The Windup Girl(48)

"I fought your kind. In the jungles in the north. Windups everywhere. Heechy-keechy soldiers."

"I am not that kind." She whispers. "Not military."

"Japanese, same as you. I lost a hand because of your kind. And a lot of good friends." He shows her the stump where his hand is missing, pushes it against her cheek. His breath gusts hot on her nape as he wraps his arm around her neck, pressing the knife to her jugular. Indenting the skin.

"Please. Just let me go." She presses back against his crotch. "I'll do anything."

"You think I'd soil myself that way?" He shoves her hard against the wall, making her cry out. "With an animal like you?" A pause, then. "Get down on your knees."

Out on the street, cycle rickshaws clatter over cobbles. People call out, asking about the price of hemp rope and whether anyone knows the time of the Lumphini muay thai fight. The knife hooks around her neck again, finds her pulse with its point. "I saw my friends all die in the forests because of Japanese windups."

She swallows, and repeats softly, "I am not that kind."

He laughs. "Of course not. You're some other creature. Another one of their devils like they keep in their shipyard across the river. Our people are starving, and your kind take their rice."

The blade presses against her throat. He will kill her. She is sure of it. His hatred is great, and she is nothing but trash. He is high and angry and dangerous and she is nothing. Even Gendo-sama couldn't have protected her from this. She swallows, feeling the blade press against her Adam's apple.

Is this how you will die? Is this what you were meant for? To simply be bled out like a pig?

A spark of rage flickers, an antidote to despair.

Will you not even try to survive? Did the scientists make you too stupid even to consider fighting for your own life?

Emiko closes her eyes and prays to Mizuko Jizo Bodhisattva, and then the bakeneko cheshire spirit for good measure. She takes a breath, and then with all her strength she slams her hand against the knife. The blade slices past her neck, a searing line.

"Arai wa?!" the man shouts.

Emiko shoves hard against him and ducks under his flailing knife. Behind her, she hears a grunt and thud as she bolts for the street. She doesn't look back. She plunges into the street, not caring that she shows herself as a windup, not caring that in running she will burn up and die. She runs, determined only to escape the demon behind her. She will burn, but she will not die passive like some pig led to slaughter.

She flies down the street, dodging pyramids of durian and hurdling over coiled hemp ropes. This suicidal flight is pointless, yet she will not stop. She shoves aside a gaijin haggling over burlap sacks of local U-Tex rice. He jerks away, crying out in alarm as she flashes past.

All around, the traffic of the street seems to have slowed to a crawl. Emiko weaves under the bamboo scaffolding of a construction site. Running is strangely easy. People move as if they're suspended in honey. Only she is moving. When she glances behind her, she sees that her pursuer has fallen far behind. He's astonishingly slow. Amazing that she even feared him. She laughs at the absurdity of this suspended world-

She slams into a laborer and goes sprawling, taking him down as well. The man shouts, "Arai wa! Watch where you're going!"

Emiko forces herself up to her knees, hands numb with abrasions. She tries to stand but the world tilts, blurry. She collapses. Pushes upright again, drunken, overwhelmed by the furnace heat within her. The ground tilts and rotates, but she manages to stand. Leans against a sun-baked wall as the man she hit shouts at her. His rage washes over her, meaningless. Darkness and heat are closing in on her. She's burning up.

Out in the street, in the tangle of mulie carts and bicycles, she catches sight of a gaijin face. She blinks away the closing darkness, stumbles forward a step. Is she mad? Does the bakeneko cheshire toy with her? She clutches the shoulder of the man who is shouting at her, staring into the traffic, searching to confirm what her boiling brain has hallucinated. The laborer cries out and recoils from her touch, but she barely notices.

Another flash of the face in the traffic. It's the gaijin, the scarred pale one from Raleigh's place. The one who told her to go north. His rickshaw shows briefly before disappearing behind a megodont. And then he's there again, on the other side, looking toward her. Their eyes lock. The same man. She's sure of it.

"Grab her! Don't let that heechy-keechy get away!"

Her attacker, shouting and waving his knife as he clambers through bamboo scaffolding. She's amazed that he's so slow, so much slower than she would have expected. She watches, puzzled. Perhaps he is also crippled from his time in the war? But no, his gait is correct, it's just that everything around her is slow: the people, the traffic. Odd. Surreal and slow.

The laborer seizes her. Emiko lets herself be dragged, scanning the traffic for another glimpse of the gaijin. Did she hallucinate?

There! The gaijin again. Emiko throws off the laborer's grasp and lunges into traffic. With the last of her energy, she ducks under the belly of a megodont, nearly crashing into its great columnar legs and then she's on the other side, pacing the gaijin's rickshaw, reaching up to him like a beggar…

He observes her with cold eyes, completely detached. She stumbles and grabs at the rickshaw to steady herself, knowing he will shove her back. She is nothing but a windup. She was a fool. She was stupid to hope that he would see her as a person, a woman, as anything other than offal.