A/N.

So. Uh. It's been a long time since I updated this. Sorry; I was in my last semester at uni and writing a very long history thesis, so I had absolutely no time to even breathe.

I have the whole plot sketched out now though, and some great ideas for conversations, so the next update should be coming pretty quickly.

Part Two
Day 1

She'd been sitting under the kotatsu for almost an hour, and she was only just now starting to feel warm again.

Mai sneezed, rubbed her nose, and cuddled deeper into her blankets. Next to her, Ayako, whose cheeks and nose were still crimson from the cold, mumbled something under her breath that sounded like, "Stop moving." On the other side of the table, John and Yasuhara-san were squished together like puppies, shucking propriety for communal warmth. Masako was in the kitchen with Erisa-san, clinging to the stove. Bou-san, he of the mountain-top shrines, didn't look bothered in the least; he was sitting like a normal person near the TV, talking in a soft voice with Ishikawa-san. Naru, damn him, was looking down his nose at them, like he was considering scolding them. As if he hadn't done that enough already today.

Mai sneezed again, and hid her face in her arms.

The Ishikawas' onsen was two stories tall, all old-fashioned shoji and wood floors, and right now, it was almost entirely empty. "There's only two of us, what with all the guests staying in the secondary house," Ishikawa Erisa had said, handing Mai her first cup of tea; the mug had burned her fingers. "There's not much sense in using all of these rooms, so you all can pick the three you'd like." The only three that Naru had found acceptable were three on the second floor, one right after another. The one she, Ayako, and Masako were staying in was called the cedar room, and had a shoji scroll with cedar leaves inked onto the delicate paper hanging in the corner. It was a traditional inn, which meant futon rather than beds. To be honest, Mai didn't care; as long as she had a thick blanket, and a heater for her toes, she could sleep on rocks at this point.

Ishikawa Erisa was probably four or five years younger than her husband, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, with long black hair and soft brown eyes, like a deer that had been caught in the headlights. She looked gaunt and exhausted, and when the SPR van had pulled up and they'd begun to unload all their equipment, she'd nearly broken down into tears. "I'm sorry," she'd said, as Bou-san and John had carried in one of the televisions. "I'd come out and help, but if I leave, it gets…"

Her lower lip had quivered, and Ishikawa-san had put an arm around her shoulders.

"We've noticed," Ishikawa-san had said, "that…whatever it is…seems quite focused on Eri. I don't…we haven't been able to figure out why."

Naru hummed under his breath, focusing hard on Ishikawa Erisa for a moment or two, and then nodded. "Would you be opposed to being interviewed for evidence, Ishikawa-san?"

"No," said Erisa. "No, of course not." She looked up at her husband, and then withdrew to make cocoa. Ishikawa Ayumi came down the steps to help Bou-san and Lin-san with one of the heavier televisions.

Mai shoved Yasuhara-san's feet off of her lap (he made a high-pitched whining sound, but didn't protest) and deeper under the kotatsu. It had been one hell of an effort getting all of their equipment set up before the blizzard hit. There were four main buildings on the onsen grounds—the hotel itself, where the main supernatural phenomena occurred; the side-building, where the two remaining hotel guests were staying; the storage cabin, about thirty yards away from the main house in a small thatch of old trees; and the renovated barn, a good half-mile away from the rest of the property. Of course Naru had insisted that they wire the barn too, even if it was just to put it out of the running as far as ghosts and ghoulies were concerned. Mai had even agreed with him until he'd put her and John on the barn team. John, bless him and his driver's license, had made the whole thing infinitely easier by just taking the van out there, but there had been no heating in the barn itself, and it had taken a good forty five minutes of fiddling with old wires to get enough electricity to power the recorders. Her hands had never been so numb.

Naru hadn't conducted his interviews yet. She could tell by the jerky way Erisa-san was moving around, her eyes flicking to Naru and then away, as though he were a mystery she was trying to solve. Don't, she told the woman silently. Don't try. That mystery bites. Nor had he hypnotized either of them. Mai wasn't sure if he was going to. Erisa-san might be young, but she was a bit old to be poltergeisting. They'd have to, just to make sure the phenomena weren't human-caused, but it was unlikely at best.

The door opened, and a blast of snow and wind came in through the gap. Lin-san slammed it behind him and pulled his scarf down off his face. His forehead and cheeks had been whipped red by the wind, and there was snow in his hair under his hat. Mai peeked at him through her arms for a second or two, watching as he fought with his lace-up boots.

She hadn't really spoken to Lin-san since yesterday. It hadn't been intentional—he'd been reading the whole plane flight over (Naru had hired a private plane, so they'd been able to load all their equipment on; Mai was still reeling from the thought of how much it would have cost), and then collecting the rental van. Still, she felt bad for not thanking him again; she hadn't even been able to say hello before Naru had pulled her into work again.

Mai sat up, and shook her head, slapping her cheeks. It wasn't as if they'd done something wrong. He'd helped her with her homework. He deserved a thank-you. Not right now, obviously, because they were in the middle of a job, but she'd thank him eventually. "Lin-san," she said, and he turned to look at her over his shoulder. "How is it out there?"

"All the cameras are protected," said Lin-san quietly, and shucked his coat. "The radio stopped working about half an hour ago. I don't know how long this storm will last. There's at least a foot and a half already."

"Oh, this one will probably be blowing until tomorrow morning at the earliest," said Erisa-san, offering Lin-san a steaming mug. He took it with a nod. "Probably until the afternoon at this rate. I'm afraid we're…" she bit her lip, and lowered her voice. "I'm afraid we're stuck inside for a while."

No one missed the stumble. No one commented on it, either. Across the table, Yasuhara-san dropped his head down into his hands. "A full day? Is that typical?"

"Fairly." Erisa wiped her palms on her jeans. "We've had much heavier storms, though. Once last February we were caught inside for a full week, and it took another week to dig ourselves out. The guests were going stir-crazy. The temperatures can drop down pretty far as well, so when the storm's over, be careful not to go outside without proper jackets. Mai-chan, miko-san, I have a few you can borrow; your sweaters won't do very well if a wind picks up."

Mai extracted herself from under the blankets. "You didn't have to do that, Erisa-san. That's very kind of you."

"Well, I'm not getting much use out of them, considering I can't…go outside." She paused, and then crossed her arms low over her belly. "Would you like to come see them? They're just through the kitchen, here."

Mai glanced back at the kotatsu. "Ayako, are you coming?"

A hand emerged from the bundle of blankets that was Ayako, and waved weakly. "Anything but pink," said Ayako in a muffled voice, and then the hand retracted. Mai made a face at Erisa-san, whose eyes twinkled, and together they went down the hall.

Compared to the rest of the onsen, the kitchen was almost unsettling modern. It was all tile and shining chrome. The walls were painted a pale pastel yellow. There was an empty nail over the sink, and a paler spot where a photograph had once been hung; it wasn't anywhere to be seen. Masako was curled up in a chair beside the oven. She opened her eyes a crack as Mai and Erisa-san came in, and then sat up a little straighter. Her kimono was far too thin for this sort of weather, Mai thought privately, and wondered if Masako would turn up her nose at the spare pair of insulated jeans Mai had in her suitcase upstairs. "Mai," said Masako, and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. "Is Naru organizing yet?"

"He's still graphing." Mai flapped a hand. "Go back to sleep, Masako."

"I wasn't sleeping," she said, yawning, and then she turned back to the oven again. Mai hid a smile, and caught up with Erisa-san in a small vestibule, almost like a genkan but not quite.

"This is the mudroom." Erisa-san went to the wall, where a number of pegs had been drilled in, and began sorting through heavy coats. "It's easier when we're working outside to go in and out through this door, and keep our muddy things where they won't make the rest of the house dirty."

The glass inlay in the door outside had three spiraling cracks all through the double-pane. Cold air was leaking in; she could feel it even from hear. Mai reached out and set her fingertips against the glass. She hadn't been expecting to feel anything from it, and she didn't, but something about it unsettled her all the same. She tucked her hand back into her pocket before Erisa-san noticed.

"Here." With a wrench, Erisa-san emerged from the pile with two enormous jackets—one shocking pink, the other electric green. They looked like something she should be wearing at the North Pole. Erisa-san offered Mai the pink one. "Your friend said she didn't want pink, right? Try it on. We're about the same size, but I just want to make sure it fits."

"It's enormous."

Erisa-san shrugged. There was a tightness around her mouth that Mai didn't like seeing on her, and her eyes were rimmed with red. "They always look bigger than they are, if you're not used to them."

It fit, even on top of the hoodie she was wearing. Mai zipped it up the front, and studied herself in the mirror hung by the door. She looked like a fluorescent-pink marshmallow. Erisa-san appeared beside her in the mirror. "So? What do you think?"

"I think if I fall down a hill I'll turn into a big snowball." She cuddled deeper into the jacket. "But it's warm. Thank you, Erisa-san."

"It's no problem. I have more jackets than I need anyway. Originally I bought some extras for guests, but with the way things are right now…" She shook her head, and hid her trembling hands behind her back. "I'm just glad somebody gets to use them."

Mai tried on the green jacket too (it was a little too big for her, which meant it would probably be perfect for Ayako) and then pulled down a blue one for Masako before following Erisa-san back into the kitchen. Masako had vanished (from the sound of it, back into the living room) so after delivering the coat (which Masako looked at with distaste, but snuggled into anyway) Mai volunteered to help Erisa-san wash the dishes. They were partway through the mugs when Erisa-san finally heaved a huge sigh, and said, "I'm sorry for dragging you out all this way."

"Don't worry about it." Mai took the frog-embossed mug from Erisa's soapy fingers. "You're not in a good situation. If we can help, we will."

"I don't know if I should say this." Erisa-san hesitated over the sink. "Even though it's so bad, I didn't…I thought it would be better for us to just move away. I didn't believe in spirits for a long time before all of this happened. Neither of us did. And when Ayumi said something about hiring spiritualists, back when it…wasn't so bad…I told him no. It was only when Natsu and Fuyu came out to visit that I finally agreed with him."

Natsu and Fuyu…"Your nieces?" Mai asked, and privately condemned whatever parent would name their twin daughters Summer and Winter. If there's any way to make sure your kids get bullied all through elementary school, that's it.

"My brother's girls." There was a mark on the teapot that wouldn't come free. Erisa-san bent her head, scrubbing hard. "My…he's my half-brother, technically. My father remarried when Keiji-onii-san was in his last year of high school, and I was born six months after that. So I was only six when my nieces were born. When I lived in Tokyo I was staying with my brother's family, and we ended up more like sisters than anything. Keiji-onii-san and his wife aren't around a lot, so until I married Ayumi, I was their main babysitter. I didn't mind it, but when Ayumi and I finally moved back up to Hokkaido, I missed them. I thought inviting them out to visit would be…nice. They've always been interested in the onsen, and when they heard Uncle Gou left it to me, they were so excited." She offered Mai a wan smile. "It took months to convince my brother to let them come out. He doesn't like Ayumi, you see."

Mai dried the plate Erisa-san offered her. "Do you mind if I ask why?"

"Oh, he thought I was too young to be getting married." Erisa-san plunged both hands into the sink again. "I was only seventeen when Ayumi asked me to marry him. He was a new teacher at my high school, only twenty-three. It was a boarding school, so the students and teachers were…closer than regular schools, but even then we were…unusual. It was such a scandal. We kept our relationship a secret until I graduated, but when the principal heard, he went ballistic. They nearly struck my name from their list of graduates, and they fired Ayumi right away. My brother almost disowned me, until I forced him to meet with Ayumi. By that time there was nothing he could do, of course, but…" She shook her head. "We heard about you from a school friend of mine, actually. Morishita Noriko. She was a senior when I was a freshman, but we were friends because she tutored me in history. She was the only person I told about my relationship with Ayumi. She kept it a secret the whole time, never said a word. I called her a few weeks ago, after a really bad night, and she told me that you exorcised a ghost from her niece's doll a few years ago. And I thought, maybe…"

"Ah," said Mai, who had just remembered. "Ayami-chan." And Minnie. She put her shoulders back rather than let herself shudder. "Is Noriko-san doing all right, now?"

"Much better. Ayami-chan had her eighth birthday a few months ago."

"And Kana-san?"

Erisa-san shrugged. "I think she and Noriko's brother divorced last year. They never really connected again after he heard that Kana-san had left his daughter behind to be attacked by a vengeful spirit."

"Oh." She looked down at the stack of dry plates, and then opened the cupboard, heaving them over her head and sliding them home. "That's too bad."

"Not particularly. She was a bitch. She treated Noriko horribly." Erisa-san pulled the plug in the bottom of the sink, and then peeled off her lemon-yellow dish gloves. When she sighed, her shoulders hitched up to her earlobes. "I'm sorry. That was…that was harsh of me. I'm…not usually like this. Kana-san had a lot of problems, and I shouldn't be unfair to her. She just…wasn't the right fit for Noriko's brother."

"If it helps, I didn't like her much either," said Mai. Erisa-san relaxed, and the corners of her mouth turned up, just slightly, only for a moment.

"Mai-chan—do you mind if I call you that? Mai-chan?" She clasped her hands behind her, shifting awkwardly. "I'm sorry to seem presumptuous, it's just—you don't seem much younger than me, and it's been just me and Ayumi up here for so long, I forgot myself. If it bothers you—"

"It doesn't," said Mai, and reached out to touch the other woman's elbow. "I don't mind. I can call you Erisa-chan, if you want."

For the first time, Erisa-san smiled. She looked younger when she did it, not so careworn, and Mai smiled back. "Eri, if you don't mind. It's what my friends call me."

"Eri, then," said Mai, and squeezed Eri's elbow.

The smile faded. Eri's eyes filled with tears. "I don't know. I'm just…I think I'm trying not to hope. It's been so hard for so long now. I would have left ages ago, if I'd been able to. But since…" she waved a hand at the kitchen. "It's been quiet since you came. Usually I can hear…things. Ayumi can only hear whispers, sometimes, but there are voices in the walls. Sometimes, at night, they scream. I thought they were going to drive me insane."

She thought of what Ishikawa-san had told them, back on the porch, about how the ghost seemed focused on Eri. She hooked a hair-tie off her wrist and began to gather her hair up into a ponytail. Mai caught sight of a thumb-shaped bruise in the hollow of her throat, dark against her pale skin. Erisa-san didn't seem to notice. "I never told Ayumi," she said, pitching her voice low. "I…I didn't want to worry him."

"Usually spirits go quiet when someone new shows up wherever they're haunting," Mai whispered back. "They don't like new people."

"So the voices will come back, then," said Eri, and her face began to crumple. Mai grabbed her by the wrists and steered her into the kitchen chair before crouching in front of her, holding her hands tightly.

"Eri, we're going to try and fix this. Naru's good, he's a good parapsychologist. I've never seen him fail at a case, and I've worked for him for two years through some…pretty bad ones." Tears dribbled down Eri's cheeks, and she pulled her hands out of Mai's to wipe them away. "We'll fix it. All right? And if we can't, we'll make sure you two are somewhere safe."

Eri shuddered. She took two gasping breaths of air, hiccupped, and then hid her face in her hands. She didn't seem to be crying, just trying very hard to breathe, so Mai stood, grabbed the mug with the dancing frog on it, and poured her a cup of tea. After a minute or two, Eri wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, and sniffled.

"I'm sorry." She wrapped her hands around the mug, drawing her feet up onto the kitchen chair. She looked very young and very old, all at once. "I don't usually break down like that."

"It's all right. I didn't mind." Mai leaned her hips against the counter. Masako had left the sliding door to the living room open when she'd left the kitchen, and if she went up on her tiptoes, she could see Naru watching them. She flicked her fingers at him—five minutes—and then mouthed please. His eyebrows snapped together, but to her surprise, he inclined his head in a slow nod, and went back to talking to Bou-san. Eri hadn't noticed; she was staring into her mug as if all the answers to life's mysteries were to be found in tea. "Do you want me to call Ishikawa-san in, Eri? I can."

"No, it's okay." She sniffed, and then groped for a paper napkin, blowing her nose with a tremendous honk. "He doesn't need to see me like this. If he does he'll ask why it happened and…And I know we're being interviewed later, so he'll learn then anyway." She peeped up at Mai. "What will he ask me? Your boss?"

"Usually about the house and its history, what's been happening, what your own theories are if you have any. We already heard what Ishikawa-san had to say, yesterday, but he'll want to hear your experiences." And then he'll hypnotize you, Mai thought, drumming her fingers against the underside of the counter. But I can't tell you that. "It shouldn't take all that long, once the general timeline is thrashed out. But you don't have to do it until you feel ready, if you don't want to. I can bully Naru if you want."

Eri laughed wetly, and took a sip of tea. "No, it's all right. I'm being silly." There were still tears clinging to her eyelashes. "Why do you call him Naru? He introduced himself as Shibuya something."

"Shibuya Kazuya," said Mai. Oliver Davis, she thought to herself. "And it's a long story. I started calling him that to make him mad, and then it just kind of stuck. I think if I called him Kazuya or Shibuya-san now he'd just look at me funny."

That pulled another smile out of her. Eri gulped at her tea, and then set the half-empty mug on the dining table again, dabbing at her eyes one last time. "I'd better get it over with," she said, and fluffed the end of her ponytail. "I don't look that bad, do I?"

"You look like you've been out in the cold."

"Good," said Eri, and straightened. "It's what I moved here for."

For the first time in a long while, Mai didn't attend the hypnotism. The interview with Eri hadn't turned up anything she hadn't already known—the house was from the Meiji Period, mostly unaltered, if expanded in a few places, and there were no known disappearances, murders, accidents, or suicides within recorded history that came nearer than five miles of the place. Neither Eri nor Ishikawa-san liked antiques, and all the furniture and decorations they used in the hotel were either new or had been there for more than a decade, too long for them to be causing whatever it was that was going on. So when Naru wrapped the interview up, Mai excused herself to go take a dip in the hot springs.

There were three major springs on the Ishikawa property. Two of them were exterior, and with the blizzard still howling and shaking the shutters, they'd become totally off-limits. The third was indoors, in the sense that it had four walls and a roof over it, but the pool itself was rocky with a thatch of lotus at the far end. It was also empty, and Mai quickly scrubbed herself clean before sinking into the steaming water with a luxuriant sigh. The bathtub at her apartment didn't deserve the name; it was only three feet across, one of those things you had to climb up a set of stairs to get into and sit in as bad jets pounded your bruises into a misery. This water was smooth and still and deliciously warm without being scalding, and she leaned her head back against the rocks and closed her eyes. If she wasn't careful, she'd spend the whole of the investigation in the springs, and Naru would probably fire her for it, but it would be so worth it.

Mai stared at the high-vaulted ceiling. Her belly squeezed uncomfortably. Despite everything Eri had said, in the interview and in the kitchen, Mai hadn't felt a single thing about this place that unnerved her. It wasn't like Urado's mansion, where she'd smelled blood within minutes, a constant haunting scent that had followed her for days even after they'd escaped. This place was just…snow and ice and the sense that people weren't smiling when they should be. It pricked at her like a thorn in her shoe.

She shouldn't feel guilty, she reasoned. After all, Masako hadn't said anything either, even after Mai had gone upstairs to get her bathing things and found her sitting on a futon, staring into space, thinking. Whatever spirit was here haunting the Ishikawas, Masako didn't know enough about it to speak up. But it still felt to Mai as though she'd failed somehow. Everyone was always talking about how she kept gathering talents, and how her dreams were useful, but she couldn't even sense one ghost.

She sank down into the water and blew bubbles.

Naru had called in the two guests for the hypnotism, too. An older woman, with close-cropped gray hair and a port wine stain named Terazawa Yuuko, and a young photographer with expertly styled hair named Sakauchi Kenzaburou. "Call me Ken," he'd said, holding her hand for a second or two longer than necessary. Bou-san had accidentally-on-purpose knocked his messenger bag into Ken's gut when he wouldn't let go, which she hoped was the end of the matter. The investigation was already complicated enough without a photographer getting frisky.

Mai sighed, and choked when water shot up her nose. To be honest, a frisky photographer wouldn't be all that much of a problem if she'd been working with anyone other than Naru. It had been more than six months since he and Lin-san had come back from burying Gene, and she still wasn't sure if what he'd said back then was true—that she hadn't cared for him, that she couldn't care for him, because every bit of her heart had been tangled up in who she'd thought he'd been, and that person had been Gene. The words still clawed at her, because if she was going to be straight with herself, even she wasn't sure who she'd cared for more—Naru, or Gene. She wasn't even sure if she had actually really loved either of them, or if she'd just been caught up in the drama and excitement of it all. A schoolgirl crush on a boy who saved her life.

Mai wrinkled her nose, took a deep breath, and dunked under the water. There was no point to these thoughts, she told herself, opening her eyes and watching bubbles circle her. Not while they were on a case. She wasn't sixteen anymore, and besides—with everything else that was going on, the last thing she needed to be worrying about was an old crush, even if it hadn't completely faded. So there, she told the rocks at the bottom.

She surfaced with a gasp, and smoothed her hair back out of her face. The windows were rattling again. These ones were cracked too, she realized, peering through the steam, but they'd been taped, or sealed somehow, in order to keep the cold out. All the windows had shattered, she remembered, when Natsu and Fuyu had spent the night out here at the onsen. Mai stood, and waded to the other side of the pool, staring at the cracked windows. They'd been replaced recently, judging by the smell of fresh glue, but each was laced with spiderweb-thin cracks, all across the surface. The biggest breaks had been taped together, but each pane looked like a lattice of fractures, ready to fall apart if someone even blew on them too hard. Mai sank back into the water, propping her elbows on the side of the pool. She hadn't been looking at any of the other windows. Did they all have the same breaks?

The change was instantaneous. She could feel her skin prickling, the way it did when someone was staring at her and she hadn't noticed, but when she turned, no one else was there. Mai shivered, and dipped deeper under the water. She was very conscious of the way her hair was plastered to the back of her neck, the way that her shoulders were bare and peeping over the surface of the pool, the flush of blood under her skin.

She thought she heard a whisper.

"Hello?" Mai said, and scooted to the edge of the pool again, seizing her bathrobe. She wrapped her fingers in the terrycloth, still searching the steam. "Is anyone there?"

Silence. Then another whisper. She couldn't make it out. She let out a shuddering breath. If this had been two years ago, her first instinct would have been to tell Bou-san off for scaring her. Now she was older, and she knew better. She held on tight to the terrycloth.

"If you're there," she said, "make yourself known."

She counted heartbeats. One beat. Two. Water dripped from the faucet. Five beats. Six beats. The windows rattled again, and then went still. Nine. Ten. Eleven beats.

The door opened.

Mai squealed, and threw herself away from the edge. In the door frame, Ayako yelped. "God, Mai! What's wrong with you? It's not like I'm a spider!"

Her heart was pounding. Mai clutched at her chest, and tried to remember how to breathe. "Ayako," she said, and Ayako cocked her head.

"What? Did I wake you up or something?"

Mai opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. "No," she said. "I thought I felt…it's nothing." She clambered up out of the pool, and wrapped herself in the robe. "The water's nice," she said, and made herself smile. "I'm going to…I'm going to go work on homework for a while."

"Mai." Ayako reached out and caught her by the shoulder. "Did you feel something?"

Mai wavered on the threshold, and then stopped. "I don't know. Maybe." Her hands were shaking. "It's possible I was imagining it."

Ayako's eyes sharpened. "Do you think you did?"

"No." She bit her lip. "It felt like someone was watching me. It was…it was creepy. I heard whispers."

Ayako said nothing for a moment. Mai squeezed her hands into fists. Finally, Ayako let her go. "Do you want me to go upstairs with you?"

"No," said Mai quickly, and then she stopped and thought about it. "No," she said again. "Masako's upstairs. And I'll be fine. Don't worry about me." She hesitated. "Do you want me to stay with you while you take a bath?"

"Nah, I'm fine." Ayako smacked her sternum with a fist. "I kick butt, remember? Besides, I don't feel things the way you and Masako do. If anybody ends up watching me, it'll be some perv that I can punch in the gut." She smiled, and Mai managed a wan smile back. "You go upstairs. All right?"

Mai nodded. Ayako patted her shoulder, and then made her way towards the bathing stools. It was only once she'd picked a stool and started setting up her cacophony of shampoos and bodywashes that Mai finally let out a breath and turned away to collect her clothes.

If she hurried on her way back up to the room, then nobody was going to comment on it.

Mai set her pencil down for the last time, and closed her eyes. Sleep was eluding her. It wasn't just the memory of what had happened in the springs, though that was part of it—she never liked not knowing for sure whether or not a spirit nearby, and she'd been second-guessing herself all night about it. The mountain of homework her professors had dropped off for her was another part. Since she was a senior, she had more work to do than ever, and it had been steadily getting worse ever since her class had submitted their lists of colleges they each wanted to apply to. She hadn't been ambitious in the slightest. She'd put down Yasuhara-san's school, but that was a no-brainer of a no—her grades weren't nearly good enough to go there, and hadn't been even before she'd started working at Shibuya Psychic Research. If she was lucky, she might be able to pass the exams to get into one of the big public universities, but she didn't have much hope.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Mai looked up at the ceiling, and then back down at her calculus homework again. Logarithmic equations were continuing to elude her. No wonder she was going to fail half her classes.

She'd finished all her homework, though. Well, most of it, anyway. She still had five or six problems left for math, and English reading to do, but her history essay was written, her literature composition was done with, she'd finished her worksheets for Japanese and for biology, and the chapter of reading she'd had for her elective film class had been the only part of her whole evening that she'd actually enjoyed. (And that was saying something, because she loathed The Cruel Story of Youth with every fiber of her being.)

The book she had to read for English was at least double the size of any of their previous readings; the print was tiny, the grammar complicated, and the title was enough to make her squirm. Still, it might at least put her to sleep, and considering the way her heart had been pounding when she'd tried earlier, she was willing to at least experiment. Mai fumbled for the lightswitch, turning it up a little, and checked in the kitchen to make sure no one else was around to hear her squirm before settling in for suffering.

"When he was ni—nearly thirteen, Jim—Jem? Jem—got his arm badly broken at the…at the elbow." Frankly, she thought 'elbow' was a stupid word. It wasn't as though it wasn't part of your arm. Why did it need a name of its own? Japanese made much more sense. "Naotta ato—When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football—football, what the hell is football, I don't understand—were ass—asu—asa—"

"'Assuaged,'" said a voice, and Mai slammed her book shut and lunged. Lin-san blocked it with one elbow, and looked at her flatly. She wondered if she was imagining the slight tilt to his eyebrow. "The word," he said, as she stared at him without moving, her mouth dropping open, "is 'assuaged.' It means eased, or reassured."

"Oh my god." She dropped the book. "Lin-san, I'm so sorry! I didn't know you were—"

"It's all right." He collected her schoolbook—a beat-up old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, in English—and offered it to her again. The watch on his wrist said 3:34. She hadn't known it was that late; she'd been working through all her homework in an attempt to get it done and hadn't thought about the time. "You're reading To Kill a Mockingbird?"

"Hayashi-sensei's husband is an American English teacher." She set the book back on the table. "And she spent most of her life in America. She's a good professor, she teaches really well, but she gives us really complicated work. I've been trying to read the first chapter for weeks, and I have a translation of Chapter Seventeen due the Friday after we come back…whenever that will be."

Lin-san nodded in a thoughtful sort of way, still staring at the cover of To Kill a Mockingbird. She felt something brush her hair, but it was gone within a second. One of the shiki, maybe. "It's an ambitious project," he said after a moment, as Mai was collecting up the papers that had somehow managed to get spread all the way across the table. "For high school students."

"I'm a senior," said Mai, and she wondered why she felt the slightest bit insulted. "And she's a really good teacher. Everyone else in the class is reading it fine. I'm just…I don't understand English at all."

The instant after she said it, she winced. She would manage to say something stupid like that to the one person on the team she knewwas trilingual. (Naru probably was too, but he never talked about it.) Lin-san could speak Taiwan Chinese andEnglish as well as Japanese. He wouldn't have time to listen to her stupid complaints about easy English reading. (Easy English reading for everyone but her.) Mai cleared her throat. "I'm…I'm gonna go to bed now. Good night, Lin-san."

She'd just shoved everything back into her backpack when Lin-san sat down at the table, and said, "You're not bad at it."

Mai blinked at him. "Excuse me?"

"Your pronunciation and your level of hearing comprehension are both good. I noticed that yesterday. You understand things much better when you hear them than when you read them, which isn't uncommon for someone learning a second language." He cocked his head just lightly to one side. Mai felt as though the world had just rocked unexpectedly under her feet. After spending so many months thinking Lin-san a silent statue, hearing him say so many words in a row was overwhelming, to say the least. "Have you taken conversational English?"

Slowly, she lowered her bookbag back to the floor. She was fairly sure that this was a first. Lin-san never initiated conversations if he could help it. "No. My English score wasn't high enough for me to get placed there." Mai hesitated. "If you don't mind me asking…um. Why are you awake, Lin-san?"

He shrugged. "I never sleep the first night of a new case." After a moment, he added, "The shiki won't let me. They don't like new places much."

Curiouser and curiouser. Lin-san never talked about his shiki, either. She wasn't sure what sort of drug had been added to his evening coffee, but she was certain that Yasuhara-san was behind it. Abruptly, he seemed to notice what he'd said, because he closed his mouth tight up again, his lips pressing thin. Mai had absolutely no idea what to say, so instead she sat down at the table again.

"I'm sorry," she said, and Lin-san blinked. "I—I know you don't like talking about yourself much. I wasn't trying to pry. If I offended you—"

"You didn't," he cut in. "Don't worry. We've worked together for two years now. If anyone's been offensive, it's me."

The world rocked again. Mai folded her hands on the table, wishing she had tea or coffee or something to use as a prop. "Well, if it helps, you've never made me want to beat your head in with a tea kettle, so you're doing better than Naru, at least."

Lin-san snorted, and then looked surprised at himself. The corners of his mouth turned up. "You sound so much like him, sometimes. Gene. He said almost the exact same thing once. Naru—Oliver—had been confined to bed, and it was driving him crazy. He was lecturing everyone who came into the room about the ineptitudes of the English medical system. Gene finally just took all his books away and demanded he be polite or he wouldn't get them back."

Mai clapped a hand over her mouth to hide her smile. She couldn't imagine the look on Naru's face if someone had dared do that to him now. He'd never been a good patient, not as long as she'd known him. She wished she could have met Gene while he'd been alive. She would have loved to have known the one person on the planet who had never backed down against Naru.

"Taniyama-san." Lin-san was watching her. Mai lowered her hand. "I'm…frequently up very late, keeping an eye on the machines. Naru doesn't trust anyone else to do it, and since I don't sleep much anyway, it's all right with me. But it's rare that anything actually happens."

"Except when they happen," said Mai, and Lin-san nodded.

"Of course." He paused, and opened a file he'd brought downstairs with him, a copy of the data Yasuhara-san had collected in preparation of their flight to Hokkaido. At the top there was an old black-and-white photo of the original building, remarkably similar to the one they were in now, just slightly smaller. "What I mean to say is that if you need any further assistance with English, or with other subjects for that matter, feel free to come and ask. You won't be disturbing me."

Mai opened her mouth, and closed it again. Lin-san wasn't looking at her; he had turned a page in his folder and was reading studiously, though not with his usual speed. For a second, all she could think about was why she'd never noticed that his eyelashes were that long. Then her brain kicked back into gear, and she beamed at him.

"I would love that," she said, and then again, louder. "I would love that. Lin-san, thank you." Worry crept in. "You're sure it won't mess with your work or anything?"

He shook his head. "I usually have little to do other than sit and watch the monitors after the rest of you have gone to sleep." He gave her a sideways look. "I was thinking that if there were particular songs or poems that you liked, you could try to translate those. I don't know if you would have time for that, with all your other assignments, but—"

"No, one of our final projects is independent study in translation, and I was thinking about doing karuta poems, you know? But I hadn't thought about it in a while." She couldn't stop smiling for some stupid reason. "I know all the meanings and stuff already, so it's just actually translating it, but if you think that's a good idea—"

Her voice dried up. Mai choked on her tongue, and clenched both hands into fists. The creepy someone's watching you feeling was back again; the hairs on the back of her neck were standing straight up, and the part of her that she had just begun to recognize as her sixth sense was trilling a warning. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something flicker, long and white and sinuous. One of Lin-san's shiki. Lin-san had gone absolutely still, his eyes flicking over the dark living room. She could hear something rattling in the kitchen, and then the sound of shattering ceramic. The teapot and mugs.

She tried to swallow, but she couldn't make her throat work. Something was stroking the back of her neck.

Upstairs, a door slammed. Then again. If she tried very, very hard, she could look towards the door into the kitchen. It trembled, and then slammed. Opened, and slammed again. Every door in the house was slamming, and upstairs she could hear Naru shouting, hear people moving around, but she couldn't move. Suddenly she realized she couldn't even breathe.

Mai made a soft desperate noise. Her eyes watered, and a tear or two ran down her cheeks. She couldn't blink them away. She could smell something sweet and full and rotting, like old meat, and under it heavy dirt. Something touched her cheek, and she squeaked. Lin-san murmured something in Chinese and reached out with two fingers to touch her hand, and whatever was holding her promptly let go. Mai sagged against the wall, breathing hard, squeezing her eyes shut. The doors were opening and slamming, opening and slamming, and she put her hands together to perform the cuts when as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

On Lin-san's wrist, the watch ticked from 3:41 to 3:42.