Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 2===

A boy lay on his back within the ICU of a large District 7 hospital.

Four days had passed, but he was still hooked up to several tubes and electrodes. He wore a clear mask over his mouth and his blood and nutrients were circulated with the help of a machine. If just one of the many machines around him were removed or just one of the switches were flipped, it would likely begin a chain reaction of organ failure resulting in his death.

“Hamazura.”

A girl sat in a round stool next to his machine-covered bed. She was known for her shoulder length black hair and her pink track suit. But not even Takitsubo Rikou’s voice got any response out of the boy.

The air purification system and UV lights left the air sterile to the point of feeling toxic and the only sounds were the steady beeps and the rhythm of a pump.

No one would tell her anything. The doctors and nurses all gave her harmless smiles and insisted he would be all right. But she knew that too steady a reading was in fact a bad sign in cases like this.

“?”

She suddenly looked up after noticing something. But not any kind of sound or a flashing light. Still, she had detected a presence of some sort on the other side of the thick glass door.

Her esper power was AIM Stalker, which let her accurately perceive AIM diffusion fields emitted by espers.

But that did not mean this was an esper.

The pink track suit girl stood from her stool and approached the glass door. She stepped on the floor pad and the door slid aside while a flat buzzer sounded.

A bouquet of flowers sat on the bench just outside the door.

The ICU was tucked away so ordinary patients and visitors would not see it, so no one would have just been passing by on their way to somewhere else. The presence of the flowers meant someone had been here to visit the ICU.

They had come all this way and then left without opening the glass door.

Had the sight of Hamazura Shiage hooked up to the bed and Takitsubo Rikou by his side brought on too much emotion for them to continue?

Takitsubo tilted her head.

The flowers had a card with them. Had they carelessly left that behind after getting cold feet about visiting? Or had it come from a subconscious desire to leave some sign that they had been here?

The name on the card was Yomikawa Aiho.

“…?”