Chapter Text
“You are lost…” the man's voice rang crisp, melded in the peal of engines.
They throttled mercilessly across the suffocated black sky and rained ash and devastation unto everything below. What little could be washed away by our tears stained our skins black and bore our wills hollow.
Come to me.
Shizue let slip her grip on the man's hand, the poor old creature slipping further and further into the crackling monster's awaiting timber maw. It knew it needn't move, needn't flail, sitting patiently and applying slow, fatal pressure into the man's shins and calves, searing them with red hot iron teeth that sprang from the rubble like a cruel dozen switchblades.
Beside, on the road, villagers scrambled for safety. The sirens had sounded late.
What, then, was she doing in the shadow of a hovel, soles struggling against the mud-soaked rug and ruined plaster, littered with food droppings, slick with grease, not from any vehicle but from sweat and grout. A wet kerchief hung around her neck. She had forsaken its protection.
“Let me go,” said the man. “You're just a girl. Find an adult. Then come back for me.”
The adults scrambled like ants. Scrambled and tripped over their own sandals and shoved the smaller of them out of the way like their lives meant little more than the ashes drizzling from above. They wouldn't have noticed the sorry man trapped beneath his hovel, hidden from sight by the climbing pyre and the dizzying shadows it cast.
“You hear me, girl? Where are your parents?”
Her mother had been at the market. The market burned first.
“Quiet,” said Shizue, heaving again. “Move your legs.”
“Can't. What's it look like?”
“Can you shuffle those nails out of the way?”
“They're nails, kid. Even if I live, I'm never walking upright again.”
“Quiet.”
“I'm already whispering. What're you—?”
“Then be quieter… p-please be quiet and just…”
Sinking her weight into the timber in an attempt to shove it aside, it groaned like a groggy bull, digging its teeth in. The old man wailed. “You're not helping! Just find someone! Anyone!”
“I'm trying!”
“I said find someone else!”
“They don't care! There's no one else!”
“Then find your father—!” Another scream escaped him as Shizue heaved tile and wood, the rusted nails grazing her fingers, pinpricks of heat welling up on her ash-caked skin. “— Your mother! I don't care! Stop pushing!”
She ignored him and pried a board loose with all the strength a ten-year-old could muster. It screamed in pain just like the man. Taking a house apart always felt a painful affair. This one was tucked away in a lonely corner of the river pier, as if ashamed of itself, but that didn't change much of its essence. Mother warned that no person nor spirit would be happy with the process, which was akin to a butchering, but both would be thankful for the result when it had passed. Always.
But that was what it felt like—killing something. She would kill the house to save its one living tenant, and the house complained and thrashed in protest. She worked without proper tools, taking apart fixtures and straightening out bent nails one at a time, without her father to guide her, without her mother to offer support, but she'd save him, she promised herself.
Minutes passed. The smoke encroached.
She braced herself to pull one last time, the most stubborn bricks finally out of the way. The nails that broke skin, she could figure out later. Right now, the man had stopped moving.
Shizue stepped back. That didn't mean he was gone. He still wheezed out thin, hacking breaths. He was running out of time, sure, and with the way she was breathing, she wasn't long for the inferno either. But she could save him. She could save all of them.
Wiping the sweat and blood off her palms and grabbing onto his wrists, she tugged.
That was until a pair of arms wrapped around her waist and lifted her off the gravel before she could so much as register the change in scenery, her hands having slipped free of the man's wrists and legs dangling powerless, limp.
She grit her teeth. No!
A fiercer hold on her waist discouraged her. A face she wouldn't have pegged for a hero's glared back: cruel, awash with creases, a complete stranger. As she kicked and struggled, the interloper sprinted to catch up with the rest of the crowd, pulling her and the trapped man apart, his agonised pleas for help coming to an end with a heart-rending SNAP!
She tore her head away. Tamp it down. The guilt, the sorrow, the pain that threatened to rob her ground from underneath. She couldn’t have saved the poor man, however much she wanted to convince herself otherwise. She'd already known there was nothing she could have done for him alone. But nobody else seemed to heed him—nobody else seemed to care. Nobody looked twice when he shambled down the street in the days leading up to the attack. Everyone seemed to think him a ghost already, diving through garbage and crates and feeding off the peels. The soldiers sneered at him and their wives resented him. Only Shizue ever seemed to notice he wasn't clinging fast to his life as most were, even past times of debt and despair. Had he no family to seek him?
Why did she have to be the one to try?
The way she'd gotten used to such scenes sent slithers under her skin. Sure, mother would always promise her that she was too young for it. Adults always seemed so eager to protect her, but she hardly felt it—neither did the other children—and she'd learned to pretend with them. Pretend they reassured her, and that way less things would seem out of their control. Had she been hoping for too much? A simple little girl with hopes that were even less, hoping to saving a life? While everyone else barely clung to theirs.
The meddling stranger hoisted her up onto broad shoulders with those strong, bulky arms, each at least twice as thick as hers—they have likely accomplished a lot more than her sticks too, swaying in the wind. “Duck, kid,” he said, and she followed. That was what good kids did in war. Good kids got to stay alive.
She clutched the interloper's shoulder, and weakly crowed in his ear, “Go back for him.”
The man said nothing for a while, then murmured, “You’re still a child. If you could save just one thing, save your own life first. Always.”
Smoke ate her lungs. She hacked out coughs. Wind batted hair and sent ash stabbing into her eyes.
She wanted to cry.
Her saviour didn't speak any more, didn't attempt to comfort her—just ran, heaved breaths, and tried to force smoke from his throat. She prayed for him to say something. Sweet nothings would be fine. Was it too much to expect from him a mother?
You wish for a father figure?
The hallucinations were growing worse with the smog. That was what they were called. Strange voices that called out to you with garbled nonsense. Except this one wasn't garbled.
Shizue clutched her wet kerchief to her mouth.
And breathed.
The musk set free a wave of vertigo. She clung to ragged bones. After, she dangled her hand beside the man's cheek, proffering the damp rag to him. He ignored her.
She tried again. He ignored her.
In the end, she was but a small, insignificant silhouette in the hellfire. Shizue retreated her hand without a sound.
After a long while, the man finally asked: “Where's your family?”
Shizue tried to speak, give form to the gurgling hatred in the pits of her stomach. Nothing came out.
Mother…
Her limp wrist grappled against her saviour's shoulder and welling tears dissolved ash, though she gave them no permission. She scowled at the man. “She's in the market…” the murmur came. “She was buying more tea…—”
“Alright,” he said. “You don’t have to go on.”
Men and women of every build and every rung of wealth in the town drudged onward in miserable file. The climbing pyre humbled everyone. Maybe they'd stop laughing at her for being a kid.
They are puny.
Looking around with half-closed eyes, at the cowering mass of flesh and soul so devoid of life but fearful of death, was she really the one so small? Or was everyone else just pretending to be big?
Mother always knew the answer to these things, so the question built at the back of her mind, ready to spring. When she saw the greying woman again, Shizue would ask her how she always stood so big, even when everyone else scuttled around like ants over a stove.
They'd reached the old bridge by then; the trek to the bunker would always slow near the choke point as the scuttling ants crossed one after the other. In the still quiet, she took the time to whisper the departed old man a prayer… In doing so, her hand had unconsciously snaked onto the pendant that hung around her neck. She froze, and held the sooty thing up to her nose. It glimmered in embers.
The camera photograph inside the locket preserved if slightly obscured. Her mother and father were smiling back, a bouquet of lilies between them.
Her heart shuddered. A weight fallen away. She thought she'd lost it in the chaos.
Tears threatened to shore her dignity a second time. She secured the silvery chain around her neck with lethargic fingers, clutching weak at her saviour's shoulders. After, she stared. At the sky. At the smoke. At the ruined town.
At where the markets laid cloaked in the inferno, and her mother waited for rescue.
Her legs dangled above the gravel. She couldn't plant them firm. The man was too tall.
Something approached from above. Engines roared. The night sky flashed gold and red. More planes.
The mass screamed. She could only watch.
It never ended.
***
The thunderous crack of broken earth ripped her ears as she threw her face down, burying it into the stranger's neck. Cascading cobblestones and shredding timber made their presence known to the wayless crowd. Her saviour launched off the ground, trying to shove past the panicking townsfolk, but his footing failed him, and he crashed back-first into a wall of searing concrete.
His weight suffocated and crushed Shizue, and she stifled a scream.
“Sorry! I'll try to—”
Another explosive rumble, this time from the wall behind them. In seconds, it split apart, bursting outwards, launching the both of them forward onto a crumbling porch.
She struggled, she yelled, she clawed. The man tried to push off as the crowd stampeded past, groaning, and picking blood from his lip with a thumb that—she was sure—was more crooked than a thumb ought to be. Another shockwave rippled through the ground and sent him hurtling into a gaping pothole left by shells from the last assault.
Her chest hurt. It hurt like it never had before. Something sharp pressed dangerously close to her heart every time she moved.
She recalled her saviour’s words.
I could save just one thing.
Save myself…
…
She moved anyway.
Shot up from her asphalt cradle, Shizue chased after her mother. Nobody tried to stop her. Nobody cared.
Smoke curled in from all around her. She sprinted on.
Market stalls fell out and crashed into dirt, embers and flames laughing victorious. She sprinted on.
Lamp lights flickered, gas swimming in glass cages eager to meet the blaze. The streets of the market, once so familiar but now so distant in her memory, clouded all manner of sentiments—idyllic peace and mirth—in the swirling black smoke. People begged for help, trapped under rubble. A younger boy looked up at her with almost hopeful eyes, hugging a doorframe with a sprained knee trailing into his house behind him. One of the neighbourhood kids that she refused to search her memory for.
She grit her teeth, shut her ears and kept running, not wishing to see the faint hope flushing from his face. She didn't have the strength—she could barely move without her ribs turning against her. Save one thing. Just one thing. She rushed past outstretched hands and agonised screams and calls for her to flee. Not one resembled her mother's.
An adult woman's voice. Drown out the men and the children. Drown out the guilt. She was a child. They'd understand.
People tried to reach out to her. People tried to save her. She dodged the sight of other evacuees in case they cared enough to stop, studying their faces from discreet positions behind refuse and debris. What if she pointed the trapped victims out to them? What if they tried to stop her…? She forced herself to think only of her mother.
Nothing else mattered, she rushed to convince herself. No one else could be saved.
Just one thing.
“LOOK OUT!!”
A steel pole carrying that proud sunrise flag now devoured by the flame it was meant to herald plummeted down for her. A dream they were meant to share—that they made her and Mother share—flinging itself for her neck like a militant's blade. She clutched her head and scrambled to run aside when a sudden but powerful gust of wind flung it against a tiled roof instead, throwing chips and sending a stream of ceramic tumbling down into dust. She screamed as it blew past, whisking with it sand and fabric that stuck to sweat. It nearly knocked her off her feet, sandal rope tugging strong at her toe, warning her not to wrench her ankle.
She wrenched it anyway.
She screamed.
Another roar of engines, and another powerful gust of wind. Something whistled as it plunged for earth.
It never ended.
***
Eventually, she found cover under an abandoned stall—it stood miraculously unmarred by the rampage, hidden behind an alley nook. The tattered plastic tarp raised for a roof flailed with a potent futility. She buried her nose deeper into her damp rag.
Curse it. Curse it all.
Blinking the invasive sand out of her eyes, she shut them hard, wet ash like glue staining her vision and burning it black.
What else was she to do? She'd evacuate, but where would she go without her mother? Why did Mother have to leave home minutes before the sirens went off? Why did the sirens have to sound so late? Why had Shizue chased after her? The airstrikes came strong and vengeful, and her mother was probably already—
She wanted to wake up.
Her ankles creaked and throbbed, scorched sinew threading them. They bled pain, though no blood trickled on skin.
Stop it. Stop it now, please!
All she wanted was her mother.
“… Shizue…?”
Nothing else mattered…
Nothing else…
Her eyes snapped open, and she wheeled her head to the source of the sound. Someone deeper in the alley.
Had she misheard?
Gathering up her legs, leaning an arm to a mottled steel beam, she stared down the darkened, too-clean path. No flame burned there.
She raced toward her. The sting of scattered burns and the aching chasm of thirst crawling up her throat seemed like drizzle to her heart's dreadful typhoon.
She was there. She had to be.
“Shizue…” it called out again.
Mother… mother…
Mother… I'm here…
She arrived at the end of the passage. An empty lot, barren, a single leafless tree hanging tired and scraggy where stone brick gave way to soil. Nobody waited there.
No… no!
That can't be! Where had the voice come from?
“Shizue…”
She swivelled around, nearly taking her ankle again, the word rasping too close to her ear. Something trapped under rubble… someone—
A corpse.
Like many she'd seen on her way, trapped under fallen concrete.
Limp. Ugly. Just another poor sap she couldn't save. But what had she expected?
A pair of red-framed glasses, the plastic snapped in half, set against flame-eaten ears. A torn dress that ripped along the leg and waist, one end of the threads crushed under rock from a collapsed ceiling and stretching a mangled web. Through the reek of blood and burnt hair, a familiar perfume of lilies and tea.
No…
Look away, a thought rang. You idiot, look away! Her head wouldn't let her. Her neck refused to move.
Hollow, dead eyes. Pupils fixed forward… they peered back at her, almost apologetic.
Shizue tripped over a decaying branch, her bony rump bashing into the asphalt. The light of flames outside encroached. The shadow of night flyers loomed, their engines relentless and mechanical and cruel and uncaring and…
And inevitable.
Unending.
Her mother had died in terror.
It would take a while for that to sink in.
But that was alright. She had all the time in the world.
She crawled to her knees, found a quiet patch of stone undisturbed by ash, and nursed them close to her breast. She forced herself to smile, to tamp down the guilt, and—
She wanted to disappear.
Something flared in the back of her mind.
I can make it go away.
I don't believe you.
Just state your wish. It will be so.
Take me to another world, she begged through tears, a prayer as futile as the ones before, but one she was compelled to utter. A world where I could be happy, a world without war and without strife. A world where I could be with full stomach and heart. A world where I could save people—where I have power, where no one has to die abandoned…
A world with my mother. Take me there.
Please…
Then it is done.
That same chilling voice. It called to her, caressed her scalp in electrifying ways…
That was never her mother.
A twister of flame sprouted around her, siphoning out of cracks in the ground, twirling in beautiful and impossible ways. She wanted to run, she wanted to scream…
But they were so peaceful.
Her tears had run dry. The growing heat had dried them for her.
“Your wish shall be granted,” the voice again said robbed of its feminine tinge. “And you shall be mine there.”
Come.