The Return of the Fire Witch (Part 4)

The next day, Nagi came to school, off her suspension.

Kyoko avoided her, and despite chasing us down the day before, Nagi acted as if she didn't even know us. Right from the start of the first period, she was slumped over her desk, sleeping soundly. The teachers said nothing, apparently letting sleeping dogs lie.

Nagi stood up to go to the bathroom once during break, and I slid out after her without letting Kyoko see me.

"Um, Kirima-san," I said.

"Hmm?" She looked back remotely, clearly still half-asleep. "Oh, you again. Sorry, but I'm going be up all night tonight, so I need to get some sleep while I still can. Talk to you later, okay?"

Her business finished, she returned to class and went straight back to sleep.

I was itching to talk with her more about yesterday, but any attempts that I tried to make were clearly going to be thwarted.

I had ended up taking Nagi home for dinner the night before.

Why? Because she said, "Your folks are probably excessively worried when their daughter comes home late, with what happened before and all. Tell them that you met me, and that you invited me over, since my parents are off on holidy."

Since she was right, I did as I was told.

Her non-blood relative brother said, "Come again," as left the Taniguchi house.

It was pitch black, the sun having long since set.

We set off on foot, with Nagi silently following after me.

Unable to stand the silence, I asked a foolish question.

"Don't you ever show your soft side, Kirima-san?"

"Sure. I'm careful not to be too hardcore. When I want, I can play a normal girl." Her voice went up an octave as she said this, and she forced the corners of her mouth upwards into a dubious-looking smile. Since she was a pretty girl, it wasn't all that unnatural looking.

"Well, good," I said, laughing.

It wasn't what I really wanted to ask her.

As I squirmed, she asked, "You're smart, aren't you?"

"I suppose..." I wasn't sure how to take this, coming from the girl who was the top scorer on the entrance exam and the top student in the school, as far as make-up tests were concerned.

"I think so. That's why I explained to you what I did, you know?"

"Yeah. I won't tell anyone."

I meant it. After all, no one would believe me.

She shook her head. "That's not what I mean. About Kirima Seiichi."

"Hmm? What about him?"

"You've been studying from his books, yet his daughter is doing this kind of stupid shit all the time.

In other words, get out while you still can." Her shoulders slumped.

I stopped in my tracks and just looked at her. "Why do you say things like that?"

"Why? That mess five years ago has nothing to do with you. Let go of it. It'll come back to haunt you. It'll warp your personality... Just like it has mine!"

"Why?"

"Why..." Nagi looked slightly irritated. "Do you want to end up like me?"

Her eyes glared at me, her face that of the Fire Witch. But I didn't pull back. I wasn't afraid anymore. I glared right back into those eyes.

"How did you know that I was almost killed five years ago? I never told anyone about it."

Nagi stiffened. She'd made a mistake.

"Um, I... That is..."

"You've barely spoken to anyone in class, so you must have assumed that Doctor Murder's past was public knowledge. But nobody knows. Just the people who were part of it. Just my parents and the police."

Nagi turned her head to the side to avert her gaze.

"Oh my god."

Nagi remained silent.

"So it was you. You saved me."

They told us the killer hung himself. But that explanation had never sat all that well with me.

She had taken him out. Just like she had saved Kyoko.

"It... It's not important. It was a long time ago," she said, sullen.

"It's pretty dang important to me! I've been over this hundreds of times. Why am I still alive? I'm only alive because the killer went and killed himself? Yeah, that makes me feel real good, knowing that. That means that the only way that good things happen is if you just sit and wait for bad things to self-destruct. What kind of explanation is that? It sucks! And you know what else sucks? That there's nothing we can do to make the world a better place."

Yes.

That was it.

Justice might well prevail in the end, but ordinary people like me had no guarantee of surviving that long. We might get killed on the whim of some serial killer first.

But even then, if we at least knew that tere were some people fighting for us, it'd make things a lot easier to bear. If we knew these people had saved us, we'd feel much more alive than if we only survived because the bad guy just up and killed himself.

"That wasn't me," Nagi said coldly.

"Liar."

"That was Boogiepop. Ultimately."

Suddenly presented with the name of a fictional character, an urban legend, I was put off my stride.

"Huh?" I said, dazed.

"Nevermind. The point is, you have nothing to feel responsible for," she said roughly.

Her tone seemed to imply that she had been joking a moment before, evading my question.

"But I..."

"Please, I don't want to talk about it," she said, and bit her lower lip.

And so we walked on, without me having said the most crucial thing.

◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆

As third period began, Nagi was still asleep.

I found myself staring vacantly at the curve of her back.

She looked so isolated, so lonely.

I imagined saying so much to her. Stuff like, 'Kirima-san, all I wanted to do was thank you. Thank you for saving me. If you can't repay the person who saved your life, then there's something wrong with the world. Right?'

Sadly, I couldn't imagine how she would respond.

Her body twisted on her desk. As she did this, she moaned aloud.

The teacher finally lost it and shouted, "Kirima!"

Nagi's head rose slowly from her desk. "Wha?"

"What did I just say? On second thought, prove this formula!" The teacher slapped the blackboard behind him.

His handwriting wasn't legible at the best of times, and having it rubbed away in places didn't help matters. All this made it next to impossible to read the whole equation if you hadn't taken notes during his lecture.

Nagi narrowed her eyes, staring at the board for a moment.

"a<b, ab>c. When 'c' is a rational number, X=24, y=17/3, z=7," she answerd, and flopped back on her desk.

The teacher's face turned beet red. She was right.

We all giggled, but Nagi ignored us and went right back to sleep.

It was another typical school day.

Her oddball behavior might be her way of preparing for her next fight, but to the casual onlooker, she just seemed insolent.

She stirred in her sleep again, moaning. The moan sounded oddly girlish, and I stifled a laugh.

After all, the Fire Witch had finished her suspension, and was back among us.

◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆

Echoes wandered the town.

The clothes he'd procured a week before were now mere rags, and the police had nearly arrested him as a suspicious character, when all he'd really done was just walk down the street.

He'd been saved by some mysterious boy in a black hat, and managed to escape without hurting a soul.

On the way here from the mountains, he had already been forced to seriously injure six people.

He knew the Manticore was near.

But human towns were built too close together, and the people living in them all seemed to congregate together. He had no idea how to find Manticore here.

As the sky grew darker, he found himself in a back alley, and once more, he collapsed on the ground. This time, there were no people around. The alley smelled of rancid water.

"..."

He looked up at the evening sky, but he couldn't see the stars here. In the mountains, he had been able to see them even in broad daylight.

But he couldn't cry any longer. The boy in the black had told him, "You're chasing something. Cry when you have found it."

This was true.

He could not rest here.

He had to stop the Manticore's slaughter. The Manticore was made from him. It was his child.

She had the power of communication that even he lacked, not to mention the powers that let him blend in with this planet's ecological system. This "transformation power" in particular, could do untold damage to the environmental balance of this planet's primarily human civilization and prevent him from carrying out his main objective.

His objective - he had to fulfill it. That was why he had been created. But the Manticore's existence was a hindrance to his objective, to his decision.

He had to make a decision, one way or the other.

That decision had to be rigorously balanced. Like him, the Manticore was alien to this planet and should not exist here.

I had to dispose of her.

"..."

He staggered to his feet.

There was a scream. A young women had come into the alley and caught a sight of him.

He waved his hands trying to show that he meant no harm.

But he didn't need to.

"What are you doing here?" the woman asked, coming towards him.

It had not been a scream of terror, but simply surprise.

"Oh no, you're hurt! How did this happen?"

On a closer inspection, the woman was still a girl.

Without any reluctance, she wiped the blood from the wound on his head with an expensive-looking designer handkerchief.

The wound itself had long since healed, and he felt no pain from it, but the blood was still there, dried to his skin.

"H-hurt..." he said, trying to explain that it did not need tending. But there were only a few words in his speech for him to talk and he could not produce a phase with meaning.

"What should I do? Call the police?"

"P-police..." was all he could say.

But somehow, the girl understood what he meant from this.

"No police, huh? Okay. Where's your house? Nearby?"

He picked some words from her speech, forcing a sentence.

"No-hou-house."

When he spoke to people, he could only return words they had spoken, so as to not provide them with information beyond the limits of their understanding.

"Homeless? Looks like you're in some kind of trouble."

He nodded.

He waved his hands, telling her to back away from him.

She patted him gently on the shoulder. Body language for "calm down."

"No way, José. I leave you here and I won't be able to sleep at night," she said.

Somehow, she seemed to understand what he wanted to say, even though he could not speak directly.

"Hmm, let me see... For the moment, let's put you in school. There's a card reader at the gate to get in, but I think I know a way back in."

"Sch-school?"

"Yeah, I live in an apartment building, but there are prying eyes everywhere. See? You aren't the only one with problems," she said jokingly, and grabbed his arm, pulling him forcibly to his feet. Then she dragged him after her.

He didn't know what else to do, so he followed her.

'Who was she?' he thought, and almost instantly she answered, 'Me? My name's Kamikishiro. Kamikishiro Naoko. I'm a senior at Shinyo Academy. You?"

"Ah... Ooooh..." he couldn't answer. He was not allowed to provide humans with information about himself.

"You can't talk?"

"Can't... Ta-talk."

"You're talking now. Hmm... They call you Echoes? Strange name. Almost like it was made for me to call you by."

Kamikishiro giggled. She had not yet noticed that she was understanding things that he had not said.

She smiled at him. "Don't worry. I know this kooky girl named Nagi. Anytime there's trouble, we talk to her and she usually takes care of it. Assuming you aren't a bad guy, Echoes," she finished with a wink.

She pulled out a cell phone, thumb flying over the keys, dialing this Nagi person's contact number with a practiced motion.