Aftermath

Rinako wandered through the clouds of smoke and dust, injured enforcers sitting propped up against upturned slabs of the concourse or stumps of pillars either side of her, coughing and being tended to by medics. Someone had put a silver blanket around her. Someone else had strapped up her arm. Someone else had put a cup of coffee in her hand. Then they’d left, moved on to the next patient.

As the smoke began to dissipate the desolation of Shibuya Metro 22 became clear. The tunnel had now completely caved in. Something lay beneath it, black and smouldering but no longer moving, like the remains of a giant snail, its body crushed beneath the weight its own shell. Dotted around the concourse she saw the occasional Inspector, their tall helmets and long robes giving them the appearance of ancient statues that had come to life and would any moment freeze again for all eternity. The medics and enforcers all kept their distance from them.

Then something strange happened.

From somewhere above, as though the heavens had opened, gleaming blue tokens started to rain down all over the station. The injured enforcers and prospectors looked up like children after a long drought. Just beside her, one of the tokens floated in the air, whistling as it span. She reached out an arm and watched in fascination as it made a blipping noise then disappeared the moment her finger touched it, like she had burst a bubble. She stared at her fingertip, still waiting for reality to return.

‘Congratulations.’ Called out a familiar voice. ‘Your first blue.’

She looked over to the side, where a little foldout table and seats were set up beside one of the medic’s carts.

‘Kurama!’ She ran over and grabbed him by the shoulders.

He winced, then smiled sheepishly, leaning away. His face was covered in dirt and little scratches.

‘Are you ok?’ His hand was covered in a thick bandage.

He tried to hide it behind him and blushed. ‘Yeah, bit out of practice, I guess.’ He smiled at her.

Suddenly, the little hook formed between her eyebrows and she shoved him, his chair almost toppling.

‘You’re an asshole!’

He looked up, wide-eyed. ‘What did I do?’

‘You tricked me.’ She choked a little on her words. ‘You—you sent me away.’

He looked down. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about that.’

***

The groans around the concourse had become somewhat relaxing. Several portable fires had been lit, tents to treat the wounded erected, and now evening was falling the station was looking more like a campsite.

Rinako and Kurama sat with thermal blankets over their shoulders, sipping from VisAge branded cups at the foldout table.

Kurama screwed up his face. ‘You’d think they could afford half decent coffee.’

Rinako had been quiet a while.

‘What happened?’ She said.

‘What do you remember…’

‘I… remember you stepping out doing your warlock act.’

He looked away.

‘Then the inspectors…’

‘Nothing else?’ he asked.

She looked down. ‘I dont know.’

He nodded after a few moments.

There was a commotion behind them. Rinako and kurama looked back. Hashimoto and his goons were drinking and laughing beside a relief truck. Calibrai, the department half-alter, and the men began to mock him. Suddenly Hashimoto started shouting. ‘If you’re not going to help, then just get out the way, you useless pieces of shit!’

He stormed off toward the back of the concourse, leaving the two officers looking at each other in bewilderment.

‘That was… weird.’ Said Rinako, turning back.

Kurama poured more coffee from the flask. ‘Three years ago Hashimoto and Calibrai were in a raid in the lower districts.’ He looked up. ‘This was before Calibrai—it was before.’

‘Anyway they thought the building was empty. Hashimoto went in to make the seizure. Turned out it wasn’t.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Two of the perps had stayed behind and had Hashimoto pinned down in one of the back rooms. Calibrai went in, took both out and dragged Hashi out the back of the building.’

Rinako looked across at the huge grey skinned enforcer now standing by the far wall on his own.

Kurama was looking at him too. ‘Took a shot to the stomach doing it. He wouldn’t have made it except that the Alter program had just started.’ He held out the flask and Rinako let him refill her cup.

‘Anyway,’ he sipped his coffee and winced again. ‘Everyone gives Calibrai shit, but you wont hear Hashimoto saying a word against him. Guy’s a piece of drak but even he’s got some sense of what’s right.’

Rinako sipped her coffee. Its warmth spread through her body. She huddled beneath the blanket. The wind was howling in from the destroyed station wall. They could see the river reflecting the lights of the city in the distance beneath. The sky was a dark indigo.

‘I’m sorry.’ Said Kurama.

She looked up at him.

‘Not just for that. But I’m sorry I haven’t kept you in on things.’

Rinako kept watching him, the coffee cup warming her hands.

He breathed in deeply, sipped his drink, then let out a long breath.

‘Ten years ago, I was an enforcer—this was before the new light regulations. At that time a gang called the Lucky Diamonds were running the streets. They’d captured a bright 9, some crazy scientist ex-Transdent had sold them a containment bay and they capturing geists to scare the drak out of the other gangs.’

She kept quiet, not wanting to interrupt.

‘Back then I had a partner. Ichihara. He was a veteran,’ Kurama smiled, ‘kind of stuck in the old ways, you know, used to keep a photo of his grandkid in his wallet, all that. I was the kid. Golden boy of the division. I’d set a record the previous year for geists broken, thought I was hot shit. The Diamonds were run by a guy called himself MasterCell. Yeah, I know. No one knew where he’d come from but within a year he’d built up a huge network - it was amazing, out of nowhere. Anyway, I put a trace on him, got lucky, turned out he was working with the companies he was ripping off. I wanted to go in. Ichihara didn’t think it was a good idea. That it might be a setup. You know, I thought he was just old, that we could go in ourselves and run through the place, no problem. We go through the channels and it would be sent up for approval, back down operations— the whole thing would take forever by which time they’d probably have cleared out, especially if we had any kind of an security problem.’

He sipped his coffee.

‘So I went in. I didn’t tell Ichihara. And he was right. It was a trap. I was surrounded the minute I walked in. They had the geist there, locked me in the bay. Anyway, I used a few tricks, got lucky again maybe, and came out with a few of them.’

The wind whistled through the station.

‘Thing was, Ichihara followed me.’ He sipped his coffee and chewed his lip. ‘He knew I’d go and didn’t want me going in alone. So he tailed me all the way across the city. That bastard was always the best undercover, you could drop him a meter behind a mark and they’d never make him.’

He looked up. ‘See, what I hadn’t thought of was that it wasn’t just this case. That maybe Ichihara knew something more than me, and that’s why he didn’t want to move. And that if I went in, I was gonna be in danger. So he went after me, see.’ He looked at the ground around his feet. ‘Because he was my partner. Because that’s what you did for your partner, right, these old guys, even when you know they’re an idiot, doing something that only idiots do, you back them up.’

His breathing had become ragged. He paused and it settled slowly. ‘So I got a few weeks in the infirmary and a bunch of citations to go with my commendation. Ichihara wasn’t so lucky. Someone took him out while he was waiting in the car. Someone who knew where he’d be, and which squad car he’d taken. He always kept a pistol on him, a real one. Old habits. Only when they found him it was still loaded. Never fired a shot.’

Rinako sat transfixed. Evening had settled over the concourse, the flickering of the nearby fire lighting their faces gently. For some reason she was thinking of her grandad.

Kurama sat drinking his coffee quietly after that, the blanket hanging over his shoulders. After some time, Rinako’s eyes wandered to his bandaged hand. ‘So it really happened? You took out a bright9 on your own. You must have been off the chart…’

He looked up, surprised then back down at his hand and frowned. ‘Oh. Not enough apparently.’ He paused. ‘So you get it?’

She looked up.

‘Why I couldn’t tell you everything. He died because of me.’

She frowned. ‘But it wasn’t your fault. You believed in justice—‘

‘Justice—I believed in Sato Kurama. Golden boy of the division. Hot shit incorporated. Yeah, ok, that happened to coincide with catching some bad guys here and there but when I was on a case all I was thinking of was the looks around the office when I brought them in, the holos the next day. Rookie cop snares another big one. Youngest chief in waiting.’ He was chewing his lip again.

‘No worse feeling ever in my life than seeing his wife at the funeral. Standing beneath a black umbrella. I was too ashamed to go. I stood outside the cemetary watching. Rain pouring down all around me. I leave her a little something now and then.’

Something in Rinako’s head clicked, as though she had been on a long journey which only now returned to where it started.

‘Takuya Pass.’ She closed her eyes. Guilt filled her.

He looked up. ‘Huh? Oh. Yeah, they had a daughter. You know what the payout for the family of deceased enforcer is? Not enough to feed a kid for a week. She must hate me.’

He sipped his coffee. ‘Back then I had a family of my own. A little girl.’ He smiled. Rinako could see his eyes moistening in the light of the flames.

‘When I got out they’d gone. I was so caught up in—just…’ he shook his head. ‘It was all I thought about back then. The perfect career, perfect family… I just forgot the real family waiting for me at home.’

‘I wrote to them at first, but her mother sent back the letters, unopened.’

Rinako thought about it. ‘But it’s not like that now. They’re still out there. Why don’t you contact them, tell them you’re sorry, that things are different now?’

Kurama looked in her eyes and smiled softly. ‘They’re out there somewhere, living a good life. Happy.’ His gaze shifted to the fire. ‘I don’t want to mess with that.’

Rinako blew out her breath. It felt like a lot of mysteries had been answered. A little mental list she’d been keeping. The drop off, the secrecy, the little doll he kept in the car—she looked up with a start.

‘What about the lollipop?’

‘The—‘ he looked at her, an expression of puzzlement on his face. Then he laughed and leant back in his seat. It was a long, natural sound, like rain falling after a hot spell.

‘I like strawberry.’ He looked at her, smiling. ‘You really were born to be a cop.’

Rinako’s couldn’t help breaking out into a broad smile. She looked down to try to hide it. She thought of her grandad again, telling her how the parts of the gun went back together. Her mother scolding him for it at the dinner table, him raising his eyebrows at her when she looked away.

Sometimes it really is just strawberries.

***

The sky was dark now. Little lights were in motion all over the station. The light-field was restoring itself. It was beautiful to watch. Sometimes it was worth getting hurt just to feel what it was like to get better.

‘My grandfather was a cop.’ She said.

Kurama looked up.

‘You asked me a while ago why I left Gokayama. Do you know the Baobab bug?’

His mind whirled—there was something familiar about the name. Suddenly it came to him. Some articles in the holos, he had seen them when he was an enforcer. ‘It was some kind of problem with the in vitro testing for the newer conversion software? Visage had to spend a boatload redesigning from the ground up for launch.’

‘Yeah, some kind of problem. Only it wasn’t just the in vitros.’

He looked at her.

‘That software was released out in the wild. My father had a rare deficiency that meant the radiation from light-space caused cellular degradation in his hippocampus. Memory loss. It didn’t have to be nearby, fields generated by layered augmented reality half way across the country would accelerate the disease. VisAge offered a new treatment. He was already struggling but after he started the treatment his disease accelerated rapidly. It wasn’t only that, he was starting to see things, remember people he’d never met.’

‘It was like he was a hundred different people. And it was me that recommended the treatment to him, being so educated and all, not like the other kids who were gonna spend their lives stuck in Gokayama.’ Her gaze fell to the ground.

‘It was leaked by an insider that the treatment was really just a medium. The treatment didn’t have a bug, the bug was its purpose. They were testing out neural sculpting… a couple of years later it started being sold as internal cosmetics. Of course, nothing stuck. The courts ruled in favour of the complainants but only for damages relating to minor negligence. We’d get sent payments every cycle and every cycle my mom would go down to the garden and light a bonfire. It was a like a festival.’

Kurama looked out at the sky hanging over the city. ‘Fucking assholes.’

‘I didnt want to go but I couldn’t stay. My mom was so angry. As long as I was there I couldn’t get away from my own anger.’

As they sat, the first light of morning began to colour the horizon. Something changed in Kurama’s face. He looked down, tapping his fingernails against the coffee cup in his hands.

‘That data you pulled from Kingfisher, remember?’

Rinako looked up, her eyes wide. She thought of the doctor leaning over her. It seemed an age ago now. ‘I’m hardly likely to forget.’

‘Yeah, well. Remember what he said?’

She frowned, trying to recall.

‘Something about how what they harvest would be put to good use.’

‘… through higher channels…’ she remembered now.

He looked around. Officers were still scattered throughout the station, talking amongst each other or working on the cleanup.

‘Feels a bit crowded here. You wanna go for a late night drink?’

‘Sure.’ She said.