BATTER 59

After blurting that out, Trixie fell into thought for a moment. Her young gaze lingered on the bluish skin beneath the teacher’s closed eyelids.

“But the teacher is sad. Because we aren’t human.”

“Ah, I figured as much,” Baron chuckled without hiding it. At the end of that laughter, which was as faint as a mutter in one’s sleep, he added, “That’s not exactly something to be sorry about, though. You just have to crush the bastards who make you sad, and that’s that.”

When he made a gesture like firing a gun with one hand, the gaze that had been fixed solely on the teacher finally turned toward Baron. A thin smile spread across a face that, since arriving underground, had done nothing but scowl or scowl even deeper. It was the first time he had seen Trixie smile. Her eyes, half-closed as she fought off sleep, looked at Baron.

“Are you really going to buy me a better gun?”

“It’s not impossible, but if you want a present, try acting a bit nicer.”

The hand that had taken the shape of a pistol reached out and playfully tickled the sole of Trixie’s foot. Before he could even tickle her a few times, it ended with him getting a sharp kick. Trixie glared at Baron, who was pretentiously playing the clown and acting like he was in pain, before continuing.

“There were other teachers at the place we lived before. There was even a teacher who looked like me…”

A long yawn interrupted Trixie’s words. The child’s following voice drifted slowly and sluggishly.

“They said there are people who need our help, and that as good children, we should help them…”

“Did you know how you were supposed to ‘help’ them?”

It took a while before the next answer came. Baron understood what this silence implied. There are children who come to know the world beneath their feet far too early. Trixie was simply one of them. He shifted the subject of the conversation slightly.

“Why did you pretend not to know?”

“Because it makes the teacher sad…”

The heavy onset of sleep blurred the end of her sentence. Baron didn’t ask further and quietly looked straight ahead. He saw the face of the teacher, currently wandering through a drug-induced haze. You raised them in such a pampered, sheltered cage, but it looks like you were the one being protected.

In the stillness, the flow of time felt exceptionally slow. He repeatedly scratched his forehead and the tip of his nose—which weren’t even itchy—for no reason, before shifting his gaze elsewhere. Then, he turned on the screen of his digital band to check how far the tracking device had moved. For a while now, the red dot had been stationary in one spot.

The image captured by the satellite camera wasn’t the desolate slums of the Lower City, nor was it a mountain range where a secret base might be hidden. It was a bit north of the center of New-New York, in the safest and wealthiest district. The red dot flickered right on the crown of Upper Hill. Examining the 3D location more closely, it was approximately 270 meters above the ground. It was situated at an ambiguous height, neither the lowest nor the highest floor.

The tracker held its position, moving neither forward nor backward from that spot. It seemed those guys had arrived. So they live in some glitzy place instead of a cave, despite their nature… They had built their nest in a troublesome spot, indeed. Since the weapons he had painstakingly found during the day were now mostly useless, he almost felt like complimenting them for using their heads.

With a smirk, Baron stretched his arm out toward Trixie. His well-timed arm blocked the sleeping child just as she was about to roll off the bed in her sleep. He nonchalantly laid Trixie in a proper position and sat at the foot of the bed by her neatly tucked feet. The dawn, where even the sky was invisible, passed exceptionally slowly.

It was nearly dawn by the time the teacher regained consciousness. Without anyone having to go first, Trixie lunged into the teacher’s arms, and starting with her, the other children joined in and swarmed over her. If Lawrence hadn’t stepped in to stop them, she would have been crushed to death—rendering the fact that she’d been brought back alive at the cost of Bijou’s life completely meaningless.

Baron peeled off the children who looked like they were going to hug the teacher to death and sent them outside. Surprisingly, Trixie listened without a fuss. After the unnecessary people left, the teacher coughed with a hoarse throat and accepted a drink from Harrison. Perhaps due to the effects of the sedative, her eyes were still hazy even after waking. Baron snapped his fingers sharply in front of her eyes, which were flickering like those of a sick animal.

“We meet again like this, Teacher.”

When their eyes finally met, the teacher’s bloodless lips quivered. A whistling sound escaped, as if she were trying to say something, but it was hard to hear. After a few successive coughs, she managed to produce a proper voice.

“Where is this?”

“I don’t know, Utopia.”

Thinking he was just talking nonsense, the teacher’s brow furrowed. Baron let out a dry, airy laugh and interlaced his fingers.

“I’m serious. This place isn’t on any map, so I don’t even know what to call it. You remember our stupid android from before, right?”

“Of course.”

“He built this village. They say he brought together people who couldn’t live peacefully on the surface and built it for them. People like you, so to speak.”

It was unclear if she fully believed Baron’s explanation, but the teacher maintained a cautious silence. Whether she believed the story of a crazy android gathering vagrants to start a cult community underground didn’t really matter. Baron shifted the topic.

“I assume you know why you were taken and why you were released?”

The teacher nodded. Her guilt-stricken expression was quite a sight, but not the kind of thing he wanted to look at for long.

“That android—I plan to bring him back.”

“What?”

“So, tell me everything you can remember.”

He lowered his posture, looking up at the teacher from below. In an attempt to hide his impatience, a smooth yet somewhat overbearing attitude seeped through his smiling eyes. The teacher, whose face had become much more haggard over the last two days, paused for a moment before speaking again.

“The guy whose fingers were cut off… I, I couldn’t bring myself to kill him… so I just performed some basic first aid and injected him with a sedative. But after a few hours, they came for him.”

“I see.”

I thought they’d chase us. It seemed that when the search failed, they chose a more underhanded method. Baron listened quietly to the teacher’s statement.

“Their faces were different from the guys who came to Edge Street before. They were on hoverbikes instead of a car… They demanded we return the comrade we were holding. When I complied, they suddenly became aggressive, and I… I got shot while trying to protect the children. I think it was a tranquilizer gun. I vaguely heard one of them talking to our kids about a hostage exchange…”

Her eyelids, as thin as an egg’s membrane, twitched. The teacher, trying hard to sift through her memories, shook her head and continued.

“After that, I lost consciousness, so I don’t remember which direction we moved.”

“Well, that’s a shame, but forget it.”

If they had been insignificant enough to not even worry about the hostage’s line of sight, he would have been even more disappointed. Baron made a gentle gesture and moved to the next question.

“When did you wake up? And what did you see then?”

“As for how much time had passed, I’m not sure. I was tied up the whole time, and it was pitch black, so I couldn’t check the time…”

“It was pitch black.”

“And there was… a salty smell.”

A salty smell, huh. Baron tapped the back of his hand with interest. His interlaced fingers twitched like the legs of an arthropod. The teacher knitted her brows to try and sharpen the resolution of her memory.

“I tried to find a way out and secretly picked the handcuffs. That was fine, but I got caught immediately, and they put something over my head… That’s all I remember. I fell asleep and woke up here.”

“Wait, they put something over your head?”

When he pointed out the vague part, the teacher gave a weak nod. She seemed unsure herself, as if the memory was unclear.

“When I was at the re… research lab, we used virtual reality headgear to control the personalities or behavior of the clones. Since we had to affect them to a degree that crossed legal boundaries, it was naturally an in-house development. I can’t be sure if it was the same device, but…”