When the sickness came over her it did so gradually, and at first they thought she was just tired, and then that she had caught a chill in the autumn air, and that it must pass. Her little sister wasn’t afraid at all. But Komako was; she was often afraid, mostly for her sister, who seemed so small and precious and frail. Her sister would lie awake coughing, blood flecking her lips, her skin going whiter and whiter. Komako took her to the Portuguese doctor at the free clinic, but he could not help her. She went to the witch in the old quarter, three times, the witch who calmed angry yōkai, who remembered the old ways, but that witch only gave Teshi a folded packet of dried moss and told her to drink it each night as the moon was rising, and nothing ever came of it.
“You must pay me better,” she said, clutching Komako’s wrist, “if you want the spirits to hear you. You must show me something rare.”
As if she knew what Komako could do, as if she suspected.
After that Komako had kept Teshi away from the witch. But then there’d been that terrible summer night, a year ago exactly, when Teshi’s skin had burned and her eyes rolled back in her head, and she lay in Komako’s arms, gasping, unable to breathe, going still. Komako had driven her fists into her own eyes, tears on her cheeks, and prayed—prayed to the dead, to her mother’s spirit, to any power that was—for her sister not to die.
This was in their tiny room at the top of the theater, late at night, alone, and Komako had felt the prickling cold come into her wrists and creep up her arms and begin to ache and throb. It had nothing to do with the dust, with anything. She’d just held her sister close to the brazier, felt her sister flutter in her arms like a trapped wing, and prayed.
And Teshi hadn’t died. Somehow, she hadn’t. But after that night some fire had gone out of her, and her skin had paled, until it seemed nearly translucent, and her lips had gone a blood-dark red. Three thin red lines had appeared at her throat, like necklaces of blood. Komako would wake to find her standing sometimes in the darkness, confused, peering down at her tatami as if trying to remember something important. A white silhouette looking strange, unearthly, in the moonlight. More spirit than flesh.
And she was cold, she said, all the time, so cold.
Cold as the dead, thought Komako.
* * *
That was the summer the cholera burned through the old quarter. It came in a fury, and faded with the autumn rains, but came back again the next summer, so that the dead were stacked like cut wood in the muggy streets and the shops stood empty and the hollow-eyed survivors burned incense to appease whatever angry spirit was killing their loved ones.
A year of fear. Teshi began walking in the night, sleepwalking, it seemed, if sleep she ever did, pacing the dark polished floors of the theater, barefoot. Komako caught her sister one night standing in the dark door to the street, staring unseeing out at the night, the warm air washing over her. Weeks later Teshi, alone, glided down into the alleys past the gambling dens and stood over the infected dead where they lay in pools of torchlight. Murmuring to herself about a door, a door she could not open. Komako had awoken to find the door standing wide and had hurried out and found her so, and folded a blanket over her shoulders, and steered her for home. There were workers and grieving figures in the firelight, watching. In the morning someone painted the characters for vermin on the theater door in red paint. Two nights later a folded note was delivered to Master Kikunosuke, after a late performance, warning of the demon child, and after that Komako saw what everyone saw, even the stagehands, even the actors who’d known Teshi since she was a baby.
“Cursed,” they’d whisper. “The disease comes in the night on two legs, crying like a child.”
And it was true, Komako knew it was true, that Teshi really was different. She hardly slept, ate nothing, was silent sometimes for days. It was not the cholera that was in her. But whatever it was, Komako at last gave in to her own fears and sent word to the witch, offering the one thing she could in exchange: the secret of the dust.
Three days she waited for a reply, and when it came, it was a folded paper delivered by a nervous boy in ragged pants. It was but a single word.
Come.
* * *
And she did, she took her sister out, into the dangerous streets, into the sickness, for the first time in months. A warm rain was falling. She led Teshi through the alley and across a cobbled road full of rickshaws abandoned and still and then down another alley, into the poor quarter. There were dead bundled in the back of carts, a reek of sickness and misery. The walking was slow, their wooden geta sinking in the muck. Her sister, bundled and cloaked to hide her appearance, coughed wetly.