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"Can you actually see the way with those glasses of yours?" asked Shoko, genuinely curious.
Despite her question, she appeared to have enough faith in Satoru's vision to keep following him as he led the three of them through the woods tonight, the way ahead lit only by the warm glow of the flashlight in his hand. The heat of the day had dissipated; the cool summer air felt good on her face, refreshing after a day spent in the small, dingy morgue.
Something brushed her arm, a light scratch, and she glanced down to see a particularly low-hanging branch from a tree. Satoru kept walking ahead, taking the sole source of light with him, and the branch seemed to retreat ever more into the night, looking like an ominous shadow.
"I can see everything...." she heard Satoru reply, his voice falsely low, barely above a whisper. He turned around, the flashlight pointed up towards his chin. His face took on an unearthly glow, its contours suddenly defined, darkened. And then, in a literal flash, the light swung to the side.
"My turn," said Suguru, having snatched the flashlight away, and began walking ahead by himself. Satoru chased after him, in that lazy half-jog half-jump way of his.
Shoko rolled her neck left, then right, sore from having hunched over the table in the morgue all day today, and the night before, to boot. She'd been looking forward to spending tonight tucked into bed by this hour, not walking through some woods god-knows-where. Satoru better finish this up before the trains stop running. She looked up, stretching the front of her neck, and caught a cloud drifting over a sliver of the moon.
The light from their only flashlight now seemed inordinately far away. She almost had to squint to see it. God, those two have annoyingly long legs.
"Heyyyy!" she yelled, ambling towards them at her own leisurely pace. "Wait up!"
The light stayed where it was, though it kept bobbing up and down in a headache-inducing manner. No doubt Satoru has retrieved control of the flashlight.
"So it begins," said Satoru, again in that decidedly very fake low voice when she reached the two of them. "Our first test of courage!" He flung out both arms dramatically, which meant the light went swinging to the left, and Shoko got a very nice, very clear, much unneeded view of the tree directly next to them.
"I did one in elementary school, actually," commented Suguru.
"Oh, me too," said Shoko. "My teacher had put out these fake skulls along the way, but then I ran into an actual curse."
"Mine wasn't quite so exciting. I actually considered releasing a curse to spice things up."
"Our first test of courage together," Satoru interrupted.
"But why?"
"Because we're making summer memories! We'll be looking back on this night with fondness in fifteen years' time."
"Also it was a mission from Mr. Yaga," added Suguru, for Shoko's sake.
"Huh? No way he sent me on a mission."
"You're right, he didn't!" agreed Satoru, then repeated: "We're making summer memories!"
"Oh," Shoko said, and then, to clarify: "So we're making summer memories by curse-hunting?"
"By doing our first test of courage together," corrected Satoru, with the tone of an exasperated kindergarten teacher.
"Hmm. I see," said Shoko, though she didn't really see why Satoru was so intent on this when the three of them knew that all these so-called tests of courage led down the same road: curses.
"Once upon a time," started Satoru, already moving on, "there was a girl-"
"It's always a girl. We really do have it harder," said Shoko, exhaling. She was dying for a smoke, and that was the least of the many reasons was why wandering around in the woods at night had never made it to her list of top activities to do in her free time.
"There was a girl," said Satoru, who was having to repeat himself a lot tonight. "She was a student at a school nearby. A first-year, just like us. But she was shy, and quiet, with bangs like yours, Suguru, so she wasn't exactly the most popular person in her year. Unlike me."
"There are three people in our year," Suguru pointed out, "and I'd wager you're the least popular out of all three of us."
"Nonsense," said Satoru. "That's what unpopular people say to pull popular people down! But I shall persist! Anyway! Of course she started getting bullied."
"Watch out, Suguru," said Shoko. "With bangs like yours, Mr. Popular here might start bullying you soon."
"It was all the usual stuff – taking her lunch money, getting her to do their homework." He nodded like he had personal experience with high school bullying, and threw the flashlight up at the sky, like he was juggling with only one object. It swivelled on the way down, and landed perfectly balanced on the tip of his finger. "One day they took her shoes from the locker and they threw them into a pond. She dove to retrieve them, but then something happened. The pond was deeper than she expected, perhaps, or she wasn't a very strong swimmer. Or maybe she hit her head on the way down. But she didn't come up. The girls freaked out. They headed home and pretended nothing happened. And it felt like nothing did – the next day, and the next, and the next... she simply didn't show up to school. They had gone back to the pond – also nothing, so they thought she just stopped coming to school. But then after a week of absence, their homeroom teacher got in touch with the girl's parents, and she never came home, either. The police were called, they set out on a search, but they never did find her.
Then, the rumours spread. Everyone knew she was being bullied, and someone claimed to have seen the group of bullies leading her to the pond that day. They were interrogated; one of them broke and spilled the beans, despite a pact of secrecy. The pond was searched, but nothing ever came out of it – no body, nothing, nada."
He turned around and shone the light to the right of where they stood, its beam travelling in between two tree trunks, illuminating something beyond their eye's reach.
"It's been a popular spot for a test of courage ever since. See how on trend we are? They say her ghost still wanders around the pond, looking for her shoes, and that she has a particular vendetta against teenage girls. One look from her, and you'll feel your lungs fill up, like you're drowning on dry land, and you'll be clawing your throat for air."
"Okay, great, thanks for bringing this teenage girl out here then," said Shoko. "Let me guess, the pond is right over there?"
"Yup!" said Satoru. "Five points for you, Shoko! I declare you the second smartest student in our year!"
"You can feel the cursed energy from here." Suguru, presumably put off by the fact that in the span of ten minutes, he'd been deemed the third smartest, least popular, and most likely to get bullied in their year, snatched the flashlight from Satoru's hand and began making his way down the path Satoru had indicated.
Or probably he was just getting a little sick of Satoru's nonsense after a whole day of listening to this. Though they'd gotten much closer since their first (extremely rocky, Shoko remembered) meeting and Suguru usually humoured (and genuinely enjoyed, she knows) all the nonsense that came out of Satoru's mouth, at heart, Suguru was an upright, model student. He respected his elders, he had a strict moral code, he got the job done right. She wouldn't have expected him to clown around while on duty.
He always went on and on about how they had a duty to protect those without power; Satoru had some choice words to say about that, and he always did. After their first fight, Shoko had learnt to mind her own business whenever they came to blows, but she was personally more inclined to agree with Satoru. She performed her role simply because she could. She'd be lying if she said it didn't feel good to do what others couldn't, but she never really looked deeper into why she could do it. They could postulate all they wanted about why each of them was born the way they were, but it wasn't as if there was some absolute truth they could come to, and she didn't see a need to attach some sort of morality in its absence.
Still, as she followed Suguru, who held back the overhanging branches for her, who muttered, "Careful, the ground's uneven here," and whose back seemed wider, somehow, more sure, backlit by the ray of the flashlight, she thought: it might not be so bad, to believe in something. To wake up and live each day with a sense of purpose.
The trees opened into a clearing. In the centre sat a pond, cursed energy emanating from it.
"We're here!" Satoru's unnecessary announcement woke up a few birds, and the leaves rustled as they flew away from the trees. The noise echoed throughout the clearing.
She didn't even see it coming.
Her breath caught.
Suddenly she was looking down at the pond from above and for one wild, singular moment, she thought she had turned into one of the birds. Her ears felt fuzzy, and she could hear rain, she could feel water on her cheeks, droplets of it, but it wasn't rain, she realised, when she looked down and saw a curse had burst out from the middle of the pond, streams of water pouring from the top of its head. The water must've sprayed everywhere when it sprung up. Below, Suguru's lone figure stood facing it.
Bird's eye view. God's eye view. This was what Satoru saw.
Satoru. She could feel his arm around her waist. She knew without turning that it was him.
For the first time all night, she understood why people were so scared of him.
Her eye caught on a glint on the surface of the pond: it was a thin, glimmering, silver crescent, a little broken up by the ripples. A reflection of the moon. She looked up, and then saw it right there, the real thing, hung in the middle of the sky, this time much larger, and it looked so close that she felt like if she reached out, she would touch it.
Below, Suguru stepped forward. He looked small against the curse.
From this height, everything felt unreal.
Then a curse appeared next to him, and its arms stretched, lashing out towards the one at the centre of the pond. Water splashed everywhere; it was hard to make out what was happening. Another curse at Suguru's side, a smaller one this time, and it flung itself towards the mayhem – then, a firework of water.
When it settled and Satoru whistled besides her, she realised it was over, just like that.
"Victory!" Satoru exclaimed as the two of them descended. Shoko watched Suguru's form get bigger and bigger, and then her feet touched the ground, and he was human-sized once more. "We've bested the test of courage!"
"You didn't do anything," said Suguru.
"We didn't do anything," agreed Shoko. She eyed the black sphere in Suguru's hand, barely smaller than a tennis ball. But black felt like an inadequate word to describe it; it radiated pure absence, an absolute abyss.
"I saved you, Shoko!"
"I think that just cancels out the fact that you brought me here in the first place."
Suguru's fingers twirled the sphere, round and round and round.
"Your hand," said Shoko.
On the back of Suguru's hand, right above his wrist, were two thin, red lines.
"Oh," he said, as if noticing it for the first time, which was probably actually the case. He brought it up closer to his face, squinting. "Hmm. I don't think it was the curse. Probably from some of the branches earlier." Then, in one clean action, a practiced routine, he raised the sphere up to his mouth and swallowed it whole.
She walked up to Suguru and took his wrist in her hand. He felt, at once, smaller and bigger than she remembered.
"Don't worry about it. It'll heal by itself," he said.
She tutted. "Why wait?"
From her fingertips came a soft glow, warm against the chilly summer breeze. Soon, it'll be autumn.
"There," she said, tapping his skin where the two lines once were. "Good as new."
"Thanks, Shoko," said Suguru, a smile on his lips.
She grinned. "You can thank me in cigarettes."
"I told you, I don't smoke."
"Never too late to start."
"We're too early to start."
"Suit yourself," she said. "Shall we head? What time is it?" She flipped open her phone. "Shit, we'll never make the last train."
She turned to Satoru, who was looking at Suguru with an expression that, she has come to realise, usually preceded one of his many terrible ideas.
"Who can tell me," said Mr. Yaga as he stepped into their classroom the next day, "why the morning news is reporting on a mysterious sighting of a flying dragon in the middle of Tokyo?"
Driven by her extremely ingrained, extremely strong sense of self-preservation, Shoko immediately pointed to Satoru, and when she looked over her finger, saw that Suguru was doing the same.
She met his eyes, and hid a smile.