Chapter 10

“So, that guy you were looking at. What did you think of him?”

If Yoko was confused about which guy was being referred to, he didn’t show it. If he was at all embarrassed that his brother had noticed the attention he’d given the other man, he didn’t show that either. Nor did he show any relief that the man who had sat at the table next to theirs in the café they had just left was the topic of discussion and not his current predicament.

“What makes you think I thought anything of him?” The answer was slow, and spoken with great care. Yoko always treated words like fragile items of spun glass and cradled them gently with his tongue, using as few as he could, in order to spare as many as possible from potential damage.

“You noticed him watching us and you grabbed at your chest.” Hiroki saw his brother begin to reply and cut him off. “Not your stomach, your chest. Which means that you not only remember him, you know him. Or knew him, a long time ago.”

Hiroki did not share his brother’s ideas concerning the sacred nature of language. Language was a toy and he enjoyed twisting it this way and that, to see what got the best reaction.

The quiet that fell around Yokoshima was not the impenetrable shield he usually armed himself with; now he was pensive, riffling through the pages of his memory and his vocabulary to decide how best to respond.

“Perhaps,” he said at length, “I knew him once.”

“And he was important to you.”

Yoko’s left eye twitched. “Perhaps that is also true.”

“You don’t know him anymore, though.”

“No. I do not.”

“Do you remember that time that our brother managed to cut off all of his fingers and you had to keep me awake all night so that I could reattach them before it was too late to save them?”

The sudden change of topic surprised Yoko. He looked up at his brother, who was smiling at him. The breeze of a passing delivery truck pulled Hiroki’s bangs out of his face as they waited for a break in traffic so that they could cross the street—his gray eyes sparkled, the way a thunderhead fills its belly up with lightning before spitting the stuff down on the ground below it.

“I remember.” How could he forget? It had been before the laser technology that would do such a job in ten minutes had been invented, and it had been the most irritable he’d seen his brother—either of his brothers, really—in quite a long time.

“Do you remember when I threw your qadesh and it hit a stone column and snapped in half?”

Yoko began to reply, but Hiroki wrapped a hand around his upper arm and half-steered, half-pulled him across the street. Interrupted, he growled to himself until they got to the other side, then considered his brother with slitted eyes. After a moment, he just nodded, too annoyed to waste energy formulating a reply that was scathing enough for the annoyance Yoko still felt, even a century after the incident. Hiroki had never learned to use a qadesh properly—had he known how, it would have been the stone column and not the weapon that had been left in two pieces.

Yoko still had the pieces, too, mounted on his wall, where he could see them and curse his favorite brother’s name whenever he liked.

Hiroki chuckled as they stepped into the waiting compartment of an almost-empty U-tram. Inside, they both remained standing, Hiroki because he was polite and tall enough to reach the loops that hung down from the overhead bars, and Yoko because he was stubborn.

“And the time that our brother came up with that concoction that let you eat solid foods for a whole week?”

Yoko’s nod was jerkier than he had intended. That particular week had been a good one, though he had never been partial to his eldest brother’s favors—they always came with very long, almost translucent strings attached. He had gotten to eat whatever he had liked for the first time since childhood though, and he had enjoyed it much more than he would ever admit aloud.

“How about that time we were snowed in and I cut a bunch of slits in my tongue and fed you mouth to mouth?”

“What is your point?” He let some of his annoyance at the questioning seep into his tone, making the words come out staccato and low.

Hiroki leaned forward until his face was close to his brother’s. Yoko was glad there were only a very few other people, none of whom were paying any attention to them, on the tram. Hiroki hung there in front of him for a moment, searching Yoko’s face, and Yoko narrowed his eyes and stared back at him. It was only in moments like these that he noticed how much his brothers looked alike: how, when they grinned, their lips pulled back wolfishly as though they were baring fangs they didn’t have; how their eyes, though different colors, had the same long, lashes; how both of their bodies moved in quicksilver motions as though their parts didn’t so much shift and swing as flow, but for very different reasons.

“My point,” Hiroki finally replied, taking his time to form the words fully, “is that all you need, you already have.”

Yoko eyed him for a moment more before his brother pulled away.

“Understand?” Hiroki’s smile and tone were pleasant as he straightened, smoothing wrinkles out of his shirt.

Yoko nodded. He understood perfectly—it was a familiar message that they had all had occasion to give to one another in the past, but it still irked him to hear it, as though he was a child.

“Well then, I guess we should finally talk about what we went to lunch to talk about.”

“We should wait for Tokoyo.” Yoko would rather not have waited for their brother, but the man was the eldest and had the most resources at his disposal. Hiroki was always fond of saying that the three of them, together, had the knowledge, power, and capital to do anything they liked, and Yoko could never find grounds on which to refute that claim. Even he had to admit that the three of them working together accomplished more than any one of them could on his own.

“He wouldn’t come see us, so I figured tomorrow we’d storm the tower, as it were.” Hiroki grinned at him, and Yoko couldn’t help but smirk back a bit. Tokoyo always hated visits from them, and so both of them enjoyed forcing themselves upon him when they could find legitimate reasons for doing so. “But before we do that, I think we ought to discuss the situation on our own. Make sure we actually need his help before we approach him.”

Yoko nodded. As much as he enjoyed putting their brother out on occasion, he didn’t want to be indebted to him for his help either.

“It’s really too bad that your father got involved.”

Yoko’s expression didn’t reflect the sudden souring his mood underwent, but Hiroki noticed it anyway.

“Don’t get wound up about it. I didn’t know he was in the city either, and I certainly never would have guessed he was playing at being an office assistant.”

“It demeans him.”

“It demeans all of us,” Hiroki agreed. “But then, I guess so does being a librarian, and pawning off ancient artifacts when you need a bit of money.”

Yoko didn’t rise to the bait. What he did with his own belongings he did not because he lacked money, and Hiroki’s job at the university library was much more than just a job. Both of them knew these things, and he felt that it was unnecessary to comment.

The tram doors slid open and the two of them stepped out, headed for Hiroki’s apartment and the small library he had collected there. Yoko hoped that they could find answers among Hiroki’s collection of texts and notes and forestall having to speak to Tokoyo at all. Yoko already knew, with whatever limited amount of foresight he had available to him, that such a meeting was not likely to have pleasant consequences for either of them.