Then, almost like she’d rehearsed it, she pulled herself together. One sleeve came up to blot her cheeks, then she dragged it across her nose. Her trembling stopped. She planted her hands on the ground, pushed herself to her feet, and brushed her palms together.
When she looked up, the tears were gone. Her mouth curled into the faintest smirk, the kind that said the jig was up and we both knew it.
“If you want to get to the bottom of this,” she said, voice calm now, sure of itself, “my advice is to start listening to me.” She motioned toward the restaurant’s charred shell. “That wasn’t accidental.”
“So you did do it,” Miki growled, muscles coiling like she was about to pounce.
“Please,” Keiko said, lips twitching into that faint smirk again. “Do I look like a professional arsonist to you?”
For a second, I just stared at her, my mind struggling to catch up. Ten seconds ago she’d been trembling under my hands, and now she stood steady, composed. I didn’t know what to make of it or if I should believe it. The shift caught me completely off guard.
“When the fire department wraps up,” Keiko continued, folding her arms, “they’ll say it was faulty wiring. No foul play.”
Miki’s voice cut sharp through my haze. “How the hell could you know that unless you were involved?”
I blinked, shook my head, still trying to process. “Yeah, if you weren’t part of it, how do you know all of this?”
Keiko’s gaze flicked between us. The pause stretched for what felt like forever.
Then she leaned in. Steadily and with certainty, she said: “You’re not the only one who survived the apprenticeship, Akiko.”
My pulse skipped.
“There are others.”
16
The words hung between us.
Keiko’s admission that others might’ve survived past apprenticeships had me twisted. Sure, I’d wondered, but I never really thought it was possible. I’d seen every one of my competitors die.
Or had I?
“This is just another one of her sick lies, Akiko,” Miki said. “Don’t fall for it.”
“I’m not lying. And I can prove it.”
“Start talking,” I said. “Tell me how you know this to be true.”
“I think it’s better I show you.” Keiko reached into the small backpack she had on. “This is the reason why I was coming here today.” She pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to me.
“What is this?”
“It’s my entire chat history with Kaiyo while he was in the program, from the moment he arrived until he went silent.”
I started flipping through the transcript. Miki stood beside me, looking as well.
“I didn’t delete anything. It’s all there.”
“Sheesh, you guys talked a lot,” Miki said. “There must be hundreds of pages.”
“Like I told Akiko, Kaiyo and I shared everything. He wanted to document his time there, and talking to me was how he did it. There’s probably stuff in here that didn’t mean much to me but might mean something to you.”
“Like what?” Miki asked.
“One time Kaiyo told me about this strange guy he met while doing chores. He said something about surviving. It didn’t mean anything to us then, but it might now. Stuff like that.”
I turned to Miki. “We need to go through this. Keiko, can you find the section where your brother was talking to this person?”
