For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  “Yasmin?”

  “We have Mala’s ransom,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “of course.” He sent a quick message to the central cell in Singapore and got Banerjee’s number, then quickly dialed it on speaker. Banerjee answered, this time in a much less fuzzy and sleep-addled voice.

  “Victory to Rama!”

  “We have your money,” Ashok said. “Our team are delivering it to the escrow’s hut now. You can check for yourself.”

  “So serious, so businesslike. It’s only a game, friend—relax!”

  Yasmin felt like she might throw up. The man was so…evil. What made a man that bad? She understood, really understood, how Mala must feel all the time. A feeling like there were people who needed to be punished and she was the person who must do it. She pushed the feeling down.

  “All right, good. I see that it is there. I will tell you where to find your friend when you tell the escrow agent to release the money, yes?”

  Ashok waggled his chin at the phone, thinking hard. Yasmin suddenly realized something she should have understood from the beginning: escrow agent or no, either they were going to have to trust Banerjee to let Mala go after they released the money, or Banerjee would have to trust them to release the money after he gave them Mala. Escrow services worked for cash trades, not for ransoms. She felt even sicker.

  “You release Mala first and—”

  “Oh, come on. Why on Earth would I do that? You hold me in so much contempt, there’s no way you’ll give me what you’ve promised. After all, you can always spend three hundred thousand runestones. I, on the other hand, have no particular use for a disrespectful little girl. Why wouldn’t I tell you where to find her?”

  Ashok and Yasmin locked eyes. She remembered the last time she’d seen Mala, how tired she had been, how thin, how pained her limp. “Do it,” she said, covering the mic with her hand.

  “The passphrase for the escrow is ‘Victory to Rama’,” Ashok said, his tone wooden.

  Banerjee laughed loudly, then put them on hold, cutting them off. After a moment, Ashok looked at his screen, watching the alerts. “He’s taken the money.” They waited a minute longer. Another minute. Ashok redialed Banerjee.”

  “Victory to Rama,” the man said, with a mocking voice. Right away, Yasmin knew that he wouldn’t give them Mala.

  “Mala,” Ashok said.

  “Piss off,” Banerjee said.

  “Mala,” Ashok said.

  “One million runestones,” Banerjee said.

  “Mala,” Ashok said. “Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else I take everything.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “I will take thirty thousand now. And I will take thirty thousand more every five minutes until you give us Mala.”

  Banerjee began to laugh again, and Ashok cut him off again, then transferred back to his American at Coca-Cola.

  “Dr. Prikkel,” he said. “I know we’re busy rescuing the economy from ruin, but I have a small but important favor to ask of you.”

  The American’s voice was bemused. “Go ahead.”

  Ashok gave him the name of the toon that Banerjee had sent to the escrow house. “He has kidnapped a friend of ours and won’t give her back.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Taken her into captivity.”

  “In the game?”

  “In the world.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And Rama, too. We paid the ransom but—”

  Yasmin stopped listening. Ashok clearly thought he was the cleverest man who ever walked God’s Earth, but she’d had enough of games. She sank down on her heels and regarded the dirty floor, her eyes going in and out of focus from lack of sleep and food.

  Gradually, she became aware that Ashok was talking to Banerjee again.

  “She is at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General. She was brought to the casualty ward earlier today, without any name. She should still be there.”

  “How do you know she hasn’t gone?”

  “She won’t have gone,” Banerjee said. “Now get out of my bank account or I will come down there and blow your balls off.”

  It took Yasmin a moment to understand how Banerjee could be so sure that Mala hadn’t left the hospital—she must have been so badly injured that she couldn’t leave. She found that she was wailing, making a sound like a cat in the night, a terrible sound that she couldn’t contain. Mala’s army came running and she tried to stop so that she could explain it to them, but she couldn’t.

  In the end, they all walked to LT hospital together, a solemn procession through the streets of Dharavi. A few people scurried forward to ask what was going on, and once they were told, they joined. More and more people joined until they arrived at the hospital in a huge mob of hundreds of silent people. Ashok and Yasmin and Sushant went to the counter and told the shocked ward sister why they were there. She paged through her record-book for an eternity before saying, “It must be this one.” She looked at them sternly. “But you can’t all go. Who is the girl’s mother?”

  Ashok and Yasmin looked back at the crowd. Neither of them had thought to fetch Mala’s mother. They were Mala’s family. She was their general. “Take us to her, please,” Yasmin said. “We will bring her mother.”

  The sister looked like she would not let them pass, but Ashok jerked his head over his shoulder. “They won’t leave until we see her, you know.” He waggled his chin good-naturedly and smiled and for a moment Yasmin remembered how handsome he’d been when she’d first met him on his motorcycle.

  The sister blew out an exasperated sigh. “Come with me,” she said.

  They wouldn’t have recognized Mala if she hadn’t told them which bed was hers. Her head had been shaved and bandaged, and one side of her face was a mass of bruises. Her left arm was in a sling.

  Yasmin let out an involuntary groan when she saw her, and the ward sister beside her squeezed her arm. “She wasn’t raped,” the woman whispered in her ear. “And the doctor thinks there was no brain damage.”

  Yasmin cried now, really cried, the way she hadn’t let herself cry before, the cry from her soul and her stomach, the cry that wouldn’t let go, the cry that drove her to her knees as though she were being beaten with a lathi. She curled up into a ball and cried and cried, and the ward sister led her to a seat and tried to put a pill between her lips but she wouldn’t let it in. She needed to be alert and awake, needed to stop crying, needed—

  Ashok squatted against the wall beside her, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I’ll ruin him,” he muttered over and over again, ignoring the stares of the other patients on the ward with their visitors. “I’ll destroy him.”

  This got through to Yasmin. “How?”

  “Every piaster, ever runestone, every gold piece that man takes out of a game we will take away from him. He is finished.”

  “He’ll find some other way to survive, some other way of hurting people to get by.”

  Ashok shook his head. “Fine. I’ll find a way to ruin that, too. He is powerful and strong and ruthless, but we are smart and fast and there are so many of us.” He rushed off to save an economy composed of runestones and dark elves, but none of it felt as real as that frail girl lying in her bed.

  Dafen was full of choking smoke. Matthew pushed his way through the crowds. He’d tried to bring the painter girl, Mei, with him, but she had run into a group of her friends and had gone off with them, stopping to kiss him hard on the lips, then laughing at his surprised expression and kissing him again. The second time, he had the presence of mind to kiss her back and for a second he actually managed to forget he was in the middle of a riot. Mei’s friends hooted and called at them and she gave his bottom a squeeze and took his phone out of his fingers and typed her number into it, hit SAVE. The phone network had died an hour before, when the police retreated from Dafen and fell back to a defensive cordon around the whole area.

  And then he was alone, making his way back toward t
he huge statue of the hand holding the brush, the entrance to Dafen. Painters thronged the streets, carrying beautifully made signs, singing songs, drinking fiery, cheap baijiu whose smells mixed with the smoke and the oil paint and the turpentine.

  The police line bristled as he peered around the corner of a cafe at the edge of Dafen. He wasn’t the only one eyeing them nervously—there was a little group of white tourists cowering in the cafe, clutching their cameras and staring incredulously at their dead phones. Matthew listened in on their conversation, straining to understand the rapid English, and gathered that they’d been brought here by a driver from their hotel, a Hilton in Jiabin Road.

  “Hello,” he said, trying his English out. He wished that the gweilo, Wei-Dong, had let him practice more. “You need help?” He was intensely self-conscious about how bad he must sound, his accent and grammar terrible. Matthew prided himself on how well-spoken he was in Chinese.

  The eldest tourist, a woman with wrinkled arms and neck showing beneath a top with thin straps, looked hard at him. She removed her oversized sunglasses and essayed a little Chinese. “We are fine,” she said, her accent no better than Matthew’s, which he found oddly comforting. She was with three others, a man he took to be her husband and two young men, about Matthew’s age, who looked like a cross between her and the husband: sons.

  “Please,” he said. “I take you out, find taxi. You tell—” he tried to find the word for policemen, couldn’t remember it, found himself searching through his game-vocabulary. “Knights? Paladins? Soldiers. You tell soldiers I am guide. We all go.”

  The boys grinned at him, and he thought they must be gamers because they’d really perked up at “paladins.” He tried grinning back at them, though truth be told he didn’t feel like doing anything. They conferred in hushed voices.

  “No thank you,” the older man said. “We’re all right.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. He had to get somewhere that his phone would work, had to check in with Big Sister Nor and find out where the others were, what the plan was. He’d have to get new papers, maybe go to one of the provinces or try to sneak into Hong Kong. “You help me,” he managed. “I no go without you. Without, uh, foreigners.” He gestured at the police, at their shields. “They not hurt foreigners.”

  The older man’s eyes widened in comprehension. They spoke again among themselves. He caught the word “criminal.”

  “I not criminal,” he said. But he knew it was a lie and felt like they must know it too. He was a criminal and a former prisoner, and he would never be anything but, for his whole life, just like his grandfather.

  They all stared at him, then looked away.

  “Please,” he said, looking at each one in turn. He jerked his head at the police. “They hurt people soon.”

  The woman drew in a deep breath, turned to the man, said, “We need to get out of here anyway. It will be good to have a local.”

  The taller of the two boys said, “What do you play?”

  “Svartalfheim Warriors, Zombie Mecha, Mushroom Kingdom, Clankers, Big Smoke, Toon,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers.

  “All of them?” The boys boggled at him.

  He nodded. “All.”

  They laughed and he laughed too, small sounds in the roar of the crowds and the thunder of the choppers overhead.

  “You are sure about this?” the woman said. Adding, “Certain?” in Chinese. He nodded twice.

  “Come with me,” he said and drew in a deep breath and led them out toward the police lines.

  Wei-Dong didn’t want to wake Jie, but he needed to sleep. He finally curled up on the floor next to the mattress, using his shoulderbag as a pillow to get his face off of the filthy carpet. At first he lay rigid in the brightly lit room, his mind swirling with all he’d seen and done, but then he must have fallen asleep and fallen hard, because the next thing he knew, he was swimming up from the depths of total oblivion as Jie shook his shoulder and called his name. He opened his eyes to slits and peered at her.

  “Wha?” he managed, then realized he was talking English and said, “What?” in Chinese.

  “Time to go,” she said. “Big Sister Nor says we have to move.”

  He sat up. His mouth was full of evil-tasting salty paste, a stale residue of dumplings and sleep. Self-consciously, he breathed through his nose.

  “Where?”

  “Hong Kong,” she said. “Then…” She shrugged. “Taiwan, maybe? Somewhere we can tell the story of the dead without being arrested. That’s the most important thing.”

  “How are we going to cross the border? I don’t have a Chinese visa in my passport.”

  She grinned. “That part is easy. We go to my counterfeiter.”

  It was as good a plan as any. Wei-Dong had watched the Webblies change papers again and again. Shenzhen was full of counterfeiters. He rode the metro apart from her again, staring at his stupid guide map and trying to look like a stupid tourist, invisible. It was easier this time around, because there was so much else going on—factory girls talking about Jie’s radio show and “the 42,” policemen prowling the cars and demanding the papers of any group of three or more people, searching bags and, once, confiscating a banner painted on a bedsheet. Wei-Dong didn’t see what it said, but the police took four screaming, kicking girls off the train at the next station. Shenzhen was in chaos.

  They got off the train at the stock market station, and he followed Jie, leaving a hundred yards between them. But he came up against her when they got to the surface. The last time he’d been here, it had been thronged with counterfeiters and touts handing out fliers advertising their services, scrap buyers with scales lining the sidewalks, hawkers selling fruit and ices. Now it was wall-to-wall police, a cordon formed around the entrance to the stock market. Officers were stationed every few yards on the street, too, checking papers.

  Jie picked up her phone and pretended to talk into it, but Wei-Dong could see she just didn’t want to look suspicious. He got out his tourist map and pretended to study it. Gradually, they both made their way back into the station. She joined him at a large map of the surrounding area.

  “Now what?” he whispered, trying not to move his mouth.

  “How were you going to get out of here?” she said.

  His stomach tightened. “I hadn’t really thought about it much,” he said.

  She hissed in frustration. “You must have had some idea. How about the way you got in?”

  He hadn’t told anyone the details of his transoceanic voyage. It would have felt weird to admit that he was part owner of a giant shipping company. Besides, he didn’t really feel like it was his. It was his father’s.

  Two policemen passed by, grim-faced, moving quickly, an urgent, insectile buzz coming from their earpieces.

  “Really?”

  “If we could get into the port,” he said. “I think I could get us anywhere.”

  She smiled, and it was the first real smile he’d seen on her face since—since before the shooting had started.

  “But I need to call my mother.”

  The policemen that questioned Matthew were so tense they practically vibrated, but the tourist lady put on a big show of being offended that they were being stopped and demanded that they be allowed to go, practically shouting in English. Matthew translated every word, speaking over the policemen as they tried to ask him more questions about how he’d come to be there and what had happened to get his clothes so dirty with paint and mud.

  The tourist lady took out her camera and aimed it at the policemen, and that ended the friendly discussion. Before she could bring the screen up to her face, a policeman’s gloved hand had closed around the lens. The two boys moved forward and it looked like someone would start shoving soon, and the man was shouting in English, and all the noise was enough to attract the attention of an officer who gave the cops a blistering tongue lashing for wasting everyone’s time and waved them on with a stern gesture.

  Matthew could hardly believe h
e was free. The tourists seemed to think it was all a game as he urged them down the road a way, out of range of the police cordon and away from the shouting. They walked up the shoulder of the Shenhui Highway, staying right on the edge as huge trucks blew past them so fast it sucked the breath out of their lungs.

  “Taxi?” the woman asked him.

  He shook his head. “I no think taxi today,” he said. “Private car, maybe.”

  She seemed to understand. He began to wave at every car that passed them by, and eventually one stopped, a Chang’an sedan that had seen better days, its trunk held shut with a bungee cord that allowed the lid to bang as the car rolled to a stop. It was driven by a man in a dirty chauffeur’s uniform. Matthew leaned in and said, “One hundred RMB to take us to Jiabin Road.” It was high, but he was sure the tourists could afford it.

  “No, too far,” the man said. “I have another job—”

  “Two hundred,” Matthew said.

  The man grinned, showing a mouthful of steel teeth. “Okay, everyone in.”

  They were on the road for a mere five minutes before his phone chirped to let him know that he had voicemail waiting for him. It was Justbob, from Big Sister Nor.

  “Mom?”

  “Leonard?”

  “Hi, Mom.” He tried to ignore Jie who was looking at him with an expression of mingled hilarity and awe. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of gamer cafes with private rooms, and had brought them to this one in the ground floor of a youth hostel that catered to foreigners and had a room set off for karaoke and net access.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve heard your voice, Leonard.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “How’s your trip?”

  “Um, fine.” He tried to remember where he told her he’d be. Portland? San Francisco?

  “Oh, Leonard,” she said, and he heard that she was crying. It was what, 8PM back in LA, and she was crying and alone. He felt so homesick at that moment he thought he would split in two and he felt the tears running down his own cheeks.