Chapter 21: The Blue Ash Crisis

“Woman Claims Responsibility for the Blue Ash Crisis.”

The headline pulsed on Apricot’s tablet, its cold light sharpening the crease between her brows. She skimmed the article, pulse lifting at the name Chino Tokuma, a supposed researcher who had sent a letter confessing involvement in a “secret project” tied to the Crisis. The spark died almost at once. The piece slid into pundit chatter, the letter itself withheld for being “sensitive.”

Of course it was.

Apricot’s jaw tightened. Look into something called the Crisis. Shiori Kinjo’s words, delivered with the practiced indifference of someone who already knew the answer. If Chino Tokuma was real, and if she knew anything at all, Apricot needed to hear it directly, not through a hollow news cycle.

Tracing the address took less than an hour through the public directories.

Now she stood at the fringe of Yhanjo, a quiet stretch of the city that seemed paused in another era. Late sunlight slipped between brick facades so thick with ivy the green seemed to grow from the walls themselves. Children chased a scuffed ball down a dusty alley, their laughter ricocheting off stone. A thin stream ran parallel to the road, carrying a damp, green scent that had no equivalent in the steel maze of the inner city.

Apricot pulled her coat tighter and checked door numbers until a cast-iron fence came into view, black paint peeling around gold letters: 1514 DUJHO STREET.

She climbed the short stoop and knocked on the forest-green door.

Silence. Then the creak of old hinges.

A petite woman stood in the dim entryway. Her gray hair was gathered in a loose knot, and fine lines traced the corners of eyes that were sharper than her age suggested. A faded cobalt blouse and pressed trousers gave her an air of quiet discipline. She studied Apricot with the composed attention of someone accustomed to measuring strangers quickly.

“Hello, dear. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“My name is Apricot Signa. I’m a student journalist.” Apricot steadied her voice. “I read you might have a story to tell about what happened during the Crisis.”

Chino studied her for a long moment. Then a small, knowing smile.

“Step in, dear.”

---

Inside, warm air carried a trace of old wood polish. Apricot slipped off her shoes at the mat and followed the narrow hall into a modest living room lit by the honeyed glow of a single lamp. Low, matte-black furniture with clean lines. Ferns and bonsai softening the corners, their leaves catching the light. The elegance was understated and unmistakably Uchellan, a style that made Apricot conscious of how little she knew about the rituals that went with it.

“I’ll put on some tea,” Chino said, already moving toward the kitchen.

Apricot settled at a small lacquered table. Her reflection stared back at her from its polished surface, tense and uncertain. Kneel? Sit normally? Her thoughts snagged on fragments of Uchellan etiquette she’d absorbed since arriving in the country. Under pressure, it all blurred. She did not want to seem like a galijoh. Her palms dampened.

Chino returned with a porcelain teapot and two handleless cups on a wooden tray. Instinct took over. Apricot slid off the bench and knelt, heels tucked under, bowing her head as Chino set the tray down. She accepted the cup with both hands, bowing again.

When she looked up, Chino’s expression was gently amused.

“My dear, you’re not from here, are you?”

Heat climbed Apricot’s neck. “No, ma’am. I’ve lived in Uchella a few years, but I wasn’t raised here.”

Chino waved a hand. “With a name like Signa, yes, I gathered. Your effort was sweet, but unnecessary. I doubt my own children remember half the old rituals.” She motioned toward the bench. “Sit like a modern lady before your legs go numb.”

Apricot settled back, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. The tea helped, warm and nutty.

“Your home is beautiful, Miss Tokuma.”

“Flattery won’t write your article.” Chino’s tone was crisp, softened by warmth. She took a measured sip. “Before we start, I want to know why you’re here. Why seek out an old woman like me?”

“Well,” Apricot began, “I’m researching the Crisis, and when I saw your letter mentioned—”

Chino lifted a hand. The room went still.

“I want the truth, dear. Not a polite excuse.” Her voice was low, precise. “And whatever I tell you does not leave this room. Are we clear?”

Apricot swallowed. She had not expected to be interrogated first.

“I don’t know exactly why I’m here,” she admitted. The professional composure slipped, and she didn’t try to retrieve it. “Someone I trust told me that if I understood the real story behind the Blue Ash Crisis, I’d find the answer to a question that’s been keeping me up at night.”

“And what question is that?”

Apricot stared at her teacup. The surface trembled.

“It’s personal,” she said quietly. “And I’m afraid it’ll sound crazy.”

Chino’s sternness eased. “When I was your age, I would have felt the same way. I won’t press you on it. Anything tied to the Crisis is difficult to face.” A pause. “And frankly, it’s unusual for a foreigner to care at all about that dark chapter of our history. Even if you wrote an article, no one would believe it. Not without proof. And the authorities would prefer you stayed quiet.”

Apricot nodded. “I know. And it’s not actually for an article. I may have stretched the truth.” A small, embarrassed smile. “This is for me. I need to understand what really happened.”

She hesitated, then pressed forward before she could lose her nerve. “Miss Tokuma, did you hear about what happened at Ichigari Grocery?”

Chino’s expression tightened. “How could anyone have missed that? It was all over the news.”

“I was there. And I don’t think the news got it right.”

Something behind Chino’s eyes shifted. Recognition, perhaps. Or confirmation.

“With a question like that,” she said, “I suspect you don’t believe the official story yourself.”

Apricot shook her head. “What if I told you that what I saw in that store wasn’t a person at all?”

The silence held for several seconds.

“If you’re asking whether I think you’re crazy,” Chino said, “I don’t.” She set her cup aside. “I’ve seen strange things too. More than I care to remember. I even told my story to that odd man who runs Paranormal Review. He wouldn’t publish it. Too far-fetched, or too dangerous. I’m not sure which.”

Apricot leaned forward. “Then tell me. Please.”

---

Chino refilled her tea with careful hands. When she spoke again, her tone had shifted into something formal, measured, the cadence of someone unsealing a story kept sealed for decades.

“I grew up in Yoshima. Farm country. My parents worked the rice fields, same as every generation before them. I had a knack for electricity, and I was good enough at it that the Okabe government noticed. They conscripted me for the Blue Ash project when I was sixteen.” She said it flatly. “There was no choice involved.”

She moved quickly past the personal history. Apricot sensed the real story was deeper, and Chino was conserving energy for it.

“Blue Ash at the time was a fishing and mining community. My official job was establishing power lines. It didn’t take long before we’d built the place into a real city. But below the surface, a drilling expedition served as cover for the actual work.”

“What kind of work?”

“They called it Mirror Crossing Operations. The purpose was teleportation. We’d built an elaborate machine underground, a gate. Early tests were successful. We transported matter from one end of the facility to the other in an instant.” She blew across her tea. “We were proud. Arrogant. Convinced we were about to reshape the world.”

“When did it go wrong?”

Chino’s cup settled against the saucer. “When we tried to go further. The project’s lead engineer was a foreigner named Hilderic. Uraias Hilderic.” She said the full name deliberately, as though placing it on record. “A brilliant man. Disturbingly so.” She paused. “He spent hours in the corridors muttering to himself. We wrote it off as genius. But his designs were beyond anything our era should have produced. He insisted the main gate be built at one exact spot underground. Specific coordinates. He wouldn’t explain why.”

“Could you find his name in any public record?”

Chino gave her a sharp, approving look. “No. He was erased afterward. Thoroughly. As though he’d never existed at all. No trial, no obituary, no file with his name on it. I looked, years later. Nothing.”

She continued. “The main gate wasn’t like the prototypes. Hilderic designed it to open a passage into what he called hyperspace. A realm outside normal reality. We called it the Between.” Her voice cooled. “The Okabe leadership imagined moving soldiers across continents. Warheads through portals. The ambition was staggering.”

“We sent an unmanned probe through. It came back intact. We celebrated too much.” A rueful shake of her head. “Then we sent a satellite deeper in to map the space. At first, the monitors showed nothing. Depthless black, like staring into space without stars. We assumed a malfunction.”

She lifted her hand, fingers curling as if pinching a drifting speck.

“Then shapes appeared. Points of light.”

A measured sip of tea. The cup rattled faintly.

“Blue spheres. Orbs drifting in that void. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands, glowing softly, suspended in formation like something alive.”

Apricot’s pen hovered over her notebook. She didn’t write.

“We had no idea what they were. The prevailing theory was that they were energy concentrations, ball lightning that couldn’t dissipate in the vacuum. If that were true, the Between represented a limitless power source. You can imagine what that meant to a government already dreaming of teleporting warheads.” Chino shook her head. “Hubris dressed as science.”

“So we built a containment device. Outfitted a drone. And a technician volunteered to enter the Between with it in an insulated suit. His callsign was Falcon One.”

The name landed with a strange weight. A person. Not an abstraction.

“I was in the control booth,” Chino said. “My job was keeping the gate powered while making sure no one aboveground noticed we were draining half the city’s grid. Uraias didn’t show up that day. Our lead engineer, absent for the most critical test we’d ever run.” She swallowed. “That felt wrong. As if he knew what was coming.”

She fell silent. Outside, dusk was pressing against the windows. The lamp’s glow had narrowed to a warm circle around the two of them.

“We sent the technician through. At first, comms were steady. He described the orbs drifting past him. Then a large one in the distance moved.” Her finger tapped the table. “It came at the gate faster than anything I’ve ever seen. The feed went to static. A sound hit us that wasn’t sound, something that overloaded every channel. Speakers blew apart. A fragment cut my cheek.”

She touched the side of her face, an unconscious gesture.

“Total blackout. The chamber shook itself to pieces. Structural supports buckled. It felt like the ground was tearing open beneath us.” She exhaled. “When we stumbled into the main corridor under emergency lighting, everything was red. Dim red, like the inside of a dying furnace. People running. Shouting. Slipping on debris.”

Chino stopped.

She picked up her cup, but didn’t drink. Her hands were not steady. The porcelain rattled against the saucer, and she set it down again. For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the faint hum of the lamp.

Apricot waited. She understood that whatever came next was the part Chino had carried longest.

“Uraias was there,” Chino said at last. Her voice had gone thin. “Standing beside the gate’s primary power conduit. No one had seen him enter. The orbs were swarming around him. Blue lights filling the corridor, whispering. Not a sound you heard with your ears. Something beneath hearing.”

She closed her eyes.

“On the floor were two of our security officers. Or what was left of them. Blood up the walls. Pieces of bone on the grating.”

Another silence. Longer this time.

“And Uraias was crouched over one of them.” The words came out flat and stripped, a voice that had rehearsed this in nightmares for fifty years and still couldn’t make it ordinary. “He was eating them. Covered in blood. Mumbling, giggling. Fragments about a new world. When he looked up, his eyes were completely black. Empty. Like the void he’d opened.”

The room felt colder. Whether from the night pressing in through the old walls or from the story itself, Apricot couldn’t tell.

“He was not our genius,” Chino said quietly. “Not by the end. Hilderic was taking orders from something on the other side. Those impossible blueprints weren’t born of his own mind. They were given to him. Whispered. And he was mad enough, or desperate enough, to listen.”

Apricot’s voice came out quieter than she intended. “What happened next?”

“The Okabe family had been the project’s overseers. They must have had a contingency. Private security forces arrived, armed with weapons I’d never seen. They went straight for the gate. Not Uraias. The machinery. They destroyed the frame.” Chino made a small, sharp gesture with her hands. “One blast. Enough to sever the connection. The orbs that had slipped through winked out, one by one. And Uraias collapsed where he stood. Like someone had cut his strings.”

She wiped at her eye.

“They detained everyone who survived. Interrogated us for days until our voices broke. Eventually they released a handful of us. Expendable cogs, they called us. We signed secrecy oaths under threat of treason.” She drew a shaky breath. “The official story was a mining accident. A gas leak. And I kept their silence for decades. I was a coward. The nightmares never left, but the silence became a habit.”

“Were the Okabe surprised by what happened?” Apricot asked. “Or did they know it was possible?”

Chino considered the question with visible care. “They had a contingency. Armed men with specialized equipment, arriving within minutes of a catastrophe no one could have predicted. You tell me what that suggests.”

Apricot didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

“How many people actually died?”

Chino looked at her with an expression that was almost grateful for the directness.

“The official count says two point three million. But the word ‘died’ does most of the lying.” She set her cup down. “What actually happened is that people vanished. Not everyone in the city, but hundreds of thousands. They were shopping, working, walking their children to school. One moment present. The next, gone. No bodies. No wreckage. Nothing to bury.”

The number sat between them like something physical.

“The reports called them casualties of an underground explosion,” Chino continued. “Evacuations gone wrong. Administrative errors in the census. Convenient fictions.” Her voice hardened. “I believe they were pulled into the Between when the system failed. Whether that was accidental, or whether they were always meant to be part of it, I cannot say.”

“And the three days of darkness,” Apricot said. She had heard the anniversary broadcasts every year of her life. Three days without sun. Tragedy compressed into a script.

Chino nodded slowly. “The sky turned black. Midnight black, even at noon. Not smoke. Not volcanic ash. No particulate. The sun simply ceased to reach us, as though something had moved between the city and the light.” Her voice dropped. “On the fourth morning, the sun returned. The authorities declared the crisis over. And the rest of the world moved on.”

Apricot sat with it. The pen in her hand hadn’t moved.

“There’s one more thing,” Chino said. She straightened, gathering herself. “This is the part I’ve never been sure about. It took me years to see it, and I still don’t know if I’m right.”

Apricot met her eyes.

“When we built Blue Ash, we followed the Okabe blueprints without question. Every road, every block, every foundation. It seemed like standard urban planning.” Chino’s finger traced invisible lines on the table. “But after the Crisis, when I had nothing but time and nightmares, I studied those layouts again. The original street plans. The geometry of the infrastructure.”

She paused.

“The pattern resembled a sigil. An old symbol from archaic Uchellan texts, the kind associated with ritual amplification. I’m an engineer, not a priestess. But when I overlaid the city grid onto those old diagrams, the correspondence was…” She searched for the word. “Unsettling.”

Apricot’s mind moved quickly. “The original city plans. Are they accessible?”

“Public records, I’d imagine. Restricted, but not destroyed. The Okabe weren’t afraid of paper. They were afraid of people who knew how to read it.” Chino met her eyes. “You’re wondering if the city itself was designed as part of the ritual.”

“Was it?”

“I think it’s possible. I think Hilderic knew exactly where that gate needed to be, and I think the city was built around it for reasons nobody explained to the rest of us.” Chino’s expression was careful, honest. “But I could be an old woman seeing patterns in her own trauma. I want you to understand that.”

Apricot nodded slowly. The ambiguity didn’t weaken the story. It made it worse.

“That is what I know, dear,” Chino said softly. She looked suddenly smaller in her chair. “Now you understand why I carry these shadows.”

It took Apricot a moment to find her voice. “Thank you, Miss Tokuma. This answers the question I came here with.”

Chino’s smile was faint and skeptical. “Does it? Then I’m glad. Perhaps I can rest easier knowing my story won’t die with me.”

Apricot reached out and touched the old woman’s hand. The skin was thin and cool.

“I’ll do something with this,” she said. “I don’t know what yet. But I won’t let it stay buried.”

Chino patted her hand once, then withdrew. “Be careful. There are people who won’t want this truth spoken aloud.” Her gaze drifted toward the window. The glass had gone dark. “The nights feel longer lately. I hope I’m wrong about what that means.”

---

At the door, Chino paused. Her final look carried warmth and old sorrow and something that might have been fear for the world Apricot was about to step back into.

“Goodbye, Apricot,” she said. “You have a good soul. Don’t let this world ruin it.” Then, almost too quietly to hear: “And if you ever see those blue lights, run.”

Apricot bowed. “Goodbye, Miss Tokuma.”

The door clicked shut behind her.

Cool air swept the empty street. The children from earlier were long gone. Hours had passed without her noticing. The stars were smothered beneath low clouds, and the darkness felt heavy, pressing in at the edges of the city like something leaning its weight against a door.

Apricot started toward the train station. She walked quickly, and she did not look at the alleys.

Blue orbs. Phantoms that escaped the Between.

The thought would not leave her alone. If the orbs had slipped through when the gate collapsed, if they had been loose in the city for fifty years, drifting through its infrastructure, wearing shapes that weren’t their own—

She thought of the creature in the grocery store. Its impossible silhouette under stuttering fluorescent light. The void where its face should have been. She thought of Uraias Hilderic, crouched in blood, eyes black, giggling to an audience no one else could see.

And she thought of Shiori Kinjo, who had known enough to send her looking.

They’re still here, she thought. Somewhere in this city, the ghosts of Blue Ash are not at rest.

Her pace did not slow until the train station’s lights came into view.