Screams and silence. Their dreadful contrast choking the air. Which had come first? Both. Neither. Each followed the other. A symmetrical circle of dissonance and quietus. No beginning. No end. Not any more. The monochrome cycle of hollow midnight and distant lightning. Around and around. Around her throat. Choking her. Crushing pressure. Weight on her breast. Weight on her heart. Weight in her legs. Silence and screams. And laughter.
"Excuse me?"
This voice, unexpected and unfamiliar, came from somewhere else, somewhere distant, and it was a moment before Midori realised the tall woman standing before her – standing over her – had spoken. Her head lifted, an involuntary motion that brought her startled gaze into alignment with eyes of polished amethyst. "I'm sorry," the stranger continued, "but do you have the time?" Her voice was quiet, almost lost in the surrounding din, and seemed both to complement and contradict her stature and statuesque beauty. Dark green hair fringed a face of marble elegance and cascaded in a jade waterfall to her knees, dazzling against the cloud-white silk of her cocktail dress. Older than Midori, she was nonetheless still young, perhaps even a fellow teenager, and yet some unplumbed depth in those orchid eyes suggested otherwise. They possessed a knowing keenness, the gift of perspicacity awarded solely to the wise. Within their grip, Midori was momentarily and unequivocally certain that this paradoxical woman knew everything. She shook her head once, breaking their hold and answering the woman's lingering question in one. Muttering an apology of her own, she turned and walked away into the crowd, pulling her cloak tighter about her as she went.
The summer sun, reluctant to end another perfect day on the Tokyo coast, had finally truckled to its daily duty and retreated to the horizon. As the moon took its place, beginning its nightly shift at the top of the world, so too was the party at the manor house on the hilltop below getting underway. A hundred guests came close to filling its stately ballroom, their ebony suits and lustrous dresses vivid against the white pine of the walls and the chestnut hardwood underfoot. The mingled sounds of their confabulation and laughter floated up to the ornate and enormous chandelier, a fluorescent crystalline flower absorbing casual conversation through osmosis.
Midori knew she didn't belong here. She was an outsider among these beautiful, carefree people. That was not to say that she was not beautiful; far from it. Beneath the folds of her ragged hood, apple-green eyes shone from an oval face the colour of rich chocolate. Curly brunette hair, a shade darker than her skin, provided a perfect frame for her delicate features, and had her tiny, cherry-pink lips curved into the smallest of smiles she might have superseded, quite unintentionally, even the most glamorous of the glitterati present.
However, she was not smiling. Beautiful she might have been, but carefree she was not.
Stepping aside to avoid a bustling, black-clad waiter carrying a silver platter of food she did not recognise, Midori silently chastised herself. She had allowed the memories to envelop her again, had surrendered to them as she always did. Screams and silence and laughter. Every night, every day, every moment. She always gave in to them, gave them license to possess her, to shout and whisper and roar their discordant sonata in her ear.
She couldn't allow them to. Not now. Not when she'd come so far. Not when she was so close.
Almost successfully ignoring the half-suppressed sniggers of a pair of partygoers who prodded one another and pointed at her dress, or lack of one, Midori cast her eyes around the crowded auditorium. She couldn't see him. Not yet. But he was here. Of that she was certain. Swallowing the cold lump at the back of her throat and feeling it sink slowly into the pit of her stomach, she began to walk again. Her weary feet took her in no particular direction but away from the persistent snickering.
Then, alone in the crowd once more, she continued her search. Sekken was here, somewhere.
She would find him.