12. Nari
TWELVE
NARI
Her loft, an hour before midnight. South-facing windows dark, the city’s glow pressing against the glass.
Record player spinning Chet Baker—quiet trumpet, music that made the room feel like it was breathing.
Nari sat cross-legged on the floor between her couch and the coffee table with two documents spread in front of her and a twist in her stomach that had nothing to do with the takeout pad thai going cold beside her.
On the left: the Voidborn script for episodes one through three. Character descriptions, world-building documents, the Yua Voidwalker design notes she’d been given during onboarding.
On the right: her grandfather’s notebook.
The one with the soft leather cover and Hideo’s handwriting—small, precise, a mix of English and Japanese that switched languages mid-sentence because his mind switched between worlds.
She’d taken photos of the relevant pages at the brownstone.
Sora Nightwind’s character outline. The gate mythology. The sketches.
She laid the Voidborn concept art next to Hideo’s drawings.
Yua Voidwalker wore different armor. Her hair was longer, her stance adjusted, the weapon changed from a naginata to a dual-blade configuration.
Surface differences. Exactly the changes a competent design team would make to disguise a source.
But the composition—the way the character held space on the page, the angle of the head, the relationship between figure and background—was Hideo’s.
Every artist had a fingerprint. Grandpa’s was in the negative space, how he left room for the eye to travel.
This design had been drawn by someone who’d studied his work, but the bones underneath belonged to him.
The gate mythology was worse. The Voidborn documents described twelve gates “based on celestial alignments” with a missing thirteenth gate “erased from cosmic memory.” Hideo’s notebook, dated 2016: thirteen gates tied to the zodiac with a Void Gate “erased from the celestial record.” They’d changed “record” to “memory.” One word.
Like swapping a serial number and calling it a new car.
They didn’t create this. They copied it, filed the edges, and called it original.
Nari pressed her palms against the floor. The hardwood was cool and solid—grounding, when her brain wanted to sprint ahead of her evidence.
The question that mattered: Did Dojin know?
She turned it over. Examined it from every angle, looking for the truth underneath the words.
The man who quoted her Empress Kira work with the specificity of someone who’d watched it multiple times.
Who brought food from a kitchen that didn’t exist and tried to lie about it in front of a woman who’d already clocked the lie.
Who looked at her through the booth glass during her Yua performance like the ground had shifted under his feet and he was deciding whether to fight it or fall.
A man that bad at lying is not a man capable of hiding stolen IP.
But she didn’t know him. Not yet. Not enough to stake her grandfather’s legacy on a gut read and good honey.
She picked up her phone.
Nari: He brought me honeycomb.
Takumi: What kind
Nari: The kind from a personal rooftop beehive.
Takumi: FROM WHERE?
Nari: His. Personal. Beehive. On top of his building. In Manhattan.
Takumi: HE HAS PERSONAL BEEHIVES?
Nari: On the roof. Of a forty-story building. He harvests the honey himself.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. A seventeen-second voice note arrived. Nari played it. Takumi’s voice, escalating:
“He keeps BEES. On a ROOFTOP. And he’s bringing you the HONEY.
Nari. NARI. I’m calling National Geographic.
This is a courtship ritual. This man is courting you with artisanal honey products from his personal apiary and you’re telling me this over TEXT?
This deserves a PHONE CALL. This deserves a DOCUMENTARY. ”
Nari pressed the phone against her forehead and laughed. The kind of laugh that loosened the knot in her chest, because Takumi was ridiculous and Takumi was also—annoyingly, persistently—not wrong.
Nari: It’s not a courtship ritual. He’s a producer supporting a lead actress.
Takumi: Producers send fruit baskets. This man is sending you THE LABOR OF HIS BEES.
Nari: You’re being dramatic.
Takumi: I am being OBSERVATIONAL. There’s a difference. One is me. The other is also me but accurate.
She set the phone down. Picked up the pad thai. Ate standing in her kitchen because the floor was covered in evidence and she wasn’t ready to put it away.
The next session was on Thursday. Scene twenty-two—Yua’s first alliance with the Second Gate Guardian. Technical work, not emotional. The kind of recording that required precision rather than vulnerability, which meant Nari could stay in her head instead of cracking herself open for an audience.
Dojin was in the control room when she arrived. Back corner. Coffee in hand. The chair that was apparently his permanent residence now, despite running a company that spanned animation, gaming, and live entertainment across three continents.
She noticed things.
The way he leaned forward when she started a take—small, unconscious, his body tilting toward the glass like a plant toward sun.
The way his eyes tracked her mouth when she spoke between scenes, then snapped away when she looked over.
The way he positioned himself between her and the door whenever anyone entered the control room—not blocking, not obvious, but consistent enough that she’d started mapping it.
He’s doing it again. The door thing. He shifted left when the audio tech came in. Moved right when the animator brought storyboards. Always between me and the entrance. Like a very polite, very large, very expensive wall.
She also noticed this: the way he watched her perform.
Not the casual attention of an executive checking on an investment.
Not the technical focus of a producer evaluating delivery.
He watched her the way she ate good sushi—like nothing else existed in the room, like the world had narrowed to one thing and he’d decided that thing was worth his complete, undivided, frankly intimidating attention.
That’s either the most flattering thing a man has ever done in my presence or a workplace concern. Possibly both.
She filed that.
Between takes, Priya called a note. “More weight on ‘oath.’ Yua’s making a promise she knows she can’t keep. I need to hear the cost.”
Nari adjusted. Found the heaviness. Let the word sit in her chest before she released it. The take was better. Priya said nothing, which meant it was good.
In the control room, Dojin’s coffee cup hadn’t moved in twenty minutes.
He forgot his coffee. He’s watching me perform and he forgot to drink his coffee. The evidence was mounting.
She went home that night and sat in her own recording booth with the door open and Hideo’s voice notes played through her monitors.
Grandpa’s voice filled the small space—warm, accented, sliding between English and Japanese whenever excitement took over. He was reading the Sora Nightwind introduction, doing the character voice he’d invented for her. Low and certain, with an edge of grief underneath.
Nari closed her eyes. Let it wash over her.
She was voicing a version of this character every day in the Keiser studios.
Bringing Yua to life with words that had been built on Sora’s bones.
And every day, she walked into that booth carrying knowledge that the man who watched her through the glass didn’t have—that the story he’d invested millions in had been stolen from a dead man’s notebook.
You should tell him.
The thought arrived clean and unwelcome.
You should walk into his office and lay the evidence on his desk and watch his face and know, one way or the other, whether you’re performing a stolen story for a man who knows it’s stolen.
But she wasn’t ready. She didn’t have the full chain yet.
She knew the what—Voidborn was built on Hideo’s work—but not the how.
Someone had accessed Grandpa’s unpublished materials.
Someone had copied them, transformed them, and sold them to Keiser Entertainment as original content.
The question wasn’t whether the theft had happened.
The question was who, and whether the man who brought her honeycomb was the buyer or the mark.
Hideo’s voice continued from the monitors. The Sora Nightwind introduction. The lines that Nari had performed as Yua three days ago, the words reshaped but the heart unchanged.
She opened her eyes. Picked up her phone.
Nari: Question.
Takumi: Answer.
Nari: If a man brings you food every day and watches you work through a window and positions himself between you and every door in the room, what does that mean?
Takumi: In what context
Nari: Any context
Takumi: It means he’s either in love with you or he’s the most wholesome person in Manhattan. Both are terrifying.
Nari: He runs a billion-dollar company.
Takumi: Billionaire version. Even better. Does he do the head-tilt thing?
Nari: He does do a head-tilt thing.
Takumi: I’m going to need a name, a photo, and a complete timeline of the food offerings. For science.
Nari: Goodnight, Takumi.
Takumi: THE BEES, NARI. REMEMBER THE BEES.
She put the phone down. Leaned back in her booth chair. The monitors had gone silent—Hideo’s recording finished, the room returned to the soft hum of standby equipment and the distant murmur of Tribeca past midnight.
The file on Dojin Keiser was getting complicated. On one side: the evidence. The stolen IP. The question of who knew what and when. On the other side: rooftop honey and matcha, and a man who listened to her perform with an attention so complete, it made her throat tight.
She reached into the desk drawer. Pulled out the framed photo she kept tucked behind her equipment manuals—Hideo and seven-year-old Nari in his studio, both of them laughing, ink on his fingers and marker on her nose. Private. Not displayed.
I’m going to find out what happened to your story, Grandpa. And I’m going to make sure whoever took it answers for it.
She put the photo back. Closed the drawer.
Turned off the monitors and the booth light and walked through her dark loft to bed, carrying the weight of a performance she’d given that afternoon—Yua at the ruined gate, speaking to an absence—and how Dojin’s hands had tightened on the equipment when her voice cracked, and how she hadn’t been able to stop seeing it since.
Billionaire golden retriever.
She pulled the blanket over her head. The city hummed outside. Sleep came slowly, and when it did, she dreamed of honey and stolen gates and a man holding on to the edge of something, white-knuckled, like letting go was the one thing he wouldn’t allow himself to do.