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Trying to open a boundary between two planetary bodies was a tricky proposition at the best of times.
At the moment, there were bullets flying overhead. As far as Maribel was concerned, this was decidedly a bad time by any reasonable metric.
It all stood in sharp contrast to the scenery around them. The landscape was breathtaking. Behind her were rolling hills carpeted with lush grass and studded with groves of peach trees. In front of her, a sea lapped at the shore. The water reflected the most vibrant sky that she’d ever seen, with the Earth hanging near the apex. Apart from the half-dozen rifle-toting rabbits trying to kill them, it was a beautiful night on the moon.
The bullets they were firing weren’t exactly normal, either. They were some kind of inexplicably bullet-shaped bundles of energy, glowing from within. Every time one whizzed past, its brightly-colored light flooded the area.
Which was part of the problem here. Maribel turned her attention back down to the sea. The water was so clear that it almost looked fake, like CGI from an old movie. The Earth’s reflection floated on its surface, shimmering with every ripple. Clearing her mind, she concentrated on the reflection and started to pick through its boundaries. Somewhere in there was the one that would lead them back home.
Just as she was making some progress, though, another bullet flew by. Its harsh orange light flooded the area, gleaming from the water’s surface and momentarily scouring the reflection from view. The boundaries slipped through her fingers like the pieces of a crumbling puzzle. Back to square one.
Behind her, she could hear Renko spring up and take a few potshots with the weird moon rabbit rifle she’d picked up somewhere. Their assailants ducked back into cover, and the barrage of bullets quieted down for a moment. It didn’t last. Within seconds, another bullet zipped by.
“How’s it going?” Renko called back, raising her voice to be heard over the constant patter of gunfire.
“All these flashes keep ruining the reflection! I don’t know if I’m going to be able to open the boundary while they’re shooting.”
“Right, u-um…” Renko peeked up over the edge of the hill. Their attackers responded with a fresh hail of bullets. She ducked back down. “If I can pin them down for like twenty seconds, do you think that would do it?”
“I don’t know! Maybe? Do you even have enough ammo for that?”
“Um. Well. I’m not actually sure how to check. I don’t even see any way to reload this thing.”
“That isn’t inspiring a lot of confidence...”
“It’ll be fine. Imagine how embarrassing it’d be if I died to bunnies. Not gonna happen.” Renko shot her a shaky grin. “Ready?”
Maribel took a deep breath to steady herself. Before she’d even exhaled it, a bullet clipped the hillside above them, sending a spray of loose dirt tumbling down. Tranquility just wasn’t going to happen right now.
“I guess.”
“Right… here goes.”
“Renko, be caref—!”
But Renko had already leapt to her feet again. As soon as she raised the rifle, she unleashed a steady, deafening barrage of her own. The air was filled with a tinny pew pew that sounded like it came from an old sci-fi movie, paired with the blue strobe light flashes of her bullets. Her body blocked much of the light, though, casting a long shadow behind her. Rushing back to the water’s edge, Maribel found that the Earth’s reflection was left intact, if constantly vibrating from the racket of Renko’s gunshots. Better yet, the return fire dried up, as their assailants dove back into cover.
Seemed like this was the best chance she was going to get. Maribel frowned down at the water in concentration, extending her hands. In her sight, the Earth’s reflection dissolved into something far more complex, like an autostereogram in reverse. The boundaries folded outward, and she started shoving her way through them, like an explorer hacking her way through a jungle. It wasn’t like they had labels or anything, either. Each one left a lingering sense, like a flavor, which she needed a moment to identify. The boundary between Wet vs. Dry wasn’t going to be any use here. Nor was Up vs. Down, or Substance vs. Void…
Behind her, the rate of Renko’s shots started slowing down. In the pauses between shots, she could hear shouted orders for the rabbits to return fire. A few bullets flashed through the air above her.
“Merry! I think the gun’s almost dead…!”
Maribel pursed her lips and started digging through the boundaries even faster, grabbing only fleeting impressions of each one and trusting that she’d recognize her target when she saw it. It was an entire assault of its own, phantasmal senses flooding her mind with information that no other human could even perceive, let alone process. Land vs. Air, Light vs. Heavy, Illusion vs. Reality…
There.
There wasn’t any time for subtlety. Maribel plunged her hand into the lake, snatched that last boundary, and wrenched it open.
The lake’s surface peeled apart to reveal the comfortingly familiar light-polluted Kyoto sky.
The air was pierced by an explosive sizzling sound, like a cup of water dumped onto a hot skillet.
Renko hissed in pain, and the rifle clattered to the ground.
“I’m fine, Merry. Really.”
Renko didn’t look fine. Her left arm was hanging in a sling. She’d needed to roll up the sleeve of her blouse, making room for the slim metal plate that was laying along her forearm. At its ends, two pins pierced Renko’s flesh to hold it in place. Underneath its center, a patch the size of her hand covered the side of her arm. The patch concealed Renko’s wound, protecting it from the elements and providing nutrients for the mending flesh.
There was a lot to mend. The bullet… laser… thing had drilled a clean hole through her arm. On its way through, it had severed her ulnar nerve, grazed an artery, and evaporated a chunk of bone. Some fairly important stuff. Maribel hadn’t gotten to hear everything that the doctors had to tell Renko, but she’d heard enough. Like the part about how, even a decade ago, medical technology might not have been able to fully repair the nerve. Or how she still would have suffered permanent tissue damage if she’d gone another thirty minutes or so without treatment.
If Renko was okay, it was because she was lucky, not because the injury was trivial.
“You still don’t need to exert yourself! I can make the tea.” To make sure that Renko couldn’t argue, Maribel rose to her feet and headed toward the kitchenette. “I’ve done it before, even.”
They’d met in Renko’s apartment today—one of the few concessions that Renko was willing to make for her injury. Maribel hadn’t visited too often, but she still knew her way around well enough for this much. Renko only had cheap teabags, but they’d be good enough for now. Maybe she’d use this as an excuse to gift her some fancier tea later.
“Personally, I’m just annoyed I dropped that gun,” Renko said. With only a low wall between the kitchenette and the rest of the apartment, there wasn’t much obstacle to continuing the conversation. “Can you imagine how much we could learn if we studied it?”
“Are you sure you didn’t just think it was cool?”
“That too. But thinking about those bullets has really been bugging me. What were they even made of? They moved too slowly to be purely electromagnetic. Plasma, maybe? But then how’d they keep them in that shape…?”
“Mmhm.” Maribel’s heart wasn’t in the speculative banter at the moment.
“Still, though. It feels kind of crazy, doesn’t it? We found a civilization on the moon, and the only evidence we brought back is a hole in my arm. I guess we’ll have to make a return trip with a video camera next time, huh?”
“After all of that, you want to go back?”
“I mean. It’s a civilization. On the moon!” Renko repeated. Excited, she started to give a broad gesture, only to wince in pain the second that her broken arm twitched. It didn’t slow her down for long. “We can’t ignore something like that, right? It’s the kind of thing we could spend our whole lives studying. Besides, the rabbits didn’t seem aggressive or anything when we first saw them. They only started pulling out their guns when that lady shouted at them. If she hadn’t been there, it would have been fine.”
“Maybe they’re always being overseen by a lady, though.”
“Hmm. Yeah, maybe. Do you think moon rabbits like the same treats as normal rabbits? Maybe if we brought them the right snacks, we could win them over. There has to be some way around it…”
As Renko continued verbalizing her fantasy about pacifying an army of rabbitgirls and documenting the moon in detail, Maribel’s attention was pulled away by a sharp click from the electric kettle. After grabbing two cups, she dropped a teabag in each of them, then filled them up with water.
No sugar cubes or milk to be found, though. She considered asking Renko, but decided against it. Renko didn’t need one more thing troubling her right now.
When she stepped back into the living room, Renko was still going. “… has to be something we could barter with. The moon’s supposed to have pretty low levels of some elements, isn’t it? Maybe if we—oh, thank you.”
After handing Renko’s cup off, she settled into her own seat. “Besides, the doctors said that you should avoid any strenuous activity for two or three months while you heal, right? So we’re not going back to the moon anytime soon.”
“Well. Hmm. If we could pacify the rabbits, it isn’t like we’d need to run or anything…”
Maribel shot Renko a look that made her trail off mid-sentence.
“I was kidding! I was kidding. Mostly.” Renko sighed, then blew on her tea before continuing, “I guess you’re right, though. I hadn’t thought about it like that. Two months without doing any field investigations… I’m bored just thinking about it. If it takes three months, I’ll be a broken husk of a woman by the end.”
“Sounds serious.”
“Good thing I’m dating a psychologist, huh?”
“Sorry, but I’m in the wrong subdiscipline to help you with things like that.”
“Huh. What does your major let you do for me, then?”
“Well… if we had access to a diffusion MRI setup, I could probably show you exactly how your brain translates the experience of tasting tea from an abstract series of chemical triggers into a recognizable sensation.”
“Bleh. I’ll pass. No offense, but that sounds pretty boring.”
“It’s just as well. I didn’t bring a single MRI machine with me today. What I can do, though, is visit you every day, help you out around the apartment, and keep you company. How’s that for a boredom treatment?”
“Hmm. Will there be cuddles?”
“Your treatment plan calls for thirty to ninety minutes of them a day, as needed,” Maribel said, quite seriously. “I happen to be a recognized expert in the field, so I volunteered. Pretty convenient, huh?”
Renko chuckled and sank back into her seat. “Anyway. If I’m going to be stuck inside all day anyway, I guess we could maybe work on some of our, uh, more rigorous indoor experiments?”
Maribel eyed Renko. She could see that she was going to be operating on a very liberal interpretation of her instructions to rest. But, she had to admit, most experiments weren’t physically exerting. If Renko was this antsy to do something, it wasn’t a bad compromise.
“If that’s what you want to do…”
‘More rigorous indoor experiments’ was Renko’s polite way of saying ‘the boring kind of experiments that we can do without leaving the house.’ She might have been a physicist, but when given the choice between doing formal scientific lab work vs. going on an outing to look for ghosts, she’d pick the latter every time.
They’d proposed dozens of them over the years, mostly mid-conversation, and mostly related to their strange abilities. If blurring the line between illusion and reality let Maribel open a gateway to the moon, what would happen if she used it on a mirror or a television? What would happen if Maribel used her abilities to remove quantifiable physical properties from an object, and then those properties were measured? Did Maribel’s abilities produce detectable amounts of EM radiation? Could they?
These experiments admittedly tended to involve Maribel’s abilities a lot more than Renko’s. There were only so many ways to exercise the ability to determine the current time and coordinates, and Renko already used most of them on a weekly basis.
“Okay,” Renko said, walking out of her bedroom. She crouched down and placed a red rubber ball on the coffee table. “This is a simple one. You mentioned one time that when you looked at a ball hard enough, you noticed a boundary between Round and Flat.”
“Right…”
“So, at the time we were wondering what would happen if you moved the ball over to the Flat side.”
“You’d end up with a flat ball, wouldn’t you…? That seems pretty straightforward.”
“I think we were arguing about what that would look like. Like, do you get a perfectly circular patch with the same diameter as the ball itself? Do you get a bigger circle containing the ball’s full mass spread out? How thick would it be if you pushed it to maximum Flat? That kinda thing.”
“Huh… well, should I give it a shot, then?”
“Might as well. If it does something interesting, we can always get a new ball and record the second one.”
“Sure. Here goes.”
Maribel took a deep breath and tried to clear her head. It wasn’t really necessary. This didn’t require her to meditate or anything. Seeing boundaries was a thing her eyes just did. But, today she was doing it with an audience. It felt important to have a sense of ceremony about these things when Renko was watching. If nothing else, it helped to distract her from worrying about how goofy she probably looked from Renko’s perspective—bent over and staring intently at a mundane object, waving her hands around as she interacted with invisible phenomena…
She locked her eyes onto the ball, centering it in her awareness. The boundaries rose around it like a cloud of smoke. Individual wisps of its nature drifted in and out of focus. One by one, she sifted through the nebulous collection of them, until her target came into sight: the boundary between Round and Flat.
Maribel reached out to adjust it. Her fingers pushed past dozens of other boundaries, which brushed along her skin like thin veils of silk. At the last second, though, figurative millimeters away from contact… she stopped. Her brain clamped down on the thought process, refusing to take that final step. Her hand was left hanging in the air, her fingers twitching in indecision.
There was a shaky, unclean feeling in her stomach. She tried to ignore it. Turning her attention back to the ball, she reached out again. This time, she could feel the anxiety welling within her as she drew closer. Once more, she tried to tweak its boundaries. And once more, she flinched away just before contact.
It was like trying to convince herself to stick her hand into an open flame. Consciously deciding to do it was a necessary part of the process, but not sufficient. Other layers of her mind had dug in their heels and refused to cooperate.
Her abilities had always come with risks. In her younger years, they’d been too weak to do much, but she’d still managed to break a toy or two in some existentially-troubling ways. She’d had her terrifying sleep forays into other worlds, of course. More recently, there had been the incident on the TORIFUNE, followed by the unsettling images she’d seen when locked in the sanatorium. But more important than all of those, there was the incident just two days earlier…
The smell of burnt flesh was suddenly fresh in her mind. Bile tickled at the back of her throat, and she forced herself to swallow it.
Her powers had caused problems for herself before, but this was different. Now they’d come for Renko. Renko, whose presence was often the only thing making her glimpses of other worlds bearable in the first place…
“… Merry? Merry? Hey, are you okay?”
Maribel looked up from the ball, wide-eyed, as her thoughts returned to the present moment.
“Oh. Um.”
“You look kinda pale…”
Maribel shook her head. “I’m fine.”
Renko didn’t look convinced. She leaned forward, reaching out to brush Maribel’s hair back with her good hand. “Are you sure? You looked like you were about to throw up. And, I mean. I just mopped in here like six months ago, which is pretty recent by my standards. I’d rather you didn’t.”
Beneath the jokes, Maribel could make out legitimate concern in Renko’s voice. She shook her head again, but this time she tried pairing it with a soft smile. “Sorry, my abilities just… aren’t working today, I guess. Trying to force it didn’t feel very good. Maybe we can try tomorrow?”
All through the next day, Maribel vacillated between trying to keep her mind off of the whole affair around Renko’s arm, and way, way overthinking it.
Putting it logically, of course, her abilities were only indirectly related to Renko’s misfortunes. She’d taken Renko to the moon, but that hadn’t guaranteed that anything bad would happen. If Renko hadn’t stepped out to greet that group of rabbits, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten into a fight in the first place. If Renko hadn’t been so reckless when it came to trying to drive the rabbits off at the end, maybe she would have made it out in one piece. Ultimate responsibility lay with the rabbit who’d shot her. Maribel had only helped her get into the situation in the first place.
And yet… if Maribel hadn’t been there, or hadn’t used her boundary powers that night, there was no way that the situation would have ever happened. Renko would have stayed on Earth, where rabbits hardly ever shot anyone.
The What Ifs cut both ways, too. If Maribel had run a bit more quickly on their visit to the TORIFUNE, maybe Renko would have gotten injured instead of her. If so, if Renko had been the one to get sick with an alien infection, maybe she would have succumbed to it. If, some night, Renko was the one to get teleported to a youkai-haunted forest instead of her, maybe Renko would get eaten by youkai, when Maribel herself had always squeaked out an escape.
Maribel’s abilities had now sent both of them to the hospital on different occasions, and maybe this was what it looked like when they were lucky.
By the time that classes ended and she headed to Renko’s apartment, she felt like she’d been awake for a few days and subsisting on coffee the entire time.
“Hey.” Renko greeted her at the door with a kiss on the cheek. “Ah, darn. I was gonna scoop you up and pack you inside, but I just remembered my arm’s broken. Horrible timing, huh?”
Maribel stepped past her, taking Renko’s hand and lightly pulling her along. Feeling Renko’s warm, solid, living hand was a nice antidote to the images of horror that had been playing in her head all day.
“Could you even do that with two arms?”
“Hey, I’ve lifted you before.”
“That was for about a two-meter trip, and your legs were shaking the whole time…”
“Ouch. Well, I thought it was romantic.” Renko flopped down on the couch, pulling Maribel down to sit alongside her. “… want to give that experiment with the ball another shot? If you’re feeling up to it, I mean. I was thinking that if we got it out of the way early, we could go out for dinner and maybe take a walk before dark.”
Maribel immediately felt her last few scraps of serenity slip away, replaced with anxious tension.
“… if you’re feeling up to it,” Renko repeated. “We don’t even have to do any experiments today if you’d rather just relax.”
“No. No. Let’s… let’s give it a try.”
The ball was still sitting on Renko’s coffee table. Maribel leaned forward and turned her attention toward it. Already, in the back of her mind, she knew that this wasn’t going to work. Her nausea was even worse than the previous day, and she had to clench her hands to stop them from shaking.
She tried anyway. She told herself not to rush it this time. The boundaries spread out in her vision, and like an ambush predator, she simply waited for her target to drift into view. It didn’t take long. As luck would have it, the boundary between Flat and Round caught her attention within seconds.
Maribel’s hand had barely even twinged in place before it stopped moving. Grabbing the boundary was out of the question. It was suddenly hard to even look toward the ball, and the framework of boundaries that she’d unfolded collapsed back in on itself. One of the many scenarios that she’d envisioned flashed through her mind: Renko, pale and curled up in a hospital bed, trying bravely to smile as she wasted away from a mysterious space pathogen.
She looked up. Right now Renko, the real article, wasn’t smiling. She looked pretty worried, actually.
Maribel shot her an unconvincing smile of her own. “Why don’t we get dinner first?”
“I want to try the experiment again.”
It was four days after their trip to the moon. They’d been sitting around Renko’s apartment for an hour now, and Renko hadn’t so much as mentioned the experiment. She’d even removed the ball from her coffee table—out of sight, out of mind.
At Maribel’s declaration, Renko shot her an uncertain glance. “… are you sure? Those last two times seemed pretty hard on you.”
Maribel wasn’t sure. Of course she wasn’t. At this point, though, it had very little to do with the spirit of scientific inquiry, and a whole lot to do with her desire to get it over with. As long as the experiment went unfinished, it would be hanging over her head. She was going to have to get back in the swing of using her abilities sooner or later, anyway. If she couldn’t get herself to use them on a rubber ball, how was she ever going to apply them to something like going to the moon again?
“I’m sure, yeah. I promise I won’t even throw up on your floor.”
“That isn’t actually what I was worried about…”
Still, when Maribel showed no sign of backing down, Renko got up and walked over to a cabinet in the corner. When she returned, she was idly rolling the ball in her palm.
She hesitated next to the table. “If you start feeling bad or something, just stop right there, okay? This isn’t worth making you miserable.”
“I will,” Maribel lied.
Renko shot her a concerned look, but didn’t protest further. After sitting the ball on the table, she sank back into her seat. Maribel turned her attention to the ball and started the now strangely familiar process of trying to flatten it.
She unfolded the boundaries, reached out for one, and jerked back just before contact. She tried again, and failed again. And again. And again.
“Merry? You’re shaking.”
Maribel didn’t even acknowledge the comment, as she threw herself into her attempts to get the boundaries around the ball to budge. It was silly. She’d done this sort of thing hundreds of times before. She’d been doing it on some level since before she was old enough to read. Why should it be so hard now?
Well… she did know why. Renko, hunched over with a hand clamped on her forearm, blood drooling to the ground and acrid smoke wafting up between her fingers. Renko, leaning on Maribel’s shoulder and half-delirious from pain, as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. A dozen snapshots from that night were etched into her mind, and while the scenery of the moon was already fading in her memories, the sound of Renko whimpering in pain as she tried not to cry was going to be haunting her for years.
Maribel locked her eyes onto the ball, but even her ability to see the boundaries was faltering now. They blurred in and out of view, defying her attempts to control which ones she was viewing. Occasionally they flickered out of sight altogether, leaving her staring at a perfectly mundane ball.
She was starting to panic. Sure, her boundary abilities had caused some issues over the years. If they failed entirely, though, what did that mean for her? They were the thing that made her special. They were what had originally had brought her and Renko together, and the basis for half of their club activities. If she lost them, would they lose their strongest link to the supernatural? Worse than that, if she lost them, would Renko get bored of her? She wasn’t so pessimistic to think that Renko was only interested in her for her abilities, but Renko was a vibrant person with so many interests, and even on her best days Maribel sometimes doubted whether she deserved—
Renko grabbed her wrist and gave it a firm tug, interrupting that train of thought.
“Merry.” Renko’s voice was firm. “That’s enough, okay?”
Maribel blinked, as her vision returned to purely mundane dimensions. After being so deep in thought, she was left a bit dazed.
Once she was sure that Maribel wasn’t going to jump back into the experiment, Renko released Maribel’s hand, stroking the back of it with her fingertips instead. “… how about we take a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you.”
Maribel wasn’t sure where Renko intended to go. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of options. There were several parks within walking distance, and long walkways on the banks of the Kamo River. Going a bit farther, there was the garden around the former Imperial Palace, and any number of shrines or temples.
It turned out, they weren’t going far at all. Once they were outside, Renko turned around and led the way along the outer wall of her apartment building.
Sometime during the decades of neo-environmentalism, several surrounding buildings had been torn down, their residents moved to new, higher-capacity apartment complexes, while the newly-vacated land was used to plant forests. ‘Forest,’ of course, was a highly subjective term here. These weren’t wild, untamed spaces, but small patches of greenery that were manicured to fit human tastes.
Even from afar, Maribel could tell that this one fit the profile of dozens of others that she’d seen. It covered a few blocks at most. The trees within represented only a handful of species, and if she studied the spacing of the trunks, she could tell that they’d been planted in a grid pattern. Thanks to intensive genetic engineering, they could outcompete any underbrush that might try to spring up around them, so only grass grew on the ground. It wasn’t dissimilar to the pristine scenery they’d seen on the moon, really. The most unnatural nature ever conceived, engineered and arranged into what was effectively a giant outdoor art installation. There were even persistent rumors that every one of these groves held one or two purely artificial trees that served as monitoring stations.
Still, Renko headed into it. Thanks the lack of underbrush, her path was unobstructed beyond the need to duck beneath a branch now and then. About fifty meters in, she veered to the right and continued.
“This is an interesting choice for a walk…” Maribel said. “Is this a shortcut?”
“You’ll see.”
Maribel had to admit, her curiosity was piqued now. “If this is just another tree that kind of looks like it has a human face on the side, I’m never forgiving you, you know.”
“That was just one time! Besides, there were credible sources saying that somebody’s soul had been trapped in it.”
“Are there really any ‘credible’ sources that say things like that…?”
Renko ignored her and kept walking. They didn’t have to go much farther, really. As they headed down a hillside, a change in scenery came into view. At the bottom of the slope was a small hollow, and it was the one place where the vegetation wasn’t uniform. Instead of evenly-spaced trees, there was a patch of bamboo a few meters wide, with fresh shoots around the edges.
As they drew closer, Maribel could make out more details. The bamboo grew in a meandering band, loosely fencing in a small area. It was thinner on this side, and Renko led the way into it, weaving between stalks. Finally, they reached the center, and their apparent destination: a clearing a few meters across, which had been turned into a small garden.
Smaller plants lined the ground. Quite a few of them were flowering, giving the area lively splashes of color. In their center was a knee-high sapling, its spindly branches peppered with fresh, tender leaves. The sun shined down on it all in mottled patches, filtered through the bamboo overhead. The flowers had been scattered around without much consideration or artistry, but here in this too-orderly forest, Maribel found it a refreshing change of pace.
“So,” Renko said. “What do you think?”
“It’s pretty… what is it, though?”
Clearly Renko had been waiting for this question. She grinned and crouched next to the patch so she could point out the individual items. “Well, remember those little pieces of bamboo you brought back from your dream that one time? I thought it would be fun to plant them and see if we could try actual bamboo shoots sometime. Then I remembered that we’d taken a few cuttings from those trees in the Netherworld too, but they’d ended up just sitting in a flowerpot by my window. So at that point I was committed, you know? I’ve tried to grab some seeds or seedlings whenever we go to another world. It hasn’t always worked out, but...”
“Huh.”
Maribel knelt down next to Renko, looking over the assorted flowers. They formed a riotous, unorganized collection. Among the ones in bloom, there was some kind of violet lily so vibrant that it almost hurt to look at, something she was pretty sure was lily-of-the-valley, a still-small camellia, and several more that she couldn’t even start to identify.
“Did some of these come from the TORIFUNE?”
“Oh, yeah. A lot of them, really. Even with you getting attacked, we got a whole box of samples.”
“So this one…?” Maribel gestured to a flower with spiralling petals in an almost-neon lavender, which dangled beneath it like jellyfish tentacles.
“Yeah, I tried looking it up and didn’t find anything.”
“Introducing mutant space flowers into the ecosystem… I bet ecologists would hate you.”
“Some of them are kinda strange, but I don’t think they’re invasive? I mean, even if they’re mutants, they’re still descended from normal flowers, right? There’s one that I could swear moves around every few days, though.”
“Huh…” Maribel cupped the nearest flower in her hand, brushing her fingers along its delicate petals. “So why did you do it? No offense, but you’ve never seemed like much of a gardener. Apart from the weird ones, there isn’t a lot we can learn from most of these, right?”
“I just wanted to, I guess. Well. Ehe. Okay, I was also thinking that maybe I could make you a bouquet from them sometime. Like… a big collection of reminders of all the places we’ve been together. You know? Shame I couldn’t get anything from the moon...”
“You still want a reminder of the moon, after all of that?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, it was still incredibly cool, right?”
Maribel’s gaze turned back toward Renko’s wounded arm, still held together with metal so her bones would heal correctly. Leave it to Renko to simplify a life-or-death encounter with the supernatural to ‘it was incredibly cool.’ With that, though, she turned her attention back to the flower in her hand.
She pulled it closer and gave it a sniff. A soft, fruity scent. Really, the longer that she spent here, the more aware she was that the whole area was suffused with a subtle mixture of floral smells. With the bamboo wall around it, she could almost pretend that they were in the wilderness, not one of the largest cities in the country.
Next, one of the lilies caught her attention. A few of its blooms were starting to fade, soon to shrivel up into seeds. After a moment’s consideration, she carefully snapped one off, then tucked it into place behind an ear.
She turned back to Renko, tilting her head to draw attention to it. “How do I look?”
“Pretty as always. I mean, don’t get me wrong. At least ten percent prettier than usual.”
“Only ten percent?”
“You’re just that pretty to begin with.”
With a soft smile, Maribel looked out over the little flower garden again. The budding cherry tree did bring back nice memories, she had to admit. It wasn’t flowering yet, but something about its current dainty appearance still reminded her of its ancestors that they’d seen in the Netherworld. The outing had left them with more questions than answers, but she couldn’t deny that it had been pleasant—an endless, placid landscape, cloaked in mist and with cherry trees as far as the eye could see.
The TORIFUNE trip had been dangerous, of course, but the flowers stirred memories of their time before the attack, floating weightlessly through a forest that had never been seen by human eyes. Even reflecting on the bamboo wasn’t a purely negative experience. She’d spent entire nights running from youkai in her dreams, sure. Others, though, had been spent nibbling cookies in an elegant mansion, or playing with children.
More than that, though… now she knew that such places existed. With that knowledge, how could she not investigate them? She’d already discussed post-university plans with Renko, and they’d both agreed: they couldn’t just forget what they’d seen and settle into routine lives working in an office. However much grief the supernatural had brought her, the idea of completely ignoring it felt even worse.
She sighed out some tension and breathed in another lungful of floral-scented air. “This is beautiful. Thank you.”
“Sure. Sorry to spoil the surprise early, but you seemed like you could use a pick-me-up.”
Maribel shook her head. “It didn’t spoil anything. I’ll still be expecting that bouquet eventually, though. Maybe with some chocolates?”
“You got it, ma’am.”
Maribel tittered, then rose to standing. “Mmh…” She arched her back, working out a bit of stiffness from being hunched over for a few minutes. “How about we head back and try that experiment again? I get the feeling it’s going to work this time.”