David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

Gurley fired a shot. The man looked up again.

Lily stood, and moved toward Gurley. As he took his second shot, she grabbed his arm. The shot went high. I saw something tug at the top of the balloon, but didn’t take time to figure out if he’d actually hit it. Instead I scrambled to get myself between Gurley and Lily. But I was too late; he’d backhanded her with the gun. She fell, hands to her face, the too-red blood of a new wound leaking through her fingers.

I could have avenged Lily then; I could have finally struck Gurley myself, or better yet, found my own gun and shot him. But I did not. I suppose cowardice was part of the reason, but it wasn’t the only reason. Because before I could do anything, before Gurley could even spit out an apology or added insult, another sharp report cracked across the tundra. Gurley and I dropped. Gurley cursed and muttered something about how we’d given the balloonist all the time in the world to fire upon us. But when I looked, I didn’t see a gun, but rather, a tiny figure of a man dangling from the balloon by his right arm, which was caught up in the rigging. A tiny puff of smoke was already dissipating. His legs were limp and his feet dragged along the ground as the balloon continued its feeble struggle against the alderwood. I thought he was dead, but then saw his head move. I grabbed up the binoculars for myself this time and focused while Gurley continued his sputtering.

“Enough of this,” Gurley said, just as I brought the glasses into focus. That’s when I saw the man lift his head, that’s when I saw the tears stream down his face, and that’s when, finally, I saw who he was. Not Saburo. Not some other Japanese spy who’d flown here from Japan.

He was, more incredibly, a boy. A Japanese boy.

I saw his mouth open before I heard his screams, but then we all heard them, high and jagged, and then we all knew what we’d found.

“Don’t shoot,” cried Lily.

“Sir,” I said. “It’s a-it’s a boy.”

“Good Christ,” Gurley said. “I don’t care if it’s an octopus. Now duck. I’m bringing this tragicomic chapter of the war to a close.”

I was still staring through the binoculars, so what happened next really did have the feeling of a film, the actions before my eyes operating at some mediated remove from actual experience. And none of it made sense: a boy, dangling from a balloon, a woman, her hands bloody, running toward him, and then, lurching after them both, a U.S. Army Air Corps captain. The woman stumbled into a puddle that turned out to be as deep as a pond, and the captain tumbled in after her. They struggled for a moment until he finally heaved both of them out of the hole and into the grass. She pulled free of him, but he caught her legs. She kicked at him and then he had blood around his face. He caught her again, higher, and this time simply held her until she stopped twisting and turning, until it was finally the two of them lying beside each other like lovers, which they once were. Or always were. I lowered the glasses, and that was better, the details were gone: from a distance, there was no blood on the two lovers, no tears on the boy.

I walked toward them, picking my steps carefully at first, and then, through no decision of my own, began moving more rapidly, tripping, falling, running.

WHEN I REACHED Gurley and Lily, she was crying and he was whispering to her, brushing her hair from her face. Without taking his eyes off her, Gurley told me to go check on the boy, and secure the balloon so that it would be safe to investigate. I tried to catch Lily’s gaze before moving off, but she’d shut her eyes in a grimace. Gurley told me to get moving.

I crept toward the balloon. Either one of Gurley’s shots had punctured the envelope or it had torn previously, because the shroud was wheezing to the earth. The basket had dropped further, and now rested on the ground, occasionally hopping up a few inches whenever the breeze was strong enough. The boy, his arm still caught in the rigging, lay along the side of the balloon like he had leaked out of it. I could see that parts of the usual balloon payload were not present. The antipersonnel and incendiary bombs that usually dangled beneath the basket weren’t there, at least not that I could see. Two cylinders that looked like incendiary devices still clung to the sides of the basket, however, and there were all the tiny charges ringing around the control frame. That last shot I thought I’d heard: it must have been one of those charges popping.

Once I got within thirty feet, I couldn’t move any closer. It couldn’t have been fear: I’d been faced with much more dangerous explosives than the ones before me then. There was no sign of the porcelain germ weapon containers. All in all, it looked as though it would be simple enough to render harmless.

But that wasn’t it, of course. It was the boy. In fact, it took me a long minute or two to realize that I’d paused because some part of my brain was processing the boy as a new kind of bomb, one that lay far beyond the reach of my training. Perhaps he was his own bioweapon container.

He looked up, saw me, and gave a tiny groan. Then he screwed his face tight and, biting his lip, began to struggle to stand. I shouted for him to stop, and his eyes snapped open. I started speaking rapidly, explaining how he had to be careful how he moved, or else he might set off some of the charges. He frowned and replied in Japanese, and the two of us went on conversing like that for another minute, each of us oblivious to our inability to communicate.

Finally, I pantomimed an explosion, and told him, as best I could, to sit tight. He did. I studied things, walked around the balloon, decided on the best route to disarm the balloon and safely free the boy. I told the boy I would be right back, and then returned to Gurley

He and Lily were sitting now. She was staring after the balloon, tears in her eyes, but no longer crying. Gurley was still whispering into her ear, her hands in his. I stood at a distance waiting for them to turn to me. I tried to blot Gurley out of the picture and just take in her eyes, imagine that she was looking only at me, had only ever looked at me, but I couldn’t. Gurley was there, and Saburo before him, and now, somehow, this boy, too. They were all there, all claiming a piece of her.

“Too complicated?” said Gurley, looking up. He began to disentangle himself from Lily while still holding her hands.

“No, sir, I—”

“Because I thought it might be,” Gurley said quickly. He gave Lily a squeeze and stood. He made a sour face and looked at the balloon. “Bastards. Can you believe—” he said, facing me, but really speaking to Lily. “Can you believe people would do this? Send children into war? Tie them to a balloon? And for what ungodly purpose? The cruelty-unspeakable. Cruel to him, but also to saps like us, called upon to witness the slaughter of a child.”

“I think we can—”

“I assume it’s booby-trapped, Sergeant,” Gurley said, fixing his attention on me more sturdily now.

“Well, sir, it looks a bit like—”

“I mean-my word,” Gurley said, more confident with the direction his performance had taken. “Is it more humane to shoot him and then detonate the balloon, or-?”

Lily gave a half-cry and rose. “There has to be a way,” she said, looking at Gurley and then me. I looked at Gurley, too, unable to decode the strange signals he was sending. He wanted to do the bomb disposal job himself, for once? He wanted to impress Lily.

“Well, I think-sir, I think there is a way,” I said. “Some of the worst stuff you find on these balloons-well, on this one, it looks like that’s all gone already, never put on or maybe dropped in the ocean.” I stopped. “As you know,” I quickly added. “All that’s left are a couple of firebombs, the little charges, maybe the flash bomb on the balloon, but—”