She flopped down into her chair and started fussing with the computer again.
When the chime rang to drive away what students remained on school grounds, Nagato closed her book, and with that as our signal, we brought our day to a close. In a way, it was similar to how cicadas measured and signaled time with their buzzing.
After we were done waiting for Asahina to change, we put the clubroom behind us. The sun was on the verge of setting, and the air still had a chill to it.
As we descended the slope that began the route home from school, a gap naturally opened up between the boys and girls. Haruhi and Asahina walked side-by-side ahead, with Nagato stepping along silently behind them.
A few meters back, Koizumi and I quietly took in the sight of the three girls ahead of us. It was a good chance, so I went ahead and asked.
“So, how’re you doing lately?”
“Today’s the same as yesterday. Currently no change,” Koizumi answered with a brittle, dry-noodle smile. “I may be worrying over nothing. From Nagato’s and Asahina’s reactions, they don’t seem to have taken any special notice of Sasaki. Hopefully the recent incidences of closed space are merely a fluke.”
A bit of time had passed since the new semester started, but neither Nagato nor Asahina had made mention of my former classmate. Of course they hadn’t. I’d have a nervous breakdown if I had to be so careful every time I wanted to talk to an old acquaintance, I said.
“For anyone else, you needn’t be so careful. This is a problem because of Sasaki specifically.”
She was just a slightly eccentric girl, and I just happened to run into her, I told him.
“Hey, I wholly agree with you. I’m confident you’re right. From our perspective, that’s that, with no further reasoning necessary. What I’m worried about is other people misunderstanding—and those who would deliberately abuse that misunderstanding.”
“The heck are you talking about?” I couldn’t believe Kunikida or Nakagawa had anything to gain from that.
“Within your circle of friends, those two are harmless. However—” Koizumi said to my doubts, carefully re-shouldering his bag and shrugging. “No, never mind. If my worries are baseless, then so much the better. Oh, you can relax on one count, though. Sasaki will not be subject to any additional harm. The Agency will do no such thing. There is no reason to.”
Of course there wasn’t. What was he talking about?
“My apologies. I was merely attempting to dispel your anxieties, but please forget it. It was unnecessary.”
Wearing a sad, sad smile that would probably melt the heart of any obliging freshman girl, Koizumi faced forward. He was looking ahead past Nagato’s head to Asahina’s and Haruhi’s profiles as they happily chatted.
Later that day.
The usual walking-home-from-school scene played out, and we all went our separate ways in front of the Koyo Park train station.
“See you tomorrow.” Haruhi gave me a look that seemed to say, Try to show up before me for once, though I wasn’t sure. She turned her back and walked away, her school uniform’s ribbon and skirt hem fluttering. Asahina waved and followed the brigade chief. When I thought to look for her, Nagato was already receding into the distance toward her apartment.
“I hope nothing happens tomorrow,” monologued Koizumi quietly, and I thought that was exactly what would happen.
—However.
Koizumi was naive. And I was naive too.
Things were already happening. It was just that nobody had noticed, but things had already started. Starting with me, all of us had long since been tossed into the maelstrom. It wasn’t just the SOS Brigade, it was everyone—Kunikida, Taniguchi, Nakagawa, Sudoh, regardless of whether I knew them or not.
But days would pass before I would realize what was really happening. The next day? Hardly. But something that seemed like an omen would happen the next day.
Was it merely foreshadowing, was it a fated coincidence, or had someone arranged it…?
Saturday morning, 9:00 AM. I reunited with two individuals, was introduced to someone I’d never met before, and was told that someone else I knew was hiding nearby…
That morning, I somehow woke up ahead of both my alarm clock and my sister, and went about my morning routine of putting Shamisen—who slept with his head on my pillow—on the floor, then sitting up properly.
The refreshing awakening was cheer itself, and one I had not experienced on a weekend morning in some time. My feet were so light it felt like my body weight had been halved. Maybe the secret to good health was waking naturally, instead of relying on my sister or the alarm clock.
I stepped lightly out of my room and enjoyed my first sister-free breakfast in quite some time, then changed clothes, got on my bike, and headed off. So early! The clock hadn’t yet struck eight. At this rate, I had a chance to beat Haruhi. Or maybe Koizumi would’ve caught my drift and taken the trouble to show up last. Not that it would’ve been unreasonable to have Haruhi treat us all for once, but no doubt the Agency’s wallet was deeper than a high school student’s. I bet Koizumi made good money at his “part-time job.”
As I pedaled happily along, I saw a confetti-scattering of pink out of the corner of my eye. All it would take was one more good rain shower to bring this year’s cherry blossom display to an end.
Once I rode my bike to the entrance of the parking lot in front of the station, I took a look around.
I had the premonition that Sasaki was going to pop out of nowhere, but it goes without saying that my self-proclaimed middle school “really good friend” was nowhere to be seen. For Koizumi’s sake, I was relieved. Not for my sake.
A look at my watch told me that I still had half an hour before the arranged meeting time. I had time to kill.
Humming as I left my bike in a paid parking space, I made my way calmly toward the rendezvous point and saw that nobody from the SOS Brigade was there.
But I was unable to enjoy a satisfied smile. Quite the contrary—I felt as though clouds had suddenly obscured the once-bright rays of the sun.
I stopped dead in my tracks, stunned.
“Heya, Kyon,” Sasaki greeted me with the grin of someone who’s successfully fooled another. “We meet again. I’m genuinely pleased. You might not be, but I definitely see a bit of fun in this situation. Although I must say it’s a bit more interesting than it is exciting.”
I stood there like a dead tree.
Sasaki was not alone. Two other girls attended her, one on each side. One of them had a face I’d never forget. It was carved into a wanted poster in my mind. The only reason I didn’t slug her right on the spot was the self-control I’d built up over the past year.
“You…!” How dare she be so nonchalant.
“Hello.” She ducked her head and smiled. “It has been a while. How is your little time traveler, Asahina? Hee hee, don’t make such a face. We’ve pulled back from such methods.”
The incident from months earlier, in mid-February, went running through my mind.
Asahina had come back from eight days in the future. I’d called her Michiru Asahina. She and I had run around together, accomplishing various goals as directed by letters from Asahina the Elder. We’d played a prank by nailing an empty can to the ground, placed the gourd-shaped rock on the Tsuruya family mountain, dealt with the turtle and the boy—and then there was the thing with the mysterious data chip and the nasty rival time travelers…
And finally, Asahina’s kidnapping.
At the end of a long car chase, one of the kidnappers who’d appeared with that other new time traveler guy was now standing right in front of me. She’d seemed like their leader. The girl who’d faced down Miss Mori’s terrifying smile without even flinching.
She was now standing next to Sasaki, right before my very eyes.
Whether she knew about the history between the girl and me or not, Sasaki cut in with one arm. “I’ll introduce you, Kyon. This is Kyoko Tachibana, my… well, let’s call her my acqu
aintance. I’ve just come to know her and haven’t shared enough discourse to call her a friend yet. Though some of what Tachibana says is very interesting indeed.” Sasaki chuckled throatily. “By your face, I’d guess you’ve already met her somewhere. And that it wasn’t a very happy meeting. I expected that, though.”
“Sasaki…” I said in a hoarse, ancient-sounding voice. “Stop hanging around with jerks like her. She’s—”
—our enemy.
“It certainly looks that way,” said Sasaki, unconcerned. “But she doesn’t seem to be my enemy. It’s very interesting, actually. She’s told me some truly unbelievable things. They’re hard for me to understand, but just thinking about them is a nice diversion. Like mental aerobics. Concepts I can’t accept, but which I can recognize.”
The kidnapper—Kyoko Tachibana—smiled, her lip twisting slightly. “Oh, but Sasaki, I want you to accept them, by all means. Otherwise”—she looked at me with eyes like a caged puppy’s at the front of a pet shop—“he doesn’t seem like he’ll listen. You won’t hear even three seconds of what I have to say. Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t wrong. She was dead right. Anyone who would dare to kidnap Asahina should be sent off to a courtroom to be judged, without a lawyer. Why wasn’t Koizumi here yet? What about Miss Mori and Mr. Arakawa, or the Tamaru brothers?
“Kyon, are you listening?”
I told Sasaki to wait. I was in the middle of looking around for someone, anyone I could trust.
“Sorry about that. But there’s one more person I feel it would be good to introduce you to. Could you let me have the initiative to do that?”
Who was it, I wanted to know. If it was that nasty time traveler guy, then I didn’t need any introductions.
“I think I have an idea of who you’re talking about, but that is not who I’m talking about at the moment.” Sasaki gestured with her hand to the person standing opposite Kyoko Tachibana. “She told me she wished to occupy a shared space of a radius of two meters with you. So I figured why not introduce you, since she gave me the sense that if we let her be, she’d become even more of a problem for you. I guess I’d describe her as being more queer than strange, somehow.”
I looked where Sasaki indicated I should.
At first I didn’t know what I was seeing.
Like a drop of black ink plopped into water, a dark and hazy fog… that was my first impression, and it took a few seconds for my brain to recognize that the image received by my retinas was that of a girl—a girl wearing the black uniform of Koyo Academy.
Yet the moment of recognition came with the sense that this girl had been standing stock still, right here, for a century. What could this aura be, I wondered.
She stood out in a crowd—it was a tired old phrase, but I’d never seen anybody in my life more deserving of it.
“Wha…?”
It was absolutely the first time I’d met her. Even a glance at this girl would’ve been unforgettable.
But what was this wintry, snow-covered-mountain chill that I felt? It seemed like I’d felt it before—
She slowly raised her head, and the moment her face and eyes were revealed, every hair on my body stood up. She had to be a ghost. She wasn’t a person. She was no human.
“—”
Her face was an inorganic white, with eyes like black crystal, and she had dark hair, so dark it seemed sprayed with a matte finish. Her hair was long enough to extend past her waist, and it was wavy to boot—in its volume and length it was like a great mop. It spread out left and right as much as it fell down, such that you could say most of her surface area was comprised of hair. It was like nothing I’d seen before, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d flapped her hair like wings and flown up into the sky. It was inescapably prominent, but I hadn’t even noticed it until Sasaki had introduced her, which was deeply strange.
A quick look around me revealed that, indeed, while passersby were noticing Sasaki and Kyoko Tachibana, they were not looking at her at all.
“Who are you?”
“—”
She stood there, not so much as making a sound or blinking, staring at me as if she were trying to identify a single pigeon among a flock at a shrine. It was a more mechanical gaze than any machine. Even the cheapest digital camera’s lens had more emotion than her eyes.
“—”
Her expressionlessness was similar to Nagato’s, but of a different type. The manufacturer and designer were different. If Nagato was like an icicle in a field, this girl was like dry ice. She wouldn’t melt; she would just sublimate and disappear.
Her pale lips moved out of obligation. “—Ah…” Her mouth opened and from it emerged, surprisingly enough, not white smoke but a regular human voice. Contrary to what I expected, I must confess that I was taken aback.
“I am—an observer. The time—in this place… moves very… slowly. The temperature—tiresome.”
The quality of her voice made her sound so drowsy she was on the verge of death. If voices could have a color, hers was the monochrome sepia of old film.
Not taking her eyes off me, she continued. “—This time… there is—no mistake—you are… him,” she said incomprehensibly.
Her appearance being what it was, it overlapped with my impression of what was going on here. Still, what was this unease? This feeling of déjà vu?
“—I am—” she said, very slowly, then continued. “Kuyoh—”
“Kuyoh?” The instant I was going to ask what characters she used for that surname, she continued.
“Suoh—”
“Huh?” So it was Kuyoh Suoh, then?
“…—Suoh—Kuyoh—”
What? Which was it? Having two surnames was strange enough, but now it sounded like she was short a gear or five in her head.
Sasaki chuckled quietly, which brought me back to reality. “Kyon, she’s always like that. Interesting, isn’t she? I call her Kuyoh, but what she’s lacking isn’t gears, but a sense of concrete individuality. She doesn’t fully understand the notion of being an individual. No, no—she’s not sick. That’s just the way she is. I can’t explain it any other way.”
Whatever her problem was, trying to talk to this Kuyoh girl was way harder than conversing with Nagato, even back when I’d first met her. Wait—Nagato?
—Could she be somewhere nearby?
—It was possible.
The SOS Brigade’s winter trip. The blizzard on the ski slope. The phantom mansion that had appeared in the snow. Nagato collapsed with a fever there, and with her hint, Haruhi’s intuition, and Koizumi’s quick wits, we escaped, and now the whole episode seemed like a daydream.
Extraterrestrial beings unrelated to the Data Overmind—the Macro-Spacial Cosmic Entity.
“I see.” I burned the image of her face into my brain cells so I’d never forget it. “So it’s you. The other aliens, not like Nagato.”
“—Aliens…—? What—is that…”
“Don’t play games with me.” It was immediately obvious, even to me, what was going on here. The kidnapper, Kyoko Tachibana, was in opposition to Koizumi’s Agency. That nasty guy from the future was Asahina’s counterpart, no question. So by elimination, the answer was clear. The one dealing with Nagato was this Kuyoh Suoh girl—bingo. I was assaulted by the urge to yell, Tallyho!
A conversation I’d had with Koizumi on the way back from the Tsuruya mansion suddenly came back to me.
—Let us suppose, hypothetically, that there are Nations A and B, who (redacted) are opposed by nations C and D, respectively, whereupon C and D ally themselves—
So it had finally happened. If Nagato’s Data Overmind were F, then this girl was the adversary of F.
I stood there on my guard, and she looked at me like I were a bronze bell in a temple somewhere.
“—Your—” she said, in a voice that wavered like an old cassette tape. “—Eyes—very—beautiful…”
It was a perfectly meaningless line.
Conclusion: she was a
n interface far cruder than Nagato, Kimidori, or even the late Ryoko Asakura. Trying to uncover her true intentions was nothing more than a waste of time. And I didn’t want to know, anyway. I had no intention of getting to know her, I said.
“That’s what you would say, Kyon,” said Sasaki, holding her stomach to keep from bursting out laughing. “But they’re all I have. Nobody else would get close to me. Is there a wide variety of interesting people like Kuyoh at North High? That seems quite nice, but unfortunately I’m not a North High student. I might complain about it, but I have to spend two more years where I am. If I can manage to get into the college I’m aiming for, I have every intention of enjoying it to death.”
“Sasaki,” I said to my former friend. “Do you know what these people really are?”
“They made me listen, so yes, I know. It’s a rather incredible story. If you want to know whether I believe it or not, I wasn’t sure.” Sasaki’s eyes crinkled as she smiled. “But I can tell by your reaction—they’re the real thing.” She cast her gaze over Kuyoh and Kyoko Tachibana. “An extraterrestrial humanoid interface and a limited superhuman. And a time traveler, was it? Seems closer to triple trouble than it does to three of a kind.”
Knock it off, Sasaki. Don’t give me this pointless chatter. You’ll only repeat my mistake. Damn—Kuyoh the ghost was one thing, but I probably would’ve treated Kyoko Tachibana differently if this had been our first meeting. But since I already knew her smug, indifferent face, I couldn’t help but have an attitude. But Sasaki had a sharp mind and sharp eyes. Even if I tried to sway her now, my arguments wouldn’t have any teeth.
Kyoko Tachibana the ringleader still had that warm smile of hers on; you’d never guess she was a criminal. Had her actions back in February just been a deliberate setup for her performance now? Which meant the same was true for that smug time-traveling bastard. Where the hell was he, anyway?
I was looking around suspiciously when Kyoko Tachibana spoke up.
“He said he was going to skip this ‘ridiculous errand.’ He’s around somewhere, but he won’t be showing up today.”
The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 8
