Missing Pieces
dark heroSix years had passed since the incident at the school, although there were days when Nezu felt as though considerably less time had passed and others when the memories seemed to belong to an entirely different life.
The school they attended now was nothing like the old one. It was larger, less obsessed with appearances and, most importantly as far as Nezu was concerned, nobody here remembered an eleven-year-old boy running through corridors occupied by armed men. To the students around him, he was simply Nezu: the unusually intelligent, somewhat strange seventeen-year-old who rarely participated in conversations unless someone gave him a reason to.
Physically, however, six years had been considerably less generous to him.
He had grown taller, naturally, but remained thin enough that the uniform seemed designed for someone with substantially broader shoulders. His body had never caught up with his mind, and despite Diana’s insistence on doctors, nutritionists and enough medical examinations to make him thoroughly familiar with the inside of several hospitals, there had never been anything particularly useful to diagnose. He was healthy enough. He was simply weak.
Segu, on the other hand, had changed enough for both of them.
Nezu watched her from the other side of the classroom as she leaned over another student’s desk, arguing about something he had stopped listening to several minutes earlier. Somewhere over the years, the small, frail girl who had once shared his physical limitations had disappeared. Segu was still Segu, but she was healthier now, with a strength and energy that had appeared around her sixteenth anniversary.
There had been examinations for that too.
Nothing unusual had been found.
Nezu had therefore stopped thinking about it.
Segu had not.
She caught him looking at her and narrowed her eyes.
“What?”
“I wasn’t aware looking in your direction required an explanation.”
“It does when you do it for that long.”
“I was thinking.”
“About me?”
“Initially.”
Segu stared at him for a moment, apparently trying to decide whether she should be offended.
“You’re weird.”
“I’ve been informed.”
“Many times.”
“Mostly by you.”
“And yet you refuse to improve.”
Nezu returned his attention to the front of the classroom while Segu shook her head and went back to whatever argument she had been having.
The exchange was ordinary enough that neither of them thought anything of it.
Ordinary had taken some time to recover.
After the attack, returning to their old school had never seriously been considered. The building itself eventually reopened, but many families had withdrawn their children, and Diana had made the decision for Nezu and Segu before either had been asked what they wanted. There were therapists, statements, meetings with police officers and adults who repeatedly asked the same questions using slightly different words, apparently hoping that children would eventually produce answers they had not possessed the first twelve times.
Then there had been the dead man.
Diana had taken care of that.
Nezu had understood enough, even at eleven, to know that killing someone was not something that simply disappeared because the person killed happened to be a criminal. There had been an investigation, of course, but the circumstances were difficult to ignore: an armed group had taken control of a school, more than a hundred people had been held hostage, students had been threatened at gunpoint, and Nezu himself had been a child attempting to survive inside the building.
Whatever complications remained after that had quietly disappeared into Diana’s hands.
He had never asked exactly what she had done.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He simply saw no reason to investigate a solved problem when the incident had left behind a much more interesting unsolved one.
Why had they attacked the school in the first place?
At eleven, there had been very little Nezu could do with that question. At twelve, not much more. By thirteen, however, curiosity had become an investigation, and by fourteen he had already learned enough about computers, public records and the astonishing amount of information people accidentally left accessible to anyone patient enough to search for it that he began reconstructing the case himself.
That was when he discovered the first problem.
The attack wasn’t hidden.
He could find contemporary news reports, public police information, insurance documentation, hospital records that indirectly matched the injuries and countless fragments scattered across databases that had never been intended to form a complete picture. Even years later, proving that the incident happened was trivial.
Finding the men responsible was not.
The deeper Nezu went, the less sense the records made. Information that should have existed didn’t. Names mentioned in one place vanished when followed into another. Backgrounds terminated abruptly, employment histories led nowhere and records that should have been duplicated across several independent systems were simply absent.
At first, he assumed he was missing something.
Then he became better at looking.
The information wasn’t difficult to find.
It was gone.
Someone had removed it thoroughly enough that Nezu eventually became more interested in the removal than in the people themselves. Erasing a person from one database was easy. Removing the trails created by a lifetime of interacting with governments, employers, banks, schools, hospitals and other people was considerably harder, particularly when several individuals had to disappear at once.
Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble.
The investigation itself was even stranger.
Nezu had eventually found where the complete case had gone, but finding it and accessing it were two very different accomplishments. The level of protection surrounding the records was so far beyond what should have been necessary that his first assumption had been that the system contained considerably more than the school investigation.
It didn’t.
As far as he could determine, the protection was specifically associated with the case.
A hostage situation at a private school involving wealthy and influential families justified discretion. It did not justify that.
Nezu had spent years occasionally returning to the problem, approaching it through different systems whenever his knowledge improved enough to provide a new avenue. He had found vulnerabilities, alternative paths and people who probably could have been manipulated into providing access, but eventually the risk stopped being proportional to the information he expected to gain.
He didn’t like abandoning problems.
He disliked making stupid decisions considerably more.
So the case remained where it was, locked behind security that had no logical reason to exist, waiting for the day when Nezu acquired the missing piece that would make another attempt worthwhile.
Akane had proven even more difficult.
There was no gradual separation after the attack, no awkward attempt to maintain a friendship between different schools and no final conversation years later when they realized they had become different people.
They simply never saw her again.
Not once.
For a while, Segu had expected that to change. She sent messages at first, asking where Akane was, whether she was all right, whether she had changed schools and, eventually, whether she was angry with them. When those went unanswered, she sent more. Shorter ones. Sometimes nothing more than Are you there?
Not once did Akane reply.
Eventually the messages became less frequent, and then stopped altogether. One day, Nezu realized months had passed since Segu had tried again.
Nezu had searched.
Of course he had.
The results were even less useful than those surrounding the bandits, although he had considerably less information to begin with. Akane had entered their lives suddenly, remained for a relatively short period and disappeared just as abruptly. Whatever connections existed between her, the men searching for the mysterious key and the absurd security surrounding the investigation remained impossible to prove.
Six years later, she was still missing.
The bell announcing the end of class pulled Nezu away from his thoughts.
Segu appeared beside his desk before he had finished putting away his things.
“Home?”
Nezu glanced at the clock, although there was no real reason to.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m starving.”
“You ate less than two hours ago.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I was merely establishing a fact.”
“Establish it while walking.”
Nezu stood and followed her out of the classroom.
As he adjusted his bag, something slipped from beneath the collar of his shirt. Segu noticed the small dragon hanging against his chest and casually pushed it back inside with one finger.
“You’re going to lose that someday.”
“The chain is intact.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“The probability of losing it while the chain remains intact is sufficiently low that—”
“Zu.”
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
He did.
The necklace had been in his possession for a little over a year, although technically it had belonged to him for much longer.
Diana had given it to him on his sixteenth birthday and explained that it had been left together with him when he was a baby. Whoever had left it had provided very little information, but they had been specific about one thing: the necklace was to be given to Nezu when he turned sixteen.
Naturally, he had examined it.
The dragon was well made, but there was nothing extraordinary about the material, no hidden compartment, no mechanism and no inscription containing a conveniently dramatic explanation for why someone had considered his sixteenth birthday important enough to leave instructions more than a decade in advance.
After exhausting every reasonable method of examination that didn’t involve damaging it, Nezu had added the necklace to the same increasingly irritating category occupied by Akane and the school investigation.
Insufficient information.
Unlike the other two mysteries, however, the dragon followed him everywhere.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he had decided to wear it.
Diana was already home when they arrived.
Segu pushed the door open first and announced their arrival loudly enough that nobody in the house could reasonably have missed it.
“We’re back!”
“I’m in the living room,” Diana called.
Segu immediately headed toward the voice while Nezu removed his shoes and followed at a considerably more civilized pace. Diana was sitting on the sofa with a tablet resting against one knee, reading something for work, although she lowered it when the two entered.
“How was school?”
“Boring,” Segu answered.
“Acceptable,” Nezu said.
Diana smiled. “I’ll assume those mean approximately the same thing.”
“They don’t.”
“They do,” Segu corrected.
Nezu considered arguing, decided there was no value in doing so and instead adjusted the strap of his bag.
“I’m going upstairs, Diana.”
The change in her expression was almost imperceptible.
Almost.
“All right. Dinner won’t be long.”
“I’ll come down when it’s ready.”
He turned toward the stairs without noticing anything unusual.
Segu did.
She always did.
There had never been a particular day when Nezu stopped calling Diana Mom. If there had been, perhaps Diana could have attached the change to an argument, a mistake or some teenage act of rebellion and convinced herself it would eventually pass.
Instead, it had happened slowly.
Mom became less frequent. For a while he used Mother, particularly when speaking more formally, and then even that began to disappear until one day Diana realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had heard either word.
There had been no anger behind it.
That was the part that hurt the most.
Nezu wasn’t punishing her. He wasn’t rejecting her, and Diana knew better than anyone that confronting him about it would accomplish nothing. Over the years, the emotional distance that had always existed between Nezu and other people had simply grown wider. He could still understand emotions with extraordinary precision and often recognized what someone was feeling before they understood it themselves, but understanding an emotion and sharing it were very different things.
Increasingly, Nezu seemed to interact with people through the former.
Diana understood his condition.
Understanding didn’t stop Diana from hurting every time she heard it.
Segu dropped her bag beside the sofa and watched her for a moment.
“You okay?”
Diana looked back at the tablet.
“Of course.”
Segu didn’t believe her, but she also knew better than to continue.
“I’ll make tea.”
That earned Diana’s attention again.
“Should I be worried?”
Segu looked offended. “My tea is fine.”
“Your tea could be used to interrogate prisoners.”
“Zu drinks it.”
From halfway up the stairs came Nezu’s voice.
“I’ve repeatedly explained that excessive brewing time is the primary problem.”
Segu spun toward the hallway.
“Then make it yourself!”
There was a short silence.
“All right.”
“Wait, that’s not what I—”
Nezu continued upstairs.
Diana covered her mouth, unsuccessfully hiding a laugh.
Segu glared at her.
“You’re both horrible.”
For a few moments, the house felt exactly as it always had.
That, more than anything else, was why Diana loved having Segu there.
There were doctors who could describe Nezu’s condition in clinical terms and specialists who could explain how it had changed as he grew older, but none of them could explain why one particular exception had survived.
Segu.
Nezu didn’t treat her like everyone else.
The difference could be subtle enough that strangers missed it, but Diana never did. Nezu considered Segu when he made decisions that shouldn’t have required considering anyone. He tolerated interruptions from her that irritated him from others. He noticed when she was unhappy even when doing so served no practical purpose, and sometimes changed what he was doing simply because she wanted something different.
Most importantly, there was her safety.
Whatever part of Nezu still formed genuine emotional attachments, Segu had somehow held onto it.
Diana was grateful for that.
Sometimes painfully so.
Segu headed toward the kitchen, but as she reached the doorway she stopped and looked at her hand.
Nothing appeared unusual.
There was never anything unusual unless she allowed herself to remember.
Even after all these years, she could recall what had happened with uncomfortable clarity: the fear, the certainty that something impossible had occurred and the days afterward when she had waited for her body to return to normal.
It never had.
The doctors had found nothing wrong with her. Quite the opposite. For the first time in her life, Segu had stopped being the fragile one.
She had never told them why.
She had never told anyone.
Especially Nezu.
Segu closed her hand and continued into the kitchen.
Some things were easier when nobody asked questions.
Upstairs, Nezu placed his bag beside his desk and woke the computer. Three monitors illuminated almost simultaneously, one still displaying the work he had abandoned the previous night.
For a moment he considered continuing it.
Instead, almost automatically, he opened an old directory.
The case number appeared on the screen.
Six years had changed many things. Nezu knew more than he had at eleven, more than he had at fourteen and considerably more than the people responsible for hiding the investigation had probably expected a child involved in it would ever know.
It still wasn’t enough.
He stared at the screen for several seconds before closing the directory again.
There was no new information.
Therefore, there was no reason to waste time on it.
Nezu leaned back in his chair and felt the dragon beneath his shirt press against his chest. He pulled it free, turning the small pendant between his fingers while his eyes remained on the darkened monitor.
The bandits.
The key.
Akane.
The investigation.
The necklace.
Too many questions, all of them missing the same thing.
Information.
From downstairs came Segu’s voice.
“ZU! If you want tea, come make it!”
He released the dragon and stood.
For six years, Nezu had learned to leave unanswered questions alone when there was nothing productive he could do about them.
Segu, however, was downstairs waiting for him.
That was considerably easier to solve.
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