The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories (draft) - Part 26
Still no Internet connection from home, posting from work again. In theory one more week is supposed to be the longest they could take to get our connection sorted out, in practice... *gnaws fingernails*
In the meantime, that new chapter certain people were clamoring for after the sort-of-cliffhanger of the last one is done - and even back on the old chapter-a-week schedule for once! Though I make no promises that people will find it any less frustrating that the previous. Or a good few of the ones still to come. I mentioned how we're moving into the final arc now, yes? Suffice to say it's going to be that kind of ending. And that is all I will say on the matter.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Side Story 1
That was exactly as much warning as they had. In the last twenty-four hours before it happened, Chi picked up nothing of note at all - not so much as a suspicious burst of static - a condition they’d later presume must have been engineered on the message transmitters’ parts.
Like the day when Watanuki had joined them, Doumeki was out on his bike alone, on an errand of no unusual importance, when he heard the sound of an engine like none he’d ever heard before. Stranger still was that the sound had no clear direction. It almost seemed to come from everywhere until Doumeki realised it was coming from above, though even then he may well have written off the impression as an aural illusion had he not heard Kamui’s tale of flying machines scant days before. When he looked up at last, two long, dark shapes were moving across the sky above. Their forms tapered towards their tails and the blur of moving machine parts was visible above them, but there were no wings - they looked like nothing that should be fit to fly. The sense of wonder lasted exactly as long as it took him to identify which direction they were headed. Somehow, that was all it took - right from that moment, Doumeki already knew.
He was still ten minutes away from the camp when he kicked the bike up to the fastest speed it could take and went roaring for home. It would be one of those journeys in which every minute of took forever, and at once lasted no time at all.
The flying machines had vanished from sight and hearing behind the hills ahead well before Doumeki arrived. He found them again landed just outside the security fence, which had been ripped asunder as though it had been no stronger than chicken-wire to leave a wide, open gash as a pathway to the camp within, the edges of the torn metal still crackling with the high voltage current that ran through the wires. Now they were landed, the huge scale of the machines revealed against familiar grounded objects, he could see that both sported giant, three-spoked propellers from the centre of their roofs, with gaping hatches in their sides opening to on to portable ramps leading to the ground. From within had come more than a dozen well armed men who now stood scattered on both sides of the wounded fence, all dressed in the close fitting armour and helmets that Doumeki was unsurprised to recognise from his visit to the far-off Complex on the trading mission earlier that year. In a strange flash he found himself wondering whether the faces of Kazuhiko and Gingetsu were inside any of those helmets, and the sense of betrayal - even from an acquaintance that has lasted no more than a few uneasy hours - burned in his chest like a sudden flame.
Doumeki knew then he had made it back too late, but almost in the same thought he saw that even had he never gone out at all, he couldn’t have made it here fast enough to matter. Whatever had happened here in the few minutes it had taken him to return was already over - the troops were already leaving. Two of the men were carrying an unconscious comrade as they climbed back up the ramp, but Doumeki scarcely noticed them when behind, two more were escorting a figure who wore none of their armour. It was Watanuki. As far as Doumeki could see he was unhurt, but his eyes were lowered towards the earth before him, his whole posture such a picture of such unconditional submission that even the soldiers who were kept guard behind him had their guns halfway lowered, assured there was no fight left in their captive. If not for the sound of the bike approaching he probably would not have looked up once until he’d reached the gangplank to the flying machine they were headed for, and even when he did the movement was so dull and slow it was difficult to imagine he’d expected to see anything of note at all.
When he laid eyes on Doumeki everything changed. A hundred different things may have flashed across his face in the moment when he registered who was there - this was nothing he’d expected, it was terribly clear he wasn’t that Watanuki had resigned himself to the idea that he was going to be stolen away yet again without so much as seeing Doumeki again before he was gone. But what finally settled was the look of the utmost paralysing terror - more scared than Watanuki had ever looked of anything he’d ever encountered before. What Doumeki saw reflected in that face was the sight of the one thing the man behind had always feared most, had always believed he couldn’t escape - couldn’t ever be more than one step behind him. It wasn’t the soldiers that had scared him, or the uncertain fate before him, or even Doumeki himself - instead, in that moment, Doumeki saw that what had sent Watanuki into this state was the thought that the frustrating idiot he’d so foolishly allowed himself to grow to care about was not going to let this happen - he’d fight for him to the very last and he’d get himself killed for the sake of a freedom that couldn’t be won.
And Doumeki would have done. There and then, even against unsurmountable odds, something hardened within him and made him realise he truly would have fought, no matter how hopeless the odds - against every last man he could lay hands on with any strength he had left. If what had scared Watanuki so much had been anything but the fear that Doumeki would die for his sake, he very well may have done it, and done it for nothing more than the crime they’d committed by making Watanuki look that way.
But with that terrible plea on Watanuki’s face, that had become the one thing he couldn’t possibly do.
Doumeki hardly heard the voices of the soldiers, yelling at him to drop his weapon. Even as he complied and let his gun fall to the ground in front of him, it was certainly not their demands that compelled him.
The relief in Watanuki’s face when he saw Doumeki had surrendered was something all consuming, but it didn’t last. Far worse was a new emotion Doumeki had not even been able to see in Watanuki’s eyes until now - that had been so masked and overwhelmed by the first greater fear that perhaps even Watanuki had not been aware of it before, though it must have been with him on some level all along. This one, as beautifully contradictory as all great illogical human emotions, was the fear Doumeki would do exactly what Watanuki had begged him to: stand down and simply let him go.
It was the last thing Doumeki would see on Watanuki’s face before the hatchway closed behind him, the great propellers began to rotate until they whipped up a gale like a storm and the two machines lifted back into the sky.
There was nothing left in Doumeki but consuming numbness as he watched the machines fly away.
***
The camp Doumeki returned to seemed at first to have fallen utterly silent. He found Fye almost by stumbling on to him, sitting hunched over himself on the ledge that jutted from the wall on the far side of the lab building. Beyond, Syaoran lay unmoving on the ground, eyes closed and body sprawled as though he’d fallen straight down where he was standing, Kurogane leaning over him. Doumeki’s appearance around the corner got a sharp look from the last, a flicker of recognition from Fye, and not a blink from Syaoran. There was no-one else in sight.
“What happened?” Doumeki heard himself ask. It seemed the most inadequate question he could have voiced.
Fye gave a rough sob. “They’ve taken the girls.” He rocked forward once and back again, speaking to himself almost as much as to Doumeki. “All our dear girls…” In one of his hands, Doumeki saw he was clutching a torn bare wire by a portion still covered by protective casing. He didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
“Watanuki’s gone too,” said Doumeki. The name felt dry in his throat. Fye gave another helpless sob and turned a little towards Kurogane.
“This one’s still breathing,” Kurogane reported. “He shouldn’t be out too long.” There was a cut above his eye that was oozing blood, and Doumeki could already see that Kurogane was using his left arm much less than usual. Syaoran, by contrast, had no obvious injuries. Fye looked back down at the wire in his hands again - an automatic gesture, and Doumeki found himself having a useless flash of insight into what must have transpired in the camp in the minutes it had taken him to return.
“It was electrocution?” he guessed.
“What else could I have done?” Fye declared helplessly, moving shakily to his feet and absently brandishing the offending wire, still grasped in his hands like a smoking gun. “He wouldn’t stop fighting! He’d never have stopped once he realised they meant to take his Sakura away! Not even when they’d riddled him with bullets and torn him limb from limb, not even if she begged him to stop!”
“You weren’t in the wrong,” said Kurogane, also getting to his feet. “There was nothing else any of us could have done.”
“Oh, but you should have seen our boys fight,” said Fye, addressing Doumeki and finally throwing the wire to his feet, though not so carelessly that there was any danger the end would land on anyone. “They were so magnificent, right to the last - even outnumbered and outgunned. Why, they took down five men between them before they were subdued!” He gave a weak laugh. “But it was hopeless from the first!”
The man Doumeki had seen being carried into the machine must have been the last of those five. It was too late now for even the news that the others had fought to instil any more guilt in Doumeki that he’d chosen not to do likewise, but the weight of his failure to do anything to protect Watanuki settled all the heavier.
“This was no random raid. They were prepared,” said Kurogane, a dull proclamation. “They knew exactly what they’d find here. Exactly who they were looking for. The three of them who see ghosts were what they were after. Chi as well.”
“How?” asked Doumeki. Fye just shook his head.
“Chi,” said Kurogane, “Is it possible they found a way to trace…”
“Oh come now, Kuro-dear,” Fye interrupted, “now is a poor time for you to pretend to forget you ever learned the difference between input and output. Chi has never been more than a passive receiver - she has no transmission circuits I’ve not disabled. They could no more have traced her here than… than you could speak with your ears!”
There was silence between the three of them for a while.
“What about Kohane?” Doumeki suggested. “Could we have been wrong that they wouldn’t find a way to track her?”
“Even if they did, that doesn’t account for how they knew about the others,” said Kurogane. “No-one outside the camp knew Sakura was here. Since she joined she’s hardly set foot outside.”
“Watanuki should be the same,” said Doumeki, feeling in one of those unjustifiable ways that it was something that needed to be said. “How could the Complexes have known so much?”
Fye threw up his hands. “Who knows indeed! They’re the Complexes, they’ve all manner of tools at their disposal of the likes you’ve never seen. I could spin you a dozen different possible stories of how they might have achieved a magic trick like this, each as unlikely as the last. Two dozen!”
“Nothing those troops gave away any hint,” said Kurogane darkly. “There’s no way for us to know.”
It would be every bit as hopeless to ask ‘why’. All they had left were practicalities. “What do we do now?” asked Doumeki.
“Why, we’ll all go charging into the Complex on pure white steeds and rescue them all, sweeping every one of those nasty soldiers aside in our path!” said Fye, gesturing dramatically. “What do you think we can do?”
Kurogane hesitated, wrestling with some unspoken portion of his thoughts even in the face of Fye’s irreverence. “Even if that would work, we’d have to find them. There are enough Complexes in this part of the country that...” but again, Fye cut him off.
“Isn’t the time passed for this kind of obfuscation, Kurogane? You know as well as I do where they’ll have been taken.”
Doumeki looked between the two of them, aware there was something more going on than he had the means to understand, but little able to muster interest in personal details when so much more was at stake.
Kurogane gave Fye a long glare, but finally gave in and supplied the answer. “It’s going to be the same one I let us go to trade with. The one where everything began.”
There was another dangerous silence, during which neither of the adults looked away.
“Do you blame me for this?” asked Kurogane at last.
Fye sighed. “No more than I have to,” he said. “No more than I blame you for bringing us all together, and giving us company we’d care for enough to miss and somewhere homelike enough that we’d stay long enough to be tracked down; for giving us anything worth having in this horrible world where no-one holds on to anything for long. No more than we all blame ourselves for not being able to stop it from happening.”
“Do you blame Watanuki?” Doumeki heard himself ask. The other two turned back to him as though they’d almost forgotten he’d been there.
“There’s no help in blaming him,” said Kurogane. “We’ve no more reason to think him responsible than Chi or the trading mission or anything else.”
“I suppose you can’t help but wonder,” said Fye, with a strange understanding. “He’s been here so long now that you stop thinking about these things, but so much would be different if we hadn’t let him join. But even you’d known what might follow, would you have changed your mind about whether we should have let him?”
It wasn’t a simple question. If Doumeki had known only that Watanuki might attract the attention of the Complex to their camp, then he would have left him where he’d been found, no question at all. But if he’d known everything that would follow… it was difficult to say what he would have decided.
Fye was right. There was no help wondering about it. What might have happened didn’t matter anymore.
Behind them, Syaoran coughed weakly, and the whole subject was quickly abandoned. Kurogane dropped back into a crouch by his side. Syaoran coughed once more and tried to sit up, managing to prop himself up high enough to look around despite wincing all the way through the process.
“You shouldn’t try to get up too quickly,” Kurogane warned. “You’ve been unconscious for several minutes.” He might as well have told the rain to stay in the clouds.
“What happened?” Syaoran asked, voice gradually steadying as he looked between the three remaining camp members who surrounded him. “Where… where’s Sakura? What…?”
The way none of them would meet his eyes was answer enough.
“Sakura!” Syaoran cried again and launched himself to his feet. He made it that far only to sway back under a wave of nausea and pain, and caught himself barely on the lab building wall and staggered forward, through nothing more than shear determination battling a condition that should have left anyone else bedridden for at least the rest of the day. Kurogane’s hand landed heavily on his shoulder before he could go another step, and the weight nearly threw Syaoran over sideways. Again he held his balance, barely.
“I told you, you’re in no condition to stand. Or fight,” said Kurogane.
“You… let go of me!” Syaoran shook Kurogane’s hand off him with surprising force. “Sakura… Sakura was taken by them, and you... you let them take her! None of you even tried...”
“It wouldn’t have mattered how hard we’d fought, we wouldn’t have won,” said Kurogane. “You saw how many there were.”
“But they came here looking for Sakura!” Syaoran protested once more as if that simple fact could negate all logic that came before. To his mind, it surely did. “You could at least have tried! You’re useless cowards, all of you…”
There Syaoran stopped completely because Kurogane had punched him across the face. Weak and battered as the boy was, the blow connected hard enough to send him sprawling back to the earth, unfit to do anything that would break his fall. He looked up at Kurogane again from the ground, face a mask of betrayal and shock.
The moment over, Kurogane looked as passive as he ever had. “Do you think she would thank you for dying for her? Didn’t you hear what she was crying out to you when you were fighting them? She was terrified for you. Did you want to leave her the rest of her life blaming herself for your death? Don’t imagine you’re the only one who lost someone they cared about today.”
Syaoran looked down and away, chastised at last. Kurogane went on speaking.
“If I let you up now, what were you going to do? The place they’re being taken is many weeks journey away on foot, and more heavily guarded than the tower. Even if you made it there it would be hopeless for you.”
“What are we going to do?” Syaoran asked quietly, his voice cracking with the effort of those words. “Isn’t there anything…?”
“I don’t know,” replied Kurogane. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. But I won’t tell you to give up yet, and if you still want to die for her, you’ll have your chance yet.”
In the meantime, that new chapter certain people were clamoring for after the sort-of-cliffhanger of the last one is done - and even back on the old chapter-a-week schedule for once! Though I make no promises that people will find it any less frustrating that the previous. Or a good few of the ones still to come. I mentioned how we're moving into the final arc now, yes? Suffice to say it's going to be that kind of ending. And that is all I will say on the matter.
Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Side Story 1
That was exactly as much warning as they had. In the last twenty-four hours before it happened, Chi picked up nothing of note at all - not so much as a suspicious burst of static - a condition they’d later presume must have been engineered on the message transmitters’ parts.
Like the day when Watanuki had joined them, Doumeki was out on his bike alone, on an errand of no unusual importance, when he heard the sound of an engine like none he’d ever heard before. Stranger still was that the sound had no clear direction. It almost seemed to come from everywhere until Doumeki realised it was coming from above, though even then he may well have written off the impression as an aural illusion had he not heard Kamui’s tale of flying machines scant days before. When he looked up at last, two long, dark shapes were moving across the sky above. Their forms tapered towards their tails and the blur of moving machine parts was visible above them, but there were no wings - they looked like nothing that should be fit to fly. The sense of wonder lasted exactly as long as it took him to identify which direction they were headed. Somehow, that was all it took - right from that moment, Doumeki already knew.
He was still ten minutes away from the camp when he kicked the bike up to the fastest speed it could take and went roaring for home. It would be one of those journeys in which every minute of took forever, and at once lasted no time at all.
The flying machines had vanished from sight and hearing behind the hills ahead well before Doumeki arrived. He found them again landed just outside the security fence, which had been ripped asunder as though it had been no stronger than chicken-wire to leave a wide, open gash as a pathway to the camp within, the edges of the torn metal still crackling with the high voltage current that ran through the wires. Now they were landed, the huge scale of the machines revealed against familiar grounded objects, he could see that both sported giant, three-spoked propellers from the centre of their roofs, with gaping hatches in their sides opening to on to portable ramps leading to the ground. From within had come more than a dozen well armed men who now stood scattered on both sides of the wounded fence, all dressed in the close fitting armour and helmets that Doumeki was unsurprised to recognise from his visit to the far-off Complex on the trading mission earlier that year. In a strange flash he found himself wondering whether the faces of Kazuhiko and Gingetsu were inside any of those helmets, and the sense of betrayal - even from an acquaintance that has lasted no more than a few uneasy hours - burned in his chest like a sudden flame.
Doumeki knew then he had made it back too late, but almost in the same thought he saw that even had he never gone out at all, he couldn’t have made it here fast enough to matter. Whatever had happened here in the few minutes it had taken him to return was already over - the troops were already leaving. Two of the men were carrying an unconscious comrade as they climbed back up the ramp, but Doumeki scarcely noticed them when behind, two more were escorting a figure who wore none of their armour. It was Watanuki. As far as Doumeki could see he was unhurt, but his eyes were lowered towards the earth before him, his whole posture such a picture of such unconditional submission that even the soldiers who were kept guard behind him had their guns halfway lowered, assured there was no fight left in their captive. If not for the sound of the bike approaching he probably would not have looked up once until he’d reached the gangplank to the flying machine they were headed for, and even when he did the movement was so dull and slow it was difficult to imagine he’d expected to see anything of note at all.
When he laid eyes on Doumeki everything changed. A hundred different things may have flashed across his face in the moment when he registered who was there - this was nothing he’d expected, it was terribly clear he wasn’t that Watanuki had resigned himself to the idea that he was going to be stolen away yet again without so much as seeing Doumeki again before he was gone. But what finally settled was the look of the utmost paralysing terror - more scared than Watanuki had ever looked of anything he’d ever encountered before. What Doumeki saw reflected in that face was the sight of the one thing the man behind had always feared most, had always believed he couldn’t escape - couldn’t ever be more than one step behind him. It wasn’t the soldiers that had scared him, or the uncertain fate before him, or even Doumeki himself - instead, in that moment, Doumeki saw that what had sent Watanuki into this state was the thought that the frustrating idiot he’d so foolishly allowed himself to grow to care about was not going to let this happen - he’d fight for him to the very last and he’d get himself killed for the sake of a freedom that couldn’t be won.
And Doumeki would have done. There and then, even against unsurmountable odds, something hardened within him and made him realise he truly would have fought, no matter how hopeless the odds - against every last man he could lay hands on with any strength he had left. If what had scared Watanuki so much had been anything but the fear that Doumeki would die for his sake, he very well may have done it, and done it for nothing more than the crime they’d committed by making Watanuki look that way.
But with that terrible plea on Watanuki’s face, that had become the one thing he couldn’t possibly do.
Doumeki hardly heard the voices of the soldiers, yelling at him to drop his weapon. Even as he complied and let his gun fall to the ground in front of him, it was certainly not their demands that compelled him.
The relief in Watanuki’s face when he saw Doumeki had surrendered was something all consuming, but it didn’t last. Far worse was a new emotion Doumeki had not even been able to see in Watanuki’s eyes until now - that had been so masked and overwhelmed by the first greater fear that perhaps even Watanuki had not been aware of it before, though it must have been with him on some level all along. This one, as beautifully contradictory as all great illogical human emotions, was the fear Doumeki would do exactly what Watanuki had begged him to: stand down and simply let him go.
It was the last thing Doumeki would see on Watanuki’s face before the hatchway closed behind him, the great propellers began to rotate until they whipped up a gale like a storm and the two machines lifted back into the sky.
There was nothing left in Doumeki but consuming numbness as he watched the machines fly away.
***
The camp Doumeki returned to seemed at first to have fallen utterly silent. He found Fye almost by stumbling on to him, sitting hunched over himself on the ledge that jutted from the wall on the far side of the lab building. Beyond, Syaoran lay unmoving on the ground, eyes closed and body sprawled as though he’d fallen straight down where he was standing, Kurogane leaning over him. Doumeki’s appearance around the corner got a sharp look from the last, a flicker of recognition from Fye, and not a blink from Syaoran. There was no-one else in sight.
“What happened?” Doumeki heard himself ask. It seemed the most inadequate question he could have voiced.
Fye gave a rough sob. “They’ve taken the girls.” He rocked forward once and back again, speaking to himself almost as much as to Doumeki. “All our dear girls…” In one of his hands, Doumeki saw he was clutching a torn bare wire by a portion still covered by protective casing. He didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
“Watanuki’s gone too,” said Doumeki. The name felt dry in his throat. Fye gave another helpless sob and turned a little towards Kurogane.
“This one’s still breathing,” Kurogane reported. “He shouldn’t be out too long.” There was a cut above his eye that was oozing blood, and Doumeki could already see that Kurogane was using his left arm much less than usual. Syaoran, by contrast, had no obvious injuries. Fye looked back down at the wire in his hands again - an automatic gesture, and Doumeki found himself having a useless flash of insight into what must have transpired in the camp in the minutes it had taken him to return.
“It was electrocution?” he guessed.
“What else could I have done?” Fye declared helplessly, moving shakily to his feet and absently brandishing the offending wire, still grasped in his hands like a smoking gun. “He wouldn’t stop fighting! He’d never have stopped once he realised they meant to take his Sakura away! Not even when they’d riddled him with bullets and torn him limb from limb, not even if she begged him to stop!”
“You weren’t in the wrong,” said Kurogane, also getting to his feet. “There was nothing else any of us could have done.”
“Oh, but you should have seen our boys fight,” said Fye, addressing Doumeki and finally throwing the wire to his feet, though not so carelessly that there was any danger the end would land on anyone. “They were so magnificent, right to the last - even outnumbered and outgunned. Why, they took down five men between them before they were subdued!” He gave a weak laugh. “But it was hopeless from the first!”
The man Doumeki had seen being carried into the machine must have been the last of those five. It was too late now for even the news that the others had fought to instil any more guilt in Doumeki that he’d chosen not to do likewise, but the weight of his failure to do anything to protect Watanuki settled all the heavier.
“This was no random raid. They were prepared,” said Kurogane, a dull proclamation. “They knew exactly what they’d find here. Exactly who they were looking for. The three of them who see ghosts were what they were after. Chi as well.”
“How?” asked Doumeki. Fye just shook his head.
“Chi,” said Kurogane, “Is it possible they found a way to trace…”
“Oh come now, Kuro-dear,” Fye interrupted, “now is a poor time for you to pretend to forget you ever learned the difference between input and output. Chi has never been more than a passive receiver - she has no transmission circuits I’ve not disabled. They could no more have traced her here than… than you could speak with your ears!”
There was silence between the three of them for a while.
“What about Kohane?” Doumeki suggested. “Could we have been wrong that they wouldn’t find a way to track her?”
“Even if they did, that doesn’t account for how they knew about the others,” said Kurogane. “No-one outside the camp knew Sakura was here. Since she joined she’s hardly set foot outside.”
“Watanuki should be the same,” said Doumeki, feeling in one of those unjustifiable ways that it was something that needed to be said. “How could the Complexes have known so much?”
Fye threw up his hands. “Who knows indeed! They’re the Complexes, they’ve all manner of tools at their disposal of the likes you’ve never seen. I could spin you a dozen different possible stories of how they might have achieved a magic trick like this, each as unlikely as the last. Two dozen!”
“Nothing those troops gave away any hint,” said Kurogane darkly. “There’s no way for us to know.”
It would be every bit as hopeless to ask ‘why’. All they had left were practicalities. “What do we do now?” asked Doumeki.
“Why, we’ll all go charging into the Complex on pure white steeds and rescue them all, sweeping every one of those nasty soldiers aside in our path!” said Fye, gesturing dramatically. “What do you think we can do?”
Kurogane hesitated, wrestling with some unspoken portion of his thoughts even in the face of Fye’s irreverence. “Even if that would work, we’d have to find them. There are enough Complexes in this part of the country that...” but again, Fye cut him off.
“Isn’t the time passed for this kind of obfuscation, Kurogane? You know as well as I do where they’ll have been taken.”
Doumeki looked between the two of them, aware there was something more going on than he had the means to understand, but little able to muster interest in personal details when so much more was at stake.
Kurogane gave Fye a long glare, but finally gave in and supplied the answer. “It’s going to be the same one I let us go to trade with. The one where everything began.”
There was another dangerous silence, during which neither of the adults looked away.
“Do you blame me for this?” asked Kurogane at last.
Fye sighed. “No more than I have to,” he said. “No more than I blame you for bringing us all together, and giving us company we’d care for enough to miss and somewhere homelike enough that we’d stay long enough to be tracked down; for giving us anything worth having in this horrible world where no-one holds on to anything for long. No more than we all blame ourselves for not being able to stop it from happening.”
“Do you blame Watanuki?” Doumeki heard himself ask. The other two turned back to him as though they’d almost forgotten he’d been there.
“There’s no help in blaming him,” said Kurogane. “We’ve no more reason to think him responsible than Chi or the trading mission or anything else.”
“I suppose you can’t help but wonder,” said Fye, with a strange understanding. “He’s been here so long now that you stop thinking about these things, but so much would be different if we hadn’t let him join. But even you’d known what might follow, would you have changed your mind about whether we should have let him?”
It wasn’t a simple question. If Doumeki had known only that Watanuki might attract the attention of the Complex to their camp, then he would have left him where he’d been found, no question at all. But if he’d known everything that would follow… it was difficult to say what he would have decided.
Fye was right. There was no help wondering about it. What might have happened didn’t matter anymore.
Behind them, Syaoran coughed weakly, and the whole subject was quickly abandoned. Kurogane dropped back into a crouch by his side. Syaoran coughed once more and tried to sit up, managing to prop himself up high enough to look around despite wincing all the way through the process.
“You shouldn’t try to get up too quickly,” Kurogane warned. “You’ve been unconscious for several minutes.” He might as well have told the rain to stay in the clouds.
“What happened?” Syaoran asked, voice gradually steadying as he looked between the three remaining camp members who surrounded him. “Where… where’s Sakura? What…?”
The way none of them would meet his eyes was answer enough.
“Sakura!” Syaoran cried again and launched himself to his feet. He made it that far only to sway back under a wave of nausea and pain, and caught himself barely on the lab building wall and staggered forward, through nothing more than shear determination battling a condition that should have left anyone else bedridden for at least the rest of the day. Kurogane’s hand landed heavily on his shoulder before he could go another step, and the weight nearly threw Syaoran over sideways. Again he held his balance, barely.
“I told you, you’re in no condition to stand. Or fight,” said Kurogane.
“You… let go of me!” Syaoran shook Kurogane’s hand off him with surprising force. “Sakura… Sakura was taken by them, and you... you let them take her! None of you even tried...”
“It wouldn’t have mattered how hard we’d fought, we wouldn’t have won,” said Kurogane. “You saw how many there were.”
“But they came here looking for Sakura!” Syaoran protested once more as if that simple fact could negate all logic that came before. To his mind, it surely did. “You could at least have tried! You’re useless cowards, all of you…”
There Syaoran stopped completely because Kurogane had punched him across the face. Weak and battered as the boy was, the blow connected hard enough to send him sprawling back to the earth, unfit to do anything that would break his fall. He looked up at Kurogane again from the ground, face a mask of betrayal and shock.
The moment over, Kurogane looked as passive as he ever had. “Do you think she would thank you for dying for her? Didn’t you hear what she was crying out to you when you were fighting them? She was terrified for you. Did you want to leave her the rest of her life blaming herself for your death? Don’t imagine you’re the only one who lost someone they cared about today.”
Syaoran looked down and away, chastised at last. Kurogane went on speaking.
“If I let you up now, what were you going to do? The place they’re being taken is many weeks journey away on foot, and more heavily guarded than the tower. Even if you made it there it would be hopeless for you.”
“What are we going to do?” Syaoran asked quietly, his voice cracking with the effort of those words. “Isn’t there anything…?”
“I don’t know,” replied Kurogane. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. But I won’t tell you to give up yet, and if you still want to die for her, you’ll have your chance yet.”