When I looked inside, I noticed that the inside of the warehouse was far brighter than it appeared — inside, holographic screens that had been set up in secret were glowing with a blue light, and there were several tables, and even several people. All of them wore dark, plain clothing, most of their faces either masked or hooded, and the conversation among them proceeded in a low voice, hurriedly.
The voices blended into each other, but some words reached my ear clearly: "protection money," "3rd District," "three more people disappeared this week," "do the children know about this?"
My heart had sped up; I felt my hands go damp. This was a meeting place, but for what? When Master Ren went inside, one of the people there walked toward him and bowed respectfully. "Commander," he said only, without saying anything else; there was a deep reverence in his tone, as if even the weight of that word meant something.
Commander? All my life I had known Master Ren as an old man with broken stairs in his apartment who read books, cooked for us, strange but affectionate. That word didn't fit at all with the man I knew; it felt as if they were speaking in another language. As I tried to listen more, a piece of rubble slipped slightly beneath my foot. The sound was small, but in an environment with people more sensitive to Chi than me, no sound was small.
Suddenly there was movement inside. Somebody turned toward the door, a shadow approached quickly. My heart leapt into my mouth; I pulled back and dove into the darkness, moving away as fast and as silently as I could, jumping across the rooftops, forgetting even to breathe. I heard a sound behind me — the sound of a door opening — but no one came after me. Maybe Master Ren had noticed me and chosen to ignore it, or maybe they really had lost me.
I lingered a while in a dark park, thinking about what had happened; then I swung on a swing a bit, and looked at the moon again. It relaxed me a great deal. Looking at it, I could keep from thinking about anything else.
By the time I got home dawn was about to break, and the sky in the east had started turning a faint orange. I got into bed quietly, but I couldn't sleep. That word kept turning before my eyes: Commander. I didn't know who Master Ren really was, or what he did. But now I knew one thing — this was not just "visiting an old friend." This was only a small piece of something much bigger that I knew nothing about.
The weekend passed, from the outside, as if nothing had happened. On Monday morning, going to school, I put on my earphones as always, leaned against the column as always. But inside me there was no longer that usual comfortable emptiness. Something had begun to change, and without realizing it I had thrown myself right into the middle of that change. Alex came over to me at one point and made his usual remarks, and I answered as always, but meanwhile half my mind was still in that warehouse, in the darkness of that place.
In class, Ms. Laura's voice stayed inside my ears like a distant hum. I was drawing meaningless lines in my notebook with the pen in my hand, my mind constantly circling that night — the woman's voice, Master Ren's answer, that word "Commander." At one point Ms. Laura asked me a question, probably having noticed my attention had wandered; but I gave the answer with such random accuracy that — I who normally gave only dismissive answers — this time answered the question that came with seriousness. No one noticed anything; only Ms. Laura looked slightly surprised.
At lunch break, to be alone I moved away from the crowd as usual and went to a little-used corner in the school's back garden; there, sitting in the shade of an old tree, I went on thinking. If Master Ren really was a "Commander," whose commander was he? How many people did he command? And most importantly, why had there been a need for such a thing? On one side the idea came to me that my Master was the commander of a classic crime gang, but I gave up that idea right away. He wasn't that kind of person.
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All that week I began watching every detail at home even more carefully. I tried to examine the papers on Master Ren's desk without being too obvious, just out of the corner of my eye, but he always kept everything tidy, he left no clue lying around. Once, on a night I thought he was asleep, I opened the cupboard in the kitchen and looked — there were only ordinary kitchen goods, no hidden compartment, no suspicious object. I could tell how careful, how experienced Master Ren was even from these small searches; he was a professional, he knew very well how to hide his trace. But the strangeness was right there: why and how was he so orderly, with nothing at all? Flawlessness is the greatest flaw. I remember clearly what I saw; this much flawlessness only meant a bigger clue.
Elisa was giving me strange looks all that week too, but she didn't ask anything. Maybe she also sensed something had changed but hadn't yet found the words to name it. One evening, when the two of us were alone, she asked me, "Brother, are you happy?" It was an unexpected question. "Yes," I had said, but the thought running through me was far more complicated — I wasn't exactly happy, but I was alive; for the first time in a long while I really felt alive, and unfortunately those two are not the same thing.
The days after that night passed, seen from the outside, completely ordinarily. Classes, people, teachers, Elena's insistent training offers, Peter's looks — still cold but no longer as sharp as before — and those curious eyes Dex threw at me now and then. Inside, though, I was constantly observing things: Master Ren's disappearances, the words he used when he spoke. I never saw that old book at home again; it was as if he were hiding it deliberately.
I didn't ask. I knew there was no point in asking again; Master Ren would talk when he was ready to talk — I hoped. And in my own way, I went on watching silently; at every evening meal I recorded his hands, his eyes, even his smallest hesitations in my mind. Sometimes, catching myself watching this closely, I felt a strange guilt — as if I were observing the person I loved most like an enemy. But at the same time, this habit of observation gave me a strange pleasure; as if a muscle of mine that hadn't been used for a long time had finally started working.
And there was one question I put back on the table every few weeks, the way you press a bruise to see whether it still hurts. Why did you let them take us? I never asked it out loud again. I only watched his hands when the subject came anywhere near it, and his hands never told me anything, and after a while I understood that they weren't going to — that he had trained them not to, the same way he had trained mine.
That Thursday evening, Elisa, Elena and I — Elena had started coming to our home by now and had become friends with Elisa too, and the two of them were constantly whispering complaints about me to each other — were sitting in a small restaurant in the 3rd District, a bit away from the city center, in the part closer to the wall of the 2nd District. Elena had come straight from training; her sword was still in its sheath on her back, and that wasn't something anyone found strange to see on the street for academy students.
Master Ren came with us too, something he rarely did; usually he left us alone, but that evening he had said "I felt like going out," which had still struck me as a little odd, because the things Master Ren "felt like" were usually books and silence.
At the table, among the smell of soups steaming hot and toasted bread, I was listening to the class gossip Elisa told, and Elena talked now and then about her own training plans, with that usual sparkle in her eyes. Master Ren, meanwhile, was eating quietly and occasionally looking out the window — the looks were full of an attentiveness I didn't notice at the time but which would gain meaning later, as if he were counting every customer who came in the door, every movement on the street. "I learned a new technique this month," Elena was saying, waving her hands in the air as she explained. "Our teacher calls it 'Footprint'; using your speed you leave false traces on the ground and mislead your opponent. I want to show you sometime, Kai!"
"Of course," I said — it had genuinely caught my interest, but there were other problems oppressing my mind and my mind was stuck on them.