Chapter 7: Next time
The scent of ginger and garlic had deepened, clinging to the warm air of the apartment. It was a good smell, a safe smell. Ren sat at the low table, pushing strips of overcooked synthetic pork around his bowl with his chopsticks. The real egg had been transformed into a delicate, fluffy tamagoyaki by Aoi, a golden luxury on the chipped plate.
“You’re quiet,” Kaito said, his voice a low rumble from the head of the table. He wasn’t eating much. He rarely did. His large, scarred hands were wrapped around a cup of tea, the steam curling around his face.
“Long day,” Ren muttered.
Aoi fluttered between the tiny kitchen alcove and the table, refilling tea, her smile persistent but her eyes soft with concern. “Kai said you boys saw some trouble at Yurakucho. Nasty business. Best to keep your head down and your eyes forward.” She placed a small, cloth-wrapped parcel beside Ren’s bowl. “For later.”
He knew what it was. His birthday gift. The day had bled away, the confrontation with Thorne and the memory of the gauntlet and the van overshadowing everything else. He’d almost forgotten himself. But they hadn’t.
His pocket comm was a dead weight in his lap. No notifications. No incoming call ID from a blocked or distant signal. Nothing.
He chewed. The food was flavorless paste in his mouth. Half of him pictured his father in some stark, bright cleaner’s barracks beyond the wall, staring at a calendar, a flicker of regret crossing a face Ren could barely remember. The other half pictured nothing at all—a void, an empty frequency where a father’s voice should have been.
“The news said it was a contained disruption,” Kaito stated, watching him. “The Metropolitan Service handles these things.”
Ren’s chopsticks clicked against the bowl. “They weren’t Metropolitan. They were military. They just… took people. Like loading cargo.”
The apartment fell silent except for the persistent, arrhythmic tick-tock-tick from the grandfather clock in the hall. That clock was wrong. It had always been wrong. Sometimes it lost time. Sometimes, like Aoi whispered when she thought Ren was asleep, it ticked backward.
“The system has protocols,” Kaito said, his tone final. It was his old officer’s voice, the one that left no room for debate. “Survival isn’t pretty. It isn’t fair. It’s a calculation. The stability of the whole against the distress of the part.”
“Is that what you told yourself? Out there?” The question left Ren’s lips before he could stop it, brash and sharp.
Kaito’s eyes, like chips of flint, met his. Aoi froze, a dish in her hand.
“Yes,” Kaito answered, unflinching. “Every single day. And the day I started questioning the calculation in the field was the day my suit’s left actuator failed and three tons of plasteel crushed my lumbar spine. The anomaly didn’t get me. Doubt did.” He took a slow sip of tea. “Your father operates on the same calculus. Remember that.”
The name hung in the air, an uninvited ghost. Ren’s jaw tightened. The calculus. So his birthday didn’t factor. The simple, human act of remembrance was a variable scrubbed from the equation.
He stood up abruptly, his chair scraping the worn floorboards. “I’m tired.”
“Ren, your present,” Aoi said, her cheer now strained.
He took the parcel. It was soft. A new sweater, probably. Something warm. “Thank you,” he managed, the words tight.
He walked to the door of his tiny room, a converted storage nook barely big enough for a cot and a shelf. He paused, his hand on the frame, listening. He wasn’t sure what for. The buzz of his comm. The sound of the apartment door opening.
There was only the tick of the broken clock.
Tick-tock-tick.
Midnight bled into the apartment silently. No chime from the clock. It just kept its stubborn, backward rhythm. Ren sat on the edge of his cot, the unwrapped gift beside him. He hadn’t opened it. The hollow feeling in his chest had crystallized into a cold, hard stone.
He’d held onto a childish filament of hope, a stupid, fragile thing. The great Hiro Ikawi, the Sword of Tokyo-1, would remember the son he left behind. It was a fairy tale. Thorne was right. The world was a screaming wrong, and the men who went out to face it had to sever themselves from the soft, quiet things that could break them. Things like love. Like family. Like a son’s birthday.
The door to his room slid open with a soft whisper. Kaito stood in the doorway, a monolithic silhouette leaning heavily on his cane. He didn’t enter, respecting the boundary.
“He won’t call,” Ren said to the darkness, not turning around. The anger was there, hot and liquid. “He’s probably saved a million people today. Or killed a million monsters. Why would a birthday matter?”
Kaito was silent for a long moment. “When your mother died,” he began, his voice stripped of its sternness, raw in a way Ren seldom heard, “your father broke. Not on the outside. On the inside. The fracture was absolute. He believed the only way to honor her—to protect the piece of her she left behind—was to become a perfect instrument. A flawless part of the calculation. He thought sentiment would get you killed. He thinks his distance is a shield.”
“It’s not a shield. It’s nothing.” Ren’s voice cracked. “It’s just nothing.”
“I know.” A pause. The old floorboard creaked as Kaito adjusted his weight. “The world beyond the wall is a greedy place. It consumes everything—time, memory, love. It convinces men they must become voids to fight the void. Your father is a great cleaner. But he is a failed man. Do not make the same error.”
“What error? Caring?”
“The error of believing the two cannot exist together. I flew. I fought. I loved your aunt every second of it. The love did not make me weak. The fear of losing it did. That is the calculation he never learned.” Kaito sighed, a sound of immense weariness. “His failure is his. Do not let it become your cornerstone.”
Ren said nothing. The stone in his chest was still there, but it had edges now, not just a dull ache.
“Open your aunt’s gift,” Kaito said softly. Then the silhouette retreated, and the door slid shut.
Alone again, Ren stared at the cloth. He untied the knot. It wasn’t a sweater. It was a photograph, printed on real, faded paper, set in a small, hand-carved wooden frame. A picture he’d never seen. His mother, young and laughing, her hair in a windswept mess, leaning against the arm of an Exosuit. She was pregnant. Her hand rested on the curve of her stomach. And beside her, a young man , his father Hiro, smiling a smile that didn’t look like a calculator’s work. It looked real. It looked hopeful.
On the back, in his aunt’s elegant script: The day we knew you were coming. They were so full of hope for you.
The stone in his chest split. Not into anger, but into a vast, overwhelming sorrow. For the man in the picture who vanished. For the mother who never got to see him. For the uncles and aunts who tried to fill a void with a quiet, steadfast love. For himself.
He placed the frame on his shelf, next to his cadet manuals. He lay down on the cot, staring at the cracks in the ceiling plaster.
The clock in the hall ticked.
Tick-tock-tick.
Backward. Forward. It didn’t matter. Time moved. The world outside the window hummed with a desperate, violent energy. Anomalies spread. People were taken in the night. His father hunted monsters in the dark.
And here, in this small, peeling room, Ren Ikawi cradled a new, more painful kind of resolve. Not just to prove himself. But to be a different kind of instrument. One the screaming wrong could not corrupt. One the calculation could not erase.
He would learn to fight. But he would not become a void.
The last thing he heard before sleep was not the clock, but the distant, subsonic thrum of a cleaner’s dropship, heading out past the perimeter wall, into the amber glow.