Thomas helped Milly up from where she’d been kneeling at Mamoru’s side.

“Is he dead?” Sayuri asked.

Winds whipped over the bridge and almost buried Milly’s response.

“Yeah.”

Thomas shivered in his jacket. He hadn’t expected a conglomerate to murder an Imperial official. Invisible rules about the way the world worked were broken the moment Genji assassinated Sayuri’s parents, but somehow this felt like the exception. The Imperial state was supposed to be an omnipresent, laissez-faire deity, a god that rationalized everything else.

“Should we report his death?” Thomas asked. “If this gets out—”

“Yes!” Sayuri said.

Her face was dark, her eyes fixed on the river as she dodged between the boats becoming frequent sights as they left the cover of the forest for a long, flat prairie leading to the ocean. Éstfýr was now a gray band on the horizon.

“Sayuri, if people find out Kintoki killed an Imperial representative, there could be serious—”

“Why was there an Imperial representative!? I saw your lack of surprise, you knew! You both knew!” she yelled over the roaring wind.

“He…” Thomas started, then stopped. He’d hoped Mamoru would do the explaining, Thomas the gentle encouragement.

“We didn’t know how you would react,” Milly said. “We needed to get you to Éstfýr first and then worry about…”

“About tricking me into Imperial captivity? And for what, because you think it will benefit Æfrians in some way?”

“For your benefit,” Thomas said, his voice soft and low. “Your family is trying to—”

Sayuri whipped around. “I know my family is trying to kill me! I have lived every moment of my life in this bloodthirsty world. Do you really think I would not know that the second house, my own uncle, would cut my head off for my father’s seat at the boardroom table!? And I know my parents are dead, not that you were forthright with me on that either.”

Yesterday, Sayuri had protested the idea that her own family might betray her. However, as Thomas had learned from his time with her, Sayuri’s words, and perhaps her thoughts, were mostly dictated by how she thought the world ought to be, not how it was. Because of that, it was impossible to say when she came to these realizations, and for how long they had sat deliberately unacknowledged.

“I’m sorry, Sayuri.”

Her head turned back to the river. “Fortunately, our time as contractor and contractee is ending. You will be free of your obligation to take me to Tо̄tо̄shi, and once I have successfully navigated the treacherous waters of conglomerate politics, I will ensure both you and Ms. Drake are amply rewarded for your service to the Ueichi clan.”

“Sayuri, what the hell are you on about?” Milly said.

“I mean we are parting ways. I would not be an Imperial lab experiment any more than a Genji or a Kintoki one. I would sooner be slain by my own kin.”

Thomas put a hand on Sayuri’s shoulder but she shrugged it off.

“We won’t force you to go to the Public Safety Agency,” Thomas said, “but right now it’s a bad idea for you to go alone.”

“Right. Because I am a liability. Should I be killed before I am in a position to compensate you—”

“Forget about the gods-damned money!” Thomas screamed. The words came out with more force than he intended. Guilty, he lowered his voice. “Sayuri, we’ll figure something out, and it’s not because we want money. We want to see you safe just… because we do.”

There was an irony, he realized, in being able to identify those things Sayuri refused to think about or believe, while being oblivious to his own feelings.

Deep in his mess of a brain, addled by alcohol, war trauma, and the Shroud, a part of him was asking, maybe begging, for someone or something to tell him what to do. The world itself didn’t want or need him. Every path out of the dark circled back to the same hopeless center. He was an unnecessary surplus. Waste.

But at some point, he had stumbled onto a reason. A reason to face the terror and the pain of living that needed no other referent. It was a reason because it was, and his reason was to see this girl to safety.

Sayuri was silent for a moment. Etched on her face was a look of suspicion and cynicism. Her jaw was set as she took short, shallow breaths. “Okay.”

Thomas looked to Milly, but her attention was still on Mamoru’s dead body. They hadn’t settled the matter of whether or not to truthfully report his death. That would come later, he supposed. With Milly’s help, they moved Mamoru’s body to the bow of the ship and propped him against the gun mount and shut his eyes for him.

Not long after, the outer barrier wall of Éstfýr came into view at the eastern end of the prairie. The Éstfýr hills which bordered the ocean were gentle on the landward side and ended in concrete foundation walls spanning the foothills for kilometers both north and south. The walls kept unwanted visitors from wandering into the Sky Band, the furthest inland of the four overhanging platforms that formed the seaward-facing city. It ran like a giant balcony across the hills with high-rises and offices built poking out from it.

Northwest of the foothills was the gigantic freight-crawler depot. Dead grass lay between the yellow warning fence and skyscraper-sized steel towers like mail-sorting cubbies, where freight-crawlers pulled up and had their containers unloaded into the cubbies by cranes who reloaded the containers onto electric trains and trucks to be taken to port.

Southwest lay the skyharbor for Éstfýr. Squadrons of gunships and warfighters sat prepped and loaded a few hundred meters from civilian supersonics, one of which cracked overhead as it reached the sound barrier. The perimeter of the skyharbor was staked out by Kintoki batteries, though their railguns were pointed skyward, and not down at the river where the Daisagi-Maru was now one boat among hundreds flowing into the city.

At the foothills, the Glær river artificially narrowed to around a hundred meters across as a series of ducts and canals carried portions of it towards water processing plants. The remainder flowed through the heart of the city as one large canalway.

There were docks at the base of the perimeter wall built for boats to stop and undergo the customs and inspection process. However, the docks stood empty as boats flowed unimpeded into Éstfýr.

Milly gestured at the empty customs dock. “Thomas… I think they’re empty because they were staffed by Æfrians.”

Thomas hadn’t thought to check earlier, but as he looked at the freight-crawler depot, it too stood idle.

“So the strike…”

“The strike is happening!” Milly said with a grin.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It was strange. Rationally, Thomas knew the general strike would make things more dangerous. Kintoki, and whichever other conglomerates were still in the city, would crack down to restore order. The results would be violent and dangerous.

And yet, Thomas found himself excited. Something was changing. Something bigger than him, but something he was fully entwined with the moment he saved Sayuri Ueichi. Isolated on the river, he hadn’t realized how drastically things had changed in the span of a week. When one impossible thing happened, more always followed.

Sayuri eased them into the canalway. The pumpjet motor echoed off the 30-meter steel walls that formed both the canal and the foundation for the platforms above. It drew the attention of Kaihonjin who looked down from balconies and bridges and gestured to each other at Mamoru’s dead body on the bow.

As they passed through the Sky Band and then the stratum that lay below and in front of it like a rice terrace, the river declined towards the sea. At the third of these raised platforms, the Base Band, the steel canal disappeared and was replaced by moist cobblestone and brick. Warning signs for the Shroud were posted every few meters, and Thomas prepared himself for the discomfort of it, but then nothing happened.

Instead, the Base Band thrummed with activity. Boats were docking at small piers or causeways connected to the road above by half-sunken sets of stairs. Food and supplies were hauled out of them by brigades of women and men, no doubt to feed the striking workers.

“I’m surprised Kintoki hasn’t blockaded the river,” Thomas said.

“Genji is the more imminent threat,” Sayuri said without emotion.

“Do you think they’ll try to shut it down?” Milly asked.

“If the Æfrian workers become the more imminent threat.”

Sayuri piloted the Daisagi-Maru around a pair of corpses floating in the river.

“If Kintoki finds itself lacking longshoremen to bring in supplies and weapons, this will be sooner rather than later,” she said.

Soon they heard chanting, singing, and marching. Towering over rickety tenements was an imposing building of bare granite and slit windows. As they passed close, the building came into full view. The Kintoki clan crest waved from a flagpole below a stone sign that read:

金時武器事業 – 中枢兵站

Kintoki Arms Services – Main Supply Center

In the square outside the building there was an ongoing picketing in defiance of the machine guns trained on the crowd from the building’s entryway. At this distance, Thomas could only read the signs carried over the shoulder of a group of young men joining the protest.

We aren’t war spoils

Æfria for Æfrians

Kintoki Kakuei should be shot!

No round-the-clock Shroud

“Shit, they’ve been running the Shroud night and day?” Milly said.

Thomas watched as the crowd parted for a convoy of Kintoki trailers headed for a loading bay.

“Wartime production,” he said vaguely.

Sayuri took the Daisagi-Maru under an iron bridge and the view disappeared.

“Gods… I can’t imagine being under the Shroud for days at a time,” Milly said.

Kintoki was far from the only target of the protestors’ ire. They passed a wave-shaped building on the waterfront with two metallic exterior stairwells shaped like drill bits. A sign identified it as the Tsukiyama Technical Instruments Naval Equipments Plant and it was padlocked shut. Armed guards blocked it off from a crowd of workers in Tsukiyama’s indigo-and-copper coveralls.

A few minutes later, the river became jammed with boats where the workers had set up an ad hoc boom of repurposed chains and ratchet straps. Sayuri steered the Daisagi-Maru towards a cement loading pier occupied by Æfrian workers drinking beer.

“Do you know where we’re stopping?” Milly asked.

The girl waited until the boat was level with the pier before answering. “Yes. This is where I make my leave.”

Sayuri abandoned the pilot’s chair, leapt the gap from boat to pier, and sprinted for the stairs to the road above.

“He— Hey!” Thomas shouted.

Before he could chase after her, the Daisagi-Maru jarred against the pier with a grinding of metal that turned the heads of the workers.

“Shit! Should we go after her?” Milly said, rushing to steer the boat away from the pier.

Thomas jumped off the boat and ran after her. With her head start, Sayuri disappeared into a crowd of protesting workers before he could catch her. He shoved his way through it, hoping to catch sight of anyone who seemed affected by the Shroud. After a few minutes of searching the surrounding streets, it became clear she’d slipped through his grasp without relying on her hatsuden.

~~~

The further into the crowd Sayuri drew, the closer the bodies pinched. Her way was blocked by striking workers who had locked arms and were marching through the crowd back and forth like a snake. This was something she had seen Kaihonjin laborers do, but it was a queer sight to see Æfrians replicate it.

Sayuri bumped into the back of a large workman.

“Oi! Whatchit!”

“M-My apologies, sir,” she said, lowering her head and darting around him.

All Sayuri wanted was to not be a liability, to not be a drain on others. She had wanted to overcome her overreliance on hatsuden and thereby to deny it as a tool for the whims of her selfish, pleasure-seeking unconscious. If she must subject another human being to the Shroud, she thought, it should be the domain of careful, rational deliberation. But the moment she had succeeded in this effort was the moment she needed her hatsuden for something truly important.

Indirectly, she had killed Mamoru Hoshi.

She still thought of him as Shuu Fukuzawa. Fukuzawa was not the strapping young warfighter pilot from newsreels and textbooks who became the first man in space, and he was not some sad little Imperial investigator. He was the man who wanted to teach her how to care for and pilot a boat and how to love the same river he loved.

And she had killed him in pursuit of some abstract moral position.

If she had not deliberately discarded the violent potentials of her hatsuden, she could have sunk the entire Kintoki battery into the river, or deflected the projectile which struck him, or she could have…

Hot tears ran down her cheeks.

Again she proved herself weak and emotional. Irrational. A liability to herself as well as others. For once in her life, she truly, desperately, earnestly wanted to give, not just take, but her very life had been melted down and reforged around taking in its most pure form. That was the true nature of Seishin-Hatsuden: She stole the life out of others.

Not only her, but her entire family. This horrifying fact had been slithering before her her entire life, but she had been blinded by socialization so pervasive it had wormed its way into every word, every feeling, every object in this world and taken root in them while strangling every possible alternative to its own existence.

The Ueichi clan was responsible for unimaginable suffering simply for its own benefit. What was Sayuri Ueichi—her body pierced to the core with gold wires—if not the living distillate of her family’s greed? Now the entire world, its logic and rationality, its meaning and purpose, its joy and its sorrow, was melting and dissolving around her, and she was the cause of it. She saw this melting world in the furious eyes of Æfrians freed from their enforced stupor. Her ears filled with chants from the crowd about driving the fishfuckers into the sea and cutting off golden fingers.

She felt dizzy. The cold, salty air filled her lungs with knives. Finally breaking from the crowd, Sayuri sprinted down roads and alleys with her eyes turned inwards at self-torturing thought-loops. She had no sense of where or how far from the river she was when a voice broke through her feverish haze.

“Oi, you seem lost.”

The voice came from up ahead in the alley she found herself in. A boy in blue coveralls, a little older than her, with shaggy blonde hair, freckles, and a snub nose. He hopped off the oil drum he was sitting on and laid his heavy book down.

“I-I… am more or less aware of— of where I am,” Sayuri replied, swallowing heavily.

“And where might ‘at be?” the boy said, taking slow, swinging strides with his hands clasped behind his back. A cocky grin scrunched up his freckles.

“Um… n-near the Glær River.”

“Near the Glar? Not on your life, girlie. You’re about a ‘alf a kilometer in the wrong direction.”

“Yes, well, my mistake. Your directional advice has been well heard.” She spun around and started towards the alley opening.

“Wait a minute! You’re a grenner, ain’tcha? What’cha doin’ ‘round ‘ere? Wrong part o’ the city for your kind, innit? You a spy?”

Her blood ran cold. The way he said it didn’t sound like a question.

The boy whistled. At the end of the alley, a few more boys around his age in more blue coveralls stood up from where they had been playing dice on the street. A couple moved to block the alley entrance.

Her heart pounded. “I-I am not a spy, I-I…”

The boy walked up to her. “You with a ‘glomrate? Come on lass, yer not foolin’ us now. Well, if ya don’t wanna answer our questions straight-like, we’ve got time on our ‘ands. Not like we need ‘em for work, aye?”

He made a circling motion with his finger which Sayuri found indecipherable until a bag was thrown over her head and her wrists were wrenched behind her.