Gold for the Guys (and one Girl)

“I’m just saying that magic-based guns being within the realm of possibility seems, to me, far enough down the technological line for timed-release explosives to have been thought out. If the military has the science down, what’s stopped wielders from adapting the concepts?”

“Sigildry is magic. Science and sigildry, like wielders, don’t play nice together, so this would demand all be the latter. Delayed reactions, combustion, triggers, maintaining potency from a distance through a constructed, artificial medium. All words, all runes. Do you know how many books there were about making your necklace? Zero. I had to talk to people for that. I had to go outside.”

“We’re outside now.”

“For mo-ney.” Arata exaggerated the syllables. “I did it then for friendship. And to not end up on the scary girl’s bad side.”

“I’m not a scary girl.”

“Girl, you literally made some poor bitch eat his own arms. You dissect insects – for fun – and you’re leaving us for schooling to become better at it.”

“For the last time, entomology is not just about dissecting. God, can we take a break. I think my arms are about to fall off.” Kira let out a cry of relief as Arata shuffled them towards a wall and lowered his end of the box, and would have made a bench of it, had he not perfectly imitated the squeal of a diseased Pomeranian at the moment of descent.

“Don’t you go and sit on that! It’s sharp!”

She stared at him wide-eyed, unable to speak until her heart retreated back down her throat. Head on a swivel, she counted the pairs of eyes now focused on them from the surrounding eateries. At least thirteen were burning holes in the pair, all businessmen, over bottles and mugs of beer, and shallow bowls steaming. Any hotter their clear anger and she’d be a ready cheese for slicing onto bread. “Are you trying to get us arrested for public disturbance?” she squeaked out. “We’re not exactly welcome in this part of the city.”

Not only by the businessmen, but also by foreigners. At least their eyes were only curious of them and their odd box taking up half the alley.

Arata had led the pair to Golden Gai, whose narrow passages packed tight with local, bitter regulars and visitors with pamphlets stuck in the wrinkles of their brains were proving perilous to navigate. So far they’d managed to avoid catching any unaware folk on the elbows, but the sharp edges of the box would snag decorations and signs. Turning was also a pain with just how long the thing’s legs were. One of many vending machines they’d passed now wore a sizable dent. “The Don will pay for that,” Arata had said. “He owns the place.”

“The machines?” had been Kira’s question, to which the ponytailed boy had given her a flat stare and thin smile as answer. What that meant she tried not to think about. She was feeling underdressed as it was, and the crisp, ironed suits of the businessmen, hugging their bodies or hung on the backs of their chairs or thrown over wage-heavy shoulders were filling her mouth with envy.

“Don’s men get their run of the place,” Arata said. “We’re welcome wherever his words have sway.”

He led further down the alleyway, turning at a wall plastered with black-and-white photographs and rolls of film. Lights had been strung up behind. Slowly they pulsed, illuminating the bronzed images captured in the reels. Midst their laborious process of backing up, stepping forward to perform a three-point turn, stopping again, Kira picked through several. A parent and child. A sequence of an individual subject lazing in the windowsill, orange tail being reached for by a baby. Someone’s guitar collection. Masked volunteers cleaning waste. She leaned closer to a close-up of a chrysalis, a duology with the butterfly partway out in the next, when the light fizzled out behind the latter. She wrinkled her nose at the acrid smell of burnt sugar.

How is this Don able to do business here with all this technology, she thought. Surely someone would have noticed devices breaking down constantly?

The strictness of the neighborhood was well documented. Signs on all fronts forbade the use of photography and recording without explicit permission. It was, on all counts, a private slice of the ward. It must help to hide what goes on.

They eventually came upon a small ramen place tucked into a brick corner where the lights were dimmer, being raised higher above the street than any eatery previous, giving the area a more secluded feel. Signs in the front were divided: one half devoted to Kanji, the other to English. Only a few patrons sat inside, cast in gold by the lights, red bowls fuming as if comically angry. A man with only a wisp of hair remaining among the dewdrops was doling out a second serving for a particularly deep stomach at the center of the bar. Heavy notes of garlic reached Kira’s nose, and her breath caught. For a moment her stomach gurgled, but subsided to a purr as Arata twisted his head around, face harder than she’d seen in recent memory.

“Constipated up there?”

“Gotta look tough for the cameras,” he grunted. With a nod to a metal rolling door around the building’s other side, he added, “Over there. That’s our entrance.”

They laid the box down, its metal clanking dully against the stone road. Arata knocked lightly against the door. The sound of rattling metal echoed down the alley, stirring a puddle of condensation above their heads to drip. Kira hissed as a cold trail of kisses skittered across the hairs on her hand, collateral from the droplets splashing against the box’s edge. Pulling down her sleeve she moved to wipe the liquid away just in case this Don took umbrage with how they delivered his prize, being a rich sounding man – and without a doubt exacting as a side-effect – when an unusual texture revealed itself. She removed her hand. What remained of the liquid still caught the light.

A dense, flowing script of minute, alien letters. Sigildry.

<”Every Don has his day.”>

Kira jumped at Arata’s sudden English, spoken to no one she could see. But the rolling door rattled in response. A set of three knocks followed, and Arata made a “Ha!” sound under his breath.

“Now what?” Kira asked.

“This!”

Dramatically, as if for the entertainment for a TV camera crew, Arata stuck up his arm, spun his wrist with a finger pointed out, and punched outward. The metal swallowed his limb, rippling around the arm like the disturbed surface of a lake. The smugness returned to his face, if only for a second, before he cleared his throat back into that performative, tough-guy expression. “Come on now. You didn’t think the Don did his business out in the open, right?”