A small object bobbed to the surface, unearthed by their digging: small, jeweled boxes with turtles carved onto the lids.
Lee clutched his box with his blood-slick hand, ran his fingers against the design, wiping the mud away.
Sen had less light, so she squinted through the darkness, trying to make out the design in the shadows.
At once, they opened the boxes.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Legend of Urashima Taro, Part III
Urashima Taro returned home with his gift from the princess Otohime, but found that the world had irrevocably changed in his absence.
The buildings were taller than they had been only days ago, now made of a strange material that glinted like the sun across the sea. The roads had turned black and firm, and strange machines rushed across them at dizzying speeds. The people wore foreign clothes, the undyed robes of the poor fishing village a distant memory.
Something was very wrong.
Urashima Taro walked slowly up the beach, the box from Otohime clutched tightly in one hand, and asked a man resting on the shore what had happened to his village.
“Nothing has happened,” the man said, seeming not to understand the question.
Urashima Taro walked home in his strange new world, but found that the home he had built with his mother no longer stood. A new one had been built in its place.
How long have I been gone?he thought, dread settling in his stomach.
“What year is it?” he asked an old man who stood outside smoking.
The man told him, and Urashima Taro realized that he had been gone not for three days, but for three hundred years.
His mother had died alone, never knowing where her son had gone.
He fell to his knees in grief and cursed the princess Otohime for her gift that had ruined him. He gripped the box she had given him in his trembling hands.
Then, forgetting her warning, he opened it.
A cloud of smoke burst forth, and with it, out came the time he had borrowed while at the emperor’s palace beneath the sea. The stolen years rushed over him, centuries of human life devouring him in a single breath. His hair turned gray and his skin turned sallow, his bones flimsy and muscles weak as he rapidly aged. His flesh dissolved and he collapsed into a pile of ashes, which the wind carried away.
Part IV
The Beginning
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lee
In the house behind the sword ferns, there was a man, and a murderer, and a stain.
The house was nearly two centuries old, its walls accustomed to drinking up soot from charcoal burned through the long winters. Its tatami mats had darkened from the sting of sunlight, hiding the footprints of the last family who lived there. The cypress walls with tobacco varnish should have swallowed even the darkest stain whole, kept it safe and secret.
But there it was, all the same—a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger had smeared it like a tally mark.
Lee Turner pressed his thumb to the stain, scraped a bit of it onto his nail, then brought it to his lips and licked. He could taste the wood varnish more than anything else, but yes, that was definitely blood, in a place it shouldn’t have existed.
“Are you... sucking your thumb?” his father said.
Lee quickly pulled his finger out of his mouth, stuffing his hands in his pockets before turning to face his father.
“Just biting off a hangnail,” Lee said, shrugging.
