Chapter 1

In August 2006, the heat in Saitama City didn't simply sit on your skin. It pressed down on everything, the rooftops, the railway lines and the people trudging between them, until even breathing felt like work.

On paper the city was barely five years old. In 2001 the neighbouring towns of Urawa, Ōmiya and Yono had been joined into a single municipality, and two years later Tokyo had rewarded it with the status of a designated city, putting it in the same league as Yokohama and Osaka. Iwatsuki had been folded in only the previous spring. Since then, money had poured in. Around Ōmiya Station and the new Saitama Shintoshin district, where the great grey shell of the Saitama Super Arena sat beside a cluster of government office towers, cranes swung slowly over half-built condominiums and glass-fronted office blocks. Every morning, hundreds of thousands of commuters who couldn't afford Tokyo rents crammed onto the Keihin-Tōhoku and Saikyō lines heading south, and every night they came home again. The developers had noticed. Estate agents had begun calling Saitama the most promising address in the whole Kantō region.

But for every new tower there was an older street the developers hadn't reached yet. In those streets, the two-storey wooden apartment houses thrown up during the boom of the 1960s were quietly rotting. The paint had long gone. The outside staircases were brown with rust. Black mould crept along the window frames, and in summer the buildings smelled of damp timber and blocked drains. These were the places people ended up when the city's good fortune passed them by: pensioners living on almost nothing, foreign labourers sharing rooms in shifts, and young men like Hisa Tomoya, who had nowhere else to go.

Tomoya was nineteen. He lived on the ground floor of one of those buildings, at the dead end of a narrow alley in Minami Ward where the overhead power lines sagged so low that tall delivery drivers had to duck. His room measured six tatami mats, roughly ten square metres, with a tiny steel sink, a two-ring gas burner and a toilet squeezed into what had once been a cupboard. There was no bath. On the nights he could spare four hundred yen, he walked to the public bathhouse three streets away; on the nights he couldn't, he washed standing at the sink. The wallpaper, cream once, had been stained the colour of weak tea by a previous tenant's cigarettes and was peeling away at the corners like dead leaves. The air smelled of mould, of instant ramen, and faintly of rust from the old water pipes.

In the corner, on a shelf he had built from a plank of plywood resting on two breeze blocks, stood a small home altar. A single candle from the hundred-yen shop flickered in front of three framed photographs.

The first two were of his parents. In the pictures they were smiling, caught in a time before everything went wrong. His father had run a small printing business in Kawaguchi, and when its biggest client went under in the long slump that followed the collapse of the bubble economy, the family had started borrowing to stay afloat. It began, as it did for so many families in those years, with the cheerful consumer lenders whose adverts filled the television between variety shows: the dancing girls, the wide-eyed chihuahua, the smiling women behind counters promising cash in thirty minutes with no awkward questions. The lenders charged up to 29.2 per cent a year, which was above the legal ceiling set by one law but below the criminal limit set by another, a legal no man's land everyone in the industry called the grey zone. His parents had borrowed from one company to pay another, and then from a third to pay the second, until no legitimate lender would touch them and the men who didn't advertise began ringing the house at night.

When Tomoya was fourteen, his parents ended their lives together. They left a short note on the kitchen table apologising to him. He had read it so many times that the paper had gone soft as cloth.

The third photograph showed his grandfather, a stern, silver-haired former railwayman who had taken Tomoya in without a word of complaint. He had been kind in a gruff, undemonstrative way, and he had worn himself out trying to raise a grieving teenager on a railway pension. His heart had given out on the morning of Tomoya's seventeenth birthday. Tomoya had come home from school with a small cake from the bakery to find him slumped in his armchair, the television still murmuring the afternoon news.

Since that day, Tomoya had been completely alone. He'd survived on what little remained of his grandfather's savings and on the wages from three part-time jobs. From seven in the morning he carried steel and bags of cement for a subcontractor building a condominium tower near Musashi-Urawa Station. Three nights a week he worked the till at a Lawson convenience store until dawn. On weekend mornings he cleaned offices in Ōmiya before the salarymen arrived. Saitama's minimum wage was a little under seven hundred yen an hour. In a good week he worked seventy hours.

Yet as Tomoya stood in front of a cracked mirror that evening, carefully straightening the collar of his only clean white shirt, the face looking back at him wasn't a defeated one. His dark eyes, usually shadowed with exhaustion, held a rare spark of hope.

Tonight was different. Tonight was Shion Kasumi's twentieth birthday, the day she officially became an adult in the eyes of the law.

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Kasumi. Her name alone had kept Tomoya tied to the world of the living for longer than he cared to admit.

They had met when they were seven, on the cracked tarmac of a playground in Kawaguchi, both of them crying over grazed knees. They'd been inseparable ever since. When Tomoya's parents died, it was Kasumi who sat with him on the steps of the funeral hall for six hours without saying a word, simply holding his sleeve.

A year later, it was his turn. Kasumi's father had borrowed from an illegal lender, the kind who operated out of a single rented room and charged ten per cent interest every ten days. People in the neighbourhood called them tōichi loans, ten-in-ten. On those terms, a debt of five hundred thousand yen doubled in less than three months. Her father couldn't pay, and the lender's friends were not the sort who took that well. He was found dead in a riverside warehouse in Kawaguchi. The police recorded it as an accident. Nobody on their street believed that for a second.

When the same men came back to collect from the widow, they beat Kasumi's mother so badly that she never fully recovered. The damage to her brain was permanent. She could no longer read, struggled to remember her own daughter's face from one week to the next, and needed round-the-clock care. Tomoya had been the one who knelt on the floor of their flat that night, scrubbing her blood out of the gaps between the floorboards while Kasumi sat shaking in the ambulance.

Because her mother was under forty, the national long-term care insurance wouldn't cover her; the system was built for the elderly and for a short list of illnesses, and a beating wasn't on the list. Her disability allowance covered part of the cost of the care home in Kita Ward. The rest came to well over a hundred thousand yen a month. Tomoya paid it.

He was clever. Everyone who had ever taught him said so. In the National Centre Test for University Admissions, the exam that almost every university applicant in Japan sat each January, he had scored in the top one per cent of the country. He had gone on to pass the University of Tokyo's entrance exam for Humanities II, the stream that led into its famous Faculty of Economics, and had won a place at Keio's Faculty of Economics as well. The acceptance letters, thick white envelopes stamped with the crests of the two most prestigious universities in the country, were now folded at the bottom of a drawer where he didn't have to look at them.

He had turned them both down. Even the University of Tokyo, a national university, charged an admission fee of 282,000 yen and annual tuition of 535,800 yen, and studying full-time would have meant giving up the seventy hours a week that kept Kasumi's mother in her care home and kept Kasumi herself in lectures at her private university. So he had made his choice. He had traded textbooks for a mop, a barcode scanner and a construction hard hat, so that Kasumi could wear decent clothes, attend her classes and step into the bright, comfortable world of the Japanese middle class that neither of them had ever belonged to.

That didn't mean he'd stopped learning. On his night shifts at Lawson, when the shop was empty and the only sound was the hum of the drinks fridges, he read the unsold copies of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the country's main financial newspaper, before they went back to the distributor. He read the stock tables the way other boys his age read manga. He kept a battered notebook full of imaginary trades: which shares he would have bought, at what price, and why, and what they were worth a month later. Over two years, his paper portfolio had more than doubled.

He couldn't have made a single real trade if his life depended on it. Japanese companies sold their shares in fixed bundles called trading units, and you could only buy whole units. Toyota Motor, the safest and most famous company in the country, was trading at around six thousand yen a share that summer, and its trading unit was one hundred shares. That meant that the smallest possible piece of Toyota cost about six hundred thousand yen, before the broker's commission. It was more than Tomoya cleared in three months. The stock market, he had come to understand, wasn't a casino where anyone could walk in and place a bet. It was a members' club, and the membership fee was money you already had.

But he had read about the people who'd found a way in. He had read about the man at Mizuho Securities who, one morning the previous December, had meant to sell a single share of a newly listed recruitment firm called J-Com for 610,000 yen and had instead typed an order to sell 610,000 shares for one yen each, more than forty times the number of shares that actually existed. The Tokyo Stock Exchange's system failed to process the cancellation, the error ran for minutes, and Mizuho ended up losing roughly forty billion yen. And on the other side of that mistake, watching his screens in a cheap flat, had been an anonymous day trader in his mid-twenties, known online only by his handle, BNF, who had snapped up thousands of the mispriced shares and walked away with around two billion yen before lunch.

Two billion yen. Not from an inheritance or a family firm. From watching closely and moving faster than everyone else.

Tomoya had cut the article out and pinned it above his futon. Some nights he lay awake staring at it.

Still, that was a fantasy, and Kasumi was real. He loved her with a quiet, stubborn devotion that had never once wavered. He pictured a future in which she graduated, found a steady job at a good company, and they married, and the door on their childhood finally closed for good.

He picked up a small velvet box from the wobbly table. Inside lay a delicate silver necklace with a small sapphire pendant. It had cost thirty-eight thousand yen, and he had paid for it by skipping dinners for two months, getting by on plain rice with a splash of soy sauce. Beside the box lay a bouquet of blue hydrangeas and white lilies wrapped in crackling cellophane. Hydrangeas were a June flower, and he'd had to beg the florist by the station to dig some out of the cold cabinet at the back. Blue had always been Kasumi's favourite colour.

He took a deep breath, slipped the box into his shirt pocket, picked up the flowers and stepped out into the sweltering night.

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The rusty chain of his second-hand bicycle clattered in steady protest as Tomoya pedalled north towards Urawa. The humidity clung to him like a wet towel, plastering his white shirt to his back within minutes, but he barely noticed. Nerves and hope drove his legs harder than any amount of rest could have.

He rode up the old Nakasendō highway, now Route 17, past the tall blocks around Urawa Station. The city slid by in a smear of noise and colour. The white fluorescent glow of a twenty-four-hour Lawson spilled across the wet tarmac, catching cigarette ends and puddles left by an afternoon downpour. The heavy, greasy smell of yakitori smoke drifted from a stall near the station's east exit, mixing with the diesel fumes of passing lorries. Red and black banners for the Urawa Reds, who were chasing their first league title that season, hung from the lampposts along the shopping arcade. Overhead, giant screens on the side of a department store flashed adverts for flat-screen televisions, mobile phones and Swiss watches, throwing artificial daylight into the sky.

His heart thudded against the velvet box in his pocket. He went over the words in his head again and again until they barely sounded like words any more.

Happy birthday, Kasumi. I know things have been hard. But I want to look after you. Not just now. Always. So please… will you go out with me? Properly?

He winced. It sounded like something out of a television drama. He tried again, and then again, and then gave up and decided he would just say whatever came out.

He turned off the main road into the quiet residential streets near Kita-Urawa, an area of tidy detached houses, neat hedges and expensive private schools. Kasumi's student residence stood at the end of the street: a smart, modern building of brushed steel and frosted glass with a keypad entrance and a security camera above the door. It looked nothing like his own crumbling block. He had paid the deposit and the key money on her room himself, nearly three hundred thousand yen in all, because he'd wanted her somewhere safe, somewhere far away from the past.

He slowed to a stop near the entrance and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Warm yellow light from the streetlamps fell across the paving stones of the little courtyard.

Then he saw the car.

It was parked directly in front of the lobby doors: a brand-new, midnight-black Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the latest model, its paintwork so deeply polished that it reflected the streetlamps like a dark mirror. Tomoya had seen the price in a magazine at work. Well over ten million yen. More money than he would earn in ten years.

He climbed off his bicycle, the bouquet held carefully in one hand, and started to walk past the car towards the lobby. That was when he heard the laughter. Soft, bright and achingly familiar.

Kasumi's laugh.

He stopped dead. Without quite deciding to, he stepped back behind the thick trunk of an ornamental cherry tree at the edge of the courtyard. His breath caught as he looked through the leaves.

There she was, and she looked beautiful. She was wearing an emerald-green silk dress that hugged her figure and shimmered under the lamps, a dress Tomoya had certainly never bought her. Her hair, which she usually scraped back into a practical ponytail, had been styled at a salon and fell in soft waves over her bare shoulders.

She was standing very close to a man who looked to be in his early thirties. He wore a slate-grey suit that sat perfectly across his shoulders, clearly cut for him and nobody else. A heavy gold Patek Philippe gleamed on his wrist as he reached up and ran one finger slowly down Kasumi's cheek.

'You look incredible tonight,' the man said. His voice was smooth and lazy, the voice of someone used to being listened to.

Kasumi giggled. The sound went through Tomoya's chest like a shard of ice. She leaned into the man's touch and rested her hands against the lapels of his jacket.

'Stop it,' she said, smiling. 'You've said that about five times.'

'Because it's true.'

'Dinner was amazing, though. Honestly. I've never been anywhere like that in my life. I didn't even know which fork to use.' She laughed again and glanced down at herself. 'And this dress, Takeshi… it's too much. Really. I can't accept it.'

'You already have,' he said. 'And it's not too much. Nothing's too much for you.'

'You're ridiculous.'

'Next time, I'll take you up to the office. Forty-odd floors up in Roppongi Hills. You can see Tokyo Tower from my desk.' He smiled. 'Better view than this place, anyway.'

'Is that a promise?'

'It's a promise.'

He stepped closer, closing the last of the distance between them.

Tomoya's vision began to blur at the edges, darkening and crackling like a badly tuned television. No, he thought. It's a misunderstanding. He's a sponsor. Someone from a company, helping with a scholarship, or a job placement. She's just being polite. It's networking, that's all.

But the lie fell apart before he'd even finished telling it to himself. Kasumi rose onto her tiptoes, closed her eyes and kissed him. It wasn't polite. It wasn't a peck on the cheek. It was slow, deep and unmistakably intimate. The man's hands slid down to her waist and pulled her against him, and she didn't resist.

A roar filled Tomoya's ears, louder than the traffic, louder than the hum of the city. It was the sound of everything he had built collapsing at once.

Every gruelling hour hauling bags of cement under the blazing sun. Every winter night shivering in his unheated room so that he could pay the bills for her mother's care home. Every dream he had buried alive at the bottom of that drawer. Every time he'd talked his way past the loan sharks' men. The blood he had scrubbed from the floor. The hunger he'd swallowed night after night. Five years of his life, poured into one person like money into a single stock.

And it had just been wiped out.

His fingers went numb. The cellophane slid out of his grip. The hydrangeas and lilies landed on the damp paving stones with a soft, pathetic rustle, and their petals scattered across the ground.

Neither Kasumi nor the man noticed. They were lost in their own world of silk and polished paintwork, completely unaware of the boy standing in the shadows of the cherry tree.

Tomoya didn't shout. He didn't march over and demand an explanation. What was there to say? The betrayal was too complete, too much a part of the way the world simply worked, to be argued with. He was poor. The man was rich. The arithmetic was that simple, and he had always been good at arithmetic.

Slowly, with the heaviness of someone who was already dead inside, he turned away. He left his bicycle leaning against the wall. He walked out of the courtyard and back into the stifling heat of the city, and the little velvet box in his pocket felt as heavy as a gravestone.

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He walked for hours without really knowing where he was going, heading west, away from the lights, until the houses thinned out and the road rose onto a long bridge across the Arakawa River.

The Arakawa was wide here. Below the bridge, its floodplain stretched out in the darkness, a broad strip of riverside golf courses and baseball pitches that the city kept clear so the river would have somewhere to go when the typhoons came. Beyond it, the water itself moved slowly and heavily, black and glossy as oil, reflecting a sky with no stars in it. The bridge carried traffic between Saitama and the industrial districts on the far bank, and at this time of night the pedestrian walkway was completely empty. Every so often a lorry thundered past, and the whole steel structure trembled faintly under Tomoya's feet.

His canvas shoes had rubbed his heels raw. He hardly felt it. Behind him, the skyline of the city glittered against the dark, all those office towers and condominium blocks and billboards, every one of them lit up with someone else's money.

He stopped in the middle of the bridge and gripped the guardrail. The steel was cold and pitted with rust. The wind up here was fierce, snapping his shirt against his thin frame and whipping the tears out of his eyes before they had a chance to fall.

'What a joke,' he whispered. The wind snatched the words away. 'My whole life. It's just one big joke.'

He had played by the rules. He had worked, and sacrificed, and given everything he had, believing that sooner or later the world would notice and pay him back. But the world didn't pay people back for being good. It didn't care. It only understood one language, and that language was money. Money was power. Money was a black Mercedes and a tailored suit and an office in Roppongi Hills with a view of Tokyo Tower.

He climbed over the guardrail and stood on the narrow concrete ledge on the other side. Behind him was a world that had taken his parents, his grandfather, his future and now the only girl he had ever loved. Below him was the black water.

He closed his eyes and took one long, shaking breath. Then he let go.

The wind roared in his ears as he fell. He kept his eyes squeezed shut and waited.

One second.

Two.

Three.

Then, impossibly, there was silence.

The roaring stopped. The rush of air stopped. Everything stopped.

Tomoya gasped and opened his eyes.

He wasn't dead. He wasn't falling. He was hanging in mid-air, perhaps fifteen metres above the surface of the Arakawa, as if someone had pinned him to the night sky. He could still feel the cool air against his face, but it no longer moved. He looked up. A single drop of water, falling from the underside of the bridge, hung motionless an inch from the end of his nose.

Time itself had stopped.

'Well, well, well.'

The voice wasn't loud, but it had a deep, resonant quality that seemed to skip his ears altogether and land directly inside his skull. It sounded like grinding stone wrapped in silk.

Tomoya twisted round, his body turning clumsily in the still air.

A few feet away, floating just as he was, was a man. Or something shaped like one.

He was impossibly tall and dressed in an immaculate white suit so bright it seemed to give off its own light. His face was angular and striking, pale as polished marble, and his eyes swirled with colours Tomoya had only ever seen in photographs of distant galaxies.

But it was his back that stole the breath from Tomoya's lungs.

From his left shoulder rose a vast wing of shining white feathers, casting a soft glow over the dark water below. From his right shoulder there was only a jagged, blackened stump of charred bone, still smoking, shedding tiny embers that hung frozen in the air around him.

The figure gave him a slow, sharp smile. His teeth were just slightly too pointed to be human.

'I used to think I was the greatest victim of betrayal there had ever been,' he said, sounding thoroughly amused. 'Thrown out by the one I loved most. It leaves a bitter taste, doesn't it? But I've spent a long time watching you lot down here, and I have to admit it. When it comes to betraying their own, nobody beats human beings.'

Cold, animal panic flooded through Tomoya. He thrashed his arms and legs, but they moved as slowly as if he were underwater, and he didn't drift an inch.

'Who are you?' he choked out. 'What are you? Am I dead? Is this hell?'

The winged man chuckled. The frozen droplets around them trembled.

'You don't need my name. People have given me plenty over the years, and most of them were wrong. Let's just say I appreciate a good tragedy.' He tilted his head. 'And yours is a very good one. I saw the girl. I saw the suit. I watched your heart burn down to the ground.'

He drifted closer. The air around him smelled of ozone and burnt matches. His strange eyes narrowed, studying Tomoya with sharp interest.

'I can change your fate, Hisa Tomoya.'

Tomoya flinched at the sound of his own name.

'But I'll have to be quick about it,' the figure went on. 'My time here is almost up. The fire that took my wing is finally finishing the job. I'm fading, second by second. Before long I'll be nothing but ash on the wind.' He raised one long, elegant hand, and the ruined stump on his back spat a shower of sparks. 'I've got just enough left in me to bend the world one last time. One wish. Anything you like. Something selfish. Something dark. I'm not fussy. But you'll have to make your mind up fast.'

Tomoya stared at him. The shock was already draining away, leaving behind the same hollow, burning numbness that had walked him onto this bridge in the first place. What did it matter what this thing was? An angel, a devil, a hallucination produced by a brain about to hit the water. He had nothing left to lose.

'One wish,' he said. His voice had gone strangely calm.

'One wish,' the figure agreed, and a note of impatience crept in. 'A fortune? The man in the grey suit, dead in a ditch? The girl crawling back to you, devoted until the day she dies, no questions asked? Go on. Name it.'

Tomoya looked down at the motionless river, then back at the figure. In his mind he saw the black Mercedes, the gold watch, the man's finger tracing Kasumi's cheek.

'I don't know what you are,' he said slowly, 'and to be honest, I don't care if you climbed up from the bottom of hell or fell from the top of heaven. If you can really give me one wish, then I don't want money. I want a power.' He swallowed. 'I want the power to hear money sing.'

The figure blinked. For a fraction of a second, the storm in his eyes went still.

'To hear money… sing?'

'Money's run my whole life,' Tomoya said. His hands curled into fists. 'My parents died because of it. The loan sharks crippled Kasumi's mother because of it. I gave up university because of it. And tonight Kasumi threw away everything we had because some man in a nice suit had more of it than me. Money runs this world. So I want to understand it. I want to be able to make it, and control it, and make it do what I need it to.'

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Then the figure threw back his head and laughed.

It was an enormous, booming sound that seemed loud enough to shake the concrete pillars of the bridge. His blackened stump flared red as his whole body shook.

'Oh, you silly little thing!' he roared, wiping a tear of glowing liquid from the corner of his eye. 'All the centuries I've spent watching human greed, and I've never heard a wish so spectacularly stupid! If you want money, just ask for money! A mountain of gold! A bank account with no bottom! I could make you the richest man on earth with a click of my fingers. Why on earth would you ask for some vague power to make it instead?'

Tomoya's expression didn't change. He held the laughing creature's gaze with eyes that had already seen too much ugliness to be shaken by anything now.

'Because gold's heavy,' he said, and his voice cut cleanly through the laughter. 'And bank accounts get frozen.'

The laughter stopped.

'Think about it,' Tomoya went on. 'A nineteen-year-old in Saitama who works at Lawson suddenly has billions of yen in the bank. How long before someone notices? The bank has to report suspicious transactions. The tax office will want to know where it came from, and I won't have an answer. And if word gets out on the street, it won't be the tax office who comes knocking first. I'd have the authorities on one side and the yakuza on the other. They'd take it off me, or they'd kill me for it. Probably both.'

The figure was watching him closely now, the amusement gone from his face.

'Look at Horie Takafumi,' Tomoya said. 'The Livedoor boss. Eighteen months ago he was the most famous young businessman in the country. Billions of yen, an office in Roppongi Hills, trying to buy a television network. Then in January the prosecutors raided his headquarters for fiddling the company's accounts and lying to the market. The whole Tokyo stock market panicked. So many people tried to sell at once that the Stock Exchange had to shut trading early because its computers couldn't handle the number of orders. Livedoor's share price went from about seven hundred yen to under a hundred, and the company was thrown off the exchange in April. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who'd bought the shares lost their savings. Horie spent three months in a detention centre, and they made him put up three hundred million yen in bail just to walk out.'

He took a breath.

'And then in June they arrested Murakami Yoshiaki, the fund manager. For insider trading. He bought shares in Nippon Broadcasting because he knew Livedoor was about to buy a huge stake in it, and the price was bound to shoot up. You know what he said at his press conference, the day they arrested him? "Is it really wrong to make money?"' Tomoya almost laughed. 'Rich men. Powerful men. And it was all taken away from them in a few weeks. So no. I don't want a pile of money. A pile of money is just a target.'

'Then what do you want?' the figure asked quietly.

'Money isn't really anything,' Tomoya said. The sharp, analytical mind that had come top in the country was finally pushing through his grief, and he could feel it, like a muscle waking up after years asleep. 'Cash, gold, shares, they're just ways of measuring value, and what they're worth changes all the time. Interest rates move. The Bank of Japan put rates up in July for the first time in six years, and the whole market shifted overnight. Companies collapse. Wars start. The money you had yesterday might be worth half as much tomorrow. But what makes the money in the first place? Information. Knowing something before everyone else does.'

He thought of the article pinned above his futon.

'Last December, a trader at Mizuho Securities typed the wrong numbers into his computer, and a young day trader who happened to be watching made two billion yen in a single morning. He didn't have a fortune. He had information, and the nerve to use it. That's the real power. A skill can't be taxed. It can't be frozen by a bank. Nobody can mug you for it in an alley. A skill gets sharper the more you use it, and it works in any market, any country, any year. Give me a billion yen, and I'm a target. Give me the ability to pull wealth straight out of markets and the men who run them, and I'll be untouchable.'

The figure floated in silence. Embers from his dying wing drifted around him like fireflies. The smirk had vanished entirely from his marble face. He looked at the ragged, heartbroken boy hanging in the air in front of him, and for the first time, something close to respect showed in his strange eyes.

'A skill can't be stolen,' he repeated softly, as if tasting the words. He nodded slowly. 'There's a frightening mind under all that wreckage, Hisa Tomoya. You've suffered enough already. I won't insult you with a pile of dead gold. I'll give you something sharper. Something better than what you asked for.'

He drifted closer still, until his face was only inches away. The smell of ash was almost suffocating.

'You want to hear money sing?' he murmured. 'Money doesn't sing, boy. Money is deaf and dumb. It's the men holding it who sing. Songs of greed. Songs of fear. Deals they haven't announced yet. Secrets they'd kill to keep buried. Your Murakami was arrested for knowing what other men were planning. You'll know it too, and nobody will ever be able to prove how.' He smiled. 'So I'll give you the only weapon that really matters in the world you want to conquer. Telepathy.'

Tomoya's eyes widened. 'You mean… reading minds?'

'With conditions.' The figure raised one long finger. 'Power without limits rots a man far too quickly for my liking, and I'd rather enjoy watching you struggle, wherever I end up after tonight. So listen carefully.

'First, you can only hear one mind at a time, and only the one you're concentrating on completely. No crowds. No background noise. One man, your full attention.'

He tapped his own temple.

'Second, and this is the important one. It won't work on strangers. The man you want to read has to know who you are. He has to know your name, and the two of you have to have actually spoken to each other. You can't wander past some billionaire in the street and pluck his PIN out of his head. You'll have to get close. You'll have to earn a seat at the table.'

'And the third?' Tomoya asked.

The figure's smile turned slow and a little cruel.

'The third is that it won't work on women. At all.' He shrugged. 'They're complicated enough without me handing you a key to their hearts. And after tonight, I don't think you'd trust what you heard anyway. No, this works only on men. The ones in the boardrooms. The ones in the syndicates. The ones in the cabinet. The men holding the keys to the world you're about to take apart.'

He stretched out his hand and pointed one finger directly between Tomoya's eyes.

'So. Do you accept, Hisa Tomoya? Will you take this curse and build an empire out of it?'

Tomoya didn't hesitate. The image of the black Mercedes shattered in his mind, and in its place rose something cold and exact: a plan, still only an outline, of the world he was going to tear down and rebuild with his own hands.

'Do it,' he said. 'I'm ready.'

The figure smiled, and it was a smile of pure, unravelling chaos.

'Then let the symphony begin.'

He pressed one long, ice-cold finger against Tomoya's forehead.

There was no sound. But it felt as if a star had exploded inside his skull. Blinding white light burst from the point of contact, boiling away the frozen raindrops in an instant and lighting up the underside of the bridge as if it were midday.

The pain was total, far beyond anything physical. It felt as though his brain were being rewired while he watched, thousands of new and jagged pathways burning into place in less time than it took his heart to beat.

Through the glare, Tomoya saw the figure begin to crumble. His remaining wing came apart first, feather by feather, and then his white suit and his marble face, all of it dissolving into bright ash carried away on a wind that didn't exist.

Then the light swallowed everything. The bridge, the river and the starless sky melted into nothing, and Hisa Tomoya lost consciousness, falling into the dark, carrying with him a power that would one day shift the financial axis of the world.