Dead Hours — We Don't Deliver, Page 16

About this chapter

3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. The store's landline will not stop ringing — caller after caller is convinced the konbini delivers, ordering pork buns and beer and party platters to addresses across the city. Kaito, unable to bear being mistaken for something he plainly is not, declares quiet war on one wrong idea and spends the entire dead shift trying to prove the store does not, and cannot, deliver — spiraling over whether a place can become a thing it refuses to be just because enough people believe it. All night the phone rings to the identical dead-eyed beat of Kaito lifting the beige handset and murmuring '...we don't deliver.' A ladder of night-shift regulars each arrive certain they have an order waiting — the tracksuit regular here to 'pick up,' a drunk salaryman demanding his delivery, a cheerful jogger insisting the place is blowing up online — three verdicts nobody can verify. Kaito escalates through head office's hold line trying to get the store de-listed while Rin quietly livestreams the whole vigil as 'The Konbini That Secretly Delivers.' Rin has one flicker of near-sincerity — that he is the only person alive who would spend six hours arguing with the internet about what his store even is — before raising her phone again. Near dawn, hollow, Kaito finally gets the listing killed and lifts the handset one last time braced to refuse an order — and the line is silent, a dead dial tone, the running beat inverting into a serene, triumphant '...we don't deliver' to no one. Then the reveal Rin planted in the first minute pays off: she had added the store to a delivery app the instant the shift began and spent the night quietly taking forty 'orders' as ordinary walk-in pickups, so every customer Kaito refused had already been served and every refusal only fed her stream. The listing he killed had long since done its work. His entire six-hour war corrected an idea that had already made Rin four hundred thousand viewers. Kaito gets nothing — not even the last word. Dawn light fills the spotless store exactly as the night began — and on the bare counter the phone rings one more time, a fresh order, Rin's phone already raised, already live.