Only I Am Love

Ren takes the alley behind Club Murasaki at a dead sprint, rain falling in flat silver sheets. The box rides his chest under a wet jacket, strapped flat over the heart, two kilos of hum.

Bass throbs through the club wall. Inside, two thousand people pay by the minute to feel nothing.

Three years of running, and the strap still bites the same rib. Good. Pain bills honestly.

A drone unspools a blue-white cone above the alley. It finds his shoulder, holds, moves on.

Behind him the alley door bursts. White coats fan out, boots throwing water. He does not look back. Looking back is a bill you pay twice.

“Curfew tone is: calm,” the city says from a pole speaker. “Calm is mandatory.”

Ren laughs once. The scanner on the pole ticks.

TONE: GRIEF. SURCHARGE APPLIED.

“Bill me,” Ren says.

· · ·

The fish market is a river of tarps and ice. Heels skid on wet tile. Somewhere east a kettle screams steam.

Kagura Industries owns the weather report. Tonight it promised clear skies. It lied in writing.

The rain disagrees with Kagura for once.

He counts exits out of habit. Three ways out of the market. Two belong to the drones.

He takes the third. It belongs to him.

The drones fly a slow V above the stalls. The market folds around them: vendors pull tarps, ice slides across the aisle like loose change. A vendor’s radio croons something scrubbed smooth, no bones in the melody.

A drone dips low. Ren tips a stall table into the aisle, and eel tanks go over — water, glass, and eels taking the corner like a wave with opinions. The cone sweeps the flood and reads: chaos, no tone. Drones hate chaos. Chaos has no billable feeling.

He vaults the eel flood. Behind him a cleaner takes the same route and learns why fish win.

Boots answer from the far mouth of the market. Not one pair. Six pairs, in step, unhurried.

Kagura walks in numbers tonight.

Ren goes up.

· · ·

Fire escapes stitch the tower walls. Rungs, landings, a gap, a jump. The gap between buildings is four meters. He takes it with the box hugged tight, lands rolling on shrine gravel, keeps moving.

At the fourth landing he slides under a sagging laundry line. The sheets snap like sails. One tears loose and glides into the dark, a slow white hand letting go.

Below, a shrine wind chime rings in a minor key: old shrine, older gods. Nobody has found a price for them yet.

Two roofs later he drops onto the fire escape. The city opens below him, neon stacked on black water. His hands do the next part without him: rung, rung, land. The body keeps its own score.

On the roofline, a drone stops moving.

Drones do not stop. Except tonight. Tonight one holds its position like a held breath.

“Vent check,” says a voice from the steam below. Flat. Corporate.

Wrong direction. Ren freezes on the platform. One hand finds the rail. The other goes flat against the box, as if it were a door he could hold shut.

Steam breathes from a vent grate. A woman steps out of it, unhurried. White coat, hem dry in all this rain. Red badge: HOUND-1. Black hair pinned with surgical neatness. Cat-slit eyes catch the magenta sign across the street and hold the color like a blade holds light.

“Ren Matsuda,” she says.

“Option one. You hand me the box. Option two. I take it. There is no option three.”

“Three always exists.” He backs to the rail. “It is just badly lit.”

She lifts a slate.

“Tone scan. Grief, unlicensed, sustained. You owe the city four minutes of silence, Ren Matsuda.”

“Bill my mother.”

The words leave him wrong, too fast. The slate ticks. She reads it without changing expression.

“Your file says no next of kin.”

“Ask my mother.”

The slate ticks. Grief, sustained.

“Your mother is not a subject I am authorized to price.”

“Then I own that subject.”

“No one owns her. The audit found nothing. Nothing is expensive.”

Rain ticks on the rail. The magenta sign across the street dies and relights.

“The box,” Kaede says.

“What box?”

“The one you are breathing around.”

His chest goes still on purpose. Purpose fails. She watches it happen and writes nothing down.

“Whoever packed that thing loved you,” she says. “That is the problem.”

“Then the problem weighs two kilos and hums.”

“Name your price,” he tries.

“Everything you carry. Retail.”

“You talk in B-flat. Did anyone tell you? Very safe. Very boring.”

“You count when you are afraid. Did anyone tell you? Very loud.”

Kaede almost smiles. It never lands.

She raises her hand. A white flower. Five petals. Wet through, unreal, alive.

Ren’s breathing changes. Once. She clocks it.

“Where did you get that?”

“From the person who stopped needing it.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is an invoice. You will understand it later.”

“What did the flower cost?”

“Less than you think. More than you have.”

“Interesting,” she says. “You do not know what you are carrying.”

“Retrieval. Correction is a kindness.”

The sign flickers. Magenta spill crosses her face and empties it.

“You left your practice room light on,” she says, quieter. “Three years ago. It is still on.”

“You are wrong about the light.”

“I am wrong about nothing. Ask anyone at Kagura.”

For one second her jaw sets. It is the first number she has ever shown him.

“Hand me the box and you walk,” she says. “I drop the charges. The grief tax. The tone file. You walk, Ren.”

“And the light?”

A pause. The first honest thing she has given him all night.

“The light goes out.”

“Last chance. Open the box.”

“Wrong guy.”

He smiles. It comes out crooked, a song in the wrong key. He lets go of the rail.

Below, six white coats spill onto the canal walk and look up. Small from here. Billable from anywhere.

The city lunges up.

Wind, neon smear, the shadow of a laundry line. The shrine wind chime again, minor key, closer.

White water.

Cold as a struck bell. Sound everywhere, then only one sound: his own breath, climbing.

Then nothing.

Kaede reaches the rail and leans into the rain. Far below, the canal closes over itself and goes back to pretending to be a road.

“Option three,” she says, to no one the city can bill.