CHAPTER ONE The Boy Who Left the Island For starters, I figured I’d ask around online. I opened Yahoo! Answers on my smartphone, glanced around—just in case—then typed in my question. I’m a guy in my first year of high school. I’m looking for a part-time job that pays well in Tokyo. Are there any places that will hire you even if you don’t have a student ID? Hmm, would that work? The Internet could be harsh, and I got the feeling I was going to get myself trolled hard. Still, a search could only get you so far, and I had no one else to ask. Just as I was about to hit the POST button, a shipboard announcement began. “Extremely heavy rain is predicted over the ocean. If you are out on deck, for your own safety, please go indoors. I repeat, extremely heavy rain is predicted…” “Yessss,” I muttered under my breath. Right now, I just might get the deck all to myself. I’d been getting sick of sitting in the second-class cabin, which was a literal pain in the butt, and I wanted to go out on deck before the other passengers came back and watch the rain start coming down. I stuck my smartphone into the pocket of my jeans, then headed for the stairs at a run. This Tokyo-bound ferry had five floors, and my cheap second-class ticket got me a spot in a room on the lowest level, where the noise of the engine was especially loud and everybody had to sleep sprawled together on the tatami flooring. Shooting a glance at the comfortable-looking first-class cabins out of the corner of my eye, I climbed up two floors’ worth of the interior stairwell, then exited into a corridor that ran around the ship’s outer wall. A crowd of people was just coming back in from the deck, or so I assumed. Page 8 Goldenagato | mp4directs.com