The Shiina family home. Dinnertime.
Taki had braced herself for a scolding from her parents. After all, she'd broken a promise and run off like a deserter.
But there was none at all.
Both her father and her mother were only worried about her. They didn't seem to mind in the slightest that she'd skipped out; instead they kept asking whether she'd gotten caught in the rain, whether she wanted to go soak in a hot bath.
[Come on. Why are you all being so nice to me? I...]
She'd gotten hungry on the walk home from school, so she'd gone a little wild at the Yuigahama Cake Shop by the roadside and stuffed herself half full on egg tarts and souffles.
Which meant that even though dinner was her favorite — soba noodles and almond tofu — she couldn't get much of it down.
"Little Taki, you should eat more. You're still growing, you know."
"I know, I know."
But I've been on a diet lately.
"Your big sister brewed you some of that coffee you love. Have a little after you eat — but not too much, or you won't be able to sleep tonight."
"Huh? Okay."
Family. What a lovely word. At the very least, Shiina Taki's family all loved her dearly — even the room with the best light in the house had been given to her.
So unlike most troubled girls, Taki wasn't actually starved for affection.
She just didn't have any friends, that was all.
Dinner went on. Countless topics were raised at the table and countless topics were dropped halfway through, and Taki paid little attention to any of them.
But one remark from her mother caught her interest at once.
"That time Little Taki fell in the water, it scared me half to death. Thank goodness there was a kind girl from your school who saved you."
[A kind girl from school, huh.]
The question slipped out of Taki before she thought about it. "So what happened to her afterward?"
"Oh, oh, that's exactly what reminded me of it. The other day I saw the name of the girl who saved you in the new students' handbook at your school. What a coincidence, right? She transferred away back then — I never expected she'd come back to Haneoka Girls' School."
"Huh? Seriously?"
The spoon slipped from her hand. For some reason she thought of the girl she'd seen on the way home from school that afternoon.
That streak of orange-red, more captivating than the setting sun, had burned itself deep into Shiina Taki's heart.
Taki swallowed her mouthful of food, confusion creeping into her voice.
"What's her name? Now that I think about it, all these years and I've never had the chance to thank her."
"Ah, her. Her name is Noshiro Chiose."
The smile on her mother's face froze, and that gave Taki a very bad feeling.
"But, well, her situation is a little unusual. She..."
[My name is Noshiro Chiose. I'm fifteen this year, a second-year in the middle school division of Haneoka Girls' School. But compared to the other children, I'm just a little bit unusual.]
Noshiro Chiose stopped writing and gazed calmly out at the moon on the horizon.
With a long sigh, she set her pen moving across the diary again.
[Unfortunately, I lost my hearing. I'm hearing-impaired.]
The nib halted there and wrote nothing more. Mentioning her own unfortunate fate stirred no sadness in Noshiro Chiose — on the contrary, the corners of her mouth curved up in a beautiful arc.
She walked to the full-length mirror and studied the self reflected there, returned once more to a middle schooler's body.
[Hee hee. Wonderful.]
The year she met first-year Shiina Taki, Chiose had known it was one of the very few chances in this life she would get to manufacture an opportunity.
Question: how do you raise the score on making someone carry this regret for the rest of her life?
Answer: you make her keep doing the wrong thing, over and over.
Shiina Taki fell into the water. She saved Shiina Taki.
Chiose had known even then that it made an excellent starting point, so she hadn't hesitated to spend the trait that could only be used once in a lifetime.
The result was splendid. Taki was rescued, and Chiose came down with a fever that wouldn't break, all because she'd pulled Taki out of the lake.
In the end, her hearing was damaged.
Chiose stroked the hearing aid in her ear with something like tenderness, feeling not the slightest grief over such a small injury.
Short of death, everything is just a scrape.
[Second year of middle school already. A very good opportunity — one I already know about — is about to come along.]
Soon Sakiko would come crashing into the lives of Shiina Taki and a good many other girls. Noshiro Chiose had thought of a way to play this that she'd never considered before.
[What if I joined Crychic myself, just once? I could gather information and deepen my connection with the victims through the band at the same time.]
Hee hee. Just imagining it makes it feel like a very entertaining stretch of life.
Chiose walked toward the balcony, passing the electric keyboard and the memorial photographs of this life's parents. She leaned on the railing and looked across at the small building opposite.
If she remembered right, that Shiina Taki girl lived over there.
"What? She has a hearing impairment?"
Dinner at the Shiina family home wasn't over yet.
Shiina Taki's stomach dropped. She'd had little appetite to begin with, and now she couldn't manage a single bite.
Her mother said the person who had saved her ended up more badly hurt than Taki herself.
The girl had run a high fever for days on end, and once she recovered she was left with a hearing impairment. Then she transferred schools and vanished without a trace, so the Shiina family never even got the chance to thank her.
It was only thanks to Mrs. Shiina's sharp eyes that she'd spotted the name on the student list posted on the notice board.
"That's right. I wonder if she's doing any better now. Maybe she's fully recovered by now."
"What does she look like?"
"Let me think. It's been so many years since I saw her, but I ought to remember."
Her mother's thinking didn't take all that long, but it was long enough to be agonizing for Taki.
"If I'm remembering right, white hair and red eyes. I went to see her the day she was discharged."
Shiina Maki took a small sip from her coffee cup and patched the gaps in their mother's memory.
"Yes, yes, that's it — white hair and red eyes. I'm getting old; my memory isn't as good as you young people's."
A white-haired, red-eyed girl at Haneoka Girls' School. There couldn't be any mistake, then.
"I'm full. I'm going back to my room."
Taki glanced at the soba noodles she'd barely touched and walked back to her bedroom without waiting for anyone's reaction.
She threw herself straight onto the bed. The scene from that afternoon kept playing across her vision.
"So that girl wrecked her own life just to save me."
That's just...
"This got heavy fast. Ugh."
She smothered her head with a pillow as if she could escape the world that way, but the world was right there. There's no running from it.
Taki sprang up off the bed again, sat down at her desk, and sank into thought.
"No good. I owe her this. I have to do something."
But what could she possibly do?
And it was her own carelessness that had put her in the lake in the first place. Someone had paid a terrible price to save her... would that girl called Noshiro Chiose hate her for it?
Taki didn't dare follow the thought any further.
"Ugh."
The tangle of feelings inside her escaped as one short sigh.
Tonight would almost certainly be a sleepless one.
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