The head nurse, her face as white as chalk, began passing these round, rough objects through the rows. When Yuriko’s turn came, her hand reached into the sack, and her fingers bumped against something cold and weighty.
“This is a grenade,” the sensei said quietly, almost soundlessly. “Type 4. You know how to use it. A weapon of despair.”
It was not made of iron. It was a round orb of coarse, baked, dark-brown clay, covered in a thin layer of rough glaze, about the size of a large Okinawan orange. They weren't made in military factories, but in pottery workshops, by hand, when the Empire ran out of metal.
“And one more thing,” the teacher pulled small paper packets from his pocket, rustling in his trembling fingers. “This is cyanide. In case the grenade misfires. Over there, by the exit, in the kitchen, there are two milk cans with condensed milk left. You can... add this in. Stir it. And drink it. It will be easier that way.”
No one cried. The word “milk” – the only peaceful, sweet word from a past life – sounded here like a terrible, absurd joke.
“Teacher...” the voice of a girl from the corner of the cave, where the most severely wounded, the amputees, lay, trembled so violently that her words broke. “What about the wounded? Are we leaving them? What will happen to them?”
Minato Kobayashi froze for a second. His hands, holding a ceramic orb, shook harder, but he did not turn his head toward the gloom, toward the pus-oozing mats where people with torn-open bellies were wheezing.
“They,” he replied dryly and abruptly, “will have their own choice too.”
Yuriko looked down at her uniform. Her fingers automatically, with a sort of domestic neatness, began to smooth out the crumpled sailor collar, to button the surviving buttons of her blouse. It was unbearably absurd: the world was collapsing, the walls of the cave were shuddering from the distant strikes of naval artillery, and they were straightening their clothes as if preparing for a calligraphy lesson. Beside her, without uttering a word, Miko hid her ceramic grenade in the deep pocket of her dark hakama. The white ribbon in her hair was gray with dust, but tied in a perfect, precise bow.
“Let’s go,” the sensei ordered.
And they ran.
The exit from the Ihamigama cave didn't just let them out – it literally spat them outside, right into the gaping, boiling maw of hell. The sky over Okinawa wasn't blue; it was the color of clotted, baked blood, ripped open by black pillars of greasy smoke. The entire island shook, shuddering beneath their bare soles like a giant wounded whale that had just taken a thousand harpoons in the back all at once.
The jungle absorbed them instantly, swallowing them whole as muddy water swallows a thrown stone. The air outside proved stifling, hot as tropical broth; it was so humid that Yuriko’s blouse was soaked in seconds, turning into a thin, sticky film glued to her body. This air smelled of ash, cordite, shredded pandanus wood, and the sweet, suffocating, nauseating stench of rot – the stench of hundreds of bodies that had been lying in these thickets for days. The sounds of explosions merged into one continuous, droning metallic chord that vibrated their teeth and bones.
They dashed through the chaos of greenery. Enormous fern leaves, resembling the bony ribs of prehistoric fish, violently whipped their faces, leaving sticky green streaks. Time here lost its linearity: it would stretch, turning every step into an endless, viscous torture, then race at a gallop, confusing yesterday, when the birds still sang, with today, where there was nothing but death.
