Chương 193: 73. When Fledglings Leave Nest 2

I needed to make one stop at the school to file departure clearance for everyone. By the time I arrived, the sun was completely gone. Worse: it had started raining. Not the poetic kind. The kind that made you suspect someone up there had been waiting specifically for the moment you least wanted to deal with anything, and then opened a dedicated meteorological floodgate just for you.

I walked quickly to the Student Council office, the hem of my uniform already damp from the cold air and rain, and called out before I touched the door:"Reporting." No answer. I opened the door. Nobody there. The lights were on. The sign-out forms were on the desk. But the room was too quiet — just the sound of rain hitting the window, steady and rhythmless, one drop after another, the kind of sound that grated on you without being loud enough to complain about.... Perfect.

Honestly, I was genuinely happy to accept this kind of unguarded administrative grace. I stepped inside, pulled the door behind me, crossed to the desk, picked up a pen, and started filling out departure clearance for everyone. Name, dormitory number, reason for absence — cargo transfer — return confirmation. The faster this was done, the better. I was already planning the route: finish, put it back, leave, don't make eye contact with anything that might generate a side quest. The rain got heavier outside.

And then, just as I was writing in the last name, a voice came from directly behind me — warm, amused, and the kind of sound that made half my face want to drop off my skull.

"My, if it isn't Cadet Hoshino." I stopped moving. Turned around. My expression probably lost half its structural integrity on the spot. Standing behind me was the Student Council President. Aki Kushima.

"... Ah — Senior Kushima." It came out almost as a reflex, and I simultaneously grabbed the back of my own head and took half a step back. That wasn't politeness. That was survival instinct. Because standing in front of me was Aki Kushima, Student Council President, wearing the same expression she always wore — the one that made it genuinely difficult to determine whether she was being friendly or dangerous. The curve of her mouth was perfectly calibrated. Her eyes were soft in a way that suggested good breeding.

At a glance, she looked exactly like the kind of person who'd be described in the school newsletter as a warm and dependable representative of the student body. The problem was that I'd survived long enough at this school to have developed basic situational awareness. Aki Kushima's smile and the word safe did not have a direct relationship.

"Coming all the way back this late just to file clearance for everyone — how diligent, Cadet Hoshino." As she spoke, she moved past me. Not hurrying, not hesitating — her skirt brushed the air as she passed, carrying a faint scent, something refined and deliberately unmemorable, like a perfume that didn't want to be identified. She walked to the desk, glanced at the clearance form I'd just filled out, and tucked it into a drawer with the ease of someone handling a document they'd been expecting all along.

I stood where I was. The alarm in my head had already run a full cycle. She hadn't wandered in. Everything about this looked like she'd been waiting. Aki closed the drawer, picked up her bag from beside the desk, and turned to face me with a smile that was, by any objective measure, perfect.

"You're heading to the harbor, aren't you?" She held up a set of car keys.

"Let me take you." I stared at those keys for two seconds. And my first thought wasn't how convenient — it was: Oh, no. Absolutely not. If I got into that car right now, the entire stretch of road between the school and the harbor would be an interrogation room. A very well-appointed interrogation room, with excellent climate control, where the person asking questions would smile the whole time.

"N-no, it's fine." I answered immediately, with the speed of a tactical evasion.

"I'll just take the bus." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. True statement. Completely sincere. If the bus stop outside was willing to open a door to the free world right now, I would walk over and kiss its rain-soaked timetable. Unfortunately, Aki Kushima did not appear to have any respect for my humble faith in public transit.

"Is that so?" Still smiling. Still warm.

"But it's raining."

"It's fine. I have an umbrella."

"The wind's quite strong near the harbor."

"... I'll hold it tighter."

"And the bus stop is a bit of a walk from here."

"I can manage."

"Hmm." She tilted her head and nodded, gently. The small, stubborn flicker of hope I'd been nursing — maybe today she'll let me go — didn't even have time to form a complete shape. I turned to leave. Her hand closed around my wrist.

"..."

"..." Not hard. Precise, even. The kind of grip that left no mark, caused no pain, looked nothing like a threat — and yet was in absolutely no way something you could simply pull free from. I went still, and slowly looked down at her hand on my wrist. The skin was pale. The fingers were slender. Even the way she was holding on looked composed. That was exactly the problem — a person like this, when they actually wanted to take you somewhere, would never make a scene. They just wouldn't give you much room to say no.

"Don't rush off." She tilted her head slightly, smile going a shade more harmless.

"Let's talk properly." Fuck. My vague sense of dread had just been officially upgraded to a confirmed incident. I'd been at this school for a while now. But it wasn't until that evening that I learned there was an underground garage beneath it. Not the kind reserved for staff parking, or the basic utility bays tucked into the corners of the administrative wing — an actual underground garage, the kind whose entrance you'd only know about if you were the sort of person who moved in certain circles.

I followed Aki Kushima — or rather, she led and I went, though the distinction felt somewhat academic — through corridors, down stairs, past a card reader, through a heavy metal door that required clearance to open, and finally into a space where the lighting ran cold and the floor was clean enough to reflect in. The air smelled faintly of machine oil, mixed with the concrete chill that was specific to underground parking structures.

It was quiet in a way that didn't feel like a school facility at all — more like a private space I probably shouldn't be visiting too regularly. I walked and quietly reached a conclusion. Right. The Student Council really did live in a different world. The rest of us were upstairs fighting with bus schedules and Form B-147, worrying about whether our lives would fit into regulation-size boxes. Down here, people drove vintage sports cars out of private garages.

The class divide at this school sometimes didn't even bother pretending.

"Here." Aki stopped. I looked in the direction she was facing, and my own feet stopped too. It was not ordinary. Low-slung body. Curves that were almost willfully round. Yellow paintwork that caught the cold white light and threw back a sheen that had no business belonging to anything mass-produced — as if someone had sealed an entire era's worth of stubbornness and extravagance into the metal, and kept it intact all the way to the present day. I looked at it for a moment.

"... A Porsche 911? Old Earth?" Aki turned, eyes lighting up slightly.

"Oh, you know it?" I mean — you didn't need to specialize in vehicle history to recognize one of these. As long as you hadn't literally grown up inside a high-G conditioning chamber, you'd probably know what a 911 looked like. I walked a little closer, taking in the front end. Round headlights, low nose, short tail, those lines that were stubborn in a way that was almost a personality trait. All right — I'd admit it. The thing had character.

Not tactical, not efficient, and by current standards probably more luxury than justification. But the character was real.

"I love vintage cars." Aki walked to the driver's side, fingertips tapping once against the roof, the way you'd touch something you were particularly fond of.

"Don't you think the headlights are adorable?" I stared at those round headlights for two seconds. Hmm. I had decided not to have any opinions about this person's aesthetic sensibility. The car was good. Genuinely good — good enough to look down on other cars. The issue was that someone who described a Porsche 911 as adorable was clearly operating on a different frequency from the rest of the population. I settled for the most neutral possible response.

"... It has personality." Aki smiled, visibly pleased. Which immediately made me more alert. Because Aki Kushima's visibly pleased expression typically meant she was about to do something that would give someone else a stomachache, with complete naturalness. Sure enough, she opened the passenger door for me.

"Get in, Cadet Hoshino." Said lightly, as if this were the most ordinary invitation in the world. Except she'd already opened the door, and she was standing there with that posture, and the garage was quiet except for the two of us and one unreasonably expensive yellow vintage sports car. If I just stood there and didn't move, I'd look like I was performing a live demonstration of social dysfunction. So I stood there for approximately two seconds of completely futile internal resistance. And then — Fine.

At this point, fate could have it. I folded myself into the passenger seat. The door closed, and most of the underground garage smell cut off immediately, leaving only the faint scent of leather inside — not the aggressive newness of a recent purchase, but the soft, worn warmth of hide that had been lived with over time. And underneath that, very faintly, something light and clean that belonged to a young woman, the kind of scent that seemed to have settled into the car without intending to....

That was not a good observation to be making. Because this space had just become too private. Too private meant too dangerous. I reached immediately for the seatbelt, attempting to anchor myself in the most ordinary, unremarkable passenger behavior possible — The engine fired. Not a metaphor. An actual, low, mechanical growl from somewhere behind me, the kind that belonged to old machines with grudges, rolling through the chassis and into the seatback against my spine. I went rigid.

"W-wait —" The car launched. Not moved. Launched. The kind of start that made you wonder whether the driver had a personal grievance against the concept of a smooth exit. I was thrown back against the seat, seatbelt still in my hand, soul briefly separated from body somewhere along the garage ramp.

"Senior!!" I yelled it at a volume that cracked slightly at the top.

"Please drive safely!! I'm begging you!!" Aki had one hand on the wheel. The other made a small, graceful, completely unhelpful calming gesture in my direction. Her expression hadn't changed.

"Relax."

"My seatbelt isn't on yet!!"

"Then be faster."

"That's not my fault!!" The car swept up the ramp, lights pulling back across the windshield in sections. I wrestled the seatbelt across my chest and clicked it in, pressing myself back against the seat, heart doing something deeply undignified. Right. I had thought the worst-case scenario for tonight was being intercepted by the Student Council President, forced into a car, and subjected to a gentle interrogation for thirty minutes. I was wrong.

The worst-case scenario was surviving the first five minutes of her driving long enough to be interrogated. The Porsche 911's engine note rolled through the garage tunnel at a low, resonant pitch that was, in strictly acoustic terms, quite beautiful. If I were not in the passenger seat. If the person driving were not Aki Kushima. I might have had the spare attention to appreciate the romance of an old Earth machine. I did not.

Right now I had one priority: Figure out how much of my soul was going to be left by the time I got out of this car.