Chapter 13Ugly, Isn't It

She drew her sword.

When Poxiao moved, the cyan along the edge shot up half an inch.

Half an inch. That was as far as it went.

Something was pressing down on it. It was not a block, and it was not a parry. It was a press. It came down from directly above the blade, evenly, holding down the whole edge, and it pushed that half-inch band of light back into the metal. Once the band of light had gone back, the blade was grey, the same colour as the steel frame.

She brought the cut down all the same.

What came down was a straight chop. It ran from upper right to lower left. It started at shoulder height and ended at the waist, at a speed neither fast nor slow. It was the first cut taught at the dojo, the one used to set a person’s wrist straight. Even a five-year-old could do it.

She finished the stroke. She raised the blade again.

The second cut was the same as the first.

It was not that she repeated it. It was that she changed it. The second time she raised the blade, it was a diagonal scoop, with the wrist turned outwards and the elbow low. Halfway through the raising, something pressed down. As it pressed, her wrist turned itself back to the proper position, and her elbow lifted by itself to the height of the cut before. By the time the blade was halfway down, she already knew where it would land.

What came down was still the straight chop.

For the third cut she raised the blade on purpose, and badly. Her weight was on the outer edge of her foot, her shoulder went out first, and the back of the blade faced forward.

What came down was still the straight chop.

The gaps between the three cuts were the same length. The paths the three cuts had taken lay on top of one another and made a single line. The angle of her wrist was exactly the same in all three, so exactly the same that she could tell it had not been set by her. Someone else had set it, and had set it considerately, in the position where the wrist was least likely to be hurt.

The fluorescent lights on the steel frame did not flicker once.

“This is good enough. Don’t stand out.”

The voice was right against her ear. Four words, then three, with the same gap between them. Then it was gone. The tower was so empty that nothing sent it back.

Mitsuki brought the blade in to her hip.

She looked down at her right hand. The web of her hand had gone white from gripping too hard. The awakening marking on her knuckle was still glowing. The cyan ran along the bone lines as far as the base of her fingers, and beyond that was the blade. Once it reached the blade, it was gone.

She tried a fourth cut.

This time she did not raise the blade. She pushed it straight out from her hip. It was the tip she pushed, and there was nothing in it that could be called “movement.”

Halfway through the push, something pressed down. It lifted the blade to shoulder height for her, and started the stroke for her.

What came down was still the straight chop.

※

The folding fan waved once.

The arc the fan’s face swept through was very short, less than a foot.

Then time began to run.

Her fifth cut was a slash. As the slash went out, a flower rose in front of the blade. It was a very faint pink, and it scattered outwards, a piece at a time. It was something she could not explain, not even to herself. It had followed the blade since the first night.

The flower had turned yellow before it took shape.

Its edges curled up first. The colour faded from pink to cream, then to brown, and then it broke apart. By the time the fragments reached the ground they had turned to ash, bit by bit, and a gust of wind scattered them. On the grid they left a pale brown mark, and in a moment that too was gone.

Halfway through her sixth cut, her arm went heavy.

It was not tiredness. Her arm was slower than she meant it to be. She told her hand to go down, and it went down, but there was a gap in between, and in that gap her arm was waiting for itself. Her breath could not catch up. The breath was still halfway in when the movement was finished, and her chest was full with nowhere to put it. She opened her mouth and took an extra breath, and that breath too landed behind the seventh cut.

Her knee bent first.

She had not made it bend. It had decided before she did. Her left knee sank two inches, and only after it had sunk did she know she was going down. She used the blade to brace herself against the ground. The tip slid a short way over the grid, and the mark it left was crooked.

She looked up.

The clock faces on all four sides of the tower were spinning. Behind each clock face trailed a translucent afterimage. The head of each afterimage joined the tail of the one before, one after another, until they made a whole ring, and the ring closed.

That ring was a full day and night.

She could count it. Starting at the four o’clock position, every mark on the ring had lit once. Twelve lit, then twelve more. None had been skipped. Twenty-four marks. One whole ring, closed.

She had swung the blade only three times.

Within that ring, a lock of her hair had come loose and fallen from her shoulder. Her lip had cracked. The web of her right hand had been rubbed raw. The floor tile under her knee had a white mark where she had braced herself. Her watch had stopped at the minute before she set out. The watch had been set on the ground, and the tower did not recognise it.

A whole day and night. Three cuts.

“You’ve already tried very hard. Now a little faster.”

Mitsuki kept the blade propped on the ground and did not move.

She counted her breaths, and by the fourth they had evened out.

She worked out one thing. From the moment Mitsuki landed on this open ground until now, the person opposite had not breathed once. It was not that the person controlled it well. There was simply none. That body had not risen or fallen, from start to finish. The shoulders did not, the chest did not, and the long sleeves of the kimono hung down, and the line they hung along was always that same line.

A person who had danced for so long and walked so many steps had not one part of them breathing.

※

The name strips on the face of the fan began to peel away.

They came off one at a time and dropped, very slowly. Each one was a narrow strip of paper when it landed, and once it reached the grid it unfolded into a whole shadow: the shoulders, the head, the arms, the creases at the trouser hems, all of it there.

The shadow stood up off the ground.

Standing, it had the shape of a person. A suit, dark grey, buttoned to the second button. The knots of the ties were all the same size, and the toes of the shoes all pointed the same way. It had no face and no dividing lines between the fingers, but its posture was complete: shoulders level, chin tucked in, hands hanging at its sides.

One. Two. Seven. Ten-odd.

They did not attack.

They walked over and formed a ring, and then they began to adjust themselves. The ones on the outermost edge shortened their stride a little. The ones on her right lowered their shoulder lines by half an inch, to bring them level with hers. When she stepped one pace to the left, the ring stepped one pace to the left with her. The centre of the ring was always her.

She swung once. The blade passed between two shadows, and the gap closed behind it, without a trace.

She charged outwards. At the second ring she was stopped. She was not pushed. The shadows had simply stood where she was about to put her feet, and they stood there naturally. None of them was in a hurry to block her.

By the seventh ring, she glanced down at herself.

Her shoulders were as high as theirs. Her breath fell on the beat of their steps. The hand that held the blade hung at her side, at exactly the angle of the nearest shadow. Seen from the tower above, this ring held twenty-odd things of the same height, the same width and the same posture, all walking in the same direction. One of them was alive.

You could not tell which.

“Look. Now you’re the same as everyone else.”

Mitsuki’s left knee sank again.

This time she could not hold it, and she knelt down on one side. The blade lay across her knee, and it was still grey.

The person opposite came forward.

One step, another step. Every four steps made a whole number. The person stopped three steps from Mitsuki.

Then that person reached out a hand.

The hand was coming for Mitsuki’s shoulder. The angle was neither high nor low. The palm faced down, and the fingers were slightly spread. Its path was to press down on her shoulder and help her to her feet.

The hand stopped halfway.

It stopped three to five centimetres from Mitsuki’s shoulder. The fingers were still slightly spread, the palm still facing down, and it held there, neither moving forward nor drawing back.

It held there for about two seconds.

“Holding someone down is also causing them trouble.”

The hand drew back. It went back along exactly the path it had come out by, and at the same speed. The long sleeve of the kimono fell and covered the wrist, and the hang of the sleeve went back to the same line as before.

The shadows went on walking round the ring.

※

A scrap of paper drifted into the ring.

The wind had carried it up from the far end of the street. It was a strip of paper, very narrow, a finger wide and three inches long. It turned twice outside the ring, then came in through the gap between the shoulders of two shadows, fell, and came to rest on the spine of the blade that lay across Mitsuki’s knee.

The spine of the blade was flat, and the paper stayed there.

Mitsuki looked down at it.

It was a quarter of a sheet, torn vertically. The torn edge was on the left, and it was fuzzy. The person who tore it had not folded the sheet first. They had torn it straight off, so the fibres stood up, one after another. The hand had shaken during the tearing, and the middle of the tear had a small nick.

The paper was ruled into boxes. Along the top ran a line of printed type, and the rightmost column bore two printed words.

‘Reason’

That column was empty.

It was not unfinished. It was empty. The paper underneath had been pressed by pencil, and something had been written there and then rubbed out. The graphite had sunk into the grain of the paper and would not come clean. Seen at a slant, you could make out the direction of three or four strokes.

Mitsuki reached out and pinched it up.

She held it by the end without the fuzz.

Her other hand pressed once, through her coat, on the inside pocket on the left.

There was a sheet of paper in there too. The third one. It had two old folds and one new. She had filled in the reason column once, and then crossed it out herself, with two light strokes.

She turned the narrow strip over between her fingers and looked at the back. Nothing was on the back.

She did not know whose it was. She did know who had torn it. The person who tore it had not folded it first. They had kept it after tearing, and carried it on them, until the edges had gone fuzzy.

The fuzzy edge lying on the spine of the blade had not been smoothed down. Everything in the ring was aligned: the grid, the shoulder lines of the shadow soldiers, the lines of their trousers, the way the dust was falling. Only this fuzzy edge was curled up.

※

The winter she was nineteen, on the snowfield behind the dojo.

There was no opponent that day, no test, and no one watching. Evening practice had broken up early, and the master had gone back into the house. The snow had begun to fall in the afternoon, and by night it lay a little above the ankles, so that each step sank to the calf.

She had gone out to turn off the lights.

She stopped when she reached the middle of the snow. She could not say why. Only one thing was clear: her body wanted to move. Not to practise. Not to beat anyone. Something inside her wanted to get out, and until it could, it kept pushing.

She had left the wooden sword indoors.

She walked one back-and-forth through the snow with empty hands. The route was not straight, because where the snow was deep she had to lift her legs. When she had finished, she stood still. Her right hand sank at her hip, then pushed out.

She drew once.

There was no sword in her hand. Nothing at all.

As she finished the stroke, she missed her footing by half a step. There was the edge of a stone under the snow, and her right foot slid off it. She pitched forward, and her left knee went down into the snow, leaving a hollow. Her hand still kept the shape of the finishing stroke. It finished on air.

Ugly.

She knelt there and looked up towards the house. The lights were still on inside. No figure showed on the paper screens. No one had seen.

Then she laughed.

She remembered that when she laughed, the white breath she let out was long, longer than the line her blade had just drawn. It drifted up past her knees before it scattered. When she had finished laughing, she stood, brushed the snow off her knees, and went back inside to turn off the lights.

Back inside, she wrote it down on the record sheet. Four lines. Then she tore it off. Before tearing, she had folded the sheet, so the tear came out very neat.

“That cut was not for winning.”

She said this while still kneeling on one side, the blade across her knee and the narrow strip of paper pinched between two of her fingers.

“I only wanted to move.”

※

She stood up.

Once she was on her feet, she did not take up a stance.

She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right.

No training manual contains that movement. It did not speed her up, it did not save her any effort, and it did not prepare her for the next step. It even slowed her by half a beat. From the left foot to the right, in that instant she was firm on neither. When the shift was done, she was still standing in the same place. She had not moved an inch.

A completely superfluous movement.

The shadows around her could not keep up with it. They did not know which side to follow. A few shifted their weight onto the right foot, a few stayed on the left, and the edge of the ring suddenly fell out of line. Two gaps opened in it.

Mitsuki raised the blade.

She raised it badly. When her left foot came down, it splayed outwards by nearly half the width of her sole. Her shoulder moved ahead of her hand, too early, and her whole body lurched forward. The blade did not come from above. It came up from beneath her right hip, flipping upwards at a slant. That angle would lock her own wrist, and the manual had marked it “forbidden.”

She chopped out.

This time the cyan along the edge was not pressed back.

Whatever had pressed down was still there. She could feel the layer of pressure on the blade, evenly spread. But the path of this cut was crooked. The pressure could not find where it ought to press. It held down an angle that did not exist. It pressed on nothing.

The blade-wave landed.

It was not a flower. This time nothing opened in front of the blade. There was only a crooked band of light, its edges ragged, pushed out at a slant from her feet all the way to eight steps away.

Where it had gone, the grid broke.

“Ugly, isn’t it. But it’s alive.”

※

A shadow had been pressed out onto the grid.

It was dark. Its edges were hard. It had thickness. At one end it was joined to Mitsuki’s heel, and at the other it spread outwards, across three squares, four, five. It was not a gap left by something cut away. A gap is white, and means that nothing is there. This one was black, and something was there. It took up room. The lines of the grid ran into it and stopped, cleanly, and came out again on the far side.

In this part of the tower’s base, for the first time in decades, something blocked the light.

The shadow crept forward.

It followed the direction of her last cut, crawling past the suited shadow soldiers, who stood motionless. They lowered their heads to look at their own feet. There was nothing beneath them. They were looking at ground somewhere else.

The shadow crept as far as the eighth step, and stopped.

It stopped in front of a pair of shoes.

They were very clean shoes. Not a speck of dust lay on the uppers, and the hem of the trousers came down exactly on the uppers, not a millimetre more.

The front of the shadow pressed onto the toe of that shoe, then climbed from the toe up to the instep, and stopped.

The person standing in those shoes did not move.

The folding fan was still raised, held at eyebrow height with its face turned outward, the two elbows at the same angle. On the side of the hair bun, the second hand of the small clock was still going round.

That person lowered her head.

It was the first time since Mitsuki had seen her that she had changed the angle at which she held the fan. As her head went down, the fan tilted three degrees. Three degrees, a very small amount. But the two elbows were no longer at the same angle.

She was looking at her own feet.

“…There is a shadow under my feet now.”

The words came out with the same smile at the mouth, at the same small volume, still against the ear. There was no echo anywhere.

But the spacing had gone wrong.

Between the first two words there was a pause, longer than any other gap in the whole sentence.

Mitsuki let the blade drop. She did not take a step forward. She stayed where she was, across the distance.

“You can stop now.”

She said it flatly. The last sound fell away.

The person opposite still had her head bowed, still looking at the dark patch on her own foot. The curve of the smile had not changed by a hair.

Down the centre of the white porcelain mask, from the forehead, a hairline crack had appeared.