The three of them cleared the dishes and trash from the table, then went to Liz's room as they had last time. Liz took an old but well-preserved map from her drawer.
She carefully spread the map over the bed and showed it to Hesta and Tulan.
It was a map of the Askia Wasteland, reputedly the largest wasteland in District 3, three times the size of Tan Yi—the claim that it had the largest land area still needed verification, but it had indeed once been an immensely prosperous city-state. At its peak, it could even rival some Habitable Zones far from the Core City.
Askia lay on a vast plain. Though its transportation was extremely convenient, it had no natural defenses.
Askia had five districts in all. Liz's home stood at the bend of an artificial river somewhere in East City. Not far from it was a small park where many residents with dogs played frisbee with their pets on weekends.
Liz knew every street in the area. Just from memory, she could name the shops along a given street and the names of their owners in order.
"Restrictions between wasteland districts aren't that strict," Liz said softly. "Take Askia and Vilyuchinsk, for example. One is in the north-central part of District 3, and the other is at the easternmost edge of District 14, but people can still move between them if they want to. It seems some of my family's elders were among the first people to go to Vilyuchinsk, but that was so long ago that the two sides lost contact ages ago."
Tulan roughly calculated the distance between the two places in her head.
"So far... so dangerous."
"The number of people a piece of land can support is always limited. If people want to survive, someone has to be a pioneer," Liz said quietly. "And besides, the journey east isn't all uninhabited land. You often come across different towns every so often. It's just that everyone is very wary of strangers and won't easily let outsiders in."
"Then what do you do if you want to settle somewhere?"
"Larger wastelands generally have dedicated contact stations and quarantine zones, mostly built under the leadership of Quicksilver Needles. The usual process is to submit an application and supporting documents, wait for approval, then have cerebrospinal fluid drawn for testing and stay in a special quarantine facility for three months... Anyway, it's a huge hassle.
"Smaller wastelands aren't so strict. They all handle things differently. After all, before the Chelated Tide broke out in Askia, no one had seen a Chelated Being for decades. Under those circumstances, getting everyone to voluntarily follow a set of incredibly troublesome rules was almost impossible."
Hesta had heard Arnold mention this before. Askia in 4620 and Hekla in 4621 were the only two places in District 3 where Chelated Tides had occurred in recent years. Most of the sixty-seven reservists at the base came from villages around those two wastelands. For Liz and the Grangua brothers, residents living at the center of the outbreak, survival was practically a miracle.
Liz looked at the map. "Those two Chelated Tides must have served as a warning to people in the Habitable Zones and other wastelands."
"Hard to say. If they really had, two Chelated Beings wouldn't have slipped into Catra City." Lying on her side, Tulan continued, "The municipal fortifications outside the city had been built carelessly to begin with, and the security department hadn't properly carried out its duty to patrol and stand watch in the quarantine zone every night. Everyone thought the Hekla Wasteland was far from Catra City. Even if something happened, it wouldn't reach us for a while... Until people actually see blood, who remembers the lesson?"
The three lay on the bed, each recalling things from the past, and fell silent for a while.
Liz suddenly glanced sideways. "Jane, what kind of place is Duanming Alley?"
Hesta had not expected the topic to turn so abruptly, and could only let out a soft, slow, "Um..."
"Is it really full of criminals?" Tulan asked.
"Probably... yeah? But it wasn't that scary," Hesta recalled. "To find enough food, clean water, essential medicine... people had to trade together. So most of the time, they actively avoided meaningless conflicts. A lot of people only treated Duanming Alley as a temporary place to stay. In the end, they still had to find a way to settle somewhere else."
Liz nodded thoughtfully. "That really does sound a little like Hekla."
"How so?"
"At the center of the Hekla Wasteland, there's a small town of a little over forty square kilometers called Oasis Land. Have you heard of it?"
Hesta shook her head.
Liz continued, "There are underground trading stations, hospitals, pharmacies, and a few supply points there... Other than the trafficking of people, weapons, and drugs, it's no different from other wastelands.
"Oasis Land is the 'truce zone' agreed upon by all Hekla people, because the locals also need a place that can save lives and gather information. So no matter what the dispute is, once both sides enter Oasis Land, they have to put their conflict aside for the time being."
Tilting her head, Hesta said, "It sounds like a sanctuary in a church."
"Does it?" Liz blinked.
"Yeah. A nun once told me that before the Great Blackout Era, the church had the 'right of sanctuary.' No matter who someone was or what crime he had committed, once he entered a church and rang the confession bell, he would immediately receive protection."
"...Even the police couldn't go in and arrest him?"
Hesta nodded. "Right. The Bishop, priest, or head nun would grant them sanctuary for anywhere from half a month to forty days depending on the circumstances. After that, they would either be permanently exiled or stand trial in a secular court—it wasn't exactly getting away with it."
Tulan suddenly froze. "Catra has a place like that too. There's a shelter near the church—it's used for exactly that sort of thing."
"Maybe some of the customs on this land had been passed down from the Golden Age? Though they might have taken a different form..."
Tulan laughed.
"Then even after more than eight hundred years, we're still descendants of the Golden Age."
Of the three, only Liz's expression suddenly became complicated.
She got off the bed and walked to the wall, where she took down her Bayan accordion.
"'White Ship' is a folk song passed down from the Golden Age. My grandmother taught it to me," Liz said in a very gentle voice. "She taught me another song too. Do you want to hear it?"
That same night, the same song was also echoing through Chiba's office.
The needle record player beneath her window was turning, its metal-plated stylus steadily reading out fragments of an unfamiliar language.
Chiba hummed the melody. She had once taken the record's sleeve to Mrs. Dalia of White Ship and asked her about the meaning of its title.
The mottled characters formed a short sentence: "I Wish to Die Young." (1)
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(1) That is, the poem "I Wish to Die Young" by Mira Lokhvitskaya.
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