The garden lamp light had been doing its work for approximately forty minutes when Yumi finally admitted to herself that the pacing was not resolving anything.
She had been through the problem from several angles. The problem was, specifically, that she did not know what to wear, which was a problem she had never meaningfully had before because she owned a bomber jacket and a utility belt and those had always been sufficient for every situation she had previously encountered. This situation was different. This situation was a first date in Kyoto with a person she had confessed to at a cemetery in the winter and who had said I know and taken her hand and whose smile she had been thinking about in various configurations since the garden this morning.
The white dress was a possibility. The blue dress was also a possibility. The dark green dress that Haruko had bought for her two summers ago and that she had worn exactly once was a third possibility, and she had been cycling between these three options for the better part of an hour without producing a conclusion.
She stopped pacing.
She looked at the hotel's lit window above the garden — Lily's room, the light still on, the shadow of a small person visible through the paper screen.
She went upstairs.
Lily was on her bed with the laptop and the stuffed cat and the expression of someone who had been waiting for something to happen and was not surprised that it was happening now.
Yumi stood in the doorway in her yukata and looked at her.
"What do you think," Yumi said. "White dress. Blue dress. Dark green dress."
Lily looked at her. The red eyes ran the assessment with the systematic focus she applied to all new problems. She looked at Yumi. She looked at the window. She looked at Yumi again.
"I don't know what dresses are for," Lily said.
This was delivered with perfect honesty and no self-consciousness whatsoever. The facility had not covered dresses. The Nightblade Academy uniform did not involve dresses. The Scarlet Bloom hoodie was as close as Lily had come to a personal clothing preference and she had arrived at that by inheritance rather than selection.
Yumi looked at her for a moment.
"Right," she said. "Thank you. That was very helpful."
"You're welcome," Lily said, entirely seriously.
The door at the end of the corridor opened. Mio appeared — also in a yukata, dark hair down, the machetes absent for once, her expression carrying the particular quality it got at ten in the evening when the operational register had been set aside in favor of something more domestic. She looked at Yumi in the doorway of Lily's room and arrived at the situation with the speed of someone who had been the older sister for twenty-four years and had developed rapid diagnostic capabilities.
"Choosing a dress?" Mio said.
"Choosing a dress," Yumi confirmed. "And I suck at it."
Mio came down the corridor. She entered Lily's room without asking, sat on the edge of the bed beside Lily — who moved to accommodate her with the naturalness of someone who had accepted Mio as a fixture — and folded her hands in her lap with the expression of someone who had opinions and was about to share them in a structured format.
"White," Mio said.
"I was thinking white—" Yumi replied.
"Not because it suits you best," Mio continued, in the tone of someone delivering a strategic briefing. "Because Nadia Burns has been to this hotel twice and Nyx Harrow owns three dark-colored dresses and Wei Xiu wears red exclusively and Vera Krauss has never been seen in anything that wasn't grey or charcoal." She looked at Yumi directly. "White is unclaimed territory. You wear it, it's yours. Nobody else in that entire constellation is going to show up in white."
Yumi stared at her.
"You thought about this," she said.
"I think about everything," Mio said pleasantly.
"You thought about what Nadia Burns wears."
"Research," Mio said. "It's important." She tilted her head. "Also, the white dress with the skirt above the knee. He's tall. The proportions work better."
"You've seen my white dress."
"I've seen all your dresses. I'm your older sister. It's my jurisdiction."
Lily had been watching this exchange with the red eyes and the expression of someone receiving new data at a useful rate. She looked at Mio. She looked at Yumi. She looked at Mio again.
"The white dress," she said, with the flat certainty of someone who had processed the strategic analysis and found it sound.
Yumi looked at her fourteen-year-old surrogate daughter who had been on Earth for a fraction of the time of anyone else in this room and had just rendered a verdict on her romantic wardrobe.
She sighed.
"White dress it is then," she said.
Mio smiled. The saccharine register had returned. "You're welcome," she said, and went back to her room.
Lily looked at Yumi.
"Good night, onee-chan," she said, and returned to her laptop.
Yumi stood in the doorway for a moment.
"Good night, Lily," she said, and went to find the white dress.
The morning was clear.
Kyoto in July had a specific quality of light — older than the light in Westend, deeper somehow, the way that places with long histories carried something in the quality of their ordinary days. The hotel's garden was bright with it. The cedar smelled of it. The stone path to the entrance was dry and clean and the narrow street beyond it was already in motion with the particular purposeful quiet of a neighborhood that had been waking up at this hour for several centuries.
Yumi came down the entrance stairs at nine.
The white dress. The skirt above the knee, as specified. The crimson streaks in her hair catching the morning light. She had done something with it — not elaborate, simply loose and slightly arranged, the way her hair was when it was being its best self without being directed. The utility belt was absent.
She had looked at it for a long moment this morning and decided that today was one of the days she was not going to be Scarlet Bloom's leader and was instead going to be a nineteen-year-old girl in a white dress going on her first date in Kyoto.
She was also wearing, on a thin chain at her neck, the small pin that Sieg had returned to her at some point without comment — the Scarlet Bloom pin she had given him in Ch.32's closing beat, quietly repositioned from his lapel to her chain. She was aware she was wearing it. She had decided not to examine this awareness too closely.
Sieg was already in the hotel's entrance area.
Blue jeans, clean and well-fitted. A white shirt, collar open, no tie — a version of him she had not seen before, the academy uniform and the carbide coat and the Prefect pin all absent, and what was left was just the person underneath all of that, which was, it turned out, a 21-year-old man in a white shirt in the morning light of Kyoto and the golden eyes and the black hair and the expression that was always the same regardless of what he was wearing — dry, present, unbothered — over a grey jacket that fit him the way his clothes always fit him, which was exactly.
Yumi's heart did something.
She was aware of it doing something. She was choosing not to address it out loud.
He looked at her.
The golden eyes moved across her once — the assessment that was not the operational assessment, the degree of attention he directed nowhere else — and then he smiled.
The real one. The rare one. Here, in the entrance of a Kyoto hotel on a clear July morning, wearing it simply, without occasion, because she was standing in front of him in a white dress and he had something to say about that.
"You look great," he said.
The crimson arrived. The full warm version, arriving before the architecture could decide whether to let it through, which it always did with him because he always caught her before the architecture was in position.
"Stop it," she said.
He did not stop it. The smile remained exactly where it was.
"Stop," she said again, and was smiling now too — the real one, the one underneath everything, entirely unable to prevent it and not particularly trying. "We're going to be late."
"We have no schedule," he said.
"We have temples to see."
"Temples have been there for several hundred years," he said. "They'll wait."
"Sieg."
"Yumi."
A beat. The smile on his face. The smile on her face that she was not acknowledging.
She took his arm and walked out the door, which settled the question of whether they were leaving, and also settled several other questions that neither of them was currently putting into words.
Fushimi Inari was the first stop.
The thousand torii gates — vermillion red, ranked in their thousands along the mountain path, each one donated by a business or a family over the course of centuries, the tunnel of red and shadow that led up the mountain with the specific quality of something that was both ordinary and impossible simultaneously. Yumi had been here before. She watched Lily's face as they entered the first gate tunnel and found, as she had in the garden with Kinkaku-ji, that watching Lily see something for the first time was better than seeing it herself.
Lily walked through the gates with both hands at her sides and her head tilted back to look at the way the red columns receded up the mountain, the morning light coming through in slats between them.
The stuffed cat was under one arm. The Path cat on her shoulder was fully present, the cardinal eyes moving in the same direction as Lily's.
"They're very red," Lily said.
"Yes," Sieg said.
"All of them."
"All of them."
"Why."
"Vermillion," Yumi said. "It's supposed to ward off evil. Also it's the color of Inari — the deity this shrine is dedicated to."
Lily processed this. "The color wards off evil," she said, filing it.
"That's the tradition," Yumi said.
Lily looked at the gates. Looked at the red. Looked at Yumi's white dress and Sieg's grey jacket and her own Scarlet Bloom hoodie, which she had put on this morning because she had not yet developed a separate category for days that were special enough to require different clothes.
"Scarlet Bloom's color is red," she said.
"Yes," Yumi said.
"So Scarlet Bloom wards off evil."
Yumi looked at her. "...That is not what I said."
"But it follows," Lily said, with the complete logical confidence of someone who had done the reasoning and found it sound.
Sieg made a sound. Yumi looked at him. He was looking at the gates with the expression of someone who was not laughing.
"Don't," Yumi said.
"I didn't say anything," he said.
"You were thinking something."
"I'm always thinking something."
Lily had moved ahead along the gate path and was examining the characters carved into the nearest column with the focused attention of someone who intended to understand what they were looking at. The Path cat on her shoulder appeared to be doing the same thing, which was either the fractured Path developing new behaviors or coincidence, and Lily was collecting data on which.
They were halfway up the mountain — the gates thicker here, the light more filtered, the sound of the city entirely gone — when Yumi became aware of two people coming down the path toward them.
She registered them first by the silver-white hair, which was distinctive in any context.
Then by the dark coat, which was distinctive in July in Kyoto.
Then by the person beside her, whose chestnut brown hair and warm amber-brown eyes were recognizable from a distance and whose expression carried the specific quality of someone who was entirely unsurprised to have been found here.
Natalya Kirinova was carrying a guide book.
This was the most alarming thing about the encounter. Not the Headmaster of Nightblade Academy being at Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto during the summer break — that was merely surprising. The guide book was alarming because it implied preparation, which implied intent, which implied that this was not an accident.
Beside her, Henrietta Brenner had a canvas bag over one shoulder and a coffee in her other hand and the expression of someone who was on a personal trip and finding it quite satisfactory.
Natalya looked at Sieg. At Yumi. At the white dress and the grey jacket and the arm that Yumi had not released since the hotel entrance.
"Brenner," she said pleasantly. "Hasegawa."
"Headmaster," Sieg said.
"Kirinova-san," Yumi said, at a slightly higher pitch than her standard register.
"Lovely morning," Natalya said. She looked at the gates with the composed appreciation of someone who had read about them in the guide book and was now confirming the description. "The upper path takes approximately two hours. I would recommend starting early." She looked at Sieg. "Which you appear to have done."
A beat.
"Enjoy Kyoto," she said, and continued down the path.
Henrietta passed them a moment later. She looked at Yumi's dress. She looked at Sieg's jacket. She looked at the arm situation. The warm amber-brown eyes acquired a quality that was entirely too satisfied for someone who had promised not to tease too much.
She said nothing.
She smiled — the full version, warm and complete — and kept walking.
Yumi watched them go. She looked at Sieg.
"Did she know we were going to be here," Yumi said.
"Henrietta knows most things," Sieg said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed, and kept walking.
Yumi looked at the retreating figures of her Headmaster and the Black Cat Café owner walking down the Fushimi Inari path together in what was apparently a personal trip that raised more questions than either of them would answer.
She decided to file it and continue.
Arashiyama was the second stop.
The bamboo grove was different from the torii gates — quieter in a different way, the specific silence of a place where the sound was present but was entirely made by the bamboo itself, the thin high creaking of stalks in the wind, a sound that had no equivalent anywhere else and that Lily stopped walking to listen to for approximately ninety seconds before she was willing to continue.
"What is that sound?" she said.
"The bamboo," Yumi said. "The wind moves it."
"It sounds like something communicating," Lily said.
"That's a very Lily way to hear bamboo," Yumi said.
"Is it wrong?"
"No," Yumi said. "It's exactly right."
They were at the grove's midpoint — the path curving slightly, the bamboo on both sides reaching twenty meters and blocking the sky into a thin strip of blue above — when Sieg registered the chain.
Not because he heard it. Because he had been in enough situations to develop a sensitivity to the specific quality of presence that announced itself in the air rather than in sound, and this presence was one he recognized with the particularity of someone who had had a chain wrapped around his torso on a beach not three weeks ago.
He did not stop walking.
"Yumi," he said.
"Mm."
"Is Nyx in this bamboo grove?"
Yumi turned to look. Then she turned further. Then she looked at the bamboo on the left side of the path, where the stalks were dense enough to conceal a person of average size who was very good at not being seen until she decided to be seen.
The chain whip was visible first — a single coil, catching the thin light that filtered through the bamboo, held with the specific looseness of something that was present as a statement rather than a deployment.
Then Nyx, in casual clothes — dark, plain, the chain at her hip — stepping out of the bamboo with the quiet arrival she used everywhere, which suggested that appearing out of a bamboo grove was simply a variant of appearing out of anywhere else, and she had no particular comment to make about the method.
She looked at Sieg. At Yumi. At the arm. At the white dress.
"Nyx," Sieg said.
"Kyoto," Nyx said. This was, apparently, an explanation.
"You followed us?" Yumi said.
Nyx looked at her with the veiled violet eyes and the expression of someone who did not consider this characterization accurate. "I came to Kyoto," she said. "This is where you are."
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't," Nyx said, with the serenity of someone who had thought about this and found the distinction meaningful.
The chain moved. Not toward anyone — a single practiced loop, the chain finding Sieg's wrist with the familiar ease of something that had done this before and considered it a reasonable arrangement.
Sieg looked at his wrist. Looked at the chain. Looked at Nyx.
"We're on a date," he said.
"I know," Nyx said, her head tilting. "I'll be nearby."
"That's not—"
"Nearby," she said again, with the finality of someone who had delivered her position and considered the negotiation complete, and stepped back into the bamboo.
The chain released. She was gone.
The bamboo creaked in the wind.
Yumi looked at the space where Nyx had been. She looked at Sieg. She looked at the bamboo.
"Nearby," she repeated.
"Apparently," he said.
A pause.
"I'm going to kill her," Yumi said, pleasantly, and took his arm again.
Lily, who had been watching all of this with the red eyes and the expression of someone receiving data at a useful rate, looked at the bamboo. Looked at Yumi. Looked at Sieg.
"Is Nyx-san always in the bamboo?" she said.
"No," Sieg said.
"Just today?"
"Apparently just today."
Lily considered this and filed it under: things about Nyx that do not require further explanation.
She followed them down the path.
Lily went with Mio in the afternoon — Mio had materialized at the Arashiyama tea house with the machetes and the saccharine register and the specific expression of someone who had decided she was providing childcare services today and considered this both a duty and an opportunity. She had taken Lily's hand with the sweetness that did not match her grip and had looked at Yumi with an expression that communicated: you have two hours, use them well, I will be judging the outcome.
Yumi had looked at her with the expression of someone accepting resources they had not asked for and intended to use anyway.
The quiet temple was in a side street off the main Higashiyama path — the kind of place that did not appear in most guide books because it had not sought to appear in them, a small sub-temple attached to a larger complex, with a stone garden and a wooden veranda and the specific quality of a space that had been designed for sitting in rather than looking at. The afternoon light came in low through the old pine at the garden's edge. The stone was warm from the day's sun. The sound of the city was entirely absent.
They sat on the veranda edge.
Not close enough to be dramatic about it. Close enough.
Yumi was looking at the stone garden — the raked gravel, the three mossy stones arranged with the precision of something that had been placed very carefully a very long time ago and had not needed to move since. She had her shoes off, her feet at the veranda's edge, the white skirt settling around her knees. The afternoon had given her cheeks the warmth of someone who had been outside all day and was not unhappy about it.
Sieg was looking at the garden too, for a moment. Then he was not.
"I have something for you." he said.
Yumi turned.
He had the particular expression he wore when he had done something and was not going to contextualize it — present, steady, the golden eyes direct. He reached into the grey jacket's interior pocket and produced a small cloth bundle, wrapped simply, tied with a plain cord.
"We walked past a knife vendor in Nishiki," he said. "On Tuesday. With Lily."
Yumi looked at the bundle. She looked at him.
"You went back?" she said.
"Yes."
She took it. The cloth fell open.
A tanto. Small, beautifully made — the blade shorter than a standard combat tanto, the proportions of something designed for carry rather than display, with a handle wrapped in dark cord and a plain black sheath that fit it exactly. The blade, when she drew it slightly from the sheath, was clean and quiet and had the specific quality of something made by someone who understood what a blade was for.
Not a utility knife. Not a decorative piece. A tanto that had been chosen by someone who knew exactly what she needed and had gone back to find it.
Yumi looked at it for a long moment.
The stone garden was very quiet.
"It's beautiful," she said. Her voice had found the register underneath everything — not the fierce, not the wild smile, the other one, the one that came out at Aya's grave and in the garden this morning and in all the other places where the architecture wasn't there to manage it.
"It suits you," he said. "Better than the ones you carry."
"You've been studying my knives?" she said.
"For some time," he said.
She looked at him. The amber eyes with the warmth in them that was not the performance of warmth but the actual thing, present and unmanaged, the thing she had stopped trying to keep off her face some time around the moment he had said I know and taken her hand in a cemetery.
He was close. The afternoon light on the old pine. The stone garden raked and still and completely indifferent to the two people sitting on the veranda of a quiet temple in Kyoto.
She leaned toward him.
He was already there.
The distance between them was the distance that was about to become something else, and the afternoon was quiet enough to hear it closing, and the tanto was in her hands and his face was close and the golden eyes were—
"I apologize for the interruption."
The voice came from behind them.
Not from the temple path. From the garden — from the space between the pine and the stone wall where no one had been a moment ago, because no one could have been there a moment ago without being seen, which meant whoever had spoken had not been operating on the assumption that being seen was a relevant consideration.
They both turned.
He was standing at the edge of the stone garden. Not in it — precisely at the edge, with the specific deliberateness of someone who had chosen not to step on the raked gravel because they understood what raked gravel was for. He was young — no older than Sieg, possibly the same age exactly, with the particular economy of movement that Sieg recognized from his own mirror and from the Grey Scythe and from every person who had been built rather than simply trained.
White hair. Not platinum like Vera's — white, completely, the absolute white of something that had never been another color. A visor over his eyes — dark, fitted, the kind of thing that obscured the eyes without being a mask, functional rather than concealing, which meant he was not trying to hide and also meant that whatever his eyes were doing, he had decided that was not currently relevant information.
He was wearing civilian clothes. Plain, dark, unremarkable — the clothes of someone who had learned that unremarkable was the most useful thing to wear when you intended to go somewhere without being what you were.
He looked at Sieg.
He looked at Yumi.
He looked at the tanto in her hands, and something in the set of his mouth shifted — not a smile, the particular quality of someone who has registered a detail and finds it appropriate.
"My name is Gideon," he said. Calm and direct, the voice of someone who had decided what he was going to say before he arrived and was saying it without modification. "You know me by another designation."
He looked at Sieg.
"Project Ten," he said.
Gideon nodded. "I've been looking for you for some time, Sieg Brenner. I think it's time we had a conversation."
The stone garden was very still.
The afternoon light held everything exactly where it was.
Yumi's hand on the tanto. Sieg's eyes on the man at the garden's edge. The pine tree. The old temple. The raked gravel that no one had stepped on.
The distance that had been closing had stopped.
Sieg looked at Gideon for a moment — running the assessment the way he always ran it, the movement map and the threat classification and the geometry of the space. He found what he expected from someone who had been looking for him: no hostile intent in the posture, no deployment configuration in the hands, the specific quality of a person who had come to talk and had arranged themselves accordingly.
"Sit down," Sieg said.
He said it the way he said most things — without drama, as a plain statement. There was a step at the garden's edge. He indicated it.
Gideon looked at him.
Then he sat down.
The afternoon continued doing what it had been doing — light and pine and stone and the quiet of a temple that had been here for a very long time and intended to keep being here regardless of what happened on its veranda.
Yumi looked at Sieg. Sieg looked at Gideon.
"Talk," Sieg said.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)