I pictured the reason, and it made me dizzy.

Because I'd wanted it-!

Because I'd begged Miu for stories.

Because that was the tie that bound us more strongly than anything else.

And so in order for the two of us to be together forever, Miu had to keep on making stories, even if she stole them from other people.

Everything! You took everything! All of it! You stole it!

And yet you followed me around, smiling, without the least sense of guilt.

And you're looking for more?

Are you going to carve it out of my body? My heart?

I have nothing left!

My cell phone suddenly rang inside my coat pocket. I came to a stop in surprise and checked the screen.

Takeda?

Had something happened? Or was it just her usual gossip?

After some hesitation, I returned the phone to my pocket.

Sorry, I'll call you back later.

When my head and shoulders were white with snow, I arrived at the middle school where Miu and I had gone to school.

In the map we'd drawn as children, our Milky Way Railroad flew off into s.p.a.ce from the roof of this building.

I turned my face to the sky, but the snow only cascaded like scattering feathers and I couldn't see the roof or if anyone was there.

But I was convinced that Miu was here.

Because the two of us had made that map so that we could find each other even if we were separated across s.p.a.ce- When I'd come here before with Tohko, my chest had grown more pained with each step forward I took, my eyes had spun at the spasms that felt like my skull was cracking, and I hadn't even been able to reach the school building from the gate.

Now my face was awash in a headwind, and when I pa.s.sed through the gates, my stomach twisted up. The wind felt like it would stop my breath.

Despite that, I dropped my body forward, and stomping furiously through the snow, I reached the entrance.

Inside the building, it was perfectly silent, perhaps because school was out for the snow.

I thought a few of the teachers would have come to work, but I took my shoes off, unconcerned, and climbed unerringly up the stairs to the roof, carrying them in my hand.

I was in my socks, so I was slipping a lot, which made it hard to run. Halfway there, I took those off, too, and stuffed them in my pockets.

One floor-two floors-as I drew closer to the roof, my breathing grew more and more strained, my vision clouded, and my head started to hurt as if it were being beaten with a hammer.

The same thing had happened before.

On a clear day in May, it had been Takeda on the roof. I had climbed up to the roof in a frenzy in order to stop her from committing suicide.

That day, tortured by the pain crushing my chest and squeezing my throat relentlessly, the image that had come to my mind was Miu.

Somehow, I had to make it this time. So that Takeda wouldn't throw herself off the roof like Miu had.

I had overlaid Miu's image on Takeda. I prayed fierce and hard, to the point that it threatened to break my heart, as I ran up and up as hard as I could.

But now the one at my destination was Miu herself!

The instant I opened the heavy door to the roof, it was ripped outward by the wind, and I toppled forward with it.

Snow the size of pebbles swirled around me in a sheet, and I couldn't see the entire roof at one glance.

But when I looked down at my feet, small footprints and the dragging marks of a crutch remained in the deeply drifted snow just like the track of a train, marking out a path.

I pulled on the shoes I carried over my bare feet; held my breath; and with my nerves strained to their limit, I followed the track.

When I spotted Miu leaning back on the railing that stood at the edge of the roof, I thought my heart would stop.

Below a leaden sky. The ends of her short-cut hair, her red scarf, her long skirt, and the hem of her jacket were flapping about in the fiercely blowing wind. She stared at me, fixated, with her huge eyes that showed a confused mixture of hatred and sadness.

Her skin was blue and transparent like ice, and her lips and body were trembling slightly from the cold.

Her silver crutch was lying at her feet, and her hands gripped the rail tightly. Her stance was incredibly tense, but at the same time, it seemed fragile.

If Miu were to jump again right at this second- I was sure my heart would shatter like ice.

Miu was staring at me in silence.

And staring back at her, I drew closer.

The snow that stuck to my cheek melted with my breath.

In the steadily shrinking s.p.a.ce between us, snow poured down like pure white feathers.

I had approached to within six feet.

"Miu..."

My chest swelled-swelled so it felt like it would burst painfully-so I thought I might start crying. I called out to her, "I read your novel, Miu."

Miu's shoulders twitched as she glared at me, and she gripped the railing even harder. A tearful light shone in Miu's eyes as well.

"I'm sorry, Miu. I hurt you a lot. I didn't take the time to notice that you were suffering, and I'm sorry."

"Why are you apologizing?"

Miu looked even closer to tears.

"I don't want you to apologize! That doesn't serve any purpose. It just eases your guilt, and you only make yourself feel better! I'm still in pain!"

The words that she hurled at me in the wildly swirling snow stabbed into my chest.

"You never understood, Konoha. How much I hated you or your family or your house...how much I despised it all...

"How it felt like you were showing off when you smiled and hugged the zebra pillow your mom had made for you by hand, or how much it hurt me. Or that I stomped on your pillow so many times when you weren't around!"

"I didn't know that. Or about your family or your mom...or your dad..."

Miu's face flushed, and she screamed as if beating at me.

"How was I supposed to tell you?! That my mom and dad hated each other and did nothing but fight! That even their daughter got completely swept up in their abuse when she was still in elementary school. But if they got divorced, it would negatively affect Dad's job and it would look bad, so they're living separately! And that's why I was switching schools!"

Miu spewed her untenable anger, her pain.

"Even my mom taking me back was a jab at my grandma-Dad's mom.

"'Cos Grandma lived in the house next door and would come to our house all the time, and she would just harangue my mom. Mom hated Grandma even more than she hated Dad. Grandma told her I was going to stay with Dad, so she got annoyed and said, 'I'm taking Miu with me,' and that's all. It's not like she loves me!

"Even after we started living together, I had to hear her bad-mouth my dad and grandma.

"Your father's awful. Your grandmother's like a demon. I'm so unlucky. It's tough, it's frustrating, it's torture! I can't take it! Everything is your father and grandmother's fault.

"I was the one who couldn't take it, having to hear stuff like that every day!

"When my mother wasn't around, my grandma would call. She said she was worried about me, but all she ever did was bad-mouth my mom.

"'Miu, your mother is a truly terrible woman. It's because he married a woman like her that your father became unhappy. Your mother has no love for you, she neglects you, and she just enjoys herself. The reason she took you away is because she wanted to get child support from your father to make her life easier.'

"The worst times, I would have to listen to Grandma's endless screeds on the phone with my mother right beside me, glaring at me nastily!

"That happened all the time! That was normal in my family!

"I was the trash can where those people tossed their filthy emotions!"

"Don't make Konoha your trash can, too!"

I remembered Miu screaming that at her mother in the hospital, and I felt as if my chest would rip apart.

That day, her mother had suddenly cornered me and glared at me with flashing eyes. She'd hurled words filled with loathing at me, and I hadn't known what to do.

My body had stiffened at the poison being spewed at me, and it was as if dozens of needles were poking into my heart.

"My mother-in-law berated me mercilessly for taking Miu away. She said it was wrong, that Miu should have been raised by her side of the family from the very beginning, that I'd ruined her precious granddaughter."

Her mother's face as she declared Miu's father an absolute sc.u.mbag, her twisted face came to mind accompanied by her clinging voice, and I shuddered.

Miu had been exposed to that gaze, to that voice, ever since she was little.

"And that's not all! Dad's girlfriend has called me a ton of times, too!"

Miu went on with a mocking expression.

That she had guessed the times when his daughter Miu and not her mother-his wife-would be there and then deliberately called her. That it was Miu's fault her father had to get away from her mother. The girlfriend would tell her in a low, detached voice that even though the two of them were living a life without hardship, she didn't have any money.

That these calls had continued even after her mother took her away and they came to this area- How Miu hated phones.

How she had made absolutely sure I wouldn't call her on the phone.

These cutthroat circ.u.mstances had been behind that.

That her parents didn't get along, that her mother and grandmother were at each other's throats, that her father had a girlfriend-these might all have been run-of-the-mill unhappiness. There are all kinds of cases like that in the world.

But to the person involved-especially to a girl in elementary school-every day must have been h.e.l.l.

Every time the phone rang, she must have trembled and felt like her heart was being churned up into mush with a knife.

Miu had tried to change that bleak, inescapable world by imagining things.

In the fierce snow, her blue lips trembling, Miu told me, "I didn't want to hear another dirty word, one more ugly word! So I only thought about pretty things or warm things or fun things.

"The world my mother and the rest of them inhabited was dark and cold and dirty, but mine was totally bright and clean. There wasn't a single person who tossed their dirty garbage around."

That was how she'd created so many stories.

When the trash can inside her heart had gotten full and it became suffocating and she didn't know what to do, she'd shoplifted.

When she reached out a hand to some merchandise, when she put it in a bag or a pocket, she broke out sweating, there was a throbbing pain in her temples, and her chest felt like it was being crushed. But when she went back home and took out the spoils of war to gaze at them, her heart and her head both lightened, and she started to feel like she'd won against something big.

Miu's face twisted wildly in pain.

"But! No matter how clean a story I made, it was all lies. So when I was telling stories, I was a flawed and dirty creature! I'm not clean like you are, Konoha! I hated you. Just seeing you smile annoyed me, and it felt like my heart was gonna rip apart, and I thought, I'll take away everything Konoha has. I'll hurt Konoha like crazy, break him, and make him cry-and I did a lot of terrible stuff!

"But still you didn't notice at all, and you came and smiled innocently at me. You trusted me completely, you tagged along after me, and obeyed anything I told you to do!"

Her cracked scream echoed wildly in the blizzard.

"Why! Why is it?! Why don't you notice when you're being tormented?! Why are you that blind and stupid?! Why did you look so thrilled when I spoke to you even though I hated you and even though I detested you?! Why'd you run up to me wagging your tail like a puppy?! Why'd you look at me with those rapturous, totally trusting eyes?!

"When I was with you, the hazy, dirty things collected in my chest, and if you so much as talked to someone else, my skin p.r.i.c.kled, my head got hot, and I wished they were dead! If you so much as looked at a girl, I wanted to burn her face! It was your fault I stained myself black like that!! Why did you stay clean and pure?!"

The wind blew into my face fiercely. My body was chilled to the core in the bone-piercing gale until even my sense of cold grew numbed.

Even so, my heart was shredded by the blades of Miu's words, and my blood continued flowing, bringing pain.