BLACK BULLET 5
CHAPTER 02

THE NEW WORLD CREATION PROJECT

1

He could hear droplets of water going plink-plink into a puddle at regular intervals. Some insects were faintly droning a fair distance away.

He could smell rusted metal. The air batting against his skin was humid, and he felt something hard and solid on his back and hips that made him wonder where they put him down.

How long had he been asleep? He needed to get up. He had important things to do. Something really important…

Trying to move his body, he realized that he almost couldn’t move his arms at all. Whenever he tried, all that resulted was some kind of jingling metal sound. His arms hurt.

Was he tied up somewhere?

—Where am I?

Finally, he came to the core question. His eyelids felt like they were made of iron, but he struggled through it, blinking several times until he could finally start to make out the environment around him.

The first thing he saw was a wall lined with light blue tiles. He was sitting on tile as well. He couldn’t move his hands. Something was hanging between his arms, keeping them aloft. He twitched his neck upward to look. Both of his wrists were cuffed, binding him to an orange, rusted metal pipe. It appeared Rentaro had been resting his back on the side of a bathtub.

Yes. That was the case: He was handcuffed to a pipe in a bathtub. It wasn’t a large bathroom, just big enough for the tub in question, and he couldn’t even stretch his legs all the way out. He guessed he was in someone’s private residence.

After a few more moments, he finally realized his predicament. He was being held. Beyond that, he knew nothing. Who was keeping him in here, and for what reason?

His mind was still hazy, but he felt he had a grip on at least two things. One, he was alive. Two, he probably wasn’t taken in by the police. If that were the case, he would’ve awoken on a hospital bed or something.

Looking down at his abdomen, he found several layers of bandages wrapped underneath his open shirt. It was basic, but he was receiving some treatment, at least.

The bathroom was dark and partitioned by a sliding door. It was bright on the other side of the opaque glass, but he could only discern faint outlines beyond it.

Forcing his body to shift position, he felt an intense pain shoot out from his side and course across his body.

“Is…anybody there…?” he called out haltingly. Then he repeated it a few times. At the third repetition, he heard heavy tramping as a shadowy figure came up to the glass and slid the door open.

“You’re awake?”

The first thing he noticed was her legs—too thin to be called supple. Looking up, he realized her thighs and arms looked just as thin, like easily snappable twigs. She had on short denim pants, a pink tank top, and an American Apparel jacket. Her cold eyes and bob-cut chestnut hair danced around in the air, a quiet anger burning behind her gaze. She was a girl as frigid as ice.

“Do you know who I am?”

Rentaro slowly nodded, trying to will his pounding head into kindling his memory for him.

I think her name was—

“Hotaru Kouro…right? Suibara’s Initiator.”

Hotaru slowly returned the nod.

“And do you know why I’m confining you in here?”

Rentaro took another look around the cramped bathroom.

“More or less.”

His memory served him up to the point when he was shot out of the air by a sniper and smashed into the river’s surface. Given that he wasn’t six feet under, he supposed that meant he was dragged out of the water at some point.

That, and he had an idea of what this girl who saved him wanted.

At that exact moment, the barrel of a gun darker than death dominated his sight. An automatic revolver, pointed right between his eyes.

“Got anything you want to say?”

“You’re the girl who flipped that van over, aren’t you?”

“Mm-hmm,” the girl murmured without hesitation, staring icicles at him.

“Why did you do that?”

“To get revenge for Kihachi. Is there any other reason?”

“You look pretty calm, considering.”

“Do you have any idea how long you were out? Three days. Three days is long enough for anyone to calm down a little.”

“Why didn’t you kill me before now?”

“I wanted to see you confess your sins,” Hotaru replied, eyebrows wholly motionless as Rentaro glared up at her.

“I didn’t kill Suibara, man.”

“Don’t give me that shit.”

The words were quiet, but Hotaru’s irises were a blazing shade of red. The gun’s hammer was cocked, her hand virtually crushing the grip. Silent rage enveloped her tiny frame.

“Don’t you care about your life at all?”

“I mean it. Seriously, I didn’t kill him—”

Then he took a teeth-shattering blow to his lower jaw, and the next thing he knew, he was looking at the ceiling tile. It broke a molar or two—he was gritting his teeth at the time. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. It took some time for him to realize Hotaru landed a straight kick on him.

“Gnh… Ahghh!”

He fixed his gaze on Hotaru as he spat out the tooth fragments. A ribbon of saliva mixed with blood hung down from the side of his mouth before falling. Hotaru watched from above like an executioner.

“I don’t think I heard you.”

“I already told you, I didn’t—”

The next kick was to the wound on his side.

“Grhh…nnh!”

She kept her foot on the opening, making him experience enough pain to make his brain explode.

Hotaru refocused her gun’s aim on Rentaro’s head.

“All right—I’m not into tormenting people like this, so this is your last chance. If you admit to your crime and beg for mercy, I’ll turn you over to the police instead of killing you. But if you lie to me, the next time your head hits the floor, it’ll have a hole right in the middle of it. Think it over before you decide—do you need to live, or do you need to die?”

Rentaro, still staring at Hotaru, nodded silently.

“Okay. Here goes: Do you feel any guilt at all about killing Kihachi? He said you were one of his best friends, and you caught him in that dirty little trap and killed him. Are you even a little sorry for that? Answer me.”

What a witch hunt this was. All she wanted was for Rentaro to confess to it. She didn’t believe he was even a little bit innocent.

But, perhaps because of that, the girl’s words were completely unadorned. They came from the heart. If Rentaro screamed his innocence, she was absolutely going to pull the trigger.

The voice of logic in his mind shouted at him to admit to it for now. He could make up for it later. This girl’s just like the cops. Why would he ever hesitate to deceive her?

His conclusion made, he gave Hotaru a defiant, resolute look. “Please believe me,” he said, elucidating every syllable. “I didn’t do it. Really.”

The gunshot blared across the bathroom. Rentaro’s body spasmed. With a tink, the empty cartridge bounced off the tile a few times before the silence returned.

White smoke wafted out from the gun barrel.

Gingerly turning his head to the side, Rentaro found a bullet lodged in the bathtub, millimeters from his nose.

Hotaru turned away from him as she took out a cell phone and dialed a number.

“Oh, hello,” she said after a moment, “is this the police?” She turned back to Rentaro for just a moment before continuing. “I came across the wanted fugitive Rentaro Satomi, so I placed him under citizen’s arrest… Right. No, this isn’t a prank. It’s true.”

After relaying her name and address, Hotaru ended the call and looked back at Rentaro. “They thought I was kidding,” she stated, “but they’re still coming. They said I wasn’t far from the nearest station, so it won’t even be five minutes.”

Hotaru leaned in, putting her eye level on the same height as her quarry.

“I’ll listen to what you have to say. But only until the police arrive. Once they do, that’s it. You’re going with them.”

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

“Because you’re not worth it anymore. Have fun getting strung up by the court.”

“Whoa, what did the police tell you?”

“They said you lured Kihachi over to you and killed him for money.”

Rentaro attempted a scornful laugh, but gurgled out a cough instead. He gazed at Hotaru as he spat out a mixture of phlegm and blood.

“The story they told me was, Suibara was blackmailing me for money and I killed him to shut him up.”

“…That’s a lie. There’s no way Kihachi would do that.”

“Of course not. He didn’t do that at all, and I didn’t blackmail him, either. So there, you see? Right from the start, our stories are contradicting each other. I think we’ve got enemies in the police, too. Don’t you think there’s something weird about all this? Nothing striking you as odd?”

“…You got four minutes.”

“There’s something I do need to apologize to you about. It’s that I couldn’t keep Suibara safe. He was a nervous wreck by the time he came to my office. I was fully willing to listen to his story so we could share the burden, but he was too freaked out to tell me. And I didn’t pursue it. I misjudged the situation, and for that, I am truly sorry.”

Hotaru kept her eyes away from him, twisting her eyebrows low as she anguished for her Promoter.

“Stop it.”

“Look, in a court of law, you’re supposed to listen to both sides of the story and then the jury or a judge or whatever makes the decision, right? You’ve already heard the police’s side. Now I want you to hear mine, but I can’t wrap that up in the course of five minutes. I want you to give me a chance.”

“A chance?”

Hotaru found herself leaning forward.

“There’s a group out there that framed me,” Rentaro continued, choosing his words carefully. “Not only did they pin the murder on me; they targeted everybody in the Tendo Civil Security Agency. I’m not some kind of innocent bystander here. I want to catch the guys that framed me. Can you help me with that?”

“You’re just gonna run away.”

“If that’s what you think, then go right ahead and hand me over. But, if you think even a little bit that I’m worth listening to, I want you to wait on that. I know you want to learn the truth about all this, if you can. I took a case from Suibara. He was keeping some kind of secret, and he said he wanted to go through me so he could reveal it to the Seitenshi. A day later, somebody killed him. There’s got to be something going on behind the scenes.”

“…Two minutes.”

“If it turns out there’s not anyone behind the scenes, you can go ahead and kill me then. Burn me at the stake, draw and quarter me, put my head on a pike; anything.”

“Are you…serious?”

Rentaro returned Hotaru’s stare and gave her a powerful nod.

“Suibara trusted in me. Now it’s your turn. Please.”

The two of them looked into each other’s eyes for several moments. Rentaro held his breath in silence. A drop of water from the tap fell with a splip onto the tile floor by his feet.

Just as Hotaru was about to say something, someone began repeatedly pressing the doorbell. It was the police.

Rentaro closed his eyes and tried to keep his body from shaking. Time’s up, huh?

Hotaru, all emotion quelled from her eyes, stood up and walked out of the bathroom. She didn’t close the glass door behind her, forcing Rentaro to watch the entire proceedings. The layout of this place meant that the main bathroom and the front door were extremely close to each other, so it took only a few seconds for Hotaru to undo the door chain and greet the person outside. He could see Hotaru, but not the policeman she was talking to.

“Are you the girl who called?”

A chill crossed Rentaro’s spine.

“Yeah.”

“All right,” said the clearly doubtful voice of another officer. There must’ve been two of them. “Um, so…let’s cut to the chase. Did you really capture Rentaro Satomi?”

Rentaro jammed his eyes shut, already imagining the next sentence. Oh, do come in. Want some tea? I have him in cuffs in the bathroom.

“I’m sorry, that…that was a prank call. I didn’t think the police would actually show up or anything!”

Watching Hotaru bow down deeply in a laudable act of apology, Rentaro had to stop himself from audibly saying Wha?

“Yeah, I figured,” said an officer, not sounding particularly angry about it. “The news said there’s a good chance he’s dead anyway. But you know it’s against the law to waste the police’s time like this, all right, kid?”

Hotaru continued to apologize. The policemen continued to give her a mild scolding. They exchanged a few more words. And then they left.

Her sorrowful expression immediately drawing itself back, Hotaru went expressionless once more as she briskly walked to the bathroom. Falling to one knee, she took a key out of her pocket, inserted it into the keyhole in Rentaro’s cuffs, and turned it.

“Why…?” Rentaro whispered, deeply moved as he heard metal rattling.

“You’re not the guy, are you?” Hotaru replied, refusing to return his gaze.

Of course he wasn’t. But how many times had he screamed that before? How many times had she ignored him? Hot tears began to well in his eyes. He wiped them away with the pit of an arm.

Soon, there was another clink, and the handcuffs fell to the floor. Rentaro tried to stand up as he checked his wrists. His knees refused to cooperate. He decided not to risk it, instead borrowing a shoulder from the suddenly cooperative Hotaru.

The moment he stepped out of the bathroom, the droning of the insects outside went up an octave in his ear. He was greeted with a tiny, cramped, and disorganized studio apartment. He didn’t realize it in the bathroom, but apparently it was the middle of the afternoon outside, the contrast between his poorly lit bathroom cell and the great outdoors reminding him more than a little of his own place.

Taking a closer look, Rentaro realized that all the newspapers and magazines strewn around the apartment had coverage of the Suibara murder in them. THE FALLEN HERO, began one. SATOMI ARRESTED, screamed another. It was like every outlet was falling over themselves to get more sensational with their headlines. Right after the Third Kanto Battle, it was almost as if they printed a new article every time he so much as ate breakfast. He couldn’t believe how far the tables had turned in less than a month.

Listening to the strange noises coming from the ancient, whirring air-conditioning unit, he was led to a creaky pipe-frame bed and felt a stiff blanket being pulled over him. There were stains from previous water leaks on the ceiling, bits of paper missing from the walls, and everything was a duller color than when it was first installed.

Suddenly, Rentaro began to suspect something. This apartment was clearly meant for one person. There was a lone single bed in this studio. So she didn’t live together with Suibara? Idly pondering this, he removed his shirt in bed, unwrapped his bandages, and examined his side.

The gruesome sight almost made him groan. It was no longer bleeding, but the wound was still a blaze of pain.

“Hey, how did you stop the blood?”

“I stuck a hot frying pan against it.”

“Oh, so that’s what I’m smelling? Were you making some yakiniku?”

Hotaru’s eyes widened for a moment. Then she let out a light sigh. “I’m amazed you have the energy to mouth off at me,” she said. “I dunno if it’s luck or not, but the bullet didn’t get lodged in you.”

“Sounds like luck to me.”

“Not to me,” she replied, chin stuck high in the air. Then she narrowed her eyes at him again. “That’s a pretty funny body you got.”

Rentaro followed her eyes down until they reached his cybernetic right arm and leg. They were still a dark shade of black. He had ripped the skin off them while he was trapped in the hotel.

“What is that?”

“Suibara never told you? It’s a set of armaments from the New Humanity Creation Project.”

That made Hotaru open her eyes even wider.

“Wait, so you don’t know anything about the New World Creation Project? Or the Black Swan Project, maybe?”

Hotaru gave him a clueless look.

Aha. Suibara must have kept any dangerous knowledge away from her to keep her safe. The fact she wasn’t as dead as Suibara was all the proof he needed for that. If she knew everything Suibara did, she would’ve been part of their hit list, too. There’s no way she’d still be alive.

Thus, Rentaro reasoned, whoever killed Suibara figured there was no harm in leaving her be.

He noticed a first-aid box tossed at him. It contained a tube of fibrin, a form of biological glue that Rentaro was well familiar with by now. Civsec officers turned to it first whenever they wanted their wounds to heal quicker. It wasn’t quite as insta-heal as some of the potions in the RPGs Enju liked, but it patched things up far more speedily than Mother Nature could.

Shutting one eye at the stinging pain in his side, he applied a fibrin glue pad and kept it fast with bandages.

He was over the worst of it. Or so he thought. Then his greedy stomach started to whine at him.

In a few moments, he was pestering Hotaru for some rice water, something that his stomach wouldn’t immediately reject. Soon, he was slurping up rice porridge. Considering he hadn’t eaten in three days, his gastrointestinal system hadn’t faltered on him that badly, enough so that he managed to keep down bread and soup well enough. The bread was only lightly toasted and he wouldn’t dare put any jam on it, but the wheat flavor that spread across his mouth with every bite almost made tears come out of his eyes. Before he knew it, he wolfed down the whole slice.

The food in jail wasn’t all that bad. But he couldn’t remember the last time he had anything resembling home-cooked food. He lay back in bed, his full stomach making him feel tremendously satisfied. The thick, starchy blanket and comically creaky bed seemed fit for a king to him. He could feel himself falling asleep, but there was no time for that.

Nothing had changed for the better at all.

His exploits at the Magata Plaza Hotel the other day seemed like ancient history to him, but the bitter, painful experience he was handed there filled him with impotent resentment.

More to the point, Tina was still with the cops, and Enju was still in the IISO’s hands.

Dark Stalker, aka Yuga Mitsugi, told him at the hotel that Enju’s new partner was a “buddy killer” and promised her a painful death. He was suddenly very curious about what the past three days were like.

“I still don’t trust you,” Hotaru said scornfully as she sat down on the edge of the bed. “Can you tell me what’s going on already?”

“Well, where should I start…?”

Staring straight up at the ceiling, Rentaro regaled Hotaru with the story of how he accepted Suibara’s job, got arrested, and found himself leaping off the roof of the hotel. By the time he was done, Hotaru was at rapt attention, chin resting in her hand and deep in thought.

“So Kihachi got rubbed out by this…group, because he knew a lot about these New World and Black Swan projects?”

“Do you believe me?”

“It’s too complex to be made up. Plus, I definitely noticed that Kihachi was hiding something from me. Never imagined it was something this immense, but…”

Seeing her accept this story the police dismissed as absurd gladdened him. It was almost anticlimactic for him. But Hotaru still glared at him coldly, the hostility still not entirely gone from her eyes.

“So what are you gonna do now?”

“What do you want to do?”

“That Hitsuma guy’s one of them, right?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Satomi,” Yuga had told him at the hotel, “we need you as a sacrifice. Tina Sprout’s going to be executed. Kisara Tendo’s going to be trained to destroy the Tendo family. Enju Aihara’s actually got her next Promoter assigned to her already. He’s a bad seed. A buddy killer. Worse than you’d ever imagine. And once you’re found guilty, the whole picture’s complete.”

Trained to destroy the Tendo family. That was what threw him. Kisara wasn’t stupid enough to let someone use and abuse her like that. But what about someone whom she’d opened at least some of her heart to? Someone with a clear gift for manipulating people’s minds? There was no telling, Rentaro thought. And in Kisara’s recent social life, there was only one man who filled that bill.

If Hitsuma was part of this criminal group, he could’ve easily ambushed Rentaro using what little information he gave his civsec boss about his whereabouts. Then he could’ve interrupted the orders from the police, put Yuga in place, and surrounded the hotel with police just in case. It seemed to fit the picture well enough.

He doubted Kisara would give up his location that easily, but if she did, that meant she was wrapped around Hitsuma’s finger.

Rentaro shut his eyes tightly, hands balling into painful fists.

I thought I could leave Kisara safely in your hands, Hitsuma. Kisara trusted in you.

He ground his teeth.

And you used her. You’ve gotta pay.

Hotaru lifted her head up from her thoughts. “I’m going to kill that Hitsuma guy,” she said. “And Dark Stalker, too, if he fired the shot.”

“Don’t.”

“Can you tell me why not?” replied a clearly peeved Hotaru.

“Because that won’t solve anything. Even if that went without a hitch, you’re still a criminal. You flipped a van; you injured three law enforcement officers; and if you did that, too, you’d be a double murderer.”

“It’s not like my enemy was playing fair. Why do I have to?”

Rentaro thought Hotaru resembled someone he knew. Now it finally dawned on him.

“Satomi, I just realized. You couldn’t punish the mastermind behind the Kagetane Hiruko Terrorist Incident, Kikunojo Tendo. You couldn’t punish the mastermind behind the Seitenshi Sniping Incident, Sougen Saitake. But I was able to punish the person responsible for the Third Kanto Battle, Kazumitsu Tendo. Do you know why?

“Don’t you understand? Justice isn’t good enough. Justice can’t oppose evil. But absolute evil—evil that goes beyond evil—can. I have that power.”

“No. You can’t do that. It’s wrong. If someone’s unfair to you, you have to be fair back at him. If you wind up turning into a criminal on me, how am I gonna face up to Suibara’s grave?”

“Don’t give me that lip service. What other choice do I have?”

“The choice of exposing the Black Swan Project, getting evidence, and arresting the perpetrators. That way, they’ll round up Hitsuma and everybody else involved in this.”

And it’ll clear his name if they arrest the real killer.

But it wouldn’t be that easy, of course. Suibara lost his life trying to reveal Black Swan to the world. Their dark tentacles had extended themselves not just to Rentaro, but to Tina, Enju, Kisara, and the Tendo Civil Security Agency itself.

He didn’t know how much of a bead his enemy had on his movements, but if they failed to fish his body out of the river, they’d be striking back soon enough. And now, there was more than Hitsuma and his police force pursuing him. There was that mechanized soldier, too, the New World update of his New Humanity self.

Frankly, he thought, I don’t like my chances much.

Surrounded on all sides. Completely isolated. The situation was nothing short of hopeless. If he could, he didn’t want to make Hotaru—Suibara’s only living memory—cross a bridge as dangerous as this.

“Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea…” Hotaru turned the cold eyes underneath her chestnut hair an infinitesimal amount toward him, face still blank. “But I need revenge for Kihachi. You’re just the bait.”

“The bait?”

“Mm-hmm. If the enemy finds out you’re alive and starts gathering around your blood, that’s perfect for me. All I have to do is take out the people trying to take you out.”

The sleeves of her jacket sprang up as she swung her hands to her hips. The next minute, she had a pair of jet-black pistols at the ready.

“This battle’s how I’m gonna be paying my condolences to Kihachi.”

Rentaro breathed an admiring sigh. She didn’t pull the triggers, but she’d drawn those guns so fast, you’d miss it if you blinked.

Even before this point, he had imagined she was pretty handy with a gun. This must’ve been how she fought in battle, then.

Her guns were both Gold Cup National Match models, one of the custom government pistol lines manufactured by Colt. They weren’t exactly suited for dual wielding, but gun collectors cherished them for ease of handling (even a small girl’s hands could wrap around them) and their sheer beauty, making them a world-renowned model. They came with a crisscrossing dual holster she kept behind her back.

Guns still at the ready, Hotaru turned her freezing gaze upon Rentaro. “So let’s keep this strictly business, all right? I use you; you use me. There’s nothing else to it. If you die, I won’t even take a look back. And if the opposite happens, feel free to leave me on the sidewalk.”

“No cooperation?”

“None.”

Rentaro grimaced. It was a blunt reaction, one that made him wonder if he hallucinated that single moment of empathy she showed in front of the police.

“…All right. Well, you can fight for whatever you want to, but if we run into anyone calling himself Dark Stalker, I want you to let me handle him. He’s this conceited little bastard in a school uniform with a pop-up collar.”

“Is he good?”

“Damn good. He’d be too much for you.”

“You mind not selling me short, please?”

Suddenly, something black and heavy flew toward Rentaro. He caught it just in time. It was a pair of nylon hip holsters—one with a gun, the other a knife. The very ones Rentaro confiscated from the SAT trooper in the hotel. The knife was a survival blade from Gerber. The gun was—

“—A Beretta…?”

It must have been a custom job owned by the trooper. It featured a reinforced “brigadier” slide, something that went out of production long ago. Kisara used a custom-line Beretta 90two as her choice of gun, Rentaro recalled. Beretta always devoted as much care to the look of their guns as they did their performance. It seemed like a match made in heaven for Kisara. But would it work for him?

“That’s not your gun?”

“Nah, I seized it along the way. My XD’s still in evidence storage.”

“An XD? That cheap piece of crap? You’ll hit more often with a Beretta.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t the sight system take some getting used to? I mean, say what you want, but I was pretty used to that XD.”

“That means you’re a cheap piece of crap, too.”

“I knew you were gonna say that!”

Then Rentaro realized he had yet to ask something important.

“Hey, by the way, what kind of Gastrea factor is in your blood?”

Hotaru gave him a sullen, silent glare as she turned her head.

“I don’t need to tell you.”

Man, she pisses me off. Rentaro decided to check how tight his holsters were instead of engaging her any further.

“I’m not done with you yet,” he heard Hotaru say.

“Jeez, girl, there’s more?” a fed-up Rentaro replied, only to find Hotaru’s index finger sticking right in his face.

“Do not call me ‘girl.’ My name is Hotaru.”

“…You’re the boss, Hotaru.”

“What should I call you?”

“Rentaro works.”

“Really? Well, great. Rentaro, then.”

Thus, their alliance to defeat their foes and uncover the truth was formed. They weren’t exactly the most steadfast of teams, but to Rentaro, she was the only ally he had in the entirety of Tokyo Area. The feeling was probably mutual, too.

“So what’re we gonna do now?”

“We start here,” Rentaro replied, looking around the room. “I meant to search Suibara’s place for evidence anyway. You can help me save some time.”

“This isn’t Kihachi’s apartment.”

“Huh?”

“I said, this isn’t Kihachi’s apartment.”

“So where are we?”

Hotaru gave an exasperated shake of her head. “Rentaro,” she said, “have you seriously not noticed yet? I don’t have a Promoter, but the IISO still hasn’t taken me away.”

“Oh—”

The vague feeling of discomfort stuck in the back of his throat suddenly made total sense. Enju was seized by an IISO agent practically the moment Rentaro surrendered his license. If Suibara was dead, Hotaru should’ve been expecting a visit from them, too.

“Wh-why’s that?” Rentaro dared to ask. Instead of answering, Hotaru pointed outside.

“Let’s go outside. It’ll be easier to show you.”

The moment they were out, Rentaro was greeted with eye-piercingly bright sunlight. The air conditioner that had so kindly kept him cool inside now blew hot, processed air at him, making him immediately break into a sweat. They went down the stairs, each step creaking in dangerous-sounding fashion, and went away from the building a bit before stopping to look at it.

The apartment was tilted to the side, boasting a simple corrugated sheet-iron ceiling and walls. Other similar-looking buildings surrounded it. The area must not have enjoyed the benefits of garbage pickup—piles of scrap iron and other junk were all over the place, and the ground was lined with a rainbow of colorful plastic trash. The stench made his nose wrinkle.

Feeling someone’s eyes upon him, Rentaro saw a sharp-eyed man staring at him before turning back into his hovel. Judging by his face, he obviously wasn’t Japanese. And it clearly was his home, judging by the sounds of daily life coming from it. But why would he leave that “house” of his in such terrible condition? Something told him the landlord probably had at least a couple gang connections.

He thought he was in the Outer Districts for a moment as he took a 360-degree look at his surroundings, but the Monoliths were far away from here. He was inland.

“Why’re you living in a place like this?”

“I had to stay in some illegal slum or another. It’s not like anyone else would take in a lone child without any parent or guardian. I had to get out of our place before the IISO got me. I knew they’d be coming.”

Again, Rentaro had to commend Hotaru’s coolheadedness and ability to take action. When she learned Suibara was killed, she barely spent a moment mourning him. She got to work. Enju was kind of mature for her age, yes, but that was because she had to experience everything from direct threats like frostbite and hunger to emotional ones like contempt and persecution. There was some truth in the idea that hardship and adversity could make a person stronger, but not even Enju could so sensitively pick up on unseen threats and flee this much in advance. Rentaro wondered what Hotaru must’ve gone through to reach that point.

“The police are staking out the place we used to live in.”

“Oh…”

Rentaro thought for a moment.

“Are you willing to risk that?”

“No. We better not, Hotaru. There’s someplace I want to go first.”

“Where?”

Rentaro looked at Hotaru.

“The place where Suibara was killed.”

2

Shigetoku Tadashima stood bolt upright, notebook in hand, thinking to himself how much he wanted to strangle the person he was talking to.

“But that guy didn’t abandon me! He treated my wound and told that police officer to carry me down. I really don’t think he’s the monster the media’s portraying him as… Are you even listening to me?”

“Yeah…”

“Okay. So where was I? Oh, right! I was all groggy from the sleep medication I took, so I didn’t make it out of the hotel when the alarm went off. So then—”

“—Um, I think I have enough, thanks,” an exasperated Tadashima said, trying to hide the chagrin on his face as he closed his notebook. The somewhat well-nourished woman he was interviewing, sitting cross-legged on her bed, looked a tad disappointed.

“Oh, really? But I haven’t even told you a third of what I wanted to!”

“It’s been a great help, ma’am. I might have some more questions for you later, but I think we’re good for today.”

Tadashima seized the moment to salute while he could and left the room.

“What’s up, Inspector?” asked Yoshikawa, waiting by the door, the moment he emerged.

“Don’t get me started,” a fed-up Tadashima said, waving a hand in front of his face. “I know the perp saved her life and everything, but she couldn’t heap more praise on his feet if she tried. She’s not a witness so much as she is a groupie. Must be that Stockholm whatever in action.”

Yoshikawa chuckled. “I’m heading back to the station for now. Are you coming with me?”

“Nah, Hitsuma’s called me in. Looks like it’ll be me and him in a two-man cell. I’ll be the investigator, and he’ll just yell at me all day.”

“Must be hard keeping your career on track, huh, Inspector?”

Tadashima gave Yoshikawa a bop on the head. “Ahh, quit your bitching. If you wanna say something, say it to him, not me. Oof… The guy’s a genius, but something about him just bothers me.”

Leaving Yoshikawa behind as he rubbed his head, Tadashima left the hospital and caught a taxi to the point Hitsuma had directed him to. It was an enormous skyscraper, easily dwarfing everything adjacent to it. It was matte black, making the inspector wonder if it was made of Varanium, and a guard armed with a pistol was standing in front.

A stone tablet with CENTRAL CONTROL DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION carved into it stood in front of the structure. People on the street just called it “the black building.” Nobody really knew what went on inside.

Tadashima rechecked the map Hitsuma texted him. This was definitely the place. Reporting to the guard, he showed his badge and was quickly ushered inside without further question. The elevator he boarded seemed to break the sound barrier as it rose, almost making him lose his footing on the way to the sixty-fifth floor.

From that point, a female employee in a lab coat guided him as he went through multiple security doors, each protected by a different kind of card-key lock or biometric scanner. Tadashima grew more and more nervous. He was dressed in the same wrinkled suit he slept in last night over at the investigation team HQ, and the stubble on his face was starting to cross that inscrutable boundary to full-on beardhood. He didn’t know where he was being led to, but he would hope for no dress code, at least.

The bulletproof-glass door labeled CONTROL ROOM opened with a hydraulic-sounding pshhuu. Behind it, Tadashima could hear footsteps running back and forth and a cacophony of noise.

The sight that unfolded startled him. The gigantic, fan-shaped room was dimly lit, mostly by the seemingly infinite number of holodisplays deployed in every inch of available space. Indicator bars and numbers danced across each screen. It resembled the air-traffic control tower of a particularly busy airport, but the main difference was the huge holodisplay in the center of the room depicting a map of Tokyo Area, monitoring electricity usage region-wide in intense detail.

Tadashima had to fight back the impression that he had somehow slipped into the future.

“What is this…?”

“Have you ever heard of the SmartCity concept?”

Startled, Tadashima turned to find Hitsuma in a freshly pressed suit, arms open wide as he walked toward him. Tadashima attempted to jump-start his mind back into action. It had been a while since it worked right.

“Um…wasn’t it an old urbanization plan? I think the first Seitenshi proposed it in an effort to optimize electrical demand.”

“Precisely, Inspector. Electricity is transported along power lines using high voltages, but a lot of that power winds up getting lost before it reaches homes. Storing it is not only difficult, but produces a lot of waste of its own as well.

“For example, places like large data centers usually keep some of their power supply in an idle state, just in case there’s any unexpected server load or heavy access, but they only use around six percent of the electricity sent to them. Twelve tops. All the rest of it is wasted. The SmartCity concept has the city monitor energy usage to distribute power efficiently while avoiding things like blackouts. You remember how strained the grid was around Tokyo after the Gastrea War.”

Tadashima nodded silently as he gave another astonished look at the SmartCity nerve center before him. “So you actually finished it, huh?” he said. “It hasn’t been in the news for ages. I thought it was canceled or something.”

“Well, we didn’t want it to become a terrorist target, for one. That’s why it’s in this nondescript building with a nondescript name.”

“Right,” Tadashima replied with a shrug. “So what did you want from me? I barely even touch a computer unless I’m doing things like police paperwork. I’m sure you didn’t call me here just to show off all your fancy machinery.”

“Of course not. There’s actually one function of this control room I wanted to show you.”

Hitsuma tapped at the central control panel. The system promptly showed a variety of video images, showing a shopping district, a café, a theater, and so forth, most looking down from a very high viewpoint. It was a familiar enough sight to Tadashima.

“Are these surveillance cameras…?”

“Yes. We had these installed in places like rail stations and airports at first, but now they cover all of Tokyo Area in order to quickly spot Gastrea.”

“How many cameras do you have for that?” an astounded Tadashima replied. “You’d need thousands. Tens of thousands.”

“Too many for human beings to monitor, certainly. That’s why we feed the video through the face-recognition system we have here in this control room. If you search based on that, you can do things like this.”

One of the images on the giant holodisplay expanded out to take over the whole screen region. “Whoa,” Tadashima marveled. There, shot from slightly above a restaurant building, he saw a young police detective in a gray business suit, speedily slurping up ramen from the front-facing bar. He recognized the face right off—despite his three years on the force, he still looked like a raw recruit. In fact, they were just talking a few moments ago.

“Yoshikawa…”

“Exactly,” Hitsuma replied as he triumphantly nodded behind him. “And we’ve got Rentaro Satomi’s facial pattern in the database, too. The trap’s already been set. Now all we have to do is wait for our prey to show up.”

“I see. That’s some pretty amazing tech. But I’m impressed you could call on the services of this place without a warrant or anything. Does the investigation team know about this?”

“Actually, no. Outside of myself and my father the commissioner, you’re the only one.”

Tadashima couldn’t believe his ears. He was acting by himself without even the HQ knowing about it? A police department was supposed to be stricter, more bureaucratic than that. Even if this was the commissioner’s son, was it really all right to let him run wild like this?

The detective felt something brooding in the pit of his stomach. It told him that the Hitsuma clan was after Rentaro for more reasons than just the crimes he allegedly committed.

“By the way,” a voice said from behind, cutting off his thought process, “how’s your investigation been going, Inspector Tadashima?” It belonged to a boy in a school uniform, coming out of nowhere in the dimly lit room.

“Oh, you’re, um…”

“Yuga Mitsugi. The civsec who ran into Satomi by accident at the Plaza Hotel. Sorry for all the trouble I caused.”

Why was this boy in the room, too?

“Um, hey…” A clearly agitated Hitsuma greeted Yuga with a cold stare.

“What’s the big deal, Superintendent Hitsuma?”

Hitsuma’s breezy composure was now a thing of the past. It looked like he was afraid the boy would say something he wasn’t supposed to. Did they know each other?

“So, uh, Inspector, how’s the investigation coming along?”

The boy’s overly familiar speech rankled Tadashima.

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss that with the general public.”

“Inspector, would you mind telling him for me? It sounds like he’ll be offering help to the investigation as a civsec officer.”

Tadashima took out his notebook, offended and wondering why anyone asked for a civsec’s help with a non-Gastrea case. “I went to the hospital and spoke with one of the SAT officers the suspect tangled with,” he stated, “along with a woman hit by friendly fire during the incident. Surprisingly, the woman said that Rentaro Satomi saved her life. She even thanked him for it, saying, ‘He can’t be the killer. I’m sure there’s something else compelling him to do all this.’ The SAT officer was just as cheerful with me. He smiled at me and said, ‘I’d love to have another match with him.’”

“Ha-ha! Pretty funny civsec, huh? Even as he’s fleeing us, he’s building a fan base for himself.”

Tadashima ignored the equally cheerful Yuga, turning toward Hitsuma instead. “About that, actually. None of it makes any sense to me. He’s a murderer. If he wanted to get out of this as safely as possible, wouldn’t it have been faster for him to take the woman hostage and barricade himself in a room?”

“I imagine he figured her wound wouldn’t make her much use as a hostage,” Hitsuma replied bluntly.

“Yeah, but he could’ve taken one of the SAT officers hostage, too. He also went through the trouble of simply incapacitating the SAT team. For him, that has to be a thousand times harder than just killing them. Don’t you think that’s strange at all? He’s on the run from the law, but he’s still taking time out to save people’s lives on the way. If he really murdered one person already, would he be this hesitant about killing another?”

“He probably can’t shake off the image of himself as the hero of Tokyo Area. And who’s to say he didn’t mean to kill any of the SAT guys? Maybe he meant to and just failed at it.”

“You sure seem intent on his guilt, Superintendent.”

“And you must think he’s not guilty, don’t you, Inspector? You’re the one who interrogated him, aren’t you?”

Tadashima rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah, you got me there, sir. But I don’t play favorites in the interrogation room. I’m tough with everybody I talk to in there. I can’t get a confession out of a criminal if I think he’s innocent.”

Yuga, to the side, gave out a sudden laugh. “Either way, though, as long as Satomi isn’t defanged, he’s going to do something for us. It’s pretty clear searching the river isn’t gonna do anything for us at this point. He’s alive—I’m sure of it. Heh-heh… This game’s only getting started, Satomi.”

Tadashima rubbed the top of his arm, feeling something cold and heartless behind the boy’s inscrutable chuckling to himself.

3

With a flashing green light and a melody that sounded like a tweeting baby chick, a mass of humanity scrambled across the busy intersection. The asphalt radiated heat like an oven burner, and everyone in the crowd looked fatigued.

Amid this swell of humanity dodging and weaving around itself in intricate geometrical patterns, Rentaro Satomi’s eyes darted to and fro. There was a man with a hurried, restless walk repeatedly looking down at his watch. A couple walking hand in hand together. A mother on the way home from shopping, her son staring into his mobile phone as he walked. Whenever someone happened to size him up, he would unconsciously shudder.

“Keep looking forward, Rentaro,” a dry voice next to him said. “Try not to do anything too suspicious.” It sounded like the chestnut-haired girl had nothing fun, nothing exciting left in her world.

“Yeah, but it’s kind of hard to act normal when you’re consciously thinking about it.”

“At least you’re aware of that. But I don’t think you need to worry. People don’t care about you as much as you think.”

“Why are you finding ways to berate me with everything you say?”

“I’m just trying to help you relax, all right?” the girl replied, not a trace of emotion to her voice. Rentaro fell silent. She was making sense. Even now, the world was in a state of constant flux. It had been three days since Rentaro’s alleged death. He recalled how Sumire once told him, “You know, people care a hundred times more about how they just banged their little finger against the corner of the dresser than about some politician or famous singer dying.”

Everyone walking around in public had their own lives to live. Not a single one of them had any mental capacity to consider Rentaro’s role in their existences. He understood that on an intellectual basis, and he kept consciously telling that to himself.

But what if somebody recognized his face? What if someone screamed and ran up to him, grabbing his arms? The nightmarish image kept flitting in and out of his mind, filling him with a dreadful sense of uneasiness.

Soon, they were past the intersection and on their way down a long, wide shopping arcade. Rentaro gave his head a light shake. Something he keenly noticed, now that he was all alone in the world, was how much he appreciated all the people that once supported him in life, tangibly or intangibly. If it wasn’t for the warmth of the girl walking next to him, he might have been too scared to so much as walk out the door.

Of course, as partners went, the girl couldn’t have acted more disinterested in him. She only saw him as a way to lure over the New World Creation Project soldier in her sights, and it admittedly irritated him a little.

“We’re here.”

Rentaro turned his head, only to find the bare framework of the new city hall building looming before him. Construction had ground to a halt on the site, the catwalks that lined the outside walls barren of people. Tractors, power shovels, and other bits of construction equipment lay abandoned around the building, like some kind of avant-garde art installation.

The sun was at its highest point in the sky. Rentaro and Hotaru fled under the building’s shadow, sweat pouring unbearably out of their bodies. They were in the middle of the city, but it was still oddly quiet. Or perhaps it was their sixth sense creating the tension, warning them of another human being’s death in a way difficult to put in physical terms.

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Hotaru replied as she walked on ahead. Rentaro grimaced. Did she really care about Suibara so much that she was willing to kill in his name? He sighed and followed after her.

The police were finished with the crime scene. There was no clotted blood on the floor, no white pieces of tape marking out evidence locations—but simply standing at the scene made Rentaro’s brain vividly re-create the entire incident. He closed his eyes and made a silent prayer for the deceased.

What did you want to tell me, Suibara?

Looking to his side, he saw an expressionless Hotaru standing bolt upright.

“You’re not going to pray for him?” Rentaro asked.

“I did all my mourning when he died. I don’t have any tears left.”

“Oh…”

“So?” Hotaru’s chestnut hair swayed in the wind as she looked up at him. “What’re we going to do here?”

Rentaro scratched distractedly at the back of his head. “Well,” he said, “it’s not like I had some grand scheme in mind. But you never know what you’ll find at the crime scene, you know? Plus, just being here is reminding me of all kinds of things.” The fateful night replayed itself in his mind. “The body was still warm when I got here. He couldn’t have been dead for long. It was too much of a coincidence that the police just happened to show up at that time. Someone waited until the moment I appeared to call the cops.”

Which meant the culprit was someone close to the scene—close enough to visually monitor Rentaro’s movements.

Then something flashed into his mind. “Hotaru,” he said to the inscrutable girl next to him, “you said you noticed Suibara acting ‘strange’ around you, right? How was he acting, exactly?”

“He started working solo a lot more. He’d go out more and more often, and he’d never tell me where. He’d try to make up silly little excuses about it. I didn’t pry at all. I figured a guy like him just had a bunch of stuff going on in his life.”

“I told you about how he wanted to meet with Lady Seitenshi, right? I think he wanted to talk about a pair of conspiracies—the New World Creation Project, and the Black Swan Project.”

“Right. And the New World is just an updated version of the New Humanity Creation Project, isn’t it? What about Black Swan?”

Rentaro shook his head. “I have no idea. But something tells me that if I can find out, that’ll blow the whole door open on this thing.”

Suddenly, Hotaru’s remarks made a new image of Suibara rise up in his mind.

“Are you trying to blow the whistle about something? ’Cause if you have any evidence you can give me, I can make sure it gets to her.”

“…I’m sorry. My evidence got stolen.”

“Oh, right. When he came to my office, he said that he had some evidence that got stolen from him. That’s why he wanted to meet directly with either Lady Seitenshi or her assistant…”

…Then, another voice rose up from the depths of his memory:

“I’ve been told to ask you this, so I will. Where is the memory card Suibara gave you?”

“Ah…”

Rentaro and Hotaru exchanged glances. They must have come to the same conclusion simultaneously.

“Didn’t the assassin at the hotel ask you for a memory card, Rentaro?”

Rentaro thought for a moment, eyes on the ground.

“Yeah… It’s weird. Logically speaking, that card must’ve been what was stolen from Suibara, huh?”

“Wait…so, what, then? Kihachi got his memory card stolen by some evil group, but then that group thinks you have it? So who has it now?”

The cry of some irritated-sounding cicada in the distance seemed to rise in volume. The shadows cast on the building uncomfortably adjusted their positions. Now Rentaro was sweating for another reason. He felt ill.

Hotaru suspiciously eyed him. “Rentaro, are you sure Kihachi didn’t give you anything? Like, anything at all? He didn’t slip you something while you weren’t paying attention?”

Rentaro briskly shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

“Oh…”

“What about you? Did Suibara ask you to keep anything for him?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

They were right back where they started.

But Suibara’s memory card had to exist somewhere. It was the one thing they could link to everything else in the case. Rentaro decided to file that thought away for now as he mentally switched gears.

“Hotaru, there’s something else coming here reminded me of. Do you have Suibara’s cell phone or anything?”

“I was kind of hoping you did,” Hotaru replied, leaning against a concrete column. “You don’t know where it is?”

“No…”

Rentaro had been asked multiple times by police interrogators about Suibara’s mobile phone. It was clear, if indirect, evidence that the cops didn’t have it. Smartphones had been everyday parts of people’s lives for over twenty years now, their functionality and privacy measures both far advanced over the initial generation.

If they could track down the phone, that would earn them valuable evidence, such as his site-access history and call records. The police would doubtlessly do anything to find it.

“The killer must’ve taken it with him,” Rentaro said. “Bastards thought of everything.”

“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet,” replied Hotaru as she took out her cell phone, tapping at it a bit before bringing it to her ear. Must be calling Suibara’s line, Rentaro thought.

Suddenly, he could hear the faint sound of a phone ringing somewhere.

“Where is it?!”

“Ssh!” Hotaru brought a finger to her lips. Somewhere between the quiet, the cicada calls, and the roar of the trucks occasionally passing by the building, they could hear a sound as soft as the cry of a mosquito. Tiptoeing to the edge of the building, they felt the wind blow against their faces as they peered downward from the dizzying height. The sound was coming from beneath them.

Rentaro and Hotaru looked at each other, nodded, and quickly went downstairs. It came from the far end of the building’s outer perimeter, and now they could clearly hear it. A pop tune, one whose main melody was familiar even to the chronically nontrendy Rentaro. Wading through the tall grass to the side, they finally found it—a black smartphone, lying facedown, vibrating a little on the ground.

He picked it up just as the vibration stopped. The phone fell silent, and no matter how much he jabbed at the start button, it wouldn’t respond.

“The battery must be drained. That sure was close.”

“Oh…”

The phone must have fallen out of Suibara’s hand as he was shot. If he consciously threw it out of the building as he fell, it’d be a pretty remarkable feat on his part.

Suibara…

Rentaro felt an odd sense of nostalgia as he turned the phone over. The screen was heavily cracked, like someone had taken a knuckle-duster to it. It was amazing that the internals survived intact. Looking at the home screen, there was only the barest sliver of a charge left. Uncharacteristically, Rentaro found himself thinking this was the hand of fate at work.

“Let’s go find a charger.”

Flying into a nearby Internet café, the two of them grabbed a PC booth, settling down on the hard, contoured chairs and plugging the phone into the universal charger on the side of the computer. They waited a few moments, hands clasped in prayer, and then the phone whirred in Rentaro’s hand. One percent charged.

Rentaro and Hotaru gave each other a joyous glance. The screen was just as damaged as before, although the touchscreen somehow still worked. But before he could start flicking around the screen, Rentaro’s finger stopped. Suibara might be dead, but how permissible would this be—poking around someone’s private property just to clear your own name? He might be about to go face-to-face with a Kihachi Suibara he never knew before. Browsing through it might be something he’d eternally regret. Paranoia set in.

Well, he thought as he brought finger to screen, so be it.

From there, Rentaro and Hotaru took their time, searching through the phone for whatever clues they could find. But there was nothing particularly noteworthy in his inbox, and his photo gallery mostly consisted of people—all shapes and sizes. Over half of them were of Hotaru. Rentaro could’ve predicted it, given that Suibara adored her to the point where he had her as his wallpaper.

Then his eyes stopped on a certain photo. It must’ve been shot on Christmas. Suibara and Hotaru were there, both wearing Santa hats and standing on either side of a fancy cake in the background. Judging by the high angle, it must’ve been a selfie.

But the biggest surprise in the pic was that Hotaru was smiling. Not exactly beaming, per se, but both sides of her lips were curled gently upward as she gave the peace sign to the camera. It made Rentaro feel like a depraved peeper of sorts, and he swiped the photo away before Hotaru could notice his surprise.

With their check of the gallery complete, all that remained to search was the call history. There, they spotted something strange. Twice on the day of the murder, and once the day before, he had spoken with someone identified as “Dr. Surumi” in the directory. Looking further back in the history, they discovered Suibara exchanged a total of twenty-five calls with the doctor, extending back over the past month.

“Do you know who this is, Hotaru?”

“Yeah. Dr. Ayame Surumi. A forensic Gastrea pathologist. They spoke a few times about autopsy findings and stuff as part of our work.”

“Wow. Just like the one I know…”

“The one you know?”

“Ah, never mind. Do you know why they’d be talking to each other so often?”

Hotaru thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t think of anything. I don’t think Kihachi and Dr. Surumi had any kind of private relationship.”

“All right. We better check this person out.”

“Her office is in a university hospital in District 6,” Hotaru said as she stood up.

“She’s a woman?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, she wouldn’t happen to be pale to the point where you can see her veins, or wear a lab coat so long that it drags against the floor, or call her autopsy room ‘the kitchen,’ or have a body temperature of around 32 degrees Celsius, or build an expansion to her basement lab so she can have more room for her collection of corpses?”

“What?” replied Hotaru, clearly put off.

“Oh, uh, nothing. I’m sure it’s not the same woman. Probably.”

“She’s absent? Why?”

“Well, that’s what I’d like to know,” the tired-looking doctor replied, his ample belly fat wobbling as he walked up to them. He couldn’t have been an intern, but his youth was evidently clear. “She won’t answer the phone, and now I have to fill in for her shifts. I’m practically going out of my mind here.”

One eye exhibited a nervous tic as he spoke. It was clear that either stress or fatigue was taking its toll.

Rentaro and Hotaru were in an examination room at Shidao University Hospital. They managed to catch this doctor, who introduced himself as Kakujo, right as he was about to take a well-deserved break.

“Have there been that many Gastrea lately?” Rentaro asked point-blank.

Kakujo nodded broadly and opened his arms wide. “That many ain’t the half of it! It’s crazy! People are spreading all kinds of rumors about how there’s something up with the new Monolith 32 they built after the Third Kanto Battle.”

That couldn’t have been the case. The old Monolith 32’s collapse was entirely avoidable, the result of adulteration that reduced the purity of the Varanium inside. The new one was 100 percent Varanium, something Rentaro and the Tendo Civil Security Agency personally confirmed for themselves.

Come to think of it, didn’t Enju mention an uptick in Gastrea numbers lately, too? Apparently the trend wasn’t exclusive to the Tendo Group’s jurisdiction. Where were they all getting in?

“Say,” Rentaro remarked, “you mind if I ask you a question? How many ways are there for Gastrea to get into Tokyo Area, anyway?”

“Mmm, good question. Where should I begin…?”

The doctor looked up at the ceiling, pointing his potbelly directly at Rentaro.

“Basically, there are three infiltration routes—air, land, and underground. You sometimes see sea-dwelling Gastrea make it in, too, but they can’t be much of a danger if they can’t breathe air, you know? Otherwise, the Varanium field weakens once you get about 200 meters underground or 5,000 meters into the sky, so if you can burrow below or fly above those numbers, you can get in that way. Remember back when a pack of really obstinate guys picked up an upward-flowing air current and caused a huge racket around the city? That sorta thing.”

The Morphe Butterfly Incident, Rentaro thought, as he nodded vaguely at the doctor. But he didn’t voice it. If he demonstrated too much knowledge, Kakujo might start thinking he was a civsec. He wanted to avoid that if he could.

“So how would land-dwelling Gastrea get in?” Hotaru asked from the stool she was sitting on.

“Between the breaks in the Monoliths,” Kakujo instantly replied.

“The breaks?”

“Yeah. The Monoliths are built ten kilometers apart from one another, right? So they kind of aim for the places where the Varanium field’s at its weakest, usually in that five-kilometer interval right in the middle.”

“Do they really succeed all that often?”

“Nah. Probably nine out of ten of ’em die trying—plus, we got the self-defense force patrolling the border, so that one lucky survivor usually doesn’t last long, either. They say maybe one out of a hundred land-based Gastrea who attempt the crossing actually make it through. But we’re still talking a ton of them, and they have a tendency to try to attack people first, so no matter how much we beat ’em down, they keep on trying to get into Tokyo Area. So that’s why, in terms of sheer numbers, it’s still the land-based ones we see the most of in the statistics.”

“Wow. I see.”

“I mean,” Kakujo grumbled, “you know how much of a hit the SDF took in the Third Kanto Battle. Something like half the civsecs in Tokyo Area lost their lives. All we got left are people who didn’t join the battle or who fled to other Areas, and do you think we could really count on those guys? We’re still managing to keep this boat afloat so far, but all of us on the ground level are scared stiff that we’ll have another Pandemic before long. Plus, the news said that the ‘hero of Tokyo Area’ guy died in the Plaza Hotel a few days ago. Hey, actually, you look a little like—”

Rentaro scrambled to say something, but a cool, composed voice stopped him from the side.

“I apologize, Doctor, but could you tell us a little more about Dr. Surumi? How long has she been absent from work?”

On the way there, the pair decided that Hotaru would pose as Dr. Surumi’s sister. The ruse seemed to be working. Dr. Kakujo abandoned his suspicion and thought a little bit.

“Well, four days, I guess. On a job like this, if you’re absent for that long a period of time, you’re not gonna last too long. It’s tough, but that’s how it is.”

“Have you contacted the police yet?”

“The police? Nah, nah,” the doctor said, smiling as he dodged the question. “The retention rate in this place—ah, you probably don’t know what that word means, huh, little girl? Basically, people quit a whole lot around here. Surumi had a good head on her shoulders, so I figured she’d stick around for the long term, but…”

He was doubtlessly right. Performing pathological work on something as hideous as Gastrea corpses would require some pretty thick skin. Sumire, who enjoyed calling it her life’s work, was one in a million.

“Is there any chance she may have disappeared, or gotten caught up in something?”

“Hmm… I couldn’t really say,” Dr. Kakujo replied as he stroked his five-o’clock shadow. “I never thought about that…” Then he slapped a fist against his hand. “Hey, are you guys going to visit Surumi’s place after this?”

Hotaru drooped her shoulders in disappointment. She had a natural talent for acting. “I wanted to,” she said, “but my sister never gave her address out to anyone in the family, so…”

“Oh, that’s fine, I can give it to you. I think I asked her for it when I had to send off some stuff that came to the office for her.”

Rentaro wondered whether Dr. Kakujo was allowed to be so cavalier with people’s personal information, but he nevertheless appreciated his falling so completely for Hotaru’s cover story. Somehow, he doubted he could have convinced him to hand off the address by himself.

The doctor stood up and recomposed himself. “In exchange for that, there’s a favor I’d like to ask of you, if you don’t mind.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Surumi conducted a Gastrea autopsy about a month ago, but the electronic version of her report’s disappeared from our database for some reason. I know Surumi printed out a paper version for our records right beforehand, so she might still have it kicking around somewhere. Sorry to bother you guys, but if you see her, would you be able to get that for us? I don’t really mind if she wants to quit or not, but we got a legal obligation to keep track of our records, so…”

Rentaro and Hotaru gave each other a glance. Dr. Surumi began making frequent contact with Suibara a month ago, too.

“Sure thing,” Rentaro replied, nodding deeply as Dr. Kakujo wrote down the missing doctor’s address on a piece of notepaper. The duo was just about to leave when the doctor called to them from behind.

“Hey, you guys don’t happen to know what Black Swan is, do you?”

Rentaro and Hotaru both whirled around at once.

“Where did you hear that name?”

Dr. Kakujo’s brows arched, a little taken aback by Rentaro’s sudden forcefulness. “Uh…well, no, I mean, I just remembered it. Surumi kinda mentioned it in passing not long before she left. Like she was kind of brooding over it, you know? It was almost like she was having a nervous breakdown or something at her lab station. And that’s not all…”

The corpulent doctor looked honestly bewildered as he spoke.

“She said she ‘had to burn the vineyard,’ whatever that means.”

The Shidao University Hospital grounds were orderly and well-kept, complete with artificial lawns and ponds. It would have been an inviting spot to rest and forget about your classes on most days, but to Rentaro, the sight was simply depressing. Hotaru’s gait next to his was similarly heavy, almost plodding.

It was clear now that Dr. Surumi and Suibara were working together. But that just led to new problems for them to tackle.

“What the hell is the ‘vineyard’…?”

Hotaru, preoccupied with the same question, had already taken out her cell phone, setting it to holodisplay mode so Rentaro could see the screen in the air. The first result was for an English instruction site. The pronunciation made it sound like some Romance-language word, but it turned out “vineyard” was simply a fancy way of saying “grape farm.”

“‘Burn the vineyard,’ though… What could that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“That guy said Dr. Surumi started acting weird about a month ago, right?” said Hotaru, her voice free of any intonation. It was a far cry from the forlorn little girl she pretended to be for a moment in the doctor’s office. “And now that I think about it, I think I started noticing Kihachi hiding stuff from me a month or so ago, too.”

There it is again. A month.

“What happened during that time…?”

Rentaro decided to step back and take an impartial look at the situation. Dr. Surumi and Suibara, two people who allegedly had no personal connection to each other, had talked on the phone twenty-five times in the past month. They started puzzling the people around them with their behavior at about the same time. Suibara was a civsec. The only thing that could connect a civsec with a Gastrea pathologist was…well, a Gastrea.

“Did you and Suibara have any Gastrea encounters in the past month, Hotaru?”

“Yeah… Actually, Kihachi and I ran into one a month ago.”

“What kind was it?” an expectant Rentaro asked. Hotaru gave him a vague look of discomfort in response.

“I dunno…just your typical Stage Two. A flying one. It had a see-through thorax, so you could see all its guts and stuff floating around. It had a really long nose, too. Pretty gross.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Yeah. Kihachi and I were driving on the expressway and it was flying alongside us. I stuck myself out the passenger-side window and blew it away with a shotgun.”

“And then?”

“That’s all.”

“That can’t be all, Hotaru.”

“There’s really nothing else worth mentioning about it. I mean, the Gastrea looked pretty weird, yeah, but you could say that about all Gastrea that are Stage Two or higher. So then we left it to the police and went home, and… Oh, I remember that Kihachi got a phone call, then hurried right out of our place. Now that I think about it, I bet that was from Dr. Surumi.”

If the Gastrea looked normal enough but caused Suibara alarm later, the forensic pathologist must have discovered something highly unusual about it. But, just as before, this lead was getting them nowhere. Rentaro felt like they had a pretty decent selection of puzzle pieces, but there was no telling how they fit together to form a complete picture.

It was clear, however, that they now had information their foes absolutely did not want them to know. If the enemy picked up on their presence, they would undoubtedly face the full brunt of their vengeance. Hotaru was sadly not privy to Suibara and Dr. Surumi’s first exchange—but then again, if she were, chances were that she wouldn’t be breathing right now. A thorny dilemma.

They were now at the end of Shidao University grounds, an ornate cast-iron gate in the red brick wall that surrounded the area marking the front entrance. There, Rentaro noticed a security camera positioned overhead, watching the thin stream of students going in and out. He kept his head down as he passed by, but for a single moment, he couldn’t help but look at it out of the corner of his eye. The moment his eyes met the lens illuminated within the domed shell, he felt a chill run down his spine. He hurried his way out of the school.

“I found him!”

The tension across the control room was palpable as the operator shrieked out.

“Where?” shrieked Hitsuma, trying to contain his excitement. Instead of replying, the operator put up an image of a gate somewhere in the city on the gigantic main holopanel.

“Where’s this?”

“The front gate of the Shidao University Hospital in District 6.”

Tadashima watched on, agape. “You’re kidding me… So he didn’t flee to the Outer Districts? He’s been walking around inland the whole time?”

The operator tapped at her panel, highlighting a section of the image. This wasn’t the grainy footage of a generation or two ago, too fuzzy to be admissible as court evidence. The video transmitted to the server was clear as day. Nobody had to strain their eyes to decipher the scene before them as, for a single moment, a downward-facing man in black clothing peered at the camera. It was apparently just enough time for the face-recognition program to do its work.

Next, the operator stopped the video and zoomed in on the figure’s face. There was no mistaking it. It was Rentaro Satomi.

Hitsuma turned his head left and right, scanning the control room for a certain face. Soon finding it, he sidled up to Yuga. The boy’s hands were in his pockets, but the look on his face made it seem like he was about to break into song.

“What is the meaning of this?” Hitsuma said, his voice low enough that only Yuga could hear. “You told me your sniper bullet made a clean hit on him. And now he’s up and walking around!”

Yuga shrugged. “Guess it wasn’t so clean after all. But what’s the problem? This just makes things more fun.”

“Fun? You find this fun…?”

Having Rentaro alive would not only make the police the laughingstock of Tokyo Area—it’d also instill a sense of hope in Kisara Tendo, right when Hitsuma thought he had her tamed and obedient.

Before Hitsuma could explode in rage, Yuga used his right hand to point out a section of the holopanel.

“Mr. Hitsuma, that girl there was Kihachi Suibara’s Initiator, right?”

He was pointing at the quiet, demure girl with the bobbed haircut walking next to Rentaro. He had seen the face several times in the evidence sheets. There was no mistaking this, either.

“Hotaru Kouro…?”

Kihachi Suibara’s Initiator. They had ordered Nest to conduct an undercover investigation, but they had no idea she was working in tandem with this fugitive.

Tadashima approached Hitsuma, saluting. “I’ll take a car over to headquarters to request support. In the meantime, sir, I want you to stay in contact with me on the radio and tell me where the suspect is headed.” He then briskly walked out of the control room.

Hitsuma watched him go, stony-faced until he was sure the inspector was gone. Then he took out his phone and made a call, his mind running in circles as he listened to the ringing. He couldn’t afford to have the police catch Rentaro. He wasn’t sure how close this civsec was to the truth, but he’d already caused this much trouble for them—it would take a lot more than the status quo to take care of him. He couldn’t afford another mistake.

The phone picked up.

“Nest? Can you create a traffic jam for me? I’ve got a police car that I need to have delayed. Also, he’s still alive. Get me Hummingbird. We’re gonna crush him.”

The up-to-now composed Yuga blanched at this.

“Wait a minute, Mr. Hitsuma! Why Hummingbird? Rentaro Satomi’s my prey. I’m gonna head out.”

“People have seen your face.”

“My body was specifically designed to be capable of suppressing Rentaro Satomi! Who could possibly be more qualified than I am?”

“Hummingbird’s good enough.”

“But…!”

“Enough!”

Yuga’s mouth stayed open, still hoping to get a final word or two in, but he thought better of it. He left the control room, gnashing his teeth the whole way.

Hitsuma, his breathing accelerated, glared at the close-up of the boy in the holopanel. If he’s pouncing upon us, trying to take us down with him…then it’s time to prove to him that dead men really don’t tell tales.

4

“Well, here’s the place. You can just toss the key back into the manager’s room once you’re done.”

The building manager used a bony hand to give Hotaru the key, distractedly using his other to adjust his reading glasses as he turned and left. Wasn’t the manager supposed to accompany them if someone besides the person renting the place came in? He didn’t act like he cared to, anyway.

Rentaro gave a look to his “sister” standing next to him. Once she was sure the manager was gone, Hotaru wiped the smile from her face and returned to her usual dour expression. “You got a problem with something?” she asked emotionlessly, once she noticed Rentaro staring at her. “It’s almost night. I’d like to get this over with by the end of today.”

The yellow sunlight streaming in through a west-facing window felt warm against his skin. They were finally about to be freed from the blazing fire of the afternoon.

They were in the hallway of a high-rise apartment complex. Rentaro looked around. The floor was comprised of two parallel corridors linked by a landing that offered two elevators, an emergency staircase, and another one for regular use. There was also an external stairwell with a ramp. Ever since the Plaza Hotel, Rentaro was in the habit of scoping out the floor plan and potential escape routes wherever he went.

Looking at the nameplate, they saw 1203—AYAME SURUMI written on a faded piece of paper. They had already rung the doorbell several times before visiting the manager’s room, but they tried it again once more with a sliver of hope. The artificial chime went ding-dong, ding-dong twice, but there was no response from within.

At his feet, Rentaro noticed a dead cicada on the floor, frozen and exposing its grotesque-looking stomach to them. A small army of ants was already on the scene, ready to feast on the meal.

“I don’t know if she’s holed up in there or she’s gone somewhere else,” Hotaru said, “but hopefully we can find something about Black Swan.”

“Holed up? ‘Gone’ somewhere? You really think it’s gonna be that easy for her?”

“Huh?”

“Hotaru, have you ever seen a dead body before?”

Hotaru looked startled for a moment.

“I’ll go in first.”

Rentaro unlocked the door and opened it a crack. Then he shivered. Through the crevice, he could feel an unnervingly strong chill—along with the light scent of something rotting.

Pulling the breechblock on the weapon at his hip to ensure he could fire it at any time, he silently went inside.

Immediately to his left was the kitchen, equipped with a semi-circular dining table. Some vegetables lay shriveled on the kitchen counter, and a half-eaten piece of cake was currently serving as an all-inclusive resort for a clan of black ants. She might have been in the midst of preparing a meal—there was a bowl of sliced-up vegetables soaking in water—although the surface was now entirely covered in black mold.

They knew from before that all the apartments in the building contained two rooms and a kitchen. Keeping his guard up and his gun cocked, Rentaro brought a hand to another doorknob and slowly pulled it. He couldn’t see inside at first—some curtains had been drawn—but it was her bedroom, as well as the site of her home computer. There was also an air conditioner chugging away as it spat cold air into the room. It sounded unnaturally loud in the otherwise completely silent apartment.

Despite being occupied, the apartment was almost bare of decoration, its colors uniformly beige. There wasn’t so much as a poster on the wall, although one shelf rack contained a digital picture frame.

The final room lay beyond. Drumming up all the willpower he had, Rentaro pulled the door open.

There was dust all over the closets and dresser, as well as the large desk that sat next to a bookshelf that occupied an entire wall. But there wasn’t any sign of a corpse. The rotting smell was already fading away.

So where did that come from…?

Just as he thought about it, Rentaro heard a sound that made him gasp nervously. He ran back to the kitchen, only to find Hotaru frozen like a statue, her eyes focused on a singular point. He realized that, from her position, she could see the bathroom door. Below it, a very dark red liquid was oozing out.

“Get back,” Rentaro said, biting his lip to keep his voice from shaking. Taking a moment to compose himself, he gently pushed the door open.

The body was kneeling on the floor, face still under the surface of the water in the bathtub. It was naked, the skin pale and bereft of blood. The long hair from its head floated on the water like algae. The water itself was black in color. On the floor, near the drain, was a pool of coagulated blood.

At Rentaro’s feet were three or so fingernails, appearing to have been pulled from the corpse. Torture must have been involved. Judging by how it only took three nails, they must have extracted the information they wanted from her in relatively short order.

Rentaro gave the body a quick once-over, then turned around and opened the closet, finding a large picnic blanket that he then placed the body on. He wondered if altering the crime scene was such a great idea, but he and Hotaru had already been seen together, and besides, the police could figure out when she died and realize soon enough that Rentaro couldn’t have been involved.

Somewhere in the midst of this, Hotaru came up next to him. He thought she’d be frozen in fear. He was wrong.

“That’s a real pity. We could have gotten a lot from her alive. Guess they beat us to the punch.”

Rentaro was shocked. “A real pity? Beat us to the punch? Is that all you have to say? You knew her, right?”

“So?”

Hotaru steeled her gaze at him, a little annoyed. Rentaro balled his hands into fists, the anger welling to the surface as he shook his head.

“You’re making no sense to me at all…!”

“Why do I need to?” She turned her back to him, then rotated herself halfway back. “You’re free to drop out of this, if you insist.”

“Like hell I am.”

“Oh?” she said, blithely walking into the bathroom to check out the body. “You know, given the time, she’s been decomposing pretty slowly. I guess that’s because of the AC running.”

Rentaro took a deep breath, bottling up his irritation. This girl was deeply involved with the whole case. Being with her got him closer to the truth; being alone kept him firmly away from it. It was theoretically far more efficient than attempting all of this solo. He had to make the best of it.

—Even if my partner’s somebody I absolutely cannot respect as a person.

It was also very clear now that their foes had no problem rubbing out anyone who got too close to the truth. They definitely weren’t out of the shark tank yet.

“All right. Let’s split up and search the place. We might find something.”

Hotaru walked off in apparent agreement. Watching her go, Rentaro went back into the bedroom. Having a dead body in the bathroom made him all the more reluctant to continue, but continue he did.

The first thing he noticed was the digital frame beyond the door. It was cycling through some pictures with the main university building in the background, presumably from her undergraduate days. It must have been fun for her. She was smiling in each and every one of them. A lot of them also included a man, perhaps a love interest.

Rentaro recalled something Dr. Kakujo told him: “Surumi conducted a Gastrea autopsy about a month ago, but the electronic version of her report’s disappeared from our database for some reason. I know Surumi printed out a paper version for our records right beforehand, so she might still have it kicking around somewhere.”

Suibara and Dr. Surumi were connected by that Gastrea. It seemed natural to think that autopsy report had something to do with all this.

Sidling into the next room, Rentaro noticed that someone had broken the lock on a drawer in the desk and rummaged around inside. He groaned. Whoever tortured and killed Dr. Surumi must have asked her about that report. A day late and a dollar short, yet again. Their foes thought of everything.

But not even the enemy could be perfect. As long as they weren’t machines, they had to make some kind of human error. There must be something. Praying to himself, he methodically took each book off the bookshelf and paged through it. Then he noticed something on the ground in the tight crevice between the desk and the wall. Carefully pulling it out and blowing the dust off, he realized it was a printed-out photograph.

The moment he looked at it, Rentaro’s eyebrows arched downward.

The photo depicted a Gastrea in mid-autopsy. The stomach had been cut open, with a mark engraved on the translucent, mucusy organs, like the insides of a squid. Looking closer, he could tell the mark was a five-pointed star, a delicately designed feather on one of the points.

“Hotaru, come over here.” He showed her the photograph. “Does this look familiar to you?”

“The claws you see on the side of the photo… They look kind of like the ones on the Gastrea from a month ago I told you about. I don’t know what that star’s for, though.”

“Oh…”

“You think this is what Dr. Kakujo was talking about?”

“Probably. I don’t think she had a picture as grotesque as this one sitting around for decoration.”

Gastrea may not be your typical wildlife, but they were still the creations of nature. They wouldn’t naturally be sporting pentagrams on their stomachs.

As he thought this over, a shrill sound made Rentaro’s heart leap. It was the phone ringing from the bedroom. He slipped inside—first his head, then his entire body—and stood gingerly in front of the noise source. It was a landline phone—a rarity, given how smartphones and satellite phones dominated the market.

Rentaro gave Hotaru a silent nod, then slowly picked up the receiver and put it to his ear.

“Hey, this is Satomi, right?”

The heavy, overwrought voice was hard to make out over the nonhuman pitch. It was someone using a voice changer to disguise his or her real one. Rentaro stared at the receiver for a moment.

“Who…are you?”

“The enemy’s about to head your way. Code name Hummingbird. A soldier from the New World Creation Project.”

“What’re you talking about? The enemy? Hummingbird?”

“You’re free to think I’m lying. But maybe it’ll make sense to you when I say this: That’s the one who killed Kenji Houbara, ex–New Humanity.”

“Wha—?”

This was all beyond his understanding, but at least one thing was clear. This was no prank, no pack of lies—the voice on the other end of the line was warning Rentaro about a real, and impending, danger.

“Lemme tell you what Hummingbird can do. You should probably use the time to devise a strategy with that li’l lady you got there with you.”

Rentaro fell silent, waiting for him to continue.

“You there? With Hummingbird, you got—”

Then, with a click, the call ended.

“Hey, what happened? Hey!”

“—Lemme have it.”

A hand reached out from the side to snatch the receiver away. Hotaru fought with the phone a little bit, but then shook her head and put the receiver down.

“I’m not even getting static. Someone’s cut the phone lines, haven’t they?”

Hotaru fumbled around her pocket for her cell phone, looked at it, then pointed it at Rentaro. NO SERVICE, it read.

He felt another shiver run down his spine. He knew they had service when they entered the apartment. The room, absent any other activity, was silent.

“Our enemy’s here,” Hotaru said. “In this building. They’re already inside.”

The sound of a propeller slicing through the air echoed throughout the cargo room.

Rika Kurume opened the sliding door. The wind blew against her body, the cold air flapping her dress around and almost knocking her straw hat off.

The evening sun, half-hidden behind the Monolith to the west, was bright enough that she had to squint.

She was in the cargo room of a transport plane one thousand meters in the air. It was clear out, with no stratus or nimbostratus clouds blocking her view. The cityscape beneath her looked like an elaborate miniature; there were no people or even cars visible. She could smell a cool clearness in the air.

“Hummingbird—jumping out.”

Rika took a step away from the cargo room, then fell backward, leaving her body to the air. She pointed her head down, her long hair forming a comet’s tail as she plunged straight toward the ground. The whole time, she was performing a mental countdown. That, plus her experience, told her when she was at the 500-meter point. Then she twisted her body around, spreading her limbs wide like a flying squirrel and pulling the cord on her Ram-Air parachute. It opened, the tremendous feeling of deceleration jarring her body from the harness on her back downward.

It didn’t last long. Opening her eyes and looking down below, she saw her feet beat against thin air. Craning her neck back upward, she watched her open parachute grow, bathed in the orange-red of the setting sun.

Making one final check of the city below her, she waved her right arm to the side. A point of light appeared on the roof of one of the many buildings down below, an arrow labeled TARGET marking it out in her vision alongside its vertical and horizontal range. It was being implanted on her retinas by the augmented-reality contact lenses she put on before the drop began.

Rika used her control lines to carefully make fine-tuned adjustments as she descended. Before long, her targeted apartment building loomed large in her sights, both feet pointed at the dead-center point.

No matter how many times she dropped, the force of the impact always tended to make her fall forward. Today was no exception. The parachute settled down on top of Rika soon afterward. Removing the belt and escaping the tangled chute, she put on the straw hat she had stuck between her dress and the harness and hugged her favorite teddy bear against her arm as she patted the debris off her skirt. Then she took a cell phone out from one of her spandex socks and called a certain number.

“This is Hummingbird. I’m safe at the target point.”

“Copy that. I’m sending target faces to you now.”

In just a few moments, the file was sent over and floating in the air on her holodisplay. There were two photos—a boy slightly older than she was, and a girl slightly younger, captioned RENTARO SATOMI and HOTARU KOURO, respectively.

“Hang on, Nest,” Rika said in her high, resentful voice. “Don’t you think you’re overworking me a little? I just killed some weird old guy a few days ago. You’re not giving me much free time between jobs.”

The voice on the other end of the line seemed unfazed. “This is your mission,” it said. “Stop complaining about it. I’ve electronically shut off the building from the rest of the world for thirty minutes, just like you asked me to. If you lose that window, we’re gonna lose them again, too.”

Rika rolled her eyes, then pointed at the photo of Rentaro with a finger. She gave a light, pity-laden laugh.

“Dark Stalker couldn’t kill this target, right? Talk about pathetic.”

“Yeah. Dark Stalker actually had a message for you. He said, ‘Don’t underestimate Rentaro Satomi, or else you might be the one regretting it.’”

Now Rika’s laugh was indifferent and haughty. “Oh, what is he, stupid? He screwed up, and now he’s making excuses for it? Laaaame… Whatever, though. I’ll make this quick.”

As Rika spoke, two smaller parachutes settled down on the building roof behind her. They looked like regular old tires at first—each about the size of a flying disc with beveled edges used for high-speed, long-distance throws in disc golf—but there was nothing typical about them.

Rika’s brain was implanted with a brain-machine interface (BMI) chip that allowed her to move and operate objects linked to her mind by thought alone. These tires were the “interface” her mind worked with.

“All right, Necropolis Striders—it’s time to get up, my beloved familiars.”

She brought her palms together. The compact motors within each tire began to whir, and they stood up as if operating by themselves, whirling in a tight circle around Rika. As they did, she reviewed her map of the apartment building, finding the phone line running behind the basement switchboard. It seemed to her that disabling the alarm system would be a good idea, too.

“Right. Let’s make sure nothing gets in my way first. Offensive Enchant: Thorn!”

There was the sound of metal piercing rubber as the tires suddenly grew large blades across their entire external surface. In an instant, they had both become sharp, lethal stabbing weapons, cutting grooves on the floor as they continued to wheel their way around Rika.

The assassin pointed at the rooftop door, then sent her Striders away.

“Go!”

On her signal, the shockwave engines installed on each Strider revved into action, propelling them at high speed. They smashed into the steel door, their “thorns” seeking to cut through its weak points like a buzz saw. The sound, and the sparks, were terrific. But before long, the latch and deadbolt were cut clean off, the disabled door slamming inward to the floor.

The Striders, not particularly moved by this sight, used their shockwave engines to pinball their way down the floor, the ceiling, the walls—on their way into the landing, leaving deep ruts wherever their rampage took them.

Soon, Rika could hear screaming and the sound of shredding flesh from a floor below.

The Striders would never stop until Rentaro Satomi and Hotaru Kouro were dead. Whenever Rika activated them, she made sure no one was breathing afterward. Hence the “Necropolis” part. Wherever they went, a city of death reigned.

Before long, Strider 1 sent a signal to Rika indicating it had cut the targeted phone line. Strider 2 was keeping watch at the front door, ensuring no one tried to flee outside. Enjoying the carnage playing out in her mind, Rika adjusted her grip on the plush bear and sang to herself as she walked downstairs.

“Overrr the raaaainbow…”

With their phone call cut off, Rentaro and Hotaru found themselves having to come up with a new plan of action. Fast.

“This is bad,” Rentaro said. “The guy on the phone suggested he knew you were here, too.”

Hotaru tried to present a façade of coolness as she thought over the situation. It was difficult given the adrenaline coursing through her, urging her on toward revenge. This was the perfect chance. She never even dreamed she’d have an opportunity to swing the iron hammer of justice so quickly.

Reaching for the pair of government handguns on her back holster, she closed her eyes as she felt the sensation of steel in her hands, praying for their salvation as she undid the safety on both.

Kihachi, I need your strength.

“We better focus on getting out of this building for now.”

“No. I’m taking them on. Now I can finally get revenge for Kihachi.”

“You’re crazy. We have no idea what kind of enemy we’re facing or what they’re capable of. They’ll kill you.”

Hotaru sneered at Rentaro out of the corner of her eye. This was exactly the kind of limp-wristed feebleness that got Kihachi killed in the first place.

“I told you. The only reason I’m working with you is so I could hunt down the enemies after your blood. You’ve been the best decoy I could ever have hoped for. If you think we’ve got some kind of partnership going on, let me assure you, it’s all in your head. I always hated you anyway.”

“Hotaru, this really isn’t a good time for this, all right? The enemy’s probably got you on their hit list by now. If we stand here and argue like this… That’s exactly what our enemy wants from us. We’ll waste whatever chance we have to win this.”

Rentaro extended a hand.

“You need to work with me, Hotaru. The enemy’s shut us off from the outside world. If they’re willing to do that, then worst-case scenario, they’re willing to massacre every man, woman, and child in this building. We need to get everyone evacuated—”

He was cut off by a dry, shrill slap. Hotaru, face full of sullen resentment, beat his hand away from her.

“If you’re so hell-bent on saving people’s lives, why didn’t you save Kihachi’s?”

Rentaro winced, unable to respond.

“Rentaro, are you really the hero? This guy who took all those demoralized civsecs in the Third Kanto Battle and drove them to defeat Aldebaran? Because you don’t look like it to me.”

He kept his eyes straight on her. “The dead don’t care about revenge, Hotaru.”

“I don’t care about you. I’m hunting them down, and I don’t need your help. Good-bye.”

“Hotaru!”

She headed for the door, Rentaro hot on her heels. Out in the hallway, she closed the door behind her and took a deep breath, focusing her mind’s eye on her navel. She could feel her limbs warm up, her five senses expanding themselves and releasing their powers.

Quietly, Hotaru opened her eyes. He’s wrong. I’ll be fine by myself. I’ll prove it by killing my enemy alone.

She scanned the hallway before her, ensuring nothing was amiss. The phone was dead, but the lights were still on.

Then, above her, she heard a scream and the sound of something being sawed through. She raced up the stairs, two steps at a time, and stormed through the thirteenth-floor doorway.

The smell of blood weighed heavily upon her nose. It was, as Rentaro put it just moments ago, a massacre. Dismembered corpses littered the hallway, dark-red blood tracing its way across the linoleum floor. The ceiling and walls had heavy ruts etched into them, as if a giant was swinging a long broadsword around the hall.

She crouched down to look at the body of a female victim. Her wounds appeared to have been made with a coarse, sawlike weapon. Looking closer, many of the bodies featured missing arms, legs, and heads, with others in a multitude of small pieces. It must have been hell for them. They must have come out of their apartments to investigate the noise and screaming.

Around the corner, she saw an open elevator car with a body preventing the doors from fully closing. Every time the doors attempted to close, they squished against the corpse in gruesome fashion, changing its position just a little each time before opening back up.

Rentaro was right. The enemy was killing indiscriminately. An enemy so completely free of morals like this— Can I really beat them?

Hearing a quiet motor nearby, Hotaru turned to find something on top of a body at the other end of the hallway. At first, she thought she was looking at a jaguar gnawing on the flesh of some kind of wild game. It took several moments for her to realize it was a small tire, the size of a flying disc. It was covered in serrated blades, and given that they didn’t seem to deflate the tire at all, she figured it must be filled with some kind of reinforced plastic or the like instead. Right now, it was spewing exhaust from two rear-facing pipes as its blades ground their way into the corpse.

Instinctively, she could tell this was it. She had no idea what made it tick, but this machine was the perpetrator of this massacre.

Is that Hummingbird? She shook her head. No. This isn’t even human.

The killing machine changed position—it had noticed her. By the time Hotaru realized the danger, it was already too late. With a scream wholly different from anything a gasoline engine could produce, it blazed a trail straight for her.

Witnessing the saw blades proceeding toward her at worrying speed, Hotaru crossed her guns together in self-defense. The tire hit them, sending her reeling back as it spun against her defensive shield, sparks flying. She gritted her teeth, attempting to push back with her strength. The distance between them grew, just enough for her to take aim and blaze away with both triggers.

Then Hotaru found herself gazing in wonder again.

Running a zigzag across the hall, the tire dodged every one of her .45-caliber shots, jumping off the floor and latching itself onto the wall. It ran along, not letting gravity affect its joyride as it crossed over to the ceiling and carved out a track for itself, advancing upon Hotaru again.

Hotaru, her aim upset by this unexpected move, instantly leapt to the side. A moment later, the murder machine’s claws had sunk into the floor where she was.

She gave a kick, knowing that it could cost her her leg. One of the knives stabbed her in the knee. A groan of pain leaked out from between her gritted teeth.

But her enemy paid the price, too. The tire, taking the full brunt of an Initiator’s kick, was sent against the wall, smashing into and almost through it before falling to the floor, twitching in its final death throes.

Hotaru jumped with one foot, healing her right leg instantaneously in the air as she sank both of her heels into the wheel portion of the tire. She landed on it, took out both guns, and fired a flurry of shots at point-blank range. She experienced it all—the noise, the eye-watering flashes, the recoil kicking at her arms, the spent cases bouncing off the walls and floor.

The results pulverized the spokes and smashed into the shockwave engine installed in the hub. At the same time, the slide stop on both guns popped up, indicating she was out of ammo.

There was a moment of silence, the smell of smoke invading Hotaru’s nostrils. She resented the heavy panting she heard, only to realize it was coming from her. She wiped the sweat from her brow. The mystery machine was dead. Somehow or other, she had won. If she had her way, she’d prefer this to be the only enemy she had to face.

“Help me!”

Turning toward the sudden shout, she realized a girl was running toward her.

She had all but told Rentaro that she didn’t care about survivors. Yet the sight of someone actually making it through this disaster alive still felt like a relief to her.

The girl bounded right up to Hotaru, hugging her as she did.

With a jnnk sound, Hotaru convulsed as a shockwave spread across her body.

“Huh?”

Slowly, her eyes fell upon her chest.

The girl, clad in a straw hat and carrying a teddy bear, had removed a knife she had hidden in her stuffed toy. And now the edge of it was—

The girl brought her lips to Hotaru’s ear.

“You dummy.”

“Ahh…hhh…”

The blade, easily making its way through her tank top, had gone right through her left lung. It was long, black, and over halfway inside her. Varanium, without a doubt.

“Well? Can you feel it? Can you see? How does it feel to be dying?”

“N-no…”

Was this the girl—?

“Good-bye, my splendid princess.”

She wrested the knife away from her body. Then, the next point she struck was the heart.

Hotaru’s body convulsed as if struck by lightning, while she coughed up copious amounts of blood. The girl took a step back to dodge the stream. The Initiator’s vision blurred as she fell to her knees. Her fingertips felt cold. Her blurred eyesight looked up at her enemy. The girl in the dress grinned as she looked back down at her.

The ground approached. Before her face even hit the linoleum, Hotaru’s consciousness was torn apart, as she embraced the end of her life.

Hotaru’s assailant picked up the fallen girl’s hand, ensuring there was no pulse. She checked her pupils, too, just in case. Listening for a heartbeat as well seemed like overkill, so she skipped that step.

Something about the sight of the body struck Rika as funny. She trampled on Hotaru’s fixed expression, stamping on it with her sole.

“Just onnnnnne leeefffft!”

Rika turned around and helped herself to the stairway, seeking her final enemy.

5

Rentaro pushed the door’s intercom button. The moment the door opened, he took a hand to the edge, pushed himself inside, and readied his weapon.

“Get out. Now. Keep it slow.”

The bathrobe-clad old man, nonplussed to be facing the barrel of a gun this time of night, sheepishly went out the door, not quite managing to find the right timing to scream or at least act surprised.

“Could I ask who you are?”

Rentaro ignored the question that finally did come out, prodding the elderly man forward until he was in the elevator. Inside were ten other people from the twelfth floor, all corralled there by him in the same manner.

“Is it money? Do you want money?” “What was that noise just now? Was that gunfire? What’s going on?”

“—I don’t have time to explain. I’m sending you guys down to the lobby, so just get out of the building and call for help.”

A few moments ago, there was gunfire and the sounds of combat from the floor above. The enemy was up there. If he could get these people down, at least they wouldn’t run into the guy. That was Rentaro’s line of thinking as he pushed the L button and took a few steps back from the door.

Before he could see them off, though, misgivings began to creep into his mind. The enemy cut off the phone lines to prevent him from contacting external help. They’d need switchboard access for that, and that switchboard had to be either on the first floor or the basement. Definitely not on the thirteenth or higher. Which meant there had to be multiple hostiles—one snapping the cords, one engaging Hotaru above him.

The moment before the door closed, Rentaro stuck his arm in to stop it.

“Wait. I’m getting on, too.”

The residents of the twelfth floor dolefully glared at him. God damn it, I’m trying to protect you guys.

The doors began to close again. This time, Rentaro stopped them because of a voice shouting “Wait! Help!” from across the corridor. A girl in a straw hat, maybe thirteen or fourteen, was making a dash for the elevator, teddy bear at the ready.

“There’s some kind of tire monster upstairs! There’s dead people up there!”

“Tire monster?” Rentaro exclaimed. Then he had a thought. He put his hand up to around chest level. “Hey, did you see a girl about this tall up there?”

The girl shook her head, tugging at her stuffed animal a little.

“Oh…”

The gunshots and other noise were gone. Whichever way the battle went for Hotaru, it was over. Hopefully she made it.

Looking at the button panel, Rentaro noticed the building had fifteen floors and two basement levels. The occupants of the car, perhaps moved by the girl’s disturbing testimony, remained meekly silent. The door finally closed. The L button was lit.

There was a slight sense of weightlessness as the car shuddered into action. The number on the top of the panel began to count downward, far too slowly for everyone’s tastes. Nobody said a word. The smell of stagnant sweat permeated the car. Rentaro had a bad taste in his mouth. The silence was painful, and not just because of the lack of personal space.

Rentaro wiped his palms against his slacks, his brain preoccupied with the thought of the elevator jarring to a halt and the overhead light going out. Luckily, it didn’t happen. The elevator let out a cheery ding as it reached the lobby.

Suddenly, a ferocious sense of dread struck Rentaro, for reasons he failed to articulate.

—Then someone or something smashed into the car with a loud roar, strong enough to put a dent in the door. Gigantic serrated blades made their way through the slit in the middle. Then they began to spin, generating a cascade of sparks. Pressing the DOOR CLOSE button did nothing. It was being pried open.

“Aaaaaaahhh!”

Doom and panic prevailed inside the car. Rentaro jostled his way to the front. No time to think. Sizing up the whirling blades wresting the doors open, he rolled up his right sleeve, revealing his cybernetic arm as he held his body low.

Waiting for the moment when the door was open enough, he activated his arm. There was a loud percussion, followed by a single empty cartridge spinning in the air.

“—Kohaku Tensei!”

He unleashed his arm, driven by a sudden massive propulsion that sent him into the lobby. The punch, easily a match for the mysterious spinning object, cut through the blades. He could feel the blow hitting home.

The tables were quickly turned. Rentaro’s blow, powerful enough to send a microbus into the air, smashed right through the spinning saw, sending it bounding off the floor and into the opposite wall.

“What is that…?!”

Now the enemy was fully in sight. “Tire monster” was the only way to describe it. Its engine revved loudly. An unmanned drone? Or…?

The person who called Dr. Surumi’s home came back to his memory. “The enemy’s about to head your way. Code name Hummingbird. A soldier from the New World Creation Project.”

If this was what this Hummingbird was capable of, Rentaro knew someone who had notably similar capabilities. Tina Sprout. She had a brain-machine interface that let her use brain signals to operate autonomous machines—technology that Ain Rand, genius scientist and former colleague of Sumire Muroto’s, pioneered and produced. Meanwhile, Yuga Mitsugi—aka Dark Stalker—boasted the same abilities as Rentaro’s 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye, an advanced piece of tech that Sumire expended countless hours of research and effort to complete.

What kind of group would it take to not only copy this tech, but actually upgrade it? Who was behind the New World Creation Project…?

Rentaro had little time to think about it. The tire monster resumed its position. He removed the Beretta from his holster and fired two shots. Shockingly, the enemy zigzagged left and right to dodge them. Rentaro deliberately ignored the gunsights his eye put up for him and fired again, aiming at a fire extinguisher near the hole the tire just gouged into the wall.

The sturdily built Varanium bullet broke through the glass and dented the aluminum exterior. Rentaro kept firing. On the fourth shot, the extinguisher finally gave up the ghost against the supersonic 9-mm Varanium bullets and went flying. He was ready for this.

“Haaahhh!”

The next moment, he closed in on the tire, gun aimed at the engine inside its hub.

“Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 12—”

He triggered a cartridge in his arm. The smell of gunpowder burned his nostrils. The monster shuddered in fear, but it was too late.

“—Senkuu Renen!”

The entire floor shook as his hand plowed through the tire’s engine and sank into the floor itself with a loud bang. The force of the point-blank strike rendered his enemy motionless, the faintly blinking signal light on it fading as it fell to the ground.

Once he was sure it was done for, Rentaro loosened up his body and took a breath. Leaving a BMI-driven machine unattended would be suicide. It was better for him to crush it while he had the chance. It was a lesson Rentaro had to learn the hard way in his fight against Tina.

Rentaro took a look around the first-floor lobby as the smoky mist from the extinguisher began to dissipate. The sight made him furrow his brows. The BMI devices had done in some of the residents who’d noticed early on that something was up and had tried to escape. The bodies were now in multiple pieces and splattered across the walls and floor. Was everyone in the New World Creation Project this heartless…?

Then, remembering his duty, he turned back through the mist, toward the elevator as he waved his arms.

“It’s all clear now!”

The people slowly, warily filed out of the elevator car. One of them, the old man in the bathrobe, asked a question.

“Wh-what is this? What’s going on…?”

Rentaro shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I can say is that the lobby’s safe. All of you get out right now and call the police.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll get as many people out of here as I can until the police come.”

It wasn’t a very well-made plan, but without so much as an emergency alarm at his disposal, the best one he could think of involved positioning himself and the residents up and down the elevator until police arrived. Considering he was a wanted man, he wasn’t entirely sure he had an escape route if the authorities decided to send an army of cops his way, but he wasn’t willing to simply leave this hideous murder scene behind him and run. Besides, the whole reason for this massacre was because Rentaro was here, paying a visit to Dr. Surumi.

Rentaro watched the twelfth-floor denizens leave out the front door, then turned around. He noticed someone still on the elevator. The girl with the teddy bear. Rentaro irritatedly waved at her.

“Hey! You get out of here! You want to get killed?”

The girl meekly smiled back. “Let me help, too,” she said. “Two people would be more efficient than one, right?”

It was a fairly incredible request to Rentaro’s ears. Unless you were trained to do so, or at least had a fairly strong sense of duty, you wouldn’t be wanting to help other people in a situation where your own life was in danger. If a lion was chasing you, your main focus wouldn’t be on the friend running away with you.

But this girl…?

Rentaro was honestly more suspicious than thankful.

The girl gave him a flick of her eyebrows and smiled. “Come on, let’s go. Even as we speak, those tire monsters are still running around, aren’t they? It’ll be twice as efficient with the two of us.”

She had a point. Rentaro closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them.

“All right. You can help if you want. I’ll get off at the eleventh floor,” he said as he entered the car and pushed DOOR CLOSE, “so you take the tenth.”

Then he smelled something sweet. Perfume. He didn’t notice it when they were packed in like sardines earlier, but she must have been wearing it.

This triggered something in his brain. Something he heard from Sumire at her underground lab when he discussed the murders of Kenji Houbara, Saya Takamura, and Giichi Ebihara.

“I got all curious about these murders, so I had Miori give me some information. There were no witnesses to Kenji Houbara’s stabbing at the theater and they couldn’t find any fingerprints on the knife, but apparently there was a faintly sweet scent left on the weapon.”

—A faintly sweet scent?

Rentaro shuddered.

If the tire monsters were BMI devices like Tina’s Shenfield system, there had to be someone nearby the scene controlling them. If Hummingbird was inside the building right now, then where?

The elevator door closed with a clattering sound. Rentaro’s pulse quickened, his chest pained. He felt nauseated. His hand, checking the position of the holster around his hips, was drenched in sweat. He looked at the girl opposite him in the car, but the large straw hat made it difficult to gauge her expression. She held the teddy bear in her left hand, and now, with her right hand, she was fumbling around its stomach area.

Taking a closer look, there was an odd indentation in the bear’s stomach. Clearly there was something besides stuffing in it.

Rentaro’s brain went on red alert. The elevator door was fully closed. The girl moved. Rentaro moved with her. At lightning speed, his gun was drawn and aimed.

But the next thing he knew, his vision was dominated by the barrel of another gun, one aimed squarely at his head.

The girl had a ferociously self-confident smile on her face. “Oh-hoh? How come you noticed that, huh? I think this might be the first time I didn’t get the first attack on someone. It’s kind of novel!”

“Are you Hummingbird?”

“Uh-huh! I’m the second assassin.”

Rentaro gritted his teeth bitterly. I am such an idiot. How could I fail to notice the assassin when she’s right in front of me?

“Listen, um, I kinda lied to you earlier.” Hummingbird waited a moment before showing off a mischievous smile. “Hotaru Kouro’s actually been cold dead for a while now.”

Fury erupted from Rentaro’s fingertips to the top of his head. He squeezed the trigger, just as he tilted his head to the side to get out of her sights. His enemy mirrored him, doing the exact same thing. Two deafening gunshots erupted. The heat from the muzzle flash opposite him made him squint his eyes as he felt a sonic boom from the bullet whizzing by his ear at somewhere above Mach 1.

One of the shots ricocheted, zinging between the walls of the elevator car—but by some diabolical coincidence, neither party was injured.

Now it was time to disable the enemy’s weapon. Rentaro slapped the girl’s thin arm away, smashing the elbow on his cybernetic right arm against the palm of her hand. She yelped in pain as the gun fell. A moment later, it transformed into a maniacal laugh.

What is with this girl?

Hummingbird lowered her body, then unleashed a kick aimed at Rentaro’s crotch. It was a clean hit. Rentaro fell back just in time to take a blow to a joint right above the arm holding his gun. The pain made him feel like his arm was being twisted off. It made him quickly shut off his pain receptors, but it was just enough to make him drop his own gun.

The girl rammed into him, plastering him against the wall of the cramped elevator and knocking the wind out of him. His back slammed against the button panel, hard enough to make the elevator shudder to life. A cold sweat ran down his side. He was flexing his muscles to the limit, but the sheer unrelenting force his enemy used against him was something no young girl should possess. Desperate, he finally managed to land three knee strikes on her hips, waiting for her to let up just a little bit before sidestepping around and behind her.

Then his brain triggered a danger signal. He reared his head back out of instinct, just in time for Hummingbird’s nails to miss the eyes they were targeting. There was no time to even be shocked. He shouted in pain at the blow she then landed on his left calf. The upper-body eye gouge segued perfectly into a low kick.

Taking a dagger out from the teddy bear lying on the floor, Hummingbird held it close to her stomach and rushed forward. There was too little space to escape.

With an electronic beep, the door opened behind him. The elevator was on the fifth floor. Rentaro realized he had an escape path after all. There was no time to evaluate how practical his plan was. Grabbing his foe by both shoulders, he diverted the kinetic energy of her bull rush behind his back, holding his own body down as he sent her flying in a classic judo-style overhead throw.

Unable to stop herself, the girl flew into the air, a surprised look on her face. She must not have realized what had happened to her at first. Before she could, her tiny body smashed into the opposite wall of the elevator lobby at full speed. It offered Rentaro a perfect chance at a follow-up strike, but his leg was still in pain from the low kick, preventing him from taking nimble action.

Hummingbird leaped back to her feet, hiked up her skirt, drew her auxiliary pistol from a holster strapped to her thigh, and fired. Rentaro hid behind the elevator frame, turning his head against the ensuing blast and rain of sparks. He jabbed at the DOOR CLOSE button. The elevator obeyed after a moment. He pushed the LOBBY button. The elevator began to descend.

He leaned his body against the now-pockmarked elevator wall, just barely managing not to crumple to the ground. Every part of him was screaming. His bandaged wound was about to reopen. For the time being, at least, he was distant from his foe, but the threat was no less present. His mind raced. What should I do? What should I do?

Then the elevator rattled like it was the victim of a sudden earthquake, the ceiling light flickering on and off. Rentaro held on to the wall to keep from slipping. Something must’ve fallen on it from above. But what?

The answer was obvious—Hummingbird had fallen on him from the fifth floor. Rentaro threw his body to the ground, grabbing his Beretta and the gun his enemy dropped, then unloaded both straight upward.

His foe was firing by instinct from above as well. The flying bullets smashed the button panel and shattered the ceiling lights, sending a rain of glass down at him. He tried as hard as he could to fight back. The concerto of crisscrossing gunfire continued on, empty cartridges providing bombastic percussion to the proceedings. A pang of pain as a bullet grazed his cheek. Then, the intense heat of bullet against bone as a ricocheting shot struck him in the knee.

Both of his guns ran out of ammo simultaneously. So did his enemy’s. For a moment, there was deafening silence, and the smell of gunpowder assaulting Rentaro’s nostrils.

What happened?

After a moment, he heard something heavy thudding against the ceiling above him. Somewhere in the midst of the battle, the elevator had stopped moving. The shot that struck the instrument panel must’ve knocked it offline. The ceiling lights were gone, except for a single flickering bulb. The space was dim.

Holding a hand against the wall, Rentaro gingerly got himself up and peeled off a dangling, heavily perforated ceiling panel. A prone Hummingbird tumbled into the elevator, groaning once her body hit the floor. Two 9-mm shots in the stomach and one in the chest were staining her dress crimson, her upper body heaving as she gasped for breath. The battle was over for her.

The girl looked up at the ceiling in disbelief. “You…you’re kidding me,” she whispered. “I was built to…to surpass the New Humanity Creation Project…and I lost…?”

Rentaro looked down silently at her for a few moments.

“…There’s a lot I want to ask you. I’ll treat your wounds if you don’t resist me.”

Hummingbird scowled in self-derision, coughing violently in response to the pain in her chest. A fountain of blood shot out, and faint lines of red oozed from her lips.

“Don’t be…stupid,” she said weakly, her trembling hands tapping against her heart. “They’re…monitoring my heartbeat, and if, if they, found out you, helped me… I’ll, I’ll be rubbed out either way. You…you’ll never have any more peace. Even if—if I die…it’ll be someone else, next. My friends, will kill…you. It’s all the same.”

She sighed as she stared upward, resigned to her fate.

“I guess…I guess Dark Stalker was…right after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dark Stalker…was the only one, who, who recognized…what kind of threat you were. He said you…you were a genius. He wanted to, to fight you again, and…and he fought our, our leader over it.”

“……”

Internally, Rentaro was shocked that someone as breathlessly confident of himself as Yuga was willing to heap that much praise upon him. Maybe Yuga Mitsugi was the greatest threat to his life after all.

Then he noticed Hummingbird’s skirt was up, revealing her lily-white thighs. He gazed at them in wonderment. There was a five-pointed star tattooed on one of them, a pair of intricately designed feathers drawn on two of the points. The exact same. Just what he saw carved on the Gastrea in the photo.

“Hey!” he hurriedly shouted. “What’s that? What’s that star on you mean?!”

Hummingbird simply smiled wryly. “Look…look at what’s, what’s inside my teddy bear.”

Rentaro, despite his suspicion, obeyed. The polar bear, a scarf around his neck, still had an oddly bloated stomach. There must have been another weapon inside. He stuck a hand in, trying to get it out, but it was too big to easily take out of the slit. The bear was soft and fuzzy on the outside, but inside, there was something cold and solid to the touch.

What is this? Growing increasingly impatient, he finally just ripped the bear’s upper body apart. Cotton stuffing flew out from it, revealing what was inside. Rentaro gulped nervously. The bear’s stomach was lined with cords and lumps of what looked like clay. A cheap digital timer was attached to the middle. It had just gone past thirty seconds. The moment he realized it was a time bomb, his blood froze as a dark chill crashed upon his body.

Hummingbird let out a bitter laugh. “If…if my heartbeat, goes down enough, it’s, it’s set to automatically, go off. The elevator’s down, your leg’s hurt… I don’t think you’re escaping. So…can we, can we call it a draw?”

“Shit!”

Rentaro jumped for the door, trying to pry it open. It wouldn’t budge. Then he tried jumping for the ceiling, holding his wounded leg in the air. A sharp pain erupted from it, incapacitating him. Twenty seconds to go.

Then, with another loud noise, his vision was jarred up and down as his feet struggled for purchase. It didn’t take him as long to realize that something just fell on the elevator again.

Through a hole in the battered ceiling, he could see what it was.

Rentaro and Hummingbird both opened their eyes wide, the confused dismay particularly clear upon Hummingbird’s face. She let out a scream.

“You, you’re supposed to be dead—”

The reply came in the form of gunfire. With a dry crack from the gun, Hummingbird’s head exploded in a spray of blood, falling limply against the wall behind her.

A cold voice fell in from above.

“Good-bye, my splendid princess.”

“Hotaru!”

The shadow he could barely make out above turned into a silhouette of Hotaru Kouro, her frozen eyes coming into view.

“You… Hummingbird said you were dead…”

Then he shook his head. There were more pressing issues at hand. He looked at the timer. Seven seconds left.

“Hotaru! The bomb!”

“Gimme your hand!”

He lifted up his arm. It was yanked up, hard enough to almost dislocate his shoulder, as he was pulled into the elevator shaft. His vision suddenly went dark, the sound of the cable groaning at the weight pounding his eardrums.

“Grab on to the wire!”

Rentaro obediently did so. Four seconds left.

With a series of nimble shots, Hotaru fired at the braking devices latched on to the guide rail, destroying them all.

—Three seconds.

Then she took out her knife, using her Initiator strength to snap in an instant the three cords besides the one Rentaro held.

Two seconds.

Grabbing the one remaining wire with her left hand to secure a lifeline, she lifted her legs high and bashed her heels against the top of the car.

One second.

The elevator car, struggling at this new force applied to it, snapped its remaining wire, tumbling down the shaft like a shooting star. The wire the two of them held shot up in response, zooming up like a bungee cord.

Rentaro and Hotaru tried madly to hold on to the torn wire. Below him, he could see the car generating sparks as it plunged down the guide rail. The counterweight scraped against the side of the shaft as it, too, whizzed downward.

Then—the bomb finally went off.

A hot shockwave, too hot for Rentaro to keep his eyes open, slammed up at him. Like a tugboat in a typhoon, they were tossed and roiled as they clung to the wire. Flames shot up the shaft as the elevator began to consume itself, stopping only when they were right at Rentaro’s and Hotaru’s feet. Slowly, they retreated downward, almost like a living creature licking its wounds in chagrin.

The two of them breathed a synchronized sigh of relief. Hotaru’s eyes, now unexpectedly close to his, were wide open with surprise. They looked endearing to him. But the attention made Hotaru avert them in embarrassment. “Let’s go up,” she said as she pulled the rope, dragging Rentaro along.

They emerged at the fifteenth-floor elevator lobby. The setting sun bathed the area in a bright red, almost too bright to set eyes upon. It was near the end of the day. In the light, Rentaro noticed Hotaru’s tank top was torn, shredded, and covered in a rich crimson.

“Did she stab you?”

“It’s already closed up.”

“Closed up…?”

She had clearly been stabbed right in the heart. Was it too shallow to kill her, though? No way. Rentaro shook his head. Hummingbird had said it herself—“you’re supposed to be dead.” He doubted a gifted assassin like her would fall for a victim playing possum on her.

“Hotaru, what type of Gastrea factor do you have?”

Hotaru stared silently at Rentaro for a moment. Then she shook her head lightly, perhaps realizing there was no way to hide it any longer.

“It’s a dugesia, a type of flatworm.”

“Dugesia…?”

Rentaro had heard of this. He hadn’t read all those nature books in the Tendo family library for nothing. It was a type of planarian flatworm, a small creature with astonishing regenerative skills and the ability to weather just about any kind of famine. They could famously form two distinct and healthy flatworms even if cut in half, making them useful for experiments in natural regeneration.

“So that means you can…”

“Basically, I have enhanced regenerative skills. Most Initiators can close up their wounds and heal even if their injuries would kill any normal person. In my case, my ability’s strong enough that I can push back against Varanium inhibiting that.”

Rentaro sighed in amazement. The natural world always had a way of aweing him like that. Twice in the past, Rentaro had personally witnessed people healing themselves at astonishing speed. The first time, it was Rentaro himself—the AGV test drug from Sumire helped him overcome mortal injury and fend off Kagetane Hiruko. But that drug had the Russian roulette–like side effect of turning 20 percent of its patients into Gastrea. Rentaro using all five of the syringes given to him and still not making the transformation was something of a miracle. It wasn’t exactly safe for everyday use.

The second time he saw regeneration like that was with Aldebaran, the enemy he fought in the Third Kanto Battle. Those ominous memories were still fresh in his mind. The high-powered EP bomb developed by Shiba Heavy Weapons eventually blew it to smithereens, but that battle couldn’t have been a closer call than it was.

“That’s so…powerful. Why’d you hide it from me?”

Hotaru shook her head in frustration. “It’s not the cure-all you probably think it is,” she replied. “The human body’s a lot more complex than a flatworm’s, so I can only regenerate so much at a time. If someone lit my dead body on fire with gasoline or decapitated me, I’m not gonna be able to make up for that. It’s not like I can put up a resistance while I’m dead, so I need to make sure my enemy doesn’t know about that ability. It’s hard to work into a battle strategy. I kept it a secret from you because if someone tortured that info out of you, that’d mean trouble for me.”

I see, thought Rentaro. That makes enough sense. When two Initiators fought against each other, even a single blow could be lethal, no matter what the ability. If her foe knew about her innate skills, that could easily be used against her. As a result, Initiators generally stayed tight-lipped about that sort of thing. Loose lips sank ships in this business.

“Wow… Well, I guess I see now. I thought you really hated me for a while.”

“There was that, too.”

“……”

“What?”

Rentaro scratched his head, forcing himself not to pursue this line of conversation. He removed the outer jacket of his uniform and tossed it at Hotaru. “Here,” he said, “put that on. Your clothes are all bloody. You can’t go walking around like that.”

Hotaru gave Rentaro’s jacket a light sniff, then winced. “It smells terrible. Why does men’s sweat have to be so stinky all the time…?”

“Okay, give it back.”

“Well, I’ll put it on if I haaave to.”

Rentaro rolled his eyes and turned around. She was so annoying to deal with.

“Oh, uh, thanks.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Let’s go, Rentaro.”

Her cheeks were red, perhaps because of the evening sunlight she was drenched in, as she marched off. “Wait a sec,” Rentaro said, stopping her as he pointed at his left leg. “Lend me a shoulder.”

Hotaru watched him silently for a moment, walked back, and just as silently offered her shoulder. He sheepishly accepted. She was unflinchingly cold to him, but for whatever reason, her skin felt hot to the touch.

Wisely opting to leave the elevator for someone else to worry about, the pair of them limped down the stairs and out the main entrance. The front was lined with people. It was only a matter of time before the police showed up. Wary that someone would notice him, Rentaro hid his face, pretending to be unconscious as Hotaru dragged him along. She keenly picked up a taxi and directed the driver to the apartment she was hiding out in.

The middle-aged driver gave the two extremely disheveled passengers a dubious look, but his sense of professionalism willed him to gently bring the car into motion regardless.

They could hear sirens far away, and before long, a small squadron of police cars came in from ahead, lights flashing. As they passed, Rentaro and Hotaru instinctively ducked from the windows. The Doppler effect made the sirens sound almost comical as they faded away behind them. Cautiously, they sat back up and looked toward the rear. The police were now pouring into the apartment building they had just left. Just in the nick of time.

Rentaro loosened up, the mental strain exiting his body—but then the driver’s eyes met his through the rearview mirror. He looked startled for a moment but quickly averted his gaze, as if he had just witnessed a couple making out at the bar. The odd response made the hairs stand on Rentaro’s nape.

That stare indicated the driver had just connected a vague memory with his current reality. And his eyes darted away right afterward. From the backseat, Rentaro sensed danger. What did the driver just remember—? What else could it be? His face matched the fugitive’s from the news. Otherwise, why would he awkwardly take his eyes away like that?

And of course Hotaru had to give him the exact address of her apartment before hopping in. The idea that the driver would drop them off then not exercise his civic duty to contact the police seemed far too optimistic to him. In fact, he might even drive his taxi right to the police station instead of taking them over. If he did, they were finished.

The taxi stopped quietly at a red light. Hotaru sat there, picking up on Rentaro’s nerves and waiting to see what happened next. She knew the driver was on to them. The tension was at the boiling point. Just a light prod could make it explode.

The light turned green. The driver stepped on the gas. Rentaro could feel the inertia drive his body into the seat a little.

“Um, sir…?”

Rentaro shuddered. His body tensed up, as if a judge just sentenced him to death.

“Would you mind,” the driver continued, “if I talked to myself for a little bit? I know this isn’t exactly a glamorous job I have, but y’know, I was seriously thinking about joining the self-defense force a month ago. At my age, you know? Like, you remember how they expanded the age limit to accommodate for just about anybody during the Third Kanto Battle? I figured, y’know, maybe I needed to take up arms and fight to defend this city, too, so…”

Then the driver fell silent. “Uh, and then what?” Rentaro dared to ask.

The steering wheel squeaked a little underneath the cabbie’s grip. “Ah, it didn’t work out in the end,” he said mournfully. “I was too scared. I lost my wife and kid in the war ten years ago, so I figured I had nothing left to lose, but…you know, I wound up marrying another widow, someone just like me. We live in a pretty humble place, but we’re happy, y’know? …So I just couldn’t go through with it. Not if it meant losing something again. If I’m doomed to die, I wanted it to be together with her.”

“…Nothing wrong about that. That’s a natural reaction.”

The taxi entered a tunnel. A steady stream of orange lights whizzed by, weakly illuminating their faces at regular intervals.

“Do you have any family, civsec?” the driver asked. He had no doubts about Rentaro’s job position, at any rate.

After a moment figuring out what to say, Rentaro decided to just shake his head, not bothering with pleasantries. “They’re all dead.”

“You weren’t scared of that Aldebaran guy at all?”

“Well, sure I was.”

Hotaru looked at Rentaro, mouth slightly open.

“That wasn’t something anyone should have to experience. And compared to the work it took, I’ve gotten far too little appreciation for it.”

“So why do you do it?”

Rentaro thought for a little, then shook his head again. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I was the only one there who could, really, so…”

“Oh…”

The driver clammed up again. Rentaro grew anxious, squirming in his seat as he wondered if he had offended the cabbie somehow. But the words that finally greeted him weren’t what he expected.

“I guess the kinds of people we call heroes are pretty much like that, huh?”

The driver smiled at him through the mirror.

“Don’t worry. I’ve been terribly forgetful as of late, y’know. By the time I drop you off, I’m probably going to forget I even had anybody in this car.”

“Oh… Uh, well, thanks. I really owe you one.”

Rentaro didn’t know what he could say after that. So he kept quiet. His conversational partner joined him. The atmosphere was far gentler now. He closed his eyes.

He was no hero, no savior of humanity. That much he was sure of. But if what he did helped others smile just a little more, enjoy that little bit more of happiness—didn’t that mean there was some greater meaning behind the path he took, at the end of it all?

Nothing at all had improved with his situation. Enju was still a ward of the IISO. Tina was still locked up in jail somewhere. And Kisara was still wrapped cruelly around Hitsuma’s finger. The thought of Hitsuma taking advantage of her trust in him filled his mind with rage, but it wasn’t like he could storm the police headquarters with guns a-blazing. That would just add to his already-long rap sheet. His only hope was to follow Suibara’s trail down whatever he was investigating and catch the people who put him in this mess.

He managed to dispatch Hummingbird. The girl who almost certainly killed Kenji Houbara. Judging by the sniping skill he showed off at the Plaza Hotel, Dark Stalker must have been Giichi Ebihara’s killer.

Which meant, by the process of elimination, that someone whose name he didn’t even know must have assassinated Saya Takamura.

So, two killers left. And the one Rentaro really had to watch out for was Dark Stalker. One thing the battle with Hummingbird made clear was that he didn’t have to dread them so much after all. They were strong, but beatable. And sooner or later, he’d make that clear as black and white to them.

The fury in his stomach warmed his entire body as Rentaro contemplated his enemies, wherever they lurked, across the Tokyo Area landscape.

6

A loud wham echoed across the control room, making the operators sit bolt upright in their seats.

Atsuro Hitsuma, not caring about the pain in his fist as he slammed it against the terminal, winced as he scrunched his eyebrows downward, all but crushing the cell phone in his other hand. “All right,” he managed to squeak out. “Let me know if anything happens.” Then he stormed out of the control room.

As he walked along, he bashed his fist against a vending machine down the hallway. “Shit… Shit! This is ridiculous! He got Hummingbird?!”

“Oooh, Mr. Hitsuma, you’re gonna have to answer for that, huh?”

Hitsuma rolled his eyes toward the voice. A completely unfazed Yuga shrugged at him, apparently enjoying the show.

“I told you that you should’ve let me take care of him. Hummingbird just didn’t have what it takes.”

“Whether she did or not, could any one of us have predicted that she’d lose? She had a one-hundred-percent mission completion rate!”

“One hundred percent of a bunch of small-fry hit man jobs. How could anyone be proud of that record? That’s all she had the capacity for, really.”

Yuga’s reaction to his colleague being killed went far beyond indifference and into the realm of coldhearted callousness.

“Rentaro Satomi… God.”

“So is it clear who we’re dealing with now, Mr. Hitsuma? Next time, why don’t you—?”

“—No! Not yet! We still have Swordtail! And I’m done screwing around. It’s no mercy from here on in! I have to get them killed!”

Yuga wrinkled his nose as he chuckled. “Well, do what you like,” he said chidingly. “But hasn’t Inspector Tadashima been calling for you?”

Hitsuma blinked, stood up, and looked at his watch. The idea of having to act cool and deal with him when one of his top assassins was dead didn’t exactly appeal to him, but he couldn’t delay the inspector any longer. It could lead to some completely avoidable misunderstandings.

“You hold down the fort here,” Hitsuma grunted as he passed by. Yuga responded with an uncharacteristically stern face.

“Mr. Hitsuma, about that inspector… He’s pretty angry, all right? Make sure you keep your guard up.”

“Tadashima is?” Hitsuma shook his head, dismissing this warning. “I don’t care. He’s almost up for retirement anyway; he’s not gonna risk his pension trying to rock the boat. There’s no way he’d ever come near the truth. That’s why I chose him as my partner.”

“Well, hopefully so. Just watch he doesn’t trip you up, all right?”

The smell of defeat was in the air.

The steering wheel of his beloved car creaked in his hands as it thundered down the road. He had the accelerator all the way down, forgetting the fact he was on duty, and he was well beyond the highway speed limit. Dark Stalker, one of his men, was openly revolting against him. If he couldn’t count on Swordtail to quiet things down, the organization might start asking some very unwelcome questions.

“God damn you, Rentaro Satomi…!”

Hitsuma found himself having trouble dealing with his emotions. If he met with Tadashima like this, he might notice something was up.

So he decided to take a quick breather in order to release some of his stress. I have enough time for that, he figured, as he spun the wheel and got off the highway, turning across several narrow roads until he reached a street lined with bars and restaurants.

He stopped in front of a dingy-looking building. Going up the stairs, he glanced at the nameplate of the Tendo Civil Security Agency. He opened the door, using a key he had made for him, only to find the office brightly lit by the evening sun through the window.

Deeper inside, behind an ebony-colored desk, Kisara Tendo sat with her back turned to him. Stealthily, Hitsuma crept up to her, then brought his hands around her head.

“I’ve come to see you, Kisara.”

The girl in black, only noticing him once he spoke, sluggishly raised her head to meet Hitsuma’s gaze. Her eyes were glassy and devoid of life. They were turned toward him, but they didn’t actually seem to be looking at anything.

“Oh…Mr. Hitsuma,” she slowly intoned. It was a 180-degree difference from her usual lighthearted self.

“What were you looking at?” Hitsuma said, smile deepening as he followed her eyes. “…Oh, did it show up?”

The soft chiffon fabric shone beautifully, extending out across the pleated skirt. It was a full-length dress, as pure and white as a young woman’s chastity. The mannequin it was on had its head covered in a see-through veil that ran down to the shoulders. It was the wedding dress Hitsuma bought for her—one he spared no expense on.

Kisara had been like this ever since she heard Rentaro died at the Plaza Hotel. Pre-wedding jitters, perhaps, or something like it. Hitsuma appreciated how pliable it made her.

His previous research indicated that Rentaro had feelings for her. Hitsuma could have any woman he wanted. To him, taking Kisara for his own had deeper meaning. The moment Rentaro was dead and this girl was his, his revenge would be complete.

“We should hurry with the ceremony, Kisara,” he said, a twisted smile on his face as he ran his hand through her black, silken hair.