On the way to the city, to help, they met the burned people, and once passed a group of soldiers; young men like themselves, but looking like black men, stumbling along in a crocodile line down the dusty road, each man with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, following the leader. The soldier at the head of the strange, silent column had one eye left; the others were all blind. They weren't Negroes. They were Japanese. They'd been closer, and watched the bomb all the way, until it exploded in the air above the city, and that was the last thing they were ever to see; the light had melted their eyes. The fluids were still wet on their charcoal-black cheeks.

Through the increasing damage and the smoking wreckage, to the stripped centre, where the buildings had almost all gone, wiped from the ground-plan of the city as though by an immense scrubbing brush.

On the walls, he saw the shadows that had been people.

His unit stayed in Hiroshima, in the ruins and dust, for a few days. They did what they could. Ten years later, a quarter of the men who'd been there with him were dead. Eleven years later, so was he.

His widow went into labour just down the corridor from where he'd died. Hisako got tangled in her own cord, stuck and struggling, and had to be removed by Caesarean section; pulled from her mother's womb by the same surgeon who'd discovered the metastasising shadow of death in her father a season earlier.

Sanae was the first lover she'd ever told about it all. She told him the night she told him she would not marry him, and she cried as she told him, thinking about her father and the man she'd killed, and about something else she hadn't told Sanae about. He looked hurt and meek and pleading, like a beaten kid, like a whipped dog. She couldn't bear to look at him, so said what she had to say to the cup of coffee before her. They sat in a little kissaten in Roppongi, and he wanted to touch her, to hold her hand, to take her in his arms, but she wouldn't let him, couldn't risk him doing that and her dissolving, giving in. So she shrugged him off, took her hand away, shook her head. He sat, slumped and dejected on the stool, while she told him, but could not explain. It just didn't feel right. She wasn't ready. She'd hold him back. He mustn't distract himself from his career. She — here she had to swallow hard, fighting the tears again, biting her lip hard, squinting hot and angry into the brown dregs in the little white cup — she didn't want to have children.

It was the truth, but it was the hardest thing she could have said, just then.

Sanae left, eventually, in distress and despair, unable to understand. Her tears collected in the bottom of the coffee cup, turning the thick brown dregs watery again.

She had put off returning from Sapporo and meeting him and telling him until the day before he left for Los Angeles for a month to do some studio work.

She had the abortion while he was away; and the world went on.

Hisako Onoda woke to shouts and general consternation, and felt annoyed that her sleep had been disturbed. The deck was hard, the morning was cold and she yawned awake, aching and shivering and feeling like shit, itching and pained and with the hangover-like feeling that there was something very terrible she'd have to remember soon, and face.

The air stank of oil. Mist clung to the hills, hovered in discreet little clouds over the islands. Elsewhere there was mist, too; over the broad waters of the lake.

Not near by though, save on the ship itself. Near by the lake was thick and brown and perfectly, deathly, calm. Wisps of vapour were still rising from the broad, pipe-cluttered deck of the tanker, just parting enough now to reveal the gush of oil from the valve cluster, spreading in a dirty brown arc as it fell to the lake. The ship sat under a stem of mist in a cauldron of clarity, surrounded by cloud. She sat up, at once thrilled and appalled.

The oil stretched as far as the nearest islands, as far as the Nakodo, almost as far as she could see; the unsullied lake was just a blue sparkle beneath the mist in the distance. A disc, she thought; a great grubby brown coin of thick, glistening, stinking oil floating on the waters of the lake like a vast wet bruise. She looked to the bridge. Harder to see now the sun was up. Vague movements behind the tipped glass; two soldiers leaning out of the open windows on the starboard wing of the bridge, gesturing and shouting.

She checked the bow camera again, but it was pointed away from her. The pump controls were still set as she'd left them, and hadn't been shut off from the bridge. She inspected them, yawning and stretching. No, there wasn't anything she could do to make it any worse; she'd done all she could. She checked the lighter, but it was spent; no hiss of gas, and even the tiny clicks sounded tired now. She put it back in her breast pocket.

She looked to the sky. Too much mist and low cloud to tell what the day would be like. Maybe cloudy, maybe clear; it could go both ways. She realised that she'd heard a weather forecast, on the radio, just the day before.

A day. Felt like a week, a year; forever.

Whatever; she couldn't remember the forecast. Wait and see. She shivered again. How stupid germs were. She was probably going to die in the next few hours, one way or the other, and here she was maybe getting a cold. What was the point?

The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast. Feast before seppuku.

She stretched again, putting her arms out, fists by shoulders, then brought her hands to the back of her neck, scratching vigorously.

You bastards, she thought. I remember Sanae and I remember Philippe, but the last act I'll take with me is yours; squalid thrusting being egged on and waiting, sneers of victory; trying to judge the level of anguish and noise they wanted to cause so not too hysterical but not too placid; a final acting, a faking when in all her life she'd never faked, and had counted that strength, made it a point of honour, and they'd sullied everything; a retrospective act, casting a shadow all the way back to… to… hell, this was a terrible thing, that poor Swede; she'd forgotten his name; Werner? Benny? She thought you were meant never to forget the name of your first…

Sanae was energetic and wild, like a storm over her, beneath her, around her, all gestures and noise; still childlike in that adult act, so self-absorbed, distracted and distracting, almost funny.

Philippe dived, skin on skin in skin, sweeping and plunging and such sweet encirclement, concentric with his homed immersion; quietly, almost sadly studious in his abandoned absorption.

But if her life passed in front of her it would end with a gang-bang, and the applause would be the crackle of breaking bones and the spatter of spilled blood, signature of her revenge. Well, worse things happen at sea, she thought, and laughed out loud, before shushing herself.

She was feeling almost happy, resigned but oddly fulfilled, and at peace at last, when she thought of the dreams, and the lake of blood.

In the past, she'd always coped, she'd put up with it, with them. Dreams were dreams and took their cue from what had happened, accessories after the act. She'd dismissed those she'd been having recently as she'd dismissed those she'd always had. But now they spoke of a lake of blood, and it occurred to her that the brown slick of oil, the great dumped flat platelet she'd spread over the waters, was a kind of blood. Blood of the planet, blood of the human world. The oil-blood greased the world machine; the blood-oil carried energy to the workings of the states and systems. It welled and was pulled out, bled to the surface, was transfused and transported. It was the messenger of soil and progress; the refined lesson of its own development.