Chapter 3

The room was barely larger than a cupboard, with no window, only four close walls and a door that had shrunk away from its frame. I sat on a thin futon with my knees drawn up and the bedding pulled tight around my shoulders. The air smelled of dust and old timber. I had never seen the place before, I was certain of that, and yet I knew without trying it that the door was locked. When I shifted my weight, my foot avoided a rough patch of floor I hadn't even looked at.

Warm light slipped through the gap beside the door and lay in a narrow strip across the boards. I leaned toward it with one eye half closed, although something in me whispered that I shouldn't. That was when I heard the footsteps, quick and heavy and coming closer.

I scrambled backward before I had decided to move, dragging the blanket with me until my spine struck the opposite wall. I sat there shaking although nothing had happened yet, although no one had so much as touched the door. Why am I so afraid? The steps stopped just outside. A voice murmured through the wood, too low for me to catch the words, but my stomach tightened at the sound as though I had heard it through this door a hundred times. When the scrape of metal began, one lock and then another, I pressed my back harder against the wall and told myself that if I kept very quiet they might believe I was asleep.

The door swung open and warm light spilled across the floor. A figure stood in the doorway with its face hidden in shadow. I pulled my knees against my chest and raised my arms over my head, bracing for a blow I could not remember ever receiving. Before it could reach me, I was torn out of the dream.

I woke with a gasp, sunlight stinging my eyes. For a long moment I could not move, because my back still remembered the wall and the robe I had woken in clung to me with sweat. I lay there trying to work out whether I had watched that child or been her.

A chair scraped, and I turned toward the sound. The girl from the other night was sitting at the desk in the corner, watching me with the cautious look of someone who wasn't sure what to do. When our eyes met, her whole face brightened.

"You're awake!"

"I am," I said, and the voice that came out was the one I had been putting off thinking about, thin and light and nothing like my own. I cleared my throat. "How long was I asleep?"

"Four days." She held up four fingers in case I needed to see it. "Mother said you needed the rest, but I thought you might sleep forever."

Four days since they had found me by the river. I remembered waking once in the moonlight and reading the note on the wall, but nothing after that. I could not even guess how long it had been since I had fallen asleep in my own bed. The girl was already halfway out of the door, calling for her mother as she went, and I listened to her feet drum down the stairs until the house swallowed the sound.

I eased myself higher against the pillows. The pain in my side was duller than before, but when I looked at my hands on the blanket, I forgot about it. I turned one over and found a raw scrape across the palm where the bark had caught me in the forest. I could feel its sting. Yet it was the narrow palm and slender fingers from the dream that I could not stop staring at. I had not seen my hands clearly until now. How had I known what they looked like in that room?

Footsteps came back up the stairs, and the girl returned with the woman I had glimpsed just before everything went dark. She looked more tired in daylight, with shadows beneath her eyes and a bowl and a clean cloth in her hands, though she smiled when she found me sitting up.

"Reina said you were awake. I'm Aiko, and I've been taking care of your injuries."

"And I'm Reina," the girl said, coming around the bed.

"Reina." I tried the name quietly, like testing ice with one foot.

Aiko set the bowl down and checked the bandage at my side, asking where it hurt and holding up a finger for my eyes to follow. When she was satisfied, she told me my fever had gone down but that I still needed rest. "You gave us quite a scare," she added, smoothing the dressing back into place.

"I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to apologize for."

She said it so quickly and plainly that I didn't know what to do with the answer. In the other house, a child had apologized over and over, as though each apology might finally make the woman stop. None of them had. I lowered my eyes to the folded bedding on the floor, and Reina followed my gaze.

"That's my futon," she said. "This is my room, so you're in my bed. I don't mind. I like sleeping on the floor, except Yuna sneaks in after we're supposed to be asleep and wants to talk."

"Who's Yuna?"

"My little sister. She's six." She leaned closer, as though she were sharing a secret. "She's very loud."

"And you aren't?" Aiko said, one eyebrow raised. Reina grinned, and I found myself smiling back before Aiko went to fetch water and something to eat.

Reina stayed on the edge of the bed and told me how many times she had looked in on me while I slept. I had barely stirred at first, then started muttering things she couldn't understand. When she asked whether I had been dreaming, I told her I didn't remember. It wasn't true, but I had no idea how to explain a locked room I had never entered, or the fear that had seized me before the door even opened. Even now, part of me was still sitting against that wall, waiting for the latch to turn.

"Are you cold?" she asked, glancing at the hands I had drawn up against my chest. When I said a little, she tugged the blanket higher over my lap and settled beside me, chattering about how Yuna always stole her blankets even when she brought her own.

I tried to follow her story, but sitting so close to her I could not help noticing how alike we were in size. If anything, I seemed the smaller. Somewhere in the middle of talking about her sister, Reina mentioned that she was ten. I looked at her, then at my legs under the blanket. I had heard the voice that came out of my mouth a dozen times already without letting myself ask why it sounded so young.

"Reina," I said, and my voice shook, "do you have a mirror?"

"Of course." She crossed the room and rummaged through a drawer, pushing aside a folded scarf and a handful of ribbons. She came back with a small hand mirror and set it in my palm.

I raised it slowly. A child looked back at me, with blue eyes I knew and the shape of a mouth I knew and the curve of brows I knew, set in a face rounder and softer than my own. I lowered the mirror and lifted it again. She was still there, looking younger than Reina. I touched my cheek, and the girl in the mirror did the same.

Pale gold hair fell over her shoulders and spread across the blanket, trailing past her waist. I caught a strand between my fingers. I had seen it fall across my eyes in the corridor while a woman held my chin. I had seen it before that, too, soaked with rain and plastered across the face of the girl I had reached for in the forest. Her fingertips had touched mine, and then she had vanished. I looked back at the mirror, trying to picture her face beneath all that wet hair, but I had seen it for only a moment.

The last time I had seen my own reflection, I had been standing at my bedroom window with chestnut hair coming loose from a bun, my eyes red from crying over a book. I had been an adult. Yet the face in the mirror could not have belonged to a girl older than nine. I kept searching it for the rest of myself and finding only the eyes.

"What's wrong?" Reina asked.

I lowered the mirror to my lap and waited until I could trust my voice. "I look different than I expected."

"Maybe because you've been sick?"

"Maybe." I handed it back. Reina returned it to the drawer without another question, and I was more grateful for that than I could have said.

"I hope you're hungry," Aiko said from the doorway. She stood there with a tray, and the smell of whatever she had cooked reached me before she did, warm and savory enough that my stomach gave a loud rumble. Reina burst into giggles. Aiko laughed too, quietly, and asked Reina to move her legs so she could set the tray down.

"Eat slowly," she said. "There's more downstairs."

I took one spoonful and then another. By the third, something warm was running down my cheek. I wiped it away with the back of my hand and kept eating, hoping neither of them had noticed, though another tear followed and then another until the bowl blurred in front of me.

"Are you hurting?" Reina asked.

I shook my head and swallowed. "I don't remember," I said, and the words came out wrecked, "the last time someone cooked for me like this."

I knew that could not be true. I had cooked for myself, eaten with friends, and left a bowl of noodles cooling on my counter the night I fell asleep. But the words rose from somewhere deeper than any of those memories and felt true as they left me. Perhaps the hunger belonged to the girl whose body I wore, and I was the one left to cry about it.

I hated crying in front of people. Usually, I could hold myself together until I was alone. Now I was crying over a bowl of food in a stranger's bed, and I could not make myself stop.

Aiko's eyes had gone bright. She blinked, slid the tray closer so I wouldn't have to hunch over it, and said in a steady voice, "There's plenty more. You can have as much as you want."

Beside me Reina was sniffling too, wiping her nose on her sleeve with a furious expression. The sight of her made me laugh, a wet, ugly sound, and then I cried harder. "It's all right," Aiko murmured. "Take your time." Nobody hurried me or asked me to explain. Reina set a cloth beside my bowl, and I ate with long pauses between mouthfuls until it was empty.

"A little better?" Aiko asked, taking the bowl from my hands. I nodded and thanked her, and she carried the tray out. Soon I could hear water running in the kitchen below.

"Was it good?" Reina whispered. When I told her it was really good, she said I should try her mother's soup on a day when it didn't have the bitter leaves in it. She lowered her voice to add that Aiko swore they were healthy but probably only said so to make them eat. A laugh scraped out of my sore throat. Reina looked enormously pleased with herself and began telling me about the time Yuna hid the leaves beneath the table and their mother found them anyway. I listened until her voice came apart into warm sound and I slept.

Over the next few days I learned the sounds of their home, which were mostly Reina's: a drawer sliding shut, bare feet crossing the floor, a whispered complaint when she couldn't find something she was certain she had left on the desk. One morning I woke to find her on her knees beside the futon, peering underneath the desk. When I asked what she was doing, she jerked upright, cracked her head on the edge and said, rubbing it, that she was looking for a ribbon. Something had been digging into my elbow, so I reached beneath the blanket and held up a strip of red cloth. Reina stared at it, then at the door, and said "Yuna" with such certainty that I laughed before I could stop myself.

At night she unrolled her futon beside the bed and kept talking after the lamp went out, telling me something she had forgotten earlier or asking whether I was still awake. Sometimes I answered, and sometimes I only listened as her sentences grew slower and her breathing settled. The bad nights still came. A sound in the hallway would turn into footsteps outside a locked door, and I would surface with my heart pounding and no idea where I was. Then Reina would shift in her sleep and her blanket would rustle beside me. I could make out her shape in the dark and remind myself that this door wasn't locked, that there was a window, that she was right there. It took a long time to calm down, but listening to her helped.

By day she brought the village to me in pieces, her friends and her lessons and a boy with a dog, speaking as though I already knew everyone, so that I had to stop her.

"Wait. Who's that?"

"The one I told you about yesterday."

"You told me about three people yesterday."

She thought about it. "The one with the dog."

At home I had always needed time alone after too much company. Yet when Reina left for her lessons, the room went strangely quiet, and I caught myself listening for her return.

Yuna visited like weather, never staying still, always arriving with a question or a leaf or something she had found. One morning she walked straight in with both hands cupped shut and announced that she had brought me a present. Reina asked whether it was alive. Yuna said no, and when Reina asked to see it, she said it was for me. Then she opened her hands beside the bed to show a small stone resting in her palm.

"Feel this part," she said. "It's really smooth."

I ran my thumb across it, cool and worn soft by water, while she told me exactly where she had found it. There were more by the stream, but she had picked this one for me and washed it first. When Reina said she had one just like it, Yuna informed her that hers was not as smooth.

"Do you like it?" Yuna asked.

"I do. I love it."

She pointed out a pale stripe that ran all the way around, and I followed it with my thumb. I thanked her, then set the stone beside my pillow, where she could see I intended to keep it. "Then you won't lose it," she said with absolute confidence. For days afterward, my hand kept finding it there in the dark.

Aiko came up every morning to check my injuries. Since she was the village doctor, there was always someone knocking at the front door, but she told me where she was going whenever she left with her bag and came to see me when she returned. Little by little I started telling her when something hurt, though it should have been easier than it was. One morning "I'm fine" was out of my mouth before I had even considered how I felt. She did not look annoyed. She only waited, holding my gaze until I looked down and admitted that it hurt when I breathed in. She thanked me as though I had given her something and began to peel back the bandage.

Their father I saw less of. I knew he was the man who had carried me home from the river, but he left early and came back late, sometimes after days away. I only understood why when Reina announced one evening, at the sound of the front door, that Father was a police officer and his name was Haruto.

He stopped by most nights, often still in his uniform, and stood near the doorway asking how I felt. I kept catching myself studying it, because it was unlike the uniforms I knew from home and yet nagged at me like a word on the tip of my tongue. Whenever he spoke I looked quickly back up at his face, afraid he had noticed, but he only waited for me to answer.

One evening I had slid too far down the pillows, and sitting up pulled painfully at my side. Haruto stepped closer and said, "Here, let me help." He eased me forward and raised the pillow behind my back before asking Reina to fetch another, which he tucked behind my shoulders with more care than the task required.

"Tell us if you need anything," he said, then left.

Reina watched the doorway. "He'll come back to check."

"Will he?"

"He always does. Even if you tell him you're fine."

I lay awake long after the lamp went out. They had fed and bandaged me and given me a bed that belonged to their daughter, and not one of them had asked who I was or how I had come to be in their river. Sooner or later, someone would. Whether it was Aiko, Haruto, or a person who came looking, I could not tell which frightened me more: being sent away, or being sent back.

When the pain had eased enough, Aiko let me try walking around the house. On my first trip downstairs, Reina stayed beside me and never hurried me on the steps. Yuna waited at the bottom and cried, "You're coming down!" so loudly that Reina had to tell her it was only for a little while. By the time we reached the kitchen, I had agreed to look at a drawing, another stone, and something Yuna had found in the garden. Then a dull ache spread through my side, and I stopped in the doorway with a hand against the wall.

"I think that's enough for today," Aiko said from the counter. I told her I only needed a minute, but she said I could try again later. Yuna's excitement faltered until Aiko promised the garden would keep.

Climbing back up the stairs, I was tired and frustrated because I had barely made it across a kitchen. Yuna came in a moment later and laid a sheet of paper in my lap. Four people stood beside a house and a fifth, smaller figure had long yellow hair. "Is that me?" I asked. She nodded and said she hadn't had the right color for my hair. I looked at the small figure standing among the others, drawn with the same care as the rest, and could not trust myself to say anything. I asked Yuna to tell me about the picture instead, and she climbed onto the edge of the bed to explain who everyone was, then the windows and the garden and a row of marks I had not recognized as flowers.

After she left, I kept thinking about what I had seen from the kitchen window: wooden buildings crowded close along a street, with mountains rising behind their rooftops. Beside the pantry door hung a paper calendar I had passed without reading, a photograph of a mountain pass above a grid of black numerals.

"Reina, what's this place called?"

"Tsumago-juku."

I repeated it quietly, hoping it would mean something. "Where is it?"

She gave me an odd look. "In Japan."

"Japan?" It settled in my stomach like a stone. "We're in Japan?"

She nodded, uncertain now. I had half suspected it from the names and the house and the paper pinned above the desk, but hearing her say it was different. I opened my mouth to ask something else and stopped. For days we had been talking, all of us, and I had never once wondered what language we were speaking.

"Are we speaking Japanese?"

"Yes," Reina said, frowning. "Are you feeling all right?"

"I'm just trying to remember something."

All I had ever picked up of Japanese came from anime and dramas, a handful of words, nowhere near enough to hold a conversation. Yet I had understood Reina as easily as I understood anyone at home and answered without searching for a single word. Perhaps it belonged to the girl whose body I was in. But if I could remember how to ask for water, why couldn't I remember her name? Where she had lived? Anything that might help me understand what had happened?

"You don't have to remember everything now," Reina said. "Mother says it might take a while."

I nodded, smoothing the blanket over my knees. Then I asked whether she could bring me the calendar from the kitchen, saying I wanted to practise my reading. She went off with a puzzled look and came back with Yuna trailing behind her. I laid the calendar across my lap and read the heading once, then again, as though the numbers might rearrange themselves.

November 2013.

Almost thirteen years. I had closed the last volume in September 2026, in my bedroom while rain struck the window. I stared at the year, trying to fit it beside that memory. I had crossed an ocean and arrived almost thirteen years before I had fallen asleep. I knew where I was now, but the body I wore and the memories that came with it made no more sense than before.

I handed the calendar back to Reina with hands I hoped were steady.

"Do you remember your name?" she asked.

Finally, a question I could answer. Whatever else had happened, I still knew my own name. But when I opened my mouth, I heard the woman from the corridor. She called the child by a name I almost caught, speaking softly enough that I leaned into the memory, trying to hear it again. The name slipped away. What came after it did not.

"Did you remember something?" Reina asked.

I barely heard her. The woman's voice was so clear that I glanced toward the door.

Let's see if anyone comes looking for you this time.