The konketsu woman's room, if one could call it that, was simply dreadful. It was only so long as would fit the woman's bed on one side from and only sufficiently wide for a dresser, desk, and vanity mirror opposite the bed. Sayuri's closet at the Imperial Academy was larger than it. Cramped herself, Sayuri could only imagine how uncomfortable it was for Chester's corpulent frame.

  Moreover, there were many odd and disquieting objects strewn about. Brightly colored tubes of rubber lay atop shelving above the bed while random bits of leather and metal of the sort one might construct a riding horse's bridle of were affixed to the bedposts. This woman had also seen fit to purchase, with whatever meager means she possessed, enough cosmetics to supply a theater production company. Though this was Sayuri's first time encountering poverty in any immediacy, she understood now the principle that the poor were largely so out of paucity of thrift and delayed gratification. Poverty was a disease of character, as her father put it.

  "Ahem, are you sure there's nowhere else we can talk?" Chester asked.

  The konketsu woman snickered. "You wanted privacy. This is as private as it gets in our humble house of pleasures."

  "But Sayuri is..."

  "Oh-ho, is that your little companion's name?" the woman said. Her voice was dark and smooth, with a buzz like a chorus of cicadas. She glanced at Sayuri and smirked, not even bothering to face the person to whom she was referring.

  "Thou mayst refer to me as Lady Ueichi."

  Chester pressed steepled hands to his face. The woman blinked, looked to Chester, then back to Sayuri, then back to Chester, and emitted a hiccupping laugh. "Thomas... What the fuck did you just bring to my doorstep?"

  There was that strange word again, ‘fuck.’ She would have thought it a slur, yet, in a syntactic sense, it only half the time functioned as a noun and the other half in a manner which seemed no part of speech whatsoever. No phonetic difference distinguished by which means it was deployed. Very queer.

  "Look, I need your help, Milly,” Chester said, his hard, clenched face turning unusually soft. "I need to get her back home and there are people— special forces guys, chasing her, and— gods above I-I—"

  The woman whistled. "Hey! Stay with me, big guy. Here."

  She shooed Chester backwards so the dresser drawer wouldn't hit him in the head and reached into a pile of lurid underwear to hand him a half-empty bottle of clear liquor. Sayuri's face burned at the impropriety of it all.

  "Get some gin in you so I don't have to hear you stammer like a kid talking his way out of a beating.”

  Chester uncorked the bottle and took three long pulls from the bottle before wiping his mouth. The woman slapped him upside the head.

  "Oi! Don't drink me dry you freeloader!"

  He swallowed hard. "Sorry, Milly. Been a long day."

  The woman took a few unhygienic sips from the same bottle before tucking it back in the underwear drawer. The nonchalance with which Afujin carried on lewd behavior rattled Sayuri. She pressed her palms to her face to cool down. She wanted to sleep, wanted her own room with a locked door, and wanted to not have to think about Afujin culture or corporate politics or... If it was Genji... they wouldn't... perhaps it was not Genji, but some terrorist group. However, a terrorist group would not bother to spare her mother and…

  "Oh, oh Loothsa. Tommy, hand me the tissues. Not those! The clean ones on the shelf. Hey!" the konketsu woman squeezed Sayuri's hand. "Breathe for me, okay? Nice and deep. Can you do that for me?"

  Sayuri's cultivated mask of self-propriety had shattered into embarrassing infantility. Emotional surplus came spilling out her eyes and down her cheeks. At the Imperial Academy, her command of rationality and logic was impeccable, so why now? Why in front of Afujin? Perhaps their primeval directness lulled her into complacent weakness. How humiliating.

  The woman pressed a tissue into her palm. Sayuri took deep breaths and hoped the woman did not think she was doing so just because she had been told to, since it was truly because Sayuri had undergone rigorous meditation practice.

  Holding her hand, the woman said, "Sayuri, right? What's wrong?”

  "I-I desire not the sympathy of a konketsujin!"

  She dropped Sayuri's hand. "You! Hmm-hmm-hmm, I'll let it slide. Once."

  The woman looked over at Chester. "In case you're wondering what that word means, your charming little companion was providing her thoughts on my ancestry."

  "Milly, I'm sorry, she—"

  "—is a naive, spoiled little silk-stocking? Yes, I realize that. But, please, don't let that stop you from explaining what in Loothsa's cunt you’re doing with the fucking—” she dropped her voice to a harsh whisper “—Ueden heiress?!"

  He took a deep breath. "Someone at Ashio arranged to have me put on the VIP detail for a private product demonstration. I saved her from an assassination team that we—think—was sent by Genji. We had nowhere to go and came here. I'm sorry for dragging you into this, Milly. If I had any other choice, I’d take it. But all we need is a place to stay the night and maybe teach her how to powder over the kinkawa. Look, I can even pay you."

  Chester pulled a wallet from the inside of his smelly, stained jacket and splayed it open to reveal a measly 5,000 dо?.

  "Gods, Thomas, where in Hel did you get all that!? Nevermind. I'm not gonna ask you to pay me for these shitty beds. You’ll need all that and more.”

  "I feel bad not compensating you."

  "My patrons compensate me. You're not a patron."

  "Thanks, Milly."

  The woman grunted and pushed herself off the paper-strewn desk. Eyes finally clear of moisture, Sayuri saw ledgers full of numbers and thought their magnitude strange given the shabby state of the hotel. Stranger still that this uneducated woman was reckoning them.

  "Be thou the accountant?" Sayuri asked.

  "We're all accountants. Girls come and go, so everyone trains to do everything,” the woman replied.

  This only confused Sayuri more. "Girls? No men work here?"

  She laughed and shot a knowing glance at Chester. "We only hire them as security. Tommy would have to go somewhere else if he wanted to get paid for more."

  "Can we not talk about this?" Chester said. The discussion of business administration no doubt hurt his pride in reminding him of his ignorance.

  The woman grinned. "Talk about what, Tommy? She's curious about the hospitality business. That's all.”

  Sayuri was missing some piece of contextual information. It felt reminiscent of conversations with girls who were friends amongst one another, yet to whom she was merely acquainted. Chester and the woman clearly had some relationship, perhaps of the romantic kind. It would be presumptuous of her to demand an explanation of private matters, so she stayed on business administration.

  "To whom doth thee refer when thou say’st “we hire”? Have thee not a proprietor?”

  The woman crossed her arms. "First things first, the "thee" and "thou" shit has to go. You gotta talk like a normal person if you don't wanna get clocked as a silk-stocking the second you open your mouth."

  "Pray thee tell why mine higher station be obfuscated for thy profit.”

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  "Because..." the woman said, leaning uncomfortably close, taking up Sayuri’s visual field with her macabre, powdered face. "It tells everyone you'd be great to kidnap and ransom. And if it wouldn't inconvenience Tommy here, I'd have you learn that lesson yourself."

  Sayuri swallowed. "Th-There be none brazen enough to layeth hand a‘pon the house of Ueichi!"

  "Oh sweetie, you wouldn't be here if that were true.”

  "Enough," Chester said.

  "What? What's wrong with our rulers learning about the people they rule?"

  At this, Sayuri took special umbrage. "’Tis no noble blood which runneth through mine clan’s veins! We are merchants! Thou art free to decide whether and in what manner thee participatest in the market. No sword of ours hangeth over thy neck and visit poverty a’pon thee, but thy own want of prudence.”

  The woman snarled. "If I had the choice not to pay your fucking family 3,000 a month to keep my lights on, I wouldn't! But since the alternative is starving to death, I gotta pay. How's that any different than the lords we had before you fishfuckers showed up!?"

  Chester stood up. "You can show us to our rooms now.”

  Sayuri appreciated him stepping in to quiet her. No Kaihonjin woman would dare speak so rudely and arrantly, especially on matters they were so ignorant of as this woman was of political economy. No matter. Sayuri possessed the forbearance to deal with her presence for the night and then they would be rid of one another.

  The woman led them down a hallway of perilously groaning floorboards. By the grace of Wotenha, they were delivered safely to a room yet more dismal than the woman’s. It was of the same dimensions, yet lacked the personality conferred by her wasteful whimsy. Only a single bed of scratchy wool, a dresser, and a film of dust inhabited the space.

  "Surely, this is not..."

  "This is. The door locks from the inside. Good night!"

  The woman shut the door, leaving Sayuri to her conflicted feelings. She was glad to have privacy to retreat to, yet the presence of Chester at her side had provided a sense of stability which she was now lacking. Nonetheless, sharing a room with a man would be unconscionable, and when, if not now, could she demonstrate the strength of character her mother and father instilled in her?

  With great trepidation, she peeled back the coarse wool blanket to reveal a mattress consisting of a layer of linen over materials including cardboard, foam packing, scrap textiles, and corn husks, with a pillow in comparable state. The arrangements made her shudder. She realized the woman had assigned her not a room, but a storage for items so useless not even paupers could find utility in them.

  Out of morbid curiosity, Sayuri sat upon the bed, and, despite its craggy appearance, it afforded some small measure of comfort. However, the true test would come with Sayuri's entire body lying upon it, whereupon she fell asleep.

  #

  "You still up?" Milly asked.

  Into the early morning, Thomas nursed a rocks glass of piss-colored liquor. Milly had seen him curled over the bar, ass on that very same, chewed-up, red-vinyl stool hundreds of times. He looked like a crab tucked into its shell under the high collar of that stinky red jacket he never took off, his hands in the shape of claws snipping his glass of Tim Hartley's.

  He turned to her with teal-green eyes going in and out of focus. "Does it look like I'm still up?"

  "Barely."

  "I need to get rid of this fucking kid, Milly."

  Milly sat down beside him. Wynnfl?d, the brothel's bartender, had gone to bed. She slid the glass away from his claws and rubbed his back.

  “You're gonna have to sleep some time."

  He shuddered under her touch, like always. When Thomas had been bothering her regularly, she was sick of him, but a year had come and gone, and she had lost her harshness. It helped that he wasn’t a threat to her freedom anymore.

  "I let my body pick when I go to sleep," he replied, scratching the plyboard counter with nails crying out to be clipped.

  "It doesn't seem good at choosing."

  He looked down at his body which got a chuckle out of her. He couldn’t see the bags like the pits of Hel under his eyes. Milly drank the rest of the awful piss she'd confiscated from Thomas and pushed it to the side before laying her arm across the bar and letting out a husky groan. Outside, a late autumn wind lashed at the building.

  "So. You're helping the heiress of the family that makes our lives so miserable?"

  Liquor confiscated; Thomas' crab-claw hands turned into jittery, flopping fish. "If she doesn't clear my name, I’ll be executed as a terrorist. You know how the Kaihonjin judicial system works: Short, sweet, and not real deep, just like a romance novel."

  Milly giggled. "Don't compare it to a romance. At least those give people pleasure."

  "I'm sure Genji’ll get pleasure from having their ?frian scapegoat back."

  "Grenner fucks,” she said, using a slur for Kaihonjin.

  Thomas couldn't muster hatred for Kaihonjin. Military propaganda rang silently in his ears, and Milly could hear it when he talked. However, unlike him, Milly could, and did, hate the Kaihonjin. Respect for Thomas was all that kept her from sticking the Ueden brat's face under a pillow. It would be a message to the Ueichi clan itself that they’d earned it by oppressing her people, and when they arrested her, she’d... do nothing. Thirty years had passed and she’d put up no fight against the Kaihonjin or their Shroud. She had betrayed her duties to the ?frian nation, becoming a nocturnal prostitute because she was afraid of the Shroud.

  She brought Tommy's glass up to her mouth only to be met with drops. After that they sat in silence. But Milly had learned how to look out of the corner of her eyes and she saw something lingering in the margins.

  She said, "kiss me," and smashed her face into Thomas.

  It was a loveless kiss. Too abrupt, too pragmatic. The only sensation was pressure, but she pushed them together long enough for the dark shape in the corner of her vision to scurry out the front door. Once the shadow departed, she pulled away.

  "Go get Sayuri. You’ve gotta go," Milly said, hopping up from the stool.

  "Milly what—"

  "Vicky just left."

  Milly watched sobriety flick back into Thomas's eyes with frightening speed. It was a feat she'd seen him perform dozens of times. Drinking late into the evening, eyes dizzy with disorientation he'd been searching for, but the second there was danger, life shot back into him. Bounding up the stairs, Milly stomped to her room, making as much noise as possible.

  Mary cracked a door. "Something the matter?"

  "Vicky went out by herself. We've gotta make sure she's safe," Milly said.

  Information spread through the walls and doors until the entire brothel was involved in a mobilization effort. Sometimes their tight-knit, cooperative business structure was a royal pain in the ass. Other times, it was indispensable. Milly never found a way to have all the good with none of the bad. The personal fury at Victoria's betrayal and the unconditional enlistment of her sister-workers flowered from the same roots.

  From under her bed Milly retrieved a small pack and threw a few useful things inside including the whitest foundation she had and a pocket revolver tucked into her green wool cloak.

  Her “search party" assembled downstairs, half still in their night clothes. Even though they really were going looking for Victoria, Milly felt like she was deceiving them.

  "Did she say anything before she left?" Wynnfl?d asked.

  "No. That's what has me worried," Milly replied.

  The insinuation was clear to the women who'd worked there long enough to recall the last suicide. Their haste in throwing a search party together was a learned response.

  Jennifer yawned. "Alright, let's go get her."

  The wind had died, leaving only the yowls of nocturnal strays and the ambient hum of idle machinery. Flashlight rays bumped along dark asphalt and caught particles of settling smog. Aware of their need to keep in their neighbors' good graces, the search party didn't shout their lost sister's name, but she didn't prove difficult to find. A block from The Silk Pillow they found Victoria in the company of four colonial police officers.

  "Halt! Where are you all going?"

  The officer tried to sound authoritative, but anxiousness crept into his voice. Milly knew the colonial police had strict rules of engagement where ?frian women were concerned. There had been politically touchy incidents in the past that had escalated into riots and she knew the officers were conscious of that. Nonetheless, they could hardly get a word in over the women’s family drama.

  "What in Hel are you doing with cops in the middle of the night, Vicky?"

  "You worried us!"

  "Why didn't talk with someone?"

  "I don't need your permission to go out for a walk!" Victoria said.

  "Out for a walk? With fishsticks? Who do you think you're fooling!?"

  "I was worried for my safety!"

  "Fishfuckers are the ones y’ought'a be afraid of!"

  "Enough!" one of the officers said, emboldened by the slur.

  No sooner had the officer stepped forward than a slap met him across the face. A stunned silence washed over both parties as they realized the deadlock they were in. The Kaihonjin police couldn't let the transgression go unpunished, but punishing it meant touching off a political powder keg.

  One of the officers, a sergeant by the chevrons on his black jacket, placed a hand on the shoulder of the officer who had been slapped. In accented but grave ?frian he said, "we are not here for your petty squabbling. We will pardon your assault and overlook your harboring a fugitive of the law if you will move and let us search your establishment."

  Mildred's heart pounded. If they agreed, her gambit would fail. She scrambled for a plan to buy Thomas more time. Fortunately, her work-sisters didn't let her down.

  "The fuck you will!"

  "I don't see a warrant in those hot little hands, dear."

  "Too hard to get the fish smell out after you leave."

  Whether their defiance came from any real desire to protect Sayuri or (more likely) from the pleasure of obstructing the colonial police, Mildred didn't know. But she was proud of them.

  "Then you are all under arrest," the sergeant said.

  This prompted more jeers and taunts since they knew the colonial police had almost no enforcement powers down on the plains. Lights turned on in nearby windows as eyeballs watched the streets below. Mildred used the opportunity to sneak away.

  In the entryway to the brothel, Thomas was only now herding a yawning Sayuri out the door.

  "Prithee tell why we so hastily depart?" she asked.

  "The police know you're here," Milly said, startling both as she stomped out of the shadows into the green neon glow of the brothel’s sign.

  "O-Oh, 'tis shrewd of thee to consider Genjūkō sitteth on the board of directors for the Suigen Public Security Agency."

  "Uh-huh. Let's go, Thomas. Now," Milly said.

  "You're coming with us?" he asked.

  "I am," she said, only sure once she had said so aloud. Under worse circumstances than these she had vowed to the goddess of irrationality and madness, Loothsa, that if ever she was presented with two terrible options, she would pick the worse of the two. Sacrificing her freedom to irritate the conglomerates certainly felt worse than staying.

  "Unless you want to figure out how to put make-up on her yourself?" Milly said.

  Thomas shook his head. "No, just surprised."

  "Me too," she replied, stepping out of the glow of the neon sign and into the dark.