Chapter one (segment one), 2016, September, Noriko

When Noriko opened her shoe locker she found both her shoes shredded. 'Die bitch!' a sign at the back of the locker greeted her.

Nao-sempai, I'll have your hide for this! Noriko punched up a contact and dialled.

“Kyoko here. You forgot anything?”

“In a way,” Noriko answered. “Could you do me a favour and come down with my sneakers?”

She could hear the hesitation in the silence from the other end. After all she could just as well have walked back up to her classroom and fetched them herself, but she wanted Kyoko to see this.

It scared her a little bit more than she wanted to admit. She'd never been the target of bullying before in her life, and even though she knew exactly what was going on Noriko felt like something unknown out there was looking maliciously at her.

She understood that things would hardly degenerate the way they had done with Kuri during their first term. Kuri had been the stunning looker with only one friend, but Noriko was, without wanting it, part of her brother's fan-club from the very start. On top of that their club was up to thirty members by now and she was one of the top three students among the freshmen to boot.

If things went down the drain for real the school was likely to explode with indignation, or at least all eight, no nine now, freshman classes. Especially 9:1. Rumours had it the new class included a few partially reformed thugs who took it upon themselves to patrol the school grounds in search of bullies.

Given what she remembered from Red Rose she almost believed it. Whatever went down in that hell hole these days couldn't be anything good.

“Noriko?”

She looked at Kyoko who arrived with a quizzical look in her eyes and a pair of shoes in her hands.

Noriko just pointed at her locker.

“What the bloody hell?” Kyoko said in a voice so far from her usual ladylike one that Noriko cringed. 

“I'll beat the fucking witches to pulp!”

“Kyoko!”

Suddenly Noriko found herself wrapped in Kyoko's arms.

“I'm not going to allow anything to happen to you. Nothing!”

“Calm down, Kyoko.” But it warmed her that her friend cared so much. “It won't be so bad. I just didn't want to take it in alone right now. That's all.”

She was still wrapped in that embrace.

“Don't talk that way. Don't you even think of handling this alone! Kuri-chan did and I couldn't stop it.”

Of course! Noriko hadn't thought about it in those terms. Kyoko still felt guilty about the assault on Kuri in the locker room, and she'd been attacked herself just a couple of weeks earlier.

Noriko ripped out the paper at the back of her locker and crumbled it. “Don't worry,” she said and freed herself from Kyoko's arms. “I won't do anything alone. I promise.”

She wouldn't. The seed of a plan was already forming in her head. She had to go through it with the others, but she already had an idea how to shoot down this idiocy so hard nobody in school would ever think of going after her again.

Midsummer's eve, nightfall

Some kind of darkness came even to this strange country in the north. It was slow in coming, but it did.

Yukio had gone looking for his wife earlier, but when he found Kyoko she sat in a sofa with an extra blanket folded in her lap. It wasn't for him. He knew her too well to make such an assumption.

She's still your most important friend. You two should have this time alone my love.

He returned and looked for Urufu instead. There was a lot to be said about spending time with your best friend. He'd still be married tomorrow, or the next week or in ten years time if he behaved in a way to deserve it.

Friends though, the best he had or others for that matter, weren't as easy to meet every day in the week, and for that reason alone he should value the time he got. Maybe now more than ever before.

“Urufu, there you are, what about checking on the kids discreetly?”

Urufu looked over his shoulder and shot him a grin in the growing darkness. “There's nothing discreet to their party. They'll be going on until morning. Let them have their fun.”

Yukio smiled. “You don't think we should see what they're doing?”

Urufu slapped his hands to his ears in an exaggerated gesture to block out the rhythmic music that hammered its way up the hillside. “Thank you but I have a pretty good idea about what they're doing even from staying up here. Don't worry, a lot of them are older than we were back then, and we even had to plan our parties all on our own.”

Yukio laughed at the memory. Madness, it had been madness, and even though Urufu had done most of the planning Yukio still took pride in having been there covering his back.

Then he remembered all that had happened apart from the planning sessions, and mirth left him in an instant.

Prologue, 2015

“I'm Ageruman Kuritina and I have transferred here from Sweden. I hope you will be friends with me.”

The rest of the class stared at the foreign girl with mouths open, just like Kyoko did herself.

That was about the worst Japanese she had ever heard, but the skinny girl had hair so blond it was almost white, so nobody expected her to speak proper Japanese in the first place. Apart from skinny she was tall as well.

Kyoko couldn't help but giggle. Two opposites. She was round like a ball and the foreigner looked like a flagpole. They were by a wide margin the two ugliest girls in their class, and that was enough for Kyoko to decide to try to make a friend of the new girl. They could share the misery at least.

During lunch break she approached her and was greeted with a wide, toothy grin.

“Friends? Sure, why not? Haven't had one for ages.”

That came out in an odd mix of Japanese and English, but Kyoko thought she understood most of it. Especially the part of not having a friend. With looks like theirs friends didn't come easy.

“What do you want me to call you?” Kyoko asked.

“Chri-chan,” Ageruman-san said.

“Kuri-chan?” Kyoko said, tasting the alien sounding nickname.

“Kuri-chan is fine. And you?”

“I'm Kyoko.” It wasn't more than fair to offer her first name.

“Then you'll be Ko-chan. I knew a Kyoko a long time ago, and I don't want to mix you two up.”

Maybe her last year in middle school wouldn't be so bad after all. “Friends, Kuri-chan?”

“Friends, Ko-chan.”

“Want to do anything after school?”

Kuri-chan lit up in a spectacular grin that for a moment hid how ugly she was. “Yeah, we'll go swimming.”

“Swimming?”

They did.

As the months passed by they went swimming several times a week. It was as if Kuri-chan knew something in advance, because she had an air of confidence belying her looks. She behaved as if she was the most beautiful girl in the world, and after a while some of that ridiculous confidence stuck to Kyoko as well.

And they kept swimming. Eventually they swam several hundred metres every time. Kuri-chan added slender muscles to her skinny body and Kyoko slowly lost weight as most of her fat was replaced by muscles of her own. She stayed a bit rounder, but when autumn grew cold neither of them could honestly say they were the ugliest girls in class.

When Kyoko eventually had to drop their swimming sessions Kuri-chan kept going. There were stupid rumours about how she spent hour after hour in the water when Kyoko no longer went to the pool with her, but their friendship survived that as well.

It lasted through midterms, finals and entrance exams. It lasted through her parents peculiar view of foreigners, accepted as well as refused valentines chocolate and confessions or the lack thereof.

When Kuri-chan grew into a stunning beauty and Kyoko was seen as the tag-along it was as if nobody remembered the ugly comedy pair from their early days, but their friendship lasted through that as well.

They played one last, naughty joke on their class. Rather than the prestigious Irishima High both of them chose the more obscure Himekaizen Academy. Kuri-chan with a letter of recommendation Kyoko was clueless how she could possibly have received, and she herself by means of accepting her place in the less expensive of the two schools. The more proper to her station as he parents would have had it, even though Kyoko never doubted that they would have paid for her attending Irishima High had she chosen to.

There never was a choice. Kuri-chan went to Himekaizen, and as Kyoko had learned to do the last year, she followed.

Midsummer's eve, dusk

Kyoko waited for Kuri-chan to return. With everyone gathered like memories tagged along as well, most but not all of them pleasant.

A few unpleasant enough to provoke lies, like when she lied about not knowing what had happened to Noriko during her last year in middle school. That had been a lie out of consideration, but there were other lies as well.

Midsummer's eve 2040 ran from sunny evening to blue dusk, and as the sun set on their party so did her memories. Her first year in high school had been when she came alive for real, but living hadn't been painless. But for the support of Yukio she wasn't sure she could have held on to what was important to her.

And Kuri-chan of course. Without Kuri-chan her life would have been a very different one. One were she survived rather than lived, just like her parents.

So Kyoko sat down and waited for the woman who had been her closest friend for so many years. There had been betrayals, but in the end none of them felt betrayed.

But in the beginning there had only been the strangest of friendships.

End of book two

The epilogue concludes book two. While I've started writing book three updates will come more slowly from now on. Reality knocks on my door, and I can't keep up the pace.

Some of the writing I do will also be a refactoring of book one and two. Those updates won't go here, apart from the collection of full chapters. I'll post those to Wattpad and Inkspired.

Talking about Inkspired. It would seem that's the site where I currently have a solid readership. Arrivals, The Billion Dollar Empress and The Taleweaver are all in the top five popular reads there. Happy camper here.

Epilogue

Amaya closed her phone and looked at Principal Nakagawa.

You old goat, she thought. You got the kids hurt again.

It didn't matter that two of the kids were senior to her by twenty years. In this world they were still kids and her responsibility.

“There won't be any more assaults, at least for a while,” she said, “but there's a price to pay for that.” Once more Amaya felt disgusted with herself for what she was about to do.

“Yes?” Nakagawa asked?

“Our contacts in Red Rose will hamper their actions as much as possible, but they refuse to be flushed out in the open.”

Principal Nakagawa grimaced. “Bloody cowards! That's why I despise the other faction.” Then he locked eyes with her. “The price. Spit it out!”

Amaya looked down at her lap. She hated it. “I'll have to hurt them both. In return for the Wakayamas to stay safe they want us to make sure the arrivals don't cooperate.” There were tears in her eyes now. “Arrivals! It's my little Urufu they're talking about, and Kuritina is just as sweet a girl.”

Nakagawa rounded the desk, and Amaya felt his hand on her shoulder. “What did they ask you to do?”

“I have to...” The tears ran down her face freely now. “I was told to ask you to help me break them up.”

The hand on her shoulder tightened. “And if I refuse?”

Amaya looked up at the older man. His face was all blurry through her tears. “If we refuse they'll target Kyoko-chan and Noriko-chan again.” There was no stopping her sobs any longer. “They said they'll make sure the arrivals won't be assaulted, but any friends of them are valid targets.”

Nakagawa sat down on his feet beside her like a man several decades younger than his age. It had to hurt. “What should we do?”

She knew what they had to do. Urufu would never accept any other way. “We hurt the children we love. We destroy their love. What else can we do?”

Chapter six (segment ten), 2016, September, Christina

This was a fight she had lost from the beginning. The moment she betrayed her best friend she lost, and for Christina there was no way of undoing it.

Ko-chan wasn't badly hurt, but their friendship was strained to the point where Ko-chan refused to attend school until Yukio left hospital and they could go to school together.

It's my fault Yukio got hurt. Knowing more of what had occurred didn't help at all. Ulf called Yukio to warn him at the same time I refused Ko-chan's call. Damn, there was someone stalking her in the dark and I told her to hang up. I'm rotten!

Christina went through he usual routine of checking that nothing dangerous had been hidden in her her clothes, got her baggy set on and left the studio. Outside a bodyguard her handle had forced onto her stood waiting. It echoed eerily of her previous life, but at least it was something she had been used to.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Home,” she answered and watched him pull out his bike. He looked like an idiot with his earpiece, dark suit and grandmother bike. His entire being shouted: 'I don't belong here and I look really funny and out of place.'

She didn't care in the least. If she had a bodyguard shoved down her throat he made a lot more sense if he stood out like a clown on a funeral. At least he was professional to understand that any normal thugs would stay away from anyone with an overdressed bully tailing her on pedals.

It helped that he avoided conversations as well, but she still preferred the thought of Ulf on his bike beside her. According to some overblown rumours he knew how to fight as well.

Christina plugged her headset to her ears and dialled him before she brought her bike to speed. Behind her the bodyguard frantically tried to keep up speed on his inadequate cycle.

“Ina!”

Her heart jumped at his voice. It always did, and more so now when they had so little time to see each other. Especially after her betrayal of Ko-chan.

I'm losing him. Can he forgive me? She coughed away the lump in her throat. “U-kun?”

“Finished for today?”

“Yes. I'm on my way home.” She'd rather be on her way to Haven Café where she knew most of their club had retreated when school closed down for the evening. “What are you up to?”

“Just back from a walking talking session,” he said. “Right now we're running workshops on presentations. The kids don't even know how to work with standard software.”

So typical of her Ulf. Two hours of intensive mind gymnastics followed by even more schooling. “How are they doing?” Talking about the club was safer than the other, darker topic.

She rounded a corner and stopped for a red-light. Behind her the bodyguard finally caught up with her as she waited for the light to turn green.

She heard Ulf calling out instructions to the club members over the phone. “Learning slowly,” he said. “Christina, we need to talk.”

No! Please call me Ina! “Yes?” She felt panic rising in her.

The light turned green and she numbly pushed down a pedal and crossed the street. Is he going to break up?

“It's about Noriko. I don't want Kyoko to know.”

Huh, Noriko? “OK, when and where?”

“It's going to be long. Look… eh...”

Ulf, I can hear you blushing on the phone. What's up? “I'm still here,” she said when he remained silent.

“Look, I've spoken with Amaya. She says it's OK if you're fine with it.”

What on earth are you talking about. Amaya allowed you to exactly what? Oh. Oh! “I don't understand,” Christina said, but she was bubbling with joy. There was only one reason for Ulf to sound that uncomfortable.

“Eh, I won't be able to see you and get home. It's too late.”

She wanted to tell him to spit it out, but it was kinda cute the way he avoided the topic. And I'm not going to suggest a taxi. “Want to meet somewhere?” she teased.

She could picture him fidgeting with his phone as she made her way uphill. If he didn't say anything she'd lead him on when she rolled downhill after the crest.

“Is it OK… I mean… would you agree to me...”

You're really dense sometimes. Ulf, don't you understand I want to? “I can't hear you. Could you say again?”

“Can I come over to your place?”

Finally! Her heart took a giant jump and she had to clear her throat. “This late?” she asked, more to force a confirmation than anything else.

“Yeah,” he said. It sounded as if he was choking, “about that. I won't be able to go home, and… no, maybe it's better if I...”

Oh no, you don't! “Come home to me now!” Christina shouted. When she looked behind her the bodyguard stared at her from atop his bike. Thank all gods I spoke Swedish!

She could hear Ulf running, and there were muted shouts of surprise in the background. “I have to go,” she heard him saying to someone where he was. “I'm on my way,” he said to her in Swedish.

Real smooth Ulf. Just start talking in Swedish to make sure no one understands you're going to the only other Swede in school. Idiot! My precious idiot. Christina kicked up speed. Now she only wanted to get back to her apartment as fast as possible.

He's staying over! I can make this work again. I can make you stay by my side. Ulf, I love you!

With her heart filled with joy she pushed her bike to it's limit. She'd been given another chance at the love she valued so much it hurt her every evening she spent restarting the only career she knew she could master.

It was a strange feeling loving this strongly. It was stranger still that she managed to spend so much time apart from him, but tonight she would have him all to herself. A chance to give their relationship a transition and restart.