CHAPTER 11 – We Need to Talk About Japan

"I think Japan has it." Panem leant back with arms folded, getting a better view of the screen hanging in the air in front of him. France's face sat in the centre, with some elegant interior design behind him. "He… Visited me. About two weeks ago, in my house." He put a strained tone on the word visited. He had the story in his head, ready to surprise France.

"Did he break into your house in the middle of the night and threaten you with a katana?" There was no concern on France's face, none whatsoever. Panem was a little disappointed, and then disturbed.

"Just how often does he do that?"

France picked up a see-through cup of coffee, and began to drink it in loud, irritating gulps. "Oh, not too often. He did it to England, I think, during the Muscovites' attack, and to me in the last Depression –"

"Wait." Panem brought up another screen next to him and began typing into the air. "Muscovites' attack. That was the second last war that involved a lot of you. Right?" The war that had ended in the Muscovites dead, and England past the point of no return. Unless you had been there to save him, an accusing voice whispered. France did not seem to hear it.

Panem's eyes were on his virtual notepad; he was having a conversation with France, and he was also listening out for news on the warmongers from his broadcasts. It had been some time since he had had to multitask in this way, and he was out of practice, but he fancied that he was doing a good job. The notepad was helping him keep up with all the world history he'd missed. He heard France sigh. "Yes. You don't miss a trick, do you? The Depression was back in 2204. It wasn't very important."

"Everything's important, France."

"Not everything. What's important now is getting the blueprints off whoever has them, before the weapon can be developed again."

"Right." Panem discarded the second screen. "Japan. He warned me about working with you, called you a bad influence."

"I can't argue with that."

"Then he said something about his own plans, something to do with… Ichi-wan? Ichi…"

"Ichi-ban, perhaps?" Those words sounded right to Panem. They triggered something inside him, an old discarded memory.

"Ichi-ban. Number one." He shuddered. "Glucose Volanticus could make any nation ichi-ban." His memories of Japan grew ever sharper, and as the details returned to him, so did awful, grisly truths. There was Wei Yao, yes, but there was also Korea.

"Leave it to me," Japan said, half-way through the Religion Wars, when North Korea finally burst out of recluse with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. There were no Western troops to send over. "Keep fighting the big enemy. I'll help South Korea." Maybe under different circumstances, they would have thought over the situation more carefully, drafted a resolution demanding that Japan wait before getting involved without the West behind him. But ISA was occupying the whole Persian Gulf, Russia's fanatics were gaining more power every day, so what's a nation to do?

No one had even noticed what had happened until the next world meeting, when South Korea's seat was mysteriously empty, and Japan explained with a face devoid of remorse, that West Japan would be unable to attend for "domestic reasons".

"If Japan has it, then we only have one option," France's voice came metallically through the air-screens. "Duck out."

"What?"

"You heard me. Japan's lethal enough, without a weapon of mass destruction by his side."

Panem thought he heard a warning beep from one of his monitors, the ones that kept track of warmongers. He ignored it, however. "Isn't that all the more reason to try and stop him?"

France laughed. "You haven't lost that hero-complex."

Panem's cheeks went hot. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that the world is not going to implode if you stay out of a situation for once." France furrowed his eyebrows. "I'm… Sorry. That came out a little harsh."

There was another insistent beep. "No, it's fine. You're right. We don't mess with Japan if we can help it." He looked down at some papers in front of him, and started shuffling them, hoping to hide his blush and the sudden shortness of his breath.

"No." France's mannerisms, it seemed to Panem, had changed since before his isolation. He seemed more restrained now, more straight-backed, more… Well, English, he couldn't help thinking, as he looked back up at his first – only national ally. "But that doesn't mean we can't do our bit elsewhere in the world. There are plenty of nations you have yet to reunite with, aren't there?"

"Are you gonna send me on some errands, or something?" He pulled a face. "Please not Europe."

"Not Europe," France agreed, "Or any of the East-Asians. Worse than them."

Panem took a moment to remember any nation with whom a meeting would be worse than one with Italy or Japan. He did not have to think long. "Oh, please. Not him."

"You'd have to do it sooner or later."

"He hates me."

"Trust me, he hates everyone."

"What would I even say to him?"

"I don't know." France's image shuddered at a fault in the connection; his head seemed, for a moment, disconnected from his shoulders as he suggested, "Give him a present. A casket of oil, perhaps."

In Europe, you'll find that the countryside is, generally speaking, safer than the city. It is also usually duller but less exhausting, less dynamic but prettier, and overall a simpler experience. Poland was no exception to this rule.

Most who lived in the Polish country had never known city-life, so had no comparison. Of these people, however, fair amounts were conscious enough of the world beyond their immediate surroundings, to be able to tell that their lives were led by mundane routine.

Natia, two weeks away from her eleventh birthday, was just coming to this realisation. It had not expressed itself in words yet, but the idea was forming in her subconscious: the idea that her life was lacking something. She was old enough – had been old enough for some time – to milk the cows. They were reared some fields away from her home, and required a journey of two or three miles, a journey laden with heavy wood-and-metal water buckets, heavier still with milk on the return. As she walked, Natia tried to quell the strange negativity in her mind with thoughts of how grown-up she had become, that the journey no longer sent spasms of fatigue down her limbs. She would have distracted herself by admiring the scenery, but the truth was that none of it was interesting. Horizontal planes swam around her, punctuated with the occasional burst of shrubbery. The buckets creaked as she swung her arms.

Once she had reached the cow field, she stood by the gate for some time, static and weighted by her buckets. She was staring at a tree, on which a single woollen glove clung to some twigs. On one of the branches there was a crow, picking moss with his jet beak, and holding it there – pieces of the stuff lodged in, his beak forming some cattle-cart-like storage space – the thoughts that plagued Natia were rising again. Her eyes focussed and defocussed on the wind-tossed glove, her peripheral vision took note of the crow's jerky movements along the branch, and slowly she puttered over her thoughts.

She did not notice a man coming up behind her, until she felt his hand in her hair. She screamed, obediently, although she was not scared. She was still lost in thought.

"Oh, sorry!" The man had a high, lilting voice. "I didn't see you there. You're tiny."

Natia craned her neck back, squinted at the sun's glare to see a young man with blond hair and a half-smile. "That's alright. I'm here to milk the cows."

"Sure." The man's eyes fell on her buckets. "Those look heavy. You want some help?"

"No, thank you. I'm grown-up enough to do it myself." Natia thought this might be enough to drive the man away, but he came up beside her, and sat down on a log, so his head was level with hers. She looked away from him and into the field, planning on finding a cow and starting her work, but finding herself rooted to the spot.

"So, you live here?" He sniffed. "Looks a little boring. What do you do for fun?"

"I." Natia racked her brains; she knew there was an answer, she was just finding it difficult to envision her day. She would get up, she would tend to the chickens, eat breakfast, do other farm duties and then… "I talk with my mother."

"Whaaat? That's so adorable!" Natia giggled. She remembered, with sudden terror, that this man was a stranger and she should be running away as fast as possible. But it was impossible. She had to know more about this fair-haired man, his strange, laid-back voice. He was the first interesting thing she had seen in months.

"What do you do in your spare time?" She asked, "Don't you live around here too?"

"Nope. Just passing through."

He pushed his large hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders, and Natia was reminded of her older brother. The pout of his bottom lip, the slitted eyes, the restless quivering of the knee – again, those thoughts of dissatisfaction crept up on Natia.

"So," the man said, "You like to talk to your mom. What about your pa?"

"Father? Oh, he died."

The man's leg stopped jittering. "Did he die… here?"

Natia shook her head. "In Africa." How did you know, she wanted to ask.

"I was there too," he said. They were quiet for some time, until he stood up, hands still hidden. "What's your name, little girl?"

Natia's tongue moved of its own accord. She told him her name.

"Natia." Somehow it sounded more correct in his mouth than in hers. "Listen, Natia. Have you ever seen someone die?"

Natia's blood ran cold. The man was a lot taller than her. She had no defences whatsoever, and even if she had been older, this man said he'd been a soldier. There was no way she could fight him off. She was stupid, just like her brother said, young and stupid… "No," she got out, before finding herself unable to stop, "Oh, please don't kill me, Mister!"

"Huh? What gave you that idea?" Natia closed her eyes, assuming the stranger would grab her and take her in any minute. "You made me lose my train of thought. Sheesh." She opened her eyes again.

"Mister…?"

"Anyway, where was I? Right. I've seen people die, Natia. I saw them die in Africa, and here, and also in the wide spaces."

"To the East?"

"Yeah, to the East. They were killed by a particular weapon." He paused here for a moment, presumably to add drama. "Did you know that you could kill an entire nation, with a few missiles? Because I sure didn't, until I saw it happening right in front of me."

Natia was fairly sure at this point, that if the man had any intention of stealing her away, he would have followed it through by now. Still, the deviation from their previous lighter topics disturbed her. "You're scaring me," she felt comfortable saying.

"It's a scary world, little girl." Was it? Was a world inhabited only by a few cows and sheep scary? "But I hope I've managed to make it a little less scary. Kids like you deserve as much." His hand came out of his pocket, holding a roll of paper. It looked satisfyingly thick and sturdy; it was held tight with a twist of wire. Through the spiralling furls, Natia could see that it was blue on one side. "You know what these are?"

The word that came to Natia's mind was not her own, but her brother's, who was working in a city factory, free from the safety of the countryside. "Blueprints!"

"You're smart! They're blueprints, exactly." He fiddled gingerly with the wire. "But not just any blueprints, Natia. These are the most dangerous plans in the world."

He laid them on the grass, where the white of them stood out starkly, a stab of the city hanging awkwardly away from it. "No one will ever know I had these," he murmured. "And that's the way it should be. I'm removing the last trace of this evil from the world…" His hand disappeared into his pocket again, and came out holding a small plastic box, the height of a teaspoon. He pressed a button on its side, and a delicate flame jumped out, fluttering restlessly but obediently on the tip. He lowered himself down to his knees and moved the flame to the edge of the curled-up paper.

Partly because of the sturdiness of the paper, the blueprints took some time to catch. But they did, and the flame encircled a small spot of growing black in their centre. The grass beneath them caught fire too, and began to give off a surprisingly thick smoke, curling fists of wispy fingers in the air. The man remained stooped over them, his head bent down, and tendrils of his shoulder-length hair hanging over the flames. "I don't want anyone else to die," was all he said, before heaving himself up and walking away into the morning mist.

Natia watched the most dangerous pieces of paper in the world burn to cinders until her eyes watered from the fumes. The tinge of the city excited her and terrified her at the same time; she needed, she realised to discover every horror of the scary world she lived in, before it was too late to try.