“They’re probably waiting for us to come out to arrest us.”
“That’s definitely one way to get us, but…now we have no idea who the enemy is.” Kunugi threw his hands behind his head. “Role-playing games are so much easier to decipher.”
“You really should have stayed home with your games, you know.”
“I can play the old ones from memory, I’ve played them so many times. The newer ones are actually a little harder,” Kunugi said.
They saw a light go on in the distance.
Probably street lamps.
Shizue had thrown her portable while on the run and now had no idea what time it was. If they’d placed a GPS tracker on her they’d know with one search where they were. She had had no choice but to throw it away. Yet without her coordinates, she didn’t know exactly where she was. How inconvenient.
They were on the west side of the green area surrounding the center; that much was certain. Yuji Nakamura had been suspected of hiding out here. Turned out he was not hiding out here after all, but now Shizue was.
It was getting darker.
Kunugi’s already nebulous profile became hazier still and eventually disappeared into obscurity.
All they could hear was their own breathing.
In a room, the sound would seem strange. In their new setting it sounded natural.
“Someone’s coming,” Ayumi said.
The sound pierced through.
“How do you know?”
“It’s the area patrol and Hinako Sakura.”
“You can see them?”
“Yes. Two area patrols. They’re holding a flashlight.”
“That’s some incredible vision you have,” Kunugi said, incredulous.
Sakura.
She’d probably finished being interrogated and had now been released. They’d been questioning her this whole time. To her it probably felt like torture.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“Sakura saw me.”
“Liar. Where is she?”
“On the main road.”
“The main road. The one leading out of the center? Don’t be stupid. You couldn’t see that road in broad daylight, much less in the dark of night. It’s too far from here. Why do you think we hid here?”
“I don’t know. She noticed me though,” Ayumi said.
“The area police have stopped.”
“Are they coming this way?”
“No. It looks like they got an emergency call. One of them is running off. The other one and Sakura are walking again.”
“Can she really see all this?” Kunugi asked Shizue.
“I’m sure there are things children see that adults cannot.”
“Because they’re innocent.”
“Because they’re ruthless.”
“You mean adults are nice?” Kunugi asked.
“Adult vision is fogged.”
Hmph, Kunugi let out through his nose again.
“Miss Kono,” Shizue called Ayumi. “How’s it…err…” What was Shizue supposed to say?
“I’m fine,” Ayumi said.
“Miss Fuwa.” This time Ayumi addressed Shizue. “I want to ask again, but killing people—it’s wrong, right?”
“Yes. It’s bad. One should absolutely never murder. It is against the law.”
“Nice and simple,” Kunugi said. “It was so much more sticky when they explained it to me back in the day.”
“What do you mean, sticky?”
“You know…” Kunugi leaned to one side. “We talked about morals and ethics, about being an upstanding citizen and the importance of humanity. Whether it was important.”
“Of course it is.”
“Right. Of course. My feelings as a concerned citizen, improving the human condition—humanism, is it? Obviously I learned all that. I know it, but hmmm, I don’t know how to explain this. When I was young, those words were all somehow meaningless. No, I mean I knew a lifetime’s worth of sadness and pain and fear. I got mad at the really flagrant criminals. I’d get unreasonably frustrated, enraged. You know, social order. I used to believe in social order so much more than now. But then, I sort of…”
“You weren’t satisfied with it,” Shizue suggested.
“Kind of…” Kunugi answered. “Even I don’t understand why I’m not satisfied. I just knew this was not the way a police officer should feel.”
“These emotions and humanist theories are not why we must not kill. Those are only the reasons why we created laws against killing humans. Confusing one for the other has led to our discordance, no?”
“Hmm?” Kunugi made a strange sound. “The reason why the laws were created?”
“Isn’t that so? When a friend or relative is killed you become sad, angry, hurt. That’s only natural. Therefore it is universally understood that any violent attack on one’s right to live of healthy mind and body is a bad thing. That’s why laws forbid the murder of humans.”
“That’s probably true, but doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Shizue said.
“How’s it different?”
“Well, let me put it to you this way. If no one was sad about the death of a particular person; if no one felt anger or vengeance or hurt from the death of someone who would have caused more suffering to others alive than dead—is it okay to kill that person?”
“N-no. I mean, of course not,” Kunugi said, sounding defeated. “No one should ever be murdered.”
“In that case, all those complex feelings and ethics and teachings don’t constitute reasons for forbidding the murder of humans. Even if you are sad, upset, or for that matter happy, you cannot kill. The law is blind. It doesn’t matter who you are.”
“Ah,” Kunugi said smartly. “That’s why you insist on saying that murder is wrong simply because the law says so. Morals and ethics in and of themselves can’t explain the reasons behind the law. Of course, it’s axiomatic that laws are created on the basis of morals and ethics, and if you can’t believe that, you will most certainly be confused, but I just don’t think the same way about the question of whether committing a crime is ever justified. As it stands, the thinking is that morality is attained as a result of abiding by the law and that it also leads to our emotionally comprehending the meaning of good, right?”
“You mean why one shouldn’t doubt the law.”
“No. Doubting the law and disobeying the law are different. If you believe a law should not be abided by, you should do everything in your power to change it. There’s no rule that because the law is bad it should be disobeyed. That’s an infringement of the rules. You can’t get along that way. Even breaking a bad law is a punishable crime.”
“But changing the law is difficult,” Shizue said.
“That’s something only lawmakers say. It’s humans who’ve created the laws, and if they follow the right procedures it’s humans who will change the laws. However, so long as the majority keeps acknowledging the law, it will not change. Even if the laws are not correct. Even if the law looks wrong to everyone. But of course, no one’s going to abolish laws against murder.”
But.
“But a long time ago in this country, vengeance killings were forgivable. Even in this century, murder was publicly sanctioned. The death penalty, I mean. Those laws were eventually changed by people, right?”
“I see,” Kunugi said.
Now they couldn’t see anything.
There wasn’t enough light for their eyes to even adapt to the dark.
“When I was about the age of this young girl here, murder was popular,” Kunugi said.
“Popular?”
“By that I don’t mean that it was a free-for-all of everyone killing each other. But kids my age were committing these crimes one after the other. I don’t know if they thought killing someone would improve their own lives, or if they were thinking at all. Well…I had nothing to do with it. Kids knew the consequences of things like that, I’m
sure. It’s only the idiots that ignored the consequences. But…”
It felt like Kunugi had stood up.
“When I was in elementary school…That is, back when there was such a thing as elementary school, that would be about when I was about seven to twelve, kids were grouped and separated into classes to learn things with other kids the same age.”
“I had that when I was growing up as well,” Shizue said. “Obviously it’s been banned since, but elementary schools existed until pretty recently.”
“Is that right? Well, it was elementary school, then junior high school, and throughout that whole time I had this one friend. A boy. He was serious and didn’t like to play outside, so we got along. That kid came over to my house one day and asked a favor of me.”
“Favor?”
“Yeah. He asked me to record an emission on what you kids call an on-air entertainment channel now. Back then we still used magnetic tapes. Anyway, it was not uncommon back then, so I agreed. I taped this thing and brought it to his house the next day. But when I got to his house, there was a tarp stretched around it,” Kunugi said.
“What is a tarp?” Ayumi asked.
“A blue sheet. I thought maybe they were renovating the house. But then it turned out to be the police.”
“Police…what was going on?”
“It was a crime scene. There had been a murder,” Kunugi said nonchalantly. “He’d killed a girl from the neighborhood, and his parents found out. He then killed his parents and siblings.”
“That’s—”
Kunugi started laughing. “That fucker beat the girl with a stone and then went home covered in blood. He was scolded right in front of the house. I guess that was when he decided he would kill his entire family. He knew that the only time his whole family would be in the same place was when his favorite show was airing. Obviously he wouldn’t be able to watch it, so he asked me to record it for him. What do you think about that?” Kunugi said. “When he came over with the blank tape, he’d already killed the girl. While I was watching his show, he was stabbing his mother in the throat with a kitchen knife. I didn’t know what to do.” Kunugi seemed to lean to one side again.
“I got angry. Even sad. But I didn’t know what I was sad or angry about. He was totally normal. He didn’t cry, yell, scream, or act frightened. So I didn’t think to bother asking him to confide in me or to tell me anything. He didn’t look like he was thinking about anything at all.”
“That’s…” Shizue couldn’t find the right words.
“I just thought ‘hmph.’ It must not be a big deal to kill people. Then I was scared of myself for thinking that. That’s why I asked an adult about it. Just like this young woman did. It’s wrong to kill, isn’t it? It’s not right to kill, right? I learned that it was wrong. No, I knew it was wrong. Any brat knows that. My heart aches when I see a child crying over murdered parents. When I see parents who’ve killed their child, I want to kill them with my bare hands. But it’s like you said before. It would be wrong for me to kill even the parent who murders his child. So then what? What’s the difference between me and that kid?”
“What was the difference between you two?”
“Nothing at all,” Kunugi said. “He was a minor. Back then, unlike today, minors were protected unconditionally, and on top of that, they got psychological assessments. Behavioral disorder, they decided. Certainly thinking about it now, it was a typical behavioral disorder, but at the time, I was totally unsatisfied. I guess I still am, actually.” Kunugi laughed.
“I mean if he was guilty of behavioral disorder then I was too, I thought. It’s the same. I couldn’t forgive him for being a murderer. I was really torn up. I was confused and frustrated. By the time I realized what was going on I was the washed-up old man you see before you today.”
He sounded defeated.
“It turned out we’re no different,” he said with the same voice. “I just discovered that. It’s really all about whether you can learn to abide by the laws as a matter of fact, or not. It’s that simple, but it took me thirty long years to figure it out,” said the voice in the dark.
“I didn’t have any adults like you around to tell me the straightforward truth. So I got to thinking. And I kept thinking…and thinking…and then became a cop. Even after I became a cop though, I didn’t fully understand. Just that it was bad to kill people, but that just because someone had killed someone, the crime didn’t make them a bad person. Humans are stupid, so they make mistakes easily. They won’t even notice that they did. By the time they do it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“Yes. There are such things as do-overs, but when someone dies it’s forever. It’s too late,” the darkness said in Kunugi’s voice.
This was something Shizue had been saying herself for a long time. Shizue extended her arms out on the ground. The warm earth felt cool despite its real temperature.
Like a corpse. Like her mother’s dead body.
“When someone dies it’s forever.” Ayumi’s voice. “They don’t come back.”
“Kind of like us now,” Kunugi mocked himself. “Good adults like us, stuck here now. It’s stupid.”
Really stupid, Shizue thought.
They were silent for a moment.
“What time is it, I wonder. How long have we been sitting here?”
“Probably about twenty minutes.” Ayumi seemed to have stood up.
“Miss Kono, you sure? You said you left your monitor.” When Shizue had thrown her portable terminal away Ayumi had said she didn’t have hers to begin with.
“I don’t carry that thing unless I’m going to the communication session. Even though you all tell me to.”
“Then how do you know how long—”
“The position of the moon,” Ayumi said.
“The moon…”
In the sky the moon hung large.
“The moon…”
Of the ten thousand lux light waves emitted by the nearest fixed star, a mere 0.5 lux was feebly reflected in the earth’s only satellite, which hung 384,400 kilometers from earth.
“The moon’s out?” Shizue asked.
She hadn’t seen the real moon in so long. Just when she was a kid. This inorganic and aimless 0.5 lux star was quiet and calm, cold like the skin of a dead body.
The clouds had obscured it.
The reflected light was almost a complete circle, like a hole in the sky. It was a weak pale blue color, but it provided plenty of light to counterpoint the outline of dull humans.
Shizue looked at the sphere of light in the sky. Kunugi probably did too.
“You can tell time by that, eh? Can you also tell where we are?” Kunugi said sarcastically. It looked like Ayumi’s silhouette had just nodded.
Her head was pitch black with the quiet light of the moon behind her.
“Did you train in this kind of thing, or are you one of those stargazer types?”
“Animals always know exactly where they are.”
“Hmm?”
“They know where they are between the earth and the sky. In other words, they know exactly what they are. I didn’t know what I was before. I was envious,” Ayumi said. She then waded her way through the grass ahead of them.
Shizue stood up.
All of a sudden…
In the path of the pure and mysterious spotlight of the moon appeared another silhouette.
The figure’s entire body, jet black, was basking in the moonlight.
“You’re a man-eating being,” the pitch-black human form said, its voice thin. “A woman-eating, child-eating being…” It was a voice that sounded like song, like weeping.
“I beg of you, embrace the blood. Give human blood. Embrace it tonight…”
Kunugi stood up.
The small black shadow slowly advanced toward Ayumi.
“Are you a wolf?” the shadow asked.
Wolf?
This voice. Hinako Sakura.
“Is that you, Miss Sakura?”<
br />
It was indeed Sakura, dressed in black mourning clothes.
“Wolves are extinct,” Ayumi answered.
“I beg your pardon,” Sakura said in characteristically over-polite language.
She lifted her face.
Straight black bangs.
Gray eyelids. Gray lips.
The face that floated in this moonlight was completely different from the one that tried to explain the meaning of a word like occult, seated uncomfortably in the counseling room chair. Her monochrome makeup didn’t feel out of place here. It was probably very difficult for a girl like this to lead an existence under the power of sunlight. In this weak moonlight she seemed more alive than ever, Shizue thought. She was very pretty.
“Why did you come back?” Ayumi asked. “Didn’t they escort you home?”
“I’ve come to warn you.”
“Warn?”
Hinako shifted her gaze from Ayumi to Shizue.
“Another girl has gone missing.”
“Huh?’
“Just as you and the police officer over there were fleeing the entrance hall a message was fielded at the center by a guardian reporting his charge missing. She’s been missing since last night, and the center’s director then ran to meet the head investigation officer, acting very confused.”
That’s why no one came after us.
The police had no time to waste looking for the likes of Shizue and Kunugi.
However…
“Who’s missing?”
“Another fourteen-year-old girl from our class. I have never talked to her myself, though I’m sure we’ve met. I have no memory of her,” Hinako said. “Someone by the name of Kisugi.”
Kisugi.
At least this wasn’t one of Shizue’s children.
What is this? Why do I care if she’s one of mine?
Even in such a confused state, Shizue couldn’t help thinking that.
How could she be worried about whether this was her problem or not when she should be worried about the girl’s safety? At least she should act shocked.
I’m really a coldhearted woman deep down inside, Shizue thought.
She couldn’t accept the facts.
No, it was probably just that she did not want to hear about any more people she knew getting killed. That was the truth; Shizue was sick and tired of all this.
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