Try Not to Touch

On the day Kira Ishikawa was born, the sun shone brighter than it had in all the years her family had been alive, though not half as bright as the first television she ever sat in front of, watching a film in her mother’s lap, when she pointed her finger and burbled out the one syllable necessary to transform the box of circuits and wires into flaming scrap.

Her father found the pair giggling at the flames, and was so elated that he plucked his daughter up and swung her about, happy to discover a new wielder for his family tree. A shriek tore its way through the house when he did, as if her mother’s brain had been rudely awoken from deep slumber, and had just then realized her wages were melting into the mats. By next week the two were sleeping in separate homes.

Kira rolled through the gaps where two of her could pass side by side, while Arata shoved past those in his path. The crowd thickened as they approached the destruction, worried and eager in equal measure to assess the damage with their own eyes. Gasoline stench permeated the air. Overhead were the cries of the maimed. Somewhere were their allies, and likely a few enemies, but they held no vantage point any longer to draw an accurate map.

Car travel, air conditioning, bank accounts and credit cards and digital payment via phone, television; these were all the comforts those like Kira and Arata had been denied their whole lives. Anything falling under the loose umbrella of the word “technology” balked in the presence of wielders. The soft buzz of live currents wrung through the walls and under the tatami mats were as infrequent gifts, like the prospect of chocolates on White Day (or Valentine’s Day, whichever one fancied more) when you were a known eater of your own boogers, or a gossip. Eventually, you learned to live without. To have these comforts ripped away suddenly gave them no pause.

The silence deafened everyone else.

Kira wove around a pair of sobbing girls stabbing at the blank faces of their smartphones. Their cries of distress over the absence of emergency services followed her through the crowd, adding to the hellish clamoring for answers.

Why isn’t my phone working?

Where are the lights?

Hey! My watch is dead!

Are the paramedics dead in a ditch, too? What about the police department?

Kira’s jaw clenched tight and tighter. So did Arata’s. The answer danced enthusiastically before them, invisible to any born without a taste of wielder skill; deceptively simple, and eye-rollingly childish.

Magic.

When she could no longer maneuver through the press without risk of brushing another’s body, Arata took the lead shouting demands for passage. In one hand he grasped by its neck a glass pop bottle filled with grey, grainy liquid, shaking it constantly. His mask was up as well as hers, and their hoods. Barks to move and forceful shoves drove home the impression of two Oni who would not be denied. One red, one yellow, both with wicked grins and gleaming teeth bared, clad in clothing of all black so they were nearly invisible in the gloom. Soon they broke through the edge of the press, and barreled past cars mashed together like renditions in softened clay by children’s hands.

“I don’t like this,” Arata said, his voice made tinny by the mask, “Those sneaky Falcon bitches can catch us with our pants down.”

“Can’t your friends keep them bay?”

“Haven’t had enough drinks together to call them friends yet. Known some to fumble at the finish line when they’re needed.” He leapt over a tire broken off in the road. “You’d know this with enough jobs under your belt.”

“Just keep going.” Groaning, she took a path around the tire. Her chest ached from the stress of running already. She had to shout her words out. “It’s up ahead!”

At the sight of the license plate, Arata flung his bottle against the van’s side. The bottle shattered, and a cloud of cottony fog rushed forth while he stared into the driver’s seat. Kira saw him stumble back before the smoke took him from sight. “Ah, that’s some brutal shit, man,” drifted from the haze.

“What did you see?”

“About twelve pink reasons to wear a seatbelt, and these two were strapped in. Airbags didn’t go off.”

Kira shuddered, the contents of her stomach quivering.

“I’m going in through the back. I don’t wanna lose my dinner.” Hurried footsteps moved in that direction. Kira followed behind. The sounds of metal straining and vulgarity reached her ears before she’d rounded the corner, a click of something slotted into place under it all, and a great flash nearly blinded her when finally did.

“Are you insane?” she hissed, only partially from the crouched silhouette burned into her retinas.

“Eat me. Door’s locked.”

“The master key is too obvious! Do you want everyone to know what we’re doing?”

“We’re inside a cloud. I repeat – eat me. Just watch my back, I’ll be through in a jiff.”

“Watch your own back. I’m getting the key.”

Kira doubled back before Arata’s protests had a chance to land, the image of the master key’s white-hot lance nearly faded from her vision by the time she ripped the driver door open. Praying no air would enter her nose, she sucked in a breath and held it as she reached across the steering wheel and the dead, dead, very dead – Oh, God, hopefully you’re dead – waist of the man half draped over the jagged glass edges of the windshield. He wore padded clothing of military make, already damp.

Her stomach rumbled traitorously, threatening to turn her mask into a bucket for bile. Finding the keys, she had given them a quick twist when his passenger moaned – still alive. A stroke of luck, she thought, between the separations in the reflections between his teeth and the spiderweb of cracks he’d left in the windshield.

Wasting no time, Kira yanked the keys over the unlucky one, returning to Arata as he was flicking off the van’s lock, the sigils on his master key still alight. A dexterous thumb swooped down the railing, and an iridescent alchemical core ejected to the ground, crumbling now but soon to be smoking dust. He sucked his teeth in her direction, an exaggerated shake of the head accompanying the sound.

“Taking your sweet time, I see. So unhelpful.”

“One’s still alive in there. That help?”

“Relax, Kira,” he purred, taking hold of the van’s doors. “We’ll be long gone by the time that matters.” With a grunt, he threw the doors wide – nearly as wide as his eyes became. Kira risked stepping closer for a better look.

A pedestal had been installed in the floor of the van. Stone, possibly, given how it caught none of what little light radiated from Arata’s knife, with metal brackets to keep it immobile. A glass case was on top, and it still was. Somewhat. One large chunk was now on the floor, another at the van’s edge, and a few shards were scattered about when the chunks had fallen. An amount of the pedestal was missing as well, cut clean from the greater body.

Numerous slivers of opalescent blue were buried in the walls, door, floor, and ceiling of the van, each reflecting the light of Arata’s knife in a pattern one might reasonably believe inspired by the sky itself, depicting the countless stars of space arranged in a pinprick vignette of light.

And in the center of the vignette, having rolled – or slid – to the van’s farthest end was a box; a black box of sharp, symmetrical angles that ate all illumination and wouldn’t have appeared out of place in a museum wing assigned to Cubism, partially sunken into the floor of the van, as if fallen from astounding height.

Beyond their cover, the night came alive with the joy of combat.