Zero

“Wo-ow what are you?” a small voice woke Ukiyo. He opened his eyes and a blurry face appeared in front of him.

He blinked desperately to sharpen the image. It was an auburn haired tween with freckles and emerald eyes that resonated at the same frequency as the sun. The green sun. Blue grass. Ukiyo pushed himself up, heart hammering in his chest. He grabbed a handful of grass, tearing it off and then holding it in his hand. The breeze quickly scattered the strips, revealing his blood caked palm. At some point the shard must have slipped from his grip.

Ukiyo breathed a sigh of frustration. It was beginning to look like this wasn’t a dream at all. Neither was it a nightmare.

“Hello? Earth to boy!” the small girl who had been patiently waiting for Ukiyo to orient himself now waved a hand in front of his face.

“Wuh-” Ukiyo started, then cleared his dry throat and tried again. “What was the question?”

“What are you?” she repeated, blinking at him. “I know you’re human, but you’re a little, um, weird!”

“I’m Ukiyo,” he extended a hand to her, “And if you’ll believe it, then I’ll tell you that I have no idea where I am,” he confessed. Then he asked, “Why is the sun green?”

“Very funny,” said the girl, “Hi Ukiyo! My name is Zero.”

“Zero? Like the number?”

“Nu-uh, just Zero,” she smiled.

Ukiyo did a double take. Zero wasn’t a name as far as he knew. The sun was not green. And glass definitely didn’t grow on trees. So where was this place? The girl had used the common phrase “earth to name”, so he wasn’t teleported to a different universe or something like in sci-fi movies. This was Earth, just different somehow. Like he was looking through a green filter.

“What color is the grass?” he asked, in an attempt to clarify whether he had become colorblind.

“Blue… Oh! Are you color blind? You asked about the sun too!” Zero gasped, but it sounded like she was only feigning shock. Maybe she didn’t believe him.

“No I’m not. Just…where I come from-” he stopped, deciding it was no use trying to explain his situation. “Nevermind. I was just kidding,” he joked.

“Are you from outside the Boundary Lines?” she asked curiously, eyes like saucers.

“Something like that,” Ukiyo replied, although he had no idea what boundary lines were.

“Wow,” she whistled, “I’ve never met anyone from Outside. Wanna see the city?”

“There’s a city nearby?” asked Ukiyo, excitedly swiveling his head around the sea of blue.

“Of course there is! What, did you just drop from the sky?” she laughed lightly.

Something like that, Ukiyo thought again, but this time refrained from talking.

“A-anyway, if you could show me around that would help,” he decided. Before he could decide on a course of action, he had to understand more about this world- or wherever he was.

Is this a reality show? The thought suddenly hit him over the head, although he knew that was completely stupid. Something like this only happened in anime.

He hoped someone would explain what was going on soon, because he was starting to worry that he was going crazy. But Zero was not the right person to ask. He wished Maho was here… She would probably know what to do.

Zero skipped across the field, her floating dress making her seem like a beautiful white butterfly flying over an ocean.

Just as she had said, a city was not far away. Ukiyo spotted it from the top of a hill, and he was a little disappointed to say that it was a very unremarkable city. In fact, it wasn’t unlike his home.

As they walked through the streets, he did notice a few major differences. First of all, there were no street lamps, but instead some luminous stones lined the roads, bathing everything in a bluish glow. Some glass-leafed trees also popped up here and there, the lights reflecting off of them like in a disco. Ukiyo smiled as he took in the sights. On a square, a marble water fountain spewed water into the air and children did cartwheels around it, laughing and spraying water on each other.

At least the people were all the same. That gave Ukiyo a small sense of relief. Even though the sun shone green and grass was blue, life remained unchanged.

“Like it?” Zero asked, spreading her arms wide.

Ukiyo nodded. He just realized that although he looked the same as everyone else, the people passing by him kept glancing at him from the corner of their eyes. Either this was a very tight knit community where everyone knew each other, or something was wrong.

“Why are people looking at us?” Ukiyo whispered as yet another woman raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh that’s nothing! Just that they sense that you don’t have any psychic energy,” Zero supplied.

Ukiyo’s brain was sloshing in his head, trying to understand what that meant. He still felt the strange dismembered sensation where his thoughts were not a part of him. Did that have anything to do with it? Honestly, all he could think of was telepathy and levitation when he heard ‘psychic energy’. Don’t draw conclusions from random words, he reminded himself.

Ukiyo was sweating. He felt like he was being watched. Not just by the people, but something more sinister. It took some time before for him to pinpoint the source of his anxiety, but once he did his blood ran cold. At least five black dogs were hiding behind people’s legs. They had yellow pinpricks for eyes and savage teeth curled from their lips. And all of them were looking at him and Zero.

Just as he was about to ask her about them, Zero yelped and started running across the square.

“Ukiyo, come! Fast! Please run really really fast!” she squeaked, already several paces ahead of him.

His legs moved before he could turn his head, but when he did look behind himself, he saw that several dogs had gathered in a group and were stalking them. They stuck to the shadows, sticking close to the buildings where the glow stones were dimmest.

Pink tongues rolled out as the dogs pursued Zero and him, but the creatures ran in complete silence.

Zero wheeled around a corner, dodging an old woman carrying a grocery bag, and Ukiyo caught up to her. The girl was breathing hard, fists moving back and forth by her sides as her eyes squeezed in an effort to sprint faster.

Ukiyo grabbed her arm and they ran hand in hand, him giving her momentum and her guiding him with cries of ‘left’ and ‘right’.

The dogs were not particularly fast, which Ukiyo only realized later. But they were nevertheless on their heels. One of them howled, which was the first sound Ukiyo heard them utter. Suddenly, the glow stones went out, and he was forced to stop because the street was bathed in darkness. This was puzzling because the sun was still partially up, and yet its light was blotted out by a thick, sticky curtain of black.

“Ukiyo,” Zero whispered. The boy could hear both their hearts thumping in the silence. “There’s a door to your left. Go in and wait for me!” and with that she wrenched her hand from Ukiyo’s grip and bolted down the dark street, feet thudding on the pavement. Ukiyo was left all alone in the disorienting layer of darkness. Nothing new.

He bit his tongue, remembering that if he cried out it would only alert the dogs to their presence. Instead, he held out his hands in front of him and blindly felt his way to a door handle that he tugged open. As soon as he was inside and the door closed behind him, vision rushed back to him and he exhaled in relief.

Ukiyo was inside a store lined on two walls with wooden shelves that were stacked with glass jars. A third wall donned thickly woven carpets, and the fourth had a long table in front of it. Ukiyo walked over to the table, waiting for the shopkeeper to show up. There was an ancient looking wooden door next to the table, which probably opened up to the living quarters.

As he waited, Ukiyo marveled at the rows and rows of multicolored liquids. He swore he could see some that contained small lizards or other preserved animals. He turned his attention to what was behind the table, spotting some carved wooden toys and metal gadgets he did not recognize. Apart from those there was something wrapped in rotting bandages. It reminded him of a mummy finger. He dared not think about where it had come from.

“Hello?” he called, voice resonating in the room. Ukiyo felt like he was trespassing on all these curios, like if something found out he was in here without permission, he would be guillotined.

Not long after this, an old woman with graying hair rose from behind the desk. Ukiyo jumped, as he thought she would be coming from the door to his right.

“Good evening, young man,” she said. Her voice sounded like nails grating on a chalkboard, but she was not the least bit intimidating with her wire rimmed glasses. “What brought you to my humble shop?”

“I wish I knew,” he mumbled, not intending for it to be heard.

“Oh? I can tell you are not from here, young man. Are you on a journey of discovery?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. If she had been younger, Ukiyo would have thought she looked cheeky. He could imagine her as a child winking and sticking a tongue out after getting in trouble with her teacher.

“How could you tell? Is it because I lack psychic energy?” he asked sourly. He had had just about enough of feeling like he was an alien.

The woman looked surprised. “Why, yes, it is!” she said, a hint of delight in her voice.

“Great, ‘cause I have no idea what that means.”

“The people in this region all have brain implants that provide us with this psychic energy. The amount you have depends on your imagination and ingenuity. Children often have the most psychic energy, and then it starts flagging as people get older. By the time someone is forty, it’s practically gone,” she explained, reaching down to open a cupboard. She started rummaging inside it.

“So you’re saying I have the brain of a forty year old?” Ukiyo crossed his arms incredulously.

The woman chortled, then stood back up, placing an intricately carved box in front of Ukiyo.

“Oh no no no,” she said, “Don’t think like that! Psychic energy can only truly be harnessed by a select few. Everyone else only has traces.”

So in this world, neuroscience seems to have surpassed the other sciences, Ukiyo thought, satisfied that he was getting somewhere now. He had mostly accepted that this was some other dimension or the like, although the fact that he was accepting this meant that he was either a wacko or the full meaning of it hadn’t quite caught up to him yet.

“How does it work?” he asked, grasping for more strings that he could hang on to.

“No one has ever asked me that, and I doubt common people would know. I have heard of people who can communicate with others telepathically or see into someone’s dreams.”

“Then it isn’t fully developed, I’m guessing. It doesn’t appear to do a whole lot.”

“If that’s how you see it then I won’t tell you otherwise!” the woman laughed again, then opened the box and shoved it in front of Ukiyo.

There was a cream colored paper inside that Ukiyo removed. It was rolled up and tied with a ribbon that he was itching to remove, but at the same time sort of dreading.

“Someone told me to give this to the first person who says they’re from another world. You’re obliged to take it with you on our journey,” the woman explained.

“No one told me about this,” a sudden, inexplicable fear gripped Ukiyo, and he tried to put the paper back in the box but the woman placed a hand over it.

“Hey! It’s not mine and what journey are you even talking about?!” he shrieked, tossing the scroll away from himself.

His fear seemed silly in hindsight, but the rich paper was staining his hand with its sinister ink. He could practically feel malicious intent dripping from it. Whatever it was, he did not want to get involved.

The woman picked it up and placed it back on the table. “Why don’t you buy something else then?” she asked, gesturing around the shop.

Ukiyo was tempted to take a souvenir, but he shook his head. “I don’t have any coins with me.”

“Coins? What do you need coins for, mister?” the woman said jokingly. “You pay with dandelions.”

Sorry, what?

“I don’t have any of those either,” he said, though his fingers curled around the dandelion marble in his pocket.

“Then I’ll give it to you for free this once. You’ll pay me back later,” she waved a hand, then handed him a silver, egg-shaped gadget. It had scratches all over it and light reflected off of it in a dull glow, like it had been used for quite a while by a previous owner.

Why was she insisting on giving him these items? Ukiyo was curious, but also cautious. It’s not a bomb, I hope, he thought.

“It’s not a bomb,” the woman said, mirroring his thoughts.

“Did you just read my mind?” astonishment echoed in his voice.
“No, that was just good old granny’s intuition. But really, it’s perfectly safe. It might be useful to you later.” She placed it in his hand and wrapped Ukiyo’s fingers tightly around it.

This time Ukiyo didn’t have the heart to refuse her. He took a closer look at the thing, and saw that there were several places where there were some chinks in the metal, little holes where metal slots fit together almost seamlessly. Apart from that the egg was smooth and betrayed nothing about its origin. There was no engraving on it either.

At that moment, the door swung open and a panting Zero appeared, leaning forward with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

“Hah-hh. Ukiyo, we gotta go!” she breathed, “The shadow hounds are gone.”

The woman’s lips twitched upwards and she raised a knowing eyebrow.

“Right, uh…goodbye ma’am. Thanks for the gift,” he waved awkwardly, and then they were outside again.

He heard the strange woman call after him, “It’s not a gift because you will pay me back!”