“Goodness me...” Leonard said with a sigh, drawing back. He didn’t look to be tired, just sick of the work.
“Keep working,” Sousuke demanded. Surprisingly, Leonard didn’t seem to be lacking in either skill or strength, and he did as he was told. It felt strange to see the ever-pretentious, suit-clad man engaged willingly in this kind of labor.
“Teletha came with you, didn’t she? You aren’t worried about her?” Perhaps unable to stand the drudgery, Leonard began to talk.
Tessa must not be in their custody yet, Sousuke thought. It was entirely possible that Leonard was bluffing, of course, but to Sousuke’s eye, he seemed to be merely speculating. Of course, Sousuke had no obligation to give him any information, so he simply said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” choosing to play dumb.
“Don’t expect me to believe you came here by yourself,” Leonard told him dryly. “She’s the only one who would have business here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sousuke insisted. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Ah, I see.” Leonard lifted up a piece of reinforced concrete, threw it down the stairs, then started again in a needling tone. “How would you feel if I told you that Chidori Kaname was here?”
Sousuke’s hands stopped on a fragment of metal pipe. “You brought her here?” he demanded incredulously. “Into these ruins?”
“Now, now. Keep working.” Leonard chuckled, seeming to consider this a point scored against Sousuke. It was annoying, but Sousuke silently resumed work. “Do you remember the helicopter that fell down the elevator shaft?” Leonard went on conversationally. “She was on it.”
“What?!”
“Your team brought it down,” Leonard informed him, “and it exploded soon after impact. I didn’t check for bodies, of course.”
Sousuke felt a momentary chill go up his spine, but filed the statement away as being a lie. If Kaname were really dead, he thought, Leonard wouldn’t be this casual about it. It was hard to imagine the man grieving over anyone’s death, but he probably wouldn’t be snickering about it, at the very least.
“I can see you don’t believe me,” Leonard observed. “It is the truth, though... I was in the hangar in my AS, and she was still in the cabin when I escaped on my own.”
“You’re lying,” Sousuke accused him bluntly.
“I am not. Kaname was on that helicopter.”
“Then why are you so calm about it?”
“Ah, a fine question... All right, it should be mobile now,” Leonard announced in an attempt to change the subject of their conversation. “Let’s try it.”
“Right,” Sousuke agreed. Together, they grabbed the obstinate beam and pulled together with all their might. The base, which had been buried in rubble, slowly began to creak as it finally gave way.
“There we are. Now... what were we talking about? Oh, yes. Her,” Leonard continued, as they each returned to their individual labor. “She was indeed on the helicopter that went down. I didn’t save her, and the helicopter exploded soon afterward. Yet she’s still alive, I’m quite sure of it. And that’s what’s so interesting.”
“What are you getting at?” Sousuke asked, completely unable to follow the sequential logic of Leonard’s statements. If Kaname was on the helicopter, how can he be so sure she’s alive? he wondered. And why go out of his way to tell me about it now?
“I tested it once... Just before your little Hong Kong rampage,” Leonard said next. “That rainy night, when she was attacked by Gauron’s assassin in Tokyo? I was hiding nearby, watching, but I didn’t interfere.”
Sousuke listened quietly.
“Think about it,” Leonard insisted. “An assassin—Gauron’s protege—pitted against a slightly above-average teenage athlete... By any estimation, she should have died. But she didn’t.”
“She got lucky,” Sousuke opined.
“Yes, lucky—unusually so.” There was a mysterious implication in Leonard’s tone. “The assassin caught her by surprise and shot her. His first shot missed on a fluke, and then the empty cartridge caught in the chamber. That’s what allowed her to escape.”
Kaname had never spoken in detail about that day, so Sousuke had never heard this part before. She’d just told him about the Alastors—those miniature ASes—and that she’d met and talked briefly with Leonard.
“Automatic pistols jam all the time,” he pointed out.
“They do, yes,” Leonard agreed. “But if you were planning to assassinate someone with a gun, what would you do just beforehand?”
“Well...” Killing your target on the first shot was of utmost importance. An early miss would spur them to desperate resistance and make it difficult to complete the assassination smoothly. Thus, Sousuke knew that he’d check the gun’s internal mechanisms and make sure the cartridges were in order.
That assassin had probably done the same. Yet the bullet had just happened to miss, and the gun had just happened to jam.
“She’s a lucky girl,” Leonard mused again. “Almost unbelievably so.”
“And that’s enough to make you believe she survived the crash?” Sousuke demanded incredulously. “You’re mad.”
“Am I? But I’m sure you’ve seen her escape danger countless times yourself, all by the skin of her teeth,” Leonard pointed out. “By any reasonable estimation, she should be dead.”
“But...” Sousuke wanted to laugh this observation off, but couldn’t, because the man was right. Kaname had survived countless dangerous situations since he’d met her, even ones that had given a veteran like himself pause. Could it really all come down to luck? he wondered. Impossible...“She’s always stayed strong and kept moving,” he said out loud. “She swiftly determines what’s within her ability and sees it through with iron will and conviction. In that sense, she’s just like any soldier.”
Of course, Sousuke had no intention of denying that luck played a role. Having seen better soldiers than him die to a single stray bullet, he knew that much of his own survival had been due to luck. There was a saying: “Do all you can, then leave the rest in God’s hands.” Luck was an ancillary element that only made the difference after you’d done everything in your power.
But, aside from her curious Whispered abilities, Chidori Kaname was an utterly ordinary person. Her stubbornness perhaps gave her an edge... but as impressive as that was, it wasn’t a particularly rare trait.
“I’ll grant that she’s a person of uncommon will and decisiveness,” said Leonard. “But have you considered that her particular combination of abilities is itself a form of luck?”
“Now you’re just quibbling,” Sousuke told him. By that standard, everyone who survived to old age was lucky; they’d lucked into the abilities and circumstances that let them live out a full life. There were billions of such people in the world.
“Ah, perhaps so. I’m engaging in a bit of circular wordplay... And the truth is that her survival is not due to luck, but predetermination.”
“Predetermination?”
“She is the place where cause and effect converge,” Leonard hypothesized. “You could say she is who she is because the world went mad, and that the world went mad because she is who she is. I believe she’s going to—and would have, even without my interference—meet the spirit that dwells in these ruins. Then she’ll fuse with that power to bring about the end of history. She’ll become the keystone—the kaname—to a world with no past, future, or present.”
“What are you talking about?” Sousuke asked suspiciously.
“The omni-sphere and the whispers, of course,” Leonard answered. “This is the place where the world went off the rails.”
The frequency of the déjà vu was increasing. Kaname felt like she had walked through this narrow corridor dozens of times, listening to Lemon’s quiet cursing and Tessa’s soft coughing. There was a sort of trick to getting past it, and by keeping her consciousness clear and focused, she was able to maintain her sanity. Nevertheless, she felt her nerves fraying in a way that she found hard to describe.
“I think I’m going crazy,” Lemon whispered. She felt like she’d heard him say that countless times before, too. “I know we’re moving forward, but it’s like the door keeps getting further away... I’m starting to understand how mountain climbers feel.”
“We will arrive eventually.” Exhaustion tinged Tessa’s voice as well. “Our destination is the core of the facility, where the device that Dr. Valov created long ago still lies intact.”
“And that device is what’s causing all this?” he questioned.
“Yes. Though to be more precise... not the device as it exists right now. There’s no electricity to run it, after all.”
“How can it be causing this if it’s not running?”
“It’s difficult to explain... the device is having the effect eighteen years in the past,” Tessa told them. “But the waves of mental energy it emitted at its full power are still echoing forward into our time.”
“Mental energy? In the past?” Lemon asked again, clearly perplexed.
“Do you remember my explanation about the omni-sphere before? The core here is the epicenter,” Tessa specified. “It’s where everything began.”
After what felt like ages, the three of them reached the core. They passed through several thick doors, which luckily weren’t locked, but were so heavy that Tessa and Kaname working together could just barely open them.
Inside was a vast space several times larger than a school gymnasium. Countless cylindrical units were fastened to the interior walls, each the size of a truck tire. In the center of the room lay a giant dome, like a cross-section of one of the spherical gas holders common in Japan. That dome was also covered in hundreds more of those cylindrical units, identical to those that lined the room’s interior walls.
“What is this place?” Lemon whispered timidly.
Its purpose was inscrutable to a layman’s eye. The atmosphere, at least, reminded Kaname of that neutrino observatory she’d seen pictures of once... An experimental device, built underground on a vast scale, yet for a very simple purpose. I exist to learn important things, no expense spared—the space’s grandeur boasted. And while it was all very well organized, she couldn’t help but to feel a morbid perversion about this place, like it was less a scientific facility and more the long-lost temple of a blood cult.
Perhaps due to the facility’s age, several of the cylindrical units had broken off the walls and fallen to the floor. They were probably amplifiers, containing special electronic circuitry to simulate the functions of a human brain. But wait... they didn’t have circuits on that scale at that time, she realized. Could it be...