The Body

by louderandlouder

Summary:

A post-series L story which follows his life and development over twenty years of post-Kira fallout, intercontinental crimefighting, prickly OC romance, illness, Russia, America, and eventually karaoke. The setting involves several resurrections. It is otherwise not an AU, or only a very slight one. Light shows up several chapters after you give up on him; B soon after.

Chapter 1: L

December 2019

 

The sky above was pure black, except for a few anemic stars. Below them hovered a thick, swarming haze of light pollution, and as he sat up, he reflected on the last thing he'd seen – Light and distant chandeliers and darkness above – he fell back down again; he was dizzy.

A tingling pain pervaded the outer layers of his flesh. Dazed, dazzled, he rolled over onto his side. His body was below him and he was on the ground.

After a few minutes he seemed to be sitting or standing, limping a little – this improved as he walked, but not enough, and he was in Tokyo, by his own building, looking at an assemblage of other buildings. A stage set. A car shot by, or something like a car.

The cold was bitter, and he was naked. His first productive thought was to get into the building, and he stumbled into the parking garage. The inner door was different; there was just a straight electronic keyhole, not a scanner, and it was locked and didn't respond to banging. Looking around for a camera, he spotted a trash can, its lining bag recently replaced and fresh, with a neat little light above it that hummed like a bee. He grabbed the bag and made himself decent, if ridiculous.

He carried within him a certain biological fear. He couldn't shut it down – a wildly flapping nerve, some ancient reflex never bred out – his heart was beating quickly and hard and in an angry way, and his limbs, though freed of paresthesia, were now palpably full of acids. He left the parking garage, tried the front door, peered into the lobby; the main room wasn't visible from here, but he could tell even from the lobby that the place was different. Different lights, screens, desk. Shaking legs, uncontrollable shaking.

He wanted a pay phone. There were none. He wanted a newspaper, at least, but there seemed to be none of those either, so he went walking until he could find a screen, a crawl – anything; his feet numbed again and a few more of the fast cars came. One of them slowed, but then it sped up again.

Once he'd left the financial district, he found a couple of Internet cafes and coffee shops that were open overnight; he stumbled, mothlike, into one. Only one or two people, who looked somehow like off-duty medical personnel, were huddled at a table in the back. He eased himself into a chair, not bothering even to talk to the employee behind the counter, and rested his head on his arms. It was only then that he noticed his hair was gone – even the brows and lashes, and the light fuzz above his hands.

 

“Excuse me. Sir, you can't be here.”

“May I make a phone call?” He had been half-unconscious. His heart had slowed a little, and he sat up, placing his hands on the table in front of him as if it were a desk of authority.

“No. Sir, you have to leave. There's a shelter a couple of kilometers away where you can go.”

“A glass of water, please.”

“No,” said the employee, from above him -- “no. It's in Higashi Nippori.”

“Where am I?”

“Otemachi. Go out, turn right – walk about twenty blocks. I'm not sure where it is from there on.”

“Can you look it up?”

The employee had a marvelous phone, a thin slab of very clear stuff like black glass, with the icons hovering below its surface; L felt his hands drawn to it like a child to a bauble. The story of Moses and the brazier of coals floated vaguely into his consciousness. Then the polite ejection was complete. He was walking again.

The buildings grew a little smaller as he moved towards Arakawa, and he was aware of a very faint light in the east by the time he arrived. It was a tight little place, the shelter; everyone in bunks – the sort of place, he thought with disgust, where they'd only take people who seemed clean, sane, employable – people who don't need the help as much, which perhaps was triage and perhaps simply bigotry. But he was clean; he was sane; he was probably even employable, and the attendants took pity on him despite the hour. They gave him some baggy black trousers, a white t-shirt, a brown jacket, some socks, some puffy sneakers, a bowl of noodles, three hours on a bunk in a dark-gray, breathing room, and a phone call.

 

The Wammy emergency line didn't pick up; it just rang into infinity, and L eventually hung up, thanked the attendants, and went out, his eyes blinking sore in the morning sun.

He didn't seem to be very interested in what had happened. The chain of events was so incoherent, and the bottomless well at the center of it – a sinkhole at the center of an orderly city – so cleanly deep that it seemed impossible to even look at it. Time had passed, he thought – obviously time had passed, or there was an afterlife that resembled the earlier life, though with faster and fewer cars, quieter trains, a general urban hush all round.

He could imagine his personal hell consisting of precisely this mechanical cleanliness with himself on the outside of it. Perfect reversal: everyone encased in technology; himself outside, wriggling on the dirty sidewalk like some sort of sweaty animal.

He trudged south to Chiyoda; the walk was long, and he found himself uninterested in a train in the same way that he was uninterested in how this had come to happen. Sometimes he was aware of other pedestrians and sometimes not. It all seemed disjointed, melting, time-lapsed.

 

Aizawa was relieved to be working on a Sunday. He was rarely alone at work anymore, and he'd slowly, imperceptibly, reached a point in life where he was happy only in his family's company and his own. When lunchtime came, he slipped down the back stairs for takeout, and was happy to find the transaction almost soundless, a minimalist arrangement of two greetings, an order, and payment.

A light winter rain had sprung up by the time he left the restaurant, and he put up his umbrella even as the headquarters building hove into view. With the rain had come a rise in temperature, and he found himself sweating in his overcoat. Undoing the top button, juggling his food bag into the umbrella hand, he was keenly aware of life's small indignities and embarrassments, which allowed him to peripherally glimpse the reality of his essentially insane problem, the small blunt fact he'd found in his inbox, Near's news: remain calm; don't reveal this rashly; the Kira dead are regenerating in San Francisco and Nice and Novosibirsk; the Kira dead are respawning in Tokyo.

“Aizawa-san.”

The voice was small and hoarse, and he'd almost anticipated it; he felt freshly the same shock that he'd felt at their last meeting, when he'd held him dead in his arms. The same disgust, the same protectiveness, the same sense of upsetting communion. Ryuzaki was a small figure, almost childlike, curled against the wall of the building. His hands held tightly to the sides of his legs; his back was bowed, his head rested carefully against his knees. Aizawa felt his hands move – putting his packages and umbrella on the bench; using the bench for support.

Ryuzaki sighed and got up. He seemed to be having unusual trouble holding up his head, as if the muscles of his neck were atrophied. He took up the umbrella and stood holding it politely.

“May I use your computer?” he asked.

 

In the elevator up, he leaned against the wall. Aizawa stared at the panelling and thought: such a thing should not exist; this is not something from which we can recover. I'm sorry that this happened to you. I am genuinely, deeply sorry. When it sunk in what we'd done to you, I almost quit; I couldn't look Matsuda Touta in his vacant, well-meaning eye. But there is no room for you here. There never was. Go home, or I'll dash your brains out, drown you in a sack.

Thus, he ran through all the stock images of destroying helpless things, all of them sounding childish and bizarre in even Aizawa's flattest inner voice; yet the sense of revolt remained, even when they had been purged.

The elevator arrived, and Aizawa asked him, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

“Just water.” He looked more than ever like a dying teenager, though ten minutes with the computer, hungry fascinated eyes, seemed to restore him a little. He asked Aizawa questions, all the obvious questions, questions about Light. As he answered them – usually to Ryuzaki's bemusement or indifference; once there was a brief sharp hilarity, clearly at Aizawa's expense – he was struck by Ryuzaki's use of familiar speech. It surprised him that Ryuzaki would ever speak this way; he had assumed that he spoke Japanese only superficially, despite his lack of accent, and yet he was speaking it now as if to family, as if in his extremity he were returning to childhood habit.

The questions stopped, and there was another sigh. There was a sheen of something on his skin – sweat or grime or something less natural; the eyes bulged even more than usual, which gave him a look of decay even when they were closed. He took up the computer again.

 

“Near,” said L, several hours later; he was sitting cross-legged on a pink bed.

“It was early when you called before,” said Near through the computer, logo, disguised voice; the whole bit. L sighed and got up to fetch his mug of tea from the dressing table.

“I see.”

“You're not the first.”

At first he didn't know what Near had meant. “Oh – right. There are others. Of course...”

“Others, yes. A late Soviet serial killer, Ivan Golubev, in Russia. In America, Susan Young, the environmental activist responsible for the bombings at Seattle. Several dozen more of Yagami's victims. Probably many more even than that; this isn't something that many people are interested in publicizing. And Yagami himself.”

A strange sound came from L's throat; he said, “Light?”

“He's already in custody.”

“Did you use Aizawa?”

“No. I didn't trust him with him. He doesn't even know. I sent Lester and Lidner.”

“I see.”

“You see all,” said Near.

“Near. Have you been...”

“Fine. Are you with Aizawa?”

“Yes.”

“I need you.”

“I need money.”

“You'll have money.”

“Near,” said L, a wild flutter in his throat, “I need money now . I can't stay in Aizawa's daughter's bedroom.”

“She's in America, reading international relations,” said Near – a bland denial.

“Oh – fine, then. But tomorrow.”

“Can you go to Russia?”

“Well, I don't want to. I have a lot of things to – to think about.”

“Golubev,” said Near. “He was in custody briefly, too, because he was picked up freezing on the street. He escaped. Probably under someone's protection; hard to walk out of a Russian prison. No leads. No real support. I need someone good on it. I have no idea how I'm going to do it otherwise. I'm going to have my hands quite full with the rest.”

“Who would you have called if I hadn't been here?”

“Nobody.”

“Where's Roger?”

“He's dead.”

“I'm sorry,” said L.

“Recently,” said Near; he spoke almost in admonishment.

“Oh.”

Near pressed on. “I have Lidner and Lester and Giovanni, but they've got their own business to work on; I have F and Zed, but they don't take assignments – Linda won't talk to us at all anymore. She even made sketches of Mello and me for Yagami. She didn't know, but...”

“Look – never mind, Near. Fine.”

“You'll do it?”

“I'm – a little overwhelmed.”

“I'll send a computer. Stay where you are.”

“Why? Will it be coming suddenly?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

L sighed and leaned back against the wall; Near cut the connection.

 

He slept badly that night, and when he did, all of his dreams were literal – replays, tapes, of what he perceived as the last few weeks: Light and Misa talking in the glare of the sunset; surveillance footage; the creature on the freeway amidst the smell of petrol and impeding rain; the sound of thunder; Light lying to him. The effect was not of sleep, but of uncontrolled and episodic time travel, and when he woke, breathing hard in the too-hot bed, clutched in his own arms, he wondered briefly at the absence of the tug at his wrist, the perpetual shuffling of paper into neater piles, the unconvincing chattiness, that meant Light was somewhere nearby.

 

He lay awake until eight, when Aizawa's son Riku banged on his door and handed him a package containing a laptop and a cell phone, another flat clear wonder; it held a line of credit, and he spent most of the morning out shopping, which was both fun and revolting.

It made him feel like a teenager again – which was bad enough – a teenager playing roleplaying games with his classmates; dice and papers. Here, you'd roll for intelligence, integrity, strength; there, you'd draw your character, equip him with armor and money, assign “flaws” that would allow you to give him positive attributes. L had disdained the games. He always played some snotty variant on a half-elf cleric called “I” who wore a white robe and solved mysteries. “I casts Healing,” he had said, deadpan, “as I is badly injured.” It had been hilarious.

And now here was I, made flesh again, buying clothes (self-consciously; what had been comfortable suddenly felt like a costume) – downloading music and books, pulling a life together clumsily and out of unfamiliar brands. More than once he wound up in a park, sitting on a bench, still wearing his shelter clothes (which were beginning to smell of sweat; he appreciated the comfort of that) and hugging the warm computer to his chest. It was still impossible to fully believe that he was here, and that the excruciating tension in which he'd lived for the past year was gone, snapped, replaced by these soft yellow rays of evening light and the sound of geese and the rotting-wood smell of the bench. Everything seemed to be rotting, in fact, and food tasted wrong. There was a disconnect in the world, a muddled frenzy of recalculations in a different mathematical base.

 

They were at dinner when he came back; he ate with them and then fled upstairs as quickly as he could. Aizawa knocked at his door only a few minutes later.

“Yes?”

“Are you in touch with Near?”

“Yes. He will support me from now on.”

“Well, listen,” said Aizawa, and L heard him opening his bag -- “he shouldn't have to.”

He opened the door. Aizawa was juggling at the bag's zipper; he first pulled a handful of small bills from its pocket. It was the only cash L had seen all day.

“Thank you, but this will not get me very far.”

Aizawa refused the joke. “That's not what I mean,” he said distractedly -- “I've secured something for you – though I don't know that you'll have anything to do with the thing, or want to enter it.” He reached deeper into the pocket and handed L the deed to the headquarters building.

He cleared his throat. “Surely I have no legal right to this.”

“You left it to the NPA, in case of your death,” said Aizawa. “I'll let the lawyers sort out any other claims you've got, but for now, by the powers vested in me by the NPA, the place is yours. I'll see to it that you have a legal identity to claim it with.”

“What are you even using it for?”

“Nothing. Someone else leases it.”

“Thanks,” said L, crumpling the paper a little in his fist. He looked down and away from Aizawa. “I am touched.”

“Well, it's the best I can do.” Aizawa's voice was a little peevish.

“I am touched,” he said again. “You had no need to do this.”

Aizawa shook his head -- “No.” L waited – he looked as if there were more – but all he said was, “What name do you want to be called on the documents? Ryuzaki?”

“Yes.”

“Ryuzaki what?”

“Rue.” He pronounced it “roo,” contrary to B's intent in creating the pseudonym; he'd always been irritated by the obvious reversal of “Rué,” and there was no longer a need, even a slight need, to feign empathy with B or interest in his decisions.

“How do I write it?”

L took a piece of paper and wrote it; dragon, promontory, and then the fragment of katakana which had always pleased him so – it looked a bit like “I L.” “Ru.”

“Is it your name?”

“In the sense of possession, yes.” He handed Aizawa the paper. “Sorry for being opaque. It's part of the profession.”

“Not the way I practice it,” said Aizawa with unexpected firmness.

“I know.” He looked at him and recognized that he'd snapped back to condescension; it was time to go, even if he'd always wished they could talk on a human level. He and Aizawa inevitably poisoned each other a little, and there was no further medical use for this poison. “I'm leaving tonight,” he added, and thanked him -- trying to sound the way he felt; they had been kind.

It must have worked. Aizawa said goodbye more kindly; he bowed and then shook L's hand with care, squeezing it in a hard, firm motion, the first physical contact he'd had since losing Light.

 

There were five Russians, all alike – oh, they were diverse in size and sex, but they all looked so identically tired that they seemed likely to melt together into twinned lumps if placed next to each other. He wasn't sure what the cause of their exhaustion was. They were too few for a task like this, but nobody seemed to mind that; it was too impossibly daunting to mind, like trying to resent gravity.

He turned on his computer at ten a.m. Japanese time – six a.m. in Novosibirsk – expecting to be the first presence in the room. Instead there was already a broad, uniformed back; it was the one with the crew cut, and he spoke with intent to startle.

"Lieutenant Krupin, did you move me?"

He could no longer see the window. Krupin turned, or half-turned, his forearm draped against the table at which he'd been slumped with his head in his arms. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“It doesn't make much of a difference, I guess.” Russian had always come to him with some difficulty; he was more or less fluent, but the pronunciation slowed him down – so slurred, so solemn – and he was conscious of the drabness of his speech, the excess of words.

“I needed another of the good computers to run the metro security footage through.” Krupin shoved his chair back and scooted over to approach L. “So I put you on an old Mac we have. Seems to be working okay.”

“The software is fairly robust, and I wrote it on an old Mac.”

Krupin hit a few keys, his hands extending in the camera's eye. “The aunt got off at Dovatora at ten-thirty again. She was carrying the same bag. I'm going home, but the others can check the morning footage; she didn't go home again so far as I know. I'm sending the clip.”

“Thank you. She doesn't even care, does she?”

“Well, she hasn't got a car. What's she going to do?”

“Borrow a car. Tonight I'll want someone to follow her. ”

“Are you asking me?”

“No, I'll ask one of the women. I don't want to put this the wrong way, but you're always uniformed, Krupin, even when you're not.”

“It's not something I often hear,” said Krupin after a brief pause, during which he visibly took it the wrong way, and just as visibly tried not to.

“Are you coming or going? I've never seen one of you here at such a time as this before.”

“Going.” He saw Krupin's eyes on his screen; there was a tracery in their movement which he recognized – looking at the details, the points, of his name; trying to decipher a human curve in them.

“Cloister Black,” said L. “000000 for the letter; CCCCCC for the background; font to fit screen. Further questions?”

“Is Golubev even still dangerous?”

“You can think of better things to be investigating?”

“A few. He did these things at the behest of his mother, and she's gone. It's not the nineties anymore.”

“That's not our problem at hand,” said L. “But I agree.”

“Why's this an important enough case for you to get involved?”

“We were asked.”

“A lot of people must ask.”

“We were asked adamantly. This man, he's a regional bogeyman; were you too young to remember him?”

“I don't believe in bogeymen, though I do remember the nineties rather well. It just seems – I don't know. Look. So much here can be political; propaganda-motivated, aimed at making the state look strong. There's still prestige in calling L and getting an answer...”

“Oh?”

Krupin had said too much; L had caught him at the end of an awful night – he wondered why he'd stayed here. “Never mind. Sorry. No. I'm going home.” He crossed the room, took hold of his bag and slung it over his shoulders; ill at ease, an awkward shuffling, too much strength for his intent. His face made no impression.

L couldn't think of the right word, so he said, “Will you be here tomorrow night?”

“Yes.”

“I will be here. Report to me, please.”

 

He had been troubled over the past few days by a strong desire to touch people. It was a physical response, the same as the sweat and the racing heart – pure reflex. He wanted to be near to others, to palpate them, to rest his face in someone's collar and to feel the furry touch of hair. It barely occurred to him that such a thing might be possible; asking or paying someone would miss the point – this had to be spontaneous, or it would not work.

L, on a whole, was not a toucher. He had not been hugged since he was ten, and he had not been willing then. Discomfort was part of it – the unpredictability of human bodies, their warmth and assorted smells – but far more than that, it was a function of a sort of field that seemed to enwrap and enfold each person. The field was composed of hairspray and clothes; makeup, shoes, the washing and exfoliation or moisturization of the face in the morning. It was a thin membrane, a type of armor cultivated by the fastidious – and he rarely met anyone who wasn't fastidious; he rarely met anyone who wasn't a cop or a spy or a doctor.

That had been the pleasure of ruining Light in the rain. Light had been aware of that membrane, L thought, in a way that most weren't, and he had not appreciated the rudeness of the downpour. His hair had still been damp when they had touched for the last time. L had been thinking, in a vague collaged way, of electricity – the strike of lightening; the emergency generators; Light's wetness; the sinoatrial node.

 

In the afternoon there was a piece of mail that made him clutch the arm of his chair.

 

Dear Ryuzaki,

I am writing to tell you that I'm alive and I'm very sorry not to have written sooner. When I was well enough to contact Near I found that he was already in touch with you. I also learned that B is alive, in California, and desperately in need of help. I am flying there very shortly to see what I can do. Unless Near has radically mis-assessed the situation, you are not in trouble; I hope you will forgive me the triage, and I am, of course, desperately eager to see you again as soon as we can possibly arrange it. We can talk then about the implications if you don't mind. I would rather not via e-mail.

Watari

 

It was impossible to classify his emotion; relief, certainly, happiness – and yet there was something wounding about the businesslike conclusion of the letter. It was too calm for the setting, an event implausible to the point where the foundations of logic and empiricism seemed to dissolve into an invisible and odorless gas.

A part of him was disappointed. Obviously, this wouldn't last long; it was completely unreasonable to be disappointed at the survival of one's family. But there had been several kinds of bitterness calcifying between them for years, and the freedom from them had been a small consolation for his loss and all the losses.

One of these bitternesses went by the initial B, and for a few minutes of blind walking his mind mechanically punned and played (B for bitterness; bitter rue, which you must wear with a difference – how clever to flippantly choose B's old alias for his cognomen – spontaneity a serious vice; maybe the only dangerous one he had).

Anyway – anyway; really he just didn't want to talk to anyone who'd been involved – he wanted to be somewhere entirely new, and for the moment, lacking any immediate work to do on the case, he took another walk, stopping at a waffle house and then a bookstore.

 

The bookstore was cavernous and smelled of paint rather than paper, and he noticed deep markdowns and a certain ominous quiet; perhaps the end of books had happened sometime in his absence, along with the end of so much else. The science fiction section was poor. He turned to literature, but on the way he stopped before a cardboard display and took up a volume, holding it delicately and with a certain revolted interest.

 

Amane Misa: Diaries

 

He choked a laugh and looked around guiltily. It had a melancholy photo on the front: Misa from a distance, looking perky as ever, but in a slightly blurry grayscale that made her look elusive and strongly implied a falseness to her smile.

Searching more for distraction than information, he sat down on the floor and began to leaf carefully through. It was full of wild swings in mood and apparent intelligence -- the bright happy child succeeded by a melancholy and precociously suicidal one, who was in turn succeeded by a brittle teenager who wrote less and less and began to assume the automatic, disinterested rhythms (friend in Aoyama; saw Morning Musume) of the Misa he knew. Then there was a gap, and a series of longer, more mature, even less actually informative entries about film shoots, TV appearances, directors, other singers, other actors.

The final entry was the only one to mention Light, though rubi suggested the “Tsuki” pronunciation for the kanji of his name; had Misa's connection to Light gone undiscovered, obsessively examined though her life must have been? He had, L knew, become publicly known as at least a strong candidate for the man behind Kira. Had Aizawa intervened? Or had the mystery simply become more absorbing than its obvious answer?

 

I haven't written about Tsuki because missing him permeates everything. I miss everyone, though. Much more than I thought I would. It was a comedy. I played the silly ingenue very well. I don't think I would ever recover from being a silly ingenue, even if I lived for many years, even if I have regrets, it's not in my nature, I've come too far in this direction now. Tsuki was the only thing that kept me grounded to anything that wasn't fake. He was the only real thing in the world, the only one who acted rather than reacting. I'm not choosing to die because I miss him; I'm choosing to die because I think death will bring me closer to him. If in the smallest of split seconds I can understand how he felt when he was dying, I can finally understand him enough to be worthy of his love.

 

“The world's well rid of you,” he said very softly into the book, and got up and put it back on the shelf, wiping his prints instinctively with his sleeve.

 

W, I am very glad to hear that you are alive. Have you found B?

I don't think it's right that we are here; I won't complain, but I feel sick. All the deaths that have happened because I wanted to be sure (when of course I was right and I had always known I was right) are terrible to think of. If some cosmic glitch, some mistake, some reversal in the flow of things has whisked you and me and a handful of others back from our timely demise, many others were not similarly spared, and my regrets are very painful. They stick in the gut and the throat.

You and I can debate about the intervention of God or gods. For me, unfortunately (and you will find this incredible) all of this has only strengthened my disbelief. A god should be unknowable, and the rules, the chain of decisions, involved in this case are all too knowable, if not actually known.

Near probably told you that I am doing a case in Russia. I am probably going to travel for it, especially if you will be occupied with B; there's no reason for me to be in Japan. I have no real desire to work, but Near needs my help. Ryuzaki.

 

Lieutenant Sidorova, a lean and nervous-looking officer several years Krupin's senior, had reported inconclusively on the progress of Golubev's aunt; it didn't appear that she was travelling nightly to see him at all. To all appearances she was having an extramarital affair. L had his doubts – perhaps she was brighter than she'd seemed at first – but he let it pass for the evening, and once Sidorova was gone he told Krupin that he was coming to Russia alone and that Krupin would be responsible for his housing and arrangements there.

 

Dear Ryuzaki,

No, I haven't spoken to Near since the initial contact. He's become very Near, hasn't he? Tell me about the case.

You would be back at work. I admire your sense of duty, though I worry a touch about your dramatic (in the highest sense) tendency in responding to all this. It's something that you and B have in common. I absolutely do not think that you're overplaying, but don't let the narrative take you over. Don't become caught up in what seems to be the symbolism of these events. There were so many factors to it all, some of which you cannot control, others of which you don't even glimpse. You may as well say that the whole business of Kira was Light's parents' fault for raising him to think of himself as a son of God in the Gatsbyian sense (and yes, we can save further talk of sons of God for later).

You were cautious, yes, but somehow I still appreciate your refusal to crash the helicopter into a building with the three of us in it, or to poison Yagami's jam or whatever it is he eats (he must have eaten sometimes, but he always gave such an impression of being above it). On a fundamental level, on the only important level, the deaths that followed ours were his fault and his alone.

Watari

 

W, He eats crisps. Ryuzaki.

Chapter 2: Lieutenant Krupin

To fly to Novosibirsk from Tokyo, you had to fly to Seoul, then to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (formerly Toyohara; formerly Vladimirovka), then transfer at Vladivostok. He played with the interface, routing himself through Beijing and St. Petersburg and then experimenting with a bizarre switchback in Helsinki; in the end he booked the flight and almost immediately got on the train for the airport, feeling apologetic as he slid away towards the cities he had so flippantly called and dismissed.

In Tolmachevo Airport, he sat hugging his duffel and waited for Krupin. It was nighttime in this ascetic terminal, which had the pale look of an American shopping mall; there were only a few distant loiterers in the baggage claim, and they didn't bother him, though they glanced at him from time to time and then resumed their conversation. He had spent the three flights in a state resembling suspended animation, sweaty and thick-tongued, accepting whatever meals and fluids were offered to him.

It was already strange to be served, to be handed things, after only a few days of fending for himself – it had been briefly exhilarating to supply himself with cake and daifuku, to check into his own hotels and to sit there in complete silence, interrupted only by the hum of the heat, but that feeling had departed quickly. It had been replaced by annoyance, which had also passed in turn. The irritation and the pleasure which he'd felt at Watari's servility had both been such shallow things; the underlying lack of him, which he was now beginning to feel, was quite different. It wasn't an emotion. It was a physical feeling, something high in the chest, and a greater awareness of his immediate surroundings which was not entirely helpful.

 

His phone rang.

“Yes?”

“I'm coming around the pass. Hover by the door and don't come out until I say I'm there. It's very, very cold. -- Here I am."

L stepped outside. The cold was absolute; he barely registered it as such, except that breathing was difficult, and there was a gluey pain around his eyes and throat. Krupin's car was the only one on the drive. He dove into the backseat with his bag in his arms, slumping back in the sudden blast of piped heat. The car was blue and Japanese and he'd registered it as only a few years old, but of course it had been a few years old in 2007; this was 2019 and it was junk.

"You need a hat," said Krupin.

L settled a little more and put on his seatbelt.

Krupin adjusted the mirror, looking at him; their reflected eyes met. Krupin's were surprisingly frank, already lined. The car smelled like cigarettes, but very distant cigarettes, and it was already pulling away from the airport and onto the main road.

L slumped into his bag and watched the lights go by. The dark road opened up quickly into suburbs; then there was the absurd, gloriously well-lit way of a bridge, and he saw the skyline of a vast gray Soviet city. His mind chose this minute to think, once again, of roleplaying games; to be impressed despite itself that it was possible simply to pay several thousand euro and be flown to a vast gray Soviet city, preserved here in oil and anthracite, at the edge of the plains, until his arrival.

 

They drove in silence for a few minutes before he was startled by Krupin's voice: "Do you mind if I stop for a burger?"

"That would be fine."

Krupin was peering at him in the rear-view again; what had been striking earlier was commonplace and a little irritating now. On the right, the bright arches slid inexorably closer.

"Will there be room service?"

"I'm actually just taking you to my place," said Krupin, audibly embarrassed. "I thought it would be best if you could stay with one of us, if you're here without any bodyguards or staff."

"Oh."

"But I have food at home. I'm just lazy. Forget this, actually. If you're hungry, I'll make us eggs or something."

"All right," said L, very quiet and uncomfortable.

Krupin drove on and parked in the garage under his building. L gathered his bag and let himself be taken into the elevator. They got out on the fourteenth floor, and Krupin let them into his flat, a breathless little place which had the graceful detail of a park view – something that must be pretty in the daytime, though at night it was just blackness edged with abstract neon streets and the dark shapes of other blocks. L looked over the orange sofa, the pile of pillows and afghans, the stacks of books, the old television, with neither approval nor disapproval.

"It seems ridiculous to entertain you in this way,” said Krupin, “but nobody else volunteered to have a guest. I'm the only one who lives alone. Are you okay with that? I know this is ridiculous; you're like a head of state.”

"Do you want me to answer, or will you just debate till the end?" L began peering around the place, looking for the toilets. "It's all right. I don't sleep very often, or very good."

“Still – oh. Your room -- here. WC on the left.” It was the only bedroom. “I'll sleep on the couch; don't worry about it.”

“I won't.” L glanced in. The bed was passable; it was a flat, sheeted mattress, covered by a crisply covered duvet, closely surrounded by various used things – boxes, a folded-up card table, paint, more stacks of paperbacks, a few odds of sporting equipment. There were no windows.

“I can make some ramen,” Krupin was saying when he came back out, “and break an egg in it – have some greens, too, I think. Is that okay? Or did you have enough of it in Japan?”

“That would be fine.”

Krupin made the ramen. He was the sort of cook who could do impressive things with ready-made cardboard. L found it helpful. As they ate, he sorted out his WiFi; his mood lightened a little, and as Krupin washed up, he found some baklava in his bag.

Krupin came over to him. The broth had darkened his lips; he asked for a piece of baklava and L indicated yes and admired the deliberate, thoughtful way in which he selected and took it.

After eating, Krupin began to talk. He talked about good boots and a coat; about his and L's shoe sizes (comparing feet matter-of-factly); about names, and here at last some input was required.

“'Ryuzaki' is fine.”

“Is it your personal name?”

“In some senses, yes. It's how certain people address me.”

Krupin glanced at him, less than impressed, but more than polite. “Do you always live under a false name?”

“It's not a false name in the sense that it's the name people use.”

“Everybody?”

“Mostly.”

“Where'd you come up with it.”

“It's the name of a beaten enemy.”

“You don't seem the type to do that,” said Krupin.

“No?”

“You don't seem cocky. Or like a trophy-taker.”
“I am and I am.”

“Okay,” said Krupin. He looked to the side.

L curled on the sofa, looking at Krupin and licking honey from his fingers, the intimacy that had come from tasting the same thing ending; he looked different in three dimensions – big and ambiguous; all chest and arms and torso, and again, if he had an intelligent or a stupid face, L couldn't tell.

“I may go to bed,” he said, though he had no idea how he would sleep.

 

The bed was even more crisp to the touch than it looked. L got into it immediately, fully clothed, and lay patiently on his side. Above him, Krupin cracked the door and said, “Do you need anything else?”

L opened his eyes. It was absurd to see another person at this angle after early childhood. “No.”

“Good night, then,” said Krupin, and there was a strange compassion in his voice that made L recognize that he truly meant no harm; L's impression of him coalesced and he recognized at last the suicidally reckless air he'd radiated throughout the evening, a feeling that to have someone stay at his home was the most dangerous possible thing to do. L understood that well. Krupin switched off the light.

“You are ex-Army,” he said, almost in resignation, as the door was closing.

There was a palpable hesitation, a catch in the mouth, from the now-invisible Krupin. “Yes.”

“You come from Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea.”

“Königsberg,” said Krupin.”

“They changed it back.”

“Yes.”

“You have always been unlucky and unhappy, but you are an optimist, so you catch yourself sometimes having a nostalgia that's false.”

“Well, most nostalgia is false, I think.”

“Most? Not all?”

Another catch in the breath. Krupin had an expressive breath, but the emotions took a type of reading which L found difficult. “It's not a point I'm designed to argue.”

“Me, neither. You are inclined to go to bed very late and sleep very late; other people think it's pathological how much.”

“Yes,” said Krupin, a touch impatiently, “all of this is true.”

“It's all in your file.”

Krupin sighed humorously; he got the joke and got that it wasn't funny. “Well, you're not used to traveling alone.”

“Is that all?”

“If I could do what you're doing, I could have your job.”

It was a cheap, self-deprecating line; L stared at the dark door. He always despised self-deprecation. “What I'm doing is just a trick. You know that because you just did it.”

“Not really. You did some Holmesian thing where you examine my flat.”

“Logic is only justified intuition. The trick of deduction is to know that. Be honest with yourself about what the justification's worth.”

“Is that the only trick, then? Now I can be L?”

“I am not joking, and nor do you feel like joking right now. Please stop.”

 

Yuriy sighed. Fine; Ryuzaki was not the sort of man to whom you said, “Are you all right?” or even “okay, good night, then” – not mean, but not interested in people, and rather obviously hurt and made angry by some outside force. He had arrived in a strange small package and would help them to catch Golubev. When he was finished, Yuriy could forward him on in slightly worse condition.

He snuck a glance back in. Ryuzaki was sitting at the edge of his mattress in the dark, his hands folded with the thumbs in a meditative position. By instinct, Yuriy asked him again:

“Why this case?”

“Assigned to.”

“Who assigns L? Or is L a corporate entity?”

“Krupin, come in here.”

Yuriy came in and sat down against the wall across from him.

“While I am here,” he said, “you must help me.”

“Of course.”

“I need things. I need other people kept away from me when I'm trying to think. I need things that are sweet – you need to make sure I have some of those. It doesn't really matter which things. But mostly you need to help make sure that the others don't bother me. Can you do that?”

“What constitutes 'bother you'? Be in your presence unasked?”

“No. Just – not ask me too many questions. Not try to talk me personally. It's okay if they think I'm a little strange, a little funny, but they have to see that you're on my side. You are a person with some gravity who has maybe a little of their respect. I don't know how much on their side you really are. But can you do that for me?”

There was an audible rawness in Ryuzaki's throat; Yuriy found himself fidgeting convulsively, a quick inward motion of the hands. “I don't think there are sides. But --”

“It doesn't matter. What I want you to do is commit to what I say. Don't speak against me; stay silent if you disagree. It doesn't need to be complicated. Just be a support.”

“A support,” said Yuriy softly -- “Yes. Well, I don't mind that.”

“It is probably some change from how you would act. I know.”

“I won't pretend I don't care, but if that's what – that's what you need. There are some things we owe to L.”

“Why do you owe them to me? About Kira?” asked Ryuzaki, taking the edge of his pillow into his long hands; Yuriy was seized by a strange interest in keeping him here – keeping him in this room if need be; he wanted to observe him. He was so stiff-soft, so claylike and strange.

“Yes, about Kira. And because we owe you some debt of inspiration, I suppose.”

He was surprised to hear himself saying these words; he had never thought of himself as a career detective, had taken the work as a palliative after finding himself unemployable after the army in any job that didn't involve sweaty government-issued cloth, day-to-day regulation of activity, cold crisp morning weather and systemic abuses. L had never particularly inspired him, though like many other children of his age, he had watched the famous Tailor video on YouTube, a dying man and a distorted voice, and admired it as a show of intellectual force.

Ryuzaki must have recognized his insincerity, but also his sincere surprise at what he'd said, because he took him at his word. “But you're a little older than me, I think.”

“I would have thought so.”

“What is the conclusion you've drawn from this?”

Yuriy suspected that this was a test – “L is a corporate entity” and “you're the same as Golubev” were likely both true – otherwise he suspected, somehow, he would not have put it that way. Ryuzaki's gluey skin, his thin stubble of hair, the air of collapse in his face, the red in the corners of his eyes all brought Golubev's latest mugshot to mind quite strongly.

“You're the same as him,” he said. “You died before.”

Ryuzaki surprised him; he looked embarrassed. He scratched at some impurity on the skin of his face. “Yes.”

“How are you?” he asked; he had no idea where this voice came from or why it was so soft. “Wasn't it frightening?”

“It was frightening,” said Ryuzaki, rather mercifully, “but I am fine. You should go to bed.”

“You should go home.”

“What?”

“You must have a headquarters; somewhere you call home. You can't be used to travelling around without help. Don't come to Russia and help us. You should go home and regroup.”

Something in Ryuzaki's broad face, which had turned toward him questingly, tensed and flattened now. “I'm fine.”

“I've offended you.”

“No. Go to bed.”
“I will, I guess,” said Yuriy, standing up, sliding up the wall, “but call me if you need anything.”

“I am fine, Krupin.”

“Help” rankled. L thought the word might not have the implication it did in English, of aid for the incompetent, the not-quite-practical, the crazy -- or else the overtones of servitude -- “you can't get good help these days”; a very Watari-ish construction.

His dreams were better than they had been. There were encouraging touches of abstraction; one or two images not wholly based on life, and when he woke he was unsurprised to be alone.

In the hour before Krupin began to stir outside, he found Light's location in the files. It was a supermax prison, one of those American institutions with concrete blobs for a bed and desk and chair. A cruel choice, he thought, by Near. Even when fully convinced that Light had deserved the grave, he had never thought he deserved to be placed there alive, and he knew the brutal potential of mental illness combined with solitary confinement – not that he'd quite have called him “mentally ill”; it was an awkward umbrella term, and difficult to apply to the political or otherwise mission-oriented killer.

 

He opened Word and typed:

 

1. I see monsters.

2. I am convinced that my close associates are trying to kill me.

3. I long for the company of people who wish me nothing but ill.

4. I am convinced that I am dead.

 

He and Krupin drove to the station in the morning. When they got there, they found a chalky, overheated room; a squad of uniformed detectives; a whiteboard, some tired tables – computers, the usual things. He introduced himself as Ryuzaki. He introduced himself as an associate of L's. He avoided speeches, feeling short of words, laconic. This would be his persona here; he wasn't interested in a persona at all, but in a flatness that resembled the way he looked when he was invisible behind his screen.

He didn't really need Krupin's help. They listened to what he said, especially when he said it quietly; this would have been gratifying, but he recognized the first stage of in-person work and knew the stages it would lead to. He resolved to end the case decisively and quickly.

 

Yuriy had hoped that a day at work would subtly nudge Ryuzaki away from addressing him by his bare surname. His colleagues called him Yuriy Aleksiyevich or Zhora – the only people left who called him Zhora, and that only when they were out drinking. After hearing Ryuzaki call him Krupin, they used his first names a little more pointedly. “Krupin” he remained, however, at least for now.

Ryuzaki impressed him a good deal. He had expected that, of course, but he hadn't anticipated just how good he'd be – he had doubted whether one could be the best detective, any more than the best claims adjuster. One couldn't even believe such a character in fiction. The age of Holmes was over. So, in succession, were the ages of Father Brown, Poirot, and Marlowe. The world was too computerized now for great detectives, or even dogged, downtrodden gumshoes – too computerized, and too lacking in the correct type of perps, crooks and cons. The master criminals had moved on to high finance and government, if indeed they had ever been anywhere else. Lord knew that was true here.

But when they began to work in earnest, he showed his powers, and the uniqueness of these powers turned out not to be a matter of height, but one of breadth. Ryuzaki worked – he worked endlessly; he scanned articles, he watched security footage, he organized and re-organized tapes and files – and he could seemingly synthesize limitless information into a short list of competing theories. His was an intelligence specifically suited to the age of excess information.

And he was a competent leader, though hardly a tactful one. Indeed, he was an incurably rude man, and it was apparent to Krupin that he had no respect for anyone's opinions but his own – he considered the others valuable tools at best; hinderances at worst. Even Yuriy found himself set back regularly, perhaps more than the others, despite the slight, circumstantial intimacy which he'd apparently taken too much for granted.

 

Yuriy drove Ryuzaki home through the blue, slushy evening. He sat slumped against the window of the car, the brief bristles of his hair pressing patterns into its moist, backlit surface. Upstairs, he made him a dinner of pancakes and tea, which Ryuzaki took to his room; there was a loud sound of typing and then silence.

When he came out two hours later, Yuriy was deep in the sofa facing the window, half-asleep – immobilized, rather; he had slept uncommonly badly the previous night, and his hands felt stiff. He registered Ryuzaki's approach only dimly at first. He had been half-dreaming, thinking of some muddled fishlike shapes, and had been rather happy.

Ryuzaki looked awful. He perched, unasked, on the sofa's other cushion. He said, “I want to tell you a story.” He did those things in that order.

“Hm,” said Yuriy, waking up the rest of the way and running his hands over his hair. “Okay.”

Ryuzaki began to tell him the story. It was fragmented, though absolutely chronological; very much like something you'd find on a tarp at an archeological dig, or on a table during the autopsy of human remains lost in the snow through the winter. He told it very clearly. He provided only the facts he was sure of, trusting Yuriy at least minimally to draw conclusions; he said nothing of human motivation, only of action, making no effort to stitch it together into a narrative with characters and a soul. His figures had no faces. They might have been people of any age and shape, or indeed any sex, except for the grammatical necessity of gender. Only Kira was described; he was represented by a rudimentary figure of youth and beauty.

If he had hoped that telling this would help, he'd been wrong. To Yuriy, as he spoke, he only looked sicker, with a growing swell of something like embarrassment -- “embarrassment” had been the word he'd thought of the previous night, too; it was a poor word, but so would be “humiliation.” He had not been brought low or wrecked or shown up. He had been disappointed. He had seen something which had made him question his own judgement. He had missed too much.

Or perhaps Yuriy was entirely wrong to see this half-defined emotion; perhaps he was merely misreading the physiological signs, a slight flush, an ironic downturn of the mouth, a faint redness around the edges of the eyes which threatened and then receded again.

While he was distracted, Yuriy took opportunity to admire the roll of his shoulders and the pallor of his lips; both of these could have been sensual given the correct opportunity, and he moved rather more loosely in the telling of the story than he did in ordinary life. It was strange of him, cheap of him, to be admiring someone's appearance at such a time, and perhaps Yuriy did it because he, too, was distracted – more shocked than he understood by the revelation that “L” had lost, his work completed by another. He hadn't guessed that from the news of his death. He had imagined Holmes at Reichenbach Falls; a sober exchange of a life for a life. Yuriy might call himself a realist, but it wasn't the sort of ending he expected -- the correct reward for such extraordinary labor.

Ryuzaki finished the story. It ended almost at Yuriy's door. He made a gesture of the hands, a flat gesture, to indicate that he was finished and there was no need to say anything; there was nothing to say.

“Do you wonder why you've come back?” Yuriy asked, hushed; he didn't want to lose the feeling in the air that had gathered during the telling.

“Yes, but it's almost small next to everything else, the other things.”

“I guess.”

Ryuzaki knew he was doubtful. “Do you want to know what it is that happens after you die?”

There was a faint quirk in his face. Yuriy stared out into the snowy mess outside. “I've always thought it was nothing.”

“Lifelong?”

“Yes.”

“I don't remember. I don't believe there's anything to remember. It was a flicker – something unspeakable. Does that word make sense?”

“Word? Oh.”

“I don't command Russian as well as I make it seem. Unspeakable? Not to be discussed and also very awful?”

“Yes.”

Ryuzaki exhaled. “I know exactly what happened, and I can't get it out of my head, in fact, but then I had to go on somehow.” Now, Yuriy saw, he had said too much. His hands tightened. Perhaps this had been the crucial thing whose telling he'd hoped would help, but it didn't seem so, or anyway he pulled back from the brink of it.

“Anyway,” he said.

“I know,” said Yuriy on impulse.

“Do you?”

“No. But being treated that way by a friend. A little.”

“He wasn't really my friend,” said Ryuzaki patiently.

“You acted like friends. That has an effect.”

“I'm not sure of that. Him, it was hard to know what to say. We mainly talked about food.”

He was getting up; clearly he meant to go back to his room, and Yuriy – again, on impulse – seized his arm. He reacted in shock, as if threatened; he threw him away, and there was an electric feeling in Yuriy's hand and wrist as if the shock had been literal. He looked pinched and ashamed, and Yuriy thought he had not meant to refuse the comforting gesture, but he did not apologize and instead hurried away, shutting the door delicately but very firmly.

 

W,

 To follow up more properly on your letter: there's no case here. There is a killer, but there's no case. Just police work. Grinding. Did you find B or not? Ryuzaki.

 

My dear Ryuzaki,

Are you angry with me, or just tired? Yes, I have found B. We are presently waiting in California until such time as I can arrange transport from the country. I've found him not at all the man he was when I last saw him. He's no longer in physical pain from his burns; he's quiet, but very penitent and grateful for his life and freedom. I am sure that he will be B again as soon as he's recovered from the shock, but for now he seems happy to be near someone who cares for him and I confess that it's easy on my recently injured heart as well. In a strange way, the bizarre event which affected us both seems less “real” to me than B's death and restoration. I had been mourning him, whereas you were never lost to me. Please remember that to me fell the small mercy of collapsing first. In many ways this is a positive outcome. I shall soon be in the presence of both, of all, of my boys.

 

Quil

Chapter 3: Ryuzaki

The Golubev raid was quick and brutal; it came after a month of work. Yuriy and Ryuzaki had no part of it. Once Ryuzaki declared his conclusions, the whole business was immediately taken over by the Spetsnaz; the team had expected this from the start, as Yuriy explained on the way home.

“Naturally,” said Ryuzaki.

“It's bullshit.”

“I'm sure it's just how it is. I've always tried to ignore interdepartmental type of politics; let them care about that, if they want to care so badly.”

“I suppose. Staying out has worked out well for me. I get promoted precisely because I'm not offensive to anyone, which is a nice change.”

“You were offensive before?”

“Oh, deeply. But now I'm like warm milk. I don't offend either the old guard or the reformers, at least not too much; I don't rat anyone out and I don't take 'gifts,' unless I know the person offering has the power to kill me. I enforce for a state that's sent me a steaming box of shit every New Year's Day since I was born and expected me to be grateful. Sure.”

Ryuzaki looked over at him, perhaps trying to gauge his tone. The words had tasted of hemlock; he had spoken, however, with studied neutrality. “I'm very naïve politically at times. I assumed they only knew you were competent.”

“No. I'm not the Captain Kirk of the militsiya.”

“You didn't solve the Kobayashi Maru scenario? You never broke the Gordian knot? Hm.” Ryuzaki's tired hand crept up to his neck. “It's a beautiful morning.”

Yuriy would not have noticed; he was too caught up in his thoughts, but he gazed around himself at the soft, heated light of the city and realized he was right. “Yes.”

They fell back into silence. In the still-quiet city, they seemed to glide through the streets, and his apartment seemed oddly large when they got to it. Ryuzaki trudged to the sofa, took off his boots and socks, and sat in his customary manner. It was wretchedly cold. Yuriy cranked the heat and watched him sit for a minute; then he threw himself sighingly down next to him, feeling young and strange.

“What are you going to do now, then?” he asked.

“Bask in my victory,” said Ryuzaki flatly. “Go home.”

“Where are you from?”

“A place called Winchester. Small. Ancient. Krupin, are we friends?”

The question surprised and excited him; he had hoped so, though they had shared no confidences after the laying-out of Ryuzaki's story. Proximity was involved, but so was Ryuzaki's recovery. He looked stronger; had taken on more color; his hair had grown in, and it was possible now to see the cleanliness and softness of the bags around his eyes, the smoothness of his fingers. There was something about watching this that made him feel responsible – there was something about it that made it feel it was happening to him.

“I see you as my friend, yes.”

“Of course,” said L, “people like you make that decision easily.”

“People like me?”

“Well, yes. Gregarious people.”

“I've never been told I'm gregarious. Ever. You seem to have this sense of me as a chatty, uniformed – a friendly neighborhood officer; it's almost flattering.”

“Do I mean gregarious, then?” Ryuzaki sat up a little and looked at him in the morning light. “I mean people with social instincts.”

“It's no good. I don't have those, either.”

“What did your friend to do you?” he asked idly.

Yuriy looked down at his hands, not wanting to discuss it; the original impulse, drawn out by loneliness more than context, was long gone, and he thought Ryuzaki had asked for form's sake, a concession he didn't need. “Zhenya. We were close – in the army – look, this is probably a bad time to bring it up, but I'm – to understand the story, you need to know I'm queer. I'm homosexual. This was very bad for me there, but also saved me. I was in love with him.”

“Oh,” said Ryuzaki, quite blasé about it; Yuriy appreciated it as a conscious kindness, though his chest remained tight with anxiety. “He rejected you, then.”

“No, no. We were together. Everything – I'm not used to talking about this or fond of talking about this.”

“You haven't got to.”

His tone was still kind; surprisingly kind. There was something in his voice that made it clear that Yuriy really didn't have to discuss it – it would not be awkward; they could let it sink into a quiet lacuna of its own.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“What you won in the crash, you lost in the boom?”

Yuriy was not yet familiar enough with English to make sense of the phrase; Ryuzaki had translated the words literally, and had to be told what they meant with reference to the stock market, and by the time they were finished he had lost track of Ryuzaki's intent.

“All I was trying to say -- I assume that it was not a time spent pleasantly.”

“Pleasantly? No.”

“And then what was between you ended when you thought the struggle was over.”

“Yes.”

It was interesting to discuss it this way. Ryuzaki always wanted to lay things out in such coherent rows; it was the same as the way he'd told the story of Kira – antiseptic and drained of its immediate pains. It was only possible to feel one or two emotions at once. There was no confusion about the story, no blood and viscera and secret tears, no frank atrocity, no systemic lack, none of the thoughtful and creative and almost loving violence inflicted from above upon him and his companions -- nothing of people splitting apart individually and from each other when the effort of evading memory proved to be too much -- only a clear, clean plot for a story or a play.

“I would really like to come back to England with you,” he said in a rush. “It doesn't – I know I barely know you. But I've enjoyed being your support, and I don't know if you're going to be working with others again there, but I know you said you don't have support now.”

“'Support'?”

“Or whatever word you would use. Help. I'm sorry. I'm making up a term.”

Ryuzaki stared at him with a gaze both direct and unpleasantly distanced; evaluating.

“Your aide,” said Yuriy, “your new Watari, maybe.”

“I don't need a new Watari.”

“Well, obviously not. Sorry.” He stammered out the words, wondering why he was apologizing, flushed with anger at himself for these confidences – too much poured out too soon; there'd been no need to admit to things best kept within, nor to respond to the slightest bit of kindness, the faintest strain of understanding, as if Ryuzaki had bid him rest his head in his lap.

“I have at least one. People would notice if he suddenly became Russian.”

“I see,” said Yuriy, half-forgetting what “one” referred to. “Fine. It's a job; that's all. I'm just asking for you – for a job.”

“I recognize that.”

Ryuzaki looked distracted suddenly, disappointed, and he pulled up his legs onto the sofa, shrinking into himself.

“Look,” said Yuriy, “I already know.”

“What do you know?

“I've always been this way.”

“What way?”

“Don't. I get enough – do you – everyone always thinks they're the first, somehow, to give me that look. You think I can't recognize that look? 'What way.' 'Get away from me,' you mean. 'I don't mind you or what you do in bed, but don't it near me.'”

“All I'm saying,” said Ryuzaki, “is that I already have enough people around me. I have too many, actually.”

“Where? No. Forget I said it. It's just, I got used to you being around, I like you, I hate being here – I know I sound like a child – I wanted to keep on. That's all.”

There was a pause, and there was the final eclipsing of Ryuzaki's pleasant mood; there was a gentle shadow over his face now which betrayed no further interest.

“Talking your language really tires me out,” he said at length.

Yuriy looked at him; he sat in profile, not looking at him, but watching the window. He could not have more directly said, “I want you to leave me alone,” and Yuriy felt himself rise and, in a strange movement, touch Ryuzaki's shoulder firmly and lightly. He knew he'd probably be gone when he came back, but he couldn't help himself; it was best just to let the whole business ebb away, and he went instinctively to the bedroom and lay down. It had been a long night.

 

W, Sorry for not writing. I don't understand why you're aiding B, or (similarly) I do but I don't comprehend it. But it doesn't really matter. Don't rush back to UK for me. He probably doesn't care where you are, and I know well how hard it will be to move a criminal overseas until your financial ducks are back in a row. I assume that's what you've been doing. You will probably read in the news that the Russian case is over. I won. I'm going to try and get some rest now. I'm thinking of you. I would like to be on my own for a while, especially since you'll be busy anyway. Hard to write; tired. Ryuzaki

 

L slept for a few hours on the sofa and woke chilly in the full sun. Krupin was just opening the door; he had an armful of groceries, and their eyes met as L sat up.

“When are you flying out?” Krupin asked quietly.

“I haven't booked it yet.”

“Oh. Well – it's nice outside. You should go out at least once before you go. The weather's breaking.”

L looked out the window; it was true that people were walking in the park below. Krupin approached him with a lidded little cup of coffee in his hand, handed it to him.

“For me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Thank you.” He had a headache, and he sat back and swallowed the hot caffeinated stuff with relief.

“And this,” said Krupin, handing him a Carbury's caramel bar; the gesture held a certain shy irony.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Krupin, I just have bigger problems than whether or not you're homosexual.”

“Well, what are they? If I'm making a fool of myself, I won't know it unless I know that. But look – we shouldn't talk to death. If you're going to stay here another day – I'm sure you want your bed back.”

“I am fine.”

“We could play chess,” suggested Krupin, looking wary.

“I suppose so.”

Krupin set up the board on the sofa -- it was blocky, heavily lacquered, heavy, and old, in the secondhand rather than the heirloom way. L liked it. He ate the candy bar, a type which he had never particularly liked, but he recognized Krupin's difficulty in securing English candy and he informed him of this and tried to eat the cloying thing with pleasure, breaking it into its constituent pieces and laying them on the edge of the board.

They played. L had never been a student of chess – he liked it well enough, but he was unable to recognize more than a few of the named feints and openings, and his manner of strategic thinking relied too heavily on psychology to give him automatic mastery of an abstract game like this. Krupin knew the business better – he'd devised or memorized set-pieces to rescue himself from bad situations, but he also played sloppily, emotionally. They were odd, limping opponents, struggling to map opposing minds which found the wrong things obvious.

L had maintained the advantage for most of the game, but at the last gasp Krupin won, and he took the last piece of the candy bar; it had become clear to both of them that L didn't want it. "Thanks for that."

"Yes."

He chewed, swallowed, and then said, “I should have clarified.”

“Oh?”

“It's a job for which I'm unqualified. I know that.”

“Do you hate this place that much?”

“You have no idea.”

“I think I do,” said L.

“Why?”

 

“Personally,” said Ryuzaki, “I would rather be in Novosibirsk.”

“Why?”

“I sleep better here.”

“The cold helps.”

“Not for me. But I'm well hidden, which is good. I've been afraid. It's as if this particular place is slightly calmer than the rest – things are carefully balanced here.”

Yuriy said nothing; he breathed quietly, heavily, to himself, as if in sleep.

“You. You like to offer advice, don't you? You like to help. And you're so offended when they don't listen.”

“No,” said Yuriy. “Honestly, no.”

“But that's what you want, right? To advise me. To steer me about, because I'm not very good at the practicalities of things. You see here a golden opportunity.”

“I don't know why you're putting it that way.”

“You can't even speak English.”

“No,” said Yuriy, “I know. I know that. I know a lot of things.”

“What are you going to do in an English-speaking place like my home without even that?”

“Speak Russian to you. I don't know. I can learn. Sweep floors if I have to. I--”

Ryuzaki shook his head, smiling slightly. “No. No. Don't even say that. 'Sweep floors.'”

“It's predictable? It's what everybody says?”

“I don't know what everybody says. Does your life here mean so little?”

“It means nothing.”

“You'd just as soon die as live?”

“I'm not living.”

“What's so bad about it?”

“I'm no use to anyone. I don't help anyone. I've made all these mistakes and I've had a little bad luck, and now I'm trapped so long as I'm in my own country. In my own home. I participate in various charades. I told you, I never wanted to be a policeman in the first place. I never wanted to be a soldier.”

“What did you want to be, then?”

“Left alone.”

He was speaking automatically but rapidly, and he saw Ryuzaki's clouded face change a little – become a little more intrigued, perhaps because of the speed more than the content of his speech.

“Is that true?” he asked. “Your dream when you were a teenager was to be left alone?”

Yuriy cleared his throat, shifted a little forward. “Who has dreams when they're a teenager? Really? I've never met anyone who wanted to be a virtuoso violinist or a famous actor or a brilliant professor. All the kids I knew when I was a teenager wanted to be left alone. If they had a talent or a gift, they wanted to work at it quietly and not be told they were good at it. Or if they wanted to be told they were good at it, that was all they wanted. All I wanted to do was read.”

“ I had dreams,” said Ryuzaki.

“Did you get them?”

“No.”

Ryuzaki was trying to resist a smile. He pulled up at his knees and held them tightly.

“What did you want?”

“To be the best detective. And a tennis pro. And a fire truck.”

“You're not the best detective?”

“No! Not by results. Look at who caught Kira in the end. Not me. My teenage student.”

“Using your work.”

“Soberly,” said Ryuzaki, “really, no. All of my work was deleted from the database out of the fear Kira would misuse it. Near started from the beginning, without ever meeting him. It took him several years, I understand, and it helped that Kira was in a more visible position then. But he did do it, and even without taking any risks. Except at the end, when he forced a dramatic and, I think, unnecessary confrontation for reasons that are beyond me. All of which is more important than who's 'the best detective,' but Near is the best. Maybe of all time.”

“Nobody capable of that kind of excellence can be free of deep, abiding flaws,” said Yuriy.

“Oh, of course.” Ryuzaki tipped himself back to rest further against the cushion of the sofa. “ Is it nice outside?”

“It's above freezing, that's all.”

“Can we go out?”

Yes, he was in a strange mood – lazy, childish, in a way Yuriy had never seen him. He put on his shoes and boots with every sign of mild pleasure, and when they were outside and the warm-cold air hit his face, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

They walked about in the pale, snowy city and talked a little; Yuriy asked him obvious questions.

“What's it like where you're from? The house, I mean?”

"I don't know." Ryuzaki rubbed at his eye. "English landscape. Hills. Wildflowers. All very old."

"Is that where you were born?"

"No, I was born in north London. Raised elsewhere. Away from my parents."

"Oh?”

“Yes. I was adopted when I was little. Or never adopted, but I lived in a home for kids – bright kids with problems, I guess, kids whose parents were dead or gave them up – I was trained there.”

“Do you remember your parents, then?”

Ryuzaki chewed his thumbnail, looking at a department store that they were approaching on the left; it had colorful signs hung in all of its windows, going-out-of-business signs. "Extremely little. I know who they are. They were very young; teenagers – I don't know how I lost them. I was young and my memory's bad. I got into one foster home, then another, then the place where I was trained. I never really asked because I thought probably it would change too much how I see things. Probably it reflects badly on them or me. And I would rather feel a little of the love from when I was small, which was very genuine and strong, than know exactly why they refused me. Probably I was just very hard to care for, on top of everything. I bit myself quietly. What sort of child were you?”

Yuriy stopped at a curbside stand to buy them more coffee. “Quiet, too. What's your ancestry?”

“English and Japanese. Japanese is really my first language. I spoke it with my mother and with her mother. Are you going to answer my question?”

“I did.”

“You didn't.”

“Like you, I was not abused nor deprived. I suppose I should say more, but I can't stand to say any more today. Here, take your drink.”

Yuriy finished paying and turned back to Ryuzaki. A pigeon with a deformed foot was pecking close to him; he stood still in the sunny square.

“Your parents,” said Ryuzaki. “You should tell me more. If I'm taking you to England – which is a ridiculous whim, but I admit it's very nice to be asked something so stridently -- I should know what you're giving up.”

“Nothing,” said Yuriy, stammering a little in surprise and hope, “leave it at that. We have no contact. I don't...”

“You don't love them?”

“Of course I do.”

Ryuzaki sighed. “You're not the kind of person who just does this every few years, are you?”

“I've done it,” said Yuriy, after a few moments of thought, “so I must be.”

“I don't think that's necessarily true,” said Ryuzaki. “Drink your coffee.”

 

They were finishing dinner when Ryuzaki suddenly said, “You know, you're right.”

“What about?”

“Kira. How people become friends by acting like friends.” He had been eating his waffle, but he put his fork down and sat back, hugging his knees. “But I don't think that's a very good word, even if I used it first. Too generic a word. Or in Russian, does it not mean the same? Connote? Just liking someone, being around them...”

“I think it means the same for everyone.”

“That's nice,” said Ryuzaki, looking a little amused. “I picture children dancing. But also, knowing everything about them; that's a third part. I knew everything about him.”

He was looking at Yuriy with odd earnestness. There was something prepared about the speech, thoughtful, even though its surface was rambling. His hands kept flexing against the surface of his legs.

“A lot of things, I knew without asking or checking. About his personality. About his history. About what would annoy him and make him sweat. It was always so easy to guess, and yet he was always a very hard person to guess for other people. And I've never been very good at guessing people – extrapolating, yes, from any data at all. But not guessing, not thinking 'ah, I know what will bother him today – if I do this and this.'”

“You bothered Kira? I mean, you annoyed him?”

“Every day, hopefully.” Ryuzaki rubbed briefly at his eyes, his speech becoming a little more halting, uncomfortable. “My point is that it was – you might understand. It was like love. Not that much like, maybe. But especially at first, before he started playing this game with – I still haven't figured it out; I still don't have the data – but when it appeared he had somehow made himself forget what he'd been doing, at least for a little while. When that happened, things just got strange. Well, they got strange earlier than that. But at first, it was like love. Nothing seemed to matter as much as getting under his skin. And we had this secret. But, of course, so much was also false about what we said to each other – and just like friendship, the more you act like you don't share a secret, the less you will share it. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” said Yuriy softly.

“And of course, for so long we were always physically close. And I would have to notice him whenever he moved, because of --” He indicated his wrist. “This was part of it, too. Never had I – I'm sorry, I'm trying to say it very specifically, so the words are hard. It wasn't about sexuality. I don't think, anyway. It was funny, because of course Amane was there too, and she was very attractive, and he didn't seem to have any interest in her. Or me, of course. In anyone. Me, I can find people attractive, in more ways than sight, I mean. Wanting to touch them, but I never really have any desire for them. I don't know what it's like. With him, what I suspect is that he can feel desire, but he only feels it when he can use them for something, when he has a reason.”

Yuriy wanted to probe this idea further, to make him explain what he possibly meant by “attracted without desiring,” but Ryuzaki's frustration was rather visible; he was reaching the limit, not of his Russian, but of language. So he stayed quiet and let him think.

“They both made me feel so old,” said Ryuzaki at length.

“How old were they again?”

“He was seventeen. She was nineteen, I think. I don't know why I don't remember. So I was only six or eight years older. But I always knew I was slumming, I guess. You know what they say about adults who go after high school kids. They've failed with everyone their own age. It was a joke in my head a little. 'Oh, yes, beautiful teenagers. Laugh and play. I'm the baggy-faced ghoul, kept in a small room for many years, who will tie you to an industrial dolly.' Yes, I know.”

“You're not a ghoul,” said Yuriy.

“Is that the best you can say?”

“No.”

Ryuzaki looked a little amused. “Anyway, that was the romance of my lifetime. And that's how it would have been forever. I don't touch people; I just curl around them like smoke. It's strange to be admitting this now. Believe me, I know it's not funny.”

“Well, that's what passion is like.”

“Not funny?”

“Well, I think it's a little funny. And almost always a little mismatched. I've only met one couple who seemed to love each other about equally and in exactly the same way. That's my parents. And they aren't always people I'd want to emulate.”

“How so?” Ryuzaki seemed relieved to have temporarily strayed from the subject.

“I couldn't possibly explain.”

“We weren't a couple, though,” said Ryuzaki with quiet force. “You understand that?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“And that's how I'll always be.”

Yuriy stared at him briefly before recovering; of course there was a motive here, a message to send – if your wanting to come with me has anything to do with attraction, with a crush, then you should know I don't reciprocate. He hoped desperately that his failure to understand, his assumption that Ryuzaki was just telling him about the lighter and more personal side of the recent horrors, somehow spoke well of him.

“I see,” he said, hoping the pause hadn't been too long.

“Like smoke,” said Ryuzaki clearly. His expression had deteriorated; he stood up and went to dump his leftovers into the trash. “You'd better get going. Quit your job. See what you're going to do about this place. I have things to do in England, and I can't sit around here forever.”

“Of course. I'll have to – have to break the lease, of course...”

Ryuzaki sighed. “Tell me again, Krupin. You want to do this so badly? You'll really just leave ?”

“Yeah. Of course there'll be some pain, leaving, but I'd take any opportunity to work with you, even if I have to grab your ankle to do it.”

“You're strange,” said Ryuzaki, not without pleasure.

 

Ryuzaki,

 

Why don't you come here and stay with us? I know that you never liked B, or at least never got on with him; I know you want to be alone, but you'd like it here. It's very quiet. The house where we're staying is big enough and isolated enough that it's quite possible to feel alone in the world when you're alone in the room. We are surrounded by deep American forests and a quiet lake, and there's ice cream and real conversation and a plasma television.

I'm enclosing details of our location. We're in the state of New York now. I trust you not to reveal even that to Near or any authorities.

I wish I could better understand your depression. Hopefully, it will help me to talk to you, even if only via voice? I'm nearly seventy and I don't ask questions of any chance at longer life. Surely being here is enough cause for celebration, whatever the emotional price you are driven to pay. I admire your standards for yourself, but I think your instinct to rest is right. Just do nothing, stop working for once, whatever Near says. Near doesn't matter. Please come.

 

Love,

Quil

 

Q – You know I can't do that. I can't deal with B right now. I am sure he's a good friend to you. For now, I really just have to get out. Don't worry about me. Please just don't write until I write you. L.

Yuriy had been cleaning the living room, stacking books and housewares for disposal. Ryuzaki had retreated to the bedroom. He hadn't wanted to bother him further this evening, but the boxes were kept flattened behind the bed, and he wanted to finish this task at least before he slept.

“Yes?”

Ryuzaki's voice was high, exhausted, plainly upset.

“Ryuzaki?”

“Mhm?”

“I just wanted to get my boxes. Are you okay?”

“Yes, I'm fine. Here.”

The door opened a crack and a box inched out, followed by another.

“You're not having second thoughts --”

“It is not about you.” A third box fed out. “I don't see any more.”

“That's enough for now, then.”

“Good night, Krupin.”

“Good night, but --”

The door closed firmly and the light went out.

 

Chapter 4: Near

Near had begun sleeping in the basement three years ago. It had greatly improved his quality of life. Before, he'd suffered from a separated brain; when he was upstairs, working or sleeping or eating, he was always aware of his work down here as an inverted life, an underground mirror-city, as seen in the strikingly illustrated children's book Round Trip by Ann Jonas, his childhood favorite. He had the original art somewhere. The Wammys were nearly all collectors; he was no exception.

Now that he worked and lived here, things were more harmonious. It was a neatly sealed place, neither grungy nor dank, and he had the added advantage of being able to lie down and daydream at any hour -- Near solved most of his problems through daydreaming nowadays, in the complete darkness of closed eyes. It had grown difficult for him to think things through with toys. He'd become too aware of others' presence, though he was certain that, down here, he was always unbugged and unwatched.

So he lay very still, on his stomach, and thought of his problems. Near was a frustrated artist in some ways, and an almost excessively fortunate one in others. He had no need to expend his various talents and so he kept them safe and unsunned within him. The words of forms – sculpture, writing, music -- would ruin everything, so far as he was concerned, in much the same vague way the toy-games had been ruined by the very thought of observation. He could not stand observed things. He could not stand permanent things. Such things were restrictive; they felt too polished to climb.

So, whether working or not, he spent most of his time sitting or lying on his stomach and daydreaming about people, real and false, living and dead. There were people he knew and ones he didn't – celebrities; sometimes fictitious people, though only from films.

L was a very common figure in Near's fantasies, which had been part of the reason he'd been so troubled upon his return. Perhaps it would be nice to meet a hero; to meet a character would ruin it.

Near's mother had left him at Wammy's when he was six. She had been raised there before him. They were on amiable, if vague, terms. She was from Lancashire, but Near spoke, like his former masters, in solid, old-fashioned BBC English. He was six feet, one inch tall, weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds, had blond hair and gray eyes, spoke several languages fluently, and had never committed a crime.

 

L and Krupin arrived in town very late on Saturday night. No car awaited them at the station; they took a silent cab with hard leather seats.

Unexpectedly, L had found the trip exciting. He'd flown many times and he was not happy to be flying now, but Krupin's embarrassed, boyish enthusiasm was catching; he seemed giddy more than happy, and he made effortless conversation, pointing out cities and landmasses below with deliberate, clumsy care.

 

It was a bright, snowy night; a full moon illuminated the clouds. From what Yuriy could see of the little town sleeping outside the train station behind the window-mist, it was an admirably, sensuously beautiful place. His roots were in beauty as well, but this was nothing like the strangely fragile, insistent, nature-threatened towers of Novosibirsk, or the more austere oceanic quality of Königsberg. This was an English beauty, with a certain self-indulgent whimsy, less touched by industry and war. The air of a locked curio. He sighed, staring through the black moisture-streaked window at the gracefully lumpy old houses.

He had expected an introduction and meeting, but when they arrived at the big house outside of town, it was silent; Ryuzaki paid the driver and let them in with his own key, taking Yuriy immediately to a large, institutional room like a hotel room. It was a faintly dirty place, but well-furnished and wooden and quiet. He put down his bag and was then taken to the kitchen for a snack. Ryuzaki scrambled a collapsed London Financial Times toward him from the table edge, eating cocoa-flavored cereal with his other hand, and quickly flipped through the first section.

“This is from a month ago,” he told Yuriy. There was a questioning English voice from outside the door, and Ryuzaki answered it.

 

Near came in, looking at the two of them. Ryuzaki seemed a stranger – it was so hard to understand that this man, whom he'd always known by a thin pseudonym insofar as he'd known him at all, was L. His cropped hair ill-became him. Krupin turned out to be a bit of a brute – more tough guy than hard man, if Near knew what Near meant -- a hard face, big shoulders and hands, a very Slavic type and very closed.

There was a round of multilingual introductions; there was a round of pleasantries, and then Near told them that he spoke Russian, which Krupin declared a relief and then let his face animate in a way that Near found pleasant to watch.

“I just want to say good night,” he told them. “I'm going to bed. I'll want to talk to you in the morning.”

“Sure,” said Ryuzaki, “good night, Near.”

“How was your flight?” He said it with robotic politeness; Krupin smiled at him and told him a little about it, lightly, using his inexperience and enthusiasm in a way that he must know was charming. Suddenly he had snapped into a new world, and he seemed to like the personality he could have there. Near sat down and looked at him seriously.

“Why have you come all this way with Ryuzaki?”

“Wouldn't you?”

“It's almost impossible for me to answer that question, given that our circumstances in life are so different. I was just curious. We rarely go so far to find our aides and handlers.”

“He came to me,” said Ryuzaki.

“Good job on the case,” he said. “By the way.”

“It was a bad job. Your decision to send me on it. You know that. But thanks.”

“I gave it you because it was the hardest,” said Near.

“It wasn't hard. It was boring.”

“That's the hardest. You think I was trying to embarrass you?”

“Maybe.” Ryuzaki looked a little pouty, a little silly; it would make sense that this room, this house, would bring that out in him.

“Test you, more.”

“I suppose you can test me. I've tested others enough.”

“Have you been in touch with Watari and B?”

“Yes,” said Ryuzaki, a bit sourly. His fingers played with the handle of his cereal spoon.

“Then you know precisely where they are?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Of course, I'm not very good at that kind of thing, but I haven't been able to track him at all.” Near gathered up the newspaper. “Never mind. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

Near left, and Yuriy and Ryuzaki were alone in the kitchen. Ryuzaki sighed, and his face twisted briefly; he got up and went to look out the window, and for a few minutes, amidst the hush, he pointed out different things outside – the garage, the tennis court, the distant lights of Winchester, giving equal weight to each. Yuriy listened, and then Ryuzaki took him to his room, told him that he could get anything he wanted from the kitchen, and left.

He was very tired, despite insomnia and jet lag, and he undressed and lay in bed. The sheets were musty; fresh once, long ago, and still unused.

He heard a distant thumping sound, and then another, and he lifted his head from the pillow to look through the crack in the curtains. Ryuzaki was outside, wearing his usual clothes and hammering a tennis ball against the wall of the garage.

Yuriy had never seen him in such an athletic mode – he was tense, low to the ground; his arms snapped back and forth and he kept wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. Breath came from him in a hard, efficient puff. It occurred to him that Ryuzaki really was an exceptional player; Yuriy was a poor judge, but he obviously had an expert's imagination, the discipline and capacity to create helpful problems for himself.

The world between them felt strangely empty – before, there had been the two of them and Golubev and his colleagues and heat and cold; now he felt he could have reached out, plucked him away from the cold winter earth, and folded him close. It struck him as strange that when he saw something that was attractive precisely because of its motion, his response was to want to make it immobile.

And yet he thought he could bear anything. This would be tolerable – he had wanted other things; he had not got them. The richness of this decaying house was palpable, and so was the sheer importance, the gravity, of Near and Ryuzaki, even though they were two young men untidily dressed in older men's clothes. The cold distance between himself and home rankled no more than it did in Novosibirsk. Indeed, he was closer now than then.

Ryuzaki threw down his racquet and pulled the neck of his shirt up over his head, exposing a narrow swathe of flesh. For a moment Yuriy thought he was going to strip it off, but he was only wiping the sweat, of course, and he sat back from the window, irritated with himself for treating this fit of sick-and-tired as if it were intended for his pleasure. Ryuzaki emerged from the shirt, took up the racquet, and went into the house; Yuriy heard the front door slam, and then a quiet vocalization of annoyance at the sound.

 

“At least consider staying here and working with me,” said Near, pale.

“I would prefer not to do that.”

“You might at least offer me a year.”

“You've been doing this for twelve of them,” said L. “You caught Kira. I have great faith in you. What need do you have of me?”

Near sat on his desk and pulled up one of his feet. L could tell that he'd long since grown too big, too gangly and muscled, for this maneuver to be easy, but it had to be done.

“I can manage,” he said.

“We're just not complementary. My leaps come from something like science; yours come from fantasy. And right now, in all seriousness, fantasy is more in line with the thrust of the world.”

“What will you do if you go?”

“I have some ideas.”

“Such as?”

“I'd rather not go into them yet. I want to make sure I've thought them through. Anti-Kira stuff – not Light, of course, but his followers, his people. Nothing violent. Seeking, in a highly calculated way, to limit his influence.”

Near stood up and slowly began stacking some thick, heavy tarot cards on the place where he'd been. Krupin approached and sat in the office chair; Near spoke in Russian to include him. “You've been paying attention to Christ Militant and the other Kirite Protestant churches?”

“I did some reading.”

“You've been in one?”

“No.”
“Go in one sometime.” Near was still avidly stacking. “They've got an eye over the altar next to the cross; they perform a type of scripture analysis called 'reading the lists,' in which they analyze those killed over Kira's career, their lives, what it implies about Kira's judgement and its pattern. Of course, since Kira was about as consistent a killer as the God of the Old Testament, they have their work cut out for them.” Near collapsed his tower abruptly and shuffled the cards, then dealt them in a cross pattern. “You're in it, too, of course. Flattered?”

“Aghast.” L was abruptly thirsty; he got up and ambled to Near's coffee maker. “What is my role?”

“A flattering one. You're like Satan.”

“Of course.”

“The Satan of Job,” said Near. “A challenger. A necessary foil. That's what Christ Militant thinks, anyway; most of the others are harsher. Someone who exists largely to define what God is.”

“Near, did you play D&D?”

“I've read the books.”

“You're true neutral, right? In your estimation?”

“Sure,” said Near. “You think you're lawful good, aren't you?”

“I hope so,” said L.

“Sit still for your reading,” said Near.

“Really?”

“Flip the center card.”

“I don't care to.”

Near flipped it for him, and said, “Four of staves. Well, that's you at the moment. Prosperity, success, being at home.”

“True. And many things of me are true at the moment.”

“You are perplexed, indecisive – but look to the Empress; you dream of something unexpected -- communion with humanity. Sensual happiness. Earthly paradise.” Near raised an eyebrow as he turned the next card -- “The essential underpinnings of your current situation, that in your past which has already passed into history: the three of swords.”

“What's that mean?” asked Krupin, interested.

“Just what it says,” said Near, rather gently. L had stilled, looking at the card sadly, hands folded.

“Near, you can hardly be serious.”

“What?”

“Well, look at that. You have these stacked, haven't you?”

“It's a pierced heart,” said Near. “A universal symbol.”

“I'm not saying you're making some sort of point,” said L in English -- “merely that it can't be coincidence that you've, among other things, explained this card and its position in detail. You glossed or ignored the other ones.”

“What motivation would I have to stack the deck? I would like your help, but I also have reasons not to want it. No offense, but I really don't care.”

“You're not so innocent as that,” said L. “If you were, you wouldn't bother with 'no offense.'”

“Don't think I can't tell when I'm offensive.” Near settled a little, playing through the cards. “The Knight of Wands. Departure, emigration, absence. Now, his house – position in life, worldly achievements, one's home, one's world --” Near flipped the card and gave a great, seal-like bark of delighted laughter which threatened to topple a nearby stack. “Ryuzaki!” he said quite loudly -- “Ryuzaki! You drew Death reversed!”

“Stacked,” said L flatly.

“It doesn't mean what it sounds like.”

“I didn't expect it to.”

“See, it normally signifies transition, rebirth, renewal. When reversed, implies a stagnation and unnaturalness. And you don't seem to be stagnating, do you?”

“This is all terribly pointless, Near.”

Near finally capitulated, though he drew the last two cards and looked at them himself. The display had vacillated between belligerence and plain interest, though very subtly so.

“He wants to be the Magician,” he said to Krupin in Russian, “but he'll have to settle for the King of Pentacles. That's all. Was that so offensive?”

L said nothing. He wasn't offended, but he wanted the conversation to be over. Krupin was looking at him with veiled concern, uncertain (perhaps) whether or not he was allowed to be concerned for him.

“If you want someone to ally with you,” he said softly, “why insult them like this?”

“You are not my ally,” said Near. “You couldn't finish your work, and left a child to finish it for you.”

L moved down from the desk and slammed his foot into Near's chest. It was a powerful attack; while Near's words had marked L's face with pink, this had Near on the floor, winded and struggling to rise. L approached him and said, “You lost your breath, correct?”

“I'm fine,” said Near, gasping.

“For a moment, you did lose your breath. Remember the feeling next time you're tempted to dismiss someone who gives everything to do something.”

“You gave nothing,” said Near, getting up.

“I would be curious to hear your justification for that.”

“You never willfully sacrificed anything. I know people who voluntarily gave their lives, their childhoods, their decency. You just forged through, remaining lawful and human as hell, until someone actually took something from you by force.”

“That's being civilized!”

“You had people tortured,” said Near, “don't talk to me about doing things the civilized way.”

“Fine,” said L, “that was a war crime, and I'm not proud of it -- strictly because it was ineffective and would have ruined my court case. Amane had already committed genocide.”

“It was no war crime,” said Near standing up, “it was a regular old crime.”

“You're such a wretched little cynic,” said L. “That's what I've always disliked about you, really. You've got no faith in humans at all, so of course you're consistent. You disdain everybody , so of course you see everyone as equal. What even keeps you good? Perhaps it was merely the desire not to be Mello. God rest his soul; at least he was a human being.”

“The religious outburst,” said Near very quietly, reaching up to toy with a lock of his hair, “is quite a surprise given the rest of this conversation.”

“--It's just an expression.”

“Really?” Near moved a little closer; he seemed enormously touched by the hyperbolic statement, and L was taken aback at the emotional switch. “I'm glad you liked him. Nobody really did like him, not even Matt.”

“He was sincere,” said L.

“It was hard on him,” said Near. “Everything was really hard on him.”

“And nothing's hard on you.”

“Lots of things are. I'm well suited for my task.”

“So was Yagami,” said L, but without malice, “and I see the 'task' in the same light. For me it was never a task; it was a – a hobby.”

“A dangerous hobby.”

“So's rock climbing.”

“Your logic's a mess,” said Near. “If it was a hobby , you wouldn't have cared so much as you quite clearly did about Kira.”

“It wasn't a divine ordination. That's all I mean.”

“My logic's a mess, too. Do you really want to go?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“I didn't ask you to go. Do you want to?”

“I need a breath.”

“Go upstairs,” said Near, turning to the cards a final time; he began stacking them in a pyramid.

“I'm sorry about Mello.” The moment had seemed unfinished, and though he had nothing more to say about him right now, he wanted it back, at least to finish. “I was fond of him.”

“He's been dead a long time.”

 

L went upstairs and lay on the leather sofa in what had been Quil's rooms; they were the same now as ever, untouched except by thick dust, though with a few peculiar additions: large photographs of Near and Roger in various scenarios of triumph. He wondered why they had risked photographs at all. It seemed like the kind of thoughtful, disastrously unsentimental bring-us-together thing that Roger would have tried.

The leather was dry and chalky beneath his fingers. He sat up. There was one photo here, over the mantelpiece, where he remembered a creeping potted plant (the fireplace below was never lit) – it brought Diane Arbus to mind. An English Boy Detective With His Kill. Near sat posed on his knees before a bright background: a warehouse; he held the two notebooks in his right and left hands; clutched in the right, like an extra toy, was a small piece of paper upon which was written NATE in scrawl, R-I-V-E in blood. Behind him, L now saw, was a shape he knew; out of focus it might have been, but the way it lay, the way it draped over the surface of the steps, was intimately familiar.

He looked away. It was impossible to look at the image for long and assimilate it. Outside, the trees beat as patiently as before; they had been waiting for him to look back, and he found that the image, which had burnt itself in insidiously at the first moment, was easier to take at this distance.

He had thought he would never see this little parlor's idyllic burn of sunlight again, not so much because he was separated from it by space as by time; it was, however, just as bright and grand and small here as it was in his nostalgic imagination. The thought brought pain. It was worse, in a way, that this place maintained its old comfort; the absence of those he remembered, the emptiness of the house, the awful photo, corrupted that comfort like a virus moving through an OS. It was necessary to wipe the disc now, reboot, reinstall.

 

Ryuzaki had disappeared upstairs two hours ago, and now he was watching some sort of film, something very, very loud which seemed to focus entirely on an argument between two men, and on a series of nursery chants. It made the whole atmosphere of the house tight and clumsy, confusing, something you walked through only between the pulses of sound. Yuriy had remained in his room since the meeting with Near, but he was hungry enough now that he had to leave, and he made his way down the hall to the kitchen somewhat unsteadily.

Near was already there, eating a peanut butter sandwich. He nodded at Yuriy and pressed bread and peanut butter at him, and though Yuriy did not normally like the gooey stuff, he began to fashion a meal of it; he didn't look likely to get anything else. The television upstairs provided dialogue, which Near translated in place of conversation.

“Why did you resign?”

“Do you know who you are?”

“Who?”

“A fool.”

“What? No...”

“Yes, an idiot.”

“I'll kill you.”

“I'll die.”

“You're dead.”

“Morbid of him, isn't it, to pick this?” Near poured soy milk in visible exasperation. “But he used to do it when I was a child, too. Blast the speakers out. He was a teenager when I was a child and believe me, he wasn't always quiet. This is the end of The Prisoner . He used to watch loads of television on casette and DVD. All still up there. Wait till it gets to the end of the episode. Does he want to bring all of that garbage back up?”

“I don't think so.”

“It wasn't really a question.” Near peered at him. “What is the point of you, Mr. Krupin? Why did he bring you down here?”

“Because I asked. There's nothing more to say.”

Near was searching at the table; Yuriy realized he was looking for something to play with. When he was alone, perhaps, it wasn't required as much – hence the lack of readily available stuff in the kitchen. Finally he took a napkin and began to doodle idly on it, small abstract shapes and faces.

“I had a friend,” he said, “who was killed by Yagami – by his associates. And then until a month ago, I had a sort of mentor or handler, Roger, who died of natural causes, whatever that means – but it's what people say. Everyone I need dies, and everyone who can cause me trouble refuses to stay dead.”

“I was a little surprised to find you alone here.”

Near ignored him companionably. “Now various people will court me. And I will accept one, probably someone I've worked with before.” He was blackening, patiently, a one-centimeter square of napkin. “If I could, I would bail out too, but I'm used to this now. Will you watch Ryuzaki? I have no reason to trust you, and I don't much trust you; I think you're probably an opportunist and possibly a creep, but he seems okay with you. He doesn't even talk to many people. So whether I like you or not, he'll let you near him and even probably keep you with him if you want to stay, and that makes you helpful. I also have Yagami in storage against when he might be useful again.”

Near stopped talking, but somehow let it be known that it was not yet time for Yuriy to talk; he would have to improve, he thought with some resignation, if he were to get anywhere with either of them.

“You are either an opportunist and/or a creep,” Near continued, “or you are in love with him. He obviously doesn't spare many thoughts on you, so he's not in love with you, and anyway, he's straight. Either way, you're being made a fool of. Like the German in Brideshead Revisited . You don't want to be that character. All you exist for is to make someone else's decline more obvious. Don't say anything. Your input won't help me make sense of the situation. If you're an opportunist you'll lie and say you're in love with him; if you're in love, you'll probably lie and say you're an opportunist, though not in so many words. Anyway, if you want to look less pathetic, then at least demonstrate to me that you're anything other than a police lieutenant. We've met enough people like that. Nod if you understand.”

Yuriy nodded, feeling embarrassed; it seemed too much a demonstration of silly pride not to.

“That's exactly what a police lieutenant would do.”

Yuriy let it pass as if it were humor; perhaps it was. The show continued upstairs, unabated.

Chapter 5: Zhenya and Zhora

Darkness now; Ryuzaki had avoided them all day. Near was in the basement, playing or working. Yuriy had gone to his room and toyed with his computer or tried to read. Once he'd walked to town, but it hadn't made much of an impression on him without Ryuzaki's presence to put it in some kind of context.

He was at his door now, wanting to say good night, or something better than “good night”; it was closed and the light inside turned off, but as he turned to go, he heard a steady voice: “Come in.”

He pushed the door open, shut it behind him. Ryuzaki was lying in the dark; he could see him, a dim form, silhouetted slightly against the heavy gray window hangings which were illuminated only very slightly by a thin moon. The room was not cold, but after the warm hallway it seemed to flicker with chill.

“Did you talk to Near?”

“He talked to me.”

He approached him cautiously and sat in an armchair by the head of the bed; it was a strange feeling, excessively classy and snug.

Ryuzaki hadn't answered him, so he said, “Are you trying to sleep?”

“To an extent. I hope I've done the right thing.”

“It doesn't matter that much,” said Yuriy.

“Why not?”

Yuriy paused; the words had come unbidden, and wished he could convey something of the emotion he'd been trying to express.
“Just that it doesn't matter as much as you. What you do is more important to me than your decision.”

“You aren't making much sense. Or I am missing my translation a little.”

“It's nothing. I was looking forward to working with you. That's all. We were a good team, so far as it lasted.”

“There was nothing particularly special about us as a team.”
He was curled on his side, looking at the pallor of the curtain. Yuriy could see the lobe of his ear.

“I --”

“We worked together well, along with a large group. You are a good detective. You and I were not particularly a team.”

“I thought the whole premise of my coming here was to work with you.”

“I just don't like it when you say empty words like 'we were a good team.'”

“All right,” said Yuriy; he had long since grown tired of being accused of speaking emptily; he had been punished for it disproportionate to his crimes of late. “Tell me how you'd rather hear me put it.”

Ryuzaki turned over, sat up in bed; fully clothed.

“Turn on the space heater, please. I'm freezing.”

Yuriy reached down and flicked on the little device; it began, though very subtly, to dispense warmed air. Both of them sighed.

“Come here. Sit with me.”

Yuriy, rather hesitantly, pushed himself from the chair and sat on the edge of the bed.

“May I touch you?”

It was a formal request, and it surprised him. Ryuzaki was huddled up small; there was nothing open in his expression, nothing curious.

“You may,” he said cautiously.

Ryuzaki nodded at him and scooted closer; at first he just took hold of Yuriy's arm, rested his head on his shoulder. There was something crowding and urgent about the gesture, tentative though it was. Yuriy, resisting a lifetime of reflex, didn't ask him if he was all right.

“Zhora?” Ryuzaki said, his voice shaking; he drew out the word a little too high and then cleared his throat. “That's your nickname. Isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“I'm afraid I like your first name better.”

“Well, you're English. It must sound weird to you. Feminine.”

“You're a little doomed to have a feminine name everywhere. Especially in Japan.” Ryuzaki gripped more tightly. “Yuriy. I wish you'd help me.”

“How?”

“I need somebody to sit by me.” Just as Yuriy was about to speak, there was a hard sobbing breath and he quite unexpectedly went on. “I'm cracking up. I need to feel somebody's warmth or I feel like I lose my mind. Or it was lost already. I don't think I'm going to be able to face everything that I'm seeing. And also everything that's gone.”

“Shh,” said Yuriy instinctively; the language had deteriorated so badly and so suddenly that he didn't want to put him through it anymore.

It was hard to parse Ryuzaki's mood – he was usually so subtle, so quiet, that one had trouble understanding that he was visibly upset. He was still holding Yuriy's arm, in a clumsy, almost inhuman way, and Yuriy freed himself from his grip in order to embrace him properly. The body in his arms was stiff and still, painfully tensed, with a hectic heartbeat; instinctively, he slid his fingers beneath the hem of Ryuzaki's shirt, pressing his hand against his bare, hot back.

“What are you doing?” asked Ryuzaki, a touch of brittle iron entering his voice.

“Sorry.” He removed the hand and felt himself flushing, nervous and confused. It hadn't been intended as a sexual hint; this was neither the man nor the moment for that; he had wanted to warm the small of his back, something Zhenya had liked – of course that was why. “I thought it might help.”

“Might help ?”

“I'm sorry -- I don't want to bother you.”

“Bother me? Shut up.” Ryuzaki took a steadying breath.

Yuriy swallowed hard. He had wanted to retort, but instead he pressed his hand to his mouth, breathing into it, feeling dizzy; too tenuous a situation, too much trust in too unknown a vessel, to risk an outburst of anger now. He had made his decision, quit his job, left his country under a visa merited solely by Ryuzaki's connections – all that was final; now he would shut up.

All this, but Ryuzaki recognized he'd gone a little far. He apologized – that voice again, shaky and oddly high. “I'm sorry.”

“Yeah?”

“You can put your hand there.” He had switched suddenly to the familiar “you,” and there was fear in his voice – a placating fear; the same type Yuriy felt.

“I'm not trying to come on to you.”

“Of course,” said Ryuzaki; he sounded genuinely surprised, though Yuriy had trouble believing it. “Sorry,” he added, a little slurred. “I just can't think. What do you do when you can't think? What does a person do?”

Yuriy had no idea what to say. Ryuzaki listened to his silence and then went on.

“All I have is something in the back of my brain that says over and over that I have to get as close to another person as I possibly can, or I'll disappear, I'll be crushed, they'll come for me, I'll be dragged away. I can't ever get safe. I can't find myself in the arms of another person. This isn't what I wanted.”

He spoke rapidly, his breathing uneven. Perhaps Yuriy had been naïve – he had never anticipated such a conversation, either; he felt sweaty and clumsy, trying to gather together something which increasingly fell into too many pieces. Suddenly he felt excruciatingly attracted to him. If he could just crush him close, kiss near the origin of his ragged breath and up his neck and ear, then he could pull him together again and rely upon him for his own safety.

Instead he shut his eyes, took tight hold of him, curled horizontally with him on the bed – there was no surprise and no resistance. They lay for some time. A certain heat crept through Yuriy's body; he tried to switch to conscious control of its every aspect, even his breath and heartbeat. He could avoid something so obvious as an erection – the situation was too uncomfortable, too strange, and it had been so long since he had felt intimate with anyone that he barely registered it correctly – but there were other types of arousal, a more general arousal of the senses, and these were piquing him quite sharply.

 

Yuriy's vacations were the only time he'd felt safe seeking sex. In Novosibirsk, he had chosen to keep his closet ironclad, buried if possible, though he had never resorted to dating women – his pride forbade it; he had lost too much from the fact of his sexuality already to miss out on the secretive pleasure of identifying with it exclusively. There was a wonderful feeling of security in that specific fact, of travelling the world as if his body were a glassed-in car.

But when he vacationed, he ran riot, by his very conservative standards: he went to quiet, secretive bars or private homes he'd been told about by names he'd met online, and he sought out men who looked a bit like him – men with delicately bagged eyes; men with moles on their faces and shoulders, soft little moles that could turn cancerous; young men whose loose bellies already pressed over their belt lines despite daily bouts of regimented exercise to strengthen their warm, muscular limbs; young men of a certain permanent pallor, strength of nose, or a hint of awkwardness in their very short hair. Once one of these men had once suggested to him in anger that he slept with other ugly people because it was all he could do, and he should admit that to himself. He hadn't cared enough about the person talking to really be able to respond – which sounded assured, but wasn't; really, he had anticipated a slight and detached from the conversation just in time.

He had never thought of himself as ugly. He didn't think people responded to him as if he were ugly. He was fairly certain he wasn't ugly, though nor was he handsome. Still, there was something in what the man had said that placed him in a certain class of people, a bureau of the losers and the lost, to which his belonging was generally as secret as his sexuality. He had come dangerously close to liking him for spotting that fact.

Now here he was, on the bed with Ryuzaki, and Ryuzaki did make him feel ugly. Of course, Ryuzaki was imperfect, too; many things distanced his appearance from the ideal or even the norm, but as Yuriy pressed his feverish body closer to him, he reminded Yuriy of the moon – a well-blemished thing which nonetheless, in its ideal shape, its reflective quality, seems silvery and gentle and perfect to the earth. And there was (Yuriy felt himself growing more fanciful in response to his change of circumstances, was not quite proud of what he was thinking, but felt his mind strain towards something more accurate and better) – there was, in addition to Ryuzaki's lunar quality (his vague serenity, his pallor, his steady refusal to present more than one side – Yuriy reached further still, through all this nonsense, hungry for the ideas underneath) – something inside him of what the earth must feel towards the moon. The frustration the earth must feel towards the moon, exerting all of its force to pull it inwards to communion, and yet always thwarted by the moon's steady, soft, almost electrical current of gravity.

This wouldn't improve, Yuriy thought (even as Ryuzaki began to rub his back gently in return, as if he were petting a cat; even as he seemed really to have attained a touch of limpness and comfort; even as his own arms tightened further, even to the point of eliciting a gasp and a wince and then a sigh of relief as if at stretching in the morning; uncared-for space, he thought vaguely, being consolidated. This wouldn't improve no matter what they did -- at least not at the moment.

Eventually, Ryuzaki ran out of energy and Yuriy felt him slacken. He gave him a final squeeze and then loosened his grip.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

The only answer was a sigh. Ryuzaki was crawling back under the covers.

“Cold?”

“Yes. You stay. You know, before Yagami, I used to think --” He paused, struggling for the right words. “Think that there were almost no humans out there. I'm not saying --”

“Out where?”

“Outside of me,” said Ryuzaki, with the first real fondness in his voice that Yuriy had ever heard from him, albeit mixed with a good many other things. “Are you worried about your future? I'll make sure you're taken care of. You came here in good faith.”

“In what capacity am I here?”

“Don't ask that. I know now what you want.”

“You have a weird idea of what people want.”

“I didn't think so.”

“You're – well, no. You're very good at knowing what we want.”

“Thank you. That's more like what I expect to hear.”

Yuriy loosened his grip a little; his hand was falling asleep. “And I get it. You assume people's baser impulses are strong and unmovable; their better ones are changeable and opportunistic and dependent on mood. So in the end it's best to bet on the base ones. In the long run, statistically...”

“Mm.”

“I don't think people are such complete monsters as that. Just big blobs of 'want.'”

“I solve awful murders for a living.”

“I thought you did it for a hobby.”

“They're similar things, in the sense that I was talking, anyway.”

Ryuzaki sat up and rubbed at his face.

“Are you feeling better?”

“A little bit.” He glanced back at Yuriy and laughed a little, a staccato sound, the way laughter might be written phonetically: hahaha! His spine was a slender hollow; there was something in his face which Yuriy read as “mischievous,” though he knew at heart that this was as bad as “embarrassed” had been. Malicious, perhaps, in a harmless away. Yuriy felt acutely aware of the way he must look lying down, the discomfort he must show.

“Yeah?”

“Sorry. This very serious scene. I've never had a conversation like this. It's so straightforward. I don't know. I feel all stuck in the wrong gear.”

Ryuzaki looked back and brushed Yuriy's hand with his, a strange, large-eyed, wet-eyed thing.

“My back itches,” he added. “It's part of it. Don't ask why.”

“Do you want me to scratch it?”

“Mm.”

There was something of the ingenue about him, and also something leaden. It made it all, somehow, easier to take. Yuriy sat up too, gently raised his shirt, and began to work at him with his short, broad nails; dark lines, faintly visible in the dim light, appeared and crisscrossed.

“I would like to cry,” said Ryuzaki finally, quietly, “but I can't.”

“Oh.”

“Do you cry ever?”

“A little.”

“I miss him. I'd help him if I could.”

This was said in tones of hushed, exhausted confession. Yuriy gripped his arms for a moment, then went back to scratching.

“No,” said Ryuzaki, “that's enough. I can't talk anymore. Watch something with me.”

“What do you want to watch?”

Ryuzaki wanted to watch a science-fiction series from the seventies; he cued it on the computer, wearily and repetitively trying to explain the basic plot, and then lay back. It quickly became apparent that he was ignoring the screen, though comforted perhaps by the sounds of the actors; he was curled up with his face buried in the sheet, his back pressed to Yuriy, having succeeded, perhaps, in crying. It was hard to tell.

Despite it all, Yuriy enjoyed those forty-seven minutes. He was comforted to be close to a warm and breathing friend, happy to think that his own warmth and breathing were comforting another; the show, though of course incomprehensible to him, was melancholy and camp, with men dressed in vinyl bug suits and studded collars.

When it was over, Ryuzaki was sleeping. Yuriy got under the covers and lay awake.

Towards dawn, he slipped under without noticing, and when he awoke Ryuzaki had left him a cup of coffee and gone out to talk to Near. There was a note to this effect. The coffee was fresh and hot, as if put down just a moment ago, and there was still a warm spot in the bed.

 

In the end L went back to Tokyo, taking Krupin (Yuriy) with him – so strange to be using his first name; a round feeling in the mouth, wholly different from the hard K and N of “Krupin.”

It was, he knew, a lot to ask of him – he had spent so much time convincing L to take him to Winchester; now the terms had changed and he was being asked to get on a plane and move to Tokyo – a city of strangers, in which he would have to learn a second new alphabet (L pictured the two of them sitting patiently, solemnly, with flashcards) – far from his family, helpless.

L knew it was a test of loyalty, with just a touch of the frank need to control him, to keep him helpless so that his own helplessness might be the less painful.

But things might be all right with Yuriy around – their night in bed had changed things for him, had made him feel strange; he felt a little wilder, a little more ragged about the edges, the prickling of the skin and the anxious sweat, and yet he also felt that these things could really be soothed by touch, by the precise thing instinct had told him to seek.

He told him some of this – at least about the test of loyalty, which he couldn't help. Yuriy had nodded solemnly. He was always very serious; this could be overwhelming or amusing, depending on the hour, and it inspired fits of kindness in L which mainly came out as financial generosity. They stayed for the first week in a hotel, and each night L crept into his bed.

 

They never “did anything,” as L kept wanting to put it -- sometimes they didn't even touch, but more often he would position himself very near to Yuriy and talk to him. He had a strong idea that they ought to talk, though he had no particular talent for it, nor desire or stamina. He told him about his parents, or Near, or Quil, as much as he knew, offering little pieces of the past as if on a street vendor's display, hopeful that some of it might align with a passerby's taste.

Yuriy answered his questions factually, but in a way that gave away nothing unintentional. The way to get him to speak was to read a book, watch a film. He liked to watch things and he liked to be read to, a mind not quite so saturated as L's but with a similarly stunted, small way about it, the mind of someone who'd grown up early and taken on adult responsibility without ever fully grasping how to rest or drift – only how to hide, and if you hit the right combination of entertainments, you could get him to praise or insult something and thus to drop some sort of fact about his parents or his school or his sexual life, something which L could seize, hide, take home, examine at his leisure.

Poverty, L gathered; a faint scent of staleness and alcohol – a sister much older than himself; the youngest of an aging family. Growing up in the post-Soviet depression – nonetheless, it seemed a Northern story to him, kitchen-sink drama, rather than his vague idea of a Russian one. Perhaps this was simply because Yuriy described everything with such English understatement, such vague gentility; perhaps L was just more provincial than he thought.

Yuriy had turned eighteen toward the end of 2008. He had reported for the draft, a rare activity in Russia; to evade service, he explained with increasing reticence one night in bed, would have cost money his parents didn't have, and he couldn't bear the paranoia of shuffling around for the next nine years without meeting anyone's eyes.

“It wasn't really that bad,” he said hastily, recognizing at last that L had won and he would be talking about this after all. “Well, Christ. You literally died. All that happened was that I had the shit beat out of me for a year.”

“You can't have it both ways. Either I'll imagine something dramatic or you'll tell me about it.”

“Dramatic?” Yuriy was looking at his hands, flexing the tips of the fingers loosely. “Look, if you'd seen it, you wouldn't use words like 'dramatic.' You're too smart for that and you've seen too much of life. Our army, it's like prison. You turn into a complete fucker and a thief. Anyone senior can do anything to you, and they do, and they're creative about it – amazingly creative, given how hungry and tired and fucking hot or cold you all always are. You would fuck anybody over to get it to stop, and you do; you have to fight people for your food. There's enough food, sort of, but you fight for it anyway. Anything not to look weak, is the problem. You can't look weak or volunteer anything. If you do, you're right at the bottom of the hierarchy and you can never, never come back up.”

“But you fell in love there.”

“Well, sort of.” Yuriy closed his eyes. “This thing with Zhenya, it wasn't much of a romance. You had no time alone. It actually really – it saved me, that he was brave enough to tell me – I mean, can you imagine? A place like that. I could just have easily have really hurt him. I don't know how he guessed about me. You'd better believe that whatever tiny traces of obvious queerness, intellectualism, obvious higher thought, are in my ordinary demeanor, they were gone there. Not that it helped me. We just had an agreement to defend each other and to stay together after we got out, and it helped, though mostly just emotionally. People caught on to it and then, let me tell you, that was absolutely, incredibly fucking fun. Christ.”

He fell quiet. L, a bit ashamed of his detachment from the story, his sense of merely gathering information, asked him where they'd gone.

“Rostov.”

“Where?”

Yuriy had slowly been working his way onto his side, facing away from L, and he spoke very quietly – L really hadn't heard him.

“Rostov-on-Don. We just hitchhiked there. It was as far as we got. We were living on the street for a few days and then he got in touch with his parents and got a little money – I never met his parents; don't know what sorts of people they were, but they did help us this once. We got this little tiny room.” There was a little sigh, an indefinite relaxation. “We were really happy there for a bit – just like this.”
It was a surprise to L to learn that they were currently “really happy,” but as he watched Yuriy's rising, falling shoulder, he thought perhaps that this was just imprecise language. Suddenly it seemed correct to place his hand on Yuriy's side, carefully feel the breath enter, exit.

There was a further sigh. L could guess the rest. He decided to let him remain at this point in the story, stay where things were quiet, but then he went on.

“Hmm – well – we needed money. Well, everyone wants to lie in bed like puppies, or go walk around and fuck with old playground equipment on nice evenings. But you can't. So I got a job; I joined the police, became a traffic cop. Have I mentioned that Russia is actually – well, you can't talk about where you're from, can you, without reducing it. It's my home. I miss it so bad right now – but, look. It just has very – problematic institutions.”

“You've made that clear.”

“I haven't made it quite as clear that I've spent my life in them without having the remotest courage to stand up to anything. This job, it's all about getting as much cash from the public as you can. Being a detective was subtler; this was just routine bribery, bills in with their papers when they gave them to you, and you had to do it, because your superior officers asked for a certain quota.

“Frankly, I didn't care. I was happy to be paid for my labor and to have a quiet place to go back to at the end of the day. Zhenya told me off for it, really hated me for it – it took me a long time to recognize how much. He didn't want to work and wouldn't – he always had higher ideals than me; he knew any job he took, unskilled laborer just out of the army – smart, but what did that get him? -- would fuck him and maybe require him to fuck over other people, and he couldn't take that. And more than that, he was just a little mentally ill, I think. Not in a hurtful way. In an anxious way – everything to him seemed really awful, intolerable, he thought of himself as a person of such talent and intelligence and yet here he was being supported by someone who really wasn't very impressive. I was supposed to be his better half. I should have been cooking him nice meals, nagging him about smoking too much, lightly convincing him not to take life so seriously. He wanted a wife, or what he imagined a wife was like; he always knew exactly what men or women should be like, without having spent much time with men or women. I didn't fit his idea of either and he wasn't shy about saying so. Philosophically, of course.

“We were together like this, few years. Then the final fight came and I actually walked out and didn't come back. At first I meant to; then I regretted it, but I came home and he was gone. Never saw him again. Now, look – you didn't enjoy hearing that; I don't enjoy talking about it, and there's nothing more boring than other people's angst, so please just don't ask again.”

“You don't really believe that,” said L. “That's a ridiculous thing to say.” There was a bit of embarrassment running through him; did Yuriy always attach himself to that sort of person, and was he one of that sort?

Yuriy's voice had grown labored suddenly. “But how do you even respond? It's a long, depressing story. Get sleepy all of a sudden? Have to get up and do something in the kitchen?”

L had thought of both. “What do you want me to do?”

“Stop asking questions. No. I'm sorry. Just – I want to sleep, I think. Wait. Look, just tell me – tell me something I want to hear.”

His voice had cracked; its sound had been muffled by the pillow. L's back was itching again, prickling, the way it did when he didn't know what to do – increasingly life put him in this position. He placed his hot forehead against Yuriy's hot back.

“I really need you,” he said quietly.

Yuriy took the hand that still rested lightly at his waist; he squeezed it tightly, even curling his body around it a little. “You're so far out of my league in every possible way. That probably helps.”

“I don't play in a league,” said L, poking him; he shivered appreciatively and relaxed a little – it felt forced, this moment, but it was possible, and that cheered L a little. When people told you about their troubles, their self-containment, their tightness, always reached a peak – that was the danger of it. You didn't know how to get in, and you certainly couldn't help. That might have been what he liked about Yuriy – he was so porous inside; no self-containment at all, despite a certain skill at hiding it to strangers. He was a nice contrast, a safe casing or shell, for someone like L.

 

Then there was an apartment, a quiet, rich, pale little place where nobody talked to them in the hall – most days they didn't see anyone, and they certainly didn't hear them. There was a bed and a sofa. The bath and toilet and sink were all cast from a single piece of plastic. The place always seemed brightly lit, whether by the sun (it had a strong eastern exposure, a big window that lifted above the level of the street opposite) or by halogen lights at night, lights embedded subtly in the ceiling which with a long press of a button Ryuzaki could illuminate as a group. He always did.

Yuriy had started calling him Rue, a name whose brevity and warmth appealed to him (it was mostly R, and Yuriy's R was burred and soft). At first it felt rude, using a fragment of name which Yuriy knew quite well wasn't real, was fresh and unused as a little bit of tech still wrapped in Styrofoam, but it worked; so was Rue himself. Yuriy didn't quite know why he had this impression of him. It wasn't about sex; it wasn't exactly about life, either. He just seemed neat and new. This wasn't entirely positive, though it was lovable.

He answered to it. He answered to it readily – just as you'd expect of someone used to fake names in endless parade; this was what Yuriy called him, the accessory that had come (for whatever reason) with the Ryuzaki alias, and that was fine. Other people might call him other things tomorrow.

For the first few weeks in that apartment they lived in a rather childish way. The questions about Yuriy's past ended and Rue began to look at him as if exhausted; he slept more than usual, spent a lot of time abstractedly playing with small objects, regularly went downstairs and vanished for half an afternoon.

Near called him almost daily. It was apparent that Near needed something from Rue, and it was something he was asking for by default rather than from any particular desire – that much Yuriy could gather from his tone (they always spoke on video). Yuriy would ask what they'd talked about, and Rue would give him a vague answer. Near was asking for advice on his priorities or on other advisors. That was all. He wanted to ask for more, but he didn't. It still seemed too dangerous – he remained mindful of that slim thread of a visa – to offend him or further exhaust him.

Yuriy went out very little. He stood out too much here, both his body and the way he glanced and moved; it made him paranoid, much too aware of being a Russian in Japan, a country not known for its exquisite fondness towards Russians.

His only regular destination was the gym. His body screamed at him if it wasn't exercised, and besides, he liked going there with Rue; it broke a bit of the recent awkwardness between them. Rue would shark for tennis partners and Yuriy, after emerging sweating from the weight room or wet from the pool, would watch him through the window into the courts. He played imperiously -- “imperious” was the word; dignified, weary, precise. Not an athlete whose personality changed in battle. Afterwards, he'd take Yuriy to some bakery or dessert place, where he'd pick with fascination at a dish of ice cream and Yuriy would sip decaf coffee, wanting to cover Rue's hand with his. Sometimes he did it, and Rue even seemed appreciative, but there remained the strong sense that he shouldn't.

 

One morning over breakfast Rue told him, “I have to take you somewhere today.”

“That's fine.”

“I'm selling the building I used during the Kira case.” He was playing with his hands, ignoring his food. “Obviously I don't want to go back there.”

“Can't you do it through proxies?”

“I'd prefer to, but I want to inspect it – just see what it looks like now. Otherwise I won't even know what I have. So I need you to come with me.”

“Yeah,” said Yuriy, “of course.”

 

They walked through the building; they explored it top to base, L carefully avoiding looking at the clean, unstained pavement outside and the clean, unstained floor of the lobby – there were a lot of things to avoid, especially when the building manager told him about Misa's death. He wondered why that image, a stain on pale concrete, had specifically occurred to him. He felt a little sick. It was hard not to picture her; he knew too well what jumpers looked like.

He tried not to look at Yuriy, either, lest he see the building even more through his eyes. It had been something he'd asked for without irony. You could tell. All those transparent staircases, the helix of them that ran up the length of the thing; the pegboard walls, the rooms (too big, too low) that swallowed up furniture and left it small and absurd at the center. It was very bad architecture. When he did glance at Yuriy, he was always looking back at him.

The feeling in his chest, the crushing and small fast beats, lingered long after they left. Yuriy tried to help, suggested they sit and eat something. They went to a funny little bar, fancy and petite, where you could get pastries and rich little drinks; L had two of these, sweet and heavy and very strong. He pretended to Yuriy that he was fooled by the sweetness. He pretended to himself that he was getting drunk, that his violent metabolism could buckle under such a gentle assault. He did not bother pretending anything else.

But it must have worked, at least a little. The afternoon-evening sun was much too bright when they emerged from the bar, and he felt a little sick and just a touch of craving for warmth. He took him up to the little flat (the elevator ride seeming very long) and kissed him just inside the door, on the neck, anxiously; then there was a tight hand at the small of his back, something that pierced a little past a hug. His lips were warm and soft. It was easy to concentrate on the contact of lips, and so L pushed things further, wanting to press whatever advantage he had with himself, the alcohol half burnt off already.

The problem was that he wanted to skip it all – fast-forward to the part where he was engulfed, fell asleep, disappeared; it wasn't really like that, and he was aghast with himself for failing to guess it, given everything else he knew and how well he was usually able to guess such things. You were conscious the whole time, like an operation under local anesthetic. And you didn't become any different. If you wanted to laugh at something, or you were depressed about your day or shy about your body being exposed, then it didn't change.

He didn't get hard. He just got nervous. And Yuriy was nervous too, he finally saw, overwhelmed and disbelieving of his luck – his hands literally shook as they caressed L, and he was sweaty and embarrassed of his sweatiness, his erection sticking out crudely. They were teenagers together, the overeager one and the one who couldn't, and in a way this was nice – this brought them close, unzipped their bodies in a businesslike way and pulled out some unexpected essence.

But it was impossible for L to hide his doubt, even his disgust, at the prospect of touching entire zones of him, and it was impossible for Yuriy to hide how much he saw this, and eventually things deteriorated and L wound up alone in bed, curled tightly, waiting for Yuriy to come back from the toilets. When he did come back, he was robe-wrapped, with a scrubbed face, and no more was said of the hardness and concentration of a few minutes earlier. Instead he got back into bed, curled around L, letting L's head push against his chest, pressing his hands to his back. He was soft now, soft and warm everywhere, as if the muscle had gone out of him as well. L felt like nothing but muscle; there was a fierce ache behind his eyes.

Eventually he pushed at Yuriy's arm. It gave way easily.

“Going to take a bath?” said Yuriy into the pillow; his ear burnt red.

“Yes.” Actually, he hadn't meant to – his mind had been blank, almost panicked; calmed within the warmth of him, tense with desperation to be alone and think. “You aren't going anywhere, are you?”

“Of course not. Go wash up.”

He made some sort of assent, clutched Yuriy's shoulder, and fled.

Chapter 6: Inspector Matsuda

Tokyo, October 2032

 

Sayu figured that Aoki Michiyo's apartment had never been a very happy place. Blush-colored in the way that hotel rooms often were, it had sadly decorated walls; a few Chinese scrolls of blurry mountains; an attractive, arty, heavy photo of a tree.

Now, though it was split open at the French doors and leaking glass, it still retained an air of stasis and depression. Sayu thought perhaps she should make a professional note of that -- it seemed such a completely concrete fact. She went back into the bedroom, combing through the clothes a final time.

“Matsuda-san?”

“Yes, Sakamoto-kun?”

Sakamoto paused, hand on the doorframe, like an appreciative lover. “Sorry it took so long. It's just one guy who owns this place, but there were a couple of layers of corporate nonsense that I had to sort through before I found him. His name is Ryuzaki Ru.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He owns half this neighborhood. I've got his number now. It was all on file. I've got his manager, too, but I figured you'd want just to talk to him.”

“Sure. Good work.” Sayu thumbed her cell phone. “I'm ready for the number.”

“Want me to drive you back?”

“Uh – may as well. There's nothing more to see here.”

They left via the smashed doors, into a bright, snappish Tokyo morning. Sayu connected with Ryuzaki. The phone rang several times; she was almost in the car before he answered, and when he did, it was in a plainly just-woken voice, thick and private. “Yes?”

“Ryuzaki-san, my name is Matsuda Sayu. I'm with the NPA.”

Ryuzaki paused, then cleared his throat. “Did that business with Komatsu-san come to a head? Is she all right?”

“No, this is about one of your tenants – Aoki Michiyo. There was a break-in at her home last night. We received a call this morning to the effect that a glass door was smashed.”

“Yes, of course. Aoki-san's real name is Komatsu. So she's absent?”

“Yes. What's that about her name?”

“Her ex-husband is stalking her. There's a restraining order, and as I understand it, she had to wait for him to violate it before anything more could happen. In the meantime, she was hiding somewhat.”

“Ah. That makes sense.”

“There's a little more.” He paused to yawn. “Private – she's hired a private detective to keep track of what goes on near her place. Saito Kenji. I can send his number.”

“That would be great.”

“Right after we hang up. Can I have yours, too?”

“Of course. 53-3570-9040 – I'll send it -- I'm Inspector Matsuda. How do you do.”

“How do you do – I'll call if – is there anything more?”

“Not just now.”

“Then I shall call if I learn anything. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

 

Rue, sweating, hung up the phone and passed from bed. He did not want to get up today. He was tired, and there was a message on his computer which he was not ready to reread, and his desire to deal with Light's sister was very slight. It might be easier to speak of it all by now; in a way, that made things worse. He went to the bathroom to take a pill, and then there was the kitchen to tamp it down with bread, and by that point he figured he might as well see things through.

 

At the station, Sayu looked up the principals: Komatsu Michiyo; Kubozono Shun; Ryuzaki Ru, who was almost certainly not a person of interest, except to her.

Her suspicion about him was, at this point, a whim, a chance interest. It was the same name as the one Touta had told her; it was written the same. The personal name, that fragmentary katakana character -- “Ru” -- a meaningless bite of language – a name no Japanese person would have; a name she doubted anyone in the world had.

His file was spare. There was the national identity card information, which came with a telling disparity. The database had been changed nineteen years ago. Files imported from the old to the new had certain traits – two new, minor fields showed up empty; a third was formatted differently – and Ryuzaki's didn't have these traits; thus, the card was rather new, which meant that his age (b. 1982) was a lie, or his citizenship status (natural-born) was a lie, or both.

The only other thing was the license information. He wasn't licensed to drive, but he had a helicopter permit. He was also licensed to fly a single-engine plane, act as a private investigator, operate a radio station, and carry a shotgun. The fact that he'd sought governmental approval on all of these points actually rather worked against her hypothesis; nonetheless, she decided to make sure the case involved a pretext to contact him again. It wouldn't be difficult. The apartment was rented in the Aoki name; Komatsu had a false identity at the highest level, too. And if Ryuzaki had arranged that for a tenant, what else could he do?

On the subway, Rue curled into a corner seat and began to type. Stations and advertisements clattered by; he had put his hair back so as not to distract him.

 

Dear Yuriy,

For the last time, I'm not angry and I was never angry, though I'm a little bit angry that you think I'm still angry.

You've written me in an impassioned manner, and while this is something I admire about you, I still wish you had written more calmly so that it would be easier for me to think about it.

You want to try again at living with me. Fine; I want to try again at living with you. How do you propose to answer the following any better than you ever have?

1. You hate Tokyo. I love Tokyo. You love Winchester. I never want to go back to Winchester.

2. You have a significant sex drive. While I also have a sex drive, it's not measurable by any but the most advanced instruments, and I am absolutely incapable of the passionate monogamous romance you want to share with your mates. You've rejected my wholehearted encouragement that you exercise your human right to do whatever you want with your body and others' bodies. You also reject my point that I don't really have a sex drive. You prefer to think I'm not attracted to you and want you to fuck off. This isn't true.

3. You work for Near. I don't. You gain a good deal of satisfaction – which I do not resent and believe you deserve -- from your work. How do you expect to reconcile these facts?

I understand that you are fond of the idea that, with friendship and affection, things will work out. The fact is that they do not always work out. I don't care how mature we become. These differences will remain. Affection which makes us happy is not always enough to compensate for other aspects of our lives which make us miserable. If you truly would like to have another try at living with me, I am open to the conversation, but you must answer these questions to my satisfaction before I will ever even

The telephone rang; Rue resignedly reached across his body for it.

“Yes?”

“Ryuzaki-san?”

“This is he.”

“I've been unable to find Aoki-san – Komatsu-san. Or get in touch with Saito-san. I don't suppose she may have spoken to you?”

“Unfortunately not.”

Sayu looked at the screen for another moment, and then decided to ask. “Ryuzaki-san, you're not working with Saito Kenji-san -- and you don't employ him?”

“No.”

“I thought so.”

“It's always worth asking.”

“But I see you do have an investigator's license. Are you using it at the moment?”

“No.”

“The reason I ask is simply that I hope you'll help us with the investigation into Aoki-san's whereabouts.”

There was a long pause.

“Come and meet me at my office,” he said. “I'll send the address. I'm eminently certain that you can handle this yourself, but if you'd like to meet, then that's fine.”

 

Ryuzaki kept his offices in a slightly dated wooden house, similar to the one in which she'd grown up. At first she thought that it was his house, but she recalled that his stated address had been different, and on the way upstairs she glimpsed other rooms which were plainly workspaces; all were empty. He led her into a little sitting area, with a high-socketed window that showed sky and a corner of a building, and a few chairs and a vaguely slept-upon sofa.

She recognized him, though it was impossible to say how – no; instinct had nothing to do with it. It was simply that he was not a usual businessman, and that fed her existing theory. He had no air of leadership or affability. He was not pleasant, nor clean-cut, nor stylish; nor was he so unpleasant that it crossed over into the zone of charisma, or simply of the kind of oddity that people overlooked precisely because it was such an aberration.

Indeed, there was a certain amount of rote flunkiness in him. He was merely a dry man, a prematurely middle-aged man, with a slapped, black-eyed bagginess to his face – drooping lids and a sad mouth. His loose jeans and baggy black sweater hid flesh of unknown qualities.

It crossed her mind that he worked enormously hard, and that he had no reason to value money when his earlier life had been dedicated to such different aims. He must have some specific need for it – she would think on it further, but they had reached the room now, had settled, and it was time to begin.

How would Light have played this? -- how strange to think he'd had conversations with this very man; conversations in which they'd spoken just as they would otherwise have, and yet doubtless with certain omissions, certain elisions, suitable to two people who knew more than they let on and wished to keep a polite acknowledgement of the fact. Had they thought this was fun?

“Can I start by asking you a few basic questions, Ryuzaki-san?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any regular involvement in the running of the property in question?”

He stretched and settled a little further into the chair, looking at her from beneath his lids. “Not really. I own it. My site manager for that area is Sato Harumi -- she works downstairs, but everyone's out for the midday break.”

“For lunch?”

“Yes,” he said, a strange relief in his voice. “I hate that word.”

“So she would have dealt largely with Sato-san?”

“Yeah. I've already spoken to Sato about this; she doesn't know anything more than I do about the woman.”

“I'd still like to talk to her about it.”

“She'll be back at one.”

Sayu pretended to take notes on her phone. “Just from curiosity, was Komatsu-san up on her rent?”

“She was.”

“So you stand neither to gain nor lose from this financially?”

“Stand to lose a little, probably, from the cleanup. If you want to look at it that way.” Ryuzaki picked up a pen, fidgeted with it purposefully, and put it back down.

“Obviously.”

“Sato-san is a dependable worker?”

“Very.”

“Now, you mentioned the private detective Komatsu-san has hired.”

“I did.”

“Can you tell me more about Sato – I mean Saito Kenji? -- Sorry. A lot of Saitos, a lot of Satos.”

Ryuzaki sighed, leaning forward glumly and resting his arms on his knees. “What would you like to know about Kenji-kun?”

“Did you refer Komatsu-san to him?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Do you know him well?”

“No.”

“Any particular reason to think so highly of his abilities as to refer a tenant to him without knowing either of them well?”

“I never said I didn't know her well.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Then please don't be that way,” said Sayu. “I don't have time. Any reason to refer the two of them to each other?”

Ryuzaki hunched his neck uncomfortably. “Yes. Saito's the grandson of one of my employees. He would often come to me for advice when he was younger. He wasn't brilliant, but he knows himself.”

“So you used to be more active using your PI license?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ryuzaki's tone was as casual as his words; of course, certainly, why not?

“Why the career switch?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Anything more on Saito-san?”

“He's moved,” said Ryuzaki, “rather quickly. I spoke to his grandfather a few minutes before you arrived. There was no suitcase in the house, and several of the clothes I most often saw him in were gone; there were no signs of anything else unusual.”

“Komatsu's closet seemed half-empty,” said Sayu, “empty hangers everywhere, and what was left looked out-of-style and cheap. Her computer's gone. She meant to leave there for a long time, maybe even just leave.”

Something about what she'd said seemed to lend Ryuzaki energy; he spoke directly to her for the first time. “Let us not jump to the same conclusion immediately; agreement won't help anything at this point. Did you check at the 7-11?”

“She didn't show up for work today.”

“Well, if they left together,” said Ryuzaki, “that makes the timing of the attack very strange, if the husband was observing her very well at all.”

“Did Komatsu-san tell you about her troubles without your asking?”

“Yes,” said Ryuzaki. “She only dealt with Sato-san while renting, but she wrote me an Email informing me of the restraining order, and I introduced her to Kenji-kun. Are you going to ask or what?”

“I've been asking you things all along,” said Sayu; Ryuzaki gave her a look of mild anger.

“Something else you'd like to ask me.”

“If there's something you'd like me to ask, why don't you ask first?”

 

All at once, and from quite the opposite position, Rue decided he rather liked Sayu. Her voice was low and hoarse; her demeanor was quite retiring, and she seemed to have trouble meeting his eyes for long -- he recalled Aizawa's mention of an old breakdown. She reminded him only a little of her brother. She was a little too willing to put him through the paces, and that was it. She had never been admired, he thought, and that would be key to any friendly discourse between them.

“Because I already know,” he told her. “There's no reason to ask if I already know.”

“Then if I ask, now you've said that, I'll make a fool of myself, won't I?”

“Well, you should still ask. What if there's a miscommunication between us?”

She asked and he answered. -- “Yes, that was my title.”

“I see.” Sayu looked quite shocked for a moment. “You never told your comrades you were alive?”

“They were not my comrades. But we must not get sidetracked. We must try to find Komatsu-san and Kenji.”

He stood up and went to the corner of the room, where there was an electric kettle. “Tea?”

“I'm fine, thanks.”

“Do you hate me?” he asked.

“No. I couldn't.”

“Why would you?”

 

It had been an odd little trap; she sighed a wry laugh. “I know it's not you who did it, and I know about everything he was.”

“Would it help to know that I was also very fond of Light-kun?”

“Everybody was.”

Sayu sighed heavily and brushed her bangs out of her eyes – they were growing out, and she had left her clip at home by accident. Ryuzaki leaned forward and handed her a bobby pin.

“What? Oh. Thank you.”

His own hair was quite long, she noticed; he kept it pushed back, without bangs, so it had not attracted especial notice at first, but now he was playing with a bit of it between his fingers and she saw its real mass. Long, sloppy, flyaway hair, clean and very dry-looking. It blended with his black sweater, which was pilling badly, and made him look like a peculiar monster. There was a chain bracelet on his left wrist.

“What can you tell me about Light?”

Ryuzaki looked more closely at her face, as if recognizing her father in it – a common gesture these days among people who'd known him. “You still think of him so much, after all these years?”

“He's my brother.”

“I guess,” said Ryuzaki, as if it were rather in doubt. “Didn't Matsuda-san tell you the story?”

“Touta worshipped Light.” She leaned on her hand, using one of the desks for support. “He told me everything, factually, and a million things about you and the case, but I think he even thinks Light might have been innocent, even though in the end he shot him. Tell me how he was when he was alone with you.”

“He often spoke of you.”

“He often spoke of his sister,” she corrected. “Tell me about him.”

“I would not treat that so lightly,” said Ryuzaki. “He cared for so little.”

“Is it true you really chained yourself to him?”

“Yes. I did,” said Ryuzaki, a little amused.

“Is that why you wear that?”

“This?” He flicked the bracelet with his thumb, making it spin. “No. The cuffs were on my other wrist. I wear this to tell emergency medical personnel that I'm diabetic.”

“You're diabetic ?”

“Do you want to make something of it?”

“No.”

“You appear to be smiling. I find only a 14% chance that your smile is basically sympathetic in nature.”

“Okay, fine,” said Sayu, “I think it's funny that you got diabetes.”

“Thank you. I also think it is funny.” Ryuzaki sighed and pushed his hair away from his face. “So you've been informed about the whole story. Well, I doubt I'd have any insights that you've missed about Light-kun, and the ones I do have mostly aren't the sort of thing that would let you remember him well.”

“I don't want to remember him well,” said Sayu. “I want to know the worst of him. It's not that I want to hate him, but I want to understand him, and that means knowing what he really was and became. Does that make it better?”

“It makes sense. You don't care enough to have sought me out on purpose, of course, but in a way I'm rather glad you eventually found me. But – I'm sure that if you are a Yagami, you'll do your job, but I would rather you see this through than talk to me at the moment. Komatsu-san may be in grave danger.”

“You suddenly care about Komatsu,” said Sayu, “when you were perfectly happy to dance me around with 'yes' and 'no' just now. Not that I desperately need to talk about Light. In fact, I try to avoid talking about him. It's just seeing you – it's a shock, and all I can think about is him.”

“That's one of the many reasons why I don't want to work together,” said Ryuzaki. “I am the same. Komatsu's not an idiot, but her life is wasted while she runs from Kubozono; I do want to rescue her from that. That's how I feel about it.”

“Okay,” said Sayu matter-of-factly.

“I didn't dance you around. That's just how I am. I answer questions as they're put.”

“Nonsense. You hate wasting time, too.”

“Do I?” Ryuzaki rubbed his hair absently. “I don't know. I hate having my time wasted, but I enjoy wasting time if it's my own, if you know what I mean.”

“But it wasn't all yours. It was part mine.”

“I told you, that's just how I answer questions.”

Ryuzaki's phone communicated with him; he picked it up absently and then reacted with visible anxiety to whatever he saw there. “Okay. I have a note I have to read immediately. Let's talk again in a few, uh – you don't want to hear this, do you? It's personal.”

“I'm a cop.”

“So is the person who sent this. I often get mail from cops.”

“You should still maintain some basic level of attention when talking to an officer. You seem to assume that you're simply in charge of any officers you meet. Are you a private citizen cooperating with me as Komatsu-san's landlord and occasional confidant, or are you L, even an ex-L? Can't have it both ways.”

“The former,” said Ryuzaki, “but alas, to the person who's sent me this, I'm the latter. How to reconcile the two. You remind me enormously of my friend Naomi.”

“How is a person ever supposed to respond to something like that?”

“Now you are simply chatting. Why don't you talk to Sato-san? She'll be back in three minutes. Her desk's downstairs, first on the right as you come down the stairs.”

“Okay,” said Sayu -- “I'll talk to her. And then I'll talk to you again.”

“Okay,” he said absently, pushing his hair back and reading the Email. Out of the corner of her departing eye she saw him curl up in the chair.

My dear Rue,

Sorry to take a few hours to reply; I was thinking.

What you say makes sense. You haven't patronized me, so I won't patronize you, as I know I've sometimes done in the past. It is completely reasonable to ask these questions, and even if I answer them agreeably, I get the feeling that you'll still believe their basic intent.

But let me sit now and do my best.

1. About Tokyo. Okay, fine. Are you truly that attached to the place? Is liquidating what you've got there and re-establishing yourself in London, say, inconceivable? Are you that close to the Saitos, who are literally the only people you've ever mentioned since I left?

I may be patronizing you right now. Sorry. You can pay me back in kind. I give permission. Or I'll call Near and ask him to do it.

 Is it possible I could keep working for Near, but from where you are? Or more realistically, would it be possible for me to split my time? Do you really believe that working for Near and living with you sometimes are mutually exclusive, especially since you say you really don't mind my working with him?

 2. About sex. I don't know. Balance my higher drive (when you put it that way, you make me feel like a terrible animal) against the fact that I only want to do it with you these days. I would rather have one lily than a hundred carnations, if we predicate our theory on the idea that lilies are handjobs from English detectives. (Also, you are like a lily.)

 3. About Near. Already answered (1 and 3 are the same question).

 Sorry for answering them with questions, but that's how you'd do it. I think the big question is, are we what we do? What is somebody, except what they do? Can you separate out the essential me (loves you) from the daily me (works for Near, lives in Winchester, eats two eggs for breakfast every day and then scrupulously brushes his teeth from fear of smelling like eggs)? You would accuse this of being a rather dull and wankish question, but I think it's the most pertinent response to you right now.

 

YAK

 

When Sayu returned to the sitting area, she found Ryuzaki still slumped in the chair. There had been a complete change in his demeanor; he had his hand over his eyes, as if wondering at the progress of a very bad, boring action movie.

“I'm going now.”

“Has forensics been through yet, just from curiosity?”

“Her house. If you'll give me his address, I'll send someone there, too.”

He bent over the phone and began tapping at it. “I'm doing that now.”

It was difficult not to ask if his note had been bad news; it so obviously had been. “Thank you for your help, Ryuzaki-san. I will keep in touch.”

“Thank you for waiting on me, Inspector.” He tapped “send” and saw her out.

 

25,

 A“higher drive” could also mean an advanced interest in something rather holy. “He had a high drive for justice.”

How am I like a lily?

Already it's “living with you sometimes .”

I don't really believe in an “essential me,” but if anyone has one, perhaps you do.

I don't know what else to say.

 12

 

Inspector,

Received a call from grandfather Saito; grandson Saito and Komatsu are safe. Apparently, Kubozono ransacked Komatsu's home in her absence; she came back, packed, found Saito the younger, and they departed in passionate fashion. They are staying in a hotel in Osaka. Apparently, this all happened quickly, too quickly for anyone to bother informing family or friends; one also wonders (sourly, not suspiciously) about her having time to pack. I hope forensics have provided some clue as to Kubozono's location, as he's certainly activated his restraining order now.

RR

 

Ryuzaki3,

Relieved to hear the news of Komatsu3's safety. Does Saito grandfather (what's his name please?) have my #? May I have his #? Chain of communication is inefficient; I'm sure you appreciate.

Matsuda

 

M-

Yoshi

81-3452-8594

-R

 

Ryuzaki3,

At his last address. Not here; no forwarding; interviewing neighbors + landlady. Should turn up something.

Matsuda

 

Dear Railroad,

You are like a lily for the following reasons:

-As you told me twelve or thirteen years ago now, “yuri” is lily in Japanese, and you have an affinity with me.

-You are a perennial, obviously. Or at least you regenerate.

-You are pale and somewhat waxy and cold. (It occurs to me that we may not be on the same page about the flowers, so let me make it clear that I'm thinking of the calla lily.)

 I know we were in the midst of intense conversation, but it seems like you kind of need a break anyway, so I'll go ahead and mention what I've been bottling up: I finally watched the new Mighty Boosh, and you're right, it's not funny. It was so not funny that it made me a little angry.

Also did you see “Testament of the Daleks” yet?

Your loving

Yak

Chapter 7: RR

Rue let himself into his flat and threw the keys rather violently onto the counter; he proceeded immediately to the window, stuffing his cold hands into the sleeves of his sweater and crouching toward the first heat from the vent below.

He changed his mind. He shut off the heat, grabbed his tennis racquet and rode back down to street level; went to the gym, pasted some poor bastard in a tank top, pasted another poor bastard in a tank top, and absolutely lost his shit on a third bastard, this one in a t-shirt, but had to resign the match because of a bout of sudden weariness; he had to sit against a wall for several minutes, sipping juice, until his legs stopped shaking. The second bastard was pasting the third by the time he got up, and by then he had rather lost interest in the whole pornographic situation.

Back on the sunset-lit street, he realized he had a call – not text; a proper call – from Sayu. It dated to about twenty minutes ago, and there had been no message.

“Inspector.”

“Ryuzaki-san?”

“Yes.”

“I'm off-duty for the day now, and I wanted to know if you wanted to have dinner.”

Before the tennis, he would not have agreed; now he felt better, and agreed, suggesting a loud cafe near his home which had a couple of nicely unobservable booths. It might have been the one where he'd first met Light; he doubted it – it seemed much too far from the school – but it was hard to be absolutely sure.

He went home and showered; his beloved jumper failed a sniff test, so he reluctantly threw it into the wash and fetched its similar but inferior fellow from the bedroom closet.

When he returned from the bedroom, he called Sayu again.

“Will you come here instead? 1-17-6, Sekiguchi, Bunkyo-ku – a few blocks south of the cathedral. A big, pink, Moorish building. I don't like restaurants.”

“I'm already here at the cafe. I already ordered my drink.” Sayu's voice was mildly dangerous.

“It's round the corner, practically.”

“My blood sugar is dropping.”

“Yes.”

“Okay! Okay, Ryuzaki-san. Whatever. It doesn't matter.”

Rue saw her arrive on the outside camera ten minutes later, wearing one of those odd, loose coats – reflective things on the sleeves – that the women wore nowadays; underneath, a long dress or jumpsuit of some sort. He had been at the kitchen counter, slicing strawberries, and let her in using a paper towel to open the door; they greeted each other formally, on his cue, and she stepped inside and took off her coat, the tension abating as the surroundings distracted her. A sofa, a television, a covered kotatsu.

“I haven't seen one of those in years.”

“Harder to find these days,” he said, returning to the counter.

“Yeah.” She lifted the futon at the edge of the table and stuck her hands in to warm them, sniffling loudly.

“There are tissues on the desk. Do you like strawberries?”

“Sure.”

“Good.”

“I guess – I guess the expats are the ones who keep some stuff like this alive, in a weird way.”

“Very true. Nothing is more conservative than a foreigner.” He used an astonishingly rude word – so rude that Sayu wondered if he realized how much its status had slid.

She looked around; the place was under-decorated, largely empty, though the few things that were present seemed carefully chosen. A reader sat on the sofa, which – like the one at Ryuzaki's work – looked slept-upon; the office chair by the window was high-end and had arm controls for the stereo. The heat under the kotatsu was inviting and she knelt and gathered the futon around her knees.

There was an increasingly uncomfortable silence; her irritation at being moved had subsided, and all the heat was a relief, but given the opportunity to speak freely, she found it difficult to bring up the sorts of things she would have wanted to discuss with Ryuzaki. And so she played with her phone and answered mail until, a brief time later, he brought in food.

It was strange food, strangely combined – sushi with strawberries in it, which tasted of Candarel; a few nuggets of soy chicken, a bag of bread, with water and tea to drink.

Ryuzaki seemed to relax a little once he'd drunk some of the tea, and it was he who finally broke the silence. “So you married Matsuda Touta.”

“Yes.”

“But you're not together any longer.”

“No.”

“Why have you held on to his name?”

“Actually, my reasons for that – I've never really spoken of them.” Sayu picked at a piece of bread. “Some of them are very petty.”

“Why are they petty?”

She didn't answer.

“I can keep a secret, you know,” he said, sushi in mouth. “Matsuda doesn't even know I'm alive.”

“I want him to see his name on the door when I'm eventually promoted over him.”

Ryuzaki looked amused.

“Beyond that – mostly, I'm not that petty. I like him. I don't resent him. I really don't like the name 'Yagami.' We've all heard a bit too much of the name 'Yagami,' with its pretentious kanji, and its illustrious history in the Tokyo police. Do you know a Yagami was among the Shinsengumi? When I was growing up, boy, did I know it. Dad was a modest man, but you knew .”

“Your father – he was --” Ryuzaki tapped his finger on the edge of the table, searching for a word. “He was limitless. He was very unpredictable.”

“I know. He sacrificed himself. Aizawa told me.”

“I'm sure I played some small part in that, but it's hard to blame myself,” said Ryuzaki, carelessly, sincerely.

“It would never occur to me to blame you for that. Should I?”

“Saito – Saito Yoshi told me today that – heh. He gave me this grand speech.” Ryuzaki colored a little, and she realized he was trying to tell a sort of anecdote. “I could never replicate it. It was about his lack of worry for Kenji-kun – his -- ”

“His grandson. You told me.”

“I know I told you. He listed off famous Saitos throughout history – Benkei; Myochin, Saito Hajime, which is why your mention of the Shinsengumi reminded me – and how none of them had been people he'd have cause to worry about. I told him that most of those people were doubtless unrelated to him, not to mention the fact that most were not really named Saito, and he laughed at me.” Ryuzaki drooped a little. “I know what humor is, Inspector. I'm not ten. That sort of thing is his real sentiment. No, you are correct. An excess of interest in names – family names – perhaps one shouldn't be too attached. I've become sadly attached to mine, though it isn't real.”

“Well, you can't live up to your ideals,” she said carefully, having found the opening she'd sought.

“Can't you?”

“No. You can't. That's part of living. And you get less idealistic as it goes, and trying to stick to your old ideas just makes you a self-caricature; you have to outgrow it all and just start living.”

Ryuzaki drained some more tea. “You talk like someone who's never had any ideals, and rather likes that about yourself.”

“I guess I haven't. I hardly know. I joined the police for idealistic reasons – to replace one of the good detectives who were lost against Kira. I had no interest in being a good detective for my own reasons. Or does that still count as idealistic?”

“Don't know.” Ryuzaki had somehow managed to speak with food in his mouth more often than not, though he had a very decorous way of doing so. “I developed mine late, and they are still rather stunted. Until I was twenty-five or so, I didn't believe in anything but myself.”

“What do you believe in since?”

“Entropy. And more recently, artificial sweetener.”

“That sounds terrible,” said Sayu, disinterested in the dodge. “I wouldn't have thought that you were a person of such limited faith, to look at what you do with your money.”

“And what is that?”

“St. Louise's Trust. The Society of Orthodox Duvallians. The American Senatorial campaigns of Tamar Harris, Dario Dautry --”

“Saint Louise is a patron of orphans; it's not a religious organization, or hasn't really been in a century.”

“Still. Do you suppose that funding the Kirite opposition will change anything?”

“I did until last year,” said Ryuzaki.

“What happened last year?”

“I got sick. My plans haven't impressed me so much since then.”

He stood up and paced the apartment a few times; the smell of the tea was oddly heavy in the air, and she thought: I wonder if this is what houses in California are like.

“But first, in my own defense -- I know what you're thinking. How much does it all really have to do with your brother? Doubtless they'll make it into much the same things they always make it into, but I remember the beginning. It started with a criminal case. And it was a criminal case. I get sick of being a part of someone else's fraudulent religion.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” He seemed sincere, sat again, and pushed his plate aside to prop his chin on his hand.

“I always thought history was made by gods. God-like people. It turns out it's made by guys like Light.”

“What is a guy like Light, Inspector?”

“Single-minded sociopaths who are nice to little girls and dogs.”

“He was more than nice to you,” said Ryuzaki. “Don't be glib. He loved you.”

“He loved nobody. Ryuzaki-san, you're very bright – that is the point of you – but nobody capable of that – of atrocities like that could love anyone. It was a lie to themselves if they said they did. Perhaps you thought he was your friend, too; I don't know if that was true, but he was not. He was never your friend.”

“No,” said Ryuzaki, “of course he wasn't. I was his, but only to be mean. I do think he was capable of love, though, and it's rather dangerous to say he wasn't. That leads to your thinking things like, 'I'm capable of love; I'm not capable of tyranny.' Or vice-versa, which is equally grotesque.”

“That's just for people who need to worry a lot about whether they're capable of tyranny.”

Ryuzaki's face was becoming rather more animated. “Tyranny can be small, too, of course. All my tyrannies have been small so far. I'm sure some sort of it is an option for you.”

“Then the word means nothing; you're just reducing it. Tyranny – what Light did; the murder of thousands, the attempt to indoctrinate the world – is categorically different from anything you or I have ever done, even if you've murdered. A thousand murders is categorically different from one murder. Both are awful. Both are evil, but a thousand murders is an attempt to move the whole world in your direction; you're destroying lots of families, changing the whole society you're in, probably for the worse.”

Ryuzaki was quiet; he had stilled; he was looking through her.

“I'm not sure I agree.”

“Of course not. You're the sort of person who only cares about his own possibility for corruption. One, one hundred, what does it matter? You're bad one way; you're bad the other way. But there is a difference, obviously.”

“I don't know whether you're correct,” said Ryuzaki. “You may be.”

There was an awkward silence. Sayu eventually filled it. “Thank you for the food.”

“You're welcome. Would you like a very small glass of vodka?”

“I would, please, yes. With fizzy water?”

“I have some around here.” He went into the kitchen and there was a sound of bottles; he came out with two glasses. “Here. I'm sorry they're very weak drinks. And I'm sorry that I don't have the idealogical clarity you would prefer.”

“Of course I don't mind. Light was very ideologically pure, and surely the point of your life and my life is not to be Light.”

“I hope not. If so, he's won.”

“I guess.” Sayu took the glass and sipped it, thanking him absently; her manners always improved the further she was from work.

Ryuzaki sighed. “So what did you see in Matsuda? I can't imagine you two having anything to talk about.”

“Oh, plenty. I don't deny he's a complete goof-up, but he's a good guy.”

“He's purely reactionary.”

“Sure, but what's it say that the reactionary has chosen good people to be around?”

Ryuzaki coughed. “Light!”

Sayu actually laughed at this; the ancient format of the joke was quite funny from a mouth like his. “You'll have to trust me.”

“I don't trust you at all. If I'm Pilate, he's the crowd who called for the pardon of one of the two thieves, as opposed to Christ.”

“You're Christ in that scenario, not Pilate, if I read you right,” said Sayu.

“I don't deny it.”

“All right, then. We'll leave aside the question of whether he's a good man.”

“Goodness is irrelevant. What did you see in him, I asked.” Ryuzaki took another long sip of his drink and burped.

“You are really rude.”

“It's rude to point out that I'm rude.”

Sayu looked at him through her glass. “At first, just that he was really kind to me after the hostage stuff, and losing my father, all of which was horrible; it changed my whole outlook on life; I was in therapy for years. When Mother died the next year, he was there, too. And I don't think he was there for underhanded reasons; he was just kind. He cared. He knew the things I knew, and was willing to tell me more about them. He was supportive; he helped me pay for my college – I know how it all sounds, and at first, believe me, I thanked him and shut the door in his face, but he kept this up for years. And I just thought, who am I to think I'm too good for this man just because he's twelve years older and a fool? He's nice, he's handsome, he's helped me, and I am completely alone. So we got married. -- But he was such a huge liar.”

Ryuzaki put down his glass and put his head down on the table. “Yes?”

“Yeah! He lied all the time. It wasn't what you'd think, from knowing him; he was very constant to me, which he'd already proven by trying for so long and making it so clear that his gifts had no strings attached. I did wonder if he'd lose interest once he had what he wanted, but I knew he'd really wanted to be a cop, too, and he was still pretty passionate about that, so plainly he was capable; besides, I'd made up my mind to trust people again – oh, therapy; it has this disadvantage – it makes everything seem symbolic, or at least it does for me.”

“Therapy,” said Ryuzaki.

“Well -- it helped me a lot. And trusting him was a nice idea. He lied a lot. He was so desperate to keep me – oh, he lied from the beginning. He said Near had framed Light, had cheated to incriminate him, even though he knew he was still guilty. He said my father hadn't been driven to death by Light. He said he knew Light hadn't killed you -- directly. He said maybe you weren't even L. And it wasn't the things he'd done or knew, obviously, it was that he thought I couldn't take the truth, or would break up with him if I learned the truth. Which I did, from Chief Aizawa when he was drunk at a Christmas party. But that's another story.”

“I'm still not convinced Light did it,” said Ryuzaki, muffled. The conversation seemed to end, quite suddenly; Ryuzaki hadn't lifted his head since she'd begun to talk about Touta. “It might have been Amane. I don't know how, if he did.”

“Are you all right?” she asked, nervously; she worried that she had bored him – or not bored him, but taken him out of his depth.

“No. I'm warm; I feel like sleeping.”

“Do you want to call it a night?”

“Not quite yet.” He sighed into the surface of it and pushed himself back up. “Honestly, Inspector, I –“

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing. You're healthy, aren't you?”

“I guess.”

“If you guess, you are. Just – never get sick.”

“No?” asked Sayu, more gently.

“I'm so sleepy now. I never used to sleep – except when I was ill from coming back, you know -- I used to only sleep a few hours every day.”

“This is the diabetes?”

“No – it's – well, that's a small part of it; it's most of what causes me problems from day to day now. But mainly it's – I have some metabolic and autoimmune problems. The diabetes is secondary. I'm fine at the moment; there was the crisis last year, but – I just still feel weird. Nothing affects me the way it used to. I'm always sleepy. And I don't want to sleep. I want to be awake and see things. History is so long and you only see a little, and unfortunately that's the whole point of things.”

The change in him had been rather sudden; Sayu got up and opened the sliding door onto the balcony, letting in some chilly air. He looked up at her and smiled a little. “Thanks.”

“Shouldn't drink.”

“Tch. I drink every few days. This never happens. I can stop. Fine. I'm not much of a drinker. But what about next time it happens? What do I lose then?”

“It just seems like a bad idea when you're on medication.”

Ryuzaki brushed at his face with his sleeve. “This isn't about that. Listen. I never talk about being sick -- feel awfully maudlin about it, too. I've been – well, when does it start and stop? Was I chatting to you this whole time because I just started getting maudlin, or did I get maudlin because I'm having an event? This is the thing about it.”

“-- are you okay?”

“Hm?” He picked his head up a little and sat back on the floor, pale and a bit palsied around the feet. “No.”

“What's wrong?”

“Dunno. Feels like hypoglycemia.”

“It could just be budding friendship, you know.”

“No. I have that funny numbness.”

“Could be modern life.” Sayu was feeling his wrist, though, aware of her own running mouth, that nervousness which pressed through the surface. “Do you want me to take you in? Just to be sure?”

“I'd hate to. Waste of time. These days I don't even know if something is important or not. I have a bad history of guessing wrong.”

“Well, are you – are you on standing orders to go in?”

“Not really. Go and get me juice, please. The food should have helped; maybe this will.”

She got up and went to the refrigerator, found some little reusable plastic bottles which had been carefully filled with small servings of red liquid. She brought him one; he took it and flopped onto the couch.

“Well, did you do anything unusual today?”

“I didn't do anything today that I don't do every day,” he said, resting his head on the armrest of the sofa.

There was sadness in that, but she tried to keep from showing it. “You have people over every day?”

“That's correct – I don't. Should I assume that you're making me sick?”

He was smiling very faintly, very sarcastically. He looked nauseated.

“Actually,” he added, “I suppose today is an unusual day. My friend is coming from England to visit me. I'd like to think that I'm overmedicated right now, though, rather than having some sort of bizarre psychosomatic response to my worry about that. If it's all the same to you. I mean, I know I'm overmedicated.”

“Why don't you tell the doctors that?”

“I don't know. I have a bad habit of deferring to experts. Other sick people tell me so.”

“Other sick people?”
“Online. As well as elsewhere. I like experts, personally. There's a reason for them. I am one.”

He seemed inclined to be quiet again. By now he'd lain down fully. Even the last vestiges of the sunlight were gone; it was dim and grayish in the room, lit only by the light from the kitchen. The tea-smell had, if anything, grown stronger.

“What's your friend's name?” she asked; it was impossible to remain quiet – she wasn't comfortable enough with him yet, and besides, it was reassuring when he spoke. Otherwise he started to remind her of her mother.

“My friend is called Yuri Kurupin,” said Ryuzaki, raising his head a little and speaking precisely, carefully, in a full sentence.

Sayu pictured Ryuzaki standing soberly next to a woman smaller than himself, even longer-haired, half-Japanese like him, perhaps with a bug-eyed baby. The thought placed him in an unexpected, pleasant new context. “Are you – may I ask if you're a couple? Or just friends?”

“I couldn't say.”

“Oh, yeah. Like that.” He seemed to be fading again, so she prompted: “Why are you worried about her?”

“I'm going to puke.

“Oh – all right. What can I do?”

He was getting up, though, and going into the bedroom, wavering a little – she heard gagging, then the running of water; finally a flush and silence. She got up, went to check on him. He was on the floor, hands between knees, hair damp for some reason, translucently pale.

“I'm taking you to the hospital.”

“No. Wait. Can you bring me my thing?”

“What thing?”

He looked at her, struggled, gave up. “They'll figure it out there.”

“Okay. My car's downstairs.”

“You drove?”

“I'm allowed to take out a car at the station.”

“Really. Well, the NPA's never done anything useful for me before. This will be a first.”

The ire seemed to take a good deal out of him; he was quite meek as she took him downstairs and put him in the car.

“Which hospital? University okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that where you usually go?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, keep talking.”

“It won't be a problem if I go to sleep.”

“Keep talking anyway.”

“I met a shinigami there once,” said Ryuzaki.

His head was leaning against the window. She stopped at a light and looked at him.

“A shinigami?”

“Matsuda told you about them, didn't he?”
“It's hard to believe without seeing.”

“It's hard to believe with seeing. It came and stood by my bed. I had an alien baby in my neck at the time.” He touched the base of his throat. “It elected to – one becomes aware of the shinigami by touching its notebook, and so it tapped its notebook hard on the alien baby. That was very much the kind of person it was, I think.”

“An alien...?”

“That's what it looked like. I am being poetic.”

“Did you have cancer?”

“I had acute Graves' disease, followed by some truly unlucky and unfortunate drug reactions. I was very ill. I was awake by then, but I'd lost a lot of weight – which I could hardly afford to lose – and my guts were in a bit of a state in general. Which they still are.” Ryuzaki cleared his throat and was silent again; just when she thought he was asleep, his hushed, grayish voice went on. “It laughed at me. I'm not sure I can convey this without imitating it. It was looking at its face that did it – hovering over me. A shinigami is a skeletal, clearly inhuman creature. I looked, and at once, all of the fear left me. I felt comforted.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”
“I know what that's like,” she said.

“Do you?”

“Finally, this is the worst thing that can happen.”

“In a way.”

Sayu pulled into the hospital parking garage. “So the shinigami – why was it there? Because you were close to death?”

“It didn't tell me yet. It wanted to yap at me instead.” Ryuzaki sighed tiredly. “'Hey, what's this? No flowers, no fruit?' I shook my head no. 'Doesn't nobody like you?' And more of the laughter. So I asked it if it had come for me. It said no, of course not; that wasn't how it worked. I asked if I was about to die and it said no. It said it was conducting an investigation, which it thought was funny. I asked into what. And it said, 'Into you.'”

“Oh?”

“They don't know either. They don't know any better than we do why a few people were spat back. The shinigami poked around the room a bit and stared at me, or rather over me. I asked it what it was investigating, specifically, and it said, 'Nothing you could help with. Nothing you'd recognize as important.' I felt great.”

“I know,” said Sayu.

Ryuzaki drew up his feet onto the seat. “This being was poking about, and I – I – I don't know why it made me so amused. It was certainly disgusting, certainly loathsome. I just didn't care any longer what it did and didn't do. All I cared about was just keeping this --” -- he squeezed his opposite shoulder -- “alive for as long as possible. I sort of fell in love with life at that moment, in a way I certainly never had even after I was deprived of life and got it back again. I don't mean abstract love. I mean romantic love.”

It was time to go into the hospital, which both of them appreciated; it was a strange thing to say and a strange thing to respond to. She helped him out of the car and helped him check in, reading her phone during his triage and intake. He didn't come back. Eventually, he sent a text:

I'm staying overnight. Thank you. Come and visit in the morning if you want.

 

Time passed. Rue awoke in the night, embarrassed and irritable. It was just the same -- he was perfectly conscious and aware, yet likewise aware of his wildly emotional, heavy mood, a mood more than natural, if such distinctions could be made.

He got out of bed in the dim, disinfected room, and went to the WC, where he avoided looking either at the hospital shower with the chair, or at his own reflection in the mirror. He was confronted, nonetheless, by himself in the room's big darkened window, with its strangely arid, lovely view of the turned-up roofs of houses and a train station through which a train ran silently. He imagined for a moment that he could see extraordinarily well, through to people in solid winter coats, wrapped against the unseasonal October weather, their breath delicately visible, waiting for and then getting into the welcoming white maw of the cute little train.

Chapter 8: YAK

Yuriy walked into the hospital shortly after eight, having spent a sleepless night at a hotel a few minutes' walk away. There was no need for a show of confidence, as the place was oddly quiet, empty. Rue had texted him his location and room number and told him that there was no reason to come before visiting hours began. He'd cheated, but only by an hour; when he arrived, Rue was asleep.

Contrary to his usual curled habits, he slept exuberantly -- arms at angles above his head, face looking proud and serious, as if he were celebrating an Olympic victory. He was warmly wrapped in cotton and hair; warm air was blowing in from a vent above, drying the room out and making him look a bit as if he were floating.

Yuriy sat wearily in a hard, wobbling, expensive chair and stroked Rue's arm, gaining some measure of visceral, empathetic rest from the act of watching him. His journey had been long – all the way over Europe and Asia – and overstimulating, as these journeys were, even now that air travel was rapidly becoming impractical for any but the rich. He missed the days of airplane cabins without the hot, calculated blaring of ads that looked like films and films that looked like ads, when there had been one or two apathetic romantic comedies at most, and a bit of bad food, rather than these engineered healthy meals and well-orchestrated chat shows and witty, dubbed French children's programming for the young passengers. Typical of people to perfect something into intolerability.

A nurse came in silently, on sock feet, seeming to probe Rue's sleeping body without quite touching him. Then he woke him gently and took a bit of blood – Rue did not protest at all, and seemed unsurprised to see Yuriy, who smoothed his forehead. He closed his eyes at the touch, an expression of pure, hungry, unremitting relief passing over his face. Yuriy tried to fix it in his memory.

 

“I never know what to call these visits, or what to call us during them.”

“I know.”

“You look good, Zhora.” They weren't even speaking Russian -- their lingua franca was English now, now that Yuriy spoke it, but he felt like nicknaming him, and he tried to take advantage of his rare moods of intimacy. Yuriy deserved such little kindnesses as this. Besides, he did look good. He was better dressed in clothes that fit; with time, his body had put on flesh and muscle, strengthened and softened in a way that made sense of his massive shoulders and ribcage, and there was something less guarded, less sickened and afraid, in his face.

Rue was embarrassed of him more often than not – embarrassed of the old split-open failure he represented, and of the past at the Wammys', which he was trying then to turn off like an old television so that it could become a white dot. Still, his presence was very comforting. There was something to be said for the physical presence of your companion. He had friends, but they were all people he'd never met, people he knew online, and though those friends' physicality was always very apparent to him – most of them were sick, too, and he had good mental maps of their bodies and their bodies' complaints – there was nothing there like Yuriy's warm, blunt-ended hands, or the very visible fluttering of the pulse in his neck.

He noted the touching fact that Yuriy's chair was designed for someone rather smaller than himself, though Rue had surely seen Japanese men who were taller or broader, and he sat in it with complete politeness and not a hint of complaint. By the time he thanked Rue for the compliment, it was already half-forgotten.

“You look like him,” Rue added.

“Who?”

He pushed it a little further. “Him. You know.”

“Rue...”

“He played for Arsenal in the nineties. And I saw him managing someone or other in the last World Cup. But you don't look how he looked in the nineties; you look how he looks now. This is a very serious question.”

“Is it a compliment?”

“It's a neutral remark. I complimented you already. I don't just hand them out.”

Yuriy didn't dignify that with a response; he squeezed Rue's hand and bent to kiss his cheek.

 

Sayu came to visit him in the late morning. He was in a private room on a high floor, with quiet wood sheathing everything, and nurses that she suspected of being selected for attractive qualities. Sayu hated money. She knocked quietly; the door was answered by a pleasant-looking Western man with heavily lined eyes, who put a finger to his lips.

“He is sleeping,” he said. “Are you Inspector Matsuda?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, he sleeps. But you can come in.”

“Is he okay?” She whispered; she shut the door behind her.

“Eh. Sort of. Now he only – well. Sorry the Japanese is so lacking. Do you speak some English?”

“Uh – 'Little.'”

He shook his head. “I stay in Japanese. I am Yuri Kurupin, called 'Josef' as a code sometimes, an aide of L.”

“I've heard of Josef.”

“I apologize. I tried.” His speech was heavily accented, immediately recognizable as Ryuzaki-taught, or at least as the product of long interaction with Ryuzaki; he had the same idiosyncratic polite speech, almost completely lacking in expressions of rhetorical doubt.

“Thank you for caring for him.”

“Did you know how sick he was?”

“No. He was very unclear. I know now.”

Ryuzaki coughed and opened his eyes slowly. “Oh, Yuri. You remembered the past tense.”

“The Inspector has come to aid in your humiliation,” said Kurupin.

“And look at you go with it.”

He took and squeezed Kurupin's hand. “Will you please be kind enough to find someone administrative? I'm extraordinarily interested in checking out of here.”

“Okay,” said Kurupin, some relief in his voice. He smoothed his hand furiously through Ryuzaki's hair, blinking hard as if he were suppressing some expression, and bent to kiss him on the forehead. Ryuzaki bent his head to him and kissed him on the mouth lightly.

He stared at the ceiling until Kurupin left.

“Inspector,” he said, “there was something I wanted to tell you last night.”

“Is this about him being actually a Russian guy?”

“No. Is Kubozono found?”

“Not yet. We're zeroing in, though. There's a decreasing number of places where he could be at this point.”

“Good.” He cleared his throat, pushing himself up, the easy confidences of the prior evening replaced with embarrassed formality. “Look. Will you be offended if I offer you a little advice? -- I see that you will.”

“It probably depends on what it's about.”

“Will it help if I am, at the same time, asking you for advice?”

“Probably. But either way, you'd better talk, because he's going to come back anytime.”

“That's true.” Ryuzaki took a water bottle from his side table and sipped from it cautiously. “It's just a story. Essentially – do you know I'm quite an accomplished tennis player?”

“Light told me you were a juniors champion.”

He put the glass back and folded his hands firmly. “Sorry. Complete lie. But I did play in tournaments from time to time when I was young. I won only one, but since I hadn't had much training, I could always blame that fact easily enough – I was competing fairly successfully against kids who'd worked for this all their lives.”

“I see.”

He tapped his thumbs against his chest. “One day, at the age of thirteen, I happened to play a match against a young Roger Federer. Federer beat me.” His voice was very wry, but one could tell it still smarted a little. “I scored a point against him in both sets; I'll say that much. But he was one of the elite; I was not. He knew it. He was rather bored. And I thought, Ryuzaki -- or whatever -- you could work at this, you could even be world-class, but no matter what you do, you'll never be this boy. In this sphere, you exist so a Federer can beat you. Your consolation is that it's a demonstration of strength to beat you.”

“So you decided to be a full-time detective instead,” said Sayu.

“Yes. You have Light's capacity for scorn. Yes, I did. I was a lot better at being a detective. And my conclusion from this event – a strange sentence; if you realize you've learnt your place, it is time to leave. Now, was I right?”

“Is this about Kurupin-san?”

“Somewhat.”

“I'm sorry. I don't really understand how.”

He pulled the sheets over his head, stretching them over his face. “I don't, either. Do you ever think of getting back together with Matsuda?”

“All the time.”

“Well, at least I'm not you.”

“I'll think on it,” said Sayu. “Is your point that you know where you stand with Kurupin-san, but you think you can do better than him -- whatever that means to you?”

“No. This is about work, I guess. I like it here, and --”

There was a knock; Ryuzaki said, imperiously, “Enter.”

“Someone is here in a few minutes to check you out,” said Kurupin, entering.

Sayu squeezed his shoulder and left, after pleasantries and promises.

 

“You have a birthday coming, haven't you?”

“Yuriy, please, no. Not a birthday.”

They were in a cab, drifting down the freeway towards Rue's home; the latter was once again wrapped in his knitted mass. Yuriy kept sneaking looks at him. It was not, he realized, particularly healthy to find himself attracted to his sleepiness and languor, but they suited him, and his attraction to Rue had at any rate sharpened horribly in the past several years – in his raggedness and small precise movements, he had become the only object. He had to break the spell of the warm morning and now of the cool-seated, clean little taxi where they sat so close together – they had to talk; Rue would only want talk, and Yuriy was ready to oblige him, and Rue, seeming to know, asked the driver not to take him home, but to drop them at “the cathedral.”

“Why?” he asked in an undertone.

“I want to see it, that's all.”

It was a big ugly place from the outside, sloped and whitish-gray, with three bells stuck awkwardly in the top. They entered, however, and the air was fresh and cool; there was a vastness and gray awe to the raw concrete interior, sweeping forward and up to the white cross. It was just what Yuriy needed, and though this was a Roman Catholic cathedral and far from either of the two faiths in which he had been vaguely raised, he indulged grandly in the atmosphere, took holy water and crossed himself in Byzantine fashion, aware of Rue's watching him. They sat together in a back pew.

“You look good, too,” said Yuriy, for lack of a better opener; he did, anyway, and Rue looked wry at him.

“You would like Light's sister,” he said.

“Is that an insult to her or to me?”

“Don't you have obligations in England?”

“Should I even answer that? You know just how hard it is for me to do this.”

“Yes,” said Rue, “I do.”

He looked wistful, suddenly, even a little embarrassed. Yuriy awkwardly took and squeezed his arm. “Nothing you can say will make me less glad to see you.”

“That would be a very nice epitaph for you.”

“Oh, I have a question. How is that different from a eulogy? Eulogy is longer, epitaph is brief and it's pithy...”

“Eulogy is an oration at a funeral--”

“I know.”

“Right. Epitaph is written on the stone.”

“Right.”

Rue was quiet for a moment and then said, “Do you know what's written on mine?”

“No.”

“Trick question.” He shook his head carefully as if to clear it, and Yuriy squeezed his arm again. “It's a plain cross, in a Catholic cemetery. I don't even know where they found such a thing. They did try very hard to be nice.”

Yuriy was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You're asking for it now.”

“For what?”

“I was trying to resist to touch you and then you say things like that.”

“Why were you resisting that?” Rue rested his head on Yuriy's shoulder. “You can – you can do that. It's fine.”

Haltingly, Yuriy put his arms around Rue's waist; the church seemed absolutely empty, but he wasn't certain, and it felt strange to stage even so demure a scene. He held him for several minutes, breathing in his shampoo-and-hospital smell, and then Rue separated them gently and – almost following through on the same motion – Yuriy stood and let the moment fall away. They went outside and walked along the trapped, treelined, delicate canal to Rue's big pink marble building, which Yuriy found astonishingly ugly; he picked up immediately that it was otherwise tenantless, to Rue's apparent pleasure.

He liked the flat – its sparsity and pallor made him see, much more quickly than Rue had, Rue's vague fantasy of the life of a rich bohemian. The warmth and lightness made him feel springlike, even with the cold gray mess outside, and he sniffled his way to the window.

“I'm going to have to work for a few hours,” said Rue apologetically.

“If you must. I might sleep.”

“Have you slept yet?”

“Not at all. The clock inside has absolutely no idea what to do under best of conditions. Now it's fucked. I feel like sleeping now, but it's one; what good is that?”

“Almost zero.” Rue came to the window, buttoning the coat he had frozen without for the past twenty hours, and put a hand on Yuriy's elbow. “I go to bed early now, if you want to try and hold out. Most likely, I will fall asleep in a secret place soon after ten. Will you find me in time?”

“What happens if I don't?”

“I think less of you.”

“Okay. Does that mean I can stay with you?”

“Of course,” said Rue rather uncomfortably; had something happened behind his back to make Yuriy suddenly worry so much about staying here, touching him, all of that?

He hugged Yuriy suddenly, delightfully, to apologize – so Yuriy thought, anyway. His warm, flat, unshaven cheek was next to Yuriy's nose. The weakness of his body was immensely evident, though it felt solid enough, even a bit more so – something in the way the muscles contacted around him; birdlike, loose. A mumbled series of expressions, of love and apology, came out of Yuriy without much effort or coherence. Rue clutched him again, and then let go.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, in unclear, flat tones. There was something terribly brittle about him suddenly. “Do you want a key?”

Yuriy felt the skin around his eyes soften a little.

Rue looked confused. “What?”

“I'm sorry. I just – for no reason – I just imagined that if I said yes, you'd open your mouth and there'd be key in there.”

“How terrible,” said Rue, brisk but oddly touched. “I suffer from magic realism. I'll leave you a key on the counter.”

“Okay. How do you get to work?”

“Take the train or my bike. Don't worry. I learned to do this long ago.”

“All right. I didn't mean anything by it.”

 

When he returned four hours later, Yuriy was sprawled all over the sofa, laughing at a film he was watching on his reader, which he was holding propped on his chest. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you.” Keys on counter; coat coming off. “What are you watching?”

“Woody Allen. He is – you know, he was sexually repulsive to me.”

“I didn't know.”

“But I understand why he got all these ladies. There was to him – he was small and smooth. You just want to pick him up and snuggle him into a wall until there's nothing.”

“Woody Allen ?”

“ Manhattan .”

Rue flung himself into a chair and began removing his shoes. “Are you in touch with Near?”

“I'm no good to anyone tonight.”

“I was just wondering.”

“I'm not here on his behalf.”

“Of course you are,” said Rue, puzzled that he'd denied it. “To an extent. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to get away. You're here to recruit me back, at least somewhat. Go on. I'm listening.”

“I'll try to recruit you tomorrow. I haven't got it in me right now.”

“I see.”

Yuriy sighed, blowing air. “They know I'm Josef now – that Josef is Yuriy Krupin, I mean.”

“I'm surprised that it took them this long.” Rue put his feet up. “Who found you out?”

“Emma Hunt.”

“Scotland Yard Emma.”

“Yes, that's the one.”

“Forgive me. It's such a generic name. Like the Saitos. Well, at least it's sort of in the family.”

“Yes. I'm sure she's told people, but I very much hope the pool will be small.”

Rue got up and sat on the table, very near to Yuriy. “Can I watch the film?”

Yuriy looked almost alarmed. “You don't want to.”

“Is it shockingly violent?”

“To you, I think it might be.”

Rue made sandwiches and they watched something else. It was then discovered that they were out of toilet paper, so he went out to the corner store, buying a toothbrush and some tea to cover. When he came back, the living room was empty.

“Yuriy?”

“Yes?” He spoke in an odd, very hushed tone.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm in your bedroom.”

“Well,” said Rue, after a meaningless, thoughtful pause, “are you all right in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

He dropped the toilet paper and things on the counter in the WC – including the tea; he'd sort it out in the morning – and went to get ready for bed. Yuriy was a dozing heap, dim and gray. He seemed naked. Rue switched off the light and curled near him in the dark.

Chapter 9: Robbie

It was a bad night. He dozed off immediately, but then woke up a few hours later, immobilized by sleepiness, but tortured by the play of hot (the quilt; too much) and cold (Yuriy's big body kept moving and turning, and each time he moved, outside air flooded the pocket between them).

After a period during which time seemed to pass quickly – the whole hour between two and three seemed to slip out of him – he finally willed himself to sit up, put on his robe and go to drink a glass of water.

He went back to bed, grateful for a second for the heat of the covers, and then miserable again, and rather achey because of the pooling of blood. This gave way to an audible groan, deliberately aimed at Yuriy, who awoke and at once apologized.

“What in God's name are you sorry for?” He addressed him in English and was answered in Russian, a trick that always seemed to come naturally when they were half-asleep or not paying attention, but which was impossible when they were fully self-aware.

“You look angry.”

Rue lay back down. “I'm not.”

“You need your sleep now.”

“There is no situation in which people don't need sleep.”

“You know what I mean. Look, though, let's just go outside for a second.”

By the time they got outside they both felt a little better. Yuriy took his hand and clamped down on it firmly. They wandered north, towards the frozen row of shops, still lit.

“You know, Rue --”

“Forget it. I am awake . You haven't shot me. Final word on the matter.” They spoke English now, with Rue's mood dominating.

“If you didn't want to see someone who's going to fret about stuff like that,” said Yuriy, “you shouldn't have – wouldn't have kept me around, now, would you? -- Don't just go quiet on me. You – earlier – when you're in a good mood, you hang on me like a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“I am distressed to learn that you associate with fourteen-year-old girls that way.”

They were clearing the shops now, and ventured onto a residential street. An inky color was in the sky, with a liquid look also like ink; the trees splayed above them, very solid and very cold.

“Keep your voice down,” Rue added.

“It's not even that you – you know, you actively – you do this on purpose. Everything that's not perfect has to be put under a microscope. If you were doing what nature intended you to do, maybe you could look at people for what they are when you're not at work, not try to solve and fix them and give them deathly looks when they commit some deadly sin like waking you up in the night.”

“I told you that you happen to be the one who made a four-hour original television drama of waking me up in the night. I didn't care.”

“Then why'd you groan aloud and wake me up so pointedly?”

“I wanted company.”

“Oh, Rue.” Yuriy stopped walking, so that Rue, losing the plot, snapped forward for a moment with his hand still in his. He stumbled, recovered, looked back at his silly mortified face.

“What?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“It's just this. I've just been so aware recently – I love you. I so desperately want to spend my life with you. Just be nice , for once.”

“If you want someone who's nice,” said Rue softly, creeping closer, “then you don't want to spend your life with me.”

“I already am, whether I want to or not.”

“Then you want to be rewarded for your service? And with what?”

“I just want to know how to make you happy. I feel like I've tried everything.”

“You already make me very happy.”

“That's a lie,” said Yuriy patiently. “You are – you are not happy. You always tell me that. I know exactly what you're going to tell me about how happy you are, always. You don't even see me as a person sometimes. Just – sort of – a companion robot. Like Robbie. Sure, yes, you love Robbie, you think he's funny, but you'd never, for example, marry Robbie. That would be ridiculous to you. You put up with what Robbie seems to want to do to you in private, but it's just slightly silly to you because of his robot body and so forth.”

“Believe it or not,” said Ryuzaki, who had been squirming a little in Krupin's grip, embarrassed despite the emptiness of the street -- “I do want to see you happy, too. I am sorry that I think of you a little like that.”

“Yeah,” said Krupin shakily -- “yeah, it's okay.”

“Did you just propose to me?”

“Sort of.”

“Did you come here meaning to do that? That's odd of you, isn't it?” He tried to keep his voice gentle.

“I came here meaning to do anything I could to make you come back to us.”

“And I would do anything to make you come back. Yet neither of us has, in fact, come back. Is it not odd?”

“I do want to marry you.”

“Oh, Zhora.” He squeezed his hand warmly. “Of course you do. Weddings make people act nice.”

“Is it so bad to want a little niceness?”

“The word has come to mean nothing consistent between us,” said Rue.

“Look -- I know we're not a couple in the usual way.”

“We are a couple in every way that matters,” said Rue, with surprising firmness.

“Oh,” said Yuriy with quiet pleasure. He seemed not to know anymore what to do with his hands. “Then – then let me stay and care with you.”

Rue touched Yuriy's face carefully. “When we met, I was successful and ill. Our friendship was forged on these terms. The best for you would be to have me successful; then you could admire me. But if I won't succeed by your standards, you'd prefer to have me at least ill, because then you can baby me and worry over me. And I like being babied and worried over, which will make me sicker.”

He saw Yuriy's expression change, become annoyed, then almost revolted; he hunched a little more and his lips thinned. “Makes no difference. You're really sick already.”

“Not really. I could easily be if allowed.”

“You're talking nonsense.”

“Maybe I am.” Rue squeezed Yuriy's hands on his shoulders, and then indicated by a motion of the head that he wanted to proceed.

“Anyway, it's illegal.”

“It's legal in Britain,” said Yuriy, annoyed at the obfuscation. “Is this going to turn into something like the asexuality fight?”

“Probably,” said Rue.

“Do you remember what I said at the end of that one?”

“No.”

“You're kidding,” said Yuriy. “I've kept that image of you inside of the head for years. You said, 'I'm sorry; do I make you tired?' You were so sincere.”

“And you said?”

“Oh, I said I was surprised you didn't make you tired.”

“I won that fight,” said Rue thoughtfully. “Didn't I? You accepted how I described things in the mail the other day.”

“It's weird,” said Yuriy, “but – well – I didn't want to fight about it then; that's all. Sorry. But now that I'm here, right now, and you were so glad and hanging on me, I feel like I can believe you just – that it's not about me, and that stuff. I really did think it was just me.”

“It's okay. I understand.”

“I've had reason – I have had cause to have some thoughts on – I suppose I don't have complete reason to imagine homosexuality really exists, either, anymore.”

“Oh?”

“I was with a woman for a little while. I might have said.”

“You didn't say,” said Rue. “And?”

Yuriy's face assumed something like a sob, and then changed back so quickly he could hardly even mark it. “It was fine. I had a good time.”

“Who was it?”
“I went home with a couple of guys I picked up in bars in London. And I had a brief relationship with Emma. Last year. While you were sick.”

Rue halted; he had become intimately and painfully aware of the way Yuriy was looking at the world, as if it were a narrowing tunnel of leaves and trees, wild, swallowing. His shame and confusion were obvious, and Rue thought: I've become so glib. I've learned it all too well.

“That's okay. I really asked you to.”

“I didn't,” said Yuriy, “and whatever my motivations, I feel obviously that I was unfaithful and I dragged Emma into it all. She doesn't deserve that.”

“How did it end?”

“The way everything with her ends, I guess. She broke up with me. She doesn't really want anything long-term; she doesn't want a partner. That's okay. It was the least painful way. I'm not angry about any of it.”

“Of course. You can't really be angry.”

“That's not true,” said Yuriy, surprised – but then, he thought, he always insisted he wasn't; there must have been a part of Rue that believed everything he said, and thought made him warm. He explained gently what Rue already knew. -- “I'm still angry at Zhenya; so angry it scares me. And I'm always angry at you, but I don't want to be.”

“Why are you angry at me?”

“Haven't I made it clear?”

“Say it again.”

Yuriy looked at him; Rue could tell his eyes were bloodshot, even in the half-dark and the streetlamp light. They seemed to blink a lot. “Simply because you won't stay with me. I can't help it.”

“You were the one who left.”

“Because you wouldn't stay .” He seized Rue's hand, kneaded it awkwardly between his. “Hey,” he said, with a certain grotesque calm and determination in his face, “why did you grow out your hair?”

It was an oddly hard question to answer, as a glass of cold water might be oddly difficult to drink. Rue forced himself to think about it. “First it was neglect. Then I realized that quite long hair isn't as annoying as short, except that it's heavy and hot in summer, and washing it is a bit more difficult. But short hair is cold in winter, and you have to fix it, and it gets in your face. And I seem to feel the cold a good deal now. And very short hair annoys me. It's itchy and it doesn't pass when you don't pay any attention to it. So I keep it long.”

“Do you like the look of it?”
“Yes. But I don't really look at myself very often. I know how that sounds.”

“I guess you do,” said Yuriy with a strange, flat fondness.

They walked for a kilometer or two more, through increasingly confusing streets; then Yuriy saw a familiar convenience store and realized that Rue had taken them on a loop. His building loomed above them. Rue fumbled humanly with a card key at the door, then pushed it down and open; they padded through the empty, reddish lobby.

At home, he went into the kitchen and began heating up a mug of water.

“Are you going back to bed?” Yuriy asked.

Rue put a finger to his lips, taking down a box of cocoa mix. Yuriy leaned against the counter and watched him make it; he didn't want to ask another question of this nature.

“Hey.”

“This is sugarless; it's not really food.” Rue mixed his drink. “Still, I shall have to speak to my sponsor in the morning.”

He appeared so genuinely melancholy about this, raising the mug to his lips, that Yuriy was momentarily taken in. “-- I always think you're not joking.”

“And for the sake of everything we have, thank God for that.” Rue hoisted himself onto the counter and began absently to pet Yuriy's hair, massaging his scalp with both hands. “Zhora.”

“Yes?”

“Do you really think I'm wasting my time?”

“No. But I think it would be better spent with us. You can't stop the world from changing, even if very subtly and thoughtfully. We've seen too many miracles, including the miracle of your own existence, if I may say so.” Yuriy squeezed one of Rue's feet; he twitched electrically, almost spilling. “Sorry. I got hold of your controller.”

“You pressed the Y button,” said Rue. “Ah!”

“Got both your controllers now,” said Yuriy.

“You do. You seem to be dual-wielding. Now, I quite agree I can't stop the world from changing, but what else shall I do?” Rue freed his feet and rested them on Yuriy's shoulders. “I don't want to give up. I've invested too much.”

“I suppose not,” said Yuriy.

Rue physical attention had drifted; his feet seemed in danger of slipping off of Yuriy, who gently removed them and boosted them back onto the counter. “No, we do owe people something. And essentially, though we've seen miracles, I won't – I absolutely won't believe that they are such. Even resurrections – even things like that – they're not miraculous; they're simply unexplained.” Rue took a tighter hold of Yuriy's hand. “Unproductive line of thought. Please shut me up.”

“Do you remember when you used to read to me?”

“Of course.”

“That was nice.” said Yuriy softly. “When I was just learning English, and you would read to me. All your authors – Chesterton and Chandler and C.S. Lewis and all of them. How did we – why did we do such a romantic, strange, nice thing as that?”

“You asked,” said Rue, with effort. “Would you like to be read to now?”

“No, I think you --”

“What?”

“Sorry. Nothing.”

“What, Yuriy.”

“I was going to ask you if you wanted to go back to bed, but you'll just complain again that I'm trying to take care of you.”

“I never said anything about your 'taking care of me.' I only objected to your --”

“What?”

“I can't even articulate it. I'll tell you when you do it again.”

“Okay.”

Rue folded himself off the counter and put his still half-full mug in the sink, clutching the edge of it for a moment and then looking down into the drain.

“Do you really love Tokyo that much?” Yuriy asked him softly, putting his arms around his waist.

Rue found this – perhaps it was not seeing Yuriy, merely feeling and smelling him, but he found that he rather liked this, more than he might usually like being unexpectedly touched in this fashion. He felt love – he felt loved, and this – this was rare – he had to admit to himself that this was rare, even when he was regularly near someone -- that he was really aware of being loved. He wondered if this was common. He thought he ought not to indulge in this sort of thought, but Yuriy always made him think to excess.

He let go of the sink, turned in Yuriy's arms, and kissed him with real passion. It surprised Yuriy – he could feel it – to feel his lips so warm, soft and unresisting, even eager. Even under normal and very mentally fond circumstances, his body usually resisted politely.

 

Rue sighed and bent closer to him, feeling his warmth and scenting him under the fabric of his clothes. He felt a kiss on his cheek, a polite kiss, and said, “Let's go back to bed.”

“Okay.”

Rue lay down first. Yuriy had wandered into the toilet; he came out again, still damp-handed, and climbed wearily into the bed, his back to Rue. “Is there anything I can do to keep from bothering you again?”

“Don't loathe yourself. That's a start.”

“I don't .”

“Good.” Something about the world swam a little, and he clutched Yuriy tightly, so tightly that Yuriy gasped a little. “Sorry.”

“It's okay.” He turned onto his back. “You're like wire, Rue.”

“Oh.”

Rue wanted to kiss him again, but he didn't know how to initiate it – he did, but it didn't seem to work. Yuriy kissed his forehead and said softly, “Are you – well, stupid question.”

Rue rested a hand on Yuriy's side, petting the dry, warm skin. Yuriy liked this; he let out a small “mmm” and relaxed a little more.

It was completely dark in the room, and Rue felt safe. He did it; he kissed him – it wasn't that Rue was afraid – it was a strange problem. The signals he was feeling inside of him were muddled and roiling -- “mixed” was too good a word.

“I don't --” said Yuriy -- “no, sorry – I don't want to try and do this again – you'll be miserable and you'll hate me a little. It's okay.”

“I wish you'd do what you want to do, if you still want to do it in any way.”

“Why?”

“I don't know why. I'm tired of things being the way they are. I feel safe with you. That's all.”

“That's something.”

It was something, and for some reason Rue did feel something different – a little heat inside of himself, in the dark, and an increased awareness of Yuriy's body, as he might be aware of the position of his own knees and ankles. It was pathetic, he thought, that this was so simple to most people and yet so opaque to him.

Yuriy was much closer now, caressing the back of his head gently; lifting it a little, which he allowed, and then moving his hand down beneath, through his hair and to the very base of his back. His mouth was on Rue's, and then Rue was moving up towards him; the kiss connected and he felt an interested, sleepy pull.

Yuriy's hand was lower, and he choked back an awkward laugh. His mouth was against Rue's throat, and Rue felt the beginnings of arousal, a slight swelling that made him want to squirm. Yuriy was trying scrupulously to keep any knowledge of his own state from Rue, but he could tell from the way he moved that he was already a good deal further along. The covers were half-off of them; Yuriy's head rested on Rue's stomach now, a brief embrace, and then he kissed – his mouth was on what Rue had always mentally referred to as “the offending organ,” and instead of laughter and disgust, he felt relief and pleasure, though he would have liked to be warmer.

It was so strange. He was so exposed. His eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that he could see his pale torso and its hard breaths, the edge of his ribs, the oddly frantic breath that moved from lungs to belly, and it was real in a way he hadn't expected. He felt painfully sensitive and yet the touch of – what was it? It wasn't so bad, to be sensitive to things, and sometimes he felt half-asleep. It took him a long time, but Yuriy seemed to be enjoying himself, and when he finally came to orgasm it was almost a disappointment; the intensity was uncontrollable suddenly, and then the feeling slowed and stopped.

Yuriy gently let him go, wiped his mouth untidily with the back of a wrist, and then crept slowly up, kissing at random, or seeming more to taste than to kiss, unabashedly ardent. Rue could feel his hardness; he reached around him, beneath his arms, and pulled him up. He was sweating. There was a strange sense of extreme tenderness towards him, almost pity, but without patronization. Rue kissed the lid of his eye; he felt a small blurry movement. He wondered if he could return what Yuriy had done; he almost wanted to.

“Let me try,” he said, and Yuriy, doubtless uncertain of exactly what he'd meant, said a vague “okay”; Rue scooted down – Yuriy, catching on, allowed him to do so – he climbed down past Yuriy's nipple, his navel, down to his penis (awful word), which he cautiously began to suck, feeling at last slightly removed from the situation, but only this time because it did have its genuine humor. The view of him from here was foreshortened; he saw the underside of his nose and chin and belly, and the hollows of his armpits, and he felt the frank desperation of his body, straining into him if not against the air, skin smelling of soap and sweat and feeling oddly and indescribably sweet, and the indignity of them both was not unpleasing. He was surprised by how easy it was – in this respect, at least, Yuriy was smaller than him -- though he did not try to swallow, and after a few moments his neck began to hurt.

But he was coming already, with a series of loud breaths and an open mouth making an expression he'd never seen before. Surprised at the taste, Rue awkwardly and instinctively spat and coughed, but that was fine; it was repayment for the tenderness (always that word; was there no other word?) of seeing his friend shudder in that way – as if he weren't being looked at. He wiped his mouth on the sheet and sat up. Yuriy attacked him, getting almost completely atop him on the bed, and squeezed at his back and took his breath out.

He lay still and rubbed his hand up and down Yuriy's back, felt his panting finally slow. After an unknown period had passed, he realized Yuriy was falling asleep, was trying to keep himself from falling asleep and at the same time that he was becoming a little aroused again, and he poked him sharply in the side to make him think about what he was doing.

He rolled off, then sat up shyly and began to tuck covers around Rue, finding excuses as he did so to contact him as much as possible; implausibly, he really was getting hard a second time, if less visibly so, and then he seemed to give up, curl around Rue beneath the covers, and hump dozily at his side, kissing him hard, and using his hands to clutch at whatever part of his flesh came to hand.

This lasted longer and by the end of it Rue was so exhausted (and slightly, pleasantly bored) that his eyes were involuntarily closing; his mouth loosened, and he felt a small breakage and cry deep within Yuriy and there was a bit of liquid on his leg, and an implausibly perfectly-judged caress. Then he was asleep.

Rue slept very late. When he woke, he was immediately embarrassed, hideously so – hot things passing through him; Yuriy was reading something, seriously and earnestly, his face tilted up at a reader held over it, and he moved close by instinct.

“Good morning,” said Yuriy, setting it down. He was hoarse and looked exhausted.

“Good morning.”

Rue got up and began his morning routine, despite Yuriy's vague protests – lie back down; he would make breakfast. “I have to take my pills,” he said, retreating to the toilet, wrapping himself in his gray robe – there was the bread next, and then Yuriy wandered out wearing sweatpants and in the white haze of the morning, proceeded to finally catch Rue and give him a tight hug, almost sweeping him off of his constantly moving, wandering feet.

“What do you want to eat?”

“Nothing I can have.”

“Can you have anything that's in a fridge? I can find you.”

“Find me?”

“Make something for you. A surprise.” Yuriy was rubbing his eyes hard, and Rue looked away uncomfortably. “Sorry. I'm so sleepy.”

“It's okay,” said Rue, in Russian, trying to form the choking syllables with a minimum of fuss. “That would be kind of you.”

“I'll make French toast,” he announced from the fridge; that didn't do much for the surprise, but Rue supposed that was more helpful anyway, and he went back to bed. He had drifted back off when Yuriy finished cooking and came in with plates; French toast made with brown bread and margarine, quite tolerable.

Yuriy ate his and watched Rue eat, which he did very slowly, picking at the food with the tips of his teeth; when he had finished, he put the plate aside and curled back up.

“What made today different?” asked Yuriy quietly, in English. “I really would like to know, if it's okay.”

“It's – I don't know; don't ask that question.”

“All right. Sorry.”

“No. Never mind. I'm interested, too. But don't ask. It's a thing I'm already angry at myself over – that I didn't or couldn't or didn't want to before, that is, not that I did. You'll make it worse. Assume that will be the only time; do you still like me?”

“God, will it be the only time?”

“I don't know , Yuriy. -- I enjoyed it.”

“Sorry. I should never have brought up.”

“I like that you can. I never do.”

“I'm going to take a shower,” announced Yuriy roughly, half-getting up.

“I feel like I know a pleasant secret about you,” said Rue, “that's all I want to say.”

Yuriy paused, shy and nervous suddenly, as if he were very young. “I don't think it was ever much of a secret.”

“Maybe not, but I feel that way anyway, and I'm not convinced we're thinking of the same thing.” Rue stroked his thigh gently and felt him retreat back towards him, surprised at how easy it was to make him come so close. “Go and take your shower, if you really want to. I'm going to stay home from work today; I'll be here when you come back.”

“Television?” Yuriy asked, kissing his cheek.

“I think so.”

“Okay.” A small soft sigh in his ear, and then he was padding away.

 

Near,

Things are going well with RR. I'm increasingly convinced that he's interested in coming home with me, at least for a long visit, and I wanted to let you know. I'm ready to resume work if you're ready to begin, but I'm also hoping to come home by next week.

Josef

 

J,

Good news. Is Ryuzaki interested in resuming as well, or is he still wrapped up in his real estate and stock-market games? Tell him he's a philanthropist. I bet he'll quit immediately. If you take him with you, it'll relax him and shut him up. Good.

N

 

Near,

I don't think he needs to be shut up any more than he already has been.

Josef

 

J,

No, he needs to be shut up badly. I don't care how wonderfully mature and self-searching he is about it; he's trying to suppress the natural course of history, and he will only put up for so long with trying to do it the Carnegie way. Nothing scares me more than a well-intentioned genius, especially one who hasn't done the reading. I understand he reads science fiction. So, an optimistic well-intentioned genius – etc. Do you understand why my fondest wish is for you to smother him with love, or whatever you want to call it, and bring him back here?

As soon as you can, ask him to make you some sock puppets. Someone needs to start monitoring the radical Kirites and environmental people a good deal more closely.

 N

 

Dear Yakovlev,

Writing from work, obviously.

I don't know what to make of you these days. You amused me back then; you were a subordinate by nature, and now you seem to be a subordinate by choice, which is interesting but a bit unnerving. Am I to be your superior, or are you to be mine?

When I picture your role towards Near, I see him as the inevitable troubled machine at the center of a room, and you are maintaining it, healing it as necessary, securing its mask and making sure it's airtight. Is this correct?

 Roadrunner.

 

Rue,

You are always my superior.

Your Zhora

Chapter 10: Quil

Winchester and Worthing, November 2037

 

Q,

This is a difficult letter to write, so I hope you won't mind if it's fairly abrupt, for all that I would like it to be otherwise. We have now been out of touch for eighteen years. This happened the way it usually happens: regret succeeded by shame. After letting someone down for so long, you begin to cringe at the very thought of them. I am now living in the UK again, and I've gathered that you are as well. I would like to talk to you, in person if possible, but by voice if that would be easier. I have no agenda and no special reason, though it would be silly to pretend that this has nothing to do with your advancing age (and mine). Not speaking to you when I know perfectly well that you're alive has become less painful than speaking to you, especially when we fell out in a way that you probably understood but didn't instinctively comprehend, and probably still don't, which is not meant as an insult to you. R.

 

Ryuzaki,

I don't know how you got this address. That's the classic opening, isn't it? I suppose the passage of time has led me to underestimate you, just like everyone else.

Forgive my own abruptness. It's absolutely impossible to write this letter except at great speed. Please come tomorrow around two o'clock (I assume you are in Winchester and this will pose no special burden) to 227 The Street, Arun, Worthing.

QW

 

They hadn't spoken a word to each other yet. At first it had been simple awkwardness, overwhelm, a breathing out of L's name which mingled with a sigh. Then, as Quil led him past B's walls of yellowing manga and into the living room, he realized there was more to their silence – that both of them were afraid to speak first for fear of releasing some dangerous thing, a volatile emotion which both held carefully in the base of their mouths.

Quil had expected some pain at seeing L's face, seeing it older, made unfamiliar by unknown pressures; he hadn't expected not to recognize him at all, or rather to recognize pieces without comprehending the whole. It was as if he were meeting the brother of a dead friend. Each movement, the shape of the eye, was so familiar, and you felt yourself relax, but you had to tell yourself that it wasn't him; he was gone. The face you'd loved, the confidences you'd shared (though Quil had never confided in L) decayed still in their plot of distant earth.

For a moment, L sat on the sofa, his feet on the floor, tensed forward, as if ready to flee; then he surprised Quil very much by turning towards him, creeping without expression into his arms, sitting in a way that made Quil's shoulder ache obscenely, feel as if it would tear apart. His face was hidden; his hair, still black and oddly soft, pressed against Quil's neck and chin. Greedy now for information, Quil pressed his hand to his back, to the side of his head; looked at his hands – a wedding ring; rather new, but already with a groove in the finger beneath. Shocking thought. Shame, relief, a touch of amusement – who could stand up to him enough to fall in love? That sort of love? Had he been worn down a little, just enough to see someone eye to eye?

Then there was the smell of him, a faint sweetish odor. There was something wrong; some daily rot, something small but hard. Some metabolic disorder, immune disorder, addiction or medicalized emotion. He lifted his hand to L's face; felt it clenched in pain and emotion. He wanted more. He wanted to kiss L's pale lips just to find out the taste on his tongue.

Eventually he lay more easily, giving Quil's shoulder a rest, a deep breath going through him, and Quil realized there had been tears – there was warm water pressed between his shirt and L's eyes; that was the only sign. Quil reached forward and over, firmly, to the coffee table, and handed him tissues, which he used mechanically, straightening up. Quil gently pulled back his long, sweaty hair, revealing a tired, bagged face.

He said, “blow,” gently, not because he thought L wouldn't, but to embarrass him a little and make him say “sorry,” which he accordingly did. There was a faint roll to the R which convinced Quil he had spent a good deal of time in Japan.

“You're married, then?”

“Don't ask that,” said L, but it was too late; he'd introduced language, and something in that made L gaze around the room more intently, at the mugs over the sink, the lay of the debris on the table – how could he have imagined that he wouldn't see B's presence immediately, once he was able to pay attention? Of course he would recognize that B was still there -- he'd probably guessed from the start -- and they would now have to evade the subject, acting like children, like L with Yagami.

But he dragged the conversation back towards himself, feeling as if he were physically pulling L's face toward him, a firm thumb and forefinger. “Who is it? You'll have to tell me more. Tell me -- what you've been doing...”

“I'm back now – back working for Near.” He was stumbling uncharacteristically.

“Near isn't working for you?”

“I'm sure you know who's working for whom. Don't you?”

“I do have access to the network still,” said Quil, tightening L's hand in his (so hot a hand, so narrow and long, so surprising to feel it adult-sized, even now). “But I don't use it. I really don't.”

“What do you do?”

“I read. I watch films. I talk to friends.” By which, of course, he meant “I read; I watch films with B, whatever he wants to see, and I talk to him – he always has something to say, some strange plan, hypothetical idea, an opinion on everything he sees and hears, and he always needs so much help straightening his thoughts out, keeping clear...”

He thought that L noticed the caginess, the sterility of his reply, but if he did he was ignoring it. “Near has been the leader for so long. And his assistant is Josef – Yuriy, the person I'm married to. And then me. I haven't been well --”

“Mm,” said Quil, as if he hadn't guessed. He felt a little pained for him. Illness, whatever it was, didn't suit L – he had always been so self-contained; now, by the nature of things, he would need help, would show all sorts of little signs, little escapes from the perfect, smooth interior life.

“-- so I'm more peripheral than I'd expect or maybe even like to be. I spend a lot of time stalking people on the computer.”

“I think that's honorable work.”

L had lost either patience or self-control; he shook himself a little and changed the subject, looking faintly as if he were drowning. “Have you been in touch with anyone?”

“With anyone?”

“With Priscilla, for example?”

“With Penny,” said Quil. “Her daughter.”

“I know Penny.”

“I know you know.” Quil shook his head; a little flush aching in his ears – of course L knew her; she and her mother had visited him often, even lived with him on occasion. Well, fine. If L hadn't noticed his age by now – if he hadn't wandered off for two decades, two decades of inevitable rot, exhaustion --

For a wild moment, he almost just asked him, “What do you want me to say about B? To do about him?” But however badly L wanted to discuss it, he could and would not, and to bring up B could be fatal – God knew what L's sense of justice would lead him to do. Better to admit nothing. Better to keep up the fragile, quiet peace, to watch L's pale ear. “Where have you been living?”

“Japan. Until a few years ago.”

“I thought so.” He stroked L's arm gently, pulling up his sleeve to get at the flesh. “And did you meet – Yuriy there? Or – no. No. Your Russian case. I remember now. It was the last thing we spoke about. He's Russian, I assume – though 'Josef'? Isn't that more Czech?”

“Ask Near,” said L. “And I see you know how he spells it.”

“I'm not entirely out of touch with the intelligence community. I didn't know you and he – well, there were rumors. L, I feel like a breath of air. Will you take me outside to the garden?”

“Mm.” L stood up and drew aside the heavy curtains, checking for and finding French doors; he opened them up, sniffling absently. “It's a pretty place.”

“Thank you. Help me up, won't you?”

L did, and then he held his arm as they went out into the garden. It was cold – a hint of snow, but the air was fresh and it helped, at least for a little while. He was glad to get L away from the house, which he could see was hurting him in a dull sort of way.

They walked over the low green lawn, away from the medicinal indoor smell, and settled onto a bench. Quil gripped L's arm tightly.

“You haven't got to tell me about your marriage,” he said. “You haven't got to tell me about anything. I'm just glad our friendship didn't end the way I'd thought.”

“I feel ten years old,” said L, and then added, “It's no good. Everything I say tells you a little about my marriage; these things are too influential. And everything you say tells me a little about you.”

“Then shall we just sit?”

“It's not that I don't want to tell you things. I'm just a little – preoccupied.”

“Work?” asked Quil, too aware of the bladelike feeling of the word, the K hard and fast in his throat, the excess of eagerness: oh, work, yes.

L kissed his cheek – strange, eager, sudden. For a moment he was almost confused as to which of them he was – B would have done that; never L, and it was impossible to know what he'd done right, what had been so very endearing about the cold word which twenty years ago would have commanded not just respect, but a cue to symbiosis. They were so far apart. With a startled twinge, Quil realized that he'd told the truth the previous night:

 

“But you do love him best, still?”

“I did.”

 

Could it hurt L now? Would he guess? Of course he would guess. This was so far from relevance that it wasn't even worth bringing up to himself. To even think about “love” and “who loves one best” -- to make shapes and categories – that was what had got them all in so much stupid trouble. Atrophied thoughts, these, the property of a man who'd never paid attention to such thoughts when they were strong, and now could only care for them, nurture them, in a state permanently weakened by decades of ignorance.

Back in the garden, L said, “Yes, work.” He was touching his lip. “Don't you miss it?”

“At first, I did. Then I began to wonder whether all our competing efforts, through the years, ultimately make the thing worse. Of course, people can't help that, and so long as they don't stop, you can't stop. I don't only mean crime, spy work. I...”

He'd lost the thought. L's face slackened a little, and he said, “I know a bit of what you mean.”

“Yes?”

“I was working in Tokyo, working agains the Kirites – the mainstream Kirites; the less dangerous ones. Trying to fight his influence, in an abstract sort of way.”

“With money? Funding?”

“Yes,” he said, and his hand tightened on Quil's again, grateful for the immediate guess.

“--I hope you're being smart about it. The right shelters.”

“Yes. I'm back in classical detective work again, though – I'm mostly done with that.”

“Because you realized that the fight was so very voluntary.”

“For a lot of reasons.”

“Hm. Do you know what comforts me nowadays?”

“Friendship?”

It was a surprising barb which Quil felt almost physically. “No.”

“That was low of me,” said L, “no, of course you deserve friendship. Deserve kindness. There's no question of it. I only blame myself.”

“Job,” he said gently. “'Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble; he cometh up like a flower and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.'”

“How is that comforting? I thought the failure of comfort in the face of real suffering was the whole point of the book.”

“Because it's been said for me already, so I haven't got to say it alone.”

Something about these words, or the sharp way Quil had said them, quieted the two of them in a way they hadn't managed to quiet before. With an expression of soft pain, L rested himself against Quil's side and they felt the sun together, the contrast with the chilly, misted November air.

“Quil, can you go back?”

He said it after several minutes; Quil's mind had wandered to L's childhood, to his strangeness and imperiousness, and everything about the phrase muddled him: the use of his real name, the ambiguous “you,” and back to what?
“Pardon?”

“They say you can't, and they're right, of course, but sometimes I always wonder if the right minds couldn't manage it. Buy back what you've sold, fire the people you've hired, say goodbye backwards, rewind the tape. Who can bring what is pure from the impure?”

“Now you're quoting out of context,” said Quil sternly, “and the New International Version or something similarly wretched, at that.”

“The King James isn't even in English.”

“It is English if you know how to read it. If you love it, it's very clear. Like Shakespeare.” Quil gripped L's arm tightly.

“It's just a clumsy translation. Deliberately archaic when it was made.”

“Whereas the NIV, and all that modern stuff, is just faith – real, heavy, weighted faith -- translated into something scientists or lawyers can understand.”

“You're a scientist.”

“Not anymore.”

“Do you know what's silly?”

“I could give you a long list,” said Quil. “Don't start me. But don't say arguing over Biblical translations; at least that's familiar.”

“Oh, never mind.” L smiled a little, a very little. “I was going to say something about Near, but I like that better.”

There was a brief hush. Quil coughed. “I want to ask...”

“Mhm?”

“Do you still believe that everything Yagami did in your absence was your fault?”

“No,” said L. “I don't. You were right. It was a bit precious of me to think so. I wasn't sure; I doubted myself, just as you doubted me – that's what a reasonable person does. And stupid as it sounds, I couldn't betray him – I kept picturing his dying face, betrayed, and I couldn't do it.”

“Out of love,” said Quil, firmly.

“You think my being with a man now is final proof I was in love with Yagami?”

“Oh, I think precisely that. And I know it's just because of the passage of time, but I find that very forgivable in you. Almost admirable. Christlike.”

“But I wasn't,” said L gently. “There was a good deal of something, but it wasn't a romance.”

“I very much doubt what Christ and Judas had was a romance, either.”

“Please stop,” said L, genuinely flustered. “That isn't how I see it. That has nothing to do with how I see it, or did then.”

“So you do have a bit of faith left – if you have a sense of blasphemy?”

“No. I'm just a prude.”

“I'm sorry, then,” said Quil. “To have offended your prudishness. Shut your eyes.”

L obediently shut them. He looked for a moment at his haggard, sickly face, the smoothness of certain skin on it and the roughness of the rest, looking at him purely as a collection of planes. His face was not relaxed; there was nothing about it that rested.

In B's absence it was possible to pretend. His beautiful thing, come to him at last, as if in a dream or a daydream – his hand stole up and felt lightly, clinically, at the back of his neck.

 

The quiet, humming train took Rue the bare half-hour back to his house outside of Winchester, where he sat down carefully, unsure of what to think. He didn't feel like napping just yet, though it was well after five; instead, he felt a phantom of energy, an animating force which was not entirely appreciated. There seemed no point in going back to work or in calling Yuriy, though he wanted to talk to someone. Eventually he went online, responded to a couple of his acquaintances about the usual things, which always came down to him offering advice (yes, you ought to go to disability services about it; yes, I heard about her; well, if you like him, I suppose age shouldn't matter...) and then went to lie down.

As he lay, “wanting to talk to someone” resolved into something far more specific – he wanted to talk to Quil again; he wanted to spend another half-afternoon, or a whole one, not to measure it out into an anxious hour, but to let it broaden into a generous day. Enough time to share two meals, to ignore each other and wrap up in work, to watch a film. Stilted, pained though the meeting had been, it had also been so achingly familiar – and there were so few familiar things left in the world. Even Yuriy had changed with the years, but Quil was as fixed as a star (though if Quil had told him so, he would have been tempted to lecture him on astronomy, a lecture whose content both of them already knew – that was the charm and the fun and ultimately the complete rest and safety of it, or so it seemed at the moment, so distant from everything that had pulled them apart, and almost asleep).

 

He was finally sleeping when Yuriy arrived. There was the blurred ringing of a phone, caught, but not quite in time -- the room was dim. Yuriy was taking the call quietly, up in the bedroom, and he sat up and looked over the back of the couch until he came down.

“What is it?”

“Light.”

Rue's chest seized. “Dead?”

Yuriy didn't react. “Unaccounted for. Someone did a damned good job of hiding it from us, but Near has a camera in his cell which I don't think anyone knows about – he's gone. Hasn't been there for two hours. Normally he'd only leave for an hour each week; this wasn't even on the schedule.”

“The footage,” said Rue tightly, and Yuriy sat beside him, lit up his reader; Rue caught a glimpse of his anxious face -- somehow it manifested as a glimpse and nothing more.

The footage was nothing. Light – a poor image, his back to them, but unquestionably Light – lay on the bed, napping or meditating; the inner door opened, he opened his eyes, turned, expressionless – the two guards got him up, shackled his hands and led him away. That was all.

“No search,” said Rue -- “no leg irons?”

Yuriy looked at him wordlessly, leaning a little closer. Rue smelled soap and heat.

“Are you going? Don't we have anyone – well. No.”

“Seven a.m. tomorrow,” said Yuriy. “That's the earliest we can go. I did try to get military help, but our name doesn't open the doors it used to – with things costing what they do...”

“Have you contacted them? Asked why?”

“No answer,” said Yuriy. “To mail, to calls.”

“We're being redirected.”

“Yes.”

“Seven.” Rue clapped his hands to his face. “Seven. Really.”

“I tried Linda.”

“That's all you can do. What are your plans? Are you going alone?”

“I wanted to bring you,” said Yuriy. “Veto if you want. You know him best.”

Something in Rue's mind snapped into position, formed from chaos; he nodded, a slight bowing of the head, half-approval and half-submission. “We ought to eat now,” he said, “and then take the train to Heathrow – stay in the hotel. You'll arrive better rested if you can get up at five instead of four.”

Yuriy took his hand, briefly echoing one of the poses of the afternoon; Rue looked down at his hand, sitting politely in Yuriy's, and his mind wandered anthropologically, considering the meaning of the gesture.

 

Yuriy asked him about Quil on the train; he said he didn't want to talk about it yet, sitting in the facing seats with his feet propped up next to Yuriy's hip. He was eating raisins out of a bag, carefully considering each one before putting it into his mouth. They were the only passengers in the car. Yuriy read Light's file one more time; when he looked up again, Rue was still staring at him.

In the hotel, they went to bed immediately. Yuriy watched Rue's back and shoulder, his eyes acclimatizing to the dark, and then cautiously moved closer, slid a hand around him, up his stomach to his chest (warmth and beating and just a touch of fuzz); Rue gave an approving sigh and turned around. They kissed in the dark, hands clutching at each other's flesh – Rue's birdlike grip, the fingers always so strangely sharp, so individually felt. He wasn't hard, and that wasn't unusual, and he obviously wasn't in the mood to take Yuriy in his mouth – he needed to be very relaxed, mildly silly, to enjoy anything like that, anything that struck him as “a bit of a production,” to use his words. Tonight was something else, something anxious and a little dizzy, and they came together in an abstract way, Yuriy pressing himself between Rue's legs, feeling the pressure of Rue's hand on him, a somewhat agonizing and impatient pleasure, but one with its own charms. It took him a long time to come, but that was what he needed, in a way – something that gave a long excuse to kiss Rue, envelop him, fill himself up with him, and when it ended he was exhausted, feeling flushed around the eyes and mouth and very clumsy and hot. Rue had grown aroused and he took hold of him and made him shudder, shut his eyes, sigh into Yuriy's shoulder.

Rue slept; Yuriy didn't.

Chapter 11: Prisoner #45395-066SP

“Good morning. We are now beginning our final descent into Denver, Colorado; the local time is nine forty-five a.m, and the temperature on the ground is ten degrees Celsius. Winds are blowing from the southeast at eleven kilometers per hour. Should be a smooth ride down into Denver, but as a reminder, the fasten-seatbelt light--”

“Rue?”

“I'm awake.”

Yuriy was gathering his things, shoving them into his carry-on bag. “Just making sure.”

He leaned back and they sat quietly, both preoccupied, as the plane landed on the broad, sunny tarmac. Then there was the collection of baggage, the rental (electric car thrumming over a quiet, empty highway, heavily treed and monotonous). They had almost reached their destination when Rue spoke up again.

“You're going to the prison right away?”

“After we shower. And coffee. I feel like death.”

“All right. I can't believe I'm saying this, but don't get too sidetracked by trying to work out who it was. Aside, obviously, from the people who were on duty in the immediate area. I want those names right away, and the names, if possible, of anyone with clearance to cut the power anywhere on the campus. I don't know enough about the place to know whether that's everyone or no one.”

“Okay.”

“Also anyone who's absent.” Rue was going through his bag, looking for his water bottle. “I'll examine the town as best I can. Hopefully nobody's expecting me as well as you -- though I imagine I'll stick out a bit, so that advantage will be brief.” He found the bottle, drank deeply, looking at Yuriy – he looked awful, slapped and sleepless, driving firmly with the wheel gripped in his fists. “Honestly, I feel that I don't know enough to form a theory. If he's the Light I remember, he'll have already turned the situation to his advantage.”

“Could he possibly be the Light you remember?”

“I don't know. Solitary confinement can do awful things to the stablest of minds, and his contact with even the guards is so limited – honestly, I doubt that he was involved in the plot – I suspect this is a kidnapping rather than an escape. But I just don't know what his state of mind could be. Near and his oubliette. I should have paid more attention to this. I shouldn't have just clamped down and tried to forget.”

Yuriy was pulling off of the freeway, into the quiet town, similarly sunny and dappled with post-industrial rust. “You had your own problems,” he said, and then glanced at Rue, struck perhaps by his bluntness; it had surprised him, too.

“At least it's a small place,” said Rue, looking into the bottle. “Unless he's already gone.”

Domestic scene in the hotel: showers, changes of clothing. Rue was still sleepy from the plane trip; he sat on the bed trying to wake himself up while Yuriy rambled at him, fretting about his own appearance, his weight, the fit of his shirt, the color of his tie – nothing more than an effort to keep him awake and attentive, and he ignored the content as it was meant to be ignored. When they were ready he hugged him suddenly, breathing into the side of his neck, and Yuriy embraced him back, nuzzling his hair; he was desperately glad for warmth and pressure. He would have been relieved to accept something more if they'd had time.

 

Rue saw him to his car, then walked to his own in silence. He had finally secured a driver's license since returning to England, though he wasn't particularly confident in his skill.

The main street of Springtown was a hellish, cheap, stuccoed strip of matter, but the moment you drove aside from it, you were plunged into something else – high trees, low warm-looking houses, graveled roads or roads with ancient pavement – an unabashedly beautiful town, and a rather shy one. It surprised him.

He drove and walked for an hour before Yuriy sent him the asked-for lists and a brief note:

 

Rue,

Interesting time. Spoke to group and now interviewing people.

Very tight group. I'll say this, though: there's no air of deception around them at all. Anxiety, yes. A certain amount of resentment. They act almost as if they haven't lost a prisoner; as if my questioning their competence (which I've only done by my presence, I think) is tolerable but insulting rudeness.

But I'm afraid I haven't anything else to give you yet. Are you still driving through town? Anything at all?

Fuck in a bag,

YAK

 

After a series of brief visits to the sick and off-duty prison employees, he turned his attention to the town's isolated and abandoned spots, places where one might be securely held (a formulation of words which suggested an embrace). These were almost too abundant, unfortunately. Like many small American towns, this one had shrunk in the increasing summer sun and with the draw of cheaper power in the city; even before the crisis, the speculative housing booms and crashes had built up encrustations of low, heavy houses, small mansions which now sat abandoned on the edges of the living town.

Indeed, he eventually reached a neighborhood that was entirely dead, at least in human terms. Cats sunned on the sidewalks; trees encroached quite boldly, making cancerous fluffs of deep green on roofs and within windows.

He drove down the main street of empty houses, distracted by his interest in it, wondering whether Light's jailers had taken him here. Any activity on the streets would be so immediately visible; it was so much easier to camouflage a hiding place deep in the town or outside of it – this was a bad choice, but he saw how it might be tempting.

 

YAK,

No.

More usefully, your impression of the group as remarkably “tight” or “closed” tends to corroborate mine. No one unaccounted for. Now driving about abandoned tract. Update please.

RR

 

Rue got out of the car, slamming the door on the warmth inside. The spread of houses was silent as it had looked. He walked forward a few blocks, feeling a surge of incoherent high emotion, processing information, trying to make the gears mesh. He turned back to the car. Then he heard a cry.

It was faint but clear. Not nearby, unless there had been some trick of sound, but preserved on the wind blowing into town.

 

“Yes?”

“Yuriy?”

“Yes, how is it?”

“For what it's worth, I heard Light's voice. Just a yell, but I know it's him. I'm in the extreme southern part of town, in the group of abandoned houses. Nothing much else up here but farms.”

“This was done on our authority.”

“What?”

“I was just told that this was done on L's authority,” said Yuriy, in rising frustration. “Nobody here has any idea why I'm so angry. The disconnect in our views of what's going on was pretty big, so big really that nobody could explain the very simple situation to anybody else. Shit, Rue. He's already gone. They want to move on with their day.”

“I don't think he's gone.”

“Where are you?”

“Sending it. There's a Dairy Queen six blocks south; do you have the map?”

“Yeah.”

Under a sign advertising PEANUT BUSTER and BLIZZARD CAKE, among other dangerous treats, Rue parked his car and got into Yuriy's.

“You're sure it was from far off? He didn't see you?”

“I don't know.”

Yuriy thumbed the parking brake irritably. “I should have known that this was going to get too complicated to keep under wraps. Near and I are going to have words.”

“Hostage situation,” said Rue. “Essentially. B, maybe.”

“Rue, we really don't know --”

“Forget it. There's a good chance this will end in Light's getting shot; no way around it. Depends on how serious our immediate opposition is. Depends, I guess, on whether he's escaped, but in that case why would he make a sound – unless, I don't know, he was trying to get my personal attention? He saw me – but for some reason didn't come? I don't know. To hell with it. You drive. Take us out of town a little.”

“Keep your head down if we're doing that.”

Yuriy drove. Rue obeyed the instruction, but he could see that there were woods ahead and to one side of the road – nothing thick, though; nothing in which one might hide effectively. Domestic, well-kept sorts of woods. Another drive; another stop, and then Yuriy's body tightened.

“You can get up. He's alone.”

The white shape was retreating rapidly, but Rue recognized Light's gait and he got out of the car, plunging into the wooded area after him, Yuriy not far behind. A chase followed – a rather sad chase; Light tired easily, and once he'd glanced over his shoulder and visibly recognized Rue, his shock and indecision slowed him down even more. Yuriy tackled him against a tree and firmly cuffed him.

“How did you escape?” he asked, in a businesslike way, and Light looked at them, retreating almost into Yuriy's hands – he looked much the same, Rue thought – shockingly the same; hair artlessly chopped very short, greying, and lines in the face, but they were baby-lines in smooth unsunned skin. In his white pajama-like outfit he reminded them of Near – and at first they worried rather that he had suffered some strong concussion or traumatic shock, so confused and febrile did he seem, and so unequal to the task of meeting their eyes.

 

The Russian or at any rate Slavic one had a very strong friendly grip on his arms; he shuddered with blissful horror at the unique pressure of his hot hands, irreplicable by any machine. Ryuzaki (it was indeed he, though Light had not been certain) looked at him unfathomably.

“They were about to move me. I broke away; I ran.” He turned his head to the side and felt the tears coming again, hot and vaguely foul to him, and the clogging of the nose. There was a tremendous cooling breeze here.

“Okay. Light, we're not going to hurt you. Or take you back to where you were. We're just going to go to the car, okay?”

“I don't need 'okay,'” he said through the tears -- “I'm not hysterical. I'm just having some trouble...”

“Well, whether it's okay or not, we're going to the car.”

“Ryuzaki!”

“Yes?” said the cautious, thick little voice; he couldn't see him.

“I missed you,” he said, in Japanese this time, instinctively.

He could still see nothing through the tears and the unbearable meeting of the eye; he sensed and heard, however, a catching of breath and tensing of muscle.

“This is something you might have thought of before,” said Ryuzaki – Light was surprised to hear his English voice, so measured even compared with his tone in Japanese.

“It's true.”

“Put him in the car, Josef,” said Ryuzaki more loudly. The Slav hustled him along and secured him on the floor of the car's backseat. He put up no resistance, but lay huddled during a brief stop – Ryuzaki ran somewhere and returned, he felt the car shudder as he came and went -- and remained bundled onto the floor during the long freeway trip north, facedown, blanket-covered, his hands and feet cuffed to the arms of the front seats.

He recovered on the trip – recovered enough to clear the liquid from his eyes and the initial madness of release, once and for all (he erroneously thought) from his lips. He began to wonder who, precisely, this Josef was; clearly he was some sort of L-agent, perhaps even a Watari of sorts, but something about the way that Josef had looked at him (not about the way they'd looked at each other; that had a deliberate, trained neutrality) made him wonder if they were not a couple – just as he had always wondered, in his moments of self-indulgence, before he'd learned otherwise, whether the ambiguously part-white Ryuzaki was Watari's son. It was no more than a slip of an idea, a fleeting insight, something about how firmly he placed himself between – but this was nonsense, wasn't it?

Both of them had worn wedding rings, though. Each was married to someone . Strange to imagine Ryuzaki married – strange to imagine his being physically passionate about anything, except possibly cake. As for the gender of his paramour, neither would surprise him. Ryuzaki was quiet and vaguely limp; he was forceful and had a temper. That was the precise depth of Light's prior thoughts on the matter.

He was not afraid. They were not going to kill him, and if they were taking him to another prison, then it would at least be a change – though he would miss, treacherous or no, the Springtown staff. He had liked them; they had been kind to him, in a limited way, or at least they had always brought his meals on time, and he wondered what effect this pathetic fondness had had on his personality, the contemplation of which always fascinated him, as a flower fascinates a botanist.

He was glad that his state upon being found had led him to apologize (as he saw it) to Ryuzaki. That was proper; his feeling on the matter deserved expression, and his sincerity of manner had been something that the day-to-day Light could not express, whether he was sincere or not.

The car left the freeway and entered a town. Josef drove around for a while and then parked, with the intent, he explained, of re-outfitting Light; Ryuzaki took the blanket away and let him look around a little at a parking lot and dying brown mall. When Light looked back at him, he was staring.

“I'll go in,” said Josef, incorporating a slight hint of question; Ryuzaki nodded, and twisted himself around in his seat, holding a gun – a different gun from the one Light had glimpsed under Josef's jacket; it was a plain black semiautomatic pistol, a characterless weapon. Josef poked his head back in for a moment to inquire as to Light's shoe size and inseam.

“I'm not going to go anywhere,” said Light, when they were alone. “I presume I'm safer with you than out there, if you and your organization care enough to retrieve me. And if you're afraid that I'll try to escape, surely having guns around is a bad idea; I could snatch one.”

“You don't use guns. They're illegal in Japan.”

“They're legal here.”

“You know how to use one?”

“I'm an NPA agent,” said Light, and was surprised to see a twitch in Ryuzaki's forehead, a refined movement; perhaps he had forgotten that Light had had an existence after him. “And I think the odds that I can find a way to get ahold of it are better than the odds that you'll hit me if I run, or will shoot without hesitation.”

“Indulge me,” said Ryuzaki tiredly. He held the gun loosely, finger well off the trigger, and did not point it directly at Light; exaggerated care, but Light appreciated it.

“I did miss you.”

“Just as earlier, I think this demonstrates a lack of foresight on your part.”

“After you had gone,” said Light, taking an agonized pleasure simply in answered speech – not caring as much as Ryuzaki thought, perhaps, for the precise reply -- “I --”

“You screamed; you swore revenge, you generally acted as if we were a pair of heroes in the elaborate shounen manga you pretend to others that you believe you live in. Eru no Monogatari. ”

“You know that's not what I was about to say.”

“No, I don't. I don't believe in precognition.” The words and tone cut Light off yet again, and he glanced out the window towards a small, solemn parade of schoolchildren wearing paper name tags, crossing a street safely some distance away.

“I didn't have anybody to talk to.”

“You never talked to me.”

“Of course not, but I had nobody who understood me. If you'd prefer to see it that way, it contributed enormously to all that went wrong.”

“So,” said Ryuzaki -- “I won't rise to 'if you'd prefer to see it that way'; plainly I wouldn't – but you attempt to praise me by saying your eventual downfall was accomplished because of my absence ?”

“To an extent.”

“How did you do it?”

“What?”

He was genuinely confused, but Ryuzaki looked insulted – suddenly and increasingly incensed, actually, foot-stompingly quick, and this was surprising. “How did you kill us?”

Light was curiously reluctant to answer, and he searched for the emotion before realizing it was distaste – disgust, though with Ryuzaki rather than himself. And it was a more general disgust than one specific to the question. It came without clear reason.

“The shinigami,” he said, “the one you met.”

“Her? Why?”

“She wanted to defend Misa.”

Ryuzaki didn't answer him; Light could think of nothing to immediately say.

Yuriy shopped fast: an off-the-rack suit of black wool (he wanted to dress him in black, nor for symbolism but for simplicity and the temptation, the sort of small private embarrassment he loved to inflict on people he didn't like, to kit him up as Patrick McGoohan in the first episode of The Prisoner ) – as such, the suit and three shirts, including a black polo. Belt, pajamas, underwear, shoes.

He knew that this wasn't the time for such things. Even in his hyper-attuned professional state, in which he carefully substituted humor for emotion, he knew that giddy references to Rue's show were too much, too distracting -- but Light made him nervous, and at a time like this he could not accept nerves. As he paid, he thought of Rue patiently sitting, holding the gun on him, and then of Light escaping him somehow, God knew how, biting him, lunging at him in a way that bent the flimsy seat rather than the hard cuffs, and his hands began to sweat.

He ran back to the car; Rue sat as he'd left him. He handed Light back his presents and uncuffed him so he could change, which he did quickly, casually, stripping to his underwear, not really seeming to care that they watched him.

 

In fact, Light didn't care. His life had been a series of cavity searches and exchanges of modest pajamas; clothing meant little to him, and when he was done, he didn't feel newly human so much as unusually constricted by even the rather baggy fit of the suit.

Ryuzaki cuffed him again and re-covered him with the blanket, pulling it over his head with both hands; then he heard, muffled, his voice -- “What?”

There were sounds of cloth and movement, and an electronic beep – some device Josef had removed from his pocket as Ryuzaki had covered him up. Then a fleshy sound, Ryuzaki tonguing his teeth. Then there was a long conversation in Russian, pointedly toneless.

Chapter 12: Denver

At a business hotel in suburban Denver, Josef let them out and let Ryuzaki escort Light to another room, quiet and very strongly lemon-smelling, while he dispensed with the rented car. Light went quietly, stumbling and unhappy with the streams of small stones on the asphalt, and with the smell of the electric cars in the focused late-afternoon light. When Ryuzaki cuffed him to the headboard of one of the beds, however, he requested that Ryuzaki open the curtains. He did so, and Light settled back to look at the red-yellow sun, covering consistently the side of the white hotel building opposite; below, in a blue dot of a pool, an anxious wind played and children raced perilously around the sparkling concrete edge.

Light heard the creaking of springs; Ryuzaki had lain down in the other bed, fully clothed except for his light sneakers, looking cold and relieved. Light watched him, feeling an expressionless stiffness in his own face, as his eyes grew heavy and body deanimated – there was a light rise in his chest and stomach, and Light realized he had gone immediately to sleep.

He sat up, insofar as it was possible, and watched more attentively. Ryuzaki slept – his eyebrows, Light realized, which had previously been sparse (why?) to the point of nonexistence, had grown in rather heavy; all that long parasitic hair lay around his shoulders – thin whorls of it, pinned beneath his sleeping head, crowned him stiffly. His lips lay very thin in a thin face; his skin was loose – an odd effect; loose skin, loose flesh on a bony body.

Ryuzaki, when alive (it was difficult to think of him as alive again now) had possessed his own incandescence – a sense of internal burning, of permanent energy, of cold fusion. His atoms hurtled always inward. His eyes shone with dull glassy wisdom; his skinny fingers, which appeared many-jointed through the prominence of knuckles and scantness of flesh on their backs, were coated with smooth rubbery skin and permitted to roam freely over the objects he desired.

And yet he had never given the expression of an exhaustible resource. He had been fully stable – that was part of Light's horror of him, both personally and as his professional tormentor; this sense that he would not stop; could not stop; was powered by unusual engines that fed on odd dews and combinations of snacks; had an internal gyroscope; slept rarely and irregularly according to a system. It was bizarre and upsetting to see him sleep now.

 

An unknown amount of time slid by. Josef returned with some cartons; it was Thai food, curries and vegetables, and smelled good – leakage of water stained the outer surfaces, but Light, who was uncomfortable now with most things like that, found it faintly voluptuous rather than unpleasant. There was a plastic cup of water. He was uncuffed and he ate – the chopsticks still natural in his hand, his mouth moving awkwardly through the unaccustomed, drippy textures. Josef sat in an office chair, heavily, looking at his computer-device again; after a few minutes of glassy-eyed breathing, he stood with a sharp effort and went to wake Ryuzaki. The latter seemed irritable at this, showing a bit of tooth and brushing his hair back, but he crawled over the bed like a cat and sat on the floor to put some noodles inside him, watching Light hard as Josef conducted an intent typed conversation.

“We're leaving tomorrow at nine a.m.,” he told Ryuzaki at last. “And --”

They spoke in Russian again, more animatedly. Josef came to re-attach him to the bed. He felt his wrists pinched by large, professional hands. Josef's mouth was tight and narrow; his face was seen at an odd, unflattering angle. Light closed his eyes.

“Where are we going?”

“To England.”

“To another prison?”

“No.”

“To my execution?”

“Of course not.” An unnecessary yank on the cuffs.

“It may be meaningless,” said Ryuzaki, hunched over the computer; Josef answered him opaquely, and Light, who had spent the previous night tied to a chair, and who had not eaten and drunk to his satisfaction in some time, succumbed to the buzzing of their talk and went to sleep.

 

He woke hours later – it was full night, and Ryuzaki and Josef's anxiety had bloomed. It was present in the room as a sweat, a scent, a sense of movement. The fact that they betrayed it rather than disguise it as anger was enough cause for him to become anxious, too. Ryuzaki was typing furiously on a keyboard plugged into one of the devices – coding, Light rather thought, though he had no evidence of it; Josef was invisible, but light from the bathroom and a series of characteristic sounds of cloth and rapid sighing demonstrated that he was changing clothes. They spoke to each other softly still, but in English.

“--Have you got her yet?”

“You'll know.”

Josef left the bathroom, wearing a shirt, a tie, a jacket; the shirt was untucked and he had on his pajama legs, nice sedate stripes, Light thought.

“Trousers,” said Ryuzaki warningly.

“Fuck it, Rue.”

“What if you stand up. They will see how flat-footed you've been caught.”

“I won't stand up.”

“As a nation, can we take that risk?” Ryuzaki spoke with a firm and even merciless wryness, which sent Josef into the bathroom again.

They were actually sitting in front of the computer (now propped with a flimsy incorporated stand) for several minutes more, even after Ryuzaki had finished his machinations, for whenever the program was to begin; during this time, they began speaking in Russian again. Ryuzaki's tone was advisory, firm, but a new strain had entered it – fondness, admiration; talking Josef up to himself, and then he reached over and gave Josef a hard, sudden kiss, after which Josef's face changed and softened and the lines under his eyes got wet, like a child's. Another kiss, on the cheek, and a violent squeeze.

Light realized then the depth of the problem, the seriousness of whatever the upcoming conversation was meant to solve or explain. It was not so much that he had guessed nothing about their relationship – nor that he thought they personally cared whether he had; but they had been so professional, and yet here was Ryuzaki, letting that mouth, which had hardened before any word to him, soften and open for a kiss.

Ryuzaki leaned forward and, with five fingertips, pushed through Josef's very short hair; he smiled at him, and actually turned his office chair toward the computer.

The conversation began; rapid, negotiatory – or conciliatory? The tones gave little away, and Light could not see the woman with whom Josef spoke from this angle, nor gather anything besides the fact that the woman was a person of power and that Josef commanded impressively wasteful splashes of calm and diplomacy in his native language which he could not in English. Their talk went on for a great while. It seemed to wind down. It did not end. The lights went out; the computer stopped and died; the light dwindled to a dot; Josef let out a loud growling sigh like the sound of a weary wolf in an animated film. Ryuzaki spoke in Russian, resigned and clipped. Then he heard Josef get up and go to the window.

Outside, all the lights were out; the ambient radiation from the stars was the only illumination.

Ryuzaki stood behind Josef, hands on his shoulders; then he said something very quietly, mouth under Josef's ear. There was a quick anxious nod from the silhouetted head, and a hand left a mouth which Light knew was white-edged.

“We'll be back soon, Light,” said Ryuzaki, and he went to put on his coat. Light didn't answer; he hadn't expected one, plainly, had spoken as if he were the only sentient person in the room. The two men departed – propping the door first -- and there was a long silence.

When they returned some time later, they had two little rafts of supplies – food and bottled water. Josef was still wearing his suit; he was beginning to remove it now, depositing jacket and belt as if he wouldn't see them again; he remained clothed, but still moved immodestly – thinking perhaps that he was less visible than he was, his eyes having been acclimatized to the relative brightness outside.

 

“We should do something about a car,” said Rue.

“No. I'm going to bed.”

“You're not electronic, Josef.”

Yuriy was seized by a violent, unfocused desire; he knew that Rue retreated from him for a completely correct reason, but he needed to grasp him, to clench his arms. “No,” he said heedlessly, “but sometimes I think you are.”

“Am I?”

“Sorry.”

Rue continued, pressed on, like an actor playing a scene off a less-practiced companion. “Our only hope of getting there quickly is to be getting there now. People will loot and panic. The roads --”

“The roads will be impossible anyway. They'll be worse now than tomorrow. Wait out whatever happens in the next twelve hours; go on foot starting tomorrow. It's not more than ninety kilometers' walk.”

“Ninety kilometers' walk through God knows what conditions.”

“We have guns.”

“They have guns,” said Rue.

“ Tonight they have guns, they're panicking, planes are still in the air, cars on the road, and it's dark.”

“I still think we could get a car through if we take side streets and really tear through it.”

“What kind of car? Has to have a carburetor. No fuel injection, because that's electronic.”

“Right.”

“So a pre-1990 car. Classic.” The words, the information – it comforted him too much, falsely, his easy access to it all. “Find a classic car right now and hot-wire it or commandeer it?”

“Didn't Crown Vics have one for a few years after 1990?”

“I don't know. Would you like to go look for one now?”

“Bicycles,” said Rue, a little shortly.

“You want us to ride bikes ? Cute little bikes?”

“Light is not coming with me, I cannot do it alone, and I refuse to go to bed tonight without ascertaining how we'll be moving at faster than a walk tomorrow.”

“Fine. Where do you want to go? Target?”

“It may be open. These places stay open all night, and they can't know what's happened.”

“Do you have any cash?”

“Naturally.”

Yuriy sighed, a sick feeling in his temples. “Okay.”

“You'll thank me.”

“Shh.”

 

Outside, Rue took Yuriy's hand; it was very chilly now, and he wished he'd brought something warmer even than than his overcoat. Normally that and his jumper sufficed for him in almost all weather – tonight he shook a bit on contact with the outside air, and his feet curled in the hated socks. He tasted unsavory things on the cold wind.

“Gloves for us all,” said Yuriy. “Helmets. Sneakers for him. Anorak for you.”

“Don't worry so.”

“I'm fine.”

“You realize, right, that this is not your fault – or two or three percent your fault at the most?”

“Not really. I hate even to be part of a chain of mismanagements.” He was choked; he did not really want to talk about it this way. “Smell that?”

“Yes. Burning fuel, far off. Very bad. Fortunately, I think it will rain.”

“I hate this kind of conversation.” Yuriy made a little throat-clearing cough. “Covering every little eventuality, thinking about burning fuel and hard-man things like that. It makes you feel competent but it nearly always means you've made a mistake somewhere. Stacks of mistakes.”

“We're doing well,” said Rue firmly. “Light's not going anywhere. You saw his face.”

Yuriy squeezed his hand, but was quiet the rest of the way to the store. Rue felt as if he was leading him towards the big, logo-emblazoned glass structure using all the social art he possessed.

They peered in. There were employees inside, talking, sitting on the edges of counters together, a camping lantern between them; the doors were manually locked, but a knock brought an employee.

“We're not really open,” said the boy, apologetically.

“Why are you still here?” asked Rue.

“Well, we don't know. Maybe the lights will be on again in a second.”

“They won't tonight,” he said, trying to choose his words carefully – wanting to warn the boy, who was florid with acne and had the expression of someone painfully more intelligent than his working persona, which made him stupid with exhaustion and customer service; he wanted to adopt him. “The failure, whatever it is, is systemic – an overload of the whole grid. Like New York in 2008, or Paris in 2017. You can tell from the sheer size and simultaneity of it. I'd suggest you bring home some food.”

“Oh, okay,” said the boy, plainly uncertain how to respond to this, whether it would do to be friendly or to question Rue's expertise in case he was being made a fool of. “And definitely go home tonight, I guess.”

“Absolutely nothing will happen tonight.”

“Is there anything you two want? Well – obviously you came in for something --”

“We want bicycles, please.”

“I'm not actually sure that the register can handle any transactions --”

“I'll leave cash,” said Rue -- “surely they'll understand. And two hundred dollars for the four of you to buy trail mix.”

“Well, that should be fine, then, I guess. Thanks.” Flattered by the bribe, the boy snapped a key and the sliding door opened a little; he gripped it and let them in. He had to use the lantern to show them back.

Rue admired his silhouette in the dark, the paternal urge losing its irony. In silence, in quiet rooms, it was so easy to get sentimental about children -- something to care for and teach; something to break his heart the way he'd broken Quil's -- something he and Yuriy would never be offered, aging, isolated, untraditional couple that they were, with one party never quite well and both of them deep in secretive work. Even if they took a child, bought one, made one with a surrogate, what could they possibly offer? A facsimile of their own lives; a second-generation photocopy of Quil's. That's how you make B, Rue thought. You try to have everything you want, you try to remake your life in someone else's, feeling your age as you are, and you make a monster. Better to be like his own parents: have children without trying. Give them silly clever names, names lifted from exotic alphabets, puns on the French word for “wing.” Don't think too much about what you're doing.

Yuriy was completely silent throughout the transaction. Once outside, he quickly grasped two of the bikes and let Rue wheel the third.

Just a hundred meters from the building, there were stopped cars in the street – abandoned now, with no sign of damage; two cars lay fender-bent at a less lucky intersection. They were both surprised at how few people were milling in the streets, but after all, it was quiet out here – the sort of suburb that fell asleep at nine without really intending to. The roads were still blocked enough that Rue felt Yuriy's views on leaving were vindicated. They may as well rest.

Light lay silently when they returned, Yuriy wheeling the bikes up the stairs and into the room. They quickly got ready for bed – Light was let out for a moment to use the bathroom; he absent-mindedly tried to flush and was returned to the bed in an embarrassed mood. Rue rubbed Yuriy's back, grateful for the privacy of the covers, and felt his breath change as he dropped away, rushing headlong into sleep, so exhausted from bad-night and plane and investigation and drive and failure that he did not even show visible fear of the anticipated dreams – as he usually did, to Rue anyway.

“Ryuzaki.”

“Yes?”

“What's going on?”

He spoke half-sleeping himself, cringing towards Yuriy. “It's what's called an electromagnetic pulse attack. You detonate a nuke high up in the atmosphere and it takes down computers and electronic systems of all kinds.”

“I see.”

“Mhm.”

“Who did it?”

“Complicated answer,” said Rue.

“Did you have warning?”

“Obviously not enough.”

“We shouldn't be running. -- Where are we going to tomorrow, anyway?”

“An Air Force base. They are protected against such things.”

“We shouldn't go. We should help.”

“Help with what? What can we give? We're not doctors; we're not mechanics.”

“We know the truth.” So solemnly pronounced.

“The truth, while helpful, will be impossible to disseminate in any way except by spreading rumors. The Air Force people, if they have brains in their heads, will find some way to explain it. I don't trust people to disseminate rumors correctly. And we take up resources that people who don't have a lift out can use.”

“I still don't like it.”

“This is not your choice,” he said, letting his voice soak up as much irritation as it liked; otherwise, they spoke quickly, quietly.

The next thing Light said was as urgent as the previous. “Did you ever read a book called The Picture of Dorian Gray ?”

“Yes. It's a classic in English. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Did you like it?”

“I don't believe I did.”

“I didn't, either, but I thought it had some application to me.”

“That is probable, though I have no idea why.”

“You sleep a good deal more now – I was surprised to see you napping.”

“Yes.”

“Are you entirely well?”

“Nobody is.”

“I'd forgotten,” said Light, “what you know how to do with people's politeness, if the business end wanders too close to you.”

“I'm sorry you forgot.”

Light seemed to give up at that point; he said some pleasantry, and Rue answered it, and he lay for a long time, as long as he could before his sweet, constricted blood began to thrum and tell him to sleep, hoping that Light would precede him. He did not. He wanted to crawl very close to Yuriy, to let the heat of his skin soothe him, but he couldn't stand the idea of Light seeing him soothed (even as a lunar shape moving in the dark; he saw Light's pale cheek and nose well enough) and so he merely shut his eyes and, at the appropriate moment, gave in.

 

Light awoke in daylight. He was still in the chintzy cuddle of the half-abandoned hotel, quiet, without the hum of heat or a/c; cold; with white light shining through the white curtain-linings, so oddly biological and soft, which he remembered from past hotel rooms in which he had slept or trysted dramatically with women he hadn't liked.

It was easier than he'd thought it would be, now that he was free and had been for a full day, to handle the stimuli. Perhaps there was a slight letdown in the fact that the outdoors had been released from his head, but he felt nothing more than pleasure at recalling these vast color plates, with sensual equipment, of farmland and the areas outside of cars.

Ryuzaki slept in the next bed – visible largely as a heap of hair buried among floral, slick duvet; audible largely as a continuing sniffle and swallow. Light awoke just as Josef came in, crouched, woke Ryuzaki, handed him a bottle of water, and spoke to him coaxingly.

Ryuzaki moaned pointlessly. Josef sat next to him, clothed, and did something on a sheet of paper; eventually, he poked Ryuzaki's shoulder lightly, said, “Four letters, 'Extinct language, spoken in some parts.' No letter cues,” and Light realized that he was doing, of all things, a crossword.

“Norn,” said Ryuzaki, after a very long pause.

“That would make sense. I got 'sophia' for 'Greek wisdom'; I think this one's got goddesses as its theme, minor goddesses.”

Ryuzaki said something to him in Russian. Light sighed pantingly, wishing he'd drop the linguistic mask, but recognizing, obviously, the reason. It made him tired to know it was him.

 

They got going in what felt like midmorning; three fresh shiny bikes, panniers heavily laden although they had abandoned most of their belongings, sweat on their backs almost immediately. Josef was dressed perfectly for the occasion – brown cords; tan sport jacket; slim black sneakers – as if he'd suspected a long bicycle trek would be in the cards. They headed for the city, vaguely north and east; Josef remembered the GPS reading for the base, though they would have to secure directions once they got closer.

From the start, the journey was difficult. Light was grateful for Ryuzaki's frequent (if calm and businesslike) requests for breaks; without such breaks, the challenge of getting re-used to the bike would have become even more daunting. As it was, he found the fast-rushing, big-domed world a bit too much – when he'd been running, he now realized (with the exasperating sense that he was not so recovered as he felt; was it not simple enough?) it had somehow seemed less real, with a video-game feeling. Adrenaline had made him feel as if he'd floated a little, anyway, and his stumbles, the uneven ground, the pale powdery dirt, had been absolutely irrelevant to his interests and mood.

Whereas on the bike it moved too fast. There was too much to see and too many light particles cramming the air. When they put the bikes down to rest on a bench or a patch of lawn, he found himself coughing or trying to curl where he sat, fighting various compulsive urges.

 

The terrain was calmer than you'd expect. Cars sat abandoned, some of them mortally wounded, but almost none of them occupied. Light supposed that the late-night nature of the breakdown had helped, as had the basically mechanical nature of the cars' brakes – not that he knew whether brakes were still essentially mechanical; he guessed, from the result.

The first actual body was in one of a smashed twin-pair of cars at the very center of an intersection; the odd thing was that the whole car was covered in a weighted sheet or tablecloth, so that the whole windowed area was invisible, and they only ascertained it was a body because Josef dismounted, came over and checked. This incident seemed strongly indicative of the general attitude toward these events, at least of the moment; it worried them all a little that no emergency personnel had even made a gesture of help.

As they rode toward the city proper, the cars very slowly picked up. So did the overt carnage and the passersby, more people on bikes mostly; a few big boxes were pried open, with people toting out bottled water, food, blankets, clothes.

 

At first, they rode nonstop, taking a brief break about every half-hour, but as the day wore on they grew tired – Light got a bit more used to the outdoors, but the mental strain of getting used to it began to affect him, as did a creeping but devastating sunburn, the sun feasting on his indoor skin. Josef seemed to be a creature of strength more than stamina, and Ryuzaki set an even slower pace.

He displayed no outward signs of fatigue, but mentioned it cooly and regularly; when they rested, sitting against concrete dividers, or on benches, or on grass, cooling their legs but feeling at the chill of their wind-beaten faces, he snacked thoroughly, carefully, consciously, as if aiming for just the right mix of something scientific. Fruit and nuts and bread. Once Light also saw him take a pill, and as he took it, he caught a glimpse of a medical bracelet.

“Are you a diabetic?” he finally asked -- conversationally, hazarding a guess; at this point he was not even aware that there were diabetics who did not take insulin. They were on the side of the freeway; a car sat abandoned fifty meters ahead, and another twenty meters behind, damaged but not destroyed. The sky was increasingly thick with clouds.

“Are you a detective?” Josef snapped, more angrily than Light would have expected; he could not tell if Josef was telling him not to pry, or correcting a faulty English syntax, or making some more esoteric point about the determination of identity by occupation or illness, or indeed suggesting that the fact should be obvious. Ryuzaki gave no obvious response except a stretch and a sigh.

“I am a detective,” said Light, “however debased, and I know very well what you're doing.”

“Taking my glucose?”

“Shutting down everything I say. It's painfully obvious. I've done it a hundred times”

“I just told you,” said Ryuzaki, “that I'm taking my glucose.”

“We're professionals and that's what professionals do,” said Josef.

“But the problem with the entirely silent treatment is that when you do give away a fact or clue, I know it's enough of a problem, or a significant enough factor, that it's impossible to disguise. Besides the fact that there's no general point using tactics I know. You don't have to believe that I don't mean you any ill, but --”

“I'm a little too busy right now with other things to sink each pertinent fact in oceans of Bond chatter,” said Josef.

“For example, you're not in charge, are you, Ryuzaki?”

Ryuzaki coughed non-productively. “You keep putting them as questions.”

Light had been shocked by the realization; he narrowed his eyes now and gripped Ryuzaki's left arm (he felt Josef gripping his own left, with rather more force, at precisely the same spot). “You haven't got the autonomy to give me information or not as you judge fit. Neither of you do – but otherwise, someone like you, specifically, would be more open. You always were open with me before.”

“Light, shut up,” said Ryuzaki, shaking his hand off. “You don't have to perform for us.”

“I'm not performing. Performing is the last thing I'm doing.”

“You are. You are showing off. I'll give you this, all right?” Ryuzaki finished his snack and sealed off the bag. “I will confirm the facts you've deduced already. One, I am diabetic, among other things. Two, my husband's name is not Josef, and my name remains an assumed one.”

Light wanted to rise to “husband,” but feared looking as if he had missed something; he was sure Ryuzaki had buried the fact in other speech to produce precisely this effect. “Do you think I have a notebook with me, then?”

“I think nothing and know nothing.”

“Are you in charge?”

“That is not a fact you've deduced already,” said Ryuzaki. “But feel free to chat.”

“Let's get going again,” said Josef briskly.

“My question,” said Ryuzaki, standing up and pulling his bike off of the road, “is what you will chat about, now that you've been informed of the option. What do you do for fun?”

“What do you?”

“Sleep.”

“Why?”

“People can't live for more than ten days or so without it,” said Ryuzaki. “And I am a cautious man. Are you both ready to go?”

 

They rode past a tree nursery, with flicking rows of young birches, and Rue found himself focusing on the back of Light's sweaty, sunburnt neck and thinking, with some degree of pain, of the removed, abstracted mood with which he sometimes greeted passion and confusion – a mood which he had now inhabited, far beyond the capacity of its design, since he'd been told of Light's recall to life.

The fancy now struck him that this was not a series of moods, but a single mood, to which he regularly returned – always identical, even if he was different. Perhaps it was more than that, even – a story he was telling to himself, through which he drifted without autonomous motion, taking it up each time as if nothing had been interrupted. Light was at the start of the story; Light was at the end of it.

This was not a function of being drawn to Light. He was as repelled from him as anyone might be when confronted with a person who has helped to create oneself. The very fact of having been made by Light meant that Light was obsolete. And yet there was this sense that he had held back a secret, had not quite signed his work. He did not want him to sign it, but he wanted – he supposed – he supposed he simply wanted more information.

The pain of thought echoed the pain of overexertion; he took a breath of thick air and tried to concentrate solely on the passing trees.

Chapter 13: Josef

They took the next break in a park, which was rather crowded. The clouds had persisted, but they'd insulated and warmed the earth beyond the usual November chill, and a couple of families were barbecuing hot dogs and sausages down at the other end of the mall. The smell of hot food exhausted Yuriy oddly. He settled onto a bench and stretched out his legs; Rue and Light joined him, Rue sitting close to Yuriy without quite touching him, and there were several minutes of silence. Yuriy wondered what the others were thinking about. They were probably, he decided, wondering the same thing about him and each other.

They heard the slamming of a helicopter long before they saw it; it appeared behind their backs, and Rue and Yuriy turned – Light leapt up almost before they had reacted to the sight and began trying to signal it, running backwards and flinging his arms around in a way that Yuriy found paradoxically cool. He made a lot of noise and movement, but the copter sailed harmlessly by and he threw himself into the grass, quickly and cleanly exhausted.

“Why didn't you try?” he asked, as soon as he had breath -- “perhaps they would've paid some attention if there were three of us!”

“What are we going to do?” asked Rue. “How on earth were we going to communicate to any level of effect? Construct a burning Gothic 'L' from gasoline and rags? Everyone will be trying.”

“Those people didn't.”

“They don't know what's happening.”

“Then why do you think everyone will?”

“More to the point, I wonder who was in it,” said Yuriy.

“Us, if we'd gone last night,” said Rue.

“Rue, stop.”

“It came from the northeast,” said Light. “The base is that direction. It'll come back. Time enough to construct your 'L' signal, if you want to deign.”

“My alternate self will loop, not come back on a linear path. He's scouting.”

“Maybe he isn't.”

“Then we'll wait for a few minutes. That's fine.” Rue swigged a little water. “Just sit. If it comes back, I promise I'll scream the loudest of any of us.”

They sat obediently for a few minutes – Yuriy felt hot acidic rebellion in his muscles; he was glad enough to rest. Rue's hair was down. His black jumper was rattier than ever, and he saw white shirt fibers beneath it. Light hunched, shivering a little as his body cooled, still jumpily reacting to the smell of food.

Finally, he asked almost belligerently: “Then do you know Brendan Behan?”

“No,” said Rue.

“He danced up and down the street,” said Yuriy vaguely; he was thinking of the Pogues, trying to remain disengaged from the conversation in favor of watching Light's body language, which right now was tight and careful, moving mostly towards Rue. He felt muscles tensing in his abdomen. “I don't know who he is.”

“A playwright and an author. He wrote my favorite book.”

“What book?” asked Rue.

“ Borstal Boy. ” Light's face had become strange. He seemed regretful, jealous – as if he were confessing an intimacy whose release he had expected to find more satisfying. Nonetheless he hurried on. “It's an autobiography. I understand that he was a prolific author, but our library had only this book, and it surprised me that they had even that. Normally, there weren't any books about crime and terrorism and so forth. Perhaps it slipped through because it is about a boy, or because most of it is about his imprisonment, a topic we could hardly avoid.”

Rue stopped briefly to take out another banana.

“Don't eat them all the first day,” said Yuriy irritably.

“The bags get easier to handle when I carry the fruit inside me. It's about crime and terrorism?”

“Yes. He is an Irish terrorist. And he's part of a conspiracy to bomb docks in England.“ Light told the story with efficient little movements of the hands. “He gets caught and sent away, but because he's a little underage, he goes to a prison for boys – like a reform school. It's very humiliating. But the power of the book is because it's a manual for surviving boredom and isolation. A useful book. He writes very eloquently about the cup of cocoa every evening, and the nineteenth-century novels he learns to appreciate because they're the only thing in the library, and how he has to scrub his cell every night until it shines like obsidian.”

“Hmm.” Yuriy cleared his throat, realizing now that he'd seen a film of this book; a film he'd self-indulgently selected because, in the end, he would watch anything in the “gay themes” section of the library. He remembered the evening well, actually; a year ago (or was it two?); a rainy weekend; the house had been dimmed, with a laundry smell, and Rue – what had Rue been doing?

“It's not,” he said, “about his friendship with a boy called Charlie?”

“A little. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. They made a film of that where they make it out to be more of an overt love story.”

“Oh, really?” Light drew aside his lips and laughed strangely, an odd cackle. “I wasn't the only one who thought so?”

“Apparently not.”

“Brendan would have been furious. I think, in the end, that he wouldn't even entertain the notion, but couldn't stop himself from knowing anyway. That – I want to ask, in fact. Charlie's in for 'some screwing jobs,'; I never figured out what that was. Do you know what this word can mean? Besides sex?”

“No,” said Rue.

“It's not just an English slang.”

“No.”

“Hm.”

“I think we should move on,” said Yuriy. “Listen, if it comes back, the nearer the base we are, the better – the more likely we are to see it.”

“Right,” said Rue. Yuriy thought he was the only one who could tell how annoyed Rue was with himself, but he couldn't be sure; Light didn't give it away. He found a way to touch his arm in passing as they got up.

 

Downtown, a thousand dollars got them a night in a luxury hotel. The room had six bottles of water arranged in an attractive shape. They gulped eagerly at three of them, a small shaking in their various limbs, darkness outside blank and absolute with only a minor interruption by the building opposite. It was nearly as cold inside as out, but the linens smelled warm and new and the room had been perfumed very slightly. Yuriy just wished they could shower, and complained to no one in particular that it would look better tomorrow if they were well-dressed and clean. He was the only one of the three who had brought pajamas.

Weary and reeling a little, they sat on the beds, and then Yuriy forced himself up again to cuff Light. This time, the headboard had no usable bars – it was a padded leather thing – and Light suggested that he might simply let it be.

“No.”

 

Light looked at Josef and realized that he had not yet addressed him by any name. Was this, he wondered, some special form of Russian contempt?

“Why would I go?”
“No.”

“Cuff him to you,” suggested Ryuzaki sleepily; he had crawled already into the other bed.

Josef was impassive. “Rather not.”

“Can't help, then. Good night.”

“Oh, hell.” Josef snapped a cuff onto Light and put on the other one, with an expression of unrestrained revulsion rather similar to what Light felt – the obvious similarity of their opinions was such that Light had a brief painful burst of extreme empathy. They were sweaty, tired, irritable; they had looked forward at last to being alone – and Light was so unused to flesh; he hated the heat and smell of it. He had never liked flesh in the first place. Misa had almost disgusted him at the best of times, when he'd been more familiar with having bodies all round him; objectively, he realized that she was attractive, small, manageable.

“Can you ratchet it a little looser?” he cautiously asked the figure next to him – was this how Ryuzaki felt – each night, did they normally sleep together in a bed? “I won't sleep. It's too tight.”

He felt the action of a key. “Relax your hand. -- No. Relax it, I said.”

He made it as loose as he could; Josef tested it, and said, “Okay. That will do.”

 

Yuriy lay awake for most of the night, staring at the ceiling, occasionally rubbing tears of exhaustion from his face with his free hand; he couldn't seem to relax, though sometimes he drifted into light dozes interrupted by pulls on the cuff. He wondered in a opaque way whether Rue had done this on purpose, had intended for him to be tied to Light in the same way that Rue had been, to learn this feeling of sensitivity and dread, but he knew Rue wasn't that cruel; he was practical and he was tired, and so he had made a small, strategic abdication.

But lying there next to Light hurt. It had been one thing to take him from Springtown, buried safely under his blanket with a gun to his head. It had been another to see him on his bike, so crisp and stately, where he'd seemed to physically grow, to acquire more color and a firmer shape, to become something quite other than the simple figure with which Rue had originally introduced him.

But now, resting beside him, Light took on yet another dimension – he was Rue's height, he was about Rue's weight, and he lay on Rue's side of the bed, a pale dummy of the beloved body. There was something about this, as his mind sparked and lightly hallucinated in the absence of dreams, that made him acutely aware of how Rue must have felt today, how abjectly afraid beneath his smothering bravery – a terrible sense of reality, here, lying close to Light's warmth that made it so easy to picture Rue on the floor, Light above him, or the two of them talking, tired one night, or eating together, both making dry, careful plans about which the other must know nothing.

He reached beneath the mattress, withdrew the key, unlocked himself; he was sweating suddenly, shocked by the desire to do Light injury, to smother him, strangle him. He didn't want to leave him unattended, but he needed to escape, and after considering leaning his head out the window (the cold air might wake the others) or going out into the hall (hopelessly far from Light and his duty), he compromised on the WC, sitting on the edge of the tub and taking off his t-shirt, mopping his face with it and breathing into it briefly to calm himself.

The door opened suddenly, and he met Rue's sleepy eye before it slammed shut again with a frightened, half-awake animal click; filled with relief, he quickly got up, opened the door and let him in (he had already half-turned back to bed).

“Sorry,” Rue mumbled instinctively. Yuriy could tell he was not really awake. He took hold of his shoulders, steered him inside, stood guard in the bedroom until he heard him finish. As he came back out, Yuriy caught at his wrist, unable to resist some brief contact, something familiar in the gloom and the choking closeness of the uncirculated air. They looked at each other, faces white and soft, lacking detail, in the dark. Rue's hand fastened about his wrist; they gripped each other.

“Rue.”

“I agree.”

He let him go and watched him return to bed; he saw the sole of a foot briefly as Rue tumbled forward and then lay still. Yuriy went back into the toilet to fetch his shirt. It was too tight – grotesquely and unexpectedly tight, as if his body had swollen, and in his insomniac haze it took him a moment to realize that at some point before or after urinating Rue had taken off his own shirt, thrown it down, and wrapped himself instead in Yuriy's, which was strong-smelling and damp from the day and night.

Sighing, he put the thing down and went back to bed, cuffing himself in, feeling like an astronaut or a test pilot restraining himself for flight. This time he slept.

 

Light slipped the cuff in his sleep. It was quite a natural thing. He simply woke up with it off. His hands were thin now; they had relaxed somewhat more than he had been able to forcedly simulate the previous night. That was all, but it was still a surprise.

He sat up, very carefully, but Josef was well out. It was his first moment of freedom, he thought, revising the story again. He'd been overwhelmed, almost with a sense of hallucination – or rather something different; hallucination, he knew, seemed unquestionably real at the time, while this seemed obviously false. The sun was injurious to his eyes. He had seen the sky every day through the beaded and water-clouded glass of his little window; yet he was unused to the direct touch of the sky, and it made him ache. Now, however, he felt the clouded, flushed shame of impractice the previous day – and the faint achievement of having got over the embarrassing first rehearsal, to realize without cringing that there would be other rehearsals ahead. He pressed at his temples; they seemed full of liquid. He was dehydrated and vaguely surfeited all at once.

The room was much as it had been when he'd awoken the previous morning, though it was a much more luxurious room – white puffs of beds; a shiny champagne bucket; an embarrassingly angelic, celestial sort of curtain. He sat up, stretched – his legs were not so bad – got up, walked around the room, used the toilet, drank some big gulps of bottled water, took off his shirt to replace it with another from the bag. The button-down, he guessed, for the Josef's vaunted impress of the Air Force legions. It would be annoying to bike in. The t-shirt first; he could change later.

He looked down, not with entire displeasure, at his half-dressed body; if nothing else, he had managed to keep himself in something superficially resembling an athlete's form, though there were odd pressures, like that of walking at length, which he could not withstand so easily – others, too; muscles tested by yesterday's cycling which seemed atrophied, their close companions overworking to compensate. It struck him how little he knew about his body and how annoying others were who felt they knew more. When he had been an athlete, there had always other athletes, boys, who talked knowingly of the various ways and methods of gaming the body's system – dances, powders, various silly repetitive movements. His boredom with that, more than his disgust with the waste of his intellectual time, had been what had driven him to abandon games.

Out the window, the street was less deserted than yesterday. People were walking around on the surface of it. There was, he could already tell, a greater sense of anxiety and purpose in the air – two days without power, without communication, without any sort of electronic functioning, had turned their priorities already from capital to food. It would not be long before someone got angry, and he reflected in surprise at the fact that this hotel had been one of capital's last strongholds – he would have expected it to be one of the first to fall. There was so much to learn, academically, about this new world – about, he thought with guilty amusement, about what was debatably “his” new world, the world he had – not made, but driven and moved and maneuvered into place. Or at least helped midwife. He remembered the thrill – the thrill that had kept him alive, in some ways, during the bad years, two through seven, along with Brendan's companionship – of seeing, among the rotating Sunday services on the television, a reference to his name, or to his loan-name or nickname, as the subject of a sermon, as relevant to some Biblical theme of sin and punishment and redemption.

His thoughts on Ryuzaki – were unusual, were complicated. He wondered if, in addition to killing him, he had broken him as well in some unique way. Certainly, he did not seem the man he remembered. That would be nice. He hated himself in a few highly specific ways for becoming personally and emotionally involved in what he was doing – for focusing on his rivals, when in fact, there would never be an end to the rivals; there were some people who would fight him to the death and to the deaths of their descendants, and that was fine. Had he to live it over, he would have tried to make the rivals allies, or at any rate to be more subtle about hiding himself from them. Not to be so brazen. Not to hurt people like Ryuzaki, who were not bad, whose goals were similar to his, though their ideas diverged. To neutralize them in some other way, or to ignore the threat – had he but ignored the threat, Ryuzaki would never have found him.

And if he'd had his life to live again, he would have clung less to his life as he knew it. He would have left – or if being a teenager was such a prison, he would have waited a few years to use his special present. All of his intelligence had, in the end, been turned inward. He had never done anything that did not direct itself to his own ego. This was his failure.

But at the same time, he could not resist – should he? -- the small, rather personal thrill of wondering if he'd broken Ryuzaki. That would be something very intimate to do for him.

He approached him quietly – not that he needed to – he slept so deeply. He stared for a long time at the unresponsive, pearly skin of the side of his neck, under his skin. Yes, he thought of pearls, but it was a negative comparison – a certain sheen and opalescence; illness, etc.

His attention turned to the bags – the guns were absent from them, but that wasn't what he was looking for; he was looking for pills. Glucose. Methimazole (one per day in the morning) to slow thyroid activity. A bottle of metformin, which looked full and almost unused. A non-generic, Priforan, to boost effects of anti-hypertensive shot.

Back at the bed. He was watching Ryuzaki in fascination, his ear and the back of his neck and the trickle of hair resting on the surface of the bed, which hurt him with an electric sense of warmth – when suddenly he was poked sharply at the base of his back and gave a disproportionate sound of shock and betrayal.

“Shall I even address this?” asked Josef, and sat up to unlock the cuff. “No.”

“What's going on?” murmured Ryuzaki.

“We were speaking fondly of you,” said Josef.

“Oh, I bet you were.”

 

Rue made himself get up, dreamily watching his body scramble and shove its way to the toilet, before he could fully awaken to the fear he'd just felt. Shut the door – didn't want to lock it. He still smelled Yuriy on the shirt and his silly little candle was still present from last night.

There were two large pitchers of chlorinated water here, and a basin, as if this were some earlier era. A handwritten card stuck to one pitcher suggested they might use it to wash and shave.

 

They emerged under a strangely clear sky – cloudless, with no planes, no vapor trails. Josef paid dearly for three Styrofoam cups of coffee; a pot over a clean empty drum full of burning wood. They ate their trail mix, rode and walked the bikes, and advanced toward the base. The hotel staff had found Light a bottle of sunscreen.

They travelled more quietly today. Ryuzaki was visibly exhausted, Josef watchful and subdued. Too, they were closer to the center of town – though as the day wore on, they left it again – and for the first time they could see how ugly things were starting to get and how ugly they would get in the coming days. The first day of blackout – fine; some looting in the suburbs, but all of it rather jovial.

The second day seemed really to be disturbing people. Once again, few were on the streets, but every store they saw had a window broken, and when they dismounted briefly to poke into a big RiteAid, they found the bottled water gone and the food almost absent, even the refrigerated food, which ordinarily, by now, a typical first-world citizen would have assumed to have gone bad. For a long hour of more-or-less straight riding, they went through a thin but massive plume of fuel-smelling smoke, and they saw, still burning in a higher area, what were plainly the sliding, fragmented remains of a crashed airliner. Their eyes teared a little and turned pink. Afterward Ryuzaki slept in the grass for an hour, his head pillowed in Josef's lap. When he woke again, he was pale, confused; he complained openly of nausea and dizziness. Josef offered to carry him, but he laughed a little raggedly and said he was fine. The laugh visibly worried Josef more than the complaints.

 

They reached the base before nightfall. The city slid again into suburbia, and then into the kind of neat town the military spawned; the base itself sat behind metal gates at the end of a long absolutely straight road, black and slick, surrounded on all sides by dirty grass.

Light did not actually see Josef speaking to the guards; he dismounted and threw himself off of his bike. Ryuzaki wearily, clumsily stepped off and let him do it, collapsing almost into the grass, not caring whether dust covered him or did not – his hair was already grayed with ash from the plume, and if Light's clothes were any indication, smelled of the same choking smoke. The change in him was immediate and extreme.

“All right,” said Josef, coming back -- “let's go in.”

“I don't want to,” said Ryuzaki in a sort of gasp.

“You can sleep in there.”

“I don't want to sleep.”

“Well, you've got to get up,” said Josef, lifting him frankly, ignoring his bike. “Light, get his bag.”

“Don't need you to lift me.”

“Obviously, you do.”

“Leave off.”

When they were inside and seated in someone's office, Josef brought him juice from somewhere and he seemed to recover a little. Then he departed, leaving the two of them alone in the dimmed blue space. Ryuzaki curled up in his chair and seemed to pass out.

This time, Light did not take advantage; he was rather frightened and repelled, as he might once have been as a child by seeing an adult cry. He sat in the other chair and waited, looking at his knees and his veined hands between them; the sarcastic good cheer with which this suit had been given seemed unbearably distant, and he felt, once again, quite alone – alone in a way he had never been before; something in him actively gnawed, and something else was having trouble remembering that there was a world outside this room – though people, busy and active, coursed through the corridors outside.

 

Josef came back. He went at once to Ryuzaki, huddled down and held him fiercely.

“There's no lights,” he said, half-awake.

“No.”

“And they were hardened, right?”

“Right.”

“So it can't be an EMP. Besides, do you really think there could have been a bomb?”

“There's going to be a plane for us tomorrow morning. First few are aid, but this one will take us to New York and then we can get to London on commercial.”

“Did you drop our name? A lot of American military are Kirites, and...”

“Yes. I really had no choice. It was very difficult to convince anyone here that we should be much of a priority.”

“All right, then.” Ryuzaki sighed shakily. “Can I lie down?”

In a catacomb of barracks, they slept on hard beds that folded out. Light kept waking up, feeling as if he were under the influence of some psychoactive drug; his muscles twitched, his skin crawled. Ryuzaki slept beneath him with Josef sitting at his side.

 

Ryuzaki was the only one who seemed to particularly enjoy the trip over. None of them had anything with which to amuse themselves, having left most of their belongings in the first room (though Ryuzaki and Josef briefly tried to play a chess game by memory); Light and Josef were restive, fretful, anxious about the plane, worried for those left behind in Denver. Ryuzaki, conversely, was very active when not napping; he chatted with a deadheading pilot, or stared off into space in a vaguely hectic way.

They landed at London City Airport, and were each dazzled suddenly by the light and florescence and heat and the magazine screens that pasted the hallway with hot digital ink. Light was, for the first time in this whole saga, tempted to bolt – from panic, rather than real desire to leave his captors. Ryuzaki, likewise, seemed flushed and blurry. Josef firmly handled them both outside and down to an electric tram; they gaped a little at the vast expenditures around them, the transactions and the movement of electric money.

There was an hour to wait for the train to Winchester. Cold and a little addled by jetlag, Ryuzaki took Light in hand and they bought things around the station: sandwiches and cups of tea and an electronic reader and some books for the reader, acquired via a kiosk. A bit timid in the face of so much choice, he tried to think of sequels to things he'd read in prison, anything he'd been curious about, and came up short, so he bought manga and crime novels he'd liked as a teenager, all in English, since that was all that the kiosk offered.

The train arrived – a confection of a train, incongruous in the blackened steel Victorian station – and they rode a slow two hours, into farmed-up countryside, the incomparably dark smell of snow outside the opening and shutting doors, and villages with increasingly idiosyncratic names – Itchen Stoke; Itchen Abbas; Martyr Worthy; Abbots Worthy; Kings Worthy. Finally the doors slid open on Winchester, which Light mostly experienced as an electric taxi, and then as another long dark road, and then as the house.

 

They arrived an hour after nightfall. Light was surprised at its quietness: a two-story house; a big, barred and gated yard, peaked and gabled and set some distance from the town. It looked purpose-built, very different from the farmhouses and outbuildings they'd passed on the way.

Only a few windows were lit. They parked the car; they went in, Josef discreetly swiping a card and offering a firm thumbprint.

“I'm in the basement,” said Near's voice over an abrupt loudspeaker – it had deepened; it was essentially the same in tone -- “please join me.”

Josef placed a key in a lock by the elevator. The hallway was a bit decrepit and had an institutional smell. Its signs of life were, again, very slight. They rode the elevator to the basement – it opened upon a dim hallway, which opened eventually upon a great empty room with brown, half-timbered walls. He detected surprise in Josef for some reason, though Ryuzaki was opaque. Against one wall there were stacks of oddities, stored items in small boxes – they were so far off that all he could register was color and shape. Against one wall there was a desk and coffee maker. In a dark corner was Near's bed, covered in a fresh, shocking spring green.

“Good evening. Welcome home. Thank you.” He could, Light suspected, have gone on with these set phrases. He hopped off the desk and approached them: a tall, slim, Gallic, slightly receded gentleman who would not look out of place in a film of the 1920s. He wore khakis and a loose white shirt, though unlike Ryuzaki's shirts it was not outside the bounds of respectability.

“It's a relief to see you again,” said Josef.

“You shall have to brief me in the morning, unless there are any pertinent details that I wouldn't gather from the news?”

“I can't say,” said Josef. “No.”

“Then tomorrow morning, over breakfast. Perhaps at nine? Will you be rested by then?”

“It doesn't matter. I never am.”

“I assume you found no trouble on the trip.”

“God, Near. No, no more than usual.”

“Tomorrow. Will you both please take your leave, then, and let me speak to Mr. Yagami alone? He will, I think, be our guest tonight as well.”

Josef sighed. “Please --”

“Trust me, won't you?”

“Near.”

“You're tired,” said Near firmly.

“Not that tired. Near, you're not going to be alone with him.”

“Fine,” said Near, his attitude snapping almost immediately into peevishness. “Take him up.”

He got into the elevator with them, though, and told Light matter-of-factly, “Every day of your life from now on, you'll make plans to kill us all. You'll never act on them. You'll make them without wanting to, the way I make plans for pandemics or Josef – he introduced himself as Josef, right? -- makes plans for what he'll do when Ryuzaki's dead. It will be a compulsion. And a sick source of fun. And you will be loyal, inexhaustibly loyal, because we finally took you out of there and because you would do anything for Ryuzaki at this point, just like Josef, though you don't know why.”

Light just looked at him. He seemed quite serious. They were advancing down the hall; Josef unlocked a door without looking at any of them, especially Near.

“Think about it,” Near added, and Light went in and listened to their footsteps receding. It was an ordinary room, quiet and plain, and he almost sobbed with relief.

 

“Do you really think he's recruiting him?”

“Sir Anthony Blunt,” said Rue, “was not so thoroughly recruited as Light is right now. Now go and wash up.”

He washed his hands in hot water and made them food – Yuriy came down just as he was finishing; he had planned the meal to fit the timing – warm bread, and agedashi tofu with curry and cinnamon, and whatever vegetables were in the house. They ate with shaking hands. Overhead came the sound of military jets.

“Will you wash my hair?” he asked when they were done, and Yuriy obliged, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and working carefully with the shower attachment. When they were finished they went to bed and made love, sort of – neither of them had anything obviously definable as an orgasm, but they were soothed and relieved by all the contact and they slept easily, nested together, with the heat on. Their house was some distance from both Wammy's and from the town, and it was very quiet.

Chapter 14: Light

Yuriy came home the following night at almost exactly the same hour. He flung open the door, entered into the flushed dryness of his home hallway, put down his keys and his bag, turned down the heat – Rue and his heat – and threw himself down on the steps upstairs, wadding his suit jacket before his face and pressing them together so that his hot damp breath, which smelled of too much coffee and the dehydration of alcohol and talk, could bathe his face.

There was a bright sulfuric light. He had been denounced today, insulted; he had borne it as well as one might, but it had been painful – as painful as anything pedantically told to him which he already knew, with that specific type of embarrassment and sense – above all – of the hideous wastage of time. Rue had spent today, he knew, asleep or talking to Near or sitting on the back porch and watching his cats with his head against a post – but that had not been a wastage of time in the same way; whatever he got out of it was ever new, even if the changes were subtle. For Yuriy the scene had been a precise replica of the one in his head, and thus redundant.

Rising, hunched -- the rest of the walk upstairs – he found Rue in bed, switched on the light, shook him half-awake. A snapshot of him with his crude small fist held before his face, blocking the light, squinting, a Yuriy-hand on either shoulder – then he succeeded in switching the lamp back off, and there was pallor from the corridor. Yuriy did not try to wake him again, but sat on the edge of the bed, cold and clothed, and cried into the jacket as quietly as possible.

He was by turns sickly-hot and cold – sometimes both at once; he glimpsed everything in the room alienated from itself, and sometimes the thick moon through curtain-cloth, and he held the jacket and breathed into it. When he was done he had made his eyes very red and things seemed fuzzy with capillaries. There was no satisfaction, but there was exhaustion – not exhaustion, but a feeling he couldn't identify because too inexperienced with tears – something like that, and he found himself undressing and getting into bed, lying there inert for a very long time without really paying attention. There was an absolute silence in his brain, an airy absence, and Rue's breathing was at times too loud to be borne. Dawn came; it came in bursts, in stop-motion; whenever he opened his eyes there was a bit more blue. Then the numbers on the clock said 6:00 and Rue's phone vibrated against him – he had begun to set an alarm; if it did not wake him properly, it at least brought him closer, to fall back and then arrive later.

He sat today, though, and then collapsed down on one arm in a jointed fashion. He had seen that Yuriy was awake. They made eye contact.

 

Rue reached to touch Yuriy's forehead. The blueness of the dawn and thus of Yuriy's face, and the way that the temperate light shaded his neck and shoulder subtly, made him seem very three-dimensional and weighted with the appropriate mass -- unlike the cartoon floaters which most people seemed to him to be these days -- and he touched the sweat-softened neck.

Yuriy rested a hand on his side and lowered his eyes. Rue thought he slept finally, so sudden was the change in his breathing, but then he hoarsely said in Russian, “Pretty rough conversation in London last night,” and Rue answered him before he quite realized he was awake enough to think.

“I'm sure. You don't deserve any blame, though.”

“I do – just because the lack of consequences doesn't excuse my failures. And I'm still not convinced of this business of no-bomb-at-all – very few people seem to be, which hasn't helped my case.” He twisted his feet a little under the covers. “Did you talk to Near about it all yesterday? How is he? What did you do?”

“I didn't. I just rested. Did you talk to him?”

“Good. No. I wish I could resign.”

“Really?”

“I wrote a letter on the train. Can you take it to him today? It's not that I can't face him, but it would be disproportionately hard, and it would make it difficult to talk afterwards. It's not about the business of the bomb or no-bomb. It's about you. And I know you don't give a fuck for the indignity of Light being around – and indeed set above you, but I do, and I hope you'll let me.”

Rue shook his head, still thinking abstractedly of the blueness of him. “It is not about indignity.”

“No. Wrong word. I know.”

“Well, but there is an awful disgust at the thought of his being around – to have him next to Near.” Rue stretched his neck, cracking the joint and muscle at the back of it. For a long time he did not speak – a telling length of time, he was pretty sure; he could not work out how to explain to Yuriy all that he knew instinctively about the length and narrowness of his bond with Light.

Finally, he began again. “Do you find it easy to think of me as the same person who spoke on that broadcast thirty years ago?”

“Yes,” said Yuriy immediately, rather eagerly – he had not expected that, nor to have Yuriy take his hand abruptly, and pull it towards him, as if they were a couple in a park, looking at a much younger couple, and reminded simultaneously of their own earlier frisky stupidity. Rue was amused.

“Well, then, you know that I spoke quite enthusiastically about being killed by him.”

“Mhm.” Yuriy squeezed the hand (still in the park). He found himself adopting a gently patronizing tone, but Yuriy obviously liked it; he had, he thought, spent too much of the previous day being spoken to as an adult.

“I wasn't enthusiastic at all, of course – just rather caught up in my own cleverness and the thrill of appearing in public. I didn't want to die. But I didn't realize for months what it actually meant to be in danger of dying. There was certainly a part of me that was sick of life – or rather, sick of my life; again, I couldn't conceive of any other life, so I did sometimes think of death – but I didn't mean it, clearly. I was idiotically young then. In many ways, I remained a teenager. Am I making sense?”

“I don't know if you are, but I think I understand. I often felt the same when I was very young. I sort of equated love and death – in a very unserious way. One's personality is so raw and one wants it covered with something -- I'm not getting at it either; this is all the sort of thing you'll find very hackneyed.”

“That wasn't quite it,” said Rue, realizing as he said it – and it was very unpleasant for him to do so – that Yuriy was right. “No. I'm afraid it was. Or at least, what you just said superseded what I'd meant, which was only a half-formed idea, anyway.”

“Just talk, then. I'm sorry.”

Rue was aware that his voice was growing increasingly blurred; he shivered deliberately in order to keep his cells awake, and addressed him over the edge of the pillow. Yuriy still held his hand, but somewhat more loosely. He spoke in English.

“When we met, I was fascinated by him. Didn't like him. Wasn't interested in anything he had to say. I was fascinated, though, with him – as a sort of test subject. He acted lordly, as if he hadn't a care, and his narcissism – it was admirable in a disgusting way, or so I thought at the time. There was always something – actually, I still think this – something specifically appealing about narcissism; its lack of regard for you, its basic tragedy, that it can never be part of anything bigger than itself, or even imagine anything bigger than itself.”

“Yes...”

Rue went on as if led by the words. “At some point, that changed. I thought I had mastered more of the situation than I really had, and his presence became excruciating. His absolute certainty in himself – the perfect certainty of the being with nothing but self-regard – seemed to cast everything I'd always prided myself upon into doubt. Not into nonexistence, but into an uglier light – especially since I was aware that he really was quite like me, with a different upbringing, perhaps, and a prettier face, and a greater ability to talk to people. Thus, when I looked at myself, I found that my caution reverted into depression; my doubt turned inward; my trust in my judgment became repetitive dogmatism, based on rote attempts to repeat specific past success. I won't say it was an absolute revolution; I was still me, but his personality's a beating it's hard to take. Or was.”

“I find him very similar,” said Yuriy quietly. “I am ashamed of myself, when he's here.”

“When are you not?”

“Never mind. But you have to admit I blew this one – Groundwater, all of it. But never mind.”

“Really? Never mind?”

“Shh. You were telling a story.”

Rue sighed. “Not a story I love to tell. And a story I'm sure I'm revising yearly. Anyway, I won't – eventually you stop trying; you begin to wonder what about you is so interesting to him, anyway -- why he cares. I had, you see, even lost touch with my original motivations for trying to search him out and punish him. I did it because it was what I did. That was enough, and I really don't think I can take any blame for what he ultimately succeeded in doing to me; I don't think I failed on any count because of my very vague and teenaged world-weariness, but it was a year spent in absolute wretchedness, and it was a relief when it was over. I recognized precisely what it meant, and I had done everything it was in my power to do, but it was a relief. And how much worse for people like his father, who never knew, and who only thought they were wretched because he was so perfect.”

He had spoken at such length that his throat was dry, and for a long time the speech had been affectless, automatic. Yuriy's grip on his hand was quite warm.

“Now is really the time,” he said, with difficulty – difficulty controlling the words; his accent and voice had thickened suddenly -- “to decide how seriously I take the authority of Near. Because he wants him with him -- ”

“It's okay,” said Rue in Russian, “you haven't got to.”

“He wants him with him, for whatever reason,” answered Yuriy, with relief and a squeezing of the hand and an adjustment of the mouth around the only real language, “and it's for us to decide if it's for his good that we do something to him to get rid of him. I simply can't tolerate – my leaving won't do him any good.”

“Threaten if you want.”

“He won't take me seriously. I sometimes do.”

“You should. He will know that you're serious. I will impress this upon him. I just don't know why you're thinking of this now – with that mess in Colorado.”

“Do you think there's any reason for me to even remotely accept Light's presence?”

“I don't know.” Rue finally, finally moved closer to him; he found himself clasped as if in a quick trap. “Well – not really. I will say that I am older; Light is older; Near is older, and perhaps more certain than I was; I am interested, almost to the point of placing a bet, in finding out which of them is really the more wholly lacking in empathy. Let me talk to both of them today. I haven't talked to Light as a human being yet this week, and I might try it before I dismiss us both. Where's your letter?”

“Jacket pocket. On the floor. I sort of want to rewrite it.”

“Don't second-guess. I'll bring it to him and see what he says.”

“Thanks,” said Yuriy, wiping at his eyes with the sheet.

 

Then there was a surprisingly gentle, quiet period. They had not been awake together at dawn in many years, and the mood of strange ease after high emotion made it easy to tell what normally felt like painful secrets. Yuriy told Rue about Near's much earlier edict to “smother him with love,” which he found quite funny, in a recognitory way; Rue told him the rest of the story about Light, about the bad dreams, the conversation on the roof – most of it was repeated from earlier years, but they had both changed since then and they found it needed updating. Then Yuriy slept, and Rue got up very quietly and checked his mail.

 

Dear Ryuzaki-san,

I'll simply ask this: where is Light? I want to get him out. I'm on the ground in Denver and it's very bad. Looting and fights. What I spent all day yesterday doing: prying open automatic doors and elevators in office buildings. Saved 4 people. The situation is not being handled well; no one predicted it, no one seems to be centrally in charge. Aren't they Americans? Why no martial law? Are you paying attention to this? I want to know where my brother is. The time has come for you to ask if we are going to stay friends.

S

 

S-san,

Light is with us in Winchester. All of these facts are unrelated.

RR

 

Later, he got in the car and clumsily drove to Wammy's, glad of the rarity of traffic, re-adjusting to the left side. All was quiet, and Near met him in the entryway, saying, “You're here to play?”

“Christ, no,” said Rue, but Near gave him an expression that plainly (always so plainly; he was always so legible and clear, because it was all so obviously put-on) asked him to let it be; he acquiesced and they went upstairs to the room with the piano.

In Rue's day, this had been off-limits – a much deeper part of Quil's private flat than the anteroom with the photos. He had been allowed into it, as a child, only on invitation – as an adult he'd come somewhat more often, but had never been comfortable here. He'd thought Quil deserved a rest from him now and again. It was a midsized, planty place with a large window that always patiently demonstrated the same spread of farmland.

Near referred to what they did here as playing, but to him it was working the piano – indeed, it was possible that he worked in precisely the sense that one might “work” any large industrial machine for the benefit of a more fragile employer.

Certainly, he liked the instrument. He had played it on and off since childhood (in fact, as a child he had played just this one – it had once belonged to Priscilla, Quil's on-and-off partner, who had taught him about scales, chords and notation without the initial certainty that he understood English).

But Near always had to be making something, and his most recent passion was music – violin, viola, cello. He had transitioned somewhat from building things and started writing things over the years, and for this sort of writing, he claimed he needed Rue. Apparently his clumsy improvisations somehow resonated well, were easy to build off of; Rue was willing to believe him, but he still always felt rather behind, trying to rush out interesting melodies while Near toyed with and noted responses to them with a luxury he did not share.

They warmed up for several minutes, Rue aware that he was playing too formally, too stiffly, focusing too much on perfection, because he knew Light was in the building and could hear him. Then he became involved in the music and Light grew smaller, all at once, but not small enough, and he found himself drifting into familiar things – snatches of melody he'd liked since childhood, and after one such melody, Near paused, wrote quickly for a few minutes with his lip bitten, and said, “Can you possibly play those last several measures again?”

Rue did. Near's viola answered them with a lovely countermelody, and he looked shy with success. “Good, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Rue, “but – you'd have to come up with something else for the piano to do.”

“Why on earth?”

“Perhaps I played it badly,” said Rue, who hated to point out Near's total lack of background in classical music, and the shocking degree to which he had avoided acquiring it over the course of his training and practice, “but that was --”

“Oh,” said Near, “it was something you knew from memory. Of course.”

Rue firmly touched middle C rather than protest the interruption. “Holst. 'Jupiter.' The main theme.”

“You must write something else around what I did, then. I like it too much to abandon it.”

“What?” Rue played another few notes, confounded and thinking again, visually, helplessly, of his American experiences. “That sounds like too many mirrors.”

“You can do it,” said Near gently.

“I don't know where you get the idea that I can write like Holst, when you've never even witnessed me writing music at all.”

“I'm sure you can.”

“Why do you? You always presume other people are as talented as you, and in all the same ways. It's insulting.” Rue closed the piano. “Yuriy is furious with you, and he spent all of yesterday soothing our contacts. For God's sake, pretend to care.”

“I know. Will you read me his letter?” Near set down his bow, but did not close the instrument into its case. He waited attentively. Rue plucked the envelope from the piano and opened it, unable to avoid a catch in his voice when he saw the greeting -- how irrelevant the letter seemed to his life now, when combined with this seat in Quil's old home and all of the memories thereof.

His handwriting, Rue noted, had deteriorated over the years. Once, it had been neat, square and fontlike; now it was loosening, as he'd lost touch with pen and paper, as they all had.

 

Dear L:

At this point in our acquaintance, it seems somewhat disingenuous to simply submit my resignation. You are too much my confidant. Yet to admit this and allow irony into this letter is an oddly informal gesture, implying that we are in friendly collusion, which, at the moment, we are not.

I have no desire to leave your service. I think that such a decision would be very poorly timed; that it would embarrass us both with Interpol; that it would needlessly deprive you of my work, and me of the employment to which I have already given so much of myself (and whose loss would therefore half me suddenly).

And yet, having heard of your intention to employ this individual it is difficult for me to see any other option. It is an intolerable insult to my companion and therefore to me, and even were I to threaten you into withdrawing the offer, the fact remains that you are still the sort of person who would do it; you still wanted to, which shocks me about you. Do you fail to remember your own history with the person in question? I invite you to look at the photograph over your mantelpiece, if you don't.

These are the moments in life when principle begins to seem like an affectation, when we question these principled impulses which would, in some ways, actively injure us. I am questioning the impulse to resign now, as you will find obvious. I am taking, therefore, two days away from your presence (effective yesterday) unless a true emergency arises. It may be that the absence from you, my employer and dear friend, if I may call you that, will allow me to steel myself enough (and deliberately, to take a lesson from RR, to forget my fondness in order to achieve a higher purpose) to leave. If it doesn't (if I realize that I am by now inextricably tied to the organization, right or wrong) then I will compromise, and apologize for this failure.

In sincerity,

Yuriy Alekseiyevich Krupin

“Josef”

 

Rue folded the note and handed it to Near, who said, “Do you understand why I wanted to bring in Light?”

He looked at the piano again, then out the window. “Can you tell me for yourself, please?”

“Oh, sure,” said Near, off-guard and apologetic, and ticking the items off with a folding of the hands. “It's become apparent that I can't count prisons safe forever; if I want him kept, I must personally keep him. And I hate wasting good talent, good brains. All the same, I'd have let him rot, or let him die, if I hadn't needed more help than I'm getting. I'm tired, you're sick, and Light knows the business. It's not as if he'll ever leave – nor want to, I think, and I have no intention of elevating him to a full share. Yuriy objecting bothers me, though. He's not enough, but I can't lose him.”

“When I allowed Light to work with me,” said Rue, “I had a similar rationale, accounting for the difference in the basic situation. Not wanting to waste him. Needing to watch him. Eventually, becoming tired. He charmed me until I saw him in human terms, which was fatal; he discredited me first, at least to my immediate companions. I would not advise using him.”

“Did he really charm you?”

“Enough.”

“What was it fatal to? Not you.”

“I gave up,” said Rue.

“And that killed you?”

Rue felt himself, for whatever reason, flushing – flushing in embarrassment. “No. I did what I otherwise would have done. But I did give up. Odd to be saying this – I think one can't usually trace things like this to a specific moment. He has a bad effect on people. They fall back like plants wilting.”

“I'll take it into consideration,” said Near, “that you used visual language. This is unusual.”

“Possibly.” Rue stood. “May I talk to Light?”

“You can do anything you want. I trust you with him.”

“I'll talk to you soon, then.”

“I wish you'd play that theme one more time. And perhaps I can send it to you – would you please work on writing something to replace it, for my sake?”

“I don't think I'm going to have time, Near.”

“It's fine,” said Near quietly. “You haven't got to indulge me.”

 

Light sat in the cold room, knees drawn up, computer discarded on the bed; he felt a private exhaustion and overwhelm, and had been relieved at the stoppage of the piano music which had wandered nervously through the house, only briefly settling into a tune. When the knock came, and then the unlocking, he registered but did not respond.

“Light,” said Ryuzaki's voice, “I've come to talk to you.”

“Sure. What is it?” He felt the words come out, boyish and unstrained; the same trick he'd always known.

“Shut up until you can promise me not to use that voice again.” There was the hard sound of Ryuzaki slumping against the wall. “Do you want to play tennis, by any chance? I was at the piano with Near; you may as well be on the court with me.”

“That was you?”

“Yes.”

Light never wanted to play tennis again, as it happened, but by a strange reflex he got up. Ryuzaki was wearing an oversized gray and brown cardigan; he looked English and faintly bitten about the fingers and hands. They were wiry, his hands, and reddened by the outdoors, and Light felt very aware of their solidity and reality and the firm clammy feel they would have.

A racquet was shoved into his hand; he hefted it instinctively, remembering a line from The Catcher in the Rye: Holden and the familiarity of the skate key. A ridiculous, almost a nauseating book – a chronicle of potential willingly lost -- but also of some value when one was alone.

Outside was as much of a slap as ever, but once they got to the enclosed cage of the court, it was a lot easier to take and he breathed out some of the self-indulgence of his loneliness inside, breathed in a smell of woodsmoke and trees. The grass around the estate was long, but it had been cut at some point in recent memory; he wondered if Krupin did it.

Ryuzaki glanced bravely at his racquet and ball, and for a moment an expression played over his face as if he were entertaining acing Light in the exact same way he had last time, but in the end he served gently, almost politely, letting the ball fly in a soft arc towards him. Light hit a groundstroke back and they traded the ball, both thinking of other things.

There was no subtext about the game at all, only the motion of limbs, and this was both sad and relieving. Light was surprised by how well he remembered their first match; it was so distant and he'd been so distracted – and yet here was the sloppy, old-fashioned one-handed backhand; here was the strange economy of movement, the sense that Ryuzaki was pulled towards the earth more heavily than most people; all obviously blunted by time, but just the same.

Light was surprised to see him playing. He'd been so exhausted when Light had seen him last, though he supposed there had been the day and nights in between. It didn't seem like a show of force, either -- though it was true that he cut things off after one set without much visible emotion, drinking from his water bottle and facing, shading his eyes, towards the interestingly anemic sun.

“You're not the person you were,” he observed at length.

“Who is, Ryuzaki?”

“The question is who you are now. But I don't really care who you were then anymore. Near and Josef are both in torments over you; I think we have bigger problems. The only thing I ask is that you don't personally treat me like either of us is a fool. Starting with the next thing you say, which won't be anything like 'who is, Ryuzaki?' or anything in that damned tone of yours.”

“That's a bit harsh of you.” He was thirsty; Ryuzaki handed him a bottle of water and he drank from it indelicately. “I meant that. I might be less than I was, but that happens to everyone.”

“I was not speaking of your being 'less.' I just mean that eighteen years in total isolation has probably changed you in unexpected ways, ways that neither you nor I can recognize. You seem to be taking it surprisingly well.”

“For a very long time, I didn't.”

“I'm not surprised. I've read the studies. I was shocked to see you so together.”
Light was torn between wanting to go back inside to safety, and wanting to sit on the grass and revel in the damp air. He glanced at the ground hungrily. “You didn't trust me to be a little different from most people?”

“Not at all. No one is free of such things. How did you tolerate it?”

“Through resignation.”

Ryuzaki seemed surprised that he'd answered. “Of some sort of religious character?”

“I chose to believe that where I was was the only real thing – this room, this little skylight, these three meals, these ten books. There was no reason to imagine that it wouldn't go on forever. I knew time was passing and my body was aging, but it didn't seem to be as bad as I'd expect. And that worked, at least the last few years that I was there. I wish I hadn't forgotten how that felt. It was very useful and it probably kept me from killing myself – not that I'm in any respect suicidal, but--”

“Untenable situations,” said Ryuzaki, “I understand.”

It wasn't “untenable,” Light wanted to say – it was the voices, but he kept his own voice steady. That was over; the effects of the vacuum were gone now, for better or worse. “Have you made any progress on why I'm not there anymore?”

“I haven't had time to think about it,” said Ryuzaki. “I'm going home in a minute and then I'll make some notes.”

“Any theories?”

“Every theory. You'll hear all about it eventually.”

He was closedmouthed after that; he let Light sit on the grass for a few minutes and then led him back inside, told him to talk to Near if Near showed up, and let him be.

Chapter 15: November

Yuriy had gone out to the store and the gym, come home, drugged himself with melatonin in order to sleep for a few more hours; now, as Rue parked the car on the graveled drive, his eyes opened and he was at once awake, as if he had simply been lying still.

Out of the corner of the window, he saw a Rue-like blur – he sat up and looked down in time to watch him enter the house from above. There was a distant stirring of downstairs air; then he emerged again, squinting embryonically, with his cardigan cuffs around his hands. He held a bag of cat food, and as Yuriy watched, he tipped it untidily into the bowls by the side of the house, bowls of ceramic and tin, sourced from local charity shops. Then the disappearance and re-appearance and the three cats, the three main ones, skulked from the trees – they had been approaching invisibly for some time, he knew, it being about the hour when they were fed, and now Rue was kneeling to meet them.

All three were rough old cats with thickly matted fur of indiscriminate color. They lived well on his largesse, but more importantly, on that of the forests and farms surrounding the house; Rue, after letting them slake their hunger, would often pull one away from the bowls, body elongating and resisting like a leech or a tick, and clutch it in his arms. He had no revolt of them, no disgust. He would hug them, shaking them gently from side to side as if soothing them, or even shyly kiss their matted heads.

Yuriy descended the stairs untidily, thinking with difficulty of what had happened, of what news Rue might bring him. His misery of the previous night had turned to a horror of the ordinary – even the kettle seemed placed off-kilter – and a disbelief that one might simply take a day off after what he'd witnessed and what he'd tried to say.

He thought, too, and for no good reason, of his wedding – his head felt heavy, and he stopped for a moment to steady himself, thinking perhaps that the melatonin had done better work than he'd suspected.

Rue was sitting on the front steps, petting the cat in his arms and watching the other two napping in the sun. He came and sat by him and quietly smelled his shampooed hair, his shoulder twinging hard so that he clutched it.

“Is that all right?”

“This?” Yuriy had parsed the phrase rather than the intent, and had wondered if he'd missed something. “The shoulder. No, I hurt it this morning. I went to work out, was benching distractedly.”

“Not serious, I assume?”

“No. Just twinge. Bad luck.”

“I've had a bit of exercise today, too.” Rue pulled the cat closer. “I played tennis with Kira again.”

“Oh? How did that go?”

“He won. Again.”

“Really? He can't be in particular practice.”

“No, but he was always a little better, and I'm still very shaky. I shouldn't have played. Shall we talk?”

Yuriy sighed into his hand, quickly, a little irritated with him. “And the letter?”

“Ambiguous response from Near.”

“I'm in shock.”

“I told him it was unwise to use Light, though I don't know that I think so anymore. It depends on how things go. I think you should go ahead and step away, but you won't really leave and he knows it. You'd do better by staying and telling him when something's being allowed to go too far.”

“I just don't want to deal with something like this. We have enough to worry about already.”

“Near's will is absolute,” said Rue firmly. “We all agreed on that. You can't replace him because you've --”

“I never said I wanted to replace him.”

“Of course not. You said no to that a long time ago. And I don't think I can – not really for physical reasons, either.”

Yuriy looked at him, unsure as to whether this was an admission or a denial. He budged himself a little closer. “It's not absolute where his physical protection is concerned.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Fine,” he said, feeling saturated. “Move on. Tell me about the case.”

Rue smiled a little and touched his lip delicately. “I will.”

“Have you any inspiration?”

“Somewhat.”

“Talk me through it.”

Rue got up – the cat still slung over his arm -- picked up a stick, sat down again, and began to sketch vaguely at the concrete. Yuriy's eyes followed the passage dully, though it appeared to follow no particular pattern or function as a visual aid.

“The facts are not complicated, because there are so few of them. In one corner, we've got Groundwater. Now, for all this, I still don't take Groundwater seriously. I find the group too nebulous and ineffectual to be capable of anything on this scale. They talk big, but to me, they're about as frightening as PETA.”

“Oh, really,” said Yuriy wearily, but not without a certain fondness.

“Well. Perhaps as frightening as ELF.”

“They claimed responsibility today,” Yuriy pointed out.

“I know. That just doesn't mean a thing to me. Too much of their activity is conducted anonymously; they've got no meaningful public face. Anyone could be speaking for anyone.”

“Yeah,” said Yuriy quickly, “I know; I just thought I'd, uh – I'm tired.”

“Of course. It's okay.” Rue sighed and threw the stick away as hard as he could, letting the cat escape and somehow giving it a little pet with his foot. “At any event, fact two is that the board chatter, which I don't take seriously either, but – everybody excited, blah blah blah, about the 'November' post. 'November'; I hate that, it's spy-talk.”

“Christ. Me too.”

“You know, right? Anyway, it's November now, and something happened, and Groundwater is happy. And I'm going to assume Groundwater was aware of the right event. Do you?”

“Sort of. Not entirely.”

He kicked the stick a little further away from the porch. “Well, perhaps they weren't; perhaps they had some other plans which they didn't carry out, or had no plans and their earlier joy referred to something else, like the election, which was one of your theories, if I recall correctly. Again, they're so decentralized and full of wind that I could imagine any of that – that they knew nothing and were just celebrating what did happen, on general principle. But I'm willing to assume that the event we foresaw and the event that happened are essentially the same. The unbroken mood of the postings, and what vague hints of content there were, more or less confirm to me in retrospect that they were thinking of Denver. But Groundwater shouldn't have this kind of resources. They're teenagers and idiots.”

“With competent friends,” said Yuriy, feeling both ahead and behind. “And admirable ideals, on the face of it, I might add.”

“Still. Their previous activities – burning a few buildings, hacking a few oil-company servers, bombing a ship – no, would you call it a ship? I'd call it a boat.”

“I won't argue.”

“Well,” said Rue -- “for now, let's say they have a powerful ally. And I'm not sure it's November, though I agree that finding November would have been a help. November certainly knows how to contact this person. Now, the other factor is us. Do you imagine it was a coincidence that two of us, besides Light, were in Denver at the time? Serious question.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Really?”

“No,” said Yuriy, “fine. I don't want to imagine we're really that important to every single little thing that happens in the world --”

“For the sake of argument.”

“Go on.”

“If it's not a coincidence, then this is someone who knew us and wanted to hinder our trip with Light, but doesn't care to harm us physically.”

“No,” said Yuriy. “Or else just to get our attention. Fire a warning shot. Light has a lot of enemies; so do we. Keep it general for now.”

“I barely believe what I'm saying,” said Rue. “I find it as likely as not that the whole thing was a set of inexplicable coincidences, but it's my job to imagine it might not be.”

“Yeah,” said Yuriy. “We should go to Yakutsk, find November. Should have gone ages ago. I just take this seriously enough – there were always more solid leads on other things. That's how it always goes, I suppose. Like being a goalkeeper. People always remember the ball you missed in the ninetieth minute of the Cup final; they don't remember all of the saves you made before.”

Rue sat and trailed his hand over Yuriy's back. He paused for a moment before speaking, and when he spoke it sounded a little studied. “Why do we always end up going to places like that in winter? I'm sure Novosibirsk – I recall you told me Novosibirsk is nice in summer.”

“Yes. But there are ticks, and they carry encephalitis. Which is brain swelling and fever, and I don't think you need a bigger brain.” There was another pause, and Yuriy hesitantly added, “Really, Rue, I'm afraid that this is going to be bad for us. This getting by me. When I was trying to resign, I was partly trying to resign to head off being sacked.”

“Near can't sack you,” said Rue. “Obviously. He can only see so far because he stands on the shoulders of Zhora Krupin.”

“Am I frantically peddling a bicycle?”

“Yes! You know that. And more to the point, he wouldn't sack you over something like this, which was so subtle, something which I had access to as well. One word! I'll tell you how wrong I was: when I heard Light was free, my first thought was that he was involved in Groundwater; he was the thing that was going to happen in November. Of course, I had smarter second thoughts, and third thoughts, too; you actually heard my fourth and fifth. He couldn't possibly. But what if he could? And I continued to suspect very slightly – despite the evidence – that he was perhaps together enough to have something to do with his release. But after speaking to him this time, he's either learnt to act in prison through some sort of correspondence course, or he wasn't involved. This is someone else.”

“You mentioned B.”

“Sometimes it's just not someone we know. I have to keep that in mind.” Rue sighed heavily, looked as if he were casting about for something to touch, something to smack at irritably – where had the stick gone?

“Write to Watari; ask if he's accounted for.”

“I can't.”

“I'll write him. Business letter.”

“He'll say he is, no matter what. And right now, I have nothing on B. I'm just talking crazy.”

“Rue, aren't you angry at Light?”

Rue stopped moving, looked up, contemplating the fringed tops of the trees. “Angry? No.”

“Don't you look at him and think of who and what he is?”

“Constantly. But there's no strong emotion left at all. A bit of fear – and, yes, a bit of anger as well. But there hasn't been much, not in years and years. He just exists. -- Yuriy, I don't see the point of going to Yakutsk. Doubtless this November person has gone far to ground.”

“There is some way. He's presumably alive.”

Rue sighed and looked up again. It was full-blown afternoon. “And Light is more occupied with himself than with what's happening. Which I like. Which I find relieving. Near is doing one of his dreamy things – I'm sure he'll snap out of it this evening and tell us what we've just told each other. If I'm honest, I think this whole event is a nail in our coffin, but not particularly because of your not quite managing to put together this Groundwater thing. There have been many mistakes. Light's discreditation of us has ensured that fact, and so have my various incapacities.“

Yuriy took hold of his wrist. “Part of what bothered me about yesterday – and this is silly --”

“Shut up and just say it.”

“Just that it involved quite a long argument with Anthony Lester. And he's such – you know what a fan, a silly fan, of his I am; the man wore a sidearm at his own wedding. I saw it. He's so classic . And you know how much Near still adores him. He has one of his strange crushes on him.”

Rue sighed again and began to scratch at the base of Yuriy's hairline, as if he were also a cat. “Near's life is a long series of men like that. Like you. I'd call it some sort of repressed homosexual urge, but I think Near's very hetero, within the usual limits. Watch what he looks at when we watch television.”

“I'm not a man like that,” said Yuriy.

“Like Anthony Lester ? Listen, I was classifying, not ranking. Lester's nothing.”

“It's not that I think he's a great detective,” said Yuriy. “Of course. Or I lie awake thinking of him as an unattainable ideal. But he's that man – you know; Company President Man – Fedora-Succeeding Man – National Security Advisor Man, in fact.”

“But he let Near order him around,” said Rue, becoming unexpectedly animated. “If you'd been there, I'm sure you would have goaded him to a more elegant plan than trapping Light in a warehouse and hoping he couldn't shut up. Not that there isn't basic logic in that, since Light can never shut up, but still, who was around him at that time -- that he thought it was a good chance? Near's no fool and has never felt like one. He was right to isolate Light, even though you have to raise your eyebrows with regard to Light masquerading as me for years, and Near not even trying to push him on it, even though the whole fucking Wammy organization was here behind him with this succession battle and everything, and then, suddenly, it's 'L isn't even talking to us and doesn't seem to know who we are, oh, hmm .' But I swear all that happened was I wore Light out, let him get cocky, shoved him as far into the spotlight as possible in case I didn't make it, and then Near came in and got him only, what, five years later? It took real genius to make the little bastard incriminate himself, but he still did some dumb things. He needed help. Focus. Can't believe Roger let him go. Roger was no slouch. People listen to Near too much because he seems so assured. Same with Anthony Lester. I guarantee you Anthony Lester goes home every night and cries into his pillow.”

“I cried last night,” said Yuriy.

“Still, you're different,” said Rue. “You cry into your coat. -- I know because I picked it up to put it on and it was disgusting. I threw it in with my wash.”

“You shouldn't – it was dry clean.”

“It seemed to come out okay,” said Rue, squeezing his hand tightly.

 

***

 

Ryuzaki must submit to him in bed, Light thought; Krupin's strength was so visible that to do anything other than submit required a kind of florid imagination, and a kind of self-deception, of which Light knew Ryuzaki was not capable. This bothered him quietly. It wasn't that his attitude towards homosexuality was entirely provincial, but to take the position he assumed Ryuzaki generally took was out of line with how he'd always seen him, a small, messy, embarrassing matter. Nor did he blame him for his illness, but it was similarly embarrassing that he napped so unapologetically during the day, sometimes just dropping off where he sat, especially after eating – that he seemed to burp a lot, speaking of eating; that he wore embarrassing message t-shirts because they were soft, or Krupin's old clothes because they comforted him. He seemed to have both regressed and aged too far.

Krupin bothered him, too. The man's intellect was visible; he carried it thoughtfully at the center of his great face. He was classically correct for an intellectual. He understood a wide range of books and he knew what wine to drink. But he approached all of these things so practically, with such a steady eye, that his intelligence and stability became troubling in their extremity. Simply put, it could not all be real. He seemed to approach a book, a friend, a cup of tea, or a major problem of national security with the same firm tread. He was like a robot, and the way Near and Ryuzaki leant happily on him was sad to see; didn't he have anything of his own, any personal ambitions, sources of professional bitterness? He would occasionally refer to an army career and then one with the police, and the more Light read about Russia the more he realized the quandaries this must have entailed, and yet Krupin seemed entirely morally unbound, entirely morally uncomplicated, a machine for completing things, signing things – knowing always precisely what to do, but completely bereft of the genius whose potential in him was always visible.

Krupin was always painfully professional in front of Light, but it was possible, on occasion, to see hints of his relationship with Ryuzaki; despite their constant disagreement, they were a close couple, in a Victorian sort of way. It usually fell to Krupin to glance or make a gesture, and Ryuzaki to respond; this underlined Light's opinions, more than ever, about what they must do in bed.

 

Light stopped being locked in his room, except at night, about three months in. On his first day of relative freedom, he heard Near use the front-hall intercom to ask Ryuzaki where he was, and Ryuzaki use the intercom at the bottom of the steps to say he was in his office. There followed a brief silence, and then he heard the elevator ding.

Ryuzaki's office was surprisingly full of garbage. There was a pinned-up, Victorian-looking etching of two men fighting on a path above a waterfall; there was a cardboard cutout of some sort of elaborate cup. Ryuzaki was drinking lemon tea and having an argument with Near on a subject so absurdly code-laden that Light had no prayer of deciphering it. He half-suspected it of being a complete fabrication. When they had finished, Near left, and Ryuzaki turned to Light.

“While you're here, do you want to talk to Sayu?”

Light stiffened his shoulders in surprise; he had wanted very much to contact Sayu, and had managed to dig out her various addresses, but she had not answered his notes, and he wasn't certain that they were even getting to her – surely it was within Near's capabilities to censor his mail.

He told Ryuzaki something alone these lines, and Ryuzaki looked down into his lap, where his hands were curled. They flexed and lifted wearily back to the keyboard, where they tapped and erased an anxious series of the letter B. “She did get them. She went back and forth a lot on whether she'd like to talk to you, but she says she'd like to now.”

“You know her.”

“Of course.”

“How is she?”

Ryuzaki finally looked at Light again; he seemed honestly surprised by the question. “How is she? You haven't spoken to her in so long; the question is what is she. I suggest you just talk to her.”

“Sayu,” said Light, blankly, trying to recall his feelings towards her at various ages, whether he'd cared and how much he'd cared or whether he'd lied to himself about it. There must have been emotion in his voice, because Ryuzaki looked at him dubiously and tapped at his screen.

The large window before him darkened, and then lightened – Sayu's image appeared upon it, writ large, and lit from behind, as if it were stained glass. Light hadn't been ready, and he cringed instinctively as if the dimmed sunlight were flooding his senses.

They recognized each other, cringed away by instinct, and then looked at each other more forthrightly. Ryuzaki had snatched up his little reader and was studiously pretending to do something else, though it was quite clear from his pose that nothing could entice him to leave the room. Sayu looked tired, looked like their father; she stared at him as if she, too, had been unpleasantly surprised by the suddenness of the picture.

“Well,” she said. Light glanced away, trying to think of the right greeting, but before he could speak she went on talking, a series of words which sounded unrehearsed but very familiar to her. “Light, for a long time I just hated you, but when everything happened in Denver, I got on a plane without even thinking about it so that I could try and find you, in case you were in trouble, and that's not the action of someone who entirely hates, so I asked Ryuzaki-san if I could speak to you.”

“Sayu,” said Light, overwhelmed, barely registering the pain of being called Light instead of brother. He kept trying to figure out more from the room behind her, but it was an absolutely generic room; perhaps even a hotel room. “Sayu, how are you doing? What have you been doing?”

“Living. Unlike you. Unlike some. How did you get out? Ryuzaki-san, quit ignoring me. Did you spring him, and how did you know?”

Ryuzaki shook his head slowly, as if it were heavy. There was something quiet and unsteady in all his motions. “I didn't. He was freed under suspicious circumstances, but all we did was find him and take him back here on Near's orders.”

“And I suppose you take Near's orders?”

“Yes,” Ryuzaki snapped, “I take Near's orders! It's called a chain of command. Leave me out of this conversation.”

“Right,” said Sayu, reaching up to push back a piece of her hair. She seemed disproportionately cowed, and turned back to Light only with effort. In the brightness of the window, Light could see that her eyes were outlined with tears; the effect, more than ever, was saintly.

“Anyway,” she said, “that's what I have to say. It's good to see you again. I can't deny it. You look different. Seem to have embraced your true nature, huh? That's good. It'll help people know.”

Light couldn't answer; he didn't even know what she meant.

“I mean your cold face. There's no expression in your face at all anymore, even when it makes expressions by force. You may not notice it, but you're not even responding to anything I say, no matter how insulted you would have been before. You got absurdly lucky, you know. Ludicrously. Disgustingly. Here you are, even working with Ryuzaki-san, not even much of a prisoner. I guess it's true; I guess intelligence, looks and privilege get you far no matter what.”

“Light isn't exactly here because of his looks,” said Ryuzaki, putting the reader down again.

“Are you sure they weren't a factor? Seriously. Pretty people get things ugly people don't. Instinctively, people give them more. There's science.”

“How do the scientists decide who the ugly people are?”

Before she could answer, Light found himself standing and leaving the room. There was a wire at the back of his head; nothing was voluntary. His face felt hot and he couldn't think. Slightly giddy at the freedom of physical movement, he turned left and wandered toward his room, but then turned round and went west again, toward Near's elevator. As he walked past, he heard a brief, incoherent snatch of conversation, words he couldn't parse, and then they resolved.

 

RYUZAKI: Look, you should go call Riku. I can't help with this.

SAYU: Shut up.

 

The intercom in the hall said, “Light?”

“Yes?”

“You can come down here if you like. I'll open it up for you.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Fine,” said Near.

 

He usually felt like nothing at all. It didn't bother him; as Sayu had noted, it was probably his natural state, and it was a relief to no longer pretend to have much perspective, to care for others in any profound way, to be anything else but a highly intelligent vertebrate on that wire that guided him and moved him about.

He had never accounted for how much of him was simply based on the influence of people around him: his father, and L a little, and later Misa. With each, he had learned to act the way they wanted him to act. The more you did it, the deeper it went, until the result was almost, but not quite, a breathing-in of personality.

He wasn't ready to argue that he had no personality, but what he did have was a very small, trembling, atrophied creature – the rest was response, and that included response to the vast audience within his own head, to which he had often been wont, in past years, to perpetually and eloquently justify himself. Now that he had been so long alone, influence didn't seem to work as well. There was a diorama effect to his interactions with the others, no matter how much time he spent. He liked Near especially, because Near was “nice” and yet so totally disinterested, but he also realized that he liked Ryuzaki, though he sometimes despised him because his thinking had become so unforgivably emotional and shallow; when they met together to discuss some problem, it was Near who had the driving insight and Ryuzaki who contributed the sloppy, unpredictable flashes of brilliance that embroidered Near's vision, sometimes to perfection and sometimes to excess. He had retained and even sharpened his psychological insight, but everything else seemed decimated, as the new Ryuzaki would say. The old one would have said “reduced by ten percent.”

Light was not given a function. He only observed. He wanted to speak, wanted to make an impression upon them – it maddened him not to be able to -- but they spoke so familiarly, and only of parts of cases, and each seemed to have his separate load, and they spoke quickly in English – Krupin's heavy accent was difficult to make out if you weren't giving him your full attention, which Light didn't respect him enough to do -- and so he often couldn't gather any sort of context. After trusting him ninety-seven percent, they seemed very loath to offer the other three. It was frustrating, and he found himself taking refuge in his prison routine:

 

6:00 a.m. Wake.

6:00 -7:00 a.m. Exercise on the floor. Calisthenics and stretches.

7:00 – 7:30 a.m. Breakfast and cleanup.

7:30 – 8:00 a.m. Cleaning and upkeep of cell.

8:00 – 10:00 a.m. Television.

10:00 a.m. - Noon. Read.

Etc.

 

In this manner, a good deal of time went by.

Chapter 16: B

Winchester, September 2040

 

Rue's health worsened that year; spots of decay began to appear on the year itself – small, infinitesimally widening areas in of a strange, hot, tingling pain – never quite quantifiable, always located in his palms and soles, but beginning to creep upward like plants. There was a protein that slowed the growth, and there was a painkiller that temporarily eradicated it, and perhaps ten months out of the year, he felt nothing at all, but he was aware of the stuff lurking in his bones, buzzing and bizarre, something normally found only in experienced diabetics, the lifers. It might well be idiopathic, he was told, as well as neuropathic. What a delight.

The pain tried to keep him awake. He was still as sleepy and needful of sleep as ever, but when he slept with the pain switched on, so to speak, it gave him nightmares and he woke up sweating, trying to throw blankets or remove cloth that wasn't there from the burning flesh. He was sure sometimes that sores would appear, burn blisters, or that he would injure himself scraping at the skin. The days afterward were foggy, vague; he would drop off on couches and chairs, and not in the usual way, which could even be pleasant – at least it was easy. At its worst, the pain brought on a permanently dreamlike state, punctuated by moments of intense emotion and visual clarity which did not compensate.

Curiously, these were some of his most productive days of work. For years now, his primary outlet had been monitoring the online activity of extremist and criminal groups. Now he seized this, weaponized it, made it active. He cowrote a program that could help determine whether certain texts or identities were the work of the same person; he released it open-source, and it became the standard software in the field. Using his knowledge of the program, he wrote another program that helped him to circumvent it, and he created identities that were increasingly important in various organizations, identities that fought against each other, that were sometimes deliberately recognizable as the same in order to shift power or an important spotlight to yet another of his selves. He allowed himself to be recognized as various people. He sowed calumny. He divided. Groundwater; the sect of radical and actively violent vigilante Kirites called The Book (how well they had guessed!); another Kirite group, secular in nature, which was far more insidious and had no organized name and was suspected of plotting to kill, in ways whose subtlety would honor their hero, various known anti-Kirite politicians and eventually politicians they simply didn't like – the less real the world became, the more it blurred, the more of them seemed to fall beneath his marauding and delirious fingers.

One night during this sleepy miasma, he was sitting on the living-room sofa, watching his vague hands, and Yuriy, who had given up on sleep that particular evening (he should try to have more sympathy for Yuriy's insomnia, which sometimes resulted in the appearance of complete hollowness, but these spots of pain made him selfish) – Yuriy was drinking some water. They were aware of part of the dawn, which had arrived through the curtains. Rue wanted to talk to him seriously, but he couldn't; he began to complain instead, which gave him some relief in a sputtering and unrealistic way, and though he hadn't thought Yuriy was really interested in talking at all, in the end Yuriy squeezed his ankle and said, “For some reason, this morning reminds me of a strange story.”

“How so?”

“Don't judge me for this.”

Rue looked at Yuriy; his eyes were stained; they seemed yellowed, dim, turned down. “I have no judgement at all right now.”

Yuriy settled a little more into himself. He told the story in Russian. “Well, Near and I had just done some private work for a rich Portuguese guy. It's ridiculous, because we hardly ever do anything of that kind, but I've completely forgotten his name. Near would know. Did it for the money and because he likes to keep his hand in the various identities. Anyway, I forget how he made his fortune, everything like that. I just remember the case – he needed someone to track down his ex-wife, that was it; she owed him some scary amount of money like those sorts of people deal in.”

Rue didn't ask what “those sorts” were, or really what Yuriy meant. He watched him take a gulp of his water and continue.

“So we find her. Near was brilliant, by the way, in this case, even for him. He does it in about a day and he largely does it without leaving the computer, and he just sorts effortlessly through it all – all the information, until he finds the right bit and seizes it. And the day we're going to go back to England, the guy invites us to his house. Near, to my surprise, really wants to go. He's been in a funny mood all day. So we agree that he'll go – maintaining the incognito, but we'll go up.

“Well, we get to the house.” Yuriy made a frustrated gesture. “I haven't a clue how to describe what happened next. I'd need a literary faculty beyond what I have. To start with, this fellow is drinking a lot – not like an alcoholic, somehow; I've known lots of alcoholics, and this guy was too Hollywood. He was doing it almost for show, and his desire to do this made you feel quite sad in an empathetic way, in an almost physical way – an intimate one. Like watching someone self-destruct in a film. And his house was amazing. It was in a town, and not on a particularly huge lot, but the yard was so heavily forested with these expensive gardens made to look wild – and everything always seemed wet in them, and incredibly fragrant, and there was a damp, gray feeling in the back of your throat in a very pleasant and nostalgic way. This guy lived among such implausible beauty. Everything in his house seemed arranged, even though the house was pretty dry and old-fashioned and beige and brown, when you considered it against the background of the garden. And after a short while, Near got uncomfortable, and started wanting to leave. I'd deliberately kept the plans vague, so I cut things off as gracefully as I could – it felt a little like a field trip for him, the way trips with Near occasionally can – and took him back to our hotel.

“Both of us were still very affected by the atmosphere of the place. This was a few years before I came back to Japan to get you. I asked if he wanted anything more for the night, and he said no, but he wanted me to know that he loved me. He said this just as Near says anything, and I didn't for a second think he meant the way, for example, I'd always told him I loved you. Of course.”

“Yes,” said Rue, a little annoyed at his belaboring the point.

“He was just looking at me sadly. So I took hold of him and kissed him on the cheek, and I said I loved him, too, but he didn't respond in any way. He looked just slightly embarrassed. I told him it was fine, and he said, 'It's not that.' I went back to my room.”

“That's an almost terrible story,” said Rue, yawning. “Very Near. No punchline.”

“It's one of those stories I can't really tell.”

“I have no stories at all from my Tokyo stay, you know.”

“You're not really that sort of person.”

“I guess not.” Rue rubbed his face. “I can't make sense.”

“Want to go back to bed?”

“You're very kind. I know you wouldn't like to be back there.”

“Nothing kind about that. You should, at least.”

“Hm?”

“You should,” said Yuriy in a whisper, and touched Rue's ankle. “You should go back to bed.”

“Are you going to sit down here all night?”

“Well, it's morning now.”

“I'll just lie here.”

 

Yuriy handed him the afghan that was kept over the sofa; he thought of Rue's old place in Tokyo, a veritable amusement park of sleeping opportunities, and he helped him to shake the afghan over himself, tucking it around his legs.

His fantasies of somehow incorporating Rue into himself had intensified, became almost violent, brutal; he half-dreamt on occasion of a scenario in which he pulled Rue to his chest and Rue became insubstantial, entered some other chemical state, and was then alive within him, the two of them a single frame with a tingle of discomfort and perplexity where their bodies met. He would half-wake in the morning, muddled and blue, and rise to go to work, immediately ashamed of the thoughts he had used to comfort himself.

 

 

*

 

Rue woke after dawn after predictable nightmares of running on hot asphalt; his feet were still buzzing, burning, and as he got up he knew that his balance would be bad today, and felt already the perverse aches, in his thighs and up his back to his armpits, that came from overstrain and overcompensation.

Yuriy was gone, and his first thought was that he'd gone upstairs to sleep in the bed, which in his mind was pale and smoothly welcoming in a purely abstract way. He felt leery and light-headed, but he stumbled up, only to find the room empty – it was hardly six. Retreating to bed, anyway. The reader: the world news, the national news, the local news, the classifieds; garage sales, estate sales. Rue liked sales. He'd always loved used things, but he read the classifieds in the expectation and dread of seeing one particular address, and today he found it. He set the reader down and looked across the room at the edge of the door.

227 The Street, Arun, Worthing

 

Cookware, vintage men's clothing, large collection of pop-culture ephemera (1950s-1990s), chairs, table, antique sofas, wall art, Japanese swords.

 

He was aware of a deep sigh coming out of him, and a certain downward retreat, and for a few minutes he fought sleep before getting up and going about his morning business, negotiating the stairs with greater care now that he was fully conscious. It was going to be another hot, muggy day – blurry heat and humidity that seemed to penetrate him and blend with his interior weather – and he put on his thinnest and palest jeans, his loosest white t-shirt, and tied back his hair, and got into the car and drove to Worthing.

 

The ancient white farmhouse, with far more ancient cottages across and nearby, had already vomited many of its contents into the lawn. Its front door had been swung wide. No one was there yet except for a pale, big-faced man in an untidy suit, who greeted Rue by name and in a sincerely friendly way, though they had met only once before and Rue could no more recall his name than guess it cold. He supposed he was a memorable figure to this community; spending freely on the rare occasions when he bought something, chatting about the implications of different items separately and together. Rue hated being memorable and thought he should chat less.

“Have there been many customers yet?”

“You're the first. It's not even opening time yet, but I finished setting up, so here I am.”

Rue wandered among the tables. “Do you know anything about the people who lived here?”

“An old man,” said the attendant. “Lived alone, or sometimes with his son – at least, I think a young man sometimes lived here; you can do some detective work if you chat to the neighbors. We're liquidating the entire home. There was some fine art and collectables, but that's going to auction in London. You found it!”

Rue was holding a sheathed katana; it wasn't a cheap souvenir, though that was where his judgment stopped. “Yes. I found it.”

“You should take it. Not everyone can get away with owning one of those, but you could.”

“Is there a stand?”

“It wasn't on any kind of stand.”

“I'll think about it,” he said, putting it down, feeling his grip slacken with more attention than was usual. “I'm going inside.”

The furniture was much as he remembered it, though the house already felt cold, vacuum-like. He went upstairs to the larger bedroom. They always cleared things out, moved them around – not much; a cursory attempt really, but enough to make the place seem anything other than recently lived-in.

He had seen Quil only once more. He and Yuriy had wanted to meet, and so Rue had brought him over for supper.. To Rue's pleasure and horror, they had got along well, talking about all the old television Rue had introduced without comment to Yuriy, about cooking, about Nabokov – Quil was delighted to find that Yuriy was a fan. To him it was very appropriate to meet a Nabokovian who had emigrated from Russia and adopted English. They achieved what must have been a lifelong dream by agreeing that Rue reminded them of the hero from The Luzhin Defense , a comparison which Rue had always found vigorously insulting, Luzhin being a childlike, sexually incapacitated figure with an unhealthy love of candy and Sherlock Holmes stories --however much they assured him that it was an abstract thing, a matter of his style of observation, nothing more. He had left feeling immensely loved in a doglike, mute kind of way.

The next week, Rue had received a very direct letter, stating that Quil had been overwhelmingly happy to speak to him again and see him settled, but that he felt it was too much, at the end of his days, to rebuild something so thoroughly vanished. How to respond to that, except with tears?

 

He drove home quietly and found that the mail had arrived; there was a package from Yuriy's parents and a letter with no return address, a letter whose provenance he guessed immediately.

As he was tearing it open, Yuriy called him.

“Rue, at your earliest convenience, can you please come over here?”

“Why?”

“Did you read about the plane crash in Florida?”

“Vaguely.”

“This isn't public yet, but it was a total electrical failure. The main and the backup systems.”

Rue paused, still looking at the letter; he scanned a few predictable words (love, apology, won't be). “Well, that's almost impossible, but if there was gross human error it might still be an accident. Did they tell you what happened with the RAT?”

“The what?”

“Ram air turbine. It generates emergency power.”

“No.”

“Wouldn't that be rather obvious information?”

“Mine wasn't an official source, Rue,” said Yuriy, who sounded increasingly as if he had a cold. “They didn't tell me much, and I think they told me all they knew.”

“You're better than that.” For a moment, he wanted the letter desperately.

“I don't think there are any official ones yet. They're still pulling people out. Rue, please just come up here; I want to talk to you.”

“Okay.” Rue clutched the letter to his chest. “But very quickly. If the RAT deployed correctly, it would be obvious. Among other things, the radio would have continued to work. Or failing the radio, there would have been some evidence from the ground that they had control over the plane.”

“None of that,” said Yuriy. “No.”

“It simply glided until it fell to earth.”

“Yes.”

“Who was on the plane?”

“I'll run it down when you get here.”

“I have one thing left to do,” said Rue, “but I'll be there very soon.”

 

When Rue was finally able to read the letter, he found that he still couldn't parse the words; it was still the same mass of “love, apology, won't be.” It was possible that one of them was meant to apologize to the other and had not; it was equally likely that neither of them owed the other any apology. Of love there was no doubt. And there was a good deal of pain in it – that was certain, although the shape, the genre of the pain were as vague as the whole day had been, no matter how businesslike his attempts to push or tear through it. He drank some water and went outside to look at the cats, but they were absent, so he drove to the big house, hoping that he could meet Yuriy briefly in some private place.

 

This proved impossible. He found all three of them in the main sitting room, squashed on the floor (the house had no air conditioning, though there were small expensive fans at work) or sitting on the loose-bound old cane chairs. Yuriy's exhausted eyes flicked at him from one such chair, which he occupied with a certain leggy awkwardness unusual to him; Rue wanted to come close and receive some sort of blessing, something that involved a hand on the top of his head, but the two obstacles went on sitting like stolid dolls. Instead he sat carefully on the hard surface of the gray sofa and said, “Who was on the plane, then?”

Yuriy had been tapping his reader vaguely against his chest. “Flight from Miami to New York. 9:30 a.m. local time, twenty-nine people on board. Embraer Excelsior microjet. Two families traveling for pleasure. A couple of businesspeople – a vice president from Bayell and a minor Google executive. Two Protestant ministers on their way home from a convention...”

“Are you sending me the data itself?”

“I am now,” said Yuriy, “sorry.”

“They were mainline Kirite Protestants,” said Near, who was wearing a white linen shirt and lying almost perfectly still beneath one of the ceiling fans. “The two ministers. Nobody of consequence.”

“I'll look it over. Have the lot of you been up to anything yet?”

“Just information-gathering.”

Rue curled up on the sofa to read, putting a pillow between his head and the arm of it. The other three exchanged a few more words, but he heard only their tone; he was busy assimilating the data of the passengers, the crew, the history and specs of the jet, a bit of independent research on the Excelsior class – a kind of plane which had arrived long after his time piloting anything, and of which he really knew nothing. Perhaps the RAT no longer came standard, even – no, he quickly found that it did.

“It reminds me of Mello's hijacking,” came Near's voice, more clearly than the rest, and he glanced up.

“Why?”

“The obvious reasons. Disregard for bystanders. Involves a plane. Is anyone seriously going to stand up for the idea that it's not Denver?”

“Don't call him Denver,” said Rue, “call him B. That's his name.”

“What?” asked Yuriy, blank and blindsided.

Rue sat up. “B.”

“ Why ?”

Rue sighed and launched into his explanation. “The evidence is circumstantial, but I find it rather convincing. Item one: it is in B's nature to pursue personal vendettas disguised as crimes of serial murder; why not personal vendettas disguised as, or conflated with, political crusades?

“Item two: Light defeated me; B always sought to defeat me; there is every reason to imagine that he might loathe Light as much as he loathes me, for being 'better' and also for taking his role.

“Item three: I have been involved for years in large-scale but subtle attempts to discredit Kirite organizations.

“Item four: This appears to be the first move in an attempt to do the same in a far more active manner, whether he intends for the two ministers to be blamed for the attack or simply intended to murder them in a Kira-like style, which would be in line with both of B's hypothetical motivations as set out here.

“Item five: B was acting as Watari's caretaker, or at any rate still had an obvious presence in his life, and Watari is now dead; he died three days ago, and since B was his caretaker, it makes sense that this would be the timing with which he put any longstanding plans into action.

“Item six: part of B's agenda is to have Light alive and safe, preferably in his power, to see what he's doing; this would explain his willingness to attempt to stop us from leaving Denver last year despite his obligation to Watari, whether he was involved in the escape and botched the job or not.

“Item seven: that was the first large-scale test of B's abilities; he had no intention of blowing out half the state, just of stopping or slowing us – and of course he wound up slowing himself as well. It makes no sense unless the scale of it was unintentional.

“Item eight: Mello's letter attributes various supernatural powers to B which line up with some of the typical powers of shinigami. I don't fully take him at his word, but I'm willing to consider it as corroboration of the possibility that B's existence has some sort of shinigami connection, and it does occur to one that there's electrical activity in the human heart and brain and it seems not entirely insane to posit that there is a connection between what B may be able to do and the general shinigami ability to kill at will, though that, unlike the other items, is not something I would stand up and testify to in a court of law.”

“Jesus, Rue,” said Yuriy softly, “Quil is dead?”

“Yes, he's dead.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. He was over ninety.”

“And you're sure B was still with him?” he went on in his careful way. Rue felt his mouth pull a little.

“Yes, he's plainly still alive and was living there. Didn't I tell you so at the time?”

“Rue, his – you said you thought he was there. I never necessarily agreed --”

 

“Stop saying my name,” said Ryuzaki, his voice increasingly snappish. Light sat up straight and stared at him, interested in what would happen next. “You never agreed because you weren't paying attention. Just spent the whole evening talking to him about Buffy .”

“Because I'm being sociable?” asked Krupin, lifting his eyes to meet Ryuzaki's and seeming, in the same gesture, to brush a fleck of something from his collar. “But let's talk about this somewhere else. Near, Light --”

“Oh, if you're going to order Near and Light around, just make them go,” said Ryuzaki. “I'm tired and I'm sick. Why should I be the one to get up just because you won't listen to me?”

“I'm not ordering them around,” said Krupin. “I'm the one who takes the orders, except --”

“For too long you've been cheapening yourself and my organization with these little kinks of yours.” Ryuzaki was getting up. “Fine. Let's have it out in my office. I don't care. I thought you were interested in a damned word I say, but it turns out all you care about is having someone to tell you what to do when it suits you.”

“ Rue !”

The door slammed, and Krupin, to his credit (Light thought) was swift and businesslike in opening it again and disappearing after him; there was something about his expression that Light found he could admire. He listened as their footsteps, Ryuzaki's caged stumble and Krupin's warm parental footfalls, receded down the hall.

“B?” he asked Near, who had not moved.

“Let's have a cup of tea,” said Near with resignation, “and I'll tell you the whole story.”

 

Light knew the story, of course, and assumed that Near knew that he knew, but he let Near tell it anyway. A refresher might be useful.

“And his theory?” he asked when near was done.

“Does it make sense to you?”

“Is the source reliable?”

“The best,” said Near firmly. “I would trust Mello with my life.”

Light said nothing, but let his expression settle into incredulity.

“Look, Mello was a lot of things,” said Near. “I mean it when I say he wasn't a liar. He had his own way of looking at things, but he never faked a fact. So while I don't know how he came about this story, I believe it, and I've backed up with Ryuzaki the parts that Ryuzaki would know.”

“Fine. It makes as much sense as anything. What's the other option, if there is one?”

Near shrugged. “Back to Siberia? Yuriy has a major lead on November; he was going to tell us about it when Ryuzaki got up to speed, but obviously he upstaged that. If this is the right person, he was recently arrested -- finally. Yuriy thinks it's Groundwater operatives with a conventional EMP weapon, bringing down the jet with an eye to getting rid of the Bayell executive; they have quite a vendetta against Bayell and, whether they were responsible or not, are probably going to make some sort of demands soon. It's the simplest explanation and, I think, the best. Which isn't to say Ryuzaki doesn't have a point. It's usually someone we know. And Groundwater still doesn't seem like the sort of organization who'd be this violent or this competent or this cartoony. I just don't make a practice of cleaving to Ryuzaki's logic when he's not doing well, and there is almost no question that this guy is November or that Groundwater are involved somehow. They always know something's going to happen. You just have to start from the outside of them and shake them about until you hear something cracking.”

“That's how you work best,” said Light.

“Don't get cute and referential with me,” said Near.

“I wasn't. I know your work. The only problem with you is that your endgames all involve a big open room and a mask of Ryuzaki's face, in one way or another.”

“I'll stop when it stops working,” said Near, beginning to lay out a tarot spread.

“In any case,” said Light, “these two ministers – I know them.”

“Oh?”

“Of them. Yes. Ramirez and Sullivan. Good people. Modest people. Very influential, especially in the beginning, in a quiet way, but no one a layperson would have heard of. Precisely what you'd hope for in an apostle.”

“That's very interesting,” said Near, not looking up from his cards. “You should tell Ryuzaki that if they stop arguing sometime soon.”

“I'll work it in.”

 

The morning, and then the afternoon, wore on. Light found himself reacting to the sheer length and breadth of Ryuzaki and Krupin's fight much as if they had been having several hours of enthusiastic sex; something twistedly impressive amidst the annoyance. Of course, there were breaks; it wasn't all blurry words through the door and the pipes. They rarely shouted. There were long periods of productive-sounding silence. At one point, Krupin trotted to the kitchen to bring them sandwiches, which Light thought epitomized him: he was the sort of person who'd interrupt an argument to take care of the co-arguer, conscientious but basically infuriating, always expecting some abstract compensation. Light had remained in the kitchen, reading; he was unsurprised when Ryuzaki followed him in and, heedless of Light's presence, said, “It's at least worth investigating. Give me that. Light, is it worth investigating?”

“Yes,” said Light by instinct.

“See, now.”

“God. He agrees. Kira agrees with you; come now, isn't that something of a reality check?”

There was a tug of tension in the room, and Ryuzaki's eyelids drooped; checking out of the scene a little.

“He is correct. I know it's a leap of faith...”

“I don't think it's a leap of faith,” said Yuriy. “I think it's just – Rue, it's – Rue.”

“Yes?”

“You'll hate this, but some fallacies. Confirmation bias. Post hoc. Here.”

He handed Ryuzaki a plate; Ryuzaki stared down at it, and the tips of his fingers poked at the bread. They were shaking.

“Eat.”

“I've always worked very much like this. This is how I found Kira.”

“Yes, maybe, yes,” said Krupin. “ Like this. Not this.”

“Then apparently I don't know myself,” said Ryuzaki, “nor you. I thought you were a man, for Christ's sake.”

“Okay,” said Krupin, and left the room rather quickly. Ryuzaki bit off a big chunk of the sandwich, chewed it, and followed him.

Chapter 17: Mum and Dad

The deepest flush of evening arrived. Near had retreated to the cellar; Ryuzaki was now in the kitchen, on the computer, headphones on, slumped back with an abstracted look on his face, nestled deep within someone's phone. Light found himself, as he often did, wandering between the rooms, feeling tired and out-of-sorts, and wishing there were some more objective source of information.

He found Krupin asleep in one of the two big parlors in which children had once played in the evenings and on weekends; he was flopped on a bald green velvet couch, his bare feet delicately touching its arm as if he were perched sideways. Light lingered over him, thinking about how strange it still felt that Ryuzaki was attached to this person – thick-necked and stiff-fingered, with a heavy red heat-flush over his face and around his mouth. His lips were full and relaxed; his eye moved behind the lid. He lay somehow defensively, anxiously, on his back with the inside of one leg sprawled and visible. As Light watched, he gave a long sigh and the corners of his mouth turned up fleetingly, so fleetingly that it seemed like an error.

Downstairs; from the musty carpet-smell (and pollen, and food) and into the musty water-smell. Near was on the bed, drawing. Light sat near him, though not actually next to him.

“Here's what B looks like,” said Near suddenly, brandishing the sketchbook at him, “at least, when I last saw him. With and without makeup.”

Light took it, a little clumsily, unused as always to the way that Near moved. “How old was he?”

“I suppose about eighteen. The concept is hard to discuss because, of course, if you've died and come back to life it becomes obvious that age is a meaningless number, but that would make him about twenty when he died, which was when Ryuzaki was twenty-four – but Ryuzaki was for a year after that, so he's now five years older. And Ryuzaki is going to turn forty-six on Halloween. So there's that.”

Light looked at the two images. Near was not particularly talented with the pencil, but he was precise, and Light was sure that he had rendered the shape of each feature and the shape of the face with care; the result did not look particularly realistic or human, but it was representative.

“The makeup was subtle,” said Near. “He was good at it. He could pass for someone who wasn't wearing it, though if you knew Ryuzaki he couldn't pass for him. Mainly, what he did was make his eyes pop and his cheeks more sunken and his lips – more. He was an ordinary-looking Japanese man. Really, not handsome, not ugly.”

“I wouldn't look at him twice on the street.”

“And a good physical actor,” said Near. “He could move like Ryuzaki; he could imitate anyone. He could also do me. I asked. It was good. He was, in general, a good actor. Nobody else here was interested in drama, particularly, and he was an awkward age, older than most of us who were there when I was growing up. Maybe that's part of why he got so fixated on Ryuzaki. Nothing else to do.”

“Did you all know each other growing up?”

“No,” said Near, and then, “I'm being literal; yes, we were aware of each other. He was much too old to be my friend and too young to be Ryuzaki's, if he had any friends.”

Light sighed and leaned forward on his knees.

“Are Mum and Dad still fighting?”

Light didn't say anything.

“Don't worry about them.”

“I wasn't.”

“Of course not,” said Near. “They depend on each other much too much to really fight. It's not very healthy, but it's the best they can do; I think it's sad. Don't you think Ryuzaki is sad, especially?”

“Obviously.”

“I'm sorry,” said Near, grimacing. “I know everything I have to say about them is obvious, but it drives me mad sometimes to be so privy to someone's marriage and to be all alone, watching. From down here. That's why I talk at you so much. That, and you're so quiet. It's a big improvement.”

“Thank you. Can I take this?”

He held the sketch of B. Near shrugged. “Okay, take it. Go and see how they're doing?”

“All right.”

“I can hear it – they don't care, or they're too angry to notice – but I'd rather someone see them. They'll go home in about twenty minutes, anyway, and then we'll probably find out their decision in the morning. It's well out of my control, just like all of this garbage.”

His hand swept the whole basement, with all of his various projects in it; his face was even blanker than usual. Light was surprised at the emotion in his voice.

He went upstairs again, arriving in time to overhear a snatch of soft conversation from the foyer.

“--uncalled for. That's all. But we can talk about it.”

“Don't be a coward,” said Ryuzaki's voice. “We disagree. You think my argument is weak; don't step back from it and make mouths.”

“I do. I do think it's weak. But--”

“I'm going to stay the night here.”

“All right. Do you have your meds?”

Then there was a sigh, louder than most of the conversation had been; Ryuzaki said, “No.”

“Then come home with me. If you don't want to talk, I'll sleep on the couch.”

“All I want to know is -- all this time, is this what you've thought of me?”

Light stole a little closer.

“Is what what I've thought of you?”

“That I just work on intuition; that I run on confirmation bias and post hoc, and always assume it's someone I know or have heard of. I was chasing after the worst people in the world when you were a little boy.”

“Rue, please. I just don't think this is going to help anybody, and I honestly just disagree, which doesn't mean you're wrong.”

“You think I'm ill-founded,” said Ryuzaki -- “ and wrong, in the bargain. I detest people who think that correct and incorrect are matters of taste, and there's room for both.”

“What are you talking about? We can proceed; we can investigate both leads. It's fine.”

Then there was a long pause, and a rustling and movement. Then Ryuzaki said tiredly, “It's possible that I am wrong.”

“No. Don't do that.”

“Do what? Acknowledge that you have a point? This is how you always do it. Do you not see the pattern? Patterns make you predictable and weaken you. First you argue with me; then, when you see I'm considering your point of view, you pull back and cheapen yourself by acting like I have a right to opinions you are absolutely convinced are incorrect.”

“You're damned right I do,” said Krupin, more loudly, and then he continued in Russian. Light's mind pulsed briefly, adjusting; he filled in the blanks as best he could, but Krupin spoke rapidly and his accent was different, rougher, from the accents on the course he'd used. “What do you expect us to do? We each think the other's talking absolute nonsense; we can't be open-minded, but we can pretend we are for the sake of the work. This is basic stuff and the fact that you're forgetting it makes you look pretty damned upset for the wrong reason. -- You know what else?”

“No.”

“You're awfully sensitive and interested in compromise when nothing's at stake; when something is, you pull right the fuck back and spit out the word 'man' or something like it. We're a democracy with a voluntary chain of command, and that satisfies you until things start going in a way you don't like, in which case you're in charge and you won't hear anything else, because you're a man , apparently, and can decide which of us are men as well.”

“I'm still right, Yuriy.” His voice had also risen to speaking tones; it had lost all of its certainty – indeed, its attitude was rather one of betrayal and shock; nonetheless, he was saying it, and then he said it again. “Nothing you say will convince me an iota that I haven't got the right person and the right idea, no matter how slim the evidence may appear to be from your side. I know B. I'll consider what you're saying only insofar as it determines what I'll suggest as a backup plan.”

“You knew him.”

There was a snapping sound; Ryuzaki cracking a knuckle. “I'm taking Light. We'll go to Florida and find him. You take Near and go back to Siberia. Check his white body daily for ticks.”

Light began to walk down the hall at normal speed; they heard him and fell silent, and then Light heard someone grab someone's shoulder, a harsh clothy sound, before he walked by and saw (as if they were a sort of diorama by the track of a theme-park ride).

“Hello, Light,” said Ryuzaki, maintaining the Russian.

“Hello,” said Light back at him.

 

Outside, under the stars, on the way to the car, Rue said, “It's simply that I was always raised to believe that a man sticks by his opinions and defends himself reasonably. He takes his leadership when nobody is agreeing.”

“Rue, listen. I don't mean this as an insult, but what part of your long-haired, sexually submissive, retiring, intuitive, gentle-to-animals self thinks that this model of masculinity applies to you in any useful way?”

“And my cock doesn't work too often,” said Rue, “you may as well throw that in, too.”

Yuriy looked away from him for a moment. “I mean to say that, if you're going to base your whole point on what a man is – and what is your point, at this point? -- then make it about what you think a man is, not what you were raised to think, because I know what we were raised to think a man is and you're not it, my dear.” (The phrase wasn't as patronizing in Russian; conversely, Rue's insult was a bit more marked.)

“My point,” said Rue, tempted to walk all the way out into the fields and to the town and through and past it and simply continue in a straight line; it was a nice night for it, “is simply that you'd better have the balls to put trust in me or argue the way you'd like to, rather than saying you don't share my tastes, but I should certainly express my bad opinions in oils.”

“That wasn't your point when you first brought up the 'man' business. As near as I could tell, it was that I didn't agree and you didn't like it.”

“Shut up.” Rue got into the car.

“Shut up? That's good.”

“If we're going to talk Russian, I can't make myself as clear as I want.”

“What would you have said in English? 'Shut up,' I imagine.”

“Just drive us home,” said Rue. “I don't want to talk to you.”

At home, Rue immediately went upstairs, not looking back; Yuriy watched him go and then poured himself a glass of wine, listening to the piping-up of the bath and feeling his way into a kitchen chair. It had felt almost tropical outside, though the weather was finally cutting down for the night, and the inside had a damp, stale feel. Rue had opened the bedroom window and the wind coming into the house was audible. There was something in it that reminded him of being on a ship, a ship of a type that had vanished long before he was born.

He closed his dry eyes and swallowed a little more of the faintly druggy liquid; the silence and safety of shut eyes made it feel as if he were putting it somewhere very safe. The water cut and he heard Rue splashing vaguely. He stayed sitting there for almost half an hour, finding excuses not to move, until he heard the drain and then the soft boof of Rue's body hitting the bed; then he got up, put the glass in the sink, and went upstairs to shower. The warm muggy wind was blowing about the bedroom and Rue was already under a sheet with the lights off. He showered in lukewarm water (Rue always took all the hot, whatever it was like outside or in), turned the tap cold for a few moments, and then switched off the shower and the light.

Swiftly moving up to the bed on unseen, naked feet; he crawled in and nestled his cold body into Rue's sweaty back. Rue gave a hard shiver and then a sound of surprise, possibly pleased surprise.

“How are your feet?” he asked quietly.

“They've actually been getting better today.” He felt their soles gently press against his shins.

“Good.”

“I'm very tired.”

“I know.”

“--Jesus, you're cold. It feels like you'll never warm up.”

Yuriy let go. “Do you want me to move to the couch, then?”

“Oh, lord, I don't care. Sleep here. It's better for your back.” He must have caught the faint scent of alcohol, because he added, “I'm turning you into your mum.”

“Rue, that's actually – that's sort of insulting on a couple of levels. To both of us. To -- you know, each thing I do isn't symbolic....”

Rue was silent; then Yuriy heard a sobbing sound in his throat.

“Sorry. It's just, he's gone, and I didn't ever – I lost track – I didn't even pay attention for years. A little gesture of independence turned into something else. I thought if I tried to contact him now, he wouldn't forgive me. Then I did and he didn't.”

“He did.”

“I don't think he did.”

Yuriy scratched at his back; he squirmed a little, stretched, sighed, and was still. When his breathing slowed, Yuriy crept back up and held him again.

 

In the quiet of the morning, Rue sat carefully, positioned his glass of water just so, and opened Quil's letter again. This time, it was easier to parse, and he read it straight through without stopping. It began without salutation; it was unsigned.

 

I was also an adopted child. The story of your life echoes the story of mine quite closely, though you don't know it and probably resent it now that you do know. I was also an adopted child; I was orphaned at the age of about six by the war, though I didn't know for some time that my father was dead as well as my mother. I was taken in by relatives, and I grew up thinking of these people as my parents. These are the rather distant family, the father who sent me to Harrow, the diplomat uncle who took me to Japan for a year, of whom I've occasionally spoken.

When I was admitted to university, I didn't cut them dead right away. I went home a few times to visit, though having spent enough time away to learn what real affection was, each time my sense that I had nothing in common with these people was redoubled. Eventually, when I was twenty-three, I made the decisive move: I stopped writing, stopped coming home, stopped answering letters. Different from your case, of course. You told me why (if not, perhaps, exactly why) you chose to drop me. Also I had cut them off because I had an idea of my future career and it wasn't one that involved contact with home, or any family.

I hope you have a family. I like Yuriy very much and I think you would be good parents, should you eventually adopt children. But part of the reason I want you to have a family is that so you will understand as I understand that some things run in families, and it doesn't matter how much the children know or whether they are biologically related. Abandonment runs in ours. It always seems very reasonable, in a dramatic coming-of-age sort of way, to the person doing the abandoning. And there are always circumstances, somehow or other, that cement it for the other party, so that in the end everyone blames everyone else.

You don't owe me any apology; in return, I hope you won't mind that I won't be apologizing to you. I love you and everything I did I did for love, including let you do what you wanted. It is my understandi ng as of now (January 11, 2039; I update this each year and instruct my proxy to destroy the previous letter, though I don't know how faithful or consistent he is) that you are now doing quite well professionally again. This has always been one of my wishes for you, but only one.

Each year I write these letters in a sitting, without thinking about them as I write, insofar as that's possible. The previous paragraph is a sort of ritual at this point. I save it for last because I know I'll say it when I've run out of other things to say. The letter is inadequate. Nothing I could write could make it anything else. Your next cup of coffee (do you even drink coffee anymore?) is going to provoke a wider variety of sensations and a deeper visceral impact than anything I could write, at whatever length, even if I had real talent with words. You know how I feel, or anyway I hope that you do, all the anger and wretchedness and confusion and love; there's something of both the parent and the child in both of us. Take good care of yo urself and of the people you love. I have tried to do the same.

 

Job 14. Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.

He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee?

Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass;

Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day.

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.

Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground;

Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?

As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up:

So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me!

If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.

Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.

For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin?

My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity.

And surely the mountains falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place.

The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man.

Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away.

His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them.

 

“'If his sons are honored, he does not know it; if they are brought low, he does not see it,'” murmured Rue to himself. “That's all. It's not complicated: lord, hide me in the grave until your anger has gone; take me back when you have need of me. Or else leave me alone. But of course, let us all be poetic; let us be archaic.”

 

But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn.

 

“He feels but the pain of his own body and mourns only for himself.”

Rue folded the paper back up and crumpled it hard into his palms, trying in a vague way to mould it to the contours of his hands. He sat there until Yuriy came downstairs.

Eventually, he arrived, in shorts and a t-shirt, a vague gray blur of shoulders and bare freckled feet; his back went into the kitchen and Rue heard the coffee maker being started, and then he came out and said in Russian,

“Rue, can I talk to you?”

Rue looked up properly, holding the papers a little tighter. Yuriy sighed and said, “That big-eyed look. Well, all right. I just have something very brief to say about that 'man' thing yesterday. I know all you meant by 'a man' was 'an adult' or maybe 'Philip Marlowe,' and I know you were miserable for various very good reasons and still are. But I don't like hearing that kind of thing from you. I don't think I ask very much of you, and yet you seem to have reached out and deliberately pressed a sore spot you knew I had. That's all.”

He had wandered closer and closer to Rue as he spoke, and when he'd said “sore spot,” he'd reached for Rue's head, the top of it, and squeezed it gently with all ten fingers in a probing, careful manner – almost an embrace, and Rue felt his back stiffen in a sort of recognition.

“I'm sorry,” he said, keeping his eyes on his cereal. “I know I'm hard to live – I make myself very hard to live with.”

“You make yourself hard to live with,” Yuriy repeated, his voice thickening suddenly -- “well, yes – well put. Because you really have to try. I think I've made it clear a hundred times how much I like you and how much I love being around you – do you think I've made every effort to keep you close to me because I'm a masochist or an idiot?”

“Masochist had occurred to me,” said Rue wryly, but Yuriy wasn't in the mood for wry and he felt his hands tighten around the crumpled letter as he watched him sigh and pinch, very gently, at the bridge of his nose – a habit he'd picked up from Rue, and one which always impressed Rue vaguely, executed as it was with his old capacity for delicacy.

“Rue, do you trust me not to say things like that?”

“Like what? How --”

“Like 'you must stay around me because you like to suffer.' Even as a joke. Even when I joked first. Do you know what that does? It immediately and instantly makes this whole conversation about you --”

“I'm sorry –”

“Both of us are always very sorry,” said Yuriy, his voice rising. “It immediately makes the conversation about you. Now I have to tell you no, even while I've been insulted in this way; you're saying that I have no perception or taste and that I've been too badly injured by life to know what I like, and the only way out of that insult is to compliment you.”

“You're right, of course,” said Rue, feeling his own voice grow smaller; he hated that, wanted to be forceful, but he felt himself starting to resign from the whole conversation. He cleared his throat. “You said it first, but I recognize -- ” he began in a firmer tone, recognizing the redundancy of adding anything, but Yuriy interrupted him again.

“All I have to say – and I know you're upset for ten reasons and I have no wish to twist the knife – but all I have to say is I trusted you not to talk to me like Zhenya did. Is that so hard?”

“No. It shouldn't be—“

“Rue, you cannot get out of this by apologizing,” said Yuriy, a depth and a slight shaking in his voice that Rue normally only heard in moments of crisis, when he was trying to impress upon outsiders that he had done all he could. He went into the kitchen to pour out his coffee. “You cannot.”

“No,” said Rue, eyes on the paper.

“I'm glad we agree. If you want to know what an adult does, Rue, whatever their sex, it's not react to feeling like shit by attacking people indiscriminately, or rather very discriminately. I don't even care about what you said. It wasn't much of an insult.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” said Yuriy's disembodied voice. “It wasn't; it was like watching a child play with a gun. You didn't really understand what you were doing. Do you want coffee?”

“Uh – no,” said Rue, caught wholly off his guard, though he always pulled this trick, “no. Is it decaf?”

“No.”

“Thanks, though.”

“It actually might have been its insincerity that hurt more. I don't know. I'd rather not react to it so hard, anyway; do you think I do on purpose?”

“No, Yuriy,” said Rue with a little more force; it was a sort of catechism, and he felt tired of it and tired in general.

“Do you think this is stupid, Rue? Do you think I'm just being little and sensitive and sad?”

He had meant it, through the thick irony. Rue sighed. “I don't want to talk about this at the moment, Zhora, really. I have this letter.”

“Oh, go ahead,” said Yuriy, “read it, go to hell. I'm going to go sit outside.” And he came out of the kitchen with his coffee, quickly passed through the room and went out.

Rue went upstairs and began to pack for the trip; most of the summer clothes he owned went into a duffel bag, and then pills, pill container, underwear, socks, reader on top. He thought about asking Yuriy to hand over the anti-anxiety meds and the opioid painkiller, of which he was usually the keeper, but it was hard to picture – that was what bothered him, really; Yuriy, whom he trusted to know his mental states better than he did, had treated his carefully thought-out theory as if it were the excess of a pathological mood. Besides, if he was going to America, he would need anxiety; it could be turned to a useful purpose.

Yuriy didn't come up. He could see him out the window, sitting meditatively on the porch with the mug in his fist. Had he always been so freckled? It was one of those days upon which the familiar dissolved into a series of observable details.

Was he crying? No, and yet his face had slumped down toward his knees as if a very quiet medical event were occurring. Rue took his bag downstairs and leant it and his emergency cane against the kitchen wall; he threw open the door and sat on the porch with Yuriy.

“You always argue so cheaply,” he said, not looking at Rue. “That's all. I always admired how willing to be cheap you are, but there are limits.”

“I,” Rue said, and trailed off.

“Yes,” said Yuriy. “Sorry.”

“I know. Do you want to go to work?”

“Not yet. I was just thinking. You know, being here – I love being here; so many places in the world people can jam themselves into your face anytime they wanted. Cities, I mean. You can never take a breath. Just stupid things like that. I...Rue, I'll miss you.”

“Yes.”

“Is that the letter? From Quil?”

“Yes.”

“May I read it?”

“Yes,” said Rue, and put it into his hand; letting go of the letter seemed to release him from his paralysis and childish feeling. He huddled up on the steps and awaited Yuriy's judgement on the thing, but he didn't seem to have one; he just handed it back, and they held hands, Rue thinking that it was rather strange, even after all this time, to have entered into this romantic contract with his protector. Still, you took these things when they were offered. He loved Yuriy; he needed love.

 

Light slept late, until seven; when he woke he felt muzzy, as if he had taken a sleeping pill. Near, Ryuzaki and Krupin were all late risers, and he left the room in his robe, face still creased with sleep, confident that nobody would see him en dishabille .

He was incorrect; Near was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating cereal and idly laying out another tarot spread, which he swept up quickly when Light came in. He nodded to Light rather than speak.

It seemed an undignified retreat to leave now, so he continued with the plan: yogurt, bread. Was this what the rest of his life would look like?

Chapter 18: The Man Who Sold the World

They went to America by solar ship. It was Ryuzaki's concession to Krupin: nothing for which the loss of electricity could be immediately fatal.

When they arrived, they began to pursue an aggressive course of entertainment. Ryuzaki explained to Light that B had a taste for such things, for bars, films, karaoke, and so for the first week they drove carefully up and down the coast, not trying to get ahead of B, but following the chain of events: another small plane crash, also of an Excelsior, this time in Roanoke, Virginia; a Kirite church in Nyack, New York, destroyed during a poorly attended Sunday service by a lightening-related fire; a prison break in New Hampshire following a brief power loss.

 

They walked into the bar, sat down. It was early and only four or five people were waiting, tensed and sharkish, in booths and at long tables. All of them felt like regulars, the people Light instinctively felt should represent American karaoke: a couple of pretty women with beery stomachs and thighs; an older, ponytailed man in a cowboy hat. The anthropological side of him that he'd developed in response to all the unexpected travel was curious to see how it felt to watch a stranger sing karaoke in a musty hall like this. The greater part of him was lost and agoraphobic and wanted to crawl into bed, though looking at Ryuzaki, who was sitting next to him, he resolved to show it even less than he normally might; Ryuzaki looked thoughtful, alert, and the colorful lights brought out his cheekbones. His fingers were examining his chin with no particular purpose.

All at once, he stood and went towards the DJ, who had finished setting up and was working on his reader – one of the fancy new ones, with the transparent screen, so that Light could tell from the back that he was checking his mail; how, he wondered, would these things catch on when they didn't afford you any privacy? Or was exhibitionism the point?

“Do you have a moment?”

Ryuzaki stood before the DJ in a pose of carefully attuned patience and nervous hope.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“I was wondering if you could help me with something small. I'm looking for my half-brother, and I think he might recently have passed through here to pick up some stuff from his old house. I know he loves karaoke, so I'm making the rounds...”

It wasn't precisely a pose, wasn't precisely a character; if anything, Ryuzaki was exaggerating his usual tics and weight-shiftings, and Light thought perhaps that he was testing for response to that as much as obfuscating. (“If a guy comes by in a few days,” he could very easily imagine B saying, “long-haired and skinny, with a twitchy way about his fingers, would you mind throwing him off? He's working for my creditors” -- and a tip, and a smile, and a well-performed song. You didn't need much leverage at that distance.)

The DJ studied Ryuzaki's face, half-rising -- “Would he have looked like you?”

“Very little, I would say. Taller, more athletic than me; younger; more Japanese blood. Probably sang a showtune or a ballad, if he was around.”

“Do you have a photo?”

“I haven't got a thing,” said Ryuzaki, “except a sketch--” His hand strayed to his jacket pocket, and he withdrew the crumpled paper. “My brother is an interesting guy -- he falls out of contact with us a lot, and I just haven't got a photo of him from after we were children. But, here. It's pathetic, I know.”

“That your timeless artwork, then?”

“Yeah,” said Ryuzaki. “Sorry.”

“I remember a guy like that,” said a blonde woman at the bar -- “it was one of Doug's nights – if you'd been here you would've remembered.”

“You do?” asked Ryuzaki, perking up gently. He was imagining himself, Light thought, as a schoolteacher with the summer off, or an accountant who mostly worked during tax season; someone who presented himself as somewhat more effeminate than Ryuzaki, though probably not homosexual, judging by the way he glanced at the blonde – a shy but direct straight-man once-over, unnerving to Light in its calculation and out-of-nowhere appearance as part of Ryuzaki's arsenal. He lifted his head, allowing himself to seem slightly more a part of the conversation.

“Can I see the sketch?”

He brought it over to her.

“May be him,” she said, “though I don't remember too many of the details of his face; he was an Asian guy, though, and he sang ballads. Old rock ballads. First was Bowie, 'Starman,' and then later that night, Queen.”

“'Bohemian Rhapsody?'”

“'The Show Must Go On.'”

“Oh.” Ryuzaki shrugged. “He always loved 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Did he dedicate the song?”

“I don't think so.”

The DJ was testing the microphone; he returned to his computer, cued a track, and took it himself – a loud and raucous rap which made it impossible to hear anything more. Ryuzaki and the blonde smiled apologetically at each other, and he shouted something at her that Light couldn't hear; she squeezed his hand in motherly fashion (whatever he had shouted had changed their relations inoffensively and inexorably) and mouthed “Good luck.”

In the next town, the site of the prison riot, the DJ was cannier.

“Looking for your half-brother,” he said – an older and rougher man with 2025's curled, backswept haircut. “I suppose if I ask why, you'll say he's due an inheritance?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I said so? As a matter of fact, he is.”

“You're not the first private detective to come in here with that story.”

Ryuzaki shrugged. “Would you like to look at a sketch?”

“Fine. Let's see it. Yes. Is this anything to do with the riot? Not a prisoner?”

“At one time. But not here.”

“He looks nothing like you.”

“Well, we all look the same to most people. He would have sung a ballad, probably an old rock ballad.”

“Don't remember him,” said the DJ. Thus far, he had seemed belligerent only in a casual, almost joking way, proud of his intelligence; now his face froze a little, though more (Light thought) as if he were realizing the weight of the conversation than if he'd recognized B.

“Did he tell you I'd be after him?”

“I don't remember him.”

“Did he tell you I'd be after him?” Ryuzaki repeated, with an odd, thin, patient, fond smile. His inflections were identical, and something about this was unnerving.

“Nobody like this was here.”

“Or do you simply sense that I mean him no good, and you liked him instinctively. He was a good singer and a friendly man. I haven't sung, haven't tipped, probably won't tip, and am not friendly, even though I am very polite. So you're on his side.”

“Fuck you,” said the DJ, his expression closing, hardening -- “I don't remember him; he didn't sing anything; he wasn't here. I won't have you thrown out, but play your games somewhere else.”

“I'm sorry,” said Ryuzaki sincerely. “I had to push it a little to make certain.”

“I'm sure you're used to not making friends in your line of work. You could stand to have a little more finesse.”

“I'll bear that in mind,” said Ryuzaki, and went back to the booth, where Light had plugged in his reader keyboard and was screening along with his head propped on his arm. “Bored?”

“They have the prisoners. Nobody got far.”

“I thought not.”

“I have a theory.”

“The judge?” Ryuzaki reached for his glass of water, touching it to his temples and then swallowing a piece of ice like a pill.

“Yes. Schweitzer.”

“So the escapees were her cases?”

“Every one.”

“So what does he do now? Another attempt? Move on? I know he'd rather do something poetic like have the person murdered by someone they put away – and just killing her after that is so obviously a backup plan; it would be difficult to find her in protective custody, anyway, and it loses face.”

“He might just move on. Right now it's deniable.”

“A deniable localized power failure with no obvious physical cause?”

“God's actions are sometimes inexplicable,” said Light. “That can cover a reasonable number of mistakes. And he's certainly setting himself up as a god. What I don't understand is how he came by these absurd powers.”

“He always had absurd powers – or so Mello claims. He was born with shinigami eyes.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“I don't know,” said Ryuzaki tiredly. “We've seen a lot of ridiculous things. At any event, he knew when people were going to die.”

“Of course. He killed them.”

“I really don't know, Light. The rules have changed. Perhaps the rules were always rather arbitrary. You and I appear to be proof. And no, I don't think he's setting himself up as a god.”

“No?”

Ryuzaki struggled a little with the words. “No. He's trying to destabilize the church, certainly – but that's all, at least for now.”

“The lightening strike?”

“It was storming. And it didn't hit the building; it hit the tree.”

“Precisely the correct tree.”

“I'm not saying it wasn't him. I'm saying he's at least trying to make it look like coincidence.”

“How long is a group of Kirites going to believe that this is all a coincidence?”

“Not long. This is why I suspect it's just the first part of a larger plan.”

“To do what?”
“I don't know. Something bigger, though – something to which response will require the stability he's trying to destroy.” The first singer was coming up to the stage; Ryuzaki sighed and pushed himself further into the corner of the booth. “I'd love to know what he's planning, but if you're wondering – no, I'm doing my best. Frighteningly enough.”

 

The next bar was a barn of a place, lit up outside with Christmas bulbs, and they could tell it would be raucous, obnoxious, a wailing mass, just pulling up in the car. The bass thumped at a slowish pace as they made their way up the pebbled walk, and as they opened the door and began to fight their way through a busy, dark front room whose denizens barely seemed human to Light, they heard the last two lines of a song:

 

“You know I think about you;

Let me know you think about me, too.”

 

--curl out of the back room; Ryuzaki's shoulder gave a startled heave; he shoved at Light and shouted -- “Don't let him get out of the building!” -- applause obliterated Light's reply, but he trusted and ran back towards the door, slamming it open and making for the back of the building, anywhere that looked like a stage door or a loading door.

 

When Rue reached the room with the stage, B had left it, though his applause remained; it was a big distracted room, fratty Americans with tall and almost-full beers in hand, already returning to their conversations, but with a certain wasn't-he-great air going around, and Rue's head jerked stageward, overwhelmed though he was by the noise and the waves of voices, scanning, just in case he'd stayed inside, just in case he hadn't bolted.

 

“Next singer is L Lawliet, L Lawliet? L? Going once?”

 

His hand clutched the end of a small square table, dark with staining and old beer. The name had come over the PA, a nightmare mosquito buzz which had at the same time a distinctness to it, a sense of being entirely apart from the room's noise. He coughed an obscenity. The DJ, a woman with long red hair, must have seen something of his expression, because she focused on him -- “Don't want to sing anymore?”

“No,” he said, “God, no. My friend's --”

But the grotesque knot of faces at the table was nodding and laughing at him, picking up on his shyness and encouraging him to go up; “I don't sing karaoke,” he said firmly, and at that point he could have left, it was the point where the tension could have been more or less politely burst, but instead he let it rebound, smiled tightly, seized the situation in two mental hands, and mounted the little stage to mild cheers, mostly from his new friends, the square-table quartet.

“What am I singing?” he asked into the mic, scanning the room – still no B, no Light; he should, perhaps, have not sent Light outside; he wouldn't know how to handle him, and Light lacked the immunity he knew B would still grant him from immediate harm. His hand tightened over the microphone.

The transparent screen was already showing it, and, delighted with him and with life, the square-tablers directed him to it by means of hand signals.

 

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD

In the style of

David Bowie

 

He sighed and rolled his shoulders a little; fine, at least it was in a range he could manage, but he'd hoped for something more revelatory.

The phone buzzed in his pocket, and he took it out, heedless of the song's long introduction. “Yes?” he said, covering the microphone and standing well away.

“Not him,” said Light. “Long story. Where are you?”

“I'm singing a song.”

Light hung up on him, which was, he thought, a reasonable response.

 

By the time Light was back inside – he had run quite far – Ryuzaki was nearly done. He did not recognize the song, and in that way of songs one doesn't recognize, it parsed for him only as a more or less tuneful moan, a blurry set of disconnected phrases. He was singing it on key, if not precisely with enthusiasm, and Light stopped, leaning against the doorway between the two rooms or circles of hell, simply to listen; he had not heard him sing before, nor suspected him of being capable of it.

When he'd finished, he hopped down and at once found Light; he was walking a little drunkenly, though Light knew he would not have taken anything to drink.

“What's the long story?”

“Let's go. It was – someone else. A man ran out, certainly, and I followed and caught him, but he didn't know anything – something a new bar buddy had put him up to a few days ago – part of a game he was playing with one or two friends.” Light bundled himself more tightly into his jacket. “I believed him. Will you trust my judgement?”

“Young man?”

“Fairly. Why?”
“Curious.” Ryuzaki looked pale and sick, paler and sicker than he usually might. “Light, please – oh, never mind.”

“What?”

“It's nothing. Nothing to do with you. Let's go somewhere and sleep.”

 

“It's a strange choice,” said Ryuzaki, as Light drove him further away, towards a motel, under a black-and-white sky, “because it's so obvious, I think. A man meets another man; they know each other, but seem to be enemies, though the second man tells the narrator that they are friends. The narrator is surprised and tells him 'I thought you'd died alone a long, long time ago.' And the other man denies it and says, 'Not me; I never lost control. You're face to face with the man who sold the world.'”

“So it's about something like a deal with the devil, perhaps?”

“It's – oh, I don't know. This isn't my kind of thing. I don't spend time reading things into old ballads.”

“Life has called upon you to do so,” said Light.

Ryuzaki pulled his feet up onto the seat. “In the second verse, the two men part, and the narrator roams the world, searching for a place to settle. Maybe he's a ghost, because he's looking at millions of other people and asking the same question about dying alone, saying 'we.' It's hard to take seriously because he 'gazes a gazely stare' at them.”

“But nonetheless,” said Light, “'not us, we never lost control,' etc?”

“No. I don't remember. I'll have to look it up. I can't suppose it's a useful clue, anyway. He's not an idiot or in a film.”

“It might give some insight into what he's thinking, nonetheless.”

“Well, yes. But you know, shinigami only eat apples; shinigami have red hands. He's capable of that sort of thing. I'm sure to you, he must seem a small-timer.”

“No,” said Light. “I know he's not a small-timer; you were willing to jump into his trap just to get a tiny clue like that.”

“Maybe I'm just stuck.”

“Maybe you are,” said Light.

“Well, thank you for your faith.”

 

They checked into the motel. Rue curled on the bed, too tired to remove his shoes; Light's had dropped, as they always did, precisely at the corner of the doorway. Rue watched him organize his bag. He was taking out trousers and shirts and jumpers and socks – gray and brown and green things, sober blue and not-quite-white, a methodical, well-fitting arsenal of clothes that all matched each other. So wholly unlike Yuriy, who dressed himself each morning at great psychic cost.

“Did you say something, Ryuzaki?”

“No,” said Rue, who might have made a noise in the back of his throat. He forced himself up and walked on heavy legs to the sink, where he drank a glass of water. It was always so hard to stay hydrated, to get enough rest, living in motels like this; he sat down at the reader, hoping for an update from Yakutsk.

As he woke it up, the machine leapt into full-video life -- B's face filled the screen (looking neat, refined, unscarred, the hair well-groomed) and he raised a hand and Rue heard Light give a great hideous gasp.

“Don't look at him,” said B in soft English, “or you'll be the same.”

Rue obeyed, his body tensing hard, his eyes examining B's face as if something in its lines and details would inform him of B's plan. In his peripheral vision, he saw Light on hands and knees, gagging; a clear liquid was coming from his mouth.

“I'm sure you've got it,” said B rather gently. “I took hold of his sinoartial node; made his heart skip a couple of beats. I want you to leave me alone.”

“You have very fine control,” said Rue. His hands and feet were very cold.

“If I wanted to, I could give your foot a little zap, like a TENS unit, and calm the pain down for a few hours.” There was a flat, froglike smile on B's face. His eyes were half-closed in an expression that could be superficially confused with one of regret. “That's how fine it is. You stay down.”

Light had risen a little and begun to calm; he collapsed again, and this time he lay still.

“I don't want to see you checking to see if he's okay,” said B. “You know what he is.”

“I don't defend him.”

“But in the most literal sense, you do.”

“That's so,” said Rue.

“I've made it clear?” asked B, his voice growing hoarse. He was leaning further and further towards the screen. “I can hurt you. I can kill you. I don't want to do either – my intentions towards him are a little different, but you, no. I owe Quil that. Please don't come any closer. We are pursuing the same goals, even.”

“With different methods,” said Rue softly.

“Oh, please don't talk to me about methods. As if you have a right to lord it over me with any of that.” B sighed heavily and leant towards his monitor, knuckles rising to clutch the unseen edge of his desk, to look at Light. “You'll tell me 'he stopped.' Well, so did Dr. Mengele.”

“You're doing the same things he did. Precisely the same things he did.”

“You have to compromise a little in the pursuit of justice,” said B. “Not much, because you'll become like them, and all that – that's how you put it; 'and all that.' Very English. Very dismissive of us all and of the words, too. The kind of thing he would have said. I do wonder if you still talk so much like him. You don't even remember this lecture, do you?”

“No.” B reminded him of the Biblical serpent; an absurdly overloaded image, and one which he couldn't even explain or literally connect to anything about him, and yet it was there: sibilant, fast-moving, with a mobile head.

“But you must compromise,” B went on, “and you will compromise, to a certain extent. It's like mathematics; it's possible to calculate a point at which the compromise becomes too much, and judge a point just before that. You could graph it. Of course, it's best not to approach it that way; best to approach it individually, instinctively, to a degree. You have to develop your own moral code – not mine, but yours. Of course, if it turns out we disagree significantly, we'll have to have another talk. Ring a bell?”

“It's the sort of thing I would have said at the time,” said Rue. Behind him, he heard Light cough and retch quietly to himself; he made sure his eyes didn't waver, didn't flicker.

“'At the time.'” B stared at him, beginning to mirror his expression. “You're a sad man. I don't mean pathetic; never pathetic. But you're unhappy-sad, aren't you? Don't just stare.”

“I'd rather not go on the couch,” said Rue.

B's lips pulled back a little, tightening; exposing a bit of tooth until he spoke again. “None of us would like to do that, for fear of what's obvious, I think. I don't blame you for all of it. I don't blame the old man, obviously. I loved him more than anything else. But it was you who trained me, much more than him. You can't fight what's trained in.”

Rue took a moment to think; he wanted to ask B what he'd done to him, specifically – been good at his job? Said sophomoric things about existentialism? But none of that seemed wise to say, and it seemed disingenuous, too, even though he believed it.

“I don't mean trained me professionally.”

“You mean, perhaps, conditioned you.”

“That's just the word,” said B. “And how can I blame you for doing your work well? But it's hard for me to look at you, even so. I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a bad heart?”

At first, Rue thought he had spoken symbolically; his responding expression, to judge from the minute change to B's, might have been funny. B clarified before he could speak again.

“I'm aware that – get down, Yagami. I won't tell you again. What d'you think you're going to do?”

This time, there was almost no sound from behind him; only a very quiet thump.

“I'm aware,” said B, “of the general slate of illnesses that you have. And I want to know so that I know, if we ever do meet each other, not to accidentally apply lethal force to someone with a dubious ticker. It's a common thing, I understand.”

Rue sighed and stared at him. “You should have gone with your other plan.”

“Yes?”

“You should just have not said anything. I'd not have hurt you so long as you didn't incriminate yourself. Is that something I put into you, too?”

“Put it into yourself!” snapped B, and he cut the connection; not believing the possible feint, Rue jammed a pen into the back of the casing, finding the tiny button for a hard reboot. He turned around to see if Light was alive.

 

Light had recovered, though there was still an excruciating twitch running through his body, and a terrible ache whose location he could not quite find. He could not quite sit up.

“We've got to get out of here,” he said. “He knows where we are.”

“I'm not certain of that. And he told us explicitly that he didn't want to hurt us any more than he has. More or less explicitly.”

“You believe what he says?”

“That, yes.” Ryuzaki had still not turned round. His shoulders were stiff, and as Light watched. he forced them to slump a little. “I believe it.”

“You and Krupin can get a fix on people's locations from contacting their computers.”

“He doesn't want to see us.”

“I would personally like to move,” said Light testily -- “I'm the one whose heart was stopped.”

“You are not the only one who is in pain,” said Ryuzaki, and he got up and moved to the other bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

“Yes, but --”

“You aren't the only one. I've about used myself up for the day. I can push myself further, especially if you're willing to drive, but I'll be borrowing against tomorrow, and tomorrow I'll need to ask more of myself – and more the next day.”

“Ryuzaki --”

“That's how it is.” Ryuzaki sighed hard, watching Light get up. “I'm going to sleep now. He has to see us, obviously.”

“I'm checking for cameras.”

“Go on, Light,” said Ryuzaki more loudly, “check for cameras in this hotel room he had no idea we would choose.”

“Assume he knows where we are. Where we were yesterday, even. He knows you; he knows how you think. This is the only decent hotel in the town. He pays the clerk. It doesn't take a genius. And, I might add: how do you know he has to see us? The whole thing was too simple; it was some sort of a feint.”

“I'm so tired, Light.”

Light straightened up a little; he'd been in his suitcase, hunting for something he could use for a screwdriver, but Ryuzaki had spoken with flat, striking emotion.

“Fine,” he said, “go to sleep. I'll let you know if I find anything.”

“If it's a trap – perhaps he had traps back in the city; perhaps he'll have a trap in the next town over. I'm confident that my machine is clean. I did the security myself.”

“I told you, just sleep.”

 

Light found no cameras, no obvious traps. Ryuzaki was breathing evenly, still dressed on top of the quilt; Light nudged him to wake him up and found that he couldn't, so he yanked his shoes off, carried them to the doorway, and flopped the other side of the covers over him. Then he turned his attention to the reader, which had rebooted now – no further sign of abuse. He kept his thumb over its pinhole camera anyway.

There was mail from Krupin, unread, and Light glanced at Ryuzaki as he clicked it open. He was still much too sore, too twitchy, to think of rest. Had Krupin written in Russian, Light would have given up; the letter was in English.

 

Rue,

 We left Yakutsk a few days ago. I didn't want to contact you by our conventional means about that because I have reason to believe our communications may be compromised at the moment. I also won't be letting you know where I am now, but I will be in closer touch soon and tell you about the trip.

 For now, it seems safe enough to say that it was depressing. The permafrost cities are dying now. There's no money to retrofit the old buildings and no point in retrofitting them, since the frost melts deeper each year anyway. It seems silly to say “it's literally sinking,” because I know that this is a common urban myth (“unwanted local thing/Königsberg House of Soviets is sinking”) but in fact it is sinking, though not in a very dramatic way. Mainly it just makes everything increasingly unstable and obviously symbolic of everything I think about.

 I wish you could be here in one particular way: you could finally see how mind-numbingly beautiful Siberia is in the summer (and it is still a sort of summer now). I know I told you about it, but in fact I've forgotten it and only remembered it when I got here. And it seems strange to feel so strongly about being here, since I really only lived in Novosibirsk for a few years (and anyway living there is to living in Siberia what living in New York City is to living in America), but there's so much nostalgia, so much a feeling of completely being at home. And nothing can ruin it, no matter how hard people try. It always wins even in losing. It reminds me of you. :)

 I had a lonely birthday in an undisclosed location. Maybe that's just as well, but I didn't mind it as much as I expected to. I think I'll be good at being 50. I feel like I should start smoking cigars and become a party boss. It doesn't matter which party.

 Near sends his regards.

 Y (Y, Y, Y Y?)

Chapter 19: Watari

In the morning, Light moved only with difficulty; most of his body was sore as if with extreme exertion the previous day. Ryuzaki didn't ask, but Light told him anyway -- “I don't know why it's all through me like this.”

“You seized, almost. That's got to have some sort of pervasive muscular effect.” Ryuzaki was on the edge of his bed, hunched over his reader, speaking quietly. If he was reading the letter, he showed no outward sign of emotion about it.

“I looked it up. It shouldn't. I wonder if he did something besides stop my heart, the second time. I passed out and I don't remember clearly.”

“Maybe.”

He seemed to be growing quieter with each word, as if his volume were being turned down. Light wanted to talk to him – wanted to talk to anyone, just to get the words out of his mind – but he couldn't bring himself to actually speak to Ryuzaki about something so intimate, and so he let him do whatever he was doing, and then they left the room and got into the car, and Ryuzaki started it and drove out of town.

Light sagged into the hard leather of the car seat. It was a bright, white-painted American morning, and he wasn't sure where they were going. The asphalt before them was brownish; different from what he remembered from home – different stone, or age, or was the memory bad? More than ever, the word “watery,” in Japanese and in English, wandered into his mental vision – swimming things and lukewarm liquid, awkwardly combined with the sun.

There was some sort of apology owed, he knew (his chest twinged and he inhaled and exhaled slowly). He ought to say something, because if he didn't say anything, he wouldn't even think of the right things, but he had no desire to speak.

“In answer to your question,” said Ryuzaki, “to Buffalo. For the Groundwater meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“There's a meeting in Buffalo for five or six somewhat prominent Groundwater people, to discuss what B's doing – on top of that, I was invited. One of me was invited, I mean. He won't target them and he won't go, but I think the odds are that he's going north; I have other reasons to suspect he's been in close contact with Buffalo-based personnel.”

“Are you going to go?” Light asked it jokingly; of course he wouldn't --

“Obviously not. I don't work that way anymore.”

“I know.”

“Then why ask?”

“Are you going to kill him, then?”

Ryuzaki's foot almost convulsed against the pedal; the car leapt to a slightly greater speed, enough for Light to feel its fragility strangely. “I'd rather not discuss it. I think prison would be logistically impossible -- and torturous for him. He can't be allowed to go on doing what he does.”

“I see.” Light took a warm breath; the light in the car was dusty. The whole state seemed rather a dusty place. “Have you ever actually killed someone before? With your hands?”

“No. I've been responsible for deaths, and I know how to use a gun. Have you?”

“Not personally,” said Light.

“Then don't appoint yourself my mentor in the art of murder.”

“I'm not. Look, I owe you an apology.”

“Many,” said Ryuzaki.

“No. Not an apology. An explanation. I've realized that I'm not reliable.”

Ryuzaki slowed the car down a little; he glanced at Light with an unexpected softness, as if Light really had surprised him. “Not reliable.”

Light took a long breath. “It's not my nature to know how I feel about anything. When B injured me last night, I felt more than physical pain; I felt...”

“I'm sure I know how you felt,” said Ryuzaki quietly, after Light had paused sufficiently.

“I've realized I have no way of knowing how I'll react to anything important, anything requiring instinct, until my body starts to move. Everything's on automatic now, as if I've learned a set of protocols for when I'm in pain or danger and I have to follow them by rote.”

“That seems a very unusual thing for you to say.”

“Yes. It is very unusual.”

“Yes,” said Ryuzaki, after a meditative minute staring at the road, “it surprises me. In the past, you were able to make a highly specific plan based upon sure knowledge of what you'd do over the course of several months, even without consciously knowing that you were following a plan. Simple trauma doesn't seem like it would change your whole personality like that, to the point where you can't even predict yourself anymore.”

“It wasn't that specific a plan,” said Light. “That's why it was so good. I only had to hit two points. Help with the investigation. And touch the notebook when it was recovered.”

“It seems specific to me . Helping with the investigation – you were imprisoned. Why in God's name did you imagine I'd ask you back?”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“What else would you do? Do you think I didn't account for the pressure they'd put on you to set me free, or for your complete understanding of what I was? You couldn't let me go and you couldn't leave me where I was, so you'd keep me with you, by your side.”

“I suppose I didn't account for the strength of the pressure,” said Ryuzaki. “No. That was all Aizawa.”

“That's not what I wanted to talk about,” said Light, feeling oddly helpless; this was almost an example of what he'd been trying to say.

“Me, neither.” Ryuzaki leaned back a little in the driver's seat and rummaged in the back seat with one hand. “Light. Please get out water for me.”

Light forced himself down, hit by a blinding bit of sunlight, and found the bottle, unscrewed its top partway. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

He took a long drink and sighed, trying blindly to place it in the drink holder and succeeding after two or three goes.

“It's not that I have no sympathy for you -- ”

“I don't want sympathy,” said Light. “I just wanted to say it. That I don't know if I can be dependable, especially with him. And I don't see how I can change; these are things that I only feel while the event is happening.”

“I understand,” said Ryuzaki softly. “I'll take it into consideration.”

Light turned to look at the window; there was a small tremor in his hands, and a buzzing in the back of his head.

 

At the next hotel, Ryuzaki immediately went to the desk and began setting up his reader.

“I'm going to do something very stupid and yet, at the same time, very predictable,” he said.

“You're going to contact him?”

“Yes. We are going to chat.” Typing one-handed, he felt for the desk chair, located it, sat down.

“Keep him on the line long enough to trace his location?”

“No.” Ryuzaki blew out a brief breath of air. “No, he'll – I don't think – distracted. Wait.”

He typed for a few more seconds and then said, “I've been through my machine, trying to trace B's hack last night, and it was definitely not his own work. I wouldn't normally be this good at recognizing someone's style, but I happen to know the person who did it – I've collaborated with her, if you can use the word for someone so far out of my league, as part of my Groundwater involvement. So I don't think that B is capable of recognizing my better tracking methods, but Miranda probably is, and I wouldn't risk it if he's dealing that closely with her. Besides, he's superb at reading faces, and I think that he will recognize any duality of purpose in mine. So I'm calling him to talk, and we'll see if he gives us a hint. I'm going to try my best not to be insincere, so it will come partially down to you to listen hard.”

“If one of your Groundwater contacts hacked 'L' and found you, doesn't that mean the game is up?”

“For one of me, yes. I'm managing the fallout. This isn't the only machine. Stop talking for a minute.'

“I thought you'd pop up eventually.” B sat down, reached forward; the screen went dark. Rue waited.

“Are you still there?” he asked mildly, after a few moments, conceding the point; B reappeared, against a different background this time. A bit of curtain had given way to a white wall.

“Yes.”

“Hello.”

“Here to chat with me?” B inquired, with enough irony lading his voice that Rue knew he'd grasped the whole rudimentary plan. He nodded, and B said, “I just finished talking to Miranda.”

“Oh, yes?”

“So you are Judge Dee.”

“Yes.”

“I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch on. It's not that reference was subtle; a detective , an East Asian detective, a detective whose name is an English letter. I've spoken to you-as-Dee.”

“I know.”

“I liked him. Of course, the next question is who else you are. In retrospect, this first alias is designed to fail to keep the others safe. Like the bumper of a car.”

“Lord God Almighty,” said Rue, “there were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the damned Council.”

“Don't allude too much too quickly,” said B, settling back a little, “or you'll get a cramp. Of course Thursday would be the sort of book you like. I like it, too. Poor, poor Lucian Gregory. Where is shining Genji, by the way? In the toilet?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Rue found himself at a conversational standstill; B laughed at him in a rather friendly way. “Blew your wad on the Thursday thing, I see.”

“I've never been much of a conversationalist.”

“It's not really a thing to be envied,” said B carelessly. “It's quite clear to us both that you've called hoping that I'd give something away; don't pretend you care. What would you possibly have to say to me after all this time?”

“You seem in a better mood, to put it mildly.”

“I can't help but think it's funny that you're reduced to paying me a social call. You're desperate, aren't you?”

“I think,” said Rue slowly, “that it's not quite 'desperation.' I always find it difficult to solve cases involving people I don't really know. I paid a social call on Light quite early.”

“Well, you were desperate quite early, too.”

“That's true. The entire case was conducted in a state of very productive desperation.”

“Not Near's case, though.”

“No,” said Rue, feeling a pull of irritation at his mouth.

“Forget it. Look, I'm not trying to probe you for soft parts. Offer me the same courtesy.”

“You seem well. Forgive me for saying so.”

“Another courtesy,” said B, glancing down and faltering briefly, “would be not to refer to me as 'well' when you mean 'not to be setting yourself on fire.' We are both going to try and be very, very courteous to each other. Yes, I have been petted. I have been carefully tamed. All his best art was used on me.”

His voice choked with irony; nonetheless, his expression was of quite genuine sadness, even mourning, and Rue found that he quite envied B's casual ability to mourn without emotional interference. He encouraged that pettish envy, let it settle into his expression.

“All his best art,” he repeated contemplatively, hoping that B would seize to this and continue.

“Yes.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“I'm sure the emotional situation is very, very complex for you,” said B. “Everything always is. Your relationships with everyone are nice and complex and fun that way. Yagami alone, and he's the least of them, you both hate and love – in a casual, disgusted way. He'll kill you someday. You know that. You recognize a pattern when you see one.”

“Light's not going to kill me,” said Rue wearily. “ You're not going to kill me. Stop being dramatic.”

“No, I'm not. I love you.”

“In your way,” said Rue, “you probably do.” He didn't want to patronize him this way, but he'd been caught out, probably looked as suddenly upset as he felt, and B visibly knew it. He hated being here; hated Quil for sticking him with this problem – his final revenge, really, for being abandoned. A very simple revenge.

“We're family. Of course I do. People can't help loving people they're related to and people they knew from childhood – oh, I know we're not related. Well, actually, we are. Distantly. On your mother's side. I happen to know. But not enough to matter.”

“I'm glad that you clarified that. You don't look much like my dad.”

“Oh, I've seen your dad,” said B. “He's the spit of you except that he looks white. He's still in love with your mom or 'mum' and he still writes her creepy letters every Christmas saying that if her husband dies he's still available. He doesn't mean to be creepy. That's just how he is. Tone-deaf. His eyes are like saucers. Every one of you nudniks is hyperthyroid.”

“I know all that,” said Rue quietly. He didn't, but he wasn't impressed by B's work -- his biological parents were both well-known enough in their fields; anyone who knew his real name could trace him to them, and from there the road was straight and clean.

“I've met him.”

“Oh.”

“For pity's sake. I didn't tell him I was you,” said B. “My God. The face you're making. He'd know, and I'm not that much of a prick . We talked about glands . I was just curious.”

“Do you know all this,” said Rue, “about your own family as well?”

“Why should I care about my own family? What's there to care about? A lot of wretched souls. Look, I have to say, I'll be honest here, I'm not enjoying this trawl through the muck.”

“You started it,” said Rue. “Elementally.”

“On the atomic level, huh.”

“Yes.”

“Look,” said B. “He's dead. I've got nothing holding me. You won't catch up with me; you won't make a single mistake, but it won't help. I'm sorry to cause you trouble. You can believe me or not. I know you feel shitty and don't really want to be bothered with someone like me. But I have a cause; all you have is the absence of a cause, which is a big difference between us. I care about my cause a good deal. And I really do love you. I wish that you loved me. That's all I have to say. I'm cutting the connection; I don't think we can say too much to each other without hurting each other – you by accident and me on purpose, though I don't want to. Take care of yourself.”

The screen went dark. Rue rebooted the machine and then shoved it into his bag.

 

Ryuzaki sat still and breathed; he seemed curiously immobile, as if afraid to move for fear of injury.

Light sat on the bed. “Well? Do you know where he is?”

“No,” said Ryuzaki, “but I have an idea. I just never thought – but of course it makes sense; it would be Watari's property, and I don't see why it shouldn't have passed to B. It's just been so long since I've thought of it. I certainly heard the wind in trees; I certainly heard a lake. I was fairly sure he was in the right state.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Watari sold him out. Without knowing it. About twenty years ago.” Ryuzaki got up and began to collect his things, so recently thrown into the bed. “It's not a hundred percent, but it's enough to make it well worth going in.”

“Are you still planning to kill him? I would advise against --”

“Why?”

“I made it clear earlier, I thought,” said Light. “You haven't thought this through.”

“I think I have.”

“Not the way you should. You're on autopilot.”

“You don't know much about autopilot systems,” said Ryuzaki, “if you think that means I haven't thought this through. Autopilots are tools. You use them when you need a calculation made that humans aren't capable of making.”

“You're not listening. When you kill someone, you must not do it casually.”

“You're funny.”

“Do you think I did? Do you think I lasted as long as I did killing people casually? And why do you think I stopped lasting?” He was ready to leave now; Light let him, but chased him closely down the dimly lit stairs.

“This isn't casual.”

“And what's more,” said Light, “you must make sure that he means the right things to you. He means too much and too little.”

“Shut up,” said Ryuzaki, irritated at the public talk, carefully neutral though Light had made it; Light thought about pushing it, but decided it would be too petty. He waited until they were in the parking lot, then thought better of it and waited until they were in the car.

“If you want to be mystical -- ” said Ryuzaki softly, turning on the car's electric motor; he didn't finish the sentence. “I don't expect you to understand – no. This is something in our family. It's that simple. I have every intention of trying to talk him down.”

“Good.”

“I'm just preparing myself for the worst.” He paused, and Light saw that he was sweating. He turned off the car, leaned back, combed his fingers through his long hair. “I never told you I was going to kill him. Listen . I may have to. He won't come quietly. He will probably try to kill me. If we send someone to conventionally arrest him, he'll find some way to kill them or at least himself before he's taken; that's how it is with him. You remember. He came close to doing it before, and he was not so powerful then. And the ridiculous thing about it is that if I can somehow manage to take him out of circulation, I'll be doing you a favor.”

“Not really.”
He turned to Light abruptly. “My God! Don't tell me you've renounced it all.”

“I would think you'd be happy to hear that. I haven't.”

“The church just doesn't have much to do with you,” Ryuzaki murmured.

“No.”

He tried wearily to rouse himself again; failed. “I don't want to die. I don't think he'd really be able to kill me – or you, probably. And this might be our only chance to catch him out. He's been unbelievably stupid to go to a place I know.”

“He didn't account for your memory.”

“That's all I have left.” Ryuzaki firmly restarted the car.

“That's not true.”

“That fucking --” he said quietly. “Both of them. To dump this on me – knowing it's not the sort of thing – it's not exactly my forte.”

“Call the police.”

“I can't trust anyone,” Ryuzaki snapped. “Don't you get it? I can't trust anyone anymore – saying who I am and bluntly asking for aid. It doesn't work. Introduces more problems than it helps. I have you to thank for that. I am the enemy of Kira; these days, anyone might be his friend. You won.”

“You're being dramatic.”

“I'm actually not.”

“You trusted the people who took us out of Denver.”
“ I didn't.”

“You trusted Krupin.”

“Yes. I got lucky.”

“You have all sorts of political alliances; you deal directly with the FBI, with Scotland Yard --”

“Marriages of convenience.” At last Ryuzaki was driving out onto the main road. “Mutual enemies. Negotiated partnerships. It doesn't matter; Kira's dead. All this will smooth over – humanity has a way of doing that. But in the meantime, I can't just call anyone to help me with B, except maybe for you. And I'm not giving you a gun. I don't trust you, either.”

 

Morning became day became evening; evening fell rather suddenly, the sky crowned with purple, everything shading into rich, velvety shadows into which one might crawl and be lost. Rue drove almost without stopping. Twice they stopped at a service station to fill the tank and fill or empty themselves or for Rue to take his medication. He felt like sleeping; perhaps he was asleep.

He could not seem to pull his mind from the same sentence: I have helped you without knowing it; now, in my extremity, you must help me. He didn't recognize what relevance this had to his current set of problems. It reminded him of a recurring dream he had been having, babies and children – either a baby was choking and he had to take it to Yuriy, who was hidden and knew how to help; or there was a years-ignored baby hidden which was somehow still alive; or there was a child he was beating senseless but which did not respond to the violent pressure of his hands.

They weren't his children. He knew that, and they weren't B.

Chapter 20: The Dead Man

Light and Ryuzaki arrived at the house quite suddenly. It seemed to Light that they were on the freeway one minute, and then almost teleported to this smaller but still arterial road. Ryuzaki parked at the side of the street several hundred meters from the house, at this point barely visible; it sat at the edge of a lake, unlit except for candlelight from a lower room. It was growing cold outside, the first cold night of the year. Light put on a sweater. Ryuzaki was already wearing his.

What followed was terrible to recall, even from a few seconds later. The back door of the house sat slightly open, a bicycle nearby; it seemed he had just arrived, and Ryuzaki pushed into the kitchen, gun in hand, and said, “B, please come quietly.”

Light arrived a moment later. The confrontation could not have been less dramatic; B stared at Ryuzaki in honest surprise, with a touch of almost patronizing amusement. “My God.”

Ryuzaki said nothing. His face was emotionless; he held the gun as if fully prepared to shoot.

“What are you going to do? Take me to prison? Or take me home and adopt me? There's precedent for that.”

“That depends on your decision. If you choose to attempt to hurt me, I'll kill you. If you come quietly – I would like to talk.”

“What will we talk about?” asked B quietly. “Do you think you can dissuade me from something I've been planning for decades? Are you going to offer me employment ? I suggest you turn around, leave and forget. My anti-Kirite efforts are perfectly in line with your ideals --”

“You're killing people.”

“Have you become that sort of person? Really?” B took a step towards him; there was a tension in his wrist which Light noticed and felt powerless to change. “Someone who believes in the sanctity of life above any larger purpose? Then why are you ready to kill me ?”

“I'm not here to talk to you about mathematics.”

“Mathematics!” B laughed in delight. “That's just how you'd put it. Look --”

He had moved towards him again, reached up to shove the gun away; it was a cocky move, a casual move, the kind of move you'd make in a film -- but too suddenly, too much anger betrayed in his expression, and Light glanced at Ryuzaki and saw too late the expression on his own face. He shot; an awful thing happened to B's face and he fell and then Light saw Ryuzaki falling to his knees, slumping to the floor, shoving the gun untidily towards himself, pressing the skin of his cheek and contacting a tooth – he seemed to be trying to make himself as small as possible, and to aim for the very center of that mass and shove – and Light threw himself towards his body to wrestle the dangerous thing away. Ryuzaki fought back with a hissing, panting breath. Then he seemed asleep – not unusual – and there was blood from the side of his skull, knocked hard against the floor.

Light's head was unsteady; he was uncertain of what he had actually witnessed, and he realized his diaphragm was pumping hard, as sore as the rest of his muscles, and he was breathing without much control. He turned him over, and yanked the gun away by its barrel – it discharged in the process, hitting the wall, and he realized that Ryuzaki was already coming to, though he remained stunned. The flow of blood had lessened, but there was still a hard rivulet of it.

He was moaning, a coughing, gurgling moan, and Light gripped him hard and lifted him, carrying him randomly into another room, any other room. There was a brown corduroy couch and he put him on it, away from the smell of powder and urine, and then – something whose motivation Light could not later find – he was kissing him, his cold flesh, on his face and cheeks and the tip of his bony nose, and on his exposed shoulder, everything but the mouth and the blood -- methodically, as if this were a procedure. There had been something so reflexive in the backward movement of the gun. Perfect resolve but no intent. He was making strangled noises, and when Light briefly let go of him, he saw his fingers digging hard into the flesh beneath his hair, and he grabbed them and twisted them behind his back.

He was in shock, but at the same time he retained enough self-awareness to be humiliated by his shock, so that even as he panted and the thick vein in his neck throbbed in time, and tiny moans came out, and he continued struggling violently against Light – his nails digging now into Light's hands; he looked almost likely to spring and bite – there was enough intelligence in his face that Light knew a part of him was cringing from the rest, withdrawing hurriedly and matter-of-factly.

At length there was silence. Ryuzaki stilled, not calm, but exhausted. His lips had a faint grayish sheen; they parted and closed. Light took his phone and called Krupin.

“Hello?”

“Rue?” asked Krupin, though Light could not imagine he had seriously mistaken his voice.

“He's here, but he can't come to the phone. B is dead. Do you have any instructions?”

“Christ. B is dead? You're certain?”

“Ryuzaki shot him.”

“Why can't he talk?”

“He's in shock, I think.”

“For God's sake! Aren't you helping him?”

“I've calmed him down. What do you want me to do? He has a minor head wound, which has stopped bleeding. And he's very upset. I'm a few centimeters from his face and he's not responding.”

This was untrue. Ryuzaki looked very much responsive; his eyes were darting; he gave another little heave; he seemed very much aware, but determined, for whatever reason, to stay silent. Once again things fell too far past the line of the comical.

“Turn on the video. I want to see him and you and B.”

“Why?”

“I don't believe you're telling me the truth about any of this. Show him to me.”

“Oh, God, please, no,” whispered Ryuzaki. “Please, no. Don't. Don't. Please.”

He went on in this general tone, his eyes squeezing shut; Light said, “I don't know how to activate the video.”

“Press the button on the right-hand side of the screen; the one, Light, with the camera on it.”

A grungy, disgusted sound arose in his throat. Ryuzaki covered his eyes with his arm; he stood up and said, “Fine. I'm going to show you B.”

Krupin made some word-sounds, and Light derived some satisfaction from listening to their tinniness from within the little machine. He thrust it close to the corpse. “Satisfied?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God!” said Ryuzaki from the next room; he spoke as if he were indeed praying.

“And here I am,” said Light, and turned the phone on himself, holding it away from his body; he saw Krupin, sitting in a chair (seeming so neat and tidy inside the phone), the very tail-end of a nauseated look on his pale face. “See? And Ryuzaki is in there.”

“I don't want to see him,” said Ryuzaki thickly.

“Sounds like he doesn't want to see you.”

Krupin's facade dropped a little; he had visibly decided which of them to essentially address, though he and Light remained, if somewhat shakily, face-to-face.

“Please.”

“No,” said Ryuzaki, damp and flat.

“Ask him why not.”

“I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear to see him in that stupid little thing. Please shut him up, Light. Please.”

Now Light wavered; Krupin now showed obvious shock and pain, but before he could really react, he said, “Fine. I'm satisfied. I apologize. What are you going to do about the body?”

“God, I hate you both,” said Ryuzaki abruptly in the same soft wail, barely punctuated, and then there were choking noises.

“What did he say?”

“We're in an isolated house,” said Light. “There's a bullet in a wall – two bullets -- and, as you saw, the body is very gory. I didn't think of it yet.”

“How isolated? Does he have any associates, any sign of other people?”

“I hate you ,” said Ryuzaki again. “Oh, God.”

“No. Very isolated. At least twenty kilometers from any other houses I've seen. Off a small highway, in the mountains, by a lake; visible from the main road, but only just.”

“Okay. I've got a fix on you. Lock up the house; stay inside. Don't let anyone in. I'll be there early tomorrow, or as soon as can get away from here.”

“What are you going to do that I can't?”

“Talk to Rue,” said Yuriy.

Light hung up on him. He went to look at Ryuzaki; he was not moving, so he went back to the other room and carefully covered B with a blanket.

 

There was movement behind him; he turned and saw Ryuzaki standing in the doorway, looking at the thing on the floor.

“I want to see his face again.”

“Very little of it is left.”

“I want to see what's left.”

“You tried to kill yourself last time you saw it.”

“No,” said Ryuzaki, with real irony.

“Why was there a gun in your mouth?”

“I was not thinking about killing myself.”

“Just about blowing your head off?”

Ryuzaki had knelt, pulled the blanket back; he looked steadily at B, whose face was almost unrecognizable, though much of the mouth was intact and had not changed. He covered him up again. He didn't seem to know what to do next. There were no overt signs of distress anymore. His hands were steady.

“I'm sorry I did that,” he said. “You're going to think less of me.”

“Why?”

“How he looked. The timing of it. An ultimate rudeness. Perhaps he might have explained himself to our complete satisfaction. Now he cannot.”

He was slumping back now, and fell clumsily into a curled position.

“Well, it's something we have in common now,” said Light. “We've both killed him.”

Ryuzaki hit him, a hard, violent smack, backhand across the cheek; the backs of his nails raked the skin, though they did not break it, and in the next moment the hand closed over Light's mouth and nose. It was clammy; it tasted like clay. He took Light's breath and forced him down, and for a few moments they fought on the floor – Light only to subdue, but Ryuzaki to wound however he could, and the difference was such that Ryuzaki managed briefly to pin him.

There was another blow across the face, and Light found his will to respond draining; the response was so mechanical and the pressure against his chest so oddly gentle – he felt he could trust this machine to do whatever duty it had, and then the rush of blood subsided and he rejoined the struggle. Once he had his wits back, it was not difficult to throw him off again, but shoving him down this time was as difficult as subduing a difficult spider. B looked on from under his tarp.

“Don't do this,” said Light. “Don't be an idiot. Did you see him then? It was a mercy.”

For a moment Ryuzaki's rage left him and he looked up at him with an intelligent eye – Light's hands were almost on his shoulders. Then he resumed struggling, but more weakly, breathing hard; eventually he had exhausted himself completely and Light allowed him to curl onto his side, clutching his stomach and looking increasingly pale. Then his muscles slackened.

 

At an automated convenience store a great distance down the hill, a garish dusty place with sickly lamps, Light bought him milk, bread, and candy. Then he added some peanut butter, soap, two withered apples from a wooden bowl by the register, some gum, some bottled water; it was hard to stop.

He thought that Krupin had been very stupid to ask them to stay in the house. What intent did he have towards the corpse – why did he think his plan for disposing of it was any wiser than any of Light's? Was it not quite probable that the Wammys had resources for hiding their indiscretions other than sending their consigliere personally to destroy the evidence? Weren't their indiscretions more or less legally allowed, anyway? Why would anyone visit the house, and if someone were to do so, why force a confrontation? Why had Krupin not asked whether there was food in the house to sustain them, particularly “Rue,” especially since he had lost blood? There was something sharp in his disgust at him; he envisioned his sweaty face in Denver, hovering near him in bed, and he felt nausea for Ryuzaki having to see it every night, probably during some far more degrading act.

He returned to the house, parking the car in the thin gravelled area behind it, wishing he could disguise it better. Inside, B's body lay like a paper thing – an incorporeal husk beneath its damp and seeping blanket. It was quite dark, and Light wished he'd bought a flashlight; he was too eager to check on Ryuzaki to return to the store, and didn't want to arouse further notice. He had paid cash and avoided showing his face to the camera, but it had still been a risk.

Ryuzaki lay where he'd left him, cuffed to the slats of an American-style futon in a small, musty room upstairs. Once again, Light wondered whether this house was B's by law, or if he was squatting here – it was furnished in anonymous American vacation style, misshapen and mismatched old furniture reflecting no particular taste. Ryuzaki looked bad. He was asleep, still very pale. Light tried to wake him gently; was unable to, and, frightened, shook him jarringly until his eyes half-opened.

 

Rue woke in a muddle of confused colors and a sensation of heat, similar to how he remembered his childhood in the nineteen-eighties – Atari, The Professionals . He wished for those days passionately – he shrank from the present; he wanted to dart off and hide in the foliage of the past. Old movie theaters and everyone having to be in a mall. Tongue-pink plastic tile floors. The squeaking of sneakers and smell of rubber. His mouth felt slack and wide. He felt something plastic clicking on his teeth and then a stupid squirt of liquid down his throat; he coughed, swallowed reflexively, and then there was another squirt. Light was sitting over him with a water bottle. Then there was another bottle, smelling of alcohol or peroxide, which Rue felt himself looking at in horror; the little puncture in his head was sterilized; various methods of bandaging it around his hair were attempted. Finally there was a wrap around his head, like something in a cartoon. He let this happen; there seemed to be no way to communicate with him.

Finally, Light sat up with a sigh and began to eat something wrapped in foil. He chomped indelicately, like a dog, as if he believed he were alone. Rue was very cold, except for his left hip, where Light's body contacted his. The inside surface of his jumper had its own chill, as if his body had ceased communicating heat.

He cleared his throat and said, “I'm cold.”

“I'll fetch you a quilt in a moment.”

“I pity you.”

“You're in a fine position to.”

“You weren't really built for taking care of things.”

Light didn't answer for a while; he finished whatever he'd been eating, toothed a crumb neatly from beneath his thumbnail, and said, “I just recall you as a person of greater acuity.”

“Show me a man who can maintain acuity when – well, never mind; I'm talking to him.”

Light stood up, left the room, and returned with a dusty patchwork which he heaped around Rue. It had no immediate good effect; there was a spider crawling on part of it. He had to urinate badly, in the way that he did when his blood sugar spiked. He thought it would be wisest to check it. His bowels ached; his skin felt as if it were receding. White couches with abstract, watercolorey patterns. Resting his head against Priscilla's hip.

“You knew we'd have to kill him,” said Light. “That was your plan. You wouldn't give me a gun, so you were going to do it.”

He ran his tongue over his teeth. They were dry and ached too. “That's true. Where is the gun?”

“Where we dropped it. If you thought you'd have to do it, you should have known that it would hurt you to do it and planned accordingly. I don't have any respect for people who don't think realistically of how they'll cope after the thing is finished. I thought you had more self-regard than that – than just to make yourself into a blunt weapon. You may as well use a state-of-the-art computer to bash someone over the head.”

“Nn.”

“Now you've done something you find intolerable, and you can't reverse it.” Light's hands sat heavily in his lap; he did not look at Rue, but at the opposite wall. “It was obviously justified, though, so I don't see your point.”

“I see,” was all Rue could think to say.

“Yes,” said Light, and Rue realized belatedly that Light, too, was afraid. He did not seem to be getting any warmer.

“Do you want to eat something?” Light added.

“Should.”

“Here's a granola bar. I wish we could wash our hands properly – but there's some water and soap. Do you want me to take you to the sink?”

“I can go myself, if you'll take these things off.”

Light unlocked him, and he shuffled to the bathroom, holding a bottle and bar; he urinated, leaning with his hand against the wall, the ache easing; washed up a little, returned safely, and retreated beneath his quilt to eat some bread and peanut butter. Tears seeped from his eyes – not gushing tears, but strange thick tears like a cat's – the kind that cleared their eyes of dangerous dust. Eating the peanut butter was one of the more difficult things he had memory of doing.

“B was even more to you than you told me,” said Light.

Rue was eating the peanut butter. He couldn't speak. He made a guttural sound in his throat.

“I suppose it's the same as if I had to kill Sayu.”

Rue made an affirmative guttural sound and swallowed most of it.

“I'm going to go outside and see if I can hide the car better. Right now, someone is going to notice it by the the road. And do you suppose he really has any friends? Or the house is some sort of trap? Krupin says to stay here; I think he's just panicking. I think we should move on. As if B's body is the worst danger to us right now. It's clearly not. You can evade prosecution. I don't know if we can evade whomever else might show up tonight.”

Light had stood. He looked at Rue as if expecting some sort of opinion. Then he lunged forward, looking mildly alarmed; Rue could not think what it was he was looking at – his fingers probed at the bandage.

“You're still bleeding.”

“Yes.”

“It must be worse than I thought.”

“Hyperglycemia may make it worse.”

“I'll see how it is when I get back. You said hyp er glycemia?”

“I don't know,” said Rue.

“You don't look very good.”
“No.”

“Are there pills you should be taking?”

Rue directed him to the right ones, swallowed, was left alone. He felt his eyelids sinking, though they didn't close; he still saw fuzzy orbs of fading outside light. He still couldn't warm himself, but that was ceasing rather to bother him.

 

There was the familiar finger-prick of his glucometer.

“One hundred eighty,” said Light, “what is that?”

Rue was almost too sleepy to speak; he felt a slow smack across his mouth. A blur of a voice came and went. He said, “One-eighty.”

“That's normal?”

“Quite high, but reasonable.”

Light said some other things. In Rue's dream, he said them too.

 

Ligt sat in the dark and thought about leaving – leaving, of course, with Ryuzaki, but he wanted to decide finally whether or not to go. Eventually – and nothing about the room changed at all during this process – he concluded that he might as well stay. Ryuzaki was distraught, but didn't appear to be in danger; the closer they stuck to the scene, the more likely that they would be able to know and thus control each aspect of the response to it, each person who had anything to do with it -- that the cover-up would be successful. The chances that any kind of ambush was planned were small, really, though certainly enough to keep him awake through the night.

 

Rue awoke running with sweat and in almost complete darkness. He felt wonderful, as if he had a fever that had spiked and broken; everything in the room seemed glacial – icy – wet and clear. There was a little glow in the corner; Light's face lit by something on his reader. He coughed and gagged.

A small gasp went through Light's throat; Ryuzaki had moved his mouth in animalistic fashion, then sat up straight, and there were dark accusatory hollows around eyes that reflected a little in the light of the reader. Misa had had the same expression on all the nights of her most irritating despair – irritating because ultimately shallow and inexplicable; he wasn't absolutely lacking in empathy – there'd been accusation in her face; a touch of triumph, yes – triumph over him, though she had attached to him voluntarily and it was irrational to seek revenge as if he'd imprisoned her. He put the reader down and stood up and went over to him. The room was quite dark.

Ryuzaki was sweating again. The fabric of his clothing was damp through and there was a harsh smell of it. As if in response to his own smell, wanting to analyze as much of it as possible, he breathed hard, loudly, his nostrils flared. Light moved his hand to his neck to take his pulse, and found felt a convulsive movement of the neck and jaw – trying to imprison or clutch or injure his hand; he wasn't sure, and at any rate it was ineffective. The pulse was fast and strong.

He had to be calmed down. Light found a towel in the hall closet, soaked it with water, and warmed it in his hands as best he could – a hot towel had always stilled Misa, even on the worst nights, provided that she was already quiet, and though he could only manage a lukewarm one, he pressed it to Ryuzaki's forehead and face. It was more effective than he could have predicted. The face pushed forward into it instinctively, breathing into the terrycloth and making a spot of warmth that Light could feel. He let go and Ryuzaki's hands took hold of the material on their own. They held it to his face in a stiff, spreading, formal way that, for the first time since B's death, Light recognized.

“I have to get outside.”

“It's very dark.”

“Please.”

Light switched on the flashlight he'd found in the upstairs bathroom, and they cautiously descended the stairs. He directed the beam past B and opened the French door.

Outside, it was a bit colder than the house – the air smelled of winter. The lake was large and placid, disinterested but not unpleasant. Ryuzaki walked out onto its dock and knelt, looking out over the silhouettes of trees that lay against the stars. Light joined him.

“What were you watching?” he asked, folding his arms tightly around himself.

“ The Only One Who Knows ,” he said, the English title strange on his tongue.

“I think that's her best,” said Ryuzaki. There was a metallic hollowness surrounding his voice.

“Yes.”

“Both the Hollywood films were good. The Japanese ones were terrible, except for Kyouki .”

“Which one was that?”

From the way Ryuzaki paused, Light knew he ought to have known this. “T he one where she killed her abuser and ran off with the doctor.”

“Oh, that one. I didn't think much of it, but I was distracted when I saw it; I always was.”

“God,” said Ryuzaki, rather out of patience, “the woman must have known you despised her.”

“You got better fast.”

“I had to get outside.” Ryuzaki covered his face and sighed. “I told you.”

“It bothers you to be in the building with it?”

“It's hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“The body and the head seem to be in conflict. Intellectually, I know that this was my intent. Perhaps it was wrong. But it was my choice. And yet my body seems to rebel; it tries to destroy what happened in various ways. But they are the same, of course. You must understand, from what you told me earlier.”

 

Rue didn't want to explain; he didn't even want to speak, though something learned and stupid and social had grown out of him and begun to talk about Misa's films. Explaining would alter Light's opinion of him permanently, perhaps even convince him fully that he did not value his life and that therefore Light had committed no sin against him – and he did value his life; he was upset, but certainly not suicidal in any way he recognized. He was rational. And yet even as he sat here, the black, undulating water seemed like something voluptuous and rich, a liqueur, a gurgling and beating body into which he longed to slip and lose himself. He was called to and crooned at by all lethal things. The trees themselves moaned in the wind in a way that lulled him either to sleep in the water or to pull himself upward into their branches and drop. Then there was the car with its hot, bright headlamps and its power to crash and crunch.

Conversely, things he knew to be healthy and safe were dry and uninteresting at best, and at worst a cowing intimidation.

 

“By destroy 'what happened,'” said Light, “you mean you?”

“Not exactly. I told you, there's a difference.”

“If you want to forget, there are ways. I don't know if it's too late. There are certain mild sedatives that bring a short-term amnesia, and I think there's a beta blocker now that they prescribe.”

“It's important to remember.” Ryuzaki had been sitting curled; he loosened now, seeming to lose the muscular power to stay together, and skimmed his sneakered feet over the surface of the water. “And beta blockers give me diabetes.”

“Ryuzaki.”

“Hm?”

“I see your point,” said Light; he did, somewhat. “But I think that would be a meaningless gesture. How does it help him now, to be remembered? You're not going to kill anyone again, I don't think; the trajectory of your life is too much against it. It's not as if you have to have something powerful to resist the temptation.”

“The trajectory of my life was against it two months ago.”

“You had to do this. He was out of control.”

“I can't tell myself anymore that a person is like a mosquito,” said Ryuzaki, “and must be destroyed for us to be happy and safe.”

“Try harder.”

“I can't take this seriously coming from you.”

“Look, Ryuzaki,” said Light, frustrated, “you've spent some time in hospitals, and at a few times you've relied on electricity to keep you alive. You could have been one of his victims – one of his innocent victims. That's why B is a danger worth destroying. His victims were innocent . He was trying to make an abstract idealogical point with blood.”

“Would you go back to your old ways, if you could?”

“If it meant I could end the threat posed by someone like B, without much pain, and without making you do it? Of course. That's what it was all supposed to be about. To a degree, sparing people the pain of having to do things like that. Taking it for myself. Of course, ideals don't last.”

Ryuzaki sighed heavily. His fingers convulsed. “This is moral philosophy on my usual poor level, but don't you think it's wrong to take that from them?”

“No.”

“If you had seriously offered to do it instead of me, I would have said no. He meant nothing to you.”

Light put an arm around his back, startled at the chill of the sweat that remained there; he thought it would do them both good to change clothes, but for now he tightened his grip, adding the opposite arm, feeling the thinness of his skin and smelling his unwashed hair. Ryuzaki's face half-turned to see him. His hands were in his lap.

“Why are you doing that?”

“To make you feel better.”

“Light,” said Ryuzaki, “the way you use that voice. Making people feel better.”

“I do the best with the personality I'm given.”

Light tightened his grip. They sat there for a toward amount of time, and then both were rather spooked by the approach of a car; it passed the house and thrummed off up the hill.

Chapter 21: Linda

In the morning, Yuriy entered the house and bypassed the corpse downstairs; he went up through the sunlit stairwell and found Rue and Light huddled in a bedroom. Rue was asleep, a dark rag, on the futon. Light sat under the window, blanket-wrapped and reading something.

An alien room -- the clothes on both men looked thin; everything seemed a tissue, insubstantial. A nostalgic feeling had escaped from somewhere. Rue slept. He, like Light, was pale; the bloody bandage around his head no doubt was not as bad as it looked.

“Good morning,” he said to Light. It was rather cold – dewy, with a particular scent; something that he associated with being on vacation. Autumn had broken. The sunlight was very bright and it brought out how awful Light looked – pale, with delicate dark patches beneath his eyes, a tiny muscular twitch in one beneath papery skin. His face had grown gaunt lately, bringing out its strong, stiff bones.

Light sighed, put the reader down, regarded him with half-closed eyes. “You made good time.”

“I hopped, yes.” So strange, always, to speak English with another nonnative speaker. He knelt heavily by Rue, stroked his face, and went through the usual motions of waking him up.

“How are you?” he asked, as gently as he could.

“Fine. What's in your pocket there?”

Yuriy took it out, opened it. “Just your benzo. I thought you might want to take some, though it's probably a little late.”

Rue gave him a look of faded amusement; Yuriy felt very much behind. “It couldn't hurt.”

“Well, you shouldn't take it just for 'it can't hurt.'”

“My heart is actually beating like mad.”

A soft pink gel pill in Yuriy's soft pink hand. Rue's mouth took it delicately, like a horse's; he dry-swallowed and said, “My hands still have powder on them.”

“We just have some bottled water and a soap bar,” said Light, surprising Yuriy with his continuing presence.

“Yes.” Rue leaned down, took up some bread. He ate only the part his hand hadn't touched.

“What are you going to do with him?” asked Light.

He had said “him” so coldly, and yet Yuriy had expected “it,” so at first he didn't know what Light meant. “Oh – I have a body bag in the car, and there's a crematorium in Syracuse that I know how we can use. For the house, I don't know if we have a choice other than to dig the bullets out and start a fire. Too bad, because it's ostentatious – and it's a nice house, but what can you do?”

Light didn't answer; he straightened his shirt. “Do you want help with the body?”

“I may need some. Yes. Rue, will you be all right?”

“I'm fine,” said Rue.

He stopped talking, a fixed expression on his face, and Yuriy kissed his forehead hard – his tooth made a brief contact; he stood up, stepped back, and forced himself to go downstairs. The labor with the bag was difficult, but it helped that it was such a wan, hot-cold morning – the chill on the ground, peeling off the lake; the promise of a devastating sun. It was the sort of morning upon which nothing could go wrong, and where all labor was atmospheric. Rue's shot had penetrated the upper part of the head; the teeth were intact, but there were bone chips, and he picked them clumsily with heavy gloves, taking regular breaks for breaths outside.

“You seem to know what you're doing,” said Light.

“Unfortunately, yes, this has sometimes been my duty.”

“I wouldn't have thought that cleaning up crime scenes was your sort of thing.”

“Not now. In earlier careers.” Yuriy delicately zipped the lower portion of the body bag; it would be helpful not to have to look at the hands, clenched and curled, like perfect reproductions.

“Why?”

“I had a pretty busy life before I met Rue,” he said, though he knew quite well that Light already knew the general outline. “Let's not talk, please, right now.”

Yuriy completed his labors and turned to the digging-out of the bullets – the gun was still here, discharged twice, and he confirmed the number of shots with Light when he came back in.

“Okay,” he said, putting the bits of metal into his pocket; they could be dealt with whenever they reached some other large body of water, or kept with him. “I'm just going to carry him out, and then we can do it.”

Light held the door for him. B was dead weight, stiff; it was like moving a trunk of wood, and as he walked he felt an immense and painful sadness, as if this, too, had been left over from last night and merely caught in his hands this morning. His rental was a small van, and he placed B in the back of it and covered him with an old blanket.

“Now,” he said, “this is getting complicated, because now we've got to split up the cars. The two of you, why don't you get into yours and go? Drive to Syracuse if you can. Don't stop, but if you are pulled over somehow, Rue will handle it. He can. I'd just prefer it, obviously, if we weren't associated with any of this. I'll handle the body myself and call you when it's done.”

“How will you handle it?”

“We have someone in Syracuse. She's taking care of the necessary details.”

“What of?”

“Cremation. A couple of other small things. Please go.”

Light stood there, then disappeared into the house, he came out with Rue, who sat on the porch steps and began replacing his bandage. Yuriy, who was getting the gasoline ready, was stuck by the fact that Light then went to the car's trunk, opened Rue's suitcase, and brought him another shirt and a jacket; Rue accepted them and began to change.

“Will you be okay?” he asked them, and Rue said in an unexpectedly firm voice, “Yes. Light can drive us to Syracuse. Where should we wait?”

Yuriy told him the name of a park and he nodded, got up, and sat in the passenger seat of the car. “See you there.”

“I love you,” said Yuriy, perhaps too quietly to be heard, but Rue looked back at him anyway.

“I didn't hear you, but I'm sure I agree.”

Light was situating himself in the driver's seat so that the car bounced a little. Yuriy grasped Rue's shoulders tightly; Rue looked at him with wide eyes, and he thought: I know what it was like for Quil sometimes; this is something he learned for dealing with Quil.

“Love you, I said,” he repeated more firmly.

“Yeah,” said Rue, “I love you, too, of course.”

He took hold of Yuriy's wrists, pulling them away, but gripping them tightly as he did so.

 

The drive was quiet and rather pretty – at times the roadway passed through small towns; it was not a freeway at all, and it was almost unoccupied. Sunlight and shadow slid over Ryuzaki's face. Light felt adult and strange, disembodied, watching his two hands in his shirt cuffs on the wheel. He was thinking of his father.

At one point, he must have asked Ryuzaki yet again how he was doing; he must have been exhausted with the question, but he rather gamely said, “I'm fine. Don't worry about it.”

“Good.”

“Yes.” He turned firmly back to the window and resumed watching the sunlight, the trees and the little towns and abandoned houses.

 

Linda opened the door to Yuriy and asked him in.

“If it's the same to you,” said Yuriy, “I'd rather go directly.”

“It's not the same to me,” said Linda and held the door wider.

He entered. The house was broad and airy, and most of it was a single large studio – he saw tiny welded sculptures that looked like lunar landers or small rockets and seemed to be produced in bulk; he saw competent portraits of businesspeople and impressive portraits of dogs; he saw knitted things in piles. It all looked like day-job work, and then as they reached the kitchen he glimpsed, in a side room, a large half-finished landscape of a lake which he immediately recognized as the lake by which B had died, and his hand tensed, and he put it on the gun holstered beneath his left armpit.

“I'm not personally angry at you,” said Linda. “I'm not one of you. I won't handle this with dramatics and wind. We weren't working together. We were sleeping together, but not in a very romantic way. I did care for him. He was doing better. But he was asking to be killed. Didn't want to, but he took idiotic risks. I said goodbye to him long ago, before he even started on this. They would come and visit every year. Was it you? I don't even know you. Not by sight. You're not from the house.”

Her back had been to him during most of this oration; now she turned and brought him a glass of water filled at the sink. She wore a paint-stained turtleneck and jeans; her hair was overdyed red, possibly on purpose. How old was she? Near's age, he supposed; Near remembered her.

“I'm not,” he said. “No.”

“Someone's handler. I always dealt with Near before. Is he still in charge?”

“More or less.”

“More or less. That sounds like him. Don't you trust me to give you a glass of water?”

“I'm not thirsty,” he said, though he was and the water looked delicious. He sighed, tense and confused. “You must be angry.”

“You trust me well enough,” said Linda, “it's just best practices not to accept it. Very well.”

She plucked it from the table and took a big swallow. “Really, I'm not angry – any angrier than I've always been, which is quite angry. When Near dies, are you finally going to shut the place down? All it makes are people who can't feel right.”

“You're wrong,” said Yuriy, “but anyway, the orphanage part has not been operating for a long time now, many years.”

“At least there's that. And how would you know what kind of people it makes? You weren't there.” She was looking at him, though, as if she had guessed precisely what sort of connection he had to one of her former classmates, and wasn't impressed.

“I can see.”

“Not really. Nobody can entirely see another.”

“I suppose not,” he said, impatient with this kind of point; it was true, but admitting it didn't help anyone. “How did you get out here?”

“I moved to America when I was eighteen and emancipated,” said Linda. “That was a long time ago. I wound up here because the rents are very cheap; nobody is here on purpose anymore. If we're going to visit, I have to start knitting. But I suppose we're not going to visit.”

What Yuriy wanted to say was “let me alone,” but he didn't, like Rue, have the luxury of “let me alone” -- he didn't know why; Rue was the sort who could always say it to anyone and still be taken seriously. He was very tired. He supposed the world owed her her monologue and little point-proving; it just hurt to hear when Rue was so far away.

“I wonder about you,” she added, “what sort of person you are, whether you are in love with anyone, or ever were, and what you are to Near and how you came from Russia, or Georgia, or wherever your accent's from. But I won't ask .”

“Okay,” he said.

“I'm allowed not to ask .” She looked more sympathetic suddenly. “Is he in the van?”

“Yes.”

“Let me get a few things, and we'll go.”

 

The few things were a knitted scarf, handsome, done in forest-green and brown; a jar of strawberry jam; a few teabags; a small paper book whose cover she wouldn't let him see, but which he recognized with an amused, embarrassed pleasure as an old copy of The Catcher in the Rye .

“We'll give him a Japanese funeral,” she said on the way. There was something about the way she said “Japanese” that dated her immediately, though Yuriy didn't know why.

She had done good work. The crematorium was empty – unlocked, but empty, and the fires were hot and in one room there was a capsule prepared. Yuriy loaded the bag onto it (it seemed to have shrunk) and Linda, with one harsh wrench, unzipped it from head to toe. There was no squeamishness in her gaze when she saw him; rather, she was pained and appraising, and Yuriy began to be afraid that she wanted this image to hurt her, wanted to imprint upon it so that she could use it later.

She tucked the jar into one hand. The body had softened again, enough that the hand could be coaxed to clutch it. The book went awkwardly under his arm, and the scarf wrapped around his neck without irony or disgust. Yuriy realized that he liked Linda, that he would have liked to see what she would have done at the Wammys, how she might have fit – but it was a thousand years too late, now, obviously, and he watched as she tucked the teabags around him, reaching slightly beneath as if tucking him to sleep.

“Sayonara, Rué,” she said, and zipped him up again, standing back. There was moist mascara around her eyes. Yuriy turned the handle to send the capsule into the fire, then wiped it with his handkerchief as they stood, waiting. A few seconds later, Linda ran to the oven door and clawed at it momentarily with a shock of emotion.

“The book,” she said matter-of-factly, after recovering, “I shouldn't have. But it doesn't matter.”

 

Later, he took leave of Linda and, stinking of smoke, swung back into the van – it could be left anonymously at the lot, wiped down, and he moved onto the deserted freeway with a buoyant heart, longing for his reunion with Rue – in his mind, all the pain of the day was gone; there was a brightness and a heat in Rue like a small sun, which would blot out the embarrassment and wrenching fondness of the book and the crematorium, blot everything into itself – he would lie with his head in Rue's lap. He would be forgiven. He felt the kind of communion one only feels mentally – that cannot be replicated in person, or at any rate is not the same in person, is much too complex and too needy. When they met in his head, he didn't need Rue in the same way. To be permanently close to him was a choice and that was somehow better. There was a heat on his left hand, focused laserlike and painful through the driver's-side window, and everything continued to smell of burnt flesh, and he turned off of the freeway, looping smoothly off of a cloverleaf of pale asphalt, old asphalt, half-cracked and with overgrown grass around it, toward the park where Rue and Light were sitting, eternally until reached, two small pale dots of faces in a field of green.

Chapter 22: Rue

They came home again by solar ship. Yuriy hadn't wanted to use such a slow form of transport, but he was still paranoid about a plane plunging from the sky with the three of them screaming in it (or, perhaps, himself screaming and Light and Rue curiously resigned), and so he'd booked passage from New York on the big, dozy daily liner, which took three days to cross the Atlantic and required a six-hour car ride beforehand.

The reunion with Rue had not been what Yuriy had hoped. He had limply accepted a long hug in the park, even huddled close, but responded with drugged boredom to the next hour before curling up in the backseat and going to sleep.

Yuriy had taken this opportunity to ask Light what had happened, and Light's replies (elicited only with difficulty, though he eventually told him something in plain tones which he thought was the truth) frightened him and convinced him to keep Rue close on the ship – to stay in the cabin with him the entire time, ideally. This was easy the first day. The room was small and extremely plain, with a small bed that was only nominally a double -- Rue had a bath and then slept for hours. The rest of the time he read, ignoring Yuriy unless he was asked a question, and then answering normally enough – he didn't seem upset, just absent, no matter how physically close they were. Yuriy recognized this mood. He didn't want to talk. He wanted to be alone for the day, but couldn't go through with it.

 

When night came, he slept again, and shrank as he slept, with that remarkable ability of his to sigh out part of his body mass. It was a lemony evening, with the smell of cleaner and a yellow light streaming in, sunshine before a storm. Yuriy covered him better – he was wearing an old gray henley that belonged to both of them – and picked up Rue's reader.

He would never normally have done this. Rue didn't like his things touched; Yuriy did it automatically. If someone had asked, he would have said “I'm just trying to get into his head,” but nobody asked and it was a bad explanation anyway; sentimental and too chatty. He did it because he did it. He thumbed the button to make the screen visible.

Maps. A text window – a Brazilian novel, the Portuguese swimming and incomprehensible, though normally he might have made out a few sentences by extrapolating from Spanish. This made him nervous, too. The best security system Rue could have put on the thing was Yuriy's nerves. He closed it and put it on the desk. Trust Rue to be reading for pleasure in Portuguese the night he'd selected to become a fratricide.

He was sitting there, feeling boneless, when Light knocked. The knock was soft and swift and sounded almost padded. Rue didn't stir. He called him in softly, without hesitation – Light had seen worse than him in his night things – and Light came in and sat at the desk chair.

“Rue?” he asked without preamble, in a whisper.

Yuriy felt himself wrinkle his nose at him, and he looked duly embarrassed about what had, after all, been a sort of endearment. But he answered. “Rue's fine. I think he'd appreciate it if both of us would go, but I can't leave him alone.”

“No,” said Light, as if he had been trying for hours to convince Yuriy to leave Rue alone. “I suppose not.”

They fumbled with the language, both tired and sick of speaking English; it was a point of awkward connection again, and then Light said hesitantly in delicately accented Russian, “I don't know why he does such thing as this. Kills B himself. He's an idiot. I told him not to. I talked to him about it a lot, not to take weights you can't hold. There's no shame with this. You have to be practical.”

“He just has a moral code about it, I guess,” said Yuriy. The pressure of speaking slowly, simply, was in its own way as annoying as speaking a second language; he disliked his use of the phrase “a moral code.” “He can't have anyone else do it, and he can't arrest him.”

“No. He knows how to save himself. Maybe it sounded wrong to him because it was coming from my mouth, not yours. Maybe he is just trying to get away from us and you.”

“From me?” Yuriy was curious more than offended.

Light looked as if he were saying something he'd stored up at length, perhaps through his entire prison stay. “He reminds me of Misa. She came to me and was devoted to me, but she tried to escape in secret ways anyway. People don't really like being together, you know. Most of us are actually very -- sickened by – to have to please another person. And he is not very good at pleasing. Does that make sense to you?”

Yuriy had his doubts. “You really think Rue's anything like your ex-wife?”

“We weren't married.”

“No, of course not,” said Yuriy, “I thought you were – thought you were for some reason.”

“They are alike,” said Light, “the way they are both somewhat crazy.”

“I've always thought that the really crazy people were the ones who always acted consistently and in their own self-interest, Light.”

“I'm sorry.” Light looked sulky, actually sulky. “My knowledge on your Russian is still not strong. Maybe I should use another word.”

“Oh, I think you meant crazy,” said Yuriy. “Both of them crossed you and then acted surprised when you murdered them or near-murdered them. They weren't stupid, so they must not have recognized the inevitable consequence because they were crazy.”

“That is certainly not it,” said Light, still placid. “No. Neither acted ever surprised. Both were willing to do dangerous things and to suffer.”

“This conversation isn't helping me.”

Light made a small motion with his hands, expressing some brief fit of strong emotion; then he said, “Of course,” and withdrew a little. His petulance was more pronounced now. In another life he could have been someone's boy toy, boon companion, a little friend; good for someone who wanted someone to both annoy and torture him.

“I want to thank you, though,” said Yuriy, “for helping him and saving him.”

“Of course,” said Light shortly.

“Don't be offended. It's not obvious to me that you would.”

“I did not say it that way because it was to me obvious that I would save him. Just because I like you very little.”

“I don't like you, either.”

“I know,” said Light with impatience. “You know, I did more than help him. I cared for him. Did you?”

“I would have, obviously.”

“You would have cared for yourself. Made yourself feel better – to be close, to feel better. That's all.”

“Well, why don't you marry him,” said Yuriy, “if that's how you feel about it all?”

“ I've never forced myself to anyone,” said Light.

Yuriy thought: he understands; he's very good. He knows the things that bother people. And yet I don't think he's malevolent right now. I don't know why he's even saying this. He's not calculating it very well to hurt me; I feel so impervious, stupid with tiredness, numb and warm and happy to have Rue beside me. He's mostly right and I don't care.

“That's true.”

“You forced myself to yourselves,” said Light, “even if you hate me so much. If you can't – you can't – take that I'm here, then you thought of it then --”

“Light, maybe it's the Russian, or maybe I'm just overwhelmed, but I'm having trouble making sense of you. I'm sorry.”

Light's face convulsed a little with anger, and he went on in English. “You forced me on yourselves --”

“Point taken.”

“I have uses,” said Light. “I can do things you can't do. Ignore myself, for example. I can make myself transparent and give all my attention to another person. This is all you want to do, but you can't. Too much empathy makes you see only yourself, because empathy, as far as I have ever seen, is just knowing how someone feels because you can imagine how you would feel. Always you.”

“Can you please just pick another time to tell me how much you hate me and why?”

“I don't hate you. I don't hate anyone. I even like you. But very little, like I said.”

“What d'you like about me?”

The contraction or the question or both bothered Light visibly; he knit his brow. “You are very competent. And you do love Ryuzaki.”

“Thank you for conceding that.”

“And you're very hard to anger.”

“I sound wonderful.”

“Though right now I suspect you're just not capable.”

“No.”

Light rose from the chair (Yuriy admired how lithely he moved) and came closer to him, to the bed. Yuriy let him sit; he reached over and rested his hand on Rue's arm, rising and falling with the side of his chest.

“You're not really asleep, obviously,” he said.

But he was; Yuriy could tell, and after a moment Light removed his hand.

“He still has a few tricks, I see.”

“Yes,” said Yuriy.

Light looked down, withdrew into himself, stood up. “I only wanted to check on him.”

“I'll tell him you came.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good night.” He left without looking back.

On the second day, Rue pretended to sleep through the entire morning (not so convincingly that Yuriy didn't get the point); Yuriy, claustrophobic, decided to risk a walk. There was an electronic lock, and he hesitated at it, worried about Rue hurting himself, but also worrying about offending him. In the end he engaged the lock, took the key and went downstairs, deeper into the ship, past Light's door, to the little library and then for a cup of coffee at an arid, cold cafe. Neither of these spaces interested him. More than once he put his head on a table and drifted without resting. After half an hour, he went back upstairs and found the cabin empty, Rue having walked through the lock as if it were quite beneath his dignity.

His throat seized. He shut the door rather firmly, and hurried downstairs again – no – Rue would go up, and he ran up the white steps to the observation deck, ringing the solar panels, above which there danced a permanent bright heat-haze that warmed the surrounding area.

Rue was on the other side of the ship, lying on his stomach on a deck chair, shirtless, with his hair swept over his shoulder and drained into the little abyss beneath the chair. His back looked warm. Yuriy dropped down facing him on the edge of a nearby chair and pressed his hands to his face, breathing hard into them.

“I'm glad you're here,” said Rue. “I was going to get up and put on my shirt in a minute, and I was hoping you'd come and shield me from people. I'm going to have horizontal marks all across my front.”

“I was surprised that you took your shirt off.”

“That's what surprised you, hm?” Rue pushed himself up, cautiously, onto his knees, and he picked up his t-shirt and soft white cardigan, in which he enrobed himself. “I wanted to feel the sun on my back.”

“You don't have to stop just because I'm here.”

“I wasn't.” Rue sat in the chair the correct way and drew up his knees a little. Yuriy sat there watching him, scooting his own chair a little closer, and eventually taking his hand. Rue squeezed it. “For what,” he said, “do you wish me to forgive you, exactly, this time?”

Yuriy hunched himself forward a little, watching a little piece of Rue's hair move against his wrist. “I suppose you would notice an apology in my manners.”

Rue pushed his hair back and looked up, straight at him. “I always do. You never stop.”

“No.”

Rue's grip on the hand was growing stronger. “I wonder if I didn't do it partly because I didn't want to deal with him anymore. I never liked him. I never had any interest in his obsession with me. It was always very one-sided.”

“It's possible,” said Yuriy.

Rue broke eye contact; he made a wounded sound in his throat and sat up a little. His grip on Yuriy's hand loosened; he felt the cold fingers individually – the sun hadn't warmed them at all. “Yes.”

“I won't say no. It is . It's possible that that was part of your reason; that's what you just said.”

Rue sniffled a little and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “No. You're right. I just wanted to be better than this. You try to make a life and all that comes out is garbage. What do you work for? All too often, you lose everything you tried to make in your own lifetime. Quil was lucky in that way.”

Yuriy reached over his body and took hold of his other hand. Bits of Rue's hair were whipping towards him in the wind as if trying to encircle him. Rue looked at him as if his head had been immobilized, with a very slight movement and with some anxiety.

“You're freezing, Rue.”

“I'm fine. It's just physiology. You know, you're just like him. Like Quil. It was always so obvious; I hoped you wouldn't notice, though. And you can't be like Quil and pour everything you have into one person. It's fine if you're sure you'll die first, frankly...”

“Let's not say this. Please. Can we not be morbid?”

Rue's eyes and nose were streaming again; it was hard to tell whether it was emotion, the weather, the beginnings of a cold. Yuriy fumbled his hand loose and handed him his handkerchief and he cleaned himself up a little, sighing a ragged breath. “I'm not being morbid. You can't go through life just saying kind things to me and trying to salve my wounds and complaints. It's nice for me and nice for you, but you have marvelous genes, and someday I won't be able to take all these imbalances and all these pills, and then what will you do? Implode, I wonder; collapse from having nothing to support. Like one of your buildings in Yakutsk. Your obviously symbolic buildings in Yakutsk, on the melting earth. But that's really happening, Yuriy; it's just physical law. With apologies for continuing to bring up the hard sciences...”

“The privilege is mine, Rue. I have Near to care for and Light to police. I'll have things to do. If I'm alone at night after you're gone, I would rather think I gave you everything I have. Held back nothing.”

“Well, when I'm gasping in a hospital bed someday, staring up at your face, I would rather think you have something left besides me. And you don't sleep. And I won't be able to work forever. And the odds really are that my final years won't be dignified ones.” Rue breathed in, breathed out, a slow and deliberate movement, his hand on his chest. “I remember asking you that first night in Winchester to hold on – just to stay close to me, keep me away somehow, I meant, from the fact of dying. I shouldn't have. No one can do that. I was reprieved then; nobody's reprieved forever, and I think that long before I'm finally gone, you're going to be very, very tired.”

“Well, I'm not that tired yet. Come here, Rue, please.”

Rue got up and joined Yuriy on his chair. They sat in silence. The deck was not quite deserted, though no one had been in earshot of their soft voices; there were three miscellaneous parents with their children, all playing shuffleboard, and a ship's officer or steward – someone in uniform, anyway – even further off, silhouetted against the rail, taking a measure of the horizon with a handheld tool. Yuriy felt Rue lean against him, felt the usual thrill.

“Near wants to move to London,” he told Rue quietly, after much time had passed.

“Mm. Why does Near want to move to London.”

“To move headquarters there.”

“I'm sick and tired of being the sort of person who has a headquarters.”

“So is he, I think. It's inescapable, I guess, but at least he wants to distance from Wammy's. He said the final result of something like Wammy's is always something like this, with B. It's mathematics.”

“Near has always had some very strange ideas about mathematics,” said Rue, his warm breath tickling Yuriy's neck. “Between us, I'm not sure he's a visionary.”

“You probably aren't in a mood to think about this.”

“It's Near-kindness.” Rue clutched Yuriy's hand again. “You know, this ship doesn't seem large enough; I feel so claustrophobic on it. And yet in a strange way, I somehow feel safer than I ever have. I don't know if it's because of B. I hope not. I don't imagine that it will last.”

“Well, we'll be home tomorrow,” was all Yuriy could think to say.

“Yeah.” Rue scrubbed at his eyelid with his fingertip. “Home tomorrow.”

“You can see your cats.”

“I know, Zhora.”

Yuriy put his arm fully around him, rested a hand at the same time on his thigh. There was a loosening in Rue's manner, and he felt warmth against his hip, and a muscular ache in the core of him, and the faint teasing of hair against his ear. He felt as if he were carrying him forward through the water, knew that he wasn't, but as he tightened his hands, he thought he would prefer for a moment to pretend it.