Now, I Am the Director
I could say this with certainty: kids these days have no patience.
Really, now. Wages can fall behind a little, can't they? Did I ever say I wouldn't pay? Money's tight, so it gets paid late — that's all it is. And every so often a person has to work a bit more, that's how it goes. Three or four extra shifts a week and they start grumbling. Three straight nights of work and suddenly it's complaints, complaints, complaints.
Back in my day, such a thing was unthinkable. To think they'd stab me in the back over a measly wage — impossible. Unforgivable.
Hah. My side just gave a searing twinge.
Ah, of course, the side is burning because of the knife. Where would the sting come from otherwise? It hurts like hell. Anyone who's ever taken a blade would know — when a knife goes into your side, the pain runs deep and it does not forgive.
Damn it all. If I hadn't been lying dead drunk in the safehouse the night before, there's no way the likes of those bastards could have done this to me.
Only one slash to the side, but the sharper wound was to my pride. Those punks — after everything I did for them. I taught them everything, right down to how to handle a blade, and they used it to stick me. What ingratitude. What breathtaking, textbook ingratitude.
Pathetic underlings or not, they'd still been mine, so I didn't kill them. I beat them unconscious and emptied every coin from their pockets, but I left them breathing.
And the rain was coming down in sheets besides. By the time they came to, every trace of blood would have been washed away. They'd never track me now.
Seriously, where else would you find such a magnanimous boss, and this is the thanks I get? I will never understand people.
So absorbed in these musings, I trudged down an alley streaked with drizzling rain. Utterly exhausting.
Should've brought an umbrella.
Rainwater was seeping into the wound, and it felt even worse for it. No — it genuinely was worse.
Time to rest a moment.
I leaned against the wall to catch my breath, and then, without warning, I sensed someone approaching. Could they have woken already and come after me? I turned my gaze — and there was a girl I'd never seen before, creeping toward me step by careful step.
She was dressed in rags and painfully thin, the kind of thin that comes from never eating enough. The girl walked up slowly and stopped in front of me. Then she studied me, head tilted.
"Mister, are you hurt?"
Of course I'm hurt. I got stabbed.
"Yes, I was stabbed."
"Oh no, are you going to die?"
Fear was written all over her face. Was she scared because I'd been stabbed? Or scared because I might die?
"Not necessarily."
"Really?"
The girl looked down at the blood streaming off me, staining the ground red, and then asked again.
"Are you sure you don't need a hospital?"
"Hmm. Give me a moment and watch."
I suppose I'll have to give up on this body, then. With that thought, I closed my eyes.
In the same instant, a sensation seized me of my whole body twisting in on itself. Crrrack, crrrack — the skeleton warped, the bones splintered and broke.
No matter. 'This body' was already ruined anyway. Time to discard it cleanly and move on.
When the reconstruction was finished, I looked down at myself and took stock.
Hands softer and smaller than before. No calluses, no scars. And that wasn't all — my line of sight sat distinctly lower than it had a moment ago. Though the clothing was admittedly quite out of date.
Now, what was this body's name again?
Bill, I think it might have been...
While I was turning the name over in my mind, the girl blinked twice, then broke into a wide grin and clapped her hands like a seal.
"Wow, that's amazing!"
Finding delight in this spectacle — I suppose that's proof of a pure heart, at least.
The girl, brimming with childhood innocence, looked up at me.
"How'd you do that? Teach me!"
Oh, so now it's informal speech.
You shouldn't judge people by appearances alone.
Granted, when it comes to a total stranger, appearance is all you have to go on. Still, a child speaking down to me is something I simply cannot tolerate.
"I'm older than you."
Therefore, you will use the polite form.
"Okay!"
"Okay what?"
Only when I pointed it out again did the girl correct herself.
"Okay, sir."
"Good. Well done."
See? Manners are one thing I've never failed to teach. If my former underlings had listened this promptly and obediently, I'd never have needed to resort to physical measures.
While I was briefly reflecting on my old subordinates' shortcomings, the girl suddenly asked me a question of her own.
"Will you come with me?"
"Where do you live?"
"The orphanage."
The orphanage, hm. I'd never paid it much mind, so I didn't really know what orphanages were around here. I'd already thrown away my old identity — might as well acquire a fresh one while I was at it. So I nodded at the girl's words.
"All right."
"Yay, a new friend!"
Why not. A new friend I was — as long as the politeness held.
The place we arrived at, following the girl, was the front of a dilapidated building.
"This is it?"
"That's right!"
Suddenly I understood why the child was dressed so shabbily. Thinking this, I stepped slowly through the door — and there a woman stood waiting. Dressed quite differently from the girl, in luxurious clothes, she fixed us with a sharp-eyed stare.
And then those already-sharp eyes deepened into something positively venomous.
"Rina! Where on earth have you been?"
The girl beside me — the one this furious woman had called Rina — simply flashed a radiant smile.
"Director, I brought a new friend!"
So this ill-tempered woman was the director of this orphanage, apparently.
"That's not the point! You had a visitor who came all this way to see you!"
"To see me?"
"Enough. They've agreed to come again, and until then you're grounded. No going out."
"Okayyy~"
For once, Rina looked a little deflated. The woman, fuming from every angle, shot a quick glance my way with those razor eyes — and Rina immediately pivoted, gesturing at me as if making an introduction.
"He doesn't have a home either!"
Is that polite speech or informal? I genuinely can't tell.
At that, the director came toward me. A wave of perfume rolled in — not the cheap kind, either. The expensive sort.
She tilted my chin up with a finger.
Hm. This woman takes excellent care of her nails. Must have cost her a fair bit.
"You turned out rather pretty, didn't you. There's some demand for this type, too."
"Pretty?"
As Rina cocked her head at the unfamiliar word, the woman turned to me.
"Child, do you really have no home?"
I nodded. The woman gave a small smile.
"There are lots of children like you here. Why don't you come in and stay with us?"
She said it with that smiling face, then turned to Rina.
"Rina, the Andelo Family has agreed to take you in, so you'll need to prepare yourself until then."
At those words, I very nearly let my expression harden.
The Andelo Family, did you say?
I glanced sidelong at Rina.
A little girl. And the Andelo Family, of all people...
The rumors flooded my mind in an instant. That family had always carried more than its share of ugly whispers — and among them, more than a few things that most definitely actually happened.
Something about the head of that family having a taste for young girls, wasn't it?
A man pushing eighty, mind you.
And they mean to hand a child over to that family.
"Taken in?"
"Yes. Now, take this child to the others, then come along with me for a moment."
"Okay~"
Rina, blissfully ignorant of everything, tugged me brightly through the doors of the orphanage.
"Look, everyone! A new friend!"
And with that, Rina introduced me to the children gathered in one of the rooms. But they showed hardly any reaction at all. Their faces were shadowed.
To put it precisely: they were cowed. Withdrawn to a degree no child should be. Watching them, I stopped Rina on her way back to the director and asked,
"If I told you my name... hmm."
As she scrunched her face trying to recall a name I'd never given her, I asked her suddenly,
"Rina. Would you like the director to change?"
"What do you mean?"
To the girl tilting her head in confusion, I murmured, low as a secret.
"Wouldn't you like it if your director treated you all a little better?"
She nodded at once, bright and unhesitating.
"Yes!"
"Good. That's all I needed. Go on now."
She scampered off at a trot.
What an obedient child. That's one consent secured, at least.
Right away I cornered a few of the other children and quietly pulled them aside, out of sight, and asked them much the same questions I'd asked Rina.
A stranger suddenly posing such questions made the kids freeze for a moment — but thankfully, several of them gave small, cautious nods. And once I'd heard every answer, I couldn't help but smile.
"Then. Where's the director's office?"
Picking the lock on a director's office is no great feat. For someone of my caliber, a bent needle or a bit of wire does nicely — and such things were easy enough to come by around an orphanage.
On my way over, I'd seen the director leading Rina somewhere other than her office. How convenient. I could work quickly.
I picked the lock and slipped inside. Now, then — time to hunt for information. Where would a woman like her keep anything that mattered?
People in her line of work hide their precious documents somewhere no casual hand could ever reach. That's the common sense of it.
The answer turned out to be simpler than that. Right there in plain view sat a safe, locked up tight and practically screaming do not open. Fortunately it was a key lock. A combination dial would have been tedious.
Using much the same technique as on the door, I cracked the safe and examined its contents.
Ha. Of course.
Inside was a substantial pile of valuables, a bundle of cash, and documents that looked suspicious at a single glance. It's always these types — squirreling away the information they'd sell the moment they got caught, just in case, to buy their own necks.
I skimmed the papers quickly. The entries were terse. 'Client.' 'Amount.' And 'Merchandise.' Sure enough, the merchandise column was filled with names that could only belong to children.
Castro Family, 150 gold, Anjil Chesker. That was the shape of it.
In other words, the director of this orphanage had been selling children for money.
Fine. Let's say I could stomach the simple fact of children sold for cash.
But among those 'clients' were more than a few buyers I couldn't reconcile at all. Children sold to those places were not, I suspected, coming back.
Anyone handed over to somewhere like the Andelo Family or the Castro Family — I could think it over all day and not find a single good ending for them.
I was deep in the documents when the sound of the door opening reached me. A quick glance: no Rina with her. The woman froze for a beat at the sight of me inside. I greeted her warmly, like an old friend.
"Oh, there you are."
"You — what do you think you're—!"
She'd evidently registered what I was holding, because she strode straight over and snatched it from my hands.
"What is the meaning of this!"
Crack!
With a crisp, satisfying sound, my head snapped to the side. Hitting a child's face with that much force — careless of her. Done any harder and my jaw might actually have come off.
"Bit harsh for a kid, don't you think?"
"Shut up and talk. How did you get this open!"
She seized me by the collar and hoisted me up. The reaction was so utterly predictable, and I so thoroughly bored by it, that I let my eyes wander the room instead. And something caught my attention.
Katejina Jinsky
The director's nameplate — something I hadn't paid the slightest attention to when I came in.
"Katejina Jinsky, is it."
"What?"
"Katejina Jinsky. That's a fine name."
I nodded, slow and deliberate.
"From this moment on, I shall be Katejina."
"What kind of nonsense have you been spouting since—!"
She stopped mid-sentence and went rigid. And no wonder — because she had seen it. The sight of 'me' being ground down, warped, and unmade, losing all shape in the space of a breath.
Her grip on my 'collar' slipped loose. She shrieked and bolted for the door.
But things like this always happen in an instant.
Devouring her took no time at all. As always, a single instant was enough.
She must have known, too, from the moment I caught her.
That she had already ended.
Yes — with a scream that lasted no longer than a heartbeat.
A short while later, I pushed open the door of the director's office and stepped out. In the window across the hall, the reflection showed a woman in luxurious clothes.
The reflection was, in every particular, Katejina Jinsky.
That's right. From this moment on, I am the director of this orphanage.