Chapter 37: Saw Enough

Nana

The block was gone.

She stopped at the corner, lungs heaving, the moonpetal pot clutched against her chest. She’d run three streets before her legs gave out. Three streets before she remembered she didn’t know where she was going.

Then she heard the explosion.

Not an explosion—a detonation. The kind you feel in your teeth. The kind that turns the sky orange for a full second before the sound catches up.

She’d turned around. Started running back.

Against the current. Everyone else was fleeing, stumbling, screaming, dragging children and bags and each other. Nana shoved through them. An old man grabbed her arm, said something she didn’t hear.

“Move.” She yanked free. “You’re in my bubble.”

The smoke got thicker. The heat got worse. She kept running.

Now she was here.

Three apartment buildings. Flattened. Her building, the one next to it, and the convenience store on the corner. All of it reduced to rubble and smoke. The crater stretched half the block. Fire trucks were already there. How were they already there? Water arcing into steam where it touched flames that shouldn’t still be burning.

Bodies under tarps. She counted five before she made herself stop. The paramedics moved too slow. Like they already knew there was no rush.

Residents stumbled past her, wrapped in shock blankets, faces blank. A man was crying about his cat. A woman sat on the curb, rocking, holding a shoe that didn’t match anything she was wearing.

Nana walked forward.

Her legs kept moving. She wasn’t sure she was the one moving them.

Glass crunched under her shoes. The heat pressed against her skin. Emergency lights painted everything red and blue, red and blue, a rhythm that meant nothing. A woman pushed past her, barefoot, carrying a photo album.

She saw him.

Kagami stood in the middle of the street. Shirtless. His suit jacket was gone. Burned away or discarded, she couldn’t tell. His back was to her, spine straight, shoulders rising and falling with controlled breath.

His back.

Lines.

Glowing lines, tracing from his shoulder blades down to his ribs, curling around his sides like vines.

Not tattoos. Tattoos didn’t move. Tattoos didn’t pulse.

She watched them sink into his skin, retreating down his arms, crawling back toward his spine. Like something being dragged back into a cage it didn’t want to return to. The glow concentrated at the center of his back, between his shoulder blades. A knot of light that throbbed once, twice.

Then burrowed into his spine and disappeared.

By the time she blinked, his back was just skin. Toned. Scarred in places. Human.

But she’d seen.

On the ground in front of him—

Nana’s stomach turned. Her throat locked.

That wasn’t… those weren’t…

Paste. That was the only word for it. Smears of red and black and something else, steaming on the asphalt. Two smears. The shapes were wrong. Like someone had taken two bodies and pressed them through a sieve.

Fatty and Skinny. The ones who’d been looking for her. The ones who’d regenerated after Kagami killed them.

They weren’t regenerating now. There was nothing left to regenerate.

“Kagami-san?”

Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

He didn’t turn around.

“Go back to the crowd, Nana.”

“I—”

“Now.”

She didn’t move. Couldn’t. Her feet had rooted to the glass-strewn street.

Black vehicles pulled up. Three of them, sliding through the emergency cordon like it didn’t exist. Bureau. She recognized the seal on the doors: six circles, interlocking.

Someone stepped out of the lead car.

She recognized the hair, the wrinkles.

Old man.

He looked at the burning building, the fire trucks, the paste on the ground, the shirtless agent standing in the middle of it all.

He looked at it like it was paperwork.

“So?”

Kagami bowed.

“You were right, Segawa-san.”

Segawa grunted. The cigarette burned between his fingers. He never brought it to his lips.

“What did they want?”

“The brat.”

Nana opened her mouth.

“Sir, they were—”

“Not you.” Segawa didn’t look at her. “Kagami.”

She shut her mouth. The adults were talking.

Nana’s chest tightened.

Onee-san sent away. Kagami left behind. Not to protect her. To see what came knocking.

She was bait.

“Assessment. Details.”

“Dead.”

“And?”

“Just avatars.”

Segawa’s cigarette stopped moving.

“Shit. Were they strong?”

“Absolute vermin.”

Which meant the real ones were worse. Nana didn’t understand everything, but she understood that. Avatars. Puppets. The things that had torn through their apartment, regenerated from death, survived an explosion. Those were the weak versions.

“The real ones are still out there.” Segawa wasn’t asking. “They saw everything.”

Kagami said nothing.

“They saw you

.”

“Yes.”

Around them, people in suits were moving through the debris. Not paramedics. Bureau. She watched two of them scrape paste off the cement with tools that looked medical, or alien. She couldn’t tell.

The firemen weren’t wearing any insignia.

This was all Bureau. The trucks, the blankets, the cordon. Containment. The whole ordeal.

By tomorrow, this would be a gas leak. A freak accident. Faulty wiring in an old building. The news would show crying families and promise investigations that would never go anywhere.

Segawa’s eyes moved. Found her.

She knew what he saw. Girl at the edge of destruction, holding a pot of flowers in a warzone, staring at smears that used to be people.

His jaw tightened. Then released. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it behind his teeth.

“And the girl saw.”

Kagami’s head turned. Barely. She caught the edge of his profile: blank expression, flat eyes. Nothing there for her.

“Saw enough.”

Segawa dropped his cigarette. Ground it under his heel.

“Get her in the car. We’ll need to—”

“I’ll handle it.”

“Kagami.”

“She’s Mio’s sister. I’ll handle it.”

They stood for a moment. Sirens wailing in the distance. Water hissing on flames.

Segawa nodded.

“Fine. But she doesn’t leave your sight until this is contained. And Kagami?”

“Sir.”

“Next time, don’t level a city block. The mayor’s going to call me.”

He turned back to the car. Barking orders to the other agents. Containment. Cover story. Civilian memory protocols.

Kagami walked toward her.

Nana’s grip tightened on the pot. The moonpetals were still alive. Somehow. Green buds, closed tight, not yet ready to bloom.

He stopped in front of her. Looked down.

She looked up.

The lines. The paste. The way he’d killed them the first time. Two seconds, and they were down. And now this. Whatever lived under his skin. She’d called him tongue guy once. It didn’t seem funny anymore.

He reached out. For a moment, she thought he was going to take the pot away from her. Instead, his hand landed on her shoulder.

She didn’t flinch.

She wanted to.

“I told you to run.”

“I came back.”

He didn’t say anything to that. Just looked at her. Same flat expression from the van. Same nothing behind the eyes.

Then he turned toward the Bureau vehicles.

“Let’s go.”

She followed. The flames at her back, the pot against her chest, everything else already gone.

She didn’t turn around.

The drive was silent.

Nana sat in the back, pot wedged between her knees, phone out the window. Recording the debris, people still wandering, smoke still rising.

“Don’t do that. You’ll drop it.”

“No I won’t. I’m responsible.”

It slipped from her fingers.

She watched it tumble. Bounce off the side mirror. Disappear under the wheels of the car behind them.

Kagami’s eyes found hers in the rearview mirror.

“…”

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

He turned back to the road. She could have sworn his mouth twitched. Probably imagined it.

Onee-san was going to call back eventually.

If she’s alive to hear it.

Nana’s chest tightened. She looked at the pot instead.

The moonpetals were still closed. Green buds, tight and patient. Mio had said they’d bloom by spring. That felt like a long time from now.

The Bureau building rose out of the dark. Concrete and glass and no windows on the lower floors. The kind of place that didn’t want to be seen.

They took her to a room. White walls. White sheets. A bed that smelled like antiseptic and nothing else.

“Wait here.”

Kagami took the corner. Arms folded. Back to the wall.

Time passed. An hour, maybe two. The room had no clock. No windows. Just white walls and the hum of something mechanical.

Footsteps in the hall. She shot up—but it was only the old man.

She took the opportunity.

“Old man, I lost my phone. You owe me a new one.”

He made a face.

“Kagami, what happened to her phone?”

“She dropped it out the window.”

“You didn’t think to go back for it?”

“She was recording the incident.”

Damn it! No free phone.

“That could land you in federal, girl,” Segawa said, ignoring the bodies hurriedly stomping back and forth. “Be a good girl and behave. Your sister is on her way.”

Segawa left without another word. The door clicked shut.

The silence came back. Heavier than before.

Nana looked at the pot. At Kagami in the corner. At the white walls with no windows.

She thought about the lines. The paste. The thing that lived in his spine.

Saw enough.

He knew. And he hadn’t tried to explain.

Time stretched. She lost count of the minutes somewhere past the first hundred.

Then something moved in the narrow window.

Torn Bureau suit. Blood dried in places that made her stomach clench. Eyes that had seen the end of something.

But standing.

The handle turned.

Onee-san.

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