Chapter 2

And then—Renko.

There, under the tree. Harder to miss, this one. A blot of black ink upon an otherwise gorgeous countryside canvas. A scowl given tall, angular form. A punk, dictionarily. From the rowdy haircut, to the piercings, to the spiked collar, foreign band tees and arm warmers, the studded belt, back up so as not to forget the gaudy black eyeliner, then back down to account for the shin-high boots with entirely too many straps.

If aposematism had developed via exposure to chunky guitar riffs and melodrama, Renko Hurane would have no natural predators.

At this specific juncture in her life, nothing mattered to Renko anymore. Not her stupid grades, not her stupid mom, not her stupid life. Each day was a spiral of misery, and she was but a marble tumbling down its track. Or something. Describing teenage angst was a task best left to the bands with names like “RAVEN REQUIEM” and “PARALOGISM.”

Suffice it to say, she was sad. But the comfortable, familiar kind of sad that’s stuck around in the brain long enough to start paying rent. You could coparent a pet with this kind of sad.

She’d made a concerted effort to not be thinking about anything in particular, today, and would have been content to lay there beneath the tree in a melancholic stew, maybe forever, or at least until it started to rain.

“Renko!”

Alas.

For a girl facing so many biological roadblocks, Bina never moved at an impaired pace. She was either sitting still, or sprinting like she thought she might outrun the asthma attack. She crossed the grassy field in undue time, and went stumbling onto her hands and knees beside Renko, red faced and heaving.

“Ren…ni…!” she gasped. “School…gonna…ghuh…”

“Shut up,” Renko said dryly. “Take your thing.”

Bina nodded, produced her inhaler, and took her puffs at a measured pace, because otherwise Renko would yell at her to slow down.

“Breathe.”

She breathed, big deep gulps.

“Okay. Try again.”

“Tutoring got cancelled so I went to miss Nanami’s to get your—”

“Closing arguments, please.”

“They’re gonna expel you!” Bina said, shooting back up to her feet. “They took you off the roster and they won’t let me bring you any homework! They’re gonna kick you out!”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“And when I asked the principal about—you know?”

Renko shrugged. “Every teacher in that school hates my guts. Figured if they were ever gonna find an excuse to get rid of me, this’d be it. Kinda surprised it took them so long.”

“But they can’t!”

“Think they’re actually the only ones who can.”

Bina balked. “I just…it doesn’t…you’re so calm! Why are you so calm!”

“’Cause I didn’t do anything wrong,” Renko said. “We fought, I won. If things made sense, you know, I’d be getting rewarded for that. But stupid people run everything, so.”

Truthfully, calling it a fight was a smidgen overgloried. Takeda had thrown a punch, and she’d responded with three years of judo training, which her mother had misguidedly hoped would curb her pugnacity with discipline. It did at least ensure the break was clean.

“Did you ever tell anyone what happened?” Bina asked.

“Nope. They probably got the story they wanted out of him, anyway. Nothing I say’s gonna change their minds now.”

“Nothing?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“You could…uhm…” Bina steeled herself. “Maybe you could…and like, you don’t have to mean it, you know, because I’m sure you had your reasons, but…if you maybe, in a roundabout way even, just sorta…say…you’re sorry?”

Sorry. Something about the word made Renko instantly and irrationally upset, which in all fairness wasn’t a difficult task. She glared at Bina, perhaps a bit more harshly than she meant to, but it stung. Every single person had immediately assumed that Takeda didn’t deserve what happened to him, when the truth was, even if he hadn’t swung first she was going to swing last.

Her own mother had said nothing in her defense. Said almost nothing at all, for days, aside from some quiet, disappointed mumbling on the car ride home. Renko could have considered a career in disappointment right then, just to spite her.

“It’s just that, well, Takeda’s an honor student,” Bina went on, unhelpfully. “And most people seem to think he’s a good guy, and, uhm, for my part I guess, he’s only ever been nice to me. So I think, and I mean, people just might be confused, is all. I mean I don’t even know why you…not that you have to explain it, but if you maybe just, you know, said something.”

Renko sat up, looked Bina dead in the eyes, and said something. “Takeda Uechi is a little bitch, and if I ever see him again, I’ll break his other arm.”

“Okay,” Bina mumbled. “Well…we can workshop it.”

Mood thoroughly ruined—more so than it was, anyway—Renko dug into her pocket and retrieved a scrunched-up old cigarette and a lighter, the sole survivors of her mother’s purge the previous week. She’d hidden it in a shoe. The lighter she’d picked up from the grocery; mister Tokuo swore by it.

Pointedly ignoring Bina’s concern—which was hard to do, she had big eyes—Renko gummed the cigarette and flicked the lighter. Then flicked it again. And again. She smacked it against her palm, tried again. Shook it, tried again.

“Stupid—” Flick. Flick. Flickflickflick. “Man,” she whined, and tossed the gaudy plastic stick into the grass. “Old people don’t know shit.”

“It’s okay. I heard smoking turns your insides black.”

“That sounds metal,” Renko said, and stuffed the cigarette back into her pocket for later, so she wouldn’t miss the opportunity. “Hey, you know what I just realized?” She smirked. “No more homework.”

Bina frowned. “I was already doing your homework.”

“Yeah. Think about all the free time you’ll have now.”

“It’s not funny, Renni,” she said. “Everything’s gonna be awful.”

“Not everything,” said Renko. “No more homework, no more shitty lunches, no more headaches from that stupid light in miss Nanami’s room. Seriously, it’s been like two years and they haven’t fixed it.”

“You’ll have to move, you know.”

Renko did know, in fact, she’d just made a point not to think about it, and she didn’t intend to start now. Unfortunately, in some abandoned crevice of her brain that had once, long ago, been dedicated to social delicacy, gears were starting to turn. Suddenly she was contending with things like guilt, and grief, and anxiety, and yes if she looked very closely, perhaps even a little regret.

Bina looked at her with those big eyes. They were always just a bit wet from her allergies, and it gave her the countenance of a kicked puppy.

“I’d miss you,” she said miserably. “Wouldn’t you miss me?”

Renko didn’t have an answer to that. Well, she did, and it was an emphatic, bordering on furious YES, IDIOT! But even in her angriest moments she had trouble yelling at Bina. So instead she just sat there staring at her, which she understood was an unhelpful response, but you didn’t have someone else do your homework for you because you were good at answering difficult questions.

Thankfully, like an overeager honor student raising their hand, nature answered for her with a roll of thunder, and not the distant, gentle kind. It sounded like someone above them had bowled a heaven-sized strike with pins of dynamite.

It started to sprinkle.

“Woah,” Renko muttered, only just noticing how dark the clouds had grown, how far they’d spread. The sky was almost black, like evening had shown up early and no one had the heart to shoo it away. “Wasn’t this shit supposed to miss us?”

“My grandpa doesn’t trust weathermen. He says the clouds do what they want, and we just have to guess.”

“It looks like they wanna turn Totono into a lake.” Which, to be clear, she was not opposed to. “Let’s go. My mom’ll be pissed if you catch a cold.”

They started off into the field, and Renko began to dread the next few hours. She had a terrible suspicion that her mother would want to talk now, about the fight, the expulsion, and then probably about moving. Bina’s grandpa had that effect; they only ever seemed to have serious talks after the old man visited. They were invariably exhausting, and led nowhere.

“A city could be neat,” she said, heading off her frustration. “Only been to one like, twice, but it was pretty cool.”

Bina pulled a protestant face. “They’re so loud” she said. “And there’s cars everywhere, and no one looks at each other.”

Few people didn’t look at Renko. Her wardrobe had a magnetic sort of quality, like goth high beams, or a bad odor.

“Yeah but things happen in cities.”

“Things happen in Totono.”

“Nothing happens in Totono.”

“This crazy girl broke a dude’s arm during lunch the other week.”

She scoffed. “School doesn’t count, it’s not in Totono. Things happen around Totono, okay, but right out there were the roads turn to dirt? Right from there, nothing happens.”

“That can’t be true,” Bina said, and her eyes unfocused on the air, like she might pull some incredible story from it. The dirt didn’t feel like sharing. “Uhm…”

“Binny, the motel ten miles down the road has more people in it than our whole village. No one visits, no one leaves, everyone just wakes up, eats, shits, then goes to bed. We’re like—we live in a glass jar in a crawl space behind the drywall. Nothing—and I cannot stress this enough—nothing. Ever. Happ—”

With a thunderous crash and a quake that could make an elephant’s marrow wobble, two worlds conspired in that moment to make Renko Hurane a liar.

Something happened.

When her senses came back she was on the ground, dazed and muddy and confused. Stars spangled her vision, her ears rang, it was like she’d been standing next to a jet engine.

Shit, she thought. Did I just die?

Renko patted herself down, frantically searching for a gaping hole or missing limbs, and exhaled her lungs empty when she discovered she was still in one piece. Then a brief stab of panic as she saw Bina curled up on her side, followed by another sigh when she sat up and appeared to have all her bits too.

“Renni?” Bina mumbled, rubbing the dirt from her eyes. “What was that?”

Finally, a good question.

She had no idea.

It could have been lightning, though it sounded like a plane crash, or a bomb, all of which seemed just a bit absurd.

More fool her when she saw the actual answer was completely ridiculous.

For several moments Renko just stared, unsure of what she was seeing. A line hanging in the air, jangling, glinting in the tantrum lights of the storm. Chains, she realized dumbly. A chain line with links as long and wide around as a person. She followed it all the way from the clouds, down, down for miles and miles, until it reached the tree.

Or, where the tree had been, the poor thing.

Now it was a ruin of splintered wood and cratered earth, and there connected to the sky by that inexplicable chain was…well, she didn’t know, really. It looked a bit like the misbegotten child of a chandelier and the claw from a crane game. An anchor of black metal that had collided with the ground so heavily it was still swathed in dust.

And then, rain.

It hit them like a wet sheet, like someone above had just remembered storms were supposed to have quite a lot of it, and now they had to hurry to meet quota. The cold was jarring, and sobering, and dispelled the lingering ringing in Renko’s ears just in time for her to hear something whistle through the air.

Somehow she knew precisely where to look. She saw a shadow plummet down from the storm like a little meteor, fast as a bolt of lightning, and with purpose.

It crashed right through the roof of her house.