He stands with his father in the river. Their pants are rolled up, his father’s to his calves, his to the knees. The fishing rod is cumbersome. His father insists he use an adult’s rod with the spinning reel his small hands fumble with. He must know the full process, start to finish. No cheating. Nothing but hazel wood in his mud-caked palms.

His father casts several meters with a flick. Not wanting to be outdone, he swings his own rod like a javelin thrower. His line sails sideways across his father’s.

“You’re comin’ too far back, Tommy,” his father says. He reels in, untangles their lines, and shows him yet again how to cast.

“It won’t go far enough!” he protests.

His dad laughs. “The fish aren’t gonna hop on your hook cuz they’re impressed with how far you chucked it. Fishing is a subtle art.”

“I don’t like art,” he says, kicking the water.

“Why not?”

“It’s boring and stupid.”

His dad has nothing to say to that and casts again. It lands precisely where he wants it to, in the little dark patch, just to the southeast of their backyard. The fish like that spot. Even if the Ueichi Electric Power Company fires him, his family wouldn’t starve. His dad could fish up breakfast, lunch, and dinner from that little dark patch in the River Cleif.

“Don’t get sick of fish, that’s my pension,” is one of his dad’s jokes. He trots it out whenever someone compliments the way his mother cooks it.

“Tommy?”

“Mmmyeah?” Thomas replied. The morning sun was lightly toasting his pink skin. Momojin. Peach person. We look like peaches when we burn, he thought.

“Put something on your head. You’re gonna burn even worse.”

It was… Her. She was talking. He knew her, it just wasn’t quite getting there. If he had some tea or coffee maybe…

“You need to get this down,” she said, pushing a mug into his hands.

He looked up and saw the forest whizzing by in a horrifying blur. His stomach churned. He pushed the mug away.

“I can’t…”

Cold sweat pricked along his nauseous body. The ribbed aluminum deck of the boat vibrated with the motor, and turned the world into a blurry mess he couldn’t stabilize. He just wanted to stand on two feet fixed firmly in place.

“Drink it and go back to bed. I’ll worry about your shade,” Miriam said. No, Milly. “Force it down if you have to.”

He accepted the mug and swung it to his face. His throat tried to force itself closed to avoid accepting the sickly liquid, but he fought it, the drink climbing into his nose as it crawled over his uncooperative tongue. He gagged.

“What is it?”

“Apple wine for your withdrawal and tea four

men in the watchtower, eleven in total. One machine gun. One rocket cart. Neighboring posts, half a ki north and south along the ridge,” his CO says.

He is surrounded by a huddle of burgundy coats, shivering in the thin mountain air. They would appear like blood clots in the snowfield if they emerged from behind the small hill they’re clustered behind. Slung over their shoulders are plastic-wrapped Chrys-Rifles.

To their left are a squadron of men dressed in a wavy mirage of white, gray, and black, camouflaged against their alpine surroundings. Underneath goggles and masks, lines of gold mark their skin like warpaint. Gold and garnet together. Even on the other end of the world, his universe is painted in these colors, the same colors as the Ueden uniform his father wore.

“Our objective is psychological,” his commanding officer says. Gold leaf fills the creases of his lips. “We are a diversionary force to draw manpower away from the valley entrance. We have one job: Present a threat. You have some discretion about how best to achieve this, but do not get in the way of the ISF. They have their duties, you have yours. Understood?”

A round of “hai!” come from the assembled Æfrian grenadiers. The operation begins as the ISF men crawl over the hill, turning invisible and impregnating the mountain air with danger. A minute passes. He can see the special forces men by the way small drifts of snow hang lifeless. The lizard worshippers in the watchtower don’t know what to look for. Their eyes see a battlefield where a machine gun and a pair of binoculars can hold a platoon of men at bay. This world does not exist anymore.

The grenadiers play their parts, peeking over the hill with their Chrys-Rifles. There are four, plus the spotter. He presses the button to switch on the magnet. His gun thrums with electric energy. Its telescopic sight has markings for bullet drop-off, but at this range, they are irrelevant. He lines up the reticle with the machinegunner’s forehead and presses the trigger.

True to the chrysanthemum rifle’s nickname, a little red chrysanthemum blooms on the gunner’s forehead. The mountainside echoes with sonic booms. More chrysanthemums bloom.

Feverish pain erupts into his consciousness.

“No. Awful idea.”

Milly stood with her arms folded beside the bridge. Shuu had slowed the boat as they passed close to a village that looked like a forming logging camp.

“But—! Mr. Fukuzawa, please talk some sense into her.” Sayuri said.

Shuu shook his head. “I know I said they’re not pirates, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to get involved. Best mind our own business.”

Thomas saw a group of villagers waving desperately to them. A woman in front waved a yellow kerchief.

Without being told what it means, he knows the little yellow flags they wave are ones of surrender. With such a quick triumph over the outmatched Ryūkokujin soldiers, the villagers are still eating breakfast when the Imperial Forces sweep through their nameless mountain settlement. Their only defense is waving little yellow flags.

The ISF men arrive ahead of the grenadiers and round up the villagers, organizing them into groups at the gate of the village’s small shrine. Grenadiers wander the streets. They have been given no new orders. Enemy reinforcements from down the mountain path have already been stopped, their truck smoking from where a Chrys-Rifle perforated its engine block.

“Should we set fire to the place?” one grenadier asks.

“No,” he replies, “Take valuables, leave beds and sheets, use the fuel and food. Their intelligence will think we quartered here and moved downhill. What do you think, Captain Kaga?”

“Good thinking Corporal,” his CO replies. “I’ll ask the ISF guys to do their business farther outside of town.”

His commanding officer leaves. He leans against a wall, taking weight off his shoulders from the heavy, magnetic rifle. His muscles are sore. He volunteered to carry extra ammunition and fuel cells for the squadron. Promotions mean a higher salary. A higher salary means more money to send home. They are saying a crop failure has made food expensive back home.

Motion flicks in his peripheral vision, coming from the window in a nearby hut. He gazes at his four squad mates and raises a finger to hush them. He pushes the door open.

Inside is a family of six. Two younger girls are held by an older girl. Between the girls and him are a mother, father, and eldest son. In the father’s trembling hands are a set of sheep shears. In the son’s, a broken glass bottle. The mother is defenseless. Their fearful eyes flick between him and his rifle, but he can kill them without it.

The mother, though scared, is the closest to calm. She looks very different from his own mother, but reminds him of her just the same. He opens his mouth,

Stolen novel; please report.

“We have to help them…”

Thomas was cold. The tarp and blanket had slipped. He was nauseous, but it wasn’t as bad. The world wasn’t shaking and vibrating anymore, just gently bobbing. The boat was stopped at a cement pier. It was definitely a former logging camp. The beachhead was cleared for logs to roll down to waiting boats, the path fresh. Probably illegal loggers now.

Thomas’ thoughts came in clear if he kept his brain firmly on the sensorial details of the present and didn’t let it wander. At the edge of this dirt clearing, by the forest’s edge, sat a dozen log cabins. The former lodgings for the log workers, now turned into proper homes. The former log workers, perhaps, the people living in those homes. Smoke rose from stone chimneys. Children watched from doorways.

“You heard him!” Sayuri yelled. Her shrill voice grated his ears and made him wince. “He said we should help them.”

Milly glared at Thomas from where she stood at the edge of the boat, speaking with the tree poachers. He wasn’t sure why she was mad.

Even after sleeping so much, he was still drowsy. And he wanted to eat. But he wanted to sleep. And he also needed to drink. By his side, someone had left a plastic jug of water and he drank deeply from it, not caring as the chilly liquid drenched his shirt.

“Please! We don’t know if anyone else will come down the river, a-and—”

It was the woman who was waving the yellow kerchief earlier. She looked scared and desperate.

“If they catch us doing that, we’ll be shot. Close the door and say we didn’t check. We don’t need to help them,” his squad mate says.

“Then say you didn’t see me do it,” he replies.

He turns to face the doorway, beckoning to the family. They don’t understand. Or they think it’s a trick. He slowly lays his rifle down and shows his empty, gloved hands. The mother must see something in his eyes because she calls her children to her. The father speaks. His tone is harsh and frightened and angry, but she says something to soothe him. The eldest son stares, fist curled around the neck of a broken bottle.

The mother shepherds her family out the doorway and he steps aside. The eldest son files out last. This close, he sees a face blank with not fear but fury. Instead of following behind his family, he speaks something in their language. His mother shrieks at him. The son lunges for the throat of one of the grenadiers.

He is fast. Glass enters the man’s throat. The memory becomes more concrete because he has seen it too many times.

Thomas grabs the boy. They look at each other, Thomas at the boy, the boy at him, and both realize their mistakes. Blood spurts on to the ground as the grenadier’s arteries pump life out of him. It stains his jacket a darker red.

Thomas shoves the boy to the ground and picks up his rifle. The scared boy holds the bottle towards him, trying to keep him at a distance. Thomas brings the butt of his rifle down onto the boy’s face. Again. And again. His mother screams and tries to run to her child’s side, but his squad mates fire chrysanthemums into her legs and neck.

The rest of the family has run, shambling down the mountainside in a blind stumble.

ISF soldiers in their arctic camouflage wander over after hearing shots. They see four spots of quilted fabric escaping down the mountainside. Beside them, two grenadiers are trying to stanch the bleeding from their wounded comrade.

“Utsu,” one of the ISF soldiers orders.

All five grenadiers drop what they’re doing to bear their rifles. The dying man, gurgling and sputtering and blubbering for his mother, nonetheless grabs his rifle and aims it downhill. He doesn’t have a choice. They all fire. The four spots fall into the snow.

The ISF soldier sighs. “Kono buta domo wa meirei nashi ja, dou shiyou mo nee na.”

“Ahh... moushi age nikui nodesu ga, sono keikaku ni tsuite wa imamotte ubugoe o ageru ni itatte orimasen...”

“I sussed that, lass,” Shuu said.

“What is she saying now?” Milly asked. She sounded tired. More tired than usual.

The sky above Thomas was on the hair’s breadth between late afternoon and early evening and the Daisagi-Maru was docked at the cement pier the woman had been waving her handkerchief from. The spans of time didn’t seem to make any sense, and he couldn’t recall what he dreamt about other than that they were nightmares. His skin was clammy from sweat.

“Would you like to translate for her?” Shuu asked.

“No, she’ll say something rude,” Sayuri replied.

The softer afternoon light was easier on Thomas’ head. It felt like the worst of the concussion was behind him. He was hungry rather than nauseous, and the headache was down to the manageable level of his usual hangovers.

“Out with it,” Milly said. She sounded bitter. Had she been rowing with Sayuri again? He couldn’t fathom what was so raw between them.

Sayuri rolled her eyes. “I said we don’t have a plan yet.”

Shuu chuckled. “In a few more words than that."

Milly folded her arms. “I’d like to hear those few more words.”

He shook his head, “no you wouldn’t. She was just saying it in a roundabout kind of way.”

“I said,” Sayuri cleared her throat, “it is regrettable that hitherto a plan of action has yet to coalesce. Are you satisfied now?”

“No, I am not. Because, Ms. Regrettably-Has-No-Plan, we agreed to a promise we can’t keep! You gave these people false hope before you even knew what you could do for them. That is worse, far, far worse, than just passing them by. Do you understand?”

“We have all night to—”

“Do you understand!?” Milly yelled.

“Yes, I understand.”

Thomas groaned. Milly’s eyes shifted to him, and her expression softened a little.

“Sorry, Thomas. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“S’okay…” he said. Slurring his words kept his facial muscles from banging against his skull.

He accepted a plate of hot, oily, canned fish and a roasted carrot on the side. Everyone but Thomas was picking at their food.

“I’m getting pretty sick of canned fish,” Milly said.

“Only a few more days to Éstfýr,” Shuu replied.

She grunted and went to eat her plate up on the bow. Thomas stood on wobbly legs and grabbed the stern gun mount as his world spun. Light-headedness was an understatement, his head was floating into the atmosphere.

After a few deep breaths, he went to go be by Milly’s side. He didn’t say anything at first, the two of them looking out at the logging camp in silence. The village had congregated in a log cabin near the shore. It reminded him of the Burnehithe Yeoman’s meetings his father dragged him to.

“You’re upset,” Thomas said.

“I am.”

“About what, something Sayuri said again?”

She brushed her hair back. “Yeah. Nothing she intended though. I’m not angry with her. Well, for that anyway.”

“What did she say?”

“She was telling me about a song my mother used to sing, about how it’s a Kaihonjin love song.”

“Did you know it was Kaihonjin?”

She laughed. “It’s in Kaihongo, Tommy, of course I knew. But—”

Milly’s voice crackled as though ready to speak, but she swallowed and lost her words. Finally she choked something out.

“—I thought… I thought my dad raped my mum. And that was awful, but it made sense to me.”

“So the song…”

“He sang it to her. He sang it to her, probably— fuck— who knows how many times!? Enough that she passed it on to me, and now I— gods, Tommy, she loved him! What was my mother thinking fucking that… that fishfucker!”

The plate of potato and fish dropped to the deck. Thomas held Milly while she cried, even though he couldn’t fathom her reason. Finding out your mother loved your father and wasn’t raped seemed like a happy thing. But thinking about it made his head hurt, so he just patted her back and squeezed her shoulders.

When she was done crying, Milly explained what Sayuri had signed them up for, but this used the rest of his energy. He hated being idle, but he had to lie back down. Unconsciousness beckoned. He could come willingly, or he could resist, but he was coming.

In the twilight phase between waking and sleeping, he sensed Milly setting his tarp up overhead in case it rained.

She has thick, moss green and wood brown eye make-up and a sparkling green, sequin dress and fake freckles and blush covering the real freckles underneath and her black-brown hair falls in lines like a waterfall crashing in a plunge pool against her narrow shoulders. Her legs are crossed, and she is laughing at her co-worker’s joke when she hears the door open for a dirty, hollow-looking man in a red jacket.

“Have a look on the wall and tell us who you like,” she says genially, waving her arm like a magic wand at the laminated sheet of women. He doesn’t look. At her, or at the sheet. He’s looking at his shoes, just as he has every step on his journey from Burnehithe after learning he didn’t have a home to return to.

“I need a job.”

This sets the girls to giggling.

“Sorry, love, only women work here,” she replies.

Her tone shifts from flirtation to business. He looks at her for the first time and he sees how skinny she is. Her upper arm would fit entirely in his hand. All the girls look skinny. He thought Suigen might have been saved from the famine, but he could see now they were hardly better off than Burnehithe.

Since coming home, he has felt guilty about his own body. Strong, well fed, and in good health, but it meant nothing when he couldn’t share that prosperity.

“I was in the military. I can guard the door. I could keep you all safe,” he says, saying whatever he thinks will help him find a job.

Her eyes narrow at him, green paint wrinkling in the creases of her sunken eyes. “We keep ourselves safe. No offense, but you look like the kind of person we need protection from.”

Her coworkers hush her, telling her not to be rude. Some of them have realized he could be a future customer as well.

One of the women, her name long lost, tells him to come back tomorrow. They will debate and take a vote on whether or not to hire him. He says okay and leaves for a Lofhearth in an old grain mill along with eight or nine other veterans returning to an unrecognizable Æfria.

After a day under the Shroud, he returns to The Silk Pillow. They have voted 14-2 in favor of hiring him as a bodyguard for the brothel. He can tell by her sour expression she was one of the two who voted against.