Reclaimed – Chapter 13

I poke at the ramen in the bowl in front of me, my appetite gone, flown out the door with Rai as he stalked out of the room from our meeting. I have no idea what I said or did to provoke such a response from him. Isn’t it good enough that I’m here now? I’m sorry, truly sorry, I wasn’t here ten years ago, but there’s not much I can do about that now.

Oyama returns to the dining room to deliver more food for everyone. He peeks over my shoulder at my full bowl.

“Sanaa, you must eat. Has the nausea returned?”

“No. No, I’m fine. I’m just not in the mood to eat,” I whisper up at him, hoping no one at the noisy and boisterous table takes notice. Jiro seated next to me sees all, though.

“Bring her something with cake in it,” Jiro says, and Oyama nods his head as I sigh.

“I really… I’m just not hungry.”

Jiro leans over to my ear. “Do you have any idea how much weight you’ve lost? You need to eat.”

I flex my hands, bony fingers clasped together. This will be my lifelong struggle, I can feel it now. I suppose things could be worse, but it becomes hard to lead an active lifestyle when you’re skin and bones.

Sipping on water, I listen to the conversations around me before a brownie appears at my side.

“Dessert before dinner?” Namika asks, a pile of noodles cascading over her chopsticks. “That’s pretty decadent. Is this how royalty operates?”

I nab a corner of the brownie and pop it in my mouth. “I’m not royalty.”

Namika slurps up noodles like a pro and laughs, her hand over her mouth. “Could’ve fooled me. I should’ve known when you arrived by the sheer amount of cats at your feet.”

Behind me, Kumo is at the door with all the estate cats. When I laugh at them, a few heads perk up, triangle ears at attention. The black cat from earlier pounces from her spot, inches up under my arm, and dives straight for my lap. I smile as she turns in circles, immediately comforted by the weight of a small furry animal. I eat more brownie and wait for the cake to blur my thoughts of the chip, how I’m going to get it, how I’m going to persuade Rai Oda to give it to me… All of my arguments swirl in my head.

“She hates it when people call her royalty,” Kentaro says, seated beside Namika, his bowl of ramen already gone.

“Well, it’s not like I knew that ahead of time.” Namika rolls her eyes. “Sorry, Miss Itami.”

Kentaro snickers, shaking his head.

“What? What did I do now?” Namika asks, her eyes wide and cheeks flushed.

“Nothing,” I assure her. “Stop it,” I hiss at Kentaro.

I swear my life is like being surrounded by twelve-year-old boys. I scratch the head of the cat in my lap and close my eyes to let the cake do its business, concentrating on the voices around me.

“Always, your most important task is to find water first. Always.” To my left, Julia is talking low to Kazuo. “Water is your number one priority over food. Then, if you can’t catch animals, I always suggest digging up roots to eat. They’re less poisonous than leaves or berries.”

I open my eyes to find Kazuo nodding his head. “Cook them or eat them raw?”

“Depends on the situation. If you can make a fire, cook them. It’s easier on your stomach.”

“What about tracking animals?”

“Animals are new to me, but I’ve read up on them, which animals like to live where…” Her voice trails off as she eats more food. “Honestly I would much rather not eat them if I don’t have to.”

I smile and nod, not joining in on the conversation. It’s still hard for me to justify eating animal meat most days especially with something so sweet sleeping in my lap. The black cat is on her back, a paw over her closed eyes. This is how I sleep sometimes with one arm cast over my face. Animals and people are not all that different.

“Have you heard from Lucy?” Usagi asks Sakai, at the end of the table.

Sakai nods his head as he chews. “She’s good, working with Maeda on city enforcements. Said that Helena and Hiro spent the day in the town center.”

“Is she walking everyday?”

“She is. They were interviewing a tutor together.”

My appetite begins to bloom as thoughts in my head fade away. Here, my family eats around a table like nothing’s wrong. I should be as carefree as them, right? I pull the bowl of noodles towards me and sip at the soup, catching bits of green onion and seaweed along with the broth. The salty liquid tastes good after the sugary brownie, so I keep going. Jiro bumps his knee into mine under the table.

“Do you want to practice more of the bow and arrow tomorrow, Sanaa?” Arata asks from the other side of Jiro. “I think the weather will be clear, and there’s a long stretch of lawn we could use.”

“You’re learning archery?” Namika asks, sipping on saké. “I like the bow and arrow, too. I shoot all the time. There’s a target out behind the barns.”

“Great!” Arata booms, laughing and patting his knee. “You should join us.”

“I think I will. If Miss Itami doesn’t mind.”

I look up and blink. Huh? “I don’t mind, of course. Why would I?”

“Oh, I just don’t want to intrude.” Her cheeks color again.

“Please,” I say, relaxing back. “Call me Sanaa, and this is your home, not mine. If anything, I’m intruding here. Feel free to say or do whatever you normally do. I prefer to be treated like a regular person.”

Most everyone at the table nods, having heard this speech from me a million times over.

“Well, fuck then. I guess I won’t worry too much.”

Everyone bursts into laughs, and she quirks up the side of her mouth at me while raising her saké cup. I smile and raise my glass of water back to her.

“You know, if you love to slum it with the locals, you should come to the sumo wrestling tournament in a week. It’s the biggest tournament of the year, Emperor’s Cup and all.”

“Slum it?”

“A joke. Rub elbows with the natives. Get down and dirty with the peasants…”

“Down and dirty I have been quite frequently. It’s the reason my hair’s so short now. I had an ant farm living in it for some time.”

“Then you’ll fit right in.” She chuckles, and Kentaro looks sideways at her. “Though I think you’ll have to wear kimono and drink beer. It’s expected.”

“I’ll do my best,” I say, gathering up the last of the noodles in the dish. The black cat in my lap wakes, stretching, and placing her paws on my chest, rubs her head up under my chin. I attempt to eat over her but have to scoop her to my side.

“That’s what I like to see.” Jiro glances over at my almost empty bowl. “Dessert again?”

“Yes, please.”

I drift on a wave of cake throughout the rest of dinner, ignoring the fact that Rai Oda doesn’t join us once, and I don’t see him before passing out for the night in a pile of animals with Jiro curled over me.

—-

The morning comes swift like a sword blade cutting through rolled up tatami mats. I close my eyes to go to sleep, open them, and I’m awake for the day. I hate that kind of sleep, the kind of sleep where it’s almost as if I didn’t rest. I would rather dream and wake a few times, knowing time had passed than feel like nothing happened at all. I drag myself from bed, brush my hair, dress, and join Jiro and Oyama in the back garden, a coffee service set up for me.

I’m drinking my second cup with my feet under Kumo when Rai approaches along the path, a squirrel on his shoulder. The squirrel runs down Rai’s back and up a tree. Jumping from a branch towards me, it snaps open its arms and legs and glides through the air in my direction. From below, the animal looks like a rectangle with a head and tail.

“Wow!” My eyes follow its path all the way to the grass at my feet. I pull my toes in, but this doesn’t stop the creature from running up my legs and into my lap. “Shit,” I cry as I jostle my mug and dump coffee all over my hand.

“Rocky, get off her,” Rai directs, pointing at the ground. “Haven’t I told you a million times to not invade the personal space of others? My apologies, Miss Itami. He’s excited to meet you.” Rocky climbs up Rai’s leg and settles into a pocket in his loose shirt.

“I’m terribly sorry about what happened last night. I wish I knew what I said or did yesterday to upset you.” I rise from my seat, shaking the coffee off my hand, and bow to him. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have been here ten years ago, honestly. It seems like you could have used us then what with Fujiwara and everything.”

Rai shakes his head. “That’s not why I’m upset. May I join you?” He gestures to another chair a few meters from us, picks it up, and sits down across from Jiro and me.

Rai wrings his hands together. “Let me start at the beginning or close to it since you expressed an interest in our history. When my ancestors were on the generation ship heading to Orihime, the in-ship habitat only had a few species of animals. Enough to keep the fragile environment onboard functioning. But the genetic engineers had embryos and DNA stored away for our eventual landing on a planet where we would need to fertilize and populate the entire ecosystem with plants, animals, bacteria, …”

He waves his hand in a roundabout motion.

“I’m sure you get the drift. By the time we arrived, the division onboard ship between Fujiwara and everyone else was acute. He wanted to return to the feudal days when things were easier. We wanted to continue in a modern vein. But he was more powerful with more people behind him. So, we built in a failsafe by genetically engineering all the animals. They’re smarter and better able to communicate with each other and us. They learn our language exceedingly fast, and if we have the chip, we can talk to them and the chip acts like a translator in our head for whatever they say back.”

He rubs his fingers along a spot behind his ear, and I hold my breath. This is the first time anyone’s been willing to divulge Orihime’s history. Hiro’s parents couldn’t even bring themselves to hint at what happened.

“Some people are never good candidates for the chip. Some get the chip and never meet the right animal or animals to talk to or pair with because not all animals understand us. Other people can understand two, maybe three, different animal languages. Those people are exceedingly rare.”

“That sounds amazing. I’m quite taken by animals, and how everyone here in the North seems to be connected to them. Do all animals have this genetic gift?”

“Gift? That’s a funny way of putting it.”

I smile and hold my coffee to my chest. “It’s a gift to me, a gift to the animals and to us.”

“Well, the genetic engineers determined that mammals and avians had the best chance of acquiring the genes and using them. Fish and amphibians didn’t qualify, and there are no reptiles on Orihime.”

“Is that so? Why?”

Rai shrugs his shoulders. “I’m not sure. Perhaps the original engineers were afraid of snakes?” He laughs. This is a very plausible theory.

“Anyway, I haven’t told you the good news and the bad news yet. The good news is that besides giving animals the ability to communicate, the head of genetic engineering hated Fujiwara so much he inserted the capacity for all animals to pair easily with royalty if given the choice.”

He chuckles and shakes his head in disbelief, as my chest grows cold.

“We had one royal ancestor onboard ship, a man the rest of us stood behind. Even Fujiwara supporters were enamored of him. In fact, Fujiwara’s own wife had an affair with this man, Korehito Itami, and when my ancestors came planet side, their affair was a big bone of contention. Here we are, three hundred years later, and the current Fujiwara still hates women and the imperial bloodline. Nothing has changed in decades. So,” he says, sighing and patting my arm, “with your imperial DNA, you could be the ultimate weapon, the best interpreter on the planet, someone every animal would want to pair with, even the nokemono animals.”

“Nokemono? Outcasts? There are animal outcasts?”

“Our most dangerous animals have the hardest time pairing with humans. Bears, though they have been bred for docility in the last hundred years, and the cats of the Nogusa-hara. Jungle cats, not domestic.”

Jungle cats? I sit forward, pulled by the tempting string all cats find impossible to ignore. “Ah, that’s what Arata meant when he said the Nogusa-hara was complicated.”

“It’s beautiful land but no one goes there unless it’s to hunt deer and antelope that don’t get eaten by the cats. We have a protected house right on the other side of the wall in the woods that butt up to the prairie.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

He waves his hand. “The house has been there forever, and we use it as a jumping off point to our shipyards on the North Coast. We carve pathways through the tall prairie grass so we can reach the Kōbuchi Desert and the solar farm. Anyway, that’s the good news, that you have imperial DNA, and you are what we’ve been waiting for for generations since Korehito Itami died without ever having children.”

I try to swallow another sip of coffee but my throat is closed up. I’m almost afraid to ask. “What’s the bad news?”

He tries to smile but the sentiment perishes quickly on his thin face. “The human brain reaches maturity at age twenty-five. Implanting the chip anytime after the age of twenty is not recommended. How old are you?”

“Twenty-four? It’s hard to say because we hibernated on the way here and our actual ages don’t really match up.” If anything, I am way beyond the borderline for this procedure. My eyes start to water in despair. “What are the side effects to implanting a chip late? What could happen?”

“I’ve planted the chips in people as late as twenty-two. Ten candidates have presented themselves over the years, some were defectors from Fujiwara who had no idea we even existed.” He rubs his hands together. “Three were fine after the procedure. Five experienced significant mental disturbances. They had trouble integrating the increased auditory traffic that animals present, and of those five, two were committed to mental hospitals and the other three live in seclusion.”

“And what about the other two in this equation?”

“They never made it off the operating table.”

I swallow, my throat completely dry, and consider the odds. I have a twenty percent chance of dying outright, a fifty percent chance of going crazy, and a thirty percent chance of having it work and be the miracle everyone has been waiting for.

It’s a good thing I’m not pregnant anymore.

I glance at silent Jiro. He hasn’t said a word since Rai arrived to talk to us. His shoulders are stiff and his fingers grasp the edges of the chair arms, the knuckles along each finger turned white.

“Oda, I understand your hesitation, but ultimately, I need to think about what’s best for everyone on this planet, not just me. May I have some time to speak with my husband about this in private?”

Rai stands, brushing off his pants, and his flying squirrel, Rocky, peeks his head out of his pocket. “Of course.” He glances between Jiro and me. “I… I’m sorry I didn’t know you were married.”

“Technically, we aren’t due to the royal marriage law left over from the pre-war Old Japan days. But Jiro is my only consort and my partner.”

Rai steps back and bows. “I remember that law. I understand. Sometimes labels are comforting.”

A huff of a laugh bubbles up my chest. It’s ironic that I used to take so much comfort in those labels, and now, they mean little to me. Rai leaves us and Jiro relaxes when I place my hand on top of his.

“What are you thinking? You didn’t ask one question that whole time.”

“What am I thinking…” He drags out each word, and I close my eyes because I’m sure I’m not going to like what he’s been thinking. “I’m thinking we’re all mad. We’ve gone crazy. That we’re still in hibernation and this is a dream. A very crazy dream.”

“A bad dream?”

Jiro sits forward, groans, and rubs his face. “It’s just nuts, Sanaa, in every possible way. How do these animals even know you have imperial DNA? Can they smell it or something? I feel dubious about the whole thing, like I can’t trust these people. I can’t trust them with your life.”

“Wait, wait. Think about it. We’ve had an insider since the first day we landed on the planet. Someone who sat in our room, listened to every conversation, was in almost every meeting.”

“Momo.”

“And it’s not like she saw many other cats when she was pregnant and on our property, which is why I wasn’t bombarded until now. I’m sure she’s been spreading the news since giving birth. I wonder, do cats talk to birds? Birds to foxes? Or do they only talk to their kin?” I glance up at the tree next to us and three birds rest on a branch, their eyes trained on us. “See? Gossipers.”

I wave at the birds. “Go on now. Give us some peace.” They take flight and head in the direction of town, away from the wall.

Jiro sits back in his chair, lifting his tea cup up from the ground. “Well, that makes more sense.”

“You’re naturally paranoid, and I only get that way when things are extreme.”

“This is not extreme?”

Kumo rolls over on his back and presents his belly to me for scratches. I dig my fingers into the fur at his chest, and his head lolls around, his long, pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. “No. This isn’t extreme. This is exactly how my life should be.” Patting Kumo on the chest a few times, I smile down at him. “Minus children.”

“Wouldn’t you rather continue with our life here, have kids, keep trying to convince these people that Fujiwara is a bad leader for them, and not risk your life with this alien tech?” Jiro’s fingers drum a fast rhythm on the chair. He’s no longer freaked out. He’s contemplative.

“It’s not alien. It’s a technology from Earth, grown and developed without the prejudice we have against this sort of thing. And no, I don’t want to just continue in the same vein we have been for the past few weeks. More than half the people we talked to ran us out of their towns. We can’t convince enough of the people to do what we want. But…” I sit forward and tap his knee. “But, we could convince the animals, and the animals combined with the support we already have would be a winning combination.”

Jiro laughs. “Your eyes are actually sparkling. Seriously. They’re dazzling.”

A broad smile breaks my face in two and a happy laugh erupts. “I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. Even you, I was more doubtful of.”

“Me? How could you doubt?”

“Remember our first weeks together in the dōjō? You speared me in the shoulder! Yelled at me. Then you kept me at arm’s length for several more weeks. I was certain you wanted nothing to do with me.”

“Come here.” He beckons me to his lap, and I smile at the chance to be cared for, instead of caring for everyone else. I curl up in that warm and comfortable space between his lap and arms, content. “I know your life is always in danger, so performing the operation is no different than stepping out the door and facing the world, assassins and all. I’ll be able to manage the two extremes — success or utter failure — but what if you go crazy? What if death had been a better choice? Tell me what you want.”

Jiro wants guidance? This doesn’t happen very often.

“I’m strong. I can handle it. If I go mad, I want time to determine if I can recover. Okay? Don’t kill me right away.”

“You say that so easily, like I can just draw Oninoten and end your life. No. I’ll find some way to make it work.” He kisses me on my forehead and squeezes me tight. “No matter what happens. I’ll make sure you’re okay.”