The city smelled like ash for days. Even when the fire at the old lab had burned down to a pile of black steel, that metallic tang lingered on my clothes, in my hair, in the way I breathed.
Airi woke first. Her hand found mine the way it always had—warm, familiar—and for a suspended second I allowed myself to believe the last few nights had been a fever dream. Then she sat up, eyes wide, and the smile dropped from her face like a curtain.
"I remember," she said, voice small.
I watched her face, waiting for the hesitation. What I didn't expect was the flood—images tumbling out of her: the argument at the riverside, the whispered threats in a dim car, Kaito's laugh as he pushed me down the stairs, the steel pipe raised in slow motion. She saw it all, but she also saw the pressure that had bent her until she broke—how her ex had threatened her parents, how his family had circled them like wolves until she'd been the only one who could feed them what they wanted: information, weakness, a scapegoat.
"I tried to stop them," she said. "I told myself I could handle it. I thought if I gave them what they demanded, they'd leave my family alone. I thought—" Her breath hitched. "I thought I could keep you safe by letting you go."
The words jagged across me, but the voice under them—raw, ashamed—was real. It wasn't the practiced coldness of someone who had plotted murder; it was the terrified confession of someone crushed by choice.
"You didn't betray me because you wanted to," I said. "You betrayed me because they made you think you had no other choice."
Her hands shook. "I should have told you. I should have—"
"You did what you thought would save lives," I interrupted, and the rush of the memory hit me hard. The pipe. The rain. Her white dress. The way she'd said sorry like a verdict.
We had both been victims of someone else's design. That didn't excuse the pain. It changed it.
Airi slid the cube from my jacket—still warm against my palm—and turned it over as if it might confess its secrets. The blue pulse in its core was steady, like a heartbeat. "This is the Core?" she whispered. "Is this how they control the resets?"
"It's part of it," I said. "Ren said destroy the Core, destroy the Cycle. He made it sound simple like folding paper. But we both saw what happened when we touched the Cycle. It fights back."
She met my eyes, and something resolute clicked into place. "Then we finish it."
Her fingers found my cheek. For a long beat there was nothing in the world but us—two burned people who had been given a crooked second chance. I saw the guilt in her, but I also saw the steel underneath. It wasn't cowardice that had driven her before. It had been fear. Now she wanted to stand.
"Okay," I said. "But you don't walk into that alone."
She flashed me a crooked smile. "I won't let you. We do this together."
We slept in shifts after that, waking to check the cube, to map the names, to prepare. The Core hummed like a living thing, and the map in my head—Kaito's mansion, the Tanaka files we'd glimpsed on the terminal, Ren's briefing—grew sharper.
We needed leverage. Information. A way to prove that the Cycle wasn't some ghost story but a machine with hands in every wound this city had suffered.
Airi had an idea she'd been hiding beneath her fear: a name. Her uncle—a quiet man who worked nights at the municipal archives—had helped her as a kid with school projects. He owed her favors, she said, and favors meant access. "If there's anything at Tanaka Corporation linking my family to the Cycle, the old municipal backups might have a record," she told me. "They'd be buried, but not erased."
It was a thin thread, but it was something. We pulled it taut.
We moved like thieves in daylight. I taught Airi how to tighten a fist so it could stop a blow, how to drop weight, how to turn fear into motion. She was clumsy at first—hands that belonged to someone who grew up delivering homework and pastries—but she learned fast, her movements quickening with a hunger that frightened me.
One evening, beneath the flicker of a streetlamp, she stepped toward me with a folding knife in her palm—an ugly thing, practical. "Show me how to aim for their weak spots," she said. "I don't want to kill unless I have to."
Her voice trembled, but there was a steadier beat under it. We practiced strikes, defenses, the kind of brutal ballet that keeps a small life from being taken. Once, I struck too hard; her face folded back and she cried out. The look on my own face when I saw the tears was the closest I came to hating myself.
"I'm sorry," I breathed, dropping to my knees, taking her hands, feeling the tremors of guilt and shame.
Her fingers closed around mine. "Don't. Not tonight." She swallowed. "If you ever… if you ever wanted me to pay a price for what I did, make me pay it with you." There it was again—her willingness to be burned down to ash beside me. The very thing I'd sworn to avoid.
"Then we'll pay it together," I said.
The plan formed in pieces: Airi's uncle would plumb the municipal backups for Tanaka's offsite records while we staged a strike at Kaito's mansion to draw the family—and their protectors—out into the open. The cube should be able to track the Core's resonance; Ren had hinted that the Cycle nested its data in places built for secrecy. If we could force the Cycle to react, we might locate the Core's true center, then collapse it.
There were holes. Many of them. We didn't have allies, only two battered wills and a boy who remembered how to break bones. The city watched us like an audience leaning in for blood. The Cycle, if Ren's words were true, would be ready.
We spent the day gathering the small things that matter in plans that end badly: dark clothes, ropes, a stolen van, an old burner phone. We burned notes when we finished with them. Each item we packed felt heavier than the last.
Before the sun sank, Airi found me on the rooftop, staring out at the neighborhood where we had both been born and almost died. She sat beside me, and neither of us spoke. She rested her head on my shoulder, careful, like touching a fresh scar.
"Promise me something," she said after a long moment.
I swallowed. "Anything."
"If it comes down to killing me or letting the Cycle live, promise me you'll choose what saves everyone—even if it costs you everything," she said.
I could see the memory of my father's face in her eyes, the machine in a lab, the names on the files. The world had offered me a cruel bargain once: live and watch everything burn, or die and do the same. I had come back to change that calculus.
"I promise," I said. My voice sounded steady even as the ache in my chest threatened to tear me.
Her hand tightened around mine. "Then let's go end it."
Night swallowed the rooftop. The cube in my jacket vibrated faintly, as if it also understood the gravity of what we'd decided. Below, the city's hum rose and fell like a breath. Somewhere, someone watched.
We were two pieces of broken glass fitting together to cut the world wide open.
And for the first time in my life, revenge felt like salvation—not simply for me, but for everyone stuck in a loop that never learned to mourn.
We descended from the roof into the dark. The game had begun.