He’d learned to scavenge around the garbage heaps, where his family landed after drifting at sea after the Great Threat. Others gathered there, hopping from mounds of plastic and traveling sludge, and became a community.
Kozo’s story started with darkness.
He was often told he wasn’t supposed to be born. His mother wailed with grief when her techniques to both prevent and then disrupt her pregnancy netted her nothing but a child who was known to wander, question, and interject himself into everyone’s lives whether they wanted him or not—a penchant it seemed he had from conception.
Megumi, born a few years later, was no more wanted than Kozo, but their mother had resigned herself to a life on the sea by then. She often wailed about wanting to die and hunted for relief from the various groups of pirates that wandered between the Trash Islands and stole anything of worth.
Megumi, unwilling even as a child to let the darkness consume her, turned her trauma into art. Without instruction, using only the materials at her disposal, she crafted paintings. In a different world, Kozo imagined his sister’s art would fetch her riches and fame.
Kozo had his dreams.
By the time Kozo was old enough to understand his mother was lonely, homesick, depressed and addicted—likely as a result of the dramatic apocalypse that changed the course of her entire life—he had already run away to the Queen, stolen his sister for good measure, and worked his way up the ranks of the command.
In his mind, he was saving his mother from the kids she never wanted.
When it was too late to go back, he realized he’d taken from her every reason to stay alive. And the guilt of sneaking into the night, leaving her only a note and his belongings, the dream journal, too, haunted him nightly.
He left her nothing she’d created herself and only ashes and trash and memories.
Kozo understood too late that he’d cast her in too harsh a light for her actions, but he also held on to his childhood hurt nonetheless and wished she could have at least tried to love him and make their days in the commune happy instead of ones where he expected to die at any moment.
Even in the Trash Islands, they could’ve made a family work. Some did. Why couldn’t they?
He would’ve made it work.
Often, Kozo woke up to his mother wailing, rocking back and forth, staring off into the darkness of their boat, swaying with the waves, “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead,” in a wail that stirred in him a prehistoric sense of grief and fear.
For a long time, Kozo never knew who was dead.
When he figured out she meant everyone it was too late to change his speckled opinion about the world outside the ocean and the people who might still inhabit it. He’d never known there were people who lived on land—how could he mourn what he wasn’t allowed to understand?
The people who inflicted pain upon the earth, well, they were painted as demons. And they were still out there, of course. On land.
As a child, it was easy to picture monsters from the deep, green and ferocious pouring out of the rolling waves and toppling over each other with a singular hunger to destroy him.
“Jiji,” Kozo once told his grandma. She wasn’t his grandma by blood, but she was Japanese and he was Japanese. Out at sea with her husband and family, she survived. She spent her days braiding plastic into rope. He’d never known anything different. “I dreamed a dragon came out of the ocean and took me to the sand.”
“The sand, you say?” his grandmother asked. “What do you think that would feel like? The sand.”
“Like little crumbs,” Kozo answered. He knew the grit of the sea and salt.
“Huh,” his grandma smiled, amused and impressed. “And? What about your monster?”
“The beast. He was mine. I understood that…we belonged together. He was my dragon and yet I was still afraid of him.”
“And?” she prodded.
Kozo thought to the edges of the dream before he woke and everything disintegrated and there was no sand, no dragon, no land or hope or adventure at the helm. His grandma, too, fragmented and he was back in his own nightmare once again. She’d died. Drowned in a swell and was too weak to swim. That left him to his dreams and no one to share them with. His dreams.
A dragon.
His.
Yellow eyes and talons that dug into the mattress, sniffing at his black hair, knocking him backward in a burst of fire and energy. His hair singed and burned and he smelled the crispiness of the flames. Screams tore at the edges of his brain and he processed the sweet tang in the back of his throat and the aroma of flesh burning.
He heard screaming.
Screaming in his dream and screaming in the base of his subconscious.
He woke with a start and sat up.
The cabin was quiet and bright. He leaned over and grabbed his notebook and pen and scratched into the next available space every detail of the dream he could recall. A sweat bead rolled down the side of his face and he wiped it away before it could drop on his words. When he was finished, he put the book down, placed his hand on top of it—he regretted leaving his old dreams behind and wished he’d had them to read every once in awhile.
He cleared his throat.
The echo of that noise bounced around the room, and the boat swayed, and Kozo climbed out of bed and walked out into the living room of his Captain’s quarters. He knew already that something was wrong—the hair on his arms stood up, his heart beat faster with recognition of danger.
It was silent.
All his life, Kozo learned the sounds of the sea and the sounds of life at sea. Outside, he could hear the flap of the water against the side of his ship and he knew almost instantly: the engines had been cut.
The Queen was adrift, the crafty turning of her core, gone.
Kozo tore from his chambers and into the hall and stumbled over the slumped body of his guard.
He barely had time to register the blood and wound before he saw another body at the end of the long stretch of corridor between his room and the outside world. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t heard a shot; the men were dead and the shooter out-of-sight.
Kozo scrambled back into his room and grabbed his own weapon—a long scythe. Guns were rare, all from the Old World, and were uncommon on the boats. A few waterlogged weapons made their way to the Trash Islands, but he was never rich enough for that commodity.
If his sword was against gunfire, he’d lose, but he could still inflict damage in the process. He didn’t change out of his silk bedtime kimono with matching shorts or his bedroom sandals, and he made a pretty tableau as he stalked toward danger, armed and angry, dressed in floral.
He paused and checked to see if the guard was still alive but he had no pulse, and Kozo shut his half-opened eyes and started down into the hallway. Carefully, he took his time edging down the side panels, the whiteness of the bulbs above casting light on any and all imperfections in the Queen’s stately appearance. The carpet was old and full of dirt and mildew. The wallpaper placed inside the interior hallways over a century ago peeled in yellowed chunks ancient with smoke.
When he got to the end of the hall, Kozo pushed open the door and walked out into the maze of the Queen’s inner sanctuaries before arriving at the main deck.
And what he found there was appalling, disgusting, and it sent him into shock.
At every turn, Kozo found people dead and slaughtered. He had seventy occupants on the sea and he’d encountered thirty bodies, all left dead, to bleed and suffer alone—while Kozo slept and dreamt of dragons.
His thoughts went to his sister, his aids, his friends, and his successors—everyone that he held dear—and he tore through the usual places to look for them. Soon his sandals and the back of his calves bore smears of blood.
This, he realized with dawning cruelty, was the monster he’d been warned about. The certainty grew, as well, that his ship was the last attacked. The Prince and the Princess, he’d optimistically thought lost for a time off course, suffered similar
fates, no doubt.
Megumi’s suite was empty and Kozo kept himself quiet and nimble while his rage flowed freely as the blood that pounded in his ears. It wasn’t just the murdered comrades that upset him, but the eeriness of the silence. Above him, the night sky dazzled, as it often did, with its millions of stars twinkling brightly.
In the Old World, they had tech that could go to the moon, he’d been told.
People were planning to go to Mars.
The overwhelming silence of his ship was oppressive and Kozo stopped and sucked in a breath.
He stood as still as he could and listened to the rhythm of his boat. It was then he heard a sound. Glass shattered in the distance—there was a shout—and Kozo followed the noise tenderly and cautiously, his only thought: his sister. Megumi was smart, witty, and she’d know where to hide if the ship was attacked. He also told her once about cutting the engines as a signal of danger, and he shivered with a sudden relief that maybe the absence of a motor was Meg’s doing.
Kozo heard more glass breaking and with the stealth of someone small, he tiptoed down a common hall and made his way to the ballroom, inch by inch. Before Kozo reached the door, a shadow drifted in front of him and then another, and he felt someone at his back, gaining ground.
Kozo turned and spun the scythe, but the attacker was too swift and had the advantage. He felt a prick in his neck and immediately his hand loosened around his weapon, the world went fuzzy and hollow, and he began to spin.
He never heard the sound of the blade clanging against the tile or his own body slumping into a heap.
Kozo was out before he hit the ground.
Sluggishness throbbed through his muscles. Once, when he was thirteen, he’d sneaked some home-brewed sake until his body lulled him to a murky sleep and sent him strange dreams he’d edited heavily for Jiji. The hangover was intense then, but the aftermath of whatever the attackers gave him was ten times worse. A deep rumbling of sick rolled in his stomach and he sat with sweat and chills and shaking, twitching, muscles.
“What did you do to me?” Kozo asked when he found his tongue, parched and dry, fat and thick in his mouth.
The shadows materialized into outlines of people and the people peered at him, and his head bobbed with heaviness, placing them into his understanding: these were the monsters.
Kozo realized he’d asked the wrong question first. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“What did you do with my people?”
“Your people?” someone said, someone he couldn’t see. His neck hurt too much to shift and peer behind him. However, he could tell he’d been brought into the galley. Pots and pans, old but functional, swung above the attacker’s heads. He smelled something sour and wanted to turn away but couldn’t.
Another voice neared his ear and he could practically smell the hunger for power in the young man’s throaty timbre.
“We know who you are Kozo and these are not anyone’s people…the people of the trash are trash.”
“My sister—”
“Oh, he did ask for her…” someone laughed, giddy off cruelty. Everyone’s voices seemed young, childish—like a chorus of pre-pubescent children, but Kozo couldn’t see.
“Let her speak to him,” the voice replied then pulled back, kicking Kozo in the ribs for nothing and causing his side to ache and his body to jerk into a ball.
Toward the back of the galley, a young man opened the doors of the Queen’s walk-in freezer and from the depths of the room, with its quickly thawing meat and provisions, he heard his sister cry and call in his direction, her voice was joined by others—again, voices of the young, reaching a scared pitch.
From there, on the ground in the galley, he could feel the ship move gently on the water. He’d never understand life on land that wasn’t full of the graceful push and pull of life afloat. How strange would be to be still?
Megumi’s voice strained over the others and she shouted, “They have—” before the freezer door shut again and the voice disappeared into a barrage of thuds and thumps and angry barks for the group to be quiet.
“How many are dead?” Kozo asked.
“How about you don’t worry about things that aren’t your problem,” the man said in an easy sing-song that grated at Kozo’s sense of the moment. There was no reason for mirth.
“The other ship gave you up, mate,” someone else said. A woman’s voice, confirming his worst suspicions. So, they were the last of the ships to survive. “They’ve been dead for weeks now. We’ve been chasing you.”
“What are you after?”
“Well, there we are. A question that matters.” A few people chuckled. Kozo felt hot breath near his ear again and he closed his eyes and geared up for another kick in the ribs. “We’re after the Queen, darling Kozo. You’re in our waters…The ship is ours. And so, by law, is everyone on it. So. I want what’s on it.”
“You killed what’s on it,” Kozo answered.
The woman’s voice cooed. “No, I got what I wanted. And now I’ll take the ship.”
“The ship is mine,” he replied, although weakly.
The blow came not as a kick but as a large thump on the head and immediately left a metallic taste in the back of his mouth. Kozo reeled and spun on the floor, and swallowed his garbled cry.
“It is no longer yours,” the man said. “You’re relieved of your duties as the Commander of this vessel and I’ll take it from here. ”
He understood then, in slow realization, that he was not going to make it off the ship alive. His sister was in the freezer and the men and women he’d been employed to protect were slaughtered around him. The other ships were gone. The entire mission compromised, dead, gone.
“Who are you?” Kozo groaned.
“We let you sleep, you know.” The young man hovered near him again and it was all Kozo could do not to buck his head backward and try to catch the animal in the chin or some other vulnerable spot. “Killed your guard. Walked right inside. Held a knife under that pretty little face of yours. Someone flipped a coin, I think, to decide if they should kill you now or kill you later. Or maybe they didn’t. No one can remember already. You get so hopped up on adrenaline when you’re taking a ship.” Now the young man paced the length of Kozo and he rolled on his back and stared at the galley ceiling, the outline of his tormenter a shadow above him. But when the man leaned down again, a knife in his hands, he smiled and everything in the kitchen went cold and icy. No.
He’d heard of the pirates along the Eastern seaboard but hadn’t believed.
This was just a kid.
“You don’t have authority over my boat,” Kozo dared to challenge. His voice wobbled and he tugged on his arms, his wrists hurt from the tightly knotted rope cutting into his skin. “The water belongs to no one.”
Laughter and mockery filled the room.
Kozo wondered who cut the engines.
“We have authority over everything,” the kid said and he squatted next to Kozo’s head and rested his arms on his knees. Kozo could see his reflection in the big brass buttons of his jacket. “We own the trash heap you were born on and we own the land and we own every living thing that dares to emerge from the decay…and we own the sea. We own the sea. This boat is ours.”
As if on cue, someone burst into the galley without regard for the scene staged there—Kozo stretched out on the floor, bound and bleeding, the guards standing, Meg and the other children knocking—and she stopped and shuddered.
“It’s a mess out there. Don’t you do anything the way I asked? Gas them. Gas first. Poison second. Shoot or slice third.” The woman’s voice was deep and brittle but Kozo could see that she was middle-aged with long blonde hair down her back. “Is this the kid?”
He hated the sound of “the kid” on her tongue like he was a stupid child like everyone else in the room. When his tormentor stretched up, she moved forward, he could see her eyes sizing him up and he didn’t like the delicious evil sparkling there.
“Do you k
now who I am?” she asked Kozo with menace in her step as she stalked forward. He didn’t answer. “I’m…” she paused for dramatic effect, “the Queen and this is my boat. Named after me already, it’s perfect.”
Kozo knew his ship was named for Queen Elizabeth the Second, an old royal monarch of the Old World. That Queen, the real one, perished with the rest of them on the day the world ended, the day of the Great Divide; nothing saved her or her family from the disease that killed mankind.
He’d learned about Queen Elizabeth after embarking on the ship and reading its history—a history he’d learned piecemeal through song and snippet and oral tradition and through the voyagers who passed through the Trash Islands on their way to find life elsewhere. They never came back. But sometimes they brought treasures like books and maps and photos. The books on the boat filled in the gaps with glorious detail with crucial attention to the politics of the ancient life. Billions of people. The power in the hands of only a few. The burden of the world held by the masses. And even then, it wasn’t the masses that revolted but were the first to die—writhing like pigs in the street, bleeding out their eyes and noses, killing each other for food and valuables.
Everyone died. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. Like his mother used to wail. But it was not everyone who died, was it?
His mother and the man who made him lived long enough to spark his life and his sister’s life as they clawed their way through survival, eager to die and leave the journey to someone else, unwilling to take their own lives out of some misplaced respect for the chance they’d been given to be unhappy.
Kozo knew the woman in front of him, now middle-aged, would’ve been in her twenties as the world ended. And now she carried herself like a Queen, regal and full of unearned power. Queens were born not elected; and to that end, she was not the Queen of history and not the Queen of his boat. That much he knew.
The self-proclaimed Queen stood and tapped her pointy, lifted shoes that clicked when she walked. She sized him up, waiting for a response, and Kozo gave none. The brass buttons on her own black jacket matched those of her small army’s uniforms.
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