[LOBBY 2 – PART B]

Masaru, trembling with the flashlight in his hands, weighs his decision.

Why does she want it so badly? he asks himself. But he realizes immediately that he’s not going to say no to her, especially not with a look like that, the one eye not concealed by her bangs staring at the flashlight like a person’s very soul… and in a certain way, perhaps it is.

He presents the flashlight and she snatches it up. Her eyes jolt open as her fingers tighten around the bright red finish of the object, as if reading a crucial message hidden on its body.

Sato, laid back and sipping on some bland lemonade through a straw, the cup of which is nestled in one of the nurse-thing’s cleavage, smacks his lips loudly after a long, refreshing gulp.

“Tellin’ ya’,” he begins with an overlubricated voice, “you shouldn’t feel sorry for her. She made peace faster than we did.”

“Shut up!” she shouts, causing only a nonchalant shrug from the big fellow.

“You really got to calm down. If you were you just figured it out like your friend did and behaved like a good girl then you-”

Valerie buckles, slings up her rifle, and points it at Sato, but Masaru’s already there.

“Hey, stop!” Masaru shouts as he fights her for the rifle.

“You’re trash. Die!” she screams through him to Sato as she quits the battle over the weapon and flings the flashlight through the air into his face.

It makes an ear-catching *clunk* as the flashlight peels off a red mark on his face before falling down to the perfectly clean floor.

Sato’s eyes are wide with shock as his mind weighs the brief contact with the flashlight. His face contorts with fury. “Y-your spiteful bitch! You think you can just throw your shit around at other people?!”

“You don’t even care about that!” Valerie, held at bay by Masaru, snaps, “you said yourself there’s no point to any of this!”

Sato laughs at her in a way that Masaru could only classify as “punchably smug”. “What are you on about, you delirious woman?! I said there was no point in fighting it!”

Valerie screams something back at Sato, who scoffs something back at her. They go back and forth as Masaru, his breath increasingly thin, looks over the other two.

Kenji is back to cleaning his rifle with a slant frown, and the girl, eyes pink from crying, is once again in her seat and scribbling a picture of two people holding a little person between them, but it’s clear she’s drawing much more quickly than usual.

Masaru leans back as he feels Valerie’s muscles relax, but the language is still sharp.

“I hate you, pig! I hope those things feed you shit one day and you’ll fall over dead!” Valerie shouts.

Sato laughs as he reaches over and hugs the nurse-thing next to him. “They’d never do that to me! They recognize me for what I am, and they’ll make my trip out very comfortable. You should try it sometime, maybe you’d get over yourself and your smelly Western brain.”

“Die, loser! She hated you!” Valarie screams.

Sato rears up, causing the lemonade to topple over onto the floor. “No, you don’t get it, she hated yo-”

“Please stop fighting!” the girl cries out before breaking out into hysterical sobbing once again.

Valerie and Sato glance over like criminals under a floodlight as Kenji just rolls his eyes.

As the elementary schooler erupts again and again with pitiful sobs, the two adults in the “debate” steadily turn away from each other.

“C-clean this shit up,” Sato orders to the nurse next to him who, to its credit, was already cleaning up the spilled lemonade.

Valerie takes a step back, but after a pause, quickly rushes up and picks up the flashlight before rushing off down the hall.

Masaru holds himself together as best he can as he just pushes out a slow, tired sigh.

“See you later, bitch,” Sato says with a sneer before collapsing back in his plush chair. “…Can’t believe she said all that.”

Masaru wisely decides not to engage with this and instead steps over to the sniffling student.

“She probably needs some time to process,” he assures himself as he tries to wrap his brain around the task of befriending a kid.

“Hey,” he says, taking a seat next to her. “How are you doing?”

Her eyes keep to her notebook at first, but slowly they slide over to look at his shoes.

It takes her a moment, but her face begins to brighten up with determination.

“Do you work at The Company?” she asks, perking up to address Masaru with wide, hope-filled eyes.

He blinks.

“Uh… which company?”

She blinks back, winning a sigh from Sato, who’s just crossing his arms like some miserable panda who lost his bamboo.

“My dad goes to work there…” she says, as if disappointed that Masaru’s some kind of inattentive moron. Of course everyone would know her dad, the one who works at the company.

Masaru takes a deep breath before shaking his head. “I probably work for a different company,” he says deflatedly.

The girl turns down to her notebook again, and gives a slow, sad nod.

“Oh…”

It’s quiet in the lobby for a moment. Masaru glances over to Kenji for any kind of contextual help, but Kenji simply glances aside as he pops some bland seaweed chips in his mouth.

Masaru looks next to Sato, who is already receiving his next tray of boring food delivered by a “beautiful,” yet cold, inhuman creature masquerading as a nurse.

He sighs.

“Hey, kid. I’m Masaru. What’s your name?”

The girl keeps her eyes to her paper. “I’m Hoshino Yuna. I’m nine years old, and I’m waiting for my parents to come get me.”

Masaru pauses.

“Come get me,” her last words ring through his mind like a sunken chime. How does he explain it to her? How could she understand?

He focuses in on her carefully as he clears his throat.

“Uh, alright! I hope they come soon. I suppose you’ve gone through those doors, over there?” he asks nodding over to the black double doors at the edge of the lobby.

She doesn’t even look at them.

“Those aren’t my parents,” she says, her head craning deeper into herself as she focuses in on the happy drawing of three people… with something extra at the side that Masaru hadn’t noticed until now.

A chill slowly crawls up Masaru’s spine like some kind of cruel insect, just waiting for its moment to be noticed and bite at the moment of terror.

“Of course,” he says simply, his gaze trailing along her drawing. “That’s nice.”

She gives him a sad smile. “Thank you.”

“Is that your cat?” he asks.

She hums. “No. He’s not ours... It’s supposed to have red eyes but I don’t have that color.”

The cold feeling cutting up Masaru ripens into a feeling of pure ice gripping his spinal cord.

“It… has red eyes?”

She nods in response.

His breath becomes shallow. “What is it supposed to be?”

“That’s Sakai,” she says, pointing at him before turning the page to reveal several doodles of the same ink-black cat with a gap in its eyes.

“Oh, that’s a really cool name. Did you make him up?”

She shakes her head. “It helps lost people. I met him in the alley next to the hospital.”

Masaru’s horror piles on top of itself like writhing insects. One of the pictures shows the cat smiling in a way that a cat simply cannot. That vicious, impossible look saturates his mind.

He clutches his chest, just over where his aortic arch should be. The girl looks over as he turns away.

“Are you okay, sir?”

Masaru brings himself to a nod.

“Just… you know when you get water in your nose?”

She pauses a moment with wide, unblinking eyes.

“Yeah.”

He shakes his head as he turns back to her. “Just felt like that. Sorry. I must be a weird adult to you.”

She shakes her head right back, her black locks of hair drifting back and forth. “No sir. You seem like the most normal person here.”

Masaru stifles a chuckle as he looks back at the cat drawing.

“So you saw it in the hospital alley?”

She nods.

“What happened after that?”

His words cause her face to tense up for a moment. “Sakai talked to me and told me its name. It told me to sit on the bench and take a nap… and then I woke up here.”

Despite the weirdness of this new discovery, Masaru can’t suppress the twitch in his eye.

Okay, I guess it’s fair that the bastard gives the little kid the easy way… but seriously?

“That’s strange,” he with a strained smile.

She nods, and all of a sudden the girl’s expression cools into something Masaru can only guess to be sorrow. “It is strange. But when I go through the doors, I see Sakai again.”

Masaru holds his thoughts as he waits through her pause.

“He tries to hurt me. I don’t understand why… He was so nice when we met...”

The salaryman glances over to Kenji, and then Sato: both are probably listening, and both are actively looking away.

He looks back to her. “How does… Sakai hurt you?”

Her eyes refill with a growing emotion as her gaze turns down. “It stops me from talking to my parents… but they’re not my real parents, and then the quiet man grabs my neck and squeezes really hard.”

“Childish bullshit,” Sato grumbles out as another nurse delivers him another drink.

Masaru tries to put on a brave face for her as he processes the information. If he heard a story like this from a kid even yesterday, he’d flick it off as some kind of nightmare, but coming from Yuna it’s like a sage premonition of death.

His eyebrow piques. “May I see your wrist?”

She pulls her school uniform’s sleeve down a bit, revealing a smooth, delicate wrist with a single black circle on it.

Masaru nods, and show her his three.

“It looks very cool on you,” she says with a genuine smile.

He smiles back, “I think you wear it better.”

She glances away. “Thank you… you’re very nice, sir,” she says, finally drawing a suspect glance from Sato.

“Thank you. You’re a very polite young lady.” Masaru doesn’t miss a beat, and glances over at Sato with the nastiest look of implication available to a human face, the double raised eyebrow with a calm expression: interest, and yet accusation.

The kind of face that says. “Oh, she didn’t say that about you?”

Just as soon as he looked over, Sato’s already shifting away with a huff— Got him.

Masaru turns back to Yuna. “So, how long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” she says, looking at the clock. “I don’t think minutes are supposed to be this long.”

Masaru looks to the clock along with her, and sees that it’s still… yep, 8:17. He can see Valerie coming down the hall, her aqua-colored gaze straining as it focuses on the black doors past him. He hums. “Yeah, they definitely aren’t. Hey, I think I have to go,” he says as he gets up.

Yuna nods with a renewed smile. “Okay. Take care!”

“You too!” he says, scratching the stubble on his chin. It amazes him sometimes just how easy it is to cheer up kids.

He steps up to Valerie, who budges past him.

“Tsk, okay?” he lets out, his mood immediately injured… but as he swings around to see Valerie march past him, he sees the look on Yuna’s face: surprise, horror even.

Something jumps through Masaru’s mind to try again. There’s a kid here, after all.

“Sorry,” Masaru says. “I’m sure you’re…”

His mind leaps into overdrive as he reaches for the correct word to describe what she’s going through.

“Bothered.”

Nice.

Valerie looks at him like she could send a truck soaring his way with her gaze, and she rears up to shout.

“It’s horrible,” Masaru correct, “losing someone that close to you.”

The woman holds her pose for a moment, her lips pursed, her eyes flaring with rage, but as his tone sinks in, her shoulders begin to drop.

“…Not here,” she says. “I refuse to hang around this dump anymore, and I can’t lay down in my room anymore.” She takes a long, heaving breath. “I just wish… I could take her flashlight with me when I go through again.”

Masaru blinks at her, her words taking him to an entirely different plane of thought.

“Hey, give me a second,” he says before heading to the elevator.

Valerie’s strained expression flickers in confusion as he rushes off.

“Huh? Give you a second for wha-”

Her voice trails to nothing as he enters the elevator and heads up to his room.

Opening the door to 359, his eyes lock onto his briefcase.

“Right where I left you,” he muses out loud.

Clicking open the two latches, the briefcase opens wide to reveal nothing in particular.

But for some reason, Masaru continues to stare at it. It’s like there’s something hidden in there— an idea that he’s trying to find.

“There were papers in here last time,” he says coolly. “…But Valerie’s ammo returns every loop.”

Squinting at the inside of the case, his eyes enlarge as if finding what he’s looking for.

It’s 8:17 PM.