Hagane no Renkinjutsushi - Volume 2 - Chapter 1

THE BORDERLANDS TRAIN

“AAAAAAAAAAH.”

A yawn erupted, great and sudden beneath the lazy afternoon sun. “Not here yet, Al?” Edward Elric called out to his brother, who stood a few feet in front of him. Edward sat atop his traveling trunk, which lay on its side on the cobblestones, with his chin in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. He lifted a sleeve to wipe away the tears produced by the yawn. 

“I’m afraid I don’t see hide nor hair of it,” his brother Alphonse replied. Alphonse stood looking down a set of rails that ran across the cobblestones at their feet.

Edward sighed. “The train—it was supposed to be here at noon, right?”

“Yup.”

“Well?” Edward pointed to a clock hanging on a low post on the platform that passed for a station. “It’s already three. Do the trains not have to run on schedule out here in the boondocks or something?”

“Don’t ask me,” his brother replied. “It’s my first time this far out too, you know. Maybe things just run late out here.” He looked up at the clock. “Hours late.”

Alphonse gazed off in the direction from which they had come. Off in the distance, a cluster of roofs popped out of the landscape, a fittingly tiny little hamlet for this middle-of-nowhere place. Alphonse and Edward had left the village to board the train. But where was the train?

Edward sighed again. “All this way, to leave empty-handed. And now we’re stuck at this blasted station.” The station was little more than a line of cobblestones sitting out in a field. No roof, just a post with a clock and rails heading off into the distance. “Can’t things go right just once?” he muttered. He peered down the rails to where they faded in the distance. There was no train.

Edward Elric was a short boy, skinny, with long golden-blond hair that he wore plaited in a braid. He seemed average enough at first glance, but closer inspection revealed an unusual history for someone so young. Several years before, he had broken an alchemical taboo—and paid for it with his right arm and his left leg. The auto-mail replacement limbs shone dully beneath his clothes. To recover what he had lost, he had joined the military and become a State Alchemist. Maybe because of this unusual career path, he had a look in his eyes not found in many boys: a fierce determination that sparkled with a keen light.

His brother, Alphonse Elric—younger than Edward by a year—was also unusual for a boy his age, but on an entirely different scale. Alphonse tended to be soft-spoken and eager to make peace, in contrast to his passionate and all-too-frequently hotheaded brother, but you would never guess it from looking at him. He stood far taller than Edward and was clothed in a giant suit of armor. Inside the armor was nothing. No flesh or bone—just a single mark, written in blood, that tied the boy’s soul to the walking suit of metal that took the place of his body.

The two brothers were on a journey to find the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, the only alchemical artifact that might restore their original bodies.

Two weeks before, they had heard a rumor of a strange stone found in the village far from Central. They had departed at once, hearts full of hope. The result of their findings was disappointing, as always, and now that they were trying to get home, they found themselves stuck. At a station. In the middle of the wilderness.

Every time the wind blew across the plains, a gust sent the dust up to dance in the hazy sunlight around them. Edward squinted his eyes in the dry air and looked up at the yellow sun hanging heavy in the sky. He picked up a pebble at his feet. “Guess we were wrong again,” he said, tugging absentmindedly at one of the cobblestones until it rattled against its neighbors. Edward’s eyes fell on his arm, then his gaze traveled along the ground until he was looking straight at his brother. “I was kind of hoping we’d get our bodies back this time.”

It seemed like he’d said the same thing a hundred times before, every time they’d followed some promising lead to find out it had all been a wild goose chase.

“But … we won’t give up, will we?” Alphonse asked, as always.

“ ’Course not,” Edward said, standing up from his trunk. He stretched and turned a winning smile to his brother. “We’ll find that Philosopher’s Stone, and we’ll get you your body back.”

“We will find it,” Alphonse echoed, completing the ritual.

Edward nodded, satisfied. On their long search for the Stone, they had developed a kind of code for dealing with the constant disappointment. This exchange was their signal to put this latest failure behind them and to start anew.

“Well now,” Edward shouted out into the hazy afternoon air. “Where to next? I’ve got a mind to get on a train, catch some winks, and tuck into something tasty. Then, back to the search.”

He threw up his arms as though to wave in some imaginary locomotive, and just then, far down the tracks, a real one appeared. The train that came chugging up to them seemed awfully full for a borderlands route like this.

“This train doesn’t go through any big towns, does it?” Edward whispered as they stepped onto the train. “Just the countryside, right?”

He went to sit down and found to his dismay that all the seats were full. Shrugging, Edward joined Alphonse to stand by the doors.

“There go my plans of getting some sleep,” he muttered.

“Maybe there’s an empty seat farther down. Want to go look?” his brother asked.

“No, that’s okay,” Edward said, shaking his head. “If it’s this full here, it’s probably full all the way down.”

Every seat in their car was taken. Some people stood in the aisle, talking and laughing with friends, playing cards on armrests. Edward’s eyes passed over the people sharing their car. “I’ve never seen this many people on a train this far out of Central,” he said, noting their clothes and mannerisms. Everything looked a little too fancy, too clean for country folk on a country train. “Everyone sure is dressed nice for a day in the countryside.”

“Yeah,” Alphonse agreed. “Maybe there was a celebration somewhere?”

“Could be. Not that we’d know after spending two weeks in the bush. Maybe we can find a radio somewhere or pick up a newspaper in the next station,” he wondered aloud. Suddenly, Edward’s mouth snapped shut.

“What’s wrong?” his brother asked, looking down at him.

“Nothing,” Edward said, scratching his neck the way he did whenever something was definitely wrong. “I just thought I heard a familiar voice.”

Edward stood silently. The next time he heard it, he was certain. It was a voice he hadn’t heard for a long time.

“Who?” Alphonse asked. “Whose voice?”

“Who?” Edward echoed. “Well, it sounds like the voice of one of those people that I owe a lot to and really wish I didn’t. Where is he?” Edward craned his neck to see through the crowd of people in the car. Alphonse looked at the deep furrows on his brow. Whoever it was he had heard, it wasn’t someone he particularly cared for—that much was clear.

“There he is,” Edward said, his eyes fixing on a point farther down the car.

“Huh?” Alphonse turned to look for himself.

“Over there,” Edward said, pointing out someone they both knew. It was Colonel Roy Mustang, talking jovially with some women they had never seen before.

Roy, like Edward, was in the army—a State Alchemist. He was chief officer of Eastern Command, a rank he had achieved in record time. A keen light shone in his black eyes, peering out from under a shock of black hair. But far from their usual wary, attentive look, those eyes looked relaxed now, even happy.

Just behind him, slightly taller, stood Jean Havoc, a second lieutenant at Eastern Command, with choppy blond hair. He stood off to one side, neither leading the conversation nor completely ignoring it, a typically bored look on his face.

Alphonse stood with his brother, silently watching Roy talk to the seated women. “He looks like he’s having fun,” Alphonse commented. “But what is the colonel doing on a backwater train like this? Some mission bring him out here?”

Edward shrugged and shook his head. “Who knows?”

Roy was too busy smiling and laughing with the women to notice the brothers’ attention. It was odd. Roy’s work directing Eastern Command kept him busy, and he rarely took jobs that brought him out into the countryside. There was something else, too. Both Roy and Havoc were wearing civilian clothes. If they were on a mission, they should have been in their military uniforms. Edward and Alphonse stood quietly and pricked up their ears to try and overhear the conversation.

“Still, it must be a bother going out, what with the trains running so late like this,” their superior was saying. His voice, usually honed to razor sharpness for chewing out underlings, sounded disturbingly warm and mellow. The brothers looked at each other in astonishment.

“Oh, a bit,” one of the women replied. “But we’re not pressed for time, you see, so it’s no real bother.”

“We’re just out to do some shopping in the big town,” added another. “Do you travel for work, perhaps?”

From the sound of it, the women were rich young housewives out on a shopping expedition. Even from where they stood, the brothers could see they wore expensive-looking clothes. Perhaps they had called out to Roy and engaged him in conversation. Now they were chatting up a storm.

Roy. Chatting.

“I’m just here to take care of some business,” Roy said.

“Oh, I see,” one of the women said. “I hope we’re not troubling you.”

“Not at all,” Roy replied. “Nothing better than a little conversation to liven up an otherwise boring day of errands.”

Roy smiled broadly. He wasn’t bad looking, and the women certainly seemed to notice.

“I’m going to bet he’s not out here working at all,” Edward decided, picking his trunk up from the floor.

“You going to go say hi?” his brother asked.

“Why not? Maybe he’s got some juicy tidbits for us, anyway.”

If the colonel was on business, Edward might have left him alone. But if he had the time to chat up these women, he had the time to divulge a little information to Edward. Edward took a step toward the back of the car, and Roy’s eyes lifted for the first time.

They exchanged glances, and Roy’s expression shifted from pleasure to surprise.

“Long time no see,” Edward said, waving in greeting. It had been a long time since they’d last met. Edward expected a wave in response, but Roy abruptly turned and resumed speaking with the women. His look of surprise had disappeared.

“Huh?” Maybe he didn’t hear me, thought Edward, and he began walking through the crowd toward his superior.

Roy was still talking to the ladies. Edward overheard him saying something about a pretty clock tower he had seen in some town, and the splendid view from a station to the west.

As Edward approached through the crowded car, Roy’s hand went down to the armrest of the chair in front of him, as though he were bracing himself against the rocking of the train. He placed it just so it was out of sight of the women he was talking to, yet in plain view of Edward.

One index finger slowly lifted and pointed directly at Edward. Roy kept talking to the women, smiling, without even a glance in Edward’s direction. But the finger pointed straight—and unmistakably—at them.

Huh? Edward thought. Before his eyes, the colonel’s finger wagged up and down as if to say: Leave me alone. Go away.

Edward finally got it. Behind him, he heard Alphonse chuckle.

Edward scowled. Here he was, exhausted after two weeks of crawling around in some dusty backwater chasing rumors of a Stone only to return empty-handed. What’s more, he had to wait three hours at that stupid station for a train, and now that he’d caught one, it was so crowded he couldn’t take a nap. Now, when he had found a familiar face against all odds, he was being told in no uncertain terms to buzz off?

The skin around Edward’s temples twitched. “Ignore me, will you!” Edward muttered.

“Aww, you know they say the colonel likes the ladies,” his brother said. “He just doesn’t want competition.” Alphonse looked at their superior, bathed in attention from the well-dressed ladies. He was obviously impressed.

“You don’t mean to say that you’re single!” one of the women exclaimed.

“Why, yes, I am,” Roy replied, unabashedly.

“My! If I had a man like you, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

“Then don’t—at least, not until we reach our station,” Roy said with a twinkle in his eye. “If we’re stuck on this train anyway, we may as well make the best of it with a little light conversation.”

It wasn’t that Edward didn’t understand. Men outnum-bered women in the military by more than ten to one. He could see why the colonel might care for a little conversation with the fairer sex once in a while. But still . . .

“Wave me away with a finger, will you?” Edward growled under his breath.

“Ah, let him have his fun,” Alphonse urged. “We can go say hi later.”

Edward scowled and began walking back to their original spot by the door when suddenly he stopped and whirled back around.

He and Alphonse had just worked up the courage to dust themselves off and try again, and now this. Being ignored was just too much for him to take, and for what? So the colonel could enjoy a little “light conversation”? He had to say something.

“Al.”

“What?”

“Watch this for me,” Edward said, sliding his trunk over toward his brother.

“Sure,” his brother replied hesitantly. “But why?”

“I’m going to go say hello. It’s no fair that he gets to have all the fun.”

“Huh? Weren’t we just going to leave them alone? Hey, wait—”

Turning his back on his brother, Edward grinned and took a deep breath. Then, not wanting to look too mischievous, he put on a broad, fake smile and walked down the car, calling out “Dad!” Edward ran toward the colonel, shouting and waving like the long-lost son Roy never had.

“DAD?” Roy repeated incredulously. “Dad?!” 

Roy glared at Edward, sitting on the seat across from him. Edward’s ploy had worked brilliantly, and Roy, now suspected of being quite married, found himself booted from the conversation. “Wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings,” one of the women had said.

“I don’t believe this,” Roy said.

Edward persisted with his charade until Roy was forced to drag him, clinging to his arm, into the next car. As luck would have it, this one turned out to be much emptier than the last. Roy sat down in a vacant seat, glowering. “Man, first time I see you in how long has it been, and you pull this idiotic stunt?”

“It has been a long time, and you wanted to wag me away with your finger? How rude!” Edward said, grinning. He stuck his tongue out at the colonel.

“He does have a weakness for the ladies,” Havoc agreed from the seat next to Edward.

“Hey, they called out to me first,” Roy replied hotly. “To me. You saw what happened. You were there.”

“Did they now?” Havoc wondered out loud.

“And here I was going to give you some pointers on how to talk to women.”

“Oh,” Havoc returned, an eyebrow raised. “You seemed much too engrossed in the conversation to worry about teaching me.”

“I had to talk to them,” his superior protested, “because you were just standing there in a daze!”

Knowing that, left to their own devices, these two could go on like this for hours, Alphonse interrupted. “Um, so you two had work out here?”

As one, Roy and Havoc stopped their bickering and sighed deeply.

“Well, not here really,” Roy explained. “We couldn’t get on our scheduled train, so we had to make a little detour.”

“Work all day, and then wait three hours for a train? It’s ridiculous,” Havoc added.

“Huh. Sounds like what happened to us,” Edward said. “Our train took forever to come. I wonder what’s up? Maybe it’s something with the scheduling.”

Roy and Havoc stared at him. “What, you haven’t heard?”

Edward raised an eyebrow. So something had been happening in the news, and he’d missed it. “What? What do you mean?”

“We’ve been in the field for two weeks,” Alphonse explained. “I mean literally sleeping out in a field. We haven’t heard anything.”

There had been no inns in the town that Edward and Alphonse’s search for the Philosopher’s Stone had brought them to, so they had slept under the eaves of houses, and when their treasure hunt took them into the surrounding hills, they pitched a tent and slept wherever they happened to be when the sun went down. They had been completely cut off from the modern world, and that meant no news.

“What was that big thing going on in the news before we left, Al?” Edward asked, trying to recall.

“Well,” Alphonse began, “there was that munitions factory that exploded. People were saying it was a miracle that nobody was injured.”

“Oh, right, that was it,” Edward said. “We haven’t listened to a radio since then.”

“So you haven’t heard any of what’s been going on,” Roy concluded, folding his hands in his lap. “In the last two weeks, train lines have been blowing up right and left. That’s why the trains are all off schedule—they don’t have rails to run on. They have to take all these detours on what’s left,” he explained. “Sometimes you’re on a train and they have to take this wild detour. Why, this train came all the way out of Central!”

Edward and Alphonse looked at each other in disbelief. “From Central? All that way?” Edward said, aghast.

“That’s why it’s so crowded,” his brother reasoned out loud.

“And then sometimes you go out on this huge detour only to come across another break in the line,” Roy explained. “The military has donated horses and trucks to transport people in some places.”

“Wow. Sounds like things are really a mess.”

“Not only that. That explosion at the munitions factory wasn’t the last one. People are saying it’s terrorists. We’ve had seven incidents in the East Area alone. And no one’s been caught,” Roy grumbled, brushing a few stray hairs out of his eyes. He looked irritated. “Civilian agencies are supposed to help, but we’re having trouble getting people to cooperate with our investigations. End result? We have practically no information. Blasted civilians,” Roy swore. “Thanks to them, the criminal or criminals have got free run of the country. Our crime scenes are a mess, and all our superiors do is complain about us not doing our job.”

Edward put two and two together. “So,” he asked, “you got called into Central? That’s where you went?”

“You got it,” the colonel replied. “We went down to get encouraged.”

“I think the term is ‘chewed out,’ ” Havoc told him. Many people in the military thought less of Roy because he had risen to the rank of colonel at such a young age—he was still in his twenties. This included some of his superiors, and so every time something went amiss at Eastern Command, Roy would be called down to Central to receive more “encouragement.”

“Wait,” Alphonse asked, “then why are you in civilian clothes?” He seemed genuinely perplexed. “You went to see the bigwigs, right? Shouldn’t you be in uniform?”

Just then the train lurched, and the squealing of brakes sounded from outside the window.

“Whoa!” Edward had just leaned over to adjust the position of his traveling trunk beneath his feet when the brakes hit. The law of inertia got the better of him, and he went tumbling onto the floor of the train. Roy, Havoc, and Alphonse all reached out to grab him, all a moment too late.

The train car filled with screams and dislodged luggage. The train slowed rapidly, the brakes screeching and smoking. Just then, Edward, who had managed to right himself, noticed something through the shivering windows.

Someone was standing out in the field, some distance from the tracks. 

He could see the silhouette clearly, like a cut-out frame of stillness in a world filled with screeching metal, the shouts of the passengers, and the clunk and rattle of their belongings. For a moment, the figure seemed so still in comparison to everything else around him that Edward thought it was a trick of the eye, some shadow cast by a standing stone or the like. But when Edward went to look away, he swore he saw the person smile.

“Huh?” he muttered out loud. Edward blinked and looked again, when the brakes squealed once more. The train came screeching and rattling to a halt.

“An emergency stop! I wonder what happened?” one of the passengers said.

“Is everything all right? We’re still so far from the next station,” said another.

“I wonder if it’s another bombing,” a man sitting near Edward whispered to his neighbor.

Edward looked out the window again, but he could see nothing—only a wide, empty field of brown grass.

“What is it?” Roy said, noticing Edward staring out the window.

“It’s nothing … I think,” Edward said, shaking his head. “Anyone hurt?”

Edward decided he had just seen a shadow of some rock or tree. The train had been shaking so much from the emergency stop—there was no way he could see a person that far out, let alone see them smile. Edward looked around the car. Roy was handing some fallen luggage to a passenger, while Havoc and Alphonse helped another passenger up off the floor of the car.

Most of the passengers had the sense to grab on to something when they heard the brakes. The train hadn’t been going that fast to begin with, so there were no serious injuries. They had been lucky.

One of the train personnel ran outside the train calling word of what had happened through the windows. “Explosion on the rails up ahead!” he shouted. “Another terrorist attack! Military facilities nearby! Passengers are asked either to wait for horse and buggies or walk back to the last station and wait for an emergency train that will take them back to Central.”

The car filled with the sound of grumbling passengers.

“Not again.”

“What’s our military doing, anyway?”

“Sure, they might bring out the trucks and the horses to carry us from station to station, but this is unacceptable! I hope they catch whoever’s doing this soon!”

“Don’t the terrorists send a warning before their attacks? And they still can’t catch them! Our soldiers are just lazy, that’s what it is.”

Grumbling, the passengers stepped out of the train, some waiting for the horses to arrive, others beginning to walk back toward the last station.

“What’s all this complaining about the military …” Edward muttered. “Hey, Colonel, is there something going on that I don’t—” Havoc’s hand slapped over Edward’s mouth mid-question. “—mow a howt?”

“No military titles,” Havoc hissed, removing his hand.

“Huh?” Edward looked confused.

“I’ll explain later. Just keep quiet,” Havoc told him, his face uncharacteristically serious. Edward and Alphonse glanced at each other and kept quiet as they were told. Ahead, Roy had gotten off the train and was talking to one of the crewmen. For the first time, Edward realized Roy was pretending to be a civilian.

“No one was injured?” he asked.

“No one,” the crewman replied. “We expect aid to come shortly, and it should take only a day or so to fix the rails. The explosion was a small one.”

“Good to hear,” Roy said. “How far is it to the next station from here?”

“It’s not unwalkable, but I think it would be faster to go back to the last station, mister.”

“I see,” their incognito superior replied with a frown. “Thanks.”

The crewman smoothed out his hair and put his cap back on with a sigh. “So many accidents these days. I sure hope the army gets its act together soon. Do they even want to catch these people?”

“No kidding,” Roy said, waving to the disgruntled crewman and rejoining Edward and the others.

“I’m not going back to that station just to get sent on some other wild detour. I’m walking to the next station. What will you do?” he said, turning to the Elric brothers.

“If it’s a choice between walking and another detour, I’m for walking,” Edward said. “Al?”

“Are you sure it’s all right?” Alphonse said, a worried look on his face. “I mean, I know it’s out of our jurisdiction, but can we just leave this train here like this?”

“Well,” Edward replied, “seeing as there weren’t any injuries, I think the best thing we could do would be to get back to Eastern Command as quickly as possible. Let’s get going.”

A few people also chose to walk in the same direction as Edward and the others, but most stayed to wait for the horses and buggies.

“What does our military think they’re doing? What do we pay taxes for?!” they overheard one man say.

“How many days has it been with those terrorists running loose?” said another. “The first soldier I see, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind!”

Edward walked, listening to the bitter complaints. He cast a sidelong glance at Roy and Havoc, who walked slightly ahead of him. They marched in silence, their faces drawn stiff into expressionless masks.

They walked past the train as it sat frozen on the tracks, and after their group pulled ahead of the other passengers, Roy spoke at last. “Glad we wore civilian clothes, eh?”

“Yeah,” Edward agreed, looking back at the stopped train. Some of the passengers were taking their frustrations with the military out on their hapless luggage, kicking their bags and cursing.

“This isn’t doing much for the military’s reputation,” Edward noted.

Roy frowned with his eyes. “Like I told you, these terrorists have been taking out rails all over the place for some time now. Only, there’s something that doesn’t quite make sense.”

Edward thought a moment before turning a blank stare to his superior. “What?”

“Well,” Roy explained, “for one, there usually aren’t this many people on the trains the terrorists target. We had one incident after another, but all of them were small scale, usually in places without too many people. And we’d never had an injury. That’s why people still ride the trains.”

Edward nodded, thinking it over. “What I don’t get,” he said after a moment, “is why are people so mad at the military? Aren’t the explosions the terrorists’ fault?”

There was a brief moment of silence.

“There are warnings,” Roy said at length. “They announce the attacks on the radio before they happen. But there’s never enough time to get people on the scene before the deed is done,” he explained. His voice sounded tired. “Not that the civilians pay much attention to that. Luckily, there haven’t been any injuries, but the train stoppages are throwing everyone’s lives out of whack. The terrorists are polite enough to warn us when they’re coming, so why can’t the military stop them … you see?”

Edward nodded. Things were worse than he had imagined.

“There was an explosion the other day in a town that didn’t think much of the military to begin with,” the colonel continued. “Just a little one, on the train line running through town. The rails lay damaged for days, and apparently when the military did come, the officer in command had a real attitude. The whole thing ended in a big fistfight. That town was pretty small, and the whole economy depended on being able to ship goods from there to larger towns. Three days without rail service left the whole place in a pretty grim mood.” Roy sighed. “We haven’t had anything quite like that happen in East Area, but when people hear we’re with the military, we get our share of dirty looks.”

“Thus the civilian clothes,” Edward said.

“Traveling with just the two of us, we wouldn’t be able to do much if people started complaining. And if it came to blows, well, fighting back would just make the military look worse. I figured it makes more sense to lay low and avoid ruffling any civilian feathers.”

“Sounds like things have been rough all around,” Alphonse put in.

“A bit,” Roy agreed. “We’ve got our regular work to deal with, some abductions and bank robberies, and then there’s the terrorists. You can see why I wanted a little pleasant conversation,” he said with a glare at Edward.

“Sorry ’bout that,” Edward said, trying to keep from grinning.

The four walked on, leaving the marooned train behind in the distance. Ahead of them, the rails stretched on as far as the eye could see, until they disappeared in the roiling dust.

“You know,” Edward said, looking up at the dust trails the explosion had sent up to float lazily through the sky above them. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”