Chapter 200: The First Thirty Seconds

Chapter 200: Chapter 200: The First Thirty Seconds

On the first of November, Studio Hikari finished the first thirty seconds of Threadless Gate. Fourteen people watched them in silence above a bicycle shop in Mitaka, and nobody moved until the screen went dark.

It wasn’t the whole episode. It wasn’t even the whole opening scene. It was thirty seconds of finished animation, with key frames, in-betweens, colour, and sound, the first fully complete shot of the first episode. Minase had decided they would watch it together, all of them, on the battered monitor by her window, before anyone else in the world saw it.

So they came.

All eight owners of Studio Hikari stood around the long table, along with two new animators Minase had brought back in September, who would become owners themselves the following autumn. Tachibana sat in his armchair by the window with his cane across his knees. Haruki stood by the door. Beside him stood Tsubasa, who had drawn the valley’s backgrounds in pencil a year ago, before anyone knew there would be an anime. Chen Wei was on the telephone from Shanghai, on speaker, propped against a jar of brushes, because he couldn’t be there in person and refused to wait.

At the very back, by the top of the twenty-four stairs, stood the bicycle-shop owner in his apron, with a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear. Minase had invited him. You fixed the step, she had said. You get to see what comes up it.

"Ready," said Minase.

She pressed play.

The screen opened on darkness, then on the faint grey of very early morning.

A hillside rose out of the dark, slowly, as the light came up. There was a valley below, half hidden in mist, and the roofs of a small town. A frozen stream ran past a house with its windows boarded. At the top of the hill stood a stone arch against a sky just beginning to go pale. It was patient and old and very slightly crooked at the left edge, where a nervous animator’s hand had trembled and the director had chosen to leave it.

Then the sound began.

It was a single violin note held almost below hearing, then another, then twenty-four strings humming together very softly. It was the sound of threads, recorded in Shanghai in July and sent to a studio above a bicycle shop.

A line of children began to climb the hill toward the arch in the dawn light. They were fifteen-year-olds in their best clothes, nervous and excited, and each of them had a faint shimmer of light just beginning above their heads, not yet a thread.

Near the back of the line walked a boy with nothing above his head at all.

He wasn’t looking up. He was looking ahead at the arch, with a small boy’s certainty that something good was coming, because it came for everyone.

The camera rose slowly from the line of children, past the boy, up into the empty space above his head, and kept going, up into the pale sky over the valley. The chord of humming threads held beneath it, waiting.

Then the screen went dark.

Thirty seconds.

Nobody moved.

On the speaker, propped against the jar of brushes, there was no sound at all from Shanghai.

At the long table, Ichinose Mao had both hands over her mouth. She had drawn the arch, and the crooked line at its left edge was hers. Beside her, the quiet animator who had worked at Hikari twice had taken off his glasses and was looking at the floor.

By the door, Tsubasa had gone very still. On that hillside, in colour and moving, was the valley he had drawn in pencil on Haruki’s floor a year ago. There were a few sharp faces near the front, and the rest dissolved into the hillside, so that it felt like being looked at.

At the back of the room, by the stairs, the bicycle-shop owner took his carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and held it very still in both hands, the way he had the first time he heard the music.

It was Tachibana who spoke first.

He sat in his armchair by the window with his cane across his knees and his eyes closed. When he opened them, they were wet.

"Fifty-five years," he said quietly. "Three shows nobody watched." He looked at the dark monitor. "I’ve never once seen the first thirty seconds of something and known."

Nobody asked him what he knew. They didn’t need to.

On the speaker from Shanghai, very quietly, Chen Wei said something in Mandarin that nobody in the room understood. Then he said, in careful English, "That is the song I heard when I was nine. On the piano with two broken keys." His voice was unsteady. "I didn’t know until now what it was for."

Haruki stood by the door and didn’t say anything at all.

In his first life, he had watched anime at half attention on a couch after twelve-hour days, and never once wondered who made it. In this life, on the first day, the system had shown him a locked skill called Animation Production. He hadn’t known it was the thing he wanted most until a woman with paint on her fingers described the sound of silence on an upturned crate in front of a bookshop shelf.

Now he had watched thirty seconds of his own story move. Fourteen people had made it, and sixty-one thousand others had paid for it, and a girl in Helsinki would be sitting in the seat beside him on the twelfth of April when it aired.

He thought about a doorframe in Koenji with twelve faded marks in his mother’s slanted hand and two new lines above them. He thought about a crib by a window on the last page of a sketchbook, with a single word in the corner.

Waiting.

He didn’t cry. He found, standing by the door at the top of twenty-four stairs, that he didn’t need to. Something in his chest had gone very quiet and very still, the way the valley had gone still in the dawn before the boy reached the arch.

[Animation Production — Level 1 → 2.]

[Threadless Gate (TV anime) — First completed shot: 30 seconds. Viewed: Studio Hikari, Nov 1.]

The court set the date that afternoon.

Shirai called at four. The Tokyo District Court had scheduled the first hearing on the petition for the twelfth of December. Both sides would present their evidence: the access logs, the binder, the five declarations, and Kurenai’s statement calling it all without merit. A ruling on the provisional disposition could follow before the end of the year.

"Before Christmas," Shirai said. "If the judge is quick. Before the first Crownless trailer airs in January, certainly." He paused. "There’s one thing we don’t have. The courier, the man in the grey suit at the café in Hakata. Morikawa-san never learned his name. Without him, Kurenai will say the outline came from somewhere else, and that the printout in the binder was planted." Another pause. "It’s the only gap. It’s a large one."

Haruki thanked him and hung up.

The postcard came in the evening post, at 7:40. Haruki found it on his doormat when he came home from Mitaka, among the bills and a flyer for a new bakery.

It had a Singapore stamp and no return address. His name and address were written on the front in thin red ink.

On the back, filling most of the card, was a drawing in black ink. It was the third, after a boy at a bus stop and a crown of grass. It showed a café table by a window in the rain. On it sat two cups of coffee and a plain envelope, sealed, lying between the cups. Only one chair was occupied, by a man in his thirties in a grey suit, very neat, looking at his watch.

Beneath it, in small red handwriting, were three lines.

I know his name.

I didn’t send him. I’d like you to know that, whatever else you think of me.

If you want it, ask me properly. In person. — I.K.

Haruki stood in his doorway with the postcard in his hand for a very long time.

Across the dark living room, the bedroom door stood open, with the doorframe and its fourteen pencil lines catching the light from the street. On his desk, beside the crate, lay a red sketchbook and a shoebox with a faded ribbon. Two maps were pinned to a wall eight thousand kilometres away, with twelve crosses each.

The blue screen opened quietly in front of him.

PART FOUR COMPLETE: CROSSROADS. The First Road Closed: Bookstore (Koenji). Print: Threadless Gate Vols. 1–2 (Naniwa Shobō). Morning Light Vol. 2. Sora: Arc 4 published. The letter: "Nobody needs to pay." Yui’s Path: Doctorate (Helsinki). Fieldwork: Tokyo, Jan–Apr. Anime: Fully funded (61,283 supporters). First shot complete. Animation Production: Level 2. Main Quest: The Golden Age — 10.0% → 13.4%. NEW MISSION — PART FIVE: GHOST PROJECT. "Five people drew your story without their names. A court will decide whose it was. A man in Singapore says he knows the last name you need. Decide whether to ask him."