[Ikazuchi Microgrid · Monthly Report · March 2065] Diesel generator hours this month: 0. Power source: Akio (6 a.m. daily). Faults: none.
* * *
Ikazuchi Village — March 2065
At six o'clock every morning, Akio Arashi walked up to the community hall, put his hand on a copper plate bolted to the wall, and powered the village for a day.
It took about ten minutes. The plate was wired to the battery bank in the hall's basement, which Kazuo had built out of forty salvaged car batteries and a great deal of swearing. Akio filled it. The battery bank fed the village. Every light, every fridge, every phone and water pump in Ikazuchi ran on what came out of his right hand before breakfast.
He had been doing it since he was twelve. The village's old diesel generator hadn't been started in three years.
"You're late," said Headman Fujita, from the bench by the door. He was eighty-five now, and he sat on that bench every morning to watch, as though someone might steal the sunrise if he didn't.
"It's two minutes past."
"Two minutes is late."
"I was up until three reading."
"Reading what?"
"Advanced Power Systems. Chapter nine. Transmission losses over long distances."
"Is it interesting?"
"No," said Akio. "But I want to know how far I can go before I start losing myself."
Fujita looked at him for a while. The boy was fifteen and nearly as tall as his father, with the same pale grey eyes he'd had as a baby and a calm, unhurried way of talking that made adults forget how young he was. He was wearing rubber boots, out of habit, though he hadn't needed them in years.
"That," said Fujita, "is not a normal thing for a boy to say before breakfast."
"I'm not a normal boy, Headman. You registered me."
"I registered you as Category E."
"And look how well I've turned out."
Fujita made a noise that might have been a laugh, if he'd been younger. Akio took his hand off the plate. On the wall, the battery gauge read full.
* * *
He was fifteen, and he could do a lot of things now.
He could feel people up to about five kilometres away, the whole valley and the next one, a soft hum for every living thing. He could feel the power lines that ran down the mountain to Takayama like veins under skin. He could run any machine in the village by touching it, gently, without breaking anything. He'd finished every one of his father's textbooks by twelve, and since then he'd been working through every book the Takayama library would lend by drone, which wasn't many.
And he could zip.
He had done it the first time at twelve, by accident, on the ridge above the shrine during a thunderstorm. One moment he was standing on the rocks. The next, he was lightning. He didn't move through the air. He became the movement, a white crack from the ridge to the bottom of the valley, and then he was a boy again, standing in the river up to his chest, soaked and very surprised.
It had been a kilometre. It had taken no time at all. He had laughed so hard he swallowed half the river.
Since then he had practised, in secret, in storms. Ridge to ridge. Tree to tree. Along the power line to the next village and back. Every time he went a bit further, and every time, he lost a bit more of himself on the way. The further he went, the harder it was to remember which parts of the lightning were him.
Chapter nine had been about that. Transmission losses. How a current weakens the further it travels, how some of it bleeds off into the air.
He wanted to know how far he could go before he didn't come back.
He hadn't told his parents about any of it.
* * *
The Satellite Link
The other thing he'd worked out at twelve was that someone was listening.
It had taken him a year to be sure. The village's satellite link sent and received data through the dish on the hall roof, and Akio could feel the signal go in and out the way you can feel your own breathing. He knew its rhythm. Messages in the morning. The weather report at noon. Fujita's government forms, Morita Keiko's shop orders, the school tablet's lessons, the village chat at all hours.
And every night, at around two in the morning, the link sent out a little more than the village had used. Not much. A thin trickle. About one part in fifty.
He'd told his father when he was thirteen. Kazuo had spent a week taking the link apart and putting it back together, and found nothing wrong with it.
"Maybe it's error checking," Kazuo had said.
"Error checking doesn't happen at two in the morning every single night, Dad."
"..."
"It's him," said Akio.
Kazuo had looked at his son for a long time. He hadn't asked who. They didn't use the man's name in the house, because they didn't have one. They called him him, and they both knew exactly what it meant.
"He's never come back," said Kazuo. "Eight years."
"He doesn't need to come back. He's reading Granny Tome's prescriptions."
His father had wanted to cut the link. Akio had talked him out of it.
"If we cut it," he'd said, "he'll know we noticed. Then he'll find another way to watch, and we won't know what it is. This way, at least we know where he's looking."
That had been two years ago. The trickle still went out every night.
Akio still felt it go, every night, at two in the morning. Like someone opening a door in another room.
* * *
The Mountain Road — Early April
The refugees came up the road on a Tuesday, four of them, on foot.
Akio felt them two hours before they arrived, the way he felt everyone. Two adults, two children. Moving slowly. One of the children was hurt; its hum was jagged and thin.
He walked down to meet them at the bend below the shrine.
They were a family. A man and a woman in their thirties, a girl of about eight, and a boy of about twelve, whom the father was carrying on his back. They had backpacks and nothing else. The woman had a burn on her neck that was weeks old and badly healed. The boy's whole left arm was wrapped in a dirty shirt.
They stopped when they saw him. The father stepped in front of his family. He had the look of a man who had been stopped on a road many times recently, and it had never been good news.
"It's okay," said Akio. "I live up there. This is Ikazuchi. Do you need a doctor?"
"Do you have one?"
"We have Granny Tome," said Akio. "She's better."
* * *
Granny Tome was eighty-eight. She no longer walked down to people. People came up to her.
She looked at the boy's arm in her front room with her tablet in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. Her hands shook now when they weren't working. They had stopped shaking the moment she started.
"Burned," she said. "Infected. A month old, at least. Who treated this?"
"Nobody," said the boy's mother. "There's nobody in Minato anymore. The clinic closed when he took the water."
"Who took the water?"
The woman looked at her husband. Her husband looked at the floor.
"Kagari," he said.
* * *
They told the story in the community hall that evening, in front of most of the village, with bowls of Keiko's miso soup in their hands. Their name was Kano, and the boy with the burned arm was called Yuto. They had come from Minato, the port ward in the south of Nagoya, where the docks were.
Akio stood at the back of the hall with his arms folded and listened.
"After the fires, the city never came back to Minato," said Mr. Kano. "The police left. The council left. The power company cut the lines. There were gangs, for a while. Lots of gangs, fighting over the docks." He held his bowl in both hands. "Then Kagari came, and there was only one gang."
"Who is he?" asked Fujita.
"Everyone calls him the Kiln." Mr. Kano's mouth twisted. "His quirk heats anything he touches. Metal, stone, people. He took the water pumping station first. Then the fuel depot. Now if you want water in Minato, you go to his men, and they decide whether you get any. If you want your generator to run, it's his diesel or nothing. And if you steal ..."
He stopped.
His wife said it for him. "If you steal, he takes you to the pier. In front of everyone. And he puts his hand on you."
The hall went quiet.
"My son took a bucket of water," said Mr. Kano. "From the station. For his sister. She had a fever. His men had turned us away twice that week." He looked down at the boy, asleep on a futon by the wall with his arm in fresh bandages. "They caught him. Kagari didn't do it himself. He doesn't bother with children. One of his men did. Just the arm. As a lesson."
Akio unfolded his arms.
* * *
Across the hall, his mother had gone very still.
She was sitting near the front with her hands in her lap. The fern-shaped scar on her forearm was showing where her sleeve had pulled back. She was looking at Mr. Kano with an expression Akio had never seen on her face before.
"Kagari," she said. "Kenta Kagari?"
Mr. Kano looked up, surprised. "You know him?"
"I knew a Kenta Kagari." Ayaka's voice was quiet. "In the fires. In 2044. He was a fireman. Sakae station was burning, and the trains had stopped, and there were hundreds of people trapped inside. He had a quirk that let him walk through fire. He went in nine times."
Mr. Kano was nodding slowly. "That's him. That's how he started. Everyone in Minato knows the story. That's why people followed him, at first. Because of what he did in the fires." He shook his head. "That was a long time ago."
"Twenty-one years," said Ayaka.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. Akio had heard the story of how his mother came to Ikazuchi a hundred times: the fires, the backpack, the long walk up the mountain. He had never heard how she got out of Nagoya.
Now he didn't need to.
* * *
The Arashi House — That Night
"He carried me out," said Ayaka.
They were in the kitchen. The Kanos were asleep at the hall. Kazuo was making tea, slowly, the way he did everything with his left arm now; the right one had never fully healed after the night in the garden, and it ached in the cold.
"I was eighteen. I'd been in a shop in the station when the fire started, and I couldn't find the stairs. There was smoke everywhere." She was looking at her hands. "And a man came through the fire like it was rain. He picked me up and put me over his shoulder and walked me out through it. My hair caught. He put it out with his hand. He didn't even slow down."
"Kenta Kagari," said Akio.
"I never knew his name until tonight. I never thanked him. He went straight back in."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"He was a good man," said Ayaka. "I'm sure of that. Whatever he is now, he was a good man once."
"He burns children's arms off for stealing water," said Akio.
"I know."
"So what happened to him?"
"I don't know." She looked up at him. "People change, Akio. When the whole world falls apart and nobody comes to fix it, some people pick up the pieces and hold them together with whatever they've got. And when nobody stops them, they keep holding tighter. And tighter." She paused. "And one day they can't remember why they started."
Akio was quiet for a while.
He was thinking about Yuto Kano's arm under the fresh bandages, and the thin, jagged hum it had made coming up the road. He was thinking about a man who had walked into a burning station nine times, and who had kept holding tighter because nobody in Minato could make him stop.
He had spent fifteen years learning to hold the fizz still so it never hurt anyone. He had never once asked himself what it was for.
Heat was only energy. Kagari pushed it into things. Akio had been reading about energy every night since he was seven years old. If anyone in Japan could stand in front of the Kiln and not burn, it was probably him.
He didn't know that for certain. He thought he did.
"I'm going to Nagoya," he said.
* * *
His father put the teapot down.
"No," said Kazuo.
"Dad—"
"No. You're fifteen."
"Dad, nobody in Minato can hurt me."
"A boy who thinks nobody can hurt him is exactly the boy who gets hurt!" Kazuo's voice cracked, and he stopped, and lowered it again. "You think I don't know what you are? I've been measuring you since you were three days old. I know what you can do. I know you've been zipping off the ridge in storms since you were twelve."
Akio blinked.
"You came back soaked to the waist every time," said his father. "The river's the only thing at the bottom of the ridge. I'm not an idiot."
"..."
"You can light up a valley. You can burn a hand off a monster. But you have never been further than Takayama in your life, Akio. You've never ridden a train. You've never slept one night anywhere but this house. You've never met anybody who wanted to hurt you except one man, and he nearly killed me on the way out." His good hand was shaking. "You might be the strongest person in Japan, and you don't know anything."
"Then I'll learn."
"From who? From the Kiln?"
"From everybody."
"Kazuo," said Ayaka quietly.
He turned to her. "You can't agree with this."
"I don't know if I agree with it," she said. "But I think he's going whether we agree or not. And I'd rather he went with our blessing than out of the window at two in the morning." She looked at her son. "Wouldn't you?"
Akio didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Two in the morning was exactly when he'd been planning to go.
His mother knew him too well. She always had.
* * *
"There's another reason," Akio said, after a long silence. "A real one. Not just Kagari."
His father sat down heavily at the table. "Go on."
"The link. The trickle at two in the morning." Akio sat down across from him. "He's been watching this village for eight years, Dad. Not me. The village. Because I'm here. Every shop order, every message, every one of Fujita-san's forms. Everybody in Ikazuchi lives under a camera because of me."
"He's never done anything with it."
"Not yet. He's waiting until I'm older. He said so." Akio's voice was level. "But if I leave, he'll stop watching the village. He'll watch me. Wherever I go, that's where he'll look. And Ikazuchi goes back to being a village nobody cares about."
Kazuo looked at his son.
"You're doing it again," he said quietly. "Going where nobody is."
"No. This time I'm going where everybody is. That's the point." Akio leaned forward. "Mum told me when I was seven. When someone comes to hurt you, wake us up. I remember. I've remembered every day. But this time I'm not running away from you. I'm drawing him away from you."
"That's the same thing with better excuses."
"Maybe," said Akio. "But I'm still right."
Kazuo didn't answer. He sat at the kitchen table for a long time, with his bad arm in his lap, looking at nothing.
He was a man who fixed things. He had spent fifteen years fixing his son's world, one rod and rule and jam jar at a time. And sitting there that night, he finally understood that the thing he'd been building all those years had never been a cage.
It had been a launch pad.
"A week," he said finally. "Give me a week."
"For what?"
"To build you something that won't die in your pocket on the first day."
* * *
One Week Later
The phone was the ugliest thing Kazuo had ever built.
It was thick and heavy, sealed inside a black rubber case with no seams, no ports and no charging socket. The screen was scratched and the buttons were stiff. It looked like a phone that had been built in a cave, by a man who had heard about phones but never seen one.
"No battery," said Kazuo, handing it over. "It runs on you. Hold it and it charges. The board is triple surge-protected, and the antenna's grounded through the case so it won't fry when you get excited."
"How long will it last?"
"A week. Maybe."
"Dad."
"It's the best I could do." Kazuo shrugged with one shoulder. "You're very hard to build for."
Akio turned the phone over in his hands. The case was warm. It already had three messages on it.
Mum: testing Mum: is this thing on Mum: if you can read this, you're not allowed to leave yet. come and eat breakfast first
He put it in his pocket.
His father held out one more thing. It was the jam jar.
The same jam jar, with the soldered lid and the copper wire and the two leaves of kitchen foil hanging inside. The lid was more solder than tin by now. The foil had been replaced more times than either of them could count.
"So you know when you're full," said Kazuo.
Akio took the jar in both hands and didn't say anything for a long time.
"Thank you," he said finally. It came out quieter than he meant it to.
"Don't break it," said Kazuo. "It's the only one I've got."
* * *
Granny Tome couldn't come down to the gate. So he went up to her.
She was sitting by her window in her good coat. She'd put it on for him. Her hair was neatly pinned.
"So," she said. "You're going to the city."
"Yes, Granny."
"To fight a man who burns people."
"To stop him."
"Is there a difference?"
Akio thought about it. "I don't know yet."
"Good answer." She held out her right hand, palm up, the way she had held it out on the kitchen table fifteen years ago.
The fern-shaped mark was still there, very faint now. Just a few pale lines, branching across her palm, like the ghost of a leaf.
"You were twenty minutes old," she said. "The first person you ever hurt was the person who caught you."
"I know, Granny. Mum told me."
"I'm not telling you to make you feel bad. I'm telling you because I want you to remember that it was an accident, and that I forgave you before you could even see properly." She closed her hand. "You're going to hurt a lot of people, Akio. Some on purpose. Some by accident. Some because they deserve it, and some because they were standing in the wrong place."
"..."
"Try not to make it a long list."
* * *
The Arashi Gate — Dawn
Half the village came to see him off.
Fujita was there on his bench, which Ono had carried down from the hall for him. Morita Keiko had packed a lunch big enough for four. Isamu, eighty-three and still without eyebrows, which had never grown back, was filming with his phone. Of course he was.
There were offerings on the gatepost. More than there had been in years. Rice balls, persimmons, a new pair of socks, a sealed envelope with no name on it.
Akio looked at them for a while.
Then he picked them up and walked down the road to the hall, where the Kano family was having breakfast, and put them on the table in front of Mrs. Kano.
"They're not from me," he said, before she could speak. "They're from everyone. You'll need them more than I will."
He walked back up the road. His mother was waiting at the gate.
She didn't say anything at first. She just looked at him: fifteen years old, a head taller than her, with his father's jam jar in his backpack and a rubber phone in his pocket and her husband's ugly old textbooks in his head.
"Do you remember," she said, "what I told you about jokes? When you were five?"
"Nobody can be scared of someone they're laughing with."
"That's the first half."
"There's a second half?"
"There's always a second half. I was saving it." She reached up and fixed his collar, though it didn't need fixing. "You're going to make a lot of jokes, Akio. I know you. You'll make them when you're scared, and when you're angry, and when you're winning. Most of them will be terrible."
"Mum."
"Listen. This is the important part." She took his face in both her hands. Her palms were warm. Skin was safe. It had always been safe, with her. "Make jokes so people can breathe. That's the first half."
"Okay."
"And make them true," said Ayaka, "so people learn."
He looked at her.
"A joke that's only funny is just noise," she said. "Anybody can make noise. But a joke that's true, that's something people carry home. They laugh, and then they think about it on the train. And a week later they realise what you really said." She let go of his face. "Make the kind they carry home."
"I'll try."
"You'll forget. You'll remember again. That's fine." She stepped back. "Go on. Before your father starts crying and pretends it's hay fever."
"It is hay fever," said Kazuo, from the porch.
"It's April, Kazuo."
"..."
* * *
He didn't take the road.
He walked up to the ridge above the shrine, where the old copper lightning rod pointed at the sky, and where the power line ran down the mountain toward Takayama like a long silver thread. Everyone in the village watched him go. He could feel them, all of them, every hum he'd known his whole life.
He put his hand on the power line's metal pole.
Then he was lightning.
From the gate, they saw a white line crack down the mountainside along the wire, so fast that the sound came after it, a long rolling boom that echoed off the next valley and the one after that. Every light in Ikazuchi flickered once, like a blink.
Then it was gone, and the line was humming quietly, and the ridge was empty.
Isamu Tsuchiya lowered his phone.
"Got it," he said, very quietly, to nobody. "Got the whole thing."
He didn't post it. He never did. He watched it about once a week for the rest of his life.
* * *
Inuyama Hills, North of Nagoya — That Night
It took him the whole day to get down off the mountains. He zipped as far as Takayama on the power line, then walked, then caught a ride on the back of a farm drone that was flying to Gifu, then walked again. He didn't zip in the lowlands. There were too many people. Too many wires, all humming, all pulling at him from every direction.
By nightfall he was standing on a hill north of the city, looking down at Nagoya.
He had never seen so many lights in his life.
The city spread out across the plain below him, all the way to the sea, a huge glowing carpet that hummed so loudly in his head he had to sit down. Two million people. More. He couldn't feel any of them as separate hums from this far away. He could only feel the city's power grid, the whole thing at once, like heat coming off a stove.
He took the jam jar out of his backpack and held the wire. The foil leaves spread out flat.
Full. Of course he was full. The whole city was pouring into him just from being near it.
He put the jar away and looked south, toward the sea.
There was a hole in the lights.
Down by the port, where the docks would be, the glowing carpet of the city simply stopped. A wide, dark patch, kilometres across, where there were no lights at all. No grid. No hum. Just a few tiny orange points, scattered through the dark like coals.
Minato ward.
He sat on the hill and looked at it for a long time.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Three buzzes. It was his mother. She'd set it that way so he would always know it was her.
Mum: you made it down? Mum: don't answer if you're busy Mum: just make sure you eat something
He typed back with his thumb.
Akio: made it. i can see the city. it's very big. Akio: there's a part of it with no lights.
He looked at the message for a moment. Then he added one more line.
Akio: i think that's where i'm going.
* * *
Osaka — Around the Same Time
At two in the morning, the trickle from Ikazuchi's satellite link came in as usual.
Tōru Sekiguchi read it at his desk. He was forty-one now. He had staff, a bigger office and a second cat. He had read every shop order, every message and every government form that had come out of that village for eight years.
Tonight there was a new line in the village chat, posted early that morning.
Isamu Tsuchiya: he's gone. took the power line. didn't even say goodbye to the dish.
Sekiguchi read it twice. Then he picked up the phone that only rang one number.
"Sir," he said. "The boy has left the valley."
There was a short silence on the line.
"Good," said the voice on the other end. "Stop watching the village. Watch him."
"Yes, sir. Should I send someone to—"
"No one goes near him. That hasn't changed." A pause. "Let him go to the city, Sekiguchi-san. He's never seen the world. Let's find out what the world does to him."
The line went dead.
In Ikazuchi, at two in the morning, the trickle from the satellite link stopped. It never came back.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Village Chat · Ikazuchi Residents
Headman Fujita: The battery bank is at 94%. Whose turn is it to charge it tomorrow morning? Morita Keiko: fujita Morita Keiko: whose turn do you think it is Headman Fujita: ... Headman Fujita: I see. Ono Daisuke: i still have the diesel truck Headman Fujita: Daisuke, I am eighty-five years old. I am not powering a village with a diesel truck. Ono Daisuke: it's a very good truck