The City Where Gray Rain Falls Chapter 27

“I-I’m really not.”

Taking the silence as an opportunity to plead his case, Isaac began to recite his circumstances, though no one had asked. What he wanted to say was clear. I am not a rebel. Vincent is just a partner I met for the first time in the Vigilance Corps, and he has nothing to do with my sneaking into the archive room.

“Then what were you looking for in there?”

A flat, emotionless voice rang out from across the room. Thinking that the other man was showing some interest in his explanation, Isaac’s voice, though stammering, grew urgent.

“A person, I was looking for a person. There’s… there’s someone I want to find.”

“…”

“I wanted to know if he was dead or alive. I had to know.”

He couldn’t say who it was he was looking for, or that the person was ‘Asel.’ If even that boy got tangled up with the rebels and was dragged here, it would be a disaster.

“Vincent doesn’t know anything. I… I was acting alone…”

The man, who had been watching with indifference until now, seemed to take interest the moment the name ‘Vincent’ left Isaac’s mouth. He pushed off the wall and walked right up to his face. Then he seized the chin of the prisoner, whose strength was gone and whose head was slowly drooping, and forced him to look up. The man’s lips were drawn in a grim, curving line.

“…Go on. What was that?”

“That I’m n-not a rebel…”

“Not that.”

“Vincent.”

“Yes. This Vincent.”

“He doesn’t… doesn’t know anything. That man is…”

“Ha.”

He had only told the truth. As if it wasn’t the answer he had expected, an irritated sigh escaped the Chief of Security’s lips. He let go of the chin he had been holding carelessly, and Isaac’s limp head dropped straight down.

Thud, thud. The sharp edge of irritation was plain in the footsteps of the man who turned his back to put distance between them. Had something gone wrong while he’d been locked in here? Had Vincent been captured like him, made to suffer unjustly, and been forced to say something?

Isaac’s mind, full of scattered questions, went completely blank at the Chief of Security’s next words.

“…Did you really not know that your partner was the ‘Head’ of the rebels?”

∞ ∞ ∞

The operation Samuel had devised was, as always, perfect.

A plan that could, with minimal movement, unveil the full scope of the rebels who had long been rooted within the city.

From his perspective, it was the ‘Head’ inside the city—not the commander on the outside—who formed the core of the rebels.

It was a simple enough principle. The one crouching beneath your feet was harder to see than the one drawing your attention from far away. If there was something you wanted to hide, you would hide it there—in that place where the pitch-black shadow pooled.

Among the Vigilance Corps, the number of rebels Samuel had estimated was around five, including the two who had died earlier and ‘Joshua.’ He had only been certain that among them there would be someone who would lead him to the ‘Head.’ A person named ‘Vincent’ had not even been on his radar.

Vincent was simply one of the genuine citizens he had selected to provide a natural cover that secretly planted officers alone could not sufficiently supply.

A man desperately seeking a new job because he needed money to take his wife to see a doctor. Testimony from his neighbors, the officer in charge of his sector, and the distribution clerk, along with records spanning decades since his birth—nothing about him was the slightest bit suspicious. A perfect citizen. A desperately poor breadwinner who, even if swayed by the rebels, would have no choice but to choose his family and the city.

He had been uneasy about his partner’s suspicious behavior. So much so that he had repeatedly avoided the eyes of other Corps members and come to Sera to report that “he seemed to have a lot of questions about the archive room”—a man with a thorough sense of civic duty to report, and a “model citizen” who distrusted even the partner he spent most of his days with.

Perhaps that was why. While Samuel had been watching the young man called ‘Joshua’ with interest, Vincent had gradually, and with great ease, slipped out of the Security Department’s sight.

Who could have predicted that an aging man with a limp, who struggled even to climb the stairs, a loyal citizen of the city, would dare sacrifice multiple lives just to steal a single “blueprint” and flee?

“You moved together with him to divert my attention, and yet you claim you didn’t know?”

“No, no. I…”

The man had shown no interest whatsoever in the comrades trapped in the basement, the gate intel, the fate of the spy he himself had sent, or the high-grade intelligence they had amassed over decades of infiltrating the Security Department.

In truth, the comrades and the spy were already cold corpses—there was no need to save or kill them. He may have judged that the city’s top-secret information they had collected was useless the moment it was discovered, or perhaps he had never even entertained the notion that he could accomplish anything in the Security Department by his own power alone.

‘…But then, why.’

What he had stolen was a relic of the city, over a century old. Even Samuel, the Chief of Security, had not known that such a thing had survived and was being kept in the Security Department.

The original blueprints of the city’s earliest days, of no particular use now. A useless legacy that only a very few knew about, and that most had forgotten entirely—so there was no need even to seek it out.

This Vincent had even known exactly that the relic was stowed away in a storage room at the far western end of the Security Department’s 3rd floor, and he had pinned Samuel’s attention on the eastern archive room—the storage room’s exact opposite. Everything had seemed to lie in the palm of his hand.

He had walked leisurely out of the building with the dust-covered blueprints. Not the guard posts boasting impenetrable security, nor the machine guns, nor the countless eyes, nor the high walls and iron fences had been able to stop him.

No, it was more accurate to say he hadn’t even needed to reach those places. Because he had opened the small manhole cover on the ground—something no one ever paid any mind to—and escaped through it.

And what had the Security Department’s personnel been doing all that time?

Several of the Vigilance Corps members who had volunteered for cleaning had caused a disturbance and were being subdued. They had stalled for just enough time, then taken the pills they had prepared, just like the rebels before them, and died by their own hand.

If Sera, finding the whole sequence of events suspicious, had not ordered a full search of the Security Department, the fact that someone had broken into the storage room and the traces of the opened manhole cover in that secluded corner might never have been discovered.

But with the Chief of Security absent, a mere adjutant could not arbitrarily order a search extending even into the city’s sewers. Handled poorly, the internal commotion could easily blow up into a problem that threw the entire city into an uproar.

“Haha, and all that time, I was down in the basement, knowing nothing…”

After finally receiving a report from his adjutant—who had gone through tedious and complicated procedures before rushing down to the basement—and grasping the full story, Samuel found it hard to hide his simmering rage. Complete defeat—no, to say he had been thoroughly played for a fool was closer to the truth.

The only person who could pull off such a scheme was the ‘Head’ of the rebels. He had made a move himself.

The opponent had disguised himself thoroughly, waiting while dangling fresh bait, and the new Chief of Security, overconfident in his victory, had bitten down without hesitation. The skilled fisherman was on the other side; he himself had been the stupid fish. The thought that he had handed over the initiative wholesale drew a hollow laugh from him.

“I really… don’t know what Vincent did…!”

Smack. Samuel’s hand lashed fiercely across the cheek of the prisoner, who had done nothing but spout excuses. His head whipped to the side, and his parched, brittle lips split in several places, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

The beating did not end with one blow. Smack—and then crack. A uniform measure of pain was delivered to the opposite side as well. Soon, accompanied by sniffling sobs, his shoulders began to tremble finely.

“…There’s nothing of any use inside that archive room.”

“…”

“Nothing but garbage that’s been waiting to be disposed of for a good twenty years or more.”

Samuel paid no mind whatsoever to the young man’s complexion. Even as he stated the facts in a composed tone, he merely tilted his head and placed a cigarette between his lips.

“There’s no way a man who’s supposed to be the ‘Head’ of the rebels—no, a man who’s been passing himself off as a citizen in this city for decades—wouldn’t know that.”

“…!”

“Even you must think it’s strange. Don’t you? Haha.”