Free The Apprentices by Maile Meloy

said. “We have an obligation to help them.”
    Benjamin sighed and settled back into the damp earth. They had come to Vietnam because his father had been looking for a particular plant with unusual medicinal qualities. But the Vietminh, who had fought the Japanese with the support of the United States, and defeated the French in a bid for independence, were now supported by Communist China. One day while Benjamin and his father were out collecting, Vietminh soldiers overran the rural village where they had been staying. The local people put up a fight and were slaughtered or captured. When Benjamin and his father returned, they treated the survivors. As soon as they were finished, a messenger begged them to come to the next village, where the same thing had taken place.
    Now Benjamin’s father wouldn’t leave, and they were stuck in a place that seemed hotter, more humid, and more murderous every day. The Pharmacopoeia, the priceless leather-bound book stuffed with medical and magical secrets that their ancestors had passed down so carefully, was wrapped in oilcloth in his father’s backpack. The oilcloth was a feeble barrier against mildew, paper-eating insects, bullets, and grenades. It was no way to protect a seven-hundred-year legacy.
    The sound of gunfire was becoming less frequent. Benjamin was hungry. “This war isn’t going to end,” he said.
    “So we should let these men die?”
    “No! But we should—I don’t know. Go back to thinking about the bigger picture.”
And eating real food,
he thought. Benjamin was sixteen and would have been hungry a lot even if they were back in England, but here there was a gnawing emptiness in his stomach that wouldn’t go away. The rice balls he carried, wrapped in a waxy leaf in his pocket, didn’t help.
    “We aren’t very good at the bigger picture, you may have noticed,” his father said. “Medicine is the great aim, the true aim. Paracelsus said it four hundred years ago. I only lost sight of it for a time.”
    Benjamin wanted to point out that Paracelsus didn’t know about atomic weapons, but he didn’t want to torture his father. After the war, in which Benjamin’s mother had been killed, his father had become alarmed by the world-destroying possibilities of the atomic bomb, and started working on an antidote. In Nova Zembla, they had succeeded, containing a blooming mushroom cloud and shrinking it back to nothing, while the Quintessence scrubbed the radiation from the air. But they had been lucky there: They knew the test was coming, and they could get close to the bomb at the right moment. The great hope was that they could improve their methods, and neutralize a bomb
after
it had been dropped in combat. But now they couldn’t even keep ahead of the escalating nuclear tests.
    They had been late for two tests by the British in western Australia, and unable to get close to an American hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll in March. An unlucky Japanese fishing boat
had
gotten close, though. The boat, the
Lucky DragonNo. 5,
was forty miles away from the atoll when the wind shifted, covering the fishermen with ash. They had stopped to bring in their fishing gear before fleeing the strange powdery mist. By the time they got to shore, the fishermen had burns and blisters on their skin. Their irradiated tuna went to market, to be sold and eaten. Benjamin’s father had followed the
Lucky Dragon
’s story with a tormented interest.
    Then, in early September, the Soviets tested an atomic bomb in the Ural Mountains, in Russia. Benjamin’s father hadn’t even known that one was coming, and he cursed himself for his blindness. Three weeks later, the Japanese radioman of the
Lucky Dragon
died at the age of forty. He said, “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.”
    After the Soviet test and the radioman’s death, something happened to Benjamin’s father. He became obsessed with their failure. He developed a tic, a muscle near his left eye