After he got to the point where he could move around, Rentaro started putting away Enju’s clothes, which were scattered around the living room. The previous day, Rentaro had taken all of the clothes Enju left behind out of the closet and slept with them around him. Unlike Rentaro, who was poor, Enju had a lot of clothes in the latest fashions. That was how he felt after spending the whole night with them. Which reminded him, whenever Enju bought new clothes, she would pose suggestively in front of Rentaro, asking him over and over, “Am I cute? Am I cute?” How had he answered her then?
Rentaro picked up the syringe that had fallen in the crack by the dresser. Inside it was cobalt blue medicine in liquid form. Realizing that she hadn’t taken her medicine, he became very sad. Nothing would happen if she skipped it for a day or two, but if she didn’t take it for a while, the corrosion rate of her body would gradually rise.
“Damn.” Rentaro threw the syringe on the floor and held his head in his hands.
Pretty much every day, he took her to and from school, and when they came back to the apartment, Enju would be pestering him for food. She was critical of everything he made, which had motivated him to cook well.
That life had been broken to pieces. Rentaro stood up and looked around the too-empty eight-tatami-mat room. What was he supposed to do now?
He slapped his cheeks hard with both hands. It was obvious. He needed to do something. Taking off the uniform he wore every day, he took a shower, letting the hot rain strike his body and loosen his stiff muscles. After he got out of the shower, he felt a little more like himself. Putting on a fresh uniform and looking in the mirror, he saw that his cheeks were slightly hollow and that only his eyes were glittering, but he decided that it was good enough.
Checking to make sure he still had a close-up picture of Enju’s face on his phone, Rentaro took his wallet and went outside. Suddenly wondering how much money he had left, he opened his wallet and laughed involuntarily. He would probably have to walk home, but he didn’t care. Rentaro jumped onto the train and got off at the last stop. Since it was early morning on a weekend, the entrance and exits were both empty. Raising his umbrella and looking into the distance to check where the Monoliths were, he walked unwaveringly toward the Outer District.
It had already been ten years since the Monoliths had formed the boundary that separated humans from Gastrea. The Tokyo metropolis was the only place that had remained whole after the Great War. The neighboring Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama prefectures all had pieces cut off by the Monoliths. It had been nine years since the Tokyo metropolis absorbed the neighboring prefectures and became Tokyo Area, with its forty-three districts.
The numbering system started from the middle of old Tokyo (the Seitenshi’s palace was in the First District), with the numbers increasing as one got closer to the border. The Outer District that Rentaro was heading toward was District 39 on the map. The Outer District referred to the border district connected to the Monolith, a no-man’s-land where no one wanted to live at the time.
Slowly, there started being fewer and fewer people, and he started seeing strange things here and there. There were gigantic footprints that didn’t look human and chairs that had blood stuck to them that wouldn’t come off. Inside a four-wheel-drive vehicle with broken windows that had turned red as though rust bloomed on them grew a mysterious reddish-purple grass out of the space between the cushions, luxurious in its thickness.
A message board created in response to the emergency was still covered with many layers of colorful papers after ten years.
“Sho, this is Atsuko. If you’re safe, please contact me here.”
“To Daiki Kato—I’m at your grandfather’s house.”
“This is my number: xxxxx. Koji Aso.”
“I’m looking for this boy.” There was a picture of a boy about five years old attached.
“To Yoko. Dad and Fuyumi are fine…” The rest was scratched off and couldn’t be read.
Rentaro had involuntarily started sweating uncomfortably. He felt like his necktie was tightening around his neck and loosened his collar.
This was a message board created by people who had been separated during the war in order to reunite with loved ones. With transmission base stations destroyed, cell phones were nothing but pieces of trash. This was probably a region that had been caught up in the war. The traces of the Gastrea War that were left behind still seemed fresh.
If he really wanted to remember the conditions from ten years ago, there were plenty of videos uploaded online, but there was no one who could watch them and feel happy about it. Once, a long time ago, Rentaro had watched a video called “Memento Mori,” and he remembered running to the sink afterward.
The farther he went, the more he could see, because with the collapsed buildings and dilapidated homes, there were fewer things to obstruct his vision. In the midst of that were conspicuously large factories that looked like they had been newly built. They were facilities for geothermal, steam, water, wind, solar, and nuclear energy. Japan had always been surrounded on all sides by the ocean, so it had strong ocean winds. Besides that, it had about ten percent of the world’s volcanoes, so it could make use of their geothermal energy, and because of its complex terrain, there were many extreme rises and falls, so it had strong waterpower, as well.
Now, in the year 2031, solar battery panels had made great advancements in conversion efficiency, and in forty-one districts, they were piloting a new Tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. It could be said that most of the energy for the center was produced in the Outer District. However—
Rentaro looked at the pristine asphalt road compared to the ruined buildings and a bitter expression crossed his face. There were examples from other disasters, too, but when a disaster of this magnitude occurred, the first thing to do was restore roads to transport goods. The next thing was to start securing the all-important lifeline of water, and then to aim for enhancing food, clothing, and shelter.
Why had restoration not moved forward if the roads had been paved so nicely? It was probably because the government had no intention of restoring the Outer District.
There were currently three uses for the Outer District. First, it was a place to manage dangerous nuclear reactions, and second, it was a landfill for the trash created by those in the center of Tokyo Area. Finally, it was where they planted the genetically improved “miracle seed” that was expected to produce large harvests in a small amount of land. Fortunately, powdered concrete worked to lower the acidity of the soil. In other words, it was an abandoned area that was now a field for these three things. None of those three uses showed any consideration for the few residents who lived here.
The Monoliths started to look very big. Surveying the area, it did not look like there were any people there, but Rentaro felt eyes looking at him from somewhere. It was probably not just his imagination. Rentaro gripped the handle of his umbrella hard. Other than the umbrella he was using, he had also brought a child’s umbrella with a Tenchu Girls character printed on it.
The circumstances this time were more serious than Rentaro had thought. There was no way that it would be resolved easily, with Enju at Kisara’s or Sumire’s or a classmate’s house. If anything, it would make more sense for her to return to her hometown, the Outer District.
Before he knew it, he had reached almost the innermost area. Rentaro relied on his memory to go to a single manhole, and knocked two, three times on the cover.
Shortly after, the cover was lifted open with a heavy sound, and a lisping voice said, “What?” as a young girl showed her face. She was probably around seven years old, and she peered at Rentaro with a puzzled look on her face. Her eyes glowed red.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said. “Can you help me?”
“Are you the police? We have no intention of leaving, leaving, leaving.”
“No, I’m not the police.”
“Then, then, are you a sex offender?”
“Huh? A sex offender? No…that’s wrong, too…”
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“Then, please leave.” The manhole cover shut with a clang, and Rentaro froze with his mouth still open. Returning to himself, he knocked again.
“I hate persistent sex offenders,” said the girl.
“Wait, wait, wait! Why are police and sex offenders the only two options you have prepared?!” said Rentaro hurriedly. “And why did you decide that I was a sex offender just now?!”
“It was what I thought after seeing your face.”
“You little…”
“By the way, did you need something?”
Keeping his irritation inside, Rentaro put down his umbrella and took out his civil officer license with his right hand and pulled up the picture of Enju saved on his phone with his left hand. “I’m a civil officer. I’m looking for this girl. Have you seen her?”
The girl looked back and forth at the license and the picture and said, “Nope.”
“I’d like to ask other people, too. Is there an adult around?”
“That would be the Elder. I’ll go get him, so please wait inside.”
“Uh, all right…” Pressured by the girl’s lilting speech, he went down the ramp and stood in the sewer. It was unexpectedly spacious inside and cleaner than he expected. However, the strong stink of many years of human wastewater had become ingrained in the walls and made his head hurt.
But the girl seemed used to it and said, “Please wait here,” and bounced off into its depths. Rentaro looked at her departing back with complicated emotions. Manhole Children. Children who had become orphans after losing their parents and siblings during the war.
As he started looking around after his eyes became used to the darkness, he could hear a clanging sound reverberating from inside a pipe, and a man appeared. He was short, and his hair was white, but his spine was straight. He wore glasses and gave the impression of being intellectual. He used a wooden cane with a rubber end, but he still looked too young to be an Elder.
“I’m Rentaro Satomi,” said Rentaro.
When he gave the man his civil officer business card, the man looked at it carefully and then said, “Aha,” nodding.
“Are you the guy that strange girl from earlier called ‘Elder’?”
“Ah, Elder is a nickname,” the man laughed. “I’m Matsuzaki. But I’m surprised, too. Maria said, ‘A guy who’s a police with his right hand and a sex offender with his left hand is here.’ I thought it was some kind of riddle.”
The girl from earlier appeared to be called Maria. It would probably be hard to make her understand the difference between a police officer and a civil officer.
“Excuse me, but what do you…?” Rentaro ventured.
“Oh, I look after the children here.”
Rentaro was silently moved. The man wasn’t homeless but probably lived here of his own accord. He couldn’t help looking a little shabby, but when he smiled, his gentleness shone through. Rentaro thought he must have once worked as some kind of educator.
The man pushed up his glasses with his middle finger and looked into Rentaro’s eyes. “It’s warm in here compared to outside, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it.” Rentaro had actually noticed when he entered. He thought the sewer would just block the wind and rain, but with this warmth, it would not be hard to live through the winter.
“It’s because most of the drainage from the power plants is hot.”
“Oh, that makes sense. But it’s easy to get sick with this sanitation environment…right?” After he said it, he thought it was probably rude and added the last part.
But the man laughed loudly. “That’s not true. The girls are actually more resistant to this environment than us normal people, thanks to the Gastrea virus. Even in the past, when this area was flooded with Gastrea, the Gastrea didn’t come all the way to the sewers, so this is a pretty comfortable place to live.”
Rentaro looked into the water pipe where the girl named Maria had disappeared. “So, is she one of the Cursed Children, too? She lifted that sixty-kilogram manhole cover like it was nothing.”
“Did you notice? She still cannot control her emotions well. I hope that she will be able to leave here someday and live among normal people, but it’s problematic if her red eyes give her away, so she needs to at least learn to control her emotions.” The man looked like he was having fun twirling his cane as he explained.
Rentaro thought about the girl called Maria. All of the Cursed Children were female. To begin with, all new lives in the womb are female for the first seven weeks. Then, the embryo’s sex is determined, and some become male. The Gastrea virus mutated the gene that determined the sex, so none of the Cursed Children became male.
“Mr. Matsuzaki… Aren’t you one of the Stolen Generation?” Rentaro asked.
“That doesn’t matter,” said the man. “When Gastrea invaded, unfortunately, the virus also infected children in the womb. The girls, the Innocent Generation, are victims.”
“If only everyone thought like you…,” Rentaro sighed. “I completely agree with you.”
“It can’t be helped. It’s not a grudge that will go away in ten years. Everyone has become overly sensitive to the word Gastrea, so it’s only natural that they would hate having children walking around town who carried the virus in their bodies.”
Feeling comfortable with this unexpected sympathizer, Rentaro could have kept talking about this same subject, but then he remembered what he had come for. “Sorry, I’m in a hurry. Did this girl come here? Her name is Enju, Enju Aihara.”
He showed the picture to Matsuzaki, who appeared to think a little before shaking his head. “Sorry, I don’t know.”
Well, Rentaro hadn’t expected to find her this quickly. Of course, he wasn’t going to get discouraged over something like this. As Rentaro bowed to leave, for some reason, the cane stretched out to stop him.
“Where will you go now?” Matsuzaki asked.
“I’ll search all of District 39,” said Rentaro. “It’s her hometown. I’ll look for her until I find her.”
“From the looks of it, you are a Promoter whose partner ran out on you.”
Rentaro suddenly couldn’t speak, and his face looked frantic. That appeared to be enough to confirm Matsuzaki’s suspicions.
“Does it have to be this girl?” Matsuzaki asked.
“What…?” said Rentaro, unsure of what he meant.
“When you take care of those girls, you naturally get to know them, but it’s not rare for civsec officer pairs to have personality conflicts. If a pair breaks up or if one person dies, you could contact the IISO to form a contract with a new Initiator. Your IP Rank will plummet, but at your age and with your record, it wouldn’t be hard for you to bring it back up again.”
Rentaro inhaled and exhaled silently and closed his eyes. “I came looking for Enju, but not because I’m a Promoter or because she’s my Initiator. You’re a good guy, and I thank you for that. But let me say this—don’t act all high and mighty without knowing anything!”
Matsuzaki widened his eyes in surprise and dropped his cane.
Rentaro clicked his tongue, thinking that he’d done it now. He had trouble controlling his emotions when it came to these topics. “Sorry… I didn’t mean to yell. I’ll leave now. Bye.”
Matsuzaki looked affectionately at Rentaro’s departing back and then turned around slowly, raising his voice into the darkness behind him. “You heard him. He’s a nice young man. Are you sure you want to let him leave like this, little lady?”
4 THE NEXT DAY.
Rentaro was speechless as he hung up the phone. His arm fell limply and he did not recover from his shock for a while. Looking at his surroundings, he saw thin clouds like the previous day’s and cherry tree leaves that looked like they were about to be scattered in the strong wind. The sky looked like it might start crying any minute. Outside the school, Rentaro gave a start as he heard the warning bell, but his legs felt heavy and he didn’t feel like going to his classroom at all.
During the break between first and second periods, he realized that he had to explain that Enju would be absent to her homeroom teacher, and went behind the school to call from his cell phone.
The response he got was completely unexpected.
Rentaro looked back at the school and went back and forth wondering if he should hurry back to his classroom or not, but in the end, he turned around and headed toward Magata Elementary School once more.
He went to the staff room and met up with Enju’s homeroom teacher. The teacher’s face looked like he also did not understand what had happened. “Yes, Aihara is at school.”
Rentaro searched his memory and only just realized regretfully that her schoolbag and a set of books had been taken out of their apartment. After he left the manhole the previous day, he’d searched District 39 until sunset, but he didn’t get any valuable information, and his feet dragged as he went back to the apartment.
The teacher brought Rentaro to Class 4-3’s room. They peeked at the situation inside through the window of the sliding door in the back.
There she was. Even though it was break time, she sat alone, looking down resolutely, her eyes staring at the desk, proof of her iron will. There was extra space between her desk and the others, and her classmates treated Enju as if she weren’t there.
Rentaro’s heart broke at the pitiful sight. He wanted to yell at her to stop. But this was probably Enju’s way of fighting. He had no right to stop it.
“Do you want to see her?” the teacher asked.
He wanted to see her. He had a mountain of things he wanted to ask her when he did. As Rentaro squeezed his chest, he pulled out a syringe with the cap on from his breast pocket and handed it to the teacher. Inside was cobalt blue liquid medicine.
“What’s this?” said the teacher.
“It’s a special medicine…” Rentaro shook his head. “No, I’m not going to lie anymore. This is Gastrea corrosion-inhibiting medication. Please give it to her.”
Saying just that, he turned his back on the teacher, who looked at him questioningly, and cast his body into the violent winds. Would Enju continue to attend school like this? Even knowing that she would only get hurt?
Black Bullet, Vol. 1: Those Who Would Be Gods Page 11