Chapter 190: Contents: TBD

Chapter 190: Chapter 190: Contents: TBD

The platform’s board met in emergency session on the sixth of August, in ōtsuka Masaki’s garden, under the persimmon tree. Nobody else would have let them.

It had been Arai’s idea. He called ōtsuka on the evening of the fifth, after reading the sealed envelope Mizuno had brought to the fifteenth floor. Inside were Nakamura’s access logs, Kagawa’s handwritten statement, and two pages from the Osaka company registry with the same name on both. Arai had read everything four times, at his desk, until the building emptied.

Then he had called ōtsuka and asked whether the Guardian of Editorial Standards would object to a board meeting that wasn’t held in a boardroom.

"I don’t want to decide this in a room with a view of Shibuya," Arai had said on the phone. "I want to decide it somewhere I can think."

So at ten in the morning, five members of the platform’s board sat on folding chairs in a small garden in Setagaya. The stepping stones were dark from watering. A persimmon tree was heavy with small green fruit, and a seedling beside its roots now stood taller than ōtsuka’s wife. She brought out tea and rice crackers, looked at the five of them in their suits on her folding chairs, and went back inside without a word.

Arai was there, stooped and tall, with his hands folded on his knees. ōtsuka sat in the Guardian’s chair, which was an old wooden bench. Nishida Kōsuke had come up from Ashiya on the first train with his walking stick hooked over the back of his chair. Tanabe was there from the Kanda children’s publisher, with a copy of Threadless Gate Volume 1 on her lap. So was the lawyer who had drafted Section 10 and later deleted it himself, properly.

The four other members had been told by telephone and had given their votes in advance to whichever way Arai decided. Mizuno had told Haruki later that she had never seen that happen before in nine years.

Haruki wasn’t there. It wasn’t his decision. The platform was the victim, not him. But ōtsuka called him at 11:40 and told him everything, sitting on the bench under the persimmon tree after the others had gone.

"The lawyer spoke first," ōtsuka said. "He said there was no question about the law. Someone used a Director’s credentials, without permission, from outside the building, twice, to read confidential planning material. That’s unauthorized access. It’s a crime. The only question was whether the platform wanted to report it." He paused. "He said that reporting it would mean admitting the account had been left open for sixteen months. It would be embarrassing. It would be in the newspapers."

"And?"

"And Tanabe-san said she didn’t care if it was embarrassing," ōtsuka said. "She said the planning database holds the next six months of every creator on the platform, and a hundred and twelve of them signed a pledge in November trusting us. She said if we didn’t report it, we’d be telling every one of them that their next Chapter was safe with us only until someone found it inconvenient to say otherwise." He almost smiled. "She was very firm about it. I think she’d been reading your afterword."

"What did Kōsuke-san say?"

"He asked to see the registry pages again," ōtsuka said. "He read them. Then he said that in sixty-five years of banking he had known a great many people who resigned from a board a month before the inspection. He said he had never once seen any of them stop doing what they’d been doing. They only moved to a different address." A pause. "Then he said, Report it."

Haruki didn’t say anything.

"Arai-san was the last," ōtsuka said. "He’d been quiet the whole time, looking at the persimmon tree." The old man looked up at it now, at the small green fruit. "He said that twenty years ago, at his bank in Chiba, a colleague had used a manager’s password to approve his own loan. The manager had left it written on a card in his desk drawer. When they found out, the bank decided not to report it. It would have been embarrassing, and the colleague paid the money back, and nobody wanted the fuss." ōtsuka paused. "Arai-san said he’d voted against reporting it. He said he’d regretted it every day since, because the same colleague did it again, at a different bank, eleven years later."

The garden was very quiet.

"Then he said, We report it. Today. In my name, as chairman. Not Mizuno-san’s, and not the young man’s." ōtsuka looked at the seedling by the roots. "Nine to nothing. Five in the garden, four by telephone. Arai-san drove to the Metropolitan Police cybercrime unit at two o’clock with the envelope himself."

[Platform board (emergency session, Setagaya): Report unauthorized access — Approved (5 present + 4 proxies, unanimous).]

[Report filed: Metropolitan Police, cybercrime unit. Complainant: Arai Shigeru (chairman). Account kagawa.t: Deactivated.]

Crownless Chapter eight went up at six o’clock on Friday, the eighth of August.

Haruki didn’t read it at 6:00. He waited until nine. He drew all afternoon and evening, on the crate in front of his desk, the pages he had been drawing since March. They were the eleven Chapters of Arc 4, thumbnailed and half-inked, and none of them posted.

At nine, he opened Crownless.

He had known it would be the letter. Chapter seven had ended with the shrine keeper saying They left you a letter. I’ve never opened it. Chapter eight would have to open it.

He read it slowly.

Sei opened the letter in the shrine keeper’s hut by candlelight. It was a single page in his mother’s handwriting. It said that she and his father loved him. It said they were sorry, that they had to go, and that he must be strong. It said that one day, when he was old enough, he should find the Council and break the crown of the High Keeper who had ordered them away, and avenge them.

On the last page, Sei stood up from the table with the letter crushed in his fist and the candlelight on his face. He said, I will.

It was competent and dramatic, the kind of ending that made readers wait a week for the next Chapter.

Haruki closed the laptop and sat on the crate in the dark for a long time.

Then he opened the pocket notebook to a page he had written in March, the night he planned Arc 4 at the yakitori table with Mizuno.

Letter to Sora — contents TBD.

He had written that because he hadn’t known. In March, he hadn’t known what Ren’s parents would write to a six-year-old they were leaving in the middle of the night, with no name in any register. He had spent five months not knowing. He had drawn the house by the mill stream, the six marks on the doorframe, and the Gate keeper’s sleeve over their names. He still didn’t know.

Mizuno had typed Contents: TBD into the planning database on the eleventh of March, because that was what he had told her. Somebody in Osaka had read it twice at three in the morning. They had known everything else. The only thing they hadn’t known was the one thing he hadn’t written yet.

So they had guessed. They had guessed avenge us, because that was the obvious thing, the thing a story with swords needed.

He looked at the doorframe across the dark room: twelve faded marks in his mother’s slanted hand, Haru-chan, and two new lines above them. He looked at a red sketchbook on his desk, with an empty crib by a window on its last page, and one word in the corner.

Waiting.

He knew now what the letter said.

He called Mizuno at 11:20 that night. She answered on the first ring, as she always did now.

"I read it," she said, before he could speak. "Chapter eight. Avenge us." A pause. "I’ve been sitting on my kitchen floor again."

"They didn’t know," Haruki said. "The letter. You wrote TBD in the database, because I told you TBD. It’s the only thing they didn’t have."

The line was quiet for a long moment.

"And now you know," Mizuno said slowly.

"Now I know."

"Don’t tell me." Her voice was sudden and sharp. "Not on the phone, or in a message, or anywhere. Not at the yakitori table." She took a breath. "I’m never putting another word of your plans into that database. Not yours or anyone’s, until the board rebuilds it with locks that mean something. I’ve told Arai-san. He agreed." A pause. "Draw it, Amamiya-kun. Draw it and send me the finished pages the night before it goes up, and not one hour sooner. I’ll read it the way your readers do, for the first time."

"You’re my editor. You’re supposed to see it first."

"I’ll see it first," Mizuno said. "By one night." She was quiet for a moment. "Nine years of typing up other people’s next Chapters so forty people could read them. I think I’d like to find out what it feels like not to know."

After she hung up, he sat on the crate in front of his desk. He took a clean page of manuscript paper and laid it on the desk under the lamp, beside the red sketchbook, open to the empty crib.

He didn’t write the letter down. He didn’t write it anywhere. He only sat looking at the empty page, knowing exactly what would go on it, and for the first time in five months, he wasn’t afraid of the next Chapter.

[Crownless Ch. 8: Letter contents — "Avenge us." (Invented; source summary read "TBD").]

[Threadless Gate Arc 4 — Letter to Sora: Contents determined (Host).]