[Village Chat · Ikazuchi Residents · 12:07 a.m.] Morita Keiko: why are ALL my lights on. i didn't turn them on. the broken ones are on too
* * *
The Arashi House — Just Before Midnight
His mother's hand was on his ankle.
Akio lay still and looked at it. She was asleep, breathing slowly, but her fingers were curled round his ankle bone the way they'd been curled there every night since the field. If he moved, she'd wake.
On his other side, his father was asleep sitting up, with his back against the wall and the big wrench across his knees. He'd said he would stay awake all night. He had lasted until about half past ten.
Outside, the dogs were silent. Every one of them.
The crowd was coming up the hill. Akio could feel it the way you feel someone standing behind you. It was past the shrine steps now. Past the Morita shop. It wasn't hurrying.
He thought about waking his father. His father would get up with the wrench. He would go to the door. He would stand between his family and whatever was outside, because that was what Kazuo Arashi did. He'd been doing it since the night Akio was born, and he'd keep doing it for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be.
And the crowd would walk straight through him.
Akio didn't know how he knew that. He only knew that his father's hum was one steady heartbeat, and the man coming up the hill was a thousand of them packed together. It was like putting a candle in front of a bonfire.
He was scared. He was more scared than he had been in the paddy, because in the paddy the danger had only been him. He could feel his heart going fast, and the fizz rising with it, and he pushed it back down. If it came out in here, it would come out into his parents.
So he made a plan.
It was the same plan he had made when he was five. It was the only plan he knew.
He would go where nobody was. If the man wanted him, the man could have him outside, away from the house, away from the two people asleep on either side of him.
Very slowly, he slid his foot out from under his mother's hand. He did it so gently that her fingers only twitched and closed on the blanket instead. He stood up. He picked his way over his father's legs, past the wrench, to the paper door, and slid it open an inch at a time.
Neither of them woke.
He was seven years old. He was very good at being quiet. He'd had a lot of practice.
* * *
The Garden Gate
The man was standing at the gate when Akio came out.
He'd taken off his coat. He had on a dark shirt, and his face, in the moonlight, was still kind. He was looking at the gatepost, where there was a single persimmon and a small cup of sake that someone had left that afternoon.
"Offerings," he said, without looking up. "How old-fashioned."
"They're for me," said Akio.
"I know." The man smiled. "I was hoping you'd come out. It's much nicer, just the two of us. I didn't want to wake your parents."
"I didn't want you to either."
"Then we agree on something already." He turned to face the boy properly. "You were waiting for me."
"You fizz very loudly."
"So I've been told. Well, only by you." The man stepped through the gate and onto the garden path. He moved without any sound at all. Akio could feel one of the hums inside him working, one of the quiet ones, swallowing his footsteps before they reached the air. "I'm going to take something from you, Akio. I want you to know that. I think you're the kind of boy who'd rather know."
"What?"
"Your quirk."
Akio's mouth went dry. He didn't know what a person was without their quirk. He had never met anyone who'd had one taken. He wasn't sure there would be anything left of him.
"Will it hurt?"
"No," said the man.
That was a lie. Akio didn't know it was a lie. He couldn't feel lies. He could only feel hums, and the man's hums didn't change at all when he said it.
"It's a rule," said Akio. He took one step back, and his heel hit the porch step behind him. "Don't touch."
"I know." The man's voice was gentle. "I'm sorry."
He moved.
* * *
Akio didn't see him cross the garden. One moment the man was by the gate, three metres away, and the next he was right in front of him, crouching, his right hand already on Akio's head, fingers spread across his hair. The ringed hand. The silver was cold against his scalp.
Something reached into him.
It wasn't like being touched. It was like being opened. Akio felt it slide down from the man's palm, through his skull, into the middle of him, the place where the fizz lived, and start to feel around for something it could hold.
The man felt it too.
He had done this more times than he could count. He'd taken quirks from soldiers and children and gods-in-the-making, and every one of them had been the same. A quirk sat inside a body the way a stone sits in a river. You reached in, you found its edges, and you lifted it out. The body went on without it. The river closed over the hole.
This one had no edges.
He reached for it and there was no stone. There was only the river. The boy's whole body was the quirk. Every nerve. Every cell. Every drop of blood, humming with the same white current. There was nothing to lift out, because there was nothing in him that wasn't it.
And then the current found the hand that was reaching for it.
* * *
It came up his arm like a train.
The man's palm turned white, then black. His fingers locked straight as the muscles seized. The silver ring on his middle finger glowed red, then orange, and then it melted, running down his knuckle like wax off a candle and sinking into the skin.
The smell was the worst part. It was the smell of a kitchen fire.
He didn't let go.
He'd lived a very long time by not letting go. He reached deep inside himself for one of the quiet hums, the one he'd taken from a man who could survive being run over by a lorry, and threw it into his arm. The skin stopped blackening. For a moment, it held.
Then Akio's fear got away from him.
Until then he had held it down, the way he held it down at school and at the dinner table, every day of his life. But the hand on his head was burning, and the man wasn't letting go, and he could feel his father's hum in the house behind him, starting to wake.
The fizz inside him doubled.
The man's durability quirk lasted about one second more. Then his hand began to come apart. The skin split across the back of the palm in long, crackling lines, like a sausage left too long on a grill. Two of his fingers fused together at the knuckle. The nail on his thumb popped off and spun away into the dark.
He let go.
He stood up and stepped back, two metres, three, and held his ruined hand up in front of his face. It was smoking. It wasn't really a hand anymore. It was the shape of where a hand had been, black and red and shiny, with a lump of silver sunk into the middle of it.
He looked at it for a long time without saying anything.
Akio looked at it too. His heart was pounding. His hair was standing straight up off his head, and blue sparks were crawling over his arms like ants.
"You have nice hands," he heard himself say.
It came out as a whisper. He didn't know why he said it. That afternoon, on the porch, he had noticed the man's hands, clean and neat, with the silver ring. It was the only thought in his head that wasn't fear.
The man looked at him.
Then Akio's stomach turned over. He had done that. He hadn't meant to, and he had done it anyway.
"Had," he whispered.
* * *
There was a crash from the house.
The paper door burst open, and Kazuo Arashi came out into the garden with the wrench in both hands, barefoot, roaring a word that wasn't really a word.
"Get away from him!"
"Dad, no—"
Kazuo swung the wrench at the man's head.
He wasn't a fighter. He'd never been one. He was a farmer's son who fixed solar panels, and he swung the wrench like a man swinging an axe at a log. But he swung it with everything he had, and he swung it at the head of the man who'd hurt his son.
The man didn't dodge. He just raised his left hand, the good one, and opened his palm toward Kazuo.
The air in front of him thumped.
It hit Kazuo in the chest like a car. It lifted him clean off the ground and threw him backward across the garden, through the low wooden fence and into the field beside the house, where he landed on his side with a sound like a bundle of sticks snapping.
The wrench clanged off the porch steps.
Kazuo didn't get up. He made a noise, low and wet, and curled onto his side with his arm folded under him at an angle arms don't fold.
"Kazuo!"
Ayaka was in the doorway. She'd seen it. She was already running across the garden toward her husband.
The man turned his head and looked at her.
He had a ruined right hand and a working left one, and he couldn't touch the boy. That was fine. He'd learned a long time ago that there are always other ways to hold something. You don't need to grip a thing directly. You only need to grip whatever it can't let go of.
He took a step toward Ayaka.
* * *
Akio's mother was running across the garden in her sleeping clothes. His father was lying in the field with his arm bent the wrong way. And the crowd was turning toward his mother.
Akio stopped holding his breath.
* * *
Every light in Ikazuchi came on at once.
Not just the ones that were switched off. All of them. The streetlamps along the main path, which hadn't worked since 2041. The broken neon sign above the Morita shop, which had last spelled anything in Akio's grandfather's time. The old phones in drawers all over the village, flat and dead for years, lit up in their drawers and began to ring. Fujita's government tablet switched itself on in the community hall and played the national anthem at full volume.
The satellite dish on the hall roof hummed so hard it rang like a bell.
The sky above the valley had been clear all evening, full of stars. Now the stars went out. Clouds rolled together over the Arashi house out of nothing, thick and grey and fast, and the bottom of them lit up from inside, flickering, with white lines crawling across their bellies like cracks spreading through ice.
The air in the garden turned thick and sharp. It tasted of metal.
Akio was standing exactly where he'd been. His eyes had gone white. Not glowing, exactly. Just white, all the way across, like the inside of a light bulb.
He wasn't thinking anymore. There was no plan left in him, no rule, nothing but his mother running across the dark garden and the crowd turning to meet her.
"Don't," he said, "touch my mum."
* * *
The man stopped.
He stood very still in the middle of the Arashi garden with his ruined hand held against his chest and looked at the boy.
He had lived a very long time. Long enough to have seen many terrible things, and caused most of them. Long enough to know the difference between a threat and a weather report. What he was looking at now was not a seven-year-old making a threat.
He did the arithmetic. He was very good at arithmetic.
His right hand was gone. He had a quirk that would grow it back, but slowly, over weeks, and it would never be quite the same. That was the first number.
He could take the mother. It would be easy. But then he'd be holding a woman in front of a boy whose eyes had gone white. The boy wouldn't stop. A child that age didn't understand bargaining. He understood mine and not mine. And the man still didn't know how much of the boy there was. A house? A field? A valley? He'd come up this hill expecting a quirk the size of a stone. He'd found a river, and he didn't know how wide it was.
That was the second number.
Every light in the village was on. Thirty-odd houses, waking up, coming to their windows. Some with phones in their hands. Phones that suddenly had full batteries.
That was the third.
And the boy was seven. He would be eight next year. Then nine. Then fifteen, and thirty, and fifty. Whatever he was tonight, he would be more of it every single year.
The man had not lived this long by fighting things he didn't understand.
He lowered his good hand.
"Well," he said quietly. "That's that, then."
He took a step back toward the gate. Then another. Akio didn't move. The sparks crawled over his arms. The clouds overhead flickered and muttered.
At the gate, the man stopped and looked back.
"We'll talk again, Akio," he said. "When you're older."
"Don't come back," said Akio. His voice shook, and he hated that it shook. "Don't ever come back here."
The man smiled at that, very slightly, the way an adult smiles at a child who has said never. There was nothing kind left in it at all. Then he turned and walked down the hill into the dark, through a village where every light was on and every door was opening, and none of the people standing in those doors ever remembered seeing him pass.
* * *
Akio felt him go. One kilometre. Two. At three, the car. The car started. It didn't stop again.
The crowd was gone.
The clouds overhead began to come apart, slowly, the way they'd come together. One by one the stars came back. Down in the village, the streetlamps that hadn't worked since 2041 flickered, buzzed, and went dark again.
Akio's eyes went grey.
His legs went at the same time. He sat down on the garden path, hard, and stayed there. He was shaking all over. Now that it was finished, he couldn't make it stop.
* * *
The Garden — Twenty Minutes Later
Half the village was in the Arashi garden. The other half was on the way.
Granny Tome knelt in the field with Kazuo's head on her knees and her medical tablet on the soil beside her. For once, the tablet was working perfectly. It had never been so fully charged in its life.
"Four ribs," she said. "Maybe five. And the arm's broken in two places. But his lungs are clear." She looked up at Ayaka. "He's going to be all right."
Kazuo was grey in the face and sweating, but conscious. He was looking at his son.
Akio was sitting on the porch step, wrapped in a blanket that Morita Keiko had brought. His mother was beside him with her arms around him and her chin on top of his head. The sparks had stopped crawling over him a long time ago, but he was still warm to the touch, warmer than a person should be.
She was holding him anyway. Skin was safe again, mostly. And she would have held him if it wasn't.
"I'm sorry," said Akio.
"For what?"
"I went outside."
"Yes," said Ayaka. "You did."
"I thought if I went where nobody was—"
"I know what you thought." She held him tighter. "Akio. Listen to me. When somebody comes to hurt you, you don't go where nobody is. You come to us. Do you understand? You wake us up. You always wake us up."
"He'd have hurt Dad."
"He hurt Dad anyway."
Akio didn't say anything. He looked across the garden at his father in the field.
"That's what families are for," said Ayaka quietly. "We get hurt together. That's the deal. You don't get to opt out of it just because you're the strong one."
He thought about that for a long time.
He would think about it, on and off, for the next hundred years. He would get it wrong again many times before he got it right.
* * *
Isamu Tsuchiya was standing by the broken fence with his phone in his hand.
He had filmed it. Of course he had filmed it. He had woken up when every light in his house switched on at once, seen the clouds gathering over the Arashi roof, and run up the hill with his phone already recording. He'd got the man at the gate. The man's face. The ruined hand. The boy with white eyes. The clouds.
For once, his phone hadn't died.
It was the best video he'd ever taken. It was the best video anyone had ever taken.
He showed it to Kazuo, crouching beside him in the field.
Kazuo watched it in silence. Then he looked up at Isamu.
"Delete it," he said.
"Kazuo—"
"If he finds out there's a video of his face, he'll come back for it. And for you. Delete it, Isamu-san. Please."
Isamu stood there for a long moment, looking at the screen. At the man's face, frozen in mid-step at the gate.
Then he deleted it.
It was the best video he ever took, and nobody ever saw it.
* * *
Dawn
Kazuo was laid out on the futon inside with his arm strapped and his ribs bandaged, and Tome had given him something that made him sleepy but not quite asleep. The ambulance from Takayama was coming up the mountain road at first light. Ayaka had walked to the bottom of the garden on her own to feel the sky, and said the rain would hold off until it got here.
Akio sat beside his father with his knees pulled up to his chin.
"Dad."
"Mm."
"He's coming back."
Kazuo opened his eyes. "How do you know?"
"He wasn't scared." Akio was looking at the wall, not at his father. "When I did the lights. When I did the clouds. Everyone else in the village was scared. I could feel it. But he wasn't. He went really quiet inside. All of them did. All his people. They went still and neat, like..." He searched for it. "Like you, Dad. When you measure a wire twice before you cut it."
Kazuo didn't say anything for a while.
"He was counting," said Akio.
"Counting what?"
"Me."
It was a strange thing to hear your seven-year-old son say at five in the morning, with four broken ribs. Kazuo found he believed every word of it.
"Okay," he said. "So he's coming back. What do we do about it?"
He meant it as a real question. He had stopped thinking of his son as just a child somewhere around midnight, when he'd watched him through a broken fence, shaking and white-eyed, ordering a monster off their land.
Akio turned and looked at him.
"Teach me," he said.
"Teach you what?"
"Electricity. How it works. Properly. All of it." His voice was very steady. "Batteries and wires and circuits, and why copper melts, and how lightning goes up and down. And how rods work, and why rubber stops it. All of it, Dad. Everything you know."
"Why?"
"Because he's going to learn about me," said Akio. "So I have to learn faster."
Kazuo looked at his son for a long time. Then he pointed, carefully, with his good hand, toward the shelf in the corner of the room.
On it were his old textbooks. Real paper ones, from the technical college in Takayama he'd attended for one year, before his father's back gave out and he came home to run the farm. Electrical Principles, Volume 1. Power Systems. Introduction to Semiconductors. The covers were soft with age, the corners curled.
Akio went over and pulled down the thickest one. It was so heavy he had to sit on the floor to hold it. He opened it in the middle.
"Those are college books," said Kazuo. "I was nineteen when I read them, and half of it went over my head. You're seven."
"You said they were about electricity."
"They are."
"Then I already know some of it." Akio turned a page. "I just don't know the words for it."
Kazuo opened his mouth to argue. Then he closed it again, because he was remembering things.
He was remembering his son at three, tapping a blank stretch of kitchen wall and saying "busy," at exactly the spot where the cable ran behind the plaster. At five, pointing to the one weak cell in the battery wall a full day before Kazuo found it with his meter. Last month, reading his mother's weather tablet manual for fun, because it was the only new book in the house.
Mr. Kondo had said it at every parent-teacher meeting, in his careful way. He reads well beyond his age. He asks questions I have to look up. Kazuo had always nodded and been proud and not thought about it much further.
Most people learn electricity from a book first and then, if they're lucky, see it do what the book said. Akio had been feeling it since the night he was born. For him, the book wasn't a lesson. It was a map of a country he already lived in.
He stopped turning pages. He had found a diagram: two flat plates facing each other, with a gap between them.
"What's that one?"
Kazuo looked. Then, for the first time since the garden, he nearly laughed, and it hurt his ribs.
"That's a capacitor," he said.
"Mum says you used to call me that. When I was a baby."
"I did. She told me off for it."
"Is it a good thing to be?"
Kazuo thought about it properly, because his son had asked properly. "It's a useful thing to be. It holds charge, and lets it go when it's needed. The bad ones let it all go at once."
Akio looked at the two plates for a long time.
"Start with the blue one," said Kazuo. "Chapter one is boring. Read it anyway. Anything you don't understand, you bring to me, and we'll work it out together."
Akio put the heavy book back and took down the blue one.
He was on page forty when the ambulance pulled up at the gate. As they carried Kazuo out on the stretcher, he turned his head and asked what chapter one was about.
"Charge," said Akio. "It was boring."
"Told you."
* * *
Later that morning, after the ambulance had taken Kazuo down the mountain to Takayama, Akio went back out to the garden gate.
The persimmon was still on the gatepost. The sake cup had fallen off and broken.
He crouched down and looked at the path.
He found it next to the gatepost, half buried in the gravel where it had dropped. A small lump of silver, smooth and twisted, the size of a fingertip. It had a dark crust on one side that he didn't look at too closely.
It had been a ring, once.
He picked it up and held it in his palm. It was cold. It didn't hum at all. It was just metal, now. But it was the only piece of the man that the man had left behind.
He didn't want it as a prize. He wanted it so he would remember: the clean hand on the porch that afternoon, and the black thing in the garden that night, and that the second one was his doing.
Akio closed his hand around it and put it in his pocket.
He still has it.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Village Chat · Ikazuchi Residents · (the next day)
Headman Fujita: To whoever turned on the tablet in the community hall at midnight and played the national anthem at full volume: it has not stopped. Headman Fujita: It has been playing for eleven hours. Headman Fujita: I cannot turn it off. Morita Keiko: have you tried unplugging it Headman Fujita: It is not plugged in, Keiko. Ono Daisuke: it's actually a very good anthem Headman Fujita: Daisuke, I have heard it four hundred times.