dérive
She pushed two fingers against the hardness of the soil, feeling the moisture in the earth, the dampness of the morning dew on the grass that ran up to her wrist, her face set in a mask of concentration, her brow furrowed. Don't do that, her mother had always said, it will make you age prematurely. Beneath the ground, she could feel the impression of what had happened, the story of what had taken place held in the soil, told by the water that fed it. This was her gift, this was the ability she had called forth in order to stand against the Crisis Empire; this, she thought, was the bitter reward for the loss of her parents.
She closed her eyes, thinking, concentrating.
Kyoko had been 16-years-old when Crisis had murdered her father and mother. Her father had made her promise that she would always treasure water, that she would never be so ungrateful that she might take for granted that which the water gave them. Those years leading up to his promotion, his role as supervisor of the reservoir where he had died, those years had been full of peace and wonder—then had come Crisis, the squat shape of Mundayganday leaping from beneath the surface of the water, cutting down her parents before her, killing all who worked at the reservoir so that Crisis might seize control of the Earth's waters.
In the days that had followed, she had prayed for the strength, the power to avenge the death of her parents, and when that power had awakened in her—a form of telekinesis that allowed her to control natural objects, that allowed her to sense water, to draw it out from her surroundings—she had been elated. 'The water fairy,' her friends, Kotaro and Reiko dubbed her as she used that power to aid in the overthrow of Crisis.
That had been eight-years-ago now. Here in America, she had learnt a very different word for those who possessed powers as she did.
Behind her, she heard the boy impatiently kicking at the ground, yawning loudly.
"Don't do that," she said sternly, her face a frown. "It disturbs my concentration."
The child made a show of yawning even louder, and she struggled not to do so herself. What was that she read once about yawning being contagious? That people did it as a sign of empathy? She tried not to yawn, and it made it even harder for her. Eventually, she gave in.
"See," chirped the boy, "even you're bored."
With frustration, she turned her head, remained crouched on the ground, fragments of brick and splinters of wood littering the lawn before her.
"You're not helping," she chided him.
He shrugged.
"Actually, just by being here, I kind of am. You never would have got here by yourself, not with how you speak English."
She felt a further stab of annoyance, the sensation exacerbated by the fact that he was right. 14-years-old and studying abroad for some years now, Kou was the ward of a friend, his services readily volunteered when she had revealed her plans to travel abroad, and whilst she did not want to admit it, it was true that she would not have got as far as she had without his help.
His dream was to be a famous movie director, Lin had told him before she had left, that was why he was working hard at his studies in America. Over the month or so that they had been together, driving across America in a rented car, she had certainly come to the conclusion that the boy had a very vivid imagination, and that she had no doubt he would make a wonderful director.
Most of his stories, she would have been inclined to write off, yet the presence of the knife he carried, with its carved white tiger head and its own ability to pipe up and offer opinions, had led her to believe that despite the fanciful nature of his tales, there was at least some truth in them.
How he had got that knife through customs though she would never know. Surely he didn't carry it with him at school? She was almost too scared to ask.
She sighed, giving up on trying to interpret what the water was telling her, and stood up, her knees protesting as she did. 24-years-old, and she was already beginning to feel like an old woman.
"You didn't find what you were looking for?" he asked, as if reading her mind, kicking away from the tree he had been leaning against, dressed in ripped jeans and flannel shirt, one of those awful bright t-shirts that changed colour whenever you sweat too much—and being a teenage boy, Kou must definitely did sweat too much, though she didn't really know how to talk to him about it.
He was as tall as her, almost taller, and given a few years, she imagined he would definitely surpass her. Not, of course, that she expected to see him again after this summer, not with as much frequency at least.
"There were kids here, Kou," she said sternly, "kids your age. Try and be a little sympathetic."
She turned away from him, looking at the ruin of the hospital and the small chapel adjacent to it, the shape of something large, a truck or something, having ploughed through it.
Kou was silent for a moment, and she worried that she might have been too harsh with him.
"Well, whoever they were, they're not here now," he said at last, and then in a softer voice added, "Maybe we could ask around in the surrounding towns. Whatever happened here, someone has to have heard something, right?"
Kyoko stared ahead at the ruins, the hole in the wall. Not a truck, she thought, an animal of some kind. On the lawn before, cast aside amidst the churned grass, she saw an old wooden sign offering up the name of the hospital, Milbury. Beneath this, below the hospital's motto, there were two further prominent words, the significance of which she did not yet understand: Essex Corporation.
"Yeah," she said, feeling faintly uneasy, as if at last the water in the soil was trying to tell her something. "Yeah, maybe they might."
Turning away, heading back to the gravel path and the rental car parked beyond, Kou talking excitedly all the while about some movie he had seen, Matoba Kyoko could not escape the feeling that something had been left behind at Milbury Hospital, and that that something was watching her carefully as she departed.