“…Huh?” Mao finally managed.
I can’t blame her, Seiji thought. She’d put a gun to her head and tried to pull the trigger, and the gun had been blown into next week instead. Not only that, but the guy who’d done it should have been three-quarters dead from poison.
“Wh-why is Mr. Tosu…? At this point, he shouldn’t even be able to move.” Mao’s eyes were on the newcomer.
As he retrieved the smartphone gun from where it had fallen by the wall, Tosu gave several thick, wet coughs. Still, considering how dead he’d looked just a little while ago, his recovery was nearly miraculous. It was clear that his fever had come down.
“It’s true that ricin is a terribly vicious poison. Once you’ve ingested it, there’s no hope: It slowly eats away at your organs, and you die unable to even put up a fight. However, Tosu was never exposed to ricin in the first place.”
“Huh?” Mao said again.
“As you’d feared, when his and Seiji’s sugar packets fell to the floor, they were switched. Seiji accidentally returned the wrong one. The poisoned packet was by his cup until we finished our meal.”
Seiji had never been so glad he took his coffee black… Although if he’d tried to use it, Shiroshi might have stopped him.
Mao’s voice was nearly a shriek. “B-but then why does he have symptoms of ricin poisoning?! Severe cough, fever… Just listen to that painful cough.”
“It’s influenza.”
“…What?”
“Severe cough, a sudden rise in temperature, joint pains, dehydration: The symptoms of ricin poisoning are easily confused with influenza in the first place. In fact, Seiji had a case of influenza that had him bedridden just a week ago; I would imagine Mr. Tosu caught it from him.”
Hm. That’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Seiji had just assumed that hunger and fatigue had made his cold worse, but apparently it had taken so long to heal because it had actually been the flu. Come to think of it, he seemed to remember the medicine they’d given him after meals being prescription stuff instead of the usual over-the-counter medications… Why didn’t they tell me? He would have loved to complain, but it would have been pretty awkward if Shiroshi had responded with Why didn’t you notice?
Tosu gave him a rather clammy look. “You were coughing across the table at me all through dinner. Without a mask.”
“I, um… I’m extremely sorry about that.” But Seiji silently added, You choked me, though.
“And so when you mentioned ricin, Miss Unoki, I promptly suspected a misunderstanding. That said, dehydration genuinely had worsened his fever, so I dragged him into the shower and poured water over his head. That appears to have improved the situation somewhat.”
“…You could have killed me doing that,” said Tosu.
W-well, that aside…
“Even if that had not been the case, I think you would ultimately have failed to kill him. Ricin isn’t a very effective toxin when administered orally. It is derived from castor beans, which contain ricinine, a toxic alkaloid that causes fever, difficulty breathing, and so on…the same symptoms as a cold. I think that is what caused the confusion. But your poisoned sugar packet couldn’t have killed anyone.”
“No…,” Mao said. She groaned, then fell silent. She seemed stupefied; it looked as if she’d given up on life itself. The smile that resembled Ibara’s was gone without a trace. Had that been her mask as the executioner? Right now, she was dismayed, drooping, and weak.
Come to think of it, she was still just eighteen.
So she’s been running all this time, too.
They were the same. She and Seiji seemed like polar opposites, but they were actually very similar. It was a bit like the way mirror images were horizontally reversed, but still perfect copies of each other.
Seiji had spent his life running. Mao hadn’t allowed herself even to run; forgetting had been all she could do.
These eyes must be a curse.
Mao had received the power of the Mirror of Illumination just after birth. With their yokai forms, sinners must always have seemed like “something inhuman” to her.
For as far back as she could remember, bad people hadn’t been “people” at all. That was why she hadn’t been able to forgive herself once she’d sinned, and why she hadn’t directed any human feeling toward those fiendish, inhuman monsters.
If she hadn’t had that eye, maybe she wouldn’t have killed anybody at all.
“Um, Miss Unoki…”
Seiji tried to say something to her, but the words just weren’t there. He could feel the end of his unfinished sentence disappearing into bottomless darkness. And then…
“Miss Unoki,” Tosu said. He bent down to meet her at eye level, the way he would have done for a crying child. It was clumsy and awkward, but he was clearly trying to be as gentle as he could. “I heard everything you said. Saijou gave me his transceiver… Actually, I’m the person he knows on the police force.”
The cuff-shaped earpiece still gleamed on Shiroshi’s ear. He’d worn it to link himself to Tosu, who’d been waiting on standby in the library after literally cooling his head in the shower.
“What you’ve been doing here is murder. You almost killed me, too. Even so, I don’t want you to die. I’m a cop, and it’s my job to make it so that nobody has to die or commit crimes…not to catch bad people and get rid of them.”
His throat rattled painfully. Still, he looked as if he were trying to soothe a child; his expression was somewhere between a smile and tears.
“I doubt your dad only thought of the good people, either. He also worked for the bad ones, the ones you say are monsters. So I don’t want to kill anymore. Not other people, and not yourself.”
However—that pushed Mao past her limit.
The scream that ripped its way out of her throat was more of a howl than anything human. With an inarticulate shriek, she shook her head like a child throwing a tantrum, then bolted for the door to the lounge car.
“Miss Unoki!”
Seiji chased after her, shouting. He dashed into the lounge car—and stopped in his tracks.
“…Huh?”
He didn’t know what had happened. He couldn’t process what he was seeing.
There was a corpse right in front of him.
The body had fallen face up, sprawled out unnaturally, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Its wide, staring eyes were vacant; they’d never blink again.
It was Mao.
“Wh…why?”
He and the others stood there, frozen.
And then…
“I see.”
Someone spoke.
Instantly, the darkness beyond the windows grew darker.
No, that was just an illusion. It was as if the night, suddenly more ferocious, was threatening to break through the glass and engulf the lights in the car.
Someone whose voice created that impression was there, right behind them.
“The demon horde’s night parade meets its end fleeing in panic from the dawn. In that case, this may have been a fitting end for her.”
Fingers snapped.
Right above the fire extinguisher where Kaganuma had collapsed earlier, in what had looked like a blank stretch of wall, a square box appeared. So did the words emergency brake.
“On her request, I tampered with the emergency brake before the train departed. I cast a glamour over it so that no one else could use it to escape. While I was at it, I put a poisoned needle on it so that it would prick her hand if she tried to run.”
With a slight rustle of fabric, the speaker appeared.
He walked like a ghost, and the ominous chill of the night seemed to cling to his long Inverness cape.
Ibara Rindou.
“There are people who can only live by dying, running, or killing, you see—congenital villains. The impulse to throw stones at evil isn’t ‘good’ in the first place. It’s more evil than evil itself. Just as she, who vanquished a hundred demons, was a demon horde unto herself.”
Ibara, who had shown himself at last, narrowed his eyes, as if he were watching a dull play. His whisper was cloaked in deep, suffocating darkness.
No—he’d been here all along.
A hidden oni.
Like the hyakki yagyou that had once been an object of dread, he could never be seen, but he was there.
“All of which is to say that, in the end, good can’t understand evil. Since you were unable to discern her true nature, you lose…”
Then Ibara smiled.
It was as if a bud of fear and death had blossomed into a great flower.
“…and I win.”
Despair gave a mocking smile.