Chapter Text
And when words were abolished,
We became invulnerable;
As if something shifted in the Milky Way,
A weight lifted from our shoulders, a release in our chests —
As if we’d finally left behind
That endless winter…
Boris Grebenshchikov, "The Branch"
The Present
White sand stretched from edge to edge, the wind tearing grains from the crests of dunes and carrying them far, far away. If those grains of sand were alive, their fate would be a sorrowful one: an eternal wandering from dune to dune, from hill to hill – a life changed by the slightest breath of air, an absolute impossibility of ever finding a home. The wind would be their god, setting the world in motion, then falling silent for an hour, a day, or a week to see how things turned out, only to shake the very foundations of existence anew in a sandstorm. Come to think of it, what had happened to people was not so very different.
The dunes were slowly reclaiming the land: a barely noticeable white veil upon the exhausted soil would, over the years, become a thick, impenetrable shroud. And after many more years, no one would even remember the earth, the trees, the gardens, or the fields. The dunes were as empty and barren as the new world itself.
The girl did not watch where the wind carried the sand away. She gazed instead at the deceptively calm surface of the poisonous sea, stretching out before her to the very horizon. Blue, like the sky above. Mortally dangerous, like everything in their lives. Beautiful. She could not have explained why it was beautiful; she simply knew it to be so.
Up here, on the crest of the dune, the wind blew harder than down below: it whipped her hair, weaving thousands of sand grains into it, and billowed her light, long skirt like a sail. She loved such windy days, loved the wind itself and the warm spring sun, loved the sand and the fiercely blue sea. Never for a moment forgetting that each of these things brought death to a solitary person, yet together, they were mesmerizing.
Beauty… a strange thing. There was little use in it — no one paid dearly for the mere chance to admire it. If anyone was willing to give anything for it at all — who needed something so useless? And yet she somehow knew that beauty was necessary. Not for the world, but for a person. For the one who would look, who would see, who would hear, perhaps. That was why she came here to bask in the sun’s rays, to feel the salt wind on her face, to breathe the fresh sea air, to listen to the whisper of the waves. Would she trade all of this for a weapon, for food, for her friends? Yes, she would give it all away, without a second thought, holding nothing back. But she would keep the memory in her heart. She smiled at the thought. A strange thing, beauty…
She opened her palm — in it lay a warm pebble the size of a bean. Amber. If you gathered two handfuls of these, you might try to trade them in the City for food, a very small amount of food. Not worth the effort. Yet sometimes she would pick up pieces of amber, like shards of the former, long-vanished world.
They said that long ago, houses once stood by the seashore, even entire settlements, almost like the City. People would come there to do nothing at all, to simply bask in the beauty and buy those bright yellow stones. They said they even built entire factories to mine them and turn them into jewelry. Madness. She believed those stories were true: the world that was lost was utterly insane. People were paid for their labor with paper, and they gave away that paper for sunny little stones. She couldn’t help herself — she flung the amber bean far away. People often called the past world paradise, but what a foolish world it was, where people didn’t know what truly mattered. Water, food, warmth, weapons — that was what truly mattered. And the people who would stay with you until the end. Or even if they weren’t people — what difference did it make? She stood up resolutely and headed home. There was still much to be done.
She returned just in time. A black motorcycle stopped a hundred meters from the house. Its rider, also clad in black, dismounted with a flourish, but then slowly sank into the sand beside the bike.
"Amon!" she couldn’t help but cry out, rushing to the fallen man. He had gone to the City yesterday to make a Trade, which was never a safe undertaking. Clearly, something had gone wrong. She dropped to her knees beside the motorcycle. Amon looked at her guiltily, squinting against the sun. Her anxiety eased a little. She moved closer, close enough to shield him from the harsh rays.
"Forgive me, Akira," he said simply, averting his gaze. "It’s nothing serious, it’s just the sun. Only spring, and yet it’s blazing like summer today."
She said nothing, but kept looking at him. He clearly hadn’t explained everything. Amon sighed in resignation.
"Alright, fine, I’m a fool. I traded all the water I had with me. But I brought back some strawberries. They haven’t been seen in two years."
Now it was Akira’s turn to sigh deeply. She moved closer, planted her hands in the sand on either side of his head, looked intently into his eyes, and squinted slightly. She allowed herself a brief, pleased smile. He opened his mouth to say something, but Akira deemed it unnecessary.
"You’re a fool, Amon Kotaro," she confirmed, and bent down to his lips. They kissed each other tenderly, thoughtfully, unhurriedly, as if trying to savor a ripe strawberry. The wind flung grains of sand at them, but they paid it little mind — sand had long since become their constant companion, absolutely everywhere. Eventually, her lips curved into a smile, and the kiss broke apart. Amon raised himself up on his elbows.
"Don't get up," Akira said seriously, but helped him lean against the motorcycle, which seemed to be standing reliably on the unstable ground. "You’ll just collapse again on the way, and I won’t be able to hold you up. Wait, I’ll call Seidou."
She walked toward the van, the wind tugging at strands of her fair hair, her skirt, and her light cloak. She seemed unreal at that moment, ghostly, like a mirage conjured by the hot, shimmering desert air. Amon closed his eyes. His lips still remembered the taste of her kiss, and he couldn’t help but smile. Lost in that sweet reverie, he would not have noticed Seidou approaching if a fine spray of sand hadn’t reached him. He opened his eyes slightly. The amusement on Seidou’s face was almost overt:
"So, shall I carry you to your bed?"
"Yeah, and grab the bike while you’re at it," he played along with their usual game.
Seidou slung Amon’s arm over his shoulder and slowly rose. Amon felt dizzy, darkness creeping at the edges of his vision. He tried not to show it and moved his leaden legs as confidently as possible, though he found himself gripping Seidou’s shoulder quite genuinely. And so they stumbled together to the van.
The three recluses kept their distance from the City — with all its opportunities, its former friends and new enemies, its endless gang wars bleeding into a war of all against all. They had drunk their fill of that life and had now decided to fight back together. They were lucky — they had acquired nearly all the wealth available in this destitute world.
An old, battered camper van had been parked for good beside a well, dug by unknown hands in an unknown age. The well turned out to be of almost unbelievable depth, and drawing water from it was no easy task, requiring considerable strength and time. This had become their small ritual, allotted its own special day. A private well with clean water was so valuable that many would have been willing to risk their lives to claim it. To avoid being overrun, they had resorted to a ruse — they built something like a covered terrace around the well, large enough to hold enough junk to conceal the brickwork. In the summer, when the van became too hot, this spot served as an extra sleeping place, albeit not entirely safe. But where could one find safety anymore? Their other treasure was a solar panel. It was perched on the roof of the van, positioned so that it could not be seen from the ground.
People who knew of their hideout also knew better than to mess with this company — these three would fight to the death. But few guessed at their true wealth: they had each other, and they could withstand anything as long as that remained true.
Inside the van, it was cool and dim, the spring warmth not yet having managed to heat it through after the winter. Amon lowered his head onto the pillow. He just needed to rest for a while, and he’d be back in form.
Seidou appeared again. With a mug of water. Amon struggled to lift his heavy head from the pillow and latched onto the blissfully cold mug. This kind of water was stored in the cellar, where a small mushroom farm had been set up. Seidou cupped his hands, splashed more water into the boat-like shape, careful not to spill a drop, and poured it over Amon’s head, ruffling his hair to make sure it was all soaked. Amon couldn’t suppress a grateful sigh and sank back down onto the bed.
"Thanks. That’s better."
"Akira said you’re a fool." Seidou sat on the edge of the bed.
Amon growled softly and muttered under his breath:
"When are you two going to quit…"
"Akira always beats me to it…" Seidou’s voice sounded sad. Amon cracked one eye open.
"What?"
"Kissing you…"
"Oh… is it a matter of principle for you to be first?"
Seidou turned to him and was silent for a while, as if thinking it over, then shrugged:
"I suppose I can’t help it anymore."
"Do you want to be the first I kiss today, then?" Amon didn’t wait for an answer, simply pulled Seidou down.
His lips were warm and dry, responding joyfully to every movement, yet not daring to go further. Amon decided to take more initiative and leaned forward, propping himself up on his elbow, but Seidou suddenly broke the kiss and pushed Amon back onto the pillow.
"Better not strain yourself. Rest." Amon had no strength left to argue, nor even to keep his eyes open.
He was still aware, just barely, of Seidou removing his jacket, unbuckling his heavy weapon belt, and pulling off the thick leather glove on his right hand that served as a prosthetic to conceal his ugly, owl-like claw. Amon helped as best he could, until he finally sank into a warm, thick haze of oblivion. He dreamed strange, absurd dreams of a world he had never seen.
Once, long ago, before the War, the world was entirely different. It was vast, noisy, and crowded, because there were so many people in it, unlike now. It was so vast that the City — the only city any of them knew, perhaps the only one in the entire world; the endless desert surrounding it, which back then hadn't been a desert at all; and the poisonous sea — all of this was merely a small part of the inhabited space, a grain of sand among thousands of large and small towns and villages, seas, rivers and lakes, mountains, forests and deserts that once covered the planet. Roads lay between them all — even across the sky. Now, to the west of the City, buried under a layer of sand, lay the ruins of an ancient airfield as a reminder of this, and above it rose the stripped, rusting skeletons of airplanes, like the bones of ancient, extinct birds that would never again take to the sky.
Amon had gone with other hunters in his youth to see them, and in secret, he had touched those giant wings spread out upon the ground, imagining how beautifully they must have flown. The sight of that abandoned airfield had filled him then with both joy and longing, like all the few remaining traces of the vanished world.
In truth, they knew very little of what had come before the War: some things they learned from the few remaining ancient books, some from dubious tales passed down by word of mouth, others from decaying remnants of the old world like these — the empty, eyeless boxes of dead skyscrapers or the abandoned airfield.
No one remembered why the War had begun or why it had continued. Likely for the same reasons all wars begin and continue. Except this one had been the last.
After the War, no more books were written, no more roads laid, no more airplanes built. After the War, the world collapsed: roads and cities, forests and crops disappeared, and — most importantly — almost everything that had inhabited it died: people, animals, fish, birds, and even plants. Where everything had once flourished and been green, the desert advanced, slowly and inexorably. And the few who remained were forced to fight for their right to exist against oblivion, every single day.
Presumably, it was then that the City — which had had a name before the War — became simply the City, because no one had yet managed to cross the desert that stretched for hundreds and thousands of miles around and find any other cities. Perhaps they didn’t exist.
The dark times that followed the War were survived by few. It was then that it became clear that the world had changed more than anyone could have imagined — the mutants had appeared. Terrible, distorted people emerging from the most contaminated zones: they seemed like creatures of the radioactive darkness, its very embodiment, a punishment for the sins of humanity. They were feared and driven out of the City, believed to carry death and disease. But the mutants proved stronger and tougher than humans: they would descend like an avalanche upon unprotected districts, without mercy, without law, and simply take what they wanted, destroying all who stood in their way. They said they fed on human flesh, that they hunted at night, that weapons grew directly from their bodies, that they were nearly impossible to kill.
People fled in terror from newly settled places, desperate only to escape this horrific threat. But there was nowhere to run — the mutants followed people everywhere. And so humanity had to learn to fight them.
Over time, the sacred terror faded; people no longer saw mutants as hell-spawn — only as cunning adversaries. They learned to kill them, learned that despite all their strength, their lives were short — scarcely more than forty years — and that their deaths were agonizing. One way or another, mutants were doomed to extinction. The only question was whether they would take humanity with them to the grave or depart into the eternal night alone.
Be that as it may, the ancient City on the coast of the poisonous sea now belonged to humans and was a bastion of order. Somewhere in the ruins and catacombs of the former city, lying around the inhabited area, mutants of course still remained. They also lived within the City itself, hiding and pretending to be human, in constant fear. After the destruction of the Aogiri Tree’s base, the infamous bloody mutant gang led by the legendary One-Eyed Owl, the survivors had nowhere else to go but here. They poured in as a flood of refugees, concealing themselves and blending into the crowds of starving poor, of which there were already plenty. Resources could not suffice for everyone, and so the Wardens set a course for the complete extermination of mutants.
The Wardens, one of the few functioning fortified high-rises in the heart of the inhabited part of the City, belonged to the Washuu clan. About a hundred years ago, when the City was torn apart by internecine strife among countless gangs and by the raids and plunder of mutants, they were the ones who gathered hunter squads and offered people protection. For a certain fee, of course.
In return, the Washuu gained control over invaluable resources and turned them into power, which they in turn converted into even greater resources. They held power ruthlessly, promising residents order, fair trade, and salvation from looting and raids. A reliable system. As long as everyone was satisfied with this state of affairs. The Washuu, however, skillfully navigated the hidden currents, keeping the most vital threads in their hands.
The hunters, who maintained order in the City, identified and captured mutants — they were just one of the Washuu’s tools. The most visible, but perhaps not the most important.
Hunters lived better than most, but there were never many of them. The Washuu sought to recruit the most desperate people, including those who had personal scores to settle with mutants, those for whom victory over them was dearer than their own lives. Hunters had to stand against a stronger and more merciless enemy, and all their weaponry and physical training allowed them to fight mutants on equal terms — for a time. In practice, hunters rarely outlived mutants. Amon saw this as a bitter irony: becoming mutants themselves, they hadn't lost all that much. Besides, as it turned out, sometimes in exchange for what was lost forever, one could find something new. For example, a life.