"But after that, I was afraid of Miu...

"And when the Java finch you loved so much died, I wondered if...maybe Miu had done it.

"I thought it was wrong to suspect her, but for it to die so suddenly on a day that she came over to play...the timing felt too perfect. Remember how the blood stained Kiss-Kiss's throat? No matter how I looked at it, it didn't look like he'd died of an illness. It looked like he'd been stabbed in the throat with a needle or a tack. And you loved Kiss-Kiss too much to have ever done something like that to him. In which case, Miu was the only one I could think of..."

The image of my small white bird grown cold and unmoving came into my mind.

"Why? Why did Kiss-Kiss die? Why is his neck all red?"

Faced with my tearful entreaties, my mother had groped for something to say, her face ashen.

And then Miu had smiled gently and said that he'd gone into s.p.a.ce. Then she told me the story of Kiss-Kiss to comfort me.

Miu's smile that day was cloaked in a totally different implication now.

A smile with poison in it, hiding dark emotions behind it- A chill coursed down my spine.

Another different scene was trying to rise from the depths of my memories.

Fluttering white curtains, a blackboard, a fish tank, desks.

I was in elementary school.

Miu was in elementary school.

Alone together in the cla.s.sroom in the morning.

My head hurt so badly it felt like it would split, and my throat squeezed instantly, sharply tight.

"Are you all right, Konoha?"

My mother frantically touched her hand to my shoulder.

"...I'm fine. I just felt disoriented for a second, that's all."

My mother's face drooped.

"I'm sorry. It's because I told you all these wild stories."

"No, thank you for telling me."

My mother looked a little closer to tears again.

From the foot of the stairs, we heard Maika's voice calling for us.

"It sounds like Maika's tired of waiting. Let's go downstairs, Mom."

As I stood up from my chair, my mother looked sad and said, "Konoha, I was scared of Miu and tried to keep her away from you. But when she jumped off the roof, I regretted it very much.

"I should have acted like an adult and sat her down and scolded her when she was still a child, for her own good. If I'd done that and been able to teach her the proper path, maybe she wouldn't have jumped."

Something grated along the inside of my chest, and I made a small noise.

My mother had been suffering these last two and a half years, too.

It wasn't just children who lost their way on the path at night. Even adults got lost and could make mistakes.

Her eyes still lowered, her voice small, my mother whispered, "Konoha, you...gave Miu strength."

I grunted, "...I guess," in response, and then Maika came pounding up the stairs.

"Mommy, Konoha, the bread will get cooold. Daddy's waiting, toooo!"

She peeked her tiny face in past the door to nag us.

"Okay, we're coming."

My mother took Maika's hand with a kind look on her face.

I followed them down the stairs.

That night, I had a dream.

On a morning of bright sunlight, I opened the door to the cla.s.sroom, panting.

What kind of story will Miu tell me today? I can't wait. But before that, I have to feed the goldfish and clean their tank.

The white curtains were lifted in a billow.

Behind them stood Miu as she was in elementary school.

She was looking down at the fish tank with cold eyes.

A slight smile curved her lips.

A school of goldfish bobbing in the tank, showing their bellies.

"The goldfish...all died."

Miu's covert whisper in my ear after I'd run over to the tank, gaping.

The faintly perfumed scent of soap.

The frothy white water in the tank.

White-and-blue pellets that stuck to Miu's fingers, which brushed mine.

That had been detergent, hadn't it?

Miu had sprinkled detergent in the fish tank, hadn't she?

But Miu was smiling that day!

Ice-cold terror shot through my spine.

From behind the rippling white curtains, I could hear Miu's whisper.

"Oh, how woeful.

"So woeful.

"The goldfish did such a woeful thing.

"Kiss-Kiss did such a truly woeful thing, too."

"You and me and all living things are so woeful."

I sat up in bed, a knifelike chill stabbing into my entire body.

When I looked at the clock, I saw it was already morning.

Still, my room was dim, and it was so quiet it seemed like all the creatures beyond my window had died off.

"Was that...a dream?"

Sweat plastered my forehead and neck.

I had gripped the edge of my blanket tightly.

No, it was different!

It was a dream, but it had really happened.

The meaning behind Miu's smile that day, the fragrance of soap coming from her, the pellets of detergent stuck to her fingers-I'd tried not to think about them, and I'd forgotten.

Likewise spotting Miu in the discount shop and all of the suspicious things Miu had done; I'd locked them away deep in my heart.

Cradling my head, which ached like it would split in half, I gritted my teeth.

I had decided to overlook a lot of things about Miu up till now.

How should I move forward? Would I manage to reach a conclusion about what I could do to help Miu?

I experienced a suffocating feeling, as if the darkness was weighing down on me, but I got out of my bed and parted the curtains.

Snow was swirling fiercely outside, and a gray world of watered ink opened before me. The ashen snow was piling up on roofs and roads.

It was unusual to get this much snow in the city.

I started up my computer and connected to the Internet to check the weather when I noticed that I'd received an e-mail.

The sender's name was spelled out in English letters, and there was a file attached. Could it be a virus?

Just as I was about to delete it, my hand stopped.

The sender's name was "hatori."

The subject line was "sky."

The name of the attachment was "itsuki."

Hatori.

Sky.

Itsuki.

I had a flashback to those three words.

Miu Inoue's prize-winning story, Like the Open Sky.

Itsuki, the girl who was its main character.

And her childhood friend, the boy that Itsuki loved, was called Hatori!

I opened the e-mail without any further hesitation.

Will you grant Hatori's wish?

This was the brief message it contained with no signature.

The attachment was compressed.

Did this mean that if the answer was yes, I had to open the file? I moved the arrow and double-clicked, then chose "open in current window."

The file was huge, so it was slow to download. I watched every twitch in the blue bar showing the progress of the extraction software.

Finally it showed the image of the file. When I opened it up, lots of tiny images spread out to fill the screen.

Were these...photos?

There were nearly two hundred of the images sprinkled with red and black spots.

I selected one that looked good and enlarged it. The instant I saw the letters printed on the yellowed paper, I knew it was a sentence I had written.

The picture was of one page from Miu Inoue's novel.

But that wasn't all.