The Depths of Despair

I had been longing to see Yuna ever since enlistment tore us apart. But this wasn’t the reunion I had imagined. Juri was right—Yuna had turned into a completely different person. This Yuna would stop at nothing to achieve her goals. Any warmth she once had was gone.

“Yuna. Long time no see,” I said, forcing a smile. I wanted to believe the old Yuna was still in there, buried beneath the weight of the painful year she had endured alone. But I knew that her scars ran far deeper than that.

“Put the gun down,” Yuna said coldly, her hand unwavering with her gun pointed at me.

She looked like she would actually shoot me if I made a single wrong move. There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in her expression. For now, I had to go along with what she wanted. Maybe, if she calmed down, I would have a chance to talk to her. Slowly, I lowered my gun and let it drop to the ground.

Yuna kicked my gun away from my feet without breaking eye contact. Then, she shifted her gaze to Hideo behind me. “Take the dog back to the base. Leave this to me,” she ordered, her tone cold and final.

There was no movement from behind me. The silence stretched. I could only guess that Hideo didn’t appreciate being ordered around by her.

Yuna changed her aim, the gun now pointed directly at Hideo. “Do it. Or I’ll tell your father.”

That seemed to do the trick. Hideo scoffed, but I didn’t miss the way his jaw tightened in frustration. Without another word, he brushed past me and Yuna, heading toward Shiba. A few soldiers arrived at the scene, falling in line with him as he dragged Shiba away. For a fleeting moment, hope sparked in me. Maybe she wanted to talk. But that hope withered almost immediately. Even after everyone left, her gun stayed trained on me, her eyes cold and unyielding.

She held out her free hand, demanding, “Give it to me, Private Akai Sou.”

I knew she was referring to the memory card. My head spun as I tried to think of every possible reason. Why had she put it in her necklace and left it at her parents’ columbarium niche if she didn’t want me to find it? When we tried to see what was on it, there was nothing except malware. She wasn’t keeping any evidence or trying to send me a message. So, what was she planning to do?

Only people close to her knew about the secret of her pendant. Of course, I was bound to find out. But what was the point of making me discover the memory card? I was a soldier like her. Neither of us could get that memory card inside the base. Why was she asking for it?

Everything she did seemed suspicious to me. Seeing her now, and noticing how much she had changed, I couldn’t bring myself to trust her. She was hiding something. I needed to know what she was planning to do with the malware.

“What’s on that memory card, Yuna?” I asked, pretending that I hadn’t tried to see the contents, hoping she would believe me.

Yuna’s expression remained stoic. “Nothing you need to know about. You just need to return it to me, and then I’ll escort you back to the base. I’d suggest you follow quietly, or it won’t end well.”

“What are you planning to do with it?” I pressed. “Why are you working with the military?”

Her calm demeanor cracked, rage replacing her blank expression. She pointed her gun upward and fired once. “Don’t think I won’t shoot. I will, if you keep this up.”

I managed to stay upright despite the sharp crack of the gunshot. If pretending to be oblivious wasn’t working, I would have to try a different approach—bait her with something she couldn’t ignore. “I can help you with your plan,” I said, my voice steady. “Let me in. I want justice for Uncle and Aunt too.”

Yuna’s expression darkened, her voice rising sharply. “Don’t you dare talk to me about my parents. Why do you care, anyway? Where were you when they were murdered?”

“You know I was already enlisted at that time. You never told me about them. If you had told me, then I would have—”

“What would you do, huh? You were stuck training at the base. What could you have done? Nothing. There’s nothing you could have done. The least you can do now is stay out of my way.”

“They’re my parents too, Yuna!” I yelled, the hurt cutting deep as she brushed me off like I was some stranger. I wasn’t—I was family. “Trust me. I want to help.”

She stared down at me for a long moment, as if weighing her options, hesitating whether to trust me or not. “You can help by coming with me to the base.” With that, she pulled a pair of handcuffs from her pocket and snapped them onto my wrist. “As a Drifter.”

As she patted down my pockets, searching for the memory card, I tried to make sense of why she needed me as a Drifter, why I had to get captured. I didn’t resist, even as she fished the card out of my pocket. There had to be a reason she said I could help. After retrieving what she wanted, she slipped it into her pocket and called for a ride. My thoughts raced so loudly I couldn’t focus on the words she spoke into the phone.

I tried to piece together everything I had learned up to now. Yuna had hidden the memory card in her pendant’s secret compartment—something she had shown me long ago. She must have stashed it there before joining the military, which would have been sometime after I enlisted. It made sense. Soldiers couldn’t smuggle anything into the base without passing through body scanners. The memory card wouldn’t have made it through without its contents being examined.

But if I were captured as a Drifter, the memory card could be used as evidence. She could fabricate a story, telling the higher-ups that I was plotting something malicious. And when she requested to inspect the memory card’s contents…

The realization hit me like a bullet train.

She had been planning everything ever since her parents had been murdered by the robots. I must have been part of her plan too. She had been betting on me moving exactly as she predicted. Since we were close friends, she could pretty much guess what I would do. She knew I would visit her apartment once I had a day off. Then, Juri would tell me about her parents, and I would visit the cemetery. Seeing her necklace there, she knew I wouldn’t just leave it behind, knowing how much it meant to her. Even if I had, she would have had another plan to send it to me or something. If I had the memory card, I would try to look at its content. She wanted me to desert while carrying the memory card. She had been betting on it the whole time.

That made me sad, somehow. She had spent the entire year focused on revenge, joining the military solely for this purpose. She had even gone as far as using me as a scapegoat.

Her plan was too dangerous. Something could go terribly wrong, and lives would be at stake.

“Don’t do this, Yuna,” I said, struggling to keep my composure.

Yuna was planning to use the malware to attack Bluefort.