A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 8 by Kazuma Kamachi Page B

menu…”
    Shirai followed Uiharu’s directions and came to a screen she’d never seen before on her cell phone. Then she took a picture of the tag again. She attached it to a message and sent it to Uiharu.
    “Oh, there we go! Got it! Umm, let’s see what the scan says…Yep, it found something.” Uiharu’s tone changed to one of seriousness. “The tag itself is the real thing, and it was definitely issued by Academy City.”
    “The real thing…Then it was going to the Garden of Learning like we thought?”
    “Yes.”
    Shirai began to think. There was no building at Tokiwadai Middle School called the “Calculation Support Facility.” By nature, if a nonexistent delivery address was written on a package’s tag, there wouldn’t be any point in delivering it. That meant this sort of message might actually have been some sort of code that would mean something to somebody else.
    “The analysis on the IC chip info finished, too. It supplements the simple type of code printed on the tag. It has the frame number of a space shuttle and an outer space work schedule number. Both belong to Academy City. They match the records of District 23. This is smelling more and more like danger!”
    “District 23…The whole thing is covered in airfields and launch sites for aviation and space research and development; nowhere else in the city has facilities like that. Students aren’t allowed in there.”
    “Yes. And that mark on the luggage? The one with the squares inside the circle. That’s District 23’s emblem. It’s kind of like a school insignia.”
    Shirai groaned. Part of her wondered why she didn’t realize that earlier, but she wouldn’t generally have remembered the emblem for a facility with no connection to students. She’d probably glanced at it before on the news during space shuttle launches or something.
    “The sender on the tag is also District 23,” continued Uiharu. “Everything there is highly classified, so there’s no sensitive details written on it, of course.”
    Shirai looked at the bag again. The date matched the date Academy City’s shuttle returned to Earth. And the shipper was District 23—an airfield-slash-launch-site monopolizing an entire school district for aviation and space research.
    Who in the world did District 23 plan on delivering the luggage to…?
she wondered.
And who could those guys who stole it out from under them have been…?
For now, she decided to just thank Uiharu. “Thank you. I will give it some thought while I deal with the luggage and these men.”
    “Ahh! Like I said before, I expect a reward! Like a proper young ladies’ teatime with a real lady like you! Actually, not just tea! It has to have the atmosphere that only proper ladies craft!!”
    She sounded quite flustered. Shirai hung up anyway.
    Like a scroll being rolled up, she watched as the super-thin phone was wound back up into the cylinder holding it. Then she returned it to her pocket and started giving some more thought to this.
    Unfortunately, Shirai didn’t have much knowledge of space-related technology or events.
    Even when she thought it over, the only space-related happening she could think of happening recently was the continuous schedule of rocket and shuttle launches by organizations all over the world, beginning with Academy City.
    “It might be…a bit of a stretch to connect this to that. Still…Sheesh. After all that, I still don’t even know whether I should look inside this thing or not.” She sighed and sat down on the luggage. The men in the suits were a mystery, but then so was the one who had been carrying this in the first place. “Either way, it is not my job to think about it any more than this.”
    Having come to a noncommittal conclusion, she waited there for Anti-Skill to arrive. They were taking a while, though the road conditions were not very good. Shirai wouldn’t complain, though—they didn’t have any abilities, so they couldn’t help it.
    Then, her cell