As Erna pondered their predicament, Annette tugged at her sleeve from the next seat over.
“What’s the call, Erna?” She whispered in Erna’s ear. “Should I go ahead—and do one of his fingers?”
“Huh?” Erna said, at which Annette flashed her a toothy grin.
There was a gadget resembling a nutcracker poking out of Annette’s sleeve. It was a torture device. If Erna gave her the go-ahead, she would crush Jean’s finger, and he would be all too willing to lead them back to his dorm.
“Annette,” Erna replied quietly.
“Yeah?”
“I already told you. Don’t do anything unnecessary.”
“Aw…”
“Also, we need to leave in the next three minutes.”
“Then I’d better finish this quick, yo!”
Annette hurriedly began scarfing down the shellfish sitting in front of her. She hadn’t had anything warm to eat in ages, and she stabbed at the food with single-minded abandon.
Jean looked at her with a pained smile. Guilt flickered in the back of his eyes. He shook his head in regret.
“…I can’t afford to do anything careless.” After warily looking around, he leaned toward Erna and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Can you prove that you aren’t Genesis Army stooges?”
“Huh?”
“Fishing is one of their go-to moves. They dangle bait to root out people with anti-government sympathies. They use women in need, servants of aristocrats, you name it. And if you ever let slip that you want to overthrow the king, you get arrested on the spot.”
A fishing expedition was a type of intelligence maneuver. All you had to do was deploy an informant or someone easy to manipulate in an area where your enemies were, then wait for the other side to make contact with them. Jean was worried that it was his own loyalty that was being tested.
“Ever since Clement III took the throne two years ago, they’ve been cracking down on dissidents harder than ever. This is a man who loves fireworks so much, he filled the sky over the capital with them the night of his coronation, but he’s such a coward, he spends all his energy trying to stamp out insurrectionists. The last king’s draconian foreign policy was a mess, but this guy’s obsession with information control is a whole different kind of deranged. Word is, if Prime Minister Valéry tells him to jump, he asks how high.”
Realizing that he’d said too much, Jean quickly added, “Though of course, I’m sure His Majesty has his reasons.”
The names he’d just mentioned were some of the key players in Lamplight’s current mission.
Clement III had taken the throne two years ago when the previous king, Benoit, stepped down after a nearly fifteen-year reign. The official explanation given was that Benoit’s health was on the decline, but rumor had it that his stringent foreign policy measures had turned Parliament against him, leading to the Royalist party getting ousted. However, it was impossible to know how much of that was true.
Still, even a royal abdication did nothing to affect the country’s totalitarian power structure. The prime minister was at the center of all the nation’s politics, and that position was still held by the same person as before.
That prime minister, Pierre Valéry, was the man who’d suggested the Nostalgia Project in the first place. He, as well as the nation’s de facto leader Nike, still maintained full control over Lylat’s governance.
Jean’s voice trembled. “I can’t just blindly trust you and throw my life away.”
As Annette continued blissfully gorging herself, Erna and Jean traded information. She tried asking him if there was anywhere else she could turn to, but she didn’t get much of a satisfying answer. In the end, all she managed to do was make a single request of him at the very end.
Right as she and Annette left the pub, it began drizzling. It wasn’t bad enough that they needed an umbrella, but the slender, misty droplets did still soak them.
By that point, Pilca was already lit by the faint glow of streetlamps.
Annette patted her belly in contentment. “I’m all full now, yo! I could use a nap right about now!”
“……………”
Erna couldn’t bring herself to respond.
There were a million things they needed to figure out, and they couldn’t afford to waste any time. There was no telling when the Genesis Army might find them if they kept loitering in the alley.
However, there was one topic that needed to be addressed posthaste.
“Look, Annette, just let me say this one thing.”
“Hmm? What’s up, yo?”
Annette was all smiles, and Erna gave it to her straight.
“What you did back there, trying to threaten civilians? I need you to stop.”
There it was, out in the open.
Leaving Annette to her own devices simply wasn’t an option. She wasn’t even trying to hide her bloodlust anymore, and her eagerness to spread her malice made her a liability.
Erna looked her right in the eyes as she went on. “You can’t go around killing people at random here. Hurting them more than necessary is off the table, too. Don’t even suggest those sorts of plans. Just behave yourself until I give you instructions.”
The grin vanished from Annette’s face.
She let out a small sigh, and her right eye was like an inky void. “You and I are supposed to be equals, yo.”
“I understand that.”
“And I’m out here protecting you. We did things your way, and now we don’t have anywhere to stay tonight.”
“I appreciate that, I do,” Erna said, without averting her gaze. “But I need you to do what I say.”
“………………”
When Erna repeated herself, Annette lapsed into an annoyed silence.
They couldn’t dawdle in front of the pub forever, so they set off. Erna walked down the road, and Annette started walking a step behind her, tromping loudly to make her displeasure known.
“I’ve spent this whole past year watching.”
They didn’t return to the hideout they’d used before, but rather headed down a different road altogether.
“I’ve seen this country. The way the people suffer under its monarchy.”
Erna decided to keep her explanation short. It would be faster just to show her.
Her nose twitched as she picked up the scent of stagnation. There was a hint of misfortune in the air that only she could smell, and she took a turn to the right.
Much like the nineteenth, the tenth arrondissement had a large immigrant population and was widely regarded as dirty and unsafe. It rained hard enough to flood the city every few decades, and the tenth arrondissement always took the brunt of the damage. The closer you got to the canals that ran through the heart of the arrondissement, the more condensed the gutter stink became.
As they walked alongside a small waterway, they spotted a man lying on the road. Not just one, in fact, but five or six of them, men and women alike, all staring up at the night sky with vacant eyes.
“They’re…on opium, huh?” Annette murmured.
“It’s a pretty common sight,” Erna replied succinctly.
That was the end result of a society built to favor the aristocracy.
Jobs in the police and the courts didn’t go to the best candidates but rather to those with family ties or strong connections. Any organization that lacked social mobility would invariably decay, and as the legal system fell apart, drugs were free to spread through the streets. As rumor had it, many nobles had ties to the underworld themselves.
As Erna and Annette continued down the path, they heard angry yelling.
There was a man surrounded by four youths.
The man was short and looked to be in his midforties, and the unkempt teens were spitting on him. “You’re from Galgad, aren’t you?” they roared.
“L-look, my family’s been doing business here for two generations—”
The youths threw the supposed Imperial citizen to the ground without even letting him finish explaining himself. The man crumpled to his hands and knees, and his assailants shouted, “Filthy fucking invader!” and “I’ll bet you were spying on us the whole time!” as they kicked him around like a ball.
It was sickening just to watch. There were plenty of people nearby, but none of them made any attempts to help. Instead, they just glared at the man in an opium-addled daze.
“…This is the land where revolutions die,” Erna mumbled. “And this is what they’ve been reduced to. Nobody believes they can actually change things, so drugs and hatred are the only outlets they have for their resentment. That’s why the state turns a blind eye to this sort of discrimination.”
She squeezed her fists tight.
“The people of Lylat are constantly suffering.”
The Imperial gave up any attempts at resisting and cowered on the ground like a turtle in its shell. The youths kicked his exposed sides and back in amusement.
Unable to bear it any longer, Erna stepped forward.
“There’s no reason to help him,” a cold voice called out to her from behind.
When she turned around, she saw Annette letting out a sleepy yawn.
“You seem kinda confused, yo.” Annette was unmoved by the deplorable scene. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing that happens to these people does. We’re Din Republic spies, not knights in shining armor. If we need to blackmail and kill people, we’re gonna do it, yo.”
“Annette…”
Annette gave her an icy look. “Lamplight didn’t come here to save the Lylat Kingdom, yo.”
Erna hadn’t been expecting her to make such a logical argument. Those were the sorts of things that usually went unsaid, but Annette had deemed it necessary to make them explicit.
However, Erna needed to reject that logic in no uncertain terms.
“You’re wrong.” Erna shook her head. “Right now, abandoning him to his fate would be the wrong move.”
“…Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Undeterred by Annette’s cautioning, Erna strode over to the youths. “Cut that out. Yeep!”
““““Huh””””? the four attackers said in confusion as they turned around in unison.
They looked surprised at first, but after staring at Erna in bewilderment for a bit, the blood suddenly drained from their faces.
“Eeek!!” “Run for it!”
The four of them looked pale as sheets as they sprinted away and vanished down the back of an alley.
Erna was shocked at how anticlimactic the confrontation had been.
Wow, I can’t believe I drove them off just by glaring at them.
She looked off in the direction they’d disappeared in.
Heh, I guess over this past year, I’ve finally started looking like a proper adult.
A surge of pride ran through her at the unexpected feeling of growth.
Come to think of it, she was sixteen now. And she’d grown even more than Annette had.
Perhaps she was as intimidating as a spy ought to be, and she could scare civilians off with nothing but her gaze—and perhaps nothing could be further from the truth.
“Bingo. B-I-N-G-O. Hook, line, and sinker.”
An ominous voice came from behind her.
She whirled around and found a slim man standing there. His monocle made him come off as pretentious, and he spun a pair of pistols around in his hands as he stared at her.
Beside him, he was accompanied by three lackeys. All of them were wearing full-length white coats.