Page 18 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

The docks fell away quickly. Soon they were walking on a path above an open beach with black sand. The little streams by the path were gurgling not because they ran over so many rocks, but because they were boiling. Six bent down to see, Katsu on her shoulder. They really did smell like something rotten. The rocks in the streams were sometimes covered in pale, yellow brine: sulphur. Thaniel had known Japan was volcanic, but it was a bit startling to see the obvious evidence of it right there on a beach. He had a sudden sense of standing not on solid ground at all, but a sort of gangway over the heavings of the lower earth. As if it heard him, the ground shook softly.

‘What was …’

‘Earthquake,’ Mori explained.

Thaniel smiled. The novelty of it was completely disproportionate to the tiny little shudder, but it had made Six giggle too. She stole Mori’s watch so that the chain made a fragile gold link between them.

Mori pointed out the house up ahead. It was just visible. It stood alone, a collection of curving roofs and gantries that spilled down the cliffside. At first Thaniel thought they must have been walking away from Tokyo, not towards it, but just after the next curve in the cliffs was the glitter of the city’s dockyards and the huge machines that lifted in freight. He felt stupid for having expected everything to be cherry trees and temples. Even from here, he could see that there were ironclads in dry dock. Furnaces in the shipyards glimmered like fireflies. A wilderness of masts reached up for the sky there, and great bramble-clusters of waterwheels.

They came level with a fence. It wasn’t high, and beyond it was a roll of land that led down to a park, full of black trees. There were men there, raking the leaves. It looked like an enormous job; the place had a wildness to it. He nearly said it was nice to live near a park when he realised it wasn’t a park at all, but the grounds of the house.

The path tipped them down onto the beach. Even through shoes, despite the cold weather, the sand felt warm. Six looked down at it.

‘Fancy a walk in the sea?’ Thaniel said. ‘I can take your shoes.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I find it all very suspicious.’ She wound Mori’s watch chain once more round her hand, which reeled him in nearer.

‘It’s just civilised,’ Mori said. ‘Free underfloor heating.’

‘Will we explode?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose that’s all right then.’

Thaniel was starting to feel light-headed. He put it down, firmly, to the sulphur, and ignored the voice at the back of his mind that had begun to sound like Dr Haverly, that said of course it wasn’t the sulphur. He had to slow down. All he wanted to do was sleep, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. Mori slowed to a dawdle and paused to pick up a shell, then another, and wondered aloud whether it would be twee to make a miniature astrolabe to sit in a clam like a pearl. There was nothing more certain in the world than Mori’s perfect disinterest in shells.

The shale of the shore swung upwards, and onto a gravel road. Gingkos were raining yellow leaves down across it with a continuous scratching sound. And then there was a high red gate, just two posts and an up-curving cross bar. Mori stopped just before it and looked up. He didn’t look happy to be home. He looked like he had come to the very edge of a battlefield.

‘If you catch a leaf, it’s lucky,’ Thaniel said, rather than ask what the matter was. The yellow leaves were eddying around them in a tiny sea wind.

Mori looked up. ‘Why?’

‘Just is.’

Mori held both hands out to either side. Two leaves settled in his palms one after the other. He gave Thaniel the nearest. ‘One each,’ he said quietly.

Thaniel took it. ‘Kei … what’s going on?’

If he heard, Mori didn’t show it. He was already looking up among the trees, quietly, as if he’d heard cannon shot coming and had no particular hope of getting out the way.

A woman whistled at them from a balcony half hidden in the trees.

‘Joy Featherworth, as I live and breathe!’

She’d said it in English. It was Mori’s name, translated; Thaniel had always known it without ever really thinking about it. It was jarring to hear in a stranger’s voice. He felt obscurely like she’d stolen something from him.

Mori laughed. There was something hopeless about it. It was happiness and despair together. ‘Pepper – are you coming down?’

The woman was in a plain white under-kimono, but her hair was swept up high and studded with jewelled pins that winked rainbows in the sun. She was having to hold some leaves aside to talk down to them on the path. An older lady batted at her, plainly wanting her not to, but she only batted her back with a tea-towel.

‘I’m being held hostage by the tailor, but I thought I’d shout at you from a tree and then you’d feel loved and wanted.’

Mori was still smiling. ‘I do.’

‘Miss? I don’t suppose there’s any sort of electrical supply,’ Six called up.

‘There is actually. Are you Miss Steepleton?’