Kurogane's Golden Broth basement was never completely silent.
Water pipes ran across the ceiling from the kitchen upstairs, groaning as they filled to capacity. The water heater cycled on and off, at an interval that Kaito had learned months before, but never named. And, beyond the floorboards and insulation, the city the traffic, the sirens, the rhythm of the city that never sleeps.
It was 3am and Kaito Asahi sat at the table in the middle of the room, his back to the wall, staring at the stairs. He had been there for 47 minutes. He had a teacup in his hands, the tea was cold, and he could feel his hands tremble.
He watched them. He didn't stop his hands from shaking. To stop them he had to make an effort, and making an effort meant paying attention, and paying attention meant having attention.
It was worse tonight. He gauged it by the tea's surface; ripples from his fingers, like the aftershock of something he no longer felt. The ripples were small last week. The week before, an echo. The tea was wild tonight.
He didn't know if it was the anemia. He didn't know if it was the memory.
He felt around in his pocket and found the small can of supplements, iron, thirty milligrams, the cheap kind you could get at any one of the pharmacies in Sector 9 if you had the money and wanted to ask questions. He tipped two into his hand and he swallowed those with the tea. It tasted like copper and stagnant water. He was used to it.
He put the cup on the table and looked at his hands.
I stood there for eleven minutes, he thought. I stood there for eleven minutes.
He remembered it suddenly, as he did every time it was 3am and the city was still and his heart rate was finally below 70 and he could no longer distract himself from what he'd done and what he hadn't.
He closed his eyes.
Three years ago.
The Asahi Clan compound was set on a block of Sector 2 that the city maps showed as "private property" and everyone else showed as "do not enter". The walls were twelve feet tall, the tops studded with spirit sealed wire which buzzed when you approached. The walls had steel doors. The gatekeepers were Bloodliners that had been bred to kill.
Kaito entered the front door.
He was seventeen. He had been an heir for 15 years, and the First Seat of the Crimson Needle School for four, and the perfect weapon, as long as anyone could recall. The guards knew his face. The seals knew his blood. The walls, the gates, the wire they were for exclusion.
They were not designed to keep him in.
The hallwalls were white. The Asahi Clan was clean, was precise, was about the excising of extraneous matter for the betterment of the bloodline. The floors were polished marble. Paintings adorned the walls, scrolls recounting the history of the clan, of the Bloodliners who had perfected the art of the cut until it became a form of art.
Kaito ignored them as he walked by. He knew every name. He knew every face. He knew who'd died at peace, and who'd been murdered by the clan for disobeying.
His father's office was on the third floor, behind a door which required a blood seal and a retinal scan. Kaito's blood was the right type. He had the right colour eyes. The door opened.
His father was at his desk, as usual. Asahi Genryuu was 63 years old, his hair white, his face a blank of impassive neutrality that Kaito had tried to decipher in his childhood. He had never succeeded. He had stopped trying.
"The Kuga girl is in the east wing," his father told him, pulling his eyes away from the paper he was reading. "Second floor. Room 204. Until midnight."
Kaito didn't move. "The mission parameters."
"Termination." He placed the document on the table. His eyes were the same blue as Kaito's, the blue that signified the Asahi blood was pure, was worth something, was important. "The Kuga line didn't pay. The successor must be removed before the succession can pass. Quick, neat, no mess. You have the skill."
Kaito had the skill. He'd had the skill since he was twelve, when he'd sliced a practice dummy in half in 17 pieces in under two seconds, not a drop of blood spilt. He'd served the clan for five years. Men, women, Lamenters, one child not much younger than the one he was about to kill now.
He'd done it clean. Precise. No witnesses.
"Understood," he said.
His father took the paper. The discussion was done.
The east wing was quiet.
Kaito was silent as the unnatural. He did not make any noise. He was breathing steadily. His pulse was low and slow at 62 beats per minute, like the Blood Seals required.
The room was 204. The door was unlocked. The girl was sleeping.
He watched her for a while. She was small smaller than he had thought, smaller than the picture in the file. Her hair was black, splayed over the pillow, pulled through. Her hands were under her cheek, and one of them held a teddy rabbit with a missing button eye. Her face was unworried like the faces of children are before they learn that life is too expensive.
He squeezed the Blood Thread from his finger. It was clear, a strand of red so thin you couldn't see it in the low light, and he set it over her neck. Over the carotid artery. Over the spot where he would cut and in nine seconds or less it would be all over, and she would never wake up.
He had a pulse of 62.
He stood there.
He counted the seconds. He didn't know why. He didn't need to count. He knew how long it took to terminate. He'd done it before. He'd done it clean. Precise. No witnesses.
Sixty seconds.
The girl breathed. Her hand squeezed the rabbit's ear.
One hundred and twenty seconds.
He didn't move his hand. The Blood-Thread stayed suspended, still as a rope, waiting for the word.
Three hundred seconds.
He was still standing there. His pulse was 62. He was breathing steadily. His hand was steady.
Six hundred seconds.
She moved in her sleep. He dropped out of her hand and onto the ground with a gentle thump. She reached out for it, and her fingers touched his leg.
She was so small.
Six hundred and sixty seconds.
Kaito pulled the Blood Thread back in. He returned Shinketsu to its scabbard. He stooped by the bed and returned the rabbit to her arms and touched her shoulder, lightly, as his mother used to touch him before the clan decided she was a philosophical contagion and locked her away.
The girl opened her eyes. They were brown, wide and for a moment she looked at him as a person waking up in an unfamiliar place might.
"You must run," he said. "Now. Don't stop. Don't look back."
He didn't wait for her to answer. He was already going, already gone from the room, already locking the door. He had a heart rate of 62 beats per minute.
It didn't change when he heard her footfalls from behind him in the hall, little and quick, scurrying toward the emergency door he had left open.
It didn't change when his father's voice over the intercom was slow and clear, asking for a status report.
It didn't change when he clicked the comm channel open, and said, "Mission complete. Target eliminated."
It didn't change for a long time.
Present day.
The tea cup was cold. Kaito opened his eyes.
It was three in the morning. The basement was quiet. He was still shaking. He wondered if it was the anemia or the memory. He wasn't sure if there was a difference anymore.
His phone buzzed. A message, ephemeral, the message itself shorn of any identifying information. The first time, the second time, the third time, and in the three seconds from the first time to the third his heart rate had jumped from 62 to 78.
*Kuga Mika. Sector 3. Processing Facility 7 B. 0600 Transfer. She's been asking for you.*
He was on his feet before he knew it. He had his coat and Shinketsu on his hip, and his legs took the stairs before he'd finished registering what it said.
She's waiting for you.
He paused at the top of the stairs. The ramen shop was closed, the kitchen lights out, the stools were in their place. He could see, through the window, the neon lights of Sector 9, the Grief Mist in the gutters, the city that had consumed three years of silence.
He turned back. The door to the basement was open. He could still see the table, the tea the tea had gone cold, the iron supplements spilt where his hands had trembled.
He didn't return for those.
Unit 4 was asleep in the main part of the shop, in various states of dress. Jin lay on the ground, his jacket out to his left, his camera held against his chest. Bakgo occupied the booth, legs over the side, snoring like a chainsaw. Yuna was in the corner, her silver hair unfashionably down, her writing pad open in her hand.
Kaito looked at them for a moment. And then said "I need help".
Jin went first. "What time is it?"
"Three fourteen."
"What's wrong?"
Kaito held out the phone. Jin read the message. He didn't so much as blink, but he was already up, he was already zipping his jacket, he was already grabbing Bakgo's shoulder.
"Wake up. We're going."
Bakgo cracked an eye open. "Where?"
"Sector Three."
"Okay." He stood up, zipped up his jacket, and made fists. He didn't ask why. He didn't have to.
Yuna was at the door. She wore her tactical jacket and her hair was in a ponytail and she had her notebook in her pocket. She said to Kaito, "The east stairwell is all clear. There's an exit on the north. The probability threads are..." She frowned, cocking her head to the side. "They're green. For now."
Kaito nodded. "For now is enough."
The building was a concrete cube in Sector 3, nondescript, anonymous, just one of thousands of buildings in the industrial zone of Neo Tokyo. It had no windows. It had one door, reinforced, locked with a blood lock that Kaito sliced through in three seconds. It had guards, six in all, Bloodliners from a minor family that had sold its services to the Asahi for money and security.
They were dead before they hit the ground. Kaito's threads were quicker than their eyes, quicker than their seals, quicker than the terror that was just starting to show on their faces when the filigree threads of hardened blood pierced their throats.
He had been trained not to be seen, and so he moved through the hallways. They had the usual set up: processing first floor, containment second, disposal basement. He didn't go to the basement. He went up.
Room 204. Second floor. End of the hall.
He didn't count things. He knew which one it was.
It was unlocked.
The room was white. White walls, white floor, white ceiling, the kind of white that was supposed to be soothing and was actually the colour of the world from which everything had been washed away. The girl in the chair was not white. She had dark hair, matted, longer than he remembered. Her face was thinner. Her wrists were bound to the chair arms with spirit sealed ropes, the kind that prevented Bloodline magic from being used to defend the caster.
She looked at him as he opened the door. Her eyes were brown. They were wide. They were the eyes he'd seen three years ago, in a room that was too white, with a rabbit on the floor and a thread around her neck.
"You came back," she said.
Kaito cut the cords. He didn't use a thread. He used his fingers, ripping the seal cord apart, not caring that it was burning his fingertips, not caring that his heart was racing at 100, 105, 110, 115, past the point where he should've stopped.
"I said I would."
She shook her head. "You didn't. You said run. You didn't say you'd come back".
He didn't answer. He took her from the chair. She weighed nothing. She weighed everything.
The extraction was chaos.
Jin was in the forefront, taking damage, accruing a debt he paid back in black flames that shattered the concrete and flung the facility's remaining staff away. And Bakgo was at the back, punching his way through anything that approached, his voice bouncing off the walls like a second blast. Yuna was in the middle, her Fate Sight casting the hallways in silver threads, helping them find their way through the probability maze that the facility engineers had designed to catch anyone unfamiliar with the facility.
Kaito had Mika on his back. His threads were all over the place, punching holes, breaching walls, creating pathways. He had a pulse of 138. Two beats from catastrophic failure. He was one beat away from the Blood Seals exploding in his veins.
He didn't slow down.
He didn't stop.
There was the doorway, the door open, the street beyond it, grey and neon and shrouded in Grief Mist. He could hear Jin screaming. He could hear Bakgo laughing. He could hear Yuna, counting down, slow and steady.
He could feel Mika's arms around his neck, her face against his shoulder, her breath on his neck.
You came back.
He ran.
The basement of the ramen shop wasn't a place for medical treatment. The cot in the corner was there when Pops took over the shop, abandoned by whichever squatter had been living here before him. The bags of saline were from a run Kaito had made six months ago, when he knew his anemia was getting worse and he didn't want anyone to know. The blankets had come from upstairs, the ones Pops laid on the tops of the bar stools in the shop when the metal legs were too cold to sit on in winter.
Mika was on the cot, in one of the blankets, eating a bowl of ramen. Pops had cooked it; thick broth, lots of vegetables, the kind of food you ate when you'd gone too long without food. She was eating carefully, as if she had been taught that if you ate too quickly it would go quicker.
Kaito was sitting opposite her, with a saline drip in his arm, and the blood was coming back to him. His hands were steady now. His pulse was now sixty two. The shakes had stopped.
She finished the bowl. She set it down. She looked at him.
"Are you going to stay?"
He looked at her face. At the brown eyes, the dark hair, the missing button eye on the rabbit she was holding, the same rabbit, he thought, that fell on the ground three years ago, the rabbit he picked up and put back in her arms.
"Yes," he said.
She nodded. "Okay."
She didn't say thank you. She didn't need to. She drew the blanket up around her shoulders, hugged her rabbit to her chest and tipped her head back to lean against the wall, and she fell asleep.
Kaito sat with her. The saline dripped. The pipes groaned. The water heater clicked on and off.
His hands didn't shake.
AUTHOR'S END NOTE
Whereas Chapter One was about forgetting, Chapter Two is about not.
Kaito's ability Blood Thread must be controlled. He can't speed up his heart rate above 140 beats a minute, or the Blood Seals in his veins go off. He's been training for his entire life to keep emotion at bay, to keep calm, to be the weapon his father wanted.
But the thing about perfect weapons is that they need a target.
Kaito was pointed at a nine year old girl. He stood there for eleven minutes. And then he did not shoot.
That's not a small thing. It's the biggest thing you can do, for the Asahi Clan, in the world they made. It's a huge thing, it cost him everything his name, his family, his future. It cost him three years of watching the girl he saved get caught and sent through the system again, because the process doesn't stop because he chose to do the right thing.
But he went back. He didn't think twice. He didn't weigh up the cost versus the benefits, or the risk versus the reward. He just went.
And now Mika's in the basement, eating Pops' ramen, sleeping with her rabbit, and Kaito is sitting next to her, with a saline drip in his arm and sixty two beats per minute.
That's what control is supposed to be for. Not suppression. Presence.
Next chapter: Bakgo's turn. Fire, the beam, the name he doesn't say.
See you later.
The Author
P.S. It's important the rabbit only has one eye. I don't know why, but it is. Keep an eye on it.