Hibiscus and Karin took a stroll through the gardens. Karin liked to call this time of year ‘the spring waltz’ - this period in early April, right when life begins anew. All around them, the first green shoots and stems appeared out of the topsoil, gradually unfurling until they revealed colorful flowers and petals. Color returned to trees, birds arrived back in Arcadia after wintering down south, crickets chirped and cicadas sang. Hibiscus supposed that behind the scenes, a hidden director kept the circle of life running smoothly; he now focused his attention on rejuvenation and rebirth. Even the dying reeds in the ponds and lakes surrounding the estates got their color and shine back to them.
That’s what Karin said, anyway. Just a few years older than Hibiscus, her brown hair went down to her shoulders, and she had even been as bold as to put a blue streak in her hair, a fashion style popularized by the Queen of Atalanta that proved a hit with the commoners and controversial among the elites. Hibiscus herself didn’t care very much for global fashion trends or anything like that; her hair was in its usual unkempt mess, all full of tangled knots.
As the sun shone brightly, Karin took Hibiscus to one of the best spots in the gardens - a giant oak tree in a large clearing. Surrounded by large hedges, Hibiscus felt like they had the whole world to themselves in here. The first returning oak leaves of the new spring season rustled in the breeze. As Hibiscus tilted her head to watch, Karin closed her eyes, listening to a song only she could hear. When the breeze settled down, Karin placed a calming hand on Hibiscus’s shoulder.
“You know why I’m here, right?” she asked rhetorically.
Hibiscus could only nod. She didn’t blame her older cousin - it had to be done. “You’re trying to train me in cultivation, right?”
“I heard your studies aren’t going so well.” Karin cracked a smile. “I know the struggle all too well.”
Hibiscus’s stomach roiled at the thought of cultivating, since shooting sound waves out of her hands or whatever wasn’t all that interesting. The Reed estate private cinema, the most advanced in Arcadia, if not the entire globe - now that was interesting. If Hibiscus had been a distant cousin or a tenth child, she could’ve apprenticed with the Arcadian Department of Culture, which the Reeds also ran. Then she could make and see all the movies she wanted to. Her ideal job was to be the head censor of the Department, because then she could change the rules - namely, by getting rid of them. All the money invested in rifles and warheads should go to things like cinemas and schools. That’s how Hibiscus thought Arcadia ought to be run.
But she wasn’t a relative of the main family of the Reeds - she was its second-child, the first daughter. That meant she needed to be a cultivator, and a prodigious one at that. She needed to dress properly, speak properly, act properly, cultivate properly, represent Arcadia’s number one family properly. It was all so much and all so boring.
Hibiscus was a songbird in a gilded cage. But was it better to be a well-fed prisoner in a comfy cell or having the freedom of a starving wolf? She wasn’t sure, but she knew people out there had basic problems like starvation and dying of polio, so her feeling sad about her life made her feel even more pathetic. Life was tough like that.
Another breeze freed Hibiscus from her thoughts. “I don’t mind cultivating with you,” she admitted. She pulled up the sleeve of her jacket, revealing angry purple splotches up her arm, before hiding them again. “You don’t cane me when I mess up.”
The smile briefly dropped from Karin’s face at the sight of bruises, but her optimistic attitude returned. “They caned me a lot, too.”
The cousins sat below the oak tree for the next few hours. They cultivated for some of it, but Hibiscus quickly found herself distracted as usual. She was supposed to just breath and think and all that jazz, but the breeze felt cool and the sun felt bright and she just felt antsy all over. Her legs turned into pins and needles as she felt that particular feeling wash through her - a yearning for somewhere else. Hibiscus finally called it quits on the cultivation when a single-engined plane flew overhead. From its blue color and the easiness with which it flew over the normally off-limits sky over the estate, it could only be one person - Secretary of the Army Alexander in his Spirit of Acushnet.
The secretary would be speaking at an important conference tonight, with both Hibiscus and Karin in attendance. Hibiscus would’ve stayed at the oak tree all day and night, but she didn’t want to get caned and put in the hole below the estate again, so she figured it would be time to return home and get ready. At first glance, Karin appeared to be sleeping soundly next to her, but when Hibiscus went to nudge her awake, Karin’s eyes were already open.
“Shhhh…” she whispered gently. “They’re speaking to me.”
The garden was silent except for the breeze. Yet Karin nodded along to the unseen words. Hibiscus could only uncomfortably watch as Karin sat up and moved in time to an imaginary rhythm. She was another person who should’ve just been a distant relative, but she was the eldest daughter and heir to an important branch family of the Reeds.
“Who’s speaking to you?” Hibiscus asked, hesitation in her voice.
“You don’t hear it? The little cuckoo in the garden, the distant horn blasts of passing ships at the harbor, the whispers in the wind? You don’t hear them transform into a singular harmony, that little voice on your shoulder?”
“...uh, n-no? The music that only you can hear…I heard it’s not real.”
Karin raised a hand to ruffle Hibiscus’s hair. Her hand was soft to the touch. “Of course it’s real. God’s speaking to me, and he speaks with song. This universal harmony only I can hear…it’s beyond description and beauty. I wish you could hear it.”
When Karin was younger, she showed great promise with her cultivation. The Reed cultivation powers generally involved sound waves, and here Karin was, able to hear divine vibrations and harmonies. But then she started talking to trees and flowers, and rumors started floating around - that Karin couldn’t actually hear anything and just imagined it all. Hibiscus wanted to have faith in her older cousin, but she knew Karin also had trouble with writing and reading - the letters all got mixed up in her mind.
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But she understood that the Reed estate was a gilded cage. And she never hit Hibiscus. And that was enough to make her a-okay in Hibiscus’s eyes.
The two took up the slow walk back to the main mansion. “You think I’ll ever leave this mansion?” Hibiscus asked as they passed by hedges cut to resemble Viola. “Should I even want to leave this mansion?”
Karin wrapped an arm around her shoulder. The warmth settled Hibiscus’s stomach, and sparrows chirped as Karin spoke. “You should pursue what you want to pursue. We’re just young kids right now. But soon, we’ll be old enough to make our own decisions. And I already know I’ll decide to help you pursue yours.”
The two stopped at the main doors to the mansion. Clerks and secretaries and servants were already scrambling to and fro, since tonight would feature Alexander’s speech, and he wanted everything to be perfect.
Hibiscus put her own arm on Karin’s shoulder. “Thanks, Karin. I really mean it.”
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In a packed auditorium in the downtown district of the port city of Acushnet, Hibiscus and Karin sat with the other members of the Reed family right near the stage, giving them front-row views of the speech. Hundreds of people attended, all of them rich and important - mine owners, Zhanghai dignitaries, the Cartwright family, and even State Police Chief Emmitt Amien sat in comfortable chairs, waiting for the speech to start.
There was a gasp as it begun - Alexander walked across the stage, giving confident waves to the crowd. He was the most important non-Reed in the Reed family - he was a boy orphaned by war, adopted by the Reeds out of the pity in their heart, and worked for them with such loyalty and dedication that he rose all the way to lead the Army as its Secretary. The most-photographed man in Arcadia. The most eligible bachelor in Arcadia. That’s what the Arcadians knew him as. A stalwart, all-Arcadian boy with ambitious eyes, a chiseled jaw-line, and flowing black hair who just wanted to do his country and adoptive family right. Not only that, but he was the first man to ever fly across the ocean solo since the Unleashing, a thirty-six hour ordeal that ended with him landing in the capital of Sigismund to adoring crowds. Hibiscus thought he should’ve been seen as the reincarnation of Viola, not herself.
Dozens of flashes from the front row sent strobing lights across the auditorium - journalists and reporters from both Arcadia and abroad took photos of Alexander, and he took them in stride, giving confident and easy smiles. The lights made Karin tense up; everybody in attendance received a pamphlet, and Karin held hers tightly, threatening to rip it entirely; Hibiscus slid a hand over hers. Karin relaxed a little, so Hibiscus gave her hand a calming squeeze before letting go. The whole spectacle was boring, and Hibiscus felt way too stuffy in the dress her servants packed her into.
“I’m here to discuss an important topic today,” Alexander began, his voice booming yet utterly relaxed, as if he was just talking to friends at a small, intimate gathering. “That of man’s survival in this increasingly complicated world.”
He waited for another round of camera flashes to die down. “Our planes can now cross oceans, our cities now sprawl across the landscape, trains connect continents and automobiles connect cities. Agricultural production has increased twenty-fold. Our industrial output continues to climb. For centuries, we have lamented the loss of knowledge from the Golden Age before the Unleashing - but, as you can see, we are close to reclaiming that lost glory.”
Alexander shook his head. “But the Golden Age had its evils as well, evils we are now facing. Population levels, both in Arcadia and across this planet, are increasing exponentially. There will eventually come a tipping point when our food production can no longer match population growth. And when that happens, we will have roving bands of starving migrants crushing entire civilizations beneath their hungry heel.”
The pain of caning reminded Hibiscus of the lesson she learned with her tutor - that rural migrants or something were now streaming into cities like Narragansett and Acushnet. The tutor made it clear that the migrants themselves were the cause, but Hibiscus asked why society and economics and all those big-word concepts weren’t at fault. When the tutor retorted by demanding a solution from her, Hibiscus had no answer because she didn’t particularly pay close attention in her studies and was also only fourteen years old. So migrants it was.
“But there is an evil unique to our own age,” Alexander continued. “That of the growth of cultivation. A power once limited to the elites and those trained in its arts - those properly educated in the responsibility and role of cultivation - has now begun appearing among the common man at an increasingly alarming rate. As to the why - change of diet, the urban lifestyle, literacy levels - I’ll leave to the men of science to discuss and debate. But let me be clear - the day where everyone will have access to cultivation is inevitable. It will become a Pandora’s Box. Every common criminal, every deviant, every revolutionary will have access to the powers of the arcane.”
He paused for a moment, basking in the rapt attention of the crowd. “So, what are we to do? To avoid a destiny of migrating bands of cultivators destroying the world, we must prevent overpopulation. But our resources are finite - even if we were to somehow colonize the stars, we could not produce enough food for everyone. So, there is only one solution - to improve the quality of the human population by culling the weak from its ranks.”
Murmurs went through the crowd - and a whole lot of them sounded positive - but Alexander had a dazzling smile and kept speaking. “Do we want to spare precious resources for those who can contribute nothing to society? Do we want to support those who would do us evil? Those who would sabotage in times of war and cause disturbances in times of peace? Murderers and career criminals? The human race, if it will survive in the long term, must be purged of those who would do it harm.”
Hibiscus thought Alexander kind of sucked.
“Now, I’m not advocating the murder of our fellow countrymen,” Alexander concluded. “But modern science has progressed to the point where we can decipher warning signs of future problems. Rather than murder, I am advocating the prevention of future catastrophes. Those who should not breed will not be allowed to breed. This is what I’m advocating. I’m aware this may cause controversy. But extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. This is the only way to ensure the survival of the human race for all time!”
His speech concluded triumphantly with a cascade of clapping, human thunder that roared across the auditorium. State Police Chief Amien even clapped politely, while several industrialists rose in standing ovation. Hibiscus resisted rolling her eyes, while Alexander beamed at this crowning moment.
But then new murmurs rose through the crowd, mixed with quiet jeers and muffled laughter. An uncomfortable amount of eyes settled on Hibiscus, though she had no idea why. She risked a slight glance to her left and felt her stomach drop.
Karin, her eyes glazed over, must’ve been listening to the music only she could hear again. She had rolled her pamphlet into a cylinder and now peered at Alexander through the small hole, as if she wielded a spyglass. The once-triumphant applause for Alexander that once roared through like an unstoppable wave had now broken up, dashed again the rocks. His big moment had been upstaged by a girl seeing things that weren't even there.
His lips still smiled, but his eyes didn’t. He could only watch with a tight grip on the podium as Hibiscus quickly slid her hand over Karin’s again. Karin slowly lowered the pamphlet in response, but she still looked lost. She glanced away, looking at nothing in particular, but Hibiscus supposed her cousin was actually looking in the direction of a God only she could see.