Bugged

There wasn’t any sign of a struggle. When Hiroki unlocked the door with his spare key, the inside looked pristine. Even the steak knife that I had hidden was still there in the place that I had left it.

“So you were here with her last night?”

Ordinarily, going a day without seeing Ayasa wouldn’t cause me to call Hiroki over to unlock her apartment. After last night, though, I didn’t really have a choice. Ayasa’s words still hung over me. When she didn’t show the next morning, I assumed the worst.

“Just for a little while. An hour or so, at most.”

“Did she say anything?”

She had said many things- almost too much. I didn’t feel comfortable sharing all that with Hiroki, though.

“Nothing about leaving, no…”

“Did she say anything about being followed, or thinking she was being followed?”

“No-”

No, she absolutely did. She knew better than anyone how many people were out to get her. She was important, for some reason- not because of anything she was, but because of who she knew. She was worried someone would try to blackmail her. As far as she was concerned, nobody was above suspicion. Not even me.

“Actually, she did say something. Someone might have been after her.”

Hiroki brushed aside some dust on the bookcases. Ayasa had been keeping the place clean, but she had avoided touching any of Hiroki’s various books or models. He reached for something on the top shelf.

“You think it’s the Border Police?”

What was the point in asking me that, Hiroki?

“I don’t think so. You’d know better than me, but… It feels like it was someone else.”

“Why would you say that, Nishizawa? BorPol are the ones running the covert sweeps in the South. If someone was following her, they’re the most likely candidates.”

“She was afraid of something different. She thought I was a spy from the CIA, or maybe ROJIS.”

Hiroki had picked up a large hardcover book. It was unmarked aside from some decorative trimming.

“That’s a little far fetched, don’t you think? There’s no way an ordinary high school girl is going to be a target of interest for the CIA. Even ROJIS has better things to do than that.”

“Oh, yeah. I was meaning to ask about that. Does ROJIS really exist? Ayasa was certain it was real, but I’ve always heard that it was just Northern propaganda.”

Hiroki looked up from his mysterious book back at me.

“Yes. It definitely exists, in some form. It’s an open secret now, but the government still denies it.”

“So Ayasa isn’t crazy, and she knows an awful lot about the kind of people who would be after her.”

“I guess, but why would she be convinced anyone would care what she does? You brought her over without her asking you to, so she can’t be a spy or anything- even a deep-cover agent would probably choose a less disruptive and obvious way of getting to the South.”

Hiroki flipped open the book. It looked like it was a journal full of pages and pages of hand-drawn notes.

“What’s that?”

“The journal?”

“Yeah. Is it yours?”

“Yes. I was keeping notes about what I saw out in the bay. It’s a few months out of date, though. I left it here.”

Sure enough, there were dated entries and sketches of the profiles of ships on the various pages. It wasn’t anything very interesting- mostly just cargo ships and the occasional ferry.

“How’s that relevant to Ayasa?”

“It isn’t. But I definitely didn’t leave this up here where I found it on the top shelf.”

“You think she moved it?”

“It’s possible.”

A thought flashed through my head.

“Check if there’s a note in there! She might have left something in there that whoever did this wouldn’t think to touch.”

Hiroki started flipping through the pages. Nothing except months and months of his own notes. No note fell out, not even a scribble on the last page. My heart sank.

“It’s gotta mean something. She didn’t touch anything else in here.”

Hiroki thought to himself for a moment.

“Maybe she was covering something up?”

“Where did you find it?”

Hiroki pointed to the top shelf.

“Give me a boost.”

“I can’t lift you all the way up there!”

“Fine. Grab a chair and hold it steady!”

“It’ll damage the tatami floor!”

“You need to replace that tile anyway.”

“What?”

“Just grab the chair. We don’t have much time!”

Hiroki did as he was told, although he grumbled a little about it. I got up on the chair- it was just barely high enough to stick my entire head over. The top of the shelf was completely empty now, except for the imprint in the dust that the journal had left. Another dead end.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ye-”

Wait. There was something. It was only the faintest trace- but something else had left an imprint in the dust. I grabbed my phone from my pocket to use as a flashlight.

“Shinji, do you keep any electronics up here?”

“No? Why would I put them up there, where I can’t reach?”

“There’s the imprint of a wire in the dust up here.”

“A wire?”

“Like a power cable. Is there an outlet behind the shelf?”

“There’s one next to it. Nothing’s plugged- wait, that’s strange. I usually keep the lamp plugged in here.”

There had been something there- traced only in the dust, now. Something that needed power. Something that Ayasa knew about, and something she knew to cover with the Journal.

“I think…I think it might have been a listening device. Like a tape recorder.”

Hiroki’s face contorted with incredulity.

“What makes you think that?”

“A hunch. Ayasa knew something was up there and covered it up with something heavy before I showed up here. Whoever left it took it with them.”

Hiroki considered it for a moment.

“I guess it makes sense, but why leave something plugged in? It’s too obvious. You can get a portable recorder that’s way easier to conceal nowadays.”

“Maybe the point of it wasn’t to listen to her. Maybe that’s how she knew about it.”

And then something clicked. That mysterious black car that kept illegally parking out front. The hypothetical tape recorder. Ayasa forcing me to leave- well, that one could have been something she wanted too, but- it was all starting to form a pattern.

No, Ayasa had admitted it, hadn’t she? I was just too focused on what I thought was going on to notice. “You’ll think they will never get past you, and they’ve already been behind you the entire time.“ Those were her words, and she meant every bit of it. That’s why she had been so insistent on being Sayu, and nothing but Sayu. Sayu wasn’t in contact with agents of the North. Sayu couldn’t possibly drag any of her friends into trouble- as long as she remained Sayu.

A horrible realization dawned on me. What if they- the North, that is- what if they knew about her leaving the entire time? What if Ayasa was roped into acting as a spy? If that was the case, then I had just proven her disloyalty last night. Ayasa had covered up the recorder not to protect herself, but to protect me. She had been right- I really didn’t have any ability to protect her in that moment.

The search turned up no further clues as to Ayasa’s whereabouts. Hiroki had a few suspicions, and I had my theory, but there was nothing else concrete. There were no more hidden listening devices in that apartment- only a small bag of the clothes Ayasa had bought to blend in, and a nicely-ironed school uniform hanging in the closet. I looked in the pockets, but there was no note for me there, either.

Thursday, Sixth Period. Mr. Matsui was going on about the Space Race and the Hydrogen Bomb debates of the mid-1950s in the United States. In another day, I’d be on a night flight to Okinawa, never to return to Tokyo until doomsday or the end of summer- whichever came first. There were more guards up on the wall, now. Where previously only one very lazy guardsman had stood, there now stood a row of sentries. They had abandoned their shiny ceremonial uniforms for camouflage rain ponchos and chemical warfare gear. It was much more imposing this way.

Sayu was gone. Some people asked questions, but nobody knew her well enough to show anything more than mild concern. I couldn’t bring myself to despise them for it. If I was right, Sayu’s disappearance had been my fault. What right did I have to call them out for callously abandoning a classmate to the fates? It wasn’t even that odd, given the circumstance. Sayu was not the only student who had disappeared without a word- some of the other students had been pulled out by their parents, off to parts unknown. Anywhere would be safer than Tokyo if someone decided to strike sparks in the wrong place.

Unfortunately, Kanamaru and his goons hadn’t gotten that message. I’d once heard someone quip that only roaches and insurance salesmen would survive a nuclear war, and Kanamaru had aspects of both. He’d be around to collect interest on my “debt” even as the tanks were rolling over the border. I stared out the window. At the very least, he wasn’t on my case today.

There was something out there. The curtains were drawn over the windows in the schoolhouse opposite the annex building, but they were thin enough for the light on the inside to cast visible shadows. In the third floor window was a figure I hadn’t seen in many weeks.

It was her, without a doubt. The girl over the wall was back.