Four days later

  Back home, Rin had smashed a plate.

  It had slipped from her hands–nothing more, nothing less. The anger slowly creeping across her burning skin was irrelevant, didn’t make her hands shake or vision tunnel until she had no awareness of her grip. The noise of it shattering wasn’t loud, but it made her feel even more on edge, like the anticipation of a fight that never quite began and only filled her with tension. It was nerve-wrenching, teeth-grinding, an inescapable suffocating mass of sour feeling that weighed down her stomach with concrete hardness.

  The plate had been rescued from a nearby tip, and now it was in pieces on the floor. Rin stepped over the shards, feeling one particularly large one making the sole of her boot rise a little, and reached down to pick them up. She fumbled twice, and saw red for a moment.

  “I want you to kill him.”

  There were too many words buzzing through her head. It was nothing new that ketsujin were less than human- she’d been raised in that soil, grown into a weed of the toughest caliber.

  “I know it was one of Zero Hand’s men. They took Se?tri, they took my baby. My only baby. Took him from me, Rin. They told us we had to leave Suzumachi. Would you even find him if you tried? Would it bring my boy back? Is revenge worthless, after all?”

  But this? It killed a part of her inside.

  “It’s not,” she’d said, because what else could she say to a grieving mother? “Not yet.”

  A piece of the scratched ceramic chilled her skin. She gathered it up, skin breaking against the sharp edges as it settled in her palm.

  Rin stared silently at them for a long moment, and at first she was thinking on how to dispose of them, but that coherency quickly escaped her. The ketsujin woman’s dull eyes swam in her field of vision, her empty words repeating themselves in an endless cycle, and each time she found some new way to rage at it.

  Despite her best efforts, Rin had been unable to locate Zero Hand at all. The man was holed up somewhere safe and sound, seemingly impossible to trace. From an outside perspective, it made sense why she had made no progress in her attempts to assassinate him. She was nothing but a street mercenary, a woman of no connections, trying to murder a man who could afford to buy all of her organs separately. But through Rin’s hazy, pinpointed vision, flickering with the beat of her pulse–

  All she could see was that photo of the little boy. His face grimy, sharp teeth bared in a grin, a candid shot. It was tightly pinched between the woman’s fingers until it creased with a sharp line across the middle.

  An uncontrollable spasm ran through her arm. It clenched her fingers around the shards, and they tore up her skin even more to leave gaping red cuts crossing haphazardly across each other.

  The bleeding was curiously delayed. For a moment as she looked down, the jagged splits remained dry and ashen white. Then dark red blood welled up in the crevices and overflowed, beginning to trail down her hand, and brought with them a stinging sensation of pain.

  That jolted Rin back to her senses. She forced her hand to relax and looked around, eyes falling upon the grimy old walls and scattered cardboard boxes wherein she stored every large and small item she’d scavenged or stolen over the years. Her throat felt like it was perforated, letting all the air she inhaled escape before it could enter her lungs.

  In.

  In.

  She held her breath.

  Out.

  A full inhale was impossible. She clawed at her throat to unblock whatever was making her so light-headed, but all that did was add more small wounds to the tally.

  Her spare bandages were stashed underneath her mattress, for some reason, and getting irritated at that helped to distract her from everything else. The pressure squeezing Rin’s arms as she wrapped them up, peeling off the old damp and dirty cloth and covering up her scar-weathered skin, was fractionally soothing. Just the smallest amount, but her legs ceased their trembling and her field of vision started to clear.

  She was thinking about playing in the reservoir.

  The blood on her hands immediately soaked through, dyeing the off-white a dark brownish-red. It stuck uncomfortably to the wounds, but pulling it off was too painful.

  Even though they weren’t supposed to, the two of them had run down anyway. The water looked like a sheet of silver in the sunlight, and Rin had been scared, but —— dragged her in by the leg and she screamed before realizing the water didn’t burn, it cooled, lapping against her dirty skin in a friendly sort of way. She dunked her head underneath as courage began to replace the anxiety and saw nothing but a greenish expanse below her body, rippling like there were deeper things she could make out if she just peered a little further.

  She finished tying it anyway. There were no fresh ones left. She’d have to buy more.

  —— was lifting her up, helping her stay buoyant. Rin’s lean body could withstand the cold, but his warm hands gave her skin back its feeling.

  “This way. Over here.”

  “I can do it myself! I’m older than you.”

  “Does a minute’s difference really matter?” —— asked, and he pulled her arm up, making sure she didn’t dip her head below the surface too deep.

  Something small and sharp, an old bottle cap, made him stumble. Rin’s reflexes lunged to catch him and for a moment the both of them were fully submerged, surrounded by air bubbles that spewed from their mouths, and everything was green and hazy like the inside of a dream.

  Her hand locked onto ——’s upper arm, and she broke the surface again, hauling him up like he weighed nothing at all and steadying him on his feet.

  “It does. I’m here to protect you.”

  She missed speaking Ketsugo, missed the familiar phonetics crossing her tongue as they tripped out into curse words, into pleas and reassurances.

  ——‘s long hair brilliantly reflected the sunlight. Rin splashed water at it, banging her knees on the edge of the reservoir as she scrambled back out again only to jump back in, and he pushed her head under, holding it there until she choked.

  His face was glossy with droplets, running down his pale skin.

  The photo of the missing ketsujin boy was glossy on the shelf, where it had collected a fine sheen of moisture from the mist outside.

  “Fuck.”

  Rin lay still on her mattress, curled up into a fetal position. The profanity tasted like reservoir water.

  Rin swallowed a mouthful of it as she resurfaced before saying, “I bet there’s human corpses at the bottom a’ this.”

  Murmuring, footsteps on concrete, the creak of a door– Rin bolted upright from where she lay, eyes wide.

  Her body knew something was wrong before she did. It had been a bad sleep, the restless kind that left behind more grogginess than wakefulness. The dark room seemed bright to her, as she fumbled to balance herself on one arm, reaching out to touch the light switch.

  Immediately her common sense took over and she stopped, finger hovering right over the plastic.

  That infinitesimal noise lingered on the edge of her hearing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then, again– something, like a boot kicking a small piece of rubbish away.

  Someone was out there in the foyer.

  She glanced at the watch she’d hung from a nail on the wall; it was past four in the morning. The building’s residents didn’t know her, but she knew them very well from afar, and she’d long since gotten used to their patterns. There were men doing the walk of shame back into the car park every weekend night, a renter on the top floor would fall drunkenly down the stairs each Friday, and everyone would leave at different times of morning to go to their respective jobs. This was unusual, for someone to be moving around at this time, so quietly too, as if afraid of being heard.

  Rin forced herself to lay back down after a moment. Her instincts were going wild, telling her something was wrong, but there was no proof of that yet. People, unpredictable as they were, had their reasons for breaking patterns.

  Still that alarm in her brain went off, sending the blood pumping around her body.

  Eventually, she forced herself to rise again, moving in a half-crouch across the ground. Her feet were bare, absolutely silent with each step, and her movements were perfectly restrained. She made her way to the other end of the room, all the while straining her enhanced ears to make out just a little more of the unknown disturbance outside.

  Rin did not live in an actual apartment. She had moved into what used to be an old supply closet, which had long since been abandoned after the apartment block’s janitor left for better pay. It was reasonably large, with bare concrete floors and walls and a few uneven shelves left behind on which she stacked the smaller of her possessions. The door to it was boarded up, which was likely why the residents had simply brushed over the unassuming room as empty, uninteresting. Nobody had noticed that the boards had been cleanly and neatly sawed on the edges, allowing the door to be opened with no sign that it was in use.

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  In addition to its unobtrusiveness, the supply closet bore a large vent to the car park behind the building.

  With the utmost carefulness Rin lifted off the cover. She’d unscrewed it a long time ago to allow for a silent escape route. Laying it flat on the ground, she got down onto her knees and began to crawl in, moving with a kind of precise slowness that belied how rapidly she was actually moving.

  She could only fit inside because it was an unusually large vent, but calling it a ‘fit’ was somewhat pushing the definition. She sucked in her breath a little, reaching out to pull herself along, skin sliding uncomfortably along the metal.

  The air snaking in from outside was cold, biting and fresh–it was still December, and smelled like needles in her nose. Rin planted both hands on the rough ground as she slithered out of the opening, palms immediately becoming numb as they made contact with frost-coated cobbles and rock-hard chunks of soil, what once used to be a park for the resident children but had long since been left to decay.

  The moment she was steady Rin flattened herself against the wall. All around her, the only movement came from the cars speeding down the nearby road. The lone willow tree waved a little in the light breeze. There was no unfamiliar scent or unknown car to disturb the quiet.

  After a pause, she began to slowly stalk in the direction of the ramp leading back into the building.

  Here, the first man signed. His fingers jabbed to the lowest door in the building’s foyer, half-open and clearly unoccupied.

  A doubtful look was cast his way. Two of the three men entered slowly, their small automatic pistols held out in front of them.

  It was empty. Whoever had once lived there had moved out, it seemed, because it was entirely stripped bare. Still they gave it a casual sweep, peering warily through doorways and into rooms as if they expected to find monsters lurking just out of sight.

  “Definitely not a false tip,” whispered one out of the very corner of his mouth. “People reported a ketsujin loitering round here too many times.”

  “Nothing here, though.”

  Outside, the third man fixed his gaze down the open way outside, towards the back. A boarded-up door; he dismissed it, eyeing the nails in the wood. He’d kick it down later if only to satisfy his sense of completion.

  As a faraway car began honking its horn, the man made his way down the small steps. His footsteps made a haunting echo in the concrete space. He walked flat and heavy, like he was absolutely certain what lay ahead of him and trusted fully the strength of his single gun.

  Outside, perched upon the highest branch of that lone willow tree, there sat a preening crow. Seconds later it flew away in fright, like an arrow to the night sky.

  From within the apartment building with walls of plaster and stone between them and the world, all the two intruders heard of the next few seconds was a heavy thud, followed by a soft crunch that sounded like overripe fruit being stepped on. It was so sudden and quiet it didn’t sound like someone had died at all, rather had heedlessly trodden on some discarded food while he stomped around searching for Rin…

  “Hey, hey now, what was that? You there, man? You copy? You–”

  “Out of the way!” Fumbling desperately with his small strapped-on radio, the first man threw caution to the winds as he switched it on and began to speak. “Ma’am, we’ve encountered a disturbance, it might be the target, are you in the area?”

  “Yes, I am. Please contain it until then.”

  His hands shook as he hefted his gun, gazing down the barrel like a one-track road.

  “If you cooperate, this is gonna be a lot easier for all of us!” Dammit, if only his voice was a little steadier, and he had the authority of the police officer he’d wanted to be, instead of a small-time merc with a hand-me-down pea shooter.

  The lifeless silence was almost worse than a response.

  Then his comrade’s arm emerged from behind the wall, as if to beckon them.

  “You get away from there,” he barked immediately, and the trembling throughout his entire body was apparent- “It’s not safe, yeah? Report back right now, we need to–”

  Oh so slowly, the rest of the man tipped sideways into view, his head no longer classified as a solid object. His body hit the ground wetly, spewing bright thick blood across the concrete, and the gaping hole where his arm had once been looked like a meaty, gelatinous void in the dim light.

  Rin leaned on the wall, clutching the limb in her right hand. The men froze, aware that one wrong move would tip the scales in her favour. The moment they looked directly at her, she extended her arm and dropped the body part onto the ground like an insignificant, dirty piece of trash. As if to say, I’ll do it to all of you.

  “On your knees and hands right up!”

  Shaky as they were, there were still two guns pointed right between her eyes.

  “I’ll get on my knees,” she breathed, beginning to raise her hands above her head. One knee hit the ground, blood pooling into little droplets on her leather trousers. Then came the other, not breaking her unwavering eye contact.

  Nobody seemed to want to make the first move for a moment, even though Rin was completely still, and not a single twitch gave her away. In the quiet, their heavy breathing filled her ears, and she could smell it all–the adrenaline, the cortisol, like a cloud in the air.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed, like a fly was caught in the gaps.

  Rin suddenly lunged to the side, and their trigger fingers responded. Two bullets ricocheted off the walls, smoking as they left behind tiny holes and then pinged right back to their point of origin. One whizzed past the man’s head, just barely clipping his hair and skipping across the ground far behind him.

  The other man was not so lucky, and he crumpled with a spray of brain matter.

  The problem was that Rin was no longer there. She had moved so fast that it looked like a glitch in a videotape, and lunged at him from the opposite side she had feinted to. Her large hand completely enveloped his face as her momentum carried them both a few feet in as many milliseconds, before his entire body turned to jelly as she slammed him into the ground. He gagged and choked, weapon flying from his hand and clattering out of reach, ribs splintering out of his skin.

  He was dead already, and they both knew it. Yet as her lank white hair tickled his face and she loomed over his twitching body, he couldn’t stop himself from whispering, “Please.”

  A look of wretched disgust covered Rin’s face, and she slammed her boot into his stomach. The organs within flattened out, fighting for space beneath the pressure.

  “You came here to kill me,” she said. Again she stomped on his sternum, but not quite hard enough to turn him into two-dimensional pavement art. “Would you have spared me if I said please? Should I have asked nicely?”

  Crunch. There were fluids bubbling from his lungs that he didn’t even recognise, sour in his throat.

  Rin bent all the way down until they were nose to nose, and he looked deep into her irises that flickered and swirled with bright blue flecks, dancing in the pale grey like chips of diamond.

  There was something immeasurably sad at the very centre of them.

  “Try again,” she murmured.

  “Please.”

  More from tiredness than mercy, Rin put him out of his misery. His head rolled a little way across the floor before coming to a dripping stop.

  She straightened up. Nobody else in the building had come down to investigate, perhaps smart enough to avoid the source of gunfire. The men were dressed in relatively nondescript outfits, nothing official-looking or military grade. Rin was familiar enough with syndicate marks, and they didn’t bear any she could see. At least, not anywhere exposed.

  So they must be disposable mercs. Unaffiliated. Paid up, outfitted, and sent in to find me.

  Rin wasn’t innocent–but she didn’t have the time to keep track of grudges and crimes, and a steady trail of wanted posters for this, that and the other followed her around everywhere she went. Once again, in a moment oddly reminiscent of the hijacking that had led her to Yugi, she realised they could have been sent by anyone.

  And yet, despite that, she had an instinct already for the culprit.

  Click.

  “Well, no matter how you spin it, it looks like you’re right in the middle of a crime scene…”

  Shit!

  Rin immediately tensed all of her muscles, fighting not to just lunge at the voice coming from behind her. Instead, she slowly turned her head, moving with tiny, restrained motions, hands flexed until the tendons stood out from her skin like ribs.

  By this point she was becoming truly sick of guns.

  The one now pointed at the back of her head was being held by a girl. No, a young woman, though she was youthful-faced and slim. Her blonde hair was cut into a loose wavy bob, and the tanned skin of her inner wrist bore a deep black tattoo, that seemed like she’d only gotten it that week. It was a mark of a single large zero.

  Her knuckles, fingers, neck and arms were all adorned by cheap-looking jewelry; rings and bracelets and necklaces. They made little clinking noises against each other each time she shifted position, and none of the metals matched at all. It brought to mind the word ‘gaudy’.

  Shit, shit, shit, how the hell did I miss her? I can’t smell her at all. There’s no scent…!

  As soon as she met eyes with Rin, the young woman bared her teeth in a smug, arrogant smile.

  “Eheh. That’s the thing about your kind, isn’t it?” She began to pace a wide circle around Rin, her weapon never wavering from its neat ring around her skull.

  “It doesn’t take much at all to make them go berserk. Apply a little pressure, make them panic, and the next thing you know–”

  Her high-heeled boots left small imprints in the bloody puddles across the floor.

  “–they have charges for a triple homicide on their hands!”

  The woman’s clothes seemed to be dusted with an odd, chalky white substance that was also smeared across her wrists and neck. Baking soda, she realised. The kind used to conceal body odour when hunting game in the wild. No wonder she couldn’t smell her scent.

  “You sound too damn happy about that,” Rin growled, tracking the woman with her eyes alone. “Those were your men, weren’t they?”

  “Oh, I didn’t know them personally! They were only, like, contractors. I paid them a little bit and told them to help me come investigate a disturbance in Suzumachi, and look at that.” Delicately she stepped over the severed head still on the floor. “They served their purpose either way.”

  “You wanted them to die?”

  The woman’s smile didn’t drop, not even in the face of Rin’s abject disgust. It was as if she didn’t even consider her opinion worth the acknowledgement.

  “Not intentionally. But, well…it’ll be helpful.”

  From her belt, she unhooked a small black object that had previously blended into her jacket, and held it up to one gleeful pink eye.

  It was a camera, Rin realised. One that had the little red ‘recording’ light blinking in the corner, like a death knell.

  “This camera is broadcasting a live feed hooked up to a computer in my house! It’s been recording everything so far since I arrived on-scene; the way you killed those men, your location, your face–everything. If you kill me now, even if you destroy the camera, it’ll stop recording and automatically save all the footage to my computer. Everyone will have proof of what happened to me, where you live, and who you are. Okayy?”

  So that’s why she sent in such underprepared mercs. Rin couldn’t tear her gaze away from the small blinking light, and how right now it looked like just another type of gun. She knew I’d slaughter them without any trouble, so she could use the video of it as…as what? A good reason to arrest me?

  But that was pointless, she realised. Rin was already wanted. She had plenty of offenses on her police record, including resisting arrest. The day that Yugi rescued her had definitely been added to that list of wrongdoings. Why bother recording one of her murders when it would have been so much easier to just capture her with an experienced group of assassins?

  She thinks she can easily take me on her own, after she got the footage she wanted. And who knows what she’ll use that video for afterwards. So then–

  “You’re not working with the police,” Rin whispered, causing the woman to stop and tilt her head in curiosity.

  She doesn’t know who I am.

  After that little pause, where some flicker of wariness seemed to be rising up within her, the young woman only laughed again.

  “That’s true, I’m not. You can call me Mirai.”