Vocalis in Gold

There's a time between midnight and dawn when Lisa Mishima dreams of crows. In those dreams she flies with them over a copper colored, spavined amusement park, into the clouds and over the world, the sky washed orange and green fire with an aurora borealis that feels warm against her cheeks. She wakes up, eventually, and discovers that the warmth on her cheeks is tears.

"Miss Mishima, what was your role in the terrorist Sphinx bombings?"

She doesn't speak for a week after the incident, which annoys everyone in the Metropolitan Police Station apart from Kenjirou Shibazaki—who sits in the corner with the hems of his pants rolled up, new badge bulging in his pocket, and a little smile half-covered by the shadow of his hair. Not only will she refuse to sing like a bird like they'd hoped, they have to record everything by means of yellow lined paper and rusty, unused handwriting.

[NO SIGNAL]

People actually have to talk to each other now. Lisa sees them in the park, faces losing their grey-washed monitor pallor, laughing, sharing drinks with plastic straws. There's more conversation but things seem quieter. Happier, somehow. They watch the stars.

Also, mom can't text her anymore.

"Those two guys, yeah. I remember them. Man, they dropped out of school after a week and our homeroom teacher didn't even notice. I mean, how do you not notice something like that? It seems like we don't notice a lot of things these days."

She tries painting her nails black, once. She admires them under the light for about five minutes before going to wash it off, leaving the sharp smell of acetone in the bathroom for hours and cotton bits sticking to her fingertips.

It's just not her, she decides.

"I think I saw that Sphinx guy at Yodobashi Camera one time. No, the shorter one. He looked pale and kinda sick."

There's a social worker that comes to visit mom, and that seems to help things. They put her on a bunch of pills with funny names and after two weeks her mom takes a brush to her hair for the first time in half a year.

"I heard they'd been experimented on as kids and wanted to get back at the government, or something."

"Uaah, no way! But was Japan really building an atom bomb?"

They ask her questions like did they hurt her, what kinds of equipment did they have, were they symptomatic of—here they say a long, medical term that basically translates into their brains were rotting alive—with their thin, grim lips and glossy clipboards. Lisa would offer things like "um" and "well" without ever really saying anything. She wants to tell them things like "Nine would sleep a lot," and "Twelve heard colors," because somehow those are so much more important. Surely though, they would find that silly.

"He hated it when I called him Arata, I could see it. The first time he really looked at me was when I called him Nine. It's important to use the right words, I think."

And when Lisa can't take everyone speaking at the same time Shibazaki guides her out of the station, firm, warm hand on her shoulder, to a place that serves deliciously cool bubble tea (because it's a hell of a lot better than curry rice with strawberry pocky in it). Shibazaki is usually up to his ears in press conferences and board meetings, but he doesn't look bad. Everybody knows the name of the detective who brought the Sphinx Case and Project Athena to light now.

People might forget about it in ten years, but then again, maybe they won't.

"Twelve scared me too, in the beginning. He said he'd kill me, and we were about the same size, but I really thought he could. He had that look."

Shibazaki takes her out when he can, but they spend most of their time staring into the deep, too-bright sky and Lisa finds her words captive, padlocked behind her tongue. She never spoke back then; never asked Nine and Twelve what they were doing or why. It had never been any of her business in the first place, and she had just been glad to have been noticed by someone. Anyone.

Shibazaki's eyes narrow. "What look?"

Lisa toys with the Kururin keychain she now keeps on the zipper of her backpack. "Resignation," she finally says. The walking dead. Some part of them just hadn't cared.

Besides, she doesn't think it was really her Twelve had fallen for. More like the idea of her. Of someone other than the Two that he and Nine were.

She's slowly starting to become okay with that.

"I didn't think…Nine liked me at first, or if he ever really did…but I think he did."

LONG LIVE SPHINX is painted on the wall of an underpass in Shinjuku. A building face behind the Roppongi Station is spattered blue and yellow; reads, IS THE RIDDLE SOLVED?

"They didn't even have real names. Just numbers. How screwed up is that?"

The sushi industry scrambles and splutters before drowning in the September heat.

School does not start until October because of the generators. Lisa is occasionally given a funny look or two, is sometimes pulled out of class by the guidance counselor with the odd cowlick and glasses like Nine, is no longer clogging the school plumbing system with her lunch. She does not answer in class unless she is called on.

Often, Lisa wonders what would happen if she were to climb on her desk, shoes crushing her perfect little notes and shout, "I was Sphinx number Three!"

People don't listen to children unless they do something to make you listen, Lisa knows now. Nine and Twelve had known this. Because really. Who would believe the words of two seventeen-year old boys with no proof other than some very interesting MRI scans? What would it have taken to be heard?

"I know what they did was wrong, but…"

Shibazaki eyes her over an iced barley tea with condensation glistening on the sides. "Somebody had to do it. Is that right?"

Lisa buys a used cookbook on sale from Kinokuniya with a smudge on the back cover. The instructions are easy and it has been the first thing since a motorcycle ride in the rain that has excited her. She's eating better now, filling out in all the right places. Her hair grows soft and shiny, and Lisa has to tie it back with a clip when she cooks.

She even takes recipe notes in homeroom before the bell. Her assigned seat at school is second from the window, row five. Five.

"She tried to tie the bomb to me herself, first. Her hands were shaking too much, so she ended up having one of the—one of the others do it for her."

Five, who had been an utter failure of a human being, made machine with baby's skin underneath, trying to find emotion in all the wrong places. But Lisa does not hate her. It had never been her fault.

She, Five, is what Nine and Twelve could have become, if things had gone differently. Skin sallow-white and translucent like paper onion; chemicals seeping into her gray matter, slowly taking root and making her dream fire. Five only saw things in chess and metal.

"I think the FBI forgot that she was only seventeen, even if she was brilliant," Shibazaki says one afternoon, as the leaves twirl ballets around their shoelaces. "Her brain was already imbalanced by hormones, on top of what was done to her. And those eyes… they were like nothing I've ever seen before."

Lisa sees people who remind her of Five. The gyaru bullies at school, her mom's boss, the bag-lady at the conbini. They used to make her afraid. Now they just make her sad, because she has become rather good at spotting sad people.

"Do you think they're all happy, somewhere?" she asks Shibazaki, squirming and squeezing her Kururin keychain because she knows it is a sappy, maple-syrup emotional question.

All physicals and checkups now have radiation screenings added to their procedures. Television is climbing back up the ladder from a nasty tumble, and the nights become heavy with light pollution. Lisa buys a Nokia flip phone with no internet and nothing really besides the ability to call. Half the time she leaves it at home. And she finds she is perfectly alright with that.

She paints her nails pastel-rose when the weather turns cold and remembers a time when she had shown Twelve a dish with too many flavors and he had just stared at it like it was going to jump out and bite him on the face. It makes her smile.

"He knew the chemistry behind making a green tea and…um, a green tea and cola bomb, but I don't think he actually understood food or the meaning behind it," Lisa tells Shibazaki one afternoon when there's powder snow on the sidewalks and she's feeling hungry.

Shibazaki asks her one time why she stayed. Die or become an accomplice? Really, she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And somehow, that made all the difference.

A year goes by in the blink of an eye, a brush of a feather, a sneeze, a clap.

A good result of Sphinx: the Japanese government is blown wide open after a group of second generation bomb victims decided to weaponize children.

"Serves them right," First Division Head Kurahashi grumbles, and Shibazaki agrees around an appallingly high stack of PR papers and a cigarette.

Summer comes again, with blueberry yogurt clouds and stunning sunsets that are not quite natural. After dusks tinted green Lisa lies in bed in a light sweat and thinks about boys for the first time in a while. She reads The Infernal Machine and Oedipus Rex (not the manga version this time), takes delicate notes in the margins, and plays Ásgeir Trausti when she cooks. She's starting to like the world now.

Mom is okay when she's on her anti-depressants and sometimes they even talk. She is fond of Shibazaki; says he's a sharp guy, if only he'd get a proper shave.

"Miss Mishima? You were involved with two subjects from the Athena Project, were you not?"

It's been a while since she's visited Shibazaki. They run into each other on the Anniversary, a day thick with breeze and pollen, and he reminds her that he is free if she wants to talk any time.

He also asks her if she would like to testify at a hearing in November.

His tie is the color of the sun.

[SIGNAL ONLINE]

"Athena is the goddess of wisdom, but also the goddess of war. Let us not forget that," Shibazaki says as a camera flashes in his face.

That tie, that tie is what does it.

It is then that Lisa decides she will talk. People choose not to talk, and build their own bombs inside. Floods their bodies with sour radiation.

"He—Twelve, that is, told me once that my voice was yellow." No more painting her nails; she would paint the world with colors. Her colors.

"My name is Lisa Mishima, and I was an accomplice to the Sphinx bombings."

[COMMUNICATIONS ESTABLISHED]

She still dreams of crows, but behind them are the shapes of boys that she can almost see. And she wakes up in the first winkings of dawn knowing, somehow, that they are proud of her.

"Please, let me tell you my story."

It's a start.