Free The Apprentices by Maile Meloy Page B

some of the blue paste to the edges. Then he placed a square of thin, transparent plastic over the hole. He taped the square at the top and the two sides, leaving the bottom edge free, to create a valve. When the man breathed in, he sucked the plastic into the hole, sealing it so that air couldn’t come in that way.
    Benjamin was leaning over the next casualty, another teenager, who seemed to have taken a lot of shrapnel on the right side of the body, when he heard a metallic click near his left ear.
    He turned to see the man holding the gun. It was a Vietminh officer, who told him to put his hands on his head. Benjamin obeyed. He could hear his father saying irritably in English, “You
must
let me finish treating this man,” and then repeating the sentence in the local dialect, using the familiar, arrogant form of
you
that the soldiers had used. But the Vietminh clearly didn’t feel there was anything they
must
do, at least not under orders from this Englishman.
    The man with the gun gave Benjamin a shove in the back. With a regretful glance, Benjamin left the kid with the shrapnel bleeding on the ground.

CHAPTER 12
Homecoming
    J in Lo wandered the streets of her city. It was early morning, on a hazy gray day. An old man with white hair swept the sidewalk in front of a teashop. Had he lived here when she was a child, when the invading army came? Or had he been a soldier, away at war, seeing different horrors?
    A striped cat stepped out of an alleyway and looked directly at Jin Lo. Its yellow eyes held hers until she was almost upon it. Then it darted away, into the shadows.
    She’d had a cat of her own once, when she was eight, a black cat with a white spot on his nose and an unfortunate tendency to drool when happy. He left wet spots on her sleeve when he purred in her arms. But he was a very good hunter, and brought home mice, which he left outside the front door as offerings. When the soldiers came, he vanished. She sometimes had fantasies that he had been out hunting all this time, that he had grown huge, and could break the necks of the soldiers with one swift bite, and leave them at the door.
    Or perhaps her cat had stayed away out of shame, because he had been able to do nothing to protect his family.
    Or perhaps a stray bullet or a cruel and gratuitous swipe of a bayonet had ended him. But that she could hardly believe. Her cat had been too quick and nimble, too savvy and wary to linger near the soldiers.
    When the soldiers came, Jin Lo’s father ordered her into a wooden trunk near the door to hide. She didn’t understand what was happening. But she had hidden in that trunk before, playing “eluding the cat” with her friends, when the object was to hide while someone searched. So she climbed in, sank down, and let her father close the lid over her head.
    Then he opened the trunk again and tried to make her small brother get in, but her brother had screamed, and would have given both children away. Her mother took him into her arms. The lid closed, and that was the last time Jin Lo saw them alive. She carried the picture with her: her wailingbrother, her mother shushing him, and her father looking afraid as she had never seen him afraid before.
    She had stayed in the trunk, silent. Many times she had wanted to climb out, to protect her brother from anyone who might try to hurt him, but then she remembered the look of fear on her father’s face.
    After a while it was quiet. She crept out of the trunk in the dark, making no sound. She had always been good at “eluding the cat”: silent and clever. She stepped outside and saw dark, still forms on the ground. She didn’t want to look, wouldn’t look. That couldn’t be her father, who had always made her feel so safe. That couldn’t be her mother, the most beautiful woman on the block. But her eye fell on a small hand sticking out from beneath the body of their next-door neighbor, old Mrs. Hsu. It looked as if Mrs. Hsu had been trying to shield the little