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Bare legs swinging, in spite of how scratchy the sheet on the examination table feels against the back of her knees, Akane looks down at the doctor’s tablet, her eyes following the graph's gently curving climb which flattens into a plateau that the physician acknowledges as “a little disappointing” before salting the wound with “most girls continue growing at least into their first year of senior high.” Hand reaching into his pocket and shaking the pill bottle pulled from it, the pediatrician smiles as he rattles off the names of other supplement options -- growth hormone injections, surgical procedures that entail breaking one’s tibia to fuse bone with metal inserts.
Just a regular check-up on a Friday afternoon. Her mother is still at work, but her grandmother listens to the pediatrician’s delivered analysis and makes a little sound of “hmph.” When they step out of the clinic, Aoi wraps a thin, sweatered arm around her, palm rubbing up and down her granddaughter’s sleeve.
“What’s wrong with this town,” Aoi murmurs, the breath of her words tickling at Akane's temple. “No one’s allowed to be content with how they are naturally. Why when you were born, that nosy housekeeping AI wanted say over everything from what milk formula we would feed you to throwing out your favorite toys because they weren’t stimulating enough. I should have tossed out that floating marine animal instead.”
Pressing closer and burrowing her giggles into the warm yarn covering her grandmother’s frame, Akane asks, eyes watchful for confirmation, “So you don’t think I should come back for another appointment?”
“Well, it’s your choice dear,” Aoi answers, imparting a soft look accompanied by a softer smile. “But I think --” A palm cupping her cheek. “That it’s most important you feel comfortable in your own body.”
“It’s just that everyone on the team is so --” Cheeks pink, more from the chili oil Kagari stirred into the miso ramen than from the wine, or so Akane keeps telling herself, the Inspector lifts her hand above her head and gestures as if sweeping across an invisible horizontal surface.
“Whaa?”
“Tall!” She blurts out, and okay, now the flush of her face can definitely be attributed to Kagari’s laughing. “I tried to tell Ginoza-san something in the hall yesterday, and with the way he was looming over me, I felt like some out-of-line student confronting her teacher.” Slumping against the cushions, Akane stares up at the recreation room ceiling, mentally cataloguing an index of her colleagues and concluding, “I’m the shortest one on the team.”
“I know, thanks for showing up.” Kagari toasts her with a swish of his glass, and she groans, raising one of the throw pillows threateningly.
“What do you want to be so tall for anyway?”
“Well, maybe not necessarily taller. I just -- sometimes feel like I should have a more imposing presence for this job. To be taken seriously.”
Setting his drink down, Kagari reaches under the table and pulls out a box that he places next to their cleaned-out bowls. Plucking three of the dinosaur figurines from the contents, he arranges them in front of her before pointing at the one crouching on its hind legs as if preparing to pounce. “Alright, ever watch one of those old gangster movies?”
“No, are they even still shown?”
“Ehehe, never mind the movie references then. Pops told me that back in the day, this town had a whole lot of organized crime syndicates. And say, like one night, a local gang wants to collect on owed profits, but somebody’s not giving it to them. So they show up on that someone’s doorstep like this. The two in the front -- they’re the Enforcers, the muscle. Let’s call this one Kou.”
She’s wholly unable to curb her laughter as she nods obligingly at the indicated dinosaur. An unwieldy, large head paired with tiny fists. Much less well-proportioned than the real Kougami, her mind supplies, and she’s glad that Kagari’s attention is devoted to the figurine battle he’s enacting rather than her face.
“Anyway, you get the gist of it. Us Enforcers, we're supposed to do the imposing. You, being a lovely albeit short --” He earns a knocked over dinosaur for this reminder. “Inspector, all you gotta do is make sure we’re not causing too much of a public disturbance. In our PSB chain of command, you’re a -- well, I guess Chief would be the Don of the family, but Gino and you are elites. You have your roles, and we have ours. Though uh, if you really want to help lighten the workload, I have no objections to giving you some of my reports. Can’t forget about all those.”
“Don’t you forget about reports all the time?”
“Oh look! The Inspector dinosaur is falling into the lava around this bowl!”
In the lunchroom, she catches Ginoza glancing more than once at her bento. Sesame-sprinkled rice, lightly wafting steam. A triplet of grape tomatoes, nestled in furls of lettuce arranged by the rolls of tamagoyaki and a portion of ochre-charred salmon.
“You know, I just stocked my kitchen yesterday. I could pack an extra bento tomorrow.”
He dips his head, amusement curling at his mouth. “That does look quite appetizing. I just uh --”
Studying his abashed expression, Akane fills in, “Your taste buds still shrivel in fear at the memory of my curry?”
“I find my hand reaching for water whenever I think of that dish,” Ginoza replies, and she counters his hand, her face one of exaggeratedly offended pretense, before his fingers can grasp a bottle just out of their reach.
“Been working on reflexes?” he asks, his brows arching slightly at how swiftly her hand blocked his.
“I started training with a sparring program,” she answers, depositing a substantial cut of the salmon on his plate.
“Oh, Tsunemori, I must admit that I’m not too fond of synthetic fish.”
“It’s not synthetic. I bought it from that grocery store Kagari once took me to. All natural protein.”
His gaze falls back on her lunch, on the ripe red of the tomatoes, the seared whorls of the fish. Silently debating what features distinguished the simulated from the natural. Conceding to her earnest look, one that takes him back to the day her proudly presented curry had near rendered his tonsils useless, he takes a bite of the fish, and the flavor that spreads on his tongue is rich and savory, a taste and texture mouthwateringly different from that of substitute ingredients.
She seems to register his satisfaction a moment after he does because she nearly passes him the rest of her lunch, and it takes increasingly firm-voiced declining on his part before she pops a tomato slice into her own mouth with a smile.
He watches her, catches himself watching, and reassures himself that it is appreciation of her reaching out to ghosts in healthier ways than through the cigarettes he found her stubbing out, initially with a look of embarrassment, then with a slight air of defiance, and finally with lowered eyes of resignation.
Her first observation is that she is the one of the youngest at this supposedly low-key work function. Well, she’d assumed that it would be low-key, and so she arrives in the same outfit she wore to the office, but then Chief Kasei grips her arm and steers her over to a severely garbed cluster congregating near the center of the room. Some of the faces Akane recognizes from snippets of news broadcasts. The names and associated titles only grow in distinction as the Chief introduces them: the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Education, a couple of members from the executive cabinet.
Her second observation is that despite the fine-cut stemware in their hands and the trays decked out with beautifully garnished hors d’oeuvres whizzing by on drones, no one in this circle bothers to consume the food or drink.
“This year will mark Miss Tsunemori’s fourth with the Bureau,” Chief Kasei informs the group, the tone matter-of-fact as usual, but then a tinge of slyness seeps from that black-collared throat. “Nearly halfway there to achieving a permanent position with the Ministry of Welfare.”
Tilting her head in acknowledgement, Akane releases a small huff. Deliberately false-toned mimicry of laughter, humorless but passably polite. “A lot could befall an Inspector in six years,” she says, matching the Chief’s direct gaze. “I hardly imagine that one could count on my being around for that milestone.”
A chuckle from one of the ministers. “So fatalistic for one so young. And here we were hoping that young blood would bring a more revitalizing perspective.” Arm extending towards a tray, the man swipes a freshly poured flute from it and presses the glass insistently against her motionless hand.
“Imported,” he tells her, brandishing his own drink of the same jewel-resplendent color. “Very hard to come across. Please, drink some. You should enjoy something so precious while you still have the opportunity.”
The weight of all their devouring eyes magnifies as she wets her mouth with the wine.
They spar on occasion, after Akane’s persistent convincing and a demonstration that she could in fact counter his metal arm as well as his right one battered down Ginoza’s worry that he would carelessly hurt her. He still holds back at times, conscious of his advantage in body mass, but her fleetly reactive footwork teaches him to not underestimate how quickly she can launch a retaliation.
As they regain evenness of breath after a bout on the mats one day, Akane looks down at her hand, five fingers spread flat near his. Lifting her hand and holding it as if inspecting for injury, she directs a quietly-pitched question that throws him off balance more than any of her recent physical maneuvers.
“We know each other well, don't we Ginoza-san? To the extent that you would know the real me from someone pretending to be me?”
He scans her downcast countenance, thinks of how he had instinctively leapt back near the end of the bout, reading the signals of her body when she moved in for a throw. She has sought his individual company with greater frequency as of late and then spent that time with averted gaze and unhappy mouth, her mind clearly regulating every emitted word. In each room she enters, her eyes dart to shadowed corners, to the machines that hum with activity in addition to the ones more subdued, to all other occupants in proximity. Her query is perhaps the most straightforward remark she has made to him in weeks.
Slowly, careful to not look quite at her either, Ginoza asks, “Is that a situation likely to happen?”
Akane’s silence, and her hand brushing his in that stillness, rings of an omen he fears to interpret.
He wakes, tuned in first to Dime’s barking, secondly to the alternating pounding and buzzing at the entrance of his quarters. As the door slides open, he’s met with Kunizuka’s stricken pallor, and the recollection that he did not intend to fall asleep, intended to wait as long as necessary for the return of Division 1’s peculiarly assigned unit, floods back.
Hounds 1 and 2, Kasei had instructed over the communication terminals. No need for your services tonight. Shepherd 1 will be overseeing the functional edification of new enforcers on her own.
“None of them came back yet.”
Akane wakes and sees herself. Blandly expressionless. At odds with how her torso feels lanced through, as if her organs were punctured and the offending objects still lodged in her flesh, languidly grinding her bones to gristle, to dust. Briefly, initially, she speculates that this must be death, to observe oneself from a disembodied vantage point. Unable to move her head, she can nevertheless identify the visage, the least desired one in her mind presently, that darkens her field of vision, blocking out the glare of lights above.
“You should feel honored,” Kasei tells her, gesturing towards the other body. “A newer model than even the form we’re currently inhabiting. Enhanced sensory receptors. Tactility for example.” The Chief lifts the other’s arm to graze Akane’s cheek with the limp hand, and the skin is indeed soft, softer than how her own fingertips have felt in years. “Certainly much more pleasing to the eyes than what we salvaged of you.”
Placing the arm gently back down, Kasei peers at her again and affixes a conditional to her words. “If your future conduct meets our standards, you’ll get to use that body too. In the meantime, we have other plans for the rest of you.”
Stabilized, they were told. Inspector Tsunemori’s condition is stabilized. You’ll be able to visit her very soon.
In the office, Ginoza closes his eyes, lids sliding over stinging, sleepless corneas as the four paragraphs on the monitor merge into a single wall of indecipherable text. It takes him a few lagged seconds to realize that the clipped sounds behind him derive from Shimotsuki striding past his workstation, having just laid down a file on the projecting end of his desk.
A flurry of photos spills out of the folder as he opens it. Photos of a face he knows well. Of a face he would recognize anywhere, her features incised and dissected with red.
Singling him out in the infirmary’s waiting room, Chief Kasei approaches him, arm sweeping towards the now accessible door behind her. It has been a long time since she deigned to speak directly to him.
“Given how close Inspector Tsunemori and you have become, why don’t you go in first?”
Her voice, strangely animated with anticipation, follows him past the door.
“We’re especially keen on seeing how you deem the results.”
He never answered Akane in person, but as he beholds the figure in the hospital bed and stifles the memory of rain ghosting his lashes, the surfacing image of a wide-eyed rookie salute, he wishes he’d quelled at least some of her disquiet and told her, Yes. Yes, I’d know.