(5)
We followed Mr. Furuya straight to the hospital on Kahoolawe Island without stopping. During the half-hour trip from Oahu to Kahoolawe Island, he said nothing about what had happened. Only when we reached the island and stood outside the hospital did he tell me-
"Toji was injured by a bomb."
I didn't ask how serious it was or anything like that. I simply hurried into the hospital in silence.
The hospital was noisy. The lobby was full of crying children, their parents nowhere to be seen.
I went around the children and found Toji in the maze of examination rooms.
Toji sat on a hospital bed, his tattered shirt discarded on the floor. Half his bare upper body was stained red with blood, and the flesh of his left arm, which hadn't yet been treated, was torn open.
Just before he could see me, I turned and left.
Just as I didn't want him to see me hurt, he wouldn't want me there at a time like this.
Once I was sure his injuries weren't serious, I returned to the lobby.
Mr. Furuya was paying at the reception desk with Megumi beside him. When he saw me, he asked anxiously, "Yuanli, where did you just go?"
I didn't answer. I only took Megumi's hand and gently squeezed his palm.
It was our private signal. It meant everything was all right.
He understood and squeezed my hand back.
After paying, Mr. Furuya settled us in the lobby's waiting area, then followed a nurse to let Toji know.
Sitting in my chair, I thought over what I had just seen.
The wound on Toji's left upper arm had clearly been caused by a homemade bomb. It wasn't deep, and the damage was concentrated in one area, which meant he had been very close to the bomb.
With Toji's abilities, there was no way he couldn't have dodged it. Unless he had been protecting something.
As I looked at the crying children around me, I felt an intense stare from behind.
I glanced back and met the eyes of the child watching me.
He had an Asian face like mine and looked about seven, with an expression of forced composure.
He seemed to be trying to confirm something as he watched me. Then he gathered his courage and walked over.
"Excuse me, are you that really muscular man's daughter?"
He spoke Japanese. Apparently, the person Toji had protected was connected to him.
"Yes," I answered in Japanese too.
The boy sat in the chair beside me, his fists resting tensely on his knees. After a while, he unclenched his hands and said, "Hello, my name is Shinichi Kudo. Don't be scared. Once my dad gets here, he'll explain everything to you."
Little Shinichi Kudo didn't seem very good at comforting girls, but what he said surprised me a little.
I had assumed Toji had been injured protecting this child. But apparently, the person he had protected was the boy's father. After all, if he had protected the child, a boy Shinichi Kudo's age should have started by thanking him, not saying his father would explain.
I found that hard to understand. The Toji I knew wasn't that helpful.
After some thought, I asked, "What does your father do?"
The boy blinked. "He's a novelist. Dad's written lots of famous novels."
There's nothing special about being a novelist. With only the information in our conversation, I couldn't make much of a guess.
Before long, Shinichi Kudo's father arrived.
He was a thin man with glasses and a mustache. After coming over, he first gathered his son into his arms, then handed me the children's drink and candy he was carrying.
"You must be Toji's daughter."
Polite in tone, gentle in speech, considerate and forward-thinking. He was a dependable adult.
I was beginning to guess what Toji had been thinking, and the conversation that followed confirmed my suspicions.
The man's name was Yusaku Kudo. He had accompanied his son to a special summer camp.
The U.S. really took freedom too far. Teaching children to fly planes at summer camp was one thing, but they even taught bomb disposal-and that was where the problem had occurred.
Ten real bombs had been mixed in with the toy models meant for the children to practice on. As chance would have it, nine of those ten were in the parents' hands. The remaining one, which was the most powerful, was in little Shinichi Kudo's hands.
And so Yusaku Kudo had protected his son, while Toji had protected Yusaku Kudo.
When I first understood what had happened, I couldn't make sense of it. Why would Toji protect a grown man?
But once I saw how Shinichi Kudo and his father interacted, I understood immediately.
Shinichi Kudo was actually a lot like me. More precisely, we could be classified as the same kind of child.
Precocious child geniuses.
Seven-year-old Shinichi Kudo wasn't putting on a show of cleverness. He was naturally intelligent.
His conversations with Yusaku Kudo were like easy discussions between adults: rational and full of ideas, free of the framework of father and son, free of the constraints of age.
They were father and son, yet they were also like teacher and student, like friends.
If Shinichi Kudo was like me, then perhaps Yusaku Kudo was the good father Toji wanted to become?
So when Yusaku Kudo protected his son, Toji had felt the urge to preserve this good father's existence. And thus, he had risked his life to save a "textbook."
It gave me a headache. A "textbook" wasn't necessarily suited to everyone.
While I was lost in thought, Mr. Furuya returned.
"Yuanli, do you and Megumi want to go see Toji?"
(6)
The first people to go in and visit Toji weren't me, but the Kudos.
I chose not to see him right away. Instead, I sat outside the door with Megumi.
Because I was still angry.
I didn't want to watch them thanking him inside, because it would force me to acknowledge that Toji was someone who would risk his life on a whim, simply because an idea had struck him.
Never mind saving people. In a fight, he would surely cast his life aside to challenge something or defeat something, fighting to the death without regard for the consequences.
Ugh, I'm so angry.
Whenever I thought that one day, somewhere beyond my reach, at a time I knew nothing about, Toji and Megumi might suddenly die for things that meant nothing to me, I felt an unprecedented anxiety. I wanted to find a cage and lock them both inside.
Of course, it was only a thought. I had anxiety, not psychosis.
Yusaku Kudo had high emotional intelligence. Before long, he came out with his son and Mr. Furuya.
We switched places. Megumi and I went inside, while the three of them waited outside the door.
When I entered the hospital room again, Toji was wearing a floral shirt that concealed the injury on his arm.
I was still furious, but there was nothing I could do.
This was what he had wanted to find in Hawaii. I couldn't blame him or condemn him for it.
But at least let me ease some of his physical pain.
Reaching behind me to draw the curtain closed, I took a painkiller injection out of the Void.
The physique granted by Heavenly Restriction was exceptional, metabolizing drugs five times faster than normal. The anesthetic and painkillers he had been given while his wound was stitched and dressed would already have worn off.
An extraordinarily strong body didn't mean he couldn't feel pain.
"Will you do it yourself, or should I?" I held the syringe out on my palm.
"..."
"Myself."
I handed it to him and turned away to give him enough privacy.
After hearing the faint rustle of him closing his shirt, I turned back, took the syringe, and tossed it into the Void. I said nothing the entire time.
Even when I left the room with him and traveled back to Oahu with the Kudos, I didn't say a word.
I had planned to return to our room and think about how to talk to him. But I honestly didn't know whether I'd been having bad luck lately or Hawaii was cursed.
We had barely stepped into the hotel lobby when a death caused the hotel to be sealed off as the primary crime scene. Until the HPD arrived, none of us could go in.
It was nearly evening, and we had nowhere to go.
The Kudos, enthusiastic about the case, were talking to the police. Mr. Furuya, who had been interpreting, had clocked out for the day, and Toji had inexplicably disappeared.
That left only Megumi and me.
"Come on, Megumi. Let's go sit on the beach."
However awful this trip had been, I still wanted Megumi to be happy, at least.
Then, as we walked along the beach, the child I cared about so deeply suddenly began coughing up blood without stopping.
I held him with one arm and decisively pulled a specially formulated inhaled medication from the Void with my right hand. As I coaxed him to inhale it, he told me with feigned composure-
"Don't panic, Yuanli. It's just cursed energy dysregulation. It'll pass soon."
I looked calm, but the hand holding the medicine was shaking.
The day before the Zenin Clan was sealed off, I had packed all the weapons and books in the Forbidden Vault into the Void. I had skimmed every book in there.
There was a passage in Cursed Energy Miscellany that read, "Cursed energy dysregulation stems from severe overexertion of cursed energy. Mild cases result in coughing up blood and damage to the meridians. Severe cases result in prolonged unconsciousness and cardiopulmonary failure."
So was Megumi overexerting his cursed energy to tame the Ten Shadows?
But why was he in such a hurry?
Were young Megumi Fushiguro's troubles really this heavy? So heavy that, wherever he was, whatever the time, however old he was, he had to risk his life to resolve them?
The setting sun fell from the sky into the cold sea. When night came, the beach was pitch-black, without a trace of color.
The five-bean porridge of daylight became a roiling, inky medicinal brew at night.
I sat on a beach lounger with Megumi in my arms, listening to the sharp sound of waves striking rocks and the rustle of the sea breeze brushing palm leaves. My heart was strangely calm.
Our family was like a group of refugees. Every one of us was fleeing, trying to escape our troubles.
I wanted to escape a century-long trap. Toji wanted to escape a terrible life. Megumi wanted to escape his inborn powerlessness.
I had thought Hawaii would be a new world, that the sea, the beach, and the islands could separate us from our suffering.
But everything that had happened today slowly made me realize that our surroundings couldn't save us from the troubles at our core.
If the cruise ship carrying us kept sailing onward, its destination would always be an iceberg. Unless one of us took over as captain and changed our course.
I let go of Megumi, and we sat facing each other on the same lounger.
For a long time, the upward-directed transference he felt toward me had led me to assume the role of Yuanli's original self, treating him as a child rather than a young boy.
But now I had figured it out. We were equals. We could share our troubles and resolve them together.
So on this night, when the sea breeze was anything but gentle, I would tell him every worry I had kept hidden, and in return, ask on equal terms for the worries of young Megumi Fushiguro.
We could be a close sister and brother.
And we could also be the trainee captain and trainee first mate aboard our ship.
Before you continue