The cell they threw him in was small and dry and smelled like old straw. Someone had wrapped his arm in a strip of linen on the way down. The blood had already soaked through.
Ren sat with his back against the stone and closed his eyes.
He'd killed a man today. He kept waiting to feel it.
What he felt instead was the night it all started.
***
One year earlier.
The Saionji house sat on a quiet street in Azabu, behind a wall high enough that you couldn't see the garden from the road. Takeru threw a party there every few months, whenever his parents flew somewhere. Ren had been to maybe six of them. He never really liked them. He went because Daiki went, and because Yui liked them, and because when you were twenty and broke and everybody you knew was going somewhere, you went too.
He'd driven that night. His car was a twelve year old Honda he'd bought with two years of convenience store shifts. The plan was to pick Yui up after her shift, swing by the party for an hour, then drive her home.
The plan lasted until Yui texted that she'd just crash at the party with Rina.
So Ren had a drink. Then Daiki handed him another one. Then Takeru's cousin opened something expensive and Japanese and very strong, and by midnight Ren was sitting on the floor of a living room bigger than his family's whole apartment, laughing at something Kenta said that wasn't funny.
"You're not driving," Daiki told him around one.
"No," Ren agreed. "First train."
"You can sleep upstairs."
Ren looked toward the stairs. Takeru was on them, one arm around Yui's waist, saying something into her ear that made her laugh. Yui was his girlfriend. Takeru knew that. Takeru had always known that.
"I'll sleep in my car," Ren said.
Daiki followed his eyes and didn't argue.
The Honda was parked two streets down. Ren got in the passenger side because the seat went back further, tossed his jacket on the dashboard with the keys still in the pocket, and was asleep before he finished leaning back.
He didn't hear the door open. He didn't feel the engine start.
What woke him was the sound.
It wasn't loud. That was the part he'd never been able to explain to anyone after. In movies, crashes were huge. This was a short, flat thump, like someone dropping a bag of rice on a table, and then a squeal of brakes far too late.
Ren opened his eyes.
The car was stopped in the middle of an intersection. The light above them was red. The headlights were pointed at a crosswalk, and in the crosswalk there was a shoe. Just one. White, the kind nurses wore. A little further on, at the edge of the light, there was a woman lying on the road.
She wasn't moving.
"Oh no," said someone next to him. "Oh no, no, no, no."
Takeru was in the driver's seat. Both his hands were still on the wheel. His face was white, and he was breathing like he'd run a marathon, and he smelled like the expensive bottle from the party.
"What did you do?" Ren's voice came out thick. His head was full of mud.
"She came out of nowhere." Takeru wasn't looking at him. He was looking at the woman. "She came out of nowhere, Ren, I swear to God, she just..."
"The light's red."
Takeru looked up at the light. Something changed in his face.
Ren reached for his door. He needed to get out. He needed to check on her, call someone, do something. His fingers found the handle and slid off. Everything was moving too slow.
Then Takeru grabbed him.
He got out of the car, came around the front, through the headlights, past the shoe, and yanked the passenger door open. Ren thought he was helping him out. Then Takeru shoved him sideways instead. Across the seat, over the gearshift, into the driver's side, still warm from where Takeru had been.
"What are you doing?"
"Shut up." Takeru pressed the keys into Ren's hand and closed his fingers around them. His own hands were shaking. "Shut up, shut up, just stay there."
"Takeru."
But he was already running. Back up the street, toward the house, toward the wall high enough that no one could see in.
Ren sat there with the keys in his fist and looked at the woman in the road. He tried to make his legs work. On the second try, he got the door open and fell out onto the asphalt.
He crawled to her. He didn't remember deciding to. He just remembered the road under his palms and the cold, and then he was next to her, saying, "Hey. Hey. Can you hear me?"
She was older than him. Thirties maybe. She had a lanyard around her neck with a hospital badge on it. Her eyes were open.
Ren held her hand until the sirens came.
It felt like a long time. Later, he'd learn it was eleven minutes. Long enough for Takeru to get back to the party. Long enough for him to round up everyone who mattered. Long enough for six people to walk down the street together, find Ren on his knees in the road with the car door hanging open and the keys on the asphalt beside him, and decide what they had seen.
***
The interview room at the station had a gray table, two chairs, and a clock that ticked loud enough to hear over everything else.
Ren told them the truth. He told it the first time, at 3:40 in the morning, still drunk, with the woman's blood dried on the knees of his jeans. He told it again at nine, sober, with a headache splitting his skull. He told it a third time that afternoon to a detective who didn't bother to write any of it down.
"I was asleep in the passenger seat," he said. "Saionji Takeru was driving. He moved me after."
"Your blood alcohol was well over the limit," the detective said.
"I know. That's why I was sleeping in the car."
"It's your car."
"Yes."
"Your keys."
"Yes."
"You were found next to the driver's door."
"Because I got out to help her."
The detective sighed and opened a folder. He didn't slide it across. He just read from it, flat, like a weather report.
"Mori Daiki states that at approximately 1:50 a.m., he saw you take your keys from the coat rack and leave the house alone. He states he tried to stop you and you refused."
Ren stared at him.
"Aoyama Yui states the same. Fujii Kenta states the same. Ishida Rina and Nakano Sho state that they saw you drive away from the window. Saionji Takeru states he was in the house the entire time and only learned of the accident when the group went to look for you." The detective closed the folder. "That's five witnesses, Kuroda-kun. Plus the man you're accusing. Six."
"They're lying."
"All of them?"
"Yes."
"Why would six people lie?"
Ren opened his mouth and closed it. He didn't have an answer that would fit in that room. Because Takeru asked them to. Because they're scared of him. Because his father is who he is. He could hear how it sounded.
"There's a camera," he said instead. "At the corner. Above the bus stop. It points right at the intersection."
The detective made a note. It was the only note he made all day.
Two days later, Ren found out the camera had been broken for weeks. Nobody had reported it. The footage didn't exist.
Two weeks after that, his mother told him through the glass of the detention center that Daiki's family had paid off the loan on their ramen shop. All of it, in one payment. Nobody in the neighborhood knew where the money came from.
Ren knew.
He'd met Saionji Kenji exactly once, at Takeru's eighteenth birthday. A tall man in a gray suit who shook hands like he was signing something. A member of the Diet for twenty years. The kind of man who didn't need to threaten anybody, because everybody already understood.
He'd shown up at the police station at six in the morning on the night of the crash. Ren hadn't seen him. He'd only heard about it later, from the detective, in passing, as if it meant nothing.
Saionji-sensei came in personally to make sure his son was all right. Very concerned father.
***
Yui broke up with him by text.
It came on the ninth day, while he was still being held for questioning. His phone was in a plastic bag at the front desk, so he didn't see it until they released him on bail almost three weeks later. He turned it on in the parking lot, and it buzzed for a full minute. Missed calls. News alerts. Messages from numbers he didn't know, most of them telling him to die.
And one from Yui.
I can't be with someone who would do something like that and then lie about it. Please don't contact me.
He read it standing in the parking lot with his bag in his hand. Then he called her. It rang once and went to voicemail. He called again. Blocked.
A month later, a friend of a friend sent him a screenshot. Yui at a restaurant in Ginza. Takeru's arm around her. Both of them smiling.
He didn't call Daiki. He kept almost doing it. He'd get as far as opening the contact, and then he'd see the name, the one he'd known since they were twelve and fighting over who got the last melon bread at the school store, and he'd put the phone down.
Daiki never called him either.
That was the part that took the longest to understand. Takeru, he got. Takeru had been the same person since middle school, a rich kid who'd never once paid for anything he broke. Yui, he could almost get. She'd always liked people who could take her places.
But Daiki had slept on Ren's floor for two weeks when his parents were fighting. Daiki had cried at Ren's grandfather's funeral. Daiki had stood next to him in the kendo club line for six straight years.
And Daiki was the one who said it first. The detective had let that slip too. Mori-kun was the first to come forward.
Ren wondered sometimes how much it had cost. What the exact number was. Whether Daiki had thought about it for even a second before he said yes.
He decided eventually that it didn't matter. The number would never be big enough.
***
The rest of the year went one piece at a time.
The university expelled him in April. The letter was polite. It talked about the reputation of the institution and the seriousness of the charges and wished him well in his future endeavors.
The kendo club took his name off the roster the same week. Nobody called to tell him. He found out when his old practice partner unfollowed him on everything.
His father stopped talking to him in May. Not in a dramatic way. There was no shouting. He just stopped. He'd eat dinner across the table from Ren and look at the TV, and when Ren said good night, he'd say nothing at all. By summer, Ren had moved into a six mat room above a laundromat in Adachi and was stocking shelves at night at a warehouse that didn't check the news.
His mother called every Sunday. Most Sundays she cried.
He met his lawyer in June. Ogawa Sumiko was a court appointed defender in her fifties with gray roots and a briefcase held together with tape. She had forty other cases. She read his file in front of him in eight minutes, closed it, and took off her glasses.
"I'll be honest with you, Kuroda-kun," she said. "Six witnesses. Your car. Your blood alcohol. No footage. If you plead guilty, show remorse, write a letter to the family, I can maybe get you a suspended sentence. If you fight it, you'll lose, and the lay judges will punish you for wasting their time."
"I wasn't driving."
"I understand that's your position."
"It's not my position. It's what happened."
She looked at him for a long moment. He could see her deciding whether he was stupid or stubborn. In the end, she put her glasses back on.
"Then we'll fight it," she said. "But I want you to know I think it's a mistake."
She was the first person in eight months who hadn't called him a liar to his face. It wasn't belief. He knew that. It was just tiredness. But he took it anyway.
***
The woman's name was Hasegawa Emi.
Ren learned everything about her from the charge sheet and the news. Thirty four. A nurse in the pediatric ward at a hospital in Shinagawa. Married six years. No kids yet. They'd been trying. Her husband said so in an interview that played on every channel for a week, standing in front of their apartment building with his hands in his pockets, his voice completely flat.
"I just want him to tell the truth," Hasegawa Tetsuo told the cameras. "That's all. I want the man who did this to admit it."
Ren watched that clip more times than he could count.
He'd thought about writing to him. Ogawa told him not to. Anything he sent would be used against him, and anything that wasn't an apology would make it worse. So he never wrote. And at every hearing, Tetsuo sat in the front row of the gallery, and looked at him, and Ren had to look at the floor.
Because the worst part was that Tetsuo wanted the same thing Ren did. He wanted the man who did it to tell the truth.
And that man was sitting across the room in a tailored suit, next to his father, checking his phone.
***
The trial started on a gray Tuesday in October.
Ren wore the only suit he owned. It was too big in the shoulders now. He'd lost weight. He walked through a crowd of cameras on the courthouse steps and didn't hear a word anyone shouted.
Inside, it was quiet. Wood paneling. Fluorescent lights. Three judges in black robes on the high bench, six lay judges in a row beside them. Ordinary people. An office worker. A retired teacher. A young woman who wouldn't stop fidgeting with her ring.
The prosecution's side had more people in it than his whole life did now. Prosecutor Kanzaki, neat and serious. Takeru in the front row behind him. Saionji Kenji beside his son, gray suit, hands folded, looking at nothing. And behind them, in a row, the witnesses. Daiki. Yui. Kenta. Rina. Sho. All of them dressed like they were going to a job interview.
None of them looked at Ren.
Except Takeru. Takeru looked at him once, as the judges came in, and smiled.
Kanzaki stood. He buttoned his jacket. He started his opening statement.
And Ren looked at the floor.
***
In the cell under Solenne, Ren opened his eyes.
The torch outside had burned low. Somewhere above him, through tons of white stone, a bell was ringing. Voices were moving through the halls, too far away to make out.
They were deciding what to do with him. He knew that. The same way the courtroom had been deciding. And the same people would be standing up to tell them what had happened.
He pulled open his status screen and looked at the newest line.
Title: Hero Slayer
There was a difference this time, though.
This time, he'd done it.