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“My adorable big brother! What’s up?!” Kotori cried, showing no sign of lifting her foot.
Just to be clear: Shido was not adorable.
“Ugh. Get off. You’re heavy.”
Kotori nodded theatrically, launching off his stomach to leap from the bed—and to deliver one final body blow.
“Gouf!”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha! ‘Gouf!’ he says! That’s a Gundam Ground Type! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
“…” Shido wordlessly pulled the covers over his head.
“Aaah! C’mon! Why are you going back to sleep?!” Kotori started to shake him violently.
“Ten more minutes…”
“No! You have to get up!”
As Kotori rattled Shido’s sluggish brain in his skull, he frowned, straining to speak. “…R-run…”
“What?”
“…I’ve been infected with the T-virus—short for the ‘Ten More Minutes in Bed, or I’ll Subject My Sister to Tickle Hell’ disease…”
“Wh-what?!” Kotori was shocked, as if she’d just decoded a secret message from aliens.
“Run…while I’m still conscious…”
“B-but what will happen to you?!”
“Just leave me here… Save yourself…”
“I can’t do that! Big Bro!”
“Gaaah!” Shido threw off his blankets and wriggled his fingers.
“Eeeeeeeeek!” Kotori shrieked, scrambling out of the room.
“…Geez.” He sighed, pulling his blankets back up. It wasn’t even six yet, according to his clock. “Why did she have to wake me up at this ungodly hour…?” he grumbled.
As his foggy mind started to clear up, he remembered what had happened the previous night.
Their parents had departed the day before on some kind of business trip, which left Shido in charge of the kitchen. Since he’d never been much of a morning person, he had asked Kotori to be his alarm clock.
“Ohhh…”
I shouldn’t have done that. He sat up in bed, scratching his head. With a big yawn, he smoothed down his bedhead before tottering out of the room.
The small mirror on the wall caught his attention. He squinted at his reflection—looking through his bangs, which had gotten too long to be considered bangs. He hadn’t had a chance to get his hair cut.
“…”
Just like his visual acuity, his appearance had gotten worse over the years. He sighed before trudging down the stairs into the living room.
“…Huh?”
The house looked a little different from usual. The wooden table had been dragged away from the middle of the room, acting as a barricade against a wall. He could see pigtails quivering behind it.
“…” He stealthily tiptoed to the side of the table.
Sure enough, Kotori was sitting there, trembling, her arms hugging her knees.
“Boo!” He grabbed her shoulders.
“Eeeek! Eeeeeaah!” Kotori flailed her arms and legs, but her shriek wasn’t exactly cute.
“Whoa there! Calm down! It’s me.”
“Aaaaah! Eeeek! …Uh? Wait. Big Bro?”
“Yup.”
“N-nothing scary?”
“Nothing scary. I come in peace. Me, friend.”
“O-oh.”
Kotori’s tense face relaxed, almost like a wild squirrel that had given him its trust.
“Sorry. I’ll make breakfast right away.”
He took her hand to pull her to her feet before righting the table and heading toward the kitchen.
From time to time, their parents went out of town on business trips for their shared workplace—a major electronics manufacturer. That meant Shido was in charge of cooking. He’d gotten used to it. In fact, he was confident that he knew his way around the kitchen better than his mother did.
As he fetched some eggs from the fridge, Shido heard the television turn on behind him. Kotori had apparently lowered her heart rate enough to turn it on.
Part of her morning routine was to channel surf for daily horoscopes and fortune-telling segments. That said, those readings always marked the end of the program. After flipping through all the channels, she watched the news, bored.
“Early this morning, in the outskirts of Tengu…”
“Hmm?” Shido rarely paid attention to the background noise, but this made his eyebrows shoot up. The reason was simple: The announcer had clearly stated the name of a familiar city. “Huh? That’s pretty close. Something happen?” He leaned over the kitchen counter to get a better look at the TV.
Everything on the screen had been absolutely decimated.
Buildings and roadways had given way, broken down into a pile of rubble. It was a disaster on par with a meteor strike.
Shido frowned, sighing. “Aah… A spacequake?” He shook his head.
The phenomenon known as a spatial quake encompassed a broad scope of tremors. Because no one knew how or why they occurred, it was impossible to predict one or know the scale of one’s damage. Spacequakes included everything from explosions to earthquakes to evanescence.
It made as much sense as a giant monster destroying the city on a whim.
The first instance of such an anomaly was observed thirty years ago.
Over the course of a night, something had gouged out the middle of the Eurasian continent—in a territory containing the former Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia. Shido’s generation had seen one too many photographs of the disaster in textbooks.
There had been nothing left. It was as though a giant eraser had been taken to the region, leaving approximately 150 million people dead.
A disaster on this scale was a first for recorded history. In the six months following that first incident, this phenomenon occurred in areas around the world, albeit on a smaller scale.
If Shido’s memory served him right, there had been around fifty events. Spacequakes had been seen on every continent, at the north pole, in the ocean, and on smaller islands.
Naturally, Japan was no exception. Six months after the Eurasian disaster, a perfect circle of scorched earth had materialized over a zone south of Tokyo and north of Kanagawa Prefecture. Everything had simply been deleted. That was the very region where Shido and his family now lived.
“Didn’t they stop for a while?” he asked. “I wonder why there’s more of them now.”
“I dunno!” Kotori cocked her head to one side, eyes glued to the TV.
After the Kanto incident, time and space had been spared the disturbances for some time. That was, until five years ago, when there’d been a spacequake in the redeveloped city now known as Tengu. Ever since, there’d been sporadic tremors of unknown cause—the majority of them in Japan.
Of course, it wasn’t as though humans had been twiddling their thumbs during the twenty-five years between the Eurasian spacequake and the Tengu one. The nationwide construction of underground shelters had exploded thirty years ago, beginning with the redeveloped areas. It had become possible to measure the warning signs of a spacequake in advance. Above all else, they had the disaster relief corps in Self-Defense Forces.
The corps had been formed with the objective of rebuilding the devastated facilities and roadways in the disaster zone. They worked their “magic” and managed to completely restore these ravaged towns in an impossibly short time.
The nature of their efforts was classified, so what happened behind the scenes wasn’t public knowledge. Still, it did feel like witnessing a magic trick to see obliterated buildings restored to their original form overnight. However, these speedy repairs didn’t make the spacequakes any less of a threat.
“Don’t you think there’s been one too many quakes around here?” Shido inquired. “Especially in the last year.”
“…Hmm, I guess. Maybe faster than scheduled,” Kotori said, leaning over the armrest of the sofa.
“Faster? What’s faster?”
“Mm, naafing.”
He gave her a quizzical look. He was less interested in what she had said than the fact that her voice was oddly muffled.
“…”
Without a word, he went around the counter and walked over to where she sat on the sofa.
As he approached, she slowly turned her face away.
“Kotori, look this way for a sec.”
“…”
“Now.”
“Ngah!”
He planted his hand on her head and forced her to face him. A strange sound escaped her throat.
“I knew it!” He saw exactly what he had expected to see in her mouth.
They hadn’t even had breakfast, but Kotori was already enjoying her favorite candy: a Chupa Chups lollipop.
“C’mon! I told you: No candy before meals.”
“Mm! Mm!”
He yanked on the stick to try and tug the candy out, and Kotori clamped her lips together to resist. Her face started to distort in the direction he was pulling, making her adorable countenance kind of ugly.
“…Honestly. You have to eat a proper breakfast. Got it?”
In the end, he gave in, tousling her hair before heading back to the kitchen.
“Yup! I love you, Big Bro!”
He shooed her away and got back to work. “…Oh, that reminds me. Isn’t today the entrance ceremony for junior high?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So that means you’ll be home around noon… Anything you want to eat for lunch?”
“Hmm.” Kotori bobbed her head back and forth as she considered the question. Then she shot up in her seat. “A Deluxe Kid’s Meal!”
It was an item from the children’s menu offered by a local restaurant.
Shido snapped to attention and inclined his upper body exactly forty-five degrees forward. “I’m afraid we don’t offer that at our establishment.”
“What?” she cried unhappily, flicking the lollipop stick from side to side.
He sighed and shrugged. “…Oh, fine. I guess it’s a special day. How about we go out for lunch?”
“Oh!” Kotori squealed. “Really?!”
“Sure. Meet at the usual spot once school’s over.”
Kotori waved her hands excitedly. “You swear? It’s a promise?! Even if there’s an earthquake or a fire or a spacequake, even if the restaurant gets taken over by terrorists, you have to promise!”
“Wait. If it gets taken over, they’re not going to be serving food.”
“Promise!” she insisted.
“Okay, okay, I promise.”
“Whoo-hoo!” She threw her hands up into the air.
Shido thought he might be acting too nice, but well, today was special.
I’ll be in charge of cooking for a while anyway. And today, we’ll both be attending our own entrance ceremonies. We can indulge a little. Although I’m not sure how much of an indulgence a kid’s meal is at seven hundred eighty yen.
“Hmm.” He reached up to open the small kitchen window.
The sky was so clear, it almost promised it would be a good day.