Paris Lights
Outside, the streets of Paris go by in a blur of colour and sounds. Buildings and people and traffic - it's the middle of the day, but it doesn't feel like it.
Kirika yawns and rests her head against the window of the taxi.
'Jetlag, huh?' Mireille says.
Is this jetlag? She doesn't know - she has no frame of reference by which to judge.
Is she used to flying? Has she ever flown before at all?
It's been months. She still hasn't quite got the hang of asking herself endless questions, and coming up with nothing.
She looks Japanese, she has a Japanese name. (But is it her real name?) She speaks Japanese - though only just as well as she speaks French and English and a few other languages besides.
Japan is all she knows: this is what her memory tells her. So maybe she hasn't travelled before.
Maybe she's been a Japanese girl all her life.
'This is your home?' she asks as Mireille dumps luggage on the floor and turns on lights and throws open windows.
There's a table for pool or something, a few potted plants that have seen better days, wide windows looking out to the sky and the roof of the building across the street.
It's bare, and a little odd, and to Kirika it feels familiar, almost safe. It feels like Mireille.
'Yeah,' Mireille replies then, and stops her restless movements and just looks at Kirika for a moment. 'So... bathroom is over there and the kitchen is through there,' she gestures vaguely.
'She doesn't know what to do with me,' Kirika thinks.
She climbs onto the bed just as she is. Her shoes are by the front door, where she left them - a habit Mireille does not possess. The clicking of her high-heeled boots on the wooden floors precedes her movements through the small flat.
Mireille might not know what to do with her, but Kirika doesn't have that problem: eat, sleep, go to school, stay hidden, stay alive. Shoot to kill. Ever since she woke up alone, she's known what to do with herself.
Right now, she needs sleep.
The pillow holds a faint scent. And one long blonde hair, almost invisible against cream cotton, is coiled in a figure-eight near her nose. She almost has to cross her eyes to focus on it.
'There's nothing in the fridge - nothing edible, anyway. We'll have to go shopping tomorrow.' Mireille's voice starts out muffled, then gets closer until there are footsteps on the stairs. 'Oh.'
Kirika looks up over her shoulder.
'I'm going to set up my computer. Guess we're open for business, huh?'
'Goodnight,' Kirika says, turning her face back into the pillow.
'Yeah,' Mireille says, then mutters under her breath as she moves away: 'Sure, make yourself at home. Don't mind me.'
Kirika hears, though, and almost feels like she could smile.
She wakes up and it is dark.
There are shadows on the walls and ceiling from the lights coming in from the street, and a faint glow, just noticeable, over the partition that separates the sleeping area from the rest of the flat.
The quiet click of a mouse. Below that, the drone of a hard drive. A car passing by outside. A chair creaking slightly as its occupant changes position. A sigh, or perhaps the tail-end of a yawn. The human element is the more difficult to identify.
It is Mireille, though, sitting there in the dark, her gun within easy reach.
'Why do I feel safe here,' Kirika wonders, 'When I'm not safe at all?'
She wakes again with the mattress dipping beneath her, the sheet being rearranged over another body. Mireille shifts around, getting comfortable, and a moment later there is quiet and stillness again, as she succeeds.
Just the sound of breathing, then, just barely audible. Kirika holds her breath so she can listen.
There's a theory - she doesn't know how she is familiar with it - that people can become used to anything, if they are exposed to it for long enough.
'In time,' she thinks to herself, her voice in her head as quiet as Mireille's breathing beside her, 'I might get used to not knowing who I am.'
The flat is filled with morning light the third time Kirika wakes. Mireille sleeps on, her face pressed into the pillow, her limbs spread out across the bed. Kirika doesn't move - doesn't know yet what might wake her.
She asks herself if this isn't a new experience, too, like flying, and jetlag, and Europe.
All she knows is the newness of things. (Which, in the absence of any other knowledge, must be everything, she decides.)
And there is Mireille, now - Mireille, who doesn't know who Yuumura Kirika is, any more than Kirika herself. They are new to each other.
'I could get used to anything,' she reminds herself. 'I could get used to this. But I might not have enough time.'
She closes her eyes again, shutting out the daylight. She will sleep as long as Mireille does. She will wake when Mireille wakes.