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Every morning, they share tea. It’s ritualistic, always loose leaf, but not served in yunomi. The lighthouse came with chipped porcelain teacups, curly-handled, painted with purple thistles. Shoko will not buy things pointlessly.
The variety changes, although primarily, it’s black. Breakfast, Earl Grey, Assam. She doles out a splash of cow’s milk for Suguru, six spoons of honey for Satoru (it turns to little sugar crystals on his lips). Her own, she steeps for twice the recommended time. She’s always had a predilection for bitterness.
She read somewhere, once, that routine is important for preserving one’s sanity. So, in the morning, she makes tea. She cooks rice porridge and oat porridge and sometimes parfait. She goes into their garden and reads exactly fifty pages of a book, annotating in blue pen. Never further than that, even if she wants to know what happens next.
In the afternoon, she brews more tea. In the evening, she drinks three fingers of single malt Scotch. In between, she smokes red Sterling cigarettes. Her fingertips are growing yellow.
Satoru and Suguru have their routines, too, but they make a lot less sense.
She finds him on the gallery deck. Above them, the lantern looms like a lifeless eye. He’s folded ninety degrees over the railing, the tips of his toes nearly leaving the floor. The wind is vicious today – it blows his pale hair back from his forehead so that she can see the scar in all its glory. Pink, ragged, miraculous.
“Shoko,” he shouts over the howling, pointing out to sea, grinning wide as the moon and like a madman – so deranged, so eager. One of his feet officially uproots itself, and Shoko’s stomach swoops; she swallows back the taste of bile and Assam. “Do you think I could fly straight to the edge of the world?”
They’ve done this before. Because sometimes he forgets – where, who he is. Not that he’s Satoru, no – those memories persist in many small and vital ways. It’s that he isn’t the strongest anymore, which, she supposes, was as integral to his identity as being Satoru is. But that was the price Shoko paid for their survival. The total annihilation of all their power.
The Six Eyes, though, are not so easily extricated. They’re a physiological idiosyncrasy, and now utterly pointless. It’s true – the horizon here does have a cataclysmic quality to it. It’s beautiful. If it looks that way to Shoko, she can’t imagine how it must look to Satoru.
“You can’t fly, Satoru,” she says, because it’s important to be direct. “Come away from there.”
“What are you talking about?” He leans out further, the tendons in his hands sharpening. “I fly all the time.”
“Not anymore.” There’s no point trying to be subtle; she walks straight up to him, twists her fist into the back of his shirt. “You live down on the ground with the rest of us now, remember?”
His eyes drop to the froth on the shoreline. They’re less luminous without Limitless, but still so startling blue; crystal and seafoam and lapis lazuli. They look like they’re trying to calculate something. Draw on his imperfect perfect recall, sift through the timeline. “Are you sure?” he asks eventually, although he sounds resigned already, and – how many times can Shoko’s heart break?
“Come on, Satoru,” she murmurs, tugging him back, using her other hand to steady him at the waist. “It’s lunchtime. Suguru is waiting.”
The heels of his feet hit the deck, and the metal resounds like a knoll. The analepsis lingers like a fever, a confused stuttering in his step, a resistance as she pulls him by the elbow. He seems unnerved at the contact, staring down at where they touch like he’s expecting Infinity to erupt and push her away. But he still follows her back into the service room and back down the eight flights of stairs. Along the walkway and into the tiny cottage built at the foot of the lighthouse, like a stone shoe.
Next time, she might find him on the narrow widow’s walk. Or clinging to the lightning rod and playing at conductor. One day, she won’t be fast enough; her blackened lungs will fail her, the stairs too steep to scale. He will spread his clipped wings and plummet to the rocks, dead before he even hits the ground.
For now, though, they eat egg sandwiches. Not with shokupan but with seeded wholemeal. Suguru is silent and washed out, as he always is these days. Shoko eats Satoru’s crusts, and when he finally recollects himself, he prattles on about the étude he’s practising and planetary alignment, and did you know there’s a seagull’s nest on the roof and that he can see every thrumming embryo-heart?
(There are three.)
At the end of all things, Japan had been a land of pyroclastic fallout and molten glass. They’d won, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Her two closest friends were bodies and nothing more than bodies. She isn’t sure they were more than that, even before they died.
(Why else would they have had their skulls cracked open? Marionettes in life, marionettes in death. The caterwaul of the bone saw will haunt Shoko into her grave.)
There was only so much her surgical prowess could achieve. A brain in a jar, a heart on her sleeve – it had been a gamble, the binding vow. The body triumphing over the soul; their jujutsu for their lives, instead of the repetitive converse (your life for their victory, again and again and again).
It had worked. Both had woken with a gasp and lungs full of rotten fluid. Her name on Satoru’s lips, just the shape of it on Suguru’s. It had worked, but not perfectly, not right. Still –
(She would take them in any form. She would take them as people, as curses, as hollow things. She would take them if they were in thousands of pieces, gather them, cherish them, make them into a mosaic.)
No one could know she brought them back. Even powerless (weak), even as non-sorcerers (monkeys), even without the higher-ups, universal law dictates that they would only be used again. And Shoko, a bona fide necromancer? She would never know peace.
She knows, now, that her job was never about saving people. It had always been about fitting for purpose; getting fodder back on its feet for another round in the ring. Shoko was tired. Their revival would be her final act of service, and it would be purely selfish. The only person she told was Okkotsu, who she felt would understand the most. He had been the one to puppet the monster, after all.
So, she signed their death certificates with love and a flourish, and booked the next ferry to Shanghai.
Shoko isn’t entirely sure why she picked Scotland.
It had looked green, she supposes. The air had looked clear, even in photos, and the water had looked bracing. Apparently, the Scots make good whiskey. What else is there?
And the Hebrides are so very different from Tokyo, even before it was ignited. Some fires were still burning when they left, sustained on flesh and chemicals alike. At nighttime, she can still smell the capital cooking, acid, carrion and singed hair.
The lighthouse was automated in 2003. There hadn’t been a keeper in the adjacent cottage for nearly a decade, which made it cheap real estate. Shoko had paid cash and moved them into three rooms of flint and mould. For weeks, they slept beneath a damp duvet on a damp mattress, with nothing but their body heat for warmth.
Or – Shoko and Satoru did. Suguru slept on the rattan rug and shivered himself into a fever of penance and disgust. Death and puppetry hadn’t been enough punishment for his crimes, evidently. Unless he was repenting on Kenjaku’s behalf, which would have been categorically stupid. Eventually, Satoru had simply pulled him into the sheets with them and pressed a kiss to his flushed forehead. Demanded he “Shut up,” even though he never spoke.
The cottage came with a small garden, fifteen by fifteen metres of overgrown grass and chipped terracotta pots. This is Suguru’s haven. He sits between tomatoes on stilts and pinkening strawberries and rows of chicory and courgettes. Digs up weeds with a trowel and waters his crops with a rusty watering can Shoko had found amongst the lighthouse’s clutter.
Today, he’s scattering powdered eggshells onto the soil to keep away the slugs. Shoko hands him a cup of Earl Grey and sits next to him, turning her face towards the sun.
It’s a lovely day.
Suguru taps her knee. There’s dirt permanently beneath his fingernails, now. He lifts his right hand and flicks his middle finger against his thumb – star. Their sign for Satoru. It’s BSL – Shoko couldn’t find anything on Japanese sign language in the library.
“He’s picking all the little lumps off the wall paint,” she tells him. Suguru frowns. “Said the ‘impurities’ were bothering him.”
A lot of small things bother Satoru these days. Last week, it was the limescale in their pipes. She’d had to buy him two jerrycans of white vinegar before he was satisfied. She wishes he would just wear his blindfold to reduce the input, but he won’t. He’d rather deal with the eye strain than lose out on even a minute of daylight.
Suguru plucks a tomato from its stalk and hands it to her. “What kind?” she asks, because there are so many. Alicante, Outdoor Girl, Crimson Crush. This one is more orange than red, and the size of a cherry. S-u-n-g-o-l-d, he spells out.
She pops it into her mouth. It’s sweet. Shoko sucks around the seeds and swallows. Not her favourite, but… “Satoru will like them,” she says.
This seems to please him, although pleasure never really reaches his eyes anymore. She reaches out, swiping her thumb gently beneath them. The shadows don’t come off on her skin like she hoped they would, but he leans into her touch.
The silence is psychological. She’s checked his throat, his vocal cords – everything is intact. She wonders whether his voice doesn’t feel like his own anymore. Whether Kenjaku tainted it, stole all his words. She misses it. The warmth, the teasing inflection. Even the theatrical edge he favoured after his defection. She’d take anything. Vitriol, even. Hatred. For now, though, she’ll take tomatoes.
“Drink your tea before it gets cold,” she urges, bringing her own cup to her lips. It’s bitter, like usual, and leaves a film on her tongue.
“Satoru, get down from there.”
He’s standing on the railings now. One arm out, cutting waves through the air, teetering. “I won’t fall,” he asserts, almost lyrical. “I’ll never fall.”
“Yes, you will. Satoru, please—”
Sometimes, Shoko drinks a little too much. Which – she’s allowed. She’s nearly thirty years old and more than permitted to her own madnesses. Satoru and Suguru can’t have all of it.
Still, her stomach hurts, and her skin feels dry. Without her technique, her body doesn’t have the resilience it used to. She’s even starting to develop a smoker’s cough. Sleep debt is, apparently, very real – it seems as though she’s paying for years of deprivation.
(Satoru still sleeps as though it’s optional, a true paradigm of obstinance and mania. Just watching him is painful. She would tie him to the bedposts if that weren’t so unimaginably cruel. The Prison Realm still lives in his bones.)
Shoko curls up small on the bathroom tile. The grout is rough against her cheek. If she lies here for long enough, perhaps the world will stop spinning, perhaps time will stand still. The nausea might retreat from behind her teeth back to where it belongs.
She slips away, and it’s the clink of glass that brings her back. Suguru, kneeling over her, a cup set next to him. He smooths his hand over her hip, featherlight through her unwashed dressing gown. He flattens the same hand and makes a downward movement over his throat twice. Water.
“Yeah, yeah,” she croaks, but doesn’t move. He sighs, exasperated. Rests a fist on top of his palm, thumb up. Help?
God, how she hates that word. It comes with an ache, a longing for self-sufficiency that she’s sure they all feel. Help. An unfamiliar notion. Something to adapt to. All of them equally terrible and stubborn about it.
She grunts, which means ‘yes’, and Suguru braces her around the waist, sitting her up against him. She groans, presses her knuckles to her mouth, but ultimately manages to regain her equilibrium.
Water has never tasted quite like this. (Except for the last time this happened. And the time before that. And the time before that—)
The disapproval that radiates from him is palpable, which is unfair. He tore his dinner into tiny pieces and ate none of it. They all have their failures, their personal self-destructions. Suguru grows food he doesn’t eat; Satoru scrubs the ceiling until his fingers bleed; Shoko drinks herself to cirrhosis. Enough, Suguru signs.
“Say it out loud, then,” she snaps, and instantly feels remorse. His answering expression is full of pity, which only makes it worse. She’d wriggle out of his arms if she had the strength. “Sorry,” she grumbles instead.
Satoru peers around the doorway. “I washed the bedding,” he announces. “We’re out of fabric softener.”
This is his way of offering to carry her to bed. She thinks his language of love might be her favourite – it’s abrupt, disguised, and easier to accept.
His arms are clumsier now, but still strong. She traces the scar around his elbow, admiring her own needlecraft. It’s moments like these she grieves for her technique. Shoko Ieiri, doctor of miracles. They all had their own god complex, in a way.
She presses her nose to Satoru’s neck. He smells like bleach and over-sweetened tea. I love you, she thinks. Please don’t leave me. This time, I won’t be able to fix it.
“What are you doing?”
He doesn’t startle. Why would he? He saw her climb all eight flights of stairs. There’s an orange cloth in his hand, and the whole lantern room stinks of Windolene. “I’m cleaning the windows,” he says slowly. “Obviously.”
The sun is setting, a yellow yolk splitting over the ocean. “The lantern will be on soon.”
“Huh?”
“The lantern. It’s getting dark. Your eyes, Satoru—”
Light floods the room like a landslide, and he shrieks like a banshee, howls like a dying animal.
Their first curse is an insidious thing. It seeps through the wall and floats up to the wooden beams in the roof, nesting like a parasite. At first, she wonders which of them it belongs to, but – it’s made of smoke and stinks of ethanol. So.
She supposes she should feel guilty for it. Responsible. Instead, she feels relief. Her misery, realised. Perceptible, killable.
At least, until she sees Satoru standing hapless in the centre of the room, fingers outstretched and completely achromatic. Limitless doesn’t come, and the curse wheezes away above him. Taunting, evil. He looks so perplexed that it hurts.
It’s a grade four at most. Shoko drags their vacuum in and sucks it into the dust bag along with the rest of their filth. Turns it off and lets it suffocate.
Suguru is already there when she turns back around, cradling Satoru’s head in his hands. They’re trembling, residues of fear in the pale lines of Suguru’s face. Had he been afraid of it? Had they both been hopeless before she got here?
(How much had been strength, and how much had been courage?)
Suguru’s mouth is moving, but there’s no sound. Satoru isn’t looking at him, anyway, still staring up at the roof, transfixed and trying to make sense of his own inefficacy.
(It’s like this: You’re the most powerful man on the planet. You’re formidable, pre-eminent, transcendent. You’re raised as a god, and that isn’t wholly inaccurate. No one can match you; you will never lose.
And then you lose. You’re confined to a cage indefinitely. You are cut down like wheat. You do not win, but your body does, and in the aftermath, you are nothing more than a stitched-together human. Only ever a god in memory.
So, you hide there, sometimes, in your memory. But all it brings you is pain when you wake up.)
Shoko squeezes his shoulder hard, digs her nails in. It brings him back halfway – still so dazed, eyes young and lustreless. Suguru makes the sign for a star, and then presses his palm to his own chest, to Shoko’s chest, to Satoru’s. As if to say, you’re still you. As if to say, you will always be you, to us.
Suguru kisses the tip of his nose, the edge of his mouth. Satoru melts a little, pressing their foreheads together. A decade of regret in only one touch. Suguru’s mouth moves again, and Shoko wonders whether he regrets it – never saying it back, when he still could.
(There are other ways to say it, though. There’s love in silence, and in tenderness, in tomatoes and in tea.)
She can’t find him.
He’s not with Suguru in the garden, or at the piano practising Joplin’s Bethena. He’s not on the gallery deck, the widow’s walk, the cupola. The lantern room is empty. He’s not on the roof of the cottage, clearing the guttering, scraping lichen from the tiles.
The panic is near crippling. She clings to the railing of the gallery and tries not to let the vertigo consume her. She can’t catch her breath, her thighs ache from running – he could be anywhere. Her only consolation is that he can’t warp, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t found a different way to disappear.
But then Suguru waves at her from the ground. He points out to sea, and – there. In a t-shirt and board shorts, up to his knees in a low tide. No more than a pale miniature from this far away. She feels like an idiot. Why hadn’t she thought to look for him in the ocean?
By the time she makes it to the beach, Suguru is out there with him. His hand is cupped and swooping down in a curve. Home. Which could mean the cottage, but could also mean her.
(‘Ie’, home, ‘iri’, to enter. To Suguru, ‘home’ and Shoko are interchangeable.)
Satoru shakes his head. Turns around and holds his arm out towards her, luring her in. A siren at sea. Impossible to resist. The water is cold on her feet, but not unbearable; gooseflesh rockets up her legs and her bones feel alive. She can taste salt on the air. Sugar kelp and gutweed tangle in the skirt of her dress. Why hasn’t she done this before?
It appears it takes forever to reach them, but that’s because they keep going deeper. The water up to their hips, their waists, their chests. She worries they won’t stop, that they’ll sink to the ocean floor without her, turn to coral and silt, leave her to rot on the land alone. But they do. And Suguru takes her around the waist, holding her above the water with them so she doesn’t have to tread it, so she doesn’t drown.
“Listen,” Satoru says, so soft it’s nearly lost in the waves. He nudges the back of his ear, and she hears it.
Osnadh. The sea, sighing. A hush that curls unto itself, over and over. A lament, but also a harbinger of sleep, of rest. The prelude to something sweet and dreamless. It’s breathing, the water, like a living thing. Shoko closes her eyes and wonders if it drinks, eats, loves like a living thing, too.
The next time Satoru speaks, he’s much closer, lips wet and cool against her cheek. “Take a deep breath,” he whispers, and then drags them all under the water.
The cold is electric, and her skin sings. The ocean rushes into her ears and stings along the road of her sinuses; every wound, every sorrow, is soothed by the salt. Shoko forces her eyes open, and it burns something fierce, but – it’s worth it, if only to see them turned blue and mythical, hair floating up like the prettiest silk.
When they emerge, they will be starved for air. They will gasp and splutter and drag their water-logged bodies to land. When they emerge, they will be shivering and raw and human. But for now, they are something else – they are breathless and immortal, inexplicable, wild creatures.
They are gods again, if only for a moment.
The waters lull me, and their foam
Laves softly round my firelit home;
And through my flowing hair the breeze
Blows gently from the moonlit seas,
Filling my nostrils and my ears,
Bathing my cheeks with salten tears;
And in my sleep I hear the tide
That creeps beneath my window wide.
— Alistair Alpin Macgregor on 'Herbridian Sea Moods' (1925)