The Windup Girl

Jaidee died. But perhaps that is the best that anyone can hope for. Perhaps if she put a spring gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, she would be happier. Perhaps if she had no large house and no kamma of betrayal…

Kanya shakes her head. If anything is certain, she must do her duty here. Her own soul will certainly be sent back to this world again, at best as a human being, at worst as something else, some dog or cockroach. Whatever mess she leaves behind, she will undoubtedly face it again and again and again. Her betrayals guarantee it. She must fight this battle until her kamma is finally cleansed. To flee it now in suicide would be to face it in an uglier form in the future. There is no escape for such as she.

29

Despite the curfews and the white shirts, Anderson-sama seems almost reckless with his attentions. It's almost as if he is making up for something. But when Emiko repeats her concerns about Raleigh, Anderson-sama only smiles a secret smile and tells her she needn't worry. All things are in flux. "My people are coming," he says. "Very soon, everything will be different. No more white shirts."

"It sounds very beautiful."

"It will be," he says. "I'll be gone for a few days, making arrangements. When I get back, everything will be different."

And then he disappears, leaving her with the admonishment that she should not change her patterns, and should not tell Raleigh anything. He gives her a key to his flat.

And so it is that Emiko wakes on clean sheets in a cool room in the evening, with a crank fan beating slowly overhead. She can barely remember the last time she slept without pain or fear, and she is groggy with it. The rooms are dim, lit only by the glow of the street's gaslights flickering alive like fireflies.

She is hungry. Ravenous. She finds Anderson-sama's kitchen and roots through sealed bins for snacks, for crackers, for snaps, for cakes, anything. Anderson-sama has no fresh vegetables, but he has rice and there is soy and fish sauce and she heats water on a burner, marvelling at the methane jug that he keeps unsecured. It is difficult for her to remember that she ever took such things for granted. That Gendo-sama kept her in accommodations twice as luxurious, on the top floor of a Kyoto apartment with a view of Toji Temple and the slow movement of old men tending the shrine in their black robes.

That long-ago time is like a dream to her. The autumn sky with its clear breathless blue. She remembers the pleasure of watching New People children from their crèche feeding the ducks or learning a tea ceremony with attention both total and without redemption.

She remembers her own training…

With a chill, she sees that she was trained to excellence, to the eternal service of a master. She remembers how Gendo-sama took her and showered her with affection and then discarded her like a tamarind hull. It was always her destiny. It was no accident.

Her eyes narrow as she stares at the pan and its boiling water, at the rice she has so perfectly measured by sight alone, without a measure cup but simply scooped with a bowl, knowing precisely how much she needed, and then unconsciously settling that rice into a perfect layer as if it were a gravel garden, as if she were preparing to perform zazen meditation on its grains, as if she would rake and rake and rake for her life with a little bowl of rice.

She lashes out. The rice bowl shatters, shards spinning in different directions, the pot of water flying, scalding jewels gleaming.

Emiko stands amidst the whirlwind, watching droplets fly, rice grains suspended, all of it stopped in motion, as if grain and water are windups, stuttering in flight as she herself is forced to stumble herky-jerky through the world, strange and surreal in the eyes of the naturals. In the eyes of the people she so desperately desires to serve.

Look what service has brought you.

The pot hits the wall. Rice grains skitter across marble. Water soaks everything. Tonight she will learn the location of this New People village. The place where her own kind live and have no masters. Where New People serve only themselves. Anderson-sama may say that his people are coming, but in the end, he will always be natural, and she will always be New People, and she will always serve.

She stifles the urge to clean up the rice, to make things neat for Anderson-sama when he returns. Instead, she makes herself stare at the mess and recognize that she is no longer a slave. If he wishes rice cleaned off the floor there are others to do his dirty work. She is something else. Something different. Optimal in her own way. And if she was once a falcon tethered, Gendo-sama has done one thing she can be grateful for. He has cut her jesses. She can fly free.

* * *

It is almost too easy to slip through the darkness. Emiko bobs amid the crowds, new color bright on her lips, her eyes darkened, glinting silver hoops at her lobes.