You should never run when you’re desperate to see someone, I felt. The delusion that my feelings would be dispersed through the vibrations of my body, my ragged breath, and my flowing sweat felt all too tangible. I breathed as shallowly as possible so as not to let my feelings escape with the carbon dioxide flowing past my lips.
Now I walked quietly to the bus stop where I always met with Chika. The only sounds I heard were my own footsteps and the branches rustling in the wind. I had abandoned my bike at the bus stop where I’d detained Allumi.
The plan had gone smoothly. I enacted it swiftly and ran. Of course, the school was probably in an uproar by now, and perhaps they already knew who the culprit was. Still, at that moment, that commotion was of no concern to me, nor this place.
By my reckoning, if the bell and the siren did in fact have some influence on one another, I didn’t need to destroy it entirely.
The sock and the shoe.
The window and the whole room.
Allumi and the dozens of people.
There was clearly a difference between the destruction in this world and that in Chika’s. A small bit of damage here became much larger there, destroying people and things. As for injuries, Chika’s might’ve simply been more severe due to her physical strength and the surface area of her body.
This was naturally an optimistic assumption, but I believed it, baseless as it was.
My plan safely concluded, all I wanted now was to see Chika. While it was another optimistic assumption, I got the feeling I would be seeing her again very soon.
A tinge of ultramarine was spreading across the sky. I had never headed for the bus stop at this hour.
What would I say to Chika if she was there? I hoped she’d laugh. I hoped she’d be happy. Such were the thoughts that crossed my mind as I reached the bus stop. Wearier than I realized, I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the sliding door, then let go. I grabbed it once more and pulled the door straight open.
Chika was there.
“How…?”
Though I’d fully expected to see her, the question still slipped out of my mouth. How, at a time like this? How were my wishes already coming true? How?
“I really wanted to see you.”
“Me too.”
This was not a lie.
“I didn’t think you’d really come, though,” she said.
Neither did I.
I sat down on the bench. My thigh muscles were stiff, probably from pedaling at full tilt earlier. I looked at Chika. There was a different emotion in her eyes than usual. I couldn’t read it clearly, but she seemed almost shaken.
“Kaya…” she started. Her voice was trembling. I wondered if something had happened to make her cry. As I worried over this, she blinked a few times and then uttered, “The siren…it broke.”
All the strength flooded out of my body. The stiffness of my muscles, the nerves that I realized I’d been feeling, my anxieties and worries all fled from me at once, and I nearly collapsed on the spot, nothing left in my body to support me. However, something else soon filled my heart, propping me up like a backup power source, and my mouth moved.
“Good. It worked.”
Chika’s eyes went wide.
“Kaya, you did this…? Well, I mean…actually, I came here because I wondered if you had.”
“Yeah, I did. My hypothesis was right. I broke something that corresponded to the siren before I came here.”
“I hope…it wasn’t anything too important?”
“No, it was something pretty trivial in this world, though I might get in a bit of trouble for it. There’s a chance I might not get to come here for a couple of weeks. Still, I’m glad it worked.”
Chika didn’t blink.
“Will this stop the war?” I asked.
I saw her nod. That split second was the happiest of my life.
“There won’t be any wars for a while, starting tomorrow. That’s what we were told.”
“What about your house?”
“They said that the damaged homes will be repaired while the fighting’s off.”
“I’m really glad to hear that.”
My heart was filled with joy. Chika’s room would be restored. Chika’s world would be restored. Chika’s reason to live would be restored. Chika wouldn’t have to be sad. I was truly thrilled.
And yet…why did I hear neither relief nor joy in Chika’s voice?
“Kaya.”
Her voice was hoarse as she spoke my name. Why?
A worst-case scenario suddenly flashed into my head.
What if I had been overeager in my actions? I had broken the bell, aiming for the siren, without consulting Chika. But what if that siren—regarded as sacred in her world—was important to Chika? I had been assuming that Chika, who was interested in little outside of herself, wouldn’t care about the sacredness of this bell, but what if I was mistaken?
Suddenly, I was overcome with worry.
“Wh-wha…what…” She seemed to have difficulty getting the words out, her lips perhaps trembling. I gulped audibly and waited for her to articulate. “Kaya.”
“…Yeah?”
“What can I possibly do for you?”
What came from her were meaningless words, fully beyond anything I had predicted.
“Huh?”
“You did something to protect my world. What can I possibly do for you?”
She gave a long blink. A droplet of light fell from where her eyes were.
“No, uh, what? No, Chika, I’m sorry if I made you sad.”
“I’m not sad.”
Those words were the most powerful I had ever heard out of her mouth. But that didn’t matter, as long as she wasn’t sad.
“I’m glad, then.”
“…Why? Why would you do that for me? Someone in a completely different world?”
For Chika, whose experiences I would never truly share, whose body I couldn’t even fully see. As I thought about it, only one reason came to mind.
“Because I wanted you to be happy.”
I heard her sharply inhale.
“Kaya.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll do whatever you want.”
I tilted my head.
“If there’s anything at all you want to know about my world, I’ll tell you. I want to pay back what you did for me in any way I can. Your precious kindness deserves some reward.”
“Oh, I see.”
I finally realized—she was happy. Moreover, she had said that I was precious to her. Could there be anything better than that? Her happiness had been my goal. Could there really be anything more?
There couldn’t be.
Still, something was bothering me. There was one thing that Chika had gotten wrong. My actions were not kindness. They were nothing so forthright. I needed to make that clear. My strange elation couldn’t be contained. It was bleeding into intoxication. My actions, and Chika’s joy. Thinking about myself in that moment, later with a sober mind, still made me blush.
“Chika.”
“Yeah?”
“I do have one request.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like to touch you, just a little.”
“Huh? But that’s nothing.”
“That’s all I want.”
Chika, accepting but not fully understanding this request, nodded and stared at me. I rose off the seat and moved closer to her. We were two body widths apart, then one, and then we sat closer than we ever had before. We sat angled toward one another, and for the first time, our knees touched.