by Yusuke Kishi
“It’s not your fault,” I said vehemently.
“It wasn’t the cat’s fault either. It’s here simply because it was ordered to end my life. …I’ve taken too long to decide on what I should have done.”
Shun pointed at a cupboard on the wall. “There’s a bottle of pills in there, filled with different types of poison. They gave it to me before I came here. Don’t you think it’s a cruel parting gift?”
So that was how the adults handled Shun’s situation, by making him end his own life? The thought didn’t surprise me. Maybe I had been exposed to so much shock in rapid succession that I was now numb.
“I’m glad you didn’t take any. You should throw them all away.”
“I took them all.”
“Huh?”
“But they didn’t work. It was too late. I guess it’s easy to change poisons on a molecular level. Though I was surprised when even arsenic couldn’t kill me. It seems like my Shadow, the part of my unconscious that doesn’t want to die, is capable of altering even basic elements.”
I put my hand on Shun’s.
“…I think it’s coming,” he said to himself.
“What is?”
“Saki, hurry and get out of here!” he drew his hand away and stood up.
The house gave a loud thump. The wasp balls rose high in the air, vibrating intensely, then clattered to the ground.
“It’s the same as that time. When my house was swallowed up… Isn’t it funny? It’s almost like the Spirit of Blessing. But instead of blessing you, it brings death.”
He pushed me from behind, “Hurry!”
I tried to resist, but he overpowered me.
“I’ll put an end to it now. I’ve had enough.”
Before my eyes, the walls began to warp and shake. What looked like bubbles appeared and burst one after another. It was a chaotic scene. My head began to hurt again.
“Saki,” Shun said quietly as he pushed me out the door.
His mask started melting even though there was no heat.
“I’ve always loved you.”
“Why are you saying this now? Shun! I…”
“Goodbye.”
The next second, I was hundreds of meters above the ground. I looked down at Shun’s bungalow in the moonlight.
There was only a deep crater.
The earth around the crater started caving in. The air was filled with a low rumbling and sharp snapping sounds as trees were ripped up by the roots.
This apocalyptic scene slowly grew farther and farther away. I realized that I was flying backwards in a large arc. A strong wind buffeted my clothes this way and that. It blew away my barrette and my hair trailed out behind me in the night sky.
If I just crashed into something and died, that wouldn’t be too bad.
With that thought, I closed my eyes.
And opened them again.
Shun had saved me with the last of his strength.
I had to live.
I turned to face forward. The wind stung but I didn’t close my eyes. My tears were blown away behind me.
It looked like I would land in a wide, grassy plain. I wondered if Shun had had this destination in mind when he flung me across the sky.
Slowly, the ground grew closer and closer.
Slowly, as if I were in a dream.
Part IV: Winter’s Distant Thunder
Chapter 1
Commotion surrounded me. The screeching of chairs being pushed back. The rhythm of footsteps on the wooden floor. The vibration of students jumping around. The sound of steam whistling from the pot on a stove in the middle of the classroom.
Voices with strange accents. Boisterous laughter. Conversations muffled as if I were listening underwater. Low mutters from an unknown person.
Everyone wanted someone to hear their words. But when all these voices joined together, they filled the air with a meaningless buzz.
Even if the thoughts of every person in the room were spoken aloud, they might all be the same thing. Each individual’s thought has meaning, but when you put them together, they lose direction and become nothing more than a chaotic blend of noises. Just like our leaking cantus.
I was lost in a sea of incoherent thoughts. Leaking… What was it?
“What are you daydreaming about?”
The words appeared on my notebook. The ‘o’ in “you” had a winking face drawn in and the ‘u’ in “about” had been turned into a happy face. I turned and saw Maria looking somewhat concernedly at me.
“Just thinking about something.”
“Let me guess. It’s about Ryou?”
“Ryou?” I frowned.
Maria took my confusion to mean something else.
“No need to hide it. You’re worried about whether he’ll pick you, right? Don’t worry. He definitely likes you.”
Ryou Inaba. A cheerful boy who I had known since childhood. A natural leader everyone looked up to. But…I was suddenly filled with a sense of discomfort. Why him?
“Ryou’s in team two though. Why would he choose me?”
“What are you saying, all of a sudden?” Maria exclaimed. “That was only in the very beginning, wasn’t it? Ever since he joined team one, he’s always hung out with us.”
Oh right. Ryou had been added our team partway through. Because team two had six members and we only ever had four.
But why weren’t there enough members to begin with…
“Saki, are you okay? You’re acting kind of weird,” Maria put her hand on my forehead as if to check if I had a fever. Then she suddenly closed the gap between us and kissed me on the lips.
“Stop it,” I turned away hastily.
No one was looking at us, but I felt embarrassed all the same.
“See? Now you’re all better,” she said.
“I wasn’t asking you to do that.”
“You’re hoping someone else would, eh?”
“I wasn’t thinking that!”
“You two are pretty close,” Ryou appeared behind Maria.
I felt my face turn red. Maria was going to misinterpret this too, I thought, and turned even redder.
“We’re living out our love here. You jealous?” Maria asked as she hugged me to her chest.
“A little, to tell the truth.”
“Of who?”
“Both of you, I guess.”
“Liar.”
Simply put, Ryou was smart, tall, and well-liked; you just couldn’t ignore his existence.
On the other hand, he wasn’t the type to think too deeply about things. He wasn’t dumb by any means, but his responses never went beyond the surface of the issue at hand. And he wasn’t particularly stellar at using cantus either…
This made me feel uneasy too. Who exactly was I comparing him to?
“Saki, can we talk before the afternoon classes start?” he asked.
“Hm. I’ll get out of your way then,” Maria floated up in the air and pirouetted, her long red hair fluttering behind her.
“Mamoru has only ever had eyes for you, you know,” Ryou said to her. “When you won the preliminary poll by a landslide, it really shook him up.”
She chuckled, “It’s a sin to be too popular, isn’t it?”
Maria flew away like a whimsical dragonfly and Ryou turned toward me.
“Let’s go somewhere quiet.”
“Alright.”
I had no reason to refuse. I followed him out of the classroom, but stopped short when he made to turn left.
“Wait, I don’t want to go over there.”
“Why?” he looked a little incredulous.
“I…what do you want to do over there?”
I wasn’t entirely sure why I didn’t want to go in that direction either.
“No one will bother us there. It just leads to the inner yard.”
Right. I didn’t want to go near the inner courtyard. But why did I feel so opposed to it?
“Don’t you want to go outside instead? The weather’s so nice.”
“Oh, sure.”
We turned right in the hallway and went out into the schoolyard. The weather was indeed nice, but there was a chill in the air. Ryou wrapped his arms around himself for warmth. No doubt he was thinking that I was some crazy woman who didn’t know what winter was.
“I’m going to nominate you as my duty partner,” he said, cutting right to the chase.
“Thanks.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I used the safest reply.
“That’s it?” Ryou sounded disappointed.
“What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do? Are you going to nominate me?” he pressed.
“I…”
This winter, everyone in Sage Academy would be broken up into pairs to serve on duty. In theory everyone would be in male-female pairs, but we didn’t have the same number of each gender, so there would also be teams of three as well as pairs of the same gender.
On the surface, our duties encompassed only day-to-day and event preparations, but for some reason, a pair could only be formed if boy and girl chose each other. So in our minds, this was a nothing other than blatant declaration of love.
During that time, it was an undeniable reality that the school controlled all our romantic relationships. That was what 「番」 represented. The usual definition was just to perform various tasks, but dictionary says that it also means ‘couple’. Given that the Ethics Committee and Board of Education seemed to be obsessed with word meanings, this idea probably wasn’t too farfetched.12
“Sorry. I haven’t decided yet.”
Since Ryou had been so straightforward with me, I did the same.
“Do you have someone else in mind?” he asked worriedly.
“Umm, not really…”
Satoru’s face popped into my mind, but I quashed the idea immediately. He was a good friend, but I didn’t see him in a romantic way.
“Why are you choosing me?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ryou answered confidently. “You’ve always been the only one for me.”
“Always? Since when?”
“When? It’s kind of hard to put a finger on something like that, right? But if I had to decide…I guess,” Ryou suddenly looked a little uncertain, “when we were together during summer camp.”
I remembered the star-filled night from two years ago.
“What’s your favorite memory from camp?”
“That…all of it. Being together in the canoe. Oh, remember when you were so into the scenery that you almost fell in the river and I caught you at the last second? That was a close one.”
I frowned. Did that really happen? There had been some dangerous situations during camp, but we had been separated during those times. So wouldn’t it be more normal to remember our first night of camp, or the day we were reunited?
“What about night canoeing?”
“Night canoe?” Then he remembered. “Oh yeah, that was fun.”
Fun… The memory of that night was important to me, and I didn’t like that he summed it up with such a banal word.
We passed by Satoru on the way back to the classroom. He was looking in our direction with a strange expression on his face, but his gaze wasn’t on me. No surprise there since he and Ryou had been in a relationship a while back.
But the look in his eyes gave me goosebumps. It wasn’t a look of jealousy or infatuation. I can only describe it as an expression of pure confusion. Like someone who had seen something completely irreconcilable with reality.
That night I had a long, rambling dream. Most of it was forgotten as soon as I woke up, but the final scene was burned into my mind.
I was in a dim, empty place. In my hands I held a bouquet of flowers. I realized that I was in the school’s inner courtyard. It was filled with gravestones as far as the eye could see. No matter how hard I tried, it was too dark to make out the words carved on the stone tablets.
I put the flowers on the grave directly before me. It was new, but the stone had already been weathered away and it sank into the ground as if melting into it. It was impossible to read the name on it.
As I stood there, an intense feeling of loneliness washed over me, like a hole had opened in my chest.
“Have you forgotten about me already?”
Someone spoke to me. A boy’s voice. It was painfully familiar, but I didn’t know whose it was.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t remember.”
“I see… I guess it can’t be helped.”
I turned in the direction of the voice, but no one was there.
“Where are you? Let me see your face.”
“I don’t have a face,” he said quietly.
At these words, I recalled an infinite sadness. I see…he didn’t have a face anymore.
“But you should know it well.”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“It’s not your fault,” the voice said kindly. “They erased my name after burying me.”
“Who? Why would they do that?”
“Look over there. They’ve all been erased.”
There was a strangely-shaped gravestone that looked like a house of cards. Most of it had already crumbled away, rendering the name illegible.
“There, and there too.”
Farther on, more gravestones stood silently. Those had no names to begin with, only a disc inlaid in the stone. As I approached, I realized that they were mirrors. If I got closer, would they reflect my face? My footsteps faltered.
“It’s okay,” the faceless boy said behind me. “Don’t be afraid. That’s not your grave.”
“Whose is it?”
“Take a good look and you’ll understand.”
I peered into the mirror.
Light flickered in my eyes.
I put a hand up to block the dazzling light. Then slowly, I opened my eyes.
Daylight glimmered through a gap in the curtains.
I stretched, got up, and pulled back the curtains. The rising sun dyed the window pane with yellow light. A few puffer sparrows flitted energetically from tree to tree.
It was the same morning scenery as always. I wiped my eyes. Even as I was dreaming I knew I had been crying.
I went and washed my face to prevent my parents from noticing.
The clock on the wall showed that it was not yet seven.
I thought about all the dreams I had ever had. Who did the voice belong to? Why did it sound so familiar, and why did it fill me with such sadness?
Suddenly I realized that the mirror in the dream was one I had seen before. Not in another dream, but in reality.
My heart started pounding. I had seen it when I was very young. Where though? Considering my age then, it couldn’t have been too far away. Somewhere near the house… no, somewhere in the house. There had been a large box stuffed with all sorts of odds and ends that I thought of as a treasure chest. I would spend all day digging through it and not get bored.
The shed.
There was a large shed near our house. The top half was made of plaster and the bottom half was built with corrugated metal. It was surprisingly spacious inside and I had spent much of my childhood playing in there.
I put on a jacket, slipped quietly down the stairs, past the entrance hall, and out into the yard. The sharp morning air made my face sting, but felt thoroughly refreshing as I took a few deep breaths.
I opened the large door of the shed with some difficulty.
There was barely enough light coming through the wooden slats of the window to illuminate the inside. The room was about eight tatami mats large, packed full of shelves, with a staircase to the second floor at the far end.
Relying on my vague memories of the place, I went up the stairs. There were shelves along the wall, with sturdy wooden boxes on them.
Each box probably weighed a hundred kilograms or more. Using my cantus, I opened each in turn.
It was in the fifth box.
I took out a circular mirror about t
hirty centimeters in diameter. Unlike the usual silver-backed glass mirror, it was much heavier, absorbed heat very quickly, and appeared to be made of bronze. It was exactly the same as the one in my dream.
Slowly, memories began to resurface. I had definitely seen this mirror in the past. And probably more than once. I examined it carefully. Bronze left out for a long time would begin to oxidize, and in extreme cases, turn completely green. But the surface looked only slightly cloudy.
The last time I had seen the mirror was within the past five years at the very least. It must have been polished at that time.
I put the box back and brought the mirror outside with me.
I didn’t want my parents to see, so I went around the house and set off down the waterway in Hakuren 4. Even though it was still early morning, there were already quite a few boats on the canal. The wind coming off the water was cold. Doing my best to be inconspicuous, I traveled down the less populated waterways and stopped at an empty dock.
I rubbed the mirror with the piece of cloth it came with to try to get rid of the cloudiness. It was more difficult that I had anticipated. I used my cantus, imagining the dirt falling off of the mirror, and gradually the bronze regained its pinkish-gold luster.
Ever since I found the mirror, I had been thinking that it was a magic mirror.
Magic mirrors are a kind of mirror created using a technique that has existed since the ancient times. You can’t see anything by simply looking at it, but if you direct the light of the sun hitting it onto a surface, words or pictures appear in the projection. It worked by scattering light from micron-thin variations in thickness of the bronze. The projections only show up in sunlight; candles, torches, and phosphorescent lights have no effect.
In the past, the bronze first had to be ground down to the proper thinness, then the design was painstakingly scratched into the bronze and polished until it was invisible to the naked eye. But it was the subject of one of our first practical lessons at Sage Academy. In order to master the delicate touch needed to control our cantus, we all had to create a magic mirror. I remember completing mine in just one lesson. It said “Saki” and had arabesque designs on it. I thought I had done a splendid job.
