And somewhere deep in her mind, on the immaculate 81 squares she had built to survive the silence, the silver general she had moved in her apartment that morning began to glow with a cold, impossible light.
Kaori's breath caught. Her left hand twitched inside the glove, a moth against a windowpane.
She did not sit. Not immediately. She stood there, dripping rainwater onto the marble floor, her useless left hand hanging, her right hand trembling at her side. The board waited. The ghost waited. Kaori Saejima -2021-
Kaori was thirty-four. Once, she had been a child prodigy of the shogi circuit—the "Lioness of Kyushu," they called her after she defeated a reigning grandmaster at sixteen. But that was before the accident. Before the tremor in her left hand made it impossible to place a piece without knocking over three others. Before her mother’s funeral, which she watched through a hospital window, her jaw wired shut after a seizure sent her down a flight of concrete stairs.
She pulled on her coat. It was too large—her mother's, from a decade ago, the wool frayed at the cuffs. She did not own an umbrella. She did not own a phone that worked. And somewhere deep in her mind, on the
The old prefectural library stood at the edge of the abandoned tram line, a granite mausoleum of a building with gargoyles that had eroded into featureless blobs. The chains on the gate had been cut. Not recently—the rust on the fresh break was already orange—but cut nonetheless. The gate swung inward with a sigh.
The rain had not stopped. It would not stop for three more days. The old prefectural library had been condemned in 2019—mold, structural decay, a stairwell that led nowhere. She knew because she had walked past it once, two years ago, on the anniversary of her mother's death. The gates were chained. The windows were boarded. A sign in faded red paint read: DANGER. KEEP OUT. She did not sit
The gold general from 2014. Her abandoned pawn. It sat in the center of the board's edge, placed precisely on the 8th square of the first rank, like a marker on a grave.