Or by illness that had backed them into a corner.
A small fraction act on impulse.
The Cursed Children who ended themselves belonged to neither group.
They didn't want to die.
The world still held things they loved. They still wanted to live.
Nor were they acting on impulse. Every one of them understood exactly what her choice meant.
But there were the others to protect. There was Matsuzaki, who fed them and cared for them and gave them the only warmth they'd ever known.
Better to die than to turn into something that would tear apart the people who mattered most.
They had no other road to take.
Maybe the kindest thing anyone could have given them, in that moment, was a handgun. Something quick. Something that spared them the dark and the loneliness and the long hours of the virus eating them alive while they waited to be afraid.
The weight of it settled over the chamber and refused to lift.
Even the laughter drifting from the far end seemed to come from somewhere much farther away.
Gojo stayed quiet a long time. His fingertips tightened.
He turned to Sumire.
"Can you find out how many Cursed Children are in Tokyo right now?" His voice sat lower than usual.
Every trace of expression left her face. She pulled out her phone and tapped through the screen, breaking into the municipal government's internal database and pulling hidden files at the highest clearance.
"Registered with the government, twenty-five thousand." Something unfamiliar weighed her voice down. "But most Cursed Children are abandoned and never registered. There are a lot more like these girls, tucked away in ruins. Rough estimate, conservatively, around forty thousand across Tokyo."
"Forty thousand." He repeated the number under his breath, thumb moving absently against his fingers. "And Initiators? How many of those?"
"Under seven thousand."
The gap between the two figures yawned open.
Becoming an Initiator, pairing with Civil Security and running missions, didn't guarantee a good life. Get partnered with someone bad-tempered who treated you as equipment, and the treatment could turn inhuman.
Still, it meant regular meals. A roof. A step above sleeping rough in the Slums with no promise of tomorrow.
And only a sliver of Cursed Children ever got there.
The remaining thirty-odd thousand lived like the girls in this sewer, hidden in corners the sun never reached, scraping out what days they could.
"Mr. Gojo, don't take it to heart." Matsuzaki forced up a smile. "An old man complaining, that's all it was. This isn't something any of us can change."
The world's hatred of Cursed Children ran down to the bone. Years of effort had bought him these dozen girls and nothing more. He didn't dare hope anyone could fix something this thoroughly rotten.
"I'm fine, Elder Matsuzaki." Gojo shook his head, smiling, and the easy carelessness slid back over him until the man who'd been sitting there a moment ago might never have existed. "So what do the children usually do with their days?"
"They play. And I teach them. Reading, writing..."
Light came back into the old man's face at that. He hurried to a battered wooden crate in the corner, eased it open, and lifted out a thick stack of books.
Every one of them had been used past exhaustion. Covers worn blank, titles gone. Pages curled and furred along the edges from a thousand turnings. Some were missing pages. Others had been soaked at some point, the printing gone soft and blurred.
Underneath sat a pile of notebooks bound together out of scrap paper.
"Their homework." Pride he couldn't hide came through. "Some of these girls are sharp. They pick things up fast, and their handwriting is lovely. If they had the chance to study properly, they'd get into good schools. The best."
Regret closed over the last of it, and helplessness with it.
Nobody in the room needed him to say the rest out loud.
Cursed Children don't live long. The Gastrea Virus eats through them a piece at a time, and for most of them the low teens are as far as the road goes.
Enju Aihara would have had perhaps another year, if Gojo hadn't come along. Her Corrosion Rate had climbed past the point where a body can keep going.
He took a notebook from the old man's hands and turned the pages with care.
Scrap paper, bound. Fronts used up, then the backs, not a square of white left to waste.
The handwriting was young, the strokes wobbling the way children's letters do.
But every line had been drawn with effort. Each character erased and rewritten, erased and rewritten, until it sat straight on the page.
In red, between the lines, Matsuzaki's notes. Careful work. Keep it up. Over and over.
Then he reached the notebooks at the bottom of the stack.
Dust lay thin across the covers. Nothing inside had been added to in a long while. The last entries stopped several months back.
"Those belonged to the ones who left us."
His palm moved across the covers, over writing that had faded almost past reading. His voice came out rough.
He'd stored them at the very bottom of the crate, kept the way you keep something irreplaceable.
The only mark those girls had left on the world.
Gojo's hands paused.
He said nothing, only set the notebooks back into the crate, squaring the edges before he closed it.
They stayed and talked a long while after that. He asked about the girls' health, about how they filled their days, about what each of them liked. Everything went carefully into memory.
Only when the sun had dropped low and the light outside had begun to fail did he gather Betty and Sumire to go.
Before leaving, he pulled a fair amount out of the Inventory Curse.
Sweets and snacks he'd packed for himself on the way out that morning. Chocolate in fancy wrappers. Hard fruit candies in every flavor. A few bottles of sweet juice.
All of it went down in front of the children.
Their eyes lit at the bright colors, but not one of them lunged for it. They stood where they were and waited for Matsuzaki to say the word.
"We'll come back tomorrow." He looked at the old man. "Is there anything else the children need? We'll bring it all."
"Mr. Gojo, you've done so much for us already. We couldn't possibly trouble you further..."
Matsuzaki waved his hands, thick with gratitude and unwilling to ask for a thing more. He'd taken enough.
"Don't bother with that." Gojo cut him off with a shake of his head. "If it's good for the children, tell me. Besides, I'm not the one paying for any of it."
He winked, grinning.
He'd worked it out already. The Seitenshi could reimburse him. The woman ruling Tokyo could hardly sit there doing nothing.
"Sorry?" Matsuzaki blinked, entirely lost.
Under Gojo's insistence, though, he eventually named what they lacked most.
Beyond food and medicine, it came down to clothing the girls could change into, and bedding. Mattresses, blankets.
Winter wasn't far off.
Winter was always the worst stretch. Barely enough food to put heat in a body, and nothing thick to wear or sleep under.
The children huddled together and borrowed warmth off each other. Some nights meant going out into the wind to scavenge anything that would burn, just to get a fire going and survive until morning.
Last winter, two of them had developed fevers from frostbite and nearly hadn't pulled through.
Gojo nodded and filed every item away, precise about it.
Then the three of them turned and left, climbing the ladder back to the surface.
Evening wind came at them with an edge of cold.
"Those children have it rough." Sumire looked out across the wasteland of rubble and let out a heavy breath.
She'd seen more death than most people could stomach. Dissected countless Gastrea. Watched the virus hollow out any number of human beings. Death had stopped reaching her years ago.
What she'd seen down there, though, and what she'd heard, had come down on her chest like a stone and stayed.
Anyone with a functioning conscience would carry today around for a while.
"Is there really no way to solve it? Their problem." Gojo pillowed his head on his arms as they walked, looking up at a blue sky filmed over with haze.
"You can't crack it, and you think I can?" Her laugh came out thin. "If it were possible, the world wouldn't be full of Cursed Children and this much tragedy. I've studied the Gastrea Virus for years and I've never found anything that reverses a Corrosion Rate. That virus is woven into their genes from the moment they're born. It only advances. There's no path back."
Nothing in her tone concealed the futility of it.
"I wouldn't be so sure. Mechanized Soldier conversions are beyond me too, aren't they?" He brought his arms down and turned to her, one corner of his mouth curving in a way that meant something.
"That's a completely different animal, and you know it." She frowned and spread her hands, exhaustion bleeding through. Years spent in a laboratory had trained her to read everything through reason and data, but reason ran into a wall here and stayed there. "There are only two directions. Either you stop their Corrosion Rate from climbing, or you eliminate the Gastrea Virus from their bodies entirely."
She walked with a strand of hair looping around one finger, the tangles crossing and knotting like problems that refused to come undone.
"Both of which are impossible."
Years of her life had gone into that virus, and she'd spent all of it circling the same spot without catching a glimpse of a way through.
"Take a human being. Making the Gastrea Virus disappear means rewriting their genes. I don't need to explain how hard that is." She paused, either arranging the words or swallowing something bitter. "And halting the Corrosion Rate means artificially suppressing growth. With an ordinary person you'd suppress hormones and be done with it. The Gastrea Virus doesn't cooperate like that."
She kept talking, half to herself.
Given the chance, she'd change all of it. She'd free those girls from a curse none of them had chosen.
She understood better than anyone how far out of reach that was.
The virus had been around for years now, and the Gastrea kept multiplying. Nothing about this yielded to a simple answer.
Scientists across the world had thrown everything they had at the problem for decades.
She remembered international research summits, faces gray with fatigue, sigh after sigh over failed trials.
Biological viruses. Mechanical augmentation. Gene editing.