I’ll stay alive just to follow you home
Follow you home
Dark.
Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark.
Dark. The world is dark and rough. The world rubs against her unpleasantly, making her gorge rise from the feeling which is both rough and slimy. That the slime which coats the world is her own sweat and bile never occurs to her, though it has only been twenty minutes since she vomited, and her breathing is stinted and difficult, the air is so thick. The air is rotten, too. It smells like people have died where she is. It smells like more people will die.
The world grates at her small thighs, underneath her crotch and butt, and out behind her. The world digs into her wrists, which have ceased writhing since she vomited. Now the only things moving in this room are her mouth and her small, flat chest, which will probably begin sprouting small breasts in the next year. Looking into this world, nothing can be seen; not even the way her mouth slowly forms words; one, single word, in fact. Listening closely, it is a series of three syllables, repeated in close tandem, but none of them are clear enough to understand. Only that she is speaking them without stopping, and that she seems to have placed everything in these three syllables. Soon, perhaps, even they will stop as the air becomes too thick for her small lungs, already tightened from the smoke she has inhaled. She will not die, but she will feel as though she might when the coughs begin to rack her small body.
The world digs into her back. There are splinters on the world, and she has found them; one was large and caused her to bleed slightly. All of them sting, and they will sting more when she begins to cough, quickly tensing and relaxing the muscles in her back which are now stuck full of wooden slivers.
The world is hard and cold on her legs and buttocks. A single, brave insect crawls near her left thigh, and she knows that she will kill it when it nears; perhaps it knows it too, because it keeps its distance. Perhaps it is waiting for her to die. Perhaps it is used to this routine. The world probably has more insects than this one—she can hear them skittering somewhere, though she does not know precisely where—the world has a powerful echo to it. Even the sound of her breathing, ragged though it may be, is amplified many times over.
She does not know if the world will feed her or not. She has not been in this world for more than eight hours, and her stomach is growling but she knows she can survive for at least another day without food. Water, on the other hand…she expects that somebody will feed her in this world. Otherwise, she will probably end up gnawing at her own flesh. Perhaps this will free her anyway. This does not seem overly morbid to her. Very little seems overly morbid to her. Perhaps nothing does. She is a tough girl at heart, and that is why she exists in the world. Because she is tough, and somebody is afraid.
She thinks, in that small part of her mind which has not shut itself off, conserving energy and waiting, that they have every reason to be afraid. She knows this because of the small tickle that is not only in her heart or stomach or head, but is in all three of those places and everywhere else on her body. It is a tickle which is a bit similar to licking a live wire which is connected to a dying double-A battery; surprising at first, not particularly pleasant, but at the same time, if only faintly…
Powerful.
Yes.
She feels it.
It will not be long now.
She continues whispering. Three syllables. Three syllables. Three.
Over and over.
Not long now.
What really bothered her were the screams.
There were two distinct people screaming not far off—or maybe very far off. Their captivity was being perpetuated in a place which was overall fairly modern—white plastic on the walls, unfathomable machines everywhere—but it still echoed like a castle. The worst of it was that while they were both female screams, she had no idea whose they were. Peoples screams were not related to their voices, not really—she could not listen, and then after a moment, say, “Oh. That one is Chie. That other one is Natsuki.”
What it boiled down to, in the end, was that she had absolutely no idea if they were torturing Chie.
She didn’t even know if Chie was still alive.
After the blast, I thought we were dead. That helicopter seemed as big as the sun—the men wearing the patch that’s all over the walls here pulled me out and shot it down, and I guess maybe we’d be dead otherwise, but I don’t really know. I passed out…I think. Or I was stuck with something.
She didn’t think she was, though. Nothing ached as though it had been roughly jabbed, and she knew that if she had been gently pricked, she’d have seen it coming. Aoi Senou was sometimes called a flake, but she was one of the more observant women that Chie knew—second only to Chie herself, she was sometimes told.
Her first cellmate had been Yuuichi Tate. That had been awkward at best, but it would have been worse if he was fully conscious. They were keeping him fairly pumped with drugs, probably because his entire left arm was in a cast which had a fairly consistent red stain on its underside. They hadn’t told either of them what was wrong, but Aoi had a fairly good idea; it didn’t take a lot of thinking about, really.
Her current cellmate was Mai.
Mai did not look well. She had not been injured, (though none of them—to Aoi’s knowledge—had gotten out without their share of cuts and minor burns) but she looked as though she had been in and out of World War One in the time she had been absent. Aoi had tried twice to talk to the girl, but Mai had not even looked up at her. She had simply stayed where she was, half-past fetal, and stared at the place she had come from. This had concerned Aoi far more than the blood dried on the girl’s shirt near her hip.
Even worse than that, though, if such a thing was possible, was the girl’s flesh. It was completely covered in gooseflesh so thick that it looked as though the girl had developed a hide of skin-covered scales. It was cold and hard to the touch; and there was something else;
had to be coincidence
it had almost seemed like it was charged with electricity. She had touched Mai each time she had attempted to speak with her, and both times she had received static shocks that had actually sparked in the air. Her memory was dulled by the sheer surprise of the thing, but she could swear that she lost feeling in the limb for a solid ten seconds after, too.
Coincidence.
Where would she even get that kind of shock?
Stupid coincidence.
What does that make Reito, then?
Stupid coincidence.
It felt a little like somebody was pushing these thoughts into her head. Aoi Senou was not a person who believed in coincidence.
Stupid coincidence.
Another scream. Aoi dug her fingernails into her palm without thinking about it.
“Chie,” she whispered.
Reito looked like Mai does, only minus the shell-shock. He looked like he was just…exhausted. Like he had just come back from a five-hour bout of getting his ass kicked by a sumo wrestler, only minus the bruises and streak marks.
No, that’s not quite right.
It wasn’t.
It was closer to the truth to say that he looked as though he was still in the ring. Still standing, eighteenth round, and sorry, folks, bellringer’s taken ill with the flu, so let’s all enjoy the show, shall we?
“She’s fine.”
Aoi almost shrieked in shock. Mai’s voice was haggard and raspy, but it was still a veritable delight to hear. Chie began to slide herself towards the girl, but as she neared her to put a supportive arm around her (Aoi would never outwardly admit that she simply needed a hug, but she did and she goddamn well knew it) a spark snapped in the air between them and she jerked backwards with a muffled cry.
Mai, moving slowly, looked up at her.
“Mai,” Aoi whispered. “What the hell is going on?”
Mai only smiled emptily.
“Please,” Aoi said. “Tell me.”
Mai shook her head with the resigned look of a woman facing a firing squad.
“I want to help,” Aoi said. “I want to do something. I want to” find Chie “…help.” She felt that little tug at her, the little thorn in the side of her sanity. That little niggle that threatened to reduce her into a screaming, drooling puddle. It almost seemed like that would be a relief. Probably it would.
Aoi wouldn’t let it happen.
Not with the screams.
Not when those screams could still be her.
Never. And she would be dipped and fucked if she would let one shell-shocked girl—what her father would have called a numb broad, much to her mother’s discontent—drag her down, even if it was Mai.
Aoi stood up. She walked to where Mai lay, and offered her hand to the girl. Mai looked at it numbly.
“Take it.” Aoi’s voice rang of the kind of sturdiness that allowed her to tell herself that she was fighting the insanity. After all, when placed in conditions which should drive a person insane, what could a person do? Go insane, or toughen up and fight.
Her father had said that, too. He had been a good man, no matter what his mother had said. No matter what anybody had said. And she would be good too.
Even if it wound up being her next time in those chambers, screaming as they did God-knew-what to her.
“Take it,” she repeated. “We’re leaving.”
“We can’t.” Mai made a compelling argument. They were surrounded on all sides by plastic, and probably behind that, metal. Aoi, however, like a good bastion of strength, ignored this argument.
“We are. Maybe not now, and maybe not for a long time, but we certainly won’t get anywhere sitting down.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Is it?”
The truth was, Aoi thought in some dark recess of her mind that Mai had gone insane. That she had gone insane a long time ago, and that the happy, carefree Mai that she had been with after her first year at Fuuka academy and through most of the summer was a sham, a façade that cracked on a whim. The strong Mai was either gone or hidden, and she knew of maybe two people who knew where it had gone. It hurt her a little, knowing she wasn’t one of them, but not much, because she was assured in that Mai still cared for her.
After all, she still loved Mai.
And you, Chie.
I’ll come for you.
“Take it.”
You sound like a samurai. Didn’t they always wind up dying gloriously or committing suicide? Hell, you don’t even know how to punch a man without jamming your wrist, and I doubt seriously if any of the black-clad bastards here would care much for you slapping them like a wounded lover.
If I were a samurai, I could get out of this joint.
She stopped that train of thought there—self-doubt would get her nowhere. She had what she had, and what she had would do. Wasn’t that what Chie always said?
Or was that you?
Don’t really care. Sounds too naïve to work in the real world anyway, but fuck it, this hardly seems like the real world to me.
“I’ll shock you again.”
“If that’s true,” Aoi said, “I’ll deal wi—” she stopped.
The walls.
Covered with plastic, yes, but also with machines. Arcane machinery that looked like it belonged either in the future or the distant past.
Aoi thought out loud. “If that’s true, then I think there’s something to this place after all.”
Mai looked almost vexed. The scream again, and she flinched, and so did Aoi.
“Who is that, do you think?” Aoi tried to speak casually, but it came out strangled.
Mai shook her head. “Don’t want to think about it.”
Aoi got the feeling that she would have to, like it or not, and in the near future.
Then Mai took her hand, and she felt her entire arm go numb. Her face contorted and she let out an agonized cry, but she made sure that Mai was standing before she let go and dropped to the ground, clutching her dead arm.
At this, Mai’s face immediately gained some semblance of life, as though the worry-lines she had acquired over the past year had suddenly reformed themselves, transforming her, like a veritable attractive female Pinocchio, into a real girl. “Are you okay?” she asked, but made no move to help Aoi. This was probably wise.
Her tailbone hurt, but Aoi was otherwise okay. She stood tenderly and gave a V-for-victory. “Just dandy,” she said as brightly as she could manage. Feeling started to return to her arm almost immediately, which helped. “Feel like I’m drowning, but you know.” This was, in fact, a clever way of changing the subject, from we’re in a prison cell to my, this is hot weather, don’t you think?
Mai just blinked at her. “What?”
“It’s hot.”
“And? We’re in a prison cell.” Mission failed. Fission mailed. Excuse me, sir, I believe that I have a split atom for delivery to this address, if you’ll just sign here, please? Fission delivered. What? Aoi couldn’t help herself; she began to crack up. The tension in the room broke immediately, and a minute later, Mai began to laugh too, hard; her eyes were red and her lips were chapped and her T-shirt was bathed in sweat and there was a splotch of red on one of her breasts that Aoi thought ought to have been cleaned up after the explosion but she was laughing. Her eyes squeezed shut and she laughed harder than it seemed she had ever laughed before, so hard it hurt, and after a while it wasn’t even because it was funny; she was trying to laugh away the fact that she was in a prison cell and Yuuichi might have been dead and hell he was already dead once I practically killed him what’s one more time to have him dead and Mikoto is God-knows-where and we’re probably all going to die in this stinking shitpot and Natsuki is dead and god it feels like my lungs are going to explode but not before my heart thumps out of my chest and my brain pounds so hard that it mashes itself to jelly and Mai was crying now, and Aoi could not move to touch her, to comfort her, because a direct shock like Mai was putting out right now—it actually crackled in the air as she cried—applied to her heart might have killed her. And that by itself killed Aoi a little; the urge to go to her, to hug her, to comfort her as she had once, a long time ago, was almost overpowering, and it was taking every ounce of her strength to keep herself from moving. Tears began to leak out of Aoi’s eyes to match Mai’s, and that was the best she could do.
But all the while, she thought. She considered. She planned.
By the end, she thought she had something workable. If not for escape, then at least for information.
They had, after all, left them alone in a cell with a lot of very expensive equipment.
But for all of that, Reito looked even worse. With nary a scratch on him, Reito looked the worst. Worry lines had developed out of nowhere on his brow; his look was haggard and his hair had been shaved in the back, revealing a bumpy patch of skin which was slightly pale but mostly red, as though it had been shaved not so much with a buzzer as with a garden edger. His eyes were red and bloodshot, and they never seemed to blink, and when nobody was talking to him, his face slowly worked its way downwards until he was staring straight-on at the plastic floor.
Midori had tried, for the first half-hour of their confinement together, to talk to him. By that point he was nearing his 37th round with near-world Sumo champion Hideto Tsushima, back from his year-2000 loss and intent on working his way to the top. He had done his best to be as jovial as he could, but he came off to her more like a dying dog, trying to lick its owner’s face one more time before it finally died, than anything else.
After that, she had slid into silence without too much argument. It was hard, because she was doing her ample best not to think too much about the situation that they were in; in part, because she had already given it a mental once-over when she was in the cell with Aoi, who had actually contributed, and in part because she knew she had a good imagination, which had already threatened to tell her what it thought about her fate—strung up, maybe with chains, maybe just tied to a chair—naked, arcane machines sticking out of her flesh at odd angles, being violated one last time before they threw her in the scrap heap because she was as useless as the machines stuck in her hair.
No. None of that.
Wait. What?
Midori’s head snapped up. She tried to stand from where she had been sitting, but was, of course, unable to. Each time she had been moved, there had been black-clad soldiers, their faces covered by somehow threatening gas-masks, to carry her to a wheelchair. They had blindfolded her for the trip, so she hadn’t seen a single part of her captor’s stronghold that they hadn’t wanted her to see. For all she knew, she could be in the converted bathroom of a fucking train station in Yokohama.
“Reito,” she said quietly. He didn’t seem to notice, so she said it louder. “Reito. Perk up, buddy.”
He looked up at her, slowly, and she was struck by how rapidly his face had aged in the past half hour. He looked like he’d been through a decade of salaryman’s work. “Wh…” he breathed heavily, as though it was difficult. “What is it, Midori?”
“Let me see your skull again.”
He looked at her askew. “What?”
“I can’t move, so slide on over here and face the wall.” Her leg and wrist sometimes blinded her with agony, but her mother had always told her that if she could push an oversized, soon-to-be redheaded baby out her cunt, then Midori could damn well take some knocking around if she had to. This was usually after she had slapped her for being petulant or some other bullshit. For some reason, this had stuck with her.
Slowly, Reito complied, without question. He even managed a half-cocked smile. A few seconds later, he was sitting in front of Midori, who was sitting leaned against a wall. She pushed aside the small net of hair which had fallen over the bald patch, and then touched that lump of skin very gently. Reito flinched in pain, and when he did, his head pressed into Midori’s fingers.
Midori kept herself from gasping, but it was a close thing, as her fingers pressed into something that could only be solid metal hiding thinly beneath skin. She felt its sharp ridges and pins, could almost feel the cold, unforgiving metal it was composed of.
“Reito,” she whispered. “What the hell did they do to you?”
Slowly, Reito turned to face her, and the dry expression on his face had been replaced by something which was half-insane, a made-up grin like a clown’s face.
“I’m trying, Midori,” he said. “I promise I’m trying to keep it out, so please don’t touch it, it reminds me that it’s there and then it’s harder to keep it out.” Saying that, he, like most of his friends had at some point in the past two hours, began to cry. Tears flowed out of his eyes, silent and steady; they were eyes which begged for help in a way that Midori could never bring herself to believe that Reito was capable of. He looked like a doll or a child who had been hit one too many times and had come to believe that every raised arm was waiting to hit him, every loud noise was the sound of somebody barreling down the stairs to punish him. He looked like that child at a sporting event, where everybody was jumping out of their seats and flailing their arms around.
He looked like something Midori had once seen in a mirror.
Midori could not think of anything better to do, and so she took him in her arms and held him as he cried.
Sometime shortly after he regained himself, he told her what he was keeping out—really, he felt better after crying, as is often the case—and then held her as she screamed, not in fright or agony but in rage and frustration, her screams echoing alongside those of whoever was being so ruthlessly tormented outside.
“I told you. It’s a simple exchange; a cease fire, and I will present the girl as collateral to that end. No more fighting, and we both win.” This was the fifth time he had said something to that end, and it was always accompanied by a thin scratching sound, as though he was an absent sort who needed a shave.
His compromise sounded promising, and she would have loved to take him up on it—she didn’t want any more useless skirmishes and attention drawn to their organization than were necessary—if not for one simple issue: He was lying through his fucking teeth, and she knew it. She had done about a billion business deals with “frightened” terrorists like him, and every time her dumbass superiors had told her to take the deal, there had always been at least twenty hiding in bunkers and bushes, waiting to take as many of her comrades with them as they could. This man was no different; his accent was better, that was all.
“Your terms are unconvincing,” she said. “I will not order my men to drive themselves into a potentially hostile compound, not even to retrieve the girl.”
“And I,” he said, his friendly, jovial voice only amplifying her annoyance, “will not consent to driving my men into a potentially hostile compound to drop off such a girl.” Another lie; they weren’t his men. The Swiss Remnants fought in a very specific way, and every time she had predicted their moves using this as a basis, she had been right. It was a very good specific way, but she was smarter than that, and they didn’t know it, which was why they lost to an inferior force such as hers. That was why the brass had sent her out here even with their army only half-formed as it was, in its initial stages, so to speak: They knew she could do it.
She scratched at the back of her neck, which had been itching all damn day, and touched her hair absently, which had picked up some sort of static charge while she was shuffling around the Commander’s office trying to think of a way to do this without getting too many of hers killed. She had even shocked the commander when he had tried to touch her—something she did not feel terribly bad about, since he had been trying to hop into her pants at the time, and she did not feel like shooting him down and dealing with his semi-pouty response at that moment. He was a genius but he was a child sometimes, and that bothered her, even if she did love his childish ass.
“Then we will conduct the exchange in some neutral territory.”
“And risk having my forces meet a superior force intent on crushing them just because you decided not to pay my price?” The price—that had been the other thing. All cease-fires required exchange, he had said, and since it seemed that they have plenty of money, that would do. They’re not your fucking troops. Stop lying, asshole. “I think not.”
“You think us so petty?”
“I think you so ruthless, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.” Scratch. Scratch. Fucking scratch. He was lying through his stubble, and she could hear it over the goddamn phone.
“Then we have no deal,” Inoue said. “We will talk later today and work out a compromise, but I warn you that if we do not, you will not be alive tomorrow.”
“Nor will most of you.” He said it with a note of amusement. Calling her bluff. She didn’t have the force to wipe out a regiment of the Swiss Remnants, and even if she did, they were notorious for receiving backup from other Swiss Remnants. He knew it.
I think.
She hoped he didn’t.
If he did, it would be very bloody indeed, and all for one stupid girl who couldn’t get herself caught like the rest of them.
Very bloody indeed.
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