Episode 1: Thursday [1]

Tap.

The rubber tip of my cane found the yellow line on the platform, and the train doors hissed shut behind me.

7:42. Two minutes later than yesterday.

'It's fine. Two minutes is nothing.'

It wasn't nothing. Yesterday, the two minutes had been the stairs at the transfer station. Today it was the stairs and the walk from the ticket gate, and halfway along I'd had to stop and pretend to read a poster about fire safety so the old man behind me wouldn't see my hands shaking.

I knew a lot about fire safety now.

Two years ago, the sky opened an eye.

That was how the news put it. Most people never saw the Eye itself. They only saw what it left behind. One city in every country, gone in a single night. Holes in the ground so deep that the government fenced them off and stopped printing the numbers.

I was thirteen. I watched it on a phone screen in my uncle's kitchen, with my little sister asleep on my lap.

After the Eye, people started to change.

Not everyone. Not even most people. But enough that "Echo" went from a word you shouted into a tunnel to a word the government held press conferences about.

An Echo was an ability. Anyone could awaken one. Nobody could tell who, or when.

First came the trial period. Fever. Weakness. A body that ran out of strength faster than it should. Most people came through it in a few weeks, able to do something no human had ever done before.

The ones who didn't come through it didn't die, exactly.

They became Hollows.

And when a Hollow showed up, the police weren't the ones who answered the call.

That was all the public was told. The rest lived somewhere we couldn't see. Everyone knew that, and everyone still went to work and school the next morning, because what else were you supposed to do?

Most people believed the trial period was something that happened to other people.

...I used to believe that too.

"Ah, sorry—!"

A salaryman clipped my shoulder on his way past, saw the cane, and bowed three times while walking backwards into the crowd.

"It's okay," I said, to nobody. He was already gone.

I pushed my glasses up my nose and started up the hill.

Seiryō Academy sat at the top of it, the way expensive things always do. White walls. A gate taller than the houses across the street. A line of black cars out front, dropping off students whose parents had drivers.

Eight hundred students.

Thirty-one on scholarship.

One with a cane.

'Guess which one is me.'

The hill took six minutes. It used to take four. Around the third minute, my left leg started to burn the way it always did, the old ache where the bone had been pinned back together when I was ten. That part I was used to.

The new part was everything else.

My heart was going too fast for a walk. My shirt was stuck to my back under the blazer. When I stopped at the gate to catch my breath, the edges of the world went grey, like a photo left out in the sun.

I held on to the gatepost and counted to five.

The grey went away.

'See? Fine.'

I'd been telling myself that for eleven days.

Class 1-A was on the third floor.

The school had a lift. It was for staff and "students with a medical exemption." I had a medical exemption. It sat in a folder in the nurse's office, signed and stamped.

I took the stairs.

If I took the lift every day, people would get used to it. If I took it one day and not the next, people would ask why. And sooner or later, someone would look at me properly, at the sweat and the grey skin and the way I held the rail, and say the words out loud.

Trial period.

Then they'd call someone. Someone would come and take me somewhere with white walls to "observe" me. That was the law.

And then who would make Mio's lunch?

...So I took the stairs.

"Ren. Ren. Ren-Ren-Ren."

"No."

"I didn't even ask yet!"

"You want the physics homework."

Takuma Ishida turned around in his chair, put his chin on the back of my desk, and gave me the face of a dog outside a butcher's shop.

"Question four only. I swear. I did the rest."

"You did question one."

"I did question one beautifully."

I sighed and pulled the notebook out of my bag. He grabbed it with both hands, like a prize.

"You're a good man. A great man. When I'm rich, I'll buy you a better cane."

"I like this cane."

"It's held together with tape."

"...I like the tape."

He was already copying. Takuma sat in front of me, talked to everyone, and had decided in April, for reasons of his own, that I was his friend. I hadn't argued. It was easier than making one myself.

I sat back and looked out of the window.

Or rather, I looked past the desk next to mine, because that was where the window was.

The back left corner of the classroom. One desk, one chair. Nothing on the bag hook. No scratches. No name written along the edge in marker, the way everyone else had done on the first day.

Nobody had sat there since April.

When our homeroom teacher took attendance, her eyes never once went to it. Not a pause. Not a glance. As if there was nothing there to skip.

In the second week of April, I'd asked Takuma about it.

"Whose desk is that?"

He'd looked at it for a long moment. Then at me.

"Was it ever not empty?"

Then he'd started talking about a video game, and I'd let it go. It was a strange thing to care about.

I still looked at it every morning.

I didn't know why.

Third period was chemistry, in the lab on the fifth floor.

Two more floors.

I made it to the fourth-floor landing before my vision did the grey thing again. This time it didn't go away when I counted to five. I counted to ten. Then fifteen. Footsteps came up the stairs behind me, and I let go of the rail, stood up straight, and studied the noticeboard like it was the most interesting thing in the building.

"You alright there?"

Hamada-sensei, the chemistry teacher, with a box of test tubes under one arm.

"Yes, sir. Just slow."

"Leg giving you trouble?"

"A little."

That was the good thing about the leg. It was a reason everyone already believed.

He nodded and went on up. I waited until his footsteps were gone before I breathed out.

Something warm touched my upper lip.

I wiped it with the back of my hand.

Red.

'...Ah.'

I pressed my sleeve to my nose and stood still in the empty stairwell until it stopped. Then I went into the toilets, washed the blood out of my cuff with cold water, and held it under the hand dryer for as long as it took.

I was four minutes late to chemistry.

Hamada-sensei didn't say anything. He looked at my leg, then at the seat nearest the door, and I sat in it.

Lunch was rice, egg, and the last of yesterday's fried chicken.

The same as Mio's. I made both every morning at six. She was in her third year of middle school, at a public school across the city, and last month she'd told me in a serious voice that she was old enough to make her own lunch now.

She made her own lunch for three days.

On the fourth day, she ate it, looked at me across the kitchen table, and said, "Onii-chan. Please."

So I made both again.

I ate slowly and checked my phone under the desk.

One message from Mio, sent at 8:10: a kid in 3-C is sick and everyone thinks it's an Echo. teacher sent him home. scary!!!

Nothing from Uncle Daisuke.

I scrolled up. His last text was from nine days ago.

Work trip. Back soon. Look after your sister.

His texts always said work.

'He's fine. He's always fine.'

I put the phone away.

Takuma leaned over with a mouth full of bread.

"Did you see the Yatagarasu clip last night?"

"No."

"Dude. Some guy filmed it from a bridge in Saitama. There was this thing in the river, like a horse, but wrong, you know? Too many knees. And this lady in a black coat just walks up to it and—" he made a fist and opened it fast, "—pop. Gone. Clip got taken down in, like, twenty minutes."

"They always get taken down."

"That's what makes them cool!"

Yatagarasu. The black coats. The people who came when the news said please stay indoors. Nobody knew how many of them there were, or who they answered to, or what their Echoes did, unless you happened to be standing on a bridge in Saitama at the right moment.

I'd never seen one in person.

I'd never wanted to.

The final bell rang at three-thirty.

By three-fifty I was at the bottom of the hill, and my legs had stopped burning and gone numb, which was worse. I turned left at the convenience store instead of right. The long way to the station was flat, and today I didn't trust myself with anything that wasn't flat.

The street was quiet. A delivery bike. A mother with a pushchair. A city bus pulling away from its stop, half empty.

Then the birds went up.

All of them, from every wire and rooftop at once, with a sound like someone shaking out a wet sheet.

The mother with the pushchair stopped walking.

So did I.

Thud.

The bus jolted on its springs, as if something heavy had dropped onto its roof.

The driver hit the brakes. The bus stopped in the middle of the road. And the roof above the driver's seat slowly bent inward.

Something was crouched on top of the bus.

And it was looking at me.