6. The Reversal Opening Ceremony (2)
6. The Reversal Opening Ceremony (2)
The third-floor reception room of the Coal Exchange.
Before a sulking Anais, arms crossed and face turned away, her uncle stood utterly at a loss.
"I really am sorry. I know I said I was leaving everything in your hands, and here I am showing up without warning. But things simply worked out this way..."
"Stop lying. You planned this from the very beginning."
Just then, a roar of cheers went up from the floor below.
The whole Coal Exchange shook with it.
A few of the sounds were closer to sobs.
The pounding of feet rattled through the entire building.
Everyone sounded beside themselves with joy.
They would be.
They had gone to bed believing themselves jobless by morning, and now they had survived.
And surviving meant keeping the exact same jobs.
Pierre twirled his hat idly in one hand as he spoke.
"Anya, think about it. Where would we possibly find the capacity to dispatch dozens of our own employees here? And the expense? The conditions for training them? Not to mention the chaos during the time it would take them to settle in. The best solution was to hire these very people."
"Then you should have explained it like that from the start. What was all this? Leaving me alone. Do you have any idea how murderous their stares have been for the past few days?"
Pierre smiled as he watched Anais grumble.
"And thanks to that, we've slashed expected labor costs by close to seventy percent. If we had come in proposing negotiations from the outset, we wouldn't have managed thirty. Because you stepped in with such brutal intent to fire everyone, my entrance was practically that of a savior."
Anais was still full of complaints, but it was hard to refute his words.
The world of commerce was exactly that: the moment you showed any sign that you had something to lose, everyone else began calculating what more they could wring out of you.
"That's what we call the 'push and pull' that happens on the ground. A fundamental negotiation technique. A merchant must be ready to bargain in any circumstance. Even if you're wandering the desert and someone appears holding the water you desperately crave and demands gold coins for it, you still fold your arms, put on an air of total leisure, and say: 'And why, exactly, should I buy that?'"
At his words, Anais let her anger cool and turned the idea over in her mind.
Push and pull.
A similar phrase for it was carrot and stick.
She was familiar with the concept.
But she had never imagined it could be used in this way.
She would never have experienced it if she had stayed in the house doing nothing but reading documents.
"In any case, your contribution this time was enormous. A knot of mining rights this tangled would normally require dozens of company employees working for months. And you handled it alone."
"I wasn't alone. There were a few other staff members, and also... Mars..."
Anais snapped her mouth shut.
Mars was the fixer who aided the Bergson Trading Company from the shadows.
He was a specialist in information-gathering and tracking rumors.
Her ability to untangle the convoluted mining rights issue this time was partly due to her own excellent mind, but it owed a great deal to the intelligence he supplied.
It would have been nice to gather and pop open a bottle of champagne together, but he disliked exposing himself.
He especially loathed hearing his own name spoken behind his back.
He claimed he could hear any voice speaking his name, anywhere in the world.
If the public ever learned of his existence and his name, the echoing voices in his head would probably make sleep impossible.
So he lived in hiding.
Only three people within the entire company knew his name.
Jeral, Pierre, and Anais.
When others needed to refer to him, they usually spoke of "intel fetched by the Hunting Dog" or "the Hunting Dog has begun tracking."
"...Anyway, the others helped a lot too."
"Heh heh, no need to be so modest. It was the Iron Mask's charisma that had them terrified."
The Iron Mask.
Anais's brow creased.
"Don't call me that! The Iron Mask, really? The Iron Mask? Isn't that a bit too horrifying for a nickname for a girl like me?"
"Ho-ho, but didn't that mask of yours magnify the 'push' effect? Would threatening them with a child's face have worked nearly as well? The Iron Mask set the mood perfectly, and thanks to that, my 'pull' landed immediately."
And so the two of them conducted a post-mortem on the affair.
Before long, the director of the Coal Exchange came up.
He had been gone less than thirty minutes, but was already drunk and swaying.
"Haha, this cake was originally bought for a farewell party! Now it's a celebration! Gahaha!"
He set down a plate of cake in front of each of them—Pierre and Anais—and went back down to rejoin the revelry.
Anais glared at his retreating back as he descended the stairs.
Maybe it was the alcohol.
He had forgotten that she could not eat.
She received her nourishment through a tube inserted into her back, instead of meals.
That had been her reality since last year.
When she first put on the mask at age five, the apparatus had been used for only about two hours a day to assist her breathing.
But with each passing year, her lungs grew weaker, and the hours spent wearing the mask grew longer.
Then, starting last year, it reached a point where she could hardly take it off at all anymore.
Of course, she could still make herself eat if she was truly determined to.
Taking off the respirator wouldn't make her lungs simply stop working.
But when she factored in the fuss of the whole process, and recalled the one time she forced herself to have a meal only for her stomach to seize up in shocked convulsions, it was simply easier to give up altogether.
By now, she was beginning to forget what sweetness was. What saltiness was. What bitterness was.
The only thing that tickled her tongue was the cool air filtering in through the metal apparatus.
"No..."
Was she going to live like this until she died, bound to this contraption of metal?
Without ever sharing warmth with another person?
Was that her fate?
"Anais."
So what if they called her a prodigy of the business world?
So what if they called her the Iron Mask?
What I want...
What I want is simply...
"Anais!"
Her uncle's call.
Her head snapped up.
Her uncle was watching her with a somewhat pitying look in his eyes.
She caught his gaze flick briefly downward.
Anais looked down at her own hand.
The fork she was holding had not just stabbed the cake—it had mangled it. Toying with food she couldn't even eat, her emotions had taken over without her realizing, and she had ended up taking out her frustration on it.
She set the cake back onto the table.
The plate wobbled with a precarious clatter.
The surge of emotion had subsided, but the trembling wouldn't stop.
At that moment, Pierre extended a handkerchief to her.
"Wipe your tears."
"Ah."
Anais touched the upper part of her mask.
Water had pooled there.
It had run down from her eyes.
"You'll ruin your pretty face."
"...I'm not very pretty."
"There you go again."
Anais scrubbed at her eyes with the handkerchief.
She wiped the tears away until she felt a faint ache.
Pierre clicked his tongue as he watched her.
"Tsk, tsk. Lucky you. Lucky you, being such a crybaby. What would your future husband say if he saw this?"
"...Do you really think I'll get married?"
"Are you a sworn spinster, then?"
At Pierre's teasing question, Anais answered in a sulky voice.
"I meant... who would even marry me..."
Anais cast a look back over her own body.
A tube connected to her mask to inject a precisely-blended air mixture.
A tube connected to her back to regulate the pneumatic pressure that made her chest cavity expand and contract.
A tube connected to her side to inject liquid nutrients.
And from the metal mask covering her nose and mouth came the constant hiss of air escaping through the filters.
From the machinery behind her came the ceaseless hum of its power unit.
"Tsk, just look at that look in your eyes. With an attitude like that, even if you did meet a man you liked, could you possibly hold onto him?"
"...I'd just hold on."
"If romance were that easy, who would ever struggle with it? Romance works the same as a business tactic. The push-and-pull I mentioned earlier—that matters just as much between a man and a woman."
"Isn't it just... liking someone if you like them?"
Pierre let out a hearty guffaw, as if he had just heard the most naïve thing in the world.
"Relationships between men and women are rather like negotiations. You need the skills to push and pull your partner, to hold them in the palm of your hand and move them as you will."
He clenched his fist tight and made a show of crushing some invisible object.
Anais tilted her head.
"But Uncle, you're completely helpless against Aunt and Renard."
At her words, the strength drained from Pierre's fist.
He let out an awkward chuckle.
"Ahem. Well, th-that is to say... I suppose with something you truly desire with all your heart, you simply can't help it? The kind of thing you wouldn't regret losing, even if you lost everything else."
"Something you truly desire with all your heart... something you wouldn't regret losing, even if you lost everything else...?"
Anais's eyes took on a dreamy cast.
Pierre decided that was enough consolation for now.
So he appended a dose of practical advice.
"Anya, remember this. If you're wandering the desert and someone appears before you holding the very water you've been yearning for... there might be poison in it."
***
A loud crash—something shattering—jolted Anais awake.
She blinked and looked around.
Her personal office, set up in a guest room at the Metropole Hotel.
The hour was late morning, with sunlight cutting in at an angle through the south-facing window.
She had nodded off while working, her head dropping onto the desk.
In the corner, her bodyguard, Sir Porshu, was watching her with a faint, quiet smile.
From the look of it, he had been observing her sleeping form for some time.
"How long was I out?"
"Less than thirty minutes."
A long nap.
She gazed at the stack of papers on her desk.
The documents she had been reviewing before she fell asleep.
Coal mine management... estimates of coal reserves... construction of storage depots...
Some mining district under the Bergson Trading Company's oversight.
She had been going through the reports that came up from there when sleep overtook her.
Perhaps that was why. The dream she had.
An outing of several weeks when she was ten years old.
For Anais, who had so rarely set foot outside the manor, it was one of only a handful of treasured memories.
It was laughable that someone who had tried to kill her appeared so frequently in those very few memories.
"What was that noise just now? Did you make it, Sir Porshu?"
"It seems the circus troupe is engaged in some sort of practice."
He indicated the window with his chin.
Anais approached the glass and looked down at the garden.
Whatever they had done, the once carefully tended greenery was now a wreck churned to mud.
It looked as though something—a firecracker, some kind of explosive—had detonated with considerable force.
Anais's eyes quickly searched the figures below for one person in particular.
The person she was looking for was immediately obvious.
A handsome young man with blond hair and a black suit stood near the site of the explosion.
His suit and cloak were soiled, but he appeared uninjured.
Just as she was about to smile in relief, her expression hardened into ice.
Because of the purple-haired woman poking her head out timidly from beneath his cloak.
Spider Woman, Yurakne.
One of the troupe's members.
He had probably wrapped her in his cloak at the moment of the explosion to protect her.
Screech.
Anais's fingers curled against the windowpane, scraping lightly.