“The diary was not only therapy,” he yelled above the engine noise. “Hiro had set out to chronicle the awful things he’d seen. He was a sensitive man and he was surrounded by countrymen he couldn’t relate to—couldn’t understand. He had to find a way to reset his expectations. He needed to find good Japanese, but they didn’t exist in his world. So he had no choice but to create them in his diary. And for five years he lived in that diary world. He saw only goodness there. And gently he came back to earth.”

“But he took that first gamble,” said Daeng. “He left his safety zone and went all the way back to the Chinese border, where he’d lost his mind. What was he doing there? After shielding himself from evil for so long, why would he take a chance of a relapse?”

“The treasure,” said Siri. “The kids in the village were dying. They needed money for medicine. Hiro had access to something—some money source he’d squirreled away while he was in control: something that stuck there in his mind and was reactivated by the disaster in his village. The war proper still hadn’t come to the region, so he went back there in peacetime. He recovered his treasure, brought it back to the village, and used it to solve their problem.”

“But Satsai said he didn’t know what Hiro had done to achieve it,” said Daeng.

“It had to be money,” said Siri. “Back then, you could only ever solve problems with money.”

“What I really want to know is where Hiro went on that last day; the day of the surrender,” said Daeng. “He couldn’t have known it was going to happen. But something he’d heard was important enough for him to leave the village and never go back.”

She looked up at the sweeping hillsides and a landscape that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years.

“Do you think Hiro loved Satsai?” she said.

“It had to be something the teacher asked himself every day,” said Siri.

“I’d like to believe that love finds its own level,” said Daeng. “That whatever mental condition Hiro was suffering from didn’t affect his natural instincts. I’d like to think that the love Hiro felt for Satsai transcended all the short-circuiting and was as natural as hunger and fear. I’d like to believe that Hiro loved Satsai without any hindrance.”

Siri looked into eyes that never disappointed him.

“You know, I have an urge to take you back to my room right this minute,” he said.

“If only we weren’t on a gradually sinking boat,” she said.

He took her hand and squeezed it gently and they both smiled.

“And you do realize we now have ourselves an antagonist,” said Siri.

“Your Japanese visitor, Yuki-san.”