You were lucky if they fed you.

Biniam had gotten away from all that by sheer determination and a huge amount of luck. After his fifth year sitting in a squalid bunker on the border with Ethiopia being whipped by an insane commander and surviving off meager rations he supplemented with roots and leaves, he decided that a ten percent chance of survival was better than living his current life and he bolted for the border.

He crossed the border into Ethiopia in the dead of a moonless night, the sound of the hyenas laughing out of the darkness sending tremors through his body that ten years on had never gone away. Much of the border was mined. None of the minefields were marked. He walked for hours and took his chances.

The next day dawned and Biniam was in Ethiopia. The nation was happy to take refugees from its breakaway province, but didn’t bother providing them with anything. He ended up in a Doctors Without Borders refugee camp, sharing a tent with ten other people and getting two meals a day, twice what he got in the Eritrean army.

Biniam used his natural talent with electronics, learned in his dad’s radio repair shop, to make himself useful to the NGO. He fixed their generator. He fixed their shortwave. Eventually they taught him to use their computers and introduced him to something called the Internet, which people like him had never seen before.

From there he moved to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, a sprawling metropolis full of opportunity and squalor. He chose opportunity. Squalor chose him. For three years he lived in a tin shack scavenging electronic parts that he sold to various shops before he landed a job in an Internet cafe. From there he worked his way up to being an assistant sysop for the local university.

From that point, Biniam always got vague with his story. He claimed to have “lucked into a connection” that helped him a receive a student visa to the United States, even though there was no way he could have afforded the flight, let alone the tuition. Once in the U.S., he got a “special preferment” to obtain a Green Card. Heinrich didn’t ask. It was none of his business and Biniam wouldn’t have been straight with him anyway. He’d take one Eritrean semi-legal refugee over a hundred latte-sipping hipsters any day.

He knew Biniam would be straight with him on this video call though. Biniam considered this service more secure than encrypted email.

“So what’s going on, bud?” Heinrich asked.

“Something interesting coming up. A neo-Nazi named Dieter Freytag got murdered. The Purity League says it was the Communists but no one really knows.”

“Yeah, I heard at that meeting you sent me to.”

“There’s going to be a funeral and a demonstration in Warsaw tomorrow, that’s why I called you.”

“Interesting. I’ll go.”

“You know what day that is, don’t you?”

“May 1, May Day. Yeah, so they’ll be spoiling for a fight with the Commies and the Commies will be spoiling for a fight with the world. Should be loads of fun. Two sets of assholes beating the shit out of each other. I’ll take some photos for you.”

“I’ll treasure them, my friend.”

Eritrea’s government was supposedly communist, although in reality, like with all communist countries, it was ruled by a small elite that gave even less of a damn about the working class than the average American billionaire. Biniam hated Commies just as much as Heinrich hated Nazis.

“So where does the demo kick off?” Heinrich asked.

“Michał Grabowski Square for the neo-Nazis. The Reds are marching from Liberation Square about a mile away and going along Gabriel Narutowicz Street. That’s where the Nazis plan to meet them.