Sayuri tried to keep track of where she was being marched. She had read this trick in a detective novel, but in a strange city, it did her almost no good other than to notice when they went under shade. She suspected this was a band of the city that overlapped the one they were standing on, creating an alcove in the city below.

Whatever building her captors brought her to, it was loud and cramped. Cacophonous echoing and the speakers’ queer accents rendered the conversations around her an unintelligible slurry. Their tone, however, was urgent.

“Mind the steps. Right in front a’ ya,” said the boy gripping her arm as they entered a stairwell.

Sayuri swallowed her fear. “It would not be a problem if you removed this bag from my head.”

“Not ‘appenin’.”

As Sayuri felt for her next step, a group of men came running up the stairs and knocked into her. The boy put an arm behind her to prevent her from falling.

“Would you just take the bag off!?” she said.

“Wouldn’t ya like that, Ms. Spy! Yer not gettin’ any of our secrets!”

“I am not a spy! If you would just—”

He prodded her back to force her to keep moving down the stairs.

“‘At’s somefin’ a spy would say. I’m not daft, y’know.”

“Your facsimile of daftness is impeccable.”

“Don’t fink you’ve got more wit ‘an me lass just cuz you know what a fact simile is. I’m an intelleckshul I am. I debate the issues. Talkin’ “polihihul ecommy”.”

She had to give the boy this: His ability to overcome the tyranny of pronunciation was impressive.

The building seemed to have not one, but multiple basement levels, all of which were in use.It occurred to her this was some sort of organization and not a random collection of people.

“Are you the Zukunashi?” Sayuri asked.

“Yeh, but don’t call us ‘at. We’re Goowies, awright?”

“Goowies?”

“Folks‘as part of the GGUW. Goowies. Other folks call us Zooks cuz they think we’re lazy, or bums, just cuz we don’t wanna give our labor for free.”

That gave Sayuri pause. She had always assumed the term “Zukunashi'' was an Æfrian word that happened to sound like the Kaihongo word for a good-for-nothing bum. She hadn’t realized it was the actual etymology.

“What do you mean free? You are paid a wage—”

“Oi! I’m not ‘avin’ this conversation again! I’m not ‘avin’ it! When we’re done wiv our fight, you can come crawlin’ to me askin’ for a fuckin’ wage.”

“But that’s not how—”

“Shut it, ‘fore I stick a rag in yer mouth!”

Sayuri’s blood boiled. Very few things made her furious like ignorant people assuming the factuality of their uneducated opinions. If she wasn’t afraid of the terrorist harming her, Sayuri would have told him off. Though, if it seemed like he might, there was always her hatsuden. For the moment she had decided to only use it if something as heinous as torture seemed imminent.

“You can call me Yoo-ray, by the way.”

“Yoo-ray?”

“It’s like the grenner word for ghost. That’s what I am. Stalkin’ streets, invisible, but always watchin’. You can call me Phantom, if ya’d prefer.”

“You mean yūrei?”

“Yeh.”

They turned a few more corners into quieter corridors before finally stopping. The outline of another person became visible behind the hemp bag.

“Brought back a spy,” Yūrei said.

“Oi, Siggy, the fuck d’ya fink yer doin’? D’ya even know who in Hel she is?”

“No! But ‘at’s what an interrogation’s for, innit? All I know is the lil’ grenner slag was skulkin’ around our streets, prolly a lookout for Kintoki, so I brought ‘er in.”

“She a grenner?”

The bag was torn off Sayuri’s head. She found herself in a hallway of roughhewn stone dimly lit by strings of electric lights. The place resembled a mine save for wooden doors. The man standing in front of her carried one of the same primitive rifles the river pirates favored. He looked several years older than Yūrei, with a shaved scalp and a scar on his jaw. She trembled as his dirty hand lifted her hair before dropping it.

“Look a’that. Alright Siggs, ya mighta been on to somefin’.”

“How come ya gotta use my real name, eh? I was givin’ ‘er an alias so she couldn’t identify me!” Siggy said.

The man laughed. “Cuz it’s stupid. I’m not callin’ ya fuckin’ yoo-ray. Now, they’re ‘avin’ a meetin’ upstairs I gotta attend, so yer on watch duty ‘til we can get someone down ‘ere to interrogate ‘er proper-like.”

The man was halfway down the hall before Sayuri heard him giggle and say, “fuckin’ yoo-ray. Yooooooo-ray. Yoooooo—”

“Nob ‘ed,” Siggy said.

“Who was—”

“Not a word from the prisoner!”

Siggy opened a door and pushed her inside a cold room with an arched brick ceiling and a couple tables full of jarred pickles and alcohol. He pulled up a large wooden chair and untied her wrists before pulling them behind the back of the chair and re-tying them. He was mid-way through binding her ankles to the legs of the chair when she saw something in the corner of the room that caused her to start thrashing.

“W-What is that!? No! Let me go!”

Siggy looked at her with a confused expression then turned to look at the torture device in the corner. He pointed at it.

“You talkin’ ‘bout the cannin’ machine?”

“T-The what?”

“Oh my days, it’s a cannin’ machine ya twit! Y’know, for cannin’ pickles n’ plums n’ fings? Make sure it don’t get mold? Yer a daft one you are. I don’t even work in no cannin’ factory an’ I know what one looks like. How ignorant are you grenners any’ow?”

Her cheeks burned, but she was glad she had suppressed the urge to rely on her hatsuden. “I-I know what a canning machine is, I just have not had cause to see one in person. And they look remarkably like torture devices from my history textbooks.”

Siggy spun another chair around and sat down backwards on it facing her. “What in Hel type a’ textbooks d’you grenners read? Ours got letters and numbers in ‘em. Showin’ kids torture devices? Ghastly.”

“Would you prefer they not teach history at all? Or merely erase from it everything which might be uncomfortable to discuss?” Sayuri asked.

“No one said nuffin’ ‘bout not teachin’ ‘istory, but the ‘istory most folks gotta know they learn from folks ‘round ‘em. Everyfin’ else is propaganda.”

The boy had the most irritating habit of repeatedly raising both eyebrows when he was nattering on about whatever insipid point he was making.

“I am more than aware of the process of political socialization, lad.” Fukuzawa’s term for “male” sounded weird in her mouth, but she would not deign to refer to him by name. “However, if you truly believe folk history is without its own biases you are sorely mistaken.”

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Well, then, we’re at a’ impasse, cuz yer fine schoolin’s probably told ya all about ‘ow the Kaihonjin came and made everyfin’ better for us Æfrians, ‘cept there were no Shroud and no dirty factories and no dirty rivers ‘fore you fishfuckers. See, my grandma’s grandma’s grandma told ‘er stories about what it was like, but the way they tell it in school, we was wipin’ our arses with sticks and bein’ burnt at the stake. It wasn’t like that!”

She rolled her eyes. “You are presenting a strawman argument. Do you know what that is?”

He snorted. “I’ve got me a debate club. ‘Course I know what a strawman is. Get off yer ‘igh ‘orse ‘bout it. I know what they teach ‘bout you fishfuckers leasin’ land from our idjit lords n’ ‘ow it was all legal n’ consensual n’ contractual n’ all that, n’ how we’re only subjects if we get our wages from a Kaihonjin company. You don’t know shit. They try n’ teach us wrong so we forget, see.”

Siggy’s point gave her pause. Sayuri knew little about public education in Æfria other than it was conducted in their native language to insulate them from precisely the dangerous, Kaihonjin ideologies Siggy was currently espousing. But her assumption had been that it was the same as the Kaihonjin curriculum.

The history taught at the Imperial Academy white-washed nothing. There was equal weight given to both the positive effects of international business like modernization and rising living standards, as well as the negative effects like institutional bigotry and economic inequality.

“Well then, what did your great-great-great-great-grandmother purport pre-colonial Æfria to be like?” Sayuri asked.

“She said we might’ve ‘ad kings and lords, but they ‘ad to negotiate wiv us cuz we were yeomen. Most folks was yeoman. Somefin’ like 80 or 90 percent of folks,” Siggy said with pride.

“Yeoman? I am unfamiliar with the term,” Sayuri said, affecting disinterest while being immensely interested in Siggy’s “knowledge.”

While she was fond of Thomas and Mildred, they were not precisely wellsprings of social science knowledge. They provided only scant clues regarding Æfrian society via their actions and proclivities. Siggy was another matter. He was intellectually intriguing, if not especially well-educated.

“A yeoman’s someone who ‘ad their own way of makin’ money. Owned a bit o’ land, or they ‘ad machines or somefin’. An’ they got together in associations and decided ‘ow they’d negotiate wiv their lord and if you were down on yer luck they’d ‘ave someone ‘elp ya learn a craft and let ya use their tools n’ give ya somewhere to stay even if you were from a different township n’ they paid for arts and culture and regulated common land. Bang on what Saito was talkin’ ‘bout wiv Toe-moko Shoogee.”

The phonetic mutilation of Tomokoshugi was torture itself. She realized that the term “Yeoman” was probably how “Yūkensha” had been translated into Afugo. It was a Companionist sociological term for a medieval social class lying between tenant farmer and landlord that was supposed to function as the template for what would supersede the system of conglomerates and wage-laborers. In other words, historical determinist pseudo-science.

“Is that why you idolize Companionism? Because it bears passing resemblance to mythologized memories of a bygone era?” Sayuri asked.

“Usin’ big words like “bygone” don’t mean ya got a point! And I don’t idolize it, it’s got its problems. I know you fink you silkstockings got a monopoly on knowin’ fings, but I study ‘istory and polihihul ecommy myself, see, and— ‘old on! I’m interrogatin’ you ‘ere. Don’t get me side-tracked wiv yer wiles! Yer not foolin’ ol’ Siggy.” He straightened up in the chair. “What’s your name?”

“My name?”

Sayuri was suddenly aware she was not in a history lecture and instead tied to a chair in the basement of a terrorist organization who wanted to extract information she didn’t have. Her legs bounced against the floor.

“I-I um—”

“Whatever ya say first’s gonna be a lie, so spit it out,” Siggy said, spinning a jar screw band around his finger.

“My name is Sakura Ashimoto,” she said.

“No it ain’t!”

“It is!”

“I’m good at readin’ people and yer bad at lyin’, so try again, and don’t lie this time.”

Sayuri took a deep breath. A familiar name in her mouth might keep her calm enough to pass scrutiny. “My name is Rei Hoshi.”

Siggy squinted for a moment. “Alright, I believe ya. So, you work for Kintoki?”

“No!”

“Then tell me what in Hel ya were doin’ out in the middle o’ the Æfrian part o’ Éstfýr while shit’s comin’ apart, eh?”

Before she could come up with a serviceable lie, someone banged on the door. “Siggs! General meetin’. They want everybody!”

Siggy pointed a finger at Sayuri. “We’re not done ‘ere. Don’t even fink about tryna wriggle free.”

~~~

Siggy and his compatriot Ethelwulf hurried to the stairwell.

“What’s ‘appenin’ Wulfie? I thought it was s’posed to be leadership only.”

Breathless, Wulfie said, “it’s the shipbuilders’ union! They sacked their old leaders, they’re joinin’ wiv us!

“Yer fibbin’!”

“Not on me mum’s life I’m not! They were sayin’ we might get the munitions union too! This is it, Siggy! It’s real this time!”

Siggy leapt up the stairs two at a time. Energy resonated through the walls as Goowies flooded into the old theater in the north wing of the former Éstfýr Yeoman’s Society meeting hall.

Three floors of wooden seating had been built for a capacity of 400, but over a thousand bodies were shoving themselves into any available space. Those down by the stage found themselves pressed against the wooden platform which itself held at least a hundred leaders and dignitaries, including First Compatriot Oliver Martin, First Foreign Affairs Officer Uthric Loothwin, and Sakae Uchiyama, the delegate from the Kaihon Federation of Companions with an entourage of at least a dozen Kaihonjin Companionists.

“Loothsa’s cunt, this is it, isn’t it?” Siggy said, squeezing Wulfie’s arm as the two compatriots pushed into the crowd.

“Shut up ya nob, I can’t ‘ear!” whispered a woman with a rifle slung over her shoulder.

Siggy and Wulfie claimed a spot against the back wall with the other provisional members who had swelled the membership rolls in the past week, all boys and girls in their mid-and-late teens.

On stage, First Compatriot Oliver boomed, his voice requiring no microphone. “Compatriots! Companions! Whatever the hell you want to call yourself, so long as it isn’t boss or king!”

This never failed to get a laugh from the crowd.

“We have called this emergency meeting of the Grand General Union of Workers to discuss the future of our nation. As you know, the time has finally come when the great monopolies have begun to cannibalize one another for market hegemony, just as Tomohiko Saito predicted. The world is now in the terminal stages of that cancer known as Propertism.”

This brought a deafening wave of cheers and clapping from the mass of Companionists. Siggy was squeezed in so tight he could only stomp his feet against the floorboards. He knew the day would come, but he hadn’t expected it so soon. The terminal stages of Propertism had seemed decades in the future, not weeks.

“We cannot rest—” Oliver paused for shouted comments. “—we cannot rest in self-satisfaction on our analysis. Material history has brought us to this moment, but it is women and men, flesh and blood, who wage revolutionary struggle!”

There was another pause for more chanting, cheering, and stomping.

“Tonight, our compatriots in the shipbuilders’ union have thrown off the shackles of not only their employers, but their complacent leadership, who refused to hear the bugle call of revolution in order to save their cozy positions. Our compatriots in the shipbuilders’ union are the first, but they shall not be the last. In this time of instability, when our employers ask us to work under the Shroud ‘round the clock, when they demand we sacrifice our body and minds so they can wage war amongst themselves, what else is left to us but revolution!? Who runs Kintoki’s warehouses and hangers?”

“Æfrians!” the theater shouted.

“And who runs Genji’s factories?”

“Æfrians!”

“Who suffers when they go to war?”

“Æfrians!”

“And who suffers when they’re at peace!?”

“Æfrians!”

Siggy’s throat stung as he screamed it raw. Oliver said something else, but it was buried under the stamping of feet.

“What’s ‘e sayin’?” Siggy asked the woman in front of him.

“Says we’re waitin’ on more folk to join up wiv us, givin’ it another week or so,” she said.

In the next moment the room burst with arguments about this choice of strategy. Wulfie was already arguing with the girl next to him.

“I says we oughta strike now! Other folk are waitin’ to see what we do! They’ll join when they see we’re the real deal!” the girl said.

“Kintoki’s waitin’ to squish us! We seem all big and impressive ‘ere in a tiny theater, but what ‘appens when ‘ey got gunships ‘overin’ over us? We need strenf first!” Ethelwulf replied.

Siggy’s heart was still racing, but there was a crash when he realized that even though this was the historical moment, it wasn’t the historical moment’s moment yet. He wanted to go marching out right that second. Instead, it was more waiting. What was the moment supposed to look like? What sign were the people on stage waiting for?

Not caring for the argument between Wulfie and the girl which was descending into a Companionist theory pissing contest, Siggy left the theater and headed for the basement to get back to guarding Rei.

Fortunately, she was right where he left her, albeit tugging mightily and craning her neck to her shoulder.

“Thank Wotenha! I thought I might be driven to insanity! My nose itches dreadfully. Please, you must scratch it,” she begged.

Siggy narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if it was a trap. He walked around behind Rei to make sure her wrists were still secure and she wouldn’t leap up and straggle him.

“Alright, alright, quit yer squirmin’,” he said, reaching out to scratch her nose.

It took a few tries to find the exact spot she was complaining about. However, in the process, he discovered something strange.

“Your nose… it’s got gold on it,” he said.

“A-Ah— that is g-glitter. It is part of my make-up, you see,” she replied, sweat beading on her forehead. Now that Siggy was close, he could see more glitter where the pale make-up was coming off.

“Wait… ‘old on a sec,” he said, walking over to the canning machine and grabbing a grease rag.

“Th-that is okay! You have gotten the itch! No more scratching is necessary!”

Rei winced as he scrubbed the rag against her face. As he scrubbed, he thought he knew what he was looking at, but it was so outlandish, so preposterous, he had to keep going to be sure. He put elbow grease into his thumb as he swabbed the gold lines on her chin, but they refused to come off.

“Ow! Stop! Stop!” she cried.

Once her face was wiped clean, Siggy stepped back, as if that would help him understand what he was looking at, and Sayuri turned her face, as if that would help her hide it.

“Oh my days.”