Kohaku put a bowl on my bedroom floor on the Monday of Golden Week, the morning after the island, at a quarter to five, while it was still dark.
It was one of our rice bowls from the kitchen. In it was a raw egg.
“Hold it,” she said.
“What?”
“In your fist. Changed. All the way around the bay and back, and bring it home whole.” She was a cat again, sitting beside the bowl with her tail around her paws. “This is how we did it at Koshigoe, in the old days. It was a quail’s egg, then. Your mother doesn’t buy quail.”
I looked at the egg. It looked back, brown and smug.
“How long is this supposed to take?”
“The first girl who did it broke forty,” said Kohaku. “She was very cross.”
* * *
Golden Week is a run of holidays at the end of April and the start of May, when the whole country goes somewhere and the trains are full. We didn’t go anywhere. Mom worked through all of it, because the supermarket was busier than ever, and Mio had extra shifts at the salon. Every morning at half past four I heard Mom’s alarm, and the kettle, and the front door close behind her at a quarter to five.
Ten minutes later I was on the roof.
Every morning started the same way: the roof, the sweatband in my pocket, the word said fast under my breath.
I flew with the staff put away as the cuff, mostly, so I had a hand free to keep Kohaku on my shoulder in the wind.
We flew at dawn, when the sky was gray over the hills and the streets were empty except for delivery vans and old men walking dogs. Kohaku said it was the best time. Nobody looks up at dawn.
“Somebody will,” I said, the first morning.
I was hanging over the railway lines with light pouring off me like a lantern, and below me a man in a tracksuit had stopped with his dog on the bridge and was staring up with his mouth open.
“Then turn it down.”
“I can’t turn it down.”
“You can. You just haven’t.” She was on my shoulder. “It’s yours. It isn’t a lamp somebody switched on. Pull it in. Like breathing in.”
It took three mornings.
On the third I could pull the light in until there was nothing left of it but a faint glow at the hems of the hakama and the ends of my hair. With the hood of my jacket up, over the top of everything, I looked like a girl out early in a strange outfit, if anyone looked at all. The dog-walkers stopped looking up.
One person never did. On the bluff above Koshigoe harbor, where Kohaku said the Lady’s shrine had been, there was still a shrine, or something like one: a stone gate and a wooden hall no bigger than a shed. Every morning at a quarter past five an old man in a white robe was sweeping in front of it with a bamboo broom. Every morning, when we went over, he stopped and leaned on his broom and waved.
On the fourth morning I waved back, before Kohaku could stop me.
“They built it again,” she said, on my shoulder. She looked back at the bluff until it was gone behind the headland, and was quiet all the way home.
By the end of the week I could do the opposite, too. I could gather the light into one hand, cupped, and hold it there like a flashlight.
“Good,” said Kohaku. “You’ll want that.”
“For what?”
“Seeing where to hit,” she said, and wouldn’t say any more.
On the fourth morning, coming back over the railway, a train went under me, the first one out of Ofuna, all its windows lit.
I saw her in them. A girl with pale hair streaming out from under a hood, carriage after carriage, sliding past underneath me.
I didn’t look away. I looked for a whole second, maybe more, until the last carriage had gone.
I liked having long hair. That was the thing. I liked the weight of it and the way it moved when I turned my head. I liked being small, too, which made no sense at all: the way the hood of my jacket came down over my eyes, the way the world was further up.
I hated that I liked any of it.
Every morning after that, at the same place over the railway, I stopped thinking about it on purpose, like turning off a faucet.
* * *
The egg took nine days.
The first morning I broke nine of them. I broke the first one on the roof before we’d even taken off. I closed my hand to make a fist, the way I’d close it around anything, and the egg went everywhere. I broke the second over the station. I broke the third trying to hold it so lightly that it slipped out of my fingers and fell four hundred meters onto somebody’s car.
By the time Mom came home that afternoon there were no eggs in the fridge at all, and she stood in front of it with the door open for a long time.
“Did you eat nine eggs?”
“I was hungry.”
“Nine.” She closed the fridge. “Raw?”
“Some of them.”
She looked at me for quite a while. Then she wrote eggs (lots) on the shopping list on the fridge door and went to have her bath.
It was harder than lifting anything. Lifting a car would have been easier, Kohaku said. Lifting is just pushing. This was holding. That’s different. Hold the egg too hard and it breaks. Hold it too soft and you drop it. You have to find the place in between and stay in it, over the station, over the hills, around the lighthouse at Enoshima, all the way out and all the way back. The wind pulls at you. You bank and climb, and the whole of you wants to grip.
“Feel the shell,” she said. “Not the egg. The shell. Hold the shell and nothing else.”
On the ninth morning I landed on our roof, opened my hand, and the egg was sitting in my palm, whole, warm from the inside of my fist.
Kohaku studied it.
“The first girl broke forty,” she said. “Well done.”
Then she made me put it back in the fridge, which Mom said later was a strange thing to find.
* * *
There were other drills, every morning, before the sun came up.
Barriers. The wall on the causeway had come out of me because it had to. The first one I made on the roof, with nothing pushing on me, was the size of a coin, and it lasted two seconds. Within a week I could put a wall along the edge of the roof, from the water tank to the stairwell door, white and flat and edged with gold, and hold it there while Kohaku walked along the top of it with her tail up like a tightrope walker.
“Thicker,” she said, every time. “The sea’s heavier than a cat.”
Chains. That was the strangest one.
When I pushed the light out through the rings of the staff instead of my hand, it didn’t come out flat. It came out in links, gold-white, each one hooked through the next, with a sound like a bead curtain when someone walks through it. The first ones were thick and clumsy, as big as my fist. Kohaku wanted thin. She wanted a chain as thin as thread, and she wanted it threaded through the clothesline on the far side of the roof, in and out between the pegs and back to me, without touching the line once.
“Why?”
“Because one day you’ll need to tie something that breaks,” she said.
It took a week. On the seventh morning I did it, a thread of light going in and out of Mio’s pegs and back to my hand, and the clothesline didn’t even sway.
And the staff.
Kohaku didn’t know how to use it, not really, any more than a cat knows how to use a broom. But she’d watched. She’d sat on a lot of walls and roofs and watched six girls hold it, and she remembered how each of them had done it.
“Hana held it like a spear,” she said. “Point first. Close to the body. She didn’t like to swing.” She watched me try it. “Higher. There. That’s Hana.”
“Who else?”
I tried it. I swung the staff one-handed in a wide flat arc out over the edge of the roof, letting the weight of the head carry it around, and caught it again on the far side, and the rings flashed and clinked in the gray light.
Kohaku stopped talking.
She got down off the water tank. She walked across the roof without looking at me, to the stairwell door, and through the gap under it, and she was gone.
I stood on the roof with the staff in my hand and didn’t know what I’d done.
She came back an hour later, when the sun was up and I’d let the light go and was sitting on the warm concrete waiting for her. She was carrying a gray pigeon feather in her mouth. She put it down in front of me.
“I caught it,” she said.
“Did you?”
“Nearly.” She sat down and washed her face very thoroughly. “Do you want to know what your sister says to that head when she thinks nobody’s listening? It’s ever so funny.”
* * *
Shino’s drill was the worst.
“Fly out to sea,” said Kohaku, on the first Wednesday. “Straight out. Don’t stop. Don’t turn. When I say turn, turn around and fly home.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
We went south from the roof over the hills and out over Shichirigahama, past the end of the land, over open water. The sea was gray and enormous under the dawn and there was nothing in front of us at all. I flew. I flew until the coast behind us was a dark line and then a thin dark thread, until Enoshima was the size of a thumbnail, and Kohaku was silent, and I didn’t look at her.
“Turn,” she said.
I turned. I flew back.
Halfway back, my legs went heavy. Two-thirds of the way back, I was sinking without meaning to, closer and closer to the water. The note in the staff had gone up into a whine. A kilometer from the beach the light flickered, and two hundred meters from the beach it went out, and I came down in the sea.
I swam the last of it. I swam in jeans and a jacket. It’s harder than it sounds.
I crawled up the beach at Shichirigahama on my hands and knees in the gray dawn. A man jogging along the edge of the water stopped and looked down at me.
“Morning,” I said.
He jogged on, fast.
Kohaku arrived a few seconds later, dropping out of the air onto the dry sand beside me, not wet at all.
“I’m tied to it,” she said, picking herself up with great dignity. “Where you go, I go. Like a kite. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be a kite.” She looked at me lying there in the foam. “You thought you had enough to get back.”
“I did have enough.”
“You had enough to get nearly back.” She sat down. “Shino had enough to get nearly back, too. That’s the whole of it. Every time you go out, you’re spending what you need to come home. Learn how much that is.” She looked out at the sea. “Do it again tomorrow.”
We did it every morning for a week.
By the end of it I knew, the way you know how much money is in your pocket without looking, the place out over the water where I had to turn.
* * *
On Thursday Mom made horse mackerel for dinner.
She brought the fish home from the counter on a tray, four of them, silver and blue, and laid them on the board. I sat at the table with my math homework and watched her work. I’d watched her do it a thousand times. That night, for some reason, I watched properly.
“Why do yours always look better than the ones in the other supermarket?” said Mio, who was eating crackers.
“Ikejime,” said Mom.
She picked up one of the fish and turned it so we could see. Then she picked up a thin steel spike from the knife block, a long one, like a skewer with a handle.
“When they come off the boat,” she said, “if the fisherman knows what he’s doing, he kills them at once. One spike. Here.” She touched the point of the spike to the fish’s head, just behind and above the eye, a small place, smaller than a fingernail. “There’s a spot there. Behind the eye. You go in there, one time, the right angle, and it’s finished. Before the fish knows anything’s happened. It doesn’t thrash. It doesn’t spoil itself.” She put the spike down. “So it keeps. That’s why.”
“That’s horrible,” said Mio cheerfully.
“It’s kind,” said Mom. “It’s the kindest way there is. Anything else, they suffer.” She took up the knife. “The spot’s very small. You have to know exactly where it is.”
I looked at the small place behind the fish’s eye.
Kohaku, on top of the fridge, had gone very still, watching the spike as if it were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
* * *
I dreamed of the shore again that week.
The tall woman was walking along the white stones with her hands behind her back, and she fell into step beside me as if we’d arranged to meet.
“The cat says there is a shop,” she said, “that never closes.”
“A convenience store.”
“It never sleeps. It sells socks, and hot food, and stamps for letters, and it is open all night, every night, with lamps burning.” She frowned at the gray sky. “Who rules it?”
“Nobody rules it. It’s a chain. There are thousands of them.”
“Thousands,” she said.
She walked for a while in silence, absorbing this.
“And the socks. Are they good socks?”
“They’re all right.”
“Thousands of shops that never sleep,” she said, “and the socks are all right.” She shook her head slowly. “I have been asleep a very long time.”
* * *
Kohaku had found short videos.
She found them on my phone, in the second week of May, while I was asleep, by standing on it. By the time I woke up she’d watched about four hundred of them. She’d learned a great deal of slang, from teenagers in Tokyo, Osaka and somewhere in America. She used all of it, carefully and with total confidence, and all of it wrong.
“This rice is giving,” she said at breakfast, looking at the bowl.
“Giving what?”
“Just giving.” She looked pleased. “It’s very giving.”
“That’s not how you use it.”
“I watched a girl say it about a cake.” Kohaku sniffed the rice. “Main character energy,” she added, to no one, and went back to sleep in the sun on the windowsill.
* * *
The Flock came on the fifteenth of May, a Saturday, at twenty past five in the morning.
I was out over the sea already when the pull came. I’d gone further than usual, along the coast past Yuigahama, with the light turned down, my hood up and Kohaku on my shoulder. The staff went warm in my hand and tugged, hard, toward the east.
Toward Zaimokuza.
Zaimokuza is the beach at the eastern end of Kamakura, past the river mouth, quieter than Yuigahama. There’s a lifeguard tower on stilts in the middle of it, and a rack of windsurf boards at the top by the road, and at the far end the long arm of the Kotsubo harbor breakwater running out into the water. At that time of the morning there was nobody there but one windsurfer, a long way out, a small figure leaning on his sail on the gray water.
There are always kites over the beaches at Kamakura. Big brown hawks with forked tails, wheeling round and round in the sky, waiting for tourists to take out a sandwich so they can come down out of nowhere and snatch it. There are signs about them everywhere. That morning there were thousands of them. They were coming in from every direction, from the hills, the town and the sea, circling over the windsurfer, lower and lower, closer and closer together.
They stopped being birds.
They folded into one another. Wing over wing, brown and black, a thousand bodies pressing together into one body, until there was a single bird over the water the size of a house, with a forked tail and wings fifty meters across. It made no sound. Inside it, everywhere, the separate birds were still moving, rippling, a skin of feathers that never quite settled.
It came down over the windsurfer like a squall, and when it rose he was caught in its feet, and it went on climbing.
* * *
I went after it.
It was climbing fast, wide wings beating, the windsurfer dangling below it in his wetsuit. He was kicking. He was screaming. I could hear him across the water.
I hit it.
I came up under its left wing and swung the staff into it. Two hundred birds burst out of its side all at once, a great brown explosion of them, and turned back into kites and scattered, screaming. The bird lurched. It dropped twenty meters in a second.
The windsurfer screamed louder.
I stopped.
If I broke it apart, he’d fall. We were a hundred meters up over the sea. He’d hit the water at the speed of a falling car.
“Get him out,” said Kohaku, in my ear. “Just get him out first.”
I flew into it.
I went straight into the feathers with the staff held in against my side, into the middle of the bird, reaching for him. It was like flying into a hedge that was alive. Wings beat against my face. Feet and beaks went past me. I couldn’t see anything. He was in there, somewhere in the middle of a thousand birds, every one of them moving, pressing and shifting. I couldn’t tell where the birds stopped and the man began. I’d grab, and get a handful of feathers, and lose him.
I got hold of something that was an arm, and he screamed in a different way.
I let go. I’d felt it start to give.
If I held on hard enough to keep him, I’d break him.
The bird climbed. The beach was falling away under us. The note in the staff was climbing with it.
“The egg,” said Kohaku. She was still on my shoulder, flat against me with her claws in, somewhere in all the feathers. “It’s the egg. You did this every morning for nine days.”
* * *
So I did the egg.
I stopped grabbing. I put my free hand out into the feathers, open, and felt for him like feeling for a light switch in the dark. Feathers. Feathers. Something smooth and wet and rubbery, a wetsuit sleeve. A wrist, inside it, with a pulse going fast.
I closed my hand around it.
Not hard. Not soft. Hard enough to keep, soft enough not to crack, the place in between that I’d found over the station and the hills and the lighthouse, nine mornings running, with an egg in my fist. I held his wrist like that, and he stopped screaming, and I felt him turn his hand around and hold on to mine.
Now I had one hand on him and one hand on the staff, and nothing to swing with.
I didn’t need to swing.
I pushed the light up the haft into the rings, and the thread came out of them, a chain as thin as the one I’d wound through Mio’s clothesline, gold-white, hissing like a bead curtain. I sent it down around his chest, under his arms, through the loop on his harness and back up around my own wrist, in and out of the birds without touching one, and pulled it snug. If I dropped him now, he wouldn’t fall far.
Then I listened.
The bird made no sound. None of them did. A thousand kites pressed together into one body, and every one of them was silent, the way the crab had been silent, the way the block had been silent.
Except one.
Somewhere ahead of me in the middle of it all, a single bird was screaming. It was screaming the way the kites scream over the beach when somebody takes out a sandwich, high and furious, over and over, without stopping to breathe. It had been screaming the whole time.
I’d thought it was all of them.
I let the light run back down into the staff and pushed the staff through the feathers toward the sound, point first, close to my body, the way Hana had held it.
The rings rang.
They rang right in the middle of the bird, clean and high, and the screaming stopped. The bird came apart. It didn’t fall. It flew apart, in every direction at once, a thousand kites bursting outward like a shaken rug, and then there was nothing around me but open sky and the sun coming up over the Miura hills, and a man in a wetsuit hanging off my wrist on a thread of light.
He looked up at me. I looked down at him.
“Hello,” I said.
“You’re a kid,” he said. “You’re, like, twelve.”
“I’m not,” I said, and flew him down slowly, with the chain between us and my hand still around his wrist, and set him down on his board where it was floating in the shallows by the breakwater. Then I let the chain go. It came apart into light and was gone.
He sat on his board with his knees up and stared at me.
* * *
The sky over Zaimokuza was full of birds.
Thousands of ordinary black kites were going back to wherever they’d come from, scattering in every direction, screaming at each other, furious. On the sea wall at the top of the beach a jogger had stopped to film it, holding up his phone in one hand and a melon bread in the other.
One of the kites came down in a long swoop, took the melon bread out of his hand and flew off with it.
“There,” said Kohaku. “Back to normal.” She was looking up at them, all of them, scattering across the sky. “About twelve hundred. Give or take.”
I flew home low and slow, with my light turned down to nothing, and landed on our roof at six.
I’d never been so tired. I’d lifted a crab off the ground and held an apartment building off a police car, and I’d never been as tired as I was after holding one man’s wrist. I slept until two in the afternoon. On Monday I fell asleep in math with my face on my textbook, and woke with a page number printed backward on my cheek.
* * *
My hair was growing.
I’d noticed it at the start of May, because it was getting in my eyes. By the middle of the month it was over my ears, much faster than it should have been, and softer, too, so soft it wouldn’t stay where I put it. Mio noticed, of course. She looks at hair the way Mom looks at fish.
“Your hair’s growing like a weed,” she said, at dinner on the first Sunday in May. “What are you eating?” Then, before I could answer: “Sit there after. I’ll cut it. I need the practice.”
In all the years of telling me what was wrong with it, she’d never once offered. She put a towel around my shoulders at the kitchen table and went at it with her good scissors, chatting the whole time about her teachers, not really to me. I sat very still and kept my mouth shut, in case she remembered who she was talking to.
On the second Sunday she had the towel ready before I’d finished my rice. Halfway through she stopped and put her hand flat on my cheek.
“Your skin’s ridiculous lately. What are you using? Seriously. Tell me. I have clients who’d kill for this.”
“Nothing. Soap.”
“Soap.” She looked at me closely, with the scissors in her other hand. “Soap doesn’t do that.”
On the third Sunday, the sixteenth of May, the day after the Flock, she put the towel around my shoulders and picked up the scissors, and I said, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t cut it.”
She stood behind me with the scissors open. I couldn’t see her face. I looked at the kitchen table, at the mannequin head at the end of it with its pinned curls, and waited for her to ask why.
She didn’t ask.
She came around in front of me and looked at me for a long second over the scissors, at my hair. It was over my ears now and curling at the back of my neck.
Then she closed them and put them away in their case.