There were two ways to walk through a city.
The Hunting Realm had taught her one. The other one she was learning.
Tsubaki Aramaki stood at the south end of the East District market on a Wednesday morning. Her hood was up. Her hands were in her coat pockets. Her odachi was wrapped in cloth and slung diagonally across her back.
She counted, the way she had been trained to count, the people in a thirty-foot radius.
Nineteen.
The vendor at the fish stall, her assistant, two children, the man selling persimmons, the woman buying persimmons, a teenage couple, the postman, the old man who always sat on the green bench next to the lamppost, the priest from the small shrine across the river, four students from the academy on a field trip, three women her own age laughing at something one of them had said.
Nineteen people. Zero threats.
She counted again.
Still nineteen. Still zero.
The Hunting Realm had taught her to count because the Hunting Realm did not have moments where the count came out clean. Every count contained at least one number that wanted to kill you. The count was the difference between living and not.
She had been counting since she was six. Her body did it without asking now.
She had been in Serenia for eleven days.
Eleven days, and the count had come out clean every single time.
She had not yet decided what to do with that information.
-----
She bought a persimmon.
The man at the stall was named Mr. Fukuda. She had not asked him his name. Other people had said it. Mr. Fukuda.
He sold persimmons in the morning, mandarins in the afternoon, and the kind of cheap candy that came wrapped in paper twists that the children of the district saved up small coins to buy. He was eighty-something. He had two missing fingers on his left hand.
The missing fingers had nothing to do with violence.
He had told the woman in front of Tsubaki, who had asked, that the fingers had been taken by an industrial press at the cannery he had worked at for forty-one years.
Tsubaki had filed this fact away.
The Hunting Realm had taught her that filing facts away was how you stayed alive.
The person teaching herself a second way to walk through a city was beginning to understand that filing facts away was also how you remembered an old man's hands.
"That'll be forty, miss."
"… Mm."
She paid. She took the persimmon. She walked.
She ate it standing at the railing of the small bridge over the canal. The canal was green-brown. She had asked Banri about it. Banri had told her the filtration plant had been closed for nineteen months. She had filed that away too.
She watched the water for a long time.
-----
Sōma had told her, last week, that she should try eating with the others.
He had said it casually. Sōma said most things casually.
Sōma was the older brother. Sōma was the one who had decided, four years ago in a Hunting Realm corridor with three bodies on the floor, that the three of them were going to leave together or not at all.
They had left together. They had been together since.
Banri had said the same thing in his own way, which was by setting an extra bowl at the table without comment and looking at her until she sat down or until he gave the bowl to one of the dogs they had not yet decided to officially adopt.
She had been sitting down at the bowl, lately.
She had not yet been talking at the table.
That was what Sōma had meant.
-----
The Kenzaki boy was at the courtyard when she got there.
Banri was on the bench. Sōma was leaning against the wall in the way Sōma leaned against walls, which was the way of a man who could leave the wall and become a knife in approximately one second. The Kenzaki boy was running through forms with Rinka watching. His right hand was wrapped in pale blue cloth. The cloth was Mei Takahashi's. Tsubaki had figured this out by elimination.
The boy was slower than yesterday. He was faster than the day before yesterday. The pact had begun to take. The cost had also begun to take.
Tsubaki sat next to Banri. She did not say hello. She did not need to. Banri made a small mm sound that meant I see you and went back to peeling an apple.
She watched.
The boy cut.
The cut was clean. The cold trailed it. Frost held in the air for a half-second after the blade had passed, suspended in a faint crystalline arc, and then dispersed. Rinka nodded once, which was the highest praise Rinka gave.
Tsubaki found, against her will, that she was nodding too.
The Kenzaki boy noticed.
He turned. He saw her on the bench. He did the small two-finger half-salute he had started doing to her around day six, when she had stopped giving him the cold reflex stare and had started giving him the cold reflex almost-stare, which was different in a way she did not yet know how to explain.
"Tsubaki."
"… Kenzaki."
"You look tired."
"… You look colder."
"Yeah."
He grinned.
It was a small grin. She did not return it. She did not know how to.
Her face had been arranged in one configuration for too many years. The arranging had set, the way clay sets. She had not yet figured out which muscles needed to move for a smile to occur without it looking like an accident.
He sat down on the other side of Banri. Banri offered him an apple slice. He took it.
"Tsubaki."
"… Mm."
"Can I ask you something?"
"…"
"Your blade."
She tensed by a fraction. Banri noticed. Banri did not say anything.
"What about it."
"What's it called?"
"…"
She looked at him. He was not asking the way some people asked, which was the way of someone trying to extract information. He was asking the way a boy asked a girl about her dog. Mild curiosity. No agenda. She had not been asked about her blade by a person without an agenda since she was nine years old.
She did not know what to do with the question.
She answered it anyway.
"… Wagamori."
"… What does it mean?"
"I, the Forest. Or Self-Forest. The grammar is wrong. I named it when I was ten."
"…"
"It's massive. The blade. Bigger than I am. I told the man who handed it to me that it felt like I was carrying a forest on my back. He told me I had three minutes to name it before the ceremony ended. I named it that."
A pause.
"The grammar is wrong because I was ten and I didn't know yet how to say it the right way. It's been Wagamori since."
"…"
"I never changed it. The man who handed it to me died the next year. He was the only adult in the Hunting Realm who ever asked me what I wanted to call something, instead of telling me what something was called."
Ryo did not say anything for a long moment.
Then he said, quietly: "It's a beautiful name."
"… It's wrong, Kenzaki."
"It's the right kind of wrong."
She looked at the courtyard. She did not look at him. She did not trust her face to do whatever it was about to do.
Banri, peeling his apple, made the small mm sound that meant I see you, but this time directed at her instead of at the boy. She heard it. She filed it away.
The Kenzaki boy got up. He went back to his forms. The conversation closed.
Banri leaned over.
"Tsubaki."
"… Mm."
"You answered him."
"… I did."
"You don't usually."
"… I know."
"Mm."
He went back to peeling.
-----
That evening she walked through the East District alone.
She did this most evenings. The walking was the part she had not told Sōma or Banri about, because the walking was not strategic. The walking was the part of herself she was teaching to want a thing without knowing yet what the thing was.
The November moon was full. The light fell on the old stone of the East District the way light fell in the Hunting Realm only when something terrible was about to happen.
Tonight, in Serenia, nothing terrible was about to happen.
The light was just light.
She passed the noodle shop under the railway bridge. She passed the conservatory, where a girl named Ami Hoshino was, somewhere inside, practicing a Brahms passage Tsubaki could hear faintly through the lit window. She passed the persimmon stall, closed for the night, with Mr. Fukuda's nine-fingered apron hanging on the hook beside it.
She turned into a smaller street.
The street was narrow. The streetlamps were old. There was an alley off the street that connected to the canal, and the alley was where she heard the voices.
Three of them. Boys. Twelve, thirteen, the age Hunting Realm children stopped being children. One small voice, smaller than the others. Crying without sound, the way children cried when they had learned that crying out loud made it worse.
She did not hesitate.
The Hunting Realm had taken many things from her. The reflex to step toward children getting hurt was not one of them. That reflex had been born in her before the Hunting Realm got to her, and the Hunting Realm had only ever sharpened it.
She walked into the alley.
The three boys were leaning over a smaller boy. Maybe nine. Glasses. A book in his arms, a small hardback he was protecting with both hands. The biggest of the three had his hand on the cover.
"Hey."
They looked up.
Tsubaki was nineteen, taller than them, hooded, with an odachi wrapped in cloth slung diagonally across her back.
The biggest of the three saw the blade. He went pale. He understood, on a level he did not yet have language for, that the woman in front of him was a person of the kind his older brother told stories about and did not actually believe existed. He let go of the book.
"… Hey, lady, we were just …"
"You weren't."
"…"
"Walk."
"…"
"Walk."
They walked. They walked fast.
They did not run, because something in her face had told them that running would be worse than walking.
They walked all the way to the end of the alley and around the corner and out of her hearing.
She stood with the smaller boy.
He was holding the book. His glasses were a little crooked. He looked up at her.
"… Thank you."
"Mm."
"…"
"Are you hurt?"
"… No."
"What were they trying to take."
"… My book."
"…"
"It's about astronomy. It's about the moons of the gas planets. They thought I was, um. They thought I was being weird for reading it on the way home."
"…"
"I read it because I want to be an astronomer when I grow up. I want to be the one who finds a new moon. There's lots of them out there, you know. Probably hundreds we haven't seen yet. Some of them have ice. Some of them have ice that has water under it. Like, liquid water. Which means. Well. You know."
"… No."
"Life. It might mean life."
He looked up at her. He did not seem afraid. He seemed proud of his book and a little embarrassed about being saved and very relieved that she was not somebody who was going to laugh at him.
The moon was high. Full. The light fell on the alley. It fell on him.
"What's your name?"
"… Tsubaki."
"My name is Kaito."
"Mm."
"What's your dream, Tsubaki-san?"
"…"
She did not answer for a long moment.
She had not been asked the question before. Or, more accurately, she had not been asked the question by anyone who would have understood the answer if she had given the real one. Hunting Realm trainers did not ask children what their dreams were. They asked children what they had been ordered to want.
She thought about lying.
She thought about saying to find a moon, which would have made him happy. She thought about saying to keep my brothers alive, which would have been true.
But that would have been a kind of lie too. Keeping people alive was a goal, not a dream. Dreams and goals were not the same thing.
She told him the truth.
"… I don't have one, Kaito."
"…"
"I never had one. They didn't let me have one where I grew up."
A pause.
"So I didn't know how to start. And now I don't know if I'm too old to start."
He thought about this for a moment. He pushed his glasses up his nose with one hand without letting go of the book with the other.
"That's not how dreams work, Tsubaki-san."
"…"
"Everyone has one. You just haven't found yours yet. That's all. My mom says some people find theirs when they're eight, and some people find theirs when they're forty. She said dreams aren't a thing you make. Dreams are a thing you notice."
"…"
"So, like. Just keep noticing things, Tsubaki-san. The dream's already in there. You just haven't seen it yet."
He looked up at her with the certainty of a nine-year-old who had been told something true by a parent who loved him.
She did not say anything.
She did not know what to say.
He held the book up.
"Want to walk me home? I live four streets that way. My mom worries when I'm late."
"… Yes."
She walked him home. She did not say much. He did not seem to need her to. He talked the whole way about Europa, which was a moon of Jupiter, and which he was going to find a sister moon of someday. She listened. She filed every fact away.
When they reached his door, his mother opened it before he could knock. The mother saw Tsubaki. The mother took one look and understood, the way mothers in Serenia had been understanding things since the city began. She did not ask questions. She bowed slightly.
"Thank you."
"… Mm."
"Will you come in?"
"… No."
"Okay. Please come back if you want to. Kaito makes a lot of tea. He's good at it."
"… Mm."
The door closed.
Tsubaki stood under the streetlamp for a long time.
The moon was still high. The November air was cold. Her hood was still up. Her odachi was still slung across her back. Her face was doing something she did not yet recognize.
She walked back the way she had come, and she did not pull the hood lower.
-----
Banri was at the table when she came in.
Sōma was in the chair beside the window. He was reading something. He was always reading something. He did not look up when the door opened, but the corner of his mouth moved by a fraction, the way it did when one of them came back from somewhere safely.
Tsubaki took her hood off.
She took her coat off. She set Wagamori carefully against the wall by the door, the way she had been setting it for eleven days now. She walked to the table. There was a bowl. The bowl had been set for her. The bowl had soup in it.
Sōma had cooked. Sōma had cooked because Banri had asked him to. Banri had asked him to because he had heard Tsubaki leave the apartment three hours ago and had wanted there to be soup waiting when she came back.
She sat down.
She picked up the spoon.
She looked at Banri.
She looked at Sōma.
The two of them.
The two who had walked her out of the Hunting Realm corridor when she was fifteen. The two who had set bowls for her every night since.
The two who had not asked her, in four years, what her dream was, because they had understood without being told that she did not have one and that the asking would have hurt.
She smiled.
It was small. It was crooked.
It moved muscles that had not moved in that configuration since she was eight. The muscles did not know what to do with the new arrangement.
The smile came out lopsided and brief.
It was a smile.
Banri stopped peeling. Sōma looked up from his book. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them needed to.
Tsubaki ate her soup.
The kitchen was quiet. The November moon was still up outside the window. Somewhere a few streets away, a boy named Kaito was telling his mother about a woman with a sword who had walked him home and said her name was Tsubaki and had not laughed at him about Europa.
In the kitchen of the apartment of the three rogues, the youngest of them sat at the table with her brothers and finished her soup.
When the soup was finished she set the spoon down.
She said, quietly, the first thing she had said voluntarily at the table in eleven days.
"… The persimmons here are good."
Sōma laughed.
It was a quiet laugh. Banri's hand stopped on the apple. Banri looked at his brother. Sōma looked at his sister.
"They are, Tsubaki."
"… Yeah."
"They really are."
She nodded. She looked at her empty bowl. She did not say anything else.
She did not need to.
The smile was still there. Smaller now. But still there.
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 79