Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive

by Shiden Kanzaki

  He seemed like the embodiment of the perfect man—tall, handsome, highly educated, well paid. But before any of that…he used to be Kisara’s fiancé, too.

  “I thought the whole thing was broken off after you left the family, Kisara.”

  “I know. So did I. What could Shigaki be thinking at this point…?”

  Rentaro could feel something spread out from his chest—something he couldn’t describe, but wanted none of. He didn’t want to hear anything else from her—for some reason, he was seized by an impulse to get up and walk out of the room immediately. But instead he silently handed the résumé back to Kisara, acting like it was nothing.

  “So when’re you gonna meet him?”

  “…Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  Which meant the proposal must’ve come a long time ago.

  “So you’ve already agreed to meet, or…?”

  Kisara twirled her hair around her finger as she averted her eyes. “I wasn’t trying to hide it or anything. It was just kind of hard for me to say it…so I wound up dragging it out all the way to today.”

  Rentaro realized he had been unconsciously clenching his fists so hard that he could feel his nails against his skin. Kisara lifted her head.

  “I want you to be there for me, Satomi. As my attendant.”

  “…What do you mean?”

  “Hitsuma is going to have his mother and father as attendants, and Shigaki was going to act as both my manager and attendant, but I still need someone else. I don’t really have anyone to ask besides you, so… Please. I know this is unusual, but would you mind accompanying me to the meeting?”

  “……Fine by me.”

  “Really? Good.”

  The beauty in black breathed a sigh of relief, but still anxiously darted her eyes back toward Rentaro.

  “What do you think, Satomi?”

  “What…?”

  “Are you, like, against it?”

  Of course he was. Just imagining Kisara being held in the arms of another man made him feel sick to his stomach.

  But Rentaro knew well enough by now. This was Kisara Tendo. A proper girl, from a proper family. The class system may have disappeared from modern Japanese society long ago, but among super-rich families like the Tendos, things hadn’t changed much.

  If she was a Tendo girl, it was only common sense that she would marry the scion of another suitably wealthy family. The idea of her running off with some stray dog instead was preposterous. Ever since it was founded, the Tendo family had never allowed a single exception to this ironclad rule.

  Practically speaking, Kisara should never have even exchanged words with the mere adopted child she shared a home with—nor had any other personal connection, for the rest of either of their lives.

  That was something the Tendo private tutor imprinted deep into Rentaro’s mind from the moment he was taken in, almost to the point of brainwashing. “Listen,” she would say. “Tendos aren’t like regular people. Don’t you dare catch yourself acting like you’re one of them.”

  “…I think it’d be a good match. If it works out okay and you wind up being happy with it, I bet Enju and Tina would love that.”

  “You, too, Satomi?”

  Light reflected from a passing car’s high beams streaked across the room for an instant, bathing Rentaro’s and Kisara’s heads in white light. He looked up, straight at Kisara.

  “Of course.”

  For some reason, the reply made Kisara lower her head, her face like a wounded animal. After a moment, she forced a smile, trying her best to bottle it up.

  “Yeah…I guess so. It’s not like we were ever exactly a pair or anything, besides. I’m acting pretty stupid, aren’t I?”

  She gave herself a light bop on the head and stuck out her tongue, determined to laugh it all away.

  That was the last straw.

  “Hey, I’m gonna go look for Enju and Tina. I’m kinda worried about them.”

  Rentaro turned around as he finished, going through the office door before he could hear whatever Kisara said in response.

  As he quickly descended the staircase, trying his hardest to leave the Happy Building as fast as humanly possible, he felt a small jolt in his right shoulder. His mind was so occupied with Kisara that it took him a beat before he realized who he had bumped into.

  “Hey! Hey, is that you, Rentaro?”

  He looked up in surprise to find the face of a man, one who had only just begun to climb the building’s stairs. Traces of happiness streaked across that face. He was young, maybe about Rentaro’s age. His face was long, his brow broad, and his hair a shade between brown and orange. His pointed gaze gave him the look of a street thug, but something about his smile made him seem oddly charming when he flashed it.

  Rentaro combed his memory—he looked familiar to him. The man before him began to overlap with the face of a boy from his memory. He let out a yelp.

  “Wait, are you Suibara? Kihachi Suibara, year four, class five, seat ten?”

  That was apparently the right answer. The man gave him a broad grin and stuffed his hands into his jeans. “Yuh-huh…Rentaro Satomi, year four, class five, seat nine…” Before he could finish saying it, Suibara’s arms were around Rentaro. “Damn, it’s been years!” he exclaimed. “Hope you’ve been doing good, you bastard!”

  “Y-yeah, you, too.”

  Rentaro’s vision lurched to and fro as this unexpected old friend jostled him in his arms. But instead of enjoying this almost too-perfect chance encounter, another sensation made the hairs on his neck stand on end.

  He looked up at the roof of the building in front of him. “But, Suibara, what are you doing here? You haven’t started cruising cabarets or gay bars at age sixteen or anything, right…?” He noticed the Rolex on Suibara’s wrist as he spoke. “And I guess you aren’t poor enough that you’re borrowing money from the yakuza, either.”

  “Of course not, you dumbass,” an astonished Suibara replied, eyes half-closed.

  “So—”

  Suibara thrust a thumb toward his face.

  “You guessed it! I’m here to visit the Tendo Civil Security Agency. I’m a client, Rentaro.”

  —A client? This childhood friend that he hadn’t spoken to in years was a client? Between this and Hitsuma’s name coming up a moment ago, a lot of old friends were popping up in the oddest of places.

  Suibara shrugged at the notably bewildered Rentaro. “Well, we ain’t just gonna stand by the stairs here, are we? Show me where your company is!”

  “Um…”

  Rentaro hesitated. He had just half-forcibly ended a conversation with Kisara and all but sprinted out of the office. Something told him trudging back up wasn’t a good idea right now.

  He shook his head. No. I gotta get this client back to our place. Why am I acting so guilty about this?

  Leading the way for Suibara, Rentaro stood before the Tendo office door. It was already dark out, but there was no sign of a light inside. Pushing the door open, he saw Kisara sitting in her office chair, staring forlornly out the window. Once she noticed them, she shot back to her feet and bounded up to them.

  “Oh, good, Satomi,” she gasped. “I was thinking about some stuff just now, and—!” She stopped abruptly, presumably noticing Suibara behind him.

  Rentaro could barely stand the awkwardness of it all, but kept it off his face. “I got a client,” he whispered.

  Kisara, looking happy about something else up to now, froze. She hung her head back down, as if heartbroken.

  “Oh…”

  What the hell? Rentaro thought. A few hours ago, you were practically pleading for a client to come in through the door.

  Suibara hurriedly intervened. “Um, I’m sorry, did I come at a bad time or something?”

  Kisara shook her head before Rentaro could open his mouth. “No, not at all. Good evening. My name’s Kisara Tendo, and I’m the president.” With a shallow smile, she extended a hand. Suibara, a surprised look on his fac
e, gingerly accepted.

  “Uh, hello. I’m Kihachi Suibara.”

  “Come on in. It’s kind of dirty, I know, but…” Kisara pushed a button on the remote she had stationed on the desk. Dazzling light poured from the ceiling, making Rentaro instinctively squint.

  Pictures drawn by Enju and Tina were strewn around the room, and the would-be dinner of sweet potatoes and nothing else was still laid out on the table. Kisara’s show of humility was clearly anything but a show as the full state of the office came into view.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll clean this up in a sec…”

  “Oh! No, actually, about that…” Suibara paused a moment before continuing. “I’d prefer to talk to Rentaro alone about this job, actually. Sorry if that’s weird…”

  Rentaro and Kisara exchanged glances, and he silently signaled her to leave. The request seemed baffling to him, but he could hardly turn this guy down now. He gave an affirmative nod to Suibara, who nodded back in agreement.

  “All right. I’ll go look after Enju and Tina, then.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Once he was sure Kisara was out of sight downstairs, Rentaro cleared the dishes and sat across the table from Suibara. The young man propped his arms on top of the backrest, clearly at ease.

  “That’s Kisara Tendo, huh? Man, you were head over heels for her back when we were all kids, weren’t you? She’s gotten dang pretty since then. That’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life, even.”

  Rentaro silently agreed. Between his encounters with people like Miori Shiba and the Seitenshi herself, he had run into a lot of women with sirenlike beauty. They had lived long enough together that it would occasionally slip his mind, but to Rentaro, the sight of Kisara side by side with Miori or standing alongside the Seitenshi was always such an embarrassment of riches for him that it’d often take his breath away. And now this beauty was going to discuss a marriage proposal with Atsuro Hitsuma tomorrow. Rentaro shook his head to clear his mind of the distractions plaguing it.

  “So, what did you need?”

  Suibara studied the office around him like a curious archaeologist. “Oh! So, hey, do you remember how it was when we first met?”

  “Hmm? Yeah, I do…”

  If he closed his eyes, he could instantly transport his mind back to the fourth year of elementary school. It was four years after Rentaro lost his right arm, his right leg, and his eye. Because he was still growing, he had to have his artificial limbs replaced frequently. The continual pain he experienced each day made him want to die at times.

  The way he could hide his metal skin under an artificial human epidermis was a fairly recent invention in the grand scheme of things. In his younger years, during school and for every other hour of the day and night, Rentaro had to live with a pair of dull, black prosthetic limbs for all the world to see.

  “Nobody wanted to come near me. They were all freaked out by this weird black arm and leg I had. But you weren’t. I think the rest of the class shunned you, too, right? Because there was one of the Cursed Children in your family.”

  “Yeah. My little sister.”

  The story of Suibara and his sister ultimately fell down a tragic path. Once the child’s presence was known to the general public, a lot of people naturally began to have a problem with that.

  Their mother was the first family member to let it all break her down—the stones her neighbors lobbed through the windows, the filthy diatribes spray-painted on the fence. “If only she wasn’t here,” she’d whisper to herself over and over like a woman possessed—and, unfortunately, Suibara’s father kept a pistol inside a locker at their home for self-defense. Everything was in place for a tragedy.

  “We were together in our loneliness,” Rentaro said in profound tones. “That’s why we started hanging out and playing with each other.”

  “Yeah!” Suibara excitedly added. “You knew a ton about stuff like fish and bugs, and we’d go running around the hills and stuff. That was so much fun! It’s like just being with you helped me learn all kinds of things, y’know? Like how to catch crayfish with a string, or how to mount an insect specimen.”

  His words were all it took to jog his memory. Soon they were sprung to life by the dozen, as if bursting out of a giant toy box. Back when he had no friends and couldn’t even leave the house freely, Rentaro would hole up in the Tendo family library and spend the entire day poring over full-color insect field guides and plant references. After a while, there was no one who could even hope to challenge his knowledge.

  “Yeah, and I learned how to trash talk from you, didn’t I?”

  Suibara beamed. “Yeah, I remember how you were all ‘to-mah-to’ when we first met.”

  Rentaro turned away, cheeks red with embarrassment.

  “Ah, shut up. Kisara was really sad once you started rubbing off on me, y’know. She was like, ‘Satomi’s talking like this criminal now!’”

  “Oh, don’t give me that crap! Who’s the guy who started imitating me in the first place?”

  “Ah, eat shit and die.”

  “You first!”

  Once their eyes met again, Rentaro and Suibara grinned at each other.

  “Rentaro,” Suibara said, leaning forward on his sofa deep in thought and lowering his eyes down to his clasped hands. “It probably wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t show this to you first.”

  The item he took out from a side pocket made Rentaro gasp. It was a black chunk of metal that made a clink when he put it on the glass table. He spotted a trigger attached to the dull matte-black frame. It was a sixth-generation Glock pistol, one where even the slide was made of a glass-fiber reinforced polymer to reduce the gun’s weight.

  Why? was the first question that came to mind. The general public still wasn’t allowed to carry concealed weapons outside their homes. According to the laws of Japan in 2031, there were three types of people allowed to walk around armed in public: the police, members of the self-defense force, and—

  Suibara placed something else from his pocket on the gun: a synthetic leather rail-pass holder. Seeing the civsec license inside, complete with ID photo, gave Rentaro the biggest shock of the evening.

  “Suibara, you’re a civsec?”

  Suibara, grinning, tapped a few buttons on the cell phone in his pocket and showed it to him. The screen showed a photo of a girl, her hair done up in a bob cut, her averted eyes indicating she didn’t enjoy having her picture taken very much.

  “Whoa, did you…?”

  Failing to notice Rentaro’s astonishment, Suibara soldiered proudly on. “That’s my Initiator. Her name’s Hotaru Kouro, and, man, is she a cutie, am I right? I mean, my grandma used to say, ‘You’re so sweet, I could just eat you up,’ but now I think I get what she was talking—”

  “Stop.”

  Rentaro, his mind still a jumble, just barely managed to get the syllable out. Suibara’s sister was one of the Cursed Children. It had wrecked the entire family. The idea of him teaming up with another one of them and working the civsec beat was hard for Rentaro to swallow. What’s more, this job meant that he was all but completely dependent on his Initiator if he wanted to stay alive. It had to be a bitter pill.

  “Is she…taking the place of your dead sister for you?”

  The quiet question made Suibara peevishly turn his face away. “Nothing like that, no. What’s the big deal?” Then, after a moment’s pause, he placed an elbow on the table and rested his chin above it. “You wanna hear about this job for you, or what?”

  Rentaro thought about that. A civsec hiring another civsec—subcontracting work, in other words—generally meant the client had a job that was too much work for him to handle alone. That often meant whoever he hired would get the short end of the stick paywise. But despite knowing that bit of conventional wisdom, something still told Rentaro there wasn’t anything conventional at all about Suibara’s job.

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Now we’re talking,” Suibara replied. But what he had for Ren
taro next was a complete reversal of his light, friendly tone.

  “So, Rentaro, like… You were the last guinea pig for the Ground Self-Defense Force’s enhanced-soldier project, right?”

  This shock was enough to send Rentaro back to his feet.

  Why did he know that? Maybe Suibara could surmise that Rentaro’s artificial limbs were black because they were made out of Varanium, but there was no possible way he could’ve connected that with the so-called New Humanity Creation Project.

  “Bingo, huh?” Suibara murmured as he glanced sidelong at the stunned, wide-eyed Rentaro. But there was something close to regret on his face, like he’d just realized he was right when he had wanted to be wrong.

  “So look, Rentaro, I picked up on some serious shit earlier. Have you ever heard of the New World Creation Project or the Black Swan Project? Either of those names, at least?”

  “New World… Black Swan Project? …No.”

  The “New World” Creation Project? What’s that? It sounded too close to the “New Humanity” Creation Project.

  An ominous premonition started to build in Rentaro’s spine.

  “Okay,” Suibara muttered in reply. Then he fell silent for a few moments, staring at the glass ashtray on the table. Rentaro waited patiently for him to go on.

  “Well…I don’t know how much you’re aware of this, Rentaro, but among us civsec folk, you’re the subject of a lotta rumors. You were raised by the Tendo family, and I’ve heard that you got personal connections with Lady Seitenshi.” He paused, face turned upward. “So that’s what I’m here for. I want you to get me connected with the Tendo Group or Lady Seitenshi. I don’t care what it takes; I gotta get a person-to-person audience with either her or her aide, Kikunojo Tendo. We’re talking serious crisis mode for all of Tokyo Area, you know what I mean?”

  “Is that connected to the projects you just mentioned?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s no other middleman you can go through besides me?”

  “No. If I try that, there’s no telling where they’ll hear about it.”

  “Are you trying to blow the whistle about something? ’Cause if you have any evidence you can give me, I can make sure it gets to her.”