Chapter 023
HER CHEEKS WERE throbbing.
To think mere sunlight could do something like that. She didn’t know it got so warm in the afternoon. It wasn’t just that it was bright out.
Hazuki marched one foot after the other. She walked the endless freight overpass, empty and macabre, one foot after the other, repeatedly. The bridge looked clumsily constructed, and even though it was suspended in the air, the ground was hard and the whole thing was just ugly. The crack-ridden surface resembled an aging animal’s skin.
She looked out as far as she could.
The bridge continued to the vanishing point.
She’d never seen anything like this before. Hazuki learned for the first time in her life that the world was so big, that space had so much depth. The world up close was full of cracks, but viewed from afar the road was flat, even smooth, and the background was all beautiful, even lines.
Her view became distorted.
“It’s the vapors,” Ayumi said.
“You mean the snake?” Hazuki asked.
“No,” Ayumi took a gulp from her water pack. “The sun’s beating down on us with no obstructions. The temperature of the road steadily increases. The heated surface warms the air above it. That’s the haze.”
“So it’s the air that wavers?”
“The air is simply moving. What’s behind it looks like it’s wavering. How are your feet holding up?” Ayumi asked.
“They’re fine,” Hazuki answered. Her outfit happened to do the job. Another more constricting outfit would have made this road impossible to walk.
“It being difficult to walk here and all.”
“I mean this is a freight road for transport vehicles, right?”
“It didn’t used to be for freighters only, but it was never designed for people to walk on.”
“So the road was for moving people too?” Hazuki didn’t understand the appeal of moving on such a fierce-looking road.
“It was a long time ago,” Ayumi said.
“It’s pretty decrepit, right? The bridge would collapse in an earthquake.”
“This road? Collapse?”
“Sure. Most distribution takes place in underground tunnels now, so they’ll probably tear this overpass down soon.”
“Rocks won’t work,” Ayumi said. Hazuki didn’t understand what she was saying. She didn’t understand but wasn’t about to ask why rocks wouldn’t work.
The sky was blue. Brighter than a blue screen. It was crystalline, deep, strong, clear.
A large cloud floated by.
It was so big it made Hazuki dizzy.
She couldn’t grasp the scale. She saw trees swaying in the green zone where the old-fashioned fencing was interrupted. Hazuki opened her eyes wide. The wider she opened them, the clearer the world was, and she felt like she could see all the details. Images not composed of pixels would stay focused no matter how closely you zoomed in.
The wind blew against her face.
The invisible air reminded Hazuki that she was here.
“Let’s take a quick rest,” Ayumi said, and sat down in the middle of the road. She lifted her water pack high, turned it over, and poured the contents over her head and face.
The spray glistened in the light.
“I like this air. It makes me want to go…anywhere.”
Because there was no one around.
Ayumi looked down the road.
“Anywhere…”
Hazuki sat too.
The surface of the road was extremely hot.
“What’s out there?”
“Another similar kind of city.”
“Does this road go anywhere?”
“It does,” Ayumi said. “It does, but it doesn’t change. Up ahead is another city, and beyond that another city. It repeats itself. Nothing changes. The road is finite but the world endless. No beginning, no end. We are simply lights that turn on and off in this place. Just going down the road is useless,” Ayumi said. She took some junk food out of her backpack. “Let’s eat. We should eat now while we can. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find food ahead.”
“Ahead…”
Out where it was useless to go.
Hazuki took a rice bowl and then some canned drinks out of the bag she was carrying. She handed one to Ayumi and chose a flavonoid drink for herself.
“Are we safe here?”
“No one thinks there will be kids here. And we don’t have any personal terminals on us.”
Hazuki thought to herself again that this meant they were not the terminus of anything.
“And I doubt if there’s some big machine in the sky watching us from overhead.”
“Sky…”
Hazuki took her rice bowl and flavonoid drink and stood up, walking over to an opening in the fence. She saw a city peek through the dense wood.
It looked like a map.
Is this how birds saw the ground?
Hazuki forgot she was in such an unusual, incomprehensible, and dangerous situation. She ate her junk food and stared at the landscape. She chewed, she swallowed. It was the most satisfying meal she’d had in several days for some reason. The flavors were strange and she didn’t know if it was delicious, but she felt like she’d really eaten.
The sun was bright.
“There’s a deserted real shop ahead thirty minutes on foot. It’s dirty but there’s a bathroom. There won’t be any running electricity or water.”
“You’ve been down this road before?”
“Yeah. I was walking on it that day.”
“The day Yuko was attacked?”
Ayumi nodded.
“Yeah. I went as far as I could and then the sun set. Off-hours were over and freighters started rolling along. So I edged along the side of the fencing, unnoticed, and headed back. Getting down off the overpass was almost impossible. I would have been apprehended if anyone saw me, naturally, but no one did because they were driving so fast. When I got to where we climbed up, Yuko was there. We weren’t supposed to meet,” Ayumi said.
“But it’s too late now.”
Ayumi compacted the now-empty backpack and stuffed it into her waist pack. She stood up and extended her arm to Hazuki.
“My load’s lightened. I’ll carry the water.”
Hazuki handed her the bag.
“Thanks.”
“We have to make it easy for you to escape.”
Escape.
Will I be in a situation I need to escape from?
Up ahead, perhaps.
“We have to walk at this pace for another three hours. The building Mao told us about is three neighborhoods away, on the edge. You won’t be able to run if your legs are tired, so tell me if we need to slow down or rest. In this heat you can also get exhausted.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re almost in the commercial district of Area 121.”
She knew.
Ayumi was different from Hazuki. She didn’t need to get an overview, be connected to anything, to know where she was. She could calculate her distance from the sky and the earth.
They kept in deep pursuit of the untenable haze emitted by the heat and walked wordlessly for some time. Sweat ran down Hazuki’s temples. She’d wipe her brow and sweat anew, repeatedly. Had she been indoors she would have felt intolerably filthy. What she was excreting was bodily waste. It was gross.
But she didn’t mind it so much.
What she did mind was the sweat dripping into her eyes.
She felt swampy and hot around the nape and throat.
The haze was blowing into the space between her hair and flesh, staying there. She pulled up her hair and tied it with her kerchief.
It wouldn’t quite hold up.
While Hazuki tried to tie her hair, Ayumi advanced.
Ayumi.
This must be why she didn’t grow her hair.
Or so Hazuki thought.
It’s useless, she thought.
She also decided she might cut her own hair when she got back.
If she got back?
Where would she go back to? Ayumi was right—there was nowhere to turn back to.
What awaited them ahead on this road was not hope.
But somehow Hazuki felt like she wasn’t going to die.
The fear, the pain, the fact that she had felt like she was dead in that dark corner of a darker room, arms wrapped around her knees notwithstanding. Circumstances being utterly dire, without a ray of hope notwithstanding. The girl in that room last night and Hazuki today being the same person notwithstanding.
Why was everything different now?
They stopped to rest at the abandoned real shop.
The building was incredibly old. It looked like something from another country. There were remains of old gas-fired moving machines left behind. She sat on an extremely uncomfortable chair made of hard material and retied her hair.
When they stepped outside the sun was behind a cloudbank.
This made it easier to be on the edge of the road.
They rounded several curves.
The road running through the commercial district was not fenced but covered by a half-dome shell held suspended in the air by thick poles.
The material was invisible but totally impermeable. The light did not shift when they walked under it but made the shell feel like a bright white tunnel.
The view opened up when they exited the tunnel.
What had been a forward view opened to both the left and right.
The fencing was shorter now, and greenery could be seen above it on either side.
“Hills.”
“These are the hills we see from the city.”
“They’re shaped differently. It’s not like this.”
“They look different because we’re looking at them from a different position. We’re inside the hills now.”
“Inside…the hills?”
Hazuki couldn’t fathom it. To her, hills were something she only ever saw in the background, a distant vista behind the city, no different from wallpaper. Now she was in that vista.
“This road was cut out of the hills. The road on the ground circles around the hills and takes twice as long.”
Ayumi touched the fence with her fingers as they walked.
“This is it.”
There was a chain-link door in the fence. Some kind of ivy or vine packed the holes. In the middle was a square steel plate prohibiting entry and trespass.
“It says not to open this. Isn’t it dangerous?”
“It’s coming onto this road that’s dangerous. We’re doing the opposite.”
“You’re going to open it?”
“Of course. The only reason people don’t is because they have no reason to.”
The fence screeched as they opened it.
Ayumi slipped through the doorway casually, as if she were returning home. Hazuki followed after her.
On the other side of the fence was dense tree and grass cover.
“Beyond this hill is Area 119.”
“This is the hill?”
It didn’t look any different from the green area surrounding the community center.
“It is,” Ayumi said. “We’re at a really high altitude now.”
“Altitude? Oh…altitude.”
“Yeah. The distance up from sea level.”
Altitude. Her own height.
Ayumi changed her direction.
Latitude and longitude. Her own positioning.
Ayumi knew exactly where she was. No need for a monitor.
“Over here.” Ayumi waded through the brush.
“We just climb a little more and then it’s all downhill.”
The grass was wet though it hadn’t rained since they set out. The ground was squishy. She looked at her feet. The brand-new shoes she’d put on were thoroughly muddy.
The tree shade swayed in the wind. Drifting shadows, clear shadows, distant shadows, nearby shadows. Large shadows, small ones. All kinds of shadows all moving in different ways. Light passing through the leaves cast complex patterns on the ground.
Replicating this on a monitor screen would be difficult even for Mio.
“Are you having trouble walking through this?”
“Not…really.”
There was no rebound in her step.
“This is better to walk on than asphalt.”
Ayumi didn’t slow her pace.
Hazuki was deliberate in her movement across the earth. She felt unsure of the ground under her shoes.
“It’s soft.”
“It absorbs all your reflexive movement, so you can’t get as far as fast,” Ayumi said.
Hazuki certainly felt like she wasn’t getting very far, though the scenery changed with every step she took. The trees all looked the same but none of them were the same shape or color. The texture and shape of the trees were all slightly different. Even the quality of the light changed. The viewpoint changed because the ground was higher. The temperature seemed to shift as well.
And…
The smell.
The smell of grass. The smell of tree moisture. The smell of water. The smell of the earth.
And…
The smell of herself.
This was…
“The descent should start right after this last incline,” Ayumi said, as she pointed forward. “We should be reaching the building somewhere in the middle.”
Ayumi rested an arm against a large tree and looked far in that direction. Hazuki hurried up to where Ayumi stood.
She felt like she was flying.
The trees were packed into the sloping incline.
There was a gray block beyond it, spreading as far as she could see. That must be the city. Further beyond that was an unusually small stickshaped building, as if part of the new wallpaper of buildings.
“Is that 119?”
“Yes,” Ayumi said.
Hazuki had been in this code region two or three years ago.
But she didn’t remember it being so flat. She had no special memories of it. Other cities she’d seen in this linear perspective were no different from her own. It was the only memory she had of such a view. In other words, the city of Hazuki’s residence would also probably appear this sparse from afar.
That had been for…a communication session field trip. Yes, in fact they’d gone to see a food-processing factory. She was pretty sure Ayumi had been there too.
Ayumi had transferred to their area five years ago, so she must have been there. But she couldn’t remember anything about her from then.
Hazuki only knew Ayumi transferred five years ago because she’d read her profile.
I didn’t remember it.
“On a magnetic multi-passenger vehicle this would have taken forty-five minutes, and even in a transport vehicle on the surface roads this would have taken three hours. The vehicles that run on the freight route we took are faster at night, so they would have taken just thirty minutes. But for humans on foot…it takes a whole day.”
On a monitor this would have taken one second.
I see.
Hazuki realized she had a filter over her eyes. The reason this view looked flat was because she couldn’t help comparing it to the image on a monitor screen.
She widened her eyes.
More vividly. More clearly. There was a depth to this world.
“There’s the building,” Ayumi said, pointing again.
A short distance from the gray city, in the middle of greenery, stood a pointed white building.
“When we came here three years ago it was still being built. That’s the SVC Memorial Building.”
So she was with us on that field trip.
“You came on that trip?” Hazuki asked.
“I was with you,” Ayumi said. “The building must have twenty floors. It was built after the skyscraper boom. We have another hour of walking, so let’s take a rest,” Ayumi said and sat down. Hazuki followed suit and sat down behind her. The way they always sat together.
Very short hair. Between her black hair and dark brown vest, a perfectly white nape.
Only what lay ahead of her foreground was different.
Usually Ayumi could sit like this for hours, but a brief moment felt like forever today.
Ayumi looked at the building at length, then turned her head to one side.
And ahead, a large round stone.
Ayumi faced that stone and fixed her gaze on it a long while.
All Hazuki could see was the pale nape of Ayumi’s neck. She didn’t know what kind of expression Ayumi had on her face.
“Ayumi.”
“What.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Probably…something I can’t come back from. I’ve put you in a terrible situation.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“No. It is,” Ayumi said, still looking in the same direction. Then she motioned toward the building again. Hazuki looked over to where Ayumi indicated.
“Mao is probably nearby. She’s still alive.”
“Really?”
How does she know?
“Look,” Ayumi pointed. “There’s a bunch of area patrols out there. Something’s wrong.”
“Those are area patrols?” They looked like bacteria in a microscope movie.
“Must be around two hundred of them. I wonder if it’s a squad.”
“Two hundred area patrols?”
Area patrol. Uniforms. The thought of uniformed men awakened fear in Hazuki. Just a day ago, the image of the uniform carried with it a sense of security. It was different now.
They were all enemies.
A green wind crossed the surface of the wood and blew past the hairs on the nape of Ayumi’s neck.
“The people in there must be really scared of Rey Mao.”
“No, they probably need her alive. They want to pin all the killings on her, so they want her alive till they’re through creating the case. I wonder what they plan on doing. Deploying such a big patrol squad is countereffective. There’s no way she would storm into that compound. She might think she’s a superhero, but she knows her limits.”
Ayumi stretched and stood up.
“The main gate must be over there. What’s that?”
“Where?”
“It must be an annex facility.”
“That’s the waste-processing facility.”
“Ahh,” Ayumi let out, as if understanding. “Then Mao must have been checking that out. It won’t burn.”
Ayumi extended her palm out over her shoulder to show Hazuki something without turning around. Her pale white hand. In it she held the pink piercing.
“It’s neo-ceramic, so it’s okay.”
Didn’t Mio say that too?
“It was stuck on my bag. It fell off Yuko easily and all the time. Yuko was kidnapped and brought here, and then the earring fell off somewhere in the building or got stuck on one of her kidnapper’s outfits. Anyway, this piercing got caught in the refuse coming out of the building and was processed along with it. In other words, Mao has to be in that building.”
“In that refuse annex?”
“Yeah, and they all know she’s in there, I’m sure. That’s why they have the place surrounded.”
“So those patrols aren’t there to capture her but to prevent her escape.”
Still, it seemed like overkill. Rey Mao might have been strong, but she was still just a fifteen-year-old girl, just like Hazuki. Two hundred people was too many.
“Cat’s really gotten herself in a mouse trap. How ironic. Still, why hasn’t she come out yet, I wonder?” She paused. “I’m going in,” Ayumi said.
“What are you going to do, Ayumi?”
“For now, help Rey Mao get out. I don’t know what she’s up to, but at this rate she’s just walking straight into the enemy’s trap. She’s not the culprit. They can’t make her one.”
“Wait.” Hazuki stood up. “There’re two hundred of them.”
“I know. I’m no match against even just one of them. I’m not planning on fighting them.”
“Yeah, but…”
“You stay here.”
“What?”
“It’s safer here. It’s even safer than my house, your house, or even Mio’s house.”
“I can’t stay here forever. I can’t be alone.”
“It’s better than being dead.”
Her long eyelashes touched with green light, her eyes were like those of a fawn. Ayumi set the bag of water on the ground.
“No, Ayumi. I want to go too.”
“You can’t.”
“I will.”
“Why?!” Ayumi said in probably her first emotional outburst ever.
“Because I’m your friend.”
“No you’re not.”
“What?”
“I hate human interaction,” Ayumi said. She turned her back to Hazuki.
“You lie. Then why are you going into that building? Why don’t you just ignore this?”
“They started it. I’m going in to stop this so I never have to deal with them again.”
“Then why did you bring me here?” Hazuki said.
It took her till now…now, to ask that question.
To wonder.
“Because it’s dangerous.” Ayumi returned to speaking in her usual voice. “This place…”
“What about this place?” Hazuki looked around herself. What was it about this place?
“This is where I stopped being human.”
“Stopped being human?”
“Thank you, Hazuki,” Ayumi said, and she fled down the slope.
Her figure soon disappeared, swallowed by the living brush.
Hazuki felt slightly defeated.
“No.”
Hazuki started after Ayumi.
As soon as she set out she felt dizzy. The strength of her legs had been sapped, and her arms wouldn’t do as she wanted. She was sure she’d just lost self-awareness and that her body was exhausted. What kind of body wouldn’t listen to the commands of its master? Whose body was this?
This is my body.
This body is mine.
Hazuki slid down the slope covered in dead leaves and then tumbled. She hit a tree root. She inhaled the tremendous scent of mud and earth. She choked on the odor and clapped a hand over her nose. The smell intensified.
“Ayumi!”
Hazuki was momentarily stuck in the brush. She cut through it, pulling out grass from the roots, caked with dirt. She jettisoned it.
Calm down. Breathe. Stand up. My body won’t do what I tell it to. My feelings are ignoring my body. It’s my feelings that won’t listen to me.
I can do what I can do. I can’t do what I can’t.
It would be wrong to want to do something I can’t.
I can stand up.
It’s still there.
The building is still there.
It was obvious, but when she faced it she didn’t know what was what.
To get to that building, she had to continue down the slope. By descending, Hazuki would find herself at a lower altitude.
The distance between herself and the building was shrinking, so the building should appear larger.
But then the blanket of tree cover should appear larger as she approached as well.
The trees in the distance were probably the same size as the ones growing right in front of her. Hazuki fired her imagination. The building probably stood as high as Hazuki was now. If only the building were on the same plane as her. The space between her and the building…
In other words, the forest…the green area surrounding the center…The building was just past it. It was much bigger than the community center.
I can see it.
As long as she could see her destination she was fine. It couldn’t be very far.
It was about the distance between Hazuki’s own home and the community center. If she calculated the height correctly she could divide the distance in measure. If she calculated the time it would take the distance would grow. That was okay so long as she was going in the right direction.
It shouldn’t take more than an hour.
Still. She could still make it. Hazuki could make it.
Just don’t rush.
The human body lives by moving. Hazuki had learned that.
The ability to see outer space, to see foreign countries without being there, to communicate with people whose language you did not know, these were all illusion. What sat in front of the monitor was an animal, and animals only knew the world in the context of its own size. The reach of your arms. That was the extent of your movement.
Hazuki climbed another slope, carrying the bag of water Ayumi left behind, and confirmed her orientation. She couldn’t situate herself. She had only her compass. She looked up. The sun was bright.
This was how she would find herself.
She descended the hill, one step at a time.
Just descend.
Lift the leg. Lower the leg. She pressed her foot into the earth.
The self she left at the top of the hill somewhere eventually caught up with her body.
Now she couldn’t see much more than half the building. This meant Hazuki had descended to a lower altitude.
She looked up. She could tell the sun had moved.
She eventually reached something like a road.
The kind of road people used to travel on, she thought.
She got on this road and started moving.
Did Ayumi take this road?
How far ahead was Ayumi?
Was Ayumi still alive?
There were flowers abloom.
It was like in the pictures of nature preserves she’d seen.
The road curved wide. One side of it was walled by a cliff held back by a flimsy metal fence, painted white. It was rusted brown in patches. She could reach its edge, which made it a short fence: of no real use.
The asphalt under the fence had deteriorated; grass grew through the cracks. Roads made of asphalt become unsightly with time, Hazuki thought.
There was a fork in the road ahead. One side kept curving and the other kept along the side of the hill.
Which way?
Hazuki looked at the sun again. The hill was shaded. The shadows had lengthened significantly. Would she make it to the building before it set? The rays were certainly descending. Hazuki thought about how her shadow moved and stretched, comparing it to the sky.
This way.
She had walked straight toward her objective but got turned around by the curving road.
This curve would probably lead her to the city.
Hazuki chose the road that branched off.
Not ten meters into her decision did she stop. There was a metal beam.
A do not enter sign. An indication not to go forward. A sign insisting that there was no farther to go.
But the road kept going.
This is the right road.
Hazuki placed both hands on the bar and climbed over, trying to hop over as quietly as she could.
She tried to follow Ayumi’s scent.
Hazuki had learned that an animal’s sense of smell was very advanced. She was not smell deficient, but she wasn’t able to distinguish all smells. For starters she had no reason to have to distinguish between smells. All noxious smells were erased. The food her helper prepared was simply to be eaten, and all scent of it was simply the scent of food. She’d never made distinctions.
Anyway the smell of synthetic food was added after the fact. Without the smell, the food would all taste the same. That was all Hazuki ate.
The blocked road did not end, nor was it demolished. In fact it turned into a new road, one still well maintained. It was made of newer compound asphalt, no different from the regulation transit roads in Section A. There were street lamps and they were all lit. The greenery on either side of the road had been tended, looked almost man-made.
That the road was blocked meant it was private.
This must have been a private road used only by SVC.
Hazuki rounded a curve in the road and raised her face, then gulped.
A giant white building thrust up from the green landscape.
She suddenly lost her sense of direction.
She could contextualize where she was now to where she had started, but barely. Her position had turned with the road and was now completely confused. Losing all sight of her objective for a moment was certainly one cause. She tried to remember what the building looked like from atop the hill. How was Hazuki positioned in relation to this building now? Any guess on the matter was just that. She couldn’t remember the image.
Refuse processing center.
That was where Ayumi had said Rey Mao was. This road probably went all the way to the building.
But though this road may have been connected to the building, she shouldn’t be walking dead center down it.
There were two hundred members of the area patrol waiting.
Merely thinking the words scared Hazuki. Her legs trembled.
Up ahead. Up ahead were two hundred enemies.
In the green.
She’d probably be safer walking in the greenery. She’d be better hidden there than on the road. If she stayed on the road and ran into a patrol officer it would all be over. With her eyes still on the building, Hazuki took several steps back and moved to the side of the road, entering the brush.
A sensor.
Hazuki hurriedly withdrew her leg.
It was too late.
Definitely.
On either side of the road were laser sensors with cameras.
No.
What am I doing?
And that was when Hazuki stopped thinking.
In her blank mind, fear crept in.
The self and the body that had finally gotten in sync suddenly broken, her self taking flight with tremendous speed.
Hazuki’s body screamed and took off at full speed toward the white building and the two hundred-strong area patrol force surrounding it. Reason and judgment had fled.
Hazuki, disjointed, was sending her self and her body straight to their deaths.
And for some reason this calmed her.