James looked at the pool. The empty pool. It wasn’t very dirty, but there was enough algae remaining on the walls and floor to say it wasn’t clean.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” he said. “Shouldn’t we be writing lines or something?”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how much our custodial staff charge for their services,” Shimoyanagi Yoshiki replied. “Having you delinquents do the work saves the school a lot of money, almost—almost—making up for the problems you’ve caused.”

  James raised an eyebrow at the delinquents crack. He didn’t think they’d caused the school much of a problem at all. But then, he already knew that Yoshiki was a bit of a hard-ass.

  “I don’t see why we can’t clean them with a Frame,” Matsuri complained. “We’ve got some rotating brush attachments that would clean this in minutes.”

  “And shatter all the tiles around the pool?” Yoshiki retorted. “Or worse, the pool itself? It has to still hold water when you’re done.”

  As Matsuri stuttered and blushed, James noticed that Kana was frowning at the pool. He guessed that she had just gathered that the pool was supposed to be full of water and also that they were here to clean it. Kana wasn’t unintelligent, but she was missing a lot of context about humans. She had a tendency to get through it, not by asking questions, but just frowning in disapproval until someone said something she understood.

  She had arrived back at the dorms that morning, seemingly no worse for wear. Expressions of concern had been dismissed on the grounds that her injury was of no great extent and easily recovered from. James thought that it was a little unfair that she’d copped a detention while unconscious, but Kana herself took no issue with it.

  Junko had gotten a free pass due to being kidnapped. James didn’t think that was unfair, exactly, but he didn’t feel it was fair that her rescuers got punished. However, there was no arguing with the PMC. Or, more precisely, Midoriko. Even Shion had shown up, though whether she’d stay for long was an open question.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, little man,” she snarled. “You think I’m scared of you because you got a metal sword? I’ll take it off you and make you wear it like a diaper.”

  “You may not be scared of me, but my sister is another story,” Yoshiki retorted. It wasn’t a strong comeback, but it seemed to work. Shion stopped talking, grimacing in frustration.

  “Shion-san,” Suki said gently. “Perhaps it would be best if you left and did not join in with the cleaning crew. No one likes you, and your presence would be disruptive at best.”

  “Oh yeah? Gimme a mop, I’ll clean up right alongside you!” Shion growled. Suiting actions to words, she grabbed a brush and jumped into the empty pool.

  Mitsue stared at Suki with a new respect. “That… actually worked?” he asked, dumbfounded.

  “I don’t think she— I don’t think that will work all the time,” Suki said, blushing. “It was just an excuse.”

  Kana was staring down at Shion as she scrubbed ineffectually at the walls, her frustration growing.

  “That does not seem efficient,” Kana said, frowning.

  “We need to get the surface wet, first,” James said. Cleaning pools was something he’d done back home, and it was nice to encounter something he was familiar with. “Suki, can you take charge of the hose and keep the walls wet? Everyone else, grab a mop. If we start at the shallow end, the water will drain to the deep end, and we won’t have to step in it.”

  All in all, it was relatively fun, for a punishment. They didn’t get it all done before James and Mitsue had to leave for PMC training. About half of it was clean, and they set up a siphon to drain the green water that had accumulated at the bottom of the pool.

  Then they went to PMC training. It was only then that James remembered that he’d been promised a richly deserved beating by Midoriko-senpai.

  “Ara, ara, getting into more fights already? I’ll start to think you’re just doing it to get my attention!”

  “This was training,” James said, trying very hard to look at anything that wasn’t Nanamori Saiako. This wasn’t the first time he’d had occasion to notice that her nurse’s uniform was absolutely scandalous, but it didn’t get easier over time. Not when she had his shirt off and was running her fingers along his chest and arms in what James devoutly hoped was a medical fashion.

  The PMC training session had not only left James with more bruises than he could count, but Midoriko had worked him hard, pushing him to the very limits of his endurance. He had thought he was doing well to stagger back into his bed under his own power.

  When he woke the next morning, everything was pain. Mitsue wasn’t in much better shape, but he powered through the pain, declaring that a Ninja fought through any weakness. He did, though, inject himself with half a pint of his blood, claiming that it would help him heal.

  It might have worked, as he got to attend morning class, while James got sent to the Nurse’s office as soon as he limped into homeroom.

  “Now, how should we proceed?” Saiako enquired. “You could rest your head here.” She tapped her chest at the point where the zipper—which was not drawn up to the top—vainly struggled to hold the front of her uniform closed against the irresistible force of her assets.

  The motion had tricked James into looking. He dragged his gaze away while Saiako kept talking.

  “It comes highly recommended. Just a few moments and your aches and cares will be gone.”

  Along with my life, James thought. Though that probably wasn’t true? Saiako had a job here; she could hardly go about murdering students. It was probably safe to—James shut that thought down. Hard.

  “I have a girlfriend,” he mumbled, still looking away.

  Saiako moved in close, letting him—forcing him—to smell her musky perfume. “It’s cute that you think that matters,” she murmured in his ear. “It doesn’t matter to me, do you think it matters to you? Just one—”

  “Don’t you have any regular medicine?” he yelped. “Educators aren’t supposed to act like this!”

  “Hmm, I suppose,” Saiako said, drawing away from him. “I do have a herbal oil that will reduce the pain and promote healing. I’d have to rub it all over your body, though…”

  “I can put it on myself!” James insisted.

  “Not everywhere,” Saiako pointed out. “You have bruises in some very unusual places.” She drew the word out sensuously, making it seem dirty, even though he knew she was just talking about his back. That was the only place he couldn’t reach, anyway.

  “It’s fine,” James said. “I’ll get Mitsue-kun to put it on my back.” Mitsue could probably use some of the oil as well. Despite his brave front, he had been moving much more stiffly that morning.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Hmph! If you insist,” Saiako said. She got a bottle out of the cupboard and handed it to him. “Rub it in until your skin isn’t slick any more,” she said. “You shouldn’t need more than one application.”

  “Thanks,” James said, looking at the bottle. “Could you… not watch me when I’m applying it?”

  “If you’re shy,” Saiako said leadingly, “you can pull the curtain around the bed closed. We keep the tissues right next to the bed.”

  When he glared at her, she giggled. “To wipe the oil off, silly. I don’t know what you were thinking.”

  Still glaring, he closed the curtain on her, only to find that the fox nurse was even more alluring when all he could see was a silhouette.

  “Hmm,” she sighed. “Since there’s no one around to see, I think I might do some stretches.”

  “Could you… answer some questions instead?” James asked. He took the top off the bottle and sniffed it dubiously. It smelled like medicine.

  “How dull,” Saiako sniffed. But she wasn’t doing a striptease, so James took it as a win. “What questions did you have?”

  “About souls,” James said. “Why doesn’t Suki-chan have one? How does Suki-chan not have one? Don’t we need them? What are they?”

  “Those are pretty deep questions, kid,” Saiako said, her voice turning serious. “If you want the real answers, you might do better asking Hachiman-kamisama.”

  James blanched at the thought of confronting that… entity. He hadn’t been affected at the time, but he had seen how the faces of the other students went blank, just from seeing the god.

  “I don’t think… that would be a good idea,” he said weakly. He distracted himself by rubbing some oil on, wincing when he went over the sore areas—which were all the areas.

  “That might be for the best,” Saiako mused. “Gods aren’t known for giving straight answers to the deep questions. Still, we foxes are known for giving crooked answers to any question, so I’m not sure how much wisdom you’re showing.”

  “Even a lie would put me ahead of where I am now,” James confessed. “And you… you foxes, you know about souls, don’t you? You eat them.”

  “We don’t eat souls, most of the time,” Saiako said. “We eat ki, which—I guess I can see some confusion there. Let’s start with something simple. There is ki and there is matter. Those are two separate things.”

  “What about energy?” James asked, “Is ki a form of energy?”

  “Hmm, I don’t think so,” Saiako said thoughtfully. “Don’t the physicists say that matter and energy are the same thing? Ki is different, so no, it’s not energy.”

  Saiko-sensei paused for thought. “This might be getting us off track,” she said, “but ki is always associated with something. It could be matter, like rock ki, or energy, like wind ki. Or it could be linked to emotions or even concepts like Death. It’s not any of those things, but that is how we perceive it.”

  James started oiling his legs. Saiako paused. “Yeah, this is definitely getting off track. Let's start simpler. Suppose there was only matter, just like they teach in schools.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not the case,” James said wryly.

  “Just imagine. No spirits, or magic or ki. How do things work in that case? What makes you work?”

  “I guess… my brain?” James hazarded.

  “Right, three pounds of meat that somehow define all that you are and can do,” Saiako said. “Now if someone were to eat that meat, would they have eaten you?”

  “It depends on what you mean,” James said slowly. “I mean, yes, my brain would be in their stomach, but I wouldn’t be. I’d be dead. Non-existent.”

  “Yes. You are not your tasty brain-meats. You are encoded in ever-changing patterns in those brain-meats.”

  “Like a program in a computer,” James said.

  “I don’t really get the bleep-boop machines,” Saiako admitted, “But let’s say yes. That’s what Shion-san is supposed to be, right? She’s got a computer where her head should be?”

  “I think so,” James said. He finished with his legs and started putting his shirt back on. “Shion-san doesn’t seem to know how she works.”

  “Bleagh. Not tasty. But anyway, we started with only matter, and we find ourselves with something that isn’t matter.”

  “Is that what ki is?” James asked. “Patterns?”

  “Nah, ki is its own thing,” Saiako told him. “It’s invisible and intangible, but it exists. Humans make it, and we yōkai eat it. It can form, or be formed into different things. Most importantly, you can encode those patterns on it.”

  “And that’s what souls are,” James said.

  “More accurately, that’s what spirits are. Not the embodied ones that you’ve seen, but the majority of them that you can’t perceive. Souls are more complicated.”

  “Okay…” James pulled the curtain back, ready to look away if the fox-spirit had decided to strip or something. Much to his relief, she was still in her uniform.

  “Intangible spirits work pretty much the same way as humans or animals; you just replace their meat with ki. They use their brain-ki to think and their body-ki to do things. Embodied spirits like myself have matter attached to the ki-body, so we can do things that you notice.”

  “So you have two bodies,” James said, thinking about it. “And… one mind?”

  “I think so,” Saiako said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure if we use our physical brains for anything or if they’re just imitating what humans do. But getting back to humans, you have one body and two minds.”

  “Why? How?”

  “Ask the gods why, not that they’ll tell you,” Saiako said. “As to how, well, you make ki. Ki attaches to things. When you were still an embryo, some of that ki attached to you and became your soul. It grew with you, and it matched the encoding of your brain meats.”

  “So it’s a copy of me?”

  “Copy implies a static thing. Shadow, or mirror of you, might be a better term. And, I don’t think it's right to think of one as an original. Both of them are you. They affect each other. If your meat-half dies, the ki-half can, under the right circumstances, carry on in some form.”

  “Is that what ghosts are?”

  “Eh…” Saiako said with a dismissive wave. “Most ghosts are just spirits that have picked up a bit of matter or magic. Enough for people to notice them. But some are—or were—people. What you want, as a post-death survivor, is to get picked up by a shinagami.”

  “Those are real?” James asked.

  Saiako rolled her eyes. “Of course. Most of them work for the gods and take detached souls to Heaven or their next life, or whatever.”

  James decided not to ask what the other ones did. They were getting off-topic again.

  “And what about Suki-chan?” he asked instead.

  “Hmm, well, I can think of three possibilities,” Saiako said. “First, she has a soul, just like a human, but the advanced magic that’s on her is concealing it.”

  “Magic? Harue-kun didn’t say anything about magic.”

  “It’s subtle. So subtle, in fact, that it’s concealing itself,” Saiako said thoughtfully. “I doubt Haru-chan noticed it. Don’t ask me what it does, that kind of enchantment isn’t something I can decode.”

  James nodded. “What are the other possibilities?”

  “In the second scenario, her ki is still being concealed, but she is more like an embodied spirit. There are plenty of yōkai who possess cursed dolls. Normally, I’d be able to tell, but we’re assuming concealing magic.”

  “What’s the third possibility?” James asked, scowling. He didn’t want to think of Suki as some kind of doll, even if others had referred to her that way. She was alive, she was soft and smelled nice, and—

  “The third possibility is that her mind is encoded in her body, but for some reason, no ki has attached to her. This could be because of the enchantment. Or there could be some other reason.”

  “So…” James said slowly, going through the possibilities in his mind. “Our best bet, then, is to investigate this enchantment.”

  “I’d advise against it,” Saiako said flatly.

  “Why not?”

  “A long list of reasons. One, that enchantment is deeply involved with Suki-san’s existence. Messing with it—or worse, breaking it—could cause her to die or change her personality.”

  “That’s—” James swallowed. “It won’t do any harm just to look, though?”

  “Two,” Saiako continued. “To have a hope of unravelling the Old Man’s work, you’d need a seriously powerful sorcerer. Those guys aren’t easy to find, and even if you manage it, they don’t work cheap. Or even expensive. The cost of their help is either going to be out of your reach or the sort of price that you will forever regret paying.”

  “That’s not ominous and vague at all,” James muttered. “I’m sure it won’t hurt to ask—”

  “Lastly,” Saiako said, ignoring his outburst, “Whoever you find—whatever twisted piece of refuse you dig up—has spent three human lifetimes sacrificing everything good in their life for power. And you’re going to give that guy access to Suki-chan’s mind and soul? Just to get answers to questions you don’t even care about?”

  “I—” James started. “Suki-chan cares. She wants to know, and I want to help her.”

  “Do you really think,” Saiako asked him, her eyes catching and holding his. “That when this is all over, you’ll be able to say you helped?”

  James wrenched his eyes away.

  “I’ll talk to Suki-chan about it,” he said. “See what she thinks. I won’t do anything stupid.”

  Saiako’s laughter rang out, the sound as pure and lilting as wind chimes in a summer breeze. “That’s a lie if ever I heard one. You’re a human, an American and a teenage boy. None of those things are associated with good decisions.”

  “That’s a little unfair,” James complained.

  “Tell me that again after disaster has struck,” Saiako-sensei said. “Or don’t. I’ve wasted enough time trying to stop you from making the mistakes you were born to make.”

  She made a shooing gesture and pointed to the door.

  “Get out of here. You’re fit to go back to class.”