Matsuda's information on the third building takes two days to fully explain, which should have told me something.
The first two buildings were simple. Dead companies. Abandoned paper. Nobody watching, nobody returning. The third building is different because it isn't dead yet — it just looks that way from the outside. It's a mid-sized logistics company that stopped processing shipments six weeks ago when its license got suspended pending a Commission audit. The offices are dark. The parking lot is empty. But the filing room on the fourth floor still holds two years of transport manifests that cross-reference hero equipment distribution routes across greater Musutafu.
Hero equipment routes. Not liability files. Not medical records. Actual operational logistics.
Matsuda knows a man who will pay seventy thousand for a clean copy of those manifests. Maybe more.
"Why didn't you lead with this one?" I ask him, the night he finally lays it all out on the floor of his section with a rough sketch of the building between us.
He looks at me steadily. "Because I needed to know if you were careful first."
I look at the sketch. I look at him. I decide to take that as a reasonable answer because it probably is.
"What's the catch?" I say.
He pauses for a half-beat too long. "The audit team left a motion sensor on the third floor landing. Old hardware — battery-powered. It trips a silent alarm to a private security company, not the heroes."
"Private security response time?"
"Eight to twelve minutes."
I look at the sketch again. Fourth floor. Staircase goes through the third floor landing. No other route up unless I find a way around the sensor, which means I need to know the sensor's field of coverage before I go in, which means I need to scout it first.
I take the sketch. I tell him three days.
He nods. He still doesn't push.
I spend two of those three days watching the building from different angles at different hours. Early morning when the light is flat and shows movement clearly. Late afternoon when shadows pool in the doorways and you can tell which windows have residual dust disturbance and which don't. I eat one proper meal a day during this stretch because scouting time is not earning time and the twelve thousand four hundred is running down at the rate of food and Ogata's utility fund and the hundred-and-twenty yen coffees I keep buying because they are the one small thing I do not negotiate with myself about.
By the third morning I know the building well enough to close my eyes and walk it. Lobby entrance unusable — line of sight from the main road. Loading bay on the east side: better. Fire escape on the north face: accessible from the alley, takes me to the second floor, one flight up to the third floor landing where the sensor is. The sensor itself I clock through a window gap on my second visit — mounted high on the east wall, angled to cover the top of the staircase. Cone-shaped field. If I hug the west wall and stay low, I am outside its range by roughly sixty centimeters.
Roughly.
That word does a lot of work and I know it.
I go in on the third night at half past midnight. The loading bay door has a padlock that takes me four minutes instead of the usual ninety seconds, which I note without panicking because four minutes is still inside the margin. I take the fire escape slowly, testing each step before committing my weight. Cold metal and old bolts and the distant sound of the canal running two streets west.
Second floor. Third floor landing. I stop at the base of the last three steps and look up at the sensor mounted on the east wall, its tiny red standby light blinking every four seconds in the dark like a slow heartbeat.
I breathe.
I hug the west wall. I crouch. I take each step placing my foot at the extreme left edge of the tread, close enough to the wall that my shoulder brushes the plaster. One step. Two. Three.
The sensor does not trip.
I exhale.
The fourth floor filing room is unlocked, which is either an oversight or a trap and turns out to be an oversight. The manifests are exactly where Matsuda said they would be — two years of binders, organized by quarter, stacked on metal shelving along the north wall. I don't take the binders. Too bulky, too obvious. I photographed a portable document scanner in a junk shop window three weeks ago and spent four days deciding it was a luxury I couldn't afford. I went back and bought it yesterday for six thousand eight hundred yen, which took my total reserves down to five thousand six hundred and made me feel sick for approximately one hour.
Right now, scanning page by page in the dark with a penlight between my teeth, I feel considerably better about that decision.
The scanner is slow. Each page takes about eight seconds. There are roughly two hundred and forty pages across the relevant quarters that Matsuda's contact specified.
I have been doing this math since yesterday. Two hundred and forty pages at eight seconds is thirty-two minutes. Thirty-two minutes in a building with an eight-to-twelve minute private security response window if the sensor trips.
The sensor did not trip.
I am twenty-two minutes into the scan when I hear the door.
Not the main entrance. Not the loading bay. The emergency stairwell door on the south side of the building — the one that wasn't on Matsuda's sketch because Matsuda didn't know about it, the same way he didn't know about the security guard last time. A pattern is forming about the limits of secondhand floor plans and I file it away for later because later is the only place I can afford to process it right now.
Footsteps. One person. Unhurried. Someone who belongs here or believes they do.
I kill the penlight. I put the scanner in my bag without finishing the last eighteen pages. I move to the wall behind the shelving unit, which is the only cover in the room that is not the door, and I stand very still in the dark and I wait.
The footsteps come down the hall. They slow outside the filing room door. A pause — three seconds, four — that feels much longer than it is.
Then they continue past.
I count to ninety before I move again. My heart is doing something loud and unhelpful in my chest and I concentrate on my breathing the way I've taught myself to, slow and nasal, until the loud unhelpful thing quiets down to a manageable pace.
I go back the way I came. Third floor landing. West wall, low, left edge of each step. The sensor blinks its four-second heartbeat and ignores me. Fire escape. Alley. Street.
I walk. I do not run.
Matsuda is asleep when I get back, which is fine. I sit in my section and I open the scanner and I look at what I have.
Two hundred and twenty-two pages out of two hundred and forty. Eighteen short. The eighteen that are missing cover the last quarter's distribution summary — the section that consolidates the full route overview into a single document. The section, in other words, that Matsuda's contact will be most interested in.
I put the scanner down.
I look at the ceiling.
What I have is worth something. Incomplete operational logistics data on hero equipment routes across two years is still sensitive material and someone will pay for it. But it is not the seventy thousand Matsuda quoted. It is probably not fifty. It is whatever a buyer decides they're willing to offer for data that is missing its most important eighteen pages, which is the kind of number that gets decided entirely on their terms, not mine.
I went back into that building for two hundred and forty pages and came out with two hundred and twenty-two.
The difference is eighteen pages and one set of footsteps that belonged to someone I never saw and couldn't risk using the Quirk on because I didn't have eye contact and the headache would have put me on the floor.
Five thousand six hundred yen left in reserves. Scanner purchased. Ogata's utility payment in six days.
I hold the scanner in both hands and I think about the eighteen missing pages and I think about the person who walked down that hall and I think about all the ways my planning was good and precise and careful and still left room for the one thing it didn't account for.
There is always one thing.
There is always going to be one thing, until I build something big enough that the one thing doesn't matter anymore.
I put the scanner in the bag. I lie down on the concrete. I close my eyes.
Tomorrow I tell Matsuda. Tomorrow we figure out what the incomplete set is worth and who will buy it and for how much. Tomorrow I start thinking about whether I go back for the eighteen pages or cut my losses and move on to something else.
Tonight I just lie here in the dark under Ogata's lanterns and let the fact of another incomplete win settle over me like the weight of the ceiling above.
"Life is full of shit"