Matsuda Kenji's life could be measured in inventory.
Twenty-two bottles of soy sauce. Forty-eight cup noodles arranged in meticulous rows. Sixteen cans of coffee in the refrigerated section, condensation beading on their aluminum surfaces. All of them counted, recorded, and positioned with a precision that none of his customers would ever notice or appreciate.
He liked it that way.
The bell above the door chimed as a teenage girl in a school uniform entered, the yellow light of early evening spilling in behind her. Matsuda glanced up from his clipboard, pushing his glasses higher on his nose with his middle finger—never his index, a habit he'd trained himself to break years ago.
"Matsuda-san," the girl said with a bow. "Sorry I'm late."
"Aiko-chan," he replied with a gentle nod. "You're actually three minutes early."
Sato Aiko blinked, then checked her phone. "Oh. Right."
He watched as she moved behind the counter, her motions perpetually uncertain, as if she occupied slightly more space than she knew what to do with. She tied on her apron with fumbling fingers, the same way she had every afternoon for the past seven months. Matsuda had counted those, too.
"The shipment from Nakamura-san came," he said, returning to his clipboard. "Peaches are in season. I've left the pricing for you."
"Yes, Matsuda-san."
His eyes remained on the inventory sheet, but his awareness extended to every corner of the small convenience store. He noted the slight hesitation in Aiko's movements as she reached for the pricing gun, the barely perceptible sigh that escaped her lips, the way her gaze lingered a half-second too long on the magazine rack where the latest issue of a scientific journal peeked out between fashion magazines.
The door chimed again. An elderly woman entered, her cane tapping against the linoleum floor. Mrs. Tanaka, eighty-four years old, arthritis in her left knee, lived four blocks away, would buy the same five items she purchased every Wednesday.
"Matsuda-kun," she called, her voice creaking like old floorboards. "Do you have any of those pickled plums my Keiko likes?"
"Third aisle, second shelf," he said without looking up. "I saved a jar for you."
The woman chuckled. "You always know, don't you? Such a good memory for an ordinary shopkeeper."
Matsuda allowed himself a small smile. Ordinary. The word settled around his shoulders like a comfortable sweater, one he'd chosen with great care.
The minutes ticked by with comforting predictability. Salarymen stopped for cigarettes and canned coffee. A group of middle school students giggled over ice cream. A young mother balanced a baby on her hip while selecting diapers. All of them moved through the store like water around stones, their patterns familiar, their needs anticipated.
At 6:47 PM, Matsuda's phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the message with hands that appeared soft and slightly pudgy, the knuckles unmarked by the scars he'd methodically removed through a series of minor procedures a decade ago.
*Bringing home gyoza from Kojima's. Don't start rice yet. Love you. - Y*
An unexpected deviation. Kojima's restaurant was a twenty-minute walk from Yumi's office, in the opposite direction from their home. Something had changed her routine. Matsuda felt a familiar tightening at the base of his skull, the beginnings of calculations running unbidden through his mind before he consciously suppressed them.
*Yumi sometimes gets gyoza from Kojima's.*
*Kojima's is popular.*
*This is normal.*
*This is ordinary.*
He typed back: *Sounds delicious. Hana will be happy. Love you too.*
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and found Aiko watching him, her expression carefully neutral but her eyes curious. He wondered, not for the first time, what she saw when she looked at him. A middle-aged man carrying an extra fifteen pounds around his middle? A kind but unremarkable store owner? A father who kept photos of his wife and daughter taped beside the register?
All those things were true. They had become true through repetition and intention. Through ten years of carefully orchestrated ordinariness.
"Matsuda-san," Aiko said, her voice quiet enough that Mrs. Tanaka couldn't hear from where she examined the pickled plums. "That man has been standing across the street for forty-three minutes."
Matsuda didn't turn to look out the front windows. He didn't need to. He had registered the man's presence forty-seven minutes ago, cataloging details without appearing to notice: approximately thirty years old, black windbreaker despite the warm evening, left-handed, weight distributed evenly in a stance that suggested formal training.
"Probably waiting for someone," Matsuda said, keeping his voice level, his expression mild behind his glasses.
"He keeps looking at the store." Aiko fidgeted with the pricing gun. "Not like he wants to buy something. Like he's... waiting."
Matsuda set down his clipboard and patted his stomach with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Maybe he's gathering courage to come in. We did just stock those limited-edition red bean popsicles that everyone's talking about."
The tension in Aiko's shoulders eased slightly, but her eyes remained troubled. She had always been observant, this awkward teenage girl. Too observant, perhaps.
For the next hour, Matsuda moved through the familiar choreography of his evening: restocking the refrigerated section, helping customers find items, processing transactions with practiced efficiency. All while maintaining constant awareness of the man across the street, who remained in position, his gaze occasionally meeting Matsuda's through the store windows.
At 7:58 PM, two minutes before closing, a second man appeared beside the first. They exchanged words, glancing at the store. The newcomer was older, mid-forties, with a military posture and hands that never strayed far from his jacket pockets.
Matsuda felt something old and cold stir in his chest, a sensation he had suppressed for so long it felt almost foreign.
"Aiko-chan," he said, "it's quiet tonight. Why don't you head home early? I can finish closing up."
She looked at him, then at the men across the street. "Are you sure, Matsuda-san?"
"Of course." He smiled, the expression practiced and reassuring. "It's a school night, and you mentioned that science test tomorrow. Physics, right?"
"Quantum mechanics," she corrected, then flushed slightly. "Just an introduction to principles. Nothing complicated."
"Even so." He gestured toward the back room. "Go on. I'll see you tomorrow."
After a moment's hesitation, Aiko removed her apron and gathered her schoolbag. As she headed toward the back door, Matsuda called after her.
"Aiko-chan. Take the alley behind the laundromat. It's better lit than the main street at this hour."
She paused, studying him with those too-perceptive eyes, then nodded and disappeared through the door.
Matsuda turned the sign to CLOSED and locked the front door. He moved methodically through his closing routine: counting the register, wiping down counters, checking refrigerator temperatures. Each movement precise, economical. No wasted motion.
Outside, the two men remained in place, watching.
At 8:23 PM, as Matsuda was turning off the interior lights, a third figure appeared on the street. This one was running, his gait uneven, one hand pressed to his side. Even from a distance, Matsuda could see the dark stain spreading beneath the young man's fingers.
The two watchers moved at once, stepping out of the shadows to intercept.
Matsuda stood motionless behind the darkened storefront, his hand halfway to the light switch. Time seemed to stretch around him, a familiar sensation from a life he had left behind. In this elongated moment, he made calculations, weighed variables, considered trajectories.
The injured young man veered suddenly, lurching toward the convenience store. Whether he had spotted Matsuda inside or was simply seeking any shelter, his intent was clear. He pounded on the glass door with his free hand, his face young and desperate in the street light.
"Please," he gasped, loud enough to be heard through the door. "Please help me."
The two pursuers were thirty seconds away, moving with the coordinated efficiency that Matsuda recognized instantly. The young man had perhaps fifteen seconds before they reached him.
Matsuda had a choice to make.
Ten years of carefully constructed ordinariness hung in the balance. Ten years of being Matsuda Kenji, unremarkable shopkeeper, loving husband, devoted father. Ten years of inventory lists and neighborhood gossip and helping elderly women find pickled plums.
The young man's eyes met his through the glass, wide with fear and something else—a recognition that transcended their status as strangers. In that gaze, Matsuda saw a reflection of someone he had once been, long ago. Someone desperate. Someone hunted.
His hand moved from the light switch to the door lock.
In one fluid motion that contained none of the middle-aged awkwardness he had cultivated for a decade, Matsuda Kenji opened the door, pulled the young man inside, and relocked it in the space of a single breath.
"Behind the counter," he said quietly, his voice dropping an octave from its usual shopkeeper's lilt. "Move now."
As the young man stumbled toward the sheltering bulk of the check-out counter, Matsuda reached beneath it and pressed a concealed button. Metal shutters began to descend over the windows and door—a security feature that none of his regular customers had ever seen deployed, that even Yumi believed was a standard precaution he had never had cause to use.
Through the narrowing gap, he locked eyes with the first of the pursuers, a moment of mutual recognition that lasted less than a second but contained volumes.
Then the shutters sealed them inside, and the convenience store transformed from a place of mundane commerce to something else entirely.
Matsuda turned to the wounded young man now huddled behind his counter, blood seeping between the fingers still clutched to his side. In the sudden silence, the sound of his labored breathing seemed unnaturally loud.
"You have approximately forty seconds to explain why I should continue helping you," Matsuda said, his voice still in that lower register, all pretense of the affable shopkeeper gone. "Beginning now."
The young man's eyes widened further, but not with fear this time. With a dawning realization.
"You're him," he whispered. "You're really him. The Timekeeper."
Matsuda felt the name land like a physical blow. No one had called him that in ten years. No one alive should even know to connect that name with the man he had become.
Yet this bleeding boy had spoken it with certainty.
Outside, the first impact struck the security shutters—testing, calculating. Matsuda knew they would be looking for the control panel, for the power source.
He had approximately three minutes before they breached his defenses.
"Twenty-five seconds," he told the young man, even as his mind raced ahead, mapping out possibilities, escape routes, contingencies that he had established years ago but hoped never to use.
The young man reached into his jacket with his free hand, wincing at the movement, and withdrew a small object wrapped in cloth.
"The Minutehand," he gasped. "I took it. From Himura. They can't—they can't have it back."
Matsuda felt the world shift beneath his feet as the young man unwrapped the object—a small, metallic cylinder with a faint blue light pulsing at one end. The Minutehand. A legend even within Hourglass, rumored but never confirmed.
Until now.
"Time's up," Matsuda said softly.
Another impact rattled the shutters, harder this time. Methodical. Professional.
He made his decision.
Moving with a speed and grace that had no place in the body of a convenience store owner, Matsuda retrieved the first aid kit from beneath the counter. In seconds, he had cut away the young man's shirt and applied pressure bandages to the knife wound in his side—serious but not immediately life-threatening with proper treatment.
"Can you move?" he asked.
The young man nodded weakly. "I think so."
"Then we're leaving." Matsuda reached up and removed his glasses, folding them carefully and placing them in his shirt pocket. Without them, his face seemed sharper somehow, his eyes more focused. He looked both older and younger simultaneously. "There's a tunnel beneath the storage room. It will take us two blocks west, emerging in an abandoned subway maintenance shaft."
"You—you planned for this?" the young man asked, clearly struggling to reconcile the shopkeeper with the man now efficiently preparing for escape.
"I plan for everything," Matsuda said simply. He reached beneath the counter again and retrieved a small black case. From it, he withdrew a phone unlike any commercial model. "This part, however, I had hoped to avoid."
He pressed a single button on the phone. After a moment, it connected.
"It's me," he said without preamble. "Protocol Amber. The safe house on Maple Street. One hour."
He didn't wait for a response before ending the call.
Outside, the shutters groaned as something more substantial than human force was applied to them.
"Time to go," Matsuda said, helping the young man to his feet.
As they moved toward the back room, the young man clutched at Matsuda's arm. "They'll find your family," he warned, his voice urgent despite his weakness. "Himura never stops. I've seen what he does to traitors."
Matsuda's expression didn't change, but something cold and deadly flickered in his eyes. "So have I," he said. "I taught him most of it."
He opened the storage room door and guided the young man through it, sparing one last glance at the convenience store that had been his cover and his sanctuary for a decade. At the photographs beside the register: Yumi smiling in their small garden, Hana on her first day of school.
The life he had built was ending. The one he had escaped was reclaiming him.
As the security shutters began to buckle, Matsuda Kenji—who had once been known by another name entirely—sealed the storage room door behind him and stepped back into a world he had abandoned, carrying the weight of the one he was desperate to preserve.
The hour that would change everything had begun.