3. Nari
THREE
NARI
For the next forty minutes, conversation drifted through work gossip, Takumi’s ongoing war with a client who insisted on autotune (“He wants to autotune a cello, Nari. A CELLO. I’m going to need a lawyer or a priest”), and a spirited debate about whether trip-hop was due for a revival or a merciful death.
The kind of evening that reminded her loneliness was a choice she made on purpose, for good reasons, and those good reasons didn’t make the apartment any less quiet at midnight when the booth was closed, and there was nobody to talk to except a cat who lived in Brooklyn and a therapist who charged by the hour.
Her phone rang a little after nine.
She glanced at the screen. Faye Matsuda.
Her agent. Calling after business hours, which Faye did not do unless the offer was significant or the crisis was catastrophic.
In twelve years of representation, there had been three after-hours calls.
One resulted in an Emmy nomination. One resulted in a contract dispute that aged Nari’s father by a visible year.
The third was a wrong number, but Faye had handled it with the same professional gravity.
Takumi waved a hand. “Take it. I’ll guard the sake with my life.”
She stepped away and found a corridor near the restrooms. A server brushed past with a tray of glasses. The kitchen doors exhaled bursts of seared garlic every time they swung.
“Faye.”
“Sit down.”
“I’m standing in a hallway next to a restroom that smells like lemongrass and ambition. Sitting isn’t an option.”
“Lean against a wall, then. Keiser Entertainment wants you for Celestial Ronin: Voidborn.”
The hallway noise dissolved. The server. The garlic. The muffled bass of the restaurant’s sound system pulsing through the walls. Gone. Replaced by a silence so total, it belonged in her recording booth.
Celestial Ronin.
“Nari? You there?”
“What role?”
“Lead. New character. Yua Voidwalker—a female ronin who guards a lost dimensional gate.” Faye’s voice carried the controlled excitement of an agent maintaining plausible professional detachment.
“They want your range, your Ronin legacy, and your—direct quote from the casting notes—‘ability to make silence sound like a threat.’”
Flattering. Accurate. File that for future contract negotiations.
Nari pressed her back against the wall. The plaster was cold through her blazer.
A female ronin. A lost gate.
“What kind of gate?” Her voice came out even. Professional. The steadiness cost her three years of vocal training.
“Dimensional. The character’s backstory involves a thirteenth gate erased from history. She’s the only one who remembers it exists. The concept art is stunning—I’ll forward the packet tonight. Production budget is massive, Nari. Full series commitment.”
A thirteenth gate. Erased from history.
Her grandfather’s voice filled her head.
Not the memory—the specific recording she’d digitized from a cassette tape three years ago.
Hideo Saitō at the kitchen table, a plate of mochi between them, explaining to a twelve-year-old Nari why the thirteenth gate mattered more than all the others combined.
“The Void Gate isn’t missing, Nari-chan. It was hidden. Because the guardian who chose to protect it understood that some doors are more dangerous open than closed. That’s not weakness. That’s the strongest kind of strength—the kind nobody sees.”
She’d eaten three pieces of mochi during that explanation. Strawberry. She remembered the taste the way she remembered the sound of his voice—with a specificity that bordered on obsessive and a grief that hadn’t dulled in five years.
Sora Nightwind. Grandpa’s character. The sketchbooks in the brownstone archive that have never left the family.
But that’s impossible.
“Nari.” Faye’s voice sharpened. “Talk to me.”
“Send the packet. I’ll review it tonight.”
“They want an answer by the end of the week.”
“They’ll get one.”
She hung up. Stood in the hallway while a busboy carried a bin of dirty dishes past her, and the kitchen doors swung open and closed, open and closed, the rhythm of a restaurant that had no idea the ground had shifted beneath its very clean floors.
Back at the booth, Takumi took one look at her face and set down his sake.
“Who died?”
“Nobody.” She slid into her seat and picked up her cup. Put it down. Picked it up again. Put it down again. She was going to wear a groove in this table. “Keiser Entertainment wants me for Celestial Ronin: Voidborn.”
Takumi’s hand froze mid-reach for the edamame. “Celestial Ronin. That sounds like your grandfather’s franchise. And you look like you’ve seen a ghost instead of booking the role of a lifetime because—”
“The character is a female ronin who guards a thirteenth-dimensional gate that was erased from history.”
The edamame hung suspended between plate and mouth. Takumi’s eyes widened. He’d been present for enough late-night conversations, enough takeout containers spread across her kitchen counter while she talked about her grandfather’s unreleased work, to understand the shape of what she wasn’t saying.
“That’s—”
“Sora Nightwind. The mythological structure. The narrative architecture. All of it.”
He set the edamame down with the care of a man defusing a bomb. “How?”
“If I knew the answer to that, I’d be on the phone with my father instead of staring at edamame and having an existential crisis in a restaurant that charges nineteen dollars for a cucumber salad.”
They stared at each other across the remnants of dinner. The restaurant clattered on around them. Nobody stared. New York didn’t stare. That was the city’s gift and its curse: the absolute indifference to anyone else’s world collapsing over the appetizer course.
“Could it be a coincidence?” Takumi kept his voice low, which for Takumi represented a Herculean act of restraint that deserved its own award. “Parallel creation?”
“Parallel creation produces similar themes. Archetypes. Tonal overlap. Two people can independently write a story about a reluctant hero—that’s Jung, not theft.
” She ran her thumb along the rim of her cup.
“Parallel creation does not produce a proprietary thirteen-gate mythology. The thirteenth gate is not established lore. Grandpa invented it. I was there. And nobody else in the world has seen those notes.”
“Nobody?”
“Family. The estate archive. That’s it.”
Takumi tapped his ring against his cup—a small, sharp sound. “So either someone at Keiser Entertainment independently invented the exact same mythological structure your grandfather developed in private—”
“Or they accessed his work.”
Neither of them said the next part. They didn’t need to.
“What are you going to do?”
Excellent question. Award-winning question. The kind of question that deserved a decisive, strategic answer and was instead going to receive—
“Call my mother.”
Takumi nodded. “Solid opening move.”
“She’ll tell my father, who will go into full lawyer mode and start using words like ‘discovery’ and ‘chain of custody’ before anyone’s had breakfast.”
“Also solid.”
“And then I’m going to take the role.”
Takumi’s eyebrows rose. “You’re going to take the role in a production that may have stolen your dead grandfather’s work.”
“I’m going to take the role in a production that may have stolen my dead grandfather’s work, because the best place to find evidence is inside the crime scene, and also because I’m petty, and if someone is going to voice Grandpa’s character—stolen or not—it’s going to be me.
” She took a breath. “That sounded more unhinged out loud than it did in my head.”
“It sounded exactly as unhinged in your head. You’re self-aware about all the wrong things.” He raised his cup. “To petty vengeance disguised as a career opportunity.”
“To Grandpa.”
The humor drained from Takumi’s face. He touched his cup to hers. “To Hideo.”
They drank.