Age of Ouran

by Sambucivox

AU - AU, science fiction twenty minutes into the future. In a country where the laws are as mutable and cruel as nature and everybody can become a criminal at the whim of the powerful. Haruhi Fujioka, a very promising student, sees her dreams crash and shatter when her father flees the law and she is put into Ouran with the children of the condemned.

6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Kosaka's headquarters were crowded. Most of the officers were men, and most of them had dark bags around their eyes and burst capillars on their noses and cheeks, the side effect of drinking too much Dragonsip in too little time. They spoke in the mechanical tone of the chronically overworked. Recharging inlaws lined every wall. They looked like gigantic toys made of hard candy.

Kosaka directed the two teenagers to a low table and threw a few SD cards to Shindou, to keep him busy. "Run these through the usual suspect parameters - I want a report of the ten people most likely to run over a puppy in one hour,"

"But nobody has dogs," mumbled Shindou.

"Yes - that's why it's challenge. When you give up - when you are done, go to WonderSea on the next corner and use these ration tickets to buy three orders of extra-crusty fish sticks and three light melon sodas. You kids do like that, don't you?"

Haruhi and Shindou nodded, intimidated by her high-strung voice. But Kosaka had already moved on, because she had noticed one of her colleagues leaving an interrogation room. She grabbed Haruhi's arm and dragged her to the door of the room, holding a sleek silver tablet. Shindou flinched at Haruhi, his face torn between fear and sympathy.

Kosaka had barely closed the door behind Haruhi when it slammed open.

"Kosaka! My office - now!" roared a tall man with slicked hair. He took in Haruhi and his face set in a mask of anger. "No - this is the last drop. Are you Haruhi Fujioka?"

"Yes..." said Haruhi, suddenly fearing for the safety of the mission. As Kyouya had predicted, her tooth had become silent as soon as they entered Tokyo, which was technically Zuka territory. But the damn radio -and the damn sedative! - were still attached to her body. She mentally crossed her fingers, praying for a quick dismissal, and focused on the badge pinned to the man's belt. "Senior Superintendent - Seizaburo Tachibana"

"THIS IS THE LAST DROP!" he repeated, pushing both women out of the room, and Haruhi scrambled to regain her seat next to Shindou, who was sweating profusely and (poorly) pretending not to hear the scene in front of him. He looked up only to ask Haruhi, "Are you OK?"

"Yes," she whispered back.

Superintendent Tachibana dragged officer Kosaka into his own office, which had a glass wall. Haruhi noticed that every single one of the policemen had stopped their stilted chatter and were listening to the violent scolding taking place behind the glass. Even the Inlaws seemed to be paying attention. Tachibana was gesturing with his arms over his head, while Kosaka stood very straight, her silver-gloved hands tied at the back, with her mouth unnaturally straight.

"You CANNOT use public resources to investigate a private matter!"

Kosaka's voice was much more contained, but Haruhi caught her vehement denial of it being a private matter, and the words, "Wrongfully accused," which made her heart toll.

"That is for the System to decide, if the suspect appears! I cannot believe that you are behaving like this in the most chaotic month of the last ten years,"

Kosaka moved her mouth like a war telegraph. Haruhi caught "on leave,"

"Then don't hoard valuable resources - like your table, or the room, or the damn intern! We need every millimeter of brainpower that we have - if you are on leave, leave. And for God's sake, take that poor orphan back to Ouran,"

Haruhi looked at Shindou, who had not even reacted at Tachibana's words. She realized with a start that he was referring to her. But I'm not an orphan. My father is not dead, not yet.

"It will do her no good to get her hopes up at this point - it's almost been a month. Do not drag her down any further with your obsessive investigation," he pointed at Kosaka, who did not back away from him. Her fingers were curled like steel paws around her own wrists.

Outside, lightning and thunder punctuated his words. The row died as the rain started to fall, and Kosaka left her bosses' office with tightly coiled rage. She motioned to Shindou and Haruhi to leave with her.

"Leave the intern here!" barked the superintendent. "I need him to prepare for tomorrow's rally,"

"Don't look so happy about it," whispered Kosaka to the boy. "He's going to work you to death - good training for growing up,"

Another thunder. Kosaka frowned, and noticed Haruhi's staring out at the rain. "Shindou - were you raised in a barn or what? Give your coat to Fujioka!"

"But it's a police coat..." he said, pointing at the print-on badge. Kosaka rolled her eyes at him for the umpteenth time that morning and ripped the badge. "Now it's a black polyblend monstrosity. Heavens," Arai shed the enormous garment and passed it to Haruhi. "And you, put that on - Ouran doesn't even have a real doctor on staff, just that lazy nurse. Gods forbid that you get sick in that hole. You might as well be dead, for all the real medical help you'd get. How's your tooth feeling, by the way?"

Haruhi, who was zipping up the surprisingly lightweight jacket, startled and reflexively touched the silent radio with the tip of her tongue. She looked up, contorting her face not to look guilty, and remembering just in time that nurse Okai had told Kosaka that she had a cavity.

"Not too bad..." she said, following the police woman to the door. Kosaka had slid her tablet into her own jacket, and strapped her fire baton, which had been recharging next to an Inlaw. Haruhi wondered if she'd been allowed to have one when she was in Ouran, like Mori, or if she had learned to use it later, during her police training.

"If it hurts, tell me, and I will take you to a real dentist,"

Haruhi smiled - it felt like she was stretching her very bones. "It doesn't," she answered. "I'm fine,"

"Hmph," said Kosaka, checking her watch, "Put up your hood, we're going to walk,"

"Are you taking me back to Ouran?" asked Haruhi, falling in step behind the officer.

"Of course not. I'm on leave, and so are you - system approved. Do you miss you four-eyed boyfriend already?"

Haruhi shook her head, relieved. "That was nurse Okai's assistant,"

"He sure got very touchy-feely - I'd keep an eye out if I were you. You can't afford to - fuck, it's flooding!"

Outside the rain was hitting the pavement with a passion. Fat drops soaked Haruhi's jeans in seconds, one expanding circle at a time, and she was suddenly very grateful for Ouran's very sturdy work boots. At least her feet would stay dry. They walked, sloshing between the rushing domes of transparent umbrellas and the glistening peacekeeping inlaws, diving deeper and deeper in the twisting streets of Tokyo. They were not in the Red district, not yet - but Haruhi saw the signs that they were coming closer in the rose-red lamps that dotted every other building. The closer they got, the eerier the light became. It was too early in the morning for the night artists to come out and play, and when they reached the entrance of the red district, the only other figures were a couple of inlaws guarding the gates.

"Do you live here?" asked Haruhi.

"Nobody lives here," said Kosaka, looking straight ahead. "They either work or pay for pleasure, but live? No," she approached the Inlaw to her right, and let it scan her eyes. "We are going to the bar where your dad worked,"

"Access granted," said the robot, rolling to let them pass.

The gates opened. And that was the moment where the buzzing restarted and a deep feminine voice echoed in Haruhi's ears. She looked around, before realizing that the crystal clear sound came from her tooth, and not from the red gages.

"Welcome to Zuka city," it said, with a hint of delight hidden in the words. "We'll be waiting for you at BonMall at 11:00 PM tonight,"

Kosaka drove Haruhi through a dozen interviews with her dad's ex-colleagues. Haruhi didn't know anyone, except for the last pair - Misuzu, a thick-lipped man with luscious brown hair hugged Haruhi -you look so much like your mama- and Mei, his very tan daughter, who was her age and, while covering her bronzed body with a gaudy yukata, offered Haruhi a make-over to cheer her up.

"No, thanks," said Haruhi, looking at the time on Kosaka's handcell. It was already half past five, and she had no idea of where BonMall was.

"Whatever. But you kinda look like a guy. If that's what prison does to you I'd better work my ass out in this bar for the rest of my life," and just like that, she went back to programming her holo make-up in a neon-lit mirror.

Every line of enquiry proved useless to Kosaka, although Haruhi found some comfort in remembering her dad with Misuzu - it helped her keep at bay the carnivorous worm that Tachibana's ominous words had planted: that it was too late already and that she was already an orphan.

Of course, he had been talking about "relative" orphan - that her parents were not around to take care of her. He had not meant it literally. But still.

"Yeah - Ranka took a pic with the chef... After he -the chef- fixed us a new cocktail," Misuzu talked like he was tired of repeating the same story over and over, like he had no inflections left to make it any more interesting than the first time. "We all tried it. It was delicious. We even clapped, didn't we, Mei?"

His daughter nodded, painting her pinky golden brown. "And then Ranka went to -err- powder the chef's nose, and that was the last time we saw him,"

"Officer Kosaka - may I call you Yuko?" said Misuzu, serving white tea with golden flakes that unfolded like origami. "What I don't understand is why our little Haruhi has to stay at such an awful place like Ouran. We would be ecstatic to take her in,"

Kosaka tapped one finger and arched one eyebrow. Misuzu pressed on. "If she has half the charm that her daddy did, she would fit in wonderfully - and she wouldn't want for a job either! My Mei could train her,"

"But I never wanted to be a hostess," said Haruhi, watching Mei's copper fingertips playing with her corkscrew hair, "I want to be a lawyer like my mom,"

Misuzu's eyes filled to the brim with incredible pity. "I know, sweetie," he said, holding Haruhi's hand, turning it over, taking in the calluses and the plant rashes, the nail that still had dirt beneath it and the burn from soldering a lose circuit in the server room. Misuzu's own hands were silky-soft with a glossy finish. "But look how she ended. Hosting is a much safer career path than lawyering. With your youth, have plenty of regulars in no time - maybe even your own patron, and then you could study law on your free time,"

Haruhi's mind jumped to the gasping and the shivering of the girls that Kaoru and Tamaki had taken. She blushed, and shook her head. "No,"

Officer Kosaka stood up to leave. "That settles it, then - no need to rush to the court to get her adoption papers. Not that the owner of a red host bar would have any chance of being qualified as a responsible parent,"

"I hear," said Misuzu, and his voice, which had been tuned to the high pitch of a middle-aged madam deepened into a vibrating baritone, "many things - and I protect my own. Nobody has ever said the same about Ouran - so many disappearances in such a little time,"

"Have a productive night, sir," said Kosaka without turning back.

Misuzu sighed like he was terribly disappointed on Haruhi, but blew her a kiss nonetheless. Mei waved her fingers in the air, playing the scale of goodbyes.

Kosaka's apartment was as grey than her clothes and functional as a clinic. Everything glistened, and the air had the faint scent of disinfectant.

"I have tea and tofu for dinner," said Kosaka, listing the raw ingredients, "And a 3D food printer. So if you want a genmaicha tofu castle, and you know how to program it, knock yourself out,"

Haruhi took off the coat and her boots and as soon as Kosaka went into the bathroom, checked that the red powder package was still safely stuck between her skin and her wristcell. Strangely enough, her bracelet was blinking rhythmically in yellow, as it did every evening in Ouran before her kitchen shift.

She heard water running in the bathroom, and decided to check the apartment. Access was exclusively via iris scanner. That meant once Kosaka was distracted, it would be pretty easy to get out. But she didn't want her to notice, and trusting the hyper tense policewoman to go to sleep early was not a sound idea.

The 3D printer was a modest model, very similar to the one that the Fujioka's had in their kitchen. Haruhi fiddled with the available shapes and flavorings, and settled on fish-stick imitation (because Kosaka had seemed to like them so much) and American style red tea, for red powder camouflage.

However, Haruhi was not completely convinced that taking Kosaka out was the best course of action. She could - for instance - confess what she'd been up to in Ouran, since she arrived. How the rag-tag boys had dragged her inside their disturbing circle, and how they'd managed to contact an (alleged) Russian hacker who apparently had the keys and the knowledge to crack into every security camera in Japan. Surely that constituted valuable information, and Kosaka might be able to act on it faster and more effectively than Haruhi ever could.

Only that she wasn't sure that she completely trusted the police. Kosaka's motives were unclear, fogged by her single-minded intensity. Haruhi didn't know why Kosaka was so obsessed with locating her father, why she was getting into so much trouble at work, why she had gone through all the trouble of getting her out of Ouran and trying to make her feel as comfortable as she could. Plus, her loyalties were murky. Kosaka would not be able to act on Haruhi's information without compromising the boys and their dream, and maybe she wouldn't believe her, or if she did, all of Kosaka's resources would be blocked, like the security camera footage had been blocked to her eyes.

Haruhi frowned, disturbed by the realization that she had come to care about the boys, and that deep inside she felt more aligned with their (deranged, delusional, destructive) goal than with Kosaka's. She prodded that sinister discovery with mindgloves, a bit afraid of the truth that lay beneath, and beneath a wall of excuses she realized that she trusted their chaos more than she trusted the system.

Which was a very suspicious feeling, as she had not chosen to trust them - especially not after they'd modified her eyes and pushed her into the center of their bootstrapped conspiracy.

But they had - from the beginning. And they had not hidden their actions - she'd been there when they sled down the pole with scavenged food, shot down drones and mysterious cyber pirates, and she had eaten their food, touched their drones and talked to their associates.

Haruhi was the only one that could carry out this mission, but she was also the only one who would win something other than an absurd satellite if they won. She would get her father back, and hopefully (and she did not lie to herself about the minimal chances that they had of escaping) they might be able to build a future somewhere else.

Kosaka, in spite of her hard work and her good intentions, could not promise even a tenth of that tiny chance.

And that tiny chance trumped Kosaka's good intentions any time.

Haruhi used her incisors to carefully rip the plastic sachet, and dropped the red powder in the tea compartment of the 3D printer.

The first time that Haruhi tried her new eyes, her heart was beating faster than a drum.

Kosaka had fallen asleep gently on the couch, her mouth slacking and both hands plied under her cheek, like a small child. She was still frowning - and it wasn't until the eerie drug-induced silence gave way to snores that Haruhi dared to move from her seat.

A few licks of the heart-shaped lollipop had numbed Haruhi's mouth for one good hour, and given her a serious case of the droopy eye - at one point Mori had applied a freezing compress to her front and neck, and Tamaki had started to sing (not too badly) to keep her awake - and her mouth consciously open- while Kyouya and the twins completed the operation.

She had fed Kosaka a bag full of candy powder. She should sleep at least until next morning. Haruhi could only hope that she managed to be back before she woke up, and that she would blame the snoozing on her chronic fatigue. She still felt guilty about leaving Kosaka there, but it was almost eight and she still had to find her way to BonMall.

She decided to test the iris print in the apartment, and lit up Kosaka's console - she would use the net to find the exact address before heading out.

The black screen turned blue, and Haruhi felt the infrared beam touching her eyes. She held her breath.

Yuko Kosaka

Junior Officer, Level 3

Access Granted

A completely unexpected wave of adrenaline rushed through Haruhi's head, - until she remembered that she was feeling triumphant about something that Kyouya had done to her without her consent, and the mad joy vanished. Her heart was still tight in her chest.

She was looking a very organized desktop. Haruhi tapped the explorer icon, and in the small screen that popped up she typed "BonMall". She was expecting a map, maybe some pop-up sales ads, but to her surprise the engine retrieved also a case file that included the word BonMall.

Hmm.

She clicked on the file. It was three years old. It mentioned BonMall just once, as one of the properties of the Suoh conglomerate. The Suohs were real estate royalty, and had been for centuries, dating back to a time when Tokyo was little more than a red district built on a marsh. Yuzuru Suoh had recently gone into politics - Haruhi had seen his very sparkling ads on holo TV and on half the building screens of the city - and his party had been climbing in the polls. Not a chance of winning, of course - Japan's party had been the same since the World War II, and the candidate that was going to win was Yoji Houshakouji.

The report was about a missing (probably stolen) necklace - a delicate web designed to lace over chest and neck, sprinkled with dew diamonds. It had belonged to the Suoh matriarch. Little more than an insurance case. The company had paid in full, and no further enquiries had been made.

Haruhi shut the window and focused on memorizing the route to BonMall. It would be some forty minutes away - if she walked fast.

She still had two hours until the meeting with the Zuka. And she did not want to be out on the street - vulnerable - any longer than necessary.

She could use some of the extra time to find some information about the boys.

Haruhi couldn't restrain a small vindictive smile. They had been so - silent - about their personal lives, while they seemed to know everything about her, and they had used it to manipulate her - transparently, yes, but the fact that she could see the strings did not mean that they were not pulling them. Now it was her chance to learn something about them.

She hesitated for a second, and then wrote:

Ootori Kyouya

And blinked twice when the search engine returned nothing.

Hmm. Maybe she had been too confident. Maybe, because they were minors, their files were protected.

She tried it again, with Tamaki Grantaine.

Nothing.

Richard Grantaine

Nothing. The engine suggested typing just "Grantaine".

So she did.

Five little windows, each with a photograph, popped up. They all showed the same woman - a delicate Westerner, with blonde hair and melancholic lavender eyes. She looked like a fairy tale princess, an impression belied by the reports attached to each picture.

Deep Cover Spy Flees Japan

Anne-Sophie Grantaine, a French citizen believed until recently to be the Event Manager for the Suoh Group, has been exposed as a deep-cover mole working for the European Alliance.

She managed to destroy fifteen inlaws and to severely injure one Japanese citizen before being neutralized by Suoh's security team. However, Grantaine managed to escape in transit to the nearest police station. Her whereabouts are unknown, and she is considered highly dangerous.

All her belongings, as well as her considerable body of work, are being processed by the Authorities. Due to Grantaine's access to high-profile clients and restricted areas -

Haruhi clicked on the next picture. Anne-Sophie Grantaine's curls were pinned under a beanie, and she was smiling like a rogue.

Tamaki would certainly count as her belonging... and if he was left behind when she escaped... he must have been thirteen. Fourteen at most.

Merciful ancestors - he had been criminally processed at fourteen. Being the son of a spy, they must have applied all the pressure they could to make him spill all his mother's secrets. Haruhi had heard stories about enhanced interrogation techniques - and then she had learned in-depth about them in class. Tamaki's skin looked smooth enough, but she had only seen him under the dim red lights of the server or the darkened nooks of the dormitories. She wondered if it held up in broad daylight, or if it might be marred by machine-applied motivation.

And - he was, after all, half Japanese, and his mother had been in deep cover - was he part of that deep cover?

Had Tamaki been born as an alibi? And who was his father? Had he been "processed" too?

She would ask him the next time she saw him. If she saw him. If she could.

Could she?

Haruhi typed again.

Hitachiin Kaoru

A hundred thousand results, all of them mismatched. Well, it was a common name.

Hitachiin Hikaru

Same.

She remembered Hikaru's reaction while they were watching the security camera footage of her dad's prison, and wrote:

Hitachiin clinic experiment

One lonely report - a clinic in the outskirts of the village of Hitachiin, dedicated to genetic research, agricultural development and animal husbandry, had burned down ten years ago. Nobody had died, but all the animals had escaped, and the fire had caught on some of the nearby neighborhoods and fields. Hitachiin had been evacuated.

Haruhi had seen the twins' skin in class and in the fields - they were very touchy-feely and liked to drop their jackets, but they bore no scars - no burns. It might be a coincidence.

Unless it wasn't.

She knew that Morinozuka had been born on the school's premises, so there wasn't much to look for there. Looking at the time, and noticing that she only had half an hour left, she typed the last name.

Mitsukuni Haninozuka

And the horror popped up, one holo-rendered, fully animated murder scene at a time, red-tinted and purpling, arenas drinking the blood of the circus children.

The problem with the Authorities was that they had originally been programmed by optimists and engineers, by individuals that either trusted human nature or rationale that had no reason to distrust it. As a result, the first ten hundred laws had been exquisitely codified. Murder was ruled as illegal, of course, as was torture, sexual and physical abuse, hurting minors. It never took into account how creative other engineers could get to circurmvert it, how easy it would be to disguise a fighting pit as a "Children Circus" where children hurt each other in new and imaginative ways, as a sport on specialized forums. And how terrifying it was that the crime had only become punishable after it had been declared a crime.

Because it wasn't illegal for sane kids to fight each other to the death while adults looked on, as long as those adults were not their legal tutors. The only guilty parties would be the children themselves.

Mitsukuni had fought for seven years and killed almost a hundred children. The last child has been his brother. The first adult had been the referee in that match. He had arrived to Ouran at eleven. He was considered too damaged to reenter society and further security measures would be applied to him and the other Circus survivors when they turned eighteen. It didn't take a Lawyer to know what that meant.

Haruhi took a deep breath and closed the windows. Forty minutes had passed. Quiet as a mouse, she rearranged the last opened filed and powered off the console. She took Kosaka's black police coat, slid into her boots and looked directly into the iris scan.

The door slid open, silent as a serpent, and closed almost immediately behind her back.

It was still raining, but the fat droplets of morning had turned into viciously cold pins that flew diagonally with the wind. Haruhi looped her fingers around the hood's strings and adjusted it to cover most of her face, then plunged her hands into her pockets.

Now would be a great time to hear another voice inside my head.

But the tooth stayed silent. She had memorized the fastest route to BonMall, a good 4 km away from Kosaka's apartment. In the pictures it had looked big, and imposing, and it had at least twelve floors and many patios and food courts, five parking lots and a lot of entrances - she hoped that at least one of them was open and that someone would meet her outside. She did not like the idea of breaking into a closed shopping mall that was probably plagued with cameras in the slightest.

She passed an okonomiyaki truck and her mouth watered - the cabbage and shrimp pancakes were one of her mum's special treats, once a week right until the week she died, with extra plum sauce, piping hot and crusty. The scent was so powerful that she stopped to queue in front of the food truck before she realized that she had no card, and that she would have to pay via iris print, which would in turn leave a track of where "Officer Kosaka" had been that night.

Haruhi forced her feet to walk away, looking back just once at the golden glow of the mobile kitchen and breathing as slowly as she could to keep the scent inside. She walked past the residential towers that lodged all civil servants and cut through the stark avenues of a winter park. At the other side laid a cheerful pink service district - not Red and Racy and Ranka, but catering to softer desires and innocent flirting. Some of the establishments even served high tea complete with elaborate cakes. The host bars melted into a scattering of high-end boutiques with price tags as high as the overhead skyscrapers. Each boutique had an iris scanner, so Haruhi pretended to fiddle with her hood to keep her eyes firmly averted from them.

Her wristcell's yellow light was still blinking. She pressed her lips to it and whispered "off", but it didn't work. It was probably a left-over alarm from her kitchen schedule. Nothing to worry about, surely.

Still, she was happy to see the mass of BonMall appear in front of her like a fairytale castle. It was difficult to miss. In daylight, its walls were white and smooth. Like most modern malls it had no windows to enhance the feeling of being in another dimension and encourage consuming, but the roof was made of glass to let in the natural light. By night, it was another story - huge projectors brought the walls to life with giants, and every side of BonMall featured a different holoyection. From her perspective, Haruhi could see a campaign ad for Yuzuru Suoh.

The base of the building was circled by Inlaws.

Haruhi did not want to run away, because that would guarantee the special attention of the robots. However, she could not see a way of entering the mall without them seeing her. She had avoided leaving a trace of "Kosaka's" whereabouts so far, and it wouldn't do to leave the only clue right at her destination.

The rain was easing into a light and chilly fog, and Haruhi realized that she had been standing still on the same spot for several minutes, watching the Inlaws come and go in spiral patterns. One of the decrees forbade looking too intently or for too long and safeguard and security devices designed to protect citizens and their property. She felt a tiny drop of sweat - or maybe rain - sliding down her chest. Haruhi turned around and walked slowly up the street that had led her there, until she found a side street that she took to get to another side of BonMall.

Houshakouji, the favorite candidate, greeted her from this wall and promised her ration stability and excellent education. There was a difference with the Suoh side, though - one door was open, and an energetic team of workers was coming and going from the mall to a huge truck without even a glow from the Inlaws. The workers were all dressed in white with maroon caps and scarves, and were carrying enormous boxes from the truck into the mall.

Aha.

She wandered casually to the truck. It was white and weathered, with a burgundy logo that read "TUPA EVENTS - LIGHT AND SOUND". She hid behind the twisted wheels until five workers had finished unloading a particularly large box. One of the smaller ones almost let a side of it fall on his foot, and his taller colleague scolded him.

"Y'all look straight ahead until this monster is in the dry, ya hear me?!"

"Aye!"

It was too good of a chance not to take it. No other workers were coming in her direction, the trailer was completely open and there were plenty of boxes to duck behind. The mass of the vehicle would protect her from the street cameras, and the Inlaws seemed utterly unconcerned with whatever was going on.

So she jumped inside, going into the box space as deeply as she could, and hid behind a column of slim rectangular boxes marked as beams.

Right on time, because the workers were back.

What she needed was a medium-big box that marked as "Frail" and "This side up". That way she would be safe from being carried around like a steel beam, and also being dropped as one. She found that at the far side of the box space. Haruhi waited until she couldn't hear the workers and used her teeth and nails to carefully open the cardboard. The box was filled with light bulbs and foam, and it was probably much lighter than she was. She could only hope that the bottom did not give up.

Haruhi crammed the lights and foam behind the last boxes and bent her body inside. She closed the box from the inside as well as she could, interlocking the flaps. The chilly air that she had trapped with her quickly warmed, and then she could only close her eyes like she had done in the pod, and count her heartbeats, and try and remember the reasons that she was going to give to the Zuka if they were inside, and how she had to trust the plan, and go forward with it, and bring back to Ouran as much help as she could as fast as she could, because each one of her heartbeats marked a stolen second of her father's life.

Eventually she heard the workers moving the beam tower and stomping around her box. It still took it by surprise when someone pushed her through the space box, and she stuffed her hand (covered in white sweater) into her mouth to deafen any squeals when the box was lifted. The cardboard bent under her weight, and all she could imagine was the impact and the arrest.

Please don't give, please don't give.

But two men caught the box by the bottom before that happened. She was soaked in sweat.

"Heavy! I thought these were lights!"

"Might be the rotor's motors, they tend to pack'em together,"

"Are we taking the lift for this one?"

"The trolley - the light geeks want all the bulbs on top of the stage, and they will take'em from there,"

"They gonna work all night, you think?"

"They'd better. The rally starts tomorrow morning. You goin'?"

"Sure am! They give free drinks and ration credits. I'm bringing the kids too for the holo combats, they love Demon Shiro. You?"

They dropped Haruhi, and their voices trailed off, only to be replaced by the huffs and puffs of two other guys. She felt the squeeze of the boxes around her, and then, after two hundred heartbeats, the trolley started to move.

They unloaded her and the other boxes as unceremoniously as a rotor motor deserved. Haruhi waited until she heard the trolley leave and then pushed softly against the cardboard flaps. They gave in easily, so at least they had not put any other box on top of her head.

She listened intently, but she couldn't hear anything. If there were light engineers coming to set the bulbs up, this could be her only chance to get out and hide and look for the Zuka. She pressed her teeth together, waiting for a crackle, for anything - she would have welcomed even Tamaki's voice. But inside her head there was only the crackling of dead air.

She had to get out now, before the trolley came back with another load and the engineers appeared. Haruhi unflapped the box and she could have sworn that the scratching of the cardboard was the loudest noise in the world. Her mouth was dry but her skin was soaked, and her stomach was a knot that jumped up and down. She lifted her head slowly, and, not seeing anyone, gathered the courage that she had left and crawled out, flat on her belly. She slid through the narrow streets of that labyrinth of boxes, telling herself that she would try and hide beneath the stage, but then she arrived to a cul-de-sac.

It would be faster to stand up and make a run for the closest hiding spot. She was still wearing the black raincoat, hood included, and her face would not appear on camera - probably.

The chance of getting caught was smaller now, she thought. Much smaller than in the streets of Tokyo, much smaller than inside the box in the truck. The odds had to be in her favor now.

So she took her chance and stood up - the stage was very wide, and the boxes were everywhere, but she was only three meters away from the edge, and then the structure would cover for her. She made a run for it, and it was only one step after starting that realized her mistake.

The sole of her heavy work boots hit the stage floor like an earthquake, drumming away in the dimly lit mall. Haruhi blanched and panicked, unable to stop on the spot, so another heavy foot fell and made a sound. She only had one option, because they had to have heard that, and that option was to jump, but before she could do it, the light bathed her.

A slow clapping filled her ears, and she turned her head around, covering her eyes from the brightness.

"Looks like we have a star among us," said a velvety voice.

"Bambi's mother, more like," replied a childish one. "Startled like a deer,"

I can still see. It is not an Inlaw. My eyes are fine.

"Don't worry, doe dear," the velvety voice approached, and Haruhi turned quickly. Strong hands pulled her, and she found her face smashed against soft cotton - and soft breasts. The same hands took off her raincoat in one swift move, and she felt smaller ones patting her up and down.

"Hey!"

"I take that you are the Ouran envoy," said the taller girl, lifting Haruhi's face to take a good look at it. "But I was under the impression that they were going to send a man?"

"It's only boys," said Haruhi, "No men,"

Giggles all around her.

"That's a good one. I couldn't agree more," said the tall girl. "Turn off the lights!" she said. "Electricity test in working order!"

The focus dimmed and faded. Haruhi's eyes took a moment to adjust to the semi-darkness again.

"I meant that we're all min-"

"Don't worry, dear doe - I know what you meant. But we are going to be working through the night, and I can't work on an empty stomach. We just picked some okonomiyaki on our way here, would you care to join us?"

Haruhi's stomach rumbled like the thunder.

"I guess that's a yes. Come on in then."