Chaos in Kadoma Ward – Chapter 34

Back up in the elevator, past the floor that’s currently under fire, and onto the twentieth floor. I don’t know what I expect to find when the doors open, some labs or rooms filled with freak android experiments? But wherever Narumi conducts her experiments, it’s not here. This building was meant to be a headquarters for Aoi Uma, a place for administrating the corporation, a place for tucking away trade secrets. Wherever they build androids, it’s far away from here.

“Out you go,” Akikazé says, keeping his sword at my neck. Outside the elevator bank, we face one locked door and the door to the stairwell. Smoke curls out from under the stairwell door, and I halt a cough. Akikazé’s blade is awfully close to my neck.

He walks me to the door and waves his wrist over the door lock. I remember the microchip Fake-Ryoko dug out of the wrist of the guard, and I frown. What a waste.

“We’re going to the last office down the hallway, before the open workspace.”

I walk forward slowly, keeping pace with him. I don’t want him to think I’m running away, and I’m not going to. If I can save my life in any way, it’s by stalling. Now that Atsumi’s been cut off, literally, through Fake-Ryoko, someone else has to be coming for me and the data. Kiiroi Yama wants it. Aoi Uma wants it. I want it. Hell, I’m sure Shiroi Nami would be here to grab it if they knew what was going on.

Which is why it’s either going to fall into my hands or no one’s.

That’s my data.

I decide what happens to it.

“Inside,” Akikazé directs me. I step into the last office and swing my head to look around. The sword in Akikazé’s hand twitches and slices a fine line across my shoulder.

“Ow!” My shirt blooms with bright red blood, and my head lightens. I stumble and grab ahold of the desk as Akikazé laughs.

“You were too pristine. Let that be a lesson. Don’t fuck with me. I’m tired of you, your brother, your people, and your boyfriend.” He crosses the small space between the door and the desk, keeping me within the sword’s length at all times. “You just keep getting in the way.”

Pristine? I have at least two broken ribs, my left arm is barely functioning, and all of my muscles are screaming from running yesterday. Akikazé can go fuck himself.

I press on the bleeding gash while he rummages through the top drawer of the desk. When he doesn’t find what he wants there, he moves to the second drawer and on to the shelves. Sighing, he points the sword at me again.

“It’s not here.”

“It’s not here?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Huh.” I shrug, jerking my lips. “Where to next?”

He leans in, letting the tip of the sword almost rest on my bloodied shirt. “Where did you hide it?”

“Me? I didn’t hide shit. I’ve been stuck up in a jail cell, remember?”

“You must have come down here and moved it.”

“Sure. That’s obviously the first thing I’d do if I got out of the custody of a raving lunatic.” I roll my eyes for good measure.

I’m walking a thin line with Akikazé. His hand shakes, and his eyes are bloodshot like he’s been coasting on amphetamines for days. Maybe he has. I’ve seen amphetamine addiction, and it’s not pretty. He seems a likely candidate, even with his size.

“Where else could it be?” I ask, trying to soften the situation. “Maybe one of your engineers took it hoping to crack the password. Too bad no one is around to ask.”

The floor is deserted and rocks again with another explosion from down below.

“Out, into the open floor space. You’re going to search for it.”

I hold up my hands and back out the door, letting him direct me with the sword. “Why don’t you just tie me up and look for it yourself? It’d be faster.”

“Great idea,” he says, grabbing a spool of wire and pointing to a column in the open office space. He binds up my wrists, sits me on the floor with my back to the column, and ties me to that.

I grow nervous watching him tear the room apart while listening to the explosions below. My palms and underarms sweat, and my mouth dries — one of my most hated states of being.

The building rocks again, and Akikazé growls as he tears the drawers out of a desk. “You know, I told Miss Narumi not to trust those mountain bastards.”

Huh? Oh, Kiiroi Yama.

Here comes the tirade.

“They were way too helpful, too accommodating, too sincere. They showed up for every meeting, brought in every hostage, and collected every penny until they turned on us.” He moves on to another desk, turning his back on me. “The power on this world has gone from Shiroi Nami to Aoi Uma and then to Aka Matsuba. It was only a matter of time before Kiiroi Yama wanted their slice of the pie.”

A flash of black out of the corner of my eye makes my heart stop.

Kazuo!

He’s pressed against the wall around the corner, a smirk on his face, a sword on his back. Lifting his finger to his lips, he opens the front of his shirt and shows me my tablet.

I almost laugh with relief. Sneaky Kazuo, stealing my tablet (and hopefully the data device) before we even got here.

“Get me out of here,” I mouth at him. He nods and flashes three fingers at me. Rin did the same thing on Kurai. Is he here? My heart speeds up, this time faster than before.

Kazuo points at Akikazé.

“Where is it?” Akikazé bellows. “It has to be here.”

He turns around and comes stalking back to me. “I’m not sure it’s even worth it to keep you alive or spend any more time looking for this tablet. It could be a gigantic ruse.”

He grabs his sword and brings it to my neck again.

“Talk. What’s on the tablet? Really. And don’t just feed me a line. I told Miss Narumi not to listen to what was on the bugs in Rin Hara’s apartment. You were lying, weren’t you? This was all some plot to get us here and bring us down.”

I swallow and keep my eyes on him, no matter what I see behind him. They bugged us? Great. I can only imagine what they’ve been listening to for weeks. I hope they enjoyed the show.

“It’s my tablet from home, and the data device was given to me by my boss. It has everything you want. Information on our animal translation chip technology, DNA sequences of the royal family, all the data brought from Earth to Orihimé on farming, biology, our jump drives, and dead tech from before the wars. Even nanotechnology. Literally a thousand years of treasures for you.”

Kazuo hasn’t moved, so I think I’m supposed to delay.

“There’s a reason we brought the royal family’s DNA. Do you know why?”

Akikazé licks his lips. He can taste victory. “No, why?”

“There’s a link between the translation chip and the DNA. Our empress, the one descended from the ancient royal line on Earth, is the Speaker For All Animals. She and her sons are the only people capable of communicating with all animals, even our outcaste animals.”

I sit up taller, remembering the bedtime stories I heard as a kid, the things I saw with my own eyes.

“You see, on my world, the only outcastes we have are the lions in the northern prairies. They can’t communicate with anyone but her. Her DNA is special.” His eyes widen. “Priceless. With the right kind of technology, you could isolate the sections that make her that way. Use it for yourself. It was her gift to you. A token of good will.”

I lean into his sword.

“So go ahead and kill me, and see how happy that will make her when she eventually comes for you, your family, your corporation.”

His face blanches, and his sword dips.

“I believe you.”

Out from behind him, Kazuo makes his move. I blink, unable to stop the instinctual reaction to the wink of the lights off his sword. Akikazé spins around, meeting Kazuo’s sword with all his strength. But Kazuo has been fighting with the sword his whole life. He once told me he even fought the empress when they were young and on Earth. That he regretted clashing swords with her. That he would never do it again.

But he would fight for our family.

Swords flash, swoop through the air, and Kazuo jumps along desks, getting up high and trying to use it to his advantage. I scoot my butt around the column, trying to put as much of the structure between me and the fighting as possible. I struggle with the bindings on my wrists, but they only bite into my skin.

Fuck. I need to be free!

An explosion rips through the outer entry area, denting the solid metal door and belching smoke into the hallway we came from. I close my eyes and try to calm my racing brain. I can’t think!

Think, Yumi.

Why in all the stars did I encourage Akikazé to tie me up?

I open my eyes and nearly knock myself out, jumping at the sight outside the window.

Descending from above, a flying Kiiroi Yama cop car slides into view, and strapped to the open door is Rin, a giant assault gun in his grips. He makes eye contact with me, signals ‘down’ with his hand, and then aims.

Bullets and glass fly everywhere. The sound is deafening, like the building cracking in two, and I can’t cover my ears or duck. I’m forced to cringe, lower my head, and hope for the best.

Gunfire strafes across the top of the room, hitting the ceiling and raining down plaster and metal onto my head. My ears ring, and my head throbs. Wind and rain infiltrate the floor, blowing pens and anything not bolted down through the air. A crack of thunder makes me scream in horror.

“Yumi!” Rin screams from the vehicle. “Move!”

“I can’t!” I don’t even know if he can hear me, the wind is so loud.

Smoke. I smell smoke. Coming from the hallway and crawling along the ceiling, fire blazes into an inferno. That wasn’t a crack of thunder. Something exploded above us.

Oh, gods. I hate fire. I’ve had enough of fire and Narumi’s crazy androids setting everything ablaze. I struggle to free myself of the cords around my wrists, but they’re too tight. Panic seizes my chest and squeezes it in a bear hug. I’m going to die here.

I look back out the window to Rin, trying to tell him with my eyes that I’m doomed. There’s no way out for me. My eyes fill with tears, and I cry for everything we didn’t do, didn’t say, didn’t feel. This is not how I wanted it to end.

Rin leans forward, his face determined, battered by wind and rain. I glance over my shoulder to get a read on Kazuo and Akikazé, but everything is silent behind me. Did they perish in the gunfire?

“Kazuo!” I call out, lifting my voice as loud as I can.

Out the busted window, the whine of the flying vehicle intensifies. I turn in time to see Rin leap through the air and land with a tuck and roll into the building.

He pulls his sword from his back and runs towards me. Fear and elation battle in my head for the prize of how I feel at this moment, watching him dodge burning ceiling parts and jump over a ruined desk.

“I’m going to help you first, and then we get Kazuo.”

My tears turn to a sob as he cuts the bindings from my wrists and chest.

“Shhh,” he urges, drawing my face up so he can make eye contact, “pull yourself together.”

It’s a moment of contact, but he’s real, and exactly what I’ve been asking for. That’s enough to snap me back into the present.

The building is falling to pieces, fire and flames warring with wind and rain coming through the windows. An ear-splitting crack causes everything in the room to shift to the right.

“Rin Hara, we have to go!” a voice booms from outside, coming from the flying vehicle.

“Where’s Kazuo?” I have to scream over all the noise and the fact that I can’t hear a damned thing now.

Rin leads the way, vaulting over desks and fallen debris until we come upon a pair of legs sticking out from under a ceiling joist. I grab a large piece of the ceiling and pull it back to reveal the bloody scene underneath.

Akikazé is dead. A ceiling joist crushed his head and miraculously saved Kazuo. He’s alive and breathing but dazed, and the joist is only resting across his lower body. Rin continues to clear a path for us while I jump down and try to stir Kazuo. I shake him, but it’s only after I smack his face that he finally snaps back to reality.

“Yumi! Rin! What the hell?” he asks, looking around. “Shit. We should get out of here.” He pats his front, sighing in relief that my tablet is still there. There would be no time to look for it if he had lost it now.

The fire is getting uncomfortably close, and the heat scorches my skin. We limp across the floor to the edge of the window where the car is waiting for us. The wind buffets it, and it whines trying to stay in one spot.

“We only have one harness, so you’re going to have to jump,” Rin says to Kazuo, but he shakes his head.

“Can’t do it,” he replies, blinking his eyes forcefully. “I’m seeing double.”

I’m surprised he’s upright.

“I’ll jump,” I yell over the scream of the engines. “You go first and throw me the harness. I’ll put it on Kazuo!”

He doesn’t even ask me if I’m sure. No time for that. He steps back a meter, runs, and jumps into the open door. The distance is maybe a meter and a half from the building to the door, but twenty stories up.

Don’t think about that, Yumi.

Rin holds up the harness and throws it across to me.

“Put your hands on my shoulders,” I yell at Kazuo, and he does, lifting each leg into the loops. I snap the belt and throw the rest of it over his body. A red button on the front blinks, so I depress it, and it shrinks to him, tightening until it blinks green. Through the tight fabric, I can still see my tablet against his chest. “Sit on the edge.”

I help lower him down to a sitting position as the building rocks again. I look down —

Shit! Why did I look down?

The building is blowing up, floor by floor!

“Run, Yumi!” Rin screams.

I back away from Kazuo, take three giant steps, and jump.

My whole body leaps first, but my soul takes longer to catch up. It hovers above me, watching my arms and legs windmill, the rain and wind pushing me sideways out of alignment with the open vehicle door, the look on Rin’s face when he realizes I’m not going to make it, Kazuo’s slumped body as he passes out, the slack of the line between him and the car tightening as he falls away from the building.

It should all happen much faster and probably does. But time never works for you. It only works against you.

I smack into the side of the vehicle like a cartoon character careening into a brick wall. All the air rushes from my lungs in a quick puff, and I’m knocked senseless.

Not that I had any sense jumping from an exploding building in the first place.

I curl my fingers, hoping to grip something, anything I can hold onto, but the rain pummels my body and makes the flying car slippery. My right hand finds a seam in the metal, and it stops my inevitable slide off into the open air just long enough to lull me into the false comfort that I’ll live.

I will not die.

“I’ve got you!” Rin’s arm stretches out across my back, but I’m too scared to open my eyes and look anywhere. “Takada! Right side up!”

The vehicle shifts slowly, bringing the side I’m on pointing to the sky. I’m so relieved, I burst into tears, but I refuse to let go.

“Come inside, Yumi. We’ve gotta go.” Rin peels me off the side of the car and swings me into the cabin, dropping me off in a chair. “Strap in.”

When he’s all business like this, I know we’re still in trouble.

“Where’s Kazuo?” My lips blubber over the words, but I don’t care.

“Reeling him up now.” Rin, strapped into the vehicle but able to hang out the side, peers over the edge of the open door and watches as the line brings Kazuo up into the car.

We zip away from the building as the floor we were on explodes into a ball of fire, raining debris down on the streets and Kiiroi Yama police.

With Kazuo inside and the door closed, the pilot guns the engines and screams off in the direction of the spaceport, the place where I started this life on Hikari.

“That… That didn’t go so well,” I stammer out.

“You’re the queen of understatements.” Rin laughs. He bends over me and takes a quick kiss, his lips soft and insistent. My heart settles down, taking the comfort and not questioning it. “I’m so glad you’re alive and here with me.”

Our eyes meet, and everything I have left in me thrills at this connection. It’s back to the two of us again, and my life will never be the same now.

Atsumi had said, ‘Because I know you love Rin and he loves you…’

Would anyone else besides my family, besides Kazuo, risk their life for me like that if they didn’t love me?

“I…” My chin quivers. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

We reach for each other’s hands at the same time, our fingers locked together. I don’t want to let go, ever.

“You have no idea what I’ve gone through to be here. I promised you you could trust me, and I’d do everything I could to make you safe. I always keep my word.”

I sink into his side, relieved. Knowing his promise was one thing. Seeing him keep it was another.

“Where to now?” I wipe the tears from my cheeks, trying to bring some calm back to my life.

“Way out of the city. We’re going to lie low, and then we have work to do.” He pulls my hand up and kisses the back of it. “Lots of work. Are you up for it?”

I nod, unable to trust my voice.

“Good. I knew I could count on you.”

I laugh once and rest my head on his shoulder.

Strength. I’m going to need a whole lot of strength.

And booze. Lots of booze.