February 22, 2007.
I was walking home late.
This was not unusual. I had a functional bicycle that I used on days when I wanted to get home quickly, and on days when I didn't, I walked, stopping at several stores along the way, buying snacks I didn't need, extending the journey through the specific luxury of having no particular reason to hurry.
Today I had stopped at a convenience store for a can of coffee and a bag of chips. Then a stationery store because they had new mechanical pencils in the window display and I had a weakness for mechanical pencils that I've never successfully explained to anyone. Then a bookstore where I bought nothing but spent twenty minutes reading the back covers of novels I wasn't gonna purchase.
By the time I was actually heading home, it was past eight. The streets were always empty on weekday nights. Not abandoned, just quiet. The drizzle had finally made its decision, turning the pavement into something that reflected the streetlights in long orange streaks.
I wasn't in a hurry.
I should have been.
CREEEK.
I froze.
My brain, which is generally very good at processing things I don't want to deal with, attempted to convince me that it was nothing. A gate somewhere. A tree branch. The sounds that cities make constantly that you only notice when you're already slightly on edge.
I started walking again.
CREEEK.
Closer now. Metal against metal, the specific complaint of something old being forced to move. My hand went to my sleeve, an old habit, touching fabric for comfort, a thing I've done since I was small, and my legs made a unilateral decision to move faster without consulting the rest of me.
I wasn't running from anything I could see. Not exactly.
But my body was less interested in that distinction than my brain was.
I turned a corner, breath already loud in my own ears, and that's when I saw them.
Higashino Cemetery, across the street. The gate standing slightly open. And between the gravestones, shadows. Not one, not two, but a handful of them, moving like they've clearly done this before and had long since stopped being nervous about it.
I pressed myself against the wall of the nearest building.
Something glinted in the thin moonlight. Something small, held carefully, the way you hold things that are fragile or important or both.
"Don't mess with them. Daigo Ren. Him and his crew."
I stayed still. Knees slowly bending until I was crouching behind a parked bicycle, watching through the gaps in the fence as the shadows moved between tombstones.
They were digging.
Methodically. One working with a shovel while two others knelt beside the disturbed earth with what looked like small tools, the kind you'd use for delicate excavation rather than brute force.
One of them reached into the hole and withdrew something.
I couldn't see what it was from this distance.
Whatever it was, they treated it with extraordinary care.
The figures vanished into the night as easily as they'd appeared, one moment there, the next simply not. Like the darkness had swallowed them whole without needing to chew.
I stayed crouching until my knees ached and the cold had worked its way through my jacket and the street was definitively empty again. Then I straightened up, readjusted my bag, and walked the rest of the way home at a pace that could be described as brisk.
My shirt, when I finally got inside, smelled faintly of wet earth.
As if I'd dragged the cemetery home in my pockets.
---
My sisters descended on me before I got three feet through the door.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!"
That was Kana, fifteen years old, three years younger than me. The littler little sister was twice as loud as any human needed to be indoors. She materialized from the direction of the living room and clearly had been waiting to ambush me.
"It's past eight, Itsu, we ate without you, the rice is cold."
"Relax," I dropped my bag by the stairs and reached over to ruffle Hazuki's hair. Hazuki being the less littler little sister, standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and her expression looking disapproving.
Kana kicked at my shin. I stepped aside without looking.
"School stuff," I said.
"School ended at four," Hazuki said.
"Extended school stuff."
"You smell weird," Kana announced, sniffing in my direction.
"It's raining."
"It smells like dirt."
"Rain makes dirt. This is how weather works."
She narrowed her eyes at me. Kana had this particular look she deployed when she was deciding whether to accept an explanation or escalate, a narrowing of the eyes combined with a slight tilt of the head, like a cat deciding whether the thing in front of it was prey.
She escalated sixty percent of the time.
Tonight, she let it go.
"The rice is cold," she said again, more quietly.
"I'll microwave it."
"Obviously."
---
Dinner was cold rice and leftover miso soup and the comfortable noise of a house with four people in it who knew each other's habits well enough to move around each other without collision. Kana dominated most of the conversation with something that had happened at track practice. Hazuki interjected occasionally with corrections that Kana ignored. I ate and listened and said approximately four words, which was about average for me on a weekday.
Mom was still at work. Dad was on call.
The house felt full anyway.
Later, lying in my room with the light off and the rain picking up against my window, I stared at the ceiling and thought about the shadows moving between gravestones. About something small and careful being lifted from disturbed earth. About seventeen people who had gone somewhere nobody could find them.
The two things probably weren't connected.
Probably.
I turned over and closed my eyes.
Outside, the rain made up its mind and came down properly, washing the streets clean of everything.
Almost everything.