He’d made that book, hadn’t he?
Yeah. I remember now. I pulled it off, didn’t I? I had no idea how it might turn out, and Sensei told me to stop, but I did it anyway.
Just that once, I made my own decision.
Naomi looked up from his creaking perch. The world suddenly looked oddly clear to him, like the feeling when your head clears up after a cold.
He rose to his feet atop the slanting light pole like a gymnast on a balance beam.
And then…
He jumped into the sky.
5.
INSIDE THE HOLE, Naomi saw a jellyfish.
He was in outer space. It was made of water, and every possible color all at once.
Something big swallowed him up. He was broken into chunks, and every piece of him caught fire.
Once he was nice and smooth, he was scattered into bits.
Someone was looking him in the eye. Naomi wanted to say hello, but he couldn’t.
There wasn’t any Naomi left to speak.
6.
SOMETIMES, A SHINTO SHRINE has a particular kind of stage, the kind used for Noh theater, mamemaki rituals, and other similar events. Naomi had lived in Kyoto his whole life, so he’d seen a lot of shrines for a boy his age. He recognized that he was standing on one of those stages almost immediately.
Naomi glanced around him. There were two white mounds of sand just outside the stage, on opposite ends. They seemed familiar, but he couldn’t remember where he’d seen them before. They were definitely from a shrine in the city, though.
He looked around again, hoping for another hint. But apart from the mounds of sand, the space around him looked like heaven, or maybe hell. Possibly outer space.
Slowly, something dawned on him.
“Am I dead?” he murmured sadly to no one in particular.
“No, you’re not.”
Naomi flinched backward. There was a three-legged crow standing on the floor right in front of him.
Once he got over his initial surprise, Naomi stepped toward it cautiously. It was that crow, the one that had turned into a glove. Or maybe it was a glove that turned into a crow. Whatever. Either way, it had betrayed him.
And just to make things even more unsettling, it was speaking to him.
“Uh, you can talk?” Naomi asked.
“Yes, I can,” the crow replied in a calm, businesslike manner. Its voice sounded like a woman’s, but its tone was oddly flat; it reminded Naomi of a prerecorded menu on a corporate support line. “I can also answer your questions. To repeat, you are not currently dead.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Additionally, you may consider me your ally.”
Naomi looked at the bird dubiously. It was a little hard to take the thing at its word, especially since it had backstabbed him not too long ago.
On closer inspection, though, he realized that this crow had a small patch of blond hair on the crown of its head. The crow he knew had been completely black; maybe this was a different bird entirely. Not that he had any way to be sure.
“Katagaki Naomi,” the bird said; apparently it wasn’t going to give him time to think this over. Staring at him with its glassy, unreadable eyes, it continued, “You’re going to take Ichigyou Ruri back with your own hands.”
7.
“I’M GOING to what?” Naomi responded stupidly.
“Take back Ichigyou Ruri,” the bird replied, ignoring his obvious confusion. “The world has been thrown off balance. To correct this, the Homeostatic System will likely attempt to erase her. You need to prevent this. Return her to her rightful place in the world where she belongs.”
“That’s, uh, easy for you to say…” Naomi couldn’t make any sense of this, and this bird didn’t seem to want to help him understand. He had no idea what to think.
Ruri had been stolen from him. That was true.
He wanted to see her again. He’d jumped willingly into that hole on the off chance it would take him to her. But he hadn’t really thought through what might come next.
He knew what he wanted. He wanted to bring her back, to see her again, to wrap his arms around her.
But…
Naomi stared down at his hands. “I’m completely powerless.”
“Incorrect,” the crow replied calmly. “You have a power all your own. One you developed through steady, focused practice.” The bird wasn’t sitting in front of Naomi anymore. Startled, he looked around and spotted it flitting through the air some distance away.
Suddenly, it banked in midair and began to dive straight toward Naomi at an incredible speed.
Naomi threw up his arms reflexively to block the attack. The bird slammed into him a split second later; but strangely, there was no pain whatsoever.
Instead, there was a glove on his right hand. Naomi stared at it blankly. It wasn’t the same as his old one—this one was pure white.
“What are you?” he murmured in disbelief.
“Just a crow,” his glove responded. “A crow that watched you work very hard for the last three months.”
Naomi felt something surge out of his glove. He couldn’t see it or hear it, but it was enough. He understood now.
He could reach her with his own hands.
“Katagaki Naomi-san,” the glove continued in its voicemail-menu voice. “Do you want a girlfriend?”
I’ve heard that one before…
This time, the answer was easy.
“Yes!”
Naomi’s hand closed around something of its own volition. He’d grabbed hold of a shining cord—like the Spider’s Thread from that Akutagawa story, only much thicker and sturdier. Looking up, he saw that the roof of the stage had disappeared. The cord stretched up endlessly into the heavens.
Naomi gave it a great, powerful tug. In response, the cord yanked him up; his body soared into the sky like a firework.
He rocketed through the sky, past the stars, past outer space itself, and into a perfectly vertical rainbow-colored tunnel. The great string guided him into its mouth. He flew up and up through it.
The journey felt like it took years, or perhaps seconds. Maybe both.
Naomi’s body shrunk into a tiny speck. The border between him and the world grew vague and uncertain. Things were passing through him in a constant, chaotic torrent: energy, objects, people.
And at the end of that great river, Katagaki Naomi fused with himself.