The noodle shop under the flyover hosted ghosts after midnight. Not the moaning kind — the city had little patience for those — but the quieter sort: men and women with empty bowls and full pockets; a courier whose bike chain caught the streetlight like a wire; two office workers who had lost their ties somewhere between salary and bar.
In the corner booth, Kurogami stirred his broth once, twice, as if testing the viscosity of the night.
"He won't come," said the man across from him, voice flat, amused. The hood hung loose, the scarf above his mask crooked like he didn't care if it hid him. He lifted chopsticks, ate with an economy of motion that bordered on lazy. "You're not his gravity."
Kurogami's mouth curved a fraction. "I didn't invite him."
"Even wiser," the man said. "You make poor company."
The shop's TV murmured a variety show into the steam. The cook wiped a counter that was already clean. Outside, a truck sighed at a light.
"I hear you were seen at the docks," Kurogami said, the words neutral.
"I was seen by no one who mattered," the man replied, and the way he said it made the sentence true in some geometry that didn't care about cameras or reports.
Wraith.
Up close, he had the stillness of a cat who'd never had to learn fear the slow way. His eyes were unreadable above the scarf. If he'd laughed in the last hour, the cloth hadn't noticed.
"You've taken contracts from both sides in the last year," Kurogami said. He sipped broth. "Efficient."
"I take contracts from those who pay and do not bore me," Wraith said. He tilted his head, studying Kurogami like a photograph he chose not to sign. "You are neither client nor entertainment."
"You're curious," Kurogami said, which was not a question.
"I am not bored," Wraith corrected. "That is all."
"About him."
A pause that wasn't quite. The TV audience laughed tinnily as a comedian fell off a fake horse.
Wraith set his chopsticks down with mathematical precision. "I am curious how the detective will decide his mass," he said. "He imagines himself a vector, but he is not yet heavy enough to bend anything worth bending."
Kurogami's eyes warmed with something like approval. "He will be."
"You hope he will be," Wraith said. "You mistake hope for physics."
Kurogami leaned back. "The city is full of men who punch. It rarely produces one who chooses where the punch belongs." He let the steam fog his glasses and then recede. "He listens. He can be taught to listen to the right things."
"And if he decides to listen to the wrong ones?" Wraith's tone didn't sharpen; it simply cooled. "I have known men who listened to their mothers and became careful, and men who listened to their ghosts and became knives."
"If he listens to ghosts," Kurogami said, "we give them names and pull them into the light."
Wraith chuckled once, the sound nearly silent. "You love the light like you invented it."
"On the contrary," Kurogami said. "I love it because it shows people what they've always been." He set the bowl aside, empty. "The Veil thinks secrecy is strength. They are wrong. Secrecy is stall. The longer they stall, the more they will need a lion to keep their herd together. They will buy your time with blood because blood spends clean, and you will take it because you are honest about what you are."
Wraith tapped a finger against the table, an absent metronome. "And you will use the boy as a torch."
"As a symbol," Kurogami corrected softly. "Weapons rust; symbols don't."
"Symbols break," Wraith said, standing. His chair didn't scrape. "When they do, the shards are useful, but not always to the one who lifted them first."
Kurogami lifted a hand in a small open gesture that looked like surrender and wasn't. "Will you take a contract if I offer?"
"I already have one," Wraith said. "It conflicts with boredom more than with your interests."
"From them?"
Wraith's eyes flicked once toward the door, where someone had passed too close to the shop without entering — a shadow choosing to remain exterior. "From someone who thinks names matter," he said. "Theirs do not."
He stepped away, and the night received him without a ripple.
Kurogami watched the space he'd left and then reached for his phone. He typed without looking: He is ready to be asked harder questions. He didn't send it. He deleted the message and typed a different one: Increase observation on his parents. Keep distance. No contact. He didn't send that either.
He put the phone away. Across the table, the bowl Wraith had used was already cooling, a ring of steam making a halo that wouldn't last a minute.
—
Elsewhere, the Guild breathed in its other ways.
Aya stacked gauze in her clinic and hummed under her breath, the kind of melody that came from childhood when songs fixed scraps into quilts. She paused, closed her eyes, and felt for the outline of Seigi's exhaustion the way a hand finds a scar in the dark. He was pushing. He was always pushing. She filled a thermos with barley tea and set it where she would forget it a little less easily.
Hana stood in the range, ear protection resting against her neck like a necklace she hadn't decided to wear. A paper target forty meters downrange waited, patient. She didn't fire. She let her breathing settle until the world thinned to a coin edge. Listen on the inhale. Move on the exhale. She smiled, small. He had read the note. She could tell the way one tells the weather in a bird's absence.
Riku napped on a bench like he'd fought sleep and then betrayed it. He dreamed of a burning car and woke with his hand closed tight around nothing. He didn't tell anyone. He jogged three laps around the mezzanine until his legs believed him again.
Seigi, upstairs in the lit world, wrote a report about a man who faked his own disappearance using three IC cards and two wigs. He watched Sato show a rookie how to lie to himself less on paper. He met Hana's eyes through a glass door and looked away first because sometimes bravery was knowing when to sit in your chair and do your job.
He left work late. He bought his mother's favourite mochi from a stall that closed in ten minutes and walked three extra blocks to hand it to her. She scolded him for not wearing a scarf and then slipped one around his neck from a drawer without saying she had bought it last winter just in case.
On his way home, a bottle rolled in a gutter and clinked against the curb. He turned. The alley offered him a cat and a broken chair. Nothing else.
When he reached his apartment, he put key to lock and paused. The sense of being measured — not hunted, not yet, just… weighed — pressed like weather on a bad knee. He turned the key anyway. Inside, he set down his bag and stood very still until the silence felt less like a test.
His phone buzzed with a message that contained no words. Just a location pin and the time: 22:00. He didn't reply.
He heated rice. He ate half. He washed the bowl. When he went to bed, he lay on his back and remembered a schoolyard and a fist and the taste of blood and a sentence that had carried him farther than all the others: Heroes don't stay down.
The city slept badly around him.
—
On a rooftop that the wind loved more than anyone else, Wraith stood with his hands in his pockets and watched Shinjuku's lights do their ancient trick—pretending to be stars that people had control over. He wasn't smiling, but he was not bored.
"Mass follows vectors," he said to no one. "Let's see which way he leans."
He stepped off the edge and didn't fall. He simply asked the night to decide what falling meant, and the night, obliging as ever, gave him an answer only he could hear.