Page 8 of The Gods Will Sing Our Song

“Dislocated,” the nurse announces.

“Dislocated!” Mama repeats angrily, as though adding it to my charge list. She remains half standing, her necklaces sending a rainbow of colorful shards around the bus as the light prisms through them.

“Don’t worry, woman,” Mr. Nomura chimes in. “We can set it. Take off your shirt, young man.”

The nurse helps me lift my shirt over my head. Despite her gentleness, I bite my lip, stifling a groan. My shoulder is flattened just below my collarbone, forming a sunken step into my arm. Mr. Nomura takes my wrist. The nurse braces me. Damn, I think, this is gonna hurt.

“On the count of three, we pop it back in,” Mr. Nomura barks, sounding like he’s commanding a fleet of soldiers, not one displaced nurse.

Nausea adds another dimension to the pain as Mr. Nomura lifts my wrist. Everyone on the bus is watching, even the baby in the mother’s lap. I swallow hard, determined not to humiliate myself by throwing up. Frantically, I look down the aisle for something fixed and sturdy to distract me. My fox buzzes, pulling my attention to the window. Oh, so you’re alive now?

“One!”

I’m seeking an anchor but find the opposite. A girl, about my age, in a black dress trimmed with some sort of frilly white material stands right in my view outside the bus.

“Two!”

There’s nothing fixed or sturdy about her. In fact, she’s nothing but motion. She’s talking to an older woman, her mother, most likely. The girl’s lips move quickly, along with her hands. A breeze messes with her hair and tugs at the label attached to her dress. She sways slightly.

“Three!”

Suddenly, her gaze cuts toward me just as Mr. Nomura yanks my arm upward. The shoulder slips neatly back into its joint. I fall to my knees despite my every effort not to react. Woozy lightheadedness crashes over me, but I can tell that my shoulder is back where it belongs. I stagger to my feet, biting my lip, determined to look unaffected but likely failing. Immediately, I glance back out the window, searching for the girl.

She’s gone.

The unconscious man lurches upright with a wordless cry, commanding our attention, even as I keep looking out the window, hoping pathetically that the girl will reappear. She doesn’t.

“Say, you okay, old-timer?” Mr. Nomura asks. “Take it easy.”

“Old-timer?” the man says. Scorn drips from his voice, which doesn’t sound aged whatsoever. At least not to me. “You insult me. I’m eternally in the full blossom of youth.”

Mr. Nomura and the nurse glance at each other and shake their heads.

“Get some rest,” the nurse says in a soothing voice, and she mouths dementia to Mr. Nomura, who gravely nods.

Using two hands, the man gathers his hair up into a topknot. The underside of his head is shaved close enough to show the whiteness of his skull. He binds his hair at the crown with practiced ease, folding one half under the other. It’s a chonmage, an ancestral style. An intricate, long gold earring hangs from one ear.

I make my way to my seat and look back, eyeing him suspiciously. Then I realize my fox is basically as dead as a doornail again. I realize what the difference is. My fox is often silent. This goes way beyond that. It’s…playing dead? Like a possum?

It’s hiding.

I frown and stare at the man.

In a way, he does seem to be in the…what did he say? Full blossom of youth? His hair is black as night, without a single thread of gray, and his skin doesn’t have a single wrinkle or crease. Strangely, the idea of age doesn’t seem to apply to him. It feels as though I’m trying to gauge the age of the sun, something ancient yet burning as bright today as it did eons ago. He isn’t human. The ridiculous thought blazes in my mind.

His eyes meet mine and the pupils narrow into vertical slits like a predator. Something tells me to stay still, to not reveal my fox pendant.

Because, for whatever reason, my fox doesn’t want the man to know it exists. An antsy feeling settles over me, along with a sense of irony. I thought getting the box was dangerous because it pissed off the guards. But maybe it was dangerous because now that I’ve crossed paths with this guy I’m on his radar. When I steal another look at him, he’s still staring at me. I almost shudder.

I face forward, slumping down a little in my seat, and try to block him out. A hazy cloud of pain settles over me, and I feel myself slipping into a daze. Still, even as my thoughts grow fuzzy, I know his eyes are on me.

Chapter Four

Violet

Dear Otōsan,

You probably have heard about the evacuation. We’re told that we’ll have everything we need where we are going, though we don’t know where that is. As soon as I can, I’ll send this letter so you have the address of our new place.