My Class is Null, But I Always Get the Best Outcome

Chapter 152: Normal Day

Kai knew something was wrong the moment he opened the apartment door.

Leo was waiting.

Not the casual version of waiting, not Leo happening to be in the room when someone came home. Actual waiting, positioned near the entrance in a way that communicated he had been there for a while and had prepared.

The moment Kai stepped inside, Leo pointed at him.

"Aha," he said.

Kai immediately considered leaving.

Mina was on the couch with a book and did not look up. "He’s been doing this for three hours," she said.

Leo did not acknowledge this. "You are hiding something."

Kai closed the door behind him. "No."

"That is exactly what someone hiding something would say."

"It isn’t."

"It is."

Mina turned a page.

"He has a notebook," she said.

Kai looked at Leo.

Leo produced a notebook.

An actual physical notebook.

Kai stared at it. "You wrote things down."

"I am conducting an investigation."

"You’re in school."

"That’s how I have time for investigations."

Mina finally looked up. "You’re failing the investigation."

Leo ignored her and opened the notebook.

"Evidence Number One." He looked at Kai with the gravity of someone delivering a significant finding. "You disappeared."

"I do that regularly," Kai said.

"Not like this."

"Like what."

Leo pointed at the notebook rather than answering. "Evidence Number Two."

Kai waited.

"Sera also disappeared."

"That’s not evidence of anything."

"They disappeared at the same time," Leo said. He closed the notebook with the specific energy of someone making a point. "Simultaneously. Which is more suspicious."

Mina rubbed her forehead. "People can be in the same place at the same time without it being suspicious."

"In most cases," Leo said.

He opened the notebook again. "Evidence Number Three."

Kai sat down on the principle that this was going to take a while and he might as well be comfortable.

"You both came back thinking," Leo said.

Silence.

"People think all the time," Mina said.

"Not like this."

"How would you know the difference."

"I observe," Leo said. He said it the way someone said something they had been waiting to say.

Mina looked at Kai. "I apologize on behalf of the family."

"You’re part of the family," Leo said.

"I apologize anyway," Mina said.

Leo flipped to the next page. "Theories."

"No," Kai said.

"Theory One." Leo cleared his throat. "Secret dungeon."

He crossed it out immediately.

"Why are you crossing it out," Kai said.

"Too obvious."

"You wrote it down to cross it out."

"I considered it seriously and then rejected it," Leo said. He did not find this unusual. "Theory Two. Secret mission."

Mina looked up from her book. "That’s actually plausible."

Leo pointed at her. "Exactly."

Kai looked at both of them. "It isn’t."

Leo crossed out a line. "Unfortunate." He brightened. "Theory Three."

Kai looked at the ceiling.

"Government conspiracy," Leo said.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Mina blinked. "Why would the government involve Kai in a conspiracy."

Leo looked at her as though the answer was self-evident. "Because he’s Kai."

A pause.

Mina appeared to genuinely consider this. Then: "Fair."

Kai looked at both of them.

Neither seemed to find any of this unusual.

Lunch happened when Mina decided the investigation had reached a level of stupidity that required intervention. She stood and went to the kitchen and Leo followed, which in practice meant Leo talked while Mina cooked.

"You are approaching the vegetables incorrectly," Leo said.

"You are not cutting anything," Mina said.

"I’m providing perspective."

"You’re in the way."

"Both can be true."

Kai sat at the table and watched this from a safe distance. No gates. No briefings. No underground archives or ancient civilizations or men who had survived centuries alone in a room. Just Leo and Mina determining via ongoing argument whether Leo’s presence in the kitchen was a net positive or negative.

The evidence strongly suggested negative.

Leo believed he was contributing morale support.

Food appeared eventually. The argument continued through most of lunch, somehow, the specific quality of an argument between two people who had been having it in various forms their entire lives and were very good at maintaining it.

At some point Leo looked at Kai directly. "So what are you doing next."

The question arrived casually.

Kai opened his mouth to answer.

The answer was not there.

He paused.

It was such a simple question that the absence of an immediate response to it was notable. He always had an answer to what came next. The next gate. The next operation. The next threat to respond to or problem to resolve. There was always a next thing with a clear shape.

Right now the next thing was not yet clear.

Leo noticed the pause. "You don’t know."

"I know the direction." Kai said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means I know what I need to do."

Leo looked at Mina. Mina looked at Leo. Some communication passed between them that Kai could not fully interpret.

"That’s suspicious," Leo said.

"You think everything is suspicious," Kai said.

"Correct." Leo pointed his fork. "Because when something isn’t suspicious it’s more suspicious."

"That doesn’t make sense," Mina said.

"It makes complete sense."

"It makes no sense."

Kai smiled despite himself.

The afternoon was quiet. Leo eventually disappeared into his room to do something that was definitely loud based on the intermittent sounds of it. Mina alternated between a document on her tablet and the book she had been reading since Kai arrived home.

At some point she came and sat near him.

"You’ve been distracted all day," she said.

Not an accusation. Just an observation. The way Mina made observations, which was precisely and without attached pressure.

"Maybe," he said.

She looked at him. Not searching exactly. Just attending.

"Something happened," she said.

He thought about the Archive. About the man in the room at the bottom of it. About the photograph with the faces gone and the notebooks on the shelf and the cracked cup. About the word that had meant something different by the end of the conversation than it had at the beginning.

"Complicated something," he said.

Mina nodded. She accepted this the way she accepted most things, which was by acknowledging it and then giving it space rather than filling the space with questions.

"Good complicated or bad complicated," she said.

He thought about it. "I’m still figuring that out."

She nodded again. "Okay."

She started to stand.

Then she stopped.

"Whatever it is," she said.

He looked at her.

"You’ll figure it out." She looked at him the way she had been looking at him since they were children, the look that contained the specific kind of confidence that came from having watched someone fail at things and succeed at things and fail again and keep going. Not blind faith. Something more honest than that. "You always do."

Then she left the room.

He sat with it for a while.

Leo returned an hour later with another notebook.

Kai stood up immediately.

Leo pointed. "He’s evading."

"I’m leaving the room."

"Evasion."

"People are allowed to leave rooms."

"Suspicious people leave rooms."

Mina’s voice came from the kitchen. "Or people who don’t want to be interrogated."

"Same thing," Leo said.

"Not the same thing," Mina said.

Kai went down the hall.

Behind him the investigation apparently continued without its subject present. Leo’s voice, then Mina’s, then Leo’s again. The rhythm of it was comfortable in the way that only things you have heard your whole life could be comfortable. Not the words. The rhythm.

The apartment quieted eventually. Leo asleep. Mina asleep. The city outside doing its evening settling.

Kai was in the living room.

There was a photograph on one of the shelves. Not a particularly notable photograph. An old one, from some occasion he could no longer specifically remember, the three of them in whatever the moment had been that had made someone think to take a picture. Leo younger, Mina with her hair a different length, Kai at a version of himself that was slightly different from the current version.

He picked it up.

The image was clear. The faces were clear. The specific expressions of that particular moment, whatever it had been, preserved in the detail that the man’s photograph had lost.

He thought about the notebooks. About the man writing things down because time was taking them and he was fighting to keep them. About the feelings that remained in the spaces where the faces used to be, the shape of someone without the content.

He looked at the photograph.

Then toward the hallway.

Then at the photograph again.

He held it carefully.

The Archive was still down there. The questions it had raised were still unanswered. The system notification that had appeared on his phone and Sera’s phone simultaneously was still unexplained. The next thing was still coming, whatever form it took, and it would require response the way everything had required response.

But the photograph in his hands was specific.

The people in it were specific.

Leo’s voice still in the apartment air from an hour ago, carrying on an investigation that had no real subject and no real conclusion but which had been entirely genuine in its own way. Mina’s hand on his arm before she left the room and the confidence in it that was not naive and not performed.

The Candidate had kept his photograph for centuries.

Had fought to keep the detail in it.

Had lost that fight eventually but had kept fighting it anyway.

Kai understood why.

Some things were worth the fight to remember. Not because losing them was survivable. Because they were specific enough to be worth everything that came with protecting them.

He put the photograph back.