Loups-Garous (30 page)

“Stupid. No one's going to think some fourteen-year-old kid would commit such pointless criminal acts. Most people think kids won't act against the system.”

“It's because they're kids that they do. Do such meaningless things.”

“I guess.” Mio lifted her brow.

“Either way,” Ayumi said to Hazuki, “this crazy one called you out here and wanted to talk to you face to face. I didn't think you'd come, but…”

“Sorry.” Hazuki's voice was soft. She was sure this was the last thing Ayumi needed. It didn't occur to her till now.

“This one's always apologizing, isn't she?” Mio pointed at Hazuki. Ayumi didn't respond. She simply turned toward the other room and said, “She came.”

Yuko Yabe stuck her head halfway out from behind the door.

“Sorry,” she said.

“This one's apologizing now too!” Mio sounded entertained. She stood up and offered her chair to Yuko.

After looking at the chair for some time with her pink eyes, Yuko sat down.

She was wearing the same thing as when they'd first met. Ayumi must have had it cleaned. It didn't look dirty enough.

“I started to feel weird. I was a little…confused.”

Of course.

You were violated.

You were about to be killed.

But, she said, she was also on her period, which made her disoriented.

It was a very matter-of-fact thing, but Hazuki was not used to hearing people talk about periods, and…she got a horribly raw, which is to say visceral, feeling.

“Yuko's assailants were Ryu Kawabata, who is now dead, and Nakamura, who's now on the run,” Mio said. She leaned against the dove cage.

“On the run?”

“On the run. The police and the area patrols are looking for him. He threw his monitor away, so the investigation has just gotten more difficult for them.”

“His monitor?”

“When there's a person of extreme interest in a level D crime, the courts are authorized to follow their GPS units. You can track everything by satellite nowadays. According to the police report, all they found was his monitor at the house. There was no money withdrawn from his account, so it doesn't look like he's used his ID card. He's apparently been on the run without food or water. I mean, unless he
is
a criminal he won't get that far. A criminal will get himself caught even before there are notices out for his arrest. It's just a matter of time before he's caught. It's best we wait till then.”

“You really think so?” Ayumi said.

“The police are also looking for Yuko. If it's just a matter of time before Nakamura's caught, it's also just a matter of time for them to find her. Neither of them have monitors right now.”

“Yeah, but…”

“It'd be stupid to think Nakamura would get caught and not Yuko.

If they can find him, they can find her, and if she can hide here indefinitely, then Nakamura can hide somewhere forever and not be caught either.

I don't think we can say for certain one way or the other.”

Yuko looked up uncomfortably at Ayumi. Mio looked unhappy.

“No one's going to find Yuko because she's got us protecting her.”

“There's nothing to say Nakamura doesn't have co-conspirators too,” Ayumi said.

“Yeah, but…” Mio said. She brushed against the wire netting.

The doves were startled.

“All the more reason to keep her here.”

“Uh, the subject in question is saying herself she wants to go home.”

Ayumi walked away from Yuko and sat in the chair in the corner of the room.

“Right, Yuko?”

“I don't want to keep being a nuisance,” Yuko said.

“Well—”Ayumi started.

“The wider the window of opportunity to go home, the harder it is to do it. I think it's plenty difficult to send her home now,” Mio said.

“Why…why were you attacked?” Hazuki asked.

Mio's eyes went wide. It must have been a bad habit. “Good question. Yuko, why
were
you attacked?”

“I'm sick,” Yuko replied.

“What do you mean you're sick? Like you're carrying a disease?”

“No. Nothing like that. I have what they call an extrasensory defect. I think.”

“Extrasensory defect,” Mio pronounced slowly.

What did that mean?

“You're talking about
that
?” Mio said. “But that was never declared an illness or a handicap. It was just announced, right?”

“It's what I have though. I think.”

“What is it?” Ayumi asked.

It was hard to ask what kind of sickness this was.

“You don't know?” Mio asked. “You don't know either, Hazuki?”

“I don't.”

“It's kind of difficult to explain. The Academy of Perceptual Disabilities just announced it last year and said they were going to further research whether there was a relationship between aberrations in the olfactory senses or whether they were unrelated, and whether one could call them aberrations in the first place. Opinions were very divided.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I heard from my friend's doctor. Well, ‘heard' meaning I read something he wrote.”

“A friend's doctor?”

“A twenty-eight-year-old German,” Mio said. “He's taking the same session as I am. You know, statistics.”

Hazuki'd completely forgotten that Mio conducted graduate-level classes in statistics. Mio was so genius she could talk circles around anyone.

“You know how there are people who are color-blind?” said the genius. “There have been people who've been unable to distinguish certain color frequencies since long ago. Now, there are people who also can't distinguish smells and tastes in the same way. They can't determine if something's bitter or sour. People with extrasensory defects can't tell shapes apart, er—it's not that they aren't capable of it. Oh, it's hard to explain.

“Okay.” Mio drew a tablet from her pocket and connected the monitor and drew something with her fingertip. While drawing she started to chuckle.

“Ha! I'm so bad at this! Oh well. Okay, Hazuki, what is this?”

On the display screen was a drawing of something that looked like a bird.

“A bird.”

“Ha ha ha. You can tell? I feel like it looks like a turtle or something. Okay, so it's a dove. I drew that guy over there sleeping in the corner of the cage. I drew it the way I thought it looked. See, you can tell by this bit here that it's a dove. See it?”

Now that you mention it
.

“Thing is…” Mio started and got serious. “If that's what this is, then what's this? It's a little childish, but then…”

Mio drew erratically on the screen, then searched for something in the monitor and showed the new drawing to Hazuki.

“What about this?”

On the screen was a cartoon deformée image of a dove.

Even Hazuki could tell what
that
was. Some famous person had drawn it. It had been used as the logo of the international bird preservation society a few years ago. The lines were simple and the details were charming. For an animal lover like Hazuki the attraction was obvious, and she had even downloaded a whole picture book of drawings by the illustrator.

“This is a caricature of the dove. But a real bird?”

Mio faced the monitor toward the dove.

The monitor beeped.

“This is the real bird.”

On the screen was an image of the dove behind a wire-mesh cage.

“People long ago used to call these photographs. This image and that bird are almost identical. The image was taken from the dove. And this cartoon character is also a dove, at first glance.” Mio worked at the monitor and divided the screen in two, the drawing of the dove on one side and the picture of the bird on the other.

“But these two things are totally different.”

“So what?”

“I can see that this image is the dove. It's not that cute. It's kind of gross, even. It's growing feathers. It has bumps all over it. I tried to draw all those details, but as you can see, it didn't matter how hard I tried. The result was this ugly drawing.”

Mio divided the screen in three now to present her first drawing along with the other two.

“It's really bad. But it's because I don't know how to draw that it looks this way. What I
see
when I look at the bird is this picture. You following me so far?”

“Yeah, but…” Hazuki answered tentatively.

Mio turned the display toward Yuko.

“Yuko, which one is real?”

Yuko looked at the screen for a while, then turned and looked at the birds behind Mio.

“I'm not sure.”

“Right.”

“If I had to guess,” Yuko said, and pointed at the caricature.

“There you go,” Mio said, looking at Hazuki again.

“There I go where? What do you mean?”

“Yuko sees the world this way.”

“What way?”

“In these
cute cartoon caricatures
,” Mio said, annoyed. “
Deformée
actually means something that's been misshapen. Exaggerated or diminished visual characteristics in drawings. With abstraction and symbolism and transposition. Hard stuff. Anyway, this kind of art is an expression.”

Mio turned the screen toward Hazuki.

“When I try to express it, it's shitty. When an expert does it, it's cute. But that's just a difference in drawing skills. I'm sure the guy who drew this and I see something closer to that picture when we look at doves. Actually, I'm positive people think we are seeing the same exact thing. There are those who differ, though.”

“You mean that the cartoonist might have seen the dove exactly the way he drew it?”

“I have no idea how
he
sees it,” Mio said. “Only Yuko can know what she sees. Consciousness is a response and responses can't be embodied, so they can't be transformed or moved or transferred. Drawing what your consciousness responds to is about as close as we get.

“Look,” Mio said once more and showed Hazuki the screen. “There's no way someone can draw exactly what they see. I thought I was drawing it exactly, but it's still closer to the cartoon of the dove than it is this picture.”

“I see…”

In other words, you couldn't look directly into someone's mind. Hazuki suddenly got uncomfortable.

People couldn't connect to each other.

“But if we believe what Yuko's telling us, that means that at the very least she does in fact see the world differently than we do. But actually, even the world Ayumi sees is different from the one you see. It's just that the difference in perception between you two is a normal aberration. When the difference is much greater, it's called abnormal. Yuko's perception might be abnormal, but it doesn't affect her daily life or have a serious impact on the human workings. For now.”

That was why they didn't call it a disability.

“It's hard to imagine this is congenital, but if it's acquired then there's no way to discern who's been affected by it. Cause unknown. Some people say it's the result of reality deprivation.”

“Reality…you mean
real access
?” Hazuki said.

“It's like people who are tone-deaf. People say that it's a result of children being exposed to electrical noises while developing their sense of hearing. I don't really understand myself, but they say that you go tone-deaf when you're restricted from experiencing the broad range of natural sounds. Similarly, people are saying you have extrasensory defects from being raised from infancy in front of a monitor's limited range of colors and shapes. Like I said, I don't know personally. It's just someone's theory.”

“That could be me,” Yuko said. “Mom and Dad were really busy all the time. They bought me a fundamental guardian system.”

“Ah…”

“We had that at my place too,” Mio said. “I didn't use it properly though. I broke it and played with it like a toy. They were so pissed. I was pretty much raised by that Chinese family below us, anyway. But you, Yuko, you were much more obedient.”

“Not obedient,” Yuko said. “Just that if I broke that thing they would never buy me anything again. Then I'd have nothing.”

“It
was
expensive. Well, cheaper than hiring someone, but still…”

“And…”

Ayumi had remained silent this whole time but finally turned to Yuko and asked, “What does your extrasensory defect and the attack have to do with each other?”

She didn't see how they could be related.

“Someone said I was blasphemous.”

Yuko lowered her eyes.

“What do you mean,
blasphemous
?” Mio asked.

“Remember when we drew pictures of ourselves in communication lab? Was it last year?”

“Yeah. I remember. I was really bad at drawing back then too,” Mio said and searched her monitor anew. “Look. Here. The instructor didn't say anything, but that damned counselor Fuwa straight out laughed out loud.”

On her screen was a drawing of what looked like a human face, easily distinguishable as at least having been drawn by Mio, regardless of any resemblance to herself.

“That was a major failure on her part as a counselor.”

To think of what you looked like; to imagine what your face communicated to others; to then know how people perceived you; to determine the difference between how you saw yourself and how you were seen by others—that had been the goal of that communication exercise.

Hazuki had hated it, to be honest. She didn't see the point in looking at herself for any length of time or in knowing how others perceived her. Hazuki never looked at anyone and didn't let herself be seen by anyone. She looked at no one.

“Can I see that for a second?” Yuko extended her hand. Mio handed over her monitor.