She sniffles. “But Kira, I’m so tired. . . .”
I silence her with a look. As if I’m not? No matter what happened tonight, I’m the elder sister. My word is law. I realize Ami’s only six, but she can’t go to sleep wearing dirt, bug carcasses, and her own grandfather’s blood.
Her legs shake as we climb the steps to the house. I snake an arm around her waist, supporting her the rest of the way.
“Grandpa’s not going to be okay, is he?” she asks quietly.
“No, Ami, he’s not,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
She tries to keep her lips from quivering. In the rush to escape, I haven’t spent a moment thinking about what we’re going to tell our parents. Anything but the truth, I suppose. I doubt I’d hear anything but the same tired responses, anyway:
Yokai aren’t real.
They don’t kill people.
It’s all in your head.
All lies people tell themselves to ignore the hairs rising on the backs of their necks. Their guts know what their minds dismiss: that evil isn’t always human, but it’s always hungry. While terrorist attacks are rare, I’m certain what happened at the shrine will be labeled as something like domestic terrorism by the local authorities. They’ll never catch the real monsters who did it.
That’s my job.
“I’ll deal with your clothes,” I say at the door. “When Mother and Father come back, tell them you didn’t see anything. We ran away before anything bad happened, okay?”
“But Kira—”
“You didn’t hear anything, either,” I tell her, maybe a little too forcefully. She shuts up and turns her gaze down, tears glittering on her lashes. At least Mother and Father will put less stock in anything Ami says. They’ll write off the supernatural as figments of her imagination, a scaffold to help her cope with the terrors she experienced at the shrine. What other choice would they have? They don’t see the world the way I do.
Ami and I take off our shoes in the lowered genkan entryway. From here, I can see our older brother, Ichigo, hunched over his laptop in the darkened living room, his back to us. University papers and books pile across the table. I doubt he thought to turn the room’s lights on as the sun set. Ichigo gets . . . absorbed in his work.
“You’re late,” Ichigo says. He doesn’t turn around, the word again implied in his tone.
“There was trouble at the shrine,” I say, ushering Ami into the hall.
“Trouble?” Ichigo’s fingers stop clacking on his keyboard. He pauses, cocking an ear in our direction while still looking at his screen. I’m never worth more than half his attention. “What kind of trouble?”
“Grandfather got us out before we saw anything,” I say, not bothering to mask the tremor in my voice. “Ichigo . . . I think people died.”
Ami looks up at me, chin quivering. If she realizes I’m lying, she doesn’t contradict me in front of our brother.
Ichigo’s chair creaks as he turns in his seat. Dark circles wax like moons under his eyes. “You look like hell.”
“We . . . um, had to crawl through the back hedge to get out,” I say, explaining away my appearance.
“Did you alert the authorities?”
“We heard sirens.”
After a long moment, Ichigo sighs, removes his glasses, and rubs the bridge of his nose. “And Grandfather?”
My tears well up again, and I blink fast to keep them at bay. I look away and shake my head. “I . . . I don’t know if he’s okay.”
“Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now, not if the police are already there,” he says, picking up his cell phone. “I’ll text Mother to let them know something’s gone wrong at the shrine. Take care of Ami, would you? I have an important paper due tomorrow.”
Ichigo sends a text and turns back to his work, fingers flying over his keyboard, clack-clack-clack. I wish he would see me for once, see my disheveled hair and the blood on my clothes, and ask me what happened. I wish he would come over, give me a hug, sit on the couch, and talk to me. I wish he would listen. See me. Understand me the way Grandfather could, rather than weighing me with a look and dismissing me when he found me wanting.
I should tell him Grandfather’s dead, but the words stick in my throat, stiff and unyielding. If I tell him I listened as our grandfather was murdered, Ichigo will want to know how; and if I tell him the shrine was attacked by spider-legged yokai demanding a famous sword, he’ll be on the phone with my parents in minutes, complaining that I’m telling stories again. The yokai are mythical creatures, Kira, he’d say. And even if they weren’t, why would they be interested in a dingy little shrine like ours?
Our family’s shrine isn’t dingy, I think, before realizing I’m arguing with him in my head.
“I should . . .” I hesitate, feeling like a stranger in my own home. “I’m going back to the shrine to check on Grandfather and help the police. But first, I’ll get Ami-chan into bed.”
“Good,” he says without turning, the way Mother sometimes does. “That would be helpful. Though I’m certain Grandfather is already getting the help he needs—I can’t imagine you would be anything more than a bother.”
His words crush crystals of salt into my heart. He doesn’t say, Let me go with you, nor does he thank me. My brother and I are bound by blood, but little else.
“Good night, Ichigo,” I say, and guide my little sister toward the bathroom. He doesn’t answer me.
He doesn’t even look up as we pass.
Five
Fujikawa Family Home
Kyoto, Japan
After disposing of Ami’s dirty clothes, I trudge upstairs to my bedroom.
My mother is a fierce traditionalist, insisting upon old-world details in our home: the tatami mats on the floor give off a sweet, grassy smell. The walls gleam like eggshells, bisected by centuries-old, cracked wooden beams. Though my parents built this house, they used materials reclaimed from century-old machiya houses in Kyoto, so everything in this place seems to have long memories. This house may have been home for my whole life, but now it feels uncomfortable, foreign. My world has shifted. Shattered. The aged stairs groan underfoot, but their voices no longer sound familiar. When I reach the top of the stairwell, I turn right, slipping into the bedroom that has long been mine.
My room is simple: Western-style hardwood floors and furniture, with a bed covered with a teal duvet. My desk slumps under a pile of books. I share a sliding shoji wall with Ami, which means I’ve never had much privacy. My sister throws those doors open whenever she pleases.
But for the next few, precious minutes, my sister will be in the shower—water already hisses from the bathroom down the hall. I close my bedroom door, turn, and lean against its wooden surface. This might be the only time I have to mourn privately, at least for a little while.
A trembling starts in my fingertips and leaps to my hands. Tectonic plates of grief shift inside me, shaking me to my core. I was a child when the Sendai earthquake hit Kyoto, but I remember how the sidewalks looked that day—hundreds of tiny cracks opened in the pavement as the ground buckled. The holes looked like mouths, shrieking without voices. At the time, I had thought the world was ending, that the earth would rip itself apart and swallow me whole in the process. Now I almost wish it had.