Steel Sakura

She spoke fast, evidently shaken. "Then this boy just looked round at me, and he had the strangest eyes..." she broke off a moment, taking a deep breath. "He looked so lost, so I asked him if he was okay, just he just stared at me as if he didn’t understand a thing I was saying, then walked away." The scene changed again to another interview with an older man with a moustache and greying hair. "These cars came speeding round the corner towards the explosion, and that boy just seemed to freeze. He looked at them and I could see he looked so scared... He held out his hand, and I swear there seemed to be something in it... Like a cherry blossom or something... But he held out his hand and screamed, I mean screamed something like ‘Stay away!’ then the cars all exploded. It was terrifying..." The man broke off, shaking a little.

Yolei stared, transfixed, at the screen as an artists impression of the boy was posted up. "It couldn’t be..." She murmured, her eyes wide.

Later that night, she went to bed with no intention of staying there. As soon as she was sure that her parents were asleep and unlikely to notice if she vanished from the house, she gently pulled open her window, sat on the sill and swung her legs over, dropping the small distance to the grass of the garden. Unnerved as she was, she felt some kind of pull that was irresistible to her. She just had to find out who that mysterious boy was, and what he was doing here, for the more she thought of him, the surer she became that he was not intended for this place. She ran slightly across the lawn and into the street, her sneakered feet making no sound as she sped silently down the road. The warehouse area of her home town was not far from the place she now lived. Common sense told her that the boy would not have stayed there, seemingly the source of his pain, yet something deeper told her that he would too scared to leave. That which does not kill us will only make us stronger, the saying went, but she wasn’t sure that he could survive much longer.

The warehouses were brightly illuminated, but the shadows were darker than the ones that surrounded her home at midnight, she contemplated as she now walked down the narrow lanes between the tall buildings. The further she walked, the more crowded the shadows seemed to become, and the closer she knew she was getting to the scared boy she had met earlier. Somehow, although the prospect of meeting him again made her feel apprehensive, she didn’t feel scared. Although she was fully aware of the possibility he could hurt her, she thought that in some way, he was as scared of himself as others were. He wouldn’t hurt her.

Wrapped in her thoughts as she was, she almost didn’t hear the snuffling noise coming from behind the boxes to her right. Her first thought was one of fear: that it might be some kind of rodent. She had a deep, ingrained fear of animals such as mice and rats, and backed away from the heavy wooden crates nervously. Then she stopped. That was no animal sound, she realised, and walked towards the cases again.