XVIII

I hid the letter in my Storage once I had read all the other supporting information – glossy brochures that portrayed army life as one of the best things in the world. I kept to myself for the rest of the day, occupying myself with writing music, a talent I had picked up over high school that Syoro Toripe encouraged and helped me with. I realised that I probably would have no time for that, nor any time for any sort of self-enjoyment. I realised then that I would have to cancel lessons with him for a year (it was then I also realised that I would have to cancel lessons anyway because I was moving to Yamauchi).

But, what struck me early that afternoon, as it began to rain, that I would not be able to write letters to Ark. Over the course of high school, the letters began to dwindle – they were often hastily written when I remembered I had not done it for a while, filled with many apologies.

I put my music aside and took a sheet of paper. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, as I don’t have the letter with me, naturally, but I do remember telling him about the trip to Tasnica. I then put down that I would not be able to write for a whole year, and that it was extremely bad form of me to have been forgetful in my writing to have this happen. I told him that I had been conscripted into the Pandoran Army and that it was a stupid system, but I could not escape it. I gave him a farewell, put the letter in storage, and went downstairs.

“I see you’re up, then,” my mother spoke with disdain as I came to the door.

“Been up since this morning, just writing some music,” I said, my voice bland. “Lost track of time.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“Er, yeah. Post office, sending some letters to my friends. They told me to keep in touch.”

“In the rain?”

“I’ve written the letters and I want to send them today.”

My mother shrugged. “Suit yourself. If you catch a cold, I’m not paying for the medicine.”

And so I made my way towards the post office, in what was a light shower, before I made a sudden turn and headed down a back street which would send me by the river along to the pod-tree. By the time I got there, the rain was pouring down.

It was another time when the rain was pouring down that the main cause of my sadness was brought about, on a summer’s day misplaced mid-winter. I stood by the tree and plucked a seedpod from it. As usual, I dropped the seeds on the ground, put the letter in again, and closed it tight. But then, I went and stood at the edge of the hole.

I looked down into it: the waterfall sprayed as it hit the overhang, sweeping back down it into the slit my brother fell through. He was down there. He had to be!

I flicked my hand over my shoulder, throwing the pod into the water. It toppled off the edge of the falls, and as I watched, it hit the outcrop below, before rolling down it, disappearing into the waterfall once more, and into the hole.

“There’s your last letter, brother!” I yelled into the abyss.

The only reply was the splashing of the water below and the pouring rain.

And there I was, truly separated from my brother. I would no longer have the means to contact him.

It was not fair, at all. Why did my opposition have to be Dogo? Why did I let it get to me? Why didn’t my luck fall with the 45.38% chance of not being conscripted? Why did my brother and I have to be separated?

If I had him throughout high school, I would have had support of my own kin, and overall, I would have been happier, I thought. Nase may have been in Ark’s place, but he never fitted into my brother’s shoes. He knew this, and although he tried his best, which I am thankful beyond measure for, it just wasn’t the same.

I looked over the edge. Ark was down there, and I was up here. What was better? A world in the shadows with the person I was closest to, or a world in the light with lonely suffering?

I worked out that the flood would not have killed him. The amount of water going down there would have been far greater, providing a sort of cushion against the outcrop. There may have been a bit of a whirlpool or something like it going down into the caves proper, but he would have been able to hold his breath. Or at least, that’s what I worked out there.

He was down there!

I looked again. I had to be with him. I had to! All I had to do was jump, aiming myself at the hole, and I would slip through it into the cave beneath. Surely there would be a pool; there always was at the bottom of a waterfall.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I bent my legs.

“Dy! What are you doing there?!”

A hand grabbed my arm and pulled me away roughly. I turned to see who it was.

My father stood before me, beneath an umbrella. I looked down at myself: my clothes were saturated, my skin was drenched, and my hair was plastered to my head.

“Ark…” I muttered. “I…I’ve lost…Ark…”

“Ark?” he asked, incredulously.

I did not nod, but remained silent. Any mention of my brother was a touchy issue in my family.

“Dyluck, he’s gone a long time ago now,” he said.

“No, he hasn’t,” I muttered. I looked at my father’s unbelieving eyes. “He hasn’t! You even said you at least thought he mightn’t be!”

“When?”

“When the whole Multehx incident happened!”

It was my father’s turn to be silent.

“See that tree there?” I pointed at it. “Ever since the flood, I have been writing letters to him and sealing them in those pods. It’s how I’ve coped, Dad. Just the hope that he survived is what makes me get up each morning! Call it a wild dream, but if I believe that he survived, I will cope with tomorrow as well as today!”

“You were about to kill yourself, Dyluck,” he scowled, his eyes both disappointed and furious. “You were about to jump. What about me? And your mother? And your friends?”

“…Nothing can replace Ark,” I growled through gritted teeth.

My father rolled his eyes and groaned. “He’s gone, Dy. He may be alive, but he’s gone. There’s no way he can come back. Now, come on, you’re standing in the rain, and I don’t want you to fight with your mother. Let’s go home.”

He turned and began to walk away. I looked at the hole one more time.

“Don’t you even think about it!” he growled, marching over to me and grabbing my arm.

He pulled and my legs were forced to follow, but my head stayed riveted on that hole.

“I’ve lost my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephew and my younger son, and I almost lost the other one today. By the gods…”

I turned my head to my father. Salt water threatened to spill out of his eyelids as he looked at me. He grunted with satisfaction and let go, turning away. I followed him back up the river bank, both of us in silence.

As we went past Approach Falls, he broke it and asked gruffly, “What happened, Dyluck?”

“Happened?”

“You looked like you got over the flood, so what happened?”

I swallowed. I did not want to answer.

He stopped and turned to me. “What happened?”

“I…I don’t want to say.”

“Dy, I want an answer.”

“I don’t want to…” I sat down by the bank and put my head in my hands, rubbing my face. There were times when I could rely on my father’s general naïveté about Pandora. “I’ve been conscripted into the army for a year, starting in a week.”

He looked let down. “I thought you were doing well at school,” he answered with a sigh. Obviously, this was not one of those times.

“So was I, until that spar with Dogo Tyrope.”

“Hm. What about your move back home?”

“Can’t do it. They’re going to have to put me on hold.”

He was silent.

“I don’t want to do it, Dad! The army’s full of bigots!”

“Is there anyway you can get out of it?”

“No!” I raised my head. “Can’t leave the country at all!”

Dad sighed. “Well, you’re going to have to pull yourself together, then. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s how I cope.”

“It’s not fair at all…it’s not fair!”

He rolled his eyes and groaned, not wanting to deal with my ranting. “Just come on.”

I got up and followed him. “It’s not fair,” I muttered.

Needless to say, my mother was told and she was disappointed, somewhat angrily. Basically, her words were much fiercer than my father’s, basically along the lines of being spineless. She was also disappointed with my poor results, and told me flat out that I should not have let my fight with Dogo get to me during exams. She cried. I cried. It was not a good scene, and is definitely not worth repeating on paper.

Nevertheless, I hoped against hope over the course of that week that my conscription would be cancelled, that I had been issued with it by mistake, or that they changed the system, or even that a meteor struck Pandora City. However, the dreaded day dawned. Everything was packed, that which was in Storage, and that which couldn’t be was on my back, like they had told me to do. My family and I rode the train to Pandora, in silence. I retreated to my thoughts; I was scared of what would happen. I was already formulating come-backs should anyone take a swipe at me being in a costume. I also remember being bemused as to what they would do about my Storage. Anyone could sneak something into the Army inside their mind.

We arrived at the station near the castle, and walked up to it, arriving in plenty of time before it. They were having their presentation in the main courtyard. My parents could not stay for long as they had inn work to do – that was their excuse, but by the way they said their goodbyes and wished me luck, I feel they didn’t want to hang around. Although they had not said it, I had picked up a feeling of shame from my parents.

So, I went inside and saw people milling about, grouping with people they knew. I looked for anyone from Luka College – there were none. Sighing, I leant against a wall at the back of the courtyard from the stage, folded my arms and closed my eyes.

“Hey…you,” came a voice after a while.

I opened them again and looked at a man about my age, with his pack by his side. “Yes?”

He looked at me in stunned silence. “Whoa…you speak Pandoran?”

I nodded. “I can speak a lot more, should you like.”

The joke flew over his head. “Riiiight.” He looked daunted, that an alien could speak Pandoran, probably more fluently than he could. He tried to look helpful. “Tourists shouldn’t be here right now, er…”

“I’m not one. I’m a Pandoran citizen.” Damn it, I added mentally.

He was stunned again. “…Whoa.”

I watched him lean against the wall with me.

“So…what percentage-score-thing did you get to come here?” he asked.

“I’d rather not say,” I answered sourly.

“Okay. I got eighty-seven point thirty-three – no, eighty-three point seventy-three…or something like that? Anyway, it’s the lowest out of me and my brother and my step-sister and my other step-sister and step-brother; they all got ninety-something? Dunno what my other brother – my real brother – got, he lives with my step-dad, my second – no, third one, haven’t seen him for about, ooh, two years? Anyway, my mother’s proud, I visited her the other day, down at the hospital – she had another overdose, you know? And my step-dad – this is the fourth one – he says to me, ‘Yeah, that’s cool’, he does.”

I refrained from saying, “I’m not surprised”, but just nodded instead, closing my eyes and leaning back against the wall, cringing mentally as his sentences inflected all wrongly. Why was I here with people like this? Were we the rejects of society or something?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to talk to him as there was suddenly a pakasisao flare. An official came over to us and said, “Hey, you two, line up, the general’s coming.”

We were all ushered into rows by sergeants and other officers, most of whom gave me a quizzical look. A captain stood up the front on a dais behind a microphone and bellowed that we all stood to attention. Remembering Lieutenant Tenovos, I snapped to it while those around me shuffled there.

The officials behind the dais made salutes as a man bedecked in clean blue uniform came to the microphone. “Now, when I say, ‘at ease’, that means legs apart, arms behind your back at forty-five degrees, left hand clutching your right wrist. Wiggle your toes occasionally so that you don’t faint. Conscripts, at ease.”

We did as he said, quickly.

“You’re going to have to do a lot of this, so it’s best that I tell you first up,” he smiled, allowing a few chuckles. He quickly turned stern again, and they stopped. “Let me introduce myself: I am General Tigolatu of the Army of Pandora. I’m in charge of everyone you see here, pretty much, and I make sure that everyone here does as our motto requires us to: ‘To Protect Peace to the Last with Duty and Honour’. As soon as I have finished talking, I will make sure that you will be doing the same. I officially welcome all of you into the Army of Pandora.”

He droned on with a speech about what we would expect, and how we should, over the course of that year, be striving to keep our duty and to be honourable in all that we do. Someone near me forgot to wiggle their toes and fainted, but General Tigolatu continued to talk while some officers worried over the fallen conscript. He then passed over to the captain who bellowed before, who told us what we would do next – basically, pointing us to various parts of the courtyard if our surname began with a particular letter. He then told us to stand to attention as the general left, and then told us to break off into our various parts of the courtyard.

Very few names in Pandoran begin with the letter “Y”, so there were only four of us standing before a sergeant, who held a roll before him. My companions looked at me both nervously and with wonder. The sergeant spotted me but then decided to ignore me altogether. Satisfied that all “Y” conscripts were present, he grunted with satisfaction.

“Right,” he said, “it’s my little job here to tell you that since you are a small group, you will be partitioned off to other ones. So, Conscript Ynali?”

“Yes, syoro?”

“You will be with the ‘N’ group. Over there. Off you go. Conscript Ytoro?”

“Yes, syoro?”

“Group ‘D’ for you. Over there, goodbye. Conscript Ysulos?”

“Here, syoro?”

“Group ‘P’, please. You’ll find them near the tree over there. Thank you for coming. Which means, you must be Conscript I-oss-hi?”

“Yes, syoro. ‘Yoshi’, syoro.”

“Ah. Doesn’t your kind all have the same last name or something? Don’t answer that. You’re with the ‘T’ group. Directly opposite, other side of the yard. Cyado.”

I turned and made my way across to the ‘T’ group. I looked ahead and saw a decent-sized group; about twenty or so people. I then saw the sergeant at the front of it and stopped in my tracks.

“Hey, you, what are you doing? Get where you’re meant to be!” some official reprimanded me.

I kept walking, in trepidation.

“I will be your unit sergeant – Ah, I see we have Conscript Yoshi with us at last,” Sergeant Dogo Tyrope sneered as I approached.