Queen Bee, perfectly capable of controlling Emi’s sleeping body, contemplates swimming to the surface. She does a quick scan of her brain, getting the idea Emi might not ask questions and therefore stay out of her own way for once: the prefrontal cortex is quieter than usual.

  A snake slithers toward her, swimming deeper into the hot spring. Bee raises a hand and waves Hitman off, stopping the rescue mission to let the memories of the inmate who just drowned in the pool play out while Emi floats, reliving memories that aren’t her own, as if dreaming.

  …

  Charles watches the formerly bubbly television reporter, her tense shoulders indicating she has gone flat. She holds her eyes too steady, as if fighting to keep herself from breaking eye contact with the camera. Her voice delivers the news in a detached monotone: “The America’s are no more. Satellite images show no signs of life beneath the clouds of smoke rising over the west coast.”

  A glass shatters on the kitchen floor behind him.

  “What did she just say?”

  Charles hesitates, contemplating how to respond to his daughter while moving to help his wife. He looks at the orange juice on the floor, wondering if his artistic wife was trying to be symbolic when she dropped it. “The America’s are gone.”

  The six-year-old girl at the table tightens the lid before taking a sip from her own cup, “Where did they go?”

  He doesn’t answer…she will forever be too young for the topic of suicide to be discussed.

  “Was it the earthquake?” The girl asks.

  Charles is saved by his wife, Mio, who has just risen from the crime scene where it appears the sun just bled to death, “Yes, Evie, it was the earthquake.”

  “We felt it too…how long until it takes us?”

  Mio laughs, “It won’t take us.”

  “Why did it steal them, then?”

  “Karma,” Mio explains, dropping her head as she remembers the stories told by her great grandmother.

  “For Hiroshima?”

  Charles shakes his head, answering for his now tearful wife, “That was only the first bomb to drop.”

  …

  Having spent the last month trying to get home, powerless in doing anything other than watching the images of the devastation on his screens, Charles thought he was prepared. He’s not.

  He double-checks his coordinates, confirming this pile of scraps on the ground was once his home. Falling to his knees, cutting open yet another wound, he starts to dig through the ash and rubble left behind by the latest, and most vicious, tsunami in Japan’s history.

  A man places a formless hand on his shoulder, “Put these on.”

  Charles spins, as if touched by a ghost, and shoves the captain of the boat that brought him here.

  The captain bows, acknowledging the pain that brought on his friend’s outburst, “I’m sorry, Charlie. I’ll help you find them, just please put on the gloves.” He holds up a small blinking device, “There’s still radiation here.”

  Charles sobs, “I shouldn’t have abandoned them…I could have got them out.”

  “You couldn’t—we were prisoners to his war, abandoned to die in China, the same as they were abandoned to die here. There was nothing we could have done, you know this.”

  Bare-handed, he continues to dig, “I still should have tried.”

  …

  Charles stands tall, marching in the emperor’s latest parade—this time through Tokyo, a city he has always felt like an outcast within. The excess of the place makes his underfed stomach curl, the flashing neon lights going up the glass buildings reflecting like a kaleidoscope that won’t stop turning into a stark reminder of the fires burning in seemingly every other place he has been in the past two years.

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  From every window, what remains of the overdressed Japanese elite stares down in unthankful bows that move in breaking waves far overhead.

  The parade stops at the base of the white stone steps leading to the newly built Imperial Palace—reportedly costing over ￥50 billion…more than enough to feed the entire starving population for a year. Though the sun goddess has long since set on Japan, Charles’ home through marriage, he has no choice but to bow low.

  …

  The Devil remains seated, judging the soldier with slouched injustice from behind his red-faced mask. “You stand accused of abandoning your duty to your Emperor. How do you plead?”

  Charles stands tall, looking the executioner straight in the face. “He’s not my Emperor.”

  The Devil waves a servant over, whispers in his ear, then responds to the man whose life is now in his empty hands. “You dare? After all he has brought to Japan?”

  “He has brought nothing but death and despair to the majority, and excess to the few.”

  One of the few, the emperor’s judge and executioner, sentences the man to death: “Take the deserter to Hachijo.”

  The Devil wipes his hands on the towel the servant offers, then takes the orange and peels back the skin.

  Charles doesn’t fight when two masked men lead him away.

  …

  “Have you heard?” Inmate 402157’s voice shakes as they huddle together in the laundry room of Hachijo Prison’s first dungeon. They look almost comfortable, as if their appendages can no longer appreciate the pain. A single uniform sits between them.

  Charles, once the other man’s fellow soldier, whispers back, “Heard what?”

  “The Devil’s daughter…she’s here.”

  Charles laughs, “Why would he send his own daughter to this place?”

  The inmate shrugs, then does the honorable thing of slicing open his own throat so his friend doesn’t have to.

  …

  The beach races closer, the blood on his hands so thick it looks like he wears gloves. Despite the protection, Charles’ skin burns from where they grip the zip-line wire. He lets go over the ocean, a slight shock spasming through him when he hits the water. He isn’t surprised to be hallucinating when two toad-like cyborgs swim up to meet him.

  …

  He awakens in a warehouse, a man wearing a monocular looking him over as if he doesn’t have the time, or interest, in being here.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are at Jashi Farms.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “You show signs of severe frostbite. You are a soldier, yes?”

  Charles doesn’t confirm, nor does he deny.

  Jashi answers with truth, “All I want is for you to eat well, stay warm, and kill someone for me.”

  “Why bother feeding me and keeping me warm? Got plans for me after I’m dead?”

  Both men lived through the war, eating a fallen soldier is no joke…nor is it worth fretting voter. He moves on to the next inmate on his list.

  …

  The woman in the filthy prison uniform wheels past him, talking to herself and smelling like an unwashed cast. Charles yells up to his bunkmate, “Did you hear what she called herself?”

  A woman yells back, “Emily, I think.”

  “Emily…” He yells to the end of the row of shelves across from his, “Yuto, you awake?”

  The man in the stall beside Yuto answers for him, “He said yes.”

  Charles asks, “What was the name of the emperor’s niece?”

  Yuto traces the name over the ground, the man next to him needing several re-writes before he gets it right. “Her name was Emi…didn’t she die in a fire a while back?”

  …

  Charles, long devoid of morality, lets the body of the inmate who volunteered for the job of being murdered drop like a sack of potatoes on the ground. Sirens sound. He sprints out the window his co-conspirators just broke open.

  Jashi appears at the end of the road, breathing fire at the first in the line of escaping convicts. Charles turns left, everything moving according to the plan…which might as well be the slogan of Jashi Farms.

  A hundred meters up the steep volcano trail, a terrible scream comes from below him. He turns, assuming the woman must be there at last. He sprints, not allowing his body to stop until he sees the rising steam, the fire of his internal sun reignited by a memory of the cloud of nuclear fallout that travelled across the Pacific Ocean and started this nightmare many long years ago.

  He waits until he hears her, then drops into the pool of hot water. When he sees her at the ledge, he raises the sharp glass—taken from the broken warehouse window on his way out—to his stomach and sacrifices his body to let his soul swim free.

  Where his freed spirit swims, the water glows pink. He looks to the surface, noting the white steam turning black. He spots the snake, letting it pass by but at the same time waiting just ahead of the body it descends toward. When the creature opens its mouth, he sees the glowing tooth just before it bites down on what used to be his neck. For the first time since leaving his family behind, he is at peace; he knows he is on the right path at long last.

  The woman, Emi, drops into the pool where Charles’ essence swims in wait. When he finds his opening, he shoves his essence down her throat and makes her watch what her family did to him—and to all of Japan.

  …

  Emi awakens on the side of the pool, glowing pink liquid flooding from her mouth with every cough like she is acting on behalf of the sleeping volcano. What just happened? She tries to ask the group of inmates who pulled her from the hot spring, but the fluid in the speaker stops all sound for escaping while it vibrates in a continuous effort to drain itself.

  A venom-soaked voice answers her, “Looks like the Devil’s daughter can’t stomach the truth.” Another inmate uses his steel-toed foot to kick her hard in the gut.

  [ONSEN DISCOVERED: OKAGO (1 of 10)]