I don’t know this street.

It’s a nondescript commercial strip that’s lost its hustle and bustle to the big shopping malls. What was the name of this place again? …I guess it doesn’t matter. This is my battle alone, so wherever this is won’t affect me.

In this middle of this barren shopping street, a boy in a school uniform, Yukito Tejima, has collapsed. The unconscious boy clutches a dress-up doll like the ones little girls play with.

“His and Her Mirrored Terminus.”

The Box had granted Tejima’s wish for “a world for only him and the girl of his dreams.” He had desired a world in which just two people existed: himself, and a high school girl one grade above him named Suzu Amemiya. But Boxes also fulfill any beliefs that a wish could never be. Tejima believed his wish could never come true and knew in his heart that Suzu Amemiya wouldn’t want to live in a world alone with him. Even worse, though Tejima had asked for solitude, deep inside, he didn’t really want it.

Putting his half-baked wish into the Box had earned him His and Her Mirrored Terminus, a labyrinth of mirrors. Tejima had merely managed to trap himself in a reflective maze along with life-size dolls of Suzu Amemiya that only said things he wanted to hear.

I entered that world and wandered the maze of mirrors alongside the dolls. With no leads on a solution, I became trapped for longer than I expected. When I became desperate, I began smashing mirrors indiscriminately in lieu of an actual plan, and I finally broke through. The rules of the labyrinth fell apart. I found Tejima within, persuaded him first with words and then with force, and removed the Box.

While only a day had passed in the real world, the time I spent within the Box felt closer to a year. If I said I wasn’t exhausted, I’d be lying.

On a side note, Tejima and Suzu Amemiya weren’t actually in a relationship. Despite Tejima’s feelings, Suzu Amemiya merely saw him as a boy from the year below hers whom she had spoken to before. She is pretty, I’ll give her that, but Suzu Amemiya is shallow and mediocre—a far cry from the picture-perfect girl I saw in the maze.

The Box has a dull sheen, as if someone covered it in origami foil paper, and it’s about the size of a trash can. I drop it on the ground and crush it beneath my foot. It shatters easily with no resistance.

Now I’m back at square one.

“You weren’t able to obtain a Box this time, either.” The one who spoke appears out of nowhere, and I glare at them.

“O.”

O’s current guise is Yukito Tejima’s father, but that bewitching smile gives them away.

“Don’t you think it’s time you threw in the towel? You’re never going to find another unused Box, and even if you did, you wouldn’t be able to use it properly.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t matter. I will continue my search. Then I will finally make Misbegotten Happiness into something complete. I will bring joy to everyone in the world.”

“Even if that means sacrificing yourself?”

“Yes, that’s right. Because I am—”

“Aya Otonashi.”

O finishes my sentence with contempt and vanishes with a scornful laugh.

I don’t recall when this game of tag began. I remember only what’s happened recently.

So even if there are important memories among the ones I have forgotten, I wouldn’t be able to reach them.

For example—

“

Oh.”

Someone’s name is on the tip of my tongue, and that lone, fleeting spark ignites a slowly growing warmth deep in my chest.

But it quickly disappears.

Yes, it doesn’t matter to me anymore anyway. Even if I did become close to someone in the past, it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember. By now, they would have found someone else and forgotten all about me.

“I—”

—am alone.

Ever since that day, I have always been alone.

Still fatigued, I stumble into a room in a business hotel and collapse right onto the bed, but I can’t sleep.

My head hurts as if someone’s pounding it with a hammer. I’ve taken a lot of damage in my long fight against the Boxes, and even now it feels as if someone is trying to kick their way out of me. If I were to scream, the emptiness would come flying out of my throat like a monster coming to devour me.

I’m at my limit.

I have been for a while.

Practically crawling, I take some scented oil from my bag and cover a tissue in it.

It smells like peppermint.

Oddly enough, this fragrance allows me to fall asleep. I guess my body remembers that it calms me, at the very least.

My consciousness falls away.

And I arrive in the past that I can recall only in dreams.

My older sister, Aya Otonashi, was a prophet.

She would know the culprit of whodunit dramas before ten minutes had passed. She could guess what our housekeeper, Yoshida, would be serving for dinner that day. She could tell who my classmates were going to go out with. She even guessed that her homeroom teacher would resign.

Every time one of her predictions proved correct, she became more of an idol to me. In my mind, they were wondrous and strange, downright magical. What’s more, my enchantress sister was more intelligent and beautiful than anyone.

I had nothing that made me special, so I took pride in having such a perfect older sister.

The thing is—Aya also made a prediction about me. An extremely ominous prediction.

It happened when I was twelve, in the winter. It was an extremely cold day, and the gusts of powerful wind rattled the windows of our mansion. As soon as I got home from school, I didn’t even take my coat off but ran to Aya’s room, where I knew it would be warm. As I had thought, her heater had made the room almost too hot, and I relaxed in the warmth and the usual scent—a mix of perfume and essential oils.

The scents weren’t ones you’d expect to find together, but they blended perfectly into a fragrance that left my beloved sister’s touch on the place.

Unlike my featureless room, here the furnishings were too luxurious for a child’s space. The chandelier and large antique mirror were like something out of a fantasy world. The drama of the room suited my sister, though.

Aya was sitting on her canopied bed as I took off my coat, but she was watching me with an oddly stern expression. When I cocked my head in confusion, she said, “I want you to listen to me for a moment.” It seemed strange to me, but I sat on the chair in front of her.

When Aya’s grim look softened into a smile, she stood up and embraced my head. Then she told me as clearly as she could, “I’m going to make a prediction about your future.”

She removed her arms from around my head.

My sister had predicted all sorts of things before now, but that was the first time it had to do with me. I was startled, but I could still feel myself sitting up a little straighter.

Aya peered into my eyes, then delivered her prophecy.

“You’re going to become me—no, you have to.”

I was too stunned to say anything.

“That means you’ll have to become someone who makes others happy.”

“I’m going to become you? But then what’s going to happen to you?”

My sister hesitated a little at my question, but there was no doubt in her eyes when she answered.

“Maria, I’m going to set out on a journey when I’m fourteen.”

And indeed, Aya was fourteen years old when she died. It was her birthday. She died in a traffic accident, along with our parents.

I was the only one left, so that her prophecy would be fulfilled to the letter.

Since then, I have been living as Aya Otonashi, just as she foretold.

I first met Aya not when I was born, but in the spring when I was four.

I remember the day well.

“Hey…why is everyone lining up?” I asked.

My mother only smiled. Everyone in our household, including the housekeeper, had formed a line in front of the entrance. This was a first for me, so I gripped my mother’s hand uneasily.

My father’s Benz passed through the front gate and stopped right before me. Then a young girl climbed out of the back seat.

When she saw all of us, her cheeks lifted in a hint of a smile, and she bowed. “How do you do?”

Though there was nothing special about the gesture, I was thoroughly shocked. She was around the same height and age as me, and yet my intuition told me this girl was an entirely different sort of creature. Her face was the definition of perfect, and she had slender limbs and fair skin like snow.

Even more extraordinary than Aya’s appearance was the aura surrounding her. She was only four years old, and yet around her was an air of both ethereal transience and world-weariness (I didn’t know the words at the time, of course). I had never seen a girl like her before, and I was so overwhelmed, I hid behind my mother.

As I did, my mother said to me, “Your older sister is going to live with us starting today.”

Live with us? This person? Is that even possible?

When I looked around, I noticed my mother and everyone else were in a welcoming mood. If anything, they all seemed to like this girl and her proper manners that were beyond her years. Maybe she seemed so odd to me because we were the same age; if she were older, would they still notice?

Aya may have made a perfect impression on everyone aside from me, but that impression changed soon enough when my father got out of the driver’s seat so our family chauffeur could put the car in the garage. She turned to him and said, “Will you get down on your knees and bow to the ground?” She sounded far too mature for a child.

Father thought it was a joke at first. Anyone would assume it was just a four-year-old girl being silly.

But Aya insisted, more forcefully this time. “We deserve an apology. You stripped me away from my mother because of your infidelity. You’re making my new mother raise me. You’re making my sister live with an older sibling from a different mother. So you’re going to get on your knees and bow.”

She looked Father in the eyes, all but saying that those were her terms for becoming a member of this household. Once he understood it wasn’t a joke, Father was naturally confused. But they were just the antics of a four-year-old. He didn’t have to listen to her.

“Get on your knees and bow.”

Except he did.

There was no room for levity when Aya was this serious. One misstep here, and she would never trust the concept of family again. I could feel it. Everyone there could feel it.

It seems strange now, looking back, but everyone was thinking the same thing.

—Father bowing down was the only correct answer.

He placed his knees on the ground and lowered his head.

“…I’m sorry.”

It was unbelievable. He was an executive at a major financial company; he normally never had to humble himself, but here he was prostrating himself at his four-year-old daughter’s feet in front of his family and servants. His face contorted with shame before her.

“Thank you. Now I can stay here.”

That isn’t to say that incident alone was enough to cost my father his dignity. From that day forward, Aya was a generally obedient daughter who listened to her father and didn’t go out of her way to injure his pride.

Thinking back on it, though, she was the one who became the head of the house on that day.

I think she took up the reins of control, and ever since, our household acted according to her whims.

Part of the reason our parents doted on Aya so much was also her sympathetic situation.

My family consisted of four people: my father, Michishige; my mother, Yukari; my older sister, Aya; and me, Maria. Aya and I were sisters with different mothers, and our birthdays were only three months apart.

Michishige’s (I imitated my mother and Aya in calling him by his first name) first wife, Yoriko, died of an illness, and five years later, he married Rinko, a former celebrity and Aya’s birth mother. He probably fell for her incomparable beauty. She was so lovely that people would question whether it was fair to call her human like the rest of us on Earth; any man would be mesmerized.

But their life soon fell apart. Rinko wasn’t the housewife type, and she didn’t love Michishige, either (according to him). He chose to find solace outside the home, and he cheated on her with Yukari, who had just finished high school and joined my father’s financial firm as a receptionist. She became pregnant not long after, but Aya had also been in Rinko’s womb for three months by then.

With an adulterous husband, Rinko easily agreed to a divorce once she was certain she would receive enough compensation and child support to live. She assumed custody of the newborn Aya, Michishige married my mother, and I came into the world.

Apparently, Michishige and Rinko didn’t cut off all contact after the divorce, and he had been visiting Aya with the permission of my mother (Yukari). Then, when Aya was four, Rinko demanded that Michishige take custody.

He accepted immediately, probably because he had received word from other sources that Aya was being borderline neglected.

Aya didn’t speak of Rinko much. Still, she did once jokingly tell me, “She used to say she wished I’d never been born.”

I met Rinko only a handful of times, so I don’t know if she actually meant it.

But judging by her circumstances, Aya was what society would consider an “unfortunate child.”

That’s probably why my parents worked so hard to make sure she didn’t feel that way. While they were fairly strict in disciplining her, she still had it much easier than I did. They gave Aya a gorgeous room, bought her favorite toys, and always let her pick first when we got cake. We were also sent to separate schools to avoid any unwanted rumors.

It would be a lie to say that the unequal treatment didn’t upset me when I was little. But I also just accepted it as the way things were.

After all, my mother always told me she was truly glad I was born.

She never got tired of telling me.

“You brought Michishige and me together. You’re my little angel.”

I was so proud every time she said that to me.

If I hadn’t been inside Mother, Michishige might have ended his relationship with her instead of with Rinko. He often told us that my mother’s profound love had mellowed him, reformed him. From my viewpoint, their love was genuine, so genuine that I hoped I could find a relationship like theirs in the future.

I was at the center of the family.

Yes.

If only that were the truth. Then none of this would have happened.

It was the first day of summer break during my first year of middle school. It was a hot day, the kind where you take a few steps down the hallway and you can already feel your underwear starting to stick to your skin. It was really gross, so I had decided to spend the middle of summer vacation under the air conditioner. I wouldn’t go outside.

I was freed from the school I despised, and not even my tutor or my piano teacher would be coming today. I wanted to enjoy this moment of happiness to the fullest, so I lay down on my bed and turned on my handheld game console. I was doing nothing today!

That was why I didn’t care when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t for me anyway. I didn’t exactly have any friends who would drop by out of the blue.

But a knock still came on the door of my room. I could tell who it was by the sound.

“Aya?”

I got up from my bed. When I opened the door, it was exactly whom I expected, and she was wearing a well-made white dress.

At thirteen, Aya was no longer called “cute.” She was beautiful, even bewitching—one look at her face would make people sigh. If you examined her closely, you could find the youth of her age in her features and her physique, but the transcendental aura around her prevented people from focusing on this.

“Was that doorbell for me? Was there a package or something?”

“No, it was my guest.”

When I tilted my head at her response, Aya started stroking my long hair fondly. I had grown it out so that my hair could be like hers, at least. It made me happy to have her touch it.

“Anyway, I’m going to invite my guest into my room, and I want you to be there, too.”

“Huh? You want me to meet them?”

It was the first time Aya had said anything like that to me. Partly because we went to different schools, we didn’t have any mutual friends… Also because I didn’t have any friends to begin with.

“That’s right. I need you to see what happens next.”

“…What do you mean?”

Perhaps because an explanation would take too long, Aya didn’t say anything else and took my hand, leading me from my room whether I wanted to go or not. I was used to my older sister’s forceful ways, so I quickly gave in and let her do what she wanted.

“Oh yeah, I have one of those predictions you like so much,” she said, turning around as we walked down the hallway. “Someone will swallow Ramune.”

I cocked my head again. I didn’t have a clue what was up with her today. When I asked her what she meant, she smiled and said nothing.

“You are always leading me— Eek!”

“Hmm? What’s wrong?”

I looked away and merely pointed. Aya grinned at the eight-legged creature.

“C’mon, it’s just a spider,” she said, picking up the big guy in her bare hand as if it were nothing.

She peered at it and watched it scuttle across her palm intently.

“I—I can’t believe you’re okay with that…”

“Hmm? It’s not like it can do anything to us. If you look closely enough, it’s actually cute. It’s like it’s trying to be endearing.”

With that said, my sister smiled gently and—

“—Oh.”

—squished the spider in her hand.

“…Why?” I looked into her eyes in shock.

“Because I didn’t give it permission to be here,” Aya replied.

While I had braced myself for whomever I’d find in Aya’s room, it turned out to be an ordinary boy who looked out of place among her opulent furniture. He wasn’t ugly, just so very average and commonplace compared with my sister.

However, the look on his face was quite grave. He had distinctly dark circles under his eyes, indicating he had not been sleeping well.

“Hello.”

Trying to hide his fatigue, he smiled and greeted me in a crisp, clear voice. He was a student at Aya’s private school, so he must have had a good upbringing.

But I stared at the floor without returning the greeting. Nothing about him put me off or anything; sadly enough, I still didn’t how to interact with boys my age even though I was in middle school.

He turned back to Aya, seemingly unoffended. “Here’s what you asked for.”

“Thanks.”

He handed Aya something that looked like a notebook, then glanced at me.

“Um, Aya, why did you ask your little sister to come here?”

“It’s fine. She won’t do anything.”

“…You don’t have a problem with letting her hear about this?”

“Of course not.”

Still, the boy’s eyes kept darting nervously my way. I was an outsider; I guess it was only natural.

…I couldn’t stand being there. I wanted to go back to my room and play games.

“Yeah. In fact, I want you to tell my sister about our situation.”

“…How much does she know about what’s going on at school?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing… So start from the beginning?”

Aya nodded.

Apparently, Aya wasn’t going to introduce the boy to me. I also got the feeling he wasn’t interested in me beyond the fact that I was Aya’s younger sister. Seriously, why did she bring me there?

“I’m going to explain to you what’s happening at our school now.” This boy whose name I didn’t know turned his body toward me and spoke slowly. I was getting nervous, having a boy look at me, and my shoulders straightened. “We have enemies.”

“…Enemies?” I repeated. That didn’t sound good.

“Yes, a group of girls led by our classmate Yamashita. They are our enemies.”

I grimaced. “Enemies” was too strong a word to use for classmates. Normally, you’d just say We don’t get along, or at most I don’t like them. It was especially strange to hear from someone who was as well raised as he appeared to be.

“Yamashita and the others are trying to force Aya to transfer to another school. And we aren’t talking about ignoring her or saying mean things. They’ve complained to teachers and parents, collected signatures, boycotted the classes of teachers who defend Aya, and worked to smear her reputation. We had to laugh when Yamashita ran for vice president during the student council elections and pledged to make Aya change schools, though. Anyway, what I want you to understand is that the bad blood between Aya and Yamashita and her crew isn’t confined to just her class; it’s school-wide.”

I had no idea. I had never heard about any of that from Aya, and she hadn’t seemed troubled, either.

In fact—

I looked at my sister’s face. She was still smiling, like before.

“……”

In fact—I had actually been thinking she was in an oddly good mood these days.

“According to the other side, there’s something wrong with Year 1, Class 3, and it’s because Aya is there. She’s disturbed the order of things. Everything would be fixed if she would just leave.”

Aya shrugged. “It’s true; classes aren’t normal with me there. That’s always been the case.”

It did seem that way. Classes with my sister in them were never short of problems. There was one incident where someone became infatuated with Aya, started stalking her, and broke into our house with a knife. Her charms tended to lead people astray and cause trouble, and that was probably the most emblematic example. Being special means you have an influence on those around you.

“It’s not like Aya has done anything wrong, though! They’re the ones making things worse, but when something bad happens to them, they blame it all on her. It’s all them! They’re crazy!”

I was starting to get the picture.

It was possible that at first, Yamashita and her friends had been experiencing the usual flare-ups of jealousy: “I don’t like how all the boys are so into her”; “I can’t stand how the teachers favor her.” Then they probably banded together and let her know how they felt. Usually, when a group starts pressuring you, you eventually cave, and that’s the end of that.

But they were dealing with my sister. And Aya would never submit to anyone.

What’s more, there were a number of people willing to take her side, and as she gained more allies and enemies, the situation blew up.

Even if she were to consider backing down, the issue was already bigger than her, so it wasn’t that simple. When you have a circle of supporters around you, you can’t just retract the gauntlet you’ve thrown.

And so things got even more out of hand.

Aya had never been without an abundance of both friends and foes. She stirred up trouble wherever she went.

This time, though, she couldn’t just relax and tell herself this was business as usual; the scale was too large. The entire school was involved in this, after all.

“It’s evil to try to make Aya change schools. She hasn’t done anything!”

Furthermore—

The madness in his eyes was real.

“I’m going to beat the crap out of every single one of them. I’ll kill ’em.”

Of course a boy would come up with that. They said stuff like that all the time.

But there was a different weight to his words. It wasn’t just talk; there was a ferocity that suggested he might actually do it.

“I’ve told you I don’t want any violence, right?”

“…But, Aya, the only way is to give it to them straight!”

“Don’t tell me you came here today to ask my permission to physically attack them?”

He lapsed into silence.

“If we resort to violence, we’ll be the ones in the wrong, no matter how just our cause may be. That’s simply how it is. We shouldn’t do it.”

“…Damn! Then what should we do?!”

He lowered his gaze and clenched his fists.

“…I want to kill them…kill them…kill them, kill them, kill them!”

I was frightened. This boy sincerely believed the people opposed to Aya should die.

This was probably the right way to describe his resolve:

Murderous.

“……Oh.”

I tried imagining it—a classroom full of murderous hatred.

One cupful of this emotion would be enough to make you sick. It would be impossible to live out each day with that in the air. A normal life would stand no chance against that raging, blazing sword of emotion.

In which case—it was hopeless.

A violent tragedy was going to take place and soon, despite Aya’s efforts to prevent it.

My body trembled.

Why did my sister want to show me this?

As their meeting continued, the boy’s aberrant behavior just became more and more apparent, so can you imagine how much I wanted to run from there?

Eventually, that warped meeting came to an end, and we saw him to the front gate.

He was polite toward me the whole time and took me seriously, almost too much so. He was an extremely proper person except when it came to enemies and Aya Otonashi.

“Oh yeah. Here.” As he was about to leave, Aya handed him a paper bag.

“What’s this?”

“Oh, just things to help you rest, since you said you haven’t been able to sleep. Some scents I recommend and other stuff. Find what works best for you. I included a note on how to use it all.”

“Th… Thank you so much.”

I was startled. Her gift had affected him so deeply that he was openly weeping.

His feelings toward my sister just weren’t normal. It wasn’t love or affection.

It was…worship.

I fled to my room. In an attempt to get the incident out of my mind, I burrowed into my futon and focused on my game.

But whether I wanted to or not, I knew.

There would be no more escape for me.

It was a week after the boy’s visit.

Someone was shaking me awake by the shoulder. “What’s up?” I asked groggily, but Aya avoided the question and didn’t explain. Instead, she began to undo the buttons of my pajamas.

After I had finished changing clothes, she led me outside the house. Aya stopped a taxi, we got in, and she gave the driver an address about one station away.

“What are we going to do there?”

She didn’t answer.

After we got out of the cab, Aya surveyed the area warily, then pulled me into the parking area of an apartment building. It was as if we were hiding from something.

“Aya…tell me what’s going on.”

“You’ll see soon.”

“But, Aya—”

She put her pointer finger to her mouth and silenced me before I could yell at her. I gave up and decided to wait quietly.

I guess it was five or so minutes after that?

A group of four people stopped in front of the house near us, and their behavior was clearly suspicious. All of them were wearing black sweat suits, as if they wanted to blend into the darkness.

“…Oh.”

I couldn’t help but let out a little gasp. One of them was a boy wearing a cap—the same boy who had come to our house before.

And seeing him, I got a bad feeling about what was going to happen next.

“Let’s do it.”

“Yeah.”

Two of the group kept watch while the boy in the cap and the last member moved in front of the house. They were carrying plastic containers filled with liquid, and they started splashing the walls.

A distinct, oily smell greeted my nose.

Was that…kerosene?

It can’t be…

As soon as I realized, I leaned forward and peered at the nameplate on the house they were dousing in liquid.

YAMASHITA

“Aya— Mmgh…!” She covered my mouth.

Why? These people are going to commit arson. They’re going to burn a house down. In the middle of the night. There are probably people inside, and the fire department might be too late. Worst case, everyone inside might die. Why won’t you stop them?

As I wondered to myself, their work continued. The two in charge of the kerosene nodded at each other and pulled out newspapers. They scattered the paper along the walls and soaked those, too.

They lit their lighters. If that fire touched the newspapers—it was all over.

“…Mm-mmgh!”

What is she thinking? I wondered, but I couldn’t just stand quietly by.

I pushed her hand off my mouth and yelled, “Dooooooooooooooon’t!!”

But it was too late. By the time I shouted, the newspaper had already caught fire, and the blaze was spreading.

The kerosene-soaked wooden home was instantly enveloped in flames.

All of them had heard my voice and turned in my direction. Though they seemed unsure what to do now that there were witnesses, the two who had been on watch ran as if they’d been planning to do that the entire time. The one next to the boy in the cap seemed confused, but then he took off at full speed, too.

The only one left was the hat boy.

He stared at me, wide-eyed—he recognized me as Aya’s sister.

“…Why is Aya’s little sister…?”

Aya stood up and revealed herself to the panicking boy.

“…A-Aya…!”

Without saying a word to him, she pulled out her mobile phone and called 119.

Before I knew it, I was ringing the doorbell of the Yamashita household over and over. “Your house is on fire! Please run! Run!” I was screaming. I pounded on the front door as hard as I could. That still didn’t get a response, so I started ringing the bell again. Finally, I reached someone who I guess was Yamashita’s mother and urged them to escape. “Run! Please run!”

After her call was finished, Aya approached the boy with the cap.

“Hey, Aya! You need to hurry and get away from here, too! If you stay, they might think you helped!”

She let out a sigh as she watched the roaring blaze. “I’m not worried about that. My sister will vouch for me… More importantly, didn’t I tell you not to do anything violent?”

“But! If we didn’t, then…!”

His face was much more haggard than when I saw him a week ago. He was the picture of a boy on the brink.

“So you did it on my behalf. I can’t turn a blind eye to something like this; I’ll take the responsibility for explaining it.”

“That’s not your responsibility at all! We did this on our own! You didn’t have anything to do with it!”

“Unfortunately, no one is going to believe that… Haven’t you figured it out? You’ve already caused me plenty of trouble. There’s no taking it back.”

His eyes went wide with shock.

“…I—I caused you trouble…? But…!”

His voice trembled, as if he had committed the most unforgivable crime of all.

“N…nnnh…!”

He broke down sobbing.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!”

His wailing grew louder and louder.

“……”

Stunned, I just watched.

What is going on here? I thought.

It creeped me out. Something was very wrong—uncomfortable, like watching someone perform when they haven’t rehearsed nearly enough.

I had known it all along.

Even though Aya could have put a stop to his crime whenever she wanted, she intentionally hadn’t. If I hadn’t yelled, she might have waited for the house to burn longer.

Meaning Aya had waited for him to make this mistake.

What was the point?

I looked at my sister.

And I gasped.

She was smiling. Sure, that much would have been okay. The problem, the biggest problem, was how I felt about her inappropriate expression—

—It was mesmerizing.

My footing became unsteady. This firelit scene was all wrong, obviously. It was out of tune. Completely out of tune with what should be.

And Aya was the one making it that way.

That incident ended the hostilities in the classroom. That was only natural, since the two at the heart of the dispute withdrew from school.

After her home partially burned down, Yamashita finally came crying to Aya, pleading for forgiveness. The boy in the cap apparently attempted suicide before the police came to his house. He tried to overdose on sleeping medicine, and he used the pills Aya had put in the paper bag for him during his visit—the “things to help him rest,” as Aya called them.

He didn’t die, though. He didn’t even suffer. He was taken away by the police as the principal offender in the arson, bewildered as to why he was still alive.

But it was no surprise that he didn’t die after swallowing everything in the bottle. After all, the contents weren’t sleeping pills, but Ramune candies like the ones they sell in convenience stores for seventy yen.

The thing is, until Aya told him otherwise, he believed without a doubt that the bottle contained sleeping pills, because she had written that it did when she gave it to him. That was enough for him. He never questioned it.

She tricked him, and yet he came up with the convenient excuse that it was all a plan to prevent him from taking his life. He was actually grateful to Aya, the one who had pushed him into committing arson.

…Oh, that reminds me. Aya’s prediction.

“Someone will swallow Ramune.”

My sister was right once again.

In my dream, the spider created its threads and built a web. The powerful adhesive of the threads never let go of anything they caught, and the spider leisurely preyed upon the meal in its web. Its fangs had a special property, a narcotic poison that left the one being devoured hallucinating in a state of ecstasy until the very end… Oh—looking closer, the one being eaten was a person. Was it the boy in the cap? Yamashita? …No, it wasn’t.

The one being eaten—was me.

Full of rapturous joy, I was disappearing into the spider’s stomach. As it ate my fingers, ate my legs, ate half of my head, and ate away at my insides, all I could feel was utter pleasure.

“…H-huff…huff…huff!”

I woke up.

My dreams had been like that ever since the arson. I was having nightmares every night.

“I have to ask her…”

Why had Aya shown me that? What was the point?

There would be no escape from my nightmares until I found out. I knew this somehow.

But I couldn’t work up the courage.

“N-ngh…”

I cradled my head. It throbbed with pain; maybe I hadn’t been sleeping enough. When I covered my eyes with my hands, I saw Aya’s face on the inside of my eyelids.

That face—her smile that was more irresistible than anything.

I didn’t understand what lay behind it, but I did know one thing:

If I were to ask, our relationship as close sisters would be over.

It was a sultry night. Sweat beaded on my skin as soon as I left my air-conditioned room. The drastic change in temperature momentarily threw my senses for a loop, making me dizzy and out of breath.

Still, I had made up my mind to ask.

I summoned my courage and knocked on the door to Aya’s room. It was the first time I had ever knocked so somberly.

My heart used to leap with excitement when I knocked on her door. I’d always loved my sister.

There was no response; I entered the room anyway.

My nose was immediately filled with the scent of several perfumes and aromatic oils. That fragrance never failed to set me at ease.

I turned to the bed. Aya was lying with her back to me in the darkness.

“Aya,” I called, and she rolled over to look at me.

Her eyes, clear like gems, gazed at me intently. It made me feel as if she could see everything inside me.

“Come here.” Aya invited me under the blankets. Before, I would have jumped right over to my beloved sister. But I didn’t move. “Maria, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Um… Um…” I clenched my fists. “Wh-what were you trying to do?”

“…Hmm? Why did I make you watch something so awful? Is that your question?”

I nodded.

“Maria. I say this to you practically every day. I’ve been working toward a singular purpose from the moment I came here.”

“And that’s—”

My sister has a favorite phrase. She’s been saying it since she was four. Her impossibly idealistic, empty dream.

“I want to make everyone in the world happy.”

Every single word from her mouth was what I had expected.

I shook my head.

“I don’t get it at all… What you did was the exact opposite of making people happy…right?”

“It might seem that way on the surface… But, Maria. You don’t know what happened to my class afterward, do you?”

“Huh?”

“The normal routine of my class had been disrupted. There was a conflict with me at the center, and everyone was upset in some way. I’m sure all my classmates were miserable. Those negative feelings swallowed up the entire school. The problem was no longer something they could leave for someone else to deal with. They couldn’t ignore it anymore. They had to keep thinking about that question: Why did the school end up this way?”

I knew the answer that came next.

“Because I made it that way.”

Yes, exactly. The problem had gotten as big as it had because my sister had intentionally fanned the flames.

“But that huge problem was solved in a single stroke by this latest incident. The students can finally breathe again now that they’re free of this massive headache.”

Aya smiled gently.

“Everyone matured a great deal in facing the issue. I doubt they’ll be making the same mistakes again. This mess around me brought them happiness and will help them find more in the days to come.”

I imagined a classroom with the students and even the teacher standing around Aya, smiling unconvincingly.

…I didn’t know if I would call that happiness.

Either way, there was still the problem before that.

“But you made that boy in the hat unhappy by doing this, didn’t you? And not just him—probably lots of other people, too.”

“I helped many more people than I hurt, but you do make a valid point. Given that my goal is to bring joy to everyone in the world, I would prefer to not make victims of anyone. But I’m too inept to do it any other way.”

“Are you saying that burning homes down and making people commit crimes are ‘acceptable sacrifices’?!”

“Sacrifices are never acceptable, but if they will bring happiness to many people, then that’s what I will choose.”

“That’s crazy… That’s crazy…!”

A normal person wouldn’t be able to make that choice. My sister lacked empathy. She was completely wrong.

“What’s crazy about it? Try to explain. If I can make a hundred people happy by sacrificing ten, then I will, even if I don’t like it. That’s all I’m saying, see?”

“B-but…it’s not right!”

It was undoubtedly wrong, I was positive; and yet, I wasn’t able to put a good counterargument into words. All I could do was shake my head and say “That’s crazy, that’s crazy” like a child throwing a tantrum.

“Well… I mean, come on! There have to be other ways… Like, I can’t come up with them now, but as smart as you are, I’m sure you can find something better… Like, can’t you find a way to make people happy with good feelings, like the trust and goodwill people have toward you?”

“I already did that in elementary school.”

“Huh?”

“As a result, I understood that simply giving people what they want just makes them happy for a little while, and it affects only a few people.”

“…I have a hard time imagining that.”

“I’m sure you do, if I merely describe it. There’s no other way—open the drawer of my desk. The very top one.”

I was too terrified to move, though. After all, I knew that whatever was in there would destroy my sense of values.

Seeing me standing frozen, Aya stood up. She turned on the lights of the chandelier, then opened the top drawer of the desk.

She took what appeared to be a notebook from it and handed it to me. It was the one the boy in the cap had given her when he came to the house. “I had him do a bit of breaking and entering.” She laughed wryly. That wasn’t enough to surprise me anymore.

The notebook had Diary written on it.

“Go on—read it.”

I knew nothing good was coming, but I obeyed and began to read.

Society would never let me be with the girl I love.

The diary began with that sentence. While the name of the person the author was in love with was never written, I could tell it was Aya. And the diary was almost completely filled with things about my sister.

How he was in love from the moment he saw her. How he decided he couldn’t tell her. How he was unable to repress his feelings when Aya came to him and gave him hope: “You’ve always got your eye on me.” How excited he was when she defied his expectations and agreed to a date. How the date couldn’t have gone any better. How he was prepared to care for her for the rest of his life. How he confessed his feelings to her, and they officially started going out. His observations on love. Embarrassingly bad poems.

After reading all of that, I was thoroughly appalled. This blind love was so unnerving. The owner of this diary paid more attention to Aya than anyone else, yet he understood her least of all. It was as if he had built a character for a pretty doll named Aya.

And to top it off, I already knew what happened next.

“Maria,” Aya softly said to me. “I could make this one man happy. But if I did, I could never make the rest of the world happy, too.”

The mood of the diary took an ominous turn.

Aya’s attitude turned cold in their relationship. His affection for her somehow became common knowledge in class. It became a major issue during a staff meeting. No one in class would give him the time of day anymore. The rumors had come from Aya herself.

The once-neat text in the diary became messy. His fury was spilling over.

Once again, he pleaded for a relationship so that they could get married, but he was given the cold shoulder. His profession of love had been recorded, and his proposal to an elementary schooler spread through the class. The students, their parents and guardians, his colleagues, and everyone greeted him with looks of disgust whenever they encountered him. He was practically asked to resign. His parents disowned him.

He broke into our home.

This diary documented the love of Aya’s teacher when she was in sixth grade. The final line was written in a scrawl:

I will kill Aya Otonashi.

Whatever this sickening feeling in the diary was, it was something far more than rage. I hadn’t known much about the break-in, but this raw depiction of it was hitting me hard.

However, it was difficult to simply blame that person.

After all, Aya had made a prediction:

“My teacher will resign.”

Meaning—as an elementary schooler, Aya had manipulated her teacher and driven him to this.

“…Wh-why would you do something like that?!”

“I was trying to make him happy. If you actually look at the diary, you can see that he seems pleased enough in the beginning, right? But he wanted to keep me all to himself. He didn’t like that I was working to make others happy. I wouldn’t have been able to bring happiness to others if things had gone the way he wanted. That was out of the question. It went against my mission. He was deluded; he believed that no one would ever love me but him. Severing ties with him was difficult. I had to reject him forcefully; there was no other way.”

Aya shook her head slightly.

“And as you can see, it clearly failed, but it also gave me a sense of the similarities between love and hate. I learned that if I could take advantage of them, I could manipulate others more effectively. So this time, I took the roundabout method, using hatred in lieu of dealing directly with a single person. The outcome was the best so far… That said, it was still far from perfect. It’s nowhere close to what I want to achieve. Nevertheless, I won’t stop walking this path.”

She pressed her lips together in determination.

“I’ll keep thinking of ways to make everyone in the world happy.”

And with that, she smiled.

Yeah.

I understood. Why would I think then, as I do now, that her smile was more beautiful, more bewitching, than anything?

The answer—

—was that Aya was nothing short of a saint.

Some might ask in what way. She had sacrificed people and didn’t even always get the results she wanted. And she wasn’t exactly humane.

And yet, she wasn’t in it for herself, not at all.

Aya had cast aside her own interests in the pursuit of bringing joy to people across the planet.

That stance was genuinely beautiful.

Oh…what was wrong with me? Why did I feel that way?

“I understand now what you’re thinking…maybe. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I haven’t explained the demonstration. But didn’t I make that prediction earlier?”

That prediction.

“You’re going to become me—no, you have to.”

I trembled as I considered what it meant.

Aya gently pressed her fingertip to my lips. “You will live for the happiness of people around the world, just like I do. So I wanted to teach you my way of doing things.”

Me? I’d do what my sister did? Set aside my own desires, my feelings, and live to bring joy to the people of the world?

“I—I could never do that.”

I wasn’t superhuman like Aya. I was just a weak child; I had so much trouble adjusting to elementary and middle school that I’d barely squeaked by.

“It’s not a question of possibility. You can’t fight your destiny.”

“Wh-why?! You should be more than enough by yourself, right? Don’t drag me into this, too!”

Aya let out a sigh at my fierce resistance. “…I was unsure whether to bring it up, but it looks like I can’t avoid the topic.”

“Wh-what…?”

“I’m truly glad you were born,” Aya said. “You brought Michishige and me together. You are my little angel.”

My mother had said that to me over and over. Those words had sustained me all my life.

“Wh-what does that have to do with anything…? Why are you saying that now…?”

“They sound like an expression of love. The exact opposite of my mother’s wish that I’d never been born. Are they really completely contradictory, though? I mean, it’s so easy to interpret it from another angle.

“You had already served your purpose by the time you were born.”

My mother’s motto was my foundation. The foundation of all that I was.

A few words shouldn’t have been able to shatter it.

“

Oh.”

—But they did.

“Ngh…aaaaaaaaah……”

I couldn’t keep it together.

A single sentence eradicated the premise that had kept me going.

It crumbled inside me all too easily, like a bunch of building blocks. The pieces thudded to the ground, never to be whole again.

Yes…I’m sure I had some sense in my daily life of how hollow it all was. I had noticed that my parents weren’t interested in me. Noticed the implications in those loving words.

“—Nh, nh.”

I hadn’t been abused or confined. I couldn’t come up with any real complaints when it came to my parents.

And yet, all the same, Aya and I were a pair of unnecessary objects in between Michishige and my mother.

If I had picked up on anything, it was that.

Right—

We weren’t needed.

As I wept, Aya wrapped her arms around my head, as if she were taking pity on me.

“You are special.”

Her embrace was as gentle as ever.

“An innocent box without anything in it. An embodiment of potential. If there was a god capable of making the world’s wishes come true, it would appear before you, not me. You have an extremely rare purity.”

But there was still more.

“However, that also means you are empty.”

“Wh-what should I do…?”

“You and I are both hollow, and that’s why we have been searching for meaning ever since we were born. It fills the void within us. Let’s give our births meaning, the greatest meaning we can find. Let’s bring happiness to everyone in the world. Then everyone will need us,” she whispered softly, temptingly, into my ear. “We will have value, being here.”

Still.

“…We may…find another purpose…” I still couldn’t muster the resolve to abandon myself. Aya’s way of life wouldn’t work for me.

“…Look, Maria. I can make anyone do what I want to a certain extent, even people I’ve just met. Right?”

“Yeah, but…”

“How many years has it been since we met, Maria? How many years have we spent under the same roof? Are you trying to say you’re immune?”

“…Oh.”

“…That’s right, Maria. I’m already manipulating you. I’m going to make you seek happiness. A part of you may reject it, but you will make the decision in the end.”

Aya declared:

“Maria Otonashi will become Aya Otonashi.”

The instant she said that to me, I could see the transparent threads of the spider. The spiderweb I had seen over and over in my nightmares that wouldn’t let me free.

I was entangled in those threads, and there was no escape. I was going to be devoured, just like the others. The teacher in that diary, the boy in the cap, and everyone else who had ever been involved with my sister.

Aya smiled. “So let’s get started. We don’t hate anyone, but there is an indescribable urge driving us forward. We have an enemy—you might call it emptiness. Well, let’s show them.”

It was bewitching.

More than anything, her smile as she spoke was bewitching.

“Let’s show them the nature of our revenge.”

The funeral of my three family members took place in the rain.

I stood in my school uniform, cradling a portrait of my sister, not speaking to anyone.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw the cast-off shell of a cicada. If someone applied just a little pressure, I would break with a crisp, satisfying snap.

“Maria, I’m going to set out on a journey when I’m fourteen.”

Why had Aya chosen joint suicide? If she died, then she wouldn’t be able to make everyone in the world happy.

This result was one of her predictions, though, so I was sure she had planned it far in advance.

In other words, my sister had intended to place her trust in me from the very beginning. She had always wanted me to take up her mission of bringing joy to the people of the world. That was why she had me witness the arson and read the diary.

Then she had decided I was ready.

On her fourteenth birthday, Aya manipulated the enmity of her former teacher, driving him to cause an accident and kill her.

Revenge, she’d said.

Aya had said she would have her revenge.

I’m sure she hated our family. Hated the family that had made her empty. And she had hidden from me an earnest wish for vengeance, true vengeance. She had polished and polished this plan for murder.

I’m certain I was among the targets of her revenge. She wouldn’t kill me, but my heart would be imprisoned.

The proof was that I no longer had anywhere to go.

“This cursed girl is the daughter of an affair. Who’s going to take custody? Certainly not us,” my relatives complained. “Give us the money; give us the house; give us the land.” I wasn’t part of the battle, but when the dust settled, my family’s entire fortune, including the house and land, was taken away without anyone taking charge of me.

All I was given was my parents’ insurance money, which was enough to support me until adulthood as long as I lived modestly. My relatives apparently decided that was enough responsibility for them.

Why would anyone think there was a place for me among people like that? I would rather waste away stuck in an abandoned cobweb.

Suddenly, everything in front of me had gone blank. It didn’t feel as if I were trapped inside a cramped room so much as thrown into an infinite void without walls. No matter how far I walked in this colorless world, nothing changed, and I never arrived anywhere.

Except for one single thing.

A transparent, vestigial silhouette of Aya. With nowhere else to go, I happily rushed over to it.

Aya.

It was still raining. Suddenly, I spotted a big spider covered in mud and picked it up calmly. Just as Aya had done back then, I closed my fingers around it.

I opened my fist.

The big spider remained in my palm. I was unable to clench my fist with any force. The spider scuttled off my palm and vanished, leaving my hand stained with mud.

I couldn’t help but feel something at that moment.

—I was going to become Aya Otonashi.

My soul was gone. Sometime later, I suddenly found myself beneath a heavy downpour. My memories of how I arrived here had slipped away. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since the funeral.

I had no idea where I was. Water dripped from the bottom of my soaked uniform’s skirt.

The storm washed away my emotions, sapped away my warmth, wore down my contours, thinned my blood, and melted me into the ground.

How long had I been walking in the rain? Maybe it hadn’t been that much time. All the same, this trek with no destination had chipped away at my soul until it was withered and gaunt.

I persisted in my journey—

And when my soul had completely eroded—

—I was standing in the light.

That was the only way to describe it. There was no sky or land there, and I was naked as the day I was born. I felt myself diffusing into the radiance, my existence fading. That space would not allow me to be as an individual. All things had equal value—no value at all.

I could feel an almost imperceptible current in the air, though. My movements caused a stir, ever so slight. Not that it meant anything, as far as I could tell. That was why I was going to disappear from this world.

Oh, but.

But I have something to do.

I have to bring happiness to everyone in the world.

That directive was the one thing left in my empty self. That instant, the currents in the air were set, blowing toward me.

The light.

The light.

The light spilled over.

The next thing I knew, I was out of the light. I sat up in an unfamiliar forest with the cries of owls and insects in my ears. I couldn’t do anything after that, though. I was petrified, unable to move. There was nothing in my heart to spur me onward.

I was still for so long that the sky began changing color. Suddenly, I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out what was inside.

It was a small wrapped bag. I opened it, and inside was a little bottle of scented oil I had intended to give to Aya for her birthday.

I undid the lid and caught the faint scent of peppermint.

Enough emotion had returned to me to make my muddy school uniform feel gross.

Then I noticed a small “box” in my hand. A beautifully transparent cube made of something like thin glass. It seemed so terribly fragile.

I understood instinctively.

This would grant my wish. I had the ability to make any wish come true now.

And it goes without saying that I had only one.

I named that box “Happiness.”

But it was flawed—misbegotten.

—Bang, bang!

I awaken to the sound of someone banging on a wall.

“…Mmm.”

I wipe my eyelids. I suspect my dream was one I know well, but I’ve already forgotten it.

The scent of peppermint lingers in the room.

I am exhausted in body and mind, but that scent allows me to get up.

“Okay, let’s get moving.”

I will stand and begin my search for a Box again. I don’t know if I will even get ahold of one. Even if I’m forgetting the past, I have to bring joy to everyone in the world.

That is why I exist.

My legs tremble after I’ve stood and walked only a little ways. I have been walking for so, so long—it’s too much for such thin legs. I’ve also spent the equivalent of a lifetime in pointless repetition. But I can’t stop. There is no need to stop.

I live only for the sake of others. I won’t let anyone dissuade me from my purpose.

—Bang, bang!

Ugh…and that pounding on the wall is so annoying.