Chương 196: 74. Capital Highway Under Rain 2

"Well. Here we are." Aki slid the smiling mask back into place — fast enough that the conversation which had all but pinned me to the passenger seat a moment ago felt like something I'd hallucinated from oxygen deprivation. One hand rested on the wheel, the other loose near the gear selector. In the cold blue glow of the dash, her profile looked clean to the point of feeling unreal.

The wipers kept their steady back-and-forth, scraping the water away layer by layer, only for new rain to cover the glass again immediately. The rhythm felt like some emotionless countdown — calm, mechanical, and utterly indifferent to how I was holding up.

"But you don't need to worry too much." She turned to glance at me, the curve of her mouth calibrated with an almost engineered gentleness.

"Maki isn't nearly as fragile as you seem to think." I opened my mouth, still trying to work out whether that counted as comfort, a warning, or the next blade wrapped in candy — and she'd already moved on, easy as anything.

"As for feelings —" Her fingertip tapped the wheel once, like keeping time for an answer I hadn't finished writing.

"You two can take your time growing that on your own." Coming out of her mouth, that didn't sound like clearance at all. It sounded like an extended observation period. Like a guard sliding the searchlight a few degrees to the side, then politely informing you: you're free to walk. I'm still watching. And then my mouth, apparently operating independently of my survival instinct, asked: "Is that from experience?" The moment it left my mouth, I wanted to fold myself into the glove compartment and die right there.

The car went quiet for a moment. The engine hummed low. Rain tapped the roof and windshield. Harbor light bled through the mist outside, cutting her profile into half light, half shadow. Aki said nothing for two full seconds — long enough that I'd already drafted three separate ways to die — before she finally spoke.

"Of course not." She was still smiling. There was nothing behind her eyes at all.

"I've long since been a bird in a cage." The words were light. Feather-light. But the sound they made landing was heavier than I will remove you had been. For a moment I genuinely didn't know which part deserved more shock — that she'd actually answered, that she'd answered so flatly, the way you'd mention bad weather or standing water on the docks, or that when she said it, it hadn't sounded like a complaint at all. It sounded like a statement of fact.

Like someone long accustomed to standing behind the bars, glancing up once at what was outside them, and then informing you, quite politely: don't misunderstand. What you think is sky may not actually be sky. My throat had gone dry. I couldn't find a single word of comfort. Because she didn't need one. Because if she'd needed one, she wouldn't be sitting here at all.

"All right. Out you go." She tipped her chin toward the windshield.

"Your friends are already waiting." Only then did I feel myself yanked back from bird in a cage and into the present. I looked where she'd indicated. The windshield ahead was a blur of rain and harbor light, reflections stretched into long bright ribbons across the wet ground, and the mouth of the drydock in the distance looked like an open steel throat — deep enough that you really didn't want to know what it had swallowed before. I reached for the seatbelt release.

My fingers had just found the door handle when I heard her add, unhurried, as if the thought had only just occurred to her —"Give my regards to Maki." That was more unsettling than anything she'd said all night. I looked back at her. Aki still wore that same perfect, courteous, watertight smile — as if the knife-edged memories, the half-threat, half-warning questions, and that bird-in-a-cage line, cold as metal, had never happened at all. And then, the very next second, she put me out of the car.

The door opened, and the wet cold of the rainy night hit me full in the face. The harbor wind slapped me straight out of the Kushima family's private psychological interrogation chamber and back into the human world. My soles hit the standing water at the drydock entrance, cold enough to nearly snap my knees straight. Behind me, the yellow Porsche 911 idled for less than two seconds.

The door thudded shut at my back, and the next moment the car was already sliding away along the harbor's outer lights, as smooth as if none of it had ever happened. The taillights dragged two thin red lines through the rain, and disappeared quickly into the overlapping glow of steel and mist. I stood where I was and didn't move right away. Not to watch her go.

I needed about three seconds to work out whether I'd just accepted a ride from a senior, or survived a survival interview sponsored by the main branch of a corporate dynasty. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. The rain kept falling. Colder here, and straighter, than it had been on the elevated road back in the Capital's south district. Harbor rain wasn't city rain.

City rain still kept up some decency — hitting glass, eaves, street signs, carrying at least a trace of everyday life. Harbor rain didn't bother with any of that. It fell straight down out of a half-blackened sky and slammed into steel plating, rails, containers, hatches, and crane arms, like the whole ocean was an impatient hand drumming on everyone who was about to leave it. I looked up. And for the first time, I really saw the Yukikaze. Not a name on a spec sheet. Not text on a duty roster.

Not the stack of handbooks at the breakfast table that seemed determined to train us into shipboard consumables. The ship itself. It was just there. The massive hull sat moored deep in the drydock, its grey-white armored shell throwing back a cold, almost inorganic sheen in the rainy dark. The bow cut into the blackness at an angle, like a blade. Along both flanks, exposed structural layers and maintenance catwalks nested one over another, like the ribs of some enormous creature turned inside out.

The upper decks climbed backward in tiers — radar masts, sensor arrays, comm towers, weapon modules — all cutting sharp, silent silhouettes against the mist and the floodlights. It wasn't moving. And yet, just sitting there, it carried a pressure that had no business being this heavy. Like something that didn't belong to a soft word like practicum had finally set its true mass down in front of me, and told me, coldly: none of what came before counted. This is where it starts.

I think I finally understood why Aki had waited for exactly this moment — the ship coming into view — to say the future head of Kushima Heavy Industries. Because the Yukikaze and Maki were alike, in a way I found deeply irritating. Neither of them was harmless just because it looked quiet. Neither of them was something you could drift toward on a whim, reach out and touch, feel your pulse jump a little, and then simply walk away from as if nothing had happened.

Thinking that, the knot that had been twisting in my stomach since the car sank a little heavier.... Thanks so much, Senior. Door-to-door delivery, complimentary psychological damage included.

"Hey — Hoshino!" A voice I knew far too well cut through the rain and yanked me out of the suffocation combo meal jointly served by the Yukikaze and the Kushima family. I followed it, and finally saw who was actually waiting at the mouth of the drydock. Almost everyone from Number 22 had made it.

Jess stood at the front, hugging a box that was clearly well over any reasonable weight limit, her rain-poncho hood slipped halfway down her face, wearing the expression she always wore somewhere between I've been pissed off for a while now and one more second and I'm executing you in public. The moment she saw me, she scowled hard, then let her eyes sweep past my shoulder, as if checking whether I'd been returned intact from wherever strange place I'd come from.

"Did you get dumped?!" she shouted.

"What are you doing standing there doing your best harbor-tragedy impression — get over here and carry something!" Good. Familiar recipe, familiar bluntness. I relaxed for half a second. At least it meant I was still alive. Aida stood under the nearby awning, terminal pad in hand, tallying the incoming luggage in that voice of hers that managed to be both very adult and very good at making people move: "Hoshino, stop zoning out.

Your box marked tactical gear goes to the left registration point first — the line only gets longer the later you are." She glanced up at me as she said it, her eyes resting on me for just a beat — as if she'd noticed something, or simply decided it wasn't worth asking about right now. That particular brand of maturity — I can tell something happened, but the work comes first — was, frankly, more useful than sympathy would have been. D was crouched nearby, securing the strap on a box corner.

She only looked up at the sound of my footsteps.

"You look terrible," she said, flat as ever.

"Carsick?"

"... No."

"Then you got interrogated."

"Can you stop delivering everything like a coroner's report."

"Oh." She nodded.

"So yes."... There really are people in this world who don't read the room. They just take the room apart. Akari stood beside her, cross-checking Form B-147 against the actual luggage dimensions. She pushed her glasses up, swept a level look over me, then toward the now-empty lane where the car had gone.

"Elevated heart rate since exiting the vehicle. Uneven stride. Visible tension across the shoulders and neck," she said, like she was reading off instrument data.

"I estimate the conversation induced moderate to high psychological stress." I wanted to thank her for quantifying me so thoroughly, but before I could, Jess cut in flatly.

"Obviously. She just got out of Senior Kushima's car. Anyone who comes back smiling from that would have to be a sociopath."

"Language," Aida said, without looking up.

"I'm being plenty polite."

"No — what you usually do isn't polite. It's just 'hasn't gotten you punched yet.'" The back-and-forth between them loosened the weight the Yukikaze and Aki together had pressed into my chest — just a little, without my permission. Then I saw Maki.

She was standing a little further back than the others, near a lamp post by the drydock entrance — a simple rain jacket over her shoulders, her dark hair weighed down by the damp harbor air, her expression exactly what it always was: faint, quiet, as if she had nothing to say and no intention of being the first one to say it. But her eyes had been on me since the moment I got out of the car. No questions. No calling my name. None of Jess's immediate detonation. She just stood there and watched.

For no good reason, my brain chose exactly this moment to drag back up what Aki had said — She's not the kind of person you can step a little closer to today, and then just quietly step back from tomorrow.... Please. Not now. At least not while I was still standing in the rain, my trouser cuffs soaked through, with the aftershocks of the Kushima family's high-pressure Q&A program still ringing in my skull. I made myself walk toward them. Standing water parted under my soles.

The cold white harbor lights pressed everyone's shadows short against the ground. The closer I got to them, the bigger and heavier the Yukikaze seemed to loom — like a featureless steel wall standing over our heads. But the closer I got, the more clearly I understood something else: whatever we were about to board, at least the people standing here right now were the ones I'd be going up with. That thought wasn't romantic in the slightest. It was almost frightening.

Because going up together, in Federation military vocabulary, had never simply meant sharing a ride.

"What's wrong?" Maki finally spoke. Her voice wasn't loud — about the same as always, nothing obvious in it. And still, pathetically, those three words threw me off balance worse than the rain at the harbor gate had. I stopped in front of her and was quiet for half a second.

For one moment, I genuinely considered laying out the entire thing, word for word — little sister, future head, stop now if you're just playing, I will remove you without mercy — and then filing a complaint on the side about whether the Kushima family had started treating intimidation as a form of pre-dinner etiquette. In the end, I just let my eyes drift to the side and said, dryly:"... Your sister told me to give you her regards." The air paused for a beat. Jess went, "Huh?" D looked up. Akari's pen stopped.

Even Aida finally lowered her terminal a fraction. Maki just looked at me. Said nothing. A second later, she closed her eyes — very lightly, very slowly, as if pressing something down, or holding something back. When she opened them again, that face of hers, which almost never showed a flicker of anything, carried something faint and brief, but entirely real. Resignation.

"... I see," was all she said. For some reason, that only made me more uneasy. Because I was fairly certain that whatever private dialect existed between the Kushima sisters — one I currently had no map for at all — give my regards to Maki was almost certainly not a normal greeting. And I had, very unfortunately, already been placed right in the middle of it. The rain kept falling. The Yukikaze was still there. And so were my friends.