Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) Read Free

of different events converged, sending certain official institutions—particularly the police and hospitals—into even greater confusion than the media had reported.
    Immediately after the slashing happened, a large-scale brawl broke out nearby, which caused the hospital to be flooded with nearly a hundred emergency patients. At least, that’s what the boy heard.
    The boy, Masaomi Kida, had no direct connection to this brawl, but he knew several people who’d fallen victim to the various incidents, and he was paying hospital visits nearly every day.
    Those friends were all out now, which meant that Masaomi had no need to come back to the hospital, but here he was.
    He was standing at the open window of the private room, schoolbag slung over his shoulder, enjoying the breeze.
    “It’s cold, Masaomi.”
    He shut the window without turning around to face the speaker. “Oh, sorry.”
    There was a wry grimace on his face, but his eyes were looking at his own smile in the reflection of the glass. He was checking to see that his expression was properly formed.



“You won’t…look at me.”
    “…”
    A silence fell onto the room. Eventually, the girl spoke up in a gentle voice that echoed off the walls.
    “So your friend is in the hospital now?”
    “…Who told you that?”
    He hadn’t spoken a word about Anri and his other friends to the owner of the voice. Masaomi turned around, his eyes full of conflicting emotion, to look at the girl sitting up in the hospital bed. She ignored his question and said, “I saw you from the window. You came every day. Was it a girl?”
    “Yeah. Glasses, nice body… Just a perfect example of a teenage girl whose imbalance makes her attractive,” Masaomi joked rather than deny it.
    The girl was not shaken by his answer. She only smiled as she got further to the point. “You like her?”
    “Yeah… She goes to my school. I’m in a love triangle with my good friend,” Masaomi noted, only adding fuel to the fire. But the girl—Saki Mikajima—seemed delighted.
    “Oh? You must be serious if you’re throwing yourself into a three-way romance like that. I can barely remember you getting involved with a girl for anything other than a fling,” Saki giggled.
    Masaomi silently turned back to the window. The entrance to the hospital was clearly visible from the fifth-floor room. If you were good at picking apart faces and clothes with sharp vision, and you had all the time in the world to gaze out the window, you might be able to pick out who was coming, Masaomi noticed.
    Meanwhile, Saki’s smile never left her face. “But I need to correct you first.”
    She tilted her pale neck, the short hair that framed her face bobbing slightly.
    “If you include me, it’s a romantic square.”
    “Stop right there, Saki. Just stop. Close your mouth, breathe through your nose, and listen,” Masaomi interjected, cutting short what could have been taken as either serious or a joke. He looked straight into his own eyes in the window’s reflection. “What we had—it’s over now. Finished. Closing time. Past expiration date. Got that?”
    “If we’re over, why do you keep showing up?”
    “…”
    Masaomi looked to be formulating an answer, but Saki continued before he could speak.
    “In fact…you’ve started visiting a lot more recently. Did something happen?” she asked briskly. He held his silence.
    In the reflection of the window, the girl’s face held a gentle smile, but nothing moved aside from her lips. Perhaps she had grown too used to holding that expression.
    “Could it be…that you want to go back to the old days again?”
    “…Sorry. Gonna go home for today.”
    It was a weak attempt to change the topic. Masaomi lifted his hand in a brief wave to Saki, then stepped out of the room. As he left, her voice held just a touch more emotion than before.
    “You’ll be back, Masaomi.”
    He put a hand on the door, trying to block her voice out. He’d heard what she would say