Episode 1: Thursday [3]

I meant to go to the station.

I really did. I turned around, walked back past the tape, and headed for the main road. Head down. Cane, step. Cane, step.

Then I passed the mouth of an alley, and I stopped.

There was something in it.

Not an Omoyami. Not a person. Something smaller than that, and harder to see. A bend in the air, halfway down the alley, about the height of my chest. Like the shimmer I'd seen around that thing's head, right before the hand closed.

The same shape.

Five curved lines, hanging there in the shadow between two buildings, not moving.

'...That's not possible.'

The man in the black coat was gone. The van was gone. There was nothing in that alley that could make a shape like that.

And yet there it was.

I looked at it.

The longer I looked, the clearer it got. The lines sharpened. I could see where each one started and where it bent. I could see that the third line was a little thicker than the others. I could see—

I stepped into the alley.

It was quiet inside.

The noise from the main road faded after a few steps, the way it does when you put your head under water. My cane made no sound on the ground. I noticed that, and then I stopped noticing it, because the shape was still ahead of me, and it was all I wanted to look at.

I walked.

The alley went on.

Past the back doors of restaurants. Past bins and stacked crates and an air-conditioning unit dripping onto the ground. Past a cat on a wall that didn't look at me.

It went on for longer than an alley should.

I didn't think about that. I only thought about the shape. Every few steps it seemed to drift a little further away, always the same distance ahead, always just clear enough to see and just far enough that I had to keep going.

My leg didn't hurt.

I didn't notice that either.

The alley ended.

There was no wall. No street. The concrete just stopped.

In front of me, the ground was broken. A wide, rough edge, as if something had taken a bite out of the world. Cracked slabs hung over a dark drop, with rusted steel rods poking out of their edges.

I couldn't see the bottom.

The shape hung in the air above the hole. Just out of reach.

'If I take one more step, I'll see it properly.'

That was the only thought in my head. It wasn't scared, or sad, or anything at all. It was calm. As calm as deciding to turn a page.

One more step, and I'd understand it.

I lifted my foot.

Brrrr—!

Brrrr—!

My phone was ringing.

Wind.

That was the first thing. Cold wind, hard against my face, pulling at my blazer.

The second thing was the city.

All of it, spread out under me. Rooftops. Signs. Tiny cars on tiny roads. The sun low and orange behind the towers in the west.

The third thing was my feet.

The toes of my shoes were over the edge of a building.

Not near it. Over it. The ledge under my heels was about as wide as my hand. Past it there was nothing but air, and eight or nine floors down, the roof of a parked lorry.

"...Hah?"

My body jerked back on its own.

Too hard. My bad leg folded. For one long, horrible second I was tipping the wrong way, arms out, the street swinging up at me—

My hand caught the railing.

Rust bit into my palm. I pulled. I don't know how. I pulled with everything I had, and my weight went backwards over the ledge, and I fell.

Thud.

On my back. On the gravel of the roof. Looking up at a pale sky with one thin cloud in it.

Brrrr—!

The phone was still ringing in my pocket.

I lay there and breathed.

In. Out. In.

My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. My palm was bleeding where the rust had cut it. My cane was lying a few metres away, next to a water tank, as if I'd put it down neatly before walking to the edge.

'Not again.'

'It stopped. It was supposed to have stopped.'

It used to happen a lot.

I'd get stuck on something. A problem in a textbook. The pattern on a wall. The way water moved in a glass. I'd look at it, and keep looking, and the rest of the world would go quiet.

And then I'd be somewhere else.

Not like the blackouts you see on TV, where someone wakes up and doesn't know what they did. I always knew. I remembered every second. I'd been in my room, reading. I'd been at the kitchen table, staring at a crack in the plaster.

Except I hadn't.

Because when something broke through, a voice, a phone, a hand on my shoulder, I'd find myself standing in the hallway. Or in the bathroom. Or once, out on the street in my socks, holding the front door key.

Where I thought I was and where I actually was were two different places.

It had stopped a while ago. Long enough that I no longer checked where I was when I looked up from a book. Long enough that it had started to feel like something that happened to a younger, stranger version of me.

And today it had walked me onto the edge of a building.

Brrrr—!

I pulled out the phone with a shaking hand.

Mio.

I closed my eyes. Took one more breath. Made my voice normal.

"Hello?"

"Onii-chan! Where are you?"

"...On my way home."

"You're so late! I've been home for like an hour!"

"An hour? Why are you home already?"

"I'll tell you when you get here. It's big news. Huge news. Hurry up!"

"Okay."

"And buy eggs!"

Click.

I lay on the gravel a little longer, holding the phone against my chest.

Then I got up, collected my cane, and found the door to the stairwell. It wasn't locked. A sign by the lift on the eighth floor told me where I was: an office building three streets from the station. The opposite direction from the alley.

The alley I had never actually walked down.

I took the lift.

Today, I didn't care who saw.

Our apartment was on the second floor of an old building by the river. Two bedrooms, one for Mio and one for Uncle Daisuke. I slept on a futon in the living room, and I liked it that way. I could hear the door.

When I came in with the eggs, the washing machine was running, and Mio was standing on the little stool at the bathroom sink, scrubbing the collar of her school blouse with a brush.

She was fourteen and small for her age, with her hair tied up in a messy ball on top of her head. She had our mother's eyes. Everyone said so. I tried not to think about it too often.

"You're late," she said, without looking round.

"I said I was on my way."

"An hour ago."

"Trains."

She turned and looked at me properly. Her eyes went to my face, then to my hand.

"What happened to your hand?"

"Railing at the station. It was rusty."

"Onii-chan."

"It's fine. It's a scratch."

She hopped off the stool, got the first-aid box from under the sink without being told, and pointed at the edge of the bath. I sat. She cleaned my palm with a cotton ball and the face of a doctor on television.

"So," I said. "Huge news."

"Right!" Her face lit up. "You know the boy in 3-C? The sick one? Kaneda-kun?"

"The one everyone thought was an Echo."

"He WAS an Echo!" She pressed the cotton ball down harder than she needed to. I didn't say anything. "In sixth period, in the middle of maths, he just, like, stood up. And his whole desk went flying. And then the window. And then the wall."

"The wall?"

"The WALL, Onii-chan. There's a hole between 3-C and 3-D now. You can see straight through. Ayaka said there was a light coming out of his hands, but Ayaka also says she saw a ghost in the gym, so."

"Was anyone hurt?"

"No. Well, Kaneda-kun fainted. And Ishikawa-sensei got dust in his hair and screamed so loud the whole floor heard." She stuck a plaster across my palm and smoothed it flat. "Then some people came and took Kaneda-kun away in a van, and they sent everyone home. And school's closed tomorrow too! Because of the wall!"

"A van," I said.

"A big black one. With no writing on it."

She went back to her blouse. That was why she was washing it. There was grey dust all down the back, and in her hair too, now that I looked.

"He'll be okay, though," she said, a little quieter. "Right? The ones who awaken are okay?"

"...Yeah. He'll be okay."

'The ones who awaken are okay.'

'It's the ones who don't.'

I looked down at the plaster on my hand.

"Did Uncle Daisuke call?" I asked.

"Oh! Yeah." She didn't stop scrubbing. "He called the house phone. Before you got back."

"What did he say?"

"Not much. He sounded weird. Like he had a cold." She frowned at the collar, held it up to the light, and started scrubbing again. "He said if anyone comes to the door while he's away, we shouldn't open it."