Emi Sekiyama [B2-A3] Schism
It’s not clear who took this picture - it was possibly Keisuke, but it could well be anyone. Emi is standing in the middle of a field in sunlight, stretching so that her hands are far above her head, which is tilted back. Her top has ridden up her midriff, but a lot of the detail of the shot is obscured by the sun behind her. It looks like a shot taken by an amateur, but there is something about it that makes the viewer look again.
There is only a single word on the back. ‘Tranquillity’.
There was blood on her clothes again. And she had nothing else to change into.
It didn’t seem to matter so much right now that her clothes were bloodied again, though. She felt that even if she should wash it off, it would still be there. Microscopic, invisible, intangible, but as clear to her as if she had bathed in it.
She hadn’t taken from Kazuhiro and Miyako, but left, ran away, as soon as she saw the bullet slam into Miyako’s chest, and the gout of blood spilling from it like popping a tiny hole in a balloon, Miyako staggering, left to deflate.
The familiar rush of saliva to her mouth and tingling in her tongue signalling that she was about to throw up was interrupted entirely by Toriumi’s voice giving them the report.
One kill. One.
Emi wasn’t sure what was worse, that she had left Miyako alive, in pain, probably dying anyway, but slowly, able to watch her life seep out of her - or that she was the only one in the past six hours who had even killed.
She had considered turning back, making sure to end Miyako’s life - because what if she were killed and the only person left didn’t know where to find Miyako? They would both blow up. And it would be over in the worst possible way.
But then Toriumi had read the danger zones, placing them within a circle of danger zones. Trapped.
She had to go back. Make sure Miyako was dead before she escaped the trapped zone.
What if someone succeeded in killing the three left and couldn’t find Miyako hidden within danger zones? They’d both die. And Miyako couldn’t leave herself.
The idea of going back to ensure her classmate was dead - the sheer callousness of the thought - made her heart wrench, eyes sting with tears; she may not have interacted much with Miyako or really paid attention to her, but she had still been a classmate. They had been paired up in projects. Emi had taken care of her right along with the rest as class representative.
Emi had to live long enough to make sure somebody left alive. She owed them all that much.
She turned around and made her way back to where she had left them.
It was silent when she finally stepped into view of where she had left the pair. She had blocked out the unnatural silence of the mountainside since the first time arriving - no animals, birds, not even the wind rustling through plant life - but the silence here felt oppressive. It was maybe just her imagination, but it felt as though what had happened was lingering somehow in the air, dampening out noise.
Kazuhiro lay almost exactly where he had fallen - surrounded by bullet holes in the earth and scrapes in the rocks from where they had fought, eyes closed, face almost peaceful if not for the blood spattering it.
But Miyako was gone. A trail of blood led away from Kazuhiro, splattered on the rocks like perverse breadcrumbs in the old fairy story.
Emi backed away from Kazuhiro as if he might rise up and attack, and only turned to follow the trail of red when she could no longer see his face.
The trail followed another path away, sometimes in spatters and droplets, sometimes in large still glistening stains on the rocks that suggested the girl had literally fallen and had to drag herself along. After only a few more minutes, the droplets stopped entirely, replaced by that grotesque onward smear.
Emi’s eyes were burning. The whole programme so far, she had felt like a cup being slowly filled to the brim. It had reached that brim, water shaking precariously at the edges where one more drop might send it careening over the sides.
This was just one more drop.
She eventually found Miyako at the side of the lake. Maybe she had died within the past few minutes. Maybe she was still alive but unconscious. Emi didn’t want to get close enough to find out anymore.
What she had just done was already filling her with choking shame - hunting someone down to ‘put them out of their misery’ was like something a psychopath would do. Convince themselves that they were doing a good thing when really they were just committing murder, after all.
Maybe that was all she was doing.
And with that thought, Emi turned and ran.
She kept going, stumbling and stopping and starting over the rocks and along paths, until she was almost certain she had left the danger zone.
That was when she heard gunfire.
At the last report, there had been four of them. Miyako had just died. That meant it could only be-
Emi broke into another run, and came panting over the top of a rocky outcropping just in time to see what was obviously the end of a gunfight.
One of the two lay dead, the other standing over them.
The first one she took note of was the dead one - the first one that naturally drew her eyes.
It was Miki.
There was a sick little swoop in her gut at the sight of her - Miki, who was stronger than she was, had always known how wrong this was, who wasn’t carrying around with her the hypocrisy of the rest of them of having loved the Programme right up until she was in it - she was dead.
Her morality hadn’t saved her.
Giving up her morality hadn’t either.
Then within a moment her eyes had moved away from her to the other.
Taro.
First she gaped at him - alive, dishevelled and clearly exhausted but alive.
Taro.
And then in midstep her knees lost all their strength and she tumbled, gun falling and forgotten - to her knees - sideways into an awkward sitting position.
This wasn’t a drop of water into a full glass.
This was knocking it over entirely, contents flying everywhere.
And she found herself wordlessly wailing, sobbing, eyes screwed shut so hard lights popped inside her eyelids. Three days of poison suddenly bursting out all at once.
“Taro-“ She looked up at him only when she felt she could breathe - he had taken a step back, clearly startled, still holding the gun he had clearly just shot Miki with and for not the first time, Emi didn’t care if he killed her or not, just-
“I killed Keisuke!” she continued, bursting it out at him in a voice she’d never heard from herself before. “I killed Tatsutarou and Keisuke and Aiko and-“ She sobbed, took a deep breath, “And Mimiko and Kazuhiro and Miyako and-and-and Tatsutarou told me he liked me and-“
She broke down into shuddering sobs on the ground, raw and flayed hands covering her face, salt in multiple wounds like some kind of punishment, one that she felt by now she deserved wholly.
It was in silence that Taro stepped forward in front of her and crouched, then sat on the rocks, lanky body buckled up next to her. His arms around her shoulders were the first real human contact - alive human contact - she had had in what felt like it could have been a lifetime.
She leaned sideways into him, cheek on his shirt, weeping silently and breathlessly, and for a moment there was silence other than their breathing. Taro was trembling, but no less than she.
“I killed all of them,” she whimpered finally. “Tatsutarou was…. He was an accident. Keisuke too. But… I thought that-that if someone could go home, it would be okay. That’s all I could do.”
There was so much more she wanted to say - that she meant well, meant to do right by everyone like she’d always tried but was this really the right thing? Was there a right thing to do? Had she died on the cliff with Tatsutarou, could one of the people she had gone on to murder have won?
She didn’t think she’d rather Keisuke live like this and feel like her. At least he didn’t know any better now. At least he didn’t have to feel anything anymore.
But none of the thoughts collected coherently enough to make words. She was done trying to explain herself. She had done it now, and now either her or Taro would go home.
Taro to the family to whom he was like a second father.
Her to her mother and brother and dog and normal, mediocre existence.
Both of them with massive holes ripped out of their lives.
-She wondered momentarily if anyone had bet on either of them to win. Realised with a jolt she herself would probably have bet on Taro.
If she really cared about the class, if she really wanted peace, if she was really the good person she had tried to tell herself she was even despite her actions, she would allow Taro to kill her and go home.
But now that the time had come to do that, she was too afraid.
She still couldn’t say any of that.
“What do we do now?” she finally asked instead, voice tremulous.
“I don’t know,” was Taro’s answer, and the laugh he gave was as devoid of humour as a laugh could ever be. “Maybe…. Maybe we should wait.”
She didn’t need to ask what that meant. And she knew she didn’t want what that implied - it rendered everything worthless, every death, ever murder, every drop of blood and every tear. But it was that or something happen. Right now.
And she couldn’t do that either.
“Okay,” she whispered.
And there was a silence broken by absolutely nothing at all, not by animals, wind - certainly not any living person.
Because there were none left at all. The flood of emotion that brought out in her - guilt, despair, a deep loneliness and above all a lack of hope so tangible it seemed to crawl in her very blood - was enough to make her want to scream it all out until her throat was even more raw than it already was.
“By the way, Emi…” Taro’s voice was thin and exhausted. “I don’t care that you killed anyone. It doesn’t matter.”
Just those simple sentences made her eyes well up in tears.
The fact that she had a friend like Taro - and was about to lose that friend - was, in a word, heartbreaking.
That was the only word she had for it.
“I killed people too.” Voice toneless. “And not just Miki…”
He trailed off after that, and Emi didn’t want to prompt him.
All she could do in the silence that followed - long, stretching minutes where she could almost feel half of Japan hanging onto the edge of its collective seat - was lean heavily into Taro and savour that this was the last time, whatever might happen.
- All of the channels have now been discontinued with the exception of two, and those two show the same image: Hanazawa and Sekiyama huddled together on the rocks, feet away from the body of the recently deceased Miki Honda. Bets are roughly even on which of the two will walk away with the title of Programme Winner - Hanazawa, who has killed the girl pregnant with his own baby and the boy with whom he shared an illegal relationship, among others. Or Sekiyama, class rep with one of the most impressive kill counts seen in recent years, including her own boyfriend.
The current lack of activity, contrary to expectation, has actually increased the number of viewers and the hype surrounding the final two, with bets on the third outcome of ‘collar explosion’ having trebled since the death of Honda some hours prior.
“You know…” she finally murmured, voice hoarse. “If Keisuke saw this, he’d flip. He always did.”
Taro gave a laugh next to her that was almost genuine, shuddering against her with it briefly before stilling. “He totally would.”
- Ten years old, and Tokyo summer is leaving everyone indoors sweltering with heat. For Emi, this is true too except for at around the end of July, when her mother tells her that a family is moving in a couple of streets over, with a kid - one of a few - who looks about her age.
Emi, sociable and bored besides, takes a folding fan and a bottle of water and nearly runs out of the house, stopping only to bang on the door of the Akita house next door and cajole Keisuke into coming with her. Keisuke, plastered in sweat and predictable grumpy, dawdles all the way there.
Taro, the one their age, is just as sociable as Emi and barely a fraction as grumpy as Keisuke, and Taro’s inclusion into the little group of she, Keisuke and Kenji is pretty much natural. And as long he doesn’t get any reason to think Emi likes Taro more than him, Keisuke’s happy too.
The small talk, mindless chat about things that happened ages ago, about their friends, about anything, slowly helped Emi to calm down, almost forget about where they were and what they were doing, until they drifted off into a long silence, and the foreboding that filled the air between them made her shaky and nervous.
Not long now.
“I can’t do this,” Taro suddenly announced, and moved away all at once, leaving Emi cold and suddenly sick with fear.
This was it.
“What should we do?” she asked in a small voice.
A long pause, and the longer it stretched on, the more certain she became of the answer.
“Maybe we should just go.”
“Okay.” She felt she might throw up if she said anything more than that.
She stood up too, and as she did she picked up the shotgun, pointedly ignoring Taro picking up his own gun. The one only inches away from Miki’s pale hand.
They stood in front of one another, holding their respective weapons, Emi’s all but looking ridiculous with its size. The silence was oppressive.
And then Taro took the two steps forward and hugged her, this time hard, face pressed into the top of her head, her arms going around his torso, face pressed against his chest.
He was sobbing as he murmured, “I’m sorry,” into her hair, and so was she.
Then in what could have been a silent agreement, they turned and walked away, as if about to perform some kind of shootout.
One of them was about to die. Maybe even both. She couldn’t stop sobbing now, making no effort to stop the tears tracking down her cheeks.
“We’re still friends, aren’t we?” Taro’s voice was husky with emotion.
“When did we say we weren’t?”
And that was it.
The end.