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In Muscat his teacher is an expatriate with a shaggy haircut and a wicked smile.
Chandra introduces himself to John in the Muttrah Souq, passing his hand over a scrap of cardboard to turn it into a business card. It’s a show of trust in John’s discretion that he can’t help but return, and soon the cherub-faced Indian is demonstrating how to shoplift incense from one of the tiny market stalls. He’s near John’s age, but his wide eyes, smooth cheeks and ready laugh make him seem a decade younger. Being with Chandra is like standing too close to a bonfire, and by the end of the afternoon John is entranced.
Traditionally, the primary role of the Shifter is “leader”: the one who negotiates, talks things through, links people together. Chandra proves himself true to the stereotype by helping John find a place to live for cheap and hooking him up with a job at a small clinic that's willing to take his credentials at face value and pay him under the table. After they both finish work, Chandra takes him to clubs and pays with pieces of paper Shifted to look like 10-rial bank notes. The fun of the game is to stay in the bar until the illusion runs its course, then escape furious waitstaff and bouncers when the ruse is discovered. Chandra crows when he tallies the list of clubs he’s been banned from. It’s fairly juvenile, but it’s also fun, and after weeks of isolation and paranoia this kind of excitement feels just right.
Occasionally Chandra asks him to take a look at some ailment in a friend or co-worker who's afraid going to hospital will get them sacked or deported, and John is agreeable enough. He likes doctoring people, and he likes doing favors for the friend who’s making life on the run bearable just by being there.
When John was growing up in Scotland, he learned that unregistered psychics formed a sort of secret society. Not the kind that wanted to overthrow the government; Mum and Dad didn’t plot raids or blow up buildings. Mostly what they did was write letters, and help other psychics who were in trouble. Once a terrified young Watcher came and lived with them for a month; Mum Shadowed her the whole time, protecting her from the notice of Division Sniffs until the scrutiny died down. When John learned he was a Stitch at age 11, he was sent to spend the summer with an “Uncle Jack” he'd never heard of before, who taught John the basics of using his abilities.
With Chandra, John manages to completely forget that the secondary role of the Shifter tends to be “con artist.”
He finds out that Chandra's “friends” are in fact paying rather substantial fees for the services of his pet Stitch, and the row is so intense that it almost comes to blows. John shouts that Chandra has betrayed his trust and deceived him; Chandra yells that John owed him for all the help and the deception part was just a bit of fun. It's just as well that John's too angry to sleep when he gets home; it means he's able to throw his pack together and escape via the window when the Royal Oman Police kick his door in around seven a.m.
He learns that fugitives can't trust anyone, their own kind least of all.
***
In Aden his teachers are a family living in a single room in the Crater district.
A Kiwi he meets in the port tells him that the local version of Division is extremely bribable, but John hasn’t the money to spare. So he makes his living healing the poor, because they’re less likely to rat him out. He mostly relies on word of mouth referrals, and business is far from brisk.
One morning a haggard man with bony knuckles and a prematurely graying beard approaches him and asks hesitantly if he’s the doctor. The watchful, deliberate way in which he bargains, chewing furiously at a mouthful of khat, makes clear just how long the man’s been saving to be able to afford someone like John. The patient turns out to be a skeletally thin boy, feverish and coughing, lying on a simple pallet in the room he shares with his parents and three smaller siblings. John has a grim suspicion what’s wrong the instant he walks in, and a touch of his hands to the boy’s chest only confirms the diagnosis: tuberculosis.
Like most of the people John visits, the boy should have been to a doctor weeks or months before now. The TB has gone miliary, leaching into the circulatory system and scattering tubercles through nearly every organ. John wants to scream in frustration; he turns away from the father hovering nervously in the doorway until he gets his expression under control. His ability has hard limits, albeit limits he has to discover as he goes, and one is that he can only manipulate human cells. He can’t simply zap bacteria and viruses directly, he has to find ways to make the patient’s immune system do it.
Weakened by sickness and malnutrition, the boy’s body has relatively few resources to spare. John spends most of the day working to hunt down and repair every single lesion, while the father paces around the periphery of the room and the mother huddles in the far corner with her other children. John breaks down and disposes of the necrotic tissue, replacing it with healthy new cells. He boosts the production of lymphocytes and directs them to the pockets of bacteria. The lungs alone take hours; each time John glances up, mother and children are in the same place, and the father is watching him like a hawk.
By the end, the boy’s fever is greatly reduced and he’s completely stopped coughing. His parents are beaming, the father embracing his boy and the mother emerging from her corner to cry and press kisses to his forehead. John doesn’t know enough Arabic to explain that the bacteria are still lurking deep in their son’s lungs and heart and liver, with every possibility of overwhelming his immune system again. He does know how to say, “He needs a six month course of antibiotics,” but their joyful expressions tell him that they don’t believe him.
The sun is setting, and John is aching with exhaustion. He imagines the family’s devastation when the symptoms reappear. The bearded man takes crumpled rials from his pocket one by one and smooths them flat with great care. He solemnly offers them to John: the price they agreed on, the fee for a cure he can’t perform. His back and shoulders are aching with the strain of spending the day hunched over and his head is throbbing with a migraine induced by overuse of his ability. The boy is smiling at him weakly. The mother won’t approach him any closer, but she cradles her son in her arms and tells John “thank you” over and over; John feels as if he’s about to shatter like a dropped glass, spinning shrapnel to every corner of the room. He hasn’t eaten in three days.
He takes the money.
He learns that desperation turns him into someone he doesn’t want to be.
***
In Djibouti his teacher is a lunatic he meets in a filthy alley.
It's the cool season and the temperature still hits 31 every day- even Karachi cooled off on occasion, Jesus- so he tends to come out in the evening, when the humidity is still hideous but the sun is down. He's walking through the African quarter towards a place where he can get dinner for about two pounds when he’s confronted by a lanky black man whose eyes are flat and gray above his wide smear of a nose. There’s no fat at all disguising the muscle that John can see shifting beneath his skin. The knife he's cradling in one of his massive fists is almost extraneous.
French class was a long time ago, but “Le sac" is pretty self-explanatory when a giant shouts it while gesturing at your pack with a ruddy great knife. The tremor in his hands and the dilation of his pupils suggest he’s high on something- probably khat, the local stimulant of choice- and the greenish tint to his teeth suggests this is far from the first time. The safe move would be to drop the pack and back away slowly.
But the thing is, that pack contains everything that he owns: what little money he's saved, his few changes of clothes. And his gun, which he vows he is never, never going to have out of reach of his hand again, no matter how paranoid it makes him feel when every passing policeman peers suspiciously at his waistband. And John really isn’t about the safe move, or he wouldn’t be here in the first place. So he looks Monsieur Hamhands in the eye and says, simply, “Non.”
The man can't quite believe it, apparently. “Donnez-moi!” he growls, brandishing the knife.
“Non,” John says, and disarms him.
The man goes berserk. John can’t tell if the drug has pushed him into psychosis or if he’s naturally insane, because he’s apparently switched his goal from robbery to murdering John with his bare hands. It's like being struck by a battering ram; whenever the man pulls his fist back again, John is tempted to look down at his chest because it feels like it has a hole punched through it. He fights back, of course, but the giant slams him up against the nearest dun-colored wall and wraps his thick fingers round John's neck, and then he can't fight back that well. Too busy suffocating.
His increasingly desperate flailing brings his hand into contact with the giant's face, and with a sudden snap he's watching the man's body from inside. The blood in his cerebral arteries is thickening to sludge as the platelets clot together. Given the strangulation, John can perhaps be forgiven for taking a few seconds to realize that he's not simply watching the giant stroke out, he's making it happen. As it turns out, directly cutting off the blood supply to the brain is quicker than choking, and within eight seconds the man's hands slacken as he passes out.
John desperately drags in air through his bruised throat as he unslings his pack and gets out the gun, tucking it into the back of his waistband. The incident was so quick that he can hardly believe it happened; he touches the giant's slack face and this time consciously looks at his brain. The clots are still wedged into the arteries, and now he can feel the rapid-fire deaths of the oxygen-starved brain cells, thousands more every second. John hesitates for a moment, then mentally kicks the clots loose, dissolves them back to individual cells. He's not going to heal the man who just tried to murder him, but it isn't in him to sit here and watch him die slowly, either.
Stitches can heal, and sometimes they can undo their own work. But he's never heard of a Stitch being able to actively, intentionally damage a healthy body. Maybe it's because there's never been a Stitch who was not only a doctor, but a soldier too. The human body is an incredibly complex machine, and John has spent years of his life studying the multitude of ways in which it can go horribly wrong.
He learns that with his ability, he can make a person’s body take itself apart.
***
In Mogadishu his teachers are a gang of thugs with AK47s.
What little money he took out of Djibouti was eaten up traveling overland; the only reason he stopped here is because he's flat fucking broke. He can't do any freelance doctoring because he has no supplies. He can't do any other work because the unemployment is something like 65%. He can't Stitch because the few psychics on the streets are the targets of possessive violence committed by competing militias.
He sleeps rough in bombed-out buildings, with his pack cradled in his arms so no one can steal it without waking him. He joins in the daily hunt for the best places to sleep and to scavenge, for a place in line at the standpipes that are the only reliable sources of water. If he dies here, it's quite likely to be from dysentery or E. coli. Maybe he'll catch a bullet in the street fighting, at least that wouldn't seem quite as pathetic a way for an ex-soldier to go.
Gradually he realizes that he's never going to get out of here without help; he studies the gangs and picks one that seems more like an actual militia and less like an excuse for rape and robbery. It's slightly dicey at first, but he cleans up a gangrenous bullet wound, makes a guy with cholera a hell of a lot more comfortable, and spends about two days painstakingly regrowing two fingers on their leader's left hand. After that, he's golden.
Like the rest of the so-called militias, the group spends most of its time extorting money from people living in or traveling through the area it controls, but there are frequent gun battles that allow John to earn his keep as a medic. He amuses himself in his spare time by practicing his rapidly-improving Arabic and learning to handle the AK47s the gang favors. The gun is heavier than the SA80 and the accuracy is for shit, but it balances out the flaws by being dead easy to clean and repair and having the stopping power of a brick wall. He decides he rather likes it.
Issak, the gang’s resident burglary expert, is eager for a pupil and takes John under his wing. The scrawny teenager painstakingly demonstrates his lockpicking skills, and grins with pleasure when John, under his tutelage, manages after an hour of effort and cursing to pick open a strongbox seized in the gang's latest round of “toll collection.” John feels ridiculously old next to these gang members; the eldest is only twenty-four. Issak is a hardened militiaman at sixteen, who tells John that Ahmed threatened to shoot him if he didn’t join up. Ultimately Issak is grateful for the opportunity, because now he earns more money to support his mother and little sisters than he did when he was shining shoes for a living.
The others tell similar stories: they aren't here to serve their country, and they're not fighting for a cause. They mostly just joined this militia because it's their only viable career path. Preying on other people is what keeps them from becoming victims themselves, and on that basis he can almost sympathize with them.
Until he overhears Ahmed and his second-in-command discussing the current bounties offered for psychics, and whether it would benefit the group more to sell John to the Federal Transitional Government, or to the Al-Shabaab rebels. John breaks into the room where they keep their extorted loot, steals all the cash they have on hand, and bribes his way onto a cargo ship headed south.
He learns that sometimes survival just means being the biggest bastard in the game.