Black Bullet - Volume 7 - Chapter 2.03

3

The sound of Ms. Yagara’s voice as she took attendance seemed to drone on and on like a mantra. The wide-bodied teacher seemed fully defeated by the day’s humid weather.

“Hozui Watanabe… Um, right. Next, the girls. Enju Aihara… Er, Aihara?”

Momoka Hieda, alert upon hearing that name, stole a look three seats down. The seat was empty, her friend nowhere to be seen.

The sounds of the waves seemed to cleanse her head as she listened to the seagulls and closed her eyes, the light sound of water flowing nearly to the trunk of the knotted beech tree that her back leaned up against.

Swishing her legs to enjoy the feel of the grass against them, Enju Aihara took in the sight of the faraway buildings across Tokyo Bay.

The evaporating seawater made the offshore prison moored to the long wharf seem to shimmer in the air.

I wonder how Rentaro is doing with that prisoner. He happened to mention the location to her, so she decided to abandon school and head over to the nearby beach park.

Reaching into a bag, she took out a sandwich she had purchased at a convenience store along the way. Removing the plastic, she took a bite from one edge and swallowed. Now used to eating with her classmates, a solitary lunch seemed dull by comparison.

Just then, she turned her face up at the sound of a shrill voice. A family of three was enjoying a beach outing—at a time like this, no less. A mother and father were smiling awkwardly as a girl, their daughter presumably, pulled at their hands and shouted, “Come onnnn, let’s gooooo!” The parents may have wanted a relaxing trip to the park, but their child, too inured to social games and other, more exciting entertainment, must’ve found it incredibly boring.

It was a happy family scene, one that should’ve warmed anyone’s heart—but to Enju, it was discomforting. She was born as one of the Cursed Children, with no place in the world to call hers, and it was hard for her to look at a girl raised under the love of two parents and not take it personally. Normally she didn’t even think about it, but whenever she felt battered down like this, even a teeny little trigger could break the seal on all the painful memories in her mind.

The first thing that sprang to her ears was the sharp sound of someone striking her. It was just a memory replayed in her head, but it seemed so real that she physically tensed up. There they were, two figures grinning at her swollen cheeks. The unforgettable Aihara family, her mother and father.

They never liked talking to her much. They preferred to express themselves through physical abuse instead. They starved her, made her sleep in the kitchen—they didn’t want her; they wanted the stipend the government offered for adopting war orphans.

She recalled the way Sumire put it a while back: “When you start attaching a monetary value to good intentions, you absolutely can’t price it too high—or too low, either. For example, blood donation is so valuable precisely because it’s meant as a donation. If you price it too low, people would see it as beneath them and stay away, but if it’s too high, you’d start to see underground operations trying to profit off it. The late first Seitenshi is widely respected as a wise and able leader, but even she made at least one policy mistake. What was it? It was pricing the monthly benefit too high for taking in orphans.”

The Seitenshi must have gone into that with good intentions, but in the end it led to hyenas like the Aihara family appearing, licking their lips as they took in girls like Enju. Without love, of course no one could ever be a good parent. As long as Enju was breathing, they were satisfied. All other aspects of handling her eventually boiled down to either starving or punching her.

Of course, it didn’t last.

She recalled herself standing in the living room, panting for breath. The dirty tatami-mat floor had been thoroughly destroyed. Her father, dressed only in a pair of boxers, was unconscious on the floor, his cheekbone practically caved in. Her walruslike mother, punched in similar fashion, was furtively edging away from her.

Her eyes were glowing a sheer red, blood dripping from each solid fist. She was pretty sure she was crying at the time. She had spent the past year trying everything to make them love her, but all the wishing in the world didn’t get her that prize. Now, her relationship with her adoptive parents had finally crossed the line.

“It’s—it’s over for you!” her mother screeched at her as she bared her teeth, snapping Enju back to reality. “You’re gonna be branded as dangerous and they’ll get rid of you! I hope you’re happy now!”

Stricken by terror, Enju fled. She wound up in District 39, where she kept herself alive by performing almost any crime one could think of apart from murder. It put her in danger of being shot on more than one occasion.

The care facility Enju lived in before the Aiharas took her knew that she was Cursed. They had long ostracized her, hoping she’d get out of there as soon as possible. There was no way she’d be allowed back.

Along the way, her eyes had started to harden. Scared of the ill intentions of those around her, she began to live with her abilities unleashed at all times. She stopped believing in people.

Somewhere along the line, another one of the Cursed told her that if she became an Initiator, they’d give her medicine to control her corrosion rate and wouldn’t ever have to worry about where her next meal was coming from. She tried to volunteer, more testing it out than anything else—and while she could admit it now, there was something about the “Promoter” role, someone to guide and support her, that she was even looking forward to a little.

The sorrowful, hangdog-looking face on the Promoter that the IISO official linked her with, however, made her want to curse the heavens. And the face wasn’t the worst part. He acted like some street hoodlum, and he barely had two pennies to rub against each other. Between him and the agency president, who looked as if most of the nutrients in her body were being used to support her voluminous boobs, she swore she’d never get along with either of them.

Enju took a big bite out of the sandwich in her hand. Why did she have to remember something like that at this point? Probably because Rentaro mentioned the Aihara family for the first time in a while over dinner last night. It was a sad connection for her—they gave her nothing but her last name—and now here she was, running again. First from her adoptive parents, and now from her classmates.

“It’s so gross. Their eyes light up red, don’t they? Why can’t they just leave this school alone?”

“Why do they let ’em out of the ghetto at all?”

“They should stop pretending to be people. It makes me sick!”

All their words replayed in her mind, accompanied by their hateful expressions. She had eyelids that kept her from seeing the things she didn’t want to, in theory at least, but she had nothing to plug up her ears.

It was a sharp, inarticulate “Agh!” from nearby that lifted Enju from her pit of self-loathing. She craned her neck to find a girl, younger than she was, staring up at an adjacent beech tree and looking about ready to bawl. Following her eyes upward, Enju quickly found out why. A bright red balloon, its string no longer held by anyone, was caught on the tree’s branches, liable to break free and into the wide-open sky at any moment. The tree, at a good four meters or so, was too tall even for a grown-up to summit.

“Do you need that balloon?” Enju asked as she approached. The child looked timid at first but nodded after a moment.

Enju looked at her surroundings. For a single moment, nobody else was around—she could do it, but it’d have to be right now.

“Close your eyes for a minute.”

“Close my eyes? Why?”

The question mark was practically visible over her head, but she meekly followed Enju’s instructions.

“Keep them closed, okay?”

Enju closed her own eyes, focused on the center point of her body, and took a deep breath. With a single exhale, she unleashed her powers in one fell swoop. Her body grew lighter, as if gravity was starting to taper off, and her arms and legs felt longer as she enjoyed the feeling of omnipotence.

Crouching down to keep the girl from suspecting her, she leaped. Buoyed by the feeling of being pushed upward, she opened her eyes to find the red helium balloon right in front of her face.

Easily grabbing it, she went back down and patted the girl on the shoulder. She opened her eyes, a little reluctantly at first. There were many ways to describe how she reacted to the balloon provided to her—confusion, surprise, wonder, joy. Just watching her face vault between all the emotions filled Enju with happiness.

“Thank you, lady!”

Enju gave her a proud nod. “You’re right! I’m totally a proper lady!”

The girl smiled back, although she didn’t know what Enju meant. Her mother chose that moment to run up to them, bowing thankfully and chiding the girl for letting go of the balloon before taking her away.

The child waved at Enju several times as she walked off. Enju watched, reflecting on how doing a good deed for someone always made one feel great afterward.

“Are you one of the Cursed Children?”

The question made her spin a lightning-fast 180 degrees. There was another girl there, this one about the same age as Enju. Her silvery hair reflected the sunlight, and her black skirt and ruffled white blouse made her look stereotypically rich. Her unique ice-blue eyes gave her an intellectual air.

Enju froze, cold sweat running down. She saw me? An adult discovering her in her Cursed state would cause a huge uproar, a gaggle of onlookers, and God knew what after that.

“Wait just a second,” the girl said, her cold eyes keeping Enju from turning around and running off. She covered her eyes with her right hand, then drew it away. Her ice-blue eyes were now a shade of dark ruby, shining amid the daylight. Enju gasped.

“You too?”

The girl nodded, put her hand up again, and removed it. Her eyes were back to their original shade.

“I wasn’t expecting to see somebody like me here, so close to the Monoliths.” She was about to raise a hand to salute Enju but stopped. “What are you doing here, though?”

“What about you…?” Enju stammered. It wouldn’t do to reveal her current boycott of school. The girl looked down on the floor, her motives apparently just as difficult to discuss frankly.

Just as the conversation looked doomed to end, it was interrupted by a low, long rumble. The silver-haired girl grabbed her stomach, her cheeks blushing.

“That looks pretty good,” she said, her eyes on the half-eaten sandwich in Enju’s hand.

Ten minutes later, the girl and Enju were sitting on a shaded bench, the girl with a steaming fish-shaped taiyaki sweet cake in her hand. She gave the sweet a long hard look.

“The batter looks like it’s made out of wheat flour, but there isn’t really any fish inside, is there?”

“You’ve never had one before?”

The girl meekly shook her head.

“Well, it’s got anko inside. Sweet red bean paste. It’s good!”

“Oh,” the girl replied. Then her brows fell, as if she was regretful of something. “But what about the money…?”

“Ah, it’s my treat.”

The girl still looked fiendishly conflicted about the taiyaki. Her body was less dishonest, releasing a single drop of saliva from the corner of her lips. That was enough of a trigger. She turned to Enju and gave a deep bow.

“Thank you for this. You really didn’t need to feed me. This is my fault anyway. I didn’t bring any extra money for today’s activities.”

“Activities?”

The girl opened her mouth and took a big bite instead of answering.

“Oh,” Enju tried to warn, “it’ll be hot, so you should take it slow instead of…”

“—?!”

The subsequent reaction from the girl was nothing short of intense. She squirmed on the bench, both hands covering her mouth.

“Hey! Spit it out! C’mon!”

“Ih…ih’s nah haht ’t all…”

“No, but…”

“…Ih’s nah haht ’t all!” the girl practically shouted, as if trying to convince herself. Her teary eyes suggested otherwise. She rolled the bite of taiyaki around in her mouth for a bit but finally managed to get a couple of decent chews on it before swallowing.

“B-besides,” she added as she began to blow excessively on the rest of the treat, “I don’t want to waste this after you gave it to me and everything.”

Once bitten, twice shy, Enju thought as the girl timidly brought it back to her lips.

“Ah,” she said solemnly as she enjoyed another bite. “I see. This works nicely, doesn’t it? I burned the inside of my mouth too much to feel how it tastes, but…”

The sight made Enju laugh. She was about to call her by name until she remembered that she never asked it.

“My name’s Enju. Enju Aihara. What’s yours?”

The girl stopped just as she was about to take another extra-large bite, then thought for a moment before raising her eyebrows apologetically.

“I’m sorry, Enju. I’m afraid I can’t tell you right now. Or I guess I should say that I don’t want to, since if I told you, it might put you in trouble.”

Don’t want to…? It took a little while for Enju to understand what that meant.

“What does that…?”

The girl looked up at the clock mounted in the middle of the park. “Well, it’s just about time. This might be good, actually. Enju, would you mind if I took a little of your time?”

The light-red sun set the sea ablaze in color as it slowly tilted its way westward. It was already too dark to see below the water’s surface.

There was a sense of having no escape, coupled with a difficult-to-describe feeling of excitement. Enju reached out to the warm water’s surface and put a finger to her lips. The salt stimulated her tongue, burning her throat on the way down.

The ripples lapped up and down along the boat’s hull, making little splashing sounds as it bobbed the vessel this way and that. The distance from the boat to the shoreline was becoming unnerving to Enju.

“Are you sure we’re okay here by ourselves?”

“No problem at all.”

The silver-haired girl Enju was sharing the boat with gave her an assuaging smile as she kept pumping the oars. They were facing each other, and while the girl seemed to be looking right at Enju, her focus was actually on the area behind her back. Her eyes were red, her powers released; she must’ve been too afraid of someone at the beachfront park noticing them to keep them that way back there.

The two were out in Tokyo Bay, and Enju was starting to regret being so impulsive. She had been led to a dock where the girl had a boat hidden, and when she told her to hop on, Enju wound up doing so without really understanding what was going on. It was a tiny little thing, more suited for a tranquil pond than the wide-open sea—and they were alone on it, two children. If a fishing boat or cruise ship passed by, it might just land them in the news.

“Could you tell me why we’re all the way out here already, please?”

“Because I wanted to be with you, Enju,” the girl said with a half smile. Enju sat there, wondering what that meant. Even she could tell this wasn’t the truth. With a sigh, she turned her ears toward the waves. A steam whistle went off somewhere. She decided to change the subject as she noticed the setting sun.

“Listen… What do you think about Cursed Children going to school with normal people?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

It was hard for Enju to explain. She decided to give the whole story—her origins; the one time her secret was revealed at school; the way her memories were dragging her down at her current one; her self-hatred at being dishonest with her own school friends. As she did, she couldn’t help but wonder why she was revealing all this to a girl she had only met that day. If there was someone Cursed in her life she could open up to, it ought to have been Tina, not this girl.

The girl listened intently. When Enju was done, she closed her eyes, then opened them after a few moments.

“I’m sorry, Enju. I don’t think I can really give you an effective solution to your problems.”

Enju grinned and shook her head. “Ah, just listening to me… And not laughing at me, either. That’s all I needed. I’m glad I did it.”

“My homeland was already gone by the time I was born.”

This startled Enju. The girl stood up as she looked at her, turning to a flock of seagulls, her eyes focused off in the distance.

“I lost mine in the Gastrea War. I was actually born in a neighboring country, but that country was rife with famine and discrimination. It was hard to live in.”

A pause.

“The more you live in poverty, the more it makes you closer to an animal. You just eat, sleep, and produce offspring. Did you know, Enju? They did a study, and they found there’s more than a ten-point difference in IQ between people who grew up hand-to-mouth and those who didn’t. Supposedly your IQ goes back once things get better for you, but once you’re in poverty, it’s hard to gain the knowledge you need to claw your way out. That’s what makes it so pernicious. Myself, I was lucky. I got picked up by someone and I lived in a pretty upper-class housing situation, but escaping that yoke—the three core desires of any living thing—made me realize that thinking, and reasoning, really is the only thing separating us from other animals.”

She turned around, holding her hair down against the wind.

“I don’t know if that really compares to your problems, but whenever things get hard for you, I think you should remember that. How you aren’t the only one who has issues in their life.”

Is it really right, though, using that as a support—that there are people worse off than you? That’s simply looking down on them, isn’t it?

The girl, perhaps reading Enju’s mind based off her expression, gently shook her head.

“I mean, the connections we make with other people, Enju, no matter how annoying they can be sometimes, form the net that helps you break up and absorb the sad or difficult things that happen in your life. There’s nothing shameful about taking advantage of that when you need to.”

Enju felt that her closed heart had suddenly grown lighter, that the setting sun looked a notch brighter than before. She looked at her palms, balling them into fists and releasing them.

“It’s weird,” she said. “I don’t feel as gloomy.”

“It’s an honor to help you,” the girl said, narrowing her eyes with a smile.

“You’re a really nice girl,” Enju replied, giving her a smile of her own. “You should come to my place, so I can introduce my Promoter to you. We’re madly in love—he barely even lets me sleep at night, even!”

“Oh? I’m glad to hear you have a good Promoter, too.”

“Is yours nice?”

“Oh, very much so,” the girl said, beaming as if she was the one who had received the compliment. It made Enju wonder who this girl was all over again. Given her pale white skin and silver hair, she must have been a non-Japanese Initiator, at least. They came to Tokyo Area a lot, Enju had heard, whenever some issue related to Varanium rights popped up. She wouldn’t know, though. It wasn’t like Initiators always revealed their abilities freely to one another.

“Well,” Enju blithely noted, “I bet you’re a pretty good Initiator. Strong, too. Able to make the right decisions all the time.”

The girl scowled a bit at this appraisal. “Oh, not at all, no,” she said in a dejected tone before falling silent and pretending to focus on rowing the boat.

Enju brought her body up, worried she had touched upon something she shouldn’t have—then a pang of pain crossed her head. Looking around, she immediately saw why. There were two gigantic walls of jet-black Varanium in front of her, one on each side. She had taken care to scope out the beachfront first and stick to an area between the Monoliths where the Varanium force was at its weakest. This boat must have taken her to a point beyond what was safe for maintaining her equilibrium.

“Are you all right?” Enju asked.

“I think I am, yes. It’s hurting you at this distance? You must be pretty sensitive. Forgive me if I’m being rude, Enju, but what is your corrosion rate?”

“Around 25.4 percent, I think. You?”

“Fairly close to that, yes.” The girl looked at Enju, perplexed. “It’s strange, though. If our rates are nearly the same, we should be equally affected by the Varanium fields, too.”

“Oh, really?”

Come to think of it, Tina had about the same corrosion rate, too, and it was the same deal with her. Enju figured her body was just more sensitive to Varanium than the norm.

“Well,” the girl concluded, “maybe it’s related to your genetic makeup or something. Ah, we’ve arrived.”

Enju looked around. There was nothing near them they could have moored to.

“I needed to visit that building over there,” the girl said, pointing to the landing point as she pulled out a pair of binoculars. It was starting to grow dark, and even without the visual aid, Enju could see the offshore prison looming far larger than before.

“You’ve got something to do in this prison, too?”

The girl’s eyes opened up wide. “Well! That’s a surprise. I didn’t think you’d know that was a prison.” She looked at her watch, then threw herself down, lowering her center of gravity as she kept the binoculars in hand.

“They’ll be here in a second.”

As Enju puzzled over this, she spotted the presence of a boat advancing upon them from the side. She lowered her own head as well. It was about as large as a fishing vessel, and it passed them by without paying their boat any special attention. Once it passed, though, it made a wide turn and approached the prison from the rear, mooring at the Mega-Float’s small loading dock.

“There’s a network of naval mines around the area to keep prisoners from escaping, and the guards can set them off from land if they want to. The ship’s taking the longer route in order to avoid them. They must be shipping something over that’s too difficult to carry by land.”

The girl beckoned Enju to come next to her, then handed her the binoculars.

“Very tight security, indeed. Can you see, Enju? It looks like just another weather-beaten building, but it’s packed with all the latest technology—sensors, biometric authentication, you name it. The walls look like they’re falling apart, but I heard they’re reinforced with Varanium core material, so they can probably take a real beating.”

The girl was too focused on her excited commentary to notice the expression on her conversational partner.

“Um, so why are you scoping out a prison?”

The girl flashed a look of guilt before averting her eyes. “Oh, I’m just a fan of prisons like these…”

Enju shot a perplexed look at her suddenly taciturn partner. Presumably, the girl would have arrived here even if they hadn’t met—and yet, when she ran into Enju, the girl was dead set on her coming along. Maybe she was just being used to fill up the ranks, since two people on a little recreational boat ride would draw less attention than a solitary rower in the bay. Enju should’ve been angered by being used like this, but she couldn’t drum up the reaction.

To be honest, she was starting to like this mystery girl quite a bit. She recalled Rentaro telling her that if she found someone she wanted to be friends with her whole life, she needed to treat them well, no matter what.

“I guess there’s a reason why you can’t tell anyone else. I won’t pry, I promise.”

The girl furrowed her brows. “Thank you, Enju, but…we should probably head back. Sorry to ferry you all around the bay like this.”

The seagulls above them cried out into the evening as the dwindling sunlight colored the girl’s face red.

“Do you think we could meet again?”

“I think it’d be better for both of us,” replied the girl, “if we didn’t.” She gave an inscrutable smile. “My name is Yulia.”

“Huh?”

She ran a hand through the hair above her ears. “I said, my name is Yulia Kochenkova.”