Chapter 1: Zaru Soba
The summer you are assigned to Geto Suguru, the cicadas start early and do not stop.
You are twenty-four. You have been an auxiliary manager for two years, which means you have spent two years driving sorcerers to places where people have died and then waiting in the car. You are good at it. You know the shortcuts out of every prefecture between Tokyo and Nagano. You know how to raise a curtain in under four seconds, the words worn smooth in your mouth like a stone you carry in your pocket. You know how to fill in an incident report so that the higher-ups read the first line and sign it without reading the rest. You know when to keep the engine running.
What you do not know, the morning you pull up outside the dormitory gate in the black sedan with the dented rear door, is what to make of the man who gets into the back seat.
He is very tall and very polite. That is the first thing. He bows slightly before he gets in, which nobody does, and he says, "Thank you for driving me," in a low pleasant voice, and he folds himself into the seat behind you with his long legs angled sideways and his hands resting loose on his knees. He is wearing the dark, loose uniform they all wear, baggy through the trousers, and his black hair is tied up in a half-bun with a long piece left falling over his forehead, and he has stretched earlobes with heavy black plugs in them, which you find yourself looking at in the rear-view mirror longer than is professional.
He smiles at you in the mirror. It's a good smile. It reaches all the way up to his narrow dark eyes, and it doesn't touch anything behind them at all.
"Saitama?" he asks.
You blink. "Sorry?"
"Your accent. Saitama, I think. Somewhere north of Omiya."
"Kumagaya," you say, surprised. "Nobody ever gets that."
"I grew up nearby." He turns to look out of the window as you pull away from the gate. "My parents still live there. In a very ordinary house. With a very ordinary dog." He says it fondly, and with something else underneath that you don't have a name for yet.
You will learn its name, eventually. It will take you most of the summer.
The first job is a curse in a disused tunnel on the old Chichibu line, Grade 2, possibly Grade 1. You raise the curtain at the tunnel mouth and the sky goes dark as ink over the two of you and he walks into the tunnel without hurrying, hands in his pockets, and you wait by the car with the cicadas screaming and the heat coming up off the gravel and count.
Eleven minutes. He comes out with his uniform unmarked. He doesn't have a weapon; he never has a weapon. Instead he's holding something small and dark in one hand, a kind of sphere, roughly the size of a plum, that seems to drink the light around it.
You've heard about this. Everyone has. Cursed Spirit Manipulation: he defeats curses and then he takes them, compresses them, keeps them. You've heard there are thousands of them in him now.
You haven't heard how he takes them.
He stands at the tunnel mouth, with his back half turned to you as though that might be enough to stop you seeing, and lifts the dark sphere to his mouth and swallows it whole.
It takes a second. Less. His throat moves. His shoulders go rigid, then very deliberately loose. When he turns around, he's smiling again, the good smile, the one that reaches his eyes.
"All done," he says. "Shall we?"
He's quiet in the car on the way back. You offer him the bento box that the office sends for every assigned sorcerer, and he thanks you and sets it on the seat beside him and doesn't open it. You don't push. You drive.
It happens the same way on the second job, and the third. A Grade 2 in a love hotel in Ikebukuro that has been eating guests. A pack of small curses in a hospital car park. He comes out unhurt. He swallows. He smiles. He sets the bento on the seat and doesn't touch it.
On the fourth job, a farmhouse in Gunma, you notice that the only part of the lunch box he eats is the little nest of cold soba in the corner, with the dipping sauce. Everything else he leaves.
On the fifth job, you don't bring the bento at all.
"I'm sorry," you say, when he gets back into the car afterwards with that rigid set to his shoulders. "The office didn't send lunch today. There's a soba place in Takasaki on the way back. They do a good zaru. Would that be all right?"
He looks at you in the mirror for a long moment. You keep your eyes on the road.
"That would be all right," he says.
The soba place is a counter with six stools and an old man who doesn't talk, and Geto Suguru eats two whole baskets of cold buckwheat noodles there with the absorbed, unselfconscious attention of somebody who hasn't eaten properly in weeks.
You eat one. You watch him without watching him, the way you've learned to watch sorcerers: out of the side of your eye, as if they were curses.
"You didn't forget the bento," he says, without looking up from his second basket.
"I didn't forget the bento," you admit.
"Why?"
You think about lying. Then you think about the way his throat moved outside the tunnel on the Chichibu line, and the way his shoulders went rigid, and you say, "Because you only ever eat the soba. And I thought, if that's the only part you can eat after... after you've done your thing. Then maybe you should eat a lot of it."
He stops with the chopsticks halfway to his mouth.
"After I've done my thing," he repeats.
"Your technique."
"You can say it. I swallow them." He sets the chopsticks down across the basket very neatly. "Do you want to know what it's like?"
You don't, particularly. But he's looking at you sideways, along the counter, with an odd challenging expression, as if this is a test that everyone else has failed by flinching. So you say, "Yes."
"Imagine a rag," he says pleasantly. "One that's been used to clean up vomit. Wrung out and left in the sun for a week. Then imagine putting the whole rag in your mouth, and swallowing it, without chewing. Every time." He picks his chopsticks back up. "Thousands of times."
The old man behind the counter is wiping a glass. The cicadas are shrieking outside the open door. You sit there and think about it, really think about it, and then you reach across without asking and slide your own unfinished basket of soba along the counter toward him.
"Then have mine as well," you say.
Geto Suguru looks at the basket. Then he looks at you. And then he laughs, a real laugh, startled out of him, his head tipping back, the long piece of black hair falling into his eyes, and it's nothing at all like the polite smile in the rear-view mirror.
"You're strange," he says.
"I'm from Kumagaya," you say. "We're all like this."
After that, there's always soba.
You find the good places. A stand in Kawagoe that does a cold tanuki with crispy bits of tempura batter. A place in Chiba where the owner makes the noodles himself and throws out anything that isn't perfect. You keep a list in the glovebox. Geto doesn't mention it, but he starts sitting in the front passenger seat instead of the back, and he starts asking you where you're taking him, and once, on a hot evening in July after a job in Yokohama that went badly, he puts his head back against the headrest and says, "Somewhere good, please," with his eyes closed, and you take him to Kawagoe and he eats three baskets.
You learn things about him in those front-seat hours. That he and Gojo Satoru were in the same year and have been inseparable since they were too young to know better, that they call each other "the strongest" as a joke that stopped being a joke sometime last year. That Gojo has got stronger since then, terrifyingly so, after something went wrong on a guard mission that Geto won't talk about. That Gojo now does most jobs alone. That Geto is fine with that.
He says he's fine with that a lot.
"Satoru doesn't need anyone now," he says one night, with his forehead against the passenger window as the lights of the Kan-Etsu expressway slide past. "He's the strongest. I'm just strong." He says it lightly. You hear it hit the glass.
"That's a stupid way to talk about yourself," you say.
He turns his head. "Is it?"
"You've been doing twice the jobs he has all summer. I've seen the logs. I fill in the logs." You change lanes. "Being the strongest doesn't mean he's the only one doing anything. It just means the higher-ups send you the jobs he's too important for, and then everyone forgets you did them."
He's quiet for a long time. When you glance over, he's watching you with an expression you can't read, the streetlights moving over his face.
"You fill in the logs," he says.
"Somebody has to."
"Nobody reads them."
"I read them," you say. "I read all of them."
He doesn't say anything to that. But when you drop him at the gate that night, he doesn't get out straight away. He sits there with the door open and the cicadas loud in the dark and says, "Thank you for the soba," and then, after a moment, "Thank you for reading the logs," and then he goes.
You start to think that the summer might be all right. That there's a rhythm to it you could live inside: the black sedan, the cicadas, the curtain, the soba. A tall polite man in the passenger seat telling you about a cat he used to feed behind the dormitory, or a book he read about the history of Buddhism in the Edo period, or Gojo doing something insane at a pachinko parlour. A man who eats all your noodles now without asking and laughs at your jokes a beat too late, as if he has to remember how.
You start to think you might be good for him. You start to think he might be good for you.
And then, on the second Thursday in August, you're driving him back from a job in Tochigi, and your phone buzzes on the dashboard.
You put it on speaker without thinking. It's Nanami Kento. You know his voice from the radio; he's in the year below Geto, and he's always been calm on the line, dry and steady and faintly bored, the voice of a man filing his own paperwork in his head.
He doesn't sound calm now.
"Is Geto-san with you?" he says.
Geto's already sitting up. "I'm here."
There is a long silence on the line. You hear Nanami breathe, raggedly, like someone who has been running or crying or both. Behind him there's noise, voices, a siren a long way off.
"The mission was misgraded," Nanami says. "It wasn't Grade 2. It was a land god. It was never Grade 2. They sent us in on the paperwork, and the paperwork was wrong, and Haibara..."
His voice stops. Beside you, Geto has gone completely still.
You pull onto the hard shoulder without being asked. You put the hazards on. The cicadas are screaming outside in the dusk, the way they have all summer, as if nothing in the world has changed at all.
"Nanami," says Geto, very quietly. "Where are you?"