CHAPTER 33

The flight landed sixteen minutes late. Nox noted the delay without caring about it. It changed nothing about what waited at the end of the line.

He cleared customs with a single bag and no checked luggage. The officer glanced at his license once and waved him through. Hunters crossed borders on short notice often enough that no one asked follow-up questions.

The train from the airport took four hours. Nox took a window seat with his back to the wall and counted exits at every stop: sixteen carriages, three doors per side, emergency releases above every third window.

He didn’t sleep. He watched the pine forest thicken as the train climbed, counting the zigzags along the pass.

The bus after the train took another two hours. He was the only passenger by the third stop. By the fifth, the road had narrowed to a single lane with no center line and no streetlights.

The driver didn’t ask why anyone would get off at the end of a dead-end road. Nox tipped him anyway.

The gate stood where it had always stood: dark wood, family crest carved into both posts, no name. The estate didn’t need one.

Lanterns were lit along the entire path up to the house. They were lit like that for New Year and nothing else.

Nox stood at the gate for eleven seconds, wondering who could have told them. Then he pushed it open.

His mother Mei hit him at a dead run before the gate finished swinging shut. Her arms locked around his neck, her face pressed into his shoulder with force that would have winded a smaller man.

“Mum.”

“A bit longer,” she said, not letting go. “You’ll survive. You’ve survived worse.”

He stood still and let her hold on. Mei was shorter than he remembered. The top of her head reached his chin now, where it used to reach his shoulder.

“Souta,” she said.

Nobody had called him that in three years. The name landed somewhere under his ribs and sat there, heavier than it had any right to be for two syllables.

He had picked Nox at nineteen, off a list of words that meant night, because the guild registry wanted something for the licence and Souta Kurogane was already a name that opened the wrong doors. It was meant to last one contract.

Everyone had used it since. Doyle used it. Yelena used it. Lisa had used it every day for five months without ever once asking what it was short for, which he had appreciated more than he could work out how to say.

Here, it meant nothing at all. Here he was his mother’s son and the second of four, and the name on his licence was a thing that happened in another country.

She pulled back and held his face in both hands, her grip stronger than it looked. Her eyes moved across his features with a scout’s attention to terrain, checking for damage and updating her map.

“You got taller.”

“I stopped growing years ago.”

“You didn’t. I made you.” She released his face and stepped back exactly one arm’s length. “You didn’t call.”

“No.”

“You flew across an ocean and took a bus up a mountain, and you didn’t call.”

“I didn’t know what I’d be calling to say.”

She looked at him for three seconds. Whatever she read in his face was enough to drop the argument.

“Come inside,” she said. “Your grandfather has been impossible all week.”

“The lanterns.”

“Ask your sister.”

Emi sat on the third stair from the bottom in a coat over her yukata, chin on her knees, entirely unsurprised to see him.

At twelve years old, she was taller than in her last photograph and shorter than she should have been. She looked at him as though she had already lived this conversation and was being patient about repeating it.

“You’re late,” she said.

“The flight was sixteen minutes late.”

“Six days late.” She stood up, grabbed the front of his jacket in both fists, and attached herself to it. “I told them Tuesday. Mum lit the lanterns Tuesday. They have been going out and getting relit for six days, and Grandpa says it’s a fire hazard.”

“It’s a fire hazard,” Ryuzu called out from deeper inside the house, without appearing.

Nox put a hand on top of Emi’s head. She let him. It was the only form of affection either of them had ever been fluent in.

The house remained unchanged: dark beams and the worn step on the third stair.

His mother led him to the kitchen and placed a cup of tea in front of him without asking. The cup was the same one he had used since he was twelve. She had kept it.

Emi followed and sat at the table, unsent to bed. No one in this family had ever successfully sent Emi anywhere.

“Tell me,” his mother said.

“I nearly died three weeks ago. My guild made me take leave.” He turned the cup once. “I didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to be.”

“Three years,” she said. “That’s how long you’ve had somewhere else you wanted to be.”

“The trail was warm for the first four months.”

“And then?”

“Then it wasn’t.”

His mother turned her cup a quarter turn, not drinking.

“Tell me what you actually have, and not the version you give Ryuzu.”

So he told her. The flat in London paid through the month, Yui’s things still inside. Nothing taken, nothing disturbed. A contract with no client name on any ledger. Two weeks of ordinary messages followed by silence, stretched across three years.

“Job is fine,” his mother said. “Client is difficult, not dangerous.”

“You remember them.”

“I’ve them written out in order in a drawer in this room,” she said flatly. “I read them when the house is empty.”

“I should have called more.”

“You called when you had something. That isn’t nothing, and I’d rather have that than a son who rings every Sunday to report finding nothing again.” She picked up her tea.

“Jun didn’t come,” Nox said.

His mother’s messages regarding his brother had turned guarded months ago.

“The Games schedule,” she said, repeating the official excuse flatly. “He stopped coming home a year ago. He stopped answering me not long after.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“You had a missing sister. I wasn’t going to hand you a distant brother as well.” She turned her cup again. “He will come now that you’re here. He keeps better track of you than he admits.”

Emi watched him with the specific stillness she held when deciding whether to share information.

“Go on,” his mother said to her.

“It’s a dream,” Emi said.

“I gathered.”

Nox set his cup down. “You knew Tuesday.”

“I knew Tuesday.” Emi pulled her knees onto her chair. “That isn’t the dream I want to tell you.”

His mother retrieved a notebook from the drawer and placed it on the table between them.

It was small and worn. Emi’s dreams had begun at age six. She woke and recorded them before they faded, writing in verses of four lines.

“Read it to him,” his mother said. “The way you read it to me.”

Emi left the notebook shut. She had it by heart.

“When the crow comes home to an empty branch, two strangers stand behind him. One holds a sword that isn’t yet a sword. One wears her bones like a coat.”

Two strangers. A sword that wasn’t yet a sword. Bones worn like a coat.

He had left both of them in a flat in London nineteen hours ago.

“When did you dream this?”

“Six weeks ago.” Emi looked at the notebook instead of him. “There’s something wrong with it.”

“Go on.”

“The empty branch,” she said flatly. “Everyone in that dream is standing around a space where someone should be. I can see all of you. I can’t see who’s missing.”

The kitchen went quiet.

“Yui,” Nox said.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to see her.” Emi sounded twelve years old for the first time since his arrival. “Not once since she went. I dream about people who are dead and people I’ve never met, but I’ve never gotten a single line about our sister.”

“Emi.”

“I’ve tried every night for three years,” she said. “She’s the only hole in it.”

Nox sat with that revelation.

A gap that specific wasn’t an absence. A person could hide from cameras, contracts, or search parties. Hiding from Emi’s dreams required something deliberate.

It meant Yui was hidden on purpose, and hidden well. A person who is dead doesn’t need to be hidden from a dream.

“Then I want everything,” Nox said. “Her room. Her file, every page Ryuzu’s people put in it. In the morning.”

“In the morning,” his mother agreed, and took the tea cup out of his hands.

His old room was exactly as he’d left it, which meant somebody had been cleaning it for three years.

He put the bag down and didn’t unpack it.

Ryuzu was on the veranda when he came back out, sitting on the boards with his legs over the edge and his feet not reaching the gravel. Eighty-one years old. He didn’t turn round.

“Sit.”

Nox sat.

The mountain gave them nothing to look at, black on black all the way down to where the road turned, and the lanterns along the path had been put out at some point in the last hour, which meant his mother had finally gone to bed.

“You’re thinner, Souta,” Ryuzu said.

“I’ve been working.”

“You’ve been losing.” The old man said it the way he said everything, as a measurement. “A man who wins comes home fat and slow. You’ve come home thin and fast. So you have been losing for three years and getting better at it.”

“Is that a criticism?”

“It is the opposite.” Ryuzu shifted. Something in his hip disagreed with the movement and he ignored it. “I have never once worried about you while you were winning.”

They sat there for a while. Somewhere down the slope, water moved over rock.

“You want the file,” Ryuzu said.

“In the morning.”

“You want it now. You’re being polite because your mother is asleep.” He reached inside his sleeve and set a folder down on the boards between them. It had been there the whole time. “I have read it four hundred times. There is nothing in it.”

“Then why bring it out.”

“Because you will read it four hundred and one times, and I would rather you did it here, where somebody can see you do it.”

Nox didn’t touch it yet.

“Jun.”

“Don’t.” Ryuzu’s voice didn’t rise. “Not tonight.”

“He stopped answering the house phone a year ago.”

“I said not tonight.” A pause, and the old man let something out that was almost a breath. “I trained three of you. One went missing. One stopped calling. You came back thin.” He got up in stages, the way old soldiers do. “Two out of three is the best result I have ever had, and I am not proud of the arithmetic.”

He went inside.

Nox stayed on the boards with the folder and didn’t open it until the house had been quiet for an hour.

There was nothing in it. His grandfather had been right about that, as he was right about most things, and had said it in the one way guaranteed to make it unbearable.