It started with the billboard outside the school.
Kazuki was walking past it at 7:15 AM, collar up, hands in his pockets, the fake cast still on his right arm. The billboard had been advertising a soft drink for the last three months. A girl laughing. A bottle sweating in the sun.
Now it was a man in a grey suit sitting in a chair.
Kazuki stopped.
The man had dark, neat hair. Pale skin. Hands folded on the table in front of him like he had all the time in the world, which in a way he did.
Victor Vane looked directly into the camera and spoke.
"My name is Victor Vane. I represent a coalition of interests that have been mischaracterised as hostile by your government and your media."
His voice was calm. Not the calm of someone performing calm. The real kind. The kind that comes from genuinely having nothing to be afraid of.
Kazuki looked around. Every screen on the street was showing the same feed. Every phone in every hand. Every television visible through every shop window.
Every single one.
"We came to your city for one thing," Victor continued. "A device. A piece of technology that was stolen from our timeline and embedded in a civilian without his knowledge or consent."
Kazuki felt his jaw tighten.
"We did not come to conquer. We did not come to destroy. Every confrontation your city experienced was initiated in response to aggression from the individual currently hosting the device. Every casualty. Every demolished building. Every bridge."
A pause. Perfectly timed.
"We are prepared to leave. Permanently. All forces. All presence. The moment the Core is returned."
Victor unfolded his hands and placed them flat on the table.
"You have twenty-four hours to convince your Speedster to do the right thing." He looked directly into the camera. "Or we begin demonstrating what the device will eventually do to your city regardless."
The feed cut.
The soft drink advertisement came back. The laughing girl. The sweating bottle.
By noon the news had a name for it.
The Vane Broadcast. Every channel. Every platform. Translated into thirty-one languages inside the first hour.
By 2 PM, three government officials had given statements.
None of them defended Kazuki.
Back at the garage, Aeva had the coverage on every monitor simultaneously. She was standing in the center of the room with her arms crossed and her eyes moving between screens with the focused stillness of someone trying not to say what they were thinking.
Rina was by the door. She hadn't moved in forty minutes.
Kazuki sat on the workbench and watched a news anchor ask a panel of experts whether a teenager had the right to endanger an entire city for the sake of keeping a piece of technology.
The panel was split.
The split was getting smaller.
"He's smart," Aeva said quietly. "He didn't threaten the city. He made you the threat to the city."
"I know," Kazuki said.
"You can't punch a press conference."
"I know."
"The government is going to—"
"I know, Aeva."
She stopped. Looked at him. Something in his voice made her not push further.
Kazuki went to the back room.
He sat down. He took off the fake cast.
He looked at the new vein.
It had moved again overnight. It was at his collarbone now. Three branching lines, thin as wire, all pointing the same direction.
Toward the Core.
He thought about Victor Vane's hands on the table. Perfectly still. The hands of a man who had already run every possible response to every possible reaction and found them all predictable.
He thought about what Renji told him in the very first week.
The most dangerous move an enemy makes is the one that looks like nothing.
Victor Vane had just made the entire city of Neo-Tokyo into a weapon aimed at Kazuki's chest. Without deploying a single hunter. Without firing a single shot.
He'd done it with a chair and a camera and twenty-two words.
Kazuki looked at his reflection in the dark window across from him.
He looked at his left eye. The blue ring was thicker than yesterday. Visible now without looking hard.
In the other room, Rina's phone buzzed.
For the first time in two days, she answered it.
Kazuki heard her say one word.
Just one.
"Where."
She didn't say it like a question.
[To Be Continued...]