“Well, thank you all,” said Ayane, her tone apologetic. “I wish I could do something to return the favor.”
“Don’t sweat it,” said Ryo. “As far as I’m concerned, I already owe you big-time, anyhow.”
“Really? What did I ever do for you, Ryo-kun?”
“You set my worst fears at ease,” he said. “Now I know that death ain’t the end after all.”
“Yeah, I’m really grateful to have had the chance to meet you too, Ayane-san,” said Aoi. “So I wanted to do something to repay you, if I could. Besides, it’s not like I’d be doing anything more productive with my time otherwise—I’d just be staying home and playing video games, probably. Figured I might as well get out there and make some nice memories, given that this might be my last summer and all.”
“Yeah, right,” Ryo teased. “I bet you just didn’t wanna feel left out.”
“Nuh-uh! Hey! Why are you bullying me all of a sudden?!” Aoi whined.
“It was just a joke, my friend. Chill.”
And so without further ado, we prepared to begin the night’s search—starting, of course, with Ayane removing each of our souls from our bodies. I was already used to the phenomenon by this point, but Ryo and Aoi seemed particularly unnerved by it. Aoi squealed and fell backward, flapping her arms and legs wildly to try to regain her balance—but her feet only slipped right through the ground.
“Just calm down, Aoi-chan,” said Ayane. “You have to straighten out your mind and stand with your heart—not your legs.”
Now that the two girls were both in ghost form and able to actually touch one another, Ayane helped Aoi back up to her feet. Aoi then proceeded to cling to Ayane’s arm, like she was trying to hold on for dear life.
“I don’t know about this, Ayane-san!” she cried out. “Maybe I’m not cut out for flying after all!”
Ryo, meanwhile, had gotten the hang of it right away. He was having a ball flying freely through the air.
“Damn, you could do some totally badass dunks like this!” He then proceeded to demonstrate via pantomime before deftly touching back down to the earth.
And so the four of us set off, flying through the night sky toward the area where Ayane and I had started looking for the suitcase yesterday. I already explained the search criteria to the newcomers, so they knew what to look for. After crossing over the floodplain, we gazed down at the city lights and headed for the railroad tracks. Aoi was still struggling to find her groove with the whole flying thing, so Ayane was dragging her along by the hand. If she didn’t, Aoi’d only start tumbling down to the ground like I had my first time. But even so, she seemed downright awestruck by the sheer beauty of it all—gazing down upon our familiar nightscape from high in the sky.
“Let’s try looking around here tonight,” I suggested, and we all headed down to a lightly wooded area slightly removed from the residential districts. There, the only things straddling the train tracks were untouched thickets and a few lumber yards.
“Yeah, if I were trying to hide a body, this is prolly the sort of place I’d wanna do it. No houses nearby, which means no eyewitnesses in the dead of night,” commented Ryo, taking a quick look around the area before promptly heading down to check underground. He dove down between the rails and the crossties and disappeared beneath the gravel.
“Here, Aoi-chan,” said Ayane. “Take my hand and we’ll go together.”
“Yes, please,” said a still very skittish Aoi.
“If anyone finds anything that looks promising, just shout it out.”
Even underground, with no air through which sound waves could travel, our voices could reach each other just fine. Communicating in ghost form seemed to work through an entirely different mechanism than the physics involved in normal speech.
We swam through the ground in search of the suitcase, being careful never to delve deeper than about one meter below the surface. Unfortunately, all we really found were bits of rubble and the occasional piece of furniture or household appliances that someone had seen fit to illegally dump in the woods. At one point, we did happen upon a rectangular box that looked as though a human might fit inside—but upon closer inspection, it turned out to merely be a small refrigerator.
Now would perhaps be a good time to note that, similar to how we could see a decent way through the mud and dirt underground, we could also see through more solid materials if we focused our minds on doing so. It worked a bit like focusing both of your eyes on a single point until you started seeing double. As a result of this, we were able to quickly confirm that there was nothing inside that little refrigerator without having to open the door or peek our heads inside.
After looking around for a while, Ryo and I linked back up and talked strategy.
“Doesn’t make sense for both of us to be searching the same area,” he said. “I’m gonna head up along the tracks facing east.”
“Okay, then I’ll check the west side,” I said. “Oh yeah—if you see any empty lots along the road where a car could easily park, be sure to check those extra carefully. We’re all but certain that the killer drove Ayane-san to the place he buried her with the same car he ran over her in.”
“Roger that, chief.”
We carried on searching like this for what felt like an hour, but to no avail. We agreed to check along another set of tracks that passed through a nearby residential neighborhood next. Regrettably, things got a lot more complicated underground in areas where people actually lived and worked—there were all sorts of cables, plumbing lines, and building foundations to weave through. All we could do was strain our eyes and try our best to seek out anything remotely suitcase-shaped amidst a veritable jungle of urban engineering.
“Why don’t we go take a quick break in there to catch our breath?” Ayane eventually suggested after another long stretch of no leads whatsoever. She pointed to a train passing through on the tracks nearby—its golden window lights shot through the night like a line of shooting stars. We flew after it and let our incorporeal selves through the outer walls of one of the passenger cars. There was almost nobody on board, and we lined up along a row of empty seats and sat down to take a breather. Never mind that we weren’t actually sitting, as our butts would have passed right through the seats—it was just to give the appearance of recreation. It may have seemed silly, but this alone was enough to trick our minds into relaxation mode.
“Not having too much luck so far, are we?” I said, just to fill the silence.
“Well, no. But it’s only day two, remember?” said Ayane. “I’d be astounded if we somehow managed to find it this quickly.”