“You must have looked really engrossed.”

  “I was waiting in line for curry bread, but I guess my serious reading face fascinated them. I told them, well, yeah, it’s terrific. And then I couldn’t shut up for the next thirty minutes.” Chiharu scanned the length of the lobby. “Her publisher is in this building. Suigetsu—you know them?”

  Eizo blinked. “Sort of.”

  “I hear Juri goes there sometimes. They have a special space for their writers to work. Isn’t that cool?”

  The waves lapped at his toes again. “Oh, really?”

  Eizo shifted his hand behind his back, adjusting his backpack to shield his Suigetsu pass from Chiharu’s sight. His backpack felt heavier than usual, and at one point, he almost dropped it on the floor. Were his fingers still not warm enough?

  “I heard COSMO is working with Suigetsu to launch a major marketing campaign next summer. They are already looking for book influencers and asked if I knew anyone.” Chiharu peered at him. “Eizo, you read a lot, right?”

  “Do finance books count?”

  “Boring.” Chiharu puffed her cheeks out, then smiled. “So, why are you here? You even have a pass.”

  Eizo stared back at her.

  Think, Kamada Eizo, think. You always have two answers for everything.

  I’m here because, one, I⁠—

  * * *

  The wizard still had his bat lowered. Eizo remained on the second plate, ready to sprint to third. The baseball launched into the air. The third-base coach swung his arm like a propeller fan, urging Eizo to go faster, faster, faster. A northeast wind blew. Any slower, and the outfielder would have caught the ball, leaving him stranded between bases. Eizo looked up as he ran. The ball curved in a skyward arc before disappearing into the sun. When you stared at the sky too long, dark spots dotted your vision.

  * * *

  Dark spots dotted his vision.

  A hand waved in his face.

  “Eizo, are you alright? You’re looking pale.”

  Was that Chiharu?

  A hand was on his arm.

  He blinked.

  A firm, familiar grip.

  The scent of cypress blended with vetiver.

  “Why are you standing around?” Ran said. “You can go up and wait.”

  The fuzziness in his eyes faded.

  He could hear Chiharu introducing herself, followed by Ran, and then a brief exchange that he wasn’t part of, until Chiharu yelped that she was going to be late.

  “I’ll ring you up for lunch one of these days,” she said. “You must tell me about it, okay?”

  About what, he heard himself say.

  Chiharu leaned in and whispered, “You came here to rendezvous with your hottie editor, didn’t you? Sneaky Lothario.”

  After she left, Eizo felt himself being tugged into the elevator. When it reached the 34th floor, he was shuffled out and led inside the Suigetsu office. He felt weaker and weaker, subconsciously leaning on Ran for support. The scenery went past in a blur, and he found himself pushed onto a chair before his legs gave out under him.

  A cool hand touched his forehead, shaking him out of his daze.

  He and Ran were inside an empty meeting room.

  “No fever,” the editor mumbled, working his fingers around Eizo’s head, thumbs pressed into the hollows behind his ears. Eizo winced.

  “Looks like a tension headache.”

  “I’m fine,” Eizo insisted.

  “Then stand up and walk to the door.”

  Eizo gritted his teeth and pushed off the chair. All he did was make a fool of himself, his heel knocking into his ankle, and he would have crashed onto the floor had the editor not grabbed him in time.

  “Stubborn little shit,” Ran muttered. “Sit here and don’t move. I’ll be back.”

  Embarrassed, Eizo placed his head on the table, the back of his head a dull ache that was spreading to the front. He should leave, but when he looked up, the ceiling was spinning like a top.

  Ran returned with a laptop charger and a glass tumbler. He slid them toward Eizo. “You left this behind,” he said.

  “Not the tumbler.”

  “I made chilled sencha. Helps with clearing your head.”

  “I said I’m fine,” Eizo insisted.

  “And you’re fine with lying to your friend too,” Ran shot back.

  I haven’t said anything.

  “You were about to,” Ran continued, the edge in his voice rising. “I don’t know why the fuck you would want to lie about this, but you clearly don’t want your friend to know what you are here for.”

  Eizo clutched his head.

  Ran was right, and he knew what Eizo had been thinking, what Eizo was really—a deceitful bastard who couldn’t come clean to his friends that he was a writer. That was the worst of all. He buried his head in his arms, too ashamed to face Ran.

  “Forget it.” Ran slapped two tabs of aspirin into Eizo’s hand. “Some temporary relief if you need.”

  Maybe that would do the trick. He pressed on the foil to pop out the aspirin, but again, his damned hands just refused to cooperate.

  Ran sighed and took the tabs from him. “Open your mouth.”

  Eizo was too weak to resist. He did as he was told, angling his head toward Ran, lips parted just as Ran fed him the pills. Perhaps they were too tiny, Eizo felt he had to compensate by shuffling nearer to Ran so the pills wouldn’t drop. He craned his neck upward too fast, his mouth closed a little too quickly once he felt Ran’s fingers skirting his lips, and when he swallowed the pills down with the sencha, he could taste the faint saltiness of Ran’s fingertips.

  Ran didn’t seem to notice it. “I need to leave for a meeting,” he said, sounding like his usual impassive self again. “I booked the room for the day. No one’s coming in, so rest here until you feel better.”

  38

  Ran returned to the office in the evening.

  Seeing that no one was around, he entered the empty meeting room and stood in the same spot as earlier. The sensation of Eizo’s lips, warm and moist, lingered on his fingertips. He imagined a trace of coffee on them. He had never drunk the heinous beverage before, never keen to learn how it tasted in his mouth.

  Was it as pungent as it smelled? Or could it be something else?

  Without realizing, Ran raised his fingertips to his lips.

  39

  Eizo missed his deadline. He was supposed to submit eight chapters by the morning, but ended up sending only four, revised based on the team’s feedback. His email swooped in fifteen minutes before noon, explaining that he needed another week for the new chapters.

  Ran fumed. “That numbskull. I already told him to send it as it is for now. What’s the point of trying to wear your pants when you are still shitting out the words?”

  He had set aside the entire afternoon to review Eizo’s submission and then meet with the team to merge their feedback before the day ended. No point in revisiting the same chapters and scouring the pages for what probably amounted to infinitesimal changes.

  His finger rested on the call dial for ‘Little Fucker,’ but he ultimately decided against it. He had already told Reika and Takeru that they would handle all communications with Eizo. It would look like he didn’t trust them if he sidestepped the established arrangements. Irate, he walked over to their desks.

  “Tell him to turn it in by Thursday, nine a.m. sharp. I sure as hell won’t read his shit over the weekend.”

  “Should we give him until Monday? One and a half business days wouldn’t make much difference,” Reika suggested to Ran’s chagrin.

  “Listen again, you two. When an author is behind on deadlines and doesn’t communicate that in advance, it is disrespectful of your time. My time. Our fucking time. It’s not about giving them more time to complete their work. It’s about sending them a message—this is work, and they are legally obliged to fulfill what they signed on the contract. Are we clear?”

  Reika chewed on her lip as Takeru patted her shoulder in commiseration.

  “Add this to your email: if you’re late again, don’t come crying when our payments to you are late as well.”

  That afternoon, he cleared all outstanding emails, replied to several book proposals and manuscripts pitched by literary agents, and refreshed his inbox again to see if any authors who owed him revisions had responded. None. None. None. Because they’d agreed on a timeline of six to eight weeks in their last exchange. Ran never had much of an issue with them. They were punctual and communicated delays in advance. Unlike Kamada Eizo, who was already behind schedule on his second deadline, and stayed quiet until the end.

  Restless, he logged into the Yoeisha web platform and checked if Baka Nori had uploaded new chapters. There were five; the latest was out on Sunday night. Ran had to dump his phone in his briefcase to restrain himself from calling Little Fucker in front of the office and hollering down the line at him to get his priorities straight.

  Since Ran had nothing to do, he clicked on the web serial to continue where he left off.

  The story reached its climax when the powerless wizard, with his mysterious wooden baseball bat and a ragtag crew of followers, stormed the tower. Even they couldn’t believe that it was real. The tower with the silent belfry had hung in the distance for so long, an unobtrusive part of the landscape painted into the sky. A feature, as it would be perceived, not an anomaly.

  The wizard, who had been apprehensive as the tower drew close, abruptly changed his mind once they reached the drawbridge. Despite his followers’ cries for caution, he crossed the moat and entered the outer gates of the tower without a second thought. He wasn’t afraid of the sleeping dragon that bore a mystical ability to suck the air out of the room, or any monsters that might lurk in the dark. He just wanted the journey to be over. It had taken far too long, and he was beginning to believe he might have powers after all.

  The tower was the ultimate test. The wizard swore to whatever gods ruled the realm that if there was another level beyond the tower, he would awaken the dragon and force the beast to consume him.

  But his followers must stay alive—they must watch as the dragon consumed him in a burst of flames and spat out his blackened bones after thoroughly digesting him. They would then flee for their lives, knowing their savior was gone for good, and tell the world they were wrong and that the powerless wizard was right. And so, the wizard desperately kept his followers alive, using his wooden bat to bash away any threats that stormed their way until they finally reached the dragon’s lair.

  The latest chapter ended with the face-off teased throughout the story.

  The long-awaited savior ran up the stairs that spiraled around the tower to the belfry. There, the dragon awaited, its crimson eyes opening just a slit, observing.

  As Ran read Wizard, the confusion that had plagued him since the haiku chapter resurfaced. A discovery perturbed him most—the wizard’s desperation to keep his followers alive should leap off the page as he centered himself in the story and led the charge for the first time. As he should; he was the protagonist, after all, and had for so long persuaded everyone he had no powers.

  Baka Nori’s writing became tighter as the serial drew to its end, lurching from climax toward denouement. He said more with less, a marked improvement in his prose.

  Yet as the story passed the mid-reveal, the prose had taken an unexpected turn. Instead of the humorous, silly tone it initially bore, the story was now written in an aloof voice. You were still seeing the world through the narrator’s eyes, but now there was a distance between you and him, as if the author deliberately put up walls as he dove further into the story.

  Ran recalled what Misaki once explained about this specific prose style.

  “The detached protagonist,” she said. “A feature that belongs more in literary fiction than in genre books. A narrator who mills about in the story and contemplates the vagaries of life. But in genres such as fantasy? No one wants to read about a protagonist who mopes about and ponders the essence of time and existence as he stares at a leaf fluttering in the wind. He needs to save someone. He needs to do something. He needs to advance.”

  The wizard was never an agent of his own making, but one forged by the fates of the story, one cast on stone slabs written before his time.

  Ran looked over his shoulder at Reika and Takeru, wondering what they thought of Baka Nori’s prose. He was the one who’d outright warned them against referencing Eizo’s past work. Now he was doing the same. What a joke.

  “Some call this subtraction of details spare prose,” Misaki had mentioned. “The intent is to convey more with less, because the spaces between the words hold meaning too. You don’t need to clutter every acre of the page with your imagination. Leave some space for the reader to fill in theirs.”

  But in Eizo’s case, Ran had the oddest inkling that he was subtracting too much from the page, until it became a negative.

  He slumped back in his chair, the sudden groan causing a few heads in the office to swivel toward him.

  “Mr. Miyamoto,” Takeru began in a small voice. “He said he’s very, very, very sorry for the delay and will send the remaining chapters by tomorrow evening.”

  “I hope you didn’t add any modifiers for that unpunctual shit.”

  Takeru shook his head. “Eizo typed ‘very’ thrice.”

  “Got it,” Ran replied. This time, he was careful to manage the tension in his voice. He’d sounded a little rough earlier. That wasn’t how he wanted to come across to the younger staff, who were still learning. He was once like them, albeit less forgiving of authors who missed deadlines.

  Takeru continued hesitantly, “May I say something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I think Eizo wrote the revised chapters in an unexpected manner. Unlike his usual style, I mean. I know we discussed this previously and had our disagreements, but I felt the detachment expressed by the monster toward its surroundings on Earth was an act of self-preservation.”

  Ran spun a pen between his fingers. “Let’s dial back one notch. If you were the stupid gyoza in this situation, how would you feel?”

  “Stupid gyoza?”

  “The Baku.”

  Takeru closed his eyes, concentrating. “I am old. Really old, compared to humans. I have the ability to transform. With all these years of experience, I would think I can handle anything, including creatures I have never seen before that tower over me and are very capable of eating me.”

  “Wouldn’t that scare you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You are on the run the whole time. You crashed on a foreign planet out of exhaustion. You got out of your spaceship and were almost chewed to death by a dog. You look exactly like the type of food the people, huge giants walking, eat at every meal. Can you still call that ‘maybe’?”

  “I would give it the benefit of the doubt, though. There is still a lot we don’t know about the Baku.”

  “You’re right. But I’m talking about the immediate threat. The now, which our little gyoza is constantly exposed to. It is what it is: a prey in a sea of predators. It should be scared shitless.”

  Takeru fell silent.

  Ran turned toward Reika. “Any early thoughts as a reader?”

  “The way he writes makes you think harder as you read. It keeps you guessing, at least. I may not understand everything that’s going on, but I would keep turning the page to find out.”

  “How about as an editor?”

  “I see it as his brand. His uniqueness is what we want to emphasize and polish.”

  Takeru nodded. “It’s confusing, but I trust he will deliver a satisfactory explanation.”

  “He has a long way to go toward earning that trust,” Ran said curtly. “Let’s talk again once we have everything.”

  * * *

  Ran stopped by a convenience store, planning to buy a bottle of oolong tea to quench his thirst. Originally an excuse to get out of the office to stretch his legs, he changed his mind when he saw the empty dining section and bought two chicken cutlets and a draft beer. Aiko once said that the best way out of a funk was to do something totally unexpected. In Ran’s case, it was sneaking out of work on a Tuesday afternoon to eat junk food and drink Asahi alone.

  The last time he’d done that was with Eizo at their local Family Mart. Since then, he barely saw him at Oakwood anymore. Had he grown sick of Kichijoji? Or did he dread having Ran as a neighbor so much that he stopped returning altogether?

  Ran finished his beer before he started on the chicken.

  Was he overthinking everything? Kisuke had green-lit the proposal and seemed to like whatever Eizo had outlined. Didn’t that make Ran’s task unbelievably simple? He only needed to shut up, agree with Eizo’s vision or whatever the writer showed them, and sharpen his work. He had always done that—what was it about New World that was different? His team was competent, too. Reika had a keen eye for editorial direction, while Takeru excelled in project management. They could step up and lead New World once he moved over to Ido. He mustn’t forget what he’d joined Suigetsu for, and he wasn’t about to be derailed by an amateur writer’s bizarre prose.

  Yes, that was it.

  Eizo was new to writing, wasn’t he?

  Wizard was his first published story. The literary and social media algorithm gods had blessed him with much attention on his debut. It was only natural that his prose would vary wildly across a story that he started back when he was twenty-one, or perhaps much earlier. He had been writing for a long time, having done the due diligence when he was younger.

  He supposed Eizo wasn’t just another writer. If anything, he possessed the rare mix of originality and technical ability that set him head and shoulders above most new writers. He had the temerity to handle in-depth research on thorny topics, and, more importantly, the gumption to pull it off. It was as though he knew he would succeed based on the strength of a story he’d developed with fervent dedication as a kid, never once second-guessing himself.