Retrieval

Noa was surrounded by light. Light was wrapped around him so tightly that he could see nothing, could only vaguely feel that his body was being compressed down, down…

But suddenly he was alone, and everything went still and silent. The tendrils loosened and then let go, but Noa was still surrounded by light. 

He tried to turn his head and found he was weightless—that he didn't really have a head, anymore. 

He had a sense that something had gone wrong with the process Shijo had begun. It felt like he was floating in a shining void, but everything else had stopped. 

He wondered if this was what being eaten felt like—because if it was, it was rather underwhelming. 

For lack of any better ideas, he tried to speak. Hello?

It seemed the Garden wasn't the sort of entity that could answer him. 

Noa, experimentally, struggled. 

The light around him, that had seemed endless…cracked. 

No longer surrounded by perfect light, Noa looked down and saw the faintest shadows where his hands should have been. Reassured that he had some sort of body, he struggled some more, striking out at whatever it was that held him prisoner. 

The light around him slid sideways, and he landed on his side outside the magic node, onto the floor of the penthouse level of the skyscraper.

He scrambled to his feet, almost floating, but there was no need to rush: he was alone. 

He felt the suggestion of a breeze across his face, and saw that the windows all around were shattered. 

"Hello?" he called again, and this time could almost hear his voice. 

Still no response. 

Noa turned back to the Garden's core, but it was quiet and dim, rotating almost sluggishly. 

He almost reached out to it again. Whatever else was happening, Shijo wasn't around to control it, and if he could just understand how it worked, then…. 

Then what? 

Noa shook himself, thinking better of it, and approached the windows. He found a gap that was large enough to pass through and sank through the air back towards the ground, trying to remember the way back to where he'd started. 

Shijo had tried to trap him in this place; that was more than enough reason to want to leave. Especially given what it had taken to get him here. He'd consider himself lucky to have any blood left to call his own, by this point. 

He tried to retrace his steps, but it was difficult. He hadn't realized how much instinct had driven his direction until now, when it seemed entirely absent. 

Worse, his attention kept slipping. He knew he wanted to leave, to go back outside the Garden, but his gaze kept drifting to the flowers overhead, drooping almost sadly against the walls and on their trellises. He kept looking up at the sky and wondering if there was anything up there, really—or whether, if he just rose up and kept rising, he would eventually lose himself entirely to the darkness. 

His body had been turning solid before, but now it was so insubstantial that he thought it might simply fade away as he moved through the streets. 

He closed his eyes—if he had eyes to close—and tried to feel his way back. Tried to feel anything except the Garden's center high above. 

Came to a halt, lost, as he realized he had no idea where he was going anymore. 

And then he felt a tug. 

Noa's eyes snapped open. The streets seemed the same as before, but now he had a direction. He started gliding, pulled along as though by an invisible current. 

He started to think he recognized a few of the buildings as he went, but he wasn't sure. Still, the pull was increasing in intensity, becoming easier and easier to follow. 

Then he heard a voice—one he was fairly sure he'd never heard before, but that somehow sounded familiar. 

Noa-kun. Noa. Come back. 

The current began to flow more strongly, and soon it didn't matter whether he wanted to follow it or not—it pulled him along. He recognized this feeling: it was what he felt when Nagasawa broke his connection to the circle. He hadn't occupied the Garden corporeally before, when he traveled around it, but it appeared to be working the same way, just…much more slowly. 

He slipped between the walls of a building and through a door that slammed open to accommodate him. Then he slid into the floor, everything going dark in an instant.

Now it definitely felt like the other times leaving the Garden. 

The darkness around him changed. Rushing filled his ears, and then other voices joined the first. 

Noa. Come back.
"Do you think that will help?"
"I don't know, but I can feel…something."
"Should we switch to chest compressions?"
"No, I can hear his heart—it's beating."
"Come on, please…."

He recognized that last voice—and he could feel his body again. 

He regained control of his eyelids and wrenched them open.

He found his lungs in the next instant, and took a deep breath. 

"Noa!"

"Noa-kun!" 

Two people tackled him—one large, one very small, and both familiar. Miyori was babbling something from where she was wrapped around the undamaged side of his neck, and as he blinked up at the ceiling, careful not to move and dislodge her, his mother's face came into view. 

"Noa." Her eyes were bright with tears, but she was smiling. "Oh, Noa, I'm so sorry. Are you all right? Can you hear us?" 

"Yes," he croaked. "Mom, what…?" 

"Hey," said the voice from before. Noa turned his head to see a man leaning over him. His palm was dripping blood, and he wiped on his jacket before reaching out to clap him on the shoulder. "Back with us?" 

"Yes," Noa said again, "but who's us exactly?" 

He was in the same room he'd been in, he was fairly sure. Miyori backed off as his mother helped him sit up, and quickly spotted Shijo—on the floor, bound and apparently unconscious. 

"Right," said the man awkwardly, taking his hand away. "Well. There's kind of a lot to explain, and we're in the middle of enemy territory, so it's not really the best moment. Can you wait just a bit? Less than an hour, I promise. We should head back to the safe house, and then I need to call in a few favors." 

His mother wrapped an arm around his shoulders, seemingly reluctant to let go of him. "Can you walk? Ryosuke, can you lend him your jacket?" 

The man—Ryosuke?—shrugged out of it without complaint and then took Noa's elbow as he tried out his shaky legs. 

It seemed he could stand easily enough, but it still felt like he was floating. Miyori grew to human size and offered him her shoulder. He took it gratefully, especially since as a human she was at the perfect height. She seemed more than a little shaken, but when she glanced up at him she gave him a massive smile. 

"I'll take the lead," Ryosuke said. "Back the way we came, and then up. I can carry Noa…kun if he needs it. Nice and quiet." 

"What about Shijo?" his mother asked. 

Ryosuke shook his head. "I wish we could risk bringing her with us, but I don't want to tempt our luck. We'll just have to trust that backup gets here before she gets away." 

The others seemed fine with that, and Noa didn't know enough about the situation to argue. He walked between his mother and Miyori, back through the halls he'd been a prisoner in. He spotted Nagasawa on the floor unconscious with the rest, and also noticed that the cells he'd been in were all empty, doors ajar. It seemed his rescuers weren't taking prisoners, but had beenwilling to free them. 

They went through a hole in the wall and up a ladder and through a manhole, emerging into a side street. Ryosuke's jacket blocked out the breeze, but the outside air prickled against Noa's face after so long, heavy with the scent of dirt and asphalt. The street lamps overhead flickered unevenly, and the sounds of sirens rang discordantly from multiple directions. 

"Gonna be a lot of cleanup," Ryosuke said, giving Noa a wry smile. "But luckily that problem's bigger than just us. Let's get to safety, and then we'll talk." 

"…Sure." Noa followed through the streets, then through some sort of portal, and into a quiet hallway that seemed very far away from where he'd been.

He wasn't sure yet what was going on—how Miyori or his mother had found him, or who this oddly familiar man was. 

But he was back in the real world, standing on his own two feet, and freed from the Shijos' captivity. Given all that, he thought he would be able to handle whatever came next.