Chapter 166: The Woman at the Gate
The fog did not move, and that bothered Ryuji more than the smile.
Keiko, the real one, could not hold still for ten seconds. She straightened pictures. She flicked crumbs off tables. She waved her spoon at strangers. The woman at the gate stood with her feet together and both hands around the thermos, steady as a lamp post, wearing a smile that stopped at her cheeks.
"Hayato," she said again. "It is cold. Come and eat."
[System Log: Day 171, continued]
[SIGNAL RESTORED. I CAN SEE THE GATE]
[I CAN SEE A WOMAN WHO IS NOT HIS AUNT]
[I HAVE ONLY JUST FOUND HIM AGAIN. THIS IS NOT HOW I EXPECTED TO SPEND IT]
"Don’t," Tetsu said, very low.
"Not planning to."
Selene came up on his other side. The spark in her palm had shrunk to a flicker, but it was there, and her pulse was a steady sixty under the thin line of silver at her wrist. "She smells of nothing," she said, in the common tongue. "Everything that lives has a smell."
"She isn’t breathing either."
"That is becoming a pattern."
The false Keiko tilted her head, politely wounded. "You are being rude. After all I have done for you."
"Where is she?" Ryuji asked. "Where’s my aunt?"
"At the keeper’s house. With a dying man and a front door that does not lock." The smile widened a fraction. "I could not be there and here at once. But someone is."
Tetsu’s breath hissed in. Selene’s flame jumped.
Ryuji felt it come up through him, fast and cold, the old calm that made him very good at emergencies. Take Tetsu. Run to the house. Leave Selene at the gate where it was safest. He had the first word out of his mouth before he heard it.
"Tetsu and I will..."
He stopped.
Selene was looking at him. She did not say anything. She only raised one eyebrow, slowly, the way she did when a recruit tried to hand her a sword by the blade.
"Sorry," Ryuji said. "What do you want to do?"
Something moved across her face, small and quick, like a bird crossing a window. It was not quite a smile.
"You hold her here," she said. "Keep her talking. I will take Tetsu."
"On what?"
She pointed. A battered green scooter leaned against the gatepost, left behind by the groundskeeper, with the keys dangling from the ignition. Selene regarded it the way she might regard a very small, very suspicious horse.
"That," she said, "is a starved animal with wheels. I intend to ride it."
"Princess," Tetsu said faintly, "have you ever been on one of those?"
"No. You will drive. I will hold on and say nothing." She turned back to Ryuji and took his wrist between two fingers. "Fifty-two. Good. Do not drink anything. Do not walk toward her. Be the most boring man in Yokohama."
"I’ll be so boring."
"I am still angry. I have a day left. Do not make it longer by dying."
"Understood."
"I mean it, Ryuji."
"I know you do."
She held his wrist one second longer than she needed to. Then she let go and climbed onto the back of the scooter with all the grace of a cat being forced into a bath. Tetsu kicked it into life. It coughed once, shuddered, and shot out of the cemetery gate with Selene’s arms locked around his chest and her silver hair streaming like a banner. Her voice carried back down the hillside, thin and furious.
"I do not like it. I do not like it at all."
Then they were gone, and there was only the fog, and Ryuji, and the woman with the thermos.
"They will not get there in time," said the false Keiko, sweetly.
"They will."
"Perhaps." She unscrewed the lid. Steam rose in a thin white thread. "But while we wait, would you like to see what it is you are protecting?"
The steam did not rise straight. It curled outward, spreading, folding on itself, and began to show him things.
A bakery, lit gold, opening for the morning. A boy on a bicycle with a stack of newspapers. A woman hanging laundry on a balcony, pinning one sock at a time. A grandfather feeding a cat on a stoop. The whole city, slow and ordinary, waking up.
"Eight million," said the voice. "All of them behind a single old man in a hole in the ground. Tell me you would not trade one for the rest."
The old arithmetic woke in Ryuji’s head. He felt it unfold, tidy and quiet, like a ledger opening itself. One life. Eight million. A simple sum.
He pressed his thumb to the inside of his wrist and listened.
There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing. He was fifty yards from his wife, and she was on a scooter, and she had told him not to die.
Then, faintly, through the thread at his collarbone, through the pendant and the key and the warmth behind his ribs, he felt something else. A rhythm, quick and steady, like a bird’s wing beating against his chest.
Sixty-four. Sixty-six. Higher. She was frightened and she was holding on and she was alive.
"No," Ryuji said.
"No?"
"I don’t trade." He took one step forward, and then another. The false Keiko’s smile faltered. "You keep saying that word. Trade. Everyone trades, you said it twice. But I don’t trade the people I eat breakfast with."
He took the thermos out of her hands.
She let him. Her fingers were light and cool and had no weight at all. He tipped the thermos over, and the soup poured out onto the wet stones in a clean, steaming rope. It hissed. It blackened. The vision in the steam peeled away like burnt paper, and the smell that rose off it was not miso, or fish, or anything he had ever eaten. It smelled of cold cellars and old coins.
"She would have asked if I’d slept," Ryuji said.
The woman blinked.
"Real Keiko. First thing. She’d have said, did you sleep, you stupid boy, and then she’d have hit me." He set the empty thermos on the gatepost. "You haven’t hit me."
The false Keiko opened her mouth. She closed it. Something behind her eyes flickered like a loose bulb.
"Did you sleep?" she said, stiffly.
"No."
She raised a hand and tapped his arm. It was the limpest, most apologetic tap he had ever received. It was like being touched by a wet leaf.
He almost laughed. It was ridiculous. It was also the most frightening thing that had happened all morning, because the thing in front of him was trying so hard.
"You are very bad at this," he said, gently.
"I have never needed to be good," said the master, in a dozen voices, out of Keiko’s mouth. "I have always had the world to borrow from."
Selene had never been so frightened in her life.
She clung to Tetsu’s back with both arms, her cheek pressed to his spine, and the little machine screamed under them and threw her weight left and right as it took the corners of the hillside streets. A truck roared past close enough to touch. A man in a white shirt jumped back and shouted a word she did not know but understood perfectly.
She did not say anything. She had promised.
Her spark pulsed in her palm, a small cold ember, and she held it close against her coat and counted the beats of her own pulse the way Ryuji had taught her to count his. Sixty-six. Sixty-eight. She could feel him through the thread at her wrist, as faint and steady as a clock in another room. He was all right. He was standing very still. That was all she needed.
I am angry with him, she thought. I am extremely angry. I would very much like to see him in one piece so that I may continue to be angry.
They turned onto Honmoku Street at a pace that would have made any horse faint.
The front door of the keeper’s house stood wide open.
A tall gray shape filled it. It had a man’s outline, a man’s long coat, and no face, nothing at all above the collar but a smooth gray curve like a river stone. It stood on the stoop with one arm raised.
Keiko stood in the road in front of it, with the saucepan.
She was swinging it two-handed. She had lost her cardigan. Her hair had come down. She was screaming at the gray thing in a language Selene did not know and had no need to, and every time the pan connected there was a clang like a bell and a spray of dark flakes that vanished before they hit the ground.
"Stop here," Selene said, and her voice came out in a croak. Tetsu skidded the scooter into the curb.
She was off it before it stopped. She ran, stumbled, caught herself, and drew up in the road behind Keiko with her palm out.
The spark was so small.
It was the size of a candle flame. It was everything she had left. She thought of the false one, of the warm, easy hands, of the way that voice had said love as if it cost nothing.
She thought: I am not a woman with nothing to lose.
She threw it.
The ember crossed the street in a clean violet arc and struck the gray shape in the chest. For one second it simply sat there, glowing, like a coal laid on a block of ice. Then it flared, white and violet, and the shape flinched, and folded, and burned from the middle outward into a soundless puff of ash.
Keiko lowered the pan. She turned, red-faced, panting, hair in her eyes, and looked at Selene as if she had never seen her before.
"You are late," she said in Japanese.
Selene understood it. She did not know how, except that she had been listening for three days. She stood in the middle of the road with her hands shaking and her lungs on fire, and she said, in her slow, terrible, careful accent:
"I came."
Keiko stared at her. Then she crossed the road in four steps and took Selene’s face in both hands and kissed her, hard, on the forehead.
"Thin girl," she said, in a voice that cracked down the middle. "Good girl."
Selene had the strangest feeling that she was going to cry. She decided it was the scooter.
Dmitri sat propped in the window of the keeper’s house with a blanket over his knees, gray-faced, breathing in short sips. Beside him on the low table the smoky quartz lay dark and cold. He lifted one hand when Selene and Tetsu came in, and his eyes went at once to the empty chair where the pendant had been.
"Where is my son?"
"At the cemetery gate," Tetsu said. "Holding off a fake of your sister-in-law."
"Good." A faint wheezing breath that might have been a laugh. "He is better at being boring than he knows." The humor went out of his face. "Listen to me. Both of you. Quickly. Mimi is crossing."
Selene’s blood went cold. "Now?"
"She called me an hour ago. She and the girl. She would not be told. I could not make her wait." His fingers twisted in the blanket. "She is bringing Yui through the cathedral circle, and the cord will carry them to the end of the road it was made for."
"Which road?"
"The one I walked every night for twelve years," said Dmitri. "The pier at the end of Yamashita. Where I first handed her a cup of tea." His voice broke. "The master has been standing on that pier since dawn. It knows exactly where they will land."
Selene did not wait to hear another word.
She pressed her wrist to her mouth, to the thin silver thread, and spoke into it the way she had learned in the corridor outside the hall at Aldenmarch, the way one speaks to a person across a very short, very strong distance.
"Ryuji," she said. "The pier. Look at the pier."
At the gate, with an empty thermos in his hands and a false aunt watching him with her mouth slightly open, Ryuji heard her voice in the center of his chest.
He lifted his eyes.
The fog was thinning. It rolled back from the water like a curtain, and the harbor lay spread beneath him, gray and flat and beautiful. At the far end of a long pier, small as a toy at that distance, a thin figure in a white coat stood with his back to the city.
He held two paper cups of tea, one in each hand. He was very patient. He looked like a man who had waited a long time for a train.
Above him the sky split, a hair-thin seam of light, and began, slowly, to open.