VOLUME 2 - EPISODE 9 - [CONTENT WARNING: MA26+]
[NARRATOR: Some people are dangerous because they hate. Some are dangerous because they want. And some are dangerous in the way cold things are dangerous: not because they burn, but because they take heat and give nothing back, and leave you colder than before they arrived. For three days Riyura Shiko has slept on a mat behind a bakery, kneading dough with one good hand, and for three days the world has been very quiet. That quiet was designed. Someone has been standing very still at the edge of it, counting. Today she steps out. She will not make a speech. She has never needed one. But first, a bathroom mirror. Nine years ago. A villain learning how to look like a person.]
PROLOGUE: THE MIRROR
A small tiled bathroom. A fogged mirror. A single bulb overhead, buzzing. Fourteen-year-old Sakura stood on a step stool in front of the sink, a silver stopwatch clamped in one fist, and stared at her own face. She was practicing.
Her lips drew down at the corners. Her brows pulled together, a tilt she had copied from a serial killer on the news that had a story much like hers and refined over months. Her eyes widened by a fraction, then glossed, the surface tension of water gathering on a lens. She held it. The stopwatch ticked. Click. Nineteen seconds. The expression collapsed.
She wrote the time on the tile beside the mirror in pencil. There were hundreds of tiny marks there, in neat columns. Each one was a rehearsal.
She tried again. Mouth, brows, eyes. A small shiver of the chin. It looked real. It looked, she thought, exactly like the face of a very human being who had lost something. She leaned toward the glass until her breath clouded it. Why doesn't it come, she thought, without any particular feeling, the way you wonder about a stuck drawer. A knock at the door. "Sakura?" Another's voice, he was sixteen years old, his voice was hoarse. "You've been in there an hour."
"I'm working," she said. "On what?" She turned on the hot tap. She held her palm under the stream, watching the skin go from pink to red to a shiny, angry scarlet, and with her other hand she raised the stopwatch and observed her face in the mirror for any change at all. Her expression did not move. Her palm blistered. She felt the heat, clearly, as information. It was not unpleasant. It was not anything.
Click.
"Sakura, please." The doorknob rattled. "You haven't cried. Not once. Not at the funeral. Not since." She turned off the tap. She looked at the red hand, then at the mirror, then at the penciled columns of numbers on the tile. "I'm working on it," she said.
[NARRATOR: Remember the tile. Remember what she was counting.]
PART ONE: THREE DAYS
Three days. Riyura counted them the way you count steps on an unlit stair.
He lived in the bakery's back room. He woke at four to the sound of Pan lighting the ovens, and by 4:10 he was already at the long steel counter with one hand in the dough. The other hand, the stitched left, hung in a sling of clean cotton. His right, the drawing hand, did the work. He pressed with the heel of it, folded, turned, pressed. Pan watched from the oven door and said nothing, and that was the kindest thing in the world.
On the second morning his phone buzzed with a voice message. Subarashī, from a hospital bed, voice thin and wet and entirely himself.
"Hey. They put many bandages on me. It's very heroic. The nurse says I can't shout, which is a human rights violation. Miyaka says you shouldn't feel guilty, and I told her you'll feel guilty anyway, because you're an idiot, so I'm telling you directly: it's fine. I mean it. I'm not saying it for you. I'm saying it for me. Come see my bandages."
He played it four times. He did not answer. He put his forehead against the cold edge of the flour bin and breathed. On the third evening his phone lit with a text from Yakamira. No question marks. Only one line, written with the strained precision of a human obeying a rule he had written for himself.
Contingency 2: Asking once. What do you need?
Riyura stared at the screen for a long time. He typed: Time. I'm not leaving. I'm not hurt worse than I look. I just need to not be in a room with anyone I might break. The reply came in four seconds. Understood. I won't ask again. There's bread on your side of the table when you come home. A pause. Then: I will not mention the bread. He laughed, once, a broken small sound. It hurt his jaw. It was the first one in three weeks.
On Friday afternoon, Pan came out of the kitchen untying his apron. "Go for a walk," he said. "You've been underground three days. Daylight won't kill you." "I don't know if I should." "I'm not saying go far." Pan hung the apron on its hook. "Just go. The route behind the canal. It's quiet at this hour." Riyura looked at the door. He should have heard it. In the steady kind tone of the figure who had sat on an alley floor, there was nothing but care. And that was exactly the moment the world, which had been so quiet for so long, decided to speak.
PART TWO: THE BENCH
The canal path ran behind the east campus, a narrow strip of damp gravel between a rusted railing and a line of bare cherry trees. The sky was the flat white of unwashed porcelain. Frost hung in the crevices of the stone. He walked slowly, with his stitched arm tucked against his ribs, and the cold air stung his split lip pleasantly. Nobody was about. A heron stood motionless in the shallows.
About two hundred meters on, there was a bench. Someone was sitting on it.
She sat very straight, hands folded in her lap, a closed notebook resting on her knees. Grey sweater. Neat hair. She looked, in the white light, like a figure in a very old photograph, the kind where nobody smiles because nobody has been told to. Riyura stopped. Sakura did not look up. Her gaze rested on the water. She did not speak. For almost a full minute the only sound was the heron lifting one foot and putting it down.
She knows I walk this way on Fridays, he thought, and the cold that came with the thought was not fear. It was the flat recognition of arithmetic. She's known for weeks. She's known when I would be alone. "Hello," he said. Nothing. "Nothing to say?"
She turned her head. It was a small motion, slow and complete, and her eyes met his for the first time since the apartment. They were brown, ordinary, and absolutely empty, with the clear surface of a pool that went all the way down. "You're thinner," she said. That was all. Four syllables. "I'm not here to fight," Riyura said. "If you've come to finish something, I'd rather you told me what."
"Someone has been very patient with me," Sakura said. The sentence meant nothing. It sat in the cold air and meant something anyway. A chill went up the back of his neck, the same chill as the smooth blank spot at the far end of the table, the same chill as the bench at the bus stop. "Who?" She did not answer. She opened the notebook.
PART THREE: THE NOTEBOOK
She did it without hurry. She uncapped a pen. She wrote a line. The pen moved in short neat strokes, and Riyura, standing four meters away, could read nothing but the rhythm of it, the small deliberate tick of a mind recording what it saw. She took the stopwatch from her pocket.
Click.
He understood a second too late. He took a step back. His heel found loose gravel. She rose from the bench, in one fluid motion, and crossed the four meters faster than he could follow. She seized his right hand. Not with violence. With care. She took it in both of hers as one might take the hand of a patient, thumb along the back of the knuckles, fingers holding the palm. She turned it over. She looked at it.
It was his drawing hand. He had drawn the gate page with it. He had folded dough with it. In three weeks of broken everything, it was the one part of him that had stayed whole. "This is what you use," Sakura said. Her voice was flat, clinical, mild. "To make honest things." "Sakura, don't..." She bent his index finger back.
The sound was small. A dry wet snap, like a green branch stepped on in a forest, and for a heartbeat he did not feel it. He only saw. The finger folded at an angle fingers do not take, the knuckle jutting beneath the skin like a knot in rope, and then the pain arrived all at once, white, enormous, a bolt that tore from his fingertip to the back of his skull.
He screamed.
She did not let go. She shifted her grip, found the middle finger, and applied the same slow, even pressure. A second snap. The bone broke cleanly and slid, and he heard it grate. His vision went white at the edges. His knees buckled. She held him up by the ruined hand as one holds up a doll. She was writing, he realized. She had the pen between her teeth. She was timing.
"Four seconds," she said around the pen, mildly. "Between the first and the second." He drove his shoulder into her. It was the wrong move. She was ready. She turned with it, spun him, and drove the heel of her left hand, with exact and terrible force, into the lowest ribs on his right side. Something gave. Not broken, he thought dimly. Cracked. The air left him in a single wet gasp. He fell to his knees on the gravel, clutching his mangled hand against himself, vomit rising in his throat, black dots swimming across his sight.
She stepped back. She had not hurried. She had not raised her voice. Beside the bench, the heron stood motionless, watching. She crouched in front of him, careful of her sweater, and looked at his face. Her stopwatch lay in her palm. The silver case was clean. "You were supposed to break cleanly," she said. He could not answer. He was fighting not to lose consciousness.
"You open. You give. You are all the way out in front, nothing between you and what's coming." Her head tilted. "That's the easiest kind of person. They open and open until they're empty."
He raised his eyes. "Why didn't you break cleanly?" Sakura asked. It was the only question she had asked in the whole encounter. She asked it plainly, almost wonderingly. A scientist whose experiment had returned an anomaly. A kid with a clock that had stopped. Riyura breathed. He spat red onto the gravel. He looked at her face, at the empty brown eyes, at the sinister university student in the mirror with the stopwatch and the penciled columns on the tile, though he did not know any of that yet. He only knew she was waiting for an answer, and that she genuinely did not know it.
"Because Pan makes good bread," he said. Her expression did not change. But her fingers tightened slightly on the stopwatch. "And because there's a direction," he went on, each word a labor. "Even when it goes through this. It's still the direction." She looked at him for a long time. In the white light her face had the stillness of a held breath. Then she rose, wiped her hands on her sweater, and closed the notebook. She pressed the button. Click. "Four minutes, seven seconds," she said. And walked away along the canal path, without once looking back.
PART FOUR: THE SPOON
He lay on the gravel.
The sky above him did not move. His hand pulsed with a slow thick throb in time with his heart, and he could feel each broken finger individually, a pair of white-hot nails driven through the bone. He thought, with strange clarity, I can't draw. It arrived like a fact about someone else. I can't draw. I can't hold a pen. Something small gleamed beside his head on the frosted stone.
A spoon. A plastic spoon, white, the sort that comes in a cafe takeaway bag. Its bowl was stained a deep clear red, glossy, thick at the edges, as though something sweet and tart had dried on it. He stared at it. He didn't know why it frightened him.
It had not been there when he arrived at the bench. He would have seen it. Someone had set it down, very carefully, between the bench leg and the railing, after he had fallen. Placed it with the neat, exact stillness of a thing left on purpose to be found. He lifted his head. The canal path stretched empty in both directions. In the distance, near the far bridge, a grey cardigan crossed between two trees and was gone.
Riyura let his head fall back. His eyes closed.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: I'm too tired to be afraid of a spoon. I'm too tired to be afraid of anything. But my body knows. The cold has crawled into the bone again, the same smooth cold as the empty seat at Midori no Te. Sakura said someone has been very patient with me. Someone who left a spoon beside a character with two broken fingers. I don't know who. I know only that whoever it is was in no hurry, and watched, and did not help.]
PART FIVE: THE LONG WAY BACK
He walked the whole way, stopping nine times.
The route back to the bakery was perhaps a kilometer. It took him forty minutes. He held his ruined right hand against his stomach with the sling-bound left. His ribs sent sharp bright flares with every breath. Twice he stopped and leaned against a wall until the world stopped tilting. Once a pair of students passed, glanced at his face, and quickened their pace.
He reached the south campus shop at dusk. The bell rang. Pan looked up from the counter, and his face changed. He did not speak. He crossed the floor in three strides, took one look at the hand, and said, very quietly, "Sit."
Riyura sat. His knees went out from under him on the way down. Pan fetched ice wrapped in a clean cloth. He fetched two flat wooden spoons from the kitchen, and a roll of surgical tape. He knelt on the tile and took Riyura's right hand, with a gentleness that was almost reverent, and examined it under the light. "Two," Pan said. "Clean breaks. She knew exactly where."
"She did." "I'm going to set them. It'll hurt worse than the break." "Do it."
Pan set them. Riyura bit down on the cloth and the world flashed white twice, and a sound came out of him that he was never able to remember afterward. Pan splinted each finger to a spoon with careful, firm winding, tape over tape, and when it was done he held Riyura's hand a moment longer, found in his own scarred ones, and let it rest.
"Can you hold a pencil?" he asked. Riyura looked at the two taped fingers, rigid as pegs. At the stitched left palm in its sling. "No." "Can you try?" "Pan..." "Try."
He fetched a pencil from the counter. He set it on the steel. Riyura looked at it, then reached out with the one working thumb and the three fingers of the right that were not spoon-bound, and pinched it. It trembled. He drew a short line on the back of an order slip. It wavered wildly, a drunken wire. He drew another. Then, slowly, with the clumsy ruined grip of a being, he drew a loaf.
It was a terrible drawing. It was lopsided, the crust misshapen, the lines thick and uneven where his pinched fingers could not control the pressure. One end of it was larger than the other. It looked as if it had been drawn in a fever. Pan took the slip and looked at it for a long time. "That's the best thing you've ever made," he said. Riyura laughed. It cracked in the middle. "It's the worst."
"It's the most honest." Pan set the slip beside the register. "The arm's wrong." "The arm?" "On the bread. Look." Pan pointed. "One end's longer. It's got a lean." "It's a loaf." "It's dynamic." For one second Riyura stared at him. Then something broke open in his heart, wet and ragged and helpless, and he put his bandaged hand against his mouth and laughed until it turned into tears.
PART SIX: THE VOICE
That night, in the back room, his phone buzzed.
A text from Hitomi, the first in three days. Short. I have something for you. Folder. Evidence of her access. I found it while looking for something else. I want to hand it to you in person. Not through anyone. Then, a second text, a minute later. Karagi deserved better than to be what she's built. He read both twice. He typed with his left thumb, slowly. Tomorrow. Bakery. 8 AM.
A last voice message came through just before midnight. Subarashī again, a little stronger.
"Hey. I asked Miyaka what you were doing and she said 'making bread' and then she cried a bit and I told her to stop because it was making my bandages sad. So. Also I heard you got hurt. Yakamira didn't say but he has the face. If it's the hand, the one you draw with, I want you to know that I looked at your manga pages in the hospital. The ones Miyaka brought. The wrong ones. The one with the arm." A pause. A thin wet laugh. "It's the best one. It's dynamic. I've been saying that for years and you finally drew it. Please keep the arm wrong."
Riyura set the phone on his chest. He lay in the dark, with the smell of bread and warm flour around him, and the two taped fingers throbbed in time with his heart. He thought of the slip of paper beside the register. A lopsided loaf with an arm that leaned. She wanted to take what I use to make honest things, he thought. And what I make now is honest in a way it never was before.
He did not smile. But the weight in his heart had shifted a degree, like a beam finding new load.
EPILOGUE: THE WALL
Sakura's studio, night. A single lamp.
She stood before the wall and uncapped her pen. Riyura's card hung at the end of the row, one word crossed out, another written beneath. Ground. She had added nothing since the canal. She tried to write the time. 4:07. She stopped. Her hand hovered. She crossed it out and began again, and could not make the digits settle. The pen skated. She stared at the wall.
Why didn't you break cleanly?
She heard it again. Not his answer. Her own question, in her own flat voice, asked of a human on a gravel path with his hand held to his chest. She had never asked anyone why before. The question had come out of her mouth without being sent.
She set down the pen. She went into the small bathroom off the studio and stood in front of the mirror, a plain square of glass over a chipped sink. On the tile beside it, in pencil, the old columns were gone. She had scrubbed them years ago. But she remembered where they had been. She raised the stopwatch. She drew her mouth down at the corners. She tilted her brows. She let her eyes gloss.
Nothing came. She held the expression for nineteen seconds, the old record. At twenty, her face slipped back to blank. She stared at it in the glass. For the first time in nine years, she did not write the number down. Her phone buzzed on the sink.
K.H.: Good. He keeps rising. Break him properly next.
She read it. Her face, in the mirror, did something small and strange, a brief flicker at the corner of the mouth that was neither smile nor frown, and gone before it formed. She turned the phone face down. She went back to the wall. She pinned the plastic wrapper of a bakery roll beside Riyura's card. Under it she wrote, in her neat typeset hand, a single word.
Why.
Outside, the oldest tree on campus stood bare against the sky. Beneath its roots, in a cold room behind a restricted door, something turned over in the dark and listened.
TO BE CONTINUED...