Sharo: “Better” is not the same as “good.”
Kid: Oh no. I didn’t mean to imply that anything about this is positive. I’m sorry.
Kid: I should’ve been clearer. I mean, I only hope it’s just an ordinary hit-and-run.
Chrome: What do you mean?
Kid: I’ve heard of Kadota, too. It’s a name you’re bound to come across in any deeper examination of the Dollars.
Kid: He doesn’t like to admit it, but many Dollars accept him as one of the outward faces of the group.
Kid: And he’s been run over by someone who drove off. Let’s just hope it’s a coincidence.
Sharo: …You think someone hit him on purpose?
Kid: It’s a possibility, that’s all.
Kid: For example, there was that story about Ruri Hijiribe’s stalker being among the Dollars.
Kid: Let’s say there was another Ruri Hijiribe fanatic, almost on the level of a stalker. What if they saw the entire Dollars as an enemy of Ruri because of that? Or more simply, what if someone hurt by a Dollars member in the past wanted revenge? But without a leader, who can they go after? Well, how about Kadota, who’s the most well-known of them all?
Sharo: So you think it might not be personal but just a consequence of him being a kind of representative for the group? That’d really suck for him if it’s true.
Kid: That’s still not the worst that could happen.
Sharo: What?
100% Pure Water: Ba-bump, ba-bump…
Chrome: Oh, I get it.
Chrome: You’re saying…what if that’s just the beginning?
Kid: Exactly.
Kid: They’re saying the gang that reps yellow is back in action, too. The Yellow Scarves, I believe?
100% Pure Water: What? Do you think they’re starting a war?!
100% Pure Water: That’s scary. That’s really scary!
Kid: We might be getting ahead of ourselves with that.
Kid: But the elements for unrest are all there.
Kid: Especially with the rumor that Shizuo Heiwajima left the Dollars.
Sharo: Yeah. Even if you hated the Dollars, with Shizuo around you didn’t dare pick a fight with them.
Kid: And then there’s this story about a purge within the Dollars.
Chrome: I heard about that one, too.
100% Pure Water: What do you mean, purge?! That sounds really scary!
Kid: In any case, I’m sure the police are keeping tabs on the Dollars by now. That means they can’t make any big moves, but all the other gangs are free to take potshots at them.
Kid: The Dollars are known for not having a color. But all the Yellow Scarves and Blue Squares have to do is remove their bits of cloth, and they’re no different from the Dollars. If they abandoned their pride and honor, they could attempt to bring down the group…
Chrome: It would be like the incident with the slasher, perhaps.
Chrome: They never actually caught the slasher, when all was said and done.
Kid: Most importantly of all, the biggest risk factor is the fact that it was Kadota who was in the accident.
Kid: It’s like the cleanup-hitting slugger on a baseball team getting hospitalized from an accident.
Kid: They have no Shizuo Heiwajima DH and no Kadota cleanup hitter. It’s the perfect opportunity for another gang to make their move.
100% Pure Water: Ahhh! Geez! Geez! This is all Bad News Bears over here!
Chrome: ?
Sharo: He’s gone off the deep end, lol.
Kid: What’s the matter?
100% Pure Water: We’re all… Well, I’m an Ikebukuro resident, at least! Kid and Chrome, you can’t keep scaring us with all these freaky stories! Look, you’ve frightened Saki into silence!
Kid: Please pardon me. I’m sorry.
Chrome: You’re right. Saki hasn’t replied to any of this.
Sharo: Maybe she fell asleep?
100% Pure Water: Saki, are you awake?
100% Pure Water: Helloooo?
.
.
.
Chapter 2: Birds of a Feather
The next day, Shinra’s apartment, near Kawagoe Highway
“Kadota’s in a coma?!”
Shinra Kishitani was stuck in his bed, covered with bandages and casts all over. The black market doctor failed to practice what he preached—good health—and now he was bedridden in his own apartment until he recovered.
While his injuries were bad enough that it would take him half a year to fully recover, thanks to the help of his beloved life partner, he seemed fairly happy with the whole arrangement. He was often smiling through the pain and inconvenience.
Now that smile had turned into shock at the news that said beloved life partner had just brought to him.
“It was a hit-and-run, apparently.”
“Hit-and-run?!”
“Yeah. He got hit on some street, and the locals who heard the noise came out, found him on the asphalt, and called for an ambulance,” the life partner typed onto her PDA, rephrasing the information she gained via e-mail.
Shinra peered up at the screen to read her message and made a face. “Is his life in danger?”
He wasn’t that close to Kadota, but they had known each other in high school, and he’d invited the other man to this apartment on multiple occasions. Most important of all, he was one of the few people who knew about and accepted the nature of Shinra’s partner.
Shinra cared about his partner above all else, so it was only knowing of her safety that allowed him the wherewithal to be concerned about anyone else. Unlike the circumstances in which a different friend got stabbed, here he was genuinely worried for Kadota.
“He did pull through, but he’s still unconscious for now. Let’s hope he recovers.”
While his partner typed worried messages on her PDA, none of her emotions showed on her face.
But that was only because she didn’t have a face to begin with. Instead, her concern manifested by the trembling of the darkness that issued forth from the surface of her severed neck.
Celty Sturluson was not human.
She was a type of fairy commonly known as a dullahan, found from Scotland to Ireland—a being that visits the homes of those close to death to inform them of their impending death.
The dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm, rode on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar pulled by a headless horse, and approached the homes of the soon to die. Anyone foolish enough to open the door was drenched with a basinful of blood. Thus, the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.
One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing if this was true.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.
When someone back in her homeland had stolen her head, she had lost her memories of what she was. It was the search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.
Now with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.
But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and her memories were still lost.
Celty knew who stole her head.
She also knew who was preventing her from finding it.
But that meant she didn’t know where it was.
And she was fine with that.
As long as she could live with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could happily go on the way she was now.
She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face while she held these strong, secret desires within her heart.
That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.
She assumed nothing would change. In fact, she prayed that nothing would ever change, that she would always be her “usual self.” But this summer seemed determined to turn
every part of that on its head.
Her head, in fact.
She finally knew the location of her head, the very reason for her being in this country in the first place.
But once she was in the presence of the person who possessed her head, she had backed down. She’d done nothing.
It’d happened right after her beloved Shinra was attacked, and she was consumed with rage at the time. She still hadn’t fully processed the waves of emotion that had overcome her then. Did the same thing happen to human beings? Or was she different from them in this regard, because she was a dullahan?
Ironically, this worry of hers was a very human kind of concern. Nonetheless, Celty didn’t know how much difference there was between her heart and a human’s. It was hard enough just for two human beings to process emotions the same way. As a different species altogether, the idea had always plagued Celty.
In this case, she’d been in an extreme state of mind when she’d heard about Kadota, which only made things worse.
Why are all these crazy things still happening?
Oddly enough, she was worried about the same things that people had been talking about in the chat room without her last night.
Is there some connection between all this? I’m sure the stalker panic is unrelated, but something just feels wrong. And I can’t believe that the Jinnai Yodogiri who Izaya was talking about has anything to do with Kadota… Could it really have been just an accident? Or is something bigger going on that I don’t know about?
Her fear led to doubt, and that doubt fueled only more fear.
Normally, being next to Shinra helped Celty ease that fear, but because she was keeping the fact that she knew the location of her head a secret from him, the guilt was another kind of shackle chaining her down.
“Well, even if I were in perfect health, I’d still recommend that he go to a normal hospital after being hit by a car. We’ll just have to hope for a solid recovery.”
“Huh? Oh, good point,” she typed, coming back to her senses. She focused on the matter of Kadota again. “I’d like to go and visit him, but I don’t think the hospital will let me in…”
“Well, if he doesn’t wake up, they’re not going to allow visits, period.”
“Good point.”
“But it is worrying,” he said, his expression clouded.
Celty put a reassuring message into the PDA. “It’ll be all right. He’s a tough guy.”
To her surprise, Shinra added, “No, Celty, you’re the one I’m worried about.”
“Huh?”
“If Kadota comes back around, he’ll still be in the hospital for a while, right? I just hope no funny business happens with the Dollars in the meantime. We’ve seen this with Mikado—when people get in trouble, you can’t help but get yourself involved, Celty.”
Oh my goodness. He’s on the same line of thought as me.
There were times when Shinra showed himself to be keenly capable of reading Celty’s feelings, but if he was actually tracing her line of thought here, he’d have to be a psychic.
No, it’s okay. Shinra’s not psychic. We just happened to be thinking about the same thing. I didn’t know he was worried about that kind of stuff, though, she reassured herself and put that feeling into words to Shinra.
“I’m not so sure. The Dollars don’t have a hierarchy. I bet Kadota being gone isn’t going to change anything in the big picture.”
“You sure about that? I’ve always thought that Shizuo served as a physical restraint and Kadota served as a mental restraint—both to others and to the group. If you messed around, Shizuo was going to flatten you, whether you were in the gang or not. That’s a simplistic view, I’ll admit.”
“But you’ve got a point.”
“Meanwhile, if you got on Kadota’s bad side as an outsider, he would galvanize a part of the Dollars around him to fight you off, and if you were an insider and he went after you, you’d have a real bad time within the Dollars,” Shinra explained.
Celty didn’t have a real counterargument.
“He denies he’s a big public figure in the Dollars, but the thing about big groups is that when stuff happens, people look to someone they can rely on. There just aren’t that many people out there who are strong enough to make decisions about everything on their own. I bet even Mikado was leaning on Kadota for a lot of stuff.”
“That might be true, but…”
It only made Celty feel worse; Anri had told her that Mikado had been acting strangely, too.
I just hope that Kuronuma guy doesn’t use this opportunity to start any funny business.
Shinra seemed to sense her concern. He sat up in bed, ignoring the pain. Before she could ask him if he was all right, he gave her a kindly smile.
“It’s okay, Celty. You should do what you feel is right, no matter what happens to the Dollars. If you have to take on the rest of the entire world, I’ll still be with you.”
“Shinra…thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me for anything. I’m doing this for my own sake.”
“Well, don’t worry. I’m not going to be that foolish,” she typed quickly, to hide her bashfulness. The little tendrils of shadow coming from her fingers flitted about, dancing over the keypad like black flame.
“In any case, you should be more worried about Kadota than about me. You don’t have any outright friends other than Izaya and Shizuo, so that’s one of the few acquaintances you can actually talk to casually.”
“Oh, please. What are you expecting from me? When my friend Izaya got stabbed, I didn’t even bother visiting him.”
“Forget about Izaya—he earned that one!” she typed, chuckling on the inside.
The feeling of normalcy returning only made her wish harder that Shinra would heal soon, so that she could feel this way forever.
But life was not going to be so kind.
Right as she got up, intending to fix something simple for Shinra to eat, her cell phone buzzed.
Who is that?
Celty pulled it out and saw a message from an unfamiliar source. She opened it up, assuming it would be another spam e-mail from a dating site or an overseas scam.
Then time stood still for a brief moment.
The title of the message was “This is Aoba Kuronuma.”
Aoba Kuronuma.
The name of the boy who knew what Celty was, where she lived, and who was trying to put weird ideas into Mikado’s head. The boy she’d been worried about making his move just a few minutes ago.
Her worst fears were confirmed true at the worst possible moment.
“I’d like to talk to you about something. Can you come outside for a bit?”
The short message put another chain of unease around Celty’s heart.
At that moment, Shiki’s private office
“And what is it that brings you here today, Mr. Newswriter?”
“…”
They were in the art trading office that Shiki used as his business front for the Awakusu-kai. Shuuji Niekawa sat on the leather sofa for guests, but contrary to its plush softness, he was as stiff as a board.
This was the second meeting of Niekawa and Shiki, the first of which had been for the purpose of a column called “Tokyo Disaster Almanac” for a tabloid that mostly ran features about street gangs.
“Given that you didn’t bother to schedule an appointment first, I’m guessing you’re not doing research for a piece.”
“C-correct. Listen, I hate to bother you about a personal matter, Mr. Shiki, but…”
“I don’t mind. If anything, it’s bringing us closer together,” Shiki said with a thin smile, putting himself on equal footing with his guest. “But whether I help you or not depends on the request. Given that you came to me, I would assume it’s a particular kind of trouble that you have.”
Shiki’s eyes gleamed with a chilling light, sensing the truth. Niekawa was worried about his daughter and came to the office out of sheer desperation, even knowing the nature
of the people he was seeking out.
The writer steeled his courage and said, “Well…I’m embarrassed to admit it’s a family matter…”
Several minutes later…
“I see. Your daughter and the Dollars.”
Shiki gave Niekawa a hard look now that the entire situation had been explained.
“P-please, anything you can do. I just need to know more about them,” Niekawa stammered.
Shiki put his hands up in a calming gesture.
“Are you sure you actually came to the right place? Common knowledge is that the Dollars are a street gang, but they’re really just a bunch of amateurs. Like an online club that anyone can join, full of teenage girls, office workers, even little kids. They don’t even have operations that pay tribute to more professional outfits like us or others in our line of work.”
“Yes, I…I’m aware of that…but it sounds like the Dollars are getting more dangerous these days.”
“It stands to reason that such types would be in the group. Because of the nature of the gang, the Dollars aren’t a monolith—they’re more like a mountain made of several strains of rock. There might be water and plants growing on top, but there could be sulfuric acid running beneath it.”
“…”
Sulfuric acid was an even stronger choice of words than poison. Niekawa was stunned; it didn’t sound like a simple threat. As a beat writer, he came into contact with many kinds of people, and it was easy for him to imagine what this meant in terms of the underside of society.
“I-I’m aware of that, Mr. Shiki. It’s exactly why I’m worried. Including past attempts, I’ve talked with people all over town who claim Dollars membership, and I’ve never gotten any good information from them. None of them recognize my daughter’s face or name. I haven’t even got any leads on the people who she was trading messages with… So I came to the conclusion that maybe the people who make their living on the underside might have better connections…”
“Ah, I see… Usually, I’d advise you to contact the police or a detective and have you leave, but I’ll assume that your presence here says you’ve already run through all your other options.”
For his part, Shiki treated the writer as though he was perfectly aware of who he was dealing with. He didn’t bother to try hiding the truth. He let the consequences be known.
Durarara!!, Vol. 10 Page 5
