Page 36 of Bearly Out Loud

Her phone lit up.

Takumi:Update. Emi has been briefed. He is unmoved. I, however, am writing your wedding toast. First draft. You can’t stop me.

Nari: There is no wedding.

Takumi:Not yet. But a man who sits on a floor in the dark because you need company doesn’t go back to being “the CEO.” He’s past that. You’re past that. The floor knows it. The jacket knows it.

Nari:How do you know about the jacket?

Takumi:There’s a jacket????

Nari dropped her phone into the jacket’s oversized pocket. The pocket alone could have held a small dog. She pulled the lapels closed and watched the rain streak across the cab window, Tribeca approaching through a smear of lights and wet glass.

She was keeping this jacket.

That was the only decision she was prepared to make tonight.

TWENTY

NARI

The corporate filing read like a bedtime story written by a sociopath.

Nari sat cross-legged on her living room floor at one in the morning with her laptop balanced on a stack of manga volumes and three browser tabs open to the New York Secretary of State’s business entity database. Chet Baker had given way to Nujabes hours ago—lo-fi beats that matched the clicking rhythm of her keyboard. A mug of cold matcha listed sideways on the coffee table. She’d forgotten it existed around eleven forty-five, when the paper trail started making her stomach hurt.

Meridian Creative Partners, LLC. Filed in Delaware, where every company that wanted to be invisible filed. Single managing member listed as Halloran Consulting Group. She clicked through to Halloran. Another LLC. Filed in Nevada. Managing member: a holding company registered to a P.O. box in the Caymans.

Three shells deep. Someone paid a lot of money to not have their name on this.

She pulled the laptop closer and opened the pitch deck she’d photographed from the production office bulletin board last week. Everyone left pitch decks lying around studios.Nobody expected the lead voice actress to photograph them in the bathroom during a break. Nobody expected the lead voice actress to be conducting a forensic audit of their flagship property, either, but here they were.

Voidborn Requiem. Pitched to Keiser Entertainment over a year ago by Meridian Creative Partners. Original concept, the deck claimed. A fresh mythology built from the ground up. Bold, cinematic, unprecedented.

Nari scrolled to the concept art page and held it next to the photo of Hideo’s notebook on her phone.

Fresh mythology. Ground up. Unprecedented.

Except the protagonist’s oath is adapted from a Heian-era poem that my grandfather translated in 1987. Including the deliberate error in the fourth line. Because Grandpa thought flaws made things human.

She’d traced the pitch backward. Meridian Creative Partners had no website, no portfolio, no public-facing employees. A company that existed only on paper. And it had somehow developed an “original” animation concept that shared structural DNA with thirty years of unpublished Wixx estate archives.

Her phone buzzed. Takumi.

Takumi:It’s 1 am. Are you investigating or are you sleeping?

Nari:Define investigating.

Takumi:Hunched over your laptop surrounded by documents looking like a beautiful conspiracy theorist.

Nari:Then yes.

Takumi:Did you eat dinner?

Nari:I ate intent. And half a granola bar.

Takumi:I’m sending you food tomorrow. Real food. The kind that requires chewing.

She dropped her phone and turned back to the screen. Halloran Consulting Group’s registered agent had a name: Kenneth Pruitt. She searched him. LinkedIn profile: Senior Vice President of Business Development at Mercer Global Media.