Don't Cry. Don't Cry. - 7
Victoria has a new friend.
It's Polaris, the one I met before. A good person — when Victoria was left isolated, Polaris came to help. Thanks to that I had the chance to hear what Victoria was thinking, and I was glad of it.
I have no intention, though, of settling the matter so actively myself. I mean instead to dance to Meriwether's tune, and watch what this person intends to do.
I tried to seep in slowly, over years. But people grow up quickly, and vanish just as fast. The ending, in those faded memories, was the same. I came to knowing truly nothing — no context whatsoever — and found myself buried in the cold. That was when my time as a human ended. People die suddenly.
The time I have with Victoria, in other words, is short.
Now then. How do I get this surveillance removed?
So long as the orders come from the king, even if this person is replaced, someone else will only come in her place. And next time, I suspect, it will be someone a little harder for me to read — assuming this one was caught only because she was unskilled.
Even so, there is an opening to ask that the escort be withdrawn. Through the prince, or the king: to say it's too confining, and ask to be let go. But to manage that, I first have to complete the initial objective.
I know what the royal family's greatest goal is, right now.
Aurora's safety.
Aurora is in the palace now, deep in rehabilitation so she can return to an ordinary life, and she is aiming to come to the Royal Academy next year. Given the difference in age between Prince Sorindiges and Princess Aurora, the two of them will overlap for a single year, beginning then. For that one year, in other words, both prince and princess will be at the Royal Academy — and if a terrorist attack were to occur, wouldn't that be dangerous?
Come to think of it, not everyone in the royal family would die. The eldest princess is studying abroad in another country, so even if the worst should happen, someone would survive.
No. That isn't the point. Securing Princess Aurora's safety is the royal family's chief objective.
And the one who made the problem is a witch whose name I do not know. The witch laid a curse on Aurora and sank her into a sleep from which she could not wake.
That, I know.
That is all I know.
No one so much as mentions the witch in front of Aurora, so there is no way for me to learn her exact name.
And Sorindiges means to use me as bait to catch the witch. The conditions are more than sufficient, because through the newspapers and the broadcasts they held me up as the one who healed Aurora.
A special supernatural power left a few irregularities, but Aurora rose safely all the same. So even if the witch cast her curse and then left well enough alone, once she learns the princess has awakened, won't she come popping out?
As I figure it, the royal family attached an escort to me so that, should the witch take the bait, they can catch her.
In short, that's it.
All I have to do is let the escort catch the witch. For that, the witch has to bite.
The bait is none other than me.
Until now, the paths I travel have been far too simple. The Royal Academy, and the lodgings in front of the main gate. Essentially, just those two. If I were the attacker, I would want my target wandering somewhere else — and I would strike all at once, where it isn't safe.
As it happens, I already have an excuse ready for this. When I was summoned by the royal family for having gone to the Brightshin Slums, I let it sound as though someone had called me there. At the time I only set the words down in the hope I might use them someday, but they serve perfectly well as an excuse now.
And conveniently, a reason to shore that excuse up has appeared.
My relations with Victoria.
A special incident is an easy thing to seize on. Even if I explain nothing, the other side will imagine it for themselves. When something happens, if there is a special incident before or after, people want to tie the two together — even when, in truth, there is no causal link at all.
Class is in session. When it ends, I'll go outside and walk, with no particular destination in mind. At least until the hour for dinner, I'll roam the capital — passing through places no Harvester has ever been, filling in the map as I go, moving about with no defense at all.
So the witch can attack with ease.
With only the one escort attached, Meriwether, I can take it as given that this person has the function to cope, somehow, when the witch appears. And while I'm at it — if Meriwether is badly hurt, if her life comes into danger?
Make her a Harvester, and I might get a look inside the intelligence bureau.
How many of these, I wonder, will actually come to pass?
Class ended, and I headed straight outside. Victoria's worried gaze caught mine, but I answered it with my eyes alone and left the Royal Academy without stopping.
"Huh? Where are you going? You're not heading back to the lodgings?"
I had kept walking along the road instead of my usual path, and Meriwether asked, as if it puzzled her.
I only gazed into the empty air, and said:
"Someone might be calling me."
Neither fact nor lie. I walked on without aim. Of course, if I only wandered I might draw suspicion, so after roaming a suitable while I meant to head for the house of a pauper known to a Harvester.
That day — the day things split between Victoria and me — not every pauper in Brightshin had taken me in. A great many had missed their chance, like people drifting through back alleys the sunlight never reaches.
"Oh my. Is that so? Then I suppose I'd better tag along."
This was a little unexpected. An escort, I had thought, would ask me to stay somewhere as safe as possible — but she simply gave me leave to go. Perhaps guarding me had grown boring. She couldn't gather all that much information, and even though quite some time had passed since I was left on my own, I still hadn't shown any sign of depending on her, had I? It might have been about the time she was finding no further results, and looking for another approach.
If I didn't need to persuade her, so much the better for me.
But this person was busy, too. The work of handling me, and the work of preparing for the witch's attack — to have to do both at once, she might be rather capable. Which meant she likely held a high position, and with it a great deal of information.
If something happened, I would use the escort as a shield as far as I could. Badly hurt — her life beginning to drain away — she would seize hold of me, never knowing the rope was rotten.
Tap, tap.
I walked the road a long while, and then I thought about it. At times like this, I regretted how small the body was. Half the size of an ordinary adult — and by the simplest arithmetic, half the stride as well. Back when I used Choseol's body, I had stood taller than most men, and in the same span of time I had gone much farther.
Even so, I had no thought of running. The concept was this.
I think I hear something, somewhere, but the sound is so faint I can't tell. Is this the right place?
A perfect reason for wandering. I didn't even have to say it outright; I could hear the sound. I would mutter an answer along those lines. Inwardly, of course, what I would really be saying was — I hear it directly, through a Harvester's ear!
Tap, tap.
From here on, it was a road no Harvester had ever walked. I had left the great road for one of middling size and gone on for quite a while. This, however, was a place where the upper classes lived, so the paupers of Brightshin had no occasion to come here at all. If I meant to fill in the map of the capital, I would need to walk these streets well in advance.
It put me in mind of filling in the map of the underground temple, back in the first world. That one I had finished quickly enough, once I had a Harvester's memories.
"Is there someone asking for help in a place like this?"
"I can hear the sound."
I may have wandered too openly. Meriwether asked as if something were odd, and I answered in a mutter. The concept mattered.
I turned from the road into an alley. A dead end. From there I turned back and came out again, and saying the sound was this way, I pointed — as the crow flies — toward the place that was, in fact, my final destination for the day.
That was where a woman who had become a Harvester was raising a child she had borne before she was one. The child was suffering from severe malnutrition. The mother, made healthy once by becoming a Harvester, fed the child this and that, but pale, watery oatmeal alone could not supply the nutrients needed.
For the record, she sold her body for a living, and her husband had been a thug. They had married in a fashion little removed from wild animals, and the woman lived unhappily. True to his trade, the husband had died some time ago. In a world like this, death comes easily in a profession that runs on force. He lunged at someone stronger than himself and became minced meat. By the next day, a corpse is thrown out with the food waste.
The gap between rich and poor exists in every world, and this one is no exception. A world where only the purely good lived could never have developed this far to begin with. Only where there is desire can people go far. That is also why I have not given up on this world.
Too wicked a world, and they kill one another until nothing remains but a field of carnage — a barbaric world in which all of them die, and meet the end. Too good a world, and they never get clear of being primitives: wandering here and there, seeing the injured through to the last, mourning the dead and honoring them, then moving on again. Without greed, they cannot advance.
A world in which the technology has developed is a good thing. At least so far as I know, no utopia exists, and neither does a world armed with nothing but ruin, madness, and selfishness.
There are worlds where humans with electrodes driven into their heads groan and are raised like plants by machines — and worlds where everyone is happy! For the record, those two are the same world.
Those who woke from the dream grieved without end and longed to return to the world inside it. And so they reached me. But the problem? Become one of my Harvesters, and every wound recovers. Even the connection ports embedded in their bodies peeled away — and far from going back, the devices that monitored their vital signs came off as well, so the machines took them for dead meat and tore them to shreds.
Just before the final instant, their genitals were ripped out while they still lived, on the grounds that they were producing bodily fluids. That was a little pitiful.
Thinking of a world so very far away, I lost the way at a suitable point along the walk, and drew slowly nearer to my destination.
And that day.
In a certain old house, where the sunset had sunk, a child who still could not walk — though the time for walking had long since passed — became a Harvester.
Unfortunately.