Page 20 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Twelve

Ten years ago

Lanzhou wakes up groggy, barely able to open her eyes. The sun has risen, but the day is dim—a huge cloud bank clogs the eastern horizon. Another morning at sea—except she’s on land. On a beach with one blanket underneath her and another pulled over her naked body.

Memories of the night before rush back. They made love feverishly, trying to keep tomorrow at bay. But tomorrow is here and he is no longer in her arms.

At least he’s only a few steps away, already in his uniform, searching in the sand. A little farther away, something bubbles on his camping stove.

“What are you looking for?” she asks sleepily.

He glances at her and peers back down at the sand, as if he doesn’t know how to face her now that they’re no longer attached everywhere. “Your buttons. May I have them?”

She recalls him ripping open her dress and the buttons flying every which way. She sits up and rubs her eyes. “You want them as mementos?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

Then she remembers that someday they could lose all meaning to him, those buttons.

Bewilderment slams into her. What is she to do?

He seeks her buttons with the assiduousness of a pauper panning for gold.

She gets up, goes back to her raft to brush her teeth.

When she returns to the beach, clad in his spare uniform, he’s still there, at the same pointless task.

On the folded blankets, next to her neatly gathered dress, lies a small pile of mother-of-pearl plumerias.

He fishes one more button out of the sand. “That’s all of them.”

She glances at her dress. “You counted?”

He nods. “Five are still on the dress, nine are here. Since I wanted those nine buttons, I’ve sewn their buttonholes together with fishing line—I hope that’s all right with you.”

She half laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. Then her eyes prickle. “What are you going to do with those buttons once you forget me?”

“I’ll put them in an envelope and mark that they once belonged to someone I loved,” says the boy who has yet to tell her he loves her.

Or maybe he just did. It feels as if he has knifed her in the heart.

“When you send your mother and your sister to freedom, why can’t you escape too?”

Carefully he drops all the loose buttons into an inside pocket of his uniform.

“They can’t sail. I’ve been building a midget sub prototype for my father.

In it they might be able to run the gauntlet into New Ryukyu.

But it has only enough power to take two people that far—add a third person and somebody will die of oxygen deprivation.

“If I start after them immediately, then, yes, we can all run away together. But chances are I’ll be incapacitated for days. And once the palace realizes they’re gone, I’ll be watched carefully. At least for a while.

“And when I regain freedom of movement again…”

He might no longer recall that he was instrumental in their escape. Might, in fact, come to believe that they have abandoned him.

And as he already told her, without his mother there, serving as the guardian of his memories, he won’t even know what he has lost.

He hands her the dress and picks up the blankets. “I made some porridge from rice rations—I’ve heard that’s what people have for breakfast in New Ryukyu. If that’s not enough, we can also heat up the leftover scallion flatbread.”

And after that comes goodbye?

Her fingers close over one of the five plumeria buttons that remain on the dress. “Rice porridge is what my grandparents have for breakfast.”

In her part of New Ryukyu, young people are much more likely to eat steamed bao and marbled eggs before they rush to school or work.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.

She shrugs. “You can’t know what I eat for breakfast when I myself haven’t had a proper breakfast in ages.”

“No, I mean”—he takes a deep breath—"I’m sorry for trying to hold onto you when I shouldn’t. For wanting too much. For...”

He falls silent. In the watery light, he looks directly at her for the first time this morning, his eyes despondent and ruinously beautiful. The enormity of their upcoming farewell pummels her like a rogue wave.

She glances away and shoves her hands into the pockets of the uniform. “You could have made this a romantic goodbye, you know.”

He dusts off sand from the already folded blankets. “Please, I’m this close to abandoning my family to run away with you.”

Her eyes sting again. “So we shake hands and go our separate ways?”

He does not look at her. The next second the blankets are back on the sand, he has his arms around her and kisses her like a typhoon coming ashore.

Her hands are in his hair; his come up to hold her face. Remember this, she makes a desperate attempt at telepathy. Whatever happens, you will remember this.

They pull away from each other at nearly the same moment and pivot toward the southeast. An aeroplane—an aeroplane—is bearing down toward them, its flight silent as a whisper.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “It’s a Risshvai seaplane.”

Has it come for the sub? Or for the boy the sub didn’t manage to kill yesterday?

“Come with me!” she shouts. “I have an autocannon.”

They run across the beach to the lagoon and leap onto her raft. Aeroplanes are rare enough that she did not expect to encounter any along her path—and she didn’t—but not so rare that her mother would have allowed her to travel solo for six months without means of defending herself.

He leaps into the hatch after her. Following her directions, he pulls the autocannon components out of storage and heaves them onto the raft above. The hundred-and-fifty-kilo autocannon is meant to fit together within four minutes—they assemble it in three.

He goes down again and shoves up two forty-kilo belts of rounds. “The plane is electric—that’s why it makes no sound. But it’s also superlight, carries no heavy artillery and only one gun.”

Once the first coil of linked ammunition is loaded into the autocannon, she cranks the barrel and fires a barrage of rounds at the plane.

It dives lower and lands on floats that descend from its belly. A man emerges from the cabin and waves a white flag while standing on the plane’s port wing.

“It’s the eleventh prince,” murmurs the boy.

The one he followed into Risshva, the one who may be forming a clandestine alliance with Risshva on behalf of his full brother, Prince Four.

The one behind the attack yesterday.

“So…expect treachery?”

He nods.

“But why is he on the surface?” An aeroplane loses its advantage when it’s no longer airborne.

“Only the front of the plane is reinforced, so it’s better off facing you head-on—your ammo would puncture the rest of it like it’s made of paper. But also, I can see Eleven’s body servant in the plane. The man is said to have an unusual concurrent ability.”

“What is it?”

His hand opens and closes—for the first time she senses real fear in him. “I don’t know—everyone who’s ever witnessed it is dead.”

A reciprocal fear rises in her as nausea. “Let’s not witness it then.”

His reply is barely audible. “Don’t do anything brave. Pay ransom, if you have to, but stay alive.”

What about him? Would he stay alive by acquiescing? Whether he possesses solid evidence of Prince Eleven’s treasonous activities, that the man has shown up in a Risshvai seaplane? He has not come for a parlay.

“Should we just blow them to pieces?” she murmurs.

“I would, except I’m not sure what the body servant will do if he survives the first strike.”

The seaplane, which has been gliding forward on its floats, at last comes to a stop some fifteen, twenty meters beyond the midget sub, which is too big to enter the lagoon formed by the atoll.

Prince Eleven, still standing on the port wing, drops the white flag in his hand and leans against the side of the plane. “Nineteen, my beloved sibling, it took a while to find you. I thought you would have taken the sub in the direction of the capital but you towed it in the opposite direction.”

He studies Lanzhou. “And who’s your friend, Nineteen?”

“You don’t recognize the ghost of Eighteen, all grown up?” says the boy, Prince Nineteen of Dawan. “He tells me it was you who put the nerve flayer into his ear.”

A shadow of fear crosses Prince Eleven’s face, but he laughs, a sound halfway to a screech.

“Very funny. Now why don’t we speak of something of actual consequence?

Give the sub back to me. When my brother Four ascends to the throne, I’ll see to it that you are rewarded and that your sister will be able to marry a man of her choice. ”

He grins, showing a mouth full of teeth.

The boy exhales, an uneven breath. Is he pondering how to respond? No, he’s bracing for an imminent attack, his finger on the trigger of his projectile sidearm.

She tenses, her muscles almost locking up.

“Watch out!” he shouts.

She sees only a thin line cutting through water at nearly the speed of a bullet. Then she senses it—so much ill will, it careens into her like a ship crashing against a promontory.

She closes her eyes. A red blur appears in the darkness behind her eyelids.

“Get down!” she cries to Prince Nineteen.

He doesn’t emanate enough ill will to show up in her mental imaging—she could shoot through him if he’s not out of the way.

The red blur switches directions, now coming directly toward the raft. She hears her lover hitting the raft and fires.

Just as the body servant swerves.

Now it’s moving too fast again. She fires as soon as the red blur pauses and becomes a dot. A man screams.

“I think you hit him!”

But the dot becomes a blur again, as crazy-fast as ever—she hasn’t hit the man in the legs or anywhere fatal.

The man zigs and zags; she shoots anytime he comes to a stop.

The boy swears. “Eleven’s climbing back into the cockpit—he’ll use the plane’s gun on us. I have to engage the autocannon.”