Chapter 180: A Second Chair

The sun came up over the Grey March the way it always did, slowly and without ceremony, and Ryuji had never seen anyone watch it so hard.

Kaelith Reika stood on the estate’s outer wall in a gray blanket Marro had put around her shoulders. One hand rested on the cold stone. Her silver braid stirred in the fog. The light climbed over the hills and touched her face, and she closed her eyes and her mouth shook.

“It is warm,” she said. “I had forgotten that it is warm.”

Selene stood a pace to her left with her arms folded. She had not forgiven anyone yet, and she was keeping it up out of principle. Voldranis stood on the right, ash gray and unsteady, but the black line under his nose had dried and stayed dry. Alexei hovered behind them all with a doorframe he had apparently decided to carry everywhere.

“I am still angry with you both,” Selene said, to the sunrise.

“Noted,” said Kaelith, without opening her eyes. “Take your time.”

“I intend to take four hundred years.”

“That seems fair. Might I sit down for some of it?”

Selene unfolded one arm. She took her mother’s hand in hers, and the two of them stayed like that, side by side, saying nothing, while the fog burned off the hills.

[System Log: Day 174]

[THE SUN HAS RISEN OVER THE ESTATE. A WOMAN WHO WAS DEAD FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS WATCHED IT]

[I HAVE LOGGED SUNRISES SINCE BEFORE THERE WERE EYES TO SEE THEM. I DID NOT KNOW IT WAS A THING TO WATCH]

[THE KEEPER’S ARM IS QUIET. THE WIFE’S WRIST IS WARM. NOTHING IS ON FIRE. I AM SO TIRED OF BEING SURPRISED, AND I AM NOT TIRED]

Breakfast was loud.

Bram had made enough for thirty. Keiko had overruled him on the rice. Dmitri sat at the end of the table with a mug of tea and a color in his face that Marro’s physician had stared at for ten minutes without comment before declaring his lungs clear for the first time in eleven years. Mireille had not let go of his sleeve since the garden. Yui sat beside Tetsu, who wore a dead man’s jacket and a very small, very peaceful smile and was eating his third pancake with the focus of someone defusing a bomb.

At the far end, on a cushion Keiko had piled on a chair so his chin would clear the table, sat the boy.

He held his fork very carefully. He had stopped glancing at Ryuji’s face, which was still, for the moment, the one he wore. Ash, the gray stray who owned the kitchen windowsill, sat with her tail curled around her paws and watched him with what Ryuji could only call suspicion.

Selene set down her coffee. She did it quietly, and the table noticed anyway.

“Tabun,” Yui said, under her breath, to Tetsu. “I’m calling it. He needs a name.”

“We’ll get there,” Selene said. She turned in her chair and looked down the length of the table at the child. “I made a promise last night. I will keep it where everyone can hear. Are you sure?”

The whole kitchen went still.

The boy set his fork down. He looked at her, and Ryuji saw it cross his face, the old pull, the thing he was made of. The wish to say yes. His shoulders went tight and his small hands knotted in his lap.

“No,” he said.

It came out thin and breathless, as if it cost him something to say.

“No. I’m not sure. About any of it. About the pancakes. About you. About whether I’m allowed to be here.” He drew a shaky breath. “I’m not sure about anything.”

“Good,” said Selene. “Thank you.”

His face changed.

It did not melt. It loosened, like a knot letting go. Ryuji’s cheekbones slid away from him. The line of the jaw softened, the brow rounded, the hair went straight and dark and fell into his eyes. In the space of a breath he was a thin plain boy of nine with gray eyes like river stones and a faint scatter of freckles. He looked like nobody. He looked like himself.

Keiko put her hand over her mouth.

“Oh,” said the boy, touching his own cheek. “That’s… that’s me.”

“It’s a nice face,” Yui said, hoarsely.

“Is it?”

“It’s perfectly good.”

“What shall we call him?” Mireille asked.

“Maybe,” said Yui. Her voice wobbled. “In Japanese. Tabun. It means maybe. Probably. Perhaps.” She looked at the boy. “It’s the opposite of what you were made to be.”

He considered this with great seriousness.

“I like it,” he said, slowly. “It’s very unsure.”

“Tabun,” said Keiko, tasting it. “Hm. It will do.” She leaned over and put another pancake on his plate. “Eat, Tabun.”

He ate. At the end of the table, Ash gave a small, flat blink, and returned to watching him as if she had known the name all along.

[That evening, Ryuji told himself later, was the first one in his life when he knew exactly what he wanted before anyone asked.]

He found Selene in the corridor after the plates were cleared, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and a very careful expression.

“You promised something,” she said.

“Twelve minutes.”

“No, that was the other one.” She did not look at him. “The one about the second chair.”

He had been hoping she’d forgotten. He had been hoping, a little, that she wouldn’t.

“I want to open the door to Yokohama,” he said. “I’m telling you first.”

“Yes,” said Selene, immediately. A ghost of a smile touched her mouth. “I would like that.”

Keiko pressed a fat envelope of yen into his hand at the door with the grave expression of a woman handing over a weapon. “No mustard yellow,” she said, in Japanese. “It clashes with your complexion.”

“I’ll remember.”

“You will not.”

The furniture store was a vast blue-and-white warehouse near the harbor with a parking lot the size of a battlefield, and Selene walked in as though invading it.

She had put the trench coat back on, and the scarf, and the sunglasses, and she paused inside the automatic doors to let the cool air and the soft music and the smell of new plastic wash over her. The aisles ran off in every direction. There were bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, assembled and empty, lit like stage sets.

“It is a village,” she said, in the common tongue, in a low reverent voice. “Of rooms. For nobody.”

“They’re models. You walk through and pick.”

“Pick what?”

“Whatever you like.”

She stared at him through the dark glasses. “That is a considerably more frightening sentence than I expected.”

They found the dining section by following the arrows. A young woman in a blue apron appeared at Ryuji’s elbow, bright as a button. “Welcome! Are you looking for a set?” She beamed at him. “Oh, you’re so tall. And your Japanese is wonderful. Are you from overseas? Are you two newlyweds?”

She was looking at him a half second too long. Ryuji felt Selene go still beside him.

“We are married,” said Selene, in carefully enunciated Japanese, in the voice of a woman reading a sentence off an iron wall. “He is my husband.”

The assistant blinked. “Oh! Of course. I’m so sorry.”

“It is no trouble,” said Selene, and then, apparently unable to stop, “He is very good at pancakes.”

There was a very long, very polite silence. The assistant retreated with her hands raised. Ryuji discovered that he was biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood.

“Do not,” said Selene, in the common tongue, scarlet to the ears.

“I’m not.”

“I said it like a threat.”

“You said it like a fact.”

“It was both.” She pushed her sunglasses up on her nose with a trembling finger. “I am a possessive woman, apparently. I have discovered it in a furniture store. It is not a dignified place to learn a thing.”

“It’s a good place,” Ryuji said. “I learned I liked the way you said it.”

She made a sound like a kettle and marched down the aisle without him.

The chairs were arranged along one wall like an exhibition. There were dozens, plain and fancy, black and white and wood, and Selene walked along them with her hands behind her back like a general inspecting troops.

“Sit,” she said, over her shoulder. “In each. I will watch.”

“Why?”

“Because it is your chair.”

“It’s your chair. You’re the second one.”

“I am the second chair. You are the first. We have not yet established who is choosing.” She stopped. “Begin.”

He sat in a black one. It was fine. He sat in a white one. It was fine. He sat in a gray one with a straight back and a price tag that said the number he would have known how to read last month, and waited for the old quiet voice in his head to tell him whether it was a good deal.

Nothing came.

He stood. He sat again. A strange, hollow panic began to climb his throat.

“Selene.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell which one.”

She did not laugh. She stepped closer, lowered herself onto the arm of the nearest chair, and looked at him.

“Which do you like?”

“I don’t know.”

“It is a simple question.”

“I know it is.” His voice came out rough. “That’s the problem. I don’t have anything for it. I used to look at these and I’d know. Price. Weight. Life. The numbers would sort it. I’d pick the one that cost least and lasted longest and never once ask myself…” He stopped. “I can’t remember the last time I chose anything because I wanted it.”

Selene was silent for a long moment.

“Then we will find out together,” she said gently. “Sit in each one. Not for what it costs. Tell me what your body says.”

He sat. He sat in all of them, one at a time. He told her the black one felt like a waiting room and the white one felt like a hospital. Somewhere around the twelfth chair, at the end of the row, half hidden behind a display of floor lamps, he found a squat ugly thing with a round back and wide arms, upholstered in the exact shade of mustard that Keiko had forbidden.

He sat down in it, and his shoulders dropped an inch without his permission.

“This one,” he said.

“It is hideous.”

“It looks tired.”

“It looks,” said Selene, “like a chair that has given up on the world and is waiting for someone to feed it soup.” She sat down in the one beside it. Her sunglasses had slid down her nose. She looked, in the fluorescent light, absurdly young. “I want it. I want two. I will sit in mine and be unbearable.”

“Keiko said no mustard.”

“Keiko is not the second chair.”

They carried them out to the car park themselves, one apiece, like two people evacuating a very small, very strange kingdom.

The apartment smelled of the ficus and of clean laundry. They set the first chair at the little table, facing the wall, and the second across from it, and then Selene stood back with her hands on her hips and nodded once, as at a battle won.

“There.”

They ate lunch from a convenience store bag, onigiri and cold tea and a bruised pear. Selene held her rice ball like a live grenade and then discovered that it had a surprise in the middle and said so, in a voice of enormous betrayal. She sat in her mustard chair with her feet tucked up under her and her hair coming down.

“I am going to be unbearable now,” she announced.

“You’ve started.”

“Tell me one thing you like. Not a thing that is useful. A thing you like.”

He thought. The wide bare room in his head waited, kindly.

“This,” he said.

“This what?”

“This table. Right now. You in that chair.” His throat was tight. “I’d like that to stay.”

Selene looked at him across a table meant for one, in a room with a brick wall for a window. Her eyes were very bright.

“That,” she said, very quietly, “is a very good thing to like.”

They went home at dusk.

The estate kitchen was warm and loud and smelled of garlic. The household sat around the long table, with Keiko directing the rice and Dmitri laughing at something Mireille had said, and Tabun, in his own plain face, sat on his stack of cushions between Yui and Tetsu, swinging his feet.

He looked up when they came in. His eyes went past them, over their shoulders, to the windowsill.

Ash had stopped licking her paw.

She sat with her ears forward and her tail very still, and the boy stared at her, and a faint, strange smile crossed his small face.

“Hello, Kindness,” he said, politely. “You can stop pretending now. I know it’s you.”

The cat blinked once, slow and gold.

Then she stood, stretched, and, in front of the entire household, in a voice like a very old lady who has been waiting a long time for someone to notice the kettle, said:

“About time. I have been feeding that man for a hundred years.”