CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“Have you heard of the Kaizoku, Thalia-sama?” Sekiguchi asked as soon as Thalia entered the room.

“Indeed,” she replied gravely, no trace of mockery in her tone for once. “The Kaizoku are universal gangsters and terrorists. Pirates. Parasites. Everything evil.”

“Precisely, yes,” Sekiguchi said, his eye lit with hatred.

“And yet you have worked closely with them in the recent past,” Thalia added unexpectedly, turning on him with withering scorn in her face.

Sekiguchi was startled. “Where have you heard such a slander?” he asked, avoiding her condemning gaze.

“Nakamura Kirito is a good friend. I drank him under the table one night not long ago when we were both miserable. He told me about the last time he encountered the Kaizoku.”

Sekiguchi reeled inwardly. He had not imagined Thalia knowing his old classmate; this was potentially disastrous. She didn’t even need to finish her explanation for him to understand her scorn.

She continued: “A group of Kaizoku drug smugglers kidnapped Saya, so he and Izumida Kei went and rescued her, blowing up a major transport ship in the process. The Kaizoku put them both on their Most Wanted list after that, and you, inexplicably, promised to deliver them in exchange for something you wanted.

“You did, in fact, deliver them – but Kirito and Izumida escaped after slaughtering a few boatloads of Kaizoku. That was also the last time Kirito encountered you, he said; but you were their comrade. You grew up together, studying under Sensei Kurama – you, Kirito, and Izumida. They’re the closest thing you have to family. You three are brothers who fought together as captains in the War of Invasion, leading great divisions of samurai against the invaders, becoming heroes of legend in your own lifetimes. You were all so young, but so gifted as leaders and warriors. Yet after all this, you betrayed them to the very ones you fought against, the Kaizoku, who are responsible for your sensei’s death.”

The air sizzled with tension. “So that’s how you see me,” Sekiguchi said.

“I haven’t looked,” she corrected him. “If I’d seen that for myself, you wouldn’t be standing here. You’re wise to avoid my eyes, if there’s any truth to that tale – and I know no reason for Kirito to tell me a pack of lies about you.”

“Kirito doesn’t tell lies,” Sekiguchi snorted. “He’s far too lazy to make them up and then remember them.”

Thalia looked at him curiously; there was real fondness in his tone when he referred to his old friend, yet he had acted with such hatred toward them both. Sekiguchi’s madness was difficult to comprehend.

“Zumi-chan didn’t add his own version? I’m surprised,” Sekiguchi said with a small smile.

“Who? Oh, Izumida? I haven’t met him yet. Kiri-chan seems to think it would be awkward, me being a lieutenant in the Shinsengumi and engaged to the Vice-Commander, while Izumida is a wanted criminal.”

“Awkwardness never stops Izumida from doing anything,” Sekiguchi said. “He was always odd; no one has a stronger sense of propriety, yet his nature is so essentially direct that he has no sense of shame. He once disguised himself as a maid in the Police Commissioner’s house at great personal risk, and went undetected for several weeks. Ki-chan and I always did tease him about how good he looks as a woman.”

“You do love them, don’t you?” Thalia said softly. “Then why? Why would you do what you did?”

“I’ve already told you – I want vengeance. I want to destroy this corrupted world and let life begin all over again.”

“All right, I can see you won’t talk about your brothers, and I’ll respect that,” Thalia said with an irritated sigh. “But I’m curious: why don’t I see any certainty in you about this new beginning? You have many specific ideas about executing destructive vengeance, which I know is where I come in. Yet I see nothing but vagaries in your mind about the new beginning.”

He looked at her with smoldering resentment and desire.

“I doubt you need me to speak at all,” he muttered. “Why bother asking, when you could simply pluck it from my mind?”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “For one thing, it takes a lot of energy for me to read what you would rather I didn’t see, unless I’m in Fury mode – and believe me, you don’t want that. Despite what you think, I am limited.”

He gave her a measuring look, then shrugged and looked away. “One does not need to plan in detail beyond one’s lifespan.”

She tilted her head. “I see,” she said. “You don’t believe you’ll witness the new beginning. You believe you’ll perish with the old order of things.”

“I would not belong in the kind of world I want to see rising from the ashes,” he said softly. He forced himself to be vulnerable to her, knowing it was the only way he could hope to gain her cooperation.

Part of him hated her for it, wanted to stomp out the one person who did not fear him and knew how much pain he was in behind his smirking mask of apathetic cruelty. Another part of him loved her for the same reasons.

He knew that eventually his sanity would snap and he would try to kill her again; but he believed that if she was as powerful as she was supposed to be, it was he who would end up dead. That was the hope he secretly cherished. She would go on. If he did manage to kill her, then it would prove he did not need her after all, and she had deceived him – and therefore deserved to die.

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“You’ve done what I did once, Sekiguchi,” Thalia said, rousing him from his thoughts. “You got so caught up in your rage and thirst for justice that you wrought great injustice. Rivers of blood have flowed at your hand; yes, much of it was guilty blood, but some was not – and you make no distinction. You no longer even pretend to. You have become what you hate.”

“Then destroy me. It’s too late for me to change.” His voice stayed neutral but his jaw set with defiance, and again she caught a glimpse of the noble soul he was meant to be.

“I don’t turn my Fury on and off like a faucet; she steps forward when she is called; called by what, I’ve never been certain. Right now she lies quiet.”

“I think you would have destroyed me with great pleasure the first time we met; you came prepared to do it then,” he pointed out.

“I still would, if circumstances demanded it,” she replied.

“I’ve taken down leaders on distant worlds; I’ve started and ended wars; I’ve killed countless people, as you said, especially if you include the ones Hellfire Rising have killed under my leadership. Destruction is my only ambition, yet faced with me, you hesitate? You belong with me, Thalia-sama; somewhere deep down, you must know it.” He bent and whispered this in her ear, then trailed her long hair through his fingers, admiring the way it caught the light and reflected it like dying embers.

Thalia closed her eyes, remembering the unique misery of other lifetimes spent knowing this soul loved her more deeply than she could ever manage to love him in return. Even during lifetimes she spent without conscious memory of her beloved, he burned in her soul like a beacon, like the memory of light and color lives on in one who goes blind very young.

Sekiguchi continued, his tone suddenly brusque. “Tell me what you see,” he said, indicating a huge screen on one wall. He had projected a holographic image of the planet as it had been during the peak of its health, directly over the reality of what it had become.

“It’s not real,” she said at once, furrowing her brow.

“Ah, I did not expect you to see that,” Sekiguchi admitted wryly. “You’re correct; it’s an image. But what it depicts did exist. Tell me what you see in the image.”

“It’s something like Earth,” she said. “Glowing with health like a living jewel. A planet like this is likely to be full of life, as ours is, and as seems indicated by the similar patterns of the atmosphere, land masses, and oceans. The colors are different here; more purples and golds, less of our greens and blues. It’s beautiful.”

“Indeed. But as you said, this is merely an image of former things. Here is today’s reality.” He turned off the image and let the shock hit her full force. Sure enough, it was not long before he felt the electricity in the air that told him her Fury was on her.

“Now, Thalia-sama, there are some dignitaries to whom I must introduce you,” he said softly, respectfully, not daring to look long at the snakelike red-and-blue eyes or the needle-sharp fangs.

She did not move at first, but stayed staring, enraged, at the image of the desolate planet.

Wataru Aoi stood nearby and trembled, his eyes wide behind their shades. He had never heard anything as frightening as what her soul-song became upon her transformation. The last time, when she had been rescuing her beloved, Wataru had not been nearly as close to her as he was now, and they had been outside. The deafening rage of near-discord had only reached him faintly, though even at that distance it had daunted him. This was far, far worse. He sank to the floor, unable to stand on his quivering legs.

“Come, Wataru,” Sekiguchi said, stopping short at the sight of the unflappable Wataru on the floor, hands over his ears, trembling uncontrollably.

There was no way his second-in-command would be able to come with them, Sekiguchi realized. He decided to take another calculated risk and bring her himself, alone. If she destroyed him along with the mass-murdering parasites, it would not be such a terrible way to die; at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing they were at last being held responsible for their crimes against all life.

He too deserved to die, as she’d reminded him by bringing his old friends up. All humans deserved to die, he believed, for one reason or another. Once you saw it that way, the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of death lost much of its importance.

“Come, Vengeance,” he said softly, and led the way to the planet’s surface.

***

Gwyneth Cairde listened intently as the Chief and Vice-Chief brought her up-to-date on everything that was happening with her sister, as far as they knew.

“You should talk to Captain Okada as well, since he was with her longest,” Harada said. “He should be back any moment; he was getting some things ready for departure.”

“When do we leave?” Gwyneth asked, her eyes dark and serious.

“As soon as possible,” he replied, suppressing his sense of urgency as much as he could.

“You probably already know this, but Thalia won’t do anything against justice. That’s one lesson we learned thoroughly from our first lifetime,” Gwyneth said.

“I do know that; I trust her absolutely,” Tetsuya said. “It’s comforting in one sense, but in another it’s scary. Sekiguchi doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer; what he might do to her for balking him doesn’t bear thinking of. Also, he has an exaggerated idea of her powers, since he’s going by myth and hearsay. She may not be able to do what he asks even if she tries.”

Gwyneth nodded. “She has more of the Fury than I do, but still nothing to what the old tales describe. In that vein, I’m not sure how much help I’ll really be, but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve. My strongest element is fire, in which I have a limited capacity as a Fury. I can’t reach into people’s minds as my sister can, or make them relive their crimes; I have strong empathy, however, and can read emotion accurately. That may help us find her more quickly, since I know her emotional signature almost as well as my own.”

Harada was so relieved to hear this his joints seemed suddenly made of water. He had been plagued by dark fears that there would be no way to find Thalia quickly, since the locator might not be working at all anymore. That depended largely on the electromagnetic fields of whatever planet she had been taken to.

“That’s the best news I’ve heard yet,” he said, giving Gwyneth a smile of relief and gratitude.

Yamamoto appeared in the doorway. “Vice-Chief, a moment please?” Harada excused himself and left the room.

It was at this point that Okada Seizo returned with Kirito, Saya, and Kyoko in his wake.

“I’m afraid a few of Kabukicho’s village idiots have followed me home,” Okada said as he opened the shoji screen and entered from outside. Kyoko smacked him in the back of the head. “Also Kyoko-san, who of course is in a separate category altogether,” he added, not missing a beat.

Gwyneth Cairde stared at Seizo as if seeing a ghost. She swayed, and Kato had to put a hand on her arm to steady her.

“You!” she exclaimed. At this, everyone looked up at her.

Seizo’s face went blank, his eyes wide and dark, his muscles tense but utterly still with shock.

“Okaa-san,” he breathed, after a moment that seemed long. She looked exactly as she had in her the vision Thalia had shown him.

“No, Seizo, this is her sister,” Kato said, furrowing his brow. He didn’t like the idea of Captain Okada wandering around calling every foreign woman ‘Mother’, which seemed to be the current trend. Okada did not reply, since Gwyneth wasted not one more moment; she rushed into his arms and embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks and took his face in her hands.

“I didn’t know you would be here too,” she said, delighted.

“It’s really you?” Okada said, still shocked. “What Kaa-chan showed me – you found me and brought me home with you,” he said, staring at her. She nodded, her eyes brilliant with tears. Chief Kato looked on, utterly perplexed.