We walked through Modu's central business district. The glass curtain walls of the office towers reflected the gray-white clouds. The buildings rose around us like cliffs of glass and steel, cold and indifferent to the bodies moving below.
The wind funneled between the towers, carrying the distant sound of traffic and the sharper clack of heels on pavement. Every few steps, someone brushed past us without a glance. No eye contact. No acknowledgment. The city was a machine, and its parts did not need to know each other.
Hanzi turned her phone screen toward Tsukago. An encrypted document. The sender field had only a single letter. A line of red text was printed across the header: SSS-Class Critical Intelligence. The screen's glow cut a pale rectangle across her face, turning her expression into something sharp and unreadable.
"From a colleague. Sat on it for a long time before sending it out." The spreadsheet was dense. All-age schools, from kindergarten to university. The number of incoming students each year had surged. The base of the demographic pyramid was abnormally wide. The middle narrowed sharply.
"As of last quarter. Marriage rate ninety-seven point four percent. Divorce rate zero point three percent. Almost no one who gets married gets divorced. The zero-to-six population is up nearly a hundred percent year over year." She paused, scrolling further.
"Elementary school enrollment has broken historical peaks. University admissions have nearly doubled in three years." Her thumb flicked across the screen. "Giving birth to so many. More people are switching careers than entering the workforce."
Tsukago walked closer, her shoulder brushing mine as she scanned the data. "Yesterday's office worker is delivering takeout today. Last month's factory worker is driving a rideshare this month."
"This girl does not even know whether to laugh or to applaud." Tsukago shook her head. "It is almost elegant. A machine designed to produce surplus humans. And then discard them."
"There's plenty of fat to skim here."
"Exactly. Schools take kickbacks. Tutoring companies take kickbacks too. From kindergarten to high school graduation—over a decade—someone's hand is out at every step." The words hung in the cold air between us. The wind pulled at our sleeves.
"Childcare facility registrations are rising faster than kindergartens. Parents dump their kids inside and go out looking for work. If they can't find any, they keep having more kids. Cram schools are booked until two in the morning."
"This country is treating children like financial products." Hanzi's voice was flat, reading the numbers like a weather report. "Online purchases can be returned. If a kid turns out to be a loss, you can't send them back."
"The labor force can't be converted. Marriages that can't be dissolved. Children piling up." She scrolled to the bottom of the document. "Every one of those dozens of résumés we saw in the talent market—behind each one is a person raised from kindergarten to university by this system, then thrown away."
Hanzi locked the phone and slid it into her pocket.
——A system that raises children like financial products. Losses can't be returned. Profits don't belong to the parents.
Beside the fire escape of an office tower's side entrance, two men in suits stood face to face. One pulled a kraft-paper envelope out of his briefcase. It was so thick the tape sealing the flap was straining at the seams. The paper bulged as if it held something alive.
"Inside here are the other company's bidding floor prices and client quote ranges for the next three quarters." His voice was a low growl, barely above a whisper, swallowed by the city noise. "Combine that with the supply chain quote details you brought out from inside, and in the next round of bidding they won't even have their underwear left."
He held the envelope out. The other man took it, his fingers gripping the edge so hard the paper crinkled. "That supply chain quote detail is still missing the schedules for three suppliers. But that can be filled in." "After you fill it in, contact this number directly."
A phone screen flashed briefly between them, a flicker of digits in the dim alley light. The camera above the fire-escape door had its lens covered by a piece of chewing gum. Gray and hard, cracked at the edges, it clung to the plastic like a blind eye.
They slipped out of the fire escape one after the other, rounded the alley mouth, and dissolved into the main street crowd. The alley went quiet. Only the camera above the fire-escape door was still lit, its red indicator light blurring into a small halo in the damp air. It blinked steadily, a tiny heartbeat recording nothing, watching everything. No one would ever check that footage.
Tsukago pulled her jacket tighter against the wind that tunneled through the alley. "Two men, five minutes, enough to destroy a company. This girl wonders how much they got paid. Enough for a mortgage? Enough for a year? Enough to sleep at night?"
"Enough to stop thinking for a while." I turned away from the fire escape. The main street was still busy, office workers streaming out of revolving doors, their security badges swinging like pendulums against their chests. A sea of white collars and tired faces.
A woman in a gray suit stopped to pull off her heels, rubbing her bare foot on the cold pavement. She winced, a sharp intake of breath, then put the shoes back on and kept walking without looking back. The red mark on her heel was bright against her skin. She did not slow down. She did not complain. She just kept moving.
"Everyone is running on something broken," Tsukago said, watching the woman disappear into the crowd.
"Some hide it better than others." I followed the woman's path with my eyes until she vanished into the mouth of the metro entrance. The doors closed behind her with a soft pneumatic hiss. The city churned around us, a machine that never stopped feeding, never stopped discarding. The encrypted data in my pocket felt heavier than it should. Soon, we would use it.