Shin and I arrived at the address listed as Kei’s home, and one look at his face told me he was thinking the same as me: this was not a fitting place for a teenage girl to live.
The building looked practically abandoned. It was a small apartment complex with three apartments on ground level and three above, but it looked like none of them were upkept at all. None except apartment three, the one listed as Kei’s home address.
Number three was the only apartment with living plants out front, though they clearly hadn’t been tended to in a while. It had the least discoloured front of all six, and it was the only one with windows that weren’t boarded up. It was also the only one to have a front door, one that was hung slightly ajar.
Whichever police officers had come here before us were sloppy, not even closing the door behind themselves. That gave me a bad feeling about what I was about to find: it likely meant there was nothing worth looking at.
“Let’s go inside. Not much we can accomplish by standing outside like this.” I mostly said that simply because the discomfort on Shin’s face was worrying me. He seemed more concerned about this than any of the rest us, which surprised me. I didn’t remember the two being particularly close.
“R-right. Let’s go.” He dragged his eyes off the dilapidated sight of the complex and cloaked us both with his magic. We entered the apartment to begin our investigation, though I doubted we’d find much.
Upon seeing the inside of the apartment however, I was shocked at just how right I was.
“Kei didn’t seem like the sort of person to be into ‘minimalistic living’ or whatever. Reckon the place got robbed?” asked Shin.
Looking at the state of the apartment, it was the most obvious assumption to make. There was very little in the way of personal effects left, with the whole place being filled with almost nothing but old furniture. A quick look around the sole bedroom confirmed this, with there even being no clothes in the wardrobe.
Given how barren the place was, a robbery would seem like the most likely option. But paradoxically, all other signs pointed to no crime being committed here at all.
A quick look at possible entry points showed no sign of forced entry. The door, despite being in poor condition due to wear, had taken no significant damage, and nor had any windows.
No furniture was displaced, nor was anything around the apartment broken or destroyed. Add on the lack of blood, something that certainly would have been preserved in an ongoing crime scene investigation, and the possibility of a struggle due to a robbery gone south seems almost nil.
In fact, nothing pointed to the apartment being an active investigation site. No yellow tape, no police on watch, nothing. That could only possibly mean that the police who came for a wellness check found nothing indicative of a crime scene.
When I explained as much to Shin, he seemed momentarily confused, before offering a possible explanation.
“Could she have moved out a while ago and just forgotten to let the school know? I mean, it doesn’t look like this whole building has been lived in for years.”
“I thought the same at first, but I found rubbish still in the bins. There was no mould or anything, so it can’t have been left there for months. Someone- assumedly Kei- was here recently.”
“So then what? A runaway?”
“Possibly. It’d be strange for a runaway to take all of her personal belongings with her, but if she planned ahead of time it’s not impossible. It would also line up with the theory that she had caught the bad side of the magical girls. Maybe she foresaw her kidnapping and went into hiding, moving all of her stuff pre-emptively so she’d be ready when the time came.”
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There were admittedly a few problems with the theory. It wouldn’t explain why the building she was living in was so dilapidated in the first place, nor why she was living alone, but both of those could be chalked up to parental neglect. The real hole in the theory was the lack of a forced entrance. Even if she ran away, it’s likely the people hunting her would have checked her apartment first anyway.
That discrepancy could be written off a number of ways, such as a skilled lock picker, which is likely how the police were able to get inside without breaking in too. But there was one other explanation that seemed to fit uncomfortably well together in my head.
I fought with myself over whether to voice that possibility to Shin, but after a lot of back and forth in my mind I decided against it. Circumstantial evidence may have pointed to it being possible, but it wasn’t an idea I even wanted to entertain. Not to mention it would likely crush the morale of all four of us if it turned out to be true.
“I’ve checked every inch of the place and there’s practically nothing to find. Even the electricity isn’t on. If you hadn’t pointed out the recent rubbish, I’d assume this place hasn’t been touched in years.” Said Shin, exasperated at the lack of progress.
“I think we’ve seen all we can. Let’s head out and let Saki know what we’ve found. Or, I guess what we haven’t found.”
The two of us left the dingy apartment filled with stagnant air and welcomed the freshness of the outside.
Before leaving the premises completely, I checked the outside bins.
“Completely empty… god I hope I’m wrong about this.” I mumbled to myself, making sure Shin was out of earshot first.
Every new discovery made my theory feel more and more plausible. I just hoped with every fibre of my body that it was wrong.
***
Saki and Nao seemed agitated when the four of us met back up. So much so that I was becoming visibly worried, Shin even more so than myself. Did they actually find something at that abandoned hideout?
“You guys tell us what you found first.” Saki spoke bluntly, and seemed very unwilling to talk about her side, but I figured it was best to ignore those details until we got their explanation.
“Our findings were… odd, to say the least.” I proceeded to explain all the strange details about the apartment that bugged me, with Saki’s expression darkening with almost every word. “…the most obvious explanation would be that she knew something was likely to find her soon, and she ran away before it could get to her. There was nothing to indicate what that ‘something’ might be, but whatever it was, it never broke into her apartment.”
Saki and Nao remained in silence for a short while after I finished explaining. Whatever they were about to say, it was clearly bad news.
“…I think I know exactly who was hunting her.” As Saki said this, she took an old and slightly torn piece of paper from her inside pocket and placed it on the table.
On the sheet of paper was a list of girl’s names, all with a date next to them, ranging from as far back as six years ago to just two years ago. One name at the bottom, however, had no date attached to it.
“Kyoukei Mira…” Shin read the name aloud, his voice wavering as he did so. Everybody had drawn the same conclusion.
“The hideout definitely hadn’t been used any time in the last few weeks. That means this comes from months ago. Months! She’s had a target on her back all that time!” Saki sounded livid, and if we weren’t in a space as private as her own home we’d likely have drawn a lot of stares.
“These dates go years back… way before all the magical girl business started… not long after my parents were killed. If this really is some sort of hit list, the Director had people being covertly killed or kidnapped long before magical girls became public knowledge…” Shin added.
“I-I checked the names on the sheet in the police database, and they’re all names from missing persons cold cases. E-even worse, their cases were all opened on the dates written on the sheet…”
The revelation certainly made everything look very grim. But one thing didn’t add up. Why would rogue magical girls who no longer have any allegiance to the Director carry out one of his planned assassinations? Of course, it was entirely possible that the magical girls had their own reasons for wanting her silenced, but the discrepancy bugged me.
It hit me then that there was another possibility for the origin of the list. One that would fit perfectly into the theory I was so desperate not to believe.
Against my better judgement, I swallowed my criticism of the explanation. My tendency to overthink was more than likely getting in my way again.
“One thing is for certain: the circumstances of Kei’s disappearance have ‘magical girls’ written all over ‘em. Our enemies are still out there causing trouble as we speak.” Saki practically spat as she talked.
“Damn it all, we can’t afford this right now. We’re preparing for a war.” Shin spoke with venom in his tone.
“M-maybe that’s why? They’re trying to disrupt us by throwing another spanner in the works?” Nao offered a feasible explanation, though I wasn’t convinced.
As everyone else continued to discuss possibilities, my mind was occupied with all the information we had found, and it wasn’t liking the way things fit together.
‘Please be wrong about this,’ I thought. ‘Please be wrong. This one time, let me be wrong.’
The sinking feeling I had only continued to grow.