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The capital of the Japanese Autonomous Oblast is a sprawling city of not quite a million people - and almost all of it is tents. Everyone in it knows how important it is never to be cornered, to have as many exits available as you can find, or make. June is shading into cool, melting subarctic summer, and along with the endless mosquitoes - at least it's not a malaria zone - the siafu are threatening to emerge. Time to wait out the warmer months and wait to see if this year will be the time they're finally overrun. Whether they'll come out of some hitherto overlooked enclave, or out of the ocean that surrounds Kamchatka on three sides, from the shallow bay that faces on to the camp in the far distance.
There are more than twice as many Japanese here now than there were Russians before the war; infections had been sparse, easily contained. Siberia's bitter climate saved it from the worst, which is why it's rapidly becoming all that's left of the Holy Russian Empire. To Light's ears, the title is ludicrous; grandiose in the manner only a dying people can call up. He hears enough of it around the camp, people wishing for stricter times, for the certainty of the whip, for the infrequent messages the Emperor sends from Okinawa. He's seen people cluster around the precious winding radios and the samizdat transcripts like they're a bowl of rice. Ridiculous. Stupid. The thought's old and tired, the dismay gone out of it. Whatever gets them through the day, after all; they're the remnant of Japan's 127 million people, and now the sun rises at the wrong latitude entirely.
The city's hospital has some low, single-storey buildings - pitiful excuses for isolation wards and operating theatres - but again, most of it's tents; terrified patients don't heal themselves with the limited treatments available, and terrified personnel burn out or snap, or make mistakes. Most of the people here came over on the boats, trapped in steel cages with the promise of death all around, and the chance of it swimming up from the ocean beneath them, and they never want to be locked inside four walls and a roof ever again.
Light has been apprenticed to the hospital almost since he arrived; it's a long story. Most of what they do is triage and public health; trying to get people not to kill themselves - not by accident, and not on purpose. In the six years he's been here, he's thrown himself into learning everything there is to know, and if it can be done with his mind and his hands, with limited equipment and next to no drugs, he can do it.
There's something else he can do, too; something he's done on the rarest of rare occasions over the years. Something that nestles in the small of his back beneath his clothes: please, doctor, I can't bear it any more. And he'll demur, and apologise, and make time to trace the pencilled characters on the notebook's page, to black-feathered, screeching glee behind him. Nothing entertains Ryuk more than seeing Light write someone down in the book.
The tent Light uses as his office and workroom, and lives in during the summer, is more of a yurt; the fire pit in the centre is currently quiescent. Part of what he does is to maintain the hospital's computer and ham radio, to track the stacks of medical books that are kept around, and all that is in here with him; the yurt is crowded. The desk he's sitting at is solid, but improvised, and low; he's sitting on a cushion. And it is as if they've all been dropped back in time a thousand years. Chairs took up more space, and weren't multifunctional, and when they were deserting Japan with what they could carry, multipurpose things had been key.
Today, Light's not writing in the book; it would be shocking if he was. He's just eaten, which isn't at all to say he's not still hungry. He ought to sleep, the sooner to get back to work - but something has him on edge. It's not the stink coming in from outside - shattered people are remarkably hard to educate that the streets aren't sewers - or the chatter of too many people, too close. Or the moans and occasional screams or shouts from the hospital itself. It might be the fact that he's spent large chunks of the day in and out of one of those single-storey isolation wards, and that Ryuk is still talking about it.
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There are more than twice as many Japanese here now than there were Russians before the war; infections had been sparse, easily contained. Siberia's bitter climate saved it from the worst, which is why it's rapidly becoming all that's left of the Holy Russian Empire. To Light's ears, the title is ludicrous; grandiose in the manner only a dying people can call up. He hears enough of it around the camp, people wishing for stricter times, for the certainty of the whip, for the infrequent messages the Emperor sends from Okinawa. He's seen people cluster around the precious winding radios and the samizdat transcripts like they're a bowl of rice. Ridiculous. Stupid. The thought's old and tired, the dismay gone out of it. Whatever gets them through the day, after all; they're the remnant of Japan's 127 million people, and now the sun rises at the wrong latitude entirely.
The city's hospital has some low, single-storey buildings - pitiful excuses for isolation wards and operating theatres - but again, most of it's tents; terrified patients don't heal themselves with the limited treatments available, and terrified personnel burn out or snap, or make mistakes. Most of the people here came over on the boats, trapped in steel cages with the promise of death all around, and the chance of it swimming up from the ocean beneath them, and they never want to be locked inside four walls and a roof ever again.
Light has been apprenticed to the hospital almost since he arrived; it's a long story. Most of what they do is triage and public health; trying to get people not to kill themselves - not by accident, and not on purpose. In the six years he's been here, he's thrown himself into learning everything there is to know, and if it can be done with his mind and his hands, with limited equipment and next to no drugs, he can do it.
There's something else he can do, too; something he's done on the rarest of rare occasions over the years. Something that nestles in the small of his back beneath his clothes: please, doctor, I can't bear it any more. And he'll demur, and apologise, and make time to trace the pencilled characters on the notebook's page, to black-feathered, screeching glee behind him. Nothing entertains Ryuk more than seeing Light write someone down in the book.
The tent Light uses as his office and workroom, and lives in during the summer, is more of a yurt; the fire pit in the centre is currently quiescent. Part of what he does is to maintain the hospital's computer and ham radio, to track the stacks of medical books that are kept around, and all that is in here with him; the yurt is crowded. The desk he's sitting at is solid, but improvised, and low; he's sitting on a cushion. And it is as if they've all been dropped back in time a thousand years. Chairs took up more space, and weren't multifunctional, and when they were deserting Japan with what they could carry, multipurpose things had been key.
Today, Light's not writing in the book; it would be shocking if he was. He's just eaten, which isn't at all to say he's not still hungry. He ought to sleep, the sooner to get back to work - but something has him on edge. It's not the stink coming in from outside - shattered people are remarkably hard to educate that the streets aren't sewers - or the chatter of too many people, too close. Or the moans and occasional screams or shouts from the hospital itself. It might be the fact that he's spent large chunks of the day in and out of one of those single-storey isolation wards, and that Ryuk is still talking about it.
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smallpackaging.]]
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"You must have missed all the fun stages. Threatening to kill my boyfriends with the notebook, being victimized by my cooking."
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"That's not even remotely funny, Sayu."
It's something he thought he'd never, ever say again, and it's colder than it would have been back when she was alive.
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She runs her hands through her short hair, and grins at him.
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No, he's not shocked. He's standing there with the book against his skin, half-starved and worked to the bone, wearing his grandfather's naval sword, and trying to hold a conversation with the ghost of his older younger sister, while another ghost watches avidly from the side. Folding his legs beneath him, he slowly drops back onto his own cushion.
It's a huge act of trust; he feels as if he might be sick from it. But it speaks; it hasn't moved towards him.
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She bites her bottom lip.
"Is this your tent? Are you a doctor?"
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[It's shorthand for "more than most"; he rarely sees patients in the yurt, but it's his domain.
She has no idea about any of it. It's like not remembering how to breathe air. Something is stinging his eyes.]
Sayu? Tell me something. Something I'd remember.
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She thinks about it.
"What about- September 11th?"
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He remembers explaining the politics of it for his little sister, as if it would cheer her up. So hard to look back to that world that's gone, that family that he can't ever touch. This older woman is more like his mother than his sister, for all that he can see the shadow of the girl he knew. And perhaps it's that, that lets the words escape, melancholy.
"I should have known then. Maybe if we'd taught you better, things would have been different."
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She knows hiw will anyways.
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The date overlaps starkly with something else in another universe, if she remembers. Another of those odd sideways glances: you're going to leave, right? Ryuk sniggers to himself, and does so, vanishing through the wall and complaining all the while. Light won't see him flit up to listen through the vent hole in the roof.
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It doesn't work like that. He has to know that, intellectually.
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Looking at this other Sayu, he doesn't think she understands that.
"Do you even know where you are?"
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That much is really, really obvious.
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The smell comes in first. It's thick, urine and sweat and distant latrines, and it's heavy with particulates: too many cooking and heating fires, and other fires; years of them hanging in the air. The sky is grey - grey, in June, with the ash of the world, with everything and everyone that burned and settled in the stratosphere. Then there are the sounds - murmurs and moans and screams from the hospital itself, and people in the distance, thin and hunched and ignoring their lives, hung about with too many clothes, tramping through squelching mud. Wind roars in the distance, with some kind of fluttering rattle, like a million people waving whips on the far side of a mountain.
The city is in a hollow, to protect it from the worst of the winds, and the tents and yurts are clustered on the slopes, spotted with the odd makeshift hut or low, flat building. There's too much rain, too much snow for most of the year, and it drains downhill into the valley, which is planted with rice shoots. As far as the eye can see, the bare scrub around the tent city is dug over, cultivated or grazed or pecked. There's some distance between the cluster of tents and buildings Light is in, and most of the rest of the city; nobody wants to be near it. On the slopes below, every roof, every flat surface, is draped with plastic - polythene sheets, layered old plastic bags, clingfilm, bubble wrap, anything that could be scavenged - draining into rain barrels. Electrical cables are tied to poles at intervals, leading to the hospital, to things like the radio and computer in the back of Light's yurt.
It's like the third world, without the high technology. Light drops the flap and turns to look at her, with something unreadable in his face. Say the wrong thing, I dare you.
"This is Russia. Kamchatka, to be precise. We're all that's left."
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She's used to sights like this, places like this. They always have existed and they always will exist. But he's here, and Light isn't a person who would voluntarily live in one of them.
When he says it's all that's left, he must mean it. The world is on the brink of collapse. Humanity is almost gone.
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Picking up his own dusty cushion, he sits back down on it, close enough to her to talk quietly - but not too close. His hands fold in his lap, out of sight; his feet are tucked beneath him in thick, coarse socks. This is not what he meant to grow up to be, and he's convinced it's all he could be.
"Do you remember all those stories about how some virus would kill us all? Flu or HIV, ebola or weaponised smallpox?"
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She is listening, though.
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He remembers his Sayu as a good girl, but not that intelligent.
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She shrugs.
"And I'm working on that funding thing."
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With whatever they need.
"If I can get warmer clothes."
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Looking at her, he'd rather she went back wherever it is she belongs. This is no place for her, and there are things she has to know that he shouldn't have to try and explain.
"Anyway, the solanum virus. Turned out the viruses-will-kill-us-all theory was more literal than we thought it might be. It's like nothing we've ever seen. It's a rhabdovirus - fragile, carried in body fluids. Related to rabies and various necrotic viruses, you know? For all intents and purposes, it's 100% transmissible. Fatal within a week."
Cold and clinical, he might be discussing nothing more than a bloom in a petri dish. And he's left so much out - because direct contact is an inherent limiting factor, and even the AIDS pandemic hadn't managed this scale of devastation.
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"Oh no." She isn't going to cry, but she looks like she might.
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"It doesn't get better. Do you want to hear the rest, or shall I stop?"
Despite the traces of understanding, that question is curt. This is something she needs to hear.
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Though she can't imagine what else there must be to the story.
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