Page 82 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

The man had come to the bars to look at the cigarettes. He must have been mafia, because he was missing the ends of two fingers – they did that, if you didn’t do a job properly – and he had a tattoo on his arm. He looked puzzled. ‘Trust me to do that, do you?’

‘Course I do,’ she said. She didn’t, but just occasionally, trust was a force in itself. ‘I think we all know which side of these bars the psychopaths are on.’

She saw him warm, just fractionally. She put the cigarettes down by the stove where no one could snatch them, went to the bars, and helped him find a way to grab her hair without hurting the new cut too much.

At ten o’clock, she took Oemoto some tea in the infirmary, where the doctor was dabbing at the puffy mess that was one side of his face.

‘I’m ever so grateful that you rescued me,’ she said, making serious eyes at both of them. ‘I made you that tea. Good thing you like it so much really; you don’t look like you’ll be able to manage anything but tea for quite a while.’

THIRTY-TWO

Aokigahara, 14th February 1889

After a long uphill climb, the path came out on the bank of a reservoir. The water was silent, and on the far side, a gaunt metal tower hummed and sparked with blue coils of static. Thaniel had to sit down for a while and watch it, because his chest hurt. He didn’t want to think about going all the way back. The walk up had taken hours.

He hated reservoirs. He had grown up in woods that flooded sometimes into pools and ponds that had no clear edges, and after seeing water free to do as it liked, something felt wrong about a dam. The quickest way to the tower, though, was to walk across on the dam, so he did, feeling taut with the awareness of the weight of the water on one side and the huge steep drop to the river on the other. Somewhere, he could hear turbines. Below him, the water roared. It went into a narrow river, all white over rocks and falls until it evened out much lower down into a silver curve. On the other side it was dead quiet. There were no birds. Ahead, there was a much louder snap, and the air crackled.

There was a gate at the end of the dam, and a gatehouse. Because it was the only tall thing but the mountain itself, there was an optical illusion around the tower from further away that made it look smaller than it was. It was colossal.

‘Stop!’ someone shouted. It made Thaniel jump. ‘Don’t cross the white line!’

He looked down. Someone had painted a thick white line across the way in. Up in the gatehouse was a soldier who was pointing a rifle at him. He put his hands up.

‘I’m from the Ministry,’ he called back. ‘I’m here to see the director.’

‘I’ve not been told to expect anyone.’

‘Of course you haven’t, all the bloody telegraphs are down.’

There was a pause. From the gatehouse, even in the mist, it would be obvious that he was a foreigner, but Mori’s imperial Japanese did its job and the soldier stepped back to talk to someone else.

‘He’s coming,’ the soldier said when he reappeared. ‘Don’t move.’

‘May I put my hands down?’

‘Keep them out of your pockets.’

Thaniel crossed his arms and paced to try and keep warm. Now that he was waiting instead of walking, the gunshot wound hurt a lot more. It was a blessedly short wait before the soldier came down and unlocked the gate.

‘He says you can come in.’ The soldier watched him curiously but didn’t say anything else.

The door at the base of the tower opened and a smart man in a suit leaned out. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting in the cold; we’ve had a few people try to wander in lately – ah – you’re not from the Ministry?’

‘Says everyone I ever meet,’ Thaniel said. When he stepped over the threshold, the air smelled of metal and damp like before, but now it had a steel-string hum in it. It was dim inside from the frost that clouded the small windows. It had made fantastic patterns, like pine trees.

‘Oh. Half and half?’

‘Yes, but citizen and all.’ It was parachuting across the face of the obvious truth, which was that there were moon rocks more Japanese than he was, but sounding right counted for much more than looking right.

‘I see. How curious. You know, I thought you were a ghost.’

‘I saw plenty on the way in.’

‘Yes, yes; very clear in the mist, aren’t they. What can I do for you?’

‘Tell me how you’re getting on, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.’

‘I was told I had wholly free rein,’ the man frowned.