Reunited – Chapter 3

Sakai and Lucy open up their room to us after we’ve slept seven hours. I’m still so tired and cold I layer on two shirts and a pair of long underwear under the flight suit. Huddling in a corner, I hug myself and try to keep my mouth closed so my teeth don’t chatter.

“Cathy and a few other hibernation technicians are already deep in the process of waking everyone in our party up. They’re being pumped full of fluids and should be awake soon.” Lucy gives me water and puree packs. They’re even colder in my hands. What I wouldn’t give for a hot bowl of soup from Oyama.

I sip on a puree of yams while Sakai briefs us on Yūsei. Much of what they’ve found is the same as what we expected. This world has two moons and is similar to Earth but a little cooler and rainier. Right now, the continent is in early spring, and every day is cold and wet in the morning and clearer at night. With the planet covered in oceans, the weather is fairly regular but whips up some intense storms.

“The political calendar I ran across was interesting in more than just learning about Fujiwara. This world circles its sun at almost the same rate as Earth. The year is only a few days shorter, so they used the Gregorian calendar and lopped off some days from the longer months. Interestingly enough, February still has only twenty-eight days. I don’t know if there’s a leap year or not. The day’s shorter, too. Their digital clocks rolled over at 24:00, but the end of every month is a daylight saving switch. They roll back the clock by an hour at midnight. It will take some time to get used to.”

“Gain an hour of sleep at the end of every month? I can get behind that.” Jiro nods his head and yawns. It catches and everyone in the room yawns in turn before Lucy laughs.

“Stop that, Jiro.”

“Well, Minamoto is awake, and I’m guessing he’ll want to wake the rest of his family and top crew, right?” I ask and Sakai nods. “What can we do about Miura and Taira clan? How much longer can they stay in hibernation before the ships need to leave?”

“Six weeks?” Lucy replies, shrugging her shoulders and tucking her hair into her collar. “But the captain of their ship seems dodgy to me. It takes him forever to answer my messages, and when I shuttled aboard last week, he canceled all but one meeting. I have a bad feeling about it.” She sucks down a packet of water, squeezing the pouch until it’s flat. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee. The beans I had vacuum-packed before we left are still in storage.”

“Mmmm, coffee. Save me a cup when you make some.” My mouth waters imagining what a cup of coffee would do to me. Transport me to heaven, most likely. “So, Mark, you’ve been up and down from the surface for the past six weeks?”

“This is my first time back in orbit since landing. The recovery time is hard, you two.” He nods at both Jiro and me. “We were all in shape before hibernation but don’t expect to get much done the first two weeks. You won’t be back to normal for at least thirty days.”

Thirty days is a lot of time to spend not at your best, and I worry about being vulnerable while I recover.

“I spoke with a physical therapist before we left,” Jiro says, and my head snaps around to him. He did? “Yes, Sanaa. Sorry. One of the many late nights. We can expect balance and coordination issues, feel weak and exhausted, and there may be some bone loss but the hibernation drugs helped us retain most of that. Your recovery, as well as mine, are my top priority, especially now that we have more to contend with. You’ll need to be up and on your feet and traveling within a few weeks.”

“I agree with Jiro.” Sakai nods at me, and my stomach shrinks. I hope I don’t puke up these purees I barely want to eat. “Just because this world is already inhabited doesn’t mean we need you any less. We need you even more. We need to keep the peace among Minamoto, Taira, and Maeda so we can assess how to deal with Fujiwara. We have no idea what kind of leader he is, but he’s the only one for this entire continent. Is he a peaceful and happy leader elected by the populace or a crazy despot?”

My skin crawls, and I shake off a feeling of dread before my teeth start chattering again. Hope for the best, expect the worst.

“You’ll have to turn on the charm and keep it coming, and we’ll start from the ground up. Town visits are first on your schedule. You need to meet everyone of influence. The clans will naturally fall into place if everyone is on your side.”

In a matter of days, my life will be hectic and confusing. My hands reach for my hair like they used to, twisting it and playing with it. Jiro smooths down my ponytail and takes my hand, smiling sweetly at me. I’d pace if I could. My legs are restless and jumpy floating here

“Town visits, lots of walking and strength training before we get back into the dōjō.” Jiro chucks his packet at the waste bin attached to the wall with his left hand and misses the receptacle by a centimeter. “My aim is off. Anyway, what about the towns and the rest of the continent?”

“We want to visit the town north of us within four weeks of landing. The whole continent is about the size of Ireland or Old Japan’s Hokkaido on Earth, eighty-two thousand square kilometers of land and a few islands off the South Coast. It’s about three hundred kilometers wide at its widest and five hundred kilometers from North Coast to South Coast. I think you’d like to visit north near the equator but the towns in the Northeast are hard to access, and we probably shouldn’t shuttle in.”

“No, I imagine that would scare the crap out of them.”

Lucy laughs, her voice full of mirth and her eyes crinkling. I love her laugh. It’s infectious and makes me giggle. “To put it mildly. We have no idea if they’d immediately burn us at the stake for being witches or not. Let’s not piss off the native population, okay?”

A soft knock on the door turns everyone’s head in the room, and I groan.

“Is this Minamoto? Because I still don’t want to talk to him. It’s a good thing Kazenoho is stored away.”

Lucy smiles at me. “No. I have another, happier surprise for you.”

She slides the door open, and Helena, the last person I expected to see right now is on the other side. I scream like a happy little girl and shoot straight for her. Her smile is a bit crooked, as if she’s lost sensation in her face, and her left arm is limp, cradled against her chest, but she slowly speaks my name before I envelop her in a huge hug.

“Oh my gods, sweet, sweet Helena.” I burst into heaving and uncontrollable sobbing, and yes, I’ve never been so happy. My friend! My best friend I thought I lost forever, here, breathing, smiling! She clutches me hard with her right hand, holding her left arm close to her body. Her embrace is shaky, but she’s alive and conscious.

“I came up to see everyone. How are you?” The words filter out slow and labored, but her voice still has the same timber it used to have.

“I’m fine. Look at you! Helena, what do you remember?” I pull her into the room, and Lucy shuts the door behind her. Jiro hugs her and gives her a kiss on the cheek with a big smile.

“I don’t remember anything. Just being at work and then waking up here. It was very confusing.” She smiles again, and her face will take some getting used to. Her cheeks and lips are not as animated as they were before she was poisoned. “But I’ve been awake for a year now, and down on the surface almost the whole time since we got here with Dr. Volkova.”

“A year? Why so early?”

“The nanos up and finished around year six,” Lucy says, filling me in, “and their diagnostic reports stated they fixed what could be fixed. So Dr. Volkova was woken up, and she decided to wake Helena too and start physical therapy in zero gravity. Helena has been building muscles and working with a speech therapist for a while now.”

“I still need help walking on Yūsei, but I’m getting better.” Helena nods, her lips set in a firm, crooked line. I shake my head in wonder. “But I’m dying to see Akio and be with him when he wakes up. He has hair now. I want to kiss him and ask him to marry me.”

I let out a big laugh and grab Jiro’s hand. I love Helena. Something tells me she’s not going to be rejected.

—-

We have a huge reunion in the multi-purpose room where everyone hugs, kisses, exclaims over how we all look, fawns over Helena and Usagi, and gazes out the window at our new home.

I can’t believe what a racket everyone’s overlapping voices make in this echoing space. The cacophony is deafening and disorienting, and I shrink back into a corner for a minute before I get my bearings. I love a good concert or party, but too much noise in every day situations is unsettling. When a room is this noisy, I can’t hear people coming.

I look around the room at each group and concentrate on their conversations until my aunts float in the door. Aunt Kimie and Lomo’s eyes slip over everyone and land on me, but I’m already hurtling towards them.

I’m a kid again, unable to stop myself from crying in my aunts’ arms. When I had hard days at school, before I met Miko and Helena, I would come home and cry on Aunt Kimie or Lomo’s lap in the afternoons. I was a quiet but smart kid and didn’t make many friends until I got older, and it was hard being left out of conversations or parties. I was so alone, a loneliness I hadn’t felt again until the year before we left for Yūsei.

“Shhh,” Aunt Kimie croons, smoothing my hair and kissing my cheek. “We’re all fine. Sorry we’re the last ones here.”

I don’t have the heart to tell her that’s not why I’m crying, but I gladly take her hugs and kisses.

Once I dry my tears, I make my way around to everyone, put on a happy, smiling face, and don’t talk much. I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I’ll spill the beans before Sakai does, and I think he should do this. I’ll get emotional (in either direction), and he can be such a rock.

Kentaro is here too, but his father is not. He smiles at me when I float past but grabs my elbow and squeezes while leaning into my ear. “We need to talk, Sanaa. After?”

The room grows quiet under Sakai’s insistence. He gives them all the news and stuns everyone into silence. It’s a silence so complete I can hear the air exchangers click on and off in the wall. I want to laugh and make the situation lighter than it is, but I can’t. Everyone is staring at me with wide eyes. If I start laughing now, I’ll be committed.

“What does this mean for Sanaa?” Aunt Kimie squeaks out, her face reddening. “The Fujiwaras cultivated their relationship with the Emperor all the way to the wars! There’s no way they’ll leave her alone. This whole situation was only going to work because we held people to laws who had to obey them in Nishikyō and here. Now that cushion is gone.”

The need to pace is so strong my legs jerk. Hearing the situation out loud from Aunt Kimie is even worse than thinking these things in my head. My royal blood means I’m prime breeding material. My hands sweat, and I rub them off on my shirt and try to swallow in my completely dry mouth.

“We don’t know what this means for any of us, Kimie,” Sakai pleads, his palms outward. “We have numbers on our side, almost twelve thousand people in this wave alone. We won’t let them force us out because within a year, second wave will be here with another twenty-thousand people. The native population can’t be larger than seventy or eighty-thousand, and it’s not like they all belong to the military. They’re spread out over the whole continent.”

If only I could believe I’d be perfectly safe, I would hug Aunt Kimie right now and tell her I’m fine. But I float in the corner, away from everyone. I’m an outsider amongst my own family and friends. Not much different from the life I had before we left but significantly more dangerous. I need to summon strength from somewhere in my body, but my soul is hollow, an empty, abandoned well.

Everyone in this room is silent. These are the people that I’m supposed to gain strength from, but they did everything in their power to distance themselves from me before we left on this journey. My aunts are lovely, but they can’t protect me. Mariko still hates me. She hasn’t said hello to me yet, hugged me or made eye contact with me. Miko and Yoichi’s gazes are pitying. Helena is confused, and if anything, I owe her my protection, not the other way around. I can count the people who will help me on less than one hand.

How did I end up here? I take a moment to close my eyes and imagine myself back at my desk, back in Nishikyō at the Colonization Committee before my life went sideways. Was I happier then? I was lonely, but I had a stable life, and I wasn’t in constant danger. When I open my eyes, Jiro is watching me from next to his mother. Whatever I wish for my life, whatever becomes of me, at least I have him.

I steel myself with a deep breath before I start. “Our new town is on the opposite coast from the capital city, and it will take time for people in our surrounding area to catch on to the fact we’re living there. By the time the capital finds out, we’ll be firmly entrenched and able to defend ourselves. I’d rather keep the peace and live together with these people. So let’s go down to our new home and hope for the best.”