Page 109 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

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.