Chapter 13: The Messenger

Freedom was supposed to feel different.

Not like this—

Not like standing in an alley under a rain-slick sky, knuckles raw and stinging, blood pooling in broken pavement grooves. Not like tasting iron on my tongue while neon screams down from a city that has forgotten my name.

But then, freedom was never the deal, was it?

---

I heard him before I saw him.

A drip of rain. A soft click of polished shoes. A silence that moved.

I looked up.

He stood at the mouth of the alley, half in shadow, half in the vulgar glow of a vending machine. Long black coat glistening, rain cascading off its edges like oil. His face—a mask of night. Not hidden by fabric, but by something more deliberate. Distance. Power.

He didn’t speak.

He didn’t need to.

Something fell to the wet ground with a muted thud.

A rectangle. Black. A phone.

Next to it—an envelope fat with cash.

The man in black tilted his head. A fraction. Like a puppeteer checking his strings. Then he turned and melted into the crowd beyond the alley without leaving footprints in the rain.

I stared at the objects glistening at my feet like bait.

Fifteen years behind steel walls and static screens had carved a few truths into me:

Nothing given is free. Nothing placed is innocent.

But hunger—real hunger—makes even paranoia stumble.

I crouched. Picked up the envelope first. The paper was crisp, dry despite the rain—as if it had never known water. Inside: stacks of yen, neatly bound. Enough to buy a week of life.

Then the phone.

Cold. Heavy. Not new. A hairline crack across the glass.

When I pressed the power button, the screen flared to life like an eye snapping open.

It buzzed.

The vibration crawled up my wrist like an insect.

I put it to my ear.

“Rei Kirishima.”

The voice was a scalpel. Smooth, precise, cutting me open syllable by syllable. No static. No accent. Male, maybe mid-40s, but distorted, like it wore a mask of calm.

I said nothing. Silence is leverage.

He didn’t wait.

“You were in a box for fifteen years. Did you think it was random?”

My jaw clenched.

“This is your second birth,” the voice continued. “Your first life ended when you failed to understand what you were. This one will end the same way—unless you play.”

“…Play?” My voice rasped like broken glass.

The chuckle on the line was soft. Deadly.

“Seven years. For every year, a truth. Find them. Or be caged again.”

Then the line went dead.

I stood there, the words bleeding into me, leaving wounds I couldn’t cauterize.

---

Seven years.

Seven truths.

Find them—or the box returns.

Not freedom.

Not mercy.

A game.

I was still inside it.

---

The rain thickened, slashing down like a thousand cold knives. I shoved the envelope into my coat pocket, the phone into the other. My pulse was a drumbeat against my ribs.

Why me?

Why now?

Why fifteen years?

I wanted to scream the questions into the sky, but I knew better. The sky doesn’t answer. The sky only watches.

And then—I saw it.

A billboard. Looming high above the Shinjuku chaos. A fashion ad, gaudy and bold:

A woman dripping in crimson silk. Jewelry gleaming at her throat.

Among the necklaces, one piece burned like fire in my eyes.

A pendant.

Red. Teardrop-shaped.

The same one from the night they came for me.

The same one that fell to the floor as Yukari screamed and Aiko cried and my world turned black.

My vision tunneled. The rain vanished. The city vanished. All I saw was that pendant, swinging like a pendulum over a pit of memory.

For fifteen years, it haunted me in dreams, in static, in the flicker of the prison TV.

Now it was here.

They wanted me to see it.

I whispered her name under my breath.

“Aiko…”

And for a moment, I wasn’t in Shinjuku. I was back in that apartment, the smell of cake and candles mixing with latex gloves and sweat.

Her small hand clutching mine.

Her voice—

Papa, why does your face scrunch when you lie?

I felt the old scream rise in my throat. Swallowed it down like poison.

The world doesn’t care about your screams.

But the man on the phone?

He cared enough to give me rules.

And that terrified me more than the box ever did.

---

I moved.

Fast. Blind.

Through alleys and streets that pulsed with strangers’ laughter, ramen steam, the smell of wet asphalt and exhaust. My shoes slapped puddles, each splash an echo of years lost.

Every face I passed looked like a mask. Every shadow a mouth whispering secrets.

My chest burned. Hunger gnawed. The adrenaline from the fight bled out, leaving me hollow and trembling.

I needed food. Shelter. Silence to think.

But the city was a carnival of noise.

And I didn’t belong to it anymore.

---

The phone buzzed again.

No caller ID. Just a blank white screen.

I answered.

Nothing.

Then—a whisper, so soft I thought it was the rain.

“Tick-tock, tick-tock, Rei.”

Click.

---

I nearly hurled the phone into the gutter.

Nearly.

But fifteen years in a box teaches you one thing:

Control is the last weapon you have.

I slid the phone back into my pocket with hands that didn’t feel like mine.

And then the smell hit me.

Warm. Savory. Ramen broth.

Like a ghost of another life curling into my lungs.

I followed it like a man possessed.

---

The shop was a hole-in-the-wall joint, lanterns swaying, windows fogged with steam.

I pushed through the noren curtains and was swallowed by heat and noise.

Laughter. Chopsticks clattering. A TV blaring a baseball game.

For a second, I froze on the threshold. My body didn’t remember how to exist in spaces like this.

Fifteen years of sterile walls and silence.

Now this—

This chaos.

This life.

A waitress barked something I barely heard. I stumbled to the counter, dropped into a stool.

She slammed a bowl down in front of me.

Ramen.

Golden broth shimmering under fluorescent lights.

Steam rose like incense.

I gripped the chopsticks. My fingers shook.

First bite. Salt. Fat. Heat.

I almost sobbed.

Second bite. Third. Fourth.

I devoured it like a starving animal, broth spilling down my chin, scalding my throat.

People stared. I didn’t care.

Dignity was a luxury I buried fifteen years ago.

When the bowl was empty, I slammed it down, chest heaving, vision spinning.

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Not from hunger.

From something deeper.

Something that whispered:

This isn’t survival. This is resurrection.

I reached for the water glass—

And the world tilted.

The last thing I saw before darkness swallowed me was the reflection in the glass.

My face.

But older. Harder. Eyes that didn’t belong to the man who kissed his daughter goodnight fifteen years ago.

Eyes that belonged to something else.

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