Game Over

Chapter 38





IT FELT ROTTEN spying on Kildare, but I had no choice but to follow him when school got out. After all, I’d only known him for a day. It wasn’t like I could ask him what he knew about his parents and the Pleionid hunt in the middle of class.

I expected him to go home to the GC Tower, but I wasn’t completely surprised when he headed in the opposite direction instead. I trailed him down the street, onto a bus, to a Mister Donut—where he bought a dozen glazed—and then to the shinkansen station. He seemed distinctly gloomy, and I again wondered what he might be thinking about tonight’s hunt. Was he really just going along with it for some almost-human reason, like maybe he wanted to please his father?

Not, of course, that it really mattered. Right then I had more immediate things to figure out—like where the heck he was going. The bullet train he was boarding ran out to the northeast suburbs of Nishinasuno and beyond.

I’m pretty good at tailing people, if I do say so myself, but we’d only gone twenty minutes when he nearly gave me the slip. The train was hurtling through the fields outside of Kurodahara when I noticed him getting up from his seat and heading forward, maybe to use the bathroom in the next car.

But no sooner had he exited the car than I happened to spot him out the window!

Somehow he’d gotten himself off the train and was striding through a rice field like he was a farmer out for a stroll.

With a quick “Pardon me” to the middle-aged commuter at my side, I made my way to the bathroom, then teleported myself off the train, something that I assure you is much easier said than done. I didn’t know the area very well, so, to be safe—and to make sure I didn’t teleport myself into a rock or something—I simply rematerialized myself five feet off the ground and on the opposite side of the train, in case Kildare happened to look back in my direction. Only problem was I forgot to materialize at a speed relative to the ground. That meant I was still traveling as fast as the bullet train.

Yeah, over one hundred miles per hour. Ouch is right.

I bounced and rolled like one of those Olympic downhill skiers who wipes out halfway through the course, only my wipeout was in a muddy, flat field. It was a good thing I’m a pretty sturdily built kid and that there weren’t any trees. It was also a good thing Kildare was too far away to hear me crash to the ground.

Once I’d determined I wasn’t mortally wounded, I turned myself into a butterfly whose anatomy I’d fortunately had occasion to memorize from Professor Kuniyoshi’s collection. I caught up with Kildare just as he made his way to a moss-covered old Buddhist lantern at the edge of a small field.

The timing was good, because what happened there was something I really had to see with my own eyes. As Kildare approached the stone lantern and placed his hand on it, the moss began to move—and talk!