Stormblood, стр. 16
‘Forgive me if I’m not glowing with gratitude.’
‘It doesn’t matter what you are as long as you get him to come clean.’
‘If he won’t talk to me, he sure as hell won’t talk to you.’ My little brother’s infinitely more stubborn than I am. No easy feat.
‘Don’t be naive. Harmony always gets the answers it wants.’
I understood the veiled threat. Commander Sokolav had said as much when I’d served in his Battalion. He’d been merciless with the Harvest soldiers we’d captured. I’d never known his methods. Didn’t need to, because he always got results. I shivered as I imagined Artyom, strapped to a chair with a distortion-mask wrapped around his face, an interrogator standing over him with pliers.
Kowalski slid a thumb over the sweeping engravings on her ceramic mug. ‘Artyom tried to sign up for the Reaper programme too, didn’t he?’
Of course Harmony had dug that data up from somewhere. ‘The chances of your body rejecting stormtech are astronomically low,’ I said quietly. ‘Artyom never got over the disappointment.’
When Harmony asked, I’d said I joined the Reaper programme because I couldn’t sit back as habitats and moonbases and whole planets got blasted to rubble and ash by Harvest warships. I’d never admitted I had to escape a violent father … or that one of us would have ended up dead if I’d stuck around. And if I’d killed him, his colleagues in high places would have ensured I’d been dumped in prison for killing a good man and Artyom would have ended up in foster care. Not exactly material you can scribble across the dotted line.
I changed the subject. ‘Why did Kindosh put you on my tail?’
Kowalski gave a hard sigh, as if it was inevitable I’d find out. ‘Remember I said I’d joined Harmony young? I was on the Narcotics Squad. Not just stormtech, but grimwire, synthsilver, bluesmoke, cloud, devilweed, whatever’s fresh out of the labs. One day we raided a junknest, where they manufacture drugs. Found a woman injecting her three-year-old kid with synthsilver from a second-hand needle. Thought it’d get her to stop screaming.’ Kowalski’s hands were tight and twitchy on the table. ‘I shot that woman seven times.’
I was silent for a moment as the restaurant clattered around us. ‘I might have done the same.’
There was a flicker of gratitude in Kowalski’s eyes, that I hadn’t judged her, hadn’t condemned her as others had done. I felt some of the tension deflate. ‘Not everyone at Harmony felt that way,’ she said. ‘My unit didn’t want a bar on me. It should have killed my career, but Kindosh pulled some strings and got me reassigned to her. And now I get babysitting jobs like this.’ She gulped down her steaming tea. ‘And you know the funny thing? My nephew Andrezj is a skinnie. I can rescue a whole shipment of stormtech at any dockyard, I can crack down on a stormdealer, I can wring a confession from a distributor. But I can’t stop my own family from using the stuff.’
The Reaper War had ended in 2429, two years ago now. It still didn’t feel like we’d won it. We’d just swapped one enemy for another.
‘You know why they call us Reapers?’ I asked her. ‘Because we were the only ones who could stop the Harvest from digging their roots in like weeds and choking everything. It’s a wonder they didn’t give us scythes instead of rifles. “Reapers to clear the Harvest away.” That’s what we’d chant before battle.’ I sipped at my tea, cooling my dried throat as I stared down at my arm where the stormtech had pooled, flickering like tongues of flame along my fingers. ‘No one thought about what happens afterwards when the Harvest is clear but the Reapers remain. No one had a chant for that.’
I was suddenly whirled back to the laboratory where I’d been transformed into a Reaper. Metal walls, white tiles, churning machinery. Plugged up to life-support systems, flat on my back and strapped to an operating table and listening to my friends scream and thrash around me as stormtech shredded their organs, poisoned their blood vessels and twisted their muscles. You can leave a battlefield behind, but you can’t do the same for your body. And that’s where the real, unwinnable war was being fought. Where we all kept fighting until we couldn’t. How many Reapers and skinnies had passed through the rehab centres in the hope of taming this addiction, only to end up killing both themselves and the people around them?
How much of a hand did my brother really have in this?
‘Local, small-time dealers initiating a turf-war or selling their product to a Common Official is one thing.’ Kowalski elbowed her way through my thoughts, as if she could read them. ‘That we can handle. But this is beyond dealing a tainted product when we’re seeing Reapers being poisoned – brutally, publicly killed, and framed as the villains – all over Compass. Poisoning the suppressors is methodical, deliberate, and it’s got force behind it. They’re attacking Harmony and laughing in our faces. That’s not something we can ignore, just as we can’t ignore your brother’s involvement.’ The edges of Kowalski’s eyes were ringed with exhaustion, frustration. ‘I’m at my wits end here, Fukasawa. We all are. So I’m asking you again, to please help us out. You want to help Reapers? You want to help your brother out? Then work with us.’
For years, I’d known I should have stayed with Artyom. Done my duty as the older brother, as I’d promised. I’d failed miserably. Maybe this was my shot to correct that mistake.
‘There are some things I’ll need in return,’ I said slowly.
Kowalski gave a small laugh. ‘Kindosh isn’t the flexible type.’
I knew exactly what type Kindosh was, which was why I was negotiating with Kowalski instead.
‘She’s made me promises. She’ll give me some leeway.’ I took Kowalski’s