Dateline: Omaha, Nebraska — December 5, 1944

The first thing Hana Ishii noticed inside Brock’s Department Store was the smell: floor polish sharp as a blade, cedar that suggested wardrobes she would never open, and a faint sweet cloud of perfume drifting up from the ground floor like a rumor. The second thing was the silence. Not the prison silence of fear and listening, but a deeper, heavier hush—respectful, as if the building itself expected to be admired. Somewhere within the walls, a low metallic hum continued without pause, like an invisible animal breathing. Hana tightened her grip on Yuki’s arm and pulled the nineteen-year-old nursing assistant a half step behind her as Corporal Evans held the glass door open with impatient courtesy. He was too young for his baggy uniform and too thin for the rifle slung over his shoulder, but he gestured as if time belonged to him. The door-holding looked like a ritual of American politeness; to Hana it still felt like a trap. “Hanā-san,” Yuki whispered, eyes fixed on the impossible sight ahead, “he means now. Are we meant to ride this?” Hana followed the girl’s gaze and saw the ugoku kaidan—the moving stairs—flowing upward into darkness like a river made of polished steel. The steps rose from a slot in the marble floor and vanished at the second level, replaced by new steps in an endless loop. Hana’s heart hammered with the primitive certainty that machines were built to grind and cut, not carry people. “Daijōbu,” she whispered, though the word was for herself as much as for Yuki. “It is only metal.” Then she realized that “only” was no longer a word she trusted.

Six Weeks Earlier: Camp Alliance, Nebraska

The bus brakes hissed and released a cloud of steam into late-October air so cold it felt clean enough to slice. Hana pressed her forehead against the vibrating window and watched the landscape that had stayed the same for three days: sky, flat earth, and now fences. The wire was new, stretched taut between thick wooden posts under a weak sun that seemed ashamed to shine. A guard barked “Hayaku” in mangled Japanese, turning the sharp command into something dull and heavy, as if even language arrived here tired. The women moved stiffly, bodies aching from transit, and Hana kept a protective hand on Yuki’s back, guiding her forward like a patient whose legs might give out. Yuki trembled less from cold than from the stories they whispered in the dark holds of ships—stories of American monsters who took pleasure in cruelty. Hana did not believe stories; she believed patterns. And the pattern of war said the defeated were punished. They were marched into a long, low building that smelled overwhelmingly of lye soap and boiled potatoes. A sign posted on the wall was printed in English and, shockingly, in precise Japanese: NOTICE TO CIVILIAN INTERNEES. ALL PROCEDURES GOVERNED BY THE GENEVA CONVENTION, 1929. Hana read the Japanese text aloud for the women who could not read, her voice steady despite the armed men. The notice spoke of rights, inspections by the Swiss legation, correspondence, regulated labor. It read like bureaucratic fantasy, disconnected from rifles and shouted orders. They stood in line while a freckled soldier processed their names from a list without looking at faces. Hana watched his pencil move slowly, methodically, and decided indifference was the true enemy. Indifference was colder than Nebraska wind because it did not need to hate you to erase you. They were ordered to strip for medical inspection. The women huddled together, shame warring with fear, but the inspection was brief—powder, checks, delousing—conducted by a stern Army nurse who seemed more concerned with procedure than humiliation. Afterward they were issued supplies from a cage: two coarse cotton shifts, a bar of soap, a thin towel. The guard at the cage was older, his face lined like dried mud. When Hana stepped forward, he tossed the items at her. She flinched, expecting a blow or a curse. There was nothing. He looked past her to Yuki, who shivered visibly, teeth chattering, eyes too wide. The guard sighed with profound boredom, turned, and grabbed a second wool blanket from the stack behind him. He threw it onto the pile. It landed with a soft thud—an extra ration, a violation of the expected script. “Take it,” he grunted without meeting Hana’s eyes. The gesture was not kindness. It was impatience, the dismissal of an adult dealing with a troublesome child. Yet that night, in the dark barrack, Yuki cried silently into the extra blanket as if it had fallen from heaven. Hana lay awake staring at the wooden slats above her, wind howling outside thin walls, thinking: I prepared for brutality. I did not prepare for clean wool and neutral rules.

Monotony: The Geneva Convention as a Cage

Six weeks passed. The brutality Hana braced for never materialized; it was replaced by something far more corrosive—monotony. Days at Camp Alliance bled together, distinguished only by frost thickness on the windows. The routine was rigid, governed by bells and whistles: wake, roll call, watery oatmeal, barracks cleaning, watery soup, laundry detail, watery stew, roll call, sleep. Geneva, Hana learned, was not a shield against cruelty so much as a guarantee of structured boredom, an argument with barbed wire conducted in paperwork. The extra blanket remained a simple object of warmth, nothing more and nothing less. They were ghosts haunting their own lives, alive enough to obey, too tired to imagine. Then, on a Tuesday in early December, the routine broke. After morning meal, a sergeant entered the mess hall with Mr. Okabe, an older Japanese American Nisei who served as camp interpreter. Okabe’s face was careful, as if he had learned long ago that expression invited suspicion from both sides. A notice was pinned to the bulletin board. The sergeant spoke; Okabe translated in a voice too flat to hide the weight of the words. “In accordance with international agreements regarding paid labor for civilian internees, the camp commandant has approved a new work detail.” The women stopped eating. Spoons hovered above tin bowls. Work. The word landed like a stone. Okabe added quickly, “This detail is voluntary. Transportation will be provided. Compensation will be issued in camp scrip redeemable at the commissary.” A woman named Chio, a teacher from Guam whose eyes were sharper than her thin frame suggested, spoke first. “What work, Okabe-san?” Okabe cleared his throat. “Non-military. General labor.” The vagueness was all the confirmation fear needed. Whispers erupted. Kōjō, factory. Danyaku, munitions. “It’s a trick,” Chio hissed toward Hana. “They mean to make us build weapons to kill our brothers. A violation.” Hana watched the American sergeant chewing tobacco, seemingly oblivious to the panic he had caused. If it were munitions, she reasoned, would he look so bored? Or was boredom part of the performance, a mask to make horror feel ordinary? “Yuki,” Hana whispered, “do not look frightened. Look empty.” Yuki’s knuckles whitened on the bench edge. “I cannot,” she breathed. Hana raised her voice and addressed Okabe directly. “The Geneva Convention requires specificity. What is this ‘general labor’?” The sergeant spat into a can and muttered something; Okabe glanced down at his clipboard as if the answer embarrassed him. “For a civilian contractor in the city after business hours,” he said. “Cleaning.” Hana pressed again. Okabe looked up, gaze meeting Hana’s. “Six nights a week. Cleaning a department store. Brock’s Department Store in Omaha.” The revelation was so anticlimactic, so bizarre, it met confused silence. A department store—hyakkaten. Chio scoffed. “They mock us. They make us scrub floors while they shop.” “After hours,” Okabe snapped with a faint edge of irritation. “Closed. Empty.” The specificity was disarming. It was not a factory. Not a base. Not a weapon. It was a shop. Hana looked around the mess hall. The women’s fear shifted into bewilderment. Why? No one answered. Hana knew only this: it was not the barrack, not the laundry room, not boiled potatoes and lye soap. It was a way out, if only for hours. “I will go,” Hana said, standing. Yuki gasped and stood immediately. “I will go too.” One by one, six other women rose. The sergeant made marks on his roster with the satisfaction of a man completing paperwork. “Bus leaves at 1900 hours,” Okabe said. As they filed out, Chio caught Hana’s sleeve. “Be careful, Ishii-san,” she warned. “They show you the store for a reason. They want to show you what you have lost. They want to break your spirit.” Hana pulled her thin coat tighter. “My spirit is already worn thin,” she replied. “Perhaps it needs to see something new.”

The Gray Bus and the City’s Stare

At 1900 hours a repurposed school bus arrived, painted dull gray, windows rattling. Their assigned guard was Corporal Evans, thin, acne-scarring his jawline, rifle carried with self-conscious awkwardness as if it weighed more than he did. He counted them—eight women—and motioned them aboard. “No talking. Sit away from the windows,” he ordered. Hana sat on cold vinyl with Yuki beside her. The bus smelled of diesel and damp wool. As the camp gates slid behind them, Hana felt her stomach knot. Chio’s warning echoed: they want to break you. For twenty minutes the bus rattled through darkness over frozen farm roads. Then lights appeared on the horizon—real lights, not camp bulbs, but a living glow. They entered Omaha. Despite wartime dimouts, neon signs buzzed red and blue advertising beer and motor hotels. Cars moved slowly, headlights casting weak beams. Hana leaned back away from the glass by instinct but could not stop herself from looking. Civilians walked bundled in thick coats. They looked well-fed. Their movements were confident, unhurried, as if tomorrow was promised. At a stoplight, a group of men in factory overalls stood smoking. One noticed the gray bus, squinted, and saw the women’s faces. His expression curdled. He pointed; the others turned. They did not shout. They did not throw anything. They simply stared—cold, unified contempt. Yuki shrank against Hana and pulled her coat over her head. Hana forced herself to remain still, gaze fixed forward, refusing to meet their eyes. She felt like a creature in a traveling zoo, paraded for the town’s disgust. At the next corner it happened again. A woman pulling a wagon stopped and spat on the pavement as they passed. Hana’s mind cataloged these acts not as danger but as atmosphere: the public hatred that could make rules irrelevant if it ever became convenient. A wadded newspaper lay kicked into the aisle. Hana could read the masthead—Omaha World-Herald—and below it a headline: “Marines Face Hell on Peleliu.” Beside it, a smaller column, an editorial with a title Hana could make out: “Why Are We Coddling the Enemy in Our Own Backyard?” A chill ran through her colder than the night air. This was the voice behind the stares. Hana looked up at Corporal Evans slouched near the driver. He was watching her. He had seen her read the headline. For a moment he held her gaze, impassive, then looked away out his own window as if dismissing her, the newspaper, and the entire town at once. His indifference, Hana realized, was in its own way a shield. He was not there to protect Omaha from them. He was there to deliver a work detail and prevent escape. Nothing more. The bus turned into a dark alley and stopped at a steel loading dock behind a massive building lit by spotlights: BROCK’S. “Out,” Evans ordered, voice cracking slightly. The alley silence was heavy, the civilian stares replaced by dark brick and cold air. Hana ushered Yuki down, heart pounding. The hostile town was behind them, yet she felt they had traded one cage for a larger, stranger one.

Brock’s: A Kingdom of Things

Evans unlocked the heavy steel door with a jangling key. Air rolled out warm and dry, carrying an overpoweringly complex scent: beeswax polish, cedarwood, and a faint sweet cloud of lavender. It was the smell of a world they had been told no longer existed. Evans flicked a bank of switches. The store did not blaze with daytime brightness; functional work lights snapped on, casting long shadows that made mannequins look like witnesses. The women stepped inside and stopped dead. They stood at the edge of a vast polished marble floor. Under canvas dust covers, behind thick glass panes, arranged in endless rows, was more—more fabric, more shoes, more objects than Hana had seen in her entire village. The silence here was absolute, heavier than barracks silence; it felt respectful, as if they had entered a shrine. Pale smiling mannequins stood frozen in elegant poses, draped in silk dresses and fur-collared coats, hats with delicate veils, leather handbags in plaster hands. Hana stared at a rack of women’s blouses—more clothing than her mother had owned in a lifetime. She thought of her mother’s kimono, patched twice at the elbow, fabric worn thin as paper. She thought of Camp Alliance’s single wool blanket, utilitarian warmth clutched like a lifeline. Here, blankets were stacked in piles dyed colors Hana had forgotten existed. This was not a store. It was an assault. Two women began to weep quietly, horrified sobs. Evans’s bark cracked through the space, unnaturally loud. “Hey. Mops. Floor. You know—soji.” He made a scrubbing motion, as if language could be replaced by pantomime. The women seemed incapable of moving. Yuki drifted toward the cosmetics counter like a sleepwalker. Glass and mirrors formed a fortress. Gold-topped bottles stood in glittering armies. She stopped at a perfume display; the liquid inside was pale amber. Slowly, mesmerized, Yuki extended one trembling finger—not to steal, but to touch the cool glass and confirm reality. Hana’s whisper cut sharp. “Dame.” She grabbed Yuki’s wrist and yanked it back. Yuki flinched as if struck, shame flooding her face when the trance broke. “Do not touch anything,” Hana commanded low and fierce. “We are not here to look. We are here to work. Look only at the floor.” She released Yuki, but as Hana turned away her own gaze snagged on the endless displays: polished leather shoes, stacks of furniture, entire kitchens waiting for owners. Hana had prepared for bombs, for starvation, even for execution. She had not prepared for casual abundance. Chio’s warning returned and transformed. The Americans were not breaking their spirit by showing them this. They did not need to. This was simply their world—an ocean of surplus existing simultaneously with the foxholes and ration lines of Hana’s homeland. A wave of sickening despair washed over Hana, not anger but resignation. If a nation could waste this much beauty, she thought, if this is their normal, then the war is already over.

Ghosts Mopping a Palace

“First floor,” Evans called, checking his watch with impatience. “Mop the main aisles. One hour. Then housewares on the second floor.” The women bent to their tasks. The harsh chemical smell of cleaning solution rose from buckets, a familiar scent of labor that briefly masked perfume but could not erase the sight. Hana pushed a mop across marble that reflected light like water. Each stroke felt like an insult and a confession. Ghosts mopping a palace. When the hour ended, the marble gleamed under work lights. Evans’s boots squeaked as he made a cursory inspection, satisfied or at least no longer annoyed. “All right,” he said, shifting his rifle. “Second floor. Let’s go.” He led them toward the store’s center where a grand atrium opened upward. Upper floors stacked like balconies, brass railings catching dim light. Hana saw a wide traditional marble staircase curving gracefully into shadows. But Evans stopped before something else—a machine that resembled a staircase only in purpose. Its steps were grooved interlocking metal within a polished casing, and it emitted that low steady hum Hana had heard upon entry. It was moving. Steps rose from a gap in the floor, ascended smoothly, vanished at the second level, replaced by new steps in an endless loop. Buckets clattered onto marble. Yuki seized Hana’s sleeve, fingernails digging into fabric. “Hana,” she hissed, strangled. Hana had no answer. She imagined gears churning beneath the floor and metal teeth designed to grip—or grind. Behind her, Chio whispered with terrifying certainty: “It is a trap. It will shred us.” Evans turned, impatience etched onto his young face as if their fear insulted his schedule. “What’s the problem now?” he snapped. “It’s just stairs. Kaidan. Second floor. Move.” No one moved. Evans exhaled a long frustrated sigh. “Jesus… H Christ.” He muttered about wasted time and stepped onto the moving tread with one long stride. His body glided upward. He balanced easily, hand resting lightly on the black rubber handrail moving with him. In seconds he ascended, shrinking until the machine swallowed him over the second-floor edge. His voice echoed down, disembodied: “Well, come on.” The silence he left behind was heavier than the hum. Hana stared at the void where he vanished. This was not a tool of war, she realized. It was a tool of leisure. They had tamed steel and made it serve them lazily. Evans’s voice echoed again, sharper now: “I ain’t got all night. Get up here or you’re all on report.” The threat hung in perfumed air. Report meant punishment, a return to gray barracks, loss of meager privileges. More than that, it meant failure—and Hana could not afford to fail when seven other women were watching her for what to do next.

Hana Steps On

Hana looked at the ugoku kaidan—the moving stairs—and listened to its hum. The sound was the worst part: oily, constant, effortless, indifferent. She watched the point where steps emerged perfectly formed, and the point where they disappeared into hidden machinery. Chio whispered again: “A grinder. For animals.” Hana snapped back, voice sharper than intended, “It is for shoes. American shoes.” She looked at Yuki. The girl’s face was pale, tears welling; she was paralyzed. Logic would not move her. Brutality would not. Only authority. Hana straightened her back. She would not be defeated by a staircase. She grabbed Yuki’s hand; it was ice cold and slick with sweat. “Ikō,” Hana said. “We are going.” Yuki shook her head, trying to pull away. “No, no, I cannot, Hana-san. Please.” Hana tightened her grip and pulled Yuki forward until they stood at the edge of moving plates. Steps slid past like metal tongues. Hana watched their speed. Slower than walking pace. “Daijōbu,” she said firmly, as much for herself as for Yuki, staring at the handrail instead of the teeth. “It is only metal.” She thought of the cold wind at Camp Alliance, of Omaha’s hostile stares, of endless gray soup. This was better, she told herself. This was different. She took a short sharp breath, lifted her foot, and did not step so much as allow the machine to take her. A disorienting lurch followed, weightlessness as the step collected her and began to rise. Hana stumbled. Yuki screamed—a short thin sound swallowed by the atrium. Hana’s free hand shot out and clamped onto the rubber handrail. It was solid. Stable. Moving with her. She hauled Yuki fully onto the step beside her. The younger woman collapsed against her sobbing, eyes squeezed shut. Hana held her up, held the rail, and waited for grinding, for pain, for the bite of prophecy. Nothing happened. After three seconds, Hana’s pounding heart slowed. Terror did not vanish; it subsided, replaced by a strange electric curiosity. Hana opened her eyes. The ground floor fell away beneath them. Marble squares shrank. Abandoned mops and buckets looked like forgotten toys. Hana looked up and saw Corporal Evans waiting on the second floor, leaning against brass railing, expression of complete boredom. The movement was smooth—smoother than the rattling bus. No vibration, no danger. Hana was rising, flying slowly toward the next level. The escalator’s polished wood panels glided past her. Cool air moved against her face. She was riding the ugoku kaidan, and the sensation—effortless ascent without exertion—felt like a pocket of time disconnected from war and wire. As they neared the top, Hana watched steps ahead fold flat and slide into a grated slot. A comb-like steel plate waited. “Lift your feet,” Hana ordered, pulling Yuki upright. Hana stepped onto stationary floor. The transition jolted her body; she wobbled, caught herself against a display of kitchen knives. Yuki stumbled too, lurching forward onto polished linoleum. The combination of fear, relief, and motion proved too much. A sound escaped her—not a sob but a high involuntary giggle, childlike astonishment. Yuki clapped hands over her mouth, eyes wide with horror at her own lapse. Evans shook his head, baffled by their reaction. Hana barely noticed him. The giggle echoed in her ears as the most human sound she’d heard in months: the sound of a person briefly forgetting she was a prisoner.

Soft Power in Brass and Steel

One by one, the other women followed. Their terror evaporated as they watched Hana and Yuki arrive unharmed. They stepped off clumsily but with faces no longer fearful—stunned, disoriented. Chio, skeptic and teacher, was pale, lips parted as she looked back at the machine that had delivered her. Hana looked too. The escalator continued its effortless climb, humming, indifferent. It did not care that they had ridden it. It existed for one purpose: to move people upward for convenience. Hana thought of propaganda posters that showed Americans as fanged demons, their cities as flames, their people starving. Those posters never showed this. This machine was not a weapon, not cruel. In its own way it was more terrifying. It represented waste—an excess of power, material, ingenuity—dedicated to something as trivial as shopping. A nation that could build moving stairs to sell hats and kitchen knives operated on a level Hana could not comprehend. This was the true enemy, she realized. Not Corporal Evans’s indifference. Not Omaha’s hostile stare. Not the extra wool blanket. The enemy was this shining humming symbol of soft power, a power so vast it did not need to be cruel. It simply was. Evans broke the spell. “You going to stare at it all night or you going to clean?” He pointed down an aisle of gleaming white refrigerators and stoves—the housewares department. Hana pulled Yuki to her feet. The girl’s cheeks were flushed; her eyes bright with something dangerous: curiosity. “Gomen nasai, Hana-san,” Yuki whispered, ashamed of her laughter. “Ii,” Hana replied, quiet but firm, pressing a rag into Yuki’s hands. “It is fine.” Hana looked back once at the escalator. It had not broken her spirit as Chio warned. It had vaporized certainty, replacing rigid belief with hollow doubt. “Work,” Hana said. For two hours they polished, scrubbed, wiped fingerprints from oven doors and refrigerator handles that stood like silent sentinels. The work was intimate. They were touching objects of an American home—items so luxurious they felt like stage props. Hana ran her rag over a chrome-plated toaster. Its surface curved like a mirror. Her exhausted face stared back, alien inside this bright clean world of domestic machines.

The Descent and the Return to Cold

At 2:45 a.m., Evans tapped his watch. “All right. Stow the rags. We’re done.” Relief passed through the women like a quiet exhale. Their backs ached; hands were raw from chemicals. They gathered supplies near the atrium—and there it was again, not the same machine but its twin. This escalator flowed relentlessly downward, a metallic waterfall into darkness. Looking down its moving length created an optical illusion of falling forward. Yuki recoiled instinctively; her brief laughter seemed months away. Chio stared with arms crossed, not terror now but cold analysis. Evans opened his mouth, anticipating delay, but never got the chance. Hana walked past him. She did not pause. She did not grip Yuki’s hand. She approached the top step, watched it flatten and move away, and stepped onto it. The handrail slid cool under her palm. The sensation of descent was immediate, a smooth controlled drop. Hana looked down at brass dividers flickering past and felt something settle in her: not control, but acceptance. This machine was not her enemy. Not her friend. It was a fact—like Nebraska wind, like wire fences. A tool built by people with enough power to waste it on convenience. She felt, rather than saw, the other women step on behind her. They followed without a sound. The ride down became quiet, meditative. Eight gray-clad women glided silently through the heart of a sleeping store. Mannequins’ pale faces seemed to mock them in dim light. They stepped off onto marble, collected mops and buckets, movements quick and practiced. Evans led them back through stockroom darkness into freezing air at the loading dock. The transition was brutal. Warm perfumed humming world sealed behind steel; raw cold rushed in. The bus ride back to Camp Alliance was conducted in absolute silence. No whispers. No weeping. Hana stared out the window but did not see Omaha passing by. She was no longer afraid of civilians and angry newspapers. Their hatred was simple, human, understandable—hot like fire. The store was cold. The escalator was cold. Its power was systematic, indifferent, absolute. It did not need to hate. Hana leaned her head against the cold glass, engine vibration in her skull, still feeling the phantom sensation of effortless glide pulling her up and down.

Back in Barracks 4: The Story Nobody Can Hear

They filed off the gray bus in pre-dawn chill, footsteps crunching frozen gravel. A searchlight swept from guard tower, pinning them in white glare, then moving on as if bored. Evans marched them to Barracks 4 and watched them enter, his responsibility ending. The door swung shut. The change was immediate and violent. The barrack air was thick, hot, stale—unwashed bodies, chamber pots, lingering boiled cabbage. After Brock’s clean sharp perfumed air, it was suffocating. Most women slept, breathing a chorus of whistles and snores, but a few sat near the stove waiting. Mrs. Sato, older, matriarch by force of personality and survival, looked up with sharp suspicious eyes. “Well,” she rasped, “they did not take you to the munitions factory.” The eight women did not answer. They moved quietly, removing coats and boots, exhaustion of mind layered over body. Yuki, however, vibrated with nervous energy, too full of sights to stay silent. “Sato-san,” she whispered, face lit by red stove glow, “it was not a factory. It was a palace.” Mrs. Sato scoffed. “A palace? They feed you propaganda and you swallow it like a gull.” “No,” Yuki insisted, voice rising with need to be believed. “The floors were like glass. The clothes—so many. The lights.” She swallowed, then rushed on. “But that was not the strangest thing. They have stairs. Ugoku kaidan. They move.” Women at the stove stared as if she’d lost her mind. “What nonsense?” someone muttered. “Moving stairs like a carnival ride.” “Yes,” Yuki said desperately, gesturing. “For people. You stand still and it carries you up. A river of metal. We all rode it. Hana-san saw it too.” Eyes turned to Hana. Hana stood by her bunk unlacing boots. She felt the weight of their gaze and knew if she confirmed Yuki’s story it would meet scorn. It sounded like a child’s dream, like shell-shock. These women understood starvation, labor, death, duty. They could not understand a moving staircase in a perfumed building. “Yuki is tired,” Hana said quietly without turning. “She is confusing what she saw.” Yuki made a broken sound. “I am not. Hana-san—tell them.” Hana finally turned and met Yuki’s desperate flushed face, then the hard suspicious faces of Mrs. Sato and the others. She felt the chasm open: those who had seen, those who had not, and no bridge between. “Get in your bunk, Yuki,” Hana said flatly. “It is over.” Yuki stared, betrayed, then fled to her corner. Hana sat on her cot and pulled the scratchy wool blanket over her legs. Weeks ago that blanket had been a complex object; now it seemed honest. Functional. It did not pretend to be a palace. Hana lay back staring at the slats above, barrack silent again except sleepers’ breathing and Yuki’s muffled sobs. Hana tried to find words for herself. The escalator was not magic. It was engineering—tons of steel, precision gears, electrical power. An engine. But it did not pull a plow, turn a turbine, move a tank. It moved shoppers. Hana realized with icy clarity her language lacked words for this specific colossal waste: a nation diverting metal, power, genius to a trivial civilian purpose. One thought formed, devastating in its simplicity: How can we possibly win? The isolation she felt was not only barbed wire; it was a chasm of experience. The escalator had separated her not only from America, but from her own people, because it had given her knowledge that sounded like madness.

The Second Night: When the Machine Goes Dark

The next evening the gray bus arrived at 1900 hours, brakes hissing in frozen dark. The eight women assembled. Yuki was quiet now, pale but composed, close to Hana, eyes holding guarded curiosity instead of stark terror. Chio looked changed too; skepticism had turned into watchfulness. Hana felt a strange pull as she boarded. It was not excitement. It was intellectual hunger—a desire to understand. That frightened her more than contempt or guards. She was no longer only enduring. She had become an observer. The bus rumbled through Omaha. This time Hana did not shrink from windows. She looked at neon signs, civilians hurrying with paper parcels, faces not demonic but complex—people living inside a reality of surplus. They reached the loading dock door; Evans unlocked it. Beeswax, cedar, perfume washed over them again. It no longer felt like assault. It felt unsettlingly like the smell of work. They crossed the silent floor toward the atrium, buckets and rags in hand. Hana looked up and her stomach dropped. The low oily omnipresent hum was gone. She stared at the ugoku kaidan. The moving stairs were still. Grooved metal steps sat motionless, frozen mid-climb. The machine was dark. It was only a staircase now—strange, inert. Hana stopped and felt a profound, illogical pang of disappointment. She had wanted to see it move again, to feel that effortless glide, to confirm the previous night was real. Now it was just cold dead metal. Evans noticed them stopping. “What’s wrong?” Hana pointed. “It is not moving.” Evans glanced and shrugged. “Oh yeah. Guess they shut it off. Save electricity, maybe. War effort and all.” He said it casually, as if he’d explained a broken mop. He pointed at the wide marble staircase. “Guess you hoof it.” Save electricity. To him the machine was convenience. To Hana it was revelation. She realized its power over her did not rely on movement. Its existence was enough. Whether it moved or not, it had been built. It existed in the world, and it had changed her.

A Nod in the Aisle

Hana turned away from the dead escalator and picked up her bucket. “Yuki, Chio—the marble stairs,” she said evenly. “Second floor. We have work.” She began to walk, and the others followed. As Hana passed Corporal Evans, she paused for a fraction of a second and looked at him—this young bored American boy with a rifle whose true power lay in the refrigerators and moving stairs he guarded without understanding. Hana Ishii, civilian internee, gave him a short perceptible nod. It was not surrender. It was acknowledgement of a terrible new understanding: that the war was not only fought with guns, but with the ability to build unnecessary things and still have enough left to fight. Evans, confused yet sensing something shift, nodded back. Hana turned and began climbing the cold marble stairs. Each step required effort; that effort felt suddenly symbolic, as if she had been returned to her proper place in the world—below, climbing, straining—while above, somewhere in the darkness of the second floor, America waited with its quiet humming conveniences turned off only because it could afford to choose when to waste and when to conserve. Hana climbed anyway. She carried her bucket. She worked. But inside her, something had been replaced: fear of cruelty had been supplanted by fear of scale. In the warm perfumed heart of a sleeping department store, Hana had met an enemy more unsettling than hatred—an enemy whose power did not need to rage, because it could simply exist, polished and humming, in the dark.