Mina asked, "Do you remember daddy?"

"Sort of.  Some."

"I don't.  Just his picture in the family shrine mommy set up."

"You were three."  Jin had been seven when their father had died.  Four years ago—it seemed half a lifetime.  He remembered his mother's extravagant grief and anger rather better, and how seldom he'd seen her after that—as if one death had stolen both parents, even before the policewomen had come for her.  "Doesn't Aunt Lorna keep the family shrine anymore?"

"She let me keep it in my room for a while, but then we ran out of space when I needed a desk for school, so she boxed it up and put it away.  I wasn't sure if to set your picture in it or not."

Mina was putting on her shoes, a determined look on her face.

"You can't go with me," Jin repeated uneasily.  "Not where I'm going."

"Where are you going?"

"A long walk.  Too far for you.  Why do you want to come anyway?"  She'd been aunt and uncle's pet, he thought.

"Tetsu and Ken are horrid to me.  Teasing and bedeviling.  Uncle Hikaru yells at them, but he never gets up and does anything."

Jin didn't quite see the problem with this.  Well, he had a dim sense that maybe it was his job to heckle his own sister, but if somebody else wanted to take up the slack, he had no objection.  "They're probably just jealous because you get all the girl stuff.  Plus if you weren't here, Ken would have your room," he added in a fair-minded fashion.

"Uncle and aunt were talking about 'dopting me, before you came back.  But I don't want Tetsu and Ken for my brothers.  I want my real brother."

"How can they adopt you when Mom's still . . ." he trailed off.  Alive?  The word choked in his throat, a wad of uncertainty.  He swallowed it and went on: "You can't stay where I'm going.  I—they wouldn't want you.  You'd just get in the way."  While Suze-san and the people at her place might be willing to treat a stray boy as casually as a stray cat, he had a queasy sense that a stray girl, and younger at that, might be another story.  And while the police, not to mention Uncle Hikaru and Aunt Lorna, might be less excited about him running away a second time, would that boredom extend to Mina?  "You couldn't keep up."

"Yes, I could!"

"Sh!  Keep your voice down!"

Her mouth went mulish.  "If you don't take me along, I'll set up a screech, and they'll catch you and put you back in my room!  And I won't let you out again, so there!"