Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 3
A week had passed since Meriwether became my escort.
Her arrival changed nothing about my life. The same routine — Royal Academy to the dormitory and back — kept turning over each day, neat as the teeth of a gear.
Victoria was growing used to the commute out to the Clockwork Knight school. Her breaks were lengthening, little by little.
Meriwether spent several days asking our classmates about me. Once she learned that I don't form proper relationships with anyone, she stopped asking. An intelligence officer might have found that disappointing, but I am not a particularly sociable person.
So much for the Royal Academy. The Harvesters in Brightshin, meanwhile, had more or less returned to the lives of the poor.
A few of them were trying to better their circumstances. Most were not. People who put on weight and swear they'll exercise, only to quit within three days, are common enough; a change, once it happens, does not simply go on happening. Their bodies had been restored, and it meant nothing. They grew dirty and worn down all over again. In a world this strict about capital and class, a slightly healthier body is not enough to climb. They had gone back to ordinary life.
The capital was peaceful.
Which is another way of saying that everywhere outside the capital was not.
For one thing, Kanna, who had gone home, still could not come back down to the capital. You could see why the houses of the north set such store by martial strength. Creatures you could fairly call monsters carpeted the ground. The one small mercy was that they were fighting one another — and even that, taken as a whole, was only a sliver of it. Monsters of every kind were pouring into this country. From where I stood, it almost looked as if some demon king had ordered an invasion.
But according to Kanna's memories, the monsters were not invading out of malice. It was closer to a simple natural phenomenon. Every few years their breeding seasons come around, and this was a time when several of those seasons overlapped. The year after, the land could no longer bear the numbers, and the monsters spilled outward in every direction. The ecosystem lurched under the chain reaction, and the aftermath came rolling in like a wave.
I know something like it. Even in a faded memory, there is the year when the thirteen-year cicadas and the seventeen-year cicadas emerge together, and an unbelievable multitude bursts out to blanket a whole continent. There, they were cicadas. Here, they are monsters with bulk — and not one species, but several different kinds overlapping at once. The entire ecosystem falls into a real-estate crisis, and those driven out of the fight for territory are pushed farther and farther still. The disaster follows.
And Kanna, in the middle of all this?
She was out in the heart of that battlefield with a great poleaxe, fighting for all she was worth. She leapt this way and that under a weapon so heavy you would never believe she had spent her whole life lame. Her stamina had grown enough to surprise even her. Perhaps she, too, had a superpower something like Tisha's.
At any rate, this was no battle against a demon king's army. It was a fight with beasts stampeding in panic. Shape a current for them, and they peel off toward somewhere else on their own. There is no clear answer for when that current forms, and so the north, as it stands, is hauling in every person it can use and fighting until it does.
Which means that until the monsters flee, warmth trickles in — sparse, irregular — every time Kanna swings her weapon.
Hehe.
Living things are peculiar. Great size does not mean great warmth. There are creatures barely half a person's height that carry as much warmth as a human being. Most of them, though, hold less warmth per life than people do. Domesticated beasts, especially, often have less warmth than insects. I knew that from the first world.
People are the most efficient. I know people well, and so I will go on choosing people. Since coming here I have begun to wonder, just a little, whether I truly know them as well as I thought — but I can still explain why they did what they did.
Was it only the north, measured from the capital, that was busy?
It was not.
South of the capital lies Berne City, and Berne City was in an uproar. Not because of monsters, as in the north. The opposite. It was a matter between people.
It began when they demanded an inquiry into why the incident had happened, and the mayor's office of Berne City gave them no answer at all. So they gathered a number of people and went again, and the other side sent those who knew how to use violence, meaning to crush anyone who asked questions. What they did not know was that among those people was a Harvester with a superpower.
A superpower is not like magic. One person cannot wield a variety of techniques. But within the field they can handle, they move it as if it were their own body. They subdued the attackers and confirmed their identities at once. Soldiers, surprisingly enough — and they had come to eliminate terrorists.
That Harvester judged they could not face this alone, laid the matter before the Purple Twilight Society, and asked for help. The Society, taking it as sound, flooded city hall and demonstrated, and the survivors of Berne City joined that demonstration one by one. Because of the goodwill the Society had shown until then, no one doubted them. Even when the mayor labeled the Purple Twilight Society a terrorist organization, not a single person believed it.
There is a saying: if you want something to spread, forbid it. The questions they tried to seize and silence only spread further.
What is the truth of the catastrophe that struck Berne City? Why are they trying so hard to bury it?
The south sat in the middle of that affair. And the people living in the capital did not know. Newspapers and broadcasts alike went on showing an everyday that never changed.
Blood had already been spilled. The pity of it was that, among the Harvesters, no one had started killing yet. But once a fight breaks out, the Harvesters will bring formidable ability to bear. They are strong, and they are sharp, and some of them have superpowers. The dead will multiply. And once the mouth has tasted blood, it is hard to go back to what you were, isn't it?
Heehee.
Seeing this, I felt relieved. This world did not look so very different from the others. And this time I did not have to worry that it would slip away with nothing happening, the way the last one did — because the person who first asked the question had already been murdered.
The Purple Twilight Society was angry in the proper way. They were resisting what was not right. Blood was already running along the ground, so avoiding bloodshed was no longer possible.
What happens now? And what about Victoria? Won't something happen to Morris and Beatrice?
I would have to watch quietly. The slightly unfortunate part was that Morris and Beatrice barely crossed paths with the Harvesters, so I could not see very well how they were living. I caught glimpses now and then, since the neighborhood they lived in was one where many Harvesters gathered. Beatrice seemed to be going in to a company, and Morris still seemed to be at home. That was about all I knew. If Berne City became a battlefield, that would change as well.
I had decided to keep silent. That I can see through the Harvesters' eyes is a secret. The Harvesters are windows that show me the world until the moment they die, and I had no intention of telling anyone.
"Belle! Let's go out and play today!"
I was looking at Victoria, thinking all of that, when she suddenly said it.
"All right."
Afternoon classes were over. After this I had meant to go back to the dormitory, wash, rest, and sleep. Going out to play shouldn't cause any trouble.
"You can just decide that without your escort's permission?"
Meriwether, seated beside me, asked it that way. But put like that, doesn't it give away that this is surveillance? For now I knew her purely as an escort, so I pointed it out.
"Isn't an escort just someone who watches over you?"
"Belle, your guard is something else. The more I look, the harder you draw the line. Mm. All right. I'm the escort, so I'll come along."
Victoria nodded, looking satisfied.
Nearly a month. Victoria had studied truly hard. Considering what she used to do, it was about time she let off some steam. If anything, she deserved praise for lasting this long.
"Then let's just drop our things and go! Waiting at the front gate is fine, right?"
She said it while shoving textbooks, notebooks, and writing tools into her bag. I had left my books on a shelf at the side of the classroom.
"I don't have anything to drop."
At that, Victoria looked at me with an ambiguous expression.
"Must be nice, Belle, not having to study."
"If all I'm doing is taking back out what I've already memorized, it's simple."
Meriwether leaned in.
"Oh my? I thought you didn't study, Belle. A few of the others leave their books behind too, so I assumed you were the same."
At Meriwether's words, Victoria looked at me. She reached into her bag, drew out a textbook, and tossed it over.
Meriwether caught it, and Victoria said:
"Mally. Open it to any page and ask her the first line."
Looking puzzled, Meriwether opened the textbook and asked. I read the page back to her, and she was thoroughly astonished.
"See it once, and she memorizes the whole thing."
Strictly speaking, it is closer to taking a photograph and filing it away in a folder. Memorizing does not mean I understand. History is comfortable enough. Technical subjects and mathematics, I dislike. They demand things that memorization alone cannot manage.
"It's only that my memory is good."
"Which is exactly why I said that's cheating..."
Watching Victoria lament, Meriwether smiled faintly and handed the textbook back.
"It still means you went to the trouble of reading the whole textbook, doesn't it? That ought to count. So, Tori — if we're going out, do you have somewhere in mind for today?"
Victoria took the textbook from her, tucked it properly into the bag, and stood. Now that I thought of it, Meriwether had no textbook either. She could lounge however she liked in the classroom, and no one paid her any mind. There must be some function that makes people regard whatever she does as acceptable.
That function alone does not get her through everything. Sometimes, when she talks with the other students, the conversations run quite deep — not in the quantity of knowledge, but in the sense of drawing near to a person's heart. And sometimes, hearing her answer with genuine adulthood, I think it increasingly likely that she is older than she looks. Even among the students she appears the same age, so either her disguise is excellent, or she is remarkably young in the face. Turning those few points over, she does seem to be someone tied to intelligence.
"Right up until summer break, I was attending the Clockwork Knight school here in the capital. So I know places worth going."
Victoria rose and went out of the classroom. I followed.
For Victoria, it really was a day off she had not had in a very long time.