Chapter 5 – September 2048 – At the top of the stairs

To be honest, I had no idea how I was supposed to spend this summer.

It felt like I had a lot of options, but none of them really stood out.

This time of year—like it or not—you start thinking about your future.

Parents, teachers, classmates—everyone starts pressing you, 『What do you want to be? What do you want to do?』But there’s no way I’d have a clear answer to that. I mean, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with myself…

Even under normal circumstances, my head was already a mess. But in my case, there was one more troublesome factor—something that added extra chaos compared to everyone else.

That was Nagamine Mikako.

You might say, 『So what, you can’t even decide your future because of some girl?』—and yeah, I wouldn’t blame you for calling me spineless. But in two ways, you’d be wrong.

First, Nagamine wasn’t my girlfriend or anything like that. And second, she never once told me what I should or shouldn’t do.

Nagamine was just one of the classmates I’d been relatively close with in middle school.

Then, in the summer of our third year, she suddenly vanished from my life—chosen, they said, as a member of the UN Space Force. She was going to pilot a Tracer and travel in search of the Tarsians. A third-year middle school girl, going off into space. It sounded so absurd, I didn’t know how to process it. It made more sense to me to imagine a cat giving birth to a puppy.

The only thing that made that ridiculous story feel real were the dozens—maybe hundreds—of messages we exchanged. We weren’t lovers, so we didn’t have that kind of special relationship. But in the sense that we talked about so many things without being lovers… maybe that was something special.

I was just an average high school student. But whether I was studying, eating, gaming, riding the school bus, messing around with friends or staring out the classroom window in a daze—there was always a part of me that carried the thoughts of space, the Tarsians, and Nagamine Mikako.

There were definitely times when it felt like a burden.

I told myself it didn’t concern me—tried to ignore her, more than once.

But I couldn’t resist the messages that came from space.

Messages that crossed vast distances in both time and space to reach me.

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

Even as her journey continued—growing ever more distant in both time and space—my feelings for Nagamine, strangely enough, only grew stronger.

It wasn’t something as simple as “I like her.” It was more like… a deep, quiet care for her. I think I only realized that clearly after the messages from her stopped.

The last message from Nagamine came from Pluto.

It was a short message, just letting me know she had arrived. Surprisingly short, for her.

Up until then, her messages had arrived at least every few days—but after that one, they suddenly stopped.

I couldn’t help but worry. The worst-case scenarios started creeping into my mind.

And half of that fear turned out to be right.

News—vague and delayed—was released four or five days after the event: the fleet had encountered the Tarsians. A small-scale battle had taken place. The fleet had then made a 1.1-light-year retreat via hyperdrive.

At first, even the basic information about the battle wasn’t disclosed. It took another three days before they confirmed that there had been casualties on our side.

They reported one death.

That countless Tarsians had appeared. That combat had occurred. That there had been fatalities.

Every part of that was shocking.

It was the first time I truly realized how dangerous the mission Nagamine was part of really was. And I was left stunned.

Nagamine was living every day face-to-face with danger!

No—more than that. That one casualty…

What if that person… was Nagamine herself?

The thought of it made me feel like I was going to come apart.

Especially because the messages from Nagamine were still silent—it only amplified my fear.

Either way, I’d have to wait over a year before I could even find out if she was safe or not. How is that fair? The result is already out there, but I have to wait a whole year, doing nothing, just to know?

I didn’t want to believe Nagamine had died.

I wanted to believe—had to believe—that she was alive.

Because… it’s just too cruel. What did she ever do wrong? Was it just bad luck? If she’d had just average luck, maybe she’d be going to Johoku High School with me right now. Maybe she’d be living a perfectly normal, ordinary high school life—nothing special, just… here.

A year without receiving a single message from Nagamine.

A year without knowing if Nagamine was alive or dead.

I had no confidence that I could get through that year with my sanity intact.

Even though it hadn’t been confirmed that Nagamine had died, I felt a gaping emptiness inside me, like there was a hole in my heart. For a while, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything.

I thought it was just too painful to keep waiting while thinking only about Nagamine.

Maybe people would call me cold-hearted, but I decided I had to stop thinking about her as much as possible. Because there was nothing I could do. Right now, I had no way to bridge the vastness of space or the time that separated us.

While I was trying to stay calm like that, the world around me was growing more and more restless after the news of the Tarsian appearance broke. The once-silent Tarsians had shown up en masse at Pluto. It was like something out of a typical sci-fi story—people feared they were headed straight for Earth, and it became a global frenzy.

But in reality, once the Lysithea fleet disappeared, the Tarsian swarm also seemed to just… vanish without a trace and the worldwide panic quickly subsided. However, after that brief calm, a flood of voices surged forth. The loudest by far was: 【We must urgently strengthen Earth’s planetary-scale defense network!】

I couldn’t help but sigh at the thought that yet another chunk of the national budget would get poured into the UN Space Force.

Was society really about to regress again? I started to worry we were heading back to a world where slogans like 【Luxury is the enemy!】would be used to force us into living modest, joyless lives. I already felt like we were living modestly enough as it was.

At the same time, a small but vocal group began criticizing the secrecy of the UN Space Force and its subsidiary, the Aerospace Self-Defense Force.【Release the information!】they demanded. What triggered this outcry was the news that there had been casualties during contact with the Tarsians. Since the identity of the deceased hadn’t been disclosed, family members of the selected crew began contacting one another and together they managed to compile what turned out to be a nearly complete list of the personnel who had been sent into space.

The details, published through the media, sent ripples across the country. Every one of the 218 selected members from Japan was female. And their average age was 18.6—in other words, all minors.

I already had a rough idea of the crew makeup from Nagamine’s messages and I’d wondered myself, Why? Why just girls? But now that it was exposed by the media so plainly, I found myself needing to know: what was the meaning or necessity behind such a strange selection?

Naturally, the topic reached the Diet, where the opposition grilled the Defense Minister. His reply—more like a desperate excuse—went like this:

【When the Tracers were designed, upgrades to the onboard options forced us to reduce the available living space. As a result, we prioritized physical suitability, mainly height, which led us to select young people, particularly females. Furthermore, extensive data collected from recent space labor missions has shown that in terms of stress tolerance in closed space environments, women statistically outperform men. Therefore, female gender became our top selection criterion.】

Honestly, it all sounded fishy to me.

For a while, the issue of crew selection sparked heated debate. But in the end, it was drowned out by the much louder arguments over Earth’s defense strategies.

***

I didn’t truly regain my composure until I moved up to my second year of high school.

It’s not that I had completely forgotten about Nagamine—I’m sure somewhere deep in my subconscious, I was still thinking about her—but I had gotten used to not receiving any messages.

Since then, the Tarsians hadn’t shown up again and with no further incidents, the public’s heightened sense of defense gradually settled down. Society was beginning to return to a peaceful state.

And in that peace—meaning, in the boring normalcy of my high school life—something unexpected happened.

It was one afternoon in June, after club activities. As I casually opened my shoe locker to go home, I found it secretly tucked inside. A scene straight out of a shoujo manga or something. I never imagined I’d be chosen as the happy recipient of something like that. A small white envelope, with no name or sender written on it. I hesitated for a moment but I had a good idea what it was. It definitely wasn’t anything dangerous, like a challenge letter.

I quickly took the envelope out, glanced left and right to make sure no one was watching, and slipped it into my bag.

Once I got home and dashed into my room, I locked the door and immediately pulled the envelope back out.

I set it neatly on my desk, took two or three steps back, and stared at it from a distance, wondering how I should deal with it. But that act of playing it cool only lasted for about three seconds.

No matter how you look at it, for a seventeen-year-old kid, something so simple and pure has pinpoint effectiveness. Like a carrot for a horse. Like catnip for a cat. And I was no exception.

Flustered yet careful, I used scissors to open the envelope and took out its contents.

In contrast to the plain envelope, the stationery inside was a soft shade of pink.

That alone was enough to send a teenage boy’s heart puka puka floating, and my Japanese reading comprehension plummeted all at once. It took me an absurdly long time to grasp the actual meaning of the sentences.

The sender was a girl named Takatori Youko—a name I didn’t recognize at all.

Class 1-A. A first-year, apparently.

There wasn’t anything like【I love you】or any other kind of straightforward confession written.

【Please give me a little of your time after school tomorrow. I’ll be the girl with long hair, sitting on the bench beside the biotope, with a volume of Hesse’s poetry on my lap.】

[Hermann Hesse, a famous German-Swiss author and poet]

***

The next day, the young fool couldn’t wait for after school.

He considered trying to gather some info from the underclassmen in the archery club, but it was obvious he’d get teased afterward, so he held back and just waited out the time.

And sure enough, the long-haired girl with her eyes lowered toward what appeared to be that very volume of Hesse’s poetry was waiting on the wooden bench beside the observation pond, just like the note had said. As I hesitated, wondering how I should approach her, she must’ve sensed my presence, because she looked up. I hadn’t let myself expect much, but she far surpassed anything I could have imagined—and I took a dokkan full-force punch of beauty that knocked the words right out of me.

“I was starting to worry you wouldn’t come. Truth is, I noticed you coming from a hundred meters away…Nice to meet you. I’m Takatori Youko.”

Right from the start, I was already caught in her rhythm.

She didn’t say she liked me. She didn’t ask me out. But when I was gently shooed away with a line like 【I shouldn’t interfere with your training】we somehow ended up with a promise to meet again—and even though I didn’t recall ever asking to borrow it, I found myself holding her paperback copy of Hesse’s poetry.

Hook, line, and sinker—I’d fallen right into her trap. That was how my relationship with Takatori Youko began.

A perfectly picture-book example of a wholesome boy-girl relationship.

It was always her leading the way, always to places she liked. That’s how we kept dating.

Of course, I had club practice, so my free time was limited. Like a personal secretary, she worked diligently to make the most of my available time, carefully crafting the most efficient date plans.

Places within the range of my school commute pass—city art museums, libraries, concert halls. Every date spot she picked was healthy and budget-friendly. These public places had never really meant much to me before. To be honest, I used to find them boring and uninteresting. But once I got pulled into her pace, I even came to enjoy that boredom.

Unconsciously, I began comparing Nagamine and Takatori.

Nagamine was supposed to be a year older than me, but Takatori always felt far more mature. I figured that made sense. In my memory, Nagamine was frozen in time as a third-year middle schooler—left behind by the flow of time, like she’d stopped growing.

Takatori Youko, though—she had this clean, elegant presence, but the way she spoke, her subtle gestures… they all gave the impression of an adult woman. She was smart, tall, and definitely not bad-looking. No—not bad-looking. Honestly, she was unmistakably beautiful.

I couldn’t understand why someone like her had taken an interest in someone like me.

According to her, Terao Noboru, second-year male in the archery club, was surprisingly popular among the girls. But apparently, I had a reputation for being cold and disliking anything shallow or flashy. I didn’t talk much—not to girls, and not even to guys. A difficult personality, she said. Someone hard to approach. And trying to make a move on me supposedly required a lot of courage.

That was a huge misunderstanding.

It’s true that, after everything with Nagamine, I had become worse at socializing, and I knew that others probably saw me as a difficult person to approach.

Takatori seemed to have been drawn to that very aspect of me—the hard-to-approach side—and she came closer, intrigued by it.

Takatori filled the emptiness in my heart.

She melted the rigid heart I had built.

Whether I actually fell in love with Takatori or not, I still wasn’t sure even for myself.

But one thing was certain—Takatori gave me the chance to experience an entirely normal youth and I was really grateful for that.

Still, as I was living this happy, normal youth, I felt a bit guilty. I couldn’t ignore the fact that, in the back of my mind, I had locked away thoughts of Nagamine, stashed in a small box and sealed tight.

Nagamine’s presence kept acting as a brake on my heart, which was starting to lean toward Takatori.

If I had let things go, I would’ve easily been swept into Takatori’s pace, and our relationship would have progressed naturally. But there was always another side of me, the colder, more detached side, that kept holding me back.

“Terao-senpai, you’re building a wall that no one can get through. But someday, I’ll definitely take it down for you.”

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

It was like a story of the North Wind and the Sun, except in this case, despite Takatori’s declaration and the warm love she showered me with, I became the stubborn traveler who, instead of accepting the warmth, kept raising the collar of his coat against her. Really, it was just prideful stubbornness at its best.

The day when Nagamine’s fate would be revealed was approaching.

I was being called back to face another reality—one that only I could confront.

***

That day, I had made up my mind.

Waiting for Nagamine’s outcome before deciding whether or not to accept Takatori—that kind of convenient thinking just wasn’t something I could bring myself to do. Even if someone asked me why, I wouldn’t have had a good answer.

Takatori must’ve sensed my decision, because when I invited her to skip club practice and walk home with me, she nodded with her usual cheerful smile—but then showed a faint, lonely expression afterward.

As soon as we got off the train and stepped out of the station building, a cold September rain started to fall. I took out my folding umbrella and held it up for the two of us.

Takatori leaned against me in silence. Her slender, pale arms extending from the sleeves of her still-summer uniform looked so cold. Every now and then, her arm brushed against mine—soft and chilly to the touch.

As we reached the sloped staircase street, I knew—I had to say it now. If we went past here, I’d have to walk her all the way home.

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

“I’m sorry. I can’t be with you anymore.”

Then, in a voice barely audible, she said, 【I know.】 And gave a small nod.

I held the umbrella out to her, then dashed into the rain.

Without looking back, I ran up the concrete steps.

At the top, something familiar awaited me.

It was the old prefab bus stop shelter—where I had once taken cover from the rain with Nagamine on that summer day.

The route to school had changed. The places I stopped by, and the people I stopped with, had changed too. I hadn’t walked this path in nearly two years, but the scenery around it felt exactly the same. That useless little shed, now two years older and more weathered, still stood stubbornly in its original place.

Relieved somehow, I ran into the shelter.

There was no one inside. Not even the usual cats, who should’ve been holding one of their little gatherings.

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

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

And then—about twenty minutes later, my phone rang unexpectedly.

It was a message from Nagamine—one she had sent after a full year of travel.

The message was cut off partway, but there was no doubt: it had been sent after she warped out.

In other words, Nagamine was alive.

The joy didn’t explode all at once—it rose quietly, gently, from deep inside me.