Chanting, singing, drumming, yelling, gunships hovering, and fire crackling created a strange and anarchic atmosphere. Among the protest songs, the favorite seemed to be a version of the Kaihon national anthem, Shiranami-no-Kisan, or “White Wave Returning,” reworded to how the land would return to the Æfrians. Periodically the song changed to replace “Æfrians'' with “producers,” implying Kaihonjin workers too.
Through the afternoon the energy was crescendoing towards something. What that was, neither Thomas nor Milly nor Kintoki nor the striking workers knew. It seemed to change by the minute. The crowds surrounding the Kintoki Central Supply Center had expanded to a six-block blob given shape by the Glær river, the path Kintoki cleared for access to their supply center, and blockades erected by striking workers.
Thomas and Milly were trying to find a way around these blockades made of boards, sheet metal, sand bags, and anything else that could block a street, but navigating around the strike proved impossible. The streets beyond the epicenter were patrolled by neighborhood militia, colonial police, and conglomerate security forces, all sharing the goal of concentrating riotous activity to a central location.
It reminded Thomas of rounding up Ryūkokujin villages during the war.
As he and Milly tried to forge through the crowd to the yeoman’s hall, there came screaming from up the street. The crowd first pressed in, then pulled out, like a strummed wire. Thomas kept one hand curled around the pistol in his jacket pocket. With Milly holding his arm, he pushed towards a gap in the crowd.
By the time Thomas saw what happened, the teenage boy who’d been struck had been pulled back into the crowd. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out what happened. The boy must’ve strayed into the path cleared for Kintoki’s supply and had his head beaten in with a rifle stock. A woman wailed as the crowd shuffled itself to get those with medical supplies and knowledge to the boy.
The boy tried to speak, but produced only burbles and twitches.
“Thomas! What’s happening!?” Milly said, stuck behind a group of taller men.
The fear and grief he felt in his chest died in his mouth and came out a neutral observation.
“They beat a kid who wandered too close.”
There was a mismatch between the emotions he felt and the responses trained into him. That wasn’t new. He’d carried that dissonance home from the war. And he thought this habit was unique to veterans, but he saw it in every face around him. Everyone was scared. Everyone felt helpless and desperate, but no one knew what form that feeling was supposed to take on the outside, or what they could do about it that didn’t end with them dying in the street like the boy.
Milly dug her nails into Thomas’ arm and pointed. Up the rise of the hill ahead of them and down the opposite way, around corners and through alleys, the crowd quivered in response, so that even those nowhere near the incident learned what happened as information rippled outward.
The chanting and singing and drums dimmed for a moment, making space in the landscape for this information, before flooding it again with noise and anger. This noise was the closest the crowd came to giving voice to the collective outrage, but it felt a climax postponed rather than catharsis.
Nationalist slogans mixed with Companionist chants, both fighting for dominance over the voice of the pulsating crowd as Thomas and Milly squeezed through its capillaries towards the beating heart in the square. In the center of the square was a vacuum created by steel-spiked barricades. The crowd of striking workers pulsed at its edges.
“It’s unreal,” Milly said. “None of this… none of it feels—” Her face was blank and pale and her tone distant. “Thomas, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how to think. I can’t—”
Then the crowd went quiet as the Shroud descended on the city. The tsunami of humanity turned into a puddle. No more information passed through the frozen, isolated cells. There simply was no longer a crowd. Only individuals.
Thomas looked at Milly, the woman who made his heart insane with love and fiddled with every dial and knob in his brain and he saw just a woman. The pores and creases, the scars and wrinkles, were no more than that. They said nothing. They meant nothing.
And he no longer wanted to save Sayuri. There was no need to, because it simply didn’t matter.
~~~
Sayuri tried to get her words out in-between ragged breaths as she raced up the stairwell with Siggy.
“I am attempting— to tell you! I will not— use my— hatsuden!”
Siggy stopped halfway up the next flight. “‘Why not!? You said you’d ‘elp us!”
“To the extent that I can, but would not the Shroud created by my hatsuden be morally worse? I will not use it unless I absolutely must,” she said.
She left her statement intentionally vague, but her main fear was that the GGUW leadership would ask her to put her hatsuden to violent purposes. Hitherto, though it inflicted the Shroud on others, she had limited her hatsuden to purely defensive actions and had harmed nobody directly. However, she suspected it could do much more. Her father would not have invested in a technology whose only return on investment was instantaneous travel over short distances.
Siggy grabbed her wrist. “I won’t make you do nuffin’ ya don’t want to, us Goowies work by mutual consent, I’ll ‘ave ya know. But yer comin’ wiv me to the front lines.”
Petrified by her own thoughts, Sayuri permitted Siggy to drag her up the stairs and onto the streets of Tо̄tо̄shi. As she surmised while hooded, they were underneath the overhang of the Ridge Band, the next higher tier of the city held over their head by giant cement pillars. Downhill she saw a commotion which appeared to be the ongoing strikes condensed into a nucleus.
Sayuri’s first thought was how unfortunate it was for Kintoki to have their logistical operations impeded, and how serendipitous for Genjūkō.
“Genji may pick this moment to initiate an assault on the city,” Sayuri said.
Siggy stopped. “Yer jestin’.”
She shook her head.
“Fuckin’ Hel. Well, we’re overfrowin’ one glomerate, what’s two, eh?”
Sayuri was not sure Siggy fully appreciated what a Genji occupation would mean. No doubt Tetsuo headed the operation, and the few interactions she had had with the man at social events was enough to know he was a psychopathic brute. Tо̄tо̄shi’s suffering would increase by an order of magnitude if he won.
“C’mon, we gotta get down there!” Siggy said, bounding down the street towards the thumping hub of bedlam. At this distance, the crowd of rioters resembled TV static. Above them, Kintoki gunships hovered, propellers spinning like the blades of a combine harvester.
Siggy and Sayuri were still several blocks away when the Shroud descended. The flashes of it she experienced while traveling with Mamoru were nothing in comparison to the dread of being helpless to it indefinitely.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
There was no way to tell where, or how many people were generating hatsuden across the city, but Kintoki employed sufficient numbers to blanket the city in strategically-positioned misery. What was more, with no workers in the factories and plants, the hatsuden served no purpose save psychological pollution. The Shroud was not a side-effect, but the end goal.
“We… we still need to get to the um, the operation. We’re gonna storm Kintoki, see...” Siggy said, slowing to an absent-minded walk.
A thought ambled through Sayuri’s foggy brain: She had stopped the Shroud before. Without understanding the mechanics of it, from her preliminary experimentation with Thomas and Milly it appeared she could either reverse or stymie the flow of neurochemical energy back towards the individual it was drawn from. Static electricity surrounding Sayuri’s body zapped Siggy at the same time as it ejected him from the Shroud.
After the shock wore off, he stared at her. “Did you jus’ switch the Shroud off?”
“Yes. It appears a property of my hatsuden is—”
Siggy hugged her. “Yer an angel’s what yar!”
Sayuri blushed as she waited for him to let go.
“C’mon, let’s ‘ave ya ‘elp everyone else too,” he said.
That was right. There was a way for her to use her hatsuden in a way that improved other people’s condition. She had prayed for an opportunity to be useful, to not be a liability, and without resorting to violence. Here it was.
She nodded with a smile. “I shall try my best.”
Siggy darted into a series of alleyways before arriving at the back door of an auto repair shop with a unicorn sketched in chalk on the pavement. Inside were not cars but people, all wearing blue coveralls. Most carried guns, both blackpowder and modern. Those that did not bore hand tools. However, the most surprising thing was that a little less than half were girls.
Their torpor dissolved the moment Sayuri’s static came in contact with them.
“Oi, Siggy! What’s this!?” said one of the Goowies.
“This’s Sayuri. ‘Er ‘atsuden flicks the Shroud off.”
“Yer takin’ the piss. You serious?” said a portly girl swabbing the barrel of a rifle.
“D’ya feel any Shoud ‘round ‘ere?”
“Fuck me mate!” said another, coming over to vigorously shake Sayuri’s hand. “Ya’ve gotta be sent by the gods!”
The terrorists in the auto repair shop swarmed around her like she was a famous painting. Becoming the center of attention gave her no small measure of consternation.
“Oi! Back off! Back off! She’s gotta ‘ave room to breave, don’t she?” Siggy said, shooing them.
“Gotta let top brass know! Whole strike ground to an ‘alt cuz a’ the Shroud,” said the portly girl.
Sayuri started to speak. “I do not know if—”
“Got ‘em on the blower now!” said another, shaking a handheld radio.
A lot of chattering followed which Sayuri could not understand. Their accents were too strong and her voice too timid to impress on them that she didn’t know if her hatsuden could accomplish what they hoped. Sayuri grabbed Siggy’s sleeve. The fabric crackled at her electric touch.
“You must tell them to lower their expectations. There are limitations to what I can do with my hatsuden. I do not believe it possible to reverse the Shroud on the scale of an entire city.”
He met her anxiousness with feverish excitement. “Do what ya can and it’ll be enough. This is our moment, Sayuri, this is the wheel of ‘istory turnin’!”
Before Sayuri could protest further, the handheld radio snapped to life and reported instructions to the squadron she was now embedded in.
“We got orders!”
“Úre! Úre! Úre!” they cheered, smacking tools and the dented butts of rifles against the floor.
“What does that mean?” Sayuri asked Siggy.
“It’s an old Æfrian word. It means “ours”.”
She could guess the object to which the possessive pronoun referred. She was standing on it.
“What’s yer name, compatriot?” One of the group asked.
It took Sayuri a nudge from Siggy to realize the radio man was referring to her by “compatriot.”
“Ahh… I do not know if I am formally admitted to—”
“There ain’t no forms to sign! If yer on the right side of ‘istory, yer in. Simple’s ‘at!” the radio man replied.
“M-My name is Sayuri. Com-Compatriot.”
There was another cheer from the Goowies as she said their magic word. Sayuri had never been to a party in the manner that girls and boys her own age held them, but her understanding from fiction was that the atmosphere in the requisitioned auto shop was rather somewhat like a party. Only a few of the assembled terrorists—or insurgents, she was not sure of the polite term—appeared to be over the age of 20. The rest were her age, a few even younger.
“Awright, ‘ere’s yer orders, compatriot Sayuri. Straight from the top brass. At 1900 ‘ours, we march out, and you bring the Shroud down. Once the crowd gets riled up again, we get our folks in position n’ then we storm the doors!”
More cries of, “Úre! Úre! Úre!” accompanied the declaration. He shoved a sweaty hand towards her. “Name’s Osmund. Everyone calls me Oz.”
She took his hand and tried not to grimace at the moisture.
“I will not be asked to use my hatsuden for anything besides removing the Shroud, correct?” Sayuri asked.
“S’all the orders I got. No way of knowin’ what else’ll come frough the blower though,” Osmund said, tossing the handheld radio up in the air and catching it. “‘Course, y’could always just say “nuts to your orders!” We ain’t glomerates who make ya do what ya don’t wanna do.”
This was fine. There was nothing morally wrong with removing suffering from people. Nor was there anything treasonous about the act, either to her family, to Kintoki, or to the Empire.
“Do you know if… is there any way your intelligence department, such as it is, might potentially be requisitioned to find two individuals currently in the city?” Sayuri asked.
Oz raised an eyebrow. “Might be possible anovah time. Right now though? Not on yer life! S’all ‘ands on deck for this. Cards all on the table. Nuffin’ in reserve.”
“I see,” she said.
“Why? Got folks yer worried about?”
“She’s got a chum, Thomas,” Siggy said.
“Oi? What kinda chum? You shaggin’ ‘im?”
“Shag?” she asked.
“Means “fuck”,” said one of the female insurgents.
Sayuri’s face burned. “N-No! Of course not!”
Oz grinned. “Well, if yer lookin’ for a shag…”
“Come off it!” the same female insurgent said, throwing a wrench at him.
“Ow! There’s no ‘arm in askin’! Everyone’s allowed to say no ‘ere!”
The squadron of insurgents—which Sayuri would classify as “irregular partisans” according to the taxonomy provided by her strategy book—did not seem especially disciplined or battle-ready, but as the time approached, their joking ceased and they gathered up arms. Through the windows, she watched the sky darken.
“It’s seven,” Oz said, looking at the same clock on the wall everyone else was watching.
“Soon as we ‘ear a commotion, we’ll come runnin’,” Siggy said, putting a hand on Sayuri’s shoulder.
Sayuri nodded gravely and opened the front door of the shop. Outside, crowds of workers were slowly trickling away from the strike like sloughing flesh. In their eyes she saw despondency. She wanted to do this. Even if it was physically painful, this would be atonement for her family’s invention of seishin-hatsuden. It was her sin to bear. She had to do this.
Focusing on her static electricity—the least draining application of her hatsuden she could think of—she expanded the field outwards, making its invisible presence known as it lifted hair and clothes. As the field came into contact with the striking workers, passion flooded back into their eyes, powerful and terrible and filled with rage at the comprehension of Kintoki’s transgression against them.
The air turned electric. The strike flooded with life. Then, without delay, gunshots.
Where it came from or who it was aimed at was a mystery, but everyone knew what it meant. The spirit of violence had come. The anonymous cracks were the first notes of the overture. These shots were joined by yelling and shouting. Drumbeats. Chanting. Humming gunships flashing their harsh white searchlights across the crowd.
Sayuri was buffeted by the crowd as it surged towards the center. Out of the corner of her eye came a bright flash as a petrol bomb exploded, showering Kintoki soldiers with sticky flame that clung to their ballistic armor and cooked them alive in it.
The screams of their comrades compelled the Kintoki soldiers to fire into the crowd. The hovering gunships spewed lead rain. In the dark and flashing lights she could only see bodies fall ahead of her. The air filled with the white noise of ear-ringing rifle reports.
A rocket soared from a darkened rooftop and exploded against the side doors of one of the Kintoki gunships.
Above it all she heard a growing chant. “Úre! Úre! Úre!”
~~~
From a nearby rooftop, Persimmon witnessed the Kintoki gunship explode from a well-aimed grenade-lance.
He spoke into a handheld radio, “this is Harmony 1-6. GYKN Carrier Taiyou-ou, you are cleared for air operations.”