31 March
It's been three days since Yuuya found the card.
Three days without a trace of Yuzu. Three days of Shuzou wearing himself thin with frantic worry. Three days of Yuuya hiding behind his goggles.
Yoko has lost track of how many times she's cleaned the house over the last three days, just as restless as everyone else but doing her best to hide it. But the main outlet for Yoko's restless, worried energy is denied to her. With Yuuya upstairs (supposedly) sleeping, and Shuzou on the couch, head drooping in exhaustion, she can't do anything that would disturb them.
Shuzou hasn't said a word since the local news station aired a fresh appeal earlier. He hasn't touched the papers surrounding him, either. The phone stays stubbornly silent. It's like nobody knows a thing about what happened that day. Or if they do, nobody's coming forward.
There's a book in her hands. Her eyes keep sliding off the words, unable to take them in. She's read this page five times now.
The doorbell chimes.
Yoko closes the book and places it on the arm of her chair. She's hurrying towards the door before Shuzou has even registered the sound. Who could it be at this time of night?
Please. Please let it be good news.
She expected one of the police officers assigned to Yuzu's case. She doesn't expect Akaba Himika to be standing on her doorstep, at 11pm, with no sign of any LDS personnel accompanying her. Yoko glances from her to the pavement, as if a second look would reveal a van or some security detail, but there's nobody else.
Then she realises how rude she must seem. "I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting you, Akaba-san."
The businesswoman's eyes narrow and grow colder. "Just Himika shall do."
Yoko nods. "Himika-san," she says, partly for Shuzou's benefit; she can hear him shuffling through those papers in the front room. She steps to the side. "Please, come in," she says, taking the opportunity to glance at the pavement again when Himika moves past her into the house. She still sees nothing out of the ordinary, and that's what disturbs her. Did Himika come here alone? Why? She closes the door, still troubled, and follows Himika's footsteps to the front room.
Shuzou's papers are neatly stacked at one end of the coffee table, as is her book, and now he's awkwardly standing next to the couch, studying their unexpected guest. Both he and Himika look out of place. Shuzou is too tired and beaten-looking; Himika is too pristine. Yoko gestures for Shuzou to sit down, directs Himika towards the armchair, and joins Shuzou on the couch. A united front, she hopes, or as united as they can be.
The question bursts from Shuzou as soon as both women have settled: "Have you found anything?"
"Yes and no," Himika says, as though expecting such directness. It might be Yoko's imagination, but she sounds almost as tired as Yoko feels. "We are no closer to finding your daughter's exact whereabouts. We have, however, gained a better understanding of her last known movements from one of our own security cameras."
She pulls a tablet computer from her briefcase, and looks at them expectantly. After a pause – does he really want to see? does Yoko, for that matter? – Shuzou nods assent. Himika sets it up with deft, brisk movements, and presses the button for playback. Yuzu appears on the screen, tiny against the buildings around her. The shadow of the LDS building looms nearby. Yoko recognises the place; it's where Yuuya found Yuzu's card. Her throat burns as she watches how Yuzu stops running, suddenly, and takes two steps backwards, eyes fixed on a point they can't see. They watch how her head turns from side to side, her shoulders rising as though they're hackles; how she grabs, desperately, at her duel disk; how green light flares in preparation. Then the video abruptly freezes.
"Where's the rest of it," Shuzou demands. "That can't be all – what happened to her?"
Himika purses her lips and admits, in clipped frustration, "This is all we have. The feed was disabled."
"But you said that was an LDS camera," Yoko cuts in. "How..."
"How." The word sounds different when Himika says it. Darker. Menacing, almost. "The entire scenario was a sham. The duel between our students," she says, turning to Shuzou, "was not authorised by somebody with proper access clearances. I can only conclude that Hiiragi Yuzu was being targeted all along."
Yoko can't be hearing this right. She glances at Shuzou for backup, but he's still staring at the image of Yuzu and her activated duel disk, as if the video will start playing again if he only hopes hard enough, and doesn't seem to have heard a thing Himika has said.
Swallowing back what she'd very much like to say, Yoko looks at Himika in direct challenge. "Somebody within LDS was responsible," she says. It's not a question. It doesn't need to be a question. Not when Akaba Himika travelled here alone. Not with the information she's just shared.
Himika's silence is all the confirmation Yoko needs.
She lets out a single curse, with the same fervour and precision as she'd once done on the Pro stages. It startles Shuzou out of his stupor, and he stares at her in wide-eyed, weary shock. Himika studies her appraisingly.
Well. She hadn't meant to lose her composure like that, but if it defuses some of the tension in the room then she can't complain. "I should check on Yuuya," she says. "Do you want tea, Himika-san? Shuzou?"
For a moment Shuzou looks ready to refuse, the way he's sidestepped every offer of food since she dragged him from that too-empty house, that first night after Yuzu's disappearance. But, with a shaky sigh, he accepts. Himika follows suit. Politeness is the last refuge they can cling to right now.
Yoko readies things in the kitchen, then slips upstairs while the kettle is boiling. The door to her son's bedroom is ajar. Yuuya's sat next to it in the hallway, in his pyjamas, goggles over his eyes as they have been for the last three days. He's so tired that he doesn't even react to the sound of her slippers on the laminate floor. How long has he been out here, trying to listen for information the adults aren't sharing? Yoko exhales shakily and kneels next to him. She won't cry. Not right now.
"Yuuya," she prompts. "Yuuya, it's time for bed."
He mumbles something that sounds like, "Mum?"
"Come on, bedtime," she says. He protests, saying something about the doorbell; Yoko stands resolute. "It's nothing bad," she tries to assure him (but it is, because this wasn't something random, it was deliberate, and who would want to abduct Yuzu-chan). "Somebody just wants to go over some details with us, okay?"
Yuuya seems to accept that, at least. Maybe he's just too tired to argue. Either way, he doesn't resist the guiding hand on his shoulder as she steers him back into his room. Core's eyes glitter at them from the foot of the bed.
It takes another five minutes for Yoko to return downstairs. Neither of the others comments on the damp patch on the shoulder of her pullover, or the red rimming her eyes. Tea. That's what she needs to do. Tea. Something to occupy her hands. Something to take her mind off everything.
When Yoko carries the mugs through, Shuzou is looking more alert than he has in hours. It's not a good alert. It's the sort of manic desperation of a duelist on the ropes. What did they talk about while she was upstairs? What words could have brought Shuzou to this?
She finds out sooner than she expected. "Earlier, you said something strange," he says. "That you don't know my daughter's exact whereabouts. Does that mean you have an idea of where she might be? If the culprit has ties to LDS, doesn't that mean you can track them?
There's a pause. "If I tell you what I know," says Himika, "you can never repeat it to anybody. For the safety of our world."
Yoko flounders for words. All she can do is repeat, dumbfounded, "Our world?"
Himika came here to talk about Yuzu-chan, right? How does one thirteen-year-old girl factor into the safety of an entire planet?
Shuzou places his mug on the table and leans forward, arms folded across his chest. His hands are shaking. Yoko has half a mind to order Akaba Himika out of her house, but the intense and desperate need on her friend's face makes her pause. "I have to know what happened to my daughter," he says. "Himika-san, please."
Himika stands, and crosses to the large glass window that looks out onto the garden. In a voice that sounds more at home in a conference hall than Yoko's front room, the businesswoman says, "There are other worlds beyond ours. We know of at least four. Our world is referred to as 'Standard'. Currently, the other three are known only by the names of 'Fusion', 'Synchro', and 'Xyz'-"
"Summoning methods?" Yoko interrupts, incredulous.
"I didn't name them," replies Himika, with a wry, exasperated note of – not humour, but something like it. "But yes. These worlds... no, dimensions is a more accurate term. They are known by the same names as the three Extra Deck summoning methods. Two years ago, my son, Reiji, found a way into the Fusion dimension. In the short space of time he was there, somebody confirmed to him the existence of the other dimensions, 'Synchro' and 'Xyz'.
"There is an organisation in the Fusion dimension that calls itself Academia. They discovered Reiji, deported him back here, to Standard, and destroyed all known links between our two dimensions. Currently, we have no way of accessing, or even contacting, Academia and the Fusion dimension."
"What does any of this have to do with my daughter?"
Himika closes her eyes. When she opens them again, her face is once again a mask of perfect control. "Shortly after this," she says, "we found traces of old records within the LDS mainframe. From what little we understood, there were apparently four 'pieces', one from each dimension, that Academia was looking for. I had thought..." She grimaces and tries again. "I misunderstood the records. There were three words that stood out, from what information we could recover: 'bracelet', 'gem', 'power'. I thought they referred to physical objects, hidden in each world. Something that would take planning and effort to obtain. Something that could claim to justify the Academia's plans to invade and attack the Xyz dimension."
Invade? Attack? Yoko's throat burns. What does Yuzu have to do with this? "You're not saying..."
"The 'pieces' were not objects after all," Himika confirms. "Reiji realised, when he saw Hiiragi Yuzu's picture on the news, that she had the same face as a girl he encountered in the Fusion dimension. A girl named Selena. She was the person who told him about the Synchro and Xyz dimensions."
"The same face." Oh god, Shuzou.
"As if they were twins. Only their hair colour differs. And she had a bracelet. Silver. Embellished with a single gemstone."
It's too hard to believe. Only... Himika is too serious about this to be lying. What reason does she have to lie? She's still talking, about the possibility – no, probability of other girls, other lookalikes, identified by their bracelets; about the likelihood of all four being captured for – for whatever purpose; about things that seem so pointless next to the knowledge that Yuzu is beyond their reach.
Yoko looks away. Her gaze falls on a photo of Yushou and Yuuya, taken just a few months before Yushou disappeared. Is everyone going to disappear? First Yushou, now Yuzu-chan.
Two years. Two years since Yushou vanished. Two years ago that Himika's son discovered that other dimensions exist. ...But why was he wandering between dimensions?
Didn't Himika's husband suddenly retreat from the public eye two years ago?
"The culprit," she says. "Himika-san, was the same culprit behind your husband's disappearance two years ago...?" But Yoko realises, even as she's saying it: no, that's not right. She remembers the way Himika reacted to her legal name. The unspoken request to divorce her from that name. And Yoko knows.
Shuzou stiffens with tension as he comes to the same conclusion. "No," he says. "No."
Yoko reaches for anger. She only feels numb and heavy with grief. Himika's eyes burn with enough fury for them all.
"Yes. Without a doubt, Akaba Leo is the true culprit."