Chapter Text
It is after midnight in Yokohama. The full moon illuminates the balconies of a small, run-down apartment complex. Most of the occupants are preparing themselves for slumber or already sound asleep, but despite the late hour, one of the third floor tenants is still awake. The curtains are drawn, blocking off the light of the moon. The only illumination in the small apartment comes from the pale blue glow of two computer monitors, giving an eerie cast to the crayons, child’s drawings, and grammar exercise book abandoned at the low dining table. One edge of the living-dining space has been converted into a makeshift office, where the two monitors share space with a heavy-looking computer tower, atop a desk made of chipped particleboard that looks barely able to support the weight of its electronic burdens. A thin woman sits in a warped office chair, the glow of the monitors casting a sickly light on her pale oval face.
The monitors display a pair of images—high resolution photographs of destruction, similar, yet each distinct. The woman pans across each image, clicking and zooming, tracing the smooth line of a crater in one image, then finding the same shape mirrored in the other. The image on the left is familiar to anyone who has grown up in Yokohama or studied the recent history of the city: archival footage taken just after the explosion that formed Suribachigai. What was once several city blocks is a tangle of tree roots and rubble, a sloping concavity shining with crumbled glass and twisted metal.
The image on the right is less familiar. At first glance, this appears to be a foreign warzone. The ground is pockmarked with craters, jagged rebar protrudes from cement walls like broken bones. Shards of stained glass in an array of reds and blues have been crushed underfoot, and amongst the detritus there’s a smattering of what appears, improbably, to be the crimson scales of a massive fish or reptilian creature… What the woman is drawn to is not, however, the stained glass or the improbable scales, but the peculiar round shape of each crater. A click and drag of her cursor activates a software program that calculates the depth, diameter, and grade of the crater, and the software’s algorithm confirms a match between the two images.
With a few swift keystrokes, she calls up a map application in her web browser and drops a pin at the GPS coordinates encoded in the photo’s metadata. The pin is one of several triangulating an area on the outskirts of Yokohama, cordoned off by the military police and declared off-limits to civilians in recent weeks due to what is being reported as a dangerous gas leak. She labels the pin “Yokohama Mist Incident, XX.XX.20XX.”
“I’ve found you…” the woman whispers into the empty room. “…Arahabaki.”
After shutting down the computer, the woman makes her way in near silence to the apartment’s one bedroom. She slides into her futon, already laid out on the worn tatami floor, and pulls the covers up to her neck.
In the smaller futon beside hers, a small boy stirs, rolling to his side with difficulty, burdened by layers of heavy clothing. “Mama…?” the boy murmurs.
“Shh, dear, go back to sleep,” the woman whispers, reaching one hand across the gap between the two futons to smooth the hair along the boy’s forehead. “Mama has a big day tomorrow, so we both need to get our rest.”
The boy leans into her hand, then nestles his face deeper into the pillow and seems to fall back asleep. In the morning, the woman thinks, he won’t remember this moment of midnight wakefulness.
She leans closer to kiss him gently on the forehead, whispering even quieter, “I’ve found him, Percy. The monster I helped create, the one who killed your father, the one who has the power to fix the horrible things that have happened to you. Sleep, my child. Mama will make it better. Whatever it takes, Mama will take care of you.”