Awakening

Then a new sound came in over the trees.

Not an engine. Not tires. A heavy rhythmic thud, felt in the chest before the ears, growing—wump-wump-wump-wump—and Masao’s eyes went up to the mirror and then up further, to the strip of sky above the windscreen, and the calm finally, finally left his face.

A shadow swept across the road ahead. Then another.

They’d gone up. Two of them, dropping over the ridge line and swinging in low above the Skyline, downwash flattening the treetops on either side, hunting us along the mountain road from the air where no slide and no maneuver and no gap in the traffic could ever shake them.

The choppers had found us.

The radio on his chest crackled to life.

“DRIVER. COME IN.” Nathan’s voice, flattened by static, threading through the rotor noise. “DRIVER—POSITION—”

Masao looked at the horizon for a long second. Then he reached down without a word and switched it off.

The choppers were quartering the road ahead now, swinging wide and coming back, herding us. And far off, out over the grey haze of the city, a streak of fire climbed the morning sky—a long bright arc, too low and too willful to be anything that flew on its own.

“A jet?”

“No.” Masao thumbed the cassette, rewinding it, the tape chirping backward. “That’s Leonie. They’re all out looking for us now. Every one of them.”

“Leonie?” My voice cracked. “Who—who is looking for us—”

He didn’t answer. He pressed play, and Saki’s voice came up again from the start, bright and young and tearing, and he drove.

The choppers cut in front of us. And they were not police, not council sedans with wings—they were military, slab-sided and armored and bristling, gunships, the kind of thing that ends a car like ours with a single squeeze. The only reason we were still alive was the man at the wheel, flinging the little rally machine up the serpentine in slides and saves that should not have been possible. But a mountain road gives you only one way up. He couldn’t out-corner a thing that flew. There was only the forest at the top—the trees, the cover—and he aimed us at it like a drowning man at a shore.

Up we climbed, into the high blossom. Some wild cousin of the sakura still flowered this far up, late and pale, and we tore through a tunnel of it. A gunship dropped in close on our right, so close, the downwash hammering the petals into a pink blizzard—and as Masao threw us into a hard left it opened fire.

I heard the rounds go through the car. A flat tearing punch of holes, front to back.

And then I saw the blood on the windshield.

Masao didn’t make a sound. Didn’t slow. He just kept driving for the trees, and his daughter kept singing—

Yoru no Speed! (Speed of the night!) 止まれないで — don’t stop — このまま fallin’ faster — I wanna feel your turbo heart —

—and the song hit something in me, deep, deeper than the needle, deeper than the fear, and the smooth blank wall in my head where the oldest part of me had always been sealed cracked.

It came back all at once. A flood through the breach.

Saki. That’s Saki singing. And behind Saki: Sasaki, switched off on his slab. And behind Sasaki: Yuri, falling to cold stone with his hand outstretched. And Shun, with his hopeful pitch. The label. Kiseki Records. The red hair, the bleach, the yellow ribbon. Erika Takamine, the borrowed girl, the borrowed name—

—no.

Not Erika. Not Fenella. The wall went down completely and I was standing in the whole of myself for the first time in two years, and I knew, with a certainty older than this country, older than the mountain we were dying on:

Eden. I’m Eden. I’m the key to the moon.

And the power came back with the name.

I turned my head toward the gunship hanging off our flank and I reached. And the pilot’s mind opened to me as clear and close as my own thoughts—I was in there, behind his eyes, riding the second-by-second of him—and I felt him sighting the small fast car he’d just been firing on, the car he’d been chasing up this ridge for minutes, and I reached into that and I smoothed it over, the way you smooth wet sand after a wave.

What car.

I felt the question bloom in him, genuine, bewildered. What car? What was I—the mission—what mission? Where am I supposed to— The target dissolved. The orders dissolved. Return to base. I felt him reach for it. What base? Where— I took that too. The other ship, the gunner, all of them, one after another—I unmade the reason they’d come, the thing they’d been hunting, the whole shape of their morning, until two armored gunships full of men drifted out over the wrong valley chasing ghosts neither of them could quite remember, casting about the empty sky for something that had never been there, looking, slowly, for somewhere to set down.

And we slipped under the trees.

The road gave out into an offroad trail, ruts and roots and pink fallen blossom, and Masao took us off the tarmac into the green dark of the forest, the gunships’ thunder receding behind us, lost.

I turned to look at him.

He was slumped against the wheel, one hand pressed to his side, the blood spreading dark and fast through his fingers and across the seat—too much of it, far too much—and he was smiling.

“Esper powers,” he said, the words coming slow and wet. His eyes found mine in the mirror. “You’re back. Finally.”

And he drove us deeper into the trees, gentle now, careful, dying, taking us as far into the cover as the last of him would reach.

He brought the car to rest deep off the trail, where the trees grew close and the light came down green and broken, and killed the engine.

“Here,” he said, “only Leonie or Nathan can find us. No one else.”

His breathing had gone wrong—shallow, wet, fast. His hands shook as he reached for the glovebox and fumbled it open, and drew out another cassette, a small one, and turned it over so I could see the cover.

Saki was on it. A photograph of his daughter, young and fierce and grinning into a camera, hair dyed some impossible color, all attitude and bright defiance.

He held it in both bloodied hands and looked at it.

I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. I was crying without having decided to, leaning forward over the seat-back, and I put my hand on his shoulder.

“They’ll be here soon.” He didn’t look up from the photograph. “You’re the only one in the world who’s above them. You understand? Above them. Not equal. Above.”

I gripped his shoulder harder, as if that could hold any of it in place.

“So whoever walks into this forest after you—” he gathered something, some last reserve, and turned his neck to find my eyes, “—Leonie, Nathan, anyone at all—you do to them what you did to those pilots. You wipe them clean. Every one. And then you run.”

“Masao—”

“Run away from all of it. Hide, the way you’ve been hiding. You’re good at it—you’re the best there ever was at it—so go and be no one again and don’t let a single soul find you.” His hand found mine on his shoulder, slick and cold and trembling. “Go. Hurry.”

“I’m not leaving you—”

“GO.” He found the strength to shout it, one last time, the word tearing out of him, and it broke something in me that there was no time to feel. “Hurry—”

I went.

I don’t remember opening the door. I remember falling out of the car into the leaf litter, finding my feet, and the song on the cassette deck winding down to its last whispered line—“Speed no naka de… I found you”—and then the soft click of the tape running out.

And I remember the last I ever saw of him: Masao, alone in the bullet-torn little car he’d driven like the devil to keep me alive, both hands wrapped tight around a photograph of the daughter he’d left to protect and would never see again, his head bowed low over her face in the green and broken light.

Then I turned, and I ran—deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the forest—and I left him there.

I ran for the path, and where the offroad trail spilled out onto a thin band of cracked tarmac, he was already there. Waiting.

Nathan.

He was covered in blood—too much of it, and from the way he stood I knew almost none of it was his. His military dress hung off him in ruined strips, scorched and slashed, and he was breathing hard, sweat cutting clean lines through the grime on his face. He’d fought something. Someone. How many, I couldn’t guess. He’d come through whatever it was barely standing, swaying at the edge of himself, a boy worn down to the last thread.

His cold eyes found mine.

And he knew. I watched the understanding arrive—not fear, nothing so simple as fear—just a quiet recognition of what I was now, and what was about to happen, the way an animal knows weather. He didn’t reach for the blade. He didn’t reach for anything.

He just let me in.

I went into him the way I’d gone into the pilots, braced for the cold grey desert, the endless empty nothing he’d hidden behind for four days—and it wasn’t there. The wall was gone. He’d taken it down himself. And past where the desert had been I found, instead, a single thing he’d kept somewhere far underneath all that emptiness:

A boy. Small, undefended, looking back at me. Standing on an open beach under a wide bright sky, the sea running up the sand, no maze, no desert, no blade—just a child, and the water, and the sun.

I could have unmade it. Masao had told me to. Wipe them clean, every one.

I left him there instead. On his beach. In the one good thing he had.

And he folded down onto the side of the road, slow, and sat in the gravel with his eyes closed, gone somewhere quiet and far away, and didn’t move again.

I walked past him.

I walked off the mountain road, down through the strange late blossom that had no business flowering this high or this late, pink drifting down through the green.

Behind me, on the gravel, I left a boy who had nearly burned himself out of his own mind to reach me first—who had cut his way through God knew what to stand on that road, swaying on the very edge of the berserk Edward had warned me about, and who, at the end of it, had chosen to open the gate rather than draw the blade. I left him on his beach. It was the only kindness I had left to give anyone, and I’d given it to the boy who killed Yuri. I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t.

Behind me, somewhere in the trees, Masao sat bowed over a photograph in a car that had finished its work. Behind him, in a tower in Osaka, Sasaki lay switched off on a slab with his word still locked inside me—found now, finally, all of it found, every name and every key, and arrived a day too late to matter. The Doc, Saika, the fifty quiet hostages of Squad 37—I didn’t know what was left of any of them. The thing wearing Edward had been holding a gun to Saika’s throat when Masao carried me out, and the building had shaken with an explosion behind us, and I had not looked back, and that was the truth of it: I hadn’t looked back, and I never learned what the not-looking cost.

And behind all of them, at the bottom of everything, on a cold warehouse floor: Yuri. His hand reaching across the stone. His eyes, his own again at the very last, finding me across the breaking circle. The one piece of all of this that had been mine—not the key’s, not Erika’s, not Fenella’s, mine—and the only one I could never get back by remembering harder.

Masao had told me to run. To hide as I’d hidden, to be no one, to let no one find me. And standing in the falling pink with my whole self finally returned to me, I understood that I was going to obey him—not because I was ordered to, but because I chose it. Let the councils tear at each other over an empty space where a key used to be. Let the moon hang up there and wait another age. They had taken Yuri, and Masao, and Sasaki, and two years of a small bright borrowed life I had genuinely loved. They would not take what was left.

So I kept walking. Down through the blossom, through all of it, through the grief I had no time to stop and feel—

—a silly, bubbly, city-pop, washed-up little failed singer.

Named Eden.