Captive in his own body, Thomas watched Persimmon shoot Milly’s arm off, watched her scream in horror, and watched Persimmon laugh. Fury and revulsion flooded his veins like boiling lead but even his throat refused to open in a scream.

Milly stumbled backwards, sobbing and clutching the stump. Sayuri ran to her side and fumbled with her cloak, trying to figure out how to staunch the bleeding.

“She may have trouble finding a doctor at this late hour,” Persimmon said. “Although I could find her a Genji field medic.”

Persimmon looked up at the sky where gunships lobbed explosives down at the crowd. Further uphill, Kintoki planes were being shot down, exploding in distant fireballs like shooting stars.

Sayuri trembled as she tried to press Milly’s wound closed. “Then call one! You— you deranged, vile—”

“In exchange, you come with me willingly,” Persimmon said, towering over Sayuri.

Her nostrils flared.

“I shall go with you to Genji if you will permit my—” Sayuri was not sure what the appropriate term was for them now. One came to her. “—permit my compatriots to leave with their lives.”

Persimmon chuckled. “We’re not going to Genji. You’re coming with me, and we’re going to put that depraved, decadent little shit-stain Tetsuo to heel. Then we can move our society forward.”

“What about the Æfrians?”

“What about them?”

“What is their role to be?”

With his giant hands, Persimmon patted Sayuri on the cheek. She shuddered.

“You sound like those cowardly bleeding hearts who protested the war. Why? You’re not weak. On the contrary, you’re nothing but gold. Better still, you’ve struggled and come out the other side stronger. Gift and willpower both, you are the image of the elites who ought to rule. Why do you play at being a weakling? I don’t understand,” he asked, staring into her eyes.

He kept talking of progress, but Sayuri pictured the warrior castes who ruled before the rise of industrial Propertism: Those rulers for whom laws were a tool for suppressing revolt, rather than forming a better society. Men just like Persimmon, warlords, had turned the continent on the other side of the Æfrian channel into a bloodbath. A war of all against all. A living hell for all but the strongest.

But…

Her family and the other clan-conglomerates had sold them the weapons. The conglomerate system had a direct hand in continuing the same brutal feudalism it sneered at as primitive. Sayuri channeled her frustration at this contradiction into slapping Persimmon.

“I would rather die than live as a tyrant.”

Persimmon grabbed her by the neck and lifted her off the ground. Sayuri choked and thrashed in Persimmon’s grip before he flung her towards the edge of the roof. Concrete tore her cloak and golden skin. Locked up in his mind, Thomas was screaming at the girl to use her hatsuden.

Persimmon kicked a mewling Milly out of the way as he strode towards Sayuri. “More people have been killed by idealists building delusional utopias than from all the warlords combined. Only discipline, order, and natural merit have never served humanity wrong. There is no world in which everyone wins, Ueichi. No world where everyone lives in separate, happy little bubbles. No world where you stand apart as a spectator without blood on your hands.”

He stomped on Sayuri’s chest, forcing air from her lungs. The steel barrel of his magnum gleamed in the spotlights of the hovering Genji gunships.

He cocked the hammer. “One last chance to join me in setting the world to order. You either help me bring humanity out of its greedy, gluttonous stagnation and into a real future, or I make sure the conglomerates can’t have you. Your choice.”

“T-Thomas! Help!” Sayuri screamed.

Across the roof, Thomas felt strange. His muscles squirmed under his skin. They still spasmed and seized, but more and more, they were loosening. At the same time, he felt something else taking over. The same dæmon that had possessed him in the Ueden building and compelled him to observe the product demonstration was taking hold once more.

His fury towards Persimmon for harming Milly, the humiliation of having the special forces voice used on him again, his single-minded desire to save Sayuri, all of that was buried beneath a floating sense of detachment.

Thomas felt no fear of dying, but he also wanted to live. And his reason for living, the offspring of the family responsible for killing his father, for putting this humiliating golden collar in his bloodstream, for making his world a living nightmare for decades, was currently pinned under Persimmon’s boot.

His muscles released all at once. With almost casual indifference, he picked up his gun. The electronics flicked on in his hand. He fired into Persimmon’s broad back.

This was just enough of a distraction for Sayuri to worm her way out from under the boot in time to avoid a bullet that blew through the concrete roof.

“So, you knew you could order him all along,” Persimmon said as his chest danced with the bullets punching into his ballistic vest.

He was wrong about that, Thomas realized. Sayuri had accidentally activated the kinkawa in his bloodstream bang in Burnehithe, but this was different. This was something else.

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Using his hatsuden, Persimmon redirected bullets aimed at his head and legs and buried them in the roof as the holographic ammo count approached zero.

“Stop!” Persimmon ordered.

The hair on Thomas’ skin prickled with electric charge, but Persimmon’s words couldn’t find a way in. Thomas gazed into the man’s dark, bloodshot eyes and saw in the soul behind them a homicidal desire to mangle the world into a playground for the strong. Firing his last bullet, Thomas tossed away the empty gun and charged Persimmon directly.

Scorching, fiery pain ignited across his arm as Persimmon tried to throw him down with hatsuden-augmented hands. But the dæmon pulsing through his muscles and arteries pushed back and held its ground.

The sensation was a strange one. The Shroud generated by Persimmon’s hatsuden would annihilate Thomas’ will, replacing it with numb misery, then in the next moment would crack into adrenaline-laced ecstasy, two twin sensations spiraling around one another. In one of these ephemeral moments of rapture, Thomas slammed his head into Persimmon’s nose.

The ape-like man snorted blood from his nostrils. “Never trust technology with the work of fists.”

Thomas put his hands up to block a few swings. Each punch from Persimmon left Thomas’ arms numb. One strike glanced off his temple and his vision exploded into stars.

“Go help Milly!” Thomas screamed.

He saw Milly fighting to stop the bleeding in her arm. He wanted to be by her side, but Persimmon hounded him, forcing him backward and backward on the roof, each punch thrown with enough force to kill him if they landed clean.

“Your spirit is strong, Momojin,” Persimmon said through a smile of trickling blood. “But you’re still a savage. You can only keep up because of what we put inside you.”

The talk almost distracted Thomas from a low kick aimed at his knee. He brought his leg up to block it and the impact made his entire leg go cold. Persimmon would win the fight through attrition, Thomas knew. All he needed to do was give Sayuri and Milly time to run.

Sayuri dashed towards Milly. Persimmon’s eyes followed her. “No you don’t!”

Persimmon lunged at her and in the split second he did, Thomas plowed his entire weight in one explosive burst into the man’s waist. Neither he, nor Thomas, expected this to do much, but he knocked Persimmon over like he was charging through curtains.

At Milly’s side, Sayuri again scrambled for something to close the wound as it spewed blood over her woad-dyed cloak. She gasped as Milly grabbed her hand.

“Help— Thomas— first,” Milly said through gasps of pain. The back-and-forth would have been humorous if the situation were less horrifying.

Sayuri glanced behind her at the two large men struggling against each other, both rippling with electric augmentation. Panic rose in her chest.

“I don’t know what to do!”

“You do know, you—” Milly paused to suck down heavy, ragged breaths. “You don’t— want to!” Milly squeezed even tighter. “Do—what you have to!”

Milly was right. Everything that had happened tonight was because she was too scared to use her hatsuden for what she knew it could do.

The truth was, Sayuri didn’t want that power. She had never wanted power over others, or the power to remake the world. By birth, it had been thrust on her, and it had kept her separate and apart from others. Her world was filled with servants and sycophants and girls that wanted nothing to do with her because they thought she was stuck up, and backstabbing clan members who wanted to take her father’s place. All because she was born with power.

Only her parents were close to her, but her father wanted power badly enough to spend a small fortune filling his own daughter’s body with gold leaf in an experiment that was just as likely to kill her. And because of that, she held the life of everyone around her in her hands, and she hated it. She abhorred violence. But violence naturally gathered around power. Around her.

Mamoru was right. It was a curse. However, if she would have to suffer a curse, the least she could do was protect others from it.

“Persimmon!” she shouted.

He looked up at her from where he was grappling with Thomas on the ground. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, his head twisted itself free of his body.

“Fuck!” Thomas yelled, pushing the decapitated corpse off himself.

Sayuri saw fear in his eyes and it made her sad. She went over towards Milly, rocking back and forth and sobbing.

“I don’t think I can put your arm back on, but I can stop the bleeding,” Sayuri said.

Gently lifting Milly’s other hand off the stump, Sayuri pressed down on the wound and Milly’s skin folded in, sealed in a temporary suture over the jagged remains of her forearm bones.

“The GGUW ought to have medical care facilities to deal with the wound properly and infuse you with blood. Should they be stingy with this care, please inform them that Sayuri Ueichi has requested this in exchange for services rendered,” she said.

Milly’s reply was strained and soft. “Thank you.”

Thomas came over to help Milly to her feet.

“Sayuri, I know you don’t trust us. Maybe you’ve got good reason not to. But we won’t turn you in—”

“I know you would not,” Sayuri said. “And I intend to join you both later at the GGUW headquarters. But there is something I have to do first.”

Thomas searched Sayuri’s gaze and nodded. He didn’t like leaving her by herself again, but Milly needed medical attention, and he didn’t have time to argue. Instead, he hugged her. Startled by the hug, all Sayuri could do was nod. Pulling away, Thomas picked up Persimmon’s revolver and returned to guide Milly down the stairs.

Alone on the rooftop, Sayuri gazed at the circling lights of gunships. Genji clan crests glowed ominously over the square as the dark machines rained fire and metal from the heavens on helpless subjects. Her eyes glazed over with fire as the pounding autocannon fire exploded against barricades in the streets.

Sayuri had grown up being told myths of the inevitability of progress, the fairness of institutions, and the freedom of the individual. She still believed in those things. However, she now knew they did not exist independently, but had to be fought for and made, and that powerful people, not just Genji, but her own family, did not truly want these things, no matter how much they professed to.

Their real face looked like Persimmon’s.

The GGUW was not necessarily right, she thought. But the conglomerates were wrong. And that was enough to force her to act. Sayuri’s skin burned and tingled. Below, the anarchy in the streets stilled. Gunfire and screaming quieted under the Shroud descending.

Using her hatsuden hurt. It felt like standing in boiling water. She whimpered, and for a moment wasn’t sure it would work. But then the spotlights and flaring cannons from the Genji gunships died out. Swallowed by an invisible wave emanating from Sayuri, streetlamps winked off. The wave washed outwards and snuffed out not just the square, but all the electric power within several kilometers. The city of Tо̄tо̄shi itself went dark. Then, without power, gunships fell out of the sky.

The dark square outside the Kintoki supply center filled with the sound of crashing planes. Blips of fire farther uphill announced Genji and Kintoki warfighters going down. Once these ceased, Sayuri released her hatsuden.

A few lights flicked back on in the Ridge and Sky bands, but the Æfrian part of the city remained dark under the shroud of night. Emerging from this darkness was a loud and rhythmic chant.

“Úre! Úre! Úre!”