One. A Council.
The Serenia East District Higher Academy student council met every Thursday at four in the afternoon in Room 2-C, which was the only room on the second floor with windows facing west, which the council president had selected three years ago for reasons she had never been able to explain when asked.
The president's name was Yuriko Sano. She was eighteen, in her final year, and had won her seat in three consecutive elections by a margin large enough to embarrass the people who ran against her. She was not loved. She was respected, the way certain weather patterns were respected.
Mei Takahashi sat at the long table with her thin binder open in front of her, her mechanical pencil in her hand, her tape dispenser keychain on the table beside the binder, and her purple hair pulled into the high ponytail that her mother had once told her made her look like a person who could not be argued with. She was sixteen. She was the council secretary, which meant she took the minutes, which meant she heard everything everyone said and wrote down most of it and remembered the rest.
Yuriko was reading a complaint.
"… and that's the third request in two weeks asking us to reverse the cafeteria policy on the Kawagoe scholarship students. Their lunch passes are being declined at the register because the punch-card system still has them flagged from last semester, when the scholarship office hadn't processed the renewals yet."
"How many students?" said the treasurer.
"Twelve."
"For how long?"
"Six days."
"Six days?" said Mei.
"Six days."
"Yuriko. Six days. Twelve kids haven't eaten lunch at school for six days."
"The scholarship office says they'll have it fixed by Monday."
"It's Thursday."
"Yes."
"That's two more days."
"Yes."
"Twelve kids. Two more days. No lunch."
The room was quiet. The treasurer, whose name was Atsumu, looked at his shoes. The vice president, who was a quiet boy named Daiki who Mei did not dislike but did not understand, looked at the windows.
Mei set her pencil down.
"Yuriko."
"Mei."
"This is the fourth time this year the scholarship students have been let down by an administrative delay we already knew about."
"…"
"I have notes from October. From August. From May. Each time, the council was told it would be resolved within the week. Each time it was. But each time it left children eating nothing for the days in between."
"Mei. We can't override the cafeteria's accounting system."
"We can pay for the lunches ourselves. The council has a discretionary fund. Six days is twelve kids times one meal times six days. That's seventy-two meals. The fund covers it twice over."
"The fund is for council activities."
"Twelve students not eating is a council activity, Yuriko."
"…"
"Or it should be. I'd like to make it one."
Yuriko looked at her for a long time. Yuriko was tired. Yuriko had been tired all year. Yuriko was the kind of person who became student council president because she wanted to make things better and then spent three years discovering that making things better meant going home most nights frustrated about a thing she could not have fixed because the structure she was trying to fix was older than she was.
"Motion to allocate seventy-two meals from the discretionary fund."
"Second," said Mei.
"All in favor."
Five hands. Including Yuriko's.
"Carried. Mei, you handle the disbursement?"
"I'll have it done by tomorrow morning."
"Good."
She pushed her chair back. The meeting kept going. The next agenda item was the winter festival schedule. Mei wrote down what was said. Her thumb pressed the edge of the binder once and let go.
After the meeting, she walked one of the scholarship students to the cafeteria and watched the cashier ring through the meal pass that Mei had quietly handed to her in the hallway, and the cashier did not ask why a student in the second year had a meal pass with the council secretary's signature on the back, because the cashier had been doing this job for twelve years and had learned not to ask.
The girl ate her lunch.
She did not know who Mei was.
That was the part Mei liked best.
-----
She walked home along the canal. The light was lowering. The water in the canal was the green-brown that Serenia's water had been since the realm-side filtration plant had been shut down for repairs in the spring of last year and had not, despite three city council promises, reopened. The water did not smell. The fish, as far as anyone knew, were still alive in it. It was just green-brown now.
She was thinking about Ryo.
She had been thinking about him for six days, which was one fewer day than the scholarship students had not been eating lunch, and she did not believe in coincidences. She had been thinking about him because she had noticed, the way she noticed things, that Ryo had begun cooling. She had told Hiroshi. Hiroshi had told her she was being weird. She had told Satoshi. Satoshi had said no, she's right.
Then they had all noticed.
She walked along the canal and she thought about the fact that there were systems in this city that took six days to fix a meal pass and that the people inside those systems were not bad people and that this was somehow worse than if they had been.
She thought about the system that had taken Yua at seven.
She thought about it for a long time.
She did not stop walking.
-----
Two. A Garden.
Hiroshi Endō was, at four in the afternoon on a Thursday, on his hands and knees in the dirt of the West Bridge Community Vegetable Plot, attempting to convince a woman named Mrs. Kazami that the tomato plant she had selected for transplant was already dead.
"It is not dead, young man."
"Mrs. Kazami. The leaves are brown."
"They're autumn-colored."
"They're brown, Mrs. Kazami. The plant is brown. The stem is brown. There is no green. Nowhere on this plant is any green."
"It's a heritage variety."
"Of what."
"Brown tomatoes."
"…"
"You don't have to be rude about it."
"Mrs. Kazami, with respect, I have been working in this plot for two years, I have killed sixteen plants in those two years, and I now know the difference between autumn and deceased."
Mrs. Kazami was eighty-four, four-foot-eleven, and had outlived three husbands. She wore the same purple cardigan to the plot every Thursday. She believed, with the unshakable certainty of someone who had seen empires rise and fall in her lifetime, that any plant she selected would grow because she had selected it. The community garden coordinator, a tired man named Mr. Ueno, had told Hiroshi privately that arguing with Mrs. Kazami was a waste of time and that the best approach was to let her plant the dead one and quietly plant a live one beside it.
Hiroshi had tried this last week. Mrs. Kazami had noticed.
"Fine," she said now, with the air of a woman granting a great concession to a child she pitied. "Fine. We will plant the live one. You may also plant the brown one, and we will see who is right."
"Mrs. Kazami."
"What."
"Thank you."
He took the tomato plants, both of them, the live one and the dead one, and he transplanted them into the row Mrs. Kazami had marked with a small red ribbon tied to a stick. The ribbon was the kind of small detail Mrs. Kazami took very seriously and that Mr. Ueno had once told Hiroshi to never, under any circumstances, move.
When he was done, he wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The November air was cold. The dirt was colder. His knees were stiff. His hands were chapped. He had not eaten lunch because he had given his lunch to Ryo this morning at the courtyard.
A small voice came from behind him.
"Hiroshi-niisan."
He turned. A child was standing at the edge of the plot. Six, maybe seven years old. Coat too thin for the weather. Mittens that did not match each other or anything else. Her name was Yuna. She lived in the apartments on the other side of the bridge. Her mother worked nights at the soup kitchen and her father had not been around since Yuna had been three.
"Yuna."
"Are you done with your plants?"
"Almost."
"Okay."
"Are you cold?"
"… Mm."
He took off his bomber jacket and put it around her shoulders. The jacket reached almost to her ankles. She held the cuffs in both hands like sleeves.
"Better?"
"Mm."
"Want to help me water the new ones?"
"… Okay."
She helped him water the tomato plants. She held the watering can with both hands and her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth in concentration. She got water on her shoes. She did not notice. They watered the live plant. They watered the brown plant. They watered the row of cabbages Mrs. Kazami had planted in October that were, Hiroshi suspected, going to be the first cabbages Mrs. Kazami had ever successfully grown, and would prove Mrs. Kazami right in a way that he would never live down.
When they were done, Yuna looked up at him.
"Hiroshi-niisan."
"Mm."
"Why do you do this?"
"…"
"Mom says you don't get paid."
"I don't."
"Then why do you do it?"
He thought about it. He had been asked this before. He had usually given joke answers because joke answers were how he answered most things. He looked at the row. He looked at the live tomato plant and the dead tomato plant. He looked at Yuna in his bomber jacket.
"Because somebody has to, Yuna. And the somebodies in this city who get paid to do it have been doing it badly for a long time. So the rest of us do it for free until the somebodies catch up. That's all."
"… Oh."
"You can keep the jacket until we leave."
"Okay."
She kept the jacket.
Mr. Ueno watched the whole exchange from across the plot. He did not say anything. Mr. Ueno was sixty-three. He had been a Hunter once. Nobody at the plot knew this except Hiroshi, who had figured it out from the way Mr. Ueno held tools, which was the way Hunters held tools, which was the way of a man who had been holding much heavier tools much longer ago.
Mr. Ueno did not talk about it.
Hiroshi did not ask.
Some things in Serenia were not asked about, and the not-asking was a kind of respect, and Hiroshi had learned that earlier in his life than most boys his age.
-----
Three. A Girl.
Satoshi sat across from Ami Hoshino at the small noodle counter beneath the railway bridge on the south end of Serenia, where the man who ran the shop made the broth with bones from the butcher across the street and would not, despite three years of asking, tell anyone the recipe.
Ami was eighteen. She had attended the same academy as Satoshi until last spring and was now in her first semester at the Serenia Conservatory, where she studied violin under a teacher who was, by general consensus, one of the worst-tempered women in the city. Ami was small. Ami was patient. Ami had been the only person in the academy class of last year who could match Satoshi for silence in a room, and that was how they had started dating, eight months ago, almost without either of them deciding it had happened.
She slurped her noodles. He watched her.
"You're staring."
"I'm watching."
"What's the difference."
"Staring is when you don't know you're doing it. Watching is when you do."
"Mm."
She took another bite.
"… Satoshi."
"Mm."
"Is your friend okay?"
"…"
"The Kenzaki one. The quiet one with the eyes."
"…"
"You haven't been you for a few days. Which usually means a friend isn't okay. So I'm asking."
He looked at his bowl. He had not eaten much. The toothpick that usually lived in the corner of his mouth was on the table beside the bowl. He had taken it out without thinking.
"… No. He's not okay."
"Mm."
"I don't know how to help."
"Have you asked him?"
"… No."
"Have you sat next to him?"
"Yes."
"Then you've helped, Satoshi. The kind of friend you are doesn't fix things. The kind of friend you are sits next to things until the things finish doing whatever they're going to do. That's a real kind of friend. Don't take it from yourself just because it doesn't look like the kind in books."
He looked at her.
"… When did you get so smart."
"I have been this smart, Satoshi. You just don't notice when I'm smart at you because I usually do it in violin and you've never come to one of my lessons."
"… You've invited me to one lesson."
"And you didn't come."
"… I'm sorry."
"I know."
"I'll come to the next one."
"I know that too."
She slurped her noodles. He watched her. She caught him watching, this time. She did not say anything. She finished the bowl.
When they walked out of the noodle shop, the street was getting dark. A train passed overhead. The bridge shook the way bridges in Serenia had been shaking for fifty years, since the last realm-side seismic recalibration, which had been imperfect, which had left every railway bridge in the city with a slight vibration that locals stopped noticing by their second year of living here.
Ami took his hand.
"Satoshi."
"Mm."
"Whatever your friend needs from you, give it to him. Don't worry about whether you have enough left for me. I have enough of my own. I'll wait."
"… You shouldn't have to."
"I'm not waiting because I have to. I'm waiting because I want to. Different verbs, Satoshi."
She kissed him quickly, on the cheek, the way she did when she did not want him to make a thing of it. She walked toward the conservatory. She did not look back, because she had learned in her first month of dating Satoshi that he was the kind of person who needed not to be watched leaving. He stood under the bridge and watched her go anyway, because watching was the thing he did, and he had not yet learned to give it up for her, and he knew he would, eventually.
He took the toothpick off the table.
Then realized he had left it at the noodle shop.
He went back for it.
The shop owner laughed at him.
It was the second time Satoshi had almost smiled in two weeks.
-----
Convergence.
They met at Hiroshi's mother's apartment at seven that evening because Hiroshi's mother had texted all three of them at the same time, separately, telling them she had made enough miso to feed the western district and that they were each, individually, expected to come, and none of them had had the courage to text back no.
They sat at the table.
Mrs. Endō served them. She did not stay. She had learned, over the years of feeding her son's friends, that the friends needed to talk after she fed them and that the talking was easier when she was in another room pretending to fold laundry.
The miso was hot. The bowls were warm. The kitchen smelled the way kitchens smell when somebody's mother has been cooking all afternoon for people she did not give birth to.
Mei spoke first.
"He's getting worse."
"…"
"I went by the courtyard at lunch. Rinka let me sit and watch. He's been wearing a wrap on his right hand for three days. He's pretending it's a sprain. It's not a sprain."
"What is it."
"I don't know yet. Cold-related. The bench he sat on left frost. Real frost, not breath-frost. The kind frost leaves."
"…"
Hiroshi set his spoon down.
"I gave him my lunch this morning."
"Did he eat it?"
"… Half."
"Mm."
Satoshi spoke last. Satoshi spoke last most of the time. Satoshi's words tended to weigh more when he had let everyone else go first, which Satoshi knew.
"Listen."
The other two looked at him.
"He's going into something we can't follow."
"…"
"His friend is coming back. The other one. The Ametsuchi. Ryo can feel him. He's been on the roof every night this week and the roof is where Ryo goes when he's listening to something none of us can hear. So whatever he's preparing for, it's coming. Soon."
"… Yeah," said Mei.
"Yeah," said Hiroshi.
"And we can't help him with the fight. We're not Hunters. None of us are. Mei isn't, you and I aren't, my girlfriend who studies violin isn't. Whatever happens up there or out there, we're not in the room when it happens."
"…"
"But we can be in the room after."
The kitchen was quiet.
"Satoshi," said Hiroshi.
"Mm."
"Say what you mean."
"… I mean. When it's done. Whoever comes home. Or doesn't. We're going to be the people in the apartment when it's over. Mei is going to be at the door. Hiroshi, you're going to be at the table with food. I'm going to be on the bench he likes in the yard. We are going to be the boring, ordinary, predictable people who are there, in the rooms we said we'd be in, every time he comes back. If he comes back broken, we sit with the broken. If he comes back changed, we sit with the changed. If he comes back the same, we sit with the same. We don't fix him. We don't ask him to fix himself. We sit. And we are there."
"…"
"He told me, once, that the thing he wanted most in the world was to be the kind of Hunter who didn't have to stop being a person to do the job. The only way that promise holds is if there are still people around him being people, when he comes back to be one. So that's our job. We are the people."
Mei put her hand on top of his.
Hiroshi put his hand on top of hers.
They sat that way for a moment. The miso steamed. The apartment held them.
Mrs. Endō, who had been pretending to fold laundry, was crying quietly in the next room and they all heard her, and none of them mentioned it, and that was a kind of love too.
"Vow," said Mei.
"… Vow," said Hiroshi.
"Vow," said Satoshi.
It was not a ritual. They did not do rituals. It was three friends saying one word three times in the small apartment of one of their mothers on a Thursday night in November, and the word held, because the people saying it had decided it would.
They ate.
They went home.
Outside, the city of Serenia did what cities do at night. The canal was still green-brown. The cabbages in the West Bridge plot were still alive. The conservatory windows on the south end of the city were still lit, and a girl named Ami Hoshino was practicing a passage by Brahms that she had been working on for two weeks. The Kenzaki apartment was three blocks east, and the boy on its roof had a wrapped hand and a borrowed cold and a friend coming for him from the eastern flats.
The boy did not know yet that three of his friends had spoken a vow over miso soup at a kitchen table in an apartment he had been to a hundred times.
He would find out.
Not soon. But he would.
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 78