The post went up at ten past nine on Tuesday night, and by midnight it had been shared forty thousand times.
It was a photo taken from a parking lot at night, on a public housing complex near Kugenuma, the kind with long concrete apartment buildings in rows, five stories high, all the same. The blocks had big numbers painted on their ends. You could see 11 and 12. Beside 12 there was another block exactly like it, with the same balconies, the same pipes running down the outside and the same green front door. Its windows were lit.
It had no number on the end.
There are twelve blocks in this complex, the caption said. There have always been twelve. Somebody tell me what this is.
The replies underneath were mostly jokes. Somebody said it was a new government initiative. Somebody said it was a hologram for an advertising campaign. Somebody who said they lived in the complex said that the new block had been there when they got home from work, and that their neighbor from Block 12 had walked into it by mistake in the dark, and hadn’t come back out, and wasn’t answering her phone.
I read that one three times, lying on my bed with my phone over my face.
The cuff was warm. It had been warm all evening, warmer than usual, with a faint steady pull in it, toward the south-west, toward Fujisawa and the sea. I’d felt it at dinner and told myself it was nothing.
“Kohaku,” I said.
She was on the end of the bed. She’d been watching me read.
“I know.”
“It’s one of them.”
“Yes.”
“People are walking into it.” I sat up. “Somebody’s neighbor walked into it and hasn’t come out. I have to go.”
“Watch it first,” said Kohaku.
“What?”
“Go if you’re going. But watch it first. Don’t touch it. Don’t go near it until you know what it does.” She was very still, with her tail around her paws. “Please.”
It had been five days since the Crab.
I’d knocked a bus-sized thing made of bicycles down a flight of stairs with a stick. Nine people had died. I’d been sick behind the racks. For five days I’d been thinking about the nine, and about the moment the rings rang. Under the sick feeling there had been something that kept coming back, hot and bright.
I did that.
I’d won.
“I’ll watch it,” I said.
* * *
I left at half past one, when the house was asleep.
I went up to the roof and took the sweatband off.
I said the word, fast, the way I always did.
The light came off my hands, the staff came into the right one, and I went up into the dark with Kohaku on my shoulder, her claws in the over-robe.
From up there Fujisawa was a spread of orange lights to the south-west, with the black of the sea beyond it. The pull in the staff drew me toward it like a compass. I flew low over the railway lines and the dark roofs, following it, and in ten minutes the complex was below me.
There were police cars at the edge of it, three of them, with their lights going. There was a small crowd behind a line of tape, people in coats over their pajamas. In the middle of the complex, between Block 12 and the parking lot, stood the thirteenth block.
It looked exactly like the others.
That was what was wrong with it. It was the same gray concrete, the same rows of balconies with the same laundry poles, the same rust stains running down from the same pipes. If you’d painted a 13 on the end, nobody would have looked twice.
Every one of its windows was lit.
I came down on the roof of Block 11, across the parking lot, and crouched behind the water tank, and watched.
People were standing in the windows. They were small figures in the yellow squares of light, one in each window, standing still with their hands at their sides. A man in a work shirt. An old woman. A teenage boy in a hoodie. They weren’t moving. They were just standing in the windows of the thirteenth block, looking out.
“Twenty-three,” said Kohaku quietly. She’d counted them.
Down by the tape, a woman was shouting at a policeman, pointing up at one of the windows, and the policeman was holding her back with both arms.
“They’re alive,” I said. “Kohaku, they’re in there.”
“Watch it,” said Kohaku. “You said you’d watch it.”
I watched it for about four minutes.
In those four minutes nobody in the windows moved. The police tried the green front door with a crowbar, and the crowbar slid off it as if the door were painted on the wall, and they stood back and looked at each other.
At two o’clock exactly the thirteenth block stood up.
* * *
It didn’t make a sound.
The ground around its base cracked, and the parking lot buckled, and the whole building rose up out of the earth on legs. They were concrete legs, thick and gray and jointed, coming out from underneath it, four of them, then six, and the block lifted itself up on them until its bottom floor was higher than the roofs of the cars. The people behind the tape screamed and ran. The police cars reversed in a hurry with their sirens going.
Forty meters of concrete stood in the middle of the complex on six legs. Its windows were still lit. The people were standing in them.
Then it began to walk toward the sea.
I didn’t decide to go. I was just going.
I was off the roof of Block 11 and across the parking lot before Kohaku had finished saying my name. She was gone from my shoulder. I was coming at the walking block out of the dark with the staff in both hands and the light pouring off me.
Next to it I was the size of a doll.
I hit it with everything I had.
The staff went into the corner of the block at the second floor, and the corner burst. Concrete blew out of it in lumps the size of washing machines and went down into the parking lot, and there was a hole in the side of the building I could have flown through. For a second it was the Crab again, the bicycles going everywhere, and the hot bright thing came up in my chest.
I did that.
Then the edges of the hole moved.
Gray crept in across it from all sides, the way water closes over a stone, and the corner was a corner again, the same rough concrete, the same rust stain running down from the same pipe.
I came around level with its third floor.
The woman in the window in front of me was waving.
She was about Mom’s age, in a cardigan, and she was waving at me with one hand, slowly, back and forth, the way you’d wave at someone on a platform. Her face was perfectly calm. Her mouth was moving. I couldn’t hear her through the glass.
I put the staff through the window.
The glass went, and the frame with it, and fell away below me onto the road. Behind it there was nothing. There was no room. There was concrete, solid gray concrete, filling the space where the window had been, flat and rough and cold.
The woman was still waving.
She was on the concrete. She was a pattern of light on the surface of it, the shape of a woman in a cardigan, painted in yellow light on solid gray stone, still moving her hand slowly back and forth, still moving her mouth.
I hung there in the air and looked at her, and I understood that there was nobody in there. There had never been anybody in there. The neighbor from Block 12 who had walked in by mistake, and the others, all twenty-three, were gone, and the building was wearing their shapes in its windows the way a shop wears mannequins.
I should have gone back to the roof. I should have done what Kohaku said.
I set the staff’s foot against the wall instead and poured the light into it.
* * *
I gave it all of it, everything I’d pushed into the crab and more.
The light ran out from the foot of the staff across the concrete in white-gold lines, along the cracks, around the window frames, up the wall in a spreading net. The rings didn’t ring. The light ran and ran and found nothing to hold. It was like pushing on a locked door, except that this time there wasn’t even a door, only a wall that went on and on.
The block stopped walking.
It didn’t turn around. It didn’t have a front or a back. It just stopped, with one leg lifted, and turned on me the way the crab had turned, the whole building leaning toward the light I was pouring into it, a pressure from every direction at once.
Then one of its legs came up off the road and hit me.
It was like being hit by a building, because I was. The leg swung up from underneath and caught me across the side and threw me down into the parking lot, and I hit the tarmac between two parked cars so hard that the light on my skin flickered. The staff went out of my hand and rang off a car roof somewhere. I tried to get up.
The leg came down on top of me.
It didn’t stamp. It pressed. It leaned its weight on me slowly, the whole weight of a five-story apartment building, pressing me into the tarmac, and the tarmac cracked under my back, and then something in my chest cracked, and another thing after it. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any air in at all. There was a noise in my head like a glass about to break, the note from the staff, wherever it had gone, so high and thin I could hardly hear it. The light was going out of my hands in flickers, on, off, on, off.
Above me, very far up, the windows were lit, and the people in them were looking down.
I’m going to die, I thought, very clearly.
Then something came out of me that I hadn’t asked for.
It came out of my back and my hands at once, flat, white and hard, between me and the concrete. It was a sheet of light like the one that had cracked under Kohaku in my bedroom, except that this one didn’t crack. The leg pressed down on it and stopped. For about three seconds there was a hand’s width of air between me and forty meters of concrete, and the light was holding it there.
I rolled.
I came out from under the edge of the leg on my side, onto the tarmac, and the light went out behind me, and the leg came down where I had been and went a meter into the ground. I couldn’t see the staff anywhere. I couldn’t breathe properly. I went up anyway, blind, with my ribs grinding, away from the block, away from everything, toward the only place my body seemed to know the way to without me.
Kugenuma beach. The summer I was eight. Wet sand and salt and a red bucket.
I smelled salt. I saw the line of white where the surf was, under me, and I thought I could make it to the sand.
The light went out.
I fell into cold water.
* * *
It was dark.
It was black and freezing and moving. It went over my head. I came up coughing and went under again. A wave picked me up and turned me over. I didn’t know which way was up. My chest was full of broken glass. The light had gone out of my hands. My hair was short. My clothes were heavy jeans and a jacket that dragged me down, and the cuff was back on my wrist, and the note in it had stopped, cracked off into silence, like a string breaking.
I was myself, in the sea at night, with broken ribs, and I couldn’t swim.
I could swim. I’d always been able to swim. I couldn’t do it now. Every time I moved my arms something tore in my side. A wave hit me in the face and I swallowed half of it.
“Haruto!”
Kohaku. She was somewhere above me, on the beach, shouting. I couldn’t see her.
“Haruto! Your feet! Put your feet down!”
I put my feet down.
There was sand under them. I was in water up to my chest, and every wave knocked me over, but there was sand under my feet. I got up, fell, got up again and walked toward Kohaku’s voice with the sea pulling at my legs, bent over, holding my side.
I came out of the surf on my hands and knees and lay on the wet sand at the edge of the water with the waves running up around me and running back.
Kohaku was beside my face. She’d shown herself. She was small and gray and soaked, her fur plastered flat.
“I came after you,” she said. “I’m tied to it. Where you go, I go. It took me a moment.” Her voice was shaking. “You went all the way to the sea.”
“Kugenuma,” I said. It hurt to talk.
“You got out from under it. Good. That was good. You got out.” She pressed her wet head against my cheek. “Don’t do that again. Don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me?”
I didn’t know which part she meant.
* * *
I lay on Kugenuma beach for a long time.
It was a long, flat beach, dark and empty, with the lights of the coast road behind it and the sea in front, gray under a sky that was starting to go gray too. My clothes were soaked. I was shivering so hard my teeth knocked together, and every shiver went into my ribs.
“Transform,” I said under my breath, to get the light back, to heal. Then again. “Transform.”
Nothing came.
The cuff stayed dark. When I reached for the light there was nothing there to reach for, only tiredness, deeper than any I’d felt.
“Not yet,” said Kohaku. “You’ve used it all. It’ll come back. Lie still.”
I was hungry. I’d never been so hungry. I could have eaten the sand.
A wave ran up and wet my face. I put my hand up to push my hair back out of my eyes, and there was nothing there to push. My hair was short. It had only ever been long for a few hours, all told, and my hand had already learned it.
I lay there with my hand on the side of my head and didn’t move it.
When I could, I sat up, slowly, holding my side, and looked east along the beach.
A kilometer away, where the beach ended at the mouth of the Katase River, Enoshima stood dark against the gray, with the lighthouse still turning on top. And between me and Enoshima, walking down the river toward the sea, was the thirteenth block.
It came down the riverbed on its six legs, lit up from top to bottom, every window yellow, the shapes of people standing in every one. It walked under the road bridge without touching it. It walked out into the river mouth, where the river met the sea beside the long causeway to the island, and the water came up around its legs, and then it stopped.
It stood there in the river mouth with the sea around its knees and didn’t move again.
The sky went on getting lighter. Sirens came along the coast road, a lot of them, and then the heavy rumble of trucks, and helicopters, two and then three, hanging over the river mouth with their searchlights on the block.
As the sun came up behind Enoshima, the windows of the thirteenth block went out, one by one, starting at the top. Each yellow square went dark, and the shape in it went with it. I sat on the sand and watched them go out, all twenty-three, until the block was just a gray building standing in the sea with nobody in it at all.
* * *
The next train from Kugenuma-Kaigan was at twenty to six.
I got on it soaked to the skin, with sand in my shoes and seaweed caught in the collar of my jacket, holding my side, and the old man across the aisle looked at me and then looked at the floor. Kohaku sat on my lap, invisible again, and pressed herself against my stomach as if she could keep me warm.
On the old man’s phone, held up close to his face, the news was showing the river mouth at Katase from a helicopter. The block stood in the water with soldiers in green on the bank and police boats circling it.
The caption said Object Kaiju No. 2. A reporter was explaining the term, a little out of breath. It was what the Defense Ministry had started calling them overnight: a moving structure built out of objects that were already there, with nothing anyone could find holding it together.
Under it, in smaller letters, they were showing Ofuna again. It said Object Kaiju No. 1 now.
I transferred at Fujisawa. I got home at a quarter past six. Mom had gone to work. Mio’s door was shut. I got the wet clothes off in the bathroom and stuffed them in the bottom of the laundry basket. I stood under the hot shower until I could feel my hands, looking at the faucet. Then I went to my room and got into bed.
I lay on my back with my hands on my ribs. They hurt every time I breathed. The broken ends shifted under my palms, and then they shifted a little less.
At eight, when Mio knocked to ask why I wasn’t up for school, I said I had a fever. She put her head around the door and looked at me, gray in the face in my bed, and believed me.
“I’ll tell Mom.”
“Tell her it’s just a cold.”
“You look terrible.”
“It’s just a cold,” I said.
She went. I lay and listened to the front door close behind her.
I didn’t tell Mom. I didn’t tell Mio. There was nobody else to tell, and I didn’t want to say it out loud, any of it: the woman waving in the window, the weight on my chest, the sea. I lay in bed with my hand on my ribs and the curtains closed and Kohaku curled against my side, and outside the window the ordinary Wednesday went on without me.
* * *
Mom came home at three.
I heard her put her bag down in the hall and go into the bathroom, and then I heard nothing for a while.
She came and stood in my doorway. She was holding my jeans.
“These were in the basket,” she said. “They’re soaking wet. There’s sand in the pockets.”
“I went to the beach.”
“When?”
“Sunday.”
“It rained on Sunday. You were here all day.” She held the jeans up a little, so that sand fell out of the rolled hems onto the floor. “These are still wet.”
I kept quiet. There wasn’t anything I could say that would be true.
Mom came into the room and put the back of her hand on my forehead, the way she has since I was small, and left it there.
“You’re cold,” she said. “Not hot. Cold.”
“It comes and goes.”
She looked at me for a moment with her hand still on my forehead. I don’t know what she saw. She has small hands, dry and cool, with the old nicks across the knuckles, and they smelled faintly of the fish counter under the soap.
She took her hand away.
“I’ll make okayu,” she said, and went out with the jeans.
A few minutes later I heard the washing machine start in the bathroom, the click of the lid and the rush of the water filling, and then the slow churn.
I lay and listened to it.
She’d put them in on their own.