Chapter 8: The Favor's First Shadow
The garden behind the genetics building had a strip of grass under a row of white lilies, and by noon the next day it belonged to them.
That hadn't been the plan. The plan had been the cafeteria, same as always, until Matthue had pointed out, gently, that there were now nine of them, and the Fudoma table only sat six, and last time someone had filmed Yuma walking funny. So Uma had said garden, and Nreanna had brought a blanket the size of a small nation, and somehow, without anyone voting on it, the thing had a name. Shirley coined it. She'd spread her arms at the lilies, at the blanket, at the mountain of bento boxes Amatsu and Rosé had built together, and announced, "Behold, the Lily Garden Group," and Rosé had clapped, and that was that.
Yuma sat in the middle of it with his back against Uma's shoulder, eating tamagoyaki off a napkin, and told them everything.
He started with the pool, because the council story didn't work without it. Elianna's voice, sweet and clinical. Tofu. A real woman. Uma's hand tightened against his spine when he got to that part; he felt it through her sweater. He kept going anyway. The hallway, the mask, the sniffing. The two fingers pointing at him, at her. Nine inches. Two inches. Uusal Khaan walking through the crowd like a ship. The council. The favor.
"And you shook his hand," Matthue said. He'd stopped eating entirely somewhere around the word mask. "You negotiated with Fuku Binri. You, the shyest man at this school, looked at the man who rewrote reality and asked him for a debt."
"It felt right at the time," Yuma said.
"It was right," Shirley said. "It's the most romantic thing I've ever heard, actually, it's like a marriage vow with extra steps."
Nreanna had gone very still. She was sitting cross-legged with her knees like soft hills under her skirt, and her green eyes had narrowed to slits, and she was looking at a point somewhere over Yuma's head.
"The glow," she said.
"Here we go," Mynia murmured, and reached past Timmy for a rice ball.
"The glow," Nreanna repeated. "I came halfway around the world to study this event and this man tells me, casually, over lunch, that the man behind it can see transformations. Skin, hair, voice. He read it off your body like a receipt." She turned to Yuma fully. "Yuma. Does anything hurt? Feel strange? Do you crave things?"
"Nreanna."
"Answer the question."
"He craves my wife," Uma said, serene. "That's the documented craving. It's very manageable."
"I'm serious."
"He's fine," Uma said. "We're both fine. Better than fine, actually, and I have a notepad that proves it."
Timmy made a small sound into his tea. Matthue put a hand over his own face. Shirley laughed the way she laughed at everything, bright and loud enough to startle a sparrow off the lilies.
"You made the council," Amatsu said, and her voice was quiet and warm the way it always was, a kettle just off the boil. She reached across the blanket and touched Yuma's wrist. "Both of you. That's wonderful. That's, Yuma, do you know what that is? Standing up after everything, in front of the whole school, that's brave."
"It's insane," said Matthue, and then, blinking, "and wonderful. Both. I've been studying Futanari health for two years and I have never once been recruited by a masked priest. You've been a couple for a month."
"That's our Yuma," Shirley said, raising her water bottle like a toast. "Underachiever. One month in and he's school-famous."
They toasted, actually, everyone, water bottles and teacups and one can of coffee Timmy had been saving, and Yuma sat through it with his ears burning while Uma glowed beside him like it was her award, which, he was learning, she considered it to be.
"The face of the bloc," Mynia said, once the cups came down. She was lying on one elbow, leopard print and yellow eyes, and there was a smile on her dark red mouth that Yuma had learned to read as fond but calculating. "Do you understand what that means, cariño? Elianna Sogran wants you gone. She told you so herself. And your answer was to stand on a stage with her enemy's flag. She will not forget that."
"I know," Yuma said.
"He knows," Uma echoed, proud, unbearable.
"So we celebrate before anything comes for us," Mynia said, and shrugged one shoulder. "That is my advice. Always celebrate first. Funerals are cheaper when you're in a good mood."
And Uma, who had been winding a strand of melon-scented hair around her finger, lit up like someone had plugged her in.
"A party," she said.
"A party?"
"A party." She sat up straight, and Yuma, from long painful experience, recognized the exact pitch of the idea taking hold. "We should throw one. All of us. The Lily Garden Group's first real event, before the council work starts and the term swallows us. To honor, okay, to honor the friendships, and to honor Yuma making the council, and to honor us surviving Elianna Sogran, and honestly just to honor us, we're wonderful, we deserve it."
"See," Mynia said to no one. "This is why I like her."
"I have a house," Rosé said, and her whole face did the thing it did when she was pleased, a slow warm sunrise. "Well, Teon has a house. We have a house. I'll cook, obviously, I've been dying to cook for more than three people, and I'll bring the tequila."
"The tequila," Matthue said carefully.
"My high grade tequila," Rosé said, with the serene confidence of a woman describing a national treasure. "From my cousin in Jalisco. The one that made Amatsu cry at New Year's."
"I cried because it was beautiful," Amatsu said, dignified, and then ruined it by going pink.
"It stripped paint off the doorframe," said Teon, who had been lying on his back at the edge of the blanket with his arms behind his head for the last ten minutes, contributing nothing, listening to everything. One green eye opened. "I watched it strip paint."
"Your house, my tequila," Rosé said. "We each bring what we're good at."
"Or," Shirley said, and Yuma watched the entire table see it coming except Shirley, who was grinning like a shark, "or we skip the pretense and just make it a big great orgy."
The blanket went up in laughter. Timmy choked on his tea so hard Matthue had to thump him. Amatsu laughed into her sleeve. Even Teon's second eye opened. Uma cackled, actually cackled, a sound Yuma had heard exactly twice before and treasured both times.
"What?" Shirley said, delighted, wounded. "I'm joking! Mostly! It's a joke with a poll attached, look at everyone's faces, I'm getting real data."
"We are not throwing a orgy," Matthue said, to his girlfriend, with the weary patience of a man who had held this exact line before. "We are throwing a dinner party. With drinks. Clothes mandatory."
"Fun ones though," said Shirley.
"Fun ones," Matthue conceded, because he was a good boyfriend and knew a lost battle when he negotiated one.
"It could be a nude party," Nreanna said.
The laughter hadn't even fully died, and now it stopped in a different way, a caught-breath way, seven heads turning. Nreanna shrugged, entirely unbothered, adjusting her fluffy green top. "What? Think about it. Everyone here already knows everyone. Nobody here is shy. Well." She glanced at Timmy. "Almost nobody."
"I'm shy," Timmy said, faintly, from behind his glasses.
"You're adorable," Nreanna corrected. "It's different. And it would be so free. Nobody comparing, nobody ranking. Just," she spread her hands at the garden, the lilies, the blue sky, "bodies, sunshine, good food. That's a party."
There was a pause in which Matthue looked at Shirley and Shirley looked at Matthue and neither said clothes mandatory again.
"It's a fun idea," Mynia said.
Everyone turned to her, because Mynia's endorsement was a rarer event than the masked priest's.
"It is," she said, unbothered, examining a nail. "We're all, what's the word, harmonious. Nobody here is going to make anyone uncomfortable. And I have never once in my life gotten to have a conversation with Timmy where no one at the party was calculating his ranking." She patted his knee. "We don't have to decide now. We vote later. Formal vote. I'll make a spreadsheet."
"You have a spreadsheet for everything," Timmy said.
"Yes," Mynia said, lovingly.
The talk turned to dates, to whose turn it was to host, to whether Rosé's cousin shipped tequila internationally, and Yuma let it wash over him. Uma's shoulder was against his. The lilies smelled clean and faintly sweet. Somewhere across the garden a lawn sprinkler ticked its slow circle. It was, he thought, the safest he had felt since before the pool, since before the hallway, since the word Tofu. Nine people and a blanket and a future with possibly a spreadsheet about nudity in it.
Then Amatsu's phone chimed.
It was nothing. Phones chimed all through lunch; Shirley's had gone off twice, Uusal had already texted Uma a banner mockup shaped like a heart. But Amatsu looked at her screen and then did not look away from it, and the kettle-warm quality went out of her face, and Rosé noticed before anyone, because of course Rosé noticed first.
"Mami?"
"I," Amatsu said. She scrolled. Stopped. Scrolled back up, as if the top of the post might have changed. "Oh. Oh, everyone. Everyone, I'm sorry, I need, please look at this."
She held the phone up and out to the middle of the blanket, and Rosé leaned in over her shoulder, and Shirley scooted, and Matthue, and one by one the circle closed around the little bright screen, and Yuma read it upside down and then right side up and then read it a third time because the words refused to arrange themselves into meaning.
The student talk page. Everyone knew it; it was the school's bulletin board and its rumor mill, where people sold bicycles and confessed crushes and argued about the factions. This was a new post, minutes old, under an account with a cat avatar and no name, no history, nothing except a handle that Yuma had heard once before, at a dinner table, said in Nreanna's wondering voice.
Momoi-Chan.
"Nya nya 🐈 everyone, Momoi-Chan's got another game for us all to play, well at least for my Futanari friends (or anyone, gay guys, girls, freaky girls with strap ons) 😍... Yuma nya is a cool guy and a team player for our team of Bitches with Dicks 🍆... but college is getting boring... 🥱💤😪 SOOO I'm offering 300,000 yen 💴 to whoever can Seduce Yuma and Fuck him... except for his sweet girlfriend, sorry nya. Gotta make that Dick Cum tho"
The garden was very quiet. The sprinkler ticked on somewhere behind the silence.
"That's," Shirley started, and stopped, and started again. "That's you. That's a bounty. On you. A sexual bounty. On Yuma."
"Three hundred thousand yen," Matthue said. His voice had gone flat and clinical, the doctor voice Yuma had heard him use once about a classmate's injury. "That's not a joke number. That's a serious number. That's a, that's more than most students make in a year."
Below the post, in the reply thread, sat a single response, and it had the little blue verification marker that only one account on the whole campus page carried. The student president's account. Kyle Rawul Marx.
"I like this idea, this is fun. I've been needing some entertainment. So whoever can do it I'll also give them 700,000 yen on top of the 300,000. So HAPPY HUNTING."
"One million," Timmy whispered. He had gone white. "One million yen. That's, Yuma, that's, people are going to," he looked up, glasses flashing, and didn't finish, because there was nowhere good for the sentence to land.
Yuma read it one more time. Except for his sweet girlfriend, sorry nya. Gotta make that Dick Cum tho. Something about the phrasing, the casual chattiness of it, the cat emoji, the affection in it, cooled him more than any threat could have. Whoever this was knew him. Liked him, even, in whatever way the anonymous mask of Momoi-Chan liked things. Had called him a team player.
"The president responded," Uma said.
Everyone looked at her. She hadn't moved. Her hand was still on Yuma's back, warm through his shirt, and her face was doing something Yuma had only seen in fragments before, at the pool, in the hallway: a very still sweetness over something running very fast underneath.
"The student president," she said, slowly, as if assembling it in front of them, "whose entire public brand is kindness and unity, just put seven hundred thousand yen on seducing my boyfriend. Into an anonymous game. On a public forum. With his verified account."
"So it's a message," Teon said.
He hadn't sat up. He was still on his back, arms behind his head, but his voice had changed, gone low and even, the voice from the cafeteria, and Yuma realized the eye he had open was fixed on the phone screen like it owed him money.
"Momoi-Chan plays games," Nreanna said. She had taken the phone gently from Amatsu and was scrolling the thread herself, green eyes flicking. "I've tracked the account. It appears whenever something interesting is happening, drops one post, and vanishes. Last month it was a ranking of the factions by, don't ask. Before that a dare chain. The account never slips. Never overexposes. Whoever runs it is either very careful or," she paused, "not a student at all. And now they've opened a game on you, Yuma. Publicly. With money."
"A million yen says someone gets past Uma," Mynia said. She was smiling, but it was her list-smile now, the one Yuma had heard about from Timmy in the cafeteria, the one attached to a folder somewhere with Clayton Verne's name in it. "That is not a game. That is a declaration of war dressed as a party invitation."
"But who," Amatsu said, small, "who would do that? It reads so, so friendly. Yuma nya is a cool guy. They like him."
"That's what frightens me," Matthue said quietly. "Malice I could understand. This isn't malice. This is someone who likes him, and wants to watch him be taken apart anyway, and is paying for the privilege. I've read about, no. Never mind what I've read."
Uma took the phone back from Nreanna. She held it in both hands for a moment, thumbs hovering, and Yuma watched her draft a reply and delete it, draft and delete, three times, which she never did, she was the better speaker, she never deleted.
Then she set the phone face down on the blanket between the rice balls and the teacups, and turned, and took Yuma's face in her two hands.
"Yuma Takeuchi," she said.
"Hi," he said.
"A million yen, and the entire school watching, and the student president personally rooting for the field." Her thumbs stroked along his cheekbones. Her voice was soft and level and absolutely ferocious. "Nobody is collecting that money. Nobody is getting close. I have a notepad, a marriage plan, and now a spreadsheet I have to move up my agenda. Do you understand me?"
"Yes," Yuma said, and found, reading it off her face rather than feeling it himself, that he was not afraid. He was furious, somewhere underneath, cold and clean, the same feeling as the pool, the same feeling as the hallway, the feeling that had gotten him a council seat and a favor owed.
"Also," Uma said, and her composure flickered, just once, just at the edge, "she said gotta make that dick cum tho, and I need everyone to understand that the only person making anything happen there is me, and I have twenty-three witnesses in handwriting."
"That's the spirit," Shirley said weakly.
Across the blanket, Teon finally sat up. He did it in one smooth silent motion, the way he'd stood up in the cafeteria, and he picked a rice ball off Amatsu's plate and ate it in two bites while everyone watched him.
"Whoever Momoi-Chan is," he said, chewing, "they know this group. They knew you'd see the post. They said team player. They know the factions, they know the pool story, they know the money would hurt." He looked around the blanket, at nine faces. "That's not a stranger. That's someone inside, or next door, watching the lilies from somewhere."
The sprinkler ticked past. Nine people looked, all together, at the wide empty garden, at the archways, at the comfortable sunny world that had just quietly put a price on one of them.
"New rule," Mynia said, pulling out her phone. "Nobody leaves the Lily Garden Group alone until we know who's hunting."
Before anyone could move, the phone buzzed again.
Amatsu turned it over. A new reply sat at the bottom of the thread, and the account at the top of it made Shirley hiss through her teeth. Fuku Binri. No mask avatar, no joke name. Just the man himself.
"Read it," Uma said.
Amatsu read it. "'This seems to be an interesting ploy at such a time, I'll give you that. However, Yuma has the Eye of the Goddess herself under my guidance. So your game can only last 2 weeks! And if Yuma doesn't get seduced more than 1 times, he gets the money.'"
She paused. Scrolled.
"And then, um. 'P.S. Wow… no gay guy… Yuma's into bitches with Dicks and Pussy… not men… cause that's just Gay…. ewww….'"
"He knows how Momoi-Chan writes," Matthue said slowly. "Two weeks. He's putting a clock on a bounty."
"How does he know the eye is watching her?" Nreanna whispered. "What eye?"
"He gets the money," Yuma said. "A million yen goes to me?"
"That's what it says," Amatsu said.