For the Win by Cory Doctorow (cheapest way to read ebooks TXT) 📖

"Who wants to spend their time chasing a bunch of skinny poor kids around instead of just finding a way to neutralize them?" A few hands stayed defiantly in the air, among them Kaden, who had come back into the room while Connor was on the phone and was now glaring at both of them. Bill turned back to Connor. "I think we'll be OK," he said. He jerked his head over his shoulder and said, loudly, "Those goons are so ornery they'd say no if you asked them whether they wanted a lifetime's supply of free ice-cream."

300,000 runestones hadn't seemed like much when Yasmin started. After all, the gold was for Mala, and Mala was all she could think of. And she had Mala's army on her side, all of them working together.

But it had been days since she'd slept properly, and there were reporters every few minutes, pushing into Mrs Dibyendu's cafe with their cameras and recorders and pads and asking her all sorts of mad questions and she had to keep her temper and speak modestly and calmly with them when every nerve in her body was shrieking Can't you see how busy I am? Can't you see what I have to do? But the army covered itself with glory and not one soldier lost his or her temper, and the press all marvelled at them and their curious work.

At least the steelworkers and garment workers had the sense not to interrupt them, and they were mostly busy with their organizing adventures in Dharavi to bother them anyway. The story of how they'd saved this gang of Dharavi children from bad men with weapons had spread to every corner, and the workers they'd inspired to walk off the job were half in awe of them.

Piece by piece, though, they were able to build the fortune. Yasmin found them an instanced mission with a decent payoff, one that three or four players could run at a time, and she directed them all into it, sending them down the caverns after the dwarves and ogres below in gangs, prowling up and down the narrow, blisteringly hot aisles between the machines, pointing out ways of getting the work done faster, noting each player's total, until, after a seeming eternity, they had it all.

"Ashok," she said, banging unannounced into his office. He was bent over his keyboard, earwig screwed in, muttering in English to his Dr Prikkel in America. He held up a hand and asked the man to excuse him -- she hated how subservient he sounded, but had to admit that he'd been very cool when the negotiations had been underway -- and put him on mute.

"Yasmin?"

"We have Mala's ransom," she said.

"Yes," he said, "of course." He sent a quick message to the central cell in Singapore and got Bannerjee's number, then quickly dialled it on speaker. Bannerjee answered, this time in a much less fuzzy and sleep-addled voice.

"Victory to Rama!"

"We have your money," Ashok said. "Our team are delivering it to the escrow's hut now. You can check for yourself."

"So serious, so businesslike. It's only a game, friend -- relax!"

Yasmin felt like she might throw up. The man was so...evil. What made a man that bad? She understood, really understood, how Mala must feel all the time. A feeling like there were people who needed to be punished and she was the person who must do it. She pushed the feeling down.

"All right, good. I see that it is there. I will tell you where to find your friend when you tell the escrow agent to release the money, yes?"

Ashok waggled his chin at the phone, thinking hard. Yasmin suddenly realized something she should have understood from the beginning: escrow agent or no, either they were going to have to trust Bannerjee to let Mala go after they released the money, or Bannerjee would have to trust them to release the money after he gave them Mala. Escrow services worked for cash trades, not for ransoms. She felt even sicker.

"You release Mala first and --"

"Oh, come on. Why on Earth would I do that? You hold me in so much contempt, there's no way you'll give me what you've promised. After all, you can always spend 300,000 runestones. I, on the other hand, have no particular use for a disrespectful little girl. Why wouldn't I tell you where to find her?"

Ashok and Yasmin locked eyes. She remembered the last time she'd seen Mala, how tired she had been, how thin, how pained her limp. "Do it," she said, covering the mic with her hand.

"The passphrase for the escrow is 'Victory to Rama'," Ashok said, his tone wooden.

Bannerjee laughed loudly, then put them on hold, cutting them off. After a moment, Ashok looked at his screen, watching the alerts. "He's taken the money." They waited a minute longer. Another minute. Ashok redialled Bannerjee."

"Victory to Rama," the man said, with a mocking voice. Right away, Yasmin knew that he wouldn't give them Mala.

"Mala," Ashok said.

"Piss off," Bannerjee said.

"Mala," Ashok said.

"One million runestones," Bannerjee said.

"Mala," Ashok said. "Or else."

"Or else what?"

"Or else I take everything."

"Oh yes?"

"I will take 30,000 now. And I will take 30,000 more every five minutes until you give us Mala."

Bannerjee began to laugh again, and Ashok cut him off again, then transferred back to his American at Coca Cola.

"Dr Prikkel," he said. "I know we're busy rescuing the economy from ruin, but I have a small but important favor to ask of you."

The American's voice was bemused. "Go ahead."

Ashok gave him the name of the toon that Bannerjee had sent to the escrow house. "He has kidnapped a friend of ours and won't give her back."

"Kidnapped?"

"Taken her into captivity."

"In the game?"

"In the world."

"Jesus."

"And Rama too. We paid the ransom but --"

Yasmin stopped listening. Ashok clearly thought he was the cleverest man who ever walked God's Earth, but she'd had enough of games. She sank down on her heels and regarded the dirty floor, her eyes going in and out of focus from lack of sleep and food.

Gradually, she became aware that Ashok was talking to Bannerjee again.

"She is at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General. She was brought to the casualty ward earlier today, without any name. She should still be there."

"How do you know she hasn't gone?"

"She won't have gone," Bannerjee said. "Now get out of my bank account or I will come down there and blow your balls off."

It took Yasmin a moment to understand how Bannerjee could be so sure that Mala hadn't left the hospital -- she must have been so badly injured that she couldn't leave. She found that she was wailing, making a sound like a cat in the night, a terrible sound that she couldn't contain. Mala's army came running and she tried to stop so that she could explain it to them, but she couldn't.

In the end, they all walked to LT hospital together, a solemn procession through the streets of Dharavi. A few people scurried forward to ask what was going on, and once they were told, they joined. More and more people joined until they arrived at the hospital in a huge mob of hundreds of silent people. Ashok and Yasmin and Sushant went to the counter and told the shocked ward sister why they were there. She paged through her record-book for an eternity before saying, "It must be this one." She looked at them sternly. "But you can't all go. Who is the girl's mother?"

Ashok and Yasmin looked back at the crowd. Neither of them had thought to fetch Mala's mother. They were Mala's family. She was their general. "Take us to her, please," Yasmin said. "We will bring her mother."

The sister looked like she would not let them pass, but Ashok jerked his head over his shoulder. "They won't leave until we see her, you know." He waggled his chin good-naturedly and smiled and for a moment Yasmin remembered how handsome he'd been when she'd first met him on his motorcycle.

The sister blew out an exasperated sigh. "Come with me," she said.

They wouldn't have recognized Mala if she hadn't told them which bed was hers. Her head had been shaved and bandaged, and one side of her face was a mass of bruises. Her left arm was in a sling.

Yasmin let out an involuntary groan when she saw her, and the ward sister beside her squeezed her arm. "She wasn't raped," the woman whispered in her ear. "And the doctor says there was no brain-damage."

Yasmin cried now, really cried, the way she hadn't let herself cry before, the cry from her soul and her stomach, the cry that wouldn't let go, the cry that drove her to her knees as though she were being beaten with a lathi. She curled up into a ball and cried and cried, and the ward sister led her to a seat and tried to put a pill between her lips but she wouldn't let it in. She needed to be alert and awake, needed to stop crying, needed --

Ashok squatted against the wall beside her, clenching and unclenching his fists. "I'll ruin him," he muttered over and over again, ignoring the stares of the other patients on the ward with their visitors. "I'll destroy him."

This got through to Yasmin. "How?"

"Every piaster, ever runestone, every gold piece that man takes out of a game we will take away from him. He is finished."

"He'll find some other way to survive, some other way of hurting people to get by."

Ashok shook his head. "Fine. I'll find a way to ruin that, too. He is powerful and strong and ruthless, but we are smart and fast and there are so many of us."

Dafen was full of choking smoke. Matthew pushed his way through the crowds. He'd tried to bring the painter girl, Mei, with him, but she had run into a group of her friends and had gone off with them, stopping to kiss him hard on the lips, then laughing at his surprised expression and kissing him again. The second time, he had the presence of mind to kiss her back and for a second he actually managed to forget he was in the middle of a riot. Mei's friends hooted and called at them and she gave his bottom a squeeze and took his phone out of his fingers and typed her number into it, hit SAVE. The phone network had died an hour before, when the police retreated from Dafen and fell back to a defensive cordon around the whole area.

And then he was alone, making his way back toward the huge statue of the hand holding the brush, the entrance to Dafen. Painters thronged the streets, carrying beautifully made signs, singing songs, drinking fiery, cheap baijiu whose smells mixed with the smoke and the oil paint and the turpentine.

The police line bristled as he peered around the corner of a cafe at the edge of Dafen. He wasn't the only one eyeing them nervously -- there was a little group of white tourists cowering in the cafe, clutching their cameras and staring incredulously at their dead phones. Matthew listened in on their conversation, straining to understand the rapid English, and gathered that they'd been brought here by a driver from their hotel, a Hilton in Jiabin Road.

"Hello," he said, trying his English out. He wished that the gweilo, Wei-Dong, had let him practice more. "You need help?" He was intensely self-conscious about how bad he must sound, his accent and grammar terrible. Matthew prided himself on how