The rest of the day Sayuri was preoccupied with how badly she wanted to fish. Yes, she thought as she mopped up trout blood, it could be grisly business. And boring. Very, very boring. But she had shared in the rush of catching a fish and now, like piloting a boat, she wanted more. She would have asked Thomas for lessons, but this was beyond the scope of their relationship.

They docked the boat that evening in another cove, this one hidden behind a half-collapsed fishing shack on stilts. Sayuri now had a proper appreciation for the precision with which Fukuzawa inched the boat around a collapsed pier and into a gap only about as wide as the vessel itself.

Surrounding the cove were yellowing willow trees around which fluttered painted lady butterflies. A little creek gurgled down into the water offering miniscule tribute to the river which evidently belonged to a goddess.

Chester spent his time sleeping, waking to ask if there was anything he could do, then going back to sleep. Worryingly, his words seemed more slurred and halting upon every waking. Most worrying of all was that he threw up off the side of the boat shortly after they docked.

Milly took over the cooking for the evening. Sadly, there would be no fish, or at least none not from a can. The woman laid three of these tinned fish across the grill while potatoes, carrots, and potatoes bubbled in the hot water boiler with the bones of the day’s catch.

“I shall have the tinned fish tonight, I think,” Sayuri said nonchalantly.

“Oh, the princess is deigning to eat peasant food, huh? Why doesn’t she ask the cook politely?”

This execrable, impetuous, obscene, and contumelious—

“May I please have some fish,” Sayuri said, the words tasting like the fish eye in her mouth.

“You may.”

The woman plucked the last fish from the tin and set it onto the grill with the others before dumping the oil into the boiling broth. Hunger could bring Sayuri to heel, a loathsome discovery which she might never have had cause to learn. It rankled.

However, the resulting dish was yet again surprisingly pleasant. Herring floated in chunks in the buttery stew which had a complex and intriguing flavor. It was good enough that Sayuri had Thomas’ bowl when he could not finish. Afterwards, the adults brought out apple wine and took turns sipping it while the sun went down and the chill took up. Sayuri huddled in her itchy woolen blanket.

“You can have a sip if you want,” Fukuzawa said, holding out the bottle.

“I think I shall,” Sayuri replied, accepting the cumbersome jug and tilting it to her mouth. The liquid rushed out quicker than expected and flooded her mouth and nose, spilling the cold wine onto the front of her gown. What did make it into her mouth was not especially delectable, neither on her tongue nor where it had shot through her nostrils.

“Pfbt! That’s alcohol abuse,” Milly said.

“Ack! Yuck! Foul fluid! It tastes as though someone mixed gasoline with apple juice and urinated into the mixture!”

Of course, Sayuri was no naive child who thought adults imbibed libation for taste rather than its psychoactive properties. She awaited with giddy excitement for said properties. In the meantime, she washed the front of her gown with water from the creek which was less likely to have toxic metals. Aside from some pleasant muscle relaxation, however, she was disappointed.

Not long thereafter, Chester fell asleep once more.

“I’m worried, Shuu,” Milly said. “He’s been getting worse since this afternoon.”

Fukuzawa gazed at Chester slumped against the bridge. “Bad concussion, I’d wager. They get worse before they get better. There’s only to let him rest.”

Milly sighed. “I’m worried what’ll happen if Genji catches up in the meantime. Could end up turning his brain into applesauce.”

Sayuri was becoming worried herself. Day by day, she was more aware of how little she offered, and how much her protection demanded. She was a liability, in other words. Until only a few years prior, she had thought the word “liability” was a curse word by the venom her father imbued it with.

“Is there anything I can do to, er, ameliorate the workload?” Sayuri asked.

Milly squinted. “Did you get a concussion too?”

“Hey now,” Fukuzawa said, “she’s been swabbing the deck for us. That’s plenty helpful!”

Sayuri brought her knees to her chest. “Yes, well, if you think of any other way I may be of service, please inform me.”

She just wanted to be alone. She missed having a room to retire to and leave the chaotic, bloodthirsty, greedy, and mean world behind, to bury herself into books full of correct answers or play with toys her father had confiscated because she was too old for them, or do anything but be stuck on a boat, in stinky, sweaty clothes, sunburnt, tired, and hungry, with a konketsujin woman taunting her and a momojin helping her for selfish reasons and a strange royalist who worshiped stranger gods, and a rival conglomerate hunting her down to carve her open.

Sayuri felt the woman’s loathsome presence by her side.

“Daijōbu?”

“Hai,” she said, responding with a lie drilled into her since learning to speak.

A moment later she realized Milly was speaking Kaihongo. She wanted to ask why, but her throat had closed the moment she began crying, and she would not debase herself by blubbering in an undignified manner. Better not to cry at all, her father said, but if one must, avoid speaking until regaining command of one’s voice.

However, try as Sayuri might to make no noise, little whines, barely audible over the babbling river, escaped her throat. The woman placed a warmed palm on the top of Sayuri’s back.

“Daijōbu?”

Sayuri shook her head.

To calm herself, she watched the ochre willow leaves swirling in the currents and eddies of the water against their will. She watched a leaf dance a little figure-eight before washing against one of the wooden stilts of the fisher’s hut.

“I am fine. I merely needed a moment to recompose myself,” Sayuri said.

Milly breathed deeply and evenly. “I’m sorry for picking on you. I’ve not had good relations with the Kaihonjin, but it’s not your fault Thomas got hurt and it’s not your fault that the police were rounding up Æfrians. I know you’re trying to help, and I know this is tough for someone who hasn’t faced a lot of adversity, so I’ll ease off a little, okay?”

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Milly put her arm around Sayuri and pressed them together. It made her feel silly and childish. It was the sort of thing her peers did with their older sisters. This crossed a line in their relationship, as the woman was not her elder sister, but an independent contractor.

“Fine,” Sayuri said.

“Nope. Not good enough. I want to hear, “thank you Milly,” the woman said, refusing to let go even as she tried to wriggle away.

“Th-thank you… Milly,” she mumbled.

Milly let go of her shoulder. “All better. Here’s a tissue, your face is dribbling.”

Reluctantly accepting the tissue, Sayuri dabbed it against each eye before discarding it over the side of the boat. She dreaded another comment, but the woman seemed content to sit there and pull from her apple wine. She was ready to ask Milly why she had spoken in Kaihongo, but a different question came out instead.

“Back in Edgarstún, when the Genkai-Wabu ambushed me…”

“Hmm?”

“You were singing Kimpaginpa-no-Uta to distract them.”

“What about it?” Milly said, wiping her mouth and setting down the apple wine.

“Why do you know that song?”

“My mother sang it to me when I was a baby. I don’t even know what the words mean, but I could sing it in my sleep.”

“Why did she know it?”

Milly shrugged. “No clue. The Drake clan are shipwrights who build Æfrian-style fishing boats. It’s a blind spot for the industrial economy, you all couldn’t make ‘em right even if you wanted to. If ever there was a clan who doesn’t deal with Kaihonjin, it’s the Drakes.”

“I wonder where she learned it, then.”

“Radio, maybe? My mum always had the radio on when she worked.”

Sayuri shook her head. “Kimpazampa-no-Uta is too old-fashioned for the radio. It would sound as silly as broadcasting nursery rhyme.”

This close to one another, Sayuri could see Milly’s yellow irises. There was an intensity in them she had not expected from a woman who seemed so flippant and carefree.

“What’s the song about?”

“Erm, if I remember correctly, it is about a sailor who hopes to see his lover back home by gazing into the ocean. He then comes to believe his hallucinations are real, whereupon he makes to jump into the ocean to be in her arms and fights off his ship’s crew to do so.”

“And then what?”

“He dies. Because he jumped into the ocean, I would imagine. I am familiar with the song and its reputation, but I have not experienced the circumstances in which it is traditionally sung,” Sayuri said, averting her gaze.

“Which are?”

“Well, it is— or was— sung by peasant men to the women they wished to woo, who will accept or reject them by choosing to join them in chorus. Or so I have heard. Now, this was not the case for aristocrats, for whom…”

Sayuri trailed off as Milly’s expression changed from curious to upset. Even Fukuzawa sensed something was amiss, however he wisely said nothing as Milly walked to the bridge to lean against its railing. Her fist jammed itself to her mouth as though stifling a cough and proceeding to wheeze and whine.

Milly did not speak with anyone else that night. Not even Chester when he roused from yet another nightmare. Fukuzawa recommended Sayuri sleep despite her insistence she take a shift of the night’s watch.

Hours later, out of a formless, anxious dream, Sayuri awoke to a cold drizzle. She had kicked her tarp over in her sleep and chilly raindrops splattered her face. The drizzling heavens were a gray void with only a silvery smudge where the moon lay bundled in clouds. Everything was still.

She had finally gotten her wish to be alone. The woods surrounding the cove were not frightening, but desolate. Empty. Someone must have owned the land, as there was no unowned land in Æfria, but they had done nothing to put it to productive use, leaving the forest, cove, and collapsed shack forgotten and undisturbed.

On a whim, Sayuri wound the blue tarp around herself in a makeshift rain cloak and stepped from the boat to the raised porch of the abandoned fishing shack and padded barefoot across the cold, wet planks. The doorway to the fishing shack was intact but the inside was half-collapsed into the river. On the side that remained, a set of wooden bunks had collapsed in the middle and their bare, moldy mattresses held pools of rainwater.

She sat down on the edge of the destroyed floor, legs dangling over splintery ruins, and looked out to the river. There was a stink to it. The stink had been in her nostrils for days and she had gone blind to it, but the earthy rain made it novel again.

The stink was metallic. She thought about the fish, and about Chester and his skill in catching safe fish. People learned what their environment taught them. Sayuri was full of grand-scale knowledge, of the rising and falling of empires, of the entangled webs of property ownership, and of feints and subterfuge.

Chester—no, he was Thomas—was full of ways to survive. She had never had to survive. Not until now. It was a desperate state. She couldn’t appreciate the crisp November night and its austere, poem-worthy majesty because she was cold. Tired. Her throat was parched, and neither the rain nor the river could quench it, for the former was suffused with acid and the latter with toxic metals.

But as she stared out to the river, the mind-gripping pressure of need and danger stilled for a precious moment, as she joined the river in its slow but incessant nomadism. She was almost beginning to feel at peace when, from the horizon, came a graying of the black river and the distant hum of motors.

Jolted to wakefulness, she pounded back down the slick wooden platform back to the Daisagi-Maru. Hopping in the boat without concern for waking the others, she turned the boat, and them, invisible. A few seconds later, a gunship swept over the invisible boat, white beams probing the water and forests for its prey. Below the motors she heard the forest burst to life with hidden, slumbering animals waking and fleeing.

Sayuri looked below her. If the spotters paid attention, they would notice that the waves from the rotors above stopped at a boat-shaped indentation. For a moment, icy fear pierced her. But they flew on, sweeping their beams of obtrusive light across the river and woods.

She dropped invisibility. Milly lay in her tarp staring wide-eyed at the now empty sky. Fukuzawa had stumbled his way to the boat console. Thomas remained fast asleep.

Sayuri could not fall back asleep thereafter. Every whistle of the wind became a gunship bearing down, every snapped twig the Genkai-Wabu. Too tired to get up yet too alert to fall asleep, she was caught in a hell of drowsy wakefulness. Moreover, her stomach was squirrely from being on a boat so much and from the low-quality food.

Discomfort turned her thoughts dark. What was her net effect on the world? All her life she had consumed without producing anything. If the gold in her skin—the thing that made her so special—if all she had done with it was protect herself, that was a net zero.She had done nothing meaningful to improve the lives of others.

She had never questioned her father on his methods of preparing her for leadership. Property takes time to build, he explained, and it compounds exponentially. Expending it early hinders later utility. Thus, the long periods of education and training an elite individual must undergo were necessary. This had all made perfect sense to her.

But now it was abundantly clear how useless she really was and how empty her feelings of superiority, her high dialects in both Kaihongo and Afugo, her abstract theories and her training in etiquette and decorum. In other words, everything that she knew or was.

Only the making of a vow would free her of guilt, she decided. Alas, there were no altars to Wotenha to which she could make the vow, nor any sacrifice of holy sugar and salt to offer. She had to come up with an ad hoc substitute ritual herself.

Food was off the table as sacrifice. The last thing she wanted to do in resolving not to be a liability was to deprive them of supplies. She must give something else, and only one thing seemed suitable.

Tip-toeing across the deck, she retrieved a fish hook from the bridge and returned to the ruined hut and sat down again at the edge of the collapsed floor and pinched the hook between her fingers. A wave of common sense told her not to make her sacrifice because it was pointless and wasteful. She allowed this wave to pass and then pressed the hook to the pad of her thumb and carved flakes of gold from it.

A slit of blood formed alongside the gold. She flicked these drops of blood and gold into the water. To the river she whispered, “I vow to— to Furodzu… or whatever your name may be. I vow to no longer be a liability and take up resources without giving anything in return, and I vow to avoid inflicting the Shroud on others whenever possible.”

The droplets of fluid and metal disappeared into the brown river water, adding gold to the metallic stew of arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead. Then, nothing happened, other than that she felt a bit silly. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked on it. It was already starting to throb, but with the offering she managed to get a few hours of rest.