As soon as he’d gotten to his new quarters, Eiji set his traveling bag on the floor, put the armor case next to it and then flopped onto the futon mat without bothering to unpack anything. He lay there for hours. The apartment was a commander’s residence, to be sure. By military standards, it was huge, with three separate rooms. He felt like he was falling through endless space or adrift at sea, lying on his back in that hollow. Out his bedroom window he noticed something he had been seeing without noticing ever since he and Minsuk had arrived in Shijima. Construction teams and the cranes of their massive machines. He could see almost a dozen just in the rectangle of his window alone, pock-marking the otherwise picturesque urban vista. When he noticed them, it suddenly occurred to him that they had been all over the city all along, wherever he went. Sometimes entire blocks were but half-finished high-rises, their spindly steel skeletons and wooden construction catwalks stabbing like insect carcasses into the sky. The entire city was being rebuilt, he realized – as if after some catastrophe like a natural disaster or a very large battle. But the city of Shijima had never in history been attacked; not once since its founding.
Alone now with his thoughts, Eiji realized that he was frustrated to have to stay in Shijima. Now that he’d said his farewell to Minsuk, he wanted to rush back to the Front and press the attack into Inner Kolsiv, all the way into Kolsivum, and sack the palace of the High Executor and his Senate. He wanted to fight without cease, to bring about a swift and decisive victory, to end the War once and for all so that he could return, not just for a few months of preparation and retraining, but for a lifetime of quiet days in the Reunification Peace, days of helping Minsuk run her restaurant and collecting a personal library of art and history and poetry. The longer he thought about it, the more and more agitated he became. His head ached and his mouth was dry. He thought about leaving Shijima, making a solitary and wild drive through the Kolsivite line, like Yuuhei had done. It had been insane, but Saitou said it had made a difference, didn’t he?
Still, he couldn’t shake the knowledge of the futility of such a move even if he tried. What we the odds he would even fare as well as Yuuhei had? That he would even survive? He pushed his palm into his forehead and groaned, before forcing himself to give up the thought altogether.
Yuuhei. Was that why he had done it? Had seeing Eiko given him this same feeling of desperation? Eiji thought about this at length. Yuuhei had always had a bold fire about him, but that kind of berserker wildness had no precedent in his life that Eiji could think of. It troubled him deeply, and gradually his initial relief in hearing that Yuuhei had survived dissolved into an intense worry over what mental state his friend must have been in to do it in the first place. And in what mental state he would be now after the whole ordeal was over. He wondered also about how severe the punishment High Command would decide for Yuuhei would be. He hoped that gratitude for the tactical impact of his actions would weigh favorably on their considerations, but the inner workings of High Command were an enigma to him, trapped as he was on this side of the one-way-mirror of the Bureaucracy.
