“You can’t escape, Miss Takai. As long as you get the TV signal I will be back. I’m not the kind of man who gives up so easily. That’s just my personality. Well, we will be seeing each other again very soon.”

She didn’t hear his footsteps, but he was no longer standing outside the door. Aomame peeked through the peephole to make sure. She set the safety on the pistol and washed her face in the sink. Her armpits were soaked. As she changed to a fresh shirt she stood, naked, in front of the mirror. Her stomach still wasn’t showing enough to notice, but she knew an important secret lay hidden within.

She spoke to the dowager on the phone. After Tamaru had gone over a few points with her, he handed the phone to the dowager without a word. They used a roundabout way of speaking, avoiding any clear-cut terms. At least at first.

“We have already secured a new place for you,” the dowager said. “There you can perform the task you’ve been planning on. It’s a safe place and you can get checked out regularly by a specialist. If you’re willing, you can move there as soon as you would like.”

Should she tell the dowager about the people who were after her little one? How in her dreams the guys from Sakigake were trying to get hold of her child? How the phony NHK collector using all his wiles to get her to open the door was probably after the same thing? But Aomame gave up the idea. She trusted the dowager, and respected her deeply. But that wasn’t the issue. Which world was she living in? For the time being, that was the point.

“How have you been feeling?” the dowager asked.

“Everything seems to be going well so far,” Aomame replied.

“I’m very glad to hear it,” the dowager said. “But your voice seems different somehow. Maybe I’m just imagining things, but you sound a little tense and guarded. If there’s anything that’s bothering you, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to tell us. We might be able to help you.”

“I think being in one place for so long has made me anxious, maybe, without my even realizing it. But I’m taking good care of myself. That’s my field, after all,” Aomame replied, careful with her tone of voice.

“Of course,” the dowager responded. She paused again. “A little while ago a suspicious man was hanging around our place for a couple of days. He seemed mainly interested in checking out the safe house. I asked the three women staying there to look at the pictures on our security cameras, but none of them recognized him. It might be somebody who’s after you.”

Aomame frowned slightly. “You mean they’ve figured out our connection?”

“I’m not sure about that. We’re at the point where we need to consider that possibility, though. This man looks quite unusual. He has a big, misshapen head. The top is flat, and he’s balding. He’s short, with stubby arms and legs, and stocky. Does that sound at all familiar?”

A misshapen head? “From the balcony I keep a close eye on the people walking down the street, but I’ve never seen anyone that fits that description. He sounds like the kind of person you couldn’t miss.”

“Exactly. He sounds like a colorful circus clown. If he’s the one they selected and sent to check us out, I would say it’s an odd choice.”

Aomame agreed. Sakigake wouldn’t deliberately send a person who stood out like that to reconnoiter. They couldn’t be that desperate for help. Which meant that the man probably had nothing to do with the religion, and that Sakigake still didn’t know about her relationship with the dowager. But then who was this man, and what was he doing checking out the safe house? Maybe he was the same man who pretended to be an NHK fee collector and kept on bothering her? She had no proof. She had just mentally linked the fee collector’s eccentric manner and the description of this other weird man.

“If you see him, please get in touch. We may have to take steps.”

“Of course I will get in touch right away,” Aomame replied.

The dowager was silent again. This was rather unusual, for usually when they talked on the phone she was quite no-nonsense, and hated to waste any time.

“Are you well?” Aomame asked casually.

“The same as always. I have no complaints,” the dowager said. But Aomame could hear a faint hesitation in her voice—something else that was unusual.

Aomame waited for her to continue.

Finally, as if resigned to it, the dowager spoke. “It’s just that recently I feel old more often than I used to. Especially after you left.”

“I never left,” Aomame said brightly. “I’m still here.”

“I know. You’re there and we can still speak on the phone. It’s just that when we were able to meet regularly and exercise together, some of your vitality rubbed off on me.”

“You have a lot of your own vitality to begin with. All I did was help bring it out. Even if I’m not there, you should be able to make it on your own.”

“To tell you the truth, I thought the same thing until a while ago,” the dowager said, giving a laugh that was best characterized as dry. “I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don’t just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they’ve received. I have only just learned that truth.”

You have to pay the price for what you’ve received. Aomame frowned. It was the same line that the NHK collector had spoken.

“On that night in September, when there was the huge thunderstorm, this thought suddenly came to me,” the dowager said. “I was in my house, alone in the living room, anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eyes. That night I lost you, I also lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person.”

“Was anger a part of this?” Aomame ventured.

There was a silence, like after the tide had gone out. Finally the dowager spoke. “You mean was my anger among the things I lost then? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

The dowager slowly breathed in. “The answer to your question is—yes. That’s what happened. In the midst of that tremendous lightning, the seething anger I had had was suddenly gone—at least, it had retreated far away. It was no longer the blazing anger I used to have. It had transformed into something more like a faintly colored sorrow. I thought such an intense anger would last forever.… But how do you know this?”

“Because the same thing happened to me,” Aomame said, “that night when there was all that thunder.”

“You’re talking about your own anger?”

“That’s right. I can’t feel the pure, intense anger I used to have anymore. It hasn’t completely disappeared, but like you said, it has withdrawn to someplace far away. For years this anger has occupied a large part of me. It’s been what has driven me.”

“Like a merciless coachman who never rests,” the dowager said. “But it has lost power, and now you are pregnant. Instead of being angry.”

Aomame calmed her breathing. “Exactly. Instead of anger, there’s a little one inside me. Something that has nothing to do with anger. And day by day it is growing inside me.”

“I know I don’t need to say this,” the dowager said, “but you need to take every precaution with it. That is another reason you need to move as soon as possible to a more secure location.”

“I agree, but before that happens, there’s something I need to take care of.”

After she hung up, Aomame went out to the balcony, looked down through the plastic slats at the afternoon road below, and gazed at the playground. Twilight was fast approaching. Before 1Q84 is over, she thought, before they find me, I have to find Tengo.