15.
We got out of the cab outside Tokyo Station, an old-fashioned brick building that would have looked way more in place somewhere like London, but felt a little out of step with the bustling, glassy, futurist neon vision that was Tokyo. It even had a clock tower complete with white-faced clock on the facade. I gawked at it while Harry, gentleman that he was, paid the cabbie.
Stepping out onto an insanely crowded street instantly triggered my agoraphobia, which was totally a thing, but fortunately not a debilitating one. “Ugh,” I muttered, looking around. We were about a solid thirty-second sprint to the station across a fairly open square, but there was a restaurant on the ground floor of a glass skyscraper behind us, which I took note of as the crowd streamed past us in all directions. Tokyo was, by far, the most crowded city I’d ever been in, especially at this time of day.
People were thick on every sidewalk, everywhere, but fortunately not so much in the middle of the street. No randos picking their way across in jaywalking fashion. There was an orderliness to the scene, a feeling of calm in the crowd that set it apart from, say, New York City, where the chaos was unmistakable.
“Klementina is this way,” Harry said, and I followed him without question through the throng. My skin still crawled at the presence of large knots of humanity as I stepped into the swirling flow of people, trying to work my way through to the entrance to the restaurant across from the station.
“Why do you call her that when you know it irritates her?” I asked, feeling a little irritation myself at the flood of people around me, packing in tightly around me, as if I was a rock in a creek and everyone else was the water rushing past.
“Because the other things I would call her would freak her out even more,” Harry muttered, almost beyond meta-low. I caught it, though, beneath the noise of the crowd, and it felt like a subtle stab to the heart.
Harry pulled me forward, and while he had a grip on me this time, it was much lighter than the last occasion. My guess was that he’d learned his lesson and didn’t want to suffer any more broken bones due to my impatience. I let him lead me, trying to put those last words he’d said out of my mind.
I wished for a time stoppage as I moved through the crowd. There were so damned many people around me it was insane. Nobody was violently pushy, but there was simply no way to have this many people moving through in one direction while you’re moving perpendicular without some physical contact along the way. It was brief and blessedly non-gropey, but it was there, and it felt like I could almost reach out and start ripping some souls from the crush of people rushing past.
Harry held the door open for me and I stepped inside, finding the interior of the restaurant only marginally better than the street in terms of crowd. The noise in the place was a little lower than what I would have expected from a similar crowd and restaurant size in the west. It still gave me a little bit of a headache from the volume, and I worked my jaw because I felt like my ears were still stoppered from the flight.
“See if you can pick out Klementina—or whatever—in here,” Harry said with thinly laced amusement as he stepped up next to a strange display with all the food apparently on offer in the restaurant modeled within the case. He was looking around, over the heads of the crowd, which, in most cases, were at about his chin level or lower.
“You are really aiming to antagonize her,” I said, rubbing my forehead and concealing the fact that he was antagonizing me a little as well. It didn’t help matters that the volume around here was crazy, and someone was pressing—gently—against my back, trying to get inside. I didn’t deign to look, because I had a feeling this proximity was just part of life in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
“That’s not even in the top five when it comes to ways I could aggravate her,” he said stiffly, and turned away, somehow leaving me a little more heartsick.
“Yeah, well,” I said, my eyes half closed, partially from how he was making me feel but mostly because there was just too much sensory stimuli in this place. There was wasabi in the air, a few different kinds of perfumes and colognes, the volume combined with my ears being stuffed was giving me a headache, and someone was pressing on the person behind me, and I was nearly all up on the person in front of me, making me feel a little too squished for comfort. We were standing in a line to get to the counter, but even past that, in the dining area, it didn’t look any more open. The tables were packed close together and anyone trying to maneuver had to squeeze through, close to the other patrons. “It’s not very nice to completely mess with someone’s identity, or whatever.” I wasn’t sure how to put it, since Kat had no memory of being Klementina, and had frankly shown the opposite of interest in learning about her past. Antipathy would probably be better description for her feelings about the good old days, like she wanted to run away from it all and embrace being a youthful little minx.
“I’m not messing with her identity,” Harry said, a little stiffly. “She lived a long life before she became … whatever she is now. I’m just trying to remind her of it.”
“She doesn’t want to be reminded of it,” I said, about ready to throw an elbow at the lady who was pushing up against me from behind. “Just let it go, man.”
Harry looked at me a little cockeyed. “It’s not making you jealous, is it?”
I froze in place. “Me, jealous? I—”
There was a disturbance across the crowd, rippling through from somewhere in the dining area. I turned to look, and through a set of double doors that led to an entirely different room, I saw a flash of blond hair.
If that wasn’t Kat, I reflected as I looked across a sea of ebony heads (with the occasional blue or pink shocker), I’d be very surprised.
“Excuse me,” I said, shoving someone out of my way—lightly. I crossed under the rope that separated the line from the dining area. “Get me a plate of sushi,” I called back to Harry. “You’ll know what I like.” I didn’t know what was going on with Kat, but I needed to separate myself from this crowd before somebody ended up getting murdered, most probably at my hand.
“Hey, wait—” Harry called back as I cut through the crowd through the double doors into the other dining area. It was packed with people, tables filled all through the restaurant with so little distance between them that a US fire marshal would have thrown a shit fit at the mere sight. Hell, for all I knew, a Tokyo fire marshal would have, too.
As I came into the dining room, I got a closer look at the blonde I’d seen from the line. It was definitely Kat, and someone was leaning over her table, talking to her. I could see long, dark hair, lank and hanging around his shoulders. The guy had a thin frame, and was wearing a black suit with a white dress shirt beneath it.
“She’s got fans everywhere,” I muttered, pushing between two guys in chairs that were backed up right to each other. “Excuse me. Rude American coming through.” And I shoved them both out of the way, because they could have shown an ounce of consideration and maybe not put their chair backs two inches from each other. Stagger them, guys. It’s called courtesy for your fellow humans who want to pass through.
“I can’t help you,” Kat was saying, and I caught a glimpse of her face now that I was only a couple more tables away from her. She was in a booth on the far wall, a small one, admittedly, the kind that would seat two people in the US but might have been designed for four or six here, for all I knew. I saw four people in the one that backed to hers, and they were the same size. Crazy.
“You don’t understand,” the man said, with a thick Japanese accent. He brushed his dark hair back over one ear, and I caught a sideview glimpse of his face. “I need this. You must help me.”
“I—no,” Kat said, and her body language told me everything I needed to know about the situation. She was all pressed up against the back wall of the booth, and if she could have made like a slug and crawled up the wall to get further away from this guy, I would have bet she would have. “There’s nothing I can do for you. Please leave.”
“You must help me,” he said, leaning further over. “This is my request. Please honor it.”
That was an interesting fragment of conversation. A lot of guys made “requests” of Kat, and not the honorable kind, either. She was strong enough to make clear to them that she wasn’t interested, but she was also way more polite, restrained and sociable than I was, which was probably a large part of why she wasn’t a wanted fugitive right now. Kat’s way had its place in a polite and civilized society, where everybody respected each others’ established boundaries.
But based on the fact that my friend was currently less than an inch from crawling up the wall to get away from this guy … I was guessing she didn’t feel her boundaries were being respected at the moment. One sympathized.
“Hey, bub,” I said, moving past that last table and grabbing the man without borders by his collar, “‘no means no,’ all right?” And I started to yank him away from the table.
Kat’s eyes widened and she shook her head at me. It was a little late to stop doing whatever she wanted me to not do; I physically dragged the guy away and spun him in the two point five inches between Kat’s table and the next, and he caught himself just before he went ass over teakettle across someone’s tuna nigiri. “No,” Kat whispered, so low I could barely hear her over the din in the room.
Which stopped, almost immediately, as Kat’s “friend” caught himself on the edge of the table. Really quickly, actually. Too quickly.
Meta quickly.
Shit.
I could see his face now, and it was not what I expected from a guy I’d just manhandled. There was no fear. He was a smooth one, kind of a prettyboy, and he pushed his long hair out of his face. It was parted in the middle, and the way he pushed it back reminded of Jennifer Aniston’s ‘do when she first came to prominence on Friends . The guy let out a low chuckle that didn’t have a lot of joy in it, almost more a quality of relief.
“Uhm … damn,” Kat said, a little louder this time.
“Let me belt this one out for the cheap seats, dickhead,” I said, right into Prettyboy’s face, “when a girl says ‘No,’ it doesn’t mean ‘Maybe,’ and it definitely doesn’t mean ‘Yes.’ It means ‘no.’ Definitive. Full stop. So when this lady asks you to move your ass away from her table, that she is not going to accede to your stated request, you need to be Johnny-on-the-spot with moving your ass away from her. Capische? This is basic manners.”
He let out another low laugh, and stood up straight. I watched his hands for a weapon, but he didn’t go for anything, nor start generating plasma from them, which—given that he was a meta—was entirely possible. “But … it turns out not to be a ‘no’ at all.” And now he laughed again, but loudly.
“He wasn’t propositioning me,” Kat said from behind me. “He was asking me to introduce him to someone. That was what I told him no to.”
“Who did he want to meet—oh.” I got it. A little too late, but I got it.
“I have been wanting to meet Sienna Nealon for as long as I have known of you,” Prettyboy said, his smile wide and genuine, and yet laced with a hint of mournfulness. He bowed deeply to me then stood straight. His posture was relaxed yet somehow threatening, as he loomed only a few feet from me in this too-tight restaurant dining area. “And now … here you are.”