Chương 6: An introduction to English and Construction

Charlotte smoothed the edge of a stack of DCFS paperwork, her thumb pressing over the "Resource Family Approval" header.

"The emergency placement expires tonight. If we don't sign the formal paperwork to foster him, the county sends a transport van at eight a. m." Steven stood at the sink, watching the water swirl down the drain before turning off the faucet.

"We're selling the house and moving to Colorado in two months. Taking in a kid we know nothing about isn't just setting an extra chair at the table, Charlotte. It's going to stall the whole move and cause all sorts of other problems."

"I read the after-visit summary you just brought back," she said, tapping the stapled packet resting on the counter.

"The doctor noted he bent a medical needle with his bare arm. If he goes into a state group home, they'll panic and call the police the first time a nurse tries to give him his school immunizations when it won't puncture his skin." Steven looked toward the hallway leading to the guest room.

"You sure we're the best people to be taking charge of this kid? A group home may panic, but what are we supposed to do? You say you read the summary? Well how about the scars all over his back? What if those were deserved punishments? We know nothing about this guy, nothing! And you just want to bring him into the fold like he's always been one of our children? What if he loses his temper?

I sure as hell can't stop someone who can rip metal off his wrists and catch a broken piece of an angle-grinder out of the air!"

"We can keep a level head and provide a suitable environment to a child with no home! Here's an idea, how about we be thankful he kept your face out of the hospital, or worse? How about we not make him lose his temper?"

"Not lose his temper? Char he's a teenager. That's all they are!"

"We were too, once upon a time!" she countered.

"We didn't have super strength and evidence of trauma and abuse all over our bodies!"

"Then that's all the more reason to protect him!" she shouted, slamming her palms down on the counter. Their eyes meeting in a stare-down, her ragged breathing the only sound in the kitchen for a long moment before she slid a form across the island, whispering.

"Just sign it, Steve. He's staying with us." Sighing, Steven grabbed a pen from the junk drawer and signed his name across the bottom signature line before Charlotte took the paper back, dialing the school district as he took a drink of his water. As he sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the muffled, unintelligible yells of his hosts, Kurisu thought back to his home. Had his own parents ever fought like this? Had they fought over him as he assumed these people did now? But what was he to do?

He had no authority here, and it seemed he had limited, if any, autonomy too. With a sigh as the shouting ended, he made his way back out. By the time Kurisu emerged from the hallway after mounting his weapon, Charlotte was talking on the phone, writing foreign scribbles on a sheet of paper with the occasional mumble. As she jotted a final note on her pad, she looked up, ending the call.. Gesturing for Kurisu to sit at the table across from his wife, Steven looked back toward her.

"So? What did they say?"

"What we already expected," she replied.

"We don't need to enroll him for the last three days of the year. But they still need him to come in tomorrow morning for his ESL evaluation." She looked at Kurisu, picking up the phone to activate the translator.

"Kurisu," she said clearly.

"Tomorrow, no school. Just a test." He frowned, narrowing his eyes at the device.

"A test?" he said in his native tongue.

"Is this a trial of martial prowess?"

"No fighting," Charlotte corrected.

"Words. An English test."" Ah," Kurisu nodded for her to proceed.

"When you fail, because you don't know any English," Charlotte continued, "you will go to summer school. Daily, through June and July, to learn English."

"Summer studies, is it? To master this English..." He mused, more to himself. Evaluating the strategy, he understood a dedicated, months-long regimen strictly for mastering the local tongue made tactical sense.

"Understood," Kurisu agreed, dipping his chin.

"I shall learn."

"Wait, he has to go to school in the summer? That sucks," Ace looked over, his game paused.

"He has to learn the language, Ace," Steven said. He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck before looking at Kurisu.

"Which means you're going to be busy. Since you're here—" Steven glanced at Charlotte, who rolled her eyes but shrugged.

"—I was hoping to ask for your help with a project. Kurisu, listen closely." Steven sat down next to Kurisu.

"We're planning on moving to Colorado, to the mountains." Head cocked to the side, Kurisu perked up.

"Mountains? Does it snow within these mountains?" with everything else going on, he'd forgotten he'd even been unacceptably hot, and constantly sweating. Now with that one word, he had some hope of relief, at least on one front.

"Lots of snow in the winter, yes," Steven promised.

"But we can't leave until we sell this house. And we can't sell this house until we fix the retaining wall. The contractors want thirty thousand dollars to do it, and we don't have that." As he tapped his fingers against the table, Steven leaned forward.

"We need to do it ourselves. It's hard labor. If you help me build the wall, we can leave this valley and go to these mountains." Staring down at his hands, Kurisu thought of his home. Fueled by nightly coastal drizzles, the constant humidity fed tens of thousands of chō of flooded rice paddies stretching toward the distant mountains, leaving the atmosphere thicker yet comfortably cool. Annoying as that perpetual dampness had been, he found himself missing it, imagining anywhere away from the heat of this place.

"Very well," he declared.

"I shall clear the path." The next morning, Kurisu sat in a small office at the District Intake Center while a woman named Ms. Alvarez showed him laminated flashcards. She tapped a picture of a dog." Inu," Kurisu answered automatically. Next, she swapped it for a picture of a house." Yakata," Kurisu stated. Setting the cards down, she looked him in the eye and asked clearly, "What is your name?" Kurisu stared at her across the desk.

He recognized the upward inflection of a question, but the English syllables held no meaning to him. Refusing to guess, he sat in silence. Ms. Alvarez pulled a red rubber stamp from her drawer and pressed it onto his paperwork: LEVEL 1 - NEWCOMER.

"Summer Academy starts Monday," she told Charlotte, handing back the paperwork.

"It's a full-day immersion program." Steven stood at the base of the slope at the edge of his backyard, staring at the rotting retaining wall, his face scrunched into a scowl. The old railroad ties holding back the hillside bowed outward under the pressure of the earth and a fallen tree on the other side. Dirt and roots already spilled over the barrier; eventually, the entire hill would slide into their yard.

"Okay," Steven said, wiping a line of sweat from his forehead.

"Here's the mission. We have to rip out this old wood, dig a new trench, and stack those." Pointing towards the driveway on the other side of the house, he gestured to where a delivery truck had dropped off three pallets of concrete retaining blocks.

"We have to be done by July so we can list the house," Steven warned.

"You do the ESL classes in the mornings, and we work on the wall in the evenings after you get back. Working through the summer heat is going to suck, but we've got to get it done." Next to him, Kurisu already had sweat pooling at the base of his neck beneath his duster and jeans.

"This wall is what obstructs the migration?" he asked. After a glance at the app, Steven nodded.

"Yes. The wall is stopping us from leaving." As he traced the path through the yard, Kurisu looked from the wall, around the side of the house to where the driveway sat out of sight, filled with the concrete, before shifting his gaze back to the rotting wood. He closed the distance and pulled at the top of the barrier.

"We're going to have to dig those out—" Steven started before his words were cut off by a loud crack, the wood splintering before it flew past him, thumping against the ground. Another tie followed the first as Kurisu ripped them away, exposing the soil beneath the dead tree on the slope. Now deprived of its support, the trunk began to shift and tilt toward the yard. Kurisu reached up, bracing the bark while he glanced at the spilling hill, which now slid into the yard just slightly with the wall partially removed.

Jumping up, Kurisu wrapped his arms around the wood as he circulated Ki through his body; easing it outward, he increased the air pressure around himself. Dragging a hand down his face with a groan, Steven sighed.

"See, now you've gone and made a mess, and we have to deal with that tree falling into the yard!" More snaps rang out as Kurisu ripped the dead trunk free, dropping the twenty-foot mass into the dirt.

"Nope! That's not my tree, not my problem," Steven argued, throwing a hand toward the mess.

"It goes on the outside of the wall. Let the city deal with it." Without a hint of strain, Kurisu hefted the dead tree back up, casually tossing it several feet beyond the property line and nodding to a staring Steven as he walked past him toward the driveway. Bypassing the hand truck leaning against the fence, Kurisu reached the nearest pallet, gripped a concrete block, and hoisted it up and down, testing its density, squinting against the sun as he realized the molded texture wasn't normal stone.

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"Yeah, those are about eighty pounds a piece," Steven warned, blinking.

"Be careful." Tossing the block a few feet into the air, Kurisu caught the concrete with his opposite hand and set it on the grass.

"It is light," he said, before he looked at the sleeves of his coat, feeling the material sticking to his sweating arms, trapping the heat against his skin. With a glance at the hundreds of blocks waiting on the driveway, and then toward the rotting barrier standing between this clan and the mountains. He reached across his chest, grabbed the left shoulder seam of the duster and wrenched his arm downward, the stitching resisting for a fraction of a second before the material tore away from the shoulder.

In a repeat of the first side, he ripped the right sleeve free, tossing the ruined fabric onto the pile of rotting wood. Standing in the remnants of the coat, he rolled his neck, his arms slightly cooler now that they were exposed to the air. Gesturing toward the loaded pallets, he asked, "All of them?" Steven swallowed.

"Uh. Yeah. All of them." With a nod, Kurisu walked back to the pallet in the driveway, grabbed two blocks in each hand, and began walking around the building, through the side gate over and over again. From the back window, Ace and Kellevra watched the display over their cereal bowls.

"Dude," Ace whispered.

"Dad just adopted the Hulk."

"He ripped his coat," Kellevra noted, chewing slowly.

"Mom's gonna be mad."

"Mom's gonna be rich," Ace corrected.

"Look at him go." Stepping into the yard with two glasses of lemonade, Charlotte stopped, staring down at the discarded sleeves resting on the woodpile.

"Kurisu!" she scolded, picking up the fabric.

"We just bought this! Ninety dollars!" Kurisu looked at the fraying armholes of his duster.

"It is hot," he stated quietly.

"The sleeves proved a hindrance." As she examined the frayed seams, Charlotte's shoulders dropped with a sigh.

"It's going to unravel if you leave it like that," she muttered, pointing to a nearby stack of blocks.

"Come here. Sit." While Kurisu drank the iced lemonade, she sat beside him with a small sewing kit, folding the edges of the material inward and sewing them down. After just a few moments, and with him still wearing the coat, she finished hemming the armholes with a bite of her thread.

"There," she said, patting the coat.

"Now you don't look like a hobo. But don't rip anything else, okay?" Kurisu touched the repaired hem, a faint smile forming before a tickle caught the back of his throat as he recalled the memory of his mother mending the knee of his hakama only moments before he had to present for his Hakamagi ceremony.

"You must be more aware of your surroundings, dear child. Today it was just the fabric, but a samurai, even one young as yourself, must always mind his footing. What's more, you are a Nodaichi, we must lead our people as pillars of dignity and inspiration! Who will look up to a lord who has fallen upon the dirt and rolled around like a boar in the mud?"

"Chichi-ue could, and the people would follow him to the depths of Meido, yet!" Kurisu pointed out. Covering her face with her sleeve, she stifled a soft laugh.

"Just so, but your father is of a unique cloth, that one."

"Kurisu?" Pulled from the memory, he looked up from the hem of his duster to Charlotte.

"I am grateful," he said softly. Seated in a metal folding chair at the back of an Irvine elementary school classroom, Kurisu watched the teacher, Mrs. Gable, point a wooden ruler at the whiteboard.

"Apple," she enunciated.

"A-P-P-L-E." Kurisu narrowed his eyes at the drawing of the fruit, focused on committing the phonetic shapes to memory.

"A-ppul," he whispered. Throughout his lessons he noticed the other children tended to keep their distance from him, often whispering and pointing his direction. When released, he'd take a large, yellow carriage he learned was called a school bus home before finally being dropped off a short walk from the house that afternoon. After eating several sandwiches, under the gawking stares of his hosts, he headed out back, and returned to the dirt.

While it may not have been martial practice, it kept him active, and was worlds apart from the expectations of his captivity. With the yard requiring a level trench for the new wall, Kurisu bypassed the pickaxe and shovel Steven had left leaning against the fence before stopping at the top of the slope, glancing around to make sure nobody was watching. With Steven momentarily inside grabbing drinks and the neighboring yards quiet, he knelt in the earth.

Placing his bare palm flat against the sun-baked soil, he pressed his will downward, sending his Ki vibrating through the ground beneath his boots to force the dirt to ripple and lose its structure. With a slow, sweeping motion of his arm, Kurisu pushed his energy forward, turning the soil into fluid, earth parted, piling itself to the side and leaving a level, foot-deep trench stretching along the property line. As he stepped out onto the back patio, Steven choked on a mouthful of Gatorade.

"Okay," Steven muttered, staring down the slope.

"That saves us about three weeks of digging." Once the trench lay open, the true physical work began. Kurisu moved the blocks four at a time. The dense concrete posed no challenge; the true test was the volume of labor required to secure their passage to the mountains. Throughout June, Kurisu settled into a cycle of basic vocabulary and moving concrete. Having zero masonry experience, Kurisu assumed, Steven initially directed him to drop the blocks and spread thick layers of wet mud between the tiers.

That blind guesswork cost them days of labor when a sudden summer shower washed out the weak mortar, collapsing the half-built wall into a minor mudslide. Forced to start from scratch, Steven apparently watched some kind of instructional videos to learn proper concrete mixing and joint staggering. Under the afternoon sun, Kurisu's skin tanned bronze as the newly reinforced barrier steadily rose along the edge of the yard.

Stepping out onto the patio, Ace carried his tablet and a red popsicle while Kellevra brought two toward the slope.

"Hey," Ace called out. Capstone placed onto the third tier of the wall, Kurisu stood from his knelt position, and, wiping his forearm across his brow, turned to meet the boys as they approached.

"Hey," he replied, his pronunciation stilted but passable by his own assumptions. Kellevra handed him one of the popsicles.

"Break time. Dad says you're making us look bad." After he accepted the refreshment, Kurisu looked back at the near-complete wall.

"The wall... strong," he said.

"Not fall."

"Yeah," Ace snorted, sitting on the edge of the finished bottom tier.

"That storm was a disaster! So, I saw you reading that kid's book on the counter. The Very Hungry Caterpillar?"

"Leave him alone, Ace," Kellevra warned.

"Bro, I'm not making fun of him, relax. Besides, mom wouldn't know if you kept your mouth shut anyway." Kurisu frowned.

"Book difficult. Many words… fumei." Ace, laughing, kicked his feet against the concrete.

"Dude, it's for babies. Here, let me show you. I'll go get it." After fetching the book the twelve-year-old boy sat cross-legged on the grass beside Kurisu, tracing his finger beneath the printed words, Kellevra sitting on Kurisu's other side.

"Ok so what's this word?"

"Long." Kurisu shook his head.

"Oh boy! Uh, hmm." Ace began.

"Do it in pieces," Kellevra broke in.

"Start with the first three letters." Ace's finger under the letter, Kurisu slowly enunciated.

"Cat-er-pill-ar… caterpillar."

"Great!" The two boys said in sync.

"Jinx! You owe me a—""Oh come on Kel, I had that!"

"Ace, I was obviously first!" Bewildered, Kurisu looked between the boys.

"Jinx? First?"

"Yea, which of us was faster?" Ace asked.

"Faster to say 'jynx'."

"You both spoke in unison, though Ace began and was finished a miniscule amount earlier. Why is this relevant to reading drills?"

"Hah! See? I told you!" Ace gloated as Kellevra rolled his eyes.

"Now you owe me a Coke! And it's not, it's just a game we play when we say something at the same time, we don't even give the soda to the winner."

"Can we just move on, already?" Kellevra groaned.

"Yea, yea, sore loser," Ace turned the page.

"Now this one."

"Batt-er-fly," Kurisu tried, his brow furrowed.

"Butterfly," Ace corrected.

"It's like... butt, not bat, then er. And fly."

"Butt-er-fly," Kurisu enunciated.

"There you go. See? You're getting it," Ace said with a grin." Arigatō," Kurisu murmured, pausing to search his memory for the correct syllables before adding, "Thank you." Ace shrugged, pushing himself up from the grass.

"No problem. Just don't tell my friends I'm teaching you baby books." Kurisu stood up, casually gripping two blocks from the remaining pallet as if they were empty cardboard boxes.

"Secret... safe," he promised, standing to resume his work.

"Wait." Ace, swapping the position of the book with his tablet underneath, called out.

"What is it?" Kurisu asked as he turned back to the young boy.

"So um, you can do things," Ace stammered, then stopped.

"The performance of tasks is nothing novel," Kurisu stated, one eyebrow raised.

"No, like, magic things. Like the mud, plus you're super strong! I mean throwing trees!" Ace's voice rose with excitement as he gesticulated large motions with his arms, nearly dropping his device and the book on the ground in his candor.

"How do you do that stuff? How is it possible? We don't have magic here, we can't move the dirt with the wave of our hand or throw whole trees like a knight throwing javelins."

"Oh." Kurisu knew there were differences between himself and these people. Of course he knew, and he'd thought he was keeping a low profile.

"How much have I done that is not normal?"

"Dude, everything! Your door, the glass cups, those handcuffs—man those things were like five inches thick and you just—RIP!" Ace motioned his hands outward in a large circle making an explosion sound.

"It's all so crazy! Dad got really freaked out when you moved the dirt though, he and mom got into it, you had to have heard them," he turned to Kellevra, who bobbed his head up and down. It was true enough, Kurisu had indeed heard elevated voices from their quarters on several occasions. Lacking the linguistic skills to understand or contribute, or even know if topics were of concern to him, he hadn't dwelt on it.

His own past crept into his thoughts, the smell of burnt flesh, the crashing of timber and the screams of his people brought a vile sting to his throat he struggled to control before spitting in the grass.

"Steven dislikes me, distrusts me, and that is wise of him. While I have no intentions of harming you, he must place priority on your safety."

"Nah, dad doesn't hate you, he actually likes you, you make him laugh when you aren't looking, but yea, he's a bit of a skeptic, he'll come around. He gets worried 'cuz mom's always gotta take care of everyone and everything, no matter what. Kept taking in stray cats and rabbits a few years ago, so glad she stopped that—so much poop to clean! She even gets upset if I squish a spider in the house, tells me to value it and take it outside." His skin tingling as a chill ran through him, Kurisu shook off the sensation.

"Understood, then I shall endeavor to earn his trust further. Were it not for your mother's…" he searched for the words. With no desire to be rude to his host, and the reason for his current stability, he wondered how to describe her naivety.

"Were it not for your mother's boundless mercy, I would not stand before you."

"That's nice and all," Ace said.

"We're used to it, but it can get annoying."

"And that doesn't explain the things you can do!" Kellevra squawked.

"Come on, how do you do magic and have all this super strength?"

"I perform no sorcery, I assure you. My abilities come from the manipulation of Ki, a force native to my realm. My strength is derived from this as well, though the pull here is significantly less than that of my home, so that likely lends aid."

"What do you mean 'the pull here'?" Ace asked.

"The force which returns one to the ground after a leap."

"You mean gravity?" Kellevra said, a quizzical note to his tone.

"Is gravity different in different countries, at least far apart ones?"

"It's not," Ace answered, shaking his head.

"Gravity's the same everywhere on the planet, mostly anyway. Which means it can't be gravity he's talking about."

"This world is not mine."

"Huh?" said both boys, once again in unison.