[Hand-painted sign · Shiomi Night Market, Minato Ward] WATER · DIESEL · From Kagari's men only · Thieves go to the pier.
* * *
Nagoya — April 2065, Day 3
"Phone?" said the woman behind the counter.
"It's dead," said Akio.
"Then I can't sign you in."
The ward's free kitchen was in the basement of an office block near the station. It smelled of miso and floor polish, and about thirty people were eating at long tables behind her. The sign above the counter said HOT MEALS FOR REGISTERED RESIDENTS. Akio had read it on the way down the stairs and hoped very hard that it was flexible.
"I can give you my name," he said. "Akio Arashi. Ikazuchi village, Hida, Gifu. I'm registered there. Headman Fujita did it himself."
The woman typed it in and looked at her screen.
"You're registered in Gifu," she said.
"Yes."
"This is Nagoya." She pointed at the reader on the counter. "Phone or MyNumber card. If you don't have either, there's a ward office on the third floor of the station. They'll register you here. It takes about two weeks."
Akio looked past her at the tables. A man near the front was eating rice with a fried egg on top. Akio had been looking at that egg since he walked in. He hadn't eaten since the end of Morita Keiko's lunch, two days ago, on a bench outside Gifu station.
"Thank you," he said, and went back up the stairs.
* * *
The phone had died on the third morning.
It had lasted much longer than a week in the village. In the city, it lasted two days. Nagoya was the loudest thing he had ever felt. Every wall had wires in it. Every street had cables under it. Every person had a phone, and every phone was humming, and the whole city poured into him from every direction at once, the way rain fills a bucket left out in a storm.
He hadn't been able to sleep. He'd sat up both nights on a bench in a park, holding his father's jam jar, watching the foil leaves stand straight out.
On the third morning, a tram had gone past him on Sakura-dori with a crack of blue light from its overhead wire, and he'd felt it pull at him, and before he could stop himself, he'd been halfway along the tram line in a white flash, and then he was standing in the middle of the road outside a department store, with people screaming and the tram's lights dead and his rubber phone smoking in his pocket.
He'd walked away fast. Nobody had stopped him. Nobody had been sure what they'd seen.
Kazuo's phone had been the best phone anyone could build for him. It had survived him for two days. In the village, it would have lasted years.
The problem wasn't the phone. It was the city.
* * *
He thought about it on a bench in Tsurumai Park, with the jar between his feet.
Everything in Nagoya worked on phones. Food, trains, water, rooms, jobs. Without a phone he couldn't get a meal. Without a MyNumber card he couldn't get a phone. Without an address he couldn't get a card. And every phone he touched would die within days.
He could knock a tram off its wire, and he couldn't get lunch.
He thought about what his father had said in the kitchen. You've never ridden a train. You've never slept one night anywhere but this house. You don't know anything.
His father had been right. He'd known his father was right at the time. He'd just thought it would take longer to prove.
Akio looked south, toward the port, where the lights stopped.
In Minato, nobody had a phone that worked, because there was no power to charge them. Nobody had a MyNumber card, because the ward office had closed in 2044. There was nobody to sign him in or turn him away. People there still did things the old way: you made yourself useful, and somebody fed you.
He didn't know how to be useful in a city.
Then he looked down at his own hands.
'No,' he thought. 'That's not true. I have one thing.'
* * *
Minato Ward — That Evening
Minato looked as though the fires had ended last week, not twenty-one years ago.
Whole blocks were black shells, roofless, with plants growing out of the windows. The roads were cracked and full of puddles. Nothing moved on them but bicycles and people on foot. The power lines overhead hung loose and dead from their poles, like washing nobody had brought in. There were no streetlights. As the sun went down, the ward simply went dark, building by building, until the only light came from the south.
He followed it.
It came from under the old Meiko expressway, where the raised road ran along the docks. A section of it had collapsed in the fires, and the part that was still standing made a long concrete roof. Under that roof, between the pillars, someone had built a market.
There were about forty stalls. Tarps and plywood and old shipping crates, strung with lanterns and bare bulbs. Each stall had its own little diesel generator, coughing and clattering, filling the air under the expressway with blue smoke. There were stalls for fish, vegetables, second-hand clothes, bicycle parts, phone batteries charged somewhere outside the ward. The smell of cooking was so strong that Akio's stomach made a noise he could feel in his teeth.
It was the first place in Nagoya that felt like home. He couldn't have said why. Maybe because everyone here was holding something together with zip ties.
He walked slowly down the row of stalls with his hands in his pockets.
At the far end, under a hand-painted sign that said OKABE RAMEN — SINCE 2031 — STILL HERE, a small, fierce woman in her sixties was hitting a generator with a ladle.
"Come on," she was saying. "Come on, you useless lump of— don't you dare. Don't you dare die on me tonight."
The generator coughed once, sadly, and died.
The bulbs over her stall went out. Under her big pot of broth, the cooker went dark. Down the row, people turned to look.
The woman stared at the generator. Then she sat down on an upturned crate and put her face in her hands.
"That was the last of it," she said, to nobody. "And Kagari's men don't come round again till next week."
* * *
"I can fix that," said Akio.
The woman looked up. She saw a tall, thin boy in a dirty shirt and rubber boots, with a backpack and grey eyes and a face that was very calm for somebody who was clearly starving.
"It's not the generator, boy. It's the fuel. It's out. You can't fix empty."
"I know," said Akio. "Can I touch your wiring?"
She looked at him for a long moment. She had been running a ramen stall in the burned wards of Nagoya for twenty years, and she'd met every kind of liar and thief and lunatic there was. She was quite sure she knew which kind he was.
"Go on, then," she said. "It's not like you can break it any worse."
He crouched by the stall. The cable from the dead generator ran up one of the plywood posts to a little fuse box, then out to the bulbs and the cooker. It was old and patched, with tape in five places. He'd have done it better. His father would have done it much better.
He took hold of the cable where the generator plugged in, and breathed out. Gently, the way he'd learned with a drill when he was five.
Every bulb over the stall lit up at once.
The cooker under the big pot clicked on, and its little screen glowed blue. Induction: Level 6. A second later, the broth began to steam.
Down the row, forty heads turned.
The woman stood up slowly from her crate. She looked at the bulbs. Then at the cooker. Then at the boy crouching by her fuse box with his hand round a cable and his eyes half-closed, as if he were listening to music.
"What are you?" she said.
"Category E," said Akio. "Atmospheric sensory."
"..."
"Inherited," he added.
* * *
Her name was Chiyo Okabe. She put a bowl of ramen in front of him without asking if he wanted one, which was lucky, because he'd have said yes so fast it would have been embarrassing.
It was the best thing Akio had ever eaten.
That might have been because he hadn't eaten in two days. But he didn't think so. It was a deep, dark pork broth, with a slice of chashu so thick it bent the chopsticks and an egg cooked so the yolk was like honey, and he ate the whole bowl standing up, with his free hand still holding the cable, and then he ate a second one.
Chiyo watched him do it with her arms folded.
"Where are you from?" she said.
"The mountains. Gifu."
"Do they not have food in Gifu?"
"They have food. I don't have a phone."
"Hah." She refilled his bowl without asking. "Welcome to Nagoya. The city where you can starve standing next to a vending machine."
A boy appeared at the side of the stall. He was about fourteen, small and skinny, with quick eyes and fingers that never stopped moving. He looked at the lights, and at the cooker, and at Akio holding the cable.
"Gran," he said. "What's he doing?"
"Powering the stall."
"With what?"
"With himself, apparently." Chiyo didn't take her eyes off Akio. "This is my grandson, Taku. Taku, this is the boy from the mountains who doesn't have a phone."
"Akio," said Akio.
Taku came closer, staring at Akio's hand on the cable as if it might bite him. "Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Can you do the whole market?"
Akio looked down the row of stalls. Forty little generators, coughing blue smoke under the concrete roof.
"I don't know," he said. "Let's find out."
* * *
Two Weeks Later
He could do the whole market.
It took some work. Taku found the copper: a long bar of it, taken from somewhere Akio decided not to ask about. Akio ran cables from it to every stall along the row, the way his father had wired the community hall in Ikazuchi. Every evening, at six o'clock, he sat on a crate at the end of the row with his hand on the bar, and the market lit up.
He sat there until midnight. It wasn't hard. In the city he was always full, always spilling over. It was a relief to have somewhere to put it.
Chiyo fed him twice a day, gave him a futon behind her stall, and cleared a shelf for his jam jar.
He thought he was the luckiest boy in Nagoya.
He didn't think about the diesel. If he had, it would have looked like this.
Every litre of diesel in Minato came from one place, Kagari's depot, and it came when Kagari's men said so. That was how Kagari ran the ward. Not with fists, mostly. With fuel. A stall that kept its lights on did it because Kagari allowed it, and every stall-keeper in the market knew it, every single night.
For two weeks, forty stalls hadn't needed anything from him.
Akio thought he'd given an old woman her lights back. What he had actually done was cut forty strings that the most dangerous man in the ward had been holding for years. He'd done it without lifting a finger, except the one on the copper bar.
* * *
The market loved him.
Nobody quite knew what to call him. Chiyo called him "the boy," the way she called her generator "the lump." The fish seller called him Denki-kun, after electricity. One of the old men who played go between the pillars called him Raijin-sama, and bowed to him every evening, and wouldn't stop.
Akio told him he was Category E. The old man said that was very modest of him and bowed again.
Taku followed him everywhere. He asked questions constantly. How far could he feel people? How much could he hold? Could he make the lights flash in patterns? Could he charge a phone battery, just one, so Taku could give it to someone? Could he do it with ten?
"No," said Akio.
"Why not? It's free."
"It isn't free. It's mine." Akio didn't look up from the copper bar. "If I charge your batteries, you hand them out. Then everyone wants batteries. Then people come to the market for batteries, not ramen. Then someone notices where the batteries come from."
Taku thought about this. "So?"
"So someone comes to look," said Akio. "And I'd like to choose when that happens."
He was right about that, in a way. He just had the timing wrong.
* * *
Shiomi Night Market — Day 16, Night
The man who came was called Masaru Ube, and he had a chest like a beer barrel.
He walked up the row of stalls with four men behind him. The market didn't go silent, exactly. It went careful. Conversations kept going, but quieter. Hands kept working, but slower. Every stall-keeper suddenly found something very interesting to look at that wasn't Ube.
Akio felt them coming from the end of the street. Five hums. One of them was big and hot, like an oven with the door shut.
Ube stopped at the first stall and looked at the generator. It was silent and cold. He stopped at the second. Same. Third. Same.
He looked up at the bulbs overhead, all of them burning bright and steady.
"Huh," he said.
He walked all the way down the row without speaking. When he reached the end, he stopped in front of Chiyo's stall and looked down at the boy on the crate with his hand on a copper bar.
"Okabe-san," he said, without looking away from Akio. "Nobody in this market has collected a drop of diesel in two weeks."
"We've been saving it," said Chiyo.
"Your lights are on."
"We've been very careful."
"With what?"
Chiyo didn't answer. She had gone pale. Behind her, Taku had gone very still, the way small animals go still when a hawk passes over.
Ube turned to Akio properly.
"You," he said. "What's your name?"
"Akio."
"What's your quirk, Akio?"
"Weather," said Akio. "Category E."
Ube stared at him. Then he laughed, a big booming laugh that bounced off the expressway pillars.
"Category E," he said. "That's good. I like that." He stopped laughing. "Here's how it works, Category E. Every light in Minato is on because Kagari-san says it can be. That's the rule. Forty stalls just turned their lights on without asking him." He jerked a thumb back down the row. "So. The generators go back on tomorrow. And you leave Minato tonight."
"He'll go, Ube-san," Chiyo said quickly. "Please. We'll go back to the generators tomorrow. The boy will stop. Won't you, boy?"
She was talking to Akio, but she was looking at Ube. Her voice was steady, but her hands were gripping her apron so hard her knuckles were white.
'She's angry at me,' Akio thought, feeling her hum go tight and sharp. 'For bringing this on her.'
He was wrong again. Chiyo wasn't angry at him. She was terrified for Taku. Six weeks ago, a boy from their street had stolen a bucket of water from Kagari's pumping station, and Chiyo had watched what happened to his arm on the pier. She had been afraid of this exact night every day since.
But Akio couldn't feel the difference between fear and anger. They felt the same. Tight and sharp and hot. He'd always assumed it was anger, because that was what it looked like from the outside.
"No," said Akio. "I don't think I'll stop."
* * *
Ube's face didn't change.
"Okay," he said, quite cheerfully. "Then we do it the other way."
He breathed in.
His chest swelled, then kept swelling, until his shirt buttons strained. Akio felt the hot hum inside him flare up like a furnace when the door is opened. Down the row, stall-keepers were already ducking behind their counters. They knew what came next.
Ube breathed out.
It came out of his mouth as a blast of air so hot that it shimmered, a roaring, rippling column of it, the heat of a bread oven pushed out at the speed of a storm. It hit Akio full in the chest. The crate under him went flying. The tarp over Chiyo's stall caught fire at one corner.
The air went straight through him.
Akio didn't move. For the half-second the blast touched him, he wasn't there to be hit. The heat passed through the place where his body had been the way wind passes through a fence. On the other side, it set fire to a pile of cardboard.
Then he was solid again, sitting on the bare concrete where the crate had been, with his hand still on the copper bar.
He looked up at Ube.
"That's very warm," he said. "Thank you. It's been cold at night."
"..." Ube's mouth was still open.
Behind him, Chiyo had put out the burning tarp with a pot of water. She was staring at Akio with an expression he couldn't read at all.
Akio stood up.
He'd been thinking about how to do this since he arrived in Nagoya. Not this exact fight, but this kind of fight. He knew he couldn't just let go of everything, the way he had in the Tsuchiya field. There were forty stalls under this expressway, and two hundred people, and one old woman with a ramen pot. If he let go here, he'd melt the market into glass.
So he'd practised in his head, on the park bench, for two nights. Not a strike. A touch. A small one, five times over.
He opened his hand.
Five thin threads of blue light jumped from his fingertips. They crossed the space to Ube and his four men in less time than it takes to blink, and touched each of them once, lightly, on the chest.
All five of them went rigid. Their hair stood up. Their teeth clacked together. For one long second, they stood there buzzing like tuning forks, sparks crawling over their clothes.
Then four of them fell over.
The fifth, the smallest of Ube's men, was left standing. His legs were shaking so hard his knees knocked, but he was standing. Akio had made very sure of that.
"You," Akio said to him, politely. "Can you carry him?"
The man looked down at Ube, who was flat on his back in a puddle, unconscious, twitching slightly.
"I ... I think so?"
"Good. Please take them home." Akio paused. "And tell Kagari-san I said thank you for the diesel. We won't be needing it anymore."
* * *
There was a reason the fifth man was left standing.
If Akio had knocked out all five of them, they would have lain in the market all night. Somebody would have had to decide what to do with them. Some of the stall-keepers would have wanted to hurt them. Some would have wanted to hide them. Some would have run to Kagari to say it wasn't their fault. By morning, the market would have turned on itself.
One man left standing meant the problem walked home on its own.
It was a small piece of thinking, done on a park bench in the middle of the night by a hungry fifteen-year-old. It was the first time he ever won a fight by deciding what to leave behind.
He'd do it many more times.
* * *
The market cheered.
It started with the old go player who called him Raijin-sama, who stood up from his board and clapped. Then the fish seller. Then Taku, whooping, jumping up and down on a crate. Then the whole row, forty stalls and two hundred people, clapping and shouting and banging pots, while the fifth man dragged Ube away down the street by his armpits, and the other three staggered after him, holding each other up.
Akio found a new crate and sat back down. He put his hand back on the copper bar. The lights hadn't even flickered.
Chiyo didn't cheer.
She stood at her stall with the wet pot in her hands and watched Ube's men go, all the way down the street, until they turned the corner at the burned-out post office. Then she put the pot down.
"Now he knows your face," she said.
"Good," said Akio. "I want him to."
"You don't know what he does."
"I know what he does. He burns children's arms for stealing water." Akio's voice was calm. "There's a boy called Kano in my village with a burned arm. His family walked to Gifu to get away from him."
Chiyo looked at him for a long time. Taku had stopped jumping on the crate.
"Yuto Kano?" said Taku quietly. "He lived on our street."
Nobody said anything.
"You think you've won," said Chiyo at last. She said it without any anger at all, which was worse. "Boy, I've lived in this ward for forty years. I watched it burn. I watched the gangs come, and then Kagari come, and then the gangs go. Do you know why Kagari's still here and they aren't?"
"Because he's strong."
"No. Lots of them were strong." She shook her head. "Because he never fights you where you're strong. He finds where you're weak. And he waits."
* * *
The Minato Pumping Station — Two Nights Later
Twenty-one years ago, when Nagoya burned for nineteen days, Kenta Kagari was a fireman who walked into burning buildings and carried people out.
Nobody would call him that now.
He was forty-one. He sat at a steel desk in the control room of the old pumping station, which had been the city's until 2044, and his since 2049. He was a big man gone heavy, with thick scarred hands and a face that had been burned so many times it no longer showed much of anything. Behind him, through the window, the station's huge pumps sat silent in the dark. They were powered by diesel. His diesel.
Masaru Ube stood in front of the desk. He'd been standing there for some time. His hair still stuck out at odd angles. It had done that for two days and wouldn't lie flat.
"Tell me again," said Kagari.
"I breathed on him. Full blast. It went through him. Like he wasn't there." Ube swallowed. "Then he touched us. With little lights. From his fingers. It was like ... it was like getting hit by the weather, boss. You know when you're out on the docks and lightning hits the crane? Like that. Only on purpose."
"How old?"
"Fifteen, maybe. Sixteen."
"Quirk?"
Ube hesitated. "He says he's Category E, boss. Weather."
Category E was the government's lowest quirk grade. It was what the screening office wrote down for people who could feel rain coming, or keep their hands warm in winter: quirks too small to ever need a second look. Ube had just been knocked flat on his back by one.
Kagari looked at him for a long moment without any expression at all.
"Did he," he said.
He got up and went to the window. He stood there with his scarred hands behind his back, looking out at the silent pumps.
He'd met people like this before. Not this exact kind. But strong people. Proud people. People who had one thing they could do better than anyone, and thought that one thing made them unbeatable. Minato had been full of them in the gang years. Fire quirks, strength quirks, men who could turn into iron. They had all been strong.
He'd outlasted all of them, and he had never once fought any of them where they were strong.
"He can't be hit," Kagari said slowly. "Fine. We won't hit him. He makes power. Fine. Let him make power." He turned from the window. "What else does that market need, Ube?"
Ube thought about it. Then his face changed.
"Water," he said.
"Water," agreed Kagari. "Can the weather make water?"
"..."
"Shut off the Shiomi main," said Kagari. "All of it. The whole district. Every tap from the expressway to the canal. Don't send anyone to the market. Don't touch the boy. Don't touch anybody." He sat back down behind his desk. "Just turn off the water, and wait."
"How long, boss?"
"Until they bring him to me," said Kagari, "or throw him out."
* * *
Shiomi Night Market — Day 19
The taps went dry at six in the morning.
By noon, everyone knew. The standpipes along the canal were dry. The tank on the roof of the old school was dry. The pipes behind the market, where the stall-keepers washed their bowls and filled their pots, gave a long, sad gurgle and nothing else.
It was the first week of May. The forecast said thirty degrees by the weekend.
There were about two thousand people in the Shiomi district. Families, the old, children, the people who lived in the burned buildings because there was nowhere else. They'd lived without power for twenty years. Nobody could live without water for twenty days.
At the end of the market, at three in the afternoon, Akio stood beside the dry standpipe behind Chiyo's stall with his hand on the metal.
He could feel the pipe. He could feel all the pipes, running under the street, empty and cold, all the way back to the pumping station two kilometres north, where something big and hot was sitting very still.
Waiting.
Chiyo came and stood beside him. She didn't say anything. She just held out a cup. It had about two centimetres of water in the bottom, from the bottle she kept under her counter for emergencies.
"Drink," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You're not. You're sixteen and you've been sitting in the heat for three hours. Drink it."
"I'm fifteen."
"Then you're even stupider than I thought. Drink."
Akio looked at the two centimetres in the bottom of the cup. It was the last of her bottle. He had watched her tip it out.
He wanted to give it back. But her hand was shaking a little as she held it out, and her hum was tight and stubborn, and he understood that this wasn't really about whether he was thirsty. She couldn't turn the water back on. She couldn't make Kagari do anything. This was the one thing she could still do for somebody, and if he said no, he'd be taking that away from her too.
So he drank it, slowly, so she could see him do it.
Then he gave her back the cup and looked down the row of stalls, at the people sitting in the shade of the expressway with empty bottles in their laps. The old go player who called him Raijin-sama wasn't playing go today. He was sitting very still with his eyes shut.
There was a piece of plywood nailed to the pillar at the head of the market. Someone had painted on it during the day, in big white letters.
WE HAD WATER BEFORE THE BOY. SEND HIM TO KAGARI.
Akio looked at it for a long time.
Kagari's men hadn't painted it. Nobody from the station had come near the market all day. It had been painted by someone in this row: somebody who had cheered three nights ago, and eaten under his lights, and was now sitting in the heat with an empty bottle. And from the way everybody was carefully not looking at the pillar, it might have been more than one of them.
"This is what I meant," said Chiyo quietly. "He doesn't fight where you're strong."
"I know."
"So what are you going to do?"
Akio didn't answer straight away.
Three nights ago, he'd put five grown men on the ground in under a second, and the whole row had banged pots for him. He'd sat back down on his crate feeling as if he'd fixed something. He'd even felt a little proud of leaving the fifth man standing.
Now his chest felt tight and hot, and he couldn't tell whether it was shame or anger. Probably both. He'd won the fight Kagari had let him have, and Kagari had simply walked round it.
Two thousand people had no water because he'd won.
"I'm going to go and see him," he said.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Okabe Ramen · Menu Board · (chalk, updated nightly)
Shoyu Ramen
Miso Ramen
Extra chashu: ask nicely
Lights: yes
Note: the boy at the end is not a phone charger. Stop handing him your batteries. — C.O.