The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  FORTY-FIVE

  Kuroda’s men had come with twelve soldiers, with rifles, and the protesters let them through without much argument. Thaniel was surprised to find that in charge was the man in the red coat, although he didn’t have the red coat now. He looked different in an austere morning suit. He shook Thaniel’s hand once the door was shut.

  ‘Phew. You’ve got a crowd out there now, haven’t you? Afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. The Prime Minister is ejecting you all from the country. He’s breaking off diplomatic links with Great Britain.’

  ‘But Mori’s alive.’

  ‘Can’t have foreigners wandering around Tokyo burning down people’s houses,’ Tanaka said easily.

  Thaniel thought about punching him.

  ‘I’m in charge here,’ Vaulker put in.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Tanaka said.

  ‘What is he saying?’ Vaulker demanded.

  Thaniel took a deep breath, waiting to be able to switch easily between English and Japanese. It was like trying to come into a piece of music just off beat. When he did explain, Tanaka waited, listening rather than idle, and Thaniel had a powerful feeling that his English was as good as anybody’s. It would have been difficult to do his kind of work without it.

  ‘We can’t go anywhere,’ Vaulker said, frowning. ‘Mr Tanaka, you walked past that mob outside, they’re out for our blood. We’ve been trying to evacuate the legation all week.’

  ‘Not really the problem of the state,’ Tanaka said drily, ‘and I don’t think we owe you any favours.’

  ‘You’ve just handed us a death sentence then,’ Vaulker said, incredulous.

  Thaniel was starting to ache from standing so tense. He knew exactly what Tanaka was going to say. It was a small relief to finally get there.

  ‘But,’ Tanaka said, cheerful again, ‘luckily, you do have a prisoner who’s escaped from state custody here. If you’d hand over Baron Mori, I’m sure we can come to an agreement about getting you all out of here safely.’

  ‘Tom,’ Thaniel said quietly, even though he could see he was on sinking ground. ‘They’ll kill him.’

  ‘This is the job,’ Vaulker said, hard. ‘What would you say to me, if I had an old friend in our cellar and a mob at the door? Those men outside are going to kill us all. And him, if they get in.’

  Thaniel nodded. He heard it all, but at a distance. He didn’t understand how things could have gone so wrong, with all of Mori’s foresight.

  Something banged hard on one of the new boards over the windows. It was small and the noise was white, followed by tiny sigh that might have been fire.

  Tanaka lifted his eyebrows. ‘What’s it going to be?’

  Vaulker nodded to Pringle and then at the stairs. Pringle glanced at Thaniel, then quickly down again, ashamed, but did as he was told.

  A vicious static snap whipped round the room. One of the soldiers dropped his rifle and most of the others put them down, quickly. Thaniel had to pull his watch out of his pocket. He had been aware before that it was getting warm, but it was scalding now. Someone at Aokigahara had turned up the electricity again.

  ‘What … by Christ is all that?’ someone said by the last of the unboarded windows.

  They all looked. It was so cold outside now that there were ice-crystals in the air, in among the snowflakes. Between them, there was a network of blue light. It was St Elmo’s fire again, as usual, but it wasn’t trailing any sharp edges now. It was cutting through the air in hair-thin lines. The noise quietened in the camp as everyone there noticed too. The tents looked like they were standing in the middle of a nebula. It glittered inside the office too, in the dust.

  Thaniel picked up a packet of icing sugar, one of three sitting on desks still, and emptied it into the air. The blue lines traced themselves through it. They had patterns and crossings, and strange juddering loops. When he thought about turning out the light above him to see it better by, a clear arc traced between him and the lamp. He looked back. Other lines ran from people to the doors.

  ‘It’s where we could go,’ Six explained, too quiet for anyone else to hear. A light between them flashed just before he lifted her up. ‘What you intend – it’s all illuminated.’

  It was everywhere. Faint arcs traced between the camp and the windows. It might have been bricks they were thinking about throwing. From Vaulker, and from some of the more frightened-looking juniors, there were strong lines toward the back door, even though they must have known they didn’t have much of a chance of going anywhere. Among the stronger lines were honeycombs and networks of other, miniature paths. Moving his hand through the icing sugar didn’t disturb them. Six put her hand out and made the space around it glow because she meant to open and close her fingers. It flared stronger just before she did.

  Thaniel stood still, because turning in circles made a pre-turn flare all around him. He tried to remember what Grace had called the ghost lines. Fate lines, fate trails. Something. In any case, someone in Aokigahara must have finally realised what they were and cranked up the power.

  Other people were doing experiments to see what would make better lights, and so were the men outside, all the fight in everyone forgotten for half a minute.

  From the stairs down to Willis’s surgery, a narrow clear light line reached up and looped to the front door. There was just time for Thaniel to think it might, despite everything, be Mori, before Takiko came up. There was no sign of Pringle.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Thaniel said. ‘You can’t go outside, you’ll be killed. If there’s one thing they hate more than the British, it’s Japanese who like the British—’

  ‘That’s the point,’ she interrupted him gently. ‘You remember when someone dies. It’s a flare. We need it now.’

  ‘You can’t. For God’s sake – let me do it.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Look, you were right. He’s something extraordinary, but I’ve been charging around like an elephant, like Kuroda, instead of protecting him like …’ She lifted her hand at Thaniel and looked desperately sad. ‘Anyone decent. I’ve been treating him like some monster who just hurts women. Didn’t even occur to me that she asked him to do it. I’ve crushed him. I owe him a chance now.’

  ‘But I’m dying anyway – Takiko!’ he called after her, because she had ducked past him and out the door. She didn’t bother to shut it and only ran the second she was outside, knowing that over the rambling distance of the lawn he had no chance of catching up with her in the state he was in.

  With his pulse echo-chambering round the inside of his skull, he followed her anyway. The cold made his lungs stick. Someone shouted at him to get back inside. In front of him, because she was running, Takiko was trailing St Elmo’s fire. It was almost as bright as the line of her intent, stretching like a white-hot wire to the camp.

  Sound carried very well over the lawn, which was amphitheatric. He heard her ask to know who was in charge, and from where a big group of people were clustered, working themselves up under banners and torches and chanting, a man came out. He was the same man Thaniel had knocked over on the way into the legation in December, Fukuoka’s friend Yuna. They had let journalists into the camp now. Someone took a photograph, and Thaniel could see why. It would be a beautiful photograph, a woman with her hair tugged loose from running, facing down a man a head taller than her, both of them haloed by their intention to punch each other. Despite that, he had to slow down. He felt like an iron cage had closed across his chest. He could hear himself coughing like it was long way away.

  ‘Hurry along before you get yourself hurt,’ Yuna was telling Takiko.

  ‘No. You’re going to move your men away from this building, and if you hurt me, those thirty journalists there will have it on film.’

  He laughed at her. ‘The film is melting, you stupid girl. They won’t have anything.’

  It wasn’t true. Thaniel could see it from here. They had brought out old cameras – glass plates, not film.

  ‘Go on then.’


  ‘You think I wouldn’t hit a woman?’

  She punched him, with real force. It broke his nose; Thaniel heard the crunch. ‘Not really, no.’

  When Yuna did hit her, he might as well have done it with a hammer as with the sake bottle he really used. It was feral, and full of all the rage that had been building up since before the Constitution. It snapped her head back. She crumpled into the snow. He poured the sake over her and spat his cigarette out. The flames went up with an unremarkable noise, like someone shaking out a rug.

  Thaniel couldn’t run. It was like being trapped in one of those foul dreams, the ones where there were monsters, but the air turned to treacle, impossible to push through. It must only have been fifteen seconds or so, but each second felt like hours, and in that time, the fire roared.

  He burned his fingertips turning her over. It would have been better somehow if it had been in silence, or if other people had stopped to see, but mostly, people hadn’t noticed. With the fire in front of him, he couldn’t tell if the journalists had caught it. There were eerie blue flickers all across the snow from the future lines, but nothing, not even a glow, from Takiko.

  Someone kicked him in the head. He collapsed, nearly grateful. The snow was soft.

  ‘Who’s that?’ someone else said, with an odd tightness. People were turning away from Thaniel, towards the house. He could only see their boots. Someone must have been coming from that way. ‘Yuna – fuck, he’s a—’

  Blood gushed into the snow, so hot it steamed. Yuna was just in front of him, but he didn’t see what had happened. He couldn’t see further up than the man’s boots. One of the other protesters ran across too and then crumpled right beside Thaniel, his throat slit – not deeply, or even violently, but exactly enough.

  Someone leaned down near him. Mori. He touched Takiko’s throat, but she wasn’t breathing. Thaniel didn’t think she had been even before the fire. The man had broken her neck. She wasn’t her anymore, just a ruined thing in the snow. It had been so fast: like dropping a glass. Even Arinori hadn’t been like that. Thaniel felt like he was watching it all from three feet to one side of his own head. Observant little mechanisms of him were noting what was happening, but there was nothing else, and he couldn’t think, or move.

  Mori shook Thaniel’s shoulder.

  ‘Get up. I can’t carry you.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Get up,’ Mori interrupted. He caught Thaniel’s hand when he struggled and half lifted him onto his feet. There were protesters watching, hesitating. Mori banged the sword down into the snow to have his hands free. Nobody wanted to see how quickly he could pick it up again. ‘Get inside,’ he said to Thaniel. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ someone said, probably with much less certainty than they’d have liked.

  Mori shook his head. He didn’t seem angry, only pressed for time. ‘You can kill me if you want, but there will be men coming for you if you do.’

  Camera flashes were still strobing on the left, much closer than before, because the photographers had risked coming in over the lawn to get a better shot. To the right, most of the protesters hadn’t even noticed what was going on here; they were still throwing bottles at the legation windows, having fun, because before each throw, the electricity and the snow traced out the bottles’ parabolas ahead of them. Dozens of arcs flared every few seconds, flashing and beautiful. They looked like the vaults of an invisible cathedral crypt. Thaniel could only just see them properly. Something strange and blurry had happened to his sight. He could see sounds much more clearly than ordinary things. Concussion, that would be.

  The crowd let Mori through. He didn’t look back as he disappeared behind the journalists. Thaniel limped towards the legation. The world swam. Someone shouted something into his face with a firework of red and yellow, but he didn’t catch what it was. When he reached the door, it was closed. He knocked his fist against it once, then collapsed on the threshold.

  FORTY-SIX

  Thaniel came to a section at a time. He was still deaf for a long while after he woke. He saw firelight, and the glint of gilt on the books on Willis’s desk, but it was all silent. There was a pattern stitched onto the pillowcase, something simple with straight lines. Not a pillowcase; it was one of the pinstripe cushions from the nice couches in the dining room. He was in the surgery. He sat up slowly. Everything was still soundless.

  It was freezing. Someone had broken a window and a blizzard was blowing in. The snow was dry and powdery, and, upset with the draught, the fire was smoking.

  Willis rushed down. As he did, someone lobbed a bottle at the boarded window. The men outside were playing and teasing each other, in the way you play with the sea; there was a sort of delicious thrill pushing and pushing to see how near you could go before you had to dive in.

  ‘Steepleton, good. Get upstairs. Can you shoot?’

  ‘Where is he?’ Thaniel asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Willis said, annoyed. ‘Hurry up. Can you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shoot!’

  ‘Yes … yes.’

  ‘Thank Christ, so far it’s only Mrs Vaulker and Mrs Henley. Oh. Look at me.’

  Thaniel looked.

  Willis looked critically into his eyes. ‘Bit of a concussion, you’ll feel dizzy. But never mind that now, get up there. They’ve only got hunting rifles. Where did you learn?’

  ‘Home. Dad was a … gamekeeper, I used to …’ Thaniel shook his head. Talking was difficult. His head ached, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. There was a bandage around his hand. He puzzled over that until he remembered he had burned it on Takiko.

  Her hair had burned. That wasn’t the worst thing, but it was what stuck the most. It had gone up fast and bright because it had soaked up the sake, beautiful in the snow, and horrible.

  Willis hurried him up the stairs into something like organised chaos in the long dining room. There was no sign of Tanaka and his men – they must have run or gone after Mori – but Mrs Vaulker seemed to have taken charge of a group by the long windows. The windows were boarded up to the height of a person, but she and a couple of others were standing on the tables rammed up against the walls. They were getting ready to shoot over the boards. Six was with them. She was arranging new bullets in a perfectly straight line on the tabletop. At the end of the line she paused and made a smiley face with them instead. Mrs Vaulker snorted and patted the top of her head. Six looked annoyed.

  ‘Where’s Takiko?’ he said. ‘Did someone – find her body?’

  ‘Out there where you left her,’ Willis growled. Then, with far more force, ‘What the hell were you thinking, letting her go out like that?’

  Thaniel stared out that way, through the last pane of glass that Pringle was just covering now. He should have been the one left out in the snow. For a fleet second he wondered if that was what he was for after all, the sacrifice to save a family. Takiko would have been a good mother to Six, and to her son. All lost now.

  Mori wasn’t so cruel. None of it was meant to be like this. All at once Thaniel could see it.

  That instant he had decided to go with Arinori to the Constitution parade had been the important one. He shouldn’t have gone.

  Vaulker should have been with Arinori. He would have been quicker. Arinori would be alive.

  If Arinori hadn’t been killed, Thaniel would never have realised that anything was wrong at Mori’s end; he wouldn’t have realised he was missing, not just absent. He would have had no reason to ignore Mori’s message in Aokigahara; he would never have gone back to Yoruji, the one place he shouldn’t have been, where Tanaka had seen him in time to produce a body for Kuroda to show the Duke. He’d been trapped inside the legation on murder charges, in that miserable freezing guest room, instead of negotiating with the protesters like he should have been.

  There wasn’t meant to be any emergency here. No one was meant to be dead on the lawn. It was supposed to be saf
e.

  In one disgusting moment, he realised he didn’t feel so panicked and so guilty only because a valiant human being had died. It was because Mori was going to be angry. It was the way he’d felt when he’d got into fights at school and been dragged into the headmaster’s office by the collar. Raw shame, and nothing about it pure or good. It was fear of the cane.

  Someone threw a brick. One of the windows smashed, spectacularly. Mrs Vaulker bent forward over Six. He’d never thought he would like her. A cheer went up outside and someone kicked at the front door, an incredible bang that made the solid oak groan. A sake bottle with a lit fuse soared in through the broken window. It smashed over the floor and spilled fire across the boards. One of the junior diplomats wrenched down a long curtain to smother it and smoke poured up. It formed ghosts, none clear enough to make out. Someone pushed a gun into his hands and Willis half helped and half lifted him onto the table beside Mrs Vaulker, who nodded.

  There was a thump outside that made them both jump, and then a perfect quiet. The protesters stopped hooting. There was no more laughing, only a crackle where a pile of old pine needles was still burning. It was by the last window, where the Christmas tree had sat until last week waiting for the gardener’s boy to get round to taking it away. In the torchlight, Thaniel saw that some of the protesters were hurrying away from something before he saw what had made them run.

  It was a phalanx of knights. They had stopped just in view, about twenty yards away from the corner of the building. Silhouettes in the lamplight around the tents stopped still.

  ‘Those are soldiers,’ Mrs Vaulker said, puzzled.

  ‘That’s not army uniform,’ someone else said.

  Thaniel leaned against the boards. They were carrying a red banner, and though their armour was dark, there was an insignia band on the sleeves. A triangle of dots and a horizontal slash, black on red.

  Some of the protesters saw what was about to happen and ran. The soldiers’ method of clearing everyone was to set the tents on fire. They went through slowly, like reapers at a moonlit harvest. A few of the younger men tried to fight and got a sword hilt in the teeth for it.