## Chapter 383 — See You Next Year

Monday, 27 December 2027, began for Kanno with a photograph on the wall and a decision she had been postponing because postponing it had remained comfortable.

Ian's photograph hung to the left of her desk, close enough to enter her peripheral vision when she leaned back from the monitor. In the clearer morning light the old stone looked flatter than it had on Christmas afternoon, but the former window still interrupted the wall in the same useful, inelegant way: dark red timber, fire extinguisher, boxes, tools, a cable that Kanno would have moved if she had been taking the photograph herself.

She had spent most of Sunday working beneath it. By evening she had stopped noticing it every time she looked up, which was the condition she wanted.

Kanno made coffee, sat down and opened the direct message thread she had used with Ian before the group chat existed. She did not open `ian-meeting-not-yet.txt`. The file had already done its work. A meeting in January. Alone. Neutral constructed place. No demonstrations unless she asked. Thomas and Isha could remain in 202 if all three still wanted that arrangement. Ian was not to use her as a route for interpreting either of them.

She typed more briefly than the file.

`Kanno: I have decided I would like to meet you one-to-one sometime in January. Not yet. I will choose a date and we can agree the details closer to it. I would like Thomas and Isha to remain in 202 if they are willing, but not attend the meeting. Is that acceptable?`

She read it twice, removed a sentence explaining why she wanted to meet alone, and sent it.

The reply arrived a short time later.

`ian: Yes. We can discuss details nearer the time.`

Kanno looked at the message for several seconds.

No café opened. Nothing appeared on her desk. The photograph on the wall stayed a photograph.

She put her phone face down beside the keyboard and started work.

---

Thomas's final university day of 2027 was quieter than the previous Monday and busier in less visible ways.

Half the office seemed to be closing something. Files moved from desks into shared folders. Paper notices came down because their dates expired during the break. Sugiyama had written a January list on the whiteboard in handwriting large enough to survive three metres of corridor, then added a second line because the first list had omitted two returning exchange students.

Mori was already at her desk when Thomas arrived. She looked at the paper bag in his hand.

“Please tell me that isn't Christmas cake.”

“Mandarins.”

“Acceptable. Put them where people can take them before four.”

Thomas did. The bag had been Isha's suggestion after he spent several minutes considering whether taking leftover cake to work would constitute generosity or disposal. Her answer had been that nobody wanted his ethical framework attached to sponge.

He opened the shared case list.

There were fewer live cases than usual. Most students who could leave things until January had already done so. The difficult ones were difficult precisely because they could not. A doctoral student needed confirmation that a residence document uploaded late on Friday had reached the right office before closure. A visiting researcher had changed a January arrival date after an airline cancellation. Two students had replied to the winter-arrival notice with questions already answered on the first page.

Thomas answered the last two first.

By ten, the doctoral student's document had become the day's only problem with the potential to follow him home. The student needed no decision before January, but the upload portal showed only **submitted**, and the responsible faculty contact had already started leave. Thomas could see the document. He could see the submission time. He could not see whether the faculty office had accepted it into the next stage.

Six months earlier he would probably have begun finding a person who knew a person who might still be checking email.

Instead he called the central residence office once, confirmed what their system could actually establish, and wrote the student a shorter answer than the one forming in his head.

> Your upload was successfully submitted before the deadline. The faculty review status is not available to our office. The faculty will resume processing after the closure. You do not need to upload the document again unless they contact you.

He read it once, added the reopening contact information already present in the winter guide, and sent it.

Sugiyama passed behind his chair carrying a stack of outdated notices towards the recycling tray. “Did you solve it?”

“I solved the part we own.”

She stopped long enough to study him. “That sounded rehearsed. You have been listening to Mori-san.” Then she continued towards the recycling tray before Thomas could defend himself.

The winter-arrival guide itself required almost nothing from him. That pleased him more than it should have. One Facilities number had changed the previous week and already sat correctly in the shared source sheet. Sugiyama had added two January notes. Mori had changed a heading in the student version because the old one sounded too much like an internal procedure. Thomas found one line he wanted to rewrite, checked whether the change mattered, and left it alone.

At eleven forty, a student arrived in person carrying a folder thick enough to imply either thorough preparation or complete confusion. It proved to be both. She was travelling home for New Year, returning in January and worried that her residence card would expire during spring research travel. The expiry date was months away. She had printed material about renewal, re-entry, university travel insurance and something from a prefectural page that did not apply to her at all.

Thomas listened until the actual question emerged.

“You do not need to solve all of this today,” he told her. “Your card remains valid through the trip you have described. When you come back in January, book an appointment with us and bring the card, your travel dates and the university document you already have. We can separate renewal from travel then.”

She looked down at the folder. “So I don't need these?”

“Some of them may be useful later. I would not carry the prefectural waste-disposal page to immigration.”

The student stared at the sheet she had apparently printed without noticing its subject, then laughed hard enough to cover her face.

Thomas smiled and helped her divide the folder into *January* and *probably recycling*.

By lunchtime the office felt half packed away. Several people ate at their desks because the staff room had acquired boxes waiting to be taken home. Sugiyama distributed individually wrapped sweets from a client office. Mori refused a second one and accepted it five minutes later when nobody was looking.

Thomas ate noodles from the cafeteria with Endo, who had been in meetings most of the morning and seemed to regard lunch as an interruption he had nevertheless chosen to respect.

After asking whether Thomas had finished the December handover, Endo said, “This will be your first January as regular staff. Do not treat the new calendar as an invitation to redesign anything.”

Thomas recognised the warning immediately. “The office is closed on the second.”

Endo continued eating. “I know. I am making the request in advance.”

They finished lunch discussing nothing more consequential than which staff entrance would be used after a January maintenance job. Thomas went back upstairs with a piece of paper in his pocket on which Endo had drawn the wrong door and crossed it out.

The afternoon shortened by itself.

Thomas checked his January appointments, made sure the two cases requiring follow-up were assigned to dates rather than to his memory, and set his automatic reply for his leave and the year-end closure that followed it. He gave the approved contact route for days when another desk was still staffed, then the reopening information. The first draft contained four explanatory sentences after the contact details. He removed two.

At four twenty, Mori stood beside the whiteboard and read the January list.

“Vaeloren-san, your three January arrivals are all on the shared sheet?”

“Yes. Sugiyama-san has the same access.”

Sugiyama looked over from her desk. “I have more access than I wanted. Mostly because correcting him became part of the project.”

Mori marked the line complete before Thomas could object.

A little before five, people began saying the phrase Thomas had heard all week and had not expected to care about.

*See you next year.*

It travelled casually from desk to desk. One colleague left with two shopping bags and called it from the doorway. Another bowed towards Mori and Sugiyama before remembering Thomas was still behind the partition and repeating it in his direction. Nobody meant anything by it beyond the calendar.

Thomas shut down his computer at five twenty-four.

The January calendar disappeared from the screen, but he had spent enough time with it to know his name was on the other side of the holiday. Meetings. Arrival work. A training session. Several cases whose owners had dates and names attached to them.

Sugiyama was putting on her coat.

“See you next year, Thomas-san.”

“See you next year.”

He put on his own coat, took two remaining mandarins because Mori ordered him not to leave them over the closure, and went home.

---

The days between Thomas's last workday and New Year's Eve were too short to become a holiday routine.

Isha had one climbing-centre shift and one session at the MMA gym which contained no revelation, only technical work and a reminder from Shibata that bruises being gone did not make December's fight footage obsolete. Thomas went to the range once, put arrows in several places around the target that could all technically be described as the target, and came home satisfied enough not to explain the grouping.

They cleaned flat 202 in pieces. Bedding was washed. Cupboards acquired space. Thomas finally removed three instruction manuals for appliances they no longer owned. Isha found a packet of decorative paper she had forgotten buying and refused to classify it as clutter because it had immediately become useful again by being found.

The flexible room returned fully to storage, drying and guest use. No door changed destination.

On Friday, 31 December, Thomas started stock for soba before lunch and was told by Isha that he had converted a simple meal into an all-day activity.

“It is stock,” he said. “It mostly sits there.”

Isha pointed out that he had checked it four times. Thomas replied that this was because it was in the kitchen, which she treated as evidence for her position.

She leaned against the counter, the fine gold-coloured chain of her Christmas necklace visible above a dark red knit top. She had worn it during the days at home and left it boxed during climbing and MMA. The routine was already becoming less remarkable. Thomas still occasionally remembered what sat beneath the fabric and lost the next sentence in his head.

“Kanno is bringing tempura,” Isha added. “You were specifically instructed not to make that too.”

Thomas said he remembered. She left the kitchen after a satisfied “Good,” and he checked the stock again only because he had to turn the heat down.

Kanno arrived shortly after seven carrying a paper bag from a shop near her station, a small box of black beans she said were for tomorrow if anybody wanted them, and no overnight bag.

“I am not staying until breakfast,” she said before Thomas asked. “I checked transport. I have a plan.”

Thomas raised both hands. “I wasn't going to organise you.”

Kanno said he had been about to ask whether she had organised herself. Thomas considered the distinction and decided silence was safer.

Isha took Kanno's coat and hung it beside theirs.

They ate toshikoshi soba at the dining table, the tempura kept separate until the last moment because Kanno objected to buying crisp food and then deliberately making it soft. Thomas's broth was good. Nobody held a meeting about it.

The television played a year-end music programme at low volume from the other side of the room. Isha recognised some performers and not others. Kanno knew more than either of them and cared about fewer than Thomas expected. They drifted between watching, talking and ignoring it.

The first serious subject arrived while Thomas was clearing bowls.

Kanno said, “I asked Ian to meet me.”

Thomas stopped with two bowls stacked in his hands.

Isha's attention moved immediately from the television to Kanno. “When?”

“Monday morning. I messaged him directly. I said sometime in January, one-to-one, details later. He agreed.”

Thomas carried the bowls to the sink before answering. It gave the statement room to become information rather than emergency.

When he returned, Kanno had taken out her phone but had not unlocked it.

“I haven't chosen the date,” she said. “I am still comfortable with you two being here in 202 while I meet him somewhere else, if you are willing. I do not want you in the meeting, and I do not need either of you checking the door every thirty seconds.”

Isha nodded. “We are willing.”

“Yes,” Thomas said as he sat down again. “If you still want that when you choose the date.” The fact that Kanno's final condition had clearly been aimed at him required no further discussion.

Isha reached for one of the mandarins on the table and began peeling it. “Do you know what you want to ask him?”

Kanno considered. The question had occupied less of her attention than she expected after sending the message. “Some things. Mostly I want to see what he is like when neither of you is there. I know him through your relationship with him, and if I meet him I want part of that relationship to be mine.”

Isha separated a mandarin segment and ate it. “That makes sense.” Thomas smiled at how closely the answer matched something Isha might have said, but kept the observation to himself.

The television audience applauded something none of them had watched. Thomas picked up the remote and increased the volume for the next song, ending the conversation without anyone needing to formalise it further.

Later, Kanno showed them a photograph from her wall series taken two days earlier: an office corridor where a rectangular patch of less-faded paint marked the former position of a notice board. Thomas preferred it immediately. Kanno told him the reflection in a nearby door spoiled the frame. Isha preferred the reflection. Kanno told both of them that friendship did not confer editorial authority.

At ten thirty they opened a second packet of rice crackers and discovered nobody wanted it. Thomas sealed it again. Isha sat on the floor with her back against the sofa, one hand loosely around Thomas's ankle where he sat above her. Kanno occupied the other end of the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her and a mug of tea cooling between both hands.

The television shifted from performance to countdown programming. Outside, the building had become unusually quiet. The normal traffic noise from farther away continued, but doors in the corridor had stopped opening and closing.

Thomas looked at the clock and said, “This is probably the point where people begin asking whether the year was good.”

Kanno did not look away from the television. “Do not turn it into an annual report.”

Isha tilted her head back against the sofa. “Was it good?”

Thomas considered the question. Mostly, he decided, which was an unusual answer. Isha immediately complicated it by mentioning that she had begun the year ill and ended it having lost a fight she was pleased to have taken. Thomas started to ask whether the loss belonged in the negative column and caught her testing smile before he finished. Kanno made a quiet sound into her tea.

The conversation refused to become an accounting exercise after that. The year had contained too many things whose category changed depending on where they stood. Thomas and Isha had become permanent employees. They had renewed their residence. Thomas had proposed. They had married. Isha had earned her first-aid qualification, recovered fully, fought twice and discovered she wanted more structured coaching work. Kanno had printed forty copies of *Until Replaced*, sold enough to know strangers had read it, and accumulated more photographs of altered walls than she knew what to do with.

The System passages had continued. Their families had answered. Ian had moved from an impossible man Isha met in fragments to a person who had sat across a café table from Thomas and Isha, then into a separate direct thread on Kanno's phone.

Nobody tried to rank these events.

Kanno eventually said, “I did not expect to agree to meet someone who claims to be outside reality this year.”

Thomas looked at her. “That is a fair surprise.”

“It is also not going in any New Year card.”

Isha smiled and reached beneath her neckline. The tiny lattice came out into her fingers, the real fantasy world resting inside it. She had stopped checking it every hour. Now she looked because the conversation had brought the other world close again.

Kanno watched the pendant turn once between Isha's fingers.

“Are you wearing that to midnight?” Kanno asked.

Isha thought about the question, though the answer had already settled. “Yes. I want to.”

Kanno accepted the answer and returned to her tea.

At eleven forty-five, Thomas poured three small glasses of sparkling wine. Kanno had refused anything stronger because she was travelling home later. Isha accepted hers and then spent several minutes reading the bottle because she had forgotten which one Thomas bought.

The city did not build towards midnight with the volume Thomas remembered from British New Year's broadcasts. Their television did enough of that work on its own. A countdown appeared. Somewhere outside, one distant group of people shouted too early and then stopped.

Kanno checked the time on her phone. “Your television is four seconds behind.”

Thomas looked from the screen to her phone. “That seems hostile to the concept.”

“Use the clock,” Kanno said. Isha raised her glass and announced that Kanno had taken control of time. Kanno declined to dignify that with more than a look.

The final seconds arrived first on the phone and then on television. Thomas gave up trying to reconcile them.

At midnight, they raised their glasses.

“Happy New Year,” Thomas said.

Isha repeated it, smiling. Kanno touched her glass lightly against both of theirs.

For a few seconds the television supplied noise enough for the room. Thomas kissed Isha. She caught the front of his shirt and kept him there a little longer than the public form of the gesture required, then released him before Kanno could comment.

Kanno drank and looked at them over the rim of her glass. “Still married,” she said.

“It has been less than a minute,” Thomas replied.

“I am recording a successful transition.”

Isha laughed and tucked the pendant back beneath her top.

A little after midnight they put on coats and walked outside.

The cold found them immediately. Their breath showed under the building lights. Somewhere farther towards the main road, other people were moving in small groups, some in the direction of a local shrine, others towards stations, taxis or home. Thomas had suggested joining the shrine crowd earlier in the week. None of them had committed to it, and standing outside now, they decided the short walk around the neighbourhood was enough.

They went without a destination.

Kanno kept her hands in her coat pockets. Isha walked between them for part of the route and then drifted ahead by several steps when the pavement narrowed. Thomas could see the fine chain at the back of her neck above her scarf.

At the first corner, Kanno looked towards a shuttered shopfront where an old sign had been removed badly enough to leave four darker fixing points in the render.

Kanno stopped. Thomas followed her gaze. “No.”

Kanno had already taken out her phone.

“It is January,” she said.

“For three minutes.”

“The wall is not aware of that.”

Isha stepped back beside them while Kanno framed the shot.

The first photograph included Thomas's shadow across the lower edge.

Kanno looked at the screen, then at him.

“Move.”