Free The Apprentices by Maile Meloy Page A

that twitched so violently sometimes that Benjamin could see it. He had never been convinced by “deterrence,” the idea that the great powers would keep each other from using nuclear weapons just by possessing them. But he
had
been convinced that a few idealistic scientists—and a teenage boy—could stop the great powers from having them.
That
was the fallacy, as far as Benjamin was concerned. They were so few, and so isolated. They had no resources beyond their own strange and secret abilities. How could they follow the intelligence traffic of so many different countries, and cover so much ground,
and
stay hidden? Of course they had failed! Staying here and giving up wasn’t the answer.
    Benjamin looked at his hands, which were dirty, and he wiped them down with alcohol from his bag. There would be casualties to deal with soon, and he would need clean hands. He thought of Janie, and wondered if she’d gotten his letter yet, with the little glassine envelope.
    “The firing’s dying down,” his father said. “It won’t be long.”
    Benjamin listened. There was a distant pop or two of gunfire, and the sound of men moaning, some of them surely dying. The Vietminh had retreated. They would return, of course. They had endless reinforcements and infusions of weapons from the Chinese. But for now they were gone.
    “Let’s go,” his father said.
    They crept out of their shelter and moved among the bodies. Benjamin had become good at triage, at knowing which men needed attention immediately, which could wait a little longer, and which were beyond help. He had learned useful first aid. He knelt beside a boy no older than he was, who was bleeding from an arterial leg wound, and he tied the boy’s handkerchief around his thigh to stop the pumping flow of blood. Then he cut open the cotton pant leg to expose the wound and reached in with a pair of tweezers to remove the bullet, wincing at the pain he was causing. The boy screamed. They needed a fast-acting anesthetic—Benjamin had to remind his father about that.
    Tossing aside the bullet, he daubed a pasty blue salve onto the wound. It was his father’s latest concoction. Under the salve, the ragged edges of the wound re-knit themselves: Each torn piece of muscle and skin and artery wall soughtthe place it had been attached before. His father had mixed in something that made it sterilizing, so it devoured any bacteria that tried to colonize the wound. He had used it on Benjamin’s scalp on the night of the ants.
    Benjamin experimentally loosened the handkerchief on the boy’s thigh, and the bleeding didn’t start up again. The skin still had color in it, so he wasn’t
out
of blood—which happened sometimes. Benjamin realized he’d been holding his breath, and let it go. The boy’s face, distorted by pain, relaxed slightly. Benjamin wrapped the leg in the clean cotton gauze from his satchel and fashioned a crutch out of a fallen tree limb. He cut a notch in one end of a branch with his knife and set a short crossbar at the top, to go under the boy’s arm, then wrapped twine from a roll in his pocket around the crossbar to secure it.
    Benjamin knew some of the local dialect, thanks to a rare mushroom his father had found in China. Small, brown, and nonpoisonous, it stimulated the part of the brain that acquires language. Chewing a small dried piece of the mushroom dramatically increased the speed at which they had learned the villagers’ language. It gave them a heightened linguistic focus.
    Benjamin asked if his patient could walk. The boy nodded, standing with the aid of the crutch, and Benjamin moved on to the next casualty. A man his father’s age had taken a bullet to the temple. His family would bury him before the animals found him, if he had family.
    Benjamin followed the sound of a moan to a lean man in his twenties, shot in the chest. Air was coming through his wound with a sucking sound. Benjamin cleaned the bloodaway as well as he could, and applied