Ulf smiled at the people in the café, or at least he hoped it looked like a smile. Then he went behind the counter and followed Yukio into the inner room in hopes his best friend hadn’t caused an uproar.

One look inside told Ulf he had. Nakagawa’s creepy but happy smile combined with the unhappy ones from the two Japanese men from Sweden said just about everything Ulf didn’t want to hear.

“What’s the fallout?” Ulf asked Nakagawa just as Yukio turned to se who had followed him inside.

“Your friend here just told us you’d bring in the big guns if we didn’t act according to your wishes.”

Nothing worse than that? Ulf nodded. He stared at the men from Sweden, the Japanese men from Sweden. “You’re not making things easier by being who you are,” he said. “Back home, if a student is raped on school grounds you start by setting off a nuke. Things can escalate from there.” He kept staring at them. “I don’t bloody care if you grew up with rape laws from the eighteen hundreds. I don’t even care about them still being practised here today. Kareyoshi’s going to jail or shit’s really going to hit the fan.”

Nakagawa just kept smiling, but one of the men, Ai’s father averted his eyes. That left Rika’s father who met Ulf’s stare with a cold glare of his own. Ulf decided to pour petrol on the flames.

“I guess you’d both be fine if Kareyoshi had Ai and Rika done over by some of his goons as well,” he suggested in his most vulgar Gothenburg accent. Switching to Swedish had the effect Ulf wanted.

“Don’t you dare compare Rika with...”

“… the daughter of a US ambassador,” Ulf interrupted. He’d already guessed where this was going. The man was Japanese and not Swedish after all. The social status of an assault victim was of equal importance as the severity of the crime. That he had to use this kind of argument at all made bile rise in him, but Ulf was here to secure the victory Yukio had prepared for him.

To his surprise it was Ai’s father who interceded. “It’s not that easy, so please hear me out,” he said in Japanese.

Ulf decided to listen and sat down beside Yukio.

“We absolutely need to get as many of them as possible,” Ai’s father continued.

“Of Kareyoshi’s goons?”

“No,” Rika’s father said. “Of those who are pulling the strings.”

Ulf smirked. Another excuse to do nothing.

“Listen to me! It’s imperative we get them all. There are some very powerful people involved.”

“What would you know?” Ulf said and snorted. He was sick and tired of people playing his visual age against him and treating him like a kid.

There was no retort. Both men looked at each other, and then at Nakagawa who just nodded.

“They have a runner in Sweden,” he said when none of the other two wanted to explain.

“A runner?”

“I don’t know how much you have already guessed, but there seems to be more than two worlds...”

Behind them the door opened.

“... and sometimes an individual doesn’t live out a full life after arriving but keeps transiting from world to world,” Noriko’s voice interrupted Nakagawa as she closed the door.

What?

“So you had him or her extracted from Japan,” she continued. “But that person shouldn’t be holed up in Sweden now unless you had a need of extensive interrogation. Am I right?”

What? Oh! Oh crap! Ulf stared at Rika’s father. “Kareyoshi’s involved with this shit in the upstream world as well?”

“Upstream?”

Ulf looked at Yukio. “His suggestion,” Ulf said and pointed a finger sideways. “The world I transited from,” he said.

Nakagawa nodded approval, and Ulf noticed how Ai’s father even jotted down a few notes on his phone.

“Upstream is a good word for it, I guess,” Rika’s father said. “Yes, yes he is, or rather his alter ego there. Principal Nakagawa got kicked out of office there as well.”

It felt strange listening to how there were multiple versions of individuals who hadn’t transited. Ulf knew there was only one version of himself in this world, of Christina as well, but this version of himself was different than the one who had transited. The thought of more or less identical people living parallel lives was somehow disturbing.

“Why is it so important that anyone associated with Kareyoshi gets punished?” Ulf asked.

Ai’s father grimaced. “We’re transferring Principal Nakagawa to Sweden.”

“Oh,” Noriko said. “Oh!”

Damn, I’m supposed to be the bright one! Why the hell… Ulf felt all colour leave his face. “When?” he started.

“Not now,” Nakagawa said. “Maybe never, but if I transit one day I’ll arrive in a world where I never spent my life sabotaging the work of Kareyoshi and the likes of him.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“How bad is it?”

“If we understood our runner correctly it’s even worse in... ah what did you call it, upstream. They don’t have you or Ageruman-san playing merry hell with their plans there.”

It wasn’t just him and Christina working to make Himekaizen a decent place, but maybe gathering friends in the club made a difference. The club created a network of fairly powerful people, and for that reason it acted as a counter weight.

“Shouldn’t things be better downstream?”

“Hopefully, but we can’t take that risk. However, according to interviews with previous runners it seems that actions taken in one world carry over to the next.”

It made sense. Otherwise the worlds wouldn’t be so similar. “How bad?” Ulf repeated.

“All the way to the diet. We need all, or at least most of them removed before we dare transiting our own people downstream.”

Our own? Ulf glanced at Nakagawa. Ah. Then a thought struck him. So there’s some kind of club for the big guys as well. Seems we’ll have a shot at helping you and Kyoko after after all. He looked at Yukio and grinned but only got a nonplussed smile in return.

***

Noriko shivered as she took a few steps and found herself a seat beside Urufu.

Adults played ugly games. He’d said as much outside the Stockholm Haven café a little earlier. Just how ugly she slowly began to understand.

She could do math faster than him, but sitting here right now, feeling the need for him to protect her, she realised she couldn’t do people faster than him, if at all. People couldn’t be calculated. You had to go by gut feeling, and that wasn’t her way of coming to conclusions.

Still, the part about ‘our own people’ shocked her. It implied they’d still have unsuspecting people transit downstream into the unknown as long as those people weren’t ‘our own’.

Will I become like them when I grow up? She hoped not. Her mother hadn’t, and her father at least not very much.

“Christmas,” Urufu said. “We don’t care any more. The pig’s gone by Christmas or we’ll act.”

“Do you have any idea...” the scary old man began.

“Not enough,” Urufu interrupted. “Christmas or I’ll call in a favour each from Christina and her grandfather. You really, really, really don’t want to mess with them.”

“Now you arrogant little...”

“You really don’t want to mess with me neither. I’ll blow your cover to Nathan Cooper. He got his daughter raped. He’ll believe anything I say about science fiction style dark operations if I make it convincing enough.”

“Mister Hammargren, you can’t,” Nakagawa-sensei said. “We play dirty, but the Americans would use direct violence.”

“You want to test that theory?”

“You little...” the scary man tried to edge in.

“Shut the bloody hell up! My girlfriend and my best friend here are the only decent persons in this room. I’m not. Push me and you’ll find out just exactly how low I’m prepared to go.”

Noriko watched he ping pong match of words in fascination. Urufu’s words reminded her he wasn’t just her boyfriend but also a man with a lifetime’s experience of power games.

When silence suddenly swept the entire room in an uncomfortable blanket of angry thoughts Noriko decided she needed to voice her own opinion.

“Christmas. We need to. We’re the ones hurting, not you.”

From out of nowhere Urufu’s hand found hers and she felt his grip harden. He’d been there and saved her once. He knew. She squeezed back.

An unexpected giggle reached her from Nakagawa-sensei. When she looked at him the expression she got in return was one of satisfaction rather than irritation.

“Well gentlemen, seems we got ourselves a deadline,” he said, still smiling.

The scary man turned and glared at Nakagawa-sensei. “You really expect us to blindly do what a couple of kids tell us to do?”

Their former principal dressed his face in a harder expression. “The arrivals aren’t really kids, and as for the kids in question, they have a right to expect us adults to protect them.”

“Look, Nakagawa-san, we had no part in your allowing things to degenerate like this in the first place.”

“You do now,” he said. “Since the moment you suggested we stall you became involved.”

“I fail to...”

“You failed to tell us you knew abut the Hitler Jugend central in the other world.”

“Hitler Jugend?” Urufu asked, and Noriko felt his grip harden until it almost hurt.

Nakagawa-sensei met Urufu’s eyes. “In you old world Red Rose is still very much operative, and it seems their version basically bought Himekaizen and merged the two high schools into one disgusting right wing power base rather thinly disguised as a place for education.”

Urufu gasped and Noriko stared at his face. A thin line had replaced his earlier arrogant smirk. “I see,” he said.

“You know something?” Nakagawa-sensei asked.

Urufu shook his head. “Not really know. It’s just a feeling. This world, or at least this Japan seems a little less nationalistic than the one I remember. Just a feeling.”

The scary man nodded. “The runner said the same thing. According to him there is a trend towards a higher degree of openness.”

“How many,” Noriko began, “times has he transited?”

“He says he can’t remember.”

That stunned her. “Not even a guess?” she tried.

“Hundreds of times.”

“Hundreds of… how old is he?”

“We don’t know,” Ai’s father replied. “Things get strange with a runner. You transit late June and arrive early April the same year. It’s like a short jump backwards in time, well apart from transiting from one world to another.”

“You mean he could have spent several years reliving spring 2017?”

Ai’s father nodded. “He probably did as well. At least he spent many decades in the twenty first century. Maybe a hundred years in total.”

“When was he born?”

She got a genuine smile in return. “I waited for you to ask that question. 1937 in a world very different from this one. No world war two among other things.”

This time she shuddered. The very thought of being disconnected from reality scared her more than she would have thought. Every deviation, every single one experienced by someone who transited meant that reality was no longer what it was supposed to be.

Somehow she had learned to accept the small changes Urufu and Kuri told her about, and a few not so small ones, but a reality where the most important event of the last century had never occurred made that reality entirely alien.

“I feel sorry for him,” she finally said. “There’s no longer a home for him.”

“There never was,” the scary man said. “He was probably mentally unstable long before he transited the first time. The ancient boy waiting to transit in Sweden is no longer sane in any sense of the world.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s mentally broken. I wouldn’t consider him a functioning human. He’s a repository of memories with a manic need to transit to the next world.”

Noriko wanted to throw up, but with the support from Urufu’s firm grip on her hand she managed by merely shuddering once again.