The bus smelled like sunscreen and Monoma's energy drink breath.
Kendo had her forehead pressed against the window before they'd even cleared the city limits.
Somewhere below her feet, in the outer pocket of her bag jammed between two rolled up shirts, the tracker sat neatly. She'd checked it was there twice already this morning. So… she didn't think she needed to check again. But she checked again anyway.
"You've been weird all week," Kodai said from the seat beside her, not looking up from her phone.
"I'm not weird."
"You keep fiddling with your bag, sneaking something in?"
Kendo didn't answer that. Outside the window, the city thinned into suburbs, then hills, the bus climbing steadily as the road narrowed and curved. Somewhere behind her, Monoma was already loudly explaining to anyone who'd listen why Class 1-B was clearly the superior class for this kind of training, and somewhere further back, Tetsutetsu was just as loudly agreeing on principle.
Normal noise. Normal trip. She wanted to feel normal about it.
She didn't.
It had been two weeks since the rooftop. Since a sludge-dark hand had reached through her window in the middle of the night and pressed something small and cold into her palm without a single word of explanation.
She'd asked why didn't you let me see you into empty air, and the air hadn't answered, and she'd gone to school the next day and pretended her hands weren't shaking slightly all through homeroom.
She hadn't told anyone. Not even Setsuna, who could keep a secret if her life depended on it. Some part of her… probably the stubborn part, the part that had cut Dante's hair by hand and yelled at him on a beach at midnight, wanted to be the only one who knew.
Like if she kept it small enough, close enough, it couldn't slip away from her again.
You don't get to die stupidly, she'd told him, once. She still meant it. She just hadn't figured out yet what she was supposed to do if he ignored her.
The bus hit a pothole and jolted the whole cabin. Someone up front whooped. Kendo barely noticed.
"You're doing the thing again," Kodai said.
"What thing."
"The staring at nothing thing. You've had it since… a while now."
"I'm fine, trust me, Kodai."
Kodai finally looked up from her phone, studying her for a second too long. "Okay," she said, in the tone of someone who didn't believe it but wasn't going to push. She went back to her screen.
Kendo let her head fall back against the window and closed her eyes.
She thought about the last time she'd actually gotten to talk to him. really talk, not just yell and cut hair and cry into his ruined scarf. Sitting on her bedroom floor at one in the morning while that little boy showered down the hall. He'd looked so tired. Not sleepy tired. Bone tired, the kind that lived behind the eyes.
I've never been more serious in my life, he'd said, about hunting down the League. About finding them before they found anyone else he cared about.
She hadn't asked, at the time, whether she counted as one of those people. She'd been too scared of the answer either way.
The bus began to slow, gears grinding down as the road narrowed further into gravel, trees pressing close on either side, sunlight breaking through the canopy in long gold streaks. Someone near the front called out that they could see the cabins.
Kendo sat up.
The training camp came into view slowly… a scatter of wooden buildings tucked into a clearing, mountains rising steep and green all around, a river cutting somewhere off to the left loud enough to hear even through the bus windows. It looked, for exactly one second, like the kind of place nothing bad could happen.
She knew better than to trust that feeling. She'd learned that the hard way, months ago, watching a sludge villain crash through a wall on live television.
The bus hissed to a stop. Bags rustled, voices rose, Monoma was already halfway into a speech about "seizing the high ground, tactically speaking" before anyone had even stood up.
Kendo grabbed her duffel, felt the tracker's weight settle against her hip as she slung it over her shoulder, and stepped out into the mountain air.
It was cold up here. Cleaner than the city. She breathed it in once, deep, and told herself… for what felt like the hundredth time that week, that everything would be fine.