Book 2 (4): Winter’s Distant Thunder — Chapter 3: |
Chapter 3
Mamoru ran away from home on a cold day in the middle of February.
When his father went to wake him up after lighting the kilns in the morning, nothing seemed amiss. But when Mamoru didn’t come down for breakfast, he went to check up on him again and found the room empty.
There was a note on left on his desk that simply said, “Please don’t look for me.” This was the message most often left behind by people who have run away, and also the most ridiculous.
“What should we do?” Maria said tearfully, her breath a white puff in the air. Her hat was covered with snow and even her eyelashes had tiny icicles on them.
Maria and Mamoru lived on opposite sides of town, but I knew that they met up everyday to go to school together. Today, she had gotten tired of waiting and gone to his house. When she heard the story from Mamoru’s flustered father, she made him promise not to tell anyone and came straight to me.
“Isn’t it obvious? We look for him.”
I had already untied my canoe from the dock. If Maria had arrived any later, we would have missed each other.
“Let’s go get Satoru and start following Mamoru’s tracks.”
Although Ryou was technically in our group, he usually spent all his time with the members of group two. Maria was right. If we all failed to show up, it would raise too many questions and we would be brought in for questioning.
“Alright. Let’s go to school for now. We have independent observation time during third and fourth period, right? We’ll sneak out then.”
Since it was Saturday, we only had classes in the morning.
“But we’ll never be able to make it back before homeroom.”
“Let’s think of an excuse later. Good thing we’ll have the genius bullshitter with us. In any case, we can’t look for Mamoru any earlier than that.”
It was initially predicted that this winter would be rather mild, but at the end of January, a cold front came rolling in from the mainland and temperatures dropped to record lows. It had snowed so much the previous night that the town was covered in a thick blanket of it. I had no idea where Mamoru could have run off to, but packed my skiis into my canoe just in case.
I arrived at Sage Academy just before class started and managed to slide into my seat without the Sun Prince noticing. He also didn’t seem to suspect anything when Maria said that Mamoru was home sick with the cold.
The topic of class for first period was “Society and Logic.” It was mind-numbingly boring. We tried our best to hide our impatience and prayed for time to pass quickly. The instant the chime sounded to end the class, Maria and I cornered Satoru and told him everything.
Second period was math, which always gave me a headache. Now there were at least three more irritated students in the class.
And finally it was the long-awaited independent observation period where we were allowed to go off campus if necessary. As the three of us hurried out of the classroom, we ran into our first obstacle.
“Hey, where are you all going?” Ryou said to Satoru, avoiding my eyes.
“Isn’t it free observation time right now?” Satoru shrugged.
“That’s why I’m asking where you’re going. We’re in the same team, you know.”
“Don’t you usually hang out with team two?” Maria said impatiently.
“But I’m still in team one. And anyway, I used to hang out with you guys a long time ago. I don’t know why we don’t anymore…” Ryou seemed a little confused by the inconsistency in his thoughts.
“Alright, alright. Sorry, we haven’t explained it to you yet,” Satoru clapped him on the back in a friendly way.
There was no intimacy in that gesture, and it was hard to believe they had ever been lovers.
“We already decided on our observation topic earlier, but you weren’t around to hear it. We’re going to be observing the pattern of ice crystals in snowflakes.”
“Snowflakes? Why? That’s kid stuff. I did it one winter break when I was in Friendship School.”
Although Ryou had been friends with us since we were little, he didn’t go to Harmony School with Satoru and me. Instead, he was with Mamoru at Friendship School.
“We’re observing the changes they undergo when we use cantus on them. We’ve already divided up the work. Could you go look behind the school?”
“What exactly are we observing?”
“First, look at the snowflakes through a magnifying glass and sketch their pattern. You need at least a hundred to start. Then divide them into broad categories by shape. Lastly, choose a few patterns and try to copy them onto another patch of snow.”
“But can snowflakes change their shape once they’ve already formed?” Ryou asked doubtfully.
“Exactly! That’s the whole point of our observation,” Satoru replied quickly. “Most solid things are some kind of crystal, right? So if we can change the shape of a water crystal without melting it, it might be possible to change other things a lot more freely than we can now.”
“Hmm…” Ryou said contemplatively.
He seemed to have no immunity against Satoru’s made-up stories and swallowed the explanation hook, line, and sinker. There was no way he had ever been close friends with us.
“I see. So you want me to check behind the school?”
“Yeah, please. We’ll be looking in the front. Oh, also, once you start the observation, you can’t stop in the middle. If you do, you’ll have to start all over.”
“Alright,” he said, and left.
“You’re so evil,” I complimented him from the bottom of my heart.
“What? It was the best solution.”
We walked boldly out of the school and to the dock. The wind stung the parts of my ears that weren’t covered by my hat, and it was snowing slightly.
Satoru had to go home and get some tools. Maria and I took Hakuren 4 to Mamoru’s house. The air was colder than the water in the canal, so wisps of steam hovered around us. There were sheets of ice in some places that we had to break through with our cantus, and they knocked against the canoe as we passed. I felt like we were steering an icebreaker through the Arctic Ocean.
“Do you have any ideas why Mamoru ran away?” I asked.
Maria thought for a moment. “I don’t know…he just seemed a little depressed recently.”
I had gotten that feeling as well.
“Why? Did anything happen?”
“No, nothing serious. I think I was the only one who noticed anything.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“There was an assignment he couldn’t really work out. It should’ve been easy for him. But he’s such a pessimist, once he considers the possibility of failing, it’s hopeless.”
“That’s it?”
Did he run away from home because of that?
“No, I think the Sun Prince gave him an earful. …then I joked that they might send a copycat after him, and he went pale as death and took it really seriously.”
If that was true, then I was also partly responsible. It had probably been a bad idea to talk about the kids that had disappeared from school.
Maria and Tomiko had been right that Mamoru was much weaker than me.
Suddenly I remembered something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link…”
“What?” she asked a little suspiciously.
I said it was nothing, even as I tried to work out the confused thoughts in my mind. Just now, a frightening thought had flashed through my head, but I couldn’t get a good grasp on what exactly it was.
Oakgrove was on the western end of the district. During this season, it was directly in the path of the winds coming off the river, so it was unbearably cold. When we arrived, the frigid air had already completely numbed my face.
I tied Hakuren 4 to a post, hoisted my backpack, and put on my skiis, which looked like a combination of traditional round snow shoes and Telemark skiis.
On the underside of the skiis were thin, angled spikes that helped you brake when you pushed your foot back, making it possible to walk on flat ground. You could also skate by spreading your legs shoulder-width, bending forward, and propelling yourself with your cantus. It was easy to go uphill this way as you could go as fast as you wanted. When going downhill, you simply used them like normal skiis.
Maria wore normal shoes and hovered in the air like a ghost.
When we arrived, we went around Mamoru’s house looking for footprints. At least now having snow everywhere was helpful.
“Hey, is this it?”
I hadn’t found footprints, but sled tracks. Judging from their width, they appeared to be a child’s sled.
“Mamoru was never great with skiis. He hardly ever used them, in fact.”
“It looks like he dug out the sled he used in Friendship School. Look at how deep the tracks are. He must have brought luggage.”
Running away on a kid sled piled with luggage wasn’t a smart plan, but it seemed like something Mamoru would do.
After a while, I saw Satoru’s canoe coming toward us at breakneck speed.
“Sorry for making you wait. Which way are we going?”
He was already decked out in trekking gear. His skiis were wider than mine, which meant they required more strength to use, but also meant he could walk on still water like a water strider.
We started along the sled tracks. Even though Mamoru had over three hour’s head start, he couldn’t have gone too far because his laden sled shouldn’t be able to go very quickly without losing balance. And if he stopped to figure out where he was going, maybe he would only have two hours on us.
The tracks started from behind the house and ran straight for a while before turning right and up a small hill.
“It looked like he was trying to find a path people don’t usually use,” Satoru said.
“But he didn’t even bother to erase his tracks. That’s just like him,” Maria replied from above us.
“Why didn’t he use a canoe?” I asked.
I had been wondering about this since the beginning. A canoe would have been more familiar to use, faster, and could fit his luggage much more easily.
“He didn’t want to be seen?”
I guess that was the biggest reason. But it might also mean something else. It was easier to go by the canals, but that meant it would also be easier to pursue him. Perhaps Mamoru wanted to go past the Holy Barrier and into the mountains.
The snow that had stopped for about an hour started falling lightly again. We hurried after the tracks. Satoru and I skied on either side of the sled tracks while Maria followed behind us, jumping lightly every forty or fifty meters. It was easier to do this than levitate continually.
“Wait!” Maria shouted.
We stopped.
“What?” I retraced my steps slowly.
Maria stood four or five meters away from the tracks, staring at the snow.
“Look. What do you make of this?” she pointed at a set of footprints.
It was the right length, but too narrow to be a print left by a human, bear, or monkey. If I had to guess I would say that it looked like a rabbit’s track. But it was too long, and there was only one print, whereas rabbits jumped with both feet at the same time. These tracks alternated left and right like human steps.
“It might be queerats…” Satoru sounded out of breath as he peeked over my shoulder.
“What would they be doing here?”
“How should I know? Maybe they’re hunting?”
“Hunting?” I got an unpleasant feeling in my chest as I looked back at the footprints. “That’s not good.”
“Why?”
“Look carefully. They’re parallel to the sled tracks the whole way, right?”
No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t shake the idea that they were following Mamoru.
The two sets of tracks led us farther and farther out into the middle of nowhere. It was difficult to make out tracks over the layer of fresh snow. Eventually, we approached the bottom of a steep slope, more a hill than a snowdrift.
“That’s an impressive slope to take on with a children’s sled,” Satoru said, sounding amazed.
“Never expected a guy like him to be so fearless.”
Or, if he were being chased by something even scarier, he might go up the hill without a second thought.
We followed the sled tracks up, but the wind had blown all the powdered snow off the face of the hill, leaving only packed, frozen snow that made our skis slide sideways and almost made us fall over. If it weren’t for having cantus, I’d have fallen head over heels to the bottom of the hill in an instant.
The slope arced endlessly before us. The valley below grew deeper. It seemed like Mamoru wanted to keep climbing, but the trees growing halfway up the hill blocked his way. If he had continued, he would have run into the rocks jutting out of the snow higher up. Having gone as far as he could go, he would have had no choice but to turn back, but even with the help of his cantus, steering a heavy sled down a steep hill was a challenge. Mamoru was trapped in a sticky situation. He could only keep going.
“Hey, I can’t see the sled tracks anymore. Can you?” I stopped and shouted to them.
Satoru shook his head. “No. Even though the sled was heavy enough to leave tracks in the ice up til now…”
“I’ll go higher to look,” Maria said and leapt up into the air, rising like a balloon.
“You can still faintly see the tracks leading up to here,” I traced the lines in the ice, doing my best not to slip and fall down the hill.
I felt a strange texture against my fingertips. Stone. Since most of it was still covered, it was hard to tell that there was a flat expanse of rock about the size of three tatamis underneath the ice.
I cleared area with my cantus and saw a thin metallic line scratched into the stone.
“Satoru, look!”
He turned deftly and stopped beside me.
“Maybe this was made by the sled…!”
Maria descended toward us. “I can’t see any tracks from up there. And there’s probably no use climbing higher either.”
“Maria! This is bad!”
As she listened to my explanation, her face, white from the cold, began to flush. “So you mean Mamoru slipped and…all the way to the bottom?”
We all looked down into the valley. Somehow, we had managed to come so far that the bottom was now over a hundred meters below us. A fall from this height was most likely fatal, no matter how skilled you were at cantus.
“Anyway, let’s go down a little and look. Even if he did fall, it doesn’t mean he went all the way to the bottom.”
At Satoru’s words, we descended the slope.
Thirty, forty meters down, the ground suddenly felt different beneath our feet.
“A snowdrift!”
There was a hollow in the ground and soft snow had piled into it.
“Looks like there’s still hope. It could have acted as a cushion and stopped the sled.”
“But there aren’t any tracks continuing from here,” Maria said, and started swiping frantically at the snow with her cantus as if she had lost all control.
“Careful. It’s tricky for you to multitask with your cantus, let me do it,” I said, stopping her.
With one gust, I sent the snow flying up around us. Satoru backed away from the flurries whipping into the air.
Although I had grandly offered to help Maria, the truth was that it was difficult, almost reckless of me to be standing on the slippery slope without the aid of my cantus. After a few seconds, I really needed to use my cantus to support myself again.
Just then, Maria shouted, and I stopped the wind.
“There! Buried over there!” she shrieked.
She was pointing at the metal runners of the sled sticking out of the snow.
“I’ll dig it out! Don’t do anything.”
Satoru visualized a giant scoop and started shoveling large amounts of snow and dumping it down the cliff. When the sled was mostly uncovered, we switched to digging with our hands. When all the annoying snow was cleared away, we turned the sled right side up, scattering the luggage that had been piled on it. But Mamoru was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is he?” Maria asked half-hysterically. “If he’s not here, then did he fall all the way down? We have to go help him!”
I stayed silent, not knowing how to respond. If Mamoru had time to use his cantus, he would have broken his fall here. If he had continued falling from here, he must have been unconscious the whole way down. In that case there was only a slim chance of survival.
“No, wait…” Satoru said calmly. “Don’t you think it’s weird? Why was the sled buried so perfectly?”
At his tone of voice, a spark of hope kindled inside me.
“Because the snow covered it?” I said.
He shook his head slowly. “It hasn’t been snowing that much. If it did, we wouldn’t have been able to follow his tracks this far.”
“Then the impact of the falling sled must have driven it into the snowdrift.”
“Even if that had happened, the snow wouldn’t have covered it so completely.”
“What are you guys talking about? Mamoru isn’t here. Who gives a damn what happened to the sled!”
“It’s important. …it means he might be okay,” Satoru said.
We fell silent at his words.
“Really?” “Why?” Maria and I asked simultaneously.
“I can only think of one reason the sled was buried here,” he said contemplatively. “It was done on purpose so no one would find it.”
“Mamoru hid it?” Maria asked, sounding hopeful.
“Or the queerats that were chasing him…”
Where would the queerats have taken him after burying the sled? I tried to look for a possible route they could have gone by.
After walking parallel to the slope for a while, I went up a gentle incline and through some bushes. There I discovered a small path running to the top of the slope.
“It looks like an animal trail.”
But there were queerat footprints on the path, along with what looked like something heavy that had been dragged along.
“What did they do to Mamoru…” Maria trailed off, as if imagining the worst.
“I think he lost consciousness and the queerats brought him with them in order to help him,” Satoru said.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
He pointed at the ground, “Look, they were avoiding the tree roots. If they had been carrying a dead body, they wouldn’t have been worried about him hitting the roots.”
Even though that explanation was not entirely convincing, it gave us a bit of encouragement.
After following the path all the way up, the footsteps suddenly vanished. After some searching, we discovered what appeared to be the remains of tracks that had been carefully smoothed over.
Twenty meters later, the footprints, as well as the marks of whatever was being dragged, reappeared. I felt that we were nearing our goal and grew a little nervous.
The tracks continued about a hundred meters into a sparse forest.
“Hey, that…!” Satoru pointed ahead.
Although it was hidden in shadow, I could see a wall of snow built up between two thick pine trees.
We crept closer and saw it was a dome-shaped structure about two meters tall.
“It’s a snow hut!” Maria suppressed a shout.
It was a snow hut like the ones we had built as kids. From the footprints on its surface, it had probably been built in the same way–first by packing the snow into a solid dome, then digging out the inside. With the pine trees supporting it on either side, it looked more durable than the ones we usually made.
“What do we do?” Satoru asked nervously.
“Let’s go in from the front.”
There was no time to discuss this. I approached the hut decisively. Maria and Satoru automatically spread out on either side of me. I didn’t think that the queerats would attack humans, but in this formation we could easily back each other up as well as avoid being attacked all at the same time.
“Is anyone there?” I asked, standing in front of the hut.
No answer. I went around to the back and saw a small opening like those you see in tea rooms. It was covered by a screen made of twigs tied together.
I peeked in through the screen.
“Satoru! Maria! He’s here!” I shouted.
They rushed over and looked into the hut.
The interior was rather large. Mamoru lay in the middle, wrapped in a woolen blanket. It was hard to see his face, but his hair was unmistakeable. His chest rose and fell slightly and he appeared to be asleep.
“I’m so relieved…” Maria covered her face and started to cry.
Mamoru’s eyes slowly opened. “Hey. You guys came.”
“Don’t give me that. We were worried sick,” Satoru said sharply, but he couldn’t help smiling.
“What in the world happened? Did you really fall down the cliff?” I asked.
Mamoru knitted his brows, looking like he was trying hard to remember.
“I see. So I did fall. I can’t really remember what happened. Every time I try, my mind gets all hazy like I have a concussion. I also hurt my leg and couldn’t walk, so Squonk had to dig me out of the snow and bring me here.”
“Who?” Maria asked, still smiling tearily.
“Squonk. Though I don’t know how to actually pronounce his name. …oh yeah, you’ve all met him a long time ago.”
“We did? When?”
There was a rustling sound behind us as the screen was pulled aside.
Startled, we turned and saw a queerat carrying a bunch of packages on his back. He seemed extremely surprised to see us.
Satoru picked up the queerat with his cantus and he dropped the packages, squealing in fright. He was wrapped in layers of clothing, including a papery thermal garment that rustled as he moved. On top of it all was a thin, dirty cape that looked incredibly familiar.
“Could he be from that time…”
“You know him?” Maria sounded surprised.
“Yeah, you were all there too. Remember how right after I entered Sage Academy, we rescued a couple queerats that fell into the canal?”
Slowly, the full memory returned to me. If I’m not mistaken, he should have the “Goat” character tattooed on its forehead… Satoru and Maria appeared to remember too.
“Put him down. Squonk saved my life,” Mamoru said.
Satoru lowered him to the ground.
“Kikikikiki… Gods. Thak you,” he bowed low to us.
“No, we should be thanking you for saving Mamoru.”
“It is nothing. Kakakakakak…ka, a god was in trouble, naturally I psssssh…should help.”
Squonk’s speech was punctuated with squeaks and grunts and difficult to understand compared to Squealer and Kiroumaru. But it was a great improvement from when we had rescued him from the canal.
“I’m grateful for your help, Squonk, but why were you following Mamoru?” Satoru sounded almost accusatory.
“I happened to be passing by and saw the tracks in the snow. I wondered if they belonged to some other grrrr…colony. Shhhhh..so I decided to go look,” Squonk said with some difficulty, drooling as he talked.
“Hm, but why were you there in the first place?” I asked
Maria interrupted before he could answer. “Does it matter? He saved Mamoru. Why are you two complaining?”
“I’m not,” I said hurriedly.
If I had pressed Squonk more at that time, maybe the outcome would have been different. But given the fact that the queerats were so good at lying that even Satoru paled in comparison, I don’t think the conclusion would have changed much.
Still, I think it would have been a good idea to ask why Squonk was inside the Holy Barrier. At the time, we were stricly forbidden from going outside the Holy Barrier. If I had known that the queerats could travel freely in and out, it would have heightened my sense of danger.
Later, when I learned the reason they could enter and leave the barrier without consequence, what surprised me was that despite having culture, queerats were still considered wild animals.
“More importantly, Mamoru, explain yourself,” Maria turned on him.
“Um…sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ isn’t an explanation. Why did you go off on your own?”
He sat up, looking like he was about to cry. “Because…I had no choice. I didn’t want to die!”
“What do you mean?” Maria frowned.
“I’m different from you guys. My cantus is fairly weak, and I have no real talents. I felt left behind.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but he ignored me.
“The Sun Prince has these cold eyes when he looks at me too. I’m already on the list of people to be disposed of. Like X, or the girl who used to be in our team. Like Saki’s sister.”
I looked accusingly at Maria.
“I didn’t tell him,” she said hurriedly.
“I know. You guys have been keeping secrets from me. Like the mirror. You didn’t want me to hear about it, right?”
“You were eavesdropping?” I asked. Everyone ignored me.
“…being disposed, the list, you’re thinking too much. It’s not going to happen,” Maria said soothingly.
“A copycat came.”
Everyone went silent at his words.
“Huh? What are you talking about? I mean…” Maria trailed off, seeing the look on Mamoru’s face.
“I saw it twice. The first was four days ago at night. I was coming home after dark and felt something tailing me. I went around a corner where there was a brazier then turned around quickly.”
“Was it there?” Satoru whispered.
“I didn’t see the actual thing. But I knew something was hiding around the corner. …the fire cast its shadow on the road. It wasn’t clear, but it was the shape of something huge.”
We swallowed, hanging on to his every word.
“I panicked and sparked the brazier. There was a blinding fireball and all the wood was burned up in an instant. But the shadow already disappeared. I ran all the way home in the dark.”
“…but are you sure you didn’t just imagine it?” Maria tried to soften her words with a smile.
“Yeah, if it really was a tainted…a copycat, it would have attacked you,” I agreed.
“No, I’m not so sure of that.” In one sentence, Satoru ruined our efforts to comfort Mamoru. “There are a lot of tales about copycats, but there’s one disturbing detail they all share. They practice tailing you first before they attack.”
Mamoru nodded, “I didn’t feel that it was going to attack me then. …but yesterday it was different.”
“Yesterday? You don’t mean…” Maria seemed to remember something.
“Yesterday after school. I was the only one who stayed behind for supplementary classes. When I was about to leave, the Sun Prince asked me to put some leftover printouts away in the storage room…”
“The one in the hallway leading to the inner yard?”
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
“Yeah. So I did. There weren’t that many; I think he was just looking for an excuse. I went inside the room, and when I was walking back, I felt something behind me.” Tears began to fall from his face. “There aren’t any windows there, so it was pitch black. I started walking faster. I knew I couldn’t look behind me. I knew that if I did, it would be the end. Then I heard it. Footsteps. They were almost silent, but the floor vibrated from their weight,” he sobbed. “When I stopped, so did the footsteps. I was too scared to move, then I heard what sounded like an animal breathing. It smelled like it too. I thought I was done for. I was going to be killed by a copycat. Then I think my cantus burst out of me unconsciously. The air gusted like a tornado and I heard a terrible cry behind me. I turned around…and saw it.”
“What was it?” Satoru leaned forward in anticipation.
“I only caught a glimpse of it before it melted away into the shadows. It was an unbelievably huge, white cat. There were bloodstains on the floor. It might have been hurt by the tornado.”
We were silent.
“Yesterday, I wanted to wait for Mamoru to finish his supplementary classes, but the Sun Prince told me to go home because it would take too long.” Anger flared in Maria’s eyes. “They were planning to isolate and kill him right from the start…”
“Wait. Why do they want to get rid of Mamoru? His cantus is average, and there’s nothing wrong with his personality. He’s quiet and cooperative…”
“How would I know? He saw a copycat. Twice! How can you still doubt him?”
As Satoru and Maria argued, a prickling unease began to grow in my mind.
Based on the stories Tomiko told me, there wasn’t anything strange about wanting to eliminate Mamoru. When he was being stalked by the impure cats, he had used his cantus in a dangerous way toward an unseen attacker. It showed that he might be reckless enough to attack other people if he were frightened. This involuntary confession posed another issue. His cantus couldn’t be properly controlled on a conscious level, which meant that he was at risk for becoming a karma demon in the future…
It scared me that I had unconsciously been thinking about it from the Board of Education’s point of view.
“I remembered something when I saw the copycat,” Mamoru said quietly. “I’d seen it before.”
“What are you talking about?” Satoru asked dumbly.
“I can’t remember clearly, the memory might have been erased…but I was hiding behind a storeroom in the inner courtyard. When the storeroom opened, a copycat came out.”
“I remember that!” Maria shouted. “I…was there too.”
There was a heavy silence.
Our naive plan to find Mamoru and bring him back was crushed. What would we do now? We were at a loss.
Since Mamoru’s leg might be broken, it would be impossible to bring him back right away even if we’d wanted to. So Satoru went back alone to tell the Sun Prince that Maria and I had caught a cold and gone home early.
Maria and I built another snow hut next to Mamoru’s. I had brought a sleeping bag just in case, but Maria didn’t have anything so we went to dig out Mamoru’s sled.
Luckily, Mamoru had more than enough food and daily necessities, so we brought them back on the sled and built a cook fire. We melted snow for water and made dinner for the three of us. Squonk shared some of our dried meat.
“It looks it’ll be clear tomorrow,” I said, sipping tea.
“Guess so,” Maria said, a little curtly.
“If the weather holds, Mamoru can ride the sled.”
“Ride it where?”
“Well…” I stopped.
“I’m not going back.” Mamoru raised his head.
“But-“
“I’ll be killed.”
“He’s right! He was almost killed once already,” Maria said.
“But realistically, there’s nothing else he can do but go back, right?” I tried to persuade them. “I talked with the head of the Ethics Committee, Tomiko. If we tell her…I’m sure she’ll understand.”
Actually I had absolutely no confidence in anything I just said. Tomiko might decide that Mamoru was indeed a danger to the town, and even if she didn’t, I doubted she would overrule the Board of Education’s decision just to save him.
“No, we can’t trust anyone in the town,” Maria said, point-blank. “You may be right that the Ethics Committee isn’t the one making the decision to eliminate students. But they go along with it. If they didn’t, people wouldn’t disappear. Like your sister, or the girl in our team, or X.”
I thought about the faceless boy. What would he say in this situation?
“So what will he do if he can’t go back?”
Mamoru answered, “Survive on my own.”
“What? This isn’t like going to camp, you know? You’ll have to spend the next few decades by yourself…”
“I don’t like it either. But I’ll manage somehow with my cantus.”
“Somehow…”
“I think we’ll manage.” Once again, Maria came to his rescue. “With enough practice, a person can survive alone. But he won’t be alone. I’ll be with him.”
“You can’t be serious!”
My head spun.
“Mamoru can’t do it alone. Plus, we chose each other as partners.”
Surprisingly, Mamoru disagreed. “No, you have to go back. Your parents will worry.”
“Why? Don’t you want to be with me?”
“Of course I do. I’m really, really happy. But living away from the town will be difficult. I don’t have a choice since I won’t be allowed to live if I go back. But you can…”
“Don’t worry about that,” she smiled gently. “So that’s why you ran away without telling me. There’s really no one as kind as you are. But it’ll be the two of us from now on. Okay? Promise.”
Mamoru didn’t speak, but tears welled up in his eyes.
I sighed deeply. There was nothing I could say to change their minds.
That night, Maria and I made love in the snow hut.
“I won’t be able to meet you again, will I?” I asked petulantly, with my head between her breasts.
“No, we’ll definitely meet again,” she smiled as she stroked my hair. “I love you, Saki, from the bottom of my heart. But right now I’m worried about Mamoru. There’s no one else who will protect him.”
“I know, but…”
“What?”
“I’m jealous.”
“Silly,” she laughed. “From now on, Mamoru and I have to fight to survive the harsh elements of nature. I should be jealous of you.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry,” I apologized meekly.
“You’re forgiven,” she said, tilting my chin up and kissing me lightly.
We kissed each other deeply and passionately, like we never wanted be parted again.
That was the last time Maria and I kissed.