When Rin next awoke, her body was racked with pain.

  This, in itself, was no special fate for her. She often woke up with a cricked neck or some pulled muscle still aching and tingling from the day before. When she slept underneath cardboard or plastic sheeting the rain always made its way through eventually, soaking into her joints and making them creak before her blood started flowing again.

  This pain was far more extensive. A bright searing heat all up her lower left leg, then the contrasting chill of her near-numb hands and feet, and the deep inner ache of her entire musculature screaming through torn-up microfibres.

  Head dazed and throbbing, Rin realised there was something in her mouth.

  It was a small plastic tube, a hospital feeding tube by the feel of it. It was laid across her tongue, not at all inserted into the correct place, and something tangy and sweet dripped from it in tiny intervals just barely enough to trickle down her throat.

  Blood.

  Rin’s throat immediately worked to swallow the tiny pool of it that had collected in the bottom of her jaw, and the rich flavour flooded her mouth.

  When she sat up Rin found herself lying on a mattress. It smelled strongly of metal and mould, overlaid with the scent of her own burned flesh. Nothing but a thin blanket covered her body, which had been stripped of her outer coat and boots, though the rest of her clothes had remained untouched.

  Immediately Rin attempted to leap off the mattress into a watchful crouching position. The moment she did, however, she immediately collapsed onto her side like a sack of wet sand, a horrific kind of agony making itself known quite clearly.

  “Ah- ah, yat?ev!-”

  She swore and grabbed her leg, face drawn into a tormented expression.

  The flesh upon her left ankle was a bright, inflamed red. It caught the light as if it was the texture of dry greasepaper, and the top layer of skin had pulled back into tiny whitish patches, crusted, revealing moist, bloodied pink muscle. In some places it had nearly turned yellow, the fat visible in patches from beneath the crispy transparent cells.

  The reek of cooked flesh assaulted her as she examined it further, seeing the splatters and streaks where the petrol had seared into her shin and knee, leaving behind angry red marks.

  The recollection of how she had been burned so badly filled Rin’s senses, along with a vicious sense of anger. It had been so long since she had been so thoroughly humiliated, and now, she had been brought to her knees twice in a row–first by the NCOs who had taken advantage of a momentary lapse in judgement; and now by the scrawny, freakish, inhuman Yugi.

  She didn’t know which possibility was worse–that she had lost to a human, or lost to something godly.

  But god doesn’t exist. So he’s just a crazy boy, whatever his ability might be. A crazy boy trying to drag me into his crazy world, like I have no brain.

  Slowly, Rin began to pull herself upright, grabbing onto the wall with one hand and holding the feeding tube in place with the other. The blood was human, and uncontaminated by alcohol or pathogens, judging by the taste. Likely from a young male, oxygenated and healthy.

  She began drinking it down with a fervour. As the sanguine substance metabolised in her stomach, the burn upon her leg smarted, and she could feel her blood flow increasing as she lapped at the tube’s glistening end. The feeling as she digested it was something akin to sinking slowly into a hot bath after a long day at work, or the first bite of a large meal you had been looking forward to since the morning.

  “...”

  The room itself told Rin very little about her situation. It was bare and sparse, with a single small window high up on the opposite wall that cast bright daylight across the floor. So, it seemed she’d slept right through to the morning. The wallpaper, the floor, the mattress and blanket–not too clean, nor too dirty. But the oppressive blandness and impersonality of the room directly contrasted the intense, overpowering smell of hot metal that clung to every fabric and surface.

  She narrowed her grey-blue eyes.

  This is Yugi’s room. His house. He must have taken me here after I passed out. And…did he give me the drip too? Someone else?

  At the very least, someone else had donated (or been relieved of) their blood; she would have immediately recognised the off-putting, metallic reek if it had been Yugi’s.

  Rin’s natural healing factor set to work soon enough. She could feel skin shifting, muscles beginning to join themselves back in place, tiny nerves and veins reconnecting through the intricate map of her damaged tissue. It was the ability of any ketsujin who was not dying of hunger to be able to heal minor injuries, and, with a little time and a few mouthfuls of blood, even more major ones.

  Rin had not been lying when she claimed to have no psychofield. It had been a long time–near fifteen years, in fact–since she had ever been able to wield the kinetic ability of haemokinesis–Blood Manipulation. It was known about, and spoken about, before and behind her back. The other ketsujin whom she now avoided, lurking nearby, forming their judgments about her. Assuming that she was weaker and broken. Unable to live up to their legacies or outperform their hereditary techniques.

  She does not remember a family. So what will she create to carry on no legacy?

  Ah, she won’t worry about that. No neuropathy, no blood technique from her. She will contribute nothing.

  It stirred her anger more than anything ever had, even Yugi.

  Though even so, ghosts of what once were still lingered in her body, knitting her wounds back together. When Rin checked her ankle it already seemed like her burns had gone from third to first degree. That kind of pain would have bedridden any normal person, but Rin’s tolerance was enough to allow her to put some hesitant weight on it.

  She stepped around the room a few times, testing herself. The bandages on her forearms which she always wore had been apparently moved to her injured biceps, and they were soaked with blood. The stab wounds Yugi had inflicted upon her seemed to be healing closed too, throbbing with a distant, dull ache. It would take some time for her to be able to lift anything heavy.

  Rin suddenly heard something outside.

  It was an imperceptible noise that wouldn’t have been noticed by anyone without ketsujin ears, and further disregarded by anyone less paranoid than Rin, but she took note of it immediately.

  One of the floorboards just outside the door creaked, settling into the house. It wasn’t the weight of a person, no footsteps or foreign scent came to her notice. But the way it moved alerted her to the fact that someone had probably just opened a door, somewhere below the room she was in.

  Immediately she stalked towards the exit. It didn’t even occur to Rin to consider her own wounded state, or to be on guard. She was only restless, eager to leave as soon as possible (and find Yugi).

  The door was locked.

  She pulled a face of absolute disdain. Did they think so little of her, that they expected a small wooden mechanism to prevent her from going wherever she wanted?

  Moments later, the door was unlocked. Not by any means of lockpicking or a substitute key, but more because it was no longer being attached to any hinges.

  Rin lowered her good leg from its position in the air as the door slowly pitched forward, hitting the floor with a crash and sending up a few splinters on the way. The hallway had a distinctly chilled, abandoned feel to it, like an unloved for-rent with no offers. As she traced her hand across the wallpaper, feeling the scratches and the little stains that could be dirt or could be old blood, she approached the stairs just ahead with a patient and slow tread. Her inconvenient height meant that she had to bend down a little, pushing on the ceiling with her palm to avoid hitting her head more than it already had been hit last night.

  Just then, someone–a tall figure–ran right up those stairs, and Rin reacted before she could even think. The moment she saw them she darted past, slamming an arm into the wall, cutting off their exit and grabbing onto their neck.

  They yelped in response and retorted with a surprisingly quick speed, but gripping at Rin’s forearm with the force of a paper towel did very little to budge her even an inch, and after that blinding flurry of movement was over the two froze in position, unblinking, panting.

  She was holding onto a man--a tall pink-haired man with eyes half hidden behind round blue-tinted sunglasses, who smelled strongly of a sweet, cherry-like perfume that likely fooled most people into thinking it was expensive, but she could make out the cheap acrid chemicals that laid beneath it. He was shirtless and wore nothing else other than baggy grey slacks, as if he’d only recently emerged from bed or a nap on the sofa.

  In the slightly awkward silence that followed, Rin said:

  “Good catch.”

  He reflexively let go of her arm.

  She did not let go of his neck.

  “Ah…I…right!” he responded, trying to look up at where she loomed over him without moving his head.

  “I just came up…to check on the door.”

  Rin watched him calculatingly, her muscles staying perfectly still.

  “You locked it to give me a little puzzle, va?”

  “No, no, I…look, I didn’t bring you here, I have nothing to do with you being here, just-” His hand slowly crept up to her own, only to flinch away as soon as she lightly flexed it. “Just! Just. Just please keep your fingers and my carotid artery a friendly distance apart and I promise, I can explain this. Okay?” And then, after a hesitation– “Pdj?are?.”

  ‘Please’. Rin raised her eyebrows.

  She was rarely, if ever, impressed, but that made her feel some flicker of interest at the base of her ribcage. It wasn’t quite correct: the ketsujin language had no direct word for please, and this was something more like the verb form of ‘ beg’. But the fact that he even knew it at all…

  She released him. They were both very aware Rin was only humouring him.

  “You speak Ketsu-go?”

  “I learned it when I came here. I’m not Japanese, y’know. I er, I moved from the UK some years back, and I just happened to brush up on my languages.” He seemed talkative, eager to fill the slightly threatening silence. Rin let him. She’d learn more that way.

  “Oh, ahaha- how could I- riiight!” He gave a little bow from the waist, before tapping his fingers to his neck. A symbolic gesture meant to highlight its weakest point, a sign of openness and honesty.

  “The name’s Dexter. Dexter Blue.”

  He was laying on his knowledge of her customs thickly, and she liked that. Whether Dexter had actually spent his time around ketsujin, or simply studied hard before their meeting, it meant he was trying hard to put her at ease. Which meant he was afraid of her.

  When she saw his bodyweight shift a little to the stairs as if on the verge of leading her down, she jerked her chin in a silent order. Rin lingered behind Dexter as he walked, not willing to give anyone the chance to jump her at the front.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, her hand crept down to catch the edge of Dexter’s elbow; he faltered in his step, and Rin responded by pressing two fingers hard into the long bluish vein that travelled down his forearm. A silent warning.

  “Tell me why I’m here,” she murmured.

  “Yugi brought you home,” Dexter whispered back. “He bandaged you and gave you the drip to help with healing. Your jacket and gloves are downstairs.”

  “Whose blood?”

  “Mine.”

  “How many people are downstairs? Don’t lie to me.”

  “Just Yugi.” She could hear his heart pounding and sense his adrenaline building, clouding the air. “I promise. You haven’t been kidnapped. Um. Well, you’ve been moved. Probably without your consent. But you’re free to go. At least until you’ve spoken to Yugi. He really wants to--”

  The moment they stepped into the foyer, Rin shoved him aside, and Dexter made an indignant noise punctuated with a thud as he made contact with the wall.

  “What does he want?” She felt along the doorframe at the end, listening carefully, inhaling to draw the stale air right to the back of her throat and parse every distinct smell she could find.

  “To talk.”

  Rin pushed open the door.

  There he was, in all his unfortunately-familiar glory. A slim and petite figure perched on the back of the sofa like a small predatory bird. At least he was clothed this time, in a simple oversized shirt that hung down to his mid-thighs. When Rin opened the door, Yugi’s head snapped to her like a mechanism had just been triggered, faster than a bear trap.

  Something about this living room felt distinctly more alive than the room Rin had woken up in, though it was almost as sparsely furnished; two brown sofas opposing one another, a small coffee table, a plain rug haphazardly thrown across otherwise bare and unvarnished floorboards. Not a shred of personality marred the listing-photo décor.

  It was Dexter’s presence that made all the difference, she realised. His scent lingered around the place, on the brightly-painted terracotta mug with some coffee still left inside it (black- she smelled no sugar), the red leather jacket and black cropped shirt thrown over the back of the sofa, a cigarette end tossed onto the floor. It all informed the eye that someone existed here, lived here, and carried out their actions here.

  When she wasn’t busy being a hired gun, sleeping out in alleyways or abandoned flats, Rin would watch the old cathode-ray television she’d stolen from one of her target's houses. It just barely worked, if she hooked it up to the wiring from the building next to her that still hadn’t realised she wasn’t paying rent. She sometimes struggled to understand the spoken Japanese, and the channels never offered subtitles in Ketsu-go (and even if they had, Rin could not read)– but she kept up just enough to follow what aired late after work hours, passing her long nights alone.

  She was always fascinated by the detective dramas that showed episodes at 9PM on Fridays. Though they were convoluted and hard to follow, Rin enjoyed the fact that invariably, humans were murdered in them. She picked up tips and facts like coins on the pavement. Something that had really stood out to her was one particular line, from a drama Rin had watched a few months ago.

  “You see, Polmes, the real kicker is the possessions of the killer. One can determine almost anything about a person from the items they own. See, here, the surface of the door is worn away, right below the keyhole. It seems this man often leaves his house at night, and fumbles his key in the dark, gouging at the door. Isn’t that telling?”

  A person left behind imprints of their mind and intentions everywhere they went, but especially in their home; Rin was well aware of that, as she rooted through dead men’s rooms, finding pictures and diaries and odd trinkets while she stuck her large hands into a tiny window of their lives. But Yugi…

  Somehow, he was devoid of personality. Even though Dexter’s words and the ingrained smell suggested that he lived here, likely for a long time, there wasn’t anything else to give her that impression. No phone, no books or manga lying around, given that he looked to be an older teenager. Not even empty bowls of food, or noodle packets, or soft drinks. A net zero sign of life.

  He was like a corpse, reanimated by a one-track goal.

  Rin narrowed her eyes.

  “You again.”

  “Me, again,” Yugi assented, with the slightest twitch of his mouth.

  “Jee-ay–sus!”

  Dexter walked past Rin with his arms up high, stretching out the vertebrae of his back with a series of pops. He grabbed the mug of coffee and finished off the cold beverage with a wince, before reaching to throw on the shirt he’d left on the sofa.

  “Yugi, I get it. You’re a young man, you’re living alone and you’ve got your urges and your needs, but listen–if you’re gonna bring women back to your place, can they please not be so intimidating next time? Your girl over there nearly freakin’ killed me just because I walked in front of her!”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  She noted how quickly he relaxed once Yugi was in the room with them.

  “She’s not my ‘girl’. I don’t have such designs with her,” Yugi deadpanned, deflating the banter entirely.

  Rin was too busy staring the boy down to even bother with Dexter any longer, now that he had proved himself harmless to her. Her heavy-lidded blue eyes, pupils a dark slitted line, bored directly into the wide fishlike eyeballs sunken deep into Yugi’s skull; and he met her gaze. He seemed perfectly comfortable meeting her gaze.

  “You’re going to tell me why I’m here,” she said quietly.

  “I already told you everything you need to know. You’re the one who refused to listen to me. And now I’ve beaten you in a fight, and proved myself superior. All you need to do is pay attention.”

  His tone had softened, become more pleading, and gently entreating, as if Rin were being oh so unreasonable, and Yugi was ever so patient in sticking out his neck this far to explain things for her. But it wasn’t even close to an explanation, at least not one that she would be satisfied by.

  Rin slowly made her way around to the sofa opposite where Yugi was perched, causing Dexter to shuffle jerkily out of the way, before she sat down with a heavy noise. It would have been comical, the way she seemed almost giant compared to the human-sized sofa, the way the cushions dipped underneath her weight as if the furniture was a few gestures away from breaking, if it wasn’t for the look in her eyes at that moment.

  She spread her knees firmly apart, leaning back with one arm dangling past the backrest. It was an intentional statement, a show of confidence, that didn’t go unnoticed.

  “I’m not joining you,” she said flatly.

  “Save your pretty words. You have nothing for me that I would ask in return for sticking my neck out this far. It’s all too much trouble for me.”

  The mug that Dexter had put down shattered.

  It exploded into shards of hardened ceramic and Dexter jumped back with a frightened noise. Rin only saw it happen on her periphery, still laser-focused on Yugi’s wide unblinking eyes as the smell of hot metal and the buzz of his psychofield became overpowering.

  “So you care nothing for the suffering of everyone in this district?” he whispered. It was the first time she had heard him ever display even a shred of frustration in his voice.

  She didn’t react.

  “Control yourself,” Rin taunted him.

  He won’t kill me. He went through all that trouble just to find me. Instead of leaving me for dead, he took me home and drip-fed me. If he lashed out now, it would be pointless.

  Yugi’s irises flickered between differing shades of grey and the inside of Rin’s nose nearly burned, but right as she swore the air bent a little with heat that made the hairs on her head begin to prickle and stand up–

  He stopped bristling.

  The silence that was left behind felt even louder than the noise. She knew Yugi wasn’t calm; the emotions were still there, stirring below the surface like bubbling, spitting lava. He’d simply contained it all, like a lid on top of a mug of hot milk in the microwave.

  Which was to say, it still held the potential to explode.

  “Right…uh, right,” Dexter interrupted eventually, after an awkward silence as the impromptu staring contest continued.

  “Yugi, I-I don’t think this is going to work out, buddy. You can’t force her to do everything you say. Can we just-” He stepped in between them with hands spread out like he was trying to prevent two cats from fighting, but they only continued to glare through him without a word, each looking as if they hoped the other would burst into flames.

  “Do we think we can agree on a compromise? Yugi, you’re determined to have Rin work with you; Rin, I understand this must be confusing and threatening for you, but you definitely stand to gain from this if we can just talk this out without turning it into a measuring contest. Okayy~?” He stretched out the ending sound of the word, and he was clearly falling into something familiar– a routine, maybe, or somewhere in the conversation where he finally felt safe to put his feet on the ground.

  Dexter took a seat on the coffee table between them, taking out a small pack of cigarettes. He offered them to Rin.

  “Smoke?”

  “I don’t.”

  Yugi’s pale hand slowly stretched over Dexter’s arm like a creeping snake and tugged out one of the small paper cylinders, and Dexter revealed a lighter from his pocket.

  “That’s fine, Rin. You do what you think is best.” As he put the little box back away into the recesses of his slacks, the lighter puffed with a newborn flame, and a small gust of pale-grey smoke seeped from Yugi’s dainty nose.

  She wrinkled her own at that, but his occupation with the cigarette lessened some of the tension in the room, and she finally broke the eye contact they had been stubbornly maintaining.

  “So let me see, hmmm? Yugi told me most of the important details about what he wants from all this. He hopes to start a new syndicate, here in the Suzumachi district. I’ve been the dedicated fixer kindly finding members for him to get off of the ground, but you, Rin…he specifically requested you out of everyone else. He wanted to talk to you personally.”

  And that went about as well as he should have expected.

  She scoffed. If Dexter was attempting to make her sound like she was special, it had no effect.

  “Suzumachi already has a syndicate.” The derision dripped from her voice, and it coloured her scornful face. “The bigger fish will eat you alive.”

  The hierarchy of criminals in the city of Namato was a rich and complex one, that spread over the entire city, to every district and block, inside and outside every home and building, and every street and road. Each of the nine large districts was illegally occupied by a syndicate, a group of ability users and others of morally-dubious skill who answered to a ‘joushi’- the boss, and undisputed leader of that district. Few happenings would ever go unnoticed by them, and they were often rich, siphoning money from such enterprises as weapons trading, embezzlement and extortion.

  Rin was a criminal too, a nokemono, a social pariah lacking a Neuropathic Registry Control license– and thus her right to healthcare, to a bank account, and an education. She was only a hitwoman for hire, though, lurking on the periphery of the underground interacting with very few humans, unless it was to kill them. She held little repute these days. There was no reason for Yugi to so insistently demand her services, given how few people knew of her services.

  Unless he knew something about her.

  “Did I know you?” she asked quietly.

  Yugi watched her with something unreadable on his face.

  He said nothing for a little while.

  “Wouldn’t you remember if you did?”

  “I don’t remember anything from before I was fifteen.”

  Something changed in his eyes then. Something she couldn’t identify.

  Almost subconsciously she reached up to her head, where the bandages that she replaced regularly were tied around her temple, no longer stained by blood.

  “Woke up, bullet in my brain. The people who found me dug it out. And that was it. I lost my neuropathy. Lost half my life.” Her voice was flat, as if all the emotion associated with the event had long since drained away. “If we knew each other back then, don’t think it’ll make me listen to you now. I’m a different woman. I remade myself, I’ve got a new life to live now. Not one to waste on your suicide plan.”

  A heavy, oppressive quiet descended upon the room. Yugi’s face was entirely still, and not a single muscle movement gave away his thoughts or feelings. His eyes didn’t twitch. He wasn’t even breathing.

  “No,” he said, “We did not know each other. I was merely curious about your limitations.”

  It seemed that was the incorrect word to use, and now Rin was the one who was on the verge of eruption.

  “I am not limited!” she snarled, clenching onto the sofa arm.

  “I don’t need an ability to crush you into the ground! I fought you without one, and I won’t hesitate to do it again!”

  Dexter could clearly see that the negotiation (if it even deserved that title) was rapidly disintegrating, and shifted forward a little where he sat.

  “Yugi is willing to offer good compensation. Free bed and board, regular pay-”

  “Not interested,” she snapped. “I don’t want a human’s money.”

  “Not even one million-”

  A small, threatening growl built up in the very depths of Rin’s throat, like a rumbling volcano about to erupt, and he immediately went quiet.

  “There has to be something you want.” Yugi tilted his head to the side, and the smoke from his lips curled into a misty, clouded ribbon across his eyes.

  “I followed your behaviour patterns across a few months, before your arrest. In that time you killed four people, once per week.”

  Yugi leaned over to press his finger into the wooden surface of the coffee table, and began to slowly trace a path across it, illustrating the winding nature of her journey through the districts.

  “Of course, you’re a hitwoman. So it makes sense. But these four people shared not a thing in common.” His other ghostly-white hand held up four fingers, dropping them one by one. “A man in his forties, who worked in a refinery and had no criminal record. A young woman who had charges for public drinking and violent rowdiness. A low-ranking member of the syndicate in Doroi district. And…a medical student from Higouya district, who had just come to Suzumachi for a night out.”

  Yugi let his words linger in the air as Rin said nothing, merely watching him in silence.

  “Between these people, there was nothing that explained a hit on their lives. You don’t offer charges for certain types of targets, and you don’t take orders from joushi like most mercenaries. Almost like you kill based on the petty grudges of others. But with your strength?”

  Yugi paused again, this time allowing a small smile to tug his lips, one of curiosity and interest.

  “It seems….almost like a waste–”

  “They were humans.”

  Rin interrupted him flatly, as she leaned forward, and her stringy white hair fell across her face and cast thin shadows over her features.

  “The man raped a ketsujin at gunpoint when she stopped by his street. The woman sold out a ketsujin who was hiding in her apartment to the NCOs. The syndicate member had killed ketsujin before. And the student rounded up ketsujin children for medical experiments.”

  Rin absently dug one nail into the coffee table until she gouged two deep white lines into the soft wood. In the corner of her eye she could see Dexter wincing slightly at the bluntness of her words.

  “The ones who paid me to kill them were their victim’s families. They always are.”

  The hatred that laced her gravelly voice then was not a quick-fire hatred. It was a loathing nurtured and borne of years of suffering, years of watching her people and the ones she had grown to secretly care for ripped away from under her; the sort of hate that could only arise from seeing the battered and bruised body of a child curled up in an alley and knowing the sole and only reason why.

  Yugi’s lips spread themselves into a grim mockery of a smile, as his eyes showed the first hint of emotion she’d seen since they had first met. A bright, sickly light, like a gas flame in a dark room, illuminated his grey-blue irises.

  “So there is something you want.”

  His voice tilted up at the end, almost an exclamation but not quite. His sinuous form slowly leaned closer across the table, until he was squatting on the couch’s cushions with one hand upon the coffee table, swaying ever so slightly back and forth like a willow branch in the wind. “You want revenge. You want to cleanse this world of the ones hunting your species. Isn’t that right, Rin?”

  Though she refused to pull away and concede her personal space to him, Rin wanted to so badly. The stifling reek of iron filled her nose again.

  “The truth is, I want the same thing that you do. I serve nobody but God, and He has given me the role of his avenging angel. The people in this city are rotten to the core. Only I can save them now. Only I can give them their grace.”

  Yugi straightened up as he grabbed the hem of his shirt.

  “The joushi here in Suzumachi is an old fool, and a terrible man. He does not know how to run this place. He only knows how to spread his false idolic ideals far and wide, and gnaw at the foundations of God’s will like a maggot… I understand your feelings on humankind, Rin.” He pulled the fabric from his body, dropping it aside as he bared his pale, skinny chest. “I still love them. Sometimes I resent them. Sometimes those feelings crawl deep into my chest and die before they can get out. But I have an obligation to them, like a father to his wayward son. Because-”

  That buzzing grew louder again.

  “I was created for it.”

  Yugi dug his fingers into the pale, pinkish scar that ran down the exact middle of his face. Rin had not paid attention to it before, it had been too light and subtle to draw her eye. But she saw now that it ran down the exact middle of his entire body, up through his hairline and down his neck and back and between his legs and then back up to his face once more.

  He began to pull himself apart.

  The skin separated with a wet, sticky noise. Strings of fat and damp mucus hung from the sides of the gash as his fingers pushed further in, peeling the two halves apart like separating two pieces of wet paper. Underneath it, the flexing layers of muscle were revealed, and along that dividing groove they too split into perfect halves, dripping blood and cytoplasm onto the floorboards.

  Beneath that lay a brilliant metal skeleton.

  Wires, steel-ribs, a frame of titanium glinting in the light and slick with sanguine intracellular fluid. There were gears and hinges where his shoulder bones would be, and a tangle of wires wrapped around the grooved spiral of his spine. It did not smell of human flesh. It radiated a powerful, tingling feeling of electricity and tin, and the wires and cables pulsed as they curled about the metallic skeleton, like living tentacles. At first Rin swore she saw organs, nestled there amidst the machinery–but no, they too were metal, a malleable aluminium that contracted and expanded in a cruel imitation of life.

  There came an awful creaking that made Rin’s stomach crawl as Yugi finally stopped wrenching the two halves of his body apart. The separation ended at the hips, his veins ran with blood, and unseen gears clicked deep within his iron pelvis and his lead collarbones. The metal skull from which both sides of his face had parted from caught the light from the window and gleamed, and the empty sockets gazed deep into Rin’s eyes--and behind them, she swore she could see his brain exposed to the air- pink, throbbing, living.

  At the centre of all of this, right where his solar plexus was, there was a curious metal object that looked almost as if it was suspended within him, but upon closer inspection it was held in place by numerous hair-thin strands of metal. It was shaped like a half-sphere, with a smaller ball half its size nestled within the centre; something like a mismatched bowl with a lid.

  There was no heartbeat to be heard; only a bone-deep hum.

  If Rin had been a weaker woman, she would have fainted. As it were she only stared into Yugi’s vile, disgusting insides, with a feeling as if her own internals were cramping up into something like horror.

  Dexter had turned very wan, but he showed no other reaction past that; he must have been privy to this sight once before. Yugi tilted forward a little, both arms still holding up the divided portions of his body. The sight was unnervingly symmetrical, as if he had been designed to be perfectly even.

  When Yugi next spoke Rin could clearly see the muscles of each side moving in his throat, his tongue squirming and flicking against his bisected teeth, like she were looking at a living PET scan in motion. His voice played twice, overlapping itself in stereo.

  “I am the blessed God’s machine, who will extend the loving hand of grace to the meek, the poor, and the unwanted ones, for they shall inherit the earth from me.”

  She was no longer looking at a strange teenage boy with ideals far beyond his means. No, this was different. A window through time into something terrible, a thing that existed far beyond her comprehension. Something ancient clung to her back, her shaking spine, as it snaked into her brain through burning teeth and electrified nose to whisper, in words that were more song than speech-

  You do not understand this. You never will.

  What Rin had just seen was something far beyond her knowledge of the world. It seemed far too complex to be the domain of a mere neuropathic ability. If it really was, it was something that by all rules and studies exceeded the limits of the human brain.

  “I understand very well that you don’t work for humans,” Yugi said softly.

  “But can you bring yourself to assist an angel?”

  Human.

  Yes, that was it. Yugi was no human.

  But in the face of all this, Rin scoffed, the sound forcing itself out from her constricted throat.

  “I don’t believe in god, or angels,” she said. “Never have, never will.”

  Yugi shifted both of his supporting hands, and tipped the separate halves of his head to the side in a bizarre mimicry of his usual head tilt.

  “You are the most stubborn woman I have ever met,” he said flatly, but there was another layer of emotion beneath it that Rin couldn’t quite parse.

  “Still you deny the evidence of your eyes, and reject God in your heart. Is that so?”

  “Yugi,” Dexter finally interrupted, still looking a little unwell. “Do you mind putting yourself back together now? This is a little unpleasant to look at.”

  “...ah.”

  With a soft sigh, Yugi slowly began to push himself back into unity. There was a series of stomach-churning wet noises and metallic groaning as the pieces of his body started to mesh back together seemingly with no sign they had ever been apart. The layers of fascia, fat, nerves, muscle and skin merged together once more, sealing up along that long central scar.

  Finally he took his hands from the sides of his head, whole once more.

  When Yugi was sufficiently normal-looking again, Rin folded both hands on her lap. He watched her intently, aware of the words that were just about to escape her lips.

  She gave a deep, weary exhale, but her eyes were bright with a newly-born focus.

  If he wants to start his own syndicate here…in Suzumachi, then….

  “....you want to kill Zero Hand.”

  Zero Hand- a name that rarely passed her lips without a curse attached. As far as Rin was aware, he didn’t know that she existed. But she’d seen him. Seen him in the Suzumachi streets, while she lurked far away in the back of an alley, seen him watching from a high-up window while people in masks cleaned up the bloody remains of someone’s brain on a wall.

  She never liked or trusted joushis, but she held a particular burning hatred for Zero Hand for one reason-

  “He’s been killing ketsujin.”

  “I know.” Yugi had sensed her growing interest, his hands tightening by almost imperceptible degrees where they were planted atop his slender thighs. “I have been keeping an eye on him myself. That’s why I knew you’d be understanding of my cause. We really do want the same things, you know? A better world for us all… a world where justice is easily carried out, and fairly dispensed–and I can bring that to pass. A sinless life. Don’t you agree?”

  After a brief pause to let his words settle, Yugi added in a quieter voice, “If you help me, I will allow you to execute him yourself.”

  And that offer– it almost brought a real smile to her hard face.

  At least…

  ...he’s not quite a human.

  “Give me a week.”

  She heard Dexter release his breath immediately, the tension draining from the room, and Yugi’s perfect mouth split into another unrealistic smile.

  “One week to decide. I won’t promise you anything either way.” With that she stood up, unfolding to as much of her height as the room would accommodate and cracking both elbows behind her back.

  The heavy atmosphere in the room wasn’t just an imagined pressure. Something real and physical seemed to recede when she gave that concession. It had felt a little like someone flattening out her nerves, sucking all the oxygen away and replacing it with thin, lifeless air.

  It was because of Yugi, she was sure of it. The boy had something about him that absorbed all energy and vitality in the area.

  “Don’t worry, I know your current address,” said Yugi, which only really served to increase her worry. “When the week is up, I’ll come and find you. I won’t forget it.”

  “Don’t let yourself in,” she muttered. There was little point questioning him on how he knew.

  Yugi turned his attention to Dexter then, and asked, “What time is it now?”

  “Ah, uh….let me see. It’s four forty-five pm. Why?”

  “Hm,” Yugi hummed, “He clearly isn’t very good at arriving on time.”

  “Wait, who-?”

  There was a knock on the front door.

  Rin wasn’t even bothered by how Yugi had apparently predicted the unknown man’s arrival. After everything else she’d seen of him, the logic of that could take a back seat in her brain. When Dexter rose to answer the door and Yugi simply continued perching silently, she tensed her legs a little, fixing the door with a stony stare.

  Must be another person he is recruiting, or recruited. The idea that she might be about to meet a future colleague (for lack of a more appropriate word) didn’t fill Rin’s mouth with a very pleasant taste.

  The door creaked open, revealing a man standing listlessly behind it.

  He looked like a homeless man, was her first thought. His yellow band shirt and worn denim jeans were stained, creased, and thin with age. His dead black hair was the kind of nondescript shoulder-length that resulted from a short haircut left to grow out, and it was so greasy it shone like chrome in the light.

  From behind the messy strands that hung past his nose, she could make out a gaunt and stubbled face that might have been strikingly handsome, had she not had a low opinion of men in general. His skin was sallow, and under those baggy clothes, she could tell he was horribly underweight. A twig of a man that she could have flicked away with a single finger.

  Rin relaxed, once she had made that observation. But Dexter did not. His shoulders were tense, and it seemed like he’d almost stopped breathing. His hand froze on the door handle, skin turning white as he gripped with enough force to almost wrench it out of the door.

  “Shimeda?” Dexter croaked out.

  As soon as the man seemed to register who was in front of him, he too turned pale, and his golden brown eyes widened.

  “Dex?” whispered Shimeda Akahoshi.