Sam nodded. They walked in silence for a while, Jake limping as they made their way up the road. Her mind worked through fantasies. Taking the children with her, going to Phuket, or starting a farm, or taking them back to the States somehow.

None of them made sense.

“So what now?”

Jake coughed. She could feel the pain in his ribs where one of the men had punched him.

“The Mira Foundation. The folks who pay me. They have their own orphanage, with other Nexus kids. They want to take ours in.”

Sam blinked. “That… That’s great! Other kids. You said they learn faster the more there are, right? They’d have more friends their own age. We could…”

“Sunee,” he cut in. “Sunee.”

She paused, and turned her face to his.

“They won’t take you. I tried. I tried hard. But they don’t know you. They only want the kids. And me.”

Chapter 12: Potential

12

POTENTIAL

Friday October 19th

Shiva Prasad smiled and bounced the boy on his knee as the salt breeze caressed them both. The child’s mind was a marvel, staring out at the azure waters of the Andaman Sea as the sun dipped towards them, full of questions about the world out there.

Why can’t we live under the water, Shiva? the child asked.

Shiva smiled, his white teeth splitting the brown of his aged, leathery skin.

Well, he sent the child. We can’t breathe down there, for starters.

He sent concepts along with the verbalization – lungs, oxygen, air pressure.

But the fish live there, the child sent. How do they breathe?

Shiva smiled again. So bright. So inquisitive.

The fish have gills, Shiva replied. The gills let them breathe in the water.

He sent an image this time, the slit-like gills of a fish.

Why don’t we have gills? the boy asked.

We evolved on land, Shiva sent. We didn’t need gills.

The boy frowned, clearly unhappy with this answer.

I want to live in the water, he sent to Shiva. When I’m older, I’m going to give us gills.

Shiva laughed out loud this time, kindly, and tussled the boy’s hair, even as the child sent him an image – his own youthful body, gill slits in his neck.

I’m sure you will, my boy. I’m sure you will.

Later, after one of the teaching staff had come to take the boy to rejoin the others, Shiva stood alone at the battlements of his island home. He stared out to the west as the waves swallowed the last rays of the sun. The breeze blew through his long, white, fine hair. The thin white robe he wore rippled in the wind. Shiva stood relaxed, yet his spine was as straight as any soldier’s, schooled by a lifetime of hard work, bolstered by the biotechnologies that kept him more fit than any man his age should be.