Chapter 193: Project Ghost

Chapter 193: Chapter 193: Project Ghost

ōkubo Shin arrived in Fukuoka at 2:40 on Saturday afternoon with a paper bag of rice crackers from the shop by Kawasaki Station. He had exactly one address, and he had rehearsed nothing. For the first time in his life, that was deliberate.

It was a small apartment building in Hakata, three stops from the station on the subway. It was old, with outdoor stairs, a row of bicycles chained to the railing, and washing hung out on every balcony in the late August heat. He climbed to the third floor and stood outside a door with a small hand-painted sign beside the bell, a sprig of blue flowers, and knocked.

Nobody answered for a long time.

He knocked again, and then said through the door, not loudly, which was difficult for him:

"Morikawa-san. It’s ōkubo Shin. Neon Shrine. We signed in the same autumn. I’m the one who sued."

The door opened a few centimetres on its chain.

A young woman looked out at him through the gap. She was small, with her hair tied back and dark circles under her eyes. There was paint on her fingers, green and blue, the colours of stems and petals.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the paper bag in his hands.

"My mother made me bring crackers," ōkubo said. "She says you don’t visit a frightened person with nothing in your hands."

The door closed. For a moment he thought that was the end of it.

Then he heard the chain come off.

The apartment was one room and a kitchen, like his own in Kawasaki. Every wall was covered in flowers. They were drawn, painted, and sketched in pencil and ink: camellias, hydrangeas, a whole wall of blue cornflowers, and a single sunflower drawn so large it filled a sheet of paper taped to the ceiling above the bed. Two rival florists on the same street, leaving arrangements in each other’s windows, filled a corkboard by the desk. They were eighteen months of a series she hadn’t drawn since March.

On the desk itself, beside a light box and a jar of brushes, sat a thick ring binder with a plain grey cover.

Morikawa Sayo sat on the edge of her bed with her knees drawn up. ōkubo sat on the floor, because there was nowhere else, with the bag of crackers between them.

"You’re the one who sued," she said. "I read about it in the spring. On the forum. I thought you were very brave or very stupid."

"Both," said ōkubo. "Mostly stupid. I didn’t know what I was doing." He opened the bag of crackers and pushed it toward her. "Then an old lawyer read my contract four times and told me the eighteen percent was void. I didn’t believe him. I made him show me the law."

Morikawa looked at him.

"Eighteen percent," she said slowly.

"Above fifteen percent, on anything over a million yen, it’s void," ōkubo said. "It’s called the Interest Rate Restriction Act. I can show you the page. I carry it in my wallet now." He took out a folded, worn photocopy and laid it on the floor between them. "Whatever your contract says, they can’t take eighteen. And if they say you owe them anything for talking, that’s a penalty. Penalties have limits too. The old lawyer will explain it. He’s very boring about it. It’s wonderful."

Morikawa looked at the photocopy for a long time without touching it.

"I haven’t slept since Friday," she said at last. "Last Friday. When the money stopped." Her voice was very quiet. "I’ve been sitting here doing the arithmetic. Everything they’ve paid me since March, at eighteen percent." She laughed, a small, broken sound. "It’s more than my father earns in a year."

"It’s nothing," ōkubo said. "It’s void. Read the page."

She picked it up.

It was an hour before she showed him the binder.

She did it without explaining, as though she’d decided it was easier than saying anything. She got up, took it from the desk, and laid it on the floor in front of him. Then she sat back on the bed with her arms around her knees.

It was the reference folder, every Chapter of Threadless Gate, printed out and tabbed. There were coloured stickers on pages ōkubo recognized from his own reading: the empty space above Ren’s head in Chapter one, and the hospital door in Chapter six. There was the riverbank at dawn in Chapter twenty-three, Tsubasa’s lighthouse on the horizon two Chapters early, and page twelve of the Gate ceremony, white.

On the cover, printed on a plain white label, were two words.

PROJECT GHOST.

ōkubo stared at it.

"That’s what they called it," Morikawa said quietly. "From the first day. We were the ghost team. They said nobody would ever see our names, because ghosts don’t have names." She looked at the binder. "I thought it was a joke at first. I thought it meant we’d be invisible, the way background artists always are." She pulled her knees in tighter. "It didn’t mean that. It meant we were drawing someone else’s story in someone else’s shape, and nobody was supposed to know it had ever been anyone’s."

ōkubo turned the pages slowly. Near the back, behind the last tab, there was a section that wasn’t printed Chapters at all.

It was a single sheet, printed from a computer, with a grey header at the top in a small plain font.

Editorial Planning Database — Entry: Threadless Gate — Arc 4 ("Sora") — Summary.

Beneath the header, in smaller type, was a line ōkubo didn’t understand until he read it twice.

Printed by: kagawa.t — June 9, 03:14.

Below that was the whole summary: the Bureau, the officials at the house by the mill stream, the parents carrying Ren through the night to the Gate keeper, and the Gate being older than the Bureau. At the bottom was the last line, in Mizuno’s words.

Letter to Sora — unopened. Reveal ch. 63. Contents: TBD.

ōkubo sat very still on the floor of a small apartment in Hakata, surrounded by drawn flowers, holding a sheet of paper that had been printed at 3:14 in the morning from a dead man’s account.

"Morikawa-san," he said slowly. "Did they give this to all five of you?"

"Only to the lead," Morikawa said. "That’s me. I was the one who had to turn it into Chapters." She looked at the page in his hands. "They told me it was from the original creator’s development notes. They said the studio had licensed them." She swallowed. "I didn’t know it was stolen. I didn’t know it was his next Chapter until I read sixty-seven, and the letter didn’t say avenge us."

Her voice broke.

"I wrote avenge us," she said. "I guessed. The summary said TBD, and they wanted a fight. So I wrote a mother telling her son to go and break a man’s crown." She put her face against her knees. "And then I read what he wrote. Nobody needs to pay. And I understood whose next Chapter I’d been drawing."

ōkubo didn’t say anything. He put the sheet of paper back into the binder very carefully, closed it, and laid his hand flat on the grey cover with its two words.

"The old lawyer’s name is Hirose," he said at last. "He’s in Kichijōji, above a tea shop. There’s no sign on the door." He paused. "He’s been waiting twelve years for someone to bring him something like this. Will you come to Tokyo?"

Morikawa lifted her head. Her eyes were red.

"The other four," she said. "They’re still in their rooms. They don’t know any of this."

"Then bring them," said ōkubo. "My mother will send more crackers."

He called Haruki from the outdoor stairs at seven that evening, with the lights of Hakata coming on below and the smell of someone’s dinner drifting from a balcony.

He didn’t say hello. He told Haruki everything, very quietly: the binder and the two words on its cover, and the sheet of paper at the back with its grey header and a timestamp from three in the morning. He told him about a young woman sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up, who had written avenge us because the summary said TBD.

Haruki listened without interrupting. When ōkubo finished, he didn’t say anything for a long time.

"She thought she was drawing someone’s licensed notes," ōkubo said. "She didn’t know. None of them knew." A pause. "She said she understood whose next Chapter it was when she read your letter. Nobody needs to pay."

"Is she all right?"

"No," said ōkubo honestly. "But she’s eaten half a bag of my mother’s crackers and read the interest-rate law twice. That’s better than Friday." He was quiet for a moment. "She’s coming to Tokyo on Wednesday. She’s going to phone the other four tonight, one at a time. She says two of them are nineteen."

Haruki closed his eyes.

"ōkubo," he said. "Thank you for going."

"Don’t," said ōkubo, and for the first time all day, his voice had some of its old loudness in it. "You read my contract in a room full of pages two years ago and didn’t tell me what to do. I’m only returning the favour." He paused. "Besides, my mother says a debt of crackers is still a debt."

[Ghost Project — Physical evidence located: Reference binder ("PROJECT GHOST"), incl. printed platform database entry (Printed by: kagawa.t — June 9, 03:14).]

[Morikawa Sayo — Lead artist (Crownless). Status: Willing to meet counsel. Ghost team: 5.]