Revealed – Chapter 7

Sakai waits for Sanaa again at the dōjō. He didn’t sleep much last night. After confessing to Koichi that he couldn’t go through with Plan B, and had formulated a Plan C on the spot, he got a message from Lucy concerning the very dōjō he was standing in. They were supposed to be moved two days prior, but the hired labor received wrong work orders. Sakai had to come all the way back and deal with the situation before bed. What a mess. And he didn’t get to see Lucy. She was at a political dinner until the wee hours, and he was too exhausted to stay up.

The door creaks open at seven forty-five AM, and Sanaa enters, this time more sure of herself and carrying her breakfast along with her.

“Just us?” she asks, joining Sakai at the window. He’s had his breakfast already but is drinking a steaming cup of tea and holding his tablet.

“Yes. It will mostly be just us for the duration of our time together. This dōjō will no longer host classes. A new facility has been opened just up the street.” He leans forward and eyes a building three down and across where the lights are blazing and a group of young people practice with the windows open. Thank goodness he put everything in the right places.

“Huh, I didn’t see that there yesterday.”

Sakai turns his attention from the dōjō. Sanaa is pale and tries to open her bento box, but her hands are shaking.

“Are you all right, Sanaa?”

She closes her eyes and blows out a deep breath, and Sakai’s heart skips a beat as her hands calm. Such an innocent thing, her vulnerability. She’s never looked on violence, never dealt with life and death situations. She’ll have to, though, and it pains him he has to be the one to take away this innocence.

“I’m afraid I didn’t get much sleep last night.” She rubs at her eyes and her shoulders slump, defeated. It’s his fault.

“I’m sorry.” He still has more to tell her. Today. Today is going to be the day he does it.

“I love my job as an engineer. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Please tell me you’ll send me back?”

“Eat.” He nods his head at her breakfast, swallowing the lump in his throat. She takes a bite of inarizushi and a sip of coffee. Coffee! Kimie and Lomo weren’t coffee drinkers, but Sanaa’s father, Max, was. At least two cups every day.

“What? I love coffee.” She takes an exaggerated inhale over her cup. He cracks a small smile, and she genuinely smiles back.

“That must be your father’s influence.” He clears his throat without elaborating further, knowing this will drive her crazy with wonder. He’s determined to make this situation fun somehow. “You did not see the dōjō yesterday because it wasn’t there yesterday. We moved them over last night.”

She smirks at him and goes back to eating, no doubt wanting to question him but restraining. The vein at her temple is throbbing again. He’s raised her temper but not caused it to bubble over.

“We?”

“I employ a staff. Maybe someday you will meet them, but until then, they’ll be of little impact on our days together.” Sakai takes one last sip of his tea and turns to her, but she’s busy shoving the rest of her inarizushi in her mouth.

“How ladylike.”

“What? You look like you’re ready to go, right?”

He nods and takes her bento, depositing the container in the auto-washer near the door. With her following behind him, they exit to the street.

“Today, we’ll take the transitway to Ku 1, the Administrative Ward. You’ve been there.”

“Yes, a few times — for work — and when I was little… when my parents died. I don’t have any other reasons to visit.”

Yes, Sakai can’t imagine why she should spend much time in Ku 1 at all. Maybe she’s blasted past the ward on the transitway to and from the other wards, but that’s about it. He would have very little reason to go to Ku 1 if he wasn’t involved in the government or a relationship with Lucy. Lucy. Sakai saw photos of her online this morning at the dinner she was at last night. She wore a modest black dress. Her hair was swept up, and she was wearing the earrings he had given her. They were his mother’s.

Sanaa keeps quiet next to him as they take the transitway north from Ku 9, past Ku 10, to Ku 1. Eventually she clears her throat, and Sakai focuses his eyes on her.

“So, do Yoichi and Jiro work for you? You were all together on New Year’s Eve.”

Uh oh, she still remembers Jiro. He hoped she’d forget. But then again, he knows she’s been unattached for some time. He watched her on surveillance visit a love hotel a few times the last year with a coworker, a dark-skinned young man named Chad. He always left the hotel early, and she would leave when the hour was up. Always. It wasn’t much of a relationship. They never dated, never went out to dinner, never spent time together otherwise. Before Chad, she dated another coworker, Joshua. That relationship was more in the open but ended abruptly. Her life had been devoid of real relationships since then.

But Jiro, no. He has to keep them apart at all costs. There is no room for love in this equation.

“You could say that, yes.”

“Will I see them too when I work for you?”

Sakai panics inside but doesn’t let the emotions surface. Sanaa is hopeful, like she’d do anything to not be alone with him.

“It’s possible, but for the next two months or so, you and I will be working alone.”

He stares straight ahead again, not giving her a chance to ask about Jiro anymore. If he keeps changing the conversation over the next few weeks, she’ll forget about Jiro until Sakai makes the introductions as teacher and student. The circumstances will be so drastic, there will be no way they can try anything.

Sakai leads Sanaa to the Data & Communications building, inside and up to theater 3B, only stopping at security on the way in. He’s had this room prepped and ready to go for a month now. The space is blocked out indefinitely on the scheduling calendar and has special access to the GDB no other room is capable of.

When he brainstormed how he would teach Sanaa about the clans without throwing her at them, this was his only real choice. He couldn’t bring her to Ku 6 and let her spy on people in the flesh. Seeing them on video was a good compromise, and here in the DataComm building, she’ll be safe, on the far opposite side of the city than the majority of them. The heads of the clans come to Ku 1 irregularly, but never to the DataComm building, always to Administration or to Lucy’s residence where she conducts meetings on the first floor.

At the door to 3B, she reaches out but stops short of putting her hand on the palm scanner.

“No. Please. You have been cleared, obviously.” She places her palm on the scanner, and the door clicks open after displaying her name and citizen ID number. Eighteen years ago, both of those were different, and Sakai was responsible for that as well.

Sanaa sweeps her gaze around the room when the door opens. These theaters don’t exist anywhere in the city but here and are restricted to people with exceptionally high clearance. Lucy had this set up for him when he came up with the plan, and the thought of her adding this extra work to her already insane load brings a small smile to Sakai’s face. She’s tireless, so full of energy and strength, a lot less worn out than he is.

The wall adjacent to the door is showing the terminal read-out screen in idle mode, and Sakai walks to the desk and places his tablet upon it. The tablet and terminal pair up, and he is given instant access into the system. He and Sanaa pull out chairs and sit down.

“Sanaa, I’m going to get straight to the heart of the matter.”

Sanaa turns her full attention on him and he hesitates for a moment. Start at the beginning, Sakai.

“You have grown up in Nishikyō, spent your entire life here, but never really left the confines of your small neighborhood unless it was for work.”

Her mouth quirks to the right, and she sighs. His words are insulting, but it’s the truth. Kimie kept her sheltered her whole life until recently.

“But, you are not unique in this. Not traveling is often a common problem amongst citizens. Few rarely leave their ku, let alone see more than ten percent of the city in their lifetime. Why is this, do you suppose?”

Sanaa drums her fingers on the desk. She’s an engineer and working as part of the Colonization Committee, she’s required to know the city infrastructure so lessons here can be applied to Yūsei. But even though she’s inexperienced, if circumstances were different, she would explore more of the city on her own. No one works so hard to join the Colonization Committee and doesn’t have the itch to be an explorer, a colonizer of worlds. Sanaa’s round eyes hold big dreams of blue skies, open water, and green grass.

Sakai waits while she thinks as his heart beats way up in his throat. He was once this young too but never this… this dreamer in front of him.

“The kus are self-sustaining and fairly segregated, yes?” She stammers, halting to test if she’s going in the right direction.

“Go on,” he prompts, and she takes a deep breath.

“If you have no reason to leave your ward then what’s the point? I can walk out the door and find just about anything I need within reach. Only the Japanese travel extensively. I rarely encounter people of other races outside of their ku. Is that on purpose? I never really thought about it.”

“It was not meant to be on purpose, no. When Nishikyō was built, the city was the last hope of mankind to continue living on Earth. The Japanese were the last majority with the technology to build it, so Nishikyō is inherently Japanese. Everything is bilingual: English and Japanese. You only hear Arabic, German, Spanish, even Swahili, in the wards where those who speak those languages settled. No one meant to segregate themselves but humans arrived at Nishikyō in waves. No laws exist that only Arabs must live in Ku 3, but that’s where the only mosque is. And this is also why the remainder of Jews live in Ku 4.”

“The only Jewish temple is located there. Yes, I’ve actually been to study the architecture. I love buildings.”

Sakai smiles at her. He loves that temple as well.

“I’ve been overly harsh with you. You are sheltered but not as much as some. I’m pleased.”

She smiles back at him, and it hits him again, like a kick to his chest. What he has to do will destroy her.

“I’ve traveled to a lot of places in the city. Aunt Kimie and Lomo love good food so we’ve been to Ku 3 and 4 a lot, and I grew up in Ku 5.”

Interesting. When Kimie originally agreed to adopt Sanaa, she said she would never let her leave their neighborhood for fear of being found out. She must have relaxed over time when Sanaa got older and nothing had happened. Sakai left them alone for years, never checking up on her, until she was in her early teens and getting ready to graduate.

“But you do spend the majority of your time in Ku 9. I think you have only ever not spent time in Ku 6, ne?”

She nods at him, and he knows it’s the truth. Kimie probably made it clear Ku 6 was not a place she should ever visit in the city. Sakai turns to the tablet. He calls up a prompt to the GDB and moves the data from his tablet onto the large screen so they can both view the graph.

This will be the most important lesson she learns today.

“This is the current population data about Nishikyō. It’s detailed. Information on every citizen is registered here, and it will give you a start to understanding the city as a whole.”

She pushes back from the table and walks to the wall screen, craning her neck to take in all the data from the top to the bottom. Twisting her hair in her left fingers and letting it go, over and over, she reminds him of Lomo again.

“This here is the census total?” She points to the number above a colorful pie chart. 6,320,426. Just over six million people left on all of Earth.

Sakai remembers the first time he and Lucy laid in bed and talked about how important it was to keep the peace on Yūsei so they could grow the population. It was before he told her about Sanaa, and they had just dealt with a big negotiation between Taira and Minamoto that almost ended up in a declaration of war. Yoshinori Minamoto and Tomio Miura screamed at each other over the conference table, finally unable to contain their mutual hatred of one another. Everything changed after that.

“Seems like so much yet I know the population is so little.” Sanaa frowns, her hands pausing and dropping to her sides.

“Yes. This data is only two days old.”

Sakai sits and waits while Sanaa absorbs more of the data, wondering what she’s fixating on. He looks at these numbers and sees a disparity, an extremely high ratio of Japanese to non-Japanese. And though he chastised Yoichi and Jiro for wanting to date outside of their culture, he wishes more people would intermix. He’s full of double-standards.

“It certainly is overwhelming. In a way, it’s hard to see the Japanese number so high.”

Sakai laughs, and she blushes.

“You have the humble gene, but that’s good. We Japanese are good at being humble, but we’re also smart and ruthless on occasion. Have you ever looked at the GDB’s family trees?”

Now is when he plans on showing her everything. Sakai makes a few more calls to the GDB and brings a series of family trees onto the big screen.

“No. This is my first time ever seeing raw data from the GDB.”

Sanaa rubs her hands together and leans into the screen. Sakai turns away. Her excitement about learning reminds him how young she is, yet she’s twenty. It’s such a precarious age, an adult but still a child in so many ways. He can imagine her diligently working on an experiment or in love for the first time. Both are easy for him to call up in his mind. He will probably witness all of these things and more as she grows older and into her position in society. The innocence will be long gone, though. Dead. Buried.

He’s selfish. He wants her to stay as she is.

“The majority of Nishikyō is Japanese, yes,” he says, distracting himself from his own thoughts by getting back to business, “but the variances in Japanese backgrounds is not as wide as you may think.” Sakai taps three different trees, groups them together, and zooms in. They are the three widest trees on the screen out of all of them. “This tree here on the left is identified today as the Minamoto clan.”

“Wait just a minute.” She blinks her eyes at him, becoming pale. “Clan? It’s been almost two thousand years since feudal Japan even existed.”

Not everyone knows how big the clan affiliations are in Nishikyō. It’s not even reported via the Nishikyō News Service. NNS stays as far from the clans as possible. There have been too many ‘accidents’ and disappearances over the years, and with no place to run to outside of the city, everyone is at their mercy.

“The clans have always been here. No one is outspoken about their affiliations but almost every Japanese citizen can trace their heritage back to a clan of some kind. These are the biggest and most prosperous in the city: Minamoto, Taira, and Maeda. Minamoto and Taira are the two largest by blood, but Maeda is strong because they recruit from other clans.”

“Yakuza,” Sanaa whispers, slowly turning to Sakai. She’s smart even if she’s never been aware of these things before.

“Don’t be too surprised. Who did you think runs most of the gambling in Kus 6 and 7?”

“I never thought much about it. My family was never involved in such things. My aunts avoid Ku 6.”

Sakai nods in response, Sanaa reaffirming what he already thought of the lies surrounding her upbringing. Gods bless Kimie and Lomo. He questioned whether they would be able to lie for fifteen or more years, but they did it.

“The yakuza are necessary to life here, believe it or not. You and I are not to debate their merits. They mostly do respectable business and rarely break the law. Taira and Minamoto on the other hand…”

His voice trails off as the guilt of what he needs to do lurks in the dark corners of his brain. Fifteen years of work, and he’s about to completely destroy Sanaa.

“What clan do you belong to?” she asks, leaning forward to look at his tablet. “What about me? My family?”

He swallows past the lump in his throat. Do it, Sakai.

“My clan is smaller. My namesake: Sakai clan. We act mainly as retainers, teachers, accountants, guides, and so on to other clans and non-Japanese here in the city. We are neutral. Your family…” His heart stops. “Your family is not currently affiliated with any clan.”

“Can I see my family tree?”

No! No, she can’t. He can’t do it. If he tells her today, everything will change. She’ll refuse to come every day. She’ll slip into a depression. He’s sure of it. Wouldn’t he feel the same? Who would believe their whole life was made up of lies?

“Not today. I’m afraid I didn’t have that data called up ahead of time.” His weak explanation is out of his mouth before he even knows it. Since when has it been acceptable for him to act on instinct alone? Where is his logic? His emotions are too strong, and he has to rein them in somehow. He needs a distraction. He can’t be here with her every day.

This is wrong. Mark Sakai is not a vulnerable man, to be swayed by the wants and needs of a twenty-year-old girl. He must distance himself. Get her working, and, when he feels nothing anymore, he’ll tell her. Preferably before he re-introduces her to Jiro.

“For now, it’s important to understand and memorize the big bosses and sub-families of each clan in the city. Your job will be to know them better than they know themselves. You can do this because you’ll have unlimited access to these families, their trees, and all of their purchases, movements via train or car, permits, hospital stays, and anything else you can call up in the database. There will also be surveillance videos from public spaces at your disposal.”

She blinks her eyes, momentarily stunned by his statements. “Why? Why have me do any of this? You have a staff. Can’t they sit here and compile this data for you?”

Quick! A lie! A believable one because she’s so smart she’ll see through base flattery.

“This sounds like a lot, but I’m sure you’re the right one for this task. I chose you because I’m certain you’re the person who can watch these people and make the connections between them that I cannot. You will advise me and, in turn, I will advise Ms. Coen. I work with these clans, but I can’t watch them like you can. My duties call me elsewhere. You’re analytical and logical. You would not only make a good engineer, you would make an excellent detective.”

Plan D. Gods, how many more plans will there be? This one needs to work. He’ll get her familiar with all the clans, and before he takes her to Ku 8, the Extinction Ward, he’ll reveal how her family fits into the puzzle. It’ll be less of a shock if she understands the whole layout.

“This will not be all that we ask of you.” Sakai pauses, as she pulls her eyes from screen to look at him. “There will be training, and you will meet these men and women. You will become a part of their world while remaining separate from them. Torinozoku: to set apart, to remove.”

She’s been removed from this culture for so long, Sakai’s not sure she’ll ever reintegrate. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe being set apart from them all will keep her head on straight. Only time will tell.