“I don’t believe those stories. If you believed what people said here, you would think everything on Con Dao is haunted.”

“No,” the second automonk said. “Not everything. Only the things that are too close to the water.”

“A woman was attacked here. On the beach,” said the first automonk. “And there were many stories in our sangha of … shadows.”

“Perhaps you are being superstitious,” Evrim said.

“We cannot be superstitious,” the second automonk answered. “We are not alive. All we can do is tell you what we have been told.”

Altantsetseg emerged from the module. “I’ve sent the signal. Now leave.”

With a slight bow, the monks turned and retreated into the dark, headed out to the road.

Chapter 24

But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.

—Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds

24

WHEN THE MUTINY CAME, it was in the middle of the night. Eiko woke to a high-pitched scream. A man’s voice—a man in agony. Son was awake and sitting up beside him. The rest of the hammocks in the crew barracks swung empty in the moonlight that bled through the bars.

And the barracks hatch was open.

Later Eiko would learn that Indra, one of the Indonesian crew members Eiko had barely spoken to, had led the mutiny. He had been a nautical engineer in a previous life, specializing in electrical systems. Working for weeks, he had disabled the sensors, hatch locks, and backups on the doors to the crew and guard barracks, as well as bypassing the motion sensors along the two passageways between them.

The plan had been formed before the Sea Wolf even docked with the factory ship, but it was there that its details were worked out. Iron bars, fish processing knives, wrenches, and other tools for the job, both sharp and blunt, were stolen over a period of a month or so, and hidden behind a panel in the passageway.

In the early hours of the morning, the mutinying crew crept down the passageway to the guard barracks. There was an intersecting passageway that was patrolled by a single guard on night watch. They ambushed the guard there just as they passed. It was the guard called the Monk—and despite all of the fear she may have inspired in the crew and in Eiko, Indra said it went quickly, with two of them on her, and then four. They slashed her throat before she could draw a weapon or raise an alarm.