Every morning, I take Fugue for a walk. We go down the hill from my house and along the banks of the Niyodo. When I look back from the other side of the Chinka Bridge, my little village glows in the morning light. I see it all the time, but every day its beauty is a little different. Sometimes there are new green leaves, sometimes red and orange ones. The river’s water level, the position of the clouds, the drift of the mist, whether any sunbeams are visible, whether it’s hot and humid or cold—all these things have endless variations. Their beauty captivates me.
One day on our morning walk, I snapped out of my reverie to see Fugue staring at me like he wanted to play. He doesn’t seem to mind that his right paw is missing; he runs and jumps and splashes in the water like any other dog. Seeing that makes me feel kind of relieved, in a way.
When we got back to the house, I took off his leash and fed him. Then I paused on the porch to wipe his feet before we both went inside.
“Okay, see you later,” I said as I folded up the cloth.
Dad came out of the garage.
“Suzu…what about dinner tonight?” he asked.
I slung my bag on my shoulder and shook my head without looking him in the eye.
“How about I make tataki?”
I shook my head again.
“Oh… Okay,” he said, then got in his car and left for work.
Dad and I have an awkward conversation like this every morning.
I hurried across the bridge, scrolling through news on my phone:
Belle Cancels Concert After Unexpected Incident
“Ugh, I’m sorry…”
I hated having disappointed everyone who’d been looking forward to that show. I was thinking about how I should prepare better next time, when I tripped over a dent in the bridge and stumbled forward.
“Ack!”
I made a valiant effort to hold myself up by flapping my arms but sadly ended up flat on my face.
“Oof! Owwww…!!”
A red bump quickly formed on my forehead. On the screen of my dropped phone, a red mark appeared on Belle’s forehead, too. My device had detected the inflammation. U’s body-sharing technology linked me to Belle through my biometric info.
“It wasn’t Belle’s fault!”
Hiro’s shrill pronouncement echoed into the hallway.
“It was all the Dragon! I seriously wish they’d just unveil him already!!”
By afternoon, the bump on my forehead had gone down quite a bit.
“I wonder why he upsets people on purpose like that,” I mused, probing the bump.
“He’s just showing off!” Hiro said, scribbling the answer to a physics problem on the whiteboard like she was letting off steam. Mr. Terada had left it there on purpose as a challenge to his students, and Hiro had accepted.
“He might have some reason.”
“It’s all a bluff!”
“You think?” I wasn’t entirely convinced.
“Why don’t we figure out who he is and unveil him ourselves?”
Hiro finished writing the answer, then underlined it forcefully with a double line as if to say she’d solve whatever problem Mr. Terada served up.
We bumped into Kamishin on the way out of the classroom.
“Oh, hi, Suzu.”
“What’s with the big backpack?” I asked. He looked fitted out for a camping trip or something.
“I’ve got an away game.”
“A game?”
Just then, Hiro squeezed out the door with a bulky cardboard-wrapped package loaded onto a metal carrying frame on her back.
“You too, Hiroka?” Kamishin asked.
“Don’t lump me in with you!” she snapped back.
Hiro and I left school and got on the train. She heaved her oversized package onto a seat, then immediately took her iPad out of her tote bag and started explaining things.
“ASes are linked to a person’s biometric data that’s constantly being scanned by their device, so a single user can’t have two ASes.”
“Right.”
“Plus, I searched the whole net, and there’s zero info about the Dragon out there other than that he showed up at U’s martial arts hall—no nationality, no age, no gender, nothing.”
“Then how are we going to find him?”
“There might not be info about the Dragon himself, but there are records of everyone he’s fought so far.”
“Aha!”
“In the past seven months, he’s won three hundred and sixty-nine fights, lost three, and tied two. Most of these three hundred and seventy-four individuals have other social media accounts linked to their U account. We might figure something out if we talk to them all.”
We got off the train, boarded the bus, and took it to my stop, where we walked along the Niyodo until we came to my old elementary school, nestled in the green summer mountains. The same abandoned school the women’s choir used for practice.
I pointed Hiro up to a classroom on the second floor. Despite her heavy-looking pack, she sprang up the stairs energetically.
A lot of schools that close because of population loss and rural decline are simply left as they were, or else turned into slowly moldering storage spaces. A minority are turned into dormitories or activity centers. Ours, fortunately enough, became a community center. I filled out a room-use form at the front desk.
“We’re going to use it for studying,” I told the attendant.
Then I got a laundry list of rules. You’re allowed to use the stuff in the rooms, but please share it with others. In case of an earthquake, remember to put on one of the safety helmets before evacuating. Et cetera, et cetera. Once that was done, I went up to the classroom.
“…Oh!”
I looked around in surprise. A whole array of monitors had been set up around a central large screen. It was like a secret intelligence headquarters. Hiro had hooked up the unused school equipment to her own high-performance computer tower, which is what she’d been carrying in the cardboard wrapping. While I was signing up for the room, she’d managed to set up her entire living-room system.
“You’re amazing!” I couldn’t help moaning.
She flashed me a proud, toothy smile. “Hee-hee-hee-hee!”
On the main monitor, the Dragon’s 374 opponents were pinpointed on a world map. Hiro addressed all of them at once.
“I have a question for everyone who’s fought the Dragon. Who is he?”
An icon near Philadelphia popped up. It was a brawny wrestler AS wearing a tiger mask.
“He’s a mystery. Definitely not an AI, though.”
The icon flipped over to reveal a slender boy holding a cat—completely different from his AS. He was frank with us.
Near the Strait of Dover, in France, a hefty green goblin fighter AS popped up.
“Super aggressive. The worst.”
The icon flipped to reveal a cheerful young blond girl.
Near Mumbai, India, an AS that looked like the divine bird Garuda appeared, tilting its head in puzzlement.
“I don’t know why he goes that far.”
The real person behind the AS was a young, intelligent-looking doctor wearing glasses.
Near Shenzhen, China, an AS that looked like the Stone Man answered:
“I was one of his first opponents. He didn’t have as many bruises back then.”
The real person was a kindly middle-aged police officer.
“So the bruises came from all the fights?” I asked the screen.
Hiro focused in on the three people who had defeated the Dragon.
“Here’s a question for the few of you who beat him. How did you win?”
“He got sloppy all of a sudden,” a boy in Los Angeles answered.
“I think he got distracted,” a thirty-something woman from Moscow added.
Of course, not everyone who fought him made their location public. The third winning combatant was among them.
“The angel…,” I murmured. It was the AS who had cheered Belle up that first snowy night.
“What about you? Do you have anything to add?” Hiro asked. The angel put out a wordless comment bubble:
…………
Then the icon vanished from the screen altogether.
“Ah!”
It was gone. Hiro’s slightly sharp tone must have scared it off. She was irritated.
“Argh! Not even a rumor?”
Who knows…?
Could be him.
You think?
The bruises look the same
An intricate web of answers popped up one after the next.
“Who is ‘him’?”
Several links appeared, and Hiro clicked one of them. It opened the browser and displayed a bunch of image search results. One of those results was a young Caucasian man glaring sharply at the camera.
“His name’s Jelinek,” said Hiro. “An obscure contemporary artist.”
His long, black hair streaked with highlights fit my mental image of an artist.
We clicked through to his website. The home page had a photo of him showing off a tattoo on his pale white skin, displayed like it was one of his own creations. True enough, the color and shape were surprisingly similar to the bruises on the Dragon’s back. The tattoo was on the man’s back, too.
Images from various social media platforms were embedded in the website. Pictures of his paintings, a woman in glasses—probably his girlfriend—which was all well and good…but for some reason, there were also pictures of a car crash and a graveyard. Why would someone want the whole world to see this stuff? So creepy.
“Six months ago, he started getting tattoos of bruises all over his body. That fits with when the Dragon joined U. After that, the value of his artwork increased twentyfold,” Hiro announced.
“Very fishy…,” I groaned. I would never want to talk to this man, or have anything to do with him.
“Oh.”
“What?”
“His agent’s number is listed here.”
“It is?”
“I’m cold-calling them.”
“What? Really? Hey!”
Before I could tell her to wait, Hiro had pressed the call button on her video chat app, which promptly started ringing. Crap, now what? I was literally just thinking about how I never want to talk to him!
The agent connected Jelinek to the call. It was late afternoon for us, night for him.
“I have nothing to say,” he said crossly from his studio. His irritation was palpable even through the machine translation. Given his paint-spattered apron and the brush in his hand, he must have been in the middle of painting. I thought I glimpsed a tattoo peeking out from the sleeve of his T-shirt; it looked like one of the Dragon’s bruises.
“What do your tattoos mean?” Hiro asked point-blank in a strange voice.
“Just who the hell are you people?!”
“What were you doing last night?” she went on. His outburst didn’t ruffle her.
The video app automatically displayed our screen next to his. There we were, all blown up and larger than life: two weird girls wearing hard hats and large surgical masks, with our bangs in our eyes and our hands folded in front of our noses. His reaction wasn’t surprising.