The night's footage had run on every network in the country until dawn, the crawl on Kaiden's forearms toward the boss room, the spur punching through his hip, the pincer closing on a foreign family holding a Japanese town's door.
Somewhere before sunrise, the nation's gratitude had turned around and gone looking for its own government.
The Circle's public phone lines went down twice before six. A petition demanding accountability for the gate's poor scouting gathered four hundred thousand signatures overnight, every line of it in immaculate formal Japanese.
Outside the Circle's Tokyo headquarters, a crowd assembled at first light and simply bowed at the building, in silence, in rows, which unnerved the security detail far more than shouting would have.
