[Agreement · handwritten on the back of a fuel log sheet] 1. Shiomi water: free. 2. Station pumps: powered by A., daily, 5 a.m. 3. The pier: no children. — K.K. / A.A.
* * *
Shiomi Night Market — Day 19, Late Afternoon
"You're not going," said Chiyo.
"I'm going."
"You're fifteen."
"Everyone keeps telling me that," said Akio. "I keep being fifteen anyway."
She stood in front of him with her arms out, as though she could stop him by being in the way. She was a head and a half shorter than him and sixty-four years old. Behind her, half the market was watching from the shade of the expressway.
"He'll kill you," she said.
"He can't touch me."
"He doesn't need to touch you!" Her voice cracked. "That's what I've been trying to tell you, boy. He's never touched anyone he couldn't beat. He turned off the water for two thousand people just to get you to walk up to his door, and now you're going to walk up to his door. That's not you winning. That's him winning."
"I know."
"Then why are you going?"
Akio looked past her, down the row of stalls, at the people sitting in the heat with empty bottles. The old go player still had his eyes closed. Two stalls down, a woman was giving her little boy water from a bottle cap, one capful at a time, and drinking none of it herself.
Akio had been watching her do it for an hour. She had perhaps ten capfuls left.
"Because he's right," he said. "I can't make water."
Chiyo didn't move for a long moment. Then she dropped her arms.
"Taku," she said, without turning round. "If you follow him, I'll break your legs."
Behind the stall, Taku, who had been quietly putting his shoes on, quietly took them off again.
* * *
The Minato Pumping Station — Early Evening
It was a big concrete building on the canal, two kilometres north, with tall windows and a chain-link fence around it. In the old days it had pumped water to a hundred thousand homes. Now it pumped water to whoever Kagari said.
There were men at the gate. They stepped aside when they saw him, without a word.
They had been told he was coming. Of course they had.
A man walked him through the yard, past rows of rusting diesel tanks, and up a metal staircase to the control room. It had a long window looking down over the pump hall, where six giant pumps the size of buses sat silent in the shadows.
Kenta Kagari was sitting behind a steel desk with a pot of tea and two cups.
"Sit down," he said. "You walked a long way. It's hot."
Akio sat down.
Kagari poured him a cup of tea. His hands were thick and scarred, the knuckles shiny with old burns. Steam rose off the cup. Akio watched the scarred hands put the pot down and noticed that the steel of the desk under Kagari's palms was very faintly warm. He could feel it from here.
"You're younger than Ube said," said Kagari.
"Ube was lying on the ground at the time."
"Hah." It was barely a laugh. Kagari's face didn't move much. There was too much scar tissue on it to move very far. "What should I call you?"
"Akio."
"Not your quirk name? The boys have started calling you the Weather."
"I don't have a quirk name. I'm Category E."
"Yes. Ube told me that too." Kagari picked up his own cup. "You know, Akio, I've met a lot of people in my life who lied to me. Most of them lied badly. You lie very well. You lie like it's a joke you're letting everyone in on."
"It's not a lie," said Akio. "It's on my record."
"That," said Kagari, "is what makes it funny."
* * *
They drank their tea.
It was very good tea. Akio was surprised. He'd expected something else from a man who burned arms on a pier. He didn't know what. Something worse.
Kagari's hum was very steady. It was big and hot, like a furnace, but there was nothing jumpy or tight in it. It reminded Akio, uncomfortably, of his father's. A slow heartbeat. A man who'd made up his mind about things a long time ago and didn't need to keep checking.
'He's not angry,' Akio thought. 'He's not even worried.'
That was true. He was right about that.
"So," said Kagari. "You want the water back on."
"Yes."
"For the Shiomi district."
"For everyone."
"No," said Kagari. "Not for everyone. Let's not start with a lie, even a funny one. You came because two thousand people near the market are thirsty and it's your fault. That's what you want fixed. Everyone else in Minato gets water when my men say so, the same as last month and the month before, and you didn't walk two kilometres for them."
Akio opened his mouth. Then he closed it again.
"..."
He was right about that too.
* * *
"Do you know," said Kagari, "what Minato was like before me?"
"No."
"Of course you don't. You're fifteen and you're from the mountains." Kagari set his cup down. "In 2044, Nagoya burned for nineteen days. Nobody ever proved whose quirk started it. Those were the riot years. Quirks were turning up faster than anyone could put a name to them, and every big city in Japan was burning somewhere. When it was over, half this ward was ash, and the city had to choose."
"Choose what?"
"Where to send its people." Kagari held up one thick finger. "There weren't enough of them. Not enough police. Not enough firemen. Not enough engineers to fix one water main, and Minato had a hundred broken. Half the officers they did have were scared of the people they were supposed to arrest, because nobody knew yet what a quirk could do. So somebody in an office drew a line on a map. Sakae, the stations, the hospitals, the castle. Everything inside the line got rebuilt."
"And Minato was outside it."
"It's flat, it's by the sea, and it was mostly gone already. It was the easiest place to give up." He said it without any bitterness, the way he might have read out a line from a fuel log. "They told people to move. A few did. Most had nowhere to go. Then the police left, then the council, then the power company and the water board. All inside a year. Nobody here was ever told it was permanent. It just never stopped."
It was the first time Akio had heard anyone explain Minato without calling it cursed, or lazy, or dangerous. It made sense. He noticed, a moment later, that it was also the one explanation that made a man like Kagari necessary.
"My mother told me about the fires," he said. "Not about that."
"Your mother was here?"
"In the fires. She got out."
Kagari nodded slowly. "Lucky woman. Most people didn't." He folded his scarred hands on the desk. "After the city left, there were gangs. Eleven of them, the year I came back. Every street had a different boss. Every boss had different rules. They shot each other over a crate of rice. There was a murder in Minato every single night, Akio. Every night. For four years. I counted."
"And now?"
"Now there's one gang." Kagari didn't smile. "Mine. And there's a lesson on the pier about once a month, in daylight, in front of everyone, with a reason that everyone knows." He looked at Akio steadily. "Work it out."
Akio didn't say anything.
"Thirty murders a month, in the dark, for nothing," said Kagari. "Or one burned hand a month, in the light, for stealing. Which ward would you rather live in?"
"Neither."
"That's not one of the choices."
"I don't like your logic."
"Nobody does," said Kagari. "But they're alive to dislike it. That's the whole point of it."
* * *
Akio looked at him for a long time.
He thought about knocking Kagari out. It would be easy. He could feel the man's hum, the steady furnace, and he could reach out and touch it with one thread of light and put it out, the way he had with Ube. Then he could walk down to the pump hall and turn the water back on with his own hands.
And then what?
Who would run the pumps tomorrow? Who would bring the diesel for them, and from where? Who would stop the ten other gangs from coming back the moment Kagari's men saw their boss go down?
He was fifteen. He could stop a man. He didn't know how to run a ward.
Kagari watched his face. He could see the whole thought go across it, start to finish, in about ten seconds.
"Good," he said quietly. "You can think. That's rare. Most strong people can't."
"I could still knock you out."
"Yes," said Kagari. "And then you'd own Minato. Congratulations. Do you want it?"
"..."
"No. Nobody does. That's why it's mine." He leaned back in his chair. "So. Let's talk about what you actually want."
* * *
They made a deal.
It took two hours. Kagari made more tea. They argued about almost every line, and Akio lost most of the arguments, because Kagari had been doing this for sixteen years and Akio had been doing it for two hours.
But not all of them.
"The pumps run on diesel," Akio said. "That's what all those tanks out there are for. How much do they burn?"
Kagari's eyes narrowed very slightly. "Enough."
"I'll run them."
"..."
"Every morning, at five, before anyone's awake. I'll come here and put my hand on your main line and fill whatever you've got. You won't need to burn diesel for the pumps anymore. That's a lot of diesel you get to keep."
"And in exchange?"
"Water for Shiomi. Free. The whole district. For as long as I keep coming."
Kagari thought about it.
"You've already taken the market off me," he said. "Forty stalls that used to come to my men every week."
"And I'll give you back more than that on the pumps."
"You don't know that."
"I do," said Akio. "I can feel them from here. Six pumps, big ones, running about twelve hours a day. That's more diesel than the whole market ever burned." He tilted his head. "I'm Category E. I'm very good at weather."
There was a long silence.
Then Kagari's scarred face did something it hadn't done in a long time. One corner of his mouth moved.
"All right," he said. "Shiomi gets free water. You run the pumps. And you stay out of the rest of my business."
"One more thing."
"There's always one more thing."
"The pier," said Akio. "No children."
Kagari's face went still again.
"The pier is the only reason this ward is safe," he said. "If I stop, the gangs come back. You know that. You've just spent two hours thinking it through."
"I didn't say stop. I said no children."
"..."
"You said yourself you don't bother with children," said Akio. "One of your men did Yuto Kano's arm. Not you. So you already know it's wrong. You just let them do it because it's easier than saying no."
Kagari looked at him for a very long time.
Akio felt the furnace hum shift. Just slightly. Not tight, not angry. Just a small change, deep down, like a door in a big house closing somewhere far away.
"No children," said Kagari finally.
He took a fuel log sheet from the stack on his desk, turned it over, and uncapped a pen.
Akio glanced at the station tablet lying at the other end of the desk.
"Not on that," said Kagari, without looking up. "You can feel what's inside a screen, can't you? You could make it say anything you liked, and I'd never know." He began to write. "Ink stays what it was."
He wrote three lines on the back in thick, careful handwriting. Then he signed it and passed it across with the pen.
It was a smart choice, and Akio knew it. Kagari had known him for two hours, and he'd already worked out the one kind of promise Akio couldn't quietly change.
Akio read it twice. Then he signed it too.
* * *
The water came back on in Shiomi at nine o'clock that evening.
It came out of the standpipes along the canal in a great rusty gush, then ran clear. People came out of the burned buildings with buckets, bottles, pots, anything that would hold it.
Nobody pushed. The queues at each standpipe formed by themselves, with the old people at the front, because that was how Shiomi had always done it. A boy of about ten filled two cups, carried them carefully to an old woman sitting on a doorstep, and only went back for his own once she'd finished. The woman with the bottle cap filled a whole bottle and drank half of it in one go, with her eyes shut.
The old go player who called Akio Raijin-sama filled a single cup. He raised it toward Akio from across the street, bowed, and drank.
At the market, the tap behind Chiyo's stall spat out a little air and rust, and then the water came.
She stood watching the water run for a long time without saying anything. Then she turned and looked at Akio.
"You made a deal with him," she said.
"It's a good deal."
"That's what worries me."
* * *
Late 2065 to Early 2068
He kept the deal. So did Kagari.
Every morning at five, Akio walked two kilometres north through the dark streets to the pumping station, put his hand on the copper of the main power line, and filled it. Six pumps woke up in the hall below and began to push water to the ward. It took him about twenty minutes. Then he walked back, ate breakfast at Chiyo's stall, slept for a few hours, and spent the rest of the day learning things.
There was a lot to learn.
Chiyo taught him to cook. Not well, but enough. She also taught him how to tell when a customer was about to cause trouble, and when to keep his mouth shut, and why you never send a hungry person away from a stall. The fish seller taught him to gut a mackerel. The old go player taught him go, and beat him every single game for two years. Akio thought this was very good for him.
"You play like a storm," the old man told him once. "All attack. Very strong. No patience."
"I'm patient."
"You're patient the way lightning is patient. It waits a long time, and then it hits the first tall thing it sees." The old man placed a stone. "That's the game, by the way. You've lost."
Taku taught him the city. Where to go and where not to. Which streets the police still came to. Which buildings outside Minato had rooms that didn't ask for a MyNumber card. How to sneak into the aquarium after closing, which Akio refused to do, and how to talk to people who didn't trust you, which Akio was very bad at.
"You're too calm," Taku told him. "It freaks people out. You talk to everyone like you're a doctor telling them they've got a week to live."
"What should I do?"
"I don't know. Smile more. Make a joke."
So Akio made jokes. Most of them were terrible. A few were true. He remembered his mother, and kept trying.
* * *
He learned the rest of the city too.
He began to go out at night, outside Minato, into the parts of Nagoya where the lights still worked. There were still gangs there, and robberies, and fights. The police were stretched so thin that a call could take two hours to answer.
He didn't go looking for trouble. He just walked, and listened. When he felt someone's hum go sharp and terrified in an alley, he went there. When he found a man with a knife, or three men with one woman, he touched them once each with a thread of light, and they fell down. Then he walked away before anyone could see his face.
He was careful. He always left one standing to call for help. He never hit anyone twice.
The rumours started in the second year. A boy who walked through bullets. A storm that came down into alleys. Lightning on a clear night in Sakae, and three robbers found twitching on the pavement in the morning with their hair standing on end.
The news feeds called it a vigilante. The police called it a nuisance. The old man in Shiomi called it Raijin-sama and bowed to it every evening.
Kagari's men called it the Weather. The name stuck.
* * *
And sometimes, at five in the morning, Kagari was in the control room when Akio came.
He didn't have to be. Akio didn't need him there to fill the line. But every few weeks, there he'd be, behind the steel desk, with a pot of tea and two cups. They would sit and drink it while the pumps woke up below.
They didn't talk about the pier. It was the only thing they didn't talk about.
They talked about everything else.
"Strong people think the world is a fight," Kagari said one morning, early in 2067. "It isn't. It's a ledger."
"A ledger?"
"Everything you do goes in it. Every favour, every debt, every person you hurt and every person you saved. Every fight you win goes in as a debt, because someone lost it, and they'll remember." He turned his cup slowly on the desk. "Most strong people never look at their ledger. They just keep winning, and the debts keep piling up, and one day someone comes to collect. And they're surprised."
"Is that what happened to the eleven gangs?"
"That's what happens to everybody," said Kagari. "The only question is whether you keep the ledger yourself, or let someone else keep it for you."
Akio thought about that for a long time.
He thought about the Tsuchiyas' field, which he'd turned to glass when he was five, and the whole village spending a year putting it right for him. About a man with a ring and a thousand hums, who had walked away from his garden, counting him. About the forty stalls he'd taken out of the hands of the man across the desk without even noticing.
He had never thought of any of it as a ledger. He'd thought of it as things that had happened. But every one of them was still open. Somebody, somewhere, was still waiting to settle each one.
"Do you keep yours?" he asked.
Kagari looked at him over the steam from his tea.
"Every line," he said.
* * *
He told his mother about Kagari.
He'd got a phone in his second year, an old one from Taku's friend, with the battery taken out. He held it in his hand when he wanted to use it, and it lasted about four months before it died. Then Taku found him another.
Akio: he's not what i thought Mum: what did you think? Akio: i thought he'd be a monster Mum: and? Akio: he's a man who worked out that a monster keeps the peace Mum: that's worse, sweetheart Akio: i know Mum: be careful. men like that keep every promise exactly Mum: that's how they get you
He read the last line several times. Then he put the phone away.
* * *
He watched the pier once.
It was autumn, 2066. A man in his thirties had been caught stealing diesel from one of the tanks in the station yard. He had a wife and two children, and the diesel had been for a generator in a basement where his mother was dying.
Kagari did it himself, the way he did all of them. At noon, at the end of the pier, in front of a crowd of about a hundred, with no speech. He put one scarred hand on the man's forearm and held it there for three seconds.
The man screamed. The crowd didn't make a sound.
Akio stood at the back of the crowd with his hands in his pockets and did nothing.
He could have stopped it. He could have reached across the pier with a thread of light and dropped Kagari where he stood. It would have taken a second.
And tomorrow morning, the pumps wouldn't have run, and Shiomi wouldn't have had water, and Kagari's men would have come for the market, and the deal would have been over. Two thousand people, against one man's arm.
He worked it out. He hated the answer. He took it anyway.
The man was carried off the pier by his wife. His arm would heal, mostly. He'd never close that hand properly again.
Chiyo was waiting at the stall when Akio got back. She'd heard. Everybody had.
"You were there," she said.
"Yes."
"And you didn't do anything."
"It was in the deal. No children. He's not a child."
Chiyo looked at him for a long, long moment.
"You traded them," she said quietly. "You know that? You traded the grown-ups for the kids. You didn't save anybody, boy. You just picked who gets burned."
Akio didn't answer.
She was right, and he knew she was right. He'd known it the moment he signed his name under Kagari's. He'd just thought it was the best he could do.
He was sixteen. It probably was.
* * *
Spring 2068
By the spring of 2068, Akio was seventeen, and things in Minato had started to go wrong.
He couldn't have said exactly when. It came slowly, the way weather comes in from the west, and he didn't have his mother's quirk to feel it two days out.
It started with the diesel. Kagari's men had run Minato by carrying it. A man with a jerry can was somebody; every stall and basement in the ward waited for him and was polite to him. Now the market didn't need him, and the pumps didn't need him, and a lot of Kagari's men were standing next to tanks nobody was waiting for. Some of them had left. A few had gone to work for people outside the ward. One or two had come back with very new shoes.
Then there were the strangers. A group from Osaka had moved into the empty warehouses on the north docks, at the edge of Kagari's ground. Nobody had invited them. Nobody had stopped them either. They kept to themselves and asked no questions. Kagari's men called them the Osaka people. Nobody knew who they worked for.
And then there were the thefts.
They had started in the winter. Diesel from the station yard. Water from the pipes after dark. Food and medicine from Kagari's stores. People in Minato had been afraid of the pier for nineteen years. Now, for the first time, some of them weren't. They'd heard the stories. They knew the Weather lived in Shiomi. They knew Kagari had made a deal with a boy.
They had decided, quietly, without saying it out loud, that a man who made deals with boys was not as strong as he used to be.
Kagari knew it too. Akio could feel it at five in the morning, in the control room. The furnace hum was still steady, still slow. But it ran hotter now. It ran hot all the time.
In March, Kagari stopped making tea.
Akio came up the stairs one morning at five and found the desk bare. No pot, no cups. Kagari was bent over the station logs and didn't look up, and the next time Akio came it was the same, and the time after that.
It was a small thing. It was also the first thing Kagari had ever taken back. Minato had quietly decided that a man who made deals with boys had gone soft, and Kagari had decided he could no longer be seen drinking tea with one.
* * *
Chiyo got sick in April.
It was her lungs. Twenty years of generator smoke under the expressway. She started coughing at night, then in the day, then all the time. The clinic in Minato had closed in 2044. Kagari's men had emptied it in 2049, and whatever was left of its medicine sat in a storeroom behind the pump hall. The nearest hospital was in Atsuta, and it wouldn't see anyone without a MyNumber card.
Chiyo had never had one. Nobody in Shiomi had.
"I'll get you seen," said Akio.
"How?" Chiyo coughed into her sleeve. "They won't let me through the door, boy. I don't exist."
"I'll find a way."
"You'll find a way." She laughed, and it turned into another cough, and when it stopped she looked very small and very tired. "You sound like my grandson."
* * *
Akio went out every night that week, outside Minato, trying to find someone who would treat her.
The hospital in Atsuta would see her, they said, as soon as she was registered. Registering needed an address outside Minato and took about two weeks. A doctor in Kanayama who used to work in the ward said he'd come and listen to her chest, and then didn't come. A pharmacy near the station had exactly the inhaler she needed on its shelf, and wouldn't hand it over without a prescription from a doctor, who needed her registered.
On the third morning, at five, he asked Kagari.
Kagari didn't look up from his desk. "The clinic stock goes to my men's families. That's been the rule for nineteen years." He turned a page. "We agreed on water, Akio. You read every line before you signed. None of them says medicine."
Akio thought about arguing. He thought about the deal, and the pumps, and the fifty thousand people they kept alive, and he walked out without saying anything.
That night he found Chiyo an address. Taku's friend had a cousin with a flat in Atsuta who would let them use it on the form. Akio filled in eleven pages at the ward office and was told to come back in two weeks.
He told himself she had two weeks.
On the sixth night, he got back to Shiomi at four in the morning, and Taku was gone.
The futon behind the stall was empty. So was the hook where Taku kept his jacket. Chiyo was asleep, coughing in her sleep. On the counter, under her ladle, there was a note in Taku's untidy handwriting.
gran — back by morning. don't worry. got a way to get your medicine. — T
Akio read it twice.
Then he stood very still and reached out with everything he had, across the whole of Minato, every street, every building, every hum. Two thousand in Shiomi. Fifty thousand in the ward. He went through them one by one, the way you go through a drawer for your keys, faster and faster.
He found Taku two kilometres north.
At the pumping station. In the yard. Behind the pump hall, by the storeroom.
And around him, closing in from three sides, nine hums. One of them was big, and hot, and very, very steady.
* * *
He was supposed to be at the station at five anyway. It was a little after four.
He didn't walk this time. He found the nearest dead power line, the one that ran north along the canal from the expressway, and put his hand on the pole, and was lightning.
The line was dead, which meant nothing in it pulled at him, and he went down it like water down a pipe. Two kilometres in less than a second. He came out of it at the station's front gate in a white crack that blew the chain-link fence flat for ten metres in each direction.
The men at the gate were on the ground before they knew what had happened. He didn't remember touching them.
He ran into the yard.
Taku was on his knees between two diesel tanks, outside the storeroom door, with a cardboard box split open next to him and inhalers and pill packets scattered across the concrete. Two of Kagari's men had him by the arms. He was seventeen and small for his age, and he was crying and trying very hard not to.
Kagari was standing over him.
"—and that's why there are rules," Kagari was saying, quietly. "You understand? I don't enjoy this. Nobody enjoys this. But if I let you go, tomorrow there'll be ten of you. And the day after, a hundred. And then the gangs come back, and people start dying in the dark again, and nobody remembers why." He looked up as Akio came round the corner of the tank. His face didn't change at all. "Ah. Good morning."
"Let him go," said Akio.
"He stole from the station. He knew the rule. Everyone in Minato knows the rule."
"He's a child."
"He's seventeen," said Kagari. "In Minato, seventeen is a man. He's been a man for three years." He didn't raise his voice. "Read what you signed, Akio. No children. I've kept that line every day for three years. I haven't touched a single child since the day you walked in here. Not one. I'm a man who keeps his promises."
"His grandmother's sick. He was trying to get her medicine—"
"I know what he was trying to get. They all have a reason." Kagari looked down at Taku. "So did the man with the dying mother. You didn't stop me then."
Akio said nothing.
"You weighed it up that day," said Kagari. "I watched you do it. Two thousand people's water against one man's arm. You chose the water. You were right to." He reached down and took hold of Taku's right forearm, gently, almost carefully, the way a doctor takes a pulse. "Nothing has changed, Akio. It weighs the same as it did then."
"Don't."
"Every line," said Kagari. "You asked me once if I kept my ledger. I keep every line."
He closed his hand.
* * *
Taku screamed.
It was a sound Akio had never heard a person make before. It went on and on. The smell came a second later, the same smell from his garden ten years ago, the smell of a kitchen fire, and the skin under Kagari's hand turned white, then red, then black.
Akio moved.
He crossed the yard in a white flash. He reached for the furnace hum with one thread of light, the way he'd reached for Ube, the way he'd reached for a hundred men in a hundred alleys. Small. Careful. Just enough to put it out.
It went in and hit something hot and hard, and stopped.
Kagari didn't fall. He didn't even let go. He staggered, one step, and the hair on his arms stood up, and the scar tissue on his face twitched. But the furnace inside him burned through the thread like a candle flame through a cobweb.
He'd been heating his own body from the inside for twenty years. He'd walked into fires nine times in a single day. There was so much heat in him that a small, careful touch of lightning simply cooked off before it could reach anything that mattered.
Three seconds. That was how long it lasted, every time. Akio had stood in the crowd and counted.
At three seconds, Kagari opened his hand.
He let go of Taku's arm, and Taku fell sideways onto the concrete between the diesel tanks and lay there curled up, sobbing, holding his arm against his chest. From the elbow down, it didn't look like an arm anymore.
Kagari straightened up and looked at Akio across the yard.
"You see?" he said quietly. "That's why I've never been afraid of you."
* * *
Nobody moved.
Kagari's men stood frozen around the tanks. They'd felt the air go strange. Every hair on every head in the yard was standing on end, and there was a faint blue light crawling along the steel edges of the diesel tanks, and a sound like bees.
Akio stood in the middle of it.
He wasn't calm anymore.
He didn't know when it had stopped. He could feel the fizz in him, the roar, the thing he'd held still since he was five years old. It was right there, under his skin, all of it, wanting out. It would be so easy. He could let go, here, in this yard, the way he had in the Tsuchiya field. Melt the station into glass. Melt Kagari into nothing.
And Taku, lying between the tanks. And the nine men around him, some of whom had wives in Shiomi. And the six pumps that kept fifty thousand people alive.
He held it.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He held it in with his teeth clenched and his eyes stinging and the blue light crawling up his arms, and he crouched down and picked Taku up off the concrete, very carefully, the way his father had picked him up off the glass.
Taku was light. Much lighter than he should have been.
"Gran," Taku was saying. "Don't tell Gran. Don't tell Gran."
"I won't," said Akio.
He turned and walked out of the yard with Taku in his arms, through the flattened fence, past the men lying in the road. Nobody tried to stop him.
At the gate, he stopped.
"The pumps," Kagari called after him. "It's five o'clock. Will you be filling them this morning?"
He said it quite calmly. Not as a taunt. As a real question. He really wanted to know.
Akio didn't turn round.
"Yes," he said.
The station's main line came in on a pole just inside the gate. He knelt beside it with Taku held against his chest, and put his free hand on the copper.
Most mornings, filling it took twenty minutes. This morning he was so full that it took less than one, and it barely took the edge off. The six pumps woke up in the hall behind him with a roar.
He didn't look up at the control room window. He could feel Kagari standing in it, watching him keep his word.
That was the worst part. Kagari had kept every line of the deal and burned a boy's arm off anyway. And now Akio was keeping his side too, with Taku's blood drying on his shirt, because if he didn't, two thousand people in Shiomi would have no water by noon. He was doing exactly what Kagari did.
Then he stood up and ran for the hospital.
* * *
Atsuta Hospital — That Afternoon
They took Taku's arm at the elbow.
There was nothing else they could do. The hospital in Atsuta took him without a MyNumber card, because Akio stood at the front desk with a hand on the counter, and every screen in the building began to flicker, and the administrator decided very quickly that this was an emergency. Akio would feel bad about that later. Not today.
Chiyo was asleep in a chair in the corridor. She had cried until there was nothing left, and then she'd sat with her grandson's good hand in hers and coughed until a nurse brought her a mask. Akio had told her what happened. He'd promised Taku he wouldn't, and then he'd told her anyway, because she was going to see the arm, and a lie would only have made it worse.
It was the first promise he'd ever broken. It felt like the right one to break.
He sat on a plastic chair outside the ward with his elbows on his knees and the jam jar between his feet.
He'd brought it from the stall without thinking. Now he took off the lid and touched the wire. The foil leaves didn't spread. They didn't move at all. They just hung there, flat, as if he were empty.
He knew he wasn't. He'd been full since four in the morning. He was fuller than he'd been since the night in the Tsuchiya field. But it was all held so tightly inside him that nothing was getting out, not even into a jam jar.
He put the lid back on.
His phone buzzed. Three times.
Mum: i had a strange feeling this morning. not weather. something else. Mum: are you okay?
He looked at it for a long time.
He thought about Kagari's steady hum, as steady as his father's. He had thought, three years ago, that it meant the man was honest. He'd been right. Kagari was the most honest man he'd ever met. He'd kept every line of the deal, every single day, exactly as written.
That was the problem. Akio had read the man correctly, and it hadn't helped at all. He'd known what Kagari was. He just hadn't understood what it was worth.
Akio: i made a deal with a man who keeps his promises Akio: you were right
He didn't send anything else. He sat there, in the hospital corridor, with the empty jar that wasn't empty and the phone in his hand, and he did something he had never done before in his life.
He tried to think of a way to stop Kagari that didn't end with Kagari dead.
He thought about it for a long time. All afternoon, and into the evening. He went through every way he knew. A small touch. A big one. Breaking the pumps. Breaking the deal. Going to the police, who didn't come to Minato. Going to the Osaka people, whoever they were. Leaving. Staying.
Every one of them ended with somebody else on the pier.
Through the window at the end of the corridor, the sun was going down over the port, over the dark patch of Minato, where the only lights were a few orange points scattered like coals.
For the first time in his life, Akio Arashi started thinking about how to kill a man.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Go Club, Shiomi Market · Results Board · (chalk, under the expressway)
Ishikawa (Raijin-sama's teacher) vs. Akio: Ishikawa wins.
Ishikawa vs. Akio: Ishikawa wins.
Ishikawa vs. Akio: Ishikawa wins.
(… 211 more …)
Ishikawa vs. Akio: Ishikawa wins. "He's getting more patient. Now he loses slower."