They made their way over the crumbling infrastructure to Piravom, a settlement on the outskirts of New Kochi that was supposed to have a resistance cell tucked away in it. He was only twenty-three, but he already had a streak of gray in his otherwise black hair and eyes like a summer sky. He had some medical training and spoke Malayalam, the predominant language of the area. To round things out, he added Chakyar, a young man originally from Dubai. (Having Lena in harm’s way didn’t settle easily on his shoulders either.)įor his people, he chose Chitto, Nishimura, and Dux, who was by that time pretty well mended. Of the two Shens, Lily was the least expendable.īut she was also stubborn, and she outranked him. From their description, a handful of notes, and an examination of Lena, she had not only figured out how the bio-implant worked but also built a detector that would expose that sort of device. He didn’t know what her IQ was, but it had to be off the charts. In his time on board the Elpis, he had come to realize that Lily was not only healthier than her father but also that she was far brighter-and that was saying something. That meant that Lily was going instead, and she was taking Lena as an assistant.Īmar had deeply mixed feelings about this. Shen was better, but the way was going to be physically demanding, and Sam wanted to delay his journey there until it was deemed necessary. The plan was for Sam and Amar to lead an expedition to discover if the ship was still there after all these years and in sound enough shape to be worth their time. It took a little patience, but in the end they found such a place. The real challenge was finding a place deep enough that the ship would not be revealed at high tide. Which made them an excellent place to hide the Elpis. But whereas Kerala had once had an extensive backwater transportation system of inland waters, rivers, and canals, outside of New Kochi, these backwaters had not been maintained, and years of flooding and meandering had taken their toll, turning them into messy, brackish marshes. This was now doubly the case-the Ghats were contagion zones, and strictly off limits. Much of the Ghats had always been thinly populated-the population of Kerala had lived mostly along the coast. Now Kerala, like the rest of planet Earth, had new colonizers. Indeed, so important was Kerala that Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal decided it ought to be conquered, so beginning an era of colonialism that wouldn’t end until the twentieth century. Black pepper, nutmeg, cloves from the distant islands of Maluku all passed through the port at Cochin. Civilization there was old, and it had formed the hub of the spice trade for millennia. The part of the range they were interested in lay in what had once been the state of Kerala. THE WESTERN GHATS were mountains in the southwest of the Indian subcontinent.