“Get to the conference room, now!” Hotaru whispered in the dark as he shook Yuto. The man was sleeping in a cot. He groaned and peered into darkness, but Hotaru had already moved to the next cot, Kenji’s, where he repeated the same message.

  Five minutes later, the core members of the KFC were gathered in the conference room, their eyes red and puffy. Hotaru hadn’t been the only one to shed tears. They all looked at Hotaru in confusion as he was once again scanning for listening devices.

  What now?

  Ishiro opened his mouth to demand an explanation, but Hotaru ignored him, completing his inspection. No bugs, no network connections and there were no phones in the room.

  Satisfied the space was secure, Hotaru turned to his colleagues, beaming.

  “Kaori’s alive.” he said.

  His voice was barely a whisper, but stopped his audience dead in their tracks. Not giving them any time to recover from the news, he proceeded to explain Takeru’s discoveries.

  “By now, she should be…” he checked his pocket watch, “she’s landed in Bangkok already. Probably on her way to an hotel.”

  They looked at him in awe, their eyes full of hope. By some miracle, their goddess had emerged from her watery grave and been returned to them!

  “We have to go get her!” Ishiro said, overjoyed. “I’ll get my private jet ready…”

  “No time for that. There’s a direct flight at 7:50 am from Narita. If we take it, it will be faster, but send your plane to Bangkok anyway, we’ll need it to bring Kaori back.”

  “What should we tell the public?” Yuto asked.

  “Nothing.” Hotaru answered. “Not even a word to the volunteers. We can’t prove anything yet, and announcing that she is alive means contradicting directly the Police. We can’t reveal our sources or explain how we have access to travel data from Kagoshima airport, so until we find Kaori, the best course of action is to continue acting the same as before.”

  “But what the hell is wrong with the police?” Kenji said in anger. “This is outrageous. How is this level of corruption even possible?”

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  “You have no idea, Kenji” Hotaru said. “When some interests are involved, anything goes. Anyway, that’s for later. First, we need to find Kaori and make sure she’s safe. They are coming for her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘coming for her’?”

  “The chief of police officially pronounced her dead and claimed they have DNA evidence to prove it. And Oroshi shot at her. What do you think happens to them when Kaori makes it back alive and accuses Oroshi of attempted murder?”

  A sense of dread fell in the room. On some level, they had all known a crime had been committed, but it was an abstract concept, a distant afterthought to the fantasy of heroically rescuing Kaori.

  Now, they were deep in conspiracy land, and the evidence couldn’t be denied.

  “So, how do we find her?” Ishiro asked. “We are in the middle of the Thai New Year. I’ve been there a few times, it’s complete chaos, but even without that, finding her in Thailand would not to be easy.”

  “I’m not sure, but we have to try and pick up her trail.” Hotaru answered. “She’s been through the airport, most likely one of the cab drivers would have seen her. There are also the airport shops. But one thing is for sure, we need boots on the ground.”

  Koji raised his hand hesitantly. “We can call the hotels.”

  “We can try, but there’s no way she checked in under her name. She traveled with Aoki’s passport, but I’m not sure she’s going to give her name.”

  “What about the Gaijin? He looks recognizable enough. If I get the guys to call all the hotels asking for Ma?l, along with a Japanese girl… 3 minutes per call means 20 hotels per hour per person. We still have 25 guys here, so about 500 hotels/hour. We can check every hotel in Bangkok by the time you land. Maybe also all the good hotels in the rest of the country.”

  They looked at him with awe. “That’s brilliant, Koji!” Hotaru exclaimed. “Yuto, you need to stay here and keep the podcast going. We have to keep Kaori’s fan base alive and active. Step up the search for Kagoshima’s coast line. That ship has to be there somewhere, or she wouldn’t have flown out of Kagoshima’s airport. Make them inspect every inch of the coast. It IS there somewhere, waiting to be found. Once we find it, we will need local police/coast guards to get evidence she was on board, and if we can do that, it would prove she didn’t die on Sado island.”

  “Isn’t it enough if she comes back?”

  “Officially, she is dead now, and Oroshi will try to have her killed when she reappears. We need to broadcast evidence of her survival as soon as we have something solid. If we can find proof, we can start getting the news out, otherwise, she’d have to go to the police to claim her identity back, and Oroshi could just grab her then.”

  “Who the fuck is Oroshi, really?” Ishiro said.

  Hotaru paused for a while. “I don’t have the evidence yet but…”

  “Your best guess.”

  “Yakuza.”

  They stared at each other in silence. An otaku fan club facing down organized crime didn’t sound like a fair fight, but when it came to Kaori, there was no backing down.