by Nisioisin
Up close, I realized afresh how enchanting the little girl’s lips were, and I wondered seriously whether imagining immoral things about them amounted to a crime. Then─
“Oh.” I got her point. “Right, and if we include pedestrian crossroads, the number increases even further.”
“There be no such designation.”
“But a pedestrian scramble is basically a pedestrian crossroads. And if anyone stops to chat in the crosswalk, that’s pedestrian crosstalk.”
“‘Pedestrian crosstalk’… Sounds doubly dull.”
“How about ‘pedestrian crossfire’? Not dull at all.”
“’Tis reminiscent of The Matrix.”
“So you’ve watched that too…”
“And what is more, footbridges are properly termed pedestrian bridges and so form another type of crossing. Beyond which there are also underground crosswalks. Considered together, the candidates for our vigilance reach voluminous proportions.”
“Well… It’s extraordinarily difficult to have a traffic accident on a footbridge or in an underground walkway, and if there’d been an accident of that magnitude in my town, even I would remember it…”
After all, at this time I was a wunderkind.
A wonder child.
“But Shinobu. Why are you so well informed about street traffic?”
“’Twas instilled in me by that Aloha brat.”
“Natch.”
In that case, the question was why Oshino bothered to be well informed about street traffic…but then I should never be surprised that Oshino knew something.
He didn’t know everything, he just knew unnecessary stuff.
“By the by,” Shinobu enlightened me, “according to a 2004 study the number of pedestrian crossings in Japan is 1,725,015. If we limit it to crossings with traffic signals, the number is 987,326. It may overtop a million by the present day.”
“Wow! No way!”
“In truth, I picked the numbers out of a hat.”
“Why lie at this juncture?!”
Just let me be impressed!
Now the rest of her credibility was gone too─not that it made sense to describe aberrations, or vampires, as credible.
“Credibility and Tempur-Pedic sound vaguely alike,” Shinobu said, resting the back of her blond head against me.
“Hmmm.” Girls really smell this good without even wearing perfume, I thought worthlessly, folding my arms in front of my chest. Given the little blond leaning against me, it’d be more accurate to say that I folded my arms in front of Shinobu’s chest. A neutral party would no doubt assume that I was hugging a little girl. “Still, we have to select one of the pedestrian crossings in advance. I only have one body, after all.”
“If ye insist, I shall sunder thy body into pieces.”
“Why would I insist on that?!”
“I wonder if thou wouldst regenerate like a planarian. Should I smash thee to smithereens, we might end up with a hundred of thee.”
“I feel like Hachikuji once said something similar. Hang on, when I really think about it…” It wasn’t because I closed the map, nothing in particular prompted it, but I realized there was another possibility we needed to consider. “When I think about it, she didn’t necessarily take the shortest route from one place to the other. Taking later developments into account, she got totally lost, didn’t she?”
“Ahh, indeed,” Shinobu agreed. “In light of her transformation into an aberration, ’tis more likely that she failed to take the shortest route.”
“But if she went every which way, there’s no way for us to keep a lookout…”
We had to keep watch over every crosswalk in Japan, to exaggerate.
I glanced over at the sign with the residential map in the corner of the park.
On that day, that Mother’s Day, eleven years from now─
Hachikuji was looking at that map.
Alone.
All─alone.
“What do we do? And after we finally pinned down the locations of the Tsunade and Hachikuji homes thanks to Hanekawa.”
“Not thanks to the former class president’s loli-version, ’twas thine own doing. Thou shouldst hold thy head up high.”
“Yeah?”
“Aye. At the very least, ’twas certainly not with that intention that the girl pointed us in the direction of that police box…” Hm, Shinobu hummed with a satisfied and not particularly gruesome smile. “I have hit upon a scheme.”
“Scheme.”
“Aye. I am Secret Schemer Shinobu. A dream collaboration.”
“Since the eras actually overlap in your case, it’s more like plagiarism than a collaboration.”
I mean, first do something about the harsh reality that, thanks to your secret stratagem, we’re stuck eleven years in the past.
Please, please, no more secrets.
Keep it open source, I’m begging you.
Of course, thanks to the stratagem we might be able to save Hachikuji, so I guess I couldn’t fault her there.
“Hearken to my words. We need not tarry at some pedestrian crossing. We have learned the location of the Hachikuji residence, so let us away there to lie in wait, whence we may tail the girl when she makes for the Tsunade residence.”
“Where’s the joke?!”
Her unexpectedly proper stratagem forced an absurd quip out of me. Because I had my arms folded, the accompanying gesture took the unconventional form of grinding my chin into the crown of Shinobu’s head.
“W-We need but tail her and, at every pe-pedestrian crossing gird our loins for action. Thus may we prevent her from falling victim…” It seemed as though Shinobu liked what was happening to her head and she made no move to stop me, going all limp as she continued her explanation. “’Tis a matter of course that tailing a girl of such tender years will appear most suspect to outside eyes, but…here, eleven years in the past, such eccentricities are still somewhat tolerated.”
“Hmm…”
Eccentricities indeed.
Well, eccentric as it may be─it was an excellent plan.
“If thou wishest to ensure that lost lass’s safety with more certainty, we might also set upon her with all our might as she exits the home, and in some way or other instill in her a fear so great that she shuts herself inside, there to remain for the entire day.”
“What do you mean, ‘some way or other’?”
Set upon her?
Trapping an elementary school girl in her home was a level of eccentricity that got you arrested, even eleven years ago.
Probably by that policewoman from earlier.
“But if it comes down to it, that plan isn’t off the table, Shinobu.”
“Not off the table?”
“Well, if it comes down to it. If it does, I’m prepared to be branded a criminal. But that’s going too far, or rather, it’s fundamentally pointless. We’re not just trying to prevent a traffic accident─I want to get Hachikuji to the Tsunade place alive so she can see her mother.”
She wanted to see her mother.
That was Hachikuji’s wish.
The reason she wandered lost for over ten years.
“I don’t know how long that policewoman has been stationed there,” I continued, “but at least as far as she could tell me, Mrs. Tsunade’s only daughter doesn’t seem to have been in an accident in the past couple of years─so this Mother’s Day, eleven years ago, must be the day Hachikuji dies. So after all, that is why I’ve come to this time. If Hachikuji can just see her mother tomorrow, then, with no regrets─even if the traffic accident happens later on, she’d meet her fate with no regrets, and without becoming lost.”
On the other hand, preventing the accident in a way where she doesn’t get to see her mother─probably would mean Hachikuji still getting lost upon dying.
Death itself couldn’t be averted.
If that fate was unshakeable, if it was history─then there was nothing to do but accept it.
However.
/> What I wanted to avert was the subsequent decade.
“Aye, if we can do this, her transformation into an aberration may at the very least be avoided. So there is nothing for it but to enact Operation Stalker.”
“Change the operation’s name right now.”
“Operation Sneakers, then.”
“Sneakers? Why the hell?”
“Because the etymology of ‘sneaker’ is one with that of ‘sneaking.’ I have heard it said that they were dubbed ‘sneakers’ because one might walk in them without making a sound.”
“I didn’t realize the word was so dodgy…”
I looked down at my feet.
I was definitely wearing sneakers.
No good, I couldn’t look directly at them anymore now that they seemed like shoes from a criminal specialty store.
They didn’t suit me at all!
“All right,” I suggested, “let’s get to sleep early tonight, and tomorrow we’ll wait in front of the Hachikuji place starting in the morning. I wonder if there are any telephone poles or anything that we can hide behind.”
“Aye, there will likely be a telephone pole or some such. Though there be no base station.” But hearken, said Shinobu─her tone of voice didn’t really change, but even without the contradictory conjunction, I’d have guessed that she was about to say something negative. She just had that air about her. “Dost thou understand, my lord?”
“Hm? Understand what? If you’re talking about the repose I derive from embracing you, then yes, I understand it perfectly well. And for that I’m grateful.”
“For that, ye need not be grateful.”
Not every single time, chastized Shinobu.
“Rather, what it will mean if thou savest that lost lass.”
“Huh? What it will mean? Haven’t we already beaten that discussion to death? Enough already. You said a time paradox won’t occur─”
“I speak not of time paradoxes and the like─”
If Mayoi Hachikuji doesn’t become an aberration.
If she doesn’t become a Lost Cow. If she doesn’t lose her way.
“Eleven years from now, thou shalt not meet the lass, true?”
“…”
“Thou shalt not meet her on that Mother’s Day, and thy enjoyable chats, all the idle banter, it shall all be gone. Dost thou─properly understand that?”
Of course.
That much─I understood.
012
That night, we hoped to camp out in the ruined cram school like Oshino, but the plan went wildly off track.
I mean, it should have been obvious.
Here, eleven years in the past─the ruined cram school wasn’t a ruined cram school. In fact─I believe it was formally known as Eikow Cram School─the place didn’t even exist yet.
When we arrived at where it should have been, all that was there was a grove of trees.
A grove!
“Yikes… If we sleep among these trees, we’ll get eaten alive by bugs… If we’re not careful, we might even get attacked by wild dogs or something.”
“If the building be not here, let us abandon the plan of staying here altogether.”
Why are you only stubborn about this sort of thing? quipped Shinobu.
A sensible quip.
“But it feels kind of odd,” I said. “I take that abandoned building’s presence for granted, and this is going to sound strange, but I’ve also grown fond of it. It’d be one thing for it to revert to being new, but not even having been built yet…”
In other words, I didn’t know when, but sometime later on, that four-story building was going to be constructed; who-knows-how-many children would pass through its classrooms; eventually, it would close after suffering financial difficulties─that whole future lay ahead of it.
Though it was impossible to predict such a future from the grove.
I muttered, “So the place going under is already woven into the fabric of destiny? That’s…”
“All things and all people have a past, a yesteryear. Because of which they have a present, which continues on into the future. Is that not so? ’Tis no different for thee, nor for me.”
“Okay, in that case, what do we do? Me, I’m so delicate I can’t sleep in an unfamiliar place where I don’t feel comfortable. I’m the type who can’t even sleep with a new pillow.”
“We have no pillows to begin with.”
“Well, I was hoping to use your lap as my pillow.”
“If that is thy desire, I shall not deny thee…”
Deny me, please.
Joking around with this little girl was pretty tricky.
“But why consider sleeping in a grove at all if thou be such a delicate fellow?”
“Why indeed.”
“’Tis less delicate than delete key.”
“Woof, painful.”
Anyway.
This place was already not the place I knew─or rather.
It wasn’t yet the place I knew.
So to speak.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I declared. “If worst comes to worst, we can stay up all night. To tell the truth, I’m not feeling all that sleepy.”
My vampiric constitution.
At the moment, my biorhythm was on normal mode, or more like easy mode, so my vampiric nature was at a low ebb. You could say that, physically, I was like a normal human. Still, my recovery and healing parameters were maintaining decent levels.
Thus I didn’t really need to sleep for “rest”─my progress in studying for exams was, of course, due first and foremost to Hanekawa and Senjogahara’s guidance, but also, I was simply in the enviable position of being able to use some of my sleep time as study time.
When I thought about it that way, I felt kind of guilty towards the other examinees, almost like I was doping, but─there were concomitant risks, so let’s let that one go.
“I was thinking we’d go early tomorrow morning,” I told Shinobu, “but why don’t we go check out the place tonight.”
“The Hachikuji residence?”
“Where else?”
“I thought perhaps ’twas Mister Donut’s location ye intended to confirm.”
“Quite a self-serving delusion to be having…”
Wait.
In this era when even the cram school wasn’t yet a sparkle in the architect’s eye, was the local Mr. D up and running?
“By the way, Shinobu, are you not feeling sleepy?”
“Nighttime is my time.”
“It is, isn’t it. But does that mean you’ll be tired during the day tomorrow?”
“An interesting question. Nay, for me, sleep has a strong recreational element. I can remain awake if I tried.”
“I see…”
If I tried was where things got dicey.
Shinobu, more capricious than anyone, might not even try.
If she stayed awake, it would certainly help me out─
“’Tis given to me to slumber within thy shadow, so I might store up on it tonight that I may perform great deeds tomorrow.”
“…”
She seemed somehow enthusiastic.
Not that I could get much of a read on her feelings.
“What? I have no feelings.”
And at that, Shinobu smiled.
Goes to show why she seemed so depraved when she smiled.
“’Tis just that I feel somewhat high, somehow put in mind of spring break being alone with thee like this.”
“I see…”
Well, yeah.
Because Shinobu needed to hide in my shadow, it felt like we spent a lot of time with each other, but being alone together─the feeling of being alone together, was nostalgic for me too.
There were my interactions with Hanekawa and Senjogahara, of course, and various other students at school, and when I got home there were my little sisters and my parents.
However unsociable a guy I may be─I never really found myself alone, at least in a physical sense.
&nb
sp; So it was never just the two of us.