“The hunters will not venture forth in the night. They would not brave the Zenbu. We can gather them all at once without waiting.” Ri flashed an infrared image over the viewer. She added a radar overlay to enhance it and the darkness beyond the window barely mattered. A jumble of buildings ran to the horizon in all directions. Ri turned the flitter slowly, shifting the image before them.
“The global nav system will give me no information beyond the center of the city.”
“No one has needed maps of Japan for the five decades since the Crash and Smash. There isn’t all that much left to recognize.”
Ri continued to quarter the area. A space of pure black interrupted the city. She pointed at it and Ri looked at her questioningly.
“That dark patch. That’s the place where we rescued you. I recognize it from our, my last trip here. Levan wanted to land in the safety of an open area.”
Ri slid the flitter over the park and dropped down to rooftop level. How strange it must be for Ri to see her world from above. All dark. No lights. Not even the warmth of friendly fires. The few bits Ri had revealed of Nara were enough to chill the soul. Open firelight drew attack. Night brought death or worse from the Zenbu. Only starvation had flushed Ri from her cadre’s nightly lair.
Suz shook her head. Odd to think of the girl like some primitive animal. But it was true, there was a primitive, or perhaps primal person within the young woman’s body that was a mystery to Suz. So self-reliant that she rarely spoke. And Suz suspected it was not out of fear or even shyness, but rather of not caring to share her thoughts with others.
Nearly a dozen blocks from the park the flitter slowed even more. The red and green of the overlapping infrared and radar revealed a jumble that looked more like a junkyard than a city. Bright echoes that might be the shells of destroyed flitters or the occasional bit of glass. The dark mess rolled by block after block, a mottled wasteland with no definition.
The flitter twitched abruptly and Suz jammed her fingers as she tried to catch herself against the console.
“What? What is it?”
“The roof isn’t there.”
Suz looked at the overlapping images, bright-green radar and dark-red heat scan. How Ri could even recognize the right building never mind tell its condition?
“Are you sure?”
She pointed. “There’s the bank. See that reflection. That’s the big ‘Y’ of the Yen symbol from when it was the currency of the world. Though I didn’t know that the last time I stood there. And that…” Her voice trailed into silence.
Suz could make out the outlines that might be walls. But what would a roof look like in this kind of imaging? The voracious student in Ri knew. And her deafening silence told Suz that it was missing.
Ri slid the flitter into place above the building and descended straight down. Once they were within the walls, Ri flashed on a landing light and cleared the heads-up display.
A small triangle of glass-less windows hung before them where a floor had once attached to the wall. A single book, as black as the walls about it, rested on the bit of floor remaining in the triangle. Ri strained forward, even zooming the display to inspect the book, but there was nothing there to see but black char.
A fluttering picture remained glued to the window frame. It was a view of the Earth from deep space. Years before, that photo had served as a guiding beacon of hope to return to the moon as humanity had once done. Now it was a cruel joke.
They continued their descent past another line of broken flooring. A door with a round hole big enough for a cat or dog in its lower half hung askew from a single hinge. They were passing through what must have once been the ground floor and were continuing into the basement when the flitter slammed into the ground. It teetered for a moment before settling down slightly to the rear.
“I have to go see.”
Suz nodded, but knew there was no point.
They had settled in a vast black hole of rubble and burnt books. The cadre was gone.
Ri slid out of the pilot’s seat and pulled on a face mask as black as the rest of her attire. Only her eyes and the hard line of her mouth showed. She slung on her fighting harness, perhaps unique in all of Earth, in that it included two sai knives and her prized pair of swords, the shoto and the katana killing blade.
“If I’m not back in five minutes, leave without me.” Ri strapped on a belt with a pair of tinglers in holsters at her lower back.
“If you aren’t back in three, I’m coming after you.” Ri nodded and cycled the hatch as Suz wondered if she would indeed be able to walk out that airlock if it was necessary. It slid shut with a comforting finality and she managed to drag a breath into her aching lungs. The scents slapped into her. Charred wood, burnt hopes, and a foul, fetid air that clung to her lungs even as she struggled to cough it out.
She swung a searchlight, once, slowly about the basement and then doused both it and the landing light. That way Ri would have a quick view, and then be safer in darkness. The reactivated heads-up display revealed nothing beyond the jumble of concrete. The sound pickups caught a rattle from the side of the flitter opposite the hatch. Suz scanned the area but could detect no motion or heat signature. A slight creaking, and Ri’s shadowed figure climbed a service ladder near the hatch.
“Who goes?” Ri’s shout blasted into the cabin, immensely magnified by the pickups mounted on the hull. Suz turned it down and rubbed her ears to ease out the lingering ringing sound.
Ri ducked as a stone skipped off the hull where her head had been moments before. Suz had seen no sign of the attack or the attacker. Ri leapt from the top of the flitter, her killing sword singing from its sheath as she fell through the air. She hit and rolled once popping back to her feet, sword poised high above her head.
“Do it.” A voice whispered from the darkness. “Please.”
The sword wavered brightly in the display as an even softer whisper sounded.
“Ninka?”
“Ri?”
A figure rose from behind her shield and the two women were wrapped in a fierce hug. As they hurried around the bow of the flitter, Suz did a quick scan, but they appeared to be alone. She opened the hatch and the two stumbled through. She sealed it right on their heels against the stench of Japan. But it didn’t stop the odor. It emanated from the greasy little urchin Ri supported.
The girl collapsed to the floor, one leg out at an awkward angle. An impossible angle. Yet she’d walked. The leg had broken and healed all wrong and Suz felt a twist of sickness in her stomach. Here, there was no one to set a broken leg properly. She’d never understood quite how low Japan had sunk until this moment. Fighters gathered around a small fire hidden deep in a bookstore. A brilliant, self-educated girl chose the fuel, and had a survivalist shine of strength and inner power. This broken bit of girl… What sort of a life was that?
“Are you spirit?” The girl was reaching a tentative hand toward Ri’s face exposed where she had pulled back her hood.
“I am as real as you.” Ri took the hand and pressed it to her face.
“But you never came back.”
“I was rescued.”
It was the first time Ri hadn’t said kidnapped in the two years since she and Levan had gathered the starving girl up in Nara-ken Park. Suz wanted to smile, but it didn’t seem right.
“The world still lives out beyond Japan, Ninka. I have seen it, just like in the books but better. And there is a fighter who can train us even better. With his learning, none shall ever touch us again.”
Ninka’s eyes widened at first, and then she hung her head.
Ri, oblivious in her joy, rambled on.
“I’ve come back for the rest of the cadre. Then we can…”
Suz’s touch on her arm stumbled her to a halt.
“What?” The one on the floor was shaking her head.
“Too late. Too
late.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you have food?”
Beneath the matted hair and soiled and torn clothing, Suz realized that the girl was literally little more than skin and bones. She scrounged in the galley and came up with a couple of sandwiches and an energy bar.
The girl took a massive bite and barely chewed before swallowing. Before she could take another bite, Ri stopped her.
“Tell me.”
The girl took another bite and chewed it at least twice before swallowing this time.
“The night you disappeared, something happened. Something awful. Blood flowed from Nara-ken. From behind the impenetrable wall. Heads were lined up upon the top of the wall that morning. Hundreds and hundreds. Who knew there were so many people left in the world. And their heads all lined up. The birds had a feast. My fever had broken and I was able to kill several of them to feed the cadre. We ate despite their last meal still being in their bellies.”
“Hundreds? What hundreds?” Suz didn’t recognize her own voice so thin in the darkness that enshrouded the flitter.
Ri turned and studied her face. She spoke slowly as if teaching a toddler how to tie her shoes.
“The gassed fighters of Nara-ken. Diabutsu-den must have found them still sleeping and killed them all before they woke. That would make Diabutsu the unchallenged ruler of Nara. The threat of the unknowable behind the Nara-ken walls always acted as a check against the other cadres.”
“Hundreds?” Suz fell back limply into a chair. “Hundreds? I killed hundreds?”
Ri shrugged and turned back to her friend who had taken the opportunity to wolf down most of the second sandwich.
“Where is the cadre? Where is Tinnai?”
The girl stopped in mid-bite and hung her head.
“Where?!”
She shifted to her knees as well as her malformed leg would allow and lowered her face to the carpet, bowing low to Ri.
Hundreds. Suz couldn’t fathom it. Her little rescue of Ri. Her strike back at her father’s legacy by extracting a single Japanese girl had cost hundreds of lives. The scale of what she was tackling slammed home. Bryce Randall Stevens Sr. had killed not hundreds, nor thousands, not even millions. A billion had fallen beneath the genetic-cleansing blade of the WEC and their testers. The Second Human Genome Mapping Project had identified humanity’s weaknesses, and a wholesale slaughter on a scale impossible to imagine had occurred.
And she had just added a hundred or more souls to the grave herself. And not even known it. She buried her head in her hands but that didn’t stop the screams within. Or the screams without.
“The Diabutsu-den Cadre got her.” The rescued girl spoke into the carpet despite Ri’s attempts to lift her. “They struck without warning less than a cycle of the moon after you died.”
Ri’s anger had returned and it drove her to her feet. Ninka wallowed in agony against Ri’s shoes.
“Why weren’t you at Tinnai’s side? You knew she was their target.”
“I’m not as smart as you, Ri. I know that now. I studied your books, but it was hard. My eyes could barely make out the words and my head would hurt after I’d read only a page or two. But I studied. And I had to go think. I was in that small bathroom on the upper floor. I would go there to be alone. To think. I was trapped there when the fire broke out.” Her weeping was muffled from where she kept her face to the floor as she spoke.
Suz was being consumed by a fire within. How many others had she unthinkingly damaged? She’d heard Robbie’s story of Jaron’s terror, though he seemed fine now. But what had she done to Devra Conrad on the Mars run, Carla Wendell busy assembling her Arctic biome in space, along with the other biome leaders, Yerke, Sylvan, Roder? Had she twisted Robbie’s life? Had others died, all unknown to her, because she’d sent Robbie into Jaron’s jungle year upon year?
“I was badly burned by the time I was able to break out the small window and drop the two stories to the next roof. That’s when I broke my leg. I tried to get to her Ri, I tried so hard. All I could do was crawl to the edge of the roof and watch as the store burned above me. I had a short knife, nothing more. And with my leg broken, I couldn’t jump again.” Her voice broke with weeping.
“The Diabutsu must have made a deal with the Zenbu because they both walked the streets that night. I could only watch as Kou-kou, Ellra, Suki dove from the bolthole into the arms of the Zenbu. I can’t believe you ever faced them alone. They were the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Hundreds of them waited on the streets. Even you would have died like Kara.”
Ri knelt again and pulled the girl up into her arms as her tale continued to pour forth. She smoothed back the long hair revealing a fine-featured, thin face that might have been Ri’s a few years and much less food ago.
“But there was one that the Zenbu did not touch. Tinnai came and stood against the burning front of the store, a blade in each hand, bluffing that they wouldn’t know of her weakened right side. She was magnificent in the firelight. The Diabutsu moved in. Of the twenty who attacked, few were unscathed and four dead by the time they subdued her.
“You’d have been proud, Ri. Tinnai was always the best of us. She was cut a thousand times and bleeding horribly when they dragged her away. I tried to follow, but I was weak from loss of blood where the bone had broken through. I bound it as well as I could and passed out. When I awoke it was daylight and the cadre was gone. We are the last of the mighty Tancho.” The girl choked and, in a splash of bile, heaved up the partially chewed chunks of sandwich onto the floor and Ri’s knees.
Ri didn’t flinch. “She was alive when they took her?”
“I, I think so. I tried to find her. But I never could. Five Diabutsu scouts have fallen to my blade, but none would talk though I flayed two of them alive, risking their screams drawing the Zenbu in hopes of finding some sign of hope. She’s gone, Ri.”
Ri rose in silence and handed a harness to her friend. It was a demolition specialist’s harness. It included knives, several different small explosives, and some assorted tools. Ri pulled a tingler and showed Ninka how to use it and then rammed it into the holster.
“We’re going after Tinnai. The flitter will draw too much attention. Wait here.”
Suz started to nod. She’d be safe here. Safe. Just as she’d been when she’d killed every soul in Nara-ken. Just as she’d been when her father had been busy murdering Jaron’s family. Just as she’d been when Tancho Cadre’s home had burned and every soul taken. Could she live with herself if she stayed behind this time as well?
That was an easy one, no matter how much the answer struck terror into her heart. A hand that she knew was hers though it felt disconnected and distant, pulled down a harness. The slick straps crossed behind her back. She slapped the ends together across her chest and hips and cinched it into place. Like steel bands threatening to crush her pounding heart inside, the harness confined and trapped—and freed.
At long last she was finally committing herself to the action she’d been professing for years. She holstered the weapons, tested a pair of knives for size in her palm, and strapped their leg sheaths about her thighs. Hood in place she turned to Ri who watched her without comment or hint of disapproval.
Ri was impossibly calm, or perhaps numb. Suz’s gut was impossibly not calm and she wished she was numb. A deep breath did nothing to help.
“Your lead.” At least her voice was reasonably steady.
Ri merely nodded in reply, pulled on a headlamp, but did not light it, and cycled the hatch open.
The passage through the Naran night passed in a blur. They scuttled from one shadow to the next. Ri sprinting ahead in startling bursts and then freezing for minutes at a time before proceeding. Ninka’s limping gait was nearly inaudible behind her. Suz had always imagined she was quiet and careful, but her breathing while standing still was a hundred times louder than Ri�
��s feet at a full run.
Shadows flickered by. Moonlight illuminated empty streets and vast desolation that stretched about them in an unending, bewildering array. If she were lost here, she would forever wander through the rubble hoping to find the single, silvered, flitter haven. She should have stayed where she was.
Her heart thudded near to bursting, her calves screamed for a rest and a nice soak in a tub followed by a good massage, her nose begged for something more than dust and char but feared the next scent might be the sharp tang of blood. Her own blood. She’d put her own blood on the line.
Ri halted at a corner exactly like every other and waved Ninka forward.
“Mad Dog Cadre?”
“Gone. Two months gone. No fire, no bodies. I think they grew careless with hunger and the Zenbu struck. There was no crucifixion.”
“Crucifixion?” The word gagged in Suz’s throat.
“It is how the Zenbu honor a great fighter. The Mad Dogs were vicious, but not skilled.”
She looked between the two girls but what little she could see of their faces, one masked by hood and the other by grime, showed no surprise…and little patience. Suz nodded that she was ready though it was all she could do to not curl up in a fetal ball right there on the street. This was a world she’d never found even in her worst nightmares, and she had a nasty suspicion that she wasn’t about to wake up from this one.
Ri rested a hand on her shoulder for a moment. She was able to nod a little more certainly and Ri squeezed her shoulder.
Then they were running again. They jumped over yet another low wall and trotted to a halt before a massive structure, squat and nearly lost beneath brambles.
“I couldn’t open it alone,” Ninka’s voice was nearly a sob. “I tried everything I could think of, but I couldn’t get it to budge. Perhaps they found it and jammed it shut from inside.”
Nara Page 21