Page 7 of Bearly Out Loud

They drank.

FOUR

NARI

The cab home smelled like leather and someone else’s fading perfume. Coldness pressed against the windows—Manhattan in sharp relief, bare trees black against lit storefronts, breath visible on the sidewalks. The city moved past in slices: a couple arguing outside a bodega with the practiced rhythm of people who’d had that fight before, a dog walker managing four leashes with the calm of air traffic control, a man carrying a cello case bigger than his body through a crosswalk with the resigned dignity of a person whose instrument choices had lifelong spatial consequences.

Nari dialed her mother.

Akemi picked up on the second ring. “You’re calling after nine. Either you’re in a hospital, or it’s work.”

“Work. Keiser Entertainment offered me the lead in a new Celestial Ronin project. Animated series. New character called Yua Voidwalker.” She paused. Let the name sit. “She guards a thirteenth gate erased from history.”

The silence on the other end stretched long enough for the cab driver to glance in the rearview, as if silence from a passenger was more concerning than noise.

“Mom.”

“I’m here.” A breath. The sound of Akemi recalibrating—a process that took most people ten minutes and took her mother four seconds. “Parallel creation happens, Nari.”

“Parallel creation doesn’t reproduce a proprietary thirteen-gate mythology that Grandpa invented at the kitchen table. I was THERE for the Void Gate. He explained it over mochi. I was twelve.”

Softer: “He did love explaining things over mochi.”

“Focus, Mom.”

“I am focused. I’m also a woman who watched her father create universes at a kitchen table, and I’m hearing you tell me that someone may have stolen his private work, and I’m holding both of those things at the same time.” The steel beneath Akemi’s composure surfaced. “How close is the resemblance?”

“From the description alone? A female ronin, a thirteenth gate, a guardian who chose erasure over exposure. Mom, that’s Sora. The narrative architecture is identical.”

“The sketchbooks have never left the brownstone.”

“I know.”

“The digital files are on an encrypted drive in your father’s safe.”

“I know that too.”

A shorter pause. Decision-shaped.

“You’re going to take the role.”

Not a question. Nari loved her mother for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was Akemi’s ability to arrive at the strategic conclusion three steps ahead of the conversation and wait for everyone else to catch up without visible impatience.

“If the work is stolen, the best place to confirm it is inside the production.”

“And if it’s not stolen?”

“Then I book the lead in a Celestial Ronin series and cry about it in a professional context.”

The smallest sound—not a laugh, not quite, but the breath that preceded one. Akemi’s version of amusement: acknowledged, contained, released only at the edges.

“Your father will want to see the packet.”

“Dad will want to depose the entire production team. He’ll have a legal strategy drafted before he’s finished his morning coffee, and it’ll be twelve pages long, and six of those pages will be footnotes.”

“Your father is a thorough man.”

“Dad is a lawyer who sleepwalks into cross-examinations. I once watched him interrogate a plumber about liability coverage. The plumber cried.”