Chapter 187 - Seven

Chapter 187: Chapter 187: Chapter Seven

Kuroda Ryu read all six Chapters of Crownless on his phone at the yakitori place, in forty minutes, without saying a word. Then he put the phone face down on the table and said, "It’s good."

Haruki looked at him.

"It’s good," Kuroda repeated. He picked up a skewer. "Not great, but good. It’s competent, and it’s fast. The fights are very well choreographed. Somebody who’s drawn a lot of rooftops has worked on it." He ate the chicken slowly. "It’s what Blade Campus Rebellion would look like if I’d read your first Chapter before I started."

It was the first of August, a Friday, and hot. The restaurant’s small electric fan was losing a battle with the grill, and the office workers at the counter had their sleeves rolled up. Kuroda had come straight from a meeting with his Iidabashi print publisher, his hair longer than Haruki remembered. It was the first time they had sat at a table together in months. Kuroda’s print volumes were selling in three countries now, and he rarely had an evening free.

He had come because Haruki had asked him to. Someone’s copied me again. Properly this time. I need someone who’s been copied to tell me what to do.

"You’ve been copied?" Haruki asked.

"Four times." Kuroda shrugged. "The first was a boy in Osaka who traced my rooftop fights panel by panel and changed the uniforms. The platform took it down in a week. The second was a studio in Seoul that made a whole series about a rebellion at a school and was very careful not to trace anything." He put down the skewer. "That one did very well. Better than mine, for a year."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing," Kuroda said. "I drew the next Chapter." He looked at Haruki across the table. "I told you that two years ago. When Threadbare came out. Copies can borrow your readers. They can’t borrow your next Chapter." He paused. "You drew Chapter five that week. The hospital door, six panels of a boy with his hand on the handle. It was the best thing you’d drawn, and Threadbare was gone in a month."

"This one isn’t Threadbare."

"No," Kuroda agreed. "This one’s better. It has a studio behind it and money, and a sword." He picked up his tea. "But it still can’t draw your next Chapter. Nobody can."

Haruki had read Crownless four times since Kenji showed it to him. He had read it on the train home from Asagaya, on the crate in front of his desk, and at two in the morning with the bedroom door open across the dark room. Kuroda was right. It was good.

The boy was called Sei. He lived in a mountain kingdom where every child received a crown of light above their head at fifteen, at a coronation beneath an ancient stone archway. The crown showed their rank and their future. Sei’s archway gave him nothing. He was mocked and shunned, and in Chapter two he discovered that he could shatter other people’s crowns with his bare hands. By Chapter four he was fighting knights. By Chapter six he was fighting a whole order of crown-keepers, the Council, whose job was to keep the kingdom’s destinies in order.

It had taken the shape of Threadless Gate and filled it with swords. The empty space above Sei’s head was drawn the way Haruki drew Ren’s, and it was drawn well. Every Chapter ended on a cliffhanger, and every cliffhanger was a fight.

It had eleven thousand readers after two months. Threadless Gate had taken seven months to reach eleven thousand.

But it wasn’t the swords that had kept him awake. It wasn’t the Council, either, although the Council was so obviously the Bureau that he had laughed out loud the first time, alone on his floor.

It was Chapter seven.

"Chapter seven," he said to Kuroda now.

Kuroda frowned. "There are only six."

"Seven went up at six o’clock tonight." Haruki took out his phone, opened the page, and turned it across the table. "Read the last four pages."

Kuroda took the phone and read.

Haruki watched his face while he did it. He saw the moment Kuroda understood. His hand stopped moving on the screen, and he read the last page again, then a third time.

In the last four pages of Chapter seven, Sei found an old shrine keeper who lived alone at the foot of the mountain. The keeper told him the truth about his parents. They hadn’t died, and they hadn’t abandoned him. When Sei was six, the Council had discovered that a boy with no crown could shatter crowns. Officials had come to his family’s house by the river. So his parents had carried him through the night to the shrine keeper, the one man in the kingdom the Council had no authority over, because the archway was older than the Council. They had asked the keeper to hide him as an orphan, with no name in any register. Then they had walked out of the kingdom that same night, so the Council would follow them instead of looking for a six-year-old.

They had left their house exactly as it was, so that someday, if he ever came back, he’d know someone had loved him.

On the last page, Sei stood in front of the keeper with his fists clenched. The keeper said, They left you a letter. I’ve never opened it.

Kuroda put the phone down on the table very slowly.

"That’s your arc," he said.

"That’s my arc."

"The one you haven’t drawn yet."

"I haven’t published a single page of it," Haruki said. His voice sounded very far away. "Chapter sixty-three went up in June. Ren found an unopened letter addressed to Sora, at the Gate keeper’s hut. That’s all anyone knows. The Bureau, the officials at the house by the mill stream, his parents carrying him through the night to the Gate keeper, and the Gate being older than the Bureau—" He stopped. "None of that is published. I’ve drawn the thumbnails for the next eleven Chapters, and they’re on my desk. I haven’t posted any of it."

Kuroda looked at him for a long time across the table.

"Who knows?" he asked quietly.

Haruki had been asking himself that since six o’clock.

"Mizuno-san," he said slowly. "I told her the whole arc in March, at this table, the night I planned it. She approved it." He stopped. "Minase-san knows the outline, for the anime’s second season. Tsubasa-kun has seen the thumbnails for the house by the mill stream, because he’s drawing the backgrounds." He swallowed. "Yui. On the phone, on a Sunday."

"That’s four people."

"That’s four people," Haruki said. "And none of them would—"

"No," said Kuroda. "None of them would." He picked up his tea again, but didn’t drink it. "So either someone has read your thumbnails without your knowing, or someone has heard you talk about them without your knowing." He paused. "Where do you keep them?"

"On my desk. At home."

"And where did you tell Mizuno-san the arc? Out loud, in March, in detail?"

Haruki went very still.

He looked around the small yakitori restaurant: the counter full of office workers with rolled-up sleeves, the small electric fan, the television in the corner showing baseball. There was the back table, the one Mizuno always chose, facing the door. It was the table where they had talked for two years about page six and Section 10 and a list of fears, because it was the one place in Tokyo where people from the industry apparently never went.

"Here," he said. "At this table."

Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

The owner came past with a plate of skewers nobody had ordered and set it down on the table without a word, as he always did. He had brought unordered skewers to this table for two years, when Mizuno cried over a grey wool scarf and when Kagawa ate chicken he hadn’t been forgiven for. He had never once spoken to either of them beyond taking an order.

Haruki watched him walk back to the grill.

"Don’t," said Kuroda quietly.

"Don’t what?"

"Don’t start looking at everyone in this room as though they’re the one." Kuroda put his tea down. "That’s what they want. Whoever it is. They want you frightened of your own table." He leaned back. "You told me once that Ishikawa’s cleverest trick was never breaking a rule. He made people suspicious of each other, so they’d stop talking." He looked at Haruki steadily. "Don’t stop talking. Change where you do it."

Haruki didn’t answer for a long time.

Then he took out his phone and wrote a message to Mizuno, from the table where they had talked for two years.

Chapter seven of Crownless went up tonight. Read the last four pages. It’s Arc Four. The one I told you in March, here.

Not here again. Tomorrow. Hirose-sensei’s office. Ten o’clock.

Her reply came in under a minute. She must have been holding her phone.

I read it at 6:04. I’ve been sitting on my kitchen floor since.

Ten o’clock. I’ll bring the notes I took that night. I want to know who else could have seen them.

He put the phone down.

Kuroda was watching him with an expression Haruki had never seen on his face before, something close to sympathy.

"Two and a half years," Kuroda said. "You’ve been copied, sued by proxy, put on editorial hold, and had your rival’s editor try to buy you in a basement." He picked up a skewer from the unordered plate. "And this is the first time I’ve seen you frightened."

"It’s the first time it’s been my next Chapter," Haruki said.

[Ghost Project — Detected.]

[Crownless Ch. 7 (released Aug 1, 18:00): Matches unpublished Threadless Gate Arc 4 premise (parents, the Council/Bureau, the keeper, the unopened letter).]

[Persons with knowledge of Arc 4: Mizuno Rei, Minase, Hino Tsubasa, Kobayashi Yui. Location of verbal disclosure: Yakitori restaurant, Koenji (March).]

[Note: Somebody has read the Host’s next Chapter before he drew it.]