Sayuri broke the silence. “Our allies have come to our aid!”
Cold dread poured through Mildred’s heart. The conglomerates had never gone to war with one another. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Laws prevented it. Yet in front of them lay four shattered war boats to the contrary, sunk by bombs detonated on Æfrian soil.
Shuu inched them around a flotsam of steel and corpses. “There’s a dock on the Cleif side. We’re gonna need some more petrol and I figure you folks’d like to stretch yer legs.”
“And get a bath,” Sayuri said, “I must have a bath.”
“Aye, and a bath,” Shuu said, eyes scanning the water.
Thomas had informed her of Shuu’s real identity. Unlike Thomas, she didn’t place any more trust in the Imperial bureaucracy than in the conglomerates. At least the conglomerates were forthright when they were fucking you. The Empire did it with a smile and a pat on the head.
Thomas was watching the shore, scanning for traces of his hometown. Apart from the clocktower and glass building across the river, nothing about the town sounded like what he’d described to Milly over the years. Even the glass building that had been a turbine factory now bore giant channel letters across its mass, a ferris wheel sprouting from a gap in the ceiling, and wooden decks with restaurant seating. The Kaihongo letters probably did not read, “Ueden Turbine Factory.”
Every centimeter of shorefront was packed with people watching the sinking wreckage of the Genji fleet and the little patrol boat passing it. As they came near the shore, skirting an unexploded anti-ship missile, Milly saw that the crowd was Kaihonjin. Not only that, there was no Shroud.
Burnehithe wasn’t an Æfrian town anymore.
Nor had it been for some time given the expensive riverfront condos and houses with private docks. The town had sprawled out to all sides of the two rivers across what Thomas had described to her in his memories as rolling fields of grass.
“From an ecological perspective, hatsuden-powered ships are superior for the environment in that they do not release hydrocarbons into the water upon their destruction,” Sayuri cheerfully stated.
One of the bombs that had floated downriver past Burnehithe detonated, sending a column of fire and vapor into the air. The shore full of Kaihonjin screamed, ran, or cheered depending on their temperment.
Shuu turned the Daisagi-Maru north-east at the confluence, up a sludgy river full of floating garbage. Milk jugs, beer cans, dead fish, and plastic children’s toys clinked against the prow.
Milly walked up next to Thomas at the bow. “This is the river you used to swim in?”
He shook his head. “It didn’t look like this back then. Over there…”
He pointed to a three-story mansion with a cherry-red speed boat docked out front. By the shore was a red maple with half its leaves gone. Behind it were children’s toys, including an electric buggy, a pink-and-white plastic castle, and a trampoline.
“That was where our house used to be. Miriam wanted to plant that tree,” Thomas said, voice choking up.
She rubbed his back and said nothing. Her own childhood house was buried under a battery plant, but this seemed worse.
“My book has talked little of naval strategy thus far and I wonder in what manners it differs from terrestrial warfare,” Sayuri said. “Nonetheless, it is satisfying to witness a conquest of one’s foes, though the blow be struck by one’s allies.”
No one had the energy to stop her gushing, least of all Milly, who’d barely gotten any sleep. Instead, she watched Thomas’ face, but after his voice choked up talking about the maple tree, the emotional valve had turned off.
“The architecture is nice,” he said. Him and his architecture fixation.
Shuu turned the Daisagi-Maru towards a diamond-shaped cut in the peninsula where hundreds of motor boats and schooners were docked. At the far end was a red-brick building with copper dome and spire.
She pointed it out to Thomas. “Was that there?”
He nodded, gaze fixed on it. “That was the town hall. The marina is where a bunch of houses used to be.”
Waiting for them at the dock was a security guard wearing a black uniform, white gloves, and an assault rifle.
“Cannot dock here. Only members of Boruhizu Yacht Club,” he said in stern and heavily-accented Æfrian.
Shuu slowed the boat and walked around to the side where Sayuri couldn’t see him and flashed a badge before saying something in Kaihongo that cowed the man. Yacht club members watched them with tuts of disapproval. Despite Shuu’s shiftiness, Milly enjoyed his ability to force outsiders on them with a flash of a badge.
The girl he was hiding the badge from was still babbling to nobody about the potential outcome of the battle and how important of a blow it was to Genji. Milly wasn’t sure how big a blow it really was, since the industrial behemoth could have the flotilla rebuilt by tomorrow morning.
Before disembarking, Milly grabbed her pack with a change of clothes and make-up. She knew Sayuri was going to twist her arm into going for a bath. She wanted one herself.
Sayuri stepped off the boat after her. “Perhaps we shall have dinner on the waterfront.” She looked back at the trash floating downstream. “Though… on the Glær river side of the peninsula, I should think.”
“No,” Milly said.
“It is always no with you! Surely with our pursuers sunk we ought to have some sort of celebration,” Sayuri huffed.
“The bath is the celebration.”
Mildred tramped down the plastic, faux-wood docks. She waited for Thomas to chime in, but he seemed locked in a trance taking in the strangeness of his home town. She decided to leave him alone and give him time to brood.
“A bath is not a celebration, it is basic hygiene!” Sayuri said.
“And sometimes basic hygiene is a luxury,” Mildred replied.
A stone path through a manicured garden took them to a street paved with cobbles over which rose four-story buildings in a late-Æfrian timber-frame and brick style (so Thomas had once gushed), but built in tighter block sizes and with the small, open-air porches that the Kaihonjin liked. Luxury electric cars purred along out front. She hated that it was so pretty.
“Is any of this the same?” she asked, worried her questions were becoming irritating to Thomas.
Thomas shook his head. Milly thought she saw anger creeping onto his face.
“I’m going off on my own for a bit. Our rendezvous is here at 1700 hours. If anyone isn’t here, something’s gone wrong,” Thomas said.
“How in the world am I going to know when 1700 hours is?” Milly asked.
He pointed at the clocktower’s east face which read 1:58 and stomped off.
She sighed. “You and me now, Sayuri.”
“So it always seems to be.”
“Try not to bury me under your enthusiasm.”
“I am not enthusiastic.”
“Oh, really?”
They walked inland, passing achingly quaint tea and spice shops, cafes, florists, and workshops advertising portraits and sculptures on commission. This was some sort of “historic district” without history. Built from the ground up to ignite the feeling of a memory. Whose memory, she didn’t know. No Æfrian town had ever looked like this, and neither had any Kaihonjin one.
Further inland lay high-rise apartments and gray, blocky office buildings. This was the real face of Burnehithe, or Boruhizu, she supposed.
“Where do you think we’ll find a bathhouse?” Mildred asked.
“A good bathhouse? We would have to ask a local,” Sayuri said.
“Any bathhouse will do fine.”
“I should think not! We must have an open-air bath. Though your island may lack volcanic springs, modern hydraulics can provide a serviceable facsimile of a rotenburo. And perhaps we could find one with other amenities, such as massages.”
Blessed unto Loothsa, that sounded heavenly, but also a great way to get the word out about a girl with full-body kinkawa.
“Privacy, Sayuri. The only amenity it needs is privacy.”
“Hmph. Obviously. I would not wish to share my bath with the filthy public.”
Sayuri soon zeroed in on an elderly couple leaving an art gallery. Mildred was worried she would launch into her obnoxious rich-girl routine, but whatever she said to them, the couple looked charmed. After a couple cordial jokes, bows, and hat tips, the old couple went on with their business.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“They recommended a bathhouse called Kawa-Roukan, though it is in the new part of the city. They described it as a tower of outdoor baths, which intrigues me and suggests privacy.”
Mildred didn’t quibble.
It was obvious where the “old town” ended because the roads turned into asphalt and the buildings turned into cement and steel. The cars were louder and honking at police officers herding crowds of pedestrians away from the riverfront and back into office buildings now that the naval spectacle was over.
“You’ve got a way with people, huh?” Mildred said as they walked through a tunnel of construction scaffolding.
“Not particularly. Just adults,” she replied.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I am very good at playing the role of a delightful young woman, but as to the matter of my peers, I have never endeared myself to them, nor them to me. They wish to discuss small things, I wish to discuss big things. They, the myriad, petty human dramas, and I, matters of linguistics, political economy, and the humanities.”
Oh, she was one of those kids.
“I’m sure there’s gotta be other students like you at your academy.”
“Yes,” Sayuri said sourly, “except instead of academic matters they are interested in comics and cartoons and model-building, which I most certainly am not.”
“So you want other kids your age to be interested in what you like?”
“Yes!”
“But you aren’t interested in what they like.”
“No.”
“Do you see how that’s a problem?” Mildred asked.
“Yes, but one cannot fake an interest in things which one finds uninteresting. It would be dishonest.”
“Sometimes you have to start by pretending to like stuff other people like, and then you get sucked in by accident.”
“How so?”
“I didn’t think about architecture much before I listened to Thomas gush about it every night.”
“But you did so because you like Thomas. I do not like those other students,” Sayuri said.
Milly chuckled. “I didn’t like him at the time.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “He’s not someone you like right away. Some people are just like that. But you’ll never find them if you don’t allow them to grow on you.”
“Perhaps,” Sayuri said in an effort to kill the conversation. Clearly, Mildred was guilty of the double crime of being a boring adult and an Æfrian.
They soon came to Kawa-Roukan, which was a tall, skinny building on the riverfront. The entryway resembled a traditional Kaihon bathhouse protruding from a modern office block.
The inside, meanwhile, was the nicest building Mildred had ever been in. Smooth tile floors and white limestone walls were lit by soft amber lights. Over the door, a local TV news station was replaying scenes of the naval bombing. Straight ahead was a bamboo slat reception desk.
“Irashaimasee~!” the man at the reception desk yelled, causing Mildred to jump.
She let Sayuri do the talking after a gentle reminder that they were there for baths and no more. After some negotiation, Sayuri announced, “the total price for a private bath is 100 dō plus a 250 dō room charge. Towels and conditioner were 50 dō, since we did not bring our own. The total price before drinks is 400 dō.”
Mildred choked down her shock at how expensive it was. The bathhouse near The Silk Pillow was 35 dō per bather.
“Drinks?”
Sayuri’s eyes lit up. “Oh! I had assumed you would not be amenable. In that case…”
Sayuri rattled off an order to the bath attendant who punched more numbers into his cash register. Well, it was a celebration, technically. Mildred tried to forget the burned, drowned, and maimed bodies a hundred meters from them.
“Ask him if they have anything with gin in it,” Mildred said.
“He said he recommends the Pink Marble. It’s gin, lime juice, rose syrup, and sparkling nigori.”
“Fuck it,” she said, not knowing what nigori was.
“Do you not want something to drink?”
“No, I— “fuck it” means yes,” Mildred said.
“This word never stops surprising.”
Once their drink orders were in, Mildred bit the inside of her cheek as she put 600 dō on the counter. She could spend the same amount on two weeks of groceries and still have some left over.
“Are we waiting on our drinks?”
“No, they’ll be sent to us,” Sayuri said, pointing to transparent glass tubes that went into the ceiling.
They rode the elevator to the 12th floor and stepped off into a long, narrow room, all to themselves. From front to back was a small sitting area with mounted TV, the bathrooms, a changing area, a set of showers, and finally a glass door to a tub overlooking the Glær River.
Leaving their shoes in a locker, they went to get changed. Sayuri had to walk Mildred through the procedures for entering the bath, including showering and washing her hair beforehand. No one bothered with that in Æfrian baths.
Milly felt some gentle jealousy of the girl’s back-length hair which, though it had gained some split ends during their hectic flight, was as black and glossy as obsidian. She’d never liked her own dark brown. It was yet another thing about her that hovered in-between two worlds.
As Sayuri washed herself for the bath, the rest of the white foundation flowed down the drain. This was the first time Milly had seen all of her kinkawa at once. She couldn’t even look at Sayuri directly, the light reflecting off the gold in her skin was too bright in the dispersing steam.
“Gods, Sayuri, you are hard to look at.”
“The scientists implanting it had to wear tinted goggles.”
“I think I prefer you covered up.”
“I as well,” she said softly, “I care little for attention, as you may have surmised. I hope it shall not be a distraction.”
“No! No, of course not,” Milly said. It was very much a distraction, but she knew what being on the other end of that gaze felt like.
When they were done showering, they stepped out into the chilly November air and all but dove into the bath. The water was stinging hot, and Milly didn’t even want to know how much energy it cost to keep baths at 40 degrees out in the cold air. She tried, but couldn’t quite forget the fact that, heated by hatsuden energy, they were stewing in someone else’s misery.
The bath itself was made of dark stone and butted up against the balcony railing of thick, darkly-tinted glass. The same glass blocked the sides and top, leaving a little viewing port for the bathers to look out without being exposed. From their view they could see the ordnance disposal boats approaching warheads trapped in eddies.
“My father must have promised Kintoki quite a bit of Genji’s industrial capacity in exchange for their fealty,” Sayuri said.
No sooner had she said this than a suctioning shoomp noise announced the arrival of their drinks in a plastic tube. Milly didn’t even have to get out of the bath to get them. Hers was in a glass flute that, true to its name, resembled pink marble topped with a twist of lime. Sayuri’s was a cup of frozen, peachy goo.
“What is that?” Milly asked, handing the drink to Sayuri.
“Frozen strawberry lemonade. Before you ask, yes it is out of season, however I wished for something nostalgic.”
Milly didn’t know what was in season, nor did she care. The “Pink Marble” was tasty enough, but was a little too froo-froo. Too much rose syrup, not enough gin. Not that this stopped her from tilting the glass back for the last drops.
Once the gin hit her stomach she finally permitted the bath to ease her troubles. She slid underwater and sighed, making bubbles with her breath. Sayuri melted in with her. After a few minutes of serene silence, Sayuri set aside her half-drunk frozen lemonade.
“You never did explain how precisely your hotel is run, Ms. Milly.”
Milly’s neck craned over the lip of the bath, staring up at the concrete balcony above theirs. The heat from the bath and the cocktail combined to make her lightheaded. The edges were running out of the world faster than they probably should.
“It’s not a hotel, Sayuri. It’s a brothel. I’m a sex worker.”
“I-I— Oh, I— erm… I’m sorry. That must be—”
“Why sorry? I chose the job.”
Sayuri blinked. The gold bands criss-crossing her face looked so strange bisecting flesh the color of strawberry lemonade. She grabbed a cold towel and pressed it to her face to calm down. When Sayuri came back from the brink of overheating, she started on a path she was more comfortable with.
“H-How is such a business structured? Is there not a proprietor— er, proprietress, p-perhaps?”
Business talk: Bright, concrete, positive, logical. And sterile. What Sayuri was trying to accomplish by asking about the business side of sex work was to sterilize the messiness out of it. There were no diseases, fluids, fetishes, or taboos in business administration. No pleasures, pains, penetrations, or paraphilias in profit.
Milly grinned. Here was an opportunity to demonstrate her devotion to her patron goddess Loothsa. She couldn’t teach Sayuri how to fire a gun or pilot a boat, but she could teach her something even more useful: How to escape the shackles of decency.
Sliding around the side of the tub, she poked Sayuri’s calf with her toe. “Come on, you don’t wanna hear about all the boring business stuff. You want to hear about all the filthy, gross, grown-up sex stuff. You want to hear about arses and tits and pricks and cunts, don’t you? That’s what you really want to hear about.”
“Absolutely not! Sexual degeneracy is a moral blemish and a stain on one’s honor. It leads to disease and mental dullness and ensures no one will ever wish to marry you. You will be cast out like a filthy, used rag!”
Milly bit her lip. Well, she knew all that shit was in there, waiting to come spilling out once she prodded. She couldn’t get angry with Sayuri just because Milly found what she was looking for.
“Do you think I’m diseased and dull?”
The girl looked away. “N-No… but you are unmarried.”
“Which was my choice, or did you already forget Thomas asked to marry me?”
“Is not your choice informed by your own extreme sexual license? Would you not otherwise have become married?”
“I’m a sex worker because I wanted independence. From the conglomerates, from the Shroud, and from my neighborhood. That was the only way to get it. If I could have freedom elsewhere, I’d do something else. Same goes for marriage. I want to be free, and those are shackles.”
The righteous indignation melted off Sayuri’s face. In all likelihood, the girl still thought she was a filthy degenerate, doomed to become an old maid. That was fine. Maybe it was even true. But it was enough that another idea was now swirling around in the girl’s brain, creating an adversary for The Correct Answer she had been taught.
“Now, don’t you want to hear about all the sex stuff?”
“No!”
“Not even how to suck a cock? Eat an ass?”
Milly mimed the acts.
“Stop this at once!”
Her protests were undermined by giggles, which only encouraged Milly to make her gestures more obscene. She knew Sayuri had a little pervert inside her. Everyone did. The only way to get yourself truly clean was to bring the dirtiness to the surface. She only let Sayuri out of the bath after forcing her to make a V with her fingers and waggle her tongue in it.
Milly had to steady herself getting out of the bath with her head spinning. She perhaps may have underestimated the gin content of that drink. Nice though it was, she wasn’t fully relaxed. She couldn’t be. There was too much to worry about.
As she closed the glass doors, Milly gazed out at the helicopters hovering around the wreckage. The bombing worried her more than being chased by Genji. This was now open warfare between clan-conglomerates. It was supposed to be impossible, and when impossible things happened in one place, they could happen in others.
In the middle of an interview segment about the attack on the Genji flotilla, the TV near the elevator played a jingle and cut to a pair of Kaihonjin newscasters delivering breaking news. Milly couldn’t understand any of it, but Sayuri watched with growing anxiety.
“What is it?” Milly asked.
“Th-They are saying… an Æfrian— a man, went on a shooting spree in the old town.”