Page 104 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

He moved across to the window to sit with Mori on the sill. It was colder, but Mori had gone there naturally when Willis tried to set him near the fire. He was looking out across the lawn, which, being downhill, was all in view despite the lowness of the windows. The protesters had gone back to their tents. It looked like a tent village now, and cheerful, hung about with lightbulbs on strings and dotted with fires. New banners were going up. More expel-the-barbarians, but other things too, fiercer, less official. The noise had been rising since yesterday.

Mori wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at a point in the air directly above a tiny sapling cherry tree. He wasn’t staring either; he was only watching the garden, his eyes moving, but always much above where any of the plants or the people were. Thaniel leaned close to him to try and follow his eye line, in case there was something in the air he hadn’t seen before, but there wasn’t. There was only the snow.

‘You were at Abashiri prison?’ Thaniel asked Takiko at last.

She nodded. ‘And he was at Kabato prison.’ She made a sound somewhere been a snort and a hum. ‘He got himself to me, so I got him here.’ She didn’t sound like she thought she had managed it very well. She looked bad up close. Her knuckles were cracked from cold, and the glow of wealth that had haloed her at Yoruji was all eroded away. He thought there were lines across her forehead that hadn’t been there before.

‘Are you all right?’

She lifted her eyebrows at him as if he’d called her a silly bitch. ‘What?’

Thaniel smiled. It was exactly the way Mori answered questions like that. ‘How do I say that in samurai? Buck up, horse-face?’

She laughed. ‘You should write a dictionary. I’m all right. Sorry.’

He shrugged to say he didn’t mind. Between them, Mori was as still as the trees.

‘I don’t think he can find where now is,’ Takiko said.

‘Sorry?’

‘He’s been getting it wrong by … a few minutes at first, and then he was hours or days out, and by the time we arrived at the dock, I couldn’t have a conversation with him. I think he’s off by much more now.’ She swallowed. He heard it. She sounded ill. ‘Years I think. He was talking about our son, going to school.’A child. Thaniel couldn’t speak for a while. Then he never wanted to speak again. He wanted to find a snowdrift and die in it – just get out of the way, out of the life Mori was supposed to have.He’d been wondering for weeks now what the point of all this was, why Mori had come to Japan at all, knowing what would happen to him. But a child was a very good reason indeed. Maybe even a child who could do what Mori could do. Maybe that child would change the world, or maybe it wasn’t that, maybe it was just about having someone who understood – someone who was Mori’s own, not a glad-rag family he had pulled together from a place so far from home that every single conversation had to be signalled across the oceans that separated how they thought.

‘He killed a woman,’ Takiko said abruptly. ‘I saw it. Kuroda was drunk, and angry, and he killed his wife. She was my best friend. Mori stood back and watched. When I asked him about it, he said he needed Kuroda, and she had been about to send Kuroda to prison. That was all. He had plans, so she died. I think he’s here with us because we’re supposed to help him, but – I don’t want to. Do you honestly think he should be free to do that? Because that seems to be what we’re saying here. Either he stays like this, or … we let something dangerous and inhuman back into the world.’

Thaniel drew both hands over his face. ‘He’s not inhuman. It’s for something.’

Takiko turned sharper than usual as she lost another few motes of patience. ‘Yes, obviously it’s for something. What if, in the really long run, it’s better if thousands of people die now and Japan folds under Russian rule? What if it turns out that insane nationalists like those pricks outside end up being the deciding vote in everything, and a powerful Japanese Empire now means atrocities later?’

Thaniel nearly laughed. ‘If he wanted to stop that, he wouldn’t use a war to do it. Some minister somewhere would trip over a screw and change his mind about what to have for dinner and the world would turn.’

‘You sound a lot like someone hearing hooves and scrabbling for reasons it might be zebras and not horses.’

Thaniel shook his head. ‘And you sound like someone who hears ticking in a watchmaker’s shop and thinks it has to be a watch, and not a clockwork octopus.’ He sighed. ‘He’s a zebra person, is all I’m saying. I just … he’s good. He is. Whatever your friend died for, it will be something good.’ He glanced up. ‘And you must think so too, or you wouldn’t have rescued him from Abashiri.’

She was pushing her hands together. ‘I owed him that one thing. No more, though. If he’d just told me what it was for … but he didn’t. All he would say is that he needed Kuroda.’

‘No, he wouldn’t tell me either, but he wasn’t being difficult when I asked. I think he was ashamed.’

‘What’s shame got to do with it?’

‘Shame shuts you down, doesn’t it.’

‘Does it?’

‘Does it?’ Thaniel echoed, not quite able to believe she was asking, but then, she had nothing to feel shame about. ‘I wake up in the night trying to think what I’d tell my sister if she ever found out about …’ He could only bring himself to nod at Mori. ‘And I still don’t know. Nothing, probably.’

Takiko was quiet for a long time. ‘He let me hurt him. Quite badly. I hit him. He didn’t even put his hands up.’

‘Why do you sound surprised? He wasn’t going to hit you back, was he? Christ, he wouldn’t hit me back.’

‘But people hit me all the time.’

He didn’t know what to say to that. He had to let his neck bend and stare at the floor. He didn’t think there was anything to say. The world had been pretty savage to her and a few words from some gaijin musician weren’t going to convince her that Mori was any different.

‘The hell is he looking at, anyway?’ she sighed. She was right; Mori was watching the far corner as though something were going on there, but there was only a bookcase.

‘Something that might happen there in ten years’ time probably,’ Thaniel said heavily.