“What do you think?”

Uchida turned and faced him. Uchida. No honorifics. For Mitsuo Uchida had lost any rights to that kind of respect eighty years ago. Eighty long years ago when the older officer made Mitsuo believe in the war crazed ideals of imperial Japan.

“Good enough,” Mitsuo said.

He spent 50 years atoning for his sins in Sweden until the day he suddenly arrived in Japan. He spent six years reliving a very different kind of adolescent in a very different kind of Japan, and then he found out that Uchida hadn’t succumbed to cancer in the late 1970s.

That took a few years to forgive. What eventually sped that process up was when Mitsuo realised Uchida had atoned in his own way. In both worlds.

“Done reminiscing?”

He always knew what I thought. “Yes, for now.” Mitsuo growled silently. He didn’t like the older man at all. “Look, you try anything funny with the Wakayamas and I’ll have every last goon you’ve hidden in Japan vanish within a couple of months. Are we clear?”

“Are they that important?”

Raw emotions flooded Mitsuo. Feelings of friendship, almost bordering on love soared through him. There was nothing sexual about it, but just as intense anyway. “They’re my friends. They made friends with me even though I never deserved it in the first place. I’ll die for them if I can stop you from hurting them.” It wasn’t even conviction, just fact. He owed them more than his life – he owed them coming alive again. Only once had he felt that strongly in his life before, and that time it was a tall, silver haired girl who turned his life upside down seventy years earlier.

Uchida stared at him. “You’ve grown.”

A sudden sensation of pain in his stomach delayed Mitsuo’s realisation that he wasn’t ill. Then he burst out in all but hysterical laughter.

“Moron,” he said after the attack ebbed out. “The hundred years old tells the ninety years old that he’s grown.”

“You’re ninety five.” There wasn’t even a trace of humour in the voice.

Mitsuo decided to react accordingly. “In this world I’m forty. In this world, and especially in this Japan I’m the one with the power to stab you from behind. In this world I left the worst parts of the seventy years I lived in that other world behind.”

“Talk, just talk.”

“You’re part of those bad parts. Two things of mine, only two, were never tainted by evil.” Mitsuo dug up old memories and sighed. Yes, this was what he truly believed. “My wife, and my daughter.”

Uchida’s eyebrows rose. “And Christina?”

Mitsuo had expected that. “She’s my granddaughter. She was never mine to begin with.” He didn’t dare to tell the older man that she carried memories of deeds almost as dark as his own. He hadn’t dared to tell Ulf when he still hoped that the man turned boy would stay by Christina’s side for a lifetime.

“About young Wakayama?”

Somehow Uchida must have read his mind. Thinking of Ulf made Mitsuo think of the kid who currently played the role of Christina’s boyfriend.

“He knows, as his sister does. He knows that their parents are involved with us, but I suspect that my friends are still unaware of how much the kids have understood.” Mitsuo scratched his chin. “I agree, he’s an excellent bridge between Sweden and Japan, but I believe Ulf’s a better one.”

“He’s an arrival. He should pick one of the nations when he’s grown into manhood again.”

“Because you don’t want him to stand with a foot in each? Is that imperial army fucking major bloody moron speaking, or did you at least learn the basics of what it means to be a decent human being since you arrived here?”

Uchida looked like he was going to explode, but as he calmed down Mitsuo had to accept that the older man probably had. Learned the basics at least.

“Elaborate!”

With a sigh Mitsuo concurred. “This is a different world. Not just because it’s a different world, but more importantly because this is the twenty first century. Ulf’s young enough to be comfortable with globalisation. He’s not one of us.” With a grimace Mitsuo tasted the pain Ulf would experience should he choose to stay in Japan. “Uchida, that boy will carve out a small part of this nation and change it. Unless you want to torment him for the rest of his life, please accept that he needs a connection with Sweden to stay sane.”

Uchida looked thoughtful for a while. Then he shrugged. “Torment or not. I don’t care. If he’s useful or not is the only important thing. An honourable man knows how to fit into society.”

And with those words Uchida proved to Mitsuo that, while he might represent the Swedish side, Uchio’s core represented everything ugly with a Japan of the past that Mitsuo still kept running away from.

“Ulf could teach you about honour,” Mitsuo said with disgust filling his stomach. “I’ll help you with building a power base for young Wakayama, but if you try to fuck with Ulf you’d better keep the body bags ready.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, Mitsuo said. “My threats send people to hospital. You’re still standing.”

In the background Hasegawa-san looked like he was going to be sick.

“Don’t worry,” Mitsuo offered him. “In difference from your colleague there are perfectly decent arrivals. If it’s any comfort I can tell you that you should be deeply ashamed of what you did to your daughter. Young Wakayama is a good man.” Mitsuo nodded at Uchida. “I’m just trying to make this arsehole understand that Ulf is an even better one.”

“Enough with the pleasantries,” Uchida said, and finally some of the humour returned to his voice. “Can we agree on cutting that Kareyoshi idiot down to size?”

Mitsuo nodded. Uchida might be a sorry remnant of a past best forgotten, but in this case he was right. “It’ll take some time, and I’ll need your help, but we have to give Himekaizen back to the arrivals.”

“Then we have an agreement.”

Late afternoon saw Nakagawa Akio, former principal of Himekaizen academy, walk along the beach a bit away from where his former students were still playing along with their foreign guests.

Less than half an hour earlier he’d had a thoroughly disgusting conversation with two of their fathers. At least talking with Uchida-san had been awful. Hasegawa-san was a decent person if Nakagawa could trust his ability to assess people.

So now, as much to feel clean again as to finish the first stage of planning, he headed for the seaside pub to grab a beer together with Sano-san.

Now Sano-san wasn’t the kind of person you wanted your children to associate with. At least not until you got to know him better, and while Nakagawa didn’t really know him all that well, he still remembered the boy from high school who never wavered in his loyalty to his two best friends.

And now your kids are in high school, and both of them dragged into this insanity.

That was a sobering thought. A quarter of a century since the old man in a boy’s body helped the Wakayama’s… no she had been Masuda back then, to play merry hell with school regulations. But they had been their twin kids inverted. Masuda Natsumi the tomboy with absolutely no regard for authority and Wakayama Tadao who followed his girlfriend in whatever she came up with.

You were both good kids. Then Nakagawa saw Sano-san waving from a table. All three of you were. Strange as it was Nakagawa still regarded the subjectively older man as the former student he had once been. It didn’t matter that he had been seventy when he arrived. Nakagawa had only seen the teenager, and Sano-san never behaved like an old man in a young body during his years at Himekaizen.

As Nakagawa came closer to the table Sano-san rose from his chair.

“Sensei,” he said and bowed.

Yeah, I guess it’s that bad. Sano-san were only polite when trouble was brewing.

Nakagawa bowed in return and went to buy a beer. When he returned to the table Sano-san sat in his chair gazing at the kids on the beach.

“Irishima High, almost all of them,” Nakagawa said and sat down.

“I made a call.”

“Who?”

Sano-san lifted his glass to his mouth and drank. Wiping off foam from his lips with the back of his hand he turned to face Nakagawa. “I called their principal.”

Nakagawa nodded. He’d just wait for Sano-san to continue.

“Summer break. I’ll do the dirty preparations before then, but as soon as the kids leave for the break I’ll have a nice mine-field ready for the bastard.”

“I doubt we can have Kareyoshi kicked out. I’m gathering dirt on him, but it’s not enough yet.”

“You know,” Sano-san started, “back in Sweden the dirt you have would have been more than enough.”

Nakagawa grimaced. “No such thing as a ‘back in Sweden’ for my part. I’ve never been there.”

“You should visit.”

“Some day,” Nakagawa agreed. “What’s your goal,” he said to steer Sano-san back on topic.

There was another drawn out moment of silence as Sano-san emptied his beer. “I’m pretty certain I can have the expulsions voided. I doubt all that may of the students will want to transfer back though.”

“How so?” Nakagawa knew the answer, but he still needed to hear it.

“You old goat,” Sano-san said and grinned. “I’ll surprise you yet.” The grin became predatory. “Objectively Irishima High is a better school than Himekaizen. There’s little reason to downgrade.

Didn’t think of that aspect. Fine, you surprised me. “Go on.”

“We don’t want the Swedish embassy involved with this. Neither faction wants that, because that means the Swedish section becomes directly involved with the arrivals on this side.”

Which was the answer Nakagawa had been waiting for.

“So you expect the other faction to start kicking around their own people just because you ask them to?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Or rather...” Sano-san hesitated for a moment. Then his eyes shifted into something that had Nakagawa back away a little. “Or rather because we will ask them.”

“We?”

“Yes, we. Not as in you and me, but the other we?”

“Stop being cryptic!”

For once Sano-san reacted like the student he once had been, and he immediately wiped off that frightening smile from his face. “We, as in us arrivals. There are quite a few of us, and together we wield considerable power.”

Nakagawa gasped. “You couldn’t possibly organise...”

“Sensei, you forget that all of us have a past in Sweden. We’ve learned to be very good at silently organising ourselves. We just don’t parade down the streets.”

A sudden suspicion flared through Nakagawa’s mind. “For how long?”

The smile he got in return was anything but comforting. “It was all in place when I arrived here. I suspect it has always been in place.”

“A third faction. I should have known!”

“Sensei, you really believed us arrivals wouldn’t contact each other as soon as we had an opportunity?”

Nakagawa shook his head. “Contact, yes, but you make it sound like a club or something.”

“No, not a club. That’s Ulf’s thing. He’s the first who got a lot of non-arrivals involved. Anyway, rather think of it as a corporation. Really do, since in ways it is one.”

“What kind of pressure could you apply to the goons behind Kareyoshi?”

“Really, I thought you had guessed. If they don’t get their shit in order we’ll emigrate. There won’t be a need for factions, because there will be no arrivals in Japan.”

Three dozen arrivals moving to Sweden. Three dozen people who shared the ability to change their surroundings. The Swedish side would accept them gleefully.

“Do you really think you can pull it off?” Nakagawa wondered.

“I don’t have to,” Sano-san said. “I just need to make the other faction believe I can.”