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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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smallpackaging.]]
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.
[[OOC: private to
smallpackaging.]]
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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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He's trying to think of a way to tell her something every baby intuits from their mother's terror. Too many of the ones he's seen don't even cry, right from birth; stress and trauma and adrenaline burnout pouring across the placenta.
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She's worked it out in her hospital.
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"All bodily functions cease as normal. No respiration. No heartbeat. No metabolism of any kind. Except the brain and the nervous system don't shut down; they continue on a low-power mode. And a few hours later—" no panic, no fear, nothing but a void—"the patient reanimates."
He meets her stare. "Do you understand me?"
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She remembers stories in the mansion, about a Matt and a Mello, about people getting up from the dead, and a garden planted just in case.
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It's true; he used to laugh at those movies, at the kind of people who watched them. One finger brushes the hilt of the sword.
"That's what this is for. The first outbreak was in Osaka. A riot, they said. Except the next day there were - riots - in two more cities, and then half a dozen more. A week and a half before they started to hit Tokyo. Then there were hundreds of them. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. And that was just Japan. They chewed up the country like ants, reproducing exponentially. And here we are."
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Oh good God. She feels a lot less safe than she did a second ago.
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Of course, there's the sea, and the ones frozen in the swamps, but mostly the peninsula is clean.
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She's already moving past terror, into planning.
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He'll let her deal with that one first.
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She doesn't ask what happened to the rest of the family.
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"The government is in Okinawa. They weren't touched; they're holding out." Subtle bitterness in his voice. "There are fortifications left in Japan, but - every so often another one goes silent. A hundred million siafu swarming the country, after all." After this long, it doesn't occur to him that she might not recognise the term - though coming from Tanzania, she might well recognise the name of the carnivorous driver ant.
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"Have any of the other smaller islands been considered for resettlement options?"
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It's perhaps telling that the part of the slogan he trails off is "reclaim our home". There's a disconcertingly militaristic tone to it.
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Can they?
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"The only way to stop them is to cut off the control centre - to destroy the brain - but, billions of them across the world. And there are always new reservoirs of the virus. It's not good, Sayu."
Classic, classic understatement.