Tonight, We Exorcise the Moon

Rei had two copies of the execution warrant. Sometimes prisoners would tear up the first copy, as she told us.

Nagi wouldn't even look at it.

She had leaned her chair back to look out the window above his head. There wasn't much: wire in the glass, a piece of sky, almost a full moon. Rei tucked the other copy back into the pile. He'd gone through it in his head, even how to handle when she cried, and now she wouldn't talk.

"Nagi."

"You're early."

"It's eleven fifteen. The sentence is to be put into effect at the hour of twelve." The orders are to-

"Of course, I am aware of it. Care to shift a little? You are in my way."

He moved out of the way before he knew he was moving and then stayed there, disappointed with himself. Her chair was resting on four legs.

There is no family name at the top of the warrant. No reference to the bruise across her cheekbone. Probably around nineteen, his age, and barefooted in a gray smock. I wish they'd let her keep her shoes. He would confront a witch gladly, but the barefootedness disturbed him.

Silver script sealed her cuffs. Or so he at least understood. They dampened her magic and responded solely to the seal hanging beneath his collar. That had been five months ago. He had yet to use it on a person.

"Do you have a final statement?"

"The moon needs exorcising."

Rei glanced at the charge. Attempted severance of the founding covenant. He'd thought it was a ward-post that she'd damaged.

"You can write that down," she said. "Or you can help. I need the roof, your seal, and a minute."

Appeals to the chapter

"They're downstairs tuning the bell. You know they won't come."

He had. The hall's senior members were all kept until the twelfth chime. The others had gone off to verify the harbor wards, leaving Rei with a prisoner, a roof, and orders not to upset the ceremony by doing his first execution. A sign of trust, said his mission slip. He had read it through hoping for someone else's.

Nagi looked over the table of property. She'd paper-clipped her notebooks and secured them with six rubber bands, she believed, sixty-one. There was a brush, a pen frayed at the tip, and a picture of two kids on a seawall.

"Tanabe," she said. "The ferry mechanic who left his little girl behind. I mean, was he somewhere in your reports?"

Rei watched him. "You're procrastinating."

"Of course I am. Was he?"

He had been working on the weekly digest all afternoon. Tanabe was on page six, right before the tide tables. Nagi moved forward in his seat the moment he looked up.

The girl writes in. A head injury by any chance? I bet your doctor couldn't detect one. He will remember his neighbour, his hometown, and all the rest except the girl! See if he made her any promises he didn't keep.

"Where did you hear about him?"

Hirano reads the paper for the night shift. It is loud enough to be heard from the stairs.

That's what it was, yes, awfully annoying. Rei had heard him already.

"And you heard about a promise?"

"No. I'm not sure. Maybe a birthday. Or some small thing he thought he could make up for later."

There was a voice message with the digest. Six twelve the night before: I'll be there, Yui. I'll be there. Promise. Save me a seat. Rei had added the medical results to his synopsis and left it that way. The bio was getting too long.

He then collected both copies of the warrant.

"If this is a trick, it wouldn't change the time."

Nagi was watching him now. "All right."

*

Hirano was at the end of the hall, trying to fasten the ceremonial collar. "Waiting to hear the sentence again," Rei quoted the clause for a final reading: "A prisoner shall hear the sentence while in earshot of the original record of the offense." The Archive had that record. They would need the key.

Hirano paused his constant fumbling to verify his seal.

"If the bell goes, I'm going. You'll have to lock up."

Rei agreed far too easily. Downstairs he carried Nagi and one of her books. Its cover had been caught in a rubber band he'd lifted it. She'd lunged, the cuffs digging painfully into her wrists, but he'd released it gently. He'd left the photograph between its pages, as well, although she hadn't asked him to.

The dehumidifiers of the Archive were operating. He knew the room well enough in the daytime, when the clerks crammed the aisles with trolleys and grumbled about the cold. Tonight he could hear Nagi's footsteps as he crossed the room. He opened the incident cabinet and placed Tanabe's file under the lamp.

Nothing wrong. The foreman said nothing had changed about the guy's work and behavior. Still telling the same bad jokes. Rei went off the daughter's account (copied down by a teacher when Yui was nine).

Her father had just entered when the lights in the school hall went up. His queried what kid he was there for.

Rei looked at the physician's notes once more. There was a diagram indicating a crescent-shaped burn under Tanabe's tongue. He hadn't noticed any, and it had cleared up by morning. Conditions: sky: clear moon: visible.

"Everyone's broken a promise before," Rei said. "You could put that in just about any file and there's going to be something there."

Choose another now. Domestic disputes, they're. Pull the drawer first and open the door.

He pulled. It stuck.

"I was doing the bindings here for two years," she told him when he picked it up. "They kept saying they were going to fix that."

A night nurse. Rang back for a last-minute shift after promising to keep her sister company in a hospital waiting room. No longer her sister by dawn. Same burn, same clear sky. Rei laid the sketch next to Tanabe's and went off in search of a third.

Sakai, a printer. 'That one was a loan,' and the relieving note alone was enough that Rei slid it to the edge of the desk before taking up the rest of the document.

Debt discharged. Promise fulfilled.

"He paid. Still forgot his business partner."

Nagi leaned over the file. "You have a receipt?"

"That's the summary."

"I can see that. Where's the receipt?"

He discovered it was pasted to a backing sheet. The lender's due date was Friday, but the repair was part of the receipt. When he lifted a corner, the thin paper split.

Nagi caught his wrist. "No. Keep this open."