Mugino rode up the escalator to visit Dr. Blue-Eyes at Hill Town from time to time.
“It’s nice to see that things are lively around here again?” she said in that odd way of lifting the ends of her sentences.
“It’s only about half as busy as before. Some of the people died, and many more don’t want to return. Not that I blame them,” he replied, then looked at Kito. “Would you put on some coffee, Kito?”
She answered, “Kii,” and began to boil water.
“She’s cute. Is that your granddaughter?”
“No. She showed up in town after the eruption. She doesn’t seem to have any relatives, so I’m keeping her here,” Dr. Blue-Eyes explained. It was the same story he gave the townspeople. Of course, he hadn’t told anyone the girl had no Suika.
“Oooh. That’s so generous of you, Doctor.”
They sat, drinking the coffee Kito made.
“On the south side, all the station staffers are working hard on excavation,” Mugino said.
“Excavation?”
“Yep. There wasn’t a sector collapse there, but it did turn into a pretty big mess? They’re looking around for possible survivors, things that might come in handy, stuff like that.”
“On the south side,” Dr. Blue-Eyes repeated. As far as he knew, there were still handicap stones around there. Perhaps Nijo still had control of the Suikanet in that region. If only he’d drop a line, in case something happened with Mt. Asama again. “Did they find anything?”
“Not really. There were hardly any people on that side to begin with? Just a bunch of automated turnstile pieces. Oh, but they did recently find something like human bones.”
“Bones?”
“That’s right. Look.”
Mugino showed the doctor her screen.
It was a familiar room—the place where he and Nijo had first met Kito on their trip to set down the handicap stones.
“It’s a whole skeleton. Someone must have died there. Probably a child, see?”
Mugino zoomed in on a part of the image. In the gloomy interior, three trash cans stood in a row, and there was a human skeleton atop the couch next to them. Plenty of time had passed since death; almost no flesh remained.
The photo’s resolution made it difficult to be sure, but the body appeared roughly a meter in length, like a child around eight or nine years old. Empty plastic wrappers from bakery products littered the area around the bones. A few seemed to have been torn open with teeth.
“…When was this picture taken?”
“Just recently. Um…ah! The nineteenth of last month.”
Dr. Blue-Eyes glanced at Kito. A year had passed since she’d showed up in his home following the eruption, and she had grown a little bit, so it was difficult to tell, but he vaguely recalled that she’d been just about the size of those bones when he’d met her in that station hollow.
Did that mean the girl died in that little room?
Then who was the Kito here with him?
After Mugino left, Kito called, “Eddie, Eddie,” waving her hands to point out that their stock of coffee was running out.
“Ahh, already out? I’ll have to go buy more,” muttered Dr. Blue-Eyes.
Kito had learned to do most of the household chores on her own, but she couldn’t run errands because she had no Suika. Considering his age, he knew that he’d need to ask someone to look after her in the future. His eyes drifted over his bookcases while he pondered this dilemma.
“There’s another one,” he muttered. A picture of his wife in a plastic photo frame sat on the shelf.
Dr. Blue-Eyes picked it up, wrote #12 on the frame in pen, then placed it atop a stack of eleven photo frames resting in the corner of the room.
Ever since Hill Town regrew, there had been problems with things multiplying here and there. Some families were heartened by the increase in clothing and food. In Dr. Blue-Eyes’s case, for whatever reason, it was the framed picture of his wife.
But the photographs that formed weren’t perfect recreations. She had the same clothes and hair, but slight details of her face were different. It was a photograph, supposedly, but there was a whiff of artificiality about it, as though someone had drawn a very detailed picture based on the original image instead. Human eyes were designed to recognize meaning and detail in faces, so even minor changes in angles and curves could make a massive difference in how a person looked.
Sometimes, Dr. Blue-Eyes set up all the photo stands in a row so that he could judge which one looked the most like his wife.
The last time, he felt like the third picture was the closest, but looking at it right now, he felt like the twelfth and newest one was best. But after a moment, he decided that neither one was his wife; the seventh resembled her most accurately. It had the most beautifully composed features. Perhaps that was because he was beautifying her face in his memory.
As he stared at the pictures, each one a slightly different version of his wife’s face, Dr. Blue-Eyes grew unsure of what she actually looked like.
Eddie Shimazaki, popularly known as Dr. Blue-Eyes, likely still operates his medical business in Hill Town on the north side of Mt. Asama, accompanied by a girl named Kito, who doesn’t have a Suika.