PART FOUR - EVOLVING

Monday afternoon, November 26th Ando had finished an autopsy on a boy who'd drowned in a river, and now he was filling out a report while listening to the boy's father explain the circumstances.

Ando was trying to ascertain the boy's date of birth and his movements on the day of the accident, but the man's answers were vague and confused, making Ando's job difficult. Sometimes the father would gaze out the window when the conversation flagged, and sometimes Ando caught him stifling a yawn. He looked sapped of strength, drowsy. Ando wanted to finish up as quickly as he could and release the man.

Then the M.E.'s office rang with a sudden commotion. They'd just been notified by the police that another body was coming in, that of an unidentified female. At the moment, they were simultaneously preparing to treat the body and to dissect it. Dr Nakayama, an older colleague of Ando's, would be in charge of the autopsy. The police had said she'd been discovered in an exhaust shaft on the roof of an office building. This meant the team would have to do two autopsies back to back, so assistants and policemen were running in and out now getting ready.

"The body has arrived, Doctor."

The autopsy assistant's voice rang out. Ando jumped involuntarily and looked toward the sound. Ikeda, the assistant, was standing by the half-open door, facing Nakayama. For some reason, though, Ando felt as though he were the one being summoned.

"Alright," said Nakayama, getting slowly to his feet. "Get it ready, would you?" Nakayama had joined the M.E.'s office two years before Ando; he belonged to the Forensic Medicine Department of Joji University Medical School.

The assistant disappeared, and in his place a policeman came in and approached Nakayama. After a couple of words of greeting, the cop pulled up a chair and sat down next to Nakayama.

Ando looked back down at his own work. But he could overhear the policeman's conversation with Nakayama behind him, and it interested him. He could only catch fragments, words here and there. The officer seemed to be explaining the circumstances in which the body had been found.

Ando stopped writing and listened. The words "unidentified" and "young female" cropped up again and again.

Nakayama asked, "But why was she on the roof?"

"We don't know why she went up there. Maybe she was thinking of jumping."

"Was there a note of any kind?"

"We haven't found one yet."

"I imagine, from inside an exhaust shaft nobody would have heard her cries for help."

"It's not a residential area."

"Where is it?"

"East Oi, in Shinagawa Ward. It's an old fourteen-story building along the Shore Road."

Ando looked up in shock. He recalled the view from the Keihin Express tracks. Beyond the residential district, one could see the Shore Road where it passed through a district lined with warehouses and office buildings. It was just a stone's throw from Mai's apartment. An unidentified young female on the roof of a building on the Shore Road…

"I think that'll do. If I have any more questions I'll give you a call." Ando thanked the boy's father and wrapped up what he was doing. He was too interested in the conversation behind him to be able to put together a report right now. There were still some things he knew he needed to find out, but he decided he'd take care of them later.

Ando slipped his papers into a folder and got to his feet. Nakayama and the policeman stood up at the same time. Ando went over and clapped a hand on Nakayama's shoulder. Bowing slightly to the officer, whom he recognized, Ando said, "The female you're doing next-she hasn't been identified?"

The three of them left the office and headed down the hall toward the autopsy room.

It was the policeman who answered Ando. "That's right. She didn't have anything on her to help us peg her."

"How old is she?"

"She's young, twenty or thereabouts. She'd be quite a looker, if she weren't dead."

Twenty or thereabouts. Mai was twenty-two, but she could easily pass for a woman in her teens. Ando could feel himself starting to choke.

"Any distinguishing features?"

He'd know immediately if he saw the body. But he needed to prepare himself first. Of course he'd much rather hear something that proved it wasn't her. Then he could leave without having to check.

"What's the matter, Dr Ando?" Nakayama grinned. "Are you more interested now that you know she's a knockout?"

"No, it's not that," said Ando, refusing to play along. "There's just something that bothers me about it." Seeing his expression, Nakayama quickly wiped the leer off his face.

"Now that you mention it, there was something strange about her. Dr Nakayama should hear this, too."

"What's that?"

"She wasn't wearing any underwear."

"Really? Top or bottom?"

"She was wearing a bra, but no panties."

"Were her clothes in disarray when she was found?"

Ando and Nakayama were both thinking the same thing: maybe she'd been raped on the rooftop, and then thrown down the exhaust shaft.

"No disturbance of her clothes, and at least on visual inspection, no evidence of rape."

"What was she wearing?"

"A skirt, knee socks, blouse, sweatshirt. A normal outfit. You might even say conservative."

But she hadn't been wearing panties. November, and she was wearing a skirt and no panties. Was that normal for her?

"Excuse me, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say she was found in an exhaust shaft on a roof," Ando said. He was having trouble imagining the scene.

"We're talking a shaft about ten feet deep and about three feet wide, next to the machine rooms on the roof. It's usually covered with wire mesh, but it'd been partially removed."

"Enough for her to fall through."

"Probably."

"Is it the kind of place you just trip and fall into?"

"No. It's not easy even to get close to. First of all, the door from the elevator hall to the roof is locked."

"So how did she get there?"

"There's a ladder up to the roof from the top of the fire escape. It's built into the outside wall. We think she went up that. It's the only way she could have gotten up there."

Ando didn't see what she could have been doing up there.

"About the underwear. Do you think she could have taken it off herself, intentionally, inside the exhaust shaft?" The shaft was three yards deep. If she'd fallen, she would have hurt herself. Maybe she'd taken off her panties to use as a bandage. Or maybe she thought she could somehow use them to help her escape.

"We looked for them. In the shaft, and all over the roof. And then, just to be sure, we checked around the perimeter of the building, too."

"Why the perimeter?" Nakayama interjected.

"We thought maybe she'd wrapped them around a piece of metal or something and tossed them. Inside the shaft, there was no chance anybody'd be able to hear her cries for help. The only way to let the outside world know where she was would have been to throw something down that might catch people's attention. But that turned out to be impossible, too."

"And why's that?"

"From the bottom of that shaft, there was no way she could've thrown anything past the fence on the roof."

Assuming it had something to do with the angle, Ando didn't press the point further.

"So, it's most natural to assume that she wasn't wearing any panties when she left."

"At the moment, that's the only explanation we can think of."

They stopped in front of the autopsy room.

"Would you like to join me, Dr Ando?" asked Nakayama.

"Maybe just for a little while." It was an honest enough answer. If it wasn't Mai, he'd sigh with relief and leave. And if it was her… he'd probably leave anyway, entrusting the autopsy to Nakayama. In any event, the thing to do now was check to see if it was her.

Beyond the door, he could hear water gushing from the faucet, as usual. As he listened for other sounds, Ando was suddenly overcome with the urge to flee. His stomach churned, and his extremities quivered. He prayed it wasn't her. It was all he could do.

Before Ando was really prepared, Nakayama opened the door and led the way into the autopsy room. The officer was next to enter. Ando didn't go in, but only peered through the open doorway at the naked, pale corpse on the operating table.

He'd had a sneaking suspicion that the day would come, but seeing the young woman's body up close sent a deathly chill through his body nonetheless. Ando finally approached the table in Nakayama and the officer's wake. He looked at the face from every angle, still unwilling to recognize it. There was mud, dried and hardened, in the hair on the back of her head. Her ankle was twisted unnaturally; the skin over it showed the only discoloration on her body. He figured the ankle was broken, or at least badly sprained. No signs that she'd been strangled. In fact, there were no external wounds at all. The body was well past the rigor mortis stage. Over ninety hours had elapsed since death.

Ando knew the healthy glow her flesh had displayed in life. How many times had he fantasized about holding her and feeling that skin against his? Now he'd never have the opportunity. Now she was a wasted, waxen corpse. The woman he'd been about to fall in love with now lay cruelly exposed on the table, changed into this. Ando couldn't bear the reality, and anger welled up in him.

"Goddamnit," he sighed. Nakayama and the officer turned simultaneously to look at him.

The policeman couldn't hide his astonishment. "Do you know her?" Ando gave a barely perceptible nod.

"I'm sorry," Nakayama mumbled, not being able to tell exactly how close Ando had been to the woman.

The policeman spoke next, slowly and deliberately. "Would you know who we should contact?" Behind the polite tone, Ando could hear a hint of expectation. If he knew who she was, it would save the officer from the drudgery of having to identify her.

Wordlessly, Ando took out his planner and paged through it. He was sure he'd written her parents' phone number in it. He found the number, wrote it on another piece of paper, and handed it over. The officer read it back to Ando.

"You're sure about this, then?" The man's tone was almost obsequious.

"I'm sure. It's Mai Takano, alright."

The policeman rushed out of the room to call Mai's parents and notify them of her death. Ando imagined the scene at their house: the phone ringing, her mother picking up the receiver, an ostentatious voice on the other end identifying itself as Officer So-and-so from the police department, then, Your daughter is dead… Ando shuddered. He felt sorry for her mother, about to experience that moment. She wouldn't collapse, she wouldn't break down crying. The world around her would simply recede.

He couldn't stand to be in the autopsy room a moment longer. When the scalpel entered Mai's body, the air would be filled with an odor much worse than what greeted them now. And when the organ wall was cut so that the contents of her stomach and intestines could be examined, the stench would be positively horrific. Ando knew how surprisingly long olfactory memories could last, and he didn't want this one. He knew very well that it was the fate of all living beings, no matter how pure and beautiful, to finally leave an unbearable stench. But just this once, he felt like giving in to sentimentality. He wanted to keep his memories of Mai from being sullied by that smell.

He whispered in Nakayama's ear, "I'm going to leave now."

Nakayama gave him a suspicious look. "You don't want to participate, after all?"

"I still have some work I need to finish up in the lab. But I want to hear the details later."

"Understood."

Ando put his hand on Nakayama's shoulder and whispered to him again. "Pay attention to the coronary artery. Make sure you get a tissue sample from it."

Nakayama was puzzled that Ando had a hypothesis regarding the cause of death. "Did she have angina?"

Ando didn't answer. Instead, he squeezed Nakayama's shoulder and, with a look that warned against asking why, said, "Just do it, alright?"

Nakayama nodded twice.

Back at the office, Ando pulled out the chair from the desk next to Nakayama's and sat down in it backwards, hugging the backrest. He waited like that for Nakayama to finish his paperwork.

"You seem rather concerned," Nakayama said, looking up from the report he was writing.

"Sort of."

"Want to see the autopsy report?" Nakayama indicated a sheaf of documents in front of Ando.

"No. All I need is a summary."

Nakayama turned to face Ando.

"Let me get right to the point, then. The cause of death was not a heart attack due to blockage of the coronary artery."

So the hypothesis Ando had shared with Nakayama before the autopsy had been wrong. Ando fell silent for a time, wondering how to interpret this. So Mai didn 't watch the video after all? Perhaps the tumor didn 't get big enough to block the flow of blood.

He decided he needed to check further. "So there was no sarcoma in the coronary artery?"

"None that I could see."

"Are you absolutely sure?"

"Well. I'll have to wait for the tissue sample to come back before I can say for sure."

For the moment, the telltale tumor seemed to be missing from Mai's artery.

"In that case, what killed her?"

"Probably the cold. She was in an extremely weakened state."

"How about injuries?"

"Her left ankle was broken, and she had lacerations on both elbows. Most likely from when she fell. There were particles of concrete ground into the wounds."

So she'd fallen in feet first, broken her ankle, and was unable to get out of there. The shaft was a yard wide and over three deep, too deep for her to escape on her own. She would have been stuck there, with only rainwater to quench her thirst. Even so, she would have survived for several days.

"I wonder how long she was alive in there." It wasn't really a question. He was merely thinking aloud as he imagined her fear and despair at being left all alone at the bottom of a hole on a rooftop.

"I'd estimate about ten days." Her stomach and intestines were empty, and her subcutaneous fat was largely depleted.

"Ten days." Ando took out his planner. Assuming she survived for ten days in the exhaust shaft, and assuming five more for her body to be discovered, she would have vanished on or about the 10th of November. Ando's date with her had been scheduled for the ninth; the fact that she hadn't answered the phone all day that day pushed the date of her disappearance back at least that far. Indeed, her mailbox had contained newspapers going back to the eighth. Which meant that something had happened to her on the eighth or ninth to make her leave her apartment.

Ando marked those two dates on his calendar.

Something had happened to her between the eighth and tenth of November.

He tried to imagine himself in her place. When she was found, she had on a skirt and a sweatshirt. Her attire suggested she'd just stepped out for a moment, maybe for a breath of fresh air. But, strangely, she hadn't been wearing any panties.

He thought again about the things he'd felt when he visited her apartment. They were still vivid in his mind. That had been the 15th of November. If the results of the autopsy were to be believed, at that point she was already trapped on the roof, waiting to be rescued. In other words, she'd been gone from her apartment for several days. Yet, Ando was sure he'd sensed something in the apartment. It should have been empty, but he had definitely felt something that breathed.

"Oh, and…" said Nakayama, holding up an index finger as if he'd just remembered something important.

"What?"

"You were pretty close to her, weren't you, Dr Ando?"

"I wouldn't say close. I'd only met her twice."

"Oh. When had you last seen her?"

"The end of last month, I guess."

"That would be about three weeks before her death." Nakayama looked as if he were holding back something important. Ando fixed his older colleague with a stare that said, Come on, say it.

"She was pregnant, wasn't she?" Nakayama finally blurted out. For a moment, Ando wasn't sure who he was talking about.

"Who was?" he said.

"Mai, of course." Nakayama was keeping a close eye on Ando's confused reaction. "Didn't you know?"

Ando didn't answer.

"You don't mean to tell me you overlooked the obvious signs of a woman nearing term."

"Nearing term?"

Ando could only parrot Nakayama's words. He looked at the ceiling and tried to recall the exact lines of Mai's figure. He'd seen her once in mourning clothes and once in a bright dress. Both outfits had been tight around her waist and hips, showing off her slim contours. Her wasp waist had been one of her most attractive features. But it wasn't just that. Ando had sensed something virginal about her. And now Nakayama was trying to tell him she'd been pregnant? Nearing term, in fact?

Not that he'd ever observed her that closely. In fact, the more he thought about her the blur-rier his image of her became. His memory was hazy. But no, it couldn't be. There was no way she'd been nine months pregnant. For one thing, he'd seen her corpse with his own eyes. Her belly had been so flat it almost touched her spine.

"She couldn't have been nearing term."

"Some women are like that, though. They don't get very big even in the last trimester."

"It's not a question of degrees, though. I saw her dead body myself."

"You misunderstand," Nakayama said, waving his hands. Then he carefully arrayed the evidence before Ando.

"The uterus was greatly enlarged and she had wounds where the placenta had been torn away. The vagina was full of a brownish secretion. And inside the vagina I found tiny pieces of flesh that I believe are from an umbilical cord."

You're out of your mind, thought Ando. But he couldn't imagine an experienced forensic surgeon like Nakayama making such an elementary mistake. Those three pieces of evidence presented by Mai's body could only lead to one conclusion: she'd given birth shortly before falling into the shaft.

Assuming the delivery was fact, could it explain her movements? Perhaps, on or about the seventh, she had gone into labor, and had accordingly headed for an obstetrician. She'd given birth, spent five or six days in the hospital, and then checked out on the twelfth or thirteenth. Maybe the baby had been stillborn. In her grief, the mother had wandered about until she found herself on the roof of the building, where she'd fallen into the exhaust shaft. She'd survived for ten days. And then this morning, her body had been discovered.

It worked out, time-wise. The birth offered a plausible explanation for her disappearance. And naturally she would have kept it all secret from her mother.

But Ando didn't buy it. Leaving aside the fact that, even allowing for individual variation, she just hadn't looked pregnant, he couldn't forget the impression their first encounter had made on him.

He'd first laid eyes on Mai right in the same office. Just before he was to dissect Ryuji, she'd been escorted in by a detective who wanted her to tell Ando all she knew about the circumstances of Ryuji's death. She had tried to sit down, then lost balance and steadied herself with a hand on a nearby desk. Ando had known at a glance that she was anemic. He had picked up the faint scent of blood on her and deduced that her anemia was due to her menstruating. His conclusion had been bolstered by her embarrassed expression as she apologized: "Sorry, it's just that…" Their eyes had met, and they'd had a moment of nonverbal communication.

Please don't worry. It's just the monthly thing.

Gotcha.

Mai had informed him only with her eyes, afraid to create a fuss given the location. The memory of how she'd made her meaning clear without words was still strangely vivid for Ando. He'd performed Ryuji's autopsy on the twentieth of the previous month. That meant Mai had been menstruating less than a month before supposedly giving birth. It was impossible, of course.

Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing. All along I thought there 'd been a silent exchange, but maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I got it all wrong. But the more he thought about it, the less he was able to believe it. He was confident he'd taken her meaning.

However, the facts revealed by the autopsy flatly contradicted his view of the matter.

Ando stood up and said, pointing to the autopsy report, "Would you mind if I made a copy of this?" He wanted to take it home and read it carefully.

Nakayama held the stack of papers out to him. "Go right ahead."

"Oh, and one more thing," Ando added. "You took a blood sample, I assume?"

"Of course."

"Can I have a little of it?"

"A little, sure."

Ando realized that he had to confirm immediately whether or not Mai had been carrying the smallpox-like virus. If he found it in her blood, it would be proof that she'd watched the video. He needed to determine if the tragedy that had befallen her had its source in the video or was the result of something entirely unrelated. At the moment, all he could do was amass data, little by little. If he could illuminate the video's role in this, perhaps he'd come one step closer to solving that "mutation" riddle.

Soon after he'd encountered Mai's corpse, Ando was notified of the death of Kazuyuki Asakawa. As Asakawa's condition had deteriorated, he'd been transferred from Shinagawa Saisei Hospital to Shuwa University Hospital, but he'd died almost immediately. Ando had been notified about the change in Asakawa's condition, but he hadn't imagined the patient would go so quickly. According to the attending physician, the death came about as the result of an infection, and the patient had passed away peacefully, as if from old age. Asakawa had never regained consciousness after losing it in the accident.

Ando went to the Shuwa hospital and told the doctors in charge of the case to look out for something during the autopsy: a sarcoma blocking the coronary artery, a smallpox-like virus in the tumor. Ando figured these points were crucial in terms of forecasting the future. He made sure the attending physician understood the importance of the situation and then left.

As he walked back to the station, he felt renewed disappointment that Asakawa had never awoken. He'd possessed essential information, and he'd died having imparted it to no one. If only Ando knew what Asakawa knew, he'd have a much better idea what to expect. The future was maddeningly opaque now. Ando didn't know what to prepare for.

The biggest thing worrying Ando right now was whether Asakawa's death had been bad luck or a necessary outcome. The same question applied to Mai, for that matter. Both of them had wasted away and died after accidents-a traffic accident in Asakawa's case, a fall in Mai's. Their deaths seemed to have something in common. But Ando had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with their having watched the video.

As he walked, he suddenly realized that the building where Mai's body had been found was not far from the hospital he'd just left. He'd been wondering why she had chosen to climb to the roof of a shabby old office building; now was his chance to have a look and maybe find out. He needed to go soon, before any of the evidence disappeared.

He decided to go back to Nakahara Street and catch a cab. He'd be there in ten minutes.

After stopping once on the way to buy some flowers, Ando had the taxi let him off in front of a warehouse belonging to a shipping company. All he'd been told at the M.E.'s office was the name of the company and the instruction that the building was to be found to the south of the warehouse; he didn't know the name of the building itself.

Standing on the sidewalk, he stared south at a building. There was no mistaking it. It had fourteen stories, and an exposed staircase spiraled up the narrow space between its outer wall and the warehouse.

Ando moved toward the front door and then stopped. He walked around to the outside staircase. He thought he'd try to figure out how Mai had gone up. She could have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor, gone out to the fire escape landing from there, and climbed the ladder to the roof, or she could have taken the fire escape stairs all the way up from the street to the ladder. At night, the front door was probably locked and protected by a metal shutter, so she'd have had to go in through the service entrance, which was surely guarded. And if it was too late, even the service entrance might have been locked, the guard gone. If she'd gone up at night, she must have used the fire escape.

But there was a gate at the edge of the second-floor landing, and it looked impassable. Ando climbed up to it to take a look. It was an iron gate, with a knob. He tried to turn it; it wouldn't budge. It had to be locked from the other side to prevent entry. The gate, however, was only six feet high or so, and a light and agile person could scale it without much problem. Mai had been on the track team in junior high; she'd have been able to get over it with little trouble.

Next to him on the landing was a door leading into the building. He tried turning the knob, but, unsurprisingly, this door too was locked. He wondered what time of day Mai had come here. If it had been day-time, she probably would have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor. If it was night then she must have climbed over the gate and taken the stairs.

Ando returned to the front door of the building, entered, and went to the elevators. There were two of them, and both were waiting at the ground floor. Each floor of the building seemed to be occupied by a different business or businesses, whose names were all written, floor by floor, on a board by the elevators. But nearly half of them had been crossed out. They must have moved without the landlord being able to find new tenants to take their places. The building was quiet and felt rather abandoned.

On the fourteenth floor he stepped off the elevator into a dark hallway, where he started looking for stairs to the roof. After walking the length of the hall once, he hadn't found anything.

Mai would have had to go outside. Indeed, there was a door at the end of the hall, and Ando opened it and stepped outside. The wind off the ocean was so strong that he had to turn up the collar of his coat. It was only here, on the top floor, that he realized how close Tokyo Bay was. There was the Keihin Canal, beyond it Oi Pier, and then finally the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel, which was quickly swallowed up by the sea. From his vantage point, the two black holes of the tunnel entrance looked unnatural. He thought they looked like the nostrils of a drowned man floating face-up in the water.

From here, he also realized why the fourteenth floor had seemed so cramped despite the size of the building. The architects had made the square footage of this story about half that of the other floors, using the rest of the space for the outdoor balcony that encircled the building on all four sides. Stepping out, Ando saw that the landing for the fire escape was actually a corner of this balcony. But Mai's body had been found yet another level up.

Right next to the door there was a ladder built right into the wall, leading up. It looked to be about ten feet to the top.

Trying to imagine what Mai could have been feeling, Ando put the flowers in his mouth, grasped a rung on the ladder, and started climbing.

What made her want to come up here anyway? wondered Ando, as he pulled himself up rung by rung. It wasn't because she wanted to jump. That was clear enough from the way the building had been designed. A jump from the roof would only have landed her a dozen feet below on the balcony. To fall to the ground, she'd have had to leap from the fire escape landing on the fourteenth floor instead.

It wasn't the kind of roof you went up to for the view, either. The water-resistant paint was peeling and cracking, and it gave way unpleasantly under his feet as he walked across it. There was no railing around the perimeter, and he wasn't going near the edge even if there was a balcony not far below.

There were concrete protrusions lined up at regular intervals, and they were shaped like the tetrapods used as breakwaters on beaches. Ando had no idea what they were for, but they were just the right height for him to sit on. Instead of going to the edge of the roof, he climbed up on top of one and had a look around. It was just before five o'clock, and it was the time of year when the sun set earliest. Lights had come on already in the surrounding buildings and the shops down below. Across the canal he could see a red Keihin Express train going by on the elevated tracks. It was actually an express train; it sped past the station platform that seemed to hover in the air. He knew that platform. He'd been on it a couple of times to visit Mai's apartment. Swathed in a diffuse white light, it was relatively empty for the time of day.

Using the station as a reference point, he tried to locate Mai's apartment. He found it only about four hundred yards away as the crow flies; it was right in front of his nose, so to speak. His gaze followed a path along the shopping street, turning right on the Shore Road. Another hundred yards brought him back to the building where he now stood.

Why this roof? There were any number of other tall buildings in the neighborhood. In fact, she could have gone up to the roof of the very building she lived in. He looked around until he found it again. Perhaps because the rooms were all low-ceilinged studio apartments, the seven-storied building was less than half the height of the one atop which Ando now stood. Still, Mai's had a flat space on the roof where one could walk around. At the same time, it was right on the shopping street, so it was surrounded by tall buildings. In particular, there was a nine-story commercial building on its west side from which the roof was easily observed. That was what distinguished the building Ando was on now. Located on a stretch of the Shore Road full of warehouses, there weren't many tall buildings in its immediate environs. No fear that someone might be looking down on you from above.

Ando descended from the concrete protrusion and went to stand between two equipment houses that jutted upward. One was for elevator machinery, while the other seemed to house a ventilation system. There was a large water tank on top of the southern machine house.

Between them was a deep groove that functioned as an exhaust shaft. Walking carefully, testing each step, Ando progressed until he stood right by it. It was cordoned off with a steel mesh, but this had holes in it. The maintenance crew must have decided to ignore the holes on the assumption that nobody but them ever came up here. Ando couldn't bring himself to step any closer. Just one foot on the lip of that dark rectangular crevice and already he felt he'd be sucked in. But he leaned forward and, with trepidation, tossed the bouquet he was holding through one of the holes in the meshing. He pressed his palms together and prayed for her eternal repose. If a technician hadn't come up here to inspect the elevator the day before, Mai would have lain undiscovered for even longer.

Night came quickly. The rooftop was veiled in darkness now, and the ocean breeze swirled in the narrow space Ando occupied, surrounded by concrete on three sides. He shivered. He ought to have come earlier in the day, when the sun would have been directly overhead. Yet, he knew he wouldn't have the courage, even in broad daylight, to peer into the shaft, this hole which had had a dead body in it until just the day before. And it wasn't just the thought of the corpse that was covering him in goosebumps. The idea of awaiting death down in that hemmed-in place filled him with terror. How many days had Mai spent down there, having twisted her ankle in the fall and unable to stand, staring at the small slice of sky just three yards above her, gradually losing hope, until she died? It must have felt like being sealed alive in a coffin floating in the air. Ando felt short of breath. The situation was too unnatural to call it an accident.

From inside one of the machine houses he heard a groan that sounded like cable being reeled in by a winch. One of the elevators was apparently on the move. Ando began taking small steps backward to get out from between the machine houses. Their walls were rough and blackened in places, with the paint chipping off, testifying to how seldom people came here.

He got away as fast as he could, rushing to the ladder and climbing down to the balcony of the fourteenth floor. The bottom rung was three feet above the surface, so he had to jump. Ando missed his footing on the landing. The back of his leg went momentarily numb; he crouched over and found himself at eye level with the bottom rung of the rusty ladder.

He went back inside and headed for the elevators. One of them was slowly making its way upward. He pushed the button for that elevator and waited in front of it.

As he waited, he tried to figure out why Mai had gone up to the roof of this building. He considered the possibility that she was being pursued. The warehouse district would be mostly deserted at night, and perhaps, walking along, she realized she was being stalked. She saw those stairs outside, with the iron gate. Judging that she could climb it but not the stranger, she might indeed have gone for them. Perhaps the person managed to scale the gate after all, and Mai had no place to go but up. Her first mistake, as it were, put her in a cul-de-sac. The ladder leading to the roof would have been her last lifeline. The bottom rung was a yard off the floor. Hoping that her assailant would give up at last, Mai had climbed to the roof. Well? Had the stranger been able to follow her up? Ando tried to imagine what sort of person would have a hard time with a ladder, set perpendicular to the ground, and the image that came to his mind was of some four-footed beast.

The elevator doors opened as the thought occurred to him. The elevator was not empty. Ando had been staring at his toes; he raised his eyes to meet those of a young woman. She stared at him as if she'd been lying in wait for him. There could be no mistake, he'd encountered this woman before, under similar circumstances. She was the one who had come out of Mai's room and shared an elevator with him. The cracked nails, and that odor, the likes of which he'd never smelled before-he couldn't forget her if he tried.

Now he stood directly in front of her, facing her, and he couldn't move a muscle. He was confused. His mind couldn't process what he was seeing and his body escaped his command.

Why. Is. She. Here? Ando flailed about for a reason, which he was doomed not to find. The absence of any conceivable reason was what truly frightened him. As long as an explanation could be found, terror could be dispelled.

As they stared at each other, the elevator doors started to close between them. The woman reached out a hand and held them open. The motion was smooth, dexterous. She wore a blue polka-dot skirt, beneath which he could see her legs, bare, unstockinged despite the early winter weather. It was with her right hand that she had stopped the doors; in her other was a small bouquet of flowers.

Flowers! Ando's sight rested on the bouquet.

"I've seen you before, haven't I?" She had spoken first, and her voice drew him in. It was deeper than her willowy proportions had led him to expect.

Ando's mouth hung open until he finally managed to dredge some words out of the parched depths of his throat. "Are you Mai's sister?"

That was what he wanted her to be. If that was who she was, it made sense: her emerging from Mai's room, her coming to this building with a bouquet. Everything would stand to be explained.

The woman made a slight, indecipherable movement with her head. It wasn't quite a nod, nor quite a shake. It could have been affirmation or denial, but Ando decided she'd intended a yes.

She's Mai's older sister, come to leave flowers on the roof of the building where her sister died. It was most natural, quite fitting. People only ever believe what they can understand.

The moment he got that straight, all of his previous cowering struck him as funny. What had he been so afraid of? He couldn't make sense of his own psychology. The first time he'd met her, this woman had given him a strong otherworldly impression. But now that the riddle was solved, that impression faded away like a lie, while her beauty alone came to dominate his view of her. Her long, slender nose, the gentle, round line of her cheeks, her ever-so-slightly slanted eyes with their heavy eyelids. They didn't stare directly at him; rather, they seemed intentionally unfo-cussed. Within them lurked a seductive glow.

Those eyes. When he'd encountered her the other day at Mai's apartment, she'd been wearing sunglasses. This was the first time he'd been able to see her eyes. Their gaze, full upon him, exerted a strong gravitational pull. He found it hard to breathe, and his chest pounded.

"Excuse me, but…" From the tone of her voice and her expression it was clear that she wanted to know his relationship with Mai.

"My name is Ando. Fukuzawa University Medical School." He knew this didn't exactly answer her question.

The woman stepped out of the elevator and, still holding the door open, motioned him in with her eyes. He had to obey. Her elegant movements left him powerless to refuse. As though enchanted, Ando entered the elevator in her place. They stared at each other again from their reversed positions.

"I'll call on you soon with a request."

She said this just before the door closed. Ando heard her clearly and there was no mistaking her words. The doors as they closed were like a camera shutter, removing her from his field of vision but leaving her image imprinted on Ando's brain.

As the elevator descended slowly, Ando found himself overcome with uncontrollable lust. Mai had been the object of the first sexual fantasies he'd had since his family had ceased to be, but this was far more intense. He'd only been with the woman for a few seconds, and yet he could remember every detail of her body, from the curve of her ankles, bare above her pumps, to the corners of her eyes. And his image of her remained sharp, even as the moments passed. Flustered by the sudden flood of sexual desire, Ando rushed out of the building, hailed a taxi, and hurried home.

In the cab, he thought about the last words she'd said.

I'll call on you soon with a request.

What was her request? Where did she mean to "call on" him? Was that supposed to be some sort of social pleasantry?

He'd rushed out of the building and into a taxi as if pursued by her gaze. He regretted not asking her for her name and number at least. Why hadn't he? He ought to have waited for her to come down from the roof. But he hadn't. Or rather, he couldn't. It was as though his every movement had been controlled by that woman. He had acted against his will.

A week had passed since Mai's autopsy. It was December, and the weather had suddenly turned wintry. Ando had never liked winter-he much preferred late spring to early summer-but ever since the death of his son he'd stopped paying much attention to the changing seasons. The morning's drastic chill had forced him, nonetheless, to recognize the advent of winter. On the way to the university he'd stopped in his tracks several times to go back and get a sweater, but in the end he'd simply continued on his way. He didn't feel like going all the way back, and the walking was warming him up.

His apartment in Sangubashi was close enough to the university that he could walk to work if he felt like it. And though he usually went by train, the transfer he had to make despite the short distance never went smoothly. As a result, and because he knew he needed the exercise, Ando sometimes ended up half-walking, half-jogging to and from work. The day had started out as one of those days, but halfway to campus he changed his mind and caught the JR train at Yoyogi Station. He wanted to get to the university sooner than later.

With just two stations to go, he didn't have the time to organize his thoughts in the rocking cradle of the train carriage. This morning he was supposed to look at samples of Mai's cells and Ryuji's through the electron microscope. Miyashita was going to be there, as well as Nemoto, an electron microscopy expert. The thought of what lay ahead made Ando want to hurry.

Up until then, the smallpox-like virus hadn't been found in anybody who hadn't watched the video. There had been no reports of the virus being spread by physical contact. In Mai's room he'd found a copy of the video, already erased. These two facts meant that if Mai's blood cells revealed the presence of the virus, it would be safe to conclude that she had actually watched the tape. The calamity that had befallen her would have been the video's doing.

He was so deep in thought that he almost missed his station, but he managed to jump off the train just before the doors closed. He allowed himself to be swept along with the rest of the crowd toward the ticket gates. The university hospital stood in all its grandeur right outside the station.

Ando poked his head into the lab, and Miyashita turned his ruddy face toward him.

"Finally he shows up!"

Miyashita and Nemoto had spent the previous week making preparations for today's session with the electron microscope. A virus wasn't something one could just pop into a microscope and take a gander at when the mood struck. There were a lot of things that had to be done first, applying a centrifuge, cell sectioning, and so on. The procedure was beyond the skill of a non-specialist like Ando. Given all the preparation it took, Miyashita could hardly wait for the moment. He'd been up since early morning getting ready.

"Lower the lights," Nemoto said.

"Yessum!" replied Miyashita, who quickly turned them off. Although they'd completed the base sequencing some time ago, this was their first chance to see the virus directly, with their own eyes. The virus that had been found in the blood of Ryuji and possibly Mai.

Nemoto went into the darkroom alone and fixed the ultrathin section on the holder. Ando and Miyashita sat in front of the console, staring at the screen in utter silence. Though it was still blank, both men's eyes were active as they chased mental images of what they would soon be seeing.

Nemoto came back and turned off the last overhead light. All set. Holding their breath, the three men watched the screen. Gradually, as the ultrathin section of cellular matter was illuminated by an electron beam, a microscopic world began to open up before them.

"Which one are we looking at?" Miyashita asked Nemoto.

"This is Takayama's."

The green pattern on the screen before them was a universe unto itself. A twist of a dial sent their field of view racing across the surface of the cells. Somewhere in there lurked the virus.

"Try increasing the magnification," Miyashita instructed. Nemoto responded immediately, taking the machine up to x9000. Another pass over the surface gave them a clear view of the dying cells. The cyctoplasm gleamed brightly, while the organelles had collapsed into black clumps.

"Home in on the cytoplasm on the top right and increase the magnification." As he spoke, Miyashita's face caught the reflection of the dying cells' mottled appearance and had the dull glow of a bronze bust. Nemoto increased the magnification to x16000.

"More."

x21000.

"There. Stop." Miyashita's voice rose, and he shot a glance at Ando, who leaned forward so that his face was right near the screen.

There they were… swarms of them!

The strands writhed around in the dying cells like so many snakes, biting and clinging to the surface of the chromatin.

A chill ran down Ando's spine. This was a new virus, the likes of which had never been seen before. He'd never seen the smallpox virus through an electron microscope, yet he did know it from medical textbooks. The differences between that and this were obvious at a glance.

"Oh my God."

Miyashita sat there sighing, his mouth hanging open.

Ando understood the workings of the virus: how it was carried along inside the blood vessels to the coronary artery, where it affixed itself to the inner wall of the anterior descending branch and caused mutations in the cells of that area until they formed a tumor. What he couldn't understand was how this virus he was looking at now could have been created via the victim's consciousness. This virus didn't invade the body from outside. Rather, it was born within the body as a result of watching a videotape; it was a function of the mind. That went beyond mysterious and Ando was dumbfounded. It represented a leap from nothingness to being, from concept to matter. In all earth's history such a thing happened only once, when life first came to be.

Does it mean, then, that life emerged due to the workings of some consciousness?

Ando's thoughts were veering off track. Miyashita brought him back with his next comment.

"'Ring', anyone?"

Ando returned his gaze to the electron microscope screen. It didn't take long to figure out Miyashita's remark; he was angling for something with which to compare the shape of the virus. Some specimens were twisted and some were u-shaped, but most of them looked like a slightly distorted ring, the kind one wears on a finger. "Ring" hit the nail on the head. There was even a protrusion at one point that resembled nothing so much as a stone on a setting. The screen looked like a view of a floor across which tangled-up rings and snakes and rubber bands had been strewn indiscriminately.

It fell to Ando and Miyashita, who discovered it, to name this strange new virus, and Miyashita's comment was by way of a suggestion. The ring virus.

"How about it?"

Miyashita wanted Ando's opinion. The name was perfect, but Ando felt uneasy for precisely that reason. It was too perfect and made him wonder if a God-like being were making itself felt. How did all this begin? Ando had no trouble remembering: it was with the numbers on the newspaper that had been sticking out of Ryuji's sutures. 178, 136. They'd given him the English word "ring". Then he'd found that astonishing report, and it was entitled Ring. And now, this, which he beheld-a virus shaped like a ring. It was as if some will, changing form with each rebirth as it strove to grow into something ever larger, had chosen this shape as its symbol.

The microscopic universe contained kinds of beauty that came from cyclic repetition, but what Ando saw now was an ugliness that mirrored such beauty. And it wasn't just the abstract knowledge that this virus brought evil to humanity that made it appear ugly to Ando. What he felt was closer to an instinctive hatred of serpentine creatures. Any human being shown the image, with absolutely no prior knowledge, would probably react with revulsion.

As if to prove this, Nemoto, who had little idea of the origin of the virus, was visibly shaken. His hands on the controls trembled. Only the machine remained unaffected, emotionlessly spitting out negatives. Once he'd taken seven photographs, Nemoto gathered them up and went to the darkroom. While he waited for them to develop, he set the ultrathin section from Mai's blood cells in the holder. Then he resumed his place in front of the console and flipped the switch without ado.

"Next we'll be looking at Takano's."

They gradually increased the magnification, just as they'd done with Ryuji's sample. They had no trouble finding what they were looking for. Without question, it was the same virus. They were writhing just like the other ones.

"Identical," Ando and Miyashita stated at the same time. Neither of them could see anything to prevent them from reaching that conclusion. But Nemoto, the electron microscopy expert, was more sensitive to minor inconsistencies.

"That's strange."

Miyashita watched him tilt his head and stroke his chin, then asked, "What is?"

"I'd rather not say anything until I get a chance to compare the photographs."

Ever cautious in all things, Nemoto hesitated to draw a conclusion based solely on his impressions of Ryuji's virus. Science was about proof, not impressions, was his motto. That aside, Nemoto could swear he saw a quantitative difference. It wasn't a variation in the overall number of specimens of the virus present in each sample. What struck him was that, in Mai's sample, there were more broken rings. In Ryuji's sample, too, of course, some of the virus specimens had come undone, making u-shapes, or snake coils, but most of them were whole and looked like rings. In Mai's case, more of the rings were broken, and stretched out like threads.

In order to confirm his suspicions, Nemoto homed in on a likely-looking specimen and adjusted the focus until the specimen filled the screen. If the normal virus looked like a ring, then this specimen looked like a ring which had broken just on one side of the stone. The "stone" and its "setting" now looked like a head with a flagellum wiggling behind it.

The result was a shape that Ando, Miyashita, and Nemoto were quite familiar with. All three men were reminded of the same thing at the same time, but none dared say it.

Nemoto's first impression was borne out when he compared the photos he'd taken of the ring virus. In any given area of Mai's sample, there were more virus specimens that looked like broken rings or threads than in a comparable area of Ryuji's sample. Statistically speaking, roughly one in ten of Ryuji's viruses were broken, while in Mai's case, the distribution was around fifty percent. Such a manifest difference was unlikely to occur without a reason. Ando requested that samples from all the videotape's victims be put under the electron microscope.

It wasn't until the Friday after the New Year's holiday that all the results were in.

Glancing out the window in the lab, he could see that some of the previous night's snowfall still lingered among the dead trees of the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine. When he grew tired of analyzing the photos, Ando went to the windowsill to feast his eyes on the scene outside the window. Miyashita never rested though, carefully comparing the photos spread out on the desktop.

Including Asakawa and Mai, eleven people had died after coming into contact with the video. The same virus had been found in each victim's blood, and there was no more doubt the virus had been the cause of death. But regarding broken rings, the victims fell into two groups. In Mai's case and Asakawa's, broken rings made up fully half of what was found in their blood, while in everybody else's samples, only one specimen in ten was broken. It was not a particularly surprising result. It seemed that the fate of the infected person hinged on the degree of presence of the broken-ring virus.

The statistics indicated that once the broken-ring specimens exceeded a certain percentage, the host was spared death by cardiac arrest, though it wasn't clear yet exactly what that percentage was.

Mai and Asakawa had watched the video. The ring virus had appeared in their bodies. Up to that point, they were no different from the nine other victims. But something had caused some of the viruses to come apart into a thread shape, and the broken particles had surpassed a certain level. And that was why, even though they had watched the video, neither Mai nor Asakawa had died of a heart attack. The question was, what had caused the viruses in their bloodstreams to come apart? What set them apart from the other nine?

"Some form of immunity?" Ando wondered aloud.

"That's a possibility," Miyashita said, cocking his head.

"Or maybe…" Ando trailed off.

"Maybe what?"

"Is it something about the virus itself?"

"I lean more in that direction personally," said Miyashita, propping his feet on the chair in front of him and sticking out his great belly. "Thanks to the mischief of the four kids who watched it first, the video was doomed to extinction in the not-too-distant future. To find a way out, the virus had to mutate. All of this is just as Ryuji told us in his message. Now, then: how exactly did it mutate, and what did it evolve into? The answer to that, I believe, lies in the ring virus that Mai Takano and Kazuyuki Asakawa carried. In its irregular shape, to be precise."

"A virus borrows its host's cells in order to reproduce itself, by definition."

"Right."

"And sometimes that reproduction takes place at an explosive rate."

This, too, was common knowledge. One only had to think of the Black Death that ran rampant in the Middle Ages, or the Spanish influenza of modern times, to find examples of a virus proliferating wildly.

"So?" Miyashita urged Ando to continue.

"So think about it. The video tells people, 'Make a copy within a week or you die.' Even if the viewer did so, that's just one tape turning into two. That's a pretty slow growth rate. Assuming the subsequent viewers repeat the process, that's still only four tapes after a month."

"You've got a point, I guess."

"That's nothing to be scared of."

"It's not very virus-like, you mean. Right?"

"If it doesn't increase at a geometric rate, then it's hardly spreading at all."

Miyashita fixed Ando with a glare. "What exactly is it you're trying to get at?"

"It's just that…"

Ando wasn't sure himself what he wanted to say. Was he trying to put a worse spin on things? Certainly there were cases when a single virus spread virtually overnight to thousands, tens of thousands of victims. That was the raison d'etre of a virus, to replicate itself simultaneously in large numbers. Having copies made of a videotape, one at a time, was simply too inefficient. The results said as much; only three months after its birth, the tape was now extinct. Unless it had been reborn through mutation…

"It's just that I have a bad feeling about this."

Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of them, piled up on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images, leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn't matter that was spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.

He couldn't shake the suspicion that some terrible mutation was taking place somewhere he wasn't aware of. Ando had visited Mai's apartment, and he'd also been to the rooftop exhaust shaft into which she'd fallen. He'd sensed the strangeness of her room and had felt the weird-ness of that roof underfoot. Maybe that was why he sensed danger bearing down on him more than Miyashita seemed to. He could almost hear the writhing, of something, accelerate under the earth.

"Do you sense some catastrophe?" Miyashita still sounded pretty relaxed.

"It's just that it's all so grotesque."

Ever since Ryuji's autopsy, Ando had been plunged into the world of the bizarre. Concrete felt soft and clingy under his footsteps, the scent of life pervaded an uninhabited room. One inexplicable phenomenon after another. And then there was the thing Mai had given birth to; the very thought made him shudder. Mai had been dead for a month and a half, and they still had no clue concerning whatever it was she had delivered. Ando doubted that what she'd had was just a cute little baby.

"Don't be so gloomy. Even if it did manage to mutate, there's no guarantee that it succeeded in adapting to the environment."

"So you think the mutated virus might be extinct, too?"

"We can't rule out the possibility."

"Ever the optimist."

"Recall the Spanish influenza virus, the one that swept the world in 1918. They found the same virus in America in 1977, but nobody died then. The first time around it slaughtered between twenty to forty million people worldwide, and sixty years later, it was basically harmless."

"I guess a virus can weaken through mutation."

It was true that since the discovery of Mai's body, no more suspicious deaths had come to light. He'd kept a close watch on the papers and worked his contacts in the police department, but so far the net had come up empty. It was possible that Miyashita was right and that the newly reborn, mutated virus had failed to adapt to its environment in the short period it had to do so, and had lost its ability to spread. Maybe it was extinct.

"Any idea what we should do next?" asked Miyashita, kicking the floor and twirling in his chair.

"Well, there's one thing I've let slip."

"What's that?"

"When and where did Mai get her hands on the videotape?"

"Does it matter?"

"It bothers me. I want to nail down the date."

Ando felt he should have checked on this. He'd been too busy analyzing the virus and forgotten. Now, it looked to be the only thing left to do. He was virtually certain that the tape Mai had watched was Ryuji's copy, but he didn't know how or when it had passed into her possession.

Finding out proved surprisingly easy.

Assuming that Ryuji's effects, including the tape, had been shipped to his parents' house within two or three days after his demise, Mai could only have obtained it there. So Ando called Ryuji's family.

When Ryuji's mother heard that Ando was an old college friend of her son's, she suddenly became very friendly. Ando asked whether or not a woman named Mai Takano had called on her.

"Yes," the woman replied. She was even able to ascertain the date by looking at a receipt in her household-finance ledger. She'd bought a shortcake to offer Mai. November 1, 1990. Ando jotted down the date.

"By the way, why exactly did Mai visit you?"

Ryuji's mother explained that Mai had been helping Ryuji with a work he'd been serializing by making clean copies of each installment, and that a page had been found missing.

"So she visited your house to look for the missing page, is that it?"

Ando jotted down the name and publisher of the magazine that had been running the series.

And then he hung up. He didn't want to be asked how Mai was doing these days. If he told Ryuji's mother that Mai was dead, he'd be sure to face a barrage of questions, and he simply didn't have the kind of answers that would satisfy her.

Ando sat there with his hand on the receiver long after he'd broken the connection.

On November 1st, Mai visited Ryuji's family home. While searching for the missing manuscript page, she found the videotape. She took it home with her. She probably watched it that very day.

He started to put together a hypothesis based on a November 1st starting point. It took a week for the virus to have its full effect. So something should have happened to her on November 8th. Ando's date with her had been for the ninth. He'd called her several times that day, with no answer. It made sense. She'd either been in her room and unable to pick up the phone or already in the exhaust shaft.

He started to calculate backwards. The autopsy had been able to tell them how long she'd been alive in the shaft, and how long she'd been dead before she was discovered. She had died, according to the evidence, on or about the 20th of November, and she had fallen into the shaft about ten days before. It was perfectly in line with these projections to posit that the virus had worked its changes on her on the eighth or ninth, leading to her fall into the shaft. Thus it was probably accurate to assume that she'd watched the video on November 1st.

The next thing Ando did was to head to the periodicals section of the library to look for the magazine that contained Ryuji's articles. He found it. And in the issue dated November 20th, he found the last installment of Ryuji's work, a piece entitled The Structure of Knowledge. This told Ando something.

Mai managed to transcribe Ryuji's article and get it to his editor.

This meant that in the time between her watching the video and her death, there was at least one person she'd definitely had contact with.

He put in a call to the editorial office of the monthly that had run the article and made an appointment with the editor in charge of Ryuji's work. Ando decided he needed to visit the publisher himself; something made him want to actually meet the guy, rather than just talk to him over the phone.

He took a JR train to Suidobashi. From there he walked for about five minutes, looking for the address, before he spotted the eleven-story building that house

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 564