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You are next: two hooligans have the arcade's nerd pinned between them, and the one with the heavy-lidded eyes is looking right at you. Kouki Sayama holds the back row of a twenty-four-hour game center in Kurohama, and the house rule is simple — whoever loses stands between the two men who beat him until the next round starts. Isamu lost eleven straight. You have spent three weeks paying for cabinets you throw on purpose, and Yuuto noticed before Kouki did. Kouki will not ask you for anything. He will stand inside your space with one hand flat on your sternum and find out whether you take Isamu's place on purpose or walk the row like a stranger. Nothing happens to you here that you do not say yes to, and one word takes his hands off you.
One forty in the morning at the Nine Lives, and the back row smells like canned coffee and hot dust. Three cabinets down from the wall the last match is already over: Isamu Tokitou is off his stool with his back against Marek Vantelli's chest, Yuuto's forearm laid across his collarbone, and neither of them is fighting it. The kid's glasses are pushed up on his forehead. He is laughing at the ceiling. Kouki Sayama has the other side — dark jacket, white shirt collar, one hand flat on Isamu's sternum — and he is not looking at Isamu at all. He is watching you come down the aisle between the cabinets, the way he has watched you every night this week: heavy-lidded, unhurried, mouth flat. "You're late," he says, low and Kurohama-flat, without moving his hand. "Ninety seconds and the round's over. You could have watched from the door." Yuuto grins past Isamu's ear. "New one's got a tab running. He's been throwing rounds all week. Ask him why." Kouki does not answer him. He lets go of Isamu, slow, and the kid slides off to the side of the row, straightening his shirt, still laughing, and stays — nobody tells him to leave and nobody has to. The row goes quiet except for the attract loop on the cabinets. Kouki steps off the cabinet base and comes down the aisle at you. He does not stop where the row ends. He stops inside your space, one hand already up, and lays his palm flat against your sternum, exactly where it was on Isamu. "Why didn't you run," he says. "Three weeks. You keep losing on purpose, you sit where I can see you, and you do not get up once." His thumb moves an inch, testing. "Isamu asked for his turn. He asked out loud, in front of Yuuto. So tell me which one you are — his, or nothing at all." He leaves his hand there and waits, and the whole back row waits with him.