“The police have indicated this may be part of a coordinated action by Afujin terrorists to exploit the state of confusion caused by the naval incident earlier today. We advise all citizens to stay indoors with doors securely locked, and to remain inside until the Boruhizu Police Department has given the all clear. Please stay tuned. More emergency information to follow.”
After the sign-off, the TV switched to a cheery advertisement for a cake-baking set from Hidari Consumer Products. Sayuri trembled. The air inside the changing room felt like a freezer.
Milly resembled an owl, wide-eyed and hard-faced. “Get your clothes on. We need to get back to the boat.”
Sayuri pulled on her clothes without toweling off. “Should we not seek out Mr. Chester? S-Surely he ought to be alerted to the danger—”
Milly stopped with her dress halfway on. “Sayuri, the next thing they’re gonna do is round up every Æfrian in the city, and if we’re caught, we’re gonna have much bigger problems.”
“B-But I can always turn us invisible.”
“You’ll be doing that anyway, we don’t have time to powder over your kinkawa. But we’re not looking for Thomas.”
“Why ever not!? Surely he—”
“Because he could be the fucking shooter, Sayuri!”
Sayuri stopped dead at the venomous words coming from the woman’s mouth. The thought that Chester could be a terrorist had not, and would not, cross her mind. The man who had saved her from Genji assassins and guarded her life and bought her a nice book would not perpetrate an act of terrorism. Yes, he was boorish and unrefined, but none of that amounted to a proclivity for extremism
“I cannot believe such a thing. How can you think that of a man who has demonstrated no such temperament?”
Milly placed her hands on Sayuri’s shoulders. “Sayuri, no one came home from the war with their heads on straight, do you understand? No one. I want to believe that it wasn’t Thomas. You don’t understand how badly I want that to be true. But I saw the state he was in earlier, and we’ve both seen him kill without issue the past couple of days.”
Sayuri shrugged out of Milly’s grip. “What about earlier!? You said you liked Mr. Chester!”
“Why do you think I refused to marry him? I like him, and I feel sorry for him, but veterans are walking time bombs, and it’s not anyone’s fault but the Emperor’s. Let’s get moving.”
“You are wrong,” Sayuri said with stubborn, irrational emotionality. She would make sure to rub it in when she was proved correct.
Before the elevator doors opened, Sayuri turned them both invisible. The timing was impeccable. A pair of police officers were speaking with the old man at the reception desk.
“Yes, they were a strange pair, sir, that’s why I called you. One of ‘em was a little Kaihonjin girl, maybe ‘bout 14 or 15, but she was wearing Afujin clothes. She’s the one I talked to. Then the other one was a half-breed who I don’t think spoke any Kaihongo. They’re up on Floor 12.”
Holding her hand, Milly led Sayuri around the edge of the lobby to avoid catching the police in the Shroud. Once they were on the streets, there was less risk of that since the streets had been cleared except for circling police cars providing peace of mind for those locked indoors. The few checkpoints were for cars fleeing the old town, and not for two invisible figures going into it.
They arrived outside the Boruhizu Yacht Club not long before the clocktower struck five. Chester was nowhere to be seen.
~~~
As soon as Thomas felt he grasped his emotions, they changed: Sadness at recognizing nothing along the riverfront lane he spent the first 20 years of his life turned into anger at the inhabitants who knew nothing about the land into nostalgia for days playing in the golden sunset into pain from seeing the spot a mighty oak once stood over the dirt road into longing for when he kissed his first love Gwendoline up in its branches, their dirty, bruised knees knocking together.
It was too confusing. He didn’t want these emotions. He wished he could be under the Shroud. Or drunk.
He wanted to be just one thing at time. Furious, maybe, at the Kaihonjin who robbed him of his hometown, at the architectural colleges too expensive for Æfrian applicants, at the system of land-use that kept him from building something as beautiful as that limestone clocktower.
But who could he be mad at? Market forces had buried his hometown under new development, not Kaihonjin. Nothing but his wallet kept him from higher education and becoming an architect. There was no single person or people, but he was angry all the same.
After a couple hours of walking, his feet carried him to where the market square used to be. It was paved with dirt when he was younger, but full of ramshackle stands selling the fruits of the river trade, just as it had for a thousand years before the Kaihonjin arrived.
It smelled like sweat, body odor, spices, and fish. It sounded like a roaring waterfall of conversing and bartering. It looked like a carnival, dyed cloth strewn over stalls and little two-story shacks on whose roofs grown men discussing who owed who what fish. Merchants sold sewing machines, shoes, rice, trout, cassette players, car parts, flowers, pop guns, ice cream, cleaning chemicals, tobacco, and horses side-by-side.
Now there was a fountain of white limestone. Cobblestone covered trodden dirt. A hundred or so Kaihonjin, spread apart in clusters, carried on quiet, polite conversations in the shadow of the clocktower that overlooked the square. The air smelled like chlorine.
Thomas scattered a blush of robins as he sat on a bench. He wondered if they were the descendants of the ones he knew.
Nearby, mothers corralled children riled up by the naval battle, elders discussed the future in concerned tones, construction workers sat at the fountain, snacking on rice balls and debating how the clan-conglomerate alliances would shake out. For once, Thomas didn’t feel he stood out as an Æfrian. The naval battle had grabbed people’s attention. However, his instincts as a security agent told him someone stood out.
A lanky figure hovered at the fringes of the plaza. He wore the gray trench coat issued to colonial infantry during the winter in Ryūkoku. Sensing Thomas’ gaze, the man looked to him. His face was unshaven, eyes sad and sunken, platinum blonde hair patchy where it had been pulled at.
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The figure nodded to Thomas. A nod of solidarity. It unnerved him. That nod didn’t belong in this space, it belonged to a battlefield. Thomas started to get to his feet.
“In the name of Fleothe, goddess of the river you rape and defile, I drive invaders from our land!”
From the trench coat, the man produced a machine pistol and opened fire into the scattered crowds of Kaihonjin.
The fire wasn’t concentrated the way an assassination or a military operation was. The body the man’s bullets were intended to pierce was a shared body, it only mattered that they entered a Kaihonjin body. No one died in the first wave of fire, but were left thrashing on the ground, painting the cobblestone with blood.
Screams replaced the sound of gunfire as the Æfrian terrorist stopped to reload. He switched out the magazine with the numb detachment of a worker under the Shroud swapping the workpiece of a milling machine. The crowds furthest were sprinting away, but those closer to the terrorist didn’t have time before another wave of bullets caught them.
Thomas was running towards the man before he knew why. All that went through his head was a brief flash of the house that had replaced his childhood home, of the plastic castle in the backyard. He caught the man halfway through inserting a third magazine into the pistol. As Thomas tackled him, the expression of numbness was replaced by shock.
He took the man to the ground. It wasn’t difficult. He was as thin as a tree sapling underneath his coat. Driven by a possessing dæmon, Thomas pinned the man’s throat and tore the gun from his spindly fingers. The man choked under Thomas’ forearm. Thomas’ anger finally had a receptacle to receive it and his fist came down on the man’s face, over and over, flesh and bone giving under force Thomas didn’t know he could summon. He only stopped when his knuckles were swollen from colliding with the man’s skull. Above, a news helicopter circled.
Some of the Kaihonjin were dead, some still alive. Green and red lights flashed in his peripheral vision along with a siren that heralded an atmosphere as pervasive as the Shroud, only instead of numbness, it was surreal horror.
The robins had flown off. The fountain gurgled pink water. The clocktower ticked on with disinterest. Thomas was forced to the ground by several policemen, his temples ground between cobblestone and a gun barrel. They yelled something at him in Kaihongo and he waited passively while they did what they would with him.
~~~
“Enough. We need to go back on the boat,” Milly said.
It was now 5:30. Sayuri felt hot and dizzy from holding the invisibility for so long, but they were trying to avoid the yacht club members calling the police.
“I refuse to return without Mr. Chester.”
“Drop the invisibility.”
Sayuri did as she was told and the two of them appeared on the lawn. Sayuri’s gold-laced skin shined in the sun’s rays.
“Even if Thomas wasn’t the shooter, we have no idea where he is. If he was rounded up with the other Æfrians then we have no way of getting to him. And if we don’t get back on the boat, we’ll get caught too.”
A powerful emotion, or perhaps the emotion of feeling powerful, sprouted in Sayuri’s mind. Its only comparison was when Fukuzawa let her briefly pilot the Daisagi-Maru. Never in her life had she made a true decision. The Correct Decision was always already made for her. It was like deciding how far to pull a throttle.
“That is precisely what we must do at this juncture, Ms. Milly. We must get caught.”
“W-Wha— No! Absolutely not, you daft girl!”
Milly grabbed Sayuri’s small wrist and tugged her towards the pier.
“Allow me to explain myself!” Sayuri said.
“You want us to get caught so they’ll take us to the police department where Thomas is. I’m not stupid, it’s just a terrible plan.”
Sayuri dragged her heels, but the older woman was stronger. It didn’t help that she was being pulled downhill.
“How so!?”
“Because there’s no guarantee we’ll make it back out!” Milly said. “Need I remind you that you knock yourself out whenever you use too much hatsuden?”
“Then I will not use it. Now release me! You have no say over what I do with myself!”
Sayuri tumbled onto the grass as Milly let go of her wrist.
“You’re right, I don’t,” the woman said. She didn’t look back as she returned to the boat by herself.
Sayuri’s bravery waned. With Milly beside her, the plan had seemed viable. Now she was again a naive little girl who understood nothing. She didn’t know how the police would treat her when she couldn’t rely on her clan’s name or what to do once caught. She didn’t even know for sure that Chester would be there. There were too many question marks, and her entire education and upbringing told her that question marks were dangerous, that the only successful plans negated them.
She stood up and brushed grass stains off her cloak. Perhaps she would go back to the boat after all.
“Excuse me miss.”
Sayuri whirled around to find two police officers towering over her. Both were eyeing her up and down, appraising the lines of gold on her face, neck, hands, and calves. One officer grasped her firmly by the arm. He spoke in an authoritative, patronizing Kaihongo.
“We have some questions for you in regards to the recent terrorist attack. Please come with us to the station.”
“W-What do you want with me? I-I was just out to the yacht club,” Sayuri said, glancing out of the corner of her eye for Milly who was already gone.
“You were seen on camera with a suspect in the investigation,” the officer said, pointing to a security camera hidden in the eaves of the yacht club building. “Please come quietly, miss.”
Escaping by using her hatsuden would have been trivial, but the police officers gave her a reason not to back out of her plan, so she allowed them to take her towards a waiting patrol car.
~~~
Two concentric waves formed below the prop-rotors of the Genji gunship hovering above the wreckage. Persimmon was less interested in a few sunk boats than in the bird’s eye view of a city scrambling like ants. The Genkai-Wabu had received word of the Æfrian terrorist attack on the flight over.
When several coincidences happened simultaneously, such as a spree shooting in the same town where one of their river flotillas had been destroyed by an Ueden ally, and where the patrol boat bearing Sayuri Ueichi was currently docked, he had to call it an act of providence. Persimmon was old-fashioned like that. He thought of himself as the hair of a martial tradition of religious warriors. The merchant class which had superseded this pious men placed too much faith in positivism and deductive reasoning.
“Take us in over that parking garage,” Persimmon said into his helmet microphone.
The rotors rotated forward and pushed the hovering gunship towards Boruhizu. He could see eyes and fingers below pointing at the Genji gunship lumbering over the city. As they descended towards the parking garage, the co-pilot said, “got chatter on the public safety band. They’ve apprehended a suspect. Red hair, red jacket, scary-looking. Sounds like your guy.”
“Copy that,” Persimmon said.
He took off his flight helmet and stowed it under a seat before leaping from the hovering gunship onto the top of a parking garage. The kinetic energy from the 15 meter fall was redistributed through the soles of his shoes, up through the kinkawa interfacing with them, and into converters buried in his skin which dispersed it as tingling warmth around his solar plexus.
There was plenty about Wotenha’s sprawling clockwork around him that he did not understand. However, intuition was a far more useful tool in understanding how the parts fit together. And he had identified two gears that turned together: Thomas Chester and Sayuri Ueichi.
He pulled out a handheld radio. “Central Telecom, this is Harmony 1-6.”
A ghostly voice greeted him. “Harmony 1-6, this is Telecom 3-2, we read you loud and clear.”
“Tell Boruhizu Police Department we’re coming to pick up an Afujin in a grenadier’s jacket and a Kaihonjin girl covered in gold and that this will be discreet.”
“Copy that, Harmony 1-6. We’ll let ‘em know,” replied a distant cogwheel turning.