Aika nodded, jaw set. She understood that the old life was gone. A mother who could pour lead into her daughter's eyes wasn't going to claim her now.
But seeing her face, hearing her voice, would be enough. Anything past that she didn't let herself want.
He took her hand. Her fingers were still cold, though the tremor had gone out of them.
Betty and Sumire fell in behind, and the four of them walked out of the alley together.
Sunlight hit the moment they cleared the shadows. She squinted, lashes fluttering, and needed a long moment before her eyes opened all the way.
The world in front of her might as well have been brand new. Her head turned constantly, wonder written across her face.
Pebbles on the roadside. Wildflowers in bloom. The faces of passing strangers. Even dust hanging in the air. She took in every detail, trying to reclaim all the light she'd been owed.
Her pace stayed slow. Now and then she stopped to reach out and brush a petal, and the softness under her fingertips brought out a clean, unguarded smile.
He never rushed her, walking beside her with open affection in his eyes. The two women slowed to match, and something warm worked its way into them watching her.
Half an hour of following her lead brought them to a block near the ruins.
Nothing here resembled the shopping street they'd left. Squat, crumbling houses stood shoulder to shoulder, walls flaking, weeds thick in every corner, dust hanging in the air.
If somewhere like the 39th Area counted as Slums, then these blocks were the Commoner District: a step above, but barely.
Only people with nowhere else to go lived here. No proper roads, no working streetlights, clean drinking water hard to come by.
She stopped and looked up at a battered little building down the way. Something tangled moved through her expression: nostalgia, dread, and a thread of shame she couldn't quite hide.
"That's my house."
Soft, unsteady, her finger lifting toward it. Not much hope in the words. More like testing a floor she expected to give way.
They came to a halt in front of the ruined structure.
Two stories, paint sloughed off in sheets to expose gray brick underneath. Most of the window glass had broken and been patched over with torn plastic sheeting. Not unlike the apartment Rentaro Satomi rented, though further gone, closer to collapse.
From outside it matched the last surviving houses in the 39th Area, maybe worse. Graffiti and stains covered the walls, and discarded junk piled in the corners gave off a stench.
"Third room on the ground floor."
Her grip on his hand tightened, palm damp with cold sweat. Wanting to see her mother and terrified of it, terrified most of all that the woman's face would twist in disgust.
"Wait here, then. I'll bring her out."
He patted the back of her hand, giving her something to hold onto. A child's wish, and he intended to grant it; she'd been nothing but obedient and quiet since they met, never once asking for anything.
"Okay! I'll hide really well!"
Her voice came out small and soft, a tremor running under it. Fingers knotted in the hem of her shirt as she pressed herself further into the corner, and those newly restored eyes, still slightly dazed, locked onto the old apartment block and refused to move.
Nobody standing there took it well.
Sumire folded her arms in the shade, and the wry humor that usually sat in her expression had gone. She reached out and rubbed the girl's back, uncharacteristically gentle about it.
She and Betty stayed with her in a nook near the building, screened by thick shrubbery, close enough to watch the entrance without being seen from inside.
Gojo pulled his gaze away, shoved both hands into the pockets of his oversized black coat, and walked toward the building alone.
Plaster had come off the walls, weeds choked the base, and a few abandoned cardboard boxes slumped by the door. The whole place felt emptied out.
He stopped at the door and rapped his knuckles against it, an even rhythm carrying something that didn't invite argument.
Knock, knock, knock.
The sound rang clear through the quiet stairwell. A lazy, irritated voice answered fast.
"Who is it?"
His brow creased. Sunglasses hid whatever moved behind them, but the tightening along his jaw gave it away. The voice was wrong. A middle-aged man's, oily and half-interested.
He said nothing, standing where he was, waiting for the door.
It scraped open a moment later, and the smell rolled out to meet him: cigarettes, liquor, cheap perfume.
The man on the other side was in his thirties, wearing a rumpled gray shirt with a yellowed collar. His face shone with grease, stubble mapped his jaw, and his eyes were clouded and still half in sleep.
"I'm looking for Kyoko. Is she in?"
Flat, no feeling in it, the way a man asks after nothing much at all.
"Kyoko?" The man blinked, then grinned wide, showing yellow teeth, his tone turning slick. Leaning against the frame, he arched his back deliberately and shouted over his shoulder. "Customer!"
He hadn't kept his voice down. Movement stirred inside, someone hauling themselves off a bed, slippers dragging across the floor.
"Coming?"
A weak, languid woman's voice drifted out. Whatever was happening at the door had gotten her attention.
Then a thin figure came weaving out from the back room, skin so pale it looked lit from behind.
She wore a loose floral dress washed colorless, cuffs frayed through. Her hair hung tangled over her shoulders, brittle and yellowed at the ends, strands falling across her face. Her eye sockets were sunken, ringed dark and shot through with red, and her lips were cracked and bloodless. She looked like a strong gust would put her on the floor.
Look closer and the resemblance surfaced. The same shape to the brow and eyes. Except her daughter's were bright and clear, and hers held nothing but numbness and exhaustion.
She lifted her head, and something sparked in those clouded eyes at the sight of him. Her mouth stretched into a stiff, sickly smile, and she shoved the man beside her out of the way.
He stumbled back a couple of steps, muttered a complaint, but made no move to return. He crossed his arms and watched from the side.
"I'm Kyoko. Want to come in and play?"
Hoarseness roughened her voice, and she'd layered a deliberate eagerness over it. Leaning closer brought the cheap perfume with her. "Ten thousand. Ten thousand yen and you can do whatever you want..."
Her gaze crawled over his face and down across a body that was young and strong, greed and calculation working behind it, that sick smile widening.
She reached for his arm.
"Pretty boys really do have it easy."
The man snorted from the sidelines, jealousy soaking every syllable. He tugged at his wrinkled shirt, shot Gojo a look full of venom, and wandered off.
His steps wobbled. A few paces on he glanced back, muttering something, then disappeared around the bend in the stairwell.
Barely any words had passed, but the exchange, the postures, the way the two of them moved around each other told him everything. Whatever this woman did to survive, it wasn't honest work.
She sold her body for scraps and dragged out an existence in this rotting building, keeping a hopeless life on life support.
He looked at her without speaking, eyes lowered, the sunglasses swallowing whatever showed.
What kind of despair, what kind of loathing, drives a mother to do that to her own small child. To throw her away that completely, and end up living like this, hollowed out and past caring.
He thought of the scars layered across the girl's body. Of the hope and hurt in her face when she talked about her mother. Of her crouched in that corner minutes ago, small and desperate and trying so hard not to want too much.
Something sat in his chest and refused to move.
His silence, his stillness, read to the woman as embarrassment or hesitation, and her smile turned more eager for it.
She reached again, fingers cold against the air, aiming for his chest, her voice sliding lower. "Come on. You're already here, what's there to be shy about? Come sit down. I'll take good care of you, you won't regret it."
Warmth poured out of her, warmth with something servile underneath. He shifted his weight a fraction and her hand found nothing.
The movement was slight, and the distance it created wasn't.
He stayed in the doorway a moment longer, eyes on that wasted, numb face, something complicated passing through him. Regret. Helplessness. A cold thread running beneath both.
He had no interest in tangling with her, and less in wasting time here.
More than that, the girl was watching from the corner. Nothing he might do to the woman she'd longed for, no question he might ask about her, could happen in front of those eyes.
Doing it would tear the wound back open the moment it had closed, and take every good thing she'd built out of hope with it.
Decision made, he turned and walked away from the door, back toward the corner where she waited.
The woman planted herself in the doorway and shouted after him, sour about it. "Hey! What, you're leaving? We can negotiate! Five thousand! Three thousand, even!"
He never broke stride, deaf to all of it, going straight to the girl.
Crouching down, he rested a hand on her head, absurdly gentle, nothing left of the coldness he'd carried at that door.
"Aii."
He kept his voice low, something soft threading through it, the way a person settles a frightened animal.
She looked up with tears standing in her eyes and forced out a smile anyway. They spilled over and ran down her cheeks, soaking small dark spots into her shirt.
"Thank you. Really." Her voice caught, and gratitude filled every word of it. "I never thought I'd get to see my mom again, or hear her voice. There's nothing left that I regret."
Not one word had passed between them. Her mother hadn't glanced her way, hadn't mentioned her, had no idea she was crouched a stone's throw away, watching.
It didn't matter. She had what she'd come for.
Set against all those nights of reaching for her mother only in dreams, of crying into the one old dress the woman had left behind, this was more than she'd ever dared imagine.
To see her with her own eyes. To hear her speak. Enough.
That tear-streaked smile put an ache in him. He wiped her face and kept his voice easy. "Come on. Come back with us."
"Tomorrow I'll take you somewhere. You'll live there from now on, with a lot of other kids like you."
"You'll get along with them, and you'll have fun. Nobody's going to bully you. No more hiding, no more going hungry or freezing."
"Okay. I'll do whatever you say."