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Creeping Eastward

Rhymney Valley, Wales - 9 January 1983

Tense knuckles of Cymru winter trembled to relax for spring. A valley of vert lichen held clouds in its throat, letting the dry fog move like a chill river current. One unlicensed gunmetal Aston Martin waited on the dirt shoulder of the bare road.

In the hands of a man was held a five year-old girl with hair blacker than a starless night sky. For today’s meeting he took it upon himself to personally buy her a new coat, bulgy and royal purple to guard against the imperial shoals of weather groaning like a decaying manor. She was always a handful without the help around. Too much energy. However, she loved him forever, the little things he did for her. A toothy, innocent grin on her pinking face. Mistrust kept him at bay. Not to be trusted. Just like her mother.

The Japanese man appeared, as was his custom, out of nothing. It was a tradition that Inagawa-Kai started here, appearing in funerary suits like sheathed katanas, leashing black strings of fate around the pinkies of the Empire. His contractor standing like a stone plucked from the giant’s causeway, choked on the last germ of fear in his lording anatomy, unused to being so easily waylaid. The child was unafraid.

“You came from over there,” she pointed, a tiny finger stretched precociously up above her head, implicating the cloud’s shadow from which he unfolded and East.

“Quite now, muffin,” Christopher Maddox snapped.

The well-dressed shadow man was already impressed. He’d heard children often possessed greater perspicacity though it was idle talk until this scamps jade Juri eyes told him absolutely no lies.

He handed over his mon, drawn up on stationary worth more than the sum of its pulp. Worth a fortune, in fact.

Worth a child’s future.