Syncope

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes.

The CEO of Hibachi once paid five hundred million for the entrance lobby's imported dust. I'm here to rob the vault underneath it for an employer called the Scribble Committee, and the first person to double-cross me is a woman I watched die.

Ban and I work for the buyers now. That was the plan: stand where they stand, and find the Cradle. I keep a ledger in a station-kiosk notebook with a cartoon cat on the cover. Left column: people who came at us armed. Right column: everyone else. The right column stays at zero. That's the rule.

But something has been riding in Ban since Tokyo a piece of the thing I built in a cellar long ago and the company's drones have started sampling her coffee cups. Hibachi keeps seventeen founders' minds in a jar. Kyoto has a dormitory of four hundred people scheduled to become someone else.

And I have a photograph I still haven't shown her.