Chapter 144
Water came bursting up out of the sewers, and it must have been nothing but water, pure and clear—streams bending sideways like a waterfall tipped onto its side, pouring straight into the burning house. As if gravity itself had swung horizontal, the torrent leapt from the ground, soaked the whole building through, and ran off along the street.
It did not take long for the fire in that house to die. Victoria came rushing out with a crowd of people hard on her heels, and before Morris could so much as start toward her, a man sprinted in from the side, dropped to his knees in front of her, and begged. His child was still upstairs. The fire had him helpless. He pointed at the building next door.
Victoria went at once.
Beatrice was busy herding the company people and the survivors off toward safety somewhere far away, and only Morris stood where he was, watching her. Standing in the middle of the road. What he thought he was doing, I couldn't say. I left him there and looked at the world through the eyes of the Harvesters.
The five who had been working farther out had noticed something wrong with Berne City too. More precisely, nearly everyone around them was staring at the city, because the whole of Berne City was on fire. Black smoke was climbing from every quarter. Only a little while ago that smoke had been white. It wasn't anymore.
Even from those five out in the suburbs, the talk was already coming in. Fire engines that went inside suffered the same sudden-acceleration wrecks, or burst apart without warning along the roadside. Mages who had stepped forward to put the fires out were stamping their feet in frustration—there wasn't enough mana left in the air. Civilization had seized up in a single instant.
And even so, there were people going in, saying they might as well try to save someone. The five Harvesters were among them. Nothing strange about that. They were the sort who committed their little evils lightly, so they moved their feet just as lightly in whatever direction everyone else was moving. Put another way, this country was, at least, a society in which going to help someone that way was simply what one did.
At least for now.
They sink into the crowd and move to save a person. But if they are hurt doing it, the loss is theirs alone. No one makes them whole. In the moment they are treated as heroes, and a moment later they are forgotten. For any single person, it is a foolish thing to do. The correct action, individually, is to watch from a distance—ah, something terrible has happened; I hope someone comes along and takes care of it—and leave it at that.
The trouble is that the world does not actually run on that kind of icy, counterfeit rationality. Social and spiritual gain sometimes outweigh bodily, material loss, and people act on it. There are those who give their bodies over to impulse the way a living thing climbs a mountain simply because the mountain is there—the way a seal's corpse was once found halfway up a rocky mountain in Antarctica, starved to death after climbing it for no reason at all. Incomprehensible impulses have always existed.
In short, able-bodied people were coming toward burning Berne City, men and women alike. They guided the fleeing toward safety, tried to put out whatever had caught, fitted together the hideously crushed pieces of bodies from the traffic wrecks, and kept the injured alive. Meanwhile Victoria seemed to be getting the hang of it. The speed with which she killed the fires on buildings, using water, kept climbing, and the number of people saved by other people kept climbing with it.
Of course, among the saved, there were those behaving strangely. Some had panicked into fits. Some screamed not to save anyone else, only them, or demanded their belongings be fetched out. That wasn't because they were wicked. Reason had shut down, and they were clutching whatever they thought about most and screaming that they just wanted to live.
The real ones moved in the middle of that confusion: people who went into buildings and came back out having quietly pocketed the expensive things. Even now, among those ducking into the water-soaked buildings and emerging again, there were some like that. They understood that in a situation like this, acting selfishly paid. If anyone questioned them, they had only to say they'd gone into their own house for what they needed. Who was going to argue? They were a tiny minority, of course. But they were certainly there.
On the other side, there were people who didn't simply wait for Victoria—who took up whatever tools they had and moved to help strangers, just to save someone. Some upended bathroom water over themselves and ran into burning buildings to drag people out. Others formed bucket brigades, drawing water from buildings that hadn't caught and passing the buckets hand to hand to fight the fire.
It was chaos. Depending on which side you watched, you could see people as entirely different things. I watched it quietly. It wasn't time for me to move. Not yet. I waited for the moment on a road ringing with screams, shouts, cries, weeping, explosions—every kind of sound there is.
Make too few Harvesters at the start, and there simply aren't enough of them. Make them carelessly, and the world collapses. So I had to move carefully.
In truth, even without me, the key to handling this situation somehow was standing right beside me. None other than Morris.
It looked like a useless invention, but Morris's machine was not built on a method that left no residual mana behind. Its output was several times lower, of course. Spend human life force instead of the mana in the air, though, and even that shortfall in output could be solved. The fatal flaw? Every use shaved a lifespan down, year by year, just like that. Turn it around, however, and that same machine could suck the life out of other people and pour it into oneself. The efficiency was poor, and it wasn't a matter of simple addition. Still—if grinding several hundred people through it bought a single extra year of life, anyone would do it.
Humans come cheap, after all.
Only, morality would rot from it. Humans would become mere commodities, and human rights would lose their worth. The logic of thoroughgoing capitalism would trample morality flat and stand on top of what remained. The sort of society that surfaces, in a faded memory, whenever someone says cyberpunk. Or, before it ever got that far, being treated as an enemy by the entire world. But once something has been made, it does not vanish easily. The world would be divided into before and after the day humans became fuel.
Curious what Morris would choose, I stepped up beside him. He must have noticed me, because he spoke.
"It was Belle, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"If it were you, could you fix this?"
I was fairly sure I'd already told him, but he looked too rattled to remember, so I said it again.
"I'm not a god."
It wasn't that I couldn't. It was that doing it might crack this world apart. I can't.
"You said you gave Tori her power. Then share that ability with other people."
"It's random. I don't know what kind of power will come of it, and I can't even say for certain who will receive one."
I had my guesses. At my answer, Morris looked up at Victoria, who was flying through the sky now. A bead of shaped water clung to the sole of each foot. She had realized water could hang in empty air, and she was already putting it to use.
"But if it goes on like this, Tori will..."
Someone who had popped up out of nowhere, in a situation like this. Perfect material to be driven into the role of a hero. Another word for it is the public's toy. A hero who is a group might be all right, but a hero who is one person is torn to shreds on the scales of profit and loss and left a corpse—or stripped of honor, trampled, and thrown on the ground. Or they seize that honor, use it, and fall into something wicked.
From a building a little way off, Victoria found a child burned over half their body, charred black and stuck fast, and gathered them into her arms. The left side was so badly burned that without treatment, the child would die. She came out holding the dying child, and instead of descending she suddenly stopped, glancing about, her gaze moving this way and that. Looking for something?
Then her eyes locked onto me, and Victoria flew straight to me.
She landed with a wet slap. Still holding the child, she bowed her head before me.
"Belle. Lady Belle. I have a request. Please save this child."
Honorifics. Hehe. Of every choice available to her, she had picked the worst. A child she could simply have left as a corpse, she had offered up to a monster. A truly excellent choice. Out of one last scrap of tenderness, I told her a single thing.
"You're going to regret this."
But Victoria looked at me with eyes that did not waver. No words necessary. I nodded and went to the child. The breathing was ragged; the mind had already gone, burned out by a searing pain among the worst there is. That was no reason a contract couldn't be made.
I asked the child. The child answered that they wanted to live. The contract was sealed.
In an instant the child's skin swelled, and like porcelain cracking, a boy with blue skin burst out from within.
"His skin is blue. Did something... go wrong?"
Victoria looked at me, utterly at a loss, so I shook my head.
"I don't know why, but those who take a wound that leads to death turn blue-skinned when they make the contract."
And while I was at it, I looked around and said this.
"If you want the wounds healed no matter what becomes of you, I make contracts."
The chance had come, and I took it. Of everyone who saw that scene, the first to come running were parents with children. They offered their children to me, and I contracted with the children. Half kept white skin; half turned blue. But burned, or with limbs severed, or with eyes crushed flat—so long as they were still alive, they returned to their proper shape.
A child becoming a Harvester took only an instant, and it was easy for the wounded to decide they would contract with me. In a flash, people gathered around me, a jumble of screams begging to be saved and sobs of gratitude. In the confusion there were those who, so that they or their own child might live, shoved aside someone worse off and ended up killing them. I like people like that, so I made them Harvesters at once.
Until the sun set, the night passed, and the sun rose again, I stood in that place and made Harvesters. A day later, things had stabilized enough that firefighters and soldiers entered the city with enormous machinery and began clearing the interior. With that, the incident was brought to a close.
And I had obtained exactly 9,190 Harvesters.