“The Queen will send somebody,” Mother replied from the small dinner table. She was writing a third letter requesting a soulcatcher, and had a third letter from Doctor Makino, who supplied them each time she went. A blackbird’s feather scratched across paper. She did not look up when she added, “It will be explained soon enough.”
From my position on the floor, I saw my father’s back straighten, the thick muscles around his neck tighten at the mention of the Queen’s name. The war had changed my father’s relationship with the Queen. He had mined before for new neighbourhoods, to find minerals, to help advance Aajnn, to help it grow. But with the war, his job had changed, and now he mined for metals and minerals that could be turned into weapons. His job, he said, was not to kill, or to aid in the construction of weapons that would, but when he complained, he was told that all resources in Aajnn were being directed to the war. He could work or starve.
The argument, however, was an old one between my parents. The more pressing concern was the need for a soulcatcher. During the week since my return from the doctor, I had not slept well, and needed to be drugged after the second night. It happened, on that night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, that I felt my bones and skin moving. At first, I thought that the doctor’s words had come back to frighten me, that it was just the lingering hint of a nightmare; but when I touched my right arm, the skin shifted, and phantom fingers pushed up against it. I screamed. It was not, perhaps, the most masculine response, but it felt—I remember it now as clearly as that moment when I first felt it—as if a hand had been trapped beneath my skin. That it was caught in the meat and the muscle and the veins. That it was tangled against the bone. That it was struggling for freedom, trying to force my body into the right size and shape so that it might be able to move freely.
My only response was to scream. When Doctor Makino arrived in his doctor’s blacks, appearing from the dim night light as if he had been waiting in the dark for this to happen, he wasted no time in sedating me. I was to be sedated, likewise, each night, and in that haze I was only dimly aware of the second body pushing against my skin. But in the morning, I was sick and groggy, and unable to attend school, but there was no presence of this soul, except in my mind. I followed my mother on her errands, or sat in the main room, or worked at some other task, but at no point did I stop thinking about whose soul was inside me.
Satomi
They tell us that the enemy makes blackbirds from brass. That beneath the black feathers, beneath the beak, beneath the hard skin of claws, there is nothing but brass machinery. That there is no blood. That there is no soul. That the birds are nothing but the machines a man made. The machines a woman made. The machines that have been sent to spy upon us, to tell the enemy who we are, where we are, and how to kill us.
The plumes of smoke draw closer and I ask myself, “Will the enemy be of blood and bones?”
Yoshio
My left arm, to this day, is longer than my right. I am right handed, and so my right hand and arm is used more, yet my left is thicker, stronger, the arm of a man who would always be more active than I. It is not something that you will notice upon first meeting me, but it is the physical reminder of my infection, of being Infected, and it is the only way by which I can now gauge what the owner of the soul inside me once looked like. Yet, in comparison to many other children in Aajnn who were Infected, my deformity is not even worth mentioning.
The Infected came into Yokto in the second week after my visit to Doctor Makino. It was they who picked up the burnt and bloody letters off the streets.
The first who I saw was a girl, no older than six. She was walking down the narrow lane that my parents’ house was on, following a blackbird. The bird was jumping from letter to letter, occasionally flying, but clearly leading her, and she was hurrying along after it. Behind her came Doctor Makino in his doctor blacks and a tall woman in worker browns that, I assumed, was the girl’s mother.
When the girl was outside our house, I walked down to her. The right side of her face was lopsided and still to the point that even her right eye did not move. Through her worker browns, I could make out the swell of a breast on her right side; it was an ugly thing, too big for her, and made more prominent next to the flatness of the rest of her chest. As she saw me approach, she did not speak, but remained still and quiet, a sullen girl.
Before I could speak, her blackbird leapt, and flew down the lane. The girl ran in a limping run, one leg larger than the other. Her mother moved quickly behind her, but Doctor Makino turned to me, his dark fading gaze resting on me, and then over my shoulder. When I turned to follow his gaze, a black blur startled me. Looking back, I saw that a young blackbird had dropped to the lane and stood on a narrow letter, watching me intently.
“I think this one wants you to follow it,” Doctor Makino said.
“How can you be certain?” I still remembered the dark blood down my father’s hand. I would not risk that.
The doctor, however, sighed and rubbed at the right side of his face with a black gloved hand. He looked tired, and sounded tired when he spoke: “The letters are meant for those like you, Michio. The Infected. At least, that is what we think, and certainly the birds are only allowing those like you to pick up certain letters.”
It didn’t take much to make the connection between the letters and the soul inside me. Would it really tell me the identity of the person inside me? Would it help? Before I could talk myself out of it, I stepped out into the street, picked up the letter the blackbird had moments before been on. Tearing its dirty envelope open, I read quickly. “It is from a man called Yoshio.”
“Is the next?”
I followed the bird, picked up a second letter, opened. “Yes.”
At the end of the lane, the blackbird stood on a third letter, waiting. The narrow buildings and dim light from the roof of the world made it seem as if I would be following it into the unknown, and I suppose I was, though I did not feel frightened. The doctor said, “Follow it and collect your letters quickly. The more you have, the more you will know about this Yoshio, and the easier he will be to remove when—
if
a soulcatcher arrives.” He paused, then added, “
Quickly
, Mi. Do you understand?”
I didn’t, and said so.
“The queen will not like this,” he explained. “The letters of dead soldiers are problematic enough, I imagine, for the secrets that they will reveal about the war. You hear rumours—you are too young for these rumours—but I hear them. The Queen and those around her deny them, but they have been busy telling us all that we are winning the war for years now, and cannot say otherwise. What if these letters say otherwise?”
I had no answer, but the doctor did not expect one. He thrust his black gloved hands into his black jacket pockets, and began walking down the street in the direction of the young girl and her mother from before. It was in the opposite direction of where my blackbird waited, and when I turned to see him again, he appeared only as a dim outline, lit by the light of the mushrooms beneath his feet.
Heeding Doctor Makino’s words, I collected the letters that the blackbird landed upon. Even in my haste it took me all morning. Once, I tried to collect a letter that the bird did not land on, but for that, I received a sharp peck in the hand. It did not draw blood like the bird attacking my father, but I did not touch any letter other than those my bird landed on afterwards.
When I returned home, it was late in the afternoon, and my mother had been looking for me. I was scolded, but not harshly, for she had seen the streets fill with children who had been infected, and watched as they picked up the letters, and had been able to deduce what had happened to me. But also, in her hand, she held a fresh green envelope that also lightened her mood. It was a letter from the Queen, informing her that a soulcatcher would be arriving in two days time, and that we would not have to pay for its services.
Satomi
The enemy is made from brass. It sounds insane, but it’s true. I saw it with my own eyes. Commander Takahashi showed me. Well, not me, not personally. I have never spoken with him personally. He won’t speak to any of us individually. No, he told us all, together. He called all of us on the Northern Line into the Forward Command so that he could show us the enemy.
It had been laid in the middle of the tent, its skin sliced open, and we could clearly see that it had been built from tarnished pieces of bronze. It was a man, though, no matter what anyone says. A man. We could clearly see that. A pale man. A man with brown hair and deep set eyes. A man who had once lived and breathed, you could believe, but he was now a man made with brass.
The Commander did not give him a name. He was the enemy. Just the enemy. A man from The Shibtri Isles. Not even a man, if it could be helped. A thing. A thing from the Shibtri Isles, the Commander said, more often than not. He compared him to the birds we shot. Told us that they were not our blackbirds, just as this was not a man like us. They were both things. Things made by the enemy to be our enemy.
We had expected men and women of blood and bone, just as the Queen said, but no. They, the Commander told us, will not fight. They will send these machines, these replicas of men and women to fight, and leave the casualties as a burden for us.
We were silent after that. Shocked. Confused. Offended? A little, but it did not matter. There was only silence. Silence in which we all heard, clearly, the click, and then the faint hum of the brass machinery starting. A gentle sound almost. A humming.
And then the thing—the man thing—sat up.
The soulcatcher wore the catcher’s dark blue pants, blue jacket and blue gloves, and, like Doctor Makino, the soulcatcher wore the white, high collared shirt that her occupation demanded she wear beneath these. To my twelve-year-old gaze, however, the soulcatcher was much more attractive than the doctor had ever been. She was a woman and I was immediately besotted, though in hindsight, I imagine that it is more correct for me to write that she was a girl, no more than six years older than me, and having only recently been appointed to her position. No family in Yokto warranted a veteran soulcatcher and experienced soulbird.
My soulcatcher’s name was Mariko Ohara. She was a small, dark haired girl, and curved in ways that I could not keep my gaze from noticing. My staring was no doubt made worse when she had removed her jacket and placed it on the steel chair in my bedroom. It is, therefore, with some amusement that I write that her first words, after the courtesy of saying hello, were spoken to me with a knowing smile on her lips and amused light in the dark eyes that were behind her thin, silver glasses; those words caused in me such utter shock that my immediate response was to blush like I had never blushed before, and to tell her that she couldn’t possibly mean that.
“I’m sorry, but I do. You have to take your clothes off.” She was trying to be firm but failing. “I’m sorry, Michio, but my bird cannot search you if you’re wearing your clothes.”
“Must he take off all of them?” Mother asked.
She was making the situation much worse and it took all the willpower that I had, then, at twelve, not to spin around and shout at her.
My distress, however, must have been plain to Mariko, for she said, “He can wear shorts, of course. Of course. He just needs to leave his chest, arms and legs free, so that my bird can search you. You’ll need to take off your soulcatcher too, I’m afraid. The birds do not like them.”
Her soulbird was the biggest blackbird that I had ever seen. It was easily twice the size of those that had made Yokto their home. It—I could never think of it as a he, or even a she—was both wider and taller than those, and it had a thick barrel chest. Its black feathers, usually so sleek on blackbirds, were shaggy, as if to suggest a wildness to the bird that could not be tamed. Its long, dark slash of a beak did not leave one with a feeling that this was not the case, either. Yet, despite its appearance, the soulbird was perched in its narrow cage quietly, drawing easy breaths. It was not bothered by the fact that it had no movement and that the black bars of its cell pressed in like a fist against it.
Once I had changed in my parents’ room, Mariko told me to lie on my back upon the narrow, single bed that dominated my room. Once I had done this, the soulcatcher and my mother tied my arms and legs down with heavy leather straps. It was while they did this that I felt, for a moment, ashamed of the room that I occupied. It was the first time that I had ever felt ashamed, and that, indeed, ashamed me. Compared to others in Yokto, I was not suffering: One of my parents worked, I did not share my room, I had a table and chair at which to do my homework, and I even had a few books and toys. I could even read. My own father could not do that. Yet, in this position, I was able to compare my mother’s faded brown worker clothing and Mariko’s new, thick white shirt, and the silver studs in her ears—three in the left, five in the right—and the glasses she wore. My family could afford none of these things, I realized. Even the bed sheets I lay upon were old and threadbare and had been mended more than once. It caused in me a sudden bout of self-consciousness in relation to the poorness of my family that I had never felt before, a poorness that if I could have hidden from this beautiful girl before me, I would have.
There was nothing I could do about these thoughts. Indeed, when Mariko lifted the soulbird’s cage above me, her slender fingers opening the door, those evaporated quickly. The soulbird stuck its black head out. Mariko bent down, and placed her mouth next to it: “We are looking for the soul of Yoshio—he does not belong.”
The soulbird’s white gaze fell upon me. It was an oddly empty gaze, one that I did not like. In its cage, the big black bird shifted. Its feathers ruffled. Its long sharp beak opened and closed in silence. Then, slowly, it’s body scrapping against the bars, feathers falling off as it pushed itself out, it dropped lightly onto my naked stomach. Its cold claws pinched my skin. Its white gaze returned to mine. The emptiness in there was slowly becoming frightening but it was not something that I could look away from—