Black Bullet - Volume 5 - Chapter 2.03

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With a flashing green light and a melody that sounded like a tweeting baby chick, a mass of humanity scrambled across the busy intersection. The asphalt radiated heat like an oven burner, and everyone in the crowd looked fatigued.

Amid this swell of humanity dodging and weaving around itself in intricate geometrical patterns, Rentaro Satomi’s eyes darted to and fro. There was a man with a hurried, restless walk repeatedly looking down at his watch. A couple walking hand in hand together. A mother on the way home from shopping, her son staring into his mobile phone as he walked. Whenever someone happened to size him up, he would unconsciously shudder.

“Keep looking forward, Rentaro,” a dry voice next to him said. “Try not to do anything too suspicious.” It sounded like the chestnut-haired girl had nothing fun, nothing exciting left in her world.

“Yeah, but it’s kind of hard to act normal when you’re consciously thinking about it.”

“At least you’re aware of that. But I don’t think you need to worry. People don’t care about you as much as you think.”

“Why are you finding ways to berate me with everything you say?”

“I’m just trying to help you relax, all right?” the girl replied, not a trace of emotion to her voice. Rentaro fell silent. She was making sense. Even now, the world was in a state of constant flux. It had been three days since Rentaro’s alleged death. He recalled how Sumire once told him, “You know, people care a hundred times more about how they just banged their little finger against the corner of the dresser than about some politician or famous singer dying.”

Everyone walking around in public had their own lives to live. Not a single one of them had any mental capacity to consider Rentaro’s role in their existences. He understood that on an intellectual basis, and he kept consciously telling that to himself.

But what if somebody recognized his face? What if someone screamed and ran up to him, grabbing his arms? The nightmarish image kept flitting in and out of his mind, filling him with a dreadful sense of uneasiness.

Soon, they were past the intersection and on their way down a long, wide shopping arcade. Rentaro gave his head a light shake. Something he keenly noticed, now that he was all alone in the world, was how much he appreciated all the people that once supported him in life, tangibly or intangibly. If it wasn’t for the warmth of the girl walking next to him, he might have been too scared to so much as walk out the door.

Of course, as partners went, the girl couldn’t have acted more disinterested in him. She only saw him as a way to lure over the New World Creation Project soldier in her sights, and it admittedly irritated him a little.

“We’re here.”

Rentaro turned his head, only to find the bare framework of the new city hall building looming before him. Construction had ground to a halt on the site, the catwalks that lined the outside walls barren of people. Tractors, power shovels, and other bits of construction equipment lay abandoned around the building, like some kind of avant-garde art installation.

The sun was at its highest point in the sky. Rentaro and Hotaru fled under the building’s shadow, sweat pouring unbearably out of their bodies. They were in the middle of the city, but it was still oddly quiet. Or perhaps it was their sixth sense creating the tension, warning them of another human being’s death in a way difficult to put in physical terms.

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Hotaru replied as she walked on ahead. Rentaro grimaced. Did she really care about Suibara so much that she was willing to kill in his name? He sighed and followed after her.

The police were finished with the crime scene. There was no clotted blood on the floor, no white pieces of tape marking out evidence locations—but simply standing at the scene made Rentaro’s brain vividly re-create the entire incident. He closed his eyes and made a silent prayer for the deceased.

What did you want to tell me, Suibara?

Looking to his side, he saw an expressionless Hotaru standing bolt upright.

“You’re not going to pray for him?” Rentaro asked.

“I did all my mourning when he died. I don’t have any tears left.”

“Oh…”

“So?” Hotaru’s chestnut hair swayed in the wind as she looked up at him. “What’re we going to do here?”

Rentaro scratched distractedly at the back of his head. “Well,” he said, “it’s not like I had some grand scheme in mind. But you never know what you’ll find at the crime scene, you know? Plus, just being here is reminding me of all kinds of things.” The fateful night replayed itself in his mind. “The body was still warm when I got here. He couldn’t have been dead for long. It was too much of a coincidence that the police just happened to show up at that time. Someone waited until the moment I appeared to call the cops.”

Which meant the culprit was someone close to the scene—close enough to visually monitor Rentaro’s movements.

Then something flashed into his mind. “Hotaru,” he said to the inscrutable girl next to him, “you said you noticed Suibara acting ‘strange’ around you, right? How was he acting, exactly?”

“He started working solo a lot more. He’d go out more and more often, and he’d never tell me where. He’d try to make up silly little excuses about it. I didn’t pry at all. I figured a guy like him just had a bunch of stuff going on in his life.”

“I told you about how he wanted to meet with Lady Seitenshi, right? I think he wanted to talk about a pair of conspiracies—the New World Creation Project, and the Black Swan Project.”

“Right. And the New World is just an updated version of the New Humanity Creation Project, isn’t it? What about Black Swan?”

Rentaro shook his head. “I have no idea. But something tells me that if I can find out, that’ll blow the whole door open on this thing.”

Suddenly, Hotaru’s remarks made a new image of Suibara rise up in his mind.

“Are you trying to blow the whistle about something? ’Cause if you have any evidence you can give me, I can make sure it gets to her.”

“…I’m sorry. My evidence got stolen.”

“Oh, right. When he came to my office, he said that he had some evidence that got stolen from him. That’s why he wanted to meet directly with either Lady Seitenshi or her assistant…”

…Then, another voice rose up from the depths of his memory:

“I’ve been told to ask you this, so I will. Where is the memory card Suibara gave you?”

“Ah…”

Rentaro and Hotaru exchanged glances. They must have come to the same conclusion simultaneously.

“Didn’t the assassin at the hotel ask you for a memory card, Rentaro?”

Rentaro thought for a moment, eyes on the ground.

“Yeah… It’s weird. Logically speaking, that card must’ve been what was stolen from Suibara, huh?”

“Wait…so, what, then? Kihachi got his memory card stolen by some evil group, but then that group thinks you have it? So who has it now?”

The cry of some irritated-sounding cicada in the distance seemed to rise in volume. The shadows cast on the building uncomfortably adjusted their positions. Now Rentaro was sweating for another reason. He felt ill.

Hotaru suspiciously eyed him. “Rentaro, are you sure Kihachi didn’t give you anything? Like, anything at all? He didn’t slip you something while you weren’t paying attention?”

Rentaro briskly shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

“Oh…”

“What about you? Did Suibara ask you to keep anything for him?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

They were right back where they started.

But Suibara’s memory card had to exist somewhere. It was the one thing they could link to everything else in the case. Rentaro decided to file that thought away for now as he mentally switched gears.

“Hotaru, there’s something else coming here reminded me of. Do you have Suibara’s cell phone or anything?”

“I was kind of hoping you did,” Hotaru replied, leaning against a concrete column. “You don’t know where it is?”

“No…”

Rentaro had been asked multiple times by police interrogators about Suibara’s mobile phone. It was clear, if indirect, evidence that the cops didn’t have it. Smartphones had been everyday parts of people’s lives for over twenty years now, their functionality and privacy measures both far advanced over the initial generation.

If they could track down the phone, that would earn them valuable evidence, such as his site-access history and call records. The police would doubtlessly do anything to find it.

“The killer must’ve taken it with him,” Rentaro said. “Bastards thought of everything.”

“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet,” replied Hotaru as she took out her cell phone, tapping at it a bit before bringing it to her ear. Must be calling Suibara’s line, Rentaro thought.

Suddenly, he could hear the faint sound of a phone ringing somewhere.

“Where is it?!”

“Ssh!” Hotaru brought a finger to her lips. Somewhere between the quiet, the cicada calls, and the roar of the trucks occasionally passing by the building, they could hear a sound as soft as the cry of a mosquito. Tiptoeing to the edge of the building, they felt the wind blow against their faces as they peered downward from the dizzying height. The sound was coming from beneath them.

Rentaro and Hotaru looked at each other, nodded, and quickly went downstairs. It came from the far end of the building’s outer perimeter, and now they could clearly hear it. A pop tune, one whose main melody was familiar even to the chronically nontrendy Rentaro. Wading through the tall grass to the side, they finally found it—a black smartphone, lying facedown, vibrating a little on the ground.

He picked it up just as the vibration stopped. The phone fell silent, and no matter how much he jabbed at the start button, it wouldn’t respond.

“The battery must be drained. That sure was close.”

“Oh…”

The phone must have fallen out of Suibara’s hand as he was shot. If he consciously threw it out of the building as he fell, it’d be a pretty remarkable feat on his part.

Suibara…

Rentaro felt an odd sense of nostalgia as he turned the phone over. The screen was heavily cracked, like someone had taken a knuckle-duster to it. It was amazing that the internals survived intact. Looking at the home screen, there was only the barest sliver of a charge left. Uncharacteristically, Rentaro found himself thinking this was the hand of fate at work.

“Let’s go find a charger.”

Flying into a nearby Internet café, the two of them grabbed a PC booth, settling down on the hard, contoured chairs and plugging the phone into the universal charger on the side of the computer. They waited a few moments, hands clasped in prayer, and then the phone whirred in Rentaro’s hand. One percent charged.

Rentaro and Hotaru gave each other a joyous glance. The screen was just as damaged as before, although the touchscreen somehow still worked. But before he could start flicking around the screen, Rentaro’s finger stopped. Suibara might be dead, but how permissible would this be—poking around someone’s private property just to clear your own name? He might be about to go face-to-face with a Kihachi Suibara he never knew before. Browsing through it might be something he’d eternally regret. Paranoia set in.

Well, he thought as he brought finger to screen, so be it.

From there, Rentaro and Hotaru took their time, searching through the phone for whatever clues they could find. But there was nothing particularly noteworthy in his inbox, and his photo gallery mostly consisted of people—all shapes and sizes. Over half of them were of Hotaru. Rentaro could’ve predicted it, given that Suibara adored her to the point where he had her as his wallpaper.

Then his eyes stopped on a certain photo. It must’ve been shot on Christmas. Suibara and Hotaru were there, both wearing Santa hats and standing on either side of a fancy cake in the background. Judging by the high angle, it must’ve been a selfie.

But the biggest surprise in the pic was that Hotaru was smiling. Not exactly beaming, per se, but both sides of her lips were curled gently upward as she gave the peace sign to the camera. It made Rentaro feel like a depraved peeper of sorts, and he swiped the photo away before Hotaru could notice his surprise.

With their check of the gallery complete, all that remained to search was the call history. There, they spotted something strange. Twice on the day of the murder, and once the day before, he had spoken with someone identified as “Dr. Surumi” in the directory. Looking further back in the history, they discovered Suibara exchanged a total of twenty-five calls with the doctor, extending back over the past month.

“Do you know who this is, Hotaru?”

“Yeah. Dr. Ayame Surumi. A forensic Gastrea pathologist. They spoke a few times about autopsy findings and stuff as part of our work.”

“Wow. Just like the one I know…”

“The one you know?”

“Ah, never mind. Do you know why they’d be talking to each other so often?”

Hotaru thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t think of anything. I don’t think Kihachi and Dr. Surumi had any kind of private relationship.”

“All right. We better check this person out.”

“Her office is in a university hospital in District 6,” Hotaru said as she stood up.

“She’s a woman?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, she wouldn’t happen to be pale to the point where you can see her veins, or wear a lab coat so long that it drags against the floor, or call her autopsy room ‘the kitchen,’ or have a body temperature of around 32 degrees Celsius, or build an expansion to her basement lab so she can have more room for her collection of corpses?”

“What?” replied Hotaru, clearly put off.

“Oh, uh, nothing. I’m sure it’s not the same woman. Probably.”

“She’s absent? Why?”

“Well, that’s what I’d like to know,” the tired-looking doctor replied, his ample belly fat wobbling as he walked up to them. He couldn’t have been an intern, but his youth was evidently clear. “She won’t answer the phone, and now I have to fill in for her shifts. I’m practically going out of my mind here.”

One eye exhibited a nervous tic as he spoke. It was clear that either stress or fatigue was taking its toll.

Rentaro and Hotaru were in an examination room at Shidao University Hospital. They managed to catch this doctor, who introduced himself as Kakujo, right as he was about to take a well-deserved break.

“Have there been that many Gastrea lately?” Rentaro asked point-blank.

Kakujo nodded broadly and opened his arms wide. “That many ain’t the half of it! It’s crazy! People are spreading all kinds of rumors about how there’s something up with the new Monolith 32 they built after the Third Kanto Battle.”

That couldn’t have been the case. The old Monolith 32’s collapse was entirely avoidable, the result of adulteration that reduced the purity of the Varanium inside. The new one was 100 percent Varanium, something Rentaro and the Tendo Civil Security Agency personally confirmed for themselves.

Come to think of it, didn’t Enju mention an uptick in Gastrea numbers lately, too? Apparently the trend wasn’t exclusive to the Tendo Group’s jurisdiction. Where were they all getting in?

“Say,” Rentaro remarked, “you mind if I ask you a question? How many ways are there for Gastrea to get into Tokyo Area, anyway?”

“Mmm, good question. Where should I begin…?”

The doctor looked up at the ceiling, pointing his potbelly directly at Rentaro.

“Basically, there are three infiltration routes—air, land, and underground. You sometimes see sea-dwelling Gastrea make it in, too, but they can’t be much of a danger if they can’t breathe air, you know? Otherwise, the Varanium field weakens once you get about 200 meters underground or 5,000 meters into the sky, so if you can burrow below or fly above those numbers, you can get in that way. Remember back when a pack of really obstinate guys picked up an upward-flowing air current and caused a huge racket around the city? That sorta thing.”

The Morphe Butterfly Incident, Rentaro thought, as he nodded vaguely at the doctor. But he didn’t voice it. If he demonstrated too much knowledge, Kakujo might start thinking he was a civsec. He wanted to avoid that if he could.

“So how would land-dwelling Gastrea get in?” Hotaru asked from the stool she was sitting on.

“Between the breaks in the Monoliths,” Kakujo instantly replied.

“The breaks?”

“Yeah. The Monoliths are built ten kilometers apart from one another, right? So they kind of aim for the places where the Varanium field’s at its weakest, usually in that five-kilometer interval right in the middle.”

“Do they really succeed all that often?”

“Nah. Probably nine out of ten of ’em die trying—plus, we got the self-defense force patrolling the border, so that one lucky survivor usually doesn’t last long, either. They say maybe one out of a hundred land-based Gastrea who attempt the crossing actually make it through. But we’re still talking a ton of them, and they have a tendency to try to attack people first, so no matter how much we beat ’em down, they keep on trying to get into Tokyo Area. So that’s why, in terms of sheer numbers, it’s still the land-based ones we see the most of in the statistics.”

“Wow. I see.”

“I mean,” Kakujo grumbled, “you know how much of a hit the SDF took in the Third Kanto Battle. Something like half the civsecs in Tokyo Area lost their lives. All we got left are people who didn’t join the battle or who fled to other Areas, and do you think we could really count on those guys? We’re still managing to keep this boat afloat so far, but all of us on the ground level are scared stiff that we’ll have another Pandemic before long. Plus, the news said that the ‘hero of Tokyo Area’ guy died in the Plaza Hotel a few days ago. Hey, actually, you look a little like—”

Rentaro scrambled to say something, but a cool, composed voice stopped him from the side.

“I apologize, Doctor, but could you tell us a little more about Dr. Surumi? How long has she been absent from work?”

On the way there, the pair decided that Hotaru would pose as Dr. Surumi’s sister. The ruse seemed to be working. Dr. Kakujo abandoned his suspicion and thought a little bit.

“Well, four days, I guess. On a job like this, if you’re absent for that long a period of time, you’re not gonna last too long. It’s tough, but that’s how it is.”

“Have you contacted the police yet?”

“The police? Nah, nah,” the doctor said, smiling as he dodged the question. “The retention rate in this place—ah, you probably don’t know what that word means, huh, little girl? Basically, people quit a whole lot around here. Surumi had a good head on her shoulders, so I figured she’d stick around for the long term, but…”

He was doubtlessly right. Performing pathological work on something as hideous as Gastrea corpses would require some pretty thick skin. Sumire, who enjoyed calling it her life’s work, was one in a million.

“Is there any chance she may have disappeared, or gotten caught up in something?”

“Hmm… I couldn’t really say,” Dr. Kakujo replied as he stroked his five-o’clock shadow. “I never thought about that…” Then he slapped a fist against his hand. “Hey, are you guys going to visit Surumi’s place after this?”

Hotaru drooped her shoulders in disappointment. She had a natural talent for acting. “I wanted to,” she said, “but my sister never gave her address out to anyone in the family, so…”

“Oh, that’s fine, I can give it to you. I think I asked her for it when I had to send off some stuff that came to the office for her.”

Rentaro wondered whether Dr. Kakujo was allowed to be so cavalier with people’s personal information, but he nevertheless appreciated his falling so completely for Hotaru’s cover story. Somehow, he doubted he could have convinced him to hand off the address by himself.

The doctor stood up and recomposed himself. “In exchange for that, there’s a favor I’d like to ask of you, if you don’t mind.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Surumi conducted a Gastrea autopsy about a month ago, but the electronic version of her report’s disappeared from our database for some reason. I know Surumi printed out a paper version for our records right beforehand, so she might still have it kicking around somewhere. Sorry to bother you guys, but if you see her, would you be able to get that for us? I don’t really mind if she wants to quit or not, but we got a legal obligation to keep track of our records, so…”

Rentaro and Hotaru gave each other a glance. Dr. Surumi began making frequent contact with Suibara a month ago, too.

“Sure thing,” Rentaro replied, nodding deeply as Dr. Kakujo wrote down the missing doctor’s address on a piece of notepaper. The duo was just about to leave when the doctor called to them from behind.

“Hey, you guys don’t happen to know what Black Swan is, do you?”

Rentaro and Hotaru both whirled around at once.

“Where did you hear that name?”

Dr. Kakujo’s brows arched, a little taken aback by Rentaro’s sudden forcefulness. “Uh…well, no, I mean, I just remembered it. Surumi kinda mentioned it in passing not long before she left. Like she was kind of brooding over it, you know? It was almost like she was having a nervous breakdown or something at her lab station. And that’s not all…”

The corpulent doctor looked honestly bewildered as he spoke.

“She said she ‘had to burn the vineyard,’ whatever that means.”

The Shidao University Hospital grounds were orderly and well-kept, complete with artificial lawns and ponds. It would have been an inviting spot to rest and forget about your classes on most days, but to Rentaro, the sight was simply depressing. Hotaru’s gait next to his was similarly heavy, almost plodding.

It was clear now that Dr. Surumi and Suibara were working together. But that just led to new problems for them to tackle.

“What the hell is the ‘vineyard’…?”

Hotaru, preoccupied with the same question, had already taken out her cell phone, setting it to holodisplay mode so Rentaro could see the screen in the air. The first result was for an English instruction site. The pronunciation made it sound like some Romance-language word, but it turned out “vineyard” was simply a fancy way of saying “grape farm.”

“‘Burn the vineyard,’ though… What could that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“That guy said Dr. Surumi started acting weird about a month ago, right?” said Hotaru, her voice free of any intonation. It was a far cry from the forlorn little girl she pretended to be for a moment in the doctor’s office. “And now that I think about it, I think I started noticing Kihachi hiding stuff from me a month or so ago, too.”

There it is again. A month.

“What happened during that time…?”

Rentaro decided to step back and take an impartial look at the situation. Dr. Surumi and Suibara, two people who allegedly had no personal connection to each other, had talked on the phone twenty-five times in the past month. They started puzzling the people around them with their behavior at about the same time. Suibara was a civsec. The only thing that could connect a civsec with a Gastrea pathologist was…well, a Gastrea.

“Did you and Suibara have any Gastrea encounters in the past month, Hotaru?”

“Yeah… Actually, Kihachi and I ran into one a month ago.”

“What kind was it?” an expectant Rentaro asked. Hotaru gave him a vague look of discomfort in response.

“I dunno…just your typical Stage Two. A flying one. It had a see-through thorax, so you could see all its guts and stuff floating around. It had a really long nose, too. Pretty gross.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Yeah. Kihachi and I were driving on the expressway and it was flying alongside us. I stuck myself out the passenger-side window and blew it away with a shotgun.”

“And then?”

“That’s all.”

“That can’t be all, Hotaru.”

“There’s really nothing else worth mentioning about it. I mean, the Gastrea looked pretty weird, yeah, but you could say that about all Gastrea that are Stage Two or higher. So then we left it to the police and went home, and… Oh, I remember that Kihachi got a phone call, then hurried right out of our place. Now that I think about it, I bet that was from Dr. Surumi.”

If the Gastrea looked normal enough but caused Suibara alarm later, the forensic pathologist must have discovered something highly unusual about it. But, just as before, this lead was getting them nowhere. Rentaro felt like they had a pretty decent selection of puzzle pieces, but there was no telling how they fit together to form a complete picture.

It was clear, however, that they now had information their foes absolutely did not want them to know. If the enemy picked up on their presence, they would undoubtedly face the full brunt of their vengeance. Hotaru was sadly not privy to Suibara and Dr. Surumi’s first exchange—but then again, if she were, chances were that she wouldn’t be breathing right now. A thorny dilemma.

They were now at the end of Shidao University grounds, an ornate cast-iron gate in the red brick wall that surrounded the area marking the front entrance. There, Rentaro noticed a security camera positioned overhead, watching the thin stream of students going in and out. He kept his head down as he passed by, but for a single moment, he couldn’t help but look at it out of the corner of his eye. The moment his eyes met the lens illuminated within the domed shell, he felt a chill run down his spine. He hurried his way out of the school.

“I found him!”

The tension across the control room was palpable as the operator shrieked out.

“Where?” shrieked Hitsuma, trying to contain his excitement. Instead of replying, the operator put up an image of a gate somewhere in the city on the gigantic main holopanel.

“Where’s this?”

“The front gate of the Shidao University Hospital in District 6.”

Tadashima watched on, agape. “You’re kidding me… So he didn’t flee to the Outer Districts? He’s been walking around inland the whole time?”

The operator tapped at her panel, highlighting a section of the image. This wasn’t the grainy footage of a generation or two ago, too fuzzy to be admissible as court evidence. The video transmitted to the server was clear as day. Nobody had to strain their eyes to decipher the scene before them as, for a single moment, a downward-facing man in black clothing peered at the camera. It was apparently just enough time for the face-recognition program to do its work.

Next, the operator stopped the video and zoomed in on the figure’s face. There was no mistaking it. It was Rentaro Satomi.

Hitsuma turned his head left and right, scanning the control room for a certain face. Soon finding it, he sidled up to Yuga. The boy’s hands were in his pockets, but the look on his face made it seem like he was about to break into song.

“What is the meaning of this?” Hitsuma said, his voice low enough that only Yuga could hear. “You told me your sniper bullet made a clean hit on him. And now he’s up and walking around!”

Yuga shrugged. “Guess it wasn’t so clean after all. But what’s the problem? This just makes things more fun.”

“Fun? You find this fun…?”

Having Rentaro alive would not only make the police the laughingstock of Tokyo Area—it’d also instill a sense of hope in Kisara Tendo, right when Hitsuma thought he had her tamed and obedient.

Before Hitsuma could explode in rage, Yuga used his right hand to point out a section of the holopanel.

“Mr. Hitsuma, that girl there was Kihachi Suibara’s Initiator, right?”

He was pointing at the quiet, demure girl with the bobbed haircut walking next to Rentaro. He had seen the face several times in the evidence sheets. There was no mistaking this, either.

“Hotaru Kouro…?”

Kihachi Suibara’s Initiator. They had ordered Nest to conduct an undercover investigation, but they had no idea she was working in tandem with this fugitive.

Tadashima approached Hitsuma, saluting. “I’ll take a car over to headquarters to request support. In the meantime, sir, I want you to stay in contact with me on the radio and tell me where the suspect is headed.” He then briskly walked out of the control room.

Hitsuma watched him go, stony-faced until he was sure the inspector was gone. Then he took out his phone and made a call, his mind running in circles as he listened to the ringing. He couldn’t afford to have the police catch Rentaro. He wasn’t sure how close this civsec was to the truth, but he’d already caused this much trouble for them—it would take a lot more than the status quo to take care of him. He couldn’t afford another mistake.

The phone picked up.

“Nest? Can you create a traffic jam for me? I’ve got a police car that I need to have delayed. Also, he’s still alive. Get me Hummingbird. We’re gonna crush him.”

The up-to-now composed Yuga blanched at this.

“Wait a minute, Mr. Hitsuma! Why Hummingbird? Rentaro Satomi’s my prey. I’m gonna head out.”

“People have seen your face.”

“My body was specifically designed to be capable of suppressing Rentaro Satomi! Who could possibly be more qualified than I am?”

“Hummingbird’s good enough.”

“But…!”

“Enough!”

Yuga’s mouth stayed open, still hoping to get a final word or two in, but he thought better of it. He left the control room, gnashing his teeth the whole way.

Hitsuma, his breathing accelerated, glared at the close-up of the boy in the holopanel. If he’s pouncing upon us, trying to take us down with him…then it’s time to prove to him that dead men really don’t tell tales.