The main hall of the headquarters was still congested, just as it was earlier last night. But now the halls have grown quiet with most asleep on the floor with only a few walking around. The sunlight sneaking in through the windows, while making it a little uncomfortable for people inside to sleep, was still an assurance of safety from the darkness that terrified them.
Minato was sitting down in the main hall outside the massive, emptied conference room where most of the people were sleeping. Twiddling his thumbs, he was rehearsing his speech. He had perfectly concocted the story about his new self; only questions needed to be asked.
It was only a few hours ago he was injecting an Intelligent Coagulant Tyclopse shot to the right side of Ash's neck. The bleeding stopped as they were looking at her.
'She's still sedated?' Hiroshi asked, standing next to Minato with his hands in his pockets. There were armed men in black walking around the vicinity. One man was squatting next to Ash, attaching electrodes to her temple.
'She was never sedated,' Minato replied.
'What?' Hiroshi's hands jumped out of his pockets.
'They would find traces in her blood,' Minato said, preoccupied with attending to his patient. 'So, I didn't inject any.'
Hiroshi stood stunned, waiting for a better explanation from Minato, who after completing his treatment looked up at Hiroshi.
'If you are worried about her getting up, don't worry,' Minato turned back at Ash and pulled out a light purple colored injection. 'She has head trauma and a concussion; I can guarantee she won't get up without this shot.'
The conversation died out as Minato continued monitoring his patient.
'There is a chance that she does not have the answers we need,' Hiroshi initiated a new topic of conversation.
'We'll cross that bridge when we get there.'
'We are at the bridge, there is no better chance to prepare a plan B,' Hiroshi said. 'We are going to need a man on the inside.'
Minato did not like where the topic was headed, but with his resume, he knew it would be impossible for him to dodge this bullet. When he was transferred to the Hitoku National Institute of Research to supervise the project to track down a girl who had crossed between worlds, out of theirs, he expected a boring desk job for at least ten years. Their understanding of the many worlds was a bare minimum at the best. There were theories, but never put to action. But with the help of the guild, tracking and opening the gateway to the world this young girl jumped didn't even take two years. Now the days of his desk job were coming to an end. In his story, Minato truly was a man suffering heavily from his success.
Knightly came out of one of the rooms swinging his hands. When he noticed Minato sitting down close by, he decided to walk over to him.
'How is she?' Minato asked, looking up at Knightly.
'Oh, she's totally fine,' Knightly answered. 'Some of her augments were damaged, they are fixing them.'
Knightly stood quietly for a while before speaking once again to see if the stranger had anything to say first.
'I don't think we were properly introduced,' Knightly extended his hand. 'Dr. Bernard Knightly.'
'It's a pleasure,' Minato replied with a smile. 'I'm Minato Kurokawa, I uh- '
'Yeah, I uh- I know you Mr. Kurokawa,' Knightly said sitting down next to Minato. 'I've been following your work since my masters. My thesis topic was on potential of GRBs from blackholes induced with knethonic Alcubierre drive. I think about half the citations for my paper were from your publications.'
Minato chuckled politely. 'Well, you are very welcome.'
'How come we didn't meet you before?' Knightly asked.
'Well, I was in Crosswind for the longest time, mostly hauled up in my apartment,' Minato replied. 'Then I found these fascinating creatures and I ended up investigating them.'
'You mean the black ghosts?'
'Yeah, but I was having some fun with naming it myself,' Minato chuckled. 'I called them hollow wraiths.'
Knightly giggled. 'That's kind of a cool name. Did you- make any substantial progress?'
'With the hollow wraiths?' Minato said, smiling. 'No, no. I got nothing.'
Once again, silence.
'I was hoping to continue with my study,' Minato said.
'About the hollow wraiths?' said Knightly. 'Please. And if you need any resources by any chance just let us know.'
'Crosswind is now closed off,' Minato replied. 'Would it be possible for me to get some sort of a pass through the wall?'
'Of course, sure,' Knightly replied enthusiastically. 'Miss Young would have to approve it. So, as soon as she's up I'll get straight to it.'
Minato nodded gently, agreeing.
'It's pretty neat how you are managing the catastrophe,' Minato chuckled. 'Now, how many people do you recover from the shatter on an average?'
'Uh- last month there was thirty-one.'
'Wow, that's a considerable number.'
'Yeah, the number is only getting bigger the more of the shatter we recover,' Knightly added. 'But we only had like- fifty thousand people total. So, we are gonna be done with all recoveries in about ten more years.'
'Is the extraction procedure the same for both adults and children?' Minato finally got to the questions that mattered.
Common decency dictated that Minato should not immediately go back through the wall, hence in order to keep his not-so-cover intact he had to wait three days before going back, but when he finally did, he was carrying the necessary documents to certify his successful infiltration.
One of the two guards, who accompanied a swarm of patrol drones, accepted the papers that Minato handed out. After taking them back to his small post by the wall he returned a few seconds later.
'You are clear to pass, sir,' he announced, handing back the papers to Minato.
It was still very early in the morning; Minato had to get things done before the rest woke up to ask questions. Cold steel of the wall was soaked with dew drops and its peak was still hidden behind a cloak of mist. A mist so thick the black wall appeared gray a few feet away from it. One guard post could not see the other, but Minato was fearless to pass the threshold.
The guard opened one gate, passed in through it and opened another gate a few feet in front of the first. He showed the way and Minato followed through.
Hiroshi was shaken awake to a knock on the door. One of his men was peeking head into the room.
'Sir, Dr. Minato's back,' he announced.
'Finally,' Hiroshi got out of Minato's chair, adjusted his shirt, picked his coat from the headrest of the chair and walked out the room.
The hallway made way for Hiroshi to pass through. He attempted to make his way gracefully passing his subordinates on the way but the accumulation of sleepless nights made it difficult.
Minato was standing by the gateway staring at a tablet computer screen when Hiroshi entered.
The lab had changed a lot since the last time Minato was in it. There were less white coats but more black vests in the room. There were weapon caches replacing a few computers. Minato noticed the room to be a little darker than he remembered, but couldn't tell if it's all the black in the room that made it appear dark or whether it had actually become darker.
'Give me some good news, Minato,' were Hiroshi's first words walking in.
'There's progress, but I don't know if it's up to the board's expectations,' Minato replied. 'How were the brain maps?'
'We have a man working on it-'
'A man?' Minato asked, lowering the tab and finally taking his eyes off of it. 'It's a brain map of a woman, you need a woman to work on it.'
'I wasn't made aware of that,' Hiroshi said.
'The more similar the observer's brain is to the scanned brain the more you can recover,' Mianto explained. 'So, try a female GDI soldier of age- over the age of fifty; someone who has seen the war.'
Hiroshi stood silently looking up at Minato who understood the silence as signs of irritation.
'So, what did you find out?'
'HE found out, other than what we already did find out in the first hour,' Hiroshi continued with an expressionless face. 'That they are overlapping with four other worlds and are at war over something known as shards that they can use to repair the – whatever that 'hyper' thing is. This one's husband has died from that war and that's why she had enlisted.'
Hiroshi took the tab from Minato's hand and walked away with it. 'And most importantly, she knows nothing about the girl.'
'Room, record,' Hiroshi commanded while placing the tab computer on a table near the exit door of the room. 'What did you learn?'
He leaned against the same table and paid attention.
'They had a Dr. Kurokawa in their world, but he only works with RnD units of GDI,' Minato explained. 'Which means they don't suspect me to be a field operative and I have a high-level clearance to their GDI mainframe.'
'What do you mean, 'had'?'
'Oh, there's people stuck in the hyperflux,' Minato elaborated. 'I just assume that my double is stuck in the hyperflux.'
'Can the girl be stuck in hyperflux?'
'Well, we don't know for a certain.'
Hiroshi threw his hands into the air in a sign of frustration. 'What do you know?' He sat down properly on the table. Minato himself took the opportunity to sit down on the only reclining chair in the room.
'Ok, tell me,' Hiroshi collected himself once again. 'How do we find the girl?'
'Well, I got security clearance,' Minato explained. 'I can access the GDI mainframe and so far it seems I have more clearance to their systems, more than anyone in their world.'
'How come?'
'Their highest ranked officer,' Minato said, gesturing to Hiroshi to recall the answer he already knows. 'That woman; she's only a normal field promoted captain.'
'Ok, continue...'
'Well, I can use their surveillance to look for the girl,' Minato said, refusing to lean backwards in the reclining chair.
'Huh? So, you have unrestricted access to all of GDI's surveillance? Including specs?'
'Until someone with a higher clearance comes along.'
'So, unless the girl is in the hyperflux we can find her in a couple of weeks?'
'That is if she didn't jump out of those worlds.'
'She didn't,' Hiroshi exclaimed. 'I had one of your students do that test we did first when we wanted to check if she had jumped worlds. She is definitely there.'
'So, confirm this for me,' Hiroshi leaned forward in his chair. 'If she is in the hyperflux we only have to wait, watching until she pops up?'
'Well...'
Hiroshi hated that; absolutely hated that 'well'. 'Well?'
'In most cases people don't recover too well from the shatter,' Minato continued. 'So, they have to be reconstructed.'
'And?'
'The prosthetists refer to the federal database to look up their appearances,' Minato had to continue. 'If a person's data is not in the database, they reconstruct, to best match the patient's profile.'
Hiroshi immediately recognized the problem now.
'We can obviously use specs to acquire DNA samples and scan for matches to identify her, but-' Minato was interrupted.
'We don't have her DNA samples,' Hiroshi replied, leaning back, getting into thought. 'That was the issue tracking her from the beginning.'
'What about voice?'
'Same issue as appearance.'
The conversation died as Hiroshi dove into thought.
'So, we can only use brain maps?' Hiroshi inquired.
'It seems so.'
'Everyone out,' Hiroshi commanded loudly. One by one the men in black started leaving the room out the door. Minato wasn't sure whether he had to leave as well. 'You stay. And room, stop recording.'
The room was emptied out in less than a minute. Now it was only Hiroshi, Minato and the open gateway.
'What are you suggesting?' Hiroshi asked, now leaning forward.
'I'm not suggesting anything, but all I know is we need at least an hour of uninterrupted time for a brain scan,' Minato replied calmly.
'How long would it take for you to convert this- portal into- like a flash recall?' Minato asked, pointing to the gateway.
'You mean so that anyone can teleport between the two words without a gateway?'
'Yes.'
'About a week, tops? But I have to warn you such a device would definitely consume more energy than a flash recall. Why do you ask?'
'Build me one,' Hiroshi said, smirking subtly.
'Why?'
'I want to try a little trick the Hitoku Army used in the old wars with Nothern territory,' Hiroshi stood up from his chair with an audible sigh. 'They needed to retake a hospital captured by the northerners, but the problem was that there were Hitoku civilians inside the building.'
Minato was listening attentively to understand what Hiroshi was attempting to imply.
'So, what they did was- they flew in miniature drones inside with active flash recall tags,' Hiroshi explained. 'And one by one they teleported each and every soldier out of the building. Then once the numbers were thin enough, they used the same trick to send our soldiers, in northern army uniforms, into the building. They surrendered in minutes.'
'Wait,' Minato finally understood the parallel. 'I hardly think the board would be ok with this.'
'The board doesn't care, Minato,' Hiroshi replied. 'There are talks of GDI getting involved over the situations of Neichan territory. These things are becoming threats to national security. It seems the only reason they haven't bombed north Hitoka at this point is because they know we can nuke them back. The replies from Tyria are not too good either. We can't get Dr. Tyson and there are talks of superweapons in development.'
Hiroshi stopped walking close to the gateway staring into the world beyond. 'The guild only needs tangible results at this point; nothing less than their research back. People really don't know this, but we are at war now. Everyone is loading their guns and it's only a matter of who draws first.'
'So, you are suggesting what? - kidnapping seventeen year old girls?'
'Anyone who can be that girl,' Hiroshi turned back at Minato. 'We do a brain scan, remove any memories of ever scanning and send them right back. They'd just disappear out of nowhere and reappear in random places with no recollection of what happened.'
'It sounds too risky.'
'No, it doesn't,' Hiroshi commented. 'They already have supernatural things happening all over; this would just be one of those things. And once we find the girl, it'd be like we were never there.'
Minato stood quiet, staring into Hiroshi's eyes and then at the wall blankly, thinking.
'Build me the device in a week,' Hiroshi replied. 'Meanwhile I'll look for agents I can send undercover to the other worlds.'
Hiroshi made his way over to Minato's chair and gripping him by both his shoulders Hiroshi made his speech.
'She's here Minato, she has to be here,' Hiroshi shook Minato with every word he spoke. 'And this time she's not getting away.'
She has to be here.
Miles away, in a different world...
Jake got off the bean and took out the gig bag from the backseat. He put it on and, waving back to the insentient vehicle, he walked in through a narrow path through the woods that the bean had refused to take him. To his right were the walls of shatter running high and to his left were more of the tall trees that made up the rest of the woods.
He walked along the footpath enjoying the breath of fresh air and an isolation he had been yearning for. Birds were chirping and the squirrels were squeaking welcoming him to his new home.
A few steps into the woods he stopped; he stopped and pulled out his phone. It was highly unlikely he would get lost along this narrow footpath, but he didn't want to take the chance, hence he opened the maps.
With his two fingertips he zoomed in on the path that laid ahead and marked the house he could see in the woods.
Suddenly, drawing his attention away from the phone, a beam of light flashed from his right and refracted off the screen. His eyes closed, involuntarily, but the flash had already given his eye a blind spot. He turned to his right to see what had caused it.
There was nothing more than a shifting sea of incoherence. The shattered realities portrayed a distorted image beyond the bounds of the shatter, but as expected of a forest, the distorted image showed only the trees.
Jake stood staring at the shatter for a while, tilting and turning his head to see if there's anything shiny among the trees. After a while he gave up his search and staring back into his phone, he started marching forwards to the cabin.
The ocean of glasses kept shifting back and forth, distance obscured by a mist that ran till infinity. The incoherent images would break apart and realign, and every time it realigned it revealed a little secret. A little secret that Jake did not have the patience to see, for all the while Jake was staring into the shattered image of the trees, from among the trees, she was looking back at him.
She who was hunted. She who ran away. She who carried the secrets to fix the very shatter that was holding her.