Meteor
I listened as Tofu laid out everything she was trying in order to get the plane into the air.
So this was what she'd been doing up on the Clock Tower.
When I'd heard her through—
"There's a way."
The problem Tofu and the pets had never managed to solve.
Calling down lightning.
A method for cracking it came to me.
"I'll solve it for you."
"You will!?"
She swore she would draw the Subway blueprints no matter what, and promised additional payment on top of that. The moment I told her I had a way, she seemed afraid I might change my mind.
The last thing Tofu dug out of the junk was meant to be my fee.
"Here!"
"......"
"Could you not look so openly disappointed?"
"It's less that I don't like it, and more... hmm."
Lipstick. Of all things. Two of them, even.
"Watch close, and don't freak out!"
With a needlessly flashy flourish, Tofu popped the cap. Inside sat a solid stick of red.
A relic of the old world. What you usually found was a lipstick used down to nothing—no pigment left, only the casing—and people collected the empties because they stood so neatly on a shelf.
Shaped like a shell casing fresh out of a shotgun. Maybe that was the whole secret of their popularity.
On the surface, lipstick was treated like a dinosaur fossil. Just as you could never lay eyes on a dinosaur from before it turned to stone, an intact lipstick simply did not exist. Nobody made them anymore, for one thing. Unless you were a special case like Dr. Myeong, hauling them in from the Geofront, even Headquarters regarded lipstick as a fossil. Which was precisely why the inside of the Geofront stirred one's curiosity. A world where the dinosaurs were still alive and breathing.
What Tofu had produced, though, was not some collector's empty casing. It was something you could actually use.
"Well!?"
"......You want me to walk around wearing this?"
"Are you insane? Something this expensive? Obviously you sell it!"
A lipstick without a single mark of damage. So it wasn't an old-world leftover after all.
"Where'd you get it?"
"From the masters."
"A gift?"
"Something like that. Not that the master would remember."
Stolen, then. And the master had probably gotten it from an illegal dealer in the first place. It really was a place thick with the rich. This wasn't meant to be worn. It was meant to store wealth. The same idea as ammunition—small, light, and worth a fortune. You could shrink the bulk of your property without losing its value. Lipstick, in short, was ammunition's superior replacement.
"I'm telling you, this is seriously expensive stuff. You do know what lipstick is, right?"
"I know."
The problem was that it wouldn't sell. Even at Headquarters, almost no one threw real money at something this absurd. They had no chance of dying in an air raid, after all. Only a person with tastes as peculiar as Dr. Myeong's would go looking for it. The black market barely touched the things. You had to hunt down a rich buyer yourself, and even among the rich, eccentrics willing to buy lipstick were scarce.
"You're worried it won't sell?"
"Now that I think about it, there is one person who might buy something like this."
Maybe I ought to just sell it to Dr. Myeong. As a trading partner she was nothing but trouble, and that was the one dealings I wanted to avoid—she was no ordinary haggler. Still, it wasn't a bad arrangement. Expensive was expensive.
My lukewarm reaction must have unsettled her, because she produced antibiotics as an added fee. The bottle was Geofront-made, no less. I'd half doubted it, but the contents actually matched the container. The date stamped on the bottle showed a good stretch of shelf life remaining. When I checked the expiration of the pills inside with my Core ability, though, a few of them didn't match the date on the bottle.
Mixed in to make the quantity look bigger.
Well. None of them seemed outright expired, so I could let that much slide.
"You really think you can sell the lipstick......? If not, I could swap it for another reward. It'd be worth a lot less, but easier to move—"
"There's a doctor I know who might buy it. A woman who wears lipstick even on ordinary days."
"Oh! Then we're good. Not sure the color will suit her, though."
"She always wears red."
"This isn't red, though?"
What was this—was the kid color-blind?
"It's Raspberry Shine."
"What's that?"
"Raspberry Shine."
"I'm asking you what that is."
"This."
"Red?"
"Raspberry Shine."
Enough.
The other one was called After Midnight, which, no matter how you looked at it, was simply blue. When the colors left me unimpressed, yet another payment appeared. The Bomber Drone blueprints.
"Didn't you say these had to be sent up and gone?"
"I've got spares! Find a buyer and they'll be worth plenty. They don't only matter once you build the real thing, you know. Every piece of knowledge in a blueprint has value of its own."
"Hell of a sales pitch."
"Sincerity always gets through!"
The black-market Boss would find a way to sell them somehow. He was the sort who liked rare items like these.
......If I look unimpressed again, will something else come out?
"Th-then this, too!"
A green Core.
This was as far as it went. Keep on like this and she'd throw in the house. She really was staking everything she had on the job.
Even so, I had to take the payment.
The problem Tofu had never solved up on the Clock Tower—to solve it, I would have to use my Core ability. And that would consume no fewer than six Cores.
I'd told Clock-out Man to go on ahead and wait outside Animal Farm. There was an errand I needed him to run.
"Will he be all right? That Toegye looked like nothing but height, and dumb height at that."
"He's not dumb. The height is useless, though."
Tofu and I headed for the Clock Tower and climbed straight to the top. I didn't need her to point it out. The thing caught my eye at once: the peculiar launcher she had prepared. Upkeep of the place was left entirely to the pets, so the masters had no idea anything like it was here. From below, looking up, it sat in a blind angle you simply could not see.
"Designed so the lightning that hits the rod can be taken in as power and used, is that it?"
"The efficiency isn't high, but it's the only way."
Lightning carried tremendous energy, but a great deal of it was lost in the conversion through the rod. Worse, the duration was so short that unless you stored it somewhere, it could serve as nothing but a detonator. Tofu's device had been built with that in mind. Let the strike on the rod throw the switch, and everything after would proceed on its own—an external fuel tank was already connected, among other thorough preparations.
"But...... how in the world are you going to call the lightning?"
"You failed with an unscientific method—"
The pets had pinned their hopes on a ritual to summon lightning. There had been nothing else they could do.
"I win with the unscientific."
"......? I feel like that sentence went wrong somewhere."
"My unscientific is on another level."
0.0000...
Finally.
The probability had appeared. An extremely low one. Once it passed five decimal places, the digits beyond were simply cut off, as if there weren't enough space left to display them. I'd seen it a few times before. Go far enough along and there would be some digit that wasn't a zero.
Doesn't matter what that digit is.
At a probability that low, whatever came after was irrelevant. Only one thing mattered. The odds were catastrophically small—but they were not zero percent. That alone was enough.
In this downpour that's started up again—
Weather was something life had drilled into me through endless repetition. The chance of rain, especially, bore on survival, so I had checked it often.
In this downpour that had begun to fall again, the probability that lightning would strike the Clock Tower's rod was......
0.0000...
Not wholly impossible. Then it would become reality.
"There was an old-world movie where lightning hits a clock tower."
A film I'd watched on the battered machine the Old Man had brought back.
"The one with the 1.21 gigawatts?"
Sharp kid. No question about it.
I bit my lip and drank the blood. Slowly, the numbers flushed red, as if the blood I'd swallowed were seeping into them. When the digits had gone entirely the color of blood—
99.9999...
The world had turned upside down.
"Huh?"
"Agh! What the—!"
Everyone in Animal Farm was thrown into a panic. A squall came slamming down out of nowhere, and the steel roof cranked itself open. The moment the rain began, the pets came pouring in.
For some reason Tofu was already up on the Clock Tower, as if she had known the rain was coming all along.
Now and then the sky turned white and settled back again. A majestic beast scraped at its throat, preparing to roar—a resonance that pressed every listener into silence. Everyone standing there knew what would happen next. Because they knew, the fear could arrive ahead of it. Right about when the sound of hard swallows began to rise from here and there—
The sky flashed.
Thunder split it.
A bolt speared down into the Clock Tower's lightning rod. The short screams that burst out in the same instant were crushed beneath a roar that tore the air apart. Soaked through like mice in a storm, every one of them dropped low at once, as if swept into a single dance.
Survival instinct.
"......Did you see that?"
"Looked like the Clock Tower took a hard hit......"
In the next moment the rain had stopped as well. The sound of water being flung down by the bucketful vanished, and the space filled instead with the small shocks of drops falling from soaked clothes.
"What kind of weather......"
Crack!
Whoomph!
"Now what!?"
"Up on the Clock Tower!"
"There's...... light?"
A warm light was spilling from the pinnacle of the Clock Tower. It swelled and shrank, over and over, then surged up above the tower and shot out through the open steel roof, clearing the sky beyond in the blink of an eye.
"What is that......"
"A comet?"
"Talk sense. It went up from below."
"Looks like just a weather thing to me."
"The pets pulling some stupid stunt again?"
That was not the end of it. Something burst from the object that had flown up over the steel roof, and, trailing a long tail of fire, it tore away at a blinding speed.
"That one's a real comet, right!?"
"Shut up!"
"This one also seems like weather......"
A machine lanced cleanly across the empty air, as if a road had been laid through it. To anyone who did not know what it was, it would look like nothing but light crossing the sky.
Clock-out Man, passing through the ruins, stopped where he was and looked up.
The thing that had come flying from the direction of Animal Farm was streaking away, spitting fire behind it. A sight he had never seen in his life. A spectacle he might not see again before he died. It was not as grand as the fall of the Giant Rods, but an experience that would never come twice carried a meaning all its own. Determined not to miss a single moment, he opened his eyes wide.
When it passed directly overhead, he could hear the rough sound of fuel burning away. There was warm, bright light as well. For a little while that fire lit the ruins of a pitch-black dawn, and thanks to it, things that ordinarily stayed unseen began to show themselves. The ones hiding in the ruins, for instance.
"Whoa...... First comet I've ever seen."
"I thought it was something like Santa. Turns out it was real......"
The ones who lived in the ruins were usually desperate to keep what they were hidden. Not now. They stuck their heads out of broken windows and climbed onto collapsing rooftops to look at the sky. The burning light had brightened the surroundings enough that they could make out one another. On any ordinary day, that would have meant drawing a gun. But nobody made a threatening move. Wary glances were traded, and that was all. Once they had confirmed that no one meant to attack, they were too busy watching the sky to risk missing the comet.
"But aren't comets supposed to be out in space? This one's flying awfully low."
"There was that other word. A meteor, wasn't it? Maybe this is that."
"What's a meteor?"
"You're looking at it."
"I'm asking what it is. How's it different from a comet?"
"Hell if I know, man."
The meteor gradually drew away, and the brightened sky darkened again. As the sound of the burning tail faded, a voice, once raised, carried all the way to the far side.
"Shame."
In a situation like this, speaking softly would have been the sensible thing, but somehow nobody felt any need to be careful.
"You hear? They say it's not a comet, it's a meteor."
"Why's this so complicated?"
"It's weird, though. Didn't it look exactly like some kind of machine?"
"A machine, now...... Might as well say an eagle flew by while shitting a stream of fire."
Voices leaked from the half-collapsed buildings. Clock-out Man, the only one standing out on the road, stayed where he was and listened.
"If you wish on a meteor, does it come true?"
"What are you talking about?"
"They say if you wish on a comet, it comes true."
"Who's granting it? The comet?"
"How should I know. Long as it comes true, that's enough."
Clock-out Man briefly wondered whether he ought to tell them the meteor was a machine. Part of him thought that blurting out something like that would be strange—and yet, somehow, in an atmosphere like this, it felt as if it would be all right to say.
"Anybody actually know what a meteor is?"
The one up on the roof shouted it, and from somewhere else another voice shouted back.
"Do you wish on meteors too?"
Yet another picked up the thread.
"It's already gone."
"I wished just in case, so I was wondering if it even works."
And so the talk went on.
"Then we just see whether it works."
"You a genius?"
"What'd you wish for?"
"They say if you tell, it stops working."
"Anybody selling smokes?"
"Over here. Military issue."
"What'll you take? I've got bandages and AA batteries."
"Batteries. Deal."
"Where are you?"
"Rooftop. I'll come down, so meet me on the second floor."
"On my way. Don't shoot."
Clock-out Man, who had been watching for quite a while, started walking again. All things considered, telling them what the meteor really was looked like more loss than gain.
The trading in the ruins went on. The one who'd been stuck with nothing but useless goods that passed for currency came away with a heap of daily necessities; the one who'd carried an empty gun all this time got ammunition; the one who'd decided to live only through today got cigarettes. It wasn't a trade, but the one who'd needed a companion found a companion too.
No one noticed.
Even so, the wish of the one who had wished upon the meteor came true.