The Gate of Sorrows (33 page)

“A woman with wings sprouting from her back?”

“Yeah. And she was big. She must’ve been seven feet tall. And she was … She was beautiful.”

Yuriko looked very serious. “Ah, yes. The beautiful woman.”

“She said she was a warrior.”

Yuriko nodded slowly. “She guards the Tower of Inception. She probably told you she was the Guardian of the Third Pillar.”

“That’s right.”

“The guardians of the first nine Pillars are especially powerful. A being like that would never leave its post except in the direst emergency.” She whispered to herself, “It’s just as Ash feared.”

“Ash?”

“An associate of mine.” For the first time, her eyes were smiling too. “Someone who helped me once. He’s my wolf master.”

Kotaro almost said “time out” again, but by now he could see that was pointless. “A wolf. Right. Is that an animal wolf? Or a man with the spirit of a wolf?”

Yuriko looked puzzled. “A man … with the spirit of a wolf. I never looked at it that way. You
are
interesting, Mr. Mishima.”

Under different circumstances, this sort of comment from a pretty girl would’ve been welcome, but not now.

“What is the Circle,
Miss
Morisaki?”

“I’m asking the questions. Why do you want to know?”

Kotaro was losing patience. “Why don’t you just cast a spell on me like you did with those guys back there? You’re a sorcerer, right? Use your magic. Make me tell you everything.”

She shook her head. “Some wolves are powerful wizards. Not me. I can’t do just anything. I’m still new at this.”

“Oh, okay. That explains it.”

“But I can read your words.” She cocked her head and looked at him as though sizing him up whole, for the first time.

“You live with your parents and two sisters. Are they twins?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, she blinked once and shifted her pupils, still looking at him. “And there’s an older person. A woman. Not a relative. Oh—”

She raised an index finger and wagged it gently. “Correction. You have one sister. Not twins. Your sister has a good friend. You know her very well too.”

Yuriko’s eyes kept flicking here and there across Kotaro’s face. “You have teachers, or mentors. People with a lot of influence over you. A man and a woman. They’re married, or lovers. You’re very worried about someone too. A friend, or maybe someone you look up to. I can’t see him clearly … He’s not your older brother.”

Kotaro almost swallowed his tongue with astonishment.

Yuriko’s wandering gaze stopped. Her eyes narrowed. She almost seemed to be listening for a distant sound.

“That girl, the one who’s friends with your sister. Is something happening to her?”

Kotaro was speechless. All he could do was goggle at her.

“Seriously. Something bad, or strange, is happening to her, I think.”

“What— How—”

“Complete sentences, please. You want to know how I know.” He nodded stiffly.

“The book in your backpack is telling me everything. It’s really worried about her. About Mika. That’s her book, right? You borrowed it from her, or she gave it to you.”

Kotaro dragged his backpack onto his lap and unzipped it. It was filled with a jumble of stuff. He upended it and dumped everything on the bench—textbooks and notebooks and dictionaries. Half-buried in the pile was a slender paperback.

LAND OF THE SUN: ANCIENT EGYPT AND THE RIDDLE OF THE PYRAMIDS

Yes, this book definitely belonged to Mika Sonoi. Kazumi had borrowed it from her, and it had been sitting on a shelf in the living room for some time before he’d stuffed it in his backpack, thinking it might be a good way to kill time.

“Your friend Mika likes this kind of thing.” Yuriko’s gaze was gentle. “Does she like to read?”

Kotaro finally managed a natural reaction. “Yeah, she does. Me and Kazumi—my sister—don’t read much, but Mika loves books.”

“Did you read that?”

“No. I was going to, but … I don’t even remember when I stuck it in there. I haven’t felt like reading much of anything recently. I’ve had a lot on my mind. Is this—is this book worried about Mika?”

“It’s very, very worried about her. She chose it herself and read it cover to cover. They have a connection. But that’s not the only reason, it seems.” She reached for the book, but stopped.

“It’s better if you check it. There’s a note in it.”

Kotaro opened the book and riffled the pages slowly. It was still practically new. Nothing was written in the margins.

“Look again.” Yuriko sounded impatient.

“I looked.”

He froze. There was something between the cover of the paperback and the binding—a thin, tiny, light-pink Post-it. He might’ve read the whole book and never noticed it. There was a message in small, rounded script.

If you touch Gaku, I’m going to kill you.

Kotaro sat paralyzed with astonishment for a full ten seconds with the tiny note in his hand.

“Girls use those little stickers all the time to pass notes in class.”

Kotaro knew. He’d seen girls using them all through middle school and high school.

Yuriko plucked the note from his fingers. “Don’t rip it up.” He had been about to do just that. “You borrowed this from her, then?”

“Kazumi borrowed it from Mika, and I borrowed it from Kazumi.”

“Kazumi’s your sister, then. Anyway, Mika didn’t know about the note. If she had, she wouldn’t have lent the book to someone. Would you agree?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“This is an important piece of evidence about what’s happening to her. You can’t throw it away.”

“But I can’t put it back where it was.”

“Of course. I’m not saying you should. It wouldn’t be fair to the book. You should put it somewhere safe.”

Kotaro felt faintly defensive for some reason. “I know what this is about, but the trouble’s blown over already.”

The bad blood over Gaku and the soft tennis club had ended. Kazumi had said so herself. It had ended so suddenly that it almost seemed strange. Glitter Kitty had gone quiet.

“Things were bad at the end of last year—at least, that’s when I found out about it, but it’d been going on for a while before that. That’s probably when someone put that note in the book.”

“When did you borrow it?”

Kotaro’s mind was blank. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d checked his pack.

“Look at the colophon.”

“The what?”

“The last page. It shows the publication date. The book looks new.”

The publication date was October 25 of the previous year. Kotaro was relieved.

“See? Mika’s a fast reader. If she read this first and lent it to Kazumi, that would be the middle of November at the latest. That was when things were boiling over, supposedly. But everything’s settled down now.”

“Looks like some kind of conflict over a guy.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“What year are the girls?” Yuriko asked.

“Kazumi will be a ninth grader in April. Mika’s a year behind her.”

“I wouldn’t be too complacent then. You have no idea what girls of that age can get up to.”

This struck Kotaro as a little condescending—after all, Yuriko wasn’t much older than Kazumi and Mika.

“It’s because they’re young. They don’t have the capacity for judgment. Girls can get pretty extreme.”

“Well, ‘I’m going to kill you’
is
pretty extreme.”

“Not if it’s just words. The problem is the story behind the words.” Her expression was suddenly intensely focused, like a child who loves to observe insects and has just found a colorful, poisonous bug on the underside of a leaf.

“The story?” Kotaro thought he understood what she meant, but her choice of words was puzzling. “I think you mean the motivation, right? The reason?”

“No.” She shook her head. “The story. Everything is a story. Human beings live their stories as they create them. Each person spins a story, and their words come out of those stories.”

That’s backward. Words come first, then stories. I mean, come on.

“I just read your story, Kotaro.” She leaned toward him. “I read the flow of the story you’re submerged in, even now. How else could I have known about your family? Or your friends?”

“The flow of my
story
?”

“It’s like a flow of energy. But it’s hard to explain in words.” She stroked her cheek impatiently with a fingertip. The gesture had a girlish freshness.

“I’d almost like to call it an ‘aura,’ but everybody uses that word. It makes it sound phony.”

“Yup, it’s phony all right,” Kotaro said.

“Still, my reading was on the mark, don’t you think?”

He didn’t answer. Yuriko took a deep breath and scanned his face carefully.

“You’re a very smart person.”

“What—”

“You’ve had a very strange, dangerous experience. Way more than what you saw with me today. Yet your feet are still on the ground. Most people are different. If they have even one experience that’s totally outside their world, they go off the deep end. But you’re not like that. You’re onto a big mystery and you’re hungry for the truth. Yet when the truth finds you, you don’t just swallow it whole.”

I
think
she’s praising me.

“I can solve your mystery for you. But to do that—to do it the right way, in a way that’s true for you—I’ve got to know more. So could you tell me? How did you end up meeting this winged warrior? I need to know everything, from beginning to end, with nothing left out.”

Kotaro gave her another sidelong look. “What happened to the ESP?”

“You and I are from the same region. I
can
read your story. But where you made contact with something from another region, that I can’t read. I know something happened to you. I can see how it’s influencing you, but I can’t see what actually happened. And that’s probably a good thing. If I made a stab at reading the part of your story that overlaps with another region, things could get … messy.”

Kotaro’s disorientation was starting to turn into a headache.

“That person you’re so worried about—he’s involved with another region too, isn’t he?”

“You read that?”

“No. It’s just a logical assumption.”

“We work at the same place. His name’s Kenji Morinaga.”

“So he’s around the same age. Then that other person, he’s older than you—way older than you, from your point of view. You feel close to him too, I think. He’s involved with the being you encountered, just like your friend from work. That makes it hard for me to read him clearly.”

Kotaro hung his head. He was drained. Emotionally, he was on his knees. “Okay, but I warn you, it’s a long story.”

He told her everything, truthfully and concisely. Yuriko barely moved during the entire account. She only interrupted him a few times to confirm a name.

When his story was finally over, she turned her head to gaze at the library. The glass exterior glowed golden in the late afternoon sun.

“All right, first things first,” she said finally and smiled. “Don’t worry about your friend Kenji. He’s alive. He’s just not in our region now. Those other people who disappeared, they’re in that other region too.”

“Can they get back?”

“Probably.”

“But not for sure?”

“It’s not a hundred percent certain. It depends on what they want.”

“What they
want
?” Kotaro couldn’t help but frown.

“Kenji and the others—they weren’t kidnapped. They aren’t trapped in Galla’s weapon. It’s like they’re making a deal with her. At least that’s my guess.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the best I can offer. I’ve never dealt with a Tower guardian. All I can do is judge based on precedent.”

And you wouldn’t take a test without studying the sample answers first, I bet.

“If it’s a deal, that means Kenji gets something out of it,” he said.

“You’d think. Except in this case, his reward is what he’s giving up.”

“Could you please start making sense?”

“Galla is gathering something from this region, something people have. She’s gathering desire. Or craving. Yearning.”

“She said she was gathering power.”

“That was the truth. Desire is power. It’s the most fundamental power human beings have. The flip side of desire is inhibition. These two drives are always competing to find some kind of balance in people’s hearts.”

“That’s too simple by half. Desire isn’t a source of power.”

“Then what is?”

“Stuff like love, or creativity.”

“But isn’t desire behind everything? You desire what pulls at your heart. You have a desire to create something. You do what you do because you want to. Am I wrong?”

“But some people love without being loved in return.”

“All that means is that their desire for love can be satisfied just by giving it.”

“You’re not totally convincing me. But how is inhibition just as important?”

“Of course it’s important. If you loved someone and couldn’t control your love, things would end badly. Same for creativity. If people couldn’t put the brakes on their creativity—if they just created without concern for others—society would be in chaos.”

“Why? How?”

“You meet people like that every now and then. People who make their own rules.” She shrugged. “Like that guy who tried to pick me up back there. If he sees a girl he likes, he takes her picture without even asking. It’s rotten manners and totally outrageous, and ignores the other person’s feelings. But guys like that have already decided it’s okay. He’s okay with it, so that makes it okay.”

“Is that really an example of creativity?”

“Sure it is. Everything people do is creation.”

Kotaro couldn’t think of a comeback.

“Kenji and those other people who disappeared had a supreme desire, and they lived with it every day without it consuming them. But the effort it took to hold back that desire was making them suffer. I think Galla came to this region looking for people like that, people whose hearts were out of balance, so she could harvest their desires.”

“So what’s in it for the people who disappeared?”