Brave Story

  Wataru was in a hospital. His mother was sleeping right in front of him. He stood at the head of her bed. There was another bed in the room, but it was empty.

  The lights were off. Through the curtain he could see the night sky. He looked out. Streetlights burned on the road below. This was the third floor. So it’s not the same time here and in Vision, then.

  “Mom?” Wataru said. His mother was breathing heavily but quietly.

  She looked unchanged from the time when he left for Vision. Maybe, thought Wataru, she looked a little thinner. There was a placard on the headboard with the name of the doctor and the date she had entered the hospital. The doctor was a specialist in internal medicine, it said. The day she had entered the hospital was the day she had left the gas on in the apartment.

  It looks like somebody called an ambulance.

  That was a relief. Wataru felt his legs wobble a little bit. Thank you, whoever did that. Thank you…

  I should wake Mom up, tell her what happened. That’s why I came here. But Wataru found himself unable to speak, unable even to touch her. He was filled with sadness mingled with relief that his mother was sleeping safe and sound in the hospital. She would be okay.

  There was a red flower in an empty milk jug at the head of her bed. A box of tissues. A paper bag at the foot of the bed. He looked inside to see his mother’s underclothes and her purse.

  In her purse, he found a small pad of paper, an address book, and a ballpoint pen. Wataru ripped out a page of paper and wrote a short note.

  —Mom. I’m okay. I’ll come home soon. Please wait for me. Wataru.

  Wataru folded the note and slipped it into his mother’s hand. Then, just for a moment, he gave her hand a squeeze. She moaned and rolled in bed.

  Wataru waited a moment. She didn’t wake up, and he heard a sound from somewhere behind him. The ringing of bells.

  Was someone coming to visit her? he wondered. Grandma from Chiba, or Uncle Lou? What about Grandma and Grandpa in Odawara? They would all be worried.

  What about Dad?

  When he thought of his father, all the feelings he had forgotten during his adventures in Vision came rushing back to him. His hands balled into fists, and he had to consciously remain calm until the storm in his heart went away.

  He heard the bells ring again, faster this time.

  Wait for me. Everything will be okay. I’ll go to the Tower. I’ll make it okay. I promise.

  Wataru turned and began to run.

  Chapter 12

  Meena

  Wataru bent back through the tunnel of light-arriving at the chapel ruins at the symbol on the ground. He thought he had run the whole way, but he wasn’t out of breath. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  Nearby, Kee Keema stood atop a rocky outcropping. Alongside him was the slender silhouette of Meena, the two of them framed by the rising morning sun. Their faces were cast in shadows, making their expressions impossible to read.

  Wataru silently climbed to the top of the protruding rock formation. Kee Keema and Meena looked at each other. The waterkin shook his head ever so slightly as if to say, “Best not to ask.”

  “Kutz and Trone have already gone back,” Kee Keema said in a cheery but slightly affected manner. “We should go too and get ourselves some breakfast.”

  The three began to walk along the outcropping. Wataru took care where he placed his feet, keeping his eyes on the ground below. The next time he looked up, the day had fully dawned.

  He turned and glanced back at the barren land they had just left—the grasslands, the rocky crags. Vision. The wind whipping across the grass stung his eyes.

  That’s why I’m crying…it’s the wind stinging my eyes. Or maybe it’s the beautiful view.

  Not because I thought, just for a moment, how much I’d like to show it to Mom. That’s not why I’m crying. I’m not a little boy, not anymore.

  Yet his cheeks were damp. Kee Keema stopped for a second and looked at him, then resumed his plodding pace forward. He motioned to Meena with his eyes as if to say “Let him cry.”

  Up to this point, the cat-girl had been walking behind Wataru. Now she hastened her pace to catch up to him. “Did you see your mother?”

  Wataru nodded. He wiped his face with his arm.

  “I’m glad.” Meena gently patted the boy on the back.

  “She was asleep, so…we couldn’t talk,” Wataru said. “I wasn’t there long enough to explain anything anyway.”

  “I’m sure she understands. I’m sure she knows you were there, even if she was asleep.”

  Wataru lifted his eyes to look at her. Meena shot him an encouraging smile. “That’s how mothers are. Even when they are far away, they know how their children are doing. Perk up, Wataru. If you’re sad, she’ll sense that, right?”

  Wataru blinked. A final teardrop fell from his eye. “Right!”

  According to the doctor’s analysis, the well water by the chapel ruins had been contaminated with a strong insecticide for repelling insects and other pests. When Wataru told him about the skeletons he had met by the altar in the underground chamber, the doctor said he would very much like to examine those bones.

  “If they died by insecticide, the bones would bear traces of it. I wonder if they all died from drinking that water? That would clarify at least one aspect of Cactus Vira’s curative activities.”

  “Isn’t it a bit late to worry about what happened?” Wataru asked.

  “Of course,” said the doctor gravely. “No amount of investigation will bring back those who have died. But if we expose the facts about Cactus Vira, about exactly what sort of man he was, then perhaps we can prevent people from being fooled the next time some crazy guy comes along.”

  Meena’s wounds were raw and exposed. The doctor administered more ointment and scolded her for not being careful. She yelped at his brusque treatment—yet, for some reason, sat there with a big smile on her face. It was like looking at a different person than the cat-girl Wataru had seen in the crowd only a few days before.

  Where did she come from, I wonder? Why was she with the ankha refugees from the North? Where did she learn to move like she does? How did she come to wear the Mirror of Truth? Wataru had so many questions he wanted to ask that he tagged along with Kee Keema during his hospital visit later in the day.

  Meena saw the look on his face when he entered the room and beamed. “You want to know my story, don’t you,” she said, anticipating his question. “One thing you should know is that originally, there were very few of my kind on the southern continent at all.”

  Three hundred years ago, when Agrilius the First helped build the Northern Empire, his policies of extreme ankha-centrism drove out all the other races. Back then, in the early years after the bitter civil war, the refugees from the north to the south were even more numerous than today.

  “My ancestors, too, came here at that time. More than half of the kitkin in the south are descendants of those early immigrants.”

  Meena’s ancestors had settled in the mercantile country of Bog. Apparently, Meena’s great grandfather was something of a financial genius, and he had great success selling produce in bulk. As a result, their clan lived a peaceful and rich life.

  “So you come from a proper house, eh?” said Kee Keema, quite impressed. Meena laughed shyly, but her smile soon disappeared. A look of sorrow crept into her eyes as she thought back upon her distant past.

  “It happened during the summer when I was seven. We were living in a small house—me, my grandparents, and my parents, just the five of us—by the lake, a short distance from town. One night, we were attacked…”

  Meena explained that she was too young to remember the details precisely. She only knew she had been awoken suddenly by her mother in the middle of the night and made to hide under the bed. She was not to move until her mother or father called for her, even should she hear her name. Her mother’s face was stern, and, Meena realized, very frightened.

  “That’s when she ga
ve me this,” Meena said, touching the Mirror of Truth at her neck. “She told me to take it with me, and to treasure it always. She said it was my good-luck charm. I begged her to let me stay with her, but she refused and left me alone under the bed.”

  The young Meena had done as she was told. She heard footsteps, great thudding footsteps, all through the large house. She also heard people shouting, and even a scream. She was so frightened she thought she might cry out loud, but she held back her tears. She made herself as small and invisible as she could.

  Wataru remembered how he had curled up under his bed when his mother had attacked that woman—his father’s lover—on the balcony. The situation was completely different, of course. Wataru had been running from a fight—there was no threat to his own life. Yet he thought he could imagine something of what Meena must have felt that night.

  “Just then I heard three or four people running through the house,” Meena continued in a small voice. “It sounded like they were looking for something. They were all men, and they talked to each other in loud voices. I became even more frightened and held my breath, and hid under the bed and did not move.”

  Unable to find whatever they were looking for, the intruders began breaking things and flipping over furniture. Still, Meena stayed in her hiding spot. She smelled smoke.

  “I crept quietly out from under the bed and looked down the hall, when I saw flame. It was all burning…”

  She heard a sound from outside the house—in the distance—the ringing of bells. The fire squad!

  “I went out on the balcony, where I could see the fire-cart coming toward the house. That was the first time I realized that it was already near dawn. It was bright enough for me to see the dust rising from the cart’s wheels.”

  The house was soon engulfed in flames and it eventually burned to the ground. Meena was saved by the fire team, but the bodies of her grandfather and grandmother were discovered in the smoldering wreckage. Her parents were nowhere to be found.

  “They told me that bandits had killed my family, stolen our money, and set fire to the house. They said I was lucky to have been saved.”

  Unlike everyone else in town, they lived in a house that was far from the nearest neighbor. There were no witnesses, and the authorities were never able to figure out what happened.

  “But that didn’t explain what had become of my mother and father. I was only a child, but still…it didn’t make sense. I had survived, and I knew it was because of the lucky charm my mother had given me. I knew the two were related.”

  Meena was taken in by a merchant house run by her father’s relatives in Lanka, the capital of Bog, but no matter how many years passed, she couldn’t forget that horrible day. What had happened that night? What became of her parents? Were they still alive somewhere? She wanted to search for them, to get to the bottom of it all. She was eleven when she ran away from home.

  “I was a bit reckless, I guess,” Meena said, blushing.

  “No kidding,” Wataru said, smiling. “Did you have any idea where you were going?”

  “Not at all. But it just so happened that around that time a large circus troupe was performing in Lanka. My relatives also ran a restaurant, and many of the circus backers frequented our place. They had invited us to the circus many times. I’d even talked with the troupe leader.”

  Meena figured that being a member of a circus would be the perfect way to travel the land. She could keep her ears open for information, and meet lots of people. One thing was for certain: she’d never unravel the mysteries of the past by staying in Lanka. Moving from town to town, she might come across a clue that would lead her in the right direction. And hopefully that would lead her toward the truth.

  “I barged in on the troupe leader, told him my story, and asked to be allowed to work in the circus.”

  Luckily for her, the circus leader Bubuho was a kindly sort. After extracting promises that she would work hard and learn to read while she was with the troupe, he granted her request.

  “The circus! That’s why you move so well,” Kee Keema said, clapping his hands and grinning.

  Wataru furrowed his brow. “So, were you with the circus the whole time?”

  “Yes. The Aeroga Elenora Spectacle Machine, we were called. I swung from swings so high it would make you dizzy. I was part of an acrobatic aerial show—it was quite a spectacle!” Meena looked proud. “I even did a little bit of aerial rope tricks. It was the troupe leader’s family secret—a real crowd pleaser.”

  “So where did you meet those ankha boys? Why were you with them? It sounded like they’d been using you for quite a while.”

  Meena’s smile faded. “That was…I was foolish.”

  A year before, when the boys had still been in the refugee camp in Bog, the circus had paid a charity visit to the camp. That’s where Meena first met them.

  “They said that before they left the North, their parents had been officials with the Sub-race Control Board. They had seen things no one else knew about.”

  The Sub-race Control Board was an organization under the control of the ruling government. In the North, non-ankha were labeled “sub-races,” and every aspect of their lives was carefully administered by the Control Board.

  “Administered! Bah!” Kee Keema snorted. “They rob them of their fortunes, shove them in camps, and force them to do manual labor! To hear the waterkin refugees tell it, they would be locked in a pen, doing repairs on sailships without proper tools, and no food or drink. Every day ten or more would drop from exhaustion, unable to work, but they didn’t get any doctors, and you can forget about medicine. The weak were left to die and thrown into the ocean once they’d breathed their last. I heard someone say they’d seen a whole pile of waterkin dead just lying there!”

  Meena lowered her eyes and nodded. “I’ve heard many such stories.”

  “So what did those two say they knew?” Wataru asked.

  “They said that the Northern Empire was secretly abducting the descendants of non-ankha who escaped to the south, and bringing them back up north.” Meena’s voice trembled slightly. “They’ve been doing it for the past twenty years or more. Their parents lived in a special center where the abductees were made to work, that’s how they knew.”

  Wataru and Kee Keema looked at each other.

  “When they heard my story, those boys told me that my parents had probably been taken back to the North. That’s why their bodies were never found. I thought this was the answer I had been looking for. My parents might be in the Northern Empire. They might still be alive…”

  Meena’s eyes sparkled.

  “But why would the Northern Empire do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t know the particulars either, but they said that one of their parents’ superiors had come to the south before them, and if I met him he might tell me. That’s why…”

  “Hrm,” Kee Keema growled. “You believed their story, and helped them escape, is that it? They led you astray with their promises, and made you work with them.”

  Meena said nothing, but her head hung so low Wataru could no longer see her face. That was answer enough.

  “But what about the circus? Aren’t they worried about you?” Wataru asked. “You must have snuck away, right?”

  “I did. If I had told them, they would have stopped me for sure…”

  “I would have stopped you too. You must have come from a good family, to take the word of those two,” Kee Keema said, jokingly.

  Meena frowned. “But, there were some things I did find out. Those two hadn’t made up everything, after all.”

  Apparently, a special unit known as Sigdora was involved with the forceful return of refugees from the North, though the reasons for their activities were unknown.

  “Are they military?”

  “They don’t have anything to do with the Imperial Army, no. The current emperor, Agrilius VII, and the commander of the Imperial Army, General Adja, were friends in their youth, but amon
g the people in the north it’s widely known—though never openly discussed—that they don’t get along very well these days.”

  The Northern Empire had its own peacekeeping force like the Knights of Stengel and the Highlanders here, but theirs was directly tied to the military. Unable to bend them to his will, Agrilius VII had gone behind General Adja’s back and created his own special forces to do his bidding. Thus was Sigdora born.

  Kee Keema’s long tongue snaked out and brushed the top of his head.

  “What’s wrong, Kee Keema?”

  “Hrm? Nothing, it’s just, I don’t much like that name. Sigdora…” Kee Keema cleared his throat. “Sigdora was the name of the monster that the Old God created when he learned of the Goddess’s betrayal—according to how they tell it in the north, of course. Three heads it had, and six legs, and a tail split in two with a snake’s head at each tip. In the tales we waterkin tell, it’s merely one of the horrible nasties living in the depths of Chaos, eating the souls of those who are lost there.”

  “Three heads…six legs…?” Wataru shivered.

  “It’s always fiercely hungry, and it will eat anything, and once it finds its mark, it never stops until it’s sated. The word Sigdora means ‘cursed hound’ in the old ankhan tongue, you see.”

  And Meena’s parents had been taken by an organization that named itself after that?

  “Wataru, I have a request,” Meena said, turning her large eyes to look at him. “Won’t you let me come with you on your journey?”

  Wataru felt his face redden. “H-huh?” he stammered, “Wh-what? My journey? With me?”

  “Please! I know I’ll be of help! And with you, I’ll be able to travel faster and farther than with the circus. Please!”

  Meena begged, leaning closer, so that Wataru leaned back until his chair was in danger of falling.

  Kee Keema grabbed Wataru by the back of his neck, and grinned. “Can’t refuse such a cute girl her one request, can you now?”

  “N-no. I mean yes, you can come,” Wataru said, wiping the sweat off his brow. “You did save my life, after all.”