Jack woke to a house that smelled faintly of the pan he'd used last night and the thin dust of sleep. Light from a narrow strip of window cut across the floorboards; the city outside still moved in a sleepy, indifferent rhythm. He rubbed at the bruise blooming across his jaw and turned his head. Sarah's side of the bed was empty.
He padded into the kitchen. A plate sat on the table—pancakes still steaming at the edges, eggs pale and steady. A small note in Sarah's handwriting lay folded beside the fork.
Enjoy your first day back at work. Love, Sarah.
He read the line three times as if the words might change shape and mean less, then more. Two weeks. That's how long he'd been away from the shop: two weeks of police questions, of paper interviews, of sleeping badly and waking from the memory of other people's screams. He hadn't meant to stay away. He hadn't meant to break; things simply folded, and grief did the rest.
He ate mechanically, tasted syrup and grease without much interest. He dressed in the same grey work shirt he'd worn the day before the raid and left for the plant where he had worked since his apprenticeship. The machinery shop smelled like oil, warmed metal, and the low hum of presses. The men called out; Sam clapped him on the shoulder with something like relief.
"Welcome back, Jack," Sam said. He was a big man—callused palms, an easy laugh that had steadied Jack on many a shift. They took their usual stations: Sam at the mill, Jack at the bench beside him. There were the small rituals of work—setting fixtures, loading material, checking tolerances—that knitted them into the world of routine. For now, routine was the only friend Jack allowed.
Hours slid by in the bright, compulsive rhythm of a workday. Men traded cigarette stories, the foreman barked, and the clock's hands moved toward noon. Lunch alarm buzzed. Sam slung his jacket over his shoulder and, with a grin, asked, "You joining me?"
Jack's hands were empty for a moment, then he cast his gaze into his pocket and felt the weight there like a small planet: the metal frame he'd welded in the basement the night before, cooled to a dull gray, the edges smoothed but still raw. He had not taken the object apart since he finished. It was hard to look at, harder to think about. It represented everything he could not otherwise do—something that could make them notice, make them feel a fraction of the terror he had been given to carry.
"In a minute," he said. He kept his voice flat. He watched the floor, watched the men moving in familiar arcs. The shop hummed around him.
Sam began to walk away. "Take your time, Jack. I'll bring you lunch."
Jack fumbled with the object the way a man might fumble for a talisman. He did not plan to show anyone the thing—he had not told Sam the truth about the diary, about the link to the Voice, about what the word revenge had become inside him. He slid the metal into his pocket, the lump cold against his thigh.
Sam returned sooner than expected, a steaming tin of stew in his hand, and froze when he saw Jack. There was a look on the other man's face Sam had not seen before: hollow, precise, like a machine wound just enough to function. When Jack tucked the item away, Sam's face went slack.
"What the hell, Jack?" Sam asked quietly. He stepped closer and that look—the look of brotherly alarm—made Jack's fingers clench.
"Keep quiet," Jack rasped. "You don't say nothing. This—this is something I must do."
Sam's mouth opened and closed, then the man folded his hands together and sighed, the damp rationality of friendship pressing in. "Alright, Jack. But you're not making this alone. If you go down, I go down with you."
Jack pushed him away, not cruelly but with the hard selfishness of a man who would not let another be destroyed for his vendetta. "No witnesses."
Sam's eyes shone with a hurt so soft it nearly undid him. "If you're thinking of something that will make it worse for everyone, you come find me." He handed over lunch with a shaky smile and walked away, the machine-shop noise swallowing the whisper that wanted to be different.
Tokyo — The Palace, the Decision
The Imperial Palace was the softest kind of power: not steel and uniforms, but gardens pruned like thoughts, rooms kept like languages. Emperor Hirohito walked his son and daughter-in-law to the carriage door with a gravity that felt like ritual. The royal car gleamed in the courtyard, attendants arranging the luggage and fussing over the final details of protocol. The Crown Prince moved with the light awkwardness of a younger man still learning the choreography of presence; Crown Princess Michiko smiled at everyone with the patient warmth of a woman used to being observed.
"Go now," advised an aide softly. "The plane is on schedule."
Hirohito hesitated. The palace had become the center of weight for him—time seemed to pool in its corridors. He had not left the grounds often since his wife had died; the world beyond the garden's hedges had grown strange. The sound of leaves on the wind and the slow patterns of koi fishes were better fits to him now than the bright glare of foreign stages.
In the doorway, he paused. "Wait," he said.
Akihito and Michiko looked at one another in confusion as their father's face, usually so contained, surrendered a small, tight expression of want—not of the world, but of companionship. "Father?"
Hirohito's voice was simple, personal. "I will go with you to the airport."
There was a flutter of surprised disbelief from the attendants; the Crown Prince's face touched with the question, "Are you sure?" in a tone half-happy, half alarmed. Officials exchanged concerned looks—protocol officers, palace aides who had memorized every contingency and now faced an adjustment in the theater of rule.
"Am I not your father?" Hirohito asked with a small, decisive laugh. "Then move over. Let me come." He ducked into the car, the emotion briefly brightening his face; Michiko took his arm and Akihito settled into his seat, their carriage feeling more like family than state.
Akihito rolled his window down to speak to the imperial guard captain standing at attention near the curb. His voice was clipped with the propriety of command. "Inform the captain the Emperor will be escorting us to Haneda personally. The route is to be secured. No delays." The attendant saluted, a young man's face pulsing with something like fear and pride at the same time.
In the barracks, the news spread like an electrical current. The captain of the Imperial Guard—an officer who had measured the rhythm of palace life for years—dropped his tea, then struck the bell that meant movement. It was not merely a practical alarm; it was a heartbeat pushed into motion.
Within five minutes, the palace courtyard filled with uniforms. The Imperial Guard's dress was ceremonial and severe: dark blue tunics cut close to the torso, shimmering braiding and brass buttons catching the light; caps of matching dark blue bore a red band and delicate red piping around the brim, the red a thin, defiant thread of color against the seriousness of the cloth. On parades, these men looked statuesque; today they moved like a living wall.
The captain stood before 8,755 men—an almost absurdly exact number, as if the service itself had been counted like coins. His voice carried over their ranks, clean and sharp.
"By order of His Majesty," he said, "we will accompany the Crown Prince and Princess to Haneda Airport. The Emperor will be inside the travel car. You will guard him with your life. If any man fails his duty and the imperial family is harmed, you will answer to me—and I will see that punishment is swift." He put a hand out, palm flat, and the men shouted, "Yes, sir!" like an oath that could not be unsaid.
A tight detail of fifty imperial guards closed around the royal car—a unit chosen less for spectacle and more for physical proximity and trained response. Two heavy armored cars followed—no civilian vehicle would drive the route ahead of the imperial convoy. The remaining guards would fan out along the route, sealing crossings and suppressing the press of curious citizens.
As the palace gates opened and the cortege rolled into a closed city, the crowd that lined the streets pressed forward until the Imperial Guard threw out a disciplined barrier. People wept and bowed as the Emperor's car moved through, hands clasped, small white flags—gestures of reverence that carried more personal grief than politics. A few voices called blessings in a broken chorus; others fell to their knees on the curb, the sight of Hirohito leaving the palace a spectacle they had waited a lifetime to witness.
"Hirohito," Michiko murmured, touching his sleeve. "Papa, we will write often."
"This will be good," he said with an odd gentleness. "It will be… a change."
Akihito watched in the reflection of the window as the townspeople's faces slid by, and thought that perhaps this trip might be the hinge on which his nation turned—some new kind of presence for an emperor who had been more keeper of gardens than leader of armies.
Haneda — A Fortress of Motion
By the time the imperial motorcade approached Haneda, the airport had become a hive. It usually hummed with travelers and trade—steam and the bright friction of commerce. That day, however, it became an extension of the palace. Imperial Guard detachments swept through the terminal, moving with the practiced violence of men who could close a public space down with half a whistle. A perimeter pushed back rows of waiting travelers: an abrupt ring of disciplined, shined boots and solemn faces.
The Captain's voice came over speakers in clipped orders. "Suspend all flights. No exceptions." Confusion rippled through the crowd—families patted suitcases, clerks checked manifests, a stewardess whispered questions into a handset—but the guard's presence swallowed explanation.
A black car slowed at the main door. The Emperor stepped down with the ease of a man who had decided privately to rejoin the world, and the public bowed low as if touched by a relic. He walked with a stubborn, small smile, hand on Michiko's, and the crowd's reaction was a little like sunlight wavering through heat: stunned devotion. Acting as though every branch of the state had been reset for this moment, the military presence lifted and the imperial family passed through a cleared corridor to the private departure gate.
At the threshold, the Emperor turned to his son. His voice softened. "Do your duty," he said. "Tell me what you see. If the Pacific requires our attention, we will supply it."
Akihito nodded solemnly. "We will report everything, Father."
He stepped up into the aircraft with the cool, ceremonial gravity of a man assuming a role and a mission. The engines warmed; the runway's arc took them into a sky that would carry them to a world where empires met and intersected—where the Japanese Pacific State's shores would soon receive the very people who were now planning other people's fate on other continents.
Jack's Work in the Dark
At home that night, once the kitchen had quieted and the radio played the endless and meaningless coda of official broadcasts, Jack returned to his basement with a singular focus. The metal frame in his hands was no longer abstract. He did not read manuals or search for diagrams online; he held a shape that his hands could remember making. Each pass of his file, each flame flare at the bench was a ritual—less technical than sacramental. He would not teach how to build this; he would only confess what it meant.
He was not an engineer. He was grief made into an object. Sparks peppered the dark room, the smell of hot metal and sweat clinging to him as he worked. He thought of the Crown Prince's face on the public broadcast, of the way the announcer said the words "state visit" with a calm that sat wrong in his cheeks. He imagined for a moment that his work was not about death but about drawing attention—pulling a bright painful thread across a world that had looked away when his family was taken.
He stopped to rest, the mask slick with grime, and looked at the frame on the bench. It was not complete. He had no plan to write out, no instruction to pass. He had a bitter resolve that a man in a bad dream has when he believes there is only one path to closure. He did not know where that path would lead. He only knew he could not return to bed and wait.
Outside, the city moved toward curfew and the lights of the distant harbor winked like a chain of false promises. Inside, the metal cooled, and Jack's breathing slowed for a few minutes until the time to continue came again. He picked up his tools and went on.
Morning in Tokyo gave way to the muted rumble of engines, and the imperial aircraft lifted into the wide sky. Below, the city kept its rituals and its hunger—markets opened, trains ran, and men pored over maps and manifest lists, each doing the small essential acts that kept nations functioning.
Across two oceans, men welded and men prayed; a king rode with his children; a man sharpened grief into purpose at a bench in a basement. The world rotated; the meshes of state and private violence tightened like the strings of an instrument. Somewhere on the road ahead, the next chord would be struck.