It had been a long, careful trip. Three months ago she’d said goodbye to Kade and Feng. Then a week coming south to Phuket. She’d spent two months there among the beach-goers and sex tourists and the international party crowd building her new identity. She couldn’t be Samantha Cataranes, agent of the Emerging Risks Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security any longer. That woman was dead. Sam needed to be someone else.
Three highly illegal, no-holds-barred fights for a Phuket mobster named Lo Prang had brought her funds, which in turn had gone towards a new ID, melanin therapy to turn her already dusky Hispanic skin a more Asian shade, subtle viral reshaping of eyelids and nose and jaw, all geared at giving her a more Thai profile, and fooling any casual face recognition software.
She was now Sunee Martin, a half-Thai, half-Canadian tourist who’d come to experience the land of her mother’s birth. The identity wouldn’t get her across any national borders, but it would hold up against casual inspection by a local cop.
She’d spent an extra month in Phuket, openly visiting a temple each day, shopping and eating with funds from her new bank account, walking past the American consulate, putting herself in view of cameras, in situations that tested her identity. If it was going to fail, it must fail there. She would not lead the ERD where she was going.
It held.
The Mae Dong Guest House staff shook their heads mutely when she asked about an orphanage or home for special children nearby. But they had a room for her.
Out in the relative cool of early evening, the shopkeepers and fuel station attendants gave the same mute shakes of their head to her questions. An orphanage nearby? Mai chai, they said. May cow jai.
They didn’t know.
But their eyes shifted to the sides. They were lying to her. Were they protecting the children?
In the tea house later, she chatted with locals, made small talk, laughed with Thai women and men. Then she’d ask, and silence would descend. People would look away. Her jokes would suddenly fall on deaf ears. At the third table, a Muslim man crossed his legs, bringing the sole of his foot to face her. She didn’t miss the insult. At the fourth, she caught a woman in her peripheral vision make the sign for bad luck.
Not protecting the children, then. Something else. Superstition.
Sam retired early.
That night she dreamt of the ring, the seven-foot-tall giant they called Glao Bot, the skull crusher. Three hundred pounds of gene-hacked muscle, his head bald from the boosted testosterone, amped to his eyeballs on p-meth, eyes glaring, veins bulging everywhere.
She was there again, the roar of the crowds in her ears, Thai techno cranked up way too loud, flashbulbs flaring all around her, Glao Bot coming at her, inhuman snarl on his face, the bloodthirsty crowd cheering louder, cheering for him to get his hands on her, to pound her skull into the post. The foul smell of his breath as he came near. Then Glao Bot on his back, gasping, blood covering his face from his broken nose, his hands rising up to his nearly crushed trachea, eyes wide with fear, the crowd hushing in shock and disbelief, then roaring ever louder.
Lo Prang, leathery, hard, an aged former champion himself, handing her the thick wad of cash, hinting at more if she stayed. Just one more fight. One more. Then one more after that. And one more after that.
Sam woke to sweltering heat. She splashed water on her face and blinked away the dream. The fights had gotten her here. She’d done what she had to.
The second day was no better the first. Questions met stares, hostility, and evasions.
That night she visited one of the village’s two bars. She bought rounds of drinks and told jokes and laughed at the right times and eventually came to her questions. After an hour of good times turning abruptly to silence, glares, and veiled insults, the bartender asked her to leave. She was bad for business.
The third night she went to the last bar in the village, back among the warehouses, a seedier and rougher location. The clients were mostly men, drinking hard. She felt them leer at her. She stared right back, threw their crude banter back at them, and proceeded to match them drink for drink and gaze for gaze. When they were good and drunk she asked her questions.
This time she was met with hostility. Men started talking all at once in angry voices. One spat on the floor at her feet. Two stood up and told her to get out. Even the few women in the bar stared at her darkly.
Sam stood up, arms raised, and backed away slowly, apologizing. What had brought this?
In the dark and relative cool of the outdoors she made her frustrated way back towards the guest house. A block from the bar she heard two of them following her. She could peg them by their strides. Big guys. Drunk guys.
Sam walked slowly, let them catch up. She turned down into a dark alley. She heard one of her followers break off. Her superhuman hearing caught the heavy tread of his feet as he hurried around the block to head her off at the other end.
Sam was halfway down the alley when he appeared at the far mouth, breathing hard. Her night vision illuminated him perfectly. She kept walking as the man behind her caught up and the one ahead closed the trap.
When they were almost on her, she spoke, in Thai.
“Tell me where the children are, and I won’t hurt you.”
They both laughed cruelly. “Crazy bitch. Go home.”
“The kids,” she repeated.
The one behind her growled and threw a punch at her head. Sam heard it coming. She turned and stepped to the side, grabbing his fist in mid-air as it went past her, and didn’t let go. The man’s eyes went wide with fear. His friend lunged at her, and Sam kicked him in the belly. As he doubled over, she spoke again.
“Tell me about these kids, and where to find them.”
After a little more persuasion, they did.
An hour later she was three miles from the village, going uphill, cutting across terraced rice paddies with their genetically hacked crop, everything she owned in the pack on her back. A bare sliver of moon glinted off the puddles in the paddies. Predawn mist pooled in the lowlands below her.
Baby-stealers, the men she’d questioned had called the people from orphanage. Mae mot. Witch doctors. Sorcerers.
Superstitions still ran deep, here in the remote villages of the South.
Three hours and a dozen miles later, the sky was brightening in the east, and she’d found her goal. It was on a hilltop, what looked to be a cluster of buildings, surrounded by a rock wall topped with an electrified fence. The main gate was wood reinforced with steel.
Easy enough to get in. But her goal wasn’t an assault. It was, what? Redemption? New purpose? Family?
It was to find other children like Mai.
Sam took off her pack, sat herself down in front of the gate, with her legs crossed, and opened her floodgates, letting the Nexus nodes in her brain project her thoughts outward.
Then she began to meditate. She started with anapana, the meditation of the breath, then worked to vipassana, meditation of awareness of the body. Her mind stilled, she turned at last to the three thousand year-old practice called metta, the meditation of loving-kindness. She held her mind as calm and clear as the surface of an untouched pool of water.
Then she let the compassion rise out of her, from a deep and bottomless well. She directed the compassion outwards. At her dead sister, innocent until the end. At her dead parents, who’d done the best they could. At Nakamura, who’d saved her young life at age fourteen, and become her mentor, the closest thing in her life to a father. At the colleagues she’d left behind at the ERD. At poor little Mai, who’d helped her so much in such a short time, and who was dead because of her. At all the men and women who’d died that night in Bangkok.