THE MOON · NINETEEN MONTHS SINCE THE SHIP LEFT
The sun set four times on the Moon that day, and three of those were Megumi's fault.
The sky rig was the machine that made the daylight. It lived in a crawlspace above the great glass ceilings.
It had developed a stutter in the dusk cycle. Urahara said it would take an afternoon and a second pair of hands.
Megumi volunteered before he could stop himself. He was twelve, and his voice had gone somewhere in the last year and not entirely come back.
"The green lead," Urahara said, from under the housing.
There were two green leads.
Megumi knelt on a gantry above twenty-one people's evening and picked one. He picked wrong.
The base got its sunset at half past two. It got another at three. It got a third at ten past four.
The rig also pushed a smell of rain through the vents at every dusk, because Urahara held that people go strange without weather. So the mess had smelled of rain three times before supper.
A cosmologist from Caltech stopped in the corridor. He looked up at the ceiling and said aloud to nobody, "I don't think I'm well."
"Solar flare," said Urahara.
The cosmologist blinked. "We're on the far side."
"Particle flux wanders. Plays merry hell with the timers." Urahara put a bowl of something hot into the man's hands and steered him at a bench. "Third one this quarter. I've written to somebody about it."
He held the lie for eleven minutes. Megumi timed him and waited for him to crack.
He held it through two more questions and a whiteboard. Then a woman from CERN asked whether the flux would spoil the sample library.
He answered her in numbers that had not existed before he said them. He was inventing them as he went. She wrote them down.
Megumi made it as far as the corridor.
He laughed until his ribs ached. Then he laughed until he had to sit down on the floor.
The unforgivable part came next. Urahara went past with the empty bowl, did not look down, said, "Flares are no joke," and kept walking.
* * *
The shadow-hall was the long black room built for his training. It had no light in it and no edges you could find.
It drank whatever noise you made. That was the only thing about it he could stand.
He wanted the third one. He had wanted it since he was ten.
His technique kept animals asleep inside his own shadow, and he could call them up out of it to fight for him. Shikigami, his father called them.
Two of them were already his. The pair of dogs, and then the toad. The third lay deeper than either, and he had never once been able to hold it.
He set his hands. He gathered the cold that lived under his ribs. He did not reach down.
The not reaching was the whole of it. The shadows lay at different depths, and the strong ones lay deepest. A boy who grabbed for the deep ones before he was ready got taken apart by them.
Grow the small ones first, Urahara had told him. Leave the deep water alone.
It had taken him a year and a half to stop being insulted by how small that advice was.
The dogs came up out of his own shadow, white first and then black, and they came up whole. Shoulder-high. Steady.
A year ago, holding one of them had taken everything he had. Now they simply stood in the room while he thought about something else.
The toad followed, and sat where it was put. When his grip slipped, a shikigami went straight back to smoke. This one had not dissolved in four months.
Then he breathed out and reached level instead of down. It was like reaching along a shelf in the dark for a thing you already know is there.
He felt the third one before anything else.
The hall had no weather, and then the hall had weather. Air moved across his face.
Something vast unfolded above him with a sound like a sail taking wind. The dark went darker in a shape with wings in it.
The nue was the big one. A bird, near enough, if a bird could be the size of a hall.
It climbed, and kept climbing, and the whole length of that long dead room was not quite enough for it.
He had not dragged it up. He had not so much as reached for it. He had simply got strong enough, and it had surfaced on its own to look at him.
Megumi laughed out loud. For about four seconds.
Then the clogs whispered on the sound-eating floor. He shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked.
"Hm," said Urahara from the doorway, with two cups. "It's ugly."
"It's not ugly."
"It's hideous, and it's yours, and those aren't related facts."
He came in and stood under it with the hat tipped back, watching the dark turn over.
"Eighteen months of a dog you could actually keep. And now the deep water's come up to have a look at you."
He held out a cup. "I'd like it noted that I guessed. Land it. Feed it. Then go and be unbearable at supper."
The wings folded and the room lost its weather. Megumi glanced round.
Urahara was still looking up, and his face had gone somewhere else.
He had seen that face once before. He had been sitting on the floor of this room with blood on his mouth, the day he reached too far down and nearly lost both dogs.
He had not been able to read it then. He was twelve now, and could read it about this far. It was the face of a man doing sums.
Then the shopkeeper came back all at once, the way a shop light comes on.
"Drink that," Urahara said. "It's going cold and I'm not making another."
* * *
The gallery over the accelerator was still the only room on the Moon where nobody tried to teach him anything.
Below the glass floor the Hōgyoku turned and turned, throwing its slow petals of light up into the room.
It was the sphere his father had built. It was also the reason any of them were on the Moon at all.
Two cups on the rail. There was always a flask.
"When's he coming home?"
Urahara turned his cup a quarter-turn on the bar. "He gave me two years. Your father has never handed me a number that turned out to be decoration."
He drank. "So. Not long. Months, if I had to bet."
Megumi watched the sphere and did not say the next thing. Not for a long while.
Long enough for the base to run a dusk down the far wall and start smelling of rain.
Then he said, "Urahara."
He had never used the man's name before. He never worked out, afterwards, why he chose that afternoon to start.
The fan stopped moving.
"Mm."
"Does he want me?" Megumi kept his eyes on the glass. "Or does he just have me."
Urahara did not laugh it off, which was how Megumi knew the question had landed somewhere.
"Six years of instructions," he said. "I've read every page, and I'll give you this one for free."
He turned the cup back the other way. "Your father is a dreadful wanter. He doesn't want things. He wants outcomes."
He set the cup down on the rail. "Outcomes live in the second half of the page, with the tolerances and the schedules and who's permitted to touch what. You remember the first line."
Megumi remembered it the way he remembered his own name. "'Keep the boy company.'"
"Ahead of the reactor protocols. Ahead of the Hōgyoku." Urahara thumbed the hat back.
"Nineteen months. I've never once been handed an instruction about you that wasn't first about keeping you well. Not one. It's the sort of thing I'd notice."
And he said the last of it brightest of all. "You're not in the outcomes. You never were. You're the first line."
Megumi looked at the sphere for a long time.
"What's the second line?"
"Reactor protocols," Urahara said, and reached for the flask.
It was the fastest he had ever answered anything.
Megumi held out his cup. He had asked a boring question and got a boring answer, which is what boring questions are for.
Below them the Hōgyoku threw its slow light across the boy's face and the man's ridiculous hat.
It was the comfortable kind of quiet. Urahara had built it, carefully, over nineteen months, and Megumi had long ago stopped noticing it was built.
* * *
The machine shop smelled of wood, which nothing on the Moon did.
Urahara stopped in the doorway with his nose up, like a dog at a gate. Megumi had not got the rag over the bench in time, and he went red to the ears.
It had taken him six weeks.
Behind the lathe bay there was a store where the packing crates went to die. It held the only real timber on the Moon. The nearest other wood was on Earth, three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres away.
He had spent four evenings finding two planks without a stencil burned across the grain. Cut. Planed. Lacquered eleven times.
He had ruined three boards before this one. He carried each of them to the recycler at night, when the corridor was empty.
The board itself lay done on the bench. A full shogi set is forty pieces. Nine of them sat in a tin beside it, which left him thirty-one to carve.
The board was for his father. He had not said so, and Urahara did not ask.
"It isn't finished."
Urahara looked at it for far longer than a thing like that needed looking at.
He put one finger on the corner and turned the board a few degrees to square it to the bench. That was the only thing he did to it.
"Nine pieces," he said. "You've a while yet."
"He'll cheat," Megumi said, running his thumb along the grain. "He always cheats."
"Then make him work for it."
Urahara went out and pulled the door to behind him. Then he stood in the corridor a while, and did not go back in.
It was the face of a man doing sums. There was nobody in the corridor to see it.