Be Well
"Dead, then……. Scientist. And he was a capable man."
Purple hair spilled in a loose cascade over the back of the chair. Minder, an executive of Another, muttered the words with a bitter twist of her mouth.
"First time it's happened since I started following Him. Someone I actually know, dying."
Was this the hour He had spoken of……?
"An Ideal World is a hard thing. Well. So long as the people around me come out all right, I don't much care."
That Scientist had not been among them ached, deep in the chest…….
"What about you? You've lost far more people than I have."
"Not lost. Departed. They have only reached the heaven yet to come ahead of the rest of us. We will meet again, in time."
The man just entering old age clutched the necklace at his throat and smiled, faint and mild.
"If your lot had come out of a normal religion, you'd be worth some respect……. The problem is, you didn't."
Minder ran her eyes over the rabble collapsed behind the old man. Black flame burned along their backs as if it might gutter out at any moment—a shrinking tip, a wick still lit. It savored the meat at its leisure, greedy for even one second more of the taste.
"Do I call that vicious, or do I call it natural? Startles me every time I see it. Unlike those wretches, you've got a bit of spine, haven't you, Master?"
"Heh heh heh. I feel nothing in particular. This is a sermon, to enlighten the ignorant. Were I to mix private feeling into it, I could not face my god."
"Tsk. And that's the truth. You're thoroughly insane."
Minder clicked her tongue. The mad who truly believed were not to be touched—and the head of the worst religion in the world, least of all.
The Cult Leader of Ilshikgyo eased, almost gently, into a new subject.
"By the way……. How fares our Saintess? Has there been any improvement?"
Minder's brow tightened. From that alone, he understood how badly her pride had been stung.
Pak. A leg came down in a fit of temper. The President of China, employed as her footrest, let out an old man's groan.
"Sorry. No improvement at all. I haven't even gotten into the deep layers of her mind, and honestly, I don't think it'd work even if I did."
"I see……."
The Cult Leader accepted it without a flicker. Of course he did. What even a god had failed to do, a moderately gifted psychic like her could hardly be expected to manage.
Perhaps it was that air of there-is-nothing-to-be-done that she couldn't stand. Sparks jumped in Minder's eyes.
"Just you wait. I'll cure her. I mean it. We're allies, aren't we? A person ought to do the job right."
"Take your time, so long as it is before the holy war. Rush, and even what might succeed will fail."
He rose from the chair and brushed off the seat of his robes.
"Then today's meeting must end here. Worship will begin shortly."
"Go on. If you're short of anything, call."
"You have my thanks for your trouble."
The Cult Leader shut the door behind him. The moment he was gone, the black flame died as if a ghost had pinched it out.
"Agh! This is pissing me off!"
With no one left to watch, Minder flew straight into hysterics. She drove a kick into the gut of the President of Russia, who had been serving as her chair.
"Guhk—!"
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"A psychic's! Got! Pride! And I! Had to! Lie! To some! Old man!"
For all her boast that she would heal the Saintess, Minder could not put the woman back the way she had been.
Just as the old man had expected, it was impossible.
"No! Fuck! What the hell! Even! Got! Her! A human?! Are you telling me! It was! A human?! Not! Some evil god?!"
When she had looked into the Saintess's mind, Minder had glimpsed the trace of something coiled through it.
Black, and sticky.
A mass of slime.
Nothing but dregs—and yet they clung to that inner world like parasites. The instinct of a psychic who had kneaded other people's minds for decades screamed at her. Those things were fouler than radioactive waste. Even Minder, nuclear-armed within the world of the mind, could not overcome whatever it was that was devouring a world whole.
Minder had run.
And she had lied to the Cult Leader.
"Hah. Hah."
She forced the panting down. Beneath her feet the President of Russia writhed, having brought up a basin's worth of blood.
"You. Get him to the recovery room before the bastard dies. He dies on the way, you die."
"Yes."
The President of China bowed low to Minder, then hauled the President of Russia out in a clumsy drag. Somewhere in his lower back, something snapped.
Ting.
"You called for me?"
"Scrub this room till it's like new. Make a sound and you die."
"Understood."
Minder had summoned the attendants with a bell and set them to cleaning a room thick with corpses and the stink of burning. They moved so as to make almost no sound at all, and so the work crawled. She didn't care. She lay back on the bed at her ease and watched them.
That one, the head of a great Chinese corporation and his heir. That one, the president's daughter and his lawful wife. Those, executives of Negus.
An unbelievable truth: people who stood among the most entrenched powers in the world, every last one of them, handled as Minder's servants. And yet it was the reality unfolding in front of her. They served her gladly, and they did not set their own work aside to do it. There was no doubt in them, and no suspicion. If Minder told them, here, to die, they would leap from the window and die.
All of it was what came of minds she had rewritten.
"The cleaning is finished."
The president's lawful wife announced the end of the work without expression, not even bothering to wipe the blood from her clothes.
"Good. Go on."
"Yes. Rest well."
Minder drew in the cleaned air. Dominion and power passed through her nostrils and stirred her brain.
"Ahh. That's nice."
Sprawled like some middle-aged man off the clock, she set about loafing.
The mission she had been given was nearly done. Russia and China had reached the point where they could not get by without Minder, and bit by bit their systems were locking into place, tied in with the organization. The soldiers of both nations prepared for war, step by careful step, and control over the citizens was being carried out not merely well enough, but with practiced skill. With state security and the underworld gone quiet, people were, if anything, finding life worth living.
"Could my Ideal World be right here?"
She was comfortable enough for the thought to verge on blasphemy. Minder thumped her own head.
"Yeah. I should do something."
A colleague was dead. Sit still, and who was to say she wouldn't be the next?
"What is it that's even in Korea?"
A peninsula stuck to the corner of a continent, eating up more of a person's nerves than it had any right to.
"But our Saintess got taken down by a Korean ability user, didn't she? That's a little scary, then……."
It isn't, right?
It won't be.
I can't fight that one. He's my natural enemy. I meet him and I'll be leaking from both ends, volunteering on the spot as a mind-broken slave.
"Ugh. Just thinking about it is awful. If I die, I die."
A future in which she betrayed Him? She'd rather sell her body in a brothel.
"……Come to think of it, what's He doing now?"
She didn't think she'd heard anything beyond what Anastasia had told her—that He had gone to South America.
"I'm bored. Should I call?"
Had the other executives caught wind of the idea, they would have turned a hundred somersaults in midair and howled. Unfortunately, there was no one here to stop her.
Beaming, Minder called Anastasia on the secret line.
It rang, long and thin.
"Not picking up……."
And so, fortunately, Minder's head remained where it was.
A buzz, and then a click. The smartphone in the pocket of Anastasia's jacket rang and went dead. Her gaze dipped, then returned to what lay ahead.
A grave, with a nameless headstone planted in it.
Anastasia set down the flowers she had been holding.
"It's been a while, Mother."
A mother who had died the day she was born. A face she had only ever been able to see in a photograph. A longing she had only ever been allowed to imagine. Today, she meant to cut that longing off.
"I've come shamelessly. I'm sorry. Your daughter is a fool."
If she had lived, would Mother have been angry? She didn't know. The mother she had heard of from him was a bold, large-hearted woman who liked guns and cigars, and to Anastasia, raised in comparative comfort, that temperament could neither be pinned down nor predicted.
Only—
For some reason, she thought her mother would have said it like that.
"I came today to be rid of all of it."
"Yes. Trying to drag it along, shabby as it is, only stirs up noise."
"From the moment I began to follow Him, it was always going to end this way."
"It's too late. If it was going to be done, it should have been done sooner. By me, or by that man."
"I clung too long to something simple."
Anastasia drew from her pocket the teddy bear and the little animal figurine she had brought. Blackened with age and grime, doll and carving sank down among the flowers.
Steel whispered free. Anastasia drew her sword and murmured its true name, short and low.
■■■■■■
Flowers, doll, and figurine drank blood, and burned.
"By next year, you won't be lonely."
Her, or that man. One of the two would follow, without fail.
"Be well, Mother."
Anastasia turned her back.
Ash, where a bond had been burned away, stretched long beneath the headstone.
Two lines. Long.
Before she knew it, those lines had been carved like a tattoo, and not even days of wind and rain together could wipe them out…….
"……."
Blood slid, thin and steady.
"A rare thing. To think you'd bleed from the palm."
Alexei opened his hand. Across the uneven palm ran a single cut—the sort of wound a beginner might take the first time they held a sword. An oddly misplaced injury, on a man who was all but a grandmaster of the age.
"I'd better rest a little."
"Suit yourself."
Dan Miryong let his dragon form fall away. Yongnyeo held out a towel, and he took it with his lip pushed out, awkward about it. For a moment they looked like a contented family.
Alexei gazed down at his palm. He closed his fist to stop the bleeding, but it would not close so easily. If anything, drops kept sliding out through the gaps between his fingers.
"……."
Something sat wrong in his chest. For some reason he had the illusion that a faint, far-off weeping was sounding from between the drops of blood…….