Right after we finished our meeting with Ice Doll and disembarked from the boat, Stephen Bluefield the Inventor contacted us for the first time in several months.
He kept it brief, just telling us to come to the hospital. Still, that was enough to convey that Siesta’s post-surgery observation period was over.
A Man in Black came to pick us up. Nagisa, Charlie, Mia, and I leaped into the car and headed for the clinic where Siesta had been hospitalized so long ago. The drive seemed to take forever, but it was probably only about twenty or thirty minutes.
It was after eleven at night. When we arrived, we raced into the hospital waiting room without even bothering to catch our breath. Stephen was standing there under the unreliable fluorescent lights.
“How’s Siesta?!” I asked, planting my hands on my knees.
It was only then that I realized someone was already in the waiting room, sitting on a couch.
“Saikawa?”
“Kimizuka…” Saikawa looked at me, then down at the ground without another word.
I repeated my question.
“How’s Siesta…?”
Even as I said it, I thought I didn’t want to know the answer.
“The Daydream hasn’t awakened yet,” Stephen told me, his gazed fixed ahead.
What did that mean? Stephen had told us the surgery was a success and that he’d just need to keep Siesta under observation for a little while. By the time that was over, she should have woken up.
“…Don’t tell me it’s because of those aftereffects.”
Siesta had used the power of Seed’s seed to house her consciousness in her heart. That meant there was a risk that a transplant would cause her to lose her personality and memories. We’d given it a lot of thought but had ultimately decided to ask Stephen to perform the surgery.
“No, the problem is more fundamental than that. Both medically and scientifically, the conditions to awaken the Daydream have already been satisfied. Yet she shows no sign of regaining consciousness.”
“Why…?!”
“Kimizuka.” Charlie shook her head.
…I know. Yelling won’t help anything.
“There is a certain hypothesis that the human body has long been equipped with an organ that governs the concepts of mind, soul, and emotion.” Stephen turned, his white lab coat flaring out behind him, and started pacing. “That organ is invisible. Intangible. However, they say it definitely exists somewhere in the body. I’ve known several doctors and holy men who’ve espoused this theory. And while I understood the theory, I didn’t agree with it.”
“…No doubt. No gods nor ghosts nor unknown organs,” Mia—a woman whose own position was deemed “holy”—murmured self-deprecatingly. Things that weren’t seen couldn’t be believed. There were no grounds for it. This was particularly true for a doctor and scientist like Stephen.
“However, after seeing a certain sample, I began to rethink my position.” Stephen stopped in his tracks. “I’m referring to Seed.”
Seed was the leader of SPES, our former enemy. Why bring him up now, though?
“After coming to Earth, the primordial seed survived by parasitically attaching itself to a wide variety of creatures, ultimately learning the structure of human DNA and assuming a human shape.”
“Right. Then Seed created pseudohumans like Cerberus and Chameleon as clones of himself.”
True, they’d been able to transform and possessed superhuman powers. But even then, they’d looked no different from us and had the same emotions we did…
“—No way. Are you saying Seed even learned about human emotions from the structure of our DNA?”
So Seed hadn’t deliberately picked up on human emotions while he was camouflaging himself as a person? Instead, he’d acquired them when he parasitically attached to a human and copied their physical form…because he’d developed the organ that governed emotions? That was what Stephen seemed to be implying.
“Come to think of it, Drachma told us something like that before,” Nagisa said, as if just remembering. “He said that recent research had discovered an organ hidden between the human nasal cavity and the pharynx.”
That’s right. He’d also told us that Seed’s seed might have firmly rooted itself in that organ in Nagisa, resulting in her word-soul ability.
“Therefore,” Stephen said, summing things up, “I have formulated the following hypothesis:
“The human body has an organ that governs a person’s will.”
Once, long ago, I’d thought about where the soul might be. It had been when Nagisa was hovering between life and death and wouldn’t wake up. Siesta and I had racked our brains, and we’d even asked Scarlet. “Where is the soul? Where do human emotions and human consciousness lie?”
Just now, using the concept of “will,” which I’d only been introduced to the other day, Stephen had given his answer: Human will lay somewhere inside the body, invisible.
“Don’t tell me the Vampire’s undead also come back to life with only their instincts because…”
If that was true, had Scarlet already picked up on the answer back then?
“The Daydream’s situation was a bit unique, though.” Guessing that I’d understood, Stephen went on. “She said she’d used the power of the seed to shift her consciousness into her heart. In short, she must have given a part of her will to her heart. Though it doesn’t seem she was aware that was what she’d done…”
“If that was only a part of it, then where’s the rest? Where’s the will Siesta didn’t give to her heart? It exists somewhere in her body as an invisible organ, right? If it’s there, shouldn’t she wake up…?”
“Yes, I had also been expecting that to happen. However, it didn’t,” Stephen said, calmly stating the facts. “There’s only one conceivable cause: The organ that governs the Daydream’s will is not currently inside her body. It seems likely that someone has taken it.”
Someone had taken…an organ?
Not only that, this was an organ that couldn’t be seen or touched. If anyone could pull off an incomprehensible feat like that, it must be—
“Abel.”
Mia’s small voice echoed through the dark hospital.
It was him. That guy’s codes had taken Siesta’s will. Stolen it.
But when? How?
“Kimihiko. You met the Phantom Thief once before,” Nagisa reminded me. “With Siesta, right?”
Over a year ago, Siesta had awakened in Nagisa’s place for a short time. Just once, while she was awake, we’d encountered the Phantom Thief.
He’d been passing himself off as the Revolutionary then…but he might have used that opportunity to tag Siesta with a code—a special code that, when the time came, would extract the organ that governed her will from her body.
“How many times are you going to ridicule us before you’re satisfied, Abel?” I couldn’t stay on my feet, and I slumped to the sofa.
“I thought I’d finally, finally get to see Ma’am. But now…” Charlie, who had been enduring all this in silence, spoke as if she was forcing the words out. She was gripping a jeweled pendant she said Siesta had given her a long time ago.
She adored Siesta and had followed her closer than anyone else. I knew that. I was the one who knew it best. After all, I’d watched her do it constantly for the past three years.
“…We’re not done yet. We’re just getting started!” The voice belonged to Saikawa. Rising to her feet, she looked at Stephen. “So if we can take the organ that controls her will back from the enemy, Siesta will wake up?”
“Yes, I believe there’s a good chance of that happening.”
“Don’t say there’s a good chance! Say it’s absolute, a sure thing.”
Saikawa had removed her eye patch, and her blue eye pierced Stephen. Up until now, the Inventor had never so much as flinched—at least, not as far as I’d seen—but for the first time, his eyes widened slightly.
“You really do have an intriguing voice,” he murmured before giving a small sigh. “I promise. If you truly manage to achieve a feat like that, it’s sure to happen.”
Once Saikawa heard him say that, she turned to us.
“Well then, let’s set out on an adventure to save our friend.”