Book 2 (4): Winter’s Distant Thunder — Chapter 2: |
Chapter 2
We rode in a windowless houseboat like the one I took to the Temple of Purity. However, this time the boat went by the normal waterways and did not make pointless changes in direction to try to throw off our sense of direction, so I had a rough idea of where we were.
The dock was a normal dock as well. That was a little anticlimactic since I was expecting to be taken outside the Holy Barrier.
I spotted the town hall and library where my parents worked out of the corner of my eye as we headed toward a narrow alley branching off of the town’s main street.
The Ethics Committee was set up just outside the center of Hayring. It looked just like a normal shop until we entered the front gate. I saw a long hallway stretching out before me and realized it was actually a pretty big building.
We arrived at a quiet inner parlor. There was sandalwood incense burning and a scroll depicting winter peonies hanging in the alcove.
Next to a large lacquered table were three deep purple floor cushions lit by the light filtering through the paper windows. We sat down apprehensively.
“Please wait here for a moment,” said the woman escorting us, and slid the door shut.
“What’s going on?” Maria and I asked Satoru in unison.
“You haven’t been spying on us for her, have you?”
“Hey, wait a sec,” Satoru said, recoiling. “I didn’t know either.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“That my grandmother…I mean Tomiko Asahina was the head of the committee.”
“Liar.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me. How could you not? You’re her grandson.”
“Just hear me out.” Satoru backed away from us so hastily that he fell off the cushion. “You guys didn’t know who the head was either, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Unlike with other jobs, the members of the Ethics Committee aren’t public knowledge. The members keep their own identities secret as well.”
“Couldn’t you tell somehow?” Maria asked, still suspicious.
“Not at all,” Satoru said seriously, sitting up cross-legged.
“But she’s your grandmother,” she said obstinately.
“I’m perfectly aware of tha…”
“Excuse me,” a voice came from the other side of the door.
Satoru hurriedly sat back on the cushion. Maria and I also turned and sat down properly.
“Sorry for making you wait.”
The door slid open and the woman from before came in with a tray of teacups. She set them down in front of us along with some snacks.
“We’d like to talk to you individually, so would you please follow me one by one?”
I wondered what would happen if I refused, but of course that wasn’t an option.
“Well then, Saki Watanabe, please come with me.”
I was dying for a drink but had no choice except to follow her out into the hall.
“The man who was supposed talk with you all is Mr. Niimi, the man who was with you earlier. Oh, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Kinomoto. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, giving a quick bow.
“…anyway, when I informed the chairman of your arrival, she asked to speak to you directly instead. So we are going to her office now.”
“Oh, you mean, Satoru’s…Tomiko Asahina?”
“Yes. She’s very kind, so don’t be so nervous.”
There was no point in her saying that. My heart, which had already been beating quite fast, began pounding even more vigorously.
“Excuse me,” Kinomoto bent down on one knee and knocked on the door.
I waited with trepidation.
“Come in,” a clear female voice replied.
The door opened and we entered what appeared to be a drawing room that was twice as large as the parlor we had come from. There was an elegant alcove on the left inside, inside which was an attached study, and opposite it was a set of staggered shelves.
“Bring her in please.” The grey-haired woman seated at the table spoke without looking up.
“As you wish.”
In the middle of the room was a low table similar to the one in the parlor. I sat down on a cushion in front of it.
“Well then, excuse me.” Kinomoto retreated swiftly.
I felt as if I had been abandoned in a cage with a wild animal. My hands and feet were cold and my throat was dry.
“Saki Watanabe? Mizuho-chan’s daughter,” the grey-haired woman said. 13
Apart from the lines around her mouth, she had no other wrinkles and looked younger than I expected.
“Yes.”
“Don’t be so nervous. I’m Tomiko Asahina. I hear you’re good friends with Satoru.”
She stood up gracefully and came over to sit with her back to the alcove. She wore a delicately patterned silver-grey outfit that matched her hair.
“Satoru…Satoru-san and I have been friends since we were little.”
“I see,” she smiled.
She appeared to be in her mid-sixties. With her large eyes and shapely features, she must have been very beautiful in her youth.
“Just as I thought. You have wonderful eyes. They’re full of light.”
People often complimented my eyes. Probably because there was nothing else to compliment. I also often heard them say that there’s light in them, but then again, people who have no light in their eyes are usually dead.
“Thank you.”
“I’ve always wanted to talk with you at least once.”
She didn’t seem to be saying this out of mere politeness. I was confused.
“Why?”
“Because you will someday succeed me.”
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t think of a response.
“Surprised? This isn’t a half-baked idea or a joke though.”
“But…there’s no way I’m fit for the role.”
“Hohoho. That’s what Mizuho-chan said too. Like mother like daughter.”
“Did you know my mother?” I asked, leaning forward.
Although I had been extremely nervous earlier, Tomiko Asahina had a special way of making you drop your defenses and open up to her.
“Yes, very well. Ever since she was born,” she said in a voice that went right to the depths of my heart. “Mizuho-chan has a special knack for leading people. She’s doing an excellent job as librarian. But my position requires more than that. And it’s something no one but you have.”
“But…why me? I’m still a student, and my grades aren’t that good.”
“Grades? You mean your cantus? You’re not interested in being someone like Shisei are you?”
“Well…even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”
“Your aptitude for cantus is not the only thing tested in school. There’s also the personality index. It’s something we never let the students know about.”
“Personality index?”
Tomiko smiled, revealing teeth unnaturally white for her age. “In every era, what is demanded of a great leader is not some special ability but their personality index.”
All at once, I felt everything become lighter. Until then, I had been oppressed by all the things I felt inferior about.
“Do you mean things like their intelligence, or sensitivity, or leadership skills?” I asked fervently.
But Tomiko shook her head gracefully. “No, It has nothing to do with intelligence. Or sensitivity. And leadership abilities are acquired through various social experiences.”
“Then…?”
“The personality index is a number that indicates a person’s stability. It is their ability to maintain a grasp on themself and carry on without breaking down no matter what kind of unexpected situation or psychological crisis occurs. That is the most important quality in a leader.”
Somehow that didn’t make me particularly happy. I recalled Maria saying that I was strong. Didn’t that just mean that I was insensitive?
“So my score is high?”
“Yes, wonderfully so. Possibly the best in the history of the Academy.” Suddenly a sharp look came into her eyes. “But that’s not all. The most remarkable thing is even after all of you discovered the truth, there was no permanent decline in your score.”
I felt the blood rush to my face. “What are you referring to…?”
“From the false minoshiro, you learned the blood-stained history of our society, and the thin ice of peace upon which we now tread. After you returned, we subjected you to a thorough psychological assessment and monitored your subsequent behavior. Your personality index stabilized in a remarkably short amount of time after the initial shock. The other four took much longer to return to normal.”
So after learning the truth, we had been observed like guinea pigs. Although I had expected that to some degree, it was still a huge blow to me.
“Could it be…you had it planned out since the beginning?”
“Hardly.” The kind expression returned to Tomiko’s face. “We’d never take such a big risk. All we knew was that you were planning to break the rules. But catching a false minoshiro…a library terminal from the previous era, nobody could have predicted that.”
Was that true? I couldn’t bring myself to trust her completely.
“So the results of the test…”
“No. To be able to shoulder the fate of all the people as their highest leader, one needs to have a broad mind and nerves of steel when faced with the truth. You have both.”
Broad-minded was a convenient phrase. Anyone could accept something beautiful. The important thing was to be able to calmly accept the dirty and ugly things as well.
“We broke the rules and learned what we weren’t supposed to. Why weren’t we disposed of?”
Even though my tone had suddenly become accusing, Tomiko did not seem to mind.
“I understand what you’re trying to say. This isn’t an excuse, but whether or not you are disposed of isn’t under our jurisdiction. That belongs to the Board of Education.”
“Their chairman is Hiromi-chan. You know her, right? She’s always been a worrier. I can’t help but feel that her worrying has been even worse lately.”
Hiromi-chan…I had heard that Hiromi Torigai was on the Board of Education, but never knew she was the chairman. She was my mother’s good friend and I remember her often staying over for dinner. She seemed to be an introverted person, with a small, skinny build, and a voice almost too quiet to hear. So she had the power to dictate the life or death of any of the students, and frequently made these coldhearted decisions? I couldn’t believe it.
“The Ethics Committee is the highest authority in the district, but we usually don’t interfere with the Board of Education’s decisions. You guys were the exception. I asked them not to dispose of you.”
“Because of Satoru?”
“No. I would never let personal sentiments get in the way of such an important matter. You were the reason. You are indispensable for the future of the towns.”
So we had almost been murdered. Somehow even knowing that didn’t disturb me.
But what was the real reason we had been spared? It was hard to accept, but was it really because I was as important as Tomiko said? No one had ever said anything like this to me before, so I was completely confused. I wondered if it was possible that they couldn’t easily kill off the head librarian’s daughter. …but if that was the case, then my sister should have been spared too.
“But don’t think badly of Hiromi-chan and her people. They’re driven by a sort of paranoia.”
“Paranoia…?”
Did possessing the power to end the lives of others cause abnormalities in their mind?
“Hm. Perhaps that was a bad choice of words. I have the same fears too.”
“Fears of what?”
Tomiko looked surprised. “Isn’t it obvious? There are only two things in this world we really have to fear. Fiends and karma demons.”
I was speechless. The two nursery-tales I had heard again and again as a child came to mind.
“But Hiromi has never seen a fiend or karma demon. Unlike me. That’s why I always say they’re simply driven by paranoia.”
“So you’ve actually…”
“Yes, I’ve seen them. Up close and personal too. Would you like to hear about it?”
“Yes.”
Tomiko closed her eyes for a moment and began speaking softly.
Records detail the exploits of close to thirty fiends throughout the world. Apart from two, all have been boys. I think this shows that no matter how much we try, we can’t break the curse that is male aggression.
This student was also a boy. Unfortunately I can no longer remember his name. Although this happened a long time ago, I can still remember every detail, just not the name. That’s always seemed strange to me. Maybe there was some reason I wanted to forget it.
Although there’s also a detailed file on the incident in the library, only the initials YK remain. We don’t even know which letter represents the given name and which represents the surname. We’re not sure why it was written like that, but one explanation was that the old Japanese laws were temporarily revived during the transitional period before the Code of Ethics was enacted. And in it, the 61st article of the youth protection act that was in effect… Well, that doesn’t matter now.
Anyway, we call that child K.
At the time, K was a first year student at Leadership Academy. Leadership Academy is the predecessor to the current Sage Academy. He had just turned thirteen. …that’s right, he was a year younger than you are now.
In the beginning K appeared to be a completely average, inconspicuous student. The first sign of his abnormalities came from the Rorschach test that all new students took. The test is no longer given, but it entails having the student look at an inkblot made from a folded sheet of paper and analyzing their personality from the images associated with the blot.
Based on his answers, it was determined that K was habitually under an unusually large amount of stress. But it was unclear what the stressors were. On the other hand, all of the associations he made with the inkblots were unusually violent. It was likely that the desire for destruction and murder was deeply entrenched in his subconscious. For some reason, his abnormalities were not taken seriously at the time; even his test results raised no concerns until they were reexamined after the incident.
K’s abnormality became apparent as he learned to master his cantus at Leadership Academy.
His ability to manipulate his cantus was average, or just below average. But in situations where normal students struggled, K seemed to come alive. There aren’t any specific examples, but in various competitions where there was the possibility of injuring other people, K continued to use his cantus completely without hesitation.
K’s homeroom teacher quickly noticed this behavior and brought it before the Board of Education multiple times, saying that they should take precautionary measures. But no effective measures were taken. There were a number of reasons for this.
First, the previous appearance of a fiend was over 80 years ago, and the memories of that incident had been largely forgotten. The sense of danger was dulled. Second, K’s mother was known as an outspoken member of the town council. At the time, everything was decided by the town council, so it was extremely difficult to pass any extreme measures on the school. Third, the bureaucratic bodies governing the schools had a widespread policy of peace-at-any-price. Though historically, it’s questionable whether there was ever a time when this policy was not in effect.
And fourth, there were no effective mechanisms to deal with such a situation at the time.
So in the end, nothing was done except to give K regular counseling. He was not dealt with, and was allowed to continue while they watched from the sidelines.
Then one day, seven months after he entered school, it finally occurred.
Tomiko looked up at the ceiling and sighed deeply. Then she stood up and went over a small cupboard and brought out a teapot and two cups. She poured hot water from a kettle on the table and started making tea.
I drank the fragrant tea and waited for her to continue.
To tell the truth, only a few records of the incident remain. In particular, the beginning of the incident is almost entirely unknown. What started it? What was the sequence of events that led to so much destruction? All of this is left up to speculation, but it did happen. Over a thousand lives were lost, that was the grave reality of the situation.
It’s almost certain that his homeroom teacher was the first to die. Her injuries were so severe that it was difficult to verify her identity when the body was found. Then the twenty-two students in his year, the second years, the third years, the corpses of about fifty students were found in horrifying condition…
K was a true fiend. He had reverted to the primitive state of his ancestors–a monster who had absolutely no attack control. Furthermore, the death feedback that he should have been born with failed to function. Statistically, the chance of a child who lacked both of these traits being born was about three million to one, in other words, almost nonexistent in a district like Kamisu 66. But statistics are only statistics.
To some extent, K’s family must have known he was abnormal. His mother in particular seemed to have been aware of it since he was a baby. She had him undergo various psychological and correctional therapies when he was young. One of these therapies was something similar to brainwashing. Maybe because of it, his aggressive instinct was suppressed during his childhood.
But whether this was a good thing still remains a question. It is still suspected that the forceful suppression of his violent tendencies was the reason for his stress.
What happened on that fateful day to make him snap?
Or rather, what was it that caused his human disguise to break and unleash the fiend within him?
Going by the all the data we have on fiends, it seems like the first person is crucial. There have been a number of cases where fiends did not go on a rampage. After all, even without attack inhibition or death feedback, humans can still decide logically that it is wrong to kill.
But once they kill their first victim, a switch flips in their brain and they will go on killing without end. The massacre only stops when the fiend dies. There is no exception to this.
K ripped off his teacher’s arms and legs then smashed her head like a ripe fruit. Then he picked off the terrified students one by one, slamming them into the walls of the classroom with so much force they were completely crushed.
It looked like a scene from hell. 90% of the people who helped clean up the aftermath suffered extreme PTSD and had to quit…
The fiend left the classroom and wandered the school in search of more prey. The children who tried to run were picked off like flies. Others were rounded up–many were trampled to death in the process–and slaughtered en masse.
No one could lift a finger against him. There were many students more adept at using cantus than K, but they were tied down by attack inhibition and death feedback…in other words, no one could attack the fiend directly.
Since K himself had no attack inhibition, it was possible he killed preemptively out of fear that others could also attack him.
Another theory is that he became intoxicated by the endorphins released in his brain and simply could not stop himself. That’s why Raman-Klogius syndrome is also called “Fox in the Henhouse” syndrome.
By the way, Raman and Klogius are not the names of scientists. They are the names of two children, one from Mumbai and the other from Helsinki, who slaughtered tens of thousands of people. Two of the worst fiends in history who gave their names to the world’s most abominable disease.
Compared to those two, less than a tenth of the number of people died at K’s hands. But I think it was no less brutal. Compared to the big cities from the previous era, Kamisu 66 has a considerably lower population density, so, fortunately…if you could call it fortunate, only a thousand died.
Also, there was someone who sacrificed himself to stop K. We owe everything to him.
Tomiko paused and sipped her cold tea. I was so overwhelmed by the story that I sat rigid in my seat, all but forgetting to breathe.
Everything I had heard so far was so terrifying and depressing that I hurt physically. But I was dying to hear the ending just the same.
Suddenly I wondered why she asked if I wanted to hear the story. Maybe she was telling the truth about me succeeding her someday, and this was some sort of test.
Having killed every living being in sight, K left the silent school. He walked down the road as if nothing were wrong. During this time only one person K set eyes upon survived by some miracle. But he said that he didn’t feel anything amiss at that moment. Just a short boy walking along the road. A scene you’d see any other day of the week.
But what happened right after that was completely unbelievable.
There were some people headed toward him on the road. A group of agricultural workers from Lotus Farms. When they were forty or fifty meters away from K, the torso of the leader of the group exploded in a mist of blood.
As the warm, wet fog clouded everything around them, the rest of the group stood frozen, not knowing what had happened. K continued walking toward them without changing pace, and one by one, the workers were reduced to bloody lumps of flesh.
Gradually, K rounded a bend in the road and out of sight. The two people who first realized that something was wrong managed to find a place to hide. One was determined to run and get help, the other cowered on the ground, paralyzed by fear.
K came to a halt. Perhaps he sensed them hiding and wanted to lure them out. Then, when one tried to escape, he snapped his neck as casually as if picking a fruit off a branch.
Once again K went on his way, leaving the surviving witness in a state of shock so severe that he couldn’t even move. He was rescued the next day, but after being forced to recount the events that had happened, spent the rest of his life in a nearly crippled state.
I’ve thought about this incident more times than I can count. So I can say with confidence that K was truly the textbook description of a fiend.
Earlier, I said that K’s skill with cantus was average at best. One of the comments on his remaining report cards says “lacks imagination and creativity”. But in using his power for murder he was a genius.
Perhaps it’s a little imprudent to say that. But the ingenuity of his plans put all other fiends to shame, and it was apparent that he had been planning to eliminate the entire town right from the start.
He started by destroying buildings and clogging up the canals. Then he set fire to parts of the town and cut off all but one emergency route. Once these preparations were done, he began his massacre.
People ran around wildly, trying to escape, not knowing that they were already trapped in the palm of K’s hand.
If at the time people had scattered, each running in their own direction through the rubble and burning buildings, a good number could have survived. But no one did. In their panic, everyone ran in the same direction. It’s typical mob psychology. They took the one open path they saw.
The path led them into a forest, where the thick grove of trees gave them a false sense of security. But when chased by a cantus-wielding fiend, this was nothing short of suicide.
Once he was sure that everyone had entered the forest, K created a ring of fire on its outer edge, trapping the townspeople inside. The ring gradually shrank as the fire spread. But true to his fiendish nature, he did not burn them all alive. Instead, he opened up a path in the burning trees.
The townspeople had no choice but to run to their demise like mice in a maze.
“So. Do you still want to hear more?”
I hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
“Even hearing about it is sickening, isn’t it? I can tell from your expression. Why do you want to continue?”
“…I just want to know how K was stopped.”
“Alright,” Tomiko smiled slightly.
Once he had killed every last person in the forest, K returned to the town. He walked around searching for survivors and killing them in an almost trance-like state. It was the beginning of winter and K appeared to have forgotten to dress properly. In the middle of the night, he became aware that he had caught a bad cold.
K first went to the half-demolished town hospital. Though he most likely didn’t expect there to be any doctors there. He probably just wanted to look for medicine. But there was one doctor, trying frantically to save the few survivors who were on the brink of death. That man, Doctor Tsuchida, saved the town. And I happened to be there at the time, so I know the entire story.
Surprised? I was a nurse then. Only Doctor Tsuchida and I were at the hospital with the severely wounded and sick patients when K came.
It was obvious from just one look that he was the fiend. His eyes were different. They were rolled back, not like the so-called sanpaku eyes, but almost completely rolled back so that you couldn’t see the irises at all. I wondered if he could even see. There was no light in his eyes at all.
His hair looked oily and clumped, and his skin was splotchy. When I realized that it was because of all the blood spattered on him, my legs started shaking uncontrollably.
K walked by me silently and entered the examination room. Without any explanations or threats, he said that he had a cold and wanted medicine. I couldn’t see Doctor Tsuchida, but heard him tell K to sit down.
I entered the room without being called, thinking that I couldn’t leave Doctor Tsuchida in there alone. He glanced at me but said nothing. He opened K’s mouth and examined his throat. It was a bright red color I had never seen before. He must have been in some pain. He also had a fever and shivered constantly as if he had a bad chill.
I can’t say for sure whether it really was a cold or not. As he had slaughtered all those people, he must have breathed in large amounts of blood as it sprayed everywhere. His symptoms could have been some sort of allergic reaction. If that was the case, you could almost say it was revenge against K from those who died.
Doctor Tsuchida spread Lugol’s iodine on K’s throat then told me to go to the farthest storage room to get antibiotics. I hated the thought of using precious medicine on a fiend, but did as I was told and went to find the penicillin. Most of the stock had been used for the wounded survivors, so I had to spend some time searching for more from the pile that was to be discarded for being almost past the expiry date.
So I didn’t see what happened during that time. But from the evidence left, it’s clear what happened.
Doctor Tsuchida had taken the potassium chloride tablets from the emergency medicine cabinet and mixed multiple times the lethal dosage in distilled water. Then pretending that it was cold medicine, injected it into K’s arm.
Suddenly there came a scream, and I dropped the antibiotics I had finally managed to find. I ran to the examination room.
Then I heard something explode violently, and saw that the entire room had been dyed a deep red. K had blown Doctor Tsuchida’s head off.
The terrible screaming continued. K was in the throes of death, but he just wouldn’t die. He sounded as if he were possessed. But the screams gradually weakened until they became a child’s sobs. Then silence…
Tomiko finished speaking and stared into her cup.
I should have had a million questions for her, but I was unable to speak.
“…it took a lot of time and perseverance for the town to recover from the fiend’s attack. The first thing we did was to eliminate everyone in K’s bloodline.”
“Eliminate everyone in his bloodline…?” I repeated.
“K’s lack of attack inhibition and death feedback were two major genetic faults. There was a very high chance that everyone related to him carried the same defective genes. So we traced his ancestry back five generations and eliminated everyone in the family tree. Please don’t mistake this for revenge. We had to do this because we couldn’t risk anyone else becoming a fiend.”
“But how did you eliminate…?” my hands shook slightly.
“Yes. Since I’ve already told you this much, there’s no point in hiding anything else. We used queerats. We created a troop of forty queerats from the most loyal colony, gave them weapons and instructions to kill the remaining bloodline in the dead of night. If these people were to learn of this, they could have dealt with the queerats without any difficulty, so the plan was very carefully laid out. Even so, over half the queerats were killed, but they would have had to be eliminated anyway, so you could say the plan was a complete success,” Tomiko said casually, as if discussing a town-wide cleanup event. “But that wasn’t enough. Even with K’s bloodline gone, there was no guarantee that fiends wouldn’t appear again. So we completely revised the education system. We scrapped Leadership School and created Sage Academy, where every aspect of the student was managed in terms of performance values. The Board of Education was given more power and answered to no one but the Ethics Committee. Finally, part of the Code of Ethics was rewritten to delay the age when basic human rights become applicable.”
“What do you mean?”
Tomiko refilled the teapot and poured two new cups of tea.
“According to the old Code of Ethics, a fetus was considered to have human rights at 22 weeks of age. That rule was created in regards to the period of time during which an abortion could be performed, but the new Code made it so that a child did not have human rights until their seventeenth birthday. This meant that up until a child turned seventeen, the Board of Education had the power to order their disposal.”
I can’t even describe the shock I felt when I learned that under the law, I was the same as an semi-developed fetus–non-human. We were never told about this in Harmony School or Sage Academy. To begin with, I’ve never questioned at what age were human rights endowed, or whether I already had human rights.
“The method of disposal was also refined. Because no matter how loyal the queerats are, giving a being with that level of intelligence permission to kill people was just asking for trouble in the future. So normal household cats were bred selectively with cantus to created tainted cats.”
Tainted cats…that phrase brought up intense emotions that had been repressed for a long time. Fear. And sadness.
“And after that, thanks to the thorough measures we undertook to stamp out any dangerous factors before anything happened, no more fiends appeared. But another terrible incident occurred. I remember this one quite clearly, as it happened only about twenty years ago.” Tomiko drank her tea in one gulp and started the story.
The dangers of cantus leakage had been identified as early as the final years of the ancient civilization. But destructive leakage, called bad spills, was overlooked and underestimated for a long time. At most, leakages would cause delicate machinery to malfunction, and objects would become a little warped, but it was never thought to pose any harm to humans or animals. And in truth, that was the case most of the time.
It was around then that a girl, Izumi Kutegawa, proved us wrong. Her cantus polluted everything around her like radiation. She was an only child who lived on a farm on the outskirts of Gold. Once she hit puberty and the spirit of blessing had visited her, the animals on her farm had an unusually high rate of deformities. Most of her crops withered, and in the beginning, we suspected that it may have been caused by a new virus.
Even at Sage Academy, anything placed within ten meters of her would show signs of deforming. Chairs and desks became unusable in a short amount of time, and even the walls and floor would begin to bubble and grow long whiskery mold like a scene from some nightmare.
The Ethics Committee and Board of Education gathered a group of specialists to investigate the situation. When they determined that the bad spill of her cantus could damage even human DNA, it caused a huge uproar. She was ordered to withdraw from school and told to study at home, but by then, the range of her spill had extended to unthinkable proportions. The gears of a clocktower six kilometers away were twisted out of place, causing the clock to stop moving entirely.
We held council and reached the conclusion that she suffered from Hashimoto-Appelbaum syndrome and would have to be disposed of as a karma demon. As the head of the Committee, I wanted to tell her this in person, but it had already become too dangerous to approach her. So I wrote her a letter and had it delivered by a karakuri puppet.
Even now it pains me to remember. Izumi was truly a kind and gentle soul. However, as history has shown, those are precisely the ones most in danger of becoming karma demons.
Once Izumi learned that peoples’ lives were in danger because of her, she proposed her own elimination.
Since Kutegawa Farm was ground zero of the bad spill, every living thing on the farm had already died. We told Izumi that her parents and all the farmhands managed to escape from danger, but the truth was that they had already died from a strange disease that caused fibrosis throughout their bodies.
The last time I saw the farm, it had transformed into an amorphous, amoeba-like thing that, to this day, swallows everything it touches.
The puppet brought five pills to a small building on the edge of the farm that had not yet completely melted away. We told her that they were tranquilizers that could help control the bad spill, and only one was lethal. We instructed her to take one a day.
Izumi took all five pills that same day. Being the smart girl that she was, she had already figured it out. She was probably afraid that her leaking cantus would alter the medicine…
Tears fell down my cheeks.
I wasn’t sure why. Even though I had never met Izumi in my life, I empathized with her from the bottom of my heart. But it wasn’t just that.
The emotions I felt were so powerful I felt like a small raft being tossed about in a storm. My tears fell unceasingly.
“I understand how you feel,” Tomiko said. “It’s okay. Cry as much as you need to.”
“Why…? Why is it so sad?” I asked.
Tomiko shook her head. “I can’t answer that yet. But when confronting our grief, we need to give ourselves time to mourn so that we can accept and overcome it. You need a chance to shed your tears.”
“Does this have anything to do with the memories you’ve erased from our minds?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
I thought of the faceless boy.
“Please restore my memories.”
“I can’t do that.” Tomiko smiled sadly. “It wasn’t just your memories. Every recorded instance of that boy has been erased, down to Maria Akizuki’s diary entries. The incident was just too shockingly visceral; we’re afraid that any memory of it would be traumatic enough to destabilize the minds of the townspeople and create a domino-effect leading to further tragedies…”
A flicker of darkness passed over her face. “You may be able to endure it. But if I restored your memories, you wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret from your friends. In the end, everyone would find out.”
“…but”
“Please think about what I’ve told you. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We must give the most care and attention to the weakest ones.”
“The weakest ones…?”
Tomiko stroked my hair sympathetically. “I wasn’t joking earlier when I said I wanted you to succeed me. If that time comes, all your lost memories will be returned to you.”
“I could never take your place.”
No matter what the personality index said, I knew that I wasn’t strong enough.
“I understand what you’re saying. I used to feel the same, but the time will come when you will have to do what needs to be done. It is a task only you can do. Do you understand? Remember what we must do in order to stop fiends and karma demons from appearing again.”
Tomiko’s words echoed heavily in my chest.