Chapter 2: The Forgetting City.

Haruto blinked.

Stone. Light. Sky.

He wasn’t in his classroom.

Actually, he did not know whether he was still on this earth.

He was surrounded by small streets, with stone walls on either side that almost made the roof of a cliff. Buildings had jutted signs by languages of which he did not understand a single word and one hanging downside-down.

This wasn’t Tokyo.

It wasn’t anywhere.

It was an intermediary place. Similar to the passage-way between dream and reality.

The blue- gray sky that stretched above was unstirred with marks of lavender and orange. No sun. No wind. No time.

The only thing moving was him.

And her.

She was on her side at Faraway End. A girl. Maybe his age. Same school uniform.

Back turned. Head bowed.

Still.

Like Ayaka had been.

“Hey”, Haruto said sharply with his hoarse voice. “Do you—”

She didn’t move.

He stepped forward with the backpack still clenched in his hands. It was once more stuffy as breathing through linen fabric. He did not feel cold but trembled.

The girl had been about ten meters distant. Long black hair. Thin frame. There was just a small flutter of the skirt, but nothing was moving the air. She was to him rather a trembling of a thing he had overlooked--a broken phrase in his mind.

The skirt had passed, without the air.

Another step.

Then—she twitched.

A small, wrong movement. And as in an intermission in a moving picture.

Haruto froze.

“Are you... okay?” he tried again.

She turned.

Slowly. Not like a human. As a puppet on ill strings.

And her eyes—

They weren’t blank.

They weren’t dead.

They were his.

Reflected in hers.

Panic surged in his gut. His legs wouldn’t move.

The girl gazed up at him, with the parted lips.

And as the clockwork went tick and tick and wheeled, so she spoke.

But the voice wasn’t hers.

It was his.

“Haruto Seno.”

He stumbled back.

“What—who are you?!”

The girl didn’t blink.

She stepped toward him. The stone gave her no response.

And a voice was not his voice this time that spoke the words.

They were twisted, layered.

As though three individuals had a secret.

The cogs turn in unworking places.

The bell used to ring when it was not expected to.

the unchosen had no intention to reverberate.

Haruto’s blood ran cold.

He was tempted to scream, but a part of him believed that this was a nightmare. All he needed to do was turn up the poor fellow a blind squirrel, and he would wake up at his desk blotting his ink and octet squalling.

His watch beeped.

I had not purchased any watch that was cheap and unlike a wristwatch, it stopped functioning weeks ago. Dead battery.

And now it throbbed with utter distinctness.

99:59:11

Not a glitch. Not a reset.

Something was counting in reverse--and he did not know why.

In the background, behind the girl, at the end of the alley.

Another person.

No—three.

Endless corpses stagnating on the street. A man holding a grocery bag. A woman, on the bicycle, still turning the wheel. A child stood on the balloon that was taken captive in the air.

Haruto stared at them.

None of them moved.

A sound overhead.

He looked up.

The crow was sitting on an electric power line that was pressing on the girl.

This time, there were two.

Feathers of the second crow were white with lines running their length. A perfect inverse. It wasn’t watching him.

It was watching her.

The black bent his head and his eye shone with an obsidian glitter. The white one never moved--but its plumes were gleaming, as though in a nonexistent breeze.

It didn’t just observe.

It judged.

Then—

The girl’s voice again.

Softer. Not echoing. Almost… sad.

“A stranger called you from the wrong side.

That is why the clock runs.

That is why you must forget.”

Haruto’s breath caught.

“I did not... want this,” he said to himself.

The girl would blink, the first movement she would ever make was a real one. When she sputtered he heard a voice, a voice in the next room, it was like a ghost of himself, walking away.

Had it been a memory or a dream?

“I don't know what this place is, dear child.”

He turned. On the other side of the alley a wall. On the wall, a shoe.

Just one. A plain, black school-shoe that had been thrust into the concrete at one-half length and had been left there as though it were plummeting out of the air and thawed half-frozen into solid ice.

That was just what his middle school shoes resembled. The embroidery, the catch of the side--nearly the same.

He moved in their direction, with a feeling of discomfort aching in his heart.

There was something about the shoes it drew, reminding him, it was like something gripping his flesh.

As he watched the concrete surrounding the shoe slowly swung, as lungs got one painless gasp right.

He froze mid‑step.

The wall was depressing fog--wet and chilly, and metallic in a small way, all musty breath in a tunnel.

Haruto made a sudden backward stride; curiosity and last at last met instinct.

He extended his hand--when he was struck with a booming gust of cold air.

Wind.

This was the first wind he felt since he woke up.

He turned back.

She was gone.

The birds left only, and he heard no far sound now, not a bell, not this once, but footsteps of a kind, too many, and all marching towards him evenly, in time.

Haruto leaned against a wall throbbing.

Shadows appeared around the corner of the alley, at its end.

Not people. Forms - high, slim, faceless, statues of inanimate figures.

A hissing that never was loud crawled along the walls, and never made his ears itch; it made his teeth, eating away the bone, and stressing about his eyes.

Something more behind them stirred, passed.

He saw nothing but he contacted it, a hook, a hook inserting into the back of his skull.

His instincts screamed.

One word, one order closed right through his brain like a sireen.

“Run.”

Prior to the beginner awakening too much of the globe.

He bolted.

The alley blurred around him.

The crows scattered above.

The walls on either side throbbed--stone like soft expendable wax, contracting inwards as though it would have slowed him down.

When they were flying the black-feathered crow turned its head in mid-flight towards him.

It cawed sharply—once.

It sounded like a word to the ears of Haruto.

“Return.”

He nearly stumbled.

The fixed forms did not pursue--just glanced round. All of them.

One of them turned their head about a little, a little movement, like they were observing. Haruto felt it , as though he were recording himself, not with sight or face but with presence.

The world seemed to realize him as through nothing less than itself.

His watch sounded once more as he made an increased effort and fled.

99:58:49

Still counting down.