Nishikawa came to the apartment on the second Sunday in September, at ten in the morning, in his crumpled suit, carrying a cardboard folder.
I opened the door. I didn’t know it was him. I’d thought it was the man from the gas company, who’d been coming around all week about the meters, and I opened it in my pajama shorts and an old T-shirt of Mio’s with my hair in a clip.
He looked at me.
He’d only ever seen me changed, in the light, at a distance or on a rooftop at night. He’d never seen me like this, in a doorway on the fourth floor of an apartment building in Ofuna, at sixteen, with bare feet and sleep in my eyes. He was a big man. I came up to somewhere around his chest.
For a moment he was silent.
Then he bowed, a small, careful bow, the way you do at someone’s front door.
“Asakura-san,” he said. “May I come in? I need to talk to your mother.”
* * *
Mom made tea.
Nishikawa sat at the kitchen table with his folder in front of him and his hands flat on top of it, and didn’t open it until she’d sat down. Mio stood against the counter with her arms folded. I sat at the end of the table. Kohaku was on top of the fridge and stayed invisible, which for Kohaku took a lot of effort. I could see her tail moving.
“You left the phone on,” said Nishikawa to me.
“What?”
“The night of the Kite. You came home and slept with it switched on.” He said it gently. “The location tracking was off. Mukai meant that. But the phone still talks to the masts, and the masts keep records, and Dr. Endo asked for the records on the fifteenth of August.” He opened the folder. “By the sixteenth she had this address.”
He took out a sheet of paper and put it on the table between us.
It was a photocopy of a household register. Our household. I’d never seen it written down before. Asakura Megumi, head of household, with her date of birth. Asakura Mio, daughter.
And under that a third line.
“And a son,” said Nishikawa.
He didn’t read the name out. He looked at me, at the end of the table, for about a second. Then he turned the sheet over, face down, and put his hand on it.
“Withdrawn from Wakamiya High School in July,” he said, “on health grounds.”
Mom said nothing. She’d put her tea down.
* * *
The next sheet was a map.
It was a map of the coast from Yokohama to Odawara, printed in color, with the sea in pale blue and the land in gray. There were fifteen red dots on it. I knew where they were without reading the labels: Ofuna, Yuigahama, Katase, Zaimokuza, Wakamiya High, Chigasaki, Tamanawa, the Kashio River, the Flower Center, Hiratsuka, and some others I’d almost forgotten.
Around every red dot was a thin blue circle. The circles were all the same size.
“Three kilometers,” said Nishikawa. “Endo’s work. Every event from April to the Kite, and where you were when it started. She worked it out from the sightings, the times, the news footage, the phone records once she had them.” He put his finger on the blue circles, one after another. “Thirteen out of fifteen began within three kilometers of you. The two that didn’t were the block at Kugenuma, six kilometers from your bed, and Chigasaki, twelve.” He took his hand away. “She ran it a hundred different ways. It holds.”
I looked at the circles.
Ofuna station. I’d been buying fried chicken. Wakamiya High. I’d been in a lesson. Tamanawa, two in the morning: I’d been asleep in my bed, a kilometer away. Hiratsuka. I’d been eating squid.
“They come to me,” I said.
“That’s what the Office thinks.” Nishikawa’s voice was level. “Some of them think worse. That they don’t come to you. That you make them. That whatever’s in that bracelet is pulling them up out of the sea, or turning things into them, and the more you use it, the more there are.” He looked at me. “There were two in April. This summer there’s been one nearly every week.”
“That’s only because,” I said, and stopped.
I didn’t know what it was because of.
“Mukai doesn’t think you’re doing it on purpose,” said Nishikawa. “He’s not a cruel man. He thinks you’re a lightning rod. A sixteen-year-old lightning rod, in the middle of the most crowded stretch of coast in the world. Nine million people in this prefecture alone.” He took a breath. “So he has a proposal.”
* * *
The proposal was an island.
Iwo To. Twelve hundred kilometers south, in the Pacific, a long way past the end of everything. There was a base there, Nishikawa said, with a runway, some buildings and a few hundred Self-Defense Force personnel on rotation. There were no civilians and no towns. Nobody had been allowed to live there since the war.
“Housing for the three of you,” he said. “Medical care. Schooling, for you, if you want it. Pay for your mother and your sister, compensation for their jobs. Full protection.” He looked at the table. “And if they keep coming to you there, they come to an island with nobody on it but soldiers. And if they stop coming here…”
“Then we know,” said Mom.
“Then we know,” said Nishikawa.
Nobody said anything.
“I’m not asking you to say yes,” said Nishikawa. “I’m here because Mukai asked me to bring it, and because I’d rather you heard it from me than from a man in a suit you’ve never met. You can say no. For now.” He paused. “For now, they’re asking.”
* * *
“No,” I said.
They all looked at me.
“They were coming before I had it.” I was holding the edge of the table. “Before the bracelet. Something was coming before I ever put it on. I heard it. For a week before. That’s why I went up into the hills. It was calling me, because something was already coming.”
“Heard what?” said Nishikawa.
“I can’t explain it.”
He took his time looking at me.
“I believe you,” he said. “I’ve believed you since Ofuna. But I can’t take that to Mukai. I can’t take she heard something to a man with a map.” He put his hand on the folder. “Endo will want a number. You haven’t got a number. She has.”
“Then I’m not going.”
“Puella,” said Mio.
I turned around. She was still against the counter with her arms folded. Her face was white.
“Think about it,” she said. “Just think about it for one second. An island. No people on it. Nobody to die. Nobody to drop off a ray, or get pulled into a river, or…” She stopped. “And you’d be safe. We’d be together. We’d all be there. You’d be safe.”
“And if they keep coming here anyway?”
“Then the army can…”
“The army can’t stop them. You’ve seen it. Nobody can stop them but me.” I was standing up now. I didn’t remember standing. “If I go to an island and they keep coming here, who’s here? Who’s on the beach at Hiratsuka?”
It came out of her far too loud.
Nishikawa looked down at his folder. Kohaku’s tail went still on top of the fridge.
“I don’t,” said Mio. Her voice was shaking. “I’m sorry. I know that’s horrible. I don’t care. I care about you. I’ve been lying to Mom for you since June. I’ve done your eyebrows. I’ve covered for you. I’ve sat up waiting for you to come back through that window every single night. I sat on a bus from Hiratsuka watching the news on my phone, not knowing if you were alive, and I’m done.”
She was crying again. She was furious about it.
“I’m done. Take the island. Please. Take the island.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“I’m your sister.”
“Then be my sister,” I said. “Don’t be the government.”
Mio went white. She looked at me like I’d hit her.
Mom spoke.
“She said no.”
That was all. She didn’t look at Mio. She didn’t look at me. She picked up her tea, which must have been cold by then, and drank some of it, and put it down.
Mio stared at her. Then she pushed herself off the counter and walked out of the kitchen.
Her door didn’t slam. She shut it quietly.
Nishikawa put the map back in his folder. He put the household register in after it, still face down.
“I’ll tell him,” he said. He stood up and bowed to Mom. “Thank you for the tea.”
At the door, he stopped and turned around.
“For what it’s worth,” he said to me, “I’d have said no too.”
* * *
Mio didn’t speak to me for six days.
She spoke to Mom. She spoke to Kohaku, and left her a bit of fish. She went to college and the salon and came home and went into her room. When we passed in the corridor she looked at the wall. On the third night I heard her crying through the wall, and I lay there and didn’t go in, and she didn’t come out.
On the sixth day, Saturday, the eighteenth of September, the black phone rang at half past three in the afternoon.
“Yokohama,” said Nishikawa. “The harbor. It’s bad.” A pause. “It’s hard to describe. You’ll see. I’m sorry.”
Mio was in the kitchen doorway. She’d heard. Neither of us spoke. She stood aside to let me past.
On the roof I took the sweatband off and said the word.
* * *
It came up out of Yokohama harbor by the big Ferris wheel and walked into Minato Mirai.
I could see it from the air before I got there, coming in over the hills from the south. Minato Mirai is the new part of Yokohama on the waterfront, all glass towers, hotels and a shopping center. The old red-brick warehouses are on one side, with Osanbashi pier sticking out into the harbor, and Landmark Tower stands over everything, nearly three hundred meters tall. The Ferris wheel stands in the middle of it, by the water. On a Saturday afternoon in September, it was full of people.
The thing was standing in the water beside the Ferris wheel, up to its knees.
It was forty meters tall. It was a girl.
It was me.
It had my shape exactly, the shape of a small girl, made huge. It had my long hair, pink, all the way down its back. It had a white top with wide sleeves, a gold cord crossed at the back, and red hakama, and a pale over-robe hanging off its shoulders. It had white boots. It had my face, with gold eyes. Its right arm was raised, and in its right hand it held a long dark pole that dripped. It stood in the harbor with the water swirling around its knees, and it looked down at the crowds on the waterfront, and the crowds looked up at it.
Some of them were waving.
They thought it was me.
It didn’t glow. That was the only difference. It had my shape and my face and my colors, and it didn’t have any light at all. It was flat and dull, like a photograph of me printed on wet cardboard. In the afternoon sun it looked almost real.
It stepped out of the harbor onto the waterfront.
* * *
I came down between it and the crowd.
The crowd was right there, hundreds of them, on the wide promenade along the water, holding up their phones. Some of them were still waving. Then they saw me come down, glowing, and they looked from me to the thing, and back, and the waving stopped.
The thing looked at me.
It moved when I moved. I lifted my hand, and it lifted its hand. I turned my head, and it turned its head.
A bus was parked at the edge of the promenade, a tourist coach, with people climbing out of it. I got my hands under the front of it and lifted it, to put it between the thing and the people.
The thing reached down and took hold of a bus too.
A city bus, red and white, at the stop by the Ferris wheel, with people in it. It lifted it exactly the way I’d lifted mine, at exactly the same moment.
Then it threw it.
The bus went end over end across the promenade, into the crowd.
I dropped my coach and went after the bus. I threw a floor of light under it a meter from the ground, and it came down on the light upside down, with the people inside it screaming, and I let it down onto its side.
Behind me, the thing had caught somebody too.
A woman. It had copied my catch. It had reached out its hand and caught a woman out of the crowd, the way I’d caught the bus.
And it closed its hand.
* * *
I attacked it.
I flew at it with everything, straight at its face, and it came at me with its face, the same speed, the same angle. We met over the promenade in a crash of light and mud. It was cold and wet and heavy where I hit it. It felt like hitting a sandbank. I knocked it back a step, and it knocked me back a step, and the step it took went through the end of one of the red-brick warehouses. The roof came down. People were running out of the other end of it.
I went for it.
I swung the staff into its knee as hard as I’d ever swung anything, and the knee burst into harbor mud, and it swung its own dripping pole into me at the same moment, the same arc, and knocked me across the promenade into a lamp post. I came up and hit it again. A leg went. It stood with its other foot in the water and pulled the harbor up into itself. The leg came back, mud, silt and black water, as fast as I could break it.
I put the staff’s foot against its side and pushed the light in, and the light went into nothing. It spread through all that mud looking for somewhere to hold, and there wasn’t anywhere I could find, not in a body wearing my outline so exactly.
And every time I got close enough to touch it, I’d brought it closer to the crowd. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
I pulled back. I put up a wall of light along the promenade, between it and the people, from the Ferris wheel to the warehouses. It put its hand up, at exactly the same moment, exactly the way I had. Nothing came out of its hand. My wall stood there, and it walked around the end of it.
I tried to get the people off the promenade instead. I slid a floor of light under a group of children and lifted them up onto the roof of the shopping center.
The thing lifted a group off the promenade too.
It didn’t set them down.
* * *
I stopped.
I didn’t decide to. I just stopped, in the air over the harbor, a hundred meters up, with my hands at my sides.
The thing stopped.
It stood on the waterfront with its hands at its sides and looked up at me. Everything had gone quiet. The helicopters were still going around. Down below people were running, and screaming, and there were sirens. But the thing had stopped, and I’d stopped, and we looked at each other.
“Hana,” said Kohaku, behind me.
She was on top of the Ferris wheel. She’d come on my shoulder, the way she does on long flights, and jumped off onto the wheel when I went down. She was sitting on the top of the highest car, a small gray cat, a long way up.
“Hana,” she said again. “It’s wearing you. It’s not you. Don’t look at what it looks like. Watch what it does.”
So I looked at it.
I looked at my own shape. I didn’t look at the faucet. I didn’t look at the floor of the train, or the ceiling of the fitting room, or my lashes in the little mirror in the lid of Mio’s case. I looked at my face, forty meters tall, and I kept looking.
It was a girl’s face, with gold eyes, a bit serious, a bit tired. It wasn’t ugly. I’d thought for five years that if I looked, whatever I saw would be something I couldn’t bear, and I looked, and it was just a girl’s face, a girl about sixteen, standing on a waterfront looking up.
It was my face on a monster.
And it was my face.
I watched what it did.
It didn’t glow. It had everything I had except the light. It hadn’t caught anything, really. It had copied the shape of catching. When I’d put up a wall, it had put up its hand, and nothing had come out of it, because there was nothing in it to come out. It had copied the shape of everything I did without any of what was inside it.
And it hadn’t left the ground.
Not once. It had stood in the harbor and walked on the promenade and gone through the end of a warehouse. When I’d gone up into the air, it hadn’t come up after me. It had stood with its feet on the ground and reached. It had never once gone up.
It had my shape. It didn’t have the bracelet.
It couldn’t fly.
Think up, the cat had said, in the cave, in April. It’s the easiest one.
* * *
I went up.
I went straight up, slowly, so it could see me, and turned toward Landmark Tower.
The thing turned with me. It walked across the waterfront toward the tower, under me, as I flew. When I got to the tower, I came down on the roof, on the flat top of it, three hundred meters up, beside the helipad, with the whole of Yokohama spread out below and the wind pulling at my hair.
The thing came to the bottom of the tower.
It looked up at me. It couldn’t come up into the air. So it did the only thing it could with the shape of what I’d done.
It put its hands on the side of the tower, and it climbed.
It climbed the way I’d seen nothing climb, hand over hand up the glass, forty meters of mud and harbor water, with the windows breaking under its hands. People in the offices inside were running away from the windows. It climbed past the hotel floors. It climbed past the observation deck. It came up over the edge of the roof, onto the top of the tower, and stood up, facing me.
We stood on top of Landmark Tower, three hundred meters up, me and my own shape, and looked at each other in the wind.
I stepped off the edge.
I stepped off backward into the air, and hung there, glowing, beside the tower, over the long drop to the harbor.
The thing stepped off after me.
It did exactly what I’d done. It stepped off the edge backward, with its arms out the way mine were, and its face looking at mine.
For a moment it hung there too, beside me, at the top of the sky.
Then it fell.
It fell three hundred meters down the side of the tower, without a sound, with its hair streaming up and its gold eyes on me the whole way. It hit the dock at the foot of the tower beside the old sailing ship, and broke. It came apart into mud and water and silt, all across the dock, a great gray splash of the bottom of the harbor, and lay there.
* * *
Thirty-eight people. That was the number.
When I got home, the kitchen television was on, with the sound low.
Mom was at the table. Mio was at the table too. They were sitting next to each other, close, and Mio had her hand on Mom’s arm. They’d been watching it the whole time. They were still watching it. The news had the footage over and over, from every angle, clear as anything, sharp in the afternoon sun.
It looked exactly like me on camera. Every clip since April had shown my face, and this was the same face, sharp in the afternoon sun. The only difference was the light, and on a phone screen, in daylight, you couldn’t tell. It was a forty-meter girl with pink hair, gold eyes and red hakama, lifting a bus and throwing it into a crowd. She closed her hand on a woman. She lifted children off a promenade and didn’t put them down.
Underneath, the caption said MIKO-CHAN ATTACKS YOKOHAMA.
Mio looked around at me. Her eyes were red.
She didn’t say anything about the island. She got up from the table and came over and put her arms around me, hard, in the kitchen doorway, by the pencil marks. She had to bend down a little to do it now.
She held on.
* * *
On Monday morning, from the balcony, I watched a woman by the bus stop at the bottom of the hill take a pink nylon wig off her little girl’s head.
The girl was about five. She was in a white top and a red pleated skirt from the hundred-yen shop. She’d been holding her mother’s hand and swinging it.
Her mother took the wig off, without a word, and the starry cape after it, there in the street, and put them both in the trash can by the bus stop. The girl stood on the sidewalk in her tank top and shorts and cried. Her mother picked her up and got on the bus.
I went inside and shut the balcony door.