Two officers rode in the front of the car and two in back on either side of a handcuffed Thomas. When they shoved him in, the policeman in the passenger seat had screamed something at him, not that Thomas knew what he was saying. Now they sat in tense silence. Outside, cliffs of concrete rolled by where farms had once been.

They came to a triangular building suspended above its own parking lot by concrete pillars. The building itself was unpainted concrete, with thin, slit-like balconies and jutting window nooks that gave the appearance of thorny studs.

The officers parked and shuffled Thomas out of the car towards an elevator. Further into the parking lot, he saw Æfrians and mixed-race people marched out of police vans. There weren’t many Æfrians left in Burnehithe. The entire population, kids, and all, were probably stuffed into those vans.

It hadn’t occurred to Thomas there would be a round up, but it should have. Domestic terrorism was one of the only circumstances that permitted the police to violate habeas corpus laws, and the violation tended to soothe the nerves of the Kaihonjin middle class. Hitherto he’d avoided the process due to being employed as the one doing the rounding up.

The scene when the elevator door opened was chaos.

Receptionists at a circular reception desk fielded calls from telephones ringing off the hook while an entire squadron of officers directed the flow of Æfrians into holding rooms marked for men, women, and children. On the opposite side, Kaihonjin citizens in a combination of hysterics and rage screamed at the receptionists.

Thomas was marched to an interrogation room in a back hallway. The officers sat him on a folding chair and re-cuffed his hands to an eyebolt in the center of a table and left. A few minutes later, two men in black kimonos with tight-cropped hair and clipboards opened the door. The only difference between them was that one wore circular glasses.

“Good afternoon. My name is Detective Miura, this is Detective Asame. Yours?”

Thomas looked up. He couldn’t bring himself to lie. “Thomas Chester.”

The bespectacled man sat and took out a pen which he pressed to his clipboard. The other remained standing and moved around to Thomas’ side.

“Mr. Chester, let’s talk.”

~~~

Perhaps they thought they were clever, looking at her through the rear-view mirror, but Sayuri could tell the police officers were sneaking looks at her and her kinkawa.

Eventually, one asked, “are you aware that facial kinkawa is illegal, miss?”

For peasants, yes, she thought, and wanted desperately to say. Yet her mind had to be disciplined if she wished to free Chester.

“I had not heard,” she replied.

“I believe you, but whoever paid to have it implanted must have known. Was it your father?” the officer asked.

He was the partner of the one who approached her earlier, and had a kinder tone of voice. She had read about such techniques while reading about statecraft. Her studies had taken her on a detour into the subject of policing theory.

“If you must know, I am a veteran of the Imperial Special Forces.”

This earned a snort of amusement from the one driving the car and a painfully fake chuckle from the one pretending to be kind.

“Were you told to say that by someone?”

“By my commanding officer.”

He found that comment less funny. She rationalized it to herself as not technically lying to the police if she was euphemistically referring to her executive function as her “commanding officer.”

“Is your kinkawa related to the Æfrian man and woman you were with earlier today?”

“No,” she said, telling the truth.

Blaring ambulances sped past them. Walking by Milly’s side on the return trip, it hadn’t felt real, as though the act of terrorism belonged to another world. From the inside of the police car, it became real. She could see the fear and anxiety simmering under the officers’ thin performance of authority.

“Do you understand what happened today?”

The question felt unprompted. It didn’t come from an attempt to get her to slip up and provide information. It came because the officer was upset.

“An Afujin terrorist went on a… a shooting spree,” she replied.

“And who do you think they wanted to kill?”

She shook her head, though she knew.

“Our people,” he said, using the term waga minzoku. The phrase had the flavor of crass populism to Sayuri’s ears. She wondered if the man was a National Royalist.

“Why do you think they did it?” he asked.

Sayuri genuinely didn’t know. Despite their sometimes poor conditions, there were no laws which affected Æfrians specifically. If they lived under the Shroud, it was because the jobs they worked required exposure to seishin-hatsuden or had purchased a dwelling nearby. Nothing prevented them from moving away. Some Æfrian had even done quite well for themselves in specialized industries. Was the man a Genji supporter, perhaps?

This made her wonder which conglomerate had ties to Boruhizu. At one time it had been Ueden, but her clan pulled their property following the turbine factory explosion in Kasetomi ‘26.

The officer she thought might be a National Royalist stared at her intently. “One of the survivors who knew Afugo reported what he shouted before the attack. Do you know what he said? He said, “For Furodzu, god of the river you defile, I will butcher you invaders.” Does that sound familiar to you? We aren’t accusing you of anything, miss, we just want to see justice done and protect our people.”

Sayuri laughed nervously. “Furodzu? What in the world is Furodzu?”

“One of their kami. Have you heard of it?”

Was it that goddess that Shuu mentioned? Without intending to, her thought process spilled out of her mouth. “Erm, I believe they are a mythological personification of the River Glær,” she said, using the Æfrian name for the river by accident.

“You mean the Suigen River?”

“Er, yes.”

“Who told you about this god, Furodzu? A momojin?”

The slur for Æfrian made her uncomfortable. Pink person. It was the kind of language the conglomerates had been fighting an HR battle to purge for as long as she had been alive. Afujin was the politically correct term. She felt ashamed that she had used the slur against Chester on their first meeting.

“No, um, it was a Kaihonjin who told me. He pilots a boat. On the river.”

“A Kaihonjin who worships a momojin god? Now that’s funny!”

Both officers laughed loudly and Sayuri joined them with a hesitant chuckle. She wasn’t quite sure what was funny.

They came upon a breathtakingly ugly building. It’s lumpy tan concrete reminded her of a chunk of fried tofu, complete with balconies for wrinkles. The police car pulled up to a small, gated parking lot on the back side of the building. Policemen stood around drinking tea and smoking.

“We don’t want to keep you from the Deputy Commissioner, but why do you think a Kaihonjin would worship a Momojin god? The same god this terrorist invoked before going on a shooting spree. What are the chances of that?”

Sayuri felt a cold sweat sprout on her back. She had said too much, and it was too late to put the words back in her mouth.

“I-I really don’t know, sir,” she said.

“Me neither,” the man said with a look of generalized disdain. “Now, Officer Konoe is going to take you inside, and you’re gonna talk to some people who are just trying to get the facts straight. Those facts need to be clear for justice to be done, so you’re gonna be a good girl and cooperate, won’t you?”

Sayuri nodded.

~~~

Thomas thought his blood was glittering where it pooled on the interrogation room table, but it was probably a hallucination. Maybe an alcohol withdrawal symptom. The next time they slammed his head into the table didn’t help clarify.

“Mr. Chester,” the man in glasses said calmly while his partner gripped Thomas’ hair like a turnip. “We almost never have Afujin in our town square, then two show up on the same day, both carrying illegal firearms. Do you understand why we have a hard time believing you just happened to be passing through?”

Thomas tried to blink away the blood leaking into his eyes. “I-I— the gun was… was— is empty, no… no bullets—” his consciousness dipped in and out of the dark. “—no bullets in the gum— gun. Gun.”

“Where did those bullets go, I wonder? Into Kaihonjin bodies?”

“Uhmng— s-some… some, not today. Not… already e-empty.”

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He wasn’t aware of anything while his skull collided with the table. Only the seconds after, when the cold impact turned into excruciating throbbing that scrambled his brain.

“Mr. Chester, if you’ll cooperate with us, we can be a lot nicer, but if you keep lying, we will have to keep punishing you. Do you understand?”

His teeth felt loose in his face. Metal swam in his mouth. The one bare lightbulb blinked like a distant star and his blood glistened and twinkled with motes of golden light.

“Am… am— I cooperating… Not— was here beguz, um…” Thomas knew the answer for that was somewhere in his head, but he needed time to think on it. “—Was my home… long— long while ago, years. Bumithe… B-Burne…”

“You used to live in Boruhizu?” glasses man said, scribbling on his paper.

Thomas tried to nod, but his head was forced straight ahead by the hand grasping his hair.

“So, were you involved in the attack out of hatred for the Kaihonjin who settled on your land?”

“N-No, j-just passing…”

The man holding him up let go of his hair and Thomas slumped forward. His head and neck bobbled from side-to-side. Then, he felt someone take hold of one of his pinkie fingers where it was restrained on the table.

“Your details are getting a little muddled, Mr. Chester. We’re going to help sharpen things up.”

He screamed before he knew why. His back pushed against the back of the chair, his legs flailed under him, and his teeth nearly ground themselves to powder. When his head forced itself up, he could see his pinkie finger was bent back to his hand.

“What was the inciting event that led you and your partner to start the shooting? Was it the battle on the river this morning?”

~~~

Officer Konoe led Sayuri through the back of the Police Department towards a set of elevators. The walls, ceiling, and floor oozed tackiness, and the cold blue lights made the place look like a walk-in freezer. On the other end of the hallway, she could see Æfrians being sorted into several rooms by age and gender.

“Why have they all been arrested? There was only one terrorist, was there not?” Sayuri asked.

“They’re not being arrested. We just need to question them and ascertain whether they have any ties to the terrorist. We don’t want a copycat event. There’s been some trouble with that in Tо̄tо̄shi. They’ve gone soft over on the coast.”

“But surely you do not have a warrant for them all? Æfrians are equal before the law, just as we are, and ought to be entitled to the same rights, privileges, and property, should they not?”

Officer Konoe raised an eyebrow. “You’re an academy girl, aren’t you?”

“Yes…”

“I could tell. You been in Afukoku long?”

Sayuri shook her head. Her family had a few estates on the island, and she recalled vacations to Afukoku as a young girl. But, as she was beginning to understand, “being in Afukoku” did not mean vacations in manor houses where the only Æfrians she encountered were servants.

“Peace and harmony require a firmer touch than back home on the islands. The more advanced a people,” there was “waga minzoku” again, “the less force you need to govern them, which is why our laissez-faire Propertism functions well. But the same cannot be said of governing less advanced people. Someday they may become advanced, but while they gun down defenseless women and children, they require firmer discipline.”

Seeing on her face that this was not convincing to her, Officer Konoe felt the need to add, “Regardless, the Domestic Terrorism Act allows suspension of some civil rights in extenuating circumstances, for Momojin and Kaihonjin both.”

Sayuri was too scared to run and find Thomas, and her demure obedience to the officers made her feel guilty. Perfidious, even. Was not loyalty the highest virtue her parents had instilled in her? Yet, they explained not to whom this loyalty was owed. It was understood this was to her parents first, the Ueichi clan second, and the Kaihon Imperial state an almost irrelevant third. No one taught her how to decide who to be loyal to.

Her instinctual urge was to help Thomas, to whom she owed her life several times over. However, doing so would be to disobey the law, and to quote her father, the death of the law comes by the cuts of a thousand exceptions. Faith in the rule of law was an irrevocable foundation of stable society. Though justice was imperfect, nothing else existed as replacement for the impartial judgment of the law.

While Sayuri was cross-examining herself, her feet stepped onto the elevator. She was taken to an office that faced out towards what must have been the hospital by the half-dozen ambulances piled into a loading bay.

The office had paneled wood walls and solid wood furniture, with delicate flower arrangements in cubbies. On the desk lay binders and files and a flag case with the Tsukiyama Technical Instruments crest in it. That answered her question of which conglomerate was invested in Burnehithe’s municipal firms.

Tsukiyama, to her extremely limited knowledge, had not yet declared a side. However, unlike Benka Arsenal, they had nothing to gain by remaining neutral and a lot to gain from handing her to Genji. Or taking her for themselves.

Sayuri emitted an un-self-disciplined squeak at the door opening behind her. She rose to her feet.

“Good Afternoon, miss. My name is Deputy Commissioner Hiranuma,” said a police officer whose uniform was weighed down by ranks of medals and aiguillettes. “”Hira” as in peace, “numa” as in pond.”

He gave her a shallow bow. Sayuri stifled her reprimand, reminding herself that the shallow bow meant he didn’t know who she was, and it would be a bad idea to disabuse him of that. She returned a much deeper bow.

“Please, have a seat,” he said.

Hiranuma walked around to his side of the mahogany desk and took his time organizing a stack of papers before sitting. His breaths were slow and long, like winds across a wide field. The man possessed a natural predisposition to positions of high status. He reminded Sayuri of her father.

After gathering some stationary and dipping a pen into an ink well, he steepled his hands. “What may I call you, miss?”

His sonorous voice relaxed her.

“Uei…. Um, Uei Satou. Uei spelled with the characters for Rain and Shadow. Satou like… the thing one puts in coffee.”

Hiranuma grinned. “I don’t suppose you have a sister named Nyuu?”

She giggled nervously at the pun on the word for milk. “Er, no. I-I do not.”

“A joke, of course.” He paused to write something down. “Speaking of your parents, could you tell me about your clan background?”

Sayuri’s brain went into overdrive. She wasn’t familiar with the Hiranuma clan, but it wasn’t unheard of for clans to subcontract to the great conglomerates—the daimei—which would explain his allegiance to Tsukiyama. Which areas of industry would he be familiar with and which could she safely claim for her fabricated Uei clan?

Tsukiyama was primarily involved in electronics, precision instruments, avionics, and the like, yet it would be her downfall should his clan be from one of the many subsidiary corporations of the Tsukiyama conglomerate which deviated from the conglomerate’s central industrial foci. Then, for some inexplicable reason, a picture of Milly popped into her head.

“P-Personal m-massagers… sir…” she said, averting her gaze. Sayuri wanted to crawl under the chair. Why had she said that of all things?”

“Does your father contract to one of the daimei clans?”

She nodded, neck and face burning. “Hidari Consumer Products, sir.”

“Ah… those massagers. I can’t say I have… personally used them, but I am familiar. No need to be embarrassed. If a clan uses its property towards productive ends and brings a product to market which fulfills the needs of consumers, there is nothing to be ashamed of, wouldn’t you agree?”

She nodded, her face cooling down. Sayuri felt a queer sort of pride toward her fictitious lineage.

“Now, Ms. Uei, I suspect you already know the first matter I want to ask you about.”

There was no point in hiding it. “My kinkawa?”

Hiranuma tapped his pen against the paper. Several of his long, slow breaths passed. They were the only sound in the room aside from the distant blaring of sirens.

“That is correct. You must be aware, as I’m sure my officers informed you, that kinkawa anywhere besides the hands and arms are illegal for civilians, correct?”

She gulped and nodded.

Speaking slowly, Hiranuma said, “I have no doubt that, being a young woman, you had neither the means nor the inclination to purchase these kinkawa implants for yourself. What I need to know is—”

There was a knock at the door.

“Busy!” he screamed. The change in tone startled Sayuri. Fury flashed across his face. Hiranuma was more like her father than she had realized.

Muffled by the heavy door, a man said, “Deputy Commissioner, sir, we received a high-priority external communication.”

Brooding anger rested on Hiranuma’s angular face. His mouth hung half open, awaiting another payload to deliver through the closed door.

“High-priority from whom?”

“I don’t know if it’s prudent to say while we have a civilian—”

“FROM WHOM!?” His voice made her wince.

The voice beyond the door swallowed. “Genji Heavy Industries. Their Harmony Division, Deputy commissioner. Sir.”

Hiranuma’s face fell into his hands. “Oh, son of a bitch.”

He rubbed his temples in awkward silence, forgetting Sayuri’s presence entirely. This was fortuitous, as she was currently expending all her effort keeping fear off her face. How had they gotten word so quickly? Not even the police knew who she was!

Hiranuma stood up and looked down at her on the way to the door. “You stay right here until I get back, understand?”

“Y-Yes, sir.”

~~~

Milly hid below the shields of the gun mount. On the other side of those shields, Shuu was arguing with police officers in Kaihongo. Not knowing what they were saying made her anxious. She was tempted to pop out and get herself arrested just to be done with it.

Maybe she should’ve gone with Sayuri, but she refused to surrender her freedom. Not to that spoiled brat, not to the Kaihonjin pigs, and not even to Thomas, who might very well be a mass murderer.

“Naikai-ō no shisan o torishiraberu kenri ga nai ze, omaera!” Shuu yelled.

She could hear him slowly losing ground against the police officers. Badge be damned, she was all too aware of how a test of “rights” would shake out between an unarmed Shuu and armed law enforcement. The two things that caused more trouble than anything else in this world were good sex and angry policemen. If they were coming anyway, she might as well go on her terms.

Milly stood up.

“Alright, fish-fuckers, gimme the cuffs. Let’s go,” she said, holding her wrists out as she stepped off the boat towards four angry Kaihonjin police officers.

~~~

Blood soaked warm and slick around Thomas’ wrists, adding lubrication to the metal cuffs and making it easier for them to slice his skin. Both his pinkie fingers were broken along with the ring finger on his right hand. One of his teeth floated in the puddle of blood pooling on the table.

“Who did you coordinate the attack with? We know two strung-out lard eaters couldn’t scrounge up automatic weapons on their own, boy!”

He had to give an answer. Anything would work, it didn’t matter.

“Ue-Ueichi Electric—” he paused to hock a glob of blood out of his nose. It sent searing pain into his jaw as it rushed past exposed nerves. “ Ele-elect— electric comp-company. Ue…”

“Lying dog!”

His other ring finger being broken barely registered amidst the symphony of pain playing across his body. But he still let out a moan.

“Try again! This time, no more lies about conglomerates funding terror—”

The interrogation was interrupted by someone opening the door, casting fluorescent light into the dark room. The figure was tall and dark, with a face ringed scalp to jaw with dark, bushy hair. Squeezed into the man’s suit was a body rippling with muscles. He gazed at the scene out of eyes outlined in gold.

Thomas’ interrogator stood up. “Kono yarou! Jinmon o jamasuru inu me!”

The man stepped into the room. Numb fear ran through Thomas as he recognized the man who attacked him and Sayuri in the Ueden building.

“Oi, kagi wa doko da?”

“Temee, nani sama no tsumo—”

In one fluid movement, Persimmon opened his suit jacket and drew a revolver with a barrel the length of the interrogator’s forearm and pressed it to the man’s eyeball. His partner clutched at the walls of the interrogation room.

“Kagi.”

“F-F-Fu-Futokoro! Futokoro!”

Tucking the gun into his chest holster, Persimmon reached into the interrogator’s kimono breast pocket for a key and used it to unlock Thomas’ handcuffs.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Chester. You are in my custody now,” Persimmon said. “Let’s start walking. There is someone else we need to collect.”