“Tonight! There’s still time!” I mutter. I’m trembling with nerves and excitement.

“Good mornin’, Mitsuha. Yotsuha went on ahead today.”

I turn around, and the old lady’s standing there.

“Grandma! You’re looking good!” Without thinking, I run over to her. She has a teapot on a tray, probably planning to enjoy some tea in the living room.

“Huh? …My. You’re…”

She pulls down her reading glasses and takes a good look at my face. Her eyes narrow softly.

“You aren’t Mitsuha, are you?”

“Wha…?” How?! I feel guilty, as if some crime I knew would never come to light has been exposed. Hang on, though. This might make things easier.

“Grandma… You knew?”

There’s no particular change in the old lady’s expression. As she speaks, she lowers herself into a legless chair.

“No. But watchin’ you lately reminded me. When I was a girl, I had some strange dreams myself.”

Hear that?! That’s awesome—this oughta be a quick conversation, then. Just what I’d expect from a Japanese folktale family. I join her at the table, and the old lady fills a cup for me, too. Sipping her tea, she continues her story.

“They were very odd dreams. More than dreams, really. They were another life. I became a boy I didn’t know in a town I’d never seen before.”

I swallow hard. Exactly like us…

“But one day, they ended, just like that. All I remember now is that I had strange dreams. My memories of who I became in them disappeared completely.”

“Disappeared…”

My heart skips a beat, as if I’ve been told the name of a disease I’m fated to get. She’s right. For a little while, I forgot Mitsuha’s name. I tried to convince myself that it was all a delusion. The old lady’s wrinkled face takes on a tinge of loneliness.

“So treasure who you are now and the things you’re seein’. No matter how special it is, a dream’s a dream. It’ll disappear for sure someday, once you wake. We all had a time like that, you know: my mother, myself, and your mother.”

“That’s… What if…?!”

Abruptly, it hits me. This might be a role passed down through the Miyamizu family: the ability to communicate with someone living a few years in the future to escape the disaster that strikes every twelve hundred years. A shrine maiden’s role. Something the Miyamizu bloodline acquired at some point… a warning system inherited across generations.

“Maybe the Miyamizus’ dreams were all for today!”

I look the old lady straight in the eye, speaking firmly. “Grandma, listen.”

She raises her head. From her expression, I can’t tell how she’ll take what I’m about to say.

“Tonight, a meteorite will strike the town of Itomori, and everyone will die.”

This time, the old lady’s eyebrows knit in unmistakable doubt.

“Nobody’d believe hooey like that.” That old broad says some surprisingly normal stuff.

I run down the hill to the high school, silently brooding to myself.

She believes the swapping dreams but not the meteorite strike. What sort of sense of balance does she have, anyway?