"........."
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi stared up at it a moment longer, and then abruptly wheeled her motorcycle around and sped off toward the structure.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kentaro was baflled by her behavior, but followed her anyway.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Ew, what a dump...” he said, as he stepped
✦ ✦ ✦
inside.
✦ ✦ ✦
The interior was heavily deteriorated. Bed
✦ ✦ ✦
frames were piled high in the lobby, dust balls heaped on them like fluffy stuffed animals. The tiles on the floor were no longer attached, and shifted underfoot. Kentaro felt like he was walking on dead insects.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yuck. Nagi, What the hell are'we doing here?”
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi ignored him, walking straight ahead. Judging from her lack of hesitation, she knew this place pretty well.
✦ ✦ ✦
Oh! Maybe...
✦ ✦ ✦
He’d heard Nagi had been sick in junior high, and spent a long time in the hospital. Maybe this was her hospital.
✦ ✦ ✦
Lots of memories, then?
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi stepped out into the open space in the
✦ ✦ ✦
center of the building.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kentaro heard her gasp, and poked his head
✦ ✦ ✦
out the door.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Ah!” he yelped.
✦ ✦ ✦
There was a shock of green. It was mostly
✦ ✦ ✦
weeds, but the leaves were lush, the white and yellow flowers bright, and he felt like they had stepped into a tropical paradise.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Wow,” Kentaro said, moving out into the
✦ ✦ ✦
garden and looking up.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was open all the way to the top, and there were mirrors placed along the walls, reflecting light down to the bottom.
✦ ✦ ✦
"...I see. This building’s most eccentric feature.
✦ ✦ ✦
Drab on the outside, green on the inside...”
✦ ✦ ✦
Of course, this had once been a proper, well-maintained garden. The trees must have been hauled away when the hospital closed. But the environment remained, and the garden had stayed alive.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Amazing, isn’t it, Nagi. . .?” Kentaro said, tum-ing toward her, and trailing off mid-thought.
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi was crying. Her eyes were wide and her lips trembling, staring at the garden as tears flowed.
✦ ✦ ✦
“‘It’s very impressive,”’ she whispered, as if quoting someone else.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kentaro was stunned. He could only stand and stare.
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi walked unsteadily away, and sat down on an overgrown bench. She hung her head, muttering to herself.
✦ ✦ ✦
She seemed oddly childish, and Kentaro was starting to get worried. “Um,” he said, hesitantly.
✦ ✦ ✦
“What do you want to be?” Nagi suddenly
✦ ✦ ✦
asked.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Eh?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“In the future, what do you want to be?” she asked, not looking up.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Wh-where’d that come from?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“What do you think will become of me? What do you think I should be?” she muttered, emotionless.
✦ ✦ ✦
“What will. . .aren’t you already a hero?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Can I really? Can I really be one?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Well, you already...”
✦ ✦ ✦
“‘You should go for it,’ I said. How thoughtless of me.” Nagi smiled faintly, and fell silent.
✦ ✦ ✦
Her shoulders looked so thin, so frail that Kentaro was suddenly reminded that the Fire Witch was just a high school girl.
✦ ✦ ✦
"...I don’t really know,” Kentaro said, hesitantly.
✦ ✦ ✦
“But I think if anyone can do it, you can. I’m sure you will. And because I think that, I’m trying to...”
✦ ✦ ✦
Help, he almost said, but suddenly hesitated. He was suddenly not sure that what he was doing was useful to her. It was fully possible he was just getting in her way, dragging her back.
✦ ✦ ✦
“So, um...”
✦ ✦ ✦
"........."
✦ ✦ ✦
Kentaro stood helplessly in front of Nagi. She said nothing for a long time, and then abruptly, “Think about it,” she said.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Think about whether I can be one.”
✦ ✦ ✦
"........." Kentaro didn’t even think it worth thinking about, but she seemed so earnest that he said,
✦ ✦ ✦
"...okay, I will.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Nagi reached up and wiped away her tears. When she looked up she was herself again.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Thanks,” she said, awkwardly.
✦ ✦ ✦
Above their heads, the mirrors glittered, reflecting the light of the rising sun.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Style ” closed.
✦ ✦ ✦
The sun reflected in the mirrors that lined the sides of the open central column of the hospital, glittering.
✦ ✦ ✦
"...mm,” Kisugi Makiko squinted at the sudden glare, walking down the fourth floor hallway.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was a young doctor, only twenty-seven.
✦ ✦ ✦
Around her, nurses hustled back and forth, and patients headed for the toilets, dragging IV stands along after them. She carefully repressed the impulse that struck her, not letting anyone know what she was thinking.
✦ ✦ ✦
"........."
✦ ✦ ✦
It was all so unnecessary. Sunlight would never normally have reached all the way to the bottom of the open shaft, but one of the biggest sponsors of the hospital’s construction, Teratsuki Kyoichiro-shi, had proposed they put a garden there. Because of him, the inner walls of the smokestack-shaped hospital were lined with mirrors, bringing light to the bottom of the pit. Most of the light hit the ground, as it was supposed to, but every now and then the angles would align and send a flash into the hospital. There were sunny spots throughout the building where this was intentional, but when the beams hit her eyes anywhere else it always grated on Makiko’s nerves.
✦ ✦ ✦
The slippers on her feet clattered a little louder than normally.
✦ ✦ ✦
“...him,” she whispered, so quietly no one else could hear. “. . .ll him.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Despite this, she went on her way, toward the hospital room where she was to do some counseling.
✦ ✦ ✦
Her primary role as a psychiatrist was to look after the emotional well-being of patients forced to stay in the hospital for lengthy periods of time, whether from illness or surgery. Occasionally she would also see outpatients when the other doctors’ schedules were full.
✦ ✦ ✦
She entered a private room without knocking.
✦ ✦ ✦
There was a single man on the bed, sitting vacantly upright.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had diabetes, and was not a mental patient, but his hollow, mindless expression looked more than a little schizophrenic.
✦ ✦ ✦
The cold gleam in Makiko’s eyes was no less
✦ ✦ ✦
insane.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Shinokita-san,” she called.
✦ ✦ ✦
Slowly, stifliy, he looked in her direction.
✦ ✦ ✦
"........."
✦ ✦ ✦
He did not answer.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Did someone come to see you?”
✦ ✦ ✦
"........."
✦ ✦ ✦
“Aw, nobody ever does,” she sneered.
✦ ✦ ✦
She moved to his side and touched him. The moment Makiko put her hand on his shoulder, the man violently convulsed. No...he shuddered.
✦ ✦ ✦
His expression changed. His eyes opened wide, his lips half-opened, quivering, and his teeth were chattering...he was shaking with fear.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Were you lonely, Shinokita-san?”
✦ ✦ ✦
Moving slowly, she slid her arm around his
✦ ✦ ✦
throat.
✦ ✦ ✦
“You worked yourself to pieces for your com-
✦ ✦ ✦
pany, but your wife divorced you, the company de-moted you, and all those years of drinking with your coworkers ruined your liver. Your company was nice enough to give you sick leave, but how long will they wait? When the insurance runs out, how will you pay your hospital bills?”
✦ ✦ ✦
She whispered sweetly in his ear.
✦ ✦ ✦
The man was shaking like a leaf, all the blood drained from his face, not even listening to what Makiko said.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Augh,” he groaned.
✦ ✦ ✦
Makiko suddenly grabbed his cheeks with both hands.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Look at me!” she snapped, yanking his face
✦ ✦ ✦
toward her.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Eek!” The man froze, too frightened to
✦ ✦ ✦
tremble.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yes, more, more, fear me more, fear me from the bottom of your heart!” Grinning, Makiko brushed the man’s lips with her right index finger.
✦ ✦ ✦
She turned the finger, pointing at her own
✦ ✦ ✦
face.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then she suddenly. plunged her fingernail into her own left eye, stabbing it to the root.
✦ ✦ ✦
"............!" The man’s jaw dropped open in shock.
✦ ✦ ✦
Makiko calmly pulled her finger out. The eyeball came with it, skewered on her finger. The nerve end-ings trailed along after it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The gaping hole in her face yawned at him.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Just a trick! A harmless little trick,” Makiko whispered breezily. But no amount of makeup could create a hole in one’s head.
✦ ✦ ✦
No ordinary human could do this.
✦ ✦ ✦
No ordinary human.
✦ ✦ ✦
But if she wasn’t ordinary...
✦ ✦ ✦
“Hee hee hee hee,” she laughed quietly, popping the eyeball back into the socket.
✦ ✦ ✦
She closed her lid, and slowly pulled her finger out again, leaving the eyeball in place.
✦ ✦ ✦
Her eyelid twitched back and forth a few times, and when she opened it again her eye looked just like it always had. Her iris focused-the eye was clearly still functioning, seeing.
✦ ✦ ✦
“...eee...eeeek. .. !” A kind of voiceless
✦ ✦ ✦
scream came from the man’s throat.
✦ ✦ ✦
The IV in his arm popped out, his arm tightening from the sheer depth of his fear. Makiko instantly clapped her lips to the wound it left behind.
✦ ✦ ✦
She began to slurp noisily, drinking the man’s blood. Fear had secreted other elements into his blood, and it was quite bitter. But she lapped it up hungrily.
✦ ✦ ✦
Only when she had sucked his blood for a full minute did she slowly begin to back away.
✦ ✦ ✦
The room had filled with a new scent. The man had pissed himself.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Aw, again, Shinokita-san?” Makiko said, sneer-ing at him once more.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Ah...ahhh...” The man was frozen, unable to move.
✦ ✦ ✦
Makiko reconnected his IV.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Whatever will we do with you,” she said, pressing the button for the nurse. In his ear, she whispered,
✦ ✦ ✦
“If you go crazy, you can come to my ward, Shinokita-san. Then I can taste you any time I want...”
✦ ✦ ✦
The man twitched again. He had no way to escape.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had no choice but to live in fear.
✦ ✦ ✦
The nurse arrived.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Ah, did we have an accident?” she asked, and then began changing the sheets, muttering under her breath.
✦ ✦ ✦
Makiko left the room as if nothing had hap-