Vol. 2 Chapter 5 – September 2048, Stair Landing

Honestly, I was lost about how I should spend this summer.

It felt like I had plenty of choices, but in reality, none of them gave me a decisive reason to choose.

Even without that, this was the time of year when, whether I liked it or not, I had no choice but to think about my future.

My parents, my teachers, and my classmates all pressed me together, asking,『What do you want to become?』, 『What do you want to do?』There was no way I had a clear answer. To begin with, I had absolutely no idea what I should do myself…

Just when I was already unable to sort out what I should do inside my head, in my case, I was carrying one more troublesome factor than other people, one that disturbed the order of things.

That was Nagamine Mikako.

You might say,『What, you can’t even decide your own path because you’re being influenced by her?』and I might not be able to avoid being called weak but that would be wrong in two ways.

First, Nagamine was not my girlfriend and second, Nagamine had never once told me to do this or that.

Nagamine was one of my middle school classmates, someone I had been fairly close with.

Then, because she had apparently been chosen as a selected member of the United Nations Space Army, in the summer of our third year of middle school, she suddenly vanished from in front of me. She said she was going to become a Tracer pilot and set out on a journey to search for the Tarsians. A third-year middle school girl, no less. It sounded so absurd that I had no idea how I was supposed to take it. A cat giving birth to a puppy would still have felt more realistic to me.

The only thing that gave that absurd story any sense of reality was the dozens and dozens of emails I exchanged with Nagamine. In the sense that we were not lovers, we were not in a special relationship, but in the sense that, despite not being lovers, we talked about all kinds of things with each other, I think it would be fair to say that we were in a special relationship.

I was an ordinary high school student, but whether I was studying, eating, playing games, being rocked around on the school bus, joking around with classmates, or blankly looking down at the schoolyard from the classroom window, somewhere in a corner of my heart, I was always carrying space, the Tarsians, and Nagamine Mikako.

Of course, there were times when it felt like a burden.

There were also many times when I tried to ignore Nagamine, telling myself it had nothing to do with me.

But I could not resist the emails that arrived from space.

Emails that crossed vast stretches of time and space to reach me.

Two people living in completely different environments, with completely different purposes.

Even though Nagamine’s journey continued, and both distance and time separated us more and more, strangely enough, my feelings for Nagamine only grew stronger.

Those feelings might not have been something as simple as liking her. Maybe they were feelings of concern for the other person. I realized that clearly only after the emails from Nagamine stopped coming.

Nagamine’s final email arrived from Pluto.

It was an unusually short email for Nagamine, telling me only that she had arrived at Pluto.

The emails that had been arriving every three days or so suddenly stopped completely after that.

I naturally became anxious about what had happened. The worst possible scenario even crossed my mind.

That anxiety turned out to be half correct.

The news that the fleet had encountered the Tarsians, that a small-scale battle had taken place and that the fleet had carried out a one point one light-year evasive maneuver using hyperdrive, was only announced as uncertain news four or five days after it had happened.

At first, even regarding the small-scale battle, whether there had been casualties on our side remained unclear, and it took another three days before the details were revealed.

There had been one death.

The appearance of countless Tarsians. The fact that they had engaged in combat with the Tarsians. And the fact that the battle had resulted in a death. Every one of those things was shocking.

For the first time, I was made to realize with horror that the project Nagamine was participating in was carrying out a mission filled with danger.

Nagamine was living every day facing the risk of death!

No, more than that… what if that casualty was…

When I thought that Nagamine herself might have been the victim, I could not sit still.

More than anything, the fact that the emails from Nagamine had stopped entirely only intensified my anxiety further.

In any case, until I could confirm whether Nagamine was safe, I would have to wait more than a year. Could something like this really happen? Even though the outcome had already been decided, I would still have to wait an entire year doing nothing before I could learn that outcome.

I did not even want to think that Nagamine might have died.

I wanted to believe that she was alive.

Because, wasn’t it just too cruel? Had she done anything wrong? Or had she simply been terribly unlucky and if she had been blessed with the same ordinary luck as everyone else, would she have gone on to Jouhoku High School with me and lived a completely normal, silly high school life?

One year without any emails from Nagamine arriving.

One year with Nagamine’s life or death still unknown.

I was not confident that I could keep my peace of mind throughout that year.

Even though it had not been decided that Nagamine had died, I felt an emptiness, as if a hole had opened up in my heart. For a while, I had no motivation to do anything.

I thought it would be too painful to keep waiting while thinking only about Nagamine.

You might think I was cold-hearted but I decided to avoid thinking about Nagamine as much as possible. Because there was nothing I could do. Right now, I had no means at all to oppose the vastness of space or the separation of time.

Contrary to how I was trying to maintain my calm that way, ever since the first report of the Tarsians’ appearance, the world had grown increasingly noisy. The Tarsians, who had not been heard from at all, had appeared in great numbers on Pluto. Just like in some typical science fiction story, people thought they might come straight to invade Earth, and it became a huge uproar all over the world.

But in reality, when the Lysthea fleet disappeared, the swarm of Tarsians also easily vanished somewhere, and the worldwide chaos settled down for the time being. However, after things regained their calm, all kinds of voices began to burst out. Of course, the loudest voice was,『Urgently strengthen Earth’s defense network on a global scale!』

When I thought that another huge amount of the national budget would probably be poured into things related to the United Nations Space Army again, I almost sighed.

Was the era going to regress again? Would a world come where we would be forced to live plain lives under slogans like『Luxury is the enemy!』? Even though we already felt like we were living plain enough lives now.

On the other hand, although they were a very small minority, there also appeared people who criticized the closed nature of the United Nations Space Army and its subordinate organization, the Space Self-Defense Force, shouting,『Disclose the information!』The trigger was the fact that a victim had appeared in the contact with the Tarsians. Because the victim’s name was not made public, the parents and siblings of the selected members contacted one another and a crew list that had never been made public until then ended up being completed in an almost perfect form. The contents announced through the mass media caused a bit of a stir within Japan. All two hundred eighteen selected members from Japan were women. Also, their average age was eighteen point six years old and they were mostly minors.

From Nagamine’s emails, I had known the composition of the crew, and of course, including Nagamine herself, I had wondered why too. But when the actual situation was revealed like this through the media, I wanted to know all over again what meaning and necessity had been put into this strange selection of personnel.

Naturally, it stirred debate in the National Diet too, and in response to the opposition parties’ questioning, the Minister of Defense gave an answer that seemed like a desperate excuse. According to him,『At the Tracer design stage, because the installed options were upgraded, we had no choice but to cut down on living space. As a result, mainly due to the factor of height, we ended up seeking suitability only among young people, and moreover, women. Also, based on the vast amount of data obtained from space laborers in recent years, the superiority of women over men in stress endurance under closed space environments has already been proven as fact. In that sense as well, being female was made the highest priority item in the selection criteria.』It somehow sounded suspicious.

The debate had flared up for a while but the issue of crew selection was drowned out by the loud uproar of rising defense discussions.

The time when I truly regained my peace of mind was after I advanced to my second year.

It wasn’t that I had completely forgotten about Nagamine and deep down in my unconscious mind, I must still have cared about her, but I had grown used to the fact that no emails would arrive.

After that, since the Tarsians never appeared again, the temporary surge in defense awareness also calmed down, and society gradually began recovering its sense of peace.

Into my peaceful, and in a sense boring, high school life, one little happening was waiting for me.

It was one day after school in June. I had finished club activities and casually opened my shoe locker before going home, when I found it secretly placed there. The kind of situation you often see in shoujo manga. I never would have imagined that I myself would be chosen as the happy person involved in something like that. A small white envelope with neither the recipient’s name nor the sender’s name written on it. I was confused for a moment, but I immediately had a good idea what was inside. At least, I was pretty sure it was not something alarming like a challenge letter.

When I took out the envelope, I sneakily looked around to make sure no one was watching me, then hurriedly stuffed it into my bag.

The moment I got home and rushed into my room, I locked the door and immediately took out the envelope.

I carefully placed it on my study desk, stepped back two or three paces, and tried glaring at it from a distance while wondering how I should deal with it, but I could only keep up that composed pose for about three seconds.

No matter how you put it, for a seventeen-year-old kid, a simple and pure item like this has an immediate effect. Like a carrot to a horse. Like matatabi to a cat. I was no exception.

Flustered yet cautious, I used scissors to open it and took out the contents.

In contrast to the plain envelope, the stationery inside was a light pink color.

That alone was enough to send a young guy like me into a daze, and my Japanese language comprehension ability instantly dropped. It took me an absurdly long time to grasp what the string of words in the letter was trying to say.

The sender was a girl named Takatori Youko, a name I did not recognize at all.

First-year Class A. Apparently an underclassman.

There was nothing straightforward written in it like『I like you.』

【Please give me just a little of your time after school tomorrow. I’ll be the long-haired girl sitting on the bench beside the biotope with a collection of Hesse’s poems on my lap.】

The next day, the young guy could hardly wait for after school.

Part of me wanted to gather information from the underclassmen in the kyudo club but I could already picture them teasing me afterward, so I endured it and waited for the time to come.

The long-haired girl, looking down at what must have been the Hesse poetry collection in question, was indeed waiting on the wooden bench beside the designated observation pond.

As I approached and hesitated over how I should call out to her, perhaps sensing my presence, she lifted her face.

Even though I had intended not to expect anything, her appearance surpassed those expectations and this young guy was hit by a preemptive blow, leaving me at a loss for words.

“I was worried you might not come. Actually, I noticed Senpai approaching from a hundred meters away… Nice to meet you, I’m Takatori Youko.”

Right from the start, I had already fallen into her pace.

She never said she liked me or asked me to go out with her. But by the time I left that place, practically being chased away with,『I shouldn’t interfere with your practice』we had firmly made a promise to meet again. On top of that, even though I had no memory of asking to borrow it, I somehow ended up being handed a paperback collection of Hesse’s poems.

Completely caught in her trap, the relationship between this young guy and Takatori Youko began.

A relationship between a boy and girl so wholesome it looked like something straight out of a picture.

Mostly under her lead, at places she liked, we continued going on dates together.

Of course, I still had club practice, and the time I had free was limited. Like a personal secretary, she busily took care of everything every single time, making date plans that made the most effective use possible of my free hours.

The municipal art museum, the library, concert halls, places within the area covered by our commuter pass. The dating spots she chose were all healthy and affordable places. Those kinds of public places had almost no connection to my life until then, and honestly speaking, every one of them seemed boring and uninteresting to me. But I had completely fallen into her pace, and even that boredom somehow became enjoyable.

Unconsciously, I was comparing Nagamine and Takatori.

Age-wise, Nagamine should have been one year older, but Takatori felt far more mature. I thought that was only natural. In my image of her, Nagamine had remained forever as a third-year middle school student, as though her growth had stopped after being left behind by the flow of time.

Takatori Youko had a refined, graceful air about her but the way she spoke and her small gestures gave off the feeling of an adult woman. She was intelligent, tall, and not bad-looking either. No,『not bad-looking』was an understatement. There was no mistake in plainly calling her a beautiful girl. I could not understand why someone like her had taken an interest in a guy like me.

According to her, Terawo Noboru, a second-year boy in the kyudo club, was actually fairly popular among the girls. However, because he hated shallow, frivolous behavior and did not like talking with people, not only female friends but male friends as well, he was apparently known as a difficult character. Trying to make a move on him supposedly required a lot of courage, and in short, people saw him as someone hard to approach.

What a misunderstanding.

Still, because of what had happened with Nagamine, it was true that I had become distant in my relationships with people, and even I knew that others probably saw me as some kind of difficult person.

Takatori, apparently, had become interested in exactly that difficult side of me and approached me because of it.

Takatori filled the emptiness in my heart.

She melted the heart that had become stubbornly closed off.

Whether or not I had fallen in love with Takatori, honestly, I did not really know myself.

But it was certainly true that Takatori had given me something like an ordinary youth, and for that I was deeply grateful.

Even so, I also felt guilty, wondering if it was really okay for me to be spending such a happy youth like this. After all, I still could not completely ignore Nagamine, whom I thought I had locked away inside a little box in the corner of my heart and sealed shut with a key.

Nagamine’s existence constantly put the brakes on my heart as it began to lean toward Takatori.

Whenever I let myself be swept up in Takatori’s pace and our relationship began to progress, another, colder version of myself would always hold me back.

【Terao-senpai, you’ve built a wall that no one can enter. But someday, I’m sure I’ll remove that wall for you.】

I remember Takatori saying that with a deeply serious look in her eyes.

It was not exactly the fable of the North Wind and the Sun, but even though Takatori declared that to me and poured warm affection over me like the sun, I went against the ending of the fable and turned into an eccentric traveler who raised his coat collar even higher. Really, it was nothing but stubborn pride.

The day when Nagamine’s life or death would become clear was approaching.

I was about to be called back to another reality, one that only I had to face.

That day, I had made up my mind.

I could not do something so convenient as waiting for Nagamine’s result and then deciding whether or not to accept Takatori. Even if someone asked me why, I would not have been able to answer properly.

Takatori seemed to have seen through that resolve of mine. When I invited her to skip club practice and go home together, she nodded happily as usual, but afterward she showed a slightly lonely expression.

As soon as we got off the commuter train and left the station building, a cold September rain began to fall. I took out a folding umbrella, and the two of us shared it.

Takatori leaned against me in silence. Her thin, white arms, stretching out from the sleeves of her summer uniform before the seasonal change of clothes, looked chilly. Sometimes they touched my arm. They were soft and cold.

When we reached the stairway slope, I thought I had to say it. Once we passed that point, I would have to walk her all the way home.

I stopped, stepped half a step in front of her, turned to face her, and said,

“Sorry. I can’t go out with you any further.”

Then Takatori said,『I knew』in a voice that seemed about to fade away, and gave a small nod. I thrust the umbrella toward her and ran out into the rain.

Without looking back, I ran up the concrete stairs.

At the top, there was something nostalgic.

It was the prefabricated bus waiting shelter where Nagamine and I had taken refuge from the rain on that summer day.

My school route had changed and both the place I stopped by and the person I stopped by with had changed too. It was a road I had not passed through at all for the past two years but I could not feel any change in the surrounding scenery. The useless little shelter, looking two years older, still sat stubbornly in its original place.

Feeling relieved, I rushed into the shelter.

There was no one there before me. Even the cats that should have been holding their gathering were nowhere to be seen.

I sat down on the bench and wrung out the sleeves of my wet shirt.

Mocking myself as an idiot, I looked up at the sky and decided to wait for the rain to stop.

Then, after I had been there like that for about twenty minutes, my phone suddenly rang.

It was an email from Nagamine, finally arriving after completing its one-year journey.

The text had been cut off midway, but it seemed certain that it had been sent after warp-out. In other words, Nagamine was alive.

A quiet joy began to rise up inside me.