The Oni’s Gift

The walk back to the Blue Gate should have felt victorious. Raven had stood in front of something monstrous and carved it apart with nothing more than breath and memory. Instead the air felt sharp enough to cut. Every streetlight resonated with a warning she could not quite translate.

Takumi stayed one step ahead of her, silent and rigid. He didn’t look back, not even once. That unsettled her more than anything.

The moment they crossed the threshold of the Blue Gate, the wards shuddered. The lantern nearest the door flickered. Mika, who never startled, actually flinched. Aki stopped mid stride beside the bar, arms folding slowly across her chest. But it was Rei who brought the room to a halt.

Rei did not yell. He never yelled. That made everything feel worse. He set his glass down without a sound. Then he turned, and looked at Raven with a glare that could pierce the soul.

“You shook four wards,” he said. His voice was calm. His eyes were not. “Half the district registered a surge.”

Raven felt herself shrink before she could stop it. “It wasn’t intentional.”

Rei stepped off the stage. Each footfall felt deliberate and precise. “Intention is irrelevant. Resonance listens to force, not excuses.”

Takumi opened his mouth, clearly ready to take the hit for her, but Rei cut him down with a glance. It was the first real flash of anger she had ever seen from him.

“This is not a game,” Rei said. “Not a school sparring match. You tore through a corrupted spirit and broadcasted your wavelength across Tokyo like a flare.”

Raven swallowed hard. Everything suddenly felt immense. The chalk dust on Takumi’s jacket, the tremor still buzzing under her skin, the high ringing in the walls, all if it was more than she could handle.

Aki crossed the room in four quick steps. She stopped just inside Raven’s reach and lowered her voice. “You cannot keep reacting,” she said. Her tone was soft, but the words landed like stones. “Every outburst draws attention. You saw the man at the gate yesterday.”

Raven felt heat bloom under her collarbone. She avoided Aki’s eyes. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Aki held her gaze anyway. She had never looked more like a soldier. “Then we must teach you to make choices.”

Rei exhaled slowly, as if letting go of something he did not want to keep carrying. He rubbed his temple with two fingers. “Do you understand what you have done?”

Raven nodded. It wasn’t a strong nod, more like a small break in her posture. “I think that I do now.”

Mika leaned against the bar. Her gaze was sharp and strangely sympathetic. “Every Oni-aligned syndicate felt that little earthquake of yours,” she said. “And every Bureau scanner too. You are trending on all the wrong spiritual frequencies, sweetheart.”

Takumi flinched at that. Raven saw the tiny loss of color immediately. He knew this was bad. Which meant that it was probably worse than she had imagined.

Rei stepped closer, studying her face like it was a page out of a forbidden text. “Whoever you were yesterday,” he said, “is gone.” His voice softened at the edges, but never enough to become comfort. “Walk carefully from now on.”

Something in Raven folded inward. Not out of surrender, but out of shame. The good kind. The kind that warns you to wake up.

The room stayed still for another moment. Mika, sensing the tension had reached its limit, snapped her fingers at the lights. They dimmed obediently. The Blue Gate’s breathing steadied.

Raven took a step back, then another. She needed air. She needed the night. She needed distance from all of them and the way they stared like she was a fuse waiting to spit fire.

She slipped out through the back door into the alley. Cool air rushed her lungs. The rain from earlier had left the pavement shining like black glass. The neon reflections trembled across it.

She pressed a hand to her chest and felt the pendant beat once under her fingers. Too alive. Too aware. Inside, she heard Takumi speaking again in a low, tense voice. Maybe arguing. Maybe defending her. She couldn’t stay to find out.

The alley was quiet except for the drip of water from the fire escape and the slow thrum of nightlife that was just beginning to wake up. She let the door fall shut behind her and finally breathed.

For a moment everything was still, like the calm before a storm. The silence was broken by a voice she did not know.

“Raven Yazzie. I’ve been waiting.”

She froze. The voice, smooth as polished stone, slid into the alley before the man did, Raven turned and found him already there, framed in the neon glow that leaked from the street.

He looked like he had stepped out of a catalog for wealthy ghosts. He was dressed in an impeccable charcoal suit with shoes sharp enough to cut water. He held an umbrella in one hand, and a lacquered briefcase in the other. His posture was perfect, too perfect, like he had been carved upright rather than taught to stand.

He smiled with exactly the right number of teeth. “Raven Yazzie. A pleasure.”

Her pulse jumped without permission. “Do I know you?”

“I knew your mother.” His answer was immediate, without hesitation. As if her mother’s name had been sitting on the back of his tongue, waiting.

Raven stepped back. Her shoes splashed through a shallow puddle. Neon fractured into ripples.

The man watched the water settle. “She and I worked on the same research initiative. Containment studies. Resonance anomalies. You come from a remarkable line.”

Raven felt the alley shift around her, narrowing. “You said you worked with my mother.”

“Yes. Before the desert.” His tone softened, almost grieving. “Before the Colonel made his decisions.”

Raven bit down hard on her next breath. Nobody outside her family and Aki knew about the desert. Nobody should know.

“How do you know about that?” she asked.

He brushed a bit of lint from his sleeve, as casual as someone discussing weekend weather. “I was there the day the Gate under Yokota began to wake. Your mother was the first to see the pattern change. Brilliant woman. Fearless. The Bureau never deserved her.”

Raven felt the weight of those words settle like stones in her stomach. “You’re lying.”

“I am not.” His smile never reached his eyes. “She was trying to seal the cracks while the rest of us were still running tests. She understood what was coming. You have her intuition.”

Raven’s palms were sweating. The pendant at her throat pulsed like it recognized him. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I only wish to honor a promise.”

He set the umbrella against the wall and clicked open the briefcase. The hinges made a soft, elegant sound. Inside was a small lacquered box, black with red inlay that glinted like dried blood.

He lifted it with both hands, reverent, almost tender.

“She left this behind. For you.” He stepped closer. His shoes made no sound on the wet pavement. “Only you.”

Raven shook her head. “I’m not taking anything from you.”

“You will once you feel it.” He opened the box.

Inside lay a talisman wrapped in red string. The paper was old, yellowed at the edges, the ink strokes thick and deliberate. Raven felt the air change around it, the way heat rolls off asphalt in midsummer. The way her chest had tightened in the desert seconds before everything exploded.

“What is that?” she whispered.

“Her last message.” The businessman lifted the talisman with two fingers. The ink shimmered faintly. “Take it.”

Raven’s heart hammered. Her instincts screamed at her to run, to turn and sprint back to the Blue Gate, to hide behind Mika’s fox grin and Rei’s cold logic. But something in the talisman pulled at her, tugging the way her grandmother’s voice once had.

She reached out. Her fingertips brushed the paper. Everything detonated. A bolt of turquoise light tore through her palm, cracking along her bones like lightning seeking ground. The alley whipped sideways. The neon dissolved. Her breath vanished.

The world snapped. Raven fell backward into raw sound and blinding color, swallowed by a vision that hit with the force of a collapsing star.

* * *

The world seized her like a hand around her throat.

Her body fell away. The alley vanished. She plunged into a storm of static so dense it felt like drowning in broken radio signals. Voices collided around her, layers of sound slamming against each other until they sharpened into something almost human.

When the static parted, harsh and sterile concrete walls rose around her. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. She smelled scorched metal and disinfectant followed by the sound of dozens of boots pounding against the floor. Soldiers yelled orders she couldn’t make out. The air shook with noise.

A metal door crashed open. Radio chatter shrieked in her ears. Someone shouted “Breach” again and again, the word multiplying like an echo that didn’t understand how to die.

She tried to turn, but her body didn’t exist here. She moved like a thought, drifting along the corridor until the light bent, red and violent, washing everything in a fevered glow.

That was where she saw her mother.

Hannah stood barefoot on shattered concrete, hair unbound and whipping in the heat. Her arms were lifted toward a torii-shaped rift carved open in the center of the room. The Gate blazed behind her. A column of red-white fire twisted upward, alive and furious, roaring like a wounded animal.

Her mother’s mouth moved. She was chanting the same lullaby that Raven whispered without thinking when she was afraid. Raven felt the vibration of each syllable hit her chest like distant thunder.

“Hannah! Get back!”

The voice tore across the room.

The Colonel, her father, entered the room. He was younger, sharper, and wore his command like a blade he couldn’t put down. His face twisted between fear and fury. He reached for her mother, but another explosion of red heat forced him backward. Instruments shattered. A technician screamed. Metal warped.

“Seal it,” he barked to someone out of sight. “Seal the entire chamber. Now.”

Her mother looked over her shoulder.

Her eyes were not fixed on the flames or the soldiers. They were fixed on something beyond the flames. The were fixed on Raven. All of it was impossible, yet true.

Raven felt the connection strike her like a blow. Her mother’s lips formed a word she knew. A word she had known her whole life. A word she needed. But the fire roared again, drowning out the sound as the world fractured.

The image burned out, tearing itself apart like paper held to a match. As suddenly as she had left, she was back in the alley, collapsed on her knees, breath ripped from her lungs. The talisman lay smoldering on the pavement beside her hand, the red string burned through. Her palm glowed with turquoise light, pulsing like circuitry waking for the first time.

Raven lifted her head. The businessman was gone. Only the echo of his smile lingered, faint and cold as smoke in the dark.

* * *

The alley came back slowly, like a photograph developing in cold chemicals. The neon buzz returned first. Then the smell of wet pavement. Then the ache behind her eyes.

Raven pushed herself upright, palm throbbing in a slow, steady rhythm. When she lifted her wrist toward the dim light, her breath caught. Thin, branching lines of turquoise glowed beneath the skin. They pulsed like circuitry, syncing perfectly with her heartbeat. There was no pain or burn, but the heat that felt disturbingly alive.

The lacquered talisman lay crumbled beside her, nothing but char and ash.

Raven swallowed hard. “What did you do, Mom…” The words wavered, barely audible.

Footsteps scuffed at the mouth of the alley.

Takumi appeared, breath fogging in the cool air, eyes scanning her first, then the ground, then the shadows. His entire posture changed the moment he saw her crouched there.

“Raven?” He slowed. “I felt a spike. What happened?”

Her mind froze. She couldn’t tell him. Not this. Not the vision. Not the man. Not the mark crawling under her skin like a secret she hadn’t agreed to carry.

She tugged her sleeve down to hide the glow. “Streetlight,” she said. “It fizzled. Sparked or something.”

Takumi moved closer, gaze narrowing. “That wasn’t a streetlight. Resonance like that doesn’t come from infrastructure.”

Raven forced a shrug. “Maybe it was the train lines. They hum weird this time of night.”

The lie tasted metallic. Takumi studied her for a long, quiet second. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that meant he didn’t believe a single word and was deciding whether to push or let her break on her own timeline.

He stepped back. “If you say you’re fine… then we should get you home.”

She nodded. But something inside her shifted, sharp and painful. A boundary forming where there hadn’t been one before. For the first time since she’d met him, Raven didn’t feel safe telling Takumi everything.

She brushed past him, clutching her wrist through her sleeve as if she could hold the secret in place. The circuitry under her skin pulsed again, a whisper of heat following her all the way down the alley.

She didn’t look back.

* * *

Raven shut her bedroom door with a soft click, the kind that made the whole apartment feel too still. She peeled off her jacket and stared at her wrist under the dim lamp. The turquoise circuitry still glowed, faint but insistent, tracing delicate lines beneath her skin like a map drawn by someone who knew her better than she knew herself.

She pulled a wide wristband from her desk drawer and slid it on. The fabric hid the shine, but not the heat. Not the pulse. It throbbed against her skin in slow, deliberate waves.

She sat on the edge of her bed, elbows on her knees, and let the vision replay in fragments.
In her mind, she replayed all of it, her mother framed in fire and the soldiers shouting over radio static. She focused on the Colonel’s face, years younger, with eyes hard enough to cut glass. He had been barking orders at people who weren’t listening. And then there was the Gate… the impossible light of it, peeling the air open like a wound. Finally she focused on her mother. She had turned toward her at the very end. Her lips were moving, but she was saying something Raven still couldn’t hear.

A thought slipped out before she could stop it. “What were you trying to tell me?”

Her voice barely stirred the air. The room answered with silence, broken only by a soft tick of cooling metal and the flutter of wings. The crow landed on her windowsill as if it had been there a hundred times. Its feathers caught the neon seeping in from the street and shimmered in faint turquoise ribbons. The same color as her wrist. The same color as the fire.

It cocked its head. When it spoke, its voice was layered, part gravel, part desert wind, part memory.

“Your mother walked through fire to seal the Gate. Now the fire remembers you.”

Raven’s breath stuttered. The room closed in around her. Suddenly it felt smaller, brighter, and colder. Outside, the city hummed under her window, each streetlight pulsed in slow, synchronized heartbeats. She pressed her covered wrist to her chest, trying to steady herself, but the glow bled through the fabric in thin, ghostly threads.

For the first time since arriving in Tokyo, she didn’t know if the truth waiting for her in the shadows would save her… or swallow her whole.