Keishin inhaled sharply. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes, but…” Hana frowned. “That cannot be right.”
“Who is your father looking for?”
Hana leaned as close as she could to the candle’s flame without burning her skin. She closed her eyes, listening intently.
“Hana?”
Hana straightened, looking dazed. “I…do not understand.”
“Help me find her.Your father’s prayer seems straightforward to me. It looks like your hunch was right. Your father isn’t missing. He’s gone off to look for someone. A woman.”
Hana stared into the candle’s flame. “There is only one woman my father has lost.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Okay. Good. We have a lead then. Do you have any idea where she is?”
Hana blew the candle out with a trembling breath. “I thought I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mother is dead. She died on your side of the door. That is what my father told me. Now it seems that either this prayer is a lie or my entire life is.”
“Hana…”
“There is one way to learn the truth.” Hana took the candle from the wall. “I am sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“For what must happen next. I am afraid that you are not going to like it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Skin and Ink
Second times were almost always more enjoyable than firsts. Kisses. Sex. Lab experiments. As far as Keishin was concerned, first times were created for the sole purpose of getting failure out of the way. Jumping into puddles was an exception. At the pawnshop’s pond, he had jumped to pull Hana out of what he believed to be a delusion. But when he dove into that puddle and landed in a field of pampas grass, he also dove into a cold new truth: Science was a lie.
In the span of a morning, he had discovered that smoke carried prayers and that candles could speak. And when Hana finally made good on her promise to tell him the truth about the pawnshop, he learned that discarded dreams and lost choices could be traded for peace. Though he did not believe in regrets, Keishin was almost willing to make one up to pawn for a quiet room in his head. Bent rules and broken scientific laws clattered inside him, crashing into everything he had seen behind the ramen restaurant’s door. And now Hana was going to show him more.
I must warn you. The next place will look…different. Whatever you see, do not panic.
Keishin repeated Hana’s words as he disappeared beneath the water. He imagined that he might emerge in darkness, even if he knew that there was no such thing. Many people fearedthe dark, but not him. Not since he was a boy and discovered the truth in one of the stacks of books he brought home every week from the local library. This had been the best thing about learning English. Books didn’t tire from answering his questions. They taught him that darkness was a human limitation, our eyes’ failure to see the entire spectrum of light. Had we been engineered better, we would have been able to see all the flickering remnants of the Big Bang that lit up the night.
Keishin broke through the surface of the puddle and clambered out. His heart pounded against his ribs. He had been wrong about emerging in darkness. The dark was something he understood. This place was not.
A stone-paved street lined with traditional machiya, narrow merchant houses made of wood, and dotted with weeping cherry blossom trees stretched out before him. Canals filled with clear water and schools of koi flowed along both sides of the road. The town reminded Keishin of the preserved historic Japanese villages he had wanted to visit, but with one difference that made every hair on his neck stand on end: The entire town was a scene in black and white, painted against a canvas of paper that stretched up to the sky. The sun. The clouds. The stones beneath his feet. Hana. She was drawn with expert strokes in black ink, with the greatest care taken in sketching the bow of her lips.
“Everything inside the scroll looks like this,” Hana said. “Even you.”
Keishin held up his hands in front of him. His fingers were outlined in black ink and shaded in with the subtlest brushstrokes. He forced his voice from his throat. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“A story. You read them in your world. We walk inside them.”
Keishin watched a sketch of a fallen leaf tumble in the breeze. “I’m beginning to think that nothing will ever make sense again.”
