The Brink Read Free

in the netting at the back of his chair, and Sam tries, telekinetically, to turn the knob on the tank and cut off whatever gas Ethan needs to survive. But it doesn’t work. The opposite happens: the professor brings Ethan over.
    â€œSpace for one more?” the professor asks, and they make room reluctantly. Ethan lays out his lunch in his lap: a baloney sandwich and chips. Sam can hear little puffs of air jetting up Ethan’s nose.
    â€œDo you have AIDS?” Irwin asks.
    Ethan sighs. He does not have AIDS, he says wearily. His lungs don’t work right. He’s on a list, and if his name comes up, they’re going to cut him in half and give him new ones.
    â€œCut in half, like side to side or top to bottom?” Sam asks, and Ethan places finger at the notch at the base of his throat. “From here,” he says, drawing his finger down his shirt to his stomach, “to here.”
    â€œLungs from a dead person?” Irwin asks. “ Awesome .”
    Ethan turns to Sam and kicks him gently. “When we get back, I want you to attack Russia.”
    This is just what Sam was afraid of, that he’d become another small thing in a game played between people. He just wants to be ignored, the way he spent the entire basketball season—on the bench, whispering multiplication tables, praying for armpit hair. Sam balls his tinfoil into a hard nut. “What do I get if I do what you say?”
    Ethan says, “You get to die for a reason.”
    On the last morning of the world, light breaks over the ocean and Sam is there, on the beach, in Guam. The people of this island nation make necklaces from shells or eat donuts, whatever they do. But the beach is all his. Sam’s father and mother lounge on the big towels, talking like they haven’t talked in a long time, like they want to keep talking. Sam pokes at a dead sand crab, a weird piece of armor the ocean threw up. He is tucked between his parents, feeling gathered and protected, when he sees the white contrail of a Centaur streak up, a fast and terrible rip in the sky . . .
    Sam holds a matchstick in his fingers.
    His missile, the one from Ethan. His turn.
    â€œSomebody’s going to win this war,” the professor says, pacing behind them. “Who is it going to be? Is it going to be you?”
    Across the map, Ethan nods at Sam privately, the way a gangster in a movie cues an execution. Sam has no strategy. He’s afraid that Ethan, up in his throne, has unspeakablepowers, the gift of knowing that you’re only alive because somebody else died. But with the matchstick in his grip, his Centaur, Sam sees his life from above. Suddenly the map, the game, doesn’t matter. Sam can be Guam, the speck in the Pacific, the small thing passed between people.
    Or he can be the missile.
    He arcs the match over the ocean, toward America. He aims for Ethan, for home. When it lands, Ethan whispers, “What are you doing?” and Irwin makes the blowing-up noise, a rumble with puffed cheeks. The professor says, “First strike. Guam against U.S.A. Interesting . . .” Soon, every missile on the map will launch, the planet turned to stone, the lesson lost. But Sam is, already, elsewhere.
    That night, Mom’s new friend Latrice reclines on the couch, smoking languidly and turning Sam’s photo cube over in her hand. It’s all vistas of his father: grilling, up a ladder, holding Sam at birth when he was still jaundiced and Chinese-looking. Sam recognizes Latrice from the Unitarian church, from the part of the service when people stand up and speak. Latrice talked about women’s rights and black people rights and coming together for a better tomorrow and Mom clutched Sam’s hand. Latrice is the only black person there, so it’s like she is all black people.
    â€œYour father looks like a nice fellow,” Latrice says, and sets down the cube. She pulls her denim jacket tight. Her hair intimidates