Chapter 15. Difference in Direction (5)
Jihye had braced herself to hear all sorts of unpleasant things while seeing Jieun off.
But the people who had brought her here, unexpectedly, said hardly anything at all.
Had they simply assumed from the very start that Jihye wouldn't be able to keep Jieun there?
If so, that annoyed her a little.
"There's no need to take me back."
Jihye said this to the person who had offered to drive her home—someone who, from the look of them, seemed to work for the government.
She couldn't imagine what scheme anyone could work in so short a ride. Abduct her on the spot to use as a hostage, or turn her into leverage against Jieun…
No—in truth, arranging for her and Jieun to meet like this today was already, for all practical purposes, a threat aimed at Jieun. It amounted to telling her that something could happen to Jihye.
And in that situation, if Jieun came back because of her, Jihye would be tormented by guilt every time they met.
…
No—she already felt that guilt.
Even now, Jihye could do nothing for the girl who was, in every way that mattered, the sister she had grown up beside. At best, she had handed her a few things hastily bought at a convenience store.
So the least she could do was not grab at her ankles and hold her back.
She left the building and walked a short way until a main road appeared. She had no idea where she was, but it couldn't be outside Seoul—they hadn't driven anywhere near that far.
She found her way with her phone and headed back to the orphanage.
When she returned, the teacher was waiting, her face full of worry. Jihye reassured her that nothing had happened, then went back to their room.
The room that had been left in disarray was properly tidied now. Unfortunately, the broken machines and Jieun's CDs were beyond saving. She would gladly have spent her allowance repairing them or buying replacements, but sadly, Jihye didn't have that kind of money.
All she had managed was to plug the intact ones back in, arranged as convincingly as she could.
After staring at her desk in silence for a long while, Jihye pulled out the chair and lowered herself into it.
How on earth had things come to this?
All Jieun had ever wanted was an ordinary life. Though even that—going to a school like hers, fitting in with friends—probably took a fair amount of money.
Thinking about it now, there was so much Jihye didn't know about Jieun, even after living in the same place for all those years.
Once, they had talked about it.
"Are we sisters?"
Jihye, sprawled on the floor as usual, had thrown out that question not long after they started middle school, most likely. It was around the time she had just begun making friends—and hearing them complain about their families, or brag about them none too subtly.
She'd heard plenty of that sort of talk in elementary school too, but perhaps because they were at the age when puberty crept in, such stories had multiplied suddenly, and Jihye, slipping into much the same sensibility, couldn't help wondering about it herself.
"Hm? Aren't we?"
It had been a question Jihye asked only after agonizing over it in her own way, and Jieun had answered that simply.
Jihye sat up and looked at her intently.
Jieun was at the desk doing homework, so she didn't notice Jihye sitting up.
"Do you really think that?"
"We've shared a room for years now—it wouldn't be strange to call us sisters. Besides, our names are similar."
As expected, there was nothing special in the voice that came back. As if it were only natural—as if thinking so were hardly strange at all.
"We don't go around calling each other 'unnie,' but who's going to say it's wrong to call us sisters?"
…
Thinking it over, that was certainly true.
In all the years Jihye had lived, she had never come to know anyone as well as Jieun. She didn't know everything about her—but at the very least, she was the only one who knew the face Jieun showed within these walls.
It was called an orphanage, but they called this place "home," too.
So in a way, the two of them were close enough to be called family.
The very thing Jihye had agonized over, Jieun had accepted as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Of course, that alone wasn't what made Jihye treasure her.
Even before that conversation, the longest and deepest bond either of them had formed in their not-so-long lives was with each other.
Which was why she couldn't bear to lose her.
If Jihye lost Jieun, she would lose the living witness of her own childhood. The one and only person in the world who thought of Jihye as family without ever needing to be asked would be gone.
That terrified her.
And yet she couldn't demand things of "family," either. That was how she had been raised.
She had no way of knowing how people with real blood relations actually lived. There were those in this world who scammed even their own families, and those who made a practice of domestic violence.
The family Jihye wanted wasn't that kind.
People who protected one another. Someone whose mere existence was a source of strength.
Living with Jieun all this time, Jihye had felt exactly that. Jieun never made a grand show of it, but her everyday words and actions made it plain that she truly thought of Jihye as a sister.
If their situations had been reversed, Jieun would surely have helped her without a second thought.
So Jihye wanted to become that kind of person herself.
Someone who could say I'm your family in any situation, without a flicker of change in her expression.
If you forced things on someone just because you wanted something, could that really be called family?
Jihye fiddled with the desk a while longer, then got up before long.
She spread her bedding on the floor and lay down.
Normally, Jieun would have been right there beside her.
On nights when Jieun didn't come in late, the two of them would talk about this and that until they finally fell asleep, quite late.
…
Jihye lay awake for a long time before sleep finally came.
Getting used to sleeping alone looked like it would take a very long time.
Whether she ever could, she didn't know.
The next day.
Jihye went to school carrying herself as though nothing were different.
But the atmosphere around her was not the usual one.
Truthfully, ever since the TV had revealed what Jieun was, things around her had never once been "usual"—but today carried yet another air entirely.
Until only days before, the way the kids brought up Jieun in front of Jihye had differed little from the way one looks at some "horrific criminal."
Jihye had never told the kids at school that she lived in the same place as Jieun.
She had, however, mentioned living at the orphanage. Jihye had never once thought of that fact as something to be ashamed of.
And perhaps because she'd said so—though where it had spread from, who knew—the kids knew that Jihye had grown up in the same orphanage as Jieun.
Of course, apparently not one of them realized that Jihye and Jieun were actually close.
Most of them simply thought of Jihye and that girl as "from the same orphanage," nothing more.
Which was probably why, when Jieun first appeared on the news, those "friends" had been able to consume her as gossip.
Jihye supposed it couldn't be helped. She traded stories about celebrities from the news with her friends, too.
And this was about magical girls. If anything, being uninterested at all would have been impossible.
Beings that, until a few years ago, existed only in manga now actually walked the earth—anyone who wasn't curious about that would be the strange one.
Besides, magical girls weren't merely soldiers. They wore flamboyant outfits that belonged in comics and fought enemies with magic—like fantasy made flesh.
Not that Jihye was happy about that fact.
…Well, it was Jieun, after all. If anyone else heard her say this, they might curse Jihye as two-faced, but what couldn't be helped couldn't be helped.
Hearing your family reviled could never feel good.
"Did you see the news yesterday? About the sixth magical girl."
The kid at the desk next to Jihye asked.
"…Yeah."
She had seen it.
Ever since then, Jihye had hunted down every article that mentioned Jieun. It had never been pleasant, but she wanted to know the news however she could.
"So that person really is that Jeong Jieun? Had people just been wrong about her all this time?"
The kid asking this was one who, until recently, had believed Jieun was a terrorist.
Perhaps because she thought Jihye and Jieun were merely from the same orphanage, she had even told Jihye, quite boldly, "That must have been scary."
That, too, was entirely the news's doing.
The kids in Jieun's class had, for some reason, given interviews saying things like "I knew it all along" and "There was always that possibility" about her.
They had surely been kids on bad terms with Jieun.
It wasn't hard to imagine. Jieun often talked about her friend Hayun, and those stories were laced with complaints that plenty of people were only out to use that Hayun girl.
If you helped Hayun, you couldn't possibly be on good terms with people like that.
"That's right. Everyone had it wrong."
Jihye said.
At least this once, she could say it with certainty.
"Jieun would never do something like that."
"O-oh, right…?"
The kid looked a little flustered at Jihye's words.
Jihye knew exactly how she must look right now.
She probably seemed like a girl talking out of both sides of her mouth. After all, until now she hadn't been able to bring herself to deny what the others said about Jieun.
"Yeah. She's not the kind of person who'd do something like that."
Not that it mattered.
From the very beginning until now, Jihye had trusted Jieun.
No matter what anyone else said, that conviction was never going to change.
Besides the kid who'd approached her, plenty of others were talking about the "white magical girl."
Until now, Jieun hadn't had a name as a magical girl. She'd only ever been "the black magical girl," "the terror suspect," and the like.
Had they come up with a new name by now?
If she was a magical girl, she ought to have at least that much.
Every other magical girl took her name from a flower—so what name would suit Jieun? Jieun, dressed in that white, lovely gown?
The way Jihye saw it—
"How about Lily?"
I had stepped outside for a bit of fresh air in the morning when Hayun said something thoroughly strange.
"Lily? As in what?"
When I asked, failing to grasp what she meant, Hayun gave a little shrug and said,
"You're a magical girl now too, you know. I figured you ought to have a magical girl name."
…
I gave Hayun an extremely lukewarm look.
"So you're telling me to go by that name?"
"Yeah… You don't like it?"
"Of course I don't—and before that, I don't see why I'd need a name like that in the first place."
Honestly, I had never understood why magical girls had separate names in the first place.
In other manga, at least, there was usually some setup about how they couldn't reveal their real names to each other, so it made sense—here, there was no such need.
Everyone's real name in this group had already been spread far and wide, after all.
In this world, a magical girl's name served little more purpose than a celebrity's stage name.
Some celebrities used stage names and some didn't—so couldn't I simply operate under my own?
"Because… you're a magical girl?"
"That's exactly what I'm asking—what does being a magical girl have to do with bearing a name like that? And why am I a lily, of all things?"
"When you think 'white flower,' the first thing that comes to mind is a lily, isn't it?"
I mean, sure. But that wasn't the point.
"And, having a name as a magical girl will probably work in our favor."
Seeing the look of disbelief on my face, Hayun apparently decided she needed a different line of persuasion, because she brought it up as though she'd had it ready all along.
"In our favor how?"
"If we're going to keep fighting, the way people see us matters too, doesn't it?"
"That's… true."
It couldn't be helped.
Just having the police stop interfering at our side had made fighting considerably easier.
This time, they'd even helped.
The police's assistance alone couldn't bring down an enemy. But it did raise my odds of winning.
And beyond that brute-force angle, so long as this country wasn't a dictatorship, politicians had no choice but to mind the public's gaze. Everyone at the top here got there through elections.
Even if they couldn't cooperate with me officially, if arresting me or penalizing me might shake their approval ratings, they would act far more carefully where I was concerned.
"So making people think you're one of us—that's important."
…
I decided to hold my tongue and hear her out.
"We all use flower names as our nicknames, remember? Each one matched to our own color."
"Wait—you all picked those names yourselves?"
"Well, no, not exactly."
Hayun answered my question with flushed cheeks.
See? Even she was embarrassed by it.
So why was I suddenly supposed to be embarrassed about it now, huh?
"Isn't everything we've fought through together enough?"
At my question, Hayun fell silent.
"If we're already staking our lives fighting side by side, isn't that enough? From what I hear on the radio and such, people already seem to think I'm on your side."
"That's true, but…"
Hayun dipped her head slightly.
Hands folded behind her back, prodding at the ground with the tip of her shoe—debate or no debate, she plainly just wanted to pin the name "Lily" on me.
I heaved a sigh and scratched my head.
Was that… really so important?
Maybe Hayun thought this way because she had already been a magical girl for over two years.
You know how it is in the army—there's always that "no idea why we do it, but we do it anyway" stuff.
If I filed this under the same category, well. Fine.
"…All right."
"Hm?"
"If you really want to call me that, go ahead. It's not like it means anything if I say no and you all call me it anyway."
Hayun's face lit up at my words.
"Yeah!"
Was that really worth being that happy about?
Anyway—the name, the white dress of an outfit… none of it sat right with me.
…Never mind that the white outfit had come out of my own subconscious. I still didn't like it.
What kind of team in this world has both a black member and a white one, I ask you.
"Well, given how things have turned out, I say we simply become a fourth faction ourselves."
We were all sitting down together, discussing what needed doing next, when Cherry tossed out that idea.
"A fourth faction?"
When I knitted my brow and echoed her, Cherry nodded with a grave expression.
"Yep. A fourth faction that needs neither the Federation, nor the government, nor the Company."
"Ho. I was not aware you harbored such an appetite for power."
"Does this look like it's about power to you?"
Then again, it probably wasn't about power.
If you asked me to name the two weakest people here, there would be no hesitation: Cherry and James.
For my part, I remained fully prepared to turn James into mouse meat if he crossed the line too far, and James—whether because he knew it or not—had yet to cross it completely.
Besides, ever since the circuit itself transformed—whether that was down to my power or not—he seemed to have plenty of his own to brood over, and at the very least he had all but stopped raising bizarre objections to everything I said.
Though from the look of it, he and Cherry were still at each other's throats.
"Anyway, keep going."
Those two would bicker for hours if left to their own devices, so I asked again.
"…Ahem. What I mean is, we become an outright fourth faction—an existence nobody can touch lightly."
"And what exactly is the upside of being a fourth faction?"
"It makes temporary alliances convenient whenever we have to fight one faction or another."
"Oh."
So that was it. That was what she meant.
Rather than latching onto one side or the other, the idea was to become our own separate faction and adopt a stance that let us cooperate or clash as circumstances demanded.
"Our side is far too weak for that, however."
James, arms crossed as he listened, said.
"Is a faction not called a faction only when it can put up meaningful resistance?"
"So I've been thinking."
Cherry said, in answer to James.
"The former Chairman—he's still alive, isn't he? He's not dead?"
…
James went quiet at Cherry's words.
"Noir Corporation isn't a publicly traded company, is it? Which means the current Chairman isn't really a 'chairman' at all. He's just a man who forcibly seized what belonged to someone else. The Federation judges it that way, too. And that's part of why they cooperated. They figured that with that Chairman cleared out, they might just be able to swallow the company whole."
"And now they've changed their tune?"
"Yeah."
Cherry nodded at Hayun's words.
"That's right. Right before I came here, there was even talk of cutting ties quickly. Of course, the Federation is such a vast organization, and everyone inside has their own stance, so no one can say for certain—but it seems some of them think that even if it pays off in the short term, it's far too dangerous a move in the long run."
"So what you are saying is that we should go looking for the former Chairman?"
"If not the former Chairman, then the next one. It's a privately held company, isn't it? In the end, it's built so that whoever sits at the very top devours nearly everything. So if we install someone who can legitimately claim the head of the company, we can normalize the situation to a degree."
At the very least, Cherry didn't seem to be planning to side with the Federation alone.
…
But James, the loyalist to the former Chairman, wore a distinctly sour expression.
Did he dislike the idea of "using" his old boss?
Clearly, Cherry meant to secure the former or next Chairman and "use" them. Not to restore the company on the spot, but to walk to the negotiating table armed with the "means" by which the company could be restored.
Of course, actually restoring it would take a very long time. The power struggles over the circuits seemed tangled far worse beneath the surface than they appeared.
Oil that could speak and move on its own. No—given the danger factor, perhaps plutonium or uranium was the better comparison.
That, presumably, was where humanity's position in the universe had risen to.
"You want to find him too, don't you? Even if it hurts the company for now, it can only keep operating going forward if things are normalized."
…
At those words, James finally heaved a deep sigh and nodded.
So even he had moments when emotion moved him.
Then again, if he weren't the emotional type, he'd never have provoked me the way he has.
"And let's make this safehouse a little more like a proper 'headquarters.' We've gained one more Hope Circuit, after all. With my cooperation, the energy could be put to far better use."
Cherry said, clapping her hands together.
Well, fair enough—if we were going to be our own faction, we ought to at least look the part.
…The question was whether we even had the parts for that.