4. Nari
FOUR
NARI
The cab home smelled like leather and someone else’s fading perfume.
Coldness pressed against the windows—Manhattan in sharp relief, bare trees black against lit storefronts, breath visible on the sidewalks.
The city moved past in slices: a couple arguing outside a bodega with the practiced rhythm of people who’d had that fight before, a dog walker managing four leashes with the calm of air traffic control, a man carrying a cello case bigger than his body through a crosswalk with the resigned dignity of a person whose instrument choices had lifelong spatial consequences.
Nari dialed her mother.
Akemi picked up on the second ring. “You’re calling after nine. Either you’re in a hospital, or it’s work.”
“Work. Keiser Entertainment offered me the lead in a new Celestial Ronin project. Animated series. New character called Yua Voidwalker.” She paused. Let the name sit. “She guards a thirteenth gate erased from history.”
The silence on the other end stretched long enough for the cab driver to glance in the rearview, as if silence from a passenger was more concerning than noise.
“Mom.”
“I’m here.” A breath. The sound of Akemi recalibrating—a process that took most people ten minutes and took her mother four seconds. “Parallel creation happens, Nari.”
“Parallel creation doesn’t reproduce a proprietary thirteen-gate mythology that Grandpa invented at the kitchen table. I was THERE for the Void Gate. He explained it over mochi. I was twelve.”
Softer: “He did love explaining things over mochi.”
“Focus, Mom.”
“I am focused. I’m also a woman who watched her father create universes at a kitchen table, and I’m hearing you tell me that someone may have stolen his private work, and I’m holding both of those things at the same time.
” The steel beneath Akemi’s composure surfaced. “How close is the resemblance?”
“From the description alone? A female ronin, a thirteenth gate, a guardian who chose erasure over exposure. Mom, that’s Sora. The narrative architecture is identical.”
“The sketchbooks have never left the brownstone.”
“I know.”
“The digital files are on an encrypted drive in your father’s safe.”
“I know that too.”
A shorter pause. Decision-shaped.
“You’re going to take the role.”
Not a question. Nari loved her mother for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was Akemi’s ability to arrive at the strategic conclusion three steps ahead of the conversation and wait for everyone else to catch up without visible impatience.
“If the work is stolen, the best place to confirm it is inside the production.”
“And if it’s not stolen?”
“Then I book the lead in a Celestial Ronin series and cry about it in a professional context.”
The smallest sound—not a laugh, not quite, but the breath that preceded one. Akemi’s version of amusement: acknowledged, contained, released only at the edges.
“Your father will want to see the packet.”
“Dad will want to depose the entire production team. He’ll have a legal strategy drafted before he’s finished his morning coffee, and it’ll be twelve pages long, and six of those pages will be footnotes.”
“Your father is a thorough man.”
“Dad is a lawyer who sleepwalks into cross-examinations. I once watched him interrogate a plumber about liability coverage. The plumber cried.”
“Don’t tell Obaachan about this yet.”
Nari winced. Grandmother Suki, informed prematurely, would not ask questions.
She would make pronouncements. And her pronouncements had a way of rearranging situations before anyone else had finished identifying the problem.
Telling Suki early was like deploying a tactical weapon when you weren’t sure which direction the enemy was standing.
“Agreed. When I have the full materials—”
“Bring them to dinner on Sunday. We’ll review as a family.” She paused. The kind that meant Akemi was adding an observation she considered relevant, and everyone else would consider mortifying. “Keiser Entertainment. That’s Dojin Keiser’s company.”
“Yes.”
“The bear shifter.”
And there it is.
“Yes, Mom.”
“His mother brought the most extraordinary duck to the last Book Club gathering. Seven courses. The woman understands presentation.”
“We’re discussing potential intellectual property theft, and you’re reviewing a woman’s duck.”
“I can acknowledge potential theft and excellent duck simultaneously. It’s called range.”
She gets that from Obaachan. The ability to derail a crisis with a single irrelevant observation delivered with total composure. It’s genetic. I’m immune to it. Mostly. Sometimes.
The cab pulled up to her building. Cobblestones gleamed wet under the streetlights—rain earlier, leaving the street polished and cold.
“I’ll call tomorrow after I’ve reviewed the packet.”
“Do. And, Nari—” There was a shift in her mother’s voice. The composure thinning to reveal the woman beneath the curator, the mother beneath the strategist. “If it is his work. If someone took what your grandfather left for you, we handle it. Together.”
The way he would have wanted.
Which was not with lawyers, at first. Not with rage. Hideo’s first instinct would have been curiosity. Why did they need it? What did they see in it? Who loved it enough to take it?
His second instinct would have been devastation. Not at the theft—at the idea that someone looked at his work and saw a commodity instead of a story.
“Goodnight, Mom.”
“Goodnight. Wear layers tomorrow. The forecast is terrible.”
Even in crisis, she leads with weather. The woman is an icon.
She hung up. Paid the driver. Stood on the cobblestones while February bit through her blazer and the city grumbled around her—a garbage truck on the next block, laughter from a bar somewhere east, the soft, persistent heartbeat of Manhattan refusing to be quiet.
Upstairs, the loft greeted her with the smell of jasmine candles burned to their wicks and the cold coffee she’d abandoned that morning. A corpse and a crime scene. Fitting.
She dropped her keys on the counter, kicked off the heels, and opened her laptop. Faye’s email sat in her inbox. Subject line: VOIDBORN – CHARACTER PACKET – CONFIDENTIAL.
She opened it.
Concept art loaded first. A woman in dark armor, standing at the threshold of a gate that pulsed with void energy—black shot through with violet light, the edges dissolving into nothing. Her sword drawn. Her face turned away from the viewer, looking into the gate instead of out of it.
Nari’s breath caught.
She’d seen this pose before. Not this image—the lines were different, the coloring digital instead of ink-and-brush—but the composition.
The emotional weight of a guardian facing the thing she protected instead of the world she protected it from.
The turned-away face. The drawn sword held low, not in aggression but in vigil.
She pulled open the drawer in her recording desk.
Beneath a notebook of undeveloped character voices and a framed photo of Hideo and young Nari in his studio: a USB drive containing digital scans of thirty-seven sketchbook pages.
The entirety of Celestial Ronin: The Forgotten Gate.
Sora Nightwind. The Void Gate. The thirteenth guardian.
She didn’t plug in the drive. Not yet. Sunday. Her parents. Her father’s legal eye. Her mother’s artistic one. The proper way to handle this, with the care and strategy her grandfather’s legacy deserved.
Instead, she scrolled through the character bible for Yua Voidwalker.
Read the backstory. The motivation. The arc.
And with every paragraph, the cold in her chest tightened, because this was not parallel creation.
This was not coincidence. This was a dead man’s unpublished masterwork wearing a different name and a new outfit and hoping nobody would notice.
Somebody noticed.
I noticed.
And I am not known for being quiet about things.
She closed the laptop. Sat in the dark of her loft with the booth’s blue standby light at her back and the city pressing against the windows and her grandfather’s voice in her head, patient and warm.
I’m going to open this door, Grandpa. And I’m going to find out who broke the lock.
She picked up her phone and texted.
I’m taking the role.
Three seconds. Takumi: OBVIOUSLY. Emi and I will be your emotional support team. He’s already in position.
Attached: a photo of Emi sitting on a mixing board, one paw on a fader, looking profoundly unimpressed by the entirety of human drama.
That cat has never supported an emotion in his life.
She typed: Emi looks like he’s about to fire someone.
Takumi: That’s his supportive face. Don’t judge his process.
Despite the cold in her chest, the anger she hadn’t given herself permission to release yet, the weight of a stolen legacy pressing against her ribs—she smiled.
Then she turned on the record player, dropped the needle on Coltrane, and sat on the floor of her loft in her red lipstick and bare feet and listened to a saxophone do the one thing she couldn’t right now: fill the silence without words.
Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow I’m going to be very, very loud about this.