Chapter 85: The Aizawa fire part 2 continuation
By the time I climbed back through the window, the smoke had already moved through most of the house.
The hallway was barely visible. Dark grey smoke rolled low across the ceiling and along the walls, turning everything into shapes and shadows. Each breath came back wrong, like the air had been replaced with something thicker and hotter that had no interest in filling lungs properly. My eyes watered immediately and I pressed my arm across my mouth and tried to blink through it.
I could hear my father’s voice downstairs.
My mother’s.
Then the screaming started.
I turned back toward the window because instinct told me to and that was when I saw the man standing in the yard below. He was not running toward the house. He was not calling for help or looking for a phone or doing any of the things a person standing outside a burning building should be doing. He was giving instructions to the men moving around the perimeter and he was watching the house the way someone watched a process they had set in motion and wanted to confirm was completing correctly.
I heard him tell one of the men to seal the exits.
I did not fully understand what that meant at twelve years old but my body understood it before my mind did.
A hand grabbed my arm.
My mother pulled me back from the window and into the bathroom where the air was fractionally clearer. She turned on the tap, soaked two towels and pressed one into my hands.
"Cover your mouth," she said between coughs. "It helps."
"Mum, what’s happening?"
She didn’t answer that.
"Where’s Dad? Where’s Ren?"
"Kuro."
She said my name in a way that stopped me from asking anything else. She was looking at me directly and her face had gone somewhere I had never seen it go before, past fear into something calmer and more terrible than fear.
"You have to survive."
Even at twelve I understood what those words meant. They meant she was not including herself in that sentence.
"No," I said.
She grabbed my shoulders and moved me toward my bedroom. The flames had reached the hallway outside. The heat came through the walls. The wallpaper was burning in long curling strips and the ceiling had started making a sound like it was thinking about giving way.
"You see that edge of the roof?" She pointed toward my window. "There’s a ladder on the far side. You follow the roof to the edge and you take it down."
"You’re coming too."
She shook her head.
"The ladder won’t hold both of us." She reached up and pushed the hair from my face the way she had done since I was small. "And we both know that’s the same ladder you’ve been using to sneak out and meet your friends at night."
I wanted to say something but my throat had closed.
She started coughing again, worse than before, and I saw blood on her lips and understood what that meant in the way children understood things they had not been taught, instinctively and immediately and with no protection from it.
"The other exits are sealed," she said.
"Then we go together through the window—"
"Kuro." She looked at me with the specific expression that had always ended arguments in our house, the one that meant the conversation was finished. "Go."
The fire came into the room. Wood split somewhere close. Glass broke downstairs. The whole house shifted around us with a sound like something settling permanently into a new shape.
She pulled me into her and held me the way she had held me when I was young enough to still allow it without protest, her arms tight and her cheek against my hair.
"You live a good life," she said. Her voice was unsteady but her arms were not. "You hear me? Be brave."
Then she let go.
So I climbed.
The roof tiles were already warm beneath my hands. Smoke followed me out into the night air. I moved across the slope on my hands and knees toward the far edge where the ladder was, trying not to look down, trying not to think about anything except the next tile and the next handhold.
My foot slipped.
The slope took me before I could react and I went down fast, tiles rushing beneath me, fingers scrambling for anything fixed. I caught a wooden beam where the roofline changed angle and stopped myself, barely, heart going so fast I could feel it in my hands.
I looked back.
My bedroom window was visible from where I had stopped on the slope. My mother was standing in it. The fire had reached her by then. It moved up through the fabric of her clothes and along her arms and she did not fight it. She stood completely still and she watched me and she kept watching until I looked away and started moving again because looking was making it impossible to move.
The smell reached me a few seconds later.
I have never lost it. I have never found a way to put enough distance between myself and that smell. Even now, in this van with coffee going cold on the table between us, I can find it in an instant if I let myself. Burning wood and fabric and something underneath both of those things that I will not name.
The beam I was holding snapped.
I went off the edge of the roof and the ground came up fast and everything stopped.
"I woke up to sirens."
Kuro’s voice had changed while he spoke. Quieter. Slower. The performance entirely gone.
"Ambulances. Fire engines. I tried to get up and my leg had broken in the fall." He rubbed absentmindedly at his left thigh. "My mother’s voice was the first thing I heard in my head when I came back around. Survive. And then I remembered the man I had seen in the yard giving orders and I understood that if anyone from that group found me alive, surviving was going to be a short-term problem."
He crawled. Through dirt and weeds and pain with a broken leg that sent white light through his vision every time it made contact with the ground. Away from the house and the sirens and the men he had seen at the perimeter. Into the bushes alongside the road."
He kept moving until I reached the open road."
A woman in a passing car stopped. She took him to a hospital and when nobody came looking for a twelve year old boy with a broken leg and no family, she eventually became the closest thing to one.
"She raised me," he said. "Fed me, put me in school, did everything she could." He looked at the table. "But none of that changed what I had seen. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. About Ren. About Asumi in her new school uniform. About the man in the yard who gave an order like it was nothing."
He had started investigating when he was old enough to know how. His father’s business dealings, his contacts, the nature of what he had been involved in. He followed threads for years. Lost them. Found them again. Every road eventually led back to the same name.
Katsuro Arashigimi.
"He was impossible to approach directly," Kuro said. "I spent years watching him, trying to find a way in, losing him every time I got close enough " He looked at me. "Then one day he made a mistake."
I said nothing.
"He met someone in a park. Sat down next to a girl on a bench." His eyes stayed on mine. "I couldn’t hear the conversation from where I was. But I could read his face. I had been watching that man for years and I had never seen him look at another person the way he looked at her." A pause. "She mattered to him. Whatever was being said, she mattered."
He pointed at me.
"You."
I held his gaze. "So you started following me."
"Yes."
He said it without any particular shame, just the simple delivery of a fact.
"I followed you to Maxford State college . Watched from a distance. Learned your patterns." His expression darkened. "And one night I was across the street from your building when I saw men carrying something out and loading it into a vehicle. Something wrapped. Something the size of a person." He folded his hands on the table. "I followed them. That was how I learned about Felix."
The trailer was very quiet.
"And Ethan?" I asked. "Why pull him into this?"
Kuro leaned back in his chair and looked at me with the expression I had seen in every X Reveals video, the one behind the mask that was harder to read than the mask itself.
"Because he mattered to you," he said. "I knew that before you did. I could see it in how you moved around him. Even when you were already dating his room mate.How different you were when he was in the room." He tapped the table once. "So when you left , I needed leverage. I knew you would come back into his life eventually. So I came first. I got close to him, became his friend, learned his rhythms, and waited."
His eyes held mine.
"And then you came home."
( to be continued in Chapter 87)
