There is always a great number of people to lose, Mayu.
For whatever reason, I couldn't stop thinking of that peculiar note which sat at the bottom of that basket. The number five that disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. Five. Five of us will be walking out of here soon enough.
There was a time when I would walk into the Hatsune clinic and the kindling fireplace would warm me up, or the thick walls would protect me from the heat. Now, walking in on this day of reckoning, the same deadness of the outside invaded every nook and cranny. I could not feel safe even here.
"Miku!" I called out. God, I hoped I wouldn't be finding any bodies in this place.
"Mayu?" From the office door, the lean and decrepit form of Gumi appeared, the crushing weight of a messenger bag causing her tiny frame to be completely off-kilter.
I almost teared up at seeing her like this, but time was against us. "Gumi! I'm so happy that you're alive. We've got to get out of Toragay right now. You, me, Miku, Yuka, and…someone else. All of us, together."
She smiled sadly, adjusting her bag to her other shoulder. "I'm afraid I can't do that."
"What? Why not?" I could not comprehend.
"I'm on the edge. My health has been declining for days now. I will no longer be living by midnight." She said it like a fact she read from an interesting book.
"Don't say that. I know what's been causing it, and if you just get away from the city, you'll be better."
She shook her head. "No. There are other reasons you couldn't understand."
"Make me understand!" I had never been overly fond of Gumi, though she had been one of the few constants in my life. However, I felt like if one more person dies, the pressure of all the departed spirits of this place would suffocate me.
"Miku and I have done horrible things. I thought I would be able to handle it, but I couldn't." She paused and looked around like she was lost. "If you're looking for Miku, she isn't here right now, but she'll be back by eleven." More looking around. "I really must be going now. Good luck and see you in another life, my friend." The poor girl shuffled past with an air of such tired resignation that I could not bring myself to stop her. It was a day of many lasts for me. This was the last time I saw Gumi Megpoid.
She was out the door with one final whisper. "The trees talk to me." Gone forever.
I let out a shuddering breath like I had seen a ghost. I probably had.
When I broke out into the streets only a minute later, she was nowhere in sight. However, it would seem that a building had caught fire at some point in the crisis and was raging one street block down from where I stood. Anarchy. Without knowing what else to do, I began heading for Yuka's bakery, trying my best to stop shivering. I could go there then come back here when Miku would hopefully have returned. We went from five to four in no time at all.
This would be the last time I stood in the Yuzuki family bakery, the last time I would see Yuka here. She was sweeping the floor so it was nice and tidy, like it was just any other night, like a lively customer would come in tomorrow morning and see the lovely, clean floors and admire how quaint the establishment looked, like any second her parents would lumber down the stairs and wish her goodnight. Those "lasts" happened a long time ago.
"Mayu! I told you not to come into work today," Yuka reprimanded. Her walls must have been built far stronger than mine.
"Yuka, let's leave the city tonight. Right now, actually. You, Len, Miku, and I can all pack our things and go together find somewhere new," I said and hoped she would understand, so I would not have to explain myself.
Her broom clattered to the floor. "You want to leave?"
"Yes."
She bounced on the balls of her feet and refused to make eye contact. "Actually, I've been thinking of leaving for a while now, but I didn't know if you wanted to. You know, I couldn't have left without you."
"You have always been too good to me, Yuka." I smiled. "Too good for this world."
Another stop needed to be made before going back to the Hatsune Clinic. The journey felt long from over, and the adrenaline faded from my system a while back. The day was over, but the night was young. I could feel every soul departing from the city like they were each a part of my own heart, taken from me. Taken by this city, taken by Death? Sometimes the rage coursing through my veins demanded a scapegoat, an instigator, a person whose throat I could wrap my hands around and squeeze. These thoughts only came at the darkest of times.
This was the last time I would be in the home of the Snake and the Rabbit. I stood between its cold walls and under the open, black sky and thanked the garden for its protection all these years. If only it could have protected Gakupo.
I couldn't think of one thing that I wanted to take with me, but it would be betraying all the memories I held in this place if I didn't bring something. After rummaging through all the scraps and barely usable necessities, I decided on my hairbrush as a suitable memento and grabbed Miku's sleeping tonic since no doubt I would be needing it someday, at death's door or not. Lastly, I gathered up all the parchment off of my lonely table and the ground into my arms. There was nothing left for me here.
On my way out, I ripped the sign off the gateway which read: Property of the Snake and the Rabbit" and place it on top of my pile of papers. Back to Miku.
Before I entered the Hatsune Clinic for a second time that night, I waltzed right past it and to the building still in a sea of flames. Without a moment's hesitation, I threw the papers and sign into the orange whirlpool of fire. A new life awaited me. Taking my first step back toward my original destination, my eyes were still trained on the flames, and I suddenly felt myself falling.
The ground hit me hard, but I had been hit harder. The real problem was that I could feel tiny shards of broken glass against my leg. Crap, the vial of sleeping medicine must have shattered. Gingerly, as to avoid cutting myself, I sat up and turned over the pocket in my dress so the glass would fall out, covered with that greenish liquid that smelled so bitter I could almost feel it on my tongue—
Then it hits me, and I had never been hit harder.
I had smelled this before. With a trembling hand, I dabbed my finger into a tiny pool of the medicine on a piece of glass and tasted. All of a sudden, I was falling again, but it was a different kind, like it was only my stomach that plunged into the dark unknown and the rest of me remained here in an equally dark and equally unknown world. I had tasted this before, twice. The first was in Yuka's bakery, when Yuka accidentally brought in the wrong herb. The second was just today in the water from the well which by now was obviously infected—no, not infected—it had to be poison.
Poison.
I wanted to throw up, but nothing occupied my stomach, so I merely dry heaved, wanting so badly to just lie down on the ground and die. All the other assumptions fell into place so perfectly that I didn't even have to form them into words in my mind; I could only think of names. Meiko, Luka, Gakupo, Rin, Gumi, Yuka, Len, and finally, Miku. Miku Hatsune.
Up on my feet, I felt lighter than before. Every pore in my body was tingling and on fire with fear and anger intertwining into a single purpose: find Miku.
There is always a great number of people to lose, Mayu.
It was fitting now, how the clinic was just like the outside since it was actually the heart of the outside. The heart of this devastation. As long as that heart is still beating, there could be no rest. I called Miku's name at the top of my lungs, and I almost couldn't recognize my voice since it was filled with so much fury. About to storm out and search the entire city, I heard a shuffling noise on the floor above.
Nearly toppling over, I dashed for the stairs and hopped up them three at a time. Never had I been to the flat above the clinic, but it was exactly how I expected a rich person's flat to look. Clean, with wood panels along the walls and flowers in vases on tables. A long corridor stretched before with doors sporadically placed on both sides and leading to what seemed to be a sitting room. Gakupo and I may have lived in a flat like this one day, before his future was stolen.
My gag reflex went off as I was about to pass an open door to my right. After escaping the smell of corpses for even a brief moment, the unexpected potency of the stench caught me off guard. Inching just a little farther, I could see inside the doorway. It was a bedroom, with a huge, cotton bed right next to the door, where Kaito, deformed after what I would guess as two weeks of decomposition, lied with his blank and bloated face peering at me. Oh, my God. What has she done?
Shuffling again, closer. Ahead of me. In the sitting room. I slowly approached. Suddenly, I remembered that Gakupo's pocket knife was still in my other pocket. I pulled it out. The blade glinted in the candlelight. Closer. With abrupt quickness, I rounded the corner and pointed my weapon wildly around the little room before letting it point at the woman in the corner, the woman I once knew.
"Mayu, Gumi told me you would be coming," Miku said, smiling and trying to hide a tin cup that was clasped in her hand behind her back. She paid no mind to the knife.
The lightness I had felt evaporated, leaving me weighed down and out of breath. I couldn't help but glance behind me, toward the room where Kaito lied.
"Ah, you saw him, didn't you?" she continued. "That room is quite a mess, I'm afraid."
"Do I really need to ask 'why?' because I thought the question was painfully obvious," I replied sharply, still keeping my arms and blade up and toward her.
"I'm so tired, Mayu. Aren't you tired? Everyone is so tired in Toragay."
"Everyone is so dead in Toragay."
"They aren't dead. Take a closer look. They're merely sleeping," she said, like those statements actually made an iota of sense. "People sin because they're tired. If they can sleep, then they will no longer sin. I helped everyone sleep. I'm a doctor's daughter, you know. Helping people is what I do."
"The only person sinning here is you! Murder! You murdered all those people! All my people! You murdered Gakupo!" Beneath all the white-hot anger, I wanted to cry. "Your husband!"
"I love my husband!" Miku yelled. I jumped. "I love him more than anything, but he was sinning. All those women. I once overheard you saying to Gumi one day that cheating on one's spouse is one of the three unforgiveable things. Well, I forgive him now. He won't sin anymore, because he isn't tired anymore."
Now, I was crying. This person standing in front of me couldn't be Miku. She simply couldn't. This psychopath before me could not, by any means, be my Miku, cool-headed Miku, strong and intelligent Miku, kind and generous Miku. The world couldn't be so dark that it could corrupt this woman. "Y-You're not making any sense, Miku."
She pulled the tin cup out from behind her back. Not once had her smile faltered until now. "All my life, ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of love. I told myself I would love a man with all my heart and he would love me, like a prince and a princess in a fairytale. It was like I was waiting for one specific person, like there was a piece of my missing before I met Kaito. Do you know how that feels?"
It took me a moment to make words come out of my choked-up throat. "I-I do. God, what's happened to us?"
"Yes, I suspected Len was that way to you. He, Kaito, me, you, Gumi, Yuka, I feel like we're not of this world. We were all destined to be here, and I was destined to fall in love with Kaito, and you were destined to fall in love with Len. Was I destined to become like this? Were the cards against me from the start? If so, this is an unfair world that I was never meant to be born in."
Before I could even register what was happening, she was chugging down the drink from her tin cup.
"No!"
My knife fell to the ground the same moment Miku did. By the time I was kneeling at her side, Miku was sleeping, sleeping forever. Her beautiful cyan locks were splayed on the ground and framed her face so perfectly, it really did look like she was sleeping.
This was the last time I saw my friend, Miku Hatsune.
As I walked numbly through the streets, I knew it was over now. The mystery was solved, the culprit was convicted, but really, did it matter? Despite what she did, despite everything, I still wished I could walk out of Toragay together with her. Now, there were only three.
Yuka and Len were pacing outside the bakery when I arrived. Both of them rushed to me and encased me in hug, since apparently, I had been gone a long time and they thought I was dead. Part of me still thought I was dead. Miku had killed me, and she was the one alive. No, I was here. I could hear my friends' cries of relief, I could see Yuka's smile, and I could feel Len kissing me as we stood in the dead city. We didn't know at the time, but we were the only three left out of a population of 140,634.
When the question of Miku arose, I told them that she died, and that was all they needed to know for now. I pushed away their condolences and pushed them for us to be on our way. I wanted to be away from this place as soon as possible.
Hand in hand, us three together, we stood at the very edge of the city, road stretching past hills and fields to a new life.
"We can do this," Len whispered to me.
"We have to," I replied.
"What are we waiting for, then?" Yuka asked.
We stepped over the threshold of Toragay as the clock struck midnight. New place, new world, new life. I promised myself I would hold onto these two until my final day, since there always is a great number to lose.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The cyan room was much like all the rooms before it. It was beginning to feel terribly frustrating, locked in here again. Yet another woman's scream pierced my heart. How many times would this happen? How many lives must be lost before this is all over? Time was drawing to a close, I could feel it.
Next time, I needed to remember. I needed to. The numbers are the key to everything. If I could just see that something was off when I get the next card. If I could just try to find out. The cracks were widening. Gakupo, my dear friend, remembered in his last moments, and Gumi, her words that day had faded in my memory, but now they were clear. The trees. The secret is in the trees and the numbers. Remember, please remember.