Hazuki had hated it, to be honest. She didn’t see the point in looking at herself for any length of time or in knowing how others perceived her. Hazuki never looked at anyone and didn’t let herself be seen by anyone. She looked at no one.
“Can I see that for a second?” Yuko extended her hand. Mio handed over her monitor.
“Is it a problem if I pull up my public file?”
“Not really. Not if it’s public data.”
Yuko pressed the keys with her slim fingers. Her pink nail polish was badly chipped.
The self-portraits from communication lab were used through the year on everyone’s public profile pages—with their consent, of course. Hazuki hadn’t consented. Yuko, having accessed her own profile, turned the monitor screen toward the others.
“This is my self-portrait.”
Pink hair, pink pupils. Pink piercing.
It was a splendid rendering of a young woman.
“You’re good!”
“I don’t know. I drew that looking in a mirror. Just like you did looking at the dove, I was drawing exactly what I thought I saw. I didn’t think anything of it when I was drawing it. A lot of kids were drawing this way.”
“It’s a copy.”
Mio kept looking at the screen in admiration.
“You can tell there’s an original. Every expression is always just a copy of some kind of original. There’s some originality in the process or method. But when it’s a child, it’s difficult to simplify complex patterns, so they mimic a method that’s easier to understand. That’s how they draw buildings and for that matter, animals. It’s a copy of a drawing, but it’s also an imitation of a thought process, because you’re drawing something deliberately unlike the way it is in reality. The child adopts a method of abstraction. But after depicting things in this way for a while, you eventually learn the difference between what you see and what you depict. That’s how you learn to revise and develop your own patterns. But these days we don’t really have the opportunity to draw anything. Most homes don’t have paper, for starters.”
Hazuki’s home had paper that her father had brought over once.
But she didn’t have anything to draw with.
“That’s why you don’t get to practice the process. And more and more people keep imitating. We fix it in our minds that this is how we have to draw, so we never learn the difference between what we see and what we draw. It’s all right since we hardly see reality. So there are some people who can draw themselves exactly how they look. But you’re different, Yuko.”
“Really?” Hazuki asked and Yuko nodded.
“But you can’t know that. There’s no way to know. So…”
They couldn’t know, could they. In fact, Hazuki had no idea even now.
“I never thought that I was so different from everyone else. I was told I drew very prettily. I wasn’t concerned with how differently I saw,” Yuko said.
“I was laughed at,” Mio said.
“But, so yeah, I got a strange message at the beginning of last month.”
“Strange how?”
“An anonymous one.”
“You can always find out the sender, even if it’s anonymous.”
“I didn’t know who it was,” Yuko said.
“What did it say?”
“Exactly what you just did, Mio. That it was a copy.”
“Copy?”
“Yeah. Copy. As in, it isn’t a self-portrait. It’s plagiarism. They said it was extremely inconsiderate of me to pass off the drawing as my own face. So I responded that it wasn’t a copy. I said that’s exactly how I drew it originally, exactly how I saw myself. Then they said I was sick. In fact they said it was a blasphemous sickness. That if I really saw things this way I didn’t deserve to live.”
“That’s creepy,” Mio said.
“But what does that mean, blasphemous, anyway? What is it blaspheming?” Yuko asked.
“If anything’s blasphemous, it’s what Mio thinks a dove looks like,”
Ayumi said.
“Ouch! I won’t disagree, but it’s not my fault Yuko’s so good at drawing. It’s not about that anyway. Okay, so what’s blasphemous about extrasensory defects?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know then either. But I started wondering if it meant I was sick that I thought I looked that way, and then I started to feel weird. I knew a little bit about it. I did a little research. But I didn’t really understand. Then we had that medical exam. You remember…”
“Did you talk to Fuwa about it?”
“I couldn’t. I wanted to ask someone I knew.”
It would be difficult to talk about accusations of blasphemy to a relative stranger, no doubt.
“So I tried divinations and things like that. I went to medical pages on my monitor. That’s when I found the International Caricature Symptoms Academy’s extrasensory defect recognition test.”
“International what?”
“Caricature Symptoms Academy. I took their test and the results were positive.”
Yuko cocked her head to one side. “It was bunk. It was baseless. It couldn’t be. It was no more than a gag page created by some pervert to increase his page views. Total bunk.”
“Well, maybe not bunk, but probably a website made by the guys who sent you the message,” Mio said.
“What do you mean?” Hazuki asked.
“The original message came from them, right? They did a search on your self-portrait and found someone who drew a deformed character that resembled your drawing and sent you a scary message, then they said they’d kill you for having an extrasensory defect.”
Then…
What were they planning on doing preparing such a test?
“In other words, they want to cleanse the world of people with extrasensory defects?”
Mio placed her chin in her hands and said with an unusually quiet air, “It has nothing to do with whether it really tests the abnormality but whether anyone will take the test. In other words the test is a trap, and those who take it…”
Are killed.
“I wouldn’t have ever thought of that,” Yuko said. “The results of the test were serious, and I got this reply from them saying that my abnormality was dangerous. That it was a problematic disease I should tell no one about. Then it told me to come out for the cure.”
“Don’t believe that crap,” Mio said aloud. “Only a child would fall for that.”
“We are children,” Ayumi said.
“You can’t make that judgment.”
“Judgment? Well, I wouldn’t buy it. Besides, it was nighttime, right?
Weren’t you scared to go out?”
“I was more scared of doing nothing about it. You know, because of that first message. I thought I would be killed if I really had this disease.”
“Oh, right,” Mio said.
“Mom and Dad couldn’t know. They were too sensitive. I couldn’t talk to them about any of this, so if I was going to be able to fix this, I figured I’d fix it as soon as possible. I didn’t fathom…”
No one would have thought there’d be someone waiting to kill her.
“You know that old building by the bridge?”
“No, I don’t,” Mio said, put off.
“It’s an old factory,” Ayumi said.
“It’s condemned.”
“I didn’t know that. I confirmed the location they gave me on my monitor and it didn’t come up as a commercial building, a manufacturing building, or a residential building. It was…nothing. It was just a site off the middle of a traffic route. It was public land, but still…on the map the building was simply marked green, so I assumed it was a hospital. If it were Section B or C, I wouldn’t have gone. But when I arrived no one was there.
“Just when I got scared and was about to leave, those guys came out with sticks and knives.”
“Yikes,” Mio said with a grimace. “That’s scary. That’s when they were like, ‘Die!’?”
“They didn’t say anything l
ike that. But they were saying something about how God made man and something about an eternity of something or other…I didn’t understand. They just yelled at me, and then as they attacked, I defended myself with the only thing I had—my monitor. Then my monitor snapped and broke. I didn’t know what was going on. In fact I didn’t realize I was set up until yesterday. So I started running with all my might and got to the bridge, when…”
Rey Mao was there.
“And that’s when the fight began,” Mio said, standing up. “What was cat girl doing? Probably practicing her gongfu, right? Then it got out of hand, and that’s when she showed up, right?”
Ayumi.
For some reason she was staring through the floor.
“I was so scared,” Yuko said. “I probably hung on to her when I saw her coming my way. I vaguely remember screaming, but I don’t know what I said, and I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember anything after that. When I came to, I found myself following her.”
Section C. The old red-light district. Rey Mao’s neighborhood.
“Where’s she living now?” Mio asked.
“Near your place. It was underground, but I knew it was Section C.”
“How?”
“The smell. Back when I lived in the city, I had relatives in Section C. When I was little my parents would leave me there while they went on vacation. I hated it. There were all these weird people and gross smells, and it was all polluted. But when I complained about it they’d get mad at me. They told me the red-light district was just like that.”
Mio made a confused look.
She was also a resident of Section C.
Yuko read Mio’s reaction. “Shit, I’m sorry,” she mumbled softly. “But that’s how it really was. I was only four or five, but I thought it was so much better to look at the district on a monitor. No offense, Mio, but I really hated it there. That’s how I knew by the smell that I was there again. But I was scared. I couldn’t stop shaking and I couldn’t keep walking. Then she started bringing me food.”
“The cat.”
Rey Mao.
The undocumented girl with Chinese clothes.
“She didn’t tell me her name. I answered all her questions. Then she said, ‘You’re the same as Mio Tsuzuki, then,’ and she told me you lived nearby. She told me to go see you.”
“Hmph.”
Mio plopped down on the floor. What’d that bitch say about me? She sighed.
“Nothing bad, actually. She said you were friends…once?”
“Tch, friends. We played together when we were little.”
Yuko looked straight at Mio with her pink pupils.
“But…she told me a lot of stories. I was crying the whole time and couldn’t remember anything, but thanks to her I calmed down a little. But just as I stopped being so scared I realized suddenly that I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t have a monitor, so I didn’t have a sense of time and I didn’t know where exactly I was. I was so confused, and when she left I went outside. That’s when you two came by.”
“Is that so.”
That day in the rain…
Hazuki had had no idea of all the things going through Yuko’s mind when they saw her there. Her talking with such familiarity about Section C, her knowing exactly where Mio lived, her standing there in the rain without an umbrella: there was a reason for all of that.
Yuko’s not knowing about the murder and her strange reaction to news of it would all be normal in that situation. Everyone had their reasons for doing what they did; those reasons produced all kinds of emotions; and those emotions prompted action. The more Hazuki thought about it the more obvious it all seemed to her, and she became uneasy. You couldn’t look inside a person’s head. So?
There was no way of knowing anything about this.
None at all.
Wait. Ayumi might have known.
“After that I lost consciousness again,” Yuko said. “The person that was killed was one of the guys attacking me. In which case, I had even less of an idea of what had happened, and I panicked.”
“Then you broke into a fever,” Ayumi said, still facing the wall. “You had a 105 degree fever.”
“You’re cold, Ayumi,” Mio said as she approached her. “I mean, you knew, more or less, what was going on. And you didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t know what happened to her afterward. She was safe as far as I could see, and since she didn’t ask for help I didn’t offer it.”
“Miss Kono did everything she could. See, I feel better and everything.” Yuko looked up at Mio.
“And you too. I wanted to thank you and Miss Makino.”
“What the…”
Mio walked past Ayumi to the other wall and said she’s so weird.
“So I’m ready to go home. I won’t continue to be a bother.”
“But,” Hazuki began and paused. “One of the assailants is dead and the other is on the run. Isn’t it dangerous?” she said finally.
“The police will protect me.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
Mio let out a sound of uncertainty.
“The police are trying to establish a connection between your disappearance and the murders. Obviously they’ve looked into your communication logs. They’re certain to have made the connection between you, Nakamura, and the now-dead Kawabata. They don’t know how Kawabata died, but it’s clear Nakamura is involved, and they’ll agree you were being followed. So yeah, if you appeared now they’d protect you. But…”
“But what?”
“How will you explain the several days of disappearance?”
“I don’t want to cause anyone any more problems,” Yuko said, looking down. “Not for that other girl either.”
“You mean Cat Freak? If you think about it though, if Nakamura is ever caught, they’ll find out about her too. She helped you knowing that much, so if you were interrogated you could just tell them you were hiding out at her place the whole time. It’s like you were anyway,” Mio said.
“No. For the time being she should just not say anything about any of this,” Ayumi said.
“Yeah…” Mio responded. “It makes no difference, right?”
“No, if Yuko talks about Rey Mao before they catch Nakamura, she’ll be under suspicion.”
“Oh, right.”
The one who was killed was not the one being violated, but the one who was violating—the violator was the victim.
If someone saved Yuko knowing who her assailant was, Rey Mao would naturally be the first under suspicion.
“I don’t think Nakamura will be caught so easily. There was another murder yesterday. I still think it’d be better for her to be protected by the police than to hide out here.”
The latest victim—Asumi Aikawa. Hazuki couldn’t remember her face.
However, Nakamura was on the run and wanted by the police. Would someone in that situation still be killing right now? Couldn’t this be an unrelated event?
“But, Mio, you’re the one who said that Rey Mao being questioned by the police would threaten the entirety of Section C and its residents. That may still be, but I doubt if Nakamura knows all about Rey Mao’s situation. I mean, even Yuko didn’t catch her name. There’s no way she’d have given up that information accidentally,” Hazuki said.
“So what’s she supposed to say about the week she disappeared?”
“I’ll just tell them I don’t know,” Yuko said.
“Temporary amnesia,” Ayumi said “Isn’t that a little childish? It’s so convenient,” Mio said.
“That’s not true.” Ayumi stood up. “If she were lying—if she were lying, that would be the most productive answer. You just say you don’t know anything if they ask.”
“You mean she just lost consciousness for a week and magically regained it?”
“No, I mean that if she started to make up something she’d have to pile on more and more lies, details. Eventually she’d say something that would expose the
lie. Why not just say ‘I don’t know’ and be confused about the whole situation from the beginning.”
“One answer for all of it then. ‘I don’t know,’” Yuko said.
Mio crossed her arms and started pacing. “What do you think, Hazuki?”
“I, uh, don’t really know, but even if she decided to pretend she doesn’t know, how’s she going to get to the police?”
“Ahh.” More of Mio’s signature eye-widening.
“What do you mean how?”
“Is Yuko going to go home still having no idea what’s what?”
“Well, she’s not going to just waltz in and say hi to her parents, but let’s say she’s walking aimlessly around her neighborhood. The police would apprehend her then, right?”
“And what if Nakamura finds her first?” Just as Hazuki asked the question, Yuko hugged her shoulders.
She was scared.
“Where do you live, Yuko?”
“Huh?”
Yuko said her address.
It would take at least an hour to get there on foot.
“So you’re pretty far from here. You think she should walk that alone? I didn’t see any police or area cops in the twenty minutes it took me to walk here. I assume you didn’t either, Mio.”
“This is a safe area, so they never patrol here,” Mio said.
“If I got this straight, a straight path from here to Yuko’s house would lead through Section C. Even if she went by way of the community center she’d have to walk through Section B.”
“There’s that green preserve by the center. The police think Nakamura might be hiding out there, and they’ve focused their search to that area. So what about going to the community center? Guaranteed to be lots of cops there.”
“But that means Nakamura might be there too,” Ayumi said.
Shit! Mio spit out.
“Anyway,” Hazuki continued. “If she’s going to go to the police, this is the safest place for her to be picked up.”
“But,” Yuko lowered her pale eyes. “You all would be…”
“That’s the safest way to go.”
“Call the police here? Hazuki. What are you going to do when they come? Are you retarded?”
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