“That’s not what I meant,” Lemon replied quickly. “I just... don’t understand. You seem like a smart girl, so you have to realize how dangerous that was.”
“What do you mean?”
“Saving that Brown guy means he can tell his allies we survived and got away,” Lemon pointed out. “If not for that, they’d have assumed we burned to death with the rest of the crew. There’s no way we’ll make it out now.”
“Ah...” Kaname suddenly stopped.
“What?”
“N... Nothing. Let’s just hurry.”
Lemon blinked in surprise. “Wait, did you not realize that? You did all that without even thinking?” He was right on the money. Kaname truly hadn’t thought that far. She’d basically been acting on autopilot. “Wow, I was right. You really weren’t thinking...”
“W-Was too!” she said defensively. “I was thinking, but I still just couldn’t let him die!”
“Hmm... Well, I won’t argue the point.”
“And you could’ve said something earlier if you were so worried!”
“Yeah, thought so,” Lemon said with a chuckle.
“Ugh...” Kaname did feel embarrassed, but another feeling had struck her even more deeply. Awakening as a Whispered had led her to a rapid increase in intelligence, and her knowledge of certain fields had increased to genius level, and yet...
Wow, I can’t believe how badly I screwed that up. Why did that thought bring her such a feeling of relief? It means I’m still me, she realized. I still make mistakes. I can still save people. I haven’t really changed...
But Lemon’s next words brought that euphoria crashing down. “That’s not what I meant,” he tried to explain. “I just... don’t understand. You seem like a smart girl, so you must realize how da... huh? I mean, I don’t think it’s self-righteous... huh?”
“What are you talking about?” Kaname asked in confusion.
Lemon stopped, put his fingertips to his forehead, and groaned. He looked really sick.
Kaname was also seized by a curious feeling. I’ve seen Lemon act disoriented like this several times before, she thought. Or is this the first time? Oh, of course...
“déjà vu, right?” Kaname whispered soberly. She’d been through this time and again herself. déjà vu wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon, and she’d thought she was used to it by now... but since entering these ruins, she’d felt she was experiencing it much more frequently. She hadn’t counted how often, precisely, but there was definitely something strange going on here.
What in the world is it? she wondered. Is it connected to the omni-sphere? Yes, it has to be... The déjà vu was a sign of its influence growing stronger. The harmless “reverberations” she felt from time to time in daily life were now affecting the otherwise normal Lemon, as well. She remembered the strange words of the helicopter pilot just before they crashed... That had most likely been the same thing.
Is there another Whispered nearby, she thought next, aside from me and Leonard? She was sure Leonard had boarded his AS, the Belial, in the helicopter’s cargo hold before the crash. He wasn’t about to let something like that kill him, so he was probably still somewhere in these ruins. A Whispered out there, using an amplifier like a TAROS... could he be creating these “reverberations,” like some kind of localized jamming field?
No... It’s more than that. She knew this facility contained something far more dangerous. She’d been feeling a sensation separate from the déjà vu... A feeling of someone whispering into her head, every time danger came near.
“Kaname-san?” Lemon’s voice snapped her back to reality.
She shook her head. “Ah, sorry. Everything okay?”
“Um... you mean with him?”
“Huh?”
The next thing she knew, she was in front of the black man she’d saved from the helicopter again. They were back by the wreckage of the truck they’d taken shelter behind initially. Lemon spoke, looking at the man’s injuries.
“His right leg is broken. There’s a gash down his right side. I think he hit his head... though I don’t know how bad it is.”
“Will he pull through?” she asked Lemon after tracing back the conversation in her memory. Ah, I’m so sick of this...
“I’m not sure. He might, if he gets treatment right away, but—”
She listened to the same explanation as before, explained their situation to Brown, wiped his face, gave him her down jacket, offered Lemon a shoulder and left. Lemon pointed out her mistake, she got annoyed and denied it, and he laughed in response.
“Lemon-san.”
“What is it?”
“We’re going to be experiencing a lot of déjà vu here, so try to keep your wits about you,” Kaname told him. “I think something in this facility is the cause.”
“Okay. Got it,” Lemon said, shaking his head.
“That was easy,” she observed. “You’re not going to ask how I know?”
“I already know at least a little bit about what this place was built for. Wraith and I were the ones who found it, after all.” He’d told her in the helicopter that Leonard had captured him while he was on a mission with Wraith. He’d said that Wraith had fled, and no one knew where she was now. But he hadn’t told her what they’d been investigating in Moscow, since they weren’t alone at the time.
“You found this place?”
“At Testarossa’s request,” he confirmed. “She’d been theorizing the existence of a top secret city like this, but she didn’t know where it was. This facility was built in the late 70s to do experiments on iffy stuff, like telepathy and precognition. Our research in Moscow told us it was spearheaded by Dr. Valov—a truly brilliant scientist—as a major project for the state.”
“Dr. Valov...” Kaname echoed.
“I didn’t entirely believe it, but now I think I’m starting to,” Lemon admitted. “Amalgam wouldn’t have captured and interrogated me if there was no truth to the story, and they certainly wouldn’t be here now. And... like you said, we really are experiencing this weird sense of déjà vu. I don’t know exactly how it works, of course... But this place seems dangerous as hell.”
“I don’t think we were shot down earlier, either,” Kaname informed him. “I think the pilot got disoriented.”
“Yeah. If so, whoever it was that shot at us... They almost killed us, too.”
Kaname remembered the conversation in the helicopter:
“AS sniper.”
“From a distance like that.”
Someone who’d be attacking Amalgam... Could the one shooting at us have been Kurz Weber? she wondered. He wouldn’t have had any way to know that she’d been in that helicopter. If Kurz and the others were close by, that could be their ticket out of here.
And not only that, she realized. It’s possible that Sousuke is somewhere out there as well... But to Lemon, all she said was, “For now, let’s just try to find an exit.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’m curious about the mysteries this place holds... but now’s not really the time.”
“Right.”
Having reached that decision, they continued down the pitch-black hallway. They went on instinct at each fork in the road, first going right and then left. The occasional dead ends and closed steel doors made the place truly feel like a maze.
There were no maps of the facility on the walls, and the label plates had long since corroded and fallen uselessly to the floor. The occasional area displays they saw simply read things like, “507” and “394,” numbers that meant nothing to them. They weren’t even sure what floor they were on.
“Sheesh. We’re totally lost...” Lemon whispered, leaning up against the wall as they found another corridor blocked off by a collapsed ceiling. He hadn’t brought it up, but the wound in his leg must have been aching by now. His face, in the light of her flashlight, was paler than before.
“No, we’re not,” she told him. “We can still go back the way we came if we have to.”
“You remember it?”
“I think so. I’m drawing a map in my head.” I never would have been able to do this in the past, Kaname thought. But aloud, she just said, “Let’s try that way.”
Five minutes of wandering later, Lemon seemed to notice something. He stopped short and seized Kaname’s arm.
“What is it?” she questioned.
“Hush! Someone’s coming. Kill the light,” he hissed, drawing a pistol from his belt. She wanted to ask where he got it, but didn’t. He’d probably swiped it from Brown while assessing his injuries.
Kaname turned off the flashlight, and Lemon took it from her. They hid behind a nearby fallen locker in time to hear a single set of footsteps sounding out in the distance. Someone was approaching, slowly, past the bend of an intersection further down the corridor.
They don’t seem to have a light, Kaname observed. Do they have night vision goggles on? As the two held their breath and waited, the person stopped at the corner. They couldn’t see them in the dark, but they could tell from the sound alone.
Lemon turned on the flashlight and pointed it at the person, along with his gun. “Don’t move!”
The person covered their night-vision goggles with an arm and hunched over in surprise. It was a petite girl dressed in shorts, a flight jacket, and hiking boots far too bulky for her skinny legs. Her ash blonde hair was done up in a neat braid.
“Ah...” The girl pulled off her night vision goggles and squinted into the flashlight’s beam.
“Tessa...?” Kaname cried out. “Is that you, Tessa?!”
“That voice... Kaname-san?” asked Tessa, in surprise.
“Yes. But what are you doing—”
“Kaname-san!” Before she could finish, Tessa had made it down the hallway and thrown her arms around the other girl. She didn’t even seem to have noticed the surprised Lemon. “Oh, I’m so glad... I was so worried about you,” Tessa gushed. “Is it really you, Kaname-san?”
“O-Of course it is! Ah... Tessa, don’t cry,” Kaname begged. “C’mon...”
“I’m sorry, but I’m just so glad you’re safe. So glad...”
“Yeah. It’s good to see you, too. It’s been a while, huh...?”
Tessa cried for a while, her face buried in Kaname’s chest. Kaname really was happy to see her too, but it would be a while before she could get over her shock long enough to appreciate it.