Book 2 (4): Winter’s Distant Thunder — Chapter 1: |
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.”
“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 thirty 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.
I tracked the sun with the mirror and directed it at the wall of a building near the dock.
The letters that appeared in the circle of light were so clumsy that they seemed more like messy sketches. Still, they clearly spelled “Yoshimi”.
When I entered the classroom, Ryou was chatting and laughing with his friends, as usual. Most of them were from team two.
“Hey, I’m counting on you today,” Ryou said when he spotted me, smiling with perfect confidence.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Sure, where should we go?”
“Doesn’t matter, it won’t take long.”
I stood up and left the classroom. Ryou, aware that his friends were watching, put on an air of self-possessed calm and followed. I stopped in the middle of the hallway that led to the inner courtyard.
“There are a few things I want to ask you.”
“Okay, shoot,” he said, casual as always.
“It’s about when we went night canoeing.”
“You’re still going on about that?” he said with a wry smile, shifting his gaze away.
“You taught me the basic tenet of night canoeing. Do you remember what it was?”
“Don’t look at the fire.”
The faceless boy’s words echoed in my mind.
“Why?”
“The first rule of night canoeing is to get your eyes adjusted to the darkness before you go. Otherwise you won’t be able to see anything when you start rowing.”
“It was so long ago, I don’t really remember… Something about watching out for the rocks, I guess?”
“That’s fine. Here’s something more recent then. Why did you break up with Satoru?”
Ryou was completely flummoxed.
“It…it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
“You guys were such good friends. It even made me jealous.”
“Oh really,” he said uncomfortably.
“Okay, last question. It’s about summer camp again.”
“Fine, whatever,” he replied carelessly.
“It’s about the priest Rijin. Do you remember how he died?”
“Who’s Rijin? …he died? What are you talking about?”
“It’s fine,” I interrupted his confused babbling. “I guess it really wasn’t you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t be putting your name down for pair duty.”
Ryou stared at me in disbelief.
“What…why?”
“I’m really sorry. But I thought it would be polite to tell you beforehand.”
I went back to the classroom, leaving him standing speechlessly in the hall. Satoru stood near the door.
“Saki, are you going to put his name down?” he asked sourly.
“Of course not.”
“Huh? Why?”
I stared hard at Satoru, suddenly seeing him in a new light.
“Hey, why did you like Ryou?”
“Why…because…” he looked horribly confused. “I wonder. Now that I think about it, I have no idea.”
“I see. I knew it. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s just not fit for the role.”
“What?”
“I’m positive it wasn’t him. The person we both love.”
It took a moment for my words to sink in. His cheeks turned red. Although he didn’t say anything, I saw the light return to his eyes.
Most pairs were decided in the first round of nominations. Although there were students who decided they had nothing to lose and put down the names of people they had no chance of being partnered with, most people had already discussed and decided their choices beforehand.
When Satoru and I were paired together, Ryou didn’t give either of us a second glance. Immediately after, he was partnered with a girl from team two, which was no surprise.
The entire class was focused on who Maria would choose, and she decided on Mamoru without a moment’s hesitation. This was probably Mamoru’s just reward for being so devoted to her.
“What happened? Why didn’t you choose Ryou?”
After class, we had gathered near the deserted waterway. Maria wanted to celebrate the four of us being paired off . Satoru and I told her the truth about what had happened. Rather than simply being doubtful of our story, she looked as if she suddenly thought we had gone insane.
“That’s why it wasn’t him. There were five people when we went to summer camp, but Ryou wasn’t with us.”
“That’s impossible. I remember him. He was the first to find the haythatcher’s nest.”
Actually, I was the one who found it, but this wasn’t the time to argue details.
“That wasn’t Ryou.”
“Then who was it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember his name.”
“What was he like? What did he look like?”
“I can’t remember his face either.”
I remembered him saying in the dream that he didn’t have a face.
“Do you really expect me to believe this? Is there something wrong with you, Saki?” Maria shook her head, smiling wryly.
I was offended by her condescending attitude.
“…but I can remember parts of what she’s saying,” Satoru said, coming to the rescue. “I remember going out with him…but now that I look back on it, I just can’t see it being Ryou. He’s not my type.”
“Well we all know you go for cute little pretty-boys…like Rei.” Maria folded her arms, looking smug. “Sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe he was just persistent enough.”
“No, I was the one who had to persuade him,” Satoru said, turning red. “Anyway, I’m sure that our memories have been manipulated. The details just don’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“Ryou…no that’s confusing, let’s call him a different X. I remember going to X’s house a lot when we were little. But it’s different from Ryou’s house. He lives in Outlook, right? It’s up on the hill in an open area. But X’s house is…”
“In the forest!” I shouted without thinking.
“Right. Way in the north. I remember it being a huge, isolated house.”
“Now that you mention it…I’m starting to remember as well,” Maria said, frowning.
Even with that expression, she still looked beautiful.
“I’ve never been to Ryou’s or X’s house.” Mamoru suddenly spoke. “But where would this forest to the north be?”
I had been thinking about this too, but couldn’t come up with anything that fit.
“Hey, name all seven of the towns in order,” I said to Satoru.
“What? Now?”
“Just do it already.”
Up until now, I never thought that Satoru would take orders from me, but he was surprisingly obedient now that we were duty pairs.
“Um, Oakgrove, Withertree, Whitesand, Gold, Waterwheel, Outlook, and Hayring, right?”
It was my turn to frown. These towns had been around all my life, but why did they sound so weird?
“If it’s in the forest, would it be Oakgrove? But if it’s in the north…” Maria had a look of intense concentration on her face now. “Withertree, I suppose. I’m not positive, but I don’t think there are any big houses there.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to imagine it being there. And most of the area beyond that seems to be beyond the Holy Barrier.”
The corner of Satoru’s eyelid twitched as he spoke.
Seeing that, I gasped. This feeling… It was the same feeling I had many times in the past when I was on the cusp of remembering something. I wonder if other people noticed my eyes twitch during those instances. It was probably some sort of warning. A trigger buried in our mind that prevented us from remembering certain things.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Everyone stared at me.
“Where?”
“Withertree, of course.”
“But we just had our pairs decided today. Everyone’s out celebrating. Do we really have to go to that depressing place?” Maria complained.
It was true that Withertree wasn’t exactly a lively town.
There were houses lined all around the dock, giving you the impression that you were in the bustling center of town. But if you went farther in, everything instantly became darker, with rows upon rows of abandoned houses. It was more a ghost town than anything.
“Where did everyone go?” Satoru asked, touching the closed shutters of the windows.
“Wasn’t there a disaster of some sort and they all had to resettle in the other towns?” Mamoru said.
That was what I remembered too. Even in a small society like ours, there was still so much ambiguity surrounding the events that occur.
“Anyway, …X’s house should be even farther north. Let’s try looking for it,” I urged them on.
We followed a narrow, inconspicuous path and met no one else along the way, which would have been impossible in any of the other towns.
After about an hour, we gradually began to see the after-effects of the “disaster” that had befallen Withertree.
There were large fissures here and there into which many trees had fallen. In some places, the ground had been vertically displaced a meter or more. It looked like the aftermath of a huge earthquake, but if there had been an earthquake of this magnitude, the entire district of Kamisu 66 would have been severely damaged.
Spreading out over a large area was what looked like a giant wrinkle. It formed a miniature mountain range over three meters tall in some places.
“What in the world happened?” Satoru whispered to himself.
“It must have been someone with a really powerful cantus to do something like this,” Maria replied.
“Why, though?”
“I don’t know any more than you do.”
We stopped short as the path forward was blocked.
“The Holy Barrier…”
The red pines had fallen on each other like dominoes. At intervals, the trees had been pulled upright and tied with the thick rope of the barrier.
“Was Withertree always this small? We’re already at the barrier,” I said.
Satoru examined the rope.
“No, this rope is new…” he suddenly stopped and looked at me.
As if by telepathy, I knew exactly what he was thinking. Deja vu. We had had this exact conversation before; I was sure of it.
We walked along the rope and arrived at an open space on a hill that had been cleared of trees.
“I never knew something like this existed,” Maria said, sounding awestruck.
A deep blue lake stretched out before us. It was almost a perfect circle, as if it had been formed from a crater. Since it was on the other side of the barrier, we couldn’t go nearer for a better look, but it was easily over two hundred meters across.
And beyond that was an even bigger lake, so vast that we couldn’t see the opposite shore. It might even go all the way to Kitaura. Unlike the smaller lake that was formed from collapsed earth, this appeared to be an old dam that had flooded a large part of the forest when it was built. That was probably where the name Withertree came from.
“There can’t be any houses farther out,” Mamoru said, sounding like he wanted to leave as soon as possible. “You’re misremembering. X doesn’t exist.”
“Then why…” Maria said weakly, “do I feel like I know what Saki and Satoru are talking about? That the person I knew wasn’t Ryou, but some other boy.”
“It’s just a trick of the mind. All of us are growing up fast these days, but it’s not just that we’re getting taller, our looks and personality are changing as well.”
Satoru and I looked at each other.
Mamoru’s words were quite different from how we really felt. To me, it felt like time was crawling along slower than a snail. I was a bug trapped in amber, doomed to be suspended in eternity.
“Wasn’t there someone else too…?” Maria said suddenly.
We thought hard.
“It doesn’t really make sense that we started out with only four people. Before Ryou joined, X should have been with us. But then we’re still one short. I can’t really remember, but I think there was another person.”
Slowly, the image of a girl surfaced in my mind. Then the gravestone shaped like a house of cards I had seen in my dream.
“There was. I remember,” Satoru said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. “Like with X, it looks like some of my memories of that person remains. But why does no one ever talk about them?”
“Stop it!” Mamoru shouted. “It isn’t right. We shouldn’t be prying into this. If we keep talking about it…” he stopped, looking terrified.
“What? You think we’ll be disposed of?”
There was a cold silence after I said that.
“Saki, didn’t we talk about this at summer camp too?” Maria asked, her face pale.
“We did. I think we did. I can’t remember anything specific though. I hit a wall or something when I pursue that train of thought,” Satoru said. “But I do remember talking to Saki about it. And also everyone else too. Around the campfire. X agreed with what I said then.”
Satoru was pushing on his temples with both palms as if trying to get rid of a horrible headache.
“Stop! I don’t want to listen to this any more. We shouldn’t be talking about this! We’re violating the Code of Ethics!” Mamoru screamed hysterically.
This was the first time I had ever seen him lose control like that.
“Alright. Calm down,” Maria put her arms around him and patted him soothingly. “Let’s drop it. …okay, you two?” she glared at us.
We nodded.
The magic mirror projected its image onto the dark planks of the fence.
Satoru and Maria were silent for a moment. Mamoru had gone home already, saying that he felt sick.
“What do you think?” I pressed.
Satoru finally spoke. “Um. …it’s pretty crude, but I think that’s because the creator was a beginner at using their cantus.”
“Yeah, it’s basically the same as what we did for our assignment,” Maria agreed.
“Now do you believe that I’m telling the truth?”
“I never thought you were lying in to begin with. And I believe that it was possible you had a sister. Just, isn’t it a bit far-fetched to assume that she was eliminated by the school?”
“If she had died of an accident or sickness, they wouldn’t have had to hide it from me, right?”
Maria avoided my eyes. “I guess that’s true. But maybe they just wanted to protect you from having sad memories.”
“But look at the characters. Don’t they seem too clumsy? Like Satoru said, my sister must have been bad at using her cantus.”
“I won’t deny the possibility, but it’s still just speculation.”
Satoru took the mirror from me and adjusted the angle at which it projected onto the fence.
“Now that I look at it, I wouldn’t say that it’s all badly done. The characters are carved properly stroke by stroke. It’s just that they’re kind of crooked and overlap each other…”
At the time I didn’t understand what Satoru was trying to get at. Much later, I learned that this kind of writing was caused by a type of visual impairment, and was surprised at how perceptive Satoru was. I strongly suspect that my sister had been judged to be inadequate at cantus because of her vision problems, but now that most records have been lost, I would never know for sure.
It appears that these vision problems had been called nearsightedness or astigmatism back in the old days. To treat it, people wore glasses with lenses of various prescriptions. This brought their vision back to normal and they could live life without any problems.
“Anyway, I did have a sister.” I took the mirror back from Satoru and held it up high. “This is the proof.”
“Cut that out,” Satoru said quietly, “you’ll get in trouble if anyone sees you.”
“Saki, I understand how you feel,” Maria whispered with her arms around my shoulders. “But please don’t stir up any more trouble.”
“Stir up trouble? I just want to know the truth,” I said indignantly. “Not just about my sister, but also that girl in our team. And even more importantly…”
X. The faceless boy. The person I loved more than anyone else, whose face I could no longer recall.
“Our friend.”
“I understand. It’s not easy for me either. I have so many memories of him, but all the vital parts are missing. I want to do something about it just as much as you do. But I’m more worried about the friends that are alive right now.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“I’m not. Because you’re strong,” she said.
“Me?”
“Yes. I can tell this is harder on you than anyone else. But you’re enduring it. I don’t think most people could bear that pain.”
“What exactly do you take me for?” I said, shaking off the arm she had around my shoulder.
“Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not saying you’re heartless. On the contrary, you’re more sensitive than most. But you’re able to shoulder that pain and sadness and live on.”
My anger subsided as I saw the tears in her eyes.
“We’re not as strong as you. I always act big, but I’m the first to run away when things get bad. …but there’s someone even weaker than me or Satoru.”
“You mean Mamoru?” Satoru asked.
“Yes. Mamoru is too kind and fragile. He would never recover from betrayal. Not just by people, but also by the world he believes in…” Maria slowly put her arms around me. “The world is full of things that should probably be left unknown. Don’t you think that sometimes the truth is the cruelest of all? Not everyone can bear it. I’m certain Mamoru would lose it if you brought up any more of these frightening truths.”
Nobody spoke for a few moments. I sighed.
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“I promise Mamoru won’t hear another word of it.” I hugged her tightly. “But I won’t give up until I find the truth. Because if I don’t…it would haunt me forever.”
The faceless boy. I wasn’t going to let him be forgotten just like that. It would mean he had never existed in the first place. I would get back my memories of him no matter what.
The three of us embraced, kissed, comforted each other and drew strength from each other’s presence.
We headed back to the dock just outside the town of Waterwheel. The place was usually empty, and the fence that ran along the waterway made it the perfect spot for our meeting.
As we untied our boats, a voice called to us from behind.
“Do you have a minute?”
I turned to see a middle-aged man and women standing on the dock. There weren’t many people in Kamisu 66 I had never seen, but these two were completely unfamiliar to me. The woman who had spoken was short and plump and gave off an aura of harmlessness. The man was also slightly chubby and smiled kindly at us.
“You’re Saki Watanabe, right? And Maria Akizuki, and Satoru Asahina?” he said.
“Yes,” we answered confusedly.
“Don’t be so nervous. We would like a few words with you, that’s all.”
Were we going to be eliminated? We glanced at each other, but didn’t know what do to.
“Um…are you from the Board of Education?” Satoru asked bravely.
“No, we’re working under your grandmother.” The plump woman smiled at him.
“Really?” Satoru relaxed.
What was going on? I had never heard anything about Satoru’s grandmother before. The woman saw the confused expression on my and Maria’s face and smiled again.
“Satoru Asahina’s grandmother is Tomiko Asahina, the head of the Ethics Committee.”