The first time Riki Yamade truly saw the sun, he was seven years old, and it appeared to him not as the brilliant sphere he'd seen in textbooks, but as a pale disc bleeding through layers of smoke and industrial haze—a ghost of light that painted the mountains of refuse in shades of amber and rust. He remembers thinking, with the strange clarity that sometimes visits people, that even something as eternal as the sun could be suffocated if you covered it with enough garbage.
That's what East Benevalant was, really. A place where beautiful things came to die.
The adults never said it out loud, but Riki understood: his home was Tokyo's shame, hidden behind propaganda and indifference, a wound the city pretended had healed. Even the name was a mockery—"Tokyo's Benevolence lies in the East," they'd said decades ago, back when someone still cared enough to lie with poetry. Now it was just Benevalant, where the world's castoffs came to rest, where chemical fires painted the night sky in colors that had no names, where the air itself was a kind of violence.
His parents were garbage cleaners. Not a romantic profession, not the kind of thing you'd see in the holographic advertisements that flickered over the distant towers of central Tokyo. But they worked with their hands and their hearts, sorting through the garbage of civilization with a methodical grace that Riki wouldn't understand until much later. His mother's hands were always wrapped in bandages, stained with rust and chemicals that no amount of washing could remove. His father's voice was a constant rumble, steady and warm, blending with the buzz of flies and the groaning of transport trucks that arrived each dawn like clockwork, depositing their cargo of shame.
"Riki," his father would say, crouching beside him in the shadow of a trash heap that rose three stories high, "the world throws away what it doesn't want. Our job is to make sure it doesn't kill itself doing it."
Riki would nod, not really understanding, watching the way his father's scarred hands moved through the refuse with surprising gentleness, as if each piece of broken plastic or twisted metal deserved pride in its final moments.
He didn't understand what his father meant. Not then. Not until the killing began.
Their home was in one of the "high-stake towers"—a name that managed to be both literal and ironic. Dozens of families lived in these vertical slums, metal scraps and shipping containers welded into approximations of apartments, stacked like children's blocks toward a sky they could never quite reach. The floors creaked like dying animals when you walked. The walls wept with condensation and chemicals. At night, when the wind came from the east, you could taste copper and ash on your tongue.
But Riki had been happy then, in the way people can be happy even in hell, because they don't yet know what heaven looks like.
He'd chase the wild dogs that prowled the waste pits, their ribs showing through mangy fur, their eyes bright with the desperate intelligence of survivors. He'd explore the valleys between garbage mountains with his older sister, Hokurine, who was six years his senior and seemed, to his young eyes, invincible. She had a way of transforming their poverty into adventure, of taking broken toys from the refuse and weaving stories around them—tales of distant kingdoms where these discarded things had once been treasured, where children played in parks instead of chemical dumps, where the water didn't leave burns on your skin.
They had a dream, the two of them, whispered in the dark when the fires outside painted shifting shadows on their ceiling. They would save money—credits, they called it, though neither of them had ever held more than a few coins at once. They would move west, to where the sky was genuinely blue instead of that sickly yellow-gray. To where people lived in real houses with real walls and real futures.
"When we get there," Hokurine would say, her voice soft with longing, "I'm going to buy you a bicycle. A red one, with chrome handles that shine like mirrors."
"And I'll get you books," Riki would reply. "A whole library of them, so many you'll never finish reading." They'd fall asleep holding hands, breathing air that burned, dreaming dreams that felt, for a moment, more real than the garbage outside.
But the poison didn't care about dreams. It never does. The sickness came slowly at first, the way dusk comes—so gradually you don't notice until the light is already gone.
His mother's cough started as something dismissable, a clearing of the throat, a minor irritation. But it persisted, growing deeper, wetter, until she was doubled over every morning, hacking up, the wrong consistency. His father's hands began to swell, the joints inflaming until his fingers looked like bombs about to burst. He couldn't grip a shovel anymore. Couldn't work. Couldn't provide.
The doctors—if you could call them that, the medical students who ran the free clinic at the edge of Benevalant—said it was Air Decay Syndrome. A clinical name for an uncomplicated reality: their bodies were breaking down from the inside out, corroded by the very air they breathed, the water they drank, the existence they'd been born into.
"It's just the cost," one doctor had said, not unkindly, adjusting her mask as she spoke. "Of living in Benevalant."
Riki, standing in the corner of the examination room, his small hands balled into fists, had wanted to scream. The cost of what? Of being poor? Of being unwanted? Of having the misfortune to be born in the place where Tokyo buried its sins?
He said nothing. He was eight years old and already learning that some injustices were too large to fit into words.
His mother died on a Tuesday. His father followed on a Friday. They held the funeral—if you could apply it with that word—at the edge of the largest landfill, where a monk (who might not have been a real monk, Riki later realized, just someone kind enough to pretend) said prayers that were swallowed by the wind. They scattered the ashes among the garbage, dust returning to dust, until there was no way to tell where his parents ended and the refuse began.
Riki didn't cry. Hokurine did enough crying for both of them, her body shaking with sobs that seemed to echo the groaning of the towers around them. He just stood there, numb, watching the ashes dance and disappear, thinking: This is murder. They call it a syndrome, an unfortunate consequence, a cost of living. But it's murder.
The government killed his parents as surely as if they'd put guns to their heads. He just didn't know how to make anyone else see it. After that, there was only Hokurine and himself, two children playing at adulthood in a world that had no patience for weakness.
She was fourteen but seemed ancient, hardened by necessity into something fierce and unbreakable. She took night shifts at the sorting facility, spending twelve hours surrounded by chemical plastics and toxic runoff, her body absorbing poisons that would probably kill her before she turned thirty. She never complained. Never showed fear. When Riki asked her once if she was scared, she'd just smiled—that sad, broken smile that made her look decades older—and said, "Fear is expensive. We can't afford it."
Riki stayed home, patching holes in their ceiling with broken tarps, teaching himself to cook with the expired food they could scavenge or afford, growing up too fast in a place where childhood was a luxury. At night, he'd lie awake listening to Hokurine hum lullabies through the thin walls, her voice competing with the crackle of fires outside, and he'd think: We'll survive this. We have to. Because if we don't, what were mom and dad's deaths even for?
That's what he told himself. He was still telling himself that the night the soldiers came. They arrived at 2:47 AM. Riki would remember the exact time because he'd been watching the clock, unable to sleep, listening to distant sirens that had been wailing for hours.
The soldiers wore white hazmat suits that gleamed in the darkness like ghosts, their faces obscured behind gas masks that reflected the firelight. They carried flamethrowers. The people of Benevalant, emerging from their homes in confusion and hope, thought they were rescuers. They thought, perhaps, the government had finally remembered them.
They were wrong.
"Contamination Protocol Epsilon," a voice crackled through loudspeakers. "All residents are to evacuate immediately. This district has been deemed a biological hazard. Purification will commence in five minutes."
The people ran. Some tried to gather possessions. Others just ran, understanding in their bones that this was not rescue but extermination, that the government had decided the easiest solution to East Benevalant was to burn it away like an infected wound.
Riki ran too, his feet pounding against metal floors that were already beginning to heat up, smoke pouring through the cracks in the walls. He could hear Hokurine screaming his name, her voice raw with terror, and he turned, searching for her through the chaos—
And then their world exploded into flame.
The heat was a physical thing, a wall of scorching air that slammed into him and sent him tumbling. He hit the floor hard, the breath knocked from his lungs, and through the smoke and fire he saw her—Hokurine, silhouetted against an inferno, her arms spread wide as she blocked the doorway to their small room.
"Run, Riki!" Her voice broke, breaking apart like glass. "Don't look back! Just run!" He looked back anyway. He would never forgive himself for that.
The last image he had of Hokurine Yamade, his sister, his protector, his entire world—was her silhouette framed in red and black, the doorway collapsing around her, her body disappearing into smoke and flame. Her final scream cut through the roar of fire and then there was nothing. Just silence. The terrible, absolute silence that comes when someone you love stops existing.
Riki survived by crawling beneath the bodies of his neighbors, hiding among the dead while the world burned above him. He lay there for hours, breathing through a wet cloth, feeling the heat cook the air in his lungs, listening to the crackle of flames consuming everything he'd ever known.
When dawn finally came, he emerged into a landscape of ash and twisted metal, a cemetery of a thousand homes, and no one stopped him as he walked away. No one even looked at him. Just another piece of garbage from the garbage district, another casualty that wouldn't make the news.
He was nine years old, and he had lost everything twice. The weeks that followed blurred together in a haze of fever and hunger and barely suppressed madness.
Riki wandered through the edges of Tokyo like a ghost, his lungs full of poison, his body wracked with hallucinations that made the line between memory and nightmare impossible to distinguish. He dreamed of Hokurine constantly—her laugh, her scolding voice calling him a crybaby, her hands patching his scraped knees. He'd wake to find himself crying, or screaming, or sometimes just lying still, so still he wasn't sure he was alive at all.
He was found—not rescued, found—by a street gang that ran scrap-smuggling operations in the industrial district. Their leader, a figure named Jiro with scars that told their own stories, took one look at Riki's hollow eyes and said, "You've got hate in you, kid. Good. Hate's better fuel than hope in this city. Use it before it uses you."
Jiro gave him food. A place to sleep. A knife. Riki took all three and asked no questions.
For the next several years, that was his existence—fighting, stealing, surviving in the cracks between Tokyo's gleaming towers. He learned to swing pipes with enough force to shatter bones. He learned to smile while lying, to cry on command, to swallow his humanity when it threatened to make him weak. By thirteen, he'd earned a reputation in the backstreets: the Garbage Prince, they called him, a title spoken with mockery and fear in equal measure.
He formed his own gang—The Death Team of Riki. It wasn't as dramatic as it sounded. They were just broken kids trying to feel like something other than refuse, trying to convince themselves they mattered in a world that had already decided they didn't. They robbed convenience stores. Tagged walls with elaborate graffiti. Laughed too loud and slept too little.
For the first time since Hokurine died, Riki felt almost alive. Almost. Then came Farina.
She was the sister of a local gang boss, sharp-tongued and sharper-eyed, with a smile that could cut through steel and a talent for seeing through everyone's garbage. She called him "trash kid" with such casual disdain that it somehow felt like affection. They'd argue for hours, trading insults like lost broken people trading promises, but when no one was watching she'd slip him food, patch his wounds, tell him to stop getting himself killed.
"You're such an idiot," she'd say, wrapping bandages around his bleeding knuckles. "You know that, right? A complete idiot." "Takes one to know one," he'd reply, and she'd punch his shoulder hard enough to bruise.
He didn't realize she was an undercover agent until it was too late. Didn't know she'd been planted to bring down her brother's operation from the inside, that every kindness had been calculated, that her feelings—if she'd had any—had been weaponized.
The night her brother discovered the truth, chaos consumed the backstreets.
The Death Team tried to run. They didn't make it far. Riki hid again—always hiding, always surviving—under a pile of broken crates while gunfire and screams painted the darkness. He watched Farina die protecting him, her last expression one of guilt and regret, her blood pooling around her like spilled ink.
When the silence finally came, Riki's hands were wet with tears and blood, and he told himself: Never again. Never trust anyone. Not the government. Not gangs. Not even yourself.
He was fourteen years old, and he had lost everything three times. Three months later, a news broadcast changed everything. "...Sheriff Hokurine Yamade has been appointed as the top investigator in City District 3, following her exemplary record in tactical operations and criminal apprehension..."
Riki had been walking past an electronics store when he saw it, the rows of televisions all displaying the same face—older, harder, eyes like chips of ice, but unmistakably her. Unmistakably his sister.
Alive.
His legs gave out. He collapsed right there on the sidewalk, strangers stepping over him, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't process the impossible reality staring at him from a dozen screens.
She's alive. Hokurine is alive. She survived. She survived and she never—she never came back for me—the betrayal was a knife between his ribs, sharp and cold and absolute.
He didn't believe it until he saw her in person, until his crew got ambushed during a robbery gone wrong and there she was, leading the police tactical team, moving with mechanical efficiency through the chaos.
"Hokurine!" he screamed, his voice breaking. "It's me! It's Riki! Your brother!" She didn't hesitate. The gunshot echoed like the end of the world.
The bullet tore through his shoulder, spinning him to the ground, and he looked up through tears and blood to see her reloading—emotionless, professional, a machine wearing his sister's face. His crew dove to shield him, shouting for him to run, but he couldn't move, couldn't do anything but watch as she executed them one by one, her laughter cutting through the gunfire like broken glass.
Something in her had shattered. Or perhaps—and this thought was worse—something in her had always been broken, and he'd just been too young, too naive, too desperate to see it.
He ran when his legs finally obeyed, abandoning the bodies of his friends, adding more ghosts to his collection.
The next day, the news reported her death: Sheriff Hokurine Yamade, killed in the line of duty by criminal elements she'd been investigating.
Riki cried. Not for her. Not for his crew. He cried for the little kid who used to believe people could be good, who used to dream of bicycles and libraries and a sky without smoke.
That child died in the same fire that took his sister. He was just too stupid to realize it until now.
By fifteen, Riki Yamade had become exactly what the world expected: a delinquent, a problem, a statistic. He drifted through high schools, transferring constantly, getting into fights, smoking behind gyms, wearing his anger like armor.
Teachers would say, "You have potential, Yamade-kun. If you'd just apply yourself—"
And he'd laugh. Because what was the point? The world had already decided what he was worth, had burned that assessment into his lungs and carved it into his skin.
And yet.
Deep inside, beneath the ash of his accumulated rage and grief, there remained something stubbornly alive. An ember that refused to die no matter how much darkness he piled on top of it. He hated that ember. Hated what it represented—hope, vulnerability, the possibility of caring about something again.
That ember would eventually take the form of a teenager named Akio Hukitaske. But that was still in the future.
For now, Riki existed in a cycle of violence and numbness, watching other students discuss their futures with a mixture of contempt and envy. What must it be like, he wondered, to believe the world had a place for you? To dream without the certainty that those dreams would burn?
One afternoon, smoking behind the school building, staring at a sky that refused to be blue, a voice cut through his haze: "Hey! You're Riki Yamade, right?"
He turned. The child was his age, maybe a year older—clean uniform, messy brown hair, eyes that sparkled with something Riki had forgotten the name for. Joy, maybe. Or innocence. One of those expensive emotions.
"What's it to you?" Riki muttered, lighting another cigarette even though the last one was still burning. The child—Akio Hukitaske, he'd learn later—just smiled. "Nothing much. I just wanted to meet the moron who keeps beating up half the class."
"You got a death wish or something?" "Maybe," Akio shrugged, sitting down beside him uninvited. "Or maybe I just think you look lonely."
Riki blinked. For the first time in six years, someone had said something that wasn't an insult or a threat or a transaction. He didn't know how to process it. So he did what he always did when confronted with sincerity—he shoved the kid hard enough to send him sprawling.
"Mind your own damn business, sunshine." Akio just laughed, brushing dirt off his uniform, his smile never wavering. That was how it started—a stupid, awkward, almost comedic moment that would later reshape both their lives in ways neither could predict.
For now, Riki walked away, hands shoved deep in his pockets, cigarette smoke trailing behind him like a ghost. He pretended the warmth creeping up his heart didn't mean anything. Pretended the world hadn't just shifted by an inch.
And somewhere deep inside him, in the place where everything had burned and died and been buried under ash—that old ember, that stubborn, stupid, beautiful ember—flickered once again.
TO BE CONTINUED...