Chapter 24: We Were Never Alone

The echoes speak well in telling you what thou wouldest hear.

The Shared Echo Zone theaters used to envelop them crumpled behind them into non- visibility and silence. Haruto could not recall walking.

Something had to be driving them on.

Something ancient.

Something to watch.

Bridge was all there was ahead, when the mist had cleared, to cross the small, broken, impossible bridge.

The garage bridge was not meant to be there.

Haruto had traversed this section of the broken city earlier.

The fetched-up avenues, alleys which breathe, the sky, which smashes like porcelain when he tries to think of the past too seriously. But no, this bridge, this memory shaped like a bridge, never before existed.

It looped over an opening of white fog suspended by nothing, composed of slabs of rocks worn bare and persecuted, as if it existed, and was waiting.

Not an illusion.

Not a hallucination.

A test.

Haruto stopped at the edge.

Hina did come to stand at his side and the lines beneath her eyes were darker now - the literary measure of what she was having to pay at this moment to be in this place.

It feels.... I started and looked down into the fog frowning, because something seemed to be waiting for us.

So Haruto did not reply at once.

He looked at the bridge and attempted to determine whether it was firm, whether it would receive their weight.

However, that was not what he was worried about.

Whether the bridge would collapse was not the issue.

It was the issue the other end consisted of.

He smelled her and felt her before he saw her.

That undoubted thrill in the atmosphere, that it was spoken of him as of a deceased love.

“Ayaka.....” he breathed.

There she was.

At the center of the bridge is a figure.

Strauss and glittering black hair as long as ever.

Her school uniform had not been in the least dusted or decayed.

Her hands clenched laxly upon her, head down.

Like she has lingered there all the hours. Or days. Or years. Haruto moved forward unconsciously.

Hina caught his wrist. “Haruto. That’s not her.”

He glanced back at her. “I know.”

But he didn’t stop walking. And the bridge creaked and did not swing on their feet.

It wasn’t stone.

Memory was a structure dressed up as memory and memory always had, at any rate at a certain time, one thing or another.

And, walking along, the fog forcibly split up, leaving suggestions of numbers of streets in the underworld below.

Moving in stutters Frozen ghosts Robed in cyclic motion, And Roses smoothrunning Hair as groomed Infinity, And Gates open but never shut.

Time eating its own tail. Halfway up Ayaka glimpsed.

Her eyes were soft. Familiar. Not slick in the way of the mannequins. Not hollow, as were the other illusions. Her lips prepared the smile he had known since third period, the one that made his chest ache, but only a bit, because she never smiled the same to anyone.

“Haruto,” she said.

These were high enough to be heard by her voice. “You came.” Hina froze.

Haruto could hear the name in his bones.

She stepped forward. Haruto’s breath caught.

“Ayaka, is that, is that really, Hina....”

“No,” said Hina sharply. “It isn’t. You know that.”

Ayaka held out a hand.

“Do you remember the last day time we were together?”

Haruto blinked. She smiled.

“We sat on the roof after exams. I said to Haruto, the clouds had the appearance of paper boats. But it might have,” said Ayaka.

“It should have. Doesn’t it feel real, Haruto? Don’t you wish it was?”

Hina stepped him one step back.

“I’m here to give you peace.”

The fog of the bridge swelled up a little and twisted round the rock as fingers.

“You are tired, right?” she repeated.

“Tired of the loops. The choices. The pressure. Don’t you want to stop running? Don’t you want to rest?”

Inside his chest, Haruto could only imagine that it was full of water.

"I…..." he looked at her again.

"You were the reason I stayed. Despite the incorrect jingling of the bell. Even after the city forgot."

Ayaka smiled wider. “Then let me give you what you lost.”

Behind her the bridge had gone--where there was no natural light. A place beyond the city. A destination free of countdowns.

Haruto took another step. And Hina stood in front of him.

She trembled and it was her voice. "You don't belong here."

Ayaka tilted her head.

Her smile never faded. "Is that what you think? That I'm a threat? I'm not. I'm kind."

“You are a tranquilizer,” Hina said, angrily. “He is attempting to recall who he is. You're here to make him forget."

Ayaka blinked. Just once. And in her eyes there punched one whitening--glancing deadness. Then they returned to normal. "I'm his memory," she said. "He came here for me."

“No,’’ replied Haruto, as he walked next to Hina.

“Something wrong brought me here. And now I see why."

The shape of Ayaka started glitching at the sides, a wavering in of the legs to bits, a disappearance and reappearance of fingers.

"I was real," she whispered.

"But not like this. This isn't a person. This is a loop. A trap."

Now she gazed with eyes filled to throbbing and trembling with bright tears of a colour she had never seen before--tears that seemed of smouldering glass that distorted confronting light. "I don't want to fade again."

"I'm not erasing you," he said. I am reminded of you properly.

Ayaka's form stuttered again. She rose a point in the middle of her feet as though the bridge were starting to take her away. At the back of them the bridge was groaning. Splits were making their way in the rock. The light ahead flickered.

The body of Ayaka began to dissolve--arms, then legs, then body. However, her face was still lingering. “I hope... you have something worth remembering,” she said. And then she was gone.

The fog retracted. The bridge stilled. Haruto sighed and almost lost his balance with the threat of ballet dancer movements on his knees. His hands were trembling. Until Hina tenderly touched his arm, he had not known he was weeping.

"She was almost real," he said.

"She was too real," Hina replied.

“That is what made her dangerous.”

They stood there in silence. The strained sky overhead leaked glowing rays of electrocution that glowed and disappeared before they struck the earth. Haruto checked his watch.

07:32:00

He turned to Hina. "Why did it feel so right?"

Everything need not be true in order to be powerful, as she said.

"The city feeds on that. It sells you dreams of love forms.

She hesitated.

I am aware simply because I have nearly been one of them.

Haruto looked at her. Hina looked him in the eye, angry and cruel and delicate--all at the same time.

“I don’t remember everything,” she said. “But I know what it felt like — to wait, endlessly, hoping someone would see me. Hoping that even if I was forgotten, we wouldn’t be.”

"We?" he asked softly.

"Anyone," she whispered. "Any of us who are breaking. We don't want peace. We want meaning."

The bridge groaned again. In their rear the way back to them had disappeared--melted. Then the fog was parted off, and a fresh passageway was discovered. One pumping with crimson lines that wrought like veins. The metropolis was making its second trial.

Haruto's body ached. He heard the echo of ghosts of Ayaka smiling, he felt the warmth of a never-was memory. And his hand never lost gripping Hina.

The number started counting again as they walked. The air felt heavier. But it was the first time Haruto had any idea what type of enemy he was dealing with. Not just the city. Not the Correctors. Not the loops. It was nostalgia. Weaponized.

He glanced sideways at Hina. "Thank you," he said. "For what?" "For pulling me out." She smiled faintly. "Next time, it's my turn to fall. Just so you know."

"I'll catch you," he said. She did not reply, but she did not have to. They jumped out of the bridge and into the other passage. They changed the world around them.

And somewhere away behind--where Ayaka had been--was a kind of chime. Not from the system. Not from memory. But from something watching. The sound of another one that is yet to be remembered.