Shinsekai Yori - 14

"Snowflakes"

The clock is ticking for Maria and Mamoru, and I'm not so sure Tomiko can keep her promise to protect them from the Board of Education.

It's with a sense of dread that the group is forced to split up; Mamoru absolutely cannot return to the village, so he and Maria plan to run away and live in the wild together as fugitives while Satoru and Saki return to the village in an attempt to sort things out. Upon arrival Saki finds her parents waiting for her, ready to deliver her to the Board of Education for questioning.

By this point we've been conditioned to be wary of the Board; it's true that nothing is more frightening than fear itself, and that's evident in the way the Board handles its matters. Panic about another catastrophe causes them to choose children for removal far too early; it's like taking chemotherapy for a birthmark that might become cancer. Mamoru hadn't yet shown any true signs of danger, but the Board panicked too easily and tried to take him out, and then failed to do so on top of that. Unfortunately that costs Mamoru his trust and even his freedom, because now the Board cannot pretend that it didn't send a Nekodamashi after him, and he really is a threat now that he's afraid for his life. It's a cycle of fear that drives the people of this world to dire circumstances, but it's well-placed fear nonetheless. I think the problem here is lack of moderation; it's healthy to fear fire, but not healthy to flinch at every spark that may begin one.

In any case, watching Saki be interrogated by these people is suspenseful; anything she says can implicate her and cause her to be the next target, but she can't afford to lie either, so she settles for pieces of the truth instead. Saki is a clever girl, but at some point she was bound to snap, and watching the Board pretend that they have no idea for why poor, timid Mamoru was forced to the brink was that last straw for her. It was a ballsy thing to do, calling the Board out on their bullshit, and had Tomiko not arrived, Saki would have been in deep trouble.

It seems that Tomiko is something of a lone operator; she has enough authority to go about with her affairs without the Board getting involved, and the Board is as shocked as Saki was that she's chosen the young girl for her successor. She later explains to Saki that the Board holds her in such high esteem because she's 267 years old and the only person in the village with the ability to live so long. In other words, knowledge and experience are power, and Tomiko hints that Saki may just be able to learn the technique, which involves the psychic repair of telomeres. Regardless, she easily gets Saki out of the quagmire she'd been caught in and reveals in the process that the children of Group One are special because of an experiment that Tomiko arranged to be performed on them.

"The village needs more than sheep to protect itself," is what Tomiko tells Saki, and while normal children undergo regular and powerful hypnosis from a young age, the members of Group One were allowed to keep their free will, leading to unprecedented results, such as Shun's demise. That same free will allowed Mamoru and Maria to realize that they had better chances of survival if they ran away, and it's also why they're such a huge threat. Two children running around unsupervised may seem harmless, but of course in Shinsekai Yori, that's not the case. I've thought this before, and Tomiko only emphasizes it with her simile to nuclear weaponry, but the PK users are the most dangerous weapons in Saki's world. Even when humanity has reached as low a population as several thousand in the Japanese archipelago, each and every human being is a potential bomb waiting to go off and destroy everything. It makes sense that rouge PK users would be hunted down as quickly as possible because nothing is scarier than a threat on the loose.

As such, Tomiko gives Saki a promise; if Saki and Satoru can bring back Maria and Mamoru within three days, she will guarantee their safety. However, the arrival of Squealer next week and the fact that both Maria and Mamoru have vanished promises disaster, and possibly the demise of the latter.