Emi Sekiyama [I5] Flight
There’s a cast on her arm, blaring white against her dark skin and uniform. The camera is zoomed in on it, and on Kenji Matsuda who is busily scrawling something unrepeatable on the plaster.
The writing dominating the back reads, ‘friends are the people who laugh when you fall off your bike, scribble rude words on your cast, then take all your class notes for you because you can’t even pick up a pencil.’
- “You’re quitting?”
Emi looks up from where she’s tying her shoelaces. It’s Tatsutarou. Her good mood vanishes somewhat and she nods, smile barely touching the edges of her mouth.
“Yeah, next Tuesday’s my last session,” she replies, finishing her lace and standing up straight, kicking her legs, loosening the muscles.
“How come you’re quitting?” He actually looks kind of crestfallen, and the realisation is like a hard jab to her gut. He thinks they’re still friends, while she…. The embarrassment threatens to make her face go red and she twists her head back, stretching her neck, to hide it.
“I don’t have the time.” The last word comes out strained as she stretches. “I have like two other clubs, cram school and all the class rep stuff, so I had to cut something. Aaaand…” She gestures around the school pitch. “I go jogging every morning and my neighbourhood’s way nicer than this.”
Tatsutarou laughs, but it’s quite a somber laugh. When there’s a few seconds of silence, Emi grasps for the opportunity.
“Well, I’m gonna go warm up. Talk to you later!” And with that, she turns and jogs away from him, so she doesn’t have to see or acknowledge the disappointed look on his face.
It was an accident.
He saved her life and she killed him.
By accident.
She was on top of the rocks now, ears ringing, skirt and blazer billowing in the wind, the clouds passing over the moon and the silver light making the front of her uniform shine black. She stumbled forward nigh on blindly, the rocks jagged and uneven and every step introducing more pain to her face, her hands, her feet - and as she helplessly gazed around her, she realised that save for the hiking trail just ahead, it was all the same.
She couldn’t walk on this. She could barely even stand here. The hiking trails were all she had. With one hand clamped over her cheek, she couldn’t even use them both to balance or climb. She had scrambled up the embankment giving small shrieks each time the wind slapped her face.
And everyone else on this island would have the same problem: they would have to use the hiking trails.
That was when the true fear hit her. Not a panic attack. There was no desperate need to flee, no struggle for breath, no feeling of being crushed alive by the weight of it all. Just a deep, deep cold that spread through every limb so that if she looked down, she would not have been surprised to see ice sticking to the individual hairs on her arm. The feeling of each breath she took coming in hot and leaving her frozen.
Her mind coldly and crisply telling her the inexorable.
This is where I’m going to die.
Would whoever killed her scream and cry and shout and claim it was just an accident, but she deserved it anyway?
Or would they just shrug it off and say that that’s what you have to do? That only one of them can win. That
- “we play by the rules!”
Toriumi - to think she used to find him funny way back when on TV - shakes his head, points the gun - Emi cringes, claps her hands over her ears - a loud bang-
And silence. She looks over. Toriumi, she realises with absurd confusion, has fired a fake. Kei stands there, looking down as if for the wound almost comically, and then she looks back up at him, the silent question on her lips and everyone else’s.
“Hah, you’re dead! … No, you’re not, I’m just kidding! I wouldn’t shoot you. That’s so messy. Who wants that? Not me!”
Emi blinks. Her hands are freezing cold, adrenaline keeping the blood from extremities - she absently blows into them.
Hiroto Toriumi is absolutely, certifiably-
“No, no…. No, I have others do the dirty work.”
-insane.
Kei was raising the gun again, this time to her own head-
Gunshots ring out - Kei Aihara, is buffeted by the force, and the flaming objects burst into her, leaving gaping holes through which even more blood gushes. She falls out of Emi’s line of sight, and before Emi can even process what had just happened-
“Now I bet the rest of you won’t try anything, huh? Hah!”
She lets out a breath, her diaphragm shuddering with it.
“Let’s see… Ahh, yes, boy #2, Keisuke Akita, step on down!”
Her next breath catches in her throat at the sound of the name. It’s as if the idea of him being here too hadn’t yet occurred to her. She can’t even see him-
There he is. Standing up over near where Kei disappeared. He looks around the room, scanning the faces there, and their eyes meet.
The helplessness is as clear on his face to her as if he had shouted it out. She wants to believe that she’s conveying back something reassuring, something helpful, but she probably looks just as scared as he.
When he turns his back and leaves the room, Emi is left staring at the doorway he went out through for a long while after the next person leaves.
She may have just seen him alive for the last time.
This was insane. This was all insane.
Tatsutarou had-
She stilled.
Tatsutarou had blown up. Her ears still rung with it. Her throat was still raw from screaming, her eyes puffy and sore from crying.
The noise they had made must have been phenomenal. And on the cliffs, where everything echoed? The entire east half of the compound must have been able to hear them.
And with that realisation, Emi stumbled forward, Keisuke, Tatsutarou and all else forgotten - she couldn’t hear her own footsteps properly, they sounded incredibly far away - school shoes scrabbling for purchase and eventually her having to leap the final ten feet down onto the path - the impact and sudden movement brought tears to her eyes as her cheek protested.
Gingerly, she reached into her bag, bringing up the map held between fingertips and realising confusedly that there was something on the back she hadn’t noticed before.
A list of names. Alphabetically ordered. Sorted by gender. It included her own, tenth down on the right-hand column. Sekiyama, Emi.
The death toll.
She felt the whimper crawl up her throat more than heard it.
Swallowing back a lump in her throat, she backed against a rock ‘wall’ - the trail here lay at the foot of a gully - and leaned against it as her legs threatened to give again. She threw her head back, shut her eyes and breathed in deeply, trying to let herself calm down.
Tatsutarou was dead. He would have died anyway. Better to die quick than slow, the way some kids died here. At least there was that much.
She had to keep that in mind if she was to get herself through this. Alive. Without having an utter breakdown.
Her face twisted as pain seared her cheek.
She had to check how bad it was.
- “I don’t like him,” she says, idly playing with a pen and staring out the window at where the third year boys are cleaning up after P.E.
“Why, what’s wrong with him?” Seira looks over at her in surprise, chopsticks hovering over her food.
“He’s weird! Don’t you think?”
“He’s a burn victim. Sorry he doesn’t look like KimuTaku.”
“I don’t think…” She trails off. Actually, she doesn’t remember any of the conversations she’s ever had with Akimitchi. She knows she must have some reason, other than him looking like a clay sculpture gone wrong. But after a moment’s consideration, she realises she doesn’t really care if she does or not.
“No, you don’t, do you?”
Emi doesn’t talk to Seira for the rest of the day.
But on the other hand, she didn’t think she wanted to look at it. Maybe if she didn’t look, she could pretend it wasn’t bad at all, that it was all okay and she didn’t suddenly look like Akimitchi.
She was still trying to make the decision, still painfully aware that more importantly than this, she should be moving, when she heard the sound of some scattered pebbles, rolling their way down the hill towards her, misplaced by what could only be a living thing. A person.
Someone was coming into the gully, right towards her.