Security Breach

◆ Yukiteru

I wake up with the announcement that the boarding has started. It seems I’ve dozed off.

“Senpai, wake up,” I hear Aishi’s voice say. “Tae and the others are already waiting.”

I stand up, reaching for my cabin suitcase—only to realize it’s not there. Blinking to clear my view, I realize Aishi is holding it.

“Someone tried to steal it while you were asleep, Senpai,” she says, smiling. “But don’t worry. I dealt with the thief.”

Why is she smelling like peroxide?

…Probably it’s my impression. Unless she mistook it for perfume.

“Thank you,” I say, as she hands it to me. The bag smells the same, I notice.

She wouldn’t spread “perfume” on my suitcase. It’s definitely peroxide.

But why?

“Senpai, we have to hurry,” she says.

“Oh, right.” I hurry after her to the boarding line, which is surprisingly small.

When our turn arrives, the middle-aged lady asks to check our passports and boarding passes. However, when I show her mine, she raises an eyebrow.

“Is something the matter?” I ask.

“No,” she replies. “It’s just… I feel like I’ve seen you before. Or someone identical to you. The same name and face.”

“Really?” Now it’s my turn to be confused. “It must be a mistake. I have never been here before.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Well, if you say so…” She gives me back the passport and boarding pass. “Clear,” she says. “Have a nice flight.”

As I walk in, I see Aishi glance over her shoulder, a dark shadow cast over her eyes for a moment. They are dark garnet, a deep red almost black.

I wonder if that is related to the smell of peroxide.

Inside the plane, it takes a while to find our seats and settle in. But when we finally fall into our seats, chaos strikes.

Enomoto and Takemoto immediately begin a heated debate about the manga they’re reading, Yuuma and Nishimura share a bag of candy, and Aishi just stares around the plane. She’s a bit jumpier than usual.

“Aishi-san, is something the matter?” I ask. She blinks, and shakes her head.

“No, I’m fine. But thanks for worrying, Senpai.” She smiles. “I hope we have a nice flight,” she adds, looking around. Then, she opens her bag, grabs a tablet and headphones, and turns on an episode of Oshi no Ko she’s downloaded.

This show ended ages before she was born. I wonder why does she like it.

I search through my bag and find my latest read, yet to finish.

No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai.

One notebook to the end now.

I smile, and open it.

***

Three hours later, I close the book with a soft thud. Finished.

The ending was just as I expected. Bleak. Predictable. Not worth thinking about.

I glance around. Everyone around me is asleep, including Aishi, dozing with her head against the window. Her expression makes her look younger than she is.

It is… not hard on the eyes.

I smile at myself, watching her sleep.

It is a task I must complete, for she might be attacked while unconscious.

A task purely focused on asset guard.

So… why am I holding her hand?

Indeed, why?

Before I noticed just now, I had moved my hand to hold hers.

It’s… delicate. Pale. Fragile. Even as I hold it it looks as if it would break, like the neck of a black swan.

Suddenly I notice red lines in her fingernails. Not light red like nail polish, but dark red… like dried blood.

They look fairly recent. I didn’t see those while she was bandaging me, and there are no wounds in her fingers.

The only remaining possibility is that…

The blood… it may not be hers.

No. This is impossible. Aishi would not commit murder… I would’ve foreseen it.

She couldn’t possibly…

A soft sigh escapes her lips.

“Senpai…” she mumbles. “Senpai, don’t go…”

She’s probably sleep-talking, but the mere words make my body temperature rise considerably all of a sudden.

I check around for possible ear-witnesses. No one is awake. I smile.

“I won’t,” I whisper. “Everything will be okay.”

She smiles, although I suspect she’s not fully conscious. “I’m so glad…” and she falls asleep again.

I finally allow myself to doze off a few seconds later, my touch nerves luxuriating in the warmth of Aishi’s hand.

***

“Yukki?”

I wake up. Enomoto is looking at me.

“Thank goodness you finally woke up,” he says, heaving an exasperated sigh. “You wouldn’t budge when the plane arrived in Newark, so I had to carry you all the way through the airport AND to the hotel. Man, either you were sleep-deprived or I might actually consider the drink lady spiked your Coke.”

Typical Enomoto. I sigh. “I think I haven’t been getting enough sleep is a better alternative,” I say. “How are Aishi-san and the others?”

“Fine,” he says. “Yukki, you gotta get ready because in a few hours we’re going to watch a Broadway play. It’s called The Phantom of the Opera. I assume you’ve heard of it?”

“Even a theater mole living under ten feet of rock would’ve heard of it. At what time should we be there?”

“8 PM. It’s 6 PM now.”

“Already?” I blink, then glance around, looking for a clock. Or for my watch. Where is it? “For how long have I been unconscious?”

“Five hours.”

“Five hours,” I repeat, shocked. It’s the first time I was knocked out for this long. Maybe my drink truly was spiked. But it sounds ridiculous.

“Oh, by the way, Nishimura-san found huge amounts of Temazepam in her bag,” Enomoto says. “She says she doesn’t know how those ended up there. She doesn’t take that kind of thing.”

Temazepam… That’s a medication for insomnia. In large amounts, it could knock out a person.

I stand up and look for my suitcase. It’s on the floor, wide open.

Over a set of clothes lies a small note:

Senpai, since we’re going to the play and you didn’t wake up yet, I prepared these clothes for you.

Hope you like them.

Tsukasa Aishi

Did… did she do this? For me?

My temperature rises before I can control it. I pinch myself to regain composure and pick up the clothes, noticing one of the pockets of the blazer is unusually heavy.

I pull out the contents. A small good-luck charm, with a prayer written in small characters.

縁結び

Why is there a prayer for a relationship inside my jacket pocket?

Sighing, I put it back.

Maybe it will bring me luck, in keeping Aishi bound to me.

Because she’s my test subject, and nothing else.

Nothing else.

***

We arrive at the theater and find the line to end around the corner of the block. Enomoto says he’ll stay in the line and asks me to find where the popcorn stand is. I’m too tired to argue about whether there is one, so I go.

However, it appears I’m not as lucky with directions.

I get lost in minutes.

“Where am I?” I wonder, walking around, trying to find the theater I left.

Suddenly, I hear voices.

“Hey boys!” A voice calls, and I recognize they’re speaking English. “Look what I found here!”

Four boys, all in madras jackets and Nicks, surround me, grinning. The one who spoke just now, a half-shaved brown-haired boy with half of his remaining hair dyed blond, laughs.

“Seems like one of these little foreigners got lost here,” he says mockingly. “Boo-hoo.”

“Please leave me alone,” I gasp. Or at least try to. I’m not scared.

But suddenly, all of them have the same face. Instead of piercings and jeans, they have long black dresses and wild eyes, and pale bony fingers are closing around my neck.

“It’s your fault. All your fault! If he hadn’t forgotten your cake, he would still be alive!”

I back to a wall. “No…” I gasp.

They laugh. “Boo-hoo, he tries to speak English but will never sound nice. He wants to come home to Momma.”

One of them steps forward and imitates me. “Me not from America. Me want home. Me want Mom.” They all laugh mockingly.

The half-shaven guy starts to crack his fists as he moves in my direction. “Let’s show you somethin’, outsider,” he says. “Time to show you the good ol’ American teenagers’ hospitality.”

My heart is beating fast. Too fast. I can’t see anything. My vision is darkening.

A fist connects to my face and I’m sent flying backwards. My head hits the wall and I slide to the ground, feeling my nose bleeding and my consciousness beginning to blur.

“Nice right, Ed!” The one who imitated me, a guy with a lip piercing, cheers. “Encore!”

“Encore! Encore!” The other two echo behind him.

The half-shaven grins, and raises his leg for another strike. This time, a kick on the ribs almost knocks me sideways, except a brick sticking out from the wall blocks my path down, making me hit my temple on it. The boys laugh, and they curse me in low voices they know I can hear.

It’s the end. They’re going to beat me unconscious, and then what? They’ll kill me? Maybe. I heard the crime rate in New York was high.

It’s the end.

It’s the end.

It’s the end.

No no no no nononono no—

“SENPAI!”

The boys turn around. It’s Aishi. She’s fully dressed, bag in hand, panting. And her eyes are changing rapidly—from white, to lemon, to red, and finally dark garnet.

I wonder what those mean… but my brain won’t work.

“Who’s that chick?” Ed, the half-shaven guy, questions. “You his girl or something?”

“Leave him alone!” Aishi exclaims, in crystal clear English. “Or else… I’ll call the cops.”

“Eh, what cops?” Ed grins. “If you do… maybe we could kill him. Unless…” — and he grins deviously — “you strip.”

“Aishi-san, run!” I shriek, with all my strength. “Forget about me! Run, now!”

Ed kicks me in the stomach. I double down, feeling my consciousness fade away.

“You hurt Senpai.” Aishi isn’t even speaking English anymore. “I know you can understand what I’m saying. Am I right?”

They go pale at the coldness in her voice. “Y-yes, miss.”

“Alright,” she says, looking at me, “I’m going to ask you a question. Were you hurting him?”

“N-no, we were just… playing,” they lie. Aishi smiles.

“It’s okay, I’m not angry,” she says. “I just want to know. Were you hitting him?”

They lower their heads. “Yes,” Ed says. “But it was just me. These guys, they did nothing.”

“Okay,” Aishi says, still smiling, still cold. “Now, what’s your name?”

“Edward,” he says.

“Okay, Edward,” she says, walking slowly in his direction. “Here’s the deal. I’ll hit you, and then your friends. If it doesn’t hurt, I won’t say anything about this. If it hurts, I’ll consider you all guilty and will judge you on my terms.”

“Okay,” Ed says.

My temple’s throbbing, and I’m sure I’m going to pass out. But I keep myself awake to watch.

Aishi stands less than a meter from him now. “Here I go,” she says.

It all happens so fast. In a moment, she’s taken something out of her bag, and the next Ed’s staggering away, holding his chest, and finally collapsing, doubled up and still. A dark pool begins to grow around his body, and in Aishi’s hand, the box cutter is dark to the hilt.

She stabbed him through the heart.

“ED!” The lip-piercing guy exclaims. Immediately, Aishi lunges in his direction, and he falls to the ground as well.

I’m struck dumb. What I’m witnessing… I blink a few times. No, I’m not imagining this.

She just committed a literal crime.

The other guys begin to run, but they don’t stand a chance against the girl hailed as the track team star in both middle and high school. In seconds, they’re down, life leaving their eyes like a helium balloon a five-year old accidentally released.

Aishi finally stops, then, pulls out a bottle that reads “Perfume” on the label. She sprays it on the hilt of the box cutter, which she left sticking out from one of the boys’ chest, then sprays it on her hands. She then rubs them vigorously on a white handkerchief she tosses into a trash can once she’s done.

The smell… it’s peroxide.

“I’ve dealt with the thief.”

Back then, she was also smelling of peroxide, and her nails had red lines on them—lines whose color reminded me of dried blood.

Could it be…?

“Senpai!” She exclaims, breaking my train of thought. Kneeling in front of me, she reaches out and takes my hands in hers. “Are you okay?”

“Aishi-san, I…” My mind is blank. There are a few lingering splatters of blood on her pink-dusted cheeks. Her eyes are sakura-pink too, glimmering in a way I’ve never seen before.

No, I have. Once. When she quoted the Bible back at the election day, when Osaragi-kun and Nozomigawa-kun broke down.

That glimmer was there.

Not happy. Not terrified. More like relieved that a threat was gone at last. Maybe all of them, actually.

Why? I want to scream. Why?

“Don’t worry, Senpai,” she whispers, tightening her grip on my hands. “I’ll protect you. Forever.”

She smiles at me saccharinely and I pass out.

***

“YUKKI!”

I open my eyes. It’s Enomoto. He’s dead pale, and it takes me five seconds to realize I’m back in the hotel, sitting on some kind of massage chair.

“Enomoto?” I ask. “Don’t get me started on the popcorn. I got lost and then beaten up by a gang.”

“For the first time I’m relieved to hear you verbally skinning me.” He leans over and hugs me so hard he almost shatters what’s left of my ribs. “God, when Aishi-chan appeared carrying you I almost died on the spot. Never scare my like that again, you jerk.” Finally he collapses in sobs over my shoulder.

I pat his back, trying to reassure him. If he gets too worried, it’ll be an issue. “I’m okay, Enomoto.” Then I remember Aishi. “What about Aishi-san?”

He stops sobbing for a moment. “She said the thugs assaulted her, but she managed to escape unharmed with you. Thank the gods…” He then resumes crying.

Over his shoulder, I see Aishi. Her shawl is gone, and only I know the reason.

She threw it in the trash can back at the alley. Because it was bloodied.

She doesn’t say a word, but her eyes convey the message, calm and simple:

We’ll talk later, Senpai.

***

After everyone went to sleep, I leave the hotel room and meet Aishi in the hallway.

“You’re here, Senpai,” she whispers. She smiles so gently, I almost forget it’s the smile of a killer.

“Of course,” I reply. “I always keep my promises.”

“Throwing my words right back at me,” she says, smiling. Then, her smile vanishes.

“Why didn’t you turn me in when Enomoto-senpai went to file an incident report?”

So this is the topic.

“Because I don’t want to,” I reply. “You saved my life. It’s only fair I repay accordingly.”

Her eyes fill up with tears. “Really?”

“Really.” I smile at her. “Your secret is safe with me, Aishi-san.”

I open my arms and she doesn’t hesitate in going into them. The scent of her hair—edelweiss and roses—mixes with the irony smell of blood that comes from my memory.

From this decision, there is no coming back…

…but…

“I’m on your side, Aishi-san. We’re in this together.”

…it makes me feel so alive.