Minami's testimony session begins at 9:00.
Kuramoto's conference room again, the same table, the same stenographer with the same practiced neutrality, two prosecutors from the Ministry of Justice who arrived this morning with the specific alert quality of people who have read a case file overnight and have questions. Rei is present as the corroborating investigator. Nishida is present as legal observer. I'm present because Kuramoto didn't tell me not to be and nobody asked me to leave.
Minami sits at the center of the table.
She's dressed differently from last night. Not differently in the way of performance, not the careful presentation of someone constructing a public version of themselves. Differently in the way of someone who has decided that the day they become visible is the day they wear the thing they actually wear, the unremarkable jacket and the dark shirt and the specific absence of anything that signals how much thought went into appearing not to have thought about it.
She looks like herself.
I don't know what herself looks like because I've only seen her in a cemetery at midnight and a Bunkyō safe house in the afternoon. But it looks like herself in the way that certain people look most like themselves precisely when they've stopped trying to look like anything.
The lead prosecutor introduces herself. Fujimoto, mid-forties, the kind of precise intelligence that announces itself through the quality of the questions rather than any surface presentation.
She looks at Minami.
"Saitō-san. Before we begin, I want to confirm that you understand the nature of this session. Your testimony is being recorded as primary evidence in the SIS investigation. The immunity framework established by the filing is contingent on the completeness and accuracy of your account. Any material omission or inaccuracy affects the framework." She pauses. "Do you understand."
"Yes," Minami says.
"And you're prepared to provide a complete account. From the beginning."
"From the beginning," Minami confirms. "Seventeen years ago."
Fujimoto opens her folder. Looks at the first page. "Then let's start with the structure. You designed the original financial instrument that became the operational foundation of the Hakurei contract system."
"Yes."
"Walk me through the design intent."
Minami looks at the recording device. Then at the stenographer. Then at the room, once, the same particular attention she gave it when she arrived, checking the real version against the imagined one.
Then she begins.
She speaks for four hours.
I'm not going to record all of it here. Parts of it belong to the legal record and the legal record belongs to the case. But the shape of it is this: a woman who understood from the inside what a criminal organization did to the people it touched and who built, from that understanding, an instrument designed to make the touching permanently visible. Who spent seventeen years inside the machine she built, tending it and documenting it and watching it incriminate everyone who used it, waiting for the moment when the external case was strong enough to absorb what the internal record contained.
Who built an exit for a nephew she recruited into the machine she built.
Fujimoto asks hard questions. She pushes on the design intent with exactly the precision Yamamoto predicted, targeting the points where building criminal infrastructure looks like criminal participation regardless of intent. Rei's immunity argument is present in the framework but Minami has to carry it in her testimony, has to make the distinction between methodology and culpability land in a way that survives the challenge.
She carries it.
Not because she's polished or because she's rehearsed the answers. Because after seventeen years of living inside the distinction she's built between what she did and why she did it, the answers come from a place that has been tested by reality rather than constructed for presentation.
At 11:47 Fujimoto asks: "Your nephew, Saitō Kurō. You recruited him at twenty-three."
"Yes."
"Knowing what you were recruiting him into."
"Yes."
"Why."
Minami looks at the recording device. "Because he was already inside it. Ryūsei had identified him and they were going to use him regardless of what I did. I gave him a version of being used that had a purpose." She pauses. "That had an exit."
"The exit being his departure eighteen months ago."
"Yes."
"He didn't use it fully," Fujimoto says. "He maintained connections, continued to hold relevant information, and was present at the scene of Mizore Yuna's murder."
"He went back," Minami says. "Not because I asked him to. Because he decided to."
"The decision that led to his death," Fujimoto says.
The room is very quiet.
I look at the table.
"The decision that led to the situation that produced the physical evidence that collapsed the murder charge against him," Minami says. Her voice is level. Precise. Carrying exactly the weight of what needs to be said. "He didn't die. He's here."
Fujimoto looks at me briefly. The recalibration. Filed and moved on.
"Noted," she says. And continues.
At 1:15 the session breaks.
Minami steps outside and I follow her to the corridor window again and we stand looking at the Kasumigaseki street below.
She doesn't speak immediately.
I wait.
"Fujimoto is good," she says finally.
"Yes."
"The question about Kurō." She looks at the street. "I knew it would come. I knew exactly how it would come because I've been preparing for that question for four years. Since he left." She pauses. "I wasn't prepared for how it would feel to answer it in a room with a stenographer."
"The distinction held," I say. "Your answer was precise."
"My answer was the true version," she says. "That's why it held." She looks at the street. "The official version would have been more protective. More legally constructed. But Fujimoto would have found the seam in it." A pause. "The true version doesn't have seams."
I look at the street.
"He didn't die," I say.
"No," she says. "He didn't." She looks at me. "Something else happened instead."
"Something I still don't have a framework for."
"No. Neither do I." She looks at the window. "But the warmth is here in this corridor and it wasn't here yesterday when you weren't. That's a framework of a kind."
We stand.
"Rei's grandmother," Minami says. "She makes pickled plums every autumn."
"Yes."
"My sister used to make them too. Same ward, same season. I used to think it was a Kōenji thing, the particular variety of plum that grows there." She pauses. "It's probably not. It's probably just autumn."
"Probably," I agree.
She almost smiles. Not quite. The shape of it.
We go back in.
The session completes at 2:30.
Fujimoto closes her folder. "Thank you, Saitō-san. The prosecutors office will be in contact regarding the testimony schedule for the formal proceedings." She pauses. "Your account is complete and consistent. The immunity framework holds."
Minami nods once.
The stenographer closes the document.
The recording devices stop.
Kuramoto sits back in his chair and looks at the ceiling for a moment and then back at the room with the expression of someone who has been building toward a specific destination for nine years and has just stepped off the last section of road onto solid ground.
"The press notification goes out tomorrow morning," he says. "I'll send the draft tonight for review." He looks at Rei. "Your involvement in the parallel investigation is described as supporting investigative work. The prior relationship with Saitō is noted in the case record but not in the public notification."
"It should be noted publicly," Rei says.
Kuramoto looks at her. "It complicates the presentation."
"The accurate version usually does." She looks at the table. "Note it. The conflict of interest motion was withdrawn. The evidence stands. The public record should reflect the actual situation."
Kuramoto looks at her for a moment. Then he nods. "I'll revise the draft."
The afternoon disperses.
Nishida leaves with a handshake for Kuramoto and the small nod for me and what might be a smile for Rei if his face operated the way other people's faces operate, which it doesn't quite.
Minami leaves with the specific lightness of someone who has set down something extremely heavy and hasn't yet fully registered the absence of the weight. She pauses at the door and looks at Rei.
"Tea," she says.
"Tea," Rei confirms.
Minami goes.
Kuramoto stays to finalize the press notification. Rei stays to review the draft. I stay because it seems like the right thing to do, which is itself a new kind of reason, the kind that comes from honest ground rather than operational necessity.
The draft arrives at 4:30.
Kuramoto reads it aloud. It's precise and careful and covers the primary facts without the texture of what those facts cost. It names Yamamoto. It names Tomura. It names the officer who killed Mizore. It describes the SIS investigation and the evidence package. It acknowledges Mizore Yuna as the journalist whose investigation provided critical predicate for the case.
It says she was killed in the course of her investigation.
It doesn't say she was fourteen days away.
It doesn't say she came to an apartment with a photograph in her jacket pocket and a press badge clipped to her front and an appointment at twenty-two hundred hours with a man who was trying to figure out how to give her the last piece she needed.
It doesn't say any of that.
The public version is accurate and incomplete, the way public versions always are.
Rei reads it and says, "The fourth paragraph. The description of the parallel investigation. Add that it was conducted in coordination with Mizore Yuna over a period of four months. She should be in the account as a collaborator, not just a victim."
Kuramoto makes the change.
At 5:15 the notification is finalized.
We leave the building at 5:30.
The Kasumigaseki street is doing its late afternoon thing, the government district at the specific hour when the day workers are leaving and the evening city hasn't yet fully arrived, the overlap of the two registers, both present, neither dominant.
Rei has her notebook. The worn corners, the four months of parallel investigation now formally incorporated into the case record. She carries it the way she's carried it all day, not as a prop or a tool but as a thing that belongs to her in the particular way that objects belong to people who have used them for something that mattered.
She looks at the street.
"The press notification goes out tomorrow," she says.
"Yes."
"Tokyo will read it over breakfast."
"Yes."
"Most of them will read the headline and the first two paragraphs." She looks at the notification printout in her hand. "They'll know Yamamoto's name and that he's been charged. They won't know about the cemetery or the bookshop or the grandmother's house or the kissaten or any of the places where the actual case happened."
"No," I say. "They won't."
She folds the printout. Puts it in her jacket pocket.
"That's all right," she says. "The true version doesn't need to be in the press notification. It just needs to exist."
I look at her.
"It exists," I say.
She looks at me. The evening light on her face. The worn notebook under her arm. The four months and the fourteen months and the seventeen years all assembled into a case that will run through the institutional process for months or years and will eventually produce the verdicts that Mizore was fourteen days from catalyzing.
The public version.
Clean and accurate and incomplete.
"There's something wrong in the fourth paragraph," I say.
She looks at me. "Which part."
"The timeline. It says the parallel investigation began in response to anomalies identified in the Hakurei contract records." I pause. "It didn't begin there. It began with Kuramoto introducing you to Mizore fourteen months ago. The Hakurei anomalies were what the investigation found, not what started it."
Rei looks at the notification. She knows this. She was there. "Do you want to correct it."
I think about it for a moment.
"No," I say.
She looks at me.
"Some things belong to the private version," I say.
She looks at the printout in her pocket. Then at the street. Then at me.
"Yes," she says. "They do."
The evening city around us. The Kasumigaseki intersection. The ordinary traffic of a Thursday in Tokyo that contains, somewhere in its ordinary business, the arrest of a Metropolitan Police officer and the surrender of a Deputy Superintendent General and the completion of a case that a journalist died fourteen days from finishing.
The public version will run tomorrow.
Tonight is the true version.
The two of us on the street with the evening light and the worn notebook and the specific quality of two people who have stopped managing the distance between what they are and what they can be in this specific situation and are simply standing in it together.
"Léo," she says.
"Yes."
"My grandmother's name is Hana." She looks at the street. "She'll want to know yours."
I look at the street beside her.
A small ordinary thing in the middle of everything that isn't ordinary.
"Léo Marchand," I say. "Twenty-two. Paris."
She looks at me. The almost-smile arriving fully, the complete version, present and real in the evening light.
"I'll tell her," she says.
We walk.