Chapter 9 — White

Chapter 9

I wake up to white.

Not light. White, ceiling, walls, floor, all the same tone, the kind of white that comes from somewhere above and has no source you can point at. The air is cool. Filtered. It tastes like somewhere that has never been outside.

I sit up.

I am in a room the size of my apartment. Bed, desk, a door with no handle on my side, a narrow window that looks out at nothing, concrete, and beyond it, dark water.

An island.

I stand. I check my pockets. Phone gone. Wallet still there. I open it. The photograph of Hana is still in it. I look at it for exactly four seconds. I put it away.

I try the door.

It opens.

The corridor outside is white and long and has doors on both sides. Not locked. I try three, empty rooms, same as mine. The fourth opens and Kenzou Momonosuke falls out.

He looks at me. I look at him.

"Okay," he says. "Okay okay. Okay." He appears to be running a system check. "I'm okay. Are you okay. Is this, where are we."

"I don't know yet," I say.

"That's honest. I respect that." He stands up fully. He is still wearing his school uniform. "I had the weirdest dream about a train."

"It wasn't a dream."

He looks at me. Then at the corridor. Then back at me. "Okay," he says again, quieter.

We find Yuma two doors down, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hands folded in her lap looking at the floor with the expression of someone who has been awake for a while and has used the time to be very calm about something that is not calm.

She looks up when we open the door. "Oh thank god," she says, and means it.

Kaito is at the end of the corridor standing at the window that looks out at the water. He hears us coming and turns around. His face is the same as it always is. Still. Composed.

I look at him.

He looks back at me.

I will ask him later what he knew and when. Not now. Now is not the time.

"Kurenai," I say.

"Next floor," he says. "I checked."

"Hori."

Something passes across his face so quickly I almost miss it. "I haven't found her yet."

I nod. I file this away too.

We move.

The facility is larger than a room and smaller than a school. Five floors, white corridors, doors that open from inside, common areas with tables and chairs and vending machines that work. The vending machines are fully stocked. Someone planned for us to be comfortable.

That is the most unsettling thing so far.

We find Kurenai on the third floor standing in the middle of a common area with her arms crossed and her expression indicating that wherever she is she has already decided she owns it.

She looks at us when we walk in. Her eyes go around the group, Kenzou, Yuma, Kaito, me, and then she says: "where's Hori."

"We're looking," I say.

Kurenai uncrosses her arms. "Then let's look faster."

We look faster.

Hori is in a room on the fifth floor.

She is sitting at the desk when we open the door, writing something in a small notebook she apparently had in her pocket when we were taken. She looks up when we come in. Her expression is warm and easy and present, exactly the same as it always is, and somehow this is the most normal thing that has happened since I woke up in a white room on an island in the middle of water with no phone and no way home.

"Oh good," she says. "You found each other."

Kenzou makes a noise that is somewhere between relief and exhaustion. Yuma crosses the room and sits next to her. Kaito stands in the doorway.

I look at Hori.

She closes the notebook and looks back at me and smiles.

I have nothing to file. There is too much to file.

"Now what," Kenzou says.

I look at the window. Dark water. No land visible. Somewhere above us the sky is doing whatever the sky is doing and we have no way of knowing.

"Now we find out what this place is," I say.

"And then," Kurenai says.

"And then we decide what to do about it."

The room is quiet for a moment.

Then Hori says "we'd be okay. We have each other right?" in the same voice she used in the library. The same warmth. The same ease.

The same face that doesn't move underneath it.

"Right," I say.

I mean it more than I did the first time.

I don't know if that's good or not.