Chapter 193
The village I am standing in now is a port city called Nantes.
Once, before Berne City swelled into what it is, this place was the waystation on the road to it. Technology advanced until the river mouth could be cleared and a harbor opened in the very heart of Berne City, and from that day Nantes set its foot on the long road of decline. In the old days a ship might sail up the river and still find nowhere to unload, so the great cargoes were set down here.
Among the people Victoria massacred, some had lived in this town for a long time. Piece even the fragments of their memories together, and the whole picture comes clear.
For the record, the townsfolk were not exactly enemies. They were only citizens who happened to live here — some of them dragged under by the sea, others unable to endure a terror that closed in inch by inch, until they took their own lives.
If you asked whether Victoria was a cruel and cold-blooded person, the answer would be no. From everything I have watched, she is a girl who understands that killing someone properly is a bad thing. But set against a power too vast, morality comes apart with embarrassing ease. I would not call it some wickedness native to the human heart. It is closer to selective indifference.
Say you must cross the city ahead of you to reach your destination, and that destination is a place you have to reach no matter what happens. Time is far too short for any other way. You are riding a weapon — a land battleship of more than forty thousand tons. Do you really need to spare a thought for whoever might be underneath? If they fail to get clear, it is a natural death. So you push on through. By that crude arithmetic, 4,439 people became warmth.
Nantes is a faded little port town. But everyone who tried to enter Berne City and found the way shut came flooding in here, and more people died than the port had ever held. Victoria is probably not weighing any of this with cold deliberation. Most people simply end up like that.
Put more simply: an ordinary person can press the button that sends a missile on its way and feel no guilt at all. If someone else is watching, of course, they will put on a show of grief — but the ones whose hearts are truly wounded are vanishingly few. It is not that people are evil. They cannot feel another person's death as their own. A gun is easier than a blade, which you feel with perfect clarity as it cuts a life away, and easier still than the gun is a bomb, which can blow an unspecified multitude off the face of the world in a single stroke.
A person can understand another person, one meeting one. Understanding a multitude is impossible. A leader is not someone who actually understands the many. A leader is someone who steers the many into a shape that can be understood.
Anyway.
This harvest was a jackpot. I hope still more people awaken to superpowers from here on. They will not even properly understand what they are doing, and they will hand me the warmth of the many.
Thinking that, I walked across the river, bone-dry. It was hard to believe that only a few hours ago this had been a channel wide enough for enormous freighters to come and go; every last drop of moisture seemed to have been sucked away, and even the riverbed gave me nothing underfoot but parched sand.
Polaris followed behind me with a dark look on her face, and she did not seem to have gained a superpower. I cannot claim to know these things by some special sense, but people who come into a power try to test it at once. There have been those, like Tisha, who hid it completely — and even she, left alone, experimented with it in secret. So unless something is truly out of the ordinary, there is no chance I would fail to notice whether a Harvester had obtained a superpower.
And from that, one more thing can be worked out. Honestly, an ability like regeneration is difficult to recognize unless you have taken a serious wound. Tisha, though, knew from the very beginning that she had one. She simply did not know how exceptional it was. Judging by that, I would guess that the on-and-off of a power, at least, becomes clear the moment someone becomes a Harvester and gains it. The trouble is that a superpower, no matter how you look at it, only comes after the point at which I receive the memories. So I can never be sure how much they themselves know, and that is a little regrettable.
Anyway.
Once we had walked across the river and followed the well-kept estuary upstream, Berne City showed itself to the east. And above it, the sea hung upside down in the sky. If that up there is the sea, then this is the shore. A thin film of water is visible overhead, and the farther I walk toward Berne City, the deeper that water grows. The faintly wavering stars and moon dim little by little until they vanish altogether into the dark, and though the sea is overhead, the air is so bone-dry it feels as if my lungs are being torn apart. It ruins any sense that this is real. If this were VR, you would say someone had pasted a sea texture across the sky. That is how unreal it looks.
Once we properly entered the city, there was no longer any light in the sky at all. The light was below instead, seeping faintly out from between the buildings.
That was when Polaris came up beside me at a quick pace and took my hand. She gripped it oddly tight, so I turned my head, and she signaled me with her eyes. She had seen someone watching us from between the buildings. I already knew, because I had seen it through her eyes, but it seemed Polaris thought I did not.
The truth is, this is a dangerous place. So her wariness is welcome.
This is no longer a gathering of victims who protested, were crushed, and found themselves trapped inside the city. It is a den of would-be traitors who have decided, out of some other hunger, to raise a world of their own. What matters is who holds the core of it. Purple hair. Skin unusually white.
Yes.
A Harvester. They occupy the upper ranks, the very top included, while those with neither strength nor intelligence are sinking into the place of underlings. If one meant to found some special order, the side that ought to be favored most is theirs. There is no need to tell them so. I am perfectly content with whatever end this little collective meets.
"Belle. Be careful."
"I know it's frightening, but walk like you belong here, Polaris. Then we won't be in any immediate danger."
Because we look like Harvesters of Berne City. And no one recognizes me. Better still, among the Harvesters who were in Berne City, not one of them is looking my way. Right now every Harvester of any standing has gone to see Victoria, so I can move as I please.
For the record, Victoria is in the middle of them at this very moment, talking. She leaves out, very neatly, the fact that she killed Marquis Gaston, and explains instead that the marquis dealt with three corporations and left this place in ruins. It does not mean much to them. They have already chosen, rather than redressing their own grievances, to build a world in which they will not be wronged. So they press Victoria hard. Pointing up at the enormous sea afloat in the sky, they tell her she can become the greatest person of all.
I was walking along while I watched, when Polaris tugged at my collar.
"Where are we going?"
"From here, I'm heading to the old house where Victoria's family lives."
It lies in the south of Berne City, where the upper class gathered to live. So instead of the downtown of tall buildings that you could properly call Berne City, we take a wide arc around the outskirts. Here and there, not a single building is intact. The sea hanging upside down overhead grows gradually shallower, and far off, moonlight is just beginning to glimmer faintly, like starlight, when Polaris suddenly screams.
"Eek!"
Mm. I know from the feel of it.
I turned to look at her. The clothes she had been wearing lay on the ground. When she shielded Victoria earlier, her whole back was burned; it was a miracle the clothes had not split apart while she regenerated. But they must have reached their limit. They gave way completely, and her pure white body was laid bare. Her face was red enough to show even in the dark.
"Shall we go into a house so you can get dressed?"
"Um, so. How long until we get where you're going?"
"We'll have to walk for quite a while."
"Nothing else for it, then."
Polaris hesitated, covering herself with her small hands, and made for a house that was at least still standing. I followed her in, and her white back came into view. I can move my hands, but I have no eyes, so seeing her with this body was impossible. I looked instead through the eyes of a Harvester nearby — one who had survived, and was dying all the same. At the time I had thought her no different from a corpse, but turning through Polaris's memories, the wounds were apparently not so terrible after all. She is about my height, so she looks like a small child, though I had wondered ever since she tore a clockwork machine apart with her bare hands. The people of the Bearington family, they say, have always been physically extraordinary. Long, long ago, that was how the first of them was made a noble. Polaris is the same. I had half-jokingly called her a polar bear, and she really was like one. Hair aside, the wounds themselves, by her own estimation, would have healed with half a year of rest.
Still, a naked girl walking into an abandoned house on a dark night — if anyone else saw it, the scene would look thoroughly unhinged. The one following her is a girl as well, so if they called it school bullying, I would not have a word in my defense.
Going in, I felt something give and squash under my foot, and looked down. Between stone and splintered wood, the half-rotted corpses of a woman and a baby lay tangled and stuck together. They seem to have died when the house came down.
Mm.
The light was gone long ago, and no warmth remains. Which means that if Polaris saw it, the sight would strike her mind a blow. At least the master of the house will not be waiting inside. I suppose that counts as a small mercy. I stepped on the corpses and crushed them flat, then nudged the remains with my foot until they were buried completely. A rotten stench did rise, but a smell like that is almost impossible to notice beneath the heavy air laid over this town.
In the meantime Polaris found clothes inside and came out wearing them. A moment ago she had been a cute girl, and it was funny how the outfit turned her, in an instant, into somebody's aunt. She is far too small to really count as one, and her face is unrealistically cute — but the clothes themselves are nothing but practicality. Or rather, they might be fine for picking through a place like this, except that even in a baggy outfit her chest insists on making its own argument, striking deep at a very particular taste. The me who lives in those faded memories might have died of joy. I, not particularly.
"You've become much more like someone from around here."
"You're making fun of me, aren't you?"
"I'll say you look like a middle-aged lady."
She hit me.
"There are things you can say, and things you can't."
"I meant you'd draw less attention. There are quite a lot of people in Berne City who gave themselves to me."
At that, Polaris nodded.
"I know. There was a big incident here about two months ago, right? That's how you and Victoria ended up at the Royal Academy."
"Yes. That's why I told you earlier to walk like you belonged, if people from Berne City were watching."
"Ah. Yeah. I get it. My clothes were rags anyway, so I must have already looked like someone from here."
She understood at once. So, before she could realize what lay behind the sour reek hanging over this whole place, I set off in an obvious hurry. Polaris followed.
"It's this wrecked, and you can still find the way?"
"If I've been somewhere once, I remember it, more or less."
I am walking with a map drawn in my head, so even if I drift a little, I can find it again quickly.
"Ugh. I wish Victoria would be there when we arrive. But she won't be, will she."
Hm?
"You know?"
"The water up there keeps getting shallower. She'll be wherever it's thickest."
"And you followed me anyway?"
"We're going to find the people Victoria is looking for, right? That girl's parents."
I nodded.
"Lift your head and you can tell where Victoria is, so let's find whatever can be found before we spend too much time. Meeting her now would only drag things out."
If she has understood, then good. With a noticeably lighter step, quietly scuffing away the last scrap stuck to my sole, I head for the house where Victoria's family and I were living, a few dozen days ago.