Marionette

Cosmos, Chapter Sixty Nine - Taida [怠惰]

Splinters of carmine worlds hung in her mind.

Mixing into the broiling cauldron filled with anxiety, terror and guilt, there was nothing in the real world that she could see.

Her surroundings were drowned in white noise, blurred almost entirely from her grasp.

The sun had finished setting as the hours ticked by, bleeding away like the last drops of life remaining within her veins.

Katsuragi Amaya couldn't sit still.

There was no way her nerves would let her, even as exhausted as she was at that moment.

Even as her head pulsed with dull aches and her body sluggishly heeded the demands of her anxious ticks, all she could bring herself to do, was stare.

Down at the bloodied package carefully set out across her dining table, she stared, wringing her hands together to try and hold herself together. Her gaze remained firmly fixed upon the visage of trauma laid out before her.

Her restless feet sounded brisk, rhythmic tapping against the scuffed wooden floorboards beneath her.

The dull, ceaseless dial tone of her cellphone hung hauntingly in the back of her head, mixing with the white static noise that pulsated against her ears.

She should know how to deal with this.

A legitimate abduction should have been entirely mundane, given the combination of her childhood and the better portion of a year existing up at that disastrous satellite campus. And yet.... Here she was terrified and at a loss of what it was she was supposed to be doing.

Nothing she ever did was correct.

She could never accomplish the satisfactory.

Doomed to fail before she could even begin to mend her misfortunes, where all she could see was the worst yet to come.

This was a sick, twisted joke.

And she was sick of pretending to laugh along with it.

Her clothes clung to her in awkward places, damp with a combination of tacky flecks of crimson, muddied dredges of after-rain slosh from that roadside ditch, and sweat. Her glasses, now scuffed and bearing a hairline fracture in the right lens sat precariously on her tender nose. There was no doubt that should any outsider see her now, she would be quite the fright.

She should change, take a quick shower and clean her various scrapes and cuts before any infections began to set in.

But she didn't have it in her to tear her gaze away from the package that had been nailed to her front door.

Beyond the obvious taunts practically screaming right in her face, there was something else there that she was failing to see.

'It's gotta be some kind of ransom package!' Hiroto's voice echoed from the further expanses of the otherwise silent house, conversing anxiously with another she could neither hear nor see. 'No, I can't make sense of it but it's definitely malicious! Like, I didn't think it was possible, but it really makes that bastard reaper guy look like some random thug in comparison!'

He had no idea just how far his voice was echoing....

At least the house was moderately soundproofed.

'...What the hell do I do? Like, this isn't just a warning. It's a threat, isn't it?! They nailed a severed finger to her front door!'

A shudder tore straight down Amaya's spine at the reminder, and instinctively she found her gaze flicking straight to the refrigerator.