[Handwritten note, unsigned, found decades later in a burned office in Osaka] 1. Never fight him directly. 2. Never let anyone else have him. 3. Find out what the glass is.
* * *
Kagoshima Port — Two Days Later
The holder of One For All was standing in a fish warehouse with his back to the sea, and he was smiling.
That was the first thing that annoyed the man who had called himself Mr. Sōma. Holders always smiled. His brother had smiled, all those years ago, at the very end. It was a family trait that had somehow been passed down through a quirk instead of through blood, and he had never once found it charming.
"You took your time," said the holder.
He was in his forties, broad and weathered, with a fisherman's jacket and a scar across his chin. Six men in dark clothes stood in a ring around him, between the ice crates and the stacks of plastic trays. Behind him were the warehouse's big sliding doors, open to the harbour, and the black water.
"I had business in the mountains," said the man in the doorway.
"Must have been important."
"It was."
The holder's eyes went to the man's right arm. It was strapped across his chest in a sling, and the hand was wrapped from fingertips to wrist in white bandages. The bandages were spotted with yellow where something underneath was still weeping.
The holder looked at it for a long time.
Then he started to laugh.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, that's wonderful. Somebody finally hurt you."
"Take him," said the man in the doorway.
* * *
It went wrong in under a minute.
His men were good. He only hired good men. They closed on the holder from six sides, and the holder moved through them the way the holders always did, with that stubborn little flame of strength burning brighter the harder he was pushed. One man went into the ice crates. Another went through a wall.
That was fine. That was expected. The men were only there to slow him down.
The man in the doorway was the trap. He always had been. For six years, every plan had been built around the same moment: a holder pinned for one second, and a hand on his skin. One touch. That was all it took. That was all it had ever taken.
He crossed the warehouse in a blur, reached out, and realised halfway through the movement that he was reaching with the wrong hand.
His body had done it on its own. Decades of habit. The right hand was the one that took things. The left hand was the one that pushed, and threw, and broke. He had never had to think about it before.
He thought about it now, for perhaps a quarter of a second.
The holder used that quarter of a second to put his shoulder through the warehouse doors and dive into the harbour.
* * *
They searched the water for two hours. Divers, drones, a boat with sonar. They found a fisherman's jacket floating near the breakwater, and nothing else.
By morning, a small fishing boat registered in Okinawa had left Kagoshima two hours early, without filing its route. Nobody could say who had been on it.
The man stood on the dock in the grey light with his bandaged hand against his chest and watched the sea.
"Sir," said his driver, from a careful distance. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You didn't do anything."
"Should I tell them to search the islands?"
"Tell them to try." He turned away from the water. "He's gone. He'll go to ground for years now. They always do after they get away."
His driver said nothing. He'd been with the man for nine years, and in that time he had seen him lose a holder twice. Both times, he'd said the same thing in the same voice and gone straight back to work.
This time, he was smiling. Just slightly. Just at one corner of his mouth.
The driver didn't ask why. That was the whole reason he'd lasted nine years.
The man was thinking about a seven-year-old boy in the mountains. He was thinking that two nights ago, a child had taken his hand, and the hand had just lost him six years of hunting.
Nobody had done that much damage to him in one night for a very long time.
He found, somewhat to his surprise, that it didn't make him angry. It made him curious.
* * *
Osaka — Five Weeks Later
The hand was growing back.
He had a quirk to thank for that, one he'd taken from a nurse in Sapporo twenty years earlier who could heal any wound she had on herself, given time. It was slow. The burned flesh had to come away first, piece by piece, and the new skin underneath grew in from the edges like ice forming on a pond.
The silver had been the hardest part. It had melted into the bones of his middle finger. A surgeon he kept for such things had spent three hours cutting it out with tools so fine they looked like sewing needles. Afterwards, the surgeon went home and did not remember the evening. That was why he was kept.
Now, after five weeks, he had a hand again. Pink, smooth, new. The fingers worked. The grip was almost as strong as before.
But it couldn't feel cold anymore.
He had tested it, alone, the first week. A glass of ice water. He'd put his new fingers into it and felt nothing at all. Not the cold, not the wet. Just the pressure, as if the water were made of cloth. The nerves had grown back wrong. They might fix themselves. They might not.
He'd taken the hand out of the water and looked at it for a while, and then he'd put on a glove, and he had worn a glove on it ever since.
* * *
Tōru Sekiguchi had never met his employer.
In thirteen years of reading equipment-fault reports, he'd received his instructions by message, sent his answers the same way, and asked no questions. That was the arrangement. It suited him.
So when a car came to collect him from the office above the VR arcade in Namba one evening, and drove him for forty minutes through the city to an underground car park beneath a private hospital, and a silent man walked him down three floors in a lift to a quiet room with a desk and two chairs, Sekiguchi assumed he was going to die.
He sat in one of the chairs and thought about his cat. He wondered who would feed it.
The man came in a few minutes later. Dark suit. Kind, tired face. A black leather glove on his right hand.
"Sekiguchi-san," he said, sitting down. "Thank you for coming. I know it was short notice."
"Of course, sir." Sekiguchi's voice came out much higher than he'd intended. "It's an honour. Sir."
"Relax. You're not in trouble." The man smiled. "Quite the opposite. I wanted to thank you in person."
"Th-thank me?"
"The Arashi file." The man folded his gloved hand over his bare one on the desk. "You flagged that boy when he was twenty-seven days old. Off one discarded reading, from a machine with a known fault, filed as Category E. Thousands of people would have looked at that log. You're the only one who tagged it."
"I marked it Low, sir." Sekiguchi swallowed. "I should have pushed it up. I didn't look at it again for seven years. If I'd—"
"If you'd pushed it up in 2050, I would have read it, thought it was a faulty machine, and thrown it away. It was nothing in 2050." The man shook his head. "No. You marked it, and you remembered it, and when the second piece came along, you put them together. That's exactly why I keep you. It's the rarest skill in the world. Most people can only see what's in front of them."
Sekiguchi didn't know what to say. He had come here expecting a bullet. He was receiving a performance review.
"May I ask, sir," he said carefully. "Did you find the boy?"
"I did."
"Was he..." Sekiguchi hesitated. "Was he what you hoped?"
The man was quiet for a moment.
Then he took off the glove and laid his right hand flat on the desk between them, pink and new and unlined, with a thin pale scar across the middle finger where the silver had been cut out.
"He was more," he said.
* * *
"You're going to have a new job," the man said, putting the glove back on. "It will be your only job, from now on. You'll have a proper office, and staff, if you want them. But you'll answer to me, directly, and only to me."
"Yes, sir. What's the job?"
"The boy." The man leaned back in his chair. "Everything about him. Where he goes, what he does, who he talks to. What his parents order. What the village says about him. What he's reading."
"You want me to watch him."
"I want you to watch him from a distance," said the man. "That's the first rule, and it's the important one. You never send anyone up that mountain. Not a spy, not a thief, not a man with a camera. Nobody gets within a kilometre of him. He can feel people from a long way off. I don't know exactly how far. Neither will you. So you stay out of the valley entirely and watch through the things the village already uses. Their satellite link. Their shop orders. Their school's tablet. The prefecture records."
Sekiguchi was writing it down on a notepad. His hand had stopped shaking. Lists calmed him down.
"Second rule," said the man. "No one else gets him."
Sekiguchi looked up.
"There are two copies of that boy in the world right now. One is in your files. The other is in the government's. A screening note, a disaster report, a witness list with his mother's name on it." The man's voice stayed perfectly pleasant. "I want the government's copy gone."
"Gone, sir?"
"The equipment fault note from Takayama. I want it marked as a duplicate error and deleted. Dr. Mano's report, I want taken down for 'revision.' If he complains, find him a better project somewhere far away. He'll be busy for a few years." The man tapped the desk lightly. "Anyone in the state who goes looking for a boy in Ikazuchi should find a Category E child in a mountain village who's never done anything interesting in his life."
Sekiguchi wrote that down too. Then he stopped.
"Sir," he said slowly. "Forgive me. If he's so dangerous. Wouldn't it be better if the government did find him? They'd register him properly. Put him in one of their schools. Keep him under control." He hesitated. "Isn't that what we'd want?"
The man looked at him for a long moment. It was not an unkind look. It was the look of a teacher who has been asked a very good question by a student he didn't expect much from.
"Think about it, Sekiguchi-san," he said. "What does the state do with a weapon?"
"It ... uses it?"
"It uses it. It points it at whoever it's afraid of. And the state is afraid of me. It has been for a very long time." He spread his hands. "Right now, that boy belongs to a farmer and a weather woman in a village with no road. In ten years, if the state gets hold of him, he'll belong to an army. I don't like my chances against an army with a god in it."
Sekiguchi thought about that.
"A god belongs to whoever finds him first," said the man. "I'd like that to be no one, for as long as possible."
* * *
"Third rule," said the man. "The glass."
He took a folder from the desk drawer. Real paper, thick and creamy. He slid it across to Sekiguchi.
"The fourteen cores from the field went to our lab," he said. "The results came back yesterday. I'd like you to hear them from the person who ran the tests, because I don't think either of us is clever enough to explain them."
He pressed a button under the desk.
The door opened. A woman came in, small and neat, about thirty, in a white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up. She had the look of someone who hadn't slept properly in a week and had enjoyed every minute of it.
"Dr. Asakawa," said the man. "Tell Sekiguchi-san what you told me."
Dr. Rumi Asakawa sat on the edge of the desk, because there wasn't a third chair, and didn't seem to notice she was doing it.
"Okay," she said. "So. Glass is an insulator. You know that. You put electricity into glass, it doesn't go through. That's why the old power lines used glass to hold up the wires."
"Yes," said Sekiguchi.
"This isn't that." She leaned forward. "Normal insulators resist current. They push back. If you put enough voltage into them, eventually they give up and the current goes through. Rubber, glass, plastic, everything. It's like a dam. Push hard enough and it breaks."
"And this glass?"
"We put a hundred thousand volts into a core about this big." She held her fingers a few centimetres apart. "That's the most our lab can produce. Nothing went through. Fine. That's what you'd expect from good glass. But then we measured the electric field around the core. And it was gone."
"Gone?"
"Gone. Not blocked. Not pushed away. Gone." Her eyes were shining. "It's like the charge goes in and doesn't come out anywhere. There's a little bubble of nothing round the sample, about a hand's width across, where there's no field at all. If you hold a charged electroscope near it, the leaves fall flat. If you bring a live wire near it, the current drops. It doesn't resist electricity. It eats it."
Sekiguchi looked at the man in the glove. The man was watching Dr. Asakawa with quiet interest, the way you watch a good film for the second time.
"How is that possible?" asked Sekiguchi.
"No idea. Isn't it great?" Dr. Asakawa grinned. "I think the strike changed it. Whatever made that field, it wasn't normal lightning. It went through the soil and left something behind in the glass. Some sort of ... I don't know. Imprint. Scar. The glass remembers what made it, and it doesn't want any more."
"Could you make it into something?" the man asked. "Shape it? Melt it down?"
"Maybe. I'd have to try. If you melt it, it might lose whatever it's got." She shrugged. "Or it might not. I'd need much more of it to find out."
"How much is there?"
"In the field? A hectare, a few centimetres deep. Maybe two hundred tonnes."
The man nodded slowly.
"Thank you, Doctor," he said. "That's very helpful. You'll have whatever you need."
She hopped off the desk, beaming, and left with the folder under her arm. She had no idea where the samples had come from, or who the man in the glove was, or what he wanted the glass for.
She would find out eventually, of course. People always did.
* * *
The Same Room — Later
"Sir," said Sekiguchi, once the door had closed. "May I ask one more question?"
"You may."
"Why not just ..." He stopped, and chose his words carefully. "If you can't touch the boy. His parents, sir. His mother. Wouldn't he do anything you asked, if you had his mother?"
He regretted it as soon as he'd said it. It sounded worse out loud.
The man didn't seem offended. He seemed to think it was a reasonable thing to ask.
"I thought about it," he said. "That night, in the garden. I was one step away from her."
"And?"
"And the boy's eyes went white, and every light in the valley came on, and a storm came out of a clear sky." The man looked at his gloved hand. "Hostages work on men who can count, Sekiguchi-san. A man who can count will look at his wife with a knife at her throat and think: if I do what he wants, she lives. That's arithmetic."
"And the boy?"
"The boy is seven. He doesn't do arithmetic yet. He looks at his mother with a hand on her arm and thinks mine." The man smiled faintly. "And then he does whatever a storm does, and everyone in the valley dies, including the one holding the knife."
Sekiguchi didn't say anything for a while.
"One day he'll learn to count," said the man. "Every boy does. When he can count, then we talk about his family. Not before."
"So what do we do until then?"
"We wait."
He said it simply. It wasn't a complaint.
"I've waited for my brother's quirk for longer than you've been alive," he went on. "I'll wait for this. A storm can't be held, Sekiguchi-san. I learned that the hard way. But it can be grounded. It can be insulated, or diverted, or trapped, or told by a law where it's allowed to fall." He counted them off on the gloved fingers. "So that's your work, for the rest of your life. Find me everything in Japan that stops electricity. Every quirk. Rubber skin, insulating fat, anything that drinks a current. Every law that makes a quirk user fill out a form. Every scientist like Dr. Asakawa. Find them, and write them down, and keep them somewhere safe."
"For what, sir?"
"For when he's older," said the man. "I never fight anything straight. I certainly won't fight him."
* * *
Gifu City — Spring 2058
Hideo Tsuchiya met the man from the materials company in a café near the station, because he didn't want to do it at home.
The man was young, polite and very well dressed, and he was from a firm called Kōsei Materials Research. He had a tablet with a contract on it. He said the company had read about the superbolt in a government report, before the report had been taken down for revision. He said they wanted the glass in the Ikazuchi field, for scientific study.
"It's no use to anybody," said Hideo. "You can't farm it."
"It's very interesting glass," said the young man. "To us."
"Then go and dig it up."
"That's what we'd like to discuss." The young man turned the tablet round so Hideo could read it. "We'd take all of it. Every piece, right down to the clay. Then we'd bring in new soil, river silt from the Hida valley, and level it, and give it back to you as a rice field."
Hideo didn't say anything.
"Not straight away," the young man went on. "Our laboratory isn't ready for that much material yet. It may take some years. But it's in the contract. The glass becomes ours. The land stays yours, and it comes back to you ready to plant. All we ask is that you keep the agreement private. No press. No other companies."
Hideo read the contract slowly, all of it, with his finger on the screen. He was not a man who signed things he hadn't read.
It was real. He could tell that much. The company had an address in Osaka and a page on the prefecture's business register. The young man had quoted Dr. Mano's report back to him, page numbers and all. A laboratory wanting strange glass was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Why put the soil back?" he asked. "You don't need to."
"We'd like to be good neighbours," said the young man.
That was true, though not for the reason Hideo thought. A torn-up hillside with trucks on it gets people talking. A field that quietly turns back into a field is something nobody ever writes about.
Hideo looked at the contract for a long time.
He thought about six generations of Tsuchiyas in that soil. He thought about the night of the fire, and his son's school bag hanging on the burned wall. He thought about the boy at the door of the community hall with the wooden cart full of rice, and about the Arashis, who had rebuilt his house with their own hands and whom he had never once thanked.
Every time he went back to the valley to see his father, he had to walk past the field. It shone at him the whole way up the hill.
He had told Ren they would go back and farm it one day. He hadn't believed it when he said it. Here was a man offering to make it true.
He signed.
That night, he told Ren they were getting the field back. Not soon. But one day.
Ren listened, and nodded. Then he went to his room and found the shard of glass he'd worked loose from the edge of the field years ago, the one with a single rice stalk sealed inside it, and put it on the shelf above his bed, next to his school prizes. If the rest of it was going away, he wanted to keep one piece.
It would stay on that shelf for many years.
Hideo had just given the man in the glove the one thing in the world that could hold Akio Arashi still. He had given it away for a promise and some river silt, and he would never know.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Kōsei Materials Research · Internal Memo · Dr. R. Asakawa
Week 1: Sample core C-07 continues to absorb all ambient electrical field within ~10 cm. Fascinating.
Week 2: Lab phones stop working within 3 m of the sample cabinet. Moved phones.
Week 3: Lab coffee machine stops working within 3 m of sample cabinet. Moved coffee machine.
Week 4: Request for a bigger lab.
[Reply from management: "Request approved. Please stop moving the coffee machine."]