Life in a country in the middle of a war isn't the most fun place to be a young woman. Market day is one of the highlights: an excuse to get out of the house, to see people, to walk up the beachline, along the only sand dunes that her country possesses, and back into the city. It's not a short walk, but it's a good way to get out, to get away, to experience -- living. Rather than being cooped up, waiting for news on the official radio -- heavily censored news, only speaking of the gloriousness of the Empire and Emperor, of victories -- and attempting to continue on with her studies. Rather than waiting for the war to be over, and for life to return to something approaching normal.
Cordy's already made the several-mile-long walk one way, warmed by the September sunlight. Stalls with freshly-caught sea fowl alternate with fruit sellers -- local or nothing, given the difficulty of moving goods from one prefecture or another. Still, there's plenty to catch the eye, and enough that she'll be able to meet her list on what she's got to spend.
The girl who will one day be known as Cordy is thrilled to be out and about. She's not much for her studies, but she likes being active, and the sun is an absolute delight. She's taken her time heading out here, lingering in the dunes before heading into the market, knowing she won't have that luxury on the way back. She knows the vendors, and greets each with bouyant, cheerful politeness, even as she avoids talking any more than she has to. She's not here for the people, that's for sure! They could be angels and she'd still prefer her own company to theirs as she fills her basket and empties her coinpurse and list.
Everyone has a question for the girl who will someday be Cordy -- how is her family? Has she heard this news, or that? What does she think of what was on the radio?
Everyone asks those things, politely, but no one wants to know anyone's true opinion. It is never known when someone might overhear the wrong careless word, and shame be brought to one's family by misdeed or ill-spoken word. Still the politesse must be observed.
Everything is normal; the scent of roasting duck competes with the warmer, earthier tones of rice from a vendor's large vats of same.
It's the sort of vivid moment that imprints itself on the mind for all its normalcy, the sort of thing the brain remembers: this is the last time everything was all right.
Because right after Cordy has the opportunity to even think about what a nice day today is, how the late-summer-early-fall sun makes the day the perfect temperature? Everything goes wrong.
When she remembers this in the future, it will be in fragments and flashes. The momentary sound that's something like a train passing in the distance. The only warning a split-second of the paper lanterns bobbing on the rice stall's overhang --
And then everything falls apart.
The stone path cracks apart. Wooden stalls splinter, throwing tiny shards of logs every which way. Hot oil spills from one vendor's pan. The roast duck collapses from its spit into the fire, which tosses coals every which way.
And the screaming.
Cordy doesn't scream. Her throat's locked up. She's breathing, but by force- she's nearly hyperventilating in her panic. She sees it, sees it all, far too clearly- sees the cook's arm break into blisters with the sloshing oil coursing down their limb, and will- later- connect that agonized distraction with the inability to get clear fast enough, realize that had they kept their head and run, instead of stopping to scrape at the oil, they might have survived. The girl who will one day be Cordy keeps just enough tiny fragments of her head to start running- as best she can, with the earth cosplaying as the ocean today, with the cobbles grasping at her ankles, the ones not underfoot bruising calf and scoring ankle as she scrambles, falls, scrabbles to her feet, leaving a fingernail behind as she makes a mad dash away from anything that could fall on her.
The bursting of one of the stall supports next to her head sends a shower of splinters right for her face. It's only by getting one of her hands -- missing a fingernail now -- up in front of her eyes that she keeps both of them. A splinter -- too large, really, for that to be an appropriate word, it's big enough to give her strange and inappropriate visions of Christ on the cross. It spears her hand, jutting out the far side. She doesn't even feel it at the moment, though. Everything is in the getting away. Shock and adrenaline are hellacious drugs.
That's precisely what Cordy's thoughts lock onto- "get away." To be more precise, the word running rampant through her head is "darekatasukete," which boils right down to "someone help me." The difference between Cordy, and the people -screaming- the word, is that she isn't -waiting- for help. She's running. Running scared, both blind with fear and hyperaware of everything her senses have to offer her, chanting the desperate mantra in her head as she scrambles madly for something less dangerous than a city street.
Get away get away get away -- someone help me --
Someone, somewhere, is listening. Fate, maybe. If Fate exists, it certainly has a perverse sense of humor, because as Cordy stumbles for shelter, she passes under a gate leading out of the market. Her hand presses to the post of the gate, a reflexive gesture, and it's only when she's through, a few steps past, and the way behind her is closing that she realizes that the world itself isn't shaking or shifting anymore. Blood's running from her scalp, now (when did she get a cut on her scalp? Those bleed like bastards), from her skinned knees, from the lost fingernail, from the massive splinter through her hand, and inexplicably she's standing on a near-silent wooded path, ancient, thorny trees stretching up toward a peaceful Wedgewood-blue sky. If she turns to look back the way she came, she'll find the gate closing in a breath's width. Beyond that disappearing aperture is only chaos. Here, there is only -- if only mometarily -- peace.
She should bolt back. There's a little voice, in the back of her head, that remembers Baba's warnings. About the tengu, the yokai, the oni- those last ring a little louder, for wasn't it the oni that stole bad little kids? Wasn't it the namahage that warned children to be diligent, to behave? But for all the warnings, faced with the crumbling chaos behind her... Cordy just... can't take the step back through. She can't. She whimpers. She -knows- this is bad. She knows what she should do, and she knows just as firmly that she absolutely cannot spur her feet to throw herself BACK into... -that.-
Whatever fresh hell this is, it -has- to be better. Her hand is starting to spark and scream at her, and she can no more brave the pain of freeing the shard of wood from her impaled palm than she can go back the way she came. So she does the only thing that still makes sense.
She runs down the path as fast as she can. Because maybe earthquakes can follow you through the gates to the spirit world.
Things that are guaranteed to be bad news:
Bleeding in the Hedge.
Not even seasoned Lost really want to do that. It's guaranteed to bring Trouble.
The girl who will be Cordy isn't far down the path when she hears the silence becoming ... less so. Less so, indeed. The rustling of branches comes first. Enough to make it clear something's there.
A few seconds later? The first howl goes up.
-Howl-? No. Nonono. There's no wolves in Nippon. Jiji had spoken of them, of the last that still lived during his youth, but now? No, this- this was -wrong.- Flight is her only option- even if she might have otherwise stood a chance against a dog or a wolf, her hand was injured, her scalp was draining blood down her face- she can't. Running ceases to be a thought and evolves into a meditation, a desperate, frantic mantra comprised entirely of one step after another step after another step.
The blood that throbs out of her arm, traces down her face, provides a perfect trail for whatever that is to follow. The howls echo and distort as the path itself rises, forcing her to clanber up rough stones, as if this path is leading up the side of a mountain.
There's a loud crash far too close behind her, and something leathery-sounding against the air. A gunshot, a yelp. Another howl, and then?
Something like a winged alligator lands across the path in front of her, and seated on its back is a singularly gorgeous woman, lithe and dark-skinned, tiny yellow flowers dotting the massive afro haloing a face whose skin's the color of good earth. Wide crystalline eyes toss rainbows of light back at the girl, and whatever the woman says is in a language that the girl who will be Cordy can't understand -- but the meaning is clear:
Come with me if you want to live.
It's a fantastically easy trail to follow. She's not even trying to be stealthy, she's trying to -run.- When the winged alligator- itself just as fantastic a creature to the girl who would be Cordy's everyday existence as the hedgebeast itself- crashes down across her path, shock leads her to make the first active sound since the quake began. She shrieks, falling backwards and chattering desperate pleas for her life as she hits the ground, cut off mid-beg by the shock of violent agony ripping through the impaled palm as it catches her weight. When she speaks, though- when she makes herself clear to be something besides a demon-mounted angel of death- the girl lunges forward, losing a nail off the pinky of her other hand in her desperate bid to do as she thinks she's being bid and follow.
One arm -- much stronger than it has any right to be for how slender it is -- pulls her up across the mount in front of the majestic woman, not settling the girl who will be Cordy in any sort of proper way, but just yanking her on her stomach across the hedgegator's back, like a sack of potatoes. With a powerful single flap of its wings, the gator rises into the air.
Just in time, too: because she's on her stomach, the girl has no choice, really, but to look down (or risk shifting her weight and falling off). Things that look nothing really like wolves and everything like what wolves are in someone's worst acid-fueled nightmares run out onto the path just then, their long arms reaching up, jagged claws tearing at the air fruitlessly as the strange beast and its rider carry her higher into the Hedge skies.
The girl who will be Cordy is violently fortunate her that her brain interprets "disaster" as time to run and "monster" as time to freeze- were it otherwise, the sight of the wolfthings raging up at the air just beneath them as they soar up into the air would have left her scrambling backwards- and in all likelihood, throwing herself right back into their grips. As it is, instead, she freezes, hands buried in her hair as a scream twists her throat into a ragged knot, satiating the wolves' hunger with nothing but the overwhelming cascade of her terror as she's dragged airborn by a too-strong, too-pretty "person" atop a thing with no business flying at all.
The flight itself is a wondrous thing, in the literal sense of something being filled with wonder. Beneath the beast, hedge and thorns pass away, under clouds that take non-euclidean shapes, twisting infinitely and strangely beneath the fae mount as it cruises through the sky with long, slow, measured beats of its wings.
Time passes, and the woman who saved her is silent. Every so often, she reaches to touch her passenger, only a mild thing, as if to make sure Cordy's still breathing, but she doesn't say anything.
Eventually, pain and shock set in as the adrenaline fades away. Sleeping this high up is probably a bad idea, right?
Cordy keeps her position, frozen, too afraid to relax. Pain and shock set in, to be sure, but she -wants- to be awake, the fear of slipping, falling, or of something coming after them in the air, through sorcery, her mind is -rabid- with thoughts of how things could go wrong if her vigilance flags. She is nothing if not determined- but there's no guarantee her body keeps up.
Over time, the desire to sleep drags down on the girl who escaped the earthquake. She startle-wakes a time or two, which brings her perilously close to slipping off of the back of the beast in question. She fights against her body, begs, pleads and borrows energy from unknown reserves, but eventually?
Blackness rises up from inside her like a ravenous thing, and devours her consciousness.
Discomfort wakes her. Not pain, which, when she can think at all, is a little strange. The pain in her hand? It's gone. The pain in her head? It's gone. She can't open her right eye at first, only her left.
The world is sideways. No. She's lying on her side. She wants to move her hands? She can't. The discomfort radiates from something around her wrists. A cord? Thread-thin, but she can't move. Her legs? Those can't move, either. Pinned in place.
When her single eye opens, she can see her hand's healed, as if no damage had ever been done to it. Something wet touches her forehead, then moves away.
Something, unseen, is wiping her forehead with a cloth. Right. There was blood. The blood is what's caking her eye shut, it's dried now. Why is she tied up? Why isn't she hurt? Why ... ?
"Excuse me?" She tries to say those words, but all she coughs up is dust from a sore throat. Her second try is better, as she wriggles a little, trying to loosen the bonds, surely just in place so she won't roll herself off a ledge or something. "Excuse me? I'm awake now. Thank you for helping me. Can you untie me, please?"
There's no response to her words, not yet. The cloth that wipes her brow moves to wash her face, wiping away the blood from her eyes. And when she can open that other eye? She sees the small, insectoid creature that's doing the cleaning: it wipes across her face with a large pad attached to its front leg, and then inserts that pad in between its pedipalps.
It is, in essence, licking her face clean. And it ignores her, its carapace shimmering in the evening light. Darkness descends.
As she comes more and more to herself, she is given reason to realize that she's not the only person nearby: the pen -- she's in a pen? A fenced area, at least -- has a woman in her early twenties, plump and exhausted, dressed in a farmer's wife's simple garb; a little boy, perhaps seven, in a colorful shirt and blue jeans, his fair hair hanging in his eyes, tears washing clean lines down his dirty cheeks; the broad-shouldered black man in the tatters of a US uniform.
And outside the pen? The woman who brought her there, speaking in hushed tones with another insectoid creature. Eventually, the insectoid creature produces a small sack and a vial full of rainbow-swirling clouds from somewhere within its iridescent scales, and hands both to the woman. Without a word -- or a look -- back at the woman who will be Cordy -- the ebony-skinned woman turns and stalks off into the crowd that moves in the distance.
FREEZE. The girl goes rigid, terrified, at the sight of the tiny insect rubbing the pad against her face, soaking it between its... she doesn't know the word. Its mouthparts. It takes several long moments of sustained care to be sure she's not being tricked or prepared for consumption, quivering as her eyes devour everything she can spot. More of the little bugs. Other people- PEOPLE!- and... the pen trapping her in place.
She fidgets, looking back at the thing cleaning her as her... savior... stalks away. She shivers, trying to sit upright, speaking again. "Hello? Can- miss? Little boy? Sir?" She tries to address the others around her while she attempts to get upright.
The soldier opens his eyes, and the look that he gives her is perhaps understandable, but no less painful in the moment. It's a look of rage and disgust. He looks upon her and sees his enemy.
There's a war on, and all that.
The kid is just staring off into the distance for the most part: he looks to and through her. There's so much that just isn't there. He may or may not even make it through this part of the mess; he's already so traumatized.
It's the older woman, whose face is so like the girl's, lifts her head. "There's not any way out," she answers, in a Japanese that's heavily-accented, Northern. "I'm sorry, child."
The bug which has been cleaning her skin finishes its work and skitters off sideways, walking like a crab.
The look is like a slap. More than anything thus far, it's -that- look which leaves her feeling for the briefest instant less than human. She recoils, loose hair falling over her face in a drape she doesn't correct. She understands now. She hadn't recognized the uniform. There's lots of dark skinned people west, past China. It's now that she catches the flag. She struggles upright now that the bug is gone, heedless of the way her long skirt bunches around knee and thigh. "Out of- where? Where is this?" She looks to the crying boy as well, feeling naturally bad for someone so young. She tries to get his attention.
"Bonsoir? Buonasera?" Her head bobs a little, as if that's going to fix things. "Can you understand me, little boy?" The last, in English. Thick, but understandable. Her English has its own accent, caught between Japanese and the drawling lilt of French.
The soldier looks away from all of them, turning his face toward the railing; the rest of them might as well not exist. His resistance is one of silence, a bold, angry silence that he builds up like a wall around himself. He won't give away anything, because so much has already been taken.
The boy stares past her, and when she speaks English, his lower lip wobbles. He understands, but his brain just won't turn over, not really.
"He won't answer you," the older woman offers almost regretfully, alnost maternally. "Might be wrong in the head. Or just... " Traumatized. She sighs heavily, brings one of her own restrained hands up enough to scratch her nose.
"This is some sort of market, as best I can figure. They come for one of us every so often."
The 'gator kicks up into the air from somwhere down the Market, circling above them for a moment before it, and its rider, swoop away.
"A... market? I was just at market. I... bought vegetables, and some fish and rice. To take home." Her words are slow, stunned. "... we're... just... rice? Fish? Lettuces to them? Are they- do they -eat- us?" Her tone holds steady, but her heart's already pounding again. "What happens to those that are taken? How often are more of us brought here??"
"I thought... I thought I was being -rescued.-"
The laugh from the other woman is bitter. "Unknown," she admits. "But yes, you might as well be lettuce to these things. They sell us to ... they don't say. They won't give them names. Something terrible. I do not think they eat us, but... "
The bitterness breaks their voice, again. "Rescued? No. Welcome to hell."
She has no idea how right she is, and no idea how wrong she is. Hell hasn't even started yet.
One of the iridescent bugs comes up to the fence, bearing a platter of bowls; it hops like a particularly graceful cricket, landing in the pen, and distributes bowls of iridescent pearl-grey slop, something like a cross between grits and tapioca pudding. With a hateful glare toward the bug, who retreats quickly, the older woman picks up the bowl, lifting it to her lips. No utensils given, of course. They're just livestock.
Cordy looks at the "food" questioningly, before glancing over towards the boy, to see if he's eating. She picks up her own bowl, carefully, and sips at it quizically herself, trying not to lose her balance. "But there were monsters. Oni, like the angry spirits of the dead wolves from our islands. Tall as men. Hungry. They'd have eaten me."
"So they would have," answers the woman, not questioning that at all. "There are many monsters here," comes the admission. "There is some kindness, but many monsters. Do not trust anyone. Not even me." A vague shrug of her shoulders. The boy? Eats nothing at first, and then just sort of ... bends forward and starts eating out of the bowl like a dog, or a pig at a trough.
The slop isn't unpleasant, for all that it's, y'know, slop. Tasting of some sort of sweet berry and cream, it has a spicy aftertaste and spreads warmth through the girl's belly. Warmth, a feeling of well-being. Contentedness.
"Not even you..?" Quiet despair in the girl's words at that. "... I don't understand. What happened? Where did we go? What happened to Tottori? Were we swallowed by the earth?" Faint relief to see the boy eating, and she does so herself, pleasantly surprised... and worried by the sudden sense of contentment. It's a faint, distant worry, but she -is- trying to heed the woman's advice. "Who has been here longest, auntie? The little boy? The... soldier? You?"
"Myself, the longest, the boy next. The woman doesn't say much more; she's busy eating. The boy wolfs down the food, heedless, and the soldier ignores it entirely. And then, almost as soon as he's done eating? The boy nods off, landing face-down in the empty bowl. The woman stretches as much as her bonds will allow, like a languid cat, and closes her eyes. "We are not in the world anymore, child. You came here somehow, and now... " She seems sort of ... not all that interested in that question, not really.
The warmth that spreads out from the stomach slides up to the girl who will be Cordy's brain, and the sedative effects of the food are immediate, and strong. Her eyes feel leaden, her head stuffy. It would be so much easier to just lie down and sleep...
She doesn't want to sleep. She wants to be awake. She feels like at any moment, someone could wring her neck and roast her like a duck, or butcher her for soup. She fights to stay awake, pinching at the palm of her hand, where her wound should be. But at the end of the day, she's just a kid.
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