The voice belonged to a woman who looked like she'd designed herself with a specific effect in mind and nailed it.
White hair. Gold eyes. The kind of face that made you feel like you were being evaluated by something that had been evaluating things since before your civilization had a name for the concept. She was sitting across from him at a table that had no business existing, in a space that had no business being a space.
Rei looked around once. Then he looked back at her.
"I'm dead," he said.
"Technically."
"The three bullet holes would suggest non-technically."
She tilted her head. Something about the movement said she found him interesting the way a researcher finds an unexpected variable interesting. Clinical. Not unkind, exactly, but not warm either. "You're taking this well."
"I've cross-examined pathological liars, a sitting judge, and a man who'd convinced himself he hadn't committed fraud for eleven years." Rei straightened slightly, out of habit. "You're going to have to work harder to unsettle me."
She smiled. It didn't reach the gold eyes. "My name is Aria. And I have a problem."
"People with problems usually make appointments."
"I reincarnate people," she said, ignoring that. "I've done it several times. The results have been..." She searched for the word. "Variable."
Rei waited. He'd learned at twenty-three that silence was a better tool than most questions.
"There's a world," Aria continued, "where power and law have been the same word for so long that people have forgotten they weren't always. The courts exist. They just don't function. The guilty walk out. The innocent fill the cells that are left over." She folded her hands on the table. "I need someone who finds that personally offensive."
"And you picked me because I'm dead and therefore available."
"I picked you because you turned down a bribe in a back alley at eleven p.m. and your first instinct was to cite the relevant statute." She paused. "Most people beg. You cross-examined them."
Rei thought about that.
"What's the compensation?" he said.
She blinked. She hadn't expected that question, which told him something. "Sorry?"
"If I'm doing a job, there's compensation. What is it?"
A longer pause. Then something shifted in her expression that might, in a human, have been respect. "A skill," she said. "One I think you'll find appropriate."
He considered the table, the non-space, the total absence of any alternative.
"Terms," he said. "I want them in writing."
Aria looked at him for a long moment. Then she laughed, once, short and genuine. "There is no writing here."
"Then we start with a bad precedent." He met her eyes. "What's the world called?"
"Aeternos."
"And the courts there. How corrupt?"
"Entirely."
Rei exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Fine," he said. "I'll fix it."
He said it the way he'd said everything in his professional life. Not like a declaration. Like a thing that was going to happen and he was simply noting it for the record.
Aria smiled again. This time it was different. This time it looked like something between relief and pity.
He'd think about that later.