Lost the Dream — 4
"Ah, I want a snack!"
It was the season when the shrubs of the Royal Academy had flushed red. We had eaten lunch in the academy dining hall and were just stepping out the door when Victoria murmured it — and went on to rattle off, in one long string, every treat this world had to offer.
"It hasn't even been a minute since we ate."
"These days I eat and eat, and I'm still hungry. I'm telling you."
She said it under her breath. Ever since Victoria had collapsed in Berne City and woken three days later, her appetite had grown strangely fierce.
I looked her over, head to toe. Purple hair. Skin white as snow. The marks of the Harvested showed plain on her: middling height, filled out where a girl ought to be filled out and slim where she ought to be slim — a pretty girl of exactly that age.
She hadn't put on weight, and she hadn't grown taller. If anything, she looked a little thinner than before. Too thin to call it gaining flesh.
Was she ill?
But through Victoria's own senses, nothing hurt. The feelings moving through her body were normal. Only the amount she ate had truly increased.
Or had something inside her broken?
Raising a sea into the sky had been strange, I'll grant that. It had looked like nothing a human being could do. If she had burned through lifespan, or life force, I could have understood it. And yet, oddly enough, the light inside her body was perfectly intact. The color had soaked through to purple, but the warmth had only grown larger.
Warmth, as a rule, swells in childhood and dwindles little by little with age. Of course it sometimes leaps upward all at once, or plunges without warning. For the most part, though, it follows a normal distribution. If you want warmth at its most efficient, you eat at the peak — and even so, waiting for the proper time yields far more than eating that way.
The light I take to be the soul is discarded once the warmth has been drawn from it. Beneath the surface, it vanishes. Here, it simply scatters.
Why throw it away, you ask? A warm stone cooled, and became a stone. What am I supposed to do with a cold stone? Eat it, the way some demon out of a genre novel would? How, exactly, does one eat light? That is the feeling of it. What remains after the warmth is taken is nothing but a byproduct with no use.
Once, one of the Harvested died and I took the warmth — and then, of all things, a demon snatched up what came after. I have no idea what they mean to do with something useless to me, but if they can use it, that is their affair. Light was never something you could catch hold of in the first place. When it disappears, it disappears.
And so I set about soothing Victoria, who was hungry now.
"Hold out until we're finished. There are still afternoon classes, aren't there?"
"It isn't a matter of time."
"No?"
Victoria looked me straight in the eye, perfectly serious, and said it like this.
"I don't have enough money."
Not enough money? No — that was true, wasn't it. An allowance had come now and then, but since the incident in Berne City, nothing further had arrived.
"Aren't you simply spending too freely?"
"No. No, Bell. For the record, I am thinking about the money I spend, all right? I don't care how good snacks are — I'm not stupid enough to throw money around without a thought!"
Watching Victoria all but shout it, I stole a glance around. No one nearby was paying us any mind. Polaris, who had taken to going about with us lately, had said she was off to talk with her own faction, and so we had agreed to eat lunch apart.
"Then is it because the allowance hasn't come?"
"That's part of it. But honestly, I'd feel too awkward holding my hand out to my parents right now, so I'm not about to grumble over that."
Fair enough. All that ever arrived were letters of truly short sentences. The one small mercy was that this time, when a letter went to the address Victoria had sent, a proper reply had actually come back.
"Then what was all that anguish for?"
"Everything's too expensive these days."
Ah. So when she had gone out purse in hand and come back sighing, it wasn't simply that she lacked the money. The prices had risen. I don't read thoughts — I only receive sensations — so I hadn't expected a gap like that.
But were they expensive? What had it been like back when Victoria's hair was still blond? Hmm. Compared with then, things had risen about twenty percent overall. At that rate, prices hadn't climbed so very much, had they? They had risen, certainly, but wasn't it a moderate sort of rise? Going by my faded memories, I seemed to recall climbs of that size. I thought there had been talk, somewhere, that the economy was simply having a hard time.
Why were a handful of those memories flashing up words like disaster, or two percent a year? Wasn't it perfectly ordinary for something that cost ten dollars to become twelve? Too many memories were glittering at once. I couldn't sort them.
Knowing a thing does not make you master of its field. What I know, and what I merely remember, are nothing alike. Owning an encyclopedia doesn't mean you're versed in everything inside it, does it? This was the same. Few people who have memorized a formula can score perfectly on the practice problems that use it. I was much the same. My head must simply be poor. Which is why I arm myself with the truth, and not with lies.
I would speak according to what I knew.
"Prices go up."
"They do? Maybe. No — even so, I can barely buy a single thing to eat! At this rate I won't even get to look at anything sweet. I don't care how good the dining hall is. I can't do without the sweetness they sell outside!"
Victoria wailed. Of course, even when she said sweet, it wasn't the sort of sweetness drowned in high-fructose syrup. It was bread folded with fruit, or confectionery packed full of sugar. This world had plants rather like corn; nothing stopped anyone from making heaps of fructose out of them. That kind of sweetness simply hadn't developed much. By the measure of my faded memories it was a mild, thin sweetness, but it seemed to be enough for Victoria.
It wasn't as if no one — Polaris, or Kanna — enjoyed sweets off in a space of their own. But that wasn't eaten at the Royal Academy. It was eaten after they returned to a villa, or a home. Hard for Victoria to get her hands on.
"What about earning money?"
"Mmmmm. Earning money. Right."
Victoria folded her arms and thought. From where I stood, earning money was easy. With a power that let you command water as you pleased, there was no way you couldn't find work. If anything, she ought to have been able to rake it in — but she didn't seem to be thinking in that direction.
"Right. Bell, what do you do about money? Does the royal family pay for all of it?"
Then, all at once, Victoria asked how it was for me.
Hm?
Come to think of it, I had never once held money in my hand. I had considered, once, a way to get hold of some, but it had fizzled and slipped out of the stream of my awareness. After I went out with Maleficent — a day when, on the surface, Victoria and I had fallen out — it was pushed beyond the edge of my notice, and there was nothing to be done about that. So I had never held money. But the royal family gave me everything I needed in order to live.
"Yes. I never get the chance to have money of my own, but it doesn't get in the way of living."
"Ah. That's you, all right. No, but still — wouldn't it be better to have at least a little money?"
"Why?"
At my question, Victoria stared at me the way one stares at something that is very much not a person.
"Bell. People need money if they're going to live."
She said it gravely, setting a hand on my shoulder with the look of someone trying to work out how to explain this to a small child.
"If you mean barter, I understand that."
"That's weird! We're learning about economics in class, and when it comes to tests you're up in the top ranks!"
"If I memorize it, I can say it."
"And understanding?"
"For a head like mine, it's too difficult."
She looked at me with an expression that said whoa.
"Bell. Wait a moment. If there was something you wanted, what would you do?"
"I wait beside it."
Why did that answer put such a frustrated look on her face?
"No — there are plenty of people who won't give you a thing even if you beg and plead."
"If I wait, someone holds it out to me eventually."
"Bell... There are so many people who won't give it, and if you wait like that they'll chase you off for getting in the way of business..."
Getting in the way of business?
No one shoves a helpless girl like this away just for clinging to their side. Unless it is out of kindness, to keep her far from danger, most people draw her in.
"Unless they know what I am, the only people who drive me off are good people."
Victoria's head tilted to a precise forty-five degrees. She had failed to understand what I was saying.
"We are talking about buying things with money right now, aren't we?"
"If what I wanted could be bought with money, I would give as much as it took."
Turning stone into gold is not difficult. Among the elements strewn across the universe, gold is extremely common, isn't it? Perhaps because of that, so long as I am not creating it outright from empty air, gold doesn't so much as pull away. There is no resistance at all.
Victoria stared at me, her eyes full of questions. I knew, and I was deliberately saying something else. Even a fool notices, partway through, what is actually being said. It was time I stopped letting my true intent leak into the words.
What I want is warmth alone, and if that could be bought with money, I would turn this planet to gold to have it. No — turning stone to gold doesn't yield the same weight. It yields the same volume of gold. Turn a planet to gold, and it would explode. Would anyone still want that? I don't really know. And at a volume that large, reality would almost certainly fail to bear it, and break.
"Uh, so... what you want isn't something money can buy. Is that it?"
"Not right now."
Someday, once the world had developed further, I might do something for them on the condition that they give me warmth. Not yet. So I would let the words blur past. I picked up a stone from the ground, then set it on my palm where Victoria could see it easily.
"Do you need gold, Victoria?"
And — tap.
I pressed down on reality, and it turned to gold.
Victoria stepped in close, folded my hand shut inside hers, and said:
"Don't you ever let anyone else see that. Ever."
She said it with the gooseflesh risen on her face.
"It's only a lump of stone."
"Thank you for reminding me what you are. Don't."
"Then I won't."
Already, what I wanted must have become something one must not ask about.
"Even so, it would be enough for your allowance, wouldn't it?"
Victoria stared at the hand she was gripping, her face knotted with enormous deliberation, and then spoke in a voice that seemed to stab into herself.
"Make it so it never happened."
Then there was nothing to be done. I turned it into sandstone. For some reason my memories glittered as they hauled up all sorts of elements, and the search program in my head was a little... Perhaps because there was no AI, it simply blazed away on raw related searches, and it was finicky work.
I set the stone back on the ground and returned to the classroom with a dazed Victoria.
It was time for the afternoon classes.