Shion stood at the broken edge of the garage, her hair stirring in the heated breeze. Bodies drifted in midair, rising, falling, vanishing into the storm of destruction. Light pulsed across the twilight sky, punctuated by blinding white detonations. Her eyes never lowered to the chaos below, never acknowledged the tiny figures scattering across the blacktop. Her attention belonged solely to the hovering silhouette above, eyes burning gold through the distance between them.

  Since I could first form memories, I heard my father’s words. How the Makabe bloodline had produced something unprecedented in me.

  The air left her lungs in a measured stream. Her hand tensed, fingers curling halfway into a fist. Memory flashed: wooden bokken yielding to cold steel, years of sessions leaving her skin purple-black. Her father had never shouted. His quiet certainty had been far more effective. “Before your first cry,” he’d told her, “your path was already written.”

  The Makabe clan operated from the shadows, their history known only through whispers. For centuries, they had produced only male heirs. A statistical impossibility that spawned wild theories among outsiders. The public imagined arcane rituals, suspected genetic manipulation. Few believed the brutal simplicity of their method: newborn daughters simply disappeared, their tiny bodies buried in unmarked graves beneath ancestral grounds, their mothers told of stillbirths and complications. This bloodstained tradition endured unbroken through generations—until her. Because she was special, marked as extraordinary, her father had spared her.

  And you… you’re something else altogether. Another explosion tore through the sky, sending tremors through the super-heated air. The clouds twisted, beams of light splintering through their folds.

  Nearly three years ago, Hanashiro Ren appeared. The foreigner with the missing arm. The rumors followed. Whispers passed eagerly. Students, faculty, the bored elite with nothing better to do than dissect the lives of others.

  They painted him in ugly strokes—arrogant, unstable, withdrawn, rude. They crossed paths in hallways, along walkways, beneath drifting cherry blossoms. He never acknowledged her. She never acknowledged him. She found him in crowds, lingered on him, and tracked his movements across campus. Where others saw a man who did not care, she began to see something else. That quiet, simmering contempt behind those molten gold eyes.

  Hatred.

  Days blurred. Possibilities unfolded and collapsed in endless permutations. Perhaps it was an illusion. A trick of the mind. A fantasy born of projection. Perhaps that vast, echoing emptiness she had carried since childhood had finally begun inventing companionship where none existed. What a curious, unpleasant sensation.

  Loneliness.

  She had almost convinced herself that she was mistaken. Then came the moment his composure slipped. He stood alone beneath the university’s western colonnade, evening shadows pooling at his feet. His hand gripped the arm that was no longer there, fingers digging into nothing. For a single, unguarded second, the icy detachment dissolved, revealing what lurked beneath.

  Despair.

  There was no audience. No performance. Only the truth. At that moment, she saw herself. The loathsome, vast cavity within. For the first time in her life, she knew longing. The need to reach out, the urge to stand beside someone who might understand what it’s like to feel nothing.

  Months passed. She prepared. When fate delivered the opportunity, Aokawa Reina stepped into it first. Again, and again, and again, and again. Always there. Reina, with her practiced warmth. The worst kind of liar. She had ruined everything.

  That night, Shion had followed Ren beyond the lights to the garden, unnervingly restless, resolve honed to a needlepoint. When he’d called out to her—Reina stepped out first, and they shared a kiss.

  In that moment, she imagined peeling back her flesh, layer by layer, until nothing remained but that pristine, immaculate fury. She should have killed them both the day the outbreak started—Reina, and the trembling leech forever latched to her. Had she known how spectacularly the world would collapse, how gloriously everything would unravel, she would have finished the job without hesitation.

  No matter.

  All stories eventually correct themselves.

  “Shion!”

  She pivoted. Through the veil of smoke and falling ash emerged Lilly, hunched beneath her burden, an outline distorted by what she carried. Reina’s lifeless form draped across her shoulders, arms swinging loosely with every unsteady step. Lilly’s knees threatened to buckle, bloody lips forming a continuous, desperate litany.

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  “…I can’t… please, help me, Shion!” Lilly staggered another step, her knees buckling before she found her balance again.

  She did not move to help, her attention drawn to Reina’s body. Blood had soaked through fabric where the wound gaped open at her side. “There’s a certain irony to this, don’t you think? Now you know how she must have felt, dragging you around her whole life.”

  Astonishment flickered in Lilly’s eyes. “H–Huh…?”

  She smiled. A gesture refined through countless hours of practice, each millimeter calibrated for maximum effect. Joy remained a foreign country she had never visited, but she had studied its customs meticulously.

  Memory surfaced with crystalline clarity: Reina’s body contorted on the distant floor, blood pooling outward. She had watched it all from the third-floor balcony.

  “Now that she’s gone… what will become of you?” She stepped closer. “That shield you carried your whole life.” Another step. “That crutch you leaned on.” She towered over Lilly now, her breath ghosting against tear-streaked skin. “What becomes of a shadow?”

  Each lungful shuddered through Lilly. Her gaze darted everywhere—anywhere but Shion. A faint shift stirred within her, a spark in the dark of her chest, minuscule but unmistakable—the only warmth she had.

  If this wasn’t happiness…

  What else could it possibly be?

  “I’ll tell you,” Shion whispered. “You’ll die. On your knees. Terrified. Exactly as you’ve always been.”

  Reina wasn’t the first. That first, the one that truly mattered, was Hanabira, the only person who might have been called Shion’s friend. They had been children together, sitting among the flowers in her family’s garden. Sunlight caught the edges of everything that afternoon: the razor-sharp lines of the hedges, the animated features of Hana’s face. And that laugh—how it floated through air heavy with the scent of flowers.

  It began as a creeping feeling. A tightening. A certainty that grew with Hana’s laughter. This girl would disappear one day. Just as mother had. The ceremonial tanto had felt impossibly light in her palm, the ornate handle smooth against her skin. One fluid arc. Hana’s laugh still hung in the air when the blade whispered across her throat.

  Red blossomed across pale skin. A shade she’d never witnessed before, impossibly dark yet bright, cascading over her shaking hands, spilling across crushed flowers, staining the pristine fabric of Hana’s dress.

  It was beautiful.

  She couldn’t look away.

  The garden transformed into pandemonium, servants’ screams piercing the air while her father’s expression calcified, features becoming granite-hard and just as cold. Shion found herself required to provide justification. The act contained no fury. No malice. The words fell from her lips with perfect honesty: “I wanted to keep her with me always.”

  It was what the old stories promised. Death anchored spirits to the place they fell. By opening Hana’s throat in that garden, Shion ensured her friend would never abandon her.

  Her father shed no tears. It only confirmed his belief. A daughter with such aptitude—such natural inclination—would become an asset to the clan. Shion complied.

  Rivals vanished. Problems ceased to exist. It became commonplace. Tedious. So she invented a diversion. Six lives chosen arbitrarily. Devoid of political calculation. Absent of clan instruction. Pure wonder drove her. She positioned them for discovery, draped beneath lamplight, arranged on public seating. She observed the investigators circling her handiwork, their whispers spinning theories from smoke. They searched desperately for meaning in her meaningless design.

  Hunting for the killer. Hunting for her.

  And yet…

  Nothing.

  That first perfect moment with Hana remained singular, unrepeatable. That singular sliver of joy remained beyond her reach, while everywhere she looked, others squandered their capacity on trivial nothings. She was a prisoner licking dewdrops from a cell wall while hearing the ocean splash beyond.

  With each shaky breath Lilly took, Reina’s lifeless weight pulled harder against her quivering shoulders. Crimson droplets fell, striking the cracked pavement. Shion extended her hand, fingers finding the hollow beneath Reina’s jaw. She cradled the skull and tilted it, the head rolling limply in her palm. She studied her face, memorizing what death had made of her.

  Perfect.

  From the corner of her eye, she caught Lilly’s features contorting in silent battle. Eyes blown wide, mouth quivering, body frozen in that terrible space where instinct demands both flight and fight.

  “You’ve given me something precious in the end. I won’t forget you. I thought I’d never feel it again, but watching you die…” Her palm rested against Reina’s marble-cold cheek. “…made me feel truly alive.”

  Lilly jerked backward. “Y-You… No! No—!” Her knees struck the ground as her body seized. Reina slipped. The corpse collapsed across Lilly, arms swinging loose, face meeting her sister’s cheek. Lilly heaved, trembling violently, fingers scraping uselessly at the ground, and a sound escaped her that belonged to no language but grief.

  Shion watched.

  The smile faded.

  “A fitting conclusion.”

  She turned her back to the scene. The ruined car garage loomed ahead, its broken skeleton of concrete and twisted steel forming a jagged ascent. A stairway to heaven she climbed with measured steps, embers drifting around her. Overhead, silhouettes collided against the sky in a violent dance.

  The old world was dead. Governments, institutions, hierarchies—gone. Those who survived would not rebuild; they would reshape.

  Destiny had chosen her.

  Shion raised her arms skyward, fingers stretching toward Ren’s distant silhouette. Her hand closed, curling around his miniature form as though she might seize him from the firmament itself, as though he might finally belong to her grasp.

  Heaven and earth exchanged positions in a nauseating blur. Ren’s dark silhouette streaked toward the stars.

  Or perhaps she was falling.

  Down.

  Down.

  Toward jagged debris below, fractured slabs, metal skeletons, and lapping fire. Her neck twisted up. At the ledge’s edge, Lilly’s tear-streaked face caught the light. Her hands remained extended from the push, trembling in the aftermath. Those blue eyes—once so timid—now burned with an incandescent hatred that transformed her entire being.

  “Oh.”

  Her skull met concrete with a wet crack. Her vision fractured into kaleidoscope fragments and melted into watercolor smears. The world’s roar compressed into one diminishing tone, a silver thread pulled thinner and thinner and thinner…

  It snapped.

  The void rushed in to collect her.