Himari sat in Sanetoshi’s exam room, rebuttoning her blouse with an unusually morose look on her face. Shirase and Souya stood in their nurse uniforms, observing her gloom with puzzlement.
Sanetoshi pulled off his stethoscope and set it on the desk. “Stunning, wasn’t it? Eating dinner with the family, like old times?” he asked as he scribbled notes in her chart.
“Yeah,” Himari answered absently.
“Is something the matter?” He looked up at her. A translucent blue ring spread into the air just overhead.
“I figured it out. You sent me home because my illness can’t be cured, right?”
“A carefully constructed theory. What makes you think that?” He smiled dryly, his eyelashes glittering.
“It’s just so obvious! Why else would you discharge me when you keep having to increase my dosage? I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
“Of course not,” he answered flatly.
“You’re lying,” she shot back firmly.
“Then what do you want me to say?” he asked—not harshly, but not quite as warmly as before.
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m just being paranoid,” she said with a forced smile.
“Tell me the truth,” Sanetoshi said.
Instantly, her smile vanished. A chill ran down her spine, as if his question reached directly into her heart. Somehow it felt as though he knew exactly what she was secretly worried about.
“The truth?”
“The whole truth.”
She hesitated for a moment…then began to explain.
“Well, you see…I’m starting to feel like I don’t belong with my family anymore.”
It all started when she saw Ringo standing in the kitchen, doing her chores, wearing her apron, smiling at Shoma. Himari already knew how the two of them felt about each other, and normally she would’ve been supportive, but…at the time, she couldn’t help but feel like Ringo had replaced her. And she couldn’t bear to see Shoma smiling back at her stand-in.
It felt like everyone was going to leave her behind all over again.
“I hate this. Why do I feel this way when they’re nothing but kind and considerate to me?”
“You don’t belong with them, hmm? Where do you belong, then? What is it you want to do?”
On the wall of the dimly lit exam room, the hands of the projected clock began to slowly spin backwards.
“I want everything to stay the same. Just me and Kan-chan and Sho-chan forever.”
Not that she held a grudge against Ringo, of course. And while it felt like the part of her that originally welcomed Ringo into the group was actually a lying witch the entire time, like it or not, this was the whole truth.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Sanetoshi asked casually.
“What?”
“You’re afraid that when you come to terms with how you truly feel, it will destroy something that means a lot to you. Isn’t that right?”
“What are you talking about? I’m being honest with you.”
“Are you, though? For I have no insight regarding your feelings, or your truth, or your past.”
He smiled faintly, and the projected clock froze entirely. The light imbued within his hair slowly shifted from blue to purple.
Himari knew that she was not the pure-hearted girl she pretended to be, but she had grown tired of forcing a smile at all times. This was the most honest she could possibly be…and yet, for some reason, she felt a deep sense of unease within her chest. For the entire duration of the subway ride home, she clutched Penguin No. 3 tightly in her lap, squeezing its short, soft feathers between her fingers as she stroked its head. On the opposite side of the car, she could see her reflection in the window, looking slightly too pale but otherwise no different from usual.
“My true feelings,” she murmured absently to herself as she gazed out the window at the darkening scenery, swaying with the motions of the train. “My truth…my past…”
If there was some sort of secret truth deep in her brain, or the bottom of her heart, or at the very core of her being—a secret even Himari herself knew nothing about—then how could she have forgotten it?
There were dozens of meaningful things she didn’t want destroyed; she couldn’t possibly figure out which in particular Sanetoshi was referring to.
Lots of troubled visitors today. Smiling, Sanetoshi gazed at Masako, who stared coldly back.
“Surely you’re not feeling under the weather, too, are you? Shall I examine you?” he teased.
“Tell me: what is the significance of the incantation written here?” she asked, holding her half of the diary.
“There is none,” he answered without missing a beat. “It’s no different from ‘open sesame.’ The words themselves have no meaning.”
“I beg your pardon? What, so it’s just magic?” She seemed slightly unnerved.
“Precisely. By completing the incantation, you will save your brother’s life and reroute his fate.”
“Are you joking? You’re a doctor,” she scoffed. “This must be a metaphor for pharmaceutical development or something, right?”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” he replied, offhanded as always.
“So you’re saying—?”
“I’m a wizard,” he declared with a grin.
The stool creaked as Masako leapt to her feet, enraged. “So you’re saying you never had any intention of helping us, right from the outset?!”
What self-respecting doctor would call himself a wizard? “Completing the incantation”? What kind of fairytale world was he living in?
“Now if you had both halves of the diary, it’d be a different story,” he shrugged.
“Liar! What are you after? What’s your angle?”
“I want to fix this broken world,” he answered matter-of-factly, a faint smile playing at his lips. On the wall, the hands of the projected clock began to warp and twist.
“Liar!” she repeated, clutching the diary tightly as she glared at him.
“It’s the truth.”
For a moment, his expression turned serious, and the plantlike smell that wafted from his hair grew stronger. Dizzy, Masako pressed her free hand over her eyes and thought back to the dream she had about the subway train. Hadn’t Sanetoshi told her about the world? And Kanba was there, too…but then he abandoned her and Mario. She remembered watching him and her father walk away from her, both of them dressed in black.
“What are you forcing Kanba to do?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer to this. She believed it was all a dream—that it was as fictional as magic.
“Your parents failed to make their dream come true. So instead, I’m going to pass that duty down to their children.”
Frowning, she scrutinized his face in profile—specifically, the upturned tip of his nose. As far as she knew, there was only one “dream” he could be referring to. But that was no dream. It was an old scar that ran deep.