The witch made a clicking noise with her tongue. “From where do you come?” she asked again.
Teshi hesitated. She glanced at Komako. “I don’t—”
“Dust, child. That is where you come from. And it is to dust you shall return.” The witch lifted her face out of the darkness. “And what is it you seek?” she whispered.
Teshi said nothing.
The witch held out a cup of tea. “Drink this.” Teshi drank. Then the witch unfolded herself from her knees and raised her arms and her voluminous sleeves fell back. She was holding two blocks. She banged them sharply over Teshi and a cloud of pale dust burst the darkness, faded. She walked all around the girl, banging the blocks. Then she began to sing.
It was a song unlike any Komako had heard, eerie and sad at once. Her little sister’s eyes grew heavy and then closed. Her skin was like a furnace. The witch fell quiet and lit a taper of incense and the coal traced a red arc in the dark. Then in the stillness there came a soft click.
The white stone had fallen out of Teshi’s fist.
“So it must be,” the witch said quietly.
Komako felt a sudden fear. She didn’t know what the witch could mean by that. Teshi’s eyelids fluttered, her breathing came fast. Komako reached for her sister’s sleeve.
The witch did not look away from Teshi when she said softly, “The dust is what animates your gift, on’nanoko. And that same dust is in your sister, making her sick. She must fight its nature.”
Something moved in the darkness beyond the second room. Komako turned her face, the hairs at the back of her neck prickling. “Is someone here?”
The witch only gestured to the paper box. “The dust is drawn to her for a reason. Something attracts it, traps its essence. Something … remarkable. I have heard of this, but I have never seen it.”
“The dust,” she echoed, afraid.
The witch smoothed out her obi in the shadow, watchful.
“Please,” Komako begged, “is it me? Am I making her sick?”
“But why would it be you, little one?” said the witch, in a tone of voice that suggested she knew far more than she let on. “Show me what you can do.”
Komako unwrapped her hands slowly. Her palms were raw and itching. She could not keep from trembling as she opened the lid of the box. “It does not always work,” she whispered.
The witch came closer. Komako could smell the sour milk smell of her skin. She hesitated, her hands hovering over the dust inside, its gathered darkness.
“You will help my sister?” she said bravely. “You must promise.”
The witch made an impatient sound. “It is not easy, on’nanoko.”
“But you can do something? Promise me.”
A darkness passed across the witch’s features. “Something can be done for her, yes,” said the witch, choosing her words with care. “I will do what I can. I promise that.”
Komako held her fingers, outstretched, high over the open box. She felt the familiar coldness seep into her wrists and winced.
And then the dust, in a long thin column, poured smoothly upward and formed, suspended in the air, a moving ball, quicksilver and beautiful in the gloom. The witch caught her breath sharply. Komako’s wrists were already hurting. She was tired. She curled her hands around and around the dust, as if shaping it, holding it suspended like a tiny moon, and then she sighed and dropped her hands and the planet of dust collapsed all at once down into the box, lifeless again, inert.
The witch was staring at her. “It is true,” she whispered. “You—are a talent.”
“I’m not anything. I’m just … me.” Komako, shaking, folded her red hands into her armpits for the warmth. She felt exhausted. Her face was wet. “You will help my sister, mistress?”
The witch had got to her feet and drifted to the edge of the warm darkness, and she stared out now, unseeing. “This is the girl,” she said quietly. “You were right.”
A voice replied from the shadows. “Ko-ma-ko…，” it said, slowly, as if tasting her name syllable by syllable. “Yes, Maki-chan. This is the girl.”
Komako scrambled to her feet, stumbling backward.
Two figures stepped into the spill of light. They were men, Westerners. The taller had a thick black beard and wore a long black frock coat despite the mugginess and he turned a silk hat in his fingers. He had deep-set eyes, and a craggy worried brow, and ink-black hair raked back off his forehead. His clothes smelled faintly of soot.