Chapter Eight
Toshiki hung in his chains, and tried to be grateful that the blonde girl with the doll had taken Fudo Takuma away with her when she left. There was something fundamentally unsettling about her -- an aura of expertise and age, totally at odds with the brightness of her hair, the pallor of her skin, the sheer childishness of her face. The way that Fudo had obeyed her made it even worse. What were they to each other?
She couldn't be his daughter, could she? No. Absolutely not. The very thought made his face twitch.
Darkness had fallen outside. He looked out at a cloudy sky, and found himself wishing for lightning. He almost missed the tiny click from the door.
It opened a tiny half-inch -- the typical mistake, he thought, of someone who wasn't used to spying or infiltration. He didn't speak, though, but waited, hoping beyond hope that this might be Kazuki or even Juubei or . . .
The door swung open more fully, and a teenager slipped into the room. It took him a shameful half-second before he recognised her as Ren, as the person they'd been looking for. He opened his mouth, but kept silent when she put a desperate finger to her mouth, and was quiet while she went up on tiptoes to work at the cuffs on his wrists with a set of lockpicks. Looks as if some of those rumours about the work she used to do for Gen might be true after all. Though in that case, she should have known better than to do that with the door. Odd.
When his wrists were free, he couldn't help letting out a tiny breath of relief. He lowered his arms to rub at the numb flesh, and tilted his head in question. What now? he tried to convey.
Ren nodded, as though understanding. She beckoned him towards the door, then added an emphatic Me first and what he thought was a fairly obvious quietly!
He nodded in response.
The corridor outside was surprisingly normal, and he found himself oddly disappointed. Things should have been stranger. Ren led him down two more bland corridors, and into a cleaning closet, before closing the door behind the two of them. It was confined and dark. It was still better than being chained up and pawed by a psychopath.
In the darkness she took a long, shaking breath.
Instinct took over, and he reached out to put an arm round her shoulders, to hold her the way he'd have held any younger friend who had been alone and in danger and afraid, and who needed a moment to know that they were protected. "It's all right," he whispered. "They can't hear us here, Ren-kun?"
"No." Her voice shook. She said it again, more firmly. "No. I don't think they bother -- bother putting mikes in the cleaning closets. That'd be just stupid."
"It would," Toshiki agreed. He wasn't quite sure about that himself, but if they were so paranoid that they'd bug the cleaning closets, then they'd already noticed the escape, and it was only a matter of time in any case. "Ren -- what happened?"
"He killed Grandfather." Ren's voice was shaking again, and her arms locked around Toshiki's waist desperately tight. She was so small and thin under her bulky jacket and her proud attitude, still so much a child who had to grow up. "They told me."
"He did." There was no point lying to her.
She took another gulping breath, then fought herself to stillness. "He. Yes. I knew. He wouldn't have let me go, otherwise, he -- yes." Another breath. "We have to get out of here."
"Where are we?" Toshiki asked.
"Babylon City."
He couldn't stop the muffled obscenity that came to his lips. Even with Kagami Kyouji involved, he'd thought -- no, be honest, had hoped -- that he hadn't ended up here, in this place that even Kazuki feared.
"Yes," Ren said, bitterly, and he remembered that she'd run with the Volts when she was younger, had learned all Mugenjou's bitter lessons about life and shit and the way that the two went together. "They're doing some sort of experiment. We're going to be used for it. We've got to get out of here."
The getting out of there, Toshiki decided, went without saying. "What sort of experiment?" he asked. Lucifer hovered at the back of his mind, a shadow on his past. But Ren had never been involved in that, so why her?
"It's something they've been planning for a long time." Her voice shook. "They were talking about original candidates and replacements and about the Children. And they want some more people for it too, and they're bringing them in now. I only heard a bit of it, I had to run for it before they caught me listening." She pulled herself together with a shudder that he could feel against his body in their cramped quarters. "Toshiki-san, it's not just that we have to get out of here because they're crazy and they're going to kill us. We've got to get out of here because we can't let this happen."
"Yes. We have to get out of here." He kept his voice calm and soothing. "It'll be easier now we're working together."
"And -- Toshiki-san, this isn't the first time. They did something like this twenty-five years ago. Only something went wrong. They said something about calling crossroads, or something like that -- it was in a language I didn't understand -- but it went wrong and they had to get ready to try it again differently. And now they're ready. Now they're going to finish it."
---
Himiko caught up with Akabane at a curve in the corridor. He'd stopped. Coming level with him and looking down where the corridor bent, she realised why. There was no sign of the Miroku. None at all.
Akabane adjusted his hat. "I believe, Lady Poison," he said, calmly and mildly, "that someone is playing games with us."
Himiko didn't have to look at his face. She knew that his mouth would have that mildly pleasant hungry curve which suggested he would be delighted to make the game more interesting for the other player. Instead, she pulled off the balaclava and tucked it in one pocket, then unzipped the parka. There was no point in encumbering herself now. "He couldn't have been that fast," she said flatly.
"No," Akabane agreed. "It would have been impossible."
"Which means that we're in the middle of Mugenjou and someone's playing virtual reality again."
"Exactly." Akabane gave her what might almost have been an approving nod. "Did you have the chance to use your Follow Scent, Lady Poison?"
Himiko shook her head. "No. Going too fast. I thought I heard Ban and Ginji behind me, but . . . " She turned to gesture at the empty corridor. "I think they've been diverted. Just like us."
"Hm. Well, then . . ." He shrugged. "We will simply have to see which of us reaches the end first, won't we?"
Himiko looked at him and frowned. "Doctor Jackal . . ."
"Yes, Lady Poison?" he inquired, all courtesy.
She remembered his face earlier, his sudden interest at the news of Gen's death, his unexpected willingness to listen and investigate. Pieces of jigsaw fell together in her mind. "While I am glad you feel that I am capable of looking after myself while walking into a trap," she said, taking care not to let her body language stray towards aggression, not to let her fingers twitch towards her vials of perfume in a move that he might interpret as hostility, "just how long have you realised that we were being led here deliberately?"
Akabane weighed his answer thoughtfully, pausing before replying. "I believe it was when they took such care to make sure that you would notice the scents to be able to identify the location. Seeing Miroku Yukihiko there merely confirmed it."
She could have said something rude. It wouldn't have been worth it. It wouldn't have made a single moment's difference. She knew who he was, what he was, and she had always lived with it; with him sitting next to her in the lorry, guarding her back on assignments, both of them professionals. Professionals. Finally, all that she said was, "You could have told me."
His mouth curved in a smile. "Perhaps they might have been listening."
You wanted a fight. "Perhaps they might," she agreed.
"And, in any case . . ." He shrugged. "If we had not come to this bait, they would have used another one. Better to spring the trap knowingly."
"Into the spider's web?" Himiko asked.
"Under the scorpion's sting," Akabane agreed. He gestured towards the corridor ahead. "Shall we?"
---
Natsumi tried the door handle of the Honky-Tonk. It was locked. With an annoyed little hiss, she balanced her bags of food in the curve of her left arm, pulled the key from her purse, murmured an apology to Rena standing behind her, and opened the door.
The Master was lying on the floor, one arm outspread, face down. That was the first thing she noticed. The other bits of it -- Hevn kneeling beside him, the smell of alcohol harsh on the air, the wet floor, the bags of food spilling from her hands, the single bottle and glass still standing upright on the bar, other bottles scattered and smashed around the room -- all those were just window-dressing, props on the set and unimportant next to the main character. With a little gasp, she ran across to where the Master was lying and fell on her knees next to him. "Master! Master! Hevn-san, is he all right?"
"I'm not sure," Hevn said, her voice calm and reassuring. "I think it's a fit of some sort. Have you any medical training, Natsumi-chan?"
"Of course," Natsumi said quickly. She'd taken first aid courses not long after starting to work at the Honky-Tonk. In the background, in the waitress-sense that she'd developed to be conscious of all the customers in the room, she was vaguely aware of Rena walking around to the bar, heard the thud as she put her bags down on it. "What do you want me to do?"
"I need you to put your hands here, and here." Hevn guided Natsumi's hands into two careful positions on Paul's back. "Just hold them there, and stay there a moment . . ." She rose. "And . . ."
"And don't move." Rena's voice was abruptly cold, and it had a tone that Natsumi had never heard before, a kind of distance and dispassion that was foreign to the girl she'd come to know as a friend. "Stand very carefully, Hevn-san, and keep your hands where I can see them."
Natsumi looked up, and saw in a sort of shock that went beyond normal horror and all the way into outright terror that Rena had taken out the gun which the Master kept behind the bar, and was pointing it at Hevn.
"Rena-chan." Hevn spread her hands carefully. Her skirt and hair swayed like a flame. "What's the matter?"
"Maybe you're possessed." Rena held the gun steady, as though she knew how to use such things. "It's not as if that sort of thing can't happen. But you don't look any different from normal. Take a step away from the Master and Natsumi, please."
Hevn took one careful pace away. She didn't look down at Natsumi.
Natsumi kept her hands where Hevn had put them, but something was nagging at the back of her mind. Something had been wrong when they came in, and was it Hevn, or was it the Master, or was it the room itself, and had Rena gone insane, to be doing this . . .
"Thank you," Rena said, the formality of the phrase out of place in the alcohol-stinking bar. "Natsumi-sempai. Is the Master breathing?"
"Don't move your hands!" Hevn hissed. "It could kill him!"
"Liar." The click of the gun's catch was loud in the sudden quiet.
"Rena," Natsumi said timidly, "why are you saying that Hevn-san is a liar?"
"It must be Lucifer again," Hevn said, her voice still calm, as though the gun pointed at her was simply a telephone and she was arranging a deal.
Rena shook her head, once. "He's dead."
"But --" Natsumi began.
"He's dead!" Rena snapped. "I know! I'd know if he's still alive! And he's dead!"
Hevn took half a pace towards her, but the younger woman centered the gun on her again.
Natsumi took a deep breath. "Rena-chan. Assuming that Hevn-san is possessed or somehow controlled, how do you know it?" She couldn't bring herself to look down at the Master, though she could feel his pulse through the thin cotton of his shirt against her hands.
Rena swallowed. "Natsumi-sempai . . . I haven't always done nice things. I am not a nice person like you. But I do know what a room looks like when someone's set it up to torch it."
Something flickered in Hevn's eyes.
Rena kept the gun steady, one hand supporting the other wrist. "And I know that if someone gets drunk or has a fit and smashes anything that he can hit, he does not leave the bottle and glass in front of him sitting there on the table untouched."
That had been it. That had been the thing that was wrong. Hevn-san was somehow being controlled, that had to be it. Decisively Natsumi took her hands away from Paul's back. "I'll phone for help . . ."
The door opened, and Shido stood there, nostrils wrinkling at the smell, face bemused. "I -- what?"
Without a second's pause, Hevn screamed, "Shido, look out!" and launched herself at Natsumi, throwing her to the ground and rolling on top of her, between her and Rena.
Natsumi hit the ground hard, taken by surprise, and felt the cold wetness of alcohol-slick tiling soaking through the thin fabric of her blouse and skirt as Hevn rolled on top of her, and she would have tried to call out to Shido, but the older woman had planted her elbow firmly in Natsumi's stomach, and all she could do for that moment was try to breathe, try very hard to breathe, to ignore the thud as her head hit the floor, and it would look as if she was trying to get me out of the line of fire, and the air was too thick for her to breathe and down on the floor it stank of alcohol and all she could hear for a moment, carrying above the crashing and thuds, was Rena's voice as she said set it up to torch it and she was lying on the floor gasping and Hevn wasn't there any more and Shido was saying, "Natsumi? Are you all right? Where's Hevn?"
She pulled herself up on one elbow, still struggling to breathe. "Shido -- Shido-san, it's not Rena's fault -- something's wrong with Hevn -- the Master's unconscious . . ."
There was a thud as the door was kicked open again, and a tinkle as a small piece of bright metal went spinning across the floor, reflecting in blue and silver.
It was a lit cigarette lighter.
Natsumi struggled to find the breath to scream as fire ballooned outwards.
---
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