Chương 415: 192.Our New Year's Start 1

As the seconds counted down toward midnight, what Maki was doing in the second half of the patrol could no longer be described as "picking up the pace." It was a flat-out sprint.

"… It's just an annual time sync. Why are we treating it like a cult ritual?" I couldn't help muttering the complaint as I jogged to keep up with her. The echoes in the east connecting corridor shattered under our boots. The flashlight beam flew across wall corners, stairwells, and exterior door handles. The first half of the shift had been strictly by the book, but in these last ten minutes, she'd suddenly turned the night patrol into a desperate dash for the last transport ship. Maki didn't look back.

She didn't even break stride.

"Maybe to you," her voice was a little jolted by the wind and the running, but still steady.

"But to me, this isn't just about syncing the time." I frowned. I heard the sentence, but there was no time to follow up. The moment Maki finished speaking, she hooked around the central stairwell and cut back from the classroom wing exterior doors toward the duty room. Her movements were so efficient it was like she'd already gridded out the remaining route, the seconds, the lock-check points, and the return stride length in her head.

Sometimes I seriously suspected that if this woman commanded a warship, she could probably slot firing solutions perfectly between the ticks of the second hand. The snow in the front courtyard was a little thicker now. Not much. Just enough that the exposed edges of the stone path were now covered by a thin layer of white. The streetlights fell on the snow, washing the entire campus clean. So clean it looked fake.

As Maki led me sprinting through the final stretch, I even had a momentary, absurd flash of déjà vu—as if we weren't on night patrol, but were just two cogs in the Federation rushing to snap back into our proper alignments. It was a disrespectful thought. But honestly, very accurate. Back at the duty room, Maki shoved the door open. Heat and light hit us at the same time.

Wasting barely half a second, she backhanded the door shut, locked it, tossed her flashlight onto the desk, kicked off her boots, and grabbed my wrist, dragging me toward the small break room in the back.

"Hey, wait—""No time." When she said it, the usual steadiness of her duty voice suddenly turned overly intense. Not panicked. Not messy. It was like someone was pulling an invisible string inside her tighter and tighter, pulling it until there was only one last minute left that absolutely could not be missed. I was dragged all the way into the small back room, nearly tripping over the threshold. When Maki let me go, her first instinct wasn't to catch her breath or fix her hair.

It was to immediately flick on the holographic TV and switch to the Federation Standard Channel. The screen flared to life. A host in a standard-issue formal suit was already standing in front of a blue-and-gold virtual Earth, wearing a smile so perfect it looked like it had been rehearsed ten million times.

"One minute to the first day of the New Year, Federation Standard Calendar." One minute. I leaned against the doorframe, slowly catching my breath. My eyes landed on that overly beautified projection of the blue planet, and I couldn't help thinking that this thing really knew how to pick its moments to torture people every year. There are actually two sets of time in the Galactic Federation. One is the time of the planet currently beneath your feet.

Day and night, changing seasons, when classes start, when shifts end, when you eat dinner, when you pass out—all dictated by the local sun and orbital period. That's the time for living people. The other is Standard Earth Time. It doesn't matter if it's broad daylight where you're standing. It doesn't matter if there's a blizzard outside, or scorching sun, or acid rain, or three moons hanging in the sky.

The moment the time on that Earth—forty-six light-years away, so distant it's basically just a political totem now—ticks over to "New Year's Day 00: 00," the entire Federation is yanked by an invisible bell. Everyone collectively stops working, lowers their heads, and bows to pay respects to the blue cradle where our ancestors once lived. Romantically speaking, this is cross-system civilizational memory. Bluntly speaking, it's a universe-wide synchronized propaganda stunt.

And the Federation has always known exactly how to milk these moments. The host's background music had already swelled into something solemn. Images cycled past: the oceans of Old Earth, cloud layers, golden sunlight hitting some prairie we were all sick of looking at. The voiceover used that we will absolutely take back our Mother tone, conveniently slipping in a condemnation of the Galactic Empire's long-term plundering and spiritual exploitation of Old Earth.

Watching the broadcast, I let out a cold, internal laugh. From where I stood, there wasn't much difference between the two sides. If you had to name a difference, it was probably that the Galactic Federation made you feel like—ah, maybe there's still hope. The Empire was just more direct. They couldn't even be bothered to slap the "hope" wrapping paper on for you. As for the actual outcome? Probably the same.

It's just that the former would gently tell you, Please believe in tomorrow, right before shoving you into the mud.

"Forty seconds." The host's voice echoed from the projection. Maki stood in front of the TV, having already smoothed her coat back into perfect order. She was always proper, but right now that propriety was pushed a step further. It didn't look like she was standing in a pitifully small duty break room. It looked like she was at some formal occasion where she needed to represent her family, her status, or some order she personally held in very high regard.

Looking at her back, I suddenly understood why she'd sprinted the whole way here. This wasn't just a "time sync." To her, it was probably more like— No matter how chaotic or rushed things got, no matter how much it felt like living amidst a pile of messy people and messy situations, the moment this minute arrived, she had to stand here, right on time, and bow to an order she believed in. Incredibly troublesome. But also very much like her.

"Twenty seconds." City lights leaked in through the break room's small window. It was unbelievably quiet outside. Not dead silence, but the kind of quiet where a massive city reaches a tacit agreement to soften its breathing for a single moment. Even the hum of the heater sounded like it was coming through a membrane. Maki turned her head and glanced at me. It was a simple look. No urging, no commanding. Just a reminder: It's almost time. I sighed, shoved my hands into my coat pockets, and took them back out.

Whatever. I'd already run all this way. Not finishing the routine now would just make those hundreds of meters of panting a total waste.

"Ten, nine, eight…" The host started the countdown. Just a moment before the standard time on the projection ticked over to zero, Maki and I both stood up straight. Dong. Dong. Dong. The moment 00: 00 hit, the faint, synthesized toll of a bell drifted in from somewhere in the city. The sound wasn't loud, and it carried an artificial, almost fake cleanliness to it, but it still pierced the window, the snowy night, and the duty room walls to float inside. In that second, it wasn't just this break room.

Probably the entire city, maybe even the whole Federation, had countless people stopping at the exact same time. Maybe workers in a gravity factory, maybe a driver in a hovercar, maybe a nurse pulling a night shift at a medical station, or maybe some unlucky student caught dozing in a hallway. Some looked up at the stars, some faced a wall, some just bowed deeply toward the alloy floor beneath their feet.

Because forty-six light-years away, next to a faint yellow dwarf star, there was once a blue cradle that had nurtured all of their ancestors. … At least, that's what the promotional videos said. I bowed right alongside Maki. When I straightened up, the voiceover in the projection had, predictably, already pivoted into the next painfully familiar Federation annual slogan.

Something about never forgetting the home world, reclaiming the glory, how the Empire can't steal our bloodline and history—every sentence delivered with ringing force, as if problems would magically solve themselves as long as the slogans were neat enough. I was about to throw out a sarcastic comment, but before I could open my mouth, Maki turned back to face me. Her expression had sunk into something heavy during that minute, but now that she looked up again, she seemed surprisingly calm.

"Happy New Year, Shimo." I froze for a second. She said it so normally. Almost flatly. Not deliberately softened, not artificially emphasized. But exactly because of that, the way it landed in my ears felt much more real.

"…You too, Maki." She gave a small nod, like an important procedure had been completed, then bent down and pulled a small box from the corner of the break room. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Next," Maki set the box on the table, opening it as she asked, perfectly naturally, "You're hungry, aren't you." I looked at her. No, that wasn't a question. That was a Maki-style declarative sentence. In other words, she had already decided the answer for me, and I'd better be smart enough to cooperate and execute it. The moment the lid popped open, I understood.

"…Toshikoshi soba."

"Yes." There it was. The kind of ritual only rich families bother with. Because of its soil structure, Planet Dunan can't grow real buckwheat. This kind of thing has to be imported from other star systems, and it's expensive enough to feel very festive. Normal people—people like me who face life a bit more honestly—usually just eat the fake synthetic soba spat out by carbon-water synthesizers. I've had that stuff.

If I had to describe the texture, it was like boiling rubber bands for a full day, fishing them out, and pretending they shared some kind of legal blood relation with food. Maki ignored the complicated expression on my face. She just took out the small bowls included in the box and slowly poured hot broth from her thermos into them. Steam rose immediately, carrying the faint but genuine scent of soy sauce and dashi.

It wasn't the fake stuff made of synthetic flavorings that punch your sinuses before insulting your taste buds. It had the warmth that normal food was supposed to have. I stared at the bundle of soba in the bowl, silent for two seconds.

"This is really expensive, isn't it…"

"My grandfather sent it to me." Maki rested her chopsticks on the edge of the bowl, her tone as calm as if she were stating something completely unremarkable.

"He told me to share it with a friend." I let out an "Oh." Then my eyes naturally dropped back to the table. That tiny portion. Honestly, let alone the whole house at 22 Platinum Bridge Street, even that poor Disciplinary Committee member who'd been standing in the cold wind with Nikaido outside the duty room probably wouldn't get a decent bite out of this. This was absolutely not enough to feed everyone. In other words— Maki hadn't brought this here for "everyone to share and liven things up."

She had brought it here, kept it for this exact time, in this exact place, to share it with me. The break room went quiet for a moment. Outside, the Federation Standard Channel was still broadcasting its high-sounding New Year's greetings. The lingering echo of the synthesized bell still seemed to stick to the snowy night. The hot broth on the table sent up wisps of white steam, softening the sharp lines of Maki's profile.

And looking at that bowl of real soba, I suddenly realized that the "expensive" part wasn't the real problem here. I knew perfectly well there were a dozen ways she could have split this. She could have saved it for when we got home. She could have said we'd eat it after the shift. She could have just taken it back and let the crowd at 22 Platinum Bridge Street fight over it, leaving nobody with more than a few strands. But Maki didn't.

She chose to open it after this specific minute, in this tiny break room, during the intermission of a night shift where it was just the two of us. … Absolutely lethal. I looked up at Maki. As if she already knew I would inevitably reach this conclusion, she just calmly handed one pair of chopsticks across the table. I stared at the chopsticks Maki was holding out for two seconds, and finally reached out and took them.

"What are you staring at? If you wait any longer, it really will clump together." She said it with a completely flat tone. As flat as reminding me not to put the duty log on top of the radio, or that the flashlight batteries needed changing. But it was exactly that flatness that made it so hard to play dumb. Because if Maki just wanted to complete a holiday ritual, she could have eaten it at home. She could have shared it with the 22 Platinum Bridge crowd.

She could have saved this box of highly-valued Toshikoshi soba for tomorrow afternoon and handled it in a way much more fitting for Maki Kushima's image. She didn't. She specifically chose right now. Chose right after midnight. Chose the middle of the night shift. Chose this break room behind the duty room, barely big enough to fit one table, two chairs, and a holographic TV. And she chose me. Thinking about that, the chopsticks in my hand suddenly felt a little heavier than usual.

"… Let me just say," I hooked my chair forward a half-step, stubbornly leaving myself an out, "if this ends up tasting like the fake synthetic soba, I'm suing your family for capitalist fraud on the spot." Maki finally looked up at me. There was something very familiar in that glance, something entirely her own. It wasn't the system-crashing blush from the school gate, nor the almost ritualistic propriety she'd held while waiting for Federation Standard Time.

It was just a simple, helpless look directed specifically at me.

"Take a bite before you decide whether to sue."

"The composure of the rich is really annoying."

"My grandfather sent this. I didn't buy it."

"Oh. Then I'll amend the suit to target your grandfather."

"You have a lot of nerve."

"I always have more nerve when dealing with distant elders. With Maki up close, I adjust my attack radius based on the temperature." Maki didn't take the bait. She just pushed the bowl a little closer to the center of the table. The hot broth was still steaming. The scent of real soba wasn't actually as aggressive as I'd imagined. It didn't leap out trying to endorse the entire universe like a cheap commercial. It was restrained. Almost quiet.

It just carried a faint mix of grain and dashi up through the steam, like it knew exactly what it was and didn't need to shout to prove it. … That was actually a bit like a certain someone. I lowered my head and picked up the first bite of noodles. Honestly, in that moment, I was still holding onto a slightly ungraceful hope—hoping it would be at least a little disappointing.

Just enough so I could fire off a satisfying complaint and drag this overly quiet atmosphere back toward the kind of banter I was better at handling. It wasn't. The moment it hit my tongue, I knew it was over. It really was different. The noodles had a solid, yielding bite, not the rubbery snap of synthetic starch that makes your teeth ache. They broke cleanly, leaving the slightly coarse but undeniable aroma of real buckwheat on the tongue. The broth wasn't the forced umami of chemical flavorings.

It was hot, steady, perfectly salted—like laying a quiet, invisible blanket over your stomach on a winter night. I chewed twice, and stopped. Maki watched me. She didn't rush me. She didn't ask. Her expression was subtle. Calm on the surface, but it felt like she'd placed a test paper on the table, deliberately refused to read the question out loud, and was just waiting for me to hand in my answer. Damn it. If I praised it honestly right now, I'd look too easy to buy off.

But if I forced myself to trash it, my tongue would protest first. After all, the gap between real soba and synthetic rubber bands was too wide even for a professional trash-talker like me to lie about. So I went with the most punchable, yet least humiliating, response available.

"…Tch." Maki's eyebrow twitched slightly.

"What kind of review is that?"

"A very high one, okay?" I put down my chopsticks with a perfectly straight face.

"This 'tch' is a very high-level concession from Hoshino Shimo to the culinary world. It roughly translates to: Damn it, it's actually really good." She looked at me, silent for half a second. Then the corner of her mouth relaxed, just the slightest bit. Not a laugh. Just a very short, very faint loosening that barely qualified as an expression. But on Maki's face, that was enough to count as a New Year's miracle.

I stared at that tiny shift, and suddenly the Federation Standard Channel blathering on about the home world, glory, and reclaiming the Mother felt very far away. Those words were too big. Like neon billboards in the sky—bright, sure, but they couldn't shine into a break room this small. What actually carried weight was this bowl of hot soup, two pairs of chopsticks, and that sigh of relief Maki had almost failed to hide. Like she actually really cared whether I'd like it.

The moment the thought surfaced, I felt a spike of discomfort. I quickly lowered my head to take another sip of soup, sinking my gaze into the bowl.

"…No wonder rich people's rituals survive," I said between blowing on the broth, carefully maintaining my final shred of dignity.

"If you get to eat this every New Year, who'd want to gnaw on the fakes the synthesizer spits out?"

"Didn't you say last time that the fake soba was like boiling rubber bands for a day?"

"I'm issuing a correction." I looked up at her.

"Thinking about it now, that was a bit disrespectful to rubber bands. At least rubber bands don't usually claim to be festive food." This time, Maki actually laughed. Very brief. But it was definitely a laugh. I froze, almost dropping my chopsticks.

"…Hey, Maki," I narrowed my eyes.

"You're being very dangerous right now."

"Dangerous how?"

"You suddenly laughing for real makes me suspect the Federation Standard Channel just secretly rewrote the laws of the universe along with the calendar."

"Your threshold for suspicion is very cheap."

"No, it's completely logical. We just finished bowing to Old Earth forty-six light-years away. If any supernatural events happen right now, I'm fully mentally prepared."

"You're classifying me smiling as a supernatural event?"

"Considering the frequency, I think that's a fair assessment." Maki looked at me like she wanted to fire back, but in the end, she just let out a soft breath, lowered her head, and picked up a bite of noodles. She ate much quieter than I expected. Not a performed, elegant quiet. Just naturally, without wasted movement. Look down, blow on the steam, take a bite, chew, swallow, then slowly look back up.

Every step was efficient to the point of being economical, like someone who was long used to handling things without wasting time where it wasn't needed. I suddenly remembered the sight of her back, sprinting all the way here before midnight.

"So," I poked at the noodles in my bowl, trying to make it sound like a casual question, "do you do this every year?"

"Do what?"

"Run the second half of the patrol like you're fleeing for your life, hit the Federation Standard Time on the dot, watch the broadcast, and eat soba expensive enough to pay off a student loan." Maki stopped. She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she put down her chopsticks and reached over to turn the holographic TV's volume down a notch. The host's voice immediately retreated, leaving only the stubbornly floating Federation greetings in the background, like some kind of year-round political white noise.

"My family took this very seriously when I was young," she said. She didn't look at me while she spoke. Just at the bowl of noodles on the table. The rising steam softened her eyelashes and the line of her profile.

"When Standard Time hit, no matter what time it was locally, no matter where you were, you had to stop. Bow. Give greetings. And then eat Toshikoshi soba." I raised an eyebrow.

"Even if you were outside?"

"Even then."

"Worthy of the Ten Families," I clicked my tongue.

"Even New Year's gets treated like an operational order."

"You can think of it as a habit."

"I'd rather think of it as domestic tyranny."

"Are you naturally hostile to anything that involves order?"

"Not at all," I said openly.

"I'm very friendly toward delicious, orderly food." Maki seemed too lazy to deal with that level of sophistry. She just kept going.

"My grandfather used to distribute it himself." I paused. The moment she said that, the flavor of the whole bowl suddenly stopped being just "expensive imported holiday food." It started carrying something else. Not sadness, not melodrama, but a very specific visual. Someone older, more meticulous, more accustomed to treating holiday rituals as something that mattered, standing at a dining table I'd never seen, handing this once-a-year thing down to the younger generation.

Passing down order and care at the same time. I looked down at the remaining noodles in my bowl, suddenly unsure if I should keep using my usual tone. … What a pain. Maki was already hard enough to deal with on a normal day. The moment she accidentally dropped words like "family" and "the past" into a conversation, the difficulty level spiked.

Because you instantly realize that this person sitting across from you—the one who forces you to bow with her, who slices patrol routes into seconds, who jabs at you with words in the duty room—was also, in some place, at some time, raised bit by bit by someone else to become exactly who she is now. And that kind of realization makes it very easy to go soft. I hate going soft. So I quickly threw out a line to drag the atmosphere back to familiar territory.

"If your grandfather knew you brought this high-value strategic resource to the duty room to eat in secret, would he just kick you out of the family?" Maki looked up at me.

"First, this isn't eating in secret."

"Oh. Public, legal embezzlement."

"Second. When my grandfather sent it, he explicitly said I could eat it with a friend." When she said the word "friend," she didn't emphasize it. But I don't know if I was just being overly sensitive—it felt like the air stalled for a fraction of a second when the word dropped. I lowered my head and picked up another bite of noodles, chewing slowly, just giving myself something to do. Friend. It was a very safe word. Safe enough that it almost felt like a fire blanket deliberately placed on the table.

Because if she didn't say friend, what else was she supposed to say? That Vice-Maki at home? That person who's always especially troublesome in troublesome places? Or— I violently severed that line of thought in my head. No. Thinking too much would just make me look like I was digging my own grave.

"… But you didn't take it back to share." The moment the words left my mouth, I realized my voice was a little quieter than normal. Maki looked at me. She didn't answer. The host in the projection was still using that highly motivational tone to talk about how "the memory of the Mother Planet will guide the Federation to a new dawn." It made me want to shove the dawn back where it came from and ask him to shut up for five minutes. The snow outside probably hadn't stopped.

The faint sound of wind brushed against the window. The heater continued its dutiful work, baking this break room into a small-scale accomplice scene. Maki finally picked up her chopsticks again, but she didn't eat.

"If I took it back," she said slowly, "it wouldn't mean the same thing." My heart gave a slight jump. That wasn't a safe word like "friend" anymore. It wasn't explicit. You could even say there was still a short distance left before it became explicit. But that short distance was the most lethal part. Because it refused to light up the whole road, only letting you see that there was a road ahead, and that it very likely led straight to somewhere very unsafe. I looked at Maki, unable to find a response.

Maki didn't force me to find one. She just rested the chopsticks on the edge of the bowl, her fingers pressing lightly against the table. Like she was holding something down. Or sorting something out. She rarely paused like this. Maki was always good at making things clear, finishing the procedure, drawing the boundaries. But now, it was like she was unsure of what she was about to say for the very first time. It was a rare sight. And a dangerous one. I suddenly didn't dare make a joke. … Damn it.

Maki kept her eyes down, staring at the remaining noodles in her bowl. After two seconds, she spoke, her voice low.

"Shimo." The way she said my name was different from usual. Not the duty-reminder tone. Not the full-name warning tone she used when I provoked her. She just simply called my name. But the simpler it was, the harder it was to hide from. My fingers tightened around my chopsticks involuntarily.

"What." Regrettably, that completely spineless response was all I managed to squeeze out. Maki didn't laugh at me. She just looked up. Her eyes met mine, and in the heat of the room and the soup, the tips of her ears slowly flushed red again. Then she said:"I didn't bring this for you because my grandfather told me to share it with a friend."