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  “Ah!” he yelped.

  There was a shock of green. It was mostly weeds, but the leaves were lush, the white and yellow flowers bright, and he felt like they had stepped into a tropical paradise.

  “Wow,” Kentaro said, moving out into the garden and looking up.

  It was open all the way to the top, and there were mirrors placed along the walls, reflecting light down to the bottom.

  “...I see. This building's most eccentric feature. Drab on the outside, green on the inside...”

  Of course, this had once been a proper, well-maintained garden. The trees must have been hauled away when the hospital closed. But the environment remained, and the garden had stayed alive.

  “Amazing, isn't it, Nagi...?” Kentaro said, turning toward her, and trailing off mid-thought.

  Nagi was crying. Her eyes were wide and her lips trembling, staring at the garden as tears flowed.

  “'It's very impressive,"' she whispered, as if quoting someone else.

  Kentaro was stunned. He could only stand and stare.

  Nagi walked unsteadily away, and sat down on an overgrown bench. She hung her head, muttering to herself.

  She seemed oddly childish, and Kentaro was starting to get worried.

  “Um,” he said, hesitantly.

  “What do you want to be?” Nagi suddenly asked.

  “Eh?”

  “In the future, what do you want to be?” she asked, not looking up.

  “Wh-where'd that come from?”

  “What do you think will become of me? What do you think I should be?” she muttered, emotionless.

  “What will...aren't you already a hero?”

  “Can I really? Can I really be one?”

  “Well, you already...”

  “'You should go for it,' I said. How thoughtless of me.” Nagi smiled faintly, and fell silent.

  Her shoulders looked so thin, so frail that Kentaro was suddenly reminded that the Fire Witch was just a high school girl.

  “...I don't really know,” Kentaro said, hesitantly.

  “But I think if anyone can do it, you can. I'm sure you will. And because I think that, I'm trying to...”

  Help, he almost said, but suddenly hesitated. He was suddenly not sure that what he was doing was useful to her. It was fully possible he was just getting in her way, dragging her back.

  “So, um...”

  “…………”

  Kentaro stood helplessly in front of Nagi. She said nothing for a long time, and then abruptly,

  “Think about it,” she said.

  “Think about whether I can be one.”

  “............” Kentaro didn't even think it worth thinking about, but she seemed so earnest that he said,

  “...okay, I will.”

  Nagi reached up and wiped away her tears. When she looked up she was herself again.

  “Thanks,” she said, awkwardly.

  Above their heads, the mirrors glittered, reflecting the light of the rising sun.

  “Style” closed.

  CHAPTER 4

  GOD ONLY KNOWS

  The sun reflected in the mirrors that lined the sides of the open central column of the hospital, glittering.

  “...mm,” Kisugi Makiko squinted at the sudden glare, walking down the fourth floor hallway.

  She was a young doctor, only twenty-seven. Around her, nurses hustled back and forth, and patients headed for the toilets, dragging IV stands along after them. She carefully repressed the impulse that struck her, not letting anyone know what she was thinking.

  “…………”

  It was all so unnecessary. Sunlight would never normally have reached all the way to the bottom of the open shaft, but one of the biggest sponsors of the hospital's construction, Teratsuki Kyoichiro-shi, had proposed they put a garden there. Because of him, the inner walls of the smokestack-shaped hospital were lined with mirrors, bringing light to the bottom of the pit. Most of the light hit the ground, as it was supposed to, but every now and then the angles would align and send a flash into the hospital. There were sunny spots throughout the building where this was intentional, but when the beams hit her eyes anywhere else it always grated on Makiko's nerves.

  The slippers on her feet clattered a little louder than normally.

  “...him,” she whispered, so quietly no one else could hear.

  “...ll him.”

  Despite this, she went on her way, toward the hospital room where she was to do some counseling.

  Her primary role as a psychiatrist was to look after the emotional well-being of patients forced to stay in the hospital for lengthy periods of time, whether from illness or surgery. Occasionally she would also see outpatients when the other doctors' schedules were full.

  She entered a private room without knocking.

  There was a single man on the bed, sitting vacantly upright.

  He had diabetes, and was not a mental patient, but his hollow, mindless expression looked more than a little schizophrenic.

  The cold gleam in Makiko's eyes was no less insane.

  “Shinokita-san,” she called.

  Slowly, stiffly, he looked in her direction.

  “…………”

  He did not answer.

  “Did someone come to see you?”

  “…………”

  “Aw, nobody ever does,” she sneered.

  She moved to his side and touched him. The moment Makiko put her hand on his shoulder, the man violently convulsed. No -- he shuddered.

  His expression changed. His eyes opened wide, his lips half-opened, quivering, and his teeth were chattering -- he was shaking with fear.

  “Were you lonely, Shinokita-san?”

  Moving slowly, she slid her arm around his throat.

  “You worked yourself to pieces for your company, but your wife divorced you, the company demoted you, and all those years of drinking with your coworkers ruined your liver. Your company was nice enough to give you sick leave, but how long will they wait? When the insurance runs out, how will you pay your hospital bills?”

  She whispered sweetly in his ear.

  The man was shaking like a leaf, all the blood drained from his face, not even listening to what Makiko said.

  “Augh,” he groaned.

  Makiko suddenly grabbed his cheeks with both hands.

  “Look at me!” she snapped, yanking his face toward her.

  “Eek!” The man froze, too frightened to tremble.

  “Yes, more, more, fear me more, fear me from the bottom of your heart!” Grinning, Makiko brushed the man's lips with her right index finger.

  She turned the finger, pointing at her own face.

  Then she suddenly plunged her fingernail into her own left eye, stabbing it to the root.

  “............!” The man's jaw dropped open in shock.

  Makiko calmly pulled her finger out. The eyeball came with it, skewered on her finger. The nerve endings trailed along after it.

  The gaping hole in her face yawned at him.

  “Just a trick! A harmless little trick,” Makiko whispered breezily. But no amount of makeup could create a hole in one's head.

  No ordinary human could do this.

  No ordinary human.

  But if she wasn't ordinary...

  “Hee hee hee hee,” she laughed quietly, popping the eyeball back into the socket.

  She closed her lid, and slowly pulled her finger out again, leaving the eyeball in place.

  Her eyelid twitched back and forth a few times, and when she opened it again her eye looked just like it always had. Her iris focused-the eye was clearly still functioning, seeing.

  “...eee...eeeek...... !” A kind of voiceless scream came from the man's throat.

  The IV in his arm popped out, his arm tightening from the sheer depth of his fear. Makiko instantly clapped her lips to the wound it left behind.

  She began to slurp noisily, drinking the man's blood. Fear had secreted other elements into his blood, and it was
quite bitter. But she lapped it up hungrily.

  Only when she had sucked his blood for a full minute did she slowly begin to back away.

  The room had filled with a new scent. The man had pissed himself.

  “ Aw, again,Shinokita-san?” Makiko said, sneering at him once more.

  “Ah...ahhh...” The man was frozen, unable to move.

  Makiko reconnected his IV.

  “Whatever will we do with you,” she said, pressing the button for the nurse. In his ear, she whispered,

  “If you go crazy, you can come to my ward, Shinokita-san. Then I can taste you any time I want...”

  The man twitched again. He had no way to escape. He had no choice but to live in fear.

  The nurse arrived.

  *Ah, did we have an accident?” she asked, and then began changing the sheets, muttering under her breath.

  Makiko left the room as if nothing had happened.

  “Whoops,” she said, wiping a drop of her own blood from her cheek. She was careful not to let anyone see.

  Looking positively placid, she muttered under her breath,

  “...not enough. Not nearly enough. More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, much more powerfully destructive! I need that kind of fear! This is not nearly enough!”

  There was a terrifying despair in her eyes, but a gleam behind it that spoke of an awful appetite.

  “It is a mistake to say that humans see

  only what lies in front of their eyes.

  They do not even see that.”

  -- Kirima Seiichi,

  When a Man Kills a Man

  1

  Makiko-san, you've been using your father's laboratory recently, haven't you?” Makiko's mother asked one day. As always, there were only the two of them at the dining room table.

  “Yes, I find I can concentrate better in the lab,” she answered, quietly.

  “What do you do in there? Are you bringing work home?”

  “A little bit. Don't worry about it. I'm not making any noise, am I?”

  Makiko was not the least bit rattled. She was absolutely confident her mother would never uncover her secret.

  “But . .Makiko-san, you work at the hospital until late at night and then you bring work home on top of that?”

  Her mother had a horrible habit of speaking in cliches.

  “I don't really have a choice. If I don't work, we don't eat.”

  “But, Makiko-san...”

  “You really shouldn't worry, mother. I am a doctor, you know. I know full well what my body can handle,” Makiko said, firmly.

  “Even so, Makiko-san. It's good to be passionate about your work, but you can't be alone forever.”

  “That old line again?” Makiko said, annoyed.

  The remainder of their conversation followed well-established lines, never getting close to anything of import.

  Her mother could never have suspected that her daughter had long since given up being human.

  ***

  Kisugi Makiko lived alone with her mother, who would turn sixty this year. The house was much too big for two. It had been built a generation before her dead father, and now was just big and old.

  The house no longer even belonged to them. It had long since been mortgaged to pay off their debts. But nobody had offered to buy it, and they had been allowed to continue living there, maintaining the property. They would be forced to move the moment the real estate agents managed to sell it.

  Her father had been a doctor as well, and the room where he had performed his experiments was where Makiko felt most comfortable. Outside of it she was scorned, the daughter of a bankrupt family, but in the lab she was cut off from the world. In there, she felt like she had when they'd been wealthy.

  So when Makiko found the

  “medicine” and began studying it in secret, her mother had not thought anything of it. It had never occurred to her that there was anything unusual about Makiko's behavior.

  Her mother had aged very quickly after her father's death, but even so, if she had watched her daughter attentively, she might have noticed the change.

  Her daughter was oddly cheerful, and there was a newfound gleam in her eyes.

  ***

  It had all begun two months before, when she had found a half-used ampule of unknown origin in a patient's room.

  It was lying on the floor under a sleeping patient's bed. It looked like nothing more than trash. It was placed there so unobtrusively, like a ball lying by the side of the road outside a house.

  But she had picked it up.

  And hidden it away.

  “...it was nothing,” she had said to the guard who came running, worried that there was an intruder.

  Even now, she didn't know just why she had kept the discovery a secret.

  But directly afterward, the patient in the room where she'd found the medicine made a miraculous recovery from an unknown and incurable disease.

  ...because of this?

  In her home laboratory she carefully examined the liquid in the ampule. There was very little of it, so she had to be careful not to waste any.

  When she injected a rat with a very small amount of the liquid, the most surprising thing happened.

  The rat's movements doubled in speed. It demonstrated reflexes and decision-making skills three times that of an ordinary rat. And not only that-the rat's body had become incredibly resilient, nearly immortal. She could cut off its legs and arms, and it would regrow them. The phenomenon was completely unimaginable given its physical construction. The data she recorded could cause a revolution in the medical field.

  ...this thing is no longer a rat.

  The more she experimented, the more her conclusion was driven home.

  The only thing she could think was that it had evolved into something else.

  The rat only died when she cut off its head. But even then, for several seconds the severed head was clearly capable of understanding what had happened to it. When she saw that, Makiko felt a shiver run down her spine. It was not a shiver of fear or revulsion, however. She knew full well this had been a shiver of exultation at the sheer power the new life form had displayed.

  She did not tell anyone about the medicine.

  If she told her superiors, they would undoubtedly claim credit for its discovery. That would've been unacceptable. The suspicion might have been part of her reasoning.

  But she felt like it was not the real reason.

  For reasons she could not fully understand, she believed this medicine was not something anyone else should know about.

  Or, yes, perhaps by then she had already ceased to be human.

  ***

  One day, Kirima Nagi, the patient who had been in the room where she found the ampule, came back to the hospital for a checkup.

  “It's been a while, hasn't it, Nagi-chan?” Makiko said, calmly, when she saw her sitting on the couch outside the outpatient reception desk. It was Makiko's job to counsel patients all over the hospital, and she'd gotten to know Nagi well enough to make small talk even though she was no longer a patient.

  “Yeah...you look the same,” she said, absently. Nagi was the heir to a huge fortune. She was always on guard against any adults who approached her. Though she didn't really seem hostile -- Nagi was only fourteen after all-she seemed quite worldly and mature beyond her years.

  “I have to admit, I still don't know how you got better,” Makiko said, not bothering to beat around the bush. Nagi was much too smart to get caught by leading ques
tions anyway. She was better off getting right to the point, expressing her professional curiosity.

  “You still think it was all in my mind, Dr. Kisugi?”

  “Well...yes, to tell the truth.”

  “Mm, well...I got to admit I've been starting to suspect as much myself.”

  It was rare to hear Nagi admit anything, so Makiko pounced.

  “ ...any grounds for that hypothesis?”

  “Yeah. I...met someone. After that...it felt like a weight was taken off my shoulders, and I've been wondering if that was what cured me.”

  She spoke calmly, peacefully. It did not seem like she was lying.

  ...so this girl has no idea that someone might have injected her with the medicine?

  It didn't seem like she did, which meant there was no point in questioning her. In fact, she had to be careful not to reveal her own cards.

  “Heh...so, this someone...was it a boy?” she said, hiding her own desire to end the conversation.

  “It was a very strange man. He's gone now. Vanished into thin air. I looked everywhere, but...I don't think I'll ever find him. Not anymore.”

  “Hmm...” Makiko said absently, not at all interested.

  “Your first love?”

  Nagi chuckled.

  “I dunno. Wonder what my dad would have said...?”

  When Nagi's father, Kirima Seiichi, had been alive, he had struggled to define the shape of the human heart. Makiko had read some of his books. From a psychiatrist's perspective they were fairly slapdash, but they had a fascinating habit of hitting the nail on the head in a manner she felt sure was pure instinct.

  “They say first love never bears fruit, and is soon forgotten,” Makiko said, hoping the cliche would free her from this conversation.

  “Yeah, I know, but somehow...” Nagi looked up suddenly, and stared at Makiko.

  “Dr. Kisugi, why did you become a psychiatrist?”

  “Eh?”

  “You see, I'm really not sure what to do with myself from now on. So I wondered why you chose your path.”