Nakagawa Akio, Princ.i.p.al of Himekaizen Academy tapped closed the phone-call . From what the Matsumoto kid had said the sudden surge of skipping cla.s.ses had a reason .

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'd.a.m.n! So they won this one . ' He hadn't expected Ageruman-san to buckle under the pressure, but then again that pressure had been absurd .

Any other two and Nakagawa would have shrugged it away, but with those two things immediately became more complicated, or complex as Hamarugen-san would have said . A few weeks earlier Sato-san told him she'd been ordered to break the couple up, and Nakagawa refused flat out . And since then there were factions within their own faction .

'But I couldn't do that . They're not teens . It's like forcing a divorce . ' And that was the reason he refused, unlike the first time, earlier the last autumn, when they were asked to create a distance between the arrivals .

'Fine, Wakayamsan, you win . ' The thought of calling the former imperial officer scared him, but he'd do that anyway . This once Nakagawa would side entirely with the Wakayamas . 'But he has real blood on his hands . I doubt the Wakayama's are old enough to understand . '

He hesitated, held his phone in his hand and stared at it as if some bakemono would suddenly creep out of it and bite his face . In the end he could hesitate no more . With a sigh Nakagawa sat down in his chair and punched up a number to a former student of his, one that he had hoped he wouldn't need to meet again .

"Yes, this is Princ.i.p.al Nakagawa," he said after the other side took the call . "Is Sano Mitsuo there?"

With some luck the arrival who once befriended the Wakayamas wouldn't be, but Nakagawa was to have no such luck .

"Sano, speaking . "

"Nakagawa . I'm the princ.i.p.al . . . "

"I know, get to the point . "

That was surprisingly rude for a j.a.panese, or for anyone with a decent upbringing . "Would it be possible for the two of us to meet? We had an incident with a student here . "

"Incident?"

"Yes, it concerns one Ageruman Kuritina, if you're familiar with the name?"

There was no response, just as Nakagawa had known . She was Sano-san's granddaughter after all . After an eternity the phone came alive again . "Where?"

"Nagoya . I can be there in three hours," Nakagawa said, because this wasn't the kind of planning you wanted done over the phone . Especially not over a phone-connection he didn't trust wasn't wire-tapped, or whatever it was called when cell phones were involved .

After a short silence he had his response . "Four, I need four hours . Seven o'clock?"

That would be enough for him to book a hotel room . "Yes, seven will be fine," Nakagawa said, and they closed the call .

***

'd.a.m.n you, Natsumi!' Sano Mitsuo sat at a table in a café waiting for an old man who was younger by far than he . Leaving one world at seventy and arriving in another at fourteen did strange things to your conception of age .

'Ah, there he is . ' They had met last August, and of course almost daily when Mitsuo was a student at Himekaizen a quarter of a century earlier . The news of two new arrivals, the first in a decade, had him remembering the years when there was an arrival almost every year . He had been one .

"Sano-san . "

"Nakagawsan . "

They bowed . Two men with more memories from days gone past than the spinning world that was today .

After he waited for Nakagawa to order his tea, Mitsuo could wait no more . "Spill!"

Nakagawa sipped his cup and put it down on the table . "Your kid broke up with Hamarugen-san . My school is in an uproar . "

"Please continue," Mitsuo said . He understood the other man would hardly have taken the s.h.i.+nkansen from Tokyo just to report that a teenage fling had turned sour .

"They had her work non-stop from Christmas until now . She's falling behind in her studies . "

"Yes?" If his granddaughter wanted to work until she croaked, then that was her decision .

"Seems she tried to get some time off . "

"Yes?" Mitsuo didn't like where this was going .

"Two other students of mine got a.s.saulted . The two arrivals are too d.a.m.n strong to be led around, but they're attacking their friends instead . "

"You had better be very, very certain about this . " He had done horrible things in his previous life . If the other faction was ready to attack school children, he was ready to do so again .

Nakagawa nodded . "The kids have an astonis.h.i.+ng network of their own, but this time Sato-sensei, Hamarugen-san's handler, confirmed it . "

"Then why me?"

"Because I can't get into contact with Sato-sensei any longer . Her former colleague got shot to death . "

'And she's on a revenge trip . Poor kid . But shot? I thought we more or less got rid of firearms . ' Mitsuo looked at Nakagawa . "Firearms? The police will never drop this, you know . Even the yakuza keep their hands off guns these days . "

"The other faction is dirty diplomatics and JSDF, just like us . "

There was that . Well, with the difference that their own faction had a lot better relations with their Swedish counterpart, but when it came to play dirty tricks, both were equally bad .

"What do you want me to do about this?"

"One of my teachers, Kareyos.h.i.+ Takes.h.i.+," Nakagawa pushed a folder with papers across the table, "is involved . He's a first cla.s.s moron, but he's part of the other side anyway . Right now he's untouchable . "

"And you want me to make him less so?"

"If you made him less alive I'd be happy as well, but we can't . "

'You're more cold-hearted than I thought . I could come to respect you . ' "Keep my wife out of it," Mitsuo said .

Nakagawa only stared back in surprise, meaning that he probably wasn't aware Natsumi had pulled her own strings a month earlier .

"Sano-san," Nakagawa said, and Mitsuo locked eyes with the man, surprised at the sudden concern in his voice . "You should probably visit your granddaughter soon . She's in very bad shape right now . They worked her to her bones, and she's heartbroken, not as a teenager, but as a grown woman . "

That made Mitsuo remember the death of his first wife . Two years it had taken for him to return to reality and become a man again .

"Thank you . I'm grateful you told me . " Then something itched at his mind . "Nakagawsan, what about the boy? He has no relatives here . "

The old princ.i.p.al of Himekaizen looked back with a face more like a ghost than a man of power . "He's broken . I don't know if we can make him heal again . "