Children of the Uprising (22 page)

To welcome Christopher, they brought in someone to dance in the fire. Everybody walked to the beach for the celebration, where a great roaring fire was the only source of light. It glowed hot and seemed to stain the world and everything in it a bright orange color—the sand, the sea, their skin, the surrounding trees. Christopher looked out over the water. Eventually the orange gave way to blackness. In the daylight, he'd been able to see a few far-off islands across the sea but now, at night and without light, they were utterly alone. The only things that existed in the world were this fire and the stars over their heads. Then the first man, naked except for the long skirt tied around his waist, ran into the fire.

“There's usually chanting,” Apsara said to Christopher. “There are usually fifty men or more chanting, creating music for the dance, but we obviously couldn't risk bringing fifty men here. Everyone here is risking their lives by being here. So secrecy is essential.”

Christopher nodded in response. He looked at the faces of the people sitting across from him, on the other side of the fire. There were twenty-nine people in all, every one of them risking their life for this moment. They came from almost every nation in Asia, from every corner of the continent. Christopher had been introduced to each one of them. It wasn't like the worship he had experienced at Dutty's. Here, each one greeted him with defiant pride. Christopher remembered how the people at Dutty's had laid their hands on him, how Evan had said that Christopher was like a god to them. If he was a god in Asia too, then this island was full of agnostics and skeptics. Even the devout hid it from the others. He wondered how he was going to earn their trust, what he could do, what he could say. A few of them met his gaze. The shadows thrown off by the fire danced across their faces.

When the man ran into the fire, it exploded into a tower of orange and yellow cinders that jumped high into the sky like silent fireworks against the black night. The dancer huffed and stamped his feet in the sand like he was in a trance. “The dance is a form of exorcism to ward off evil spirits,” Apsara told Christopher. “It's Balinese, even though this part of Indonesia is Muslim. It is usually preceded by another dance, an epic dance about Hanuman, the Monkey King, and his search for the beautiful kidnapped wife of a wise prince.”

“What happens?” Christopher asked Apsara. “To the Monkey King?”

“He is captured after he finds the prince's wife and begins to destroy the city where they were keeping her captive. They catch the Monkey King and bind him up for burning.” The dancer rushed into the fire again, kicking at the burning logs with his bare feet, running through cinders dancing in the air like falling stars. The dancer was sweating in the heat. Christopher could see his sweat glistening in the orange light of the fire. His feet became black with soot. Each time he ran through the fire, each time he pummeled the embers with his bare feet, another man took a long stick and rebuilt the fire, pushing the embers back together until the flames rose again into the night. As the man rebuilt the fire, the dancer huffed and pounded his feet into the sand as he readied himself for another run into the flames.

“Do they burn him?” Christopher asked Apsara.

“No, he uses magic and escapes.”

“And then what happens?”

“Nothing. That's where the dance ends.”

“That doesn't seem like much of an ending,” Christopher complained.

“What would you have preferred?”

“Some sort of resolution. What happens to the prince and his wife?”

The fire was dwindling now. Each time the dancer ran through the fire, it became smaller and the night darker and the faces of the strangers more obscure. The twenty-nine included twenty men and nine women. Some were taking advantage of the darkness to stare at Christopher now. He could feel their eyes on him. It didn't matter that he was halfway across the world. Watching eyes always felt the same.

“You want closure?” Apsara asked Christopher.

“Doesn't everyone?” Christopher answered. Now that the fire had gone down, Christopher could hear the breathing of the dancer. The dance wasn't a trick. Christopher knew that. The dancer's only defense against the fire was to move through it quickly and to know that pain preceded the burning, even if by only a split second. Pain was a warning. “What happened to Jin?” Christopher asked Apsara quietly, now that the sounds from the fire had subsided.

“He tricked the people who were chasing you into following him. He led them away from the ferry terminal. Once he got them to chase him, there was no way for him to get away. Is that enough closure for you?”

The dance ended when there was nothing left of the fire, when the dancer had extinguished it with his bare feet and the sheer force of his will. The light from the fire gone, tiki torches were brought out and placed them along the beach so that everyone could still see. Once the dancer had mostly recovered, they escorted him to Christopher. The dancer spoke no English. He merely bowed to Christopher. Christopher couldn't take his eyes off the man's blackened but blister-free feet. This time Christopher bowed back.

“How did you like the dance?” the man from Indonesia asked Christopher after the dancer had walked away. Christopher gathered that this man was the owner of the island.

“It was inspiring,” Christopher answered. The man smiled and, for the first time in a long time, Christopher felt like he'd said the right thing.

“Now,” the Indonesian man said, “it's time for business.” He looked over at Reggie, who had been doing his best to disappear, letting Christopher take center stage. “Shall we bring out chairs?” the Indonesian man asked Reggie.

“There's no need,” Reggie answered. “We can talk without them.”

So they sat in a large circle in the sand, thirty-one of them counting Christopher and Reggie, and all Christopher could think was
how do you end a war by destroying a bunch of paper?
Christopher wondered who would speak first. He thought that maybe it would be Reggie or Apsara, who acted the part of the leader. In the end it was the Indonesian man, the host. “Thank you all for coming,” he said to the crowd in English. Christopher understood that he was speaking English solely for Christopher's and Reggie's benefit. “I hope you all feel safe here. We all know how dangerous it is to gather together like this, but we are all professional secret keepers and lie tellers, so I have faith that no one will find us. We are alone on this island. The nearest village is on another island, at least twenty minutes away by boat. We can talk freely here. I hope we will.” When the man finished, he looked toward Christopher as if for approval. Christopher nodded to him in response, not knowing what customs might dictate and hoping that he wasn't supposed to talk.

The nod seemed to suffice. Apsara spoke next, as if the order were ritual. “Thank you, Bejo, for your hospitality.” Then she addressed the rest of them. “We all know why we're here. Together, we represent the Underground in Asia. I reached out to each of you because I know the power that each of you wields. But we are not kings. We have no kingdoms. We are leaders, and leaders who don't lead are nothing. We all know that being here is dangerous. Let's make it worth our while.” She didn't look at Christopher when she was finished. She looked at Reggie.

“We've all heard the rumors that the Child has a plan to end the War,” somebody shouted. Someone else laughed. Christopher felt his cheeks burn. “Let's hear it.” Murmurs of consent echoed through the air.

Reggie looked over at Christopher to see if Christopher would respond, but the look on Christopher's face told Reggie everything he needed to know. So Reggie spoke instead. “We have a plan. It's not all Christopher's plan, but it falls apart without him.”

“Out with it,” the giant Chinese man shouted.

“We all know how the two sides in the War have organized their histories and their intelligence,” Reggie continued with admirable calm. “The structures are remarkably similar.”

“Quite a coincidence,” one of the men shouted. He was a Cambodian man, Christopher remembered, named Sun Same. Half the circle laughed. Christopher had never thought about what it meant that the two sides were built around the same essential structure. He wasn't sure if it meant anything, but many of the people there apparently thought it meant a lot.

“Intelligence Cells exist all over the world,” Reggie continued, ignoring the heckling. “We don't know where they are. We don't care. They come and go. They change. Throughout history, we know, rebel groups have attacked individual cells.” Reggie looked at Christopher again. “Even when successful, that achieves nothing. It's the equivalent of killing a single ant. It has no impact on the colony. It doesn't prove your power. It reinforces their power and demonstrates your overwhelming impotence. The only way to rid yourself of the ants is to kill the queen and make sure that no one takes her place.”

“Parables are for monks and dreamers,” a woman shouted.

Reggie nodded. “Intelligence Cells exist all over the world, but there are only seven Intelligence Centers. One side has three, the other four. We now know where these Intelligence Centers are: Costa Rica, Tokyo, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Cambodia, Paris, and New York. These are the queens. These are the keys to the organization of the information on both sides of the War. Without the Intelligence Centers, the Intelligence Cells are feckless warehouses of pointless information.”

“Feckless?” one of the men of the circle asked.

“Powerless,” Reggie clarified. “As useless as a few random sentences from a history book.”

“So we start taking out the Intelligence Centers?” someone asked.

“Yes,” Reggie replied.

“It's been done before,” said an older man sitting almost directly across the circle from Christopher. “It wasn't rebel groups. It was during the course of the War over a hundred years ago. They re-created it. They had all the information they needed in the other Intelligence Centers.”

Reggie nodded. “That's why we need global coordination. That's why we need to hit all seven of them at exactly the same time.” A hush fell over everyone.

“What if someone fails?” someone eventually asked, breaking the silence. A few people broke off into side conversations in other languages.

Reggie spoke more loudly, trying to get everyone to listen to him. “If someone fails, we all fail.”

“How do we know that everyone can be trusted to do their part?” a man shouted.

“How do you know that everyone here can be trusted?” Apsara shot back at the man.

“I don't,” the man replied.

“How do we know they won't rebuild from the information in the Intelligence Cells?” another woman interrupted. “It would be extremely difficult, but it's not impossible. Mistakes might be made, but over time it could be done.”

The murmuring increased. “That's why we need the Child,” Reggie shouted over the foreign whispers. It was the first time Christopher heard Reggie refer to him by his awful nickname. Everyone went silent. “We can trust everyone because everyone will believe that the plan can work. We can be sure that no one will rebuild the Intelligence Centers because no one will want to waste the effort because everyone will believe that the War is over. The War ends when everyone believes it's over.”

“And they will believe all of that because of that
feckless
boy?” one of the men called out, holding the new word in his mouth for a moment. Everyone's eyes turned back to Christopher.

“They will believe it because they want to believe it. They will believe it because that's the only way to complete the legend. They will believe it because it's the only way to end the story and still have it mean something.”

“They will believe it because the only way to get a fool to retry what he's already failed at repeatedly is by convincing him that this time something is different,” said Katsu, the Japanese man who had greeted Christopher and Reggie on the dock earlier that day, without a hint of scorn or sarcasm in his voice.

“Who are the fools?” someone asked.

“We are all fools. Otherwise this War would have ended generations ago. The Child is what makes it different this time.” Katsu spoke the words as if suddenly awakening to the idea.

“Then let him speak!” shouted the man who had called Christopher feckless. “Let the Child speak.”

The words brought Christopher out of his daze. He looked at the man who had spoken. He was not a big man, though he looked strong and weathered. Christopher wished he could remember where the man was from. Was it Hong Kong? Mongolia? Korea? All Christopher could remember from when he'd been introduced to the man was that the man hadn't smiled. Christopher tried to think of what he could say to make them believe that he had the power to inspire belief in others, but he couldn't think of anything. So Christopher asked the man, “What do you want me to say?”

The man laughed dismissively and looked around at his colleagues to find others who believed this to be a giant joke.

“You called him powerless,” Reggie said to the man, “but when was the last time all of you met together?”

Twenty-eight people began to look at each other. “This is the first time,” Apsara said.

“Would any of you be here if Christopher wasn't?” Reggie asked.

They all looked at each other again, shaking their heads. “No. We would not,” Sun Same, the Cambodian, called out.

“No,” the giant Chinese man agreed, “but there is a difference between getting us here and getting others to believe that the War has ended because of him.”

Reggie looked over at Christopher. Christopher could see the light from the torch flames flickering in Reggie's green eyes. It was time for Christopher to say something. He knew it. Everybody sitting in that circle knew it. The problem was that Christopher still didn't know what to say. He knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell everybody about his paranoia. He wanted to tell them that his paranoia was different from theirs because he wasn't complicit in his own paranoia. He wanted to tell them that they were all crazy and that he blamed every single one of them for everything. He blamed them for the fact that he had only one real friend in the whole world. He blamed them for the fact that he'd put that one friend's life in danger and the only way for him to make it right was to end the War. He wanted to blame them for the fact that he couldn't go home to his parents again until the War ended and, even then, he wasn't sure what he could do. He wanted to tell them that he hated the War and all of them with it. He blamed them all for needing him, but he couldn't say any of these things because he needed them too.