Chapter 173: A Song Nobody Wrote Yet

Chapter 173: Chapter 173: A Song Nobody Wrote Yet

Chen Wei’s demo arrived at Studio Hikari on the second of May as a single sound file, three minutes and forty seconds long. At one minute and twelve seconds, the music stopped for exactly twelve seconds, then began again in a different key.

Minase played it for Haruki at the long table above the bicycle shop at nine in the morning, before anyone else arrived. She didn’t say anything first. She pressed play on the old computer at her desk and turned up the speakers, which crackled slightly, and sat back.

It began with a single note held on a violin, so quietly it was almost below hearing. It was joined by another, and another, until there were dozens of them. They weren’t a melody. They were a soft, continuous chord, the sound of many strings humming together very faintly.

Haruki sat very still.

It was the threads. It was the sound Minase had described on an upturned crate in front of a lit manga shelf in October of the first year, a violin string held just below hearing, hundreds of threads humming together in every crowd scene. It was the chord in the twelve seconds on a battered monitor.

Then, beneath the chord, a piano began. It was simple and patient, a melody that sounded like someone walking uphill in the early morning.

At one minute and twelve seconds, everything stopped.

It didn’t fade. It stopped all at once, completely, as though someone had lifted every bow from every string at the same instant.

For twelve seconds, there was nothing.

Haruki realized he had stopped breathing.

At one minute and twenty-four seconds, the music came back. It was the same chord, the same threads humming, but it had changed key around the silence. The gap wasn’t a gap anymore. It was a rest, the pause in a piece of music that makes the next note matter.

The piano came back too, climbing now.

Minase stopped the file and turned to look at him.

"I never sent him the twelve seconds," she said quietly. "I never sent him the storyboards. Nobody outside this building has seen page twelve, or heard what I told you at the shelf about the hum changing key." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the desk. "He sent this on Friday night, with a note that said for the Gate ceremony."

Haruki didn’t say anything.

"I’ve been directing for twenty-one years," Minase said. "Composers read the script, and they watch the storyboards. Then they write something close to what you meant, and you spend six months making it closer." She looked at the silent computer. "This is exactly what I meant. It’s the key change and the length of the silence. It’s the same twelve seconds, Amamiya-kun." She paused. "He’s never seen any of it."

He called Shanghai that evening from the crate in front of his desk. Minase had given him the number and said, very carefully, that she thought it should be his call, not hers.

It rang three times.

"Hello?" A young man’s voice answered in English, clear and slightly hesitant, with a Shanghai accent.

"This is Amamiya Haruki," Haruki said. His own English was careful. He had learned it in another life, in meeting rooms, for presentations he had once been unable to give. "Threadless Gate. Studio Hikari sent me your number."

The line went silent for a moment.

"Amamiya-san," Chen Wei said. His voice had changed, very slightly. "Thank you for calling. I didn’t think you would. I thought Minase-san would call and tell me politely that the studio had its own composer."

"You heard the demo," Haruki said. "The silence. Twelve seconds."

"Yes."

"Nobody outside the studio knows about the twelve seconds."

There was a long pause on the line.

"I know," Chen Wei said quietly.

Haruki waited. With people who were deciding how much to say, the second answer was always the one that mattered.

"I’ve been writing songs since I was nine," Chen Wei said slowly. "In a small flat in Shanghai, on an old piano with two keys that didn’t work. My mother thought I was very gifted, because I could hear a melody once and play it back." He paused. "But it wasn’t that. I was playing songs nobody had written yet. I’d heard them before, somewhere, a long time ago. I just couldn’t remember where."

Haruki sat very still on the crate.

"When I read your first Chapter," Chen Wei said, "the boy walking through the arch with nothing appearing above him, I heard it. The chord and the gap. The song for that scene. I heard it before I’d finished the page. The same way I’d heard every other song I’ve ever played that didn’t exist yet." He was quiet for a moment. "I wrote the card that October because I thought, he knows something he can’t explain yet. The boy with nothing above his head. I thought maybe you did too."

The apartment was completely silent. Outside, a train rattled past toward Koenji Station.

"What did you mean," Haruki said carefully, "when you told Minase-san you’d been waiting to hear from me since the eclipse boy?"

The line was quiet for a very long time.

"Not on the phone," Chen Wei said at last. His voice was very gentle. "Please. I’m not sure yet what it is I know, or how to say it without sounding mad. And I think you’re not sure either." He paused. "I’d like to meet you. In person. When you’re ready. Not before."

Haruki looked across the dark room at the open doorway and the pencil lines on its frame. He looked at the red sketchbook on his desk, and a postcard from Singapore, and a shoebox with a faded ribbon.

For twenty-five months, he had carried a memory of another world by himself. In that world, stories had filled stadiums and children on opposite sides of the planet had argued about the same characters. He had never told anyone. He had never imagined that anyone else could be carrying something similar.

"I’m not sure yet either," he said.

"Then we’ll wait," Chen Wei said, "until we’re both sure." A pause, and then something that might have been a smile in his voice. "In the meantime, I’d like to write the rest of the music. For nothing, until your studio finds money. I already know how it goes."

"You can’t work for nothing."

"I’ve been playing these songs for nobody on a piano with two broken keys since I was nine," Chen Wei said. "Working for nothing would be a promotion."

Haruki laughed out loud. It surprised him.

"Minase-san will want to meet you," he said. "She’ll want to argue about the second act."

"Good," said Chen Wei. "I’ve been wanting someone to argue with about it for twelve years."

He texted Minase afterwards, because she had asked him to.

He’ll write it. For nothing until we find funding. He wants to argue with you about the second act.

Her reply came in two minutes. She was still at her desk by the window in Mitaka, although it was nearly ten on a Friday night.

Good. The second act needs arguing about.

A moment later, a second message arrived.

Tachibana-san listened to the demo this evening. Four times. He didn’t say anything until the fourth.

Then he said: "That’s the first time in thirty-one years anyone has written music for this room before they saw it."

Then he asked me to play it for the bicycle-shop owner. He came up the stairs in his apron and listened with his cap in his hands. When the silence came, he took his carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and held it very still until the music started again.

Haruki read it twice.

What did he say?

He said his father would have liked it, Minase wrote. He said it sounded like someone waiting at the top of the stairs.

After the call, Haruki sat on the crate for a long time in the dark.

Then the system opened.

It didn’t open quietly this time, and it wasn’t blue. The edges of the screen were pale gold, the colour of a signal he had seen three times now: once on a Sunday morning in the first October, once at a long table above a bicycle shop when a skill unlocked, and once for less than a second on his own floor.

Signal: External. Source identified: Chen Wei (Shanghai). Classification: Unknown. Note: The Host is not the only one who remembers something that has not happened yet. The System does not have permission to say more. Contact: Deferred (by mutual consent).

He read it three times.

The System does not have permission to say more.

In twenty-five months, the system had never once said it didn’t have permission for anything.

He sat on the crate in the dark with the phone still in his hand. Across the room, the open doorway held its pencil lines, fourteen and a single word, January. Somewhere in Shanghai, a man was sitting at a piano with two broken keys, playing a song nobody had written yet.