“I thought you said that reasons didn’t matter.”
“So it wasn’t a kiss.” Keishin’s face grew somber. “And I thought that I was the only scientist here. It was an experiment to prove that I was wrong and you were right.”
“Was I?”
Keishin lay back in the boat, casting his eyes over the bulbs above them. “Yes.”
“You were right too.”
“About what?”
“The kiss. The first one was an experiment.”
“And the second one?”
“Was the second real choice I have ever made.”
“And was it a good or bad thing?”
—
Unanswered questions were like boxes you never opened, their contents vanishing and reappearing, stretching and contracting, being nothing and everything all at once. Hana did not make a habit of hoarding them. In her world, it wasn’t difficult. For every question that had ever crossed her mind, there was a black-and-white answer that stripped it of all mystery.
But tonight she sat on a rubber boat, a box containing Keishin’s question balancing on her lap. The question knocked on the box’s lid, trying to get her attention. Hana tried toignore it. She kept her eyes on Keishin as he slept, watching his song dance behind his lids as he dreamed. The box rattled louder. Hana heaved a sigh. She leaned closer to the box and heard the whisper inside it.Was it a good or bad thing?Hana touched her lips, remembering the moist heat of Keishin’s mouth.
His question was simple. Answering it was not. If she was going to find her parents and bring them home, it was not an answer she could ever say out loud. She tossed the box into the water, drowning it in the reflection of eleven thousand moons.
Chapter Twenty-three
Sand
The most comfortable bed in the world was the one you needed to get out of before you were fully awake. In this instance, the bed wasn’t a bed, but a rubber raft floating on extremely purified water. Keishin turned to his side and reached for a snooze button that wasn’t there. He pressed it anyway. The last few minutes of sleep were always thicker, creamier, and more delicious than all the hours that came before them.
“Kei,” Hana said. “You need to get up.”
Sand whipped against Keishin’s face. He spat grains out and pried his eyes open. Sunlight shimmered over golden dunes.
“We’re here.” Hana turned her collar up against the blowing sand.
Keishin scanned the desert. Every trace of the Super-Kamiokande detector had vanished, but the memory of Hana’s lips on his remained. Understanding how he felt about the kiss was easy. Hana was an intelligent, beautiful woman, and Keishin did not deny being attracted to her. But finding words to describe what he felt about her was proving to be more difficult. She was the moon in the water, close enough to touch, yet beyond reach. “Where is ‘here’?”
“The end of your song,” Hana said.
“I can see why we couldn’t use water to travel to this place. Please tell me that the museum isn’t far.”
“It isn’t,” Hana said. “This is the Kyoiku Hakubutsukan. We are standing on it. We need to purchase tickets so that we can go inside.”
“Is this the part where you fish something out of that magical bag of yours?”
“I wish I could, but the only currency the museum accepts is time.”
“And how exactly are we supposed to pay with time?”
“We spend and waste time every day. This is no different. The price of a ticket is little more than a few seconds, but they need to be precious ones.”
“Precious? Does that mean that I have to give up a happy memory?”
“Not a happy one. A mistake. It will be stored in the museum’s archives.” Hana grabbed a fistful of sand. She straightened and unclenched her fingers, letting the wind snatch the grains from her palm. “As these are.”
