54
Frozen Odaiba
"You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day." – H. P. Lovecraft, "Cool Air"
"Daisuke…"
Daisuke opened groggy eyes and turned his head to the side, blinking at his darkened room. There was no one there.
"Chibimo…" he began, but stopped when he saw that his partner was sleeping peacefully to his left. Had he really heard anything? The voice had been so soft and faint that it may have been his imagination, or the last fragment of an unremembered dream.
He shut his eyes and waited to drift off; it didn't take long for him to fall into another dreamless sleep. An hour passed.
"Daisuke."
There it was again, slightly clearer than before. It was a girl's voice. A voice he felt he should know. But he couldn't remember, and a look into the shadows beyond the bed revealed no one else in the room. Daisuke didn't shut his eyes again, but listened for any repetition of his name. The room remained silent. Eventually the stress of the day caught up with him, and he was asleep again.
"Daisuke."
There was no mistaking it this time. Someone had called his name. Simultaneous with the sound came cold. Daisuke awoke freezing, shivering under icy sheets. The room was unchanged, still dark, the silence marred only by that one word.
"Who's there?" he asked, sitting up and throwing the sheet off of him. The air was just as chill. "Chibimon?" He looked, but there was no sign of his partner. "Aah, where did he go?"
"Daisuke, please…"
He whipped his head around, but still saw no one. Now that he was more aware, however, he finally recognized the disembodied voice.
"Nat-chan?"
He was sure it was her. Just earlier this summer he had met her, and spent a day uncovering her identity. Was she here? In Tokyo? Was that why it was so cold?
He got out of bed and went to the window, wincing as his bare feet met the burning coldness of the floorboards. He could see that the streets below him were dusted with white. Winter had come to Odaiba in the middle of the night. He hurried over to his drawers and pulled some socks on. Chibimon was still nowhere to be found, which Daisuke thought was a little strange. He was sure now that the experience in New York was repeating itself, but the last time his partner had been drawn out of summer with him.
But what mattered now was finding Nat-chan. Partly because she might be the only way back to his own world, but mostly because she needed him again. He left the bedroom to get his winter coat from the closet. The apartment was silent. His parents, Jun, and Caprimon were all missing. Was he all alone this time? After bundling up, he stepped out of the apartment and into the frigid air of the balcony.
"Nat-chan!"
There was no reply.
Why won't she answer? He wished Chibimon was here, or anyone for that matter. Wallace and Gummymon could get on his nerves, but at least they and Mimi-san had been company in an unearthly situation. Maybe… maybe some of his friends were in this world as well, asleep in their apartments? He went for the stairs and began heading down to the Yagami family's floor.
He caught up short, however, once he had reached it. Would Nat-chan want him to bring anyone else? Would their presence comfort her, or just remind her of her loneliness? What would he say to introduce them? "This is Taichi-san, but he already has a partner. And this person is the reason I couldn't name you Hikari."
It wasn't long before he found out that it wouldn't be a problem. The door to the Yagami apartment was frozen shut.
"Taichi-san!" he shouted, pounding on the door. "Hikari-chan! Is anyone in here?" There was no reply. He couldn't even try and turn the door handle without his fingers slipping off. Everything was coated in ice so thick that his knocks couldn't make a crack in it.
"Please come, Daisuke."
He turned. It sounded as though she was somewhere below him, but looking over the railing he could see no one, just the snowy plaza, its trees bare of leaves. He started walking back to the stairs. On the way he happened to notice that the doors to the other apartments were not iced over as the Yagamis' had been. For some reason, it made him uncomfortable.
Finally he reached ground level, and looked around for Nat-chan.
"Daisuke. Daisuke!"
The voice was faint and far, but he knew instinctively which direction to go in order to follow it.
"Come, Daisuke. Come…"
Before long he had broken into a run, slipping every now and again on patches of ice or slick snow, but managing to stay on his feet. Wind stung his face and ears. He had no idea where he was headed, and wouldn't be able to remember afterwards just what route he took. All sense of time left him. He may have run for hours, or ages, or mere moments before he had come up against what he knew was his destination.
He didn't recognize this part of Odaiba, assuming he was still in Odaiba. He stood on a windswept city street, and in front of him was a door, the glass front iced over, but the handle unfrozen. He couldn't hear Nat-chan's voice anymore, but he knew, somehow, that she was waiting for him beyond the door.
He grasped the handle with one gloved hand and pulled. At first it wouldn't come; there was ice around the frame, but with another tug he was able to pull it free. It was dark inside. Daisuke stepped in, but couldn't find a light switch anywhere near the door. The place appeared to be empty. The moonlight from the street failed to reveal any furniture.
"Nat-chan?" Daisuke asked the emptiness. In here he was out of the wind, but the temperature hadn't risen at all. "Nat-chan?" He was growing impatient with the silence and the cold. He rushed forward, farther into the room. "Nat-chan! Where are you?"
This time he got an answer, though not the one he had been hoping for. Behind him, the open door slammed shut. He started and turned around to absolute blackness, as if the door were no longer translucent. For the first time it occurred to him that he may have walked into a trap. He tried to retrace his steps through the cold dark, but couldn't find the door, or a wall, or anything to dispel the emptiness and desolation of the place.
"Damn it…" In every direction there was nothing but darkness stretching on forever. Was Nat-chan somewhere in it? And – a chill, not from the cold, ran through him – was she the girl he had befriended, or was she the Digimon with claws that could level a house?
He didn't call her name again. In that vast dark, anything might answer his call. He listened, straining his ears for any whisper of friend or enemy. After a few moments of tense waiting, he thought that he might be able to hear something after all. It was not the sound of movement, really, but a sort of continuous background noise so faint that he could only notice it in the absolute stillness. There was no telling when it had started, or if it had been there all along.
It could almost be described as musical, but there was no tune to it. It tinkled and shimmered – not sounding like anything in particular, though Daisuke felt as though he knew it, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, as if he had heard it before. It seemed that to an extent the sound was all around him, but listening closer he realized that it was loudest behind him.
He whipped around and let out a yelp, because at first glance there seemed to be a pair of golden, luminous eyes staring at him. Then he saw one wink out and the other rise, and noticed that the air was full of them, small lights at various distances, glowing briefly into existence and vanishing the next moment. Like fireflies.
But more like data chips, the things he and the others had seen hovering in New York's snow, because that's what they were. He had seen them emerge from Nat-chan, flock around her, turn her into a rampaging monster. Did that mean—?
"Nat-chan!"
The words had no sooner left his mouth than the chips shot forward to engulf him in a shimmering cloud, the noise of them leaping out of the background to fill his ears with cacophony. Some collided with his face, stinging like bees, while he could feel others latching onto his limbs and thudding against his coat. Too surprised to even cry out, he beat at them wildly with both hands, and staggered drunkenly about trying to escape the angry swarm. He smacked them from his arms, but they swirled about and reattached themselves to some other surface of his body. He wasn't thinking coherently at the moment, but there were a number of thoughts tumbling loose in his brain: Why?, Stop!, Nat-chan? Nat-chan!, No, go away! I'm not like that!
He dodged to one side and weaved, trying to shake off the storm of data chips. He spun half around and ran with his head down low, but his feet ran out of floor in the darkness and suddenly he was plummeting through sub-zero temperatures. Then there was something under him again – a frictionless slope. He was sliding down and down into the frozen core of the earth, but the chips were gone and light was creeping back again. Soon the floor had leveled out, and he came skidding to a stop.
Shuddering with cold and adrenaline, Daisuke got to his feet. He could see again. A blue light, cold, like everything else here, illuminated a titanic chamber like the heart of a glacier. For the most part the place was empty, on one side rising into the steep slope he had just slid down, stretching away on the other sides into frozen infinity.
But there was something to break the monotony. Near where he stood there were strange immobile shapes rising from the floor, and he approached them, trying to determine what they were. He had come almost up to the first structure before he realized that it was a swing set like what might be found on a playground. But the whole thing was coated with ice. The swings hung stiffly, and every surface was so thickly frozen that it was impossible to see any sign of what lay beneath the ice.
Looking around, it dawned on him that all of the objects looked like playground equipment. There was a jungle gym, a merry-go-round, a slide. Without really thinking he grasped one of the swing's chains, to shake it free of the ice. The ice broke when he pulled, but there was no chain beneath it. The whole thing just shattered at his tug, and the seat broke loose of the remaining chain and exploded into shards as it hit the floor.
Daisuke looked about him in uneasy wonder. The playground was not covered in ice, it was made of ice. How anyone could have created it, and why, was beyond him.
"Tears make good building material."
Daisuke had been waiting to hear Nat-chan again, but this was a man's voice, and there was humor behind it.
"Who are you?" he shouted, turning his head back and forth to scan the frozen horizon. "Where's Nat-chan?"
"Have you overlooked her?" the voice asked. "Don't feel too bad. Everyone does."
Daisuke growled, but he was cut short.
"You came," she said.
This time he could tell where her voice was coming from. The other voice temporarily forgotten, he walked about to the other side of the merry-go-round and saw her. Nothing about her had changed. She was dressed the same as she had been in New York, without a coat, and it made him even colder to look at her.
"Nat-chan?"
She looked up at him; her eyes found his face.
"Daisuke. You came back."
"Yeah," he said, with a half-smile. "Of course. But… where are we?"
Her expression darkened.
"I don't know. I've always been here, alone."
"Let's get out of here," he said. "Back to where it's summer. Oh," he started to remove his coat, "Aren't you cold? Here."
"Daisuke," she smiled, "You're always so nice to me. You're the only one who hears me. Can't you stay?"
He draped the coat awkwardly over her front, not having the courage to move her so as to put it on properly.
"You don't have to stay here," he said. "We can find a way out! We can find a place that's warm."
"I can't… please stay."
Her voice sounded distant, as if she were no longer right beside him. The whole scene before him was shrinking, becoming vague and hazy.
"Nat-chan!" The name echoed. The terrible cold ebbed away as the vision of Nat-chan darkened and faded entirely.