The shop in the alley behind Worachak was still one shade darker than outside.
Mook went in at three in the afternoon on a day when rain was threatening. Auntie Phai came with her because she refused to let Mook come alone, and stood with her arms crossed by the door, making it clear that if anything seemed suspicious, she would drag Mook out immediately.
"I've been waiting for you since the day the elimination-round results came out," the seller said without looking up from his ledger.
"I came to ask about my mother."
"You can ask. I'll answer as much as I'm able to."
Mook set the notebook down on the counter and opened it to the page where she'd copied down the recording-studio bookings. Her mother's handwriting, copied out line by line, including the words don't turn on the mic.
"The year Mom disappeared from the music industry was the year I was born," she said. "She booked a recording studio to sit and listen to the dead every Tuesday while she was pregnant with me. And at the end of that year, she returned those earrings to you, didn't she?"
The seller set down his pen, looked at her silently for a moment, then nodded once.
"Why?"
"Because she heard someone she didn't want to hear."
He said that sentence a little more slowly than the others, and Mook knew at once that he wasn't going to continue.
"Is that all?"
"That's all I'm allowed to tell you," he said. "The rest belonged to your mother. She left it with the place where she fell, not with me."
Auntie Phai stepped forward. "For fuck's sake. The way you're talking, you're obviously trying to pull one over on a kid."
"I've never deceived a single person," the seller said, turning to give Auntie Phai a polite smile. "I always tell people everything I'm able to tell them. The problem is, the people who come to buy things from me never really want to know everything. They only want to know when they'll get the item."
Auntie Phai opened her mouth to retort, then shut it again because the statement was too true to argue with.
Mook swept her gaze over the wooden cabinets around the shop as she had never looked at them before. In the third cabinet from the door, on the middle shelf, between a pocket watch and an old lantern, lay a necklace on velvet cloth the same color as the one in her velvet box.
The pendant was a deep-blue sapphire, cut in an old style, the stone large enough that most people wouldn't dare wear it outside the house.
"Ceylon sapphire," the seller said without turning to see what she was looking at. "The previous owner was a woman. She wanted to know what everyone really thought of her because she'd been deceived all her life. This item granted her request as well. She could hear the thoughts of everyone standing in front of her, as clearly as if they were saying them aloud."
"And the price?"
"Her own voice," he said. "It wasn't a disaster. She could still speak normally until the very last day, but no one could hear her. Anyone who listened forgot the moment they turned away. She could write letters, but no one ever replied. By the end, even her own child couldn't remember her mother's face."
The shop fell silent for a while. Rain began pattering on the corrugated roof in the alley.
"Every item collects its price in the same kind of thing it gives," the seller continued, his tone like someone explaining the terms of an installment plan. "Want to hear other people? You pay by making it so no one can hear you. Want to hear the dead? You pay with the voices of the living. It's very straightforward, and it never charges more interest than what was agreed upon."
"If I return it now," Mook asked, "will Auntie Phai's voice come back?"
For the first time, Auntie Phai whipped her head around and looked Mook straight in the face.
"No," the seller answered immediately, without a moment's hesitation. "What's already been paid is paid. Returning the item means you stop paying more. It doesn't mean you get the old price back. I made it clear from the beginning that the price accumulates."
"What about you?" Mook asked. "What have you already paid?"
The seller was silent longer than he had been for any question that day. He closed the ledger and adjusted the rolled-up sleeves on both arms so they were even again, though they had already been even.
"I'm still paying," he replied. "I never seem to finish paying. That's why I still have to sit in this shop when people like you walk in."
Mook stood there, her hands pressing against the edge of the counter until her knuckles turned white.
She had only just realized that she hadn't asked her question because she wanted to return the earrings. She'd asked because she wanted to hear the word no, so she'd have a reason not to return them.
And she'd heard it already.
When they walked out of the shop, the rain was coming down so hard that the alley had turned into a stream. Auntie Phai opened a single umbrella over the two of them and complained the whole way that they shouldn't ever come back, damn it, that a place like this sucked the souls out of people. Mook heard the sentence in fragments—the beginning was gone, the middle came through, and the end vanished again.
She wasn't as afraid as she had been last month.
That was the scariest thing about that day.
At Toba Bay, in the same season one hundred thirty years earlier, a six-year-old boy fell into a cleft in the rocks along the beach at high tide.
The boy called out for quite some time. Shizu sat ten paces away, listening to the last words of a boatman who had died twelve years earlier for his son, who was sitting beside her and waiting.
She didn't hear the boy's voice. Not a single word.
The one who heard him was a cloudy-eyed old woman standing twice as far away. She shouted, and everyone on the beach ran over. The boy survived.
That night, the boy's mother placed a fish in front of Shizu's hut as usual, unaware that the person sitting closest to her child that day had been the only one on the beach who hadn't heard her child's voice.