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Touch Canopus.
Izanami dissolves into ash all at once and is carried away by the wind and water, and Koku watches as the last traces of gunmetal gray and dull blue steel wash out to shore. Their leg is cold in his hand, but the fire searing up the blue steel of his arm is hot enough to drive all other thoughts away as he slices through the skin and muscle and bone of his own left leg and replaces it with theirs. He looks down at the gaping cleave just below his knee, where Izanami’s flesh is already knitting with his—their skin is pinker than his, but he knows that in just a few hours, the flush will fade, and the leg will be identical to his other one.
Given that the connection sets properly, that is.
Koku can’t stay here for long. There are bound to be people who heard the commotion, and maybe even authorities, before long—he can’t afford to take that risk. So he spreads his wings again, takes one last look at all of the snuffed-out candles floating in the shallow water, and whispers a silent apology before he takes off.
He lands, not long after, on a cliff overlooking another part of the lake. Even if there were investigators out and about, their radius wouldn’t extend this far, so he gingerly maneuvers himself into a sitting position, legs dangling over the edge of the cliffside. It hurts to bend his left knee, but not that much. He runs his finger over the seam.
He’s supposed to know Izanami. He’s supposed to know Izanami, from somewhere.
From some time.
If he tries hard enough and squeezes his eyes shut he can almost see the very edges of a high-walled institute settled upon a mountain like a sleeping dragon, pale light filtering through windows, the snow and the trees and white hair and —
The memory flits away as quickly as it came.
The Izanami that Koku had met tonight had looked at him with heavy-lidded disdain. They had set eyes on him and hadn’t hesitated for a single moment after that to try and kill him. They had tried to blow him up in a narrow alley, had tried to carve his flesh from his bones with hot steel, had sung nonsense words and laughed while they slit his face, his arm, his chest.
But Koku sees them standing in the water, moon above them and thousands of tiny candles below, bobbing with the waves their footsteps made, doing a half-spin in delight like a child, and imagines that for a brief moment, when Izanami knew for sure that they had been forgotten, they had just sounded very sad.
Koku traces his hand over the healing scar on his leg, and squeezes his eyes shut, and just for a little while, feels very sad, too.
When the mask falls and hits the roof, and then the ground, in a series of hollow clacks, and the hood falls back, Koku figures that he must just—be seeing things wrong. He must have wanted to see Yuna so much that he’s filling in the gaps on his own. But he blinks, and he blinks again, and the heat of his blue-steel arm is still buzzing against his skin, and the night breeze is still cool against his face, and Yuna is still there.
She’s grown out of the proportions of childhood, just like him. Her hair is darker. The front is cut straight across. She’s got paint on her face, scoring under her eyes and a teardrop down her cheek.
She’s staring at him like she hates him.
“It can’t be,” he says, almost in a whisper.
It is.
She doesn’t stop looking at him like that. Her brows furrowed, her eyes cold in a way that they never were—she hates him. She knew who he was when she attacked, and she’d tried to kill him. She hates him. It must be because she left the thirteen-and-four for him, right after he had promised, he’d promised, that he’d come help her if he saw it, and he’d left anyway. Even though she’d been waiting for him, in the fire and the falling ash, and he’d left her alone.
She’s had to grow up for seven years on her own.
“Yuna,” he says anyway, and lets the guise of the black-winged king fall from him like oil sloughing from water. Turns his arm back to flesh, hides the blue steel. He doesn’t even flinch away when she cuts at his face.
But there’s something wrong. She’s close enough now that Koku can see—she doesn’t even recognize him, not in a way that matters. There’s something utterly incongruous behind her eyes. “Yuna, he says helplessly, and catches her next strike clean through his hand, like the skin and muscle is nothing but tissue paper, and it burns. “It’s me.”
You killed everyone at Jaula Blanca.
No. No, that’s not true.
Even if he can’t remember, it can’t be true. Something so important to Yuna—to his closest friend—he would never have touched. He stares, unblinking. Yuna’s irises flash a deep, vibrant red. Something is wrong.
There’s a blinding pain blooming beneath his ribs from where her blade runs him through, but Yuna is right there. He has to fix this, somehow. Even if it means undoing whatever seal is on his own memories, he has to do something. Yuna is wrong, not just in what she says—something about her, something about who she is, has been twisted up and ripped apart and sewn together to read something new. He has to fix it. He stares at her, and he doesn’t blink, and the very center of his eye sparks like static electricity in the curve of his skull.
The schoolyard.
Their favorite tree.
The mountain, the first place to snow every year.
The open rows of desks in the classroom.
Needles.
Canopus.
The inscription.
His eye.
The blue steel blade the fire the trembling explosions the woods the wall the shelter the cold key in his fingers a warm hand against his—to the left is another Fourth. A cycle of wicked slaughter. The moon of carnage traces out its eternal ellipse, and the hour draws near when the ash-colored—
The cycle breaks.
“Koku, where were you? I was waiting so long.”
There’s the sound of another blade through flesh, and through the red-hot sting of the new steel through his skin, Koku feels foreign blood soaking against his shirt. He thinks he screams, with raw lungs and a tense throat. Gunfire. He’s on the roof, loose shingles slipping beneath his shoes, and then he’s on the ground. Pain exploding through his chest, then his arms and his legs and his neck and then—darkness, and grass soft on his face like feathers.
Koku is silent on Keith’s run-down couch. It’s cramped for just about any person who tries to sit lengthwise on it—Keith needs to pull his knees in when he tries to sleep on it, and even that makes his toes cram into the far end and his head knock against the near—but wrapped up in a blanket, half his head swathed in bandages, Koku looks impossibly small.
Man, Keith thinks. Killer B is a kid.
He’d gotten close to the realization throughout his time with the case—there had been some things, thinking back, that had lined up just so, and now with what he knows it seems like he should have seen the truth much earlier—but knowing something logically is different from seeing it sitting in front of him, picking at the loose threads in his threadbare cushions.
“Hey,” he says. Koku looks up at him, his visible eye unreadable. “Stop that. It’s hard to fix those.” Koku’s hands fall back into his lap. He digs himself further into the blanket and leans back against the armrest—if Keith didn’t know better, he would have thought Koku was pouting.
But the expression drops off of Koku’s face as fast as it had appeared, and the silence returns, almost deafening. Keith had been making coffee, but at some point the pot of water must have boiled over without him noticing. Little searing droplets jump over the rim and hiss on the stove before he reaches over to turn the heat off. Pot of water into a long-spouted kettle, coffee beans into a paper filter that he fumbles unfolding. Cup under the funnel. He’s got the kettle in his hand, ready to pour, when Koku speaks.
“When Jaula Blanca burned down,” he begins, looking steadily down at his hands. Keith pours out the water from the first bloom and sets the cup back underneath the funnel. The smell of coffee starts to rise in the air.
“Canopus told me to go with Kirisame to the shelter that we had, just in case someone attacked. I don’t know if Kirisame was a Reggie or not,” Koku says, idly picking at his thumb with the opposite hand. “I don’t know if it matters.” Keith waits for the coffee to drain into the cup and looks up. Koku’s eye is unfocused, his iris twitching minutely to and fro like he’s watching a scene playing behind his eyes.
Snow. Sparse trees. The smoke, the flecks of molten ash, rising from behind them. A warm grip, even starker against the cold, around his hand. Kirisame’s fingers shaking ever so slightly as they clasped around Koku’s palm tight enough that it hurt.
“When we were right outside of it, members of Market Maker caught up to us. But so did some others from Jaula Blanca. Kirisame told me that I had to lock myself in the bunker and stay in there until it was safe.” Keith sets the kettle down as the last drops of coffee drip slowly through the filter, and sidesteps his low table to hand the cup to Koku. Koku wrinkles his nose at the smell, but cradles the hot cup like he’s never held one before and doesn’t know how careful to be. Keith doesn’t wait for him to keep talking; he goes back to the counter, takes another cup from the tiny cupboard, sets it under the funnel, and starts pouring coffee for himself, too.
After a beat of silence, Koku raises the cup to take a sip, flinches at the scald, licks his lips, and starts talking again. “He shoved the key in my hand and then pushed me in. I… listened to him. When he closed the door, I locked it. I sat there,” Koku says, and then stops again. Keith doesn’t say anything—he just watches the bubbles rise over the coffee grounds. This time, Koku barrels on like the words are sharp and if he swallows them he’ll be cut to ribbons. His voice is hard. “I waited there for what felt like forever. I was… I waited. Until I couldn’t hear anything else from outside. I had my ear pressed to the door the entire time, and they didn’t even—” His hands wrap around the mug so hard his fingers tremor, just for a moment, before he consciously loosens his grasp. “They didn’t even scream when they were killed.”
His breath is coming heavy, like he’s been running, and Koku has to swallow hard with every couple of words he speaks, but he keeps talking in fits and starts. “There was gunfire, and then they just stopped. Stopped making sounds. I waited—until they stopped, and then I waited longer. When I went outside, they were all dead. I didn’t even know all of their names,” Koku says, like it’s a sin. “And I went back to try and find Yuna, and I couldn’t.”
Keith’s coffee is done. He folds up the bulky filter and throws it in the trash, rinses the porcelain funnel, takes his cup, and sits on the table. He’s sitting askew from Koku; Keith stares steadfastly forward so that he’s not looking at him.
“She was waiting for me to come,” Koku says from behind Keith. The blanket shifts with a barely-audible sound. Keith drinks his coffee and waits. He hears Koku drag in a breath, and when he speaks again his voice is measured. “Canopus said to, so I went back to the shelter. I knew what the—I knew what they were raised for. So I took a blade from one of the Market Maker corpses. I dragged all of them into the shelter and I cut off Kirisame’s arm.” Another breath. “He was cold from the snow when I did it. He didn’t bleed much at all. I—” Koku cuts himself off. “The rest of them. I did it for them too. I took parts of them and made them into parts of me.”
Keith turns his whole body to look at Koku. His cup is empty, and he sets it on the table before propping an elbow on his knee.
“Do you know what Kirisame said to me before he pushed me into the shelter?” he asks.
Keith can guess. “No,” he says instead, gruffly.
“He told me that I couldn’t die there,” Koku says, “because I’m their king. And then he said he would see me soon.” He leans over with a wince at his pulling side to put his coffee on the low table, and draws his legs up under his arms. Bandages peek out from the edge of the blanket. “Canopus said that I have a duty to them to survive. So I did.”
The boy looks miserable.
“So?” Keith says. He picks up Koku’s cup, and when Koku doesn’t move, Keith pours it into his own mug. “What are you going to do now?”
“I have to, don’t I? I have to keep going. Because if I don’t, then they’ll have lived for nothing. No one will remember them, so I have to. They’re still here,” Koku says, fiercely, like he’s afraid Keith is going to try and tell him it’s not true. “They’re still here.” Koku’s voice is soft this time, and he brings a stiff hand to his chest, where it bunches in the collar of his shirt. “I have a duty to them.”
Keith drains his—Koku’s—coffee. They’re not the same at all, him and this odd, black-winged boy with an arm and leg of steel and an eye that bypasses reality. They carry different types of burdens, and he can’t say that he truly understands everything that Koku says. The words rattle around in his steel trap of a brain, but their meanings are lost to time. There’s probably only one person on earth who could understand Koku, and it’s not Keith.
But Keith walks over with his empty coffee cup and, without saying a word, puts a hand on his shoulder anyway.
Drip.
Drip.
Koku should probably be more concerned about the amount of blood he’s tracking across the consecrated floor of these millennia-old ruins, but he can hardly think. He just takes one careful, trembling step at a time. In the center of the floor of the Jetblack, the ash-colored bones of the progenitor god curl around those of his priestess, so closely intertwined that they’ve almost become one in death, entombed in rock with nothing but each other and their inscription for thousands of years. Koku stands above them for a moment, a hand to his chest.
He’s here, so that means everything is finally okay, right?
He’s here, so that means Kirisame and Canopus and Izanami and everyone else didn’t die for no reason, right?
The thought doesn’t soothe or settle. Instead, there’s just a deep, heavy hollowness resting just below his throat. Koku can’t do anything but swallow through it and turn away from the bones to let them rest again.
Laica—Minatsuki—what’s left of him twinkles up at Koku from the ground, ash scattered amongst folds of his clothing and stirring gently in the wintry wind that finds its way in from the open ceiling.
Koku wants to hate him. He wants to hate all of Market Maker, wants to hate all of the people who played a part in this great orchestration of chaos and destruction—how many people have died? How many humans, and how many Reggies? How many of his friends? How many of Yuna’s friends? Even if he wanted to count, the numbers are dead and buried, or never existed at all.
But looking at the hat and vest lying on the ground, crumpled and empty, the disguise of someone trying to seem older and stronger—the disguise of a man trying desperately to be someone—Koku can’t bring himself to hate Minatsuki. He can’t forgive him for what he’s done, but he doesn’t think he could ever hate him. To the researchers—to Canopus—Koku had always been a person, but Minatsuki had only ever been spare parts. Koku knows that, now. If Koku lost his eye, Minatsuki would surrender his own. If Koku lost a limb, it would have been excised from Minatsuki before the sun set.
It’s not pity that makes him still, even before he crosses the clearing to Yuna. It’s not sympathy, either. It’s some sort of regret—regret for something that Koku never did. A distant, aching regret that it had happened at all.
That couldn’t have been a way to live.
Koku tries to kneel down—he gets about halfway there before his knees give out and he has to catch himself on the fragmented, blunted end of his blue steel arm.
He’ll never be able to forgive Minatsuki. They’re not the same at all, he and his older brother, the man with the matching eye to his—but in some ways, Koku understands him. He reaches out his right hand, battered and bloody, and rests it atop the vest.
He closes his eyes, and breathes in, and breathes out, and stands up again.
Koku leaves the pile of Minatsuki’s ashes and the bones of the god and priestess and walks to Yuna, and unties her and picks her up as gently as he possibly can.
Slowly, with one step, and then another, and then another, Koku walks out of the ruins of the Jetblack, walks through the falling snow, and heals.