Volume Two: The Floor Below*
"You think you are running from death. You are running toward the thing that sent it."
Chapter 11: The Morning After
Kaito did not die at 11:58 PM.
He sat in the hotel dining room and watched the clock on his phone tick past midnight and felt nothing in particular. That was the strange part. Eleven years of building fake lives, and the moment his real one was handed back to him, he felt nothing.
Kira had made a phone call at 11:45. Three sentences, flat voice, like she was confirming a restaurant reservation. When she put the phone down she said "it's done" and poured herself more tea.
Just like that.
Kaito looked at his hands on the table. Same hands. Same ink stain on his left cuff from three weeks ago that he kept meaning to deal with. He was alive and his hands looked exactly the same as when he thought he was going to die, which felt like it should mean something but didn't yet.
He walked home at one in the morning.
Osaka at that hour was honest in a way the daytime city wasn't. Two drunk salarymen holding each other upright at a taxi stand. A woman walking a very small dog with the focus of someone for whom this walk was the best part of her day. A convenience store worker restocking shelves alone, back to the window, no audience.
Kaito stopped and bought a rice ball and coffee and ate them on the kerb outside. The rice ball tasted like nothing. The coffee tasted like hot water with ambitions. He ate the whole thing anyway because his body needed it and his body was, apparently, going to keep existing and therefore required maintenance.
He went upstairs.
His apartment was exactly how he'd left it. Money still stacked on the table. The letter sitting face down where he'd put it before walking out into what he'd thought was the last night of his life.
He picked up the letter. Looked at it.
Put it in the kitchen drawer under a takeaway menu he'd never used.
He slept for eleven hours.
When he woke up it was two in the afternoon and someone was knocking on his door. He opened it and Naomi was standing there holding two coffees, wearing jeans and a grey jacket, looking like a person rather than an operative. It was somehow startling. Like seeing a surgeon in their pyjamas.
"Tanaka wants a meeting," she said. "Tonight. I thought you might want coffee first."
"How did you find my apartment?" he said.
"Kaito," she said patiently. "We have known your apartment for eight months."
He stepped back from the door. She came in and looked around the way people look around when they are reading a space. The bare walls. The single shelf of unread books he'd bought because a bookshelf looks like a person who stays places.
"You don't have any photographs," she said.
"No."
"Not of anyone?"
"No."
She didn't say anything else about it. She sat down at the table and he sat across from her and they drank their coffee in the quiet of a Namba afternoon. Outside, the city made its city sounds. A delivery truck. Someone's television through the wall.
"How is your son?" Kaito asked.
He hadn't planned to ask this. It came out of him the way honest things do when you are very tired and your defenses are slow.
Naomi looked at him over her cup. "Better. The last scan was good." A pause. "She doesn't know I know about him. It's compartmentalized above my level. I'm telling you because you already know, and because I think you're one of the few people in this organization who will hold that information correctly."
"What does correctly look like?"
"Like you just did," she said. "Asking how he is instead of how it affects the operation."
Kaito nodded slowly.
They finished their coffee.
"The meeting is at eight," Naomi said, standing. "The room above the yakitori place in Fukushima." She paused at the door. "My mother always said the best thing you can do for someone carrying something heavy is give them something uncomplicated to eat." She put a wrapped onigiri on the shelf by the door. "You looked like you hadn't eaten properly in days."
She left.
Kaito stood in his apartment and looked at the onigiri on the shelf. It was wrapped in the careful way of someone who had made it themselves rather than bought it. He picked it up. Held it for a moment.
Then he put it down and went to the bathroom and stood in the shower for twenty minutes and let the hot water run until it went cold, and stood in the cold water a little longer because he felt like he deserved it and he wasn't sure why.