I picked up the umeboshi from my tray and popped it into my mouth. I made a show of savoring the flavor. Truth be known, it was sour enough to twist my mouth as tight as a crab’s ass at low tide, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of seeing that.
“Pretty good.” I smacked my lips.
Rita stood, her mouth a stern line. She left me sitting at the table as she strode down the corridor between the tables, past throngs of soldiers, and up to the serving counter. There, Rachel spoke to a gorilla of a man who could reach up and touch the ceiling without so much as stretching-the same gorilla from the 4th whose fist my jaw had encountered all those loops ago. Beauty and the Beast were understandably surprised to see the subject of their conversation walk up to them. The entire cafeteria could sense that something was up; the conversations dimmed, and the banjo music stopped. Thank God.
Rita cleared her throat. “Could I get some dried pickled plums?”
“Umeboshi?”
“Yeah, those.”
“Well, sure, if you like.”
Rachel took out a small plate and started piling it with umeboshi from a large, plastic bucket.
“I don’t need the plate.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That thing you’re holding in your left hand. Yeah, the bucket. I’ll take all of them.”
“Um, people don’t usually eat that many at once,” Rachel said.
“That a problem?”
“No, I suppose not-”
“Thanks for your help.”
Bucket in hand, Rita walked back triumphantly. She thunked it down in the middle of the table right in front of me.
The container was about thirty centimeters across at the mouth- a tub big enough to serve about two hundred men, since nobody ever wanted more than one-packed halfway to the top with bright red umeboshi. Big enough to drown a small cat. The base of my tongue started to ache just looking at it. Rita went for her chopsticks.
She singled out one of the wrinkled, reddish fruit from the bucket and popped it into her mouth. She chewed. She swallowed. Out came the pit.
“Not sour at all.” Her eyes watered.
Rita passed the barrel to me with a shove. My turn. I picked out the smallest one I could find and put it in my mouth. I ate it and spit out the pit.
“Mine either.”
We were playing our own game of gastronomic chicken. The tips of Rita’s chopsticks quivered as she plunged them back into the barrel. She tried twice to pick up another umeboshi between them before she gave up and just skewered one on a single stick, lifting it to her mouth. The fruit trailed drops of pink liquid that stained the tray where they fell.
A crowd of onlookers had begun to gather around us. They watched in uneasy silence at first, but the excitement grew palpably with each pit spat out on the tray.
Sweat beaded on our skin like condensation on a hot day’s beer can. The revolting pile of half-chewed pits grew. Rachel was off to the side, watching with a worried smile. I spotted my friend from the 4th in the throng, too. He was having such a good time watching me suffer. Each time Rita or I put another ume in our mouths, a wave of heckling rippled through the crowd.
“Come on, pick up the pace!”
“No turnin’ back now, keep ’em poppin’!”
“You’re not gonna let this little girl show you up, are you?”
“Fuck, you think he can beat Rita? You’re crazy!”
“Eat! Eat! Eat!”
“Watch the doors, don’t want nobody breakin’ this up! I got ten bucks on the scrawny guy!” followed immediately by, “Twenty on Rita!” Then someone else cried out, “Where’s my fried shrimp? I lost my fried shrimp!”
It was hot, it was loud, and in a way I can’t explain, it felt like home. There was an invisible bond that hadn’t been there my previous times through the loop. I’d had a taste of what tomorrow would bring, and suddenly all the little things that happen in our lives, the minutiae of the day, took on new importance. Just then, being surrounded by all that noise felt good.
In the end, we ate every industrially packed umeboshi in the barrel. Rita had the last one. I argued that it was a tie, but since Rita had gone first, she insisted that she had won. When I objected, Rita grinned and offered to settle it over another barrel. It’s hard to say whether that grin meant she really could have gone on eating or if the overload of sour food had made her a little funny in the head. The gorilla from the 4th brought in another full barrel of the red fruit from Hell and placed it in the middle of the table with a thud.
By that point, I felt like I was made of umeboshi from the waist on down. I waved the white flag.
After that, I talked with Rita about everything-Yonabaru who never shut up, Sergeant Ferrell and his training obsession, the rivalry between our platoon and the 4th. For her part, Rita told me things she hadn’t had time to get to in the last loop. When not encased in her Jacket, the Bitch wore a shy smile that suited her well. Her fingertips smelled of machine grease, pickled plum, and a hint of coffee.
I don’t know which flags I’d set or how, but on that 160th loop my relationship with Rita deepened as it never had before. The next morning, Corporal Jin Yonabaru didn’t wake up on the top bunk. He woke up on the floor.
3
I found no peace in sleep. A Mimic would snuff out my life, or I’d black out in the middle of battle. After that, nothing. Then without warning, the nothingness gave way. The finger that had been squeezing the trigger of my rifle was wedged three quarters of the way through my paperback. I’d find myself lying in bed, surrounded by its pipe frame, listening to the high-pitched voice of the DJ read the day’s weather. Clear and sunny out here on the islands, same as yesterday, with a UV warning for the afternoon. Each word wormed its way into my skull and stuck there.
By “sunny” I had picked up the pen, by “islands” I was writing the number on my hand, and by the time she’d gotten to “UV warning” I was out of bed and on my way to the armory. That was my wake-up routine.
Sleep on the night before the battle was an extension of training. For some reason, my body never grew fatigued. The only thing I brought with me were my memories and the skills I’d mastered. I spent the night tossing and turning, my mind replaying the movements it had learned the previous day as it burned the program into my brain. I had to be able to do what I couldn’t the last time through the loop, to kill the Mimics I couldn’t kill, to save the friends I couldn’t save. Like doing an iso push-up in my mind. My own private nightly torment.
I awoke in battle mode. Like a pilot flipping through switches before takeoff, I inspected myself one part at a time, checking for any muscles that might have knotted up overnight. I didn’t skip so much as a pinky toe.
Rotating ninety degrees on my ass, I sprang out of bed and opened my eyes. I blinked. My vision blurred. The room was different. The prime minister’s head wasn’t staring out at me from atop the swimsuit model. By the time I noticed, it was too late; my foot missed a platform that wasn’t there and my inertia sent me tumbling from the bed. My head slammed into a tile-covered floor, and I finally realized where I was.
Sunlight shone through layers of blast-resistant glass and spilled across the vast, airy room. An artificial breeze from the purifier poured over my body as I lay sprawled on the floor. The thick walls and glass completely blocked out the sounds of the base that were usually so loud in my ears.
I was in the Sky Lounge. In a base of exposed steel and khaki-colored, fire-retardant wood, this was the one and only properly appointed room. Originally an officers’ meeting room that doubled as a reception hall, the night view of Uchibo through its multilayered glass would have fetched a good price.
