10. Demon in a Bottle (34)
10. Demon in a Bottle (34)
It was past noon the next day when Ella woke.
A dizzyingly high ceiling swam into view.
She realized she was lying in the school auditorium.
Rows of identical cots stretched out beside her, packed tightly together. Doctors and nurses moved briskly between them, and now and then she glimpsed someone in clerical robes.
Ella pressed a hand to her throbbing head and forced herself upright.
A passing nurse spotted her, hurried out of the auditorium, and returned with Wonderstein.
"You're awake."
"What happened? The welcome party...?"
He eased her back onto the pillow, let her settle, then gave her a terse summary of the night's events. Ella's face tightened with disbelief.
A Demon God's Avatar, here at the school.
It was starting to feel as if trouble and calamity followed wherever she went.
"Anyone dead or hurt?"
"No. Everyone else is unharmed — Professor Phairen excepted."
She had vanished without so much as a corpse to show for it. Whether the monster had devoured and digested her, or she had simply been blown somewhere else, no one could say.
Ella swept her gaze across the auditorium, let out a long, relieved breath, and nodded.
"Is that so...? That's good."
But her expression was far from bright.
She buried her face in the pillow, pulled the blanket up to just beneath her eyes, and stared at the ceiling.
Wonderstein didn't ask her what was wrong. He'd heard enough during his time here about what the victims of Sinepekus's authority had endured.
Lost in thought for a while, Ella slipped one arm out from under the blanket and held her hand toward him.
"Hold my hand."
Wonderstein smiled and took it.
"Shall I ask you for a dance, Deputy Leader?"
He was mimicking what she'd said to him at the ball the night before. Ella remembered and let out a giggle.
But the lightness didn't last. Before long, a shadow settled back onto her face. Still, Wonderstein kept silent and stayed at her side.
After a long, blank stretch of lying there, she finally spoke.
"It was their voices — my friends' voices."
The words came out of nowhere, but Wonderstein understood exactly what she meant.
"They were?"
Silence returned. She hesitated, then forced the words out.
"They... cursed me."
She murmured it, her voice leaden with gloom.
She hadn't been close to everyone at the school. But she'd never heard the kind of venom that had come at her — hatred and spite so thick it stung. Some of those voices had belonged to children she'd once called friends.
"Said they'd get revenge... said they'd kill me..."
Wonderstein could piece it together easily enough. Her friends, most likely, had no idea that Ella had followed him in order to save them.
Knowing Ella, she would have chosen to bear it alone rather than leave any opening for them to try to rescue her and follow along. The odds were high that they now thought of her as a traitor.
"Hey, listen... what did I do wrong?"
He could see the fear swimming in her eyes.
If she'd known nothing at all, she could have simply enjoyed the present. But now she'd glimpsed a fragment of the truth — and in the cruelest possible form.
From now on, she would be haunted, imagining what her lost memories might hold.
"Was... was hiding my memories also something you did for my sake? Did I make some mistake, mess something up, and you were trying to cover for me?"
A pang twisted somewhere inside Wonderstein's chest.
Even in a moment like this, she still trusted him. It was a gratifying misunderstanding — and a bitterly sad one.
"No. You haven't done anything wrong, Miss Ella."
"...You mean it?"
"Every one of those voices you heard was false. A trick of the Demon God."
"Really?"
Ella let out a soft, silly laugh. She saw through the lie immediately. But she was deeply grateful that he'd gone out of his way for her.
Her old dislike of him — it really must have been rooted in some kind of misunderstanding. The theory she'd cooked up last time, the one about "she confessed and got rejected," might even be true.
He was a good person, and she was fond of him. That much, she felt certain, would not change even if all her memories returned.
"You know... I'm always grateful to you."
A wry, bitter smile touched Wonderstein's lips.
What a cruel joke — the one consoling her was the very person responsible for her friends' resentment.
What would happen on the day she learned the truth? And which version of her would be the one to accept it?
The Ella of now, drowning in a sense of betrayal — or the original Ella, drowning in shame.
He prayed it would be the latter. Shame, at least, would only embarrass her. The other path would cause her too much pain.
Shaking off her melancholy, she changed the subject.
"By the way, have you really just been here alone since yesterday?"
"No. Miss Yurakne took over for me through the night. And I wasn't alone — Miss Maya was with me."
Ella lifted her head and glanced around.
"I don't see Maya."
"Right when you woke up, Miss Karen also regained consciousness, so she went to check on her."
Wonderstein tilted his chin toward the space behind her. There, sure enough, Maya stood in front of a cot.
"Tch. What's that about? She ought to come see her Deputy Leader first."
Ella's voice was mock-petulant, but a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. Thanks to Maya's absence, she'd been able to have some time alone with him.
Karen had only just managed to open her mouth to speak. She'd been conscious for a good while, but unlike the others, the lingering effects of her injuries made even small movements a struggle. It had taken her a considerable amount of time just to get her fingertips to obey.
"Uh... hey...?"
Karen offered Maya an awkward greeting. Saving someone's life didn't necessarily translate into reconciliation or the restoration of a friendship.
But what came out of Maya's mouth next was the last thing she'd expected.
"I was worried about you."
Karen's eyes went round.
"W-worried? You... about me...?"
Her voice lost its confidence and trailed off into an indistinct mumble.
"But... but I... I had such awful thoughts about you..."
"It's okay."
Maya shook her head. She had no intention of dredging up the whole miserable mess and explaining exactly what the misunderstanding had been. But she did want to apologize.
"I'm sorry I said those harsh things to you."
She hesitated a moment, then, rather stiffly, leaned in and wrapped her arms around Karen — the same gesture Karen used to offer her so often.
Karen sucked in a sharp, involuntary breath. She could smell Maya's hair, the faint scent of her skin, all of it intensely close.
Every time she'd been the one pulling her in, she'd instinctively held her breath, terrified that audibly sniffing her would make her look like some kind of degenerate. But this was the first time Maya had ever initiated the embrace.
A giddy dizziness swam through her; her vision seemed to whirl as if she were drunk. Her face turned every bit as red as Maya's hair.
A floating, weightless euphoria seized her, as though she might simply lift off into the air. When Maya finally let go, the pang of disappointment was so sharp it came out as a sigh.
Karen laughed awkwardly and scratched her cheek.
"Uh... so, does this mean... you're finally acknowledging me as a friend?"
"No."
Expressionless, Maya shook her head. Then she looked her friend straight in the eye and spoke.
"You were always my friend, Karen."
Something hard and tight lodged in Karen's throat.
A friend.
At last — a girl who was her friend...
She let out a ragged breath and rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her palm. It came away wet.
"Don't cry."
Maya's voice was cool.
Anyone who didn't know her would assume she was annoyed and telling her to stop sniveling. But Karen could feel the warmth tucked inside that tone.
"O-okay. B-but, in that case, then... as, um, a token of apology... kiss me on the cheek!"
Maya's eyebrows shot up. The moment Karen saw it, she knew.
Ah — that one's real annoyance.
Growing up, she'd heard older boys and men around her make those kinds of creepy requests as a joke so often that the habit had rubbed off on her. The words just slipped out on reflex.
"R-retract that..."
Karen coughed a few dry, embarrassed coughs and averted her eyes.
"Oh, right — anyway. Where's my brother?"
The answer came from the patient on the cot directly beside her.
"Took you long enough to ask."
Karen turned her head. Her voice seized up.
"Uh... Hobbs, you were right there?"
"Yeah."
A brittle silence stretched between them.
Just then, three people in black bodysuits and coats strode through the auditorium entrance — members of Papael Circus.
Maya rose from her seat.
"I'm going to go see our Deputy Leader."
Karen watched her leave but couldn't muster a goodbye. She was too mortified to open her mouth.
Her brother had witnessed the entire scene from right next to her — Maya holding her, her face turning bright red, her simpering voice asking for a kiss.
It was as humiliating as the time she'd run to him declaring she was gravely ill, only to discover she'd just gotten her first period.
Hobbs said nothing, simply watching her yank the blanket up higher, and smirked.
"Why not just leave and go with your friend? Hm? That school uniform suits you, too."
Karen bared her teeth and snarled at his grinning face.
"Quit your shit. Thirty percent of Papael is mine — where the hell am I supposed to go?"
When she switched back to her usual rough tone, Hobbs let out a guffaw and kept right on teasing her, not letting up until his troupe members reached the cot.
Even so, Karen could sense it — he was forcing the cheerfulness. She wanted to ask what was wrong, but out of consideration for his mood, she played along and kept the banter going.
Seeing Maya approach Ella, Arno rose from his seat. He'd come here to brief Wonderstein on the situation's aftermath.
As he — or rather, she — turned to leave, Wonderstein spoke.
"One day, I should like to see your real face. Hoo-hoo."
Arno's tone was glacial. "...Nonsense."
He gave a single curt nod to Maya in greeting as she passed him, then walked on. There was no awkwardness in his stride. The articulation of his joints, the flex of his muscles, the way his weight shifted across the floor — every detail read as perfectly real.
Arno.
No one had ever seen behind his silken veil. The veil itself was an illusion to begin with, so it never caught the wind, never offered a glimpse inside.
But what people didn't know was that it wasn't just the veil that was an illusion — his entire existence was.
There was, of course, a face behind the veil. To maintain a natural illusion, the projection of one's own inner image was crucial.
It was Lumion's sculpted vision of an "ideal man." Lumion was the only one who could see the man's face behind the veil.
The features, somewhere within them, resembled Maya. If Maya had an older brother by ten years, there was a high chance he'd look like this face.
Anyone who had only heard that grave, weighty voice would never guess that such a face lay behind it. Beautiful was a more fitting word than handsome — a striking man, but with something smarmy and irritating lurking in the overall set of his expression.
It was the face of an old colleague, the way Lumion remembered him.
Before Lumion stepped out of the auditorium, she glanced back once. There was Maya, bickering with her own Deputy Leader about something.
The girl had inherited her looks from her father, and her white hair and red eyes from her mother.
Lumion noticed the way Maya's gaze kept straying toward Wonderstein. Had she inherited her mother's habit of falling for some easy-smiling philanderer, too?
She studied Wonderstein's face for a moment, then turned and left the auditorium. Arno's veil rippled once, then settled back into place.