Page 6 of Bearly Out Loud

Back at the booth, Takumi took one look at her face and set down his sake.

“Who died?”

“Nobody.” She slid into her seat and picked up her cup. Put it down. Picked it up again. Put it down again. She was going to wear a groove in this table. “Keiser Entertainment wants me for Celestial Ronin: Voidborn.”

Takumi’s hand froze mid-reach for the edamame. “Celestial Ronin. That sounds like your grandfather’s franchise. And you look like you’ve seen a ghost instead of booking the role of a lifetime because?—”

“The character is a female ronin who guards a thirteenth-dimensional gate that was erased from history.”

The edamame hung suspended between plate and mouth. Takumi’s eyes widened. He’d been present for enough late-night conversations, enough takeout containers spread across her kitchen counter while she talked about her grandfather’s unreleased work, to understand the shape of what she wasn’t saying.

“That’s—”

“Sora Nightwind. The mythological structure. The narrative architecture. All of it.”

He set the edamame down with the care of a man defusing a bomb. “How?”

“If I knew the answer to that, I’d be on the phone with my father instead of staring at edamame and having an existential crisis in a restaurant that charges nineteen dollars for a cucumber salad.”

They stared at each other across the remnants of dinner. The restaurant clattered on around them. Nobody stared. New York didn’t stare. That was the city’s gift and its curse: the absolute indifference to anyone else’s world collapsing over the appetizer course.

“Could it be a coincidence?” Takumi kept his voice low, which for Takumi represented a Herculean act of restraint that deserved its own award. “Parallel creation?”

“Parallel creation produces similar themes. Archetypes. Tonal overlap. Two people can independently write a story about a reluctant hero—that’s Jung, not theft.” She ran her thumb along the rim of her cup. “Parallel creation does not produce a proprietary thirteen-gate mythology. The thirteenth gate is not established lore. Grandpa invented it. I was there. And nobody else in the world has seen those notes.”

“Nobody?”

“Family. The estate archive. That’s it.”

Takumi tapped his ring against his cup—a small, sharp sound. “So either someone at Keiser Entertainment independently invented the exact same mythological structure your grandfather developed in private?—”

“Or they accessed his work.”

Neither of them said the next part. They didn’t need to.

“What are you going to do?”

Excellent question. Award-winning question. The kind of question that deserved a decisive, strategic answer and was instead going to receive?—

“Call my mother.”

Takumi nodded. “Solid opening move.”

“She’ll tell my father, who will go into full lawyer mode and start using words like ‘discovery’ and ‘chain of custody’ before anyone’s had breakfast.”

“Also solid.”

“And then I’m going to take the role.”

Takumi’s eyebrows rose. “You’re going to take the role in a production that may have stolen your dead grandfather’s work.”

“I’m going to take the role in a production that may have stolen my dead grandfather’s work, because the best place to find evidence is inside the crime scene, and also because I’m petty, and if someone is going to voice Grandpa’s character—stolen or not—it’s going to beme.” She took a breath. “That sounded more unhinged out loud than it did in my head.”

“It sounded exactly as unhinged in your head. You’re self-aware about all the wrong things.” He raised his cup. “To petty vengeance disguised as a career opportunity.”

“To Grandpa.”

The humor drained from Takumi’s face. He touched his cup to hers. “To Hideo.”