Autumn Recollection II

Mount Hoshiumi, Japan, 2019

POV: Haru

The generators in the orphanage never slept. Their hum lived under the floor like a second pulse that pressed up through the concrete and into our bones. On quiet nights it felt almost like the mountain breathing, but I didn’t know we were on a mountain then. I only knew the throb, the draft from the vents, the way the dorm shook when the wind outside pushed against something big.

I lay awake and counted the hum until I began to think about the words I’d overheard by the stairwell.

Subject number seven. Compatible. Procedure. L.A.

Vinnie snored three bunks over, sprawled on his back like he’d fallen asleep in the middle of a joke. His blanket slid down to his waist, one hand hanging off the side and fingers twitching like he was still talking.

I wanted to shake him and I couldn’t, because if I woke him and had no way to stop what was coming, it would make me feel worse.

I slid off my bunk. The floor took the heat from my feet in a breath. Aki turned once on her side and settled again. The younger kids curled tighter when the draft from the vents passed over them.

Makoto was awake. I don’t have a memory where he wasn’t. I think he was always waiting for everyone else to fall asleep first. He was always watching. Maybe that’s where I picked that up from.

He sat with his back to the wall in the far corner, knees drawn up, arms folded. His eyes tracked me and then stilled, a kind of nod without moving.

“Makoto,” I whispered.

He crooked two fingers, beckoning me over. I sat, hugging my knees to match his shape.

“I heard them,” I said. “Two caretakers. By the stairwell, near the inspection room. They said a subject’s almost fully compatible. They’re sending him to L.A. for a procedure.”

He listened without blinking.

“It’s Vinnie,” I said. My voice felt like it didn’t belong to me. “They said he could die.”

There was a shift behind his eyes. Not a flinch. Not surprise. Something like a weight settling inside the place where he kept everything straight. Fear scraped across the surface and disappeared, and what was left over looked even heavier.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“I’ll take care of it.” His voice came out level, but too level. The way a bridge sounds right before it’s about to collapse.

“Should we...run?” I asked.

He shook his head once. “We can’t tonight.”

“Why?”

His gaze lifted to the ceiling. “Night lock. Maintenance hatches are sealed with weld tabs between inspections. Double guard rotation every two hours in C and D corridors. Generator panel’s will be checked tonight, and we need to get there to get out. If we try now, they’ll catch us right away.”

“How do you know all that?” It came out more like an accusation than a question.

“I’ve been watching,” he said. His jaw tightened like the word tasted bad. “Every day. I know when the lights flicker for tests. I know where the inspection forms go when they forget to close the clipboard. I know when the floor under the laundry drains faster because someone opened a valve wrong. I know when they’re lazy and when they aren’t.”

I swallowed. “So why haven’t we escaped until now?”

“Because I still can’t find a way to escape with everyone,” he said. The frustration was painted on his face.

Makoto had been there longer than everyone. He must’ve wanted so badly to run away on his own everyday. But he didn’t. Not until now.

“During supply. They open the south gate early to defrost the hinge when the air drops. The truck comes up slow. They pull two guards from C-level for the dock. The generator panel will be unwatched for five minutes if I’m right. That’s our gap.”

“If you’re wrong?”

He didn’t answer that. He didn’t have to. The hum under us filled the space.

I went back to my bunk, lay flat and stared at the ceiling. I slept for maybe a handful of breaths.

Then morning came the way it always did here. Boots on tile, the door opening too hard, and then the taste of metal in the air like the room itself winced.

Two men in black suits walked in, pressed to sharpness you could cut yourself on. The caretakers came with them.

“Number seven,” one suit said without looking at faces.

Vinnie rubbed his eyes with both hands. “If it’s about the bread, that was Haru,” he said, pointing at me with both thumbs and a grin.

They didn’t answer. They took him by the arms and lifted.

“Hey,” he said, trying to twist it into a joke. “Hands off.”

He laughed. They didn’t. Something in his eyes shifted when he saw that. The grin faltered and collapsed like a tent without poles.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. What did I—”

Aki hit one of them at the knee right away with everything she had. Her fists sounded small against wool and flesh, but she didn’t stop. A caretaker shoved her, slamming her into the bed frame.

I went for the hand on Vinnie’s elbow. My teeth met glove. The arm shook, then I flew sideways and the wall knocked the air out of me. My vision shrank to a coin and then widened again in pulses I couldn’t control.

The younger kids were under their blankets, eyes big and round as plates, fists in mouths to keep from making noise. One prayed into the mattress.

Makoto moved. “Stop,” he growled, rushing straight to Vinnie.

A suit stepped into him and planted a fist to his sternum. The sound was dull like a door shutting. Makoto staggered. He didn’t fold. He drove into them again before three caretakers dragged him from behind like anchors.

“Makoto!” Vinnie shouted, for real this time, no grin. “Makoto, don’t let them!”

Makoto shouted and screamed as they pinned him down. “Vinnie! I swear I’ll get you!”

They hauled Vinnie through the doorway. His voice stretched thin down the corridor and faded off the way all sounds do here when a door shuts.

The caretakers waited until Vinnie was taken a safe distance away before letting go of us. Then silence crouched on the room as they left.

Aki’s shoulders hitched. The kid who prayed started over because he’d lost his place. My ribs hurt in a high, thin line against my breath. But the hum kept going. It always did.

Makoto stood with his hands clenched into blood. He stared at the floor.

He didn’t look up again until lights changed to night.

That night, the dorm lights went to their tired yellow. The last inspection passed by with the sound of keys before the door clicked shut.

Makoto tapped the underside of the radiator twice, the way he always did when he called a meeting. Viora and Aki came over after me.

He pulled a bundle from inside the hem of his shirt. A handful of paper sheets stitched together with thread he’d pulled from a blanket.

The pencil lines were precise. Rooms, shafts, valves, arrows, notes that were just marks to me and a map to him.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

“When?” Aki asked. Her voice wore no fear. It wore readiness.

“Now,” he said. “We have to save Vinnie. Tonight, we’re going. The supply run stretched the staff thin. Maintenance won’t be back for some time. That means the panel will be unwatched for a few minutes. We take it.”

“You knew all this?” Aki said.

Viora didn’t look as surpised. Makoto probably would’ve told her first. They were close, having been here the longest.

“Yeah,” he said. “Tonight is the best chance we’ll get until the next supply run.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Aki said this time.

“We’re running out of time. It’s Vinnie tonight, but next it could be any of us.”

Viora’s face was still. She could hold still so well the caretakers saw obedience where there was only weight. Now her mouth trembled before she set it again. “And the others?”

Makoto didn’t look her in the eye. “I can only move you three. There’s no time, we’ll be caught if we move everyone.”

“Why us?” she asked.

“Don’t make me answer that question,” he said. “I don’t want to leave anyone. But it’s now or never and we have to make a choice.”

Viora looked at the map, not at him. She couldn’t argue back.

Makoto folded the paper and slid it away. “It’s time.”

We moved quickly and quietly. Past the storeroom with mopwater breath. Past the laundry where steam coughed and the floor sloped toward a drain.

The generator building hunched against raw rock. You didn’t notice its size until you stood beside it in the dark. Condensation filmed the corrugation like the building was sweating. The access panel sat low, paint flaking to reveal dulled steel.

Makoto’s bent strip of metal slid under the lip and lifted. The sound it made was a single dry cough. Inside was a nest of wires and knobs that smelled like old heat.

He got to work like he was picking locks in the dark. A quick spark. The hum fell silent for the first time.

“Hold,” he said.

We held. The lights across the compound hiccuped and went out. The alarms stuttered into a chorus, one high wail, one low buzz, and a chirp.

Suddenly, shouts rose from the gate. Someone yelled a time. Someone else yelled back.

“Now,” Makoto said.

The maintenance hatch was covered in gravel and old leaves. Rust made lace out of the hinge. Makoto hit the door with his shoulder.

Nothing.

Again. The third time the seam unglued with a snarl and the door yawned open. A ladder sank into a square of cold.

“I’ll test it,” Aki said, dropping through before he could tell her not to.

I went after her. The rungs were wet, scraping skin where it had already been scraped today.

Makoto and Viora came last and let the hatch drop. The clang was sharp.

The tunnel smelled of mold, pennies and the kind of damp that settles under your nails. Pipes ran along the right wall, sweating. The flashlight made a small beam, and beyond it, the dark waited with its mouth open.

The catwalk was only strips bolted to anchors. We moved along it because there was no other way to move. The alarms upstairs muffled into a far pulse, the shouts became weaker.

At a junction the catwalk ran out and a steel grate blocked a lower conduit. Makoto crouched and ran fingers along the bolts like reading braille. He worked it loose. The grate lifted and seized. He changed the angle and it came with a scrape that set the pipes vibrating.

“Get in,” he said.

The channel beyond was a squared and narrow path, ankle-deep in water cold enough to bite. The ceiling brushed my back. Aki crawled in first, elbows and knees taking the brunt. I followed. Viora slid in behind me, then Makoto, pulling the grate almost shut.

We crawled. The flashlight turned the surface into a smear that jittered when our breath did.

Halfway through the conduit, the line went slack. I felt it first in my hand where I held Makoto’s wrist and he held Aki’s. He tugged me forward twice. When I squeezed back, nothing answered from behind.

“Viora?” I whispered. The pipe carried her name forward and back.

The flashlight turned. Her face lit up in the beam, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime.

“I’m going back,” she said.

We fell silent.

“No,” Makoto said. He twisted as much as the walls let him, shoulder scraping concrete. “No.”

“The little ones…” Her voice shook. “I can’t—I can’t just leave them behind. They need me…more than you do.”

Makoto’s fingers clamped around her wrist, bone pressing into bone. “Don’t do this.”

She leaned forward as far as the conduit allowed, enough that the flashlight painted both their faces. Her mouth trembled a second time, then steadied. “Just know that I—”

“Don’t finish that,” Makoto snapped, sharper than I’d ever heard him. His voice cracked. “If you do, I won’t be able to go through with this.”

Silence gathered. The water ticking in the corner marked how long it lasted. Viora swallowed, bit her lip, and then nodded. Tears kept going even when she held her face still. She pried his fingers from her wrist, pressed her forehead against his for a heartbeat that hurt to watch, and let go.

She turned and crawled back toward the dark. She didn’t look over her shoulder. None of us said goodbye out loud.

Makoto stared at the space she’d been in until the heavy air moved again, then turned and dragged us forward.

The conduit bent and dipped, cold air sliding in across our faces with the taste of outside.

The mouth at the end was covered by another grate, this one wide, its slats slick with algae. Beyond it, nothing the light could own. Makoto wedged his fingers between the slats and pushed. The grate squealed and jolted. It jumped the last ridge with a violent shrug and fell out crooked.

We slid out into the outside.

Cold hit first, fast and sharp. The air tasted cleaner than anything I’d breathed in the dorms. The ground under my palms was not poured or tiled. It was rock, scattered with twigs that snapped beneath my weight. The air had edges. Resin, wet earth, something faint and sweet under it that the vents in the orphanage had never managed to steal.

“Where…?” I started, and the question broke apart because there wasn’t a word yet for everything that isn’t here.

“Mountains,” Makoto said, quiet and sure. “We’re in the mountains.”

“How do you—”

“Pressure changes on the stairwell turns,” he said. “How the vents breathe when the wind picks up. The north hinge swells when the fog rises. I didn’t know for sure until now.”

I turned to look back because I had to. The orphanage clung to the rock face, a box with red emergency slits pulsing along one side. From out here it looked small for the first time in my life.

Anger lifted in my chest. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling.

We moved downslope. The ground tilted under us in ways my body hadn’t learned yet. Rocks waited under thin soil for the weight of a foot that trusted too soon. We followed a shallow runnel of water because Makoto said water always went somewhere lower.

Aki’s lips went the wrong color and she kept going like color was another rule she didn’t listen to. Makoto shrugged off his thin jacket and put it around her shoulders.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked when the ground leveled into a shelf of rock and air. “About this. About… where we are.”

“Because it doesn’t matter,” he said.

We tucked under an overhang of rock for a minute to breathe. No speeches. No rewriting what had just happened while it was still wet. The wind scoured the edges of us and made us sharper or smaller, I couldn’t tell which.

“If I’d moved last week,” Makoto said then, voice low and sanded down. “If I’d trusted what I knew, then Vinnie...” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. The mountain didn’t answer either.

Aki touched his sleeve and left her hand there until his breath evened.

We moved again.

The mountain taught fast. Knees bent. Weight followed foot instead of leading it. I learned to feel the ground with my toes. I also learned that fear is loud when there’s nothing for it to cling to, and that you can make it quieter by making your steps smaller.

The runnel cut into a shallow gully that led us to an old maintenance road. A bent reflector post leaned out of the ditch like a broken finger. When I touched it, cold bit deeper than the air.

Down was the way. Makoto said nothing and walked. We followed because that’s all we knew to do.

We stopped where the road widened so two vehicles could pass. Makoto turned back for the first time and looked at the orphanage. Its red rectangles still pulsed on one face, slow and weak. From here it could have been a toy someone had forgotten. It had never looked like that to me. The sight did something clumsy inside my chest.

Makoto crouched. He set both palms flat on the grit, fingers spread like he was trying to hold the mountain still.

“If I’d done this sooner,” he said. “We might’ve caught them at the door. We might’ve kept him. We might’ve kept her.”

Aki leaned her shoulder into his until their balance had to account for each other. I stood on his other side and rested my hand at the base of his neck where the heat collected. None of us spoke. The wind made its slow work.

We started down again when standing still made us colder than moving. The caretakers would do a headcount soon, and we had to be a safe distance away before they were done.

The road bent toward a chain link gate set into a shallow cut. Frost gathered along the bottom links like spilled sugar. A trail of old tire prints cut the frost, turned right where the slope did, then vanished under a scab of shadow where the road went under trees.

I didn’t look back again. There was nothing left up there for my eyes that my ribs hadn’t already learned.

We didn’t say the thing that would have been a vow. We didn’t talk about L.A. or planes or money or names. There was a road, and it went down, and somewhere down it people wore shoes that made clean sounds without hurting you, and somewhere farther than that a boy was being moved like cargo with a form and a time.

The wind shifted and brought up a thinner breath of diesel. Aki adjusted the jacket at her throat without pausing. The hum that had lived under our feet for our whole lives didn’t reach out here.

We kept moving. Not because we were brave. But because there was nothing else left to do.

The wind carried the bite of autumn down the mountain, stripping leaves from branches the way this night had stripped us of everything, and we followed the road into the cold season that waited.