Clocktower Read online

  “I helped perfect a technology of everlasting life.”

  “You covered up a murder. You spat on the foundations of your own city, and a man of Sonnerie took his own life for what you did.”

  “It was a sacrifice that needed to be made! Don’t you see?” she insisted.

  “A sacrifice?” Johnny’s anger caught in his throat, quieting his voice to a hushed whisper. He turned back toward the door, and proceeded down the steps to the stretcher. In a feat of raw strength, he grasped it with one arm and pulled it behind him back up the steps and straight to Dr. Tonimura’s desk.

  “The consequence of your infallible morality,” he said, tearing the sheets off Mari’s stretcher and ripping open the zipper of her body bag. “An entire family, destroyed. But that’s what needed to be done, is it not? A small price to pay for perfecting a technology of everlasting life,” he mocked.

  Dr. Tonimura averted her eyes from the corpse, and turned back toward the window. “I tried to save her,” she said. “I tried everything I could.”

  “You failed!” Johnny spat. “And the worst of it is, you don’t even grasp the depths of your failure. Tell me, Doctor, when you close your eyes at night, do you see her face?”

  The doctor folded her arms across her chest and lowered her gaze. The armor of certainty she wore so well had started to crack and break apart, leaving her nothing more than a frail woman grasping for rationalizations and vindication.

  “Where did you go?” she asked, looking over at Mari’s body. “Why couldn’t I save you? I gave you the original. The result of Itsuka’s ceaseless toil.”

  “Dr. Tonimura,” Mari said from behind them. Johnny turned and watched as she stepped past him and came to her side. But the doctor did not notice. No one except Johnny could see the real Mari or hear her voice.

  “Auntie,” Jack cut in. “You know why we’re here. Hanekawa’s men are already downstairs. When they discover the body is missing, they’ll come for you. They’ll destroy everything.”

  Johnny looked over at him, shocked at the tenderness in the boy’s voice. But Dr. Tonimura only shook her head.

  “Mutsumi, my old friend,” she said, taking a framed photograph from her desk into her hands. “When did we find ourselves at opposite ends of this fateful intersection? When did we stop understanding each other?”

  She returned to her seat behind the desk, her face drained of its vitality. For several moments, she only brushed a hand back and forth over the picture she held. She never noticed when Mari came to her side, and Johnny expected nothing more until he watched Mari set a hand on the doctor’s shoulder, and whisper in her ear.

  The change in her expression was almost immediate. Did she feel the hand upon her? Did she hear the voice of the girl she’d let down murmur words of foreordination to her very soul? The portrait in her hands fell to the desk below, and before Johnny had the chance to question it, she stood with rapturous certitude, and met his gaze.

  “I know what must be done,” she said. “My time has come.”

  Mari Mishima backed away and said nothing more.

  “Auntie,” Jack stepped forward. “We don’t have time. They’ll come for you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’ll come. But I will not be here for them to find.” She paused, looking over at a large painting on the wall.

  “What you seek is in there,” she said. “All of my notes and documentation concerning the surgeries. Both of them. The code is 0078.”

  Jack gave her a bow, and hurried to the painting.

  “Investigator,” she said, her eyes meeting Johnny’s. “Why don’t you walk with me for a moment?” She turned to the giant glass window overlooking the clocktower.

  Johnny acquiesced, and followed her to a sliding glass door in the corner. She took off her shoes at the door, and gently set them aside before stepping out to the cold, wet balcony.

  The moment he stepped through into the still-misty January night, the clocktower began to ring its midnight twelve, and both hands pointed straight up to the partly clouded sky.

  “I must apologize to you, Investigator,” she said as she approached the railing. “There is so much I would have liked to tell you, but I’m afraid now my time grows so very short.”

  “Then perhaps there is a question you can answer for me instead,” Johnny said. He looked back through the glass at Mari, who still stood with her head down beside Dr. Tonimura’s leather chair. “Is there a way to fix Mari?” he asked. “Is there a way to bring her back?”

  “I cannot tell you. Only one man can. The designer himself, Akira Itsuka.”

  “Not Ninomiya? Was it not his doing?”

  “No.” Dr. Tonimura’s voice quivered. “The movement that I implanted in Mari’s chest was the only surviving prototype of Itsuka’s originals. Ninomiya gave me only one movement, and demanded I use it to save Ayano. But I had the power to save both . . . so I did. Or I tried.”

  Johnny turned around, and found the Twelfth Index standing atop the guard rails, smiling. Her garb of pure white was an angelic silhouette against the light of the clocktower.

  “Doctor!” Johnny shouted. “Stop!”

  But as the twelfth bell tolled, Sachie Tonimura only shook her head, then leaned back and disappeared over the edge.

  Twenty-Sixth Movement

  Insanity

  There was no sound following the twelfth bell. No drops of rain. No wind stinging his cheeks. Silence drew out like a blade in the night, a blade that pierced his skin and buried itself in his heart. His mind was overtaken by a sense of vertigo so powerful that he might have lost his legs if Jack hadn’t shot out from behind him, screaming after the fallen Index.

  “Why?” Jack yelled. “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Johnny said.

  Jack ran back to him and grabbed Johnny by the collar. “Why didn’t you help her?” he demanded.

  “I couldn’t reach her. I’m sorry,” Johnny said. From below, the first signs of commotion had begun to stir.

  “We have to get out of here, Jack,” Johnny said. “We can’t stay.”

  An insurmountable rage was painted upon Jack’s face. He pushed Johnny against the glass and snarled, but Johnny offered no resistance.

  “Jack,” he repeated his name. “Did you find what we came for? Can we escape?”

  “God damn it!” Jack said, pulling his hands from Johnny’s collar. “Yes. I got everything, though there wasn’t much in there. Just a VHS tape and a manilla folder.”

  “Right,” Johnny said, straightening himself out. He turned around to search for Mari, whom he found almost immediately sitting in Dr. Tonimura’s large leather chair. Jack remained outside, his mind awash amid the midnight mist.

  “Come on,” he said to her. “It’s time to go.”

  “She heard me,” Mari said. “I don’t know how, but she heard me.” She looked up at Johnny, her face wet with fresh tears. “Why did she kill herself? She was an Index.”

  “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “But we can talk about that later. We have to get your body out of here.”

  “Look,” Mari said, pointing at the desk. “She left this.”

  In the pale dark, he never would have noticed. But at Mari’s direction, he focused his eyes on the item on the table, and moved to retrieve it. It was a wristwatch. Thinner and lighter than the one he had taken from Saito, but with the same recognizable style. A crisp, snow-white dial crowned with the numeral XII in solid gold.

  Johnny pocketed the watch and scanned the desk for any other items of interest. It was mostly bare, and he would’ve been content to leave it as it were if not for a familiar face smiling at him from a portrait in the far corner. It was Saito, or at least a much younger version of her. Standing together with a beaming young man dressed in traditional Japanese wedding garb.

  Before he cou
ld inspect it further, however, Jack returned from the balcony. Johnny watched him pace back and forth a few times before he came to a stop in front of Tonimura’s desk. He set his hands down upon it, and tucked his chin into his chest.

  “I think we’re fucked, Tokisaki,” he said. “Unless you’ve got any bright ideas on how to get out of here.”

  Johnny looked around the room thoughtfully for a few moments before sucking the air through his teeth.

  “If only we could create some kind of distraction,” Jack said. “Some kind of . . . ”

  “Wait,” Johnny said, holding up a finger to silence him. “Do you hear that?”

  The two men stepped forward and listened. Mari, too, stood from her seat and peered into the distant blackness. At first, the room was as silent as a mausoleum. All Johnny could hear was the sound of their own shallow breaths. But steadily from that silent dark, a rhythmic tapping began to rise. Johnny felt something touch his hand, and turned to find Mari pressed against his arm.

  “She’s here,” she whispered.

  Johnny furrowed his brow, then turned his gaze back toward the giant doors of Tonimura’s office. The tapping grew louder, until it was easily recognizable as footsteps. Johnny held his breath and watched as the silhouette of a girl appeared at the entrance. Her footfalls vanished suddenly as she emerged onto the crimson carpet, and even when she had come close enough that he could see the whites of her eyes, she remained as taciturn and forbidding as the moon.

  Ayano Hanekawa. She was dressed in a school uniform not unlike Mari’s, but instead of a jacket, she wore a haori-style top with watch hands in the one o’clock position emblazoned on the breast. She neither smiled nor frowned as she approached. Her singular gaze focused on Mari and Mari alone.

  When at last the silence was broken, it was by neither party. Unnoticed by the three, another man rushed forward—the very guard who had been assigned to protect Mari’s body inside the morgue.

  “Mistress!” he shouted after her. Johnny looked past Ayano, and watched as the hapless guard jumped in front of her and held out his arm.

  “You mustn’t confront these criminals! You saw the severe wounds inflicted by this one on your own men!”

  Ayano looked up at him with an expression of more than mild annoyance.

  “Where is Dr. Tonimura?” the guard demanded.

  Johnny exchanged glances with Jack, but neither man gave an answer.

  “The Twelfth Index is dead,” Ayano spoke for the first time, an impish grin widening on her face as she did.

  “What?” the guard stepped forward. “Murderers! Monsters! Terrorists! You’ll pay for this. You’ll—”

  There was nothing to describe the speed with which Ayano moved. Had Johnny not had his eyes on her the whole time, he may as well have thought the dagger in the guard’s heart had materialized there of its own will. With his last breaths, he looked down at his killer in hopeless confusion.

  “You’re too loud,” Ayano whispered. In one fluid motion, she pulled the dagger out of his heart, and let his body slump to the floor.

  Johnny instantly tore his .38 from the holster at his side and pointed it straight at Ayano.

  “Drop it,” he said.

  “Hmm?” Ayano put a finger up to her lips and giggled. “And if I don’t?” she asked. “Will you shoot me?”

  Johnny cocked the hammer and stared Ayano down. “Yes,” he said.

  “You always were a psychotic bitch,” Jack said.

  “Oh please,” Ayano shrugged. “As if Mutsumi Baba’s little errand boy has never gotten his hands dirty. You could at least try to enjoy your stature.” She wiped her blood-stained blade on the sheets covering Mari’s body.

  “How is the old hag, anyway?” she asked. “Still slumming it in her club full of hookers and second-class citizens?”

  Ayano paused for a moment and looked at Mari. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to insult your former employer.”

  Jack looked over at Johnny, puzzled.

  “Mmm,” Ayano pondered. “You can’t see her, can you?”

  “See who?” Jack asked.

  “Ha!” Ayano laughed. “What a lonely existence it must be for you, Mari. The only people who can even prove your existence are myself and this investigator I’ve heard so much about. Tokisaki, isn’t it? You did quite a number on my little Yama and his men. I wish I had been there.”

  “Johnny,” Jack leaned over. “Is she talking to the corpse?”

  “Not exactly,” Johnny said.

  “Corpse?” Ayano asked, looking down at the stretcher. “Mari, is this you?”

  She put her dagger down, then peeled back the zipper on the shroud, revealing Mari’s lifeless body. Johnny steadied his breathing and kept his sights trained on Ayano.

  “My, my,” she said. “I would have loved to hear the explanation as to how this all happened. But the one person I could have asked is now splattered all over the concrete outside.”

  “Step away from the body,” Johnny said.

  “Can you feel it when I touch you?” Ayano ignored Johnny and brushed a hand over the face of the cadaver, keeping her eyes on Mari as she did. “No? A pity.”

  “I’m not going to ask you again,” Johnny said.

  Ayano pulled the zipper down further, exposing the breasts, and the circular scar where Mari’s movement should have sat.

  “Not even here?” Ayano asked, pressing a finger down against her chest.

  “Stop it,” Mari said, her voice cracking with distress.

  Ayano smiled a warped, sadistic smile. “Let’s just do one more experiment,” she said. In a flash, she grabbed the dagger and lifted it up directly over Mari’s chest.

  Johnny didn’t hesitate. He squeezed the trigger, sending a single round straight through Ayano’s chest, knocking her to the ground.

  “Fuck!” Jack yelled. “What are you doing?”

  Johnny watched the gun smoke rise from his two-inch barrel. His ears were ringing, and the pistol in his hand felt heavy with the weight of sudden contrition. After a few seconds, his good sense returned to him, and he lowered his pistol and surveyed the carnage. Ayano lay motionless on the floor, next to the guard she had murdered. Her eyes were wide open, and that same impish grin was painted on her face.

  Still, something was missing. And when Johnny turned to where Mari had stood, he found only empty space. She was gone.

  “Shit,” Johnny said. He pushed his revolver back into its holster and looked over at Jack.

  “What the hell is going on here? Who was she talking to?”

  “We’ve got to get back to The Lugs,” Johnny said, avoiding the question. He commandeered the stretcher and began pushing it toward the exit.

  “What are we going to do about all this?” Jack asked.

  “Nothing,” Johnny said. “Stay focused on the job. We can take the emergency elevator down to the first floor. After that, we make a break for the car.”

  “Right,” Jack hesitated. “Okay. We can do this. We can—”

  Dong!

  Johnny jumped and spun around. The sound was unmistakably from the clocktower, but the time was off. It was still only a few minutes after midnight.

  “What the hell?” Jack trailed off as he stepped back into the office.

  Dong! The clocktower rang again. This time, the bell was followed by what sounded like a swarm of mechanical hornets.

  “Ahh . . . ” a human voice groaned from within the chaos. Amid the deafening noise, the body of Ayano began to rise. Gradually, it levitated upward until, as if being assisted by some invisible being, her body straightened out and her feet fell upon the blood-stained carpet.

  “You shot me,” Ayano said, touching a hand to the hole that had pierced her left lung. “Ah, you really shot me, didn’t you?” she laughed a wild, harpy’s laugh,
sending a chill down Johnny’s spine.

  “What are you?” Jack asked.

  Johnny grabbed his revolver once more, but before he could remove it, the dagger Ayano had carried shot out of her hand, impaling Jack through the shoulder and sending him flying through the air.

  “Amano!” Johnny yelled, running to his side.

  “Sh . . . shit,” he wheezed. “Is this as far as I go?”

  The wound was deep, and fresh blood was pouring from it. Johnny put a hand on the hilt, but Jack pushed him away. All the while, Ayano’s lunatic laughter continued.

  “Leave it,” he said.

  “Come on,” Johnny said, pulling Jack’s other arm around his shoulder and lifting him to his feet.

  “The body,” Jack said, motioning to the stretcher.

  Johnny paused. There was no way he could get them both out. His eyes raced back and forth between the dead girl on the stretcher and the still-living Jack Amano hanging on his shoulder. But in his brief indecision, Ayano descended the office steps and approached.

  “Exhilarating,” she said. “I feel so alive!”

  “Shoot her,” Jack said, gripping Johnny’s shoulder as tight as he could.

  “Why don’t you shoot him instead?” Ayano suggested. “Mutsumi Baba can always find another son to adopt.”

  “Go to hell, Ayano. I’m sure your mother is waiting for you down there,” Jack snickered through the pain.

  Ayano’s smile vanished. “Kill him, Mr. Tokisaki. It’s the only way out of here for you. Kill him and take a seat in the house of the First Index.”

  “I’ve already got a job,” Johnny said. “With a third-floor office and a street view.”

  “And yet, you’re here now. A pawn to a plot you barely understand. You could be so much more than what you are. A servant in the house of a Goddess.”

  Johnny shook his head. “You’re no God. You’re just a girl with a complication.”

  Ayano said nothing more. She took another step forward, but as she did, Johnny saw a hand shoot out from behind her and grab her by the shoulder.

  It was Mari. She put her arms around Ayano and restrained her as best she could.