Chapter 405: Behind The Boxes
By nightfall the four of them were on the couch.
Kori had apparently gone to the Academy to retrieve Hikari, insisting she never came back before dinner, and it was extremely impolite for her to miss Raizen’s arrival (Raizen stared at her dead in the eyes for a few seconds, not being able to remember one time when Kori actually cared about being polite). Hikari hadn’t argued - she’d just nodded once when Kori told her to come home, packed her staff away, and walked back beside Kori without complaint. She’d greeted Raizen at the door - quick, her face doing the small private smile she reserved for him - and then she’d taken her usual spot on the couch’s other end.
Now they were arrayed around him. Hikari at one end, Kori sprawled in the middle of the floor, Keahi cross-legged on the low table with a bowl of something that had survived the kitchen, Arashi in the armchair across from them.
"Tell us everything," Keahi said.
Raizen sighed. He told them about Ukai. About the platforms and the bridges and the canopy that diffused light and made it look softer. About the welcome dinner, the host, the Enya, who could grow flowers Raizen had never seen before. About Eiden’s mountain story, edited carefully - focused on the geography, the climb, the soldiers, ending where the actual tragedy started - and about the Echelon meetings he’d followed from a glass roof. He skipped the parts where his hands had been on broken drawer locks. The parts where he had accidentally drugged a member of the Echelon (plus Saffi and himself). The parts where a lizard had held a hydraulic door open with its body. The column.
The hole in the sky he described as Eon experiment, big one, just the way he’d told Kori.
He talked about the festival. The lanterns. The food. He left the bench out. He left the confession out. He left the conversation about empathy out. He talked about Kenzo’s training, the laugh, the multi-dash kick, the moment they’d fallen into each other on the practice ground and lost it for a full minute.
Hikari watched him while he talked.
Not staring. Just watching, her eyes on him for most of the story, her face neutral, her hands folded in her lap. He didn’t know what she was tracking, but he didn’t bother much, either.
After he finished, they took a sip from Keahi’s suspicious stew (Arashi whispered a bet with Raizen, betting on whether Kori will call it poison or not.)
The bright red food had a sweet taste, at first, but then everyone – except for Keahi – started coughing, because it was too hot. Arashi even had to run to the store for milk. He didn’t come back for a while.
Keahi had a confused look on her face. "What? It’s not that hot~"
Raizen tried to answer, but instead made the big mistake of drinking water, thinking that it would help. It didn’t. But all in all, it wasn’t that bad, and Kori didn’t call it exactly poison, but something closer to a national threat. Keahi was very offended, saying it was a local dish where she was from.
"Wha, you got volcanoes there!?" Arashi teased.
"Yes" Keahi answered as if that was the most normal thing in the world.
"Let me guess, you even take baths in them." He tried again, the terror on his face growing every second.
"There are a lot of natural hot springs, yeah" Keahi answered as if that was also the most normal thing to have around your home.
Kori stretched, then lazily got up. "Come on, all of you."
Raizen looked up. "Where?"
Kori took them up the stairs, to the attic. The space was just the way Raizen remembered it – back-half filled with Kori’s accumulated things, stacked boxes, crates and folded canvas covers, Kori’s archive, her decade of accumulated things she had not yet decided what to do with.
He and Hikari shared the cleaner half, the part with the actual mattresses and where the small angled window gave its awesome view - the next-door building’s wall.
Raizen had been around the boxes a few times. He’d never gone all the way to the back wall though.
Kori went first. She moved between the stacks or hugging the wall, navingating the maze easily with her elasticity. Keahi struggled a bit, her rigid body trying not to knock something down. The four of them followed in a line - Hikari behind Kori, Raizen behind Hikari, Arashi behind Raizen, Keahi at the back.
The angled wall at the end was lower than the rest of the ceiling, the slope of the roof bringing the wood close enough that Kori had to duck slightly as she approached it. There, set into the angle where the wall met the rafters, was a trapdoor.
It was small, square, painted the same colour as the surrounding wood, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.
Kori reached up and unlatched it.
The trapdoor folded down. A short, narrow ladder dropped from inside the frame, unfolding in two segments until its base touched the attic floor. Cool air came down with it - clean, slightly damp, the open-sky air of a Neoshiman night.
Kori didn’t say anything, she just climbed up.
Raizen followed. The ladder gave him a brief view of the city slightly below as he emerged onto the roof - the Academy’s lights in the distance, the Counci Spire’s lights glowing faintly.
The roof was small. Maybe five meters by seven. Flat enough to stand on safely, with low parapets at the edges. The view in every direction was full sky.
The cloud cover hung overhead. White, even, the standard Neoshima ceiling - the way it had looked in the morning when he’d landed and looked up and felt the absence of Ukai’s hole.
Arashi came up last. Pulled the trapdoor partway shut behind him to keep the heat from escaping the house.
"Okay," he said. "What are we looking at?"
"Juust wait" Kori said.
They stood. Hikari beside Raizen. Arashi a step behind. Keahi off to the right, her arms wrapped around herself against the cool. The five of them facing west, looking at a sky that was showing them nothing they hadn’t seen before.
A minute passed.
"...Are we just looking at clouds?" Arashi asked.
"Yes," Kori said.
"For how long?"
"Until."
"Until what?"
"You’ve all seen it before."
