The next photo was of a parking lot somewhere. Here, they were around the tires of the cars. After that was a photo a mother had taken of her daughter. The white things were scattered over the paving stones, and pigeons were pecking at them. The little girl was looking down at them from under an umbrella. “They do look a little like fish, maybe, but…” I zoomed in on the photo. “…These things fell out of the sky, with the rain?” All the photos that had been posted to social media had captions to that effect. “But they’re just photos, and there’s no proof, right?” “If you touch them, they disappear. Look.” Natsumi replayed a video someone had uploaded. It showed a lump a couple of inches long, with a surface like dried jelly. The finger of the person taking the movie entered the screen, then touched the lump, gingerly—and with a faint plish, the thing turned into water and flowed away. “Whoa!” I yelped. Natsumi continued excitedly. “You remember what that guy from the university said when we interviewed him earlier? The world of the sky is far deeper and stranger than the ocean. Humans have only seen a tiny bit of it directly, and a single cumulus cloud is its own kind of ‘world.’ A cloud several miles in size holds enough water to fill a lake and countless organisms inside it. There’s plenty of sunlight and water and organic stuff in a huge space where nobody messes with it. Down in the ocean where the light doesn’t reach, there are all kinds of unique creatures, so it wouldn’t be weird at all to find new, undiscovered ecosystems in the sky. He said it made no sense to assume the sky and the biological world are totally separate!” Natsumi went on and on in a rush, and I was startled by both her memory and her enthusiasm. “So there really must be something in the sky!” “And it’s these fish?” “Maybe! Well? Isn’t that amazing?!” “Then—” In spite of myself, I started thinking hard. Then— “If we made an article about that, we could make some real money! The urban legends feature is over, but if we do a feature on cryptids soon, we could—” “Huh?” Natsumi’s voice was icy. “Huh?” I broke off. “What do you mean, ‘We could make money’? The important thing is whether people think it’s interesting, right?” Page 51 Goldenagato | mp4directs.com