1
Futaba's name was uttered in the desperate rasp of a creature hauling itself out of the deepest pits one clawed hand at a time. It sawed through her bones, reducing her to a ball sinking into a computer chair, hands grasping the headphones that never left her head. They crackled right down her ear canals and eroded her brain like sand wearing down stone. All she could do was scrunch her eyes shut and wait for it pass, like all the other times.
A pair of hands fell over her shoulders and grasped them tight. She felt cold breath on her neck and shivered in their grip, clenching her jaw as hard as she could so the whimpering wouldn't escape. She knew that as long as she stayed still, and as long as she kept quiet, it would grow bored and leave her alone until the next time. That as long as she never looked the creature in the eyes and revealed the fear undoubtedly in her own, she would be fine. Just fine.
As if someone unplugged the headphones, the sound stopped and she was soon embraced by the strained whirring of the computer's cooling fan. On a desk was one monitor of several, hosting numerous open taps on an internet browser she counted to ground herself back in reality. Another monitor displayed moving numbers and oscillating graphs measuring the machine's performance. Everything was as she left it moments ago.
She searched for the phantom touch on her neck, but found only sticky patches of sweat. The room tended to swell with heat and body odour, even during the early Spring. A bath was in order. When the house's only other occupant was gone. Not now, when the world on the other side of the bedroom door housed all kinds of unknown threats. Now she would settle into the blue glow of her monitors.
A melodic ping in her ear. A pop-up box appeared on the main screen displaying sound waves stretching and relaxing. A couple of clicks later and the audio from Cafe Leblanc came through her headphones crunchier and more distorted than she would have liked. An old couple – regulars, talked a lot without spending much on coffee – spoke about the recent spate of traffic accidents dominating the news. The bell above the front door jingled and a newspaper rustled.
"So, you're the one," said Sojiro, his tone as level as the counter he typically sat at.
"Sojiro Sakura?"
A voice she had never heard before. Male, barely detectable over the microphone. She had to press the headphones closer to her ears to hear what this newcomer was saying.
Sojiro sighed. "Yeah, that's me. Look, could you come back later? My regulars are here, and-"
"Oh, no, don't let us interfere with your business," said the old man. "We'll be on our way now."
Ding-a-ling. The couple exited the café. Sojiro clicked his tongue. "Four hours for one cup of joe."
A drawn out pause. It seemed Sojiro was waiting for the newcomer to say something. When he didn't, he said: "So you're the guy. What was your name again?"
"Ren Amamiya."
"Right, I remember now. Last time I spoke to your parents, you were still in elementary school. To think you'd end up like this." Sojiro's tone remained even. "Not that this is the place to talk about it. Follow me."
The voices faded until she could no longer hear them. If Futaba had to guess, Sojiro was taking him upstairs to the attic, where he dumped a bunch of junk he used to keep around the café. Broken furniture, old signs, menus – stuff like that. The microphone didn't reach that far, so she had no idea how often Sojiro went up there, or whether he was in the habit of entertaining strangers and holding secretive discussions. She should let it be, but no – she was Alibaba. Uncovering secrets was kind of her thing.
Problem was, a name and a slither of voice wasn't much to work with. There were lots of Ren's in the world – a simple search yielded countless social media and business profiles – but finding this Ren required something more specific. An email address, phone number, place of work or education... anything with history attached to it.
Her phone winked at her from the desk. She picked it up and swiped away a dozen or so push notifications, before pulling up Sojiro's contact details. Her thumb hovered over the call button. If she called Sojiro now, she could ask him straight up what he was up to, but doing so would imply she knew he was up to something in the first place, which would then prompt all kinds of uncomfortable questions about how and why she lacked the guile to answer. Alibaba could be more direct, but Sojiro would most likely freak out if a stranger suddenly asked what was in his attic.
She leant back in the chair, allowing the suspension to support her weight. On the ceiling were pictures of hieroglyphs, pyramids, ankhs, and all sorts of Egyptian iconography that had fascinated people forever. Whenever she looked at them, she could slip away and feel the scorched sands on her feet and the coarse grains between her toes. In this space, where sand went on for miles and miles, rising and falling in impeccable mounds, she would be totally alone. A singular speck of a lifeform. Every thought she ever had would disperse with the grains kicked about by the wind. In that state, she came to one conclusion.
Sojiro was alone, in a secluded space, with someone he was meeting for the first time, for reasons unknown to her. This someone's presence was so troublesome he could not be spoken to in front of his regular customers or even in public site. He was someone to be hidden away as fast as possible. Something was up, and Sojiro could be involved in some dubious business – in danger, even.
And that would be a big problem for her.
She couldn't ask him directly over the phone, but she could persuade him to come home. She rang and told him exactly that, face flushing as her voice cracked, before hanging up and distracting herself with a forum crawl.
Moments later, Sojiro's voice came through the bedroom door, thin, breathless, damaged by decades of smoking. "Futaba, what's wrong?"
She typed out an answer, erased it, typed it out again, then erased it again. In the end, she settled on a "Nothing" and blew her cheeks out as she got a tired sigh in response.
"I might not be able to come home right away anymore," Sojiro told her. "I'll have to spend longer nights at the café, too."
The first question was why. She could ask it innocently, too, without him suspecting she knew about the stranger in Leblanc's attic.
She sent back an "Okay".
"Don't worry about me. It'll all work out."
Sojiro shuffled away, slippers scuffing the floor. Apparently, he closed the café early that night, stranding a handful of regulars outside. He made her curry, which of course she ate up in record time (technically every time was a record time, but she preferred not to think too hard about it), and then immersed himself in late night TV until he fell asleep on the sofa.
The whole thing was too suspicious.
She knew she should trust him, but she couldn't help herself tuning back into Leblanc, listening out for the slightest of sounds that something could be awry. There was a hollow tapping in the distance, coming out in uneven bursts until fading. Soon, midnight struck, and everything fell silent. She pulled the headphones off her head, letting the earmuffs tussle her hair, and rubbed her searing eyes. The time said "wasted evening". Her head said "go to bed, you crazy person".
That's what she tried to do. Even tried counting sheep, too. She was well into the millions when she accepted the annoying truth.
She wasn't sleeping that night.
Lying down on a mattress and tucking herself under the covers was the starting pistol. Her brain's synapses fired off like sparklers, searching for any connection they could and establishing one every thousandth attempt. The solution to a problem she encountered on a project eight hours ago would come to her, only to be swamped by unsavoury opinions on a pair of fellow players on the foreign MMO she was currently playing and how to insult them in English. When that hit a dead end, usually after realising translation apps would make her sound dumb rather than witty, she'd ponder the applications of cognitive pscience, recalling the bulky passage she read the day before, reciting it word for word and finding the crumbling textbook supporting a stack of other books in the corner irresistible. Then, in the process of pulling it out without the entire thing crumbling in a paper avalanche, she'd lose interest.
How her mind worked was a complete mystery. She was sure by this point the sleep function in her brain was bugged beyond repair and needed replacing with new hardware.
In all likelihood, it was her computer usage. Common advice stated you should avoid using computer devices – phones, tables, laptops, and the like – before bed time, as the light from the screens tricked your brain into being awake. It was recommended to switch everything off at least an hour before sleep, to allow the brain to wind down and communicate to the whole body it was time for rest. But no matter how often Futaba recited this advice, it never stuck. It could never compete with the convenience of transitioning from computer chair to bed, bringing a wireless keyboard and mouse over with her and binging on anime all night from the comfort of her sheets. Nor could it beat out the hard-coded habit of whipping out a mobile phone and scrolling through social media for an easy dopamine fix. By the time she was done, commuters would be scurrying to catch the early trains at Yongen-Jaya station, and she would finally decide to turn in, only to find out she felt too tired to sleep, stress out because she couldn't get to sleep, and then return to her desk as bleary-eyed as the overworked commuters on those trains.
This night was no exception, and as she flopped back into her chair she raised her legs and perched her feet on the edge of her desk. Using it as leverage, she pushed the chair back, then gripped with her toes to draw herself back in. Back and forth, in front of blank screens and a keyboard with its LED lights extinguished, looking as lonely as a carnival that had been switched off for the day. She couldn't switch them on in this state; sleep-deprived fingers made for sloppy code, and sloppy code lead to faulty programmes frazzled minds were ill-equipped to deal with. She didn't fancy a day in a hole of her own making.
So now what? Her phone had a page full of games. Brain teasers and puzzles to kick-start her brain when she was in a slump, competitive multiplayer games to vent, and a shameful amount of gacha games downloaded in envious fits after seeing people slobbering over the latest designs, then abandoned when her luck plummeted to zero and her rolls yielded dupes and trash. It was just as well she didn't have a card linked to any of the games, otherwise she might have spent a fortune on in-app purchases.
Suddenly, 7am. The front door sliding open and snapping shut signalled Sojiro's departure. Time for a bath.
She peered around the bedroom door. To the right, laminate floorboards leading to a dead end. To the left, laminate floorboards leading to the stairs, three stops on the way. One was the bathroom, which reeked of aftershave. The offending bottle, a tiny cuboid with a fancy title promising the stench of youth, was left by the sink. Putting it away, she caught her reflection in the cabinet mirror. Flakes of dry skin peeling off her forehead, dark rings under puffy eyelids hiding bloodshot eyes, splotches of acne invading her cheeks, and a cracking pair of lips in need of water. She was the monster living in the closet.
Being emerged in water was fascinating. Every twitch and jerk of a limb shifted its mass in one direction, pulling her along with it. Then it would settle atop her shoulders and wrap around her neck like a fluffy sweater, encouraging her to sink further and extract even more warmth out of something already smothering her entire body. Her brain ceased its hyperactive activity, deeming this outcome acceptable, disabling its survival instincts because not even someone as sleep-deprived as her could fall asleep in the bath, easy as it would be-
Her hands flew to her ears, pressing them tight to her skull. She tucked her chin in and folded into herself until she was almost kissing the porcelain, it growing louder, eager, almost satisfied...
Her head exploded out from under the surface. Tendrils of hair plastered to her face like over-affectionate seaweed. The disturbed bath water heaved over the edge and splashed onto the bathroom floor. She glanced up, gulping in air. A figure illuminated by the sunlight filtering in from the tiny window offered a hand to her. She reached out to take it but only grasped at air and wiped away the illusion. The everyday bathroom, now infested by pools of water, came back into view.
She had to get out. Dry off, clean up the mess before Sojiro came back and hat a fit, and then go to bed and sleep it all off.
By lunchtime, she was having a dreamless rest.
The bells above the front door hadn't even finished jingling when Sojiro launched into his new tenant. "I just got off the phone to your school."
Futaba squirmed in her chair as the microphone fizzed. She edged forward, keeping a hand on her earphones so they wouldn't slip from her head.
Ren Amamiya's response was barely audible. "I'm sorry."
"Do you even know what probation means?" Sojiro sounded incredulous. "Keep this up and they'll be hauling you off to juvie in no time."
She imagined Ren glaring back at Sojiro in unrepentant defiance, like a naughty child not at all sorry for what they had just done. She snorted, and the image disintegrated. In its place, a teen with unidentifiable features and of a vague height, dressed in prison rags sneered at his warden.
What this person was doing in Café Leblanc was anyone's guess.
Either it was a defect in Sojiro's thinking, or there was something else at play here. A threat, some incentive, or something of benefit to all involved. A complicated arrangement involving a wayward son spending his probation for an unknown crime in the attic of a retro-style café in a tucked away part of Tokyo couldn't have been something decided on a whim. Sojiro may have been the type to adopt all the stray cats in Yongen-Jaya if he could, but even he wouldn't wake up one day and decide he needed a criminal in his life. Somebody had to have asked him, and him specifically.
The obvious answer was the parents: the Amamiyas. They and Sojiro had a connection. She could work out what it was, too. All it would take would be a peek into Sojiro's bank account to find a transfer of money from a unusual source, which could then be traced until she stumbled upon the source. Once she knew that, she could dig up information on Ren Amamiya himself; his age, what school he attended, and, most importantly, the nature of his crime.
But she didn't do any of that. When it came to Sojiro, there was a line she refused to cross.
She was the notorious hacker Alibaba. No secret was safe from her, especially if they belonged to abusive companies and corrupt organisations. Sojiro was neither of those things, therefore she refrained from prying into his business. Going behind his back, knowing he'd probably never find out unless she told him, did not sit right with her.
The bug planted in Leblanc didn't count. That was there so she could pick up on unscrupulous individuals who threatened the business. Make no mistake, this new guy was one such individual, and should the day come when he harmed Sojiro, she would make him pay. There'd be no more holding back.
She decreed it, there and then: she'd be keeping a very close on Ren Amamiya.