Page 157 of Under Story

He greeted her, and she rose to follow him. To their right, she saw the ramp that led upstairs. The overtaker turned left, where a different ramp spiraled into the bowels of the building.

They entered a warren of rooms. The air cooled as they descended, and the walls were lined with torches. Rugged passageways had been carved out of rock. Laurel peered into cavern-like offices, some even darker than the hallway; several people were working by candlelight.

Mr. Nakamura saw her looking. “Down here, we use as little electricity as possible. We don’t want to interfere with what happens underground.”

As they turned a corner, two people appeared, walking toward them: a woman and a man, both near Gloria’s age. Seeing the overtaker, they bent their heads with respect. Mr. Nakamura’s clothing had the fineness of his black coat. His pants were crisp, and the top had been made from a fluid material that rippled as he walked. The approaching pair wore the same work boots, but their uniform was different: a black tunic and technical pants.

Mr. Nakamura nodded, and the pair continued down the corridor.

“Apprentices,” he said to Laurel.

Each of their tunics was cinched with a belt that doubled as a holster for three tools: a spade; a probe, encased in glass; and an implement shaped like a pen. Even from a distance, Laurel could tell that they were exceptional.

“Those tools,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”

“And almost ten thousand years old. The spade is palladium, and the capacitor is mica. Neither tarnish,” he said. “An overtaker’s tools are precious. The set an apprentice receives belongs to them for the rest of their career.”

Mr. Nakamura opened a door to their right. Like the other offices, this chamber had been hollowed out of rock. His desk looked like a space-age navigation system: there were levers and dials, keypads and buttons. This faced a wall of tile-like screens, each of which showed one portion of a larger grid.

“My God,” Laurel said.

The grid corresponded to the cemetery. Red dots—bodies, she thought—pulsed hotly. Fractal lines, which seemed to represent the fungal network, flowed between them.

The overtaker turned a dial. Every screen became dark except for the one in the northeast corner, which enlarged to cover the others. Mr. Nakamura selected a single dot. Now the view changed again: the chosen body moved into the middle screen, and the others became electrical graphs.

“The screens aboveground, by the tombstones—you’ve seen them, I think?” he asked, and Laurel wondered if the overtaker had been watching, years ago, as she uncovered the wires. “They show the total power in one section of soil. Here, we can divide that signal into separate waves. This is the heart. And this is the brain,” he said, pointing to different tiles in turn. “We can see entire organ systems, too: the cardiac system, for example, or the nervous system.”

His fingers flew over the instruments, evoking this or that reading. The screens had a holographic depth, so the command to view two systems at once summoned overlapping layers. Laurel knew that he was harnessing an elaborate program, but she couldn’t shake the sense that he was also doing magic.

Laurel said, “Can you see the bodies themselves?”

Mr. Nakamura paused. He stood to close the door before he returned to the desk. There he navigated to the previous image: the northeast section of the cemetery. Next, he performed a series of light, deft strokes, and a cluster of red dots lit up. When he turned another dial, the diagram disappeared, replaced by images in sepia. Each screen now showed a black chasm—a pond-like sac—in which a single human being curled.

The bodies were little more than shapes, but Laurel could discern varying stages of development. Some appeared as skeletal clusters, sticklike in the dark void of the cavity. Others had acquired roundness: fat, muscle, skin. The images shifted and rippled, articulating faintly. They looked like sonograms.

“Thank you for showing me,” Laurel said. Her eyes were wet. When she looked down, to compose herself, she saw that boxes lined the floor. “Are you leaving?”

“Retiring,” Mr. Nakamura said, and only then did she notice how young he had become—how different he looked from the first time she’d met him, when he came to Laurel and Eli’s house to tell them where to look for Silas. Any lines had been erased; even the scar she’d noticed on his cheek was almost gone. But his eyes betrayed fatigue, and his hair was untidy. For the first time, Laurel saw through to his humanity, his ordinariness, even though he was also abnormal, as if humanness was something he could calibrate with yet another dial.

“Oh.” She felt a sense of loss. “What will you do next? You and your wife?”

“We separated.” Seeing Laurel’s face, he added: “It was the right choice. She wanted to stay in Wisconsin. I wanted to go home.”

“Where is home?”

“I was born in Otaru, just before the Russo-Japanese war. When I was young, the Russians invaded Hokkaido.”

In the antiuniverse, the tragedy is not that one can die but that one can’t. The brain can be nearly dead, an organ unsewn, and still a body perseveres until the end—the only end, as, in Laurel’s world, there is a single way that life begins. Yet the toll of war is still immense. Conflict takes other forms: technological, financial. Physical violence can incapacitate, if not kill. Survivors must be cared for until infancy. Families who can afford to do so spend their savings on long-term assistance; those who can’t take on multiple jobs, or relinquish retirement, or fall into bankruptcy. The waitlist at veterans hospitals is staggering.

“Most people couldn’t leave the country, but overtakers have that privilege: there is a network, with tributaries and pools. My son found a placement here. I thought a day would never pass when I didn’t miss the ocean.” The overtaker smiled. “And it hasn’t.”

“It must have been incredibly painful. I can see how much you’ve given of yourself,” Laurel said. “Mr. Nakamura—”

“Kenji,” he said.

“Kenji.” She toggled, readjusting. “I don’t know that Eli and I ever thanked you. Properly, I mean. For helping us to find Silas—and then coming to see us again, when he was a baby. We must have seemed so disrespectful. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve known many parents in that state. I’ve experienced it myself,” Kenji said, and Laurel thought of his son.