**Chapter 19: Undercurrents in the Business District**
We walked through Modu's central business district. The glass curtain walls of the office towers reflected the gray-white clouds.
Hanzi turned her phone screen toward Tsukago. An encrypted document. The sender field had only a single letter. A line of red text was printed across the header: SSS-Class Critical Intelligence.
"From a colleague. Sat on it for a long time before sending it out."
The spreadsheet was dense. All-age schools, from kindergarten to university. The number of incoming students each year had surged. The base of the demographic pyramid was abnormally wide. The middle narrowed sharply.
"As of last quarter. Marriage rate ninety-seven point four percent. Divorce rate zero point three percent. Almost no one who gets married gets divorced. The zero-to-six population is up nearly a hundred percent year over year."
"Elementary school enrollment has broken historical peaks. Middle school and high school numbers are all surging upward. University admissions have nearly doubled in three years. Social mobility is high."
The numbers didn't lie. They stacked on top of each other like building blocks someone kept adding to without checking if the foundation would hold. Every row on that spreadsheet was another year of children fed into the machine. Every column was a pipeline with no exit valve.
"Giving birth to so many. More people are switching careers than entering the workforce. Yesterday's office worker is delivering takeout today. Last month's factory worker is driving a rideshare this month."
"There's plenty of fat to skim here."
"Exactly. Schools take kickbacks. Tutoring companies take kickbacks too. From kindergarten to high school graduation—over a decade—someone's hand is out at every step. Taking kickbacks until your hands cramp."
The document scrolled on. Each new page was denser than the last. The data had been compiled over months, cross-referenced from half a dozen government databases. The colleague who sent it had been sitting on this information, waiting for the right moment to pass it along.
"Childcare facility registrations are rising faster than kindergartens. Parents dump their kids inside and go out looking for work. If they can't find any, they keep having more kids, then dump those in too."
"Cram schools are booked until two in the morning. Kindergartens teach advanced math. Elementary schools run mock corporate interview courses. Three years of middle school to finish advanced calculus, then graduate straight into unemployment."
The whole chain was laid out in those cells and columns. Kindergarten to cram school to university to job market. A conveyor belt with no off-ramp, carrying children from one station to the next. Some fell off early. Most stayed on until the belt dumped them at the end with a diploma and nowhere to go.
"This country is treating children like financial products. Online purchases can be returned. If a kid turns out to be a loss, you can't send them back."
"The labor force can't be converted. What's the point of just having more births. Marriages that can't be dissolved. Children piling up. Factories can't find workers. The talent market is bursting at the seams."
The marriage rate held everyone in place. You couldn't divorce, so you stayed married. You stayed married, so you had more children. You had more children, so you needed more schools. The schools needed more funding, so everyone along the chain took their cut. It was a closed loop, and the only thing it produced was more people to feed back into the same loop.
"Every one of those dozens of résumés we saw in the talent market—behind each one is a person raised from kindergarten to university by this system, then thrown away."
——A system that raises children like financial products. Losses can't be returned. Profits don't belong to the parents.
Beside the fire escape of an office tower's side entrance, two men in suits stood face to face. The alley was narrow, the walls close enough to touch on both sides. Their voices were low, swallowed by the hum of the air conditioning units overhead.
One pulled a kraft-paper envelope out of his briefcase. It was so thick the tape sealing the flap was straining. The paper was worn at the corners, handled too many times, passed between too many hands before arriving here.
"Inside here are the other company's bidding floor prices and client quote ranges for the next three quarters. Combine that with the supply chain quote details you brought out from inside, and in the next round of bidding they won't even have their underwear left."
He held the envelope out. The other man took it. His fingers closed around the paper, and for a moment neither of them moved. The weight of the envelope was the weight of every confidential document that had ever changed hands in an alley like this one.
"That supply chain quote detail is still missing the schedules for three suppliers. But that can be filled in."
"After you fill it in, contact this number directly."
The number was written on a scrap of paper no bigger than a receipt. It had been folded twice. The ink was starting to smudge from the moisture in the air. A number like that was worth more than what was inside the envelope. A number like that was a direct line to someone who could make things happen.
The camera above the fire-escape door had its lens covered by a piece of chewing gum. The gum was still soft, pressed into place less than an hour ago. Someone had stood right here, looked up at the red blinking light, and decided it needed to go blind before the envelope changed hands.
They slipped out of the fire escape one after the other, rounded the alley mouth, and dissolved into the main street crowd. Their footsteps were quick, purposeful, swallowed by the noise of the city. One turned left toward the subway entrance. The other turned right and vanished behind a row of parked delivery vans.
The alley went quiet. Only the camera above the fire-escape door was still lit, its red indicator light blurring into a small halo in the damp air. The chewing gum held. The lens saw nothing. By the time anyone checked the footage, the transaction would be hours old, the data already in someone else's hands, the bid already lost.