March 25, 2007. Night
The raider against the tree looked like a puppet.
Specifically, a puppet with cut strings, quality of a body that has stopped making its own decisions. His mask had cracked across the cheek, the fracture running from jaw to temple, and through it I could see skin that was the wrong color. His chest moved. Inhale, exhale.
I watched him breathe and tried to do the same and discovered that breathing, currently, required more conscious attention than it usually did.
My hand was still bleeding.
I looked at it. Then at the grave. Then back at my hand.
What, I thought, is happening to my hand.
Not the cut, the cut was explicable, I'd cut it on the stone, that part made sense. What was less explicable was the way the blood seemed to be moving, not flowing exactly but drifting, lifting slightly from the surface of my skin in thin threads that curled upward like smoke from an extinguished candle.
Being drawn toward the stone.
Being consumed.
"Not bad," said a voice.
Seimei Arata materialized from between two gravestones like he'd been standing there for some time and had only now decided to be noticed. His coat swayed, his staff rested against his shoulder. Through the eyeholes of his Noh mask, the red glow was steady and calm.
He looked at me.
He looked at the grave.
He looked at my hand.
Something in his posture shifted, a micro-adjustment, barely visible, the kind of thing you only notice if you're paying attention.
"First binding," he said. Not a question.
Before I could process that or respond to it or ask what it meant, the cemetery gate bent.
The iron bar in the middle folding inward. Another raider came through, the one who'd been standing closest to Ren in the alley, bigger than the others, moving with energy of someone who had been very angry for a very long time.
Arata turned toward him without urgency.
His fingers moved. Paper slid between them, rectangular, printed with dense black characters, the edges crisp, not cards exactly, but moving like cards, fanning out, settling. Talismans, I would learn to call them. Ofuda. But in the moment all I registered was the motion.
Three foxes appeared.
This requires a moment to sit with.
Three foxes. Pale, the color of moonlight in deep water. Tails splitting behind them into multiple, three apiece, four. They didn't make sound.They were simply there and then they were moving and then the raider was simply no longer a problem. Mawled to death.
The foxes dissolved into light that fell like snow and was gone before it landed.
Arata hadn't watched them. He was already looking elsewhere.
"Daigo Ren," he said.
Ren stepped through the bent gate.
I hadn't seen him enter. I was beginning to understand that Ren moved in ways that didn't announce himself.
I had to revise my earlier impression of him. In the alley he'd seemed dangerous in the way most dangerous people seem dangerous, which is to say mostly through implication. Here, in the cemetery, with moonlight catching the tools in his hands, shovel, hoe, sickle, all of them modified, filed and sharpened and weighted in ways that made them into something with no agricultural application, he was dangerous in a way that didn't require implication.
He was just dangerous.
"You should've stayed home," he said. Voice quiet.
Arata's smirk was visible even around the edge of his mask. "Never liked home."
They moved.
I stopped breathing for approximately four seconds.
---
Itsuki cannot follow what happens next. I can. So I'll take over for a moment.
Ren moves first.
The left tool comes in low — a feint, but a committed one, the handle angled to force a downward parry. It's a good opener. Against anyone slower, it would have worked.
Arata doesn't parry. He sidesteps a single inch to the right, lets the tool pass through the space where his knee just was, and brings the base of his staff down on Ren's wrist — not hard enough to break, exactly hard enough to redirect. The left tool swings wide. Ren's shoulder overextends by three degrees.
That's all Arata needs.
The staff comes up in the same motion, catches the right tool mid-swing before Ren has finished correcting his balance, and pins it against his own forearm. Ren tries to pull back. Arata doesn't let him — he steps into the pin, closes the distance to nothing, and turns his hip.
Ren leaves the ground.
He lands on his back four feet away. Both tools still in his hands. That's impressive, actually — the grip discipline of someone who's been hit before. He rolls, gets his knees under him, and comes back up breathing hard but functional.
Arata is already standing still again.
Staff resting at his side. Weight centered. Like he was never interrupted at all.
Itsuki is watching with his mouth slightly open. Back to him.
...
Ren was good.
Arata was something else.
But I wasn't watching them anymore.
Because the whispering had gotten louder.
Not in my ears. In my skull. In my teeth. In the marrow of the hand I'd pressed flat against the stone while I was watching the fight, the hand that was still bleeding, still feeding the glow.
I blinked.
The cemetery disappeared.
---
The place I arrived in was the cemetery and wasn't. Same stones, same paths, same layout, but stretched, extended, the distances between things subtly wrong. The moon hung lower here. The sky was the color of deep bruises. And the stones themselves were different, larger, more elaborate, carved with faces that looked like they'd been done from memory.
The grave I fell on was in front of me.
And he was there.
Kenji Eito.
He looked like what he was, a man who had died violently, in 1987, in a way that involved knives. Prison uniform, tattered at the edges, the fabric a stained off-white. His body was a topography of wounds. And his face was, wrong. It wasn't decomposed or monstrous. He was feeling something too large for ordinary expressions.
He was smiling.
He was looking at me.
"You fed me," he said. Not with his mouth. The words arrived directly, the way the whispering had, bypassing sound entirely.
My blood, the threads I'd watched lifting from my hand, drifted in the air around him, orbiting slowly.
"Give me more," he said.
I took a step back.
The ground extended under my foot. Two steps back for every one I took. His smile widened.
"More," he said. "More. More."
He lunged.
The stone cracked.
Reality slammed back into me like a wall that had been falling toward me for the entire duration of the other place and had only just arrived. The glow died. The whispering cut out, sudden, total, the silence more disorienting than the noise had been.
My body was shaking.
The embers of something remained. Smaller than what had been there a moment ago, diminished, but present. A warmth behind my sternum that hadn't been there this morning.
Arata stepped back from Ren.
One step. One palm, extended, connecting with Ren's midsection.
Nothing happened for a moment.
Then everything happened. Blood, organs—an entire anatomy textbook emptied onto the dirt. Ren died like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
I looked away.
When I looked back, Arata was sliding his mask aside, holding it in one hand, He had eyes that were red, a shade of deep red that some people have and that most people don't. He was looking at me with an expression that managed to be simultaneously assessing and amused.
"You went under," he said.
"I… yeah," I said.
"For a first timer, that's impressive."
"How did I get out?"
He gestured with his staff toward the headstone. It had cracked, a fault line running from the top corner diagonally through the name. The glow was gone entirely, the stone just stone again.
"Broke the connection," he said. "Can't be pulled under if the anchor's snapped." He crouched beside the shards at the base. "Kenji Eito. Stabbed repeatedly in a prison yard, 1987. Reason for imprisonment: multiple counts of assault with intent. Not a pleasant man alive. Less pleasant dead."
I stared at the stone. "He was trying to… he wanted…
"Your blood," Arata said. "Which you gave him too much of. Classic rookie mistake. You fed the grave before you understood the terms of the contract."
I looked at my palm. The cut had mostly stopped bleeding. The skin around it felt different, not painful, but aware somehow
"What is all this?" I asked.
Arata stood. Stretched. "Someone who just tripped and fell face-first into a lifestyle." He extended a hand, not to help me up, I was already standing, but as a gesture. "Come with me."
"Why would I?"
"Because you're alive," he said. "And alive Gravebinders don't stay that way long without guidance. Education. Understanding of what just happened to you."
I looked around the cemetery. The raider against the tree. The bent gate. The place where Daigo Ren was.
"Fine," I said. "I'll come."
He grinned. It was the grin of someone who had already known I would say yes and had simply been waiting for me to arrive at the answer on my own.
"Good boy," he said.
We walked out through the bent gate into the city.
Behind us, the cemetery settled back into silence.
Except, very faintly, just at the edge of what was audible, the sound of the stone continuing to crack.