On the soccer pitch the referee had heard the general alert siren, judged the distance to the changing room and ordered everyone to lie flat in the goal. Kyle had just wrapped his arms around his head - Day One Lesson One - when the boom lifted him off the ground by the belly and punched every breath of wind out of him. For a moment he thought he had gone deaf, then the sounds of sirens and RAV airdrones pushed through the numb until he was sitting on the grass beside Salim seemingly at the centre of a vast spiral of roar. It was much bigger than the exploding cat. A column of smoke leaned over toward the south. Hummers were rushing past, security men on foot dodging between them. The football net was full of chunks of blast-foam and scraps of wire and fragments of shattered plastic robot shell and warning signs in three languages that this was a restricted area with security authorised in the use of deadly force. A shard of nanodiamond anti-personnel blade was embedded in the left upright. The referee stood up, took off his shirt and wrapped it around the shard wedged under the crossbar.

‘Would you look at that?’ Kyle said.

There was a long green smear down the front of his fresh-laundered soccer shirt.

~ * ~

‘Salim’s always welcome here,’ Mom called from the kitchen where she was blitzing smoothies. ‘Just make sure he calls home to let them know he’s all right the moment the network comes back up. Now promise you’ll do that.’

Of course they did and of course they didn’t and the smoothies stood there forgotten and warming on the worktop while Mom edged about folding underwear and pillowcases but really keeping an eye on the rolling news. She was worried. Kyle knew that. Cantonment was locked down and would be until Coalition and Bharati forces had re-secured the Green Zone: that was the way it was, Kyle had learned that. Locked-down was locked-out for Dad, and the SKYIndia hovercams were still showing towers of black plastic-smoke and ambulances being walked through the crowds of lost people and burned-out cars by Bharati policemen. The reporters were saying there were casualties but they were also saying that the network wasn’t fully restored and that was why he couldn’t call; if there had been Western casualties they would have said straight away because dead Bharatis didn’t count and anyway, it was inconceivable that anything could happen to Kyle’s dad. No, in situations like this you kept your head down and got on with things while you waited for the call, so he didn’t trouble Mom and fetched the smoothies himself from the kitchen and took them to join Salim in his world.