The third day began with blood.
Not mine. Not yet.
I woke to the sound of my grandfather coughing—that wet, rattling hack that had become his primary form of communication over the past months. But this time it was different. Louder. More desperate. Interspersed with gagging sounds that made my stomach clench.
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to him die slowly in the room above mine.
Miyuki was already awake. She'd been sitting in the corner of my room all night—watching, always watching—and now she moved to my bedside with that impossible silence she possessed.
"He's getting worse," she said. Not a question. A statement of fact.
"He's been getting worse for months."
"No. This is different. Terminal different." She tilted her head, listening to the coughing above us. "He won't last the week. Maybe not even three days."
The way she said it—clinical, detached, like she was reading a weather report—should have bothered me more than it did.
"Should I check on him?" I asked, not moving from the bed.
"Do you want to?"
"No."
"Then don't." She leaned over me, her hair falling around us like a curtain. "You have more important things to worry about. Like school. Like surviving the Census checks. Like not letting anyone realize what's happening to you."
She touched my face, and I flinched. Her fingers traced the new lines around my eyes, the deepening hollows in my cheeks.
"You're aging faster," she whispered. "Each feeding takes more now. I can feel it. You're burning up inside, Kaito. Like a candle with both ends lit."
"How long?" I asked. My voice was hoarse, rough. When had that happened?
"Until what?"
"Until there's nothing left."
She smiled. It should have been comforting. It wasn't.
"Does it matter? You were going to kill yourself three nights ago. At least this way, you get to feel loved first."
She kissed my forehead—that same burning sensation—and stood.
"I'll make breakfast. You should shower. You smell like… decay."
-----
The shower helped. Hot water, hotter than I should have been able to tolerate, pounding against skin that felt too thin, too fragile.
I watched the water circle the drain, taking with it dirt and sweat and something else—fine gray particles that might have been dead skin or might have been something worse.
When I looked down at my body, I saw changes that hadn't been there yesterday.
My ribs were more prominent. Not dramatically—not like a famine victim—but visible in a way they hadn't been three days ago. My hip bones jutted out sharply. The muscle definition in my arms had softened, replaced by something looser, something that moved wrong when I flexed.
And my hands.
I held them up, watching water drip from fingers that looked… *longer*. Not by much. Just enough to be wrong. The bones more prominent, the joints more pronounced, the veins standing out like blue worms beneath paper-thin skin.
I was seventeen years old.
I looked thirty-five.
Maybe forty.
The realization should have terrified me. Instead, I just felt tired.
I dried off with a towel that had been white once, years ago, when my mother was still alive. Now it was gray, threadbare, smelling faintly of mildew no matter how many times I washed it.
When I wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror, the face that looked back at me was a stranger's.
Same bone structure. Same eyes, same nose, same mouth.
But older. Weathered. The face of someone who'd lived decades I hadn't actually experienced.
The gray at my temples had spread. Now it ran through maybe a third of my hair, silver threads woven through black. I pulled the baseball cap on—the same one from yesterday—and covered as much as I could.
From downstairs, I heard Miyuki humming. Some tune I didn't recognize. Too old for someone her age to know. Too young for something that felt ancient.
I dressed in yesterday's uniform—I only had two, and the other was worse—and headed downstairs.
-----
The kitchen smelled better than yesterday. Not good, exactly, but less burned. Progress, I supposed.
Miyuki had set the table again. Two bowls. Two sets of chopsticks. Two cups of tea.
The miso soup looked almost edible today. The rice was only slightly overcooked. There was even a piece of fish—mackerel, maybe, or something that had once been mackerel before it spent too long in the freezer.
"I'm getting better," she said proudly, sitting across from me. "I watched videos. On your phone. While you were sleeping. There are so many cooking tutorials. It's fascinating what humans need to survive."
The way she said *humans*—like she wasn't one, like she'd never pretended to be—made my skin prickle.
"Thank you," I said, picking up the chopsticks.
The soup was still too salty, but better than yesterday. The rice was edible. The fish was… fish.
"You need to eat more," Miyaki said, watching me with those dark eyes. "You're wasting away faster than expected. The feedings are taking too much. I need to slow down, but I'm so *hungry*, Kaito. All the time. Your loneliness is so rich, so deep. It's like drinking from an ocean."
"Then stop," I said.
"I can't." She reached across the table, grabbed my wrist. Her grip was firm enough to hurt. "And you won't let me. Because you need it too. Those four minutes. That warmth. That silence. You're as addicted to it as I am."
She was right. I hated that she was right.
"Eat," she commanded, releasing my wrist. "All of it. You're going to need your strength today."
"Why?"
"Because of what's happening at school."
I looked up. "What's happening at school?"
Her smile was sharp. Predatory.
"You'll see."
-----
The walk to school was different today.
Yesterday, the neighborhood had been quiet—unnaturally quiet, everyone hiding behind locked doors and drawn curtains.
Today, it was *empty*.
Not just quiet. Not just hiding.
*Abandoned*.
The houses I passed weren't just dark—they were *vacant*. Doors left ajar. Windows broken. That symbol I'd seen yesterday—the red circle with a line through it—was spray-painted on almost every door now.
But not all of them said **VERIFIED: CLEAR**.
Some said **QUARANTINED**.
Some said **REMOVED**.
And one—the house where the unemployed man used to scream—just said **CONTAMINATED** in dripping red letters.
Miyuki walked beside me, visible today, holding my hand like a proper girlfriend.
"They're cleaning," she said conversationally. "The military. Going door to door. Checking everyone. The Census isn't just about counting who's human. It's about eliminating who's not."
"And the people who lived here?"
"Gone. Quarantine camps, probably. Or dead. Does it matter? They're not your problem anymore."
We passed a house where the front door was completely ripped off its hinges. Inside, I could see overturned furniture, broken glass, dark stains on the walls that might have been mold or might have been something worse.
"Did they find an anomaly there?" I asked.
"Maybe. Or maybe they just found someone who couldn't prove they were human fast enough. The Census doesn't wait for evidence, Kaito. It operates on suspicion."
She squeezed my hand. Too tight.
"Which is why you need to be very, very careful today. Don't let them look too close. Don't let them ask too many questions. And whatever you do, don't let them *touch* you."
"Why?"
"Because if they do a thermal scan close enough, they'll see. They'll see that your core temperature is wrong. That your heart beats too slow. That you're dying from the inside out."
She stopped walking, pulled me close, put her lips against my ear.
"They'll see what I've done to you. And then they'll try to take you away. And I can't let that happen, Kaito. I *won't*."
The threat in her voice was unmistakable.
-----
The school looked different.
The guards at the gate had multiplied. Yesterday there were two. Today there were eight, plus a military vehicle parked inside the fence, plus something that looked like a mobile command post—a trailer with antennas and monitoring equipment visible through small windows.
The line of students waiting to get in was longer. Slower. And I could see why.
Yesterday's checkpoint had been quick—a visual check, a temperature scan, a few questions.
Today they were doing full body scans. Each student had to step into a booth—some kind of medical equipment, portable but sophisticated—and wait while lights flashed and machines hummed and guards studied readouts on tablets.
It was taking three, four, sometimes five minutes per student.
And some students weren't coming out the other side.
I watched a boy—maybe fifteen, sophomore, I didn't know his name—step into the booth. The lights flashed. The machines hummed. The guards studied their tablets.
Then they grabbed him.
He didn't scream. Didn't resist. Just let himself be pulled aside, through a side gate, into a cordoned area where I could see other students sitting on the ground, arms zip-tied behind their backs, guards standing over them with rifles.
"What's going on?" someone in line ahead of me whispered.
"False positives," someone else replied. "The scans are picking up anomalies. Or what they *think* are anomalies. I heard they're taking everyone to a testing facility."
"What kind of testing?"
"The kind you don't come back from."
Miyuki's hand tightened on mine.
"We should leave," she whispered. "Right now. Turn around and go home. This is too dangerous."
But I couldn't leave. Because if I left, if I didn't show up for Census, they'd come looking for me. They'd come to the house. They'd find my grandfather dying upstairs and me aging decades every night and Miyuki—
They'd find *her*.
"I have to go through," I said quietly.
"Then I'm coming with you."
"They can't see you. You said—"
"I said I'd be there. I didn't say I'd be *visible*." She let go of my hand, took a step back, and began to fade. Not disappear—just become less solid, less present, until she was just a shimmer in the air, a cold spot, a feeling of being watched.
*I'm right here*, her voice whispered in my head. *If anything goes wrong, I'll get you out. Even if it means killing every guard in this place.*
That should have made me feel better.
It didn't.
-----
The line moved forward. Slowly. Agonizingly.
I watched student after student step into the booth. Most came out the other side, shaken but cleared. Some didn't.
A girl—third year, I recognized her vaguely—stepped in. Five seconds later, the guards grabbed her. She screamed. Actually screamed, struggling against their grip, insisting she was human, she'd always been human, this was a mistake.
They zip-tied her hands anyway. Added her to the collection of students sitting in that cordoned area.
How many? Fifteen? Twenty?
What were they going to do with them?
"Next," a guard called.
I was at the front of the line.
I stepped forward.
The guard looked me up and down. His eyes lingered on my face—on the lines around my eyes, the hollows in my cheeks, the gray in my hair.
"Name," he said.
"Yamada Kaito."
He checked his tablet. Found my name. Made a mark.
"You look different from your file photo."
"I've been sick."
"That's what you said yesterday." He studied me closer. "How sick? What illness?"
"I don't know. I didn't go to a doctor."
"Why not?"
"Couldn't afford it."
He frowned. Suspicious but not enough to act on it. Not yet.
"Step into the booth."
I walked forward. The booth was small—just big enough for one person to stand with their arms slightly raised. The walls were white plastic or metal, lined with what looked like sensors and cameras.
The door closed behind me.
Darkness. Complete darkness. Then light—bright, blinding, coming from all directions at once.
I felt it scanning me. Not just my skin—*through* my skin. Through muscle and bone and organs. Mapping my body at a level I couldn't comprehend.
My heart was beating too fast. Or too slow. I couldn't tell anymore.
The machine hummed. Beeped. Hummed again.
Then stopped.
The door opened.
A guard grabbed my arm. Not gently.
"Sir," he called to someone I couldn't see. "We've got an anomaly."
No.
*No.*
"Wait," I said. "I'm human. I'm—"
"Your internal organs show accelerated aging. Your bone density is consistent with someone in their sixties. Your cellular degradation is—" He looked at his tablet, frowned. "Consistent with terminal illness or radiation exposure. You're coming with us for secondary testing."
I felt Miyuki's presence sharpen. Cold spread through the air around me like frost.
*Don't*, I thought at her. *Don't hurt them. Not here. Not in front of everyone.*
The guard started pulling me toward the side gate. Toward the cordoned area. Toward whatever fate awaited the others.
"Please," I said, my voice breaking. "I'm just sick. That's all. I'm not—I'm not one of *them*."
The guard stopped. Looked at me. Really looked at me.
And I saw something in his eyes I didn't expect.
*Pity.*
"Kid," he said quietly. "I don't think you're an anomaly. I think you're dying. But the protocol says anyone with readings like yours gets sent for testing. I'm sorry."
He wasn't lying. I could hear it in his voice.
But that didn't change anything.
I was going to be taken. Tested. And when they found out what was happening to me—when they found out about *her*—
The cold intensified. I could see my breath now, misting in the air.
Other students were noticing. Pointing. Murmuring.
"What's wrong with the temperature?"
"Why is it so cold?"
"Something's wrong. Something's—"
And then I heard it.
A sound like breaking glass. Like ice cracking. Like reality itself fracturing.
The guard holding my arm stumbled back, his eyes wide.
"What the—"
Miyuki materialized behind him. Fully visible. Fully *present*.
Every student in line saw her.
Every guard saw her.
And in that moment, I realized: she'd been invisible because she *chose* to be. But now she was done hiding.
"Let him go," she said. Her voice was quiet. Calm. But underneath it was something else—something vast and hungry and absolutely inhuman.
The guard's hand fell away from my arm. He stumbled back another step, reaching for his rifle.
"Anomaly!" he shouted. "We have a confirmed—"
Miyuki moved.
One moment she was standing behind him. The next she was—
I couldn't even describe it. She was everywhere and nowhere. The air itself seemed to *ripple* around her, like heat waves, like something was distorting space.
The guard fell. Not injured. Just… *dropped*, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Every other guard raised their weapons.
"Everyone get back!" one of them yelled. "Active anomaly! Lethal force authorized!"
*No*, I wanted to scream. *Stop. You'll just make her angry.*
But before I could say anything, before the guards could fire, Miyuki turned to me.
And smiled.
"Time to go home, Kaito."
She grabbed my hand. Her grip was ice-cold. Burning-cold.
And then the world—
-----
—*shifted*.
I can't describe it better than that. Reality bent, folded, compressed. One second I was at the school gates, surrounded by guards and students and weapons. The next second I was—
Home.
In my bedroom.
Miyuki released my hand and I collapsed, gasping, my head spinning, my stomach threatening to revolt.
"What—how did you—"
"I moved us," she said simply. "Through the spaces between spaces. It's easier with you than without. You're so light now. So… hollow. There's barely anything left to carry."
I looked up at her. She looked tired. Not physically—she never looked physically tired. But there was something in her eyes, something *dimmed*, like she'd expended energy she couldn't easily replace.
"They saw you," I said. "Everyone saw you."
"I know."
"They'll come here. They'll find us."
"I know."
"So what do we do?"
She sat down beside me on the bed. Took my hand again. This time her grip was gentle. Almost tender.
"We have tonight," she said. "One more feeding. Maybe two if you're lucky. And then…" She trailed off.
"And then what?"
She looked at me. Really looked at me. And for the first time since this started, I saw something in her eyes that might have been *regret*.
"And then you get to decide," she whispered. "Do we run? Do we hide? Do we let them take us? Or do we—"
She stopped.
"Or do we what?"
"Or do we become the thing they're afraid of."
I didn't understand what she meant.
Not then.
-----
The rest of the day was quiet. Eerily quiet.
We stayed in my room. Miyuki sat with me, sometimes visible, sometimes not, always *present*. We didn't talk much. What was there to say?
Around noon, I heard my grandfather. Not coughing this time. Calling my name.
"Kaito," he wheezed. "Kaito, where are you?"
I started to stand, but Miyuki put a hand on my shoulder.
"Don't," she said.
"He needs help."
"He's dying. There's nothing you can do."
"I can at least—"
"You can at least *what*? Sit with him while he mistakes you for your father? Watch him waste away? He doesn't know who you are anymore, Kaito. He doesn't even know who *he* is."
The calling stopped. Replaced by coughing. Then silence.
Miyuki was right. She was always right.
I hated her for it.
-----
Night fell.
I heard vehicles outside. Multiple vehicles. The sound of boots on pavement. Voices calling orders.
They'd found us.
Miyuki stood at the window, looking down at the street. Her expression was unreadable.
"There are twelve of them," she said. "Military. Armed. They've surrounded the house. They're getting ready to breach."
"What do we do?"
She turned to face me.
"We feed. One last time. And then we see what happens."
"They'll break in while we're—"
"Let them." Her smile was sharp. Predatory. "Let them see what we are. What we've become. Let them understand that some things can't be killed with bullets."
She began to transform. The school uniform dissolved, replaced by that writhing mass of tentacles, that obsidian surface that reflected nothing.
The door downstairs exploded inward. I heard boots pounding up the stairs. Voices shouting.
"Go go go!"
"Secure the building!"
"Target is on the second floor!"
Miyuki opened. That flower of darkness, that space prepared just for me.
I stepped inside.
The tentacles closed around me. The warmth enveloped me. The silence descended.
Four minutes.
Four minutes of perfect peace while the world outside descended into chaos.
I heard gunfire. Muffled, distant, like it was happening in another world.
I heard screaming.
I heard… nothing.
And then the four minutes were up.
Miyuki released me. I fell to my knees, gasping.
My body felt wrong. Lighter. Looser. Like something inside me had finally *broken*.
I looked at my hands.
They were translucent. Actually *translucent*. I could see the bones through the skin, the tendons, the blood vessels like dark threads through milk glass.
I was fifty now. Maybe sixty.
How much time did I have left? Hours? Days?
I looked up.
The soldiers were gone. Not dead—I could hear them outside, shouting, regrouping. But they'd retreated from the room, from whatever they'd seen when Miyuki was—
When *we* were—
I stood. Shakily. My knees nearly buckled but I managed to stay upright.
Miyuki, back in human form, was standing by the window again.
"They're going to burn the house," she said calmly. "I can hear them discussing it. Flamethrowers. Complete eradication. They think we're both anomalies now. They think you're lost."
"Am I?"
She looked at me. Really looked at me.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "Are you?"
From downstairs, I heard a new sound. Liquid sloshing. The smell of gasoline seeping up through the floorboards.
"We need to leave," I said.
"Where?"
Good question.
The neighborhood was compromised. The school was compromised. Everywhere I'd ever known was compromised.
There was nowhere left to run.
Unless—
"The forest," I said. "The one north of here. Past the old industrial district. There are caves there. Old maintenance tunnels from when the factory was still running. No one goes there anymore."
Miyaki tilted her head, considering.
"It would buy us time," she said. "A few days. Maybe a week if we're lucky."
"And then?"
She smiled. That sad, beautiful smile that made my chest ache.
"And then we become the Flowerbed."
I didn't ask what that meant.
I was pretty sure I didn't want to know.
"Can you get us there?" I asked. "The same way you got us home from school?"
"Maybe. I'm weak from the feeding. Moving both of us that far…" She frowned. "It might break something. In me. In you. In both of us."
"Try."
She walked toward me. Put her hands on my face. Her palms were cold. Always so cold.
"Are you sure?" she whispered. "Once we do this, once we run, there's no coming back. You'll be an enemy of humanity. They'll hunt you until one of us is dead. Or both of us."
"I'm already an enemy," I said. "I've been an enemy since the moment you walked through that door three nights ago."
"No." She leaned her forehead against mine. "You've been an enemy since the moment you decided you were worthless. Since the moment you gave up on being loved by humans. You just didn't realize it yet."
From downstairs, I heard the *whoosh* of ignition.
The house was burning.
"Hold on to me," Miyuki said. "This is going to hurt."
I wrapped my arms around her.
She wrapped herself around me—not her human arms, but *all* of her, the mass beneath the mask, the thing she really was.
And then reality folded again.
-----
We emerged in darkness.
Not the warm darkness of her embrace. The cold darkness of underground spaces, of places where sunlight never reached.
I fell to my knees—my legs couldn't hold me anymore—and vomited. Nothing came up but bile and blood.
When I was finished, I looked around.
We were in a tunnel. Concrete walls, rusted pipes running along the ceiling, water dripping somewhere in the distance.
The old maintenance tunnels. Just like I'd remembered.
Miyuki collapsed beside me. Her human form was flickering—sometimes solid, sometimes translucent, like she couldn't maintain it anymore.
"That took too much," she gasped. "I need to rest. I need to—"
She looked at me.
"I need to feed again. Soon. Tomorrow night at the latest."
"I don't think I can survive another feeding," I said honestly.
"I know."
"So what happens?"
She reached out, took my hand. Our fingers laced together—young and old, human and not, dying and hungry.
"Tomorrow night," she said. "We do the final ritual. The one I promised you. The one where we become one. Forever."
"The Flowerbed."
"Yes."
I should have been terrified. Should have been screaming, running, trying to escape.
But all I felt was tired.
So tired.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Tomorrow night. We'll do it. We'll become… whatever we're supposed to become."
She smiled. Pulled me close. Let me rest my head against her shoulder.
"I told you I'd never leave you," she whispered. "I told you we'd die together. Like lovers. Like two halves of the same whole."
Above us, through dozens of feet of concrete and soil and rock, I could hear sirens. Helicopters. The machinery of a military searching for something they didn't understand.
Searching for us.
But down here, in the dark, in the cold, with her arms around me and death circling closer every second—
For the first time in my life, I felt *safe*.
Even though I knew—absolutely knew—that this safety was just another kind of death.
Maybe the kindest kind.