It was Saturday, five PM, the end of the busy time at Café LycoReco. That was when it happened. A very minor, yet impossible to ignore, event.
“Kweh!”
Takina Inoue couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard that rather unremarkable noise. It was the sound of somebody’s slightly wet cough. It was followed by an audible throat clearing, as if something had been blocking the person’s airways. To be more precise, it was the kind of cough that signaled that somebody was sick.
Takina looked around, searching for the source of the cough among the customers and staff scattered around the café. There was one young and one old couple seated on the second floor. In the kitchen, Mika was washing the dishes while Mizuki was assembling a parfait.
Yoneoka, a writer and a regular at LycoReco, was sitting at a low table in the tatami area. Kurumi noticed him staring blankly at his laptop earlier—it had crashed, and she was fixing it for him, restoring any salvageable data.
Another regular, Detective Abe, was sipping his coffee at the counter.
Lastly, Takina’s gaze fell on Chisato, who’d just come out of the restroom. She was pressing her right hand to her throat, looking up in surprise.
It was clear who the culprit was.
“What’s the matter, Chisato? Caught a cold?” Abe asked her in a friendly tone, holding his cup in one hand.
“Hmm, dunno? I think it’s nothing!” Chisato replied chirpily with a laugh.
“Sure, it’s nothing. You know the saying, ‘Idiots don’t catch colds.’ Mr. Abe, here’s your limited-edition kiwi parfait!” said Mizuki as she came over to the counter and placed the parfait down in front of Abe, whose middle-aged face lit up with a childlike joy at the sight of the dessert.
“You’re speaking from firsthand experience, right?” Kurumi laughed mockingly, removing the SSD from Yoneoka’s laptop.
Mizuki yelled at Kurumi. Takina ignored their loud, pointless banter, turning her attention to Chisato instead.
“When did your cough start, Chisato?”
“Not sure… I guess I woke up with a funny feeling in my throat?”
Mika came out of the kitchen.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Maybe we should make an appointment with Dr. Yamagishi? Call her and she’ll see you right away, even at this time.”
Takina didn’t know this “Dr. Yamagishi,” but she guessed she was Chisato’s usual physician.
“Hey, why is everyone making a big deal of it! It’s totally nothing to worry about!”
Mika raised the inner corners of his eyebrows, thinking that Chisato was being stubborn like a little child.
Takina thought to herself that Mika was always overly protective when it came to Chisato.
“I’m perfectly fine! Anyway, we’ve got our board games meetup tonight! And I’m going to—”
“You’re going to lie down,” Takina cut in.
Approaching Chisato from behind, she put her hands on Chisato’s shoulders and started pushing her toward the locker room.
“Let’s take you to the back. I’ll set up the futon for you. Have a lie-down. Come on, Chisato, hurry up.”
“H-hey! I’m fine, honest! Takina, you’re being really pushy… Takina? Are you listening? I’m not sick. It’s just my throat being a bit scratchy today…”
“You will lie down. This isn’t a debate.”
She practically shoved Chisato into the locker room.
“Uh, okay?” Chisato said, turning around so that Takina’s hands slid off her shoulders. “You worry about me so much, Takina.”
Chisato booped Takina’s nose, grinning. Takina, though, stared back at her coldly.
“I’m not worried about you,” she said.
“What? You’re not? But then why do you want me to lie down?”
“Because you’re a liability. We’re a café. You can’t have a sick person serving food and beverages to customers.”
“Oh… Right…”
“Now please go to the back and get some rest.”
“Okay…”
“Or would you rather go home? Can you get home by yourself?”
“I don’t want to go home… I don’t want to miss game night…”
“Then go and have a quiet lie-down. And take your uniform off.”
Takina went rummaging through the lockers, which held all manner of clothing.
“Your sleepover bundle is here, correct? Is this the one? This is yours, isn’t it? Now hurry up and get changed into pajamas. I want you to get a proper rest. What are you waiting for?”
“You sound kinda draconian, Takina. I think this is madness…or is this Sparta?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Okay. You get changed now.”
Nagged by Takina, Chisato gingerly changed out of LycoReco’s Japanese-style waitress uniform into the pajamas she had in her sleepover bundle while Takina prepared the futon for her in the tatami room at the back of the café. Once she was done changing, Chisato followed Takina into the tatami room.
“Get on the futon and rest. If you don’t feel better by evening— Chisato! You look flushed!”
Takina stared intensely at Chisato’s face. Since she was going to nap, Chisato had taken out her hair clip and removed her makeup after changing into her pajamas. Her cheeks were slightly reddened…
Without warning, Takina put her hand on Chisato’s forehead, and then she touched her own forehead to compare.
“You have a fever…I think…”
“Really?”
“Do you want to go home after all?”
“No, no, no! It’s nothing, honestly! It’s just… Right! I’m just blushing! You saw me undressing, and I felt a bit shy!”
“I wasn’t watching you.”
Chisato pursed her lips and folded her arms, looking as if she was thinking hard of some other excuse… In the end, she drew a blank. She unfolded her arms, letting them dangle.
“A bit of rest is all I need to beat this bug,” she said, finally admitting to being unwell.
“Possibly. For now, lie down, and we’ll see how you feel later.”
Takina knelt down by the futon, pulled back the cover diagonally, and patted the mattress. Chisato obediently lay down.
“Did you do anything that might’ve made you sick?” Takina asked while tucking Chisato in.
“Don’t think so.”
“Maybe you slept naked?”
“Oooh, that’d be sexy!”
“You didn’t eat anything you found on the ground?”
“What, like a stray dog?!”
“On the subject of stray dogs, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a feral dog.”
“You might come across a lost pet dog in Tokyo, but strays and ferals get put down for public safety and so they don’t spread rabies. It’s been this way since the war.”
“Yet there are so many feral cats around.”
“Yeah. Dogs get unfairly discriminated against!”
“You’d like to have feral dogs roaming the streets?”
“No, but it’s not fair because cats can spread rabies, too.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought it only affected dogs and humans.”
“Right? It’s because people call it the mad dog disease!”
Chisato told Takina that the disease could actually be transmitted by any mammal, but people most often contracted it by getting unexpectedly bitten by infected dogs on account of dogs being the animals most commonly living near humans.
Takina thought about stray cats, how they were unlikely to suddenly approach and bite you. If anything, they tended to run away from humans.
“But thanks to the rabies vaccine and the extermination of feral dogs in Japan, humans and their pet dogs are safe from rabies.”
“Well, that’s enough about dogs. It’s not really interesting to me.”
“But it was you who brought this up!”
“I wasn’t expecting you to turn it into a lecture.”
“I’m teaching you important stuff here! Rabies is still a serious risk in many countries abroad!”
“But all of us Lycoris are regularly immunized against transmissible diseases.”
Lycoris agents frequently encountered criminals from abroad, so in addition to the standard immunizations administered to children as part of Japan’s free vaccination program, they’d also receive a number of vaccinations against less common diseases from a young age. Many of them had adverse reactions to receiving so many vaccines at once, but it was necessary.
Criminals who entered the country illegally would, of course, not have passed any medical checks, and since the Lycoris often fought at close range, it wasn’t unheard of to come into contact with the targets’ blood.
“See, this is the wrong way of thinking, that it’s fine as long as you’re safe. Vaccination programs are only effective if everyone gets immunized.”
“Yes, you’re right. Now take a nap.”
“Okay, okay. Come to think about it, it’s been two nights since I last slept on a futon.”
“What?”
“Two nights without it, and it already feels like a luxury.”
“Did you not sleep in your bed?”
“No, because the other day we were helping Ms. Itou until morning, remember? It was actually almost noon when we finished.”
“Yes, but we didn’t have to come in to work after that… Did you not go home to sleep?”
Chisato laughed awkwardly.
“I went straight to a movie theater.”
“And after the movie…?”
“I absentmindedly walked over to the café. Muscle memory. Mizuki was zombified after running the shop all by herself, and she pounced on me and wouldn’t let me go until evening!”
“And then…?”
“By then, I was seriously tired. I went home, started getting changed out of my clothes, and ended up falling asleep on the sofa…”
“I knew it. You did sleep naked after all.”
“I wasn’t like, buck naked! I was still wearing panties…”
“Now you’re going to tell me you also ate food you found on the ground?”
“Come on, I wouldn’t do that!”
Takina sighed inwardly at Chisato’s lack of sense… And then she thought about something unpleasant. She put one palm on Chisato’s forehead and bent down low over her, like a bowing waitress at a traditional inn, bringing her face close to Chisato’s hair.
“H-huh?! Sorry, Takina, b-but what are you doing? What is it? Hello? Are you listening?”
Takina almost buried her nose in Chisato’s hair. She was sniffing it.
“Hmm… You don’t stink,” she said.
“I-I did shower before coming in, you know!”
“Your hair smells really nice.”
“………………………Thanks…?”
If Chisato hadn’t showered those two days, despite having been on a big mission involving a gunfight and a lot of running around, that would have been pretty disgusting. She’d have all sorts of dirt on her, in addition to dried-up sweat.
Not only would that be a problem for their café, but it would also not be good for Chisato to be so unhygienic. Takina had been prepared to force her into the bath or at least help her clean herself with warm, wet towels… Thankfully, that wouldn’t be necessary.
“…Huh? Chisato?”