When the police came and asked me what my name was, I told them that my name was Hokuto. Ichihashi Hokuto. I had no idea why I didn't tell them that my real name was Hellen Black, that I was a twenty-five-year-old woman from Seattle, Washington, now strangely inhabiting the body of a ten-year-old boy. They spoke in Japanese, I realized, even as I understood every word they said, so maybe that was why I gave them a false name. Or maybe it was something else. Something that niggled at the back of my mind and told me that I was called Hokuto, that my family name was Ichihashi. Maybe it was something, or maybe it was nothing else but my crazy imagination. Either way, I was now Ichihashi Hokuto.
It was on the news — an apartment building around Shibuya, mysteriously burnt down and decimated in a span of what seemed to be minutes. A hundred seventy-two casualties, and only one survivor: a young boy named Ichihashi Hokuto, the son of a young widow named Ichihashi Sumi. No other buildings were touched by whatever happened to that one building, and investigators wondered what happened to make the building burn down so fast, and what strange force made it contained to that one place. They dubbed it "The Calm Fire" — "calm" being a rough translation of the actual Japanese word "odayaka na"— because it was apparently satisfied with destroying just one building. In my opinion, if a fire had to kill over a hundred people, it was anything but "calm."
The decision regarding my future was unanimous — I was to stay in the nearest orphanage, as soon as the social workers deemed me ready for it. My new identity being that of a ten-year-old child, it seemed I had no say whatsoever. After looking into my background the police discovered that besides my supposed "mother," who had died in the fire I had supposedly "survived," I didn't have any other living relatives or caretakers. They turned me over to a child protection services unit of some kind (which I never understood, as no one had been abusing me or anything), I didn't remember what the institution was called, and they were to look for an orphanage that could accommodate me. I didn't pay attention to the specifics much, or the names of the people who bustled around me and persistently asked me such probing questions that I was sure would have been considered nosy in all cultures. But I answered their questions, my replies short and clipped and overall uninformative, since I really had no idea about my new body's true owner besides his name. Ichihashi Hokuto, I told them every time they asked for my name (and they did ask several times). My name is Ichihashi Hokuto, I told them, and I don't know anything else. They went along with it, to my relief. They told me that I was, after all, still in shock. Which I was, undeniably. They just didn't know that I was in shock because of totally different reasons.
In the first few days I spent in the orphanage I kept to myself and nobody bothered me. The kids looked at me with wary eyes and avoided me like the plague, and the adults threw me pitying glances and avoided me just as much as the children did. For that, I was thankful. I didn't need people talking to me and embracing me and... and touching me, when the last people who embraced and touched me were homicidal rapists. Physical contact of any kind with people — male or female — made me nauseous. The government-hired therapist said it was some sort of post-traumatic thing, and he wasn't that far off the mark. Not that I was ever going to tell him that. Dr. Shinpo — I only remembered his name because he kept repeating it as if he knew I wasn't interested in remembering — visited the orphanage often. He asked me considerate questions about how I was adjusting to life in the orphanage and respectfully avoided the topic of my "forgotten" past. I had amnesia, he told me on his third visit, and when I only nodded mutely he rushed to explain that it was common for people who had had traumatic experiences to repress memories of those experiences. He said it was a coping mechanism, a way to heal, and that there was nothing wrong with it. He said I would remember things in time, either slowly and in trickles, or instantly with a boom. I expressed that I understood what he meant and that I wasn't really bothered overmuch by the lack of memories, and he looked particularly disgruntled by that, for some reason.
The very next day, I killed a child. A young girl named Yukari. She was left at the doorstep of the orphanage seven years ago, when she was only a baby, and the box she was inside of only had "Yukari" written on it. I knew this because after her "disappearance," she was all people in the orphanage could talk about. She didn't have a last name. And because of me, she never will.
I hadn't meant to kill her.
It was an accident, and one that I would never ever forget. Nobody else saw what happened... what I did to her, so they thought she ran away. But I knew what happened, no matter how hard I wished I could forget. She'd touched my hand and she just... burned. Burned until there was nothing left where she was except smoke and a few ounces of dirt. It wasn't instantaneous — the whole process took nearly six seconds, but it had been quick enough that she hadn't had time to scream. One moment she was touching me, and the next she was only smoke and dust. Six seconds. Six seconds of only death and deafening silence and the unforgettable expression of pure horror on her face.
Who would be able to do something so ordinary as scream, after all, when your body was being so quickly incinerated that you could only watch as you died?
Three days after Yukari's death, the kids in the orphanage were all shocked when men in black suits came striding through the doors, claiming to be members of a supposedly non-government counter-terrorist organization called A.L.I.C.E.
They were looking for a boy named Ichihashi Hokuto.
They were looking for me.
A/N: Please review!