"Hide not your thoughts/from your own eyes. Chaos and order/are just two sides. Both light and darkness/lovers and twins. Ignore the balance/and corruption wins."

- Path Song. Traditional.

She had been at this for only about a week, and already she was starting to have a sinking feeling in her chest that she was way in over her head.

What were the two of you upto, mom and dad...? she thought, biting her lip.

It was late—too late, grandma would probably scold her in the morning for the dark circles under her eyes. But she hadn't finished her column work until late, and she needed to make sure she got her own research done for the day.

Her screen blipped with a notification from someone she was messaging, and she quickly opened up that tab to tap out a reply. Fingers at rest for a moment, she reached for her coffee and gulped down the last few drops. It was cold, and she shook her head with her tongue out at the horrid, bitter taste.

She opened back up to the original tab, eyes flickering through the information.

She didn't have much to go on. Her parents hadn't left any itinerary aside from a few checkpoints. What she did know was that they had gone to Brazil, deep in the south of the Amazon jungle. They hadn't reached their first checkpoint, a small anthropology outpost about ten miles in from where the helicopter had dropped them off. Akari wasn't even sure why they had gone that way—and in fact, if the travel logs she was reading were correct, it seemed that her mother and father had split up before the helicopter had even left the ground. The copter listed Tsukumo Kazuma as an occupant, but not Tsukumo Mirai. She had an airfare ticket, but as far as Akari could tell, she had never even come to the helicopter launch pad—and it had been a job and a half just getting the list of people who had been on board that stupid helicopter in the first place.

Why did you guys split up? What happened?

She checked the list of passengers on the helicopter again. A Byron Arclight and a Tenjo Kenshin were the only other passengers aside from the pilot. The pilot was accounted for, so Akari didn't bother looking into him. But Byron Arclight had been declared missing at the same time as Akari's parents, and Akari couldn't find much more about him. Tenjo Kenshin appeared to have faded from existence too, although there were no mentions of him being declared missing. One way or another, it seemed he hadn't come back to the launch pad when it was time for the helicopter to leave, though. So if he wasn't missing, he had found his own way back.

She opened up her own case file again, thinking over her notes. There had to be something she could glean from this.

Byron Arclight was a respected interdimensional physicist. He had written several acclaimed books and participated in an international science summit on renewable energies about a decade ago, and was still considered a top expert in the field of environmental science on top of his physics studies. When he had disappeared it had been a major wave in the scientific community, and more than one search party had been sent out to find him. However, in all of the articles Akari had found about the incident, none of them seemed to be able to decide why Dr. Arclight had decided to travel to the middle of the Amazon jungle. It was uncertain if it was for scientific reasons, which made little sense to his colleagues, or if it was some kind of pleasure excursion.

Tenjo Kenshin was a tougher case; Akari found the name attached to a handful of old scientific journal articles, but none of them were newer than a decade ago. Interestingly, all of those articles were also in the realm of interdimensional physics, the same field as Dr. Arclight. Akari had come to the conclusion that this Dr. Tenjo had been writing under pseudonym since his last articles—she had found a few others in the same field that read the same way as Dr. Tenjo's, only these were submitted under a clearly false name, "Dr. Faker." Geez, what kind of weirdo came up with a pseudonym like that, though?

What was most strange to Akari was that this Dr. Faker seemed to be heavily involved in city planning, too—his name showed up in a million architectural plans for Heartland City, and he seemed to have been the one who designed most of the city's infrastructure.

"So what were mom and dad doing carting a pair of interdimensional physicists out to the middle of the Amazon...?" she muttered.

The answer, it seemed, was still out of reach for now. But she had a sneaking feeling that she was getting close. Very close.

Part of that was due to how much dark web redacted shit she was starting to run into.

Unease twisted in her stomach as she scrolled through the article that her questionable messenger contact had sent to her. It was some kind of government file, she thought with a nervous twinge. She wondered where her contact had gotten it, and if she was going to be in trouble for keeping it. Just in case, she ran it through a few encrypters to block any internet viruses from picking up that she had it, and made a note to print it off and file it before deleting it.

The first half of the document was mostly just legalese about infrastructure, permits and all that, dedicated entirely to Heartland's design. The second half was where stuff started getting interesting because...well, the good parts were all weirdly blacked out, but...

Testing on Operation - successful, Neighborhood - confirmed sufficient - energy amplifier. Heartland Tower receiving and channeling optimal amounts of - energy. - expected to be open within the next two months.

"What kind of energy?" Akari mumbled to herself. "And what...is our city being built to channel energy?" She supposed Heartland did have a very odd configuration; she noted that herself when she saw the maps while researching Dr. Faker.

Trash receptacles to be redirected to Site - while Neighborhood - construction is completed. Testing to occur in - with discarded materials.

What testing?

Final adjustments added to Heartland Tower. Testing to begin on attracting Numbers.

Akari's jaw tightened. Numbers.

If there was one odd thing she had noticed in all of her research, it was that the English word Numbers constantly showed up. At first, she had dismissed it, but...over and over again?

No, something was up. There was something called Numbers out there, and it was important. She had found a few dark web sites trying to explain the word showing up in multiple government files, folk legends, and numerous other places, but the threads were slim and far between. All Akari knew was that there were one hundred of these "Numbers," whatever they were, no one could decided exactly what they looked like, and they had some kind of mysterious, otherwordly power.

Interdimensional physicists and otherworldly artifacts, Akari thought. Yeah, something is definitely up. What were you two getting yourselves into?

She still hadn't made any progress on determining where her mother had gone in between the plane and the helicopter, and she was no closer to figuring out what had happened to both of them, or what they had to do with the Numbers.

Her eyes wandered over to the box that she had placed on her desk some weeks ago, almost on a whim. A box she never intended to open. Her fingers twitched towards it, her brain itching. She swallowed through a thick throat.

This game has power, her father had said.

I'm not going to open my stupid deck box, she thought, pulse thrumming in her ears. God, why did I take it out from under the bed?

Before she could stop herself, she reached out and picked it up, turning it over in her hands. She wasn't sure if it was her imagination or not, but the box thrummed beneath her fingers...as though something inside were alive and with a heartbeat.

She quickly put the box back aside. She'd—she'd put it back under the bed later. Right now, she should think about going to bed. She had done as much as she could for the day...tomorrow, she'd see what she could do to hack into the main database of Heartland Tower...that might be where some more of the answers could be...