Package Delivery

The lock had never worked right, which was the only reason Sasaki got the door open before I got to it.

He didn’t knock. He didn’t call my name from the hall the way a normal person might. He simply put his shoulder to the warped frame the way he’d learned to over the past two years—one sharp shove, the swollen wood giving with that familiar thunk—and then he was standing in the middle of my apartment, filling it, the way he filled every room he ever decided to be furious in.

And it wasn’t a hard room to fill. Six tatami, if I was being generous. A kitchenette the size of a confession booth, one ring of which actually lit. A futon I hadn’t folded away, a low table with a ring stain I’d given up apologizing to, a window that looked out on the back of another building exactly like this one, somewhere in the cheap warren of streets south of the river where nobody important ever looked twice. The rent was almost nothing. The anonymity was the whole point. Erika Takamine lived here. Nobody else did.

“Three days,” Sasaki said.

I set my bag down very calmly. “Good morning to you too.”

“Three days.” He didn’t raise his voice. Sasaki never raised his voice; it would have implied he’d lost control of something, and Sasaki did not lose control of things. That was the entire reason I’d brought him down with me. “Three days, no contact, no trace. You walked out of a party full of people who would give a great deal to know what you are, and then you simply—stopped existing. Do you understand what that did. Do you understand what I sat here imagining.”

“I’m fine. I’m right here. I’m—” I gestured at myself, at my whole intact body standing in my whole intact apartment. “Accounted for.”

“You are visible again,” he corrected. “That’s a different thing, and you know it’s a different thing, and the fact that you’re pretending you don’t is how I know exactly what kind of trouble this is.”

I went and put the kettle on. The little ring ticked and caught and burned blue. Outside, the morning was the flat grey of a Kyoto that had never once been to a mountaintop, that didn’t know mountaintops existed, that had laundry to hang and trains to catch and no idea at all.

“Where,” he said, quieter now, which was worse, “did you go.”

And there it was—the question I’d spent the whole long walk down from the hills and the whole long train ride back not letting myself answer out loud.

Because I knew where I’d gone. I knew exactly where I’d gone.

I’d gone up a mountain with a man who caught me out of the air. I’d eaten with my fingers by a fire under a moon the size of a country, and I’d taken his hand because I wanted to and not because I’d calculated anything, and I’d kissed him tasting of woodsmoke, and I’d fallen asleep in a one-room ranger’s hut at the top of the world with his arm heavy and warm across me and the river singing somewhere far below.

And then, somewhere in the blue hour before dawn, I’d woken up.

I’d lain there in the dark and listened to him breathe—slow, deep, trusting, a sound I had no defense against whatsoever—and something in me had simply come apart. Not a thought. Not a plan. Nothing as dignified as a decision. Just a cold animal flood of no, not this, not you, you don’t get to have this, you of all things do not get to want this, and underneath it the oldest fear I owned, older than any of the grand and terrible reasons I could have given Sasaki, the small stupid human one:

If you stay, he’ll know you. And if he knows you, you’ll lose him. So go now, while it’s still only beautiful.

So I’d gone. I’d slid out from under his arm an inch at a time. I’d found my discarded heels and not put them on. I’d stood in the doorway one second too long looking at the shape of him asleep in the moonlight, the keys still in the glovebox, the road still there, and then I’d taken the 4x4 and left him alone on top of a mountain with no way down, because I am a coward in exactly one direction, and that was the direction he’d walked into.

I left Yuri on that hill. Before the sun came up. Without a word.

The kettle started to scream.

“Erika.” Sasaki was watching me with that unbearable patience. “Where did you go.”

“Nowhere,” I said, and lifted the kettle off the ring. “I went nowhere. I’m back. Drop it.”

He didn’t drop it. But he let me pour the tea, which was almost the same thing, and for a moment the only sound in that tiny grey room was water hitting the bottom of a chipped cup, and a whole mountaintop’s worth of moonlight quietly dying inside my chest where he couldn’t see it.

Then the cup stopped mattering.

I felt it before I understood it—the way you feel a held breath in a house you thought was empty. Nothing changed and everything did. The morning sounds I’d stopped hearing years ago, the ones that made up the wallpaper of this street—the bicycle bell two alleys over, the old woman beating a futon on her balcony, the distant complaint of the first trains—they were all still there, and that was the problem. They were too still. Arranged. Like someone had turned the volume on the ordinary up just slightly too high to cover a silence underneath it. My skin knew before my mind did. The fine hairs along my arms lifted, and the tea went lukewarm and forgotten in my hand, and somewhere below the level of thought a very old voice that had kept me alive across more years than this city had existed said, simply: they’re here.

I looked at Sasaki.

He had gone still in a way no living thing goes still. Not frozen—frozen is a human word, frozen has fear in it. This was something else, something I only ever saw in him in the half-second before he did something I’d have to forget I’d watched. The argument had drained out of his face entirely. He wasn’t angry anymore. He wasn’t anything anymore. His head had tilted a fraction toward the warped door, toward the thin walls, toward the stairwell beyond, and his eyes had taken on that flat, processing depthlessness that always reminded me—against my will, in moments exactly like this—that the thing I’d brought down from the moon to keep me safe was not, and had never been, a man. He was listening to the building the way I could not. Counting. Placing. How many, where, how close. And whatever the count came back as, he didn’t like it, because the next thing he did was meet my eyes and give the smallest shake of his head. Not yet. Don’t move yet.

My heart was going like the run uphill all over again, except there was no laughter in it now. Three days ago I’d jumped off a balcony into the dark because a beautiful man asked me to. And here was the dark’s invoice, arriving the way I’d always known it would, on a flat grey morning that smelled of cheap tea and old tatami. The exit plan. I had one. I’d had one the day I signed the lease, the way I’d had one for every room I’d ever slept in—the bathroom window, the narrow one, the one I’d told myself for two years I would never, ever need: out over the sink, onto the neighbor’s tin roof, down into the service alley where nobody would think to wait because nobody would believe a person could fit. I’d memorized it and prayed to never use it. I could see the bathroom door from where I stood. Two meters. It might as well have been the mountain.

They’d found me. After everything. After all the names and the cheap rooms and the careful nothing of my little borrowed life—they’d finally found me.

Sasaki was beside me without seeming to have crossed the room. He crouched low, his back to the window, his voice dropping to almost nothing.

“We do this the way we rehearsed. I take the door. I’m loud, I’m slow, I’m in the way—they’ll commit to me. You go out the back and you don’t stop being other people until you’re three cities from here.” A brief pressure on my wrist. “Business as usual.”

I nodded. I already had the route lit behind my eyes—bathroom, window, roof, alley.

Then he said, lower still: “One of them’s third circle.”

The route went dark in my head. He didn’t explain and he didn’t need to. I watched the words do their work on his face too—that flat, ready stillness going a degree colder—and I understood that business as usual had just stopped being either.

The knock came before I could ask. Not a kick. Three light, polite raps, and a young man’s pleasant, bored voice.

“Delivery. Package for Takamine Erika-san.”

My eyes went to the window before I could stop them. On the balcony opposite, where the old woman beat her futons every morning, someone stood too still and beat nothing. In the mouth of the alley—my alley, the one nobody knew to watch—a second shape leaned against the wall with its hands in its pockets, looking up at my bathroom window.

The door. The alley. The main window.

All of it.

The instant Sasaki moved for the door, I moved for the bathroom.

I didn’t see what happened behind me. I only heard it. The door went—not kicked, not shouldered, but flung, a flat thunderclap of wood hitting wall with nothing human leading it—and in the same breath the window blew inward, glass and frame and all, a second bang folding into the first. Then the sounds of Sasaki, the particular sounds I’d only ever heard a handful of times and never wanted to hear again, the sounds of him stopping being polite. They were rushing him. From the door and the window both. I didn’t count them. I didn’t have the seconds to count them.

I threw the bathroom bolt, hauled myself onto the little tansu chest wedged under the high window, and went through the gap headfirst. It was a gap no one believed a person could fit through—that was the whole point of it, two years of telling myself a body my size could thread that needle if it ever came to this. It came to this. I poured through, scraping, the fresh air hitting me cold on the other side, and dropped onto the neighbor’s balcony with the fight still roaring through the broken wall behind me.

What happens to Sasaki?

No time. No time for that question or any other.

Not the nearest fire escape—the second one, the one that didn’t make sense, which was exactly why I’d chosen it. Up, not down. Onto the flat roof. The plank was where we’d left it months ago under a sheet of tar paper, grey and ordinary and invisible, and I set it across the gap between buildings and went over it the way you cross when you don’t let yourself look—light, fast, low, a cat over a wire—and onto the far roof, and only then let myself breathe.

No one would guess this. No one could guess this. The route existed in two heads in the entire world, mine and Sasaki’s, and one of those heads was busy.

Rooftop door. Down. A stranger’s stairwell, four flights, my bare feet silent on cold concrete. A back alley I’d never been seen in. And then the bright ordinary roar of the main street, morning traffic, people, anonymity, out—I was out, I was through, I had threaded the impossible needle and come out the far side into a city that didn’t know my name—

A shadow stepped into my path.

Except it wasn’t a shadow. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen step in front of me, and my heart smiled before my brain could ask the one question that mattered, the heart leaping up with stupid joy—him, he came, he’s here—

Yuri.

Our eyes met.

And the street tilted. Something vast and heavy came down over me all at once, a weariness that wasn’t mine, a hand closing softly around the inside of my head, and the panic arrived a half-second too late to do anything but watch. My knees stopped being knees. The ground rose up gentle and grey.

How did he know.

How did he know where I’d come out—when only Sasaki and I—

Only someone inside my mind could have known. Only someone already—

The thought never finished.

The street went dark, and I went with it, down into a slumber I hadn’t chosen, the last thing I felt the awful tenderness of him catching me before I hit the stone—the way he’d promised he always would.