The Trancer

by Reki Kawahara

  Minoru—rooted in place, messenger bag still slung over his shoulder—heard Suu mumble something to herself.

  “I’m…the first…”

  Then, with a somewhat apologetic look on her face, the beautiful young woman bowed to Norie again. “…I’m very sorry, Ms. Norie, but I am not Minoru’s girlfriend or anything.”

  Minoru was now strongly considering dashing up the stairs, flinging himself into his room, and cowering in the closet with his protective shell around him, possibly never to leave again. But again, there was nothing he could do but grin and bear it.

  About thirty minutes later, the two large platters of sushi on the dining room table had been utterly wiped out, leaving behind not a single grain of rice.

  Norie had a habit of making too much food anyway, and tonight’s dinner, complete with rice, seaweed, and other accompaniments, was no exception. The meal could have easily fed four people, and while Minoru had certainly eaten his fair share, Suu had packed away so much food that he had to wonder where it all went given her thin frame. All the while, Norie looked on smilingly as Suu gobbled away.

  Eating her last sesame and plum sushi, Suu finished her plate at the same time as Minoru, took a large gulp of green tea, and gave a long, satisfied sigh. Then her lilac eyes widened.

  “Ah…I’m so sorry, I got completely carried away and ate too much…even though I’m not even his girlfriend…”

  Side-eyeing her as she bowed apologetically, Minoru groaned. “…Enough about that already…”

  Norie simply giggled. “It’s fine, really! Please come back for dinner again anytime… Oh, the tea! I’ll go make some more.”

  As she stood up to leave, Minoru and Suu both bobbed their heads, thanking her in unison. Then, once she was out of the room, they cautiously exchanged glances. Minoru was quick to avert his eyes, but then he heard Suu murmur something to him softly.

  “I’m…the first…?”

  Don’t tell me she could be… No, she’s definitely making fun of me. Why are all the members of the SFD like this?

  As Minoru groaned again, Suu stood up, trotting briskly over to the kitchen. After another moment of hanging his head, Minoru heard the Refractor’s voice.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Norie? Would you mind terribly if we had the tea in Minoru’s room instead?”

  If there was any small comfort to be had in this uncontrollable situation, it was that Minoru’s kindly older sister was always cleaning his room for him. So at least it would be tidy, the furniture free of dust, and there wouldn’t be anything lying around that he didn’t want Suu to see (at least on the surface).

  And so, balancing a tray with two small teacups and some tea cakes, Minoru resignedly walked up the thirteen steps to the second floor and his room as if being escorted to the gallows. Suu followed close behind him, her footsteps scarcely making a sound.

  What on earth is she trying to do here?

  Minoru was wondering, too late to do anything, as he awkwardly turned the doorknob with his wrist and stepped into the darkness of his bedroom. Then, nudging the switch on with his shoulder, he waited for the LED ceiling light to illuminate the room before placing the tray down on the low table in the middle of the floor.

  The only major furnishings in Minoru’s four-by-four-meter room were his computer desk, his bed, and a few bookshelves, so the floor was fairly spacious. “Please have a seat,” he said stiffly, motioning to one of the two round cushions that sat on either side of the table.

  The Refractor closed the door with both hands, then nodded, sitting down on the cushion with her legs out to the side. Minoru knelt stiffly on the opposite cushion, lifting one of the teacups off the tray to place it in front of Suu. He put the cakes and other teacup on the table, set the tray aside on the floor, then carefully lifted his cup with both hands and took a sip.

  “…This feels like a marriage interview.”

  Caught off guard by Suu’s quiet, unprompted remark, Minoru practically choked on the hot tea and swallowed it painfully in silence. He returned his teacup to the table—having nearly dropped it—and took a deep, ragged breath. “So…,” he said weakly, “what exactly is going on here?”

  “What’s going on…? Well, you’re the one who invited me over for dinner…”

  “I-I guess so, but…I didn’t think it would end up, you know…like this.”

  “I should hope not. If you had, it would seem like you’d invited me with the ulterior motive of luring a girl into your bedroom, now wouldn’t it?”

  “Ah…right, that’s true.”

  Minoru nodded absentmindedly, then hurriedly switched to shaking his head rapidly as his mind caught up to him. Throughout all this, Suu paid him no mind, calmly and quietly taking a sip of her tea. She gave another little sigh, then abruptly ducked her head.

  “But really…thank you for inviting me. I can’t remember the last time I had such a delicious meal. You have a wonderful older sister—I can understand why you’re so reluctant to move to SFD Headquarters.”

  Blinking in surprise for the umpteenth time today at Suu’s serious face, Minoru nodded slowly and responded in a small voice, “Um, you’re welcome…”

  Speaking with her up close like this, it was even harder not to notice her overwhelming beauty. She definitely had some amount of foreign blood. There was a golden tint to her tawny-brown hair that didn’t look artificial, and her skin was snow-white to the point that the whites of her eyes looked faintly blue by comparison. Among these pale colors, the violet blue of her irises stood out brilliantly.

  Nearly getting lost in those eyes, with the color of clouds at dawn and the jet-black of her pupils, Minoru quickly came to his senses and looked away. The silence between them was as complete as if he were inside of his protective shell, until it was broken by Suu’s quiet voice.

  “Minoru. Do you believe in the existence of ‘sight lines’?”

  “…Huh?” Minoru looked up blankly, not understanding the meaning of the sudden question. Turning the phrase over in his mind a few times, he attempted to formulate a response. “Sight lines… You mean like, um…a line that connects a person’s eyeballs to whatever they’re looking at…?” he asked, drawing a line in the air between his right eye and Suu’s face as he spoke.

  Suu, however, shook her head lightly, her expression as hard to read as ever. “No, not exactly. More like the sort of thing that makes you turn around because you felt someone looking at you from behind. A sort of signal or energy that emanates from someone’s eyes when they look at something.”

  “What…?” This time, it was Minoru’s turn to shake his head. “That’s more of a figurative concept, right? After all, human eyes are like camera lenses that take in light…um, electromagnetic waves? So they’re receptors, not transmitters. So there’s no such thing as a physical sight line…at least, I would think so…,” he mumbled awkwardly, again looking into Suu’s violet eyes.

  Even those beautiful eyes wouldn’t be able to emit some kind of energy or anything, right? And yet…why does it feel like it’s harder to breathe when I meet her eyes, then? It’s like she has enough power to look right through me…

  Suu nodded slightly, maintaining eye contact with Minoru. “Right. That’s what the doctor who examined me said, too, a long time ago.”

  “What? A doctor…?”

  “I can see other people’s sight lines. I’ve been able to for a long time…ever since I was a child.”

  Hearing this explanation in a small, wavering voice, Minoru took a full five seconds to process her words. “Since you were a child…?” he asked uncertainly. “Komura, you’re in middle school, right?”

  “Yes. I’m a third-year.”

  Only a year younger than me… Wait, that’s beside the point.

  The appearance of the mysterious spheres that infected human hosts had been just three months ago, meaning that this ability Suu was talking about wasn’t one that came from a Third Eye. In other words…

  “So…it’s a real
psychic ability?” Minoru asked hoarsely.

  “That, or a mental illness.” Suu lowered her long eyelashes, barely moving her lips as she spoke. “The doctor said that scopophobia—the fear of being seen—is fairly common in Japanese people. However, there are aspects that a phobia doesn’t explain. For instance, I can see someone’s sight line even if I don’t know that person is there.”

  “If you don’t know they’re there…? You mean, you’d see a sight line first, follow it, and then see that there’s a person looking at you?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Certainly, if that were true, a simple diagnosis of neurosis wouldn’t explain that phenomenon. At a loss for words, Minoru simply nodded back, and Suu continued with words that were even more startling.

  “There’s another thing, too. The sight lines that I can see have colors.”

  “Colors…?”

  “It’s very pretty. They’re thin, colorful beams of light that sparkle in the air. So when I was young, although I didn’t understand them, I wasn’t afraid or unhappy. It was only when I became older, and realized that the colors had meaning, that I became afraid…”

  Raising her head, she stared straight at Minoru with her lilac eyes. He looked back reflexively, but of course, he couldn’t see any lines or colors emanating from her eyes. Her lips moved slightly as she continued in a quiet voice.

  “…When I was small, most people looked at me with a yellow sight line. But around when I started middle school, most women started to look at me with blue lines, and most men’s lines were a shade of red. At first, I thought it was just based on the person’s gender. But there were still people whose lines were other colors—yellow, green, orange—so I tried to think harder about the differences.”

  Suu paused for a moment, her slender frame trembling ever so slightly.

  “Then, one day, something happened that made me realize the truth. The colors of the sight lines change based on the individual’s feelings toward me. Yellow means they feel love and affection. Blue is the color of hatred. And red is the color of lust and desire.”

  “…!”

  Minoru breathed in sharply.

  In other words, that meant that most women hated Suu, and most men lusted after her.

  Well…in a way, it wasn’t entirely surprising. By nature, both Suu’s appearance and her disposition were very out of the ordinary. And human beings were programmed by society to instinctively want to either reject or possess anything unfamiliar.

  But to be able to visibly detect that kind of negative emotion would certainly be nothing less than terrifying.

  As if detecting Minoru’s thoughts in that moment, Suu shrugged lightly, trying to bring the mood back to normal.

  “…At this point, I understand that feelings like that can’t really be helped. But…what I really couldn’t take was watching my mother’s sight line turning from yellow to blue, little by little…and my father’s…slowly but surely turning red.” She glanced at Minoru, who had frozen in place again, and continued with deliberate indifference.

  “If that black sphere hadn’t come down from the sky three months ago and given me the ability to hide from the gaze of others…I think I might have committed suicide by now.”

  With that, Suu stood up abruptly, walked over to the wall behind them, and flicked off the light switch.

  The room was plunged into darkness. For a moment, Minoru could see nothing, but his Third Eye quickly went to work enhancing his vision, so that he saw everything as if through a dark gray curtain. Through the haze of darkness, he saw Refractor walk back over, come around the table, and kneel down to sit close beside him. Minoru couldn’t say a word as he strained to see in the dark.

  Suu’s voice rang out through the heavy silence. “The reason I wanted to come to your room is so that I could clearly see your sight line again.”

  Hearing this, Minoru finally recognized how stupid he’d been. Suu had been able to see his sight line this entire time and, with it, the color that revealed his emotions. Realizing this far too late, Minoru squeezed his eyes shut. As soon as he did, he heard Suu whisper into his right ear:

  “Don’t worry. In the car, your sight line wasn’t red or blue. If it was, I would’ve declined your invitation. Now…open your eyes and look at me.”

  I can’t, Minoru thought immediately.

  Minoru had never been able to show his true emotions to anyone, even his beloved older sister Norie—perhaps not even his real parents, when they were alive.

  Through his entire life, there was only one person who had been able to completely break down the wall around his heart: his older sister Wakaba. Though she had been three years older than him, they had laughed together, cried together, and occasionally even fought together. She was the only person in the world whom he hadn’t even remotely seen as a stranger. Ever since she’d passed away, Minoru had been determined to never again let somebody else into his heart.

  However…

  “Look at me.”

  Suu’s words seemed to be casting a spell on Minoru’s eyelids. Somehow, something about the flat tone of her voice—even though all emotion seemed stripped away, or perhaps because of it—was shaking his resolute refusal.

  Having squeezed them shut for as long as he could, Minoru finally eased open his now-stiff eyelids.

  In the dim light, just barely a foot away, Suu stared back with violet eyes under thick eyelashes, her face almost inhumanly expressionless. She was so close that he could count every lash, trace every patterned line in her irises.

  Minoru could almost feel his sight line being sucked into Suu’s dark pupils as if they were two black holes. For a moment, her violet-blue irises widened, then quickly returned to their usual aloofness.

  “…So…”

  Even though he’d just finished drinking his tea, Minoru felt hoarse as he uttered the question almost unconsciously: “What color is my sight line…?”

  Suu didn’t answer for a moment, opening and closing her eyes twice, then three times. Finally, her lips parted ever so slightly, and she murmured words that for once had a faint tint of emotion. “…It was difficult to make out your sight line in the light, and now I see why. Minoru, your sight line… It almost doesn’t have a color.”

  “What…?”

  “It’s thin, weak, almost transparent… I’ve seen one like this only once before… It’s the color of apathy.”

  Minoru’s eyes opened wider despite himself.

  “The color of…apathy?”

  “Yes. You feel no desire toward me, certainly no hatred, and maybe not even any human interest at all,” she stated bluntly. For some reason, as she spoke, there seemed to be the faintest, softest hint of a smile on her lips.

  Minoru stared once more at the girl sitting stiffly before him, then slowly shook his head again. “That can’t be… Of course I feel interest toward you! At least, it seems that way to me…”

  “As a fellow Third Eye host, maybe. But as Suu Komura, I don’t interest you at all.”

  Her retort caught Minoru off guard, leaving him at a loss for words. As much as he instinctively felt that to be a ridiculous assertion, there was still a part of him that thought it just might be true. Her ability to see others’ sight lines, and the ability to avoid that sight through refraction, certainly fascinated him. But as for the girl in front of him who held that power…

  Could he really say that he hadn’t questioned whether there was any point in getting to know her?

  Minoru’s left cheek prickled with pain. It was the spot where the Divider, Olivier Saitou, had slapped him a week earlier.

  Olivier had accused him of not feeling anything toward the taxi driver who had fallen victim to the Ruby Eye Igniter.

  And he was right.

  Of course, Minoru couldn’t forgive the Ruby Eyes for targeting innocent people, and he truly did want to work with the SFD and put a stop to their murders—but he couldn’t say he felt any real pain over the deaths of the victims.
After all, they had been strangers, with no connection to him. This applied to the Ruby Eyes and their victims alike.

  Was there some sort of defect in his heart that made him this way? And his colorless sight line just proof of that warped part of him? Minoru bit his lip and looked down, but Suu’s voice immediately addressed him again from nearby.

  “Don’t make that face. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “But…”

  “If anything, I’m happy about it, because I don’t need to be afraid of your sight line. And besides…I probably feel the same way.”

  “Huh?”

  Raising his eyes to glance at her, Minoru saw that Suu was smiling faintly again. “I’m sorry. But I’m also more interested in your ability than in you yourself. I have been ever since I heard about you at headquarters. Because…our powers are similar, but they’re also opposites.”

  Unable to understand her meaning right away, Minoru furrowed his brow. Then, after a moment, he realized what she was trying to say.

  They were similar in that they both isolated the user from the outside world.

  And they were opposite in that Suu’s power blocked out visible light, while Minoru’s power blocked out everything but visible light.

  Shuffling closer to Minoru so that their knees almost touched as they knelt next to each other on the floor, Suu continued, “The sources of our powers seem as though they would be quite similar. And yet, why does your power spare only visible light? To me, the eyes of other people are the most frightening things of all. Is it different for you?”

  It was a question that Minoru had no reason to be able to answer. After all, it was the Third Eye in Minoru’s chest that had formulated his protective-shell ability, not Minoru himself.

  And yet Minoru felt compelled to answer. For Suu, who could perceive other people’s emotions through their sight lines whether she wanted to or not, it must have been terrifying to enter this house—no, even to have just deactivated her ability in the car. And yet she had pushed ahead and done so, most likely for the sake of asking him this question.