Riiko Hoshino had no regrets about last night. More accurately, she hadn't had time for regrets. From the moment she noticed the name "Yoshio Dohmoto" on the delivery list, the three monitors had gone dark past three in the morning. The resource folder from the video she'd posted three months ago, screenshots of newspaper articles from back then, the public meeting minutes from the Yoeda New Town Complex Three management association—she'd pulled everything out, stuck notes on them, organized the timeline. And then she'd noticed the alarm was ringing. The time she'd set was six. The delivery hub—Hop Step Yoeda Central—opened at six-thirty. Twelve minutes by bicycle along the Edagawa. The math didn't work out. As she powered down the monitors, Riiko checked her smartphone screen. Six twenty-four. *(I'm done for.)* She assessed the situation calmly, and calmly reached that conclusion. ＊ She opened the sliding door of the hub at six thirty-six. Hop Step Yoeda Central was a single-story former warehouse converted along the Edagawa, with the smell of cardboard and newspaper mixed into the morning air. Packages were stacked in the sorting space, and delivery workers moved through their tasks in silence. Kyouya Hayase stood in front of the sorting table. One hundred eighty centimeters tall. Deep purple short hair arranged in a slightly careless way, gray eyes quickly scanning the delivery slips. A small dented badge on the chest of his uniform. His expression didn't change. But when Riiko opened the sliding door, his gaze shifted toward her. One second. Two seconds. "Six minutes." His voice was low and quiet. Riiko kept the apology she'd prepared caught in her throat, her mouth closed. She'd been about to say, "Sorry, I was investigating last night—" But the single phrase "six minutes" was so complete in itself that there was nowhere to add anything else. Hayase had already returned his gaze to the slips. She couldn't apologize. There was no place to apologize. *(I want to apologize but can't—what kind of situation is this?)* Riiko stood in her designated spot with her mouth closed. It was a strange equilibrium. She hadn't been scolded, nor had she been forgiven. Just the fact that she was "six minutes late" hung in the air, and no one touched it further. One of the delivery workers—a sun-tanned man in his forties—looked at Riiko's face and grinned. "Ah, a newbie, huh? Kyouya told you 'six minutes'? You got off light," he said quietly. Riiko nodded. No sound came out. Hayase brought the manual and delivery route map three minutes later. "The basic flow is written here. Terminal operation is the same as I explained yesterday. If no one's home, leave a notice and move on. Redelivery requests are automatically handled by HS Navi—Hop Step's exclusive delivery management app." Thirty seconds of explanation. Riiko took it. "…Understood." That was all. No consideration, no encouragement. No "do your best" or "are you okay?" Just the necessary information, in the necessary amount, and done. *(Strangely… it's easier.)* Riiko thought that as she folded the manual. When people are considerate, you brace yourself. When you're encouraged, you reflexively want to run. But if it's just "six minutes" and "it's written here," then you can complete it with just "understood." She was learning for the first time that being cold could be used this way. ＊ Today's delivery area was Yoeda New Town Complex Three—about two point five kilometers southwest of the hub, sprawling across a hill. Twenty-four five-story buildings built in 1982, nine hundred sixty units total. No elevators. Current occupancy rate sixty-eight percent, average resident age sixty-seven, according to a note in the manual. *Delivery workers' nightmare*, it said. She thought this wasn't a place to come on your first day, but she wasn't in a position to say so. She was six minutes late. She borrowed a light van, loaded the packages, and drove up the hill. The moment she arrived at the complex, Riiko couldn't move in the car for about five seconds. Too many buildings. The numbers were hard to read. C-1, C-2, C-3… The roads were complicated, and the map app was pointing to a slightly different location. The May morning light hit the concrete, giving off an indescribable whiteness. *(Stay calm. If you think logically, building numbers correspond to addresses.)* Deep breath. Check the terminal. First delivery: third floor of Building B-3. She carried the package into the entrance and pressed the intercom. "Yes?" "Hop Step delivery. I'm here to deliver your package—" "Did you change again?! The last person came much earlier!" Riiko's words stopped. *"Changed again"*—anger at the fact that the handler had switched. Not dissatisfaction with the previous person, but anger at the change itself. A reaction common in elderly people, she'd read somewhere. "…I'm very sorry." "Sorry doesn't mean anything. Send someone competent next time." A click—just the sound of the lock releasing, then the voice cut off. Riiko climbed the stairs to the third floor. Over two kilos in her arms, climbing the creaking stairs, standing in front of the third-floor door, pressing the buzzer, waiting thirty seconds, the door opening, handing over the package, and it closing without a word of thanks. *(…Yeah.)* On to the next delivery. This time it was the fifth floor of Building D-4. Fifth floor. No elevator. The package was just under three kilos. She climbed step by step, pressing down with each one. On the landing between the fourth and fifth floors, Riiko took a break. Physical strength wasn't the problem—the problem was that her leg muscles hadn't climbed five flights since more than two years ago. She stood in front of the door and pressed the buzzer. …No answer. She pressed again. …No answer. Early Hayase's explanation came back to her: "If no one's home, leave a notice and—" She fumbled in her delivery bag. She couldn't find a pen. Chest pocket of her uniform. Pants pocket. She set the package on the floor and opened the whole bag. No pen. *(I definitely put it in. I put it in when I checked the bag last night—but last night I was investigating and stopped to check, so I put off putting it in, which means—)* She hadn't put it in. Riiko couldn't put herself on a shelf, so she reached the accurate conclusion: "It's my fault." Reaching that conclusion accurately made her feel even worse. She tried to enter the absence record on the terminal, but the screen froze. *(It froze.)* Tapping didn't help. She held down the restart button. The logo appeared. She waited for startup. On the fifth-floor landing, three kilos of package at her feet, waiting for the terminal to restart. A thin fluorescent light glowed dimly on the concrete wall. A TV played somewhere in one of the rooms. *So this is what delivery work is like.* Riiko thought. Not anger, but quiet acceptance. The terminal came back. She processed the absence notice and was heading to the next delivery when a voice came from C-7, room 303: "Did you ring the buzzer?" She turned. The door was slightly open, and a woman in her seventies was looking out. "…It seems you weren't home earlier." "It takes me time to get to the door. Sorry about that. Can you deliver it today?" "Ah, yes. …If so, I can give it to you now." "That would help. Just a moment." The door closed, then opened again. She'd brought her seal. Thirty seconds later, Riiko handed over the package. "Thank you." "You're welcome." "…You look like you've had a rough time." Riiko was a little surprised. The old woman was small, her white-streaked hair neatly tied back. Haru Mishima—Riiko had confirmed the name from the slip. Wrinkles gathered at the corners of her eyes, but the eyes themselves still held a bright color. Not "you've had a rough time" but "you look like you've had a rough time." A statement of fact. Observation, not consolation. "…Well, a bit." The words came out. For the first time today, there was the sensation of words coming back as conversation. "That sounds really rough." Haru said just that and closed the door. She didn't say "hang in there" or "take care." Just repeated the fact: "That sounds really rough." Somehow, that fit best. Riiko stood in front of the door for a while. The hallway was lit by a fluorescent light that was better than the one on the fifth-floor landing, and somewhere outside, a bird was singing. *(…Strange person.)* Strange, but not bad. Thinking that, she headed to the next building. At the next delivery, the recipient asked her to "come back in thirty minutes." Riiko waited exactly thirty minutes. She sat on a bench by the entrance of Building C-7, reading through the HS Navi operation guide on her terminal, and pressed the intercom exactly thirty minutes later. This time someone answered. *(Maybe I waited too literally, but the other person said "thirty minutes later.")* She told herself that was right, and smiled slightly at herself. The fact that she'd waited thirty minutes was a little funny, but the fact that she couldn't move was also true, and she couldn't bring herself to blame herself for not being able to move. ＊ She returned to the hub a little after two in the afternoon. As she bundled the completed delivery slips, Riiko was checking today's records on her terminal. With each tap, slip numbers and addresses scrolled past. C-7 Building, D-4 Building, B-3 Building— Her hand stopped. "Return address: Yoeda City, Sakuradai 2-chome, 0-banchi" She scrolled back and checked again. 0-banchi. Zero. Riiko remembered from last night—or rather, when she'd memorized the manual before starting the job. There was one line written small on the page explaining the address input system: "Since zero-banchi is set to trigger an error flag in the system, it's normally impossible to input. Auto-correction activates in case of misentry." Auto-correction hadn't activated. Which meant it was entered manually. Or someone who knew the system's loophole had deliberately gotten it through. Not a misentry. The return address didn't exist. It had been deliberately made not to exist. *(Who. Why. For a package to Haru Mishima?)* Once the reasoning circuit started, Riiko couldn't stop it. It was part of her body that hadn't changed even during two years shut away in her room—if anything, the fatigue from today made the power flow back in the opposite direction, like a rebound. In front of the small office at the back of the sorting space, Hayase was checking documents. Riiko stood up. Her legs felt heavy. Interpersonal anxiety and, on the other hand, the impulse to share her reasoning clashed for a moment. Even Riiko didn't know which would win until the last second. As it turned out, her legs moved. "Um…" Hayase looked up. His gray eyes were looking slightly above Riiko's face. "About today's deliveries—the slip for Haru Mishima at C-7 Building had a return address of Sakuradai 2-chome, 0-banchi. The manual says zero-banchi should trigger a system error. So I thought it must have been deliberately gotten through—" Hayase's hand stopped. The sound of him setting down the documents. Small, quiet. Then Hayase looked at Riiko's face directly for the first time. "You noticed that?" The tone of his voice was clearly different. Not the "six minutes" or "it's written here" from this morning. The businesslike quietness remained, but something else was mixed in. Riiko couldn't quite put into words what it was. "You knew?" There was a pause. "I've been wondering about it for a while." "…About the zero-banchi?" "Not just that slip." Hayase didn't say more. He took the slip, checked the number, and filed it. The words "that's all for today" came through not as speech but as attitude. Hayase created the end of the conversation without words. Riiko returned to her seat. She turned over the tone of hi