Kidnapped?
Kidnapped?
My entire body was bound. I couldn't even speak.
All that filled my vision was a firmly shut steel door beneath a blinking green light.
When I suddenly came to one day, I couldn't help but be thrown into confusion by this bewildering situation.
Was this a kidnapping? Or human trafficking?
I'd just been living an ordinary life.
Even faced with this absurd reality, I managed to calm my chaotic mind for the moment. The reason was simple: quite a long time had passed, and yet no one had come looking for me.
No demand to call my parents for ransom. No warning not to even dream of escaping. Far from any such threats, not even a soul bringing food or water had shown their face.
I had no idea of my captors' intentions, nor where this place even was. In that dark room, unable to so much as turn my head, bound tight — a terrible stretch of suffering dragged on.
How long had it been like that?
Fixed in place as if nailed to the wall, clinging to the faint thread of consciousness, a sound jolted me awake.
— BOOM!!!
— WEEEEENG! WEEEEENG!!
An enormous roar, followed by a shock that rattled my insides. The green light that had been glowing by my head turned red, and a siren blared, announcing an emergency.
Terror surged through me and I wanted to run that very instant, but I was bound so tightly I couldn't so much as twitch a finger.
After several explosions, screams, and the faint smell of gunpowder had faded — even the one light I'd been relying on went out, and at last the door opened.
Huh?
What surprised me first wasn't that the person who'd come was a complete stranger — a woman in peculiar clothing.
It was the vast expanse of space visible through the window.
When a lake of stars I'd only ever seen on YouTube spread out before my eyes, I lost the ability to speak.
Do kidnappers these days flee all the way into space?
My ransom would probably be embarrassingly small compared to the cost of a civilian spacewalk experience.
"Hah, hahh…!"
Anyway, fortunately the woman didn't seem to be a kidnapper but someone who'd come to save me — the moment our eyes met, she rushed straight toward me. The expression I glimpsed through her visor looked so desperate I almost wondered if she was some forgotten old lover.
She stretched out her arms as if diving in, and pulled me into an embrace.
At the sudden physical contact, I desperately tried to recall a name, wondering if she really was someone I knew — and then, along with ragged breathing, her voice reached me.
"Guh, uugh! Hhk…! I-I'm alive… Last, sh-oxygen… Remaining amount…!"
Right inside my body.