[FFML] [FIC][DEATH NOTE AU]Silent Partner, Unfinished Business ch. 01

[Paul Durant]

    I am not Brian Azzarello, author of 100 Bullets, nor am I Tsugumi
Ohba, author of Death Note.


    "100 Bullets" is an anthology comic series about crime and
revenge. You don't need to know anything about it to read this fic: just
like a Twilight Zone crossover would just be submitted for your approval
by Rod Serling. There is one scene in the first chapter where there is one
guy who is Clearly From Something Else who lays out the premise, and
that's all you need.


    Cover art: https://i.imgur.com/Sup6qUl.png


                               * * * * * * *


    SILENT PARTNER, UNFINISHED BUSINESS:


    ONE IS THE LOWLIEST NUMBER


                               * * * * * * *


    Kira. The mysterious killer who could murder anyone worldwide with
just their name and face. The most important matter in the history of law
enforcement. I remember L, the so-called World's Greatest Detective, had
narrowed the killer's location down to Japan. I remember the FBI sent
twelve agents to assist the investigation, and one was my fiance, Raye. We
were talking about  me coming along with him, because he’d be doing
administrative work, and I could take him to meet my parents the way he
took me to meet his. I wanted to make sure everything was smooth before we
could start a family. I remember... I remember there was a hotel room. Why
did we get a hotel, when we hadn’t left yet? We hadn’t decided if I should
stay. I remember asking him to shut the curtains. I remember I picked up a
phone, and from that point, everything was just one long nightmare.


    I pick up the phone and I hear a cacophony of the wailing,
anguished dead denied the gates of Heaven or Hell, screaming my name,
unable to hear me call back. I am alone.


    A man with a blacked-out face and two smoldering red embers for
eyes tricks me into opening my mouth; he opens his coat and reveals his
flesh is made of writhing snakes before he shoves a bronze spear down my
gullet. I am betrayed.


    I am yanked around, made to dance like a marionette, hangman's
nooses tied to every part of my body. They jerk my limbs back and forth to
emulate the way I walk and talk and speak, twisting my body into something
that is no longer my own. Nobody around me can see it and I can't make it
stop no matter how much I thrash and scream. I am violated.


    I open my neck and write a sonnet of lies in the steaming blood. I
look out from the edge of a cliff upon an ocean of crow feathers and
leering jaundiced eyes; on the horizon a wide, grinning maw has replaced
the sun, the teeth jagged and uneven. It pulls me toward it with a force
not my mind nor muscle can resist, and I am dead.


    Again. And again. And again.


    And then I was awake. I was laying in a bed in a paper smock, with
a needle in my arm, metal electrodes stuck to my head and chest, and a man
in a white smock picking up my leg.


    If I'd considered the things that I saw and felt, rationally, I
would have come to the conclusion I was in a hospital and the man was
either a doctor or nurse. Instead, I half-screamed half-grunted and I
tried to kick him in the face. He yelped, let go of me, and took a step
back, my feeble attack fell limply down to the bed. My arms and legs felt
heavy and so weak, it felt like for every meter of effort I was putting in
I only got a few centimeters of motion. I tried to scream for help, but my
jaw was so weak...


    And I couldn't find the words. I stared at his shocked eyes, I let
out a weak, gurgling moan, I tried to shout. What... What was the word for
'Stop'? It was on the tip of my tongue. and it fled, instantly. What was,
how, how did I say 'Help me'? Maybe I couldn't speak English. He was a
Japanese guy, I might be back in Japan. I could... What... What was the
Japanese word for 'Japanese'? How did I say Raye's name?


    I didn't know how to talk. Why didn't I know how to talk?


    "Oh my God, lady," said the young man in the smock, in Japanese,
with his hand over his chest. "Damn near gave me a heart attack!" We
stared at each other for a few seconds, eyes wide and terrified. He was
panting, my breath was shuddering and uneven. Finally he said "I'm, uh,
supposed to move your limbs around every couple of days so you don't
atrophy too bad. That's what I was doing when you woke up. Are you awake?
Say something -- tell me your name."


    Naomi Misora. My name is Naomi Misora. "Nnnnngghhhh..." Naomi.
Naomi Misora. "Hhhhhhh..." I didn't, I can't, what is my NAME, it's Naomi
Misora but what IS it why can't I SAY IT? I started to weep. I wanted to
throw something, but couldn't move far enough.


    "No verbal response," he said. "Eye movements are definitely
purposeful. So... if you're actually in there, I'm just gonna go get the
doctor, okay? I'll be right back."


    He left. What could I say about it? I looked at my surroundings. I
was in a hospital room, illuminated by harsh fluorescents, smelling
faintly of disinfectant and ammonia. There were three other people in
three other beds, not reacting to anything. The walls and ceiling were
bare of decoration or amusement. I must have been in the coma ward, and
judging by how long my fingernails were and how long my hair felt, I must
have been there for a while.


    So I was in a coma ward, and while I was unconscious, I was
repeatedly experiencing some kind of symbolic betrayal, violation, and
death. That made... some sense, I guess. I was afraid and I still couldn't
move or talk in an unfamiliar place after losing an unknown amount of
time, but I figured that out, and that was something. My nose itched. I
couldn't scratch it.


    The young man came back in short order, carrying a black laptop,
with the doctor leading him in. The doctor was an old man, his hair an
obvious too-dark dye job, his face leathery and creased by age, laughter,
and cigarette smoke. He was holding a folder that had to be my 'chart',
and after a quick bow he said "Hello, miss! I'm Dr. Mitsumo, and I've been
your doctor these past few months. This is Akira, he's a resident here. I
know you're probably very afraid right now, and very confused, but I want
you to know that you're safe here. Nobody is going to hurt you."


    Akira took a hesitating step forward with the black laptop. "Uh,
it looked like you're having trouble speaking... and, your fingers
probably can't hold a pen right now, so, uh..." It took a second for me to
realize he was waiting for my approval. It hurt, but I shook my head 'yes'
at him. He stared at me for a couple seconds and I shook my head again,
slower. "No? No... you can't use the computer?" he asked, like I hadn't
been signalling 'yes'. I nodded again, very very slowly, and pain shot up
my neck. "Okay, I'm just going to assume that one counts." He set the
computer down in my lap, opened it up and turned it on, lifted my hand
over the keys.


    "Today's date is March 19, 2007," the doctor said while Akira
waited for the computer to boot up. "You've been in a coma for a little
over ten weeks, and your muscles have atrophied in that time, which is why
you're having difficulty moving. You're at Kanto Rosai hospital in
Kanagawa right now. You're very lucky -- the paramedics said you were dead
for three minutes before they revived you. The first thing I need to ask
you is your name, miss. We can't contact your family without your name,
and we just can't find the person your identification card says you are."


    Akira's computer finally finished booting up; his desktop
background was a kid hitting a giant baseball with a guitar. He opened up
Notepad and stepped back to let me type. Moving my hand around was
arduous, it was as if it was encased in lead, but it could move over the
characters on the keys.


    My name is Naomi Misora. They must have pulled my fake ID card
from me, for Shoko Maki. Why did I have my fake ID on me? I must have been
worried about Kira... there was no way that this was some ploy to get my
name out of me since if they wanted me dead I was in a coma for ten weeks.
But Raye knew my undercover name, and he'd be upset I was putting myself
in danger, but if he heard Shoko Maki was in the hospital he'd be by my
side. They needed to find Raye Penber... where was Raye? What was I doing
here? What happened to us?


    How did... how did I spell any of those words? What... what order
do they go in?


    "Take as much time as you like, miss," said the doctor as he
leaned over to see what I was typing. I got as far as //H//. My name is
Naomi Misora. What I needed more than anything was my fiance Raye. Where
was he? Did he find Kira? Did I? Did Kira kill him? Did Kira kill both of
us? Why can't I talk?


    Nothing came out of me but confused grunts. I was trapped in my
body, and my words trapped in my skull.


                               * N A O M I *


    I was a broken woman.


    Any fantasies of breaking out and finding Raye on my own withered
away quickly. I wouldn't be able to run without them catching me. If they
didn't try, I couldn't make it outside the building. If I did... I
couldn't tell anyone what I wanted or who I was looking for. They didn't
know who I was. Didn't know what I needed. I could emote to them -- they
knew what food I liked and what I didn't. But I could barely hear from my
left ear, and I couldn't seem to get across that concept. I discovered
only after a lot of difficulty that I couldn't nod or shake my head "yes"
and "no" any more. I thought what I was doing was obvious. But I was
picking gestures at random without realizing it.


    Expressive aphasia due to brain lesion, they told me. I wasn't
mute. If I was, I could write. If I was mute and illiterate, I could use
sign language, or charades. But the part of my brain that transforms my
thoughts into coherent and legible information that could be understood by
other human beings was broken. The gap between brain and mouth seemed
unbridgeable. I couldn't tell anyone anything. I couldn't have Raye at my
side. He would know... He would know what to do. He would know what I was
thinking just from my expression.


    My "recovery" was constant humiliation. I wasn't confined to a
wheelchair, because it hurt too much to sit up; I was confined to a
gurney. They wouldn't let me look in a mirror. I had a call button I could
barely press to summon a nurse who I couldn't ask anything of.


    Speech therapy consisted of listening to music and trying to sing
along. Just grunting melodically, if that was all I could do. They had a
CD of American Classics of the 70's and 80's; I couldn't tell them what
music I preferred. It didn't take long to at least grunt along to "Don't
Stop Believin'"; I think that song must be written into your DNA after six
months in the US. Melodic intonation therapy works on the principle that
singing is controlled by a different area of the brain than speaking, so
singing words can re-map the brain's ability to speak them. I was
practically honking along to Journey, like an idiot, but I kept going.
Maybe I'd be able to sing all my words. Maybe I could perform my wedding
vows in aria form. It was nice to hope.


    The physical therapy, for the beginning, consisted of stripping me
naked and putting me in what was essentially a Jacuzzi. Warm water,
flowing around with jets. Keep me weightless so it was easier to move my
weak muscles and strengthen them again. The moment they dunked me in for
the first time, I pissed myself. Too weak and useless to even control my
bladder. Too dumb to communicate it had happened and someone should do
something about it. I soaked in my own swirling urine for two hours as I
tried to return some basic function to my muscles, while a nurse stared
through me. And the next day, I got in the tub again. I would have loved
to say it was raw determination, my unbreakable willpower, my conviction
that no obstacle was too great to return me to my beloved.


    But I just had nothing else to do. I couldn't really think too
hard about possible paths to the future, nor meditate on the past. They
had me on some really powerful painkillers, and time passed in sort of a
fog. I didn't care much more than the nurse about my accident in the pool,
at the time. I didn't make plans for the future, didn't realize how
humiliated I was. Going to therapy was the thing that was done, so it was
the thing I did. La la la. Don't stop believin'.


    If I wasn't in physical therapy or speech therapy I was in the
ICU, laying in bed, accompanied by the rhythmic beeping of EKGs and
nothing else. I wasn't even freaking out about Raye. It felt like he was
close by, like he just left the room to talk to a nurse. He'd be back
soon.


    Of course, he was not. After a week at the hospital, just long
enough for me to be out of the ICU, they turfed me off to a clinic.
Kanagawa Neurological Health Center, I saw on my way in. Rolled me on my
gurney, got all my belongings in a plastic bag, draped my chart on the end
of the bed -- it was in the name of Tarouko Yamada, Japanese for 'Jane
Doe' -- took me in to the clinic to be surrounded by stroke patients twice
my age. I never saw easygoing Dr. Mitsumo again.


    My second day at the clinic, a woman named Aoba pulled up her
wheelchair and was determined that we would make fast friends. She chatted
to me for two hours even though I couldn't form a single word in response.
Everything she said was complete gibberish. The words were mostly real
words, in the right cadence and intonation, put together in a way that had
no meaning. Receptive aphasia, they told me. She could speak language, but
she couldn't understand it, not even her own. I let her talk, let her
words wash over me. No point being cruel to an old woman worse off than
me. Maybe she thought we were some cosmically ordained pair. And it felt
nice to have someone act like you're worth talking to. The nurses didn't.


    And while Aoba was talking to me and the old painkillers wore off,
the gears started turning again.


    "Hoberdie! We licked at it in the while it didn't ripple yet.
Should be." All right. Here I was, in a clinic. Bedridden. Aphasic. What
happened to me? My body was covered in scars -- I glimpsed a dark ring of
scar tissue around my neck in a passing reflection, maybe they were trying
to keep me from seeing it. I had a scar of a gash running down the inside
of my right arm, and my right thigh. A thin line running from around my
right hip to between my breasts, with two thick sections on it. I could
move my arm enough to touch my head and feel my hair was uneven, recently
shaved on the left side. A gash near my temple and a vertical scar over my
lip, where my teeth might have been fixed.


    "Oh, and the frog. The frog! He was for the running, and in the
frog. Let's eat, right?" Whatever had happened to me, the doctors and
nurses wouldn't tell me. This was probably an indication that they did not
want to tell me what happened. Mitsumo did mention, with pride, I was dead
for three minutes. That would narrow it down; if your injuries are caused
by gunshot and you're dead for three minutes, then you're also dead for
every minute that comes after. So as bad as these scars were, they were
not likely my cause of death. I didn't bleed out. EMTs say 'nobody is dead
until they are warm and dead', so it was likely I went someplace cold.
There were a lot of those in Japan, eleven weeks ago.


    "They have it in there, for wagamins. You're very pretty!" I
didn't know if that was a compliment, or not, but I smiled. "But it hasn't
fallen in yet. Wiggle a little, yes?" I could have fallen into a pool and
drowned, but there are few outdoor pools in Tokyo, and I know how to swim
besides. An indoor pool would be heated or it wouldn't be usable in
January, and wouldn't be filled with debris. I wasn't just hit one time:
whatever struck me was in multiple impacts, some of which were dragging.
Most of the damage was to my right side, but the left side of my head was
hit. The scars don't seem purposeful, like I was stabbed. This suggests an
accidental impact of some kind, at some velocity, and I spun a
half-revolution before or after hitting my head.


    "Come inside in the buttons. Buttons, buttons on head. And she
comes too, for pretty head. Going in there, good." The most obvious
hypothesis would be a motorcycle crash, but it didn't add up for several
reasons. My body had no abrasions I could see, and I'd feel them in the
areas I couldn't see. And the doctors clearly had my wallet: they'd played
American music for me because most of what was in there was American. And
they didn't say anything about my motorcycle, like that it had been
impounded or destroyed or recovered, and as far as I could tell it wasn't
brought with me. And I didn't have my driver's license on me, or my credit
cards, or they would have known who I was. I had brain damage from a head
wound, but only a few scars on my face; it didn't seem like I was wearing
a helmet and it shattered. I had fallen, maybe off a building, onto a fire
escape or a Dumpster with sharp corners? I had slipped, been pushed -- or
jumped.


    "He would! He was in the hat that he rode, the dear, but there
wasn't any. And it was all red!" Of course. No wonder they didn't want to
tell me what had happened. They thought I tried to kill myself -- heck, I
had killed myself. And maybe if they told me they would remind me. There
was only one way to be sure: get my chart. If my suspicions were correct,
I'd removed my ID because I was going after Kira, and either I wasn't
careful enough or I ran into one of his lackeys, who killed me. And that
meant if Raye was still here looking for my trail, he was in danger. On
the far side of the room, some grannies were playing mahjong. Could all of
them talk? If singing was a different part of the brain than speech, were
numbers stored elsewhere than words? Only one way to find THAT out too. I
needed my chart, and I needed a phone. But this was Japan, not America; in
America they never let you see your chart and I was in the country that
did not invent the phrase 'patient-centered care'.


    And I was bedridden, only able to move my arms and neck weakly,
completely unable to use language. The docs had given me a purple squish
ball to crush in my hand and gain back grip strength, I could MAYBE throw
it to the end of the bed. I had my engagement ring and no other
ornamentation, and there was a swivel lamp above my bed. My only
accomplice was arthritic and completely unable to understand words, and
judging by her cadence, right now was telling me the plot of a movie she'd
seen. The nurse's station was around the corner, where my chart would be.
It wouldn't hard for her to get the chart, if she knew that was the plan,
but I couldn't tell her what I needed and why. But it wasn't yet hopeless.
I couldn't play Charades -- based on my "yes/no" trouble I would make
random gestures -- but Charades is about reconstructing a grammatically
complete sentence, and pantomime is about reconstructing how things look.


    I let Aoba keep talking to me, and when I did, I held up my ring
finger, and I played with the ring. Mmmm, I like this ring! This ring is
important to me. (Sorry Raye, but our love gets to be a prop if it means
saving you from danger.) I twisted it on my finger, and I admired the
diamond in the center. I think Aoba got what I was going for there, though
her speech didn't slow down a bit. I could tell by how she was moving her
hands and listing to the side that she was at least two digressions deep
from her main thread. I took off the ring, and I showed it to her. She
took it in her arthritic hands, and she said "Oh, they're rumbling a lot
for the little people now, in the oven!" but it was a warm tone so I'll
take it. She asked me "Were any of it outside the mountain?" but I just
kind of weakly tapped at my mouth to remind her I could not speak, and she
got it. She handed it back to me, and I kept it in my hand.


    Stage 2 was easy. Hit the call button. The light at the nurse's
station corresponding to my bed went on, and the nurse would have to bring
my chart with him to see me -- I couldn't tell him any answers he needed!
Sure enough, the stocky man on duty came to me with my chart in his hands,
an opened three-ring binder with //TAROUKO YAMADA// written on a slip of
paper slid into the front. It was pretty thin, but still disturbingly
thick considering they had no idea who I was and what medical history I
had. I beckoned the nurse closer to me, with my neck -- his nametag was
blacked out, and that alone told me that Kira had not been caught yet.


    Aoba was still there, haranguing the poor nurse with what was to
her a list of all the ways I'd been mistreated. "Pillot shoes, keep for
burning! You always come at the wrong way, and she doesn't soak inside
it!" That was good. When the nurse walked close to me and my hand was up,
it was REALLY important that she see the moment I dropped my ring into
that plastic sleeve on the back of the binder. If she didn't, this was
pointless. The nurse came in close, and I pitched my head, tried to get my
hand behind it... I couldn't, but he got the idea. He left with my chart
and the ring inside it, and came back with a couple of pillows, to help me
sit up. Perfect reading position.


    Next step required some waiting. Had to wait for someone else in
the room, other than Aoba, to need assistance going to the bathroom. I did
not have to wait long. The nurse had to take the blue-haired old woman
into the restroom... and then I looked down at my hand. Oh no! Where is my
ring? I'm very distressed by not having the ring I established myself as
liking. I will reach out and try to get up, but I can't! Aoba saw all of
this, and she decided to help the poor young woman. She sauntered off like
she owned the place. Around the corner, she would easily find the ring, be
unable to extract it from the plastic sleeve...


    And come back to me with my chart so I could take it out.


    //PATIENT NAME: Tarouko Yamada

    PRESIDING PHYSICIAN: Genzo Mitsumo

    DATE: March 20, 2007

    SOURCE: No outside source of medical history is available.

    COMPLAINT: N/A

    HISTORY: Ms. Yamada was discovered at the base of a cliff in
Kanagawa-ken by an unrelated Tarou Yamada. She appeared to have fallen
from the cliff into the water and struck it on the way down; cliff is
known spot for suicides as water takes bodies out to ocean when the tide
is high. Patient's wrists and neck were bound with cord. Patient had
broken both legs and arms in indicated locations, fractured four ribs,
fractured skull, and drowned. Paramedics report patient was clinically
dead for three minutes before being revived.

    PRESENTATION: Ms. Yamada is a Japanese female, in her mid 20s,
171cm and 46kg. Currency and cards in her wallet suggest American
nationality; patient had American and Japanese ID in name of "Shoko Maki",
but they were forgeries and no such person exists. She has significant
scarring over many areas of her body, most notably a ring of scar tissue
around her neck. Observation reveals general muscle weakness and
incoordination. Her right knee flexes with great difficulty and pain.
Patient is unable to articulate complaints or provide her real name due to
an observed inability to use spoken or written language. CT scan confirmed
lesion on Broca's area of brain, beneath skull fracture. No associated
hemiparesis or hemiplegia has been observed.

    DIAGNOSIS: Expressive aphasia due to brain lesion, muscle atrophy
and ACL tearing.

    PROGNOSIS: Muscle function will return with physical therapy. Knee
movement can be repaired with surgery, but a cane or crutch will be
advisable. Dangerously underweight, having lost significant mass during
her coma, but this can be treated with diet. Expressive aphasia is the big
question mark. She will definitely improve her ability to use language
with melodic intonation therapy, but it doesn't mean she will make a full
recovery. The patient's mental state is most important, and beyond the
expected frustrations of being totally unable to communicate, Ms. Yamada
was found after a failed suicide attempt. She is wearing an engagement
ring with no wedding band, suggesting an obvious cause. Recommend
procuring English-language entertainment media, on the off chance it makes
her feel more at home, and that nobody ask her about who gave her the
ring.//


    Suicide. I jumped off the Kanagawa lovers' leap, so the tide would
take me away. This was Kira's doing.


    It was not inconceivable I would kill myself. I'm honest about my
own mental instability. But I know how I'd kill myself: heroin overdose.
It was the obvious choice, I thought, so your last seconds would be in
doped-up bliss instead of pain and terror. And if I couldn't find any
heroin, gunshot to the head, end it quickly. Chucking myself off a cliff?
Drowning? Way too drawn out. Painful.


    But having my body carried away on the waves would be convenient
to someone who wanted me to disappear. If I OD'd on heroin, I'd leave a
body somewhere. If I blew my brains out, I'd leave a horrible mess. If I
hung myself, I didn't intimately know my surroundings, I couldn't know
where my body wouldn't be found. But if I took all the ID out of my
pockets and got rid of the motorcycle so the rental couldn't be traced
back, them jumped off a known suicide cliff to be whisked away by the
current? Nobody would ever find me and if they did nobody knew who I was.
I must have known something Kira really, really didn't want coming out.
Great. If only I knew what it was.


    That just left another question: Kira can control his victims to
some extent. Why wasn't I washed out with the tide? If he had mind control
powers, he had me cover every angle, except that I jumped at the wrong
time to be dragged away into nothingness. The cord on my wrists and neck
was to decapitate me postmortem and chop off my hands so I couldn't be
fingerprinted, not that having fingerprints did me any good here. But some
unknown character was able to save me. That seems like a rookie move for
Kira, or for me. Just jump six hours later or earlier, right? Maybe there
was another condition on his control of his victims. Maybe I HAD to do it
at the first available opportunity. Maybe he controlled the time someone
did it, and he hadn't checked the tide chart. High tide is usually around
6 PM, right? Whatever it was, L would want to know. And Raye would be able
to use the help... and know I was alive.


    Aoba had been reading over my shoulder the whole time. She started
off like we were looking through a photo album, but as she saw my facial
expression, she got the context clue that I was reading something grim and
serious. Time to take a calculated risk. Three things had to work right
for it to work, but if one of them didn't, I was out nothing. But if it
did... The odds that Kira was staff at a neurological health clinic were
really, really small. Calling Raye might put him in danger, but
identifying myself in a way that just linked me to my family had the
smallest risk, as our marriage wasn't in any registry. I looked to Aoba, I
held out my thumb and pinky, and I mimed dialing a phone. Then I looked up
like I needed help.


    The plan had more steps than that, but she got up and came back
with a cell phone pretty much instantly. It wasn't the time to look a gift
horse in the mouth. I closed my eyes, and I psyched myself up. Okay. This
was not a word. I was not going to be using language, and that broken part
of my brain can stay asleep. I am using a number. No, just a simple
automatic action. It's 1997. I'm at UCLA. It's Sunday, and Mom wants me to
call her every week to check in and I'm still doing that for now and I go
down to the lobby to make an international call and my index finger makes
the same lopsided triangles and stars pattern over the 10-key pad every
single time...


    I called from Japan to Japan as an international call because that
was what I had the best muscle memory for. My finger ached by the end of
it, but I can still read, and the phone's display told me I got it right.
All I had to do was call and make any sort of vocalization and hang up;
Mom would call back, the phone would ring in my bed, the nurse would
answer it, and then pieces would be put together. But what if she didn't
recognize me from just a grunt over the phone, and assumed it was a wrong
number? I hit "Call" and I had to psyche myself up again.  Okay. Okay.
This one's easy. It's the Beatles. Everyone knows it. You know I need
somebody. I can sing one word of that, right? Not just anybody. Not really
a word, a short piece of music. You know I need someone.


    "Hello, this is Maiko Misora speaking, who is this?"


    I replied with the first word I spoke since the accident:
"Heee-eeee-eeeelp."


    I heard her receiver, and her, hit the floor.


                               * * * * * * *


    Maiko Misora has been talking to her husband about this very
subject. How much longer do they want to keep Naomi's picture in the
household shrine? They have completed the final funeral rite at her grave,
at least the one she had in Japan. Every time Maiko looks at the picture
she starts to cry. Born Shinto, marry Catholic, die Buddhist, only her
daughter skipped the middle part. They didn't even have a body to cremate.
She doesn't know how much longer she can bear that constant reminder of
what her baby girl had taken from her, but doesn't know if she can live
with herself for taking the picture down.


    She is clearly fishing for her husband to do it for her and take
it out of her hands. The possibility that their daughter was alive does
not cross their minds at all. Her fiance was killed by the most prolific
serial killer in human history. Naomi wouldn't take that lying down. And
then she vanished without a trace. Maiko and Kenji Misora don't need L's
super intelligence to figure out what happened, and to their credit, they
are correct in their assessment, just incomplete.


    The phone rings during a long, uncomfortable silence and Maiko
tries not to look at the photo of her daughter sitting at the family
shrine when she answered. The last thing she expects in the world was her
daughter singing the word 'help', and it's understandable she might pass
out. This leaves Kenji to pick up the phone and call back, ready to berate
whoever had terrified his wife, only to find a confused nurse on the other
end. A confused nurse at the bed of an aphasic woman they could not
identify but who looked really eager.


    Kenji and Maiko's baby girl is alive. They get to race to the
clinic to see her. They get to hold her. They get to see her face again,
scarred though it was, and her soulful grey eyes. They get to hear her
laugh again. They can't hear her say how she missed them, but they can see
her eyes light up. They get to see her showing her ring, anxiously
gesturing, trying to ask them where Raye was.


    They get to tell her that Raye Penber has already been buried in
Quantico National Cemetery with the other 11 FBI agents, next to an empty
grave marked with her headstone.


    They get to see her joy turn to anguished horror. They get to see
her break down and cry, great ugly heaving sobs. They get to see her try
to throw a pillow but be too weak for it, too weak even to flip herself
over.


    They get to tell her that her fiance died a hero, protecting his
country and theirs.


    It doesn't help very much.


                               * N A O M I *


    My medical treatment could change, my care could improve, now that
they knew who I was and I could force out a word occasionally. And it
didn't matter because Raye was dead.


    The enormity of it hadn't hit me until Dad told me he was dead.
Then it all came crashing down on me like a tidal wave. I was
brain-damaged for life, my fiance was dead. My body and soul had been
violated and my thoughts twisted to suicide against my will. Everything I
wanted and everything I was was overridden because someone decided they
should be and there was nothing I could do about it. There wasn't a word
for the kind of rape I had experienced. The man who could get me through
it was dead because a psychopath decided he should be dead and there was
nothing anyone could do about it. Nothing mattered. How could anything
matter when anything can be taken on an unstoppable, immutable whim?


    They got me the music I liked. Tried to bring me back again to
UCLA. It's '97, I want to be as American as possible, and ska is just the
shit, punk is the cool new music for the American underground. For the
first time in my life I'm hanging out with cool people and they don't even
give a shit about my accent, but I'm secretly going to speech therapy on
the weekends just to sound more American because I love this place and I
think everyone around me is expressing their love of it too. I want to
find a way to wear a piano-key necktie as the ribbon on a sailor fuku, and
I'm trying out flannels and studs and vests before I've even settled on my
personal style of black jacket and blue jeans. I'm blasting Ixnay on the
Hombre and Turn the Radio Off on my Walkman to and from class, thinking
about Bob Burnquist grinding his skateboard upside down. The last point in
time when the world was my oyster, everything was open to me, and I can
choose any of the thousands of paths before me. Except no it isn't and no
I can't. It's 2007. I majored in criminal justice, I enrolled in the FBI
in a post 9/11 patriotic fervor, I met a wonderful man named Raye Penber,
we decided to start a family, and Kira snatched him away from me before he
smote me down and robbed me of language. Somebody hates me. I hate
somebody too.


    I could get one, maybe two words out now. For some reason, it was
worse than zero. At zero, I was mute. At two, I had so much I wanted to
say, so much I needed to, and the river was dammed after a second. Any
time I tried to speak ended in me weeping as the words fled away from my
useless, worthless brain. It should be easy! Why isn't it easy? They
guessed I might do better writing than with speaking. But I couldn't
write, not until I squished the squish ball enough to be able to hold a
novelty pencil the size of my forearm. At that point, I guess I was
better. I could write, giant, shaky and misspelled words, with what they
called "telegraphed speech." Like a telegraph in an old-timey show.
Everything but the most crucial content words cut out. And sometimes in
random order. If that was too much, I could always draw a picture. Not
that it mattered. How do you draw nihilistic anguish at the inescapable
fragility of everything that can be loved? How do you draw a spectre
taking your soul because he felt like it? None of it mattered. Raye was
dead. So was I.


    Every step of being a functional human being has to be won back. I
needed to learn to sit up in a wheelchair once again. It didn't matter.
Nothing mattered.


    Hold my arms level to my head for ten seconds. Twenty. Above my
head. You're making amazing progress, Naomi! It didn't matter. Raye was
dead.


    Hold myself up on the parallel bars to walk. Take a step. Two.
Collapse. Don't get discouraged, Naomi! You'll get it eventually! It
didn't matter. I was already dead.


    Sing along with the music, Naomi! We don't know what it is, but it
sure sounds energetic! You remember it, don't you? Back off your rules,
back off your jive, 'cause I'm sick of not living to stay alive! I was. It
didn't matter either way.


    Sit in the pool, Naomi! Work against the resistance of the water!
I thought about being helpless. I thought about soaking in my own urine.
It didn't matter. How could I be more degraded than I already was?


    Mom and Dad visited. Their support would be crucial to my
recovery. Their daughter was distant, depressive, and brain damaged, and
their presence did nothing but make them sad. Their visits got shorter and
shorter. It didn't matter. I'd die alone when someone decided I would.
Kira murdered Raye and he hollowed me out like a jack o' lantern. He'd do
as he pleased.


    Aoba could tell how despondent I was. She tried reading to me,
like I assume her grandkids would have enjoyed. Her stories were
gibberish, recited from medical reference books. She was trying as hard as
she possibly could to connect to another human being, to balm the pain I
was in. I didn't care, and I didn't bother pretending to care. She stopped
trying. It didn't matter.


    None of it mattered.


    I cried every time I tried to talk and failed. I cried every time
I thought about Raye. All the things he said to me I would never hear
again. All the things he did for me I would never see again. All the ways
he made me feel I would never feel again. I couldn't even articulate why I
was weeping, but they could guess. They said I would probably never
recover my memories of his death. I'd give anything to go back to that
last moment I remembered, when he was alive. No, I'd take the atrophy and
brain damage, just to have him walk in and say he was here, he was alive,
he was faking his own death to avoid Kira but now he was here and he was
here for me and everything would be okay. He wasn't going to do that.
Nothing mattered.


    I wasn't sure why I didn't kill myself. Everything had been taken
from me. Spite, I guess? Kira wanted me to commit suicide, so no matter
how grinding and hopeless my existence, killing myself would be giving him
something he wanted. Nobody got to have what they wanted, not me and not
him. Or maybe I was just too powerless to take my own life, whatever dark
power he replaced my soul with robbed me of any sense of agency.
Powerlessness was the only rule of the world. And it didn't matter either
way.


    It went on like this for weeks.


    I had a visitor, they informed me. Wasn't Mom and Dad. I was
loaded into my wheelchair and taken to the lobby, where a white man was
sitting in a dark suit, holding a briefcase, waited for me. His face was
in shadow when he smiled at me, and his teeth were so pearly white they
were illuminated. He took my wheelchair by the handles, and he dropped a
yellow legal pad and the giant novelty pencil in my lap.


    There was a small wooded area out behind the clinic, for patients
to take walks in. At the dead center, there were exactly enough trees and
bushes not to see the fence enclosing the clinic grounds. He didn't speak
a word as he wheeled me there, and I didn't say anything. If he was here
to kill me then I would die and nothing I said or did mattered.


    He wheeled me to the center of the area. Parked me next to a
bench, sat next to me. It was twilight, and the lights hadn't yet kicked
on. If you ignored the noises of traffic, it was like we were in a forest.
Nobody was around.


    "The guy who saved you was Kazuki Takihito," he said, in English.
"The one who pulled you out of the water. You probably don't remember him.
He convinced himself you were sending him coded signals of love, or at
least he could catch you on the rebound." He pulled his briefcase into his
lap before pulling a folded piece of paper from his pocket. "I gather you
don't remember your conversation because of the head trauma. Same reason
you have that, the whaddyacallit, the aphasia. There was no possible way
you could have known he'd be worried about you and follow you from your
hotel room to your suicide spot. If he didn't, then you would have been
washed away and nobody would ever find you. He pulled this note from your
pocket when the paramedics were on their way. I can't read Japanese, but
it's obvious what it was." He handed it over, and with shaky hands, I read
it. The last fluent thing my hands ever wrote.


    //I DO NOT SHUDDER TO TAKE THE COLD AND FATAL CUP, FROM WHICH I
SHALL DRINK THE DRAUGHT OF DEATH. YOUR HAND PRESENTS IT TO ME, AND I DO
NOT TREMBLE. ALL, ALL IS NOW CONCLUDED: THE WISHES AND THE HOPES OF MY
EXISTENCE ARE FULFILLED. WITH COLD, UNFLINCHING HAND I KNOCK AT THE BRAZEN
PORTALS OF DEATH. OH, THAT I HAD ENJOYED THE BLISS OF DYING FOR YOU!

    -- SHOKO MAKI//


    Anger filled me, radiating out from the back of my neck. If there
was any doubt, now it was gone. I had a suicide note so I wouldn't be
investigated as a homicide, but I signed it as my alias so I wouldn't be
traced back to my real identity. The note itself was a quote from "The
Sorrows Of Young Werther" by Goethe, a story that famously inspired a
string of copycat suicides all over Europe. I memorized bits of it for
class, the most melodramatic thing I had ever heard, and I read it aloud
in William Shatner's bizarre cadence. The note didn't even end at a
sensible place, but the next sentence had someone's name in it. Anyone who
knew me at all would instantly know this note was fake and my death was a
homicide.


    "Kazuki got spooked by all the paramedics and cops, or else he
would have visited you at the hospital, and they could have figured you
out from what hotel room he saw you in," the man said. "He was hell to
track down." Then he looked over to me like he realized he'd been rude and
offered his hand. "Agent Graves. It's nice to finally meet you, Ms.
Misora."


    I met his handshake with my trembling, weak hand. He didn't
squeeze too hard. "Uh... Hi." What was the purpose of our little meeting,
anyway? "Ah... uhhhh, Want?"


    "I really would have liked to wait for you to recover more fully,
Ms. Misora." he said, looking off into the little Potemkin forest. "But I
don't come out to Asia all that often, so I have to get as many people as
I can in one go." It wasn't an answer to my question, but it wasn't much
of a question. "The FBI sure had a lot to say about you. Glowing reviews.
Once you cracked the LABB case, word around the office was that you were
the best agent they'd had in decades. Equally capable in the field and in
the office. Analytical mind. Cool head. Able to put up with L without
going insane. Any insubordination problems were well worth dealing with."


    I didn't crack the LABB case. Nobody did. It was an utterly
meaningless waste of time and life. I slowly scrawled a response in giant
letters on the legal pad. //FBI YOU?// He shook his head with a little
chuckle. //NOT GOD NEMORE//.


    It took him a couple seconds to decipher me. "You're not any more.
Okay. You and Raye wanted to start a family together, and if the both of
you were FBI agents, you could never have the stability you needed. Raye
insisted that you stay out of danger and you went along because you loved
him. The FBI tried to convince you to come back but you loved Raye more
than you loved your job."


    //STILL. CARE?// There was a word there. A word that made it a
question. A word I'd never be capable of using.


    "Raye Penber was sent to Tokyo to die."


    I yelped in wordless, incoherent surprise.


    "The Kira case was a nightmare. A murderer who can kill from any
distance, with no more effort than it takes to breathe, simply by knowing
your name? It shouldn't even be possible. L was heading the investigation,
but he still required feet on the ground, and the assignment was a
deathtrap for any law enforcement official. Deputy Director of the NPA
Kitamura Koreyoshi balked at the prospect of walking his men into that
meat grinder, so he said in an interoffice E-mail, 'let's see if we can
convince those American cowboys to send someone over to die in our
places.' He put a smiley face on the end and then he proceeded to do just
that."


    //BAD.//


    "It's appalling and racist. What's really bad is the fact that he
and the FBI's Deputy Director of Human Resources, Walter Sorenson, would
go on to compile a list of FBI agents they either would not mind seeing
dead, or actively wanted killed. They would send these agents to Japan so
they could claim they were devoting their full resources to the Kira case,
letting the Japanese hide behind a human shield, and getting rid of people
they wanted to be rid of. Five of them were whistleblowers. Three had
taken bribes themselves without sharing the wealth. Two had suspected ties
to the Triads, but nothing that could be substantiated. One of them had
sex with Sorenson's wife. And one of them was your husband, Raye Penber."


    //DRTY NOT.//


    "He wasn't a whistleblower either, as I understand it, because he
hadn't encountered anything to blow a whistle on. No, they wanted Raye
Penber dead to get at you. Specifically, if he died, you'd have nothing
holding you down to a home life and would be free to go back on the force.
If your husband-to-be was killed by a criminal, why, you might swear
vengeance against crime and re-dedicate yourself to law enforcement. Then
the FBI could have one of its own 'in' with L that wasn't a total basket
case or a child, like the people they usually have on deck. They didn't
expect that you'd go with him to introduce him to your parents, but it was
too late to stop the assignment, and they ended up throwing you to Kira as
well."


    This was appalling. Unthinkable. //NOT BLIEVE.//


    "Inside this briefcase are audiotapes, files, originals and
photocopies of interoffice memos, and locations of these E-mails on the
NPA's mailserver that prove everything I have just said is true." He slid
it over into my lap. "You will also find a pistol, one spare magazine,
your holster, and one hundred utterly untraceable bullets. Do you recall
the short time when you worked on the Julio Allero task force in Palo
Alto?"


    //YES.// Julio Allero killed a liquor store owner in a botched
heist, was convicted, imprisoned, then escaped and crossed a state line
before he killed three more people. The FBI assembled a task force, but it
was inexplicably dissolved as soon as we started working the scene of the
first shooting. //FBI PORTCT?//


    "No. Julio was framed for the murder by his then-girlfriend and
the crooked cop she was cheating on him with, and the local police didn't
care enough to see through the deception. When he broke out of prison, I
gave him one of these briefcases, and proof of who had framed him. And as
soon as you ran the ballistics from his ex-girlfriend's trailer, the
investigation ended. Because as long as he was using that pistol with that
ammo, he was above the law." He tapped the briefcase and flipped it open,
I noticed the combination was the day me and Raye were going to be
married. June 18, 2007. A blushing June bride.


    The briefcase had what he said, several manila folders,
audiotapes, loose pieces of paper, a bundled-up shoulder holster, a
semi-automatic 1911 pistol, and two boxes of bullets from a manufacturer
I'd never heard of. "And while you are using that pistol, Naomi, you will
be above the law. You will face no legal consequences for any action you
perform with that weapon in Japan, the United States, Germany, or South
Korea. If arrested, you will be released and your weapon returned. You
have carte blanche." He paused, then added something he clearly thought
didn't fit with the rest of his speech. "Theoretically you'd be above the
law in Iraq and Afghanistan as well, any nation the United States has
directly rebuilt, but there's not much law to be above in those places."


    //WANT KILL FR?//


    "No. I don't want you to kill anyone. I am giving you a tool for
your own independent use; you can do with it as you like. Kill them with
it. Carry it as your sidearm for personal defense. Put it to your temple
and finish the job Kira started. Throw it away if you want, it doesn't
matter to me."


    //NOT CRRY JPN// Can't carry a firearm in Japan. Like that was my
only objection.


    He pointed at one of the inside pockets. "I am aware that Japan,
Germany and South Korea have gun ownership laws far more restrictive than
the US, but I said you will face no legal consequence." I pulled out two
little laminated cards with my picture on them, one said 'Naomi Misora'
and one said 'Shoko Maki'. Both said 'Special Dispensation for Firearms
Possession,' had a very long serial number and the signature of someone I
guess was in the NPA.


    //GIVE? CARE?//


    "You were betrayed, Naomi. You and Raye were betrayed. And
everyone else who these men betrayed is dead, they can cover up their
crimes. If you go to the media you know they will quash the story. They'll
say you hit your head and you're making up crazy delusions. Kitamura
Koreyoshi and Walter Sorenson killed Raye and nearly killed you as surely
as Kira did, and they did it to manipulate your trust. I didn't give you
this because I want you to kill them. But the fact that the man you loved
was taken away from you like that is gnawing away at your insides right
now, isn't it? Someone just gave you a chance to do something about it.
Going to take it?"


    //GOOD EVDNEC. GO AUTHORTY?//


    He said nothing, but he smiled. His teeth were so white they made
the rest of his face seem pitch black by comparison.


    //NOT KILL KIRA.// Then I added //CAN// when I realized his
confusion.


    He sighed, leaned back and scratched his face. "This won't help
let you kill Kira, no." And then he looked sad, sad like a mysterious man
handing out untraceable guns shouldn't be. "This is what I do, Naomi. I
have these briefcases, I fill them with evidence, I have these guns. I go
around, I give them to people. People who got a raw deal, and few got it
rawer than you. People who were betrayed. People who need a chance to take
the power back. I usually do it in America; like I said, I don't come to
Asia very often, and Germany even less. It's... it's complicated for me
over there. I could kill a lot of these people I give out dossiers on, but
what would be the point? I'm not doing it for their sake, I'm doing it for
the people like you." He looked  off in contemplation. "I've been here a
couple weeks. After you and this yakuza kid, I head out to Seoul. The past
ten briefcases I've given out, one of them was a dossier on someone who
died of a medically inexplicable heart attack, a corrupt prosecutor named
Takamoto Nareo. And three of the people who'd been wronged, who needed a
chance at revenge, met the same fate. The people who notify me of these
things must use a lot of the same channels."


    //KIRA.// I already wrote it, so I underlined it for emphasis.


    "Two nights ago," he continued, "Sakura TV broadcast some tapes
from Kira. Predicting more deaths at specific times. Then he killed a
newscaster for speaking out against him, even though he didn't do anything
wrong, because he's speaking out against making a better world or some
horseshit, my Japanese isn't that good when people talk fast." He sneered.
"Kira is a piece of shit kid who thinks he can make the world a better
place by killing everyone who hurts his feelings," he said. "Some prick
that thinks he's the spirit of justice. I don't care about justice, Naomi.
Justice is something big, bigger than anyone has a right to control.
Justice asks us to trust it, and repays that trust with betrayal. I want
revenge. Few things would make me happier than seeing you took that gun
and you splattered Kira's brains on the pavement. Or you just
pistol-whipped his face into hamburger." He was grinning again. I think I
was too.


    He caught himself. "L has a big task force on him now, here. If I
found you, it won't be long before L does too. I think he's gonna want to
talk to you. L's employers and I... we don't really see eye to eye. Not
any more. But I don't hold that against the guy. He asks you something,
you go ahead and answer."


    He looked at me while I stared at the open case. He said the files
in here contained all the proof I need to know that Koreyoshi and Sorenson
sent my husband to his death, but I couldn't bear to open them. I just
kept looking at the gun. I never understood what happened in the the Julio
Allero case. He was on the run but we were on his tail. After the second
shooting we were doing a ballistics analysis, the gun was some rare
caliber we hadn't seen before and if we could trace back to where he
bought it we could find out who was giving him funds and a place to sleep.
The report came back. The bullets were 8.47mm, a caliber none of us had
ever heard of before and we wondered how they even made the distinction
from a standard 9mm after the bullet had been fired, and the task force
was disbanded. Just like that, no further attempt was made to capture him.
Not even when he killed again. I think he eventually got nicked in Arizona
for robbing another liquor store. He had a .38 that time, never stood
trial for the murders, and the FBI took no part in his prosecution.


    I picked up one of the bullets and rolled it between my
fingertips. I used to carry a nine-millimeter on rare occasion, and I
thought this looked slightly thinner than the rounds I used. Maybe .53
millimeters thinner. Graves had just dropped these in my lap and said
'Here's a free pass to murder, go nuts'. I should have thrown it away,
refused it, but I couldn't.  I held up the holster, and he helped me slide
into it. It fit me perfectly.


    I held the gun in my left hand, wavering it back and forth
slightly. It wasn't simply heavy, it was weighty. I didn't usually carry a
gun before, I thought they were crass and unnecessary. The few times I
did, I'd been very glad to do so, because I was usually walking into a
high-risk situation with multiple armed suspects, and I had to defend
myself. The gun was heavier and heavier in my weak hand, and I couldn't
holster it. I lowered it back into the case, and Graves helped take the
holster off. I felt unbalanced already.


    //HAEY. NOT USE.// I scrawled. Then I made a picture of a
trapezoid with a ring on top, and speed lines, the universal symbol of
falling heavy object.


    "I'll tell you what," Graves said. "You clearly need to finish
your recovery, miss Misora. Won't do to keep this in a hospital. What do
you say I take this to your parents' place. I lock it, I tell them it's
yours, I tell them to keep it in your room. You get well enough... you
come and pick it up. Or you don't." I should have said no. It was crazy,
and it was evil. I couldn't be a murderer. Something as small as a gun
couldn't make me feel safe. Something real and tangible wasn't enough to
take back the all-encompassing power that had been stripped from me. I had
already written their address twice, recognizing that I wasn't writing it
completely and legibly enough for him to follow. I did the third time in
Japanese, so he could get the complete version from the nurse.


    He nodded. "If you see L, tell him... wait, what the hell am I
saying, I'm a jackass. Give me a sheet there." He pulled off a sheet of
yellow legal pad, dashed out a note, and slipped it into an interior
pocket of the case. "Give that to him. He will know what it means." He
closed the briefcase and spun the wheels of the combination lock. In
silence, he stood up, wheeled me back inside, and put me back in the
custody of the nurses of the Neurological Health Center. Then he was going
to go to my parents' house, and he was going to put that case in my
bedroom. That case full of incontrovertible evidence of who betrayed Raye
and myself. That case that showed me who manipulated me to throw my life
away. That case with the gun that I could carry and nobody else. That case
with the gun I could do anything I want with and the law couldn't stop me.


    I paged the nurse. I wanted into the physical therapy room.


    Hold the parallel bars. Learn to walk. One step. Two. Three. Four.
It's okay Naomi! You don't need to push yourself so hard!


    One step. Two. Three. Four. Five. Whoa, slow down, what's this
rush all of a sudden?


    Put on the music. I want to sing while I walk. Speech therapy and
physical therapy together means I recover twice as fast.


    Because I'm sick of not living to stay alive.


    Give me the big blue rubber ball to roll on. Then leave me alone.
I'm not asking a lot.


    I just don't wanna be controlled.


                               * N A O M I *


    I felt like I was in a really bad kung fu movie. "I have mastered
the water tub! The parallel bars! The giant rubber inflatable ball! The
flash cards! The giant pencil! And the purple squish ball! Now I demand
the rite of the live-with-my-parents belt!"


    I'd gained back most of my weight, up to 58 kg. Most of the
function in my hands and limbs was back, though I walked with a pair of
those crutches that attached to your biceps. My speech was slightly
better, and my writing improved. I was up to using a normal pen, and a
pocket-sized notepad. I had even learned a trick that if I focused very
hard, and I jammed my tongue in between my lip and my upper teeth, I could
trick my brain into thinking that nodding and shaking my head *slowly*
were new gestures, not language, and I could use them accurately. I got
new clothes, good ones, instead of the old-lady sweats they had me in. My
old leather jacket smelled like brine, so I got a new one. I wore it all
the time to hide my scars. I got kick-ass boots, and they zipped up with
big easy to grab rings on the zippers but still looked stylish and not
like remedial physical therapy fashion.


    I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I made way more progress in
this month than in the previous one. Because I had a goal. An end in mind.
I needed to get into my room. I needed to get that briefcase. I needed to
be a person who could use what was inside it. When they released me for
outpatient services in the custody of my parents, the first thing was kiss
Aoba on the forehead and wave her goodbye, because she was a nice old
lady. The second was walk out of there under my own power, even though I
had crutches and Dad was right beside me waiting for me to fall. The third
thing I did was have dinner with my parents, and watch a movie in the
family room. But after all that, I put on the holster, I put on the gun, I
put on the jacket, I walked out to the park all by myself, and I fired two
rounds into the pavement before I dropped the gun, in full view of a
patrol officer who arrested me immediately.


    Two hours and forty minutes later, they gave it back to me,
apologized, and drove me back to the park. 98 bullets left. I wasn't
strong enough to use the gun yet. But it worked as advertised. Now all I
had to do was read the dossier of evidence.


    I was having trouble with that. Nothing like moving back in with
your parents to bring back the sense of shame. All of my pride over my
accomplishments, sure enough, was changing back to shame over not being
able to do what normal people could. I could see it in Mom's eyes too, her
frustration at trying to communicate. She was never the best communicator
to begin with. We tried, I guess.


    So I hadn't read the files. I was having doubts. Maybe I
shouldn't. They would just make me angry, after all. I had the gun, didn't
I? That would make me safe. I would feel safe because I could defend
myself. Reading the files would make me angry. I'd think about Raye dying
again instead of focusing my reminiscing on Raye being happy. Remember
Santa Monica Beach? The guy who called it "water ice"? Maybe if I read the
files I'd do something bad I had no right to do. I didn’t read them. But I
didn't throw them out, either.


    I was in my room, with the laptop the hospital gave me. In between
speech therapy sessions, they loaded up a little program that showed me a
picture of something, and I'd have to say what it was, or it would say
something and I'd have to repeat it. I'm glad I did it alone, because it
felt embarrassing to stumble my way through it, I didn't want anyone to
watch.


    The program showed me an image of a dog, so I said "Dog."


    It showed me a picture of a motorcycle, so I said "M... Muh...
uhhh.... cy, uh, cy... motor, uh, bike. Cycle! Motor cycle."


    It showed me a picture of a Gothic-font "L" on a white background,
so I said "Huh?"


    A computer-scrambled voice, one I'd heard before, emerged from the
laptop speakers. "Am I speaking to Naomi Misora?"


    I nodded. Then I slowly said "Y-yes."


    "Due to your difficulty speaking, miss Misora, please type your
responses." The image hitched as something else drew focus, the remote
session hit alt-tab a few times. I don't know what surprised me more, that
L's secret backdoor message was routed through AOL Instant Messenger, or
that I was 'TheLPlane' speaking to 'TheLMothership'. "I am currently
heading a special investigative force into Kira. I realize that this is a
difficult period for you. Raye's death was a tragedy, and I know he is
greatly missed. But I hope that if you help us, we may be able to afford
you some closure, and now that you are no longer an inpatient I want to
move as quickly as we can."


    Yeah. Yeah he was greatly missed. But L wouldn't take the blame
for making me think of him. //KNOW NEED?//


    "First? I want to know the last thing Raye said to you about the
case."


    I paused. It was... It was that Kira could control his victims.
That's how I knew that at first, even though my own experience proved it.
But how did we figure that out? //KIRA CONTROL PERSON. SOMEONE DIE. NOT
KNOW.//


    "Hmm. We've had some other evidence of that ability, and I suppose
you do as well. You believe you were manipulated into committing suicide.
I agree with you. What led you to come to this conclusion?"


    I got the feeling he'd be impossible to read even if he wasn't
speaking through a voice scrambler. //WAY KILL I. LEAVE NOTE. NOT FEEL.
HELP KIRA.// That wasn't it, was it? I wished I could lay out everything,
the entire chain of reasoning, but typing this was hard enough. //KIRA
CONTROL BAD. NOT INFO ALL. JUMP TIME BAD. HIDDEN SAVE.//


    "Interesting. Interesting." I could hear him musing on the other
end. "He tried to kill you. Either he failed, or he succeeded and did not
know his work would be undone by paramedics. This failure was due to
something you, his victim, could not have foreseen. Do I understand you
correctly that you left a note that does not match your sincere feelings?"


    //YES. QUOTE.// It took forever to type. I guess the World's
Greatest Detective had nothing better to do. No, he was probably
multitasking with his microphone muted. //QUOTE STUPID. MOCK.//


    "You mocked people for knowing the quote? No? You knew the quote
to mock it. You knew it because you mocked it." Was his microphone muted
while he paused? Through the voice scrambler I couldn't tell, there was
tape hiss anyway. "Your suicide note contained a quotation you had
memorized, but only for purposes of mockery." Even the world's greatest
detective had trouble talking to me. "This is important. Do you have any
plans later today?"


    It was 11. I alt-tabbed out to the calendar program, and copied my
entry for today in the chat. //PHYSICAL THERAPY 4 PM//


    "So if I asked you to come over here and join the Kira Special
Investigative Team now, would you cancel or would you have to leave here
at 3:30? Watari's going to order pizza and he needs to know how many
people to order for."


    I was taken aback. Nobody ever accused L of having tact, but why
would he want me? He was a super-genius on the caliber of Lex Luthor or
that guy from the 'Fantastic Four', the kind of brain you only find in
comic books. He sat around all day doing idiotic logic puzzles that never
intersected with real police work. Even when I 'worked with him', I didn't
work with him. What could he possibly want with a broken person who spoke
like a cavewoman? //CAN LATE. WANT I???//


    "Because you're Kira's only living victim. You have observed
things nobody else has had a chance to. My assistant Watari is going to
come by in an hour, please pack a few changes of clothes. Tell your
parents that... what am I saying," //MR. AND MRS. MISORA: YOUR DAUGHTER IS
ASSISTING L IN AN IMPORTANT INVESTIGATION. MY ASSISTANT WILL CONTACT YOU
IF YOUR HELP IS NEEDED. YOUR COOPERATION IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED, AND
YOUR TIME WILL BE COMPENSATED.//


    They took the news pretty well. I think they didn't know how else
to take it. Mom packed me a bento. When I got in the car with Watari, I
brought my crutches, my lunchbox, my black messenger bag, my purple
squishy ball, my briefcase, and above all else my gun.


                               * L I G H T *


    Everything was in place. Of course, things would have been so much
easier if they'd captured Misa ten minutes later and I could have got L's
name right then... or if Misa didn't leave her hair on the goddamn
envelope she mailed the Kira tapes in... but it happened and I adapted to
it. Misa had revoked her ownership of the Death Note. My old Death Note I
got from Ryuk was prepared and on its way to its new home. Misa's old note
she got from Rem was buried in a secure location. My emergency page was
safely loaded in the secret compartment in my watch, and my instructions
to Ryuk had been set. Now all I had to do was put on my best 'scared of
myself' face and confess that deep down I was afraid I could
subconsciously be Kira, and of course I could neee-eeever live with myself
if it were true, so I was voluntarily placing myself in custody.


    I couldn't really practice my speech in the bathroom mirror,
someone could hear, but I didn't need to. Everyone was so gullible I
almost felt sorry for them. Almost. So they'd lock me up on suspicion of
being Kira, and of course it would just prove I wasn't. Because after
let's say a week, I'd 'get rid of it' and I wouldn't be Kira any more. And
there would be a new Kira going around. If everything went according to
plan, me and Misa's names would be cleared, L would be dead, and I'd be
free to remake the world as I pleased. If anything went wrong, I'd expose
myself to no criminal liability, no physical danger, I'd be a genius with
an idol singer in my pocket with no idea he was missing anything. That's
not as good as the power to shape a new, better world, but as things go
it's still a pretty damn good life to have.


    Ryuk the shinigami was floating along a little ahead of me,
bopping back and forth, humming the jauntiest funeral dirge I'd ever
heard. He'd wolfed down a bag of apples in the bathroom of the subway
because he thought it'd be his last chance to get some for a while, and I
think he was experiencing quite a buzz. I came to L's room, my 'scared and
concerned' face already up, Ryuk drifted through like the door wasn't even
there. When I opened the door, I heard him burst into harsh, gravelly
laughter.


    "Oh, Light," said Ryuzaki from his weird tiptoe perch in his
high-back chair. A metal crutch was propped against the seat next to him
and I saw a black-sleeved arm on the armrest. "I'm glad you could come in
on short notice. I want you to meet someone."


    "Yes, Ryuzaki, I think we have to talk about something..."


    "Oh, Light, Light," Ryuk said, trying to get back his composure.
"You're gonna want to have the Shinigami Eyes for this one. It's really,
really funny."


    "Light, I'd like you to meet the newest member of the Kira Special
Investigative Team, Naomi Misora." The woman in the chair next to him
leaned around to look at me, wincing slightly, and gave me a meek little
wave with a purple ball in her palm. She looked a little different than I
remembered, face was a little off, scars on her lip, temple, the underside
of her wrists, and a big scar around her neck, but it was her. I am amazed
with myself that I didn't cry out, panic, or let something slip at this
point, because I knew my shit was well and truly wrecked.


    Naomi Misora was the woman who might have had enough clues to let
the police know that I was Kira. Naomi Misora was the woman who I most
DEFINITELY told 'By the way, I'm Kira' seconds before the Death Note sent
her off to kill herself. There was no way she wasn't going to recognize
the person that killed her husband. I wasn't going to leave this room
alive unless I played every single thing in exactly the right way.
Couldn't act surprised to see her, couldn't act like I knew she was going
to say anything. Had to be surprised when she said I was Kira, but not too
surprised. Slightly insulted, but only slightly, and mostly supportive and
nurturing 'oh look at the poor lady she's mad with grief.'


    "Naomi, this is Light Yagami, Chief Yagami's son," Ryuzaki
continued. "Miss Misora used to be with the FBI... and she is also, as far
as we can tell, Kira's only still-living victim." She was the only
still-living victim as far as Kira knew, too! This shouldn't have been
possible. She went off to kill herself on January 1st, at 1:45... and when
someone found her in a coma, barely hanging on to life, she should have
died of a cerebral aneurysm twenty-one days later without ever waking up.
By all rights she should have been dead twice, and if someone had to live
through the Death Note why did it have to be the one I told, to her face,
that he was Kira?


    "Oh, come on. I'll give you a hint, Light," Ryuk chuckled. "You
got her name right... and if I did my math right, you had her time of
death too."


    What the hell was Ryuk talking about? Was she a ghost, another
shinigami? No, that wasn't possible, Ryuzaki was talking to her, and even
to see her I would have had to touch her Death Note. She opened her mouth
and she stammered for the longest three seconds of my entire life before
saying "...Hello, uhh... Light."


    "Hello, miss Misora." I said with an easy, warm smile. I think if
anybody had given me the slightest poke I would have screamed like a wild
ape and torn at my own hair, but nobody did. She looked at me for a few
more seconds, smiled meekly, and then turned back to the screen. She
didn't shout at me. Didn't say 'You son of a bitch you killed my husband'
or throw things at me or try to beat me to death with a metal cane. She
turned away and looked back at the screen of Misa, tied up in a
straightjacket and blindfold.


    Of course. The cane, the scars, the therapy ball, the HOSPITAL
stay for God's sake. She'd hit her head trying to kill herself and she
didn't remember my confession. That's why she didn't react when she saw
me. That's why I walked up here in the first place and I didn't get shot
in the head by a police sniper on the way. She didn't know I was Kira. It
didn't feel good to be saved by blind luck, but it felt a hell of a lot
better than dying to it.


    "So, you've really survived an attack by Kira?" I sounded
impressed, and in some small way I guess I kinda was. "What happened?"


    Ryuk had floated over to where the two were sitting and was
swirling his finger around in the space above Naomi's head. "I'm telling
you Light, something up here you're really, really going to appreciate."


    "Miss Misora's fiance was one of the FBI investigators who came to
Japan to investigate the Kira murders, and she followed him so they could
meet her parents," Ryuzaki said. "Our current theory is that Kira used his
ability to control those he kills and forced her to attempt suicide when
he realized he didn't get all the FBI agents in one swipe. She left a
contentious suicide note and attempted to make it impossible to find or
identify her, after all. Or, it could have been another experiment of how
far his capabilities go. She can't remember how it happened because of the
head trauma." She didn't say anything, letting him talk for her
completely.


    "Well, if she can't recall it, do we know it was even Kira at
all?" She turned up to look at me with an expression that told me that
line of conversation was headed nowhere.


    "Mmm, nothing is ever certain. But I will say there is a good
chance."


    I didn't have to see into Ryuzaki's eyes to know what he was
thinking, and I think I got what Ryuk was talking about at the same time.
I decided to draw it out of Ryuzaki, make sure we were on the same track,
that I wasn't coming up with anything too far from what he knew, and that
it looked like every idea was his. "Then, do you really think it's safe
for you to be here? I mean, Kira has your name and he's shown he wants to
kill you. Wouldn't it be safer if you went back home?"


    She passed me a small sheet of notepaper. //SAFE NOT -> KIRA DEAD
THEN.//


    Ryuzaki fidgeted with his toes while I read, muttered "Miss Misora
has to communicate mostly in writing, as a side effect of the injuries,
it's called..." He paused to search for the word, "...expressive aphasia.
Her notes are characterized by a succinctness called 'telegraphed speech'.
And sometimes you have to wait for other people to finish before you know
what she said," as he waited for me to pass him the note. He read it,
pinched between his thumb and forefinger hanging right in front of his
face, nodded, and laid it on a pile of similar papers on the table by his
microphone. "I don't believe she is in any more danger here than in the
US. In fact, I think I'm in more danger than she is."


    "How?" Other than the fact that I'm Kira and I am going to kill
you, that is.


    "Because there are a great many ways for her to die in a hospital
and none of them happened. The hospital didn't understand the need for
secrecy and an administrator asked about her false identity, with her
picture, on an unsecured message board for law enforcement agents, asking
who she was. We know that in the past, criminals whose names and mugshots
were placed on that website were killed by Kira. Kira, knowing her real
name and seeing her face, could easily have her die again by untraceable
medical error. So... it could mean that Kira no longer reads that website.
But if Kira still did, he would certainly have a reason to kill her again.
That could indicate that Kira's powers only work once." He chewed his
thumb. "Maybe a five percent probability. But better than nothing."


    I did read that website, and I read that posting, and I wrote her
name in the Death Note again, but that seemed to do a hell of a lot less
than the first time. The Death Note might only work once, Ryuk said he
hasn't told me all the rules and doesn't know them all himself. And it
makes a certain kind of sense to say that if it's 'killed' someone once,
it won't do it again.


    I certainly couldn't go ahead with my plan to discard the Death
Note while she was still around. I'm not a neurologist, and though I am
aware that amnesia is not as simple as they show it on TV, I have to admit
I don't know off the top of my head if she might be able to get her
memories back. If it turns out the answer was 'yes', it would do me no
good to voluntarily imprison myself and set up evidence of another Kira if
one of the investigation members remembered me confessing to her right
before I killed her. Judging by that note, if the team didn't believe her
recollection of events, she might kill me herself. She was weak, but it
didn't matter when she had a gun under her armpit. So, I needed a new
thing that I came up here to talk to L about, and put off this part of the
plan. I figured I may as well steer L away from the truth and appear to be
working with him at the same time, I went to backup story-slash-revelation
number 3.


    "That's actually what I came here to talk to you about, L. Do you
know of a man named... what was it... Svyatoslav, Innokentiy...
Shevchenko?"


    "Yes, a member of the Russian Mafia who worked in Japan for some
time. A vicious one, as I recall. Frequently resorts to jury tampering and
witness intimidation so no legal charges will stick."


    "Right. He's one of the most vicious criminals there is, but I
looked it up, and apparently he's never had so much as the sniffles. Why
wouldn't Kira have gone after him first? He didn't get criminals whose
names were spelled incorrectly at first, but then it's obvious he went
back to get them." They didn't know that I did go after him first, but I
misspelled it four times while I was trying, and one of the rules is that
once someone's name has been misspelled four times in the Death Note they
can't be killed by one. In my defense, I don't read or write Russian and
his name is incredibly hard to transliterate. "Kira hasn't shown that he's
on the Russian Mob's side. I was thinking, maybe he didn't get skipped
over, maybe whatever Kira does won't work on him."


    "Yes, I considered that. We don't know how Kira's abilities work,
so, we don't know it's something that would work on everyone. It's not
unreasonable to assume given this evidence that there are people Kira
cannot kill."


    "So if we can find out what they have in common, we can figure out
who else he can't kill!" Matsuda added. I didn't even notice Matsuda was
in the room until he spoke up. I don't count that as a failure of my own
perceptions, I count that as him being incredibly uninteresting.


    "No, I doubt Svyatoslav will cooperate with any law enforcement
agency," Ruizaki said. "If he knew he was Kira-Proof, that would just mean
Kira would be able to kill his competitors and not himself. He wouldn't
want to stop that. And he's in Russia now, the reliability of their law
enforcement is spotty at best, it's highly unlikely we can have him
detained... and we would likely need more than two people to establish
what the factor is anyway. An interesting theory, but for now, only a
theory. It's not even the most important part of miss Misora's experience,
I believe."


    "How she died?" I knew what he was going to say, I wasn't going to
give him more information than he had anyway, but it was good to get him
talking, feed his ego about what a damn genius he was.


    "Yes. She took many precautious so her death would be
undiscovered. She was discovered by someone she cannot have forseen. She
jumped at a time when the tide did not immediately take her away, so she
was resuscitated."


    Naomi looked up at me, beleaguered and exasperated, as we spoke
about her too quickly for her to contribute, as if she were part of the
furniture. I laughed inside at the irony of her looking to me for
sympathy, but I made a show of giving it anyway; I nodded at her and cut
him off. "Uh, Ryuzaki, I think that Naomi wants to say something."


    We all waited as she scribbled the note, then she passed it up to
me, I read it aloud so we wouldn't have to bother passing it around.
//LEAVE DEATH NOTE. DUMB QUOTE MOCK. NOT USE. KIRA I KNOW I AM//, she
scribbled a thought balloon around "I know" trailing to Kira and another
balloon with an X over it on "I am", which I read as //KIRA KNOWS WHAT I
KNOW BUT NOT WHO I AM// Ryuk laughed again when I said the phrase 'death
note'. I wondered how close Naomi was to the truth. This wasn't something
I could test, and once the Death Note kicked in she refused a chance to
capture Kira and told me there was 'something she needed to do', but she
was obviously acting differently than she had minutes before. Did the
Death Note know what to make her say then to act suicidal but not know
enough about how she'd articulate her particular suicidal urge?


    "Yes," said Ryuzaki, "if you'd let me finish my sentence, I would
have said just that." He made an impatient little pouting noise. "This is
in fact the biggest piece of information we have gathered about Kira so
far. With one exception, each member of the investigation team is here
because I trust that they are not Kira..."


    Dad growled.


    "...but there was no way to know anyone here was not having their
actions controlled by Kira undetected, set on a program that would destroy
the investigation and lead to their own death. Now, it seems, there would
be a noticeable change in their behavior, as Kira would be unable to
access certain knowledge of how they acted, and we would be able to
prevent a Kira-induced sabotage."


    "I never even thought about that." Matsuda interjected. "Man, I'm
glad that isn't how it works."


    "Yes... to be quite honest, I had already assumed his power had
some similar limitation. I took no precaution against it."


    Matsuda, Naomi, and Dad all looked at him with shock, and Naomi
managed to stumble out a "Why?"


    I nodded ruefully and put on my best 'quaking, hushed awe' voice.
"Because if Kira could seamlessly control anyone in life or death, with no
way to tell it was happening, there wouldn't be any precautions we could
take. He'd, he'd be unstoppable."


    "Yes. Kira would be a god," Ryuzaki said, chewing his nail. "Let's
all be thankful he isn't."


                               * N A O M I *


    L was using the name "Ryuzaki" here, to differentiate himself as
an individual from L-the-institution. It was the same name BB had used,
when he was impersonating L, but it wasn't like L copied the idea from
him. I'd get over it.


    So, 'Ryuzaki' told me and everyone else I was a member of the Kira
Special Investigative Team. He gave me an ID card with a fake name and
special emergency-signal belt, like every other member had received. He
gave me a cell phone too, but he realized I couldn't really use it, and
Watari said he would have a 'BlackBerry' for me within a few days. I was
in the hotel room the team used as a meeting place and I participated in a
meeting, talking about how we might be able to use these new restrictions
on Kira's ability in order to track him down, but I didn't feel like a
member of the team.


    Ryuzaki and Light Yagami were working on an entirely different
level than anyone else, building up these huge chains of 'if Kira knows
this, than he'd want us to think this, and if he knew that he would have
chosen his victims in this manner, which this smudge on a photograph
indicates he was left-handed, so the surgeon is a woman' that I don't
think anyone else in the room could follow, and they all ended up back at
'so we don't really know anything' anyway. The few times other people like
Matsuda and Chief Yagami could add something, they'd already said what I
wanted to or moved on from the topic by the time I finished writing a
message. I felt like Ryuzaki could have mentioned my case without bringing
me here and I would have added the same amount.


    The meeting was over, the pizza boxes cleaned up -- Ryuzaki didn't
eat any -- and now it was just him and me, in the two high-back chairs,
staring at the image of Misa Amane in her straitjacket and metal
blindfold. She'd been pleading for a while with the 'stalker' that she
thought had imprisoned her to let her go, but now her head had lolled off
to the side and she was snoring just barely loud enough for the microphone
to pick up. Apparently she was some model, a celebrity here in Japan, but
I'd been in America for years and the half-life of these teen idols is so
short anyway I'd never heard of her. Ryuzaki also claimed she was the
number one suspect to be the second Kira, the one who didn't need a name
to kill, which justified the elaborate restraints.


    "She doesn't act like someone who could be Kira," Ryuzaki said,
pausing to drop a marshmallow Peep in his mouth. "Admitting to idolizing
Kira only makes her look guilty, as does the sudden switch to the story
about a 'stalker'. The real Kira -- a real Kira -- would certainly have
more sense than that."


    //FAKE OUT?//


    "Yes, I know, she could be pretending not to know what makes her
look guilty to mask her actual guilt. That's the difficulty when trying to
interview a sociopath, there is no level to which you can deconstruct
their behavior to and get accurate information. And a sociopath wouldn't
slip up due to emotion, but only if he logically but mistakenly believed
something would benefit him." Another Peep, lifted with two fingers, down
the hatch. "Her hair and skin were found on the envelopes the Kira tapes
were found in, but theoretically she could have been tricked into sending
them. Or perhaps compelled by Kira to do so and then avoided her death,
like you. Or perhaps she left them there to appear careless deliberately."


    //NOT KNOW. SOCIOPATH = NOT INFO.//


    "Oh, I wasn't talking about Misa. She doesn't have the
intelligence or emotional control to maintain this level of deception.
Unless she has deliberately been building this persona since age ten,
which is impossible, she's not a sociopath. She is an actress, which is a
much lower tier." A third Peep into his mouth, he wasn't even biting them.
"We don't know enough, but that doesn't mean we know nothing. Our problem
may be that our means of restraint are too excessive. She has nothing to
do but think of how to perfectly construct a lie, all day long, with
nothing else to occupy her thoughts. With nothing to engage her, she has
no chance to slip up. " He licked the yellow sugar powder off his
fingertips. "And, as the second Kira was working with the first toward the
same goal, we cannot expect a drastic reduction in Kira deaths to indicate
we'd imprisoned one of them. If we had the second detained, the first
would certainly increase his kill rate to throw suspicion off the other
who was imprisoned."


    I held up a finger to tell him to wait -- I had forgotten the note
I was to give him. I reached into the briefcase and pulled out the note,
which L unfurled to reveal //IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO DECIDE, YOU STILL HAVE
MADE A CHOICE. -- GRAVES//


    He stood up and put his hands in his pockets, not putting this
note in the pile with the others. "Rush, 'Freewill'. That explains where
you got your sidearm from. I'd have thought he'd agree that the Kira
investigation was more important than this conflict with my employers..."
He rubbed his chin, talking to himself. "...and I thought he'd have run
out of those briefcases by now." Did Ryuzaki know this guy? How? Who were
L's 'employers' anyway? What conflict? I knew that absolutely none of
these questions were going to be answered. Yeah, the Kira investigation
was more important than whatever this was.

    Ryuzaki looked back at me. "I'm going to have to ask you not to
execute Misa Amane or Light Yagami, then. Light and I... have a little
game we play, where I say that he is Kira, and something proves it. We're
just playing a game. I don't believe he's Kira. And if I did, I would find
it far more important to understand what Kira was doing and how, without
alerting him, so I could prevent it from happening in the future. And
while Misa may be the best suspect to be the second Kira, this does not
mean she has a large chance of being Kira. Killing her would deprive us of
valuable information. I would request that you please not shoot either of
them."


    Wow, that was nonchalant as Hell. //NOT KILL. NOT WANT.// Well, I
thought about it a little, but I decided I didn't.


    "That's good, because you'll have to speak with her soon."


                               * L I G H T *


    Mogi followed me home, as he often did, so I did nothing unusual.
I got home, I greeted Mom and my sister like normal, I walked into my
room, and only then did I speak to the shinigami who had been floating
over my shoulder.


    First I told him, "I hereby rescind my earlier orders about
forfeiting the Death Note. Don't assume that anything I say will secretly
mean I want to give up the Death Note until I explicitly say otherwise."
It wouldn't do to accidentally lose the Note and my memories in a normal
conversation.


    Ryuk gave me the 'thumbs up', his hand moved too slowly and he
held it up for too long. "Gotcha. When you say 'get rid of it', it doesn't
mean anything."


    I paused, working something out. "You were laughing because you
could see her lifespan with your Shinigami eyes. There's something
obviously wrong with it. Zero? No. It's a negative number, isn't it?"


    "Heh heh... You guessed it, Light." So, there were two things
about her I needed to know. If her memory was returning, and what it means
when your lifespan is a negative number. One of those I could find out.


    L could probably pull a record of my library checkouts, so if I
got a few books on neurology he could probably guess I was going to check
out if Naomi's memories would come back. There could be a thousand other
reasons why I would read those books, but I would have to bring them up in
my own defense, and the instant I did that L would know I was guilty.


    So I couldn't be a hundred percent sure of the accuracy of my
information, as it came from the Internet, but it did appear promising: if
Naomi hadn't remembered my confession by this point, she probably never
would. 'Probably' wasn't enough to stake my life on, but, at least a
little of the pressure was off.


    "Ooh, Light, click that one," Ryuk said from over my shoulder and
pointed at the screen. "You can remember something but just forget where
you know it from... that's weird." He chuckled, wheezy and gravelly.
"Shinigami don't have brains. Is it scary to know a smack to the head can
break you in so many different ways?"


    "Not any more scary than knowing writing your name in a notebook
will kill you."


    "Ooh, that would be scarier, wouldn't it?" He grabbed an apple off
the desk and took a noisy bite, I wondered if he would ever have enough.
"So what are you going to do about Naomi? I don't want to wait to see the
plan."


    I could in theory unfold the paper I'd hidden in my watch, start
writing names on the back and the folded parts. But it was no good. It was
far less than a sheet and I'd only be able to keep up killings for a few
days. I needed to validate his suspicion for now, now that she was safely
in custody. Kira would go silent.


    "Well, I can't use the Death Note to have someone else kill her,
since one entry can't kill two people. I could send her into a situation
where she's most likely to die, but I couldn't use the Death Note for it,
and it would require I get close to her to manipulate her. I can't kill
her myself, because it would be infinitely harder to make sure there was
nothing to trace back to me."


    "It's a lot different without a Death Note, right?" I think he
thought he was grinning, but with his wide maw and jagged teeth I couldn't
really tell when he wasn't grinning. "All that blood everywhere. You're
lucky, shinigami aren't allowed to kill humans without using the Death
Note. It's the worst punishment we can get."


    "Well, it doesn't matter anyway, because the most effective course
of action is not going to be to kill her. If I can get her off the case,
destroy her credibility, or find some other way to neutralize her without
killing her, it can't be Kira-related. Prison, a mental institution,
something like that."


    "You came up with that pretty quick. You're good."


    I briefly considered writing Naomi's name in my watch to be safe,
on the back of the page, but L would assume I hadn't known she was alive
until today even if it did work, and it wouldn't. "I can't be sure she
won't eventually recover her memory, and if I submit myself into custody
there remains the chance she could get it back before I've convinced
Ryuzaki I'm not Kira, and then he'll know that everything I've done was a
ploy and I wouldn't have the memories to defend myself. But if Ryuzaki
becomes suspicious enough of me to have me imprisoned like Misa, I'll be
in an even worse position. The investigation needs to keep advancing to
occupy his time. We can hunt the decoy Kira, or look for some nonexistent
Kira immunity factor."


    "Oh, there's a factor, all right." I think he smiled, but again,
it was hard to tell. "Misspell someone's name four times, or spell it
right once."


    "Kill them? Naomi survived having her name written."


    "What makes you say that?" He laughed. He loved it when I ran into
a restriction or factor I didn't know about, because he loved seeing me
have to adapt to it. "She did exactly what the Note made her do. She tried
to kill herself on January first, and she did. But then again, human
medical technology has advanced pretty far. If someone's nearby with those
paddles, you can bring back a human who's been dead for... what is it,
five minutes? And if there's more than one entry in the Death Note for
someone, only the earliest one works. Not even the Death Note is perfect,
you know. You probably won't need to kill someone with 12 minutes of life
left anyway, will you?"


    "And your shinigami eyes can't tell that she didn't stay dead and
figure out what her lifespan should be now, so they just say how long
since she's 'died'?" Ryuk was playing with me, and it was getting
tiresome. "I said that nobody would find her until much later. There
couldn't have been someone close enough to resuscitate her."


    "Oh, Light, you already figured this one out. You couldn't make
the prisoners write out facts they didn't know. You said, how did you word
it..." he put his hand on his chin in a grotesque pantomime on
contemplation, "...that she 'becomes consumed with the desire to kill
herself in such a way that it inconveniences no-one and her body is not
found for a long time,' or something close to that. You can make her try
to kill herself so she won't be found, but all she can do is try. Heh...
That's why the standard option is a heart attack, it doesn't require the
person to know anything. Doesn't let them get back up, either."


    "So she was found by someone she didn't know would be there, and
tried to kill herself in such a way that she could be revived. I should
have been more specific."


    "No, what you should have done is not confessed you were Kira. And
now you have a living dead girl who might be able to remember your secret
and you can't use the Death Note on her. How are you going to deal with
this one, Light?"


    I was going to make a plan, that's what.


    * R U L E S *


    15a: When the same name is written on two or more Death Notes, the
note which was first filled in will take effect, regardless of the time of
death.


    Clarification: Specify that the name written in two or more Death
Notes must be a valid entry each time (correctly spelled while envisioning
a unique face).


    X-1a: The time of death written in the Death Note corresponds to
when the human's heart does not beat, blood does not flow, and brain has
no activity for 117 consecutive seconds.


    X-1b: It not inconceivable for developments in human medical
science to revive humans who meet these criteria and return them to life.
Such a human will still, eventually, die, and not be revived. As a valid
entry already exists in the Death Note for this human, further entries
cannot be created for them.
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