Allegiance
Keep your hood up and keep your head down, don't make eye contact, don't stop to think about what you are doing. Her lips moved as she mouthed the words, trying to feel the weight of the words, trying to make the conviction real. How long had it been? She was two years older than that girl they keep parading about in front of the UN, so that must have made six or maybe seven months? Before that, her life had been normal, those years leading up to her father's promotion, his role as supervisor of the reservoir where he had died, those years had been full of peace and wonder—then had come Crisis, the squat shape of Mundayganday rising from beneath the surface of the water, cutting down her parents before her, killing all who worked at the reservoir so that Crisis might seize control of the Earth's waters. Had it not been for Joe, had it not been for the awakening of her own powers, where would she be now?
Kyoko moved aside cautiously as a procession shoved past her, indifferent to her presence, eager only in the spread of their message, the rattling of the sabres, so to speak, every placard announcing some turning point in the increasingly bitter vitriol between those suspected of being kaijin and those who claimed an imagined notion of purity.
She tried to keep the expression of contempt from her face. All of this sound, all of this fury, whilst above them, Crisis were preparing the vanguard of their assault, a decisive strike whilst the Earth's peoples were divided.
She pushed herself flat against the dirty wall, watching the faces of each of them as they passed, contorted with anger, eyes wide with intensity, people haunted by their sense of righteousness. When Mundayganday had struck down her father, she had at first mistaken him for a kaijin, the words of anger from the mouths of these people not vastly different from the sentiments that had escaped her when confronted with her father's death. It had only been the words and actions of Joe the Haze that had revealed their difference to her. Joe, she thought, a little sadly, with his one man war against Crisis, the person he had been lost in the humiliating and cruel surgery those interstellar tyrants had performed on him.
Her lips turned downward, a sense of disgust rising at the closeness of others. All of these people arguing about what was human and what was less-than-human, and above them contact had already been made with a brutal alien race plotting their enslavement. It had seemed so tawdry, so pathetic.
In the days that had followed her father's death, she had prayed for the strength, the power to avenge the death of her parents, and when that power had awakened in her—a form of telekinesis that allowed her to control natural objects, that allowed her to sense water, to draw it out from her surroundings—she had been elated. 'The water fairy,' Joe had dubbed her as she vowed to use that power to aid in the overthrow of Crisis.
Arms at her sides, she tightened her fists, the leather of her gloves creaking as she did. This place, Samezu Yokocho, where the poorest found themselves, where no one would notice a kaijin going missing—if she used her power here, she would surely be mistaken for one of them. Still, the temptation was there, the desire to spite these people, to wake them up from their stupor.
She turned her head from them, looking away as they continued to pass, chanting their words, calling out to any who looked undesirable, offering solutions to problems they could not understand.
'How long have we got?' she had asked Joe as they had sat around the campfire several nights ago.
He had looked up, his face lined and wrinkled, a tarnished fork paused above a tin of cold beans.
'I don't know. A week, a month.' He shrugged, turning away from the fire, looking out into the darkness. 'There are more skullma on our tail than there used to be. I guess that's as clear a sign as any.'
He was handsome in his own way, she had thought then, staring at his profile in the firelight, somewhere in his early 50s, a shock of grey running through his dark hair, the cybernetic enhancements that had robbed him of his past also allowing for him to age with a grace rarely seen in men who had lived the kind of lives he had.
'Do you think there are others like us?' she had asked, but what she was really asking was if he thought there were others like him, cyborgs engineered by Crisis who had shaken off their shackles.
He had shrugged again.
'Maybe. Kaijin don't age like normal humans, maybe some of them are old enough to have wised up to the threat that is about to pounce.'
She could not imagine another man like Joe the Haze, not really. To have lived so long, to have fought for so long despite the horrific things done to his body, it made her hate Crisis even more.
At last, the crowd passed, and Kyoko was able to peel away from the filthy wall. If there weren't others like Joe out there, if there weren't others willing to fight for change, for survival, then she did not know if they could survive. Surely soon all this would be forgotten, surely soon the world would realise the true threat waiting amidst the stars above.
Keep your hood up and keep your head down, don't make eye contact, don't stop to think about what you are doing, she told herself again, and, dressed in a battered motorcycle jacket and torn trowsers, continued to make her way outside of the shopping arcade, her pockets heavy with stolen food.