They were too late to save Mr. Makabe.
The day they planned to do it, the house was full of priests, so busy that they couldn't leave their room. After midnight things grew calmer, and Yae slipped out to check the cell, but it was empty.
Yae was in a rage for two days after that. "Why didn't he run?" she hissed to Sae, her hands in fists, twisting the new white kimono they were supposed to be sewing together for the twin shrine maidens who'd come after them. "Why didn't he leave when we gave him the key?"
Sae only shook her head. She felt cold and sick. It seemed impossible that her father could do such a thing. He could be stern - not to them, but she'd heard him instructing the priests - and still, she'd never really thought he would...
"We should have told Mr. Makabe what the Hidden Ceremony was," Yae said wretchedly. "He couldn't have known. He must have thought it was something else, or he'd never have stayed." She threw the half-stitched kimono to the floor and wiped her eyes. "And now he's dead! What will we tell Munakata, if he comes back?"
"If we did the ritual - " Sae began in a small voice, but Yae was on her feet now, pacing the room in agitation.
"We have to stop it," she said to herself, over and over again. "We have to make this stop."
But at night it was Sae who lay awake, thinking of Mr. Makabe. She could picture how it had happened. They had come for him in the night. He would have been asking questions, but her father and the priests would have kept their silence. They had dragged him off to that unknown place even she had never seen. He had been a guest under their roof, and they had killed him anyway.
She couldn't help thinking that if last year's ritual had been her and Yae instead of Itsuki and Mutsuki, none of this would have happened. Everyone would still be alive.
Except me.
She dreamed that she went down into the tunnels, into a place deep beneath the earth, where the darkness was choking and something watched her. "It should be me," she said. "I'm the one you want. Take me, and let him go."
Something heard her voice. Something moved, weighing her request. Only then did she realise she'd come alone, leaving Yae behind. They couldn't do the ritual without Yae, and Sae couldn't remember the way back to find her.
She'd made a terrible mistake. But in the moment she understood what she'd done, she woke.
----
She thought about that dream, as the priests escorted her down to the forbidden place. As they led her through the room where a hundred candles burned, one for every sacrifice. As the cavern opened before her, and she finally saw it, the well of darkness that had swallowed each of those lives. As they put the rope around her neck, and she knew at last there was no bargaining, no begging, no escape. All she could do was listen, listen for Yae's footsteps in the passage, listen...
----
Sae had always known her place in the world. She had always known she would die on this night. She'd never been afraid of it. As a child, she'd gazed at the butterflies that decorated every important place in the village, and even though she'd known there would be pain, she'd thought that, when it was over, it would be like going home.
She'd thought the darkness would embrace her like a cocoon, and she would be reborn.
She'd thought it would recognise her, welcome her.
She'd thought it would know she was there.
But she'd been wrong about all of it. The Abyss wasn't anything she could understand, or that could understand her. It went on forever. The world had vanished, somewhere an unimaginable distance above her, and Sae was still falling, falling, until there was no longer any difference between falling and floating.
She'd thought the butterfly was a sign of triumph, the soul's victory over the darkness. She'd been wrong about that, too. It was a mockery: tiny, weightless, the merest spark of light and life that would beg to be crushed if only it had a voice, and that was all the greedy dark would surrender. It swallowed life, hope, promise, a mountain of suffering, and gave back the last red flickering of a candle flame. And still, even now, she'd choose that over an eternity in here.
It grants us life, her father had told her, many times. You'll be with Yae forever, he had told her. Sae started to laugh.
But she wasn't completely alone. Something was close to her in the dark, like in her dream. She couldn't see, but she felt its thoughts, red and mutilated, like a butterfly turned inside out. She thought it had once been Seijiro Makabe.
She knew why he'd stayed, even when they showed him the way out. He'd wanted to know the truth, to see it with his own eyes. Well, he knew it now, just like she did. Sae laughed even harder.
She'd been too late to save him before. She was too late now. But as she floated in boiling nothingness, she realised one thing was still true: she knew the way out.
She couldn't turn into a butterfly, but there was still a way to go back to the world - as long as she didn't mind changing it. Even now she could feel the darkness trying to pour itself through her, through the gate she made. She just had to let it.
"Come with me," she said to the Kusabi. "Let's show them what we know."
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