Chapter Text
The sun descends beneath the oceanic horizons of Inazuma, casting the remnants of its heavenly glow upon the thriving city. The rays of which peek through the cracks of a window curtain and into a spacious living room where one Kujou Sara dozes peacefully on the sofa.
Taking in the sight, Raiden Ei smiles fondly at the slumbering woman, undoubtedly exhausted from her long work shift. She draws the curtains closed, granting the room some blessed shade before carefully striding towards Sara to place a delicate kiss atop her forehead.
The woman is rather infamous for not being known to smile, and to an idle observer it would seem that she even frowns in her sleep. But Ei has bore witness to many of Sara’s smiles and bouts of laughter, and has been the subject of both on more occasions than she could think to cherish. And so, when she comes upon her getting some well deserved rest—curled up on her right side with her hair free of its ponytail, and head resting against the fold of her elbow rather than one of the many throw pillows that surround her—the only word to describe the sight is ‘peaceful’. ‘Beautiful’ comes a close-second.
“She’s still asleep?” the curious, yet bemused whisper of Yae Miko sounds from behind her.
When Sara still doesn’t stir, Ei straightens with an affirmative hum and turns around. “Yes it would seem so.”
“And how is it that you can look at her and still find the will to leave for the night?” Miko teases, though the cross of her arms over her chest is nothing short of scolding.
“I will admit that it’s proving difficult to withstand the temptation to lay with her.”
“Then stop withstanding,” Miko insists as she joins Ei at her side. She drops her voice into a low murmur whilst wrapping her arms around Ei’s waist and resting her chin on her shoulder. “Come now, Ei, surely you can afford to miss the weekly report just this once.”
Ei chuckles, chest warming with mirth as she turns to kiss Miko’s temple, a preamble to her inevitable apology. “I miss one and it will inevitably become many. Especially when it’s you spinning such tantalizing words.”
“Not tantalizing enough it seems.” Her hand drifts lower where the telltale lump of metal meets her fingertips. “Your keys are already in your pocket.”
“I’ll only be a short while, Miko. I feel as though I am close to making a breakthrough, the Shogun program told me as much.”
Miko makes a noise, ambiguous to whether it’s meant as protest or understanding. Just a neutral hum in the back of her throat, and her arms wrap tighter around her waist. Reaching up, Ei threads her fingers through Miko’s hair, lightly scratching at her scalp in a soothing caress.
“Help Sara to bed, love. I’ll see you in the morning as always.”
Miko snickers at that. “You mean you’ll see Sara in the morning. It’s no wonder she sleeps so early in the evening when she’s waking up at such ungodly hours.”
“I would say that waking up to her breakfast is quite a perk, is it not?”
“Not as much as waking up to the both of you.”
“My, my, what a flatterer you become when you’re trying to keep me from leaving.”
“It’s becoming a full time task if you’d ask me,” Miko quips, then nuzzles deeper against Ei’s neck. “Why not indulge me?”
Another chuckle and Ei pulls away to kiss her lips, “I won’t be long. After that, then you’ll have me, I promise.”
Miko sighs, not at all fond of defeat, but a compromise is a compromise. “Alright.”
Ei fishes her keys from her pocket as they kiss once more, this one lingering longer than the previous, and they finally separate.
As she goes to exit out the front door, Ei spares one last glance over her shoulder, just in time to see Miko kneeling in front of Sara’s slumbering form and gently coaxing her awake with soft murmurs and the promise of a comfortable bed. Sara grunts in protest, much to the bemused exasperation of Miko. Half awake and limp, she allows herself to be pulled upright even if her eyes remain shut.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Ei offers one last time to the two of them.
“Oh go on now before I pounce on you again,” is the final warning and push Ei needed to finally close the door behind her, a smile dancing on her lips as she walks away.
***
“Breaking news: renowned founder and CEO of Raiden Corp, Raiden Ei, has been reported missing. Last seen by her partners around six o’clock Tuesday evening before leaving for work, Raiden failed to return the following morning. Investigators speculate abduction and/or foul play, however a list of suspects or ransom declaration has yet to be released. Anyone with information regarding the CEO’s whereabouts are encouraged to come forward with any eyewitness accounts.
“As of now, both Raiden-Yae Miko and Raiden-Kujou Sara have declined to make any comments regarding the case.”
The television is promptly turned off, and the hand holding the remote aloft is lowered with a weight only grief can instill. Miko leans back against the sofa, staring ahead and yet wholly unseeing. Vaguely, she becomes aware of Sara leaning her head against her shoulder, hair loose and disheveled from restless nights and nose red from sobbing only minutes ago.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to her,” Sara says, voice weak and breaking beneath the harsh syllables.
Miko shifts and brings her arms around Sara, pulling her closer. Sara wasn’t awake that night to see Ei off one last time, so by all means, that must qualify Miko as having the last farewell. But of course it wasn’t— isn’t. What they shared wasn’t a goodbye, merely a ‘see you later,’ farewell with the expectation for another day to share. No one ever expects a goodbye, blatantly stated or implied, to ever be final. Not like this.
And so, Miko reciprocates in an equally weak voice buried in the locks of Sara’s bedridden hair, “Neither did I.”
***
Five years later
The cruelest part of grief perhaps is the expectation to continue living the unrelenting forward procession of life. After all, Raiden Corp. needed to be managed and its security detail needed to be maintained. Thus, Miko and Sara were expected to carry on those duties despite the veil of their sadness clouding their sight and dulling their senses, and the gaping emptiness swallowing light and warmth from their chests. Is there some consolation prize for having both lived half a decade without really having lived a single day of it?
Then, something happens to throw a hopeful wrench in the mindless monotony.
As Miko stands outside of their apartment door, she can’t stop thinking about it—can’t stop thinking about whether it was worth sharing with Sara.
Eventually, she shoulders the door open, ramming her body against the spot that kept sticking in the frame until it finally gave in. She stumbles inside the living space that has been their escape from any reminders of Ei. However, while it’s a space built from only Sara and herself, that fact is just as painful as what was missing.
“Onigiri again?” she remarks as she enters the kitchen and finds Sara at one of the bar stools, carefully folding seaweed over clumps of rice and bits of cooked salmon.
A shrug, detached and half listening as she doesn’t deviate from her task. “I didn’t feel like cooking much tonight.” She holds one out to Miko, who sets down her purse and accepts the proffered morsel.
They eat in silence.
Then, “Something happened today.”
“More bureaucratic nonsense?” Sara surmises around a mouthful of rice.
“That’s actually tomorrow’s meeting...” Miko tries to reply in light jest, but her smile barely manages to curl the corner of her lips enough to be remotely noticeable.
The conflicting moods aren’t lost on Sara. “Miko?”
Setting down her half eaten rice ball, Miko takes out her old pager—an ancient thing by today’s standards, and even by the standards of five years ago but Ei enjoyed their simplicity and insisted that that is what she and Yae should use when it came to business talks. Five years later, she had kept it out of sentimental value. And apparently it’s a good thing she did.
“Huh, I didn’t realize pagers are still in fashion,” Sara teases. “New company standard the board wants to implement?”
“No, no, I... I got a page today.”
Sara says nothing, continuing to eat and waiting for her to get to the point.
“The number came from Ei’s private pager, Sara. The one that she always kept in her office at the original building.”
Sara freezes, mouth ajar mid-chew. “No...”
Wordlessly, Yae hands over the device for Sara to see for herself. Sure enough, the number is Ei’s and a simple message is stated plainly on the screen: Come find me.
Ominous to say the least, like something out of a movie. If this did indeed come from Ei’s pager that never left the old Raiden Corp. office then... “It must be some sort of trick,” Sara immediately opposes, all of her defenses flaring. “That building was the first place we looked for her in, and you and that cleaning team had it cleared out of her belongings.”
“We never found her pager,” she points out.
“So someone stole it then. Maybe some psychotic fanboy of hers broke in and swiped it before you could find it.”
“You don’t think I’ve thought of that already? A part of me doesn’t want to hold on to hope, but for this to just… show up after all this time—I don’t know,” her tone trails into a stiff quiet, the sort of quiet where there is so much left to say but either no words or energy
Sara smiles, sardonic with disbelief. “What is it you expect to find, Miko? You make it sound like she’s going to be sitting at her desk. I ride over there and just—” Then adopting a lighter tenor, “‘Oh, Sara! Sorry, I must’ve lost track of time again. Miko is going to wring my neck when we get home, isn’t she? Nothing a little fried tofu can’t fix I hope.’”
Miko, to her credit, laughs at the imitation—a wistful breathlessness despite the hurt behind her normally enigmatic gaze. “Oh the countless times I’ve fantasized about a day like that,” she murmurs. “I haven’t the faintest idea what this could mean. I tried running my Sakura program on the message to see if it’s fraudulent, but Sakura is just as unresponsive as ever.”
Sara sighs, a quaking exhale through her nose as her heart aches with the familiar agony of lonely days, months, years they’ve shared since Ei’s disappearance. Though she and Miko had each other, it’s impossible to ignore the absence of a loved one.
What are the odds that it was truly Ei and not some sicko pretending to be her? The latter would be easy to do in this day and age, and the former has reached the point of impossibility, easier to just treat it as such and move on. But the odds that Sara would end up living the rest of her life in regret for not at least trying to find out aren’t odds at all—it’s practically a guarantee.
“We’ve been hopeful before,” Sara utters.
“We have,” Yae returns with a slow nod, recalling all the time and resources they both pooled into private investigators when the police deemed the case cold. They were inconsolable when the same answer resulted from each of those attempts. The loss of Ei was one thing, but the reality that they had truly done everything they could to find her? That had almost been their complete undoing.
“I don’t want to keep hoping, but no one else would have access to this line so if this truly is from Ei—“ Miko’s voice cracks and her arms go to wrap around herself.
Before her logic could get the better of her, Sara goes and hugs her. When she feels Miko’s arms wrapping around her waist, she turns her head to murmur in Yae’s ear, “I’ll go check it out. If I find her somehow... ”
Yae hums, arms tightening in affirmation of what Sara wants to say, “Bring her home.”
“Five years. Lucky number five right?” Sara muses before she goes to ready herself for the long drive to Ei’s old office.
However, Yae’s hold remains steadfast. Her nose is buried in Sara’s hair and her lips are curled downward into a quivering frown like she was holding back the urge to cry. Carding her fingers through her pink locks, Sara asks in a hush what was wrong.
“Bring her back,” Yae repeats, but this time she adds, “and don’t you dare disappear on me too.”
***
The comforting rumble of Sara’s motorcycle silences with the turn of the key. She removes her helmet and shakes out her hair before turning her gaze up at the office building that once housed the sproutlings of Ei’s growing enterprise in computer software engineering. The building itself has long since been cordoned off, condemned but not officially. Yae, being the co-founder of Raiden Corp., still owns the building despite all the unsolicited advice for her to sell it off. An individual with business prowess should never be sentimental, but whoever deemed that the case clearly never met Yae Miko.
Even Ei never had the heart to tear it down or sell it after the company had moved into a proper corporate office at the heart of Inazuma. Instead, she kept it as her own private workshop, away from the eyes of the bureaucrats that seem to infect Raiden Corp. more by the day.
Memories of being a recruit for the building’s security detail cross over Sara’s thoughts. The days where it evolved into something more when she came to meet Raiden Ei, who had taken the technological world by storm alongside the infamously cunning Yae Miko as her partner in every sense of the word were remembered fondly. Looking back, she couldn’t help but wonder if the three of them spent those days well enough. Did they make enough time for one another? Did their careers get in the way of too many dinner dates they could’ve had? Did they take advantage of enough rainy days to enjoy one another’s quiet and stillness?
Sara wants to think yes they did what they could with the time they had together. But an absence, especially one as glaring as Ei’s, exposes the harsh reality that there can never be enough.
She wheels the bike into the side garage, unlocking the latch using the key that Yae gave her before kicking the bike-stand down, and closing the door behind her. The last thing she needs is to have her only ride out of here stolen just because she felt like following a bread crumb of a message.
Another key on the ring opens the front door of the building proper, which creaks on its old hinges and stale, dusty air assaults her nose. The wind behind her kicks up and rushes inside, chilling her enough to raise goosebumps on her arms despite her leather coat. Plastic sheets shroud lines of desks and appliances. The vending machine that somehow always worked and served Ei’s favorite dango milk is unsurprisingly empty. Though she isn’t a fan of sweets, her throat parches itself with the sudden craving for a bottle.
Flicking on a flashlight, she steps deeper into the empty office space.
“Ei?” she calls out, aiming the light’s beam to and fro. “Ei? Are you here? Miko got your page.”
Silence.
Eventually, she does manage to find the circuit breaker. A flip of the master switch brought the building to life, right down to the delicate music of violin strings falling from the overhead speakers. Ei certainly enjoyed her music while she worked.
She climbs the stairs that lead up to Ei’s main office, calling out the woman’s name with expectations low and hope fading fast.
It’s empty. Nothing more than dust and plastic coverings awaited her.
Sara sighs, the ache in her chest feeling more like a broken bone in how it will constantly remember what caused it the most pain.
She needs to leave. She hurries back down the stairs, nausea and an unpleasant sting behind her eyes too much to bear. It’s clear that the message was a fluke. Maybe it was a delayed one Miko had meant to receive five years ago before their lives were ultimately changed. Sara isn’t a tech enthusiast like her partners though, she couldn’t begin to justify how something like that would even work but—
Her eyes catch on the vending machine again, humming with electricity and flickering with its lavender shaded bulbs as opposed to the standard white. A color courtesy of Ei’s personal touch simply because she deemed it aesthetically necessary. At the bottom of the machine’s inventory rungs, sat a single bottle of dango milk. Even stranger than finding one at all is the fact that it wasn’t filled. It looked to be sealed, untampered at first glance, and yet the glass bottle is pristinely empty and glittering in the violet light.
What’s that about? Sara wonders. Fishing out some change from deep within her pocket, she thumbs a quarter into the slot.
It clatters and rattles about before it’s spat right back out through the bottom return slot, landing on the linoleum floor below.
She bends down to pick it up, internally berating herself for trying something so baseless and trivial. But that’s when she notices the next odd thing about this machine: the lines in the tile don’t quite match up with one another.
She drags a fingertip over them, thoughtful.
Then she stands, repockets her coins, and takes the vending machine with both hands. With a heave, Sara begins to turn it like she is trying to get a look at its back. It isn’t the machine that moves, however, it’s the entire uneven tiles and the wall that it’s prostrated against.
Even more dust, cobwebs, and stale air rushes to greet her only this time she couldn’t help but cough. The flashlight is back in her hands as even the lights of the office illuminate only a few feet in front of her.
Illuminated in its beam is a set of stairs heading downward.
Was this... always here? Sara never saw something like this in the building’s original blueprints, and she had those studied thoroughly when was head of security. Why wouldn’t Ei tell her about this? Does Miko even know?
She follows the stair steps downward, occasionally brushing her hand against the walls for extra balance as lightheaded anticipation and wary curiosity blended into a dizzying concoction. When she reaches the bottom, she is met with a set of doors that are slightly ajar. Carefully pushing them open, Sara emerges into a spacious room.
“Ei?”
It’s another office, this one far different from the one upstairs. To the right are stacks of hard drives and wires that make up a long work desk, and to the left is a blinding shine of chrome—a strange machine that looked like something out of a sci-fi film with protruding pistons that made up the machine’s body, and a long nozzle that resembled something like a laser gun pointed right at the desk.
Littering the surface of the far wall across from where Sara stood are photos upon photos of Ei, Miko, and herself—together and separate, posed and candid, all of them faded with time and bent at the corners from where Ei had constantly held them.
She tries not to linger on the pang of nostalgia for too long, and instead makes her way towards the desk where she finds a large cork board with a single sheet that dominates the surface labeled “The Plane.” Pinned around it are what looked to be codes that Sara couldn’t even begin to decipher.
The Plane, or Plane of Euthymia, is a digital frontier Ei had named to be her life’s work. She insisted it would bring about an age of technological progress if she could somehow gain control of it. Sara always knew that Ei would come here to work on the project, but not that she had built and dedicated an entirely separate basement space for it.
Sara wipes her hand over the thick layer of debris that coats the desk, and a screen blinks bright green, startling her just enough to pull her hand back like it had been burned. A keyboard appears along with a blank window—the ‘command line interface’, she vaguely recalls from Ei and Miko’s crash course they gave to help her keep up with their conversations (which, of course, did very little by the by, but it was still a valiant attempt)—that awaits with a cursor patiently pulsing for a command.
This is far out of her realm of capability. And so, fishing her phone out of her pocket, she immediately dials Miko’s number.
Two dial tones later, “Sara?”
“Hey, are you in the middle of something?”
There’s a brief pause filled with shuffling, as if Miko was getting up from a chair. It doesn’t take much to surmise that she’s the meeting she mentioned last night. Sara winces at the belated reminder.
“Nothing that can’t wait,” Miko reassures regardless and without hesitation, as if she could see Sara’s grimace. “What’s going on? Are you okay? Did you find...?”
“No, Ei isn’t here,” she says with renewed disappointment, but quickly refocuses on the room that isn’t supposed to be here. “But I found something else. Do you know anything about a secret basement in this building?”
“A basement?” She lowers her tone into a low murmur so as to not be overheard, “Not one that I’ve ever seen. Ei had that whole building to herself, why would she need one?”
“Well, there’s equipment in here that I’ve never seen you two tinker with before, let alone even use. I think it’s got something to do with The Plane.”
“I see...” Then she utters to herself in a voice laced with concern and confusion, “What on earth were you doing, Ei?”
“You really didn’t know?”
“I may be the co-founder of this company, but there were lots of things, especially things about The Plane, that Ei kept to herself. It used to drive me crazy, but I trusted her to know what she was doing and getting herself into. We wouldn’t have started the company together if I hadn’t.”
“And now?”
“I still trust her, of course I do,” Miko affirms. “It’s The Plane that always sets me off. Her precious project that was supposed to lead Inazuma to new heights of progress. She believed in it and so I did too, even if it often took her attention away so often.”
Sara hums a soft note as a pang of empathy settles in her chest. “So do I…”
“And look where it got all three of us, hm?”
“For what it’s worth, between last night and now, I think this is the most we’ve talked about her in a while.”
Miko sighs ruefully. “Yes I suppose it has.” After a short, reflective reprieve, she gets them back on the topic at hand, “How did you find it?”
“I went to use the dango milk machine and noticed some uneven tiles on the floor. When I went to move it out of the way, an entire wall just opened up to me.”
“How innovative and yet so expected of her,” Miko remarks with a scoff just on the cusp of fondness. Such a strange addition to the office it was at the time, but Ei had fallen in love with the beverage and her immediate agreement to having a machine installed even flustered the young amateur entrepreneur selling it to her. Even so, both their days were made brighter with that decision. That sort of spark of life is sorely missing in this skyscraper that flaunted success more than the humble beginnings that made it possible, small things like bottles of dango milk popped open to get them all through the long days at the office.
“What is it you’re looking at right now?” Miko asks and Sara looks down at the screen.
“Uh, I think it’s a... command line interface? Did I say that right? It’s the window where you manually instruct the computer to do tasks, yes?”
Miko hums, impressed. “Very good. Ei and I were worried that you might’ve spaced out during our lessons together.”
“Hey, I’m capable of learning new things.” Then she grimaces and quickly backtracks. “That being said, I was hoping that you can help me. Is there anything I can use here to give us another clue about Ei? The equipment looks too advanced for something that was made five years ago, I think you can even try running Sakura on it.”
Another sigh, this time long and thoughtful, passes through the receiver that tapers into a low growl. “Hold on, Sara.” The volume of her voice dips drastically as she pulls the phone’s receiver away from her face. “Excuse me, gentlemen, I have something important to sort through. I’ll only be a few minutes.” Soon the clacking of Yae’s heels reaches Sara’s ears followed by the sound of a door opening and closing. “Sara?”
“I’m here.”
“This is going to be a long shot, but I think we can try using that interface to at least figure out what Ei was working on before she disappeared.”
Nodding, she quickly seats herself into the desk chair and wipes the rest of the dust off of the screen. “What about Sakura?” she asks, shaking her hand free of the lingering debris.
“I would have to actually work with the equipment to even determine if the program can even run on it.”
“I mean, this is Ei’s stuff. I don’t see why she wouldn’t make a system compatible with Sakura’s diagnostic protocols,” Sara reasons.
“Listen to you,” Yae laughs. “A few more months and you’ll be talking like one of our junior programmers.”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up, I barely even know what I’m talking about here.”
“I’ll see what I can do once I get my hands on that keyboard myself. For now, first thing’s first: can you type in ‘who am i’ for me? No spaces between letters. The dollar sign in the beginning will be your command line and the lines without it will be the computer talking back to you.”
“Okay.” She switches the phone to speaker mode and sets it down on the desk to free her hands to type:
$whoami
And the computer responds in a blink:
Raiden
“It says, ‘Raiden,’” she relays.
“Alright... so it certainly belonged to Ei. Or at the very least, the company.”
“Did we really need to ask the program for that?”
“Better safe than sorry. Type ‘login’ then a dash and ‘n root’”
$login -n root
Login incorrect
“No good.”
Yae exhales through her nose, thinking. “How about ‘backdoor’?”
“Would it really be that obvious?”
“It always depends on the programmer and if they left a password file with that name. ‘Simple but hardly ever easy’ is the name of the game in this profession, dear.”
“I’m glad that I just worked in security then,” she mumbles and types what she’s told.
No home directory specified in password file
Logging in with home=/
#
“I… think that worked? Sort of?”
“‘Good enough’ is another name of the game.”
“Now I’m really glad I worked security. So what next? There’s a hashtag in the command line now.”
“That’s fine. Type ‘bin-forward slash-history’.”
Sara does, then hits Enter. What follows makes her sputter out loud, “ Uh, alright now several things just appeared. Numbers from 488 to 502 and—Damn it, how would I read the rest of this out to you?”
“You’re doing extremely well, Sara, you pulled up the last fourteen tasks Ei had the computer perform. Deep breaths, then tell me what number 502 says, that’s the only one we need to focus on.”
She squints at the screen. “L-L-L-S-D-Laser control-dash-ok1. What does that—?”
Immediately she turns around to face the contraption sitting just behind her. Her stomach churns. And Miko, unaware of Sara’s sudden bout of uneasiness, continues, “Good, now type all of that with the same ‘hashtag-bin’ command at the beginning.”
Turning slowly, warily, back around she types and hits Enter.
In a blink of an eye, several lines of text flood the window, faster than she can even begin to process what’s being said to her. But just as quick is the appearance of a single Confirmation Alert window:
Aperture Clear? <Yes> <No>
“What does ‘aperture clear, yes or no’ mean, Miko?” she asks, her voice smaller than before.
“I...” She can practically hear the gears grinding to a halt in Miko’s head. “I don’t know. Aperture, aperture… it, uh, it usually means a hole or opening of some kind for light to enter through. It’s a photography term.”
“Okay... So am I looking for a camera?”
“Or lens, more specifically.”
Again, Sara’s attention falls onto the unknown contraption. “Do...I say yes?”
“Are there any other windows on the screen to interact with, or any way to keep using the command interface?”
Sara tries to tap at the screen, and when that didn’t do anything she began to type randomly. Again, the screen remains unchanged. “Nothing.”
A noise sounds in the back of Yae’s throat, displeasure and hesitation. “I don’t like this, Sara.”
“This is what Ei did last,” she tries to reason, though her leg unconsciously begins to shake. “It’s the most information we’ve gotten about what happened to her in five years. The message must’ve wanted us to find this, it has to be. I...”
She swallows down the persistent anxiety rising like bile in her throat. “I want to see this through. For Ei.”
“...Okay.” Yae eventually concedes. “Okay. But if something happens that isn’t a new window or interface opening, you get out of that room immediately and wait for me to get down there myself. You hear me?”
“I do. I will.”
“Alright.”
“Alright... here goes nothing.”
With the <Yes> option already highlighted, Sara taps her pointer finger down on the Enter key—
For a final time.
***
The sounds of a machine’s whirring fans and electrical pulses firing up fills the speaker of Yae’s phone. For a moment, it becomes too much that she has to pull it away from her ear. But there is no reprieve from her deafening heartbeat that’s already thundering in them.
When it seems as though the noises have quieted, Yae brings the phone back to her ear. “Sara? What the hell was that? What did it do?”
The waning noise of the fans powering down answers her.
“S-Sara?”
Silence.
Her hand that had been fidgeting nervously with the hem of her dress shirt the entire phone call flies up to rake through her hair, pulling a fistful of it until her scalp burns. “Kujou Sara, I swear to god— answer me!”
She doesn’t care that her outburst turned some heads in the office, nor does she care when concerned murmurs begin to fall from the lips of her employees. None of that matters. Only the fact that when the silence persists, a sob tears its way out of Yae’s throat. No. Please, no.
There’s a part of her mind, forged and conditioned by the years of Ei’s absence, that wants to curl up in the middle of the hallway and cry—a prologue into what will be yet another period of mourning. I shouldn’t have let her do it, she laments with another sob. I shouldn’t have let her go there alone. Just like she shouldn’t have let Ei go alone.
But then, another part of her grief-addled mind rears its head, a part that is fiery hot with rage. Whereas before, there was no answer, nothing to point her blame. Now she does, and with it comes a resounding conviction:
No. No. No . This isn’t happening. Not again.
“I’m fine,” she says at the encroaching crowd of worried colleagues, her voice just on the cusp of a bark. Thankfully, her secretary is amongst them and she immediately addresses her, “Clear my schedule, there’s a family emergency that requires my immediate attention.”
She doesn’t wait for confirmation of understanding or reminder regarding the meeting that she had just been in the middle of, they hardly matter. Yae storms down the hallway towards her office, one that she used to share with Ei. Her nameplate is still perched on the desk that is sequestered on one side of the room while Yae’s sat on the other.
She rummages through her desk, digging and digging through the bottom drawer filled with loose documents and cords belonging to some device or other. When she reaches the bottom, a single thumbdrive sits innocuously among the wires. A strip of old masking tape that covers one side is scrawled with her handwriting, bearing the name, “Sakura.” She clutches it tightly in her palm like it’s a lifeline, and it damn well may be.
Finally, after five years, she has a culprit for Ei’s disappearance and now, Sara’s. If this really is all related to The Plane then...
“Sara,” she speaks into the ongoing phone call, “if you can hear me, I’m coming. And I’m going to do what I can. I just hope that it will be enough.”
She ends the call and brings the hand clutching Sakura’s flash drive up, pressing it against her lips with her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Don’t you let me down,” she pleads into her fist.
With that, she gathers the rest of her things and rushes out of the office with the memorized route to the old Raiden Corp. office building already playing behind her eyes.
***
Vertigo isn’t a sensation foreign to Sara. She thrives on the back of a motorcycle where no speed is fast enough to frighten her, and in a plane there’s no height that can sway her fascination with the open sky. But those are times where vertigo is expected.
Sitting down at a dusty computer desk entering lines of commands that might as well be in another language is not one of those times vertigo should be felt.
But sure enough, as soon as her finger pushed the Enter key, that telltale sensation of weightlessness that rocks the very foundation of her body shoots through her nerves like a bullet. And with the speed of one, it ends just as quickly before she could properly process what had just happened.
She gasps and chokes on her startled inhale and suddenly finds her eyes trying to adjust to the dimmer lighting around her. Whipping her head around the office, she finds it completely barren. Its contraptions, its photos, its codes pertaining to The Plane—all gone.
“What the—? Miko, I don’t know what that did but there’s nothing here now. Miko?”
She looks down at the desk where she had left her phone on speaker but it’s missing. Looking under the desk, she finds nothing. Not even the layers of dust.
What?
Thunder roars overhead, kicking her heart into overdrive so hard that she practically leapt out of the chair where the need to leave the old building is back in full force. Thunder? But there were no storms forecasted.
She sprints back up the stair steps two at a time, hardly having the wherewithal to pause and wonder why the rest of the office interior is also suddenly devoid of its plastic covered desks or that the dango milk machine that led her into the basement in the first place was now just a regular door. All that passes through her mind is getting the hell out through the front entrance.
This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening—
The doors clatter open from her brutal shove and she runs out onto the empty streets. Instead of her eyes being assaulted by the rays of a sunset, she instead stares wide eyed at the unexpected onslaught of purple and red neon lights stretching on for as far as she can see. City skyscrapers, dark in their silhouettes loomed proud and powerful in the distance. The other buildings that have surrounded the old Raiden Corp. headquarters for years are familiar and yet so clearly and utterly not.
Where am I?
A blast of whirring air that sounds like a dozen jet planes fills her ears, the intensity of which practically slams her square in the chest. A spotlight trains itself on her in a blinding flash before she could recover. Instinctively, her arms raise in surrender as her mind is too busy reeling with her uncanny surroundings to even question why a police surveillance helicopter would be after her.
But as moments pass and she squints past the white light, she doesn’t see a helicopter at all. Rather, it’s an aircraft that shouldn’t even be able to exist , let alone fly. Square in its overall shape, the top of it is a windowed cockpit attached with two symmetrical prongs that curve inwards at the end like landing gears. As it touches down on the ground, the cockpit lowers like an elevator down the sides and a separate platform detaches from the bottom.
Two uniformed individuals, clad in black jumpsuits trimmed with the same neon red that lights the city, step off the platform and march up to her in perfect synchronized strides. Too stunned to even move, Sara could only stare as they take her roughly by the arms. One of them looks at her back and declares in a distorted, reverberating voice, “This one’s missing a disc. Another rogue program.”
Finally, her mind catches up with the present. “Wait, stop,” she protests uselessly as they drag along her towards the platform where several other individuals, all of them dressed in the same black uniforms except these are glowing with purple light, are kept locked in place.
She struggles and thrashes but their grips never once falter. “I’m not a program!”
Her words fall on deaf ears as she’s thrown back-first into the line up where red clamps affix against her boots and wrists, trapping her completely in place. The two guards return to their posts, upright pods where only their heads are visible and the impossible aircraft takes flight.
The winds whip her hair wildly in all directions, but nothing could impede the absolutely breathtaking sight of the cyber metropolis before her. Several other neon red aircrafts dot the dark sky, traveling to and from what is undoubtedly the city’s centerpiece. This place that she’s found herself in, it can only be one thing.
“She actually did it,” Sara breathes. Ei’s magnum opus of Raiden Corp. “I’m in The Plane.”