Memory (3)
Memory (3)
Alice lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Sleep wouldn't come.
Not because a baronial mansion's bed was particularly less comfortable than the academy's. The most expensive mattress brand in the world was well-established, and any reasonably wealthy noble house, or any bourgeois commoner with money, would use that brand. There was no reason to worry about an uncomfortable bed when visiting a household of some standing.
The reason Alice couldn't sleep wasn't the bed. It was Sylvia.
Or perhaps not just Sylvia, but Claire, and the children from the orphanage who had been with Claire.
More precisely—it was because of "those children who were with Sylvia."
Alice prided herself on having known Sylvia for a long time. Five years old was an age that could still be called very young in a person's life, and since she'd known her for a full ten years since then, no one could protest if she firmly called them sisters. Besides, there were hardly any people in the world who could accurately recall memories from before the age of five.
But... today Sylvia's expression had looked as though she was properly remembering those days from when she was five.
Whenever Alice read Sylvia's expression correctly, people around her were astonished, and Sylvia always looked at her as if she were something bizarre, wondering how she could possibly do it, but in truth, the skill was nothing special at all.
If you wanted to read Sylvia's expression, you only had to gaze steadily into her eyes.
Eyes turned toward someone. Or Sylvia's eyes aimed at some object. Not for a single moment had those eyes ever been "devoid of emotion." Sylvia was always thinking about something, calculating something.
And today, Sylvia's expression as she looked at Daniel had been close to longing.
Seeing Sylvia with an expression of longing for something gave Alice a truly, profoundly strange feeling.
Discovering an unknown side of someone she'd prided herself on knowing for a lifetime... it wasn't as purely pleasant as she'd thought.
She wanted to know. But what she felt at that moment couldn't be boiled down to one simple emotion.
Even when it was a dark bedroom ceiling, if you kept your eyes open and stared up at it, the light would eventually find its way through the gaps in the shadows. Though it was far too faint to truly be called "light"—not enough even to make out the face of the person beside you.
Even when she turned her head, she could barely see Sylvia's face where she lay in the other bed in the guest room.
Only her vague form was visible beyond the darkness.
Now that she thought about it, Alice had almost never seen Sylvia asleep. They'd used separate rooms since they were children, after all.
During long hours on a train, Sylvia never nodded off. The same was true during lessons, and during her personal rest time.
Alice did know that Sylvia lived a highly regimented life and went to bed without fail at eleven every night—
"Ah."
Now that she considered it, Sylvia always slept soundly. She always went to bed around eleven in the evening and slept straight through until morning. Unless there was a request to carry out or something else she had to do, Sylvia always maintained such a regular routine.
Was it possible that Sylvia actually needed quite a lot of sleep?
It was astonishing that this thought had only just now occurred to her.
Because Sylvia was always so thorough, so methodical, someone who always finished whatever had to be done—
—not just that time at the ruins.
"......."
She remembered it vividly: the sensation of a gun aimed at the back of her head. She hadn't seen it herself, nor had she heard a sound. But she had felt the killing intent with stark clarity.
Killing intent that promised certain death.
Sylvia had never once shown anything like killing intent. Even in moments when her own life was at stake, she had never displayed it. Because Sylvia was right there in front of her, that alien species of killing intent had felt that much sharper to Alice.
It was alien. Something she had never felt from any person before.
And yet, at the same time, it had felt somehow familiar.
When she turned around and looked at the person, she'd seen the gun in his hand.
The kind Sylvia always carried. A little more worn than the one Sylvia had.
At about that point, Alice had stopped thinking.
It felt like she shouldn't.
A sense of resistance had welled up, a feeling that she mustn't keep thinking about that alien human being.
"......."
Had she been thinking too much?
Even though a full month had already passed, the memory of that moment still clung to some corner of Alice's mind, sticky and stubborn, refusing to be erased.
She would probably meet him again someday.
At the very least, she hoped that person was not the one sleeping beside her at that moment.
Because if Sylvia ever came to hate Alice enough to want to kill her, Alice didn't think she could bear it.
At the very least, she hoped that inside Sylvia, Alice was at least as important as the people from the orphanage who were here in this territory.
She knew she shouldn't be thinking this,
but Alice felt a small, wistful regret that she herself wasn't from that orphanage.
*
Last night, I'd slept deeply, with no worries at all, and woken up.
I'd opened my eyes wide before the sun had even fully risen, realized I was feeling much fresher and more refreshed than usual, and quietly mulled over the reason by myself.
Probably because there was no one here I had to be on my guard against.
Leo was an important figure. The protagonist, after all. Claire was the same, and Baron and Baroness Grace hadn't exactly been lightweights in the story either.
But none of those people had any reason to attack me.
Alice was even more so. Apparently she'd seen me as a rival as recently as the start of last year, but over the past year she'd suddenly matured and now styled herself as my big sister.
Though at the moment, she was more deeply asleep than I was.
Once I'd organized my thoughts like that, it all made sense.
There was no need to wonder whether I was being watched by Lucas; Leo and Claire hadn't gone charging out at dawn to take on requests; I didn't have to get caught by other nobles on the road and waste my mental and physical energy. Everyone here was honest enough that I could deal with them with my guard down.
"Huh."
Yet somehow I still felt oddly deflated, and I let out a hollow little laugh without meaning to.
I glanced toward Alice, but she seemed fast asleep and didn't appear to have heard the sound.
I rose from the bed. Most of my luggage from the academy had already been moved to the imperial palace, but I had still brought some things I could use while sleeping somewhere other than the palace. I'd loaded them into a large trunk.
I pulled the trunk out from under the bed and picked up a few pieces of my underwear and clothes from inside.
"......."
Then I stood there, looking down at the clothes in my hands.
What I was holding was my uniform.
A uniform that looked endlessly like a military uniform.
Actually, the same went for the other clothes in the trunk. Even when they weren't my uniform, almost all the clothes I wore around were dress-uniform style. The kind Lucas and Jaden wore day to day.
But that didn't mean I didn't have something like a dress.
I thought of Claire. She'd just gotten back yesterday, so she'd still been in her uniform until the end of the day, but would today be the same?
She liked swinging a sword, but I didn't think her tastes were therefore completely masculine.
I stared down at the uniform for a moment, then put it back into the trunk.
And picked out a different set of clothes.
*
It was summer, but I still didn't want to shower in cold water.
The shower room was extremely tidy, but the fixtures looked—by my standards—extremely old. Then again, a newly built shower room probably wouldn't have been much different. This was still the early 1900s, after all. Even though it was another world, and things that had been handled by electricity where I used to live were replaced by magic or steam engines, that didn't mean this was a world with smartphones.
A steampunk smartphone, though. I had to admit I'd like to see that if it existed. They did have digital clocks that ran on just a mainspring, so surely making one couldn't be impossible?
I was gazing vacantly with those idle thoughts while hot water came out of the shower just fine.
I stared blankly at the steamed-up shower partition and briefly wondered how the steam engine produced the hot water for this shower, then gave up. To be honest, I didn't really know how a boiler worked back in the modern world, either. Probably water heated with coal or something like that. I'd heard that apartment buildings used to have a central boiler in the facility back in the day.
In this world and in that world, I really knew very little about how anything worked, I thought, and laughed without much meaning.
Strangely, that fact was comforting.
If I'd lived my whole life not knowing anyway, what did it matter if there were things I didn't know in this world too?
*
"...... Sylvia?"
Only after I'd finished showering, dried my hair completely, and gotten fully dressed did Alice wake up. By her standards, the hour was late enough to qualify as sleeping in.
And that Alice looked at me with a startled expression.
No—maybe "startled" didn't quite do justice to the look on her face.
Because when Alice saw me, her expression was closer to horror.