London, 2022
NIJIKA
She files the article at 11:47 in the evening.
"The Headhunter of New York: Ten Decapitations, No Answers." Three weeks of work. The story needed three weeks and she gave it three weeks. She has never given a story less than it requires.
She sits for a moment looking at the screen. The office is mostly empty at this hour — a few other reporters, the night editor, the particular ambient hum of a place always running. London outside the window is orange and gray and enormous and indifferent, full of its own ongoing life, unbothered by the small dramas of the people moving through it.
She picks up her coat. She turns off the desk lamp. She takes the lift down.
She takes the route that goes over the bridge. She always takes this route. She cannot fully explain it except that moving water helps her think, and she has a great deal to think about.
She stops in the middle of the bridge. The river moves below. The city lights make patterns on the water that look, if you are in the habit of thinking about threads, almost like threads.
She thinks about him.
She thinks about him every day. Not with grief — she moved through grief a long time ago, on a roof in Yamanashi with the December sky doing its specific cold thing. What she carries now is something else. Something closer to certainty. She has spent eleven years building the case for something she already knows.
The book came out three years ago. The Boy Named Kakeru. People wrote to her from places she had never been: I don't know why, but this felt true. She knows why. She wrote it true.
She is getting closer. The headhunter cases — ten decapitations, no surviving witnesses, The mass suicide in Ariazona around 1990.
She believes this the way she has always believed her theories — from the inside, from the structure, from the evidence of her own memory and what it was for.
"Time and tide waits for no one. There are infinite paths for time, there are infinite possibilities, there are infinite events that will happen, there will be infinite routes, so there are infinite ways to find you, I'll live through those infinite moments just to see you again", Se says to herself.
✦
"Excuse me, are you Ms. Nijika?"
Someone called her from behind.
She turns.
Someone is standing on the bridge. The person is few meters away from him. The city light comes from the wrong angle to see the face clearly. But the stillness — the quality of it, the stillness of someone who has been moving for a very long time and has now, deliberately, stopped — is readable from a distance.
Something moves in her chest.
An unfamiliar face but somehow she feels like she knows that person.
She takes another step.
The river moves below them. The city moves around them. All the threads of all the connections running their invisible lines between all the moments and all the people and all the things that were and are and will be.
She walks toward the figure on the bridge.
She does not stop.
The distance closes.
— END OF TOKINE —
The frequency continues.
It always does.