The playhouse annex of the former Éstfýr Yeoman’s Council building had been turned into a field hospital overflowing with patients. Less urgent cases were being tended to with the patients upright in the audience under lantern and candlelight.

It had taken a few radio calls but, true to her word, Sayuri’s name bounced high enough to get Milly a bed on stage where a few woozy-looking teenagers with the letter “O” painted on their arm donated blood under the direction of an older woman.

To Thomas’ relief, the woman knew enough to swab the needle with alcohol. He was less confident in her ability to administer drugs, as her prescription for Milly’s pain relief was, “thereabouts’ good,” after pouring out unmarked pills in the dark. To the woman’s credit, Milly hadn’t stopped breathing, though she moaned and murmured through the night.

With nothing else to do while he waited, Thomas sat and observed. Inside the hall, despite its inhabitants being maimed, shot, on the brink of death, or dead, there was a sense of relief. Pain was easier to bear, he supposed, when there was a reason for it. Outside, gunfire was becoming less frequent, and he heard Zukunashi hauling—or driving—loot from the Kintoki Supply Center.

Thomas still didn’t know where he stood. He wasn’t a zook, nor did he want to be, but there was no turning back after their declaration of war. The Ryuu-Kaihon War had also started with a small group of radicals and ballooned into a conflict where millions died. Horrifying as the thought was, his intuition told him that something similar had happened that night in Éstfýr.

“What did we do, Milly?” he asked the woman sleeping beside him.

He felt responsible for Milly losing her arm by dragging her into danger. Strangely, her face, pockmarked with anxiety and distrust since the day he met her, looked soft as she slept.

~~~

“Ain’t it ironic? It is, ain’t it?” Siggy said, walking through the halls of the GGUW headquarters with his arms folded behind his head. “Little Kaihonjin heiress ends up bein’ the big revolutionary ‘ero, savior o’ the Æfrians, n’ I end up on evacuation duty. Ain’t it ironic?”

Sayuri shook her head. “I am not a hero.”

“I got two tits ‘tween my chest if ya ain’t! Ya dropped the Shroud, n’ that was impressive enough, but then ya knock Genji and Kintoki outta the sky! It was incredible-like!”

Sayuri blushed at that. Siggy knew she was embarrassed by the praise and had turned it into a game to see how much he could annoy her with it.

“No I— it’s not…”

“They’re callin’ ya a Sylph, know that?”

“A what?”

“A Sylph! See, it’s a creature, from pre-colonial times and such. It’s got to do with air, cuz ya know, what ya did with the—”

Siggy was interrupted by a group of fawning Goowies who came to shake Sayuri’s hand and hug her and thank her for doing her part for the revolution.

“If ya told me we’d be saved by the Ueden heiress this mornin’ I’da smacked the silly outta ya,” one of them said.

“But didja expect ‘er to be a wee girl?”

By her side Siggy said, “I found ‘er yesterday, I did, just walkin’ about—"

“Look a’ all a’ gold! Gods preserve…”

“D’ya need someone to show ya ‘round the base?”

That last comment rankled. Siggy grabbed Sayuri by the arm and pushed through the rapidly-growing crowd of admiring fans.

“Oi! Out the way! She’s gotta meet up with ‘er chums! Out the way!”

Clearing a path towards the field hospital in the auditorium, he glanced at Sayuri. Where it wasn’t gold, her face was bright red. He didn’t feel so much like poking at her anymore.

She swallowed. “I-I am glad they do not think of me as someone who caused collateral damage, but I cannot face them knowing I—”

“Ya did what was right. Nothin’ more to say,” Siggy said.

“But—”

“Ya stopped the Propertists from killing more Æfrians? Aye. Ya did. S’like I said, Sayuri, revolutionary ain’t a tea party. Folks’re gonna get hurt. But if the choice is leavin’ their big metal killin’ machines in the air, then I ‘ope ya knock ‘em down again.”

They walked in silence for a moment. Beside them, a girl with a rifle strapped to her back jumped up and down in front of an equally ecstatic boy who was laughing and telling her to calm down. The moment her feet touched the earth for more than a second, she smashed their faces together in a kiss.

“Thanks, Siggy,” Sayuri said.

“Fer what? Keepin’ yer head on straight?”

Sayuri shook her head, raven black sidelocks spilling out of her cloak.

“No, for helping evacuate people to safety.”

Siggy blushed and looked away. “O-Oh! Yeh, I don’t— it was divinely inspired. Or somethin’.”

They reached the door to the auditorium and Siggy looked down at his boots.

“Well, tell yer chum Thomas I said hi,” Siggy said.

Sayuri smiled and nodded. “I’ll see you soon.”

He blinked. “S’at mean yer joinin’ the GGUW for real-like?”

“I shall think on it, but I wish not to tie myself to a cause I do not yet fully comprehend the ideological implications of. My actions tonight were merely humanitarian intervention on behalf of an unfairly besieged people.”

“Right. Cool. Guess I’ll see ya ‘round then,” Siggy said, bobbing his head.

Once Sayuri left, Siggy punched the wall. Around him his compatriots gave their thoughts:

“Fuck’d the wall do to you, eh?”

“That’s domestic abuse it is.”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Sure ya don’t wanna save yer hand fer later, mate?”

~~~

Lights were coming back on in the Ridge and Conglomerate bands, but due to damage to the electric grid, they were sporadic and few.

Instead of electric light, the dark city was illuminated by a field of stars and a moon a day past full. Across the city of Éstfýr, a few childish hands reached out and grabbed for the bright, silvery moon. To the humans below, the night sky felt closer than it had in decades.

~~~

Milly felt like she needed to wake up, then she would wake up, then realize she was in another turn of her dream’s phantasmagoric wheel.

She thought she saw her father in one dream, but there was no clear picture associated with him. In another, she and her mother were walking in a park. They were both the same age despite her mother being in her mid-40s the last time Milly had seen her. After her mother wandered off, she felt Thomas sit down and try to explain something to her that she couldn’t understand.

Permeating the dreams was a sense that she had lost something dear to her, but the merry-go-round of dreaming phantoms kept her from looking for it.

Her childhood friend Sunngifu came the closest to saying something coherent. Milly tried to speak to the little girl, but she kept saying, “don’t touch me!” even though Milly wasn’t touching her. This was in some vast warehouse, but she knew it was somewhere in Edgarstún.

After another formless, anxious dream, Milly was confronted with her teacher Ms. Beth in her old classroom. This was the most vivid dream yet. She had a strong sense that this was real life, and that she’d finally woken up.

“What do you think?” Milly asked Ms. Beth. Her teacher said nothing. But Milly realized she didn’t care about the answer.

Then the viscerally real scene dropped away and was replaced by a fuzzy, unreal mess that felt like being under the Shroud. She was on a stage full of beds with people in them and Thomas was standing by her bedside in his stinky burgundy jacket and Sayuri was behind him, sitting on a folding chair reading a thick book. It took a few seconds of focusing before she could read the cover: On Property, Vol. 1 by Tomohiko Saito.

“G’mornin’,” Milly said, her mouth cotton dry. Thomas held out a bottle of water for her and she tried and failed to grab it.

Her left arm was a mangled mess of scabbed and oozing tissue hastily sealed over by Sayuri’s hatsuden. Whatever drugs she’d been given were working wonders, because aside from a dim sense of loss, she wasn’t too bothered.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

Thomas looked away. “The Zukunashi said their doctors will be busy stabilizing people in critical condition for a while before they can perform a surgery to clean up the wound.”

“Thanks. Both of you…” she said, her words goopy in her mouth.

Thomas gazed at her with his sad green eyes. “Milly, I’m so sorry, I—"

She flapped her remaining hand at him. “You didn’t blow my arm off, Tommy. Shut up.”

“But I—”

“Shut it,” Milly said. “No one forces me to go anywhere or do anything I don’t wanna do. I tied myself to your suicide mission cuz I wanted to. Which, speaking of suicide missions…”

Milly looked up and around at the auditorium she vaguely recalled being shuffled into. It must have been the GGUW headquarters. She thought it looked like the biggest Lofhearth she’d ever seen. “What are we doing now? Joining the Zooks?”

“Thomas and I discussed this,” Sayuri said, putting a band-aid wrapper between pages and setting the book down in her lap. “He is skeptical of the GGUW and wishes not to associate with them, and I am examining the merits of their political ideology as we speak, though I am finding the political economic arguments to be uncompelling at best and intellectually dishonest at worst,” Sayuri said, tapping the book with her nails.

Milly set down the water bottle and collapsed back into her pillow. “Join them.”

Sayuri blinked. “Pray tell why?”

“Hunch. Intuition. And because we don’t have a choice. None of us do.”

“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.

“Because Sayuri’s never gonna be free so long as the conglomerates are hunting her, and I couldn’t live with myself if I passed up our only shot for a free and independent Æfria, and you’ll drink yourself to an early grave if you don’t have someone giving you orders.”

“I would not—”

“Yes, you would. You’d drown yourself in Timmy’s. Don’t even try to tell me you wouldn’t.”

Thomas frowned. “Even if that’s true, we can’t trust the integrity of insurgents. We may be putting Sayuri in more danger by staying here. If any of them decide they could make money betraying her to Genji—”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll grind you down later.” Milly turned to face Sayuri. “You should hurry up and go talk to whoever the big cheese is and ask them how you can help. Genji’s gonna come right back with even more firepower. The more you help the GGUW prepare, the better.”

Sayuri nodded and stood up, book in hand. Milly figured the girl had already made up her mind. In the meantime, a throbbing pain was sprouting in Milly’s arm.

“Tommy! Go find me more drugs!”

~~~

It was not hard to find Oliver Martin. A pair of guards at the exit of the auditorium-cum-hospital saluted Sayuri and told her the First Compatriot was ready to speak with her.

“I am surprised he did not compel me to come sooner,” Sayuri said.

“If a whole mess o’ gunships couldn’t compel ya, lass, I wasn’t ‘bout to try my luck,” replied one of the guards. She could see weariness in his eyes, like he was escorting a bomb.

As they made their way through the GGUW headquarters, she heard whispers about her, including that strange word Siggy had mentioned “Sylph.” Knowing nothing of the attendant folklore, she was not sure how flattered she ought to be.

“What is a sylph, precisely?” she asked.

“A sylph? S’like a worker for the gods, or somefin’. Oi, Gaz, you explain.”

The other guard shrugged. “Right, so, they float ‘round doin’ fings in the sky, but if a god or goddess wants somefin’ done, they go and say, “oi, sylphie, can ye shoot fundahbolts for a bit?” Or maybe Hel says, “got some troublesome buggers, killed their own mum, stick ‘em in a hole for all eternity, wouldja?” That sorta fing.”

“Is First Compatriot Martin the god in this metaphor?” Sayuri asked.

Both guards snorted. “Not on ‘is life. Can’t tell a god to stuff it if I don’t like what ‘e’s on about. Gods is gods, ‘umans is ‘umans.”

“What are sylphs then?”

One went quiet. The other chuckled. “Beings what can take a whole mess o’ gunships outta the sky, ‘at’s what.”

The “command center,” was in the back of the first floor. At one time it must have been an assembly room. Now it was filled with radio sets and tables with maps and charts and figures and grown men screaming at each other. Barring the radios, it reminded her of Ueden board meetings.

The tone of the room was best described as passionate. Anger burst forth in screamed insults then died away the next second. Euphoric laughter and congratulations spewed from radio speakers and their operators’ mouths. One man was crying in the corner, consoled by his compatriots.

“She graces us with her presence, finally,” Oliver Martin said, standing up from where he was overseeing a logistics ledger.

His face was brighter than the evening before last when he was threatening to kill her, though the shadows under his eyes and stubble on his pockmarked face had only grown longer. Sayuri nodded curtly.

“Don’t s’pose you’re a bit cheesed about almost executing you, eh?” he said with a laugh that almost hid his nervousness.

She shook her head. “It was a sound strategy given the circumstances. I have recently become familiar with the conduct of warfare and its philosophical principles, and as such, I cannot fault a rational decision.”

The first compatriot stroked his bristly jaw, mouth half-open. “You’re a strange one, you are.”

“I have been denied the opportunity to be otherwise.”

He nodded. “Yeh, I’m sure you have. Which leads us to my question and the one you came here to answer: Was the sylph act a one-off, or d’ya intend to reprise your role? Gods know we couldn’t stop you from walking out that door if ya wanted to.”

Sayuri looked around the room at the Goowies acting in a chaotic concert, hurling themselves into some kind of future, be it good or bad. She was reminded of that first day Thomas took her down to the plains and showed her how Æfrians lived when not stripped of their humanity by the Shroud.

All of them were in full vivacity, bursting with energy that could not be harnessed. This energy was contained as much in the man sobbing in the corner as the radio operators interrupting broadcasts to their sister branches with disbelieving giggles. In the command room, she saw the emotion present in Thomas’ relieved smile when Milly finally awoke. The choice to leave them at the mercy of the conglomerates, at the mercy of the Shroud, at a hopeless future disguised behind a facade of progress, was not a choice at all.

The First Compatriot must have seen something in her face as, before Sayuri could give her answer, he said, “splendid! Let’s get you some coveralls.”