Thomas opened his eyes to gray heavens ringed by gently waving trees. The boat swayed like a child in its mothers lap. Autumn leaves, gold and red, fluttered to the shore or settled on the deck of the Daisagi-Maru.

Both his alcohol withdrawal and the worst of his concussion had broken in the same night. He still felt weak and in pain, but with the worst of his discomforts gone, Thomas felt a strange and alien sensation that he almost wanted to call contentment. He’d even slept through the night without a nightmare.

No impending Shroud threatened to steal from him the pleasure of lying and listening to the river, the same sound he’d fallen asleep to every night as a boy. The thought made him ache for his mother and father and siblings. It hurt, but at least it could hurt.

Thomas lay there, like an old stone hedge being slowly overtaken by the forest, until Sayuri flailed and spat.

“Peh peh! Yada!”

A brown oak leaf had fallen into her open mouth. Milly grumbled and rolled over in her blanket. Shuu, who’d been asleep in his pilot seat, woke with a jolt and reached for the ignition. Thomas forgot Shuu—or Mamoru—was a military man too, the Imperial Air Service Officer’s uniform he lent to Milly proof. They hadn’t served in the same war, Ryūkoku was decades after Mamoru’s time, but they shared the habits of their training.

Thomas pulled himself to his feet and began preparing tea.

“Do we have time for tea and breakfast?” Milly asked.

Shuu scratched his head. “I think so. Genji won the battle at Burnehithe, but Kintoki’s got some nasty anti-air defense positions, I’d wager. I wouldn’t take our time, especially if that general strike is more’n just hearsay, but we’re safest in the no man’s land we’re in right now. The closer we get to Éstfýr, the harder it’ll be for Genji to catch us, and the easier for Kintoki.”

“Is Kintoki not our ally in this conflict?” Sayuri asked.

Shuu laughed darkly. “I wouldn’t go assuming anyone’s your ally right now, lass. Kintoki is your clan’s ally, and I don’t think we can say the Ueichi clan is on your side either.”

Sayuri scowled. “Mr. Fukuzawa, your japes are ill-received! Do not besmirch my clan’s honor by insinuating they would betray their kinswoman!”

An awkward silence followed as everyone but Sayuri understood there were no japes being received, ill or otherwise. Maybe even Sayuri knew, and what bothered her was simply to hear it spoken aloud.

“Chalk it up to me being leery of money-grubbin’ conglomerates, but, lass, ya gotta concede Kintoki’s got their own agenda, and it might include that gold ya’ve got in ya,” Shuu said.

For a moment Sayuri didn’t seem to want to concede even that, but she finally sighed and waved her hand. “Yes, I suppose it would be wise to be discreet.”

The time was coming soon when they’d have to break the news to Sayuri that she wasn’t going home, and none of them looked forward to her reaction. He wondered whether Shuu was deliberately planting seeds of doubt now to soften the blow when she was taken into Imperial custody.

Sayuri was in a foul mood for the rest of the day, not speaking other than to say she wanted more fresh fish, and staring pensively off the side of the boat rather than reading her strategy book as she had been. Thomas had a plan to cheer her up.

“You wanna learn to fish?” he asked when they stopped for lunch.

“Not especially,” she said.

“I don’t believe that, I think you wanna fish.”

“Not at this time,” she said, turning her head.

Thomas crouched down to her level which made his temples throb in pain.

“You seem happiest when you’re learning something, so maybe learning to fish will make you feel better.”

She stared at him. “Feel better? Thomas, I assure you I have no trouble regulating my own emotions. I am exceptionally skilled at it, in fact.”

“Hmm…” he stood up, hoping the blood rush would give him an idea. It did. “How about I teach you some puns in Æfrian while we fish?”

“Well, perhaps I can give fishing a try. Explain to me what you were doing with the little doo-dads last time?”

Thomas walked her through baiting the line and explained how the weighted bobber would keep the hook from enticing bottom feeders who had more toxic metals in them. This she had no problem grasping. The trouble came when he had to explain how to cast.

“So, you’ve gotta let out a little bit of line first and— oops, that’s alright, just reel it back up. Well, that’s a little far. We want to leave about—” he indicated some arbitrary length with his fingers, “—yay much line. Now, when you go to cast, you wanna kinda line it up like— your chest… line it up kinda uh, like this kinda. No, not quite. Like this. Ahh… close enough. Then you’re gonna flip the bail. That’s the little thing you, yeah tha— no, that’s fine, just reel it back in. Here, I’ll help you put the corn back on the hook. Now, here I’ll just show you...”

Little noises from Sayuri betrayed her frustration. Thomas worried he was losing her interest. The prospect of teaching Sayuri had, without him noticing, enlarged into a matter of great importance. Taking the rod, Thomas showed her every step at a pace he thought was slow enough to follow, but not so slow she lost interest.

“You see how I’m pressing my index finger to keep the line in place?”

Sayuri shook her head. “Why do they not make these where one may just push a button?”

“They do, but that’s cheating.”

“Okay, so one pinches the line, then releases simultaneously with the flick of the rod,” Sayuri said.

“More or less. Once the bobber is where you want it, you’ll flick the bail closed. Wanna try?”

She nodded and held her hand out for the rod. Milly hadn’t bothered to redo Sayuri’s make-up, so her hand was a splotchy mix of sparkling gold leaf, pasty make-up, and a few spots where her natural, pale skin protruded. It was the same for her face. He felt sorry she had to cover herself in cosmetics just to look normal.

Thomas watched without comment as Sayuri wound up to hurl the rod forward like a javelin.

“Wait, hold up,” Thomas held up his hand. “You’re gonna send it flying in the wrong direction. Here, it’s more like a flick. Mirror me.”

He made what he thought was a pretty clear miming of the flicking motion but Sayuri still looked confused.

“That’s what I was doing,” she said.

“No, you were doing more like this,” Thomas said, showing her what she was doing it more like.

“Very well. Let me try it your way,” she said, before doing it the same way she did it before.

“Close, but it’s more like—”

“Why is this harder than piloting a boat!? Mr. Chester, please, I will leave the fishing to you. It would be the most efficient division of labor.”

Hearing “Mr. Chester” out of her mouth after she finally started calling him Thomas stung more than she probably intended, but this was worth seeing through. It was hard to focus through his headache, but he focused anyway.

“Efficiency isn’t the important thing,” Thomas said.

“What do you mean?”

“Teaching you to fish is the important thing.”

Sayuri looked confused. “Why?”

“Just…” he paused. “I don’t know.”

Neither of them said anything as a chilly wind came off the water and cut through Thomas’ red jacket. Sayuri shivered in her cloak.

“I shall give it another try,” she said.

She reeled the line in and pulled back and cast and it was slightly better. Thomas supposed there was no point in pressuring her to cast like him right off the bat.

“Good! See? Not that hard.”

She smirked with satisfaction.

“Just remember to close the bail.”

“Oh, right.”

Now came the game of waiting and luring a fish that was, to Thomas, pure instinct. He tried to explain what he was doing, but the words couldn’t quite come together. His decision-making was so conditional or even contradictory that, when forced into concrete language, sounded like gibberish. Eventually, he gave up.

“So, uh, you wanna hear some puns?”

“Oh, yes. I had assumed by your lukewarm reactions to my jokes that puns play a negligible role in Æfrian humor.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Gods no,” he said, “we just haven’t been in a very punny mood lately.”

“Punny? I am unfamiliar with the word.”

“Well, uh, that’s already a pun. Like, it’s funny, but it’s punny now, cuz it involves puns,” he explained.

Sayuri stared at her feet for a moment. “Oh! Apologies, I am quicker to perceive purely homophonic puns. The homophony in this case is strained. But I would like to hear another.”

Put on the spot, Thomas’ entire knowledge of puns drained out of him. He looked off the starboard side to where the bobber was quivering against the water. Finally one came to him.

“Alright. What do you call a fish with no I’s?”

Sayuri tapped her chin. “Hmm, I believe I recall this from a book. I know not the Æfrian word, but the literal translation from Kaihongo of the creature is a cavefish…”

“Fsh,” Thomas said.

“What?”

Milly cackled while Shuu chuckled from the bridge. Thomas wagered it wasn’t the pun they were laughing at. Sayuri furrowed her brows.

“I suppose this was an uproarious pun I have missed.”

“Sayuri?” Thomas said.

“Yes?”

“Fish with no I’s.”

“Yes, as I said, they are—”

“Fsh.”

The girl froze for a moment. Then Sayuri popped with machine gun giggles.

“What do you call a fish with ten I’s?” Thomas asked.

Sayuri knew the answer immediately but this just made her even more giggly. “A fiiii— bwahaha fiiii— hehehehe! I cannot!”

Grenade bursts of snorts joined the machine gun giggles. Thomas thought it was a bit much for a third-rate pun, but it felt nice to make her laugh.

“Try not to let the line wiggle in the water. It spooks the fish,” Thomas said.

Sayuri tried to portray herself as suddenly being concentrated on the act of fishing, but sporadic giggles and snorts ruined the illusion.

“Would you like to hear a pun in Kaihongo? I shall have to explain it, but I suspect it will prove humorous regardless,” she said.

Thomas leaned against the bridge railing and folded his arms. “Oh yeah? Let’s hear it.”

“What do you call a bread knife?”

“Isn’t that Æfrian?”

“The pun relies on loanwords.”

“Okay, what do you call a bread knife?”

“Rai bureido!”

That earned another light chuckle from Shuu but Thomas was lost.

“Would you like me to explain?” she asked.

“Please.”

“Rye bread in Kaihongo is rai bureddo, but your word for ha, or the sharp end of a sword or knife, is “blade,” which is transliterated back into Kaihongo as bureido, with the long ‘eh’ sound. Thus, a bread knife is rye bureido.”

Thomas laughed less at the pun and more at the convoluted absurdity of the explanation. You really needed to know the language you were punning into or out of to get the joke. He thought back to how clunky and outdated Sayuri’s Æfrian had seemed when they first met, and how easily she’d slipped into a—mostly—modern vernacular. Lack of street smarts aside, Sayuri was undoubtedly one of the smartest people he’d ever met.

“Do you have any puns that are entirely in Kaihongo?” he asked.

“Yes, actually. One of my personal favorites was one that my… komori? Erm… a household servant whose duty is to attend to the needs of young children…”

“A nanny,” Milly said.

“Yes, a nanny. I used to dislike baths when I was very young. Therefore, in order to coax me, Ms. Fujika would sing: “Ima wa Sayuri ga sayuu ri suru!” which translates to something like, “Sayuri would really benefit from a bath right now!” she explained. “It’s not all that funny now, but it is pleasant to recall.”

They traded a few more puns while he showed her how to move the line somewhere else if nothing was nibbling.

“What do you call a man with no arms and no legs, sitting in a ditch?” he asked.

“Hmm, I do not know, what does one call him?”

“Phil!”

“Phil?” she pondered, then laughed. “Aha! Fill!”

“Hey Sayuri,” Milly called from her multi-layered cocoon of blankets. “What d'ya call a man with no arms, no legs, no head, and no chest?”

“Does one call him anything? What even remains—”

“Dick!”

This threw Sayuri into such an intense fit of heaving laughter that Thomas had to confiscate the rod for fear of it going overboard. While she was doubled over, he recast it in a more promising spot. When she was done, he handed the rod back.

Against the ease and pleasure, Thomas felt something darker. This moment would end, he knew. Days long ago when he was a child had felt like this, but they, too, were gone. Looking back, those moments of contentment were like oases in a desert.

“Oh, ah, oh! A tug! I feel a tug!”

Sayuri jerked on the line and started furiously reeling in.

“Wait, wait, wait! Hold on! Give it more consistent pressure and pull up on the line gradually. No! Don’t stop reeling! There you go, nice and easy. Keep it taut and let the fish tire itself out. Dip the line back down and reel then pull it back up when it starts to fight. See? You’re getting it!”

Thomas patted her on the back. The fight caught Milly’s interest and she wandered over, still draped with blankets. Shuu watched with his feet up on the bridge railing sipping on a mug of tea.

“Want to hear another one?” Milly said mischievously. The only jokes she knew were dirty ones, so Thomas could guess why she was so giddy. He wondered if the day would come when Milly’s bawdiness would exhaust Sayuri’s endless capacity to be scandalized.

“Hmm?” the girl said, still focused on the fish.

“What do tofu and dildos have in common?”

“What is a dildo?”

“Oh gods dammit, nevermind.”

“Please explain, I would like to put in the effort to understand!”

Milly smirked.

Thomas sighed. “Milly don’t…”

“She asked! So you see…”

“Chikusho! He broke the line!” Sayuri yelled.

“That’s alright it happ…ens…”

The Shroud popped a hole in the world and deflated the happiness from it. Thomas’ brain felt fuzzy and lethargic, and the pain of his concussion headache returned in full force without the neurochemicals to douse it. Milly lost her racy excitement. Shuu shut his eyes and grimaced. A second later, the Shroud dropped and a trout lay flopping helplessly on deck.

“There we are! I was not about to let him get away so easily, I—”

It was then Sayuri noticed the effect her hatsuden had caused. Thomas stomped on the fish to stun it before plunging Shuu’s hooked knife into its brain.

“I-I am— m-my sincerest apologies! Truly! I was not thinking—”

“It’s fine, Sayuri,” Thomas said.

“No, it is not! I should not have done that,” Sayuri said. Her fists balled and her head hung. She looked furious. “The night we were at that abandoned fishing shack, I made a vow to stop being a liability. And just now I broke that vow. Two days after I made it.”

Milly touched her shoulder. “Sayuri, it’s alright. It was just for a moment.”

Sayuri shook her head. “No! Any leniency I permit myself threatens to return me to my selfish disposition.”

Sayuri made her way up to the bow, ignoring Thomas and Milly insisting they forgave her. At the front of the boat, she sat cross-legged facing the bow gun mount and didn’t say another word, refusing the grilled fish when it was offered. The three adults ate in subdued silence.

“This a Kaihonjin cultural thing?” Milly asked in a quiet voice about the meditation Sayuri had set herself to.

Shuu shook his head. “Not if you’re not a monk. Might be it’s a class thing, rich folk are always doin’ weird things to get ahead. Seems like it’s important though, I’m happy to leave her to it.”

“But you can’t meditate hatsuden away, right? That’s ridiculous,” Milly said. “It’s part of her body!”

“Your brain is part of your body,” Shuu said, “and people have twisted their brains into doing all kinds of weird things.”

Night fell and Sayuri remained doing whatever it was she was doing. Shuu went to bed but Thomas and Milly stayed up. Both were too nervous about the final stretch to Éstfýr to get any sleep. They sat side-by-side with their feet in the water, gazing out at the cloudy night sky and the river where it rushed down some rapids near their parked boat.

“It feels like a fever dream,” Milly said.

“What does?”

“This past week.”

“Gods, it really has only been a week, huh?”

The full moon was bright enough to pierce the cloud cover, appearing like a distant spotlight through a gray curtain. Little, wriggling pollywogs swirled around their ankles.

“Why did you decide to come along?” Thomas asked.

Milly glanced at him. She always looked beautiful, but half-shrouded in darkness, with her green cloak bundled up around her pale neck, and her mahogany hair around her shoulders and her bright amber eyes peering mischievously over their dark bags, Milly was transcendent. She made his heart pound like he was a tongue-tied teenager rather than a middle-aged veteran.

“Loothsa told me to,” she said.

“But you’re an atheist.”

“That doesn’t mean I can defy the gods.”

She tilted her head back and tossed her nose towards the moon. “When you feel like you’re in a corner, and everything is going wrong, and rationality can’t save you, then you throw yourself at the mercy of chaos. That’s what I mean. Or that’s what I think Loothsa means.”

Thomas looked up to where Milly’s gaze was resting and saw only a stampede of on-rushing clouds and the moon glimmering behind. He wondered what she saw up there.

“I wish there were still rational options,” Thomas said. “Like our parents had.”

She snorted. “Yours are dead and mine were insane enough to mix. I don’t know if our parents were rational either. Might be it’s all insanity, all the way back.”

“Might be,” Thomas said.

It didn’t make him feel better about the world he lived in. In a weird way, the first time he’d felt sane in years had been this past week. It made more sense to him than the tangled web of laws, property, and rights that was the world outside their desperate bubble.

“Plus, you made your insane choice first, picking up Sayuri, so you’ve got no room to complain!”

“I’d never complain about you being here with me,” Thomas said.

Milly paused and then chuckled softly under her breath. “Rightt…”

Well, maybe he believed in Loothsa too. “Milly I still love you.”

“Ah. Obviously.”

“What do you mean obviously?”

She cocked her eyebrow like she was asking if that was a joke. “I know what wanting someone looks like, Tommy. It’s my job. You’ve had a dopey, kicked-puppy look on your face since the second I came down the stairs.”

His face burned. “I— really?”

“You have the self-awareness of a twelve year-old, Tommy, I swear.”

“Where does that leave us?”

Milly looked down at the dark water around her ankles.

“I think I love you too. But I’m also scared of you. For the same reasons you’re scared of yourself.”

“I see.”

She knocked her shoulder into him. “Don’t you “I see” me mister, it wasn’t a no, I just need some time. We’ve been apart for a couple years and this past week hasn’t left me time to think through things. Maybe I should join the shamaness up there.”

He had a lot of things he wanted to say, but the only thing his dumb brain could think of was, “do you know how to meditate?”

“Not at all,” she said before kissing him on the cheek. “I’m cold and tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Good night, Milly.”

“Good night, Tommy.”