Wrong Turn
dark heroThe attention began before Nezu had even reached his desk.
It followed him through the classroom in brief glances that retreated whenever he turned toward them, gathering again the moment he looked away. Most belonged to the same group of boys who had made his life difficult before his absence, although there was nothing particularly unusual about that. They had watched him before. They had laughed when he passed, whispered loudly enough for him to hear and occasionally discussed what they intended to do to him as if informing their victim in advance made the threat more impressive.
Today, however, they were quieter.
That made them easier to understand.
Nezu placed his bag beside his desk and sat down. Across the room, one of the boys looked away a fraction too late. Another leaned closer to him and whispered something behind his hand. The third glanced toward the teacher’s desk, then toward the classroom door.
They were waiting.
Nezu lowered his eyes to the notebook in front of him.
Two weeks earlier, the prospect of being surrounded by them would have required preparation. He would have counted their numbers, considered the objects available in the surrounding corridors and identified the fastest route toward a place with witnesses. If escape became impossible, he would have calculated how much force he could use before the consequences became unacceptable.
Now, the calculation was considerably simpler.
He could hurt them.
The bathroom scale had gained more than ten kilograms while insisting that almost none of it was fat. The marks left behind whenever he gripped something too tightly had proved that the change was not cosmetic. Steve’s tests had been inconclusive only because Steve had ended them each time Nezu demonstrated something that should not have been possible after spending two weeks confined to a bed.
Even Kuro had become dangerous enough to remove a curtain rail from the wall while attempting to climb it.
Nezu looked down at his hand.
The boys believed he was still recovering from an illness.
They were wrong.
Unfortunately, Nezu did not yet know how wrong they were.
Someone else was watching him.
Akane made no attempt to hide it. She sat several desks away, following his smallest movements with an attention that would have been conspicuous even if half the class had not already noticed her doing it. Whenever Nezu looked in her direction, their eyes met immediately.
She did not smile or wave. She simply studied him, her expression composed and her gaze far too perceptive for his comfort.
Nezu looked away first.
That happened three more times during the lesson.
By the fourth, he had established that Akane was not observing the boys behind him. She was watching him specifically.
He did not know why that felt different.
The sensation was not unpleasant. It was warm and restless, accompanied by an unreasonable awareness of where she was even when he concentrated on the teacher. It made it more difficult to listen. When Akane tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Nezu missed an entire sentence about quadratic functions.
That had never happened before.
He wrote down what remained on the board and decided to investigate the symptom later.
The boys continued exchanging looks throughout the lesson. Nezu caught fragments of their whispered conversation whenever the teacher turned toward the board, but the words offered little information beyond what he had already concluded. They intended to confront him after class, preferably somewhere without witnesses, and believed his recent illness had provided them with an opportunity that might not last.
One of them occasionally looked uncomfortable.
Nezu recognized him as the boy who had objected when the others first proposed attacking someone they believed was still recovering. Whatever remained of his conscience had not been strong enough to keep him away, but it had at least prevented him from sharing their enthusiasm.
That made four of them.
Four bodies of different weights and heights. Four sets of joints that could be damaged by applying force in the wrong direction. Four skulls that would not react well to striking a wall or floor.
Nezu’s fingers tightened around his pen.
A thin crack appeared along its plastic casing.
He released it immediately.
The lesson continued.
When the bell finally rang, chairs scraped across the floor and the classroom dissolved into conversation. Nezu closed his notebook, placed it inside his bag and glanced toward the group near the back.
All four boys were standing.
So was Akane.
Nezu left.
Akane had barely taken two steps toward his desk when she found it empty. She looked toward the classroom door and caught only the last movement of his uniform disappearing into the corridor.
“Akane?”
She stopped.
One of the girls stood beside her carrying her sports bag, while several others were already leaving together.
“We have PE next,” the girl reminded her. “If you want to talk to Nezu, you can do it later.”
Akane continued looking at the doorway for another moment.
Then she collected her things and followed them.
Nezu did not run immediately.
Running would confirm that he was avoiding the boys and encourage them to follow him. Instead, he walked at a pace slightly faster than usual and selected corridors with enough students to discourage an open confrontation.
The strategy worked for forty-three seconds.
The first route became unusable when two of the boys appeared near the stairs ahead of him. Nezu turned before they could block it and took the corridor leading around the opposite side of the building.
The other two were already there.
Nezu stopped.
One of them smiled.
“You look better.”
Nezu turned around.
The first pair had entered the corridor behind him.
Apparently, his attempt to avoid them had produced the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of recognizing caution, they had interpreted it as weakness. Their expressions had changed since the classroom. The uncertainty was gone, replaced by the confidence of people who believed their victim had already begun fleeing.
The uncomfortable boy remained behind the others. He would probably not initiate the attack, but Nezu could not assume that he would remain uninvolved once it began.
Nezu considered explaining the situation.
I am avoiding you because I may accidentally cause permanent injury was accurate, but unlikely to be persuasive.
He chose another corridor.
They followed.
Nezu increased his pace. Their footsteps accelerated behind him.
He passed two classrooms, descended a short set of stairs and turned left. One of the boys shouted for him to stop, although nothing in his tone suggested that stopping would improve the situation.
Nezu moved faster.
So did they.
The remaining students in the corridor looked toward them as they passed, but nobody intervened. Some moved aside. Others watched with the interest normally reserved for entertainment that carried no personal risk.
Nezu reached the end of the corridor and found the doors ahead closed for cleaning. A yellow barrier stretched from one wall to the other, leaving him with no route except the stairs to his right.
He took them three steps at a time.
The sound behind him grew more distant.
Nezu noticed it and slowed, uncertain whether the boys had abandoned the pursuit. Their voices reached him from below a moment later, accompanied by hurried footsteps and increasingly strained breathing.
They were still following.
He resumed running.
The landing passed beneath him almost too quickly. His legs moved without the familiar resistance, each step carrying him farther than expected, while his breathing remained calm despite the sudden exertion. He reached the next floor before his mind had adjusted to the speed.
Nezu looked back.
The stairwell was empty.
He turned forward again just before reaching the wall, changed direction and continued through the corridor.
Something was wrong.
The doors passed too quickly. His shoes struck the floor in a rhythm that should have left him breathless, but his lungs showed no objection. A display case approached, vanished beside him and was already several metres behind before he realized he had passed it.
Nezu attempted to slow down.
Instead, he heard one of the boys shouting from the stairwell and looked over his shoulder again.
They emerged several seconds later, breathing heavily. The most enthusiastic of them pointed in his direction and shouted something Nezu could not hear over the pounding of his own footsteps.
He faced forward.
The next corner arrived sooner than expected.
Nezu planted one foot and turned. His shoe slid several centimetres across the polished floor before finding enough grip to redirect him. He narrowly avoided colliding with a student carrying a stack of books, twisted around another and continued without losing speed.
The corridor blurred around him.
Nezu did not understand what his body was doing. Steve had made him run during one of the tests, but only for a short distance and under controlled conditions. He had been faster than before, yet not like this. Not fast enough to leave four pursuing boys behind while feeling as though he had barely started exerting himself.
A rational part of his mind attempted to estimate his speed.
Another part remained occupied with what might happen if they caught him.
He imagined blocking a punch and breaking the arm behind it. He imagined pushing someone away and sending him into a wall. He imagined the cracked pen, the damaged furniture and Steve’s expression each time another supposedly safe test stopped being safe.
Nezu ran faster.
The boys’ voices faded.
He turned into another corridor and looked back again, expecting to see them rounding the corner.
Nobody appeared.
Relief arrived briefly, followed by confusion.
Segu, meanwhile, stood one floor below with her sports bag hanging from one shoulder.
She had left the classroom late after realizing Nezu was gone and had followed the familiar sense of his presence through the school. At first, locating him had been easy. Then his position began changing too quickly.
Nezu was near the eastern stairs.
Then above her.
Then halfway along the opposite corridor.
Segu stopped and concentrated.
The answer moved again.
She frowned at the ceiling.
Whatever connected them had never behaved consistently enough to come with rules, but Nezu had never crossed that much of the building in so little time. Either her perception had become unreliable, or he was running faster than any person had a reason to run inside a school.
A moment later, his presence disappeared.
Segu waited.
Nothing returned.
That had happened before, and worrying about it had never made the connection reappear. Nezu was still somewhere nearby, probably avoiding someone or interfering in a problem that had nothing to do with him.
Segu sighed and turned toward the girls’ locker room.
If he did not appear before PE ended, she would find him afterward.
On the floor above, Nezu reached another intersection.
The corridor to his left contained several students. The corridor ahead led toward the gymnasium. Behind him, the first of the boys finally appeared around the distant corner and shouted when he saw Nezu waiting.
Nezu moved again.
He chose the right-hand corridor because it was empty.
The boys interpreted that as another attempt to isolate himself and followed with renewed determination. They could not match his speed, but they knew the building and began dividing at each intersection, attempting to approach him from different directions.
Nezu recognized the strategy too late.
One appeared at the far end of the corridor ahead. Another entered behind him. A third emerged through a stairwell door to his left.
The fourth boy remained nowhere in sight.
Nezu changed direction.
They moved to close the remaining paths.
He accelerated.
The corridor narrowed around him. Doors passed on either side, some closed, others partially open. He saw signs and labels but processed none of them. His attention remained divided between the route ahead and the footsteps following behind.
The boy in front moved to block him.
Nezu adjusted his path without slowing, passed close enough to make the boy flinch and slipped through the space beside him before an arm could reach his uniform.
Someone shouted.
Nezu looked back.
The corridor ended.
He turned through the nearest open door, crossed the threshold too quickly and caught himself against the wall before his momentum carried him any farther.
Voices surrounded him.
Many voices.
Nezu looked up and discovered almost every girl in his class preparing for PE.
Several girls had already changed into their sports uniforms and were arranging their hair, collecting shoes or talking beside the benches. Others were still halfway through the process, their school uniforms folded inside open lockers or hanging from hooks while they searched through bags for whatever they had forgotten to bring.
At the centre of it stood Akane.
She had already changed most of her clothes. Her sports shirt followed the shape of her body more closely than her usual uniform, and her hair, gathered loosely over one shoulder while she prepared to tie it, left the line of her neck exposed.
Nezu stared.
The boys pursuing him disappeared from his thoughts.
The room disappeared with them.
For several seconds, Akane became the only thing his mind remained capable of processing.
A strange warmth formed beneath Nezu’s chest and spread outward with alarming speed. It climbed along his neck, reached his face and settled in his ears, while his heartbeat accelerated far more violently than it had during the chase. His eyes moved before he could decide where they should go, following the unfamiliar shape created by clothes he had never seen Akane wear.
It was not happiness.
It was not envy, guilt or worry.
It was something hotter than all of them and considerably less cooperative.
Akane noticed him.
Her hands stopped in the middle of tying her hair.
Their eyes met.
Nezu’s face turned a deeper shade of red.
Akane’s expression shifted from surprise to disbelief, then immediately toward alarm. Her gaze travelled over him, searching for an injury or some explanation for why the boy who had only recently recovered from a mysterious illness was standing breathless and crimson inside the girls’ locker room.
Nezu waited for her to shout.
She did not.
More importantly, nobody else did either.
A girl walked past him while pulling her sports jacket over one arm. She came close enough for the fabric to brush against his sleeve, yet she never looked in his direction. Another girl closed the door Nezu had left open and continued her conversation without acknowledging the boy standing beside it.
Laughter continued around the room.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody covered themselves.
Nobody appeared to know he was there.
Akane slowly lowered her hands.
Her eyes moved from Nezu to the girls surrounding him and then back again. A classmate crossed directly in front of him, forcing Nezu to step aside, but the girl showed no reaction to the movement.
Akane understood before he did.
She crossed the room quickly, caught him by the wrist and pulled him away from the entrance.
The contact made the heat beneath Nezu’s skin intensify.
Akane felt it through his hand.
“You’re burning,” she whispered.
She stopped and placed the back of her fingers against his forehead.
That made it worse.
Nezu’s face, already red, approached a colour normally associated with emergency signs and ripe tomatoes. His entire body became rigid as Akane leaned closer to inspect him, bringing with her the faint scent of shampoo and the warmth left by changing clothes.
Her concern deepened.
“Are you sick again?”
“No.”
“You have a fever.”
“I don’t think this is a fever.”
Akane studied his face.
Then she noticed that Nezu was making a determined effort to look above her head.
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
She glanced down at her PE clothes, then back at him.
Understanding arrived for the second time.
This time, it brought colour to her own face.
Without another word, Akane took him by both shoulders, turned him around and guided him toward the most distant corner of the room. She placed him directly in front of the wall and adjusted him until there was no possibility of him looking anywhere else without deliberately turning his head.
“Look there.”
Nezu looked at the wall.
“Do not turn around.”
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