"HIKARI! HIKARI!"

Blown away by the sea-breeze, Takeru’s voice was faint as he ran down the hill that led to the beach. Yamato swore and sprinted after him. His thoughts pounded in counterpart to his feet. He’s still sick. He had a bad fever last night, He should be in bed, not running across Odaiba. I hope Dad only stops by after we get home. I hope Mom doesn’t get back from the office. If that happens . . I’m so dead. Mom will kill me. He felt his stomach lurch as his younger brother suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, doubling over and coughing. That tears it!

"You’re coming home and going straight to bed," Yamato told him, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. Takeru shook it off with an angry sound, and ran on towards the edge of the bank where he continued calling for her. Even shouting, his voice was completely drowned by the sighing of the surf against the shore. This is ridiculous. She wouldn’t even hear him if she was standing next to him.

"Hikari’s not here. This isn’t going to help her," he remonstrated, coming to stand next to his brother, "But it is going to hurt you."

Takeru ignored him, his eyes fixed on the ocean in front of him. He had stopped calling out to Hikari now and had a grave look on his face, as if he were concentrating deeply on something. For an instant, Yamato thought he could see the Crest of Hope glowing its shooting star over his brother’s heart, but he dismissed it as a trick of the sunlight.

"Takeru, what the hell are you look-" he trailed off, blinking in disbelief. At the edge of the shore, where the waves lapped whitely against the sand, it looked as if someone had cut a hole in the air. It was slightly shorter than he was and only little wider, but it was still undeniably a hole. On either side of it, blue sea stretched across to the other side of the bay. He could make out tall buildings and trees, misty in the distance. Through it, however, a different landscape shimmered. He could make out a grey ocean, broken only by the curve of an oddly sinister, low reef some distance out to sea. It seemed to be calling him, drawing him into it in a way he did not like and could not understand.

"I can see it too," he whispered, "Is that the way to the Dark Ocean, Takeru?"

"I don’t know, Yamato. This feels all wrong," he replied, his blue eyes troubled, "It wasn’t this way before. Last time, Hikari answered me. She pulled me across to her."

"I know the Dark Ocean is through that . . . whatever. I know my sister’s there. I don’t need to know anything else," Taichi said resolutely, scrambling down the bank and running towards the edge of the sea where the hole in the air was. Yamato stifled a sigh, as he followed him. Taichi hasn’t changed a bit, has he? He still leaps before he looks. I guess I can’t blame him. Five years ago, I was prepared to search for Takeru in a raging blizzard. Looks like I’m going to have to go along to keep him out of trouble . . . Again.

"Wait for us here, Takeru," he told his younger brother from the bottom of the bank, "We won’t be too long, hopefully."

"Like heck I will, Yamato!" he flashed back, jumping down to land slightly in front of him. In a parody of his usual athletic grace, he stumbled forward onto his hands and knees when he hit the soft sand. He stayed there for long moments, breathing hoarsely and evidently trying to gather his strength. Undaunted, however, he clambered to his feet and dusted off his trousers.

Daring his brother to comment, he glanced back over his shoulder, "Let’s hurry. If the Dark Ocean is anything like I remember, Hikari won’t want to spend a moment longer than necessary there."

Walking along the beach with Takeru, Yamato tried to remain calm, as he looked around himself. The Dark Ocean was even worse from close quarters. The grey waters lapped against the grey shore, as pale and cold as despair. They stretched to the horizon, where they blurred with the grey sky. Far out at sea, he could see the long, black reef that barely rose above the water yet seemed the centre of all the darkness. At its end, a high, black monolith rose starkly against the grey sky. As he stared at it, it seemed to beckon him to come to it. It seemed to pull him in with all the slow inevitability of the ocean tide. He turned his head firmly away from it, and shut his mind to its subtle, insistent call.

In the opposite direction, from which they had just come, the sands gave way to grass and then to pavement, as beach became town. Yamato could not imagine anyone wanting to live in such a bleak places, but there were a row of houses along the shoreline and even a square, brick building that seemed like a factory. Unsurprisingly, however, it looked like the buildings’ inhabitants had deserted them a long time ago. The paint was flaking off their walls, and their gambrel roofs sagged. Some houses had collapsed completely with only a wall or a fence to mark where they had once stood. Above the rest of the decay, a church’s steeple rose, but there was only a gaping hole where the clock-dial should have been.

Yet, for all its strangeness, it felt familiar. A long time ago, he had been here and he had almost been drowned in these dark waters . . . .

"I know this place," he said in sudden recognition.

His younger brother paused, turning to face him, "What do you mean, Yamato?"

"Do you still remember the dark pit that Sora fell into, Takeru?" he ran a hand through his hair, "Remember I said I’d been in the same place?"

The other boy nodded, "I remember black tentacles coming out of the ground and wrapping around her legs, then the ground splitting open to swallow her. I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do. But what does that have to do with the Dark Ocean?"

"That place, it was exactly like this," he spread his arms to indicate the landscape around them, "It was like I was sinking into some deep, dark lake. Or like I was being pulled under by some ocean current, I guess. The more I thought about how alone and friendless I was, the deeper I went."

"Do you think that’s why Hikari came here?" he said quietly, "Do you think she felt like she didn’t have any friends?"

Glancing over at him, Yamato felt a strange, tight pain constrict his chest. Takeru’s shoulders were slouched and he was kicking at the damp sand. And, even though his face was shadowed beneath his hat, his emotions were all too evident from his posture and his words. He blames himself for this. He thinks it’s his fault for not being a better friend, just like Taichi thinks its his fault for not being a better brother.

"No way. Not with a best friend like you," he smiled at his little brother, "Besides, Sora ended up here because she was scared of letting all of us down. You heard her yourself. I think . . . I think the Dark Ocean calls everyone in different ways and for different reasons."

"I guess so," Takeru straightened, looking towards the low reef where Taichi was standing and calling for Hikari, "Come on. We should help Taichi."

His hair and clothes whipped about him by the breeze, Taichi carefully picked his way along the reef towards the monolith. Together with Takeru and Yamato, he had walked the length of the beach, paced the town’s overgrown streets and called for his sister until his throat hurt. They had had no success so far, and the reef was the last place he had to look. A sudden, sickening image flashed into his mind of a small, pale Hikari lying broken on the rocks or floating in the waves like a drowned cherry-blossom. He forced it ruthlessly out of his mind. That isn’t going to help you, Taichi. You have to think she’s all right. Hikari’s a tough kid. She will be all right.

To distract himself, he stared at the monolith. He had an odd sensation that the tall, black stone was at the heart of the darkness here. It looked like one of the Kaizer’s Control Spires, yet Taichi had the impression that it was far more ancient. Cautiously, he approached it. Slick and glistening from the seaspray, its surface was covered with a strange writing that looked almost like hieroglyphics. Here and there, however, pictures had been carved into the black stone. Even with all the Digimon he had seen, the creatures in the carvings looked weird to him. He was not sure whether they were supposed to be fish, frogs, or humans - or a combination of all three. Despite their relatively human shape, they seemed to have webbed hands and feet; glassy, bulging eyes and fins. He thought he could even make out slits chiselled in the sides of the necks, like gills. He shivered, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was soaked to the bone by the spray off the reefs.

Nonetheless, as oddly frightening as it was, it was no help in finding Hikari.

"Any luck?" Yamato asked, balancing his way along the rocks to come and stand beside Taichi. He had evidently managed to convince Takeru to stay on the shore, because Taichi could see the younger boy standing at the very edge of the reef and shouting.

"None," he admitted, "I’ve looked everywhere, except under the ocean, and there’s no way they would have been able to take Hikari down there."

"She’s not here, Taichi," his friend told him grimly, "There would have been some sign of her if there was. And Takeru said it was different from last time in that he could not hear Hikari calling for help nor feel her pulling him to her. So, she must have just run away from home, like your mother said."

Staring at his friend, Taichi wanted to argue with him, but the stark truth of his words was undeniable. They had searched every, possible inch of the Dark Ocean, and they had not found Hikari. They had not even found any indication that she might have been there. All his anger, all his sadness, all his desperate hoping had vanished and no other emotion had come to fill their place. He suddenly felt very tired and hopeless.

"I want to go home, Yamato," he said.

"You’re lucky Mom didn’t catch us," Yamato told Takeru as he handed him a bowl of raman soup and a spoon with which to eat it, "You’re the one who has to live with her and her lectures about responsibility, after all. I can always escape home to Dad."

Curled up beneath his blankets, Takeru tried to manage a weak smile for his brother’s sake, but failed. He knew Yamato was trying to make him feel better by joking and talking as if nothing had happened, but he doubted that anything could. With Hikari missing, he could not even pretend to be brave or cheerful, as he had so often in the past. She had been the reason for his courage and his happiness. Now that she was gone, he felt empty in a way he had not felt since Angemon had sacrificed himself to save him and to defeat Devimon.

Even worse than that, however, was the nagging feeling at the back of his mind that he had forgotten something important. It had been plaguing him ever since he heard Taichi shout at Yamato that Hikari was missing. From time to time, bits of it seemed to emerge clearly from the blur of fever that had been the previous night. A heavy slant of light across the hallway. Glitters of sand on bare feet. The clear, night sky with its cold stars shining through . . . He shook his head in frustration.

"If only I could remember . . . ."

"Remember what?" Yamato asked, taking a seat in the other chair and tucking into his own plate of soup.

"Nothing," he lifted his head to look directly at his brother, "Yamato, do you think Hikari’s gone forever?"

"No way," he said resolutely, "Like I said to Taichi earlier, we’ll get her back, no matter where she’s gone. Dad’s getting the newspeople to run a segment on Ohayo Odaiba!, Mom’s putting an advert in all the papers which she does freelance work for, and the rest of us are going to cover the city in flyers. We’ll find her, you’ll see."

Takeru was silent, stirring his soup with his spoon. As much as he wanted to believe his brother’s reassuring words, he could not. He knew with a cool, precise certainty that none of that would work. He did not understand how he knew it, but he did beyond all doubt. Hikari was beyond the reach of adverts and flyers and television segments. She was somewhere beyond even his reach, and they had been connected both by destiny and by love since they had been children. Hope and Light at the heart of the Digital World. Takaishi Takeru and Yagami Hikari in the heart of each other.

"I’m in love with her, Yamato," he admitted at last.

Setting aside his bowl of soup, his brother came and put an arm around him, "I know."

Ohayo Odaiba! = Good Morning Odaiba!

Digimon Kaizer = Digimon Emperor