Sayuri lifted the baggy fabric of her new blue coveralls. They were heavier than she expected and made of a fabric she had never dressed in before.

  “What is this made of?” she asked.

  “Canvas,” replied the lady helping her dress.

  The portly, middle-aged woman helping Sayuri with her clothes was manhandling her the way one might a young child, turning her around and around to check for various things. The woman was not unkind, though she was in a hurry. Everyone was in a hurry. Within hours of seizing Kintoki’s supply center, First Compatriot Martin ordered a retreat from éstfyr that baffled Sayuri.

  “Up ya go, love,” the woman said, tugging Sayuri to her feet from the locker room’s wooden bench. Sayuri had asked the women her name, but her accent was so thick the only thing Sayuri made out was, ‘Emglem,’ which she doubted was correct.

  “Where am I to go next?” Sayuri asked.

  “D’nno, love. I’ve got trunks to pack. Ask the high brass,” she replied.

  The woman scooted Sayuri out the door, leaving her in a stone hallway in one of the basements. The hallway was clogged with Goowies coming and going and her small body formed an eddy in the center where people carrying boxes and trunks and luggage were going one way and people rushing to grab more were going another. Everyone was doing something far more important than her so she didn’t dare interrupt anyone’s business. Instead, as had been the case for most of her life, someone came to her first.

  “You the sylph lady?” a young man asked her.

  Bombarded with the question, Sayuri had ceased correcting them and merely nodded. She mentally prepared for the self-humbling ritual of downplaying her role in the supply center raid.

  “Got two hands don’tcha? Grab somefin’!” he said, giving her a gentle shove in the back.

  Even during her time escorted by Thomas Chester she had not experienced anything close to the level of physicality she encountered with the GGUW. They were very hands-on people. The first couple of times someone laid hands on her she thought it a thinly-veiled attempt to flirt or even to harass (not all were enchanted by Kaihonjin elite in their midst). However, after being jostled and guided and positioned by some of the union women, it was clear this physicality was a matter of culture.

  Sayuri adjusted quickly. She fell into line behind the others and wound up in a queue at the end of a hallway where boxes were being passed out to carriers in assembly-line fashion. She noted the seamless flow of this human machine which, it seemed, had sprung up autonomously. These were men and women to whom assembly lines came naturally. At one time she might have even assumed the imperative biological, though she was now certain it was learned.

  For some odd reason her heart pounded as she neared the front. It was not entirely unlike a class lecture where the teacher was asking questions down a line and one was anticipating their own turn, anxious not to be the fool who fumbled the answer and embarrassed themselves.

  At the front, a man shoved a plastic bin at her. “Mind the clasps.”

  Focused on accepting the container dutifully and humbly as she might a gift and making it clear by her deferential nod that she considered herself honored to be helping, she failed utterly to mind the clasps and spilled the bin of cleaning chemicals and mop-heads over the floor. A detergent bottle came loose and spilled a viscous liquid the color of sapphire across and into the cracks of the cobblestone floor. For a moment, the man handing out supplies seemed wroth, though his anger vanished as he realized who he was handing the bin to.

  “M-My apologies!” Sayuri said.

  “It ‘appens, no worries!” he said, helping her set the bin down in the cramped corridor and toss the intact bottles back inside.

  Before she could thank him, he shut the bin back up, patted her on the shoulder, and returned to handing out items. Not wanting to hold up the line, Sayuri power-walked back into place in the departing queue. She marched under dim electric lights down sweating stone hallways, up busy stairways, through yet more halls, and out the front of the building to a cobblestone plaza where people were loading supplies onto the backs of trucks. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the morning light beaming in through the overhang above.

  “Where does this go?” she asked a woman returning to grab a new box.

  “Anywhere it’ll fit!” the woman replied.

  Sayuri looked around and spotted a black supply truck of Benka Arsenal make. Since most of the other vehicles were built by Genji Heavy Industries, she thought it a good omen to pick a non-Genji truck. She was most of the way there when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “Oi! What’re ya doin’ carryin’ the baggage?”

  The question had come from First Compatriot Oliver Martin. Since she had last seen him a couple hours ago he had changed into a leather overcoat and gloves. Shadowing him were several bodyguards with rifles slung over their shoulders and in a holster at his side was a revolver with a silver-plated grip.

  “Er, carrying boxes, sir?” she said.

  “No ‘sir,’ first off. I work for a living. Second off, we can put you to better use than carryin’ junk. You there!” The First Compatriot snapped a gloved finger at a teenage boy jogging back inside. “Take this bin.”

  The boy gave a quick salute and snatched the bin from Sayuri’s hand.

  “M-Mind the clasps!” she called out.

  The First Compatriot took her around the shoulder and led her down the line of vehicles at a brisk pace while giving instructions to someone through a handheld radio. Sayuri hoped the channel was secure.

  “What exactly do you need me to do? Am I to be issued a firearm as well?” Sayuri said.

  Oliver laughed a deep belly laugh at that. “Gods no! What in the world would you need a gun for when you can pluck gunships outta the sky?”

  “Well, there’s a limit to—”

  “Yes, yes, you’ll fry yourself alive. Your pal Thomas apprised us. Said not to work ya too hard, or let you work yourself too hard. And I don’t plan to. Right now the best thing for ya, lass, is to get you aboard the train. I don’t know how long we’ve got until the ‘glomerates come swarmin’ back in but we can’t ever hope for as much as we’d like and I’d rather you be somewhere secure when that happens than die stackin’ boxes. Be a shame if you got blown up over some tinned food.”

  “Laundry detergent.”

  “What now?”

  “The bin was full of laundry detergent.”

  “Worse still!” he said. “Any’ow, the most important stuff is goin’ on the first train out and the rest’ll follow however we can get it.”

  Questions bubbled up so quickly Sayuri wasn’t sure which to ask. She decided upon the first one with a concrete noun:

  “Trains?”

  “Train,” Oliver said. “Singular. We’ve just got the two things of rolling stock right now on account of they don’t make much anymore, and only one of ‘ems south of the castle. Don’t want all our eggs in one basket, aye? If our compatriots on the continent can get us more we could have one going both ways, but they use a different gauge so I doubt it’ll happen any time soon.”

  Sayuri knit her eyebrows. “Er… I suppose I am asking why a train. There haven’t been intermunicipal lines since… since before Hatsuden, I thought.”

  Oliver Martin chuckled. “Oh trust me, there’s still a line, and it’s got one, nice little advantage going for it: It’s owned by one of us.”

  Sayuri blinked. “Owned? Are you not against Property ownership on principle?”

  “Sure we are,” he said, “but you ain’t. Well, by you I mean the Propertist class but—”

  She suspected by the phrase ‘Propertist class’ he meant Kaihonjin.

  “As it were, the train, the depot, the rails, and everything on ‘em are the private property of Artegal IV af-Cólhyll. He goes by ‘Arty’ and he’s a compatriot, if not quite a Goowie.”

  At that, Sayuri’s eyebrows finished knitting themselves a parachute which snapped open at this piece of information. According to Afujin naming convention, surnames ending in ‘af such-and-such’ had a very specific meaning.

  “You are working with ?frian nobility?” she asked.

  “Not the nobility. Just Arty,” Oliver replied. “He shares our vision.”

  “And he owns a railroad,” she said, not entirely sure whether that was a question or a statement.

  “Yes he does,” Oliver said with a grin. He raised a gloved finger and drew an invisible line off to the northern horizon which then cut west into the heartland. “One gorgeous line of steel and wood, bought dirt cheap in an IMR bargain bin sale. Course, it was us Goowies who helped get ‘er back in working shape, so you could say it was a joint-enterprise.”

  With the train question settled, Sayuri prepared to move onto the next question. But before she could, one of Oliver’s bodyguards hauled her onto the back of a covered truck where she was greeted by a pair of soldiers showing her to a bench.

  Oliver Martin slapped the side of the truck. “Be a good girl now. And don’t get into any trouble, eh?”

  “Wait, but Thomas—!”

  The truck lurched into motion and Sayuri was forced to sit down to keep from falling. Looking around, she saw the truck filled with the injured, elderly, and a few scared-looking children. The only exceptions were two soldiers hanging onto handrails at the back flap. Their hands curled around the pistol grip of an automatic rifle—the same ugly, tubular ones the river pirates bore.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “How far to the train station?” she asked the nearer of the two soldiers.

  “Dunno,” the woman replied. “Never been. Didn’t know we ‘ad a train station ‘til this mornin’.”

  That was smart, Sayuri thought. Sensitive information ought to be compartmentalized. That was something she had read in her strategy book and it heartened her to know the GGUW had a modicum of strategic sense and operational security. They were still best classified as irregular partisans, though in the course of a protracted conflict they might develop into a professional fighting force on par with a conglomerate army. It struck her as queer how quickly her mind had positioned itself in their camp. She had to remind herself she still had ideological qualms with their mission.

  More than once en route the truck stopped and the soldiers got out to do something or other. Most likely clearing the roads. On the second of these occasions, Sayuri noticed a middle-aged woman toward the back of the truck with a freckled, red-haired boy of four or five pressed to her bosom. Her eyes were fixed on Sayuri and held a quiet, seething rage.

  Feeling suddenly sick, Sayuri averted her gaze and stared at her feet as the truck lurched into motion. But she felt the woman’s eyes on her and at the next stop, the woman broke silence:

  “You killed my husband!” She screamed, squeezing her child closer to her. “His father!”

  Her son burst into tears, whether at his mother’s tone, or at being reminded of his father’s death.

  Sayuri’s neck choked closed. Even if she could speak, she had nothing to say. The hatsuden she used the night before had knocked hundreds of aeroplanes and gunships out of the air. These machines had to come down somewhere. The rapid pace of the 12 hours since then had prevented her from grappling with this fact.

  From the moment her father proposed the surgery to implant the kinkawa in her, she had feared the full extent of her seishin-hatsuden might entail enormous amounts of unintended casualties. She had stared down multiple life-or-death situations with no intention of relying upon her hatsuden for precisely this reason. Only the urgency of Genji’s air superiority was sufficient to force her hand. In the end, her fear had proven justified. The number of deaths she was responsible for might never be counted.

  “I-I’m sorry…” Sayuri whispered, her hands bunching the coveralls around her knees.

  “Sorry!?” the woman shrieked. “What fuckin’ good is your sorry!?”

  “Shut up ya hag!”

  “Ya prefer gunships in the sky!?”

  “Fink you’re the only one who sacrificed somefin’?”

  The truck erupted into an argument with Sayuri’s chastiser taking the brunt of it. The soldiers—irregulars, she was reminded—made no pretense to neutrality and were among the most vociferous in shouting down the woman. The faces around Sayuri turned pink with anger, and a darker part of herself noted that the slur ‘momojin’—peach person—had not come from nowhere. She tried to interject and ask everyone to calm down, but her quiet voice stood as much of a chance as a torch in a typhoon.

  What ended the argument was a bullet whining past the truck and skittering across the pavement outside. Within seconds, Sayuri was the only one still sitting on the bench. The rest of the truck, including the elderly and injured, had thrown themselves to the floor. The woman who had screamed at Sayuri was covering her bawling child like an enormous blanket.

  “Get her down!” the male soldier yelled.

  In the next moment Sayuri found her face pressed to the aluminum bed of the truck, pinned there by the female soldier. The other soldier leapt off the truck.

  “Stay down,” the soldier on top of Sayuri said before she followed her compatriot.

  A queer and empty silence followed which made Sayuri question whether the original shot had not been a hallucination after all. But as she lifted her head, another bullet plinked off the pavement outside. Her eardrums erupted with fully automatic fire which continued until the Goowie soldiers were forced to reload.

  In the lull, Sayuri crawled to the edge of the truck bed to peer out. The truck was stopped on a road running parallel to the overhang of the Ridge Band. Ten meters above them stood a long, city-length balcony on top of which sat nicer homes, likely belonging to wealthier Kaihonjin businessmen.

  The source of the gunfire was not obvious to her until a Kaihonjin man dressed in leisurewear, taking advantage of the same lull, popped his head over the top of the sloped balcony railing and fired a sporting rifle down at them. Sayuri lifted her hand to redirect the bullets before realizing she didn’t have to. They were far enough away that the bullets were going well wide of the truck and the people in it.

  “Wait! He’s not hitting anything. Let’s keep driving,” Sayuri said.

  It was a wonder to her why they had even stopped to begin with.

  “He fired on us, ‘e’ll pay the price! One less enemy in the class war,” the female soldier said, slapping the bottom of a boxy tin magazine and lifting her rifle once more.

  Sayuri plugged her ears. The two soldiers seemed to learn their lesson on using automatic fire indiscriminately, as their next few shots were slower and better placed despite having nothing but naked steel to aim with. Though Sayuri knew little about small arms, she knew some guns fired larger and faster bullets than others, and that the battle rifles the Goowies possessed outclassed the hunting rifle of the Kaihonjin man above in both of these respects.

  Silently, she wished the man would cease shooting at the truck and flee. She could hardly fathom what compelled him to do so in the first place. But he did not do this, and after another dozen shots from the Goowies, one of their bullets caught the man above and he disappeared from view.

  The female soldier punching the shoulder of her compatriot. “Pricked the bastard, Albi! Good shot!”

  “Aye. Let’s be off then,” he said, shouldering his rifle and hopping back into the truck.

  Sayuri swallowed back bile creeping into her mouth. Above she heard screaming from a woman’s voice alongside a child’s wailing. It all seemed entirely pointless—the man shooting at the truck and the soldiers firing back. None of this had served any purpose.

  While reading her strategy book on the Daisagi-Maru, Sayuri’s brain had been filled with grand battles fought by grown men in uniform, ready to die. She thought of logistics lists and manufacturing bases, of daring special operations and clever psychological gambits. This was how war was meant to be. Her mental picture had not included a pair of factory workers firing without discipline at a civilian who had pointlessly provoked them and who, if her ears were not hallucinating, had left behind a family.

  “Never you mind it. ‘E made his choice. Was an enemy soon as ‘e pulled the trigger,” the female soldier said to Sayuri.

  Sayuri nodded and said nothing. The only good to come of it was that there was no longer any argument. No one wanted to speak, least of all the injured who were the more so for having been thrown to the floor at the first shot.

  By Sayuri’s estimate it was another half hour before the truck stopped and men with high-visibility vests over their coveralls slapped a wooden ramp against the back of the truck.

  Sayuri was the first off the truck and was surprised to find herself in a sparse part of the city. To the south she could see most of Tōtoshi laid out before her. She could see where the city’s vast industrial harbor gripped the eastward bend of the shoreline, and she could see farther inland where, like the knees of a cypress tree, tenements and smoke stacks thrust from the urban ground. Farther west still, she could see the higher terraces curving upward from the ocean upon which sat glittering skyscrapers, condominiums, and luxurious mansions spread out in a leisurely arrangement compared with the tightly-packed industrial landscape below. The two sections appeared as though they belonged to entirely different municipalities. Or perhaps historical strata. They were united, however, by pillars of smoke still burning from the wreckage of planes and gunships.

  Wishing to think of anything else, Sayuri’s gaze turned northward. There the great terraces holding the more affluent members of society ended in half-completed construction where monoliths of bare concrete shot through with naked rebar lifted themselves over the rocky hills and cast lattice shadows over them.

  The great architectural divide between higher and lower ended here and dissolved into a bluntly functional landscape of steel, asphalt, and softwood warehouses. Supply depots and overland shipping facilities, flat and long, filled the city blocks and linked themselves with the heart of the city by way of cracked and ill-maintained roads.

  These petty buildings stood like bowing worshippers before a titanic, skyscraper-size jungle-gym: the freight crawler sorting depot. Crawlers lined up to feed its thousand steel mouths. They were dormant now. Morning mist gathered about their treaded feet. Above, millions of kilograms of merchandise lay entombed in dark containers, where they would lie for the duration of the conflict. Tomatoes and apples turned to moldy sludge, grain rotted, and plastic children’s toys slowly stripped of their bright hues by the force of oxygen.

  Sayuri’s visual observations were broken by the pungent stench of gasoline and a tarry smell she couldn’t identify. A truck honked at her and she realized she was standing in its way.

  She stepped aside and allowed it past and was shocked to see its bed overflowing with coal. When the First Compatriot had said they possessed a train she imagined it to be electric, or perhaps diesel-powered. The question of how or where the GGUW had come across a steam locomotive and the accompanying cars of suitable gauge to attach to it baffled her. No such locomotives had been manufactured in at least a century. She knew this because the Ueichi clan had been the chief manufacturer of them.

  Curiosity gripped her in its claws and she followed the coal truck through the gate, down a loading ramp, and out onto a rail yard where all but one of the yards two dozen tracks had been reclaimed by weeds, rust, and rot. On the last of these tracks, however, was a train which looked to Sayuri as though it had been plucked from some kind of period science fiction movie.

  The engine was a sleek, streamlined thing which made her recall that these exact machines were the etymological source of the term ‘streamlined.’ It possessed a rounded front and covered headlight blending almost seamlessly—for Sayuri, if she looked closely, could see the rivets— into a long, ovaloid boiler. The body of this boiler hung down like a surcoat and covered the wheels so that the entire engine all the way back to the cab resembled an aerodynamic cylinder. If she was correct, this was a very old Ueichi design representing the apogee of steam locomotion on the eve of its being overtaken by diesel, electric, and finally hatsuden power.

  Despite its age, the train looked brand new. Uncannily new. And like nothing she had seen in a history book. Whereas the original Ueichi engines had been painted with the colors requested by their purchaser (most often the white-and-purple of the Imperial clan in those years), the train standing in front of her was painted a strange combination of pastel pink, green, and gold, which were not the colors of any clan-conglomerate she knew of.

  At the front of the locomotive these colors were simply an abstract color scheme, but as they moved back they blended into a garish and tacky painting of an Afukoku countryside. Where the class and number of the engine would have been written there were instead Afugo words in a calligraphic script which she was unable to read.

  Wanting to know what they said, Sayuri flagged down a railworker and was disappointed to find he also could not read this fancy script. It took two more tries before an elderly woman in the middle of boarding the train happened to hear Sayuri’s question and came over to help.

  “S’noble hand but I worked as a receptionist for a time for me landlord so I can sure read it,” said an elderly woman squinting through a sooty pair of glasses. “Says this ‘ere train’s the ‘The Lady of Cólhyll’. Don’t rightly know who the lady is though m’afraid.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Sayuri said with a bow.

  The old lady raised an eyebrow at the bow and pat Sayuri’s shoulder with a frail hand. “Dun mention it. Jus’ keep ‘em from blowin’ up our train, would ye?”

  Sayuri chuckled nervously at the woman’s morbid humor. Rationalistic as she was, she couldn’t shake the sense of something ill-omened in the request. She was not so much concerned about being killed, but that she might be called to kill again.

  Rather than letting her mind dwell on this macabre possibility, Sayuri instead mulled over the strangeness of the locomotive’s name. The Lady of Cólhyll. It appeared to her as though ‘lady’ in this instance meant not the general term for a woman, but rather the more specific usage of a noblewoman, roughly analogous to how Sayuri herself was often referred to as ojousama. This would not have seemed amiss were it not for the well-known Companionist hatred for anything they deemed feudal or monarchical. The GGUW had therefore probably not christened the train. Rather, it seemed likely that The Lady had sprung from the mind of their mysterious aristocratic benefactor who Oliver Martin identified as Artegal IV.

  “Who are you and what do you want with a Companionist revolution?” she muttered to herself in her own language.