Page 14 of Mastermind

CHAPTER EIGHT

ROGUE PLANET

When I lay in the jungle, bleeding out my side, watching the stars through a tiny break in the canopy, Johnny long gone and my attacker slumped over me, dead, his blood warm on my skin, I thought about the planets drifting between solar systems—rogues that escaped their own stars to wander the cosmos. Mostly they pass by, causing only the mildest of disruptions to debris at the edge of each system’s heliosphere, but sometimes a rogue is captured by a star’s gravity and it spirals inward, building up velocity until it gets pulled into an orbit and either escapes or collides with some other world, causing havoc and destruction. That would be an astronomically rare event, but in a galaxy with billions of rogues, astronomically rare events happen every day. There could be some rogue planet drifting in our direction right now. The earth and the moon exist because two heavenly bodies in our own solar system collided. Who’s to say the next civilization doesn’t get its start at the end of our own?

As a centipede crawled across my face, I wondered whether that next civilization would resemble anything like humanity.

Could something like me happen again? Would another village like Bo Luc have to deal with the wrath brought upon them when someone such as myself interfered?

Was I an agent for order or a magnet for chaos? The latter seemed more likely, given what damage I’d done both in my personal life and here, ten thousand miles away from home, where a simple and pure gesture on my part ended up causing more bloodshed than I could have imagined.

“Dr. Cray? Are you with me?” asks the woman with the probing eyes sitting in front of me.

“Yes. Always.”

“I think you’re suffering from a fever,” she says.

“I left that in Portland.”

Lights spin.

I fall into the dark.

“Shit,” she says, keeping me from falling over in my chair. “I need you to hold it together a little while. Okay? We don’t have much time before they realize I got you out with fake papers. Drink this.”

I gulp down the water from the bottle she hands me. Something tastes off about it. My mouth starts to slacken, and water drips down my chin as I process what’s different. My lips close and I swallow as I realize that the water tastes different because it’s clean.

Anything I’ve drunk in the last month that wasn’t alcohol-based was filled with bacteria and parasites. Even before they came for our camp, I’d been suffering from a low-grade fever.

I take another sip of the water and try to pull myself together. I’m no longer in the prison cell. I’m outside. Motorcycles and buses run back and forth on the dirty street in front of me as old women on bicycles weave through them. We’re sitting under an umbrella near a stand where a man is selling fruit drinks and snack food.

This is the civilized part of Myanmar, not the Rohingya townships where the army has ground everyone under their boot . . . not the remote villages being quietly eliminated while the world looks elsewhere.

I came here to follow up on a promise to a friend. I was with a group that was trying to help vaccinate the Rohingya and other groups the government was trying to kill off. When the soldiers started threatening us, we moved on. When they started killing villagers . . . I started killing the soldiers.

They didn’t know who it was at first—even the team I was with had no idea what I was doing when I sneaked out at night and went on my walks.

Only Johnny knew—the thirteen-year-old kid who’d had two older brothers kidnapped by the army. He told me how to find the commanders and the other men behind the atrocities.

Contact poisons, electrocution . . . I even killed a man with his own tire iron as he tried to fix a flat that I caused. I wish I could say I felt remorse, but that emotion could never materialize after I’d heard the cries from the metal shed at the camp where he’d been torturing and indoctrinating the children he’d taken from their families.

I came here to kill parasites. It didn’t matter if I didn’t need a microscope to kill some of them.

The moral line is clear for me: If you kill the innocent, prepare to be killed.

This woman . . . Who is she? And can she be trusted?

She’s watching me carefully, but she’s also watching the street and studying every face. When someone’s head turns, she casually glances to see whether they’re looking at us.

She’s smart. She knows how to use all the parts of her environment to sense a threat. She doesn’t turn around when a motorcycle with a bad muffler drives by, but anything with a large engine that sounds a little more tuned than everything else on the street . . . she pays keen attention to that.

That’s how you spot the government vehicles. Bureaucrats and generals are the ones with repair shops and money to keep their fleets running.

“Give me a second,” she says, standing up. “I need to check in and then ask for directions.”

She walks a few meters from our table to make a call. Her left side is to me, her right to the street. Straight ahead is where we came from, the small prison where they were holding me.

Through the street din, I can make out her words.