Furukawa, Furukawa

‘Furukawa, are you listening to me?’

She turned back from the window from which she had been watching the rain in the school field. ‘Hmm?’

Principal Koyama shook his head. ‘For goodness sake… ’ He looked up again. ‘Tomori-san is very upset.’

‘Really…’

‘Saori told him you have been spreading rumours about her bullying some of the students.’

‘Well, she was.’

He exhaled loudly through his nose. ‘Saori is an outstanding honours student. She has absolutely no history of trouble here.’

Unlike some… why not just say it?

‘I must say you dont seem too bothered.’

She shrugged.

‘You stole a girl’s bike, rode it into a ditch, and spread baseless rumours about her conduct in the school. Not just a girl but the daughter of—’

‘She’s a piece of shit.’

For a moment it seemed as though Koyama-sensei’s head was going to explode like an overheated kettle, but after a few moments he managed to take a breath, close his eyes momentarily and gather himself. ‘Do you want to be expelled?’

She shrugged again and looked back to the window. Rain didn’t care why you—wait, hadn’t she heard something like that before? Ugh. She was becoming as much of a cliche as the other students here, obsessing over their cliques and social status.

‘Listen, you’re very lucky to be here.‘

She burst into laughter at this. It didn’t seem to help the mood.

He sighed. ‘I can see there’s no point to this.’

The little hook returned between her eyebrows. There was now a mark where it had been, even when it disappeared. She stared at the window emptily. ‘Yeah. You’re right. There’s no point.’

He paused and leant back in his seat, staring at her for several moments. ‘I’m going to make a call.’ He held his finger up, a gesture for silence, and invested his attention in the comms screen that had appeared above his desk.

Silence wasn’t a problem. She’d love to live in silence for the next ten years. Forever, if it were possible. Except for the sound of the rain. She’d miss that. It hissed like static outside the window and her eyelids grew heavy. Nothing mattered in the rain.

‘Yes, yes—yes, she’s well—glad to hear it—and your mother—no, not at all—of course, we’ll be there, you know Hinako wouldn’t miss it—‘ the call proceeded like this until, ‘—listen, is Otomo there? Yes, no, it won’t take long.’

She waited while Koyama-sensei was put on hold, which didn’t last long.

‘Otomo! Good, good, all good, you know - yes she’s fine, they’re both doing well. Listen, do you still have a vacancy—you know, at the centre?’

Rinako frowned.

He looked up and scanned her head to toe as he spoke. ‘Yes. I’ve got someone I think would benefit greatly from some of your instruction. Yes, she’s available as soon as possible.’

***

‘Furukawa. FURUKAWA!’

Huh?

Her eyes had already refocused, it just took her brain a few moments to catch up, for the abstract landscape she was looking at to resolve into a face. Kurama.

‘Are you ok?’

‘I’m fine.’ She said.

‘Are you sure? Because—’

‘I’m fine.’ She pulled her arm from his hand.

He looked at her for a moment. ‘Ok, you need to switch to filters. Two oh seven.’ He moved to the corner of the alley, crouched with his back against the wall and glanced around it.

The rest of her surroundings started coming into focus. They were in the shade of the cut-through from earlier. Only it looked different to then somehow… a wave of anger interrupted her thoughts. She was about to ask where in drak he had disappeared off to but before she could open her mouth he turned back to her. ‘I’m sorry. I doubled back. I was trying to find a good spot to—I’m sorry.’ He looked down for a second.

‘It’s fine.’ She said.

Kind of.

He was loading rounds—were they bullets?—into a weapon—a pistol?—in his lap. Her grandad had owned one of the antique police issue weapons. She remembered it disassembled into parts on a dirty cloth on his table, each being polished at a time, the clunking noise the body made when he set it down. She glanced up at Kurama’s face.

His tone softened. ‘What were you doing anyway? You were just.. standing there, right in front of it.’ He examined the weapon, then put it back inside his jacket.

What was she…

She sat up, propped herself on an elbow then felt a stinging sensation and put a hand to her cheek. ‘Did you just slap me?’

He was now fiddling with one of the dials on the SP-G on his belt. ‘Huh? Yeah, sorry about that. Or I don’t know, maybe you’re into that. Come on, two oh seven.’

Into… that…

She winced as she lifted herself to her feet.

‘Did you have to smash me across half the alley?’

‘You were two meters from it.’ He said.

‘Two—it was more like five, don’t exaggerate.’ She reached down to the black brick of her own spectrogram.

He looked at her hand.

‘Did it touch…?’ He looked away again.

Two oh seven.

Her mind reeled for a moment as she turned the dial, as though she were detuning her own thoughts.

Concentrate.

Two. She turned the dial clockwise with a series of clicks. Oh. Anti-clockwise. Seven. Now clockwise again. Like cracking a safe. If her head was a safe. A blue waveform burst into life on the display with a muted crackle and wail. From the roof of her helmet, a small eyepiece lowered on one side. Where it lay over the visor her vision shifted through several hues, parts of the alley around her fading in and out of existence, before settling on a deep magenta. There was a strange sensation of depth, as though the world extended in a direction she couldn’t quite see. If she closed one eye, the feeling disappeared but she felt a flatness to things she hadn’t before.

Perfectly normal. She muttered in her head. It’s normal for things to just disappear and come back again when you wink at them. Definitely not weird or mental breakdown-inducing.

‘Alright, comms off.’ He gestured with his head and with a clattering of equipment she ducked across the alley and took up a position opposite to him. There, she stole a quick look around the corner. The passage stretched up toward a brightly lit spot in the distance where it opened out into a larger street. She couldn’t see the geist. Not where it was, anyway. Kurama nodded toward the passage again, his breaker now raised at his side. This time she looked more slowly. No, it wasn’t there. Dustcan, crates, but no giant weird thing. Her gaze travelled up along the alley, past more debris, wooden boxes, bags weighed down by their contents but fluttering in the wind. The filters made everything seem somehow less distinct, as though there was something missing from the image. At the end of the passage, the artificial glare of lights from the street beyond overwhelmed them, turning her vision a pixelated white at the brightest spots.

Then she saw it.

It was so obvious she had somehow completely missed it. Right in the middle of the street, in the glare of the lights. It was just standing there. Completely still. Like it was part of the street. And now she saw what the filters were for. The outline of before was now clearly that of a large bell shaped body. What had appeared to be swarms of bugs were hundreds of long draping filaments, running along their course with continual streams of pulsating lights. The colours were unnervingly gentle. It looked like water running over a fountain. As she watched, the whole thing suddenly shook as one before settling again. It was without doubt the creepiest thing she’d ever seen. Like the leaves of a bush shaking in unison when there’s no wind.

She couldnt believe she had been right up close to it. Then she turned back and saw something even creepier.

Kurama was smiling.

WHY IS HE SMILING?

To himself.

IS HE A PSYCHO?

He lifted a wired comms chip. This was for when the wireless was out or otherwise unusable.

‘HomeStation, this is Merl, calling in a Bright6, repeat Bright—we got a weeping willow!’

After a few moments, Chizuru’s voice came back.

‘Negative, we can confirm 4 max in—‘

He shook his head and lifted the chip to his mouth again. ‘That’s nice. Well, I got a weeper here, looking right at it, so I don’t know what show you guys are watching.’

There was the sound of several voices arguing at the end of line. ‘Ok, ok, just hold on…’

‘Uhh. Pointless.’ This to himself. He lifted the chip. ‘Moving to engage.’ This wasn’t.

The familiar kkkssshhhh of static.

‘Negative. Negative. Do not engage. Kurama, stay back and wait for—‘

‘Are you crazy? I get this I’ll be back up on Hashimoto in one run.’

‘Kurama—‘

‘Sorry, kssshhhhhh,’ he rubbed the chip against his jacket. ‘Kssshhh ksssshhh breaking up—-can’t kkssshhh——you. Equipment ——’

‘KURA—‘

He flicked off the channel.

‘Ok, you ready?’

Rinako looked at him blinkingly from across the alley. His hair was blowing wildly beneath his helmet in the wind.

Ready. Ready for what?

‘You know how to run ObSup, right?’ he said.

It wasn’t a question.

Her mind raced, as though the words were all there, familiar to her, but she had no idea how to string them together. No. I remember nothing. I am sure to be killed here and probably you along with me as a result of my incompetence.

‘Yes.’ she said.

What was he doing?

But it was too late, with a snap of his jacket he was gone. She looked round the corner where he was already making good ground, keeping low, hugging the wall, his breaker raised. His jacket billowed as the wind howled low through the alley. The rain had died down now.

Observation and Support. It meant stay back, really. Do not get in the way. It had been a joke among the cadets; Obzup was what they called whoever ran the worst scores that week. Her first few months, she’d taken it more than a few times. She sighed.

Kurama was edging toward the middle section of the passage where the ground started to rise between two large sets of battleship-like warehouses; he was a tiny silhouette in her visor now, though she could still see his breaker raised, the proximity numbers breeding alongside him. Within a few moments he’d made it between the warehouses. There, he started to move with more caution, keeping to the great swathes of shadow cast by the warehouses from the streetlights beyond, sliding from cover to cover. She felt completely helpless watching him. Once he was close enough the geist and him were visible at the same time, his tiny figure standing in the darkness at the edge of one of the warehouses, the geist in the bright yellow light just beyond. He looked like a kid next to one of those giant mall Christmas trees.

Her eyebrows knitted. What’s he doing? Why is he getting so close?

The filters were locked on him now and followed unsteadily as he moved across the passage, focus shifting intermittently between different parts of his body like one of those feeble claws in the ufo catcher machines. They still hadn’t perfected that technology. He couldn’t be more than ten meters away from it. Tension coursed through her. Somehow it was worse watching someone else.

She glanced up. The thing was still just standing there in the artificial lights of the street. No movement. She lost Kurama for a moment then found him again in the shadow of a doorway of the old warehouse nearest it. Something about the image didn’t seem right, like a photo of someone standing calmly in front of a tidal wave or of those people who chase tornadoes or volcanoes halfway across the world.

Come on. Break it. What are you waiting for…

As she waited, a few tiny numerical indicators flickered in the sky at the upper right of her visor. A few seconds later they flashed again, this time at the level of the rooves. Was this a glitch? Sometimes you’d get that with dirt and debris in the air, particularly in run down environments, a problem with sensitive equipment. She banged the helmet with her hand. But a couple of seconds later she saw it again, the same pattern of digits. The upper one representing proximity was plummeting. They disappeared again.

Her hand was shaking now.

What the drak. Something atmospheric? She looked up to the rooves to the far right of the passage. They were a series of rising blade-like structures, like artificial waves, probably built to store parts. The numbers were appearing more frequently now, the gaps between them shrinking in duration. Whatever it was, it was like it was teleporting, appearing one second on one side of the rooves then the next on the other in a zig zag pattern. Or burrowing. But always moving to the left. Toward the passage. Where Kurama stood. All of a sudden the numbers shot past her view, moving so fast they appeared to be in several places at once, like vines growing all over the building, for they were descending rapidly now across the warehouse walls. Each change in direction was a series of right angles, unnatural movements that couldn’t be made by…

Her eyes widened suddenly.

Another one. It’s another geist.

‘Kurama…’ she turned away from the wind, and hissed into the comms, her hand against the side of her helmet as if it would somehow improve the connection.

‘Kurama, pick up.’

Nothing. He’d switched off.

She turned back and looked for him again.

What do I do…?!

There he was. What the drak was he doing now? The little black figure was standing at the edge of the passage. He was looking up somewhere beyond the geist. Completely unaware of the numbers plummeting toward him.

What was he looking at?

The numbers spread like electric current over the walls of the warehouses behind him. She didn’t need a filter to calculate the trajectory. Their path would take them to exactly where he was standing.

She turned and slid down the wall into a crouch.

Drak. What do I do?

The dull thunk of a pistol against a wooden table sounded in her ears.

She closed her eyes a moment. Then she pulled the breaker from her jacket. It made a tiny whine.

She closed her eyes a second time, whispered something, then span round the corner and ran.