“Any luck?” asked Ryo as he passed me by at one point.
“Nope,” I said.
“Man… If it’s not here, then where the hell else do we look?”
“We might have to loosen our criteria for where to search a bit,” I said. “Either that or we overlooked it somehow, and we’ll have to slowly retrace our steps through everywhere we’ve checked previously.”
Just then, I heard Ayane calling out to us.
“Tomoya-kun! Ryo-kun! Where are you two?”
Her voice was coming from up above. Ryo and I lifted our heads to look up at her, floating high above the train tracks. Her usual hand-holding partner was notably not along for the ride this time.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I can’t find Aoi-chan,” she said, her tone somewhat frantic. “We were trying to practice letting her fly on her own again, so we went searching through the ground without holding hands. At first, she seemed to be doing just fine, but I took my eyes off of her for one second, and I guess she must’ve whooshed off somewhere…”
Oh, great. There was no predicting Aoi’s movements once she lost control like that—she’d go bounding around at light speed at sharp angles that totally defied the laws of inertia (which the rest of our minds generally adhered to, despite it not being strictly required). Finding her would not be an easy task.
“Maybe we should just leave her be?” I suggested.
“Yeah, I mean, she’ll still wake up back in her body at the end of the night, right?” Ryo offered in agreement.
“Wow, you two are pretty heartless,” said Ayane.
“Fine. Where did you last see her?” I asked.
“Back over there.” She pointed down along the tracks.
“Okay… Why don’t we head over in that direction then? We can still continue the search while keeping an eye out for her underground.”
I wondered just how far it was possible to fly while in ghost form—assuming there were any limits at all. Could you fly through the stratosphere and out among the solar system? Could you delve deeper into the Earth’s core than mankind had ever done before? I was mildly curious, but oddly not so much that I would ever bother trying to do so myself. And for whatever reason, something told me we wouldn’t be able to go too far beyond the sphere in which our daily lives took place, even if we tried. It was almost like instinctive knowledge; perhaps all wandering spirits were bound to a central location. In that case, my suggestion to Ayane a while back about her still being able to go out and see the world may not have been a viable option after all.
Such were my absentminded thoughts as we flew around looking for both the suitcase and Aoi—until eventually, I caught a glimpse of a hazy silhouette that looked vaguely similar to the latter, floating awkwardly off in the distance.
“Hey guys!” she cried out, waving her hands back and forth as she fumbled her way toward us through the air. “You guys, come quick! I think I might have found the suitcase!”
Upon regrouping with us, Aoi explained that this discovery had apparently been a total coincidence. She was flying alongside Ayane when she got careless for a moment and lost her sense of balance. Then, upon attempting to set herself upright again, she got suddenly and completely turned around before wildly spinning out as she went barreling off in a completely random direction. From the way she described it, it sounded almost like she’d been dipping in and out of the underground at peak velocity like a broken rocket on a wonky trajectory, struggling to break out of Earth’s orbit. And try as she might, there was nothing she could do to stop herself, apparently.
“It really felt like I was clinging for dear life to a bucking bronco or something!” she exclaimed. “Honestly, I thought I was gonna die for a minute there.”
She then recounted how, eventually, she broke out of this cycle and shot high up into the sky and cut a sharp curve over the city, like a shooting star. After passing over countless apartment buildings and residential homes, she eventually fell back down to earth—diving through everything from a dining room where a family was just sitting down to eat dinner, to an older couple’s living room as the pair watched TV, to a convenience store where a lone employee was dutifully restocking shelves. When she at last regained control over her altitude, she found herself hovering in the air near a large radio tower—but was still unable to stop spinning rapidly in circles. She shut her eyes tight in an attempt to stave off the dizziness from her whirling vision, and it was then that she remembered what Ayane had told her—about how she could go anywhere her heart desired if she could only picture it in her mind.
Where do I want to go? she thought, and all of a sudden, she stopped spinning in midair. Her body went completely still. Finally able to catch her breath, she calmed down and tried her damnedest to head back in the direction from which she came. She knew that if could just make her way to the railroad and follow it underground, she’d be able to meet back up with us eventually. Noticing a set of tracks that conveniently ran right alongside the radio tower, she dived down into the murky, fathomless underground.
“But then I couldn’t pick which way to go down the tracks,” said Aoi. “I had completely lost my bearings and had no idea which one would lead me back to you guys. So I just kind of hung out there for a sec, not sure what to do…and that’s when I saw it, right there in front of me.”
There in the ground, not even a meter below the surface, was something. It was a large, rectangular, boxlike object—just large enough for a human to fit inside.
We all followed Aoi back to the site of this discovery—an empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence on the outskirts of town. A lone radio tower stood above it with little white flowers clustered around its feet. And sure enough, it was there that we found the object Aoi had described—a suitcase, large enough to be taken on a several-week-long overseas trip. We all simply looked up at it in silence from where we were submerged, slightly below it in the ground.
I strained my eyes, and the outer shell of the luggage became slightly transparent, allowing me a vague glimpse of what was inside. Even though it was already hard enough to see anything underground through the mud and earth, I could see the pale moonlight shining down from high above the surface—illuminating the suitcase and its contents from behind.
“This is it,” said Ayane. “That’s me.”
Her voice was filled with a soft sort of reverence as she stared up at the suitcase and the silhouette of the curled-up human form that had been laid to rest therein.
And that was the last thing I saw before my vision blacked out.