Man’s inhumanity to man—Izaya jumped up and down on his back repeatedly.
Like greased lightning—this happened before Mikado’s eyes in the span of ten seconds.
“Thank you.”
Izaya bowed ostentatiously in the direction of the shocked Anri, her bully, and all the other students who happened to be passing by. He was still standing atop the unconscious Takashi.
“You knew that hitting girls wasn’t my thing, so you made sure to prepare a guy for me instead! Now that’s the sign of a dedicated woman. I’d love to make you my girlfriend, but sorry. You’re just not my type. Get lost.”
It was all very cruel, but the girl was off and running before he even finished speaking. She didn’t even spare a backward glance at Takashi underneath Izaya’s feet. Mikado had to admit that he felt a bit sorry for the guy.
The girl’s face already vanishing from his memory, Izaya turned to Mikado.
“Heya, it’s too bad we were interrupted yesterday. I don’t think we have to worry about our friend Shizu butting in here. I thought it would be rude to look up your address and barge in, so I decided to lie in wait at the school entrance instead,” he said, smiling all the while. Mikado didn’t know why Izaya was smiling or what reason he would have to seek him out. But that actually wasn’t true—he knew of one possible reason. Mikado couldn’t openly acknowledge it, though. He clenched a fist.
Seemingly unaware of the boy’s train of thought, Izaya tilted his head in confusion.
“By the way, what’s the Black Rider doing here?”
I could ask the same of you, Celty thought to herself.
She had indeed found the student who escorted her head away yesterday. She intervened to save him from being pounded, but Izaya’s presence was a mystery to her.
Celty couldn’t imagine Izaya getting involved with an ordinary person, much less a teenage student. Was he the son of some powerful politician? Or some kind of despicable pusher, spreading drugs to children in elementary and middle school?
But whoever the boy was made no difference to Celty now.
All that mattered was whether he knew the location of her head or not.
Mikado snapped to his senses with a shock when he realized that Anri was even more dazed by the incident than he was.
“W-well, Sonohara, I should really be going!”
“Huh…? Um, okay…”
And with that awkward farewell, Mikado quickly left the scene. As he suspected, the shadow and villain followed him. Once a safe distance away from the school, he timidly turned back and decided that Izaya was more likely to understand him.
“Umm… I don’t know what’s going on here… But if you’d like, we can go back to my…”
Mikado stopped and held his breath. If he took them back to his house, the Black Rider would find that girl. In fact, she was probably the only reason that the Black Rider had come for him in the first place.
“Uh…well, actually, there’s something I’d like to ask the rider in black…”
Celty pulled a PDA out of the shadow riding suit and typed, “What is it?”
So there was a way for them to communicate after all. Mikado was slightly relieved but also noted that the situation was taking a turn into even more surreal waters.
I feel like crying.
Just a few minutes away from the station by foot was a building. It was hard to guess exactly how old it was, but the countless tiny cracks in the walls and the abundant ivy said enough on their own.
Once the building came into view, Mikado stopped and said, “Well, my apartment is on the first floor of this building…but I want an explanation first. Who in the world are you people?”
Celty avoided mentioning anything about her head or her true identity. She only typed, “I recently ran into a girl I knew who had gone missing, but she fled for some reason I cannot fathom.”
But Mikado was not naive enough to take such a transparent excuse at face value. Celty decided that she didn’t have a choice but to give him the truth.
She asked Izaya to give them some momentary privacy, then took Mikado around the back of the building. Summoning her courage, she started typing on the PDA.
“How much do you know about me?”
Mikado stared at the tiny LCD screen, then gave the question some thought.
“Well…you’re sort of an urban legend, and you ride a motorcycle without headlights that makes no sound. And…”
He paused, sucking in a deep breath, then letting it all out at once. Along with the fear in his voice, there was something expectant, even excited.
“…you don’t have a head.”
Celty typed, “And do you believe all of it?”
She showed him the screen, then immediately regretted it. What human being would possibly believe that? But Mikado nodded.
Huh?
She couldn’t hide her shock. Mikado went on.
“Um…can you show me what’s inside your helmet?”
Celty stared him right in the face.
Aha, just like yesterday.
That strange expression again, a mix of fear, expectation, despair, and joy all in one. And the student with all of these emotions in his eyes wanted her to expose her true face to him. Celty hesitated, then typed in her PDA.
“Do you swear you won’t scream?”
She knew it was a stupid question, but she had to be sure. Celty hadn’t removed her helmet for anyone in the last twenty years but Shinra. There had been a few times it popped off in the middle of a fight, but the only reaction she got from the witnesses was a grimace of terror.
But this young man named Mikado was facing his fear directly. He believed that her word was not a lie or a joke and still asked her to see. It was foolish to ask such a man if he wouldn’t scream.
Mikado’s reaction was exactly as she expected. His head nodded vigorously, and at the same time, Celty pushed the visor of the full helmet upward.
Darkness. There was nothing before his eyes but empty space. Technically, it wasn’t empty in the vacuum sense, but that made no difference to Mikado. It was a space where what should exist did not, and the presence or absence of anything to fill that space was immaterial.
Nothing. There’s nothing there. It’s not a magic trick—but if it were, I’d sure like to know how to pull it off.
For the first instant, Mikado’s eyes were wide with terror, but it did not lead to a scream. He stifled that emotion, and his shock turned to elation. There were even little tears forming at the bottom of his eyes.
“Thank you…thank you.”
What he was thanking her for was unclear, but his eyes were full of childlike wonder. She was completely at a loss for what to do.
It was rare enough for her to be thanked, much less meet acceptance for the idea that she had no head, that the situation was entirely baffling—but not in a bad or uncomfortable way.
After Celty explained the situation to him, Mikado happily agreed to let her see the “head girl.” When he told the dullahan that the girl’s memory was gone, Celty had no immediate answer. She said she had to see the girl so that the misunderstanding could be corrected.
They called Izaya back at this point, but he claimed that his business could wait until later. He stayed back and watched the other two.
“All right… Please wait here for now. I’ll go in first and talk to her. I don’t want her to see you first before I can explain your presence here, in case she gets the wrong idea.”
“I understand.”
Izaya piped up with a sarcastic-sounding “Very cautious—that’s a good stance to take.”
They waited outside the apartment building as Mikado went in. As they stood there, Izaya said, “By the way, courier, I hadn’t caught your name before this. Didn’t realize you weren’t from around these parts.”
He grinned. Based on the smirk, he probably already knew that, and it was meant to be a dig at Celty’s uptight refusal to name herself. She understood all of this already and chose to ignor
e him. It was possible that he even knew what she was—but only cobbled together from eyewitness accounts, not because he recognized her as a fairy.
Not to mention that any levelheaded person would not even imagine that the Black Rider could be anything but a human being. The problem was that Izaya was not levelheaded. He was not a man to be underestimated.
“So what’s taking him so long?”
It had been more than five minutes. Even if he had failed in his negotiation, he should have at least come back out to explain by now.
“Maybe I should take a look.”
The apartment building was too quiet. Celty felt a creeping unease steal over her. That unease was amplified by a cleaning service van parked next to the building.
A professional cleaner at a dump like this? Not likely…
Her fear was well-founded.
“I’ll ask again… We know you were keeping a girl here in your apartment. We just wanna know where she is now.”
“There’s no use denying it. We found a woman’s hair in your bed. Pretty short cut but clearly longer than yours.”
Two men were waiting for Mikado when he entered his apartment. They were wearing work uniforms, but one look at their faces said they weren’t simple laborers. Mikado was shoved to the floor before he could say a word, and they kept interrogating him, over and over, in low, menacing voices.
They were looking for the “head girl,” but Mikado wanted to know her location just as much as they did. Either someone else had already taken her away, or she’d gotten up and run off on her own…
“I-I don’t know! Please, I really don’t know!”
“Listen, kid. You’ve seen our faces. We could make you disappear right now,” one said like some kind of gloating movie villain. Mikado felt tears of fright welling up in his eyes. He felt so stupid—just moments ago, he’d been filled with joy at the sight of something inhuman and alien, and now he was mired in terror of plain old humanity again. He lamented his carelessness.
“Someone’s here!”
The men jumped up without hesitation and raced out. In a few moments, the van’s engine started outside.
“Whew…I’m saved…”
In particular, he was saved from the shame of shedding tears of fright. He did not, however, avoid tears of relief.
Celty raced past the door of the apartment and made to chase after the van, but Izaya said there was no need to do that.
“I’m pretty sure they’re from Yagiri Pharmaceuticals. I recognize the van,” he noted, a free piece of intel from the info broker.
“Yagiri…Pharmaceuticals…?”
“Yep. A company down on its luck, in danger of being bought out by foreign capital.”
When he processed that name, Mikado’s teary eyes went wide. Yes, it was the same name as his classmate—but he recognized that name from something else.
The tears drained back into their ducts.
A girl bearing a head gone missing. A dullahan. Yagiri. Pharmaceutical company. Missing people. Mika Harima. Anri Sonohara’s story. Seiji Yagiri. Kidnappers. Dollars.
Various fragments of information floated into Mikado’s head and disappeared. The free flow of concepts coalesced into a theory.
In the now-quiet apartment, Mikado quickly started his computer. While he waited for it to boot up, he turned on his phone, which had been off since school, and immediately checked his e-mail.
Celty watched him curiously. In contrast, Izaya was like a hunter watching over rare prey, his sharp eyes gleaming wickedly.
“You know, I had my doubts,” the information broker started. Mikado opened his Internet browser the instant his computer had fully booted and typed in some kind of code with tremendous speed. He was logging into a website. After that came the rhythmic sound of mouse clicking.
Mikado examined the page for a little while, then turned to his guests.
Celty shivered despite herself. His eyes did not have the bedraggled look of the boy who’d been helpless to stop the circumstances around him for the past hour. His were the eyes of a hawk following its quarry, endlessly deep and sharp. He bowed to them.
She was taken aback. He didn’t seem to be the same weak-willed student who was just here moments ago.
“I need your help. Can I count on your assistance for just a short while?” he asked, full of purpose and determination. “The pawns are in the palm of my hand.”
Izaya patted Celty on the shoulder and boasted as though he’d just found a new toy. “Jackpot.”
Celty looked back and forth between the two, unsure of what Izaya meant. She didn’t know what had just happened, but she could tell that Izaya was more excited now than she’d ever seen before. And even more excited was Mikado Ryuugamine.
His face still had the trappings of childhood, and now his eyes were shining like a boy who’d just received a new toy. There was no sign of the tears of terror anymore, only an expression of strong will and elation that said he was in full control of himself.
Over the last few days since his arrival in Ikebukuro, Mikado had run across a number of baffling, inexplicable events. And right before his eyes, they were all connecting into one convoluted case.
He breathed heavily, mentally examining each piece of the puzzle to make sure they fit together.
Boring days. Familiar sights. Stuck in place with no future.
It was to escape all of these things that he decided to move to Ikebukuro. And now he could feel himself achieving that escape at last.
Mikado Ryuugamine realized that he was becoming a kind of lead player in this story. At the same time, an enemy had appeared that threatened his new life—and his life, period.
In his state of excitement, he felt no hesitation or fear toward the need to eliminate that foe.
The time had come to speak. He started to explain everything about himself to Celty and Izaya.
In the hallway outside of Lab Six beneath Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, a cold voice split the air.
“What do you mean…she wasn’t there?”
“Apparently, when the underlings reached the place, there were signs that the lock had already been pried open…and no sign of the girl inside.”
“So someone got the jump on us?”
“The place is a dump, so it’s unlikely to be a burglar.”
Namie’s brows knitted together in thought. If the student took her out, then what would be the purpose of breaking open the lock? On the other hand, she couldn’t think of anyone aside from her company who would want the girl.
“And the student who lives there?”
“When they returned to report, they claimed they were prepared to bring him back with them, but he had…company.”
“So why didn’t they bring him, company and all? Such incompetence…”
She clicked her tongue in irritation just before her phone started ringing. The display said it was an unlisted number, but she answered anyway on the chance that it was important.
“Hello?”
“Um, is this Miss Namie Yagiri?”
The voice was young. It sounded like a teenage boy, probably in middle school.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“My name is Mikado Ryuugamine.”
“—!”
Namie’s heart silently upped its pulse. Her brother’s classmate, the one who took the girl away with him. There was an eeriness to the fact that he was calling right as they’d been talking about him. She wondered how he’d even gotten her number.
Meanwhile, the voice on the other end of the call continued on its business.
“As it happens, we have a certain young lady under our care at this moment…”
After a brief pause, the phone produced a message that made no sense at all, devoid of even the slightest bit of tension, as matter-of-fact as if it were asking her out to dinner.
“…How about we make a deal?”
11:00 p.m., the same day, Ikebukuro
Night had fallen on 60-Kai Street in Ikebukuro. Th
e shutters were down on virtually every business except for the bars, and unlike during the day, the pedestrians no longer ruled the street—there were actual cars going to and fro now.
A young man in a bartender’s uniform leaning against a streetlamp spoke to an enormous black man.
“What is life? What do people live for? Someone asked me that once, and I beat him within an inch of his life. It’d be one thing if it was a starry-eyed dreamer of a teenage girl, but from a grown man who wanted to be a yakuza but tried to get out because he didn’t like running errands? It’s practically a crime.”
“That’s right!”
“Everyone’s free to think what they want about their own life. No one can deny you that. But why the hell would you ask for answers from another person? So I told him, ‘This is your life, live so you can die,’ while his pupils dilated. Then again, that was the bar manager, so I probably screwed up again.”
“That’s right!”
“…Simon, I get the feeling you don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“That’s right!”
Shizuo Heiwajima bellowed and threw a nearby bicycle at Simon, who caught it one-handed. The town swallowed up this scene, assimilating it—business as usual.
When night hit Ikebukuro, it was a completely different place than during the daytime. It was just as crowded and chaotic, but blackness swallowed everything, so that the world seemed to be in negative. Nowadays, more people were utilizing cheap manga cafés to spend the night than more expensive hotels. Missing the last train was no longer the big deal it had once been.
On streets close to the train station, karaoke barkers hustled about, latching onto groups of students and new employees out for a celebration. Most of those groups already had their next destinations picked out, and they gradually faded away from the street.
People left drinking establishments and headed home, young people partied through the night, and smatterings of foreigners dotted the scene. It wasn’t on the same level as when the sun was out, but the night had its own crowded bustle.
However…
In front of the Tokyu Hands store that intersected the main road, two people stood apart from the crowd.
One was a student wearing his uniform jacket. The other was a grown woman wearing a business suit.
Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) Page 14