Marionette

Skies, Chapter Forty Two - Iro o Shukketsu [色を出血]

Through all that searching she had done that afternoon, Amaya had found nothing in any of the books she'd pulled off of the shelves.

None of the time spent painstakingly using the computers had done her any good either, though that might be attributed to the fact that she had no real experience with using the damn things.

Through the almost hundred odd books she'd found, scanned and put back on the shelves, there was not a single mention on anything related to that image in the book.

Sure, she'd found plenty on the controversies of cloning, patents on certain human genetic codes, and even the problems of discovering what illnesses and diseases were deemed heredity within a persons bloodline.

But that wasn't what she was looking for.

A mildly confused Reiko had been waiting at home when Amaya had arrived back around 7pm, though the moment Amaya revealed a take-out bag of all of the girls favorite foods, her concern was immediately put on the back-burner in preference for gorging to her hearts content.

Amaya went with a white-lie about her actions for the forseeable future – She claimed that she was busy studying for the End of Term exams, and she implied that she'd gotten involved in a bit of a contest over it.

At the mention that she was going to be studying with Isogai and Maehara tomorrow after school before going to Shigure's for her usual Tuesday training, Reiko had suddenly piped up with great enthusiasm.

'Ooh! Can I come to the library too?!' Reiko had piped up, with vibrant energy in her eyes. 'We have tests next week, and I want to score better than Yuta at English for once!'

Amaya had thought about it for a few minutes, deliberating the pros and cons of such an arrangement.

It was just a library visit.

She honestly doubted anything unusual would come of it.

She could play the older-sister card if push came to shove. After all discrimination was promoted at that school when it came to Class E, but Reiko was still in elementary school. It wouldn't be in their best interests to be so cruel to an outsider who could be a very promising student in two years time.

And so, after contacting Isogai to ask if this was okay with him, Reiko was included in the head-count. Amaya would be waiting at the station to walk Reiko to the library – They'd be meeting everyone else there. And she guessed Reiko could come along with her to the training afternoon, as well.

Yuta wouldn't complain about getting to see Reiko a little more that evening, and Shigure had given his consent for that, as well.

Things had been set in motion, leaving Amaya to wait for the morning.

The return of the dreaded Mach-Speed clones of doom stretched out for far longer than they had during mid-terms.

The clones multiplied, and their stability was even greater.

The frustration of all this for Amaya was the fact that the number of clones allocated to every desk was still more than one.

For most of the morning, Amaya had three Koro-sensei clones fussing over her, trying to force science into her skull – He had tried to force Maths into her, but after Karma's blunt remark of 'Don't even bother - You actually made her stupid, last time', he decided to leave her well alone for that subject.

Of course the bluntness of his remark had hurt, but it was a hard truth.

She had forgotten how to math when Koro-sensei had tried to teach it to her at mach-speed.