Lately, the bitter cold was starting to wear out its welcome, but the dawn was gradually creeping in earlier and earlier. Our cocktail party started after midnight and lasted until nearly 6 a.m., and after a night of no sleep, the morning sun was vicious.
“Are you taking the train home, senpai?”
“Nah, I’m grabbing a taxi and going back to work,” I said.
“Huh? What for?”
“Got a backlog of videos I wanna watch in the AV room.”
“Busy little beaver, huh?” Tatsuki said. “Did you learn anything from the get-together?”
“Not sure yet. Gotta organize my thoughts a bit more.”
We talked about the potential dissolution, political scandals, faction battles—the kind of idle gossip you’d hear at any bar, really, just with a bit more technical jargon—but no leads regarding Wakamiya Homare. He was a veteran Diet leader with a crystal-clean personal life, and the reporters present had nothing bad to say about him. Gee, thanks.
“Want me to try again sometime?” he asked.
“Put it on pause for now.”
“One of the girls was saying she’d love to go to a mixer with y—”
“Hell no!” I shot back.
At the TV station, I took a shower to wake myself up and set up camp in the AV room at one of the little manga café-style cubicles. A list of videos popped up when I searched “Wakamiya Homare,” so I went down the list, one by one. The first time he won an election, he must have been about the same age as Ushio—the resemblance was even stronger. But that was the only observation that came to mind; the rest of it was just boring Diet hearings or unremarkable election footage. Almost none of it afforded me a deeper look at him. As I watched it all on fast-forward, my head started to droop, and before long, I was dozing off.
In my fitful dreams, Ushio never made an appearance, but his astronauts sure did, wandering around the darkness of space in their little spaceship. They were probably in search of their missing creator, now that I thought about it. And in search of a new planet to call home…if it was even out there…
Suddenly, Wakamiya Homare’s voice cut through the void of space: “I never would have won this great election without help from all of my voters.”
“How do you feel, looking back at the election?”
“I hate to call Tokyo’s first district my voter base—it sounds too clinical. It’s my hometown, after all. The whole thing feels like one big house to me.”
Oh, shut up. I don’t care about your stupid house. Not after you destroyed Ushio’s.
Just then, my folded elbow accidentally knocked over a pile of video tapes sitting on the desk. As my headphones slid off my ears, the loud crash shocked me awake.
“Are you okay?” Though it was early in the morning, the room was by no means deserted, and a few heads popped up like daisies to investigate the sound.
“I apologize for the disturbance,” I said.
I hastily gathered up the tapes, checking each of their numbers to make sure I wouldn’t put them back in the wrong cases. Man, that scared me. My heart’s pounding a mile a minute… Huh?
Was my heart really only racing from surprise? Because it felt a bit…deeper than that… What was I just thinking about? Clutching at my chest through my clothes, I squinted at the computer monitor.
✦ ✦ ✦
And so I gave my pawn—er, Tatsuki—his second mission: “Could you pass this along to Grandpa Eba? He’s here today, isn’t he?”
He looked down at the blank envelope I was holding in his direction. “What is this, a love letter? A challenge to a duel?”
“Open it and I’ll kill you.”
“Dude, I can’t just sneak around the satellite TV studio for no reason. They’ll think I’m up to no good,” he complained.
“Maybe you got lost.”
“How stupid would I have to be…?”
“Look, when you find him, say it’s a thank-you for the candy or something, and make sure he takes it,” I pressed.
“You’re such a slave driver…”
“I’m pretty sure this’ll be the last thing I need from you.”
He tucked the envelope into his inner suit pocket and then regarded me with a serious look. “I don’t mind running errands, but you better not disappear on me too, okay?”
This is why I can never let my guard down around you. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Oh yeah, and I do have one piece of good news for you, senpai.”
“What’s that?”
“You know that ramen place we went to? They taped up a piece of paper that says, ‘Visited By Newscaster Kunieda’!”
“Burn it. Now.”