It was unsurprising that Akiza hadn't slept much that night. Partly down to her two days of near-constant rest and mostly because of the tumultuous storm of emotions regarding Yusei. Before the sun had even risen, she was already well on her way to the SRC in an effort to get answers as soon as she could.
Few people tend to walk the streets at six in the morning. It's a quiet hour, the night-shifts winding up their activities, the day-walkers not yet up and about. She could have taken public transport – free for being classed as a city servant – but chose a brisk walk instead as Koharu's flat was less than twenty minutes from the extensive grounds of the Scientific Research Centre.
Even when the rest of city slept, many lights still sparkled from the tall buildings in the midst of the clockwork pattern of open space. Scientists tired from staying up too late or getting up too early drifted around the grounds like ghouls held upright by scientific enquiry and vast amounts of caffeine. It was only as she headed down the path towards Building Eight that familiar instincts began rising on the back of her neck. Every time she turned around, she knew nobody was following her. Only a few trees cluttered the open space between the centre of the SRC and the outer buildings. Yet still, she couldn't help but feel there was something following her. As she approached the thick doors, a glimmer of a pale reflection caught her eye in the shape of a distorted face. Nearing panic, she slammed against the door and pushed as hard as she dared.
Whatever technical trickery Yusei had done to the door last time she tried entering Building Eight had been undone and her I.D. was enough to let her in. With the doors firmly closed behind her, she looked out over the view and tried not to let tales of ghosts fill her mind. Once she was as sure as she could be that nothing was following her, she turned and headed for the elevators behind her.
As she rode the lift, Akiza tried to still her beating heart. Coming back to New Domino had been harder than she expected but the biggest hurdle was still ahead of her. If Yusei didn't have good reasons for everything that had happened in recent days, she would cut her losses and simply leave again. With her documents back in hand, it would be easier to prove her credentials and get another job elsewhere.
When the lift doors opened, she was surprised to see the light on in his office across the floor. Yusei had asked her to arrive before her shift started at eight but it was still earlier than she would have expected him. Walking down the narrow corridor, she kept her emotion under a tight grip. Whatever would come, would come. Taking an extra breath outside the office, she opened the door with less explosive anger than her last visits.
Sitting at his desk, Yusei looked perfectly normal. If she hadn't seen his screaming fit the night before, she wouldn't have believed it had even happened. A cup of steaming coffee sat on his desk, he was wearing a crisp white shirt and staring absently at his computer. Other than the slightly damp hair, it was possible he had just come from a meeting about stationary budgets. Noticing her standing in the doorway, Yusei straightened up from his slight slouch and focused on the problem at hand.
"You're earlier than I expected." Fishing about for something pleasant to start the conversation with, he focused on the mug on his desk. "Would you like some coffee?" Though he and Chris would deny it, the fat chef kept his boss supplied with a private stash of grounds for use in his office. In return, Yusei turned a blind eye to the unconventionally dimensional transcendental storage facilities in the kitchen and defended the extortionate supply budget.
"Please." Crouching by the squat cabinet running beneath his window, Yusei pulled out a still bubbling kettle and spare mug. Akiza mutely sat in one of the padded chairs as he slowly made her a fresh cup and set in on the table in front of her. "Thank you." Settling in his chair, neither spoke for a minute as the caffeine did its work.
"I'm sorry." It was not the best place to start but it was the most important. "Everything that's happened, what I'm going to tell you. I did plan to tell you," A bitter note entered his voice and mingled with the taste of the coffee. "Not now, not all at once." Sighing, he put aside his cup and pulled the thick tablet he had given Akiza from his desk drawer again. "I took this from Din's lab. He wasn't too pleased because he thought he was making some progress."
"Was he?" She had heard the tired tone, like he had seen the work before somewhere.
"Not as much as I would like." Resting the tablet between them, he nudged it towards her side of the table. "I've unblocked all the files. No redactions, no restrictions. You know who your patient is anyway." Akiza did. She had since the moment she had walked in and seen him thrashing around on his bed.
"It's you." Regret filled the air as he avoided her gaze, looking past her to the far wall. "You're sick." At the words, all emotion drained from his face until it left blank despair.
"Akiza, I'm dying." Finally meeting her stare, he gave a smile that was tired in more ways than one. "I have about ten months left. Maybe a year if I get lucky." It was a brutal blow. Akiza hadn't studied the other holograms at that time but they would show signs of synaptic degradation if she compared them chronologically.
"Wait," Grasping at straws, she remembered what Yusei had told her when he first gave her the files. "You said my patient would 'take steps' in four months." Leaning back in his chair, Yusi rubbed his tired eyes.
"If no treatment is found by then, there will be too much damage to recover from." It was a brief summary of the conclusion he had drawn. The SRC had worked on and with thousands of different types of medicine. Several dozen could help repair the damage after that point but would cause considerable harm to other parts of his body. Even if a cure was found seven or eight months down the line, any treatment to restore his brain would likely kill him some other way. "At that point, I'll start making arrangements for my replacement and... passing." It was the way he said the word. Not a note of sadness for himself but only a slight pause as he tried to think of an easier way to break it to her.
"There's a lot of doctors in the world. Maybe one of them knows something." It was inevitable he had already reached out but she was going through the list anyway.
"And the best of them are just over there." Picking up his mug, he tipped it towards the main hub of the SRC. "Trust me, nobody is working on this." They sat in grim silence for a moment.
"What about Yliaster?" Checking the time on his computer, Yusei balanced telling the entire truth against only some of it.
"With everything that happened eight years ago, Yliaster was dealt a heavy blow. They weren't gone but they needed time to heal." That was putting it mildly. After Z-One had been defeated, Yliaster had almost died overnight. It had taken months to begin recovering. "For a while, Yliaster was vulnerable and there were some who tried taking advantage of that. They were foolish to do so." Even at their weakest moment, Yliaster had people in every government and enough resources to take over a country. Of the plucky few who dared tangle with the shaken organization, few lived out the week. "One of the survivors contacted me and begged for help. I reached out to Yliaster and agreed to do some work with them in exchange for sparing the lives of whoever was still alive." Checking the time again, he brutally curtailed the rest of the story. "As part of the deal, Yliaster was supposed to leave you and the others alone."
"Then why didn't they?" It had sounded like a one-sided deal. The smartest man alive lends the almost unending resources at his command to Yliaster in exchange for them leaving alone a handful of practically helpless former Signers.
"I don't know. That's why I've asked them to call me." Drawing his phone from his breast pocket, Yusei weighed the device in his hand. "If you want to leave, now is your chance." In reply, Akiza dug herself deeper into the chair and gripped her coffee cup as they waited for the call. As soon as the clock hit seven, Yusei's mobile rang. Placing the handset on the table between them, he put it on speaker.
"Good morning." It was a cultured voice, almost artificial in blandness.
"Nanashi. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me." Akiza blinked at the title. It literally translated as 'nameless'.
"You said it was urgent. Of course I would make the time." Nanashi sounded pleasant, educated. The sort of voice that made for a good politician or con-artist. "How can we help one another?" It was small but insidious. Planting the idea that Yusei had to help Nanashi for Nanashi to help him.
"I'm here with Akiza." There was a slight intake of air down the line. "Somebody from Yliaster returned her bags yesterday. I thought we had an agreement." Silence reigned around the room.
"Let me start with my congratulations for all your accomplishments, Dr Izinski." Unsure of what to say, Akiza chose to remain mute. "And I assure you, the order to not contact or interfere with any of you remains very much intact. I will personally look into it."
"Thank you." Evidentially, Yusei had not been expecting anything so forthcoming. The relationship between Yliaster and him was usually a one-way street.
"Think nothing of it." There was a power in that voice, like royalty who are accustomed to being obeyed in all things. "Consider this one on me. I will contact you in due course." A dull tone filled the room as Nanashi dropped the call.
Leaning back in his chair, Yusei slowly let out a tense breath he had been holding through the entire conversation. "For the record, Nanashi doesn't know about my condition."
Akiza was still struggling with events. It had been difficult to understand that Yusei and Yliaster had a partnership of sorts but the phone call had made it seem so... ordinary.
"What do you do for Yliaster?" It was the one thing she was still worried about. That, his condition, the shadowy organization intent on sinking claws back into her life.
"A few science problems. Nothing they couldn't get elsewhere with a bit more work." There wasn't much shame in his voice. Whatever toll the self-betrayal had demanded had been paid long ago.
For some time, they sat in silence as Akiza tried to absorb the information she had been given. Eventually, only fifteen minutes remained until her shift.
"I should probably go." Setting down her empty cup, she tried not to feel angry at Yusei. She had pity in equal amounts but anger at being deceived was the overriding emotion.
"There's a couple more things you need to know before you do." Standing upright himself, Yusei straightened his shirt. "I'll walk you to the elevator." Their footfalls were the only sounds to be heard in the quiet floor as they walked the length of the building. "I still have a blank period, a hazy gap in my memory from eight years ago." As he reached out to tap the call button, he missed the flash of instinctive panic on Akiza's face. "I remember bits and pieces but there's a lot missing. I know Musume woke me up though." As the lift doors opened, he positioned himself before the rows of buttons and waited for Akiza to stand by his side. "What I didn't know was the cost." Reaching out, he held his thumb on the button for the thirteenth floor. After a moment, the elevator started lowering down the shaft.
"What do you mean?" When the lift doors opened, Akiza was looking out over an empty floor. All the windows had been covered over with thick metal panels and the only light was from a strip-bulb above the elevator and another in the far distance. Where rooms had been routinely placed on Yusei's level, the only feature on this floor was a thick cube in the middle of it. "Yusei, what is this place?" Silently walking ahead, Yusei approached the metal box and laid his hand on the panel by the door.
"It's the safest place in the city." Once his palm-print had been verified, he typed in a long password and presented his eye to a scanner. Checks complete, the door slid inwards and over to one side. In side the cube, each wall was covered in a pattern of hexagons and scars. Several cables trailed across the floor into a reinforced socket by the door. In the precise middle of the room, a single hospital bed lay with a still occupant in a raised position.
"Who..." Sensing Yusei waiting for her to approach the patient, she quashed down her curiosity in favour of her medical instincts checking the readouts. Blood pressure, neural displays, heartbeat and even a full-body thermal view were only as far from death as a shadow was from sunlight. Less than an inch, shorter than a nanometre.
"Trudge found her." Instead of a face, the blankets had been tucked up against a shining metal plate. It was perfectly smooth and held only the barest impressions of a nose and mouth as it covered the rest of the skull in a round bulge. "After Bruno and I recovered, she collapsed on the outskirts of the city. Nobody figured out how she made it so far on so little energy. Then again," An incredibly slow beep was coming from the monitors Akiza was past noticing. "Musume always was tough."
"She's dead." Even without the quiet shrill tones of every machine, she could tell something was wrong. There wasn't any movement, breathing or signs of life. Each item in the room had some sort of presence but there was almost a void when it came to the space on the bed.
"Give it a second." Just as he finished speaking, the figure on the bed saw up with a single, sudden intake of gasping air. Limbs tightened and every joint was stretched to the fullest. What had been a vague shape of lips broke apart into a gaping jaw. Even as the figure resumed the same posture as before, Akiza was surprised to realise that she had noticed perfect teeth hidden behind the silver mask. Fresh images appeared on the screen, side-by-side with the old data. Now, they showed healthy blood pressure, high oxygen levels in the blood and even enough brain activity to rival the scans she had seen of Yusei.
"What was that?" Heart still beating fast from the shock, she backed into one of the trolleys as Yusei carefully tucked the blanket back into place.
"She does that every few hours." Checking the displays, not even a memory of surprise crossed his face at the regular scans and readings. Already faded back into her near-death state, Musume seemed completely unaware that anything had even happened. "Physically, she's in perfect form. Biologically, neurologically and even chemically, I have no idea what's going on inside her. Any invasive scans end up highly distorted." Recovering enough courage to approach the bed, Akiza took up place on the other side of the dead body. "As far as I am able to tell, her brain isn't functional, her heart beats only five times every minute and she has never... needed a toilet." There were usually complications involved in coma patients. Bed sores, possible choking once their gag reflex shuts down. Somehow, Musume was suffering none of the normal problems. She just waited on the edge of life and death with a will of diamond.
"Why is Musume even here? Shouldn't she be somewhere she can get treatment?" There were even more machines in this room than Yusei used when he fell asleep. One seemed to exist just to monitor the contents of the air alone.
"Nobody noticed her condition until Musume was almost at the morgue. Luckily, she managed to react before she got there. Trudge heard about the incident, called me. I brought her here." Slowly gripping a wrist, Akiza checked the shockingly low pulse. The slowest survivable heartbeat on record was a medically induced twenty beats per minute. How Musume was surviving at only a quarter of that was unfathomable.
Akiza was suddenly tired, exhausted. It was as if all the revelations of that morning had undone all the extra sleep she had scrounged at Koharu's. Another shift with the insufferable genius of Dr Din was the absolute last thing she wanted to do at that moment.
"That's all, right?" Rubbing her tired eyes, she fought to get them open again. "Nothing else that can change the course of history?" Noticing the fatigue, Yusei walked around the bed and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.
"Everything else can wait." Guiding her out of the door, he sealed up the room as she leant against the thick metal barrier.
"Why the walls?" She had known them, recognised the pattern from her last attack as the Black Rose. Reinforced against any Psychic attack and wired with alarms. "Are they to keep her in or everyone else out?"
"Both." Resting against the wall on the other side of the door, Yusei hung his own weary head. "There were some incidents when she first moved here. Every time I went near her, something inside didn't like it." After a few weeks of mild starvation, he was finally able to hook up an IV drip to keep her sustained through her coma. "It took some broken ribs but I think she's warming to me."
"You talk like she's still awake in there." Turning to face her, Yusei smiled gently.
"It helps to think she is. I don't need another death on my conscience." It would take some time before he admitted it but – other than the one person who had made contact with him – Yusei had never heard from any of the other people who attacked Yliaster eight years ago. As far as he knew, his actions and sacrifice had only saved the one target. Dozens of others were probably not as lucky and even the idea of so many bodies was an insufferable idea that haunted his waking hours. "You should probably get going." Pushing himself off the wall, Yusei dulled out the pain in his muscles. It shifted and flowed every few days but he had come to ignore the pains when they come. Any bruising that could not be explained away was easily covered up with the art of make-up. "Dr Din will probably be wanting his research back."
As she began the walk back to the elevator, Akiza wondered why he had chosen her to research his condition. There was probably nobody less qualified in the entire SRC to continue searching for a treatment with such a short timeline. Her only companion, Din was outspoken, brusque and at odds with everything professional. By the time she arrived back at the extensive lab with scientists already running down the corridor, she had an answer to the one question she hadn't asked: Yusei had given her the task of saving his life because there was nobody else he could trust to do so.