She smiled. It was the same smile she used when a customer tried to haggle her down to half price.
“And who exactly are you?” Natsuki asked.
The boy stepped forward. “You died at 8:47 AM. Your soul, however, refused to leave. You grabbed onto the first thing you touched in the moment of impact.” He nodded at the fish. “A kuro-sardine . A creature that swims between the living world and the Utsushimi —the Mirror Sea. By clinging to it, you’ve become a Sakana-Bito . A Fish-Person.” hatakeyama natsuki
The humming stopped. In the silence, Natsuki heard something else: the distant, rhythmic crash of waves where no ocean should be.
Natsuki looked down at her hands. They were still her hands—chapped from cold market water, nails short and practical. But a faint, silvery webbing had begun to grow between her fingers. “That’s disgusting,” she said calmly. She smiled
“I feel pretty alive,” Natsuki said, gripping the sardine like a tiny, slippery sword. “Aside from the whole ‘waking up in a stranger’s alley’ thing.”
The last thing Natsuki Hatakeyama remembered was the wet slap of a fish tail against her cheek. Now she was standing in a silent, rain-slicked alley in Tokyo, holding a sardine. The boy stepped forward
It was the same sardine. The one she’d been trying to sell at the Tsukiji outer market before a rogue delivery truck had introduced her to the hood of a Honda. But the fish was wrong. Its scales shimmered with a deep, auroral blue, and when she tilted her head, she could hear a faint humming from inside its silver body.