"He doesn't remember anything right now. He poses no threat to you."
Sakayanagi Arisu leaned her cane against the bedside table. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, its silvery-white color gleaming with a fine sheen. The petite girl lifted her eyes and gazed at Matsuo Eiichiro with a half-smile. Her deep-purple eyes were as still as a deep pool, making it impossible to tell what she was thinking.
"How can you be so sure I don't know him—or that he doesn't know me?"
Sakayanagi Arisu paused. She had recognized Matsuo Eiichiro long ago. In fact, more than two years earlier, she had deliberately revealed Kitagawa Ryo's whereabouts to his father. So she smiled.
"His life didn't begin when he turned fourteen. And you aren't the only friend he's ever known."
Matsuo Eiichiro heard no malice in the girl's tone and calmed down. Frowning, he asked, "You know Ryo came from the White Room?"
"The White Room?"
Sakayanagi Arisu tilted her head. She sat with perfect posture, so the slight movement made her seem all the more lively.
"You could put it that way, but in essence, it's different."
"The White Room's goal is to raise a group of emotionless robots... Oh, there's someone else here, isn't there? Is it all right for her to know?"
Sakayanagi Arisu glanced at Nanase Tsubasa beside them and asked with interest.
"She's someone I trust," Matsuo Eiichiro replied at once.
"If you really know something about Ryo's past, I beg you to tell me."
Then he stepped forward and bowed slightly, his lips pressed together.
"Please."
"All right. It looks like he'll be out for quite a while anyway. Though, maybe he'll never wake up?"
As if playing a prank, Sakayanagi Arisu poked Kitagawa Ryo's cheek with her right index finger.
"...You're not that pathetic, are you?"
she murmured.
"How much do you know about the White Room?"
"I only know it's an organization that develops geniuses... I didn't dare ask my father too much."
Matsuo Eiichiro's father, Mr. Matsuo, worked as a steward for powerful people in the upper echelons, which was how he'd learned a little about it. But only a little.
"As for the White Room, it's more or less what you imagine: through a closed system of management and education, they mass-produce artificial geniuses—or, you could say, emotionless robots."
Sakayanagi Arisu explained.
"I visited once when I was little. In that enormous white building, five- and six-year-old children sat through their lessons. It was suffocating."
The girl shook her head.
"Even if this kind of education produced a successful case, it wouldn't be suitable for widespread use. Or rather, the plan was wrong from the very beginning."
Sakayanagi Arisu laid a hand on the boy's face.
"What they create that way isn't human. It doesn't matter how much of a genius it is."
"Through contact with one another, people learn what warmth is. That matters a great deal. The warmth of another person's skin is nothing bad."
"So what then?"
Matsuo Eiichiro seemed to have an unpleasant suspicion. He tried to steady his wavering heart as he listened to Sakayanagi Arisu.
"So I wanted to prove their method was wrong."
Sakayanagi Arisu's smile never changed.
"If their belief is that people become stronger by getting rid of their emotions..."
"Then all I have to do is create someone who acts for the sake of emotion, and have him defeat the White Room's 'Masterpiece.' Wouldn't that prove it?"
"That person was Ryo?"
"It was just a coincidence."
Sakayanagi Arisu shook her head.
"In fact, Kitagawa Ryo's situation was quite unusual. His parents died in a car accident, and he lost all his memories too. He was ten, but in some ways no different from a newborn baby. Because of that, almost all his relatives refused to take him in."
"An orphanage wouldn't have been a good choice for a child like that, either."
"I happened to hear the nurses talking about him at the hospital, so I had my father 'adopt' him."
Matsuo Eiichiro suppressed his anger as he asked, "You mean you sent Ryo there?"
"Yes."
"Then what about his correspondence with Ichinose Honami?"
For some reason, Sakayanagi Arisu covered her mouth and gave a quiet laugh before answering.
"We only found out later that Kitagawa Ryo still remembered a few things back then. For example, his childhood friend, Ichinose Honami. Oh, he used to call her little Honami, and she called him big brother Kitagawa Ryo."
"Before leaving with the people who came to take him, he secretly ran off to Ichinose's house to see her one last time. He even thought he was clever, leaving behind a fake forwarding address. In reality, it was a vacation home the Sakayanagi Family owned in the United States. I don't know when he memorized the address."
"Sure enough, Ichinose Honami started sending letters to that address after that. Of course, they all came to us."
Sakayanagi Arisu seemed to recall those days. Her tone grew a little lighter.
"Our plan was to instill an idea in the amnesiac Kitagawa Ryo: 'You must work hard for someone,' or something like that."
"Later, we discovered there was no need to instill anything. Someone like that already existed in his subconscious."
"You mean Ichinose Honami?"
Matsuo Eiichiro looked intently at Ichinose Honami, who lay unconscious in the other bed.
"Correct. Unfortunately, there's no prize."
Sakayanagi Arisu's tone was flat. Perhaps using the feelings between two people who didn't even know each other meant nothing to her. It was like finding a fun new toy.
"Kitagawa Ryo accepted our guidance without a hitch. His past memories laid the groundwork, so he quickly came to believe he had a little sister. Then he worked himself to the bone for that imaginary 'sister' in that sealed white room."
"He really did try hard."
She spoke as if praising him, her eyes lowered toward the unconscious Kitagawa Ryo.
"He didn't have much talent, but he was determined to get stronger for his sister. In his first three years in the White Room, he went from a blank slate to one of the top students. Ryo was so adorable back then, it made your heart ache."
"All you had to do was say, 'You have to do your best today, big brother,' and he'd study without sleep until he collapsed. If you patted him on the head, he could knock down someone physically stronger than him in afternoon training. Then he'd run back covered in bruises and tell his sister, 'I did it!' He was just like a well-behaved puppy."
"Oh my, are you angry?"
Sakayanagi Arisu smiled at Matsuo Eiichiro, whose fists had clenched tight.
"Ryo chose to do it himself."
"He'd been brainwashed by you! You were exploiting his will!"
"Is that so?"
Sakayanagi Arisu seemed to have remembered something amusing. She paid no mind to Matsuo Eiichiro's rather rude tone.
"Unfortunately, his will wasn't all that strong."
"By the fourth year—when he was about fourteen, I think—Ryo seemed to reach his limit."
She looked up and recalled it with great seriousness.
"Whether it was his studies, physical training, or learning other subjects, all of a sudden he couldn't keep up."
"Falling behind in a place like the White Room is terrifying."
"He started losing his ability to remember in huge chunks. He couldn't retain what he'd learned that day, and the next day he might even forget what he'd studied the previous month. As a result, Ryo's grades fell step by step until he was at the bottom of his cohort."
"Thinking back on the look on his face when he realized he was about to be eliminated... It was so despairing. But he still cried and begged to stay for his sister. His failure was ugly, too."
Sakayanagi Arisu's lips curved into a cruel smile.
"So in the end, I had to send him out myself—as a failure."
You rolled over in an ocean of dreams. These dreams, like bubbles, wrapped around you as softly as the finest sofa. You beckoned, and a dream drifted over to you, beginning to play out before your eyes like a movie.
When you were thirteen, you realized you could peer into other people's dreams. From then on, you deliberately reached out at night and gathered all kinds of dreams from the area. You hadn't realized the immense strain this would put on you in the future. Back then, it was nothing more than a way to pass the time at night.
"But these people's dreams are so boring."
You yawned. Most of your White Room classmates' dreams were blank. Empty, just like that enormous white room. When these dreams entered your mind, they didn't even make a ripple.
"Should I look at my little sister's dream?" Every night, you wrestled with the question. On the one hand, you were extraordinarily attached to your little sister. On the other, you felt that peeking into the dreams of someone close to you wasn't right.
"But I really want to see."
The thought surfaced in your mind and spread through your heart like fast-growing weeds.
"Maybe I'll just take a look?"
Unable to resist, you began searching the area for your little sister's dream. Before long, you found it. Unlike the other white dreams, hers was crystal-clear and shone with a rainbow of colors.
"If my little sister says something bad about me in her dream, I'll just treat it as a dream."
"If she says something good about me, I'll take it as her subconscious's true feelings!"
After reassuring yourself in advance, you carefully touched the dream. The next moment, your consciousness was pulled inside.
"Dear big brother, Kitagawa Ryo! This is Ichinose Honami. It's been two weekends since you moved away. I'm very unhappy right now, so I don't want you to be happy when you read this letter, either. If you're happy, you won't know that I'm unhappy."
"Actually, what makes me even more unhappy is that when I'm unhappy, I can't come over to your house and tell you so. I have to write you a letter instead. By the time you get it, I might have already forgotten about this. And when you write back, I might have something else I want to tell you."
"I really don't like writing letters. I'd rather look at your face, look into your eyes, and tell you all this."
Sakayanagi Arisu looked at the letter from Ichinose Honami in her hands and rubbed her forehead, looking weary.
"Why do I have to write back?"
"Because you were the one who volunteered to play the 'little sister' role, my lady. I thought that if you answered her letter yourself, you would better understand how she feels and play the part more convincingly."
The old butler beside her bowed in his immaculate suit.
"Is that so...?"
Sakayanagi Arisu, who considered herself a genius, hadn't been interested in anything for a long time. "Kitagawa Ryo" was one of the few things that had recently caught her attention. She read the whole letter again. By literary standards, it suited the sender's age of ten, riddled as it was with misspellings and occasional grammatical errors. But in terms of emotion, it was heartfelt enough.
"To make up for taking your place, I'll give you a beautiful dream."
Sakayanagi Arisu picked up her pen.
"Don't wake up."
She quickly wrote Ichinose Honami a reply as Kitagawa Ryo. She told her how much he missed her and hinted that he wanted to write more often. Then, at the end, she bluntly added, "I really like Ichinose Honami best!"
For the next three years, she kept exchanging letters with Ichinose Honami this way.
"A boy in her class confessed to her, and she doesn't know what to do? Oh, they must be in middle school by now. The timing works."
Sakayanagi Arisu spread out the letter. A mischievous idea suddenly came to her.
"I like you. We've been apart for three years, but it's because we were separated that I've realized how I feel."
"I can't see you yet, but would you become my girlfriend, Ichinose Honami? Would you be Kitagawa Ryo's girlfriend?"
Sakayanagi Arisu stopped writing. She propped her head on her hand and lightly tapped the desk with her pen, smiling.
For some reason, she didn't feel as pleased as she'd imagined.
Instead, as she wrote the final sentence, her heart gave a faint, painful twinge.
It must have been her imagination.
That was what she thought.
"Hello, this is Sakayanagi Arisu, the psychologist."
"This is Kitagawa Ryo."
Before you continue