Narcotic oblivion wound its tendrils through Milly’s mind, demanding she relinquish consciousness. Through stubborn willpower alone she remained awake and upright in her hospital bed, periodically flexing the muscles around her stump of an arm to jolt herself with pain through the drug-induced haze. Hours ago, in twilit awareness, she heard a nurse mention the injured were being evacuated from the city. With both Thomas and Sayuri off somewhere she refused to be moved while she was asleep. If they were staying, she was staying.

  “Really, ma’am, ya can’t—”

  Milly waved the nurse off with her remaining hand. “I’ll go last. Don’t worry about me.”

  “But the First Compatriot—”

  “I’m not a Goowie, I don’t answer to him.”

  Milly had repeated this conversation with four different nurses. She couldn’t complain too much, however, as the frustrating nurses were inadvertently helping her cling to consciousness. Not long after this exchange, Milly was suddenly aware of an unaccountable gulf of time that was neither sleep nor wakefulness. The large playhouse hall was dim now, though this was because the light outside was enough to turn the electric lights to preserve fuel.

  “Get her a wheelchair.”

  She looked for the source of this command and found Oliver Martin by her headboard.

  “I don’t need a wheelchair. It was my arm that got blown off, not my foot,” she said.

  “Trust, you’ll want that wheelchair.”

  To prove him wrong, Milly swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up and then promptly sat back down when nausea rippled through her and her knees threatened to drop out. Sitting down eased this and when she felt better she accepted the wheelchair.

  The First Compatriot himself wheeled her through the crowded and hectic halls, creating a bubble wherever he went. There was something performatively humbling about it, Milly thought, as though the shrewd revolutionary had calculated he could score points with her and with his supporters simultaneously by wheeling around a cripple.

  “I’m flattered you’d deign to cart me around, Oliver,” she said, pointedly using his name and not his title.

  “Gets people out of the way faster. I need you and Thomas squared away before I can move on to other matters,” he replied.

  “Sounds like a duty you could delegate.”

  “It’s not,” he replied.

  The First Compatriot steered her into a small room near the back of the first floor which had at one time probably been a clerk’s office by the wall-to-wall wooden shelving which even stretched over the doorway. It felt to Milly like a cage of binders and folders, half of which were packed and sealed in boxes. He parked her wheelchair against an emptied out desk and then disappeared for a moment before returning with Thomas.

  “How are you feeling, Milly?” Thomas asked.

  She blinked in surprise. His scraggly red beard had been shaved clean off. He looked ten years younger, or about the late 30s he actually was. She wasn’t sure what she thought of it.

  “I feel like the Shroud would be an improvement,” she replied.

  “If you wait around, I’m sure the ‘glomerates would be happy to oblige you,” Oliver Martin said, shutting the door behind him.

  “Where is Sayuri?” Thomas asked.

  “Around this time?” Oliver checked his wristwatch. “Hopefully gone. I put her on the first train of evacuees out.”

  Thomas’ nostrils flared. “You separated us?”

  Unbothered by Thomas’ growing anger—his armed bodyguards were right outside the door—the First Compatriot shrugged. “I needed her elsewhere.”

  “We’re not Goowies! That wasn’t your choice to make!” Thomas said.

  Milly watched Thomas’ hands fidget at his sides, knowing they yearned to be around Oliver’s neck. It was probably for her sake they remained at his side.

  “No,” Oliver replied, pressing a finger to Thomas’ chest. “You are not Goowies. Sayuri, as of this morning, is. And I seem to recall it was at your partner’s insistence that she join us. Am I mistaken?”

  Milly bit her lip. That was true, but she was also getting a bad feeling about where Oliver was going with this. Perhaps she had been too hasty encouraging them to throw their lots in with revolutionary zealots. Unfortunately, they had gotten Milly by her arteries, pumping full of red, ?frian blood. Nonetheless, she knew by her experiences with GGUW-occupied lofhearth that they could be reasoned with.

  “How can we join her?” Milly asked, fighting down a ball of nausea with each word.

  “You? We tried to get you on the same train and you kept refusing. You can be on the next one out, whenever that might be. We’ll have you at Arty’s castle with her.”

  Thomas frowned and folded his arms. “And what about me?”

  Oliver grinned and wagged a finger. “I’ve got work for you.”

  “I’m not a Goowie.”

  “Then I am sorry to say we cannot guarantee your access to Goowie personnel. We’re fighting a war, after all. Who’s to say whether you’re an enemy combatant once you leave this office?”

  Milly watched Oliver’s eyes for the intent of his words. They weren’t so malicious as to suggest there was a bullet in Thomas’ back waiting for him if he said no, but they weren’t far off.

  Thomas growled. “I know damn well you didn’t give Sayuri a choice in this, you Zook prick! Otherwise she would’ve—”

  “Thomas!”

  Thomas turned to Milly who was scowling, though this wasn’t his fault. She was simply doing too good a job fighting against the painkillers.

  “Let’s hear him out. We’re already relying on their hospitality for… this,” she said, holding up her bandaged stump. “If it’s not an unreasonable request… we can take him up on it. He won’t put Sayuri in danger in the meantime. She’s too valuable.”

  Oliver chuckled. “Look at her! She’s got more sense than you and she’s stoned out of her gourds!”

  Thomas rolled his jaw which Milly took as a good sign since it was one rung down that escalation ladder of his she knew so well.

  “First, I want to know what you want from me. Second, I want to know what you want from Sayuri. Give me a square answer for both and I’ll consider what to do next,” Thomas said.

  In response, Oliver went over to one of the walls still occupied with binders and picked up a large red one overflowing with crumpled bits of paper. He handed it to Thomas who, in turning it over, discovered the title of this particularly dossier was, ‘Training & Warfare Doctrine.’ Oliver motioned for him to read through it and he did so.

  “This is shit,” Thomas said.

  Oliver laughed. “It is shit. See, for half our history, the GGUW has been nothing but a glorified book club. It was a big deal when we graduated to community gardening. That was about half a century ago. Thirty years ago, just before our dear friends the Ueichi clan invented the Shroud, we had just managed to pull together a militia who drilled with black powder muzzle-loaders. There were six of us back then, in the éstfyr Companionist Militia, and one of them was twelve. We haven’t exactly had a lot of experience building an army. Hel, until a week ago our main goal was convincing the flunkees in the moderate unions to fucking grow a pair.

  “That’s where you come in: The Propertist classes needed you for their extraction wars. In the process, they inadvertently lent you, a son of ?fria, a piece of their own dominance. What you have inside that whiskey-riddled noggin of yours is the knowledge of how to wage war. A proper war. And even better, you know where the cracks in their military are. You can tell us the brittle points we can strike to make the whole, contradiction-rotten house collapse. The sooner you help us, the sooner you and the Ueichi girl can go back to playing house.”

  Thomas shut the binder and slid it across the empty desk to Oliver.

  “I can’t be the only veteran you have,” Thomas said.

  Oliver chuckled. “No, but you’re our only grenadier. If I’m not mistaken, part of your duties in Ryūkoku was arming and training right-wing death squads, was it not?”

  Milly tried her best not to glance at Thomas. She didn’t want to make his negotiations any more difficult. And yet, a part of her was curious enough to sneak a peek and she saw a grimace plastered across his face.

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  “You would be correct,” Thomas replied. “And you want me to repeat those sins for your benefit?”

  “I do,” Oliver said as he put the worthless training document back on the shelf. “War isn’t a moral argument, after all. It’s an economic debate. All involved are sinners, even the pacifists who want everyone to return to the happy status quo of being crushed under beams and sucked into lathes. They’re implicated by their inaction.”

  Thomas exhaled through his nose. “Fine. And my second question?”

  “Sayuri…” Oliver said with a sigh. “Sayuri, Sayuri, Sayuri. What to do with Sayuri? That is an interesting question I’m still trying to answer. At a minimum, she’s a rapidly-deployable, city-sized, anti-material bomb. We haven’t tried it yet, but if her aeroplane trick works the way I think it does, it’ll work on tanks and trucks too, provided they’re hatsuden-powered. Considering we’re still struggling to put guns in hands, let alone grenade-lances, that’s pretty damn useful.”

  Milly and Thomas shared a look of concern. His verbiage painted Sayuri as some kind of military equipment.

  “And what are you hoping for beyond this ‘minimum’?” Thomas asked.

  Oliver chuckled. “It’ll be fun finding out, won’t it? For one, she can teleport, so what’s stopping her from teleporting right into a board room and plucking Genji out by their roots? After all, we don’t have to fight the ‘glomerates to their last worker. All we’ve gotta do is make our native land unprofitable. Threaten the executives directly and you have them by the balls.”

  “She’s a girl, Oliver,” Thomas said. “She’s a teenager and she—”

  Oliver slammed his fist on the table. “I was 12 when I first picked up a gun! Growing up has nothing to do with age!”—he thrust his finger at the ceiling—“There are people walking around above us right now who’ve never grown up. Their entire life has been laid out for them, cradle to office to grave, who will never make a real choice in their life! They will never put their life on the line for anyone or anything. Now, I don’t know what kind of weird, surrogate dad roleplay thing you and Sayuri have going on and frankly I don’t give a fuck. What I know is that last night she made a real choice. A hard choice. And as far as I’m concerned, she’s an adult, same as you and I. So spare me the reactionary Propertist moralizing.”

  “Have you asked her if she’s fine being your pet assassin?” Milly asked, pre-empting the fury she could see working its way up Thomas’ throat.

  “Do you think we could force her to do anything she didn’t want to? She’s practically a comic-book heroine whose superpower is being so rich her veins are gold,” Oliver said.

  “I didn’t ask if she agreed to work with you or become a Goowie,” Milly said, “I asked if she was fine being used for assassinations.”

  “We haven’t asked her to do any such thing.”

  “But you’re planning to.”

  “I’m not planning to do anything which I don’t even know is possible yet.”

  “And if she decides she doesn’t want to obey one of your orders, what will you do?”

  Oliver shrugged. “I already said we can’t stop her.”

  “You could slit her throat,” Milly replied.

  “Milly, enough,” Thomas said, squeezing her shoulder.

  “Would you slit her throat if you thought she might turn tail?” she asked, ignoring Thomas.

  “We’ll work hard to make sure she never has a reason to,” Oliver said.

  “What about when she hears about Kaihonjin being massacred?”

  “What massacres?”

  Milly’s nose flared. “The ones you damn well are coming! I grew up in the first wave of nationalism, Oliver, and so did you. You know and you haven’t told her. Even if you had all of the GGUW under your thumb you still couldn’t stop the bloodbath that’s coming. So how do you plan to keep Sayuri on a leash when the process of ‘cleansing’ ?fria begins?”

  Repeating himself, this time in clear, enunciated Capital-?frian with no trace of his usual coastal accent, First Compatriot Oliver Martin said, “We will work hard to make sure she never has a reason.”

  Silence followed as Oliver looked at the two of them and Thomas and Milly looked at one another.

  “A little ironic you’re not giving us a real choice. Didn’t you just give a speech about the importance of grown men making choices?” Thomas asked.

  “Grown people,” Oliver corrected, with a nod toward Milly. “You still have internalized misogyny from your exposure to Propertist hierarchicalism.”

  “From the guy who wants to mint child assassins…”

  “From the man who wants a daughter to coddle cuz he doesn’t have his own! We’ll all be making tough choices from here on out. Mine was whether or not I ought to use a bit of the political compulsion I find so repugnant to secure special forces training and a literal demi-god for my cause. I suspect by doing so I will have saved the lives of thousands of good, honest people. So, what choice will you make, Mr. Grenadier?”

  “Give me a timeline for when we can be reunited with Sayuri and I’ll give you your training,” Thomas said.

  “Give me a corps of military instructors I can use to train the rest of my force and I’ll give you a reunion.”

  “That could take a year or more!”

  “Best be efficient then.”

  With this Oliver departed the room, though he had given them no orders for where to be or what to do next. The implication, as Milly saw it, was that if they wanted to come aboard, they would have to come to him and pledge fealty outright. He was a bit of an asshole, Milly thought, but the part of her hoping for an independent ?frian nation couldn’t help but admire his ruthless pragmatism. And as it was, Oliver’s offer was a better one than they could have hoped for even a day ago.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said to Thomas.

  Wheeling Milly out of the building was trickier without Oliver’s aura giving them a berth. The men and women running supplies out to the trucks frequently bumped into both Thomas and the chair. A girl of about 13 or 14 who had grabbed one too many ammo boxes knocked against Milly’s arm pinkening the end of her bandage and doubling her over in pain.

  “Should we get you back to bed so they can give you more painkillers?”

  “No—!” Milly replied through grit teeth. “I’m fine. For now.”

  She was not fine, but she also wanted to make sure Thomas didn’t do anything stupid while she was zonked.

  Skirting around the bustle of loading trucks, they came out from under the Ridge Band overhang and arrived at a quiet side-street formed by two steep tenements running along a narrow, zig-zagging path that could not have been built after the advent of the automobile. It was paved with bumpy cobblestones and half-sunken in parts which made maneuvering Milly’s wheelchair quite tricky. Nonetheless, it was quiet and it was private.

  “There really isn’t a choice here, is there?” Milly said. “We’re not on a boat anymore. There’s no charting our own course. We’re on a train now, and it’s a little unrealistic to think two people by themselves can throw on the brakes. There’s too much in motion.”

  “But I still don’t like it,” Thomas said.

  “What don’t you like? Training soldiers? I don’t care how Oliver framed it, you don’t have to compare it to what you did in Ryūkoku. You can think of this as helping people defend themselves against invaders,” Milly said.

  “If it was only adults I was training there would be no problem,” Thomas said. “But did you notice anything about who was carrying arms and who was sitting in a planning room? Despite all that bullshit about ‘reactionary thinking,’ did you notice that he and his leadership are all grown men sitting in a planning bunker away from the danger? And that the one’s bearing arms are women and children? He wants me to help him build an assembly line for child-soldiers. You heard his plans for Sayuri. I have to get her away from him. Or at the very least wrestle an ear away before he starts filling her head with radical propaganda.”

  Milly hummed. “I think you’re underestimating Sayuri a little, Tommy. I think she’s smart enough to see through a bit of propaganda.”

  “She’s a kid, Milly.”

  “She’s not. You can get frustrated with me if you like, but I agree with Oliver on one thing: Sayuri isn’t a child. When you first rescued her? Absolutely. Hel, for most of our little river excursion she was a spoiled brat. But she’s made some hard choices in the past couple of days and I think she knows that.”

  “Making hard choices isn’t a substitute for experience. It’s the starting point for that experience meaning anything. She’s never been lied to by someone with an agenda.”

  Milly snorted. “She comes from the conglomerates, Tommy. She’s been training for that her entire life. But sure, let’s say you’re right. What is this if not the time for her to gain that experience?”

  “The consequences for failure are death,” he said.

  “And? Do you think they’ll be any lighter if she’s safely tucked under your wing? That wasn’t true on the boat and isn’t true now. Even if you were at her side, what can you actually do? Jump in front of her to stop a conglomerate airstrike? If anything, she’ll be protecting you.”

  Milly prepared herself for a longer argument but Thomas lapsed into silence. At least part of the reason was that he was preoccupied maneuvering her wheelchair around a garden plot full of gourds whose vines had burst the confines of their wrought-iron fence and begun to colonize the road. In one spot this had caused the cobble to sink and he was forced to pick up the entire wheelchair with Milly in it and carry it across.

  On the other side they paused for Thomas to catch his breath and finally he said, “You’re right. About Sayuri.”

  He seemed like he wanted to say more so she waited patiently for him, staring up at him with her amber eyes. This didn’t help him collect his thoughts at all. Seeing those fiery eyes now warm and placid dominated his mind until they and the softness they created in him were all he could think about. They forced him to speak without preparing what would come out of his mouth.

  “I am… a pretend father,” he said. “That is— I mean that Oliver was right. Guarding Sayuri pulled me out of the worst moment of my life, and now— it’s so silly, but maybe all I’m doing is chasing that feeling. Maybe I’m— what I’m afraid about is— gods-dammit, Milly, I can think until I’ve done this.”

  He knelt down and placed a hand behind her head and lifted her gently to his lips. She smelled like sweat, gunpowder, and salt and her hair and skin were as cold and clammy as the late autumn wind coming off the ocean but it was the loveliest kiss either of them had ever had. A warm buzz beginning at Milly’s tongue spread through her brain and down through her body. It did more to ease her pain than the drugs the nurses shot her up with. Neither of them wanted to pull away but Thomas’ legs burned from bearing his weight and he was forced to stand.

  “And?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Well that was all about getting your head clear, wasn’t it? What else did you have to say?” Milly asked.

  He blushed. “O-Oh! Yes, I… Well, I think I said it all. Other than that I’m afraid if I abandon Sayuri I’ll revert to how I was before. That I’ll go back to being some pathetic boozehound wasting away until I die.”

  Milly laughed. “Gods, Tommy, you are downright catastrophic sometimes. No one’s asking you to abandon her, but you can’t expect things to look like how they used to. Even if we win this war, don’t you think she’ll want to go home? Her family might have been trying to assassinate her, but if she finds herself on stable footing, she’ll probably go back to Kaihon and claim her birthright. She’s not about to become an ?frian citizen just because she got stuck here in the middle of her dad’s business trip.”

  It hurt Thomas to hear that, but it was the truth. He was aware of his own delusions even if he couldn’t turn them off. Despite knowing her for less than two weeks, he loved Sayuri the way he had once loved his younger siblings. It was unfair for Sayuri to bear the weight of Thomas’ past trauma. He knew that. But twelve years ago he had returned home from the war to find an empty house and learned that good-byes not intended to be final could suddenly become so.

  Seeing the grief on his face, Milly reached out her hand and touched his elbow. “You won’t go back to being a drunk, Tommy. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “Will you look after Sayuri when you get to wherever it is they’re sending you?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “What? Oliver said there’s a train out for the injured—”

  “And I won’t be on it,” she said, craning her neck to look up at him from her seat. “I’m going where you’re going. If you need, I can yell at your new recruits for you. Put the fear of Loothsa into them!”

  “Milly, why—?”

  “Cuz it’s my job to make sure you don’t go to pieces again, that’s why,” she said. “Now turn me around and let’s head back to the playhouse, I need a nap.”