Two nights later, Naru was awakened by a soft knock on the door. She sat up, her heart pounding, wondering what was wrong. The knock came again, a quick but soft tapping on her door. Curious, she got up and opened her door just a bit.

One of the largest, friendliest male orderlies stood outside. "Good evening, Naru-san," he whispered. "The one who isn't says you should come with me."

It took a few seconds for the message to make sense. The one who isn't--No one. Mumeishi. This must be Mumeishi's ally inside the Institute. "Just a minute." Naru closed the door, trying to decide what to wear. A track suit would be boring and unnoteworthy, warm in case the night was cool, now that autumn was finally coming on, and easy to run in if she had to. She knew better than to think that no one would come after her, either from the Institute or sent by Mumeishi to make sure she did what she had told him she would do. He might trust her as much as he trusted any of his other allies, but she didn't think that trust was unquestioning and unconditional. She wished she had some sneakers, but residents at the Institute had no need for outdoor shoes. Her house slippers would have to do.

There wasn't anything in the room she wanted to take with her. She had no money; she had no idea what had become of her purse when she was moved to the mental health institute. She put on the green track suit, then opened the door just a crack again.

The orderly still stood there. "Come with me, Naru-san." She slipped out the door and closed it silently behind her. The hall lights had been dimmed for the night. There was a single night nurse going into a resident's room with a tray of meds. Naru and the orderly hung back until the door closed behind the nurse. No one else was around. They walked silently and quickly, but not quickly enough to look suspicious, to the dining hall and through the kitchen.

At the back of the kitchen was a double-sized service door. The orderly ran his ID card through the card reader, then a second card. Naru didn't ask where the second card had come from. The door clicked open, revealing a small, dark, bare hallway with a large service elevator on the other wall. The orderly took two more ID cards from his pocket and ran them through a card reader above the call button. After a moment, the light by the elevators doors came on. With a buzz, the elevator stopped and the wide doors opened. The orderly guided Naru ahead of him into the elevator. The doors slid shut, and the elevator slowly chugged down to the basement.

They left the elevator and the orderly guided Naru through the vast basement, filled with shelves and stacks of all kinds of goods and supplies, ancient file cabinets, and broken furniture and other equipment. At the far end was a closed roll-up door that, Naru guessed, would open to a delivery driveway. The orderly slid two of the four ID cards he held through the reader next to the door. Slowly, with a clanking noise that Naru was sure would wake the whole hospital, the door rolled up. "One of his contacts is waiting for you at the east driveway," the orderly said. He stepped back into the basement while Naru walked out onto the long sloping ramp that led from the delivery entrance up to the street. A few seconds later, the door began its noisy descent.

Naru pressed back against the shadowed wall so that no one looking to see what the noise was would see her. The night was lit by thousands of stars in the sky, more stars than she could ever remember seeing in the skies over Tokyo. But there was no moon right now, and the streetlights were distant from where she was, so there were plenty of dark places to hide. She crouched down against the wall and tried to decide what to do. If she didn't meet Mumeishi's contact, no doubt Mumeishi would find out about it quickly--she didn't know how, but she was beginning to suspect he had ways of communicating with the outside world that went beyond normal methods. He would probably have someone looking for her within the hour. Even if he didn't, her absence would certainly be discovered in the morning, and the Institute would begin a search. Based on her memory of the drive to the Crystal Palace, it would take her a little more than an hour to walk there, if she walked quickly and didn't have to wait for too much traffic. But if she put herself in the hands of Mumeishi's associates, who knew how long it would take her to get away from them? If she ever did. She decided to take her chances with avoiding the person who was waiting for her. Once she got to the Palace, hopefully she could persuade someone, anyone, to let her take refuge there. She turned toward the street that ran past the Institute below her window.

Too late, she caught a whiff of cigarette smoke close by. A dark figure stepped out from around the corner of the building to block her way. It was a man wearing a black trenchcoat and a black hat pulled forward to obscure his face in shadow. "Good evening, Umino Naru-san".

"I don't know who--" Naru stammered. She tried to duck around the man, but he grabbed her arm in a bruising grip.

"You don't need to bother lying to us, we have your description. And we were warned that you might not be quite as trustworthy as you appear to be. You can come with us now, and do what you promised Mumeishi-sama you would do."

Without giving Naru a chance to say anything, he started dragging her the other way from where she had been headed. She went along, pretending to cooperate while she tried to think of a plan.

The black-coated man took another drag from his cigarette, then dropped the glowing butt on the immaculate sidewalk. Without stopping to think about her sudden idea, Naru pretended to trip over one of her house slippers. She stumbled to the ground, pulling the man halfway down with her. While he was still off-balance, she grabbed the cigarette butt and pushed it up against his face, close to his eye.

The man shrieked and clapped both hands to his injured face. Naru jumped to her feet and started running. He yelled and lunged towards her to try to grab her, but, blinded by pain, he missed.

She ran towards the street, stumbling on one slippered foot and one stockinged foot. She kicked her other slipper away and ran across one side of the street, scrambled through the plant-filled median, then crossed the other side of the street just ahead of a delivery truck that was coming her way. She could hear the pursuit behind her. With the truck shielding her from view, she ran alongside it for as long as she could keep up.

The truck pulled ahead of her. She risked a quick glance back; three men in dark coats were running diagonally across the street towards her. They would catch up before too long. She tried to push herself faster, but after the serious injuries she had suffered and all the months in the hospital and the mental institution with almost no exercise, she wasn't in any shape to run so fast for so long. Her heart was pounding too hard and too fast, her lungs burned, her legs shook.

Her pursuers were closing in quickly. She ducked into a dark, narrow alleyway between two buildings and fell to her knees, gasping for breath, her legs completely useless. The shadowy forms of two of the men who were chasing her passed the entrance to the alleyway. Naru forced herself to her feet and stumbled towards the other end of the alley. Then a powerful hand grabbed her arm. "Nice try, Naru-chan," a harsh voice said in her ear.

She let her legs go out from under her, hoping that her sudden dead weight would force her captor to let go. Instead, the grip on her arm tightened and he jerked her to her feet again. "I'll just put this little game of hide and seek down to you being bored after being a guest at the Institute for Wellness and Joy for so long. Mumeishi-sama told us not to hurt you unless it was absolutely necessary, and if you'll come with us now it won't be necessary. Understand?"

A sense of defeat took the last of Naru's remaining strength. She nodded. "Yes, I understand."

He pulled her back to the entrance to the alley and whistled. A moment later, the other two pursuers became visible in a pool of light from a streetlight, walking towards them. One of them appeared to be a woman. "Got her," Naru's captor said. The other man took out a cell phone, pressed a button, and spoke briefly and quietly into it. Naru couldn't hear what he said.

Her black-coated captors crowded around her. After a few moments, a large, shiny black sedan came speeding down the street and squealed to a stop in front of them. The first man, the one she had burned with his discarded cigarette, was driving. She winced to see the raw, angry-looking burn right beneath the outside corner of his right eye. She couldn't believe she had done that; she had never wanted to hurt anyone like that. The man who had grabbed her in the alleyway handed her off to his male companion, and shoved the wounded driver aside to take the wheel himself. The woman opened the back door of the car and got in. The man holding Naru's arm shoved her into the back seat. As he pushed her through the open door, the memory of a car flipping end over end down a steep, rocky slope washed over her again. She shrank back, but the man behind her gave her a hard push. She landed half on the seat, half on the floor. The woman pulled her up onto the seat, then the man got in and sat on Naru's other side.

The driver hit the gas even before the man in the back seat had closed the car door. The abrupt acceleration jolted Naru back against the plush leather seat. Glancing side to side, she noted that no one else in the car had put on their seat belts. A plan came to her; her mind seemed to be working independently of her exhaustion and fear. She made a show of pulling her own seatbelt across her lap, then hit the tab against the buckle with a firm metallic click but didn't actually fasten the belt. She kept the seat belt in place with one hand resting casually in her lap. "Sorry," she said. "I got mixed up on which way to go to find you, and you guys scared me, chasing after me like that."

"I told you, you idiot," the man next to her said, addressing his words to the man she had burned. "You got no more than what you deserved."

The burned man scowled. "Mumeishi-sama told us he wasn't sure she was a hundred percent trustworthy."

"Yeah, but scaring her didn't do any good, did it?"

"Quit arguing, you idiots," the woman said. "The important thing is we got her now. Mumeishi-sama would not have been happy if we'd lost her because of your incompetence."

That quieted the men. They drove through the dark, nearly-empty streets of Crystal Tokyo, so unlike the old Tokyo that Naru remembered, that seemed to never sleep. The traffic was so light that they never had to stop or even slow down. The glow of the Crystal Palace, which seemed to be constantly lit from some source deep within the crystal walls, lay ahead and to the right. As they drove, the Palace stayed on the right, though they were angling away from it. Naru watched carefully; if she lost track of the Palace, she would be lost. Even the district she had grown up in was so changed that she barely recognized it, and they were now leaving Juuban behind for less familiar neighborhoods.

Naru slumped in the seat. What was the point, anyway? Even if she did get away and make it to the Palace, who would listen to her? She had been judged mentally incompetent, and had refused the Queen's purification. Why should anyone at the Palace listen to her? Or believe her?

Except for Nephrite. Surely he would listen to her, and believe her. He had cared about her enough to die to protect her; he couldn't have forgotten that. Even if the Queen or his duties had prevented him from looking for her. Even if he didn't feel the same way about her as he had before. She couldn't believe that he would have forgotten her, or allowed the Queen to take his memories of her. He would listen, if only she could get to him.

A horn blared, and headlights glared into the car. The driver swerved to avoid an approaching truck, then tried to correct their course. A memory flashed through Naru's mind, of her mother lunging for the steering wheel of the taxi. Flinging aside the unfastened seat belt, Naru dove forward and reached over the driver's arm to grab the wheel. The car swerved sharply to the left, then to the right as the driver tried to correct the skid and wrestle control of the car away from Naru. The man and woman sitting beside Naru tried to pull her back, but she wriggled free and grabbed the steering wheel again. "You stupid bitch!" the woman shouted. "Are you trying to kill us all?"

Naru shoved the driver aside, causing him to spin the steering wheel all the way to the right. The car skidded into a circle, out of control. Naru ducked down on the floor of the back seat as the car spun across a sidewalk and smashed into a brick building front. The woman next to Naru sat stunned, a trickle of blood running down from her forehead. The man on her other side, where the side of the car had caved in, was also still. Naru lunged across the woman's lap, pushed the door open, and scrambled out of the car.

"Hey, everyone, she's getting away!" the burned man shouted. He struggled with his door, which was jammed shut. "Wake up!" He pushed against the driver, who was slumped over the wheel.

A few people were gathering on the sidewalk around the wrecked car. Naru guessed they must live in apartments above the shops on this street. The onlookers surrounded her, asking if she was all right.

Naru backed away, feeling smothered by the close press of strangers. "I'm fine. Worry about the others. Can someone call an ambulance? I'm fine--don't worry about me--"

She pushed her way past the half-dozen bystanders, who turned their attention to the wrecked car and the injured people inside. Though her legs felt like jelly, she started walking as quickly as she could in the direction where she last remembered seeing the Crystal Palace. "Wait, miss!" someone called after her. "You have to wait until the peace officers come! They'll need to take your name!"

"Mumeishi," she said. "That's my name." She turned a corner, and saw the glowing towers of the Palace in the distance. Having her goal in front of her, in her sight, pulled her onward in spite of her exhaustion and pain.