It wasn't just the body.
The red blood that had been covering the ground as well as both walls was as cleanly gone as a stain that had been wiped off of some glass. None of the flesh or hair that had been scattered about remained. The area did not even smell like blood. The stink of flesh was gone as well. It was as if there had never been a body there and thus nothing had occurred there at all.
"Eh?"
At first, Kamijou only let out that surprised voice.
He stood in place and the Anti-Skill group ahead of him turned around.
"What is it? Did you notice something?"
"No, it's not that." Kamijou pointed toward the ground. "It was here. This is where the body was. And where it should still be."
"What?"
The Anti-Skill members looked at the ground, but there was not a single drop of blood much less a body there. There weren't even any damp traces of something having been wiped away.
The Anti-Skill members exchanged glances. An unpleasant atmosphere hung in the air. Some of their shoulders relaxed and some were clearly staring at Kamijou.
"Wait a second! There really was a dead body here!"
"Okay," one of them said while looking at Kamijou. "Even if you really did see what you think you did, are you sure it was here? Your memories could be a bit confused and you mistook this for the actual place."
His words were kind, but they had no seriousness to them like a soda that had lost its carbonation. Kamijou heard the words as those used to pacify an unmanageable drunk.
He was at a loss for words because he couldn't figure out what had happened.
Had it really all been an illusion? If it had been an illusion, then why had Misaka Imouto disappeared from in front of the used bookstore? Kamijou pulled out his cell phone. The quickest way to figure out if it had been an illusion or reality would be to contact Misaka Imouto. If the phone connected, he would know she was alive.
However, Kamijou did not know Misaka Imouto's cell phone number.
As he could not even make a simple phone call, the only thing left was to try to figure it out on his own.
"…"
Kamijou was frozen in that spot.
The scene before his eyes seemed so ordinary that he started to doubt his own memories. And Kamijou was actually glad to doubt his memories. If he had been seeing some sort of illusion, then his report to the police would have been nothing but nonsense. Misaka Imouto would be walking around in some completely different place and would appear before him after remembering about the cat. That future was clearly the more desirable one.
(…Dammit. What is going on?)
He would prefer it if Misaka Imouto was not dead, but he hesitated to just write off the reality he had seen as an illusion. That odd contradiction ate into his heart.
"What the hell is going on!?"
Kamijou could not stand it any longer, so he pushed past the Anti-Skill group and ran further into the alley. He heard a voice calling out telling him to stop, but he doubted they would come after him. Those Anti-Skill members were probably thinking he had called in that report as a prank.
The black cat in his arms mewed.
Kamijou ran along the narrow alleyway, but he had no idea what he was searching for. He knew he was searching for something, but he had no idea what that something was. It may have looked like he was just running to get rid of the strange gloom that had come over him.
As he continued to run down the dark and rotten back alley, he approached a T-intersection. The path split off to the right and left. The right path was a narrow path continuing into the darkness, but he could see the glow of streetlights coming from the left path. Most likely, it connected to a main street. It looked a bit like the exit of a tunnel.
Emotionally, Kamijou wanted to head for the exit to the left.
However, leaving that back alley felt like giving up, so Kamijou headed for the darkness to the right.
That part of the alley was a little wider than before so the word "path" fit it better than "gap". Because of the extra space, polyethylene buckets, unused bicycles, and other items were scattered about. A tipped over case of beer bottles, a cardboard box that seemed to have soaked up water, and other sources of liquid led to all sorts of liquids flowing across the ground, mixing together, and forming a sticky liquid.
Footprints could be seen in that sticky liquid leading further down the path.
Kamijou followed the footprints with his eyes and stared into the darkness. He heard something moving in that darkness.
Someone was there.
He thought his heart would be crushed by the shock.
The cat struggled in pain. He may nervously have started squeezing it in his hands again.
"Who's there!?" Kamijou yelled.
The person in the darkness turned around in response to his voice.
Surprisingly, the person was shorter than Kamijou and appeared to be a girl. However, the body bag-like object she was carrying over her shoulder was quite ominous indeed. Yes, it was a body bag, a bag used to contain a human who was at least unconscious. The body bag was bent into an upside down V-shape over the person's shoulder and Kamijou felt like he could see a limp girl's silhouette in it.
(What is that…?)
That silhouette left Kamijou speechless. It looked less like a living human was stuffed inside and more like the parts of a dismantled mannequin had been thrown inside. While the overall silhouette was collapsed, what were clearly wrists, ankles, and other body parts could be seen pressing against the fabric from the inside.
And then Kamijou saw.
He saw the person who he had not been able to see properly due to the darkness. He saw the person holding the body bag that clearly had a person stuffed inside.
Kamijou saw her.
With the darkness cleared away, he saw the person standing there.
It was Misaka Imouto.
"Wha-…?"
Kamijou froze up in front of that ridiculous sight. The friendly mew the black cat in his arms gave seemed strange.
That was clearly Misaka Imouto.
She had the shoulder-length brown hair and the military goggles on her forehead. She wore the short-sleeved white blouse, summer sweater, and pleated skirt. She stood there as if she had been remade in a mold.
Kamijou did not understand. He simply did not understand, but…
"Misaka apologizes. She intended to return there after she was finished working, says Misaka as she starts with an apology."
That gaze, that behavior, that atmosphere, that manner of speaking…It was clearly her.
"Hey, wait a second. You're Misaka Imouto, right?"
So was what he had seen a very real-seeming illusion after all? Kamijou felt dissatisfied in some way, but Misaka Imouto was standing before him the same as she had always been.
He lost strength in his legs and collapsed to the ground.
"Dammit. What the hell is going on?" he spat out. "Oh, sorry. This may sound really weird to you, but I seriously thought something bad had happened to you. But it seems you're all right. I'm glad."
"There are some parts of what you said that Misaka is having trouble understanding…"
(Well, I'm not sure how she was supposed to understand that.)
Kamijou didn't know why he had seen that illusion, but he didn't particularly care as long as Misaka Imouto was fine.
"…but Misaka is indeed dead, reports Misaka."
Kamijou's breathing froze.
Misaka Imouto was right in front of him, but Kamijou belatedly started to wonder what the body bag she was carrying over her shoulder was. The silhouette within was like a broken mannequin. The construction seemed off and the joints were all pointing in odd directions.
He looked toward it wondering what was inside. As he did, something jumped into the center of his vision. It was an object sticking out from the zipper of the body bag. The brown object was sticking out from the gap next to the zipper like it was a weed.
It was hair.
Kamijou was utterly shocked. A strange chill ran across his entire body.
(Is she carrying around a realistic life-sized doll or something?)
But that brown hair was much too familiar. The color, the gloss, and everything else about it was exactly the same as the hair belonging to the girl holding the body bag.
"Wait, wait. What are you carrying? What's inside that body bag?"
"…? You do not know? asks Misaka in return. As you entered the testing site, Misaka assumed you were related to the experiment, but…yes, it is true that you do not look like someone related to the experiment, responds Misaka based on her intuition."
(Experiment…?)
Kamijou fell silent as he had no clue what Misaka Imouto was talking about.
"Just to make sure, Misaka will check using the passcode, says Misaka as she does as she says. ZXC741ASD852QWE963, says Misaka testing you."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"As you were unable to decode that passcode, you do not seem to be related to the experiment, says Misaka having received logical proof backing up her intuitive assumption."
Misaka Imouto's words sounded like some kind of alien language to Kamijou.
He looked at her doubtfully.
"This body bag contains a Sister, responds Misaka."
The voice that had answered Kamijou's question had clearly been Misaka Imouto's.
However, the voice as well as a footstep had come from behind Misaka Imouto.
The voice had sounded like it was coming from a ways down the alleyway.
This was not mistake in Kamijou's senses. With the sound of more footsteps, someone approached from behind Misaka Imouto.
"Misaka apologizes for leaving the black cat behind, states Misaka."
The person who had appeared from the darkness was a girl who looked exactly like Misaka Imouto.
(What? She looks just like Misaka Imouto…so is that Mikoto?)
"However, she did not want to get an animal involved in unnecessary conflict, says Misaka explaining her actions."
However, that other girl's footsteps were not the only ones.
"Misaka wishes to apologize to you for the same reason, says Misaka as she lowers her head."
There were two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…a seemingly endless number of footsteps.
"It seems the experiment caused you unnecessary worry, says Misaka as-…"
"But you do not need to worry…"
"So you were the one who called the police…"
"That was the appropriate decision…"
"Is the cat okay, asks Misa-…"
"Every Misaka here is Misaka, says…"
"But what would you have done if Misaka had been the murderer?"
"The details are classified, so Misaka cannot explain, but there was no trouble here, responds Misaka."
"…Ah?"
Kamijou naturally stepped back as Misaka after Misaka appeared from behind the first. His back ran into something. He turned around and found more Misakas with identical expressionless faces.
"What…?"
Kamijou was left speechless at the sight and he tried to sort through everything that had happened.
Had what he had seen not been an illusion but actually the corpse of one of those identical Misakas? From the fact that Misaka Imouto was carrying the body, they seemed to be concealing it.
It was true that the blood could have been dried up in about a minute with a coagulant and heat from a dryer. Then they could clean it up as easily as tempura oil that had been hardened with a chemical. And the fingerprints and luminol reaction could be easily erased with chemicals.
But Kamijou found something to be odd.
From the very start, it was odd that there were so many people who looked exactly the same.
Monozygotic twins, often known as identical twins, were siblings with the same structure at a genetic level, but they were not actually as identical as they were often represented as being in dramas and novels.
Let's take a hypothetical man named Tanaka-san. Tanaka-san would clearly have very different ratios of muscle and fat depending on if he trained every day in order to become a baseball player or if he just ate sweets all day long doing nothing in particular.
With differences in sleep, exercise, eating habits, and stress, people's living patterns would change their physique even if they were the same at birth. And it was not normal for two people to maintain the exact same sleep, exercise, and eating patterns after living for 10 or 15 years.
The girls before his eyes were too identical.
They looked exactly like the girl named Misaka Mikoto.
It was like their sleep times had been measured with clocks, their exercise amounts had been measured with measuring devices, and their food portions had been measured with scales.
Yes, it was as if everything had been precisely measured in order to match Misaka Mikoto.
It was as if they had been created by someone.
".............."
Kamijou spun around looking at the area and then looked back at the body bag.
It seemed they knew him. It seemed they knew of the black cat. But then Kamijou had to wonder who the girl he had thought was Misaka Imouto had been. Was she with them or were there still more Misakas? Or was the Misaka Imouto he had been in contact the one inside the body bag?
"Do not worry, responds Misaka."
The Misaka holding the body bag spoke to Kamijou who was frozen in shock.
"The Misaka you were in contact with previously today was Serial Number 10032. In other words, this Misaka, responds Misaka." She pointed toward herself with her free hand. "The Misakas use their power to manipulate electricity to link their brain waves. The other Misakas merely share #10032's memories, explains Misaka."
Linking brain waves sounded unbelievable at first, but it was possible if they were twins. Brain waves differed from person to person like fingerprints and voice prints. Having someone else's brain waves flow into your brain would just destroy your brain cells, but if two people who were identical on the genetic level did it…
But Kamijou didn't particularly care about that.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"The Misakas are the Sisters, cellular clones created as mass-produced military models of the Original, one of the seven Level 5s of Academy City, answers Misaka."
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Merely an experiment, answers Misaka. Misaka apologizes again for getting you involved in this particular experiment, says Misaka as she lowers her head."
"What-…?" he started to ask, but then he closed his mouth.
The girls standing before him were simply too different and too remote.
Kamijou was all alone as he leaned against the alley wall while holding the black cat.
The group of Misakas had disappeared as if they were melting into the darkness. They were likely taking the corpse to eliminate every bit of evidence. And the experiments would continue. He didn't know what they were, but those Misakas were being killed and then taken off somewhere without him knowing.
The term "cellular clone" brought the urge to vomit back to him. The spine of the book he had spotted in the used bookstore floated up in the back of his mind. "New! The Scientific Cows of the Farm Buildings". He was reminded of those beings that lived within the windowless buildings, breathed air-conditioned air, drank nutrients, and were raised solely to be eaten. He envisioned them having their guts cut open, their innards dragged out, their flesh sliced up, and then being packed up and distributed to supermarkets and butcher shops throughout the city. He tasted sour stomach acid coming from deep in his throat. He doubted he would be able to eat meat for a while.
However, there were pragmatists who did not care about things like that. The people behind the experiment were killing people in the same way that cows were killed, gutted, chopped up, and packed up, so they would likely continue the experiments without caring. Kamijou did not know what exactly the experiments entailed and he doubted he would understand something that repulsive even if it were explained to him. However, he could say one thing for sure. Allowing that experiment to continue would lead to more people being killed.
(…An experiment?)
That term caught in Kamijou's mind.
Misaka Imouto had called it an experiment, so was there a research facility behind it? If that were so, the use of the technical term "cellular clone" made sense. A cellular clone was not made like a normal baby. They were created from DNA extracted from a hair or a drop of blood.
Suddenly, Kamijou froze.
A hair.
To create a cellular clone, DNA was needed. It could be a single hair or a single drop of blood, but raw material like that was needed.
Misaka Imouto had said that they were mass-produced military models of Misaka Mikoto.
(It couldn't be…)
Kamijou stopped breathing. He looked up at the rectangle of sky he could see as a thought of despair entered his mind.
(Does Misaka Mikoto know about this?)