“Why?” Sora leaned forward, trying to find a way to dispel the fate they’d been burdened with. It might be possible if Fuuka remembered how it had begun.
“When I kill someone, I don’t have any time to think,” Fuuka confessed helplessly, first to Sora, then to Tamuramaro. “There’s nothing in my head. My body just moves. I’m not even thinking about killing or not killing.”
He never intended to kill. He couldn’t change an intention that was never there in the first place.
“Then who’s doing the thinking?”
Just as the question escaped Sora, Tamuramaro interrupted by saying Fuuka’s name. Gripping the pencil with his large hand and pressing the hard lead against the notebook, he wrote a single kanji character in one smooth, swift motion.
“That’s sheath.”
He wrote the character big on the paper, laying down each stroke and dot very clearly.
“Looks hard…”
“It’s made up of the characters for leather and to imitate. Probably because the sheath is where you keep a sword, and there was a time when they used leather to protect the blade.”
“‘To imitate’—what does that mean here?”
“To become similar, to resemble. To become the same.”
“Sheath.” Fuuka picked up his pencil and wrote the character slowly, intoning the word as if to drink in its meaning. He wrote leather for protection on the left, and imitate for becoming similar on the right, then carefully came to a stop.
“Sheath.” Fuuka smiled blissfully.
Sora studied his brother’s profile. He was certainly so much more than a sheath. He promised himself that he would protect his beloved brother’s path, wherever it led, no matter what.
It was long past midnight, and the crescent moon was a thin sliver of silver in the sky. Sora, who had been staring at the computer screen in his office facing the street, sensed the presence of a man standing on the threshold that led to the main part of the house.
“Our bodies have such a troublesome design, don’t you think? We get hungry; we get sleepy. We feel pain; we get tired. Wrestling with a laptop for long hours kills our eyes and shoulders. But we can’t die. What a punishment,” Sora told Tamuramaro, who was standing behind him.
“I have to agree with that. And I’m the great sei-i taishogun. People all over sing praises of my valor, and I feel like I’m dying when I look at a screen for too long.”
After his lesson with Fuuka, Tamuramaro had gone upstairs again to examine all the information. He looked utterly exhausted as he came to Sora’s side with a tablet in one hand.
“But we never die.”
He pulled over a navy office chair next to Sora, who was sitting at his wide desk, and sat down. The office was about 290 square feet, fitted with dark-grained wooden floorboards. Instead of a set of couches for receiving guests, there was an office desk with four nicely designed office chairs.
“Gotta say, your office is minimalist at best,” Tamuramaro remarked, carefully regarding the space for the first time and shaking his head.
The shutters were down over the entrance, and the wooden indigo blinds above the window that looked out over the little garden path was the most the office could claim as interior decor. The opposite wall was lined with bookshelves containing books and documents.
“I never imagined I’d have so few visitors. I even set up separate male and female toilets.” Sora sighed, regretting the unnecessary money he’d spent on the bathroom during the renovation. He’d stowed away the partition long ago, and he didn’t even remember where it was anymore.
“Ms. Koudera can use the women’s toilet. Tell me, young Sora, what’s in that document case of yours? It looks like it’s about to explode.”
“Maybe it’s inappropriate for you to be my lodger after all, Mr. Tamura.” Sora was actually relieved that Tamuramaro turned to talk about work without bringing up Fuuka.
“You know how competent I am. We’re researching the same thing. Don’t you think it’ll be faster for both of us if we shared information?”
“Faster to do what?”
This time, Odajima’s consulting tax accountant had officially hired Sora as a certified fraud examiner. It was his job to audit the internal records of the subsidiary company as a third party.
“That’s what I haven’t figured out yet,” Tamuramaro replied.
Teaming up with Chairman Odajima’s consulting attorney was out of the question as far as Sora was concerned.
“But it’s one way to find the best path—a point of compromise where we save as many people as possible from misfortune.”
Until now, Sora would never have chosen such a path.
“Right when I wanted to say, ‘This is it. This is where we start,’ I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to them anymore.”
Earlier that day, by the lake in the park, Sora had confessed to Tamuramaro that he was still running away. And Tamuramaro had smiled back at him, saying he’d keep him company.
He’d heard Natsuki’s voice, too, as she spoke of Odajima as though he were her father.
Even if he was lost, he didn’t want to run away anymore—not if he could make good things happen.
Sora turned his screen toward Tamuramaro to show him the website he was looking at. Without throwing any questions at Sora, who had just managed to take a step toward a different path, Tamuramaro simply smiled and peered at the screen.
“I haven’t heard about this,” Tamuramaro said, once he carefully read through the page. He’d slipped back into his role as Odajima’s consulting lawyer and was pointing at an elegant, wooden structure presented as a prospective roadside station, a rest area along a major road designated by the government.
“Maybe he’s keeping it a secret? A new prospective roadside station called North Station, opening this autumn. I found this when I was looking through new construction projects in the area where Odajima Construction’s subsidiary company is operating. The label that says TO BE BUILT BY ODAJIMA CONSTRUCTION is embedded in the image, so it won’t show up in a search.”