The Book of Heroes by Miyuki Miyabe Read Free Book Online

there anymore.
    Her knees buckled, her jaw sagged. When she ran, the world seemed to sway around her, and the pavement turned to wet sand beneath her feet.
    Back home, she ran into the living room and grabbed on to her mother. Then she cried and wailed louder than she ever had. Louder than Fukuyama’s mom.
    For a long while, the two of them sat there, hugging and crying.
    Yuriko wouldn’t be going back to school. She would never go to that school again.

    Late that night, Yuriko went back to her brother’s room. She didn’t want her parents to know she was in there, so she left the light off. The light coming in through the window from the streetlamp outside was enough.
    The red book was back on the bookshelf. It was sitting at the edge of one of the front rows. Her mother must have come in here and picked it up. The bent pages had been smoothed out.
    Yuriko stepped closer and gently touched a finger to the book.
    The magic was back, she could tell that instantly. The jacket felt warm to the touch.
    “That you, little miss?” the book asked in her head. Yuriko nodded silently. She began to cry as quietly as she could. The more she cried, the more tears came.
    She grabbed the book off the shelf and hugged it to her chest.
    “Y’know, that kinda hurt the other day,” the book said, pouting.
    “I’m sorry,” Yuriko said, the tears rolling down her face.
    The book sighed. “Sounds like you got hurt too.” A gentle vibration came through the book’s cover. Yuriko nodded, hanging her head, and she slumped down against the wall with the book in her arms.
    She told him what had happened that day at school. She kept backtracking, adding details, and crying in between parts of the story so that in the end it must have sounded like a tangled mess, but the red book seemed to understand. The whole time she talked, he said only one thing. It’s okay. Don’t cry. No matter what she said, no matter how much she cried. It’s okay. Don’t cry.
    “It’s like that for everybody, you know,” he told her when Yuriko had finally finished her story and her tears had dried. “Everyone feels the same thing you do, little miss, when the Hero takes someone.”
    When the book spoke, it sounded almost like a song. There was a melody to his words. It was a song about the river of tears that people had cried over the ages, over countless sorrows.
    “No one can do anything about it. I’m sorry, but no one can undo what has been done.”
    You can’t turn back time.
    “You’ll be at home for a while now, won’t you, miss? You should take it easy. Time may be your enemy now, but in a while, it will become your ally.”
    “You mean I’ll forget?”
    “Maybe. Probably.”
    No I won’t. How could I?
    “But my brother is gone.” Her brother’s absence had stopped the clock for Yuriko. The whole Morisaki family was frozen in time. “Remember what we were talking about yesterday?” Yuriko asked, holding the book up in front of her face. “You know more than you’ve told me, don’t you. If you know why my brother did what he did, I’ll bet you know where he is now.”
    The red book hesitated.
    Bingo, Yuriko thought. “Where is he? Where’s Hiroki? What happens to people taken by the Hero? Does the Hero bring them somewhere? Is he in some kind of prison?” Her questions came out one after the other, with barely a pause between them. “Hiroki didn’t stab his friend because he wanted to, right? The Hero made him do it, right?”
    After a pause, the book answered. “That’s correct. That’s in its nature. It manipulates people, starts wars, turns the world on its head.”
    Yuriko had to think hard to understand some of the words he was using.
    “The Hero starts wars? That’s weird. The heroes I know about are always ending wars.”
    That was how it was in all the stories. That was how it was in her textbooks.
    “Beginnings, endings, they’re all the same, miss. They’re the head and the tail of the same