Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

quicker study, perhaps she and Ty would have that understanding now, as he and Naila so instinctively do. It’s a painful irony that she communicates better with the Biya—even when they, too, are speaking silently—than she can with her own son.

      But she and Ty have a long future in which to repair their bond. Soon these objects could be all she has left of her Biya friends and mentors. While no one on this island now can be certain of their fate, the Biya’s numbers began to decline decades before the war started.

      What if she never comes back? This is the thought that derails Claire when Naila and Ty appear in the doorway, Ty making straight for the arrowheads, which are sharp enough to hurt him.

      Reflexively, she grabs her son’s arm. He replies by punching her hard in the chest.

      Claire pulls back and holds still, as she’s trained herself to do in such moments, waiting for Naila to glide between them and apply her mysterious powers to soothe whatever injury Ty believes his mother has inflicted. Instead, Naila gives a little gasp. Glancing down, Claire notices the circle of blood where the stone in Ty’s fist pierced her shirt.

      Her son watches from Naila’s sheltering arms, his green eyes bright with attention now as the wound begins to throb.

      “Mem—” Naila starts, but Claire waves her away.

      “It’s nothing. Really.” She meets Ty’s gaze. He studies her with a detachment that hurts far more than the scratch. She forces a smile, and he shrugs as if tolerating a truce.

      “Please,” she says to Naila, then hears herself begging. “Just keep him out of the way.”

      The girl takes Ty’s hand, and he presses against her, quiet now, his hair a halo of wavy darkness against her crumpled blouse, his face the same warm brown as her arms. They grimace in unison, and then, for no reason that Claire can discern, they grin.

      Urchins, the two of them, she thinks. Like brother and sister. Unlike either of his parents, Naila always knows what Ty most wants: to memorize sunbeams and trace the clouds, to match each bird to its song, to draw the botanical names of plants, even if he can’t speak his own.

      She dreads ripping them apart almost as much as she yearns to share in their closeness.

      “Ten minutes,” she says. “I just need ten more minutes.”

      Naila circles her chin and crooks her pinky in a signal that lights the boy’s whole small being. Then the two turn to leave. Joining hands they skip in unison out into the sun.

      Shep surrenders so deeply to the stupor of duty that when the Norilla’s horn blasts, he loses his balance. Catching himself on a wooden bollard, he checks that his final batch of crates has started up the gangway. He’s seen to that all right. What he’s failed to notice is the chaos thickening on the jetty behind him. The scene is a frenzy of Burmese, Indian, and Eurasian officials and their families, everyone who’s allowed to leave desperate to get on board with their belongings, while the local remainers taunt the Indian soldiers and police who’ll be left with them “to keep order.”

      He glances at his watch—twelve thirty—and searches back over the throng. Claire and Ty should have been here at least an hour ago, but he resists the alarm that needles through this calculation. The crush must have held them up in the square.

      It practically requires hand-to-hand combat to get back through it. Every few feet, exhausted couples block his path squabbling over heaps of possessions that exceed the emergency restrictions, and the light-fingered locals threading around them don’t help. One of his own porters earlier tipped a box of surgical supplies into the drink, no doubt with a plan to retrieve it as soon as the Norilla sails. If the Japanese ever do land here, those scopes and scalpels will be worth more than gold. The potential end of British rule in these islands makes everything fair game for those staying on.

      He takes a breath and presses forward, but the dread that the horn unleashed keeps rising. Why can’t Claire ever just follow the rules?

      “On the next ship, then!” A squat Indian matron is shouting at the MP who’s threatened to confiscate her trunks if she doesn’t move them back off the pier.

      “God willing,” comes the young Sikh’s beleaguered reply.

      Shep elbows past. The real question is, why are they still here at all?

      Hubris. Delusion. Fantasy. Did he and Claire honestly believe the war wouldn’t find them, that their respective ambitions justified putting their lives—and Ty’s—at risk? Possibly, but it was his own cowardice that tied the knot. The prospect of abandoning his wife and son terrifies him even more than the inevitability of being called up.

      A sudden spasm compels him to check that the gangway’s still down, and in that instant the Norilla appears as a towering gray Gulliver bedeviled by Lilliputians. The mooring cables groan against the wharf’s pilings, and the midday heat makes the hull seem to tremble.

      He blinks. Or was it that the balance he and Claire struck together might be too fragile to survive anywhere other than “paradise”?

      At last he’s through the worst of it. He stands on the curb of the foreshore road and scans the crowded waterfront, but the only car visible amid the jam of rickshaws and lorries is the police superintendent’s jeep, which careens to the platform and disgorges two reluctant plantation managers who seem to embody Shep’s guilt.

      Sunburnt and unshaven, still in jungle kit, the men look like they’ve come straight from the toddy shack. One Shep recognizes as the widower of an elderly woman who sailed from Calcutta with him and Claire when they first arrived in this tropical backwater. The wife succumbed to dengue not long afterward, and this bastard didn’t even see fit to notify the authorities.

      “Dr. Durant!” Assistant Commissioner Alfred Baird hails him with a sheaf of his inexhaustible lists. “Your specimens get on all right?”

      “Specimens.” Shep needs a moment to realize that the well-meaning major is referring to his botanical samples. “Yes, but . . .” He shades his eyes against the sun and traces the route to Middle Point. “I’m still waiting for Claire and Ty.”

      Baird’s voice spikes. “Why in God’s name—”

      Just then Shep spots the large red knob of the Morris winding down the hill. His hand twitches as he points to the car. “It’s all right.”

      By the time the vehicle reaches the backup of vans and carts above the square, his pulse has returned to normal. The car halts. Claire jumps out and pushes ahead on foot. But even from this distance her spasmodic haste and rudeness—blindly shoving people and animals alike out of her way—telegraphs her desperation.

      He’s never seen Claire behave like this. And why is she alone?

      Inside a giant banyan grove on the other side of the hill, the only audible sound belongs to the cicadas. When he first showed her this hiding place, Naila’s father said the cicadas kept time for the gods, but Naila thinks now the gods must be deaf to need such noisy timekeepers.

      Her father counsels her, Listen, beti, and watch the shapes, the size and color of the sound. Don’t be so quick to judge, then even the screech of the cicada may bring music to your ears.

      She shakes her head. The gods are deaf. And her father is dead. Would he offer the same advice if he’d heard Mem and Doctor Shep last night?

      You know we’d take you if we could.

      This evacuation is just a precaution. We’ll be back before you know it.

      Leyo has promised to look after you.

      When the doctor placed that wad of rupees into her hand, she held it like a dead fish. Then he gave Leyo a bigger