Promptober 2026 Day 27: City
(This is part 2. Part 1 is here.)
For ten minutes, we walked hand-in-hand.
We opted to follow the railroad tracks. It would be too easy to get lost otherwise. With no cars coming from either direction, we reasoned that we’d hear anything before we saw it, and could get to the sidewalk. We needn’t have worried - there were no cars, no people, no animals.
The only light at all came from the stars that shone down from the moonless sky. The wide, unfocused beams of light from our phones only allowed us about ten meters of visibility in any direction, and turned the pitch darkness into more of a hazy gloom. Still, it was enough to ensure that we wouldn’t walk into any poles.
The worst part was the silence.
I’ve always lived in Tokyo. The noise of the city is so much a part of the background of my life that I don’t even notice it anymore. The sound of distant cars, of train crossings, of people walking, the low hum of air conditioners or heaters or machinery, a thousand different chimes and beeps, a thousand thousand footsteps - that’s what silence is.
This was something else entirely. This was the sound of memories.
Of two or three dozen skeptical pairs of eyes staring up at me on the stage.
The moment after Sakiko slammed the studio door on the last day that CRYCHIC ever met.
The tomb-quiet of my house when I come home and close the door behind me and all of the lights in the living room are out.
It was a silence of absence. Of lack. Of hunger and thirst.
Right after hopping off the tram, both of us had tried shouting - less because we needed help so much as we just wanted to make sure that we weren’t alone. The tram had stopped in the middle of a residential area, too, so we even tried knocking on a few doors.
“We should be coming up on your stop soon,” I said.
Tomori nodded.
Without exception, nobody was home. Not a single person came to the door. But we did make an important discovery: Doorbells were still ringing. That meant that electricity was still flowing to the houses. The knowledge that we weren’t experiencing an ostensibly city-wide blackout brought me only a fleeting instant of relief, because the alternative was so much stranger:
Everyone had left, and had turned off the lights on the way out.
So instead, we had set out on the road, thinking that at the very least, we could stop by Tomori’s apartment and find her parents. According to her, her mother was working at the hospital until ‘very early in the morning,’ but her father would be home.
“Tomori.”
“Mmm?” She looked over at me.
“...what do you think happened?”
“I… don’t know,” she said. She sounded thoughtful. She also didn’t sound even a little scared, which was good, because I was about to tear my hair out and start screaming. “I’ve… been running through the possibilities in my head.”
“Yeah?”
“I think there are… two categories,” she said. “‘Possible, but unlikely,’ and ‘definitely impossible.’”
“That sounds about right to me.”
“I-in the first category… ‘Civil defense drill that neither of us knew about.’”
“...at night?”
She shrugged.
“‘City-wide blackout.’”
I frowned. “But, the doorbells…?”
“S…some doorbells have battery backups,” she said matter-of-factly. “Because they’re hooked to intercoms and door locks. And… you need to be able to open a door.”
“...guess I can buy that– hang on.” I held up my arm and frowned. My flashlight had fallen on a sign that I actually knew - an overhanging awning for a ramen place not far from my house. Like everywhere else, the door was shut.
“We went too far,” I said. “This is near Waseda station.”
“O-oh…” Tomori bit her lip. “I’m… sorry, I wasn’t… really paying attention.”
“No, no! No, it’s okay, I wasn’t either. I lost track of the time, we must have walked a lot farther…” I trailed off as I turned around. It felt like we had only been walking along the rail for a few minutes, but when I checked my phone, it confirmed that we had been going for almost half an hour. It was 8:30. “Let’s turn around.”
For about thirty seconds, we walked back the way we came in silence. The familiar scenery of Waseda peered out at us from the darkness. Then, Tomori started talking again. Suddenly, her voice was tentative, unsure. She sounded more nervous in that moment than she had all evening. “Um… d… don’t laugh at this one. Okay?”
“Of course.”
“...plague.”
My eyebrows shot up, but I didn’t laugh.
“S…something that made everyone outside get sick and die immediately, but for some reason didn’t affect us.”
“But… you know, no bodies,” I pointed out.
She gave me an impatient look that, even in the gloom, I could interpret perfectly.
“Right. ‘Unlikely’.”
“None of these… explain everything.” She sighed. “None of them really… explain anything. But…”
“Okay. So that’s the first category. What’s the second?”
“Th…things that are impossible,” she said. “UFO abduction.”
“They abducted everyone in the city?”
“Or… they abducted us. And the city we’re in now is… it’s like a giant ant farm. It’s just so we can– can walk around. UFO sightings mostly happen overseas, but… it’s not like they never happen here.”
I made a skeptical noise.
“Or,” she continued. “Maybe we died.”
“Oh,” I said. “And this is hell?”
She shook her head. “Purgatory.” She corrected me with surprising earnestness. “If it were hell… they– they wouldn’t have let us come together.”
For a long time, I didn’t know what to say. I was lucky it was dark, and that the autumn chill was already making my cheeks pink. We came to a tram station, and I mumbled something incoherent as we climbed the steps up to the platform.
“...wait,” Tomori said. Suddenly, she stopped walking.
“What is it?”
“Look around.”
I raised my phone above my head to spread the light out a little, and immediately saw what she meant.
“...this is Higashi-Ikebukuro. This is where we got on the tram tonight,” I said.
She nodded.
“But… we walked on the tracks the entire time,” I continued. “And we didn’t come across the tram, even though it was stopped.”
She nodded again.
“So… so, what…” I started, but my voice faltered. All of a sudden, my hands were shaking, and panic was rising in my chest, and I felt faint. I put my back against one of the support pillars and slid downward. “What…” I tried again, but it came out closer to something between a sob and a squeak.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it*.*
“Taki-chan…”
I tried again, but nothing came out at all. I reached up and grabbed a handful of my own hair, pulling enough to hurt a little. Just a little. Just to bring me back down to earth.
“It’s… it’s going to be okay,” she said. “Okay? Just take– take a deep breath.”
I did as she instructed. She squeezed my hand again, really hard. Harder than I thought she might be capable of doing, under normal circumstances.
“It’s going to be okay,” she repeated. “We’re going… to get home. I promise.”
I wanted very badly to believe her.