Chapter 2:

Skit

Tokyo5: Prosper’s Law


The little girl stood on one side of the classroom, a row of boys on the other. A man crouched before her, his hands on his knees.

‘Now, what do you say?’

The room was illuminated by sunlight from a single square window. Sunlight didn’t care why you were called in after class.

The line of boys began to snigger, like a set of those roadside statues shaking as a truck drove past.

‘Are you listening?’

She felt his finger poking her forehead.

‘Are you able to listen?’

More sniggers from behind him. This time he glanced back for a moment. A little hook appeared at the corner of his mouth.

A sudden awareness washed over her. This was her teacher. He shouldn’t be smiling. And yet he was smiling. There was something in the space between those things. Something to do with laughter. She looked at the line of boys. She couldn’t imagine her teacher fitting in with them when he was at school. She saw him instead staggering around an athletics track, head flung back, a grimace on his podgy, sweating face. Now she was smiling.

The teacher’s expression changed.

‘You think it’s funny? You think it’s funny to go around hitting fellow students, breaking their property?’ He gestured behind him.

‘It really hurts.’ Said a boy at the end of the line. He rubbed a pale red mark on his cheek. ‘I-I wouldn’t mind… but the pen was given to me by my father…’ There was a smile buried somewhere in his pained expression.

‘Oh, rubbish.’ She said and flung out an accusatory arm. ‘They took my bag. They were going to throw it in-‘

‘-And now,’ the teacher stood, ‘-lying on top of it. I had hoped that you’d at least have the decency to own up… but I see now Nakama Sensei was right. Bad blood always tells.’ He sighed. ‘It was foolish of me to expect more.’

The little hook now appeared between her eyebrows. The teacher seemed to derive some satisfaction from this. ‘What do you say I speak to your father?’

‘My father’s dead.’ She said.

He paused.

For a moment she felt something inside the teacher. It was trying to speak. Trying to raise its voice up beyond the person around it. This thing didn’t have the same hard expression he had worn. But its voice was soft and easily quelled, and the hard expression quickly returned to her teacher’s face. ‘Well, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised, judging by how you behave.’ Inside him the thing laid back on the floor, a bag spewing scattered schoolbooks beside it.

It was just a moment.

And these moments always ended the same way.

The little hook between her eyebrows deepened.

***

‘WheeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-!‘

The object floated in the air above them. Rinako whirled, pointing her breaker at it. Her heart was pounding in her chest, her eyes half-closed. Numbers and cross-hairs flashed all over her visor. The object enlarged and shrank unsteadily in her view several times before her visor acquired a lock.

A little metallic disc hung in the air, tilting this way and that like a cheap UFO prop suspended on strings. If it was possible to skid to a halt in the air, that’s exactly what it would have just done.

The skimmer.

She hung her head, and withdrew the breaker.

‘Hey buddy, you hear something?’

It floated down and hid behind Kurama’s shoulder. After a few seconds its ‘eye’ appeared just over the top and it gave her a rueful beeep. How could a band of black glass look so indignant?

‘Don’t worry about her, Skit. She’s new.’

There was a whir as the skimmer’s (—Skit… wtf—) eye rotated toward him It made a noise that sounded a lot like nnnew and looked back to her. Kurama held out his arm. After a few seconds it ascended, gave an unconvinced-sounding wheeep and floated over his shoulder, its eye trained on her the whole time, before lowering itself into the circular recess plate in his gauntlet, where its whine disintegrated into a series of grumbling chirps and beeps.

‘Skit?’

Kurama watched it settle into the gauntlet. ‘Something wrong with that?’

‘No, it’s just naming your skimmer. It’s…’

He looked up at her, one arm jutting out from his side and rain spattering his half-lit face.

‘… really… normal.’

Skit gave a final note of protest, then started to produce a churning noise, the unmistakeable sound of a directory-search. Even the bulky Xantek processors at the Ikeda hillstation had made that noise, though a lot less rapidly. A holo-image projected above it, lighting the walls pale blue. It cycled through data sheets, none remaining long enough to make out any of the figures or charts they were displaying.

‘How far ahead?’ said Kurama, his voice now more urgent. She was going to ask how he understood it, but had a feeling the answer wasn’t one she wanted to hear.

The data sheets flickered faster then halted suddenly and a large map shot into the air as though pulled from a folder. After a few moments she realised it was displaying the passages around them and the two brightly glowing blobs near the bottom left were their location. That wasn’t what caught her attention though. That was the enormous swirling, shifting shape a few passages ahead of them.