Chapter 71

SUB.19 “They’re not here,” said Enshuu Kihara in an utterly innocent voice. Her clothes were soaked with splotches of melted snow and mud. Meanwhile, the screens hanging from her neck—her smartphone and her one-seg TV, among others—showed complicated graphs as they reflected the building’s walls and windows before being absorbed into Enshuu’s eyes. “Yeah. Yeah! The situation is outrunning the damage being caused. I’m really sorry, Uncle Amata. Now this will look like a safe space even though a Kihara is here.” She was in a large condominium district, with nearly identical rectangular buildings lined up like library shelves. The gate had an auto-lock on it, for whatever that was worth, and the hallways didn’t lead to outdoor spaces like balconies but instead through the center of the buildings. But that was all they were. Ram a snowplow with a thick blade attached to the front into that gate, and the gate would be destroyed, lock and all. The front doors to each dwelling were even weaker than that. One could shove an electric drill into the gap between a door and the wall, pull the trigger, and slice right through the dead bolt. After prying open one door after another and checking inside, she kept finding rooms that didn’t look very lived in. A lot of the furniture was identical across all the dwellings, too. Maybe this place doubled as a hotel that people could rent a room in for a week at a time or so. “I’m supposed to do every single one. But now everyone’s going to be mad at me. They’ll say I’m not a true Kihara.” In fact, the faint lingering scents of people who had been living in the units was actually eerie. It called to mind Mary Celeste. “…Five hundred thousand normal residents. And three million others, here to watch Natural Selector or just stay here for a while. Not that they’re any different—they’re all people related to the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians, just dressed up in disguises. But where did they all go? I wonder. You would think it would be a big to-do if they were all to move out at the same time.” Her odd mutterings echoed in the empty spaces. She was reorganizing her thoughts—shifting data from short-term memory to long-term memory. Talking to herself like this helped her with it. As she continued to murmur, she pried open the next door, then the next. “Philanthropists? No, they’re not those. Academy City soldiers invaded the city, but now they’re lying all over the ground. That means the Pied Pipers of Hamelin are only picking the people on Baggage City’s side to help.” But 3.5 million people couldn’t possibly all be hiding in the same place. She couldn’t even think of any building big enough to fit that many. “And they couldn’t have left the city limits. Not when the Five Overs are automatically looking for people to eliminate. Besides, it’s negative twenty degrees Celsius outside. They’d all freeze to death before getting to the next city.” Which meant they all had to be somewhere in this city. In several different, smaller places. Still, places that were obviously meant for fitting tons of people inside at once—like the dome—were out of the question. For example, if you were to ignore this mammoth housing complex’s livability, you could squeeze forty-five thousand people in each building. And that was what the pipers were doing—hiding an absurd number of people somewhere one wouldn’t think so many could fit. “…Maybe I’ll request a bombing run. It would be so easy just to level the entire city. Even if they survive the blasts, they won’t have anywhere left to hide. Then they’ll freeze to death.” And that would be the simplest solution. Even if bombings alone couldn’t bring down the Guardians, they would pave the way for a head-on clash with them. The enemy had facilities, weapons, and cover they could use. Attacking and destroying them all from a distance first was the standard, tried-and-true approach. But there was a simple reason they couldn’t do that. “Yeah. If Gremlin plays dead after that, it’ll be a big mess.” Academy City versus its cooperative organizations—it was very clear who would win there. But Gremlin was different. They could burn down the whole city with wave after wave of cluster bombs, but the Gremlin sorcerers could potentially survive it. If the attack created millions of barely identifiable corpses, it would be easy for Gremlin to take advantage of them to get away. First, they had to make sure the Gremlin people were dead. They could wipe Baggage City off the map after that. “I wish it could be the other way around. It’s so annoying. It means I have to fight regular soldiers, too.” Ordinarily, Enshuu’s search for civilians in Baggage City wouldn’t have been part of the objective. But now that Gremlin had joined forces with the Science Guardians and were plotting something, the Kiharas wouldn’t want the city destroyed—in form, at least, if not function. They needed people living here, going about their lives. So if they started killing unrelated civilians at ground zero, Gremlin would have to show up to stop them—not out of goodwill or a sense of justice but out of their own interests. That was the reason for her search. That was the reason for her massacre. …Unfortunately. “Well, this is a problem,” said Enshuu, her expression making her look like a lost child. The smartphone and one-seg TV hanging around her neck continued to display complex graphs. “Yeah. Yeah! I know, Uncle Amata. At a time like this, a real Kihara would do something like this, right?” She grasped the hem of her skirt with her little hands, then flipped it up. Then after waiting about ten seconds, she crooked her head to the side. “…Wait, nobody’s coming.” She shivered—her belly had gotten cold—and then set off for her next destination.