As if responding to the need from outside the ward to produce greater and greater thrills, Shinjuku seemed to sink deeper and deeper into its accursed swamp.
Several years before, Shinjuku had seen an influx of forty-five thousand members of the criminal classes, approximately equal to the lives lost in the Devil Quake. That number had by now risen to at least sixty thousand.
Versus “regular” citizens sixty thousand strong. One out of every two was on the wrong side of the law somewhere. It was unlikely that such ratios could be found in any “uncivilized” city anywhere else in creation.
“Excuse me, but I’m not talking about the customary tabloid press treatment. We are going to address the meaning of Demon City in today’s world. That means digging down through the historical strata and getting back to the beginnings, to the origins of everything that goes on here. I’ve taken personal responsibility and have gone to great lengths.”
Sasaki awaited the young man’s reaction. This little speech should have given him an edge. He knew he had that look in his eyes that dared anybody to think otherwise.
“Hmm,” the young man said. “So, exactly how much do you know? Roran’s name came up in your letter.”
Sasaki felt a rising frustration, unable to infer anything from his tone of voice. It was like conversing with an animatronic doll that had perfected human speech. He licked his lips. Wait for the other man to play his hand or show his cards? The room fell silent. The silence stretched out. Sasaki blinked first.
“I’ve researched the Devil Quake from every angle, the results of which leave me with one big question. Supposing we could assign to it something like intention, can what has sprung forth since be attributed to the person who triggered the Devil Quake, or attributed to the Devil Quake itself? A satisfactory answer has eluded all my investigations. How could that intention be described in the first place? This is where scholars are bound to focus their attention next.”
Sasaki worried he was laying it on a bit too thick. The young man listened attentively with no evident distaste. Or at least he appeared to be paying attention. Sasaki had no choice but to continue. At some point, the drive of a veteran reporter to seek out a response from the questioner had abruptly waned.
“This was the focus of my attention when I started collecting material. A magnitude 8.5 earthquake struck directly beneath the city. As if reading a map, the earthquake left the neighboring wards untouched. What could explain such a phenomenon?”
Sasaki took a breath and continued.
“How could forty-five thousand people die while at the same time and literally next door, not even a puppy was hurt? Then there were the repeated and unsettling setbacks in the reconstruction efforts. The killing sprees with automatic weapons. The transport that inexplicably went missing on its return route. The memorial service where the skin melted off the priest’s body. What is at the root of all this? There’s so much to investigate that I hardly knew where to begin. In fact, were it not for a rather trivial incident, I would have approached this special edition with a point of view hardly different from the rest, and equally far removed from the reality of the situation.”
He stopped talking. Not so much because he’d come to the conclusion of his thoughts. Something stirred on the young man’s face, as if to say: Don’t tell me what I already know.
Sasaki hadn’t gotten to the point, but Setsura Aki was doing a fast-forward. He asked in a perfectly polite tone of voice, “What was this rather trivial incident?”
Sasaki gulped a bit. His mouth was so dry there was nothing left to swallow. “That would be—” he began hoarsely. He paused and tried to summon up some saliva to wet his vocal cords. He hadn’t felt like this even interviewing one of Shinjuku’s deadliest assassins.
“A friend of mine is an internist,” he began again. “He showed me something very interesting, a microcellular scan he’d done on a cancer patient. The display showed the afflicted carcinoma and the surrounding organs. This was a patient on his death bed. The only question was how rapidly the cancer cells would invade the healthy tissue. He’d mapped the whole thing using computer graphics. Not exactly my cup of tea, but he seemed to get a kick out of it.”
Sasaki permitted himself a small sigh. “So I ended up as the spectator for his show. The cancer cells were dyed black. They spread into the white normal cells. I sat there glued to my seat. You can probably guess where this is going. The map of those cells perfectly aligned with a map of Tokyo—I know, because I carry a map of Tokyo with me wherever I go. I pulled it out, and I swear it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.”
He wiped his brow. The ventilation left much to be desired. All the better to make the suspect literally sweat. The interrogators could take a drug to cool down their own body temperature during the questioning. But it wasn’t the warmth that was making Sasaki sweat. The fever was erupting from within. He felt he’d said too much already. He felt something approaching despair.
“That definitely is quite interesting.” Though his eyes said something else entirely. “Please continue. Let’s get to me and Roran.”
“Ah, first, I need some water.”
“Yeah, it is hot. But there’s no running water down here. Keep going, in as much detail as you can.”
“Just a minute—”
“Exactly how did you come to know about me and Roran?”
Sasaki stared back at him. It was like he was looking at a different person. “Who—who the hell are you?” Civility was hardly the issue now.
“How did you find out what you found out?”
“I’ve done some investigating of my own—witches and warlocks working in Shinjuku, new religious sects—and the connection between these supernatural phenomena and the Devil Quake is impossible to ignore. God, I need some water.”
“And the result of these investigations?”
“Nothing but dead ends there. I chanced across a more productive thread while looking into the early days of Demon City’s fratricidal conflicts.”
“Hoh.”
“I have connections at the National Library and the resource center at the Police Training Academy. I turned up a name, Onizuka. A police officer, nearing seventy. He was the only cop who survived Demon City’s first year.”
“That many died?” the young man said. He seemed surprised.
“In the three days after the Devil Quake, until the temporary bridges were erected, gangs ran rampant, violence and murder broke out everywhere, and the Shinjuku law enforcement infrastructure was in shambles. The cops who’d survived the Devil Quake were all pretty much killed in the line of duty.”
“Horrifying.”
“And I’m sure you don’t need to be told the murder rate in the year following. The total came to 5,824. If my memory serves correctly, the number of homicides for the entirety of Japan during that period was 1,920. In other words, a single ward had three times as many killings as the rest of the country combined. Add in theft, burglary and assault and it comes to more than three-hundred thousand cases. That year, 2,819 police officers died in the line of duty. Only one lived to tell the tale.”
“And that would be Onizuka.”
“Yeah. He was discovered in a vacant lot near Kabuki-cho, alive but his memory gone. He spent the next fifteen years convalescing. I checked him out.”