Who? What? Where? When? How?

The first thing I notice is the cold.

The second is the smell. Bleach, raw meat, and something metallic underneath. It takes my brain a few seconds to put the two together and come up with an answer I don't like.

I open my eyes. The light is a single bare bulb, and the room is full of hooks. Long steel hooks, and things hanging from them. A pig, split down the middle, is looking at me from about two metres away.

"…Great," I say. My voice comes out as a croak.

I try to move and find out that my wrists are tied to the back of a chair. My cast is sticking out in front of me like a very sad, very white log. My crutch is gone. So is my scooter, probably, and the delivery bag, and any chance of me walking out of here on my own.

Okay. Let's stay calm. This is a walk-in fridge in the back of a restaurant, and I'm alive, and nobody has hit me yet. Honestly, I've had worse mornings. Well, I've had worse afternoons. I don't know what time it is.

"At least the room's cold," I say out loud, to nobody. "Really helps with the swelling."

Nobody laughs. Nobody's supposed to be here to laugh. I just needed to hear a voice, and mine was the only one on offer.

"You're awake."

The voice comes from the corner, low and flat, and it takes my eyes a second to find the shape it belongs to. A man steps out from between two hanging carcasses, arms crossed, watching me the way you'd watch something you're deciding whether to throw out. There's a dark ring-shaped bruise on his forehead, half swallowed by shadow, and it takes me a moment to place it.

The hotel. The bin Lei Mei dropped on his head before I put him on the ground. This is him.

"Hey," I say. "You look... better than the last time I saw you."

He doesn't say anything. He just watches, and the silence stretches out longer than it has any right to, the kind of quiet that makes you start filling in the worst possible reasons for it yourself.

"Sorry about the bathroom," I try again. "It really wasn't personal."

Nothing. Not a flicker. I decide to stop talking before whatever's building behind his eyes finds a reason to move.

I don't know how long passes after that. Long enough for my fingers to go numb, for the cold to work its way past my jacket and into my bones, for the pig across from me to start looking less like meat and more like a warning. Then, somewhere beyond the door, footsteps. Slow. Unhurried. The kind of pace that belongs to someone who has never once needed to walk faster than they wanted to.

The door opens with a heavy, hollow clunk, and every muscle in my body decides to stop moving at once.

A woman walks in.

She's tall and slim, dressed in a dark, high-collared coat that stops just below her knees, with her hair pinned back so tightly it looks like it hurts. The cold doesn't seem to touch her. She isn't wearing an expression of any kind, not anger, not amusement, nothing, and somehow that's worse than if she were smiling. She simply enters the room the way water fills a glass, taking up exactly the space allowed and not one drop more.

The man in the corner straightens up. Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't.

She stops in front of a metal shelf near the door. One of the crates on it is slightly crooked. Her left eye twitches, just once. She reaches out and straightens the crate with two fingers, without looking at it, and it's so quick I almost think I imagined it.

Then she turns to me.

"Aguni Taji."

She says my name in perfect, polite Japanese, the way a bank teller says your account number.

"That's me," I say. "Hi."

"Please don't strain yourself. The rope is tighter than it needs to be, and I apologise for that." She says it flatly, like a line she's said many times before. "Do you know why you're here?"

"Is this about the delivery? Because the guy already tipped me, and honestly, I'd feel bad keeping it."

Something in the corner of her mouth moves. It might be a smile. It goes away too quickly to tell.

"The man who ordered your delivery works for me," she says. "The tip was mine. It was a fee for your time."

"Oh. That's… generous. Do you also do birthdays?"

Nobody laughs. The man in the corner looks like he's aged five years in the last five minutes.

"It was calculated," she says, as if I hadn't spoken. "Please don't mistake it for kindness." She pulls a phone from her pocket. It's mine, with the crack across the corner. "Two nights ago, one of my men was tied up in the bathroom of a hotel by two children, and I would very much like to know why."

The man in the corner looks at the floor.

"We didn't know who he was," I say. "We thought… actually, we were following my father. We had no idea he was there for anything."

"I know." She scrolls through my phone, slowly. "I have seen your photographs. A suitcase. A floor covered in banknotes. A pair of shoes." She turns the screen toward me. "No faces."

"It was dark. And freezing. And I was hanging off a balcony with a broken ankle, so I wasn't really focusing on composition."

"Yes. I noticed the ankle." Her eyes go to my cast, then back up. "That was my man's fault, indirectly. I'll deal with that separately."

The man in the corner goes very pale.

"The suitcase in those photographs held money that belonged to my organisation," she continues. "Three months ago, a woman stole it from us and left the country. She needed to convert it into yen quickly, quietly, and with no questions asked. She found a buyer."

I feel something drop in my stomach. I already know what she's going to say.

"Your father," She says.

"He didn't know," I say, faster than I mean to. "He wouldn't. He was saving money so I could go to China. That was all. He probably thought it was a good exchange rate."

"I believe you."

"You do?"

"That is why you are still breathing." She says it in exactly the same voice she used for everything else. "A man who buys without asking is a fool, and I don't kill fools. It attracts attention, and it's bad for business."

The word business lands somewhere in the middle of my chest and stays there.

"The woman who sold him the money vanished the same night," she says. "No name that means anything, no trail that leads anywhere useful. She took the yen with her. My man went to the hotel to recover what remained of it."

"And failed," I offer. "Just to save you the trouble of saying it."

Her eyes move to me, slow, unreadable, and for a moment the temperature in the room seems to drop another few degrees that have nothing to do with the fridge.

"He failed," she agrees quietly. "Twice, in fact. Once at the hotel. Once tonight, when he told me it would be simple to bring you here without anyone noticing."

Somewhere behind her, in the dark between the hooks, I hear the man shift his weight. He doesn't say anything. I get the feeling he's learned not to.

"So. Here is my situation, Mr Aguni." She sets my phone on the shelf, screen down, beside the crate she straightened without looking at it. "Your father still has what's left of the money. That part is simple. He will hand it over the moment I ask, and he will apologise while he does it, because he'll believe it was his mistake to fix. The woman who sold it to him is not so simple. She is the one I actually want, and she is the one I cannot find. And you, Mr Aguni, are the last person outside your own family to have looked into that suitcase, however briefly, however badly you photographed it."

"To be fair, I was hanging off a balcony with a broken ankle at the time. Five stars for effort, maybe two for composition."

Nothing. Not even the corner-of-the-mouth thing this time. I decide, somewhere around my third joke landing in complete silence, that I might be worse at this than I thought.

"I'm going to ask you some questions," she says. "Answer them carefully. I've asked the same questions of other people before you, and most of them stopped being useful to me long before I ran out of things to ask."

There's no weight behind the words. No raised voice, no leaning in, nothing that would look threatening on its own. It's the flatness that gets under my skin, the sense that whatever happened to those other people happened exactly this quietly, in a room exactly this cold.

"Okay," I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "Ask."

She doesn't, not yet. Her eyes drop to the shelf, to my phone, to the name still glowing faintly on the cracked screen from whoever tried calling while I was out.

Lei Mei.

Something behind her expression shifts, so small I almost miss it. She picks the phone up between two fingers, the way she straightened the crate, and turns it slightly, reading the name again as if it might say something different the second time.

"Lei Mei," she says, mostly to herself. Testing the shape of it. "An uncommon name to be finding on the phone of a Japanese boy."

My stomach drops somewhere past my shoes. "You know her?"

"I know a Lei Mei." Her voice gives away exactly nothing. "Whether it's the same one is a separate question, and not one I intend to guess at out loud."

The phone buzzes again in her hand, and this time she doesn't set it down.

"Let's find out together," she says, and answers the call.

She doesn't hold it to my ear. She doesn't let me hear a word of what's said on the other end. She simply turns, walks back toward the door, and speaks into the phone in a voice pitched too low and too even for me to catch, each word placed like a piece on a board she's already looked five moves ahead on.

The door shuts behind her with the same hollow clunk it opened with, and the room goes quiet again except for the hum of the compressor and the sound of my own heartbeat, which I am fairly sure is now the loudest thing in the building.

I look at the pig.

"So," I say. "Anyone want to tell me what just happened?"

The pig doesn't answer. Neither does the man in the corner. Somewhere on the other side of that door, my girlfriend is talking to a woman who might be tying my hands one moment and might be her own blood the next, and I am sitting here in a room full of dead animals with absolutely no way of knowing which.