Half a year had passed now.
“Doctor, did you hear? The chunk that got scooped out is filling in again,” said Mugino the staffer. Dr. Blue-Eyes was still playing the role of leader at the foot of the mountain.
“Filling in?”
“The part of the mountain that crumbled? There are images on Suikanet. Want to see?”
She turned the screen of her device toward him.
Beneath a blue sky, the clawlike marks where the sector collapse had occurred, leaving behind a jumbled mess of rock and rubble, were now crisscrossed with what looked like gray threads. Although the color was different, it resembled a scab forming on human skin.
“What is all of that?”
“Apparently, it’s pipes and girders and things? They’ve extended over from the adjacent areas, and they’re getting thicker. This is what it looked like last month.”
Mugino showed him another picture. In this one, there were many people standing atop the roof, observing the hazy scene.
“I see. The structure must be regrowing.”
“Regrowing? I’ve never seen that before. I didn’t know Yokohama Station could do that?” replied Mugino. It was the first time Dr. Blue-Eyes had seen it, too, but that was because this was the first time such a large portion of the station had been destroyed.
Dr. Blue-Eyes went to see the regeneration from time to time after that. If he wore the sunglasses he’d asked the station employees to get for him, the brightness wasn’t so bad, and because they hid his blue eyes, he could move about in relative peace.
The gray, hazy growth ballooned up in size like a silkworm cocoon. In time, the fibrous materials were no longer visible, becoming more like a bulging white loaf of bread. It seemed to be excreting concrete around the fibers.
After that, the recognizable geometric parts of the station appeared—roofing, stairs, escalators, and glass windows. A year after the eruption, the mountain’s appearance had returned to what it was before.
Of course, the structure was simply covering over the earth where the sector collapse happened. The interior wouldn’t be the same. It was like packing some stuffing into a tooth cavity. Still, the mountain was so neatly repaired that you couldn’t even tell where the collapse had happened.
Many of the families that had evacuated from Hill Town to the foot of the peak started to argue whether or not they should return or remain at the bottom. Some didn’t want to go back to the site of such a traumatic experience, while others wanted to, now that they had the chance.
By this time, the chaos in the little city at the foot of the mountain had diminished, and the station employees did not need Dr. Blue-Eyes’s reassuring presence to the same degree, so he elected to go back to Hill Town.
After climbing the escalator, he found that his home had been regenerated in the same place it had been previously. It was divided up with bookcases, precisely as it had been before. His massive library was all there, too. Even the rusted metal door to the adjacent room was back.
The only indication that anything had changed was the girl standing there.
“Baa, baa,” she said, breaking into a smile when she saw him. Her face was filthy, and trash and sand were caked onto her hair, which reached down to the ground.
He stood and stared at the inexplicable girl until he finally understood.
“Oh…you’re alive. How did you get Inside? Did someone give you a Suika?” he asked, placing his hand on her shoulder. The girl just tilted her head and uttered, “Wraah?” It did not seem that she’d learned any more words.
It was the plump little girl the doctor had met on the south side of the mountain, when he’d gone around placing the handicap stones with Nijo. She was somewhat thinner now, however.
“Meh, meh,” she said, grinning happily. Her teeth were horrible, and her breath smelled like a dust chute.
✦ ✦ ✦
Before long, the entire town—in fact, the whole city at the foot of the mountain—knew that Dr. Blue-Eyes was living in the regenerated Hill Town with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. After the eruption, she had appeared out of nowhere and settled in his home. He named her Kito and began raising her.
Kito grew slowly and learned to call him “Eddie, Eddie,” but proved more resistant to learning any other words. She’d probably been abandoned by her parents shortly after birth, then reached the age of six and was expelled by the turnstiles without ever picking up language.
Dr. Blue-Eyes recalled the method of accessing locational data from Nijo and decided to try it out with Kito to see where she’d been.
Yet when he put the device to her hand and executed the command, the response declared that no Suika was detected.
He tried it on his own hand and succeeded at pulling up a map of his life’s travels (around the Gunma area and nowhere else).
Mystified, the doctor sought out a bioelectric technician, who pressed his diagnostic tool to Kito’s neck in search of a signal. Eventually, his face pale, he gasped. “Dr. Blue-Eyes, what does this mean? She doesn’t have a Suika.”
He gave the technician a quick explanation of Kito’s past. He’d found her in a station hollow on the south side of the mountain before the eruption, and left her there initially, but she appeared in the town after it had been regenerated.
The technician considered this, then said, “Meaning that, because the station structure was reconstructed in the eruption, she wound up Inside without a Suika, I guess?”
“Is that possible?”
“No. I’ve never heard of it,” the man answered, worry evident in his expression. Dr. Blue-Eyes impressed upon him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want anyone else to know that the girl did not have a Suika. “Well, if you say so, Doctor,” he replied.
Dr. Blue-Eyes wanted to ask Nijo his thoughts, but the net address the man had left behind was no longer working. He’d probably arrived in Kyoto by now. As far as Dr. Blue-Eyes knew, an extremely long distance, individual communication from Gunma to Kyoto was essentially impossible. Perhaps Nijo could pull it off, but there was no communication forthcoming from him.
He was such a loud and obnoxious man when he was here, but he won’t get in touch when I really need him.
While the appearance of the books on the shelves was virtually identical to how it was before the eruption, little details had changed about them. Sometimes, the pages were in reverse order, or the same entry repeated hundreds of times, or a section of a literary novel was found smack in the middle of a medical text. The combinations of words and definitions in his dictionary were all scrambled, making it useless. If he’d known this was going to happen, he would have simply given Nijo the dictionary.