The pull came on the Monday after the shopping trip, at twenty to twelve in the morning, while I was hanging laundry on the balcony.
I was holding one of the new T-shirts, the navy one, with two pegs in my mouth. The cuff went warm under the sweatband and tugged, hard, toward the south-west. Toward the coast.
Toward Chigasaki.
I stood there with the T-shirt in my hands.
I hadn’t changed in twenty days. I hadn’t been up to the roof. I’d hung up the yellow top at the back of my wardrobe and not worn it, and I’d done the mascara once, in the bathroom, with the door locked, and wiped it off. My hair had stayed the length it was. Nothing had moved. Mom’s question was still sitting in the kitchen, unanswered, every time I walked past the sink.
If I changed, it would all start again. I knew that. Kohaku had told me, and I’d felt it, that week in the dark, the change waiting like a train at a signal. The moment I took the sweatband off and let the light come, the signal would go green.
The cuff pulled.
On the kitchen television behind me, through the open balcony door, the lunchtime news had stopped what it was doing. A reporter was standing on a quay somewhere with a cold store behind her, a long low concrete building with a corrugated roof, and white mist was pouring out of its doors into the sunshine.
Reports of workers trapped inside, she was saying. Chigasaki fishing port. Temperatures inside are believed to be…
Kohaku was on the balcony rail. She looked at me and waited.
I took the pegs out of my mouth and put them on the rail. I took the sweatband off.
“Tell Mom,” I said.
“I will,” said Kohaku.
Then I had to say it.
I hadn’t said it in nearly three weeks. Before that I’d said it to a wardrobe and a water tank and the back of a bathroom stall door, fifty times, a hundred, fast, like a password.
I stood on the balcony with the T-shirt over my arm and Kohaku watching me, and it took me a long time to get it out.
“Transform,” I said.
The gold seam lit.
Heat ran up into my shoulder, the way it always had, and with it came something else, a feeling like a held breath being let out, all through my body, faint. The signal going green. The staff was in my hand.
I went anyway.
Kohaku landed on my shoulder as I went off the balcony rail.
“Oh, you’re up,” she said, delighted, as if I’d been ill in bed for a month. “Look at you. Up.”
* * *
Chigasaki is along the coast west of Fujisawa, twenty minutes by air. The fishing port is a small square harbor inside two breakwaters, with a fish market and a row of sheds and a cold store along the quay where the boats unload.
It was noon. It was the hottest day of the summer so far. The quay was black asphalt, soft in the sun, shimmering with heat. There were fire engines and police cars parked across the end of it, and men in uniform standing back from the cold store with their hands up against the glare.
White mist was pouring out of the cold store’s open doors. Frost had spread out across the asphalt from the doorway in a fan, white on black, in thirty-five degrees of heat.
I came down on the quay beside the fire engines. The firemen turned and stared. One of them had his helmet off and his face was red with the heat and white with frost down one side.
“There are three of them in there,” he said to me, as if I’d asked. “In the freezer room at the back. Minus twenty-five. We can’t get to them. Something’s in the way.”
I went to the doors.
* * *
Inside, it was dark and freezing.
The cold hit me in the doorway like a wall. My breath came out white. The light came off my hands into the cold store. It shone on rows of steel racks, on stacked plastic fish crates, on a floor glazed with ice, and on the thing that filled the middle of it.
It was made of ice and crates.
It had taken the ice off the walls and the frozen fish from the racks and the blue plastic crates the fish came in, hundreds of them, and built itself out of them, a great hunched shape the size of a truck, wedged into the cold store from floor to ceiling. It had something like a head, low down, made of crates. It had something like arms, long and white and crusted, braced against the walls. It didn’t move when I came in.
It was cold, and it was waiting.
Behind it, at the back of the building, there was a heavy steel door with a small window in it. The freezer room. In the window there was a face.
I hit it.
I swung the staff into its side as hard as I could, and the side burst. Ice and crates exploded across the cold store, rattling off the racks, skidding across the glazed floor, a blizzard of white chips and blue plastic. For a second there was a hole in it the size of a car.
Then the cold closed it.
I watched it happen. The chips of ice on the floor crept back toward the hole across the frost, and the crates slid back after them, and everything froze where it touched, with a sound like a pond freezing over in a film played fast. It took about five seconds. The thing was whole again, and a little bigger.
I put the iron foot against it and pushed the light in. The light ran out across the frost in white-gold lines and found nothing. It went into the ice and got lost. Somewhere in the middle of all that frozen water was the place where it was holding on, and the light couldn’t get to it through a truckload of ice.
I got my hands under the edge of it, then, and pulled it toward the doors, toward the light.
It moved. It slid a meter across the icy floor, crates grinding, and stuck. It was bigger than the doors. It filled the cold store from wall to wall, and the doors were half the width of it, and I couldn’t get it out.
The cold was getting into me.
I could feel it in my hands first, and then my arms, and then my chest. The light was dimming. My strength was going out of me into the ice. I hadn’t changed in twenty days. I was out of practice, and the cold was eating me.
The face in the freezer-room window was looking at me. It was a man in a woolen hat, white with frost, with his eyes wide.
* * *
“Fumi,” said Kohaku.
She’d come. I hadn’t noticed. She was in the doorway behind me, sitting on the frosted floor with her ears flat, a small gray cat in the white mist.
“What?”
Her eyes were on the white mist pouring past her out of the doors, the way smoke pours out of a building.
“See the way out,” she said.
It didn’t sound like her. It was flat and small and far away, and it wasn’t talking to me.
Then she shook herself.
“You’re in a box. You’re fighting it in a box. Look for the way out.”
I looked.
The doors were too small. The walls were thick concrete. The floor was ice.
I looked up.
The roof of the cold store was corrugated steel sheet, on a frame of steel girders, low over our heads. Above it was the sky. Above the sky was the sun, at noon, on the hottest day of the summer.
It wasn’t held together by what it was made of. Ice and crates. Ice was only water. It was held together by cold. Take the cold away and it was just water, plastic and frozen fish. None of that could stand up on its own. Get faster updates on g.com.
I went up to the roof.
I got my hands around the nearest girder, set my boots against the top of the wall, and pulled.
It came. The whole thing came, girders and steel sheet together, in one long scream of metal, bolts popping out of the walls like corks, and I turned with it in my arms and threw it out over the quay into the harbor. It hit the water like a dropped wall.
The sun came down into the cold store.
It came down all at once, white and blinding, straight down onto the ice and the crates and the thing in the middle of the floor. The mist went up in a great cloud. The air changed in a second from freezing to hot, the heat of a July noon pouring in through a hole the size of the building.
The thing moved.
It reared up out of its corner, toward me, toward the light, the way they all turned to my light in the end. It came after me as I went up, out through the open roof into the sun, climbing up the steel racks and the walls, reaching for me with its long white arms.
It climbed out onto the top of the wall, into the full sun, onto the edge of the quay.
And it came apart.
It didn’t break. It sagged. In the heat of the sun the ice that held its joints went soft, and wet, and the crates slid off each other. Its arms dropped. Its head fell off and rolled. It leaned out over the quay, too heavy now for what was holding it together, and the whole thing slumped off the wall onto the black asphalt in a clatter of crates and a slide of melting ice. Fish crates bounced across the quay. Frozen fish skidded away into the harbor. Water ran everywhere, steaming, off the hot black tarmac, in clouds of white vapor that went up into the blue sky.
In the middle of the melt there was a fish.
It was a tuna, a frozen one, as long as my arm, lying on its side in a puddle on the black asphalt in thirty-five degrees of sun. Everything around it was melting.
It wasn’t.
Frost was growing on it. I watched it creep out across its silver side in white feathers, in the sun, on the hottest day of the year.
I set the staff’s foot on it.
The rings rang, out over the harbor. The frost let go of the fish all at once, the way a held breath goes, and it was just a tuna, thawing in a puddle, with the gulls already looking at it.
* * *
The freezer-room door was frozen shut. I tore it off its hinges.
There were three of them inside, on the floor of a steel room glazed with white, among racks of frozen tuna. The man in the woolen hat was sitting against the wall with his arms around himself. The other two were lying down.
They’d been lying down for some time.
I carried all three of them out into the sun, one after another, and laid them on the quay by the fire engines. The paramedics took over. They worked on the two who were lying down for a long time.
Then they stopped working on them.
The man in the woolen hat lived. He sat on the back step of an ambulance wrapped in a silver blanket, shaking, and looked at me.
“It was in the ice,” he said. “It came out of the ice. We were just unloading.”
I had nothing to say to him.
I went home low and slow along the coast, with the sun on my back and the staff warm in my hand, and the change running again in my body like water in a pipe that had been turned back on. I could feel it now that I knew to feel for it. A faint pressure, everywhere, all the time I was changed, like a hand on the small of my back.
I felt it all the way home.
I’d known it would happen. I’d done it anyway.
Somewhere over Tsujido, with the sea flashing under me and my hair streaming out behind, I made myself say the true thing, once, in my head, all the way to the end.
It wasn’t the flying I’d missed for twenty days, or the strength, or any of it.
I’d missed being her.
When I came down on our balcony, Mom was there. She was standing at the rail in her work fleece, home early, with her phone in her hand and Kohaku sitting on the rail beside her. She’d watched it on the news. She looked at me, glowing, soaked to the knees with melted ice.
“Kohaku told me,” she said. “Before you’d even got there. She came to the supermarket. She sat on the crushed ice in my fish counter, where nobody else could see her, and told me.”
“I asked her to.”
“Good,” said Mom.
She went inside and put the rice on.
* * *
It went on like that for a week.
There were more of them now. Not big ones, like the crab or the block. Small ones. A thing made of shopping carts in a parking lot in Tamanawa at two in the morning. A thing made of reeds and mud in the Kashio River, behind the station. A thing in the ponds at the Flower Center that took the koi. Every one of them was Kohaku’s three things: something to hold on by, a shape it had seen, and whatever was nearest. I got quick at finding the first. All of them close. Most of them close enough that I could have walked. The police couldn’t do anything about any of them except put up tape and move people back and wait for the girl in red and white.
I went to all of them. Kohaku told Mom every time, before I went, and Mom said “Good,” and put the rice on.
My hair started growing again.
* * *
On the second of August, the government set up an office.
It was on the evening news, the main story. The Cabinet had established a new office, the Object Kaiju Response Office, to coordinate the government’s response to what the newsreader called the ongoing situation in Kanagawa Prefecture. There was a press conference at the Prime Minister’s residence. A man in a gray suit stood at a lectern in front of a blue curtain with a row of flags behind him.
His name was Mukai Sadao. He was fifty-eight, the caption said, a former senior official at the Ministry of Land, now the head of the new office. He had thin gray hair and a tired, careful face and big reading glasses he kept taking off and putting back on. He read out a statement about cooperation between agencies and public safety and the importance of calm.
Then he took off his glasses, and put them on the lectern, and came around from behind it.
He stood in front of the lectern, in front of the cameras, and bowed. A deep bow, from the waist. He held it while the cameras clicked.
“We ask,” he said, when he straightened up, “the person known as Miko-chan to contact us.”
The room full of journalists went quiet.
“We know that you have saved many lives,” said Mukai. “We know that you have done it alone, and without any help from us. We are sorry for that. We would like to help you. We would like to understand what is happening. Please. We ask you to contact us.”
He bowed again.
In our kitchen, Mom put down her chopsticks.
“Well,” said Mio, “he’s polite.”
* * *
“You can’t call them from here,” said Mio, that night. “Or from your phone. They’ll trace it in about five seconds.”
We were in her room with the door shut, the three of us, and Kohaku. Mio was sitting on her bed with her laptop. Mom was in the desk chair with her arms folded. I was on the floor.
“I’m not calling them,” I said.
“You’re thinking about it.”
I was thinking about it. I’d been thinking about it since the press conference. I’d been thinking about the carts, the reeds and the koi ponds. I’d been thinking about the two men on the floor of the freezer room, and how many more there would be, and the fact that I couldn’t be everywhere. Read the latest chapters at NovelPing.
“I’d call him,” I said. “Not them. Him.”
I took Nishikawa’s card out of my wallet.
Mom looked at it. She didn’t take it from me.
“There’s a payphone,” said Mio, “outside the post office by the station. Nobody uses it. It still works. I used it in high school to call a boy I liked.” She looked at Mom. “Don’t look at me like that. I was fifteen.”
* * *
He answered on the second ring.
I was in the phone booth outside the post office a little before midnight, with a hundred-yen coin in the slot, my light turned right down and the hood of my jacket up over everything, and Mio standing outside with her back to the glass, keeping watch. Before I dialed I’d gone around the back of the post office, where the garbage cans are, and said the word into the dark. I didn’t want him to hear my real voice.
“Nishikawa.”
“It’s me,” I said. “From Ofuna. From the beach. You gave me your card.”
There was a silence on the line.
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
“I want to talk to the man on television. The one who bowed.”
Another silence. I heard him breathe out.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me where.”
* * *
We met on the roof of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police headquarters building in Yokohama, at one in the morning on the fifth of August.
It was Nishikawa’s idea. There was a helipad up there, a flat square of concrete marked with a big H, surrounded by railings, with the lights of Yokohama harbor all around it and the big Ferris wheel standing still in the distance.
I came down out of the dark onto the edge of the helipad with my light turned up enough for them to see me. Not all the way. Enough.
There were three of them waiting.
Nishikawa, in his crumpled suit, with his hands in his pockets. Mukai, in his gray suit, with his glasses on. And a woman in her thirties I didn’t know, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, holding a tablet against her chest. She had short hair and a sharp, thin face, and she was staring at me with an expression of intense, almost greedy interest, the way Mio looks at a new kind of hair.
“Thank you for coming,” said Mukai. He bowed again. “I’m Mukai. This is Dr. Endo, from my office. And I believe you know Inspector Nishikawa.”
“Yes.”
“May I ask your name?”
“No.”
He nodded. He’d expected that. “Your age?”
“No.”
He looked at me for a long moment then, at how small I was, the top of my head somewhere around the middle of his tie. Something went out of his face.
“You’re a child,” he said.
“I’m older than I look.”
“I hope so,” said Mukai.
“She’s a civilian,” said Nishikawa.
He hadn’t taken his hands out of his pockets.
“A volunteer. She doesn’t work for us. She doesn’t take orders from us. She came here because she chose to. I want that clear at the start.”
Mukai looked at him. “You trust her a great deal, Inspector.”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
Nishikawa was quiet for a moment. He looked at me, standing at the edge of the helipad in the light.
“At Ofuna,” he said, “after it was over, she went around the back of the bicycle parking and threw up. On her own. In the dark, where she thought nobody could see.” He turned to Mukai. “I’ve seen a lot of things in thirty years. I’ve never seen anything that enjoys killing do that.”
Mukai looked at me again, differently.
* * *
They didn’t ask much more.
They told me what they could. That there had been more of the things since April than the news had reported. That they all came from the sea, or near it. That the Self-Defense Forces could slow them down and couldn’t stop them. That they didn’t know what they were or where they came from, and that they wanted to.
Mukai gave me a phone. It was a plain black smartphone with nothing on it but one number.
“If there is an event,” he said, “we’ll call you. We’ll tell you where. You can choose whether to come. That’s all. The location tracking is switched off.” He paused. “I’d like you to trust us that it is.”
I took the phone. I didn’t say anything about trust.
Dr. Endo had been tapping at her tablet the whole time. Now she looked up.
“When did you first see one?” she asked.
“The twenty-second of April,” I said. “At Ofuna.”
She wrote that down. She didn’t ask anything else, and I didn’t tell her anything else. I didn’t tell her about the ringing.
It didn’t seem to matter then.
* * *
When I got home it was nearly three.
Mom was up. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe with a cup of tea gone cold, and the kitchen television was on with the sound low.
It was the weather. A satellite map of the Pacific, and a white swirl on it, far to the south, with a dotted line curving up out of it toward Japan and then curving away again, out to sea, past the coast.
“Typhoon,” said Mom. “Number nine. They say it’ll pass offshore. Next week.”
I sat down across from her and put the black phone on the table between us. She looked at it. She didn’t touch it.
On the screen the white swirl turned slowly, and the dotted line curved away east, out into the empty ocean.
“That one’s going out to sea,” said Mom.