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Dishes lay scattered on the floor amid torn cushions, overturned drawers and discarded tools. Behind them, cabinet doors gaped open, many of their magnifying lights twisted or broken. After picking my way through the rubble, I finally joined Kei at the cold storage drawers. I doubted a full-grown adult could escape their confines—they were designed to hold corpses, after all—yet one door bore bloody smears and shallow impressions on its metal interior, where a small body had twisted itself about and tiny feet had kicked their way free. "You said you gave him a double dose of the sedative."
"I did! I did!" Kei clapped his hands over his face and slid down against the unit, moaning.
As he did, I spied a piece of metal still dangling from its slender chain. Now I wanted to moan. "You didn't lock it, did you?"
"What?" He looked up.
"You knew what he was becoming, so why didn't you lock it?" I stabbed one finer at the pin.
"I couldn't! He was cold, Renata, so cold and frightened!" Tears welled in his dark eyes. "I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry." He began to sob.
I wanted to kick his head through a wall. Kei's misguided parental instincts had endangered both our lives. We had enough on our plates without having to deal with an escaped, pint-sized Kufugaki! "Yeah, I get it. It's okay," I muttered. It really wasn't but what we needed right now was not tears and recrimination, but an action plan. If the rain held off, we still had an hour or so of daylight left, and the kid was small. He couldn't have gotten far.
Unless he fell in the lake!
While I actually favored that possibility—an accidental drowning would save us a great deal of time and argument—I didn't want to broach that subject with an already distraught Kei. Then, another thought occurred to me, and although I found it loathsome, I had to ask, "Kei, what about his implant?"
"What about it?" Kei snuffled.
Balling my hands into fists, I forced myself to utter the rest, "You said you can track people who've been Seeded. Can the implant still function after it releases the virion?"
Kei stared at me a moment, then slowly, began to nod. "Maybe, Renata. Oh, gods, if there's a chance—that's—that's brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!" Springing to his feet, he swept me up in an embrace so fierce, my ribs cracked.
When I briefly entertained the idea of getting into a tight spot with him, being mashed against his damp chest like a favorite toy was definitely not the scenario I'd had in mind. Arms pinned, legs dangling—any attempt to wriggle free only made him tighten his grasp, effectively trapping me in a suffocating funk that seemed to emanate from every pore of his body.
"Kei...can't...breathe," I gasped, deciding I liked him much better from a distance.
Nor was I convinced that this latest emotional display was completely genuine. Maybe I'd let too much of Satoshi's paranoia rub off on me or maybe I was completely inept in the social nuance department, but I found his reaction more overreactive than proactive. Tracking someone with a possibly-functional GPS implant in his freaking neck wasn't 'brilliant,' it was just plain common sense: the kind of thing a real father—especially one with elite military training—would've thought of immediately.
"Damnit, Kei! Let me go!"
He murmured something about Hiro but didn't relinquish his hold, forcing me to keep squirming against him.
Finally freeing one arm, I pushed myself into a more acceptable breathing space. "It'll be dark soon. We should go. We wouldn't want Hiro's mother to worry."
The remark worked like a bucket of ice water, effectively snapping him out of whatever spell had been holding him in sway.
Strange, after everything that had happened, he'd never mentioned her. I found Kei's convenient omission of any reference to the mystery woman in his life extremely suspicious. The possibility that she may have been a Saisei brood mare—anonymous and disposable—made it all the more infuriating. Feet back on the ground, limbs free, I slapped him across the face. Thunder lowered outside, shaking the body of the ship.
"Renata, I-I didn't..." He tottered back, dazed. At least he'd stopped crying.
"This ship isn't going to fly itself. If you still want to find your son, I'll be on the bridge."
I stormed off, unwilling to listen to his apology—anything he had to say. My thoughts were troubled enough. Mounting a search for Hiro seemed batcrap crazy. Even if by some stroke of mad luck, we found him, his safe capture and containment still posed serious issues. While Kei seemed willing to overlook those problems, I wasn't, already envisioning a conversation in our near future that began with, 'He's not your son, anymore...' Right now, I didn't know which was more of a liability, Hiro's disease or Kei's emotional instability.
By the time he darkened the archway on the bridge, an odd silvery tinge had suffused the rapidly dwindling light, rendering everything it touched in a surreal aura. Lightning flashed over the lake near a point where two mountains overlapped like arms draped in shades of black. Above them, Mt. Fuji stared impassively down through her misty veil.
Sighing, Kei sank into the Captain's Chair. "I offended you, Renata. I'm sorry."
"I'm not much of a hugger, that's all." I looked away, preferring the fat droplets spattering against the cockpit to his hangdog expression.
"Noted. I don't know what came over me, but I assure you, it won't happen again." Sighing, he brushed a sweaty hank of black hair off his face. Plastic squeaked as he tapped icons on the touch pad. A section of the console slid away, revealing a large, set-in display.
"Good to know. Apology accepted." I leaned forward to inspect the new monitor, watching the sweep of the polar green radial arm against a dark grey ground. It pixelated at a few points during some revolutions—interference from either the mountain or the storm—but made an intact circuit during others. "If we have implants, shouldn't we be somewhere on this display?"
Kei jerked back, banging his knee on the console. "Uh, no, it sweeps out from here, so we're above the radar, so to speak." Then, looking over at the monitor, he nodded reassuringly. "I'm going to have my hands full, flying in this storm, so keep your eyes peeled for any blip on that screen."
The ship juddered, the rumble of its wings extending for takeoff eclipsed by a booming roll of thunder. A nearby streak of lightning produced an eruption of static on our radio and set every interior light flashing. Outside, rising winds whipped Shoji’s once placid waters into angry whitecaps.
We began our search by circling the lower portion of the lakeshore. Small patches of open ground, sunken buildings, dense forest canopy: all blurred into rain and gloom beneath us. Even with the ship's floodlights on high power, it was impossible to visualize the terrain below.
"See anything?"
"Nothing yet." More like nothing at all.
I soon lost count of how many times we orbited Shoji. The green arm on the display swept and stuttered and paused and flickered without producing a single sign of Hiro. After each unsuccessful sweep, Kei widened our course to cover more of the lake and forest; but the closer we came to Lake Sai, encroaching on Aokigahara's forbidding storm-tossed wilderness, the more difficult navigation became. Panel lights sputtered off, then flashed erratically on again, setting off a host of alarms that were soon silenced in mid-screech by yet another power flux. Our search beacons snapped out and turbulence threatened to tear us from our seats, while the storm pommeled the skycraft with hail and small debris.
After a spectacular bolt of lightning and another power outage that sent the main engine into stuttering fits and produced strange insectile click-clacking from the console, Kei finally had to concede defeat. "It's too rough to hold her on course. There's just too much interference."
I scowled into the darkness. "Where would you say we are right now?"
"We just crossed over Saiko. The hike here would have taken us hours from where we found the canoe. There's no way Hiro could have made it this far in such a short time." Expression turning from anxious to grim, he shook his head. "I'm going to take us back to Shojiko and find a place to land. We'll have to postpone our search until the morning."
"Maybe Hiro took shelter in a cave or one of those abandoned buildings near our last landing site," I offered. But the attempt to reassure Kei only instilled more anxiety in me. If the kid could get out of the ship, he could certainly let himself back in any time he wanted. Not knowing when that might happen meant we were in for another sleepless night.
The ship veered sideways, triggering a frantic interior light show that set off a host of alarms, including those for our cloaking shields. Kei white-knuckled the steering lever and I dug my nails into the chair arms as we surged forward. Now propelled by the force of the storm instead of fighting against it, we overshot Lake Shoji, entirely.
Cursing, Kei opted to reroute us by swinging wide over the middle of Lake Motosu, Gradually, warning lights and alarms petered out, leaving only the strange clacking sounds on the radio. Sounds that seemed to intensify as Kei guided the skycraft over Motosuko's black expanse. We were somewhere over Lake Shoji before he finally managed to maneuver it into a less harrowing, horizontal flight position.
The ship's searchlights, which had fizzled out after the last lightning strike, sputtered back to life. When he saw what was floating in the choppy waters below, a low moan escaped Kei's lips.
Even in the storm, the color of Hiro's tunic was unmistakable.