Dead Hours — Days, Page 10
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1: The regulars — the tracksuit regular with his bag of cans and the drunk salaryman with his canned coffee — gather their things and drift toward the sliding doors, the store emptying again. Regular: "Good luck, driver." Panel 2: Yuki glances toward the dark, rain-streaked window, thermos in hand. Yuki: "Seven minutes." Panel 3: Kaito hunches harder over the blank strips, muttering and tracing back and forth. Kaito: "Five fifty-eight... no. Six-oh-one... no."
Image description
The regulars drift out of the store; Yuki notes seven minutes left; Kaito mutters times to himself while tracing the blank strips.
About this chapter
The finale of the Yuki arc. On what turns out to be her last night layover, Amano Yuki tells Kaito she's been promoted to the daytime express route — her first run leaves at six. Kaito treats the goodbye as a timetabling problem, laying two blank schedules side by side and tracing them with a finger, hunting for a single minute where a day person and a night person could both exist. The night regulars deliver contradictory, unverifiable verdicts on whether day and night can ever meet. Again and again he finds nothing — "...no overlap." Then he finds it: one minute, 5:59 to 6:00, the seam between the end of his shift and the start of her first run. When the minute finally arrives, the delivery doors slide open, the day clerk walks in and the store fills with morning commuters — the minute exists and it is not theirs. What they had they only ever lived in the empty hours, and no version of it survives daylight. Yuki says so kindly, without drama, and goes to drive her route. Kaito is left with the correct answer and nothing else; Rin sits beside him in the daylight, phone face-down, saying nothing at all. The next night at 3:12 the doors ding and it is a stranger — Rin starts to raise her phone, and doesn't.