Later, each of them would try to describe what the portal felt like from the inside. They would do this separately, because for a long time they were not in the same place, and by the time they were, the experience had settled into different shapes in different memories.
Riku would say it felt like falling sideways. Not down — sideways, as though gravity had briefly reconsidered its orientation and decided east was interesting. There was the sensation of speed without movement, of the train around him becoming transparent and then absent, of the dark tunnel replaced by something larger and colder and full of light he couldn't locate a source for.
Hana would say it felt like waking up. Specifically the ten seconds after waking — when you know you've been somewhere else, can still feel the logic of it, but the dream is already going, going, gone. Except the dream she was leaving was Shibuya and the ryokan and her father's worried face, and what she was waking into was the forest.
Aiko would say it felt like a page turning. She was reading when it happened, and the portal seemed to her, in the fraction of a second she had to notice it, like the membrane between chapter and chapter — the moment when one place ends and another begins, and you can't quite remember what side of it you were on.
Kenji would not describe it at all, because he was already on the other side of the tunnel when the portals opened, already watching the separation happen, and there are some things that look very different from the outside.
This is what he saw:
The blue-white light that bloomed in the window beside Hana's face was the first portal activating — calibrated to her, answering to the specific frequency of her psychology the way a tuning fork answers to its note. She had two seconds to press herself against the glass, wide-eyed, before it took her. One moment: Hana, pressing her nose to the impossible light, the cat taxonomy still glowing on her tablet. Next moment: the seat was empty.
Riku was already half-standing when it happened. He'd felt the air pressure change — the subtle equalization that preceded a portal opening, which he had no reason to recognize and recognized anyway, the way some people feel storms coming in their knees. He turned toward his sister's seat and found it empty and made a sound that was not quite a word, and then the second portal opened above him and simply collected him, as efficient and impersonal as a current collecting a leaf, and he was gone.
Aiko had not moved. She sat with her book open in her lap and watched the seat across from her where her son had been, and then she looked at the seat beside her where her husband had been, and then she looked at the empty carriage around her — utterly, impossibly, suddenly empty — and she said, with remarkable composure, "Kenji."
The third portal answered her.
It did not open the way the others had — with light and speed and the sudden erasure of a person. It opened slowly, like a wound, in the air beside the window, and it had a color she couldn't name: not quite the blue-white of the others but something warmer, more amber, like the light in a room where people have been living for a long time. She looked into it and felt, impossibly, like she recognized what was on the other side. Not from memory. From instinct.
She thought: this one knows me.
She stepped through.
The carriage was empty.
Kenji Tanaka sat down in one of the empty seats and looked at the negative spaces where his family had been. Hana's tablet, still running, the cat taxonomy displaying neatly. Riku's headphones, left on the seat, one of the ear cushions slightly frayed where he worried at it when he was thinking. Aiko's book, closed now, a paper receipt marking her page.
He did not pick any of them up. He sat with his hands on his knees and breathed through his nose and reminded himself, methodically, of the things he knew: the portals had worked, the calibration had held, his family was alive. They were in trial environments that were difficult but survivable. The trials were designed to help them, not to harm them. He had built this, or a version of him had built this, and the version of him who had built it knew what it cost and had done it anyway.
He knew all of this.
His children were gone and he sat in the dark of the tunnel and the knowing did not make it better.
The train had stopped moving. He hadn't noticed when — at some point during the separation the engine had simply ceased, and now the Shinkansen sat in the mountain like a fossil, preserved perfectly in its moment of becoming something else. The emergency lighting had come on: a dim red along the floor, just enough to see by.
He walked the length of the train.
It was empty from front to back. Not just his family — all three hundred and forty seats, every reserved carriage, the dining car with its half-eaten meals still on the tables, the café car with the coffee machine still running, still hissing steam into no one's cup. A full train's worth of absence. As though everyone had simply stopped being there.
He found the screen at the far end of the last carriage. He had been expecting it — the voice had mentioned it, the system's status interface — but seeing it still pulled something loose in his chest. Not because of what it said. Because of how it said it: in the calm, neutral font of a transit system announcement. As though what had happened was a scheduled stop.
TANAKA FAMILY TRIAL: INITIATED
RIKU: ACTIVE — TRIAL ENVIRONMENT: POLARIS CITY (UPPER ATMOSPHERIC SECTOR, GRID 7)
HANA: ACTIVE — TRIAL ENVIRONMENT: THE REMEMBERING FOREST (HOLOGRAPHIC SECTOR, DEPTH 3)
AIKO: ACTIVE — TRIAL ENVIRONMENT: THE BRIDGE OF PARALLEL LIVES
KENJI: PENDING — TRIAL ENVIRONMENT: INITIATING
And at the bottom, in smaller text:
ANCHOR NODE: ONLINE. MONITORING ALL TRIALS.
He sat down in front of the screen and pulled out his backup notebook. He still had it — still had the pen, still had the eleven pages of notes from the frequency call. He opened to a clean page and wrote the time: 14:43. Then he wrote: Family in trials. All active. Anchor confirmed.
Then he sat and waited, because there was nothing else to do, and because waiting was something he had become very good at.
After forty minutes, a door at the far end of the carriage opened.
Not a train door — a door that had not been there forty minutes ago. Wooden, old-looking, with a paper panel and a handle worn smooth by many hands. A Japanese house door, the kind you slid sideways, except it was standing in the middle of a Shinkansen carriage where it had absolutely no business standing.
Kenji looked at it.
"Your trial begins when you walk through," the screen said. The text appeared without him touching anything, without a keyboard, simply arriving.
"What's on the other side?"
"Tokyo Station. Circa present day. Fully reconstructed. Empty."
"Why Tokyo Station?"
"Because you know it well. Because it is a place of arrivals and departures. Because it is, architecturally, one of the best-engineered public buildings in Japan, and you will feel the truth of that in your body, and that grounding will help you do what needs to be done."
— ✦ —
Kenji looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he looked at the sliding door. Then he looked at the screen again and asked the question he'd been building to since the frequency call three weeks ago. "Who else is in this system right now? Besides my family?" The screen was quiet for long enough that he thought it wasn't going to answer. Then: ELEVEN OTHER FAMILIES ARE CURRENTLY IN TRIAL. FOUR HAVE BEEN IN TRIAL FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS. ONE HAS BEEN HERE FOR TWO YEARS. He stared at those words. "Two years? In the trial environments?" YES. THE ENVIRONMENTS ARE STABLE. THE FAMILIES ARE INTACT. BUT THEY HAVE NOT COMPLETED THEIR TRIALS. He thought of Riku in the sky city. Hana in the forest. "What happens if a trial isn't completed?" The screen stayed lit for three long seconds before answering. THE ENVIRONMENT BECOMES PERMANENT. Kenji stood up and walked toward the sliding door.