The Prison Of Whispers
Chapter 7: The Prison of Whispers
They found a narrow alley between two of the grey stone buildings, a gap barely wide enough for Doraemon to fit his round body through, and they stopped to breathe.
The shadow soldiers had lost them three turns ago.
This was also strange. If the soldiers didn't need to hurry, why had they stopped following?
"They didn't stop," Doraemon said, reading the scanner. "They're redirected. Darkseid doesn't want us to run. He wants us to look for a way out."
"Is there one?" Shizuka said.
"No."
"So he's letting us figure that out on our own."
"Yes."
Nobita sat down against the wall. "That's mean."
"That's efficient," Doraemon said. "He doesn't have to chase us. He just has to wait."
Giant stood at the alley entrance, looking out at the grey street. The citizens moved past in their columns. Nobody glanced toward the alley. Nobody reacted to anything.
"We need a plan," Shizuka said.
"I need to think," said Giant.
This was such an unusual thing for Giant to say that everyone looked at him.
He didn't notice. He was still watching the street.
Doraemon produced the Power Glove from his pocket.
It was a single glove — right hand only — made of something that looked like dark rubber but wasn't. The product label on the wrist read PSYCHIC INTERACTION GLOVE, ALLOWS USER TO INTERACT WITH NON-PHYSICAL ENERGY CONSTRUCTS, USE WITH CAUTION. There was a small dial on the back of the hand, currently set to NEUTRAL.
"This might help," Doraemon said. "The shadow soldiers and the crystal prisons Darkseid uses — they're psychic constructs. Physical objects can't affect them. But the glove acts as a bridge. It lets you interact with psychic energy like a physical thing."
"Give it to me," Giant said immediately.
Doraemon hesitated. "It requires some—"
"Give it to me."
Doraemon gave him the glove.
Giant turned it over in his hands. It was a strange feeling, fitting it onto his right hand. Like putting your hand into water that had decided to be solid.
He flexed his fingers. Something hummed in the material.
"Can I punch with it?" he asked.
"Yes, but—"
"Good." Giant tucked his gloved hand behind his back and turned to the group. "What's the plan?"
"We were hoping you'd have one," Nobita said.
Giant looked at him for a moment.
"I don't have one yet," he said.
The plan, such as it was, involved circling wider. Doraemon mapped the frequency patterns as they moved — lower here, higher there, one spot near the city's center where the reading went off the scale entirely. That was where Darkseid's tower was. That was where the frequency came from.
They made it four more blocks before Darkseid found them.
Not himself. He sent the crystals.
They came out of the ground. There was no warning — one moment the street was empty, and then four pillars of dark purple crystal rose up around Nobita, Shizuka, Suneo, and Doraemon in a single second, smooth and fast as glass growing in time-lapse. Each one sealed with a click that was felt in the teeth.
Giant was two steps away. He hadn't been inside the ring.
He grabbed the nearest crystal with both hands — left hand first, which did nothing, the crystal didn't flex or crack. Then he switched to the gloved right hand, and felt something different. A resistance. A response. The crystal hummed where he touched it, as though acknowledging that he existed.
He pulled.
The crystal didn't break, but it moved. A centimeter, maybe two. He could feel something on the other side — not the glass, but the energy in it.
"Giant," Doraemon said from inside his crystal. The walls were translucent. He could see the others — Nobita sitting down with his knees to his chest, Shizuka pressing her palm flat against the inside of her prison, Suneo looking like he was calculating something.
"I can feel you," Giant said to Doraemon. "With the glove."
"Good. The prisons are psychic constructs. You can interact with them, but breaking them from outside requires enormous psychic force. More than the glove provides."
"How do I get more?"
"You'd need to understand the frequency. Counter it somehow." Doraemon pressed his small hand against the crystal wall. "But Giant — there's something else."
Giant was still pulling on the crystal, the glove straining.
"The portal home," Doraemon said. "Darkseid is leaving it open."
Giant stopped pulling. "What?"
"It's open. On the edge of the city. I can track it." Doraemon's voice was calm. "He's leaving it open deliberately. It's the offer."
Giant understood immediately. He was not slow when it mattered.
Leave. Forget everything. Go home. Or stay and be absorbed.
He straightened up. He looked at his four friends inside their four crystals.
"I'm not leaving," he said.
"Giant." Doraemon's voice was careful. "If you can't free us, and you can't fight him, and the portal stays open — it might be the only—"
"I'm not leaving," Giant said again. He said it the way he said everything that he had decided: loudly, flatly, and with the quality of a wall that has made up its mind to be a wall.
Doraemon was quiet.
Then he said, "All right."
Darkseid's voice came from the tower. It didn't need to come from anywhere specific; it just was.
"Small thing," it said. "Your friends are comfortable. They feel nothing. In a few hours, they will want nothing. The frequency will do its work. You can leave, and they will not miss you. They will not know they ever knew you."
Giant stood in the empty street. The crystals hummed around his friends.
"Or you can stay," Darkseid continued. "And join them. You are strong. I have use for strong things that have no will. You would last a long time."
Giant said nothing. He was looking at his gloved right hand.
He flexed the fingers slowly.
The glove hummed.
He found a corner of an alley that the frequency seemed slightly thinner in — the scanner was inside Doraemon's crystal but the readings had been burned into his memory from the walk over. Lower here. Quieter.
He sat down. In the grey of this world, with the buzzing sky above him and his friends locked in crystals two blocks away, Giant sat down in an alley and tried to think.
He didn't sit still very often. Sitting still was for Nobita, who sat still in class and still managed to fail everything, which Giant had never understood. Giant moved. Movement was how he processed things.
But he sat now, and he thought.
He thought about the choice: leave or stay.
He thought about the crystals.
He thought about the way the child had smiled at him, earlier. All the muscles correct, nothing behind the eyes.
And then, because it was there in his mind uninvited, he thought about Nobita.
He had been bullying Nobita for as long as he could remember.
Not recently — recently they were friends, mostly, in the way that boys who have known each other since kindergarten are friends whether they mean to be or not. But there had been years. Many years of pulling Nobita's homework away, of forcing him into games he didn't want to play, of making him do things Giant wanted because Giant was bigger and louder and getting what he wanted was easy.
He had never thought much about it.
But here, in this grey place, sitting with a glove on his right hand that was designed to interact with the energy of psychic control — a tyrant's energy, a king who made his people want what he wanted because he was bigger and louder and getting what he wanted was easy—
Giant sat with that thought for a while.
He was not stupid. He had never been stupid. He was impulsive and loud and he defaulted to his fists before his brain because his fists were very reliable, but he was not stupid.
He thought about Nobita walking home to do his homework after Giant had torn it up. He thought about Nobita's face when Giant told him to get up, to play, to do this — the face that never quite said no because it knew there was no point.
He thought about Darkseid's citizens with their empty smiles.
He sat with that for a long time.
Then he thought about other things.
He thought about the time three older kids from the middle school had cornered Nobita by the riverbank, and Giant had shown up and they had run. He hadn't planned that. He'd just been walking home and had seen Nobita surrounded and had run toward the situation without thinking about it, because that was what you did, because Nobita was his, in the way that small things you've always known are yours.
He thought about sharing his lunch with Nobita that time Nobita forgot his, even though the fried chicken was the best part and he had given that away too, and it had cost him more than he had shown.
He thought about the end of the movie they had all watched at Shizuka's house last winter, the one about the dog and the old man. He had cried. He had tried extremely hard not to cry. He had failed completely.
He had tried to pretend he hadn't cried and everyone had pretended to believe him, except Suneo who had started to say something and Giant had looked at him and Suneo had chosen wisdom.
He sat in the alley.
He was Takeshi Goda. He was loud. He punched things. He forced people to play baseball at seven forty-five on Saturday mornings. He sang at the top of his lungs and people covered their ears.
But he was also the one who ran toward Nobita and the older kids, without stopping to calculate odds, because that was simply what you did.
He was both things.
He had been trying to figure out which one was real, and the answer was both, and neither, which wasn't useful, so he stopped trying to figure it out.
He stood up.
He had a different problem to solve.
He walked back to the crystals.
The glove hummed when he got close. He could feel the psychic energy in the prisons — not just feel it, he realized; he could almost hear it. A low hum, steady, like a note held for a very long time.
The Anti-Life frequency. That was what Doraemon had called it. A frequency. Like music, but the wrong kind. Like a song that had only one note and played it forever and the note was: you don't need to choose.
Giant pressed the gloved hand flat against Doraemon's crystal.
"I can hear it," he said.
Doraemon looked at him through the purple glass. "The frequency?"
"It sounds like—" Giant stopped. He pressed his hand harder. "It sounds like something. I can almost—"
"The Translation Gummy," Doraemon said suddenly.
"What?"
"My pocket." Doraemon pointed at the crystal wall. "If you can reach through — the glove might let you—"
Giant pushed his hand against the wall. And the wall — didn't break, exactly, but gave. Like pushing through very thick water. His hand went through up to the wrist. He felt around inside, found the small pocket in Doraemon's front pouch, found a small round thing. A gummy candy, the texture of a normal candy from a convenience store, the product label too small to read from this angle.
He pulled his hand back through the wall. Opened his palm.
The Translation Gummy was pale yellow. It smelled faintly of citrus. The label, which he could now read, said TRANSLATION GUMMY, TRANSLATES ANY LANGUAGE, ANY FREQUENCY, SPOKEN OR OTHERWISE. CHEW COMPLETELY. 50 YEN VALUE PACK.
Giant looked at it.
He looked at the buzzing grey sky.
He looked at his gloved hand.
He put the gummy in his mouth and chewed.