I cannot bring myself to accompany Ajax back to the apartment. He goes to break a heart I could never stand to see broken. It is the right thing to do. But that doesn’t make it any easier to let him go.

Instead, I lose myself in the overcity in a way I haven’t done since further back than I care to remember. There’s not a single dark street in the Electric Town, or so the saying goes. I walk the alleys alone throughout the evening until it feels safe enough to return home. Everywhere I go, I feel the pulse of the city. Fans I pass on the street stop and ask about the upcoming tournament. So many of them recognize me. I brush away their questions with a smile and a laugh, but I can barely even think about the winter invitational that’s only two weeks away. That tournament used to be the highlight of my year and my reason for training even harder through the fall months. Now it seems just a silly contrivance. Meaningless after experiencing all I have this past month.

I’ve been behind the curtains of the Section and seen what makes the clock tick. Faced threats no university student ever should. No longer is the cost of defeat just public embarrassment over another upstaging at Ajax’s hand. I’ve faced death, even though I didn’t fully understand it at the time. And now it’s come for me anyways.

Ajax is dying.

It wasn’t easy to help him process that fact. It’s even harder to come to grips with the idea myself.

I have a bad habit of eating things I never should when I’m stressed. Ice cream has been my partner in crime since my first week at university. It’s a delicacy in the Electric Town, one neither Jolie nor I had experienced on our side of the capital. Our first week at university, we bought an entire gallon of the stuff and threw it in our freezer to save for a future day of celebration. Noble idea, right? So you can imagine the look on my sister’s face when she came home at the end of that week to find me angrily devouring the last remnants of that gallon while a replay of my first loss to Ajax played on loop in the living room. I thought she was going to kill me. I still worry she might, if I ever repeat the incident.

Now I always make sure to get my ice cream out of her sight. There’s a little dessert bar on the edge of the Electric Town, right near the Main Street metro station, that knows my order far too well. A small bell announces my entrance through the hubbub of a full store. By the time I reach the counter, a hand-sized cone of vanilla is already waiting for me.

The boy behind the counter grins. “On the house.”

I pay anyways.

I hop on the metro and pick at my cone in silence. Girls from other universities take surreptitious screenshots through the crowded train. Kids tagging along with parents on their way home from work point to my hair or my arms, only to be shushed while those same parents blush and apologize for their manners. Any other day I’d be enjoying the attention and making my best impression. It’s who I am. But I can’t help but feel guilty about it today. So many people know who I am. I might be able to tell Ajax he was wrong, but a cold feeling in my gut gnaws at me that he’ll be right in the end. Will no one remember him when he is gone? If only I do, will that be enough?

My ice cream melts while I ride from the Electric Town towards the Pavilion district. From there, rather than numb myself in the capital’s shopping hub, I take a smaller metro to the Kingswalk’s artificial beaches stretching between the city’s industrial forests and research sector. Winter has driven all the crowds away. Summer sees the sands filled in droves by families and friends who can’t afford the time for a trip to the villages, but this late in the year, only rare joggers leave imprints on the curated coastline. What few people come to this part of the city come for the community gardens.

Maintained by the elderly and the nostalgic, the gardens look over the beaches from a sprawling park of green hills and willow trees. Chirping insects imported from the villages strain to be heard above the wind. Between the foothills, long stalks of aquatic plants rise out of sunset paddies bridged by wooden walkways. Floating paper lanterns drift through the water. Flowering rice and lotus blossoms bend in the current of a cold wind. The chill reminds me of the coming night while I wander between the plants.

In the distance, train tracks for an ancient metro take the curvature of the surrounding hills at a gentle angle, winding between them to fields just out of sight. If I don’t look up and see the skyscrapers on the horizon, it would be just like my brief taste of the villages. Even the air smells like I remember. Tinged with sea salt, pocked by the occasional howling of distant lupines. Couples walk among the rice pools enjoying the ambiance. Further off, hidden beneath a pergola near the center of the wooden walkways, a lone performer plucks out a wistful tune on strings like those used by village performers in their plays.

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My mind recognizes the notes of the song she plays. I retire to a hill overlooking the gardens to listen, sitting nestled in the roots of the only Lungracian in the garden; a tree of silver leaves. More absorbed in the haunting music and my thoughts than the melted desert that drips over my fingers. Wind stirs my hair in eddies around my face. I straighten it with a hand, then leave it be when another gust leaves it flapping to the east. The sun sets with a slow monotony on my other side. Notes of the song, the Tetsuka Monogatari, drift to me when they are not stolen by the breeze.

Falling leaves.

I can hear it too, friend.

I can’t even imagine what I will do without Ajax to chase after. We’ve been constants in each other’s lives for so long. Who will I be when he is gone? Who will I chase then? Who will push me to better myself, to evolve time and time again? Who can take up the lead after he has carried it for so long? I don’t feel ready for it. I have looked up for so long that I don’t know if I will ever be able to look down.

I forget how long I sit there thinking. Eventually, plummeting temperatures bring me back to reality in the gardens. All is silent and windy. Cold has chased those chirping bugs away, and the musician has long since packed up to leave for warmer places. Stars wink in the black sky above. Clouds drift like dark battleships in low orbit.

Earlier messages from Jolie and Mori ping for my attention as I pick myself up and brush the grass from my arms. I click my tongue when I see the time. I didn’t mean to stay out so long. They’re probably wondering if I got kidnapped by the corporation. Shoving my JOY into my pocket, I jog up the hill and towards the nearby metro station. I pause at the top to look back one last time. Lanterns glow in the paddies below, preserving this artificial slice of a land I’ve only briefly seen. Those moments held more peace than the skyscrapers have in years. No wonder Ajax talks of it like paradise.

In that moment, I make up my mind to return to it someday. So I seal everything of this place- its quiet, its scents, its colors and its solitude- in my memory, preserving those feelings for the day I see the villages again.

Then I turn my back on the simple paradise, and I return to neon heaven once again.

-

I return to a darkened home.

No strip of light leaks beneath the locked door to my apartment. I pause outside, listening for any of the sounds my instincts usually expect to hear. Rattling pots. Dulled noise of a stream screen broadcasting the night’s main event. My sister cursing over some line of code going wrong in her newest project. Yet I hear nothing at all, and that one thought sends a jolt of fear through me until I stretch out my kinetic sense and feel Jolie’s heartbeat deeper in the apartment. She’s alone, but that’s no surprise. Ajax and Mori might have gone out to fetch dinner and talk. Their bond runs longer than I knew. Mori deserves to know the truth as much as my sister does.

A single lamp lights up a corner of the living room when I enter. The stream screen that’s always playing something hangs dormant on the wall. I pad through to the kitchen. Only then do I hear the flowing water and broken sobbing coming from the washroom. My fingers cycle through the menus of my JOY, unpowering it with an unconscious motion. I leave it in the kitchen and lean my head against the washroom door, listening to the shower running on the other side.

The wall shakes when a fist beats against it. Choking cries weep through the steam. My eyes close and my heart breaks as I stand there. Every pain my sister feels makes its way to me through the plaster that separates us. She was only just beginning to dare for something she’d never felt before. Her shy, hopeful love shatters to sobbing agony in my ears. She screams and hits something again.

I leave her for only a moment. Grab her softest, most favorite clothes from a drawer in our room and take them to the drier to warm. My feet go mad with tapping while I watch the drier spin. I wipe angry wetness from my eyes. I’m about to leave her clothes outside the washroom door when it suddenly slides open. My shadow falls over Jolie. She looks up to me broken and weeping. Then she buries her face in my sweater, crying again as we fall against the wall.

“It’s n-not f-fair,” she cries. Her bleeding fist pounds weakly against my chest. “N-not…”

She collapses in my arms. Snot and sniffling soak into my shirt. Wrapping my arms around her, I hold her close and press my lips to her hair, shushing her pain while her shoulders shake violently inside of mine. I absorb every tremble, every tremor. I do not cry where she can see. If I showed her how scared I am, how could she, who believes in me more than any other, be brave? I am strong for her. For Ajax. Because a champion never folds, and when my friend is gone, that is what I will have to be. The best are mountains. Immovable, untouchable, idolized.

They are invincible.

Right up until the day they aren’t.