Free The Serene Invasion by Eric Brown

believe that Bilal had gone the same way as his cup, squashed beneath the merciless wheels of a train, because there was no blood on the oil-stained gravel between the timber ties, and when she asked a friendly chai-wallah if a street kid’s body had been found that morning, he had shaken his head and told her no, only the bodies of a station monkey and a dozen rats.
    So what had happened to her brother?
    Ten years ago now... and Ana recalled the sense of desolation, of disbelief and loneliness, as if it had been just yesterday.
    For years she had thought that one day he would return, fabulously wealthy, and whisk her away from a life of begging and stealing. And even now, at the age of sixteen, she still harboured a tiny hope that this might be so. But sometimes she gave in to despair, and wondered what kind of death her brother might have met.
    She heard a sound behind her and turned quickly to throw the banana skin at the approaching monkey – but it was not a monkey, or at least not a furry monkey. Prakesh, whose protruding ears gave him the appearance of a little wise ape, swung onto the girder and hunkered down beside her.
    “Station Master Jangar has just said the word, get out!” he reported, staring at her with alarmed eyes.
    Ana produced a gob-full of spit and dropped it onto the tracks below. Dead shot! It hit the silver rail and sizzled in the midday sun.
    She shrugged. “So, the bastard is always saying get out. That’s his job.”
    “No, this time he means it. Lila and Sara and Bijay have left for the park, and Gupta and Sanjay are packing up.”
    Ana smiled to herself. Gupta and Sanjay, miniature businessmen in the making, had a shoe-shine box between them, a possession that legitimised their presence on the station, if only to themselves. It made no difference to Station Master Jangar when the word came down from the politicians to clean up the station.
    “So if everyone goes, leaving only me, then they won’t think I’m a street kid, will they? They’ll overlook me and I’ll just stay where I am, resting in the sun...” She stretched out her short length along the girder, placing her hands behind her head, then squinting up at Prakesh with one eye.
    He looked alarmed – his default expression – at both Ana’s reckless posture on the girder twenty metres above the rails, and at her defiance of Jangar’s wishes.
    “But Ana, he said that Sanjeev and his thugs are on their way! And you know what that means!”
    His small hands were on her now, trying to tug her into a sitting position. Reluctantly she sat up, for mention of Sanjeev sent a cold jolt of dread down her spine.
    Sanjeev was a fat thug and a bugger. He liked to corner boys and girls, smother them into submission with his great rolls of flab, then shove his greased and tiny tool up their bottoms. Those who protested too loudly he strangled and had his cohorts leave the bodies on the tracks for the trains to mangle in the night. If you bore the buggering in silence, you might live. Ana had survived a night with fat Sanjeev, thanked Kali that his cock was the size of a chilli pepper, and vowed never to be caught again.
    “When are they coming?” she asked.
    “Now!”
    She scanned the length of the platform. “Where are they?”
    Prakesh shook his head. “They started in the goods yard, moving west. I don’t know where they might be now.”
    “Ah-cha, Prakesh. Let’s get out of here, let’s ‘don our masks and fly with the night!’”
    Prakesh grinned. He couldn’t read, like so many of the other kids, so Ana often read to them from her comics. Her favourite strip was Superhero Salam and the Warriors of Dawn, who helped the poor and fought the rich and corrupt.
    They mimed donning invisible masks, stood up and walked wobblingly along the girder to the timber signal box. From the underside of the footbridge they scrambled onto the sloping, slipping tiles of the box, crawled along the gutter, and shinned down the