Waking up under the Shroud was a strange experience. You opened your eyes and were dimly aware you were no longer permitted to sleep. Dreams dissolved into nothing. Bodily sensations, however, came through.

First a pounding headache, an awful, dreadful, crescent-shaped headache. Then sickly vertigo, the lingering effects of alcohol and sleep deprivation. Heartburn. Muscle cramps. Sticky, clogged throat. Ticklish esophagus. Twinge in the neck. Sore feet.

Thomas moaned and lifted his head off the broken dresser. Black mold speckled it in the beams of daylight piercing through the tarp roof and broken wall. Dust fell like snow. From outside came the sounds of honking cars, ringing trolleys, machinery and construction, and the uncanny lack of human voices. A few feet away, Milly lay curled on her side, head resting on her canvas pack.

Sayuri was awake and drawing Kaihongo characters in the settled dust. Milly had gotten around to disguising her, since she now resembled a pre-colonial burgher girl except for the long, front-fringe haircut of Kaihonjin executives.

Sayuri stared at him. "Mr. Chester, this place is horrible."

He exhaled and picked painful bits of sand out of his eyes. Even the small pleasure of clearing out the body's crud was stolen away. He tried to massage the twinge in his neck, but it only screamed back in protest.

"The place isn't horrible," he said, massaging the heartburn in his chest, "the Shroud is."

"There's no difference," she said, staring off somewhere past him.

"There is. I remember it."

Thomas’ feet begged him not to crush them under his carcass's weight, but he had to get moving. Physical momentum was all you could rely on in the Shroud. If he didn't get up now, he wouldn't. He stretched as best he could, squeezing, pulling, and contorting blood back into his veins out of intellectual awareness of the need to stretch, but no pleasure awarded his thoroughness.

"What are we to do?" Sayuri asked. Her dark blue cloak was pulled up around her.

"We'll walk to the river and try to find a boat to Éstfýr," he said.

"To... where?"

"Tо̄tо̄shi."

"Oh..."

Sayuri sounded like a sleepy toddler. The mention of Æfria's main industrial harbor left no impression. Not even the desire to return home.

"Shall we wake her then? I wish to be out of this Shroud," Sayuri said.

Thomas shook his head. “Let Milly sleep. The Shroud won't be going away any time soon."

The thought seemed to freeze Sayuri in her tracks, her dust-covered finger paralyzed against the floor.

The one mercy of the Shroud was that it produced a state of eventlessness. Each discrete moment dragged on to eternity, but eternity passed like an unstoppable flood. There was no crescendo and no decrescendo in the flat experience. Only endless calligraphy in the dust. Only a stale blue sky.

Milly woke, sat up, and groaned. Make-up residue lay starchy and mottled on her face, eyes puffy and red.

"What time is it?" Milly croaked.

"A little after noon, by the light," Thomas said, staring through a gap between the tarp and the wall.

"I'll wipe off my make-up and we'll go," Milly said.

Milly walked ahead of Thomas and as they arrived at the bottom floor, the light from outside hit her hair in a way that revealed a dark red streak the color of a distant fire against a night sky running through her black brown. The way her hair flowed, split and ruffled, right down to her elegant neck made him feel lighter.

"That's strange..." Milly said.

No, it wasn’t just her that made him feel lighter. The Shroud was gone. So was Sayuri, though Thomas could hear her footsteps beside them.

"Did the factories shut down?" Thomas asked.

Milly gestured towards an open room on the ground floor. A half dozen squatters lay on benches or on the floor in sleeping bags. Dim light streamed in from windows papered over with cardboard. No one showed the slightest interest in the new arrivals.

"Sayuri, drop your hatsuden," Milly said.

Sayuri appeared alongside the Shroud, as though the two phenomena were inseparable.

Milly swayed in place before recalling what she meant to do before the Shroud scrambled her mind. "Can you do something with hatsuden that isn't going invisible? Anything at all.”

Sayuri lit up. Her lines of kinkawa glowed like an electric white sun through the thick white slabs of foundation and lit up the room. The Shroud disappeared.

Milly's eyes went wide. "Sayuri, I think your hatsuden cancels out the Shroud!"

Weary, sunken eyes from the inhabitants of the room, too far to benefit from the aura Sayuri was emanating, glanced their way.

"Turn invisible again and let's keep walking," Thomas said, sticking one arm into his jacket, curled around the grip of his pistol.

In the entryway, the men guarding the door were a different pair though they, too, were wearing blue coveralls and reading On Property. As an invisible Sayuri passed by, both men jolted and looked around in confusion before returning to numb stupor after she moved away.

"Fuck me," Milly said, looking up at the wide, open blue sky like a work of art, "she really can turn off the Shroud, can't she?"

“I-I have no idea why that should be the case,” replied a disembodied voice.

“I don’t know either, but don’t turn it off.”

They exited the alleyway into a bright, dusty street. Across the road was a wrought-iron fence hemming in a red-brick factory with a sign reading “Fujita Toys & Games Manufacturing Plant.”

What was ordinarily a dreary, meaningless scene was now pregnant with picturesque charm. Factories chugged away, cars whirled and honked, the sun warmed an otherwise chilly day, red brick tenements rose stately over ground-level stores. Thomas wondered if this was what Kaihonjin saw when they looked down at the plains.

"Which direction is the river?" he asked.

"East-abouts," Milly said, pointing towards the ivory factory in the center of Edgarstún, "on the other side of the battery plant."

As they drew closer to the battery plant, cars, couriers, and construction workers disappeared. The gravity of the streets welled somewhere else. Thomas felt the lack not as a void, but as the strum along an urban spiderweb telling him what was happening.

"A strike," he said.

Dull surprise nudged Milly's eyebrows up. "What? Here? Not at the Ueden plant."

Thomas could guess that Ueden paid above-average wages, turning the neighborhood into a loyal workforce that wouldn’t rock the boat for fear of being replaced. But nothing besides a strike could suck in an entire neighborhood, cars and all.

The next sign came from distant murmuring. Only a strike could amplify the human silence of the Shroud to an audible volume. Turning a corner, Thomas saw the barbed wire fence and steel gates of the Ueden Battery Plant and a crowd of men and women standing outside. Thomas couldn't estimate the size since it spilled into adjacent streets and alleys.

Like most strikes under the Shroud, it was a quiet affair of refusal. These strikes were nothing like the pre-Shroud carnivals of fury and ecstasy Thomas remembered from remote youth.

As they approached, the curtain of buildings pulled away to reveal two flanks of the Genjūkō Company Harmony Division, or Genkai-Wabu, on either side of the crowd. They had the workers funneled into a single, easily-assailable corridor.

Between the Genkai-Wabu and the crowd lay a mobile barricade composed of five-foot tall, interlocking metal caltrops extended like an accordion. The side facing Genji’s agents was smooth to allow for bracing rifles, while the side facing the workers was milled to a sharp point for an attacker to impale themselves on. Not that Thomas had ever seen a worker try. The Shroud devoured the zealous self-endangerment it took to throw oneself at a chain of metal spikes.

Ryūkokujin, the people he fought in the Ryuu-Kaihon war, had tried. It was an ugly sight.

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On their side of the barricade, the Genkai-Wabu stood in lethargic irritation, sharing the Shroud with the strikers and watching them like dozing lions deciding whether to maul a mouse in front of their nose. Arcane logic dictated when their commanding officer would give the orders to mop up. Thomas suspected a few sheets of paper were missing a stamp. Gas masks, grenade launchers, and dish-shaped hatsu guns in the hands of the Genkai-Wabu told Thomas it was a matter of time.

"We should go around," Milly said. The words rang hollow. Even she wanted to know what was happening. Under the Shroud, strikes had a magnetizing force. They drew the neighborhood and anyone in it into their orbit. At the outskirts of the crowd, Thomas stopped a middle-aged woman running plastic jugs of water to the workers.

"What's the strike about?" he asked.

The woman looked him up and down, then his companions side-to-side. "Genji shut us down."

"What doth— do you mean? This is not Genji's property," Sayuri said.

The woman blinked. Both at the strange remark, and the Shroud alleviating. Thomas bit his lip. Milly hid Sayuri's kinkawa well, but there was no disguising she was Kaihonjin, even with her hood drawn up.

"Property belongs to whoever's got guns out front of it. They brought in their own workers n' shut the gates this mornin'. Told folks to go home and they'd reach an agreement later, 'cept we need money now. And we're Ueden folk here, y'understand? They treat us good, so we gotta stand by 'em."

Sayuri gave a grave nod. This was, after all, a typical phenomenon. There was even a term for these loyal workers and neighborhoods: Ashigaru. Peasant levies. Ashigaru could be counted on for additional service to the clan-conglomerate including, ironically, being brought in to break strikes. Milly did not seem enthused about her former neighbors becoming Ueichi ashigaru.

"You said there were Genji corporate officials inside the plant?" Sayuri asked.

The woman nodded. "They poke their little heads out every couple a' hours, over yonder. You can see 'em now."

She pointed towards a terrace formed by the plant's stepped-pyramid rise. A trio of men in black suits were gazing at the crowd through binoculars.

"Then perhaps I shall go speak with them."

Sayuri did not take off with any great speed, but the imperative to stop her took a while to move Thomas' dulled mind.

"Wait, Sayu—"

Milly jabbed him in the stomach.

"No names," Milly said, nudging herself into the crowd after Sayuri.

The girl's dark blue and burnt-orange cloak made her difficult to spot through the forest of Ueden workers in black coveralls and garnet aprons, but they could follow her by the trail of people released from the crowd she left behind. Wading towards the center, Thomas could read the cardboard signs some of the workers were carrying:

We aren't pawns in corporate struggles

No Genji, No Ueden, No Conglomerates

Æfrians save yourselves

The man holding the last sign was the door guard from the night before. Not everyone in the crowd was an Ueichi ashigaru. The GGUW were here, mingling in the crowd, pushing it in a radical direction. Once they were involved in a strike, the mop up became messier.

Thomas and Milly caught up to Sayuri as she reached the steel-barred gate. The workers steered clear due to Genji soldiers on the other side swinging clubs at anyone that got close. Sayuri, however, was unaware of this. Thomas was a few meters too far to stop her from walking up to the gate.

"Excuse me, sir. I wish to speak to your superiors," she said.

The soldier she was speaking to thrust his club forward. A millimeter of space stopped it as Sayuri's hatsuden switched on in instinctual self-defense. The sudden discharge must have been orders of magnitude larger than her invisibility, because the sensation of being free from the Shroud hit the entire crowd in the exact same moment.

Murmuring rose to talking, then to shouting. Until then, the crowd had been tightly packed and mostly still. Thomas watched the vibrations and energy of the crowd grow exponentially, forcing outwards as they adjusted to the absence of the Shroud.

"Come outta there ya fishfuckers!"

"This is our neighborhood! We decide who’s allowed here!"

The strike was regaining its missing carnival atmosphere. A handful of Genkai-Wabu seemed to realize this and, freed into the same anxious energy as the crowd, fired tear gas and phantom bullets.

Without a top-down order, the timing of the attack was off. There were a couple thumps as the grenade launchers fired gas canisters and yelps from workers burned by the directed energy from hatsu guns, but without a coordinated attack, the workers felt the assault not as a force to snuff the protest, but a prick of injustice.

"Fuckin’ hang 'em!"

While the other Genkai-Wabu were trying to figure out from whom the order had come, a young man, barely older than Sayuri, peeled off from the crowd with a ball-peen hammer in hand and threw himself onto the spiny barricade. His hammer cracked one of the soldiers across the temple.

Two formerly impossible things became possible in that moment: The crowd could use violence against the Genkai-Wabu, and the Genkai-Wabu were permitted to kill.

In a wave of motion, the Genkai-Wabu dropped their grenade launchers and hatsu guns for pistols and shotguns. The crowd descended into chaos. Some workers ran, some stood in shock, some charged and shredded themselves on the barricades. Some even made it to the soldiers and attacked them with hand tools. A handful, probably the GGUW members, came with improvised black powder firearms.

Thomas’ mind wanted to watch the spontaneous orgy of violence, but his body saw the soldier who swung at Sayuri pull out a firearm. Before the man could bring his pistol up, Thomas' own gun was out of his jacket. Its barrel greeted the shocked man at eye level. Sayuri jerked away as a bang merged with the ear-splitting cacophony.

Milly tried to scream something inaudible over the eruption of gunfire from the Genkai-Wabu. Entire waves of the crowd fell at once.

Then they were somewhere else.

The riot was now off in the distance behind the pale colossus of the Ueden Battery Plant looming over them. Its heiress and owner stumbled forward and vomited into the scrubby grass. They could tell the moment that Sayuri fainted because the Shroud rushed back in.

The mental stillness moments after being in a life-or-death situation made the experience even stranger. Barely enough momentum remained in Mildred to not leave Sayuri in the street where she lay, but Thomas crouched down and lifted Sayuri up in an arm carry.

Mildred kicked herself for letting the girl run off so easily, but the drama of her hometown had an unshakable allure. Somewhere in that crowd were kin of the Drake clan, old neighbors, friends and schoolmates. A part of her was in that crowd, and the threat of losing that part had been greater than the threat of Genji and their guns.

The streets near them came alive as word of the strike spread. As alive as they could. People wandered out their door, straining to hear gunshots. It wasn't long before they identified Thomas and Milly as having come from that direction.

"Have ya come from the plant? What's the word?"

"There was gunshots weren't there? Real guns?”

"Where'd Ueden get off to?"

"Was that one hurt in the scuffle?" a woman asked.

The last question stuck out as particularly dangerous. The woman was probing, Mildred could tell. The three of them had been marked strangers by the neighborhood, and it was the nature of neighbors to ask why someone was carrying a young girl off somewhere. She saw Thomas narrow his eyes and the image of him shooting the Genji soldier point-blank filled her head.

Mildred said, "aye, but just a wee little bonk. We're takin' her to lie down."

Milly's accent, an old one, with rounded vowels, emerged from the depths of childhood.

"You from around here, love?"

"Not for a while, no, but I'm from a ramblin' branch of the Drakes," Milly said.

The woman squinted. She looked down at Sayuri's pale face, then Thomas', then back to Mildred. "So you're from Wulfie's side? I knew her back then. Went to school with her. That one yours? I'm Ilsa, by the way, of the Ashers."

Curiosity wasn't possible under the Shroud, so Ilsa's grilling was rooted in pure mechanical habit. While the rest of the neighborhood lost interest in the arrivals, Ilsa seemed possessed by an inhuman need to obtain information from them. And people like her didn’t hoard that information for themselves.

"Nice to meet you, Ilsa. She's ours. Takes after her mother, doesn't she?" Mildred said.

"Maybe you should stop having children. I don't think we need any more mix-ups.”

The woman had no malice, no desire to humiliate Mildred, or gain any sadistic satisfaction. She was speaking her mind. A pure thought spoken aloud. Being in the Shroud alongside her, Mildred couldn’t feel hurt by it. Not yet. But she could tell when something would hurt once the Shroud rose because it circled her mind with mute ferocity.

"We won't have another one," Mildred said.

"Good."

Eventually, the Shroud wore down even Ilsa's inquisitiveness and she returned to her children swinging idly on a swing set in a nearby alley. They’d been lucky the rabbit trail of the Drake clan’s scandal was enough to run Ilsa out of steam before Sayuri herself became the topic.

After another half hour, the River Glær's wide course came into sight. Lining the waterfront, were three-story buildings of bare cement with communal balconies stretching their length. These were leftover remnants of the first wave of colonization, architectural hand-me-downs that had outlived their prestige and been discarded. Better-off Æfrians lived there now.

Abutting the river were large warehouses, empty and collapsing. Most freight was conducted over land now via skyscraper-sized stacks of containers powered by hatsuden energy. Half the wooden piers had rotted through and collapsed into the water and the survivors were patched with sheet metal, spare boards, and any other long-flat surface. The remains of the piers belonged to small-time fishermen, or Æfrians who could afford pleasure rowboats.

Further upstream lay a gated harbor. Docked there were some smaller container ships, a few vessels in for repair, and four military boats: River monitors flying the blue-silver colors of Genji Heavy Industries. Ahead, a column of black smoke rose over the river.

Walking down to the wharf, a container ship with its hull bisected came into sight. The culprit was a railgun turret on the bow of one of the Genjūkō river monitors. An Ueden flag on the sinking ship's mast flapped in the wind.

"They aren't hiding it," Mildred said, watching as a container tilted back and slid down the deck with a moan of metal on metal before plunging into the brown water.

"The other conglomerates won't know they're looking at war for a while," Thomas said, shifting Sayuri in his arms to redistribute her weight.

"How can they not?"

"They want to believe they're too civilized. If Genji tells them this was terrorism, the other conglomerates will believe them."

"What about Æfrians?"

Thomas’ response was to awkwardly make the sign of Heáhrodor while carrying someone.

Between the two arch-gods, Heáhrodor and Loothsa, Milly preferred the latter. Heáhrodor was the icon of reason and rationality, the transmuter. Loothsa was chaos and passion, the dissolver. The theological explanation was they were two inseparable poles, but the Heáhrodor end reminded her of the numbing Shroud. She preferred to live in Loothsa's madness, in both pleasure and pain. As far as Milly was concerned, logic could lead you to a worse form of madness where you convinced yourself you weren’t mad.

To counteract Thomas' sign, she made the sign of Loothsa, which was whatever its signer felt compelled to do in the moment. She stuck out her tongue.

"Something wrong?" Thomas asked.

"There's a lot of things wrong, Tommy."

They went south along the wharf in the opposite direction of the Genji warboats. Almost all the boats were out at the moment, meaning they would probably have to wait for sunset. As Mildred though this, her stomach growled.

"We should find somewhere to lie down and have naps for lunch," Mildred said, "but I don't know any Zook lofhearth nearby."

"Should we find a bench?" Thomas asked.

"Wouldn't that be dangerous? Edgarstún is crawling with Genjūkō right now."

"Less dangerous than a lofhearth full of ungoverned drug addicts," he said.

Spotting a bench a bench surrounded by overgrown shrubbery, Thomas lay Sayuri down on it before sitting down in the dirt. Mildred sat down on the other end of the bench by Sayuri's head and went limp.

Willow trees lined the far shore of the olive-colored river with bushes gathered at their feet. Behind those trees lay undeveloped green hills rising towards the clear blue sky. She would have felt soothed if the Shroud allowed for such an emotion.

The last thing that slipped under her drooping eyelids was the sight of a burnt shipping container floating downriver.