Meanwhile Dr. Banerjee was saying, “You suffered an exposure to a pattern of energy that coupled in a deleterious manner to certain delicate structures inside of your noggin.”
“Consider a spherical brain,” said Kadar. He had plucked a single green grape from a bunch of them on the fruit plate. He now extracted a steak knife from the silverware drawer and used it to cut most, but not all, of the way through the grape. Laks drifted over to watch. Kadar opened the grape like a book. The uncut skin in the back held the two halves of it together like a hinge. “To most people, a piece of fruit not quite cut in half. To a radio engineer, a butterfly antenna.”
“Antenna!?”
Kadar nodded solemnly and placed the grape in the microwave. He slammed the appliance’s door shut and poised a finger over the “Beverage” button. “The last thing you saw before you lost consciousness on the top of that ridge was a Chinese weapons system that projects electromagnetic energy in a certain band. A little bit like this microwave oven.” He hit the button while indicating with his other hand that Laks should observe. Laks bent over and peered through the perforated-metal screen behind the door glass to see the grape dimly visible trundling around on the glass turntable and presumably getting warmer. But suddenly there was a flash like a little lightning bolt and a sizzling noise. Kadar shut off the microwave, opened the door, and pulled out the two halves of the grape, which were no longer attached. “Hardly even warm,” he said. He rotated the halves so that Laks could see the former place of attachment, now marked with tiny black smudges where the skin had explosively vaporized. “But in that one place, for a moment, it was as hot as the surface of the sun.”
“How do you know that?”
“The color of the flash.” Kadar held out the grape halves. Laks let them tumble into the palm of his hand. They were scarcely above body heat. “And that is the problem. The radiation from the Chinese weapon coupled weakly to most of your body but strongly to certain bits. Which got damaged. We’re trying to get those bits to grow back—or provide substitutes where that isn’t going to be possible.”
Laks looked over at Dr. Banerjee, who seemed mortified. Presumably she felt that Kadar was being a bit blunt. But Laks didn’t mind. “I’ll keep the grape next to my bed as a reminder,” he said. “So I don’t have to keep asking you.”
Kadar seemed slightly abashed. “I don’t mean to suggest in any way that we are unwilling to answer any and all of your questions.”
“In that case, I have one more.”
“Shoot.”
“Why go to all this trouble just for me?” Laks looked around. “I mean . . . this is a pretty nice hospital room, right?”
“Very nice,” said Dr. Banerjee, with a depth of feeling suggesting that she had, in her day, seen some pretty fucked-up hospitals.
“It’s because you are a hero of India,” Kadar said, “but India is not quite finished with you yet.”
THE BEAVER
From the river IJ—the water in the heart of Amsterdam—to the Lagoon of Venice was beyond the Beaver’s range. So the former queen stopped off at Lake Como to refuel, to pee, to get a cup of coffee, and to drop off her co-pilot. She would fly the last leg solo. Partly that was for the visuals. Whenever there were two people in the cockpit, cynics assumed that Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was just faking it.
But also she needed some alone time. She had abdicated the throne and seen Lotte become the new queen first thing in the morning. Since then she’d hardly had a moment to herself; and those moments had been interrupted by texts from Lotte asking her mother for advice and for reassurance.
She answered a couple of the more urgent questions while sipping her coffee beneath an awning by the water. Nobility and royalty had been coming to Lake Como since Roman times, often to lick their wounds after some kind of reversal in their fortunes. So its shores were strewn with spectacular old buildings with long, complicated, and not especially cheerful histories. Saskia could have found family connections to many of these, should she care to go rooting around in her ancestral tree. So having that cup of coffee, there in the dockside café of a luxury hotel that had once been the private villa of some great-great-uncle thrice removed, was a reminder that, if she so chose, she could while away the rest of her life in such a place. Just like many other defrocked, deposed, defunct, or disgraced persons of former importance down through the ages. To some that might be an irresistible siren’s call, but it made Saskia’s skin crawl. She couldn’t finish that coffee fast enough. She had a sort of vision, sitting there enjoying the temperate breeze off the lake, that if the climate apocalypse happened, this place would be the last bastion to fall. And having now given