Bryan Anderson sat on the tram from Kurunoshi to Segano District. He had two large bags between his legs, but his thoughts were not fawning over what he would make from the ingredients.
People talking on their phones around him; children complaining; lovers kissing; it was suddenly all the same to him. Hardly anything remained of his former life, but he had already realized he had to make a new start. His guardian had taught him well through the years - about economy, however worldly off-put he himself had been -; about love - however stand-offish he himself had been even from his first to last love -; about life's predicaments and tight turns... of which he had offered no advice at all, strangely.
Bryan forced air out of a closed mouth, his lips vibrating from the pressure. He looked out the window on the trees that flew by and the sky, which looked cloudless and serene enough to hint at another 'good' year.
The doors slid open, and he stepped out on the platform and headed east toward the complex in which he lived. The brisk wind was poking him in the side of the green jacket and ruffling his short blond hair. The playful demeanor almost felt comforting to Bryan as he strode for the apartment, and a tear piped up in the corner of his eye only to run down his cheek and get swiped off with his hand. Just the wind, he told himself.
The inside of the apartment was quaint, and there was not much more than what would be considered necessary for a man of God and the child he raised through the years. Bryan had known the priest had nly been his guardian for years - he had heard nothing of his parents and never asked about them.
As he ate the stiff rice and meatballs in the lukewarm sauce and soggy vegetables, he looked at the only framed picture in the house of him and his surrogate parent. It had been a highly ill-advised trip for one of them, and Bryan suppressed a snicker at the annoyed expression on the man's face as he sat by the little boy in the roller-coaster cart, arms crossed and glaring at the camera.
It'd been an entire week since then, but his educator was dead - murdered. They had already caught the perpetrator the following day, but he hadn't broken until he collapsed on the interrogation table. The forensics had found cyanotopoeia in his system - a drug that supposedly caused not only instant death but wiped one's entire memory system so the craneo-neurotopsists couldn't extract suggestions from neither brain, nerves nor skin. They ended up with a complete mind-wipe, so to speak. The guy had no matches on the Network, either.
So the case was closed.
However heartless he realized it might seem, Bryan cared nothing for the matter now. His caretaker was gone - that was it. If the Enforcers found the need to reopen the case, fine, he would stay far away from this, like a good common citizen of Senai.
He tossed the leftovers in the bin, washed the plate and cutlery and went outside.
***
He walked down a cobbled street, casually looking into shop windows and greeting pedlars half-heartedly as he passed.
Crossing the street to the small enterprise on the other side, the doorbell rang as he stepped over the threshold. The sweet scent of incense caressed his nostrils, and warmth danced around him like Aborros on Gallos' Day. He automatically closed his eyes and made a long, sensual and out-of-character inhale, but had to cough and croak as the fumes clogged his nose.
"You come here to relax, young one?"
Bryan opened his eyes to the voice. They met a man's in the innermost corner of the place, and first now the boy realized how musty and old-looking the locale turned out. It was a bookstore, as read the sign outside and which had prompted him to enter, but the sheer quantity of books - which was a frightening amount balancing on thin, rickety shelves - combined with the timid size of the room - which was really more on a par with the seams on the outside - might have been enough to turn any bookworm around.
"Sorry, man, didn't see ya," Bryan mumbled, reddened by his unexpected reaction to the bookkeeper.
"So what're you looking for, may I ask," the old one pried curiously.
Because that was what he was - old. Probably in his nineties. He had wrinkly skin, half-moon specs, crescent cut hair and a seemingly toothless smile as if he had opened his flabby gums. He looked to be from the older, hotter countries; skin was brownish and spotty with what could be cancerous pricks from the sun, and his accent was not from around.
"Work, mostly," the boy shrugged. "Just came in here to check the place out. You newly opened? I don't seem to recall this place..."
"Oh, yes, we moved in last month. Are you perhaps a bookworm yourself? Or are you looking just to meet new people?" The old man spoke slowly but definitely, as if he wasn't old or toothless. Besides, there was something about him that Bryan couldn't specify. His voice? No... His demeanor - the way he spoke - definitely. Reminded him of his former guardian. Which in a way was creepy, as if he was staring at a mannequin his mentor had possessed to talk to him.
"Nooo...?" Bryan eyed him from the corner of one eye, suspiciously. "Well, I don't mind meeting new people. As long they aren't--"
"Well, then I think I have a job for you," he waved - lightly, like he wanted to reassure him of a deliverance from long ago. He limped behind an enormous stack on the counter and reemerged moments later, having torn half the stack down. He reached out a shaky hand where thin fingers had creased by the wrinkles of time.
Bryan nearly stared, disbelieving. In the old hand was a leaflet of the... Hagura Inn, it said.
He looked at the geezer with the same odd look, but the man's eyes only squinted friendly in return. Bryan hesitantly took the leaflet and put it in his pocket.
"You'll find what you are looking for there, Kett."
A poke in the heart made Bryan flinch. His own lower eyelid flexed ever so slightly, but the old guy never even seemed to notice. He just turned toward the tumbled stack of books from before - which was still higher than he - and walked behind it.
"Hey wait, man, what did you mean by that name?" Bryan leaned over the counter to look behind the stack, but the man had gone off. There was a wall about three feet from the stack. He scratched his head, puzzled, fished up the leaflet and noted the address. It was in the next town over. This job meant he would most likely have to turn to commuting.
He sighed. At least it was something. Could he really be this lucky again and land a job closer to home? If not, maybe he could rent a place in town the days he worked there.
He stuffed the leaflet and exited the store, just to have his head and shoulders drenched by rain. He blew his lips harder this time and was just about to cover his head with his arms and rush when he noticed a pristine umbrella standing by the door to shop. It had a label on it - a white greeting card that read one word: Kett.
Bryan frowned and looked around, but the streets were empty and the red and yellow-flowered drape in the rectangular and narrow window in the door to the store hindered him to see if the clerk had returned to the counter. Also, the door was locked when he tried the handle. The hours sign read 'Friday: 0800 - now".
"Well, isn't that too convenient," Bryan scoffed. He eventually shrugged; after all, he had never heard the name Kett before and the old guy had just called him that. At least he thought it was for him and not that the man had mistaken him for someone else, like his great-great-great-grandson or something...
So he extended the umbrella and hurried home.
***
The next morning he realised waiting until the next day as he coughed back up his glass of milk over breakfast: the deadline, written snarkily and with blotched ink halfway across the image of the Inn, was this morning!
He threw his shoes on his feet and barely remembered to bring and zip his jacket up as he stormed to the train station. Luckily it was one of those systems where you paid on arrival with your charge card, so he could just board the cart.
On arrival his hands, shaking with anticipation, barely slid the card in the auto-detector, and he resorted to vaulting the gate going up because it was slow!
His heart raced up in his throat, and he started coughing due to that and the strain the run and stress put on him. Consulting his leaflet, it relieved him to find a map which based the location of the Inn on that of the train station. He kissed it, looked around sporadically and kept going.
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He arrived ten minutes later at the spot the map described - a literally immense hole in the ground. Bryan groaned aloud, staring skyward as he slugged around on his heels and ran down the hill to the pedestrian street and the markets.
Rounding a corner thirty seconds later, he slammed on the breaks. Dead in front of him was a woman sitting on the cobblestone, wringing her hands in tears. He felt hesitant to approach her for several reasons, but ventured over with gritted teeth, hands clenching and opening with intense stress.
"Uh... excuse me... miss?" he stuttered. The woman, who had been sobbing audibly, sniveled once before she looked partly up at him, her face wet with tears. And what a face! Huge brown eyes seemed to dig into his very core. The dropped, well-defined lips fought bravely to smile reassuringly at him but ultimately failed. She had a beauty mark under her left eye in the diffuse shape of maybe an anchor. She made a shy hic and spoke, her voice breaking.
"What."
Bryan caught himself staring dumbly for a little too long. He scratched his neck, tried to find words that could defy what kind of ... something this woman possessed. It ended with him just bowing his head and held out the leaflet with the picture of the Hagura Inn on the front.
"Oh, that, right - they've, uh..." She dried her tears in a timely manner, but something made Bryan not want to rush this one. "... They moved. Up the street at the end of this road and to the left. You can't miss it..."
It was the happiest - and the most stressed-out - Bryan had felt this whole morning. He could kiss the woman out of pure relief, but refrained for obvious reasons. Instead, he fumbled mutely around in his jacket pocket and fished up a small paper slip and put it carefully on her black satchel as he bolted in the direction with she had specified.
The woman picked up the slip of paper; it was a 1000 dina bill! She stared first at the money and then her head slowly and wide-eyed turned after the boy who just turned the corner at the end of the street. A weak giggle escaped her speechless face as her lips finally broke in a genuinely hopeful smile, flashing teeth blinking white in the pre-noon sun.
***
Bryan rushed up the hill and heaved left, continuing along a much less completely paved road. To one side was the upper part of the city shopping district; to the other the edge of a thick, dark forest.
Rounding another distant corner, he slammed on the breaks once again as he barely avoided a major face-plant with an enormous staircase cut up through the forested hill.
This wasn't here in her description... He suppressed the urge to scream with a loud sigh like before and started ascending the stairs. The steps were low, and he skipped three or four with each leap, until he was up, panting with his hands resting on his knees.
He looked around eventually. The whole place was vast, probably like three soccer fields laid next to each other on the long side. At the end of the plaza - which was so spartan that he could imagine a tumbleweed on the other side - was an almost even bigger mansion. There was a moderately sized shack beside the Inn's staircase, and on the door, a sign read: Applicants welcome - please wait in line and don't shove, loiter or make any fuss if you don't get the job!
Bryan swallowed; this just got better by the minute. But the fact that the sign was still up could mean that the spot was still vacant, so he figured he might as well try his luck. Knocking, the door slid open slightly, and he pushed it all the way.
The inside was as confirming of the simplistic lifestyle as the outside suggested. The single room was a few ten feet in, with a small, open kitchen at the back-right, a bed to his immediate left by the door and a bigger table set fitted with - it looked like - home-made benches to sit on one side.
On the far end of the table, facing him, sat a grown woman. Had she stood Bryan could guess she'd be taller than he, with charcoal black, short hair. Her eyes were dark brown and unexpectedly unnerving. They took him in with an admirable calm that he immediately felt envious that he didn't possess.
He stood there dumbly, watching her uncertainly, hand on the handle of the door, still ajar. After a few seconds, her attention went back to the book on the table. He guessed she had been reading when he had entered.
"You gonna stand there all day? Get over here."
His body jolted as his attention spiked, but he pressed out the words, "I'm here for the job.
"Aren't you a little young to be a manager of a dorm?" The woman raised her eyebrows. Bryan had slight difficulty piecing her words together because of the pen in her mouth.
"Oh, uh... sorry... the leaflet didn't mention an age limit or preferred professional proof. I don't have anything like that..."
"Relax, kid," she waved him off. "Listen, the only thing we care about here is whether you have some ID on you, if you know how to clean rooms and other technical stuff and can keep your nose outta other people's stuff. Don't even care about your gender or sex."
Ok, so this was some kind of manager or custodian job, huh? Well, he had certainly had worse tasks...
"Good," he laughed, "because I really have a hard time talking to women."
"Hm, could'a fooled me; aside from that little hiccup over by the door, I'd say I could very well been your bestie." She said it with the utmost care, not batting any of the hanging eyelashes, still writing in her book. Her tone, however, was collected and almost flat, as if she couldn't decide if she was interested in the conversation or not.
Bryan continued; this far into the conversation, it thrilled him it actually went as well as it did. "Yeah, it's odd. I usually screw up talking to women, especially pretty ones, but strangely I feel fine talking to you..."
He held his breath at that last comment. Judging by the silent treatment he was currently undergoing, he figured not to press his luck to have come this far at all. It was better to just accept defeat and apologize to save his dignity.
"I'm sorry about that. It was uncalled for, and I wasn't thinking. Sorry."
The woman looked up, seemingly hesitant. "Did you say something?"
Bryan's head raced. Phew! That's a real bullet-dodge. If he could just play it cool for the rest of this meeting...
"So you want this job or not?"
Oh! Right... He fished up his passport from his pocket. Part of the reason he hadn't gone yesterday after receiving the leaflet was that he didn't have his identification, which he imagined being of some importance in a job-seeking setting. But that would be just about everything he'd need, since at least larger businesses and onward now had the means to check anyone's nationally registered for relevant information. Though this enterprise didn't seem very astute, he imagined that since she hadn't asked for more than sufficient ID that she had the rest under control.
She jotted something down from glancing at his passport before flipping it shut and handing it to him. "Okay, seems to be it. I'll just need the weekend to look into you and inform with the tenants, and you'll have the answer by Sunday."
It felt like someone had lifted a boulder from Bryan's shoulders. He waited until outside to breathe, though. As he stretched to relieve the tension, his attention turned to something moving in the corner of his eye.
A young girl had been moving briskly down the few steps leading to the Inn itself. As he stretched her pace had slowed as she looked with a curious and - he could tell - humoured - expression on her face.
He just hoped that he didn't have to engage in conversation - and that she didn't live at the Inn, because she was one of those carelessly described 'pretty' ones. Her face was stocky but didn't look contorted. She must have been close to his own age and slightly shorter, with deep red hair tucked in a low tail on her back. With that and a few freckles strewn on a red patch covering her higher cheekbones and the lower part of her nose, she reminded him of how a lion cub re-imagined into a human girl would look. She wore a light outfit which comprised a flash pink hooded top and - to his own ... masculinity - uncomfortably form-fitting yoga pants. Her brown eyes seemed to play with his own ocean blue nervous ones for that one second of his life in which he hated his existence as a man with fully functioning facilities, before she shook her head, turned her gaze and jogged lightly across the plaza.
He exhaled again, loudly this time, and closed his eyes for a moment before hearing the door behind him open.
"You still here, kid? Get going," she slapped him encouragingly but hard on the back, to which he immediately started running with a panicked shout, "You're gonna need the weekend, trust me."