Chapter 11Get Them Out First

There was no wind in the Star Corridor.

The wide, plain-white sleeve on her left shoulder hung down. On the ground, after two steps, this sleeve would lift at one corner. Here it had stayed against her forearm, and the fold at the cuff, where the Noh cloud pattern was pressed in, had not moved. She had walked for a long time, and the sleeve had not moved once.

Under her feet were stone steps. They ran ahead one after another, but there were breaks in them, and each break was exactly one step — no more, no less, as if someone had measured it. She counted to the forty-seventh step. The edge of every step had been broken, not cut. When a sole pressed down on one, grit came away and dropped into the black below. It never made a sound.

It was the second time she had walked this path.

The first time had been a few hours ago. That time she had seen a person six steps away on this path. The person had said that they did not know each other, but that she had seen her. After that the steps had always been there. By day she walked the corridors of the office, carpet under her feet. At night she went back to her room, tatami under her feet. This path stayed underneath all of it.

The temperature in the Star Corridor was the same as where she had set out. Neither warm nor cool. She had breathed out once here, and the breath had no shape at all.

She had crouched once on the thirty-first step. On the broken edge of that step there was a mark. It was not the rough burr that breaking leaves. It had been carved: a single horizontal stroke, very short and slanting, deep at one end and shallow at the other. She ran her fingertip from one end to the other, and felt where the stroke began and where it ended. Whoever had carved it had an unsteady hand, or had nothing suitable to hand.

She could not make it out. She did not touch it a second time.

Ahead of her stood five beams of light, each in its own direction, none of them touching the others. She did not look over that way. She was looking for the way out.

The way out was a narrow crack. It was narrower than her shoulders, so she would have to turn sideways.

At the bottom of the crack was Tokyo.

First she saw a platform. At the far end of the platform the lights of a convenience store were on, and beyond that were the tracks, the level crossing, and several streets side by side. The wall clock on the platform jumped one notch.

Then the clocks along the whole street jumped together.

It was not almost at the same time. She counted them: the clock face on the Shadowless Clocktower, the one on the level crossing barrier, the digital clock behind the till in the convenience store, and the four digits in the top right corner of the screen across the street. The same second, one notch, all lined up.

When the hands lined up there was no sound. She had heard many kinds of clock: the ones that ticked, the ones that chimed the time, the ones that rang once on the hour. This time there was none of those.

She stepped out sideways.

Her ears came back first. There had been no sound in the Star Corridor. In the instant she came out, the insides of both ears went dull together, then all at once cleared: the hum of the tracks, the rattle of a roller shutter, a horn far away. Her ears reached Tokyo before her eyes did.

The disc was still hanging in the northern sky, just as she had seen it through the train window a few hours before, half lit and half dark. The black mouth beside it was still open. No one on the platform looked up at it.

The sheet of paper in her inside pocket had come out with her. She pressed it through her coat. The paper was on the left, against her ribs. Three folds, and the deepest was the first.

※

The tower began to light up from its base.

Cold white light climbed the steel frame, floor by floor, not in any hurry. She tipped her head back and followed it up. By the twelfth floor her neck had gone back as far as it could go. The light was still above her, through the clouds, and beyond that it stopped. It was not that it went out. Her eyes could not reach that far.

She lowered her head.

On the ground where the light column swept, a grid rose up. White and hard, it spread one square at a time: across the asphalt, across the zebra crossing, across the wheels of a row of bicycles at the kerb, all the way to the street corner.

Wherever the grid spread, the shadows vanished.

The shadow of the bicycle was gone. The shadow of the telegraph pole was gone. The shadow of the man standing at the level crossing had been taken away whole. Under his feet there was only a gap, whiter than the grid, and the gap was in the shape of a person: the shoulders were his shoulders, the head was his head. The lines of the grid ran straight through the gap, and not one of them was broken.

She landed on the open ground in front of the base of the tower.

When she landed, her weight came down on her right foot. She always landed that way. Her right knee was older than her left, and the older side was the steadier. The crescent-shaped mark under her left eye lit up, starting at the outer corner and glowing all the way to the cheekbone.

Poxiao was in her right hand. It had no scabbard. The blade lay along her forearm, and the cyan band of light was moving along the edge, pausing at the tip, then coming back. The cherry-pink cord wound round the hilt had worn pale, and at the third turn two strands had come loose. She had not cut them.

Her thumb pressed onto the guard.

She pressed down only a hair’s breadth.

※

She did not draw it.

She was counting people.

There were still eleven on the street.

Three at the level crossing, two at the convenience store door, one under the bicycle shed, two on the platform stairs, and three further off. The last three were walking towards the tower. They were not running, only walking, with steps as long as usual and shoulders level. One of them was still looking down at a phone.

What she counted was never how many had gone. She counted how many were left.

She had brought this way of counting from that dojo.

Before the dojo closed each day, the last person to leave tore off that day’s record sheet, folded it in half three times, and dropped it into the wooden box by the door. Whose turn it was depended on who left last. From the year she turned fourteen, five days out of every week it was her. It was not that she trained longer. It was that she waited for the others. After training she did not change. She sat on the step and waited for the changing-room lights to go out, one after another, and for the last person to push the door open and leave. Only then did she get up to tear off the sheet.

Someone had once told her to just go her own way. She did not explain. She could not remember the ones who had gone. She could remember the ones who had not yet gone.

Now there were eleven.

“Get them out first.”

She did not say it loudly. No one on the street heard. Her words came down and stayed where they fell; the ends of them did not rise. When she had finished, she moved her thumb a little off the guard, leaving a gap.

She walked towards the level crossing.

Halfway there, the three had already crossed the zebra crossing. She cut across from the direction of the bicycle shed, and her soles made a sound on the grid. The grid was hard, and it rang when stepped on. Asphalt should not make that sound.

The man at the front wore a trench coat and carried a briefcase in one hand, its corners worn white. She stepped in front of him.

“Go back.”

He looked up at her. He had seen her; she was certain he had. His gaze stopped on her right shoulder for half a second. Her right shoulder was bare, and the cyan line was moving up along the bone. On this street there was no other thing of that colour.

He said sorry.

Then he went round her. The curve was small. His shoulder brushed her sleeve as he passed, and his step did not falter once.

The second went round from the other side. The third kept his head down and walked straight on until he was a foot from her, then stepped half a step aside. As soon as he had done it, he walked back onto the line he had been on before. He did not even know he had moved.

The three of them walked in single file towards the tower. Their strides were the same, and so were the gaps between them. The foot of the one behind came down where the foot of the one in front had just lifted.

She did not try to stop them a second time.

Stopping them was no use. She knew how many times she could try before she had to stop, and that was something the dojo had taught her too: if someone wants to leave and you stand in the doorway, all you block is the door.

She went back to the open ground in front of the base. As she backed away she kept her eyes on the backs of the three. She watched the grid eat their shadows until only three patches of white were left. She watched the three patches of white walk into the dark beneath the base.

※

The fluorescent lights on the steel frame began to come on, floor by floor.

From the top down. The ninth floor, the eighth, the seventh, with the same distance between each floor. By the time the light reached the base, the whole steel frame was white, without a single dark patch. The faint hum of the current in the tubes was pressed down too, floor by floor, and it folded into one flat sound.

She noticed one thing: the order in which the lights came on was too neat. It was not the neatness of a circuit running along its path. It was the neatness of someone pressing them down in turn. One press. Then another. Then another. The gaps between them were exact to the hair.

It was like someone clocking in, one after another.

※

Outside the railing of the observation deck, a person was standing.

There was nowhere to stand outside the railing.

The person simply stood there. Toes together, the tips of both feet lined up on one line. The folding fan was held level at eyebrow height, its face turned outwards, and both elbows were bent at the same angle.

Mitsuki looked for three seconds. In those three seconds not one part of the figure moved.

The dust had stopped in mid-air. Dust had been drifting around the base, and it had stopped halfway. Each grain hung where it was, holding the place it had been a second before.

The face was white porcelain. It had no eyes, only two very fine horizontal slits, and nothing could be seen beneath them. The curve of the mouth was exactly the same on both sides, and it did not change, not by a second. A very small clock was pinned to the side of the bun. Its second hand was moving, and moving steadily. All the dust in this area had stopped. Only that hand moved.

The face of the fan was not paper. It was hard to see from so far away, but the panels between the ribs were stiff, with square corners, and each panel had a row of small holes. The holes had been punched in, row after row, and they were not all at the same height.

At the waist there was a hard cut. Above it was a furisode kimono with very long sleeves, and the part of the sleeves that hung down was not out of place by a single thread. Below the waist were lead-grey trousers, the creases running straight, the hems falling exactly on the tops of the shoes, not one millimetre more.

Mitsuki did not move forward. She watched across the distance and did not step any closer.

The fan closed.

There was no sound. When the ribs came together there should have been a sharp crack. There was none.

A ring of something was pushed out from the fan. It could not be seen, but the dust moved. The dust hanging in the air was pushed outward, one ring, then another.

The people on the street lowered their heads at the same moment.

Eleven people, in the same second. The three at the level crossing, the two at the convenience store door, the one under the bicycle shed, the two on the platform stairs, and the three walking towards the tower. The movement of their heads was exactly the same: chins tucked into collars, eyes dropped to their shoes, shoulders drawn forward by half an inch. Then they all quickened their pace together.

Not one of them looked back.

Mitsuki opened her mouth.

She called out once.

Her throat moved, her chest moved, and she could feel her vocal cords trembling. But no sound went out. There was only the shape of her mouth. Her words were flattened three inches from her lips, pressed into something with no thickness, and pushed away along the ground.

The ring pressed against her.

It pushed her back half a step.

Her shoe scraped a mark across the ground.

Along the whole street, only this one mark was out of line at that moment. The grid was straight, the trouser creases were straight, the people’s paths were straight, the gaps between the lights were straight. Only this mark was crooked, about a foot long, its edges fraying.

She looked down.

She knew how conspicuous that mark was here.

“Don’t cause trouble for others. Don’t stand out. Don’t stop. Keep working.”

The voice was pressed against her ear.

Not far. Not loud. It was just inside her ear, so close that the fine hairs in there moved. Four sentences, with the same gap between each one. When the last word was finished it was gone. It had no tail, and no wall sent it back. She looked up at the tower. It was so large and so empty that the words left not a single echo inside it.

The shape of a smile. She could tell it had been said with a smile.

※

The person began to walk down.

There were no steps outside the railing. Her feet came down one step at a time, each one lower than the last, and the drop was the same every time. She did not walk fast. Each step fell on the same beat: the time from the third step to the seventh was as long as the time from the seventh to the eleventh.

Mitsuki counted. Four steps made one whole number. All the way down to the ground, not once was it off.

Landing made no sound.

Over at the street corner, nine of the eleven had already walked on. Of the two left, one had stopped. Not turned back, just stopped. His shoe was caught halfway, its toe an inch above the ground, and it stayed like that.

They were black leather shoes. The outer edge of one heel was worn away in a patch, and the laces on one side had been tied in two knots. A little white dust clung to the hem of his trousers.

She stopped beside the shoes for half a second.

Then she bent down.

The bending was also in line. Her knees and waist went down together, her back stayed straight, and the long sleeves of the kimono hung down, the cuffs exactly a finger’s width above the ground.

She pinched one corner of the shadow between two fingers.

The shadow lay on the grid, pale grey, its edges clear. You could see the shape of the toe and the crease at the hem. She had pinched the corner by the heel.

Then she lifted it up.

She lifted the whole thing. Not tearing, not cutting. She peeled it up from the ground bit by bit. Halfway up, the edge of the shadow curled, and the grid showed beneath it, very clean and white.

Mitsuki watched the movement from a dozen steps away.

She had seen this movement before. When she was small, the wallpaper in the room at home had been changed once. The man who came to do it picked up one corner with his fingernail, opening a seam, then pinched it between two fingers and drew it down the wall an inch at a time. He went very slowly, so that it would not tear. He said that once it tore you had to paste it again. When the whole sheet came down, the patch of wall beneath was whiter than everything around it, and shining. That day she crouched in the doorway and watched all afternoon.

Her hand moved. The band of light on Poxiao moved half an inch towards the point, then stopped.

The person folded the shadow in half twice.

The first fold was along the long side, the second along the short side. When the folding was done, the person pressed the creases flat.

Then the person put it into the fan.

On the face of the fan a new strip appeared, pale grey, a narrow line pressed between two ribs. There were already many strips on the fan, in different shades. Mitsuki counted them. She counted to thirty-seven and could count no further. The ones after that were too faint, and two lay side by side so that she could not tell them apart. Further in, close to the rivet, there were only a few marks left, as if something had once been there and had faded.

The new strip was the darkest.

The man in the leather shoes was still standing where he was. He lifted one foot, put it down, and walked on. He walked faster than before.

He did not feel his pockets, did not look at his watch, and did not turn round to look for anything. He walked towards the corner, where a bus stop sign was lit. He walked past the sign without stopping and kept going. The place he was going to was later than the last bus.

Mitsuki noted the shoes: the worn patch on the outer edge of the heel was on the left foot, and the two knots were on the right foot.

There was nothing left under his feet.

Only a patch whiter than the grid was left. The shoulders were his shoulders, the head was his head. The lines of the grid ran straight through the gap, and not one of them was broken.