The cicadas had been screaming since six in the morning.
Junpei could feel them in his back teeth, that high drilling frequency that August pressed into everything on the peninsula — the wooden shrine steps, the heat-softened tar of the road below, the particular stillness of air that hadn't moved in three days. He'd wedged himself between the base of the left torii pillar and the moss-slick stone step at its foot, his school bag under his knees, and he was not quite asleep in the way that only truly familiar places allow. The wood of the pillar was rough and paint-flaked against his shoulder. He knew the exact shape of that roughness. Had known it since he was seven.
Somewhere behind him, a pen scratched.
Natsuko was writing again. He could tell without looking — the particular rhythm of it, a few words, a pause, a longer clause, another pause while she thought, then several words fast. She'd been at it since they arrived, her back against the low stone wall that divided the approach path from the groundskeeper's storage area, a notebook balanced on one knee and her father's old canvas bag spilling beside her on the step. That notebook was fat with summer. She went through one every two months, Junpei knew, and she called them complaint logs because she refused to call them diaries, which she considered a childish word for a serious activity.
He knew these things about her the way he knew the loose third step on the inner precinct stairs, which he'd been stepping over since childhood without ever having decided to memorize it. Simply by accumulation.
The humidity was extraordinary. It sat on his chest like something alive.
"This one's for the big catch," Tetsu announced from the direction of the offering box. "Watch."
"You've said that four times," Natsuko said, not looking up.
"I was warming up. The superstition requires a warm-up period."
"Show me the source."
"My grandfather. The source is my grandfather. Do you want a citation?"
Junpei opened one eye. Tetsu was standing at the offering box with a five-yen coin held between two fingers at chest height, his expression one of performative gravity that fooled no one and was never meant to. He was tall in the uncomfortable way of someone who had grown two centimeters more than his body had finished deciding on, and he was wearing the bait shop's delivery t-shirt even though it was Sunday, orange with kanji on the back that read FRESH CATCH — OGAWA TACKLE. He'd been wearing it every third day all summer. Junpei suspected he liked how it made him look older.
The coin dropped. Tetsu clasped his hands and bowed with great solemnity.
"For a big catch," he said again.
"The kami of this shrine," said Natsuko, "governs safe sea passage. Not fish volume."
"The kami of this shrine," Tetsu said, turning around, "governs whatever I need it to govern on a given day. That's how my grandfather explained it."
"Your grandfather also told you that throwing salt over your left shoulder would prevent jellyfish stings."
"And I've never been stung."
"You've never gone in past your knees."
Tetsu pointed at her with great deliberateness, then turned and pointed at Junpei, who had closed his eye again. "Your friend is taking my side on this one. I can tell."
"Junpei is asleep."
"He's agreeing with me in his sleep."
Junpei smiled without opening his eyes. The cicadas shifted pitch, or perhaps he only thought they did. Beyond the treeline to the east he could hear the sea — not see it from here, but hear it, the long slow drag of tide over the break rocks at the cove's edge, that sound like the world exhaling. He'd grown up with that sound as background. There were days he couldn't hear it at all, the way you stop hearing the refrigerator hum in your own kitchen. But today it was distinct. Something about the air pressure, maybe, or the heat pushing everything closer together.
He'd been coming to Shiokaze Shrine since before he could name it. His father kept the grounds — swept the approach path, replaced the offering box paper, repainted the worn patches on the torii when the maintenance budget allowed for paint. It was part-time work, a thing his father did on Tuesday and Friday mornings along with three other small-shrine contracts scattered along the peninsula, and Junpei had simply grown into its orbits. Every summer, the shrine. Every summer, the others arriving because he was here and because there was nowhere else in Shiokaze that was simultaneously shaded, untraveled, and permissible.
The shrine was not popular. That was the precise word for it. Tourists who made the drive down to Shiokaze mostly came for the fish market and the old fishing pier, photographing the weathered boats and buying dried eel in vacuum-sealed packages. The shrine sat at the headland's western edge, accessible by a path so badly signposted that the two or three visitors who found it each month seemed primarily to have done so by accident. There was no famous statue, no spectacular view, no featured festival in the prefecture guide. There was a cedar-shaded approach, a stone lantern listing slightly leftward since the earthquake three years prior, an inner precinct with a bell hall and a main hall that the local preservation committee periodically discussed doing something about, and then the usual quiet. Junpei had never been able to explain, precisely, why he found this preferable to the beach or the shopping street or anywhere else in town. He just did. The shrine was not his, technically, but it felt more his than most things.
He heard Reiko before he saw her — the particular small sounds of her working, an almost-inaudible exhalation when she saw something she wanted to capture, the soft scrape of pencil.
He opened both eyes.
She'd moved from the top of the approach steps, where she'd been when they arrived, down to the edge of the inner precinct's wooden veranda, where she was crouched at an angle that would leave her right knee aching in about ten minutes. Her sketchbook was propped on her thigh. She was looking up at the eaves with the expression she got when she was genuinely absorbed — distant but not vacant, her focus pointed outward at rather than inward at. Reiko had moved to Shiokaze from Kyoto at the end of their second year of middle school, and for the first several months she'd drawn everything in the town with the methodical thoroughness of someone taking inventory. She'd moved on from that now, or she seemed to have, but every so often Junpei caught her looking at familiar things with that same fresh-surveyor attention, like she was still checking whether they'd stayed the same.
The eaves were interesting today, he supposed. The main hall's curved roofline made a good silhouette against the white sky.
"You should draw the lantern before it tips over completely," he said.
"I drew it in June," Reiko said, without breaking her focus. "I should draw it again when it falls over and compare."
"That's morbid."
"That's documentation."
"Same thing," said Natsuko, writing.
Tetsu had wandered from the offering box to the stone lantern in question, regarding it now with his hands on his hips. He gave it an experimental push, very gently, with two fingers. It didn't move. "Solid," he announced.
"Don't touch it," Natsuko and Reiko said simultaneously.
Tetsu withdrew his hand. The cicadas filled the gap.
Saki hadn't come. She'd sent a message to Natsuko yesterday evening — Junpei hadn't seen it but Natsuko had told him with the particular tone she used for information she was passing along without comment, which usually meant she had plenty of comment and had chosen not to deploy it — saying she had a family thing in the city. Saki had been having family things in the city with increasing frequency since June. No one had said anything about this directly to anyone else. They were all carrying it separately, which was what you did when a friendship was fraying in ways that felt temporary and might not be.
Junpei sat up properly, vertebrae clicking. The pillar had left a rough impression along his shoulder blade; he could feel the texture of it through his shirt.
The air tasted of salt and cedar and the specific green decay of old wood warming in strong sun. He'd loved that smell since childhood without analyzing it. He analyzed it now, briefly, the way you sometimes examine old affections with sudden awareness of having had them for a long time, and found that it still held.
"I'm going to check the back path," he said.
"Why," Natsuko said.
"My dad thinks one of the drainage channels is blocking. He asked me to look."
This was true. It was also not the whole truth, which was simply that he wanted to walk through the grounds again, the way he sometimes needed to, the way you might walk through your own house in the dark not because anything was wrong but to confirm the shape of things by feel.
Natsuko looked up from the complaint log. She had the look she sometimes got of reading a room without appearing to — her eyes still angled toward the notebook but not actually seeing the page. "Don't go into the inner precinct."
"Why not."
"Because the floor boards back there. Your dad said last month."
"I know which ones." He did. He'd known which ones for years. The rot had been spreading slowly, a gradual softening of the planks nearest the north wall where the drainage ran inadequate and the wood sat damp even in August. His father had put a folded cardboard notice by the step two weeks ago, a hand-lettered sign that read PLEASE DO NOT ENTER — REPAIR SCHEDULED. Junpei had read the sign and thought: I know where it's bad.
"He knows where it's bad," Tetsu said, because Tetsu understood certain things about how Junpei moved through this particular place.
Natsuko looked back down at her notebook. She wrote something. "Don't go near the north wall."
He promised, because he thought he meant it.
The back path ran along the main hall's eastern side, narrow enough that the cedar boughs brushed his shoulder, and it was several degrees cooler here, the sun not reaching. He moved slowly by preference — he had never been someone who moved fast in the shrine grounds. His sandals on the flat stones made a sound he associated with summer mornings and his father's early starts, the two of them out in the blue-gray light before the heat arrived, his father with the push broom and Junpei allegedly helping but mostly watching the way the swept cedar needles made patterns in the dust.
The drainage channel was fine. A few leaves, nothing blocking. He kicked them loose and watched the thin trickle of runoff resume.
He didn't turn back immediately.
The inner precinct's north side was accessible from here, through a wooden gate that was never locked because it had no lock, the latch mechanism long since rusted into permanent recession. He pushed it open the way he'd pushed it open a hundred times, with the heel of his palm against the specific spot where the wood still held, and he stepped through.
The inner precinct was the oldest part of the shrine. His father had shown him the dedication plaque once, Meiji period, though the structure had clearly been repaired and re-repaired over what seemed like much longer. The bell hall sat to the left, its bell dark and still in the shade, and the main hall's rear face looked out here with its back-of-house plainness, no ornament, just boards and beams and the accumulated solidity of something built to last. The floor of the precinct itself was raised — a wooden platform, covered and partially open to the weather, where the priests would have conducted the inner rites in some earlier period of greater ceremony. Junpei's father accessed it from the north side to check the bell mechanism. Junpei had stood on it many times without incident.
He was not supposed to be on it.
He told himself he was just looking at the drainage on that side.
He stepped up.
The platform gave slightly under his weight, the way wood does when it remembers it is wood and not stone. He'd felt this before. He moved toward the north wall with the careful proprietary knowledge of someone who understands exactly where not to step, his weight distributed the way he'd learned instinctively over years of this ground, eyes tracking the subtle gray of compromised grain versus the still-sound planks —
And then he miscalculated, or he forgot, or the rot had moved further than he'd accounted for, and the plank under his left foot gave — not gradually, not creakingly, but all at once with a sound like a rifle shot that scattered the nearest cicadas into sudden silence, and his foot went through, and then his knee, and then the rest of him followed with a kind of terrible completeness, the way falling is never slow no matter how you remember it afterward.
He heard Tetsu shout his name.
He heard Natsuko — not a scream, Natsuko didn't scream, but something fast and involuntary and high that he had never heard from her before.
He heard Reiko's pencil hit the stone approach.
And then the dark came up around him and the sound of the sea, that same long exhale, grew suddenly enormous.
He said something. He thought it was just her name — the word for help, maybe, or simply a sound — and then the cold hit him. Not the cold of soil or stone. The cold of deep water, of something much further down than any basement or crawlspace had a right to reach. A cold that tasted of brine and something older than salt.
Then his voice stopped.
Up on the approach path, the cicadas started up again, the same register as before, filling the space as if nothing had interrupted them.
Reiko picked up her pencil.
She looked at the hole in the floor where Junpei had been, and then at her hand, and then she began to draw it. She couldn't have said why. Her hand was shaking slightly and it didn't matter; she drew the shape of the broken wood, the dark aperture, the splintered edges where the plank had given. She drew them carefully and with great precision while Tetsu was already running and Natsuko was already calling his name in a voice that was trying, very hard, to remain the voice of a person who was not afraid.
The bell in the hall gave a single low tone.
There was no wind.