The Hunters' Compact — Chapter 3: Knife and Paper
Public Safety West Complex, 07:41.
Glass lifts out of concrete like a blade. Rain stripes the façade. Security gates take your reflection and hand it back worse.
Rei doesn't badge us. He walks. Doors open. Elevators learn.
"Keep your ears," he says. "Don't look for it."
"For what?"
"The wrong footstep."
We ride up. The floor indicator skips 6 like it offended someone.
The training level smells like detergent and old rubber. Corridors in a grid. Lines on the ground like a school gym for ghosts. Speakers murmur weather and warnings in equal parts.
A wall monitor blinks:
GRADE D — INDOOR DRILL LIVE. HEADS DOWN. NO RECORDING.
A second strip in the corner keeps breathing red:
GRADE S — SHINAGAWA — ACTIVE.
We turn left, then left again. Rei's coat whispers. He holds the paper case like a knife he doesn't have to draw.
"Eyes down," he says. "Even breath."
I don't ask if this is a test. If it isn't, it still is.
We enter a hall that looks like every other hall. White paint, scuffed baseboards, exit signs staring like cats.
Rei stops. He raises his hand.
"Listen," he says.
I do.
Our steps come back at us a half beat late. Then another pair, same cadence. Then a third that isn't ours.
"Footstep," he says. "Mimic-type. Grade D in the tower. Grade B in a station."
"Rule?"
"It copies your last three and adds one."
He breathes in through his nose like the room might offer him tea.
"When it adds, it shows its seam," he says. "If you're not there to take it, it learns your ankle instead."
He points at the floor. The gym lines are a grid, taped straight, two palms wide.
"Put down white tape," he says.
I lower my palm.
Cold slides out of me with purpose. Frost runs in a ruler-straight stripe from wall to wall. It looks like a mark a careful janitor might love—clean, exact, honest.
"Again," he says.
I lay a second line, parallel to the first.
The air tightens. The lights hum like gnats.
Somewhere behind us, a step happens where no foot is.
"Don't turn," he says.
I don't.
We walk.
Step. Step. Step.
Echo. Echo. Echo-plus-one.
The extra lands just ahead of us, polite as a door being held. The floor dips a breath where it touches.
"Count," Rei says.
"Three."
"Good."
He steps left onto the frost line without breaking cadence. My body follows his even though my head wants to check a mirror.
Step. Step. Step.
Echo. Echo. Echo-plus-one.
We cross the second frost stripe like it's a street.
The extra step tries to fall where our fourth would be.
The cold takes it seriously.
The floor wrinkles under the air. The seam shows—thin and bright under nothing's throat.
"Window," Rei says.
He stamps the air with paper.
"Pattern."
The grid lines on the floor wake up and decide to be rules. The tape becomes law for three breaths. That's all he needs.
I don't swing. I don't have to.
I keep walking and the thing has to keep up with me by the terms it thought it wanted. It tries to figure new steps. The pattern says no.
Rei slides the blade into the empty seam where sound pretended to have a neck.
The mimic collapses into the noise you hear when a stadium goes quiet between songs.
The hallway keeps being a hallway. The grid forgets it was a cage.
I stop because stopping is a kind of victory.
My hands buzz like a missed call that won't give up. Aura low, body honest. Breath in cluttered stacks.
Rei wipes the blade on the back of the permit and drops both in a wall bin marked WASTE in three languages.
"White Tape," he says, nodding at the frost lines. "Keep it straight. It keeps you alive."
"Is that the name?" I ask.
He looks at me. The kind of look that puts a date on a thing. "It is now."
A speaker pops. A voice reads a schedule like a lullaby.
"Fourteen minutes to next drill," the ceiling says.
Her cadence is wrong, then right. Like a girl rushing to catch a train.
Kelly used to breathe like that when she ran.
I put my hands in my sleeves.
We double back through the grid. A door marked with nothing opens onto a room that belongs to no one: a metal table, two chairs, a sink that never gets used.
Rei pulls a badge from the paper case and sets it between us.
White plastic. Black print.
K-14.
Temporary. Provisional. Like a bandage.
"You're attached," he says. "You keep your distance. You do what I say. If I count, you don't blink."
"Yes," I say.
He looks at the badge like it might decide something for us.
Then: "Say Rule One."
"Come home."
He nods. Checks his watch. 07:41 flips to :42. He looks like a man who isn't allowed to be late and never is.
The room hums at the edges. I feel tired in the true way, not the dramatic one. Aura sits quiet. Muscles mutter about stairs I didn't climb.
On the wall, a small monitor blinks an alert most people will ignore.
GRADE C — ODAIBA — CONTAINMENT ENGAGED.
The red bar for Shinagawa keeps breathing.
Rei picks up the badge and pins it to my chest without touching my shirt. Two fingers on the edge of plastic. Precise. No heat traded.
"Don't put your hands on civilians," he says. "Don't take theirs. Use cloth. Use tools. Use your head."
"I know," I say.
"You don't," he says. "But you will."
We step back into the hall.
The tower goes quiet all at once, the way rooms do when they realize someone is listening. The floor numbers freeze. The lights blink and clear.
An elevator opens to an empty corridor and the sound of two extra footsteps for every one I take.
They fade when I stop.
I don't turn. I breathe.
Rei waits for the doors to close again.
"Rule Zero?" I ask, because the day will keep moving whether I understand it or not.
He doesn't smile.
"Kill the Devil," he says.
He starts walking.
I keep up.
On the elevator down, rain webbed the glass like white tape laid by a careful hand.
Shinagawa's red banner kept breathing.
"Fourteen minutes," the speaker whispered again in a voice that didn't belong to the building.
I closed my eyes and counted to three because it felt like a thing that might save me.
The doors opened on the city.
Tokyo inhaled.
We went with it.