Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"Well, he never met us, did he? Chinma, be at peace. You've already faced your share of death and loss and suffering. This is a time for you to heal. Be good to Nick and Lettie and Annie and J.P., and obey Aunt Margaret, and get to learn to speak English even better so you can go to school in the fall. That's your job. What Mark and I are going to Nigeria to do, that's our job. Okay?"

He hesitated, then nodded.

Cecily went back to the car. Mark was already inside and so were their bags. Cecily kissed everybody again and whispered to Aunt Margaret, "Chinma is feeling bad because he blames himself for this epidemic. He was the first victim. He didn't cause it, but if he's morose, that's why."

"Got it," said Aunt Margaret. "No blaming Chinma for the deaths of thousands. I'll try to avoid that."

"For an old lady, you're such a brat," said Cecily.

"I was a brat when I was young, too, you know," said Aunt Margaret.

"I don't doubt it." Then Cecily was in the car and Stevie pulled away from the curb.

Mark was silent the whole way to Andrews, and Cecily wasn't inclined to chat, either. The silence was probably killing Stevie, because to her, talk was like oxygen, but she was a good friend and let the silence reign.

Until they were stopped at the drop-off curb and Mark started to get out of the car.

"Wait," Cecily told him.

Dutifully he sat back down, but did not fully close the door.

"This isn't the last chance, but it's a chance."

"For what?" asked Mark.

"To change your mind. No shame in it. You're only thirteen, it's okay to tell your kids, I wanted to go to Africa but I was too young."

"I have kids? When did this happen?"

"You know what I'm saying."

"If you've changed your mind, Mom, don't lay it on me."

She ignored his defiance. Male bravado. Definitely not a phase—a lifetime commitment, or at least until the testosterone ran down. "When the door closes on the airplane, Mark, that's when there's no turning back."

"Then let's get inside so they can close it."

On the plane, she had halfway expected Mark would read the Bible, or maybe he had loaded his Kindle with medical information.

How to care for dying people. But instead he had a paperback of the long-awaited final volume of some massive fantasy series, and the few times she tried to talk to him, he looked up as if he were in another world, and she was a hallucination interrupting his preferred reality.

Books about heroes, warriors with swords and bows, powerful wizards, ruthless and beautiful women. The same kind of thing Nick cared about, only Nick wanted to see it on the screen and play through it and win, while Mark wanted to be carried away in a story that had more to it than fighting. Reuben and Cecily had seen these tendencies in both boys from the start.

Nick had to be active all the time—though neither of them had guessed that his main "activity" would turn out to be sitting in front of a TV screen, twitching in response to some game designer's plan.

Mark, on the other hand, would sit still for minutes, sometimes hours, listening to adult conversation. As soon as he learned to read, that took the place of listening—though Cecily and Reuben had both learned very early that when the boys seemed least to be listening, that was when they were most likely to hear and remember everything that was said.

And Mark was a crier. That really flustered Reuben. "I wasn't even yelling at him," he'd tell Cecily. And she'd say, "He's not crying because you yelled, he's crying because he disappointed you."

Crying because somebody else was in pain, because he had inadvertently hurt somebody, because the movie was sad, and sometimes because it was happy. Hyperdeveloped empathy, Cecily called it once, and Reuben said, "Empathy's the thing you have to switch off if you're going into the soldiering business."

"Well, I guess that's not where Mark's going to go," said Cecily.

But they both knew it wasn't true. Reuben was consumed with empathy for others. That was part of what made him a good soldier—his ability to sense what the other guys on his team needed to hear him say. And his ability to guess what the enemy would do. Not to a level that would qualify as magic in one of Mark's books, but often enough to make a difference, to make Reuben a superb leader of men.

They hadn't got parts and pieces of Reuben. Mark and Nick were their own men, their own mixture of genes and upbringing and whatever God put into them and maybe whatever was really them, independent of everything and everybody.

Mark is the one who cries at the drop of a hat, so I'm taking him to a place filled with suffering and death.