Before he was a Hunter — before a girl fell out of the sky and rearranged his whole life around the act of catching her, before the only real friend he would ever make put a sword through him on a mountain in the wrong season's snow — Ryo Kenzaki was ten years old, and he was going to cure death.
He had not told many people. The ones he had told kept responding in ways he found deeply unscientific.
He kept the plan in a notebook. Across the cover, in the careful block letters he reserved for things that mattered, sat the title of his life's work.
Things That Are Alive, and How to Keep Them.
And under it, smaller:
Volume One.
His mother had laughed at the volume number long enough that he'd come close to striking her from the acknowledgments.
-----
The backyard behind the Kenzaki house was crooked in three different places. The fence leaned left whenever the wind felt theatrical. The tomato plants by the steps had refused, on principle, to grow straight, and looked insulted whenever anyone mentioned it. Kujuro had been promising to fix all of it "next weekend" for most of a year — a phrase Ryo had recently worked out was adult for possibly never.
He liked the yard best in the late afternoon, when the light went thick and gold and every living thing in it slowed down enough to be studied properly.
Tsumugi Kenzaki stood at the laundry line, pinning a white sheet one-handed, the other resting on the curve of her belly. Rumi wasn't born yet. She was, in Tsumugi's words, still a rumor with elbows, and had already registered a firm position against sour plums.
Ryo looked up from his work. "Mom."
"Yes, Professor?"
"I need you to stop laughing at serious research."
"I apologize to serious research."
"You're still smiling."
"I'm smiling academically."
"That's not a thing."
"It is now. Put it in Volume Two."
He lowered the pencil and frowned at her stomach. "Rumi's going to think you're funny if you keep this up."
"I would be honored."
"She needs higher standards than that."
"She is unborn."
"That's when they're easiest to install."
Tsumugi looked at him a moment, then aimed her voice at the kitchen window. "Kujuro. Your son is attempting prenatal education again."
From inside: "Tell him to start with taxes. Nobody warned me."
Ryo made a note in the margin. Adults fear taxes. Investigate later.
A beetle came over the lip of the wooden step near his shoe. He leaned down until his nose nearly touched the board.
"Subject fourteen," he murmured. "Black shell. Six legs. Unclear leadership structure."
The beetle pressed forward, met a splinter, turned, met it again, and tried a third time with what Ryo considered genuinely admirable commitment.
"Possible stubbornness. Possible strategic failure." He wrote it down. "Possible Kenzaki bloodline."
It cleared the splinter on the fourth try and stood on the far side looking faintly astonished to still exist. Ryo watched it a while. 'Everything alive is just trying to keep going,' he thought. 'It mostly just needs somebody paying attention.'
Tsumugi lowered herself onto the step beside him with the slow care of a woman carrying a second person, and read over his shoulder. "What are you trying to prove with all of this, anyway?"
Ryo didn't answer right away.
"People used to die from being cold," he said, as if reminding her of something the whole world kept forgetting. "Just cold. And from the dark. And from little cuts that went bad, and water that looked completely fine." He turned a page to where the real notes were. "And then somebody figured each one out. Fire. Medicine. Boiling the water. Every single thing that used to kill people, somebody just — looked at it long enough that it stopped being allowed to."
"And you've decided to look at the rest."
"Somebody has to." He shrugged, like the conclusion was obvious and slightly overdue. "Sickness. Getting old. Losing people. They're not impossible, Mom. Nobody's finished with them yet. That's all. That's the only difference."
The sheet snapped on the line above them.
His method, which he was very proud of, was simple. You watched a living thing. You found out what it actually needed to keep being alive — the real thing, not the thing everyone assumed — and you wrote it down, so that no one would ever have to guess again. The beetle needed the wet bark and not the dry. The maple by the gate needed the bad soil; the good soil had killed the first one, which made no sense and was true anyway. His father needed to not skip lunch on the days he claimed he wasn't hungry. The old woman at the market needed someone to say her name back to her, because she had started, quietly, to lose it.
Ryo wrote all of it down. Page by page, he was building the one book that had never been written: a complete and honest account of how to keep every living thing alive. Death, as far as he could tell, was just the part of the data nobody had bothered to fill in yet.
"I'll science it until it works," he said. "So nobody has to lose anybody. Ever."
His mother's smile didn't fall. But something moved behind it — something with years on it, something that had once known the exact weight of a blade and had spent a long time training itself never to let that knowledge show.
"And if it doesn't work?" she said.
He looked genuinely affronted by the suggestion. "Then I did the science wrong."
Tsumugi laughed, and then she stopped laughing, and she brushed the hair off his forehead the way she did when she wanted an excuse to keep her hand near his face a second longer.
"You keep trying to save the world like it's a broken toy," she said.
"Is that bad?"
"No, baby." Something in her voice had gone very gentle, and very far away. "It's just going to hurt."
-----
Mei came through the back gate that afternoon without knocking, on the grounds that she had long ago classified the Kenzaki yard as public land.
Scraped knees. A bandage on one elbow. The expression of a person arriving to contest a legal document.
"I brought revisions," she said.
Ryo shut the notebook against his chest. "You haven't even read this edition."
"You still spell chrysalis wrong."
"You don't know that."
"You always spell chrysalis wrong."
"That's pattern-based prejudice."
"That's evidence."
Tsumugi put a hand over her mouth.
"No laughing," Ryo told her, pointing. "This is peer review." He turned back to find Mei's hand already out, palm up.
"Book."
"No."
"Book."
"It's not ready."
"That's the entire reason I'm here."
"You enjoy being awful."
"I enjoy the truth."
"You enjoy the truth when it makes me lose."
She took the notebook out of his hands while he was still assembling a defense, and went through the pages with the grave cruelty of a judge who had seen more than enough already.
"You wrote that ants are loyal."
"They are."
"You watched one ant."
"It was representing the others."
"It fell into the jam."
"Out of loyalty."
"It fell into the jam because you put jam there."
Ryo opened his mouth, then thought better of it and closed it. Tsumugi made a small sound that was unmistakably a laugh wearing the costume of a cough.
Mei turned another page, and slowed.
"Flowers don't come back if you apologize to them."
The yard went a little quieter.
Ryo looked down at his knees. "I know that."
Her hand stopped on the paper. Even at ten, she had a way of catching the things that were trying hardest to slip past being caught — which was the reason she annoyed him, and the reason he could not do without her. She handed the notebook back more gently than she'd taken it.
"Then don't write it the way they do."
He looked at the page. Beneath Dried Hydrangea, in his own careful hand, he had written: May recover if spoken to enough.
He looked at it for a long while. Then he drew a line through recover, and under it, slowly, he wrote:
Does not recover.
He paused over the page. Then he added one more line.
Still should be spoken to.
Mei leaned over his shoulder to read it. "That's better."
"You're mean."
"I'm accurate."
"Meanly accurate."
"Someone has to be."
Tsumugi looked between the two of them, the late sun caught in her hair. "Keep her," she said. "She'll make the book true on the days you're trying too hard to make it kind."
Both children looked up.
Mei nodded slowly, like a girl accepting a sacred office. "I accept."
"I didn't offer you a position," Ryo said.
"You needed to."
"Your title is assistant."
"Corrector."
"No."
"Forever corrector."
"That sounds like a curse."
She smiled. "It is."
She would still be doing it at seventeen. She would never once say a single sappy word about it, and she would never miss a single day.
-----
That evening Kujuro found him out on the back step, watching the sky go purple over the rooftops, and sat down beside him with a sound that took the whole day personally.
"Never become an adult," Kujuro said.
Ryo didn't look up. "Because of taxes?"
"Because chairs turn against you."
He wrote it in the margin. Kujuro leaned over to look. "Did you just write adulthood is chair warfare?"
"Possibly."
"Good. Important work."
Inside, Tsumugi was humming as she cut vegetables, one hand drifting now and then to her belly as if soothing a secret storm. Kujuro watched her through the window, and his face did something Ryo didn't yet have a word for. Then he looked down at the notebook.
"Your mother tells me you're going to keep everything alive."
Ryo stiffened. "She reported my research?"
"She reports all dangerous activity."
"It isn't dangerous."
Kujuro was quiet a moment. "It can be."
Ryo looked at him.
His father turned his big hands over, hunting for the words the way men do when they wish the truth came with handles to lift it by. "There are two kinds of strength people line up to praise," he said. "The loud kind is the easy one. Blades. Blood. Winning. Standing up because somebody else went down."
Ryo glanced at his own hands. "And the quiet kind?"
Kujuro looked back toward the window. "The quiet kind is noticing the exact moment someone stops laughing." The kitchen light lay warm across his face. "It's knowing how your mother takes her tea on the days she's tired and won't say so. It's seeing that your friend's gone sharp because she's frightened. It's carrying the heavy thing without making the whole room watch you lift it." He let out a slow breath. "That one saves more people than the loud kind ever has."
"Then why does everyone only ever talk about blades?"
His father's smile was a tired thing. "Because quiet strength has never once looked good in a statue."
Ryo turned that over far longer than his father probably expected him to.
"That's the kind I've got, right?" he asked. "The quiet one. Looking at things. Keeping them."
Kujuro set a hand on the back of his son's head, big and warm and careful, and for a moment didn't seem able to answer at all.
"Yeah," he said finally. "I think that's exactly the kind you've got." His hand stayed where it was. "Do me a favor and never trade it for the other one. No matter who asks."
"Who'd ask?"
His father didn't answer that. He just looked back at the kitchen window, where his wife was humming a song she'd never once managed to sing in the right key, and held on to the back of his son's head a little while longer.
-----
The next day Tsumugi took him out past the old bridge, down to where the spider lilies grew in red crowds along the riverbank. She brought the notebook, a spool of red thread, and the particular look she wore when she had decided a lesson was going to hurt and was worth the hurt anyway.
Ryo eyed the spool. "If this is sewing, I'm retiring from childhood."
"It isn't sewing."
"Good. Sewing has no sense of urgency."
"You are ten."
"I have deadlines."
She tied one end of the thread around his finger and the other around her own.
"Pull."
He pulled. The thread snapped.
He frowned. "Bad thread."
"No," she said. "Living thread."
"Living things break?"
"Living things can be broken. That's a different sentence, and you'll want to know the difference one day."
He turned the snapped ends over in his palm. "Then what's the point of holding on?"
She tied a fresh length between them. This time she didn't pull. She just laid it gently across both their open hands and left it there.
"The cutting was never up to you," she said. "The holding on is. That part is yours. All of it, right up to the very end."
The river ran on under the bridge, bright and entirely uninterested in any of it.
"That's unfair."
"Yes."
"You're supposed to say something wiser than that."
"I'm wise enough not to lie to you."
He looked up at her. The wind pulled a few strands of hair across her cheek, and for one strange second she didn't look like his mother at all — she looked like someone the world had once come after, hard, and somehow not managed to keep.
"Mom," he said. "When you were little, what did you want to fix?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"A great many things," she said at last. "I wanted a great many things, before I was your mother." She smiled, and the smile cost her something he wouldn't be able to name for years. "Some of those wants stop fitting, after a while. Even when you still remember exactly how they felt to wear."
"But you remember."
"I remember everything," she said. "That's the trouble with people like us."
He didn't understand it then. He would.
She opened the notebook to a clean page and guided his hand until the pencil met the paper.
"Here's the part I actually came down here to teach you," she said. "A book can't keep a thing alive, Ryo."
His throat went tight. "Then what's it for?"
"It can keep it loved." She closed her hand warm over his. "That's a different promise. And it's the one you can actually keep."
The river threw up a flash of silver beneath them.
"Even after," she said.
Ryo looked at the river for a long time. 'A book keeps it loved,' he thought. 'But loved isn't the same as here.' He looked at the blank page under his hand, and at his mother's fingers folded over his, and he made the only decision a boy like that was ever going to make.
"Then I'll do both," he said. "I'll keep them loved, the way you said. And I'll keep them alive, the way I said. I'll get so good at the science that nothing ever has to be 'even after.'" He nodded, settling it, the way he settled everything. "I'll build a world where the thread doesn't get cut at all."
And his mother — who knew, far better than her son ever would, exactly how a thread sounds in the instant it goes — looked at him with her whole face, and let nothing underneath it show.
"I believe you," she said.
And the worst of it, the thing he would spend the rest of his short life never quite understanding, was that she meant it.
-----
That night he opened the notebook to the first clean page after his father's entry, and at the top, in the careful block letters he saved for the things that mattered most, he wrote down the real project — not the beetles, not the maples, but the whole of it.
HOW TO KEEP EVERYONE. So no one ever has to lose anyone. — solve by:
He left the date blank. He didn't have one yet. He was ten; he figured he had time.
He was ten years old. He had a crooked backyard and a fence that leaned whenever the wind showed off. He had a mother who couldn't carry a tune and never once minded, a father who had set down something terrible in order to make mackerel on a Tuesday, and a best friend whose entire way of loving him was refusing to let one wrong word stand. He had decided, with the complete and unembarrassed certainty that only a child can manage, that he was going to study the world until death stopped working.
And in that last summer — the last one in which every single person he loved was still breathing at the same time, in the same town, under the same leaning fence — not one of them could find it in themselves to tell him he couldn't.
So no one did.
And Ryo Kenzaki kept writing.
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 87