Loups-Garous (5 page)

Shizue thought to herself that this wasn't her normal spiel. This was something the area bureau chief of the juvenile counselors cooperative should be saying.

The chief in question was scowling and simply sat there trying to see where this was going. He wasn't upset. He was resigned. It probably didn't matter to him what happened either way.

“And so…” Shizue continued. She had no choice but to. “And so the information I have on the children is all provided to me by them. We are forbidden from acting as a third party without any notice to the child in question. Doing that would be a violation of the relationship of trust between the center and the child, and it cannot be done.”

“Relationship of trust…” The area chief wrinkled his nose. “Well, I'm just a patrol officer, and I don't understand these more complicated things, but speaking on my own behalf, with or without this counseling you're talking about, the world isn't a better place at the end of the day. Crimes committed by minors have certainly shown a tendency to decrease, and I don't know about the numbers, but the actual reality of the situation hasn't changed. When you say we can't use the word ‘education'…”

The police officer looked around for reactions from other people of his generation.

“When we were growing up there was still school, but everyone complained that we were just being trained. I mean, as you pointed out, no one really trusted the schools, but what we have now is not so different, I don't think. If anything I think it's gotten worse. There's no discipline.

That's probably not good.”

“Could you not make this personal? Subjective interpretations are unacceptable to further such discussion.”

The police officer went “Oh” and cowered at the neck. He was no good.

“The point is, I'm against it.”

“You're a counselor. You were just brought out here from central, weren't you?”

“Of course I don't have the power to make any decisions. I'd like to hear what the regional head and area chief have to say about it.”

The two in question both voiced strange sounds.

“In any case we have no precedent. We have to come to a consensus with the whole national organization of youth counselors.”

“There's no need for that,” Ishida pronounced.

“No need?”

“Yes. Actually we've already broadcast news of this to all reporting areas outside the one in question, pursuant to the requirement.”

The local center's director muttered in an uncertain tone that he
hadn't been told anything about this
.

“There was no established route of communication for this kind of broadcast announcement.”

“Of course, the very fact that we had information of this nature was in itself not to be made public, so…”

“Are you covering something up?” Shizue asked.

“Covering up? We are simply not publicizing it is all.”

“You're covering up precisely because you know this will be recognized as uncouth behavior.”

“That is not true.”

Ishida spoke up affirmatively again.

“This situation calls for immediate action. However, the reality is that there is no prior legal protocol for this kind of response. That's why we requested cooperation and reached out to the adolescent welfare department through the respective prefectural offices—to see if we couldn't find the most legal way to do this, in a best-case scenario. As it is, we are unable to compel compliance. But we were able to obtain the consent required. Rest assured they thoroughly studied the request. However, as has been mentioned more than once, this is an incredibly delicate situation, without so much as being illegal. Which is why we're issuing a formal gag order so as not to create any confusion with the public.”

“You're saying the welfare department answered positively to your request to keep this sharing of data a secret?”

“The gag order was issued by the police, but if anyone's going to benefit from it in the event of such a data share, it's the adolescent welfare department that provides the data.”

He'd been holding this information back as a courtesy, or at least that was what it sounded like.

Shizue stared at the bureau chief.

His mouth was a perfectly upturned V.

“You're saying there is a precedent then.”

“Yes, that's right.”

“That's how we convinced central.”

The bureau chief and Shizue stood up.

“Either way it's a very unique illegal precedent. It's clear this isn't just the piecing together of established facts. It's an abuse of power backed by destructive legalese.”

“Whether it's an abuse of power or not, it falls in line with legislative privilege.”

“Our job is not to make laws, of course, so there's nothing we can do about this.”

Shizue looked at the edge of her desk.

It was useless. There was no arguing this.

It was a foregone conclusion.

This wasn't going to be documented.

And that was exactly why they'd gone out of their way to assemble this emergency meeting. Everyone was now implicated.

Shizue stopped breathing.

She couldn't stand the smell.

CHAPTER
003

HOW DO I
describe this smell?
Hazuki couldn't stop asking herself.

RGB. CMYK. Describing colors was easy. Hazuki didn't know the words herself, but there were apparently any number of ways to describe various timeless color palettes. There existed even a plentiful lexicon for shape and texture. Brightness and temperature could be quantified. Sounds had wavelengths, and there were even ways to describe timbre. Sound itself was a way to describe aural input. There were even mimetic words to describe touch.

Sight, touch, sound could all be described.

When it came to taste and fragrance however, things got really miserable.

Even taste though could be described with any combination of sweet, spicy, bitter, and sour. There weren't such categories for smell. If you took apart the components of a smell you could probably quantify aspects, but smell could not be understood in numbers. There was unfortunately no figurative translation of this hypothetical math.

That was why there was no more concrete way to describe a smell than to announce what it was you were smelling.

But if you said something smelled like roses, a person who'd never smelled a rose would not know what it was you meant. You could say it was intoxicating or stimulating, but those things meant nothing. You could also say something smelled sweet or sour, but those were expressions associated with flavor; well, except for something that smelled fishy, but that described a situation, not necessarily a smell.

Something either smelled good or it smelled bad.

Smells were generally categorized as pleasant or unpleasant.

Particular distinctions or unique characteristics could not be precisely described. This smell was not necessarily good or bad. It was unlike any other smell. The smell of the city. The smell of outside. The smell of air.

So this was the smell of water.

Water from a faucet didn't smell like this.

In any case it wasn't a smell you found indoors.

“I'm wet,” Ayumi said. “Is this material really water repellent?”

Hazuki didn't know either. “A small clear droplet of water crystallizes like dew.”

When she said that, Ayumi told Hazuki that real dew was whiter. Hazuki didn't know what real dew was. Was it like when the cable broke down and data got noisy, creating a white haze?

The air was clear but the town was dark.

The buildings were old. There was not even a uniform architecture.

If it looked sooty out it was because the building materials were blackened. Verticals were all a little crooked. Cables connecting the tops of utility poles to individual doors drooped, only adding to the effect of incoherence. This region hadn't been retrofitted with underground cables. Meaning that the town must have been built at least twenty years ago.

It was Section C.

More commonly known as an extinct red-light district.

Of the two great residential zones in the region, one of them was Section C. As the name implied, it hadn't always been a living quarter, but if asked, Hazuki could not say what it was. She had the impression from the phrase “red-light district” and the age of the buildings that the area must have been a low-level living quarter, but she'd been told over and over that there was nothing different about the people who lived here.

That much was obvious. Where someone came from or what they did was no reason to judge them. It wasn't possible. It was so obvious it didn't bear repeating, and careful instruction on that matter made such discrimination actually seem less natural.

However, Hazuki'd just learned that there was a time in the past when geographic discrimination and physical discrimination had sparked conflict. Everything had a troubled history. She thought that to bring excessive attention to it would actually have the opposite of the intended effect.

If you keep saying we're all equal, people will start to think we aren't.

In reality, there happened to be a disproportionately large number of Section C residents who were economically depressed. Section C also happened to be located next to the most ethnically diverse residential section—Section B.

There may be no difference between us but there is disparity.

You could tell just by looking at the color coding of the
navigator
. Public institutions with green areas were all green, commercial regions were blue, and the industrial areas were gray. General residential sections—save for the one under development, Section A—were mostly marked white. And yet Section B was yellow and Section C was magenta. Where B and C overlapped was red. It wasn't to denote how dangerous it was. It was ostensibly just color-coordination, but red was officially designated a color of danger, and thus the association was impossible to avoid. Even a child could discern the significance of a map simply color-coded in red, with a little thought. So…

They couldn't conceive of discrimination against people who lived in that region, but Hazuki couldn't say with any confidence that if the preconceived notion of the area being dangerous wasn't germinating deep in the minds of these children.

But if they'd not kept insisting we were equal I'd never think about it
, thought Hazuki.

People who lived in the same region didn't have intimate relations to begin with. Most communications took place on monitors through cables, so there was no way of knowing where they lived or what thy looked like; their gender, age, or even ethnicity.

The information broadcast through the wires was the only reality. Most of reality was a lie.

There was no difference between truth and falsehood.

There was no point in knowing it.

Proof of this lay in the fact that Hazuki had no idea of the names or provenance of most of the people she'd physically met in communication groups.

Under that circumstance, Hazuki thought it would be difficult for these same people to start any kind of antagonism.

Maybe these were just the ramblings of a child.

Hazuki took another look at the view. She couldn't get her eyes used to it. She couldn't get used to either the front or back. If the cityscape were in a monitor, it wouldn't matter how dissimilar the elements were on screen, she'd just turn her head and be in her room again.

She couldn't get stable. The width of the road, height of the buildings, and layout of the city were all curiously inconsistent, her sense of scale totally inverted. She couldn't place herself in it. She felt as though she might just float off into space.

She looked around and ended her gaze upon Ayumi.

Ayumi was looking at her portable monitor.

“It should be around here. Tsuzuki must—” Ayumi bent her neck before finishing the words, tilting her face away from Hazuki.
She must live in Section C
. Ayumi swallowed the rest of the sentence.

Hazuki, uncharacteristically, was also thinking about this. Mio Tsuzuki and Section C didn't go well together. But the address they got from their search clearly indicated that she lived in the area.

Yet for her to think such a thing must mean that despite herself Hazuki had some prejudice against Section C. Because all she knew about Mio Tsuzuki was that she was at an unusually high study level, she assumed that Tsuzuki couldn't be from Section C, and therefore assumed this was some kind of coincidence. Considering she wasn't conscientiously disdaining the assumption, there was no mistaking Hazuki had some kind of prejudice.

“Oh.” Ayumi made a small sound.

Hazuki expanded her gaze out toward where Ayumi was looking.

Just beyond an unusually narrow road.

Another even narrower road sandwiched between walls made of cheap building material.

“Yabe.”

A groupmate.

She had trouble putting a face to the name. In regular clothes, it'd be even harder. She concentrated her eyes. She started to recall what she'd looked like. Skin nearly translucent, wearing pink contacts that were popular a while ago. It looked good on her, so it didn't strike Hazuki as outdated.

She didn't know much else. But that she remembered that much must mean Yabe was a girl from her class. No matter how tenuous the relationship, she could at least distinguish between people she'd only seen on monitors and those she'd physically met. And if she'd met them in person it couldn't have been anywhere outside of the communication group.

Speaking of which…

Yabe, Yuko Yabe…she hadn't been in class today.

I wonder what she's doing
.

Yuko Yabe looked up, exhausted, and stood under the eaves. She didn't appear to be wearing any rain gear and had on only a light layer of clothing. She must have been soaked.