Chapter 196: Blue Ones

Chapter 196: Chapter 196: Blue Ones

Morikawa Sayo signed her name on a police statement at 10:40 on the morning of the second of September. It was the first document in two years with her name on it that she had understood completely before signing.

The cybercrime unit’s interview room was on the fourth floor of a grey building near Sakuradamon. It was small and very clean, with a table, four chairs, and a window looking out onto the moat of the Imperial Palace. It was the same moat, she realized with a strange jolt, that Kanzaki Hayato’s desk at Yamashita overlooked from the other side. The detective was a woman in her forties with short hair and a grey cardigan. She wrote everything down in careful handwriting in a notebook, the old-fashioned way, and asked each question twice, differently, to be sure.

The five of them had come together on the subway from Kichijōji, with Hirose in his cardigan and the grey binder in a canvas bag on Morikawa’s lap. Nobody had spoken much on the train. At Sakuradamon, Mizutani Kei had stopped at the top of the station stairs and said he didn’t think he could do it. Sano Aki had taken his sleeve without a word and walked him up the last flight, and he had come.

They gave their statements one at a time. Morikawa went first, because she was the lead, and because she had asked to.

She told the detective everything: the company in Osaka in March, the tabbed folder of Threadless Gate on the first day, and study how the empty space is drawn and do it the same way, but different. She told her about the outline in June, and the original creator’s development notes, and the payments stopping on the twenty-second of August. She told her about page six and the eighteen percent.

Then she opened the binder to the last section and laid the single sheet on the table.

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

Printed by: kagawa.t — June 9, 03:14.

The detective looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then she put on a pair of thin white gloves, lifted the sheet by its corners, and slid it into a clear plastic evidence sleeve.

"Who gave you this?" she asked.

"A man from the Osaka company," Morikawa said. "In June. At a café near Hakata Station. He brought it in an envelope and said it was licensed." She swallowed. "I never learned his name. He said I didn’t need to know it."

"What did he look like?"

Morikawa thought about it carefully.

"Thirties," she said. "Grey suit. Very polite. He apologized for the café being noisy." She paused. "When I asked where the notes came from, he said the person who’d sent them had been in the industry a long time and knew exactly what the story needed."

The detective wrote that down. She read it back aloud to be sure, and wrote it down again, underlined.

At the end, she turned the statement around on the table and handed Morikawa a pen.

"Read it," she said. "All of it. Before you sign. Take as long as you need."

Morikawa read it twice. It was four pages, in plain language, and every sentence was hers. There was nothing on page six except the date and time of the payments stopping. There was no clause she didn’t understand, and nothing that belonged to anyone but her.

She signed it.

[Police statements: 5 (Ghost team). Evidence: Reference binder incl. printed database entry (kagawa.t, June 9, 03:14) — Secured.]

[New detail: Outline delivered in person (Hakata, June) by unnamed male courier, 30s. Source described as "in the industry a long time."]

Afterward, on the pavement outside, in the bright September sun, Hirose gathered the five of them by the railings along the moat.

"There’s something you should know," he said. "Before you go home. Before you read anything in the newspapers."

They waited.

"What happens with the police is criminal," the old lawyer said. "That’s about whoever used the account and printed that page. It will take as long as it takes. Months, perhaps. They’ll decide who to charge. You’ve done your part." He adjusted his glasses. "But there’s another question. Whether a studio can make an anime from a stolen outline and broadcast it in March."

Morikawa went very still.

"The platform’s planning database is a trade secret," Hirose said. "Confidential business information, kept secret, with commercial value. That’s how the law defines it. Anyone who acquires a trade secret by improper means, or uses one knowing it was improperly acquired, can be stopped by a court. That’s the Unfair Competition Prevention Act. It’s civil, not criminal." He paused. "The platform owns the secret. Amamiya-kun owns the story in it. And five artists who were given it under false pretences are the only people who can explain to a judge exactly how it travelled from a database in Shibuya to a café in Hakata."

"An injunction," said Ogawa Daisuke slowly. He had been quiet all morning. "Against the anime."

"Against the use of the stolen material," Hirose said. "Including in an anime, if a court agrees." He looked at the five of them in the sunlight by the moat. "It won’t be quick or cheap. And it will need the platform, the creator, and the five of you on the same side of the courtroom." He paused. "That’s not a case. That’s a coalition."

Nobody said anything.

"I’m not asking you today," Hirose said gently. "Go home. Eat something. Sleep. Then decide."

Hirose called Haruki at four, from the tea shop below his office, over the clink of cups.

He told him everything: the interview room overlooking the moat, the evidence sleeve, and the white gloves. He told him about the courier in a grey suit at a café near Hakata Station, who said the notes came from someone who had been in the industry a long time. Then he told him what he’d said to the five of them by the railings.

"A coalition," Haruki repeated slowly.

"The platform as the owner of the secret. You as the creator of what was in it. Five witnesses who can show how it moved." Hirose paused. "Twelve co-plaintiffs are already in ōkubo-kun’s case. Some of them will want to join this too. The Lantern will want to help pay for it." He was quiet for a moment. "It will be the largest case of its kind in the industry. It will be in every newspaper. You’ll be asked about it in every interview until the anime airs."

"I don’t want it to be about me."

"It won’t be," said Hirose. "That’s why I told them first, and you second." A pause. "But it can’t happen without you. The story in that database is yours. A court will ask whose it was."

Haruki sat on the crate for a long time with the phone against his ear, looking at the thumbnails for Arc 4 on his desk. Eleven Chapters were drawn at his desk, and some of them were already stolen, and a studio in Osaka was turning them into twelve episodes of a boy with a sword.

"Arai-san," he said. "The platform. Will they—"

"He called me at two," Hirose said. "Before I’d even asked. He said the platform’s lawyers would be at my office on Monday." The old man almost laughed. "The lawyer who drafted Section 10 is leading them. He said he’d like to finish what he started."

"Then yes," Haruki said. "If the five of them say yes. Not before."

"I’d have thought less of you if you’d said anything else," said Hirose.

Morikawa took the Shinkansen home to Fukuoka that afternoon, five hours with the empty canvas bag on her lap. She slept for most of it.

At 7:20 that evening, she walked two streets from her apartment in Hakata to a small florist’s shop with a green awning and buckets of flowers on the pavement outside. In the window, propped against a vase of white lilies, was an index card. For the girl who draws flowers in windows. We read it. We noticed.

She had lived two streets from that shop for three years and never once gone in.

She went in.

The bell over the door rang. An old woman behind the counter looked up from the arrangement she was making, with her reading glasses on a chain like Oda’s, and a pair of secateurs in her hand.

Morikawa stood in the doorway, surrounded by buckets of flowers, and found she couldn’t say anything at all.

The old woman looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at the paint on her fingers, green and blue, the colours of stems and petals.

"You’re the girl who draws," she said. It wasn’t a question.

Morikawa nodded.

The old woman put down her secateurs, came around the counter, and went to a bucket by the window. It was full of small blue flowers, the kind Morikawa had drawn on a windowsill two years ago and photographed and sent to a stranger with no caption.

She took out a bunch and wrapped it in brown paper.

"Blue ones," she said, holding them out. "I’ve been saving them since the card went up. I thought you’d want the blue ones."

[Morikawa Sayo — Visited the florist’s shop (first time in 3 years). Purchased: Blue flowers.]

[Proposed: Civil action (Unfair Competition Prevention Act — trade secret misappropriation). Parties: Platform + Host + Ghost team (5). Target: Use of stolen outline, incl. Crownless anime. Status: Coalition forming.]