Episode 16: SELFISH | DURRUN by Aito Kitazaki

Episode 16

Two conversations run at once, above and below the same bar. On the DOUDOU rooftop, Soujun is still reeling that Yu-ri paid 300 million Lenny to bury what happened — a hundred years of pizza-shop wages, by his reckoning. Ojiki brings word from Time Child, who wants the pair to come and show their faces in person, and promises to look after the siblings until their trip is done. Yu-ri presses the point Soujun keeps avoiding: he is leaving TOKYO today and has not told his sister. What starts as agreement turns vicious. Yu-ri calls Utaki selfish, demands to know why a man would carry someone like that, and says he would never throw his own life away for family — a sentence shaped by the father who threw him away first. Soujun takes him by the collar. Downstairs, Alice is holding court. A regular starts telling Utaki that Alice fled the center of TOKYO two years ago and leaves through the window feet-first. Komugi the baker arrives and realises she has met Utaki before, on the day a stranger handed her a bandage. Alice covers hastily for how Utaki got into TOKYO at all, then draws the city on her palm: fifty towns stacked by elevation, Zone 1 at the summit, MACHIDA down in Zone 4. Komugi will not go higher, and cannot say why — only that she believes the rumours about who rules the center. Above them, Soujun finally says it. Utaki has spent her whole life believing she alone was the one left behind.