Chapter 26: The Bell Tower Breach

Not all loss is loud. Parts of it simply evaporate away, and in their place is this strange, indescribable smile whose location you help not at all.

The metropolis completely ceased this make-believe that it was a city.

The streets did not get any smoother thereafter, after the messed-up echo erupted on the arms of Haruto. They just shook. Constructions sprung out of the ground like strange sores. Stairs were like malfunctioning displays that appeared and disappeared. Gravity beat in a sick rhythm. The whole place sank in and out like memory was weary of itself, and could no longer hold its own together.

Haruto was strolled by Hina in… silence.

Even so, she did not say a single word since they drove out of that alley.

He got it. Both of them were different.

They had fought weds and accessions.

Fighting back more now the system was going to fighting back.

They hit a turn and the skyline parted right over.

The Bell Tower.

Old, massive, just wrong. It had not been constructed, but had been furnished, of bone-white stone and chimes never to be still. No doors. No obvious way inside. Endless curving walls to the clouds above.

Haruto stared up.

His watch beeps.

99:22:11

It was time.

into the plaza beneath it they went. No one else was around. No weird glitches. Just silence.

That’s when the wind changed.

Haruto’s breath hitched.

Hina turned fast.

They all came at once.

Correctors.

Four of those guys. Smoothed porcelain faces. 6 feet tall, floating only slightly low. Smearing with tattered school uniforms throbbing alive. They said nothing but their voices burst forth across the air - like meat which unravels:

“Unidentified person over the Core. Counterbalance required.”

Haruto grabbed Hina’s arm. “Run.”

Too late.

One of the Correctors rattled on.

An impetus of silver, and Hina screamed.

She convulsed. Not pain. Fragmentation. The edges of her body broke off as the system could not resolve which of her forms to preserve.

“HINA.” Haruto lunged.

The second Corrector struck him with a shock-wave that hurled him to the town square. His under-eye offloaded, broadened, and then tripled.

One of the third Correctors had seized Hina before he managed to turn his head.

She was weeping these days, but it was not in fear.

Do not make me disappear, don’t make me disappear, she thought. “Not before I tell you….”

And then she was gone.

Swallowed in white code.

Haruto screamed.

It didn’t matter.

The Bell Tower took her.

He ran.

In quiet, without reflection, without even drawing breath, Haruto pursued her withdrawal figure as the Correctors clawed their way up the tower.

The Bell Tower had no door.

But it had a price.

On reaching its base the Correctors sank through its wall like a light. He didn’t. He hit the stone. Hard. The stone sang.

Wall never hurt him — it read him.

It was glowing, with words all the same embraced in code. The words were continuously rotating, as they were never quite the same.

But gradually one word flashed to mind:

“Sacrifices A Memory That Counts.’

Haruto stared.

And then the tower spoke.

Not with sound.

But by some such thing as an incantation.

Offer a part of yourself. Not a thing you can name.

A truth you have lived.

A moment that shaped you.

He staggered back.

Not because he didn’t get it.

But because he did.

Knowledge was not everything that the system desired.

It wanted identity.

His hands shook.

What could he give?

What does he remember, is of him, but perhaps he seeks to forget it and lose it, were he to attempt to renounce it?

The system was waiting.

Behind the wall, I realized that Hina was locked up. Maybe she was held. Maybe erased. Perhaps just part of the suspended code like a girl caught up in some unattainable dream that would not go.

Haruto closed his eyes.

And remembered—

A rooftop.

Spring sunlight.

The acute odor of white board pens and spoiled lunch of a person.

And Ayaka.

Her laugh.

The last time it came to him painless.

They were seventeen. This was the very first day of school. Haruto spent two months alone preceding that, burying the accident in his father under subject matter of classes and glassy-eyed expressions. After school Ayaka had found him and got him morbidly on the spot with her traditional silent power.

“I heard you are fond of the library,” she had said. “I get bored there. Sit with me?”

And so he had.

They spent weeks meeting up on the roof. Shared lunch. Stories. Silence. One afternoon, as the sky grew dim, she bent near.

No fanfare. No blushing. Just real.

I should like to have it in mind, she said to herself.

Then she kissed him.

And there was not hurting in the world the first thing in many a long month.

Haruto opened his eyes.

Tears blurred his vision.

“I can’t,” he said aloud. “Not that.”

But the tower pulsed again.

That is the shape of yourself. That is the key. Offer it—or lose her.

His palm is gripping the strap of his watch.

Hina had rooted him more than once before knowingly.

She had made him get up in grief, had made him pace in guiltiness, would not forget himself, and be what he might be. And now she was in that tower, burning.

Because of him.

Because she chose to stay.

And Ayaka…

Ayaka was already gone.

It was this memory, this kiss, that had set the fuse on it all.

And now it had to end.

Haruto whispered, “I’m sorry.”

And there he went-- and scatter doth he fling.

The pain was not pain.

It was absence.

As picking a thread and it having no weave.

As above, Trying to say something that you have never said.

The memory was leaking out of him--a light, a glow on the face, the load of the hope of another human being.

Gone.

The tower accepted him.

The stone rippled.

And then he was inside.

The Bell Tower was prohibitively large.

A church out of hyperboles and broken reverberations. A chalky odour and cold metal were in the air. There were ornaments, hung at strange angles, bells from overhead, the walls, Campus-defying chains of more vines, swinging across the floor.

They all came ringing with other memories.

And by this web of clear wire dangled Hina.

She wasn’t unconscious.

She was remembering too much at the same time.

Bratches turned her about, variants of herself that never occurred. A girl who was a painter. A girl who screamed in fire. One of these girls kisses Haruto beneath the sakura trees, which never blossomed.

She was breaking.

No, Haruto screamed, and explained again at a running pace towards her.

Four correctors appeared, and this time, they did not move.

They watched.

The system had received what it merited.

Now it waits.

He reached her.

Held her.

Hina opened her eyes.

“Who… are you?” she asked.

Haruto’s heart cracked.

But he didn’t flinch.

I am not somebody who remembers something important, he said. “To remember you.”

And such--he drew her in his arms.

The tower screamed.

The bells rang.

All at once.

The rays burst out of the wires. Timelines fractured.

But Haruto held on.

And Hina blinked.

Not recognition.

But trust.

And that was enough.

Bell Tower started to collapse.

Prison wardens vaporized.

The world reshaped.

As the light was vanishing they were standing in front of the tower. The plaza was empty. The sky above was bleeding red--the cracks that made the sky open up and show the white code below.

Hina staggered beside him.

“I cannot recall how I got here,” I said to myself.

“I do,” Haruto said. “That’s enough.”

He didn’t cry.

But something in him had died.

And he did not recall what it was.