It was only the next morning, standing in the wreckage of that one house with the whole party gathered quiet around me, that I learned it belonged to Alfred.
Hilda and Elin didn't survive the night. Alfred did, only because he'd been at the tavern helping us plan, and I watched something go out of his face the moment he understood what that meant, a light going dark the same way it must have gone dark in my grandfather's eyes after Hallowmere took my grandmother from him.
"They come back for whoever they hated in life," Namey said quietly, later, once we'd done what little there was left to do.
"Or resented.
Or envied. That's the pattern. That's not in Tomiyasu's design either.
Someone built that rule into these things on purpose, and I think I know whose desk that decision would've needed to cross."
"Whose?"
I asked.
"I don't know yet," Namey said, and something tight and afraid moved behind his glasses that I hadn't seen on him before.
"But I've got a very bad feeling it's got less to do with monsters than with who's currently sitting in my old boss's chair."
I didn't press him on it. I filed it away instead, next to Corvin Ashe's name, next to the unmemorable merchant, next to whatever Yomi had meant by two of me, all of it sitting in the same growing, unanswered pile at the back of my skull.
Later that night, sitting apart from the others with my own thoughts for company, I found myself turning Savage's fury from the ridge over in my head, and Abigail's fury from her letter, and even Greta's old fury back in Fenholt over every unpaid coin my father had ever owed her, and I realized, properly, for the first time, that I'd been careless to ever lump the three of them together in my own head as though anger were a single, interchangeable thing women my age simply carried around. Greta's anger ran on fairness, on debts owed and honored, plain as a ledger. Abigail's ran on the particular terror of things and people disappearing without warning or explanation, which made a brutal kind of sense once I actually thought about where she'd come from and where she'd ended up.
And Savage, whatever else she was, burned hottest and fastest whenever someone weaker got hurt by someone who was supposed to protect them instead, in a way that ran older and more personal than anything she'd said out loud to any of us yet. Three different fires, lit by three entirely different kinds of wood. I don't know why it took me this long to actually notice that.
I suspect I'll be embarrassed about it for a while yet.
◆ ◆ ◆
"I made my first game when I was five," Takehiro said, seated at the far end of a long boardroom table that suddenly felt built for a much smaller man than the one currently occupying its head.
"It wasn't really a game, not properly.
I wrote code to cheat at Scrabble, except you had to manually enter every letter on the board yourself first, since I didn't have a camera fast enough to read it for me. Completely useless in practice.
I loved every second of building it anyway."
"Take, I don't think the board wants your childhood stories today," Shinji said, low, not unkindly, from two seats down.
"They want to know how you plan to make this company profitable again."
The mood in the room sat somewhere between a funeral and a trial. A handful of underperforming quarters had brought the whole board down on Takehiro's head at once, and he had been summoned to explain a path forward that everyone in the room besides him already suspected he had no intention of offering.
"I don't care about profits," Takehiro said.
"Or margins, or overhead, or where the stock closes on a given afternoon.
It's never once been about any of that for me.
I just want to keep making better games than the last one."
"I apologize for him, Mr.
Sullivan," Shinji said quickly, to the man at the head of the table.
"He gets carried away.
He's always been like this about the work."
Shinji was trying, visibly and a little desperately, to salvage something out of the room, but the board had clearly finished deliberating long before the meeting even began. Whatever brilliance Takehiro's obsessive perfectionism had produced over the last decade, it had also cost far more capital than it had returned lately, and the board had decided, unanimously and in private well before this meeting, that a steadier hand belonged at the helm now.
"I believe the board has heard quite enough," Edward Sullivan said.
"We cannot entrust this company to a man who has demonstrated, repeatedly, that he doesn't care whether it survives."
"I agree," said a balding man near the far end whose name Takehiro had never once bothered to learn in four years of board meetings.
"Effective immediately, I move that Shinji Nakamura be named the new chief executive."
The vote took less time than it took Takehiro to finish his glass of water. Nobody in the room quite met his eyes on the way out, except Shinji, who lingered a moment at the door, looking like a man about to apologize for something he had wanted for a very long time and had just gotten anyway.
Takehiro sat alone in the empty boardroom for a long while after everyone else had filed out, staring at his own dim reflection in the polished tabletop.
If they wouldn't let him finish Aftermath the way he'd built it, piece by exhausting piece, from a boardroom chair that no longer belonged to him, then he'd simply have to find another way to be inside it properly. All the way inside it. Close enough to feel it the way a billion strangers already did, every single day, instead of only ever watching it happen from the outside through a wall of spreadsheets and quarterly reviews.