The city felt thin in the days after the Veil's strikes. Tokyo still pulsed—trains shouldering through tunnels, cabs gliding like sharks under sodium lights, convenience stores humming their neon lullabies—but beneath the usual noise ran a tension like wire pulled too tight. Patrols doubled without being named as such. Shops closed a little earlier and opened a little later. Conversations trimmed their edges and ended mid-thought. Seigi began listening to the spaces between sounds—the way laughter dipped too fast, the way doors clicked shut a fraction too carefully. Tokyo hadn't broken, but it had learned to flinch.
The Guild convened, scattered, reconvened. In the underground hall, paper maps lived beside digital feeds, and the room smelled of metal and antiseptic and tired bodies. Riku stalked the length of the table like a caged storm.
"Hit something that matters," he snapped, knuckles rapping the wood until pens toppled. "Make them flinch for once. Warehouses, handlers, whatever name they're hiding under this week—give me one and I'll turn it into gravel."
Aya sat opposite him, palms flat, voice soft enough to travel farther than a shout. "And while you're punching concrete, the clinics? The shelters? You want me to choose which ones get fewer guards tonight?"
Riku's grin was all teeth. "Then we bring them somewhere the Veil can't reach."
"Nowhere is that," Aya said. "Not tonight."
Kurogami let the argument breathe before cutting it. "They're probing for rhythm." His tone was a metronome, even, inevitable. "If we lunge, we confirm their tempo. If we turtle, we starve our own momentum. We need to move orthogonally—sustain the shield while we shift the field."
Seigi stood at the edge of it all, arms folded, trying to fix the coil in his chest with posture alone. He could feel the way Kurogami's words tightened the room, how Riku's fists kept time with an urge none of them could indulge, how Aya's gaze refused to stop counting lives.
Hana arrived with a printout, placing it between Kurogami's hands without flourish. "Confirmed sightings near Shin-Koiwa and a rumor about a safehouse sweep. Nothing solid yet."
Sato lingered near the doorway, trench coat draped like a patient shadow. He said nothing. Even his silence felt like intention.
The alert came in minutes later. Static. A clipped voice. An address.
"Go," Kurogami said, already moving. "Riku, with me. Hana, Aya—triage prep. Seigi—"
"I'm with the response," Seigi said, before the sentence could close around him. Kurogami's glance weighed something invisible and allowed it.
They drove through a city that smelled of rain and exhaust and the iron thread of oncoming winter. Seigi watched wipers push water back into shape and tried not to imagine the shape of what they'd find.
What they found was worse than blood.
The safehouse door hung ajar, latch splintered but still clinging as if the wood hadn't learned how to be broken. Inside, lanterns burned steady, light pooling on the floorboards with unnatural calm. A kettle whispered steam on the counter. In the corner, a rice cooker waited with its lid tilted, warmth clinging to the plastic like a breath that wasn't finished. Beds lay turned down, blankets creased, pillows hollowed by the weight of heads that hadn't returned. On a crate, a half-played card game: two kings, a joker, a queen held in an invisible hand. A child's stuffed rabbit slumped under a chair, one ear pinned beneath a table leg.
No screams, no bodies. Just vacancy peeled clean, as though life had been lifted out with surgical care, and the room—polite, bewildered—was waiting for it to come back.
Seigi's boots creaked once. He ran gloved fingers over a rectangle of undisturbed dust on the wall, the outline where a picture frame had been. Not smashed. Not discarded. Taken. Someone wanted possession of the memory as much as the people.
He crouched and touched the card table with the back of his hand. The grain was warm. He could smell scallions half-cut on the board, the sweetness of tea just gone astringent, the faint citrus of someone's soap rising from a folded towel. A radio in the next room hissed static, the kind that comes when a song is interrupted mid-chorus. He lifted a notebook lying open on the arm of a couch; the last line ended in the middle of a word.
"They didn't want to kill here," Hana murmured, standing beside him. Her gaze paused on the rabbit's bent ear. "They wanted to remind us how easily they could."
Riku prowled through the rooms and came back with his hands empty and bleeding from where he'd punched a doorframe. Aya stood in the kitchen, staring at the kettle until its whisper became unbearable. She turned it off with a motion so gentle it broke something anyway.
Sato touched the split latch, the old wood, the new damage. "Clean. Practiced." He didn't say what else his eyes were weighing.
Outside, the night pressed its face against the windows. Seigi's reflection in the glass looked like someone mid-vanish.
He couldn't go underground after that. When they cleared out and set watches and wrote report titles they didn't know how to fill, he stepped into the dark and let the rooftops sort his head.
He ran.
The city unrolled in black angles and neon veins, billboards smearing color over puddles, antennas picking stars out of smog. He moved by feel—two strides, leap, touch the ledge with the balls of his feet and the thread gave him an extra half-breath of hold; three strides, drop, shoulder roll, breath again. A helicopter droned somewhere far off, its blade-beat unsettling the surface of his thoughts. In an apartment below, a family ate in silence, chopsticks moving with careful persistence. Two floors down from that, a man watched a news anchor say nothing honest beautifully.
On the eighth roof, Seigi stopped. He didn't know why eight, just that his body believed it. The air tasted like rain waiting.
Wraith was there. Cloaked. Still. Not a man so much as the rumor of one. His cape stirred against a wind that didn't exist; the silence around him arranged itself like a room prepared for a guest.
Seigi leapt the gap between them. The air thickened under his soles, obliging him.
"Why me?" he asked, breath threading white. "Why this?"
Wraith tilted his head the way you do when measuring a beam for load. "Because mass follows vectors. And you, Hero Boy, are becoming heavy." His voice was neither warm nor cruel. It simply carried the weight assigned to it.
"You talk like the world's just math."
"Everything is math until someone refuses the equation." The hood didn't move, but Seigi felt the gaze pass through him. "Do you know the Veil's first act?"
Seigi set his jaw. "What?"
"They chose a name." Wraith stepped once nearer; ozone prickled the back of Seigi's tongue. "A name to promise fear before a single blade was drawn. Warnings work better from the dark. People draw their own blood in imagination long before you lift a hand."
"Then what are you?" Seigi asked. "What name did you choose?"
Silence stretched. When it broke, it did so without sound. "A trajectory," Wraith said at last. "Sold on retainer. I am not their creed. I am not your shield. I am the line between points when points pay enough."
"You're a contractor."
"I am a consequence," Wraith corrected, almost absentmindedly. "Hired, yes. Owned, no."
Seigi's fists tightened and released, the city's wind stubbornly failing to arrive. "So why tell me any of this?"
"Because stories need a mirror." Wraith leaned closer, and the space between them felt like a decision someone else was making. "And you—" the title landed without reverence, without contempt, only inevitability "—you are standing in front of one. You will either force them into the light or be extinguished in the attempt. Both change the world. I am indifferent to which. Indifferent is not the same as uninterested."
"Is that what this was? Tonight?" Seigi's voice scraped. "Their message? Or yours?"
"Theirs," Wraith said. Then, after a breath that might have been humor dying unformed, "Mine is simpler: choose your own vector before someone assigns it to you."
Before Seigi could answer, Wraith stepped backward into a fall. He did not fall. He persuaded gravity into patience and walked down the face of the building like the earth had agreed to wait for him.
The quiet that remained was wrong, a chord missing its root. Seigi found his hands shaking only when he tried to make a fist and his fingers wouldn't close all the way. The skyline had grown teeth.
Back at his apartment, the locks sat where he'd left them; he still double-checked. The radiator clanked to itself like an old man clearing his throat. He didn't turn on the lights. He didn't want to see himself.
A soft knock. Three, spaced like someone thinking. He was at the door in silence, then relaxed when Hana's profile shadowed the peephole. He let her in. She carried two cans of tea from a vending machine down the block, condensation cold against his palm when she pressed one into it.
"You've got that look again," she said, sinking into a chair without making it creak. "Like you're trying to balance two worlds while pretending one isn't already winning."
He sat opposite. "Which one's winning?"
"The one you feed," she said simply. "The one you let name you."
He told her some of it—the rooftops, the way the safehouse had felt politely abandoned, the outline of a frame that meant more than the picture could show. He did not say Wraith's name. He didn't know if that was caution or superstition. Hana didn't ask. She studied his posture the way she studied trajectories: elbows, gaze, breathing. When she finally spoke again, her voice had steel in it.
"I'm afraid of what he sees in you," she said, as if stating a lab result. "And I'm afraid of what Kurogami does."
Seigi almost laughed. It came out as breath instead. "I know."
She looked at the window; the city looked back. "You don't have to carry all of it alone."
"I don't know how not to."
"Then learn some of that, too." She stood, leaving the empty can on the table with the precision of evidence placement. At the door, she added, "Tomorrow—" a word that sounded like a treaty "—eat first."
When she'd gone, the apartment reclaimed its small sounds. The fridge hummed like a throat trying to sing. The clock ticked like an apology.
He slept near dawn and dreamed of mirrors.
They began as one and multiplied, each reflection a half-second out of time with the next. In one pane he was wearing his badge and nothing else—a man-shaped outline cut from paper. In another, he was older, the lines around his eyes the kind left by looking at hard things too long. In another, his gaze had Kurogami's stillness, his hands Sato's patience, and somewhere in the farthest pane a cloak moved without wind.
Voices braided behind the glass.
Kurogami's: The world is not saved. It is leveraged.
Aya's: Hope is a muscle. Train it.
Riku's: You puke, you keep running.
Sato's: Pick the truth that's worth your life.
And another voice, not a voice, a pressure in the air: We see you.
The panes leaned toward him, and for a moment he thought he could step through and choose which man to be. Then the glass tightened and he woke before it could crack, breath tearing the quiet into uneven pieces.
Dawn was a bruise at the edge of the blinds. The tea can was where Hana had left it, a small, ordinary proof that the world still permitted continuity. He sat up, rubbed the ache out of his knuckles, and found his phone face down on the table. A message from Renji pulsed on the lock screen, unread. He didn't open it. Not yet.
The city inhaled. Somewhere below, a market rolled up its shutters with a sound like armor learning to be doors again. Somewhere above, a plane stitched a white seam across an indifferent sky.
The Veil had given him absence. Wraith had given him a mirror. Between them, a path sharpened, not by fate, but by the refusal to be named by someone else.
Seigi stood. He didn't reach for the thread. He let it arrive.
Tomorrow could decide itself. Today, he would choose his vector.