The name Aoi’s father gives to a CPU—shi pi yu—should be read as a Romanization of Japanese characters, with “i”s that sound like long “e”s. “yu” may be read as “Yoo.”
Ten thousand yen is approximately a hundred U.S. dollars.
After reading this chapter, I guess you can probably figure out what I’m majoring in at College. I hope it doesn’t read too much like a manual.
Show them your fighting pose.
Rolling star
Inoue Nakahara thought that living in a field base was nowhere near as bad as some of the more upper-crust brass claimed. (And really, weren’t they all upper-crust if you dug deep enough through layers of bullshit?) At least she had a working shower which she shared with nobody at all, and water which, while not hot, was at least lukewarm. She knew the troops she had in the area were still forced to essentially get naked together and dump buckets of cold water over their heads if they wanted to appear clean, but she had reassured them that she was doing her best to get them some hot water, anyway. They had mostly ignored her. It mattered to them about as much as knowing exactly what they ate every meal, or about the innocuous little white powder that didn’t always mix in fully. (The reason, incidentally, that they were able to take those co-ed showers without any incidents, and why a few of the women had discovered, much to their chagrin, that they were starting to develop very fine hair above their lips.)
Such was life when one was in a private army.
Inoue shut the water off and stood in the small aluminum niche for a moment, letting what was left of the lukewarm feeling run down her body—or at least, that had been the plan, until something started buzzing in the office to which her shower was attached.
Sighing, she stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel above her small breasts, and hurried into the other room, feeling almost painfully girly as she held the towel in place with one hand (not like anybody’s going to try anything anyway, most of these men haven’t had a stiffy since they signed on, ha-ha) and ran bare-footed, doing her best not to drench any important papers. (As if such a thing truly existed.) She grabbed the small cellular phone and flipped it open, pressed it to her ear, and heard a voice she did not expect but certainly did not object to.
“Hey, babe,” Shiratori Endo said, his voice deep and slightly ragged, a product of age and experience (and oh, what experience) both. “Catch you at a bad time?”
“What makes you say that?” Inoue said, turning away from the office window that none of her soldiers were peeking in to, in spite of several having passed it by. She began to make her way back into the bathroom.
“Usually takes you maybe a ring and a half to answer; two if I catch you during a good bowel movement.”
“Charming, as always, Shiratori.”
“Hey, I don’t have to charm you anymore. I’m straight with my wife now.”
“Bull shit.” Inoue did not believe this because she had slept with Shiratori Endo not three weeks ago.
“Well. Mostly, and I’ve already got you down.”
“You allure me with your wisdom and information, not your dignified speech, and for that, you should be grateful. Am I to assume you’ve got something fascinating for me, or have you just got your dick in your hands?”
“Now who’s charming?”
“Hm. So do you?”
“Of course. Have any of the other men around your place got their dicks in their hands?”
“Haven’t in quite a while,” Inoue said.
“I still can’t believe you’d actually do that, Inoue,” Shiratori said, his voice suddenly serious. “That’s crossing the line from efficient into…”
“Robots? I think that’s the idea. When you’ve got a tiny little army against the world, you do away with everything that doesn’t involve planning and killing out of necessity.”
“Everything, huh?”
“Hey, I’m not the one we’re worried about.”
“Because you have a set of tits instead of testicles.”
“In so many words.”
“That’s a little sexist.”
“It’s a harsh world, isn’t it? Did you say you had something for me, or did you just call to give yourself something to masturbate to when your wife is around?”
“I always have something for you when I call.”
Inoue stayed silent, now back in the bathroom, her mouth pursed in a thin smile which contained more humor than she gave it credit for.
“You remember Minoru Alder?”
“No,” she said at once, because she didn’t.
“Sure you do, babe. You met him once at a party with me. Remember, the one that the Kurosaki family threw back in ’96?”
“No. I was sloshed that night. That was the second time you got in my pants, and that was how, after the first time.”
“You wound me. I was nowhere near as bad as you remember.”
“That is because I can remember very little. Small favors.”
“Hey, are you all right?” Shiratori’s voice showed genuine concern. “I feel like tonight’s beating is a little more brutal than usual.”
“Just ducky,” Inoue said. Except that unless you’re about to tell me that God himself has brought his fist down and smashed the living fuckall out of the Swiss, I’m about to lose one hell of a lot of men unless I can come up with a strategy to rival one of Sun Tsu’s. “How are you?”
“You never tell me things anymore, babe. You know that?”
“I am married, you know. And I love my husband very much.”
After a pause, Shiratori said, “You know…if I thought you believed that halfway as much as you wanted to, I don’t think I would keep doing what we do, babe.”
Fuck you. The last thing I need right now is a lecture about something that already makes my stomach fucking jerk every time I goddamn think about it. Especially a lecture from somebody like you.
Fuck this. This, now, is the last thing I need. And, pushing her feelings back as she always had, Inoue Nakahara shook her head out, water coming out in small showers, feeling a bit like a puppy for a moment. “Did you have something useful to tell me, Shiratori?” Inoue said, “Or shall I hang up now?”
Shiratori sounded…not hurt, but certainly melancholy. “No,” he said. “I have something for you. Right now, I’m waiting for a call from Minoru Alder, the guy I just told you about. Right now he’s inside the Swiss compound, and I think he’s going to blow the whole damn thing.”
“What?” Hand of God, man. “How?”
“They’ve holed up in an old building, so the whole thing is wired through just a pair of generators. Just one backup and one primary, and there’s only like two circuit breakers, and one of them is only hooked up to the primary. It’s set up so that if one blows, the other one will kick in after a few seconds, and then if that one blows people are really shit out of luck.”
“You’re the engineer here, Shiratori, not me.” Immediately, Inoue felt that little irritating niggle in the back of her head. It was called impatience.
“I’m getting to it. So, turns out he managed to scrounge up essentially a thick chain and a thicker metal stake. Both of them are made from copper. I have no fucking idea what either of them are normally used for, but it had to be something kinda fucked up, since he says he found some blood stains on both of them. You know what happens when you hook up a power source to ground?”
“You do.”
“Smoke. You fry the fucking wire. Circuit breaker’s supposed to prevent this, but it’s a matter of twenty minutes, some rubber gloves, and a set of pliers to bypass it in an old building like that. You do that to a whole building—hook a thick wire on the other side of the building from the generator just…into the earth, even, and you have a whole fucking building full of smoke and dead equipment, unless you’re lucky as all hell and one of your wires was old enough that it fried faster than the rest.”
“Can he do that?”
“Inoue, when Minoru Alder sets his mind on something that he thinks will make him feel even a year younger than he is, he can do just about anything, or fucking die trying. Especially if I’m on the phone coaching him through it.”
“He’s pretty old?”
“He thinks he is. He can’t be more than forty five or fifty. He retired a few years back. I guess somebody called him out of retirement.”
“Who?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
Inoue took a deep breath and sat down on the toilet seat. “I don’t trust this.”
“You don’t have to. Call your boy over there back in an hour. If he doesn’t pick up, Minoru’s done it.”
“…You’re serious about all this.”
“Dead serious.” Something rang in the background. “Oh, shit. That’s him. Gotta run, babe.”
“Call me and tell me what happens.”
“I will.”
They didn’t tell each other that they loved each other when they hung up. Inoue hoped he had to try as hard as she did.
I love his childish ass. Shiratori is just…
Grown up.
Kenji is an adult too, and a damned fine commander. And a dear friend. And he’s supportive and intelligent.
So then what the hell do you need a lover for?
Inoue felt that she had been trying to answer that question since she had met Kenji. The best she had been able to do was keep trying to promise herself that she would stop. That she would love only him. She thought that maybe she could take her job as her lover, and it usually worked…for a while.
This time, I’m going to keep my promise to you, Kenji.
One way or another, she would prove to herself that she loved him.
No matter what.
On this one instance, she waited until he left the room to go relieve himself—of his wife, of course, at a local bar—she hid in a hall closet, and then, when she was quite certain he was out of sight, she crept down the carpeted hallway of the distinctly western house her family had inherited from her aunt, into the room, and began her search for the CPU.
When she found it, she made to grab it, but the instant her finger touched it, an enormous spark leapt from her fingertips, numbing the upper part of her hand and causing her to leap back in alarm, shrieking as the smell of smoke filled her nostrils.
It was then that her father had advanced into the room and sat down next to her and sighed. What he was doing there, she didn’t know, but it became clear to her, thinking on it later, that he had let her make that mistake. “That will cost me nearly ten thousand yen,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. She had begun to cry, more out of fear of what the shi pi yu might do to her than what her father might do to her. He held her until she stopped, and then smiled at her gently. “Looks as though I’ll have to wait until another day for the bar, anyway. Shall we make a lesson out of it?” he said. He loved to make lessons out of things.
She nodded somberly, and he grinned at her and held the CPU up to the light—she flinched from it, but he patted her reassuringly on the head.
“Whenever I work with these things,” he said, “I make sure to hold on to that metal case. That way all the static electricity I pick up from shuffling up and down these halls with you goes away, right down into the earth.”
“Did…I break it?” she had asked timidly, and he nodded.
“Computers are very delicate machines. They’re made out of tiny little wires and even smaller little machines. When you shocked the computer, all of the wires got fried.” He said the last word in English, a word that she had always laughed delightedly at, and this time was no exception, even through her childish terror.
Most parents would have tried to make a life lesson out of the incident—look before you leap, or some other nonsense—but not Aoi’s father. That day, he taught her something about computers and electricity, and from that, she developed a curiosity which had spanned all the way into high school. He would have called that good parenting.
Aoi certainly did.
The machines which hummed on the walls of their plastic-coated cell were encased in a plastic coating as well, and now Aoi thought that she knew why.
The plastic was cheap, though. There were a lot of things about this building that Aoi thought were cheap. The small glass windows on the plastic doors, for example. Glass that could be easily smashed by a determined girl with an elbow wrapped in cloth.
And cloth was easy. Aoi was wearing cloth. Lots of it.
Uttering a brief prayer to a God that she believed in about half of the time, Aoi asked that if a guard were to interrupt her, it would be once she had her shirt back on. She removed her shirt with only the slightest niggle of modesty—Mai, after all, was much better endowed than she was, and so it was only normal, and besides, Mai was damned pretty. She wore no bra, not because she was far-out like that but because it had been burned when she had been captured (she had the burn marks to prove it) and so when she made her way to the window, wrapping the shirt around her elbow, she covered her
(baby-feeders they’re coming to eat me)
(don’t you dare cry)
average breasts with one hand, as much for protection as for modesty. Mai watched all this with more fascination than she had displayed in anything so far, and Aoi thought that if she told this to Chie, the both of them might wind up having some very unwarranted thoughts about the girl, who was, after all, very pretty. (Which was stupid, since Mai was very thoroughly enamored with Yuuichi, and Aoi and Chie were..)
(don’t)
Without thinking too much about it, Aoi raised the covered elbow to the small window and smashed as hard as she could. It splintered with an almost icy crack, but did not shatter, and that was just fine by her. She switched the covering to her hand and pressed gently on the glass, now covered by thin cracks like spiderwebs, and managed to procure two very sharp, fairly large pieces of glass for her efforts.
“What are you doing?” Mai asked, her voice actually perking up, though still hoarse.
“Something I’ll need your help with,” Aoi said, putting her shirt back on as she laid the two pieces of glass out in front of her. “Come here and give me a hand.”
Mai made her way towards Aoi, looking almost decrepit as she did.
“Take this. Do you see the plastic seam there?” Aoi pointed towards a spot on the nearest machine. “Get to sawing.”
Mai stared at her. “That’s…stupid. We won’t be able to break that.”
“Don’t need to,” Aoi smiled. “We just need a finger-sized hole is all. Computers are delicate machines, after all.”
In fact, it was safe to say that every single person who had killed and died last year in that sick, awful carnival felt it.
Reito felt it too. He felt it hard.
And, God help her, that was exactly what she realized she had to do. They would kill Shizuru. Fucking kill her
(like you killed her)
and she would die screaming like that.
But first, she would have to get past this elevator, and the shot waiting for her at the top.
“How is your leg?” the man with the scratchy face asked, and, as though prompted, her leg began to tingle. Like pins and needles it began to tingle. As though it had been simply asleep, and not like the muscle had been cut.
liar liar pants on fire.
Her side still hurt. She was still cut badly, but she could feel even that healing as a new energy, like a second wind, seemed to pour into her.
“Still the same,” Natsuki lied. “Can’t feel it.”
“Please,” the man said with a smile which Natsuki had now determined was very much forged. “You do not need to exaggerate your tolerance for pain on my account. Just a little longer, though, don’t you worry.”
Scratch scratch scratch.
“Do you think I could get a new bandage for my side when we get up there, too? Something to hold me together a little better than a soggy piece of cloth?”
If the accountant was bothered by her suddenly-conversational tone, he didn’t show it. “Of course,” he said. “Planning on doing some gymnastics later?”
She shrugged, forcing herself not to answer, reminding herself that she was not yet that talented of a liar.
The man flipped open his little phone and muttered something into it. After he flipped it closed, he said, “There will be a bandage waiting for you when we reach the top.”
“Kind of a long way, isn’t it?” Natsuki asked carefully. “It must be a slow elevator.”
“Well,” the man shrugged. “The base was constructed in a hurry. State of emergency and all that.”
“Where are we, anyway?” The second after she said it, Natsuki cursed herself an idiot.
The man paused for a moment, and then said smoothly, “Afraid I can’t tell you that either. The Swiss are remarkably closed about such things.”
The elevator jerked to a halt, and then the man said, “Well, there we are.”
The door was halfway open when Natsuki moved her big toe, and then tensed the muscles in her thigh, finding nothing to move nearly as slowly or painfully as it should if she had just had a strand of muscle cut.
Then everything went to shit.
The door stopped halfway, and for a second, Natsuki wasn’t sure what was going on, even as the lights began to break open—shatter, really. Smoke began to pour from just about every little crack in every wall in the building—electric smoke, with its own unique, acrid stench.
People began shouting. A hand reached into the half-opened door holding two things: A needle and a bandage. The man with the scratchy face made for both of them, but Natsuki moved faster, grabbing both with one hand as she stood and shoved the chair backwards with the other. The heavy metal frame slammed into the man and air left him in a woof, and he staggered back, stunned for long enough that Natsuki had time to uncap the needle and jam it into his neck. He uttered a gasp that told her that she had failed to piece his lung as she had been hoping to do, but he went down fast enough anyway as the drugs from the needle ate his consciousness.
“Accountant, huh,” she said with a backwards, dismissive look at him.
“You and your ilk will burn for your crimes,” he said, and then he said something which made her gasp.
“You, and all of the other fucking HiME.”
The shock nearly floored Natsuki where all the drugs could not.
Then a gun poked its little muzzle into the gap in the doorway, and Natsuki lashed out with her left hand and knocked it aside before it could fire. Grabbing it, she glanced up briefly, spotted an emergency grate in the ceiling of the elevator, and leapt up, knocking it out of place and grabbing onto the ledge with a single, fluid motion. Adrenaline filled her veins, and in a single moment, she felt as energetic as she had during the carnival.
It was a strange, foreboding feeling.
But it was not wholly unpleasant.
Maybe that should have disturbed her. But as she pulled herself up onto the roof of the car, finding herself immersed in near total darkness—whatever had killed the electricity had done it but good, since not even the backup lights were on—she felt simply alive.
Hiding on the roof, she tended to the wound that she had not felt herself reopen with the bandage she had stolen. Nobody came up after her—maybe they assumed she would be heading for higher ground. That was fine.
The wound wasn’t as bad as it had been before.
Between the two of them, it took them half an hour and four shards of glass to dig a finger-sized hole in the device. In spite of the cloth covering, both of them had blood on their hands and arms by the time they finished—if not from tears in the cloth, then from shards of glass that nicked them when what they were using shattered in their hands.
But a finger was all they needed.
Aoi was sure of it.
“This is probably going to hurt you,” Aoi said. “A lot.”
Mai shrugged the shrug of—and Aoi had no idea where this thought came from, because it certainly wasn’t her experience talking—an old soldier. “Have you heard Shizuru screaming? I’m sure it’s her—I can feel it.”
Aoi had, but she hadn’t known who it was. That Mai knew so readily gave Aoi a sick feeling in her stomach.
An ugly little part of her, though, felt relief.
At least that’s not Chie.
“There’s things going on here that I don’t know anything about,” Aoi said. “And you’re going to tell me when I need to know, right?”
Mai nodded somberly, not certain if she meant it or not.
“Just tell me this: Does it have something to do with what happened last year at school?”
That ugly little part of Aoi tried its best to put down the feeling of embracing Mai tearfully before their train pulled out of the station last year; the feeling of embracing somebody’s warmth for the last time.
It couldn’t quite do it.
Aoi hugged Mai again, and Mai hugged back. Her grip was strong now; her task had rejuvenated her. Or maybe it was just her sight that had come back; she knew that what she needed was straight ahead, and once she knew where she was going, she had the resolve to get there, or at least go down hard.
Mai stuck her finger into the little hole. There was a loud crack and instantly smoke began to billow from the hole, and Mai jerked back almost immediately, clutching her finger, which had a nasty purple spot on the tip that hadn’t been there a second before. She stuck her finger in her mouth and cursed to herself, taking care not to swear aloud.
This, after all, was the easy part.
The hard part would come when somebody came inside to figure out what the hell had happened.
Back to Resolution Index - Back to Mai HiME Shoujo-Ai Fanfiction