The rain continued into the night, its roar making sleep impossible. Akiko sat on her futon, watching it fall, while she thought about what had happened. She found it impossible to escape the conclusion that Tamao, or at least Tamao’s aramitama, was causing the flood, and was doing it because it was angry. But what was it angry about? The problem wasn’t so much that she couldn’t think of anything as that there were too many options. Certainly, the burning of the shrine was a possibility, but the kegare Akiko had seen across the city was another, as was the presence of protesters just outside the shrine precincts. What sort of things bothered kami? She had to admit that she didn’t know. Nor, she suspected, did Shiraishi.

The storm finally eased off around midnight, and Akiko managed to get some sleep. She dreamed of rivers in flood, and waterfalls, and maelstroms in the ocean.

The next day dawned bright and clear, the sky sparkling as if washed, the leaves on the trees sparkling with droplets of rain that had yet to evaporate. Akiko pushed her window open, expecting the air to be clean and refreshing, and coughed as the smell hit her. Obviously, the flood had not carried everything all the way to sea. Quickly, she closed the window again, and got dressed in old clothes.

Shiraishi was dressed similarly, and no discussion was needed before they got ready to clean the precincts. The shrine house was, fortunately, fine, as the water had all flowed out of the shrine and not got high enough to come in, but there was mud everywhere on the path, mud mixed with ashes, and the ashes from the burned shrine had been spread around by the water. Shiraishi stood at the door to the house and surveyed the damage, frowning.

“We’re going to have to pick up a lot of this piece by piece.â€

Akiko had to agree with her; the ashes were too spread out across the grass to sweep up now.

“Well, we’d better get started, then.â€ She reached for a pair of gloves, but Shiraishi reached out to stop her.

“You do the path first. That can be swept. We need to keep the shrine accessible.â€ Without thinking, Akiko glanced towards the space where the shrine used to stand, and realised that Shiraishi had done the same. “We <em>do</em> need to keep it accessible. The building was never the main point.â€ The priest was clearly trying to convince herself as much as Akiko, so Akiko said nothing, just nodding and fetching a broom.

As she swept, Akiko kept catching glimpses of things off to one side, almost behind her, right on the edge of her vision, but when she turned to look, there was nothing there. The ash and mud were stuck to the stones of the path, so the sweeping took longer than Akiko had expected, and the things kept dodging out of her sight while she did it. By the time she was finished, she was very nervous and tense.

Not being able to see anything definite was bad enough, but the glimpses she did catch reminded her of the kegare spirits she had seen throughout the city, but not within the shrine grounds since the purification after Takenaka’s death. If they were back inside the shrine, that was bad, surely, and another reason for Tamao to be angry.

When Shiraishi called a lunch break, Akiko knew what she wanted to do.