Nine Moons in a River of Stars: Phase Three (Marrow Book 3) by Xen

Author:Xen [Xen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-22T18:30:00+00:00

WHERE ARE YOU?

Just those three words.

A question without an answer. A question he might never know, and suddenly Naoki had never felt more alone.

And while the moon watched through the window glass, as jewel-winged butterflies flitted across its curve…

Alone, the notebook clutched to his chest, Naoki cried.

xiii

JIRO WATANABE REFUSED TO MOVE.

He burned both cold and hot with the sun beating down on the back of his neck but the early winter air crawling down inside his puffy insulated jacket, which made him look like a blue Michelin Man.

He’d pulled his blue knit cap over his ears, but his nose was still frozen while a sick feeling welled in the tender lymph nodes under his jaw; a feeling he only got on sunny winter days when his body got confused between the eye-searing sunbeams and the frosty jets of wind off the sea.

Still, he wouldn’t move.

He stood just outside the lines of black and white striped police barricades, all of them sawhorses fitted with reflectors and strung with yellow tape that said POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS.

They’d been set all across the road, and miles back the state had put up roadblocks that said this stretch of highway was closed for construction, please take the off-ramp, please return to the interstate at the next exit.

The road wasn’t closed for construction.

The road wasn’t closed at all, save for by that invisible barrier Jiro could feel when he put his hand out and pushed against the soft, cushy air that pushed right back with a sort of strange, springy-warm force.

He hadn’t tried to get back in.

Not after watching police and reporters attempt again and again. Not after seeing a police van drive at the invisible barrier at full speed, only to be flung back with such violence its rear tires bounced right off, rolling away onto the highway shoulders, while the van skidded over a hundred feet with its back bumper scraping up showers of sparks and its hubcaps tumbling away with loud cymbal clatters. Things had gotten quiet around the barricades, then.

And one by one first the police, then the reporters got frustrated, gave up, and went home.

He wondered if the military would come.

Or scientists, who would want to stand here and look inside the town that was somehow right in front of their faces and still not quite there at all.

Maybe they would stroke their chins, and take intangible measurements of things like wavelengths and frequencies and resonances and things he didn’t understand. Until they, too, got bored and gave up and went home, nothing to see here.

He wondered if anyone would hold their breaths and push hard enough and try and try and try until they could get inside. Or maybe stab something long and sharp through, though when he tried with a big branch torn off a tree at the side of the road, it didn’t get far before it pushed back like it was giving back all the strength he’d put into shoving, reflecting it back at him to reject his attempt to intrude.

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