[Tsuchiya house · rebuild estimate] Timber, roof tiles, labour, wiring: about ¥8 million. Insurance payout (cause of loss: "act of God"): ¥0.
* * *
The Arashi Gate — One Week Later
"Rice ball. Rice ball. Persimmons. Rice ball." Ayaka was sorting the gatepost into a basket. "Sake. More sake. A hat."
"A hat?" said Kazuo.
She held it up. It was small, red, hand-knitted and very well made.
"Granny Ume," said Kazuo.
"Granny Ume is ninety. She can barely see." Ayaka turned it over. "She must have been up all night."
There was also an envelope with a ¥10,000 note inside it and no name, which bothered her more than anything else on the post. Ten thousand yen was a week's food for most families in Ikazuchi.
Akio sat on the step, watching. He'd been watching the gatepost all week. He couldn't stop.
Every morning there were more things on it. Every morning, someone passing on the path would slow down at the gate, look up at the house, and bow. Sometimes they bowed to the gate. Sometimes they bowed to him.
Old Granny Ume had done it yesterday, on the path down to the school. She had stopped, put her hands together, and bowed so low he thought she might fall over.
He had bowed back, because he didn't know what else to do. She'd seemed very happy about that.
"Mum," he said. "Why do they keep giving us things?"
Ayaka stopped sorting. She looked at Kazuo, and Kazuo looked at the basket.
"Because they're scared," said Kazuo.
"Kazuo."
"He asked. He should know." Kazuo sat down on the step next to his son. "People have been leaving things at the Raijin shrine on the ridge for five hundred years, Akio. Rice, sake, little things. They did it because the sky could kill their crops and burn their houses, and they couldn't stop it. So they gave it presents and hoped it would be kind."
Akio thought about this.
"And now they're giving them to me."
"Yes."
"Because I'm the sky."
"Because they think you're like the sky," said Kazuo. "That's not the same."
"Am I a god?"
"No," said Ayaka at once. "You're human, Akio. The same as me and Dad."
"Granny Ume thinks I'm a god."
"Granny Ume also thinks the moon landing was a film." Ayaka put the last rice ball into the basket. "You're our son. A boy with a very big quirk. That's all."
Akio looked at the basket, and at the hat, and at the envelope with the money inside it. Then he looked down the slope toward where the Tsuchiya house used to be.
From here, you could only see the black frame and the edge of the glass.
"Hideo-san didn't leave anything," he said.
Neither of his parents had an answer to that.
* * *
The Field — Two Weeks After the Strike
The road reopened on a Monday. The government arrived on Tuesday.
It came as a white van, three drones and a man named Dr. Hiroshi Mano, who stepped out onto the edge of the glass field, looked at it for a long moment, and said, "Oh, wow."
He was a geophysicist with the National Disaster Agency. He was forty-four, and he had wanted to see a superbolt with his own eyes since he was nine years old.
"Do you understand what you've got here?" he said to Headman Fujita, who had been chosen to meet him because he was the only person in Ikazuchi who owned a tie. "Lightning makes glass when it hits sand or soil. It's called a fulgurite. They're usually about the size of a finger. A big one might be the size of your arm." He spread his own arms out wide toward the field. "This is a hectare. There's nothing like this anywhere in the world."
"It's very large," Fujita agreed.
"It's not just large, Headman. It shouldn't be possible."
"Typhoons are very strong in the mountains."
Dr. Mano laughed. He liked this old man already. "I'll need to talk to anyone who saw it. And I'll need samples. Cores, from the middle and the edges." He was already waving at the drone team. "Was anyone near the strike?"
"No," said Fujita.
At that moment, Isamu Tsuchiya came down the path with no eyebrows.
"..." Dr. Mano looked at him.
"Cooking accident," said Isamu.
"Was that before or after the strike?"
"During."
Fujita closed his eyes briefly.
* * *
The village had decided on the lie together, at a meeting in the community hall two nights after the strike. It hadn't taken long.
Nobody had said the boy's name. Fujita had stood at the front and said, "A superbolt hit the Tsuchiya field in the typhoon. It was a very rare natural event. Nobody saw it happen up close. Is that what everyone remembers?"
There had been a long silence. Then Morita Keiko had said, "That's what I remember," and one by one the rest of the village had agreed.
Not everyone agreed because they loved the Arashis. Some people agreed because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't. Some agreed because they remembered the Hayashi girl. A few agreed because they'd left something on the Arashi gate that week, and it is hard to report a god to the government after you've given him a persimmon.
Hideo Tsuchiya hadn't said anything at the meeting.
He hadn't agreed. He hadn't disagreed. He had sat at the back with his arms folded, and he'd left before the end.
* * *
Dr. Mano interviewed nine people that afternoon in the community hall. Most of them said the same thing in almost the same words, which he put down to the fact that it was a small village and people talked.
He asked Fujita if anyone in the village had a registered electrical quirk.
Fujita checked the government tablet. "No electrical quirks. We have a strength type, two minor mutants, a water sense, and one Weathersense. Category E. Ayaka Arashi."
He did not read out the line below it, which said ARASHI, Akio — Category E (inherited). He scrolled past it with his thumb, smoothly, the way a man turns a page he has already decided not to read aloud.
It was the second lie Fujita had told a government official that day. Before that day, in seventy-five years, he had told none. He was surprised by how easy the second one was.
"Weathersense." Dr. Mano sat up. "Interesting. Can I speak to her?"
Ayaka came down to the hall with her bandaged arm in her lap. She'd thought about taking the bandage off. Then she'd decided that a woman who lived next to a field where lightning had struck would have a burn, and hiding it would look worse.
"Did you feel it coming?" Dr. Mano asked her eagerly. "The strike? Can Weathersense pick up something like that?"
"I felt the typhoon three days out," she said. "I told the headman. But nobody can feel lightning, Doctor. It's too fast. It's not weather. It's just ... what weather does."
He wrote that down. He liked it. It went into his report almost word for word, and with it went her name.
"And your arm?"
"I was outside when it hit. Something hot came across the field." She held his eyes. "My husband says I'm lucky it wasn't my face."
"You are," he said, quite seriously. "You really are."
He believed her. He had no reason not to. She was a pleasant, tired woman with a minor quirk and a burned arm who lived in a village that had just been hit by the strangest lightning in recorded history.
He didn't ask about her son. She'd never mentioned having one.
* * *
His last interview was Hideo Tsuchiya.
They did it at the edge of the glass, because Hideo wouldn't come into the hall. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his back very straight, and he looked at his burned house the whole time Dr. Mano was talking.
"I'm very sorry about your home, Tsuchiya-san."
"Thank you."
"Were you inside when it happened?"
"Asleep."
"Did you see anything? Anything at all, before or after?"
Hideo didn't answer straight away.
Up the slope, at the Arashi house, Kazuo was standing at the window. He couldn't hear anything from that distance, and he knew it. He watched anyway.
Hideo Tsuchiya had a choice, and he knew it was a choice. Isamu had come to see him the night before, in the corner of the community hall where the Tsuchiya family had been sleeping on borrowed futons for two weeks.
"If you tell them," Isamu had said, "they'll take the boy to Nagoya, and we still won't have a house. Then they'll come back and ask why the whole village lied to them. Every one of us. Your mother-in-law. Keiko. The headman. Me." He had looked at his son. "You'd be the man who sold a five-year-old to the government, and got nothing for it. Is that who you want to be?"
"He burned down our house, Dad."
"Yes. He did. And the government won't give you a single yen for it. You know who will?" Isamu had pointed across the hall at the window, where the lights of the Arashi house showed through the trees. "That family. And this village. That's who's going to rebuild your house. Nobody else."
Hideo hadn't answered him then.
Now he looked at the black frame where his son's bedroom had been, and at the glass with his whole year's rice sealed inside it.
"Lightning," he said.
Dr. Mano nodded and wrote it down. "Thank you, Tsuchiya-san. And again, I'm so sorry."
Hideo turned and walked away up the slope without answering.
He'd had his reasons, and none of them were kind. Some choices are made out of love, and some are made because the other option costs too much. They look the same from the outside.
* * *
Dr. Mano's team took fourteen glass cores before they left: long, thin cylinders of green-black glass, drilled out of the field, each one sealed in a labelled tube. The Agency's own lab in Tsukuba had been closed three years earlier in the budget cuts, so the samples would go to a private materials lab in Osaka that did the Agency's analysis work on contract.
That was perfectly normal. Half of what the government did in 2055 was done by someone else on contract.
He shook Fujita's hand at the van.
"I'll send the village a copy of my report," he said. "This is going to be a famous field, Headman. People will come from all over the world to study it."
"Please don't," said Fujita.
Dr. Mano laughed, thinking it was a joke. But Fujita wasn't laughing. He was looking at the field, and his face was quite serious.
Dr. Mano's laugh trailed off. He shook the old man's hand again, a little uncertainly, and climbed into the van without another word.
* * *
The Tsuchiya Site — October
The rebuild cost about ¥8 million, and the insurance company paid nothing, because a lightning strike was an act of God.
Kazuo had read the letter out loud at the village meeting. Then he'd set it down on the table and said nothing for a while, and nobody else had said anything either, because there was nothing to say that wasn't true.
So the village paid. Everyone gave what they could, which wasn't much, and then they gave what they couldn't, which was time. Ono drove down to Takayama for timber in his truck. Fujita found roof tiles from a house that had been empty since the riots. Morita Keiko fed everybody.
Kazuo did the wiring, the plumbing and the solar panels himself, for free, with a five-year-old helper.
"Three hundred tiles," he told Akio on the first morning, pointing to the stack at the bottom of the slope. "They all need to go up there, to the house. One at a time. Don't drop them, they cost money."
Akio looked at the stack. Then at the house. Then at his father.
"Ono-san could take them up in the truck."
"He could."
"Then why do I have to?"
"Because Ono-san didn't break the house."
Akio considered this. He picked up one tile, holding it carefully in both hands, and began to walk up the slope.
It took him forty minutes to carry ten. His arms ached. On the eleventh trip, he dropped one, and it cracked, and he stood looking down at the pieces for a long moment.
"Bring the pieces," said Kazuo, without looking up from his wiring. "We'll use them for the path."
Halfway through the morning, Granny Ume came by on her way to the shop, saw the boy with a roof tile in his arms, and stopped to put her hands together.
"Gods don't carry tiles," she said to him admiringly.
"Then he's not a god yet," said Kazuo, from the top of a ladder. "Good morning, Granny Ume. Thank you for the hat."
She bowed to him too, for good measure, and went on her way.
Akio set his tile down on the stack by the house and looked up at his father.
"Why do I have to carry tiles," he said, "if everyone keeps giving me rice balls?"
Kazuo came down the ladder. He sat on the bottom rung so his face was level with his son's.
"That's exactly why," he said. "Listen to me, Akio. This is important. When people give you things because they love you, that's a gift. You say thank you, and you love them back." He held up one finger. "But when people give you things because they're scared of you, that's not a gift. It's a debt. And it means you owe them more. Not less."
"Owe them what?"
"Whatever they need. A house. A roof. A boy who carries tiles." He tapped the top of the tile. "Being strong doesn't mean you get to stop working, Akio. It means you have more work to do than anyone else."
Akio didn't say anything. He picked up the next tile.
He carried all three hundred, in the end. It took him eleven days. He dropped four.
* * *
Then there was the power.
The valley transformer had blown out again the night of the strike. The new one wouldn't come for six weeks, if it came at all, so the rebuild had no electricity. That meant hand saws, hand drills and a lot of swearing.
On the third day, Akio watched his father drill a hole by hand for twenty minutes. Then he walked over and held out his hand for the power drill that was sitting useless in the toolbox.
"No," said Kazuo.
"I can do it."
"No metal. That's the rule."
"I won't touch the metal. Just the plug." He pointed. "The two little pins. That's where the power goes in, right? I'll just put some in."
Kazuo looked at his son for a long moment.
He had spent five years building walls around this boy: rods, mats, rules, a jam jar full of foil. He had never once asked what Akio could do on purpose. It had never occurred to him to ask.
But he wasn't going to find out with the only power drill on the site.
"Not the drill," he said. "Not yet. If you get it wrong, that's seven thousand yen we don't have, and a week of holes by hand. We start with something cheap."
That afternoon he went down to Morita Keiko's shop and came back with a dusty box of twenty old light bulbs, the kind with a glowing wire inside. She'd had them at the back of the shelf since before the riots, because nobody wanted them anymore. Kazuo screwed one into a work lamp, cut off the plug, and stripped the two wires bare so Akio could hold one in each fist without touching anything else. He stood the lamp on an upturned bucket in the middle of the yard, well away from the timber.
"A bulb tells you how much is going in," he said. "Dim means too little. Bright means right. Pop means too much."
"How much is too much?"
"That's what we're finding out." Kazuo stepped back. "Gently. Like breathing out. Not like a sneeze."
Akio took the wires in his fists.
The bulb went off like a firecracker. Bits of glass scattered across the bucket.
"Sneeze," said Kazuo.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. That's what they're for." He screwed in the next one.
The second bulb lasted about a second. The fourth glowed orange for one breath before it went. The ninth one lit up and stayed lit. It flickered, too bright one moment and too dim the next, but it stayed on.
Father and son stared at it.
"Keep it like that," said Kazuo slowly. "Exactly like that. Don't change anything."
"I'm trying."
It lasted almost a minute. Kazuo wrote it down in the notebook: 9 bulbs. 1 minute.
A bulb cost three hundred yen and showed you exactly how much power was going into it, just by how bright it was. A drill cost more than twenty times that and showed you nothing until it was dead. Kazuo had been measuring his son with cheap, simple things since the jam jar, and he saw no reason to stop now.
It took the rest of the box and most of a week. By the following Monday, Akio could keep a bulb burning steady and bright for ten minutes at a time. Only then did Kazuo take the drill out of the toolbox.
It whirred into life in his hands and kept running.
"Can you hold it for one hole?"
"I think so."
Kazuo drilled one hole. Then another. Then six more, while Akio stood next to him with his eyes screwed shut and the plug held in his fist, breathing very slowly through his nose.
By the end of the month, he could run the drill, the saw and the work lights for half an hour at a time, and the whole rebuild ran on him.
Morita Keiko never charged them for the bulbs. She said they'd been sitting on her shelf for years, and it was nice to see them finally do something.
* * *
The Village School — November
There were twelve children at the Ikazuchi village school, one teacher and one AI tutor tablet, which Akio was not allowed to touch. He used a wooden pointer.
The other children had kept their distance from him before. Now it was worse. Their parents had stopped saying "delicate." They didn't say anything at all, which was much louder.
Hana Morita, who was six and Keiko's granddaughter, bowed to him at the school gate on Monday.
She was shaking while she did it. When she straightened up, her eyes were wet. She ran inside before he could say anything.
Akio stood at the gate for a while. He didn't go in. He walked home instead, very carefully, keeping it all in, and sat down against the rod in his room for an hour, and didn't cry.
His mother found him there.
"What happened?"
He told her. It didn't take long.
Ayaka sat down on the floor next to him and leaned against the wall. She didn't hug him. She'd stopped hugging him when his hair was floating, after the night of the strike, and they both knew why, and neither of them talked about it.
"Can I tell you something about people?" she said.
"Okay."
"When I first came up the mountain, nobody liked me. I was a refugee from the city. I talked funny, I didn't know how to plant rice, and I kept telling people about the weather. They thought I was a witch." She smiled a little. "Then one day, the headman fell in the irrigation ditch in front of everyone. And I said, 'Oh, Headman, I could've told you it'd be wet today.' And everyone laughed. Even him, eventually."
"That's not very funny."
"It was funny at the time. Trust me." She nudged his shoulder with hers. "The thing is, Akio, nobody can be scared of someone they're laughing with. It's very hard to do both at once. When people are scared of you, make them laugh. Then they'll see you're just a person."
"How?"
"Make a joke. About yourself, ideally. Something true."
Akio thought about this very hard, all evening, and most of the night.
He tried out jokes in his head, lying on his futon in the dark. A joke about the rice. A joke about Isamu-san's eyebrows. He threw both away, because they were about other people, and his mother had said about yourself. The only true thing about himself that everyone already knew was the worst thing. So that was the one it had to be.
If it went wrong, they would be even more scared of him. He knew that too. He decided to do it anyway, because he couldn't think of anything else, and because Hana Morita's wet eyes at the gate were worse than anything that could happen in a classroom.
The next morning, he walked into school, went to the front of the classroom while the teacher was out of the room, and looked at the eleven children who were all very carefully not looking at him.
His palms were damp. He could feel the fizz prickling up the back of his neck, and he held it down hard. He had practised the line forty times in the dark, and now his mouth had gone so dry he wasn't sure it would come out.
"Don't worry," he told them. His voice wobbled on the second word. "I only burn houses down on Tuesdays."
Nobody laughed.
It was very, very quiet. Hana Morita put her hand over her mouth. Akio felt his face go hot, and he thought, very clearly, I got it wrong.
Then, at the back of the room, somebody snorted.
It was Ren. He tried to stop it and couldn't. He had his face in his arms on the desk, and his shoulders were shaking.
"It's Wednesday," Ren managed.
That did it. Somebody else giggled. Then a third child, and a fourth. It wasn't a big laugh. It was nervous, and it didn't last long. But when the teacher came back into the room two minutes later, the children were talking again for the first time in a month, and Hana Morita was looking at Akio as though he were a strange boy from up the hill, not the Raijin-sama her grandmother whispered about at the shrine.
Akio sat down at his desk. His hands were still shaking a little. He looked across the room at Ren, who was the one person with every reason not to laugh, and who had laughed first anyway.
He didn't know how to say thank you for something like that. So he didn't say anything. He just remembered it.
He told his mother about it that evening.
Ayaka listened to the whole thing, and then she was quiet for a while.
"Well," she said. "That's a start."
"It worked."
"It did. Mostly." She rubbed her forehead. "Next time, sweetheart, try a joke where nobody's house burns down."
"But that's the funny part."
His mother opened her mouth to argue, and then closed it again, because he wasn't entirely wrong, and that worried her more than anything else he'd said all year.
* * *
The Community Hall — December
The offerings kept coming all through the autumn. Fewer than in the first week, but they never stopped completely. A rice ball here. Persimmons there. Once, a whole sack of sweet potatoes nobody claimed.
The Tsuchiya family was still sleeping on borrowed futons in the community hall. Their new house had walls and a roof now, but no floors and no water yet.
One cold afternoon in December, Akio loaded his little wooden cart with everything that had come to the gate that week, and pulled it down the hill to the hall.
Hideo Tsuchiya opened the door. He looked down at the boy, and then at the cart.
"What's this?"
"Offerings," said Akio. "From the gate."
"We don't want anything from you."
"They aren't from me. They're from everyone." Akio had practised this part all the way down the hill, and he said it carefully, the way he'd planned it. "People gave them to me because they're scared of me. But Dad says when people give you things because they're scared, it's not a present. It's something you owe. And I broke your house. So I owe you. So they're yours."
Hideo didn't move.
His wife came up behind him, looked at the cart, and then at the boy. She looked at the sack of rice in particular for a very long time. They'd been living on Keiko's kindness for three months, and they had a growing son.
She stepped past her husband and took the rice.
"Thank you, Akio," she said quietly.
Hideo said nothing for a long moment. His hum was still pulled tight, still angry. But it was a different kind of tight now. Akio couldn't name it. He would have needed many more years to learn what it was like to be a proud man who had to accept rice from the child who burned down his house.
"You talk like an old man," Hideo said finally.
"Dad says that too."
Hideo almost smiled. He didn't quite manage it. He closed the door.
* * *
Kazuo was waiting at the top of the hill with his hands in his pockets. He'd followed his son down and back without being seen, which he'd done every day since September.
"You gave them all away," he said.
"Yes."
"Even Granny Ume's sweet potatoes?"
"Mm."
They walked home together in the cold, the empty cart rattling behind them.
"Dad," said Akio. "If everyone's going to treat me like a god, I'd better be a good one."
Kazuo stopped walking.
He looked at his son, five years old, pale grey eyes, one hand on the handle of a wooden cart, saying the most serious thing he had ever said in his life as calmly as if he were reading a weather forecast.
He had a lot of things he could have said back. That there was no such thing as gods. That it was a heavy thing for a five-year-old to decide. That he was proud of him, which was true, and frightened, which was also true.
"Start with being a good boy," he said instead. "That's harder."
"Is it?"
"Much harder. Gods only have to be good once in a while. Boys have to do it every day."
Akio thought about this all the way home, and decided his father was probably right, and that he would do both anyway.
* * *
Spring 2056
The Tsuchiyas left in April, a month after their house was finished.
It wasn't about the house. The house was good. Kazuo had wired it better than his own.
It was the field. Glass doesn't grow rice. The Tsuchiya land had fed the family for six generations, and now it was a hectare of black glass that shone in the sun and couldn't be ploughed, drilled or sold. Hideo had found work at a parts factory in Gifu city. It paid in money instead of rice, which, he said, at least never flooded.
Isamu stayed behind. He said he was too old to move and too stubborn to let the house sit empty, and that somebody had to film the storms.
Ren came to say goodbye on the last morning. He stood at the Arashi gate with his backpack on, looking at the gatepost, which had a single persimmon on it.
"Do the hair thing," he said. "One more time."
"You didn't bring a snack."
"I know."
Akio looked at him for a moment. Then he reached up and held his hand an inch above Ren's head, and the hair went up, all of it, straight toward his palm like grass toward the sun.
Ren grinned. He didn't laugh this time.
"That one's free," said Akio.
It was the first thing he had ever given anyone that hadn't been given to him first.
Ren patted his jacket pocket. There was something flat and heavy in it, about the size of his palm.
"I've still got the glass," he said. "From the field. I'm keeping it."
"Why?"
"It's pretty." Ren shrugged. "And it's from you. Sort of."
Then his father called him from the truck, and he ran.
* * *
Osaka — Spring 2057
Government reports take time.
Dr. Hiroshi Mano's report on the Ikazuchi superbolt took sixteen months. It went through four rounds of review, two budget freezes and a change of minister before the Agency finally published it, in a quiet corner of its website, where it was read by about forty people.
One of them was Tōru Sekiguchi.
He read it over his evening coffee, in the small office above the VR arcade in Namba. It was an interesting report. A hectare of fused glass. An unprecedented natural event. Samples sent for analysis to a materials lab in Osaka, which Sekiguchi happened to know very well, because his employer owned it.
On page nine, there was a list of witnesses.
Ayaka Arashi, resident (registered Weathersense, Cat. E): "Nobody can feel lightning, Doctor. It's too fast. It's not weather. It's just what weather does."
Sekiguchi read that line twice. Then he opened his own files and typed in a name.
ARASHI, Akio. Born August 2050, Ikazuchi, Gifu. Category E (inherited atmospheric sensory). First field reading discarded: equipment fault. Priority: Low. Recheck if anything further comes out of the Hida region.
Same village. Same family name. Mother: Weathersense.
A hectare of glass.
On its own, each piece meant nothing. Old machines faulted on babies every week. Typhoons did strange things in the mountains. But Sekiguchi had something Dr. Mano didn't. He had the other file.
And there was one line in the report that Sekiguchi read three times. On page six, under the drawings of the fourteen cores, Dr. Mano noted that the glass was thickest at the centre, down at ground level, and thinned toward the top. Lightning melts the ground from above. This field had melted from a single point in a wet rice paddy, outward and upward, as though the strike had started there and gone up into the sky.
Dr. Mano had written unprecedented next to it. He had no reason to write anything else. He had never seen a screening note from Takayama.
In 2050, in that village, a baby's electrical reading had gone off the top of the scale. Five years later, in the same village, something had sent lightning up instead of down.
Sekiguchi had been doing this job for thirteen years. He had learned that a coincidence was usually a coincidence, and that the ones that weren't usually looked exactly like this.
He sat there for a long time with his coffee going cold. Then he changed the file's priority from Low to High, attached the report and the screening note, and sent both up the line.
The reply came three days later. It was very short.
How old is the boy now?
* * *
— ⚡ —
Morita General Store · Price Board · (Spring 2056)
Rice (5 kg): ¥4,200
Eggs (10): ¥680
Light bulb (old type): ¥300
Light bulb (old type, Arashi account): free
Light bulb (old type): SOLD OUT. First time ever.
Kazuo-san: the new box comes with the spring truck. Please tell Akio to breathe out slower.