“We have to figure out who he is before the Justices capture him!”
“How?” Hiro demanded. “He could be in another country. He could be on the other side of the world. We’ll never find one person out of five billion accounts!”
“Where is he?! Where did he go?!”
I searched for him among the countless glittering buildings of U’s bustling streets. But this world was so big, and there were so many ASes.
The ASes, meanwhile, didn’t have a hard time finding me.
“Look, it’s Belle!”
“Belle?!”
“Belle!!”
They peeked between their fingers and pushed aside their hair to look. All sorts of ASes were staring at me in shock.
“It’s Belle!”
“Is it really her?”
“She came back to us after all!”
A crowd rapidly gathered around me.
“Talk about a rare sighting!”
“Sing for us!”
“Sing!!”
“Stop! I have to find him!” I pleaded, trying to push forward, but a horde of ASes was hemming me in.
“Let me through! Please!!”
I swam, panting, among the sea of ASes. But they surged like a huge wave, and soon only my head was free.
“No…!!”
They flocked around me in a massive clump.
“She’s finally gonna sing again!”
“She really is doing a surprise show!”
“I’ve been waiting for this, Belle!”
“I’m dying to hear your voice!”
“Sing!!”
Hiro watched in a daze as I was swallowed up.
“Everyone, let her go!! We’re in a hurry!” she begged, but no one listened.
More and more ASes eager to hear Belle sing were sucked into the ever-growing mass.
“She’s surrounded,” Ms. Okumoto said, pausing to look at her phone as she weeded her garden.
“This looks bad,” Ms. Hatanaka murmured, standing at her university lectern after a class ended.
“But if we go to her…” Ms. Kita was in an apron, resting her elbows on the bar of the izakaya where she worked.
“Then she’ll realize we knew all along,” said Ms. Nakai, wearing a white coat. She had just finished seeing her last patient of the day.
“But still…,” Ms. Yoshitani began, dressed in waders as she peeled off her rubber gloves at the wharf. “I think we should go.”
Inside the windows of their group chat, all the members of the choir started getting ready.
Hiro was screaming at the ASes on the big screen.
“Please, everyone!! Let her through!”
I stood quietly next to her, my hands on my chest and my eyes closed. I was trying to think back over everything I knew and find within it his true identity.
“I’ve been hurt! ” Swan had screamed, her eyes sharp. In that video chat, she was smiling brightly. Behind these polarized images was a third where a sobbing baby AS symbolized her lonely heart.
Was the Dragon, like her, isolated somewhere?
“I got my tattoos in the same places the love of my life was injured,” Jelinek had said in response to an interviewer’s question. On his website were pictures of him showing the swollen tattoos on his pale skin. But I was sure the Dragon’s bruises weren’t put there by design.
“I was seriously ill as a child and required many major surgeries,” Fox the baseball player had confessed. But somehow, the Dragon’s bruises were different from those very real surgical scars.
U devices picked up inflammatory reactions in the wearer’s body. When I hit my forehead, Belle got a red mark on her forehead. Maybe the same bruises existed on the back of the real person behind the Dragon.
As I thought about it, I remembered that when I felt emotional pain, a round, bruise-like mark appeared on Belle’s chest. The round mark gave off a soft, warm light. If emotional pain was transformed into visible marks, was that why the bruises on the Dragon’s back quivered so strangely the night we danced…?
And when we clung to each other in the starry sky…
…his eyes had looked just like a child’s.
“A child…?”
I gasped.
“La la la…la la…la la la…”
Somewhere in the distance, I heard what sounded like a child humming.
“That’s a child’s voice!”
It was coming from one of the countless windows open on the screen.
“La la la…la la…la la la…”
“He and I are the only ones who know that song!”
It was the melody I had written, the song Belle had sung in the ballroom. I was certain.
“Where’s it coming from?!”
I searched the screen frantically.
Shinobu, Kamishin, and Ruka had just shown up and were watching from the back of the room.
“Suzu…,” Ruka whispered worriedly.
I desperately moved the mouse, sorting through the endless windows from Hiro’s automated search.
“Where is he? Where?!”
Windows flew away in all four directions.
“La la la…la la…la la la…”
The singing was getting closer.
Finally, I arrived at a single window. A boy wearing a white hoodie was staring out from a white room, singing.
“La la la…la la…la la la…”
It was a live feed. In the corner of the screen, a message read, LIVE: 1 VIEWER. In other words, I was the only one watching.
“……!!”
I stared in surprise. I recognized the boy sitting there singing with hollow eyes.
“I’ve seen him somewhere…”
I quickly remembered—he was on Mr. Reseggnation’s YouTube channel:
“The Dragon…is…my hero.”
He’d seemed somehow different from the other kids. In that one related video, he had been with his father and older brother.
“We’re a happy little family of three. We’re doing just fine without Mom around. We support each other.”
“Why is this kid singing my song…?”
Why was he humming the melody I’d danced to with the Dragon?
“I’m gonna enlarge this,” Hiro said, starting up a photo-editing app. The boy’s face grew larger and larger on the screen. As the image repeatedly became grainy and then cleared up, I made out someone’s reflection in his dark, lifeless eyes.
I stared in shock. The person in his eyes was Belle, smiling as she danced with the Dragon in the ballroom.
“Why is she…?”
I blinked, totally stunned. What do I make of this new information?
“La la la…la la…la la la…”
The boy strode lightly to the back of his room. It was a big room, but nearly empty. From the angle of the camera, all I could see was the door and one small window. The white wallpaper full of flying birds jumped out at me the most. Pushed up against one wall was a table with a glass vase of red roses on it.
“So is this kid the Dragon?” Hiro asked.
“Something’s off,” I said.
“Off?”
“I just don’t think it’s him.”
“I agree. I don’t see any bruises—,” she started saying, when there was a loud bang onscreen.
“What was that?!” I shouted, staring at the stream.
The boy’s father walked in slowly. I recognized the man from the related video I’d watched before. He’d said he was a single father. He had bushy eyebrows, and he walked confidently, with his chest stuck out. Muscular arms protruded from his shirt sleeves. He wore an expensive-looking silver watch.
“Tomo, what are you singing? ” he asked quietly.
The boy didn’t answer.
“I’m trying to work. You should know how distracting that is.”
Tomo ignored him, swaying as he continued to sing. The viewer number in the corner of the screen rose to 2. Someone other than me had started watching.
Tomo kept swaying. His father stared at him.
Suddenly, the man swept the vase off the table with his left hand. It smashed on the floor, the red rose petals scattering like drops of blood. Tomo looked surprised. He stopped humming and slowly plopped down, like a broken puppet.
I stared at the screen in shock, unable to speak. The father raised his thick eyebrows and looked down at Tomo.
“Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
The viewer number in the corner of the screen went back to 1. I wondered if the other viewer had retreated out of shock. Hiro and I were the only ones watching now. The boy’s father continued.
“The world has rules, and in this house, I make the rules.”
Tomo listened to the quiet scolding with a blank expression.
“If you can’t obey them, you’re nothing to me. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
The man raised his right fist threateningly.
“Because if you still don’t get it…”
He was going to hit the boy. I closed my eyes reflexively.
But someone interrupted.
“Stop!!”
A second boy, dressed all in black, stepped between Tomo and the man.
“Leave Tomo alone!!”
He wrestled with their father, managing to hold him back.
“Move.”
“Stop it!!”
“Why’re you looking at me like that?! I said move!!”
“Ow!!”
The boy in black fell to the ground, and a cracked phone slipped from his pocket. He huddled protectively over Tomo, covering the boy’s ears.
“Tomo, don’t listen to him,” he said.
Their father glared down at them and shouted, “Who do you have to thank for this roof over your head?! ”
“It’s my fault, not Tomo’s,” the older boy said, his voice barely audible.
“Kei, you’re fourteen. You ought to know better by now!”
“It’s my fault…”
“What good are you, dammit?!”
Every time his father yelled, Kei’s back flinched.
“It’s all my fault,” he whispered pleadingly, his whole body shaking.
His father kept hurling abuse at him, like some awful boss chastising a subordinate.
“Get out. Do you understand me? If you’ve got nothing to contribute here, then get out of my sight!!”
With each word, Kei’s back trembled like he was being beaten. “Ungh… Ngh… Ngh…!!”
I remembered how, on the night the Dragon and I spent together, he had trembled and grunted miserably as if he were being beaten by an invisible hand:
“Just gotta get through this… I just gotta get through this…”
The words played in my mind as I watched Kei.
And I realized something else.
The home screen on the phone Kei had dropped—it had a picture of a woman holding a rose. The same photo that had hung in the Dragon’s room. The cracks were the same, too—which meant they’d been the cracks in the screen of his phone.
“I found him…,” I said out loud.
Between the strands of Kei’s disheveled hair, I saw his eyes squeezed shut.
“This boy…is the Dragon.”