“You two look, er, awfully young to be in the military.” The chubby man eyed Yu and Ijuin’s rifles as he steadied himself against the house.
Yu looked to his friend. “Um, how do we explain?”
“So, well, we’re technically middle schoolers,” Ijuin said. “But a few months before the Evacuation, we got made junior operatives, which I’m pretty sure is fancy talk for child soldiers.”
“Child soldiers?!” the man cried.
Yu shrugged. “They’re short on people. We do what we have to.”
“We’re with R&D, though,” his partner explained. “See, before Japan sorta went to hell and all, the Defense Force was secretly gathering a bunch o’ preteens that scored high on some kind of nanomachine aptitude test. ’Cause you gotta be augmented young for the next-gen tech, after all. Anyway, that’s us.”
“These are troubled times, I suppose,” the man replied.
“So you from the refugee camp?” Ijuin asked. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“At first, yes.” He cracked a dry smile. “But I didn’t stay long. Couldn’t stand the way the officers ran the place, so I’ve been living here.”
“Ah.”
“Yup, makes sense,” Yu nodded.
The bespectacled man’s nerdy appearance would have certainly made him easy prey for Leading Private Takeda.
“I’ve been getting by relatively fine with whatever food and water I can find, but then I heard a child crying and found him with those dogs. There’ve been a lot of wild animals around lately.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to drag myself back to the camp at some point.”
“We could take you back with us if you want,” Yu offered.
“Oh, no. I’m not throwing in the towel just yet. Although...” The man offered a pitiful grin. “You wouldn’t happen to have any food, would you?”
“Thank you so, so, so much!” the lost child’s mother exclaimed.
She was surprisingly young—about twenty-two or twenty-three. Despite the state of the world, she still bothered to maintain her bright hair and heavy makeup. Yu had a feeling he could tell what sort of student she must have been in high school. It was pitch dark outside the shelter and most of the hundred-plus refugees had long since gone to sleep. The boy Yu and Ijuin had brought back to camp was also probably already snoozing away inside the cramped warehouse.
“I-I should go,” the mother stammered. “Need to, um, report back to Private Takeda. And stuff.”
Yu and Ijuin quietly smiled back, daring not to ask any questions. It couldn’t have been easy—being a mother so young, losing your family, and then finding your way to a place like this where food and human decency were scarce. If dolling herself up and pandering to the boys in charge was what she needed to do to provide for her kids—perhaps even score a little extra—then no amount of external judgment would stop her. Everyone was struggling, including the bespectacled man, and Yu felt a pang in his chest.
Suddenly, the woman perked up with a start. “Oh! I nearly forgot.” She struggled to find the words. “There was...something I was supposed to tell you.”
“For the love of... Why can’t they clean their own crap?!”
“This seriously needs to be done in the morning,” Yu grumbled.
It was well past midnight, and the boys sat cross-legged in the armory. Various Type 89 rifle parts lay neatly on the ground while Yu and Ijuin carefully scrubbed every piece with oil-soaked cloths. Besides soot and fingerprints, salt carried by the breeze from the nearby ocean needed to be diligently cleaned to keep the metal from rusting.
“You’d think they’d be worried about us jumping them, leaving all these guns lying around,” Ijuin said.
“Doubt it. They’re living it up right now.”
“Compared to the old SDF, the Defense Force really lowered the bar. All you gotta do to get in these days is have a resume and be eighteen. Whatever gets them more people, I guess.”
Power sources were precious and needed to be conserved, so they had to make do with leftover salad oil from the garbage to light their makeshift lamp. It didn’t actually make things that much easier to see, but it was the best they had.
Yu finished his work dexterously and started to reassemble the rifle. The most skillful soldiers could take apart their weapon and put it back together in about three minutes. But the boys were not the most skillful soldiers.
“Please take your time, Ijuin. If they find even a speck—”
“Yeah, I know! They’ll whip us both! I ain’t gonna screw up like that again.”
If they were lucky, they’d be forced to do a dozen laps and twenty push-ups, but it wasn’t uncommon for them to be pushed to the point of vomiting. At worst, they’d get to be the punching bags for every squad’s sparring sessions.
“I might not be as mad if we were aiming for baseball championships or something,” Yu complained sarcastically. “I wonder if teams who made it into nationals every year even got it this hard.”
“Dunno. I’m the indoorsy type. Never liked sports. You’d probably know better than me.” Ijuin glanced at Yu. “Didn’t you play soccer?”
“Not for school. I was on the Urawa youth team. I didn’t even bother checking out my middle school’s team, so I don’t have a clue how those guys do it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We didn’t really have much of a hierarchy, you know? Didn’t have to clean up after the older members or anything.”
The hours flew by, and the sky was starting to brighten as the two finished and locked up the storehouse.
“Sun’s already coming up? Man, that sucks.”
“Let’s get back to the shelter,” Yu said.
“Eh, we’ll have to wake up soon anyway.” Ijuin looked out at the first cracks of lapis on the horizon, his eyes brimming with excitement all of a sudden. “Hey, come with me a sec! Got a new trick to show ya!”
Before becoming a military outpost, Gorogatake’s summit had been a popular park for tourists. These days, though, research labs and warehouses occupied the area. When power to the region had failed completely, the park’s own array of solar panels and large windmills equipped with superconductive motors managed to keep the site running. Even today, they continued to provide a sufficient, yet meager, amount of energy. Overlooking the monolithic turbines was the fifty-meter observation tower—the last trace of the park’s history as a sightseeing hotspot. A sort of huge, conch-shaped antenna rested at the top.
Yu tilted his head quizzically at it. “I wonder what they’re using this place for. Professor Chloe will never tell me.”
“My guess is it’s an observatory or something. The antenna looks like some kinda radar thing to me,” Ijuin replied. “Anyway, that’s not important. You know how only officers with the right keycard can get inside?”
The entrance to the tower—a thick, automatic door—was shut tight. Installed next to it was a console with a small slit, just big enough to fit a card in, and a hemispherical nanomachine interface.
Ijuin touched the hemisphere, and after a few electronic beeps, he muttered, “Watch this.”
Yu jumped as the door swished open. “How did you do that?!”
“The awakening experiments.” Ijuin opened his right palm, revealing the ring of light. “I think I picked it up somehow along the way. Been using the nanomachines a lot.”
“So what, you like, hacked the terminal?” Yu asked excitedly.
“Something like that, yeah. All I gotta do is touch something with a nanotech interface and I just kinda know how it works. You know, they kept talking about aptitude this, aptitude that, but I’ve never actually felt useful until now!”
“Dang, man. Nice going.”
Their pathway was clear. Beyond the mysterious door to the unknown was an ordinary reception desk. Perhaps a remnant of the tower’s days as a tourist attraction.
“So, Ijuin. What do you say we take a look inside?”
“Could always use more info for the escape plan.”
“I really hope there aren’t any security cameras in here,” Yu said.
“Lemme check.” Ijuin closed his eyes and touched a hemispherical nanotech device conveniently placed on a nearby wall. “There aren’t any in this hallway, that’s for sure. Actually, the whole tower’s in low power mode. Pretty much the only things that move are the front door and the elevator. I mean, even if there were cameras, there aren’t enough people to watch them anyway.”
Yu was thoroughly impressed. “Wow, you’re like a super hacker from some manga.”
“It doesn’t really feel like it, though. It’s less computer-y and more...tactile. I just touch it and I understand the mechanisms. ‘Don’t think. Feel,’ you know? Anyway, the top floor looks like the most important.”
They stepped into the elevator and rode it all the way up. They arrived on a floor enclosed with glass, wrapping around the full three-sixty degrees. They could see for miles. Sizable wooden boxes littered the floor and countless cables crisscrossed throughout the walking space, making the room a treacherous maze to traverse.
Yu carefully navigated his way up to the window and looked north across Maizuru Bay, over to the greater Wakasa Bay beyond. Although it was only the size of his fingertip from this far, he could even make out the enigmatic mass floating in the distance. Heaven-piercing ramparts sat distinctly upon the massive lump of levitating stone.
“I can see the portal,” he mumbled.
“Ichinose! Check this out!”
Ijuin pointed at a rectangular, glass case filled with blue liquid. A young girl was floating inside, completely naked. Her hair was a dark midnight blue, and despite her eyes being delicately closed, their striking beauty was plain to see. Bubbles occasionally rose from her peach-colored lips. But what stood out about her most were her long, pointed ears.