Tokyo Demons: Book 3, Chapter 7, Part 1

Jo slowed his steps on the entry sidewalk. He adjusted his fake glasses and tilted his head up. Hospital loomed over him, gray against the burning blue of the sky.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Remember the plan.”

Sachi blinked over his contact lenses and adjusted his grip on the handles of Ayase’s wheelchair. Kiyoshi grunted through the medical mask on his face.

Jo’s phone buzzed in his pocket–the signal from Shouri and Adam, keeping an eye on the hospital entrance from nearby. Jo gestured to Sachi.

Sachi slowly pushed Ayase up the wheelchair ramp.

It took a few awkward, tense minutes on the surgical floor for them to find an abandoned laundry room. But once they did, Jo ducked into it with Kiyoshi and Sachi while they left Ayase and her half-missing leg to passively draw attention. Jo grabbed two pairs of scrubs from the laundry shelf and threw them at the boys.

“The top has short sleeves,” he warned Kiyoshi, unzipping his own hoodie. “Wear a coat over it.”

Kiyoshi mumbled an affirmative, his voice an unusually low rumble. That lingering darkness behind his eyes hadn’t subsided since he’d looked at that photo of Fujito.

Keep that anger, Jo encouraged silently. But control it, Kiyoshi.

Feeling a million times freer with a lab coat over his clothes, Jo slipped out of the laundry room to check on Ayase. She was sitting quietly in her wheelchair in a corner, staring at the giant white board posted on the wall behind the check-in desk…which was packed with names and codes scribbled in dry-erase ink.

“Any luck?” Jo whispered.

Ayase shook her head. “Her name’s not written on there. Either of her names.”

“Then we’ll go straight to the internal medicine floor, since she’s supposed to be registered there.”

She glanced around her, then lifted the edge of her skirt for a few insects to crawl out from her leg stub. Jo shuddered slightly as the bugs flew down the hallway to find positions.

With a faint chak behind them, Sachi and Kiyoshi left the laundry in their newly stolen scrubs. Between that, the lab coat, and the face mask, Kiyoshi was barely recognizable, which alleviated Jo’s biggest concern. With Shouri outside, Kiyoshi was the only one of them Fujito might recognize.

Unless this hospital is crawling with Core thugs we’ve punched before.

Or we run into Touya.

Jo clenched and unclenched his sweaty hands. Kado hadn’t been inside this hospital to give them more insight–he’d said as much when Jo had texted him about it. But his strange message still bothered Jo:

Touya isn’t there for this block of time.

Kado had refused to explain–once again saying he didn’t want to throw them off-course if they were close, and he needed to know whatever they found out. He also mentioned something about “interfering with the wrong timeline,” but Jo had trouble wrapping his head around that one.

He didn’t know if pushing the issue was smart if Kado was trying to manipulate the future.

Sachi gripped the handles on Ayase’s wheelchair again. “Okay, two flights up.”

Jo decided, for a few minutes, that he would stop thinking about the tangles of time he was only barely privy to. He took a breath in the present and followed the others to the elevator.

***

Ayase’s eyes darted around their surroundings, taking in every milling nurse, every shuffling janitor, every bored family sitting in a corner while their kids played with tissues and hand sanitizer. The internal medicine floor had no operating rooms and lacked the general tension of other floors they’d passed–this seemed to be mostly closed patient rooms and doctor’s offices.

Ayase cupped one hand against her wheelchair armrest. She formed several bugs in her hand, leaving a stinging patch of thin skin on her palm, and slowly spread her fingers. She let her bugs fly out one at a time and zoom to different corners of the floor.

“There’s the nurse’s station,” Sachi murmured near her ear. He nodded at Jo and Kiyoshi, who hung back, and pushed her to the long desk that wrapped around a nurse’s cubbyhole like a half moon.

“Um, hi,” he said, and he sounded reasonably calm in Ayase’s ears. “I have a patient who stopped by the hospital to ask about a consult. She didn’t have an appointment, but do you think we can help her out?”

A nurse glanced at him over the chart in her hand, disinterest written across her features. “Excuse me?”

“I guess she got a few suggestions for doctors in the area, and she’s doing some research before she makes a decision. Um…” He knelt closer to Ayase. “Who were you looking for, honey?”

“Doctor Fujito,” Ayase said evenly.

The nurse went back to her chart for a moment, then sighed and put it down. “Nana Fujito?” she clarified as she sat and opened a binder.

Then that’s her first name. Ayase paused to close her eyes and settle her insects on the upper lip of doorframes. She had a broad view of the hallway, although that didn’t do much for the closed doors. Maybe she needed to put some bugs under doorways…

“Oh, right,” the nurse said, snapping Ayase back to her human eyes. “Doctor Fujito’s on leave. She’s been gone at least a week.”

Ayase’s stomach tightened, although this wasn’t a surprise. “Is there a way I can contact her?” she asked thinly.

“No, but she has another doctor supposedly taking calls and covering her patients. Someone from another hospital, one second…” The nurse ran her finger down a sheet in the binder. “Here it is. Doctor Yui Takahashi.”

Dammit!

“Do you know when she’ll be back?” Ayase asked, this time through her teeth.

“A week from Tuesday.” The nurse pulled a pen from a cup. “I’ll give you the number for Doctor Takahashi and you can set up an appointment.”

“Sh-she’s still researching her options,” Sachi said, glancing down at Ayase. “Right? Before you make that appointment. Did you have questions about Doctor Fujito before I take you back downstairs?”

Ayase opened her mouth, but a second nurse–sitting at a computer terminal–hummed from another corner of the station. The new nurse looked over from her computer screen.

“Doctor Fujito?” she asked. “I just saw her.”

Ayase froze. The first nurse turned from the desk, her face twisting into a grimace.

“What are you talking about? She’s on leave.”

“I just saw her on this floor.”

“Maybe she was picking something up, but she’s not working.”

The second nurse raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure about that? She was wearing scrubs.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” the first nurse snapped, but Ayase was already whipping her head to look down a hallway.

“She might be one of those people who hides in plain sight.”

Shouri’s words echoed in Ayase’s head as her eyes darted back to Jo. Leaning against the wall, Jo met her gaze through his glasses and mouthed something.

End it.

“I-I’ll take the phone number,” Ayase said, reaching over the desk with an open hand. “Thank you.”

The nurse placed a sticky note in Ayase’s palm, which made her twitch as it touched the new sensitive patch of her skin. Sachi nodded and thanked the nurse before wheeling Ayase away.

He pushed her the long way around the floor, eventually meeting Jo and Kiyoshi behind the double doors that led to the elevators. Kiyoshi was peering through the tiny window and back into the internal medicine ward, murmuring numbers that Jo jotted down in a notebook.

“What are you doing?” Sachi whispered.

Kiyoshi squinted. “Thirteen, fifteen…and seventeen,” he finished. “There’s something written for room eighteen, but it looks like ‘needs clean-up crew.’”

Jo let out a breath. “The room assignments,” he said, handing the notebook to Ayase. “They’re posted on the board over the nurse’s station. Emi-san said to look for an on-call room, but I didn’t see one.”

“If Fujito’s somewhere on this floor,” Kiyoshi added flatly, “she’s probably hiding in one of the empty rooms.”

“Or…moving from room to room.” Sachi clenched his jaw. “She could probably live in a hospital for a while, if she knew exactly where to hide.”

Ayase looked down to the notebook in her hand. Jo had scrawled out a quick grid of numbers, then crossed out most of them. Four rooms remained.

I already have four insects out there.

She closed her eyes and focused on one at a time, flying along the ceiling until she could make out the fuzzy numbers tacked outside each patient door. She zoomed down, swooping around the people who walked through her path, until she could land on the floor and crawl under doorways.

The first three rooms were empty–no lights, stripped beds. But with the fourth and final room, she heard a faint noise before she was all the way in.

She pushed her body through the tight space beneath the door, her wings flapping awkwardly against the low ceiling. When her head poked through, the dark room opened up in her wide, compound gaze…including a lone figure on the bed, its form barely lit by a quietly playing television.

Ayase could feel her human heart pound elsewhere as she squeezed out of the tight space. She flapped her crunched wings before leaping off the floor, dipping as her wings opened wider and caught the air beneath her, and soared to the top of the room.

She tried to focus on the memory of Kiyoshi’s Pitch injections. She ached when she remembered men strapping him down on a table, and a woman leaning over him, pulling on latex gloves…

And now, as Ayase hovered in the room over that lone figure, she felt déjà vu wash over her in a cold rush. The feminine shape, the top of that head. The pinned-back hair and sharp nose. This woman lacked the white blur of a lab coat over her clothes, but here, in the dark, in fuzzy insect vision…Ayase recognized the woman better than she had from that photo.

It’s her!

Fujito sat on the end of the stripped bed, her attention locked on the television hanging in one corner of the room. The volume was turned so low that Ayase couldn’t make out the words, but she strained her insect eyes until she recognized the live feed of the chaotic gunfights and arrests that had been happening all day.

Nothing was blocking the door. Thanking the universe for that stroke of luck, Ayase settled her bug on the light switch box and opened her human eyes.

“She’s in room sixteen!” she hissed. “And she’s alone!”

Kiyoshi growled. Jo took the wheelchair handles from Sachi and rolled Ayase into a single-room handicapped bathroom nearby.

“Lock the door behind you,” he ordered as he switched on the light. “If this goes to hell, phone the alert to Shouri and Adam.”

“And send bugs,” Ayase snarled.

“Yeah. And send bugs to sting the shit out of her.”

Ayase formed several more insects and settled them under Jo’s coat collar. After he left the bathroom and closed the door, she lurched forward in her wheelchair and pushed the lock.

She closed her eyes and watched the world open up from Jo’s shoulder. She heard his breathing speed up over a whispered prayer as he shoved open the double doors in front of them.

Proceed to Chapter 7, Part 1, page 4–>