Chương 194: 73. When Fledglings Leave Nest 3

Whoever designed this road had clearly sent their brain to be incinerated alongside the budget proposal. The fastest route from the school to the spaceport was theoretically to get onto the Capital Expressway and head south. Under good conditions: thirty minutes. Average conditions: forty-five.

Conditions like tonight: you'd find yourself watching the traffic at the on-ramp twist itself into a massive rotating knot of headlights and start genuinely wondering whether the Federation's urban planning division was a form of slow, legal execution. The problem was never the Expressway itself.

The problem was that when the Capital Expressway was first built, the designers had tried to simultaneously satisfy the Ministry of Defense, the Supreme Council, and the Joint Operations Command — and the result was that the southern district's traffic grid had been smashed apart and reassembled into a map that only made sense to whoever had drawn it.

Every vehicle approaching the Expressway had to loop around three government buildings in a sequence of merges, splits, re-merges, and re-splits, as if the city's patience had been wrung into a braid and fed to the bureaucracy. Through the rain-blurred window, I looked out at the statue standing in front of those three buildings: the Galactic Federation's Founding Father, Masayuki Tonami.

The statue stood perfectly straight, cape falling behind him, gaze fixed on some distant point — the look of a man contemplating the Federation's future. I, meanwhile, found myself wondering whether the man, if he knew, would be angry enough to throw open his own coffin lid, storm up here, and beat the Transport Minister's ass raw with it. The rain kept falling. The wipers dragged across the windshield in a dull, rhythmic squeak.

Raindrops hit the roof and hood in an irregular percussion, no pattern, like a group of children who had no musical ability but were deeply committed to the percussion ensemble. Ahead, brake lights went red as far as I could see. Behind us, the traffic crept forward like something that had been sick for a very long time. We'd been sitting here for over twenty minutes. And Aki Kushima, in the driver's seat, had not said a single word.... That was worse than if she'd been talking. Genuinely. I mean it.

If she'd started in immediately — that polite, gentle, every-word-has-a-needle voice asking so, Hoshino, you've been spending quite a lot of time with Maki lately, haven't you — at least I'd know what I was defending against. The worst thing was never the interrogation itself. The worst thing was being left in the silence to frighten yourself half to death first. For fuck's sake, say something. The quiet is going to kill me before you do.

I sat in the passenger seat, seatbelt pressed across my chest, both hands folded on my lap, posture so correct I could have been a model defendant about to be escorted into a court-martial. Aki had one hand resting lightly on the wheel, the other loose near the gear selector, her profile caught in the cold blue glow of the instrument panel and heads-up display. That kind of quiet wasn't harmless quiet. It was more like the quiet of a blade that had been sheathed — you still knew exactly what it had cut.

The yellow Porsche 911 sat low in the traffic, like a predator that had been obliged to queue with ordinary people. The classic bones of an old Earth design, kept alive by Federation engineering; leather, metal, electronic projection, and rain-wet neon all layered together into a very specific and deeply irritating kind of luxury. Irritating because the car, like its owner, managed to be elegant in a way that had teeth. Did you know this text is from a different site?

Read the official version to support the creator. Just as I was starting to wonder whether the silence was going to suffocate me first, Aki spoke.

"Hoshino." Her eyes stayed on the road ahead. Her voice was quiet, almost gentle.

"Would you listen to a story?" I didn't answer. She wasn't asking. She was notifying me. I shifted my gaze to the rain on the windshield and pretended to be deeply absorbed in the arc of the wiper blades, while internally running through every possible version of what came next.

There were a few scenarios: one where she just wanted company, one where she was going to tell a story and then quietly bury me in the concrete near the spaceport, and one — the worst one — where she'd use a very calm voice and a smile to open up everything between me and Maki and let me pick my own method of dying from the available options of shame, panic, and survival instinct.

"I watched Maki grow up." She said it. My spine went rigid without making a sound. Right. Not a story that was going to be gentle, or safe, or suitable for any audience. Aki seemed either unaware of the way I'd stiffened, or had decided it was the expected response. Her fingers tapped lightly against the steering wheel. The light from the instrument panel swept across the gold trim at her cuff and was gone.

"She always followed me around when she was small." I nearly lost control of my expression. Wait. The information density of that opening — was that not a little much? I cleared my throat and worked very hard to sound like a normal, law-abiding person who had not done anything to anyone's younger sister that would warrant a family conversation.

"... I-is that so." God, that sounded idiotic. Aki didn't appear to mind my idiotic response. She just smiled, faintly. The smile was thin, shallow — like the reflection of a streetlight in rain, there and gone. Not warm. But clearly not false either.

"When she was small, Maki was even worse at talking than she is now." Aki paused, as if searching for the right way into a memory that had gone a long time ago.

"She had plenty to say. She just liked keeping a straight face about all of it. When people misunderstood her, she wouldn't explain. When she got hurt, she wouldn't say so. She'd just file it away and remember it herself." I looked at the traffic ahead. My throat had gone slightly dry. Hearing this from someone else felt completely different from piecing it together through time spent with her. Because it meant Aki genuinely knew. She knew what Maki was like. She knew how Maki had grown up.

She knew what Maki kept hidden, and she knew who Maki let into her rhythm. So what was this car ride actually for — a warning, or a handoff?

"She's a handful, isn't she." Aki said it suddenly. My heart jumped. I turned to look at her before I could stop myself. She was still facing forward. There was even the faintest trace of a curve at the corner of her mouth, as if the words had been entirely offhand, carrying no weight at all. But I knew perfectly well that a person who drove a Porsche like an interrogation room didn't say anything entirely offhand.

"... S-she's fine," I said, carefully.

"Oh?"

"I mean, Kushima— Maki, she—" I nearly bit my own tongue. Using her given name right in front of her sister felt like digging my own grave in real time.

"She's just... not very good at making things sound nice. That's all." Aki let out a soft laugh. I'm doomed. Her laughing only made it worse.

"Is that so," she said.

"So in your eyes, Hoshino, Maki just 'doesn't say things nicely.'" I realized, immediately, that I'd walked straight into it.

"No, that's not what I meant—""I know." She cut me off. Her tone hadn't changed at all. That I know was the most terrifying part. Because whoever says that is usually about to follow it with the sentence that nails you to the wall. Outside, another wave of rain hit the windshield. The traffic ahead had finally started to loosen, just slightly — a few cars sliding forward, taillights dragging blurred red streaks through the mist, like the city bleeding into the rain.

Aki eased the wheel a fraction to the left, eyes flicking across the rearview and side mirrors, every motion so practiced it looked like she could play games with traffic law just for the fun of it.

"You don't need to be so tense, Hoshino." Her voice was easy, unhurried.

"I just found myself thinking about how interesting Maki was when she was small." I did not feel reassured. Not even slightly. If anything, that I just found myself thinking tone was structurally identical to the countdown beep right before something detonates.

"Back then, she—" Aki had barely started the sentence — as if she'd finally decided to push that door open a crack. The next second, she'd apparently run out of patience with the turtle-paced traffic entirely. Her right hand snapped the wheel. Left foot and right hand moved together without a fraction of hesitation.

The yellow Porsche 911, penned into the gridlock until now, let out a low growl — like a beast that had just had its collar unclipped — and tore violently out of the lane, cutting a sharp diagonal across the road. I was thrown hard against the seatback, my stomach instantly filing for divorce from my soul.