[Shopping list · Kazuo's phone] copper mesh (2 m) · copper rod · earthing strap · rubber mat · nappies · MORE nappies · kitchen foil · a jam jar · ask Ono about the truck
* * *
Ikazuchi Village — Day 3
Kazuo Arashi was holding a dead phone over his three-day-old son, and his wife was holding her breath.
"If he so much as squeaks," Ayaka said, "you take that thing out of the room."
"It's a phone, not a soldering iron. It's not even switched on."
"It doesn't need to be switched on. Three nights ago he melted the battery wall from across the room, and nobody switched that on for him."
That was fair. Kazuo lowered the phone very slowly and set it on the futon, about a hand's width from the baby's foot. It was the old spare he kept in the drawer for emergencies, the battery drained flat since spring.
The baby was asleep on his back with his fists up by his ears. He did not care about phones.
"Now we wait," said Kazuo.
"For what?"
"I don't know yet. That's why we wait."
They waited. Ayaka knelt close enough to snatch the baby up in one move. Kazuo sat cross-legged with his notebook, a paper one, because his tablet was sitting in a bag of rice in the kitchen, and neither of them believed the rice was going to fix it.
After ten minutes, the phone's screen lit up by itself.
Charging. 1%.
"..."
"..."
"Kazuo," said Ayaka. "There's no cable."
"I can see there's no cable."
"Then why is it charging?"
He didn't have an answer. He wrote 10 min — 1% — no cable in the notebook in very neat handwriting, which was what Kazuo did when he was frightened.
By lunchtime the phone was at 9%. By evening it was at 22%.
It was the first useful thing their son ever did for the family, and he slept through all of it.
* * *
By the end of the first week, Kazuo had four pages of notes. They came down to three rules.
One. Skin was safe. Ayaka could hold him all day, feed him, kiss his head and sleep with him on her chest, and she never felt more than a faint warmth, like a cat lying in the sun.
Two. Metal was not safe. They learned this by accident on Day 4, when the steel strap of Kazuo's watch brushed his son's foot during a nappy change. There was a crack like a twig snapping, a blue spark the size of a grain of rice, and a smell like a struck match. The baby frowned. The watch never worked again. Kazuo took it off, put it in a drawer, and from then on the whole family changed nappies with bare wrists.
Three. When he was calm, things near him slowly filled up. Phones, the radio battery, the torch. When he cried, everything came out at once.
"So he's like a capacitor," Kazuo said on Day 6, mostly to himself. "Tiny bits of charge collect in him from the air. When he's calm, it leaks out slowly into anything nearby. When he's upset, it all dumps out in one go."
"Don't call our son a capacitor."
"He's a very sweet capacitor."
Ayaka gave him a look over the top of the baby's head. Then she sighed and leaned back against the wall.
"It explains the sky," she said. "When he's touching me, I can't feel the weather at all. I thought my quirk was broken. But it's not broken. He's just eating all the static around him. There's nothing left for me to feel."
"That's a good theory."
"I know it is. I've had a lot of time to think." She looked down at the baby. "Feeding him at three in the morning, with no lights, and the whole sky gone quiet. I've been thinking about nothing else."
Kazuo moved across and sat beside her, and for a while neither of them wrote anything down.
* * *
Village Office — Day 5
A birth had to be registered within fourteen days. In Tokyo that meant a ward office and a queue. In Ikazuchi it meant Headman Fujita, the community hall, and a government tablet he treated like a holy relic.
"Name?" said Fujita, with his finger hovering over the screen.
Kazuo and Ayaka looked at each other.
They hadn't settled on one. They'd had a short list before the birth, and every night since, they had said the names over him one by one while he slept. Each name was fine. None of them felt like him. They loved him too much to give him a name that was only fine.
The door banged open behind them.
"Raijin," announced Isamu Tsuchiya.
"Isamu-san," said Fujita, without turning round. "This is a private matter."
"Nothing's private in this village. Morita told me they were here." Isamu came in, shaking rain off his hat, and held up his phone like a lawyer holding up evidence. "Name him Raijin. After the shrine. I have two hours of video that says it's the only sensible—"
"We are not naming a child after a god."
"Why not? It's a good name. It's strong."
"Because a name is something a child carries his whole life," said Fujita. "To every school, every office, every job. A god's name is a heavy thing to put on a baby who can't refuse it. Let the parents choose, Isamu-san."
Isamu opened his mouth, then closed it. He was a man who had lost arguments to Fujita for forty years, and he could feel another one going.
Ayaka was looking down at the baby asleep in the sling on her chest. He had one hand out of the blanket, curled around a fold of her shirt.
"Akio," she said.
Kazuo turned to her. "Akio?"
"Akio. 'Bright,' and 'life.'" She touched the tiny fist with one finger. "He came on the darkest night this village has ever had, and he's the brightest thing that's ever happened to us. So. Akio."
It was a lovely thing to say. Kazuo found he couldn't say anything back, so he just nodded.
"'Bright,'" Isamu repeated thoughtfully. "Like the lights."
"Like the future, Isamu-san."
"The lights went off, though. When he cried. The whole house. Morita said—"
"Like the future, Isamu-san."
"Like the future," Isamu agreed quickly.
Fujita typed it in: ARASHI, Akio. Born 14 August 2050. Ikazuchi, Gifu. As he hit Confirm, the screen flickered and the hall's overhead lights brightened for a moment, the way they did when the solar panels caught the noon sun.
It was raining. There was no noon sun.
The baby yawned.
Fujita looked at the lights. Then he looked at the baby. Then he looked at his tablet, which was still working, and decided that was the important part.
"Registered," he said. "Congratulations to you both."
He didn't mention the lights. He wrote nothing about them anywhere. But when the Arashis had gone, he sat alone in the hall for a while, looking up at the ceiling.
* * *
The Arashi Kitchen — Day 10
Granny Tome came on the tenth day, with a bag of mandarins and a folder of paper.
The paper surprised them. Nobody used paper anymore unless they didn't want something to exist on a network.
"I asked a friend at Takayama General for the screening procedure," she said, laying the pages out on the low table. "She printed it for me. I told her I was writing a guide for new mothers."
"Are you?" asked Ayaka.
"I am now. I'll write it after." Tome smoothed down the first page. "Listen carefully, both of you. The screening has three parts, and each one is a different problem."
She held up one finger.
"First, the blood test. It checks for the quirk factor. Every child born in the last twenty years has about an eighty percent chance of having one. If he has it, it shows up. We can't hide that, and we're not going to try. A baby with no quirk factor and a mother with Weathersense would look odd."
"So he has a quirk," said Kazuo. "That's fine. Most kids do."
"Most kids do. Second." Another finger. "The scan. They lay him in a machine that takes a picture of his nerves. Quirks leave marks on the body. Fire quirks leave them in the lungs, strength quirks in the muscles. The scan guesses what kind of quirk it is from where the marks are."
"What will it see in him?" Ayaka asked.
"I don't know." Tome said it plainly, because it was true. "But the machine at Takayama is old, and newborn scans are blurry at the best of times. Babies wriggle. Their nerves are still growing. Technicians see strange things on newborn scans every day and write 'normal for age.' I've watched them do it."
"And the third?"
Tome put down a third finger, and her face got serious.
"The field test. They stick sensor pads on his chest, arms and legs, and record what his body gives off for five minutes. Heat, sound, light, magnetism. Electricity." She let that sit for a moment. "That's the one that catches children. The Hayashi girl passed her first screening. Then she set her blanket smoking at four months, and the Prefectural Office sent her back for a second field test. Her pads read four hundred degrees."
Nobody said anything. Outside, it had started to rain again. Ayaka moved her hand to cover the baby's back.
"So we need a story the blood test and the scan agree with," Kazuo said slowly. "And we need the field test to see nothing."
"Yes. And I think we have the story already." Tome looked at Ayaka. "You're registered as Weathersense. Category E, atmospheric sensory. Children inherit their parents' quirks all the time, often in small, odd versions. If Akio's quirk goes on file as an inherited atmospheric sense, a tiny bit of static would make sense. Static is weather, more or less."
"And if the field test shows more than a tiny bit?"
"Then it's your job to make sure it doesn't." Tome turned to Kazuo. "Can you empty him? Before the test?"
Kazuo thought about it. He thought about it the way he thought about water pumps and broken inverters, quietly, from the bottom up.
"If he's a capacitor," he said, "I can discharge him. Ground him. Let the charge run off into the earth slowly, so it never builds up enough to make him cry." He frowned. "But he fills up again. I'd need to know how fast."
"Then find out," said Tome.
"Granny." Ayaka was looking at her, not at the papers. "If anyone finds out about this, you'll lose your licence. You signed his birth record. You'll be the midwife who lied to the state."
"Yes."
"Why would you do that for us?"
Tome began peeling a mandarin. She took her time with it. She had spent forty years in rooms where people needed someone to stay calm, and she had never lost the habit.
"Because that school promised Mrs. Hayashi a message every week," she said. "I was in the room when they promised. She's still waiting for the first one. And I'm seventy-three years old, Ayaka. I don't want to be in that room again."
She put half the mandarin in Ayaka's hand.
"Also," she added, "the fine is half a million yen. I've seen your house. You'd need to sell the chickens, the roof and Kazuo."
"I'm worth at least a hundred thousand," Kazuo said.
"Dear," said Tome kindly, "you're not."
* * *
Days 11 to 25
The problem with measuring Akio was that nothing digital survived long enough to measure him.
Kazuo's good multimeter died on Day 11. His spare died on Day 12. On Day 13 he stood in the kitchen with a jam jar, a strip of kitchen foil and a length of copper wire, and built an electroscope the way schoolchildren had built them three hundred years ago.
It was a simple thing. A wire went through the jar's lid. At the bottom of the wire hung two thin leaves of foil, side by side. When something charged touched the top of the wire, the charge ran down into both leaves, and since the same charge pushes itself apart, the leaves swung away from each other. The more charge, the wider they spread.
It couldn't tell him a number. It could tell him more and less, and it would never, ever break.
"You've built a toy," said Ayaka.
"I've built the only machine in Japan that can measure our son."
He touched the top of the wire very gently to Akio's bare heel. The two foil leaves sprang apart until they were standing straight out sideways, like a bird's wings.
"Is that a lot?" Ayaka asked.
"That's all it can do. That's the top of the scale."
"So he's full."
"He's full."
Then came the grounding mat. Kazuo sewed a square of copper mesh into an old cotton pillowcase, ran a wire from it out through the wall, and connected it to a copper rod he drove a metre and a half into the wet earth under the house. Between the mat and the rod, he soldered a resistor, so the charge would drain off slowly and gently instead of all at once.
They laid Akio on the mat, wrapped in his blanket. He slept.
After twenty minutes, Kazuo touched the electroscope to his heel. The leaves barely twitched.
"Empty," he said.
He wrote it down. Then he timed how long it took to fill again. When Akio was calm and asleep, it took about three hours to reach the top of the scale. When he was awake and fussing, about one hour. On Day 19, a small thunderstorm rolled over the valley, and Akio went from empty to full in eight minutes.
Kazuo underlined that one three times.
"So it has to be a dry day," he said that night. "No storms, not even a cloudy afternoon. And he can't be off the mat for long before the test. An hour, at most."
"The drive to Takayama is two hours," said Ayaka.
"I know."
"So he'll be full by the time we get there."
"I know. I'm working on it."
He solved it on Day 21, lying awake at three in the morning, and woke Ayaka up to tell her. She didn't thank him for it.
The answer was an earthing strap. Old petrol tankers used to drag a rubber-coated strip of metal along the road behind them so static couldn't build up and spark near the fuel. Kazuo would line Akio's car seat with copper mesh, connect it to the frame of the vehicle, and run a strap from the frame down to the road. The baby would ride for two hours with his charge trickling off through the truck and into the tarmac the whole way.
"What truck?" said Ayaka.
"Ono's truck."
"Ono's truck is a diesel. It's older than you."
"Exactly. It's the only vehicle in the village that doesn't have a battery big enough to matter." He was talking fast now, because he was proud of it. "Think about it. If we put him in Fujita's van, it's an electric. He'd charge the battery the whole way, or blow it up, or both. Ono's truck is just an engine and some steel. There's nothing in it for him to break."
Ayaka thought about this for a while.
"Kazuo," she said finally. "Are you telling me our son can only travel in the last diesel truck in Hida?"
"For now."
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
* * *
The truck cost them more than anything else. Ono Daisuke didn't want money for it, but diesel had been rationed since the Kobe riots, and a round trip to Takayama burned through about forty litres. At nearly ¥600 a litre, that was almost a month of Kazuo's rice.
Ono drove. He had been told it was a hospital visit for the baby. He didn't ask why the baby's car seat was wired to the truck frame with a copper cable, or why a strip of metal was dragging behind them along the road and throwing up sparks on the turns.
He had been the one who watched the Arashi house go dark on the night of the birth. He'd also been the one who said, in the village chat, that Isamu's two-hour video was too long to watch.
He had watched all of it, at home, alone. He just hadn't told anyone.
Ono Daisuke was a quiet man, and he had decided to stay that way.
The day they chose was Day 27. Ayaka had handed Akio to Kazuo the evening before, walked to the far end of the garden, and stood there for ten minutes with her eyes closed while she felt the sky properly for the first time in almost a month.
"Clear," she said, coming back. "Dry. High pressure for three days. It'll be the best weather of the summer."
Then she took her son back, and the sky went quiet in her head again.
She didn't say how much she missed it. She didn't need to. Kazuo saw her face.
* * *
Takayama General Hospital — Day 27, 4:40 p.m.
Haruto Ishida had done thirty-one quirk screenings since eight o'clock that morning, and he was starting to see babies when he closed his eyes.
He was twenty-six. He was the only screening technician for the whole Hida region, because the other one had transferred to Nagoya in spring and the job had never been refilled. His machine was twenty-two years old. It had faulted twice that week already, once on a girl with a light quirk and once on a boy with no quirk at all, and he had filed two maintenance tickets that no one had answered.
He liked babies. He was good with parents. But by the last slot of a Friday, Haruto Ishida mainly wanted to go home.
"Arashi, Akio," he read off his tablet. "Twenty-seven days old. That's cutting it fine."
"We live up in Ikazuchi," said the father. "The road's been bad."
That was true. Every road to Ikazuchi was bad. Haruto nodded and didn't think about it again.
The mother was holding the baby against her chest. An old woman, the midwife, stood beside them. The father hovered by the door, holding a large bag he didn't put down.
"Right," Haruto said, with a tired smile. "Three steps. A little blood, a scan and a field test. Twenty minutes, and you're done. Is he a crier?"
"No," said all three adults at the same time.
Haruto blinked. "Lucky you."
The blood test was easy. Akio didn't cry when the needle went in. He frowned at it, as if it had said something rude. The midwife, Tome, stroked his head and talked to him in a low, steady voice the whole time, and Haruto, who had heard a thousand mothers try to soothe a thousand babies, noticed that she was very, very good at it.
The tablet chimed.
Quirk factor: POSITIVE.
"He's got one," Haruto said. "No surprise there. Mother's quirk?"
"Weathersense," said Ayaka. "Category E. Atmospheric sensory."
"Father?"
"Quirkless," said Kazuo.
Haruto typed. Then he moved them across to the scanner, which was a padded tray inside a white plastic ring that hummed. Ayaka laid Akio on the tray and kept one hand on his tummy. The ring slid slowly over him from his feet to his head.
The image that came up on the screen was grainy and grey, the way newborn scans always were. Haruto leaned in and squinted.
There was a strange thickening along the spine. Odd threads that ran out along the arms, too dense, too regular. He'd never seen quite that pattern before.
He had, however, seen about four thousand newborn scans. Roughly a third of them had something he had never seen before. Babies were weird. Their nerves were still growing. Half the oddities on a newborn scan were gone by the age of three, and the other half were wriggling.
Analysis: Inconclusive. Recommend: Normal for age.
"Normal for age," Haruto said, and meant it. "Last one. The field test."
Behind him, Kazuo very quietly let out a breath.
* * *
The field test was a small padded bed with a nest of wires. Haruto stuck five sensor pads onto Akio: one on his chest, one on each arm, one on each leg. Each was about the size of a coin.
"This bit's five minutes," he said. "I'll play him a few sounds, warm the bed a little, cool it a little. We just watch what his body does. Most babies don't do anything at all."
He pressed Start.
A soft line crawled across the screen for each sensor. Heat: normal. Light: zero. Magnetism: zero. Electrical: a little higher than most, but not alarming.
One minute. Two minutes.
The machine played a gentle beep. Akio turned his head toward it and looked, in that steady way he had, at the speaker.
"He's very alert," said Haruto.
"He takes after his mother," said Kazuo.
Three minutes. Tome's eyes had not left the electrical line once.
Out in the corridor, a nurse dropped a steel tray.
It hit the hard floor with a crash like a car accident. Every adult in the room flinched.
So did Akio.
He didn't cry. It wasn't nearly enough to make him cry. He only jerked, the way all babies jerk at a loud noise, arms flying out, eyes snapping wide.
The electrical line on the screen shot straight up through the top of the graph and kept going.
The ceiling lights flickered. The tablet in Haruto's hand froze, went white, and then came back with a message in red letters.
ELECTRICAL ANOMALY. Reading exceeds sensor range. Possible equipment fault. Repeat test? Y / N
"..."
Haruto stared at it.
"Old building," Kazuo said, in a perfectly normal, helpful voice. "The wiring in these places is ancient. We get that up in the village all the time."
Haruto looked up at the flickering lights, then back at his machine.
"This thing is older than me," he muttered. "That's the third time this week." He reached over and pressed the reset. "Sorry. I'll have to run the full five minutes again. It'll just take a second to reboot."
"Of course," said Ayaka. "Take your time."
She didn't look at Kazuo. Neither did Tome. They didn't have to.
It would take the machine about a minute to restart. Akio had just dumped a burst of charge into the sensors, and a startle like that usually came with more behind it. He'd begun to fuss, small breathy sounds, his face working up toward something.
If he cried here, every light in the wing would go out.
Tome stepped neatly in front of Haruto's line of sight, asking him something about the paperwork. It was a very boring question, and she asked it very slowly.
Kazuo moved to the head of the bed.
He laid his left hand on his son's bare chest, just above the sensor pad. With his right hand, out of sight behind the bed, he took hold of the steel frame, which was bolted to the floor and wired to earth like every piece of hospital equipment in Japan.
Then he let his body be the wire.
It went through him like a hot needle. In through his left palm, across his chest, down his right arm and out into the steel. His teeth locked together. His whole right side went numb. It lasted perhaps two seconds, and it felt much longer.
Akio stopped fussing. He blinked up at his father with mild interest.
Kazuo smiled down at him. He kept smiling. His right hand stayed on the frame until it stopped shaking.
"Reboot complete," said Haruto, turning back. "Right, let's try that again."
The second test ran for the full five minutes. Heat: normal. Light: zero. Magnetism: zero. Electrical: low. A soft, slightly raised wobble, the kind of little fuzz you might expect from a baby who'd inherited a weather sense.
Field test: Within normal range.
"There we go," Haruto said happily. "Machine just needed a kick."
He typed it up quickly. He had typed up thirty-one of these already that day, and he could do it in his sleep.
Result: Inherited atmospheric sensory (maternal line). Minor static effects. Category: E Note: First field reading discarded. Suspected equipment fault (third this week). Maintenance ticket filed.
"Congratulations," he told them. "Category E. Same as Mum. He'll probably be able to tell you when to bring the washing in." He peeled off the sensor pads one by one. "You'll get the record on your MyNumber in a day or two. No follow-up needed."
"Thank you," said Ayaka. Her voice was steady. "Really. Thank you."
"It's my job." He yawned behind his hand. "Sorry. It has been a long day. Drive safe up that road."
Haruto Ishida went home at a quarter past five. He had made a sensible decision, for sensible reasons, and he felt good about it.
He also filed a fourth maintenance ticket. Nobody answered that one either.
* * *
Route 41, Northbound — 6:10 p.m.
The truck rattled up the mountain in the evening light with its earthing strap sparking behind it.
Ono drove and said nothing, which was what Ono did. Tome had fallen asleep against the passenger window before they'd left the hospital car park. Akio was asleep in his copper-lined seat with his fists up by his ears again, the same way he had slept on the third day, as though nothing interesting had happened to him at all.
Ayaka sat in the back with Kazuo. Halfway up the first hill, she reached across without a word and turned his right hand over.
There was a red mark spreading across his palm. It branched out from the centre, thin and delicate, exactly like a fern pressed into the skin.
He had one now, the same as Tome.
"Does it hurt?" she asked quietly.
"Only when I think about it."
"Then don't think about it."
"I'm trying." He looked at the mark. "It's not that bad. He's very small."
"He's not going to stay small."
"No," Kazuo agreed. "He's not."
Ayaka held his hand in both of hers for a while. The truck bounced over a pothole. Akio didn't wake.
"You didn't tell me you were going to do that," she said.
"I didn't know I was going to do it until I did it."
"Next time, tell me first."
"There won't be a next time," said Kazuo. "He's Category E now. It's done. He's safe."
Ayaka didn't answer. She was looking at their son.
She was a woman who could feel weather coming two days before it arrived. For the past twenty-seven days, she hadn't been able to feel anything at all. But she didn't need a quirk to know that a piece of paper saying Category E was not the same thing as safe.
She held her husband's hand and let him believe it, for one evening.
* * *
Osaka — Around the Same Time
In a small office above a VR arcade in Namba, a man named Tōru Sekiguchi was reading equipment-fault reports.
He read them every evening. Every medical scanner, every screening machine and every quirk sensor in western Japan quietly filed an error log whenever something strange happened, and a company Sekiguchi did not officially work for paid good money to receive a copy of all of them.
There were roughly two thousand a month. Almost all of them were real faults. Dirty sensors. Bad cables. A technician who had spilled coffee on the keyboard.
Sekiguchi's job was to find the ones that weren't.
He had been doing it for six years, and in six years he'd found three. His employer had been pleased with all three. Sekiguchi had not asked what happened to any of them, and he had never seen any of them again.
Takayama General Hospital · Screening Room 2 · Field sensor reading exceeded range during infant test. Room lights affected. Repeat test normal. Logged as equipment fault.
He looked at it for a while.
The machine at Takayama had faulted twice that week already. It was twenty-two years old. The repeat test was clean, and the baby had been filed as Category E, the most harmless category there was.
It was almost certainly nothing.
Sekiguchi tagged it anyway.
Priority: Low. Action: Recheck if anything further comes out of the Hida region.
He saved the file. It held a name, a date of birth, a village and one discarded reading.
It was a very short file.
It wouldn't stay short.
* * *
— ⚡ —
Maintenance Ticket #4471 · Takayama General Hospital, Screening Room 2
Issue: Field sensor spiked off-scale during infant test. Room lights flickered. Tablet froze.
Priority: Low.
Status (2051): Pending.
Status (2052): Pending.
Status (2054): Closed. Machine replaced. Old unit sent to an engineer for testing.
Engineer's note: No fault found. Honestly, it's in better shape than I am. Whatever spiked this machine, it wasn't the machine.