Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) by Ryohgo Narita Page B

company president.
    Her fast-track career course was not simply nepotism from her family’s control of the company; her intellect and skill were exceptional. However, her blood was indeed a factor in her current position—not in terms of rank, but assignment.
    It was the subject of that very lab that the Yagiri family secretly suspected was the driving force behind Nebula’s merger offer.
    Lab Six was not studying a new pharmaceutical, to be precise. On paper, it was developing new immune system substances for clinical trials…but what it actually contained was
not of this world
.
    Twenty years ago, her uncle returned from an overseas trip with a taxidermy head that was modeled to look like a human’s. It was as beautiful and still as if it were still alive, just sleeping. The pretty girl’s head was tasteless, to be sure, but it was oddly tranquil, not barbaric. It seemed to anyone who looked at it like the head was an entire living thing all its own.
    Though Namie did not know this at age five, the item had been smuggled into the country and would certainly have been seized at customs if declared properly.
    Whatever the reason that her uncle had procured the head, it was treated like a Yagiri family heirloom. When he had time, he would lock himself in his study, gazing upon the head, even talking to it.
    As a child, Namie visited that house often to spend the night with her cousin, and she found her uncle to be creepy, but that feeling faded over time as she grew accustomed to him. The only problem she had was that her younger brother, Seiji Yagiri, was even more attached to the head than her uncle was.
    The first time Seiji saw the head was when he was ten. Namie snuck him into the study when their uncle wasn’t around to show him the odd trophy. Even now, she terribly regretted this decision.
    It was from that point on that Seiji slowly came undone.
    He asked to go to Uncle’s house more and more often. Whenever he could slip past Uncle’s guard, he would stare at the head. With every passing year, Seiji’s infatuation with the head grew stronger, until three years ago—the moment that Namie earned a job with her uncle’s pharmaceutical company—he said to her, “I’m in love with a girl.”
    The girl her brother loved didn’t have a name. Or a body below her neck.
    The emotion that stole into Namie’s heart at that moment wasn’t the pitying sympathy for her brother’s unrequited sexual fetish—it was the dark red and rusted flame of sheer jealousy.
    Namie’s parents were originally supposed to be next in line to inherit Yagiri Pharmaceuticals. But when Seiji was born, a large business deal went south because of a mistake on their part, and they lost face and authority within the company. After that, the love of their marriage went cold, and with it, the love of their daughter and son.
    If anything, it was their uncle who offered more care and attention to Namie and Seiji. Their parents had no comment when they went to Uncle’s house. It wasn’t out of any implicit trust of him. They just didn’t seem to care what happened.
    On the other hand, their uncle’s intention was to raise them as pawns of the family’s interests. He cared for them as he would for his employees, not with the love reserved for one’s family.
    Eventually, Namie sought in her brother the kind of close family kinship that she was lacking elsewhere. That grew over time to eclipse the standard bounds of familial love into a twisted one-sided mockery of romance.
    That was why Seiji’s professed love for the head was so displeasing to her. Rather than returning the love she showed to him, Seiji chose to love a head, something that would never reciprocate his feelings. She knew that feeling jealousy toward a head was crazy, but she decided that she would sneak in and destroy it anyway.
    But when she took the head out of the glass case, intending to discard it, the sensation on her fingers told her a terrible truth.
    That soft