"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
— Genesis 3:19
She walked into the lift and pressed the button to go to deck C. The only romaji in the lift was on those buttons, everything else covered with the Kusarian moonrunes, squiggles and hieroglyphs that she could not even attempt to learn. Thankfully she rode the lift alone.
Having puffed up her now blonde hair and corrected her now red dress, she winked at herself in the mirror. She hadn't expected to fit into her new style this quickly. It felt liberating, not having to cover up her face with a black hood, layers of makeup and fake lenses. This was authentic. It looked right.
The lift door opened with a ping. Many Samura staff were pacing around the deck. She squinted, trying to locate some kind of a guide as to where she should go, finally deciding to turn left and looking for any kind of indication where the office door number 112A could possibly be. Only minutes later she realised she had been walking in the wrong direction, as the numbers were ascending past 150. She sighed with frustration and turned back.
The language barrier worked in her favour. All papers that were required from her holding to comply with Kusarian laws had to be submitted in Japanese, and her Samura partners on Shinjuku kept all documents in English under lock and key, in an anonymous vault that nobody should ever want to see. The language barrier was just one of many obstacles she put up against her old identity being discovered. A web of operational security measures that kept her legitimate holding business set up in the only house that hadn't considered her a criminal in her previous life.
She was one of the good guys now, but that didn't mean any of her past transgressions were forgiven or forgotten. Perhaps they would be in time.
After pacing around the deck for a few minutes she finally found the door she was looking for. Underneath an elegant gold plaque with black kanji and the number 112A there was a less elegant piece of plastic taped down with the words "NNK Consulting, Hano Nobuyuki" written in pencil. She knocked, then opened it without waiting for an answer.
The office inside dispensed with the elegant, tasteful, feng shui appearance of the rest of the station. Boxes, piles of papers, binders, filing cabinets were stacked upon one another seemingly without any regard for organisation and order. The central part of the room was occupied by a giant metal desk, behind which sat a middle-aged Kusarian man typing something into a console. There were two chairs opposite the man.
Without waiting for an invitation, she carefully walked past a stack of papers and took the left chair. The man looked at her first with outrage, then curiosity, then fear. "Afternoon, Hano. You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Haze..." he started, but she interrupted him immediately.
"Haze is dead, let the earth be light to her. It's a bad idea to call out ghosts," she pierced him with her gaze. Up to now she had spoken with a border worlds Libertonian accent, the kind most associated with those not clinging to a national identity. To make the warning more substantial, she switched to a trained, posh, Bretonian voice. "They might come back to haunt you, or worse..."
The man went pale. She raised and eyebrow, then laughed out loud. "Oh, come on, Hano! Our mutual friend told me you were good at this."
Colours slowly returned to Nobuyuki's face. He gulped as his composure returned to him. "Of course. My apologies, miss..."
The woman grinned. "Oh, my manners. Rose. Mel Rose. Sorry it took me so long to get here. I was grieving, you know."
Nobuyuki raised an eyebrow, but asked nothing. "Just two papers for you to sign, one that attests that you will receive the inheritance from the late Jennifer Haze, another that engages my services to you directly." He passed a stylus to her.
"I guess I should have figured out a new signature... There. Now. You think this will be enough? No background checks, no issues?"
Nobuyuki shook his head. "Inheritance law is sacred in Kusari. And Haze did good work here. There are records of her shooting down Chrysanthemums and Dragons, claiming bounties for it. She was an upstanding guest, for all intents and purposes, unlike those Guild fiends. You weren't related, so there's a tax to pay, one percent of the value. I handled that. That's about it."
"Good. What about business? I wasn't paying attention, I was off the grid."
The consultant tapped something into his console, then turned the screen so Rose could see as well. It showed a report with candlestick charts and columns of numbers. "The balance sheet is looking good. The inherited cash is in the company's account, minus the tax, of course. Your bid on wartime bonds paid off. The index funds are up three percent, that's not much, keeping in mind previous trends, but the economy in Kusari is going sideways after the war."
"What about the ventures?"
Nobuyuki scrolled the report. "Streethawk is the only one that's turning any profit now. They're actually doing very good. Seems like that business of selling premium alcohol was an excellent pick. The other ones, the Honshu bike company and the Cambridge biotech are in the red. Not a complete write-off, though."
Rose wanted to dig into the matter. "Streethawk... Exile been in touch?"
"No, unfortunately. The filings were on time, but nothing beyond that. I didn't ask about anything more, in the transition period."
She tapped her finger on her cheek and paused for a minute, then shrugged. "You got anything else for me?"
"That's all." He stood up. "Good meeting you, miss Rose. Welcome aboard."
Mel smirked. "You too, Hano. Take care of yourself. And of me."
She left the office and sighed with relief. She was one of the good guys now, even though her capital was built on blood money. On bounties financed by Hackers, Rogues, Insurgents. On the corpses of Liberty's finest. A tiny part of her felt guilty about it. She walked back to the lift. On the way, she set up a small, recurring donation to a charity for deceased veterans in Liberty from the holding's account. Tax deductible. The guilty part was silenced, the business part was appeased. She smiled. What new opportunities lay ahead?
