Chapter 1: The Diplomat

The redwood-paneled study held two kinds of light: the warm amber of a desk lamp and the cold blue of winter twilight pressing through a broad window. Where they met, neither won. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls, leather spines faded and uniform, the kind of collection assembled for authority rather than reading.

Lord Tetsuro Ietsuna sat behind a mahogany desk wide enough to land a small aircraft on. He was a large man, carefully groomed, white hair tucked beneath a military cap. Two thin mustache strips framed his upper lip. The chest of his fatigue uniform carried enough medals to anchor a fishing net, each one catching the lamplight as he shifted.

Apricot Signa sat across from him with a notebook in her lap and a pen that hadn’t touched paper yet. Her pulse was quicker than she’d have liked, but her face gave nothing away. She’d practiced this. The composure. The professional mask. Months of hunting things that shouldn’t exist had taught her how to sit in a room with a powerful man and not flinch.

“Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed,” she said. Polite. Steady.

He inclined his head. His eyes moved over her the way an officer inspects a recruit, not unkind, but measuring. “My pleasure. You have an impressive portfolio for someone your age.” A pause. “You may call me Tetsuro.”

The invitation sat between them. Using a noble lord’s given name uninvited could end a career in Uchella. Refusing the offer might insult him. Apricot decided to sidestep the problem entirely. She would use no name at all.

“To start,” she said, pen hovering, “could you clarify your role as the Ietsuna clan’s representative?”

He gave a single nod, approving her directness. “I serve as the bridge between the Ietsuna and the Okabe. The Okabe have embraced Western customs and technologies more than most clans, and they want greater respect within the Empire. My role is to oversee that modernization while ensuring it remains distinctly Uchellan.” He settled back in his chair. “In a secondary capacity, I monitor military developments and how our nation responds to foreign movements.”

Apricot wrote. His answers came measured and practiced, a man who had given many interviews and knew exactly which words to offer and which to withhold. She let the rhythm of question-and-answer carry them forward, each exchange building a thin bridge of rapport across that enormous desk.

“For our foreign readers,” she continued, “could you explain how the Ietsuna clan connects to the other clans of Uchella?”

Tetsuro straightened. Something shifted behind his eyes, pride surfacing like current beneath ice.

“We are the ruling clan,” he said. “All others answer to the Ietsuna. Five centuries ago, Emperor Uchella Ietsuna united the warring states under a single banner. Rather than eradicate the defeated clans, he forged a coalition. It was prescient. Western powers were already pushing eastward. Fragmented fiefdoms would have been consumed. Under Ietsuna leadership, we survived. We take great pride in that legacy.” His gaze held hers. “Our traditions and our people are treasures to us. I hope you won’t take offense at our fervor.”

A mild challenge in the last sentence. Apricot recognized it. She was a foreigner sitting in an Uchellan study, asking an Uchellan lord to justify his civilization. The dynamic required careful navigation.

“None taken,” she said. “Pride in one’s heritage can be a strength, as long as it extends respect to others.”

He accepted this with a nod that might have been approval. Apricot turned to the questions she’d prepared most carefully, the ones that mattered.

“I’d like to ask about the tensions between Uchella and Arslana. Reports from the Sotaro clan indicate that Kubebna ships have been passing through Sotaro waters to reach the demilitarized zone. How accurate are these reports?”

The warmth in Tetsuro’s face cooled. His brow lowered.

“I’m inclined to believe them,” he said. “Kubebna, Stezyl, Tvekala. They’re positioning themselves as aggressors in our waters. We’ve had naval standoffs. In response, we’ve solidified a mutual defense pact between several clans: Akiyama, Iori, Kinjo, Sotaro.” He paused, jaw tightening. “Other major families, Tatsumi and Okabe among them, have stayed out of it for now. Meanwhile, Arslana’s allies, the Armaryol and Tortau, have been testing our resolve in western waters.”

Apricot wrote quickly. Alliance names. Clan positions. The shape of a conflict assembling itself beneath the surface of official statements.

“If this continues,” Tetsuro said, his voice dropping, “we may have no choice but to initiate military operations against the Aristocracies. And if that happens, the entire Empire will unify.”

His gloved hands clasped tighter on the desktop. The confident diplomat had receded, and something older sat in his place, a man calculating the cost of what he was describing.

Apricot lowered her pen. “Strictly between us,” she said, “what does the Ietsuna leadership truly believe about the situation?”

A risk. She watched him weigh it.

A wry smirk tugged at his mouth. “You’re astute to notice I was holding back.” He folded his arms. “Our stance is simple: no one sets foot on Uchellan soil uninvited. The northern island clans might be small and far-flung, but they’re our people. If Arslana believes it can violate our sovereignty, then Uchella will remind them why we’ve survived five centuries.”

The conviction in his voice had an edge to it that journalists rarely heard, the kind of certainty that precedes action rather than commentary. Apricot kept her expression neutral and wrote it down.

She moved through the remaining questions efficiently. Castor? No alliance. Uchella stood alone. Estarus? A mutual non-interference arrangement, respected on both sides. Tetsuro’s answers were firm but unremarkable, the positions of a man who had drawn his lines long ago.

For her final question, Apricot set her notepad aside. “Okabe’s immigration policy has drawn attention abroad. How do you feel about Okabe opening its doors to so many foreigners?”

Tetsuro’s stern demeanor softened. “To be frank, I’m proud of it. The influx of new people makes the community more creative. Sometimes you need fresh eyes to discover new possibilities.” He paused. “As long as those influences remain in Okabe and don’t upset the broader Empire’s balance, I consider it a worthwhile experiment.”

Apricot returned his smile and stood. “Thank you. I believe I have everything I need.” She hesitated, then added, “Before I go, would you like to review my notes? I understand information at this level can be sensitive.”

She held the notepad across the desk. It was an uncommon courtesy. Most journalists would never offer it.

His eyebrows lifted. He took the notepad, skimmed her shorthand, and handed it back with a dismissive wave. “It’s fine. You’ve represented my words well.” Something shifted in his expression, brief, almost personal. “These days it’s rare to find a journalist who shows any responsibility toward their subject.”

Apricot bowed, tucked the notepad away, and left.

⸻

She stepped out of the Ietsuna Tower into flat white afternoon light. The marble lobby gave way to the city’s current, and Apricot let it carry her.

At the university, she sat through a media ethics lecture and took notes without hearing most of it. The professor droned against the hum of fluorescent lights. She asked a question when prompted, packed up when class ended. After that, the campus gym: an hour on the machines, a half-hour jog on the indoor track. The same sets as always. Sweat and repetition and the blankness that came with both.

By evening, the sky had gone the color of a bruise above the neon, and she was sitting on a plastic bench outside Bingo Burgers with the people who, in another life, would have constituted her entire world.

The dinner rush had thinned. A few delivery bikes idled at the curb, engines ticking. The fryer exhaust mixed with the cold settling in from the street, grease and frost fighting for the same air. Inside, a wallscreen cycled through headlines nobody watched.

Bonni had changed out of her café uniform into an oversized sweater that kept slipping off one shoulder. She sat cross-legged on the bench with a strawberry milkshake, stirring it with a bent straw while she talked. The story involved a regular at the café who’d been coming in every day for two weeks, ordering the same latte, and leaving unsigned poems on the napkins.

“Not bad poems, either,” Bonni said. “Like, actually good. Machi, you’d hate them.”

“I hate most poems,” Machi confirmed. She had her phone propped against a napkin dispenser, a stock ticker running across the screen. She picked at a basket of fries without looking at them, her attention split between Bonni’s story and whatever the Nikkei was doing. Her neon-pink barrettes caught the restaurant’s fluorescent spill.

Sato sat across from Apricot, his camera bag wedged between his feet. He’d ordered two burgers and was halfway through the first, eating with the steady, absent focus of someone refueling rather than enjoying a meal. His wrist comm glowed against his skin, but for once he wasn’t scrolling. He was listening to Bonni with the half-smile he wore when he found something privately funny.

“So today he comes in,” Bonni continued, “and instead of a poem, he leaves his phone number. On the napkin. Same napkin spot. And underneath it he wrote, ‘If not now, when?’”

“Did you call it?” Sato asked.

“Obviously not. I showed it to my manager, and she said to throw it away. But I kept it.” Bonni fished a crumpled napkin from her pocket and held it up. Blue ink, neat handwriting. “I mean, look at that penmanship. You can’t throw away penmanship like that.”

Machi glanced at the napkin, then at Bonni, then back at her phone. “You kept a stranger’s phone number because his handwriting was nice.”

“Yes.”

“That’s how people get murdered, Bonni.”

“That’s how people get romanced, Machi. There’s a difference.”

“Not always,” Machi said, and stole one of Sato’s fries.

Apricot listened. She held a can of coffee between both hands, the aluminum warming slowly against her palms. She hadn’t eaten much. The day had been long in the way days were long now, not from exhaustion but from the effort of maintaining two separate lives inside the same body. The interview with Tetsuro felt like it belonged to a different person, someone who still lived entirely in the daylight world, whose biggest concerns were deadlines and diplomacy. That person had written six pages of clean notes and would transcribe them tonight and file a solid piece by the weekend.

The other person, the one who sat here now, was thinking about the duffel bag in the corner of her bedroom.

“Earth to Apri.” Bonni waved the napkin in front of her face. “Verdict? Romantic or creepy?”

Apricot blinked. “The penmanship is nice,” she said.

“See?” Bonni jabbed the napkin toward Machi. “Two votes romantic.”

“She said the penmanship was nice. That’s not a vote.”

“It’s adjacent.”

Sato finished his first burger, balled the wrapper, and lobbed it at the bin. It bounced off the rim and fell to the ground. He looked at it for a moment, then went back to the second burger. “I’ll get it later,” he said to no one in particular.

“You won’t,” Machi said.

He probably wouldn’t.

The conversation drifted. Bonni asked about Apricot’s interview, and Apricot gave the abbreviated version: high-ranking lord, surprisingly candid, off-the-record material she couldn’t share yet. Sato asked which publication she was pitching it to. Machi wanted to know if the lord’s office had been as ostentatious as the ones she’d seen in documentaries. Apricot described the medals and the desk and the bookshelves full of unread leather volumes, and Machi said, “Classic,” and went back to her fries.

It was ordinary. All of it. The kind of evening that should have felt like enough.

Apricot watched a delivery bike pull away from the curb, its taillight bleeding red into the wet street. Bonni was showing Sato something on her phone now, their heads close together, the screen lighting both their faces from below. Machi had given up on the stock ticker and was arguing with Bonni about whether the napkin poet could be a woman, which Bonni conceded was possible and, quote, “would actually make the whole thing even better.”

Three people she loved, talking about nothing important, on an unremarkable evening in a city that didn’t know what lived underneath it. Apricot held her coffee and felt the distance settle into her like cold water filling a glass. She was right here. She was already somewhere else.

When they finally gathered their things, Bonni had an early shift, Machi had a problem set, Sato needed to develop film from a shoot that morning, the goodbyes were quick and warm.

Bonni pulled her into a hug that smelled of strawberry milkshake and the lavender detergent she always used. “Text me when you get home.”

“Always do.”

Sato raised two fingers. Machi was already walking, phone out, not looking back. Sato picked up his wrapper on the way to the trash can, which surprised exactly no one more than Machi, who didn’t see it.

Apricot watched them go. Three shapes moving through the neon and the cold, splitting at the intersection, each heading somewhere safe. Her chest ached in a way she couldn’t name. Not grief. The awareness of distance, growing quietly, like a crack in something she couldn’t afford to examine.

⸻

She walked home through streets that had emptied with the temperature. Stopped at the convenience store for canned coffee and a packaged bento. The cashier greeted her by name. She returned it with a small smile.

At home, she ate standing at the kitchen counter, washed the dish, and checked off the day’s tasks. Interview. Class. Gym. Friends. Dinner. All done. The house was quiet. Her parents were traveling. Jasper was staying at a friend’s place for the night. She moved through the rooms with the calm purpose of someone settling in for a quiet evening.

Then her eyes drifted to the duffel bag in the corner of her room. Inside, beneath a neatly folded change of clothes, waited a handgun loaded with silver rounds, a collapsible baton, and a pair of thin leather gloves.