The sentence landed like a grenade rolled under the table. For a heartbeat the kitchen held its breath; the sunlight out the window kept moving, oblivious, sliding across the tatami and making a thin line of gold that trembled like a thread. Bird's mouth opened and closed uselessly around the taste of miso and shame, his chest still heaving from the gag. Blackbird Named Mask's wheeze cut into the room like a broken music box, and then, between fits of hysterical cackling, the creature hissed the cruel line again as if repeating a sacred joke no one else was supposed to understand. The words were not funny. They hung there, ridiculous and terrible, and Bird felt the floor drop out from beneath him.
Then came a knock at the door—official, polite, the one with three sharp beats and not waiting for an invitation. Kousuke blinked, tucked the receiver into the crook of his arm as though he was still in the middle of a conversation about it, and trooped to the door with the customary composure of a man greeted by customers and neighbors for the better part of a century. His smile as he opened the door was the one for easing whatever embarrassment lay beyond the doorway, but it gave way to kindly confusion when the man at the door was dressed in a gray suit, a shiny badge pinned at the breast of the jacket, and a face the precise shade of municipal forms.
"Morning," the officer said, voice all business and not a syllable of judgment, holding out a clipboard like a shield. "National Tax Agency. I'm here to follow up on your—ah—claim. There was some unusual language on the phone earlier. We just wanted to confirm that everything is in order."
Kousuke's eyes widened with the same honest bewilderment he carried through life's little surprises. He adjusted his muffler, glanced apologetically back into the kitchen as though he might be interrupting a private festival, and then gestured grandly toward Bird in a way that meant, "This is my son; please be gentle." "Ah, forgive me. My boy has a bit of a… morning," he said, struggling for the right euphemism. "We had a misunderstanding. I thought I'd caught some kind of illness. Contagious. Terrible word, very awkward."
Bird could sense the color ripping across his face in slow motion. He wished he could sink through the tatami, be engulfed by the floorboards and shoot off into some anonymous sewer wherein nobody could ever pose questions. Blackbird Named Mask, now settled atop the rice cooker like a tiny, treacherous monarch, fluttered wings and cackled and reveled in the coming show. "Tell him you're horny, Bird," the bird breathed, feathers trembling with malevolence. "Tell him you're terminal."
Kousuke—blessed, trusting fool—did not receive the cue this was not the moment for metaphors. He cleared his throat, grinned as wide as a man presenting a bowl of soup, and in the simplest tone humanly feasible, said to the officer, "Yes. That's right. I fear I am … very horny. My son taught me about it—he informed me it's similar to being sick. Very unlucky."
The officer's pen stopped mid-scratch. For a second the world seemed to spin inward on itself, all noise muffled as if the house were underwater. He stared at Kousuke, then at Bird, then at the blackbird, which was now sitting with a ridiculous solemnity as if it were a prophet in feathered form. The badge man's mouth opened and closed, and somewhere out on the street a deliveryman paused with a hand on a parcel, listening. Somewhere else, a neighbor's door cracked and an ear crept out.
There was no graceful recovery from whatever registers had been shorted in that moment. The officer tried to smile, to save decorum, and to steer the conversation back to tax codes and deadlines, but the air had already ruptured into a thousand private jokes. Bird felt like he was the center of a terrible cartoon his life had become—an animated calamity with a laugh track he did not deserve. He wanted to explain, to apologize, to confess every humiliating thing he had done and undo it all in a clean, repentant sweep. Instead he could only stand there, the uniform clinging wrong to him, breath uneven, while his father politely shuffled paperwork and the blackbird polished its beak with an expression that read, very plainly, I told you so.
.
Zenkichi's shoes slapped the pavement in a hurried, uneven rhythm, blazer half-buttoned, tie hanging loose like a rope he'd already given up tying properly. The morning air in Mushashi no Yamato carried that faint autumn crispness, the smell of bakeries waking up and old men hosing down storefronts. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he fished it out with the reflex of someone who dreaded what it might say.
[Ms. Rin: Shotaro hasn't been in the room by himself since yesterday evening. Hiroki's gone alone to Tokyo for the chess match of his mother. If you see something, tell me.] Zenkichi looked at the screen for longer than necessary, thumb frozen, the words revolving in his mind. Shotaro is gone. Hiroki is missing. The safety net was yanked away in one movement. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket without a reply, because what the hell did he have to say? That he'd keep an eye? That he'd help? He was not Shotaro. He was not Hiroki. He was the man who once made human beings like them suffer.
A blackbird named Mask fluttered down to the low brick wall lining the sidewalk, walking beside him like a companion with sharper claws. "Funny, isn't it?" the bird chirped, its tone both playful and poisonous. "The mighty Red Eye Ronin are scattered already. Your precious hero is gone, his fat shadow off to play good son in the big city. And you? Just you, Bird. Walking through the kingdom you used to rule."
Zenkichi's jaw set, but he didn't stop walking. The landmarks he was familiar with loomed up around him like indictments—the corner deli stand where he once would linger in a cluster of tough-talkers, the alley where he bullied kids for money at lunchtime, and the bus stop at which he once kicked a boy so hard the boy's teeth fractured on the edge of the curb. All the faces he recalled had been faces he had eliminated, mere props in his act as "Bird."
Some of them walked by him now in real time, kids he knew by the way they looked at him and then looked away quickly. A girl he'd bullied until she cried was now giggling with friends but tensing up when their gazes crossed. A kid he'd pushed into lockers, walking down the hall with a violin case and a quiet air of ownership. He walked through them like a ghost among survivors, and every step drove the weight of memory deeper in his bones.
"See them?" A blackbird named Mask crooned, hopping closer on the wall. "Little pieces of you scattered everywhere. Scars with your name stitched into them. You thought you were free when you wore me, when you strutted as Bird. But look at them now, Zenkichi Gojo. They don't flinch for you. They don't kneel. They don't even care."
Zenkichi's throat was scorched, but he pushed his voice hard and even. "Yes. I know what I did. I don't require you reminding me at every damn step."
The bird cocked its head, beady eyes glinting cruelly. "You say that, but you wouldn't have me. Who's going to ask the question you've been running from? Was it you or me—the mask you created, the mask you nourished? If it was me, then you'd be innocent. If it was you, then perhaps you didn't deserve Shotaro's hand digging you up from the earth."
Zenkichi stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk, gasping, staring down at the sidewalk cracks. The crowd streamed around him, business suits and school uniforms, morning chatter like background noise. For the first time, he was not quite sure whether he was immobilized or whether the world had gone around him.
The bird fluttered onto his shoulder, the voice a whisper in his ear. "So tell me, old friend. Who are you going to school with today? Zenkichi Gojo, the boy who has nothing left? Or Bird, the mask who can't quit prowling the street he used to own?"
The school gates were just in front of him as he saw a person crossing the sidewalk across from him, head down, fists deep in pockets. He thought he was going crazy again—another ghost summoned by memory, another hallucination joined by his conscience in order to harass him. But no. The tilt of the shoulders, the gait that put too much weight on the right leg, the shape of a face he hadn't seen in close to a decade—it was him.
Sakamoto Tam.
The boy he had bullied when they were both aged seven. The boy who had sniveled without a sound, tears running down his cheeks in silence while Zenkichi pushed him in the mud, took his toys away from him, and informed the world he was nothing. Zenkichi had assumed Tamura abandoned the city years ago, having run away as many others did. What was he doing here today, walking as if he owned the sidewalk?
Zenkichi halted in his pace, his heart pounding in a discordant, jerky beat. Blackbird Named Mask tilted upon his shoulder, voice singing with malicious glee. "Ohhh, this is rich. The ghost has returned home. What say you now, Zenkichi? Fate? Or merely another noose closing in about your neck?"
Tamura took a thin side alley without a backward look. Zenkichi delayed by only a breath before he trailed behind him, drawn by something he didn't quite understand. The alleys became increasingly darker the farther he went, sunlight blocked by rusty fire escapes and slumping concrete walls. The air was heavy with the smells of oil and sweat, old trash, and wet stone.
He followed Tamura through alleys and passageways that none but a man familiar with the underside of the city dared navigate with such confidence. Then, having ducked beneath a steel door half-concealed behind a closed ramen stand's shuttered hatch, Zenkichi entered a world he knew too painfully well.
The subterranean battle arena.
Dim lights buzzed overhead, casting shadows across graffiti-stained walls. Men in sweat-streaked undershirts smoked in corners, money changing hands with a language older than the rules of schoolyard power. The air vibrated with shouts, bets, and the dull, wet thud of fists meeting flesh. And here at the lip of the pit stood Tamura Sakamoto with arms akimbo, not the quiet child he used to be who shrank beneath the shadow of Zenkichi but another person—someone toughened, someone at ease here. Zenkichi stood frozen just outside the door, every fiber screaming, every memory struggling back to the surface. Blackbird Named Mask whispered with relish, "Welcome back, Bird. Welcome home."