Inception

Chapter 15: A Riddled Brother

Another of the soldiers had vanished with them, the pink-haired one, Iharu.

She mashed her fingers to the screen, pulling up their last location, furiously following protocol to start it up but gave up halfway through. Protocol be damned.

She leaped to her feet. "Ichikawa Leno and Furuhashi Iharu's signals have vanished! Sending last known location!"

"Lena, calm down," said Okonogi, her expression hidden behind the light reflecting off her large spectacles. She hadn't even bothered looking back, though her mouth was thin.

"Copy," said Hoshina over the speakers. "I'll check it out."

Lena didn't sit back down. She couldn't. Her nails dug into the thin skin beneath her eyes. The air had gotten thin.

"Ichigawa, calm down. Your brother was taking out yoju as good as a veteran, and Furuhashi's no slouch either," said another operator a chair down. He was a thin man with hollow cheeks. He looked like a skeleton, clothed in the dark walls behind him. A grim reaper.

"Why were they off by their own?" she asked. "Where are the senior officers?"

"It was only for a moment, the area was clear—"

But she'd already skipped several protocols and called up the nearest officer on the intercom—the head of the platoon that was supposed to be watching her last remaining family.

"Please check in with Ichikawa and Furuhashi."

"Lena!" shrieked Okonogi.

Lena didn't care. She hated this part of the job anyway. She'd been begging them to make her full time like Cromwell and Yoji since the day she came here.

So many regrets flooded Lena then. She shouldn't have choosen to find out the cause of kaiju. She should have been an officer. Screw her hypoglycemia, she could have hidden it, worn the suit, grabbed a gun, then she'd be out there able to do something to protect her idiotic brother who had to take a more direct approach to getting his revenge. She should have smashed his kaiju hunting dream as far as it could go. She shouldn't have tried to be understanding. She should have offered to support him from behind. She should have—she should have—

A faint blip over her headphones broke her from her spiraling. Something tickled down her cheeks and she had to blink several times to register what she had seeing. Leno and Furuhashi's signals had checked back in. Their location bleeped back onto the screen. Furuhashi had elevated heart rate and two large lacerations, one in his upper arm and the other on his thigh.

But her brothers numbers were red lining. The diagram of his body was riddled with holes, the suit struggling to seal up the bleeding.

Her hands had never left her face. She didn't register the pain of her nails digging deep atop her cheeks.

This was a nightmare. She had to still be asleep. She didn't feel any pain. This had to be a dream.

Her world flashed with the changing front screen. Operators started yelling out over each other.

"Fortitude 8.4 registered!"

"Report from Furuhashi in—it's a humanoid!"

"Fortitude 9.8! It's kaiju number 8!"

"Vital signs weakening!"

"Where is Kafka Hibino!"

"Vice Captain Hoshina, Captain Ashiro is redirecting, she needs a marker. What is your eta?"

Leno was dying. He was going to bleed out like their baby brother, with his lower half cut off by a beam. His cries would seep out with his blood.

He was dying like their twin kid sisters, their fingernail polish still wet, a blanket of shingles crushing one's chest and the other's head smashed in beneath their dresser and the upstairs floor.

His face would be slack, eyes unblinking and dark, like the brother between them who'd been under a blanket of tile. Lena had been stopped before she could dig him out to fix the damage that had been done to him underneath.

Dead like their mother and father, who Lena had only been able to make out their feet poking out of the rubble which had once been their living room.

Hands pinched her shoulders. "Ichigawa! What are you—shit!"

The hands moved to yank at her wrists.

"Someone call a medic!"

"What do you—fuck! Ichigawa!"

"She can wait! Someone take her officers!"

"She's bleeding everywhere!"

"Cromwell! Get Cromwell!"

Lena wasn't in the operations room anymore. She was back in the rubble of her house, staring up into a too-blue sky. Her hands not on keys, but filled with splinters from tossing aside wood and fiberglass insulation. A dull ache came from where debre had hit her head. But she'd finally found a spot in the house where she could see them all, all her family, as she waited for someone to find her, to find them, and pull them away.

She'd amounted to nothing then, and her efforts meant the same now.