Chapter 57.6: The Perfect Epilogue

  “Michio! Michio!”

  Michio Mikami cracked open his eyes and groaned. His name was coming from somewhere close, but it reached him like sound through water.

  Then the banging registered. Whoever called out to him started shrieking.

  Michio shot upright just as the door shattered into splinters. Everything happened at once—boots, shouting, the crash of furniture toppling—and then something slammed into him from behind.

  Michio’s cheek hit the ground hard. The stench of stale beer and old food crumbs filled his nose, and he choked on it, coughing a glob of phlegm across the grimy floor. Hands pinned him down, heavy and unyielding. No matter how he twisted his head, he could not find her.

  His Arisa.

  His wife.

  Arisa started screaming her head off. “ARISA!” Her name tore out of him, muffled against the floor. Armed policemen swarmed the room like a tsunami, and her face was nowhere that he could see.

  The shouting did not stop, but the boots started to shuffle away from his face. Only one pair remained.

  “I can’t talk to him like this.” One boot tapped against the floor. “Make him sit.”

  The hands pinning Michio down shifted their grip, hauling him upright with the impersonal efficiency of men following an order. The room lurched around him as he was pulled upright and slammed on his behind. A well-dressed man crouched down into Michio's line of sight. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a worn leather wallet, flipping it open with the practised ease of a man who had done it a thousand times. Credentials. A badge that caught the light for just a moment before it was folded away.

  “I am Detective Makishima.” The detective looked Michio straight in the eye. The two moles under his right eye moved with every syllable. “We are arresting you for your role in the recent terrorist attacks on Yokohama Highland Hospital.”

  The words entered Michio's ears. He heard them, turned them over, and felt them settle into his chest.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Michio laughed.

  It was ugly, but Michio found himself lacking care for the world around him. Events and faces strobed through his mind. White corridors, screaming, the smell of something burning. But beneath the haze, one thought burned clear and absolute.

  “They deserved it,” Michio spat at Makishima’s feet. “All of them deserved it!”

  Flames licking the hospital walls, alarms screaming into the night, screams swallowed by the roar of the explosion. The memories did not come in order. They never did. But Michio remembered: the twisted metal, the shattered glass raining down like deadly confetti, the faces frozen in shock and terror as he watched from afar.

  The hospital killed his mother.

  That fact Michio remembered perfectly.

  A name surfaced through the wreckage of it all, clear and unblemished where everything else was char and smoke. Seiko Mikami. Michio wished he had painted it across those hospital walls before they came down—her name, in letters large enough that the doctors who let her die would have had to look at it. Would have had to know whose son had come back for them.

  In fact, a doctor had kindly helped him, but his name escaped Michio then.

  Michio only laughed as he was hauled out of his house. He jeered at anyone within earshot, at the officers gripping his arms, at Makishima most of all. The fire in Makishima’s eyes only blazed brighter with every taunt; it was a fierce, burning intensity that sent a thrill coursing through him.

  Michio spat on Makishima’s boots again. Just to see what would happen.

  Without warning, Makishima’s fist cut through the air.

  The punch connected squarely with the side of Michio’s face, jolting him back and stealing the breath from his lungs.

  The world around Michio grew dark and muffled. The last words he heard were from Makishima’s lips.

  “You will not breathe a word about this.”

  =*=*=*=*=

  The death of Seiko Mikami is believed to be the catalyst that drove her son, Michio Mikami, to plant a network of explosives at Yokohama Highland Hospital. His wife, Arisa Mikami, has since been cleared of any involvement, with authorities confirming she had no prior knowledge of his role in the attack.

  Mikami has since made repeated and insistent claims that he did not act alone, alleging that a doctor served as his accomplice in the lead-up to the attack. However, investigators have been unable to identify or locate any individual matching his description, and his accounts of the doctor's involvement have remained inconsistent under questioning. Whether this unnamed doctor is a real figure yet to be identified, or a product of Mikami's deteriorating mental state in the weeks surrounding the attack, has yet to be determined.

  This is the correct truth.

  Michio, Michio… You will not breathe a word about this.