“How could they do that to her…?”
My genuine feelings poured out of my mouth.
It was nothing I’d ever be able to understand. Before she came here, Marie was all alone, by herself, never cared for by anyone.
When she talked about Ene being all lonely…she must have meant it. Seriously.
I felt the emotions clutch at my stomach, incapable of going anywhere else.
I tried to process them in my mind—“there has to be something I can do for her”—but the idea was promptly crushed by my overall sense of powerlessness.
“Do you remember any of the faces of the guys who took her? Any kind of unique features at all?”
“…I don’t really remember. It was a real long time ago, and one of them knocked me out, so I didn’t see their faces. And when I woke up, they and my mom were gone…”
Marie looked part perturbed, part apologetic. I couldn’t blame her. She was a victim of a violent crime. At such a young age, too.
“All right…Do you remember how long ago it was, at least?”
Marie hemmed and hawed to herself, trying to remember, before answering.
“Ummm, well, I used to like counting the summers, and there’s been a hundred or so of ’em, so I think it’s been around a hundred years. But I forgot to count them after that, so it might be more, but…”
Mm. Makes sense. I’d have trouble remembering things from a hundred years ago, too. Even just a few years ago can be pretty tough some—
“A hundred years?!”
The words shot out of my and Kido’s mouth in perfect unison.
A hundred years?
There was no way that could be possible.
If a hundred people heard this girl say “I’m a hundred or so years old,” the reply would unanimously be along the lines of “Bwa-ha-ha! Aww, isn’t that cute?”
“Eeek! I’m sorry!” Marie replied, shrugging her shoulders in response to our dual reactions.
“Y-you’re joking, right? I mean, a hundred is just too…You don’t look like it, so…”
“No! I’m telling the truth! My mom taught me how to count and everything! Oh, but when I asked her how old I was, she got angry and said ‘Don’t talk to me about age anymore,’ so I wouldn’t really know unless I counted, so…”
Marie defended herself in a clearly peeved tone, but this still wasn’t something we could just say “Okay, we believe you” to.
Still, given that we were currently sharing the room with The Amazing Invisible Woman, I couldn’t deny it out of hand either.
Kido, for her part, furrowed her brows in confusion.
“Yeah, but that kind of thing…”
The ability to live past a century. Mad Marie stumbled across the power of immortality somehow?
No. That’s just silly.
That kind of thing couldn’t possibly exist…
Just then Kido’s story from yesterday crossed my mind. How she gained her own skills.
It was the same with Kano, Seto, and Momo. They had a near-death experience…and then they awoke to their powers.
And judging by Hibiya’s behavior yesterday, it must’ve happened to him, too.
But Marie, meanwhile, claims that she was born with those eyes of hers. She clearly took a different path from the rest of them.
“Hey, uh, Marie? So were you really born with your powers?”
“Hmm? Um…uh-huh. My mom always told me. She said ‘Oh, don’t you ever go using that, Marie’…”
This was becoming more and more cryptic.
Yesterday’s conversation gave me a fairly clear impression of how these powers…happened. But Marie was such an extreme case, it made everything else fall apart.
The fact she had that power from the start. Without going to…that world.
The fact that her mother was awakened to her skills, too.
And the fact that I’m sharing a roof with a one-hundred-year-old Medusa.
It was a bewildering fairy tale. Were there really all these bizarre events taking place worldwide? We were practically tripping over them.
All of the strange and mysterious things I’d seen or heard of, including the traumatic experiences of Kido and the others, seemed to all boil down to a single…thing. A thing that’d lasted over a hundred years.
But if it was all related, then solving the riddle behind Marie’s story could be one way to arrive at the big answers we needed.
Even if we tried searching for Marie’s mother, though, it’d be a daunting task. Calling the police and saying “We’re looking for the mother of this girl here; she went missing a hundred years ago” wouldn’t accomplish much.
That, and Marie’s memories were a little too hazy to seem reliable. It was hard to say what the next step should—
“Um…I just had this thought…”
Out of nowhere, Konoha raised a wavering hand as I stewed in my confusion.
“Oh? What’s up?”
Kido looked a little surprised at this unexpected statement.
Konoha, his expression inscrutable as always, slowly began to speak.
“This might not be anything important, but would it be okay to maybe try going to this girl’s home?”
“Huh?”
Kido and I looked at him, perplexed.
“No, I, uh, I was just wondering if it’d be bad to check out her home. Oh, I don’t mean her home here. The place she was living before. Um…”
“That’s it!”
Kido and I exclaimed in unison, cutting off Konoha just as he found himself at wit’s end attempting to conclude his thought.
Thinking about it, it made sense.
If Marie’s mother referred to the both of them as Medusa, she must have had some kind of knowledge of her own abilities.
Even if it didn’t lead to the big answers we sought, we might still find some info on these powers in Marie’s house.
“I think it’d be worth our time to check out. Shintaro, how about you?”
“I’d say it’s about the only thing we got. Maybe it’ll help us find an answer to all this stuff that happened to you all.”
This startled Konoha. “D-do you think it’ll help us rescue Hiyori, too, maybe?” he said breathlessly.
“I can’t really say yet…but maybe we could find some hints, at least.”
Konoha’s face clearly began to grow sterner.
Looking back, that was about the only thing Hibiya yelled at him about yesterday.
He said that Konoha failed to rescue this girl named Hiyori. Maybe that really moved Konoha after all, although it never registered on his face.
“Well, if we’re going, let’s go. Marie, do you mind showing your place to us a little bit?” Kido stood up as she spoke.
“For you guys, it’s not a problem at all,” Marie replied with a smile.
“Cool. In that case, let’s get this cleaned up. I don’t want Kido to do all the work, so lemme clear the…”
I tried standing up as I spoke, forgetting exactly how sore my legs still were.
I froze in a semicrouching position, not wanting to make the dull sense of pain get any worse.
Kido, probably picking up on this, flashed a spiteful grin. “Okay, I’ll start getting our stuff ready,” she said as she returned to her room. “I’ll be counting on you, Shintaro!”
Hang on a sec.
I know we kind of threw ourselves into this headlong, but I’m afraid I forgot something important.
This shade of uncertainty began to write itself large in my mind, its importance now all too obvious. I cautiously turned toward Marie.
“Uh, Marie? Where was your home, anyway?”
She grinned back. “It’s kind of far away from here. In a forest! I think maybe two hours’ walking from the station?”
I crumpled off my feet and to the ground.
Two hours?!
No. No, no, no. Not happening. I was a ninety-pound weakling already. How much walking did I have to do, day after day?
/>
I’m out.
Yep. I’m out.
Better go to Kido’s room and tell her—
“But oh, boy, we’re going out today, too? This is going to be great, Shintaro! Oh, and, uh, is he coming along, too? I can’t wait!”
Marie smiled from ear to ear.
I don’t think anyone could have said “no” to a smile like that.
“Oh…yeah. Me neither…”
I felt my face start to twitch as I dragged myself back up to the sofa.
But the girl’s enthusiasm reminded me that my phone should be charged by now.
When I unplugged it from the outlet nearby, the phone indicated it had nearly a full charge. Though, when I turned on the power, I realized something was odd.
“…Huh?”
I didn’t see Ene in the middle of the screen.
I tried shaking it, muttering “Helloooooo?” a few times, but she still didn’t show up.
She must have been paying a visit to Momo’s phone.
This was a girl who survived me picking up my computer and dropping it on the floor. No way she’d simply disappear over a dead phone.
I slipped it into my pocket, fully satisfied by my own logic.
With a deep breath, I looked across the table in front of me.
First, I gotta clear this table. Then, we got another long hike ahead. Both concepts filled me with dread, but there was no point whining about it now.
It was weird, though, these past few days. Like it’s all been a special curriculum designed to re-form me into a decent human being.
Maybe someone really did devise all of this for me.
Someone with the power to mess around with people’s destinies, or something…
I smiled to myself a bit. The thought seemed oddly comforting.
What a crazy situation I’m in.
If I wasn’t experiencing it for myself, I’d laugh it off with a chiding “Yeah, right.”
But here I am. Filled with an oddly passionate desire to get to the bottom of all this.
For the sake of…someone.
It wouldn’t help me atone for anything I’d done in the past.
But still, if there’s anything I can do right now, I guess I need to try and take the plunge.
I thought it over as I began cleaning up the fully eaten breakfast.
REAPER RECORD II
“I told you, if you won’t let me in, then bring that man here at once!”
Around the old brick gate, people gradually began to gather, no doubt curious about the excitement.
That bald-faced, tasteless sense of urgency that appears whenever a crowd forms. There was nothing I liked about it.
Even inside the gate, people were watching down at us from the windows of the stately mansion. Servants, probably.
“No, but…My dear, you know I can’t just hear that and say ‘Oh, certainly, yes.’”
The scrawny-looking man, talented in little apart from making himself look all prim and proper in front of others, smiled a thin smile, clearly treating me like a fool.
“Then what do you want me to do? Listen. I’ve gone through the most horrible experience thanks to that guy. He said he knew everything about me, so I shut up and did whatever he told me to do…and now that I’ve been handed over to these crazy people, I’m treated like some kind of animal, and I even took a lead ball to the stomach.”
Who the hell is this guy?
His lukewarm, waffling attitude made me want to scream.
Plus, it took me several weeks to walk back here, along this path. I was on a wagon last time. Where do they get off, treating me like this?
“Ah-ha-ha! My lady, listen to me…If a cannonball hit you, then I very much doubt you should be here at all.”
“What? What are you talking about? I’m here right now!”
The scrawny man took a breath, then laughed with all the power his lungs could muster. I could hear the rest of the people around us begin to snicker themselves, taking the cue.
My stomach began to churn with the fires of annoyed rage.
Why do all the creatures here have this knack for riling me up?
I considered leaving the premises immediately, but then this entire journey would be a waste of time.
No matter what it took, I knew there was no getting rid of this seething feeling until I asked that rotund little man about “myself.”
“Look, if we’re just gonna keep doing this all day, then I’m going in whether you like it or not. Who are you, anyway? I’m not here to talk to you—”
Just as I took a breath, ready to push this annoyance aside and storm into the mansion, I saw the man himself peeking at me through an upstairs window.
My return had apparently caused him to take fright.
The look of fear on his face as he stared on was written clearly across his entire face.
Seeing him, knowing full well I was here but still opting to watch me from his safe hideout, caused the rage boiling within me to finally explode.
“Him…!”
I wrapped my hands around the iron fence surrounding the gate. “Stop!” the scrawny man said. “Stop at once! I am done playing with you!”
“…You think I’m still ‘playing’ now?!”
My anger was already at its peak.
The blathering of the scrawny man before me no longer had any power to slow me.
But the man never intended to physically intervene himself.
From the crowd, now grown to the point where it filled the road in front of the gate, several men appeared, iron swords sheathed by their sides.
“I did not wish to do this…but this is all because you refuse to listen to reason! Do you understand, my lady? Please, just give this up at…eep…”
Aha. So that’s how it is. Rotten to the core, all of them.
In an instant, the heat began to pump itself into both of my eyes as they glared at the man.
His eyeballs, after matching gazes with mine, twitched and thrashed about for a few seconds, then stopped dead. The rest of his body quietly followed suit immediately afterward.
I then turned toward the crowd.
They looked vacant, bewildered, unable to comprehend the situation they were in.
“You! What did you do to him?”
One of the men brought a hand to the hilt of his sword as he edged closer to me.
“Sword.”
An object created by mankind to kill others.
One swipe from its wielder was enough to split muscle, to crush bone.
I came to understand that all too well after I left the cavern. Painfully so.
And I knew, generally, that this world was already one giant piece of property to them. Such foolish creatures they all were.
“Answer me now, or I will treat you as hostile and take suitable action!”
Agghh. Simply exasperating. Why, after all this time, are these people still expecting something from me?
I closed my eyes, my vision filling with darkness.
When was the last time I used this?
It must have been at one church or the other, when I was forced to act as a “god” around some people. That earned me nothing as well.
Or perhaps not.
Every single time, the only things I gained from these people were contempt and hopelessness.
And yet this time as well my heart was filled with a ridiculous sense of hope.
Opening my eyes, I saw a man brandishing a sword at me.
An attempt to take my life? No matter who it was, it always came down to that.
“Captivating…eyes.”
The moment I muttered it, the man froze.
The mindless chatter from the crowd behind him disappeared.
As it should. Everyone here, after all, was locking eyes with me.
There, lined up before me, were the faces of men and women suddenly thrown into a state of horror. They must not have been expecting this. Pitiful, foolish, and completely beyond saving.
/> The thoughts of the man brandishing the sword—“Who the hell is this…?”—flashed across my mind. I did not invite it in.
It was proving a serious encumbrance, not being able to control this “stealing” ability of mine.
But who could, in my shoes? The more I looked into the thought processes of humans, the more it rankled me.
It would have been nice, actually, if I could go around and look directly into everyone’s heads like that.
That way, at least I could tell at a glance whether they were lying to me or not.
But the minds of these people were buried in a putrid mishmash of sheer nonsense.
It was all but impossible to pick out only the things I wanted to know from them.
That would be much like attempting to find a small pebble in a vast mountain of garbage.
“I suppose you’d call me a monster, wouldn’t you?” I said to the frozen crowd. There was no reply.
Silence.
This silence always awaited me at the end of it all.
A cold, cold silence, just like way back when. By this point, I loathed it.
I turned toward the mansion. The fat man staring out the window was gone.
Must have fled through some passageway or another.
He might tell me something if I chased him and threatened him enough, but I was no longer in the mood.
How much longer do I have to keep doing this?
It felt like I was just silently plodding along, even though I was fully aware there was no light beyond the endless darkness.
I knew that long before now. I knew that, yet I kept going.
But every time I had the thought:
“There’s nobody in this world who knows about me.”
The tears would begin to well up.
My mind would be overwhelmed with irrational thoughts. “I can’t stand this,” and so on.
Thus, I had to keep going.
If I didn’t, it almost felt like my thoughts would push me over the brink and I’d disappear entirely.
But there was no end for me.
I had experienced death many times before, but it never brought me to an end.
The immobile man posed in front of me had no thoughts left in his mind.
He was simply there, stilled, in all his splendor.
The Missing Children Page 5