Chapter 78: Test Subjects
Ichiro’s mouth tipped and then righted. "They had rooms," he said. "Dark ones. Warmer than this. Colder than this when you were alone. They never said please. They had gloves."
Lynea’s fingers curled against her knee, nails making half-moons in her skin.
"Dozens of us," Ichiro said, and the word dozens was measured and measured again and still came up wrong. "For a while. They put... Stones. Or tried. I don’t remember the day. I remember after. The lights went kind of inside my eyes for a week."
The stone in his shoulder pulsed, a slow seep of brown-gold under the skin that didn’t decide to be pretty. Keahi flinched, barely.
"Most of them died" he said. He didn’t turn it into a story about their names or their last sounds. He said the truth the way a door opens and either you walk through it or you pretend the hinge is a kind of music. "They were... We were... Test subjects. Disposable lives."
Arashi’s hands were open on his thighs like he’d been told to prove he wasn’t hiding anything. He swallowed, and his throat made more noise than his mouth.
"I was the only one who could carry the stone and not go" Ichiro said. The word go did work he didn’t want to make the sentence do. "They were very excited about that. They said it like I should be proud I was a vessel that didn’t leak. I thought a lot about how many doors were in the place and how many people those doors could hold if you ran."
He flexed his fingers. The skin over the knuckles went pale and then remembered blood. "I didn’t sleep a lot. The stone kept digging."
"Digging?" Hikari asked, small, and hated her curiosity, and could not help it.
He nodded. "Feels like a wire under your skin that wants to be more than under. It... wants. If I don’t use it, it... eats. Slow. Quiet. It doesn’t shout. It’s good at its job."
"Can’t you-" Feris started, and then couldn’t finish "take it out" because she could see where it lay and because you could tell a story about the heart and it would be a lie before your tongue remembered the word.
"It’s too close," Ichiro said. "And it spread. You can’t pull roots without ripping up the ground. It’s a curse until someone like us points it the right way. Then it’s a weapon. Sometimes those are the same thing. I’m not... I’m not making it noble. It’s not."
Esen didn’t say anything. He was watching Ichiro like a man trying to see a reflection in water and not disturb the surface.
"I found the right door" Ichiro said, and his voice didn’t move. "Or the right door found me. Doesn’t matter which. I made the whole thing collapsed on itself. Not neat. It was... loud. I didn’t... I didn’t get anyone out."
The air between them changed temperature. It wasn’t colder. It was closer.
Lynea put her hand on the bench as if to stand and go to him and then didn’t because she would have stood in the place where the sentence lived and she was not the right person to step on it.
"I walked until I couldn’t," Ichiro said. "Wardens found me again. They didn’t know where to put me. Someone said Academy because I had a cloak and I didn’t die. So they gave me a bed and told me to do homework." His mouth shivered once. "I like homework. It doesn’t try to run when you finally get the right answer."
No one laughed. The shape of a laugh came and died very young.
"Your parents?" Keahi asked, and did it like a friend, not like an investigator.
"Later" Ichiro said. "I learned later." He tilted his head back and looked at the slice of sky the Lighthouse allowed them. "Mom was a Vanguard. They said she bought time at Velarion. That the Phalanx came and there were people alive because of her. But she was not among them." His jaw moved, slightly trembling. "Usually, parents are supposed to be proud of their kids. But I think that the children’s trust and respect needs to be earned. She rightfully earned mine, even though I can’t say that I lived to spend time with her. But she was a good human. I’m proud of her."
"Then... your father?" Esen asked, gentle not to be gentle, only to be correct.
"Graver" Ichiro said. "The kind of people who fight Nyxes when no one puts a uniform on them. He... None of that part sticks. They both died before my first memory learned shapes."
Feris scrubbed at her face like she could rub the idea of children in white rooms off her skin. "They put... stones in kids" she said, because she needed the words to be ugly so she wouldn’t drown under a softer version.
"They put a stone in me" Ichiro corrected, "and tried with the others." He didn’t take the weapon of that sentence and lay it at their feet. He just didn’t let them clean it for the world’s sake. "I was the only one who could carry it."
The stone pulsed again, a slow signal under his collarbone, and his hand made the smallest gesture toward it and then away, as if scratching were a kind of prayer he didn’t believe in.
"If I use it," he said, "the digging slows. If I don’t, it gets sick of me and reminds me who is wearing who." His mouth did something that could not be called a smile. "So I like training. It is... quiet, inside the noise."
He looked up, finally, and his eyes found them. Raizen met his and didn’t look away. Arashi’s stare, which had been on the grass, lifted and held. Keahi shifted her weight off an invisible fight stance and onto something like attention. Hikari’s hand hovered and hovered and then set down on the bench between them, not touching him and also touching him as much as she could. Lynea let the breath out she’d been saving. Feris’s eyes were wet and all she did was blink like leaking was a mechanical issue and not a sin.
Silence returned, not because there was nothing to say, but because anything else would have been less than the thing on the table between them. Somewhere, the Lighthouse’s petals turned just enough to catch a corner of light and throw it back.
"I’m not-" Ichiro started, and paused, jaw shifting like he could push the word aside with bone. "I’m not asking you to fix this."
"Good" Arashi said, and when everyone looked at him because it sounded like a joke that had forgotten its punchline, they found no grin waiting. "We’re not engineers."
"I am" Esen murmured.
"Metaphor, Esen."
"Ah."
Raizen said nothing, but Takeshi’s voice sat down beside him on the bench anyway, the remembered cadence of a tired soldier speaking a story he hated. The Moirai took kids nobody would miss... He put a hand flat on his thigh to keep from making a fist and scaring everyone unnecessarily.
Hikari finally let her hand move the distance it needed. She didn’t touch the stone. She touched his sleeve just above his wrist, the ordinary part of him. "Then," she said, voice as deliberate as a stitch, "we will try to be a thing you can... stand near. If it starts to eat, we will find it something else to chew."
Esen slid off the back of the bench and stood, easy. He crossed the space like crossing wasn’t anything at all and put his palm on Ichiro’s good shoulder - not the wrong gold side, the other, the one that was still just a shoulder.
"Alright" he said, and made the word chatty on purpose. "Then you stick with us and fight Nyxes. Noble cause doesn’t hurt."
Ichiro’s mouth did not learn to smile in that instant. But something in his face voted to give the day five more minutes.
A lamp clicked on. Then another. The little park agreed with the idea of evening. Somewhere below their feet, a runway remembered it could lift and decided to wait. The city did what cities do when nothing is on fire: it breathed.
They sat with that. Not as soldiers. Not as children. As eight people who had held the same picture long enough to make it less heavy.
When they finally stood, it was because the wind told them the hour had turned. They started back toward the white corridors and the more honest lights. Kori would be somewhere with a paper bag warm in her hand, looking at a clock she pretended not to consult
Ichiro fell into step with them like the decision had always been written. The wrong, brownish gold under his skin stayed quiet, for now. The Lighthouse’s beam found the clouds and swept them, as if checking each for a secret, and moved on. He wasn’t alone. Not anymore.