I’m afraid to die, he thought. The instant he died—and not a moment later!—his consciousness would cease, and he would be incapable of thinking or feeling anything ever again, leaving time to proceed with no connection to him, passing solely for the sake of the living. Trying to imagine this pushed Kido’s mind to its limit. Here he was, alive today, with a world persisting for him, when the more than fifteen thousand people who’d lost their lives in the tsunami two years earlier could perceive nothing of what was occurring in the present. They had left no trace of anything substantial with
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