The man called Renjo Aki raised his hands and stopped. He stared at the gaunt, headless man he had so strangely killed. The torso was, from an utterly perverse perspective, doing what it should naturally do. It leaned forward, reached out, and picked up the head.
The man who had killed him stood there like a statue as the bloody corpse clambered to its feet. The air was thick with magical miasmas and the stench of blood.
In the crystal clear moonlight, the bad dream had taken a turn for the worse.
The arms cradling the head raised it up and placed it on the stump of the neck. Out of alignment at first, the head facing to the side. A quick adjustment brought it facing forward.
The head opened its eyes. A grave and gravelly voice said, “I, Gensei Roran, have spoken. When we meet again, the era will no longer be ours. I shall rest for a while. What shall become of this city? Renjo Aki, this is the time for you to start planning as well.”
The words had barely left his mouth when his body crumpled. In a flash, the bloody black smoke spread through the air and shrouded the dark silhouettes of the three other figures.
As Onizuka tried to keep his eyes open, exercising all of his remaining will, he heard what he took to be Renjo Aki’s voice.
“Sorry for wasting your time, Mr. Policeman.”
Then the headless Roran’s response. “He cannot be left to his own devices. It is not good for the hoi polloi to see their overlords fighting among themselves.”
“I—”
Onizuka feared the voice of that child more than all the rest. Renjo came to his rescue. “There is no need to take his life. I shall take his memories instead.”
“Can you, from this man?”
“Only the exchange of your life after this for being alive. Which would you prefer?”
Hardly a simple struggle between life and death, these mortal enemies not only wagered their souls, but freely dealt with the devil on matters that lay far beyond this realm.
On the verge of losing consciousness, Onizuka croaked out the answer and then slumped to the ground.
Sasaki concluded the account, his voice exhausted. The young man rested his elbow on the table and cupped his chin in the palm of his hand.
“Fascinating. A truly fascinating story. So for fifteen years, he committed himself voluntarily to a psychiatric facility and didn’t say a word. He shut his mouth and closed the door on his life. They tied up the loose ends in an altogether alarming manner. That was how you came across my name and Roran’s name. So, what do you think? Does that make you a lucky man, or the opposite?”
Though Setsura asked the question with an utterly pleasant smile, Sasaki felt a cold chill down his back.
“I can surmise the rest. The police officer knows nothing. The true heart of the matter yet eludes you. And so you turned to Setsura Aki.”
Sasaki cleared his throat and tried to clear his thoughts of the sheer surprise and that faint sense of terror. He had finally noticed that the young man in front of him was a different person entirely. That smile was the smile of an angel. An angel of death.
“Alas, having only just returned to this city after fifteen years, I’m still getting myself up to speed on the subject. This conversation has served as a tremendously useful reference. Greatly appreciated. That the price should come at the cost of a life is highly unfortunate, to be sure.”
These angelic assurances perversely set Sasaki’s mind at ease. Mopping his sweaty brow, he tasted a bit of the good old piss and vinegar that got him up in the morning. A faraway look came to his eyes.
“Returning here after fifteen years—the kid of six or seven Onizuka spoke of—I see—you aren’t Setsura Aki. You’re Gento Roran.”
The young man didn’t answer. That was the answer.
Sasaki felt the tension oozing out of his body. Not only his muscles, but his soul was growing numb. This was not the time or place to care about the reasons.
“Hey,” Sasaki said, making a show of backing down for the time being. “This tough guy business is all part of the act, okay?”
He understood this wasn’t going to end well. He’d begun to grasp what kind of a person he was dealing with. Which was to say that the dark depths of some people were well beyond human comprehension, except that Gento Roran had no intention of helping him out.
He was the hoi polloi, the insects crushed beneath the feet of the overlords.
In that case, better to kill than be killed. Though he lived outside Shinjuku, Sasaki traveled regularly to Demon City to gather material. While associating with people who breathed in its vapors on a daily basis, their moral and ethical outlook had seeped into his own consciousness in ways he wasn’t fully aware of.
“All I want is material for my articles. This feud between you and Setsura Aki is totally not my concern. I’m a neutral observer. I don’t know what you’ve been doing or where you’ve been doing it for the last fifteen years, but I certainly wouldn’t begrudge sharing what I know. Of course, in return, I would expect a helping hand in padding out my portfolio a bit.”
Gento Roran didn’t answer, only quietly looked back at Sasaki. Sasaki’s face reflected in his eyes. Only the reflection. No sense of will or emotion shone in those eyes. The light in his eyes was more that of a camera lens.
“Or then again, maybe not.”
Sasaki scratched his head with his left hand. His right dropped to his side. His left hand quickly moved to the horizontal. A loud
bang!
shook the air.
Gento’s eyes moved slightly, a natural response. Sasaki’s right hand moved too. The hem of his jacket kicked up. He was holding a Military & Police revolver. The 2.5 inch barrel was perfect for making a quick draw.
Raising the gun to a 45 degree angle, Sasaki felt a sense of calm well up in his chest. “You talk big, Gento Roran,” he called out.
His finger resting on the trigger, a moment’s intention away from firing, he aimed at the point between his collarbones. Double-action revolvers had a tendency to pull low. At this distance, if Gento stood up, he’d hit him in the stomach. Even hitting him in the heart or lungs wouldn’t necessarily kill him on the spot, to say nothing of a shot that only grazed the ribs.
In order to momentarily distract an opponent in a high-risk situation, he had a small flash bang concealed in the left cuff of his trousers. It’d done its job this time too.
“Like I said, I don’t have any desire to shoot you. I’m merely a reporter in search of a story. Give me an interview and everything ends nicely. I haven’t met this Setsura Aki chap either. So, what do you say? Deal?”
This blend of coercion and conciliation was something Sasaki could rightly take pride in.
Gento didn’t answer. His frame shook. Sasaki tightened his grip, then relaxed. Gento was only shrugging his shoulders. He was a handsome enough man that everything he did had a kind of panache to it.
“What did you want to ask me about?”
Imparting additional weight to this discovery of his, Sasaki paused to take two dramatic breaths, then said, “The true nature of this city.”
He was answered only by silence.
“What about it?” he pressed, a touch of irritation in his voice.
Gento said, hardly more than a whisper, “I should be on my way. There is much more I have to learn before I can answer your question. For now, we should say our goodbyes and leave it at that.”
“Let’s stop screwing around, okay? I’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. Mine is not the kind of job that can wait another day. I don’t have any qualms about pulling the trigger. Perhaps if I presented your head on a platter, the Aki clan will make me a better offer. Tell me what I want to know.”
“A good idea,” said Gento, not hiding the mirth in his voice.
Sasaki felt a burning in his gut, an anger born of holding the clear advantage in the showdown but being dissed anyway. His emotions snapped like an over-tightened string. It wasn’t hard shooting a person. Even with Gento dead, there was still Setsura Aki to deal with. But he couldn’t be as big a pain in the ass as this guy.
The six reports echoed off the walls and ceiling. Sasaki grimaced at the painful shock to his ears. Without a second glance at the body lying beneath the haze of blue smoke, he turned toward the door. The interrogation rooms were soundproof, but there was no point in overstaying his welcome.
A cold sensation crawled across his skin. He stopped. He looked back. Gento’s smile drifted up behind the fog of gun smoke like a flower.
“Want to give it another shot?”
Gento thrust out his hand in front of Sasaki’s face. A hard, metallic sound came from the tabletop. Sasaki looked down as the spent bullets spilled from his hand. The deformed slugs suggested they had all struck home.
Gento opened his hand and showed his palm to Sasaki. It was covered with metal. The skin shone with a black luster. Based on how smoothly he unfurled his fingers, it must be a very flexible foil. The condition of the bullets was evidence of its hardness.
But that wasn’t what struck Sasaki dumb.
How had he snagged those bullets in midair?
Those lumps of lead traveled at up to two thousand feet a second.
“What are you doing?” Gento asked with a perfectly straight face. “If you have to be on your way, then you’d better be on your way. Before my mood changes for the worse.”
Sasaki began his retreat only several seconds after Gento made this pronouncement. He was in way over his head in the weirdness. All he wanted to do right then was get out of that police station. He couldn’t help feeling a sense of brotherhood with this Aki fellow, whose face he wouldn’t even recognize.
Even after leaving the room and heading to the elevators, he kept his eyes focused on that door, practically running down the hallway backwards.
It was one of those dreary, two thousand yen a night rooms, in one of those cheap hotels that could be found just about anywhere in Shinjuku. Hardly ten feet by ten feet, equipped with a metal-frame bed, a metal desk and chair—old, used, secondhand and bargain basement.
The ceiling lamps provided sufficient illumination, though the sterile white light did nothing to dampen that bleak sense of a winter landscape.
The reason was obvious. The bare concrete walls had the effect of enervating the human mind as soon as anyone stepped into the room. An organic person would never truly feel at home among the inorganic.
Through a flimsy plywood door in one corner was a toilet and bath. Nothing else. A cold, hard space that suggested nothing of the “life force” engendered by all living things.
But there was something living there, a black silhouette lying on his back on the white mattress. It would be no exaggeration to describe his youthful features as sculpturesque, perhaps chiseled from pale marble by the hands of an accomplished artist.
Light shone off him, a brilliant kind of beauty, brighter than the light itself. But calling it the “light of life” suggested that, contrary to the average man on the street, this young man was a kind of antimatter formed from moonlight. He breathed in air and breathed out moon dust. The touch of his fingers surely left behind traces of frost.
Such was the unapproachable beauty found in too perfect a mien. And in the countenance of Setsura Aki.
A long black slicker covered his lanky frame. He didn’t remove it even in the room. Darker than the artificial night, his pale hands and face emerged from the sleeves and collar.
His raven eyes were open, looking at nothing, taking in the past and the future, sadness or joy, and reflected it all back in a cool light. Perhaps all creatures of Demon City looked at the world with eyes like these.
This was one of Setsura’s many safe houses scattered throughout Shinjuku. He’d instructed his secretary to take a breather outside the ward, shuttered the
senbei
shop and moved here—before his visit to the Sanbo Group.
Everything he needed was packed into the one suitcase beneath the bed. He hadn’t carried it here. It never left the place.
Something moved in the stagnant air, as if pushing aside the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen. Setsura’s right hand.
A white sheet of paper slipped off the edge of the bed, glided across the floor, and approached a corner of the door.
A brief flash. The thin Japanese paper parted in two. Not torn. The one sheet became two, as if two pages stuck together had been peeled apart. They were about to hit the door and wall when—without the hint of a draft—they changed direction like willful animals and rose vertically up the surface of the walls.
Climbed halfway up when the forefinger on his right hand moved ever so slightly. One sheet of paper became four. And kept on going, reaching the ceiling and sliding along it.
Their movements only became disturbed when reaching the middle of the ceiling. The four sheets and the one trailing behind scattered in all four directions.
Setsura pursed his lips. The puff struck the four sheets. They became eight. And then the same wave of wind hit the newly formed four. As if each puff of air had a mind of its own, losing shape and form, the bits and pieces fluttered down.
Ignoring the snow of paper, the man in black sat up. He went to the door. He didn’t reach for the knob. The key quietly turned in the lock. As if nudged by the breezes he’d aroused, the door swung open of its own accord.
The gloomy hallway revealed no sign of human life, all the doors shut tight, like he was the only occupant in the building.
A dozen minutes later, Setsura was wending his way through the crowds on Yasukuni Avenue. Past the Tokyo Daihanten Restaurant, Hanazono Shrine, and the Pension Fund Association Building and on through Ichigaya, eventually coming to the Outer Moat Road. The streets here showed the full effects of the Devil Quake, the rows of houses still dotted with mountains of rubble.
The buildings here just barely preserved the outlines of their previous selves. Patched up, or simply opened for business the way they were, or taken over by squatters and vagrants.
This sense of indifference after the Devil Quake, the investigating committees had all observed, was a particular characteristic of Shinjuku.