Chapter 1
The summer Suguru Geto stopped eating, Satoru Gojo was too busy being the strongest to notice. He would remember that later, in the specific way you remember the step you missed on a staircase: not the fall, but the half-second before it, when your foot found air.
It was August of 2007 and Tokyo held the heat the way a closed car does. Satoru came back from Sendai on the last shinkansen with a paper bag of kikufuku in one hand and nothing in the other, because the curse he had been sent to exorcise had been a grade one and had lasted about as long as it took him to take off his sunglasses. He had kept Infinity up the entire ride home. He did that now, all the time, without thinking. The reverse cursed technique hummed along under it like a refrigerator in the next room, repairing his brain cell by cell so he could keep doing it. He had not slept a full night in three weeks and felt fantastic.
The dormitory hallway was dark except for the vending machine at the end, which buzzed and threw a square of blue light onto the floor. Suguru's door was open an inch. Satoru knocked with his foot and pushed it open with his shoulder.
"You're up," he said. "Good. I bought too many."
Suguru was sitting on the windowsill with one knee pulled to his chest. He had his hair down, which he never did in front of anyone but Satoru and Shoko, and he was wearing the black uniform trousers and an undershirt that had once fit him. The window was open. The cicadas outside were so loud they sounded mechanical.
"Sendai again?" Suguru said, looking at the bag.
"An abandoned onsen hotel. Very atmospheric. I was in and out before the window finished the paperwork." Satoru dropped onto the bed, which complained, and held the bag up. "Zunda or cream. I'm not sharing the zunda, so that's a trick question."
Suguru smiled. It was a good smile, the same one as always, the one that had made Satoru stop on the training field in their first year and think, oh, this guy is going to be a problem. But it arrived late, as if it had to come from farther away than it used to.
"I'm fine," Suguru said. "I ate."
"What did you eat?"
A pause, just long enough. "A grade two in Saitama."
Satoru laughed, because that was what you did. Cursed spirits did not count as food. Everyone knew what Suguru's technique cost him, in the abstract; he had told them once, early, in the flat practical voice he used for things that weren't up for discussion. The taste of a curse going down was like swallowing a rag that someone had used to wipe up vomit. He had said it the way you'd describe a commute. Then he had done it a few thousand more times.
"Here," Satoru said, and tossed a cream one. Suguru caught it without looking. He turned it over in his long fingers and did not unwrap it.
The room smelled of the mosquito coil burning in a saucer on the desk, green and smoky. There were books stacked by the bed, the old kind, with brown spines, and a cup of tea that had gone cold enough to grow a skin. Satoru noticed all of it with the Six Eyes, the way he noticed everything: the dust on the top shelf, the faint residue of cursed energy around Suguru like a heat shimmer, thinner than it should be, the bones in Suguru's wrist where there hadn't been bones before. He noticed it and did not put it together. Afterward he would think about that a great deal. What was the point of seeing everything if you didn't know how to look.
"How was Haibara's funeral," Satoru said, because he hadn't been there. He had been in Sendai.
"Small." Suguru looked out the window. "His mother kept thanking Nanami. Nanami kept bowing. I think if she had said one more thing he would have walked into traffic."
"Nanami's tough."
"Nanami is seventeen."
Satoru didn't have anything to say to that, so he ate a kikufuku in two bites instead. The bean paste was sweet and grassy and stuck to the roof of his mouth. Outside, someone was setting off a single sparkler in the courtyard; he could see the white fizz of it reflected in the glass.
"It went fast," he said, meaning the mission. "Sendai. I didn't even need the full Blue. I think I could clear the whole Tohoku list in a week if they'd let me. Yaga says no, obviously. Yaga says I need to learn to delegate." He leaned back on his elbows. "Delegate to who, though. That's my question. If I can do it in five minutes and someone else does it in three days and maybe dies, the math's pretty simple."
He meant it as a joke, mostly. Suguru did not laugh.
"Satoru." The cicadas had stopped all at once, the way they do, and the room was suddenly very quiet. "If you were the only one left. If there were no one else. Do you think you'd still be strong?"
"Yes," Satoru said immediately, because it was true. "What kind of question is that."
Suguru nodded slowly, as if that were the answer he had expected and also the one he had been afraid of.
"No, I mean." He finally unwrapped the kikufuku. He didn't eat it. He pressed the edge with his thumb until a little of the cream showed. "You said strong. I asked if you'd still be strong. But I think I meant something else, and I don't know what the word is."
"Then think of the word and ask me again."
"I've been trying." Suguru set the sweet on the windowsill beside him, very precisely, like a man laying down a weapon. "Do you remember what you asked me in that hall? The Star Religious Group. After Riko."
Satoru remembered. He had come back from the dead that day, more or less; he had stood in a room full of applauding people and looked at a girl's body and felt nothing at all except an enormous, ringing clarity. He had asked Suguru whether he should kill them all. The applauding people. He had meant it as a real question, the way you'd ask a friend which train to take.
"You told me not to," Satoru said. "You said there was no point."
"I said there was no meaning in it." Suguru looked at him then, really looked, and his eyes were tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "I've been wondering lately whether I was right."
Satoru sat up. Something cold went through him and he did the thing he always did with cold things, which was to turn it into a grin.
"Hey. Don't steal my lines. I'm the unhinged one, you're the one with principles. That's the whole arrangement."
"Is it."
"Yes. It's in the contract. You read the small print."
That got him. Suguru laughed, short and surprised, and for a second the shimmer around him thickened and brightened and he looked seventeen too. He put a hand over his eyes and shook his head.
"You're an idiot," he said.
"The strongest idiot."
"Hm." Suguru took his hand away. "Satoru, could you do something for me?"
"Depends. Is it homework? I'm not doing your homework."
"Eat the zunda one in front of me so I can watch you not share it."
Satoru held up the last green kikufuku like a prize and ate it slowly and with great ceremony, making small sounds of enjoyment, while Suguru watched him from the windowsill with his chin on his knee and an expression Satoru could not read at all. The Six Eyes could count the threads in a curtain at fifty meters. It could not tell him what that look meant. He thought, later, that it might have been fondness, and he thought, later, that it might have been goodbye, and he thought, much later, alone, that there was no reason it couldn't have been both.
"Good?" Suguru asked.
"Incredible. You missed out."
"I always do."
He said it lightly. Satoru let it go by. He was tired, finally, the good kind, and the bed was soft, and the mosquito coil had burned down to a little gray spiral of ash. He lay back and closed his eyes and listened to the cicadas start up again, one at a time, until the whole night was ringing.
"Wake me up if a curse eats Tokyo," he said.
"I'll handle it," Suguru said.
When he woke up it was morning and he was alone, and the cream kikufuku was still on the windowsill, unwrapped, the edge pressed in by a thumb. He ate it standing at the window in the hot white light, because there was no sense in wasting it, and then he went to training and did not think about it again for a month.
A month later Yaga called him into the office and told him about the village. A hundred and twelve people. Two little girls in a cage. Suguru's parents.
Satoru listened to all of it with his sunglasses on. When Yaga finished, the first thing he thought, absurdly, was not about the village at all. It was about the windowsill, and the small crescent a thumb had left in the edge of something sweet, and how carefully Suguru had set it down, as if he had been practicing.
He had asked for a word. Satoru had told him to think of it and ask again.
It had not occurred to him that there might be no again. He was the strongest. There were a lot of things the strongest had never had to imagine.