The Rise of Shiroi Nami – Chapter 5

I drift from our room on a cloud. I’ve heard the phrase ‘Cloud Nine’ before, but I always thought it was one of my father’s dumb Earth sayings. Like, whatever happened to Cloud Ten or Eleven? Why is Cloud Nine so unique?

I don’t know. These are the things that go through my head on a daily basis.

I’m warm from my head to my toes. It’s not enough to know someone finds you special, that someone loves you. Actually seeing and feeling that love? That’s a whole other level. Rin loves me for who I am. He thinks I’m attractive, even on my most horrid days. He promises he won’t leave me, though I fear that every single moment. It all gives me the confidence I need to keep going.

“Yumi!”

I freeze, my foot forward in mid-step.

Shintaro. Didn’t he come and almost interrupt us last night? With something urgent?

I turn around and spot him running up the hall towards me. Something’s different about him. He has a genuine smile on his face, and his strides are long and light. He looks like he’s had the weight of the world lifted off his shoulders.

“Yumi, wait!”

I pause as I let him catch up. He dips down, grabs my waist, picks me up, and swings me around like he did when we were kids.

“Ha, ha! I have the best news!”

I stumble as he sets me down. “What is going on with you?” I lean back from him with wide eyes.

He throws his arm over my shoulder. “You’re never going to believe what happened last night. Never believe it.” He stresses every word, and he’s so giddy, he’s practically vibrating.

“You need to cut back on coffee.”

He ushers me forward, speeding me along in the direction of the cafeteria. “Coffee? I am high on life!” He throws his head back and cackles, and now I’m really worried about him.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

He rolls his eyes. We round a corner together and smile at two medics who pass us on their way from the cafeteria. Medics? I wonder if everyone is okay.

“Nothing, dear sister. I am great, fine, amazing. And you are going to be so thrilled once you guess why I’m so happy.”

I wag my finger at him. “Oh, no. No. I don’t do guessing games. You know that.”

“Come on,” he says, stopping me. “Humor me.”

“No.” I turn and keep going. “And whatever it is, it better be here in the cafeteria because I’m starving from the hours of hot sex I had all night lonnnnnggg —”

I halt in the cafeteria doorway like it’s a cement wall. My head buzzes, and my heart leaps into my throat.

“Yumi,” Kazuo says, getting to his feet, “I found them.” He waves to the table of familiar faces, including Ryoko with tears streaming down her cheeks.

My legs won’t work, and I wonder if I’ve slipped into an alternate dimension.

My former boss, Chiéko, looking like she’s seen the bottom of a lake followed by ten years in the sun, rises to her feet with her mouth wide open.

“Holy. Shit.”

I force my legs into movement, and once they’re going, I can’t stop them. I cross the room and land right in her open arms.

“Yumi!” Her voice sounds like sandpaper being dragged over rough wood.

“Oh my God, I thought you were gone, dead. How did you…? Where have you…?”

She rocks my body side to side, squeezing even more than I thought was possible. “Shit, Yumi. It’s a blessing to see you.”

We pull away from each other and laugh at the tears in our eyes. As hardened media professionals, we have never cried around one another. Cried in private in a bathroom stall, sure. Not this. She wipes my tears with her thumbs before turning away and coughing. Kazuo hands her a bottle of water.

“Thanks,” she wheezes out after the coughing subsides.

I peer past her to the other people at the table, all of them bridge crew and a few from the science divisions. Wow. Mari and Jonathan look as bad as Chiéko, but it’s great to see them. Mari stands up and hugs me when I approach her. She reminds me, for a moment, of Mara because of the name similarity, and tears rush to my eyes again.

“Kazuo told us what happened to Shien.” She sobs once. “He was such a kind soul.”

They used to work comms together on the Murasaki. I had forgotten that. And Jonathan, he was at ops. I close my eyes, and I can still hear his voice echoing around the bridge about incoming missiles. He was the last thing I remember before the missiles hit the ship.

“Isn’t it amazing? I thought I’d never see them again,” Ryoko says, pulling closer to Mari and Jonathan.

I open my arms to them, and they join our group hug. I wasn’t close to Jonathan or anything, but I had interviewed him. I remember him as being competent and kind, a person you want to be friends with. It looks like all of their skills kept them alive in the wilderness.

Shintaro joins us and gestures to the remaining two people. “Yumi, these are fellow science team colleagues, Maddie and Erik.”

I shake their hands and hug each one of them. It feels good to see my people.

“I’m just so… stunned. I thought everyone else from the ship was dead.”

We sit down at the table, the door swings open from the kitchen, and one of the cafeteria waitstaff delivers steaming cups of coffee and plates of food. I snag a piece of toast and add cream and sugar to my coffee. Everyone else is slow to follow suit. Whether they’re just as stunned as I am or wary of their new hosts, I’m not sure. It’s probably best if I try to make them more at ease.

“Please eat. The food here is good. Much better than other food I’ve had on Kurai.”

As they each reach out for something to eat, I’m struck by how skinny everyone is — skin and bones, leathery, ragged. The toast hits my stomach like a brick.

“It’s been months since we last saw each other. How have you been surviving all this time?”

Chiéko’s eyes are on the doorway as if she’s waiting for someone to walk in.

“It’s a long story,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

Chiéko details the group’s survival efforts from the time of the crash. Her life pod landed far from ours, in Aoi Uma territory. Chiéko, Jonathan, and Mari were the only passengers, and thankfully none of them were injured in the landing. They trekked across the terrain until they found another destroyed life pod. Maddie and Erik just barely survived their landing. Their life pod hit an enormous boulder on the way down a mountainside and caught on fire. Maddie has a few terrible burns that have healed, and Erik sprained an ankle getting out of the pod.

I focus on listening, chewing on toast and concentrating on them. My heart aches as they describe the first few weeks of finding shelter from the ambient radiation and their attempts at reconnaissance to acquire more food. They moved around a lot, between three different shielded locations in rocky areas. Once they found an Aoi Uma outpost stocked with food, they were safe for a while, only venturing out when they needed to.

“Then we saw the androids.” Chiéko’s mouth hardens into a straight line. “They were the hardest to avoid. They combed the hills for days. We learned how to cover our tracks and climb trees. Until one day, they were just gone.”

She blows up her fingers. Gone like a puff of smoke.

“That was probably when Aoi Uma executed their hostile takeover on Hikari.” I point upward to the planet.

This is now her time to lean in. “You’ve been there?”

“We’ve all been there. Me, Ryoko, Shintaro…” I don’t know how to start this conversation. How do I tell her about Gen Miyazawa, the traitor who went to Narumi Ogawa and Aoi Uma? How do I tell her about the others who died and I couldn’t do anything to save them?

She knows I’m holding back because I won’t make eye contact with her. Everything I went through on Hikari is a nightmare except for the time I spent with Rin in the countryside, in… Fuck, I can’t remember the name.

I touch the tiny book in my pants pocket and try to divine its name.

I can’t remember.

“What’s it like?” she asks.

I lift my head. “It’s advanced but complicated. More complicated than you or I or even the natives will ever understand. I…” I shrug my shoulders. “I want to go back, but I don’t.”

She lifts her cup to take another sip of coffee. “Tell me everything about them.”

Her eyes jerk from me to the doorway. Rin walks towards us, his demeanor all business. The shoulders of everyone at the table rise up, and the room tenses with fear. They know he’s not one of ours.

I try to understand what they see now, and it’s impossible. They see a stranger, a native, no one they know or recognize. But to me, Rin is the man who held me last night, kept me from losing my mind and my life on so many occasions.

I stand up and meet him halfway across the room.

“Good morning,” I mumble to him as he joins me. “What took you so long to get here?”

“Well, your brother dropped by to talk about this situation, and then I had to spend fifteen minutes deflecting his attempts to flirt with me. You know, the usual.”

I grab his arm and squeeze it. “You’re a saint.”

Time to find my peaceful Zen.

“Hey, everyone.” I keep my voice light and pull a smile onto my face as we sit back down at the table. “This is Rin Hara. He’s a native of Hikari and used to work for Kiiroi Yama.” When Chiéko’s eyebrows scrunch together, I continue. “Kiiroi Yama is a corporation here that handles police and military work.” I decide to go for complete honesty. “He’s also my partner.”

“Your… Partner?” Chiéko tries to process this word I’ve used to describe Rin.

I clear my throat. “We’re romantically involved.”

She sighs. “Great.”

If Rin is put off by her cold greeting, he doesn’t show it. He smiles in his amiable way and shakes hands or bows to everyone around the table. He’s not warm and fuzzy, and he’s never been easy to read either. But I can tell he’s trying his best. He knows these people mean something to me.

I can’t believe they’re here!

Rin sits down next to me. “Ms. Mori, Yumi has told me so much about you. She feared you were dead these last few months.”

With her arms crossed over her chest, she’s not very interested in hearing anything Rin has to say.

“Well, through no help of your people, we managed to survive.”

I cringe at the hostility vibrating through her. But Rin is a seasoned professional.

He nods once. “Aoi Uma is not the kind welcome anyone hopes for. I’m glad you could avoid them.” He turns to me. “I was just reading Kazuo’s brief before I came here.” He smiles again at the people gathered. “Shiroi Nami is more than happy to help you.”

“At what price, though? I gather with corporations running things, everything is going to cost money we don’t have. What has Yumi had to give to stay here, to be with you?”

My face heats with a flush too fast to stop it.

“Look at her?” She waves to me and the state I’m in. “She looks just as bad off as we are.” With a cough, she leans forward. “Darling, what happened to your hair?”

“It’s a long story,” Rin mutters. I reach under the table and squeeze his knee once before he grabs my hand and holds it.

We’re in this together.

“It is a long story,” I interject. “And I don’t want to put you off. It’s… complicated.”

“You’ve said that already,” she points out.

“I have a great idea,” I say, coming to my feet. All the plates on the table are empty, and the cups of coffee are consumed. “I’m sure there are rooms for you all here, and I doubt you have had a bed to sleep in for the last few months. Why don’t you all take a few hours to shower and rest? Take a nap. Walk around the compound… Wait.”

I raise a finger and shake my head. And before I’m able to warn them, the clicking of a passing kumojin echoes through the cafeteria’s door. Jonathan’s and Mari’s eyes widen as they watch the giant spider creature walk past, off on its errand to wherever.

I sigh. “Fuck me. I was, like, five seconds too slow.”

“What the fuck was that?” Mari stands up and points at the door.

Kazuo laughs behind his fist, and Rin closes his eyes in silent prayer.

“Okay, before I let you go, I have a few things I need to warn you about.”

Chiéko pulls out my chair. “Sit down and start talking, missy. The showers can wait.”