The first day, Kori slept. Twelve hours, dreamless, sleep that erased time. When he woke, the light through the window had shifted from morning to late afternoon, and his body felt strange in ways he couldn't immediately name.
Not wrong. Different. Like wearing clothes that fit better than they should.
He lay on the futon for a while, cataloging. His spine didn't hurt. It should have—he remembered the wall, the impact, the absolute certainty that something had broken in a way that couldn't be fixed. But when he moved, when he twisted to test the range, there was nothing. Not even stiffness.
Just bone and muscle and something else. Something that hummed faintly at the base of his skull when he paid attention to it.
Akane had left a plate in the refrigerator. Rice, pickled vegetables, fish. The same as always. He ate standing at the counter, watching the light change outside the window, and when he finished he washed the plate and put it in the rack beside the cup from that morning.
The blue ceramic cup sat in the cabinet. He didn't look at it.
That evening, he found the knife.
It was in the kitchen drawer, the one that stuck slightly when you opened it. A paring knife, nothing special, the blade dulled from years of use. Akane used it for vegetables, for the small precise cuts that cooking required. He'd seen her use it a hundred times.
Kori held it in his hand. The weight was familiar. But now he was thinking about the wall, about the broken spine, about the way his body had rebuilt itself around something new.
He pressed the blade to his forearm. Not hard. Just enough to feel the edge, the cold line of metal against skin.
Then he pushed.
The cut opened clean. Blood welled up, red and ordinary, and the pain arrived a half-second later—sharp, bright, exactly what a cut should feel like. He watched the blood run down his arm, watched it drip onto the counter, and waited.
The edges of the wound began to close.
Not quickly. Not the instant knitting he'd felt when his spine rebuilt itself. But fast enough that he could see it happening, the flesh drawing together, the blood slowing, stopping. In thirty seconds the cut was a pink line. In a minute it was gone.
He made another cut. Deeper this time. The blood came faster, pooling in the sink, and the pain was more substantial, something that demanded attention. He watched it heal. Forty-five seconds. A little slower.
Another cut. Another. Each one taking slightly longer to close, each one demanding more from whatever was inside him now.
By the fifth cut his head was swimming, a dizziness that had nothing to do with blood loss and everything to do with depletion—something being used up.
He set the knife down. Cleaned the blade, cleaned the sink, cleaned the counter where the blood had dripped. The dizziness faded slowly, over the next hour, and by the time Akane came home he was sitting in his closet, staring at the photograph of Hina, feeling perfectly ordinary.
"Did you eat?" Akane asked through the curtain.
"Yes."
"Good."
Her footsteps moved away, toward the kitchen. He heard her open the refrigerator, close it, begin the small noises of preparing dinner for one.
Kori sat in his closet and thought about what he'd learned.
He could heal. Fast, but finite. There was a cost—not blood, not pain, but energy. Whatever reservoir fueled the presence in his spine could be emptied. Push too hard, and the tank ran dry. Wait, and it filled back up.
He wondered what else had changed.
The second day, he went running.
It had been years since he'd run anywhere. The job at the convenience store required nothing but standing, and before that—before everything—he'd been a child who walked everywhere, who never saw the point of hurrying.
You walk like an old man, Hina used to say. Like you've got all the time in the world.
He didn't have a destination in mind. Just out, past the convenience store, past the shrine where he'd bought omamori as a child, out toward the river where the joggers gathered in the early morning.
The first kilometer felt normal. Breath coming faster, heart rate climbing, the familiar burn of muscles that hadn't been used this way in too long. He settled into a rhythm, feet striking pavement, the world passing by in a blur of storefronts and pedestrians.
The second kilometer, the burn didn't come.
He kept waiting. The tightness in his lungs, the heaviness in his legs, the wall. None of it. His legs moved. His lungs filled and emptied. The pavement passed beneath him at a speed that should have hurt, and it felt like walking to the corner store.
Four kilometers. He stopped at the river, not winded, not even warm.
His hands found the railing. The metal dented under his fingers.
An old man sat on a bench nearby, feeding pigeons from a paper bag. The river carried debris downstream, gray-green and sluggish. A Tuesday morning. Nothing special.
You walk like an old man, Hina used to say.
Kori looked at the dents in the railing. At his hands, unmarked, steady. He walked home slowly, testing each step, waiting for the tired to catch up with him.
It never did.
That evening, Akane dropped a plate.
She was washing dishes, her back to him, and Kori was standing in the doorway of the kitchen—existing in the same space the way they'd learned to exist over eight years.
The plate slipped from her wet fingers. He saw it happen, saw the moment her grip failed, saw the ceramic begin its fall toward the floor.
He caught it.
Not a dive, not a lunge. His hand was there before the plate arrived, plucking it from the trajectory like picking fruit from a tree. The motion felt casual, inevitable. He had known exactly when and where the plate would fall before Akane's fingers had even loosened.
Akane stared at him. Her hands were still wet, still holding the shape of the plate that was no longer there. Water dripped from her fingers onto the floor.
Kori set the plate on the counter.
"Careful," he said.
She didn't say anything. Just watched him, the same way she'd watched him for eight years, looking for something hidden. This time, there was something to find. He could see the question forming behind her eyes, the shape of words she wasn't sure how to speak.
He went back to his closet.
A moment later, he heard the water running again, the small sounds of dishes being washed and put away. She didn't ask.
That night, sleep came slowly.
He lay on his futon and listened to the apartment settle around him—the creak of old wood, the hum of the refrigerator, Akane's breathing through the thin wall. The world felt different now. Not just his body, but the way he perceived everything around it.
Time moved at a pace he could track, could anticipate. The falling plate had been obvious, inevitable, a trajectory he'd understood before it began.
He thought about the devil on the street. The ice-crack sound of its vertical mouth. The way his body had known exactly where to cut, exactly when to move, as if the fight had been choreographed years in advance.
He thought about Hina. About the alley beside the shrine. About standing frozen while the devil's legs bent backward and drove through her stomach.
That memory came without paralysis.
He could feel it trying—the old response, the ice in his veins, the body refusing to obey—but it couldn't find purchase anymore. Something had been severed. Rewired. The signal that used to lock him in place now dissipated before it reached his muscles, absorbed by the presence in his spine.
He fell asleep eventually. He didn't dream.
On the third day, Akane left early.
He heard her moving through the apartment at 6 AM, heard the coffee brewing, heard the front door open and close. Then silence. The apartment empty except for him and whatever else lived there now.
Kori waited an hour, listening to the building settle, making sure she wasn't coming back for something forgotten. Then he walked to the middle of his closet, stood in the small clear space between the futon and the wall, and lifted his palm.
"Scythe."
The black material flowed down his arm. He watched it this time—the way it emerged from somewhere beneath his skin, the way it encased his hand and forearm in something that looked like obsidian but moved like water.
The blade sprouted from his palm. Twenty-four inches. Obsidian steel. It caught the morning light and didn't reflect it.
He held it there. The weight was negligible, balanced, an extension of his arm rather than something separate. He moved it experimentally—a slow arc, a thrust, a defensive position he'd never been taught but somehow knew.
His body understood the scythe the way it understood breathing. Automatic. Inevitable.
He turned the blade, angled it to catch the light differently, and saw his reflection in the obsidian surface.
Brown eyes stared back at him. But not his eyes—not nineteen years old, not shaped by convenience store nights and eight years of frozen grief. These were the eyes of a child. Eleven, maybe. Younger.
The boy in the reflection stood in a place that wasn't this closet, somewhere darker, and in his arms he held a black cat. The cat's eyes were closed. The boy's were open, brown and wide, and he was looking at Kori with recognition.
Kori blinked. The reflection became his own again—nineteen, tired, holding a blade made of darkness in a closet that smelled like dust and old paper.
He stared at the obsidian surface for a long time. The boy didn't come back. Neither did the cat.
Eventually, he retracted the scythe. The black material flowed back up his arm, disappeared into his skin, left his palm unmarked. He sat on the futon and looked at Hina's photograph and thought about nothing in particular.
That afternoon, he called the convenience store and quit. The manager asked if everything was okay. Kori said yes and hung up.
Akane came home at the usual time. She made dinner—rice, pickled vegetables, fish—and they ate in silence, sitting across from each other at the small table, not looking at each other.
When she finished, she washed her plate and put it in the rack. She made tea. She sat back down.
"You quit your job," she said.
It wasn't a question. Small neighborhood, smaller building. Word traveled.
"Yes."
She wrapped her hands around her tea cup. Not the blue ceramic one—never that one—but a plain white cup she'd bought years ago, the glaze cracked from heat and use. Steam rose between them.
"Are you going to tell me why?"
Kori looked at her. Same brown eyes as Hina. Same shape of jaw.
She'd aged in the eight years since she'd taken him in—gray at her temples now, lines around her mouth that hadn't been there when she'd cleared out her closet and hung a curtain across the doorway. She had given him eight years of everything she had.
And she was hollowed out by it.
He could see it now—the inward curve of her shoulders, the way she clutched the cup like she needed an anchor. Eight years of silence. Eight years of waiting for him to become someone she could finally reach.
"Something changed," he said.
Akane's eyes searched his face. Looking for what she'd always looked for. This time, she found the edge of it—he saw the moment it registered, the slight widening of her eyes, the way her hands tightened around the cup.
"Changed how?"
He didn't answer. The silence stretched between them, filled with eight years of things unsaid, and Akane's breath caught once before she got it under control.
"Okay," she said finally. "Okay."
She finished her tea. Washed the cup. Went to bed without saying goodnight.
Kori sat at the table until midnight, listening to the building settle around him. Then he went to his closet, lay down on the futon, and closed his eyes.
The dream came.
He was standing in a room he didn't recognize. Dark, but not completely—light came from somewhere, enough to see the outlines of furniture, the shape of walls. It felt like a place that had existed once, a long time ago, before it had been forgotten.
The black cat sat in the center of the room.
She was grooming herself, one paw raised, tongue working methodically through the fur. The same small body, the same posture, but different somehow—more defined, more present. As if the dying thing behind garbage bags had been a sketch, and this was the finished painting.
Her eyes were purple. Not amber, not gold. A soft violet that caught the dim light and held it.
Kori stood at the edge of the room and watched. The cat didn't acknowledge him—just continued grooming, paw to tongue to fur, patient and thorough.
No sound except the faint rasp of tongue against fur.
He understood without knowing how that this was the first time. The first contact. The first acknowledgment of whatever lived in his spine now.
The cat finished grooming. She set her paw down, settled into a loaf shape, and closed her eyes.
Kori woke.
Gray light through the window. Early morning. He lay still for a moment, feeling the dream fade, feeling the presence in his spine settle back into dormancy. No voice. No urging. Just the memory of purple eyes and the methodical rasp of grooming.
He got up. Made coffee. Drank it standing at the kitchen counter, watching the light strengthen outside the window. Akane was still asleep—he could hear her breathing through the thin wall, the slow rhythm of someone not yet ready to face another day.
The knock came at 7:15 AM.
Three sharp raps, evenly spaced. Expectant. Kori set down his coffee cup. Walked to the front door. Opened it.
Two people stood in the hallway.
A woman and a man, both in suits that didn't quite fit the neighborhood. The woman was young, mid-twenties, with brown hair that fell past her shoulders and eyes the color of sea glass. The man stood three paces back, hands loose at his waist, weight balanced. Not threatening. Just ready. The answer to diplomacy gone wrong.
The woman's eyes swept over Kori—his face, his hands, the way he stood. Whatever she was looking for, she found it immediately.
"Kuroshi Kori," she said. Not a question. "Public Safety Bureau, Shibuya Division. We need to talk about what happened on Sakura Street three days ago."
Behind him, Kori heard Akane's door open. Heard her footsteps stop at the end of the hallway. Heard her breath catch the way it had caught last night, when she'd looked at him across the table and seen the edge of something she couldn't name.
Kori looked at the woman from Public Safety. Her face gave nothing away. The man beside her shifted the folder from one arm to the other, papers rustling.
"Can we come in?" the woman asked.
The morning light fell across the hallway floor, catching dust motes in the air. Somewhere outside, a train was running. The city continued without pause, without concern for the knock at the door or the people asking to come inside.
Kori didn't step back. The door stayed where it was.
"No," he said.