Zero Sum Game (21 page)

"Hi," she said, and resumed walking home.

Ami looked her up and down. "Why are you wearing your uniform?"

"I had weightlifting today."

"Yeah, but you could have worn your gym clothes. You've been wearing your uniform a lot."

Had it been that noticeable? It must have been if even Ami could tell. What was she supposed to say?
Of course.
It gives me super powers and there is an alien threat that will pop up at any time and anywhere.
No, she couldn't say that.

Ami grabbed Hina's arm. "Where's my fashionable friend? Where's the girl who should be on the cover of Niko magazine?"

"It's
Nicola
," Hina corrected.

Ami tugged on her arm and leaned close. "I need my fashion friend back to make fun of my clothes and tell me how much I look like my grandmother." They laughed. Ami took Hina's teasing in stride because Ami didn't care. She dressed bad and knew it, but wouldn't change. Hina liked that about her friend.

Ami stepped back and squeezed Hina's upper arm. "You must be doing a lot of weightlifting. You're like steel." She squeezed harder. When Hina said nothing, Ami wrapped both hands around her and squeezed as hard as she could, gritting her teeth and scrunching her face in effort. "Can't you feel that?"

"Of course I can feel it," Hina lied. "It doesn't hurt." She could show off a tiny bit, couldn't she? Even if it didn't raise suspicion? Hina thought that Voice didn't approve of this behavior and would complain to her later tonight.

Ami shrugged and dropped her hands. "I guess you'll help the red team win the sports festival for sure."

Hina rolled her eyes. "Don't remind me. It's bad enough I had training today."

Ami nodded her head in agreement, as if she understood Hina's pain. She was in the art club and risked getting a paper cut instead of broken bones.

Starting Monday, the entire school would begin practicing for the annual sports festival, which was next Sunday. Unlike most junior high schools in the area that had the students practice the first week after summer vacation ended, Hiroshima City Junior High School had one week of classes, then a week of sports festival practice, followed by Sports Day. The principal knew most schools held their sports day on the same day. By having HCJHS's sports day a week later, it gave everyone a chance to attend.

While Hina liked the sports festival itself, she hated the week of practice beforehand: endless marching drills, radio exercises, standing outside in the oppressive heat. It exhausted her. As a second-year student, she had done it before. The red team had lost last year, and she was determined to win this time. Because HCJHS was a fair-sized school, they had three teams: red, white, and blue. The red team's mascot was a phoenix. The white team had a white tiger and the blue team had a turtle.

Ami asked, "Are you going home now?"

Hina nodded.

"Do you want to stop and get some coffee?"

"Sure," Hina said, and they switched directions towards Hondori. They walked in silence for a few moments.

Ami cleared her throat. "Are you all right?"

"What? Yeah, of course," Hina said in surprise. Ami didn't smile, and she saw genuine concern behind the lopsided glasses. "I'm fine," she said.

Ami shrugged. "You were…strange last week. Like you've been thinking hard about stuff. Sometimes even depressed, it looked like. I was wondering if something bad happened."

Hina suppressed a sigh. It was terrible enough that Ozaki-sensei already knew her secret, but that had been unavoidable, he had seen her powers in action. But she couldn't tell Ami what was happening. She would be putting her in danger; Hina was trying to save her life, not end it prematurely. They were best friends, and it hurt her not to tell her the truth.
What was one more secret?
she thought with a bit of loathing. She hadn't told Ami about her parents' divorce.
Why should I tell her anything any more?

Hina pushed away her anger and guilt and tried to sound normal. "Nothing. I…I have a lot on my mind. That's all. I'm fine. Don't worry."

Ami said nothing, not seeming to believe her. They entered Hondori and decided on which coffee shop to go to.

Soon they were seated on the first floor at the far end of the coffee shop. Ami warmed up, moving the conversation away from Hina and onto how she might look into getting contacts again to replace her glasses.

Voice interrupted. "Hina. I've been monitoring the activity in the establishment, and there is something you should pay attention to."

She acted as if she had not heard him and kept her focus on Ami. She was getting better at hiding her reactions to him. She no longer jumped as if a bug had bitten her and had to apologize to everyone in class, or wherever it happened when he spoke up. She raised her coffee cup to her lips. "Go ahead," she whispered, then took a sip and nodded at Ami's ongoing conversation.

"Focus on the man ahead of you, third chair from the door," Voice said.

A businessman sat at the window counter with his back to her, talking on his cell phone. She heightened her hearing and heard the voice coming from the man's phone.

"
I just want you to be careful
," a woman said.

"The highway doesn't cut through Himeda," he replied. "I'm sure it's not washed away. It has to rain for a landslide to happen. Got it? It's been sunny all day. You worry too much. I'm still at work. I have to make copies now." With a "tsk" of disgust he flipped his phone close and drank his coffee.

"We should investigate this," Voice said.

Hina pretended to study the decor on the wall near her. "Why?" she whispered.

"It's too unusual," Voice replied. "Terraforming Earth will be a violent process, one your scientists will have no explanation for. This could be the start of it."

Hina almost screamed in shock. How much time did Ami have left? What about her father and mother?

"What's wrong?" Ami asked in concern.

Voice cut in before Hina could reply. "I don't mean that Shimizu and Fujiya have begun the terraforming process. They couldn't do it in such a remote location. But they may be testing the catoms."

Hina stood up. "I have to go," she told Ami. She pointed to her bag. "I'll pick that up at your house."

"What's going on, Hina? Is everything all right? Tell me what's happening with you."

"I can't." She hoped the pained expression on her face was enough for Ami to see she was telling the truth. "I…I'll see you tonight." Hina ran out of the coffee shop.

CHAPTER 19

Voice plotted a route to the site of the disturbance. "Take the nearest street and get on the expressway," he instructed.

"What?" she shouted. She ducked into the doorway of a shop. "I thought this was supposed to be secret and all that."

Voice said, "If you go through the forest, you can't run as fast as you need to, there's too much in your path. If you take the expressway, we can pass any emergency vehicles and authorities that have been called to the scene. You'll be able to run faster."

"What about security cameras and cell phones? Don't you think people are going to take pictures of a girl running as fast as a car?"

"I can emit a small interference field that will scramble your face on any recording device. It doesn't work on the human eye, but cameras will show you as a blur. Your ID will be concealed."

That sounded reasonable. She took a breath. Voice had protected her so far, she figured he would still do so now. She jogged to the nearest street and paused on the sidewalk, looking both ways at the traffic. On her side she noticed a brief lull and stepped out into it.

She ran.

She approached the back of a car before she knew it and veered around. Running this fast made her nervous.

Voice spoke up. "Trust me. Run, Hina, run."

"Okay." She thought of it as practice for the sports festival.
The five kilometer dash
. For a moment she wished she could wear her uniform during the games, if just for one event. That was cheating, but it was a fun thought.

She passed a car and heard its horn blare behind her, but she was already two car lengths ahead. She didn't focus on the cars themselves, but the spaces between them. The vehicles blurred behind her. She approached the intersection that led to the expressway. The light shined red and a line of cars waited. She moved to the left side of the road, ready to bypass the traffic. The overpass of the expressway loomed above her. She passed another car.

Ahead of her, a truck door opened. She didn't have time to jump or dodge. She threw up her hands in instinct and bashed into the door, ripping it off the frame in a screech of metal. The window frame caught her foot and she stumbled, spinning like a drunken ballerina. She put out her hands and slammed into another car. The impact rocked the vehicle and lifted it a few centimeters off the road. Her hands left imprints in the metal roof. She surveyed what had happened. The truck door lay against the guard rail; the man who had opened it leaned out, his seat belt still attached.

Hina bowed to a ninety degree angle. "I'm sorry," she said to the man in the one-door truck. She turned to the car beside her, whose roof was now bent. She bowed again. "I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry."

She took off again. At the intersection, she leapt, arms out, legs tucked. She cleared the railings and high fence of the overpass and landed in the left hand lane in a crouch. "Which way?"

"West," Voice replied. Hina didn't move. "Left."

She took off and stayed as much to the shoulder as she could, weaving through traffic when necessary. As she ran, Voice informed her of what to expect. "If they have indeed succeeded in terraforming, the ground should be a gray color, almost silver. The sky will have a subtle purple haze. The plant life in the area will be dying as well."

Her enhanced hearing picked up the rumble of moving earth. The expressway curved to the left but Voice told her to go straight. She jumped the barrier with ease and entered the woods. She ran through the forest, then burst into a clearing on top of a small mountain. Ahead of her, all of Voice's predictions became reality.

The trees and plants were still there but Hina knew they didn't have long to live. Silver-gray dirt slid down the slope and popped like lava from a volcano. A cloud of faint purple hung above the infected area like colored smoke from fireworks. The purple mist faded as the breeze pushed it away. Part of the mountain crumbled away, carrying the silver soil with it. Hina moved as close as she dared.

"It's okay, Hina. I'll protect you from the Noigel environment. It is too dilute to cause much harm to your human physiology. It's okay for you to touch it. You can breathe the air as well."

She stuck out a foot, paused, then set it onto the alien ground. It didn't feel any different from Earth soil, and she settled her weight on it. She stepped up to the edge of the crumbled area. Below her, a silvery cloud of dirt slid down the mountain. The catoms were turning brown soil to silver, as if the world was bleeding mercury.

"Put your hand on the ground," Voice said. Hina felt a slight tingle in her palm. After a moment Voice said, "It won't spread. The catoms have been programmed to expand to a certain radius then shut down."

She sighed in relief. The sight frightened her. Until now, Voice's talk of terraforming had been intangible, a vague picture in her imagination. She realized the truth.
This is what my world faces.
It wasn't a change of government or the subjection of the human race; it was the transformation of the planet itself. The catoms would spread like algae across a pond and they would destroy everything in their path, including the rocks themselves. Nothing would be safe. After the world was killed, it would murder its own inhabitants. Death would be slow and merciless. No secret weapon would defeat it, no cure would help. Humans would fight Earth itself.

They would lose.

A few hundred meters away, a raccoon dog came out of the forest. It approached the silver ground. Above, a few wisps of purple mist hung in the air. The raccoon dog sniffed the colored vapor and yelped in either shock or pain, Hina wasn't sure, then it bolted back into the forest.

The crumbling river of dirt continued down the side of the mountain. She looked out over a shallow valley; here the homes were spaced far apart from each other with wide fields between them. Most of the inhabitants were farmers. The area resembled where her grandparents lived. They were farmers too, and her parents had sometimes taken Hina to visit them. She couldn't imagine living in such a remote place; she was a city girl.

Two pairs of parallel lines at the base of the mountain caught her eye. For a moment, she wondered what they were. She traced their course from right to left. They ran out of sight around a bend. Her eyes widened in shock when she realized they were train tracks. As the mountain crumpled, the dislodged dirt built up on the tracks. If a train hit the pile, it would derail. In the other direction Hina noticed the tracks disappeared into a tunnel. From her vantage point she had no way to know if a train was coming.

"The train…" Hina said.

"What are you going to do?" Voice didn't offer anything else.

It was her choice, she had to make the decision. After seeing what her world would become if Shimizu and Fujiya succeeded, she had to be proactive. Voice could give all the advice and information he wanted, but she had to do something with it.

This is it,
she thought.
After now, I fully step into this mission. I kept saying I wanted to save people. This is it. Here.

Which should she try to do: stop the train or move the dirt? The crumbling had ceased, and a pile of silver-gray soil and rocks covered the tracks like a giant anthill. It would be almost impossible to move the dirt, there was too much of it. Also, she didn't have any sort of equipment or tools. What was she going to do, shovel it out by hand? That was useless.

That left option number two: try to stop the train. She knew one would come along, but it might be any time between now and two hours from now. But that could give her time to call the authorities, get them to shut the train now. She knew they had plans for that. Her father worked on the Shinkansen and sometimes told her what had happened when bad weather made the trains dangerous to operate. She would have to get to a phone.