Which meant—
Rentaro and Tina looked at each other and shouted in unison:
“They’re stealing our bounty!!”
2
It was mid-August, and even with the Gastrea War decimating population figures worldwide, global climate change was still a serious problem.
The latest way it manifested itself was in the tundra—the eternally frozen land up north. Now that the permafrost wasn’t so permanent any longer, the animal and plant carcasses caught under the ice were starting to decompose, unleashing an astonishing amount of methane into the atmosphere and further accelerating the warming trend. The media were on it like hyenas, of course.
The human race was releasing only a tiny fraction of the carbon dioxide that it used to, but they were still inheriting the cost for all the excesses of generations past. For all anyone knew, it was well beyond the point that anything could be done about it.
Even when operating at full blast, the air-conditioning unit back at the office could do little against the 39 degree Celsius temperature outside. The droning of the cicadas began to sound like a plea for help in the occupants’ ears.
At least it was quiet inside the office. Solemn, even, in a way. Tina, Enju, and Rentaro were at their seats, meekly examining one another as the sweat poured down.
In a corner of the Tendo Civil Security Agency, lit diagonally by soft light from the setting sun, lounge chairs were positioned around a glass table. It was meant for conducting conversations with paying customers, although in practice it wasn’t used for this purpose too often.
Kisara Tendo, wearing an apron tied over her school uniform, appeared through the noren curtain separating the lounge from the kitchen area, setting four plates on the glass table. The one placed in front of Rentaro emanated a sweet scent that found its way into his nostrils as the steam washed against his face. It was enough to make his stomach growl.
Settling down with her own plate, Kisara closed her eyes and put her hands together.
“All right, everyone. Ready to get started?”
Rentaro and Enju did the same, but just as they were about to tuck in, someone shouted “Wait a minute!” in a panic.
Tina looked around in abject bewilderment, then pointed at her plate.
“Um…what is this?”
Rentaro followed Tina’s eyes down to the object placed on her lily-white plate. It was shaped like a somewhat elongated diamond, laid upon the plate in all its purple, tuberous glory.
“What is it? …Well, it’s a potato, right? A sweet potato, to be exact. A perennial root vegetable from the family Convolvulaceae.”
“Th-that’s not really what I meant… I mean, is this all? This is all we have for dinner tonight?”
Kisara placed an index finger on her chin, having apparent trouble understanding Tina’s complaint. “Hmmm,” she muttered, before slapping a fist against her hand. “I got it! Just a minute, okay?”
Tina breathed a sigh of relief as Kisara ventured back into the kitchen. “Wow, President Tendo, you sure can be a prankster sometimes!”
Before long, Kisara cheerfully came back out, plinking a cup down in front of Tina.
“Here you go. A glass of tap water. All the seconds you want, too.”
Tina’s face stiffened for a moment.
“Uhhmm, President…? Is our agency really this short on money?”
“It’s desperate.”
“Wh-what’s on the menu tomorrow?”
“Bean and bean-sprout soup. Also, plain udon noodles. I’ve got some bread crusts that the bakery gave me for free, too.”
“What about the day after that?”
“Sautéed bean sprouts and bread crusts.”
“And the next day?”
“Bread crusts.”
Tina began to see a pattern emerge.
“Umm, and f-four days from now?”
Kisara, impressed that she even dared to ask, gave herself a confident thump on the chest and smiled warmly.
“Well, on the fourth day, I figure we’d change it up a little and go with fried bread crusts!”
“That’s the same thing!” Tina shouted. “Just because they eat fried food all the time in the US doesn’t mean I have to!”
This triggered a sudden mood swing on Kisara’s part. She stood up and slapped her hands against the table.
“What do you want from me?! We’ve completed exactly zero cases this month, too! I was preparing beefsteaks for all of us tonight, but Satomi’s such an idiot that we’re out the entire bounty! And we even had you on site this time, Tina…!”
Rentaro scratched the back of his head. He was certainly not expecting the Katagiri Civil Security Agency to scavenge his (okay, their) kill like that. The end result was all too clear, however: Today, the civsec experts at the Tendo agency were going hungry.
“But why,” asked Enju as she poked at her sweet potato with a finger, “are we always so penniless like this?”
“Yeah.” Tina nodded, seeing the logic in this. “Where’s our pay from the Third Kanto Battle, Kisara?”
The Tendo Civil Security Agency, after all, had at least three major jobs under its belt. The Kagetane Hiruko terror incident; foiling the attempt on the Seitenshi’s life; and more or less snapping victory from the jaws of defeat during the Third Kanto Battle. Each should have generated a nontrivial payment on its own.
Kisara looked oddly startled for a moment. Then she turned her eyes upward, cheeks reddening. “Listen, Satomi,” she mumbled. “I kept this under wraps until now, but about two months before the Hiruko case, our finances pretty much hit the limit and I couldn’t pay the lease on the office any longer. So I, uh… I kind of borrowed some money.”
“From where?” Rentaro asked, already dreading the potential answer. Kisara replied by bashfully pointing up at the ceiling. Their upstairs neighbors—Kofu Finance, the friendly neighborhood yakuza-funded loan shark.
“You might be too stupid to realize this,” Kisara dolefully continued, “but when you take out a loan, there’s something called ‘compounding interest.’ For example, let’s say I borrowed a million yen, right? After ten days, they’d apply ten percent interest on it, so now I have to pay back 1.1 million instead. Then, ten days after that, they add on ten percent of that 1.1 million figure…so then it becomes 1.21 million.”
That was all it took for Tina to put her hands to her face and start crying. Rentaro, for his part, closed his eyes tightly and silently apologized to her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Tina. It’s not your fault our president is so clueless.
“What’d you use for collateral when you borrowed the money?”
“Y’organs.”
“Buh?”
Kisara said it a little too quickly for Rentaro to pick up.
“I said…your organs, Satomi. Like, Abe up there said your lungs and corneas and stuff would go for a lot of money, so…”
“Wuh?”
Kisara, cheeks still flushed, put her hands on her hips. “Look, you’re my employee, Satomi,” she sulked. “I’m the president, and that means you’re mine. Plus, you get to work for one of the cutest presidents out there. A cornea or spleen or two is more than a fair price for that!”
Rentaro stared at Kisara. There were no words.
—Did I just have this girl I like order me to hand over my internal organs?
Enju looked equally disgusted, but in another moment her eyes were back down upon her plate.
“So these potatoes…”
Kisara ran a hand up through her black hair. “Uh-huh,” she intoned. “Kind of the Last Supper, if you know what I mean. Starting today, it’s nothing but bean sprouts and bread crusts, day in, day out. By which I mean six days, because starting day seven, we’re gonna have nothing but water to live on. I hope you enjoy all the luxury I’m giving you tonight.”
The group listlessly stared at the sweet potatoes on each respective plate. A sudden quiet descended upon the office.
Enju silently raised a ha
nd. “I have a suggestion on how we can split these,” she said. “We should divide Kisara’s potato into thirds and give one piece each to me, Tina, and Rentaro.”
“Wh-why is that?”
“We three couldn’t survive three days without food or water, but with all the nutrients you have stored in your breasts, Kisara, I’m sure you’d be all right for at least a year or so.”
“Oh, a year without food or water, huh?” Now it was Kisara’s turn to raise her voice. “I’m not a monster! Besides, Enju, you’re always picking on me about my chest, but it’s not like this is all wine and roses for me! They make my shoulders all sore, there are never any nice-looking bras my size, I keep getting prickly heat all over them…”
Sadly, the pain Kisara’s gifts gave her was not shared with the others.
“Daaaaaahhhh!” Stricken by a sudden case of breast hysteria, Enju lunged over the table toward Kisara. “If you don’t want them, let me take them from you! Give me back the boobs you sucked away from me!”
“Ow ow ow ow! Stop pulling at them, Enju! You’re gonna rip them off!”
Tina shot Rentaro a nervous look. Rentaro shook his head at her and sighed. “The hunger’s just getting us all worked up.” Then he turned toward Kisara, an offhand premonition crossing his mind.
“Hey, um, we are kind of the ‘saviors of Tokyo Area’ and everything, aren’t we? Shouldn’t that earn us at least a little more regular work?”
Kisara, finally a safe distance away from Enju’s ferocious attack, turned back toward him. “It is,” she said, her breath ragged. “Someplace on the east coast of the United States wanted us to eliminate a great white shark Gastrea that’s been appearing around the beach. Apparently it’s been chewing up all the local shark fishermen with gusto, and the local oceanographers and police chiefs don’t know what to do about it. How’s that sound to you?”
“It sounds like something we better leave to an underwater specialist. What else?”
Kisara ripped a page from the memo pad next to the office’s landline phone. “Here, I’ll read it to you,” she said. “‘They’re late with my food delivery again; do something about it.’ ‘I challenge Rentaro Satomi to a duel. Let’s find out which of us is the real man!’ ‘Hey, President Tendo [heavy breathing], what color panties you wearing right now [groan]?’ ‘Get this cockroach out of my closet!’ ‘I want you to kill that good-for-nothing housewife next door for me.’ …That kind of thing.”
A wave of hopelessness crashed over Rentaro. What do people think civsec officers do all day, anyway?
“Okay, well, do we have any other way to make money?”
“You could always work at the gay bar on the first floor, Satomi. They said they’d start you at 8,000 yen an hour.”
“Why don’t you work at the cabaret on the second floor, Kisara? They said they’d give you 10,000!”
“……”
Between the yakuza on the fourth floor, the den mother running the cabaret on the second, and the strapping lads behind the bar on the first, there was something about the Happy Building that kept its tenants either slaphappy or trigger-happy all the year through. Rentaro, given the choice, preferred not to deal with them.
“Still,” Enju murmured, her face harboring serious contemplation. “We might not be wrapping up any jobs, but I heard the number of Gastrea sightings is creeping up.”
Rentaro nodded at the observation. “Yeah. A little too much, if you ask me.”
Whenever a Gastrea was sighted or caught on a security camera, an alert mail was automatically sent to all civsec officers within a ten-kilometer radius. From there, it was an all-out first-come, first-served Gastrea competition. Agencies may have occasionally worked with one another, but generally, whoever struck the killing blow first would get the entire bounty from the government.
That was how civsec agencies kept the books balanced—never receiving formal requests, just hoping the right Gastrea crept along at the right place and time—but the sheer number of incidents lately was getting crazy. The alerts would force Rentaro out of bed in the middle of the night, its shrill, piercing beep even going off during class before summer break began, making his teachers want to stab him.
None of these invaders had triggered a Pandemic yet, thanks to a citizenry well used to evacuation and a herd of civsecs always rushing to the scene in time, but the sheer numbers would put anyone on edge. And to someplace like Tendo Civil Security Agency, getting tossed this way and that by all these alerts and always missing out on the kill by the barest of margins, it was starting to become downright frustrating.
“Is there another Monolith problem, maybe?”
“No way.”
Rentaro was quick to reject Kisara’s question, but his voice trailing off showed that he wasn’t too convinced himself. The previous Third Kanto Battle took place because of a defect in a Monolith, something thought to be impervious to damage. It was a completely avoidable, manmade disaster.
The only sure thing when it came to security was that there was no such thing as a sure thing. It hadn’t even been a month since Tokyo Area paid a dear price for failing to realize that.
The eyes of the agency’s employees wandered over to the window. On the other side, draped in a dark red, the line of Monoliths stood tall, their tops hidden by a line of clouds.
“This really doesn’t taste good…”
Turning back, Rentaro found Tina chewing on the potato, her face puckered. Enju, driven by curiosity, took a bite herself, only to bunch up her face and stick her tongue out.
“Nnh! This isn’t cooked all the way through.”
“Um, really?” said a confused Kisara.
Enju sighed. “Kisara, you should really have Rentaro teach you how to cook sometime. For real.”
The sheltered little rich girl shrugged despondently in response. After a moment, she dejectedly turned her eyes upward.
“Could you?”
“Uh, sure.”
With another deep sigh, Kisara dragged her feet over to the reproduction of some Klimt masterpiece across from her ebony-colored desk. Slipping her hand behind it, she took out a thin envelope.
“All right,” she said, burying a 10,000-yen note in his hand. “Here. My private stash, if you want to call it that. Go buy something with this. You can have Enju and Tina do the shopping.”
The two girls’ faces sparkled with joy.
“We’ll try to keep it as cheap as possible!” Enju said with a wave as she took Tina out of the office.
The sound of them clanging down the stairs faded away, silence reigning once again. It was half past seven in the evening. The wretched-sounding drone and clicking of the evening cicadas filled up the emptiness, and across from the now deep purple sky, the last weak rays of sunshine were dimly lighting the room. Once the sunlight disappeared for good, a nearly full moon drifted into the heavens, the LED lights bordering the signs beyond the window began to systematically flicker into existence, and the Magata neighborhood found new life as a town of the night.
The moldy smell seeped into the room from somewhere.
“We’re alone.”
“We are.” Rentaro stole a glance at the side of Kisara’s face. “And?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you send the girls out shopping because you wanted to talk to me?”
“Well, sort of.”
With practiced hands, Kisara untied the apron behind her back and shook her hair a bit. There was the sound of rustling clothes as the apron fell to her feet. She picked it up and, with the echo of her slip-on loafers, walked over and sat on her ebony work desk, a tad forlorn as she looked at Rentaro.
“Listen, Satomi… I’ve been offered an arranged marriage.”
She looked at the surprised Rentaro, then back down at her feet as she began swinging her long, thin legs back and forth.
“It came to me through Shigaki. I told him I didn’t want anything like that yet, but he’s done a lot for me, so I couldn’t just turn him down�
��”
Through Shigaki, huh…? Having that name brought up left even Rentaro in a weak position. Senichi Shigaki, once a butler at the Tendo residence, was probably approaching fifty-six years old this year. He had known Rentaro and Kisara since back when they lived in the Tendo manor. Even after he retired, he had helped them through all sorts of issues in their lives.
Most important, though, was that (on paper) he was the manager of the Tendo Civil Security Agency, not to mention Rentaro and Kisara’s more-or-less legal guardian. They owed him a lot. She couldn’t dismiss his offer out of hand.
“But why now?”
Kisara had long been disinherited from the Tendo family will. If she was still considered a Tendo woman, it wouldn’t be unusual for her to be forced into a succession of arranged (or even forced) marriage proposals starting at sixteen—a sort of modern human sacrifice still prevalent in Japanese high society. But now that she was de facto not a Tendo, she could no longer effectively function as a tool for a strategic marriage.
What were Shigaki’s aims, making a request like that? Kisara seemed to understand Rentaro’s doubts, but merely shook her head in response. “I don’t know. But you’d know the guy pretty well, Satomi.”
“I would?”
Kisara took a piece of paper out from the desk and gave it to Rentaro. The moment he saw it, he felt a jolt of surprise.
“Atsuro Hitsuma…? …Why?”
The headshot, printed upon the fancy cotton paper used for the résumé-like introductory papers, stared blankly in response. He was somewhat oval-faced, wearing silver-framed eyeglasses and projecting an air of intellectual ease.
“We must have both been eleven, right? The last time we saw Hitsuma.”
Sliding his eyes down, Rentaro saw that he was a police superintendent, working at Tokyo’s metropolitan police department after passing the civil-servant exam. His whole family was in law enforcement, his father the commissioner of the entire force. A brilliant record, all written down in elegant block-style lettering.
Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive Page 3
