"Mm-hm. I definitely said I would, didn't I? That I'd talk about it..."
"Th-That is..."
I still wasn't mentally prepared. Not that I was ever going to be.
"You're not getting away this time, are you?"
"...Ah."
Damn it.
After Ms. Rodion gave her firm answer, she briefly vanished from my field of view...
And just like that, an impromptu hearing was held aboard the bus.
Ah... I really hate this. Why are there so many of them gathered here? Did they really want to hear some poor man's past that badly?
Even by a conservative count, there had to be eight of them.
"So, Rodion. That tight-lipped gentleman is going to spill his story?"
"Yep, that's why I brought everyone~ If I do that, he can't run away, can he?"
So it was you. Why are you doing this to me? Why!
It was my karma at the root of it, sure...
"Haah... give me a moment to prepare myself."
I hadn't expected to keep anything hidden forever in a place where we were all packed together like this, but... this was still too fast.
After pressing my throbbing head with both hands and sighing a few times, my frayed nerves finally settled a little.
...If I don't do this now, it won't work at all, will it.
"Yes... please ask whatever you're curious about. I'll answer as long as it doesn't cause any problems..."
After I gave up and muttered weakly, a few inquisitive prisoners' eyes lit up as they fired off questions.
"Hmm~ First thing. Which Wing were you under?"
Ah, damn. They're coming in hard right away. Well, first...
"...I was with B Corp, though administratively it was A... no, that's not right. It was B Corp."
"Hmph. You didn't make us wait this long just to hear that. Get to the point."
"...It sounds like Ms. Ryoshu wants the important part."
Already? The important part... so basically, explain it in a way that makes it clear why I was hiding it?
Wait, that might actually work surprisingly well.
"If that's the case, then... the reason I kept it hidden was because I held a fairly high position. I've since quit on my own terms, of course."
"A fairly high position, you say... roughly how high?"
"...At the very least, I can say it wasn't lower than an ordinary Grade 5 employee, right?"
"....."
At the answer to Mr. Gregor's question, the prisoners all fell silent at once.
I knew it. I'd phrased it as "not lower than," but that meant I'd held a rank higher than most top field personnel.
And B Corp, after all, was one of the City's absolute military institutions, a member of the Head.
Any sharp-eyed prisoner would probably have already guessed why I'd tried to hide that.
"Hmm~ But you ended up resigning from there? You said you'd been working as a doctor until recently."
"Ah, yes. If I'm to say only what won't cause problems... I ended up resigning due to emotional issues. It involved rather sensitive information."
"....."
Sensitive information. The kind of phrase that makes it feel like they shouldn't push any further.
Good, success. Now I just need to act a little fragile...
"C-Could you all stop looking at me like that? I'm just an ordinary person now. There was also a memory-erasure procedure when I left, so even if you ripped my head open, you wouldn't get much useful information out of it..."
"...If it were you, could you really hear that and go, 'Oh, well, it's not now, so I guess that's fine~'?"
"Ah."
Hearing Ms. Ishmael's words, I realized it. Right. This is the present.
If I pushed through here properly, I could probably get through this somehow.
"Any more questions? If not, we're done, okay?"
"W-Wait, doctor. If you're going to tell us something like that, we need time to think..."
"Anyway! Don't look at me like that. I'm a common citizen now, that's all. I don't exactly have any important information, and this is just the kind of past I had~ If you understand, stop staring at me weirdly and go back inside! If you do this again tomorrow, I'll really get angry!"
My raised voice pushed the prisoners back into their rooms, half by force of momentum alone.
I'd never liked talking much to begin with, and I had my own private anxieties too. I didn't tell them because I figured they'd just feel burdened if they heard it, and yet they kept prying.
My head already hurts... ah, maybe I should just go rest.
Ms. Otis's expression had turned serious in the middle there, though... well, it should be fine.
Though at that reaction, she probably figured out my rank completely. That might be a problem.
Ah, forget it, forget it. It hurts, so I don't want to think. There's no benefit in digging too deeply into each other's sensitive matters anyway.
They probably backed off quietly because they felt there was nothing to gain from prying into my past this hard.
At least for now, I'm still not ready to reveal everything either.
...Though that still isn't the most important thing, in the end.
"Ugh..."
The headache that had eased up a little earlier...
It was around midnight.
At that hour, when most of the prisoners were asleep, I was once again being tormented by pain.
When will this stop and get better? It's only been a few days, but still.
Even though it had only been a short time, the headache kept coming back, and I began to think I might understand how it worked.
Maybe there's something else to it...
Then, a faint phantasm rose from the glass window set in one corner of the room, and a familiar voice reached me.
"Saramago, are you awake?"
"Yes, I am, but..."
"That's a relief. Could you come out for a moment?"
"Yes."
What was this all of a sudden, on a day like today? The prisoners' gazes had changed in subtle ways, and I didn't feel especially good about it.
The eyes of the people who looked like they had no thoughts in their heads were as consistent as ever, though.
Well, I might as well go out for now.
"What is it?"
"Ah, I wanted to ask about the things you were planning to write in the notebook."
The notebook... ah, so that was what he'd been scribbling in while fiddling with the terminal all this time.
"There's nothing I can't do. What do you want?"
"Nothing else, just information about the B Corp you were in and that... place called the Head. They seem like pretty important pieces of information, but I don't know any of them."
"....."
No, seriously, that hit right where it hurts.
It would be good to know in advance, since it's something I'll probably hear at least once on the journey ahead, but...
Tsk, was that why I couldn't join in on the earlier conversation? If you know nothing about B Corp and the Head, it's definitely hard to do anything there.
"Yes... well. If you want me to."
"Then first. What exactly is B Corp? Any known Singularity or anything like that?"
"Ah, that is..."
I slowly laid out the elements B Corp handled.
The outward-facing aspect of its Singularity. Its rarity as a member of the Head. Its power. The many operations it oversaw.
I poured out the information that kept surfacing even in my mind, where most memories of B Corp had been incinerated away.
Mr. Dante listened, fell into thought for a moment, then quickly summarized it and wrote it down in the notebook.
In the end, this too could be called common knowledge of the City, so whatever my feelings were, it would still have been a useful time for Mr. Dante.
After clearing up most of the questions he'd had about B Corp from earlier that evening, Mr. Dante turned the notebook to another page and looked at me again.
"Next, please tell me about the Head."
"...Yes, understood. The Head used to be, in some Wings..."
Even if most of the information had been incinerated, lately shallow bits of knowledge that weren't especially important have been surfacing in my head again.
Simple facts that weren't crucial information about the Singularity, or common knowledge that I wouldn't have needed otherwise.
My mind right now might be in a strange state, with a vast amount of shallow information circulating through it.
"...C Corp handles direct military force. It has a representative weapon called the Claws. Did you get the gist?"
"Yes. That should be enough. Thank you."
"Not at all. I should help if I can."
"But, Saramago."
"Yes?"
Was there more he wanted to ask?
"When you were in B Corp... what exact position did you hold?"
"....."
A sudden direct hit. My body, which had been preparing to answer, froze solid.
As I kept emphasizing, I didn't want to drag up the past of having belonged to the Head if I could avoid it.
So a question that struck at that head-on was enough to leave even me unable to hide my surprise.
My expression right now probably looks pretty stupid, even to me.
And yet...
It was reluctant to say, but if it was only Mr. Dante, maybe that much would be all right.
"If you don't want to say it, you don't have to. But..."
"...An Observer."
"What?"
"An Observer. A member of the Head's information agency, the Eye. People who gaze over the entire City and handle all that information with ease."
"....."
"If we're talking about when I worked there... it would be from several years before the outbreak of the Smoke War until after it, up through the founding of the old L Corp and a few years beyond that. Probably more than ten years in total."
"...I see. I didn't expect you to say it."
"To be honest, I only hesitate because I don't like saying it. If you hadn't figured out a way to dodge the earlier questions and kept pressing me, would I have ended up telling you anyway? It's not the kind of thing I'd rather die than say or anything..."
"So there is something you'd rather die than say..."
"...You can probably guess what it is. Everyone here has their own circumstances. I have one of those too."
...My circumstances.
My thoughts sink downward.
In this bus that has now become half a home... back to that ward where no one had any proper sense of judgment.
I still remember it vividly... the moment I stained my own hands with blood.
Until I boarded the bus, I had no way of knowing at all... but at some point, it entered a corner of my heart and took up a large place there.
The moment when people turned into beasts, when everything became a complete mess... even now, I can't say I've been left with many good feelings about it.
"The spark that made me lose my way in life. It's only related to the Head... it wasn't the fundamental cause..."
"....."
"...Ah, haha. Sorry. It's night, so all sorts of strange thoughts are coming to me. I'll head back in first."
"...All right."
After hearing Mr. Dante's somewhat uneasy reply, I stood up and headed back to my room.
The part of my mouth I touched instinctively as I returned to the room...
Was stiff, unmistakably stiff, even without thinking about it too much.
No, not just the corner of my mouth... my entire expression.
A slightly sunken, faintly unsettling blankness.
Suddenly, I looked toward the mirror set in one corner of the room, and even in the quiet room, seeing myself like that made me feel like I might go mad, so I forced the corners of my mouth upward.
"Ha, ha... ah."
But the laugh that came out was an obviously unnatural, grotesque smile.
...What was it again, how to smile naturally? I feel like I had it right earlier.
Feeling a sense of estrangement from the me reflected in the mirror, I tried twisting my expression this way and that.
And yet...
"...I don't know. Anything."
The result remained the same as before. An empty smile that had never quite become human.
After staring at it for a moment, I soon felt that none of it meant anything and lost interest in my own expression.
Let's sleep. Even the memories of the past that have begun to spill out for the first time... maybe they'll feel a little better after a bit of rest.
Thinking that, I lay down on the bed and sank into deep sleep...
And the room was left in complete silence.