The Fallen Tabernacle of David (1)
"...Mm."
Han Seoyeon let the sound out without meaning to.
Was that too much, after all...?
She could hardly help the thought. On the bed a woman lay prone like a frog, seized with fine, helpless convulsions, and Seoyeon simply watched her. The moment their bodies overlapped, desire became a difficult thing to govern.
No. I did put the brakes on this time, too...
She offered it to herself like an excuse. The convulsing, if nothing else, was proof of life. Unless, of course, transcending humanity had endowed Hitomi with a truly prodigious grade of rigor mortis.
...The clone already gave out and vanished. Still—that one was only a clone.
What her eyes found next was a wig and a cosplay costume flung across the bed. Their owner had been ash for quite some time.
One might assume a clone would make it two against one, and tip the odds in her favor. In practice it was the opposite. Share the senses, and all that remained was being struck twice over—the whole point defeated. Worse, once the labor of keeping a clone intact was counted in, the thing turned counterproductive. Yesterday the clone had even risen in revolt partway through and come at her.
For an instant a doubt flickered past. Could something that attacked in defiance of its original truly be called a clone at all? Well. The original had punished it before long. Technique honed at a dead sprint across dozens of hours of marathon with Han Seoyeon was not a thing one simply brushed aside.
In any case, a clone gambit that had piled on nothing but disadvantages—not a single advantage among them—ended with Hitomi raising the white flag sooner than usual. A white flag, if one insisted. What had actually gone white were her eyes, rolled clean back.
Hitomi could not have been ignorant of the trouble that came with using a clone. She must have chosen it anyway, knowing full well, for the sake of pleasing Seoyeon that much more. The thought warmed her all over again, and Han Seoyeon pressed a kiss to the cheek of the woman lying face-down. Then she stroked her hair, humming low and soft, as if the tune might pass for a lullaby.
For now, she would let her rest deep. There was an important meeting today; better that she recover her strength before it came. Not that the one who had wrung that strength out of her had any right to say so.
Haa... what on earth am I supposed to do.
Ninomae Hitomi had sunk into worry. As for the subject of it—the bedroom, of course.
It wasn't that she had any complaint against Han Seoyeon. On that front she was thoroughly satisfied. She simply found it hard to believe Seoyeon felt the same. Not that Seoyeon failed to enjoy herself. Even so, the way she kept trying to hold something back was plain to see, and how was Hitomi meant to set that aside? Her own stamina still fell well short of drawing every last desire out of Seoyeon and into the open.
She had even gone so far as to make a clone and dress it as Mary Tepes, the one Seoyeon adored, hoping to satisfy her a little further on the inward side, at least. In the end the drain only came that much faster, and it hardly made a difference. No—there had been harm in it, too. Partway through, the clone met its limit and vanished, and Seoyeon was made to remember Hitomi's death all over again.
Even panting, even with her mind gone cloudy, Hitomi did not miss the way Han Seoyeon's eyes cooled, if only by a fraction. Right after that, Seoyeon's movements turned gentler still. There was no name for it but one-sided consideration. Hitomi nearly sighed, then drew the breath back down her throat. She didn't want the sight of a sigh to plant some needless worry. So she smiled instead, soft and bright, and carefully toyed with Han Seoyeon's hand where their fingers were laced.
"You need a passport even to go to the Vatican. Is that because it's a country, after all?"
"Strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to call it an identification document than a passport."
Seoyeon answered while turning to face her. For foreigners such as they were, a passport was merely the most convenient proof of identity. It was not, in fact, required in order to cross the border of Vatican City. Hitomi nodded at that and leaned, just slightly, into her side.
Seoyeon's first reflex was to kiss her. Then she remembered where they stood, and pressed the impulse down. They were in line before the Vatican border checkpoint—which was to say, people were packed in front of them and behind. The two of them were not so lost to shame as to carry on in a place like this.
Someone might well ask whether there wasn't a more fundamental problem than that. The country they were about to enter was the very seat of the Catholic Church, and Catholicism, as a rule, held homosexual acts to be a sin. Those attached to the Vatican were Catholic in the main, and no small number of the tourists would be the faithful as well. Of course, two people of the same sex showing affection would not be punished outright. At most they would be looked at with distaste. The worst one could reasonably imagine was a zealot picking a quarrel.
The two of them were not worried on that account, and for a simple reason: Han Seoyeon was dressed as a man. A slightly loose long-sleeved button-down and a pair of jeans, cut to hide the lines of her body. Her hair was tied half-up and covered with a charcoal-gray knit newsboy cap. The disguise could manage an androgynous air and no further, but same-sex couples were still not so common, even now, that most people wouldn't casually decide Seoyeon was the man of the pair.
Her voice had always run husky, which helped on that score. The large backpack, blunt in its design, would have pressed the impression home as well. And so the two of them crossed the border without drawing much notice. Being East Asian, lost among a crowd of tourists, was not the least bit remarkable. The impression Seoyeon left, or certain particular assets of Hitomi's, might have lodged in a memory or two... Well. If they were remembered only as tourists who stood out a little, that sat just barely inside what could be allowed. Today, besides, there were more visitors than usual, on account of a major event: the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church was paying a call on the Vatican.
"I'd love to show you the Vatican, since we have the chance... but I'll leave that for next time. Today there is important business to see to first."
Han Seoyeon said it as they crossed St. Peter's Square. The important business was, of course, the council of the Apostles, and Hitomi nodded as if that went without saying. It was not merely the reason they had come to the Vatican today. It was the reason this journey existed at all. What a profoundly stupid thing it would have been, to shove that priority to the back of the line.
"Where are we going?"
"The Tower of St. John."
Seoyeon's answer sank into the noise of the tourists around them, pitched so low that only Hitomi caught it. Even as she spoke, she let her eyes travel over the square, for all the world like an ordinary sightseer. A woman who had come and gone from this place as if it were her own house was not, at this late hour, suddenly taken with tourism. A strategy, most likely, for standing out as little as possible. She had gone so far as to dress as a man, when they might simply have walked about as a couple, for the same reason.
The meeting of Apostle Peter and Apostle Andrew—in other words, of the head of the Catholic Church and the head of the Orthodox Church—could not be hidden. In a situation like that, journalists from the surface world would of course have entered the Vatican in no small number. And into the meeting place of those two, someone meant to walk in openly? Ten of them, no less, of different nationalities and different races? Unless they were bent on slinging filth all over the Secrecy Protocol, that was a thing to refrain from.
So they would have to use a secret passage. Seoyeon had told her as much beforehand. Draw eyes now, and there was a good chance the very act of using that passage would be seen. Security of a sort was in place, so that not just anyone could pass; still, the best of it was never letting the passage itself be found. And the place where that passage lay was precisely the Tower of St. John, which Han Seoyeon had named a moment ago.
A tower that seemed to jut from one corner of the Vatican's city wall. Had this been a fortress or a castle, one would have called the structure a watchtower. It was not, in fact, used as one. In the ordinary way of things it served as lodging—the Pope's temporary residence, or a place where distinguished guests stayed the night. A space no ordinary person could enter. Tourists only ever admired the tower from outside.
"...If we go in, we'll stand out after all, won't we?"
They arrived, and the worry rose in Hitomi at once. The whole point of a secret passage was to move unseen, and yet stepping into a residence for honored guests seemed conspicuous enough on its own. Han Seoyeon only grinned.
"About that. Surprisingly, it's quite all right."
She strode up to the tower's outer wall and set her hand against the stone. Hitomi was still glancing around, unconvinced—and then she understood. Broad-shouldered men, large in the frame, had come up without her noticing and turned their backs, making a screen of themselves.
"These people... could they be—"
"Yes. I expect it's what you're thinking."
Han Seoyeon crouched, and with a look told Hitomi to do the same. Bodies lowered like that, they seemed entirely hidden behind the men.
"You needn't worry. We aren't going in by the entrance to begin with, and they're covering us besides."
A few anomalies had been set as well, the sort that gently turned other people's gazes aside. No need to fear being found out, Seoyeon said, and smiled. A moment later she tapped the lower stretch of wall with a fingertip. She repeated the knock in broken beats, a peculiar rhythm in it, and before long the wall shifted slowly aside. A hole opened, large enough for an adult to pass if they bent at the waist. Beyond it, stairs led down.
"Let's go, then. Hitomi."
"Whoa... this really does feel like a secret passage..."
"That's because it is one."
Once the two of them had passed through, the entrance moved smoothly and was a wall again. The space for sunlight narrowed until the dark was complete, but only for an instant. Lamps set along the edge of the stairs woke to a soft glow and showed the way.
At the bottom there was a small table, and on it a black telephone. A black rotary landline.
"It's for entering the code."
What on earth was that thing? As if she had read the question off Hitomi's face, Han Seoyeon explained it with a faint smile.
"Would you like to try entering one?"
"What?"
"It's all right. Go ahead."
What came after was harder to follow. She lifted the receiver and held it out. Hitomi was seeing this passage for the first time today, and of course there was no possible way she knew the password.
"Any number that comes to mind will do."
"Um... how many digits is the password?"
"It doesn't matter. Just do as you please, Hitomi."
"Whaaat...?"
What was that even supposed to mean. Hitomi was thoroughly lost. Still, if Han Seoyeon said to do it, she would. She set her fingers to the dial and began, quite at random, to turn it. Spin the dial, let go, and it wound back with a click. She put in eight digits with no particular thought, waited a moment, and a tone began to purr through the line.
And then—a click.
"Eek—?!"
Hitomi's eyes flew wide. Her head jerked around, stiff, toward Han Seoyeon. Seoyeon was wearing a smile that reached her eyes, playful in a way one rarely saw on her.
"Were you startled?"
"W-what is this?! I really just punched in anything...!"
What were the odds of hitting an eight-digit password by chance? That was the first thought through Hitomi's head.
"Could it be some kind of miracle...?"
"It is a miracle. Not, however, a miracle that makes you guess the password."
Strictly speaking, Hitomi had not guessed it at all. It was the other way around. The password had simply matched itself to her.
"It doesn't matter what number you entered. Precognition read it in advance, and the password was set to fit."
There was no need to tell the code even to the person opening the way, and so the chance of a leak converged on zero. Perfect security. Han Seoyeon shrugged as she said it.
"...The Church is terrifying."
"Well. It is an organization fit to serve as the police of the world, after all."
The wall had begun to turn, baring yet another passage, and it was toward that wall that Hitomi murmured the words.