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On the first night of camp, Sakamichi dreams.
He's riding his city bike up the school hill. His front wheel is flat, but it's all right because he can just pedal harder. It's a thousand kilometres to the top but he can make it, and when he gets there, he'll come back down.
"Oonoda!" Naruko-kun shouts, and he’s mistaken Sakamichi’s name again. He rides alongside him on his Pinarello. He has no handlebars, but it doesn’t fluster him and he's bent over with his arms out in front of him like a swimmer mid-dive, his balance perfect. "You can't tell Smug-izumi!"
Naruko-kun starts to pull ahead, but Sakamichi just has to raise his cadence by ten and then they're back alongside each other.
I won't tell, Sakamichi could say. Tell him about what? he could ask. And he tries, he shouts one thing after another, but no matter how loudly he yells he can't even hear himself over the whistling of the wind.
"Onoda!" And Imaizumi-kun's on his other side, and his bike has no chain and the pedals aren't turning but he's going even faster than Naruko-kun. "Don't say anything to that Naruko!"
Imaizumi-kun draws ahead, but it's all right because Sakamichi can just increase his cadence by twenty.
"Oi!" Naruko-kun shouts even louder. "If you don't tell him, I’ll buy you a Zaku kit!"
"If you swear not to tell him, I'll join the anime club!" Imaizumi-kun promises.
The anime club! He was going to the anime club, he remembers, and he was bringing all the capsule toys in the latest All-Nippon Cyclists set; there were twenty-nine in all and it took him five years to find them but he has every single one of them.
"Hiiiime hime hime!" Makishima-san croons in his ear, his voice sounding so close he could be sitting behind Sakamichi if it were a tandem bike, but when Sakamichi turns to look, there’s no one there at all. “Lovely chance Petanko-chan!” He doesn't see anyone, not Makishima-san, not Naruko-kun, not Imaizumi-kun―but there they are, Naruko-kun and Imaizumi-kun off in the distance, head to head and perfectly matched and neither of them seem to have noticed Sakamichi is gone.
I brought them! Sakamichi wants to say, and would if he could. I brought the capsule toys! Because he did, they're all here, they're piled up in his basket and he daren’t dance to catch them or he'll spill them all for sure.
The only thing he can do is to increase his cadence by thirty, so he does.
He's still alone.
"Would you love the climb even if it wasn't easy?" Makishima-san asks. "Even if it didn't love you back?"
He just needs to show them the toys and then they'll understand. He grabs one of the capsules in his basket but it breaks into shards; he picks up another, then another, and another, and all of them break into pieces, completely empty with no collectible inside.
Because they're not capsule toys, Sakamichi realises. They're spiders.
He overbalances on his bike, pitching off to the side and tumbling down onto the roadbed, but nothing bumps and nothing rashes and when he stops rolling, he's laying on his back staring up at the endless blue sky.
That boy steps into view, the boy from Hakone; his smile is soft and uncomplicated, and he offers Sakamichi his water bottle.
"If you love the climb, you can climb," the boy says. "If you climb, I'll climb too."
But when Sakamichi reaches up to take the bottle it's gone, so instead Manami-san takes his hand and pulls him to his feet.
"Is Aquari fine?" Manami-san breathes, and he presses his mouth to Sakamichi's and Sakamichi drinks cool, sweet mountain spring water from his lips until his belly is round and full and cold.
"Sharing a water bottle is like an indirect kiss," Kanzaki-san tells him.
Sakamichi wakes up trembling with the chill of the sweat beading in frigid droplets across his skin, and he wonders if he ever slept at all.