Chapter 7

By noon on Friday, the thermometer nailed to a pillar in the old press works read thirty-six degrees, and the only cool place within a kilometre was a box of black velvet.

Tomoya had hired two portable air conditioners from a firm in Kawaguchi and stood them just outside the curtain, their ducts pushed in under the hem. Their compressors, the two big fans and the quiet piano jazz from the speakers laid a steady, shapeless blanket of noise over that end of the workshop. Anyone standing three metres from the curtain would hear a hum and a faint tinkling and nothing more. Inside, the air was a crisp eighteen degrees. The red rugs glowed under the pendant lamp, and the mahogany table shone like a dark pond. Eight leather chairs stood around it, with a pad and a sharpened pencil squared in front of each. By the entrance, on a stand, was a plain wooden box with a card on it, lettered in English: MOBILE PHONES, PLEASE.

At twelve o'clock, as Hakiro had warned, the first of the Americans arrived alone, in a hire car, an hour ahead of the others. He was a broad, silent man with a shaved head, in a short-sleeved shirt and chinos, and he carried a grey case the size of a lunch box. Hakiro, who had been there since eleven looking as though he hadn't slept in a week, bowed to him. The man nodded once and, without a word, began to go over the box inch by inch. He ran a handheld detector along the velvet. He lifted every rug and shook it, took the back off the telephone box, unscrewed the lamp and felt underneath the table. Then he spent a very long time standing between the two speakers with his head on one side, like a man listening to the sea in a shell.

Tomoya stood by the curtain in his black waistcoat and white cotton gloves, hands folded in front of him, and looked at nothing at all. His heart was going like a pneumatic drill. There was nothing to find, but the man's eyes passed over him once, slowly, and stopped for a moment on the brass badge pinned above his heart. It wasn't the badge the hotel had given him. Eichiro had paid twelve hundred yen to have a new one engraved at a key-cutter's near Urawa Station: TOMOYA HISA, in Roman capitals, in the Western order. Eichiro had thought it a waste of money. Tomoya had told him that foreign guests like to be able to read a name.

'Who's the kid?' the man said in English.

'The host's waiter,' said Hakiro. He had spent two years in Michigan on a company scholarship, and his English was fast and flat. 'He's been told to be furniture.'

The man grunted, looked at Tomoya a second longer, and went back to his speakers.

At one o'clock exactly, two black Toyota Alphards with tinted windows came crunching down the lane and stopped in the yard. They were the kind of vehicle every hire firm in Tokyo kept for foreign guests. Two men got out. The first was a tall man of about fifty with a grey crew cut and a crumpled linen jacket, who carried nothing at all, which told Tomoya at once that he was the one who mattered. Behind him came a lean, pale lawyer with a briefcase in each hand. Hakiro bowed from the waist, deeper than Tomoya had ever seen a director bow to anybody.

'Welcome, Mr Rodriguez. Mr Hale. Thank you for coming so far.'

The man in the linen jacket gave a tired smile and shook his hand. Tomoya, ten metres away in the shadow of the curtain, kept both names and said nothing.

Inside the box, he moved like a man made of smoke. He had rehearsed it for two days with a tray of empty cups. He poured for Hakiro first, and Hakiro never looked up. His eyes were fixed on the stack of paper in front of him, a contract the thickness of a telephone directory, and the sweat stood out on his forehead in spite of the cold. Then Tomoya went round to the lawyer, and then to the tall man in the linen jacket. He came up on Rodriguez's left and, as he did, turned his body a few degrees so that the brass badge caught the pendant lamp. Rodriguez's eyes lifted from the page, passed over the metal, and went back down.

'Coffee, sir?' Tomoya said softly, in the careful school English of the Centre Test.

Across the table, Hakiro's head snapped up. His face went the colour of paper.

'Thanks,' Rodriguez said, not looking up, and pushed his cup an inch across the table.

Tomoya poured. It was a foolish thing, a superstition, but as he set the cup down his gloved thumb brushed the rim of the saucer, the way a man might touch wood. Then he withdrew into the corner, folded his hands behind him, and lowered his eyes.

He had spoken. The man had replied. The name on the badge had been read.

He turned his full attention on the grey crew cut across the room.

It was like putting his head under a waterfall. The roar struck him all at once, a hard, fast, glittering rush of English, spoken at the speed of thought and with none of the pauses of speech. Tomoya could hear every word, and he could hold on to almost none of them. He had read English newspapers with a dictionary at his elbow for two years. Nobody had ever taught him to follow a mind that talked to itself in half-sentences, in jargon, at that speed. Clause numbers and dates tumbled over one another. Names of firms went by as quickly as street signs from a train window. He gripped the carafe with both hands to keep it steady and caught only fragments, bobbing on the surface of the flood:

…Cupertino wants the yield clause… no scratches… the whole front of the thing, no buttons… a phone… the whole operating system under your finger…

A phone with no buttons. Tomoya tried to picture one, with its whole face made of glass, and failed. Every mobile phone he had ever seen, from the cheapest prepaid handset to the folding models the salarymen flicked open on the Yamanote Line, had a keypad. Then a pain like a nail started up behind his left eye, and he pulled his mind out of the American's head. The flood stopped. The room came back: the hum of the fans, the hiss of the air conditioners, the dry scratch of Hakiro's pen.

The details were locked behind words he couldn't hold. But the fragments told him all he needed to know about the size of what was being decided at that table.

He turned his attention to the other man, the one with the pen.

After the American's head, Hakiro's was like stepping out of a storm into a kitchen. Everything was in Japanese, and every thought was as clear and shaking as a plucked string.

Page sixty-two. Initialled, dated, the first of September. They've signed. Fifty million units, three years, five hundred million dollars. Fifty-seven billion yen. Kameoka is going to run day and night for the rest of my life.

One slip and I'm finished. Clause nineteen. If a word of this gets out before the filing, they can cancel and claim the penalty, and the penalty is bigger than the whole company. TDnet, half past eight on Monday morning, not a minute before. The board approved the release by telephone last night. Fukuda has it locked in his drawer. Four people in Japan know the number, and I'm the only one who knows the name behind it. Keep your face still, Hakiro. Three more days.

Tomoya stood perfectly still, and the information settled in him like a stone dropping into a well.

Half past eight on Monday. The Tokyo Stock Exchange opened at nine. For thirty minutes the news would be public and the market would not yet have moved. And for a little over seventy-two hours more, only five men on earth would know. Tomoya was the only one of them whom nobody had counted.

At twenty past two, the Americans stood up. They shook Hakiro's hand, one by one, and filed out through the curtain without a glance at the waiter in the corner. Tomoya heard the Alphards start up in the yard. He stayed exactly where he was, a ghost in a waistcoat, until the sound of the engines had died away down the lane.

Then Hakiro sat down heavily in the nearest chair and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. He mopped his forehead, his neck and the back of his hands. He looked ten years older and ten years younger at once, like a man who has just come off an operating table. When he spoke, it was in Japanese, and his voice cracked.

'It's done.'

'Congratulations, sir,' Tomoya said quietly.

'Don't say that. Not yet. Not until Monday.' Hakiro laughed shakily and shook his head. He took an envelope from his inside pocket and pushed it across the mahogany. 'That's for you. There was no obligation. I was going to give you one more thing, and that's a word to say you were the best ghost I've ever had in a room.' He tried to smile. 'I'm going home to sleep for three days.'

Tomoya bowed, deep and slow, and took the envelope. It was thick, and he didn't look inside. It was twenty-eight minutes past two.

He waited exactly as long as it took Hakiro to rise, collect his coat and walk out through the curtain. Then he tore the bow tie from his collar and ran.

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He crossed forty metres of cracked concrete in the white glare of the yard at a pace that would have appalled Kaito. At the far end of the annex stood the old foreman's office, a plywood box with a window that no longer opened. In it, behind a steel desk under a 2004 calendar from a bolt supplier, sat Eichiro, with the ThinkPad open in front of him and a Willcom data card jutting from the side of it. The card was the only connection the warehouse had until NTT came to lay the fibre. Its green light blinked slowly.

'Two thirty-two,' Eichiro said. His voice was hoarse. 'The approval came at twenty to nine. I took your envelope to the bank, the money reached Matsui at twenty-six minutes past ten, and I've been staring at this screen for four hours. In four hours, exactly eleven thousand shares have traded.'

Tomoya dropped into the swivel chair and pulled the laptop towards him. Matsui's members' page filled the screen, grey and cluttered. In the top corner, a box read Margin buying power: ¥6,666,000. Beneath it, the board for Kyoto Glass & Sensor sat in a column of numbers, the sell orders in green above, the buy orders in red below. Last trade, 214.

'Thirty minutes,' Tomoya said. 'Listen. Kyoto Glass trades about forty thousand shares on a normal day. Right now there are roughly thirty thousand for sale between 215 and 225, and that is the whole supply of the company's shares, at any sensible price, until the news is out. If I buy all of it, I move the price. That is the problem. A man who buys three-quarters of a day's volume in half an hour stands out like a camel in a cornfield.'

'Then don't buy it all,' said Eichiro.

'I have to. In three days it will be a different company and nobody will sell it to me at any price.' He was already typing. 'So we do it in four bites, a few minutes apart, so that each one looks like a different buyer.'

Eichiro's face was grey. 'Tomoya. Murakami—'

'I know. They'll look at everyone who bought before Monday. The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has a list of who bought what, the day before any announcement, and I'll be on it. A coffee shop whose director signed a margin agreement last week, which bought thirty thousand shares of a dashboard-sensor maker the afternoon before the news.' He didn't look up. 'That's what the file is for. It'll say that we found a stock trading below its book value, that we liked the balance sheet, and that we liked the price. Everything in it is public. And nobody on earth has a way to prove how I knew. Please sit down, Mr Eichiro. You're making the chair nervous.'

Eichiro sat. Tomoya's fingers moved.

Buy. Kyoto Glass & Sensor. 7,000 shares. Limit 218. Margin.

He pressed Confirm. Three thousand shares went at 215 and four thousand at 216. The sell column above the best price lost two rows, then refilled with fresh orders at 217 and 218 as the market took fright and then took heart again. At 2:41 he did it again, five thousand at 218. At 2:48, ten thousand, limit 222, and the screen blinked and rearranged itself, and for a moment the last price stuck at 222, like a rung the whole column was leaning on. At 2:55 he looked at the board. There were eight thousand shares at 225 and nothing more until 230.

He bought them.

Order filled. 8,000 shares @ 225.

At 3:00 the board froze. It was a quiet end. The Tokyo and Osaka exchanges had no bell for it any more, only the figures stopping where they were. The last price for Kyoto Glass & Sensor that Friday was 225 yen, the highest it had stood in three years, and nobody on the floor of anything noticed.

A new line appeared on the Matsui page.

Margin position: Kyoto Glass & Sensor, 30,000 shares, average price ¥220.2. Margin maintenance ratio: 31.7%. (A call will be made if this falls below 20%.)

Eichiro stared at it. 'That's it? Six and a half million yen?'

'Six million six hundred thousand,' Tomoya said. 'Borrowed. With a deposit of two million behind it.'

'Borrowed in a company whose director, whom I've known for six days, signed a personal guarantee.' Eichiro put a hand over his mouth, and behind it, for a moment, he laughed, a thin, cracked sound that had no humour in it. 'I used to think I'd lose my house to a fire or an earthquake. It would never have crossed my mind that it would happen to me through a computer.'

'You won't lose it.'

'You can't know that.'

'No,' Tomoya said. He closed the lid of the laptop. 'But I know what the Americans signed.'

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The weekend was the longest of Eichiro's life.

The exchange was shut on Saturday and Sunday, and with nothing to trade, the numbers on the Matsui page simply stayed as they were, a red 225 sitting there in the middle of the screen like a dead insect. Eichiro refreshed the page every few minutes anyway. He gave it up for ten minutes at a time to pace the living room, floorboards creaking beneath him. By Saturday night the air in the house had gone thick and grey with cigarette smoke. He smoked a pack in an afternoon and half of the next one by evening. He stubbed butts out in the ashtray, then in the saucer from under his coffee cup, and then in a tin that had once held shortbread. At two in the morning he was sitting alone at the low table with the laptop open and the light off, watching the number that did not change.

Tomoya paid the screen no attention at all. He sat on the veranda, in the dark, facing the little gravel garden, while the crickets ticked in the hedge and a faint, hot wind stirred the persimmon tree. On Sunday night, when the house had gone quiet at last, he tried the thing he had been turning over in his mind since Friday afternoon. He closed his eyes and tried, by main force, to climb inside himself, to reach the bridge and the gold sky and the ruined thing on the guardrail. He wanted to demand terms. He wanted to ask what the man with the half-burnt wing had meant by what's underneath.

Nothing happened. The darkness behind his eyelids was plain darkness. He could hear a lorry on the bypass, and Eichiro coughing on the other side of the paper wall.

He opened his eyes and looked at the gravel, thinking it through as he would a problem in an exam. The first time, he had been falling. The second time he had been asleep. It didn't answer when called. Either it chose when to come, or he had to be unconscious to go.

He lay back on the boards, slowed his breathing and ordered his exhausted body to sleep.

The dark stretched like a drum skin. Then it tore, and the gold poured through.

He was standing on the bridge over the Arakawa. The sky above the river was the colour of beaten brass, shifting slowly, like something alive. The ticker tape had stopped falling and lay in drifts against the guardrail, higher than before. On the rail, with its legs crossed, sat the Entity, holding something in its long, translucent fingers that glowed like a bulb. It took a bite out of it. The sound of crunching glass rolled across the empty river.

'Hello, boy,' it said, chewing, quite unbothered. 'What do you want?'

Tomoya crossed his arms and walked towards the rail. 'Terms. You said if I kept feeding you, you'd grow my gift. I want to know how much it takes. And what it grows into.'

The Entity threw back its head, and the laugh tore out of it, grinding gears and a dropped tray of glasses.

'Your weight isn't heavy enough yet to be asking me for a menu, boy.' It flicked the rest of the glowing thing into the river, where it went out with a hiss. 'But I'll tell you. You're a sharp little brat, and I may get something out of it myself.'

It dropped off the rail and landed softly on the asphalt. It was tall, taller than he remembered, and the stump on its right shoulder dripped small, hot embers that vanished before they reached the road.

'It isn't the money,' it said, and laid one long finger against Tomoya's breastbone. 'You think it is, because you're a child of the age. Money is paper. What I eat is what the paper does. When you take a secret from a man who has held it too long, when you move fortunes from one pocket to another and bend the paths of people who thought they were safe, it makes waves in the world. Cracks in the shape of what was going to happen. I swallow those.'

'And what do you do with them?'

'I make them into something I can use. Divine power, if you like the sound of it. And I put it into you.' Its nebula eyes flashed. 'I rewire you. Your next step is a door I call the Vault.'

'The Vault.'

'Memory.' It smiled. 'What you have now is the noise of what a man is thinking at this moment. Surface chatter. With the Vault you'll go below it. You'll see through his eyes. You'll live what he remembers, exactly as he lived it, the smell of the room and the colour of the light.'

Tomoya's mind had already taken the idea apart and was turning over the pieces. 'Is it an open book? Can I walk through a man's head like a library?'

'Of course not.' The Entity shook its head. 'There are rules. There are always rules for you, little predator. First, Synchronisation. The memory has to be rising in the man's mind when you reach for it. If it's asleep at the bottom, you can't touch it. You have to strike at the moment he thinks of it.'

'Then I have to make him think of it.'

'Which is the second rule.' The grin was a terrible thing, a whole mouth of needles. 'The Squeeze. You bring the memory to the surface by talking. Interrogation. Hint at what you want to see. Frighten him. Make him afraid of what's down there, and he'll look straight at it for you.'

Tomoya thought of Tanaka, and the word trustee, and how it had done the whole job by itself. 'And the third?'

'The third hasn't changed.' Its voice went flat. 'Men only. Women stay invisible.'

'Does touch make it stronger? I brushed a man's saucer on Friday. I thought—'

'Touch has nothing to do with it.' The Entity's shape flickered like a badly tuned set. 'Fourth rule. Don't waste your gloves. It's pure mental resonance. Nothing else.'

A crack ran across the gold sky with a sound like a pane splitting. Another ran after it, and a flake of brass the size of a house drifted slowly down towards the river.

'Time to go,' the Entity said, and turned its back on him.

Tomoya woke on the veranda, with the crickets still going and the same hot wind stirring the persimmon leaves. He lay for a long time looking up at the ceiling boards. Then, slowly, he smiled.

He had the rules now. All of them. And the next time he sat across a table from a man who had something to hide, he would not have to wait for the secret to surface by itself. He would drag it up.

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Monday broke hot and low and airless. The sun had been up for two hours, and the whole of Saitama sweated under a white sky.

At twenty-five past eight, Eichiro sat bolt upright at the low table with the ThinkPad open in front of him. His shirt was soaked through at the collar. A lit cigarette had burned down to a long grey ash between his fingers, and as Tomoya watched, it broke and fell onto his trousers. He didn't brush it away. Tomoya sat across from him with a glass of cold water, perfectly still. Behind him, the wall clock ticked loudly in the quiet room.

At eight-thirty, nothing happened.

At eight thirty-one, nothing happened.

At 8:32 and forty seconds, a single new line crept across the bottom of Matsui's disclosure feed, between a bank in Fukuoka and a firm making sewing machines. It was written in the flat, bureaucratic Japanese of every timely disclosure. Kyoto Glass & Sensor Co., Ltd. — Notice Regarding Conclusion of Long-Term Supply Agreement.

Eichiro made a small sound, like a man stepping on a nail.

Tomoya clicked on it. It was a plain page of black type. The company announced that it had that day concluded a long-term supply agreement for cover glass for touch panels with a major technology company in the United States. Quantity, approximately fifty million units over three years from the next financial year. Value, approximately fifty-seven billion yen. The company would increase capital expenditure at its Kameoka plant. The effect on its results would be announced in due course. Hakiro Yamashita's name was nowhere to be seen.

At 8:44, a headline flashed up on the news feed: Kyoto Glass to supply US tech giant: 57bn yen order.

At five minutes to nine, the board for Kyoto Glass & Sensor came up on the screen, and it had changed. The usual neat staircase of green and red had gone. A single red figure stood in the middle of an almost empty field: Special bid quote: 305. Under it, in a column that kept growing as they watched, were the buy orders. One million two hundred and forty thousand shares. One million three hundred thousand. The sell column above it was blank.

'Three-oh-five,' Eichiro whispered. 'It's up eighty yen. Is that all? Eighty yen?' His face was falling in front of Tomoya's eyes, like a sandcastle in a tide. 'I thought it would double.'

'Watch.'

At 9:00:00, the opening bell that nobody rang went off on the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges, and nothing opened. There was no opening price. There were more than a million shares waiting to be bought at 305 or anything higher, and not a single seller to sell them to. The red figure stayed where it was. The queue grew. One million nine hundred thousand. Two million one hundred thousand.

'It hasn't opened,' Eichiro said hoarsely. 'Why hasn't it opened?'

'Because nobody is selling. And the exchange won't let it go any higher today.' Tomoya's voice was quiet and steady. 'Every share has a daily limit. It's worked out from yesterday's closing price. Yesterday it closed at 225, and for a stock in that range the limit is eighty yen. So today it can't go above 305, however many people want it. It's called sutoppu-daka. Stop-high. Think of it as a speed governor on a lorry.'

'And the queue?'

'The queue is the point.' He tapped the screen. 'Two million shares of people who want to buy at 305 and can't get any. Tomorrow the limit will be eighty yen above the close, and they'll all try again. It will go on like that for as long as there are more buyers than sellers.' He sat back. 'It won't stop today, Mr Eichiro. It will only stop when the sellers outnumber the buyers.'

Eichiro stared at the red number, and for the first time that morning, his mouth began to curve. 'It's paper,' he said weakly. 'It's only paper.'

'Yes. It's only paper.'

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The week that followed made a gambler of Eichiro and a stone of Tomoya.

On Monday, nothing traded all day. Kyoto Glass & Sensor closed with a bid queue of 3.6 million shares at 305 yen and not one sale. On Tuesday it did the same, at 385. On Wednesday morning, at half past eight, at Aiiku Hospital in Tokyo, Princess Kiko gave birth to a boy, the first male child born into the imperial family for forty-one years. The whole country stopped to look at its television, and the country took no notice at all of a small company in Kyoto that closed limit-up for the third time that day at 465 yen. On the Yahoo! Finance Japan bulletin board for the stock, which had received a dozen posts a month for as long as anyone could remember, the posts passed four thousand by lunchtime. Some of them were wild guesses about the American customer. Some were screenshots of hundred-million-yen profits that Tomoya didn't believe. A great many were from people who had never heard of Kyoto Glass a week ago and were begging, in capital letters, to be told whether it was too late.

Eichiro kept the closing prices on the back of an electricity bill, in pencil, in a column that grew longer every night. 305. 385. 465. 545. On Friday, when the limit rose from eighty yen to a hundred, the figure was 645. On the Monday after, 745. On the Tuesday, with the limit up again, it reached 895. On the Wednesday, 1,045. On Thursday evening, with the stock into four figures and the daily limit at three hundred yen, he put down 1,345, looked at it for a long time, and did sums on the edge of the paper.

'Forty million yen,' he said, in a small voice. 'Thirty thousand shares times thirteen hundred and forty-five. It's worth more than my father's house.'

'It isn't worth anything until we sell it.'

'And when do we sell it?'

Tomoya had been waiting for that for a week. He took the pencil out of Eichiro's fingers and wrote one word under the column, in his small, neat hand. Queue.

'Every night, the queue of buyers gets bigger. Every night more people read about it in the papers, and more of them open accounts, and more of them join the line. As long as the line grows, we hold. The morning it stops growing, we sell.' He put the pencil down. 'The market is a crowd, Mr Eichiro. A crowd goes on pushing until the day somebody at the back stops, and then everybody does. We won't wait for the end of the rush. We'll be out of the door when it starts to thin.'

On Friday 15 September, they were both at the table again, Eichiro with a day's paid leave that he had told the hotel was for his father's memorial service, and Tomoya with a day off he had put in for a month ago. At five to eight, with the pre-open orders coming in, the board for Kyoto Glass showed that the thing had changed.

The bid queue, which the night before had been over five million shares, was down to nine hundred thousand. Above it, for the first time in ten sessions, was a green wall. Three million one hundred thousand shares were for sale at the market. The exchange's indicative opening price flickered, jumped, fell, and settled near 1,560. There were sellers. The line had begun to thin.

Tomoya's fingers were quite steady. He opened the order form and typed.

Sell. Kyoto Glass & Sensor. 30,000 shares. Market order. At the open.

He looked across the table. Eichiro had stopped smoking. His eyes behind the glasses were wide and wet, and he nodded once, like a man agreeing to be shot.

Tomoya pressed Confirm.

At 9:00 the stock opened for the first time in two weeks. The opening price was 1,520 yen.

Order filled. 30,000 shares @ 1,520.

The figures on the Matsui page rearranged themselves. The margin loan, six million six hundred and seven thousand yen, vanished from the left-hand column. The two-million-yen deposit moved to join the profit. A new line appeared at the bottom of the screen in plain black type, as undramatic as a bus fare:

Realised profit: ¥38,944,000. Account balance: ¥40,944,000.

At six minutes past nine, the price fell to 1,380. At half past, to 1,240. By noon it had slid to 1,180, and the buyers who had stood in the queue for ten days, who had read about the American contract and the boy prince and the fortune that had gone to somebody else, were holding shares they had paid fifteen hundred yen for. Tomoya looked at the falling red numbers on the screen, and for a moment he thought of the boy who had sat at the till at the Lawson at three in the morning, reading the stock tables for something to do while the fridges hummed. The people on the other side of this trade had been boys like that. A small, cold pinch went through him, and then he put it where he put everything.

Eichiro took off his glasses and put both hands over his face.

He wept openly, with his shoulders shaking, the way a man weeps who has been holding his breath for fourteen days. Tears ran between his fingers and fell on the table. For a long time he couldn't speak.

'Thirty-nine million,' he got out at last. 'Thirty-nine million yen. In a fortnight.'

'Forty-one, in the account,' Tomoya said gently. 'But about fifteen and a half million of it belongs to the tax office. It's a company profit, so it's taxed as one. We declare every yen.'

Eichiro stared at him through wet eyes. Then, to his own surprise, he began to laugh, the helpless, hiccuping laugh of a man too tired to stay frightened. 'You're the only man alive who'd think about tax at a moment like this.'

'Somebody has to.'

Tomoya stood up to fetch a glass of water, and the floor tilted.

A pain like a hot wire went through the middle of his skull, from the bridge of his nose to the base of his neck. He dropped to his knees on the tatami, clutching his head in both hands. His vision blurred and whitened. He felt his brain swelling against the bone, as though something inside it were being forced to hold more than it was made for. He heard Eichiro shout his name from very far away, and then he could hear nothing at all.

The bridge came up around him in a gale.

The gold sky over the Arakawa was boiling, torn into shreds that streamed across the heavens like banners. The wind howled so loud it seemed to come from the inside of his head, and ticker tape poured past him in a blizzard, thick enough to blind him. From somewhere far above, a wave of something dark was falling through the sky, heavier than weather, the weight of a fortune that had changed hands and the fear of the men who had held it and the hope of thousands who hadn't. It came down through the gold like a falling mountain.

It struck the Entity squarely in the chest.

The thing on the guardrail spread its arms wide and tipped back its head and drank. Its whole body shone. On its right shoulder, the black and smoking stump erupted in a column of white fire. Flesh grew back where there had been none, bone knit under the flame, and something began to unfold from the stump, thin and trembling and almost translucent, the first pale ribs of a wing.

It lowered its head. Its eyes, two whirling galaxies, fixed on Tomoya through the storm.

'You fed me well, little predator,' it said, and its voice rolled across the sky like thunder. 'As promised. The Vault is open. Go on, boy. Go on with your feast.'

The pain stopped.

Tomoya opened his eyes on the tatami of Eichiro's living room, with the ceiling lamp above him and Eichiro's frightened face over his. He got slowly to his feet, brushed the dust from his knees, and looked down at the screen. Account balance: ¥40,944,000.

He did not smile. Something that had been in his eyes all fortnight, some thin, bright last trace of the boy on the bridge, had gone out, and what was left was cold and level.

'Are you all right?' Eichiro said, in a trembling voice. 'Tomoya? You went white as a sheet.'

'I'm fine, Mr Eichiro.' He turned to the weeping man at the table. His voice was quiet, flat and sure. 'That was only the seed money. It's time to hunt Arata.'