Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Lok tore over to Kraft, spitting in hill dialect delight, "Hey, do that again!" That bit of extended sass, mouthing off to the pod of helicopters that had come bringing nothing at all, not cigarettes, not opiates, not candy.

Nam Chai's future proceeded to parade about the room, rooting through the forbidden containers and demanding an explanation for every arcane item. They found and unspread a cartoon, room-encircling alphabet banner: kh as in bottle; k as in water buffalo. From the bottom of one eclectic crate came a book from the empire's sunset years, destined for Malaya or Burma but ending up here, in the one country that had never been anyone's colonial possession.

Kraft, folk hero of the hour, was made to read. He had to repeat Messrs. Rat and Toad a thousand times for the little ones, who hadn't a clue, even in hasty translation, what the words meant, but who knew a funny voice when they heard one. Calls of "Encore," even from the ironically amused anglophones, were punctuated by fanatical cries for "Bed-jah!" from Lok, for whom badgers and moles were monster fantasies as outrageous as monkey generals or demon kings. What was the appeal of a story that meandered, messing about in boats, going nowhere? Kraft went on doing the voices, the creatures' falsettos and growls, all the explanation ever granted.

Only waiting until the contingent had gathered, a face appeared at one of the unfinished openings. One look at her hushed the hilarity, confiscated it like an intercepted note. The stalk of body stood wrapped in a dress cut from an old rice sack, the stenciled brand still visible, swallowed up in a dart. The burlap makeshift lent the wearer the aura of escaped animal kingdom. The Northerners thought at first that she was a local, but she left the village children even more surprised.

Two Institutes undid the wall's hinges, but the creature wouldn't enter. Like a velvety automatic weapon, she repeated two singsong syllables. It was not Free, nor any language Kraft had ever heard. "What's she saying?" he asked Lok.

Lok answered in dialect, an aggressive but entranced "Who the hell knows?"

Just as suddenly, Kraft heard, although the syllables remained impenetrable. The rice sack girl was chanting, in some form of Ur-pali, the same words that had issued from the abbot's crabbed statue the instant before he'd smashed it to the floor: "Come away!" Come away.

Her furious gestures confirmed him. Asian, yet pale, luminous, she glowed like an impatient filament. She circled and yipped, dashing a few paces into the bush before doubling back to see what was keeping them. Every so often, she released explanatory bursts, pleas that might have meant anything: a parent prostrate on the path with snakebite, a house on fire, or a feast just one village over, replete with pipat band and unlimited roasted bananas. Her choreography proved the size of the prize, as a bee's dance spells out to the hive a massive find.

The children stared at the dancer, then at one another. Even the upper forms deferred to Kraft, as if his taboo-breaking incantation of that afternoon had summoned up this sprite. Kraft took a breath, although there was never any choice, not even briefly. "So. Who's up for it?" he asked in English. Then, once more, in the five tones: "Bai mat?"

It surprised no one that she led them toward the neighboring disaster. Even the Northerners began to realize that the trek wound them slowly down to the river, the imaginary buffer between the one country that until then had gone officially unscathed and the other, already smeared by the nightmare adjacent to it. But the specific destination Kraft could only imagine. It took the shape, in his sleep-heavy head, of an improvised emergency paradise, a forced regrouping along an itinerary of true amazement, a swelling river settlement full of the napalmed and claymored, driven from their lives.

A camp of children, he thought. She has come for the newest batch of recruits, new lives to boost the ones already assembled there. These thoughts contended with the rattan and fern, the shadowy plants scraping his face on the dark path. The girl knew the terrain, keeping to the best track, a packed mound both dry and open, yet not too exposed to bare moonlight. They walked long enough to lose track of time, and only the gibbon whoops from distant canopies convinced Kraft that they moved at all.

Although he was older than their guide, he felt like the little girl's infant. How many kilometers now? Are we there yet? It occurred to him that they might not make it there and back again before Nam Chai awoke to miss them.

A sound like twigs snapping underfoot grew gradually as they walked until he had to recognize it: sporadic small-arms fire. Then, pitching over a sharp rise, they saw it. She had led them right up to the river at its narrowest, the same river that meandered to the senile dowager city a thousand kilometers downstream, at its gum-diseased mouth. Here it was narrow enough to skip a lucky coin over. Before they had time to take in the sight, the girl, twenty meters in the vanguard, slipped her rice sack off and paddled into the current, her shift held over her head.

On the other side, she dressed hastily. Annoyed at the others' failure to follow, she made that odd hand gesture, palm downward and out, fingers curling repeatedly. To the Euro-offspring, the wave meant good-bye, auf, au rev…, we will never see each other again. But in the region, the fingerpumping was fiercely unambiguous: ma nee, get a move on, what's keeping you? A cold, deadly Red Rover.

Lok was first in after her. He slipped into the water as if it were a buffalo patty pool. Kraft watched terrified as Janie Hawkins stripped and lowered herself in after. Then the other student shadows began to shed their shock, and the party became a filament of frog kick and dog paddle, as silent as tension permitted, a cortege of clothes held above bobbing heads under the angled and eerie moon.

Compulsion brushed away the risk. Swimmers peeled off one by one, the group crumbling like a heel of hard bread. Kraft stood with the group riveted on the Free side by their failure of nerve or inability to swim. They had been brought here for life's one classic examination: turn back to camp now, to a life of empty safety, or press on, on nothing, following an apparition that might just as easily be malicious as revealing.

Kraft, answerable for every life in the water-snaking conga line, gauged the instant. The girl, whose Oxfam face made her the perfect insurgent, had come to lead a unit of foreign imperialists into ambush. She had suffered some Special Forces Pentecost from the air and had wandered stunned for days until she found the only people she could trust, minors, whom she now led back to a scene of unimaginable hideousness. She was It in a trillion-hectare, multinational kick-the-can, the globewide game that every child knows is taking place without him, and finding them assembled late at night, she decided to cut them in. She was the recruiting arm of a child cartel intent on stopping the war where the adults had failed, and she took them now, untrained and flawless, to the front. She was a shape changer, a demon from the Ramakien, come to teach them what the tales really meant.

He knew what he needed to do. Break off, bring the contingent back. Instead, by the dark riverside, he began to undo his shirt. As he touched his collar, a sound wafted across the stilled air, the lightest of clicks. He knew, on the envelope's attack, what the snap was. The girl had just stepped on that kind of mine, pointlessly polite, that warned the victim by the cock of the firing pin.

In her excitement to keep the file moving, the girl had dropped her guard just long enough to miss the telltale artificial mound. Kraft had no moment to shout stop, nor did he know the word in her language. He didn't need to. She knew what she had triggered as soon as the click rippled up through her foot.