The air seemed to freeze between them. Hisako could sense Serizawa tense and stutter-step beside her. Kumagai walked a step before them, stride uninterrupted.
"But that's just my personal conjecture," Kumagai said casually. "There was no evidence to suggest any foul play, and Lady Seki simply had the kind of constitution to just fail out of the blue."
"O-oh," Hisako said quietly.
She glanced at Serizawa, seeing his quizzical and shocked expression. She hoped her face wasn't as openly surprised as his was if Kumagai looked back at them.
A ping on Kumagai's phone distracted them all.
"A door has been detected," Kumagai announced.
She picked up her swift but controlled pace into a hearty jog. Hisako and Serizawa followed.
They exited the cozy narrows of the city and broke out into wider roads lined with small homes. Blue streetlamps lit their way, occasionally accented by the glowing face of a vending machine. Finally, they reached a small passage between the homes: a little walkway to a small community garden.
Hisako didn't notice the door at first. She only saw it when Kumagai approached a dark shape between two carefully tended, squat maple trees.
She couldn't help but instinctively gasp when she saw the door, not because of how it appeared, but because of the knee-jerk reaction ingrained in her by her upbringing.
Once the primal unease subsided, she took in the beauty of the door.
It was some kind of rich, dark wood– something used in art, not construction. In the thin moonlight, it glittered cooly, but in the hearty rays of the sun, Hisako was sure it'd glow like fire. The handle was a wrought brass knob with an intricate fractal design. It lacked windows or a peephole, but it had panels like Hisako's own door.
Hisako hadn't seen many doors. Only six now: hers, Kohaku's, Amajiki's, Nanae's, Lieutenant Strömberg's, and the one sitting quietly between two maples.
She hadn't even seen Serizawa's yet.
She approached, but only as closely as Kumagai did, and she didn't touch it.
"It's odd," Serizawa said quietly, seemingly similarly enchanted by it. "How such a thing can cause so much pain."
Hisako blinked. The illusion broke. She wasn't looking at something simply missing from her life. It was banned, and banned for a reason.
She wondered if Kohaku had felt the same wonder she'd given in to momentarily.
"We'll wait here now for a higher-grade keeper. They'll arrive to clear the door, and we'll resume patrol," Kumagai explained. "Ever since the higher alert for Trapdoorings, patrols don't clear doors. We're needed to protect the people and guard the doors."
"Everything really is changing, isn't it?" Serizawa breathed.
"Not forever. It's just until we find our footing."
"Do you like clearing doors?"
Kumagai pondered it for a moment. "I don't enjoy the act; I enjoy the execution of my duty. My specialty is combat, though, and I miss performing the full extent of my duties." Her eyes wandered casually but vigilantly. "A blade left unused becomes dull."
"So a Doorkeeper will show up and clear the door with the owner none the wiser?" Hisako asked. "That's how it's supposed to go?"
"Yes." Kumagai nodded. "Generations ago, it was decided that it was safer that way. That's when the manmade doors were done away with."
Hisako pondered it for a quiet moment. She'd never had a life with doors, but she wondered why they had to be completely erased. It felt extreme and a little restricting to remove all doors everywhere.
Her mind offered a simple solution: if she were to one day accidentally board an evil train, and it were to take her to a bloodthirsty nightmare meant to kill her, she'd rather take a bus and have there be no trains at all.
"I'm not sure I understand. Why did they remove manmade doors?" Serizawa asked.
"When there were manmade doors, doors–doors in the sense we know of them now–didn't appear. Your door would naturally replace a door you regularly used. You would simply open a familiar door, and it would take you to the wrong place. I'm told it was a dark time."
Hisako's previous hesitation went out the window. "How did they manage to remove doors everywhere in Japan?"
"There are Doorkeepers everywhere. Not all of us play roles in the field, the hospitals, or the labs. Some of us have everyday jobs and use our position to help the Doorkeepers," Kumagai explained. "Everyday secret society stuff, I suppose," she added playfully, then shrugged. "Long ago, when the disappearances were at their worst as the population grew, a Doorkeeper had the right ear to whisper into."
"How do you convince a country to abandon doors?" Serizawa breathed.
"We've all lived fine lives without them, haven't we? It's a simple, solid barrier meant to ensure privacy and security. Human decency and other forms of security have taken their place in Japan. All there was to prove to the people making the decision was that doors were the issue."
"But they weren't."
Kumagai shook her head. "No, they were not. Not really. It was the most damaging blow to our reputation. It sullied our name irreparably with the governing bodies of Japan. Still, the removal of doors went well. Now, when a door appears, it is unnatural and easily reportable."
"It's easier to tell people to fear and report doors than to teach them how to clear a door," Serizawa mused.
"It works, most of the time," Kumagai said. "In Chubu, we can boast a high rate of success in recovering civilians from doors. We're second-highest in rescue and third-highest in recruitment."
"What causes doors to appear?" Hisako asked.
"We're not entirely sure. We know it's an externalization of a person's heart, soul, whatever you want to call it. Something inside–something intangibly you–is the source of an Awakened's abilities and door. As for why they appear at certain times, we don't know. There seems to be no pattern to it."
"How long have the Doorkeepers been around? It sounds like a long time, how do we not know by now?" Serizawa asked.
Kumagai's expression darkened. "While the Doorkeepers have only been around since the early 1900s, organizations of Awakened have existed before that. We have compiled the research of all known organizations, and we collaborate with foreign organizations as well.
"On the matter of what causes the manifestation of doors, hopefully, we will never know. The Intelligence Division believes that further understanding requires human experimentation. The highly… unethical kind."
An unnerved silence settled between them.
"If any of our counterpart organizations overseas know more than we do, they are smart not to share so. There are written and unspoken agreements to essentially go to war for the sake of stopping human experimentation."
"Have Doorkeepers tried?" Serizawa whispered.
"There was a man, only twenty or so years ago. The former captain of the Intelligence Division secretly conducted experiments on captured rogue Awakened. When he was discovered, his head was publicly removed." She smiled eerily. "Captain Akabane was barely a D-Rank Doorkeeper, but the duty was placed on her blade. The fame would've put her on the fast track to captaincy if she hadn't already been on it."
"Captain Akabane?" Hisako echoed.
She remembered the imposing woman from their brief meeting in Doctor Moon's office. The woman couldn't have been older than forty-something.
"Twenty years ago? How old was she?"
"Old enough. Perhaps she is the reason for such unrest in the traditional families," Kumagai chuckled. "She has no regard for anything but justice. Politics is an annoyance to her, I hear."
"You speak highly of her," Serizawa noted. "And of Lady Seki."
"I appreciate disruptors," Kumagai replied. "As I said, I also do not care for political games. I have a duty. Lady Seki, Captain Akabane, and many others I respect play these games in the name of duty, but I don't have to question their motives."
Hisako nodded. She also found politics annoying; it was a complex game to win, and she didn't know the rules or the strategies, but she knew it was naive to dismiss it entirely. She also found that some of the individuals who claimed to speak their mind–to say as they did and do as they say–were not as they seemed.
She'd always avoided video games with complex social systems for the very reason of the "political game," but she'd found herself in one in real life. She felt the selfish, lazy desire to tune out the explanation, but Kumagai was giving her valuable information, and she felt like a reliable judge of character.
"Ah," Kumagai perked up. "He's arrived."
A figure entered the little community garden. He was wearing a Doorkeeper uniform, carefully tailored and fit to his lithe form.
As he neared, Hisako saw him more clearly. Based on what Kumagai had said, he was a higher-ranking keeper than her, so Hisako put extra effort into memorizing his appearance.
He was middle-aged, maybe his early forties, with a short beard peppered with gray, and short, red-dyed hair. His eyes glittered darkly in the night, but they had a playful mischief to them rather than the serious cut to Kumagai's eyes. Curling around his neck, rising from a primly pressed collar, was a snake tattoo that ended at his right jaw with an open mouth of venomous fangs. When he smiled at Kumagai, the snake's mouth twisted menacingly.
"Lucky door!" he giggled, reaching out to run rough fingers over the lacquered wood. "You always find the luckiest doors, Akiko-chan."
Kumagai ignored his chirping. "Mentees, meet Kamui Taniguchi. The Snake of Chubu," she said dryly. "The most relentless hunter in central Honshuu."
"I'm already on door number eleven this shift," Taniguchi cheered. He slid a sleek silver stopwatch out from his sleeve and started it. "Wish me luck!"
Before they could even debate doing so, he threw open the door and disappeared into it. Hisako caught a brief glimpse of a burning stairway ascending out of sight, then the door slammed shut and disappeared in a burst of embers and smoke.
"He's one of the weirder ones," Kumagai said, breaking the growing silence. "His ability makes him one of the fastest Doorkeepers alive, which allows him to hop across Chubu hunting down doors."
"What rank is he?" Hisako asked.
"A."
"May I ask what rank you are?" Serizawa asked.
"C, bordering on B," she hummed and began to move again.
"So you're only about one rank away?" Serizawa asked. "Is that a big gap?"
"A-Grades are in a different league. It's not a simple 'graduation' to the next grade once you hit B, but our responsibilities are similar," Kumagai explained. "Grades are more about what Rank doors you can take on safely."
Hisako nodded. She didn't yet have a grasp of the power levels of the different grades, but she was determined to figure it out as quickly as she could.
"Rank?" she echoed. "I haven't heard of Ranks before."
They exited the garden and hit the streets again. The neighborhood wound and wove its way along the roads, lit by regular streetlights. As they walked through them, lights shuttered off for the night in the houses around them.
"Ranks are only given to doors. It's the door version of the Grade system, basically."
"Does that get confusing?" Serizawa asked.
Kumagai shrugged and led them onto a wider street where the quiet neighborhood became a city again.
"Only known doors can get Ranks. Sometimes a Doorkeeper has a door at a higher Rank than their Grade, so it's useful. It's most often used to inform keepers on rogue Awakeneds' doors."
Hisako nodded. She wondered if her door's Rank was high, and that's why Amajiki and Nanae had thought it to be so tricky.
"I have a question about the big clans, if you don't mind," Hisako asked.
"Mm." Kumagai was looking down at her phone again. "It will have to wait. A door has been detected across the city." She shoved her phone into her pocket and began to run. "I know a shortcut."
Hisako and Serizawa broke into a sprint to catch up and then keep up with her.
Her idea of a shortcut had them leaving the little residential area and heading right through a strictly commercial area. They sprinted through a department store, entering at a subterranean hillside entrance, and exited from the second floor onto an elevated walkway.
From the walkway, Hisako could see a good chunk of the city. The trains were still running, creating illuminated lines that flowed through the city like veins, and she could practically count every office still occupied and every apartment and home still awake. She almost lost sight of Kumagai and even Serizawa, taking it in, but the loud clack of Serizawa's boots on the ground kept her in the moment.
They burst from the walkway onto a sidewalk, then hurried down block after block until they reached the other side of town, a similarly quiet area of smaller commercial buildings, private offices, small businesses, and mom-and-pop restaurants.
Shoes slid on neglected concrete as they rounded a corner, then stopped. Hisako almost bowled Serizawa over, nearly knocking them both into a wired, ready to pounce Kumagai.
Hisako was almost so caught up in Kumagai not moving that she didn't notice why she wasn't moving.
Four people were crowding a fifth person against a door. The fifth person was being shoved back by hands and barred by arms, and one of their assailants was already twisting the handle of an elegant red door laced with metal framework and crowned with a half-circle window.
Kumagai was gripping her phone with whitened knuckles. Hisako could see the intensity in her eyes and the clench of her jaw, but Kumagai did not move.
On her phone screen, Hisako could see she'd already reported a Trapdooring. An ETA blinked next to a red pin on their location.
The door opened, washing the quiet street in a baleful yellow glow.
"Hey!" Kumagai shouted sharply. "Stop!"
The fifth person turned to face them for the first time, and Hisako saw the fear on their face turn to relief. The four assailants turned too, but their hands went through with their actions, shoving their victim into the door.
For a moment, the poor man walking home from a day at the office became Kohaku in the work uniform Hisako remembered wearing alongside them for years.
For a moment, Hisako didn't see hope turn to despair on the stranger's face, but on Kohaku's.