“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 rightâthere 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.”
“Insideâ¦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? Ohâ¦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?”
“Notâ¦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.
Andâ¦
The smell.
The smell of grass. The smell of tree moisture. The smell of water. The smell of the earth.
Andâ¦
The smell of herself.
This wasâ¦
“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 forâ¦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 footâ¦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?”
“Probablyâ¦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.