Volume 1 – Chapter 13: No Turning Back

The city felt like a corpse. A great, empty thing, emptied of life, emptied of warmth. The sky above was an ugly gray, strangled with residual smoke from some faraway conflagration, and the streets — deserted, hushed — felt almost suspended in time.

We stepped lightly, huddled in the shadows, our breath shallow, timid. Once we got away from that derelict building I could feel the full weight of everything come crashing down on us. There was no turning back. Not now. Not ever.

Rika was next to me, and I could feel the tightness in her muscles, the drumbeat of her shaking fingers, close enough that I could hear the rasp of her breath. She was scared. I was too. But neither of us said it. It was not worth saying at all.

“We should stop,” she said after a few more minutes of walking. “Just for a bit.”

I hesitated. Stopping felt dangerous. It felt like giving up. But she wasn’t wrong. We were drained and mentally depleted. I was lost in my mind, my thoughts spiraling together. I didn’t know if I was even making the right decisions anymore.

We took refuge in a tiny alley and jammed ourselves between the damp walls of two derelict buildings. Rika sucked in a breath, ran a hand through her hair, trembling fingers. “This is wild,” she whispered. “Everything about this is nuts.”

I leaned against the cold stone and closed my eyes for an instant. “I know.”

A silence stretched between us, thick and heavy. The whole weight of everything — of Project Eclipse, of the video, of the men observing us — felt unbearable.

Then, suddenly, Rika spoke. “Kaito.”

I turned to her. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were a million miles away, staring blankly at some point in the dark street. Her voice was softer than it had been, almost timid. “Back in that building — that building that night — when you pulled me away, when we ran…” She trailed off, then took a deep breath. “I kept thinking. “If we hadn’t gotten away in time, if they’d captured us …”

She finally looked at me, and there was something raw in her eyes. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you came to some harm.”

A weird feeling twisted in my chest. It was something new, something I could not quite name. “Rika…”

She gave a low, nearly bitter laugh. “I thought nothing of this mattered,” she said. “The world, the people in it. Everything was so… distant. As if I was just watching it all behind a glass wall.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet and let her talk.

“But then you appeared," she whispered. “And then, suddenly, it was all real again.”

The words landed on me more than I thought they would.

Now she was looking at me, her eyes searching mine. For what, I wasn’t sure.

I swallowed, my throat dry. “You matter to me too, Rika.” The words came out quiet but they were true. More true than anything I’d ever said.

Something flickered across her face — relief, perhaps. Or something deeper.

For a while, the rest of the world didn’t exist. There were no men after us, no secrets to be unveiled. Just me and him, alone in the quiet of the devastated city.

And then, before I could quite comprehend what was going on, she leaned in.

Soft. The only word that came to mind. Her lips pressed against mine: soft and tentative, and yet fully assured. A moment suspended in time.

She didn’t seem embarrassed or regretful when she pulled away. Just… steady. As if something had finally fallen into place.

“We’ll get through this,” she said, her voice low but firm. “Together.”

For the first time in a long time, I believed it.

We weren’t going to remain incognito forever.

The city was beginning to stir in its own odd manner. Distant sirens, the occasional rustle of movement in the dark. We had to move.

“Where do we go now?” Her voice flared back to that hard,tense edge. Rika asked.

I thought of the video. The cryptic warning. The final choice.

“There’s a piece we’re missing,” I said. “Something important. We need more information.”

Rika frowned. “And where do you think that will be found?”

I exhaled. “We need to find a person with knowledge of Project Eclipse. Someone who can explain to us what the hell is really going on.”

She crossed her arms. “And you figure these guys are just walking around the city waiting for us?”

“No.” I met her gaze. “But I think that they’re watching us.”

A flash of understanding stirred in her eyes. “You want to draw them out.”

I nodded. “We don’t have a choice. We need answers.”

Rika snorted, in thought. Then, after several seconds, she nodded.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

And with that, we left the alley and entered the unknown.

There was no going back now.