By Thursday, Kohaku had worked out the hours of every convenience store within a kilometer of our building, and which ones kept fried chicken in the warmer after nine.
“The one by the station,” she said. She was lying on my math homework. “The others sell out. The one by the station has a girl who puts more in at half past nine. I’ve watched her.”
“It’s twenty to ten.”
“So it’s fresh.” She looked at me without blinking. “You did say you’d look after me.”
“I never said that.”
“You said it with your face.”
So at twenty to ten on a Thursday night I put on my jacket, told Mio I was going to buy a drink, and walked down the hill to Ofuna station with a cat that nobody else could see trotting at my heels.
* * *
Ofuna at night is busy in a tired way.
The station sits in the middle of a tangle of railway lines, and on the west side there’s a long pedestrian deck that runs out from the ticket gates over the bus rotary, so people can get to the buses without crossing the road. Under the deck, in the shadow of its concrete pillars, is the bicycle parking, hundreds of bikes packed into racks. Along the far edge of all of it runs the Kashio River in its deep concrete channel, black at night, with a railing along the top and a flight of steps going down to the water near the end of the deck.
Above everything, on her hill, the Ofuna Kannon was lit up white against the dark.
The convenience store is at the bottom of the deck stairs. I bought two pieces of chicken from the girl at the warmer, who smiled at me as if she understood, and came out with the paper bag warm in my hand. The ten o’clock rush hadn’t started yet. A few people were coming down the deck stairs from the station with their ties loose, and a woman in a gray coat was unlocking her bicycle under the deck, and two high-school boys were sitting on the railing by the river, eating ice cream and filming each other.
The station jingle played for a train coming in on platform five. Somewhere a bus was reversing and beeping.
Kohaku stopped walking.
She stood on the sidewalk with one paw lifted, looking toward the river. Her ears were flat against her head.
“What?” I said.
The cuff went warm on my wrist. The warmth it always had was stronger now, a pull, faint but definite, like a hand on my sleeve drawing me toward the railing.
“Kohaku. What?”
“Oh,” said Kohaku very quietly. “Oh, not yet. Not this soon.”
* * *
The river moved.
I saw it from where I was standing, at the bottom of the deck stairs, maybe forty meters away. The black water in the channel heaved up as if something very large had rolled over underneath it. Then a shape came up out of it, over the top of the steps, wet and dark and wrong, and climbed onto the concrete at the edge of the bicycle parking.
It was the size of a small car when it came out of the water.
It didn’t stay that size.
It walked into the bicycle racks, and the bicycles went to it. They came off the racks with a noise like a hundred shopping carts being pushed together, frames, wheels and handlebars sliding and tangling and locking into each other. The shape grew. It grew legs. It grew a back, wide and flat and plated with bicycle frames. It grew two long arms that ended in claws made of handlebars and chains. Wheels turned in its joints when it moved, spinning slowly, ticking.
By the time it had finished it was the size of a bus. It looked like a crab. It looked like something that had heard about crabs and had a go.
It made no sound of its own. The bicycles clattered and the wheels ticked, but the thing itself was silent, completely silent, the way a picture is silent.
The woman in the gray coat was standing with her key in her bicycle lock, looking at it.
One of the claws came down on the rack beside her, gathering bicycles, and took hers, and she was still holding it.
She didn’t scream at first. She made a small surprised sound, as if she had missed a step. Then the claw lifted her off her feet and the crab began to walk backward toward the river, sideways and backward, the way crabs go, with its wheels ticking.
That was when she screamed.
The two boys on the railing dropped their ice creams and ran. Someone up on the deck shouted. A car alarm went off in the rotary.
A man came out from between the racks at a run. He was in his fifties, heavy, in a crumpled suit with no tie, and he threw himself at the woman and got hold of her by the wrist and hung on. The crab kept walking. He was dragged along the concrete toward the steps, on his knees, holding her wrist in both hands, shouting at her to hold on.
Her other arm was caught in a tangle of handlebars. I could see it from the stairs. The claw had her around the waist and the handlebars had her arm, and the man had her wrist, and the river was ten meters away.
The other claw swept along the racks by the deck stairs, gathering bicycles, and the people standing among them went with the bicycles: a boy in a school blazer, an old man with a shopping bag. It went back to the river with all of it, and down the steps into the black water.
It came up again without them.
“Kohaku,” I said.
“Go,” said Kohaku. “Go around the pillar. Don’t let anyone see.”
* * *
I went around the pillar.
There was a corner in the shadow of the deck, behind the stairs, where the light from the station didn’t reach. I dropped the chicken. I pulled the sweatband off and shoved it in my pocket.
“Transform,” I said to the concrete, so fast it barely came out.
The seam lit. Heat ran from my wrist to my ribs. My hair came down, my clothes went, and the cuff ran off my wrist into my right hand and lengthened into cold iron, and then weighed nothing. I was standing behind the stairs of Ofuna station in red and white with light coming off my hands.
I went up.
I didn’t think about it. The ground let go of me and I was over the racks in two seconds, looking down at the crab’s flat back, at the woman in the gray coat and the man in the crumpled suit still hanging on to her wrist.
I dropped in front of it, got both hands under the edge of its shell, and lifted.
I came up to about the top of its leg. It was like trying to lift a house. The weight came into me through my arms and my back and down into my knees, a weight I could feel in my spine. The crab rose a meter off the concrete. Its legs scrabbled in the air. The note in the staff went up and up into a thin whine.
Then my knees went, and the crab came down, and I went down under the edge of it onto the concrete, and there was blood running out of my nose.
It stopped running almost at once. I wiped my face with my sleeve. The sleeve came away clean.
“Not the whole thing!” Kohaku, from somewhere behind me. “You can’t. Not yet.”
The claw with the woman in it was still moving toward the river. I rolled out from under the shell and came up with the staff in both hands and swung it at the claw as hard as I could.
I had never swung anything at anything in my life.
The claw burst.
It didn’t break. It burst, like a bag of shopping dropped from a height. Bicycles went everywhere. A front wheel bounced across the rotary and over a taxi. Handlebars and frames rang off the pillars and skidded across the concrete. The woman dropped out of the middle of it onto her back, and the man in the suit dragged her by the wrist away from the steps, still shouting.
For about a second I felt wonderful.
Then the crab leaned over toward the racks, and more bicycles came off them and climbed into the stump of its arm, and the claw was whole again.
It took four seconds.
I hit a leg, and the leg went into pieces and grew back out of the racks before the pieces had stopped rolling. I hit it again. The racks under the deck were nearly empty now.
It didn’t matter.
There was a sound coming from the streets.
A ticking, everywhere at once, getting closer. Bicycles were coming. They came down the hill from the shopping street with nobody on them, wheels spinning, pedals going around on their own. They came across the rotary through a red light, between the stopped taxis. They came off the racks outside the supermarket and the cram school and the apartments. The ones that were locked came anyway, dragging their chains and bits of railing behind them, sparking on the road. A man pushing his bicycle across the deck had it wrenched out of his hands, and he stood and watched it roll away down the stairs toward the thing that wanted it.
Every bicycle in Ofuna was coming to it, like filings to a magnet.
I could break it all night. It would never run out.
I put the iron foot of the staff against its back and pushed the light into it, the way I’d held it in my palm in my bedroom, as hard as I could. The light ran out over the frames and did nothing. It scorched the paint. It made the chrome smoke. It was like pushing on a locked door.
* * *
It turned toward me then.
It stopped. The front of it, the part that wasn’t a face, swung around to me, the way a compass needle swings around to north. It had nothing to look with. It didn’t need to. I was the brightest thing under that deck, and every frame in it had turned to face me.
It dropped the rest of what it had been carrying, a bicycle with a man’s coat caught in the spokes, and the coat was empty.
Then it came toward me.
All its wheels turned at once, spinning, ticking, and somewhere inside the mass of frames a bicycle bell rang, once, a bright little ring like a child coming down a hill. It came across the parking toward me sideways, fast, faster than anything that size should move, and it came up the stairs of the deck after me as I went up them, and the stairs cracked under it.
I went over the railing at the top and dropped behind one of the deck’s concrete pillars, and the crab hit the pillar, and the whole deck shook. Dust came down. Up on the deck people were running for the ticket gates. Somebody was filming.
Somebody is always filming.
Kohaku was on the pillar above me. I didn’t see her get there.
“Where’s it holding on?” she said.
She said it brightly, the way a quiz host asks the easy question at the start of the show.
“What?”
“Where’s it holding on? Don’t hit it. Look at it.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I looked anyway, around the edge of the pillar, at the thing on the stairs.
It was all frames and wheels and chains, and it was changing all the time. Every time it leaned on a rail or scraped a pillar, bits of it fell off and other bits climbed on, so that it was never the same crab two seconds running. The bicycles in its back on the way up the stairs weren’t the ones that had been there at the bottom.
The bell rang again.
It was a tiny bell, a child’s bell, and I knew where I’d heard it. I’d heard it three days ago, under this deck, when Shun knocked it with his elbow.
And I thought, for no reason, of Mio at the kitchen table on Sunday, with a head full of pinned curls, showing me the one pin at the back.
This one’s the anchor. Pull it and the whole thing comes down.
I looked for the bell.
It was in the middle of the crab’s back, wedged deep among all the others: the small red bicycle from the rack, with its white basket and its ladybug bell. While I watched, the crab rebuilt a whole leg out of the racks. Its back heaved and shifted and took in a dozen new frames, and everything around the red bicycle changed.
The red bicycle didn’t. It hadn’t moved at all.
The crab drew back from the pillar to hit it again.
I went over the railing, onto its back.
It was a heap of scrap, and it was trying to throw me off. Wheels spun under my boots. Something with pedals caught at my hakama. I got one hand on a crossbar and found my feet, and the red bicycle was right there in front of me, with the ladybug bell trembling on its handlebars.
I turned the staff around in my hands so that the pointed iron foot was down, and I drove it straight through the white basket into the frame underneath.
The rings rang.
I’d never heard them do that. They’d clinked before, like keys. This was different. It was a clean, high sound, like a lot of small bells all struck at once, and it came out of the top of the staff as the light went down it into the bicycle. I felt the light go in. It was like a key turning in a lock, a soft, definite give, all the way down.
The crab let go.
It didn’t fall apart. It stopped being a crab. Every bicycle it had pulled in came down the stairs of Ofuna station all at once, an avalanche of them. Frames, wheels and handlebars slid, bounced and poured down the steps and out across the concrete. I went down with them, with my staff still stuck in the red one. They spread out across the whole parking, right up to the railing over the river, and stopped.
Out in the streets, the ones that were still on their way fell over where they were. In the road, against shop shutters, in the middle of crossings, all the way up the hill, with their wheels still turning.
The noise went on long after they’d stopped moving. Then it was only the car alarm in the rotary.
At the bottom of the stairs, on its side among all the others, the red bicycle’s front wheel was still turning, slowly, and the little bell rang once more on its own.
* * *
It was quiet for a moment after that, apart from the car alarm.
Then people started crying.
The woman in the gray coat was sitting at the top of the river steps with her knees up and her arms around them, shaking. Her sleeve was torn off at the shoulder. The man in the suit was kneeling beside her with one hand on her back.
On the steps going down to the water there was a shoe.
It was a woman’s black work shoe, standing upright on the third step as if someone had just stepped out of it. Further down, on the wet concrete at the edge of the water, there was a supermarket bag with a carton of milk in it. At the very bottom, half in the river, there was a primary-school backpack, the hard leather kind, red, with a little reflective tag hanging off it.
I looked at the backpack for a long time. I couldn’t make myself look away from it.
Later the news would say nine people. I didn’t count them. I didn’t see most of them go. I only saw the boy in the blazer and the old man with the bag, and the backpack, and the backpack was the one I kept seeing.
The man in the suit got up off his knees.
He came toward me across the parking, slowly, the way you’d walk toward a deer. His suit was torn and his pants were black with oil from the knees down. He had a tired, lined face and gray hair cut very short.
He stopped a few meters away. He was a big man, and he had to look down a long way to look at me, the way grown-ups look at a child who has gotten lost in a store.
“Who are you?” he said.
I don’t know what my face did. I didn’t have an answer that would fit in my mouth.
So I went up.
The concrete let go of me. I went straight up past the deck and the station roof into the dark, and I didn’t look down until Ofuna was small.
* * *
I didn’t go far.
I came down again a little way along the river, behind the far end of the bicycle parking, in the narrow gap between the racks and the river wall where the broken ones were piled, out of the light. I meant to let go of the transformation there and walk home.
Instead I was sick.
I leaned on the wall with both hands and threw up everything I’d eaten that day onto the wet concrete, and then kept being sick after there was nothing left, with my long pink hair hanging down on either side of my face and my light shining on the mess. My whole body was shaking. I couldn’t stop it.
Below the wall, in the black water of the river, a girl was looking up at me with her hair hanging down around her face. She was about to cry.
It took me a second to understand that it was me.
When I finally straightened up and wiped my mouth, there was someone standing at the end of the gap.
It was the man in the suit. He was standing at the corner of the river wall, maybe twenty meters away, with his hand on the stone, watching me. He didn’t come any closer. He didn’t call out. He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, and then he looked away, at the river, as if he’d decided I should have some privacy.
I went up again, fast, before he could change his mind.
* * *
I let go on the roof of a parking garage two streets farther on.
The light dropped off me. I was myself again, in my jacket and jeans, on my knees on the concrete with the sound of sirens coming from every direction at once.
Kohaku was there. She came and sat beside me.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
“There was a backpack,” I said eventually.
“I know.”
“A kid’s backpack.”
“I know,” said Kohaku. “I saw.”
I looked at my hands. There was nothing on them, but they smelled of cold iron, like the staff.
“You knew,” I said. “In front of the convenience store. You said not yet. You knew that was going to happen.”
Kohaku looked out over the edge of the garage toward the station, where the blue lights were. Her tail was wrapped around her paws.
“I knew something would,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be so soon. It’s never been so soon.”
“What was it?”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. I promise. Not tonight.”
“I was sick,” I said. “Back there. He saw.”
Kohaku didn’t answer straight away. When she did, it was in the flat voice from the roof on Tuesday night.
“Hana was sick too, her first time. On her own sandals.”
I waited. She didn’t say who Hana was.
“Do you want the chicken,” she said, brightly, much too brightly, “or shall I have it?”
“I dropped it.”
“You didn’t. It’s in your pocket.”
It was. The paper bag was in my jacket, folded over at the top. I didn’t remember picking it up. I must have gone back for it without knowing.
* * *
I walked home the long way, around the back of the station and up the hill, while police cars and ambulances went screaming past at the bottom of the street. I put the sweatband back on. I kept my hands in my pockets.
At the top of the hill I sat on the wall outside our building, took out a piece and ate all of it, then started on the second.
I was halfway through it before I realized that it was Kohaku’s. She was sitting on the wall beside me, watching me eat it and not saying anything.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right,” said Kohaku. “You’ll be hungry, after. You’ll always be hungry after.”
Upstairs, Mio’s door was shut and Mom’s light was off. The kitchen television was on by itself with the sound low. Mio called through her door, “Did you get your drink?”
“Yes,” I said.
I washed my hands at the kitchen sink with dish soap, looking at the faucet. There was nothing on them. I washed them again anyway.
When I went to bed, Kohaku settled on my feet without a word, and I held my hands up in the streetlight from the window.
I could still feel the staff going in. The soft give of it, all the way down.
Down at the bottom of the hill the sirens went on until after two.