January’s winter sees Manchuria frozen over in the daytime and arctic in the night. The faraway horizon blows wind through the plains. The mountains shiver, shake down clumps of frost that harden into place and build an encasement of ice over the world. Heat is a luxury that the soldiers planted up here will not be oPered. The military base the Japanese have built is biting, dry. If one doesn’t keep moving their feet, the ground stakes its claim. Opens a crack and swallows a soldier in for food.
Most of them aren’t of the mind to complain, at least. The moment they think to protest their unsavory conditions, a silent chemical command slithers into position, scrubs away the words before they can leave their tongue. It keeps them loyal. Compliant to their leaders. Not every soldier needed to be given this 1x, but since the science exists, it may as well be generously used.
One traitor has done too much work to hear arguments otherwise.
Inside the military base, she’s of the few who need to bundle for warmth, a threadbare blanket pulled over her shoulders. The facility isn’t large, built for surveillance instead of true oPensive capabilities. Its perimeter is tucked inside a hill, and the hill is tucked inside a valley. When a rumble of thunder moves through the clouds, its echo booms tenfold, rebounding again and again and again. With each passing hour the temperature drops, but she doesn’t show that she’s bothered. Even if frost seeps through her ribs and crawls into her heart, she won’t display discomfort lest the ambassadors see her as weak, lest they pivot their investment and choose another avenue of interest.
A rumble of activity clatters outside the office. The traitor doesn’t yet stir, eyeing the blackboard stretched along the wall. Very little is ready. She is immensely behind. They asked for the concoction to be complete before winter
scratched its 1ngers on the chains of their tanks. She promised she could do it. She had pulled out her research 1les, pointed to two separate concoctions that had proved to be possible—albeit with faults—and claimed that the perfect science was in their complete merge. She only needed the right ratio. Easy.
Footsteps enter through the door. She doesn’t turn. The birds that have stolen over the base’s perimeter cluster around the window like civilian witnesses, peek their small heads against the glass. Maybe blood will spill. Maybe this is the point where she will be punished, having pushed their mercy too far. Who would know if they were to dispose of her?
“You said this week at the latest.”
Mr. Akiyama is one of three ambassadors that she has been in contact with. He’s a quiet man, with very little patience for nonsense. According to the pictures in his wallet, he has two children, both of whom have barely learned to walk, but he never mentions them in conversation. He frowns upon uncouth behavior, and he is never late to any place he is expected. When he was summoned into this country, “ambassador” was a loose term for his role. Others might call him a “government official.” Or a “diplomat,” on assignment to survey relations and determine prospective goals for an empire that requires resources. Regardless of what other de1nitions may be used, “military general” is the only title he is not. Though the soldiers here operate under his command, he will not be claimed by his empire if anything goes south. They will insist he was an individual actor. Anyone asked will put a 1nger to their lips; anyone trying to 1nd evidence will have to rummage extensively under the table, beneath cover after cover.
The traitor slowly pulls the blanket oP her shoulders. She folds it in half.
Then again. The birds watch her, forming a tighter line.
“There are many moving parts to this invention. It needs more time.”
The days have been long, but the nights have been longer—when the units pause in their movement and take inventory of their progress. At a certain date, they must move into Shanghai, awaiting a signal from the top. At a certain date, they will proceed with or without her, and if it is the latter, then she is useless, gaining absolutely nothing out of this arrangement.
“How much more time?” Mr. Akiyama asks plainly.
Enough time to make and combine the two parts again. There’s the 1rst half of the concoction which provides strength—that’s straightforward. She invented it on its own at 1rst, but it doesn’t last long, eating away at the body it occupies unless there are new doses. In a war, there’s hardly time to be checking in on a soldier every few days as though they run a nursery.
“Another week,” she decides shortly. It might not be enough. There is a lot to create from scratch again. In that brief moment before evacuating Warehouse 34, she had turned her back on her successful invention to secure transportation, and the assassin the Nationalists call Fortune had destroyed everything. Her papers. Her progress.
“That’s too long.”
She tosses the folded blanket onto the table. Her patience snags, catches a tight knot. The second half of the concoction is much harder—that’s what she needs time for. A science entirely new… but one that will 1nally balance her invention of strength, change a body so that it shall be everlasting and won’t be eaten up without new doses. It will provide the ability to heal any wound, to never require sleep. It will halt the cells at every stage and freeze a subject in its present form. Her classmates at Cambridge heard the hypothetical proposal and called it immortality, but that’s not entirely true. A soldier might still take a bullet to the head, blow his brains out without recovery. True immortality is something for the hands of gods. She doesn’t need to play God. She just needs something so undeniably powerful that the Japanese will perceive her as one.
“I had it,” she says tightly. “I told you I had it when we were still using
Seagreen as a middleman.” Before Seagreen had gotten caught. Before her husband was hauled in and her son tried to break away from her. “The 1nal product had been perfected. The ratio worked. We know it is possible; we know it can be done—I only have to do it again, and that takes time.”
Silence.
The birds peck at the glass. Beg to be let in. Each of the traitor’s brittle words forms clouds of breath in front of her.
“Won’t it be worth it?” she continues when she gets silence in response. “Think about what is within reach. These are soldiers stronger than any man on earth. They can heal any wound. They require no sleep. What other asset in this
coming war will match up? Once you have this, who will bring something better up the chain of command?”
Mr. Akiyama considers it. He turns to look out the window, and at once, the birds Aee, soaring into the night. In the time she has been working with him, she has never seen anger cross his manner. Only carefully measured neutrality, occasionally furrowing his thin brows. It’s never too late for rage to erupt on the scene, though. That’s something to remember about men: the trickiest ones know how to hide their temper, so one should never assume the absence of anger equates kindness.
“Very well,” he says. His expression never changes. “Another week.”
Orion.
At the farthest side of the military base, a voice whispers through the soldier’s room. The soldier startles awake, launching oP his sparse mattress and barely catching himself before he strikes the concrete Aoor. Very few items occupy the room with him. His uniform. His weapons. Dust, coating the walls and coating his world like a curtain before his eyes.
Orion, Orion, it’s me. It’s me.
A terrible ache presses at his head. There is no one else in the room with him, no one to attribute to this voice, waking him from his dreamless sleep. It is only his own mind, calling him by a name that isn’t his.
“Get out,” he whispers. The concrete is painfully cold on his skin. The Aoor beats with the sound of his own telltale heart, buried six feet deep.
Orion, please, please—
He slaps his hands over his ears and screams.
