Page 5 of Bearly Out Loud

For the next forty minutes, conversation drifted through work gossip, Takumi’s ongoing war with a client who insisted on autotune (“He wants to autotune acello,Nari. A CELLO. I’m going to need a lawyer or a priest”), and a spirited debate about whether trip-hop was due for a revival or a merciful death. The kind of evening that reminded her loneliness was a choice she made on purpose, for good reasons, and those good reasons didn’t make the apartment any less quiet at midnight when the booth was closed, and there was nobody to talk to except a cat who lived in Brooklyn and a therapist who charged by the hour.

Her phone rang a little after nine.

She glanced at the screen. Faye Matsuda. Her agent. Calling after business hours, which Faye did not do unless the offer was significant or the crisis was catastrophic. In twelve years of representation, there had been three after-hours calls. One resulted in an Emmy nomination. One resulted in a contract dispute that aged Nari’s father by a visible year. The third was a wrong number, but Faye had handled it with the same professional gravity.

Takumi waved a hand. “Take it. I’ll guard the sake with my life.”

She stepped away and found a corridor near the restrooms. A server brushed past with a tray of glasses. The kitchen doors exhaled bursts of seared garlic every time they swung.

“Faye.”

“Sit down.”

“I’m standing in a hallway next to a restroom that smells like lemongrass and ambition. Sitting isn’t an option.”

“Lean against a wall, then. Keiser Entertainment wants you for Celestial Ronin: Voidborn.”

The hallway noise dissolved. The server. The garlic. The muffled bass of the restaurant’s sound system pulsing through the walls. Gone. Replaced by a silence so total, it belonged in her recording booth.

Celestial Ronin.

“Nari? You there?”

“What role?”

“Lead. New character. Yua Voidwalker—a female ronin who guards a lost dimensional gate.” Faye’s voice carried the controlled excitement of an agent maintaining plausible professional detachment. “They want your range, your Ronin legacy, and your—direct quote from the casting notes—‘ability to make silence sound like a threat.’”

Flattering. Accurate. File that for future contract negotiations.

Nari pressed her back against the wall. The plaster was cold through her blazer.

A female ronin. A lost gate.

“What kind of gate?” Her voice came out even. Professional. The steadiness cost her three years of vocal training.

“Dimensional. The character’s backstory involves a thirteenth gate erased from history. She’s the only one whoremembers it exists. The concept art is stunning—I’ll forward the packet tonight. Production budget is massive, Nari. Full series commitment.”

A thirteenth gate. Erased from history.

Her grandfather’s voice filled her head. Not the memory—the specific recording she’d digitized from a cassette tape three years ago. Hideo Saito at the kitchen table, a plate of mochi between them, explaining to a twelve-year-old Nari why the thirteenth gate mattered more than all the others combined.

“The Void Gate isn’t missing, Nari-chan. It was hidden. Because the guardian who chose to protect it understood that some doors are more dangerous open than closed. That’s not weakness. That’s the strongest kind of strength—the kind nobody sees.”

She’d eaten three pieces of mochi during that explanation. Strawberry. She remembered the taste the way she remembered the sound of his voice—with a specificity that bordered on obsessive and a grief that hadn’t dulled in five years.

Sora Nightwind. Grandpa’s character. The sketchbooks in the brownstone archive that have never left the family.

But that’s impossible.

“Nari.” Faye’s voice sharpened. “Talk to me.”

“Send the packet. I’ll review it tonight.”

“They want an answer by the end of the week.”

“They’ll get one.”

She hung up. Stood in the hallway while a busboy carried a bin of dirty dishes past her, and the kitchen doors swung open and closed, open and closed, the rhythm of a restaurant that had no idea the ground had shifted beneath its very clean floors.