Children of the Sky

The Junk Zone was quieter now. The heavy crackle of static had settled into a low hum, like the world itself was holding its breath. Eito and Hina moved carefully through the debris, stepping over broken signs and shattered fragments of forgotten code.

They had stopped talking about the wings. There was nothing left to say. The truth hung between them like the buzzing air, unspoken, undeniable. One set of wings meant one chance at escape.

Still, neither of them were ready to give up.

"If you could do anything," Eito asked suddenly, kicking aside a cracked streetlamp fragment, "after all this… what would it be?"

Hina thought for a long while. The faint glow from the unfinished wing device pulsed gently from the small satchel at her side. "Anything?"

"Yeah." Eito's gaze drifted upward, past the layers of digital static, toward the distorted sky. "When we make it out."

A faint smile ghosted across her lips, small but genuine, at the boy's confidence. "I would like to touch the sky," she said quietly. "Not the ceiling of this world, the real sky. Clouds, stars, the endless unknown."

Eito chuckled under his breath. "An astronaut? Ambitious."

"What about you?" she asked.

Eito thought for a moment. "Sleep in," he said finally. "In a real bed. No resets, no loops. Just… time that keeps going. Finally graduate and actually become an adult." He looked at her, expression softer now. "That's all I really want. Nothing like going to space like you."

The two of them giggled at Eito's little quip. For a while, they walked in silence again, the only sound being the rhythmic crunch of debris beneath their shoes.

The further they wandered, the more they saw what the system discarded of what others had left behind - old makeshift shelters, fragmented recordings, scattered scraps of attempted escape plans. The remnants of anomalies who had tried and failed to break free. Maybe some of these trashed fragments were also Eito's. He could feel the weight of their absence pressing down on the air.

The boy paused near a pile of cracked glass panels and scorched data chips, sifting absently through the fragments. Some were etched with faint symbols, others frozen in glitching loops of forgotten voices or static-filled images.

"Children of the Sky," Hina murmured, brushing her hand along a weathered wall etched with faint, glitching symbols. "Some of them called themselves that."

"The Children of the Sky," Eito echoed softly, his eyes tracing the faint symbols. "Did a lot of them make it beyond the layers?"

"Some," Hina admitted, her voice steady but distant. "Not all. Some disappeared before I could erase them. Some vanished without a trace after repeated failures." Her fingers lingered over the symbols, their meaning long corrupted by time and data decay. "Some made it." She glanced back at him. "That's what we have to believe."

Eito nodded. "And we're going to be among them."

They passed through a collapsed structure - once a checkpoint or outpost, now nothing but jagged framework and hollowed-out walls. Faint echoes of long-lost conversations crackled in the air, fragments of memory loops still clinging to the decaying data.

Eito's eyes lingered on a rusted data console half-buried in rubble, its screen flickering with remnants of old escape plans. Routes, symbols, notes scrawled in desperation. It reminded him how close others had come—and how far they'd fallen. Some of the handwriting seemed familiar, but Eito didn't know if it was because he made similar plans. Maybe he knew some of these people whether they succeeded or failed.

"All this effort," Hina muttered, "and still no one knows what happens after you make it."

Eito was quiet for a moment, then shrugged lightly. "Maybe that's the point. Maybe becoming real means no one comes back to tell the story because they're off enjoying the real sky."

Hina didn't argue. Her expression softened, but there was a distant sadness behind her eyes, like she had partially given up going beyond the sky. Even though she and Eito shared their plans, Hina seemed to still be filled with self-doubt. He understood that their odds were grim, and she was thinking opposite of his idealistic beliefs. Her fingers brushed briefly over the faint symbols on the wall again, lingering just a moment too long before she pulled her hand back and turned away.

They moved on, the forgotten ruins stretching endlessly ahead, the faint hum of the system far above - always watching, but for now, not yet ready to intervene.

And somewhere beyond, the real sky waited to receive for Children of the Sky.