Page 100 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Mori stopped on the jetty. The others ran on ahead. She shook his arm.

‘They’ll leave us behind, move.’

It was a clear struggle for him to talk. ‘This … jetty will be burned down soon. I can’t really see. I can’t …’

‘Shut your eyes. Hold my arm.’

By the time they reached the ship, one of the men had already got the engine going. The yakuza man helped Mori over the rail, then lifted Takiko. She thanked him and locked her face into a smile, so that no one would see she was almost certain they would steer the ship wherever the hell they wanted and pitch her and Mori overboard if they complained too much.

When she looked back the way they had come, the prison was burning.

FORTY-TWO

Watching Mori felt like living in the lag of someone else’s déjà vu. Whenever the boat rocked as it struggled through the ice, Mori leaned into the corner where his seat met the wall a second before he needed to. It was maddening, because it wasn’t enough warning to copy him, and so Takiko found herself jolted about, always knowing fully it was about to happen. Mori watched her as if he couldn’t quite see what the trouble was. He didn’t eat when someone brought in some fish, just caught from over the side. The others were ravenous, and so was she.

‘Not hungry?’ she said. She couldn’t believe it. The bones in his hands showed too much.

‘What?’

‘You haven’t eaten yet.’

Mori moved the bowl toward himself and picked at it, slowly, as if they had just eaten and nothing but good manners had persuaded him to even look at it. Before long he left it again and ignored her when she tried to tell him to have more. He was looking over at the far corner, at a stack of newspapers.

‘Do you want …?’

‘No. Someone’s left some French pornography over there, it’s horrible.’

All around the ship, the ice broke and clunked, groaning. Sometimes she couldn’t tell which noises were from the ice, and which from the hull. One of the men knew how to steer a boat, and they were all keeping pretty jolly, but everyone was staying very quiet about how rusty the hull was, and how the Narwhal had probably been docked for repairs.

Takiko nudged Mori and gave him some soup – it was just miso boiled up from an old cube someone had unearthed from a cupboard, hardly more than flavoured water, but it was better than nothing – hoping that having to hold something liquid was a better anchor than a bowl of sashimi he could ignore without burning himself. Mori touched the edge of the cup, but then stopped and looked out of the window, where there was a sea eagle on the ice. She saw him forget about the soup.

Someone came in and rifled through the pile of newspapers. ‘Ooh, nice,’ he said, over something with a black cover.

Mori pushed his hand over his eyes, then seemed to forget. ‘I miss radio,’ he said. ‘What do people do on long journeys?’

‘What’s radio?’ Takiko said. She sighed. ‘No, I don’t care. Look, I know you’re not hungry, but you haven’t eaten. Think about it. Please.’ She picked up the bowl and put it in his hands again. He put it straight down.

‘I can’t read books, I always know what happens.’

‘Unless you eat that,’ she said experimentally, ‘I am going to punch you in the eye.’

He pressed one hand over his eye, and took the bowl.

She sat back once he had got a respectable way through it, feeling like a bully. ‘What will happen when we reach Tokyo?’ she said.

He ran his fingertips over a few inches of the window pane, exactly level with his own temple. It was where he would have hit his head, if she had knocked him hard enough. ‘Say again?’

‘Has – something gone wrong?’ she said. She hadn’t meant to say it, but it was self-preservation; if she hadn’t asked, she would have drowned in it. ‘You’re not – well.’

‘The legation might be difficult,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s trouble …’

She felt like she was trying to swallow her own heart. It was torturous to see him like this, such a ruin of himself. ‘Hey. Do you know me?’

Nothing. She unfolded one of the blankets on the shelf behind them, because he must have been cold, even though the part of him that should have known to shiver had gone wherever the part that should have been hungry was. He was just present enough to hold it when she put it around him, but after a while, his fingers slackened and the blanket fell.

‘Hey, miss,’ the yakuza man said from the doorway of the little bridge cabin. ‘You should come and see this.’

As she got up, something huge boomed, a long way off. It still shook the whole ship. She had to hold onto the door frame as she ducked into the cabin, and then she stopped dead when she saw what was beyond the windows.