Chapter 3:

Countdown: 176 Days Remaining.

Despite his mechanical lung, Rui’s breathing sounded natural. Makoto waited until the breaths were shallow and slightly faster, indicating he was dreaming, before making his move.

The lower half of Makoto’s body was purely organic, so he had to move carefully to make sure none of his joints groaned or popped as he stood. The body scan had told him Rui didn’t have altered ears, but he could be a light enough sleeper that the slightest noise risked rousing him.

Makoto looked at his backpack and initiated the silencing mode, instructing it with a sweep of his eyes to lock his instruments into place and muffle all sounds.

Large slabs of stripped concrete and metal littered the room he and Rui had chosen to sleep in. It lacked furniture, and the short remains of a painted wall provided the only refuge from the wind rustling the ruins outside.

The nights never used to be silent, Makoto thought forlornly. But I guess those voices, those sounds, will never be heard again, now that almost everyone is dead.

He glanced at Rui, whose wrists and ankles glowed faintly red from the neon strips sewn into his clothes. Makoto made a mental note of the idea, should he find several neon bulbs, to sew them into the places where his body loses the most heat. The slight residual heat of the bulbs, even though they no longer received any energy, could prove helpful in maintaining homeostasis, and it was certainly how Rui had survived on his own for so long.

Assuming he’s been alone, and isn’t simply a scout for any of the trade organizations, Makoto thought. He dismissed the idea almost as quickly as it had come -- Rui had several opportunities to kill him for his organs or tools, but had made no such move since their initial encounter.

Makoto shook his head and turned away. He’d already labeled Rui as a chameleon, so dismissing any possibilities because he didn’t seem to fit the image was dangerous.

Taking a few steps closer to the entrance of what used to be a house, Makoto paused to adjust his respirator. Even with the insulation giving it a snug fit around the bottom of his chin and tops of his cheeks, enough cold managed to get in that he could feel it draining his energy. The tightly woven metal grate through which the air was filtered with each breath wasn’t holding enough of the heat from his exhales to adequately warm the inhales. He’d have to make searching for a new thermal coating a priority.

The house reeked of dust and rot. The respirator did nothing to filter out smells, but Makoto had long since grown accustomed to the unfortunate odors lingering in the ruins. The smells of burnt or rotting flesh and food, of dust and ashes, of rust and oxidation -- he’d gone nose blind to them all, even though his nose, airways, and lungs were unaltered.

Along the walls, what remained of them, he saw the memories of the family who once lived here. The outlines of picture frames and wall ornaments had been singed into the curled wallpaper, too burnt to be salvageable. Fragments of glass and loose bolts littered the ground, left behind when the photos within were stolen to be burned for energy. A fleeting thought went through his mind, wondering who lived here and what their lives were like, but he pushed it away. Thinking about life in the Before only slowed him down.

The front door hung off its hinges, only half attached since any salvageable wires had been stripped and taken. Makoto examined what remained of the coating on the door, wondering if he could melt it down and reuse it as thermal insulation. Some parts had been scraped clean, leaving the metal dull and almost white in its pallor, but a few sections had been untouched. A closer look revealed the stains on the remaining sections were blood, purely organic in its crimson color. He resolved to come back during the day and check whether the coating was salvageable, even with the evidence of the massacre. 

Upon stepping out of the house, Makoto detected a difference in temperature of at least half a degree. Even with little insulation, the home provided some shelter.

The chill in the air nipped at any inch of Makoto’s exposed skin as he walked away from the house and down a neighborhood where all the other homes were in similar, if not worse, states of disrepair. He quickened his pace once he felt he’d put enough distance between himself and Rui to be certain Rui wouldn’t hear his footsteps.

The day spent with him had been filled with a lot of chatter, if little else, but Makoto noted that Rui never talked about himself or anything detailed. He gave vague accounts of the things he’d seen, the places he’d been, but never enough to give his past away.

He’s trying to gain my trust, but he certainly doesn’t trust me, Makoto thought, approaching the remains of a teleport station. The neon lettering still had a slight glow, denouncing the area as Kichijouji, but the station had long since gone obsolete.

He paused, staring at the open mouth of the entrance, once guarded by transport security but now abandoned. I used to come here with Miyuki, to accompany her so she could meet her friends. She and Sumire used to play at the fairgrounds a few stations from here.

How those carefree summer days seemed so distant. He was only twelve then, and Miyuki was seven. It was shortly before the planet’s core chilled, and energy rationing began as heat became a commodity.

Makoto dropped his gaze and crossed the threshold. He pushed the memories aside, and returned his attention to his surroundings. A single moment of inattention could prove deadly, especially at night.

Inside the station, there was a slight static to the air, the softest hint of a buzz. Where his world used to be filled with life and electricity, vibrant and exciting, now it stood barren and abandoned. He avoided looking at the decaying signs for the different stations, all the places he could have gone. The international terminal had been cleaned out long ago, before the ban on all teleportation. It proved too costly to travel overseas, and soon even inland travel became difficult.

The floor tiles still held a fading shade of green, but the varnish had been melted off. The terminals lay in pieces, all the wires and usable plating stripped away. Makoto had already salvaged everything he could from them.

Only the dying light of the neon bulbs hanging too high for anyone to reach provided a faint illumination. No outside light could reach into the room, even though the window panes were scattered across the floor, shattered beyond repair.

Not that anyone would care to repair things around here anymore.

Makoto turned around to check for any sign of movement as he approached the hatch. His heightened hearing hadn’t picked up anything, but that didn’t mean there was nobody around.

To be extra sure, he withdrew his monocle from his shirt pocket and performed a thermal scan on the room. No human heat signatures appeared, but he noticed a faint heat emanating from one of the walls. It took up the entire surface, and though the prospect of some current remaining behind the concrete intrigued him, he was late for his rounds. He had to get to the others before they experienced withdrawals.

The entrance to the underground “cathedral,” as it was once called, sat hidden under carefully placed slabs of hollowed out concrete. Makoto and a few men with sufficient physical strength had spent hours creating the disguise to protect their camp from invasions. Nobody in the aboveground world seemed to know about this area, and Makoto was determined to keep it that way.

He slid one of the slabs away enough to reveal the hatch and opened it. Upon climbing in, he withdrew a magnet from his bag and connected it to the one fastened beneath the slab, sliding the disguise back into place.

Complete darkness surrounded him, but he was well accustomed to moving without the aid of his eyesight. He listened for voices, but he was farther from camp than his ear could detect, even with its sensitivity maxed out.

He made his way over as quickly as he could, counting his steps to avoid the pillars. Anytime he got too close, he noted the echo of his footsteps sounding different, and stepped away, effectively avoiding collisions.

Silence accompanied Makoto until he had walked about a kilometer north, where he started to hear the distant hum of snoring.

He stopped, frozen, a chill going through his veins. Of the seven people who occupied the camp beside himself, five of them snored. He only heard two. While it wasn’t unusual for the other members to come and go during the day, everyone returned at night to escape the temperature drop.

His feet moved of their own accord, taking him forward faster as he hovered a finger over the edge of his monocle, ready to initiate night vision mode once he was close enough.

Makoto nearly slammed into a pillar, only skidding to a halt when he heard the slight crackle of the insulation crumbling, as insulation always did over time, from where he’d stuffed it into the cracks. The toes of his boots grazed the concrete.

Pausing to catch his breath, he tapped the top right edge of his monocle to initiate night vision mode, and directed it towards where the camp members should be.

His initial suspicions were confirmed when he saw three people lying down and two sitting. Shu and Granny sat on opposite ends of the camp, with Granny leaning against a pillar and dozing off, and Shu fiddling with his mechanical arm. Sumire lay beside Granny, sound asleep. The two other sleepers were a man about the age of Makoto’s father and the man’s son.

Shu looked up at Makoto when he approached. “You’re late,” he said, reattaching the wire in his arm before closing the hatch. He flexed his fingers and scowled.

“What happened?” Makoto said, breathless. An icy hand closed around his throat, threatening to strangle him. He still searched desperately for the two missing members, switching between night vision and heat scans as though he couldn’t believe they weren’t there.

“Shinobu and Satoshi left,” Shu said. He looked up at Makoto but didn’t meet his eyes. “They’re tired of this, too.” He all but spat the words out, injecting as much venom into them as he could.

Shu had always been the most vocal of the group, but the least likely to act upon it. He preferred to complain and argue, refusing to listen to dissenting opinions, than get up and do something. Makoto knew not to take him seriously, as did the others, or so he thought.

“Why did they leave?” he asked softly.

Searching Shu’s gray eyes for an answer got him nowhere. The boy was younger than Makoto, only fifteen at the most, and he showed every bit of immaturity on his face as he mockingly said, “Why did they leave? Why do you think?”

I took too long getting home. They needed food. They were injured. They were dying. They… They…

A thousand thoughts ran through Makoto’s head, but none made it out his mouth. He couldn’t swallow his dry tongue, so it swelled until he couldn’t speak.

“They wanted to go back home,” Granny said, speaking up from where she’d been sleeping. She shot Shu a look, one that usually shut him up, and fixed Makoto with regret.

“But-”

“I know.” Granny answered his protests before he could finish wording them. “But they said they would rather face the danger out there than spend the rest of their lives sequestered underground, waiting for the cold to kill them.”

Makoto opened his mouth to say something more, but the words died in his throat. He couldn’t refute their argument, and it was too late to do anything. We’ll all be dead by winter anyways, regardless of how much I try to help them. The thought didn’t make him feel better, but it steeled him against the loss. He didn’t have energy to spare on finding people who didn’t want to be helped.

Not when Sumire was awake and blinking up at him, waiting. She had to be his first priority within the camp. Miyuki would never forgive me if I let her best friend die. And I would never forgive myself if I fail her a second time.

Now that his sister was out of reach, Sumire was the closest he had left to his family, to his life before the uprising.

“Makoto…” Sumire whispered from behind her respirator. She made no move to remove it or any of the layers keeping her warm. “I don’t feel so good…”

Granny and Makoto flocked to her before she could finish speaking. Panic rushed through Makoto’s veins, making his hands shake as he reached to tap his monocle to initiate a full body scan.

“She’s dropped three degrees,” he said, mostly to himself. He barely heard his own voice speaking, felt his lips moving. A horrible weakness passed through him.

“What can I do?” Granny asked. Her large eyes fixed on Makoto, searching for an answer before he could give it. Every limb of her body tensed visibly, and Makoto’s ear detected a similar level of panic in her voice, though she was more adept at concealing it, at least in her face.

“I don’t know,” Makoto said, ripping the layers of blankets away from Sumire’s shivering body. “I have to figure out what’s wrong with her, which organ is failing.”

He had never screwed a scope as fast as he did in that moment, but his hand shook too much to connect the thin wire between his monocle and the scope. Try as he might, his fingers were sweating through his gloves, and he kept losing his grip.

Granny took over, leaning close to find the port, and he thanked her with a nod.

The next moment, he froze.

“What is it?” Granny asked, her voice a whisper.

Makoto’s throat closed up. His body went ice cold, even though a thought in the back of his mind told him that could be fatal to his heart.

There wasn’t time to pull Granny away to talk privately, and one look into Sumire’s eyes told Makoto she already knew. “They’re all failing,” he said, his voice hoarse.

The tissue around her major organs was necrotizing. Where it had once been red, it was turning black and yellow. Her muscles were shrinking away, atrophying before his eyes, leaving the mechanical organs almost detached.

“She needs an injection.” Only revitalizing the organs could potentially save her. Her systems were failing because the organs lacked the energy to function, and were trying to pull it from the rest of her body.

Makoto threw his backpack off his shoulders and flipped it over to reveal a pocket hidden underneath, concealed by a flap of thermogenic fabric. He unlatched it and snatched the vial inside. The faintly glowing liquid only filled half of the vial.

This won’t suffice, Makoto thought, dread dropping a weight into his stomach. But it’ll slow the necrosis long enough. It’ll have to do.

He extracted all the fluid with a needle, then quickly located the port in Sumire’s liver and stabbed the needle into it, pushing the liquid so fast it nearly gushed out of the port. Then he watched as the tissue around the mechanical liver began to pull itself back together, filling gaps and lightening in color. Her body temperature rose only a degree, but it would be enough to hold her for a day.

Sumire’s eyelids drooped, the tension on her face relaxing as she sighed in relief. Her brain waves soon indicated she had drifted to sleep.

“Will she be alright?” Granny asked, lowering her voice.

Makoto replaced the layers of clothing and blankets, tucking them beneath Sumire so as not to let even the thinnest gap cool her. “For now,” he said.

He sat back on numb heels, shaking uncontrollably. He had learned about necrosis during his training but had never seen it firsthand. The sight of a person’s entire body rotting away while they still lived made his stomach retch.

Fortunately, Makoto had stopped eating solid food months ago. Unfortunately, an organic stomach still produced bile, which rushed up his throat. He had only enough time to turn away before vomiting.

Granny patted his back gently until he calmed down, taking shaky breaths. He couldn’t tell whether there was a chill in the air, or his skin just couldn’t maintain any level of heat.

Makoto recovered quickly, pushing the images into a corner of his mind. I don’t have time to be sick -- the injection won’t last long if I can’t get her more.

He packed up his tools and pulled out the nutrition vials that had refilled throughout the day, drawing nutrients from the environment through the device in the bag. It had been specially designed for the military, in case they had to refuel rapidly before battle, but the military had been disbanded a hundred years ago, and the equipment had largely wound up in pawn shops.

Handing one to Granny, he said, “I have to go back out. I need to siphon more energy because that small amount won’t hold her very long.”

She nodded and said, “I’ll keep an eye on her until you return.”

He left the vials for Sumire and the other two sleepers with her and walked over to Shu. The boy looked at him with an expression of disgust, as always, but he accepted the vial nonetheless, downing it in one gulp before handing it back.

For once, Shu didn’t complain before Makoto rushed back to the outside world.