Published at 31st of August 2019 1:07 am

Volume 1, Lingering Pain - III

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

Though I really didn’t want to resort to this, I am left without any other alternative. I decide to contact an old high school friend to see if I can bor- row some money. I know what places he haunts. I go to the university I dropped out of not two months ago and wait for him in the cafeteria. Just a few minutes after noon, right on schedule, the large, imposing shadow of Gakuto comes into view, easy to pick out among the crowd smaller than him. Spotting me, he swaggers on over to my table.

“Well, look who decided to come back! How you hangin’, man? Here to stay for good this go around?”

“Unfortunately, no. School treating you well?”

“Ah, you know, this here’s a game that needs to be played, so I play it. How about you? If I know you like I know you, you ain’t gonna holler at me just for a social call. What’s the trouble? How’d that job hunt go?”

“Great, actually. Got a job.” “So what’s wrong?”

“The job,” I reply dryly. “My generous employer has decided that she’ll forego the usual paycheck this month, so that leaves me hanging in the wind.”

Gakuto makes a face halfway between disappointment and genuine bemusement. “That ain’t so bad, man. And here I was thinking it was gon- na be some profoundly life changing shit, and you drag your broke ass all the way down here for extra dough? You sure you’re not some alien in disguise?”

“Very funny. When you’ve got your back against a corner like this, you can expect the same hospitality.”

“But to have money being the first thing out of your mouth; it just ain’t like you. And anyway, ain’t your folks supposed to have your back on this one?”

“Me and my parents haven’t talked since the big fight we had when I stopped going to university. How can I go back to them right now like this? It’d be like surrendering.”

“You got as thick a head as me sometimes, I give you that. Now, don’t tell me you called your folks names and shouted in their faces or something?” “I’ll thank you to leave that out of the discussion and focus on the real

topic. So are you gonna lend me some or aren’t you?”

“Damn, man, you in a fighting mood today. But there ain’t no need to be, ‘cause I’m feeling awful generous. Plenty from our school called you a

friend back then, Mikiya, and that includes me. If I put it out that you’re in need of cash, we’d all be pitching in to help. So don’t worry, man. We got your back.” Gakuto pats me on the shoulder. “Don’t misunderstand, though, this ain’t charity,” he adds. “Friends gotta look out for each other, after all.”

Seems Gakuto’s got his own favor to ask as well. He looks over the crowd carefully to see if no one is listening in, then leans his head in closer to me and whispers.

“The short of it is that there’s some youngin I want you to look for. Old junior from back in the day, actually. Seems he gone and had his ass caught up in some heinous shit, and he hasn’t come home yet.”

Gakuto continues to explain, mentioning the name of the person in question: Keita Minato. Gakuto knows him as a member of the bunch that got cut up last night in the bar, but apparently he’s alive. Whereabouts unknown, but at a period of time after the time of the killings put out by the police, Keita called up a mutual friend of him and Gakuto. The friend then contacted Gakuto, saying Keita was acting strange and incoherent.

“He just kept shoutin’ that he was gonna die and someone be hunting his ass down. After that, nuthin. Don’t even answer his cell now. Guy who took the call says he was mixing his words and shit, sounding really doped up.”

The fact that even a high school kid like Keita could purchase dope with- out us so much as being surprised was just a fact of the times. Many of the corners and alleys of mazelike Tokyo have quickly turned into open-air drug markets, proof of the increasingly high demand for stimulants and depres- sants that so many people turn to for the clarity and solace that they felt society could not give them. However, when you’re the survivor of a mass murder and you feel that the killer is coming for you next, when you’re a person like Keita Minato in other words, your next fix should really be the last thing on your mind.

“I kinda feel like I’m being thrown into the fire without a hose here. Do you really think I can survive talking to these hoppers on my own?”

“I’ve faith. You always been like a bloodhound, finding people with next to nuthin to go on.”

“This Keita kid—does he often do drugs?”

“Far as I know, no. Only them corner boys killed last night were married to them acid blotters. But if what the friend’s saying be for real, he might’ve had a change of heart. Come on man, you still can’t search your head for Keita? He’s that kid that like to tail around your ass some in high school.”

“I kinda have a vague idea, yeah…” During high school, there were some

juniors who liked to hang around me for some reason, possibly because of me being friends with cool kid Gakuto here. “Well, if he’s just having a really bad acid trip, then that’d be good…or at least better than what we’re suspecting,” I mention with a sigh. “Guess I got no choice if I want to live this month. I’ll check it out and see what I can do. Can you tell me about his friends? Contacts, connections, anything?”

Gakuto reaches into his pocket to retrieve a small notebook, as if he was just waiting for me to say it. There’re a lot of names, aliases, addresses for hang outs, and phone numbers in that notebook, which means a lot of ground to cover if I want this done quick.

“I’ll be in touch if I find out anything. If I manage to find him, I’ll try to see him protected as best as I can. That good?” By protection, I mean in the form of my detective cousin Daisuke. He didn’t have anything to fear from him. Daisuke’s the kind of guy that can let you go for a drug abuse charge if you were witness to a red ball murder, which this one could end up as, what with the mutilation and multiple homicide. Far as Daisuke was concerned, nabbing the users is small game and a waste of time. Gakuto nods his assent, thanks me, and gives me 20,000 yen to start me off.

Once me and Gakuto go our separate ways, I start to make my way to the crime scene. I’ll have to work this one at least vaguely similar to how cousin Daisuke works cases if I would have any chance of finding Keita. I know that I shouldn’t really get involved in this, but Gakuto was right. Friends have to look out for each other, after all.

The sound of a ringing phone resonates in my empty apartment. I screen

the call, as I am wont to do when I’m tired, and sure enough, after five rings it switches to the answering machine with a beep. Cue his voice: familiar,

yet still feels alien enough so soon after recovering from the coma. “Morning, Shiki. Sorry to call you so early, but I’ve got a small favor to

ask if it isn’t too much trouble. Azaka and I promised to meet at a café near Ichigaya station called Ahnenerbe around noon, but something came up and it looks like I won’t be able to go. You’re free today, right? If you can, drop by there and tell her I’m not coming.” The message ends there.

I roll my body sluggishly over to the bedside and take a look at my clock,

a digital green “July 22, 7:23am” on its screen; not even four hours since I came home from my nightly outing. Christ, do I need sleep. I pull the sheets

back over my head. The summer heat doesn’t really bother me much. I’ve been able to deal well with the heat and cold ever since my childhood days, and it seems that trait carried over from my…previous life.

Just as sleep was about to take me again, the phone rang a second time. This time, when the answering machine picked up the message, it was a voice I knew, but definitely one you didn’t want to hear at just half past

seven in the morning.

“It’s me. Watched the news this morning? Probably haven’t. That’s all right, I didn’t either.”

What the hell? It’s always been at the back of my mind, but now I can definitely say that I have absolutely no idea what the fuck goes on in Tōko’s head; it is an incomprehension that sometimes continues on to her speech more often than I’m comfortable. It requires at least a few precious sec-

onds of cranial spelunking before you can start to understand what she’s saying, a trait which always tends to leave you at a disadvantage when talking to her.

“Listen up. I’m gonna phrase this in a way even your sleep-deprivedbrain can process. Three interesting deaths last night. Another jumper that hit pavement, and some girl who killed her boyfriend. I know, I know, same shit, different day, right? But here’s something that’ll help you out:” she pauses. “Our little killer struck again.”

Tōko hangs up abruptly, leaving me to wonder what she thought I would

feel when confronted with these facts. Did she expect me to feel a rush

of noble intention, and a renewed commitment to this job? How could I, when I still see the world I just awakened back into in a hazy grey veil, when

I am yet to even feel the world of my senses in a manner that seemed coherent and real? Harsh as it may be to admit, but the deaths of these people with no relation to me faze me less than the rays of the sun beating down on me.

After sleeping in for a while more, I get up much later, only when my fatigue finally gives ground. I cook breakfast in the manner that I remem- ber, after which I start to dress. I choose a light orange kimono, which should be cooler if I’m going to walk around town all day. It’s then that I get that feeling again, which causes me to bite my lip: a feeling that someone is watching me do all of this from afar. Even my wardrobe choice is one from a memory that I feel far removed from. I wasn’t this way two years ago. The two years of emptiness created a rift, a boundary line between the past and now, as if creating two very different people, yet sharing the same col- lective memory. It felt as if the weight of that memory, those sixteen years of life before the accident, kept pulling the strings attached to me. I know it’s probably just an after effect of the coma, some brain damage from the accident at the worst. I know that no matter how much I spit on this empti- ness, this fabricated dollhouse of a lie, in the end, it’s still me pulling those damn strings. Hell, maybe it’s always been me.

By the time I finish dressing up it’s almost eleven o’ clock. I press the “Messages” button on my answering machine, repeating the first message.

“Morning, Shiki…,” repeats the voice I have heard many times in the

past.

Mikiya Kokutō. The last person I saw before the accident two years ago. The only person I trusted two years ago. I have many recollections of being with him, but all of it missing details, as if I was looking at a tampered photograph, something in them not squaring with what I know. And one memory is a gaping hole, completely gone: my last memory of him and the accident. Why was Shiki in an accident? Why was Mikiya’s face the last thing I saw?

It’s the reason I still feel awkward talking to Mikiya: I feel like I should know something important about him but it’s missing in my head, and without it I won’t be able to carry out an actual conversation without them. If only these memories lost to oblivion were stored in an answering machine too.

“…tell her I’m not coming.” The answering machine stops and falls silent. It’s probably just another after effect of the coma, but hearing his voice softens the annoying itch in my mind. Problem is, that’s the itch that makes me feel alive. It’s the itch that tells me to kill.

It’s only a short forty minute walk to Ahenenerbe. The café sports their unusual German name on a sign hanging above the entrance, which I spare only a momentary glance at before entering the establishment. Once inside, I immediately notice the dearth of customers, despite it being noon, the hour when college kids frequent cafés to write a novel or do some oth- er boring activity. The café has little lighting. Its sole sources of bright light come from the entrance and four rectangular windows placed on either side of the shop, admitting the sunlight and silhouetting the tables and customers sitting there in a dark, hard-cut outline. The tables further inside the shop aren’t so lucky. It paints a nostalgic picture, as if some European middle ages tavern had stepped out of antiquity into the modern age.

I spot a pair of gaudily uniformed girls in a table way in the back, and a quick glance confirms that it is indeed Azaka Kokutō, along with another girl. Strange—Mikiya never mentioned another girl. Oh well, no biggie.

“Azaka,” I call out, while walking briskly to their table.

Azaka herself is quite a character on her own. She goes to a fancy girl’s boarding school, so she acts the part, complete with a tendency for being ladylike. But you take one look at the way she carries herself and you real- ize it’s all an act. At her best, she has an amazingly competitive streak in her, as well as a boldness that is sorely lacking in many people these days. In contrast to her brother, who endears himself to people by sheer likeabil- ity and charm, Azaka is a figure who commands respect with a single, solid look in her eyes. Those eyes now turned to me as she does a quick about face at my voice calling out her name.

“Shiki…Ryōgi,” she says, each syllable uttered and spat out like an insult. The lingering animosity towards me that she tries so hard to keep in is so palpable I can swear I almost feel the temperature rise. “I have a prior engagement with my brother. I have no business with you.”

“And it seems your brother has a prior engagement of his own,” I say, egging her on. “He said he can’t come. You know, this might just be me, but I think you just got stood up.”

A single restrained gasp. I don’t know if she’s shocked that Mikiya just treated their promise like trash, or the fact that it’s coming from me and I came down here to tell her.

“Shiki, you…you put him up to this, didn’t you?!” Azaka’s hands tremble in barely suppressed anger. I guess it’s the latter, then.

“Don’t be an idiot. He’s done his level best to piss me off too. I mean really, asking me to come all the way here just to send you away?”

Azaka glares at me with eyes full of fire. At that moment, her friend,

who has until now remained silent, interrupts; and a good thing too, since Azaka looks like she’s about to abandon her carefully cultivated demeanor of placidity by seeing how well she could throw a teacup to my face at point blank range.

“Kokutō, everyone’s staring,” the girl says in a voice as slender as a wire. Azaka looks around the café for half a beat, and then embarrassed, she sighs. “I’m sorry, Fujino. I don’t know what came over me. I just ruined your day, didn’t I?” she says apologetically. I haven’t really looked at this Fujino clearly up until now. Though she and Azaka look somewhat similar by vir- tue of the uniform and their school’s grooming standards, their demeanor cannot be more different. While Azaka has a hidden strength behind the prim and proper façade, her companion Fujino looks, at a glance, more

fragile, as if she were sick and could collapse at any second.

“Are…you okay? You look kind of—“, I involuntarily say. She answers only by looking in my direction. The way her eyes pass over me feels as if she’s looking at something beyond me, like I was just an insect on the ground to be ignored. My gut tells me she’s dangerous, and my mind itches again. My reasoning tells me that there’s no way a girl like her could do anything like what happened to the victims in that underground bar, and the itch recedes. “Never mind, pretend I didn’t say anything,” I conclude.

That crime scene was the handiwork of someone who enjoyed murder, and a girl like this Fujino could be someone like that. Reason says her hands are too weak to twist and tear off their limbs like that anyway. I turn my attention away from her and back to Azaka.

“Well anyway, s’all I got to say. Seeing as I seem to be messenger for a day, is there anything you want to say to your brother?”

“Oh, you’d do that?” says Azaka, who then proceeds to clear her throat. “Then please communicate to Mikiya my desire for him to terminate rela- tions with you. A woman the likes of you has no business being with my brother.” Azaka leaves me a final, satisfied look before I go.

I watch as the girl in the orange kimono Azaka called Shiki Ryōgi walks out the front door of the café without incident. Their verbal sparring was tense, and I was sure that if they were armed, they’d have been at each other trying to score a cut across the other’s jugular. While it didn’t esca- late to anything so dramatic, it still stifled me of all but one sentence.

That Shiki certainly had a…particular way of speaking. Azaka mentioned her surname as Ryōgi. If she is, as I suspect, a child of the Ryōgi dynasty, then that explains the unusually well-tailored kimono she wore.

“Lovely looking person, wasn’t she?” I ask Azaka.

“Well, I suppose,” she replies truthfully. That’s Azaka for you. She’d argue with a person and cause a public commotion one second, and admit without shame the same person’s better points the next.

“But only as lovely as she was frightening.” I say this firmly, with no sar- casm or humor. “I don’t like her.” It catches both me and Azaka off guard, which is only natural. I rarely, if ever, react sharply to other people, after all.

“That’s surprising. I thought you were the kind of person who wouldn’t hate a dog even if it bit you, but I suppose I still have a lot to learn about you, don’t I?”

Curiously, Azaka equated “hate” with “dislike”, which to me are two very different concepts. I didn’t hate Shiki Ryōgi. I only felt that she and I would never get along. My mind returns to the moment she and I locked eyes on each other. My eyes look over her black hair, her white skin, and the black emptiness in her eyes, all somehow ominous, as if looking at a cracked mir- ror, and seeing the distortion looking back on you, changed. We both saw what we were trying so desperately to hide behind our backs. She has the blood of many on her, and a predatory countenance. My gut tells me what I’ve been trying to avoid thinking: she is a killer, a cold-blooded murderer.

But I’m different. I’m better than her. I’ve never even so much as enter- tained any thought of murder. I say it to myself, in the dark, forbidden plac- es of my mind, closing my eyes and calling it out repeatedly. Why, then, does she not disappear? It’s as if, without even exchanging a single word, Shiki has been indelibly burned into memory.

“And this was supposed to be our day off too. I’m really sorry, Fujino.” Azaka renews her plea. I smile my practiced smile.“It’s all right. I wasn’t really feeling up to it today, anyway.”

“Well, you are looking kind of pale, though it’s hard to tell what with your skin already being so white.”

That wasn’t the real reason for my lack of enthusiasm, but I nod my acknowledgement at Azaka all the same. More importantly, I know that my body is continuing a slow slide from bad to worse, but I didn’t know that it had reached the point where it showed.

“There’s nothing we can do about it today,” says Azaka. “I’m just going to ask Mikiya myself, so why don’t we head on back for now?”

“Thank you for the concern,” I reply. “But wouldn’t your brother be at least a little mad at what you just said to Shiki before she left?”

“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. This is probably the thousandth time I said it to him, so if he’s gonna get mad at anything, it would just be me acting like a broken record about it. They say belief bends reality, so maybe if I believe it hard enough and repeat it over and over like a really pathetic curse, it’ll come true, right?”

I don’t know if she’s serious or just having fun, but I’m already used to her being largely spontaneous, so I wouldn’t at all be surprised if that’s something she just made up to make herself feel better. With a consistent record as the top notcher in Reien Girl’s Academy, and a similarly consis- tent placement on the national top ten rankings, it’s easy to see how the stress of retaining her place can get to her.

Reien Girl’s Academy provides education anywhere from the first grade to college level, and people usually go in there starting from first grade until they graduate college. People like Azaka and me, who come in after graduating high school, are quite rare. Both of us came from the same school, and we applied at the same time, making her one of my very few close friends in Reien. We usually go out on weekends and holidays to have fun, but today was supposed to have been something else entirely.

Enduring the events and the memories of the past few days has proven to be…difficult, and my depression isn’t so easily willed away. In the midst of my difficulty, an old memory of mine came to mind. For some reason, I found myself thinking about an old upperclassman, one who of the few who talked to me when I was a freshman in a local junior high school. The memory comforted me when even the company of other people couldn’t, and I cherish it.

When I told Azaka about it, she immediately jumped at the opportunity to try and find this upperclassman immediately. Apparently, her brother knows the neighborhood surprisingly well, and it’s easy for him to search for anybody. The truth is, I wasn’t too fond of bothering her brother like she suggested, but once Azaka sets out to do something, especially something she just decided in the space of a second, she follows through. Her brother not being able to come today is regrettable but is fortuitous in a way.

When I said I really didn’t feel like it earlier, the truth of it was that I already met this fabled upperclassman two days ago. When I met him, I was finally able to say what I couldn’t say three years ago. Maybe Azaka’s brother not coming was God’s way of finally putting a lid on the matter.

“Let’s scram. I bet they’re thinking of throwing our freeloading butts off their establishment just for drinking a single cup of tea and stealing a table for an hour.” Azaka stands up, and even tries her best to hide how disap- pointed she is at her brother not being able to keep his promise. Azaka might have been acting the lady when she was talking to Shiki, but I’m one of those people she can be herself around, and at her worst times, she can talk like a sailor and lose all sense of formality. It’s not that she’s pretending to be something she’s not, but it’s just something she does unconsciously, like a filter she can use to weed out people who aren’t worth her time.

Azaka is a true friend, probably my only one. She shouldn’t be involved in what is about to happen, which is why we’ll never see each other again.

“Azaka, you can go back to the dormitory without me. I think I’ll sleep over at my parents’ house tonight.”

“You sure? I mean, I’m cool with it, but you’re gonna get in trouble with the Directress if this becomes a habit. Don’t let it happen too often, okay?” And with a flutter of her cassock, Azaka leaves the gloomily lit café.

When Azaka opens the door, my eyes suddenly catch the sign outside. “Ahnenerbe”: “ancestral heritage” in German.

I never came to school again after what happened two nights ago. No doubt, the school has already contacted my father about my absence with- out leave. And when I come home, I will surely be subject to a strict ques- tioning as to what I have been up to in the past two days. And, like a child who has finally acquiesced to the whipping, I will tell everything. My father will then probably disown me, all because I cannot craft a single convincing lie. Except for one lie, the one I told Azaka. That was simple and easy. Not like home. Now I’ll never have a home to return to. Home, and each and every part of it, is a lie.

My father now is mother’s second husband. The problem stems from the fact that I come from the first. My father only wanted the house, land, and title that my mother’s family would bring him, and to him I was just a bonus, an extra, a spare. This consideration of my status led me to try hard- er, to be a woman of faithfulness and virtue like my mother, to be a model student my father could be proud of, to be a normal girl anyone could trust. I wanted to be that girl so much, not for anyone’s sake, but for myself. It

was an ambition that drove me and, like a charm, protected me, as much from my father as it did from forcing me to think about a better life.

But the lie is over now. Whatever magic that unreachable dream grant- ed me for protection is now forever lost.

The sun slowly descends to rest, its light now visible only in the gaps between the buildings, and it casts long, parallel shadows in the streets of the darkening city where I continue to walk. The wave of people coming and going, walking the streets in a great roiling mass, the traffic lights blink- ing red to green to red again; I walk amongst all of them. Here and there, among both the young and the old, you can see happy faces, picturesque expressions of joy all around, and my heart tightens at the sight. It’s all like a dream, another lie.

On a whim, I pinch my cheek, and feel nothing. I pinch harder, twisting skin.

Nothing.

When I look at my hands, I see red on my fingertips. Even though I dug my nails deep enough to draw blood, I still feel nothing, no spark of life. I laugh, the exhalation coming out in little fits and starts.

Is it the soul that hurts when I saw the smiles of passersby, or is it, as when people try to hurt me with words, really my brain firing neurons to generate a predisposed reaction from me? A flash of pain to make you understand that bad things are happening and it needs to stop. Whatever the source of the pain, whether rejection, abuse, self-defense, or some other cause, all these are already after the fact, and whatever justification your brain creates for the pain is just like any other drug, a function to make you feel better, to sober your soul about what was done, and what has been done to you.

Though I do not know the common pain, I understand the wounds of the soul, and the pain that comes with it. But that particular breed of pain is hardly important, nothing more than a fleeting delusion you entertain, because the pain of the soul is easily dispelled with the right words from the right person speaking them, massaging them into a lie, and you forget the pain because it was so trivial. Real pain is not so easily remedied, because as long as the wound remains, the pain continues its course, throbbing, pulsating, and proving if nothing else, that you are alive.

If the soul were real, if my soul could be touched, then maybe the wounds on it can be real too, and pain, real pain, would follow. Like on that night, when those boys violated me. I still remember: their low voices of laughter, the shadows on their faces flickering in the light of the alcohol lamp.

Threats—

Shouting—

Accusations— Being violated—

I remember the man lying on top of me, clutching something in his hand raised above his head. It caught the light, and for an instant I saw the glint of steel. I remember it falling fast, swung downward. Afterwards, I felt a warm sensation in my stomach, and when my eyes looked downwards, I see my uniform torn in the abdomen and wet with blood. After that, a haze of violence and carnage, dealt not by them, but by me, my own doing. I end their little lives and realize that the warmth in my stomach was what they truly called pain.

My heart tightens again. An ethereal voice spoke in my ear, but it sounds as if it’s coming from my own head. It tells me that there is no mercy, no forgiveness, and it repeats over and over. My legs buckle, and the warmth in my belly, now more like a scalding fire, comes again; an unseen hand clutching my insides in an ever tightening grip.

The nausea is overwhelming, more so than usual. I should be slipping into unconsciousness by now. An arm goes numb, almost as if it was sud- denly taken away, and only by looking at it do I know it’s still firmly attached to my shoulder.

It hurts…so much. Now, I know I am alive.

The stab wound that I know has been healed now suddenly burns again. In a childhood long gone, my mother once told me that the pain would go away once the wound heals. But now even that is a lie. Even after the bleeding stops and the skin sews itself back on, the pain remains.

But mother, I don’t know if you understand, but I like this burning sensa- tion. There is no greater object that makes me realize I am indeed alive! This is the lingering pain that I can be sure is no fleeting delusion.

“I need to find him…quickly,” I whisper to myself, the words coming out in rapid, ragged bursts. The score must be settled, and the life of the boy who escaped must be taken. It is the last thing I want to do, but there is no other choice, if I don’t want to be hunted down myself as a murderess. And now that I finally have the pain I craved for so long, it would be a shame to end it like that. No, I’ll have more of this, this pleasure of finally feeling alive.

My body moans and screams with an ache when I move it, but nev- ertheless I manage to start dragging myself to those corner boys’ usual haunts. Tears start to form and fall from my eyes from the sharp pain, but right now, even the pain is almost like a beloved companion.

I go back to my apartment after my little parley with Azaka, trying to catch up on my sleep. Only at night do I go out again. So far the job Tōko hired me for is still in its early stages, and yet only two days after it adds a fresh corpse to its tally, making it a total of five bodies so far: four in the underground bar that started this whole mess, and the one that Tōko said showed up last night, apparently at some random construction site in the same neighborhood. I don’t really see it being related to the four originals. But then, Mikiya did say to me once that these people tended to know each other at least on a cursory basis if they’re in the same neighborhood. They’re hoppers, alley kids, and drifters that are slinging, buying, and play- ing the same game night after night, after all, he said. If so, last night’s fatal- ity may have known the bodies in the bar, at least by name or reputation.

My attention drifts back to the girl Azaka was with at Ahnenerbe. I’m still mostly groping in the dark with the brand-new capabilities of my Eyes, so I ended up accidentally seeing her lines— the traces of death that ran over all things—when I looked straight at her. That was careless, even for me. She looked normal enough, very much like your average stuck up rich kid. But she was hiding blood in her past; of that much I’m sure. Her eyes told her story well enough: hers was a liminal existence, tied by one fragile string to one side of her life, and being pulled like a metal to a magnet to the other, as if she belongs there. I mean, fuck, of all people, I should know the feeling.

We read each other like two predators back there, and my gut tells me she’s the one, but I can’t entirely be sure. I don’t see, or at least I don’t yet see, a reason for her being someone who enjoys murder as much as I do. But then, since when did killers in this town start needing a reason to enjoy killing?

Hah, “enjoy killing.” I wonder what Mikiya would think if he heard me saying that. He’d probably give me a stern telling-to, saying “murderin’ be a purty steep crime, Shiki” while waving a finger in front of me.

What an utter idiot, I muse, as much to myself as to Mikiya who must be half-way across town right now.

Mikiya once said to me that I haven’t changed from before. I wonder, then, if I was always like this even before the accident: walking around town aimlessly, a woman a little off her rocker searching for something to kill.

I try to tell myself that no, Shiki never had any liking for this sort of

stuff, or if she had, it certainly wasn’t in her laundry list of priorities. This was always Shiki’s line of thinking. Shiki, the man—yin, dwelling inside Shikithe woman—yang. But then, where does that put me? Shiki was

here before, but he’s gone now. Dead, probably, or something like it. Then that means this desire to kill isn’t anything else but my own, and I can’t let some other personality take the fall for it. Tōko had the right of it I suppose. This case does fit me like a glove. I mean, holy shit, I get to kill someone with no strings attached!

It’s almost midnight. I ride the subway to a station I rarely get off at. The city is sleepless tonight, the noise rising to the all too common cho- rus of the streets: the melody of traffic and speeding cars; and then the background vocals: the shouting and arguments echoing in the streets; and now the percussions: the sound of bats and pipes and knives, setting the tempo by claiming their share of screaming victims; and then the main vocals: the siren wail of the police rollers; and always, the footsteps are there, in some places a scattered rhythm, in some a low rumble, all of them here in this labyrinthine city.

Here, from the exit of the station, I can see the tall cargo cranes and stacks of shipping containers, themselves as tall as a house or larger, that reveal the short distance to the port.

I don’t know where the last one ran off to, but I’ve thought of a way to solve that problem. I was taken to a lot of places by those men. They had hangouts scattered all over the neighborhood, places where they could unwind before they did me. I might find out where the last one is hiding by going back to these places and asking the people he knows there. They must know. He can’t rely on his parents, or his school, or the police, so he has no other recourse but his own kind.

Walking the city at night is something I’ve never gotten used to, and a little part of me keeps saying that I should just go home and not bother with going to these shady night dens, but the pain and the filthy memories propel my feet step by step.

At a large karaoke bar, the third place I visited tonight, I finally manage to meet a person who claims to be a friend of Keita Minato. An employee of the establishment, he lets slip a dirty smile when we talk, and suggests that we go to a quiet place to talk. Ditching his shift, we walk again. The little voice tells me that this is another trap, another game we play before he jumps me like the others. He knows how weak I am. He can smell it, and the smile he made while we were talking was him reading me as easy prey. He must know what Keita Minato and his friends did to me, and he thinks he can do it too. That’s why he hasn’t a worry on his mind right now. Even knowing all this, I ignore the voice and follow him. He’s my only chance at finding my lost one, and I’m not going to pass it up.

We arrive at a lonely stretch of road. I grip my burning stomach even tighter, and prepare myself.

It’s almost midnight. For the hundredth time tonight, I summon the memory of me being violated, and my conviction is renewed, my steps unyielding. The city whispers again tonight, the noise coming together in its regular volume: the shudders in the air from the breaths of the pained, the sighing release of the dying, and the whispers of the dead. This is a place that bleeds, suffers, and dies every night, and for a moment I come to an understanding with this labyrinthine city.

Here in this barely lit strip of road with this wretched man, I can see the warehouses and silos, black silhouettes towering in the sky, that reveal the short distance to the port.

Luck’s on his side tonight, thinks the young man. Keita and his buddies were a talkative bunch, always consummate loudmouths talking about the rich girl they kept banging over and over again every week. For his part, the young man had long since resigned the matter to the back part of his brain where he could filter out all their voices as just meaningless background noise, just part of their routine. What they did in their spare time was their business, not his, always had been. Keita and his group weren’t anyone special, and every one had grown up in a different corner of the hood any- way, so it wasn’t his job to butt in, and anyway the story had sounded suspiciously embellished right from the start so he tended to take it with a grain of salt in the first place. But then, the girl coming to his job on his shift was just too irresistible a treat.

Oh sure, he knew she was the girl they were talking about. She fit the bill exactly: rich girl from a rich kid school. Now, on a regular occasion, he’d be on a payphone right now telling his crew about the find, to share the fun. But as good a friend as he was, this was not an opportunity that necessitated a lot of people. This was not, in other words, the kind of easy alley gang bang he and four other boys would occasionally engage in. It’s a whole different ball game this time, seeing as he recognizes the girl as fam- ily to the owners of Asagami Construction, the daughter if he remembered correctly. They’re the kind of upper crust clan who put a premium value on appearances and the gossip about them in the local patrician society. Rap- ing this girl and threatening to divulge the dirty details to the public later, maybe even with some carefully selected photos, was as good as him dip- ping his hands into the family wallet himself; for this is a family that would sooner settle the matter with money than drag the whole scandal through the publicity of a trial. That’s why he didn’t call his friends tonight. To him, this was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

This is a solid caper, thinks the young man; a caper Keita and those dumb fuckers never thought of. Despite being the leader of a semi-famous crew in the neighborhood, the man Keita and the others followed were so dumb they probably couldn’t figure out which way to point a gun if they shot themselves looking down the barrel.

Fujino Asagami keeps pace with the man without a single word. It almost makes him a little nervous. Bad idea to bring her to the usual places, he thinks, so he heads to the warehouse section of the harbor. There’s little light, and at this midnight hour, the longshoremen would be home and there’d be no one guarding the place. When they enter the dark spaces between the tall warehouses, he finally turns to face the girl. The sound of the waves and the faint traces of light coming from the Broad Bridge

construction site nearby compound to the uneasiness of Fujino’s silence, but the man shrugs it away.

“This should be far enough,” he mutters. “So, what did you wanna ask about?” He figures he might as well answer Fujino’s question. Not letting her voice her question, after all, would be in bad form.

“Er, yes. Would you happen to know where Mr. Keita is now?” she finally says after a full five-second delay. Through all of this Fujino hadn’t been making eye contact with the man. Her eyes, half-obscured by her well-kept bangs, were downcast and seemed to alternate in interest between the one hand she had on her stomach and the floor.

“Nah, girl, Keita ain’t been seen ‘round here last few days. I heard he ain’t even got a place of his own, so he bounce around, crashing in a differ- ent crib every week with his peoples. Far as I know, he ain’t got a cell either, so you can’t connect with him.”

“No…I can contact him.”

She’s talking weird. She doesn’t know where Keita is even though she can contact him? Did those guys fuck her so much her brain shut off or something? That should make things a lot smoother for business later, but he had to admit he’d been expecting a little resistance. He likes his girls with fight in them.

“Oh, well, cool then,” he responds. “Then why dontcha just ring him up and ask then?”

“That is…well…it seems Mr. Keita doesn’t want to tell me where he’s hiding. That’s why I’m looking all over and asking his friends. Please, I’d only like an answer. It’s perfectly fine if you don’t know.”

“Wait, hold the fuck up. Whatchoo mean he’s hiding? He gone and got hisself into some deep shit, ain’t he?”

She was beginning to irritate him. Having not seen the news himself, he considers for a moment the possibility that Keita raping Fujino had leaked out somehow, a thought easily dismissed when he realizes that, were that the case, it wouldn’t be Fujino herself coming for Keita, but the cops with a wagon and a waiting interview room downtown.

“Oh, I see what this about now, girl. Now that Keita’s gone and dumped you, you come hollering for another man, am I right?” The smile which never left his face now turns into amused laughter. If he was really lucky tonight and Fujino became his woman, he might not even need threats to get the money. She’s no slouch in the looks either. Money and a woman: what else could he call this but the Almighty himself putting some polish in his life?

“We probably shoulda rolled over to my place. Or are you fine doing it

here?”

The girl in the black uniform nods. “I’d like an answer before that,” she says.

“Bitch, shut yo mouth with that excuse. I mean, like I know where he crashing at before he shoot up. I dunno, and I ain’t got a yearning to know.” Fujino looks up, a content look on her face. Her eyes hold no warmth now, save for a faint light in her pupils that was not there before, a light that shines like a spiral. All normality seems to have left it. For his part, the man is less focused on her eyes and more on the odd situation that is tak- ing place on one of his arms, which has started to move by itself. His elbow starts to turn, the flesh there contorting, slightly at first but then more severe, in the manner of something being twisted. A small creaking sound of the bone accompanies the elbow twisting past the ninety degree mark, but it doesn’t stop there. Within another moment, it finally breaks with a

single popping noise.

The young man manages a short, piercing shriek, his voice slipping out like gas from a balloon at first, but then growing into a scream when his arm breaks. Earlier he had kept praising his luck, but he’s one of those who can’t distinguish between the good and the bad kind, and whatever amount of good luck he had tonight has definitely run out.

In this narrow alleyway between two warehouses untouched by moon- light, the first stirrings of tragedy begin to unfold.

Since the first twist, the man’s scream has gone from recognizably human to something resembling the baying of some beast. His arms don’t even look like arms anymore. They’re more like wire puzzles, or one of those rubber bands twisted around to make paper airplanes fly. At any rate, they’re not going to go back to anything resembling functioning arms any time soon.

“H-h-help!” he shouts in vain. He tries to run away from the girl, who only stands still before him, but finds his efforts to do so are hampered by his right leg suddenly being torn to a bloody pulp from the knee, and his body stumbling into air and slamming into pavement. Blood scatters with a sickening splat, as if someone emptied a bucket full of it on the concrete walls, the spatter looking like some obscene piece from a modern art museum. Fujino Asagami, with eyes lighted by some flickering flame of spiral behind them, watches the entire scene unfold.

“A…screw, she’s sc—, she’s screwing me, haha!” His words are almost unintelligible. Somehow, amidst the blinding pain, he finds the will to laugh

at his own private joke. Fujino decides to ignore him and continue. “Bend,” she whispers softly, like a curse, the same curse she’s been using

since she started this. Her friend once told her that belief bends reality, that repeating something over and over like a curse might cause it to come true.

The man is squirming on the ground, with both arms twisted and with one less leg, moving his head from side to side. The blood flowing from the open leg has formed a red carpet on the ground, welcoming Fujino. She steps into the carpet, her shoes dipping into it slightly. The sweet fragrance of the blood around her resembled the hot, humid, and sticky air of the summer so much. She emits a sigh as she looks down at the writhing mass of flesh before her. That she has to do this is regrettable, detestable even, but necessary, something she had intended to do right from the start. Fuji- no knew from the way he was hitting on her that he was yet to be enlight- ened by what happened at that underground bar. But it was only a matter of time before he did, and when that happened, he would also remember Fujino asking about Keita Minato. It wouldn’t take long before he put two and two together, and start to suspect Fujino, maybe even report her to the police. So this is something she truly has to do. And that besides, the man had been asking for it. Though it was indirect, this is nothing less than her revenge against the ones that violated her. Luckily, her ability to violate them turns out to be much more potent.

“Forgive me—but I have no choice.” The young man’s remaining left leg is ripped to shreds in a manner similar to its counterpart. The man, who had been hanging onto a small thread of life earlier, expires with a final convulsion that continues even after his death. Before, Fujino would look at a body like this and she wouldn’t feel a shred of empathy. But now, hav- ing finally known pain, she understands, and she sympathizes, and she is glad. She knows now that to live is to feel pain.

“Only through this can I finally be normal.”

She was the one who made the man this way. She was the one who hurt him. She is better than him, than all of them. This is what it means to live, Fujino thinks; to be able to celebrate true happiness only in the midst of such cruelty and suffering by becoming cruel as well.

“Mother, am I no longer human for going this far?”

The burning in Fujino’s stomach has become almost unbearable as her heart pumps blood faster and faster, the beating the only thing she hears. Despite the summer heat, a shiver worms its way up her spine.

“I never wanted to murder people—““Oh, I beg to differ.”

Fujino turns towards the sudden intruder. Silhouetted against the moon- light reflected off the harbor waters, a single kimono-clad figure stands in the entrance of the narrow alley: Shiki Ryōgi.

“Miss…Shiki?”

“Fujino Asagami, huh? It’s all in the name. I should have known you were related to the Asakami dynasty.” Lightly, Shiki starts to walk towards the alley interior. With narrowing eyes, she observes the scene of carnage around her.

“When did you—“, Fujino starts to ask, but she already knows the answer.

“Ever since you lured that lump of meat out here, I was watching the whole time,” Shiki says coldly. That means she saw everything. She saw it but didn’t try to stop it. Even knowing what would happen, she revealed herself, ensuring that only one question races through Fujino’s mind: why?

“He is not a lump of meat!” says Fujino angrily, thinking Shiki’s casual callousness going too far, even despite her own thoughts earlier. “He is— was—a human being.”

“You sure? ‘Cause, at least to my understanding, he doesn’t look too much like one right now. Fact is, you butchered him, and he didn’t die like a human at all.” Shiki continues to advance, her pace quickening with each step, boots clicking with each advance. “He probably was human before, but humans don’t end their life that way. It’s a death removed from all boundaries of common sense, and it deprives him of all meaning. You deprived him of all meaning. You chopped him up good and proper just like a, well…like a lump of meat. Good entertainment, though.”

The declaration makes Fujino truly disgusted at Shiki, a more potent loathing than before. She says that both Fujino and the corpse are not nor- mal, an aberration, when if anything she herself is abnormal, considering the way she observes the scene with an eyebrow cocked, as if this was the grandest excursion of her life.

“No!” Fujino declares loudly. “I’m normal, unlike you!”

Shiki only responds with curious laughter. “Trust me, Fujino, we’re more alike than you know. We’re birds of a feather.”

“And I don’t believe you.” Fujino’s eyes now fixate on Shiki, and soon enough the power she had when she was just a child starts to manifest. Her vision of Shiki becomes strangely distorted and warped—she need only will it now to make it real. But as suddenly as it comes, it fades away and dies. Both of them are surprised: Fujino at her ability losing focus, and Shiki at Fujino’s sudden change.

“Again?! What the fuck is up with you tonight?” Shiki asks, voice rising.

She scratches her head at the wasted opportunity. “I could’ve killed you right before now. Hell, I could’ve done it in the café. What a waste. You’re useless to me right now.” After saying thus, Shiki turns on her heels and walks away, the sound of her boots starting to echo as she goes farther.

“Listen, if I were you, I’d cut my losses and go home,” Shiki calls back to Fujino. “That way we won’t have to see each other again.” After a few moments, her silhouette too, disappears behind a building, leaving Fujino still standing dumbstruck at the red carpet of blood. She was back to the way she was before. Without pain. She looks down at the corpse again, and finds that she can no longer feel what she had felt earlier. The wellspring of pain she had felt was again gone, leaving only the memory of the crime, and the words of Shiki Ryōgi, echoing like an accusation. We’re birds of a feather.

“No. I’m different…from you,” she murmurs repeatedly, like another curse. How she wished it was true. She hates what she is doing, and she trembles at the possibility of having to repeat the process just to find Keita Minato, for she truly feels, in her conflicted mind, that murder is the most unforgivable of sins.

On Fujino’s blood tinted reflection on the pavement, a little smile plays across her face.

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