Unfortunately, she didn’t seem willing to even meet me at the negotiation table. In fact, she didn’t even look at me as she walked over to lie down on the bench seats along the opposite wall, using her backpack as a makeshift pillow. Something told me she wasn’t in the mood to listen to anything I could possibly have to say right now, so I figured I’d best just give up for the night and try to talk to her again when her mood improved.
But after we awoke, and even after we left the fast-food restaurant, Akira remained completely closed off to me. Whenever I tried to talk to her, she’d either ignore me outright or give some callous, uninterested one-word answer. She also stopped her usual demands for me to come up with topics of conversation, which meant that neither of us were saying much of anything.
I may have loved my peace and quiet, but I hated awkward silences as much as the next person. And right now, Akira’s cold demeanor toward me was so suffocating it felt like a vise squeezing all of the air from my lungs. My anxiety slowly hardened to resentment. What had I really done, at the end of the day, to deserve the cold shoulder? She was the one who’d been in the wrong. Everything I’d said was true, and I hadn’t even been all that harsh with her. If this was how she was going to act any time we had a minor disagreement, then I didn’t want anything to do with her.
And so I gave up trying to work things out with Akira, and I just put one foot in front of the other in silence. The southern skies looked overcast—as if they’d predicted this strife between us and dressed themselves in shades of gray to match.
Two days had now passed since Akira and I stopped talking.
“Man, it’s cold.”
We departed from a drive-in where we’d spent the night and entered a mountain pass that cut straight through the woods. Shortly after, I felt a sudden wetness on my face. I reached up and wiped it off—only to find that there were actual water droplets on my hand.
“Is it raining?” I wondered aloud. The sky was dark with cloud cover—almost too dark for it to feel like it was really 11:00 a.m. As a test, I held out my hand and waited to see if any raindrops would land on my palm.
…Wait, what am I doing? Rain wouldn’t fall in the timefreeze, would it?
“Huh?” Akira mumbled. Then, as if she were doing an impression of me, she lifted her own hand to touch her face before looking at it as well.
Hang on a minute.
I looked down at the ground; it was a little bit damp, though I hadn’t noticed since the asphalt was black. And when I looked far ahead, everything was shrouded in a haze of mist. I could also make out little puddles of condensation along the roadside.
“Watch out,” I told Akira. “It’s raining.”
“Uh, what?” she said, looking at me like I was crazy. And while this was, admittedly, a questionable way to phrase it, her gaze felt even more feral and unforgiving than it had been before—though perhaps the faint dark circles under her eyes had something to do with it. Maybe she hadn’t been sleeping all that well again. If so, I wondered if it was simply due to stress related to the timefreeze, or if it was because of me… For all I knew, it could be both.
“Er, sorry,” I said. “How do I explain this…? So it’s not raining-raining right now, but the rain that was falling here when time stopped is still frozen in midair. So if we continue this way, we’re probably gonna have to deal with that for a while.”
“…Right,” said Akira. It seemed she understood.
But what exactly were we supposed to do now? Neither of us had umbrellas. And would an umbrella even work to ward off a billion tiny little raindrops suspended in space? Maybe a poncho or something would help, but even so… As I stood there considering our options, Akira just started walking down the road, completely undeterred.
“Wait, you’re just going in there? You’re gonna get drenched.”
“Psh. A little rain never killed anyone.”
“I don’t think it’ll just be a little…”
I thought things over for a moment. We hadn’t even seen a single house in over an hour; if we were to turn back now, it’d cost us quite a bit of time, not to mention energy. And there was always a chance this rain was simply a passing shower that we could break through in no time, so maybe the best course of action here would be to press on like Akira seemed to want. I jogged ahead to catch up with her, and the two of us walked side by side directly into the static storm.
Unfortunately, my forecast proved to be overly optimistic.
As we walked farther down the road, the rainfall—or rain density, rather—only grew heavier. And with no way of avoiding it or warding it off, we had no choice but to just take it. Our clothes quickly became soaked through, which sapped both our body heat and our stamina. There was even water sloshing around inside my shoes, which was a singularly unpleasant feeling I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Every single step I took felt like setting my bare feet in a thick puddle of mud.
“Ugh, damn it…”
Frustrated, Akira swiped the raindrops out of her face as if she were batting away flies. As she tucked her wet bangs back behind her ears, I could see that her lips had gone pale, which didn’t surprise me. We were already in the chilly part of the year, and when you added rain into the mix, it just made things that much colder.