2
Night wore on.
The blue sky darkened as the curtain of night fell over it in those early hours of evening. One house at a time, the lights on the capital streets went out.
The sound of the cars on the roads, once bustling, subsided.
Not even the cries of a bird or the calls of the insects could be heard.
In the dead of night, as the people of the capital slept—no, as the capital itself slumbered…
…What is this?
A faint noise had woken Crossweil.
A rustle, to be more precise.
Then he heard someone tumble onto the floor and groan in a stifled voice.
That was…
It was coming from the person sleeping right beside him.
“…Ah…uh……ugh…n-no…hot……stop……”
Was it Alice? He could hardly make anything out in the pitch-black living room, but he could still hear his sister’s pain as she slept next to him. He held his breath and focused on the darkness just centimeters before his eyes.
But he hadn’t needed to do that.
Bwoosht!
Right in front of his eyes, he saw hazy light emanating from his sister’s body.
“Alice?!”
“……Ugh……Cr…ow…” She turned to him, looking pallid.
He found that she had abandoned her nightclothes and was now in only her undergarments. Beads of sweat rolled down her neck and back like a waterfall.
“Alice?!” he called her again. “What’s wrong?!”
“……Crow…” Her breath ran ragged as she breathed, and her wet eyes turned to him.
“I feel…hot……,” she said.
“Is it a cold?”
“No…not like that…it’s like magma is deep inside me. I feel like the heat could scald me…”
“What?”
He tried to remember their conversation from earlier that day.
“Alice, your eyes look red.”
“Oh, you mean this? …Yeah, I haven’t slept well for the last three days.”
So this was the reason she hadn’t been sleeping.
“What’s been making you feel too hot to sleep, Alice?! Since when?!”
“…”
“We need to get you to the hospital right now!”
He grabbed her arm.
Even though she had barely been able to speak or breathe, his sister grabbed his wrist, her desperation showing on her face. She was telling him not to—hinting she didn’t want to go. But why was that?
He found the answer on her left shoulder.
“…Huh? What is that?!”
A green mark shone on her shoulder. The faint light in the room was coming from none other than that.
…It’s the same as the one on my neck!
…Wait, it isn’t. Mine is purple, but hers is green.
The shape was different as well. His mark formed a spiral, but hers looked more like a rounded heart.
…Alice has a mark, not just me.
…Wait, then does Eve have one too?
“Eve! This is serious. Alice is—”
But he stopped in his tracks.
Why hadn’t Eve woken up?
They’d been talking in such loud voices that it was odd she hadn’t reacted at all. There was no way she couldn’t have noticed her little sister in such agony night after night.
“It’s calling.”
He heard a voice, one with the vestiges of childishness to it.
He turned to find the curtains wide open. The moonlight filtered in and illuminated by it, he found a girl, tanned from the sun, standing there.
“Eve?”
“…” She didn’t answer. Had she not heard him?
Eve stared outside, her eyes wide open. Then she suddenly moved. Her nightclothes were thin, and her feet were bare, yet she leapt out the open window and began to walk with a purpose down the main street.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going, Eve! Don’t you see how much pain Alice is in?!”
She didn’t reply.
As he watched her leave, he felt a chill run down his spine.
A dark mark. Under the thin fabric of her nightclothes, he saw the faint glow of a dark mark on her body. It was large, almost as though swallowing her entire back.
…Eve has a mark on her back, too.
…What is it? What’s happening?!
His instincts told him what it was.
This was all happening because of the marks. Alicerose was burning up as though she had a fever, and Eve was acting like a puppet without her own will all because of them.
…Will this happen to me too?
…No, this isn’t the time to think about that!
He needed to help both his fever-stricken sister and Eve, who had leapt out of the window under a will that was not her own. But he could only save one of them. Which one should he prioritize?
“Huh! …Sorry, Alice, but I’ll be back in ten!”
He laid her down as she breathed raggedly.
He needed to help the older twin first.
…The mark on Eve’s back stands out way more than either Alice’s or mine.
…There’d be a scene if anyone else sees it.
No one would have believed in a birthmark that could glow in the night. He was sure that a stranger would find it ominous. And because they’d already been involved in the accident from five days ago, it was likely result in more trouble for them.
“Ugh, what’s going on?!”
He didn’t even have time to change.
He put a jacket on over his own nightclothes and rushed out barely dressed.
Where was she? Where had she gone?
“Over there!”
In the dark of night, he could barely make out the silver-haired girl lit by the dim streetlights.
As the cold wind lashed about, he ran after her small figure. It gave him a feeling of déjà vu. This was the same main road he would travel down during the day. The hospital he had been admitted to was up ahead, and on the way was—
“She couldn’t possibly be?!”
He knew where she was going. They were headed to the site of the explosion that had been responsible for the mysterious marks that had appeared on all three of them.
“The Planet’s Navel!”
The place was now surrounded by two or three layers of barricades, which was only natural given the size of the blast. With the possibility of a second upsurge of energy, countermeasures had been taken to ward off any would-be visitors.
However…
The steel netting and wires had been torn to shreds.
“……Huh?”
The alloy wires should have been impenetrable except by specialized tools. In fact, even the security camera cables seemed to have been melted into a dribbling mush from intense heat, and had also been wrenched apart.
The same was true of the steel mesh.
And the size of the holes left behind were oddly perfect for a small girl to travel through.
…Wait…this can’t be real.
…Eve couldn’t have…not this…
This wasn’t the work of any human.
How had she torn through the alloy, much less melted it?
And…
…there Eve was, standing before the gigantic opening the light had burst out from.
The moonlight shone down upon her, illuminating the large mark on her skin. Her fair hair twinkled in the light as it fluttered. She was peering into the open hole.
“Eve, it’s me!”
He didn’t know if his sister had heard him, but as he was now, there was nothing else he could do but call out to her.
“I’ll tell you as many times as I need to: Alice is in trouble. You need to come back home with me right now!”
“…”
“Please, Eve!”
“Who?”
“What?” he responded.
Who are you? Somewhere inside him, he had been ready for his sister to ask him that. But the words that came from her mouth were even more inexplicable than he had imagined.
“Who am I?” she asked.
“……Huh? Come on, what are you saying? Eve?!”
“Wh…what am I…h-human…or astral power…?”
Her delicate limbs began to shiver. She held her head and doubled over.
“…I…I’m……”
The mark beneath her thin clothes began to glow even stronger. The light swelled, just as it had during the eruption. A torrent of light rivaling the explosion from five days ago came flooding out of her.
“What?!”
That decided it. What he was witnessing—human flesh releasing an inordinate amount of light—was nothing short of unnatural.
…This isn’t any ordinary mark.
…There’s something going awry in our bodies. The marks are a sign of abnormality!
Eve’s mark was bigger than anyone else’s, which must have influenced her behavior as well. But what could he do?
“…Cr…ow…run away…!”
“What?!”
“A-ahhhh!”
He wondered how her small frame was even capable of making such a loud noise. After shouting at him, Eve Sophi Nebulis shrieked.
Her entire body released rays of light several hundred times stronger than before.
But there was no sound now.
A beam that had just grazed Crossweil’s face pierced through a metal rod, evaporating it without a trace. The light flew upward, toward the clouds, blasting them away upon contact.
“……You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
He couldn’t fathom how hot the light must have been to have punctured the thick rod. In addition to that, he’d seen hundreds of rays bursting from her. He was relieved many of them had shot up into the sky, but if the light came back down to earth, the entire capital block likely would have been obliterated.
“……Crow…help me…”
“…Eve?”
The small girl was right before his eyes. She knelt in front of him, squeezing the hem of her clothes in her hands, as she looked up at him weakly, almost as though begging.
“…I don’t…want this……”
She slowly crumpled. His sister lost consciousness, still clutching at her clothes.
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