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The air in the sanctuary felt almost freezing. The night wasn’t unusually cold. Yukinari figured it was his own emotions that were the problem. This was the chill of a place that had long gone unoccupied. They had only been away for a month, yet it felt almost like an abandoned building.
He was used to having Berta there, having Ulrike there. Without them, there just seemed to be too much space.
Incidentally, Angela wasn’t in the room. Trying to entertain her constantly—trying to maintain the tyrannical front that made her pliant and malleable—was immensely tiring, so Yukinari had confined her to a different room and used physical reconstitution to weld the end of the chain to a wall so she could never escape under her own power.
“Dammit,” Yukinari muttered. It was the realization that he felt lonely that brought the word to his lips.
He was actually surprised to realize he was still capable of feeling lonely. For as long as he could remember, he and his older sister had been together. As she’d said, he’d had her and she’d had him. They were an entire world to each other. Neither of them had many friends or acquaintances, so they were never left feeling lonely. They were used to having only each other.
But now Yukinari felt terribly alone. Since he had come to this world, he had met a wide variety of people, created relationships and made friends. Perhaps he had only been trying to fill the hole in his heart left by the loss of his sister, but all the same, before he knew it Yukinari found himself with more close friends than he could count on one hand. And now, that was what he was used to.
That was why he felt lonely now. As for Hatsune, who felt this was a betrayal... He could understand.
“Oh, my sister...”
But if Yukinari had changed, Hatsune seemed to have changed even more. Yes, she could be surprisingly childlike, but he remembered her as a basically kind girl. She had doted on her little brother, Yukinari. She had always been gentle to everyone; he had never seen her yell at or mock anybody.
He wondered what could have happened to make her the way she was now. Had something changed when she had been reincarnated? Or... maybe she hadn’t changed. Maybe Yukinari was only just now seeing something that had been there all along.
“I...”
He thought back to their life together. From a rational point of view, they were two children who had been neglected by their parents; conventional wisdom might have taken them to be completely unhappy. Yet when it came to the relationship between just Yukinari and his sister, they were totally fulfilled.
“Yuki...”
He looked up when he heard his name. Dasa was standing in the doorway. She was dressed in her usual outfit, but in her right hand she held Derrringer, while in her left was a box of extra bullets. Both were things Yukinari had made and then left at the sanctuary.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah... I’m fine.” He made himself smile.
Dasa came over to the bench where Yukinari was sitting. She rested the sniper rifle against the wall, set the bullets on the ground, and sat down next to him.
“Ah...” Dasa blinked as if she had just thought of something. “The password...”
“Uh-huh.” Yukinari smiled ruefully.
On the way to the sanctuary Yukinari, Dasa, and Angela had settled on a password. Hatsune could turn into anyone at any time. Not just her face, but even her clothes and body. Someone they thought was an ally might be their enemy in disguise.
“I guess just bringing it up proves you’re all right, though.”
If the girl in front of him was just Hatsune in disguise, she wouldn’t even have known about the password. There was always the possibility that she had secretly substituted herself for Dasa immediately after they left the Schillings mansion, before they arrived at the plaza.
“I won’t forget Jirina’s pain,” Dasa said without hesitation.
“Red hot chili pepper,” Yukinari said, responding to the password.
Now they each knew that the other was who they claimed to be. And yet, an unnatural silence fell between them. Neither spoke.
Seated side by side on the bench, they looked not at each other but at the same little bit of the wall. Now that the weapons were ready, there was nothing for them to do but wait for Hatsune to arrive.
Then...
“Yuki...” Dasa, perhaps tired of the strange silence, sounded almost as if she had just thought of something. “I want to talk a little. May I?”
“Er, sure. Of course you can,” he answered, feeling Dasa’s hand edge closer to his own.
What am I acting so awkward about at this late date?
He and Dasa had often touched each other before. They would join hands on their travels, or he would embrace her when they slept under the same blanket. Yukinari saw Dasa as Jirina’s little sister, indeed as almost his own little sister. But this...
“And, uh, what did you want to talk about?”
“About the... world you come from... Yuki.”
This seemed very sudden. He and Dasa had never talked about this sort of thing before. Partly that was because they hadn’t had the chance, but maybe they had been subconsciously avoiding it. What good would it do now to think about his previous life? He couldn’t go back, and he couldn’t forget it, so in some ways it was best just not to think about it...
“What kind of world were you in, Yuki?”
“That’s a tough question...”
Now that the subject had come up, he found it difficult to explain. He knew he couldn’t just say that everything had been average, normal, but he didn’t think he had been a strange enough human being to warrant special attention, either. At least, that was how people around him had seen him—both him and Hatsune.
“Were you and... your sister... Hatsune... Were you good... friends?”
He didn’t say anything immediately. It was like she had seen straight through him. “Hatsune and I were...” A wide range of different words went through his mind, but none of them quite seemed appropriate. “My family... My mom got drawn into this weird religion, and my dad hardly ever came home from work. Looking back on it now... What happened to mom probably really hurt him.”
“Your... mother...?”
“Yeah. You already understand it from seeing the True Church of Harris, right? Religion itself isn’t inherently bad, but it can drive people insane if they’re not careful.”
“Yes...” Dasa nodded.