Chapter 3

The staff changing room of the Grand Imperial Hotel lay two floors below street level, past the laundry, the linen store and a long corridor of steel trolleys that rattled through the walls all day like distant trains. It had no windows. The air smelled of cheap deodorant, stale cigarettes and damp wool, and somewhere behind the far wall an industrial washing machine thumped through its cycle with the slow regularity of a heartbeat.

Tomoya stood in front of a narrow grey locker with the number 214 stencilled on the door and buttoned up a white shirt that had been pressed so hard it crackled. Over it went the black waistcoat, then the bow tie, which he fastened at the third attempt. A small brass badge reading HISA was pinned above his heart. The mirror inside the locker door was cracked from corner to corner, and the face looking back at him was cut neatly in two.

It was Thursday, the week after the Obon holidays, and his first real shift on the floor. He had spent three days in a training room learning the hotel's hundred small rules. He had learnt how to carry six glasses on a tray without a sound, how to mix a whisky and water so the ice never clinked, and when to bow fifteen degrees and when thirty. He had learnt how to say 'certainly' in four different levels of politeness. He had been a model pupil. Now, in the broken mirror, he saw what the hotel wanted him to see: a thin, neat young man with a clean collar and an empty face. The exhausted labourer from the back streets of Saitama had vanished. He looked like nobody at all.

That was exactly what he needed.

'Listen up, all of you.'

The head waiter clapped his hands once, sharply, and the murmur in the room died. Kaito was a lean man of about sixty, with silver hair combed flat and the upright bearing of someone who had spent forty years carrying things without spilling them. The younger waiters liked to say he had been in the Executive Lounge since the day the tower opened. He ran his eyes over the six men assigned to it as if counting the creases in their trousers.

'You are going up to the fiftieth floor. The people up there run companies and ministries and, on a bad day, this country. So I will remind you of the golden rule once, and then I won't say it again.' He raised one gloved finger. 'You are ghosts. You do not speak unless you are spoken to. You do not hover. And you do not listen. If I catch any of you turning an ear towards a conversation, you will be out of this building before your shift is over. Two years ago, a waiter at another hotel sold the name of a guest's lunch companion to Shūkan Bunshun for a hundred thousand yen. He sells insurance now. You are here to keep their glasses full and their ashtrays empty. Is that understood?'

'Yes, Mr Kaito!'

Tomoya bowed his head with the others. Behind his blank face, something cold and amused stirred. Be a ghost. Don't listen. It might have been the best advice anyone had ever given him.

Kaito handed round the lounge list, a single typed sheet of the day's reservations with each guest's habits pencilled beside the name in a small, exact hand. One guest took still water, never sparkling. Another was never to be seated within sight of a third. Tomoya ran his eye down the page. Most of the names meant nothing to him: executives from the big trading houses, the Tokyo chief of a foreign bank, two officials from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Then one entry near the bottom made him stop.

15:30. Table 12 (by the pillar). Arata Kensuke, representative director, Arata Real Estate Co. Guest: Ōta Masayoshi, Saitama City Assembly. Bottle kept: Yamazaki 12.

A property developer and a city councillor from the very city he lived in, sitting down together at the quietest table in the room. In Tomoya's experience of the world, which was bitter but extensive, men like that did not meet to talk about the weather.

'Hisa.'

He looked up. Kaito was standing in front of him, studying him through narrowed eyes.

'You're the new boy. The manager's protégé.'

'Yes, Mr Kaito.'

'Table 12 and the north windows are yours. You carry and you clear. You do not pour until I tell you to. Is that clear?'

'Perfectly clear, sir.'

Kaito gave a short, unconvinced nod and moved on. Tomoya fell into line for the service lift with the other waiters. While they waited, he fixed his eyes on the back of Kaito's neck and let the noise of the corridor fall away: the trolleys, the washing machine, the shuffle of shoes on concrete. He poured everything he had into the one man in front of him.

Thin as a rake. He won't last the week. Still, he's polished his shoes properly, which is more than the last three managed.

The voice came and went in under a second, faint and echoing, like a call down a long pipe. Tomoya looked at the floor to hide the twitch at the corner of his mouth. Kaito had spoken perhaps twenty words to him, but he knew his name, and that was enough.

The thing on the bridge had told the truth about its rules. That meant it had probably told the truth about everything else.

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The service lift smelled of floor polish and cold steel and rose without a sound. When its doors opened on the fiftieth floor, it was like stepping out of a ship's engine room onto the deck of an ocean liner.

The Executive Lounge was long, low and hushed. The walls were panelled in dark mahogany. Deep armchairs in cognac-coloured leather stood in small groups around low tables lit by brass lamps, and the carpet was so thick that footsteps vanished into it. The air smelled of cigar smoke, beeswax and old whisky. Along one entire wall, windows ran from floor to ceiling, and the whole of Tokyo lay spread beneath them like a map on a table. To the west was the dark green square of the Imperial Palace gardens. Directly below, the red-brick front of Tokyo Station looked as small as a toy. Far to the east, across the haze over Nihonbashi, the squat grey block of the Tokyo Stock Exchange sat at Kabutochō. Until 1999, men in jackets had stood on its trading floor and shouted prices at one another. Now every trade in the country ran through computers, and the shouting had stopped.

For the first two hours, Tomoya was exactly what Kaito wanted. He was a ghost. He moved between the tables with a tray balanced on his fingertips, refilling water glasses, clearing cups, bowing at the right angle to people who never looked at him. At table 3, two bankers talked quietly in English. A grey-suited man in the corner read the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, which that morning reported that the Nikkei average had finally clawed its way back above fifteen thousand after the June sell-off, and speculated on what the Bank of Japan might do next.

Twice, very carefully, he tested the limits of the thing inside his head. At table 5, a stout executive was dictating something to a younger colleague. Tomoya had never exchanged a single word with him. He stood behind the man's chair, stared at the back of his head for a full minute and heard nothing at all. It was like pressing a radio against a wall.

The lounge hostess, Miss Ishida, was a poised woman in a charcoal suit. She had greeted him that morning by name and told him how pleased the floor was to have him. He turned his attention on her while she checked the reservation book. This time there was no echo and no voice, only the soft clink of cups across the room. The entity had been quite clear about that rule too.

He had expected to feel relieved. Instead he felt a small, dull pang he declined to examine, and he went back to refilling glasses.

At half past three, Arata Kensuke walked in.

He was about forty-five, tanned, with the loose, unhurried walk of a man who spent his weekends on golf courses. His navy suit had been cut for him and no one else, and Tomoya guessed it cost more than he had earned in a month from all three of his old jobs put together. A thin leather folder was tucked under one arm. Behind him, puffing slightly, came a heavy-set man in his sixties whose face shone with sweat despite the air conditioning, and on whose lapel the silver badge of the Saitama City Assembly caught the lamplight.

Miss Ishida showed them to table 12, a corner table behind a pillar, as far from the other guests as the room allowed. Another waiter brought hot towels. Across the room, Kaito caught Tomoya's eye and gave the smallest of nods. Now.

Tomoya carried the kept bottle of Yamazaki over on a silver tray, with a jug of iced water and two heavy crystal tumblers. It was early for whisky, even in the Executive Lounge, but Arata had asked for it before he sat down. He seemed to be celebrating.

Tomoya set the glasses down. As he lifted the bottle to pour, he let its neck touch the rim of Arata's tumbler, and the crystal rang with a faint, clear chime. It was a mistake so small it would have gone unnoticed, except that he made sure of it. He did it exactly when Arata was in the middle of a sentence.

Arata broke off and looked up, irritated.

Tomoya was already bowing, the deepest bow he had practised all week, the forty-five-degree bow reserved for apologies. 'I beg your pardon, sir. My name is Hisa Tomoya. It is my first day on the floor, and I should have been more careful. It won't happen again.'

Arata sighed and waved a hand. 'Your first day. God help us. Fine. Leave the bottle, Hisa, and give us some room.'

'Certainly, sir.'

Tomoya backed away with his heart knocking against his ribs. The slip had been calculated to the millimetre, but at the moment of the clink he had felt as close to falling as he had on the bridge. If Kaito had seen it, he would have been in the lift and out of the building by evening. But Kaito was watching the door, and Arata had said his name. They had spoken.

He took up position by a pillar twenty feet from the table, folded his hands behind his back and let his eyes rest on the middle distance, like a good ghost. Then, very quietly, he focused on the back of Arata's head.

The room drained away as if someone were turning down a dial: the murmur of English from table 3, the tick of ice, the hiss of the air conditioning. For a moment there was only a thin electrical hum, like the sound of a television left on in the next room. Then a voice swam up out of the hum, clear and close and faintly echoing.

Out loud, Arata was saying, 'The prefecture is fully behind the community initiative, Ōta-sensei. Local jobs, local business. That's all we want.' Sensei was the title Japanese businessmen kept for politicians from whom they wanted something. The councillor merely grunted and turned his glass in his thick fingers.

But the voice in Tomoya's head was saying something quite different.

Just sign the paper, you fat, sweating pig. Three dinners in Akasaka, a set of golf clubs and two million yen in an envelope, and he still wants to be courted. I got off the plane at Narita at seven this morning after eight hours in a middle seat, and I am not going to be kept waiting by a man who can't say yes.

Tomoya did not move a muscle.

Cyberjaya. God, that heat. Like standing in a wet towel. But it was worth it. The Mitronix people signed on Tuesday. A research and development centre, a billion dollars, a hundred and fifteen billion yen at today's rate, on the old factory land at Misono, right behind the stadium. Their government's been pushing firms to expand abroad ever since the Japan–Malaysia partnership agreement came into force in July, and Mitronix wants a base within an hour of Tokyo.

A billion dollars. Tomoya's breath caught, and he forced his face to stay smooth as a plate.

And they're not coming alone. Veeroc Chip Design is opening a branch next door to support them. Hundreds of engineers by next year, all of them needing somewhere to live, eat and shop. Once Ōta's committee passes the revised land-use plan this afternoon, the city announces it at two o'clock tomorrow and the whole district is rezoned for business use. Until then, nobody knows a thing. The old factory owners are still selling at industrial prices. I have signatures lined up on the last four commercial lots by noon. Five times what I'm paying, within the year. Maybe more.

On the table, Ōta finally drew a fountain pen from his jacket and signed the single sheet in Arata's folder with a flourish. Inside Arata's head, the voice relaxed into something warm and purring. At last.

Tomoya stood quite still and let the information settle in him like a stone dropping through water.

He thought of Murakami Yoshiaki, who had been arrested in June for buying shares because he had known in advance what another man was about to do. The law that had caught him covered securities of listed companies. This was land. A lease on an old building. There was no law in Japan against renting a warehouse because of something a customer had said near your elbow, and nobody on earth could prove where he had heard it.

He didn't have millions. He didn't have a single yen to spare. What he had was a head start of less than twenty-four hours, and the beginnings of an idea.

He lasted the rest of the shift on a kind of cold autopilot, pouring, clearing and bowing, and didn't make another mistake.

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Eichiro was waiting at the staff entrance at seven, jacket over his arm, looking as though he had spent the day carrying the weight of both their futures. Together they took the Keihin-Tōhoku Line north, standing among the sleepy salarymen with their briefcases between their feet while the lights of Ueno and Akabane slid past the windows.

'How much have you lent the company over the year?' Tomoya asked quietly. 'Out of your own pocket. Not the capital. The money you put in when the shop ran short.'

Eichiro blinked. 'Hard to say. Little bits. Two hundred here, three hundred there. About three point eight million, all told. Why?'

'Because that makes you a creditor, and a creditor can ask the district court to declare a company bankrupt. You don't have to do it. You just have to be believed when you say you will.'

'I hate this,' Eichiro muttered. 'He's been my friend for thirty years. I taught him to carry a tray.'

'And he hasn't answered your calls for two days.'

Eichiro said nothing. The train rocked round a bend.

'And the price,' he said at last. 'You said ten thousand yen. He put two million into that company. Ten thousand is an insult, Tomoya. He'll walk out of there out of pure spite. I'll give him a hundred thousand, and not a yen less.' He set his jaw. 'He should leave with some dignity.'

Tomoya shrugged. 'It's your money.'

At Ōmiya, they stopped at the Japan Post ATM beside the station, where Eichiro drew out the cash and sealed it into a white envelope. Then Tomoya slipped into an internet café for ten minutes and printed a single set of papers at ten yen a sheet. He had typed them the night before on the ThinkPad from a template he'd found online. They were a transfer agreement, a letter of resignation and one short clause stating that neither party had any claim against the other.

The sign above the door of Café Lumina flickered in the dusk and hummed like an angry wasp. One of its letters had burnt out, so that it read LUMI A. Inside, the tables wore a thin skin of dust, the booths were upholstered in cracked imitation leather the colour of old plasters, and the air smelled of burnt rubber from the failing espresso machine and, underneath that, of milk that had turned a week ago. There wasn't a single customer. Eichiro had sent the part-time student home early.

'It looks worse every time I come in here,' Eichiro said, pushing up his glasses.

'It's not a business, Mr Eichiro,' Tomoya said. 'It's a graveyard. Let's get it over with.'

They sat at a table at the back. Tanaka was fifteen minutes late.

He came in on a wave of cologne and cigarette smoke, a slick, slightly puffy man of about fifty in a shiny blazer and a gold watch far too large for his wrist, the sort of watch that was either very expensive or very fake. 'Eichiro! Sorry, sorry, the train was a nightmare.' He dragged out a chair and sat without looking at Tomoya. 'Listen, I know this month's figures look a bit tight, but I've got a huge marketing plan—'

'Tanaka,' Eichiro said, nodding towards the boy beside him. 'This is Hisa Tomoya. He's staying with me for now.'

Tanaka glanced at the thin young man in the cheap white shirt and dismissed him in the time it took to blink. 'Nice to meet you, son. Be a good lad and go and wipe the counter, would you? The grown-ups are talking.'

Tomoya didn't move. He looked straight into Tanaka's eyes. He knows my name. We've spoken. 'I'm fine where I am,' he said pleasantly.

Tanaka frowned, shrugged and turned back to Eichiro. 'Anyway. I need another two hundred thousand for the new bean supplier. They won't deliver without cash up front—'

Two hundred thousand. That'll cover the till for a fortnight. I'll take my fifty on Saturday as usual and nobody will notice.

Tomoya let the thought pass through him without a flicker.

'No,' Eichiro said. His voice shook slightly, but he held on to it, and Tomoya, sitting beside him, felt a small and unexpected surge of respect. 'I've lent this company nearly four million yen on my own signature this year, Tanaka. I'm not lending another yen. On Monday I'm calling in every loan. When the shop can't pay, I'll petition the Saitama District Court to declare the company bankrupt. I've already spoken to a lawyer.'

The colour drained from Tanaka's face as if someone had pulled a plug. The bravado went out of him all at once. 'B-bankrupt? Have you gone mad? You can't do that, you'll ruin both of us! We just need time! And it's my name on the loan from the National Life Finance Corporation, that's my guarantee, five million yen—'

And inside his head, the voice broke into a howl.

The trustee. They send in a trustee, he goes through the books, he'll see the invoices, the ones to Kita Coffee Trading, which doesn't exist. Fifty thousand a week since the day we opened. Pachinko, the horses, the finance companies, the man who takes my bets. Two and a half million yen. Prison. Or the bookie's men first. Oh God, oh God. I have to get out of this company. Now.

Tomoya set his elbows on the sticky table. The polite young waiter had gone. His eyes were cold and level, and very sharp.

'I've been reading about how it works, Mr Tanaka,' he said. His voice had dropped and gone perfectly even. 'When a company goes bankrupt, the court appoints a trustee. Usually a lawyer. His job is to go through everything: every bank statement, every receipt, every supplier's invoice for the last several years. He's very thorough. He's paid to be.'

Tanaka stared at him, sweating. 'Why are you telling me this, kid?'

'Because if a trustee finds money missing, he doesn't just write it down. It's embezzlement in the course of business. On paper, up to ten years. In practice, five or six for a director who has spent a company's money on himself.' Tomoya let the silence stretch. 'And for a director who has invented invoices to cover it up, I'd expect no mercy at all.'

Tanaka recoiled as if he had been slapped. His eyes darted round the empty café like a trapped rat's. Tomoya hadn't said a word about pachinko or horses or a supplier called Kita Coffee Trading. He hadn't needed to. Every sentence had landed squarely on a nerve he could see raw inside the man's head.

Without breaking eye contact, Tomoya took the papers out of his bag and slid them across the table with a black ballpoint pen.

'Mr Eichiro doesn't want that for an old friend,' he said softly. 'So here's a way out. He'll buy your forty per cent for a hundred thousand yen. In cash, tonight. You resign as director. Mr Eichiro goes to the National Life Finance Corporation and takes over your guarantee himself, so your name comes off the loan. And there's a clause saying neither of you has any claim against the other. You sign, you take the money, and you walk out of here a free man. No lawyers. No trustee. No police.'

It was the cleanest exit anyone could have offered. In a small limited company like Lumina there were no share certificates to hand over. Ownership was simply a line in the company's register of members, and a transfer between two existing members needed nothing more than two signatures. A hundred thousand yen was a twentieth of what Tanaka had paid for his stake. But to a man looking at a concrete cell and a bookie's collectors, it was a golden ticket.

Tanaka didn't read a word. He grabbed the pen in a shaking hand and signed three times, snatched the envelope from the table and ran for the door. He didn't say goodbye. The bell above the door jingled, and then the café was silent again.

Eichiro sat very still, looking at the signed pages. 'He didn't even read it,' he said at last. Then he turned, and Tomoya saw that his eyes were wet. 'What was he so afraid of? How did you know?'

Tomoya leaned back and gave a small, tired shrug. 'I didn't, not really. Liars think everyone else is a policeman, Mr Eichiro. Say "trustee" and "invoices" to a man who's been cheating, and he'll fill in the rest himself. I just pushed.'

Eichiro said nothing for a long moment. 'Thirty years,' he murmured, almost to himself. He took off his glasses, wiped them on his tie and put them back on. 'Well. It's done. I own a hundred per cent of a dead café.'

Something moved briefly in Tomoya's chest, small and unfamiliar, and then passed. 'Not for long,' he said. 'We kill Café Lumina tonight.'

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An hour later they were sitting at the low table in Eichiro's living room in Sakura Ward, with moths knocking against the ceiling light and the ThinkPad open between two mugs of instant coffee. Tomoya had not once turned his attention on Eichiro that evening. He realised it with mild surprise, and found that he did not want to.

'Step one,' he said, opening a blank document. 'The name. Café Lumina sounds like a hostess bar in Kabukichō. We need something sharp and modern.'

Eichiro rubbed his chin. 'Something classic, then? The Daily Grind? Morning Star?'

'Too generic. We want people with money and no time. Origin.' Tomoya typed it. 'The good specialty roasters put the farm and the region on the label, where the beans come from. We'll do the same. Origin Coffee. It's short, it looks good on a plain black sign, and it tells people something.'

'Origin.' Eichiro tried the word out. 'I like it. But the company? I can't start from nothing, Tomoya.'

'You don't need to. We keep the company. It has a bank account, a food licence history and a loan record. We change the name and the registered address at the Legal Affairs Bureau. It costs a few tens of thousands of yen. A new company would cost more and take longer.' He glanced up. 'Step two is the location. And that's where we do it differently.'

He dragged the map of Saitama City across the screen, away from the blaze of the Ōmiya shopping district, and circled a pale patch in the south-east of the city, behind Urawa-Misono Station and the stadium.

Eichiro squinted. 'Misono? Behind the stadium? Tomoya, have you lost your mind? That's nothing but old factories and car parks. Sixty thousand people turn up when the Reds play at home, and the other three hundred and fifty days of the year the place is a desert.'

'Right now, yes,' Tomoya said. 'But think about where I work, Mr Eichiro. The lounge. The walls have ears, and men who drink Yamazaki like to talk. Today I heard two very important people discussing that district. At two o'clock tomorrow afternoon, the city announces a rezoning. A Malaysian semiconductor firm is building a research and development centre there, worth about a billion dollars. A second company, a Malaysian chip-design firm, is opening a branch next door to support it. Within a year, that desert will be full of engineers.'

Eichiro stared at him. Then his face changed. 'Tomoya. Kaito told you. The first thing he said this morning. You don't listen.'

'I wasn't listening. They talk as if staff were furniture, and some things you can't help hearing.' Tomoya held up a hand. 'And I won't do it again. I won't tell you their names, either. You're safer not knowing.'

'If anyone found out, I'd be out of a job, and so would you.'

'Nobody will. Nobody but the two of us will ever know.'

Eichiro rubbed his face with both hands. 'Is it even legal? Acting on something like that?'

'It's not shares. They arrested Murakami in June for buying shares on inside information, and that law is about securities of listed companies. We aren't buying shares. We're renting a warehouse.' Tomoya smiled thinly. 'It isn't cheating, Mr Eichiro. It's called being early.'

Eichiro stared at the map for a long time. 'Forty hectares of new buildings,' he said slowly. 'A thousand engineers, maybe more. And not a single coffee shop for kilometres.'

'And tomorrow at two, every estate agent in Saitama starts ringing every owner in the district to double the rent. So we're on the doorstep of the first one before it opens at half past nine. I've found a few listings.' He pulled up a property portal. 'A former workshop of about a hundred and forty square metres. A hundred and eighty thousand yen a month. Deposit of six months, one month for the agent. The owner's had it empty for two years and has no idea what's coming. We sign the lease before noon.'

'In whose name?'

'Yours. The company register still shows Tanaka as representative director, and no landlord will accept that. Once the registration is changed in a couple of weeks, we transfer it over.' Tomoya tapped at the screen. 'And the old shop? East exit of Ōmiya is one of the best corners in the city. We don't surrender the lease and lose the deposit. We sell the fit-out and the right to the space to the next tenant through a shop-transfer agent. In Japan, outgoing tenants do it all the time. Somebody will pay for a ready-made café.'

'The licence,' Eichiro said suddenly, in the voice of a man who had run restaurants for thirty years. 'The public health centre has to inspect before you can open. Sinks, floors, drainage. It takes weeks, Tomoya.'

'Which is why we sign tomorrow. You already hold the food sanitation manager's certificate from your restaurant days, so we don't have to wait for that. By the time the builders finish, the inspector can come straight in.' He turned the screen. 'Step three. The product.'

He opened a spreadsheet and typed in a few figures.

'We can't compete with Doutor on price. They sell a cup of blend for a hundred and eighty yen. Starbucks charges a little over three hundred for a tall latte. So we don't try. We're competing on quality, and on speed. We buy specialty-grade Arabica, a washed Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia and an Antigua from Guatemala, roasted light so it has flavour instead of char. We sell a latte for five hundred yen.'

'Five hundred?' Eichiro choked. 'Tomoya, nobody pays five hundred yen for a coffee.'

'Engineers earning seven or eight million a year will. They don't care about a hundred yen. They care about whether it tastes good and whether they can get it in two minutes.' He pointed to the screen. 'Look. Two staff, six hundred thousand a month. Rent one hundred and eighty thousand. Power, water and the rest, perhaps two hundred and twenty. Call it a million a month to keep the doors open. After beans, milk and cups, each cup leaves about three hundred and seventy-five yen. We break even at under twenty-seven hundred cups a month. That's a hundred a day.' He closed the spreadsheet. 'Four hundred engineers will drink that before ten o'clock.'

Eichiro said nothing. He was staring at the nineteen-year-old across the table as if he had never seen him before.

'The machine?' he asked, almost in a whisper.

'A second-hand La Marzocco Linea, two groups, and a Mazzer grinder. About seven hundred thousand yen for the pair, if we're patient. The fit-out, the counter, the plumbing and the electrics, about two million. Furniture, half a million. The deposit and agent's fee and first month's rent, a million four hundred thousand. Beans and stock, internet, licences and so on. All in, a little over five million yen.' He looked up. 'You said you have savings.'

Eichiro winced. 'About eleven million between the post office and the bank. But I'm not putting in more than four.'

'You won't need to. The sale of the old shop's fit-out will cover the difference.'

'And the interior?'

'Industrial,' said Tomoya at once. 'We're in an old workshop anyway, so we lean into it. Bare concrete floor. Leave the ceiling ducts exposed and paint them matt black. Look at what they've done with the old warehouses on Tennōzu Isle in Shinagawa. They've turned them into restaurants and galleries and there are queues out of the door. We build a long communal table out of reclaimed timber with a power socket every two feet. And we put in fibre. NTT East's B FLETS, a hundred megabits, with wireless LAN across the whole floor.'

'Free?' Eichiro said. 'Nobody gives wireless away. The chains charge by the hour through the phone companies' hotspots.'

'Exactly. So an engineer with a laptop can sit down, work for three hours and never leave. Tanaka ran a shop where old men read the newspaper and smoked.' Tomoya closed the laptop with a soft click and looked across the table, and the fire burning in his dark eyes was nothing like the hollow flame that had walked onto the bridge. 'We're going to build a refuelling station for the new economy. Are you with me, Mr Eichiro?'

Eichiro did not hesitate. He reached across the table and gripped Tomoya's hand in both of his. 'Let's build a monster, kid.'

Outside, the last trains rattled along the Saikyō Line, and the moths kept up their small, steady tapping at the light. Tomorrow at half past nine, the first estate agent in Midori Ward would unlock his door and find a fifty-five-year-old man and a nineteen-year-old boy waiting on the step.