So, Isae and I were talking: What if Sayo never fell in love with any of the cousins (or anyone else) before finding out the truth of her past, her heritage and her body? We agreed that she still would have been traumatized, but she might have been slightly less traumatized by it. I wonder if maybe, with this difference in mind, Sayo would have lived past 1986, and the family massacre might never have occurred. My reasoning is this: in 1986, Sayo announced to the family that she had found the gold two years earlier and that she possessed the ring of the head of the family. She handed the ring over to Krauss and distributed the majority of the gold, but took a portion for herself, left the island, and proceeded to go traveling.

I own nothing.

When she was little, there were times when Sayo imagined that it would be good to know who her parents were.

As a child of the Fukuin House, she was taught to believe that God was her father and that with God for a father, there was no need for an earthly mother, or an earthly father, for that matter. The few children of the Fukuin House who were ever adopted (and Sayo was not one of those; she was never even looked at twice by prospective adoptive parents) were told that their new parents were their caretakers, to be loved and honored like their parents, but that they would always have God's love. God would always be their father, even when they went into the home of a man and a woman they called 'Father' and 'Mother.' No one was ever encouraged to express curiosity over their origins.

And yet, Sayo had felt the odd twinge of curiosity. She could only suppose that it marked her out as deviant, that she had God as her father and yet wanted more. She was an orphan with no past. Her past was a closed book with a lock on it, and Sayo, ever curious, kept searching for a key or a lock pick. Her future was unfolding before her, but it would have been nice, she thought, to know the name of the road where she had begun.

As they say: Be careful what you wish for.

When Sayo got her wish, she thought it might have been better had she never been born. And she could see that she had no future. Not on Rokkenjima.

But what of the rest of the world?

Only time could tell.

-0-0-0-

Two years she had spent, preparing for the day she would leave the island. Sayo had taken some days off of work to venture inland in order to obtain a passport. Her regular time off was now spent entirely researching Italy's immigration policies and trying her best to teach herself the language. She had bought workbooks and cassette tapes, practicing pronunciation and comparing it against the voices on the tapes, and taking quizzes out of her workbooks, as many times as needed until her score was perfect. When Sayo could read an Italian novel and follow most of what was going on, she felt, well, she didn't feel ready, but she felt as ready as she knew she ever would.

Two years she waited, and in October of 1986, she left, leaving a place that had been her resting place but not her home behind her, leaving a family she wished she didn't have for the circumstances that caused her to be a part of it. She took with her a great sum of money derived from her grandmother's gold, and left the rest to her stunned half-siblings. Sayo did not inform them of her relation to them. She knew them all too well to believe that she would have fared well after such a revelation, and honestly, Sayo didn't want to be their sister, their brother, or whatever it was she was. She handed Kinzo's ring over to Krauss, and felt nothing. The ring had no value. It may as well have been her noose, but Sayo felt nothing to remove it.

(Genji had one last 'gift' for her. Sayo did not know how he'd done it, but he had altered her birth certificates to list her birth parents. Sayo was now the acknowledged child of Ushiromiya Kinzo and his daughter, Beatrice, the acknowledged granddaughter of Ushiromiya Kinzo and Beatrice Castiglioni. She didn't know whether to thank Genji or spit in his face. It was all she could do not to do both.)

When Sayo learned the truth of who she was, she felt like a doll whose lungs were stolen from her and whose limbs had been attached to strings. She was the puppet of fate. She did not feel as though she had begun to breathe again, did not feel as though the strings had been cut, until she stepped off of the plane and set foot on Syracuse, in Sicily.

-0-0-0-

(A well-meaning café waitress warned Sayo of a few things about being a tourist. Don't wear expensive clothes. Don't wear too much jewelry. Always make sure that you know exactly where you are going, and don't go out after dark, at least not anywhere well-lit. Also, your Italian is very good for a tourist, she said, but don't let on too much that you're a tourist.

Sayo had no intention of that. Certainly, she had bought new things with her newfound wealth. She had four dresses, three blouses, two skirts, two pairs of slacks, three pairs of shoes, one coat, two scarves and a bathing suit. Beyond that, not much. She had almost bought a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a rose before Sayo had stared again at the pendant, and become reviled. She didn't really need anything else. If she wanted to read a book, she would frequent a library.

And she wasn't really a tourist.

Rokkenjima could never be home. It was more on the level of a prison. A fish who had never known anything but an aquarium could believe that the aquarium was the whole world, but when a fish had tasted the ocean, they would see the aquarium for what it was: a small, constricting prison.

Japan had too many of the features of Rokkenjima. Taiwan was an option, but Sayo's blood ties to that land came to her through Kinzo. Instead, Sayo would journey to the only other place on earth that she could claim was hers by blood, and see if there was anything here that could convince her to stay.)

-0-0-0-

She started out in Syracuse in the winter. It had snowed sometimes on Rokkenjima, but Sayo did not believe that this place had ever seen snow, not in a lifetime at least. The winters were wet, something Sayo was used to, but she saw the sun and felt warmth on her skin more than she had on Rokkenjima at this time of year. It felt… It felt… She had no words to describe how it felt.

Like something new, she supposed.

In her actions, Sayo supposed that she was something like a tourist, after all. She started in Sicily, in the wet, mild winter. She visited the Necropolis of Pantalica, an archaeological site supposed to boast over five thousand* tombs hewn into the limestone. Sayo wandered away from the tour, stumbling over the steep hills and narrow, winding paths. She ran her fingers over the entrances to the tombs, stared into the dark, and wondered if she would ever see eyes staring back.

In Ispica, she stared at a ruined, centuries-old monastery covered in trees and bushes. Sayo imagined the chapel on Rokkenjima looking just the same, and thought it would be a fitting end.

Under Palermo there was the Capuchin Catacombs, and Sayo nearly ran out screaming when it began to too closely resemble the chambers under Kuwadorian.

Standing beneath a vault fresco in the Basilica della Collegiata, she wondered if God would ever forgive her for contemplating the death of the Ushiromiya family—her family.

Sayo saw many things in Sicily. She wandered through many towns, hearing the sounds and smelling the mixed aromas of life. And nowhere did she see anything that could convince her to stay. Nowhere did she see that nebulous thing that would have let her stay.

-0-0-0-

(Sometimes, Sayo wondered exactly what it was she was looking for.

Sometimes, she imagined that it was Beatrice.

She imagined that she was looking for the ghost of Beatrice in her homeland, trying to find some echo of the fantastical woman in the landscape. She imagined that she was trying to hear Beatrice's voice on the night wind.

The thought was repulsive.

If that was what Sayo was looking for, she was just as insane as Kinzo had been. She was not Kinzo. Sayo had Kinzo's blood, and nothing would ever change that, but she was not him. She would not look for Beatrice.)

-0-0-0-

In Naples, just as the lemon trees were beginning to bloom, Sayo learned how to swim.

Amando was about twenty-one or so. He had curly dark hair and an uneven tan; his limbs and his face were quite brown, but his chest was pale. He had an easy laugh and didn't seem even to notice Sayo's still rather uneven pronunciation. At the very least, he was gracious enough not to comment on it. The sting of realizing that she didn't speak Italian as well as she thought she did was still fresh. She could be grateful to Amando for not drawing attention to it.

Under the water, swimming in the deep blue sea, Sayo felt lighter than she ever had. She saw schools of silver fish that glittered in the sunlight, saw the shafts of light and shadow that rippled like a curtain. The sea had never been like this in Rokkenjima. But then, Sayo had never swam in the sea off of Rokkenjima. The beach wasn't hers to bask on, and the sea wasn't hers to swim in. She was caged as Beatrice's spirit was, bound to the land. The island was her cage, the beach the iron bars that kept her in. This was the sea of the world. In it, Sayo was weightless.

Amando liked her. Sayo wasn't blind.

He liked her 'exotic' looks. Sayo had to swallow bitterly on that. In Japan, she had been looked at askance by many because she looked 'foreign'. Sayo hadn't known what they meant by that, and should have suspected, but of course everyone could see how strange she was, wasn't her strangeness self-evident? (There were some who had thought her—or him—good-looking despite that, but Sayo tried not to think about them anymore, even when they were all she could see.) Was she going to be 'foreign' everywhere? Was everyone she would ever meet on the earth going to look at her and think, know, that she didn't belong with them?

He had complimented the tattoo on her left leg. Sayo considered telling him that she had had the image of the One-Winged Eagle engraved onto her flesh when she learned that her entire life had been a puppet show for the Ushiromiya family, when she had learned that her birth, her very existence, was the end result of rape and incest, when she had come to believe that she was a game piece on a roulette board, and that the only way to escape would be to leave everything behind her. She clamped her mouth shut over the words. It would have only frightened him.

He liked to tell her stories about the things he'd gotten up to in Naples and on his father's fishing boat. He talked of seeing strange lights on the horizon at dusk, lights that could never be explained away by having as their source fishing boats or one of the many tiny islands that dotted the Mediterranean. He spoke of the trouble his great uncle would get into whenever he got drunk and what it was like to fly in an airplane for the first time, when one of his friends invited him to visit relatives in the Netherlands. Amando would ask her if she had any stories to tell and Sayo would smile prettily and say no, while slamming doors and stolen keys flashed through her mind.

Sayo had worn a bathing suit around him. A skin-tight bathing suit. Amando had seen more of her boyish, broken body than possibly anyone alive. And yet he still thought she was attractive.

On a beautiful evening, the cloudless sky awash with crimson and fuchsia and gold, he tried to kiss her. Sayo pulled her head gently back when Amando leaned in, and smiled apologetically in response.

'Attractive' or not, he didn't know the truth. Didn't know that her body was twisted and broken, that though she called herself a woman she had been born a boy. He didn't know that Sayo was still working out whether she was a human being or a piece of furniture unfortunate enough to be given a beating heart. Amando didn't know that she had nothing to offer him, and never would.

Before she had known the truth, Sayo had realized that George probably liked Shannon, the same way Amando liked her. Before she had known, Shannon had played dumb to his attempts to make her aware of this, reasoning that as a maid of the Ushiromiya family, it would not be her place. When she had known the truth, she knew that George was her cousin, and that he was her nephew. He liked girls, not girl-boy things that played at being one of the other. He would have balked at the idea of incest. She did not regret rejecting him.

After she discovered the truth, Sayo had realized that Jessica liked Kanon the same way Amando liked her. Jessica was Sayo's cousin, and her niece. Jessica liked boys, not boy-girl things that played at being one or the other. She would have balked at the idea of incest. Sayo did not regret rejecting her.

Sayo left Naples the next day.

She imagined that Amando's lips would have tasted of salt.

-0-0-0-

Pompeii managed to be an eerier place than the tunnels dug under Rokkenjima and the ruins of Kuwadorian, half-reclaimed by nature as it had been.

In ruined Kuwadorian, Sayo had seen a forgiving promise. Nature and the world would hide the blot that had been cast on the land for a house to be erected for the purpose of caging an innocent girl. It had been a comfort to look at the ivy growing over the walls and the young trees sprouting up in the rose gardens to know that her mother's manor-prison would be consumed and rendered unrecognizable, possibly even within her own lifetime.

By contrast, Pompeii was a gutted, ashen ruin left open to the sky. It was so carefully preserved that no trees or shrubs would ever engulf this place. It was too carefully preserved for the scars of remembered suffering to ever be wiped clean from the earth.

Sayo wandered down empty deserted streets and listened to the wind howl through broken walls and open roofs. She stared, transfixed, at plaster casts of the victims, their bodies twisted and reeling from their own deaths.

You know, she could have died somewhat like this. Choked by poisonous smoke, or smothered by ash, or, at the end, if she was unlucky enough to survive so long, she could have been consumed by fire. This lot had had only minutes or hours at the most to appreciate how fragile their lives were. Sayo would have decades to think on that.

She found herself smiling at strangers more often.

-0-0-0-

As the weather warmed and the sun made its presence known between the clouds more often, Sayo's skin tanned and her hair lightened. She looked into the dingy mirror of her hotel room one day and stared, startled, at what she saw.

Her skin was no longer the soft, pale pink it was when she had served the Ushiromiya family as their servant. Neither was her hair the dark brown it had become as she grew older. Instead, her skin, while lighter than many of the tanned girls who vacationed here, had grown light brown, interspersed with freckles—Sayo had forgotten her sunscreen for too many days at a time for it to go unchanged. Her hair was nearly as light as it had been when she was a child, golden-brown as it now was.

It took a moment for Sayo to recognize herself in the mirror. She couldn't remember the last time she had willingly stared at herself in a mirror. She couldn't stand to look at her face, you see, before because it seemed so pathetic, and afterwards because she was terrified that she would see Kinzo staring back at her, too.

She looked like a different person, now.

For the first time, Sayo smiled at her reflection.

-0-0-0-

(This is a ghost story Sayo told herself.

It was inspired by listening to an old man tell his young grandchildren a tale in Florence. They had begged and begged until he told them the story of a mermaid who lost her life for the love of the land, for a mermaid could not survive away from the water for long, and she dried up away from the ocean. She had gone somewhere she didn't belong, and died as a result.

This is a ghost story Sayo told herself:

There was once an old sorcerer who fell madly, truly madly, in love with a beautiful witch. In his madness, he imprisoned her in an old holding of his deep within a nigh impenetrable forest. The witch, despairing of ever regaining her freedom, committed suicide… No, not suicide. Never suicide. The witch severed her ties with mortal flesh to escape the sorcerer, but he was as clever as he was mad. He had anticipated this.

The sorcerer caught the witch's soul before it could depart and sealed it in a newborn homunculus. The homunculus would grow believing itself to be human, an amnesiac with no memory of its time as the witch. The homunculus was brought up in the sorcerer's household as a girl servant, distantly cared for by the elderly housekeeper and the sorcerer's oldest friend and closest confidant.

The homunculus did not learn the truth until the hour of the sorcerer's death. She was dressed up in the witch's old clothes and presented to him, so that he could make his peace with her at last. His last words were spent gifting his fortune to her and begging the witch's forgiveness for how he had wronged her. He died content.

Meanwhile, the homunculus lived in turmoil.

All her life, she had believed herself human. Now, she discovered that she was not. She discovered that her 'father' had committed the greatest sin known to man. He had intruded upon God's domain, and created life. She was not a human being; she was a living doll. Her soul was not her own. So what was she?

And that old man. Why was it that he was allowed to settle all his regrets when he had committed the worst of all sins? Why was he allowed to die content when his ill-begotten creation lived in turmoil?

The homunculus, she took the fortune she had been gifted and left the place where she had been brought up. Not her home, though in all honesty it never had been. She searched the world, looking for a reason for why she was alive. She journeyed, seeking purpose.

She journeys still, but lately the journey has weighed less on her shoulders than it used to.

She searches still.)

-0-0-0-

Venice was supposed to rank among the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth. All the tourism agencies Sayo visited had raved about the city's loveliness, practically begged her to go visit. And indeed, Sayo had to admit that she had never seen the city's like before. As she lazily wandered through the city, she laid eyes on more canals and bridges than she had ever seen in one place before. She gazed through shop windows showcasing the famous Venetian glass, fashioned into glassware or stained glass windowpanes or figurines. The wind whistled through trees and shrubs and flowers packed into cramped gardens. The sun shone weakly down from the cloudy sky.

She found herself standing outside of Saint Mark's Basilica, having wandered through crowds of humans and pigeons alike, staring up at replicas of the Horses of Saint Mark. The four massive bronze horses were made green by exposure to the elements, and were positioned above the entrance into the cathedral. Sayo couldn't see them very well from where she was standing, but from what little she saw, they seemed spectacularly lifelike.

The cathedral alike was massive, adorned with domes and spires and arches. Above the main entrance there was a statue of Saint Mark surrounded by angels; beneath him on the gable was perched a winged lion. Sayo felt as though the saint's eyes had fallen upon her; the hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

"The cathedral is lovely, isn't it?"

Sayo's head snapped to her left; she stared, startled, at a woman who had come to stand beside her. The woman was quite elderly, her hair silver with age and her face deeply lined. But she stood straight and tall, and her mouth and bright blue eyes crinkled in a kind smile.

Sayo smiled slightly back at her. "Yes, it is. I've never seen any equal." There had certainly been some cathedrals in Rome that outshone this one; certainly, the Vatican must have outshone this cathedral, as beautiful as it was. But Sayo had skipped Rome on her trip—her ultimate purpose in Italy was not to sight-see, after all—so she couldn't know.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

Sayo felt her face grow warm. "Is it really so obvious?" What was it about her that seemed to mark her out as a tourist to everyone she met? She hoped it was merely that her grasp of Italian was not so secure as it would have been for a native; though Sayo had contemplated this possibility more than once, she did not want to think that her facial features would clearly mark her out as 'foreign' wherever she went.

The woman nodded. "You had the air of someone over-awed by her surroundings. What is your name?"

"Sayo Yasuda." Sayo had learned early on not to tell anyone her name surname first. Most assumed, from that, that 'Yasuda' was her given name. Being called 'Yasuda' without so much as an honorific to go with it was too close to being called 'Yasu' for her tastes. "And your name, ma'am?" she asked politely, trying to hide her disquiet at being asked her name without the woman having first supplied hers.

The woman's eyes lit up. "Oh, so you are Japanese?"

Sayo nodded cautiously. This was the first time someone had asked her name and immediately known it to be Japanese.

"Well, young lady, my name is Beatrice Silvestri."

"My mother's name was Beatrice," Sayo blurted out, before she could clamp her mouth shut over the words. "Her mother was from Italy," she explained in response to Beatrice Silvestri's quizzical look.

The smile faded from the old woman's face. "Is that so?" She paused, brow furrowed. "You speak of your mother as if she is dead."

"She is."

"My condolences, then, on her passing."

Sayo shook her head sharply, frowning. "My mother died when I was a baby." And when she decided to escape Kinzo, she didn't want me in the new life she longed to live. "I never knew her, and knew nothing of her until a few years ago."

She was older, now, than her mother had been when she died. Sayo had been nearly the same age as her mother at the time of her death when she learned the truth of her mother's identity. Somehow, she doubted that Signora Silvestri particularly wanted to hear that.

"Still, you have my condolences." Beatrice's mouth twisted momentarily. "That makes it worse, in a way. Are you here with your grandmother, then?"

"No, Signora. My grandmother passed on long ago." And no matter how much she had pressed, Genji, Kumasawa and Doctor Nanjo alike had been exceedingly vague as to the nature of her death. Sayo could only suppose that her grandmother had died giving birth, or something along those lines. "I'm here alone."

"What, alone?" Beatrice's eyebrows shot up. "At your age?"

"I'm twenty," Sayo replied shortly. She had often been mistaken for a girl of much younger years in this land, when she was no longer padding her bra or trying to hide her real body shape from the world. She knew why, and didn't care for it. Not at all.

Beatrice frowned. "Still, you are young to be here by yourself. If you like, you could stay with my family."

Sayo frowned. She had been warned, above all other things, to beware offers such as this. She could meet with great harm, she was told, could end up robbed, raped, or even murdered.

But what could they do to her? Money meant little to Sayo, and who would want to touch her after seeing her mutilated body? Death also meant little, and beyond that…

Beyond that, she could not sense any malice within Beatrice Silvestri.

"I would… like that, yes."

And she could not remember the last time someone had helped her without any sign of ulterior motives.

* Most recent estimates actually put the number at closer to four thousand.