Gojo reached out and brushed his fingers along the cloth tied across her face, careful, as though the girl in front of him might come apart under too much pressure. Warmth passed through the coarse fabric into her skin.
"I mean I'll make your eyes work again. You'll see. Sunlight, flowers, everything around you. And anyone you want to see."
Every word landed clear in her ears, gentle, delivered like a promise worth keeping.
Her face lit up. The smile spread wide and unguarded, a flower opening, and though nothing changed behind those ruined eyes, joy and anticipation crowded into every line of her.
"If it's possible, then of course I want that." Her voice went light, the way a child's does when someone hands her candy.
"Ever since I stopped seeing, I can't find my house anymore. I don't know where Mom is."
"If I could see, I'd want to go back and look. I'd want to find her. I'd want to see her face again."
The words trailed lower, some of the brightness draining out, leaving disappointment and a longing that ran deep.
"You want to see your mother?"
Sumire had come up beside them. She crouched down to Aika's level, pity threading through her voice.
The child hurt to look at. Wounded by her own mother, and still turning toward her.
Aika didn't know who this woman was, but Gojo hadn't objected, so she answered politely. "Mm. I want to look at her from far away, see how she's doing. If I could hide somewhere and listen to her voice, that would be even better."
She wasn't asking for much. Not recognition, not to be taken back. A glimpse from a distance, proof that her mother was well, would be enough.
The answer caught Sumire off guard. She'd expected resentment, a refusal to speak of the woman at all. Instead the girl still carried her mother around like something precious.
"You don't hate her? She did this to you. She threw you away, blinded you, put you through all of this."
Sumire couldn't keep the edge out of it, confusion tangled with anger. Nothing about this made sense to her.
Aika lifted a hand and touched the cloth over her eyes, the smile holding steady. She shook her head, and when she spoke there wasn't a trace of performance in it.
"I don't hate her."
"Mom gave up so much to take care of me. Back when I could still see, she worked so hard every day to feed me. She came home late. Sometimes her boss yelled at her, sometimes customers gave her trouble."
"My eyes caused her a lot of problems too. Because they were red, people treated me like a monster. They hated me, they bullied me. Mom had to keep moving us. She had to put up with the insults and the looks people gave her."
She recounted it softly, sifting through old fragments, all those exhausting and humiliating scenes, and not one syllable of complaint came out. Only understanding. Only ache on her mother's behalf.
"And honestly, after I went blind, it wasn't so bad. At least when I'm begging, nobody knows I used to have red eyes. Nobody knows I'm one of the Cursed Children."
"Otherwise not many people would give me money, and I probably wouldn't have made it this far."
That was how she worked. Thinking of others by reflex, digging one thread of hope out of whatever misery arrived, holding onto gratitude no matter how much she'd swallowed. Never a complaint. Never a grudge.
"Even like this. You'd want your eyes back only to look at her once?"
Betty rarely inserted herself into anything so sentimental, but she spoke now, flat on the surface with something knotted running underneath. Her gaze stayed on the girl.
She was thinking of her own mother. Of four hundred years of waiting in the Forbidden Library. Of missing someone across all that time, and how the ache of it never quite stopped.
"Mom is my favorite person in the whole world. If I could see her again, then it's fine if things get worse for me. It's fine if people bully me more. It doesn't matter."
Nothing wavered in her. To look at her mother once more was the largest wish she owned.
Betty fell quiet. Her feelings for the Witch of Greed ran no shallower, and the girl's answer softened something in her expression.
She'd want the same, wouldn't she. Even after being left alone, even after a wait long past reason, even knowing the meeting might fall short of what she'd built in her head.
Four hundred years in the Forbidden Library, keeping a promise, swallowing the loneliness of it. And still no resentment toward her mother anywhere in her. Only longing.
"I can help with that."
Sumire drew a breath and pushed the tangle inside her down, turning to the pair with confidence returning to her voice.
"I built Rentaro's prosthetic eye. His is mostly for combat calculation, no visual signal, so it can't actually see."
"But an ordinary prosthetic eye is no trouble at all if you give me the materials. I can make you a pair."
"Once they're wired to the nerves you'd have light again. Not as responsive as your own eyes, but you'd see everything around you. Enough to give you what you want."
Pity had gotten into her. The girl was too pitiable, too well-behaved, and being well-behaved about it made it worse.
By comparison, the children living in the 39th Area under Elder Matsuzaki's care had it good.
Same abandonment. Same Cursed Children. Same brutal odds.
They slept in a dank sewer with never enough food, no clean clothes, no warm bedding. But they had each other to lean on, bodies to press close to for heat, and an old man who loved them and would give up anything for them.
Those kids all looked underfed, thin, pale. Yet they'd kept a child's brightness and stayed cheerful, even hopeful.
Aika had nobody. No companions, no family, nothing holding her up. Begging on the street, shoved around, spat at, and somehow she'd held onto this clean, sunlit outlook. That took something Sumire couldn't name.
As a woman, as a scientist who'd spent her career elbow-deep in the machinery of living things, it was hard not to feel something maternal rise up, hard not to want to throw whatever she had at saving this child.
"Not necessary."
Gojo shook his head, and the refusal came out with no room in it.
"Nothing beats her own eyes. Certainly not cold hardware."
He reached over and rested a hand on the top of her head, absurdly gentle, then took her hand in his.
"Come on, Aii. When we get where we're going, I'll do a magic trick for you. Your eyes come back, and you get to use them to look at whatever you want. And see whoever you want."
She took it for a kindness, a joke meant to comfort her. Hope filled her chest anyway, though she understood such things didn't happen. She nodded and smiled regardless, unwilling to let the gesture go unmet.
"Thank you. I'm looking forward to it."
Delight ran all through her voice, and the smile widened. Even believing it was only a joke, she chose to believe in it, chose to want that impossible sliver of hope.
Feeling her way forward with Gojo keeping patient pace beside her, she led the group into a narrow alley before long.
It sat tucked behind a busy shopping street, a corner the world had misplaced. Cold, damp, a leftover seam between two tall buildings, barely wide enough for one person to squeeze through.
Standing water and garbage covered the ground, and the air carried mildew and rot. The buildings overhead blocked the sky entirely, so no sunlight reached it. Even at midday the alley stayed dim.
No voices. No lights. Wind moaning along the walls, and now and then a stray cat calling out somewhere in the dark.
The lowest, meanest corner of a glittering city. Also the only place she had.
"We're here. This is where I've been staying."
She stopped and turned toward him, an embarrassed little smile surfacing, her voice smaller than before.
At the far end sat a crude shelter. Her "home."
Calling it a shelter stretched the word. Nothing about it kept out weather.
A broken umbrella served as roof, cardboard scraps and torn cloth piled over it in no particular order. Holes riddled the fabric. When wind moved through the alley, the rags on top stirred.
Underneath lay more salvaged cardboard, a few chunks of battered foam board, and a heap of filthy clothes stiff with dust and grime. That was her bed.
Beside it stood a cracked plastic bottle holding cloudy water, and a few pieces of bread gone hard. Rations she'd stretched out.
Put bluntly, plenty of dogs slept better. Filthy, sodden, bare, without even a decent scrap of cover.
Sumire's face darkened, and Betty's with it. Neither could get her mind around the idea that a child had survived here day after day.
Gojo didn't react to any of it. The smell was foul, the place squalid, and his eyes stayed soft and fixed on her without a flicker of distaste.
"Aii, I'm going to take the cloth off your eyes now. Time for the magic trick."
He crouched and took her hand, his voice easy, giving her something solid to hold onto.
"Okay."
She had no idea what he meant to do, and her body stiffened a fraction. Still she nodded and put her weight on trust.
Nerves aside, one thing was clear enough to her: she had nothing worth taking. No money, no possessions of value, not even a working pair of eyes.
And blindness had sharpened everything else. She could read the air around a person now, could feel malice or kindness coming off them.
She'd been on the receiving end of malice enough times, bullied and cursed at and chased off, to recognize its absence. What came off this man carried no threat at all. Only warmth.
He untied the cloth with the care of someone handling glass, watching not to hurt her.
The fabric was ancient, gray with dirt, frayed along every edge. Worn a long, long time. Never once replaced.
Beneath it sat a ruin. The eyes had clouded over, threaded with broken vessels, scar tissue puckering the corners. Lead poured in and left untreated had done exactly what lead does.
The tissue had died years ago. That she'd lived through it at all came down to luck; infection or the pain alone would have finished most people.
Sumire's brow drew tight and she turned her head away. Corpses and viruses had been her daily work for decades, and this still hit her somewhere soft.
Betty's expression went heavy too, all the pride and cool distance gone out of it, replaced by something closer to grief.
Gojo showed nothing but calm. He raised a hand...