Obviously enough, since Lady Neku was officially unaware that her mother wanted to see her, and since her mother’s study was not somewhere the girl would usually go, she needed to find a reason to visit.

“Fish,” she told her cat.

This was enough to get the animal’s attention.

“Real?”

“Of course,” promised Lady Neku, wondering where she’d get fresh fish this time. Her mistake had been to feed the animal Nico’s goldfish in the first place, no matter how much her cat begged.

“Now?”

“Later,” she said firmly.

All the cat had to do was get comprehensively lost. Since High Strange had a hundred and nineteen levels in the spire alone, twelve spars, ninety knot rooms in the ring to handle karman lines and more maintenance tunnels than anyone had ever bothered to count, that should be relatively easy.

Once the cat had sloped off, adding extra demands and sub-clauses tied to any late delivery of its food, Lady Neku took a shower. The water was warm and undoubtedly tasteless, but she still kept her mouth firmly shut. Lady Neku used water because Nico once told her about a great aunt who was cooked so thoroughly in a malfunctioning cleanser that flesh fell from her bones.

A week later, he stopped her in a corridor and wondered, idly, if she realised the liquid in which she now bathed was distilled from his piss? An hour passed before Lady Neku started to worry about how Nico knew she’d begun taking showers.

Having dried herself, Neku dressed in a simple white frock and combed her hair until it fell around her shoulders. She debated using a silk scarf to hide the scar on her throat and decided against.

The staircase to her mother’s study was empty. Lady Neku stopped, rephrasing that thought. There were no members of her immediate family on the stairs. There were, however, numerous servitors, a guard, and a kitchen girl. All looking slightly breathless, as fugees did when placed in high orbit. The girl had been crying.

“It’s okay,” said Lady Neku. “You can tell me if something’s wrong.”

The girl kept her mouth shut and her eyes on her feet.

“Or not…” Having opened the study door, Lady Neku barged her way into the room and froze just inside.

“I’m…” She caught herself. “Lady Mother.” The curtsey Neku sketched was almost elegant. “Lord Brothers.”

Lady Katchatka’s smile spoke of deep thoughts and dark plans. Her smile and her eyes were two of Lady Katchatka’s strongest assets. Her daughter took care not to smile back.

“You’re late,” said Nico.

“For what?” Lady Neku did a good job of looking puzzled. Since all four of them regarded her as an idiot, this took remarkably little effort. She just pulled a face and her brothers and mother imposed their own meanings onto the expression.

“My message,” Lady Katchatka said.

“What?” Lady Neku bowed her head. She had no wish to get slapped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have missed the call.” Neku saw her mother blink and knew she was checking with the major domo.

“I sent it an hour ago.”

“Ah…” Neku took time to consider this. “I’ve been looking for my cat.” What correlation there could be between the cat being missing and the call went unspecified, but no one asked her to explain. One of the great advantages of being the family idiot was that she had very little to live up to.

“Did you try asking the kami?” said Nico, with a smirk.

“Nico.” Their mother’s voice was sharp.

“Just wondering,” he said.

“Well stop.” Lady Katchatka glared round at the boys, softening her gaze as it reached her daughter, which worried Lady Neku greatly. “We’ll have no such talk…you can go,” she told Nico. “You can all go.” She meant the boys. “Your sister and I have a wedding to discuss.”

CHAPTER 27 — Saturday, 23 June

“Next…”

The immigration officer at Heathrow flicked through the Japanese girl’s passport to check the stamp marks, uncovering New York, Paris, and Milan. After this, he matched her face to the smiling photograph and took fingerprints, checking these confirmed a twelve-point match with the example held on her passport’s digital strip.

The fingerprints tallied. And the passport definitely showed the young girl shuffling her feet in front of him, though her hair looked shorter, having been pinned back before the picture was taken. Neku was pleased with that touch. She already knew the digital strip said all the right things, down to height, weight, original hair colour, and iris pattern. So far no one had checked these, but it was good to know the details were correct if they did.

Besides, what else was she going to do with all that stolen cash, if not give a fistful of it to Tetsuo for top of the range fakes…Invest it, buy herself an apartment in Marunouchi, give the stuff back? She could just imagine trying. Hi, I’m no longer the person who took your money. These days I’m someone else…No, honestly.

“Why are you here?”

“Holiday,” said Neku.

“And you’re staying at…” The officer examined the form Neku had filled out on the plane. “Flat 7, 5 Hogarth Mews, Fitzrovia?”

“North of Soho,” said Neku brightly. “A friend of the family. I’m using his flat.” She’d gotten the address from No Neck, who’d been given it by Kit.

“Do you plan to find work in England?”

It was one of those trick questions. Neku knew it was a trick question because the man left a slight gap between each word and watched her eyes.

“I intend to write.”

While he was still thinking this one through, Neku unzipped her shoulder bag and dumped a paperback of TunaBelly in front of him. When he still looked blank, she took back her passport and opened it, pointing out the match between names.

“It contains a clear and troubling truth,” Neku announced, translating the cover quote.

The man looked blank.

“You know fan boys,” said Neku.

He looked blanker still.

“They love manga, video games, fighting beauty…” He was muddled, Neku could tell by his strange green eyes. “Fan boys,” she said. “People think they want to fuck fighting beauty, anime gun-wielding girls. No, otaku want to be fighting beauty. Bishoujo, cute teenage girls, they want to be fighting beauty too. So everyone liked this book, even old people…”

“You wrote this?”

Neku nodded, watching him check her date of birth and work out her age.

“Right,” he said, “I see.”

Quite what he saw went unsaid, but it probably didn’t matter. He stamped her passport with an inky square and handed it back to her. No one stopped her in customs, which was probably just as well because Neku had lined the bottom of her shoulder bag with $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills, three bundles at a time wrapped in dust covers stolen from hardback books.

Having debated what to do with the rest of her haul, given that she could only leave her bag in a locker for three days at a time, Neku had come up with a solution that was either extremely clever or unbelievably stupid, only time would tell. She took the bag to Mrs. Oniji, along with the bowl dug from the ruins of Pirate Mary’s.

She told the woman how she found the bowl, then suggested by implication that the bag belonged to Kit Nouveau. The bowl was to be a present for Mr. Oniji, a man famous for collecting ceramics…Neku would let her know what to do with the bag.

After Mrs. Oniji got over her initial surprise, which divided into three parts:

1) That Neku knew where she lived

2) That Neku knew about her friendship with the Englishman

3) That Neku thought it might be a good idea to give Mr. Oniji the bowl

She invited Neku inside and offered the girl tea.