Chapter 137
There was a dining room of respectable size aboard the ship. It was nothing so lavish as the appointments of a luxury liner, but the place looked clean. The curious thing was that every table and chair was fixed in place. On a ship that was only natural, if anything was; still, it was a pity that once I sat down, the gap between chair and table proved a little too wide.
There was no menu to speak of. When we ordered a meal, out came something made by mixing meat with flour, bread, and fresh vegetables.
I could let the first two pass. But vegetables?
I speared one with my fork and lifted it.
"Aren't these difficult to keep?"
"The place you lived didn't have a storehouse with a preservation unit?"
A preservation unit?
I rummaged through Victoria's memories with that for a keyword, and something surfaced. Lay a special field over mana so as to suppress its flow, and there is a mechanism by which the various reactions arising within are inhibited; join that to a refrigeration apparatus, and you have a technology for preserving all manner of substances.
I had no idea what any of it meant. But the word refrigeration was attached to it, so I supposed it was a refrigerator.
"We had something similar."
"Don't leave any."
What was that, all of a sudden?
Victoria's words had veered off so abruptly that I found it strange, and when I followed her gaze I saw she was staring at the vegetable on my fork, a tangle that might have been broccoli and asparagus twisted together.
Ah.
Come to think of it, there was such a thing as being a picky eater. Soo ate so well that I had never once had to consider it. Not that anyone there had been in a position to be choosy about food in the first place.
Thinking so, I brought it to my mouth.
Nom.
"Huh. You eat fine."
"You shouldn't leave food."
"You really do sound like a mother."
Do I?
Strictly speaking, I didn't raise Soo. We were simply together. I may call us something like family, but I have no intention of taking her true family from her.
"It's because I lived with a human child for a little under two years."
"That's a headache of a thing to say. A kid this small raised a child?"
"I wouldn't say I raised her. We only lived together. And back then I was about two heads taller than I am now."
Choseol's body had been about that tall. Raised under abnormal conditions, she had grown tall beyond her years. Even if I had never entered her, even if she had never been made a Sacrifice, Choseol would not have lived long. So after I went in, I quietly swapped things for something that would hold.
Victoria packed the food away as if she were possessed. Then she spoke.
"So you really aren't human."
"I told you I was a monster."
"You don't look it at all."
Victoria cleaned her plate in no time and ordered cake and tea.
I waited for the cake, thinking it had been a long while since anything sweet, and what arrived was a thing smeared all over with cream and chocolate mousse, so laden with sugar that my faded memories would have named it American the instant they saw it. Judging by Victoria's expression, this was perfectly ordinary food.
I cut a little with the utensil that had come alongside it, and a thick, smeared stickiness traveled up through the metal. A few bites of this and I felt as if a blood vessel might burst. I brought it to my mouth, and sweetness exploded across my tongue. One bite, and it was already sickly rich.
I set it down, wanting no more, while Victoria went on eating happily and calling it delicious.
"Small appetite?"
"No. Please, eat plenty. Using your ability is hard on you, isn't it?"
"I'm starving."
Victoria nodded and went straight back to eating. She gulped the tea in great swallows, and only to get the food down. I had little interest in the tea or the cake either way.
Looking at the past stored in those faded memories, I had liked such things well enough in my own fashion, but I had no wish to eat them in this body. For me, bodily pleasure, pain, and a state of doing nothing at all are all the same. If a character in a game is struck with a status ailment like panic, the person playing them doesn't fall into a panic, do they?
Seeing her eat more than her usual amount, I supposed some of the hunger really did come from the power. Which is to say that simply using a supernatural ability makes the weight come off. Marketed properly, this too would probably sell. The trouble was that if someone prayed for the weight to fall away, there was no telling whether a power would burst out of them or whether no ability would arise at all. I suspected it would have to reach a pathological pitch before anything changed, but until I experimented, it remained unknown.
So I waited until Victoria had finished, and we started back to the room together.
No. I thought that was where we were going.
"Let's look around the ship a bit."
Bwaaaaaaahn.
Just then the ship set off again, and the horn sounded. We had been on our way back when Victoria heard it and, as if something had just occurred to her, made the suggestion. There was nothing in particular to do in the room, so I nodded.
"All right."
"Let's go!"
If one speaks of looking around a ship, a person might expect the night view beyond the windows just now, or some finely decorated place like the main hall. Victoria climbed up onto the deck and went to examine the enormous paddle wheel at the stern of it. More precisely, she was examining the engine that turned the wheel. She studied the machinery with glittering eyes.
They didn't seem to use a screw here. Was there some restriction? Given the level of technology, I wouldn't have thought they lacked propellers, and yet, strangely, the vessel was fitted with a wheel-type engine. Thinking that, I watched Victoria, up on her toes and sightseeing with great concentration, before a notice that read:
NO ADMITTANCE
GENERAL PUBLIC PROHIBITED
That was when it happened.
A thick hand suddenly covered my mouth and seized me tight. I turned my eyes and found three men standing there. They dragged me down below the deck just as I was.
It must have been one of the cheaper spaces, the sort that corresponds to third class; the moment we descended, stale air pressed in on me. At a fork in the narrow corridor they hauled me toward the section that corresponded to the stern. It was a fairly dark place, loud with the roar of the engine. I rolled my eyes for a glance and saw somewhere they stacked things—lifeboats and the like. A place people seldom came, and noisy enough that even if a sound were made, others would have trouble hearing it.
Two more large men were waiting there for the three who had brought me.
"Oh, you brought her?"
"You sure this is all right?"
"Yeah. A stowaway's a stowaway. On a ship like this, even if a stowaway meets with an unfortunate accident, it gets written up as if nothing happened, doesn't it?"
"And the one she came aboard with was just some girl. What's a kid like that going to do? Besides whine?"
One of the men mimed a little girl sobbing, turning it into a ridiculous pantomime, and the others snickered. From the way they talked, at least one of the men who had brought me must have watched Victoria and me board. They knew a fair amount of detail.
"Well, look at that pretty face. She isn't really some important person's daughter, is she?"
"Look at the clothes. The clothes. All stained up, dressed in something like a rag. Would a rich man wear clothes like these?"
They stripped my clothes off. The garment they had called a rag was what I had worn in the second world. The style of dress was different, so it was reasonable enough that they should think it strange.
"Hey, let go of her a second. Why's she just sitting there so still?"
The man's hands came away.
"Hello?"
"Has this bitch lost her mind?"
Smack.
I had only greeted him, and he struck my cheek. Then he seized my hair, dragged my head in close, and told me what he meant to do.
Well. What of it. Healthy enough, as an organism. In any social sense they were stepping over the line, and yet I would still call it sound—at least in that they had chosen a victim incapable of wounding them.
"Cold little bitch. Not a single tear? Or are you too young to even know what's happening?"
Five men in all, looking down at me while telling him, in words alone, to stop. And in the middle of them, one little girl they might do anything to. I was not fool enough to fail to grasp the situation.
So I said this.
"Don't you want to live a better life than the one you have now?"
"What?"
"Hey, Mr. Smith. Shut her up and get on with it. Or I'll go first."
"No. Let's hear what kind of bullshit she's spouting."
I ran the experiment on the five varied men—the one snickering, the one lowering his trousers, all of them.
"That man there, for instance. You limp when you walk. Running is impossible, isn't it? The pelvis is twisted, and the foot points the wrong way. You've taken a serious injury before."
"What, playing detective, little girl?"
I had singled out the victim who caught the eye first. The one whose recovery would be the easiest to see.
"Make a contract with me, and I can heal that wound right now. If it doesn't heal, I'll do whatever you tell me, and I'll do it eagerly."
I cast the line of desire and watched to see whether the man would bite.
"Hey, try it."
"Ooh, eager! Doesn't get better than that, does it? Not like we lose anything."
"Where else are you going to get a chance like this? Go on."
Egged on from the side, the man scratched his head and stepped forward. Shadow had hidden it, but there was a large scar on his face, the mark of some blow that had never healed properly.
"What do I have to do?"
"I will give myself to you. In exchange, later, once you have brought everything to its end, I will take all that you have. How does that sound?"
"Fine."
In that instant, cracks ran across the man's face. Then, tick by tick, his skin flaked away like porcelain, and skin of pure white showed through. Skin without a single scar. And his steps moved straight, no longer awkward. Anyone could see how smoothly he moved, and when he sprang upward from where he sat, he leapt high enough to strike the ceiling.
"Uh. What?"
"Wha—?"
"Mr. Brutal?"
The man, his hair turned purple, looked down at his own body with a dumbfounded face.
I smiled toward them and spoke.
Once more.
"Don't you want to live a better life than the one you have now?"
Now they all faltered and drew back from me. It was a shocking thing. This was a world where a disability was not easily cured without powerful magic, or at least a place among the upper class.
"Every wound heals."
I went over beside the man named Risen Brutal and tapped his leg.
"You grow stronger. And smarter."
I didn't know to what degree, but that it truly happened was a fact.
"You have a chance to live better lives."
A chance to commit worse savagery, to live more fully according to desire, and to harm a great many people.
"Of anyone who contracts with me, I will ask only one thing."
And I stepped forward into their midst and took my place there.
"To live as a person ought, doing what you want to do."
The wicked gather, and they rejoice. The sort who, the moment an opportunity appears, move to indulge their biological impulses. The sort who can trample another person underfoot with ease. Very fine harvesters.
"If you can keep my request, then contract with me."
And then—
Over the course of today, I made five harvesters in all.
It was very easy.