The Last Crane

Toma kept finding medicine in scraps everyone else had already given up on. That skill made him valuable in the mountain school infirmary, and it also made him the easiest person to blame when poison entered the case that shook the campus from the cloud line down. Reiji, the detective who kept circling him, saw a suspect first and a person second, which was enough to make every answer feel risky. A folded silk pouch sat in Toma's safe, a shared notebook stayed sealed in an envelope, and 999 origami cranes waited for a thousandth fold that never came. Toma wanted the truth, but he also wanted the one man asking for it to stop looking at him like a locked door.