The City Where Gray Rain Falls Chapter 22

As he spoke those words, the curves forming at the corners of Samuel’s red lips were crusted with dark reddish-brown scabs of dried blood, lending them a strangely obscene quality. Those whose gazes were stolen by that sight failed to realize that his eyes were not smiling at all.

“Ahem, I am merely pointing out the risks. It seems to me that you simply lack experience compared to the previous Chiefs, and therefore don’t quite understand…!”

Thud. The Intelligence Bureau Director’s words could go no further. He had been kicked square in the chest and sent tumbling backward.

“Urgh!”

Samuel removed the cap resting atop his head and handed it to Sera, who had appeared at his side to wait on him before anyone had noticed, then slapped the sprawling man’s cheeks lightly, pulled off the gloves he had been wearing, and crammed them into the man’s mouth.

“Still, you were once my superior. It would be troublesome if you bit your tongue while getting beaten. Wouldn’t it?”

After those affectionate words, a merciless beating followed immediately. The man being trampled under the hard soles of those dress shoes flailed his limbs and screamed for his life, but because of the scrap of cloth stuffed in his mouth, no sound escaped—only strangled, gasping breaths barely leaked out.

“Hah…”

After about five minutes, the clumsy resistance and groans faded, leaving only the dull, thudding impacts of flesh being struck. The Chief of Security had little interest in whether his insubordinate underling had passed out or died. He stopped only once a rough sigh escaped his own lips and his irritation had, to some degree, subsided.

“My cap.”

“Here, sir.”

Covering his disheveled hair with the cap handed to him by Sera, and pulling on a fresh pair of gloves, Samuel addressed the bureau chiefs from each department, who had been standing rigidly at attention without so much as glancing back.

“Now then, who’s next? Who else has some advice for me?”

In that room, at least, there was no one who could offer advice to a madman who mercilessly turned bureau chief-level officials into lumps of meat.

As if their very breath had been cut off, the fingertips of those who had stifled their breathing to the absolute limit trembled in minute convulsions, and their hearts pounded violently, dropping down into their stomachs again and again.

Cold sweat streamed down, but all of them kept their eyes fixed straight ahead, unable to so much as turn their heads freely. If they did not wish to die, the only sound they were permitted to make was that of swallowed silence.

“Shall we continue?”

Leaving behind that existence—now impossible to tell whether it was a lump of meat or a still-living person—Samuel returned to his seat before the desk and ordered the report to proceed.

As one by one they forced their tightly sealed lips to move and recited the details of their respective duties, Sera approached the man lying on the floor, checked his pulse, and called in two officers waiting outside to drag him away. To say he was moved for medical treatment would be less accurate than to say he was removed from Samuel’s sight.

Though they wondered whether their colleague was alive or dead, the only thing that mattered was what came after making it out of this room unscathed. Their reporting time was supplanted by a heated competition for survival, yet unable to endure the frigid atmosphere, they could do nothing but keep freezing up.

∞ ∞ ∞

He had thought there would be no further opportunity to access the archive room. Yet contrary to expectations, a second chance came in less than a week.

“…They say they’re going to pull a few people from the Vigilance Corps to serve as cleaners.”

“I suspect they’re planning some kind of grand cleaning. Honestly, how they expect just us to handle this entire vast place…”

Among the Corps members gathered in the Vigilance Corps office on the 2nd floor of the Security Department for shift change, a few who were quick with news had their heads together, already sharing worries about an order due to come down from above soon.

Isaac and Vincent, who had been fortunate enough to finish their patrol quickly and return, could also hear the whispered talk.

“This job’s tougher than I thought.”

“Tell me about it. I thought it’d be easy.”

The Vigilance Corps members’ main complaint stemmed from the odd jobs piled on top of their patrol duties. Having actually done the work they had assumed would be easier compared to other jobs, they found it came with its own share of hardships.

Even a cursory sweep of one sector of the city took at least three or four hours, and a Corps member had to cover at least two sectors over the course of half a day.

Wearing the cheap, ill-fitting shoes distributed by the Party and walking briskly all day left their feet without a single patch of healthy skin, and no matter how robust the man, the moment he returned to the office and planted his backside in a chair, he let out a groan of pain.

On top of that, there were no designated days off—work was daily—and with all the odd jobs the officers ordered them to do, like hauling garbage or repairing the iron fences, it was more accurate to say that, despite the pretense of a two-shift system, they worked without rest like worker bees in springtime.

“If it’s a grand cleaning for the Founding Day anniversary, how much worse are they going to work us?”

The sole Party that had built the city and distributed the necessary goods to its citizens. The Party’s Founding Day was ten days away.

It was a day when special food was distributed throughout the city, and instead of the earsplitting sirens, the Party leader’s address played over the speakers. It was also the most important day of the year—when everyone cleaned their homes and the streets thoroughly, and gave thanks to the city and the Party that had accepted them as citizens.

It was hardly strange for each department to put extra effort into beautifying the environment in commemoration of Founding Day.

“I’m scared to death. What if I end up cleaning some suspicious place by mistake and get accused of being a rebel?”

The recent rebel commotion within the Security Department. Though it was said that the rest of the Vigilance Corps members had gotten through without interrogation or torture, they were not entirely free of suspicion.

Citizens on the lower rungs of the outskirts were, by nature, always outsiders compared to those in the city center, Sectors 1 through 4, and Sectors 5 through 12—and the closer they were to the outside, the more suspicion naturally followed. They were never even given a chance to prove their innocence or speak in their defense, so the moment they were singled out as culprits, everything was over.

So if, by any chance, some officer thought an ordinary Corps member doing his cleaning looked suspicious, or if they happened to enter a place for cleaning that contained information linking them to the rebels and were framed, there would be no way out. It was inevitable that they shrank from the extra duty, each secretly hoping, with the feeling of passing a live bomb, that they alone would not be the one caught.

“Surely, isn’t there anyone?”

What the gathered Corps members had been worrying about soon became reality. Not long after, Sera entered the office and asked if there were any volunteers to take charge of the cleaning at night, after Security Department employees had left work.

The dozens of Vigilance Corps members lined up only shot sidelong glances at one another; not one came forward willingly.

Still, since it was a task someone had to do, the prolonged silence was awkward and uncomfortable. Secretly, most of them wished to push it onto the youngest, so many directed their eyes toward the young man named ‘Joshua’ standing in the back row.

Sharp, stinging glares fixed on that single person, and heads shook ever so slightly, urging him to hurry up and raise his hand.

The black-haired young man with his cap pulled down low had no choice but to say, “I’ll do it,” and slowly raise his right hand—and his older partner standing beside him also displayed a solidarity too moving to behold without tears, saying, “I’ll join him.”

Only after half a dozen or so more reluctantly volunteered after that were the rest of the Corps members able to breathe a sigh of relief, having escaped both the danger of being branded rebels and the increased workload.

Among them, one or two were beginning to dimly realize that being in the Vigilance Corps was not so different from other occupations in the city—that it was a job which put their lives at risk. But there was no way they could quit now.

For the moment, the best they could do was to count it a blessing just to have dodged today’s crisis.

∞ ∞ ∞

‘Will it really be all right?’

In truth, Isaac had heard in advance, through Vincent, that they would be recruiting cleaning personnel.

Vincent was on good terms with the officer in charge of Sector 26, where he lived, and so he often got word of the Security Department’s affairs a step ahead. The information related to the archive room had also come through that officer.

‘A grand cleaning on that scale is usually carried out after everyone has left work, and no one wants that job. For us, it’s an opportunity not to be missed.’