“We are very, very disappointed.” It was her third try, and it still came out feebly. “We thought we made it super clear that any, any change in material, maker hand, machine, or method, however small or irrelevant it may seem, must be notified beforehand.”
The proprietor scratched his head. “I really don’t think—”
“Silent change is an industrial crime—”
“Kiri-chan. Listen. I do want to help. How exactly do you see it changed?”
Kiriko wanted to sigh heavily putting out all the breath she’d been holding, but forced herself to exhale very, very slowly. She took the ink bottle she’d most recently purchased from this shop out of her satchel, shook it about ten times, and placed it on the counter. Minute, iridescent particles swirled inside, among an indigo colorant. The particles went down to the bottom as the ink surface stopped sloshing. Kiriko folded her arms, Well?
The proprietor bent over, looked carefully, and then looked back at the customer with a perplexed frown. “What exactly—”
Kiriko looked surprised for a moment. She then pulled a piece of thin, soft leather out of one of many pockets inside her bag, and then a thin capped brush from another, uncapped it, ran a stroke on the leather with the ink from the same bottle, and showed the line to the proprietor. See?
The older man rubbed his chin. “Sorry, Kiri-chan, I have no idea what you want me to see here.”
“The—the-the speed at which the particles precipitate! Too fast! At this speed, no matter how hard we try, we cannot draw or paint quickly enough while the particles are spread evenly within the ink.” She gave the leather piece to the man, who squinted at it, with and then without his glasses, but shook her head in the end, unable to believe that he still looked clueless. “Try with this—” Kiriko lent him her loupe. Still no good.
The ink maker held up his hand as Kiriko rummaged through her pockets for something that might be useful, and he said, “Look. Whatever you are seeing that I cannot see, obviously this is inside our tolerance range. The tools we use for making your things are cleaned and calibrated regularly as per your very strict request. If anything changed, that must be one of the materials. None of our suppliers has notified us of anything, and we haven’t seen anything wrong, so we haven’t asked. Do you want me to ask our suppliers?”
“Oh. Y-yes, please.”
“And Kiri, I would hope you’d have gotten better at complaining, after all these years. Sometimes, simply starting an ordinary conversation would get you there faster.”
Kiriko nodded, looking down at the ink bottle on the counter.
The next day the ink maker got back to her on the phone. “None of the suppliers has gone through any kind of change.”
“That doesn’t make sense—”
“ . . . But the shell particles supplier remembered something. Their vendor, a seashell supplier, mentioned that the shells they harvest have moved their usual habitat just a little. The same species, the same coastline, but they now live a bit off to the west. This is not exactly applicable to material change, but the timing seems right.”
“Yes.” Kiriko breathed out. “Would you kindly give us the contact to the shell supplier? We won’t be doing business directly with them. We cannot make the material into an ink ourselves.”
“Of course. I know you like us, that’s why you complained, rather than moving away.”
“Thank you.”
The shell supplier in question was located in the small region immediately to the southwest of the city, a one-hour train ride from the station nearest the atelier Kiriko worked and lived at. She didn’t particularly enjoy riding trains, but being from a mountain village she had to suppress her amused cry when she caught a glimpse of the distant, shimmering body of the sea from the window. After she got off the train she walked a long distance from the destination station. It was a small village, quiet except for the crazy wind that blew from the sea, and occasional sounds of the waves when the trees beside the roads cleared enough. It was nearly lunch time when she found herself at the door to the hut that the shell supplier used as the preparation/break space. There she was met by a middle-aged man and his son, who looked to be about the same age as Kiriko had been when she’d left her own home village.
Unlike the father who didn’t seem to have any particular pattern or color on his skin, she could see something that might be worthy of note on the boy and in his eyes, something that reminded her of fish seen from outside the water. Perhaps flickering scales, or the ripples their fins make. In any event, it was too subtle to merit a venture into the city to seek work in the tourism industry. She could picture him, in twenty-something years, inheriting his father’s business here in the quiet of the village.
The boy showed Kiriko the original habitat of the shellfish and then the new one.
“It’s not even a hundred-meter difference,” Kiriko said, looking at both of the spots from a bridge over the stream that flowed into the sea. If the stream, and some wave-dissipating rocks placed around it, had actually divided the old and new habitats, it might have made sense to her. But in reality, only a small mound of soil, with some reeds growing on it, appeared to be separating the two locations. The water moved freely between the two. Kiriko realized she couldn’t blame them for not reporting this change—if this could be called change, at all. “Is this the first time something like this happened?”
“Yes.” The boy stood a bit behind her, hands on his hips. “It felt weird, just a little bit, but we didn’t think it would matter. You paint, I heard?”
“I . . . we do that, among other things, yes.”
“Some people make brushes and pens out of the reeds growing over there.” He pointed. “Feel free to take some if you like.”
“Oh. I’d love that, yes, thank you.”
In the end, she took a few lengths of the reed, as well as some sand from both habitats. She told the father and son that she’d probably have to come back sometime in the near future.
Kiriko compared the samples from the two habitats, and while there seemed to be a slight difference in the sand composition, she couldn’t tell if that was simply because the current habitat was closer to the stream. The craftspersons of the atelier—Kiriko and her mentor, who was also the founding owner of the place—weren’t generally used to things from the sea, and the ink was one of the very few things that involved any marine product.
“How many stock bottles do we have?” Kiriko’s mentor said as he put down his notes at the low table of the atelier’s reception space.
Kiriko looked into their book. “Two untouched bottles. And I asked the fisherpersons to turn in all the remaining stock shells from the previous habitat to the particle supplier to Mikasa Inkt. For just Sakamoto-san we will be fine for a while, but I was hoping I might try the same method with the same materials on a few more patrons.”
The ink in question was not part of their usual product line that they openly listed in catalogs—like furniture decorations or fabric designs—but for the art they performed with their doors securely shut. Only through word of mouth, patrons of this “other” work found and visited the atelier, to have their bodily discomfort tended, through a use of patterns. A client with a persisting headache and a troubled stomach that could hold no more painkiller; another with a limp that the clinic regarded as just another sort of inconvenience that the patient had to live with. These people came to the atelier, like it was their last straw. The craftspersons of the atelier couldn’t cure, no, because they weren’t doctors. But mitigate they could, perhaps better than anyone.
Mitigating such discomforts was mostly about smooth flow of bodily fluids. And though every human being had a different shape, bodily fluid was meant to flow, one way or the other. All the craftspersons had to do was adjust that flow, by altering the way air and light touched that specific area, and by tweaking the way the affected person moved their muscles around that area. They drew or transferred a pattern on the skin to do that, thereby changing the lines of traffic there. The craftspersons regarded this traffic as another kind of pattern, and they manipulated the flow there by drawing a new pattern to change the lines of the traffic pattern.
All this procedure was further complicated by the fact that many (though not all) of these patrons had color, or pattern—or both—on their skin. A lazurite-colored skin with veins of pyrite all over the arms. Hair and nails that changed colors as they moved. The remedy pattern had to be prepared in a way that it did not interfere with the color/pattern on the person, lest it caused a different problem by putting a completely different pattern there with some adverse effect on the patron.
These colorful islanders were the real and sole asset to this small, good-for-nothing island. Accepting tourists, whose purpose for visiting was exclusively to stare at the jewel-like locals, was the only way this nation could gain enough foreign currency to barely survive. The remedy patterns prepared for them worked far better when the patterns directly touched the patron, but in this country where the locals’ “native” colors quite literally determined their whole career path and their very status in the industry and the society, drawing patterns on one’s skin, even for a short duration of time, could be deemed illegal, or extremely obscene at best. Thus the atelier had to work in secrecy, carefully creating patterns that could please their colorful or colorless clients.
The ink in question, concocted with a very specifically prepared medium and colorant as well as the shell powder for iridescence, was currently being used for a pregnant woman, Sakamoto, who was having trouble sleeping. Unlike other flow-related symptoms, everyone had a different reason why they could not sleep. She was suffering from severe swelling of her legs and the baby being restless at night for a reason that the city’s clinic didn’t even bother trying to determine. The swollen legs were easy, it was about the fluid flow, but the baby’s reason?
After spending a long time talking to Sakamoto and inspecting her body conditions, including her native color and pattern, Kiriko found that only when Sakamoto allowed a slight tan on her skin, a different pattern than her native ichimatsu seemed to bloom, too thin for ordinary eyes to see—which reminded Kiriko of poppy flowers laid randomly. These “hidden” patterns were often what caused anomalies or discomfort, as the bearer neglected to tend to them. But oftentimes, they could also be used as a hint to the solution of the situation, being another element coming from the body.
This gave Kiriko an idea—she decided to make a set of three films for Sakamoto, with one pattern each.
The craftsperson put this tan pattern down on the first film of very thin plastic, with a UV-hardened ink. A layer of the shell-particle ink was then thinly and evenly applied over the tan pattern. This film was to be adhered to Sakamoto’s skin on her stomach before sleep. The UV ink, after curing, became a hard, bulky mass, pressing the impression of the tan pattern on the skin there.
The second film, a starch-paper sheet, was prepared with Sakamoto’s most prominent ichimatsu pattern on it. This pattern was also drawn with the shell ink, and the starch film was to be taken orally, also before sleep.
During the night, the ink with the shell particles would take off the second film and then travel through her system, drawn to the tan pattern adhered onto the other side of Sakamoto’s flesh. If the timing was quite right, and you had an eye for such things, you might be able to see the iridescence pooling and swirling near the flesh of her taut belly as Sakamoto lay in her cot.
The last was another starch film, with the tan pattern pressed on without ink. In the morning this third film was to be used to wrap Sakamoto’s daily dose of clinic-issued medication. The tan pattern impression on the film would follow the shell particles’ trail made overnight inside the woman’s system, carrying the medication more efficiently, and when the dissolved starch paper caught up with the shell particles, the starch with the pattern’s impression would hold the particles so that they would travel more smoothly in the patient’s bodily fluids. That way the shell particles would be fully and safely discharged from the body.
Kiriko’s understanding was that the shell particles’ iridescence had some affinity with the unborn child’s native color or pattern, or, simply, the child enjoyed watching the iridescence. She really liked the latter explanation better.
The new batch of the shell ink wasn’t totally useless, but the previous one had worked much, much better. They needed to know what was causing this variance.
“Hey, by the way,” Kiriko’s mentor looked up from his notebook for once. “What’s in the other huge bag? Did you bring back some nice seafood, or . . . sea confections?”
“What is a sea confection?” Kiriko walked to the end of the earthen floor and picked up the linen “emergency bag,” which was what they used when they bought too many things, or something too big, for their usual bags. She opened the content over the raised floor: the reed stems. “The shell supplier’s boy told me some people make these into brushes and pens. I thought I could sharpen one like a pencil and see how it goes.”
They could see why people liked using this particular reed—the material was really hard and robust in the parts closer to the root, but the textures changed towards the other end. Very processable for writing/painting tools. They were still a bit moist in the bottom-most part, but otherwise mostly dry.
Kiriko picked up a length and squinted at it. “Something . . . ” She pulled out her loupe and slowly went over the whole length. Funny—she couldn’t tell how, but something seemed to have changed in these stems, or some of them at least. Frowning, she sliced tissue off three parts of the stem, and took them away into the lab, without any further word to her mentor, who went back to his own project untroubled.
In the lab Kiriko set the pieces of stem tissue under the microscope. She sketched what she saw, went back to the reception space and grabbed a few more stems and scurried back into the lab again while her mentor nonchalantly went on with his own writing. Ten minutes later she went back to the reception again, stared at her mentor, who frowned but stood up from his flat cushion and followed her into the lab.
He was still frowning when he looked up from the lenses. “What are these?”
“I don’t know,” Kiriko admitted. “I thought they were some kind of microbe at first, but . . . this is a silent pattern inside the reed cavity, especially in places where the tissue is less dense. It’s jumping around the cavity, like it’s alive. It looks like a variation of something that any plant could have, but the behavior is too weird.”
“Silent pattern” was a term that the craftspersons used to refer to the traffic around a specific body of existence. Most of the atelier’s microscopes were customized to make it easier for craftspersons to see these silent patterns more clearly or track them more easily, and it wasn’t that rare that they mistook them for something that was actually there. “You say these grow somewhere between the old and new habitats?” he asked, after confirming that this indeed was a silent pattern.
“They do. But come to think of it . . . the mound these plants grew on must submerge in the water from time to time—high tide and low tide. Maybe the shells were only trying to move away from something, from east to west, around this mound. But they couldn’t go any farther because of the stream?” she said drawing a simplified picture of the beach.
The two tried to isolate the “microbe” pattern, but it turned out to be very, very tricky; it kept on changing—its shapes, locations, and the number of locations at which it appeared simultaneously. Kiriko tried a few markers to track the moving centers of the pattern, found only one that worked, and they didn’t have a customized microscope lens that was quite appropriate for this particular marker. The atelier had to send an inquiry to the microscope manufacturer.
Meanwhile, Kiriko visited the beach again, for more samples—this time possibly for some other plants, which could hold the microbe-ish pattern inside their cells. Their hypothesis at the moment was that the half-enclosed environment created by plant cells was more appropriate for this anomaly to gather and grow large enough for the craftspersons to perceive than in shellfish, which would actively try to remove the foreign pattern. Only its impression and influence would be left on the shells.
She also asked the shell supplier if they’d noticed anything, like a new kind of plant or animal, visiting the beach recently.
“You mean, like new birds?” the shell supplier’s son said as he scratched his head.
“Yes, like new birds. Or bugs, fish. Anything that could have carried . . . something that caused the change.”
The boy considered this for a long moment. “ . . . Or a ghost?” he asked at length.
“A—” Kiriko glowered. “If you are trying to frighten me or something—”
He waved a hand. “No, sorry, it’s a person like a ghost. We are just rumoring among ourselves. There’s a woman who lives on the other side of that hill.” He indicated the direction with a finger. “We don’t even know when she moved into that half-crumbled house there. We rarely see her walking about. But she has been spotted going into the water at night, several times.”
“You mean she has been having a night swim?”
The boy shook his head. “No—I don’t think so. She wouldn’t be able to see anything, and would certainly drown if she kept going. And she goes in fully clothed, as if she is planning to drown herself. An uncle watched her that first night, thinking to go rescue her in case she actually was trying to kill herself. When she was waist-deep she turned on her heels and came back ashore, he said. She’s been doing that for some time now, like, once or twice a fortnight. It’s been a bit more than three months since she started, I think.”
Intrigued, Kiriko went to the ghost woman’s house using a map the boy had drawn her, but the woman in question was not home. She wanted to have a closer look at the place, but then she would be trespassing, and a few passers-by had already eyed her suspiciously. She would have to come back.
The shell supplier and his son informed the atelier of the woman’s sightings, but they, and everyone else around the area, seemed reluctant to actually talk to this woman. Kiriko kind of understood why—if this woman was somehow related to the microbe-ish thing, the folks around her might be feeling the jumpy, weird impression of it somehow, when they were close enough to her. In that case the woman had to have the thing on herself, affecting her surroundings. What kind of person would that be?
It took some time before Kiriko got the timing right. With the help of the shell supplier and his son, she worked out that the person was likely to appear sometime this week, and the fisherpersons offered a few nights’ lodging for Kiriko. On the third night, she finally saw the woman, walking slowly but steadily against the waves, wading deeper, deeper on.
The whole scene was just so absurdly beautiful—the woman’s hair flowing in the wind, black against the twilight, against the water under the twilit sky. Kiriko almost called out, but what could she say? She didn’t even know the person’s name. Up until this point, according to the villagers the person had always turned around, had come back to the beach, and probably gone home, her lungs unharmed. But what if the woman’s longing for the water or the world beyond won this one last time? The thought made Kiriko’s own lungs ache.
The other woman waded on, now knee-deep. Kiriko stopped over the line on the sand made by the waves, of seashells and branches and stones washed ashore, some of them crunching under her own feet.
The person waded on. Until she stopped, waist-deep.
Then she suddenly looked about, and turned around to realize she was not alone. She was now facing Kiriko’s direction, though Kiriko couldn’t see the face of the person in the darkness.
Still, Kiriko could feel it; there was something buzzing over the skin of the woman in the sea, which made Kiriko want to look away for some reason. Kiriko resisted the urge. The person in the water didn’t turn back away. After a moment that felt absurdly long to Kiriko, the ghost-like person started walking in the water, now back towards the beach. Kiriko waited, until the person was out of water, until the two women were close enough.
Kiriko’s throat finally worked and she said, “We’d really appreciate it if you’d stop throwing yourself into the sea.”
The room was a mess—not the too-many-things-but-no-time-to-organize mess of Kiriko’s own place, but the real, desperate, helpless mess. The woman—Mana, her name, as Kiriko finally learned—noticed Kiriko’s eyes looking about, and muttered “sorry” as she sat down on a chair, her dress still sodden. Kiriko found what seemed to be an ottoman (though there was no matching sofa in sight) and took a seat on it. Mana was a colorless person, at least on the surface, her damp black hair clinging to her shoulders like seaweed. Her long-sleeved thick shirt looked a bit too heavy for the weather, and Kiriko had the impression that the other woman didn’t have many options as to what to wear each day. “None of this is your fault,” Kiriko said after a moment.
Mana cocked her head. “What—” Then she looked up involuntarily, into Kiriko’s eyes, and Kiriko imagined the other woman seeing her own room reflected there, the mess she’d made by throwing things, breaking things, trying to break herself but failing. None of this was Mana’s fault. Still frowning, Mana started blinking, her breaths heaving. When the tears fell off her lashes, she seemed a bit more composed, just a little. “Who are you? How did you find me?” she finally said.
“Call me Kiriko. I’m from a pattern atelier in the city. We . . . make patterns.” She massaged her chin. “I’m here because . . . it’s a long story.”
“But—how can you say . . . that . . . all this . . . ”
Kiriko frowned and then blinked. “Oh—that none of this is your fault? That, I am absolutely positive, and I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. I knew the moment I saw you on the beach that you were having problems, though exactly what kind of problem, we’ll need to investigate more closely. My best guess at the moment is,” Kiriko took a towel off a nearby shelf, soaked it with the sea water she’d brought here in her thermos and then draped the towel on the other woman’s head, “you have something very peculiar, either in your systems or on your membranes, something very unstable, and it’s affecting your mind. Do you often get suicidal?”
Mana blinked, and then nodded, glancing perplexedly at the wet towel. “Those feelings get just . . . too much, building up until I can’t stop myself. All I can think of is drowning myself. But then . . . I kind of snap awake, I think, when I’m in the water long enough. So I come back out. And repeat the process. Again and again.” She touched the hem of the towel. “Is that to do with this? That I’m feeling a bit calmer with the sea water dripping over me?”
“I believe it is, yes. I have visited you a few times during the day, but you weren’t here. Where were you? Where do you spend the day?”
“There is an old dugout in the slope at the back of the house. It’s really dark in there, and I sew with the candlelight. I’ve worked out that the more sunlight I get, the more suicidal I become. But the landlady prohibited me from living in the dugout for a safety reason.”
The landlady would have been right about the precaution under usual circumstances. But from what Kiriko could see so far, Mana was feeling better when she was covered in seawater, which meant the sun drying her skin would have an unfavorable effect. Or perhaps heat. Could excessive heat work adversely on her? Kiriko made a mental note to check later. “Would you let me take samples of your—skin, hair, membranes, things like that? We’ll have to see if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“But . . . as you can see, I barely get by. What I earn from sewing is barely enough to sustain me. I cannot pay you.”
Kiriko heaved a sigh. “Yes, I can see that. But if we don’t do anything we won’t be able to keep getting what we need. Believe me, this is not for you, we are doing this for us. And it’d be really great if you’d come with me to our atelier, and let me do the sampling and inspecting in the lab where our full equipment is available.”
“Oh. Well. All right, then.”
Mana let Kiriko stay for the night. Once Kiriko was more or less settled on a cushion they found at the back of an upturned shelf, she started tatting, making lace that looked like a net.
“Do you always carry those tools with you? And those yarns and threads?” Mana asked as she put down a teacup for Kiriko on an empty space they’d managed to make on the floor.
“Not always, but today I wasn’t sure what I would be facing and needing.” She gently prodded her huge backpack with her foot. “I decided to add this tatting shuttle at the last minute, and I’m glad I did. Do you crochet?”
Mana nodded.
“Ah, I thought so. You sew, so I thought then you might be into this kind of thing. I can’t sew, or knit, you know, though I’m fine with lace making. I’m barely on the okay side with embroidery. But folks who sew usually can knit and crochet, too, which is unfair. Would you crochet a net with this skein? Two nets should be better than one.”
“Okay.” Mana picked up the thread. “What are we making?”
“Your emergency protection, of course.”
“Huh. Of course.”
They managed to snatch a few hours of sleep in bits, but the priority tonight was on finishing the net. In the morning Kiriko felt truly relieved as she spread two huge nets over broken furniture and heaps of rubbish. She soaked the nets in the seawater left at the bottom of her thermos, and draped them over Mana’s head. On the way to the station they went by to the beach to refill Kiriko’s thermos and a few more bottles from Mana’s house, dropped by at the shell supplier who looked quite ill at ease with Mana waiting outside while Kiriko spoke to them, and then caught a train, on which Mana remained on foot so as not to get the bench wet. Kiriko mostly stood, too, and watched the scenery go by.
It was a slow procession, their packs heavy with bottles containing seawater and Kiriko needing to add more of the water to the net from time to time, and it took them twice as long as it usually would for Kiriko alone to get back to the station nearest the atelier. The owner of the atelier was waiting with devices and materials ready, and shortly after they started working on Mana—looking for a pattern on her, either hidden or silent, more traffic-related, affecting her mental health and, possibly, her surroundings, too.
“This doesn’t make sense,” said a frustrated Kiriko through her teeth, an hour later.
She could see some strange pattern that kept moving, and the way it jumped around reminded her of the microbe-ish pattern from the reeds, yes. But they were too different—quite obviously two completely different patterns, there was no way one was a variation of the other, or even remotely related.
Her mentor scratched his shaved head. “But the behavior is too similar, to rule out the possibility just yet. It’s too soon to freak out like that.”
“I hope you two are not . . . arguing over me?” Mana was sitting on a wooden box—a makeshift stool—placed on the earthen floor of the atelier’s reception space, still quite moist. The first thing the craftspersons had done when Kiriko and Mana had arrived was to check the composition of the seawater and reproduce it. They’d been afraid that the composition might contain some substance which was vital for Mana but they had no access to (in which case they’d have had to come up with a way to substitute that missing element with a new pattern,) but luckily, making a solution of exactly the same salt percentage with boiled well water and the salt that Kiriko had purchased from a shop near the seashell supplier’s place seemed to work just fine for now. So they didn’t have to worry about using up the seawater Kiriko and Mana had carried over here, but still, they didn’t have forever to work this out.
The owner of the atelier sighed. “It’s not your fault, as I’m sure you are well aware. Perhaps—your medical records might tell us something, if you have any. Do you have any?”
Mana sadly shook her head. “These days I don’t have enough money to see a doctor. I grew up in an orphanage, but I doubt they kept any records.”
Silence hung. After which Kiriko stood, went into the storeroom, came back with a huge cardboard box and set it down on the earthen floor in front of Mana, went into the kitchen, came back with a tray of tea and snacks, set it firmly down on the box on the floor. “It’s not like we have run out of measures to take,” she said. “At least the jumpy thing on your skin seems to work with the marker that we prepared for the microbe-ish thing in the reed. We are waiting for the customized lens for that marker to arrive from the microscope maker. The new lens may tell us something. It’s bound to. So now, we eat, and we wait.”
Mana turned out to be a very good helping hand to the atelier, a nice surprise. She was also a patient teacher—unlike Kiriko’s mentor—when Kiriko wanted to give up on a project that involved a lot of sewing. She needed to wear water-resistant gloves over her now perpetually salt-moist hands when she worked, and take a break more often than the other two, but she could work much longer, much faster, than in her dark dugout.
When the new lens finally arrived from the manufacturer, the craftspersons asked Mana to take a tablet of the marker ink on an empty stomach, and also to bathe in a tub full of marker-dissolved, weak saltwater. Kiriko took most of the samples from Mana, and the atelier owner inspected them under the new lenses. They’d also ordered the loupe for the same marker to be calibrated, so Kiriko could look with it at Mana sitting in the tub. For a moment Kiriko was so frustrated that she actually ground her teeth, because even with the marker the visibility didn’t improve by much as the pattern kept on jumping around. But at least now she could catch the pattern’s center faster when it popped up somewhere in the area of her sight, and if she forced her eyes to unfocus a little bit, trying to get a better look at the larger picture . . . there seemed to be . . . something strange in the background? Or perhaps . . .
Kiriko stood off the bathtub and almost stumbled out of the bathroom, just as her mentor darted out from the lab. They stared at each other for a moment, until Kiriko said, “What in the skies is that?”
“Viscous?” Mana said, wrapped in the saltwater nets. “My skin?”
“Um—yes and no.” Kiriko flailed a little. “It’s not like your skin is actually oozing or anything. It’s the . . . the impression that a pattern leaves on your skin. We thought the microbe-ish thing we found in the reeds, and your jumpy thing, were moving around, and we were getting it all wrong. It was the background, or rather the foreground, that was shifting all the time like some kind of viscous mass. The common phenomenon here was the foreground covering your skin homogeneously, which was also invading the reed cavity. What seemed to be moving around was just the native traffic of elements on your body or the plant cell, nothing special, visible through the gaps made in that ever-shifting foreground stuff. This is so, so, very, um, new!”
“Does that mean . . . you cannot cure me of this, then?”
“Oh no no, it does not. It only means that we might need some time to figure this out!”
Now, Kiriko and her mentor needed a different marker than the one for the jumpy thing, to isolate this oozy one. Which required another customized lens. Kiriko visited the microscope maker, as she had countless times. The place was on the far end of the street which ran more or less parallel to the High Street, and was a ten-minute walk from the atelier. Compared to the busy High where most of the tourism happened, this street was occupied by shops where the locals did their daily shopping, and the traffic was light there during the day. The proprietors and assistants who worked here were all colorless just like the craftspersons of the atelier, because behind-the-scenes jobs were all for the colorless, valueless folks in this city. Kaneoka, the microscope manufacturer, was a very able, colorless professional themselves. Even a small country like this needed very good microscopes from time to time, and Kiriko couldn’t imagine herself ordering lenses and devices that met the atelier’s very specific requirements from anybody else.
As soon as the glass door opened Kiriko saw Kaneoka look up from their writing on the counter, to give her a gaze equally amused and exasperated. “What now?”
“Is that the first thing you always say to a customer entering your place?” Kiriko pulled a fat envelope from her bag and placed it on the counter. “Just another customizing request. The instructions are written down here as usual, and here’s a bottle of marker sample, its main components are on the label . . . ” She trailed off, as she noticed a small package placed on the table at the back of the counter. It had very distinctive stamps and writings on it. “Is that from the continent? Do you take mail orders from abroad?”
The proprietor waved a hand, negating. “This customer is an exception. She’s been doing business with us since my father’s time and I’m not sure how we began dealing with her in the first place. We make customized lenses for her, just like for you, except she doesn’t mention a lot of details like you, so we need to send things to each other back and forth many times until the customer is quite happy.”
Kiriko vaguely remembered that this shop was a father-child succession, which didn’t happen nearly as often in this city as in the rural areas like Mana’s sea village. And Kaneoka’s apprentice working at the back right now was not their daughter. “That sounds like a lot of time and labor wasted though.”
The proprietor shrugged. “She does pay for the extra time and labor, though.”
“Hm.” Kiriko pursed her lips for a moment. “So you don’t know why anything is necessary for this particular person at all?”
“No, we don’t. We have never known, not once. My father told me not to ask too many questions, obviously.”
“Oh—I do wish I could talk to her. And hear how the folks on the continent see things.”
Kaneoka laughed. “You might even get along—she always sends us letters and broken parts wrapped in paper of colors and patterns. Anyway, we’ll get back to you with the new lens in two weeks; this customer on the continent has an urgent order, so we’ll have to work on that first, before we start on yours.”
“Sure, thanks.”
Kiriko wasn’t that pressed for now, because for Mana’s immediate situation, the previous marker and the lens worked just fine. While the oozy, “foreground” thing seemed to have more effect externally—the environment that Mana had touched, and the people around her feeling ill at ease in general—the internal problem, Mana’s state of mind, seemed to be affected more by the “background” traffic happening over her skin, which Kiriko had first mistaken as the “jumpy” pattern. The background traffic was unstable in its own way, taking too much influence from the oozy thing, the depth of its lines shifting according to Mana’s mental state, and that generated variances in the locations and sizes of the gaps in the foreground through which the background pattern showed. A hint was found in the salt component that came from within Mana herself; supplementing some of the curves and lines of the background pattern with parts from the silent pattern that Mana’s salt emitted seemed to stabilize the background pattern, and when she had this new combined pattern transferred onto some membranes on her body she needed much less seawater to stay calm, and for a long duration of time.
“You can go back to your place by the sea as soon as this combination pattern is properly sorted out,” Kiriko told Mana. “This might be a temporary cure for you, or a permanent one, depending on what we find out later about this oozy foreground. It will be easier for you if you live near enough to the sea, in case of emergency—the sea is a lot of salt, and salt is salt, after all. Not exactly the same as your body salt, but they are basically the same substance, and sea salt effect can simply be amplified with the sheer quantity. Your health is the first priority, by far the first, and then the second is the sea health. We’ll visit you from time to time, or ask you to visit us. We’d also very much like to keep doing business with you if you don’t mind.”
“Why would I?” Mana smiled; the quality of her smile seemed to have changed a lot since she’d first come to the atelier. “Thank you. I don’t know how I can thank you enough.”
When Mana was gone back to her own house, the two craftspersons began working on the sea environment remedy. For people used to dealing with the confines of the human body, the problem seemed too broad.
“We might want to wait until we have collected all the variations of this shifting pattern,” said Kiriko as she rotated her teacup between her hands. “Write everything down, compare them all . . . It might tell us something.”
“And how long would it take? Is that even possible, at all, even with the new lens for the oozy pattern?” The owner of the atelier picked up the largest daifuku off the plate on the low table between them, scattering starch powder all over his notebook as he tried to evade Kiriko’s grabby hand. “What if the creatures got worse, developing some more damaging patterns within themselves, while we idly wait? We need to act now,” he said, his mouth full.
Kiriko set down her cup on the low table and slid the plate with two smaller pieces of the confection close to her. “I know, sensei, but—don’t you think everything about Mana-san is just so . . . wrong? I don’t mean Mana-san is wrong, of course, but . . . so much weirdness crammed in on one person’s body? Until we have a good idea on the root of this problem—I’m not sure if it’s wise to make a move.”
They kept on drinking their lukewarm tea in silence, which was broken a few minutes later by a phone call.
Kiriko took it, and found the microscope manufacturer on the other end. “Kaneoka-san? I thought it would be another week until we can have our new lens,” she said into the receiver.
“You are right, it is. This is about something different.” There was a pause. “Can I come to your place sometime today, or tomorrow? I—I got some very beautifully patterned paper from the continent, and thought you might like it.”
This was strange; she had been invited before by this proprietor to have a look at peculiar specimens or unusual devices, but not patterns. Let alone them offering to visit the atelier instead of the other way round. But Kiriko could feel that they didn’t want to discuss details on the phone. “Now is fine, actually, if that’s not too inconvenient for you.”
“That would be great.” And they hung up.
Kiriko and her mentor spent the next ten minutes slightly frowning, and then found the scope maker slightly frowning too, when they opened the door to the atelier. “What’s wrong?” Kiriko asked, as Kaneoka sat down on the edge of the raised floor of the atelier’s reception space.
“Sorry, my customer advised against saying things out loud inside my own place.” They rubbed their face. “I had no idea . . . ”
Kiriko set down a teacup next to the visitor. “You’re not making sense.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I got a package today, from my customer on the continent. Some extra repair work for her device. The whole thing was put in a box, which wasn’t unusual, but the box was neatly wrapped in two layers of paper. This, for some reason, gave me a strange feeling, so I carefully peeled off the sheets instead of tearing them. You might think I was thinking a bit too much—”
“We don’t,” said Kiriko and her mentor in unison, who never tore paper sheets, especially patterned ones.
“Ah. Okay. And this was not the only weird thing. I took the package apart for a close inspection, and I noticed a slide tucked in in a niche of the packaging material. I looked at it, wondering if I should be. Turned out it was a message written with microscopic letters on a tiny, tiny piece of paper.”
Kiriko and her mentor looked at each other, and then back at the scope maker. The owner of the atelier said, “What did it say?”
“That my place is likely closely monitored by the government—possibly bugged. And to give the two sheets of wrapping paper to the person from the pattern atelier who seemed very interested in the work of the customer from the continent.” They pulled folded paper out of their bag and gave it to Kiriko.
She unfolded it, to find a sheet from the island’s local newspaper, and another of the exact same size with a minute pattern in intricate colors. She immediately dropped the newspaper and held up the patterned sheet up in front of her face, excited. “Whoa. This is beautiful. Does this person make patterned artifacts, too, like us? Not just being fond of patterns in general?”
“I know almost nothing about her. After you left the other day, I had to call her, and mentioned you. And a bit about the new marker and lens for a person from a village by the sea who was suffering from a mental illness. She seemed really intrigued. As soon as I hung up I entirely forgot about the conversation. Today I received this.”
Kiriko nodded and spread the patterned paper over the floor of the reception space. She squinted, glanced at the newspaper, and then looked up and found her mentor squinting, too. “Sensei, this is . . . ”
He stopped her with a hand and said to the visitor, “Thank you, Kaneoka. I don’t think you should hear what we are about to discuss, it will just make you more uneasy.”
“Urgh.” The microscope maker rubbed their face again. “Okay, I’ll leave it to you two.”
The patterned paper and newspaper were both double-sided. The pattern, at a glance, seemed to consist of repetition after repetition of a smaller pattern. There were, however, points where slight changes were added to the lines, the colors, or the sizes of blank space between lines, some of the changes being loupe-observed or even microscopic size, making it much more complicated than it looked. In some places the changes were a bit vague, especially those represented by the size of the blank spaces, but after a long time of inspection and calculation, they decided the locations of these change points were indicating where to look, and their angles and distances to one another in what order, of characters from the newspaper. In the end, they had a message decoded before them, which started with these paragraphs:
I may know the person you are dealing with right now—I don’t, in a way people say “know” usually, but I think I may be the reason why this person is suffering. Or I may be the one who caused all this.
I don’t think you’ll believe me straight away. I’m sure what I’m about to say here next is going to be hard to swallow, in very many ways, especially to people like you. Please proceed only when you are ready.
“This cannot be true,” Kiriko said when they were done constructing and reading the whole message, which went on and on to describe something . . . horrendous. Her mentor said nothing. Kiriko wondered if they hadn’t got the message correctly and tried deciphering it again, and reached exactly the same result, with only a few characters and punctuations varying.
This shouldn’t be true.
But much as they wanted to deny it, it made sense. In the city, the business succession was rarely conducted based on the family. You could be a colorless person and start a behind-the-scenes business and be as successful as a colorless person can be, but then, you might have a very colorful child; the child may be sent to train as a candidate for a more sparkly job like diplomat, attendant, or shop assistant on the High Street. There was certainly a tendency that ran in the blood—like a person whose dominant color was blue was likely to have a descendant of the same hue. But whether it expressed as homogeneous color, or as pattern, seemed to depend entirely on chance.
So what hadn’t made sense, in fact, was that very rich families seemed to always have perfect children. The colorful minister’s son grew a patterned beard; the nation’s largest corporation’s president recently boasted the birth of a mosaic-skinned daughter. “Fairly rich” people had colorless children and tried to hide the existence of these children all the time; very poor colorless laborers sometimes had a child with extremely nice colors, making the whole family rich.
All of this suddenly made sense if, as their mysterious correspondent on the continent claimed in the coded message, you could buy colors and patterns on newborn children.
“So this continent person is suggesting . . . Mana-san is but one of her ‘works,’” said Kiriko after reading the message for the hundredth time.
“Yes.” Her mentor stretched over the reception floor. “And she is willing to provide us with the blueprint of Mana’s oozy pattern. I still have trouble picturing what this mysterious continent person does, though. How can one add colors to a baby before they are born?”
They really wanted to know the answer to this, and they really wanted to not know the answer to this. In any case, their work would be much easier if they could see the whole, accurate picture of the oozy pattern that the continent person said she still had with her. They decided to write back, after all. With the same method that she had used to code her message, the craftspersons of the island built their own, just a single line of Yes, please, but burying it deeper and more meticulously among a verse of a popular poem. They also prepared a slide with the salt component from Mana’s bodily fluid, so that the continent person would have some reference to make sure they were talking about exactly the same person. Kiriko went to the scope maker’s place under the excuse of picking up their customized lens, and left an envelope there without a word about it. The proprietor nodded and put the envelope away.
“It did feel like a transaction between spies!” said Kiriko as she climbed the raised reception floor when she got back to the atelier.
“Have you ever been a spy?”
“What? Of course not.”
The next communication came two weeks later, and several more followed once a week thereafter. A pattern was divided into many, many slides, and they were sent in batches, which the craftspersons had to construct following the continent person’s instructions and then enlarge to see it without a magnifying tool. Just like the instruction pattern for decoding the message in the first communication, there were minute, slight changes throughout the entire pattern which presented the irregularity that made grasping the whole thing difficult. But the clarity of these change points, compared to those in the first decoding pattern, improved in the batches that came later, as the craftspersons sent a note or two to inquire or comment on the way these points were expressed. Soon it got easier and easier for the craftspersons to see where to look and how to look.
After eight weeks, to their surprise and disappointment, the compiled pattern wasn’t the same as the oozy pattern.
There was also a message in each package. A long description of what her daily life was like, which didn’t seem to be so different from the two craftspersons in the island after all: working long hours, lower-back aches, a lot of tea, inventorying tools and inks. They thought the continent person had coded her true message again, using these message sheets just like the newspaper in the first communication. But when they enlarged a pattern portion to the exact same size as the message sheet and sought out where the change points in the pattern indicated, the words around these points meant more or less the same thing: about being immobile, or weighing too much. Also, even though these words meant more or less the same thing, and many of them were even the same word or phrase, these were written in several different ways. The island’s phonetic scripts, logographic characters, or even the continent’s alphabets. In normal, bold, or italicized strokes.
In the final package, there had also been a piece of glass that looked like a lens, the size of the atelier owner’s palm. It was as thick as the length of the nail of Kiriko’s little finger, and was probably made by adding layer by layer over the top. Something was engraved on the surface, and they hoped it would be some kind of answer or hint from the continent person. But it turned out to be just a small portion of the fully-compiled blueprint pattern, which didn’t tell them anything either, anyway.
“I so wish we could just call her—wait, but how much would that cost?” said Kiriko, totally resigned and frustrated. “Why is she doing this to us? She could have just sent us the real pattern blueprint for Mana-san, or at least, say something meaningful in the coded message. Do you think the authorities somehow cracked the previous coding method she used?”
Her mentor shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I truly don’t. Maybe we should start considering the possibility that she is a scam.”
“But sensei, after going through so much trouble, what is it she would get from us?”
“Maybe the satisfaction that she made fun of poor colorless laborers?”
She shook her head, her chin on her hand, her elbow on the low table. Then she narrowed her eyes, glaring at her mentor. “Oh, sensei, stop that.”
“Stop what?”
She pointed at his hand, which was holding a stylus, scratching a sheet of thin paper on the tabletop. “I understand that you need to draw something when you are thinking hard, but that tool is not for that material and you know it. The table is full of scratches and slashes because of you.”
“Oh. I do have an impression that you, too, sometimes . . . ” He trailed off, seeing Kiriko’s face. “What now?”
“The length of the words.”
“What?”
Ignoring him, she went into the lab, not bothering to put on her sandals as she walked over the earthen floor, and came back to the raised reception space, not bothering to flick dirt off her feet before climbing. She spread the compiled pattern, enlarged and glued together, over the low table. “These change points happen more often in this part of the pattern,” Kiriko said, pointing at a part of the huge sheet of paper with all the marks and annotations written in. She had also brought the lens-like piece of glass that had come with the last package, and held it over the sheet, and then placed it over one corner of the paper. Then she took out her small journal from her pocket. “There is . . . something I did not tell you about Mana-san, sensei.”
Her mentor raised his brows.
“It felt too personal. I didn’t even mention it to Mana-san herself, but I put it down in here, just in case it was relevant. She—sensei, throwing herself into the sea wasn’t the only way in which she’s been trying to hurt herself.”
“You mean . . . ”
Kiriko nodded. “They weren’t just cuts that might be made accidentally with a knife. Some of them were long slashes, made with perhaps large scissors. Some were quite small but deep, like dots—maybe an awl’s doing. At first I thought she was wearing long sleeves simply because she doesn’t like the sun, but . . . ” She closed her eyes for a split second. “Some of the scars were obviously very freshly made, but there were others that looked so, so old. I don’t know how long she’s been cutting and puncturing her own skin. She has so many tools ready about her, you see, all the needles and rippers and scissors. All the time. And if this part of the blueprint pattern with these change points represents where it’s easiest for her to reflexively reach . . . ” she trailed off, as she pointed at two far corners of the pattern, over one of which rested the strange piece of glass.
Her mentor swallowed. “This part here is completely devoid of the changes, and maybe she cannot reach here by herself.” He looked at his stylus for a moment, then back at Kiriko, who nodded and fetched their sewing set basket.
Kiriko looked at the message sheet that had come with that pattern portion. “First, five-letter word.”
He, always the precision hand of the atelier, made a long slash with scissors over the designated spot.
“Two-letters.”
A shorter slash with a ripper.
“One-character, a space, and another character.”
Two dots with an embroidery needle.
“Two-letters, punctuation, and three-letters.”
A short slash, a dot, and a longer slash.
“One-character.”
Another, final dot.
Nothing happened. They both frowned at each other. Then Kiriko held up a hand. “Wait. I thought this was a writing mistake, but there’s the same character’s impression here, overlapping the inked character, like, she wrote the character with a stylus, not a pen.”
Her mentor nodded, and without a word, he took out a threading needle from the basket, and drove its tip harder, deeper, into the glass.
Immediately, the underside of the glass seemed to quiver, and then, a thin line of crack spread over the surface. When it reached a slash, the crack got redirected, towards another slash. On and on it went, from slash to slash, dot to dot, all over the surface and the depth of the glass. In the end, there was a familiar pattern, staring back at the two craftspersons.
Kiriko closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh . . . oh my, oh no and no and infinite nos. Did the continent person do this to her?”
“I don’t see who else could.”
Kiriko massaged her brows, her eyes still closed. “I guess I need to go see Mana-san.”
The weather was mild the next day, so Mana and Kiriko decided to have a picnic on the beach. Neither of them had ever had a picnic on the beach; Kiriko because she hadn’t lived near a beach, and Mana because she had never regarded the sea and anything in its proximity with a calm enough mind. Mana pulled a few left-over cloths out of one of the stacked boxes for them to sit on, and a few clean towels to cover a rock to place their tea and snacks on. Kiriko still couldn’t get used to the smell of salt water in the air.
“I—there is something I need to apologize,” said Kiriko when both of them had enough confections in their stomachs, clutching her teacup with both hands. “I . . . I have done something I shouldn’t have done. Something I should have asked you first.”
Mana smiled weakly. “Are you talking about my scars?”
“Oh.” Kiriko exhaled sharply. “Did you know?”
“Who can help but notice such things, especially if your occupation is to do with handling human bodies?” Mana sipped at her cup. “I started trying to hide them when I realized people were looking horrified seeing my scars, I just kept on trying to hide them even though no one wanted to talk to me anymore, anyway.” She pulled up her sleeve and held her hand out towards the sea, as if she wanted to find some kind of correlation between her scars and the waves beyond. “When you wanted to inspect me, there was no way of hiding them and I didn’t know what to do.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t just look; I wrote it down in my small journal—which even my sensei doesn’t open without my permission. I meant to burn the pages as soon as this was all over, but even at that time, I think I thought the information might be important. Now, I know it is important. I need your permission to use it.”
Mana sipped some more tea, frowning. “Can I have a look?”
“My journal? Of course.”
The needleworker flipped through the pages, the frown etched on her face. After a while she said, “I thought you drew a picture of my body and the scars on them. These are more like symbols. Like knitting stitches. And a lot of numbers. Nobody but you, or your mentor, would know what these might refer to, anyway. This doesn’t really look like such sensible information to me.”
“Oh, this is just superficial. If you let me, I want to look more closely at them and get more precise records, deeper data. Only if you let me.”
Mana laughed, seemingly despite herself. “You are trying to cure me, yes? I don’t see why you, or I, would have to hesitate.”
“This is more than just that.” Kiriko exhaled deeply. “I think, Mana-san, the continent person is behind your suffering.”
Mana’s frown deepened further—years of practice making it so easy for those muscles to move that way. “I don’t follow.”
“The pattern was a kind of camouflage, we believe,” Kiriko started, groping for words. “You were modified at a very early stage of your life, probably as an ovum, to be born patterned. She hasn’t explained much, but the way she asks Kaneoka-san—our favorite microscope manufacturer—to calibrate her devices, and what she buys from them, indicates that she works with something very small, with a high precision required. We are calling this modification your native pattern for convenience here. Your native pattern was a very complicated, sophisticated, multi-layered . . . trap. We’ve been thinking a lot . . . if your native pattern that she sent us wasn’t exactly identical to the pattern on your skin right now, why would the continent person send it to us in the first place, after so much trouble, knowing we all would be in so much more trouble if the authorities found out? There is one answer to this—your native pattern is identical to the current oozy pattern.”
“I . . . ” Mana shook her head. “I don’t think I understand.”
Kiriko sighed. “Don’t worry, we don’t, not really. But after some experiments, we have reached a conclusion—or something like one. It’s like one of those ornate puzzle boxes they make in the mountain not far from here. You find one place to fiddle with, and something moves somewhere inside the mechanism of the box, which reveals another key, which leads to another niche, until all the pieces are moved in the right direction and the puzzle is solved, and then the box opens.”
Mana poured more tea into the two cups, and wrapped her shawl tighter about her. “Go on.”
“We don’t know what happened to you in the stages of your life between ovum and child, but at least, when you were administered into your old orphanage, you weren’t patterned. Otherwise you’d have joined a boarding school for prospective children. There you began training as a needleworker, and got access to various needles and scissors. You then started injuring yourself. When your needles and scissors touched the right places at the right pressure, like a switch was flipped, the native pattern on you gradually changed into the oozy pattern. And it started affecting you, amplifying a tendency that was already there, I think. And folks around you, and even the environment.”
The needleworker looked out at the waves coming and going, coming and going again and again. “Now that you mention it, ever since I picked up sewing I’ve become worse. I never associated needlework with my problems before. I thought I was just a weak thing.” She swallowed. “Before I came to this place, I made myself bleed a lot more—that was just another form of salt water, I guess. Here, I needed to cut less, but I couldn’t ever shake off that longing for drowning. But I couldn’t wade on and finish myself off. I thought . . . I was just a weak, weak thing.”
“No,” Kiriko’s voice rang raw. “Now you know it’s not your fault. We know it’s not your fault.”
“But then, how could she know I’d become a needleworker? And how could anyone have known that I’d have a breakdown or start injuring myself? Is she a prophet or something?” She snorted, and then sniffed.
Kiriko replied to the snort with a sigh. “If she has access to ova, I’m sure she also has access to their genetic information. She most likely knew you were at higher risk for mental illness. And if you were a colorless orphan with that tendency, there really weren’t many choices available to you as to occupation, as we all know very well.” She cleared her throat and took a sip from her cup. “When we make a remedy pattern for someone, we check the silent patterns that the person has near the affected area, so that the remedy pattern and the silent pattern don’t work adversely on each other. The continent person must be doing something similar, only with the genetic tendency of the person. And she turned this effort against you, in this particular case.”
Mana traced a few lines of old scars on her arm with her fingers. “She must really, really hate me.”
The sight of the scars hurt Kiriko, but she knew she had no right feeling hurt, here, on this beach. “That’s what I don’t get—why would she hate you?” she said after a moment. “I mean, I’m not even trying to be nice to you right now. You weren’t even born when you were with her, not in a way babies go in our small normal world. She could just be a complete bitch, yes. But in that case, why is she cooperating with us now like this, with the danger of the continent and the island finding out she is betraying them a huge
