Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Even a single midnight ago, she would've said that the choice has neither rhyme nor reason.

But he's brought reason, and she's brought Rhyme.

Never has the moon shone so radiantly full as it does from the roof of Pork City. But not tonight: tonight the sky is a pool of ink so near that she could touch it with her left hand, let it stain her fingertip and run down her flesh. The vortex of emotions wickedly twisting from the spiral-square stairwell that straddles parallel worlds, disrupted halfway between memory-merges into an intersection between another world's Mark City and his world's Pork City, has gone quiet and still. By morning, filled with the people of Shibuya who call it Mark City, their thoughts and feelings will rise again, teeming, trembling, intoxicating.

Even if the city has gone, briefly, silent, on a moonless night like this, the two of them—they can kick up a fuss, before the night ends.

Because tonight he has invited her not to Mark City, but to Pork City.

Leaping the fence onto the verboten skyscraping realm sealed off by the city's grand design, making the first move. Laughing like a fool on the roof, spraypaint cans in hand.

She takes the black. It seems, somehow, like her color. Others might have said coral, or salmon. But if she had to choose herself which color to slam into her Soul: her pale fingers stand out against the dark. The old spraypaint can rubs color off onto her skin.

Yeah, he's rubbed off on her.

He's still laughing, grinning at her, tilting his hat up so she can see his wide eyes, his dilated pupils, his gaze fixed on her. The laughter is a cacophony, chaotic, disjointed, noisy noise: a microcosm of his city. Rusty, throaty, rowdy, and so infectious that she hears a harmony rising from her belly and spilling from her lips. Laughter.

He watches her as she aims the can. Not in a circle of his design, but by her hand.

Her own symbols in twelve. The isolated. The outsiders. The ones who developed on their own, cut off, by themselves, before bridges formed across the islands of land and sea. Some equivalent or analogous, others purely of her own choice. Logical operators not substituting for alchemical symbols, but combining qualities that she sees into the magnum opus of her interpretation. The symbols spiral. No longer ||s. She has had enough of ||s. She will do what she wants and she will get what she wants. All of it. &&. This && that && these && those && her dreams, too. She wants everything. She'll get everything.

The lines come together. Spokes of a twelve-fold wheel. The blackening, the whitening, the yellowing.

Shibuya has already seen the mount, has already seen the flame, has already seen the wind, has already seen the wood. Now she'll add a touch of her own choosing, to balance the fire, fire, burning bright, in the concrete jungle of his night, a purely mortal hand and eye that framed the lion's symmetry. For herself, neither a tiger nor a wolf: the frost. The ice. The rime.

And the skull in the sigil's heart. The long skull, neither felid nor canid, taking neither the lion nor the dog from the guardian lion-dog, but characteristics of both in the body of neither. Shibuya already has a lion, already has a dog, already had a tiger. She isn't emulating. She isn't copying. She's making her own from scratch. The skull of the animal she has chosen. The skull of the form that she has decided on. The skull of the artwork she will mold her Soul into, shattering it across the firmament and letting the shape of its destruction transform into a zetta beautiful heap.

Intricate patterns weave around the edges. None of his patterns. None of the crown from the pendant someone else gave her, but the skull and bones that she printed over her own threads and cloaked herself in. The sky she sees: dark. The spray she sprays: darker. The herself she faces: darkest.

And then, there, beneath the skull, at the beast's heart: a tag of her own. Not Raimu. Not Rhyme. Not in characters that anyone else has ever written her name with. But her own strokes.

A right angle. A straight line. A jagged sawtooth wave in two periods. A three-pronged tuning fork.

Decorated with her own touches. Small triangular fangs and claws drawn along the surfaces, fitting the sawtooth, and on the other characters as well. Brush-stroked tufts of fur to cut through the cold she'll run through. Bars of her own rules—no one else's—streaming like sheet music, but only the percussion. She brings the rhythm.

Her tag. Not her name, what others can call her by, but her tag, what she marks her artworks as, what she marks her world as, what she marks the masterpiece as: Herself.

She stands back. Admires her handiwork. A complex sigil simultaneously neat and messy. Overflowing with details that only make sense to her. Running through with all her desires, her hopes, her wants, her needs. Not her dreams, not yet. The truths that she tucked away so deep within her sleeves that they've throbbed and festered along her arms: she's rolled them up and pulled them out, pouring that thick copper-crackling slurry into the can and spraying her own paint over the rooftop beneath the moonless sky.

Her truths.

That she won't be her big brother's little sister. That she won't be a symbol for others to fawn over. That she won't have a smile that others will protect. That she would die for herself, kill for herself, take anything for herself, and for her older brother—because she chooses to—and for her friends—because she decides to—and for Shibuya—because she does it out of her own free will. That she lives for herself, and no one. That she isn't the good innocent sweet little girl. That she wants neither fear nor mercy, neither hesitation nor sentiment, neither pity nor protection. That she doesn't only exist for her older brother's sake, or for the hero of Shibuya's sake, or for the saint of Shibuya's sake, or for her friends' sake, or for anyone's sake but her own.

That she wants to know. For fun. For kicks. That she wants to learn. That she is the she who smiled throughout the apocalypse. Heh heh heh. Zetta fun times.

That she's alive, and she very much intends to stay that way.

On a moonless night like this. The wintry chill biting her face as she'll frostbite back.

No need to explain the sigil to him. He won't be activating any of it. All her own drive, her own willpower, her own Imagination. If she can't decode it in the UG, then she's failed through her own capacity. No runaway cars, no minefield sharks. No surprises. No tricks. He's laid out all the cards on the table and she's stacked them into whatever house opted to make before scattering them overground. He's unveiled all his garbage and she's thrown it into the asphalt and let the shattered pieces transform into an artwork in her own hand.

She's examined all of her own trash and now she's drawn her mark on the world. For the sheer pleasure of learning and teaching she walks him through the symbols and their meanings. What they mean to her, and her alone. And, now, what they mean to him.

He runs his fingers over the visor of his hat and tilts the brim up. That's his protégé.

She presses her fingers to her cheek. She doesn't need his approval, his permission, his blessing. But she'll take his comments from the peanut gallery.

Drawing her fingers towards her sternum, she gathers the rhythms of her body: the bones, the breaths, the beats. How she rocks, how she sways, how she plays her own song, her improvisation, her contribution to the chaotic cacophony of the city around them.

Time to shout out the melody.

She strums the notochord, a cord between her fingers, and the chord brings the sigil to humming life beneath her left hand. The graffiti's rubbed off on her palm.

Last chance to walk away. Last chance to return to the life she's had before. Last chance to go back to Raimu "Rhyme" Bito, everyone's little sister, the Hachiko gang's fifth-wheeling friend who sometimes gets remembered.

Someday, she'll show them a smile, out from under the cloudy sky. Searching for the words to shout, she's still on that journey today.

Today, she'll show him a smile, out from under that moonless sky. She's still on that journey. She'll be on that journey forever. And the journey of ten thousand strides begins with a single step, as they say.

She's looked before she leaped. She's considered a gram of prevention worth a kilo of cure. She's chosen of her own accord.

The ones above might've called her wishes a sin. The one beside her might've called her wishes a sine. She calls a sign of her own design.

And now she shouts out the melody.

Even if her head's killing her, this isn't a dream. But neither is it a nightmare. Where is she? Pork City. What's happening? She's taking the Taboo. What's that black thing? The black spirit: the darkness within her. She's aiming for herself. She's falling again—off the ladder, because she chose to let go. Didn't her older brother get it? She's been going behind his back this whole time. She can fly. She's a Noise. She's not that much of a bird brain. Because she's not a bird at all. She's—

She dips her left forefinger into the ink. That deepest, richest black. Purification without consumption. Dissolution and coagulation. The magnum opus.

A rhyme and reason of her own choosing.

Don't worry. Because this is the way her life goes. Because she has chosen that this is the way her life goes.

Chapter Text

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Years ago, when her big brother had decided to eschew the given name gifted him by their parents in exchange for a nickname, she had understood the significance of the gesture.

He hadn't given up on his family. He went by his own version of their family name now, the ending shortened, the beginning lengthened, from Bitō to Bīto, from Bito to Beat.

She saw how their parents tried to take the unshapen clay they saw in him and squeeze it into something pure and right before they fired it stiff and taut.

But nothing about her older brother spoke of unshapen clay waiting for the kiln. The strong, sturdy stuff that made him up could change and flow over time. She'd witnessed him changing and flowing over the years: emotionally opening up, taking pride in his ability to do and not overthink, finding enough confidence to leave their parents' demands, wishes, and eventually house.

She had never taken issue with the given name gifted her by their parents, who had treated her kindly: the one who met their expectations, the one who succeeded, the one who deserved. Yet while their hands had passed over her, the image of those hands squeezing that clay, squeezing it, squeezing it—

So she had found a way to bridge the gap. To support him while staying honest with herself.

He became the Beat, and she became the Rhyme. No real difference from her given name, only a little change in context. No ending shortened, no beginning lengthened. Spoken exactly the same as her given name: their—her parents would never know if they only heard the household talk, if they refused to read the writing on the wall.

Except for how he said it. Clipping off the last vowel to make it sound more like the English word, drawing out the first whenever he called her name.

On the road, car lights flashing: "Rhyyyme!"

In the street, shark Noise thrashing: "Rhyyyyyme!"

After the apocalypse, chatting with the dashing: "Rhyyyyyyyme!"

The first Game had changed him. He'd come back surer, more confident. He'd always worn his heart on his sleeve, but now he wore the diamond, club, and spade too: the full gamut of who he was and who he was going to be. Not just holding the cards he'd been dealt until the fire burned them up, but working them, actively, into a better hand.

He'd chosen to leave. And she'd chosen to leave with him.

Her older brother had begged her to stay, to take advantage of her parents' kindness, to not follow in his footsteps or his boardtrails. To stay in school, real school, not transfer to the school of hard knocks. He intended to do it all for her, anyway: intended to make enough money living by himself that he could spend it on her, do whatever he could to keep her healthy, hearty, happy. Even when he'd pleaded with her not to go with him, his hands had trembled, like the wolf pleading with the bunny not to climb into their mouth, the hawk pleading with the hamster, the monkey cloaked in the wild boar's armor pleading with the animal they'd identified as a squirrel.

Telling the squirrel to turn away, because the monkey cloaked in the wild boar's armor wouldn't be able to decline, so much did he want her by his side, even if he—thought he—knew that staying with her parents would have been better for her.

But once she decided on something, whether she'd decided to protect him from a shark, or protect him from Tigris Cantus, or protect him from Soul Pulvis, she saw it through. And she'd see this through, too.

He'd given up on his parents and the name that they'd gifted him.

But he hadn't given up on his family or the bonds that joined them to each other. Hadn't given up on her. Hadn't given up on the one thing that mattered to him more than anything else in this world by the shared blood commingling in their hearts, by the shared bone commingling in their skulls.

So she had gone with him, and they had made an apartment their fortress. Whatever they could afford.

She stayed in school like she promised she would. He stayed out on the street, working odd jobs here and there, hustling where he could as a kid without a high school degree, doing deliveries on his skateboard and refusing his friends' charity, trial-and-erroring his way through learning curry, even if he couldn't afford the fatty fish for the seafood curry she liked best, figuring out sewing so he didn't have to get threads he couldn't afford, drifting away from Shiki and Eri in just how busy he'd gotten trying to keep a roof over their heads. And maybe from the silent shame, though he'd never voice it, of falling deeper into the red for all his hard work, while his more successful friends blossomed into young money for all their hard work.

Or maybe that was just her. She'd call him out for refusing their friends' kindness, but that'd be the pot calling the kettle black.

Wherever she could, she'd tried to chip in.

Taken up programming so she could finish small tasks on freelance marketplaces between homework and exams.

Figured out the best prices for produce ahead of time so they could string together deals from Aoyama and eat satsumaimo every day for a month, RSS-feeded coupons for them to dine on fast food when fresh vegetables went out of their budget—and often.

Leveraged how much yen her older brother had showered during the Game—the pins had vanished from his pockets the moments he'd reincarnated, but the funds he'd already spent hadn't—to make friends across Shibuya: HT, who had opened his own clothing modification boutique when le Grand had shuttered its doors, and now shared secrets to making clothing last, sometimes mending things for free under the table. Ayu, who had opened Dangerous Branding after D+B's violent takeover by Joli bécot, and now let Rhyme relax in her tattoo parlor during opening hours so she didn't have to drive up their electric bills or data cap at home. Hideki, who got her involved as a taste-tester at Mexican Dog for her thoughtfulness and willingness to taste for free, and now found excuses to make slight modifications so she could take home bags of 'work' for her 'job.'

Maybe she took advantage of their kindness. But they remembered her older brother, and they called her wise beyond her years. Sure.

For her older brother's sake, she'd take everything that she could take.

Medicine from the herbalist who took pity on her, mistaking her for being around her grandson's age instead of years older. Sure. She'd gotten that, a lot.

Out-of-date and busted computer parts that would've gotten thrown away anyway from the internet café that had sprung up near Stride, that she fixed up on her own time and strung together, that had gotten the owner to whistle at her skills given her youth. Sure. She'd gotten that, a lot.

The good, patient, and kind little sister who did everything for her big brother.

And they liked her big brother. What a kind-hearted brother, taking such good care of his adorable little sister, doting on her, walking her home, keeping her safe.

Of course they'd chip in. Better for her not to worry about anything and just smile.

Her big brother was working so hard to protect that smile, didn't she know?

So here, another tear stitched up in her big brother's favorite skull jacket, another day she didn't use the aircon, another definitivo chili dog that her big brother called a party in his mouth, another box of curious mushroom—her big brother considered great—and other supplements to their cheap diets, another spare computer part so her big brother could protect that smile.

He must've thought that too, because he never told her much anything cost, never complained, never fretted, just grinned her and encouraged her to go ahead and grab dat second fearless fishwich if she wanted it, yep, an' dat new gradical card deck thingy too, 'cause he'd figure how ta afford all dat one way or anotha.

The fearless fishwich never made it into the order. Neither did the graphics card.

She learned to count every yen. Not knowing only brought her eyes to narrow all the further at every dot and comma, each flick of paper or—increasingly—swipe of phone for ShibuPay. She'd had to jailbreak their phones to get the app on it. Not like they could get actual accounts to their names without enough for the deposit.

The freelancing, the deals-searching, the networking: she had the time for it between classes. Never spent much time with her peers anyway. Didn't feel like explaining why she couldn't go out for boba with them unless they'd let her stand around awkward and cupless, why she never bought any threads and just windowshopped, why she stared out of the classroom at the listless blue sky whenever their teachers went on about the future, about how they had the imagination to shape Shibuya's limitless possibilities, about how they held the country's hope as the new generation, about how they could do anything—as long as they could dream of it—and about how they had to follow those dreams.

Nah, better off by herself. So much to do! Exams to study for, programs to write and revise, deals to scrooge up, stand-up routines to write.

A friend in need was a friend indeed. And she wouldn't be a friend indeed.

So every yen she saved, she turned towards her older brother. Her older brother, and his education: occasionally fitting in credits at the junior college over the summer where he could get them.

So he could work towards a stable future outside of supporting her. She'd insisted.

He'd claimed they couldn't afford it. She'd said she'd drop out of high school and take on odd jobs herself in that case. He'd threatened to drop her back off at her parents'. She'd held her ground. He'd held his. She'd asked him, please.

He'd crumpled like wet tissue paper. Yeah, he'd take the classes, get the certification. Few, and far-between, when he could pony up the cash.

How tightly she'd hugged him. Having the same meatless cheap homemade curry a few more times every month worthed every last moment.

She found it all so funny that she could've worked it into one of their stand-up routines: she'd convinced him to go to school, and school had nearly gotten him taken from her forever, again. He'd gotten that Reaper pin, that Player pin, from one of his summer school buddies. The pin that had plunged him into the Game. The pin that had prompted her to investigate his disappearance. The pin that had gotten her to hack into the RNS, meet Kaie, come face-to-face with Reapers, hear about Minamimoto's comprehension of Soul Pulvis, listen to his thoughtfulness about how to awaken Souls that had had their very desires, hopes, and dreams taken them from them, learn about the man who had broken the UG's highest Taboo and come back just to figure out how to restore Shibuya's people, and then return home again, all without crossing over into the UG.

Never before then had she considered it possible. That she could interface with the UG from the comfort of her own home. That she could poke, and prod, and investigate, without doing anything dangerous like she'd promised her brother she wouldn't do.

After all, he'd thrown everything that he could have into making her life shine so brightly.

Fed her, clothed her, watered her, kept their home warm in the winter and cool in the summer, never asked her for anything but a bright smile, a held hand, a warm hug.

Never asked her for anything but that. Just a hug. Holding her against him, cradling her head on his chest where she could hear his heartbeat, snug, warm, safe, protected.

Everything worth it for her smile.

Never asked her for anything but that.

If only she could—

He'd raised her so well. With all the free time that his hard work had afforded her, she'd had the opportunity to teach herself how to program as a hobby, no need to fret about the bills. With how much he loved her, he'd agreed to do stand-up comedy with her even when he felt the audience laughing at him instead of with him, sacrificing the precious little free time he had on something she'd suggested. With how much he loved her, he'd take her to the skatepark whenever they had a spare minute so that she could watch him board and do tricks, sacrificing the precious little free time he had on teaching her something near and dear to him.

Thanks to his efforts, she'd even made friends. Yup, the little sister who hadn't made any friends her own age had finally had excuses to meet people who would want to protect her smile, too.

Such as his old pals, from the original Game she'd played for three days.

Old pals like Neku, who had greeted her just the same way he'd greeted her during that first post-Game meet-up by the ever-faithful Hachiko, by asking about the bell that her big brother had gifted her, the bell that Neku had returned to her big brother, the bell that had sparked Neku's friendship with her big brother, whether or not she'd even had a human neck to wear it at the time.

Old pals like Shiki, and Shiki's non-Player friend Eri, who fussed over her outfit and offered to get her cuter ones, promised her that she didn't need to shop for cheaper threads from the men's section and they'd delight in designing something that fit her style—whatever her style was!—whether closer to Shiki's or closer to Eri's. Shiki had fussed over the bell, too, the first time they'd met, in one of the initial conversations they'd ever exchanged, her brother's gift connecting her with those she wouldn't have had a link to otherwise.

And Eri, too, had fussed over the bell. She—especially after she'd explained her older brother had gotten it for her—had flashed said big brother with an appreciative gaze that had made Shiki elbow Eri lightly and whisper something about her big brother being single.

Not old pals like Mr. Hanekoma, who had vanished somewhere after the first Game that her big brother had played and won and who had stayed vanished after the second Game that her big brother had played and won. But man did her big brother lament that. She would've loved him, her big brother had said. Shiki had agreed. Neku had agreed. What a shame. She couldn't meet him.

Not just his old pals. The shopkeepers who couldn't remember her but who all remembered her big brother skating in with that orange-haired spicy tuna roll that everyone loved even more. Everyone who wanted to chip in, won over by his big warm grin and bigger, warmer heart. The clerks, chefs, managers, waiters, cashiers he'd met during his original Game and his second. Everyone with a gift to take home for her big brother. Growing boy like him needed a second helping of that chicken curry he loved so much, eh? Fish curry? Nah, he liked the dal and chicken more, so here, all boxed up for 'im.

And his newfound pals, too. The Wicked Twisters, they called themselves. Real sweet kids. Clinging like puppies to the perpetual big brother. Everybody's big brother, who slung his arms around all of their shoulders, embraced them all snug and warm, didn't go a day with bear-hugging at least one of them while they laughed and grinned and let themselves get spun around.

They invited her to go out with them on all the Wicked Twister meet-ups. Even let her join the group chat. Real sweet of those real sweet kids to do so.

'Cause they always wanted to invite her big brother, and her big brother spent all his free time on his precious little sister.

So she went to those outings, whenever they invited her. Sipped her bubbly berry blend whenever Fret suggested they go for some drinks at somedrinks, nibbled on her fearless fishwich whenever Nagi sally-forthed towards her favorite Justice Burger, chewed her takoyaki whenever Rindo asked if they could pop by Asia Fantasia, drank the not-too-sweet matcha milk tea whenever Shoka steered them towards Bubblevision, quietly ordered the fish curry whenever her big brother suggested they drop by the Don's. Listened to them laughing at one another, occasionally adding in a word of wisdom or two as the conversation called for one.

Wow, they told her, she really knew her stuff. Sometimes they wondered whether she even paid attention, since she didn't say all that much, but then she'd cut in with just the right thing to say.

Always had the right word up her sleeve, the right thought or two to slice right through the heart of the matter. Called out her big brother's real kindness even when he downplayed it and passed out sagely advice, so much wiser than her years, and—really? Only a year younger than her big brother? No way. Really? Older than Fret and Rindo? Whoaaa. No way.

But they all got it. Smart as a whip and basically a bonafide genius given her 1337 hacking skills and all that stuff. Man, did she even need to go to college? With how much she'd figured out on her own, even busting into the UG with her ridiculously fast typey-typey-hacky-hacky skills! Like, if her big brother was a soundsurfer, then she was a...a...! A 𝐶-surfer, perchance? Yeah—wait, why a seasurfer? 'Twas quite appropriate, given the programming language 𝐶. Ohhhhh. Yeah! A 𝐶surfer! Nice one!

The way she could hack the UG—not the UG; she'd hacked the RNS, she reminded the Wicked Twisters, a mere online network accessible in the RG—and turn everything into numbers like some sorta kid genius—anyone could hack a private online network like the RNS, left unprotected given the dearth of ex-Players who would even try—made 'em think of Mr. Minami!

And then they all had to shut da hell up, 'cause they sure as hell weren't givin' that no-good math-shit-spoutin' Tabooty the time of day. Nasty brotha'd beaten her big brother and Phones's asses back during the first Game widdout a care in the world. Gotten his fellow Reapers—his coworkers, man, couldn't just pull dat crap wit' his coworkers—junked an' didn't so much as bat an eye. Even went an' abandoned the Wicked Twisters after the first week like the total tool he was! Used peeps, abused peeps, left 'em for dead. Forget about Tabooty.

Ain't no one cuhrayzee enough to blow himself sky-high and then pop back up like a damn daisy only to go berserk worth their time.

Ah-hem, her big brother would have to pardon the intrusion, but Lord Minamimoto had certainly not intentionally gone berserk: Soul Pulvis had cloaked him in curious armor, resembling a wild boar, against his will.

Naw, her big brother hadn't been talkin' about dat. He'd been talkin' about the original game, the 𝑂-𝐺, when that blowin'-himself-up thing had apparently gotten him even more screwed up in the head than he'd already been.

That, or he'd gotten off the hook from the few rules he'd still had as a Reaper. Oh, yeah, ex-Reaper, ex-Game Master like that Shiba dude, except he'd smacked enough rules that even the Conductor had had enough.

'Sides, no one had seen his ugly mug since the Game had ended. No matter how much Rindo, Fret, and Nagi had staked out his old haunts, trying to lure him in with promises of free melon cream soda and parfaits. Nagi and Fret, at least. Rindo hadn't started out on board—had complained about Minamimoto not exactly cooperating with them the last time they'd seen him during the Game—but he'd ended up getting into it, too.

Shoka couldn't understand it. They'd puttered around with this absolute weirdo eccentric for one week, one guy who had gotten his Soul so completely screwed up that he didn't even count as a Reaper, maybe some kind of really gunked-up Noise that she couldn't even start to piece together. His numbers on the RNS hadn't made any sense. Drawn some funky spirals and loops that looked like he'd done it on purpose just to mess with 'em. Maybe because he hadn't even registered as a Player. Or maybe...

Either way, that asshole had told her friends later, losers, and only she could do that. If she ever saw him again she'd kick her trainer so far up his ass he'd be tasting rubber insole for a week. Yeah, hoped he enjoyed that taiyaki with his whole mouth flavored like her freaking shoe.

...Shoka'd asked the other Reapers about him anyway. For Rindo's sake, for Nagi's, for Fret's. Uzuki. Kariya. Kaie, too. None of 'em had seen any trace of him in Shibuya, Shinjuku, or elsewhere. Gone with the wind.

If he ever showed up again, he'd show up on his terms only. No obligations, no gods, no masters. He served himself, came and went as he pleased, nobody's pet, nobody's friend, nobody's anything.

From what Rhyme could tell they'd pretty much given up at this point on ever actually seeing him again. But they still went on their outings together to try to catch him. Just in case.

Even when her older brother snorted and twisted his face about the whole thing.

Wha'd they need dat loser for, anyway? They had the bes' big brother ever right here widdem. Didn't need dat joke of a temporary babysitter. No way was Tabooty big bro material.

If he made a Tabooty call anywhere, they'd find that bastard in the dumpster where he deserved to be. Wherefore a dumpster? Yeah, not cool, dude: just 'cause her big brother didn't like Mr. Minami didn't mean he had to compare him to trash. Though, Mr. Minami had made a lot of references to trash and garbage during the Game...? Whooaaa, how observant. That was his Rindude!

Talk turned elsewhere. Always did. Her big brother never chatted about Minamimoto much. Never really answered her questions about what had happened during the Game or set the memories that had shuddered through her Soul straight.

The Wicked Twisters, huh.

Nagi had her own busy life with college, but she always tagged along on outings, too, attentive in her own way, excitable about most things nerdy, referring to her as Lady Rhyme even when she'd kindly asked Nagi not to speak so formally. She treated Nagi politely on their outings and thanked her for all of the Elegant Strategy merchandise that Nagi had imposed on her over the past year. All in the devilish effort to convince her and her big brother to play the mobile game, of course. That most of her gifts happened to have useful functions on the side—underwear, socks, even branded toilet paper that...admittedly felt pretty nice, well, two-ply and all, once she could get past the fact that every square came with a drawing of the game's posterboy—was a pure coincidence.

Fret, Shoka, and Rindo went to the same school she did. Fret always had a laugh or two for his Beat-buddy and Rhymey-wimey. No? Not working for her? All righty, he'd stick to Rhyme for now until he moseyed onto something she'd like. Yup, sure. Wow, studying for her college entrance exams in the winter? How studious! Hey, did she know that Rindo had scored an 89 on his mock exam in world history? Maybe Rhyme and his Rindude could study together, huh? Eh? Eh? Fret? Nah, nah, he didn't need to study. All good! He'd...figure something out!

Shoka and Fret didn't have college plans for after high school. Shoka, who teased Fret and Rindo relentlessly, treated Rhyme with an unusual kindness, an isolating kindness. Called her 'sis,' and everything. Such a kindness. Such a kindness that made her wince, just a little bit.

Because, Shoka explained, the world had shown her a kindness: Ken Doi, the Don himself, had adopted her as his own on his friend Aadiv's advice.

Shoka still bumped into people sometimes, still found herself snapping doors off hinges without meaning to, still showed off her sharpened canines when she smiled. Some parts of having worked as a Reaper for four years, she'd some day finally learn how to cope with and changed.

But other parts Shoka'd have for life. Like the fangs. And the mental trauma. For which Nagi had recommended therapy, and Shoka had gone. Pretty expensive, to be fair. But worth it, if she could afford it.

Her dreams didn't have to involve financial success, or getting a college degree, or anything like that. Shoka'd wait tables at the Don's, see her friends, go to therapy, and become...happy.

And Fret... Well, Fret hadn't told his parents about the whole 'not going to college' thing yet. But he would! Eventually. According to him.

So what if he didn't have a dream in mind right? He could figure it out. Not like he couldn't come up with one later even if he didn't have one right now. Right now he'd cruise, and his dreams would take care of themselves. No biggie.

Rindo had plans. Oh, yeah. He'd turned all his spare time into buffing up his application so that he could get into the best possible college. He'd gotten serious about Shoka. Wanted to give her a good life. Shoka, and his other friends. So that if anyone ever ran into a hard spot, Rindo could bail them out of it. All those part-time jobs, all those unpaid internships, all those club positions. He'd wasted the first semester of his high school life on his indecisive drifting through life, but no more.

During the Game he'd nearly died of anxiety just thinking about working retail. Now he ran around trying to cram another 'thing that would look great on his CV' into his schedule.

Did he still feel anxious about it? Hahaha...

But he'd suck it up just like he'd sucked up his feelings about causing Soul Pulvis with all of his Replays. For his future! For his friends! For his dreams!

And for her, if she ever needed the help. Since, well, he cared about her. Pretty much an honorary Wicked Twister, with being her big brother's little sister and all. So...she could count on Rindo, too.

All of them always called her over. Always asked how her big brother was doing. Always invited her and her big brother out on the next outing. After all, he was practically everybody's big brother!

And if he was everybody's big brother, then that made her everybody's little sister.

...So, really? Only a year younger than him? In her last year of high school already? Daaaaang...

Not just old pals, shopkeeps, and new pals. She'd even met other people during the new Game, thanks to her big brother. Like a penpal over in Shinjuku! Kaie, who treated her so incredibly kindly! Kaie, who worked with her on his awe-inspiring project—no, his dream—to digitally archive all known phenomena! Kaie, who didn't really know her big brother all that well. But then again, she'd only met him because her big brother had gotten that Reaper pin, because her big brother had skated into the UG, because her big brother had had a high enough Imagination to do so. He had the kind of Imagination that made a natural at surfing sounds, the kind of Imagination would let him shape his own future from all those limitless possibilities, the kind of Imagination that let him realize his dreams.

Yep, so many people who all loved her, and cared about her, and asked her how her big brother was doing, and beamed to see her doing so well on his kindness, and would help him protect her smile.

Thanks to her big brother.

Thanks to all his hard work, she'd even go to college soon! In her last semester of high school, now, the winter surely about to give way to spring. College entrance exams taken, the first class to take on the new format: the old National Center Test replaced by the Common Test, Shibuya steadily drumbeating to its new future. When her results arrived in February, she'd have to finally pick a college. Would she stay in Shibuya? Would she pack her bags and leave?

...What would her big brother do?

In the meantime, her January birthday crept up on her. So soon! So soon. A year closer to becoming a fully-fledged adult. And, if the new laws of the age of majority ended up in place, she would be a fully-fledged adult. But even if she became a fully-fledged adult, whatever the laws said, at whatever age, she'd always remain her big brother's little sister, far, far into the future.

No matter what happened. No matter what she did or didn't do.

She'd always remain his little sister...

And she'd make him proud! She'd made him so proud. She'd be the one who met his expectations, the one who succeeded, the one who deserved, and then he'd give her the biggest, warmest, tightest of hugs.

If only she could—

—have let him hug her without wincing.

...Would've been so much easier to let him hug her if she didn't still bear the scars of having become a Noise.

...Would've been so much easier to try to imagine that future if she didn't still bear the scars of having lost her entry fee.

...Would've been so much easier if a sibling by any other name marched to their own beat.

With her parents: Raimu.

With her big brother: Rhyme.

The same sound. Just different writing on the wall.

Chapter Text

The lessons began on a moonless night, the shadows knee-deep. He met her outside of Neku's café Mewsic once again. Still in his upper half-planes, but not as a unique local maximum. Instead of blinking inside its doors as he had before, he merely grinned at her, pointed his forefinger at her in a gesture that most others would others would have read as impossibly rude, and crooked that finger inwards with such gravity that she found herself stiffening her muscles to keep from accelerating forward. She would accelerate on her own terms, and no one else's.

Only because of that, because she wouldn't accelerate to his gravity, had he agreed to teach her in the first place.

"No contract this term?" he asked, a throaty laugh tugging at the corners of his words, unfolding the sounds into fractals, the perimeter infinite.

She'd already signed it, her name in sharp red on the dotted line, beside his signature, doodled in the worst handwronging she'd ever seen, marked with a mathematical bar, adorned with lion ears and a tail. For heroes, there were trials; for saints, there were temptations; for her, there was a devil, and she had resigned the contract with a striped tail curling around her own name. "You already signed it. Same rules apply... Sho."

Even on a moonless night like this, his brown irises reflected some distant light. The streetlamps, undoubtedly, but it seemed like a glow from within, chemical reactions sparking light where the cloudy heavens had cut him off from the sun. "Femtogram."

Rhyme touched her hand to her cheek. A mutual invocation. Summoning one another to their circle.

"Stay adjacent," Sho said, warmly, and then turned.

Abruptly he strode away, long coat lengthening his shadow. The fang earrings glinted in and out of view as he stepped between cones of lamplight. For a moment she stared at his receding back. The gravity dropped by the second by the squared distance between them.

Not by his acceleration that she moved. Not the inevitability of two binary stars orbiting one another by the ineffable natural laws. But by her own twist of the key, her own spark of the ignition, burning up the fuel she'd brought with her, to put out enough joules to reach escape velocity and bolt from orbit into the limitless dark void beyond, ever-expanding into the unknown.

She did not follow him, but she walked a similar path that he did, curious in what he would teach her.

He: walked. Walked down the street. Walked down the road. Walked down the Scramble. Jaywalked down the red lights. She studied his footsteps. She heard no music, no humming, but he walked to a rhythm that only he knew. Complex and interlocking. Too chaotic for her to say anything definitive other than that a pattern existed.

But in that lay the initial step to the sequence. To solving the problem. To puzzling it out: recognizing that an answer existed in the first place.

Though, even if she worked out the answer, she hadn't yet worked out the question.

He thrust his arm out near a convenience store, wrapped his hand around a streetlamp's thin stalk, leveraged it to rotate his direction without losing momentum, and tromped into the alley. Glancing at her hand for a second, curling her fingers in and out, she approached the streetlamp. As she emulated the motion, she found her body turning naturally towards the alleyway by the tension in her arm, slingshotting herself around with ease. Not starting and stopping, not braking slowly into the curve as one did, but reaching out and using what existed in this world, even for something as minute as an alleyway minuet.

Rows of lit vending machines hawked everything from pop to instant ramen to phone cases. A shadow near the skinny alley's end caught her eye. His, too, apparently: Sho approached the unlit vending machine with his hands out.

Rhyme observed in stunned silence as he checked over the machine, ran his fingers up and down its length and buttons, poked around the back, and then kicked the entire thing over onto the ground. It wobbled, then toppled. Its corner struck the other side of the alleyway with such an almighty sound, metal ringing so loudly and so sweetly that she stumbled back with her palms clapped over her ears. It resonated through her bones to the marrow. How it vibrated through the base of her skull. For a second she heard nothing else. Then the ringing in her ears faded just in time to listen to his nearly-rhythmic tromping over to where the vending machine had crashed.

Surely someone had heard that. The proliferation of trash cans across the city—regulations finally loosening, decades after the sarin gas attacks that had rendered Shibuya garbage-free—had accompanied the proliferation of security cameras.

The city shrunk by the day. Watchful eyes and listening ears multiplying in the corners. Shadows slinking back into increasingly far-between spaces.

How long did they have? What did he—

Sho'd scaled the vending machine. Resting his boot on the glass, he laughed even more loudly than the machine's crash. The glass shattered. Even beneath the moonless sky the fragments threw up a shower of sparkling glitter before they scattered to the ground.

Rhyme couldn't tear her gaze away as he leaned down into the depths. Coils wrenched unbent in his bare hands. Metal groaned and cried from friction.

The changing wires that the vending machines had stocked popped as he pulled the insulation from the conduction and twisted the metal like tendrils of silk woven into textiles. Hopping out from its gaping, jagged-glass maw, he dug his boot under the machine's spine and kicked it up, then kneed it. With his leg as a fulcrum, he bent the machine inside-out, the contents of its belly rising from its jaws.

The coils he'd straightened out fanned out in black rows, notched with brown and gold wires that wavered and waved in the thin alleyway wind.

Snatches of red glistened up the steel.

She could feel the crunch and friction in her bones. Vertebrae sliding against one another, gristle sticking, screaming, and then shearing, facets and joints grinding against one another so painfully that her eyes watered. He took apart the vending machine like a war with his own body. The rough material that scraped at his palms, the tear of muscle and strain over tendon required to rend metal against his own limbs, the fragments of glass that he'd shattered crunching under his boots and still falling like ashes from his coat, from his face where they'd embedded briefly before his battle against his body had shaken them out.

He tore it into pieces with his hands, but every chunk he tore he shoved back into a new place, at a new angle, forming a new silhouette.

Nothing would stop him. Not the catch of his cloak on the coils, not the rivulet of red on the rent, not the bounds of his body or the limits of his lucency.

The faint hints of white with his fingers molded into the iron where the folded steel had permanently weakened, the black and grey strips that fluttered weakly, the drying wetness that had dribbled down the wires and slicked around the bases: they only added to the effect, the creator's touch. The blood, sweat, and tears, figurative and literal, poured into the work.

The Grim Heaper. Her older brother and Neku had mentioned it. Piles of trash, sometimes pretentiously labelled, towering sky-high. Traffic signals, cars, televisions, radios, consoles, cameras, sections of fence. Nonsensical, meaningless phrases tacked on.

Her older brother had given her the analogy after Neku had described the piles.

How Sho hoarded like a dragon making its nest, or perhaps a particularly shiny-inclined raven, no scrutable rhyme or reason behind it, as worthless as the math that tumbled from his maw. A danger, Neku had noted mildly, to mistake madness for genius, chaos for intent.

No. her older brother had spoken, partly, truly. Sho did act as though making a nest. Because, like most territorial beings, he nested on his turf wherever he pleased.

He'd protect this city. He'd already protected this city. His city. His joy. His pride.

Of course. What was a lion without his pride?

But not meaninglessly. Not inscrutably. Not any less intentionally than the mathematical metaphors in which he spoken, which she had recognized, understood, and interpreted like a compiler for Kaie to initiate Operation: Awakening and save the Souls of Shibuya.

Jury: still out on genius.

But intent? Sho, the one who had suggested turning to the dormant Souls of Shibuya and reigniting their light? Sho, in whose arteries ran blood so thick with sociopathy that only by his driven will had it failed to congeal, had gone beyond sympathetic shakes of the head at Shibuya Syndrome and figured out a solution? He had intent. He'd demonstrated it. Neku had said Sho wanted the city: sure. But his actions had implied how he conceived of the city he wanted. Not merely the buildings. Not merely the power. Yet the people: not mindless, not Angelically wiped, but awake, alive, noisy.

And this... This destruction of the vending machine... This wrenching apart, this ripping, this tearing, this bodying the box until he'd bled into its bones...

This, too, spoke of intent.

Her eardrums throbbed from the sounds of metal crashing and shrieking. Still she approached him, step by step, of her own volition. She could watch him more closely. How his nails clawed into the machine's innards. How he wrung out wire after wire, coil after coil, painting it with its own insides, and his. How the sharpness of metal not meant for human touch had cut along his flesh where he'd violently perverted its shapes anyway.

Perverted? No. Who had claimed that the metal making up a vending machine had to look like that? Who had claimed that just because someone had spent money putting the machine into its place that another couldn't change it into something else?

When had she become so accustomed to the idea that something had to look a certain way just because it'd paid for that way, that she'd read his actions as destructive, when, in fact, he was con—

"Sho," Rhyme said, quietly.

She watched the arc of blood droplets from his knuckles splattered the machine's shine, the lights of all the vending screens behind him reflected from their curved shells.

The hands that had carved through her Soul, the teeth that still woke her up in cold sweats from nightmares, the horrible laughter resonating through her skull.

Had he bled like this over her Soul, too?

"You're not just trashing the vending machine, are you?"

All those vending machines, and the brightness they radiated at his back, cloaked his face in shadow. But she could still faintly see the white of his teeth where he grinned. "Heh. Heh heh heh. Ha ha ha ha ha!" His arms rose. His fingers splayed against the few stars visible against the city's light pollution. Tangled in wires thick and thin, some coiling around his joints, others knotted at his wrists. "Theorize, femtogram."

"This seems too deliberate," she mused, her fingers pressing into her cheek. "This seems like what you did in the attic."

In WildKat. Not Mewsic. WildKat.

"When I broke the mug, and you put it back together again." Rhyme still had it on her desk. She'd looked at it before leaving home to meet him tonight. The bird on the mountain, surrounded by waves. Like the radicals forming the kanji for island. An island. Both of them: islands. But islands with volcanic centers, perhaps. Islands who could draw the magma from deep within, and spew it over their surfaces, letting the lava cool down deep beneath the waters into bridges of land. "Is this...art?"

"Are the angles of a square all right?" Sho called back, crunching the wires in his palms.

She could hear the tear in his skin from the conductors that splintered into his flesh. The wince tugged at her cheeks. "All of your actions have rhyme and reason! This isn't destructive at all, is it? Or, if it is: it's constructive, too!"

"This—" He jabbed his finger towards the inside-out vending machine with its stomach contents filed into so much broken bones and the wires ribboning outwards like tiny hands reaching for the sky. "—is why I'll keep my series from converging for as long as I can keep it divergent!"

"...To construct?" Rhyme guessed.

Sho's hand smeared red along the brim of his hat. "Are you trying to be an inverse idiot? Who am I?"

She hummed in thought. "Is this a trick question? Sho Minamimoto?"

"What am I?" he snapped.

"Taboo Noise?" Rhyme pondered, then rubbed her cheek. "No, human?"

He barked out a laugh, sharp and short. "Correct, and correct! The latter's a nontrivial solution! But I'm looking for a solution to a different system of equations! What do I do, femtogram!?"

What did he do. Such a human thing to say. To beg. To plead. But he never did any of those things. He didn't mean the idiom. He meant it literally. At face value, straightforward and honest as the rest of him.

She studied him. His grin halfway between smile and a smirk that split his face in two, almost grotesquely. His gaze riveted on her, keen, interested, challenging her to figure it out. Never a game of mind-reading. He'd given her enough clues.

The graffiti in the Pork City stairwell. The fingerpaints and easels in the WildKat attic. The bird from the broken mug.

Something constructive. Construction. Creation. Creative process. How simple.

For most people, home was where the heart was.

But for him, knee-deep in the knee-length shadows, bleeding over a vending machine, resonating his cacophony up into Shibuya—

"Home is where the art is," she offered. "You're an artist."

He laughed, long and loud, with a sound like he'd swallowed steel himself and gurgled it in his gizzard, more like a rusty engine shotting and firing. "Radiamn straight!"

Sagging in relief, she leaned her shoulder against the alleyway wall far from the vending machines.

Yes. Artist Sho Minamimoto. She could see it. Vandalism, street art, tagging his own sigils, chalk and graffiti and...broken vending machines, apparently. Piles of garbage. All of them art. Made for himself? Or sending out messages? Those pretentious words that her older brother and Neku had mentioned... "Tell me about your art. Why the vending machine? What does it mean?"

"Factor it out yourself!" he volleyed back as he slammed his wire-tangled wrist into the vending machine's head and punctured a hole through its crown. "The set's bijective! Work out your solution to the problem presented!"

Rhyme dipped her head. The jagged fangs and angled claws of metal and glass didn't speak to her of anything but violence, nor the twisted ropes of wire that the vending machine vomited out from its guts which Sho was currently stuffing into the top through the hole he'd bare-knuckled through. It had a pattern. It had a meaning. Sho dealt in numbers and axioms, in functions with knowns and limited unknowns. He didn't do postmodernism. Didn't perch serenely above the masses witnessing their debates and arguments and struggles over meaning when the only meaning in the art stemmed from the fact that it had none whatsoever, because the debates and the arguments and struggles themselves had significance.

No. He did the legwork. He made the art and then jumped down into its depths, invited whoever wanted to come so that they could clamber up onto the glass and metal themselves. Add their blood, sweats, and tears into the sharpness and the grit if they liked. Drench in their own meaning. Write their equations below the system he'd already scribbled out and start isolating variables. A puzzle to work out, a problem to solve.

She couldn't see it, yet. Something about violence. Something about rearranging oneself.

A representation of Soul reading? The tangling of wires from gut to brain because she had felt the pain viscerally in her Soul even if she couldn't feel it on her body?

It had a shape. It had a shape, that meaning: a shape, a flavor, a spin.

Yet she couldn't make it out. Foggy and indistinct, blurred at the edges, so close and yet so far, untouchable by her fingers on his plane, like trying to make out the shapes of her dreams that sometimes almost rose out of the mist only to disappear in the fog once more the moment her eyelids lifted. Sometimes she could swear she'd been chasing foghorns, circling a lighthouse she'd mistaken for her own kind. But the resonant metal hadn't yielded an answer—yet.

As Sho kept cleaving through the vending machine's cranium, layers upon layers of metal screeed outwards and curled in other themselves. The vending machine groaned as he fed more length of wire into through. "Miniscule fraction of tetrahedra less typhlotic than you are, femtogram. You looked at the scatterplot and found the tracing of the strange attractor."

"I'll keep thinking," Rhyme confessed, "but I think I need to see the forest for the trees first. Help me understand your point of view. When you make art—"

Either he'd heard the question in her voice, or he'd happened to start talking in the same general direction as what she'd said. "Shibuya makes zetta quality garbage."

She blinked. Then she leaned forward. Tried to listen. Really listen.

"The random radians of this city are trash. The axiomatic instincts that make the chaos systems of their actions—deterministic yet unpredictable—overflow the streets with garbage for the heap. I'll take that garbage and cruuuuuuunch!" Another hole punched through the vending machine's top. Two holes. Representative of eyes? Of ears? Of neither, and she had squirrelled up the wrong tree entirely with regarding that as the vending machine's 'head' simply because it had once stood up? "Any material has the potential to become beautiful with flawless calculations! No matter how many yoctograms at the sequence's start, the right transformations can expand that matrix to any wave equation! "

"...Only a bad crafter blames their tools," Rhyme observed.

"Correct! Heh heh heh." Suddenly no longer feeding the wire to one side, Sho shoved his arm through the second hole he had made. She flinched back to think of what he could stab his palm on or get his fingers caught between with how recklessly he had just stuck his hand. Yet a moment later he smirked, reared back, and jerked his arm out with something gleaming along his palm: the rope of wires he'd fed into the first hole, salvaged and fed back out through the second. "A factoring hectopascals who throws some garbage away because they think it's a worthless is just admitting that they're too hollow-skulled to sum it into something aesthetic!"

She tilted the visor of her own visor upwards, just to signal to him that she still listened.

But he would've gone on anyways.

Because he had an audience? Or whether or not he had an audience? If an artist spoke into an alleyway and no one was there to hear him, did he really make a sound? Or would he need to speak so loudly that someone would hear him, even to the farthest reaches of the universe if he had to?

"Every wrapper, every scrap of paper, every broken vending machine can be added, multiplied, exponentiated, tetrated higher and higher! All materials has value, from the fraction closest to zero to the prime closest to infinity! All numbers—real, imaginary, natural, irrational—can be used in flawless calculations!"

Holding out her hand, Rhyme presented her own addition to the altar: "One man's trash is another man's treasure."

"Ninety degrees!" She could hear the wires rustling as they slithered through the machine's underbelly. Just how deeply had he punched those holes? "And all materials can be converted into a magnum opus!"

All materials. All materials. Whatever value they started at. Whether others would view them as garbage or not. Whether they looked like useful stuff to make art out of or not.

Whether they had lost their entry fees or not.

In a way, Rhyme, too, was practising her artistry. While he heaped the metal, she heaped his words, forming a pile of the ideas that he'd put forward and running her hands over it like he'd run his over the metal flanks. Taking what her old brother and Neku had called trash and turning it into...the treasure of hope. Of possibility. Of...

Pushing his hand upwards, he held up one finger at a time and punctuated each word with a stamp of his boot on the vending machine's skull-or-maybe-not, caving the center inwards and deforming the holes he had made outwards. "Melanosis!" Stamp. "Leucosis!" Stamp. "Xanthosis!" Stamp! "And iosis!"

Crunch. The steel gave way. The vending machine rumbled. She could hear things on the insides breaking, or falling, or fragmenting somehow. A series of metal clanks and plastic thwunks.

"The chaos system of Shibuya and all the constantly-shifting terms in this city make for especially zetta quality materials. Ha! An entire city overflowing with trash to add to my heap!"

When he yanked on the wire rope, it appeared to catch on something. Rhyme tried to followed the tautness of the wires down into the box's belly, but she couldn't see anything except darkness through the holes.

Could he see in the dark? Or he had merely make a series of educated guesses?

No, he wouldn't leave it up to chance: perfect calculations?

"I'll tetrate it higher! It'll never reach infinity, but it'll asymptomatically narrow the distance!" Sho tugged, again, and it caught, again. "Beautiful in the imperfections! If it ever reached infinity, then, what, the series would converge? And then what? The rest of the interval spent in a bounded box of my own creation? What a load of obtuse trash! Gödel's incompleteness theorem is what keeps the sequence going! I can do this ad infinitum!"

Incompleteness theorem? Maybe he did do postmodernism, and her entire quest for meaning had just hit the wall and splattered over it instead. But somehow... Gazing at how even his most brutal action produced a particular reaction with the exquisite precision of numerical cause and effect, she couldn't help but convince herself that he had some message, no matter how obtuse to her, no matter how seemingly obfuscated, that to him could have looked like he were screaming it in plain arithmetic in broad daylight.

"The difference between lead and gold? A known quantity of protons. Just need to factor out the algorithm for summing 'em! Purificatus non consumptus, femtogram! It's not consumption of the raw material, not destruction of its characteristics, but purification through impurities!"

Sweeping his arm out over the vending machine, Sho adjusted his stance, clomped his boots firmly against the vending machine's maybe-top, and paused.

Rhyme studied how he tensed himself.

Going to war again with his body. He'd slide the wires through, whatever that meant for him, even if it rawed his hands, even if it dislocated his shoulders, even if the wires snapped and clawed rivers of metal into his face.

"Constants and variables! Coefficients and scalars! If you don't like something, subtract it and see what other equation you can plug the numbers into! If you're missing a term, solve for it and add it! You're garbage, femtogram! Nothing but trash in every spare yoctolitre! Confront the darkness within yourself—"

The darkness within herself? The lack of an entry fee? As if she hadn't tried to confront it already. But, no, something in what she'd heard from him already—ranting breathlessly in WildKat, with his boot thumping under the table at Mewsic—made her think he meant something more...not necessarily profound, but significant.

"—and transform it into a canvas for your own artwork! Make yourself a factoring masterpiece—"

He yanked.

"—or get crunched in the process!"

For a second Rhyme had every certainty that it had gotten caught it again, and perhaps it had. But Sho didn't yield. He wouldn't lose to the vending machine, and he wouldn't lose to his body, unless he lost everything at once. He grunted, and he heaved.

Nothing. And then: krnnnnnnnnk.

The vending machine folded in itself like its spine had snapped. He'd already bent the back in half on his knee—literally on his knee—but now the insides warped radially outwards, bulging as though he had lobbed a giant sphere into its behind, the metal nearly swelling before her eyes as the rope compressed its insides. The black coils notched with wires emerged further from the vending machine's maw until the rectangular rim that had once held the glass screen snapped off entirely. It exploded outwards from pent-up force. The corner hurled into one of the other vending machines and, embedding itself into the screen, made the radiantly flashing soba noodle ad flicker, shower sparks, and die off into the darkness.

The insides ballooned outwards as its spine collapsed outwards, and suddenly the rectangular prism had transfigured into something like a sea urchin nestled in a broken coffin.

A blob of grey metal. Studded with straightened and spiralled sable coils. So many tiny golden wires reaching out from the tip of each coil like spokes radiating from eightfold wheels. And the nestled mass of wired roped just barely visible around the rim like a nest of bronze-and-copper snakes entangled in themselves.

It resembled nothing she'd ever seen before.

It made no sense, no heads or tails, clearly of some significance to him yet barely conceivable to her, other than that some pattern existed, some intent, some deliberation. Not genius, but it didn't have to be genius. It just had to be Sho.

It made her feel like he'd jammed his hand down her throat, seized a fistful of her entrails, and wrenched it enough of her maw, then used the juice-glistening intestines wrapped around his fingers to pull her onto the second story.

No rhyme or reason to her.

But all the rhyme and reason to him. More than rhyme and reason. He'd called this why he kept the series from converging, didn't he? And if a series didn't converge, then it went onwards, out to infinity. A reason for him not to end. A reason for him to keep going on forever, was it?

A reason for being. A raison d'être.

"So, femtogram. The first lesson in this sequence." Right. Rhyme had followed Sho here, had met him outside of Mewsic, had stolen out from the apartment she shared with Beat in the middle of the night, for this exact reason. Not merely to watch Sho create, although the horrifying, beautiful destruction and construction would replay itself in her nightmares tonight and in her waking life tomorrow. But for him to teach her. More than he already had.

Grinning at her and palming his fists that left bloody imprints of creases valleyed along his knuckles, Sho angled his cap upwards. Calculating. But calculating what?

"What," he called, his voice throaty with something verging on hunger, those snapping teeth from her nightmares, too many to fit inside her Soul no matter what lengthwise impossibly Klein bottles they folded themselves into, "is art?"

Oh. And there went the police sirens. Took them long enough.

Chapter Text

His arm formed a steel vice around her midsection, her limbs flailing for a second before she drew them inwards and let herself hang from the impromptu method of carrying. Her nape crawled from the contact. Heat flashed like a throbbing infection from where her side pressed against his flank and radiated outwards. She swallowed back up the burning stench clogging the back of her throat.

For all of having rummaged through a charging-wire vending machine—and she could catch whiffs of iron and oil where the threads had torn and his skin had ripped—his coat smelled more like cedar than garbage. The evergreen scent surprised her so much that, for a moment, she blanked out on anything except the mystery.

Did he shop for detergent on Sundays at TOKYU HANDS, same as everyone else?

But even when her amusement at the image ebbed, the seriousness of the situation had not: why Rhyme had agreed to let Sho hoist her underarm as he scaled the vending machine and clambered onto the convenience store roof. The police had arrived on bikes to investigate the noise, or whatever else had alerted them. The second vending machine breaking?

The moment that his boots landed on the rooftop, she felt the firmness of cement flatline her trainers. He dropped her without warning.

Rhyme wobbled, then solidified her stance.

Not from the unexpected independence, but from the release of contact. The lack of touch. The break of intimacy that let her muscles cease writhing under her skin. Only then did she let herself breathe out. Still, her legs trembled, for just a second, prior to her planting her soles down to the base.

From the alleyway below, the sounds of chattering—noises of surprises, requests for one another to act carefully—interspersed with the susurrus of Sho rummaging through his pockets. Not for long: a second later he'd flipped something shiny out of them and held it out to her. A pin held between his fingers, that made her eye it carefully.

On one hand: best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

On the other hand: best to look before she leaped.

His eyes narrowed slightly. "It'll tune you up to the UG. Make it easier to subtract ourselves from this quadrant."

"You're offering," she noted carefully, "to make me a Player?"

Sho scoffed. "Contradiction by omission. Q.E.D. Recheck the propositions you skipped. It'll tune you to the UG."

"That doesn't exclude the possibility of it doing something else, too." Rhyme smiled innocently at him. "You'll have to give me the full parameters if you want me to agree."

"Hmph." He tossed the pin up and caught it again. This time, unfolding his fingers, he let her see the top more closely. "Here."

The colors stood out to her even under the moonless sky, but she still shone her phone's light to make it out more clearly. Though she peered at it, examining the design, she couldn't exactly say that she had much knowledge of different pins, at least not of the variety usable for the UG. She'd barely even gotten a chance to try shopping for threads and pins prior to losing the girl in favor of the squirrel.

An abstract design of some sort. Shapes and lines that didn't entirely converge into an image she could recognize. A vertical rectangle at one diagonal end, a horizontal rectangle at the other. Shades of neons. The pink and green on black made her think of Shiki and Gatto Nero's usual tints, but that seemed like a coincidence. Rhyme couldn't imagine Shiki taking a request from Sho. Neither did the design look like anything she'd seen before from Sho. Then again, the vending machine had surprised her, too.

She glanced up at him; he gazed back coolly, expectantly. Expectantly? Was the design supposed to mean something to her? Elucidate the pin's inner machinations?

"Don't waste my time." Apparently so.

"Haste makes waste," she responded sweetly, lingering over the word just to see him grind his teeth a little. The incident at WildKat still had his engine revved: his boot tapped incessantly against the rooftop. Thumping like a dog getting scritched behind the ear. Would the police hear them with how loudly it echoed? "Do I need to use the pin, for the lesson?"

Crossing his arms over his chest, he huffed. "The sigils we're using are barely decodable in the UG on the strength of my Imagination alone. Think you're gonna read 'em in the RG? Get rational."

"I signed up for lessons on theory," Rhyme observed, "not practicals."

"Hey, who gives a digit?" Sho let his arms fall out to his sides, palms open with the pin balanced on the tip of his middle finger, as if asking, who cares? "Be an ignorant integrand if you want."

"Remember...the reason for why I'm here." She lined her words up one by one. "As fun as learning things from you is, we also have a purpose. You said that you could possibly restore my entry fee if you read my Soul, but the Taboo inhabiting your body makes that risky, if you lose control again."

Rhyme watched the scowl quirk down the corners of his lips. "Don't underestimate me."

"So I agreed," she interjected, "to study the theoretics of the Taboo with you to stabilize you further. I don't mind doing something risky. Pain and progress are balanced equations, right?"

His mouth curved up. Easy as 1-2-3 to read him. "Correct."

"I take calculated risks. So I only want to restore my entry fee once it's safe—" He clenched his jaw again instantly, and she stifled a giggle, not to protect his ego, but simply to finish speaking. "—to do so. I don't need the practical applications to work through theories. I'll be the theoretical mathematician; you, the experimental physicist. So: teach me what I need for the theoretical. Two heads are better than one. Between us, we'll find a way to..." Rhyme hesitated. 'Tame' didn't sound like the right word. "...We'll figure things out."

Sho hmphed. "Enough axiomatic reiteration. If those meddling microwebers catch up to us, you're on your own."

"You can't carry me elsewhere on the RG? You got up to the rooftop without breaking much of a sweat." Or any sweat. Rhyme quirked an eyebrow carefully. She'd long enjoyed the saline tang of seafood, but rarely had she had an opportunity to go fishing. Still, she'd fit this particular worm on this particular hook carefully, bring her arm back, and cast the bait. "Are you saying that you can't lose a few cops on your trail without hopping into the UG?"

His hand plunged into his pocket. Hook, line, and sinker. "Fine. Nonzero touch?"

He'd said that the first time he'd grabbed her, too. Where had he learned that from, exactly? She'd heard bits and pieces from others, that he'd been hanging out with some of the other Wicked Twisters the past few months since his return to Shibuya, but she couldn't have said much about the specifics. The most she knew: that Sho and Nagi had argued about that phrase, about whether or not pain and progress were balanced equations, that Sho would take on any pain for the sake of his progress, even if it meant leaving the Wicked Twisters behind, again.

Drawing in a breath, Rhyme steadied herself. Her arms twinged already from the anticipated contact. The uncomfortable sensation of another's touch.

She didn't even want to hug her older brother for as long as he wanted to before the crawling under her flesh grew too much to bear. Suffocating from the closeness, the proximity. As though human touch itself had become toxic.

Never had she particularly liked extended contact too much, even as a child. Embraces from relatives, grandparents and aunt-uncles squishing her cheeks and stretching them, even so much as holding her parents' hands while crossing the street: she'd shied away from it. As little as possible. They'd all chuckled at how she tried to put on a tough face and look independent, but she'd always be their little baby. Yet never had she shuddered from so much as a hand on hers since the Game.

Right? Surely. Surely the Game had disrupted her senses, fleeced her nerves and skinned the myelin sheaths. It must have sprung from the Game, even if she'd had inclinations before.

Rhyme could, if she wanted to. Didn't hurt. Not like what she'd heard from Nagi.

To Nagi, something as simple as failing to remove the tags inside of her shirt could tip her over. Far from mere discomfort, Nagi would find contact unbearable. She'd scream, cry, flail uncontrollably, voice rising in pitch no matter how hard she fought it down, snot and tears rolling over her cheeks. It seemed like a nightmarish, miserable existence. At all other times, though, Nagi—from what Rhyme could tell—enjoyed it. She hugged her friends when they met up for outings, joyfully and sincerely agreed to hold Fret's hand when they wandered as a group, and embraced her older brother back whenever he went in for a full-strength... Well, Beat would have let out a, "Bwaaaaaah!" if Rhyme described his action as a 'glomp.'

Only occasionally did Nagi decline a request for contact, usually in the conspiratorial tones of a confession. That right now, Nagi couldn't handle it. That of course she would want to otherwise.

In contrast, Rhyme had no trouble with any of the clothes she wore or anything she ever touched. Only human contact. It didn't flick on and off for her depending on her mood. Just didn't want to touch or be touched. Didn't yearn for it at times that she couldn't. Just didn't want to.

And she could. If she wanted to. She didn't want to, but it didn't hurt. The crawl under her flesh didn't feel any more uncomfortable than a prickle of a spirit-fearer's nape upon entering a haunted house.

More like the discomfort of bad vibes than anything else.

And yet: she didn't like it. Didn't want to feel it. Didn't want to feel the touch.

When Sho had held her that close, for so long, his bulk hot like a radiator in the middle of winter, those vibes bristling against her. Still, better than picking up a pin when she didn't understand the inner workings fully. Especially given what he'd claimed about her in the Pork City stairwell, and in WildKat, too.

Noise static still buzzing at the edges of her Soul. Enough Noise static that she could feel the emotions vortexing up the stairwell of Pork City.

"You can touch m—"

Without further ado Sho snatched her up again and tucked her under his arm where she hung limply. The unbearable heat made her shut her eyes, but, well. At least he smelled pretty nice. If she could afford a car in the future—and her older brother stopped blocking her from trying to get a license, which she understood—she'd put up a little evergreen-scented air freshener like this one. Maybe he had a few in his seemingly bottomless pockets.

Wind buffeted her face. The sounds of air plocking against hear eardrums, cars zipping past with Doppler artifacts warping their engines fires and tire screes, thwumps of his boots on different materials that resonated at different pitches into chords of different notes.

The sharpness of that evergreen kept her grounded until solid ground reached her soles again. This time she flung her arms out the moment she sensed it. When he let go, she didn't wobble.

Instead Rhyme breathed out, opened up her eyes, and glanced around.

They'd ended up in a thin, tiny alleyway. More like an alcove than an alley. The alley's back looked tagged with all manners of graffiti and other street art, but new. Cleaned up often? The sudden fsssssssing sound accompanied by a puffed cloud of aerosol made her cough and turn around: Sho was spraying something on the ground. A circle. Shaking the can and passing it into his left hand, he drew such intricate pieces in loops and spirals that it amazed her he could manage it without any stencils of any kind. Especially with the exaggerated, wild motions he arced his arms through. He turned the spraying of the graffiti into as much of an artform as the graffiti itself. And it looked silly enough for her to laugh. Just a little giggle.

As she laughed, she sniffed the air, which didn't give her any clues as to their location. Sidling along to the alley's edge, she peeked out. CYCO Records? Oh. The Udagawa backstreets. Surprisingly close to home.

"Wait an attosecond."

Snapping her head back, Rhyme peeked at him just in time for him to vanish. Her eyes widened. The graffiti he'd drawn abruptly started curling in on itself as if it had caught fire in time that she'd blinked. Not only that, but a layer of grime had appeared, caked around the graffiti's perimeter. A circle of brown, red, grey, and black intermixed. It looked nearly nauseating. It looked like the shade of human filth.

When Sho popped back into existence—downtuned back to the RG, she supposed—he grinned at her. He held his arms out and motioned towards himself. "Zetta sexy, huh?"

It took a second for it to dawn on her what he meant.

But the stains of oil and blood had disappeared from the fabric. Entirely. As though they'd never existed there at all. She glanced between him and the grime around the sigil. His grin widened. "Good deduction. That's a sigil."

"So if I'm understanding this correctly," Rhyme mused, "it removed the dirt from your coat. Dirt, blood, grease, metal?"

His hat brim tilted up. "Ninety degrees."

She pointed to where a stray wire or glass shard had carved up flesh of his arm from his elbow to where his short sleeve started halfway to the shoulder. The bleeding had stopped, but the skin hadn't mended itself the way that she'd expected. The still-visible line looked delicate. Like, well, a wound that had just closed. "What about the tears? The cuts?"

Sho shrugged. "I'll sew it up later." He shook a tattered sleeve as if already calculating the patterns or calibrating where he'd get the textile from if he needed it.

"Not your clothes. Your body." Rhyme squeezed her upper arm with her left hand. "Your physical body. Your skin."

He rolled his shoulders dismissively. "All these are too miniscule to need any sewing." She winced at the mental image. Did he really? "Harm in the RG can't be inverted by healing psychs. Got shot in the shoulder a few chronological years—"

Chronological years? As opposed to...?

Biological, perhaps, since Reapers didn't age?

Although, as an ex-Reaper, the rules governing Reapers might not have applied directly to him.

"—ago and it took me weeks in the UG to get out from under the curve." He flexed his hands, curling and uncurling his fingers. The way that he gazed at his own hand: as though he marvelled at the moment. It made her stare down at her own. For all the things she'd learned in high school biology, the sparks of electricity racing through her nerves, the interplay of ions that let the complex machinery of muscles relax and contract, the piston-like motions of molecules which braced her tissues against her tendons, it seemed like magic—whole—in retrospect.

"No magicking away the glass and metal that wounded you?" Rhyme asked.

"Zetta duh." Sho spun the spraypaint can around his thumb. "First lesson—"

Rhyme held her hand up. "You hurt yourself over that art. Do you want to go back and get it? I mean, maybe not even you can move a vending machine, but—"

The irritation in his voice did make her giggle that time. "So zetta annoying! First, don't underestimate the exawatts I can put out. Second, art is transient. I created it. It's finished. The series has converged. Doesn't make a difference to me what happens to it from here. It's material for other canvases. Third, don't make my words parametric. Pain and progress are balanced equations. I wanted to make art. So I made art. I don't give a digit about the 'pain' or the 'scars' as long as it doesn't permanently diminish my potential range." Catching the can, he gripped it. "Lessons or not, femtogram. My 𝑡-value's limited."

"Everyone's is," she answered with deliberate slowness, until she could see the slight bulge of muscle at his cheek where he'd clenched his jaw. She waited. He said nothing. "Now then. I'm ready for the lesson."

"Then solve the problem." Sho jabbed his finger towards her. "What is art?"

Rhyme touched her fingers to her cheeks in thought. "I didn't know you were a philosopher."

"It's such a simple equation. Redundant expressions don't make a system of equations more complex, only more complicated. Complex and complicated don't equal." Sho started spraying again. Another sigil? As she leaned forward, she noticed that evergreen fragrance again, sharper and fresher this time, more distinct. Did it come from the sigil? She heard herself laughing. Did Sho Minamimoto, ex-Reaper, Taboo Noise, felon to the Higher Plane, care enough about how he smelled that he drew his sigil so that he'd come out smelling like grass and cedar, like the summer sun? Either that, or he'd run off during the blink of time he'd spent in the UG to stuff more air fresheners into his pockets. She wouldn't put that past him. "What?"

"Art," Rhyme managed between giggles, "is a broad subject. It means different things to different people. But I guess, if I had to summarize, I'd say something like: creative pursuits. Any kind of human expression. You know. Painting, sculpting, even something like a diorama, the graffiti that you're drawing right now, or your three-dimensional..." She hummed. "...collage." He smirk-smiled broadly.

"Words," Sho said, apropos of nothing.

She rolled her fingers along her cheek. "Words?"

"Are words art, femtogram?" he pressed. "Don't get the wrong corollary out of this. Words are garbage. But they're a good test for your hypothesis."

"Like books and stuff? Yeah, I think so. Writing. Books, plays. Oh, I even think that writing for other works counts, like writing for television shows? Because television can be at. Movies, video games. Even advertisements." Rhyme let her hands fall to her pockets. "Slogans and jingles. I know that advertisements are just trying to sell you something! I've seen some ads that I thought were real art. At least until the part in the end where they actually show you the product that they're trying to peddle."

He hmphed with emphasis that he sounded personally offended. She giggled at his expense. "Commercialization is garbage. But next term: music."

Rhyme's giggle opened up into a laugh. "Duh! Music is art. I guess other sounds can be art, too? I feel like there's an art to public speaking, for example, even if we don't think of it that way. Okay, I think I see what you're getting at. I've been too closed-minded. Lots of things are art. Cooking's an art. Telling jokes is an art. Rakugo's an art. Skating's an art!"

"Motion," he added.

"Motion?" She tilted her head. "Oh, like dancing? And acting! Those are art. I already said skating, too. I'd put lots of kinds of sports under that. I know that a lot of people try to divide up sports and art, but things like rhythmic gymnastics, cheerleading, synchronized swimming... That's art!" Rhyme snapped her fingers. "And programming, too! For me, at least. It's not just about writing code that does whatever you need it to do. It has to be organized and readable by people other than yourself. That's an art."

Sho held up his hand. Curling and uncurling his fingers. This close, the area where the tattoo had marked his flesh gave him resemble a living ink blot, so pitch-black that the lack of highlights or shadows made his fingers and palm look two-dimensional. More like the graffiti-decal body parts of a Noise than something of a human. Then he extended and flexed his wrist. The three-dimensional rotation disrupted the effect. Human. Very human. Or, at least, not two-dimensional.

She watched him for a few seconds before she noticed that she'd been curling and uncurling his hand, too.

"Motion," he repeated.

Rhyme echoed him: "Motion. You're asking me if this—" She curled and uncurled her fingers, at first in time with his, and then deliberately off-set, until she had settled her own natural rhythm. He gazed towards her hand, his smile widening the more different from his her rhythm became. "—is art?"

"Well?"

She stared at her own hand. At the rhythm that she'd brought her fingers into. If she followed the same rhythm on a drum, wouldn't that make music? She'd talked about rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming, but what about other sports? What about baseball? Honing one's skills, learning the motions, practicing them over and over the way that a dancer or a synchronized swimmer would. But did it have to require practice? If someone scribbled on a sheet of paper, didn't make make art? Bad art, possibly, but still art? A scribble to a painting, a rubberband ball to a sculpture, a curling and uncurling of her fingers to dancing.

If she followed her own rhythm, if she followed her own rhyme and reason, did that make something so simple art?

"It's...part of human expression." Her fingers, curling and uncurling. "I'm choosing how to move myself. Which makes it an art, because I'm expressing myself."

Rhyme hmmed.

"Something about that doesn't feel right. It doesn't make intuitive sense to me that it should be art. But if we're going to call dancing or acting art... If I do this on television as part of a show, does it suddenly become art, when it wasn't? I don't think you need an audience to make art. In that case..."

His gaze bored through her. He wanted to hear. Interested. In her, and not in anything surrounding her. Yes, she had the Soul that had intrigued him so much, the Soul that had gotten dragged through kilometers of broken glass: erased and back again, into Noise and back again, losing her entry fee and...not back again from that one. But his interest went beyond that. To what she'd say. To how she'd solve his problem.

"...Yes, this is art, too." Straightening her fingers, Rhyme fanned them out. "Just moving is art. Sending text is an art. Eating is an art? They're all ways that we express ourselves."

Dropping his hand, he picked up the spraypaint can again and went to work. Went to make art. "So what's the conclusion, femtogram? What is art?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "Even something like eating can be art. Words have power. They should mean something. There has to be a boundary between art and non-art."

"Ha!" Sho smirked. "Just as calculated. Words are garbage. Divide 'em out. We're only using them as chain substitutions. The second that we actually integrate, we can plug the real truth back in. Now think. Don't be an empty-craniumed exahenry. Work it out. Your solution."

"I don't..." Rhyme paused.

He made a low hhhh in the back of his throat. Not an animalistic growl, just a human expression of exasperation. "I already told you. Such simple equations. It's a system of equations like any other. What's your nontrivial solution? Don't be so zetta slow."

This didn't have to do with reading his mind. If she could decode his plans on Soul Pulvis, she could come with a nontrivial solution to this system of equations.

She didn't have to say the right thing for him to not worry about her. Didn't have to walk on eggshells. Didn't have to swerve around and pray she didn't hit any potholes. Didn't even have to come up with some wisdom beyond her years. Just had to speak her open mind.

The art that he'd started drawing with his spraypaint didn't look like a sigil. Well, perhaps he'd chosen to draw a different kind of sigil.

But, still. Maybe not. Maybe he'd just started to draw whatever he felt like.

Drawing for the sake of drawing.

Art for the sake of...

"Living," she said, plugging in the number and seeing what the function spit out. "Everything that we do is part of self-expression. Being alive, and all the different things we do as part of being alive in order to live, are all art. I never really thought about that. I don't mean to sound ungrateful for my life. More than anything I understand how fleeting and precious it is."

If not for the Game's existence. If not for Mr. Hanekoma having decided that her older brother had enough importance that he would intervene to save his precious little sister. If not for the Composer deciding to bring her back as a gift to his proxy.

"But I haven't thought about all of it as art." She looked up at him, as the great and wild arcs that he swung his arms through, only for the spray from his can to end up in such calculated, precise streaks that made up the most minute details. "I think that's my definition. No: it is my definition. Art is being alive. It might not be good art, but it's all art."

"Heh! Perfectly calculated, femtogram. That's a nontrivial solution." Sho nodded approvingly. Rhyme found herself exhaling in relief with her hand on her cheek. "Life's just transient performance art. Everything from fighting to walking to making art. Art feeds art. The outputs of one function are inputs for another. A chicken transforms into a nugget. That nugget transforms into joules to fuel more of my art. And when I ended up compacted with the rest of the heap, I'll be material for some other artwork too." He grinned. "Trash art in comparison to my magna opera, but art either way."

She heard herself laughing at the sheer self-assured arrogance it took to say that.

Smirking, he skimmed his fingers over his hat.

"So when you took that vending machine and turned it into an artwork," Rhyme asked, "you weren't saying that it wasn't art. It's art, and it's material for your art. And when you finished with the art, you were happy to leave it, because you'd done what you wanted to do with it. Now it's just material for someone else to turn into their own art if they want to. But it's not your problem anymore."

Sho nodded decisively. "Radiamn straight. Everything is garbage. Everything is material. Our bodies, too." He traced a finger up the cut that she'd noted earlier. When he pressed into the edge, it slo-o-owly oozed out another drop. "So take that trash body of yours and use it as a canvas for your next artwork. Then take that trash artwork and use it as the canvas for the one after that. Keep heaping yourself higher! You're a pile of trash, so you can add whatever you want to yourself! Figure out a foundation, then crunch it and make it a new foundation, then crunch it again, until you've heaped it all high enough to reach the sun!"

Rhyme hummed. She studied his hands as his fingers grasped the can. The darkness inked into his skin shifted like liquid. As if all the blood normally hidden in his body had been brought to the surface. "That was...pretty motivational, Sho."

She could see the sharpness of his teeth in his grin.

"So, if you view living as art, too..." She mimed the arc of his hand. "That's why you make art that way. All of your movements are art."

"Heh. I'm a transient performance. Next term." Next term? The next lesson already? "What's the endpoint of art?"

"The endpoint? As in, its purpose? Its raison d'être?" Rhyme stroked her chin. "Well, expression, right? I already said that I don't think it needs an audience. Beauty! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it's beauty to the artist. Which is a message. I guess it's used to send a message, to the artist or to whoever happens to be around. That message could be anything, including, 'I think that what I made is worthwhile to look at,' or, 'I wanted to make this,' or even, 'I made this.'"

"Heh." Sho stood. "Q.E.D. Class dismissed."

Rhyme glanced down at what he'd sprayed into the ground. Lines and angles, curves and arcs. It didn't form any kind of image that she could make out, but neither did it look random. Not some deliberate inkblot in which she could see anything, but an artform that expressed something he wanted to show, even if she couldn't see the forest for the trees. Like an impressionist painting, all tiny dots, but she had her face too close to the page to see the picture that the dots made up. A city, perhaps? A rendition of Shibuya? "Class dismissed? That was the first lesson?"

Spinning the spraypaint can again, he tucked it into his coat. "Midnight at the same coordinates." He took a step forward, stopped, and grinned lopsidedly back at her. "Converge, femtogram."

Not by the natural laws of his gravity, but by her own ignition, her own acceleration. "I'll think about it, Sho," Rhyme answered, intentionally gently, just to see him cross his arms.

"Factoring hectopascal." He huffed and disappeared from view.

She laughed again, then leaned against the brick wall, staring at what he'd drawn. Yes, she'd need to sneak back home and hope that Beat wouldn't catch her, and yes, she'd probably be rubbing her eyes from exhaustion all of tomorrow—all of today, given the time.

But she'd be there at midnight again the next day.

By her own choice.

Chapter Text

A fading sting on the very tip of her left forefinger, as though she touched a burning stove or pool of acid. The wintry rooftop air cools even that slightest ache away. Rhyme inspects her hand: pale as ever, skin smooth and unblemished, except for the slight callous on her wrist where she braces it against a keyboard every day.

Sho's gaze scours over her body with such intensity that weight feels like sandpaper skinning her alive. "Within parameters," he says after a moment. Then: "Femtogram."

Rhyme completes the equation on her side of the equals sign: "Sho."

He points at her. "Report."

"I don't feel different," she notes slowly. She curls and uncurls her fingers. Motion. Art. "My heart's still beating." She breathes in. "My lungs haven't caught fire." She wriggled her toes. "Nothing's gone numb."

Sho nods. When he raises his left arm, she lifts hers, too. The left-hand path. The left-hand path that they now walk down together. Mutually. Having made masterpieces of their bodies. Their own separate masterpieces. Their own separate paths. Not following in one another's footsteps or tracing each other's vectors, but choosing to walk within earshot.

...If it worked.

Sho was a Reaper. A being in the UG. With a strong enough Imagination to not only survive his own Game, but go on to become a Reaper officer, despite his bucking of authority. And Rhyme, for all of the abnormalities in her Soul, is still a human. A human who lost her Game and was brought back as a kindness to someone else.

She wills that sting at the tip of her left forefinger to stay even for a second longer. But the skin looks like skin. Human skin, and nothing more. No pain. No burn. No gasping agony, no body doubled over from torment, no tears she fights to hold back.

"Nonzero touch?"

The bluntness of his voice makes Rhyme blink. She meets his gaze and the ferocity with which it bores through her hand. "Which part of me?"

"Hand." For once, no admonishments for her to factor it out, no insults, nothing but the outputs of his functions. With a deep breath, she holds her hand out. His fingers sear against her flesh as if trying to brand it. His thumbs press painfully into the creases of her palm. She winces. Her muscles twitch. Sho pinches along the skin of her forefinger and swipes his thumb over her nail, then—

—softly touches the tip of his left forefinger to the tip of hers.

For a stunned moment she stands there, staring at the moonless sky, and then she peeks back down at the sigil at her soles, at the burnt edges of spraypaint still smoldering as they curl inwards on themselves like smoking paper charms, at the shadow left in the graffiti.

How did that song go? His favorite. Before the night ends, make a fuss. Sure. The night hasn't ended yet.

The burn of his forefinger on hers cools as he lets go. When the prickle on her nape fades, the sting hasn't returned. She feels: normal. Her fingers clench into fists. His voice rumbles, so loudly in the post-midnight silence. "What do you need?"

Rhyme studies his hands. The hands that briefly held hers. The hands stained in the ink of his choosing. "Will mine look like yours?"

"The helix?"

"My hands." She holds them up. Wriggles her fingers. "Will they look like yours? Will the Taboo blacken them?"

Sho scoffs. "How the factor should I know?"

She stares at him.

He stares back.

"You..."

"Trying to pound yourself into an inverse idiot? Hmph. Maybe the sigil crunched more joules than I thought." He points heavensward. "The right-hand path's the vector decided by someone else. It might have microvariations, but it's always the same. But you? You jumped off that vector." His arm plunges downwards. "You're out of your vector. You're tracing your own function now. The left-hand path isn't a single path. It's all the other paths. All possible vectors. All possible collapses of the wave equation. What happened to me could happen to you. But it could be something else entirely. We're in experimental territory now. Enough calibration. Now we're getting the data."

His grin is all teeth. His eyes remain brown, not glinting with unnatural gold. The black shadowing his collar stays still with his skin and doesn't roil.

But his gaze says the same: so zetta fascinating.

Rhyme exhales. She rubs her left palm with her right thumb. "Okay. So there's a possibility that the Taboo will blacken them?"

"Sure." He shrugs. His excited timbre raises the volume of his words. "That's the expected value according to my calculations."

"Okay. Better safe than sorry." The unmarked skin. She keeps looking at that fingertip, seeking the black. "I need...some gloves."

"Hmph." Angling his cap up, Sho appears to be calculating something. "You'll need potential energy for the imminent conversions. We don't know when the vector will multiply to a point of being detectable by your eyes, but I'm expecting exponential growth."

...If it worked. But even if it didn't work, potential energy sounds nice.

"We'll get gloves," he declares, as though going down a mental checklist. His voice picks up tempo. "What do living things need? Food. Water. Sleep. Where are you sleeping?"

"Huh? Home is where the heart is, so...I have to go back to my apartment." With her older brother. Who doesn't know about anything of this.

"Hmph. Fine. WildKat's open to you if you ever need a different quadrant." He doesn't linger on the point. Already his mouth is shaping into the start of his next sentence. But the words she just heard percolate through the bones in her ears and slide into her skull to nestle between the wrinkles in her brain. "Come on. Poisson distribution of 𝑡-variable between now and sequence start."

Poisson. The word reminds her of another: poison. Does that poison lurk within her forefinger now, soon to spread like a cancerous growth, seething up her arm and across her body?

No, not poison. Venom.

She comes on. He offers to erase the evidence of the sigil burnt into the roof, but Rhyme does it herself. Scrapes it off and crunches. More trash for the heap.

Then down the quiet steps of the Pork City stairwell. Out through Dogenzaka, across the Scramble, towards the west exit bus terminal. He holds open the door to Moyai Mart. Her trainers squeak on the linoleum. Her eyes adjust blearily to the yellow overhead lights. The scents of fried chicken and convenience store croquettes drenched in oil wash warmth over her cheeks.

The cashier perks up. A...friend? Sho has a friend? The cashier—a middle-aged woman whose nametag tags Hirasawa—chatters with him about the music she's put on. Rhyme listens: some kind of rock, the lyrics dark and emo, the guitar riffs thick and meaty. Grunge? He compliments the vibrations, then shifts the conversation to gloves. Waving Rhyme over, the cashier points out the selection and helps her find her size, notes the best deals. Such kindness. Why? Oh, any friend of a fellow Beltie is a friend of hers!

B...Beltie?

Somehow it feels different. Not exactly like the friends she made by leveraging her brother's popularity. Because she can't choose her brother, and her brother can't choose her. The blood commingling in their veins connects them, the string red and pulsating. A string that will exist tied around her wrist no matter how far she strays.

But Sho is... She doesn't know whether he'd call himself her friend. But she chooses him, and he chooses her. Mentor and protégé, perhaps. The blood commingling on the same sharp glass and metal that has bitten into both their skins, the string black and delicate. A string that she has to reweave every day.

She selects the gloves. Thin and black. She could have picked coral, or salmon. But the black feel right when she runs her fingers over them.

As the cashier rings her up, a cacophony of crinkling plastic brings Rhyme to turn her head: Sho has dumped a variety of snacks on the counter. Gesturing towards them, he insists that she pick some out. As many as she wants. She opens her mouth and closes it again. A kindness. He glares at her. Not a kindness out of pity. Not a kindness out of mercy. Sho doesn't have a gram of empathy in his body, much less anything but flawless calculations and beauty. If he's getting her food, he's getting her food because he's flawlessly and beautifully calculated the probability of her needing that energy. For his plans. A practical, pragmatic offer.

Rhyme sifts through the oden bowls, packaged pancakes, and chicken nuggets. Salmon onigiri. Dried squid. Okay, five chicken nuggets, too, if only because she noticed that he plucked all of the dinosaur-shaped ones meant for kids.

And she would bet all the yen to her name—not very much, to be fair—that he hadn't done that out of seeing her like a kid. But, since she only calculated risks, she asks him why.

He eyes her like she did turn into an inverse idiot. "Because they're so zetta aesthetic."

Sho pays for the zetta aesthetic nuggets. Rhyme lets him.

Eating the convenience store food inside with the grungy guitar riffing through her ears, the cashier talking to Sho about something as mundane as an upcoming concert for some band called The Dead Seatbelters, the dried squid so tangy-chewy on her tongue, the salmon onigiri so fragrant and ripe, the chicken nuggets so fulfillingly meaty, makes for a surreal experience. Her head swims. She shivers in her trainers. Her vision blurs her fingers twofold. The forefinger she keeps staring at. The smooth, unblemished skin.

Eventually the warmth in her belly gives way to an almost uncomfortable tightness. Bile bubbles around the base of her throat. The grungy guitar riffs morph into a sonic smear vicing around her temples.

She doesn't remember thanking the cashier, but Sho tells her that she did on the walk home. Her politeness kicking in when she has nothing else, she supposes.

Mirroring the time after the incident in WildKat's attic, Sho gives her a piggyback-ride home. The uncomfortable sensation of human touch beats trying to stumble on wobbly legs with her head so woozy she can barely make out the difference between stars and streetlamps. At least her verging-on-out-of-body experience softens the impact of touching another. Burying her face into his warm back, she lets herself have this kindness.

The solid ground meets her soles. He drops her without warning and she nearly topples over, but manages to catch herself on the brick wall before he has to touch her again. Rhyme exhales. Her fingers shake.

The Taboo?

No. Her skin remains unblemished. No burn. Perhaps her version of the Taboo won't burn, won't hurt, won't blacken her flesh at all, but merely make her sick.

Not sick in the way Fret used it. But sick sick. Nauseous sick. Shaky sick. Clutching her head sick.

Except, if anything, the sensation reflects the one she had on the trek back home from the WildKat attic, where he gifted her—no, offered her the sculpture of the bird on the mountain, made from the mug she'd broken. Out later than before, after all these sleepless nights, pushing her body to its boundaries, her lucency to its limits. This doesn't feel like a transformation. Merely a garden variety fatigue that she would sleep off. Perhaps her journey will end this way. Night after night staying up and sneaking out at midnight, then trying to act fine the day after, leaving her with what output? Groggy sleep. Nothing else.

Sho reminds her that she has his number. The only person in Shibuya who has his number, in fact, other than his pact-partner Coco. Rhyme rubs her eyes. Really? Not even any of the Wicked Twisters? Not Shoka, not Rindo, not Fret, not Nagi?

Null matrix. He texts them using Nagi's phone on occasion—for some reason, that makes Rhyme giggle, in a dazed and star-seeing sort of why—but hasn't given out his number to any of them.

But Rhyme has it. So if anything happens, if she needs anything: call him. Even if he doesn't answer, he'll know. He'll show up. The food that she picked out at the convenience store: would she eat more of it in the future?

She nods.

Good. He'll check in on her later.

Rhyme grabs his sleeve. He doesn't have to, she murmurs. She'll be fine.

She doesn't need to be an ignorant integrand. Hmph. Fear and mercy are garbage. Hesitation and sentiment are trash. He'll check up on her because he wants his numbers. If she refuses, he won't even cross the threshold. But he'll want the numbers. The data: zetta interesting. Her Soul: zetta fascinating. Her future potential with her RNS abilities: zetta useful. No kindness. No mercy. No sentiment. No pity. Not anything else.

Her vision can hardly make out his silhouette, so smudged at the outline by the film of dampness. "Opportunity doesn't knock until you build a door. Okay. You can check up on me, because you need your data so you can crunch your numbers."

"Radiamn straight. Now sleep while you can." His hand hovers over her head. "Nonzero touch? On the hat, not directly tangential to your hair."

"...You already know to keep the hat on, and then it doesn't count as touching me," she answers, nodding as she has before to signal that he can touch her cap. "Why are you asking? Touch my hat. Just not me."

"Rechecking my work. The Taboo's a new addition. Could've changed up your functions." His palm descends onto her head. He brushes his hand over her hat as if intent on ruffling her hair; it rocks back and forth, a familiar rhythm that brings the slightest of smiles to her face despite her fatigue. Then Sho palms his fists. "Need anything before I subtract myself?"

When Rhyme shakes her head, he checks the perimeter, then vanishes from sight.

The air from her lungs tastes like chicken, squid, and salmon, but she doesn't have the strength to brush her teeth. All of her concentration zeroes in on quietly opening the door, closing it, crossing the tiny foyer, entering her room, lurching towards her bed, slumping into the sheets with her face planted into the pillow, covering herself with the Mandelbrot-fractal blanket, and—

—gasping herself awake.

Eyes wide, heart thudding, chest tight as though on the verge of death, something stabbed through her left forefinger, plunged into the flesh and scalding her alive from the inside out.

Her eyes water. Rhyme shuts them so tightly that she swears her eyelids will tear off around her lashes. It takes all of her willpower to swallow her scream for long enough to wad a blanket into her mouth and bite down. Her forefinger pulsates painfully with every heartbeat. It reaches a point where the thought flits through her: if her heart just stopped, it wouldn't hurt so much. Her skin crawls, itches, burns. Her muscles spasm and seize. Grabbing her left wrist with her right fingers takes almost more effort than she has in her shaking body. But she forces her eyes open just long enough, even through the tear-filmed slits, to stare at the tip of her skin.

The tiniest of black dots. A little black splotch. An itty-bitty droplet of ink, like a single touch of a tattoo needle. It doesn't even look like it's moving, but it must be, even if imperceptibly, spreading across and spreading in, outwards and inwards and deeper still.

Her shoulders slacken. She could cry. Instead she forces herself to breathe even if her throat has gone scratchy and rough and her lungs feel coated in grit.

She could attempt to cough it up, but the phlegm—would it stain her sheets black? Or not yet?

It hurts. It hurts so badly that she can't register the brightness or darkness in the room, the sensation beneath her body, the air on her skin. Nothing but the tightness of fabric between her teeth and the roaring of her heart against the insides of her eardrums, so hot and so hard and so fast that the delicate membranes will surely burst from the inside out.

She writhes in the sheets with her hand clamped around her wrist. The pain seeps too deeply for her to sleep.

Instincts bring her finger to her lips, but her saliva will do nothing for this internal agony, and she fears biting her finger off if she manages to wedge it between her teeth. If. If she manages, given how hard she clenches her jaws around the blanket, her chin aching.

Whether she moves or sits still, whether she applies pressure or leave it open, the pain doesn't change, only throbs with the beat of her heart.

As if trying to punish her for the sin of living.

At some point: a knock on the door. A sound. A voice. Her older brother's voice. She can scarcely concentrate enough to keep her screams muffled, much less register what he's saying.

How much time has passed? Did she wake shortly before dawn, or has she been clawing at her covers for hours?

She pieces together something of a meaning from his tone, from singular words that burrow into her brain, from the expectation of what he's said in mornings—it is morning, she assumes, unless she's missed prior knocks on the doors, or unless he's checking on her at three in the morning because she's been screaming so loudly that she hasn't even heard her own shrieks—to make out the impression of his words from all the dots. That he's leaving for the day in a few minutes. That he's left her breakfast in the fridge since she didn't come out to eat it. That if she wants to see him off, she can. That, either way, he hopes she has a good day. That, if she needs anything, he's a phone call away. That he loves her so much.

Rhyme rolls over. He leaves. She curls up. She thinks she possibly cries. Her face seems damp with something. Tears? Mucus? Sweat? Saliva? Vomit? Blood? Some combination of the above?

Her breath feels congealed and coiled in her throat, her sinuses clogged. It takes another—indeterminate amount of time, seconds or years—to figure out why. The stench. Something, from somewhere.

The stink of something rotting. Something decomposing. Something come back wrong.

Every time she glances back at her forefinger the splotch looks to have expanded. Just a little. Not enough. Not yet.

At some point the writhing, the trembling, and the seizing exhausts her. Her tongue feels like a furry worm in her mouth. Clammy sweat clumps her covers to her body. At least she's gotten used enough to the agony to feel these sensations. The pain hasn't subsided, but her muscles can't fight anymore. The lightheadedness worsens. Her breathing sounds as though it has slowed from her earlier hyperventilation. Not because it hurts any less, but because her ribs have grown sore, the tissues between them too fatigued to keep panting.

She fumbles through the sheets. Her nails twinge as she rakes them on the bed until they chip against something solid. Muscle memory locates her phone.

His number. Sho's. Rhyme has only slitted open her eyes long enough to check on the black burn of her forefinger. But if not for that, she might not be able to open them at all. Sand and grit has crusted over her lashes. Her eyelids cling together. It takes strength and pain to unstick them. She gasps softly as her lids sting. Her right thumb scrolls through her contacts. Her arm has such a limpness and weakness to it that her fingers' motion don't appear to spring from within. A phantom hand stumped onto the stump of her wrist. His name in her phone remains Minamimoto, unchanged from when she first typed it in.

Rhyme calls. The phone slips from her fingers. Her eyes slam shut again.

Some time passes, or maybe none at all. When she comes to, or perhaps she never went out, a familiar set of brown irises fills her vision. Sho's gaze.

Her lips part but no sound emerges. At least, none that she can hear.

But she can hear his words, his voice, low and urgent, shot through with intensity. "Nonzero touch?"

She nods.

His hand burns where it cups under her head, but somehow that pain takes away from the agony in her forefinger, like a distraction. He jerks her body upwards too quickly at first and she dry-heaves, but nothing comes out. Still, he lowers the angle of her head back down, then slides her entirely off the sheets and onto—the floor? His lap? Something else? She can't tell. Everything feels so heavy. Bags of sand piling in around her limbs, bones replaced with metal, vision dark.

Rhyme accepts the kindness. Lets herself have it.

When he yanks the blanket out from her teeth, she screams, but something wedges her teeth apart no matter how hard she tries to bite down.he feels something wet her lips, but not unpleasant. Her tongue flickers moisture. Water, or something. It tastes too salty, too citrusy, too sweet to be water. Only when she tries to swallow does the scorched-earth skin inside her throat dawn on her. He only gets droplets at a time into her mouth despite how badly she wants to drink. But even those maddening few drops add up to an ocean over time.

Eventually the water thickens. Some kind of paste. Sweet and warm. Like rice congee. She drink-eats it up. The aches in her throat and her stomach die down. And then, something else wadded-up forces her jaws open. Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, he vanishes.

She pushes her face into the hard floor and shivers there, alone.

Does she need to call again? But the bed, the floor, so far away—

The stench. No longer there. It doesn't stink anymore? It...huh...

Hands on her back. Sho? Sho. The scent of grass, of cedar, of summer, of sun. Her arms lift up. Something slides up and down her body. Then a similar sensation over her legs. The occasional burning touch on her skin makes her cry out but it passes as quickly as it comes. Then softness against her spine. Oh. The pillow. She breathes it in, that scent, lets it surround her, envelope her, embrace her. His thumbs press painfully into her palm just as they did on the roof of Pork City. That familiar agony could rock her to sleep.

She hears him speaking. The words don't make sense at first. But even if she can't see the full picture for the dots, she can connect the dots.

He grips her hand so tightly in both of his that her flesh feels as if it caught flame.

"My value," he says, and she doesn't want to turn her face away from the clean-smelling pillow, but she twists her neck just enough to listen, "surpasses H's. This won't be a recurrent parametric equation of his outputs to mine and mine to yours. I'm changing the equation. I'm not going to divide myself from you."

Rhyme presses her face into the pillow. It has his scent.

"The pain won't improve, but you can learn to bear it. Start counting. Focus. Concentrate. Doesn't make a difference what you count. Natural numbers. Even numbers. The Fibonacci spiral. Something you don't need to memorize. Something you can add or multiply together. Start counting. If you lose count, start over. Stay focused."

0. 1. 1. What... Oh. 0. 1. 1. 2. 3. 5. 8. What... Oh. 0. 1. 1. 2. 3. What... Oh. 0. 1. 1. 2. 3. 5. 8. 13...

"Femtogram."

She listens.

"You've had Noise static in your Soul for years. But this Noise will grow. For now, it's a fraction of a percent of your Soul. It can feed on the emotions that the human fraction of your Soul generates. But the numerator of that fraction will keep multiplying. I don't know how in how many terms. But eventually on the number line, you'll have to get that Soul from other Souls. In the UG."

Eventually. Eventually. Eventually, in all this pain. Eventually, in all this agony. She chose this. She chooses this. The rest of her life. The rest of the words vibrate meaninglessly through her crown but don't make it to the skull underneath. They collect there, at the base of her crown, for later. Something about Noise. Something about Soul. Something about the UG.

...How will she face her older brother with this pain? How will she go to school? How will she live?

...Rhyme has to. Pain and progress are balanced equations. She went nowhere in life before, nowhere and nothing, miserable and alone, gnawing the bitter copper out of her own arms until it refused to sublimate from her tongue. If she can overcome this—when she overcomes this—she'll have her dreams. In a way, she already does. Her dream of learning to live with the Taboo. Her dream of grasping her entry fee again with both hands. Her dream of never sinking her teeth into her arm again. At least not in her sleep.

"I'm going to subtract myself from this quadrant." She freezes up. Her nails sink into his flesh. "But I'll recur." His voice doesn't waver. "Tell me if you want to end the algorithm. Otherwise I'll be a periodic function."

Her throat constricts in on itself, tissue glued together. Still she forces her breath out and the wad in her mouth within it. Her teeth snap shut from the agony, thankfully not around her tongue. Her jaw grinds together. "Wait." Has her voice always sounded like this? Raspy and coarse, as though she gulped a grater?

The heat of his palms boils the blood in her hand and punctures needles through her neck.

"Sho. My phone. Text Beat." She wheezes between words. "I have a fever—can't come in my room—am fine—know he can't get sick—has to go to job—will rest up—doesn't have to worry."

He hmphs. But a moment later—or a lifetime later—he shakes her shoulder. "Open up your eyes," he suggests.

She does. He holds her phone in front of her, yes—he typed up her request, adorned with mathematical words that she'll have to replace momentarily lest her older brother flip his lid, yo, and she will, in a moment—but more importantly, beyond it, she can see her hand. Her finger. Her stain. Her ink. Her Taboo. Darkness not only on the tip, now, but crawling under her nail, sunken over the curve, halfway to the first joint. It burns. It hurts. So much worse than when it shocked her out of sleep, and so much better.

A pain that links her and Sho. An agony they share. Both of them, out of their vectors. On their own separate left-hand paths, within earshot of one another.

She does open up her eyes. She does accept this. She will keep her eyes on this corruption. Yes, she will...

She will watch this transformation.

Chapter Text

Losing her entry fee meant losing her dreams.

Which meant losing her capacity for dreams. Meant losing her capacity to dream of a future. Meant losing her capacity to dream of tomorrow. Meant even losing her capacity to dream overnight.

But losing her dreams didn't mean losing her nightmares.

Thankfully Rhyme—Raimu, as her parents called her then—had long-since preferred longer sleeves, her wardrobe more flush with sweaters, jackets, and hoodies than other articles of clothing. Like other complex beings, from onions to oni, she had layers. But even she—or, rather, the person they had called Raimu-Rhyme before that person had gotten crushed like a butterfly beneath the wheel—had broken out the shorter sleeves when summer hot waves rolled over Shibuya. She'd bumped and scraped her elbows trying to emulate her older brother's skating enough times to have felt the warm sunlight bathing her bare skin.

Even when her parents had scolded her big brother—never her—to quit acting like such a bad influence on his pure and impressionable little sister who would follow him to the ends of the earth, she wore whatever length of sleeves she liked.

Just patched herself up with a bandage here and a little gauze there and got back up.

A skinned elbow, a skinned knee: she'd fall down nine times and get up ten.

Still, no one, neither her older brother, nor her parents, batted much of an eye when the person who returned from the Game quietly retired anything that didn't go up to her elbows, and then that didn't go up to her wrists.

Rhyme still wore them, of course. Just with a light jacket thrown over. No, not too warm at all. Oh, yes, a little sweat never hurt anyone. Nothing to worry about.

Her arms itched under the sleeves. She didn't scratch them. Rarely, she gripped her fingers around the cylinders that made up her limbs, but squeezing her flesh didn't make the itch go away, only ached down into her skin.

She'd tried different methods. She'd tucked her arms under the pillow. She'd tucked her arms in at her sides beneath the tightly-cocooned blanket. She'd worn long-sleeved shirts to bed. She'd borrowed braces meant for straightening out aching elbows and aching wrists. She'd wadded up blankets into her mouth and bitten down on them.

Some things worked better than others when she woke in the mornings. But nothing worked perfectly.

Strange, and a little comedic, how the nightmares twisted the truth, regardless.

Not the jumbled memories staticked with noise that occasionally flitted like the vibrations of far-away footsteps over the otherwise tranquil water in a teacup. The past twisted in the present, the present twisted in the past, turning into one another over and over, the snake eating its own tail, the squirrel gnawing on its own limbs, the fangs sinking into the claws.

She'd spent so much time fettered and limited in that form, that adorable little form that Mr. Hanekoma had seen fit to stuff into that pin, that adorable little form that her older brother had called her Soul out into to perch on his shoulder.

Psychs followed the user's Imagination. A manifestation of how the user envisioned that psych.

Just as sheet music suggested a sound, but the instrument's player made it manifest, so too did the pin suggest a shape, but the Game's Player made it manifest.

Then Tigris Cantus had plucked her from her older brother's shoulder.

Tigris Cantus, claws long even in her Reaper guise, had squeezed her. The car's trunk had slammed hard enough into the body's head that the black-out had come instantaneously, any other pain thereafter vanished into the void. The shark Noise's bite had sunk through the body's midsection, a single moment of obliterating pain before the Soul had dispersed into crackling sound. But Tigris Cantus's all-too-human hands wrapped around the body had squeezed her. Slowly. Agonizingly. Every moment of pressure on the graffiti and ink that made the body up, until the flesh caved inwards and the entrails burst and—

Neku of all people had summoned her again from the pin. Neku, who had viewed her as nothing more than her big brother's little sister. Neku, who had also had few other preconceptions about her, whose Imagination had imbued the pin with Mr. Hanekoma's shape and her big brother's sound, but without her big brother's sureness of that sound.

Her skin had mottled purple. Her size had swelled. Her teeth had grown. Her claws had sharpened. Her hunger had—

Her older brother, after the Game, had assured her: not her fault. The actions of a Noise. Didn't matter, anyway. They'd had to erase the Iron Maiden jus' to get outta there with their lives. Ain't no one gon' go after her for gettin' a lil violent wit' it. He'd been punkin' Noise on his board for weeks. A squirrely Noise wasn't gonna have anythin' to smack a sista 'round with other than her fangs an' claws. Nuthin' else to it. They'd all gotten home safe an' sound. Nuthin' else mattered. He'd protected his little sister's smile.

Safe and sound. Safe and sound, albeit without her entry fee, something that her older brother had gulped down the guilt for, over and over, saying how sorry he was, and could she ever forgive him, and he'd tried to do everythin' that he could for his precious little sister, an'—really? She'd forgive 'im, again, jus' like dat, the tenth time they'd had this conversation? An' he was gonna wallop Prissy-Kid's ass if he ever caught wind of 'im again, 'cept that he had brought her back in the first place when he didn't gotta, so maybe her older brother shouldn't go flyin' straight into the horny nes'. Whuzzat? Hornet's nes'? Aight, tight, he'd try to remember dat. So did she want curry or did she want curry?

The person who had come back from the Game had nodded. All was well that ended well with a good meal, right?

A good meal.

Her arms itched. So itchy. So...

She could still sense how the shadow had stretched over her nails, could still feel how the static had flickered between her teeth, could still taste how the copper clung to her tongue, refusing to sublimate.

Variations on the same nightmare. In the Game, bodies had only bled static. Buzzing noises in black and white that dissipated like ashes on the wind. One could claw and bite and punch, and the Noise—or the Reaper, or the Player—would stagger over in agony, but the Game had turned violence into just that. A game. Sanitized of its weight, of its purpose, until the final blow. She'd seen more realistic effects slotting in 100-yen coins at TAITO STATION.

But her nightmares twisted the past into the present, the present into the past, looping over itself again and again.

Past informing present. Present informing past. Past changing present. Present changing past. Past transforming present. Present transforming past.

Tigris Cantus, wings fluttering behind her, reclining back on her airy throne, the creepy weepy barrier of her own shadow snapping up Noise in its jaws, swift as the wind. The tiger stripes from her name stretching out across her body to ribbon it into sections as if marking the cuts of her flesh. Tigris Cantus, who had threatened her older brother's life, and Neku's.

Her big brother sought to protect his little sister no matter what. Whether it meant trying to stop a car. Whether it meant rail-sharp wings breaking through the skin of his back. Whether it meant having to put down Reapers.

He wouldn't hurt a friend. Wouldn't hurt a good person. Wouldn't take part in a rigged, messed-up Game.

Rhyme wouldn't have wanted him to. Rhyme hadn't even asked for the protection in the first place.

But herself?

She would die for her older brother. She would kill for her older brother. She would...

The shadow beneath Tigris Cantus had spread like an ink-stain. But a limited one. A barrier that she defined the perimeters of. Creepy in its absorption of colorful Noise to strengthen itself, weepy in how it cried out for the black Noise that it couldn't siphon the life out of, its only weakness—the only way that Neku and her older brother had even managed to defeat the otherwise impenetrable defense of an Iron Maiden-class wall—the monochrome thrashing gnashing ultraviolent Noise with sounds that shook the heart and eyes as crimson as the blood that didn't otherwise exist in the Game.

Not a true ink-stain. Not an ink-stain that could handle the genuine darkness. A splotch of white, a ghost of a divine shadow, seemingly immortal in comparison to the weak psychs that her older brother and Neku could put out.

Yet, when the true darkness sank into its depths, that splotch of white, that ghost of a divine shadow, that seeming immortality gave way.

Poisoned from the inside-out. Rotted away. Darkness seeping through every pore, multiplying, exponentiating, tetrating, until the dam bent, and cracked, and shattered.

Yet even with the glistening white darkened to black, Tigris Cantus had continued running away, swift as the wind, cloaking herself in shadow.

Her older brother had rescued her. Of course he had. Her big brother, the hero, saving his little sister. Smile status: protected.

When Neku had summoned Rhyme from the pin, with her mottled skin, her swelled size, her grown fangs, her sharpened claws, and her hunger, she had flown directly towards that shadow. On instinct, on decision, on choice, on hunger, on whatever parts of her had comprised of Noisiness or humanity or Playerhood. She had sunk her nails into that shadow. She had sunk her teeth into that shadow. She had sunk every mote of hunger to protect her older brother's smile into that shadow.

She had felt it strain against her claws, her teeth, her hunger. She had felt it tear. She had felt it rip into ribbons as Tigris Cantus cried out.

Vexatious worm.

Rhyme had torn that false shadow, that pseudo-stain, that limp so-called mockery of the real 'darkness' out from under her. And then Rhyme had leaped forward with her fangs and claws outstretched.

Towards Tigris Cantus's chest. The seat of her Soul, perhaps, if Souls even had seats. Rhyme had aimed herself, like an arrow from a bow of her own making, body weaponized into a single shot, one that would mute the threat to her older brother's life, regardless of the consequences. She would die for her brother. She would kill for her brother. She would take anything for her brother.

The two of them. She with her wings, and she with her wings, and she with her claws, and she with her claws, and she with her fangs, and she with her fangs.

She could still remember—her nightmares wouldn't let her forget—how her claws had raked over her flesh, how her teeth had broken into her skin, had her wings had beaten against her body, how—

—her incisors had scraped the tissue from her chest, how her jaws had broken through the bones of her ribs, how her muzzle had drenched in the heat from her vessels, how her eyes had glommed shut from the congealing fluid over the lids, how her face had grown warm in the bath from her pulsating insides, how her teeth had torn through the fibrous capsule around her heart, how her canines had sheared through the still-beating muscle of her lifeforce, how her momentum had punched her skull through the back of her spine, how her agony had lightninged through her nerves up her body, how her pain had torn her screams from her throat, how—

—her blood. Tigris Cantus's blood. Had coated her tongue. Rhyme's tongue.

Rhyme had died for her brother. Beneath a car's tires. Between a shark's jaws. In the human-guised fingers of the Iron Maiden Mitsuki Konishi.

And now Rhyme had killed for her brother.

Killed, murdered, erased. Landed with her claws on the Rubicon as the Noise Plane had dissolved around her and her corporeal body with it. The scent of static, perhaps, in the present of the past, but the stench of blood, over and over, in the past of the present.

She'd take anything for her brother.

She'd take a pact. She'd take an oath. She'd take a shadow. She'd take a Soul. She'd take the heart out from Tigris Cantus and crunch it between her teeth.

She could taste the blood. So bitter. Copper. Not iron, that which flowed through human veins. But the copper, wired for electricity, jolting through vibrations from the music that grooved through the city's sounds, from the emotions that vibed from the city's humans, that which flowed through Noise. The copper that wouldn't sublimate, no matter what she did. The Game had sublimated her entry fee, and her nightmares had sublimated her dreams, but the copper stayed, solid, coating her insides in its taste, in its scent. Metallic, tangy, sharp, wanted, ta—

A monster fighting a monster. Furred, clawed, fanged, winged, tailed, hungry.

Her older brother had hugged her so tightly. They'd had to erase Tigris Cantus. Only a monster could have done something like that, all that horrible shit that the Iron Maiden did, messin' wit' him, messin' wit' Phones, messin' wit' his little sister, even betrayin' the trus' of her own boss to side with that mathematical wack-job, wacker than wack, yo, an' huh? Yeah, dat wack-job had bumped into 'em on the same day, yeah, dat wack-job had roughed 'em up real good, yeah, dat wack-job had left 'em alive an' moved on but only after kickin' their asses, an' yeah, her older brother'd never gotten a chance to kick that wack-job's ass back, what about it?

Didn't matter. He'd brought her back. Safe an' sound. The same precious little sister that he'd sworn to protect. The same little sister.

The same little sister.

The same little sister?

Rhyme—or Raimu, as her parents had called her then—and her older brother had both fallen beneath the car's tires. She hadn't seen her body, but if that body had perished, then it couldn't have emerged unscathed. Had its threads thrashed? Had its bones broken? Had its meat mangled? Had its brain bled? Had it lain there in the street with a pool of its own juices? Tears? Mucus? Sweat? Saliva? Vomit? Blood?

Yet she had awoken in the UG whole. All of her clothes mended. All of her bones in place. None of her sinews snapped or tendons torn. None of her innards inverted or her spine stretched. Nothing at all but the precious smile on her face. Protected.

The same little sister? How did that work? A gathering of Noise? She supposed that she simply had to believe it. Fair enough.

The action of death meant the passing of Soul from the RG to the UG. The uptuning, as the Reapers called. Otherwise none of them had come back. Not herself, not Shiki, not Neku, not her older brother. She could believe in that identity, continuous and unbroken along the number line, because the process of tuning, up and down, took all the same Soul. The Soul, the whole Soul, and nothing but the Soul.

So what if her threads hadn't thrashed, her bones hadn't broken, her meat hadn't mangled, her brain hadn't bled, her body not lying there in the street in a pools of its own juices, tears, mucus, sweat, saliva, vomit, blood?

Most of the cells in her body turned over at some point during her life too. It didn't make it any less her. So long as she kept the same Soul, she could believe it. The same Raimu Bito.

But then the shark Noise had erased her.

Rhyme had seen other Players erased before her very eyes. When the pink-haired Reaper had shown up on the very first day and tricked her older brother with a 'test of courage'—"Just a little leap of faith! Come on, big boy, you're not scaaaared, are you?"—Player after Player had screamed and seized amid fumbling through useless psych pins and staggering from frogs' graffiti-decal legs.

The air had grown dark and loud with static. With erasure. With death.

Players didn't come back. Players didn't get saved into pins. Players didn't turn into Noise.

And Mr. Hanekoma, the saintly figure that he was, had happened to choose her? For what, her great 'sacrifice,' pushing her partner out of the way to give him seven more measly minutes to live? She'd seen other partners sacrificing themselves. Neku had told her about such a sacrifice he had witnessed himself: a young couple, compassionate and kind, that he had met in his second week, one of whom had sacrificed herself just so that her lover could soak in the sunlight for a few more minutes, eke that last sliver of life from existence. Yet Mr. Hanekoma hadn't stepped in then.

All those other Players who had died during the Game, and Mr. Hanekoma hadn't lifted a single finger.

No. Mr. Hanekoma, the saintly figure that he was, had stepped in because Rhyme had happened to meet Neku Sakuraba, because Rhyme had happened to serve as powerful motivation for Daisukenojo "Beat" Bito, because Rhyme had happened to have given Neku, the heroic figure that he was, another reason to go after the Composer.

Rhyme had gotten to live because the saintly Mr. Hanekoma had thought ahead and considered her older brother useful to the heroic Neku Sakuraba.

Mr. Hanekoma, whom the rest of her friends regarded as untouchable. Yeah, Mr. H! Mr. H who saved Shiki from getting killed! Mr. H who saved Beat from getting erased after seven minutes! Mr. H who saved Neku from distrusting his partner! Mr. H who gave Neku the keys to the Shibuya River! Mr. H who was CAT, Neku's idol, Shibuya's darling! Mr. H whose graffiti didn't even get hosed from the Udagawa mural when all the other street artists' did, because he meant something to Shibuya! Mr. H who could do no wrong! Mr. H who did everything right!

Mr. H who had saved her life. Mr. H who had bound her Soul into a pin, even though he didn't have to. Mr. H, who had gotten her un-erased, even though he hadn't done the same for any other Player.

Why did none of them consider that strange? Why did none of them consider that weird? Why did all of them act like she had to exist in a perpetual state of gratitude towards him?

What a saint. Truly, what a saint. If Neku had become the legendary hero, then Mr. Hanekoma surely deserved to exist as the legendary saint.

Except that Mr. Hanekoma hadn't cared about her, had he?

If he hadn't cared about all of the other Players. Or, rather, if he'd allowed them to become truly erased as part of the Game, as part of the great 'talent show' that weeded the weak from the worthy, then why wouldn't he let her get erased in the same way? She didn't matter. She could have been anyone. She could have been any Player, so long as her partner had met Neku Sakuraba, and so long as her partner had met whatever internal qualifications Mr. Hanekoma had set for someone who could prove useful to Neku Sakuraba in the future, and so long as she had gotten erased.

Because Neku Sakuraba, the hero of Shibuya, the Composer's proxy, couldn't see the first people with whom he had had a kind interaction get erased.

Couldn't have the hero of Shibuya get traumatized when he had just started to learn to trust people. No, no. Mr. Hanekoma had to arrive in the nick of time—as though he couldn't have warned them of the shark Noise in the first place?—to show the heroic Neku Sakuraba that he could trust others to repay kindness, that he could trust others not to abandon him even to the literal jaws of death, that he could trust Mr. Hanekoma, specifically, to do something so compassionate, so altruistic, so saintly. Because Neku Sakuraba could trust Mr. Hanekoma with anything.

She had existed as a grail, as a prize, as a motivation, so that the hero of Shibuya would save the city. Nothing more than that.

Quite literally. He had, after all, transformed her into a pin.

Mr. Hanekoma hadn't even told her older brother how to summon her back into reality; he had had to go to the Reapers for that.

So then, what did it matter to Mr. Hanekoma if she came back as the same little sister, as long the possibility of her had motivated her older brother, had not re-traumatized Neku?

Her older brother had trusted Mr. Hanekoma, hadn't he? And yet.

When she had died, all of her Soul had uptuned at once to the UG, still contained in the shape of her body. But when she had gotten erased, her Soul had scattered to the four winds. Blown away into static.

So then, what did it mean for Mr. Hanekoma to have gathered her Soul into a pin, to have turned her into a Noise?

What did it mean.

Perhaps the UG worked differently from the RG. But in the RG, if Rhyme threw her body into the fire and immolated herself, and the ashes scattered to the four winds as the static of her Soul had, how could someone had gathered all of her ashes together? Her ashes, her whole ashes, and nothing but her ashes?

Someone could, perhaps, gather most of her ashes in great clumps, immediately after she had burnt to a blackened crisp.

But some of her ashes would mix with whatever else had burned. Some of her ashes would float away on the wind and mingle with the dust. Some of her ashes would even stick to the hands of the one trying to gather all of it.

When someone gathered their loved one's ashes into a vase, they didn't expect to gather the ashes, the whole ashes, and nothing but the ashes.

The saintly Mr. Hanekoma, who could output prolific work as CAT, make acquaintances with the Composer, either foresee or survive an attack by a supposed 'wack-job,' and even create a phone camera which allowed one to take photographs of the past—which Neku had told her about and which somehow sounded like the most incredible aspect of the entire Game, even though none of her friends seemed to think the same—surely had skills far beyond their meager mortal, human ken.

Maybe he could do so.

But she had no guarantee. The Soul that he had supposedly gathered and bound into a pin: had he truly gathered all of her Soul, or had some of it vanished, swift as the wind, leaving her incomplete, less than herself? Had he truly gathered nothing but her Soul, or had he picked up other Soul with it, from other Players also erased by the same Reaper trap, from other Noise erased even by the very heroic Neku Sakuraba and his partner, from the—from the shark Noise that had erased her, even, leaving her infiltrated, more than herself?

In truth, he hadn't even needed to save any of her Soul.

Throughout the entirety of the Game after her erasure, her older brother had only spoken to the pin and later the Noise. He had never seen her as Rhyme, his little sister, until after the Game, until after he'd helped the heroic Neku Sakuraba, until after Shibuya had been saved.

For all her older brother knew, the pin didn't even have to contain her. That he summoned a Noise at all only happened because he distrusted Mr. Hanekoma and had gone to the Reapers. Her older brother had taken one look at the cutesy, adorable pink squirrel that clung faithfully to his shoulder, that did nothing but copy all of his motions, gestures, and emotions, that didn't so much squeak on its own unless accompanied by his bwaaaaaaah!, and immediately told himself, "Yup, dat's my little sister a'ight."

For all he knew, for all any of them knew, Mr. Hanekoma hadn't needed to save her Soul.

The person who came back from the Game had woken in the RG. The person who came back from the Game had had memories in their head that told them their name was Rhyme and they were their big brother's little sister. The person who came back from the Game had had Rhyme's shape, had had Rhyme's voice, had had Rhyme's walk, had had Rhyme's shadow. But had she had Rhyme's Soul?

She didn't know. She couldn't know.

Did she have the pure, pristine, and unblemished Soul of Raimu "Rhyme" Bito after all? Or did she have holes in her Soul where Mr. Hanekoma had missed a spot? Did she have others' static in her Soul where Mr. Hanekoma had stained her in spots? Or did she have another Soul entirely, conjured up from her older brother's memories of her?

The fact that she could have her own emotions, perhaps, and question all of this, at least implied that she had her own Soul.

Even if that Raimu Beat had died, and the person who came back from the Game had taken her place, that person did not exist as a mere projection of her older brother's feelings, wishes, and desires. She was more than a manifestation of his dreams. Maybe if she had sprung up from his dreams, their lives would have so much less complexity, so much less grief, so much less pain. But she had her own Soul, and so she struggled, and strained, and suffered.

And even if she did have the pristine and unblemished Soul from the Raimu Bito who had died in the RG, what of her revival from the UG? She hadn't had her entry fee restored. Even now, she couldn't dream. Not of the future, not of tomorrow, not even tonight. Thus the Game had proven that it could make long-term consequences on her Soul that persisted even in the RG. What of the fact that she had once lived as a Noise? Did the memories gained during that time, or the Soul she had drunk from Tigris Cantus's heart, still linger in the same electric twang that vibrated with the grooves of the city's sounds? Did she have not only iron flowing in her vessels, but copper wiring through her hunger?

Because the taste of it refused to sublimate from her tongue.

Her arms itched. So very itchy. And so...

She had died as Raimu. But who had come back? What had come back? Raimu? Or a word with the same ending sounds—the girl in Raimu Bito's shape—but a different start: human, or Noise? An echo? A rhyme?

Raimu. Rhyme.

The same sound. Just...just different writing on the wall.

That nightmare that Rhyme lived through over and over, night after night, the present eating the past and the past eating the present: the sight of copper on her wings, the scent of copper on her claws, the taste of copper on her fangs, how her agony lightninged through her nerves up her body, how her pain tore her screams from her throat, how—

—her blood. Rhyme's blood. Coated her tongue. Rhyme's tongue.

She woke from the pain shooting down her arm. She woke from the heat dampening her cheeks. She woke from the hunger panging the empty void inside her.

She woke with her teeth sunk down into her own flesh, bitten through her own skin, bitter with her own blood.

Night after night after night. So itchy, her arms, and...

Her older brother came to the door and asked her about the shouting. Rhyme assured him, said she'd be out in a just a moment, dabbed ointment on the fresh wounds, checked the many, many, many bruised and scarred-over ones for any that had reopened, wrapped herself up in gauze, threw on a long-sleeved sweater, jacket, or hoodie, ensured that the sleeves went up to her wrist, and then opened the door to greet her older brother, to protect his smile.

Grinning, he asked for a hug. Beaming, she allowed just a little one. He embraced her, strong arms around hers, crinkling the gauze into the wounds she'd just bitten into herself, and she buried her face into his chest so he wouldn't have to see her wince.

Who could she tell? Not her brother, who gulped down his guilt three years on, over the lost entry fee, much less the rest of this. Not her friends, who had gotten their entry fees restored, who had never become Noise, who had won their Games and were moving on, needing no reason at all to get sucked back in. Not a doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a therapist, a professional, who would put her on antipsychotics for even trying to describe the Game, much less anything else. Who could she tell?

Who could she tell about the void inside her? From the lack of an entry fee? Or from the hunger of a Noise?

Who could she tell that she nightmared about the person she had murdered? That she woke with her meat on her teeth, her blood on her tongue, her copper never sublimating from her?

That no matter what she ate, no matter what she drank, no matter what she did, the taste of copper never sublimated from her?

She could pretend. She could pretend that she took all those desires, all those hungers, all that emptiness and transformed it into something that her older brother, and her friends, and all the people around them would accept. The perfect precious little sister, friends with all her older brothers' friends, working hard in school, about to go to college, a success story from the Udagawa backstreets, all possible thanks to her brother's kindness?

Who could she tell?

Who could she tell about her arms?

So itchy, her arms, and...

...And so tasty.

Chapter Text

When Sho had first returned to Shibuya, and Rhyme had gotten his number, he had sent her puzzle after puzzle, problem after problem, proof after proof. He'd tested her, perhaps. He'd expressed interest in her Soul. He'd wanted to metaphorically vivisect her and see what he could shake out.

She'd invited him out for ice cream.

Outing after outing. To arcades, where she found him surprisingly adept at a wide of variety of cabinets from twin stick shooters to lightgun games, and terrible at racing games, because he seethed that the physics in those games made no logical sense.

To animal cafés, where she discovered that he didn't particularly care for cats all that much—though they seemed to like him, drawn to the radiant heat that his ink-black tattoos exuded—but had something of a penchant for dogs, his right hand reaching out to stroke their wagging tails.

To soft serve shops, where she unearthed that he had a sweet tooth larger than the entire city but couldn't handle any flavors stronger than citrus tangy, something as mild as mint getting him worked up.

To karaoke, where she learned that he loved songs that shook the heart, even leaped onto the table and thumped his boot-heel on the edge so intensely that the poor thing rocked and nearly toppled over, but that he couldn't carry a tune to save his life, his voice garbled, out-of-key, and more comparable to yowling than singing.

To the park underpass, where she observed that for all of his energy, his capacity to constantly go and never look back, his tendency to accelerate indefinitely until he reached the speed of light and broke through temporal boundaries, he could also stand in one spot for hours, grinning at passersby, staring soundlessly at some spray of graffiti on the far wall or a smudged greasy handprint someone had left on the cement.

She'd forced him on outing after outing after outing...after outing after outing after outing. She'd tested the limits of his patience. She'd ignored all his excited theories and enthusiastic hypotheses, and she'd made him pay for her food and tickets, just to see if he would.

Sho kept telling her to stop wasting his time, to stop pretending that she didn't understand, to stop being so zetta slow.

Yet for all of his pushing, he had never done anything, just went with her to arcades, to animal cafés, to soft serve shops, to karaoke, to the park underpass. When she'd tried to probe why, he'd dismissed her: "It's garbage if it's not from free will." He'd speak to her intensely, going over his calculations again and again, as if fully convinced that he would persuade her to let him sight-read the Sheet Music of her Soul if only he could give her the proof for his conjecture.

And, in a way, he had. Once Rhyme had assured herself that Sho would listen to the word no, she had agreed, in the end.

If she hadn't, she wouldn't have been leaning against the alleyway wall right now, watching the crouching-down Sho Minamimoto fold thrown-away new bicycles—he had left broken pipes in their place, like gravemarkers, for reasons that Rhyme couldn't yet fathom—like tissue paper, albeit with considerably more strain.

As she witnessed him holding the metal in his bare hands and slowly bending it around his fingers, it occurred to her that for all of those outings where she had acquired a great deal of information about his plans, his park underpass habits, and his patience, she hadn't learned very much about him as a person.

She'd only ever dragged him along to things that she wanted to do.

...And to things that she thought might have annoyed him, to carefully assess the limits of his tolerance as much as he assessed the limits of her capabilities.

Still, for all of that painstaking testing of his patience, it had still run out. With his hands—and his teeth—deep in the very depths of her Soul, Sho had...snapped. Those snapping teeth still cycled through her nightmares again and again, too many to fit inside her Soul no matter what lengthwise impossibly Klein bottles they themselves into, laughing with rowdy rust, asking her what she meant by no. He'd jittered through his motions, his voice crackling; he'd staggered back a moment from touching her; he'd jerked back his arm while that black, poisonous, intoxicating tar-lightning had radiated through her. He'd echoed himself: "It's garbage if it's not from free will." And then he had—

His upper half-planes. His unique local maximum, he called it.

When he dipped his hands into her Soul again to restore her entry fee, what would stop him from snapping, again? Him, and those snapping teeth? What would stop him from going too far this time? What if he didn't remind himself about free will, and garbage, and whatever else prevented him to simply shoving his fist down her Soul and grasping the lock on her entry fee because he could?

All the countermeasures that they had come with up, the slow counts of Fibonacci that might soothe him, could still fail. Merely symptomatic treatment.

She had come here, for these lessons with him, to devise some manner of getting at the source.

A gram of prevention was worth a kilo of cure. But figuring out how to prevent it for him, specifically—not just anyone who had taken the Taboo, but Sho Minamimoto who had taken the Taboo—would mean more than just learning about the Taboo. If listening to the Fibonacci sequence could help calm him down...then, perhaps, finding out more about him as a person would unlock further avenues to explore.

And, well. Honesty was the best policy: the first lesson had intrigued her.

Not at all what she had expected. She had anticipated him grabbing his mythical megaphone and shouting numbers at her under the midnight sky. Giving her some equation for the Taboo. Telling her at how many hertz Souls resonated. Teaching her to plug in some numbers, and bada-ding, bada-boom, after weeks or months of studious, rigorous mathematical analysis, she would comprehend the Taboo.

But... Tearing up a vending machine? Transforming that 'garbage' into art? Turning towards her and demanding to know her definition of art, only to give a surprisingly motivational speech that he might not have even registered as motivation?

Her older brother regarded Sho as wacker than wack, yo. Neku regarded him as something of an amusing oddity, potentially dangerous but mostly harmless, in the manner of a stray cat.

Yet Sho wasn't a cat.

He was a lion.

And, at least for the moment, that would make him the mane event. Of her research, at least.

Thus Rhyme studied him continuing to bend the bicycles over one another. He squeezed the handlebars off; they disappeared into his coat with its seemingly infinite pockets. A different coat than yesterday's. Also with short-sleeves, with a shorter back as well, and buttoned up along his front. The long popped collar looked like the kind of thing that a fifth-grader would find cool, and she'd been giggling a little bit about it the entire time.

Hm. The bicycles. What did they mean?

Why had he deflated the tires? Why had he bent both of them in half like two inequality signs? Why was he now twisting those inequality signs around one another? Idly Rhyme flicked through a few pages of Moogle searches, examining different fractals or other famous mathematical designs. The blanket that he'd let her take home had the Mandelbrot stitched into it, so perhaps he'd gotten inspired by some other pieces of mathematical beauty. Hmm, mathematical beauty, mathematical beauty. Everything from monstrous moonshine theories—pretty name, and apparently related to quantum physics in some fashion—to the compound of five cubes popped up, but nothing that matched the spirals he had whorled the bicycles into.

Bicycles without handlebars and without tires. He'd even taken the seats off.

The spokes groaned as he broke them from the inner edges of the wheels and angled them towards the other bicycles. Hm. A double spiral with connections across the middle.

Oh. A helix? A double helix? Hold on. Rhyme leaned forward with her fingers pressed into the outside of her cheek and her tongue rolling against the inner curve. Bicycles, hm? Broken bicycles. Symbols of human motion but no longer able to allow humans to move. All of the miscellaneous parts of them removed, stripped down to just the metal. Yet a bicycle without all of those extra parts couldn't possibly transport anyone. And now the double helix...of human DNA? Hmm.

Something about how speed wired in human DNA? The human urge to go fast? Sho had told her to not be so zetta slow. If anyone liked to go fast, he liked to go fast.

No, maybe something about art? Even if the bicycles had gotten all of the things that made them useful to human activity removed, he could still turn that garbage into art, and that represented humanity? Well, while it fit with his philosophy, it felt...too simple. Then again, he had referred to his question as such a simple equation. But this seemed too repetitive to what he had taught her yesterday. An intentional refresher of a lesson? Hm, for some reason, he didn't strike her as the type.

Did he have a lesson plan in mind for these impromptu tutoring lessons of theirs? Or would he just teach her things—or get herself to teach herself things—about whatever vaguely related whim he had had that day?

...How long would these lessons of his take?

Rubbing her eyes with her knuckles, Rhyme took a fresh glance at the bicycles. Sho had moved on from the spokes to the pedals, which he had apparently bent inwards and then twirled around one another. Now he had started to shear the frames apart—still keeping each bicycle as a single unbroken piece, but ripping off any redundancies—and twisting those around each other in the middle too.

Perhaps... Perhaps it had to do with the fact that humans had made those bicycles? That humans would invent anything they wanted?

Maybe she'd gotten too tired over the past few nights, sneaking out past midnight, cautious not to wake her older brother up, returning to her room a few hours before dawn and prior to her older brother leaving for his daily odd jobs, napping for a brief period, then having to force herself to class, and school? Her classmates joked with her that she had finally hit the senior slump with her graduation fast approaching, and perhaps she had. What did that graduation mean, either way? That she would just continue to live the life that she had right now, but with college courses instead of high school courses, and less of a chance to randomly bump into Shoka, Fret, and Rindo?

Or...did it relate to the fact that he'd gotten them down to their pure metal?

She blurted out the words: "I get it."

Sho didn't so much as flinch. "Show your work."

"You've taken off everything that isn't totally metal," Rhyme mused, "and then you've turned it into something that looks like a double helix. To me, anyway. But taking off everything that isn't metal means that the bicycles can't work the way that they're supposed to work. Wait. Not the way that they're supposed to work, but they're lost their functions."

He didn't reply, just continued to bend the bars over one another.

She didn't pace back and forth, but she did step closer, until she watched him work over his shoulder. "I think you may be saying that it's human nature to want to purify things. Yet, in purifying things, we make them lose their functions. Basically, impurities are important! If we wanna have functional things, we can't purify them. It's all the things mixed together—" Rhyme circled her hands around one another. "—that makes things functional. And the world, too. That's...my answer."

"Heh! Sure. By Gödel's incompleteness theorem, a complete set of axioms can't be consistently provable by itself."

Rhyme beamed. She'd figured as much back in Mewsic. Such a simple equation! As long as she paid attention to the small details, she'd figure out the 'axioms' that made him tick. A chaos system. Deterministic. Clockwork. She'd learn the rules and then manipulate them.

Manipulate them for good reasons, she meant. Manipulate them so that he could stay out of another unique local maximum, maybe even out of the upper half-planes.

...Because he had agreed to it. Not because she knew what was better for him.

"But you defined it as the answer." Still not glancing at her, he continued working through the bicycles. Rhyme kept wanting to refer to it as 'wickedly twisting' the bicycles, but would the man who called words garbage appreciate a pun about their—her—their?—her?—her older brother's friend group? "So, define the question."

"Hm?" She drummed her fingers on her cheek. "The question? Is your art asking a question? I figure that all art is a question, but do you mean something more specific?"

"The helix?"

Leaning back, Rhyme observed his back. The helix. She'd called it a double helix. But maybe... The red tails of his bandanna bobbed as he crafted his latest... He'd probably call it a masterpiece. Not just bobbing up and down: they looped through little circles. "What does that mean?"

Sho shrugged. "I don't know what the factor you're talking about."

She stepped back, both figuratively and literally, and drew her gaze down the bicycles hugging each other again. "The art that you're making: it has a meaning, doesn't it?"

"Do the internal angles of a hexagon add up to 720°?" he replied dryly.

"Okay." Rhyme did some quick mental math: six minus two times one-eighty degrees equaled three-sixty plus three-sixty equaled... She exhaled. "All of the things that I just told you about impurities and things like that. It's... That's what I think your art means. The art that you're working on right now."

He still didn't pause in his motions for even a second, but he burst out laughing, a low throaty voice that clunked through every peal of mirth: "Ha ha ha ha ha!"

She let her hand fall away from her cheek.

"Completely orthogonal! Heh heh heh. Are you trying to be obtuse? Irrelevant garbage from a typhlotic tetrahedron! Here's a pop quiz! What fraction of photons that have reflected off of this magnum opus reached a typhlotic tetrahedron's eyes?"

Rhyme blinked. "If you're looked for an estimate, I could approximate it by...the surface area of my pupils divided by the surface area of the sphere centered at the 'magnum opus' with a radius of the distance between that central point and the midpoint between my pupils." She hummed thoughtfully. "That's assuming your magnum opus to be a central point from which the photons radiate in all directions equally, which isn't true. But I think it would be a reasonable approximation. What do you think?"

"Ha! My answer had been, 'Zero, if you could make that interpretation,' but I like your nerve better!" His laugh rumbled in his throat. "Keep iterating!"

She pushed her palm into her cheek again. Such a complex equation after all. Perhaps if she truly strained to come up with every possible interpretation, she'd eventually hit upon the one that he meant and could glean something from it.

But if she wanted to learn something about him as a person before the cock's crow—not that she'd ever heard a rooster in Shibuya—she would have to take a more direct approach.

"Sho, before I do, could I ask you a question?" she said, asking him a question in the process. But Sho also didn't strike her as the kind to smarmily tell her that she already had.

He shrugged. "Skip the unnecessary redundancies."

Hm. What might reveal something about himself as a person? "How did you end up getting into the Taboo in the first place?" There, that seemed like a good, relevant question to break the ice, even if it sounded utterly deranged both in and out of context to anyone but themselves.

Sho barked out a laugh. "I factored out that the equation was possible, so I kept iterating until I found its zeroes."

Rhyme waited for a few minutes, but when he offered nothing wrong, she sighed. "You...factored it out?"

"Naturally."

Dot dot dot. "Where?"

He tapped his temple before resuming work on the double helical bicycles that once again made no sense to her. She stared at his back for a long moment, the silence disrupted only by the schkkff schkkfff of creaking metal. "What, you want the exact coordinates when I derived each step of the proof?"

"No, that... I'm good. Let me ask a different question. Hm... You were a Reaper."

Sho didn't bother qualifying her statement, perhaps due to its obviousness, so she moved on.

"From my understanding, Players who win the Game have the opportunity to leave. My brother became a Reaper because he specifically asked the Reapers how to do so. I think...Shiki mentioned that he had asked the Conductor. The Conductor said it was within his power to grant. Or his authority? I'm fuzzy on the exact details." Rhyme tapped her cheek in a deliberately different rhythm than he had used to tap his temple. "So, how did you become a Reaper? And why? Actually, I have another question. What was your first Game like? Did you have partners? What was your partner like? Did you have an entry fee?"

He scoffed. "You want me to answer all of those at the same time? Better start working on multiplying my vocal cords."

She giggled. "One at a time works for me, in any order that you'd like to answer them." After a moment she snapped her fingers. "It's a balancing of equations. You read my Soul, and I can't read yours—"

"Not my problem," Sho said immediately, not unkindly, simply with complete disinterest. "Figure it out."

Clearing her throat, Rhyme tried again: "You read my Soul, which means that there's an inequality between us. Tit for tat. And, if you answer my questions about you, I'll answer any questions you have about me that—" She enunciated slowly and loudly. "—have verbal answers I can give you by saying words in Japanese. And maybe saying digits, as appropriate."

"Heh! Nice bounding of the problem." Sho clapped his palm against the bicycle frame with enough force to instantly smash it into a ninety-degree angle. "Sure, femtogram. What's the first term in the sequence?"

Rhyme tilted her head. "Can I crouch down next to you for a closer look?"

Squatting down in the alleyway on his right side while the metal popped and cracked under his incessant manipulation: surprisingly comfy. The heat that he gave off cut through the winter chill, as though she huddled beside a merry fire. Once she became used to the sounds, they comprised a white-noise cacophony not unlike one of those rain-noise videos Fret had mentioned using to try to help himself fall asleep in the past, even if the occasional high-pitched squeak or shrrrk made her wince. And his voice, at least when explaining, had a strangely soothing quality to it for the consistency if nothing else. It reminded her of listening to old-style trains—like in the movies—lurching heavily down their metal tracks, or distant thunder in the faraway mountains.

She'd had worse ways to spend a few hours. Better this than gnawing on her own arms, if she had to speak honestly.

"My partner was a worthless piece of junk. Would've been a waste of my own 𝑡-value to bother. Stupid scalene!"

Off to a great start.

"That prattling petaweber pushover couldn't even figure out how to use a single psych. Not even the ones that use a fraction of a femtojoule like cure drink. That yoctogram had walked over to me and asked me to join in a tuple with 'em. I'd already calculated the probabilities. So zetta obvious that I would've figured out a way to use psychs even as a unit, but those trash Reapers wouldn't have left me alone if I broke their precious rules that early in the sequence. I'd use 'em to subtract some rogue integers while I learned the function's behavior at the limits...and then I'd break 'em.

"So, fine, I stuck an equals sign between us. Hadn't even factored in the possibility that the yowling yoctogram's Imagination was practically a null matrix!

"But I do what I want, and I get what I want.

"You were a Player, femtogram. Every random radian's got their own combat zone. Partners end up in different combat zones linked together by their senses. The whole system can get derived. I never asked to feel some irrelevant integer's fear or pain. Maybe some garbage Gaussian noise out there needs that kinda input so their negative velocity dendrites can figure out when their partner's about to hit the axis.

"But me? Useless inputs like that? Just noise in the scatterplot. Decreasing my correlations. Distracting me from my flawless calculations.

"Heh... Didn't distract me so much I miscalculated. Just make it so zetta annoying.

"Didn't make a difference to me. I figured out that the same Noise was in both combat zones at once, so as long as I erased 'em at 299,792,458 m/s, who gave a digit? But not all Noise functions by the same limitations.

"Heh.

"Correct! Some Noise only ends up on one, or one at a time. And if that yoctogram yowled their last, Ï'd end up crunched with 'em. Hmph!

"But if the Noise could intersect both combat zones at once, why not a Player?

"There had to be a way to activate the transitive property. So I factored it out. Both the combat zones were planes in the UG. Not a completely different set of frequencies like the RG in comparison to the UG, but the same frequency, just using different orbital angular momentum states that allowed the waves on the same frequency not to interfere completely. Said states aren't entirely perpendicular. That's how the pact works across 'em, and how the light puck travels between the two. That gave me my second breakthrough: even if a Player couldn't exist on both combat zones simultaneously, I didn't need to. I only needed to be able to swap between 'em.

"Radiamn, if the light puck could change its orbital angular momentum, then so could I.

"Which meant I just had to figure out how to align my vector. What was the equivalent of the orbital angular momentum operator 𝐿?

"Answer ended up coming from observing the light puck. Each intersection of my vibrations and Noise's vibrations changed the orbital angular momentum. Usually these calculations from the light puck worked out because of the light puck's design. I manually calculated all the possible collapses of my wave equation to find the one that'd align 𝐿 with that petaweber pushover's. So I vacillated between combat zones like a factoring lone electron.

"End of the week. I erased the GM. So zetta weak that I couldn't believe that rooster-headed radian had even bothered.

"That useless yowling yoctogram didn't even have enough Imagination at the week's end. Got crunched. What? It's split up by tiers. Like quartiles, but arbitrarily chosen values. Minimum to the first quartile gets immediately erased even if they won the Game. First quartile to median gets a chance to become a Reaper—or get crunched, if they want. Median to third quartile can recur back to the RG. Yeah, or be a Reaper or get crunched. And the third quartile to the maximum? They can factor off and turn right into obtuse angles in the Higher Plane.

"Heh! Who called the Game fair? No one gives a digit if someone won or lost. It's all a zero-sum game for tetrating the Imagination.

"Don't factoring underestimate me! I won with enough Imagination to hit another plane if I'd wanted to! I chose to be a Reaper. Me. Don't compare me with those trash Reapers who picked it over erasure! I chose it...myself.

"On one condition. That my Player file was sealed. Irrelevant trash. More garbage for the heap.

"I defined my own variable. No one else. 𝑥 = Sho Minamimoto. Q.E.D.

"Megs—

"The Conductor.

"How the helix am I supposed to know? He was Megs. I called him a doddering dodecahedron before he told me to come up with less of a mouthful name, that heedless hectopacal without enough memory for a single-digit number of syllables.

"Megs asked me why I wanted to be a Reaper. I told 'im. The factor was I going to do in the RG?

"I knew the world was made of numbers. And I'd been right.

"Why would I ever leave the place where I could manipulate those numbers directly? Without my garbage head and garbage heart decelerating me?

"...Enough irrelevant chatter.

"Her Iron Frostiness—

"Heh. Yeah, that's the digit.

"Her Iron Frostiness petitioned to close that 'loophole' I'd found in orbital angular momentum states. Hmph. No fun allowed... My least favorite kind of calibration. But it didn't make a difference to me anymore.

"Except I'd just gotten myself out of one vector space and into a homologous one. Trash!

"Radiamn disciplinary hearing after disciplinary hearing! Her Iron Frostiness's favorite hobby: subtracting from my arts 'n' crafts time with a decillion disciplinary hearings. For complete garbage!

"Only reason I'd ever willingly converge on Dead God's Pad would be to crunch the Composer. Or reformulate the records in the jukebox.

"Heh. The jukebox? I switched out the records on it. Megs had me do it. I'll give that digit one picohelen of good taste for the aesthetic. Calculated that I'd pick some heart-shaking melodies, and he calculated correctly.

"Hmph, the disciplinary hearings? Nonsense more irrational than all the digits of π in a row.

"The wall Reaper rules said I could give the Players whatever challenge I wanted in the Game's scope. What kind of quasi-braindead quotient ring couldn't even tell me a three-by-three's eigenvectors? I'd thought I'd made the problem too simple and wanted to argue that at least some of the Players were as young as fourteen. Turned out they had the opposite problem. The helix was I supposed to do?

"Added me to the harrier pile. Finally. I could get Players derived and generate all the Noise I wanted to. Heh! I'd look forward to it. Those decibels were in reach. Time to rock.

"But they weren't! So many rules. So many limits. Could only use these categories of Noise. Had to follow a difficulty curve set by the GM on the stats. Couldn't even try getting creative without going through mountains of paperwork. Paperwork? Paperwork is garbage? Cruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucnh! I'll add it to the heap!

"But even when I made Noise all according to their parameters, they still threw me into another disciplinary hearing.

"Too hard! Too many complex behaviors! No zetta duh the behaviors were complex: they were Imaginary! Ha ha ha ha ha!

"I'm so zetta funny.

"...Hey, I'm answering your question here.

"...Ninety degrees. It is so zetta funny.

"Heh. You might be an ignorant integer, but you're an ignorant integer willing to self-study. Not half bad.

"No matter what rules they put in place to try to limit my Noise production, they kept claiming I was being 'deliberately rebellious' and found 'loopholes.' How is it a 'loophole' if it fits their own trash parameters? Not my problem. They give me a problem to solve, and I solve it, and then they have a problem with me? This wasn't just a helix but an entire tendril perversion.

"They couldn't handle some unexpected variables in their simultaneous equations. They couldn't factor it out.

"Players were dropping like flies. Not even surviving half the week.

"So Megs promoted me to officer. Heh! Youngest officer in Reaper history.

"Didn't give me a choice. Walked up to me and told me I'd be an officer. I told 'im I wouldn't integrate that. The officers got bound even further than the harriers. Unless they were Game Master for the week, they couldn't do anything. No Noise, no interactions outside of Conductor's approved business, nothing. Couldn't even sneeze tangent to a Player without the Conductor's authority.

"Not to mention the frequency of meetings. I'd just be trading disciplinary hearings for meetings. If they'd even stop trying to discipline me.

"But Megs told me it wasn't a choice.

"Being bound is garbage.

"But becoming an officer... Hmph. Didn't match my expected values. I'd miscalibrated. I had a lot of free time on my hands outside the weekly meetings that I blew off. Her Iron Frostiness kept getting on my case, but Megs'd tell her to get derived. I had more time to calculate than I'd had before. So I accelerated a few pet projects of mine.

"Femtogram, the world is made of numbers. This Game might've looked just like another cyclic number, but its properties were more insidious. Like 142857, right? Just looks cyclic, doesn't it? But it's more than cyclic. Heh.... It's a parasitic number with a period seven. Churning out Imagination repeatedly for some endpoint that didn't seem like it was adding to Shibuya's beauty or chaos.

"The more numbers I crunched on the Game, the less added up.

"I'd thought I was looking at the entire coordinate graph. But I'd been looking into a single quadrant, maybe two.

"Wasn't just two axes. Three. Four. Twenty-four. As many dimensions as 𝑀-theory for all I knew.

"The point system for the Reapers? All those rules and boundaries? The difficulty curve? The worthless missions? They're all distractions.

"Even as a support, as a harrier, I'd kept myself busy pushing my limits so I could accelerate my Imagination to the asymptote. That was when it occurred to me. The codes that make up Souls? Player? Reaper? They were artificial. To be precise, they've got different additional restrictions on 'em. Every plane has its own restrictions. Those factoring Finsler-feathered yoctofarads in the Higher Plane, the Riemann geometries solvable by the zeta function in the UG. We've got quadratic restrictions that they don't by virtue of the lower planes' geometries. Just how the fundamental forces work on this scale. Restrictions from natural laws. Nothing surprising.

"But the codes were restrictions on top of that. Arbitrary ones. Power limiters.

"Orders of magnitude less capacitance than we could've had. Someone, something, had set up a system to intentionally limit people. Even down to the psychs that arbitrarily enumerated ways of using the Imagination, when the Imagination's a vector field without exact coordinates, an abelian space, virtually limitless in its potential.

"Something was going on. Something beyond the UG. There had to be more this than this worthless hierarchy. And I'd find it. First step in the sequence: breaking through the limiters of the Reaper code. What powers lay beyond it? What calculations?

"What? Because I wanted to know. And I want to know now.

"I didn't need another reason. I do what I want and I get what I want. And I wanted to know.

"I hadn't learned about purification then. About inversions. Ward-wide erasures. I wanted to know.

"Hm?

"Sure. Curiosity, if you want to define it that way.

"The desire to know would be enough. Right now... If the obtuse angles got derived, and I knew that Shibuya's range would be sufficiently chaotic for most of my domain if not all of it, I'd go study the boundaries of the UG and break the limits.

"For fun, femtogram. For kicks. For the decibel of it. I want to make some noise. I want to crunch some numbers. I want to turn some garbage into flawless calculations and beauty.

"It's art. It's my masterwork. The masterpiece of Myself.

"...Heh.

"Correct.

"I had just defined it as the pursuit of knowledge at the time. The quest to find 𝑥.

"But it wasn't just that. Heh. Heh heh heh. Zetta fun times. What I was figuring out, trying to surpass my limits...

"I had a working proof for the Taboo.

"I knew that wouldn't just get a disciplinary hearing. I obfuscated my work. And, hmph, I was working on the order of μm/s when I wanted to be working on Mm/s or faster. Listen, femtogram, I would've worked it out myself. I already had the working proof on my hand, burning my kelvins inside out.

"Just so happened that I wouldn't have factored it out in time.

"Heh...

"The future-former-Composer had set a bet to erase Shibuya. The Conductor knew. No one else. I was working out the Taboo, sure, and given enough of a 𝑡-interval, I would've gotten the Composer derived myself. But Shibuya'd gotten a timer slapped across its coordinate plane. One month. I can't solve a problem I don't know about, femtogram.

"So that was about the time H approached me. That was when I found out about the bet. He told me. Offered to give me that impetus to boost my velocity so I'd be able to crunch myself into Myself before the month ended.

"I still wanted to try taking 'im myself. That 𝑗-invariant... I'd drop the freaking monstrous moonshine on him. I didn't need the UG's psychs to boot some binomial brat who didn't even appreciate Shibuya two meters underground. So I found out when he'd be in the RG picking a proxy from H, figured out that the Taboo already in my left hand would ignite from centikelvin to kilokelvin the smaller the distance between myself his obnoxiously high vibes, and took a pepperbox revolver to that sum of a binomial's face.

"Got shot in the shoulder. Didn't factor out. Didn't know the Composer could use his Imagination in the RG.

"Made me realize I could, theoretically, use sigils and psychs in the RG too. Just had to work out how.

"So: back to the blank canvas. I had twenty-eight days to finish my proof for the Taboo. H 'helped.'

"And then I reverse-engineered my perfect solution and turned myself into the Myself you see.

"So zetta beautiful. Take a good look. This is what it means to have no limits.

"I can tetrate my power to infiiiiiiiiinity, bound only by my abilities. My skills. No arbitrary, artificial boundaries.

"Hmph? My entry fee?

"Such a simple equation, femtogram. You haven't figured it out?"

Chapter Text

Sho Minamimoto, who had just casually unloaded a quarter-hour of personal information about himself without a second thought, because she had asked, including implying what his very own entry fee might have been, abruptly dropped the mangled metal frames he had twisted into a grotesque spiral and rose to his full height. "Enough irrelevant chatter. This masterpiece's at its endpoint, and the second lesson's starting in one point seven three two zero five zero eight seconds."

Rhyme blinked at him.

"So," he said warmly, casually, completely non sequituring his revelations about the Game and himself, "how does Imagination work?"

Walking, they had ended up in MIYASHITA, fluffy 'n' sweet's usually brightly lit interior so unusually dark and quiet at the midnight hour. Rhyme noted the near-silence first. The revvs of cars along distant streets, the quiet footsteps of late-night workers making the long walks home after their superiors finally departed for the night, a few people apparently curled up here and there, catching sleep in the park's hours before nightly patrols chased them off.

A far cry from the park's lively greenery during the day.

The slightly waxed moon shedded just enough light over the lawn-like grass kept immaculately short for Rhyme to make out where she put one foot in front of the other one. Sho beelined for the bench, and Rhyme broke out into a jog and then a run to keep up with his longer-legged stride. Her trainers squelched along the damp grass. Slumping onto the bench, her hands on her knees and her head bowed, she panted. The tingling metallic electricity of copper stuck to the back of her throat as she wheezed her lungs up. Sho grinned, apparently unfazed, and scuffed his boots along the grass until he abruptly lunged down—her body tried to flinch from the surprise, but she held herself absolutely still—and then rose back up. In his hand, triumphantly clenched: a stick.

Did he simply have more endurance, both brawns and brain in one? Did it spring from living part of his time in the UG? Shoka still had the human-but-apparently-filed canines and human-but-barely-so strength from her time as a Reaper; Fret had made jokes here and there about how she gave crushing hugs, literally. Beat always seemed to enjoy embracing her and getting embraced back.

At least someone returned the bear-hugs he loved.

It made Rhyme beam, seeing him talk so animatedly about the Kitty Girl who threw up a fuss about him stinking of sweat and then told him not to stop hugging her, Worms-for-Brains.

It would have brought a smile to her face now, if not for her struggling to catch her breath.

While Sho squatted in the grass and dug the stick's end into the soil, Rhyme finally exhaled without the sense that her lungs had liquefied and then gotten guttered out of her throat. If, by some true turn of misfortune, she ended up a Noise again, let her at least end up a Noise with similar speed and stamina.

So: because of his status as an ex-Reaper? Or because of his status as Taboo Noise? If he'd broken his limiters, did that mean that he'd broken his limiters on his body's tolerance, too?

But she'd seen his hands, bloodied and bruised, from his battle with bicycles and his siege on the vending machine.

The scars had seemed...very human.

Speaking of scars, she refocused her gaze and peeked down along his coat. Oh, right, he'd chosen to wear something different tonight; she couldn't have checked whether he'd actually sewn the fabric up or not.

"Femtogram."

Sitting—not jolting—up and forward, Rhyme glanced at what he had drawn through the dirt: many small circles with designs too intricate to make out in the dark. Could he see in the dark? Or did he just know those designs by heart? Or had he envisioned novel ones so strongly?

Or...did they look like chickenscratch, and she'd just presumed that he had jotted down something finely detailed because of her expectations around him as a person, as a psych user, as an artist?

Neku had warned her not to mistake madness for genius.

Whichever, both, or neither, Sho leap-lunged from one side of the drawings to another, facing her and rapping the branch against the ground. "What is Soul?"

"What a soulful question to start on," she began to buy herself a second's worth of thought. "Soul is something that makes up each person. Noise are hungry for it. Missing parts of your Soul is how you have your entry fee taken and brought back. No, wait. I have to recalibrate—" He smirked at her word choice, and she quietly formed a fist of victory in her sleeve. Such a simple equation amid a system of potentially more complex equations than she had anticipated at first blush. "—my thinking. They add something to the Soul in order to block someone's entry fee. Soul can exist in a variety of formats, called codes." Rhyme tilted her head. "Or codes are limiters? Can Soul exist without a code?"

"Heh... Common misperceptions." Sho poked at a plane of soil that appeared to have nothing on it, or at least nothing that registered as a doodle.

Rhyme squinted into the darkness, but not even the slight lighting from the crescent moon above aided much in her sight.

"The RG's made of matter and energy as its basic building blocks," he explained, continuing to prod at the dirt, "or at least a fraction of it. We'll limit ourselves—ha!—to that for the analogy. The RG's dark energy and dark matter have equivalencies in the UG, but they're irrelevant on our scale of operations."

It interested her. If she had to guess about his behavior—purely, mostly, for the sake of trying to figure out how to knock his Taboo into a little bit of manageable sense—then if he thought that she should have everything she needed to answer a question, he'd forced her to 'iterate' on it until she worked out a solution. But if he genuinely thought that she didn't have sufficient information, he'd provide it. She'd have to test the hypothesis.

Perhaps he explained or didn't explain to his whims, and she'd overthought something that complex.

Clapping her palms against her cheeks, she concentrated back on the lesson. She had time to study him as a person, poke him through the bars of his cage, and toss peanuts in his direction during his impromptu art-making marathons. Right now the lecture's topic had changed from Sho Minamimoto to Taboo. She had to keep up with the program, Raimu Bito.

"You can think of Soul as the equivalent of matter. Matter makes up the RG body, and Soul makes up the UG body. Not only that, but everything. All phenomena. Feelings, thoughts, the atmosphere, willpower, psychs. In alchemical terms—" Rhyme raised her eyebrows. "—it's like salt."

She bapped the side of her right fist against her left palm. "Ah, that explains it!"

His pupils gleamed. "Explains what, femtogram?"

Rhyme almost felt sorry for the guy, for his pure and unadulterated enthusiasm, attention for whatever she'd worked out. "Why, when Noise can't get the Soul they're after, they're salty about it."

Hm, needed to work on the timing of that one before she incorporated it into her manzai. Heh, maybe if she ever did a stand-up routine in the UG.

Reaper manzai, huh? Say, her jokes were to die for!

"Wrong," Sho replied with such irritated sincerity that she burst into giggles. "Soul is salt. If the Noise are constantly trying to sum Soul into themselves, then they're not salty. They're lacking in salt."

"Sho," Rhyme responded honestly, tears brimming at the corners of her eyes, "you should consider doing stand-up. You'd be a one-man act."

He jabbed the stick into the ground. "I've got better media than that trash."

On one hand, she could have pushed him and completely derailed the conversation. Baited him with something about a poor crafter blaming their tools and challenging him to try to make a masterpiece out of manzai. Just the thought of him attempting to enter the world of intentional comedy nearly had her internally hacking out a lung, though externally she just laughed to herself.

On the other hand, Rhyme only had so many hours before the sliver of moon drooped beneath the horizon and the dawn heralded another day of waiting for nightfall. She could always try to bully him over text. For now, she'd focus on the lesson.

Matter and Soul. Salt and body. Alchemy.

All of that time assisting Kaie had whetted her appetite for the matter. All of that time trying to work out the impacts of the Game on her Soul and on herself. Perhaps, through Sho, she'd even have the chance to solve her own problems that had spun without proofs one way or the other.

"Not a single Soul in each body, but Soul as something like matter. Okay. Hmm... Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges, but you started this by asking me about Imagination. Imagination seems to be tied to actions, so is it the equivalent of energy?"

Sho grinned. "Golden, femtogram. If Soul is the salt, Imagination is mercury. Imagination's what governs the interactions between Souls. Take a psych integrated into a pin."

He circled around one of the smaller circles he'd drawn. Those intricate designs... Were they pins?

"Imagination has no theoretical limits," he continued, still drawing circles, or spirals in the tiniest increments, "on what it can do as long as it follows the natural laws of the plane."

So, like energy. At least, in the physics definition of the term. Hm, no, the analogy didn't exactly work. Or more like the capacity to manipulate and do something about energy, if not the energy itself. Or more like a combination of that and the four fundamental forces? Rhyme had spent most of her past few months diving deeper into data analysis with Nagi's expertise as well as expanding her own concepts of coding, but maybe she'd bust out her physics textbooks again and brush up.

And alchemy, evidently. She'd encountered a little here and there in manga, but applying what sounded cool to a writer-artist as a real-life lesson sounded dubious at best.

Then again, the Taboo must have sounded cool to the artist crouching in the grass before her.

"Pins and other conduits of Imagination are useful limiters. Hmph. I hypothesize that whatever hyper-reals introduced codes also introduced psychs. Arbitrary bounding of the world for easier control, making order out of chaos." Sho sounded so revolted that she couldn't help but laugh again. Somehow she suspected he wouldn't appreciate a joke about having hairballs in the throat, but she did.

Rhyme hummed. "Pot calling the kettle black."

"Hmph."

"Isn't mathematics the same way? Bringing order to chaos. That's what all of science is, the pursuit of knowledge." She kicked her legs out and let her heels muck up the worn soil under the bench. So she would come home with her sole a little worse for wear, a little dirty, a little unclean. Not a big deal. She could clean it up later.

But Sho might have thought otherwise, because he hmphed more loudly than before. He crossed his arms, then reached his hand into his coat while he drew himself to his full height. She angled forward towards him only to see moonlight glinting off of a well-worn blue-grey surface.

The megaphone expelled a burst of static as he clicked it on. Rhyme's palms rose over her ears.

"ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇǫᴜɪʀᴇᴅ ᴜɴɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ sᴇᴛs ᴏғ ᴋɴᴏᴡʟᴇᴅɢᴇ ᴘᴜʀsᴜɪᴛs ᴀɴᴅ ᴄᴀᴛᴇɢᴏʀɪᴢᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ɪs ᴢᴇʀᴏ! ᴄᴀᴛᴇɢᴏʀɪᴢᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ɪs ᴀ ғᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ! ᴀ ʟɪᴍɪᴛɪɴɢ! ᴀ ɢᴀʀʙᴀɢᴇ ʙᴏᴜɴᴅɪɴɢ! ᴄʀᴜɴᴄʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇ ʀɪsᴇ ᴏᴠᴇʀ ʀᴜɴ ɪɴ ғᴀᴠᴏʀ ᴏғ sᴇᴛᴛɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍɪɴɪᴍᴀʟ ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴀxɪᴍᴀʟ ʙᴏᴜɴᴅs ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ɢʀᴀᴘʜs ᴛʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴀʀᴛɪғɪᴄɪᴀʟ ᴍᴇᴀɴs! ᴛʜᴇ ғᴜɴᴄᴛɪᴏɴ ᴇxᴛᴇɴᴅs ʙᴇʏᴏɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴠɪᴇᴡɪɴɢ ᴡɪɴᴅᴏᴡ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴀʟᴄᴜʟᴀᴛᴏʀ, ғᴇᴍᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴍ! ɪᴛ ᴅᴏᴇsɴ'ᴛ sᴛᴏᴘ! ɴᴏ ᴏɴᴇ sᴛᴏᴘs!"

His right hand punched into the air as if he were trying to punch through the heavens.

"ᴛʜᴇ ᴀʀʙɪᴛʀᴀʀʏ ʀᴜʟᴇs ᴏғ ᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴘɪɴs ᴀʀᴇ ɪᴍᴘᴏsᴇᴅ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴅᴏ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴛʜᴇ ᴀxɪᴏᴍᴀᴛɪᴄ ғᴏʀᴄᴇs ᴀɴᴅ ɪɴᴛᴇʀᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ! ᴍᴀᴛʜᴇᴍᴀᴛɪᴄs ɪsɴ'ᴛ ᴀ ғᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ, ʙᴜᴛ ᴀɴ ᴜɴʟᴇᴀsʜɪɴɢ! ɪᴛs ᴇᴠᴏʟᴜᴛɪᴏɴ ᴀʟʟᴏᴡs ᴜs ᴛᴏ ᴜɴʟᴇᴀsʜ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ's ʙᴇᴀᴜᴛʏ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʀᴜᴛʜ! ᴛʜᴇ ᴇʟᴇɢᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴏғ ᴘᴀᴛᴛᴇʀɴs ᴀʟʟ ᴀʀᴏᴜɴᴅ ᴜs! ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇsᴄʀɪᴘᴛɪᴏɴ ᴀɴᴅ ᴇxᴘʟᴏʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛʀᴜᴛʜ, ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴜʀsᴜɪᴛ ᴏғ ᴋɴᴏᴡʟᴇᴅɢᴇ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴅᴏᴇsɴ'ᴛ ᴍᴇᴀɴ ʙᴏxɪɴɢ ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ɪɴ ᴛᴏ ɪᴛs ᴏᴡɴ sɪɴɢᴜʟᴀʀ ᴄᴏᴏʀᴅɪɴᴀᴛᴇ ᴘᴏɪɴᴛ. ᴄʜᴀᴏs sʏsᴛᴇᴍs ᴇᴍᴇʀɢᴇ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ɪɴᴛᴇʀsᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴs! ᴅᴇᴛᴇʀᴍɪɴɪsᴛɪᴄ ᴀɴᴅ ᴜɴᴘʀᴇᴅɪᴄᴛᴀʙʟᴇ!"

Deterministic and unpredictable, the characteristics of a chaos system, such as himself. But the unpredictability of a chaos system reflected a lack of knowledge, didn't it? Unpredictable only because the people studying it hadn't yet characterized it. What, did Sho seriously find something inspiring about ignorance? That didn't track with anything he'd shown her so far.

"ᴅᴇᴛᴇʀᴍɪɴɪsᴍ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀᴡs ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ᴜᴘ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ, ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪɴʜᴇʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ᴡɪʟʟ ᴀʟᴡᴀʏs ʙᴇ ᴜɴᴘʀᴇᴅɪᴄᴛᴀʙʟᴇ, ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜsᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛᴏᴛᴀʟ ᴀᴍᴏᴜɴᴛ ᴏғ ɪɴғᴏʀᴍᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ʀᴇǫᴜɪʀᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ɪᴛ ᴘʀᴇᴅɪᴄᴛᴀʙʟᴇ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʀᴇǫᴜɪʀᴇ ᴀ ɢʀᴇᴀᴛᴇʀ ᴄᴀᴘᴀᴄɪᴛʏ ᴛᴏ sᴛᴏʀᴇ ɪɴғᴏʀᴍᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴛʜᴀɴ ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ᴄᴏɴᴛᴀɪɴᴇᴅ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ɪᴛsᴇʟғ!"

Rhyme narrowed her eyes. She'd heard that statistic before, about the universe's information density. But did it really hold water, for him to sound so sure? What stopped data scientists from learning something new about the universe in the future?

"ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ɪs ɪɴʜᴇʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ᴅᴇᴛᴇʀᴍɪɴɪsᴛɪᴄ ᴀɴᴅ ɪɴʜᴇʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ᴜɴᴘʀᴇᴅɪᴄᴛᴀʙʟᴇ!"

For a moment Sho lowered the megaphone.

"Which is what makes it so zetta interesting."

Then the speaker crackled again.

"ᴛʜᴇ ɪɴᴛᴇʀʟᴏᴄᴋɪɴɢ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀʟʏɪɴɢ sɪᴍᴘʟᴇ ᴇǫᴜᴀᴛɪᴏɴs ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʟᴇᴀᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇxɪᴛɪᴇs ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴀ ʟɪᴍɪᴛ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴛᴏ ɪɴғɪɴɪᴛʏ! ᴀ sᴇʀɪᴇs ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴡɪʟʟ ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴇʀɢᴇ ᴜɴᴛɪʟ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ɪᴛsᴇʟғ ᴅɪᴠᴇʀɢᴇs ʙᴇᴄᴀᴜsᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴇʀɢʏ ᴅɪғғᴇʀᴇɴᴛɪᴀʟ ʜᴀs ᴢᴇʀᴏᴇᴅ ᴏᴜᴛ! ɪᴍᴍᴏʀᴛᴀʟɪᴛʏ ɪs ɢᴀʀʙᴀɢᴇ! ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴇʀɪᴍᴇᴛᴇʀ ᴏғ ғʀᴀᴄᴛᴀʟs ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ɪɴғɪɴɪᴛᴇ, ʙᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ's ᴛɪᴍᴇ ᴡᴏɴ'ᴛ ʙᴇ! ᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴ ᴄᴀɴ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴇxɪsᴛ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴᴡɪɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴏғ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴇʟᴜᴄɪᴅᴀᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ғɪʀsᴛ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ! ᴛʜᴇ sᴇǫᴜᴇɴᴄᴇ sᴛᴀʀᴛs ᴀɴᴅ ᴇɴᴅs! ᴍᴀᴛʜᴇᴍᴀᴛɪᴄs ɪs ᴀɴ ᴀᴘᴘʀᴇᴄɪᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʙᴇᴀᴜᴛʏ. ғʟᴀᴡʟᴇss ᴄᴀʟᴄᴜʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴs ᴀʀᴇ ᴀ ᴍᴇᴅɪᴜᴍ ғᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ ғᴀʙʀɪᴄ ᴏғ ʀᴇᴀʟɪᴛʏ ɪᴛsᴇʟғ. ᴀ ʀᴀᴅɪᴀɴ ᴜsɪɴɢ ɪᴛ ᴛᴏ ᴄᴀᴛᴇɢᴏʀɪᴢᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ʙɪɴᴅ? ᴅɪᴇ, ʀᴀᴅɪᴀɴ!"

Well, certainly, that would serve as one way to prevent that 'radian' from categorizing and binding.

"ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʀɪɢʜᴛ-ʜᴀɴᴅ ᴘᴀᴛʜ ᴀɴᴅ sʜᴏᴠᴇ ɪᴛ ᴜᴘ ʏᴏᴜʀ ɪɴᴠᴇʀsᴇ ғʀᴀᴄᴛᴀʟ! ʙʀɪɴɢɪɴɢ ᴏʀᴅᴇʀ ᴛᴏ ᴄʜᴀᴏs..." His fingers splayed as he reached upwards to the moon above. Like this, with him standing tall and the moon behind him, the curved upwards crescent transformed into an optical illusion, briefly gracing his crown with a pair of silver horns. Devil horns, or something like. "ɪ'ʟʟ sʜᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛʀᴜᴇ ᴍᴇᴀɴɪɴɢ ᴏғ ʟᴀᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ ᴀɴɴɪʜɪʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴ! ʜᴀ ʜᴀ ʜᴀ ʜᴀ ʜᴀ!"

With how hard Rhyme pressed her palms so hard into her ears, her skull felt as though it were trembling. From her palms, or from the megaphone's vibrations blasting her with all the ferocity of a supernova and ten times the gamma radiation.

But at least Sho had clicked off the megaphone again and thrust it back into his coat as if nothing at all had happened. If only Rhyme had had apology gifts for all the poor shmucks trying to catch 𝑍s out in the grass.

Ever so slowly she pulled her hands away from her ears. The ringing had vaguely stopped, at least, leaving just a dull quiver in her eardrums.

He'd already gone back to doodling in the dirt with his stick. His stick, and his self-satisfied sneer. Couldn't forget that. What ever would he have done without it?

"Okay," Rhyme told him. He grinned. She smiled back. "I politely disagree."

Sho tilted his hat down. "Why do I even bother."

"I understand that you're not saying that the universe is cool because we don't know everything about it." She rubbed her cheek. "It's not like you to find anything interesting about ignorance itself."

"Ha!" Immediately perking up. "Radiamn straight. Ignorance is a missing variable."

Her fingers pressed lightly into her face. "Right... Most people fear the unknown, but to you, it's something to sink your teeth into. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

"Then those obtuse angles can get bisected," he said dismissively, immediately, with such certainty that her shoulders shook in silent laughter. "I'll tread where I want and I'll rush where I want." Uncurled his fingers and curled them again. "Heh. With my limits broken, nothing's keeping me from accelerating as much as I want except myself."

She nodded through her mirth. "But I disagree about chaos systems. Maybe we can't predict the entire universe, and it's a fool's errand to even try. But you don't need to bring back the entire mountain to bring back a stone! We can predict plenty of smaller models. There's nothing wrong with being able to predict things. It means that we can manipulate them for good reasons."

"Naturally. We can have expected values. I never miscalculate." He smirked at her. "Heh, once, my calculations seemed off."

Rhyme cocked her head. "Wow, once?"

"Seemed," he repeated, as though irritated that she'd picked the wrong word to emphasize. "I didn't believe it. I never miscalculate. The only reasonable option was that someone'd messed 'em up. Someone with information from outside the state of the universe. Either an obtuse angle, or a natural number with information from the future."

"Uh-huh. You were so convinced about your own calculations that you thought it was less reasonable that you'd messed up calculating...than that you'd run into a time traveler." Rhyme quirked an eyebrow.

His grin only broadened.

She sighed. "The victor tells the story. You'd never let me know about all those times you were wrong. So, I'm guessing this is about Rindo."

"Ninety degrees." Sho tamped the soft earth down with his bot. "I know about predictions, femtogram. I use 'em all the way. Use all the garbage in my vector for my magna opera. Making and testing predictions isn't necessarily binding. It's one of the media of making the truth into art." Had she squirreled up the wrong tree? "That's orthogonal to setting upper and lower bounds arbitrarily. We can describe the beauty of a chaos system without binding it. It's not the expected values that make things unaesthetic, femtogram. Pay attention; don't make me remediate you."

Yep, seemed like she had squirreled up the wrong tree. Or had she? He'd gone on about the universe's unpredictability. Maybe he only took with the idea of predicting the entire universe?

"Description and proscription aren't part of the same set. Seeing what sets naturally form from laws and detailing their properties reveals their beauty. Trying to artificially isolate them is what obscures that beauty. We talk about rigid linear algebra and soft point-set topology, but the fields connect and interlink."

He interlaced his fingers in front of himself. A visual, eh?

"Set theory and modular functions were thought to be separate classifications entirely. Different branches of the mathematical tree. Same startpoint, but differing endpoints on different vectors. Each studied in isolation because of garbage categorization. Then some sharp-eyed centisiervert figured out that the monster group's irreducibilities and the 𝑗-invariant's Fourier expansion just so happened to align."

While his hands exploded out from one another, she filed away terms for later Moogling.

"Monstrous moonshine. Now we're calculating through 𝐾3 surfaces under the moonshine's umbra. And who knows what else we'll find when we stop pretending that numbers don't influence each other, don't connect, don't have aesthetically elegant and aesthetically chaotic symmetries?"

More terms for later Moogling...

"Something's true beauty is only fully revealed in its full context. Newtonian physics predicts expected values within parameters at the macroscale, but it's not the truth. It falls apart at the quantum scale. Fully modeling the quantum physics—the complete wave equation—of a single quark or lepton would mean modeling all the strings in the entire universe, because all of their vibrations resonate with one another, no matter how miniscule of a fraction that impact has." Sho spread his hands out from one another. "Calculating an expected value based on a simplified probability model doesn't equal predicting it with complete determinism. I never miscalculate, femtogram. But I can miscalibrate. And the universe itself doesn't have sufficient information storage to hold all of its calibrations."

Rhyme rocked slightly back and forth with her heels against the soil. The fact that he presented his ideas in his mathematical metaphors—even if she understood the references—didn't make them any easier to digest. "In other words, you're saying that you predict things, but you know that they're simple models. They're good enough to predict things reasonably well on the scale you use them in. But they're not the whole truth. We can't ever predict the whole truth because information density has limits."

"Correct." His hat's brim angled up. Good sign so far.

"Okay. I think I... Well, let me try to stretch it here. Are you saying that trying to make it all predictable... Wait." She rubbed her temples. "You had a problem with me categorizing things. Because in reality, things can't be isolated like that from each other. Because everything, according to you, is connected."

Sho nodded. "Keep iterating, femtogram."

"So, say, I want the universe to be completely predictable. I can't completely predict it while all the parts of the universe interact with each other. I can calculate, say, the gravitational force from all the planets in this galaxy, but I calculate the gravitational force from all matter everywhere in the universe, plus all the other forces... Okay. So, the only way that I'd be able to calculate that would be to isolate it. So I say, 'This thing is part of this system. And that thing is part of a different system. And they don't intersect.' Because then I'll can store enough information to just fully model the first system or just fully model the second."

He opened his mouth and she held her hand up.

"I know it's not actually fully modeling. That's the point. The arbitrary categorization and isolation is fake. Treating things like they're separate, like the set theory and modular functions examples, doesn't actually make them different. It just prevents us from seeing the connections. It prevents us from seeing the truth."

Glancing down at her hands, Rhyme smoothed her knuckles over her athletic shorts. Even if she didn't touch the fabric underneath her directly, she still sensed it tauten around her thighs. If she'd only looked at the shorts stretching out their wrinkles on top, she wouldn't have noticed it straining on the underside. Everything in its context.

"Like how studying a molecule in a pure glass of water doesn't tell us how the molecule's going to react if we dump it in a river."

His smirk widened. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

"So... In the end, splitting things up by different codes, or by different...psychs and pins... It's not that our observations about those things is false, but it's not the entire truth, either. It's wrong." Rhyme propped her chin up in her palm. "And you don't like it when things are wrong, Sho."

"Factor that." Sho grinned.

She felt herself smiling too, just a little, in a mirror of his all-encompassing...pride? Pride, maybe. In her.

The fingers of her left wrinkled the fabric of her shirt, a little to the left of the center of her heart.

"Hmm. Okay, I can see what you're getting at. I don't know if I agree completely, but I can see where you're coming from, and..." Her soles had picked up a smidgen more of dirt the entire time that he had spoken. "...I'll think about it. Though, there's something else, Sho."

"What now?" he snapped, and yet the jitter to his pupils: that meant a genuine interest. Or, that was her limited prediction of a simplified model of his behavior, at least.

Rhyme mulled over the words for a moment before speaking, to think and to stretch him thin. "Were you trying to say that death is what gives life meaning?"

Sho grimaced as if she'd forcefed him a ghost pepper from Crowned Curry. Or as though she'd gotten two plus two equals four wrong. He'd probably grimace more at the latter. "The helix did you get that null matrix from?"

"When you were talking about immortality. I know there's nothing new under the sun, but that kind of philosophy... I don't mean to be rude," she said sweetly, about to be rude, "but it's so banal and trite. Especially coming from you. Death giving meaning to life, or suffering to joy, is what people who live in a world full of death and suffering tell themselves. Pain is the proof of life, when there's nothing truly inevitable about pain, is there?"

He let out a breath that she could only have described as arrogant. "Hmph. Naturally. The probability of living a life with zero pain is asymptotically close to zero. But close to zero doesn't equal zero."

She hummed.

"Death doesn't give life 'meaning.' Life doesn't even need 'meaning.' But existence itself isn't a point or a frozen state. Every state is a vector. The uncertainty principle ties position and momentum. Momentum, femtogram. Reality only exists because there's an energy differential. Momentum requires an energy flow from high to low. Reality only exists in the moment of change. That's what I find so zetta 'interesting.' Not because it ends."

Sho shrugged, and Rhyme's hum lowered in pitch, to something deeper, more thoughtful.

"Sure, the fact that it changes means it will end. Every motion reduces the total energy differential in the entire universe. Eventually, there won't be a differential. Everything will have the exact same energy, and time will unwind. That's part of transformation, sure. Reality is one never-ending corruption. So I'll keep my eyes on it, that continuous generation of imperfection. A function that keeps going. And how do we explore a function, femtogram? We talk about its derivative. Its slope. Its end behavior." He tipped his hat upwards, his grin simultaneously dangerously toothy and completely genuine. "The fact that reality keeps changing means that I'll never finish calibrating. Heh! Ignorance is a missing variable. I'll never stop having missing variables to solve for."

"Never run out of numbers to crunch," she offered. "Never stop calculating."

"Never stop making art," he agreed.

Rhyme studied him. She'd meant her words as applicable to him—that he would never stop calculating—but how had he meant it? The same? That he'd never stop making art.

Or a command? No—a suggestion? A hope? That she...?

She cleared her throat. "It's getting a little late. What were you saying about how pins work?"

Mission failed. She'd tried not to derail into speaking about him as a person and...promptly ended up doing so. Fission mailed. He'd pushed her envelope, and she'd watched herself bend: to stop splitting things up into such arbitrary categories.

"I get the warning about not confusing—" Madness for genius. "—the categories we're going to be talking about with something that 'intrinsically' exists. Someone or something—the Angels, I'm assuming—put those arbitrary categories in there to limit the UG. I understand. But all the understanding in the world isn't gonna stop this yawn from coming out."

Right on cue, Rhyme yawned. Whenever she yawned, her older brother yawned with her, blinking sleep from his eyes. But Sho just kept looking back at her.

Hm. Guess that staring too long into the abyss didn't mean it had to yawn back.

"Sure. The lesson. Psychs—" Rhyme had almost forgotten about the stick, but she hadn't forgotten about the self-satisfied sneer, and now he produced them both. "—in pins are limiters. They imprint a specific shape of Imagination. The exact effect depends on the interference between the vibes in the pin and the resonance of the user's Soul. But the pins themselves have no power. They're limiters: they have resistance. The psych user brings the current through their Imagination, and together that leads to the power."

She bobbed her head. If not for her somewhat drowsy state, she might have spent more time musing on the implications. But they'd have another lesson tomorrow. She'd have time then, assuming she didn't derail them in talking about his philosophy again by saying something that set him off.

Hm. He couldn't stand wrongness, so when she'd said something wrong, he'd dropped everything—including his branch—and grabbed his megaphone to correct her.

Then again, did she know that he couldn't stand wrongness? He had spoken in the affirmative earlier, when she had brought it up, but he might not have meant that at all. Hmm. No, she had to focus on the lesson. Her nails scritched into her knees.

"For useless unimaginative univariates," he spat, "like most Players and Reapers, trash meant for the lowest common denominator is helpful."

"It's like a calculator," Rhyme pondered. "You can learn how to add numbers together quickly on it, because it gives you all the options you need. But if you have to add together numbers too big for the calculator's memory banks, or you want to do an operation like calculating fifth roots or graphing or whatever else the specific calculator doesn't have the functionality for, you're stuck."

She sat up. The pins and psychs that the Players used didn't compare to the ones used by the Reapers.

But in the end, they all still used pins and psychs: "You could get a fancier calculator. Upgrade from a scientific to a graphing calculator. But you'll still eventually get stuck...because a calculator is inherently limited in a way that math itself isn't."

Sho's laugh sounded more like a bark. A hyena bark. "Heh! Exactly. A disgusting proportion of Reapers and Players never go beyond that. They just ascend on the stairs the obtuse angles built for 'em, never once questioning what quadrant that stepwise function will dump them out into." He crossed out several of the circles. "But some Players and Reapers, either accidentally or intentionally, end up interfacing their Imagination directly with the Soul around them and the Imagination of others. Call 'em Naturals."

"I'm guessing that you're one of them?" Rhyme asked. "Since you were such a natural at the Game that you worked as a surprise bug tester for them. I'd trust your quality assurance." Her sleepiness softened her giggles. "If you can't break something, then I'll really believe it's unbreakable."

"Heh. No materia or pleroma's unbreakable. Just need to find the right angle to fracture it across."

Even those 'obtuse angles' in the Higher Plane, huh.

"But any random radian can be a Natural. Natural abilities are just ones that you're not using a pin or other conduit for. The zeptograms told you about Dive and Remind?" Rhyme's head drooped drowsily. She giggled again, this time at how stilted and awkward the words 'Dive' and 'Remind' sounded in his mouth, like he'd borrowed them from someone else. "They're not special, intrinsic, unique abilities for a single digit. They're not even singular abilities—" The corners of his mouth turned downwards. "—though obtuse angles act like they are."

The way he framed that last sentence: as if he were responding to some specific Angel or Angels. Talking shit about Mr. Hanekoma? She could only hope. "The Angels act like they're special abilities because they want to categorize those abilities. And if the Angels act like it's natural—not Natural—for only a gifted few to have those supposedly unique abilities, then the Angels can justify a Game that destroys anyone with too little Imagination."

Like herself. Like Sho's original partner. Like all the other Players who had ended up erased.

"I get it," Rhyme mused. "In reality, anyone could learn any Natural ability. But if anyone could learn any abilities, then the Angels should theoretically let everyone learn. It's not just some super-talented handful that get to be the Angel's chosen ones."

Diving into people's minds seemed pretty powerful on paper, but she had the impression that the Wicked Twisters hadn't used Dives for anything more than deleting this Game's equivalent of negative Noise possessing people. Reminders felt like a more efficient way to mass-imprint memes. Soundsurf had let the Wicked Twisters, what, get around more quickly? It hadn't sounded—or Soundsurfed—like her older brother had even made use of it in combat beyond dodging, something any Player could do. Tsugumi Matsunae's Trailer hadn't managed much, either, beyond sending Rindo into a confused panic. From what Rindo had confessed, he hadn't managed to stop a single one of her visions from occurring, even after he learned how they worked and who had sent them.

For being a sign of a supposedly higher Imagination, these Natural abilities hadn't really given the Wicked Twisters much leg up until Operation: Awakening, when Rhyme, Kaie, and Sho had figured out how to combine them together into a multiplicative function.

And Replay hadn't even been Natural, but had come gifted from an Angel with a healthy dose of imminent apocalypse.

"So that's why these Natural abilities are treated like a big deal, even though they're more useful than..." She searched for the word. "...all-powerful?"

"Perfectly balanced," Sho responded. Smiling at herself, she let her lids fall softly over her eyes, just for a second. "Most pins and psychs are calibrated for combat. But Naturals can be anything, because Imagination can do anything. Doesn't make 'em more powerful, just unlimited. Average Higher Plane pin's going to be more powerful than a Natural just starting to derive arithmetic on their own. Put the golden zeptogram and his 'Remind' against a pin-user with firestorm and predict who gets erased first. The Taboo doesn't make anyone more powerful in of itself, either. It breaks the upper and lower bounds, but you've still gotta write out the equations yourself. And the Taboo is just another interface of Imagination to Sou—femtogram."

The sudden wallop of heat straight to the middle of her chest made her gasp as she jolted back onto the bench. Her gaze followed Sho's pitch-black hands up to his outstretched arm and shoulder, still squatting in the damp grass.

He stayed crouching on the ground with his arm out as she blinked blurry tears from her eyes.

"Did I...fall asleep?" She'd fallen forward, hadn't she? In her doze, from the bench. Ah. Right. That made sense. "Well, hunger never knows the taste, and sleep never knows the comfort. I'm listening."

"Hmph. Burn out like that and you'll intercept your own horizontal axis before you even hit the vertical." Standing up, Sho stepped over the circles he'd drawn and stopped next to her by the bench. "If you want to keep iterating, I won't stop you. But unique local minima are garbage, especially self-calculated ones."

Rhyme tried to laugh and her drowsiness turned it into a cough. "So much for pain and progress are balanced equations. But I won't make much progress if I'm asleep. Well, early to bed and early to rise..." She wobbled. "...Hey, Sho, you got a problem if I lean on you a little on the walk home?"

He rolled his shoulders. "Hey, who gives a digit? You're a femtogram. I'll observe the weight but it won't impact the expected value of my Newtonian physics."

She giggled. "Okay. Let's pick up here for the third lesson."

When Rhyme rose from the bench, she nearly toppled over, but—even dazed—she grabbed Sho's—

Letting go of Sho's bare elbow, she intentionally reached around it and sank her fingers into his short-sleeved trenchcoat, holding him by the fabric along his side. He laughed in short clips like shotgun shells going off. Her trainers squelched back in the even damper predawn grass. Her sole would end up so stained by the time she got home.

...Sho tucked the stick into his coat. For a later opus, or just because he wanted it. He hadn't forgotten the stick. With any luck, he wouldn't forget that self-satisfied sneer either.

Chapter Text

Sho took most of the Taboo all at once. He exploded like a firecracker, dissolving his Soul into the darkness, and then rose up from the graffiti-tagged Udagawa cement, coagulating himself on his own willpower and desires.

...And then he ended up crunched under a vending machine shortly after that.

But before that, he had walked around with his left hand blackened from the ink that stained his skin. Neku and her older brother never thought much of it, during the Game: a black tattoo, a cool glove. Yet his Taboo must have burned all that time, such constant and unyielding agony, that she could scarcely comprehend how he casually went around doing his Reaper duties, his GM duties, his attempt-at-godslaying duties with a grin on his face.

Then again, Sho mentioned his body becoming 'zetta uncomfortable' after he exploded like a firecracker and then rose up from the graffiti-tagged Udagawa cement.

Did his left hand hurt him that badly before he dissolved and coagulated?

Or does this represent her left-hand path, separate from his?

Her left hand. Over the past few days the black has crawled through her flesh. It spreads too slowly for her to watch, but she has witnessed it in timelapse: the seething roiling under her flesh, the needling jolts that bleb out akin to so many pseudopods, the rolling and writhing through her meat, as though so many burrowing maggots had nestled beneath her skin and were steadily wriggling along through her necrotic body in search of fresh flesh, spreading the rot and pestilence where they crawl, laying eggs along their trails from their blood-swollen bellies to hatch anew and quicken the pace of the infection-infestation through her. She can only shudder at what will happen when those hungry mouths and snapping teeth reach her heart, her entrails, her eyes.

Necrotic... Appropriate.

She can only feel her left hand for the shape of the agony that it makes. The skin prickles as if a thousand, no, a million tiny needles plunge inwards through it and back out. As though the RG itself noticed the blasphemy under its nose and were trying desperately to stitch the anomaly back into existence.

When she presses her hands together, the left feels boiling hot, feverish, throbbing.

When she runs her fingers over her skin, the flesh feels roughened, hardened, ridged. Scarred. She supposes that it makes sense: that sensation of tiny needles stabbing through every pore, over and over, would leave her surface as cratered as the freaking moon that Sho plans to drop.

That scarred tissue has gone numb but for the pain. Like a phantom limb. Even setting her palm on the scalding-hot lightbulb makes her feel nothing in particular. Not the heat, not the texture, not dustiness of the old metal.

Is this how Sho lives? Unable to feel at all over his tattooed skin except for the constant torrent of agony?

Or does this have something to do with her transformation? With her transformation, or with her transformation?

Or something else?

Her body falls apart, replaced by ink.

Her fingers writhe before her eyes, repetitive and periodic in their motions, not entirely her own anymore. Or, rather, her own, but a Noise her, not a human her, the impetuses foreign and alien, the motions like having to learn to move all over again.

It hurts. It hurts so much.

For the first day she lay doing nothing but existing in the pain. From what she could tell, Sho cleaned her sheets and changed her pyjamas. The scent of summer wood and sunlit cedar didn't last nearly long enough until the stink of her sweat overpowered what Sho left her with.

But she cannot let the pain overtake her forever. She has school to attend, and the fever excuse will not last for very long without a doctor's note. So she counts. She counts up the Fibonacci. She missteps. She starts over from scratch. She counts up the Fibonacci until she can hold four-digit, five-digit, six-digit terms on her tongue despite the Taboo scorching her hand out of existence without breaking. Seven digits. Eight. She counts up. She adds. Carries the one. Carries the one. Carries the one.

She stops crying. Mostly. Empty of tears. Exhausted. Worn out.

Swiping open her phone camera with her right hand—Sho plugged her charger in when he departed—she records herself speaking over and over, until the tremble has mostly drained from her timbre. She sounds hoarse, and as if she cried for hours—which is true—but she doesn't sound like she's actively dying of agony.

Only a little bit.

Her older brother returns and asks about her. She answers in a taut, coarse voice, muffled by the Mandelbrot blanket that she's pretty sure she threw up on at some point before Sho cleansed it, that she's fine, that she's sick, that she ate some food and drank some water, that she's staying hydrated, that she'll call him if he needs anything, but he knows as much as she does that he can't afford to get sick trying to take care of her, so she'll see him afterwards, okay?

She can hear his quiet, heavy breathing on the other side of the door, a long moment before he tells that he's left dinner for her at her door and that he'll be right there in the main room if she needs anything at all.

And that he loves her. That he loves her so much. That if she needs a doctor, he'll find the money. "I really... I really love you, Rhyme. I gotchu. No matter what. Ain't gotta worry 'bout a thing while your big brotha's here an' witchu. I love you."

"I know," she says, sincerely, and waits for his footsteps to fall away.

She counts up the Fibonacci. She counts up the Fibonacci. She counts up the Fibonacci. She loves him too. She counts up the Fibonacci. She—

Even with her left hand—her left hand, and nothing and no one would take it from her, even burnt black as it is—so numb that she can't feel anything she touches, its boundaries only defined by where the agony ends, she forces herself to keep her eyes open and look. To watch herself going through the motions with her hand. At first she merely observes the athetosis, as Moogle calls it. Bracing her palm against the table and counting up the Fibonacci, she makes herself... She can't make it stop. Can't make it still. But she can learn to do other things.

To slowly curl and uncurl her fingers. To wiggle one finger at a time. To rotate them around. Holding a pencil goes beyond her capacity, and she's never written with that hand anyway.

But she forces herself to get to a point where she can tuck her hand into her pocket and have it look vaguely unconcerning. If she forms a fist with her fingers, her muscles twitch and spasm with the desire to move, yet she can nearly pass for...normal. It hurts worse, like this, than letting her hand writhe as it will.

But pain and progress are balanced equations.

Heh.

As promised, Sho returns regularly. About once every four hours, it seems. He brings nondescript bottles of liquid that taste like salty, sugary, slightly citrusy water. She declines it after the first sip. It doesn't even seem like something that Sho himself would want to drink. For dehydration, he elaborates, in case she suddenly loses control again. Better than plain water or electrolytes. The Taboo will eat her alive. The Noise fraction of her Soul will consume the human fraction of her Soul mote by mote. She has to keep the human materia of her body well-nourished, well-fed, well-watered, well-rested. Dealing with the pain won't come easily, and doubly so if she doesn't take care of herself.

It could have annoyed her, such paternalistic, quasi-mothering behavior. Yet Sho inspects her hand with the glitter-eyed gaze of someone not concerned but fascinated.

And that, somehow, makes it so easy for her to swallow down the bitter medicine.

Because Sho wouldn't, in this parallel world or any other, paternalistically mother her out of concern. No, he's tending to the Taboo festering within her, giving it—that side of her—the best possible chance to grow upwards and outwards. Keeping the human part of her fed, watered, nourished, and rested serves the equivalent of keeping herself fattened up so that the cannibals can make cracklings from her flesh, except that the cannibal wears her face and goes by her name.

He tends to her because he wants her to solve more puzzles. He tends to her because he wants her to develop another RNS for her in the future when he becomes Composer. He tends to her because he wants to see what she did with the Taboo.

Not a scrap of pity, or mercy, or empathy. Pure selfish interest. She lets that pure selfish interest tend to her. Lets him hand her the back of Moyai Mart food. Salmon onigiri. Dried squid. Chicken nuggets, of the dinosaur-shaped variety. Lets him pass her a bubbly berry blend from somedrinks and cola from Mexican Dog which Fret tipped him off that she would enjoy. Lets him take her sweat-soaked sheets and clean them off with one of his cleansing sigils that leaves the fabric dry and smelling like him. Doesn't let him read her Soul—he laughs—but does let him pat her head through the hat.

However, that gritty, nasty, salty-sweet rehydration fluid in case she 'loses control?'

She shakes her head. Doubts that she'll lose control. Counts the Fibonacci out loud for him and stops at the two hundred and fourteenth term. Her timbre trembles, but she firms it, syllable by syllable, digit by digit, number by number, term by term.

"Not half bad, femtogram," he observes, smirking, his hand on his chin. "So zetta proud."

Rhyme manages what she hopes looks like a smile, stretched across bared teeth. She'll tuck that away into her pocket for safekeeping, pull it out again on a winter's midnight, to hear the warmth in his voice. "Don't underestimate me."

He grins back, also all teeth, as though baring his to hers. His examination of her hand with his thumb pressing down painfully into her palms makes him grin. Coming along smoothly. As hot and rough as his Taboo skin. Even though her fingers shudder from the contact, she forces herself to run a single experimental right forefinger down his skin. Hotter to the touch than she expected, just like hers. Roughened and cratered compared to his human flesh, just like hers. Tattooed over with the Taboo, just like hers.

...Just like hers.

She clenches her hand into a fist of victory under her sleeve.

As for the numbness in her left hand? Hmph. Sho assures her that his flesh can feel just fine. His skin can sense the warmth and softness of hers where she stroked along his inside of his elbow. He never experienced the numbness—she swallows—but he has a hypothesis. Noise straddles the UG and RG, but it usually exists more in the UG than the RG: intersecting with the RG, sure, but visible and active in the UG.

Sho himself almost always has himself straddling both planes at once and merely uptunes the RG part of himself into the UG as well if he wants to disappear from view.

The numbness... If she can't uptune herself to the UG yet—she can't—then the Noise part of that hand might feel confined, or might not have the capacity to manifest fully. He can't say with any kind of certainty, but if he has to put down some kind of expected value, he'll say that the numbness will fade once she enters the UG, whether by pin or by uptuning. Does she want the Instrumentalist pin? To test his theory? Heh heh heh. Hypothesis testing. Zetta fun times. Well, does she?

Not now. She'll wait to test his theory.

He shrugs. Pauses. Speaks haltingly, stiltedly. Anything else she needs, right now?

No, not right now, she thinks. Just needs to figure out how to deal with the pain enough to go to school. He scoffs. All the limitless power of broken limiters at her fingertips, and she's wasting her exajoules on factoring academia? Rhyme giggles at him, or at least as much as she can giggle with her entire body seized up and tense from the pain. Oh, and another thing. She's not sorry for retching on the Mandelbrot blanket—hers now—but she'll thank him for cleaning it.

Bursting out laughing so loudly and so rowdily that Rhyme has to shush him to keep the neighbors from calling the police, Sho answers her: "It's factoring yours now, femtogram. So go ahead. Integrate it. Transform it into an opus."

She will.

At length he has to depart. Rhyme asks: would he return? Sho glances at her as if she truly made herself out to be an inverse idiot. "Unless you artificially bound the domain, I'll be a periodic function."

Like a sine wave. It fits him. It really, truly does.

True to his word, Sho returns like clockwork every few hours with fresh food, fresh water, fresh cleaning of anything that needs it, whether her clothes or the sheets or something else. At her request, he pops his head out of her room just long enough to take the food that her older brother's been leaving her, to keep her older brother from getting suspicious. Then the goods: checking on the Taboo's progress. Listening to her reach the four hundred and twenty-eighth term of the Fibonacci. The heat of her hand matches the heat of his with each renewed inspection, with each broadened smirk, with each widened grin. All within parameters. All according to his calculations. Heh heh heh. Zetta fun times. Does she need anything else?

For him to come again during the next 2π period, Rhyme replies.

Sho runs his hand over her cap. Anything that she isn't already guaranteed, femtogram?

By the third day, Rhyme—doesn't have it under control, not one bit. If she loses the slightest hint of concentration, the sounds of agony emerge from the back of her throat again, and her fingers writhe, and her expression twists and contorts from that placid smile to one of barely constrained pain, the very essence of it.

Yet so long as she concentrates, she looks... Well, she looks sick, haggard, and uncomfortable, but that only furthers the flu excuse.

Tomorrow she'll try to go to school. She'll pass herself off as incredibly sick and wear a mask to cover any grimacing or contorting her features will surely undertake. But she has to try. When she lets her older brother know that she'll try for school tomorrow, her big brother demands to see her. If she's well enough for school, she's gotta be well enough for him, right?

...She doesn't have to. Her big brother won't do a thing if she doesn't want him to. He promised to respect her privacy an' her agency after the Game, an' he's doin' it, ain't he?

But if she wouldn't mind lettin' her big brotha look at his little sister jus' once...

Rhyme slips the Moyai Mart glove on and flexes her fingers. Well enough. Her skin crawls for how she's bound the Taboo into the material, as though her flesh could strain against the thin fabric and break free, or extrude teeth out of her meat just to rip and tear itself out of confinement. She hides the remaining Moyai Mart wrappers, the somedrinks and Mexican Dog soda, and the nondescript container of rehydration formula that she will only drink if she has not a drop of moisture in her entire body. And the Mandelbrot blanket. Can't show him the blanket. And the—the bird! The bird on the mountain made from the mug that she broke! All of it goes under her bed before she gets back in under the far-less-soft-and-warm sheets she had before and tells him that he can come in.

At least she doesn't have to fake the cough when he enters. She struggles to keep her face calm and tranquil, her gloved hands fisted and relatively still under the covers.

Her older brother approaches her. Worry has creased his brow. His eyes look ringed in red and purple, twin culprits of tears and tiredness. The line of her mouth thins, and she sets her jaw firm.

Not a question about the gloves, hidden under the sheets. Instead: "Wha's up witchu?" She's never heard him so anxious, not since the day he first saw the bites on her arms, the old scars, the fresh wounds. Neku's mentioned that, during his first Game, her older brother nearly had a nervous breakdown. Did he look like this then, too? "Sumthin' wrong? You know you can tell me anythin'. Ain't a problem for me to grab a doc. Ain't lyin'. I got a little sumthin' set aside for a rainy day like dis, yo." He gives her the most hopeful lopsided smile that she nearly feels pain other than the one in her hand for a second. Nearly. "Jus' in case my bestest an' most precious little sister in da whole world ever needed it."

Swallowing her sudden arid throat, Rhyme takes a moment to breathe in, breathe out, and smooth out the vibrations of her vocal cords so she doesn't sound mewling in pain from parting her lips. "I'm okay... Just sick. I don't even have a fever anymore. You can check if you don't believe me."

"Aw, don't pull dat card. You know I believe you." She notices his fingers twitch.

She stifles the pain and she stifles the giggle, too. "You can feel my forehead anyway. I won't think that you don't believe me."

The relief in his sloping shoulder matches the tenderness in his gentle touch when he lays his warm hand across her brow. Shorter and wider than Sho's, Rhyme reflects, wondering when she started comparing everything between them.

"See?" She doesn't dare try for a smile. "No fever."

"I can see dat." Indeed, he glances at his palm as if it betrayed him. "Rhyme... I been thinkin'."

"Uh oh." Her timbre has no mirth to it, but even with a deadpan delivery, maybe it'll convince him. "Do you need a doc? I know you haven't been eating an apple a day..."

He frowns like she socked him in the gut, and she shrinks into the pillow. "I'mma be da first to say that I don't know what the hell's been on witchu. Hope you ain't been hangin' out with dat math-spoutin' freak no more. You still, uh..." His feeble gestures towards her arms make her huddle in further beneath the covers. "You still doin' dat wit' yo'...?" His words trail off along with the lingering cedar scent on the pillows.

"Not as much anymore," Rhyme admits truthfully. No need to mention that the not as much has more to do with her three days of exhaustion from nonstop pain over anything else. "See? It's always darkest before the dawn. I told you that things would get better."

"A'ight." He rubs the back of his head. "Dat's... Dat's great, yo. Y'know, Rhyme, you, uh... You soundin' a bit scratchy. Need some water? Or anythin'? Whatchu need?"

She almost automatically asks him to come back at the end of the next period before screwing her head on straight.

"Nuthin'? A'ight, jus' lemme know." He lingers. As though he thinks that the second he closes his eyes, she'll puff away into a cloud of dust. Little does he know that the taste of copper refuses to sublimate. "I been thinkin' 'bout the future."

Her left hand burns, but the rest of her body chills into a sheet of frost.

"Jus' wanted you to know, Rhyme..." Shuddering, shivering, she stares at him and the horrifying kindness in his wide eyes. "...If you don't know what college you wanna go to, you don't hafta go to any college at all."

Her mouth drops open. "...What?"

"I'unno if dat's been botherin' you at all." He makes a discomforted noise, the kind of grunt she's heard when she's given him some manzai material a little outside of his wheelhouse, something he can't just skate through. "Jus', y'know. You ain't gotta be some superstar hotshot. You ain't gotta do nuthin' to 'make me proud.' I ain't our old man. I know you been thinkin' on where to go for school, an'...if the answer's nowhere, I'mma hug you jus' as tightly." He pauses. "If you let me. No hugs 'less you want 'em." Suddenly his eyes narrows and the worried creased on his brow intensifies. Rapidly Rhyme turns her head away. Must've let her mask slip in her surprise. "Did I say da wrong thing? I'm... I'm sorry."

Heh... Earlier she nearly felt a pain not from the Taboo. Now she does, a dull, aching pain in her chest, in her heart.

What is she doing to him?

Mustering up the laxity of her vocal cords, Rhyme tries not to whimper when she speaks, her eyes suddenly stinging. "...Thank you. It's not that, I promise. Um..." Her fists tense under the sheets, but she still doesn't look at him, can't look at him, not with that creased brow, those kind eyes. "...I'm thankful, you know, for...everything that you've done for me."

She hears his sharp intaken breath. A fool. What a fool. What a fool she is.

All too belatedly Rhyme realizes that she couldn't have said something more concerning.

"Whuzzat mean?" he presses. "Wha's goin' on? I can't fix nuthin' if you never tell me anythin'. I know I messed up dealin' wit' the bites on yo' arms an' all, but I ain't finna mess up again. I been doin' readin' 'bout how to approach stuff like dis, been askin' Pinny an' Rindo since they good at cheerin' up they friends... Please," he says, quietly, and her chest hurts almost worse than her left. "I jus' wanna see you happy. Jus' wanna see dat smile of yours again. Dat's the reason I feel like I can face everyday: remembering yo' smile."

"No!" she cries out, sounding either so loud or so pained or both that he shuts up, eyes watering. "I picked! I wanted to look before I leaped, so I took my time, but I'm sure now. I'm staying in Shibuya for college."

The relief in his voice, the held-back tears tightening his timbre, made her writhe away from him in bed. "Really? Dat's... Dat's great, yo!" Such hopefulness. Such optimism. Such...love. She'll die. "Means I'mma see you 'round a lot?"

"No, not a dorm... I'll...be staying here, if you'll have me," she mumbles. "Home is where the heart is."

Held-back tears? No, she can hear him crying now, choking back little gasped sobs. Her eyes sting so badly. "Aw... Aw really? Dat's... You ain't ever gotta ask me. Always finna keep a plate out for you at dinner, always keep this bed clean for when you come home. Stay wit' me fo' college, fo' after dat, fo' as long as you want, an' you know you always got yo' place here if you leave an' don't like it. I love you so much. Would... Would'ja look at me? For jus' a sec? Ain't gon' be long. Jus' wanna see yo' smile an' yo' eyes. So I can remember dat one more time."

A year ago he would've been asking for a hug right now. She can hear it in his tone, that desire to sweep her up into the safety and protection of his arms, to squeeze her tightly. Her brother and his strength could protect her from many things, but all the brawn in the world can't do much against an illness. And he's learned. No requests for hugs. Just a smile. She could do that, surely. Just a smile.

Deep breath. Burning hand, aching heart, stinging eyes. Just a smile.

Ever so slowly, Rhyme turns her head back towards him. Ever so slowly, Rhyme feels out the shape of a smile, tensing the right muscles, pulling up her lips, stretching it over her mouth. Ever so slowly, she sees herself gazing into his kind, kind eyes. So very kind. Couldn't spell kind without kin...

"Yo..." Ah. So Rhyme screwed up after all. "You sure you don't need a doc? Or 'em drops for yo' eyes or sumthin'? Dat what got you in bed? Da infection?"

"Infection...?" Rhyme echoes, peeking down. No: her hands remain firmly beneath the covers, and no tendrils of black, veins engorged with clots, have shot up her arms. What did he notice?

He's never lied to her, outside of his dreams during the Game, to be the best skater ever. No reason for him to lie here and now. But what...? "In yo' eyes?"

"In my...?" Trapping her left hand between her thighs just in case, Rhyme flounders for her phone with her right. He's saying something, in that worried tone of his, that paternalistic, mothering tone, but she can only hear the dull decibels chiming in her ears. All those times she used the camera the past few days just to record her voice. Her eyes? What could she have in her—

The camera app opens to her blank blanket. She can't hit the selfie button fast enough. The nail of her thumb stings as she jams it into the screen.

There. Selfie. Tilting her phone. Her chin, her mouth, her nose, her eyes, her brow, back to her eyes.

Her eyes that widen. Her pupils that jitter. Her irises that...

She remembers.

In WildKat.

Sho, with his hair rising as if by static, with his voice as though he'd swallowed lightning, with his tattoos around his collar like burrowing worms struggling to break his skin.

And his eyes. The usual autumn-brown of his eyes, given way to an inhuman gold, the shade of the summer sun.

And her eyes. The usual winter-blue of her eyes, still there, dark irises ringing darker pupils, except for the thin disc of spring-green around the black, and...the even thinner disc, like a pair of crescent moons barely waxed, between the green and the black.

...The thinnest possible halo. The usual blue of her eyes, giving way to an inhuman gold, the shade of the summer sun.

Chapter Text

Most people hoarded something.

Neku hoarded friends without meaning to: all the shops he visited knew his name. Shiki hoarded threads and textiles, having built up a sizable sample collection. Eri hoarded flower seeds for the garden she grew on her windowsills. Rindo hoarded CDs for the old-school player Neku had given him. Shoka hoarded reminders of past outings: ticket stubs, meal receipts. Fret hoarded threads and compliments from his friends. Nagi hoarded pins and merchandise for her favorite fictional character. Her older brother hoarded her affections and precious smiles.

Rhyme hoarded dreams.

Not her own dreams. Eri and Shiki, who dreamed of expanding their clothing line, who dreamed of showing others that anyone could learn to live stylishly no matter what they thought of their body or personality. Rindo, who dreamed of becoming so financially successful that the rest of his friends wouldn't have to worry about it, who dreamed of being able to be there for everyone as their responsible rock if what made them happy wouldn't make ends meet. Shoka, who dreamed of the intrusive thoughts and lashings-out lessening with each day, who dreamed of a future where she could happily hold her friends' hands without wondering why they even wasted their time on her.

Fret, who dreamed of making others smile with his sunny disposition but sincerely with his mask of pretend-optimism slipped from his face, who dreamed of figuring out something he could do after high school that would make himself happy and make his parents happy and not make him dread every work day. Nagi, who dreamed of employing her skills in data analysis towards projects that would help others self-actualize, though Rhyme admitted she hadn't spoken to Nagi as much about her dreams: they'd mostly talked about the aforementioned data analysis, EleStra and other games, and observations on personal habits whenever they met up.

Ayu, who dreamed of continuing to model ane-gyaru for as long as she lived, even if the style had gone out of fashion, who dreamed of letting younger generations understand that they could style themselves as they wished even after trends had ended. Hideki, who dreamed of leaving Mexican Dog and breaking into manga someday, who dreamed of giving readers laughs and tears alike with his art. HT, who dreamed of finding the right person to spend his life with, who dreamed of a morning-breath kiss each dawn and a hand holding his each night.

Kaie, who dreamed of cataloguing and archiving all known phenomena, who dreamed of analyzing and storing accessible information on the entire universe for the sake of all others after him, so that they could expand and learn from the knowledge themselves, so that nothing would end up lost to the void.

Her older brother, who dreamed of giving his precious little sister a life where she could grasp her own happiness, who dreamed of protecting his little sister's smile and seeing it every day.

And she, herself, the wise-beyond-her-dreams fly-ing squirrel-on-the-wall, who dreamed of nothingness.

She had read about the discovery of black holes. About how they themselves shed no light, but that they warped the light of all the celestial bodies around them. About how that warped light, that darkness between the lights, revealed the existence and outlined the shape of the black hole.

Thus she hoarded dreams. Even if her own future remained in the impenetrable darkness, even if the light reached her dreams but could not escape back out into reality, perhaps she could make out the existence and outline the shape by seeing where others' warped and deformed, by making out the darkness between the lights.

Even Neku's. Neku, who had spent time after the Game taking Nagi's advice on seeking therapy and dispensing wisdom to the Wicked Twisters and his old Hachiko reunion friends. Neku, who lived with Shiki, who relaxed her older brother with his presence, who gifted Rindo a CD player, who reached out to the Wicked Twisters whenever they asked him for assistance or queried him on what he would do in a given situation.

Neku, the hero of Shibuya, who dreamed simply of seeing his friends happy and at ease.

Neku, the hero of Shibuya, who dreamed of stepping into the perfect mentor's shoes, and who had effectively done so.

Neku, the hero of Shibuya, who otherwise didn't impose on the Wicked Twisters or anyone else much at all, who spent the majority of his time with her older brother or with Shiki, and whom everyone loved, not only as the Legendary Player and the one who had saved Shibuya twice over, but as an all-around great guy, the sort of person everyone could rely on. Rhyme...could never express all of her thanks for how much Neku meant to her older brother and everything that he did for Shiki and the others.

Nor could she ever express how palpable his absence felt among the Wicked Twisters. He never asked for the hero worship; perhaps he kept mostly to himself for that reason. Whenever anyone reached for him, he met them as the perfect, invulnerable mentor, and then he submerged back into the lake, waiting for the next person who sought his advice.

Nor could she ever express how much he...

...acted like he knew better than everyone else. That what he had seen had given him a unique kind of wisdom. That his repression of feelings—which he called patience—and his carefulness in treating others in the way that he thought would best help them grow—which he called kindness—made him a mentor among mentors, a Mr. H when Mr. H had left his little café on Cat Street abandoned.

The mysterious Mr. Hanekoma, who stepped in just when people—which people?—needed him most, who pushed them to reach their full potential—decided by whom?—with the right blend of compassion and tough love that dribbled down through the coffee filter into the perfect espresso, rich and smokey, the healthy bitterness of adulthood distilled into a cup.

Rhyme had asked him what he'd thought of doing in the future. Neku'd shrugged. His shadow had overlapped hers in the afternoon light. They'd walked back together from Cosmic Corner, her older brother having asked him to go with her and back, to make sure that they glanced at both sides of the road twice before crossing over anywhere.

He'd figure out something or other. Yeah, he didn't want to rely entirely on Shiki financially, even though he understood that he didn't burden her, that she wanted him there as much as he wanted her there. He'd explained that he wanted to contribute, too, in some way. And he recognized that he contributed now. Going to therapy, working through his traumas, learning better coping skills: bettering himself meant that he could better support the people around him, so taking the time to heal contributed to everyone's health. He'd impressed the same upon all the Wicked Twisters, especially Shoka and Fret. Not useless, not worthless: recovery as contribution, the most useful and worthy thing they could do.

She'd smiled upwards into the gold-tinted sky. A sincere smile for his genuine wisdom. If Fret and Shoka could have internalized that...

Neku always looked out for everyone, like a perpetual parent. Fret had jokingly referred to him as a 'mom friend' on more than one occasion. Fret had also quietly expressed his wish that Neku would stop yelling at him to focus whenever Fret tried to have a little fun. But maybe Neku knew better, Fret had added after a moment, since Beat and everyone else thought so highly of him. Yeah! Guess he totally did need to learn to focus.

'Mom friend?' Rhyme would have called him the 'mentor friend.' Mr. H had left sizable shoes to fill, and every day Neku took a step closer to filling them.

She could only hope that he'd learn to fill Mr. H's shoes, and not Mr. Hanekoma's.

Really, Neku radiated light, warmth, and safety into everyone's lives. Never once showing his vulnerability. Never once showing his uncertainty. Never once showing his weakness.

Except to his partners.

With his Jupiter of the Monkey high-tops squeaking slightly against the Dogenzaka sidewalk, Neku had stepped in slightly closer to her, his head slightly tilted to one side, his hand on his shoulder. Besides, even outside of his recovery, he'd elaborated, he contributed right now to Shiki's life. To her happiness, to her stability, to her feelings that they discussed every day like they discussed his, mutually supporting one another as partners. "Like you and Beat, right?" He'd smiled at her.

She'd giggled and replied, "Least said, soonest mended."

Neku had nodded, seemingly agreeing with her, without having understood her words. But because she'd beamed back at him, he must have assumed that she'd echoed him.

He and her older brother talked about their feelings together, too. Feelings that her older brother didn't share with her. Not wanting to worry her. Not wanting to shackle her to his life. Not wanting to make her life any worse for his choices. When she'd chosen to leave the house with him. Yes, perhaps she wouldn't have left if he hadn't. But that hadn't made the choice any less hers.

No, Rhyme could never express all the gratitude for what Neku meant to her older brother and what he brought to her older brother's life.

But she could express a question. "Neku, what you said about recovery..."

"Yeah?"

Her fingers hadn't pushed into her cheek. "What happens if someone can't recover, no matter how much they try?"

"I don't think anyone's like that," Neku had answered without hesitation. "Many people think that they can't get better. Usually, that's because they don't have the support they need. Or they're being pushed to recover too fast, too hard. Life's hard. People need time, space, and more support that they might feel comfortable asking for. Or, they're getting the wrong kind of support. Recovery is a little like fixing up a rotting house. You need people who will build the house back up, and you need someone who will take the rotting wood out. Too much of the first, and the rot's still there. Too much of the latter, and the house'll collapse on itself."

"Hm." Rhyme had interlinked her hands behind her back. Thus why Neku alternated between praising Rindo for his decision and shouting for Fret to focus. "I see the analogy. But what about if someone can't recover?"

His gentle, patient expression had reminded her of a pre-school teacher going over the rules again. "Like I said, if someone thinks that, it means they don't have enough support. What's up? You know someone like that? I'm happy to talk to them."

As the distance between them narrowed, his longer shadow had subsumed hers.

"It's not good to force someone to be happy, or to tell them they shouldn't be struggling," Neku had noted mildly, "but helping someone towards a genuine positive outlook can have a big impact. You know, if someone's convinced they won't get better, they usually won't. It's not that they can't."

Rhyme'd squeezed her fingers against one another so that her hand wouldn't rise up to her midsection where that gnawing void—

"It's okay if I don't know the person too well. Sometimes a single sympathetic conversation can help someone on the right path. No one has to go at it alone. No one can go at it alone. I needed Shiki, Beat, even Joshua. Teamwork makes the dream work... That's something Mr. H told me and Shiki." Of course it was. "So, what do you think?"

She'd thanked him then, and she'd thanked him again when they'd come to her apartment's door, and she'd thanked him a final time—and firmly told him good night—when she'd closed the door behind her and locked it with him still lingering.

What did she think?

Did she not have enough support? Did she not have the right kind of support? Did she have too little kindness, or too much? Not enough carrot? Not enough stick?

Heh, Rhyme supposed that she did lack a genuine positive outlook. If she'd convinced herself that she wouldn't get better, then she wouldn't, huh. According to the wisdom of the mentor among mentors, the hero of Shibuya, her older brother's very best friend, Neku Sakuraba.

After all, Rindo had flourished under his mentorship, and Neku took pride in every time that Rindo made his own decisions, even if Neku himself would've done differently. Fret and Shoka had benefited from slowly plucking out their guilt and shame and focusing instead of overcoming their mental anguishes. Nagi had—well, Nagi had appeared remarkably well-put-together as was, but his friendship with her older brother had given her a new appreciation for how very different people could grow very close indeed.

And her older brother, well. Her older brother attributed much of his growth to Neku's presence.

Rhyme didn't know better than her older brother did. But it seemed to her that her older brother had grown more in the three long years of Neku's absence than in the three weeks with. Then again, three weeks couldn't compare with three years.

Still, Neku's wisdom worked so well for everyone else. The kind of power, her older brother had said to Nagi during the Game, that made everything jus' feel different, y'know?

She knew.

So she'd spent, now, three long years verging on four, returned from the Game. No entry fee. No dreams. Just had to try a little bit harder. If everyone could recover.

If the Wicked Twisters could all recover, and Shiki, her older brother, and Neku could all recover, then what set her apart? Nothing, really.

Nothing. Right?

They had all entered the Game. Yes, the Wicked Twisters had entered it alive, but even they had gone through the shock of believing that they had died for a time. The experiences they had shared in the Game had bonded them, hadn't they? The friendships that they had formed between one another hadn't become life-long during the Game, but the shared path on which they walked, that long and winding road, that suffering and that pain, leaning on one another for support, pulling one another up when they stumbled or fell behind, dependent on each other for their lives, had planted those seeds and nourished the tender saplings in the frail first growth of their greenery.

The blood of the covenant ran thicker than the water of the womb, or so the wisdom went.

What differed between herself and the Wicked Twisters? Between herself and Neku, Shiki, and her older brother? The experiences that they had possessed? The inside jokes that they had made? The little references to small happenings in the Game that made them nudge each other in the elbow or the ribs?

Shoka had been a Reaper. Her older brother, too, for all of a week. Surely that experience set her apart from the others, too. And yet the Wicked Twisters integrated her into the core of their group.

Rhyme had asked her, once, gently, if Shoka felt like an outsider. If Shoka disliked how Shiki and Neku treated her like an adopted daughter despite her chronologically older age, or how her older brother extended his everyone's-older-brother vibe to her despite being chronologically younger. Shoka's hands had dragged the ears of her Mr. Mew hoodie down. Rhyme had kindly told her that honesty was the best policy.

The hoodie's attached tail—how did it move?—had trembled. Rhyme had listened. An outsider to an outsider. She would understand.

Shoka's lips had parted.

She...hadn't understood why they would spend so much time and effort on her. Hadn't understood why they would give her another chance at adolescence. Hadn't understood why they treated her like they would give her back the four years that Reaperhood should have taken from her when the Composer had clicked everyone's memories back on the clock so that she could return to the RG as a human being without anyone questioning why someone born twenty years ago only looked sixteen.

But even though she could barely admit it through the knot in her throat, even if the flashes of returning to the UG still peppered through her thoughts, her friends...

Her friends gave her all the reasons she needed not to go back. Ever.

Rhyme had smiled. Sincerely. She hoped that Shoka would feel that way long into the future and eventually have her own reasons for not going back herself, for her own sake. Shoka had sniffled and pulled the hoodie down further. "Yeah," she'd said thickly. "You too."

Her too, huh?

Having been a Reaper hadn't set Shoka apart enough, and that made Rhyme beam. It truly did. She had played the Game with them. She had lived through the Game with them, and she had ended it at their side, and whatever copper she might have tasted during the Game—if she had tasted any at all—was sublimating away with the passage of time and the warmth of her friends' hands holding hers.

Rhyme had gazed at her own hand. She could have, but no. Not something she couldn't. She simply didn't want to.

What of Rindo? Rindo, who sometimes flinched at inside jokes about the Game and almost never brought them up himself. Rindo, who had gotten so busy securing his financial stability that he only made it to outings once a week, while Rhyme went whenever Fret or another invited her. Rindo, who had looked up at her in some confusion, pushing up the reading glasses he'd gotten to help with all the squinting at papers and screens he'd been doing for his internships.

"Huh? No, it's—kinda silly. But I've got memories of other timelines that ended up, you know, erased." He'd smiled sheepishly at her. "I like the jokes. I just don't want to confuse anyone by talking about things that no one else remembers. Huh? Yeah, I'm busy, but every time I go somewhere with the whole group, it's like a big warm group hug without the hug. Oh, yeah, I don't like hugs or anything either. You too? Cool! Thanks for hanging out with us, Rhyme. And thanks for checking in, but no, I don't feel excluded. Do you?"

Rindo didn't need to hold his friends' hands to feel the warmth of their words, their voices, their existences alone, even when he couldn't spend time with them.

Rhyme glanced at her own hand, the hand that she didn't want to hold anyone else's in, and then straight ahead.

Perhaps, then, Nagi? After all, the rest of the group went to the same school, even if some of them would graduate first, while Nagi spent most of her days under her mistress's cruel boot. Thus Nagi referred to her college courseload. Nagi lived in a world apart from the others. Didn't experience the same school events: no cultural festival, no sports day, not even complaints that the school canteen had run out of yakisoba pan again, while Rhyme did. Nagi's contributions in the Wicked Twisters' group chat usually consisted of offering thoughts and wisdom, though she had requested that the minors move any 'spicy'—not safe for work—conversations to their own subsection, which Fret had duly named rindude don't look, as Rhyme knew. Nagi had lowered her justice burger and tilted her head in perplexion.

"Not at all. 'Tis quite invigorating to have such close allies about me and to converse with them as my peers. It matters not that we have different daily experiences. My absence from their academics gives them reason to report on daily goings-on in ways that both strengthen their camaraderie and loop me in to the jest. More importantly, we deliberately choose experiences that bind us to one another even across distances: EleStra, for instance. Friendships begin by happenstance, but they evolve and grow by deliberate choice."

The light had shone over Nagi's lenses, obscuring her eyes and making her smug smile a little softer.

"Indeed, Lord Tosai in particular has...disrupted my life in ways that I had not thought tolerable prior to the Game. His disruptions have...heavied my heart and lightened my spirit. For to share his burdens and his joys, and for him to share mine in turn, has... I hope to deliberately choose him each day for the rest of my days. Hemblemblem, Lady Rhyme, pardon the intrusion, but may I...inquire about whether you feel lonely?"

Rhyme glanced at her own hand. A mobile game, something that transmitted warmth only from the undercooled batteries of an overworked phone. Intentional reports, to loop one another into their lives, even when they spent most of their days apart. She read the same group chats. Even the one that Nagi had intentionally excluded herself from, citing reasons of legality and morality.

So then, why...

The last of the Wicked Twisters. Fret. Fret, who formed the heart of the group. Who made up the glue that held everyone together. Who invited Rhyme everywhere at every chance that he could. Did she want to grab something from the canteen? Did she want to do some quick karaoke with him? Did she want to hit up the arcade? Did she want to go shopping with him and Shokie? Did she want to go skating with him and Beat-buddy? Did she want to go wandering around talking about anything 'cause he just wanted to spend time with him and Boss? Ooh, how about popping in on Rindo's workplace just to bother him?

Did he feel like an outsider?

Fret had rubbed the back of his head. "Sometimes, a little. I mean, Nagi's getting a college degree and stuff. My Rindude's already has jobs. Shokie's gonna wait for the Don. Eri and Shiki got Gatto Nero. Beat's got his odd jobs. Neku's got... Well, no one's better put together than he is. And you! You're going to college! You're smart enough to hack the UG!"

The RNS, she'd reminded him. Just an online network, and one without commercial protections.

"So I guess I feel like the odd one out, sometimes, compared to you and everyone else in the Wicked Twisters."

She'd blinked. So did he... Did he feel excluded from his friends?

"Kweh? No way. No one's ever been there for me—the real me—like you guys have. Even when my Rindude's busy, I know he cares...mostly. So, you know. Thanks. A lot. For making me part of the team, too, Rhyme. Even when everyone else is busy, I've got you! So, uh, I know you're not big into ES, but Boss, Shokie, and me, we're hitting up the new pop-up at Seibu as soon as class lets out. Wanna come?"

She'd come. She'd listened to Fret and Nagi jabber excitedly about the game, listened to Shoka ask questions about this Lord Dena guy and this Lord Wasafu dude who had caught her interest, listened to the three of them ask her if she wanted anything from the pop-up, since she hadn't said anything for a while. "Thanks, but this kind of thing isn't my style," she'd answered. "Waste not, want not."

...Want not, right?

So then...what differed?

Why did she...?

What was she doing wrong?

Or maybe, because...

Because their experiences had differed.

The pain and suffering they'd experienced during the Game hadn't forged their friendships. The pain and suffering alone hadn't made a bond.

But it had given them a shared basis. A shared kernel. A shared seed and tender sapling. The pain and suffering that they had commiserated on. That they had understood. That they had spoken about not in the heat of combat but in the moments of rest in-between, in the breaking of bread and sharing of salt, in the warmth of a shared campfire. Watering that sapling together, nourishing it, attending to it as they attended to each other, patching up different wounds cut from the same claws and fangs and hunger.

And while she and the two friend groups had both experienced pain and suffering, their pain and suffering had...differed.

They hadn't...gotten erased. They hadn't...turned into Noise. They hadn't...used been by Mr. Hanekoma. They hadn't...gotten crunched in anyone's grip. They hadn't...been excluded from the final fusion-sync that had saved Shibuya. They hadn't...

They could offer her pity. They could offer her mercy. They could offer her hugs, and apologies, and sympathetic noises, and then they would turn to one another, because Ayano had her meinichi soon, and Kanon, and even Motoi, the latter of which shocked the rest of the Wicked Twisters when Rindo had brought it up. And Rhyme had had to thoughtfully raise her hand to her cheek and ask why that had surprised them. And...who was Motoi, anyway?

They could know, and yet they couldn't...understand. They could sympathize, and yet they couldn't...empathize. They could say that they, too, had felt such a gnawing void within them. From sadness. From loneliness. From lack of affection. But people could fill such voids. People could fill such voids for each other.

Neku and Shiki, sharing one another's feelings.

Shoka and Rindo, there for one another.

Nagi and Fret, burdens and joys.

And she? With her arms so itchy during the day, and so tasty during the night? With her jumbled static of Noise? With her uncertainty about the wholeness of her Soul? With her having gotten erased as a Player and erased as a Noise? With her entry fee missing? A part of her that would never return?

To whom did she turn? To her older brother, who had experienced none of those things at all?

Sadness, loneliness, lack of affection: people could fill such voids.

But the gnawing void inside of her and the sharpness of its hunger had been carved out of her by a divine hand.

A jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. Many missing pieces. But she just had to try harder. Had to try harder and work smarter to find the shape of her dreams between the outlines of others', to find the darkness between the lights.

In Kaie's dream she found an archive to work on, to contribute to, and so in analyzing and cataloguing data with him, she fulfilled another's dream.

In her friends' dreams she found a shared desire for warmth that included her on the basis of her being her beloved big brother's little sister, and so on in existing near them and letting them feel like they helped care for her, she fulfilled another's dream.

In Neku's dream she found a want to help others, to mentor them through thin and thick, and by the mere act of reaching out and listening, she fulfilled another's dream.

In her older brother's dream, she found that something so simple as her precious smile...could fulfil another's dream.

Yes, she could spend the rest of her life doing this. Existing as a convenience to others. Existing as a motivation. Existing as the person with the skill. Someone needed a reason to comprehend the gravity of the Game and become Composer of Shibuya? She was the squirrel for the job. Someone needed a hacker into the RNS who could happen to interpret a mysterious helper-question-mark's supposedly incomprehensible speech for Kaie? She was the girl for the job. Someone needed an archivist, another body on group outings and mutual little sister on whom they could project and satisfy their desire to do her older brother a favor, a precious smile to protect?

She couldn't dream of the future, but the future could dream of her. The rest of her life, fulfilling others' dreams and trying, trying, trying to squeeze herself small enough between the outlines of those dreams to gather some fulfilment.

What more could she want? Than the chance to selflessly help those who had helped her? What wouldn't fulfil her about a life spending fulfilling others? She would help. She would do good. She would even protect smiles. Did she really... Was she truly selfish enough, to have such loving allies, such loving friends, such a loving older brother, such a future with college and work and other things that people like Fret and her older brother would never have the opportunity to do, and still wish for something else?

Everyone hoarded something.

But not everyone wished they were hoarding something else.

Chapter Text

They had settled into something of a rhythm. Rhyme would arrive home, check and respond to any messages from Kaie, take a nap until her older brother arrived—how happily he'd call her name and ask her about her day would wake her into business before he could notice she'd slept—welcome her older brother home with a smile and a hug, eat dinner with him, retire to 'do homework' better known as 'sleeping,' bid her older brother good night with a smile and a hug, set a quiet vibratory alarm for a little before midnight, check that her older brother remained asleep, slip on a jacket and trainers, walk out the door, meet Sho outside Mewsic, listen to his lesson, have the opportunity to go home early to avoid falling asleep again...

...and then stick around to watch him make art afterwards, carry on despite the relative lack of rest until he finished, then wobble back home on sleep-deprived legs, check that her older brother slumbered on, crawl into bed, nap again for a few hours until dawn, greet her brother with a smile and a hug, eat breakfast, and leave for the day.

How many hours a night did she sleep nowadays?

Tonight Sho had taken an entire dumpster to task, one of the increasing numbers that had dotted Shibuya since the recent ordinances on covered garbage had gradually relaxed. Instead of an alleyway, he had dragged the entire thing to the plaza in front of PARCO. Rhyme watched him from her perch on the nearby steps: a suitable hiding spot in case a nightly patrol stopped by, so long as she didn't have a direct hand in the art.

Something about his artistry mesmerized.

The wild, theatrical movements that she completely believed he would do with or without an audience, the trash artist's equivalent of dancing by oneself in the bathroom.

The delicate, precise work that his movements lead to, every swipe blooming with details, every violent thrust that she thought had to topple over the whole structure only resulting in the tiniest of wires or screws or tin cans getting affixed somewhere. Rhyme had the impression that he controlled his own body so well that he could stop just short of the masterpiece. Or did he pass by with such perfect tangents?

The loud, uneven crunching of the materials in metallic twangs, plastic crinkles, leather pops, steel screeches, screws and bolts whizzing out like broken buttons, the texture indescribable, sometimes so high-pitched that she could barely tolerate existing in the same space, but usually so curiously cacophonous that it gave her eardrums a relaxing, massaging workout. She could fall asleep to such tunes, at least when listening to them from fairly far away.

Sho made art, yes. But he also made art out of making art. Made art out of living. Every motion a performance. Every walk down the street a rhythm and bop. Every moment a chance to...keep making art.

He picked through the dumpster. Some of the pieces that he dragged out from its depths looked like nothing Rhyme would have expected to end up in the trash. Long scarred pieces of metal, broken propeller blades, snubs of steel fuselages. Where had he gotten it from? He'd met her at Mewsic with the thing already in tow.

What, exactly, did he do during the day? What did he do at night? She had some inklings based on what he had implied or told her before, and the fact that many of his 'zeptograms' had spent time with him since his return to Shibuya, but the specific schedule eluded her.

Then again, how did she even know that he kept to a schedule? He came and went as he pleased. The only clock he'd learn to the ticks of was his own.

The pile rose up from the cement in front of PARCO's sign. It unfolded like a stack of cards. Well, like a stack of snapped wings and shredded fins, at least. Triangles upon triangles. Steepling her fingers under her chin, Rhyme pondered at the possible meanings. Did it have anything to do with what material he had chosen to use? Or did it have more to do with what he used it to create?

The stack appeared particularly fragile despite the tessellated triangles, giving her the distinct sense that a stiff gust of wind could blow the entire thing over. A stiff gust of wind, huh?

Hmm. Hmmm. Hmmmm!

"Is it something about planecrashes?" Rhyme asked.

"Factor it out yourself," Sho countered. "Show your work."

She tilted her head to one side. "I guess I could always safely say it's about trainwrecks."

Sho hmphed. "You going to write your proof or keep wasting the decilitres of oxygen in your lungs?"

"My proof?" She'd tried to comprehend it from Sho's own perspective in the past, figure out what he wanted. On one hand, perhaps he truthfully just wanted her to come up with her own interpretation and then confidently back it up, even if he had one in mind.

But then again, he'd torn into her reasoning on the bicycle artwork. But she'd framed the bicycle piece as concerning his interpretation. So, perhaps, if she framed her as her own interpretation from the start...?

"I don't know what you think this piece is about, but what I'm seeing from it is...that it's about planecrashes. And irony. Wait, less irony and more juxtaposition. All the pieces that you're using... I don't think they're actually from crashed planes, but they look like they could be from planes." She squinted. "I don't think that modern planes have propellers, either. I hope you didn't steal this from some hobbyists."

"I don't steal," he snapped, then smirked. "I balance the equations."

"Right. So my interpretation is that... People use planes all the time to fly wherever they want, and they don't think about the dangers often because it's so commonplace. Yet, planes are incredibly fragile. I think I've read stories—" By which she meant that she had just Moogled some while watching him work. "—that planes can even crash because they were hit by birds. So they're fragile. I think that what you have is really fragile. You've made it out of triangles, which are the strongest shape—"

Sho laughed rowdily at that and sneered at him in a manner that she read as...pleased?

"—but it looks like a deck of cards, which are known to be weak. I think that you're saying that planes are thought to be strong, until the moment that something happens—even a stiff gust of wind—" Heheheh. "—and it crashes. I think that that's the point of the piece." Freezing, Rhyme hastily amended herself: "The point of the piece to me. This is my interpretation, and why."

"Hm. That's the 4th interpretation," Sho observed, in a matter-of-fact tone that implied his words made coherent, casual sense.

She rested her elbows on her knees in her forward lean. "4th interpretation?"

"4," he repeated. "You'll have to show your work. No probabilistic proofs."

"What do you mean? Are you looking for a geometric proof that they're triangles?"

Her eyes widened: Sho actually twisted his head to look at her, grinning widely enough that she could see the sharpness of his canines. She felt herself rising up from the PARCO steps, then forced herself to sit back down, breathe, nod to herself, and intentionally lift herself up. Phone in hand, she opened an art app and drew a vertical line bisecting the page. A geometric proof. The internet coughed up a protractor. Technically, not the way that one constructed geometric proofs, but she didn't have any angles marked, no congruences, no starting assumptions. She could only measure internal angles and give him probabilistic proofs. Not like she could prove that the triangles' legs made exactly straight lines.

Approaching the opus from the other side, Rhyme paused, watching Sho work through the triangular lattice. "Can I touch it?"

"Nonzero touch," he affirmed. Nonzero touch. He'd said that in WildKat's attic, too, though he had framed it as a question then, to her.

Nonzero touch. Meant not-zero touch. Meant touch okay.

Gingerly she brushed one of the metallic sheets making up a triangular's leg. The metal felt rough under her fingertips, worn and battered. It left a light sprinkling of rust on her fingertips when she quit her hands.

At first Rhyme scarcely put any weight on it whatsoever, as if she could will her hand to reform out of gossamer. He'd surely seethe at her if she knocked over his deck of cards.

Yet it didn't budge, even when she unintentionally bumped it with her wrist.

She wouldn't experiment with leaning on it too much, but if she had to guess, it could probably have taken her full body weight and more.

Surprisingly stable.

Holding her phone up to the vertices, Rhyme noted the angles. The first triangle: A perfect 90°, a 46°, and a 44° angle. Huh. Had he made an error? Sho, making an error? Well, given that the airplane hunks he'd use had different widths, maybe such minute errors came with the craft. Except... The next triangle also consisted of perfect 90°, 46°, and 44° angles. And the next. And the next.

All the way down the lattice: a right angle in each triangle, a 46°, and a 44° angle.

Indeed, they all added up to 180° per triangle. Supplementary angles along same-sided interiors and exteriors, congruent along alternative interiors and exteriors. She'd measured the angles, which made them imprecise, but they at least by her measure, they followed all the rules triangles did in two-dimensional plane. The precision of the artwork amazed her, given that he'd constructed the triangles by straightening and then grafting together various chunks of iron and steel of varying thicknesses. But he'd adjusted every vertex as necessary until they came together in perfect angles.

She had watched him do it with his bare hands, aligning two sheets of metal at the appropriate angle, then crunching and folding over the corners with his fingers or under his boots depending on the width of the hunks.

When Rhyme had finished going through most of the triangles—he was adding more—she turned her phone towards him. "There. Triangles."

Sho grinned as he glanced between her phone and the triangles in his ensemble. "Nicely measured angles."

She beamed, but then immediately quirked her lips down. The last time that she had beamed with such satisfaction, she'd ended up getting it entirely wrong.

"But I said no probabilistic proofs. You trying to be obtuse?"

Ah. Yes. There it went. Rhyme's arms dangled at her sides, the phone almost slipping from her fingers. "It's impossible to do anything else if I don't have any starting assumptions or axioms. I can only measure."

"Not my problem," he replied instantly, and she stared at him through the triangular lattice.

"You're the one who asked for a geometric proof of triangles," Rhyme retorted, then paused. "Unless there is some way to show you the proof, and I just need to figure it out."

He didn't bother looking up from his work. "I didn't say that."

"I—" She touched her hand to her cheek. "...You're right. You didn't. When you looked in my direction and grinned, I'd..." It made her consider the conversation she had had with Neku months ago on the way back from Cosmic Corner, when his shadow had subsumed hers, when he'd read her giggle and smile as agreement with him, even though she'd used a proverb with the opposite meaning. "I see. I'll try not to assume anything about you anymore."

"I never miscalculate." So confident. Spoken like a true statement of fact. A basic underlying axiom of the universe. More natural than the natural laws governing the fundamental forces. All the supersymmetries of superstrings sprang from his supersureness. "But you've got guts, femtogram, and an eye for precise measurements. That's not half bad, even of your erroneous assumptions make you a stupid scalene with zero right angles. Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Zero right angles. Just a joke about scalene triangles, or a hint that she had spun off in the entirely wrong direction? "Glad you like my guts. No guts, no glory, right?"

"Wrong. I said zero right angles."

"If a scalene triangle means three different sides, then this whole—" Rhyme motioned. "—artwork is made of right scalenes. Does a stupid scalene imply the existence of unstupid scalenes? Or smart scalenes? That is to say, the artwork and I are both scalene triangles, but the artwork has right angles."

Sho shrugged. "Technically correct."

"Is it possible to give you a 'geometric proof' of these triangles?"

"Can you have a Riemann space without quadratic restrictions?" he answered in a timbre more arid than the asphalt that shark Noise somehow swam through. "If a proof requires something impossible with the current axiomatic set, switch axioms or try a different proof."

"Try a different proof...or switch axioms," Rhyme echoed.

The shrill rkkkrkk of iron nearly drowned out the first part of his words. "Sure, the commutative property works."

"You know what else works?" Rhyme giggled innocently. "I baited you into admitting that this is made of right scalene triangles. What kind of proof is that?"

He scoffed. She laughed. "Heh. So you're admitting that I set the universe's axioms?"

Her laughter died down as she turned over his words. "What do you mean?"

The cockiness surged in his voice. "If I say that this is made of ipsilateral triangles, does that make it right?"

"Would you? Honesty's the best policy, and I don't think you'd ever intentionally miscalculate." She patted the triangular lattice.

"Doesn't make a difference to whether or not you can use something I say in your proof. Here's a pop quiz, femtogram: how many times in my life have I miscalibrated?" Sho krnched another propeller blade in half.

"Wait, I know this one. It's going to be a joke answer like zero again. Fool me once, fool me twice." What would she write for her manzai? "'Too many to count?'"

Sho barked out a laugh. "By definition it's a finite number. That answer doesn't count."

Rhyme frowned. "But the photons you asked me about last time wasn't zero either. You're applying logic inconsistently."

"Incorrect." He sneered. "I qualified the first answer with an if and framed it around being a typhlotic tetrahedron. If you're not one, then it didn't apply to you. If you applied to yourself, and you see yourself as typhlotic, then eradicate yourself from my spatial coordinates! My protégé—"

His protégé. It took her a second to hear the rest of the words coming from his mouth.

"—will have enough processing process to stop being such a mindless monomial and realize that she's already gotten the experimental evidence to prove one of her assumptions wrong! This artwork isn't fragile! Miscalibrated monad... My magna opera are stable no matter what a hollow-skulled hectopascal assumes about them." The sheer ire that she'd underestimated the stability of his art made her laugh through the second half of his explanation, until she heard those words again. "And my protégé will be able to do the algebra and realize that she already stated an axiom! These materia don't come from planecrashes! Here's a pop quiz: what do they come from?"

"Am I supposed to figure that out? It could be from planes that have flown but were taken apart, or planes that've never flown at all." Rhyme sighed. She had to give Sho that. No one else could make her sigh with such frequency in such a small interval. He had to win an award for the highest sigh density. "Okay. So it's not about planes or fragility."

"It's not about 4," he said amiably. "I don't give a factor about that."

Rhyme sighed again. Yes, he certainly won that award. "What is 4? The number pun? Death?" Sho grinned. "I'm not making an ass out of you and me this time."

"Ha! Correct. It's not about death. But you seem fixated on it. Recurring to the topic over and over. Hmph." Abruptly Sho met her gaze. The intensity in his narrowed eyes made her firm her stance, straighten her spine, and gaze right back into the abyss in an impromptu staring contest. Her eyes watered, but she didn't blink. "Are you afraid of uptuning to the UG because you're afraid you'll die? Fear and mercy are garbage, femtogram."

She couldn't gather data points about him without him gathering data points about her. Studying each other. But she studied him to study his Taboo.

What reason did he have to study her? Her Soul, sure. But her?

Either way, Rhyme tucked her hands into her hoodie pockets. "You're making a lot of erroneous assumptions yourself. I pitched an interpretation about planecrashes, and you think that I'm obsessed with death? Better safe than sorry. I don't want to use a pin unless I'm sure I know how it works."

Sho slammed his hand against the triangular lattice's upper vertex. Rhyme, stance firm, muscles locked, body tense—flinched.

But the lattice barely bent. Surprisingly stable.

"My protégé isn't a mindless monomial," he all-but-shouted, which honestly meant that he just spoke at his normal volume, but the sudden uptick in her heartbeat magnified every decibel tenfold. "I want you to make an RNS for me in the future. You think I'm such an ignorant integrand that I'd let you get subtracted? Or have you bound to the UG? If your variable towards me end up 'anger' or 'hate,' you won't make an RNS for me. Even if I told you to make it or get crunched, it would be garbage. I gain nothing from your anger towards me. So stop being obtuse."

"I didn't think you gained anything from getting the Wicked Twisters mad, either," Rhyme said mildly, "but you still left them after... What was it? A week?"

"Hmph. While I was helping them subtract rogue integers, I ensured none of them got permanently derived." Sho folded his arms over his chest for a second, but then immediately went back to his arts and crafts time. "Golden zeptogram kept jumping straight into Noise battles. Had to intercept, repeatedly. Even used healing psychs—and I think they're so zetta annoying."

She tried not to giggle at his inability or unwillingness to stop making art for long enough to keep his arms crossed. "But you still left."

"Think I left to crunch numbers for fun?"

Rhyme rolled her shoulders. "I wouldn't put it past you."

Sho huffed. "I had to factorize that trash Noise from the masked zeptogram's garbage pin. None of the zeptograms, who generated the radiamn junk, even figured out to separate it from the heap. The furthest they got was the axiom that it gave them, hah!, 'bad vibes.' After that, I was working out the calculations required to awaken the Souls of Shibuya."

"Which Kaie and I contributed to," Rhyme noted.

"Correct, which is part of why I even bothered to be adjacent to you tonight."

She gave the sentence the time and space to hang in the air. He'd said it so...openly. So casually. So plainly.

"I wouldn't have been able crunch those numbers if I was wasting my 𝑡-value running that kilokatal's zero-kelvin missions—heh heh heh—and besides, if the zeptograms got compacted with the rest of the heap the moment I stopped following the associative property," he continued with zero inflection beyond his normal declaratory tone, "they didn't deserve my time."

Her eyebrows arched. "What's stopping you from deciding that the same's true for me?"

"Because you uptuning to the UG's got no overlap with your zetta fascinating Soul, your capacity to factor it out, or your future RNS."

She hmmed in thought.

"The probability of you understanding the intricacies of the Taboo without getting hands-on, experimental evidence from psychs and sigils is even lower than you working out your nontrivial solution to my magnum opus if you can't even calculate its stability by looking at it. You had to touch it—am I right?" Sho jabbed his forefinger into the lattice as though to prove his point. "Especially if you have a temporal deadline, you need to accelerate your plans. You can calibrate all you want on theory. But it's by making predictions and getting them crunched through experiments that a binomial like you will complete the proof in a reasonable time."

A temporal deadline. If she wanted to figure this out before she had to choose a college, then she couldn't afford to waste time figuring out stability from sight and getting it wrong over and over when she could just...reach out and bap it with her palm.

With enough time, Rhyme could figure it out even like this. But given the time constraint.

Heh... Sho had said something similar about the Taboo, hadn't he? That he would have worked it out himself. But Shibuya had been on a deadline, and so Sho had agreed for Mr. Hanekoma to 'accelerate his plans.'

"...I guess that deriving an equation for gravity's a lot harder if you can't actually let things fall. I'd rather not get clobbered by any apples, even if they keep doctors away." She breathed out. "Okay, but I have a question."

His laughter sounded more like a gunshot. "That's a constant."

Rhyme smiled, then shook her head ever so slightly, hopefully imperceptibly, though she doubted that. "A living person being in the UG... I know living people can't legally be Players, but what about just being in the UG? And if we're talking about—" Or dabbling. "—Taboo in the open like this, won't we get caught?"

"Hmph. Based on my previous experiences? Trial without error: the likelihood of the obtuse angles noticing is functionally zero. Technically nonzero, but such a low probability given that we don't have to factor it in to our simplified model."

"That doesn't make sense." She drummed her fingers on her cheek. "What about Mr. Hanekoma?"

He sounded close to bored. "What about that sum of a digit?"

This time she beamed. "Didn't you say that he caught wind of you dabbling in the Taboo the first time?"

"Only because I let 'im," Sho replied. "When I saw him again in the UG, and he saw me, I jumped from asking him who he was to asking him what he was."

"Oh," said Rhyme, and then she grabbed the triangular lattice. "Wait, 'again?'"

"Sure. I'd worked out that Finsler-feathered factorer's usefulness before I ever translated myself from the RG to the UG," he explained nonchalantly.

Her pulse rocketed from her wrists and the wintry chill inverted to her body flushing way too warm. "In the RG. Before you died."

"Don't reiterate such obvious axioms."

For a moment she couldn't find a word. Sho's room in WildKat's attic. The bed with the notches carved into the posts. The easels. The sculptures. The fingerpaints in a childish hand. Sho had known Mr. Hanekoma in the RG. Sho had known Mr. Hanekoma in the RG. Had had a room in his café. "He told you that the Composer was planning to erase Shibuya, and you told him that you were doing the Taboo, because you already knew and—" She cut herself off. "...Because you already knew each other."

Sho nodded. So simply. So obviously!

"...And he abandoned you." Sweat soldered her collar to her neck. "He abandoned you. You wrecked his café looking for him. You asked Neku and my brother where he was. And he abandoned you, brought back the Composer, and—probably warned the Composer about you, so the Composer was ready. And he left you to get erased under a vending machine. My brother said he saw your body. Unless Taboo Noise is different... That means you weren't erased, yet. Mr. Hanekoma just..." A thin line of pain across her palm. The triangular lattice's sharp edge had bitten into her skin. "...left you there."

She studied him. Studied his reaction. But he remained nonplussed. Unfazed. As cool and constant as ever. "Ninety degrees."

"How..." Her right palm stung. She'd gotten her last tetanus booster about six years back. She could dig her hand in if she wanted to, let that serrated line burrow into her flesh. "...do you feel about him? Knowing that he abandoned you for dead? After everything that he did for you, and everything that he did to you?"

"Irrelevant chatter." Still unruffled in tone, in expression. But: irrelevant? No... No, she didn't think so.

"Once bitten, twice shy?" Rhyme pressed. The burn in her head worsened the further she ground it against the metal. "He betrayed you, and you're afraid of trusting me with the truth?"

He made a sound in the back of his throat. "Fear and mercy are garbage."

"There's a world of difference between, 'I don't have any feelings on him,' and 'I don't want to talk about the very real feelings I have.'" She'd have to bandage her palm when she got home. Dab antibiotic ointment. Wrap it in gauze. Waste her supplies. What would Neku, the man trying to become the man who had left Sho for dead, say? "There's nothing wrong with sharing your feelings. I'll...listen."

"Hhhah... You're zetta persistent." A screech of metal. Rhyme leaned forward. Pressed her face against the lattice. Stared right at him from one of the triangular holes of the increasingly thin divide between them. "Fine. You think there's 'wrong' with sharing feelings? Then demonstrate your proof. Share your 'feelings' on my art."

...What? Her grip on the lattice loosened. The cold winter-midnight air numbed the cut.

"It's a simple equation," he continued unabated. "The most basic application of my axioms. I created it because I thought you'd recur to your previous interpretations of the bifurcated lituus spiral."

Rhyme scrutinized his features. A buy-in. She could play this game. "The bifurcated lituus spiral?" A spiral, and bifurcated into two. Rhyme pressed her fingers into her cheek. "The bicycles—the artwork made from bicycles?"

"Naturally." Sho eyed her, as if goading her. "Like any function, it has derivations and it has integrations. There are multiple solutions, some more simplifiable than others."

She nodded, slowly. "So there are basic solutions, and then more advanced ones. And this one is a simple solution. Or, at least, it has a simple solution. It has...less simple solutions, too, but I can start with the simplest solution." Rhyme glanced over the triangular lattice again. An artwork born from a dumpster he'd gotten from...an airfield or something like that. Pieces of trash, thrown away. No overthinking. The simplest solution from Sho's philosophy. The basic reason why he made art in the first place.

When she peeked at him askance from the corner of her vision, he looked directly and unerringly at her.

A test, maybe. A simple test of her comprehension. Of her worthiness on whether he could answer her question about Mr. Hanekoma. Or...no. He still didn't seem like the kind to give her that kind of 'homework.' But maybe... What if he'd decided to simplify it down to give her a chance at the correct answer? Or, rather, a correct answer? To make her work her way up to understanding his art. Did he... Did he want to be understood? All of his excitement about teaching her the Taboo... Did he want someone to share it with? His art? He'd make it—he'd been making it—with or without her. But opportunity never knocked twice at the same door.

He was willing to walk her through the Taboo from basic principles, as he'd said. Then who said that he didn't have the same willingness with his art?

Perhaps...

Perhaps, if she demonstrated that she understood him on this level...then he'd share his feelings on Mr. Hanekoma. If Mr. Hanekoma had betrayed him had abandoned him, had left him for dead—er, erased—beneath a vending machine, then perhaps...

"Whoever threw them away decided that they wouldn't have the functionality of being planes anymore," Rhyme mused, rubbing the stinging line across her right palm with her cold left thumb, "which means that they categorized it as garbage. You've turned it into artwork, and put it in the middle of PARCO, because..." No, maybe PARCO had nothing to do with it. At least not the simplest possible solution. "You've turned it into artwork because it doesn't matter that someone else threw it away and categorized it as garbage. You saw the potential for an opus in it, so you make it into art."

To interpret a piece of art in relation to its creator meant walking down a folly of a voyeuristic road.

But she knew the creator.

And if the creator wanted to be understood, if the creator wanted to write his philosophies and his triumphs into his art, if the creator wanted for the people interpreting the art to exist in awe of the creator who had built up his trash pile in the middle of PARCO, then...

"Just like how the Angels deciding that Shibuya is garbage," Rhyme said, lowering her voice, "won't stop you from trying to protect it so you can make it into art. That's...how you live your life. No—that's my interpretation of your art, and how you live your life. That's my solution, and I think it's nontrivial."

"Heh..." Sho's fingers swept over the brim of his visor. It tilted first down, and then upwards, his gaze just as intense as before, his pupils wide and dark, his grin both sharp and—pleased. "Q.E.D."

Rhyme's shoulder slumped against the triangular lattice. It didn't crumple beneath her weight. Didn't even shift.

...Surprisingly stable.

Chapter Text

The moon had waxed a sliver more from their last clandestine meeting at MIYASHITA, but Rhyme still couldn't make out the details in the circles Sho had drawn. She could, however, make out the details of the pin he had offered her, at least after repeated questioning that had left him huffing with impatience while she meticulously inquired about each and every possible side effect she could think of.

According to him, the Instrumentalist pin hadn't come from his own design, as Coco had apparently commissioned it from someone with even higher skills in producing pins than him. That made sense, from what Coco had told Rhyme weeks ago, when she had first asked the Reaper-slash-fairy-princess about the safety of Sho's offering. At the time, Rhyme hadn't pieced together all of the implications.

But now, all of this made Rhyme squint even further at the pin. It certainly looked like Shiki's handiwork—she designed all of the Gatto Nero pins herself, while Eri's sketches formed the basis for any threads, as far as Rhyme knew—but she couldn't picture Shiki willingly working for Sho in relation to the UG.

Then again, while Sho wouldn't trick someone into making UG-capable pins, Coco could.

Shiki didn't exactly harbor much sunshine and rainbows in her heart for the self-titled fairy princess who had shot Neku—again—but every time the topic had come up in front of Rhyme, Neku had gently asked Shiki to accept that he considered himself Coco's ally, friend, and confidante. Could Coco have coaxed Neku, and Neku convinced Shiki? Or, perhaps, could Coco have disguised herself, or commissioned anonymously?

Though, the probability of the bombastic decora-toting pink glitterbomb doing anything anonymously...

And the real truth: possibly none of the above. Perhaps some UG-flitting maestro on the level of CAT had swished their uptuned hand and produced a Gatto Nero knock-off. Or just something with a similar design.

Not like Shiki owned these shades of black and pink, or what Fret would call an acid-jazz palette.

Still, the design had too similar of an appearance to the four seasons set Rhyme had seen prominently displayed in Gatto Nero's commercials for her not to consider the possibility. On one hand, Rhyme weighed the value of approaching Shiki with her concerns. If Shiki knew about the situation and assured Rhyme that she had created the pin intentionally—or not created the pin at all—then Rhyme would breathe easily. And if Shiki didn't know, then she had every right to. On the other hand, Shiki—or Neku, or her older brother—would undoubtedly question how Rhyme had learned about Sho's use of the pin.

And while she could lie and say that she had just seen Sho wearing the pin randomly, she preferred not to lie. Even if she did lie, what if this resulted in her friends placing her under surveillance? 'For her own good,' they might say.

But the path to regaining her entry fee lay so close that she could almost reach it from her fingers, so close that she could feel its warmth radiating through her skin.

If Sho had used the pin for this long without any harm coming to Shiki or Eri, then Rhyme could wait a few more weeks for these lessons to conclude. Then, with her Soul cleansed of the lock on her dreams and her life rightened again, she could approach Shiki without concern about whether her good deed would go unpunished. Would that mean betraying Sho? But, no, if Sho—or Coco—were doing something that could hurt Shiki or anyone else, Rhyme would side with her friends.

...With her older brother, Shiki, Eri, and Neku. Those friends. Ethically speaking, she couldn't let any of them end up hurt, if she could help it. Honesty was the best policy.

Besides, Sho was using her. For data, for the RNS, for an outlet on the Taboo. Then Rhyme could use him back, to reclaim her entry fee.

A relationship built on mutual selfish benefit. No obligations, no ties, no necessary bonds.

So...even if it meant betraying him, even if it meant abandoning him, even if it meant angering him to a point that he deemed her hazardous to his plans and cut all contact, she'd do the right thing. Ethically speaking, that was.

For extra insurance Rhyme asked him point-blank: "Did Coco commissioning this pin, or you using it, put Shiki in danger? Is Shiki in danger?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Who?"

After twenty-questions of reminding him of Shiki's existence—Sho finally recalled her as the radian who had stitched up Tsugumi's plush Soul prison, a fact that Rhyme only recollected because she'd asked about the wooden kitty carvings on Shiki's mantle: gifts from Tsugumi in exchange for having saved her Soul—he burst out laughing. She could well have experienced danger from something else; he didn't keep tabs on her. But from the pin? No.

Rhyme scrutinized him. Sho grinned at her. She sighed. He might have miscalibrated that, or used a different definition of danger, but he wouldn't lie.

Next set of questions: the safety of the Instrumentalist pin. No, she had no danger of getting stuck in the UG; the moment that she dropped the pin, she would downtune back to the RG. No, she would not become a Player, Reaper, or anything. No, no one would forget her, as had happened to her older brother when he'd skated into the Shinjuku-style Game. No, this wouldn't affect her Soul in any other way than the Reaper decals she'd encountered during the Game, the ones that had let her eat at restaurants and shop at outlets.

Would this permanently alter her Soul?

Scoffing, Sho stopped crossing his arms over his chest and turned his open palms skywards. "There's no operation that doesn't permanently alter the Soul. Every breath you take permanently changes the lungs. Even if you stopped breathing, your lungs would change permanently from the passage of time. Sure, it permanently alters the Soul. Just like a Reaper decal does." He shrugged. "Does tuning to your combat zone while silencing Noise alter the Soul? Correct. Does walking into the Shibuya River's outlier plane alter the Soul? Ninety degrees."

Hm. Rhyme pressed her hand against her face. Former Players from Games would have downtuned and uptuned repeatedly, but both the survivors from her own Game and the Wicked Twisters had emerged...

...She couldn't say unscathed. The wounds and scars peppering their psyches would take many more years to heal from, if they ever did.

But their Souls had emerged, as far as Rhyme could tell, unscathed. So she had little to worry about from the sheer machinations of uptuning and downtuning.

Still, Rhyme exhausted every possibility that she could think of. Drawing in the dirt with an increasingly stubby stick, Sho answered every question. No, uptuning to the UG wouldn't 'unleash' any existing scraps of Noise in her code. No, the Reapers wouldn't catch them with any reasonable likelihood, and even if the Reapers did, nothing would happen other than him taking the pin from her and her returning unblemished to the RG. No, uptuning to the UG without a pact-partner wouldn't have Noise attack her, and even if some freak accident happened, he'd factor it out. No, he wouldn't abandon her, given all of her usefulness. No, she couldn't—wait. Yes. Yes. Yes she could have the pin! Ha ha ha ha ha!

He held it out with her with a perfectly still hand and perfectly tremulous pupils, smirking into silence, waiting. Rhyme's fingers hovered over the pin. Breath. One. Two. Three.

The metallic surface cooled her fingertips where she brushed her hand over the pin.

But only for a moment. The sudden blush of heat bloomed through her fingers and raced up her arm with a sparkling sensation as though she'd touched a Tesla coil. She sharply inhaled from surprise; the air smelled of...sunlight?

To you who are not from here,
welcome home.

The sentiment resonated through her skull and warbled down her spine. Warmth fizzed over her entire body. That heat radiating through her gave her a sensation similar to when she tried alcohol for the first time at Ayu's behest, sipping a can of chuhai while perched at the Dangerous Branding counter until the buzz of tattoo needle had matched the buzz at the base of her neck. The world a little too bright, her cheeks a little too blushed, her head a little too light, her body a little too flushed, everything a little too right. As if she had trudged through the winter snows all night, and only now wound her way home, the warmth washing over her as she opened the door to where she belonged.

Rhyme forced her focus forward. Sho's eyes gleamed all the more radiantly for the crescent moon above. He leaned forward towards her and over her. She leaned towards him and up to him.

"Ha! So zetta fascinating." With his hand on his chin and his toothy grin, he had the same expression he wore whenever he ate chocolate soft serve as Cutie☆Pies.

Ignoring him for the moment, Rhyme glanced around. The same MIYASHITA. She couldn't see anything much different. No Noise symbols. Then again, she didn't have a Player pin: no scanning. The park bench felt just as solid as before when she sat down in it, but the same time, she'd had the capacity to sit down on the sidewalk and lean on bus stop awnings during her Game.

Truthfully, Rhyme didn't comprehend all of the rules separating the UG and the RG: how psychokinesis pins could move objects such as cars, and yet those same cars—when driven by humans—harmlessly passed through Players wherever they crossed the street. Kaie's archives focused on higher-level concepts than the mundanities of how low-level psychs functioned. Sho had been right on one count; nothing compared to getting the experimental data of trying to touch cars and benches herself.

Hm. No real way to test whether or not she had uptuned to the UG.

Then again, Sho had no reason to trick her. She'd find out soon enough: as soon as she tried to phase through a person.

At last Rhyme turned back to Sho, whose ravenous gaze had followed her to the bench. "What's so zetta fascinating about it?" she asked, keeping her tone cool and casual.

"Welcome back to the UG." Sho spread his arms out. Rhyme stepped back, but he didn't embrace her as her older brother would have, just splayed his fingers out towards the stars. "The future Composer of all the 000s here will be me!"

The corners of her mouth arced upwards. "Uh-huh."

"And in my UG, all random radians can make their own pins. Heh! Whether or not you're a Natural now, you'll become one, if you take the Taboo. Heh heh heh. Zetta fun times."

Her eyebrows arched. "'Take?'"

"Here." Digging his hand through his pockets, he fished out a silvery circle. A blank pin. Hm. Neku and Shiki had mentioned getting a blank pin from Mr. Hanekoma, which had filled in with symbols relating to Neku and his partners. The fusion pin, or something like that. Did this have some similar capacity?

"And this pin? I agreed to the 'Instrumentalist' one—" The name sounded both musically thematic and unstylishly unwieldy, which made her assume that Sho had named it, or had taken a name from Nagi. "—but I'm not going to take any other pins unless I have the exact information. Only fools rush in."

Sho hhhed in the back of his throat. "There's no psych embedded at all. But let's refactor this equation. You've used pins."

Rhyme inclined her head.

"You have any pins that you trust, femtogram?" He watched her expectantly.

Clipping the Instrumentalist pin to her jacket, she found her hand dipping into the inside of her jacket. Her body heat had warmed the metal inside, and it nestled in the curve of her palm like an old friend as she brought the brightly coloured orange pin out of hiding. The cartoonish mouse, its ears connected by bars that resembled two musical eight notes, opened its drawn whiskered snout in silent song.

"Huh. Mus/rattus." Sho sounded...appreciative? At least, from what Rhyme could tell. Her older brother would've whistled. Sho, on the other hand, clapped his fist into his palm. "A street jam psych. Infrequently used, but factoring cool. Heh! I zetta dig your style, femtogram. 2.2360679! If some clogged-ear kilocandela's ignoring you, just shout out the melody even louder! Make 'em hear it, whether or not they listen."

"You could tell by looking?" He had shown her the Instrumentalist pin before. Rhyme figured that he hadn't intended to hide anything from her.

Sho's smile broadened. "Heh. Interested in learning those identities yourself—am I right? Simple as applying SOH-CAH-TOA."

She glanced down at Rhythm Warning for a moment, then breathed in, held the air in her lungs long enough for the bases to sting, and exhaled. "Yes. We're making that part of the lessons. So, why'd you ask me about the pin?"

"Ha! You are interested. Zetta fascinating, femtogram." How widely could his grin get? "We'll start this sequence with a Noise battle." He raised his hand skyward.

A sharp sting along her ring finger: Rhythm Warning's fastener needle from how tightly she'd clutched it. "No."

He scowled. "No?"

In a milder, gentler tone than the abruptness of her no: "I'm not fighting any Noise right now." Rhyme beamed sweetly up at him. "It doesn't matter why, and I won't answer. I don't think that I need to fight any Noise for the lesson on psychs, do I?"

"Hmph. I wanted to test your psych. Fine. I can pull you into a combat zone with a docile Noise. No rogue integer subtraction." A docile Noise? "Well?"

"You want to see whether I can use my psych?" Rhyme circumscribed the metal with her thumb. The years had left the paint a little chipped, the smoothness a little battered, but the vibration within hummed as resonantly as when she'd first tried it out while her older brother had manipulated his skateboard using the only pin that he'd managed to make work: a design of sharp lines and sharper graffiti named Respect. She hadn't a clue where Respect had gone since then, or if her older brother still had it. As for why she had kept Rhythm Warning... "As long as I'm not fighting Noise, I'll agree to tune to the combat zone."

"Heh." Sho glanced upwards. Rhyme followed his gaze but found only the nighttime heavens. "K6!"

Huh?

Abruptly everything lurched and Rhyme stumbled back, reeling from the spiritual equivalent of her ears popping from the shift in pressure. The sudden brightness made her rub her eyes as her pupils adjusted to the daylight sky above. Daylight? No: light suffusing the Noise plane. The park remained the park, but the grassy turf had warped in shape, and she could sense the perimeter bounding this tiny fragment of existence.

So familiar, and yet: ever so slightly different. Like she'd taken an old violin from its case, the familiar lush resonance colored differently from the passage of time. Maybe the difference arose from the lack of a pact. Or perhaps the fabric of combat zones had shifted since her Game. Or, possibly, having arrived as a mere human rather than a Player had altered her senses.

Even with Sho so close beside her, she couldn't sense him the way she'd sensed her older brother during the Game: his pain, his fear, his anger, his joy as palpable as her own, as though—rather than fighting in separate dimensions—they sat intensely gazing into one another's eyes, paying attention to the most minute changes in expression and body language. Passing the light puck back and forth had only intensified the effect. The pact, Rhyme supposed. She could faintly feel his body's resonance, vibrating in time with the music that rolled through the air and ground, but not nearly the closeness the pact had afforded.

Not nearly the feeling of connection to something bigger than anything.

As if she'd shrunk inwards. A tiny, lonely speck, confined and constrained within her body's boundaries to whatever height her bones chose to grow.

But she hadn't come here to play a Game. Rhyme peeked back and forth. No Noise. Well, other than the Taboo Noise in Sho's Soul.

"Femtogram." Sho was pointing at her. "So much for the mission."

Rhyme held Rhythm Warning between her fingers. "Is friendly fire on?"

"You're out of your vector." He laughed as he spoke. "You won't intercept me."

"Hm." She squeezed her hand over the pin. The familiar sensation: the sound humming through her body, the frequency in the pin matching it, as though she'd held down a piano key and then sung until her voice had slid into tune. The pin booted up. Her older brother's psychs, and the pins that the Wicked Twisters had used, had relied on bodily gestures to activate them: swiping, circling, striking.

Rhythm Warning used a shout.

She'd learned, during the Game, that she hadn't even needed to say anything. Even so much as a purposeful puff of breath outwards would count as an activation. Back then, straining to hear her older brother's words, she'd spent more time blowing out hot air than yelling. But the words she'd wanted to say, the words she'd wanted to be heard, sprang so readily to her tongue that it felt—natural: "Listen to my song!"

She yelled it so loudly that her voice echoed off the effusive sky.

The rumble within her swelled outwards, her marrow hollowed into the inner linings of woodwinds, her intestines transformed into the tubing of brass, the hammers of her joints striking the vibrating strings of her sinews, her skin the tight skein stretched over a drum, all the sound and noise of her life vibrating against the underside of her flesh until the psych activated and the tension sprang free with the rush of the drumstick lifting up and letting the membrane bounce back.

Visible shockwaves in blue and orange emanated from her: sharp, jagged zigzags of decals that appeared two-dimensional to her eyes yet which rippled out in every direction.

Rhyme could only see the sphere's circular shadow, but that didn't stop the projecting sphere from hitting everything it touched. The power rapidly drained away the further the living graffiti traveled as the vibrations spread thin and weak, the rhythm fading out at the edges of her song's reach, sublimed. But she could always add another line to the song: just needed to write one that rhymed.

She hadn't shouted like that in ages, hadn't taken the opportunity to simply scream, to lift her voice and make some noise.

Only once she'd satisfied the cry within her—and Rhythm Warning had run out of juice—did Rhyme look around for Sho while waiting for the pin to reboot. She spotted him near the far side of the combat zone. His crooked grin and ferocious gaze made her feel that blooming warmth from the Instrumentalist pin all the more clearly.

"Fine, for a femtogram!"

As Sho stepped forward, he vanished from view, only to reappear a half-metre closer. A psych of his? She'd watched him disappear in front of Mewsic's doors and apparate again inside to let her in, but she'd assumed he'd just uptuned to the UG and then downtuned back to the RG. Seemed he could teleport across space as well.

"So you can still use psychs." At least he had the courtesy of not sounding surprised. "Making a novel psych's easy. Imagine the operation you want to do to the world's numbers, Fourier transform it into its constituent frequencies, integrate it back together into a cohesive proof that the operator works, and inscribe that proof into the pin."

The silvery blank pin flashed beneath the 'daylight' sky.

"It's all a game of number crunching. As long as you can prove to existence that you can crunch it, it'll get crunched right along the frequencies you've calculated." Skidding to a stop a few paces from her, Sho closed the remaining distance in a single long stride. "The world is made up of numbers."

Rhyme gave herself a few moments to catch her breath. Rhythm Warning had rebooted by now. The simple joy of shouting out the melody—as Sho had described it—brought her to lift the psych once more. Then she halted and tucked the pin back into her jacket instead. "I thought you said that we didn't have to use pins in order to make psychs or use our Imagination."

"Naturally. But we'll need to integrate sigils into the lesson." Rhyme blinked: what did that have to do with pins? "Which makes pins an easier and more useful method for introducing the concept, like comprehending the fundamental theorem of calculus before learning about derivations and integrations." Sho held out his hand with the blank pin once more. "You can sense it. No vibrations. No embedded psych."

In comparison to the richness that hummed through Rhythm Warning, the blank pin remained quiet and dull, even when Rhyme took it into her hand.

"Make any kind of psych you want. Doesn't matter. I won't be grading it on artistry, just whether or not you can even complete the proof." He flicked the brim of his hat upwards. "Though I will be judging you on artistry."

"I wouldn't expect anything less, Professor."

He tapped his boot against the grass. "That's the odd function. I'm Dr. Pin." Rhyme turned the words around over and over in her head but couldn't connect them to any relevant meanings. Before she could ask, Sho motioned at the pin again. "Femtogram."

"Okay, gotta crawl before I walk. Makes sense to me." She gazed at the pin.

Sho nodded. To himself? To her? Just because? No, he didn't do anything just because.

"A journey of a thousand paces begins with a single step. Right. From the basics." The pin rested in her hand, cool and inert. She could imprint anything, huh. "So...the pin is a resistance circuit. It'll limit the Imagination that flows through it into a specific shape. That makes sense. Electrons can theoretically go anywhere, but when they're in a circuit, they continue to flow around the wire." Physics worked something like that, approximately.

"Ninety degrees."

She rolled her thumb along the outer edge. Unlike Rhythm Warning, this pin felt nearly perfectly smooth. Nearly. The barely perceptible imperfections gave it a handmade feel. Had he made this blank pin himself? Giving her his garbage to turn into art, was it? "When you said that I had to Fourier transform it down into the base components, what did you mean by that?"

Though he folded his arms across his chest, she didn't detect anything of irritation or annoyance in his stance or his tone. Rather: a challenge. "Don't be obtuse."

Hm. "You said that the world is made up of numbers. Kaie sees the world in lines of code. Fourier transforms: they're used for audio frequency...decomposition too, right? So. Let's say that I see the world like a song, or like a collection of notes..." Rhyme touched Rhythm Warning on her jacket's inside. "If I want to add something to that melody, I have to figure out the song. And then I have to break it down into the song's different parts."

She envisioned it before her: the music editing software, something amateurish, suitable for a garage band. Heh, now that she considered it, wasn't the industry standard called Reaper? No, wait, wasn't that an audio workstation? Something of a different beast?

Rhyme would Moogle it later and end up on a Wightipedia dive with dozens of tabs open. Something to occupy her time with during class between texting Kaie, solving Sho's latest puzzles, and waiting for night to fall.

For now, however, she imagined the music editing interface. Here, the different tracks on which she could string notes. There, the toolbar with all of its icons. Keyboard, mouse. Her hands rose. She flattened them in the air, fingers poised. Typing on a keyboard: not so dissimilar from playing on a piano. Except this time she'd taken to the piano of her own will, and not of someone else's expectation on her.

"It's funny to imagine myself as trying to convince reality that I'm right," Rhyme confessed. "Or, that the thing that I'm trying to do works. It's a little hard to wrap my mind around."

Sho's lip curled. "Hmph."

Hmm. Wrong track? "But I guess it's not so different from making art, right? You can do whatever you want, and everything is art. Living is art, right. But it'll only impact other people as art if they recognize it as art. And that changes. A hundred years ago, a urinal submitted to a museum might have been rejected. Today, the same urinal submitted to a museum might be accepted, because our perceptions and thoughts on art shift."

The crossing of his arms tensed. His features hadn't changed, but the sense she got from him: entirely unimpressed.

No... If she kept paying attention to his reactions, what was she actually learning? No different from those dogs who learned to 'count up from one' by examining their owners' responses and learning the subtle tells that their owner exuded when they reached the right number of barks, then stop. If she wanted to learn it herself, rather than rely on his approval, she couldn't seek it.

Thus Rhyme turned slightly away and angled the brim of her hat down until she'd obscured him from view.

She could still hear him impatiently tapping his boot against the ground: a sign of him being in the upper half-planes. The sound of crinkling: making another art project? He'd never liked his time wasted, had always done something different, but he'd never incessantly tapped his boot like that. Still, he didn't interject. Just kept up that paper-crinkle sound.

Back to staring at the pin, then. Where did she even start?

If she wanted to convince someone of something, she would figure out that person's values and adhere to them. Words of wisdom and proverbs worked well for this: most people tended to cave to social pressure and longed to view themselves as wise. Reminding them of supposed 'common sense wisdom' usually appealed to the average person on both counts. Never mind that almost every proverb had a sibling that meant the opposite; she just needed to say the right one for whatever outcome she was trying to spin the dial towards.

But to convince existence?

What did that even mean? That she had to act so confidently that she could actually produce a jet of flame from her hand or lasers from her eyeballs that existence would look at her, shrug, and say, "That checks out?"

And how did she inscribe it? Did she need art supplies to draw a design onto the pin? Would the art automatically appear the moment that she rendered the design in her mind? Rhyme would have to get Hideki in on this if so. Why even learn to draw if he could manifest manga with his mind just by making a quick turn into the UG?

No amount of concentrating on the image of fire or lasers changed the silvery sheen.

But not all pins had worked for her in the UG. Not like Neku, who could use nearly anything. Well, if Sho had framed it as a matter of a high enough Imagination, and the Games sought those with high Imagination, and she had lost her Game, then what did that have to say about her Imagination?

No: hope sprang eternal. She had used Rhythm Warning; that kind of psych did work for her. Perhaps, for her first attempt, she would emulate that.

Drawing up her memories—the strings of her sinews, the woodwinds of her bones, the brass of her hollow spaces, the drum of her skin—she pictured the music of her entire body gathering at her chest and then vibrating up to her arm, channeled into the pin within her palm. Her concentration screwed her eyes shut and made her legs tremble. The pressure in her thorax and abdomen grew as she bore down on herself, like a fruit attempting to juice itself. Pour the juice into the pin and pluck the fruit of her labors.

When the vibratory well of her attention had run dry, she let herself crack open her right eyelid, just enough to peek at the pin and whatever design must have blossomed on the surf—

The pin stayed entirely blank.

Rhyme sat down in the combat zone grass. At least the Noise plane's version of MIYASHITA left its greenery dry, warm, and springy. The blades tickled her palms where she leaned back on her hands. The pin, held between her right hand and the ground, formed a circular impression around the creases of her skin.

She gazed upwards at the uniformly lit sky. Not unlike a video game skybox. How far up did it extend? Where did the light come from? How could such pocket dimensions exist?

At least these questions, Kaie might've answered if she asked. But the question of how to imbue a psych into a pin...

Couldn't ask that without drawing his suspicion of what she wanted to know.

And even if she persuaded him that she had merely gotten curious, what benefit would his answer? Sho had more or less given her a step-by-step WightiHow walkthrough for imprinting a pin onto a psych, and yet. Instructions unclear. Imagination caught in ceiling fan.

Patience was a virtue. Slow and steady won the race. Such frustrations seemed uncharacteristic for her.

Frustration? Not just that: tiredness. Exhaustion. Meeting him at midnight, watching him make art. Yes, the artistry fascinated her. Yes, she wouldn't want to miss it, her attempts at understanding his art. But getting so little sleep, and trying to learn things after exhausting herself spinning through cycles of understanding: she had to admit her limits.

Yet... More than that. More than the simple day-to-day exhaustion of not enough sleep. A deeper fatigue, an ache atop her, a looming weight.

Not frustration. The feeling of time, heavy on her back. The weight of a clock's ticking hands holding hers while her skin crawled. Time before she had to choose a college, even if she didn't have a dream to figure out which one to choose. Time before she had to choose a degree to pursue. Time before she had to choose a job. Time before Sho ended up bored. Time before Sho lost interest and ceased his lessons. Time before she had to choose between a potentially unsafe restoration of her entry fee and losing the chance to have it restored, possibly forever.

Slow and steady won the race, but only if the race didn't have a time limit. So long as the tortoise could trundle on while the hare slept, the tortoise could win.

But if the race ended at midnight, and it would take the turtle until dawn to cross the finish line...

Leaning down towards the grass, Rhyme exhaled and watched her breath rustle the grass. An impact, no matter how small. A change in reality, brought about by her actions. A butterfly's wingbeat could torrent a tempest on the other side of the sea.

She could keep calm, reassess, and try again. No need to rush into anything. "In times of need, even a cat's paw will do. So, Sho, I'm asking for a hint."

The low vibrations of Sho's voice rolled through her thoughts like thunder through a valley. "It's not a conviction," he said finally, "but a proof. There's a nonzero probability that anything can happen, that the wave function of local spacetime can collapse into any solution. You can imagine it as changing the probabilities of which collapses are the likeliest. You can't predict the universe, but you can influence the probabilities. This happens in the RG as well the UG. The higher up in vibe you go, the lower the coefficient of resistance to change; the higher the Imagination you have, the greater the coefficient of your capacity to calculate."

Rhyme looked up at him with her chin in her palm.

Sho met her gaze, his pupils now still and comparatively slitted from how blown-out she'd seen them when she'd been managing to work things out. He had a leaf of crumpled paper held against his right arm. Hm. So he wrote with his left hand. Whatever he wrote, she couldn't see the page through this angle.

She mused. Drawing analogies: she'd drawn analogies for Kaie, between Sho's mathematical reasoning and the programming that Kaie could understand. If nothing else, she could draw analogies. "Pushing around a box on different surfaces? Trying to push it on carpet, where the friction's high, and it'll barely budge even if you throw all your force on it. Put it on smooth ice, and you can push something really heavy around easily. Lower planes have a greater friction to change. Higher Imagination means you can push further, but you still need a really high Imagination to push a block where you want it to go if the ground has a really high friction."

"Sure," Sho answered.

"That's why I can use Rhythm Warning in the UG, but not the RG. Okay. That much makes sense." As Rhyme ran her hand over the ground, she felt the grass pop up between her fingers and then immediately bend beneath. "But that doesn't help me figure out how to... What does that have to do with figuring out how to imprint psychs onto pins? Making pins at all?"

Why... Why did she have this pit of frustration, this sense of time's weight gnawing within her?

"Hey, Sho..."

Rhyme listened to the sound of his pencil scratching against the paper. Writing on a thin sheet against her own arm sounded uncomfortable. But what she found uncomfortable, Sho might've found comfortable, even natural. Just what he found natural, found obvious, found such a simple equation might have ended up uncomfortable for her. Uncomfortable, or even...impossible.

"When you say that we need to imagine the psych—"

Ah. There. She'd located the source of the buzzing. Found the fly that had gotten itself caught in the pudding trying to taste its sugar, and now she'd clap her hands around it to squish it even if it meant the pudding exploding between her fingers.

"—is it that we need to be able to dream it up? The way that we have to dream...in order to dream a shape for the future?"

Sho scoffed. The scoff turned into a snicker, opened into a throaty laugh that stripped her skin off like a sandpaper rub. "You're out of your vector! You think your entry fee's removal keeps you from making art? Garbage! Stop thinking there's a single nontrivial solution to this system of equations! You're looking at a twenty-four dimensional space and calling it three-dimensional because you can't figure out how to fit a fourth perpendicular line! There's only one right-hand path—" He threw his hand up towards the heavens, clutching the leaf of paper between his fore- and middle fingers. "—but there are infinite left-hand paths."

His hand crashed through the air downwards with such speed and force that she could hear the wind whistle between his fingers.

"The right-hand path's one-dimensional! There's only a single vector with the same startpoint and endpoint! But even giving yourself just one extra degree of freedom? Even a two-dimensional plane? Now there are infinite vectors between each startpoint and endpoint. Infinite, femtogram." She dipped her head. Infinite. "Some random radian could dream up their psychs. Who gives a digit? You're not congruent to them. You're only congruent to yourself, femtogram!"

Rhyme sat slightly up.

"Doesn't make a difference if no one else thinks your art's art. Doesn't make a difference. Forget imprinting memes and command codes. Those are applications of Imagination, sure, but they're only a subset of the entire transfinite matrix. All those useless yoctograms are just more trash for the heap!"

She pressed her fingers into her cheek. "But you said that I had to prove it—"

He cut in: "Here's a pop quiz: Do one and one have to be convinced that they add together to two?"

Rhyme shook her head. Sho stared her down. She cleared her throat. "No. No they don't."

"Ninety degrees! But if you want to add one and one together, and know that you're correct, then you have to write down the axioms, and you have to write down the proof! The proofs are how you build tools that you know adhere to the truth! Existence doesn't need to be convinced. You need to prove it to yourself so you know that it's the truth."

Her hand pushed into her skin.

"What do we write at the end of a proof?" Sho barked.

"...Quod erat demonstrandum?"

"What else can we write at the end of a proof?"

A quick Moogle search revealed the words that she read out loud in English: "WWWWW. Which Was What We Wanted."

He stabbed his forefinger through the air towards her; the page crinkled and fluttered in his hand.

"Which was what we wanted," Sho repeated. "Which what was you, writing the proof, wanted. To prove it to yourself. Not others. You."

But for all the wrinkles and bends the paper accrued, it didn't change what he'd written on it, whatever he'd written for himself.

"Stop thinking about extraneous exa-amps! You're only congruent to yourself, so find the path that proves it to you. Calculate your own perimeter. Factor out your own darkness. Keep iterating on yourself."

"I'm only congruent to myself," Rhyme echoed quietly.. "Does that mean...I have to be alone?"

Sho's eyes narrowed. "The factor is this garbage? One and two aren't congruent, but they can be part of the same set."

She breathed.

"But that doesn't mean you have to factor 'em in." He gestured to himself. "I know that Myself is a masterpiece. But don't factor me in, either. Work out your own nontrivial solution. It doesn't mean that every possible solution is correct, but there are infinite possible solutions. So factor out yours, femtogram."

Rhyme looked at him. Sho looked at her.

His hand slid into his coat. She couldn't get her palms against her ears in time before the crackle popped: "ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ɢᴀʀʙᴀɢᴇ, ғᴇᴍᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴍ!" Ow. "Golden!" Not ow. He'd flicked the megaphone off. "That means you can make yourself art! So keep factoring iterating!"

As she let her hands fall away from her ears, she observed the imprint that the blank pin had left in the creases of her palm. She squinted down into the grass.

Blank and silvery, but no longer shiny. Dulled over by the dirt of the grass and the sweat of her palm. Not taunting her in its emptiness. Rather: a challenge. Just like Sho's.

She warmed the pin up again in her hand. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Her heartbeat thumped at her throat. "I am garbage, which means I can be art. Okay. I'll..."

His pupils, visible at the corner of her gaze, were wide again, soaking in whatever fraction of photons reflected off of her that they absorbed. She could estimate that number.

"...keep iterating."

Chapter Text

When the black ink has stained half of her forearm in an asymmetric spiral, like a tongue of black flame, Sho rests his thumb against the farthest edge and grins. "This is as far as my own harmonic progression went before the slope of my vector became vertical."

"That's very interesting," she says sincerely, "and I wonder how long it'll be until the slow burn burns through me," she says, just as sincerely.

"Hmph," he responds, his eyes narrowed as he examines her for any signs of the process going wrong, not in protecting her from herself, but in mutually agreed-upon safety. "As long as it doesn't burn you out, first."

Rhyme's found the heat and roughness of his Taboo-infused flesh on hers more tolerable than the warmth and softness of human skin on the places where the ink hasn't reached. She still doesn't like it. But the dislike doesn't make her wince quite so intensely. She lets him inspect her Taboo for longer, both by necessity and by choice. As it grows, so does the perimeter, so does the surface area. He tests her human body underneath. The numbness has spread with the Taboo. She wakes from uneasy naps with a sensation like her hand's gone to sleep, but it never wakes. An unruly phantom existence that only stops writhing when she concentrates on it.

Her hand spends a lot of time in the pocket of her hoodie. Her hand. Hers.

The pain has only sharpened and expanded. But she can count up to four hundred and twenty-eight terms in the Fibonacci consistently, and has reached far higher at times. Her record has capped at sixty hundred sixty-five so far.

Hilarious: one short of poetic significance. But then again, she doesn't need anyone else's significance for her to make her own.

Sho never lingers too long during his inspections, but the sunlike warmth he leaves where he sat on her bed, and the summer-cedar scent that remains where he touched her skin, keeps his presence long after he's gone. Perhaps because Rhyme knows he'll recur. A periodic function. Looping again and again. Doesn't matter if she only sees him for all of ten minutes a day if she'll see him again, and again, and again.

The morning before Rhyme returns to school, her excuses having dried out, Sho delivers the contact lenses that she asked him for. Somehow he managed to find a pair in the exact shade of her irises.

Well, the exact shade that they used to be.

Maybe they will be, again. After the process has completed. His eyes only glow gold when he hits the unique local maximum, when the Taboo breaches his concentration. Perhaps when she learns that much focus, she'll will the Taboo to peel off the backs of her irises and she'll have eyes in blue again. Or maybe she'll will the Taboo to peel off the backs of her irises and she'll have some other color. Whatever color she'll see in the mirror, she'll call it her own, and thus it will be.

The contacts look eerily like her irises on the fluffy white cushion in the box she opens out. As if she plucked her eyeballs from her orbits and tucked them into the pillow with only the pupils and irises showing.

Yet when she fights through the initial discomfort and touches them to her eyes, the hue in the mirror looks...wrong.

Too bright, too blue, too artificial. Even contacts in her exact shade. She'll never have those eyes back. But she doesn't need them. She has her eyes. Beauty in the eye of the beholder. So what if she's trash? Golden. It means she can keep iterating on the work of art called Herself.

Rhyme eats breakfast with her older brother. She keeps the gloves on both hands. With her left hidden in her jacket pocket, she continuously motions with her right, brushes her palm against the table, drums her fingers on the glasses of barley tea he picked up from his part-time job and apple juice he insists that she drink. He asks her about them this time, casually. When she offers her right hand, and he pulls the glove free, her smooth, unblemished, normal fingers wriggle at him. Just gloves. Gloves for the winter chill, and for fashion. Her older brother shrugs. She tucks them back on both hands. Her left forms a victorious fist in her jacket pocket even without her focusing on it.

Good to have done that now, while she still has a smooth, unblemished right hand to do it with.

Her eyes look better, her older brother tells her. Less sick. Infection's goin' away? He'll buy more apples.

More apples? Rhyme tilts her head.

Yeah, he says. More apples. So da doc stays away. Ain't dat what she says? Her voice still sounds pretty bad. He packed some extra apple juice into her bag fo' school too. Wash it down her throat to cool it an' all.

She hugs him—with her arms itchy, with her hand numb, with her eyes burning uncomfortably from the contacts—and she waves, beaming, at him from the doorstep. Only when she's closed the door and walked into the apartment foyer does she stumble into the cement wall, panting, sweat glueing her shirt to her skin under the jacket, the pain so overwhelming she puts her palm over her mouth to hobble down the apartment stairs and vomit in the bushes outside instead of in the building.

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts so much, and all the Fibonacci counting in the world only makes her strangle that pain down temporarily under a cellar so she can pretend she doesn't feel it for brief snatches at a time. It doesn't make it hurt any less.

Rhyme makes it to class. She types a text on her phone one-handed that she's lost her voice, because keeping her tone straightened out from pain for hours sounds—not impossible, because nothing is, but implausible. She doesn't have to do something out of possibility. She doesn't have to do something just because she theoretically can. She does what she wants. What she likes. And as much as she wants and likes to shout out the melody and ask them to listen to her song, she wants and likes to survive the day without everything coming back up in the middle of class.

Her teachers worry about her, but she's always maintained her grades at the top of the class. Their concerns don't sound like the ones she overheard lobbed at her brother when he came down with the flu: "Are you really sick?" or "Aren't you just skipping school?" Their concerns sound like: "Is there anything that we can do?" and "Would you like to rest in the nurse's office for the rest of the afternoon?"

Her classmates don't bother her much other than the class representative reassuring her that she didn't miss any of her cleaning duties and asking her if she got the print-outs.

Rhyme thanks him. By typing it into her phone and showing him. Yes, she has special permission from the teachers to stay at home or visit the nurse's office whenever she needs. No, she didn't get the print-outs. No, no, he doesn't need to blame the assigned student. Yes, she no longer lives at that address. Yes, she'll take another copy now.

Beyond that, the classes tick by quietly. The fingers of her left hand move like five independent worms under her desk.

But her quietness and isolation have followed her for years, so her behavior changes remarkably little other than that she keeps her hand in her pocket. Around three and a half hours after she left home, she asks to be excused for the class; her teacher falls over himself to grant the request.

Climbing up to the rooftop, Rhyme closes the door behind her, pokes around for a few minutes, hmms contemplatively, and turns around to find Sho grinning at her.

Like clockwork. Four hours exactly. She asks to shift the time over so that it will coincide with her lunch period instead. He acquiesces if she balances the equations by chowing through the entire bag of takoyaki from Asia Fantasia he got her on her order. She sits down in the sunlight next to him, holding the bag in her lap as she eats fresh takoyaki with her right while he pushes up her sleeve, pulls down her glove, and examines the encroaching darkness. Her wrist flaps against his palm. When it reaches her elbow, she'll have to figure out a way to tape her arm to her body. Maybe splint it and pretend she broke it.

It needs the UG, Sho tells her. She needs the UG. Perhaps not yet, not while her human fraction of Soul still puts out enough emotion that the Noise fraction of Soul can latch on with its fangs and suck. But that balance is changing every day. Could he leave an Instrumentalist pin in her room? Just in case she needs it and cannot text?

Rhyme meets his gaze.

Such a valuable experiment, he observes with his thumb stroking the perimeter of the tattoo, with data that he doesn't want to lose. Another Taboo that he gets to witness from start to completion. A different left-hand path from his. Heh. And he still wants her to make him an RNS when he becomes Composer.

Okay, she says. When he comes to see her afterschool, they'll pick a hiding place for the pin.

When he's about to step away, Rhyme asks him to wait, for just a moment. Sho watches her, perplexion written into his features. She lowers his arms to his sides, smooths out a nice wide part of his coat's jacket, and then—without touching any of his skin—leans against him, just for a second, to breathe in that summer scent. Would he mind making that sigil for her? She feels caked in sweat, and unlike at home, she can't strip and clean herself off.

Rhyme can draw the sigil herself. But without the capacity to uptune to the UG, she can't activate it. Though she'll find drawing the sigil tough with a single hand.

Sure. Does she want him to draw it for her?

She shakes her head. But she does want him to check her work afterwards. With his black spraypaint can, Rhyme struggles to keep her hand steady. Slowly she psssshes her art into the cement. Her art. Hers. With her symbols, and no one else's. A circle of animals because she wanted one, and the animals she decided upon. Sho's triangular symbols for fire, air, water, and earth, because he'll have to understand the sigil in order to activate it. Not a single simple circle with sprawling lines like his, but a shape all her own. Interlocking circles, intersecting lines, interdependent spirals. She explains her adaptation of the design as she paints, then stands in the middle.

Sho, straddling the UG and the RG at once, sets the sigil aglow. The graffiti bursts into flame and curls at the edges where it smolders. The abrupt stickiness of her skin makes her jump. The scent of summer envelopes her. On her body. On her clothes.

Rhyme buries her nose in her elbow and breathes in the fragrance. Cedar. Pine. Grass. The smell of the sun.

Anything else? he asks. The warmth from the sigil matches the warmth in his voice.

She rests her head against his shoulder for just a second. A moment of steeling her resolve for the rest of the day.

If she needs to break escape velocity quickly, he notes, she can text him, and he'll snatch her out with the Instrumentalist pin. He huffs at her look. Not from pity. She can't get caught with the Taboo. Can't let the RG scrutinize her when she can't even uptune herself and leave.

Rhyme laughs. She's teasing. She knows by now. She knows that he wouldn't do anything out of pity. That's why she can lean on him for a moment longer, like this.

He leaves. The lunch period rolls around. Rhyme managed to avoid the Wicked Twisters until now, but Fret finds her first, a man on a mission. All of them have blown up her phone with worries and well-wishes. She never asked for any of it. Shoka and Rindo don't stray too far behind. What happened? Did she get that sick? Ohh, she can't talk right now. Lost her voice. Dang. That sucks. Oh, but she can type, right? Huh? One-handed? Something wrong with her other hand? Oh, yeah, not trying to be overwhelming. Does she want to go to karaoke? She doesn't have to sing! But, maybe, if she wants to just vibe with her friends, know that they're all worried about her, that they all care, that she has a place with them whether or not she's got her voice or anything else.

Rhyme thanks him. She truly, sincerely, genuinely does. No, no karaoke: she'll go home and get some rest. But they're free to keep inviting her, if they want.

Rindo nods. He gets it. Even if she never goes out with them, the fact that they invite her, and mean it, means something to her in the here and now. She looks at him. He looks at her with an encouraging smile; she can correct him if he's said something wrong. But he'll keep inviting her to outings. And if she does choose to come, she'll always have a place.

In response: she smiles. She can't hold it for long, not even with her counting the terms of the Fibonacci up and up, but she tries, a little longer, for them.

Shoka doesn't say anything for a moment. Just studies her, peeks at her phone. If anyone could smell the Taboo on her, the ex-Reaper could.

But then Shoka turns her phone around to show Rhyme. A keyboard with a different arrangement of button sizes. If Rhyme wants to type one-handed for one reason and finds it hard to do with the default, why not try swapping to this keyboard? If she just wants to text them, they can text back all day, whenever she wants. Not like she or Fret pay attention in class anyway. Rindo opens his mouth and closes it. Shoka nudges him in the side, and he blushes and smiles sheepishly at her. Fret n'awwws and slings his arms around them both.

Nagi, too, chimes in over their group chat. Even with her distance, she offers her availability over text, for any reason. She has a wealth of knowledge to provide concerning accommodating temporary losses of vocal ability. That which she does not know, she would gladly help research. Rhyme need not see herself as alone. For she need not act alone unless she chooses to. No shame in acting alone, and neither shame in acting alone for a time and joining in once her time alone has passed. She need not always spend time with her friends to deserve a place among them; she has it, always, whether she takes it or not.

Rhyme texts back. Using the keyboard that Shoka pointed out for her. That she appreciates them. So much. And that when she wants to spend time with them, she'll slot right into the space they've left for her.

'Til then.

After school Rhyme goes straight home. At least the streets between her school and her apartment wind through roads littered with the kinds of bars that allow daydrinking. The gutters splash with highballs from mostly older drinks, but few people bat their lashes about her leaning over with her hands on her knees and heaving. Maybe the Instrumentalist pin would do her good, for spraying on sigil to clean herself if nothing else.

But even if she took up the Instrumentalist pin, what would she do? To try to activate psychs in the UG when she can barely go for a class period without having to excuse herself to the washroom just to lock herself in a stall and let herself grip her left hand, her skin prickling and stabbing from existing in the RG?

Sounds dangerous. Too dangerous. She'll wait until she has enough control over herself. Even as her pain worsens every passing second of every passing day.

Instead Rhyme hides away in her room for now and towels the sweat off her skin drop by drop. Breathes in, breathes out, gives herself the time and space, and then: considers her phone.

Back before all of this, months and months ago, she took the time to ask the Wicked Twisters about whether or not they felt like outsiders. None of them did, except—arguably—the one she had expected it the least from, Fret, who at least indicated that he didn't know where he'd end up in life, while everyone else had a path—at least immediately after high school—figured out.

But Shoka, despite being an ex-Reaper, felt connected. Rindo, despite being busy with internships, felt connected. Nagi, despite being physically distant in college, felt connected.

And Fret, as well. Fret, at the end of it, despite his uncertainty, felt connected.

When Rhyme probed, they all replied, but Nagi's words now bounce the hardest through her head. The exact wording of the wisdom eludes her, because Nagi doesn't speak in proverbs, doesn't speak in quotes except, occasionally, from that game she liked or from The Art of War. Nagi speaks with her own heart. As she spoke then: that despite the physical distance, she chooses, deliberately, to partake in activities with which she and the Wicked Twisters can bond even when far away. Deliberate choices, each and every day, to close that distance.

Deliberate choices, yes. She reaches for her phone.

Lying on her back under the blanket and hoping that it won't feel too unclean before Sho's next inspection, she scrolls through her contacts. A deliberate choice to close that gap. She hovers her thumb over the name, and then clicks. Taps out a message one-handed. Apologizes for the length of time since her last message. Explains that she got sick recently. Something that causes her...much pain. Something that she will not likely recover from anytime soon. Not an excuse, merely an update on her life. He doesn't need to worry or feel sorry for her.

She's...

She's happier than she has been in a very long time.

Kaie texts back almost immediately. A flurry of emoticons—from :D to :) to XD—awaits her. He assures her that she never has to worry about how long it takes her to respond back. No one ever accused him of being in a hurry. Whenever she does have a chance to text, he will gladly return and speak to her. And if she does not have time, then he will wait. The task of archiving all phenomena will stretch on for the rest of eternity, and any help that she chooses to give, at any point, he will only appreciate and never take for granted.

Rhyme perks up. Speaking of his archive, she has some things that she can contribute! As long as he promises not to ask her from where she discovered the information. She will clearly delineate the facts from the speculation. Would he accept that?

He admits his nervousness about uncited information. But, perhaps he can add it as information notably needing citation, so that he can replace it in due time. But best to have the information in the archive, and then paint over it again in the future, than not to have it at all.

Well, Rhyme tells him, she'll tell him where she got it from at some point. She just needs to wait for certain things to happen first. But she won't leave him wondering forever.

In that case, Kaie answers, he'll gladly take her information, whatever she wishes to share.

And she will tell him. As soon as things have stabilized. As soon as the Taboo has ingrained so deeply in her Soul that removing it would mean erasure. As soon as it reaches the lock on her entry fee and devours it from the inside out. Not for her dreams, but so that her body is wholly hers again. Because she can contribute to the archive, in the here and now, not to fulfill Kaie's dreams, or to fulfill her own, but because she finds the conversation fun, and because she wants to share, and she doesn't need another reason to do something she enjoys.

So, his archive at present contains much information on the higher-level concepts. But she's found out some juicy details about the machinations of some psychs that have technically gone out of style since the combat zones evolved. Before the Shinjuku Reapers arrived in Shibuya and imposed their version of the Game, the combat zones contained objects: cones, cars, even lucky blue panda gachapon for the very few Players who could spot them, occasionally carried in by decadraven. It seems so obvious in retrospect: just as the Noise can straddle the RG and UG, the Noise plane can straddle the RG and UG as well, the resonance in objects' RG selves also harmonizing with the plane. In the UG alone—which by definition does not straddle the RG—Players pass through such objects. But in the Noise plane? Suddenly the Players can interact with the RG objects just as easily.

What happened in the Shinjuku Game? The combat zones have become simultaneously less limited and more limited. The original Noise planes—at least, under the previous rules—had to have the capacity to straddle multiple planes, or the Noise wouldn't have existed across two different combat zones at the same time.

But in the Shinjuku Game? No need. Players all remain within the same combat zone, no longer vibrating on a specific frequency like under the previous rules, but rather operating on a band of frequencies wide enough to ensure that even non-Players like Sh—backspace backspace—Mr. Minamimoto could engage as a team together. Thus, instead of harmonizing with RG objects, the pins and psychs changed to generate purely UG versions of such objects. Which, in turn, allowed them to generate objects that didn't exist in the UG, the psychs apparently becoming more and more fantastical over time. Even massive golden pigs, from what the Wicked Twisters had told her!

This earned her a series of X)s and XDs.

But yes, she continued: it intrigued her, how the RG and UG had become relatively more split in the interim.

Ah! Kaie texted back with many more :Ds and XDs in turn. Excellent observations. Indeed. Many instances of the UG and the RG intersecting had ended up shelved under Game Master Shiba. Shibuya's Composer had allowed the RG and UG to intersect in sometimes much messier ways and merely touched up memories willy-nilly as needed to keep knowledge of the UG within the realm of conspiracy theories and folk tales. But as time has marched on, it has become increasingly difficult to do so. That which humans can be brought to believe they didn't see becomes many times more complicated when camera footage captures the event for posterity. And although Composers and more powerful entities can change, for example, security footage quite easily as well, it becomes significantly more challenging.

Even a collective crowd of thousands of humans can have their memories edited appropriately in a short time, especially if they cannot witness the event again.

But if one of those people uploads a video to social media, and that video ends up downloaded and copied, the Composer would not merely have to alter or corrupt the original video, but also every single copy, with all of the data stored separately. It could quickly spin out of control. And while such incidents have occurred and have ended up contained with diligent work, the difficulty of such containment rises every year. One can pass off many things as urban legends, but frequent videos of entire cars regularly levitating and knocking across the Scramble—caught from multiple angles—would...cause problems.

Not only Shibuya, but many other wards have made similar changes. Shibuya's Composer stands out as someone who held out for amongst the longest.

Yet, in much the same way that most of Shibuya has folded under the pressures of ShibuPay and begin to take the electronic payment option, time moves on, and the UG and RG become more distant. Many previously accepted interactions such as Reaper Creeper have had deliberate campaigns to make them unpopular. Even if Players can manipulate objects in the RG with their Imagination and still theoretically play Reaper Creeper, the deliberateness of such interactions from the RG said has gotten purposefully suppressed. Even the Shinjuku Reapers had much stricter rules of engagement than the Shibuya ones. Yes, many of the Reapers broke those rules, but those Reapers have since undergone punishment.

Rhyme grips her left hand with her right. So the RG and UG have become more separated. Is the RG under greater...scrutiny not to mix with the UG?

Hmm, under scrutiny? Not necessarily, Kaie responds cheerfully. The rules have changed and will likely continue to tighten. But even as the UG and RG separate in some ways, they will develop new ways to come together! Such as through the RNS, or the fact that UG Players can interact with the RG internet to look things up, even if they view a limited version of the internet served without the capacity to post or interact. For now. Many of the 'older' forms of communication between them have fallen under greater scrutiny, certainly, but Rhyme has no need to fear, given that she would not do anything to break any rules. X)

The phone falls from her grip and onto her chest. She hears—and feels—it buzzing against her chin where Kaie has continued to text her, but for a few moments she simply lies there and stares at the ceiling. She's made this choice. She's made this choice. Her choice. Rhyme's choice. Whatever happens, she can only keep walking forward.

When she makes the RNS for Sho, she'll figure out a way for Players to post to the internet as well. She'll develop tools for safe interactions between RG and UG. She has that capacity. And if she doesn't, she can hone it.

Then she'll finally prove Fret right. The woman who did hack the UG.

Lifting her phone from her chest, Rhyme reads Kaie's texts. He welcomes her to text him at any time, and he'll do his best to entertain her or cheer her as she wants, given her sickness—and even if she had no sickness. Even when she recovers. Whether she has information for him about the archive or not, or whether she simply wants to chat. He finds her quite delightful to talk to. And he would happily attempt to take her mind off of things if he can. He has many stories to share, in this little interaction between the UG and the RG.

She smiles. Mm. Once the Taboo has taken over fully, she'll tell him. She'll tell him everything. She'll tell him carefully, so that she can ascertain his feelings and whether or not he'll turn on her if she tells him. But if he accepts her, then...

For now: Rhyme texts him more often. She has learned so much from studying with Sho. From making her own psychs, sigils, Noise. They have much archival content to discuss.

And... They have much outside of that, too. Throughout the days. He worries about her texting him in the wee morning hours, but she admits that she has insomnia, that the pain keeps her up at night and that she catches sleep in shorts bursts when she can, when she naps out of exhaustion. What about him? Oh, he rests at very bizarre times as well. He will inform her if he cannot speak with her at a given moment, but otherwise he welcomes for her to call him and bug him if he does not answer right away, because he very much wishes to do so. She asks him about Shinjuku, about Tsugumi and Hishima, about his everyday life. He asks her about school, about her older brother, about her college, about her dreams, about her quest to restore her entry fee.

Oh, that? She... She has some avenues that she is exploring. But whether or not she restores her entry fee, she's walked forward as a person, one step at a time, on her own sole. Whether or not she restores her entry fee, she'll keep moving forward. Not passively bopping along with the passage of fate, but actively finding her own vector. Her vector. Hers.

Kaie is very, very proud of her. :)

Rhyme takes to texting him throughout the day. It makes the hours at school pass by a little more tolerably. It still hurts. It still hurts so much. She still declines the Wicked Twisters each time. No to pop-up shops, no to boardgame cafés, no to escape-the-room games, no to movies, no to just hanging out. She has college to study for, she tells them; they awwww and tell her that she already took her entrance exams and that she can senior slumps if she wants, but they respect her choices, and that makes her, little by little, warm up to the idea.

Little by little, her life is easing. Not the pain. Never the pain. But...her life. Yeah.

Little by little, day by day, it becomes easier for her to use her voice without fearing the crack of pain tremoring through it.

Because the person she talks to most—outside of Sho's constant visits—gives her all the space she needs to, to voice her thoughts in text, without any concern of having to concentrate more than just tapping out messages at her own, slow, steady pace. Kaie notes the slowness and tells her to take her time, and his. Notes the one-handed typos, and doesn't tell her not to text him, doesn't tell her not to rush, just trusts her to decide what's best for her.

And, in having that space, and in having that time, she also has the opportunity...to remind herself how to be.

It hurts. It hurts so bad.

But it helps. To have good friends. And Kaie... Kaie is a good friend.

Chapter Text

Neku getting shot shortly after her Game had taken precedence over anything else ongoing at the time. The emotions had exploded. Shiki's grief: waiting at the statue of Hachiko each and every day, watching, scanning the crowd. Her older brother's frustration: for having failed to protect his partner right before his very eyes and for having no way of knowing where Neku had gone, despite how much he'd tried to tear the city up. He'd even gone back to Mr. Hanekoma's café, to the saint of Shibuya. But WildKat had—it hadn't disappeared, per se, but it had changed. Rhyme hadn't ever visited in person, not during the Game, so she couldn't have said either way. Maybe only denizens of the UG could see the sign labelled WildKat.

Because now the café's signage read Mystery Circle. Quite apt, given that Mr. Hanekoma had mysteriously disappeared.

Rhyme would have found the entire situation amusing, in that poetic irony sense, if she hadn't had to witness her older brother pounding on the doors until his fists had bled. She'd held him afterwards. Held him, hugged him, promised him that he hadn't 'failed' in protecting Neku, that Neku wouldn't have wanted him to blame himself. Not like Rhyme had really known Neku all that well. Only knew him for a handful of conversations during the Game, and then seen him on a couple of outings by Hachiko afterwards, where he'd mostly focused on his partners.

But if her older brother had entrusted him with so much, she could say that 'common sense' wisdom with some probability.

Curious how after all of that, her older brother still had retained a high opinion of Mr. Hanekoma, who had used him and then abandoned him as soon as he'd made himself certain of Shibuya's safety.

Eventually the initial fiery explosion had faded and the long, cold, three-year winter had set in. Shiki still waited every day at Hachiko—though she allowed herself to take trips out of Shibuya at times—and redoubled her efforts into what became Gatto Nero. To follow their dreams with Eri. Neku would have wanted her to, she'd say. Her older brother hadn't stopped searching for Neku, not even for a second, but he'd left their parents' house and started up on odd jobs. To stop trying to meet his folks' expectations. Neku would have wanted him to, he'd say.

And the Game had become something of a taboo topic, other than reminiscing about Neku. So much of an impact he'd left on them, for having known one for a week for the other for about two and a half.

So Rhyme had waited. Focused on learning to live on a small budget alongside her older brother.

The farmers' markets, the friendships with shopkeepers around the city, the freelancing. Reassuring him about his guilt. Hugging him. Beaming for him. Doing whatever she could for his peace and happiness, to protect his smile.

And then the second Game had happened. The Wicked Twisters' Game. With it: Neku's triumphant return to Shibuya. Her older brother and Shiki greeting him again after all of that time. The Wicked Twisters' willingness to discuss the Game, and their desire to, open and honest with one another, to work through the mental anguish that they'd experience, to sit beside one another around the campfire, to take off the tourniquets hastily applied during the Game, to slowly clean out and then bandage up each others' wounds, and to walk forward, one day at a time. Airing out their traumas. Going forward, hand in hand. And with Rhyme, too.

The collective breath that Shibuya had held during Neku's absence had released, and with it all the tension.

When she had ever so briefly brought up that her Game, too, had left its Players with deep-set scars, the Wicked Twisters had turned to her and invited her to talk about her own problems. If she had any.

After all, she was her big brother's little sister, and that made her an honorary Wicked Twister, or something like that.

The Wicked Twisters hadn't even heard of entry fees, much less comprehended what they could have lost. When Rhyme had told them about the concept, Shoka had teased that the Wicked Twisters had had entry fees temporarily taken during their Game. Some of them, anyway, like Nagi, who had lost access to EleStra, the most important thing in her life. Nagi had blanched.

Rhyme had smiled. Had Shoka meant it as a joke? Or had Shoka meant it seriously, to compare a video game to her dreams?

Well, she hadn't known Nagi that well, then, either. Perhaps Nagi would have lost EleStra as her entry fee, given how Nagi had clapped her hands together and sent up a grateful prayer to the heavens that she hadn't lost EleStra permanently.

None of them had known that she'd lost her entry fee. None of them had tried to make light of her explanation of her Game. None of them had intended to slip the knife between her ribs and gouge out her insides.

The Wicked Twisters turned out more than willing to inform her all about what she had missed during their Game. Such a different Game from the one she had played, though she hadn't played very much of her Game at all. Still, it had surprised her. Even during the Game, it had surprised her to hear of Minamimoto's survival, when her older brother had always spoken about him in the past tense, had outright laughed about how that guy had gotten squished under some garbage after all of his obnoxious obsession with trash.

At the time, Rhyme had concentrated on the fact that Shibuya needed saving, and the prospect of...taking part in saving it. Unravelling what this 'Minamimoto'—what this 'Tabooty'—guy had said. Realizing that, far from the nonsense that her older brother and Neku had claimed shortly after the Game, his words had made sense. Turning that sense into something that Kaie could put into action. Witnessing her contributions leading to Kaie's analytical screen transforming from dull whites to vibrant hues as the Souls registered reawakened, Shibuya's colors filling back in.

The Wicked Twisters had commended her for her cool head during the entire apocalypse. How she'd beamed the entire time. How her lighthearted approach had eased them. She'd really felt like a veteran of the Game to them, unperturbed, tranquil, serene.

If they hadn't known any better, Fret had said cheerfully, she would've looked like she was treating the whole like a game? Ehh? Get it? Get it? Like Game? Aww yeah!

Like a game, huh. Her heart had raced. From the adrenaline, from the danger, from the pressure, from the...fun.

She left that part out.

Curious about the person who had come up with the formula without which Shibuya would have remained dull and Soulless forever, Rhyme had inquired.

Her older brother's opinion of Minamimoto hadn't shifted. Belonged in the garbage then, belonged in the garbage now. Oh, but Neku's had, at least a little bit: not nonsensical, just hard to understand. Neku had trusted Minamimoto's words enough to have dictated them to her older brother, just so that Rhyme could have looked over them. Neku, who had laughed about 'Pi-Face' and 'the Grim Heaper' before getting shot again, now gave her a neutral smile when she asked him.

Minamimoto? Neku had held his shoulder. Minamimoto... Cared enough about the city to have given the Wicked Twisters the solution for Shibuya Syndrome, for the Reverb. Gotten less self-obsessed enough to have allowed the Wicked Twisters the starring role in the operation rather than trying to do everything himself. Learned enough about working with other people to have saved some Shibuya Reapers—dismissing them as trash in the same breath—for no personal gain whatsoever.

His Reaper friend, Coco—the same Coco who had shot and killed him? Yes, the very same, he'd responded mildly, who had also become one of his closest allies—had confirmed that. Minamimoto had shown up to erase the Noise surrounding her, spout some stupid numbers, and leave like a huge jerk. Not that she had seriously needed his totez obnox help, duh.

And the Wicked Twisters had observed him bailing Kariya out.

Koki Kariya: the Reaper who had summoned the shark Noise that had erased her, who had rescued the Wicked Twisters from the Shinjuku Reapers' machinations, who had held off the Plague Noise long enough for Operation: Awakening to have worked, who had played a major role in convincing Uzuki to help Shibuya and thus getting the Game Master to back down, who had admitted that he would've been boned if Minamimoto hadn't stepped in, made some egotistical remarks, insulted the Shibuya Reapers, and gone on to the next street to compact all that rapidly multiplying Noise into the trash.

Minamimoto had had the power to erase all of that Noise by himself, really. Coco, Kariya, and Uzuki hadn't made much of a dent. But he'd saved them anyway. And not because he'd expected anything else, it seemed, because they hadn't seen hide nor hair of him since the Game had ended.

The Wicked Twisters hadn't lost hope. And they had even more stories about Minamimoto. Rindo had hung back at first, claiming that Minamimoto hadn't exactly cooperated with them during the last day, but even then he'd confessed that he wouldn't mind seeing the guy around again, theoretically. Just wanted him to quit insulting them. And not...abandon them again. He could deal with the funny math words, but he wouldn't deal with someone popping in and out of his life on convenience.

Shoka, too, hadn't had much positive to say. Someone that unreliable? Hard pass. Plus, nothing Minamimoto had said ever made any sense. She had the impression that even if she tried to impress him, he'd just roll his eyes. Not that she would.

Though she did mention something that had perked Rhyme's ears up. When Shoka had approached him during the first week of the Game and demanded to know about him, Minamimoto had suggested a trade: his secrets, in exchange for hers.

Shoka had brought it up in exasperation, but to Rhyme, it had implied something else.

That Minamimoto had a willingness to share his secrets. So long as he thought it worth his time. Not unknowable, per se. Not like Mr. Hanekoma. Though Rhyme supposed that she could've learned his three sizes, from what Shiki had said.

On the other hand, Fret and Nagi had walked away with a different impression. According to Nagi and Fret, Minamimoto had more or less babysat them during the entire first week. He'd vanished from their sides whenever they went out and about. But he must have stuck somewhere close by: he'd show up anytime they popped into battle, any time they messed up a puzzle too many times, any time they entered a restaurant. Guy had really liked his melon cream soda.

Oh, yeah, Fret had noticed so many things about his 'Mina-man,' and Nagi had observed others about 'Lord Minamimoto.'

How 'Mr. Minami' had gotten totally excited about that virtual Hachiko thingy in TOKYU PLAZA, like nearly adorably so. How he was crazy good at arcade games, like better than Nagi, Rindo, and Fret combined. How he'd agreed with TOWER RECORDS' motto and even told 'em what kind of music he'd liked: stuff that shook the heart, or something like that, so, like, rock and stuff? How he had some kind of affection for Mark City, but said that he hadn't cared about it in the RG, whatever that meant. How he'd never been to SHIBUYA STREAM before, which, like, whaaaat, how could someone have lived in Shibuya and not been there since it'd opened in 2019? How he'd just...have fun with them.

Yeah. Fun. For all of his gruffness, and all of his impatience, and all of his insults, he'd just...look at music records with them. Play arcade games. Stop for ice cream. Shop for threads.

Respond to Fret's math puns with his own. 'Sign' Nagi's stuff by graphing a 'sine' wave on it. Enjoy the moment.

What about stuff related to the Game? Rhyme had asked.

Yeah, that too! How he'd jumped in front of him to protect him from wayward Noise on multiple occasions. How he'd brought out healing pins when Rindo had asked him to use them, even if he'd insult his 'zeptograms' every time he had to use them. How he'd never give them the answers, but just snap at them that they could do better, and they could have. How he'd encouraged them to test out their powers and to push their Imaginations to the limits, even though he'd claimed to have only had interest in Replay's power. How he'd let them dress him up in whatever threads they'd chosen even if he'd laugh at them for being so zetta unaesthetic or call the wackiest things so zetta sexy.

How he'd once brought out a pin he'd been supposedly saving for a special occasion...only to pull out a freaking croaky panic pin with some goofy cartoon frog on it!

How he'd never skipped a beat. How he'd spring them out of any danger. How he'd let them get themselves into trouble, trusting them to their own devices, but always get them out of it if they needed him. How he'd—

Except for those times, Rindo had interrupted rudely, that Minamimoto hadn't joined in fights, causing Rindo to Replay. Oh, sure, Minamimoto would join in the second time around, because he'd somehow figured out that Rindo had traveled back in time, just like that. But what if Replay hadn't worked, and Minamimoto had let all of them die?

Fret had countered: had his Rindude ever actually seen any of the Wicked Twisters get erased in bad ends like that?

Rindo had frowned. No... He hadn't, but... But it would've happened without Replay activating.

Nagi had adjusted her glasses. Did Lord Rindo know that for certain? Lord Minamimoto hadn't allowed any of them to face erasure, to her knowledge.

Rindo had sputtered. Yes, he was sure of it! At the end of the first week, Susukichi had been about to... Okay, maybe sometimes he'd just assumed that they'd bite it and anxiety had made him jump back in time! But still! Just because they hadn't seen it, didn't mean he hadn't!

Fret and Nagi had leaned forward. Neither of them doubted him. But Mr. Minami had totally been right about Replay, right?

Indeed, Lord Minamimoto had correctly deduced the ability's existence and need to recharge, had he not? Not once had Lord Minamimoto placed them in insurmountable danger whenever Replay had exhausted its power for the day.

Rindo had squinted at them, his face pale. Shoka had stood up from the SPICY CURRY DON table. Her Rinrin rarely if ever brought up those alternative timelines. If he'd taken the time to say something about it, he must've been serious. So if Nagi and Fret could quit simping for some guy just because he looked like that Lord Tomo-ninny, or whatever, maybe they could all walk away from this conversation with their dignity still intact.

Rhyme had quietly sat forward. One more question, she'd requested, and they could move on.

Rindo had nodded. Shoka had relented and sat back on, but glared at Rhyme as though she'd just given her boyfriend pickles when he'd clearly asked for none.

Rhyme had measured her words. "You know, Neku told me that Minamimoto had gotten erased during my Game. Did he ever mention anything about how he'd come back?"

The Wicked Twisters had exchanged glances. Shoka had scoffed. "Even Reapers can't come back from getting erased, Reverb or no Reverb. You sure he got 'erased?' Maybe he just bailed and let people think he got erased like the loser he is. 'Deuces, dummy, I'm outta here.'"

Rhyme had shaken her head. No, Neku and her older brother had seen his corpse under a vending machine. Had looted it, actually, stealing his hat from his still-warm body.

Shoka had scoffed even harder. "A body? Then he didn't get erased. Mystery solved." She'd leaned back in the booth and kicked her feet up. "Next we can solve the mystery of where we're getting dessert from."

While Fret had suggested Cutie☆Pies, and Rindo had suggested the sweets menu at Asia Fantasia, and Shoka had shot back with Udagawa Parfait, and Nagi had gone to bat for Cutie☆Pies as well, Rhyme had...pondered. Because while her older brother and Shiki might have well mistaken a 'dead' body under a vending machine for erasure, Neku had...sounded very confident when he'd talked about Minamimoto having come back. Or, more accurately, having been brought back.

Another mystery circle around a wildcat. Hmm.

Rhyme had embarked on her quest by bringing it up idly with Shiki. She'd couched it in the form of asking him about Gatto Nero: Fret had mentioned that Minamimoto had particularly liked some of her threads. The asymmetrical jeans and the zippered shirt. Shiki had laughed about the fun fact about this strange garbage man she'd heard a little about, who sounded like a real jerk based on what Shoka and Rindo had said. And so Rhyme had casually continued the conversation. Speaking of the garbage man's fashion, didn't Neku own some of his clothing? Oh, the Gatito stuff, back from the Game? Replicas. He had thread replicas from Higashizawa, Konishi, even Kariya and Uzuki, and a replica of Rhyme's pendant, too.

Her hand had closed around the pendant she kept tucked under her shirt. Did Shiki mean...another copy of the pendant? Not a unique item, after all.

No, no, a replica of Rhyme's pendant. The Gatito-branded tag had called it Sis's Pendant.

Rhyme had giggled it off. Sis's Pendant. A replica copy of her own. Gatito, who had replicas of threads from all kinds of Players, all sorts of Reapers, that had ended up in Neku's possession. Rhyme could have been overthinking it. Could have connected dots into constellations, when the constellations burned light-years away as entirely disparate stars. But: CAT. WildKat. Cat Street. Even Ha-neko-ma.

...Gatito.

Food for thought. Catnip for thought, in this case.

Still, Rhyme had asked again; didn't Neku have a hat that he'd stolen from Minamimoto's body? Out from under a vending machine?

Shiki had giggled. Oh, that ratty old thing. Yes. What about it?

Shrugging, throwing out an aside question about what Neku had done with it, Rhyme had gotten to business: had Shiki seen the body get erased? Turn into static? Go kssssh into the air?

Shiki had poked her forefinger against her philtrum in thought. No, she hadn't. Why?

Oh, Rhyme had just gotten curious about how Neku could've stolen his hat if the garbage man had gotten erased, nothing more. Curiosity killed the cat and all that. So, anyway, how had preparations for next season's collection been going?

Hm. She'd have to question Neku after all. And Neku had a much higher likelihood of letting it slip to her older brother than Shiki would. Not that Rhyme had a problem with her older brother finding out, exactly. But her older brother hated Tabooty. Didn't even hate the Reapers who had gotten her erased nearly as much as he hated Tabooty. And Rhyme just...didn't want to worry him.

She had no interest in Minamimoto himself.

No... If he really had brought himself back from erasure, something that even longtime Reaper Shoka had claimed impossible, then Minamimoto's story could hold the key for bringing back other impossible things.

It could all end up in a wild goose chase. But she could try. For the first time in the years since her Game, she had a possible lead.

And so, presently, Rhyme tagged along with Neku to Nishimura Drugs, where he'd gone to pick up his prazosin prescription. Therapy had really lessened his nightmares, but they'd still cropped up more often than he'd liked, and he hadn't wanted to accidentally hurt Shiki or anything like that. The pills had helped with the rest. He dreamed more frequently than he had nightmares, now, and the nightmares that he did have passed by peacefully, no longer waking him shouting and trembling in the middle of the night while Shiki soothingly grounded him, promising him that he wasn't in Shinjuku anymore, that he wasn't in the UG, that he didn't have to worry about Noise attacking him, that everything would be okay.

Rhyme beamed. "I'm really happy for you, Neku."

Neku nodded. "Me too." He held his own shoulder. "You know, it's...still a little weird for me to talk about that so openly. Thanks for listening, Rhyme. It's all thanks to you, my partners, my therapist, and everyone else that I've gotten this far. Thank you. If you need anything, I'm here for you, too."

She interlaced her fingers behind her back, let her itchy arms squeeze in against her sides, and waited patiently as the pharmacist brought out his pill bottles and confirmed his name and date of birth. The pharmacist called him sweetie and congratulated him on staying so healthy, speaking to him as if she personally knew him. And perhaps she did.

After all, Neku hoarded friends, even when he didn't mean to.

On the way back from TOKYU HANDS, she popped the question. About the hat. Minamimoto's hat. The one that he'd lifted from his body under a vending machine.

Sure. What about it?

Well, the Wicked Twisters have been talking about Minamimoto, here and there, so Rhyme had remembered it.

Oh, yeah, he still had it. If Minamimoto ever wanted it back, Neku'd give it to him. Why?

No, that hadn't been her question. Actually, she'd meant to ask about Minamimoto himself.

Yeah, what was up?

Well, Rhyme mused, Neku had told her that he'd gotten erased, right? But how had he looted it off of Minamimoto's body if it had gotten erased? Something... Something about it bothered her.

She wouldn't tell him. But even with her Soul trapped in the pin—because neither her older brother nor Neku had bothered to summon her from it after Tigris Cantus's erasure—she'd sensed it. Something...off. Some kind of, almost, definite wrongness. The same something that she'd tasted during the battle with Tigris Cantus. The same something that she'd tasted throughout the Shibuya River. A true darkness. A consuming darkness. A darkness that spread like shadow and stained like ink.

And there, in that room, so concentrated that her Soul had shivered from those reverbated vibrations, even louder than a sound that shook the air—a voice that shook the heart. A voice so loud it could wake her up, shout and wake her up—

Rhyme? Something up?

Huh?

Had she heard his explanation? Neku had answered her question. Was she okay? Did she need a minute? He understood if she needed a minute. He needed minutes all the time. No biggie.

No, she'd just...gotten a little lost in thought. Nothing more. Could he repeat what he'd said, though?

Sure. When Neku had grabbed the hat off of Minamimoto's body, he'd assumed that Minamimoto had gotten erased, but no, he hadn't been erased yet.

Oh. Rhyme glanced downwards: Shoka'd been right after all... She thanked Neku for the information. So he hadn't gotten erased.

Neku laughed. Oh no, Minamimoto had definitely ended up erased, just not at that moment.

She blinked at him.

Coco had told him. He'd, well... He'd spent a lot of time with Coco in Shinjuku, and they'd talked about...many things. He didn't know what Rhyme had heard from Beat, but Coco really...cared, after all of that. She'd even stopped mentioning her extensive gun collection after Neku had politely asked her not to show him any more guns.

Rhyme winced sympathetically.

Anyway, Coco had mentioned that she'd brought Minamimoto back from erasure. Coco'd confirmed it for Neku: Minamimoto had been entirely erased, and he'd gotten erased the first time he had blown himself up on the roof of Pork City.

Hm? Pork City?

Oh, yeah, right, most people called it Mark City now. But they acted like it'd always been called Mark City. Weird... Rhyme hadn't been there during her Game, had she? Anyway, when Minamimoto had been Game Master, Neku and Joshua hadn't technically defeated him. Not to erasure, anyway. Minamimoto had made some kind of wild psych. What had Joshua called? A Lv. Something Flare? Lv. 𝑖, maybe?

Lv. 𝑖? Like an imaginary number? Wait, had Minamimoto really used a psych named after a video game spell?

Huh? A video game spell?

Well, Flare was—never mind. What had been they talking about?

Well, either way, he had erased himself. And then he'd come back, covered in black markings, and claiming that he'd acquired some...serious firepower. He'd kicked Neku's ass and his older brother's ass to the curb without breaking a sweat. Then he'd ended up under a vending machine. Kitaniji—the former Conductor, if Rhyme didn't remember the name—had confirmed his first erasure, and Coco had confirmed his second.

Her eyes widened.

Hey, Rhyme? Was something wrong?

How... How could someone come back from erasure?

Neku shrugged. Hadn't Rhyme come back from erasure? Thanks to Mr. H.

Yeah, sure, thanks to Mr. Hanekoma... Rhyme stopped. She and Minamimoto had both gotten erased and then come back. Yet, she had her doubts about the veracity of her coming back. For all she knew, Minamimoto might have undergone a similar dubious coming-back process. Still: a similarity. Wait. Wait. She looked at Neku. Not just Mr. Hanekoma—but Coco? Coco, a Reaper, had brought Minamimoto back? Could anyone get brought back from erasure? Anyone? What about all the other Players who had gotten erased? Could the Reapers bring them all back, too?

Oh... No. Probably not. She'd only gotten brought back because Mr. H had stepped in right as she'd gotten erased, and because Mr. H was, well... Given that Mr. H was the Composer's confidante, that Mr. H had even given them a phone app that could take photographs of the past, and that Minamimoto had been seeking Mr. H when he'd come back to life, Mr. H probably had powers even beyond a Reaper. Really, having gone through the second Game and learning about the existence of Angels, Neku had his inklings about who, and what, Mr. H might have been.

Rhyme stared at him for a second, processing, and then asked again: Mr. Hanekoma had such powers, sure. But Coco?

Neku chuckled. Coco had some pretty wild powers. But no, Coco had used something different from what Mr. H must've used on Rhyme.

How...did he know that?

Mr. H had bound Rhyme into a pin, and Rhyme had come back as a Noise with her sanity intact.

...Right.

Coco had brought Minamimoto back with something that... Neku didn't have all the details, but from what Coco had told him, it was essentially illegal to the UG.

Illegal? Rhyme echoed.

Yeah. That's why they called it the Taboo. You know, like the Taboo Noise that had attacked Reapers as well as Players? Neku must've mentioned it here and there. Had to use the light puck to take 'em down.

Taboo Noise, she repeated. Yes. The Noise that had destroyed Tigris Cantus's creepy weepy barrier, right?

Yup, the very same. Huh, he hadn't thought about it at the time, but he'd never figured out who'd sent him that...text he'd gotten. Something about her hiding in the white darkness, something about Taboo Noise. Well, knowing what he knew now, he'd probably guess that Mr. H had sent it to help them out.

Right... Mr. Hanekoma, again...

Coco had told him something else interesting, Neku noted, rubbing his shoulder like he were trying to massage out an old ache. She'd copied the...whatever she'd used to bring Minamimoto back from Mr. H. That was probably why Minamimoto had been looking for Mr. H and ransacked WildKat.

What? Rhyme tried to connect the pieces together. Was he implying...that Minamimoto had gotten this 'Taboo' thing from Mr. H?

What? No way. Mr. H wouldn't have helped someone like that. But it's possible that Minamimoto had stolen that information, or tricked Mr. H out of it.

...But Coco would?

Coco and Mr. H were...very different people. And Coco had been desperate. Besides, she'd been right, in a way: Minamimoto had pitched in to help save Shibuya in his own way from Soul Pulvis.

Fair enough. So this 'Taboo' thing: why was it illegal? Or 'taboo,' anyway?

Neku looked down at his hand. Didn't know, really. It was definitely different from what Mr. H had used to bind Rhyme's Soul to the pin, though. Mr. H'd said that it would only work because he'd done it immediately, right? But Minamimoto had come back a week after his erasure the first time, and two weeks later the second time.

...Which meant it was more than just vacuuming up stray Soul right after someone's erasure.

Right. But did that make it illegal? Neku couldn't say. He was just reassuring her that Mr. H hadn't done anything illegal to her.

...He knew that for sure? Rhyme asked.

...No, but Mr. H wouldn't have done something illegal. And Joshua had brought her back, so she didn't have to worry about suddenly getting charged for something in the UG, or that she wasn't supposed to exist or something like that. It was good that Mr. H had bound her Soul to the pin. It was good that Joshua had returned her to the RG along with her older brother, Shiki, and himself. It was good that she was alive, right now, to enjoy this moment. That was all Neku had been trying to say. That he was glad she was here.

...But he didn't know for sure?

Whether it was good that she was alive? No, Neku knew that for sure. Shibuya would be worse off without Rhyme. It wouldn't even exist without her having stepped in to help save it from Soul Pulvis. And her big brother loved her so much. Shiki and Eri doted on her like big sisters, too. And the Wicked Twi—

Stop. He'd misunderstood. She'd been talking about why the Taboo was illegal.

Got it. His bad for assuming. But if she ever felt otherwise, she knew that she could tell him about anything, and he'd be there for her, anywhere, anywhen.

...So, anyway, he didn't know for sure? Why it was illegal?

Not really, no, Neku admitted. Coco hadn't talked about it much, and he hadn't had much reason to pry.

Could he ask her about it now?

Nah, he didn't really want to. Besides, she'd skipped town shortly after the Game. But even when she got back like she'd promised to, he'd rather move on. He'd had enough of investigating weird Soul stuff for a lifetime. Why was Rhyme asking?

For a split-second Rhyme studied him with a little smile. Then she answered, before the silence became suspicious: curiosity. Since they'd been talking about it and all, and she was helping Kaie fill out his archive of documented phenomena, so she'd gotten in the habit of asking about stuff.

Oh, cool. How was that project coming along?

Pretty well!

Cool.

Mmhm! Cool!

Could she give his regards to Kaie? And thank him again for all of his help? Well wishes for Shinjuku, too.

Yup! She'd let him know!

Thanks.

Uh-huh!

Mmhm.

Mmhm!

...

...

So, they'd arrived at her older brother's apartment—

Her and her older brother's apartment. They shared it.

Yep! The Bito siblings' apartment. Neku'd catch her around later. He thanked her for joining him. Made the walk there and back a little less lonely. Hey, when Shiki and Neku's lease ended sometime next year and they rented a bigger place, how would Rhyme feel about...moving in with them? The four of them. Shiki, Beat, Rhyme, and Neku. How about it?

Rhyme smiled. She'd be in college by then, right?

Oh, right. Well... If she picked a place nearby, in Shibuya or something, the offer still stood. Neku would have to figure out a way to ask her older brother. So that it didn't come across like charity, but so that the Bito siblings didn't have to shoulder half the rent on a place they couldn't afford. It was a selfish offer. Neku wanted to live with...both of his partners. But he was worried that her older brother would take it the wrong way an' insist on payin' half da rent.

Heheh. That was a terrible impression, 'Phones.' He shouldn't do that again. Ever. She'd heard enough terrible impressions of her older brother's cadence in her life, okay?

Oh... Sorry. Neku hadn't been trying to make fun of him. Her older brother was his partner.

Yes... Yes, Rhyme knew that.

Right. So. Yeah. He wanted to live with both of his partners—

And her big brother wouldn't agree if his little sister didn't agree, right?

Hold on, Neku hadn't meant to imply that he didn't want to live with Rhyme or something. But, yeah, he'd wanted to get her opinion on it first, so—

So that she could be on his side and encourage her older brother to move on at a reduced rent rate or something like that?

...Yeah. Or even for free, if they could convince him.

...She'd think about it. Her older brother wasn't so easy to convince. And they didn't take charity.

It wasn't charity. Not to Neku. It was selfish.

Yeah. And seeing 'Shi' and 'Phones' all the time would make her older brother happier. So Rhyme would lend Neku a hand when the time came. And if she ended up not living in Shibuya for college, she'd want her older brother in good hands, anyway. With people who would protect her older brother's smile.

Come on, Rhyme. She had to know that her older brother could protect himself.

Yeah, and it helped to have other people around to protect him, too. That was why Rhyme couldn't go into Shibuya without an escort, right?

...Hey, it was a big brother's job to protect his little sister. Neku wasn't going to get in the middle of that.

Right. And it was a partner's job to protect her partner, too. So would her partner's partner do his job and protect his partner who was also her partner, partner-in-law?

...Whoa. Everything okay?

Yes. Rhyme was going to help Neku fulfill his dreams about living with both of his partners. So, while she couldn't call it a dream, could he do her the favor of looking after her older brother?

Yeah! Not the way Neku looked after Rhyme, but always. He and her older brother had each others' backs, no matter what. Rhyme could count on him.

...Good. Well, she'd see him around.

Yeah. Thanks again.

...He could go now.

Yeah, yeah, he could, after she closed the door.

...Okay. Closing the door. Locking it.

Listening to his footsteps fade away.

Glancing down at her phone.

Thinking about the possibility.

The Taboo, which had brought something back weeks later.

Could it... Could it bring something back years ago, too?

Mr. Hanekoma had been involved, but he'd mysteriously circled away, perhaps down the drain.

Coco had been involved, but she'd skipped town after the Game, huh? Hm...

Minamimoto had been involved, but no one had seen him, either.

But Kaie's archive of phenomena...

For all of the searching he'd done on Rhyme's behalf, Kaie hadn't found anything that talked about restoring entry fees. Perhaps she'd ask about the Taboo, and he'd tell her that it could only bring people back from erasure—not restore entry fees, gone forever. Maybe he wouldn't have any information on it at all. Illegal, and all.

But...

But it was worth a shot.

Chapter Text

The pin remained infuriatingly blank. Her head grew infuriatingly heavy. By the time her phone vrrrrbed to notify her of the time, Rhyme hadn't gotten much more headway than before. But she had nearly fallen asleep under the light-suffused sky and the warmth-suffused grass.

Sho'd spent the entire time cackling to himself, scribing on his paper, and occasionally pacing. Couldn't keep still. Still in his upper half-planes, she supposed.

Rhyme accepted the piggy-back ride from Sho back to her apartment. As she rested her cheek between his shoulder blades, she reflected. Keep iterating. What Was What She Wanted. The question spun through her during breakfast, during class, during her brief texts with Kaie where he asked about her distractibility, during her walk home, during her efforts to catch some sleep, during dinner, during the time-slowed wait between dinner and when she'd sneak out for another lesson.

Would he accept a limitation? Would he accept a request for a different method to his madness?

When he had gone on his speech about the two paths—the one that only had a single line, and the one that had infinite paths—had he meant that she could choose her own complete path? Or that she had to choose one within the paths that he accepted?

But she'd had enough. She'd shout out the melody. In front of Mewsic the next day, with her hands linked behind her chest, eyeing the dumpster he'd dragged with him. A different one from last night. "Hey, Sho. Listen to my sound."

"Don't waste my time." Sho already had his hands on the dumpster. He'd affixed wheels to the bottom, she observed. Hm. "Say it."

"It's best to cross the stream where it's shallowest," Rhyme explained, for herself, and afterwards added, for him, "and it'd be better for me to learn lessons when I'm the least tired. I know you like making art. What do you think about swapping the times? So, we'll do lessons first, and then you can make art. Don't worry; you won't lose your audience for your art!" He laughed. "I'll stick around to watch."

Sho tipped his hat upwards. Calculating something? Would the next words out of his mouth have something to do with limits? With breaking her own boundaries?

She'd already struggled through these past few years. She'd struggle through this, too. Not for him, but for the sake of her entry.

His teeth parted from one another. "Sure."

Rhyme blinked. "...That's it?"

"I answered your question. What's the problem, femtogram?" Sho tapped his boot against the ground. "Cut the redundancies. Let's start with the next lesson."

She stroked her jaw thoughtfully. "I'm surprised that you didn't tell me that I had to do it your way, or not at all." Then again, he'd only ever offered suggestions to the Wicked Twisters, from what Rindo had told her. Rindo had gone along with them most of the time, but Sho had left them to their own devices. As Fret had told her months ago, Sho had always let them get into danger, and only then would he rescue them out of it. But... "I'm not saying this because I underestimate you. I know you're—"

No, wait. She had been about to say that she knew he was in the upper half-planes. But if she were sick, she wouldn't want anyone to start a phrase off like that. Rather, to simply express the concern and offer a solution, and then move on. Or, maybe, to take his sure at face value. But she'd ask, this time, to get to know him better.

"You've been making art first-thing each time." Just like he'd made art in WildKat's attic, a crown of erasers, shortly before he'd snapped. "You're going to be okay with swapping and making it second?"

"Ninety degrees," Sho replied instantly. "I can work on my art while you're factoring out the lesson."

Rhyme inclined her head. "I guess that makes sense."

"So, femtogram. Wanna keep iterating on the psych, or want to diverge onto another vector?"

She hummed. "I'm allowed to do that?"

"Zetta duh!" He leaped onto the dumpster, swinging one leg off of it; she had to seize up her muscles not to flinch. "I told you! Infinite paths! Pins are just one conduit! Well, femtogram? Decide!"

"Then let's try something new. I'll keep working on the pin in the future." Rhyme touched her hands to her chest, interlacing her fingers together on the front of her skull-printed sweater. "What do you have for me, Sho?"

What did he have for her? He had an alleyway in Udagawa for her—the same alleyway as before—and he had a can of spraypaint. Fanning out his collection of various hues, he urged her to pick one. Rhyme hovered her hands over the different colors. She'd told people of her favorite color as this orangey-pink coral-salmon tint that her older brother had once bought her a sweater in, years ago, as one of the earliest purchased gift he'd ever given her. Their parents had taken them out clothes shopping and urged them to get something practical for each other, so her older brother had gone with a sweater, and she'd gone with a beanie. Their parents had tutted at the beanie with its skull decal, but her older brother had loved, and Rhyme had begged. They'd relented, for her sake.

She'd always liked the hand-made stuff more. The little crafts from class, the scribbled drawings, the writing assignments about her, back when his classes had contained such things.

Sho, rather predictably, didn't have anything in pink, per se, but he had a nice purple that seemed close enough.

...If anything, it looked a little like a more vibrant version of the purple fur she'd grown while tearing Tigris Cantus's shadow and Soul asunder.

Her hand closed around the can. Warm metal. Warmer than she'd expected, but he'd pulled them out from his coat. Notches along the rim. Uneven, but she could thumb a roughly chipped, uneven pattern going around the bottom. A circle—or maybe a zero?—followed by seven notches, then a thin space, then three notches, then a thin space, then two notches, then a long space, then five notches, then a long space, then eight spaces, then an even longer space, then, and then it would restart with another circle. Hm.

It felt...strange. To have a lesson first, and then art. Like the streams had subtly shifted. No longer in Sho's vector, but now a little bit more in her vector. Yet also something...wrong. Something not quite right. A sensation of something out of order. Hmm...

The fssss of spraypaint dragged her out of her musings as Sho flushed a line of vermilion red across the wall. He grinned crookedly at her. "Sigils."

"Sigils!" Rhyme echoed. "I'm ready to learn about sigils."

Heh, she... She could sense herself smiling, a little. The warmth of her slight flush spread through her like a thrill of excitement.

From the Instrumentalist pin. Not from anything else. That almost tipsy-like buzz. Mm. Right.

"Most psychs require active activation. Some psychs seem to work 'passively,' such as psychs that increase one's capabilities, but in reality, they require a low level of Imagination constantly. Other psychs have trigger; they require both a charge of high Imagination from the start, followed by a low level of Imagination at all times, scanning for the trigger. Once the trigger conditions are fulfilled, the 'passive' psych will activate using that stored Imagination. However, the 'stored' Imagination isn't really 'stored.' If the low level of Imagination is interrupted at any point, the charge has to restart from the beginning. Charging psychs like homing rockets work the same way," Sho explained out of the blue.

At risk of sounding like a video game character scrolling through dialogue options, Rhyme asked anyway: "Homing missiles?"

Several pins clinked in his palms. "A newer type of psychs to Shibuya. When you first activate the psych, it stores up a charge of Imagination. The pin's still a circuit with resistance, but these circuits have capacitors. Once the capacitor's ready, you can discharge it all at once." He looked at her. "There were charging psychs even in my Reaper quadrant. Ever used 'Long Live the Ice' or another pin with 'freeze?'"

"Out of all the pins I got in the first few days, I couldn't use that many," she confessed. "Only Rhythm Warning."

"Hm. Insufficient Imagination, or incompatible flavor or spin?" His eyes narrowed in her direction as though he could sift through her Soul. "Hm."

"Don't judge a book by its cover." Rhyme's fingers strained against one another. "I could use Rhythm Warning, like we saw yesterday. My Imagination's not that low."

Sho shrugged. "Doesn't make a difference to me. Even a charging psych still requires an active Soul around."

"And you're telling me this because—" Mr. Hanekoma had only bound her to a pin in the moments immediately after her erasure. The illegal Taboo had brought Sho back days and even weeks after his. "—sigils don't?"

"Nice derivation." He drew another line, and then another. Not a circle. Ah, working on art. Well, he'd abandoned the dumpster, unless he went back to grab it later. "Sigils, once imbued with Imagination, can store that Imagination indefinitely, no matter how long the interval on the number line. There are effectively two types of sigils: sigils intended for immediate use, and sigils intended for delayed use."

"That makes sense so far." She ruminated. "I'm guessing that immediate-use sigils are a little like pins. You have to give them the Imagination juice right now. Delayed-use sigils are the ones that you store Imagination in and then release it later?"

The lines and angles added up. It reminded her somewhat of the city-like projection he'd painted the last time they'd ended up here, but not identical.

A similar idea? Or a different idea, expressed similarly?

"Golden. A sigil, like a 'passive' psych, has two components: a trigger, and a triggered effect. Immediate-use sigils have the activation itself as the trigger. Delayed-use sigils can have any trigger as long as you can measure it objectively. Sigils don't have the capacity to make subjective decisions."

"But whatever trigger we choose, we choose subjectively." Rhyme dipped her head. "So I can't just say, 'When it rains.' I have to define what 'rain' is for the sigil. I could define it as, I don't know, measuring so much volume of water on its surface, maybe?"

Sho shrugged. "Sure."

"...But that wouldn't necessarily activate it under a light drizzle. And it would activate if someone spilled their drink over the sigil." She let her thumb roll over the can, over the notches that Sho—she assumed Sho—must have left along the perimeter. "That's not a problem. I feel like it's not that different from programming."

"Just remember that you're putting your Imagination into it. You set the trigger. If you can imbue it with your idea of 'rain,' as long as the sigil has an 'objective' idea, it can do it. It's not a matter of scientific objectivity, but a clear, specific instruction." He pointed upwards. At the nighttime sky? "Even if you told a sigil to measure a certain 'volume of water,' you'll have to define what you mean by those terms and what it'll be measuring."

She pushed her fingers into her cheek.

"Don't overthink it, femtogram. A painting factors in thousands of strokes and colors that can be objectively described." He smirked. "Just because I can calculate all of those doesn't mean that any random radian can, but plenty of those random radians paint, too."

Rhyme hummed. "Okay. I think I understand. In the same way, all programming is objective, but it can look subjective. Many AIs are blackboxes: the equations and numbers under the hood are 'objective,' but the data, how we train it, and what we're looking for is all 'subjective.' For example, we don't know exactly 'how' the AI decides what a dog—"

His smile broadened.

"—looks like. But we can tune the AI until it puts out the kinds of 'dog' we want to see."

"Don't make me reiterate it: sigils are nothing more than conduits. As long as you can prove it to yourself, you can make it happen. Just remember that, whatever way you define it, once you're no longer actively tangential to the sigil, it'll continue using whatever decisions you left it with last."

She shook her head. "Hold on, that almost makes it sound like I'm trying to explain my decision-making process to a child. Is it subjective?"

"No, femtogram. All I mean is that you have to consider all the possibilities and account for them if you want to make an effective sigil."

"Hmmm..." Holding the can out away from her, Rhyme fit her finger onto the trigger, but didn't depress it quite yet. Would it have a kick? "Okay, I think that the AI analogy is the closest I'll get before we have some hands-on practice."

"Experimentation yields more data than theorycrafting at a distance," Sho said amiably. "But we should iterate over the other axioms in the set before we start applying operators."

Rhyme lowered her arm. "Hit me."

"The next term in the sequence: sigils are made of individual components that add up to the whole trigger and effect. The exact components, and the design of the sigil, are irrelevant. The images themselves have no power. Your Imagination gives it power. The sigil will have the trigger and effect of the activator's interpretation of the sigil."

She nodded along as she listened.

"Pins are similar, because the user's Imagination can inflect the psych that manifests. But pins have a much more limited set of solutions. Sigils have infinite solutions. You might be able to activate any sigil that I draw if you can figure out a solution for it, but unless you interpret the factors in design with exactly the same symbology as I do, we won't have the same output. Observe."

Shaking the can, Sho turned towards the wall and sprayed red over the surface. Rhyme coughed from the aerosol cloud rising up from the paint. She glanced over to what he'd written: "2+5?"

"Correct." He watched her expectantly.

"...Two plus five equals seven?" Rhyme offered.

"That—" Sho jabbed a finger in her direction. "—is your interpretation. But if I say that this symbol—" He motioned at the 2. "—is equal to three, and this symbol—" He gestured towards the addition sign. "—is an exponentiation operator, and this symbol—" He motioned at the 5. "—is equal to four, then I would interpret this as three to the fourth power, or eighty-one."

2+5...meaning 3^4. Huh. "...I see."

"And why stop there? That example assumed that this was two numbers with an operation in the middle. If I interpret '2+' as being a number equal to four-point-seven, and '5' as an operator that discards anything after the decimal point, then this expression evaluates to four." He clapped his palm against the wall. The sound resounded through the air and down her spine.

"I get it. So there's an infinite number of ways that we can interpret '2+5.' Depending on our system, it can mean anything. If I ignored the symbols '2,' '+,' and '5,' and took this, uh, graffiti—" Graffiti? Tag? What was the right word for it, anyway? "—to break it down into the coordinates of its individual motes of paint...then I could encode an entire book or computer program into what you've drawn." Rhyme ran her hand down her face. "So, in other words, is it impossible to use a sigil drawn by someone else?"

Sho scoffed. "Why do you think I write 2+5 when I mean two plus five, and not some other arbitrary symbol? Even if I draw the '2' differently—"

A series of 2s with slight variations, bigger, smaller, wider, thinner, with loops, without, blocky as digital clock symbols, fancy as cursive, populated the wall.

"—you read them all as 2s. This is the basis of communication. This is why a set of standard symbols was created. For example."

He sprayed a triangle onto the wall. Rhyme nearly burst into giggles. Of course he would paint a triangle. A 🜂.

"This means 'fire.'"

Another triangle, beside it, this one marked with a line across the top. 🜁.

"'Air.'"

A triangle with a vertex pointing groundward. 🜄.

"'Water.'"

And another inverted triangle, with a bar along the bottom. 🜃.

"'Earth.'" Turning towards her, Sho leaned his shoulder into the wall.

"They're triangles," Rhyme started.

His pupils flickered between her and the wall. "They're symbols."

"You made them yourself? Are you teaching me your—"

He dragged his palm down his face. "Null matrix, you ignorant integrand. These symbols have existed since before I was born. Did some radian in the UG or higher make 'em, and then disseminate them in the RG? Or did they start in the RG, where most non-obtuse-angular Imaginations can't do a thing to 'em, and then end up used in UG? Who gives a digit? These symbols exist because they can be used to distill complex ideas into simple arithmetic. Like the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix."

Now that Sho mentioned it... They did look familiar. She'd seen them in Unicode blocks. Ones poorly supported by fonts, but still. A Moogle search, and: right. In the U+1F700 to U+1F77F block, a set of alchemical symbols. Huh. "Okay, I shouldn't have judged a book by its cover. I know that you're not the only person in history obsessed with triangles."

"Ha!" He grinned. "The full-skulled femtopascals who derived these symbols had zetta good taste."

Rhyme giggled. "I don't think I can look at triangles anymore without thinking of you."

"Heh! Admire the masterpiece of Myself all you want, femtogram." He circumscribed a circle around the symbols. "You can use whatever symbols you want for your own sigils if you activate them. You don't even have to use concrete symbols. As you said, you could interpret a sigil whatever way you want. You can interpret 2+5 as a sigil if you wanted to. I could write down a proof using random lines for each digit and operator, and the proof would still be true to myself as long as I remembered exactly which random line meant which digit and operator in each line. But it's much more effective to keep it constant. Use consistent symbols for consistent ideas."

She copied the Unicode block of symbols—good a place to start as any—and opened her notes app. Fire, air, water, earth. Tappity-tappity-tap. "I'm following. That makes sense. I can make anything into a sigil, but then I have to memorize ahead of time whatever I'm making. If I use the same symbols every time, then I can easily remember what I was doing with a specific sigil and imbue the same effect every time." Rhyme glanced up from the screen. "It's basically...a mnemonic device? I never thought about math like that, either. But something like a '+' or a '^' is really a mnemonic for a series of actions. If I see '×,' I still have to use my memorized algorithm for multiplying something. The '×' doesn't multiply it for me. But it's easier to write '×' every time than come up with a new symbol."

"Naturally." Sho began to doodle other symbols on the walls. "Starting from widely understood symbols can make it simpler than deriving your own from scratch."

"The same is true of math, I guess. We don't ask people to come up with their own ways of writing numerals." Rhyme hummed. "But the symbols here aren't 'objective' in the same way that math is, are they? It doesn't matter how you define 'two,' but once you have something that equals 'two,' then 'two plus two' will always equal four. I know there are different, like, geometries, like how parallel lines on a flat surface don't necessarily follow the same rules as analogous lines on a curved surface. But things like 'air' or 'earth' are abstract."

He hehed. "Nicely integrated."

Rhyme beamed.

"At some point in the sequence, you'll have to derive your own symbols for triggers and effects unique to your situations. Additionally, you'll want to derive your own symbols for secrecy. Widely used symbols are useful when greater-than-one people are trying to communicate the same set. But once we get to the Taboo, heh heh heh..." She could hear the tip of his boot tmp-tmp-tmping against the cement, like a dog thumping its foot at a good scritch behind the ears.

"Like a cypher," she supplied, giggling to herself. "That makes sense to me."

Most of the symbols Sho had drawn matched the symbols she had saved in the notes app, with some minor alterations. But others didn't. Did they not match because Unicode didn't have all the 'widely known symbols?'

Or because Sho had added some symbols that he had come up with himself? Probably a combination of both.

"When greater-than-one people are trying to communicate the same set," Sho went on, "that communication becomes important. Having a consistent set of symbols helps with intuitive understanding and memory, but the purpose of the sigil has to be mutually understood. What does the earth symbol mean in this sigil? More specific symbols can narrow down the possibilities. But at the function's end behavior, the points of view have to converge."

"...Which means that it's about more than understanding the specific sigils. You have to talk to the person who made the sigil to understand their intent. A picture is worth a thousand words, but if you want to make sure that the interpretations are the same, both people have to write out their thousand-word essays and compare." Rhyme nodded. "That makes sense."

Sho smirked. "Words are garbage. But it's relevant to explain the components of your sigil as you construct it. Here's an example: another zeptogram made a sigil using interpretations of the alchemical symbols I wouldn't have considered. Heh."

Her smile grew small and tight. "Another zeptogram? Are you teaching these to...someone else, too?"

No, that made sense. A jaguar couldn't change its spots. If he'd agreed to teach Rhyme, and took such joy in it, then naturally he would've had the inclination to teach others.

But then what had he meant when he'd said, 'My protégé?'

"Sure. I used a basic sigil in front of a zeptogram, and she wanted to understand its factorization. I taught her the axioms. She integrated that with her own research and formulated a sigil she wanted me to activate." Sho tilted his hat downwards as he spoke, enough to hide his eyes, intentionally or not. A blush darkened along his cheeks. Sho? Blushing? Rhyme studied him. Why the obfuscation? Did he detect what she... Had he realized that she... "The sigil she generated was unaesthetic and had trash takes on the symbols. Heh. Even derived her own digit for sulfur. She explained each of 'em to me. What the symbol meant to her, and how its placement in the sigil added up to the final summation."

"...And because she walked you through it—" She maintained a level, even voice. "—you were able to activate it?"

"Correct. Heh. Don't simplify the process. The zeptogram subtracted a long 𝑡-value to explain it, and the effect was ultimately a modified version of a sigil I'd already shown her. But alternative or even orthogonal interpretations don't make a difference as long as they can be explained. I can handle a few unexpected variables in my simultaneous equations." Sho laughed to himself under his breath. Hmm. An inside joke with that other protégé? "But can you?" The brim of his cap rose again until she could see his pupils. "Femtogram, what variable is this?"

Rhyme clapped her palms against her cheeks hard enough to sting. "Sho, are you...teaching other people?"

"Heh! Can't go an interception of functions without learning something and teaching something." As he leaned casually back, his palms opened skyward. A truest expression of 'so what?' that Rhyme had ever seen.

"I didn't mean that. I meant... Have you been teaching—or have you taught—someone like you've been teaching me? Walking them through Imagination, through psychs, through sigils, for the purpose of—" She stopped. For the purpose of getting them their entry fee back? No, that only applied to her.

Sho snickered. "If a zeptogram asks me a question, I answer it."

"But do you..." Rhyme rubbed her temples. "Are you teaching anyone else about the Taboo? Have you taught anyone else about the Taboo?"

"Hmph! Zero. The double-cosine and I studied it together in the past to formulate a sigil that would heighten my beauty." He motioned towards himself. Normally his peak of arrogance would've elicited a giggle. Right now the slight burn she could sense behind her esophagus just tightened her chest. "That sigil restored the third curve I'd graphed on myself—" Sho swiped a thumb over the whisker-like tattoos on his face, three on each other. "—and moved the Taboo to a visible layer instead."

"But you haven't taught anyone else about the Taboo."

He eyed her. "Ninety degrees."

"And have you met anyone else like this? Regularly? Specifically to teach them?" Rhyme stepped forward towards him. "Sho?"

"Nothing analogous to your iterations. Sporadic lessons as I've been asked questions? Sure." Sho rolled his shoulders. "But the endpoint for you is to subtract out the hyper-real boundary on your entry fee, isn't it? Heh. You're not here just to learn, either."

The exhalation that left her lungs drained so much of the wind from her sails that she wilted against the wall. Right. Yes. The entry fee.

"So, let's recur to the lesson." Sho swept an arm towards the wall he'd drawn on.

"...Okay."

Rhyme took a moment to rub the heels of her hands into her eyes before she slapped her cheeks again, breathed in, and focused on what he was saying: "Even the average attogram will find sigils more challenging to evaluate than pins. Pins can be made for the lowest common denominator. Command codes even work on any Soul as long as the resonance is properly tuned. Sigils can't. Sigils require novel Imagination use on the part of the activator, even if they're activating someone else's sigil. So then, femtogram." He gestured towards her. "You can try making whatever sigil you want."

"...And then I'll have to teach you, right?" she asked. That slight burn at her esophagus had faded. The two of them: connected, at least for right now, by this thin, frail link, night after night. Not protecting each other's smiles, but recognizing each other's aptitudes. "Because you spent a lot of time talking about how to communicate a sigil to another. I'm guessing that this is relevant because...I'll be tweaking your Taboo. Which means that we have to be on the same page. Oh, like you and Coco had to be on the same page? To make you more 'aesthetic?'"

"Naturally! If you're transforming my Taboo, then our points of view have to converge. Which means we have to study one another's intents and build Markov chains to reverse-engineer one another's blackbox functions."

His grin stretched across his entire face, so lopsided, so bright, so exuberant, as if delighting in the very prospect of these study sessions.

...Study sessions. Mm. She could work with that.

"Which means that we'll have to keep meeting like this until our points of view converge. Little strokes fell great oaks. One study session at a time, until the last drop makes the cup run over." Rhyme picked herself back up from the wall. The spraypaint can felt both so heavy and so light in her hand at the same time. "So we should try to understand each other as people. No, wait. If all living is an art, then... We should try to understand each other as...artists?"

The expression on his features. She wouldn't have called that a smirk, or even a grin, but something closer to: a smile. Wide and toothy, but a smile. A smile. At her words. "Naturally. You have to understand how to transform my Soul, and I have to understand how your Soul will transform mine. Those are such complex equations. Heh... And that's another reason to use sigils over pins. Because sigils can encode ideas as complex as they are Imaginary. Heh heh heh."

She laughed. Like complex numbers. Heh. "...Zetta fun times? No, wait, wait, let me..."

...If they were going to understand each other as artists, then that made her an artist too. Didn't it?

First: she Moogled metric prefixes to ensure she had the right symbol in mind. Then: Rhyme held out the can of spraypaint again. She pressed down just slightly on the trigger and felt the can kick back against her palm as a jet of paint blasted forth into the wall. The graffiti dust made her eyes water. She coughed through it. He had made it look so easy, but her lines wobbled with uneven paint.

Still, holding her right arm with her left hand for extra stability, she sprayed the world's ugliest decal onto the wall in purple: '𝑍 𝑓𝑢𝑛 ×'

Her arm ached when she lowered it, and she panted slightly from exertion and excitement both as she spun around and jazz-handed over what she'd written. "...Zetta fun times!"

At the angle that he watched her, the waxing crescent above reflected in his eyes, setting them alight with a silver glow that made the brown look almost gold. "Heh. Heh heh heh. Ha ha ha ha ha!" He laughed so loudly that her ears hurt and she wanted the sound to never stop. "Zetta fun times!"

His hand reached out towards her. Freezing, Rhyme scrutinized those ink-black fingers.

"Nonzero touch?" he asked through his laughter.

"Over clothing," Rhyme answered, "is okay. But not directly."

His palm aligned on her cap. She could feel the rough strokes of his hand on how the hat's perimeter tugged against her head. Closing her eyes, Rhyme let the sensation infuse through her. "Femtogram," he said, so warmly she lifted her eyelids just to observe him in silent surprise. "These are zetta fun times."

"...Yeah. They are. This is fun with you, Sho. All work and no play makes Rhyme a dull girl." Rhyme peeked down at the notes app she'd opened. "I want to keep learning. So...can you keep teaching me?"

He grinned. She grinned back. Her face felt like it'd split from beaming too much, but she couldn't help it.

"I know that I have to find my own path to making psychs. And I will! It's just... It's a lot more fun when we have a back and forth like this. I'll 'keep iterating' on the pin. I'm sure that I'll hit a wall where you'll have nothing else to teach me about sigils, and it'll be exhausting. But I want to try to make this fun."

Fun. Like the fun he'd had with the Wicked Twisters. Going to arcades. Checking out music. Eating food.

She'd done all of those things with him, and yet she'd spent that time pushing him through the paces, making him pull teeth, seeing just how far she could smear his patience across the asphalt before he finally broke her trust and snapped.

But what had she learned about him as a person—as an artist—in all that time?

All that cleverness, all that caution, all those intentionally provocative responses, and...for what?

Rhyme breathed out. Looked at him. Really looked at him. Took in the sight of him: standing there with his hand on the brim of his visor, a laugh in his throat, the crescent moon gleaming silver in his irises, whiskers tattooed across his cheeks, mussed hair fanning out like a lion's mane under his ragged cap held back only by the red bandanna, white earrings glinting beneath moonlight in that mess, arrowhead pendant around his neck like the one she wore about hers, long-sleeved black coat marked in geometric squares, black shirt painted with golden triangles, a jangling metal bracelet that clinked whenever he motioned like the bell around the cat's neck, the black Taboo markings scrawled over his skin, burning hot and shadowed dart. The street artist Sho Minamimoto, and the masterpiece he'd made out of 'Himself.'

Yes, she'd use him to restore her entry fee. A tool to her own ends. Just like he'd use her, for his.

But they had something else in common. Had had, and would have yet.

These 𝑍 𝑓𝑢𝑛 × they shared.

Chapter Text

83.15°: [Twentieth Stage]
Conjunction ~ Albedo (Leucosis)
Taurus

...If only her efforts at drawing sigils had proved as zetta fun as learning about the mechanics.

Well, once she got the hang of steadying her arm, Rhyme didn't have much problem with the spraying. Other than the graffiti dust that kept her coughing. But pulling her shirt up over her mouth and nose had done the trick.

If anything, she found the spraying pretty fun. Maybe not zetta fun, yet, but just drawing pictures on the wall, watching the art within her come to life in her own hand, had a... She supposed she understood why cave paintings existed, too.

Yet. None of her sigils activated.

No matter how meticulously she recorded the rules to herself. No matter how objectively she tried to devise a programming language from the symbols. No matter how much she specified, her sigils remained inactive, inert.

So many regarded Sho as a mathematician. But no. He had to be an artist. No other way, for him to effortlessly doodle up a few lines, watch the graffiti burst into flame, and do everything from reheating a bag of chicken nuggets he'd gotten from Moyai Mart to instantly separating a plate of multicolored fruit candies by hue. Rhyme watched him eat any extra candies until he had five piles of exactly the same number, then chow through each heap one at a time, until he had a single candy left of each flavor. The last five he gathered and ate all at once. A fascinating algorithm. That taught her absolutely nothing about activating the sigils herself.

Even copying down his patterns exactly didn't help. Honing the accuracy of her mimicry earned her nothing other than Sho deriding her efforts as worthless junk.

No wonder she'd never heard of these. No combat applications outside of preparing the equivalent of traps and mines, as far as she could figure. But even then, who had time to diligently draw up circles within circles and wheels within wheels when one could simply grab a pin and start lobbing bombs the size of one's upper body at Noise?

The Game had encouraged creativity, but only within its parameters. Well, had it encouraged creativity? Those who had sufficiently high Imagination or...Sho had referred to some kind of compatibility, hadn't he?...could exercise their creativity in choosing their pin decks and figuring out the best ways to use those pins. Yet the pins themselves had set effects. And the Players were at the mercy of whatever pins the shops carried and the Noise dropped, or the pins that the Reapers graced them with. Mixing-and-matching threads, choosing which foods to eat first: the Game allowed some self-expression. But limited self-expression. A bounded sort of creativity. Limited. Creativity in the way that a paint-by-numbers set allowed for creativity.

For Players with less Imagination, like herself, her older brother, or Shiki, they had even less outlets for creative expression. What if she hadn't come across Rhythm Warning, or her older brother had failed to find Respect?

Sure, they'd gotten a handful of pins at the Game's start—just as Shiki had, just as Neku had—but what if none of them had worked?

And some Noise outright resisted certain types of psychs. Two partners limited to positive psychs, who came upon a Noise that healed from that positive spin? Sho himself had previously used a passive psych that made him activate his teleportation—his 'vector displacement'—whenever hit with a physical psych. Would a pair of melee-only partners find themselves stuck during the Game Master's fight, unable to proceed?

Neku must have used a combination of cleverness and luck to have packed psychs that could cover all possibilities.

Or had he had the luxury of swapping pins mid-combat, with the sheer height of his Imagination? Without that, even Neku, the hero of Shibuya, could have easily walked into a battle and gotten erased without the right pins for the job.

The gift of limited creativity and self-expression given only to those who passed some arbitrary, initial gate: thus the Game simply excluded anyone who stumbled at the door.

"Hmph. That was the previous term. In the current Game, the pins have been refactored so that even the lowest common denominator can use 'em, no matter how low their Imagination." Sho's lip curled. He had resumed scribing something on paper while Rhyme made flashcards of the alchemical symbols to give herself a break from straining over silent sigils. "Worthless garbage."

"Is that so bad, Sho?" Rhyme asked. The sound of his pencil scritching over the paper never ended, but she'd never had a chance to glimpse what he wrote. "The Shinjuku-style Games let everyone have a chance. And it meant that Players could get more creative with their pins! Don't you think that people should have a chance to make art?"

He huffed, then angled the brim of his cap skyward.

Hm. She'd take that as a sign of him considering her words. "Like the Wicked Twisters," Rhyme continued. "You said that Nagi and Fret needed high Imagination to be Naturals. That's what Dive and Remind are. But what about Rindo? He didn't have a Natural ability, given that Replay... That was from the pin that the Angel gave him, wasn't it?"

"Naturally," Sho replied, seemingly gazing at the sliver of shadowed sky visible between the Udagawa buildings.

Rhyme waited for a moment, to see if he'd say anything else. Her patience rewarded her.

"Despite his trash-tier Imagination, Zeptogram No. 2 and his integrated integers erased that trash Noise and Phoenix Cantus. Hmph. His Imagination scalar is so low that it's barely complex. Yet the terms in his polynomial that contributed to that summation... His capacitance for aligning points of view and deflecting others' vectors to his own by simultaneously deflecting his to theirs... Now that's a variable to solve for." He drew the hat low. "Under the previous set of rules, he wouldn't have lasted a day. Heh. If I hadn't intercepted the zeptograms, they would've gotten crunched on the first day even under these terms. They were only part of the remainder because I associated with them."

Nodding, she listened, careful not to interfere with his train of thought, but he didn't offer more. Rhyme mulled over her words. "Mighty oaks from little acorns grow." No, wait. Words were garbage. "Even a function that trends towards infinity starts near zero at the 𝑦-axis."

"Ha!"

"I know that you can be elusive. Maybe you think that some people aren't worth your time." Rhyme stroked her chin. "No, that's not fair. I think that everyone makes judgment calls like that: which people they want to be friends with. I don't think that using Imagination is a good metric. Sho, if you don't mind me asking, why..." She studied him for a moment.

He appeared to study her back. "Why what?"

"I'm trying to understand why you would think about the boundary of Imagination as a good thing. You said yourself that you don't like to be limited, and you think the limits on the UG's creativity are trash. But you were acting as though it were a good thing that pins used to require actual Imagination." She hummed. "You're usually really logically consistent, I think. The exception proves the rule, right? So I'm trying to understand what I'm missing. Help me solve for the missing variable?"

"Factor it out yourself," Sho snapped irritably, predictably.

With a stamp of his boot-heel against the cement, he returned to shaking the spraypaint can with enough force that Rhyme stepped away, just in case it exploded in his grip.

She'd never seen him shake it to a point of explosion, not here or in the Pork City stairwell, but there was a first time for everything. Like a first time for Minamimoto admitting to a logical inconsistency.

Rhyme paused. As much as she liked to gently stretch out any nerves she inadvertently struck, a change in tactic might have elucidated more answers.

No. Rhyme had resolved to meet him head-on. To view him as a person, not as something from which merely to extract usable information. She'd stretch that nerve out, yes, but she didn't need to do so in a way that annoyed him. At least not about something potentially dear to his mathematically-molded heart. Annoying him about his picky food preferences and poor singing voice remained fair game.

"Sho," Rhyme began, "I've been approaching this from the perspective of programming. But it's important to work smarter, not harder." Rhyme hesitated. "I brought up the idea of... 'What if I can't do this because I have low Imagination?' You told me that I just need to keep iterating on it. But do you think that there's a possibility that my Imagination could be so low that I can't activate any sigils because of it?"

She nearly asked whether he had a way of calculating her Imagination.

But knowing the numbers, while undoubtedly exciting for him, wouldn't necessarily do her any good. Still, certain software couldn't run on certain hardware. Regardless of how much she comprehended the theory and how succinctly she wrote the code, if her mental—spiritual?—hardware couldn't keep up, then all of this would end up moot.

Hmphing, he ceased shaking and started spraying. A new work of art, not a continuation of the old one. Whereas the first one ran over the wall and ground in wild, abstract lines, this one looked like a tesselation of hexagons and pentagons that scrawled over the brick. Huh. Impressive how Sho managed to draw perfectly straight lines. "There isn't a global minimum of Imagination required. The Imagination only serves as a measure of how many watt-equivalents you can put out. If you can put out any Imagination, you can activate a sigil."

The amount of Imagination didn't matter? No wonder, doubly so, the Game didn't mention this. "Hm. In a circuit, there's a minimum wattage for powering, say, a lightbulb. What if my wattage is so low that the lightbulb never turns on? If I can output any current, we can find some lightbulb out there that I can power. But if all the lightbulbs in the world require more wattage than that..."

Rhyme pushed her hand into her cheek.

"You told me that I could make any kind of sigil I wanted. But what if all the kinds of sigils I'm trying to make would require too much Imagination for me to activate?"

Sho's gaze abruptly fixed on her; she stood still as he appeared to scan her from head to toe. "If you have enough Imagination to activate the Mus/rattus pin, you should have enough Imagination at the required power for similar sigils. Doesn't make a difference whether or not you have enough Imagination to activate the Taboo refineries."

"Right, that's why I'm going to be explaining the sigil differences to you, and why I'm going to be learning these symbols." She held up her phone, the screen paused halfway through making a flashcard for sublimate of mercury. "But here's my question, Sho: why are you hanging out with me and teaching me all of this if my Imagination might be low?"

He turned back towards his work: hexagons and pentagons. "Only looking at a single axis is garbage. You've got other terms that make you so zetta fascinating."

"So what you're saying is that my level of Imagination doesn't matter to you?" Rhyme narrowed her eyes. "But you thought that the change in the Game was for the worse, because it meant that Players with low Imagination could use pins. The way you talked about it made it sound like you didn't think they deserved it. They hadn't earned the right to it. I know that you've been hanging out with Nagi and Fret, but you haven't been hanging out with Rindo."

Sho shrugged dismissively. "I do what I want."

"But is one of the reasons you're not hanging out with him because of his low Imagination?" Rhyme pressed. "Because he isn't a Natural like Fret and Nagi are?"

"Irrelevant. The odd function and the golden zeptogram aren't useless trash to my current algorithm." He rolled his shoulders. "Hmph. Fine. The zeptograms gave me enough data to consider a recalibration. Heh... That hyper-real hectopascal miscalculated." The sudden edge to his voice made her carefully peek back at the section of wall that she'd been working on. Better than sorry. She'd prepare to proceed carefully.

Hmm. Something about that laughter... Was she projecting onto him? Or did she sense something like hurt, like pain, like bitterness? Did he have... The taste of copper still hadn't sublimated from her tongue. What tastes did he carry, what damned spots refusing to wash out?

"Imagination isn't equal to artistic ability. Heh heh heh."

Perhaps not: when she listened more intently, he sounded more self-satisfied and cocky than anything else. Still.

"Femtogram." Rhyme's spine stiffened. Not from fear or discomfort, but at attention. "It's an art. Who gives a digit if you think you don't have enough Imagination? Make it more efficient. Find a way to reach the same effect while needing less power. The pins having different Imagination requirements isn't in the same quadrant as a radian working out how to generate their own psychs and interface with Soul directly. Figure out how to simplify the obfuscatingly complicated functions written down for you."

She glanced over at his wall. Huh? The hexagons and pentagons had morphed. From straight lines to wobbly curves. If she hadn't seen the straight lines first, Rhyme might have interpreted him as incapable of doing so at all.

"If you limit yourself to plugging in numbers to someone else's equation, you're not writing your own proofs. Imagination does factor in, but Imagination isn't artistic ability."

But far from the case: he'd chosen to draw straight lines, and he'd chosen, now, to draw wobbly ones.

"All the processing power of the fanciest calculator in the world won't give the capability to write proofs. It takes an artist's eye to do that. An artist's ingenuity. An artist's motivation to create."

Even if he could only draw wobbly ones, he'd still...be making art, wouldn't he?

"Stop focusing on garbage that you can't factor out of the equation, and start focusing on what you can simplify, integrate, and derive."

Flipping the spraypaint can into his coat, Sho yanked out another one in black and began to spray a second pattern over the first, in long sloping curves, different from either of the patterns he'd painted in red. Rhyme looked down at the can still simultaneously light and heavy in her own palm. "So do you still think that it's better for the Games to have pins that are gated by Imagination?"

"Ha! The Games should have blank pins and let the Players work out their own psychs. Hmph. Fine. Giving the Players access to a greater fraction of pins expands their number of potential paths. But having to subtract decibels still makes their survival a dependent variable on Imagination. Those lowest common denominator pins didn't stop the zeptograms from needing me to do some Laplace annihilation. Even the most powerful pin wouldn't have saved the zeptograms from a psych that instantly zeroed out because they didn't have sufficient Imagination to withstand it. If I'm trashing Imagination as the independent variable, then I'll have to write an entirely new set of parameters for the Game. Heh. Compacting the entire Game into a heap and then piling a new artwork of my own...sounds zetta fun." Grinning at himself, he started spraying something vaguely familiar, that made Rhyme survey his work more closely.

And then she burst out laughing: he tagged the artwork with his name, complete with the lion ears and tail that he painted over the 𝑜.

Well, Sho did aim to become Composer. Making a Game that didn't test Imagination, or that let Players pass the test through other qualities, too... Hm.

"Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way," Rhyme said slowly. "Work smarter, not harder. If trying to bruteforce my way through it isn't helping... You were right when you said that I should try something new. I'm gonna forget about sigils and the pins for a second—"

She heard the disgruntled sound he made. "Don't waste my time."

"—and try to just make some art."

"Heh. Heh heh heh. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!" The rowdy laughter grew louder the more it echoed off the walls and oscillated through her cranium. Her legs became as wobbly as his lines for just a second before she ground her soles against the asphalt. "Sure, femtogram! Transform yourself into a masterpiece! It's all exponential!"

"Third time's the charm!" Rhyme called brightly. "Hey, Sho, thanks for being so patient with me! I don't know if you're finding it frustrating that I'm learning all your lessons but can't put it into practice, but I'm going to keep iterating. Good things come to those who wait, even if they have to be bullheaded about it! So, thank you."

"Heh! Irrelevant garbage." He pointed at her, or past her? "That kind of trash is a zero matrix of beauty. Get a better determinant!"

A better determinant? Right! She'd just... She'd just make some art! Easy! Like cave paintings! Cave paintings that humans made! Anybody could fingerpaint. Rhyme still kept her older brother's pre-school drawings of his 'family'—mostly of himself and her holding hands or doing something together, and occasionally their parents in the background—in her desk at their apartment. If she could just gain a little bit of confidence about her art, then...

She peeked at the abstract cityscape or something like it that he'd sprayed over the floor. Just...painted lines. Letting all the emotions flow through her and out. Simple. Easy.

Tucking her shirt up over her nose and mouth again, Rhyme felt her exhalation warming her lips and chin under the fabric, lifted the can, and sought her own cityspace, like his own. Like opening up a blank program and starting from scratch. She'd done so many freelancing projects. She'd even hacked into the RNS, simple of a task as that had ended up given the relative lack of protections. She'd typed in so many lines, adjusted so many codeblocks copied from Stack Ochuflow, puzzled out the ways to get her clients exactly what they'd asked for.

Without all of those restrictions, without all of those limitations, she could paint freely. Infinite paths. Such freedom. Chaos, chaos! She could do anything!

...She could do anything.

...So then what did she want to do?

Her attempted emulation of his cityspace didn't have the same drive, the same energy. His seemed to rise up out of the cement, or perhaps suck her into it. Hers looked dull, lifeless, uninspired on the brick, barely any different from if she'd just...tipped over a bucket of paint and watched the droplets randomly splash without any input from her at all.

Plenty of her classmates during art class had acted snide whenever presented with modern art. Some squares and lines? Splotches of rainbow hues slapped onto the canvas? Handprints—and sometimes pawprints from artists' animal companions—smearing shades over the white?

Anyone could do that! And these things made people famous? Fetched how much at the market? Clearly some kind of money laundering scheme. None of this looked like art.

Well, the money laundering scheme—from Rhyme's curious research on the subject—might not have fallen so far from the truth.

But regardless of the ethics of 'high-class art,' her classmates hadn't derided it on the basis of how much it cost. That condescension arose from a lack of identification of it as art, a lack of identification of it as something worth anyone's time, a lack of identification of it as something requiring skill. A still-life, a complex portrait, a realistic city skyline: her classmates could try to copy them and fail. They could see the challenge in producing or reproducing such work. But it still didn't look like art. Their art teacher had chided them not to dismiss it. Rhyme had, too. To not judge books on their covers. To not assume that such art hadn't required skill.

Yet internally Rhyme had walked away with the same question. She forced herself to call it art: the polite thing to do.

But logistically? Did it require skill?

Well, she'd finally answered that question. Yes. Yes it did require skill. A skill that she apparently didn't possess, given that the extent of her artistic abilities sprang forth in the kinds of stick figures that her older brother had painted at four years of age.

Maybe her entry fee had something to do with it? If she couldn't dream of her own art, and thus she couldn't bring that out into paper? Well, brick, in this case.

But she'd done all of that programming without her entry fee. And she had no troubles with closing her eyes and visualizing objects: a red apple, her older brother, the starry pattern she'd chosen for her desktop wallpaper. Still, just in case, she'd try to paint something that didn't require any visualization at all. Something that she could look at nearby. Oh. Of course.

Yet, even staring directly at Sho and trying to copy his silhouette: the very physical, corporeal, material image before her eyes somehow didn't translate to her hand's motions.

No problems with her vision. No problems with her nervous systems. No problems with her hand. Yet, as if something somewhere had broken the connection between the two, she simply...failed. He'd finished his artistic endeavors about halfway through and returned to scratching over his paper. Him keeping approximately the same stance should've made it even easier. Yet about twelve severely poor renditions of Sho that looked less like people and more like randomly-circled squiggles lined up on the wall before Rhyme tucked the spraypaint can into her pocket and leaned her brow against the wall.

She inhaled. Exhaled. Yes. No shock that she'd failed at the pins, failed at the sigils, if she failed as an artist.

"Hey, Sho," Rhyme said cheerfully. "You read the Sheet Music of my Soul."

He made an affirmative sound without looking up at her.

"You said that there were Noise parts in my Soul. And I already knew that my entry fee was blocked off. I don't think that the entry fee has anything to do with it, but from what I remember from the Game, Noise feeds on Soul. And Noise...isn't human."

"So?"

"Is it possible that I can't do this because... Because of what happened to me?" She smiled. "I'm still having fun with the lessons! I'm just wondering if we need to pivot to something else. Something that doesn't involve me making art, if I'm...incapable of it."

Sho let out a short, clipped laugh. "Femtogram. Classify me."

"Classify you?" Her brow furrowed. "What do you—" He hit the wall with his palm, his fingers fanned out, a dark stain on the brick. She clapped her palm over her face. "Oh. Right. Taboo Noise. And an artist."

"Quit the garbage self-subtraction." Rhyme gazed at him from between the bars of her fingers as they stretched across her eyes. "Quit with the trash excuses." Her spine straightened out. "There's no one singular axis for making art. Infinite possible terms in the matrix. Who gives a digit if your Imagination coefficient's low or if the fraction of your Soul human code is zero? Figure out other terms that you can alter the coefficients of!"

But even Sho had said something different earlier. That logical contradiction. That inconsistency. He'd taught her about his philosophies: about living as art, about infinite paths, about writing her own proofs to prove her ideas to no one but herself, and then he'd turned around and complained about more accessible pins. So what other inconsistencies tumbled around his head? Everyone contained contradictions and multitudes. But his contradictions meant that he could define mercy and pity as garbage in one breath and then show them to her in another. So she'd have to stretch out that nerve: "Sho, you said that some—" How had he termed it? "—hollow-skulled hectopascal had miscalculated something. Did it have to do with the pins? With Imagination?"

"Are you still trying to find excuses when you should be finding your 𝑥?" Sho snapped. "Divide out the garbage."

"No. I'm trying to understand you and where you come from. You said so yourself. I'm going to be explaining my sigils to you, then I need to know you. Know how you think, and what makes you tick." Picking herself off the wall, Rhyme kept her hand on the spraypaint can in her pocket as she approached him, lest it fall out.

His gaze slid off of her and onto the brick behind her. "The factor's that?"

Glancing over her shoulder, she smiled sheepishly. "I was...trying to draw you for inspiration. I failed. They don't resemble you very much, do they?"

"Heh! Trash all the way down, femtogram!" Sho's pencil didn't cease for even a second, but the warm amusement in his timbre came out louder than his words. "...That hyper-real hectopascal—" Oh, so she'd gotten the moniker wrong, by a little. She'd have to pay more attention next time. "—mentored me about art because he'd measured me as having a high Imagination. That was his reason. He wanted to see how much he could multiply my Imagination by."

"Taught you about art?" Rhyme's eyes widened. "This is..." She didn't let her nose wrinkle. "...Mr. Hanekoma, isn't it?"

"Ninety degrees. WildKat always had zetta fascinating trash in the back." Huh. Fascinating trash, in the Shibuya of the past that had mostly banned dumpsters and garbage receptacles entirely? And here Neku had thought that Mr. Hanekoma wouldn't do anything illegal. "Heh! Mentoring to him meant giving me problems to solve. Making me try out all kinds of artistic media. I figured out my own vector," Sho added smugly, "with piling heaps of trash. I worked through those problems."

In WildKat's attic. The fingerpaints. The sculptures. The carvings. The watercolors.

"Even if I added 'em all to my heap in the end, that meant I added 'em all to my heap. I transformed all that garbage into my own art!" His arms outstretched to their full wingspan, Sho basked in his own glow.

"It's like in math," Rhyme mused, choosing the example as much for his benefit as for hers. "Different branches of mathematics adapt tools and ideas from other branches all the time. Your art is a trash collage, but you took the lessons you learned from all of those lessons and added them to your repertoire."

"Correct. Doing whatever I want with those formulae and algorithms. Testing 'em, crunching 'em, twisting 'em, trashing 'em. More material for my art."

The moment that he finished posing, he returned writing on his paper. She hadn't noticed the relative quiet until the unending scratching scratched against the silence, too. "So it was Mr. Hanekoma who you said miscalculated about Imagination equaling artistic ability?"

Sho nodded decisively.

"Did he teach you about all different kinds of arts because he thought that it would increase your Imagination?"

"Heh! That hyper-real hectopascal—" Her lips curved up, and she brushed her hand over her mouth to feel it. "—is full of garbage." He sounded matter-of-fact and self-assured, but something bubbled up beneath that, audible here and there at the snipped sounds of his vowels, at the croaked corners of his consonants. Or maybe Rhyme was just projecting, again. "Stopped wanting to collaborate with me just because my Imagination went constant for an interval. Heh heh heh. Only a mindless monomial could miscalculate like that. Ha!" The pencil-scratching intensified, as did Sho's grin.

Her fingers rocked against her face as she contemplated him: shoulders square, smirk wide, ferociously gazing down at whatever he was writing—or drawing?—jaw set, the very picture of determination from the crown of his cap to the bottoms of his boots. "...I'm about to say something that might sound a little bit mean. Correct me if I'm wrong, okay?"

His cap tilted slightly upwards. Curiosity?

"...It sounds like Mr. Hanekoma made you feel like your high Imagination made you special," Rhyme started carefully, "and that if you didn't have your high Imagination, you wouldn't be special anymore. Do you think that, maybe, you were fixated on the pins even though it didn't fit your philosophy because...being able to use those pins was proof of your high Imagination? You'd struggled through learning art—"

"Garbage! I didn't struggle. Hmph. I lived and breathed art before H ever converged."

Rhyme dipped her head. "I wasn't trying to insult you! But you felt like you'd earned it, right? You'd earned that Imagination, and Mr. Hanekoma made you feel like it made you better than other people. So seeing pins that anyone could use... It was like something that made you special was taken away. Is that right?"

"Heh." Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.

She rolled the question around on her tongue before she answered it, but she only succeeded in coating it with the taste of bitter copper: "Do you think that having a higher Imagination makes you superior to others?"

"Yeah."

Flat. Immediate. Factual.

Rhyme stared incredulously in his direction while he continued his scratching, entirely unfazed. "Even after all that? Everything we just talked about? About how Rindo had a low Imagination and was still able to save Shibuya? Your pep talk about how I can this even if I don't have the highest Imagination? What you said about how Imagination doesn't equal artistic ability? You think that having a higher Imagination makes you superior?"

"Ha!" He barked out a laugh. "The world is made up of numbers, and the numbers speak for themselves! My Imagination is higher! And I'll exponentiate it to infiiiiinity!"

Her arms dropped to her sides. Her fingers curled into fists. "...Aren't you just doing the same thing that Mr. Hanekoma does? That the Angels do? Like how Neku's the savior of Shibuya because he had such a high Imaginati—"

"He doesn't have a high enough Imagination to activate my Taboo refinery sigil." Sho's grin grew teeth. "I did. A refinery sigil that should've been undecodable in the UG. But I figured it out. Doesn't make a difference if if that meddling monad added the finishing touches. It was my Imagination that overcame the limit. That decoded it in the UG! Heh! Ha! I reverse-engineered my perfect solution! It was my will, my Imagination that made it po—"

"Then why are you even," Rhyme interjected hotly, "here with me doing all these lessons if you think that you're just...just better than me because you have a higher Imagination?"

"Stupid scalee!" Sho spat back. "Don't make me reiterate! You have other terms that make you so zetta interesting!"

"So what? So you're just going to let me try, try again? Want to watch me fall down seven times and get up eight? Going to stand there smirking and writing whatever you're writing while you watch me struggle and fail because, for all your fancy words, even you think that my lower Imagination makes me worse?"

Flinging her arm out, she smacked it against the brick. The graffiti she'd sprayed dirtied her hand with its damp dust, and she smeared her fingers over the wall.

"What's your point? Convincing me that I can't help out so I agree to you taking the entry fee out unsafely? Wearing down my patience with myself? Encouraging me? Praising me? Giving me false hope just to see me mess up again? Telling me that I can do it? Telling me it's okay if I can't do it, because I can keep trying until I get it? Telling me it's fine, it's fine, I'll recover eventually? Making me think that maybe this time I'll get it? Is it funny, Sho? Is this your nightly entertainment? Chipping away my excuses with logic and reasoning? Waiting for me to realize that it's my own fault I'm not better? That I'm still bitter?"

She could taste it on her exhalations. The metal buried deep in her innards. The heaviness that she could sense with every twist and turn of her abdomen. The bitterness tang that rose from the depths of her lungs. The copper that refused to sublimate.

"Is that the point? You figured out that you can't convince me through logic, so you're going to convince me by letting me exhaust myself. You're going to praise me for getting all the theory. You're going to tell me how smart and clever I am for figuring out your lessons. You're going to go on about how I'm so special, and then you're going to let me figure out that all my specialness doesn't let me get what I want. All my intelligence and wisdom beyond my years doesn't mean I get to be free with any of it. And it's not because something bad happened to me. It's because of who I am. Until I finally get it through my head that it's not because of the entry fee or being Noise or whatever other excuse I make. It's because of me."

The graffiti on her palm left a print on her chest over her heart. Had that taken any skill?

"Because I'm not supposed to worry about any of it, right? I'm supposed to move forward. I'm supposed to smile so the people who actually matter can feel good that they protected that smile."

Sho didn't even bother lifting his pencil, much less his gaze towards her. "Femtogram. What the helix are you talking about?"

Rhyme gripped her shirt with her graffiti-fouled hand. Her heart thudded against her curled fingers. She wouldn't knock the paper from his arm, wouldn't grab the pencil from his hand. "You're right. All of that was 'irrelevant chatter.' Here's what I want to know: is that what you're planning? To convince me that I can't do it, so I either give up or let you solve for that variable in my Soul as things are?"

She stared him down. He finally met her gaze, or at least looked at her face. His pupils tracked over each of her features in turn.

"Well—am I right?"

He scoffed.

Rhyme's nails dug into her skin through her shirt.

"Do you have anything to say that isn't garbage, femtogram?"

She stopped. Blinked.

Sho laughed. A long, clunky, rowdy laugh that sounded like a dying lawnmower. He jabbed a finger in her direction. "I won't reiterate everything I said about your excuses. But I wouldn't be wasting my time if I hadn't calculated your potential. Freedom? Ha! If you wanted to take the Taboo for yourself, femtogram, I'd help you keep iterating on it. But don't factoring underestimate me. I do what I want."

"But y—"

"If I wanted to convince you to let me subtract that entry fee from your Soul," he interjected, smugness radiating from him like warmth from a heating coil, "I would just tell you to let me do it or go factor yourself. What would you do, femtogram? Live until your series converges without it? Heh. Tell me to my face that you'll walk away from this with your entry fee constant."

Rhyme's mouth fell open and stayed open for a full second before she set her jaw.

"I don't tell you to go factor yourself because I want to see what equations you'll derive. That hyper-real hectopascal miscalculated. Sure, I have a higher value because I have a higher Imagination. Just like Zeptogram No. 2 has a higher leadership coefficient than I do. Just like you have a higher garbage-word-outputting coefficient than I do. The numbers don't lie, and all probabilities are nonzero. Heh. You typhlotic tetrahedron. You've already Q.E.D.'d your solution to this proof and you're still trying to calculate something. I'm adjacent because these are zetta fun times." Sho eyed her. "If I say something's nicely calculated, it's because I checked your work. If I say something's garbage, it's because it's garbage."

He gestured to the wall where she'd repeated his designs.

"Your sigils? Trash!"

To the cityspace she'd tried to emulate, and the silhouette she'd attempted to copy.

"Your art? Garbage!"

To her, and the graffiti handprint on her chest.

"You? Full of junk! But I don't have time for uninspiring integers. So get inspiring, or our vectors will diverge."

He laughed. So long, so loud, so not giving a shit if anyone in Shibuya heard him. Not a single bone of bullshit in his body. Not for underhanded tactics, not for false praise, not for telling her that she didn't have to try so hard.

"You're radiamn straight. Doesn't make a difference how many times you need to iterate. You can keep iterating until your series converges. And if the proof goes unsolved, I'll reclassify you as an inverse idiot who pounded herself stupid. And if you do prove it? Ha! I never miscalculate, femtogram." He emphasized the prefix with the full weight of his body, as palpable as a subwoofer's blast of air-shaking bass. "I'll teach you all the identities you need and bring you to all the geometries that will free you of restrictions. But I'm not going to accelerate your plans for you like that hollow-skulled hectopascal did to me. I want to see the functions you derive. I want to see the expressions you evaluate. I want to see your proofs, for yourself."

She made a noise that might've sounded as softly as an "oh," and might've started as hushedly as a "sh."

"So, femtogram." All teeth, that grin, and all hunger, that gaze. "Get deriving, or get derived."

Chapter Text

Rhyme grinds her knuckles against her cheek. Nothing to chuckle about now. She's had a good run. But all of her one-handed texting has come to an end: While her left arm boils up to the elbow, numb and prickling with a sensation that everything inside her paper-thin skin had dissolved into vibrating static, a dot of abject agony has appeared on her right forefinger's tip as well. Soon her right hand will begin to spasm, too. She's at least learned to concentrate well enough to keep her left arm reasonably still, although she still can't text with it. For all the time that she's avoided the Taboo and relied on using just her right hand, now she'll really have to contend with working with the Taboo in it.

The weather will warm up eventually. Would she even be able to keep the gloves?

...Especially given her nails have started to quicken their growth. She can't keep them clipped in time, not with their sharpness, the midlines stabbing forward into something more like claws. On the bright side, as long as she doesnt'split her gloves from the inside-out, they obscure her increasingly inhuman nails, too.

But gloves can't obscure the irritability. From the constant, incessant pain. From the sleep deprivation of trying to catch some 𝑧s despite that unyielding pain. From that yearning, panging, prickling of her skin, as though she's developed an allergy to the RG to go along with her acquired allergy to human contact. From the constant buzzing at the base of her skull that has steadily grown in volume, like the listless ache of a fever that left the head heavy and dull. From the fatigue, as if she won't ever rid herself of that deeply-settled exhaustion in her bones.

A different exhaustion from the exhaustion of dealing with her missing entry fee, but an exhaustion that makes her feel like she'll never get enough sleep, never eat enough food, never drink enough water. A weakness. That she hopes will pass.

At least over her texts with Kaie, Rhyme can catch herself in the middle of her irritability and backspace. But she's had to resume speaking out loud in class and with her friends.

There, she lacks the reaction speed.

The Wicked Twisters seem to take it mostly in stride. All that stress of choosing a college, right? Nagi gets it; anxiety and overwhelming burdens tend to bring Nagi the Edgelord out to the surface. Rindo gets it; he's acted like a jackass while freaking out, too. Fret gets it; when stuff's piling up, he tends to pull stupid crap, too. Shoka gets it; she perfected the art of lashing out at people while caring so much it hurt. More like purr-fected, right, Shokie? Fret, shut the freak up. But, yeah, what he said. They'll be there for her, and if they can do anything at all, she can tell 'em, any time!

Her older brother...not so much. He asks about wha's been goin' on, yo. He queries her over and over if she needs to get a doc to check her out. He can ask the gramma from his part-time if he can get an advance on his stacks or sumthin' to help out. Anythin'? Rhyme? Please? He's jus' tryna help. He ain't gon' push it, but he can tell dat sumthin' ain't right. She don't gotta tell him nuthin', but he's gonna be right here if she ever needs anythin'.

True to his word, he doesn't force her to tell him anything. He's... He's trying. She can see that.

Soon, she'll tell him. But not yet. Not while all of this is ongoing. When she's comfortable that she'll be able to live her life.

Shiki notices, too. And Eri. When they stop by the Bito siblings' apartment here and there, more frequently than they did before she got 'sick.' They offer to pay for a doctor's visit, or for therapy, like they have before. It helped Neku! It might help her, too. She shouldn't knock it until she tries it! She's not weak for accepting help! It's the opposite. Being able to accept help takes so much strength and courage. So, won't she at least think about it?

She'll think about it. Once the pain ebbs. Doubts that there's any therapy for lessening the impact of a slow-burn Soul-corrupting transformation into a living embodiment of heresy and sin. But, hey, who knows? She's been wrong before.

And Neku, the hero of Shibuya. Rhyme couldn't avoid Mewsic forever. Not when her older brother asks her to go get some of Neku's grub for him, please, and she's already caused him enough grief.

So she stops by Mewsic on her way home. Stands outside the café with her hands in her pockets and her thumb tap-tap-tapping on her phone to ask Neku to come out to see her, because walking in to a small cramped space full of people sounds like not the best idea at the moment. Feeling the slowly enlarging pocket of numbness and pain on the finger of her right hand. Ordering some bouillabaisse, her older brother's favorite, with Neku's interesting recipe. Waiting for her order. Having Neku inquire about what she's been up to recently, since he hasn't seen her around too much. Feeling the weight of his scrutiny. He doesn't voice her big brother's name but she can sense his presence looming over the conversation.

College, choices, and the future have been stressing her out, she admits, mostly to get him off of her back. How's that bouillabaisse coming along?

...Does she want a recommendation for a therapist? Therapy isn't just for people who have gotten really hurt. Even with something like a little school stress, they could help her out with learning to adapt and destress.

No need. Eri and Shiki have already offered.

Right... Neku packages up the bouillabaisse for her and brings it out to where she waits outside. Hey, has she seen Minamimoto around?

Rhyme stiffens.

Neku kneads his thumb into his shoulder. He hasn't spotted Minamimoto popping by Mewsic recently. The last thing he came to the café, all revved up like that, Neku had threatened to kick him out if he didn't stop scaring the customers, but he hadn't intended to chase Minamimoto off forever.

No, she says after a moment, she hasn't seen him around here.

If he picks up on the carefulness of her words, his expression doesn't show it. Instead he sighs with relief.

...Did her older brother put him up to that question?

Sorta. Neku mostly wanted to know himself. He's not going to tell her older brother anything. But Neku... Well... The last time he saw Minamimoto and Rhyme together, Rhyme seemed...pretty set on helping him out of the goodness of her heart and all of that. And Neku appreciates her kindness! Really does! Just worried that Rhyme would get herself tangled up in something bad. People like Minamimoto... They can't be helped so easily. They don't think there's anything wrong with them. There's nothing to be gained from trying, and a lot to be lost.

Oh really? What's the difference? How come Neku's problems are the kind of thing he goes to therapy for, but—Rhyme pauses before she says his name to make sure she doesn't slip up—Minamimoto can't be helped?

Well... That is the difference. Neku has done everything that he can to make sure that his problems aren't hurting other people, or himself. Minamimoto isn't a bad person. Just someone to hold at arm's-length. Neku can tell the guy's been around Mewsic because he'll spot the missing pastries overnight and the extra anonymous ShibuPay transaction on the till. And he's fine with that. He told Minamimoto that he's welcome to come by Mewsic whenever he wants, that he doesn't even need to pay for his sweets. As thanks for helping to save Shibuya, and so that Neku can keep an eye on him, in a way.

Hm... Rhyme looks at him. Quietly.

Neku sighs. Listen, Rhyme, interacting with Minamimoto itself isn't a problem. Neku put them in touch with one another because he thought they might get along. It's just important to not try to be Minamimoto's friend or therapist. She can text with him, sure. Neku suspects she's done him good just by giving him an outlet to talk about math with. But she shouldn't be doing the guy any favors.

And here she thought that Neku was all about Mr. The World Ends With You, Mr. Open Up Your World To Other People, Mr. Twist—

He sighs again. Yes, that's why he put them in touch. He just doesn't want to see Rhyme's kindness be taken advantage of. That's all. He's friends with Coco, too, and Coco's pretty close with Minamimoto. Coco can handle it because she can stand up for herself and be cruel right back, and Coco knows how to ask Neku for help when she needs it.

Even if it took her three years to learn how to ask with her words and not with her gun?

Rhyme doesn't say that part, bites it back between her teeth. Her head feels so heavy, her skin so needled, the prickling worsening with each word. Instead, she says:

Huh. Really. Coco knows how to stand up for herself and ask for help? But Rhyme doesn't?

Rhyme...

Isn't this just because her big brother is worried for her safety? Coco can frolick through all the flowers with Minamimoto, but Rhyme can't?

Rhyme. Coco is a powerful Reaper who can hold her own with Minamimoto, and—

Hehe!

Hm? Something up, Rhyme?

No, no, she's listening. What was he about to say?

Neku eyes her, then continues: Coco is a powerful Reaper, unlike himself, unlike Rhyme. And, more importantly, Coco understands that Minamimoto sees nothing wrong with himself, so she's not going to try to 'help him.'

She's right, Rhyme says, because there's nothing particularly wrong with Minamimoto. Everyone has flaws and things that they could improve. But there's nothing particularly wrong with him, no more so than what's wrong with herself.

Neku looks at her. She looks back at him. Neku holds the packaged bouillabaisse out to her. Minamimoto's less crazy than he used to be, Neku says after a moment, and he's not actively doing things that will get people killed. As far as Neku or Coco know, anyway. But he's messed up in the head. That doesn't make him a bad person, again. Neku hopes Minamimoto comes by Mewsic during daylight hours again soon, so he can see what Minamimoto's been up to recently. Being messed up in the head doesn't mean Minamimoto doesn't have a place in Shibuya, or that Neku isn't going to keep making him his favorite pastries. Just means that Rhyme should be careful. Not mistake talking about mathematics with friendship. Minamimoto doesn't do friends.

Not mistake madness with genius, right?

Right. Neku exhales. Look, Rhyme, he's sorry if she hasn't seen Minamimoto around, and she's hurting because he abandoned her.

Rhyme keeps her smile small and tight.

But he was never her friend to begin with. It's good to open up one's mind to other possibilities, and to get along with people different from oneself. But it's also important not to trick oneself into thinking that someone like Minamimoto can truly care about others. That's really what he's been trying to say. Minamimoto is never going to care about other people, not as people. He might care about them as tools, and he'll help save Shibuya in a pinch—so it's good to keep him around as an ally. But he's not going to care about her, ever. So he doesn't want to see her get hurt.

Yeah, well, she doesn't need his fucking protection, thanks.

His eyes widen. Hers, too. Her hand rushes up to her mouth. She can see him trying to study her, his mind racing almost audibly.

Please don't tell her older brother that she said that. Please. She's just—she's been sleep deprived recently. That's all. She didn't mean to snap. Sorry.

...Yeah. Sorry for pushing her. He's gotta get back to the café soon, anyhow. And it doesn't really matter since she said she hasn't seen Minamimoto around, huh?

...Not around here, no.

Yeah. Well. He's sorry. Has she tried texting him?

Rhyme brings the bouillabaisse back home. It's like a party in her older brother's mouth. Her older brother asks her if Neku said anything. She has to bite back her laughter long enough to inquire whether her older brother put Neku up to asking anything.

Her older brother admits he asked Neku a few weeks ago to check whether she been hangin' out wit' Tabooty. But he took dat back, yo, an' told Phones he wasn't boutta snoop on Rhyme's business. He trusts her not to be hangin' out wit' Tabooty or doin' anythin' dangerous like that.

...Uh huh.

When Rhyme retires to her room and closes the door, Sho manifests like usual. She shrugs her jacket off at lightning speed, peels her gloves off, and shows him. Look, her right hand, too. Progress! Progress!

Grinning and dropping the Tacos y Más Tacos bag brimming with spicy verde and super spicy tacos onto her desk, Sho runs his hands over hers, inspecting the perimeter, touching that dot of abject agony. Her nape crawls, but she waits patiently until he's finished before she flops onto her bed and opens the bag of tacos. Eating twice—three?—as much food as usual since all of this began. Her normal three meals a day from her school and her older brother, and these six-times-daily infusions of calories and energy from Sho.

Heh heh heh. Zetta fun times. It's all going to add up when she finally crosses over to the UG, too. Which will likely have to happen soon, based on her progress.

But not yet?

No, not yet.

Rhyme breathes out in belief. Not yet. Yes, not yet...

Does she need anything else? Sho asks. He tends to spend more time with her at midnight, not so much time in the afternoon. She prefers it that way. Less of a chance for her older brother to overhear, to find out. She can linger at the midnight hour.

But no, Rhyme doesn't need anything else. She's been dealing with insomnia and irritability from the constant pain and the sleep deprivation, but what can Sho do about that?

Sho tilts his hat up. Calculating.

She sits up. Looks at him.

Whenever he's irritated, Sho starts, he creates art. She could try that.

Yes, Rhyme answers, she could.

But it's not only from the pain, or the sleep deprivation.

...

The Noise fraction of her Soul's multiplying by the attosecond, femtogram. It's putting so many factoring hectopascals of pressure onto the human fraction. Her emotional functions aren't outputting sufficient quantities anymore. For now, she can still keep herself constant, but that'll be over soon. Like he said, she'll have to start deriving that Soul from elsewhere.

...Rhyme knows that. She has the Instrumentalist pin under her bed just in case anything happens.

Hmph. Once she starts tuning to both the UG and RG, she can stay adjacent to her RG human friends while intersecting with two planes at once to derive Soul from them. The closer she converges, the better; zero distance is best. Skin to skin tangents, if she can, especially if she can evoke powerful emotions in her integrated integers. That Soul will nourish her through her growth curve and out into the sigmoid bend.

...Right. That's what he does, isn't it?

Sho grins. Humans generate Soul. It spills out of them and becomes Noise, and plenty of random radians ask for skin to skin tangents, for powerful emotions evoked, through different artistic media. Powerful emotions don't have to be negative. That dawned on him a few months ago. Takes more effort to stoke positive emotions than negative ones, sure, but it means a bijective set. For one zeptogram who'd pushed him out of his vector, the appropriate physical manipulation leads to veritable outpourings of positive emotions, so much Soul that he'd even factored in some functions that he'd dismissed years ago as worthless in the RG. For another zeptogram, an equation as simple as being held until sleep can stoke exajoules' worth of emotions of safety, contentment, belonging. Heh...zetta fun times.

Rhyme gazes at her hands. The left, trembling, writhing. The right, not yet, but soon. Then she looks back up at him. What are they, radiamn vampires?

He scoffs. Hardly. Humans feed on Soul, too. Whether they integrate it from embracing friends, exchanging feelings, or even interacting with non-threatening strangers, most humans will weaken without other humans, or some other method of gaining Soul. Their Noise code just needs more of it, much like how she needs more calories a day, too. Their metabolism have accelerated, so they need to be more deliberate.

Hm, she answers. She'll think about it. Yes, she'll go to the UG when she needs to. But physical proximity with her friends would be... Even as a human in the RG, she'd found that difficult to accomplish. And she doesn't want to... Being with her friends just to leech Soul off of them. He doesn't feel bad about it?

Feel bad about what, femtogram? His zeptograms are happy, happy enough that they've confided being worried he'll diverge permanently from their vectors after his plans come to fruition.

Feel bad about... Do they know? Do his zeptograms know that he's 'skimming a little Soul off the top' whenever he interacts with them? Do they realize that he wouldn't be doing that if he weren't using them as a snack at the same time?

Sho flicks his cap upwards. Null matrix, femtogram! He does those things because he wants to. The integration of Soul is a bonus. He could go derive Soul from the Pork City stairwell without expending a single joule of his own energy.

She nods. Looks down thoughtfully at her hands. Rhyme supposes he wants his peanut gallery, too.

Radiamn straight he does. And the femtogram will have to come to a resolution sooner rather than later. Does she need anything else?

Rhyme inclines her head. She can't offer him much Soul, but would he stay for a few minutes longer? Misery loves company. And a burden shared is a burden halved. Him being around, it... It helps to know that someone else is hurting like she is, too. Not just that someone else is hurting, but that...

That their pains are congruent?

...Yeah. That their pains are congruent.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The listless days rolled into one another without end. The same deep ache in her bones, the exhaustion that never wore on. The same lunches spent trying to excuse herself from the Wicked Twisters' table without worrying them so she could nap in the library. The same lectures that barely any of her classmates paid attention to, their gazes extending outwards to passing the torch for their clubs, to living arrangements for the next year, to making the most of their time with friends whom they might never see again, to the graduation ceremony, to the rest of their lives and the dreams they would fulfill.

Rhyme could sense the passage of time only in the shifting phases of the moon overhead, the silver gradually swelling with light. What would happen when it filled, ripe as a mountain peach? Would it burst? Or would it simply recede back down with waning hope into the darkness so black its shadow obscure the stars?

Trying to inscribe a psych onto a pin hadn't given her anything to latch onto. But the sigils, and the mysterious but learnable language that Sho used, did.

As she had thrown herself into learning programming, now she threw herself into studying the occult. Few of the texts had readable translations. Fortunately her dabbles in code had likewise sent her into searching up English text or reading through English forums, although the ornate and vague writing of the alchemical texts she could find online threw her for a loop. Or several loops. Yet another mystery circle in her life. The challenge of it, the capacity to sink her teeth into something and hone her skill through understanding, gradually took up a greater fraction of her day. She flipped through flashcards in class, surveyed the texts on her phone on the walk to and from school, and recorded questions to badger Sho about when they met that night.

All those hours counting down to their nightly meetings: Rhyme intellectualized them away. An unhealthy coping mechanism? She did have to learn these. To communicate with him. Nothing more or less.

She witnessed the interplay of philosophies playing out in the texts. Some tried to elucidate the properties of metals and elements, attempted to further metallurgy and chemistry, the applications practical and pragmatic, many of their findings and theories still holding up relatively true in the now, the observations on which much conventional science had been built. In the texts—she mostly read the English ones, relatively familiar with the language, but found a wide variety stemming from all over the landmass, from Europe to Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, in all wealth of tongues beyond that which she could even pronounce—she found recipes for strengthening steel and making iron-copper alloys that tracked with reality. The earliest recordings of electrical conductance, of heat capacity, of chemical reactions now widely studied: the study of Imagination had walked hand-in-hand with the study of the material world. Matter and Soul, energy and Imagination.

The same demonstrations that had amazed her in her chemistry classes—watching nickel oxide spark yellow when heated, or observing how hydrogen chloride bubbled through water to make acid that could strip magnesium—amazed the writers of these texts. But while she had long taken those elements for granted, highlighting notes from her textbook and regurgitating the information on multiple-choice tests, the alchemists had sought to understand them for the first time, and then to expand, never satisfied with what knowledge they had.

More, out there. More to know. More to learn. More to understand.

It left her almost dazed: simply reading through the experiments and how these alchemists, these artists, had devised ingenious methods of measuring properties and sealing reactions given the equipment that they had.

They'd had to fight, tooth and nail; had had to squeeze out every use of the materials that they had available; had had to prove the validity of their experiments to themselves.

Rhyme had no doubt that her contemporaries in research did the same, cleverness and ingenuity, pushing the boundaries of what people could do to learn every day. But the materials that those researchers used, expensive and requiring technical jargon to comprehend, went far above her head. She could read the articles and understand them, yes, even appreciate the incredible insights from which such sharp experiments had sprung. Yet they felt as though they took place in another world, one far, far from hers, that she would never see, of shiny laboratories and bigger budgets than her older brother would see over the course of his entire life.

Yet these alchemists? Much of what they used, she could find in her kitchen. True, she didn't have the tools for refining metals, but many of the other experiments?

She gazed upon the world around her. That paper clip, that oven, that baking soda, that vinegar. Cooking itself felt like chemistry, like alchemy.

What was baking a cake, but a dissolution of materials, and then an irreversible process leading to their coagulation?

Dissolution and coagulation: the purification of the so-called magnum opus. The alchemical texts described it as capable of anything and everything, but most focused on its supposed properties of immortality. Hmm. Did quantity of life matter that much? What of the quality?

But she read onwards. Dissolving and coagulating, purifying each time. Purifying? As in to cleanse, to make pure? As in what the Angels tried to do? For some texts, yes. But for others: no. Purification didn't mean a scraping away of other materials. Purification meant...something like making better. To take the existing components, to break them down, to rearrange them, and to build them back up. Like baking a cake, yes. Cracking eggs, mixing flour, pouring milk that dissolved into one another, then letting the heat build it back up to a solid—coagulate it. Like baking a cake. Like dissolving a vending machine and coagulating it back into art.

Like blowing oneself up on the roof of Pork City and coagulating oneself back to life.

Everyone had their own ideas for a recipe. One list had four major steps in its production: the blackening, the whitening, the yellowing, the reddening. Black, white, yellow, red? The first four colors that most human languages distinguished between in their development, said Moogle. The first four colors that an infant's eyes would recognize.

Another listed twelve: Calcination. Dissolution. Separation. Conjunction. Putrefaction. Congelation. Cibation. Sublimation. Fermentation. Exaltation. Multiplication. Coagulation.

But it all came down to dissolution and coagulation back in the end.

Solve et coagula.

Yes, Rhyme could gather what Sho might have found fascinating. Such a human thing. The desire to know.

The desire to study Soul in the UG, for fun and for kicks, just to find the limits of reality, the boundaries of one's wildest Imagination, and then pierce through the veil to what lay beyond.

These texts she read, invigorated.

The texts that she found somewhat...less interesting focused more on the feelings and sentiments behind the elements. On the apparent war-like properties of iron, or the supposed feminine connotations of silver. Riiight. From divination to immortality, these texts implicated fantasies on a perpendicular axis to anything cognizant with Rhyme's world.

...At least in the RG. But, then again, Sho had mentioned that Imagination could interface even in the RG, had given the example of bullets stopping in mid-air.

And she herself had seen the impacts of Shibuya Syndrome.

Rhyme lay on her back in bed and dropped her phone onto her chest. Staring up at the blank darkness above, only the slightest reflections of light implying a ceiling and not an infinite yawning void.

She could hardly slog through these. The stuff of absolute nonsense. No matter how much she attempted to respect the ideas, Rhyme couldn't help but shake her head and wonder at how people could even come to such conclusions. Out of desperation, she supposed: so desperate for virility that they would poison themselves with iron, so desperate for beauty that they would ruin themselves with lead. Wishful thinking. Observations based on societal rules rather than anything relevant to reality.

But these texts held the key to Sho understanding her sigils, and to her understanding his.

Iron having 'war-like' properties, or silver having 'feminine' connotations, didn't matter. Didn't make a difference, as Sho would say. The symbology could have meant anything, so long as the words conveyed ideas. They wouldn't destroy their own bodies in some wild goose chase for something they wished could happen.

...Never mind the agony Sho reading her Soul had stricken through her. Rhyme was preparing for a safe operation, doing everything that she could so that her goose chase wouldn't end in sickness and in death.

Out of desperation, yes. Like all people in the texts, turning to alchemy, turning to the supernatural, turning to the Imagination.

Except that she had actual proof, and she wouldn't do a thing until she had considered it thoroughly from every angle.

So she continued. Perhaps, when she drew her own version of the Taboo sigil, she could set a glyph to remove and mute iron's 'war-like' properties, getting the Taboo to chill out for a little bit. Or silver's 'feminine' connotations... Well, she couldn't really think of something for that one, yet. If 'feminine' included 'girls,' then perhaps she could use it to indicate herself with some kind of glyph of protection or sacred place, something like that. She had to take that iron, that silver out of the contexts she'd nestled her knowledge in for the past eighteen years of her life, and treat them like spells from a fantasy game.

Like a Lv. 𝑖 Flare.

Not unlike a game of pretend. The floor was lava. The steps in the sidewalk meant jumping over them. Not the real properties. But imaginary ones of her own choosing: Imaginary ones.

So she resumed and redoubled her efforts to read through the symbols, to understand.

Of all the symbols she tabbed through, she paused on what had quickly become not her favorite but the one that always made her thumb hover for just a moment before she flipped the flashcard over: 🜢

The sublimate of copper.

A circle and a star, connected by a rod. The sublimate of antimony looked similar, albeit flipped on its head. Antimony, the wolf. And copper... The texts varied on its meaning, some connecting it to the morning and evening star, most to Venus, and still others to every celestial body in the night sky. The element associated with love and desire? She laughed to herself.

The element associated with a perpetual strain and a perpetual stain. With the bitter taste that ever shadowed her as her constant companion. With the violence that she had committed and could commit, yes. With the fact that she would die for her brother, kill for her brother, take anything for her brother. Even take his smile away temporarily, so that she could protect it in the future, when all of this sneaking around behind his back could end.

Well, she still didn't have a dream, but she had a goal.

The sublimate of copper. 🜢. When the bitterness faded from her tongue, then she would know peace.

Whenever she eventually finished her lessons and embarked on writing instructions about herself into the sigil—instructions for the Taboo not to cause her bodily harm, instructions for the Taboo to respect her autonomy, instructions for the Taboo not to flare up if she declined—she would mark herself with that. She would use it to identify herself. The variable holding her name.

The sublimate of copper. That which she wished to be.

That which, in a manner of speaking, she dreamed to be.

When Rhyme returned to the skinny Udagawa alleyway that had become their de facto base of operations while she struggled with sigil, a question burned through her. A question, and an answer. First, the question: the symbols Sho had shown her had come from overseas. But Games must have existed on Japanese soil for some untold number of years, perhaps even stretching back into antiquity. Then the Reapers and other denizens of the UG must have found their own ways to make delayed psychs possible. Whether they looked like sigils or something else, the denizens of the local UG must have used something that did the same thing that sigils did now. Why didn't Sho use any of those symbols, or whatever pattern, instead? Why not use the methods that had been used in Shibuya even before it became known as Shibuya? Why reach for something on the outside?

If he would be the future Composer of Shibuya, why wouldn't he emphasize something uniquely Shibuyan?

Rhyme didn't disagree, just curious on his take.

He shrugged when she asked. Not a particularly avid reader, he had studied along with Mr. Hanekoma's teachings before he had developed his own. Besides, the sigils looked zetta cool, so who gave a digit?

She agreed with that. The sigils did look zetta cool. His sigils, anyway.

They didn't even resemble the ones from the texts so much as they... No, they didn't really resemble the summoning circles and such from manga and video games, either. They resemble the graffiti of street art the most, which made sense, given that he sprayed them on with paint. He'd designed his own visual language for it even when he used existing symbols. On the sigils that he made for himself, not demonstrating to her, she couldn't identify any of the symbols.

Well, she could. Digits, constants, set operations. She could read those. But what they meant? Only Sho could tell her.

And taking inspiration from outside of Shibuya? So zetta sweet. Imagination bled across lines. To meet what he didn't understand, to learn about it, to try to see it in its own context, expanded his own repertoire. Shibuya didn't need to close itself out from the rest of the world like a dragon coiling up on its hoard or flowing down the same river in every passage. The same garbage arbitrary classification. Why limit himself to Shibuya? Even the brands recognized by the Game came from everywhere around the world, from Hong Kong to Milan, new connections made every year.

"Po—that polynomial at SPICY CURRY DON's idea is 𝑥. Everything that he makes has Shibuya's Soul in it, because he's making it here, and it mixes the Soul of the inspirations he's carried. That polynomial across the street at Crowned Curry? Mixing his own Soul into Shibuya, too, in an inverted matrix to the first. And the polynomial that completes the triangle on Dogenzaka?"

"Suzu Slurpz?" Rhyme supplied.

Sho grinned. "Correct: a polynomial from Shibuya, making something from Shibuya. Three different cases. All adding to Shibuya's summation. Purificatus non consumptus!"

"And when you say purification here," she mused, reflecting on the alchemical texts that she had read, "you're not talking about the idea of something becoming 'pure.' You're talking about making something harder, faster, better, stronger, by mixing more things into it, right? The way that metal alloys can be better for specific...applications, I guess?...compared to 'pure' metals. Getting things all mixed up."

"Naturally. Heh! You've been studying up, femtogram. This is hardly even a practice test for you."

Rhyme beamed. "Someone from Shibuya making food from Shibuya. Someone from Shibuya making food from outside Shibuya. Someone from outside Shibuya making food from outside Shibuya." She nodded to herself. "And someone from outside Shibuya making food from Shibuya, too. They're all part of Shibuya. And because they're all different experiences, they give people different inspirations?"

"As long as you're balancing the equations in equivalent exchange, take inspiration, take garbage, and transform it into your own art, then let other radians turn that into more garbage for you to pile even higher! And that makes for six-sigma more interesting garbage." Sho spun the can of purple graffiti can and caught it. "Makes my city more zetta interesting."

More zetta interesting, he said. The very mathematical numerals that he used? Hindi-Arabic. The alphabet used for variables? Latin. The concept of the guardian lion that he had used for his motif? Chinese.

Himself? Not from Shibuya at all.

Rhyme tilted her head. "You're not from Shibuya?"

"Not the origin of my graph. Doesn't make a difference." Sho crackled his knuckles. "I chose this city, and this city chose me. It's my 428, and I'm its 44."

"Why do you want to be Composer of Shibuya?" she asked, tucking her hands into her pockets for lack of anything better to do with them. "I don't think you'll be a bad one. Hmm. I shouldn't judge a book by its cover. And I didn't. Even though you..." Her voice trailed off as she glanced over him and his evidently insuppressible toothy grin. "With how dogged you are about trying to become Composer of Shibuya, I assumed that this place really... I mean, that you were from here. Like I am."

"Heh! Check that lower-order logic, femtogram! Who gives a factor what helix I crawled out of? I chose my own vector. I've been in my 428 since Δ𝑡 = 10𝑦, and I've been beautifying it with art." Sho threw his arm out. "You know how many inverse idiots with origins in my 428 take the zetta fascinating factors in this city and crunch them into garbage? I'll take those inverse idiots out with the trash when I become Composer." His hand swept in a great arc along the wall. "It's not about where my function started, but what quadrant I've led it to now."

She stroked her chin. "That's true. I... Huh. I always thought about tying myself to Shibuya because...I was born here?"

"What an uninspiring integer. Integrate yourself to 428 because you choose to. It's garbage if it's not free will, femtogram." Sho leaned forward until he loomed over her, though she had the impression that he never intended to tower on purpose. "Doesn't make a difference if you originated from this plane or not. It makes a difference if you give a digit about it and if the plane integrates you back into a bijective set. It's garbage if it's not your free will, and it's garbage if it's not the plane's free will. Heh."

"That... That makes sense. It's my choice." Her choice of where to go for college, too. "I chose to save Shibuya from purification—from what those Angels had planned—from Soul Pulvis. I could've just stayed outside the city." She met his gaze. "Is that one of the reasons that you trusted me? That you decided it was worth teaching me?"

"Heh! Ninety degrees. You demonstrated that you'll pick Shibuya. Even increased the probability of a negative outcome for yourself over it. Put yourself in danger, and stayed at those spatial coordinates through Operation: Awakening. You weren't a Player. None of that was a given." Sho held onto his cap, his grin giving way to an almost fond smile. Her lips curved towards to match. "You did it anyway. Out of your free will. Heh. Not half bad, femtogram."

Rhyme hmmed. "I do like the city. But I decided to save it because I cared about the people. My older brother and his friends in the microcosm, and all the people of Shibuya in the macrocosm."

She had the sense that he was looking at her like walking garbage, and not the sort that he'd add to his heaps. "The factor do you think a city is? The buildings?"

"Well, they are rectangular prisms, mostly," she replied mildly, "so it seems like it would be your thing."

"Shove it up your inverse fractal!" Sho was grinning at her so widely that she couldn't stop giggling. "It's all the random radians that produce trash that I can dissolve and coagulate. It's the random radians that generate Soul and Imagination."

"So the fact that I saved it for the people..." Rhyme regarded him for a moment. Fret had told her something that Nagi had said to him, months ago, during the Game. About Nagi's definition of humanity. About how, to Nagi, true humans looked at others not for the sake of using them, or extracting something from them, but rather for the sake of truly seeking to understand them, to accept them. How did Sho see the people of Shibuya? He called them garbage and seemed to mostly value them for the trash that they put out. Did that count as seeing them as resources? Did that count, if he had wanted their own individual Souls reawakened and reignited? Nagi appeared to have few qualms with Sho herself, given how she spoke about him, but did she view him as...human? "That's part of why you chose me."

The bracelet on Sho's wrist jingled as he motioned with his hand. She'd been noticing the noise more and more recently. The noise... Not so much the Noise. "Naturally."

"I'm honored. And for what it's worth...I'd like to see what Shibuya looks like with you as Composer. At least I'm pretty sure that you're not going to let it get purified without a fight."

The arrogance in his timbre, that self-assured tone of someone completely convinced of their competence if not immortality, made her smile, just a little. If anyone could talk the talk and walk the walk, the cat—no, the lion—who had gotten himself killed on curiosity and brought himself back on satisfaction. "Radiamn straight! I'll bisect any obtuse angles—or anything else—that even tries to factor out my 428! Cruuuuuuuuunch! I'll add them all to my heap!"

"Hee hee! I believe that! Wow, and to think that you're not even from Shibuya...but I really do believe that you care about it. Wait... You said something about being in Shibuya since..." Rhyme peeked upwards at his face. "What did that mean? Δ𝑡 = 10𝑦... Ten years ago?"

"Hmph. Try the inverse operation."

She hummed. "Since you were ten years old?" He smirked. Rhyme nearly went on, but no, she'd learned about assumptions. "Am I right?"

"Correct!"

"Did you move here?" Rhyme asked. "Or how did you end in Shibuya?"

"Heh! Femtogram. I'll solve whatever problem you give me. I moved here as a monomial." As a monomial? By himself? "Came by bus." Somehow the utter mundanity of him saying that, nestled between the mathematical metaphors that had just left his mouth and whatever he would say next made her laugh. "But didn't you want to invert the enumeration?" Sho held up two fingers. "First the lesson, and then any extraneous expression?"

...Right. She'd had the question, that had spun out that conversation, and now she'd give him that answer. Second, the answer: Rhyme had picked out that symbol for herself.

"Sure. Show your work." Sho held out a spraypaint can of a different color. Not the red, or the purple, or the black that he'd presented her with before. "Well, you asked for it."

Rhyme took the offering. She fwwshed it out experimentally against the wall. Coral. Salmon. That orangy-pink color that her older brother had picked out for her. For a moment she merely observed the smear along the brick, the motes drying in the air, the dust the exact shade of the sweater that she'd worn when she had indicated the hue. How Sho had matched it so precisely, she couldn't have guessed. Actually, she had no idea from where he got his paint. For all she knew, he might have mixed it up himself. And... And taken the time to mix up the exact shade that she had asked for. "Thanks."

"So, show your work already." Sho quirked his head towards the streak she'd painted along the wall. "Unless that's it?"

"Huh? No. I wanted to do something artistic, so I picked it out for myself." Rhyme shook the can for a few lingering seconds. If Sho could rock these cans that violently and have them not explode on him, then she could surely shake hers a little longer, too. "I started thinking about how I'll put the Taboo together. I was thinking that it would be ideal for you to never hit the unique local maximum at all, but on the off-chance that you do, I could just draw—no, wait, add—"

He laughed, and she giggled with him.

"—instructions that would make it safe for me to be there, on top of everything else."

"Hm. Limits?"

It made her burst out in peals of mirth, his one-word show of displeasure. "It wouldn't be that limiting. It would only be about me. That's why I'm picking a special symbol for myself, and making sure that it only applies to me. Because I'm trying not to limit you." Rhyme tapped her finger on the can's trigger. "And as soon as you finish subtracting my entry fee, you can put your Taboo back the way it was. Or we can remove only the limits related to me."

Sho folded his arms over his chest and angled his upper body back. "Hmph. Work out the proof, and I'll consider it."

She would take a maybe over a no. If Sho said that he would consider something, he meant it. No empty words out of politeness for him. Turning back towards the wall, Rhyme aimed the can, steadied her arm, and began drawing the world's wobbliest loop. But even the world's wobbliest loop could still make a mystery circle.

The loop. The star. The rod connecting them. The sublimate of copper. All that she dreamed to be.

With her mouth aching from smiling so much, Rhyme faced him once more. She watched him study the symbol, his hands having relaxed down into his coat pockets.

"That's it?" he asked.

"Mmhm! I looked through everything before I decided. Knowledge is power! I wanted it to be something that I'd be able to text, and something that I felt really symbolized me." Rhyme pressed her fingers into her cheek. The taste of copper, still such a raw metallic tang on her tongue, that crackling electricity of static. Not the taste of human blood-of iron-but that which she'd tasted of Tigris Cantus's Soul, that which she'd tasted of her own flesh, that which would finally sublimate away from herself when Sho tore that static from her Soul. "It's... It's what I've picked for myself."

"That looks congruent," he observed, "with the symbol for the sublimate of copper. But I don't deal with probabilistic proofs."

Rhyme slapped her palm against the wall as if high-fiving the brick. "Then it's recognizable! A picture really is worth a thousand words!"

"A thousand words of scrap simulacra!" The disgust brimming through his timbre made her lower her hand along the wall, the brick's rough texture scraping against her skin. "You're going to use a symbol that already exists to represent you?"

"It doesn't matter, right?" she tried. "It's not like it has an intrinsic meaning! You're not worried that you're going to confuse it with the other meanings of the sublimate of copper, are you? Because I'll explain it! Just like we can say that iron means anything, as long as we're, you know, on the same page." Her shoulders bumped against the wall where she'd painted the symbol. Her symbol. "Or on the congruent page? On the same plane?"

The mathematical puns rebounded from the immovable blackboard of his features like a rubber ball smacking her in the face hard enough to break her nose. "You stupid self-subtracting scalene, are you going to define your own variable as some other scrap's sweepings?" Sho's hand fwipped out of his pocket and stabbed through the air towards her. "You're only congruent to yourself. The common symbols are only worthwhile in the learning phase and for speed. I'll accept it because you've set a temporal limit. But if you want to keep learning sigils after we break that entry fee boundary—"

She blinked rapidly. Huh?

"—then I'll expect you to derive your own symbology. You understand that what we're doing here is the unfettered Taboo. The sigils' Imaginary intent can already be read by those familiar, no matter what symbology we use to obfuscate it to random radians. But to use symbols that anyone could read? Absolute trash."

Rhyme shook her head. "Why is that important? If I'm going to rename all the variables, it doesn't matter what I'm using the existing ones, does it? Your equations aren't any less...yours just because you use those Hindi-Arabic numerals."

"Naturally. But you're putting two unrelated equations in the same system. This isn't about you using something so that I can understand it and draw the sigil, is it?" Sho jabbed at her with his finger.

"Don't make any assumptions, please." She backed herself further against the wall. "Because you said that we have to understand each other, right? That's exactly why I'm doing it. Because...you have to understand me, and I have to understand you, and that's why I've been studying up, like I said." Linking her fingers behind her back, Rhyme felt her sleeves dragging against the brick.

He scoffed. "You think I'm going to understand you if you copy something, than if you show me your own proof?"

"If I explain it!" she countered cheerily. "Even if I draw my own symbol, I'll have to explain it to you anyway, right?"

"You found this symbol—" Sho gestured towards the wall. "—by looking through the work done before."

"That's right! I'm taking the existing garbage and making my own art out of it! It's exactly what you said!" The brick had rolled up the fabric of her sleeves. "I'm taking the trash that other people out out, and I'm turning into what I want it to be! It's exactly the same as your art, Sho. Don't be the pot calling the kettle black."

The hhhhh from the back of his throat accompanied his arms lowering to his sides. The pose resembled the way he shrugged, with his palms opened up towards her, but the slight hunching of his shoulders, narrowing of his eyes, and baring of his teeth made everything look more like unbridled rage. "You're asking for a remediation, you useless trash! No comments from the peanut gallery! Your opinions are garbage!"

She gasped. Not from his anger, which didn't faze her—she'd seen him angrier at chocomint ice cream, and if he tried something now, she'd chuck the Instrumentalist pin and abscond—but from the feeling of the brick biting into her bare forearms. Wincing from the wear on her old wounds, Rhyme pressed her lips together and said nothing. No comments from the peanut gallery, after all. And silence was golden. So much for silver.

"Worthless waste of wattage. Hmph! I don't take a vending machine, rip it out of its socket, and call it art. I smash it, wrench it, destroy it, dissolve it into its components, and then I coagulate the remainder and the quotient into something novel. Sure, mathematics uses all the same digits. Sure, you can use whatever symbols you want in your sigil, because you're remixing their positions and meanings. But for yourself. Here's a pop quiz, femtogram." The distance between them closed rapidly until his face filled nearly her entire vision save for slivers of dark alleyway on either side of his hat. "How do I define myself?"

"...As Shibuya's guardian lion?" Rhyme tried.

Sho's eyes narrowed further, lip peeled back from his teeth. Those canines that triggered her heart into palpitating in her chest against her will: did they come with Reaper territory, or with Taboo Noise? Or both? Shoka had them, too, but when had Sho gotten his? "One more iteration."

"Only one more?" she inquired sweetly. "I thought that you told me I could keep iterating."

"You can, you interpretation-challenged inverse idiot. I'm asking you for another iteration on the answer. How do I define myself?" His fingers curled inwards as though pointing up his arms.

Rhyme panned over him, up and down. Hat, bandanna, messy hair, earrings, tattoos, necklace, hood, coat, bracelet, ripped jeans, boots. "Sho Minamimoto, artist and artwork in one?"

"Are you trying to be obtuse? What the factor did this sequence start with!?" Sho slammed his fist into the brick above and to the left of her head. Despite her effort to keep herself absolutely still, her body betraying her, a jolt quaking up her spine and shivering her into the wall. He glared straight through her, his irises almost entirely black from how the darkness of his pupils had swallowed them, the explosiveness nowhere near the golden eyes of the Taboo: a very, very human flavor of upset. His arm stayed ramrod straight. The shakiness of her drawn-in breath made her cut it halfway. That thumping thunderclap against her eardrums: from her heartbeat, or his? The warmth that radiated from his body this close turned up into an oppressive heat.

She'd heard the parable of the frog who stayed in a pot of slowly boiling water.

"How—" The growl along his words that vibrated against her skull: still not animalistic, but him knowing what he was choosing to do. "—do I define my own factoring variable?"

She let her tongue simply exist in her mouth for a moment until the tremble through it faded. "Sho," Rhyme said softly.

"Y—"

Her voice stayed quiet, gentle, unperturbed. "Back away, right now. It's garbage if it's not free will."

Sho's jaw snapped audibly shut, the clack of his teeth against one another quickening the hot flood through her veins and jumping the pulse that bounded against her throat. Then she sensed the temperature cooling around her as he straightened up, leaned back, and stepped away from the wall, his hat drawn down over his eyes. "Worthless garbage."

"Thank you." Peeling herself from the wall, Rhyme glanced at her arms where the sleeves had rolled up: whitish older scars and reddish-brown recent wounds, the scabs like uneven hardened hills on her flesh, some of the newer ones still gummy, textured as if damp. One of them was. Moist, weeping anew, a combination of blood and a clearish-yellowish fluid where the brick had sheared the scab right off. She closed the fingers of her right hand around the wound on her left forearm and chose to rivet her gaze on what part of the wall he'd punched. Ah. "You meant how you define yourself in your sigil." The slight quake to her consonants made her hesitate long enough for the quiver to subside. "You define yourself with your name in Latin characters."

His breaths rattled akin to the bars of a cage.

"No, wait. That isn't the full story. You start with your name in Latin characters, because you want people to recognize it, but you embellish it." Even now, visualizing his signature brought a thin, frail thread of mirth to her mouth. Not enough to curve her lip, but just enough for the corners to twitch. "You add the bars to the first two characters and the leonine traits to the last. You make them your own."

"...Ninety degrees."

She couldn't see him from this angle, but she could hear the sound of that familiar scratching. Already with the paper and the pencil.

"Femtogram." His breaths still rattled, but they had taken on a different timbre now, more similar to a metallic gutter shaking from an explosive rain. "I don't give a digit what symbol you use to define yourself. If you'd shown me the same zetta ugly scribble—"

Rhyme nearly began giggling from the sheer gall that even here, even now, he took the moment to critique her artstyle, her horribly wobbly lines, her asymmetric radial star.

"—and called it something you'd factored out yourself, I would've made it part of my set. But you didn't. You chose that zetta ugly scribble because you couldn't make it yourself. It's you, femtogram. Only you are congruent to you. Remix all the trash you want. Take whatever garbage you want to take. But it has to be you."

She listened to the hhhah, hhhah that gradually dwindled into even, steadier breaths.

"Gödel's numbering. Every entry in that map is comprised of digits. Digits all the way down. But every entry in that map is a unique number. Come up with your own. You can start with the factoring sublimate of factoring copper as a base. Doesn't make a difference. But build it up into your own heap. It can be congruent by chance to another symbol. You're right: I won't confuse the two even if they're congruent after you explain. But it has to be you, femtogram."

"...So if I just take this—" She held up the spraypaint can. Her arm shook, but she supported it with her left hand, even with the torn-off scab wetting a spot on the inside of her sleeve. "—and add something..."

The skull on her sweater? No, she'd taken that from her older brother. The crown from the pendant that she'd added a pin to her hat? No, she'd... She'd taken that from her older brother...

"Like this." A few streaks. A couple lines. At random. Couldn't have copied anything except accidentally. "Does this make it mine?"

Sho huffed. "Is it you, femtogram?"

Rhyme kept her gaze trained on the wall. On the subl—on the symbol that was no longer the sublimate of copper, even if she could still identify it under the new mess of paint she'd made. "I'm asking you."

"Femtogram." His voice had returned to its typical volume, but something about the slope of his cadence sounded almost...warm. "I can't solve for 𝑢. Only you can solve for your own self-𝑖."

"...Only I can solve for it." She leaned her head against the wall. Raimu, from her parents, chosen long before they'd known anything about her except that she existed as their child. Rhyme, the color of the spraypaint can she'd asked for, the skulls, the pendant, from her older brother, matching his chosen nickname for himself. Even the Reaper who had summoned the shark Noise that had erased her, the Reaper who handed out nicknames like the candy he held in hand, had called her—Neku had mentioned it in passing—Skulls Jr. Having known her for but a moment, having seen her die, he hadn't regarded her as anything more than her older brother's shadow. Just an echo of someone else. Not a full word. She might have started differently, but she'd end the same. Just a rhyme. "What if I don't know who that is?"

She waited for it.

That factor it out yourself.

"Hmph. A novel data point."

Rhyme's eyes opened slowly, still facing the wall. "...What?"

"The overlap with your Soul in that parallel dimension—" Sho said, bafflingly, unattached and unanchored to anything.

"The Rhyme from the other world?" she asked in disbelief. "The one attacked by Soul Pulvis? What does that have to do with... No, I didn't expect you to answer my question, anyway. I know I have to work it out myself."

"I hypothesized that that overlap was a strange attractor for trash Noise," he went on once she'd finished speaking, as though she hadn't said anything, "because of the irrational codes in your Soul. But the outputs during that Dive were...not all within expected parameters, were they? Heh heh heh... The trash Noise that escaped into other dimensions should've only had the cognitive energy from the masked zeptogram's world-line, and the masked zeptogram had only begun regraphing functions at the start of his three weeks in the Game. At the time, I hadn't elucidated enough information about you to recognize those outputs as not within expected parameters."

She pushed herself slightly away from the wall, enough that she could roll over onto her back and look at him. Sho eyed her, his pupils slightly widened, his smile that of a calculating curiosity, a Cheshire lion. "Are you talking about the...'memory leakage?' About how that other me knew things from this world?"

"Correct. But I have another hypothesis that I want to guess. That overlap didn't recognize any of those memories, which means that they have to come from you." Sho stepped closer to her. With him looming once more, and her gazing up at him, that curved-horn moon had silhouetted itself behind his head again. How apt. "Do you remember flying, and being a Noise?"

"Is this a trick question?" Her brow furrowed. "Yes, I was a squirrel Noise during my Game, and...I could fly."

Sho's grin had all but frozen in place. "Trial 1: failure. Next: do you remember falling, and calling out for that roadkill?"

"You mean my brother?" Rhyme nodded. "I'm guessing that was from my Game, too. All of these are from the Game? Are you saying that Soul Pulvis shouldn't have taken memories from my Game, because Rindo only joined in years after it was done?"

"Null matrix. Answer the question."

She hmmed. "Some Reapers tricked us into taking a leap of faith off a rooftop on our first day. He had to save me. So... Yes, I remember that."

"Trial 2: failure." Still grinning. "Next: do you remember being a spy?"

"A spy?" She pressed her fingers against her cheek. "Like...what do you mean?"

"Heh. Hmph." Sho's boot thdded repetitively against the ground. "Thought was so zetta fascinating I—" He snapped his fingers. "Two 𝑒 two 𝑒 two 𝑒 four two six five six one seven four two 𝑐 two zero six four six 𝑓 six 𝑒 two seven seven four two zero seven nine six 𝑓 seven five two zero six seven six five seven four two zero six nine seven four three 𝑓 two zero four nine two zero seven seven six one seven three two zero six one two zero seven three seven zero seven nine two zero seven four six eight six nine seven three two zero seven seven six eight six 𝑓 six 𝑐 six five two zero seven four six nine six 𝑑 six five two 𝑒! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Rhyme blinked.

"The garbage from the overlap's mouth. '...Beat, don't you get it? I was a spy this whole time.' That familiar to you, femtogram?"

"Uh." She scratched her cheek. "No, I don't think so. I mean, I'm sure that we've played games of pretend before, but I don't remember us ever playing spies or something like that." She peeked up at him. "Those numbers and letters. Was that... That was hex, right? 0x2E is a fullstop, and what you said ended with that, which...makes sense for a quote? I didn't hear any letters other than 𝑐, 𝑒, and 𝑓—no, wait, I think there was a 𝑑 in there?—and the way you said this had this...up and down quality, like you were saying two-digit pairs. I could be wrong, but I think I've stared at enough assembly to recognize the basic pattern." She shrugged. "Couldn't decode it, though, so thanks for translating it back to Japanese."

His boot stamped again, this time more grinding from impatience. "Ninety degrees—" She beamed and giggled, jury out on whether her mirth stemmed more from her own recognition of hexadecimal or the fact that Sho had apparently memorized two sentences by converting them into hexadecimal first. With added punctuation. "—but answer the question. Is that familiar to you or not? Binary answer. You've got an attosecond."

"...No," Rhyme said hesitantly, and then firmly: "No. Especially not anything from my Game."

"Heh. Heh heh heh. Now that's a novel data-point." Sho leaned forward. "That memory leakage wasn't just from you. Somehow, that trash Noise had absorbed and translated cognitive energy from other parallel dimensions. You were the only radian I intercepted over all of Shibuya possessed by the trash Noise. You and only you, femtogram. Part of it's the unique properties to your Soul, at a likely probability. Either the Noise in it, or, more likely, the hyper-real block on your entry fee. But I wonder if you were particularly susceptible to memory leakages even in dimensions where your overlaps didn't have those components to their Souls because of your Soul's inherent instability."

"From the entry fee block, and the Noise?" Rhyme shrugged. "That's what you said before, too."

He smirked. "The shape of your Soul isn't just the code in it. You factor in, too. The inherent instability in your self-identity, and your inability to define yourself as you alone: what if those factor in to the tendency for even overlaps to your Soul to identify and subsume memories as their own?"

Her shoulders fell. Her arms dandled limply at her sides, and then her right hand rose up while her left forearm still stung, badly. "You mean to say...?"

"All that alchemical studying was hardly even a practice test for you. Here's your homework, femtogram." Sho's finger hovered a centimeter from her nose. "𝑖 = Sho Minamimoto. What is 𝑢?"

She stared at him. That thunderclap against her eardrums: his heart, or hers?

"And 𝑦?"

Chapter Text

On the bright side, the garbage didn't feel nearly as repulsive to touch as Rhyme had expected. At least not the trash that he dredged up from...somewhere. Not from a dumpster, this time, but from an assortment that Sho dumped armfuls of on the alleyway ground between bolting in and out of view. He had just about everything: traffic lights—much, much larger than she had ever realized when brought up close—stereos, tea kettles, rocking chairs, microwaves, chunks of metal and wiring she couldn't identify, motherboards, crumbling cement slabs, game consoles, engine blocks, televisions, stop signs, telescopes, car doors, boomboxes, amps, scooters, many of them lavishly decorated, handmade items.

His eclectic collection appeared especially attuned to anything that she would vaguely describe as 'punk,' or maybe 'emo,' or even 'goth.' Hand-painted flames licking up the sides, hand-made bat wings or dragon heads affixed to the ends, tassels and stripes that looked attached by someone, intentionally, who must have thought it cool, or pretty, or at least meaningful enough to make.

Did Sho just...have mounds and mounds of this stuff, apropos of nothing, traded for at grunge shows and underground motorbike races?

Or had he brought out some kind of private, curated stash of exquisite trash, just for her?

Spreading his arms out, Sho laughed into the alleyway. "Well, femtogram? You asked for it!"

"So I did," Rhyme replied calmly, peeking around the overwhelmingly vast array in front of her, unsure of where to start. "I'm just gonna...start trying to put something together? Um. Sho?"

"Hesitation and sentiment are trash." Squatting down, he began rummaging through the trash pile before her eyes as if incapable or, more likely, unwilling to not make art for even a second. "What, femtogram?"

"Are there rules to this?" Rhyme started, then immediately stopped. "There aren't any. I know. It's whatever I make of it."

His eyes glittered in the waxing moon's light when he looked up at her from his crouched position. Didn't make a difference to him if he were looking down or up, huh, all that confidence giving him a vantage point in any direction, as though he alone could decide what direction the force of gravity accelerated him towards. As she could. Choosing herself to walk beside him, deliberately not magnetized to his motions. "Ninety degrees."

"A lot of this stuff looks...unique. Or special in some way. Is it okay if I break it? I mean—"

Rhyme brushed her fingers against an old television, the kind with rabbit antennae poking out from the surface, and felt the shiver of static electricity from the chipped display. On closer inspection, the rabbit-ears looked glued on. The sight of the crinkled black felt, starry-dotted with sequins, around the base made her laugh. That someone had decided to make their own antennae for a television that didn't even use them.

"If you're planning to use any of this in your art? I can start with something less...meaningful?"

"You think I give false choices, femtogram? If I've written down a bifurcation, it's a bifurcation. Even the Mandelbrot bifurcates in three-dimensional space. Ha!" Grabbing a lamp painted with green and orange lightning bolts along the shade, Sho reared his arm back.

Rhyme couldn't step away in time before he spiked it into the ground. The stem—green, in the shape of a galloping horse—fragmented across the asphalt. The shards of that and the lightbulb blew through the lampshade. She could just hear the nearly damp sound of canvas getting shredded after the horrendously loud pop and bang of the bulb exploding into a hail of glass.

Some of the shards skidded over the ground towards her but stopped short before they reached her trainers.

Had he...calculated that out?

"All this trash needs to get crunched! I'll just turn whatever junk you heap into its own masterwork! Ha ha ha ha ha!" Sho grinned toothily. "Do whatever you want, femtogram! But keep it zetta interesting!"

She hmmed. Experimentally, she set her heel against one of the larger glass fragments and bore down her weight. The feeling of it crunching further underfoot, and the sound that reached her ears, sounded almost like the autumn leaves she'd heard in movies. Because...they used the sound for foley? As how the noises of appropriately named iceberg lettuce crinkling together became the backdrop of ice and glaciers for films?

Approaching the various piles of garbage, Rhyme ran her hands over them. Not slimy, not even really grimy.

A little dusty, a little worn, textiles rucked up, metal and plastic dented, paint faded, glaze chipped, rough around the edges, a little personality in the seams. A little grungy, maybe, but not grimy.

But how did one take all of this...interesting garbage...and turn it into art?

Left to her own devices, she would have thumbed through them, examined the exteriors and interiors, marveled at the skill that the creators and modifiers must have had, at the joy that they must have taken. What kind of people had chosen these objects? What kind of people had changed them? What kind of people had passed them along and modified them further?

What would Kaie have thought of this, turning 'garbage' into art? Would he have rued the situation? Wished to archive these pieces before Sho destroyed them and rebuilt them?

...Would he have wished to archive what these pieces had been in the past, even before their owners have painted them, sculpted them, added fake bunny-ears?

She plucked a broken boombox that someone had attached what looked like a cigarette lighter to. Even when Rhyme tossed it against the ground, it hardly dented, though the lighter now stuck out at a funny angle. Then...something else. Something related? An amp with flaming tongues burning along the edges in various shades of blue. Rhyme stacked it on the boombox's flattest surface to keep it from falling off. How did Sho get this stuff to stick together? So many chaotic, disparate elements. But she'd never seen him use glue, or tape. Just stacking them together as if he'd mastered real-life 𝑇-spins.

A stereo? A few CD players? One with a tray that wouldn't open, the other hot pink, both of them branded with some crocodile decals on the bottoms. Rhyme dropped them at random on the boombox, then stood back to admire her handiwork.

Her handiwork of...a boombox with an amp, a stereo, and two CD players sitting on it.

Less art and more kitschy home decoration. Maybe she needed...more stuff?

More stuff related to music. Rhyme had centered her theme around that. Like her older brother's name for her, or like Rhythm Warning. Worked for her! Another few amps here, another few amps there, that microphone with the bat wings that had ended up bent in half, another couple of CD players, a few speakers, what looked like half of a light pink boombox that had gotten utterly devastated as though someone had dropped a grenade on it and then chucked it down thirteen stories—and by 'someone,' she meant, 'probably Sho'—and a music box with a rotating giraffe on the inside that she couldn't bear the thought of crunching or breaking, so she set it on top like a cherry on a fluffy 'n' sweet sundae.

Then she stepped back and... It still looked more like a kitschy home decoration, but like the kind of kitschy home decoration that might have ended up on a two-second blurb on some late-night variety show. Better than nothing, right?

When Rhyme glanced at what Sho had worked on—she hadn't heard any scratching, but rather than clunking and clanking of different bits stacked on one another—she found him seated on a pile he'd built up while she'd cobbled together a handful of pieces. Her gaze followed it up: a little bit of everything from game consoles to what looked like a crown of variously broken blowtorches making up his throne.

He eyed her, looking down. "Well, peanut gallery?"

"You're the master of this domain," she answered, tracing the silhouette of metal and electronics, trying to look at all of it in whole and in individual parts at the same time, visually precarious although she would surmise that she'd sooner get knocked over than this heap. His philosophy. An understanding of what he meant by these symbols. A blowtorch could mean anything to anyone. But to Sho? "No, not exactly the master. You're...overseeing it? Building it higher so that you have a vantage point? Because you want to see everything. You want to know."

Sho hadn't interrupted her yet, which could either mean that she'd found herself 'in his vector,' or she'd gone on a complete tangent and he'd soon say something like, "What the fractal are you talking about?"

"I'm not sure about the rest of it, but the blowtorches are like... They're all busted and broken, but together, you've given them a new function. By bringing together the things that other people think are useless, you can make a throne for yourself. And, let me try to take it a step further."

She motioned towards the 'throne' itself. Quite an array. How had he found so many blowtorches of so many different makes and models?

"Those...are blowtorches, right?" Rhyme asked suddenly. "I've never seen one in person, only on television, so I'm guessing."

Sho barked out a laugh. "Naturally."

"Okay. So blowtorches are used to melt and weld together metal, too, right? And the magnum opus is all about dissolving and coagulating." Rhyme intentionally zeroed her gaze in on the blowtorches and how they formed almost the shapes of a hand, five pillars of blowtorches jammed onto one another rising behind him as the remainder of the throne fanned out.

Or something like...a makeshift clamshell. Or like the bars of a cage, but not around him. Rather, behind him. So many possibilities.

"It's like your art," she continued. "Melting and dissolving, and then welding and coagulating in new shapes. You have to soften things up so that you can change them. You're not making it any less metal—both literally, and figuratively—"

"The helix?" Sho cut in.

Rhyme giggled. "As in, you're not making it any less whatever metal element it's made of, and you're not making it any less...you know..." Holding up her fish, she poked up her pinky finger and forefinger, then her thumb: metal horns. "Metal metal. Like the music! You're not going to make something less interesting. You're not going to make it less metal. You're just gonna stick stuff together and see what happens. Dissolving and coagulating. Purifying without consuming. Making something better without using it up or extracting things from it. That kind of thing?"

"Ha! Any fire could melt a metal. My ferocity melts the Soul!" Clenching his Taboo-inked hand into a fist and driving it skyward, Sho broke into laughter.

She studied how he perched himself on the garbage pile, too. That relaxed, satisfied repose, one of his leg hanging off the edge, the other one bent so that he could rest his arm on his knee. The sort of pose that she could have envisioned keeping for a while. Comfortable. Sho, himself, part of his own artwork. Artist and artwork in one. "Because the blowtorches wouldn't look like a throne if you weren't sitting on it. So it has to do with you. You're not going out there to soften up Shibuya and mold it to your vision. You're...doing it to yourself? Hmmm."

"Heh! My 428's noisy, femtogram. All that chaos. Those clashing vectors that make new vectors, freshly calculated, like Tin Pins exchanging momenta and transforming impetuses!"

Tin Pin? The Game that her older brother and Neku had a fondness for? She blinked.

She'd played it before, on his behest, but she'd always had the impression he'd more so used it as an excuse not to practice their manzai stand-up, back when he'd waffled on whether or not he could make people laugh. Dark days, those. Then he'd entered the world of intentional comedy.

Now they did manzai every week at Hachiko Café's open mic. By his choice and enthusiasm.

"I don't want to bind! What the factor's the fun in that?" Sho shrugged. "A homogenous 428 is garbage. Doesn't make a difference if it's homogeneous to my vector or some other radian's vectors. Naturally, my homogenous 428 would still be orders of magnitude more zetta cool—"

Rhyme giggled to herself at the sheer cockiness in his voice.

"—than some factoring hectopascal's Shibuya! But even my homogeneous 428's less zetta cool than the true chaotic, noisy 428! Ha ha ha ha ha! Can't have strange attractors in a homogenized UG, femtogram!" Rising to his boots, he leaped down from the trash pile—from the artwork—and landed in front of her, the rush of displaced air knocking her cap off her head.

She dove for it. Her knees hit the cement and the cap hit—nothing?

Looking up, she found it dangling from his hand. "Here, femtogram. Don't lose part of what you've heaped on yourself."

"What I've heaped on myself?" Rhyme echoed.

The wintry chill nipped her crown. The discomfort of that unbidden icy breeze ruffling her hair gave her a sensation halfway between vertigo and a brainfreeze. Snatching the cap from him, she brushed the inside reflexively, fit the back first, and then pulled the brim forward until it safely nestled on her head again, trapping a snug pocket of warm air between hair and hat.

"I think I get it." Her fingers drummed along the cap's bill. "I'm trash, right? So I have to make art out of myself. And that includes the threads I wear. Just like you're decked out in flashy jewelry and...all that."

"Ninety degrees." Smirking, Sho flicked his wrist. The metal bracelet jangled. On purpose?

Peeking behind him, Rhyme pointed heapwards, at the now-empty throne of blowtorches that scarcely looked like a throne. "And that's why the heap isn't the same without you. Because you're...trash! And because you're trash, you can heap yourself, and you can add to your own heap, too. I'm starting to get it, I think?"

"Correct. You're part of your art. A component of it. The vectors, the positions. You're trash too." His own fingers splashed on the visor of his hat. The red bandanna-tails bobbed. "I'm part of my 428. A component of it. Subject to the same quadratic restrictions as any other vector in Riemann space! Sticking the Composer's constant to the end of my function just lets me stop the enharmonic progression of obtuse angles that'd make my 428 less—" He grinned at her. She pressed her fingers thoughtfully into her cheek. "—metal."

The snrrk quick-exhalation through her nostrils, and then the full-bellied laugh, burst out of her from both the unexpected joke and the sheer waves of smugness he gave off at having made it.

Sho looked so damn—so radiamn?—proud of himself for it, too. Rhyme wiped the tears from her eyes.

"Are you trying to say that...even when you're Composer," she mused, "you're going to try to change the city...by being another component of it? As in, not going to use your Composer powers to make the city more like...you? Or to like your art?"

"Correct! If random radians see my magna opera and end up transformed from the cross-section, heh, that's a natural reaction!" His mouth curved downwards into a scowl. "If I force that transformation artificially using obtuse angle operations—whether something as zetta obvious an inversion or as zepto obvious as command codes in my art—that's factoring trash! Worthless garbage! Equations that only an attohelen abelian vector with negative confidence in their artistry could write!"

"Zepto... That's a new one. Wait. Like zeptogram. Oh, right, zetta is...ten to the twenty-fourth power, and zepto is ten to the negative twenty-fourth?" Rhyme nodded to herself. "Your Shibuya's pretty zetta metal, and a homogenized Angelic Shibuya would be pretty zepto metal."

His smirk all but split his face. "Naturally."

"So...how I'd do on interpreting your art this time?" She yanked once more on her hat visor to ensure its position and then linked her fingers behind her back. "Closer to zetta, or closer to zepto?"

His laugh always seemed to come from his throat rather than his abdomen, but while most laughs like that came across as insincere, she had never heard a more candid and genuine laugh. Her older brother tied, probably, or almost. "Closer to zepto than zetta—" She exhaled. "—but above yocto. You've got the fundamentals, femtogram. Need to apply more higher-order logic."

"I'll take that. Practice makes perfect. I'm getting better at understanding you, Sho!" Better at understanding him, but not any better at understanding... Regardless. As she beamed, she tracked the hand that rose up towards her. "You wanted to pat my hat?"

"Sure." His palm hovered over her. "Nonzero touch?"

Right, he'd asked her that before. Questioning whether or not he could touch her. One quick last check that her hat sat firmly on her head, and she bobbed her head. "Zero touch. Touching the hat is fine and doesn't count. Don't touch my hair without the hat." He'd ruffled her hair, once, outside of Mewsic; the gesture had made her smile and set her skin crawling at the same time. For now, Rhyme motioned at her temples. "Go ahead. It's a reward for a job well done, isn't it?"

His hand settled down on the cap. She couldn't say that she found that weight particularly unpleasant in context, so as long as he didn't touch her actual head, she'd keep her head still.

In a few minutes she'd have to show him her heap, which, most likely...wouldn't necessarily come across well. Something still missing about that...about her 'heap,' in comparison to his. Then, before that utterly ruined the moment, she'd squeeze on the opportunity to scrape away a few more facts. About Sho Minamimoto, artist, artwork, human.

The Sho who signed his name with a horizontal bar, a vertical bar, and lion ears and tail.

"...Hey, Sho. You don't have to ask me 'nonzero touch' in the future when it comes to patting my hat. Just wait for my nod, like this." Rhyme gave him a quick, certain nod.

In response Sho grinned that crooked, lopsided, toothy grin. "Sure."

"Hey, Sho, can I ask a personal question? To try to understand you better?" He gave her a quick, certain nod: not an emulation of Raimu Bito's, but a quick, certain nod of Sho Minamimoto's own design. "Did Mr. Hanekoma ever pat your head like this?"

He scoffed. "Null matrix."

"He never..." What wording to use? The words that Rhyme came up sounded oddly clinical, but they'd have to do. "...showed you affection? Well, I shouldn't assume: do you want to be touched, affectionately?" Oh. That sounded weird. Clearing her throat, Rhyme added, "Similar to what you're doing right now, patting my head. That kind of touch. I didn't mean anything else."

"Hmph. Reciprocal equations are garbage." Sho rolled his shoulders. "Doesn't make a difference to me if anyone's tangent or not."

She inclined her head. "That makes sense. There's no point in Mr. Hanekoma offering physical affection if you don't want it." Made sense, and yet she felt a thin reed of disappointment, that she didn't have another thing to mark Mr. Hanekoma down for. Oh, so she'd reduced herself to this? To seeking reasons to dislike someone? She had to get her head together. Mr. Hanekoma, the saint of Shibuya, had done some cruel and terrible things, but combing through his behavior in all other instances... Pathetic. Something she'd excise from herself.

"Median of my shoulder blades," Sho said, apparently in answer to a question that Rhyme hadn't asked.

Rhyme would compare the noise that slipped from her mouth as the vocalization of a question mark. "Median of your shoulder blades...?"

"Factoring hectopascals. The pressure of his hand on the median between my shoulder blades. When I was so zetta annoyed at something, he'd leave his hand there as a constant. A pressure to concentrate on and re-inflect myself towards the coordinates I had set as an endpoint." Sho rolled his shoulders.

"He...put his hand between your shoulder blades? And kept it there." Closing her eyes, Rhyme tried to picture the sensation, a gentle and constant pressure, not on her skin, but through the back of her jacket, past the three layers of clothing she wore. And here, when he had first said that Mr. Hanekoma hadn't patted his head, she'd sought it as an excuse. Hmm. "And did you like that?"

Sho shrugged. "It worked. Both in the RG and the UG."

"Right... You'd said that you'd known him in the RG." She couldn't move her head much—though she doubted that such a movement would have dislodged his hand—but she tilted her chin up just enough to keep looking at him. "How did you get to know him?"

"Hmph. Two factors. One: owned a garbage heap." A dumpster, in a city that had largely forbidden them. Right. That part made sense, that Sho would have gravitated to the few shops or other locations that had some kind of trash. Huh. If Sho had stacked trash even before he'd come to Shibuya, did that mean that he'd grown up somewhere with dumpsters, with garbage cans, with enough litter to make into art? He'd said that he'd arrived in Shibuya by bus, but that didn't mean that he'd only taken the bus. Where had he grown up? "Two: didn't call any mindless monomials on me."

It amused her, how many of these conversations ended up with Rhyme repeating whatever Sho had said with a question mark attached, just to prompt him further. Like so: "Mindless monomials?"

"Average tasteless tetrahedron sees a genius making art out of the garbage that they threw out, and they turn into yowling yoctograms or call the cops." Sho crossed his non-hat-patting arm over his chest and tapped his forefinger impatiently against his other arm. "Waste of my time. H was part of a tuple that didn't."

"Wait, they called the cops on you?" Rhyme blinked. "I thought you said that you were ten years old?"

"Naturally. Waste of my time. They subtracted that garbage from their quadrants. Indicated they thought it was worthless. But I couldn't add it to mine, if they thought it was worthless? How the factor can someone even 'steal' something thrown away?" His voice rose in volume for a second, peaked, and then returned. "Hmph. Null logic. I don't have time for uninspiring integers."

She frowned. "I'm..." Fear and mercy were garbage, he'd said. Arrived in Shibuya at the age of ten. Went dumpster diving. Gotten cops called on him... And Mr. Hanekoma was one of the only two who didn't. "Wait, you said that he was part of a tuple?" Yep, another question mark. "Who was the other?"

Sho's features...squiggled? Rhyme had no words to describe the sudden contortion and shadow that crossed his face. "Irrelevant. H put out the most zetta interesting trash in the city."

Irrelevant? Okay, if he didn't want to talk about other, she'd follow him down the path he did choose to talk about. Rhyme could connect two and two. "...Because you had a high Imagination?"

"I didn't know it at the time. But if he intentionally output zetta interesting trash, heh, WildKat was a strange attractor. He closed the distance between us when I was making art. Invited me inside." Sho smirked smugly. "I trashed his entire attic. Wanted to see how much he'd let me divide, or I'd divide myself from him."

"...I see." Hm. Sho had immediately tested Mr. Hanekoma on how much Mr. Hanekoma would let Sho get away with. What did that say about Sho's experience at ten years of age? What did that say about Mr. Hanekoma?

...What did that say about her? What had Rhyme done, testing Sho's patience over and over, smearing it over the asphalt, seeing how far she could stretch that rubber band until it snapped?

...She'd tested him out of safety. To reassure herself that she could say no, and he wouldn't force her to do that. If Sho might have thought similarly, then...

...Then what had ten-year-old Sho been afraid of?

"How long did you know him?" Someone who had taught Sho art... The relationship had probably lasted for more than the three weeks that Neku knew Mr. Hanekoma... Three weeks in which Neku had already grown to trust 'Mr. H' to that degree. A few weeks? A few months? "In the RG, I mean."

"Eight years," Sho answered without pause. "Continuously until I translated myself into the UG."

Eight years. Rhyme's mouth dried. It took her a second to curl up her tongue and unglue it from the sudden arid wasteland. "You knew him for eight years. From...when you were ten, to when you were eighteen."

"Heh. So you can do basic arithmetic."

She shook her head. "It's just that, Mr. Hanekoma is...someone who uses people. It's hard for me to imagine that he'd help anyone out for eight years unless he wanted something from you. Well... Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you meant by 'knowing him' for eight years. What did he do exactly? What was your relationship like?"

"Ha! I ate his pancakes whenever I wanted, demanded whipped cream and sprinkles, had a bed that I could go horizontal in, an attic for me to trash and turn into art, and in exchange I tried whatever garbage medium of art he showed me and let 'im read my Soul."

Let Mr. Hanekoma read Sho's Soul.

...Had it hurt him as much as it hurt her? No, she had another question first.

"Sho..." Rhyme observed his features, the sharp grin, the sharper eyes. "Maybe I'm misreading it, but... That room in WildKat's attic was yours. A bedroom. And he gave you food? A place to stay? For eight years? That almost sounds like he adopted you." No almost. It did sound like that, although judging by Sho's story, she couldn't have imagined anything resembling a legal adoption.

"Hmph. The dependency between us was 𝑥 = mentor and 𝑦 = protégé. Your previous proposition was correct: I didn't know the underlying axiom at the time." The second time that Sho had said that, as if it had some significance. "He was so zetta ninety factoring degrees—" The sudden self-assured, arrogant pride in his voice caught Rhyme off-guard, and she laughed. "—that I had a high Imagination. H wanted to see how high he could push my Imagination, and his usual command codes didn't work on me at all. Like trying to integrate or derive 𝑒ˣ, ha!"

Ah. The pieces were starting to fall into—no, she wouldn't make the same assumptions. She'd ask. "So you had high Imagination, and his command codes didn't work on you." Command codes. The 'zepto obvious' Angelic tactic that Sho had identified earlier. "So something about you meant that you were... Well, you weren't immune to the Angels, but they couldn't do all the same things they did to others. Can't do all the same things, I should say."

"Heh. Correct. The obtuse angles can't bind my Soul. I'll bisect all those zetta sums of digits. Crunch!" His hat's visor tilted up, like he were shouting his challenge to the heavens. But Sho wouldn't care about something like that. "But it was my exponential Imagination and the infinite potential I have that had him teach me art." That pride. That egotistical pride. Whatever Mr. Hanekoma had taught Sho...Mr. Hanekoma had instilled that in him, hadn't he? The idea that his Imagination made him worthwhile. That he'd be worthless without it. "Art as a way to refine, expand, and multiply the Imagination further. Beyond my limits! Heh!"

"So he treated you like an experiment..." Rhyme said slowly.

"Naturally. He found me so zetta fascinating, heh. Heh heh heh. So he treated me like an experiment. Ha!" The hat's visor angled in the other direction, almost covering his voice "Always wanted to ask him—" His voice coarsened. "—whether he'd find my art aesthetic if he hadn't correctly measured my zetta Imagination."

Rhyme kept her mouth wisely shut. Silence was golden. No sentiment. No pity. No mercy. The hand on her head heavied.

"Found me zetta fascinating," Sho went on, matter-of-factly, "so he obtained data from me like an amoeba in a petri dish."

"Does it," she inquired in her normal sweet tone, not a hint of sympathetic inflection, "bother you, that he treated you like a zoo animal?"

Sho scoffed, loudly, the hhh growling out of his throat. "Who gives a digit, if the output's the same?"

"Does it bother you," Rhyme asked, her voice utterly placid and level, "that he abandoned you in the end, after all of that? Not someone you knew for a few weeks, but someone you knew for...years? Who fed you? Sheltered you? Taught you art?"

The unspoken: taught him to value himself on the basis of his Imagination.

The unspoken: taught him to see himself as chosen, as special, as uniquely deserving, like the winners of the Game.

"The principal component of H's analysis is Shibuya's future." That nonplussed, factual tone. The instantaneous answer. He hadn't thought about the question. The words just emerged from his mouth. "H did what he calculated would increase the probability of Shibuya's survival by the greatest fraction." A shrug. Dismissive. "I didn't factor in to the equation with the highest expected value."

"But does it bother you?" Rhyme pressed.

"I just factoring answered that, femtogram," Sho snapped. "It's irrelevant chatter."

She lifted her head with her cap butting up right into his palm. "But it's—"

"Femtogram. Irrelevant, and irrelevant to the lesson. Show your work. Demonstrate your heap."

Her eyes narrowed. "I thought that you were still fixated on proving your Imagination superior because of what you said about Mr. Hanekoma having to complete your sigil for you. So making a big deal out of your Imagination kept the Taboo your thing, because you could tell yourself that it was your Imagination that drove the sigil, not Mr. Hanekoma's fixes. Would it lead to ego death, Sho, if you found out that you couldn't have taken the Taboo without Mr. Hanekoma? So you focus on the Imagination instead."

Not that Rhyme could have said either way, but it succeeded in darkening Sho's irises with the sudden dilation of his pupils, with darkening Sho's face in the sudden flush of blood. "The hel—"

"But it wasn't just that, was it?" she interrupted. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Mr. Hanekoma ground this into your h—"

The sudden lightness of her head gave her pause. The weight of Sho's palm: gone. Returned to his side. No, grasping the bill of his hat, drawing it over his eyes. Rhyme's own palm rose to her head, but it... It didn't feel the same, didn't feel like the heaviness of his hand on her hat. When he spoke, his timbre remained single-channeled. Flat. Constant. As loud as ever, but...so zepto metal. "Who gives a digit if he's another tasteless tetrahedron?"

She bit her tongue to answer with the variable she'd derived: 𝑢.

"I want to know if you're a tasteless tetrahedron." Sho motioned to something behind her. Something unseen. Unheard. But there, looming, ever-present, tainting the air. "Demonstrate your work, femtogram. Your heap."

"...It's not much of one," Rhyme muttered. "I don't know what he would've said about your aesthetics, but I can guess what you're about to say about mine."

Chapter Text

Sho has brought her takeout from all across Shibuya. Moyai Mart, Mexican Dog, Tacos y Más Tacos, Justice Burger, Shadow Ramen, Asia Fantasia. But it's her favorite restaurant, and the fact that it doesn't do takeout, that finally brings Rhyme to miscalculate.

Fret invited her. Donburi Town. Months since she's had a chance to go, given the relative expense. But apparently Nagi copped some free vouchers in exchange for taste-testing—long story, but does Rhyme remember that time that she, he, Shokie, and Boss, all went to Tacos y Más Tacos together, and Boss was like scribbling away in a notebook the entire time? She does? Great! Boss'll fill her in on the rest any time she wants! It's a fun story!—and everyone's going as the weekly Wicked Twisters outing. No charity, no mercy, just honest free vouchers given out to all her friends. And yeah, yeah Fret knows that Rhyme's been busy lately and that Rhyme's gotten sick a lot and all of that, and if Rhyme can't come, no problem, but if she wants to, she can just show up on the day of, and—

She agreed. For the sake of maintaining some appearances. For the sake of preserving some normalcy. For the sake of...truthfully, seeing her friends again.

An outing to a restaurant: fairly safe.

Not shopping, where she'll have to move the entire time, where having to maintain her walk and her hands and her voice all at once might tip over her capacity. Not a movie, where she'd end up trapped for least an hour and a half, closer to two or three hours.

A restaurant, where she'll have a chance to sit in one spot, listen to the conversations, breathe in their atmosphere, eat quickly, leave at any time if she needs to, and...have something delicious.

Given the fact that her insides are actively breaking down, liquefying, putrefying, rotting away, dissolving for the sake of future coagulation, Rhyme has not an iota of shock that her hunger has intensified to such a sharp degree.

The Taboo hasn't reached her stomach, but she might compare the pangs to walking about with a bag of shattered glass fragments packed into her gut, the serrated edges jabbing into her flesh from the inside out.

From what Rhyme has learned on Moogle, the brain localizes biological, physical hunger to the stomach in the same way. The stomach doesn't actually feel 'hungry.' The brain decides that due to low blood sugar or low energy stores, then manifests the feeling in the stomach to clue the stupid animal brain into shoving something into its mouth.

It reminds her of the Soul reading in WildKat's attic. Of how her brain struggled to process the agony in her Soul and manifested it in sharp-singing nerves, cut and frayed, along her entire body.

Rhyme Moogled this the night before the restaurant outing out of curiosity, during one of her sessions forcing herself to sit at her desk and practice using both hands, rather than curling up under the covers and sweating through the pain.

She's been counting the Fibonacci. And she's getting there, ever so slowly.

Correcting every typo where her thumbs tremble over texts to Kaie. Picking up the chopsticks every time she drops them; she's had to switch to using a fork, for now. Relearning her penmanship all over again, the pencil shaking in her right hand.

But her wobbly lines have gotten straighter and clearer each time, her handwriting a little more legible. She has probably lost that tidy, beautiful strokes that her teachers have praised for years...forever. But she can reach something of a legible penmanship. Legible to herself, if to no one else. She might lose that in the future, too, to whatever the future holds in store for her. But even the bits and pieces that she can regain—no, gain anew—she will.

And so she Moogled the hunger and the brain. Just as the brain makes her feel her biological, physical hunger in her stomach, her poor confused brain must have no clue on what to do with a spiritual hunger.

When her body can sense her starvation, but all the food her body tries to force her to eat doesn't help, what can it do?

So she feels the shards in her stomach, every time that she moves, sharper and more painful in the vicinity of people, dull, throbbing, and relentless when alone.

But she feels, she truly feels, that endless hunger in her arm, in her blackened flesh from the tips of her left fingers up to the curve of her left shoulder, in the ink-stained skin of her right hand that has started to stab into the wrist. Beneath the gloves and the sleeves that obscure the shadows where they once obscured her wounds, her skin prickles. Thousands of tattoo needles driven into her flesh from every angle. A rejection of everything around her, as though the very air itself has transmuted into a veil of acid laced through with fire.

And right now, seated in Donburi Town, her skin has enflamed, envenomed, enneedled. The shards in her stomach match the fragments gouging out the inner linings of her flesh.

The Hokkaido bowl before her should have whetted her appetite. No: it has!

The food itself—the mild sea urchins and salty salmon roe—has an even more scrumptious taste than she recalled from her last time here. Nothing wrong with that savory, saline flavor, or how easily it goes down her throat, in the few bites that she's managed to eat.

But. Everything else.

It takes all of her focus to move the fork that she asked for. To hold its metallic weight in her hand. To feel the coolness that has rapidly heated up even through her gloves. To maintain her fingers still enough that it doesn't rattle out of her grip. To maneuver it well enough to jab it into a sea urchin or a clump of roe with mercifully sticky rice. To continue having it steady while she brings it to her mouth.

Rhyme eats with her face all but attached to the bowl, leaning forward over the table, her shoulders bowed, her lips hovering just above the rim.

So that her fork has to move as little of a distance as possible. So that she can concentrate. One thing at a time.

Because everything around her, everyone around, generates so much noise. Her head buzzes with it, as if some fly had crawled into her eardrum, laid eggs, and died there, its corpse blocking the way out, and the resultant larvae had split open, their moist wings zzzzzzzzing incessantly everywhere in her skull. An entire swarm. Beating themselves to death against the bone, desperate for food, desperate for air, drowning in her spinal fluid, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing until they rot and putrefrey like everything else.

So hot. So heavy. Her head droops as though her neck has lost the strength to keep it aloft.

Not just her head. Her entire body bends forward, one lapse away from slumping into the bowl entirely.

She can hardly even keep her eyes open. Every time she blinks, her lids seem to clam together, glueing themselves shut. She has to force them open, lashes quivering from the rapid blinking. Nerves along the lids twitch here and there.

The lights overhead: too bright, far too bright. The conversations near her: too loud, far too loud. The scents of different dishes, perfumes, colognes, sweat. The sounds of talking, laughing, sneezing, whispering, coughing, breathing. Does she hear her own heartbeat shuddering her sluggish and starved blood through her body, or the heartbeats of all the people here, their laughs and tears grinding those shards of glass inside her guts, their heartbeats quickening the slutch into her veins into a torrid torrent of magma threatening to boil her alive from the inside out.

Rhyme wants to go home. Wants to peel off the gloves and the jacket. Wants to stare at the Taboo on her left arm. Wants to observe how it spreads like a slick of oily water.

Oily water. Oil and water shouldn't mix. Couldn't mix. Noise trapped entirely in the RG. Bounded. Limited, the way that Sho hates limitations. Buzzing, fizzing, frothing to get out. To tune itself up to the UG where it can spread freely, not roped, gagged, chained, shackles, wings clipped, claws snipped, teeth dulled, forced to the ground.

She'll leave. In about five minutes, once she's eaten another few bites, she'll thank them, get this packaged, and then leave.

No problems. She's already paid. She's already typed the text out ahead of time, saved to her clipboard, so that the only thing she'll only need to open up the group chat—or a private PM to Rindo—and ask him to get her food boxed.

Just a few more minutes. A few more minutes of sitting here with a hot and steamy meal right in front of her.

A hot and steamy meal right in front of her that she can't eat. Can't even reach through the bars of a cage partly of her own making. All these emotions, and it sifts through her fingers, wisps through her jaws, as if she were snapping them shut around smoke.

"..."

The Wicked Twisters, seated at her table. Rhyme listens to them talking, quietly enough. She can tell by the way that their voices weave in and out that they glance at her every so often. Yet they don't interject. Don't bother her. Let her sit there struggling to take even another bite. Let her sit there with shaking shoulders. Let her sit there in stony silence.

"...yme."

She couldn't thank them enough for it. They do exactly as she asked, exactly as she agreed to: that she'd come, that she'd sit, that she'd vibe, but only if they let her come, sit, and vibe as who she is and what she needs right now. Their discussions concern some video games that they've played together somewhat recently. Something about gathering enough pieces. Something about a time limit. Something about stress and anxiety. She hasn't played the game, but the stress, the anxiety, the time limit, the gathering pieces of oneself: she doesn't even need to play the game.

"...Rhyme."

They leave pauses in the conversations. As though inviting her to speak. Little silences that make all the noisy noise around her that much louder. Without the buffer of sounds up close, the restaurant reaches a dull roar. She can't listen to it anymore.

"Rhyme."

Can't listen to the music piped in overhead. Can't listen to the kitchen's sizzling and clanking. Can't listen to the footsteps shuffling over the floor. Can't listen to the discussions. Can't listen to the mirth. Can't listen to the chewing and swallowing. Can't talk to the breathing, the beating, the being.

"Rhyme!"

Her head snaps up. She registers dampness around her mouth. Oh no. Did she—did she bite herself in the middle of the restaurant? Sink her canines into her own flesh? Let the hot, metallic, electric-crackle blood ooze onto her tongue?

Her gaze rivets onto her arms. No: sleeve still there, gloves still here, fork clattered somewhere to the floor.

The dampness sloughs from her chin, and she watches the bits of roe and urchin stuck to her face fall back into the bowl. The moment that she tries to look downwards around the floor to locate where her fork might have fallen, the dizziness hits her all at once. Reeling back into her chair, she holds her temples with her hands.

"Rhyme—"

So loud. So loud. Right in her ears. Every word like a stone digging into her eardrums.

"—if you tell me that you're okay—"

Like a gong banging over her head, cracking her cranium in half.

"—I'll trust you. But what do you need—"

So noisy. So noisy, noisy, noisy that she—

"—right now?"

She opens her mouth to say something, anything, and the words that fly sound even noisier than before, the loudest thing in the restaurant herself: "Be quiet."

The Wicked Twisters' conversation extinguishes. The sounds from everywhere else pour in like the ocean waves rushing in to fill a chasm newly left behind. Her head wobbles. Her ears blare. Her vision blears. Her gut hurts. It takes a few seconds for her vision to sharpen. To find everyone looking at her. Worried. Concerned.

Nagi's eyes obscured behind her lenses, Shoka's lips flattened out, Fret rubbing the back of his neck, Rindo leaning carefully forward, adjusting his reading glasses with his hand.

Rindo... He says nothing. Just observes her with his brow slightly wrinkled and a small, encouraging smile on his face.

She rises immediately from the table. So quickly that the table practically jumps. The Wicked Twisters' heads all lift upwards as if she were puppeting them to gaze at her. Shoving her hands into her pockets and fisting her fingers together, Rhyme turns. The door. She cannot fixate her gaze on the door quickly enough. Already paid. Will she waste the food. The food given to her for free. The food that she could use to feed herself without her older brother covering the cost. She knows Sho will rendezvous with another helping of whatever she wants. Too dependent. Too soft. too taken for granted.

Door. There. The world narrows down into that door with daylight paling the outside into a nearly dizzying white.

Rhyme walks. Outside. Stepping. Sidewalk. Daylight sun. So bright. Under the awning. In the shade. Step. Trainers on asphalt. Dragging her soles over cement. Music, distant. Cars, nearer. Pedestrians. Walking. Light and shadow. Weight of body. Swing of leg. Push of foot onto ground. Moving. In some direction. Down Center Street. Somewhere. The Scramble. The Hikarie. The bus terminal. Or does she not even get that far? Looping about Center Street?

The people here, too, buzz in her ears. The flies in her head, hungry and desperate, killing themselves for the barest shot at escape, somewhere where they can find food.

But not nearly so bad as in the restaurant. The people here don't know her. Don't know anything about why she sinks her body into her jacket, about why she wears the black gloves over her hands, about why she keeps tugging up her sleeves, about why she plods forward, as though the more pavement she could walk over, the less pain she'll feel.

Her skin prickles. It won't stop. It'll never stop.

In the well of shadows on the stairs near the Shepherd House, Rhyme crouches down with her back to the wall and leaves her head in her hands for a few moments. She breathes in. Breathes out. Lets the sounds rumble through her. All that noise. All that hunger. Her nails like claws, her teeth like fangs, the muscles in her back trembling and burning as if she were growing wings.

No wings, though. Not this time. She has something better in mind. Something more her. Not decided for her, but rather her own. Not the sublimate of copper, but...

Something that she can share. Not copied, not emulated, not taken from anything or anyone else.

Something she's come up with on her own.

Something she's chosen. Like she chose this spot here, smelling of discarded cigarettes and tossed wrappers that have gotten swept to this relative cesspool of litter. Like she chose to go out today with the Wicked Twisters, just to take in her friends for a little while. Like she chose to walk away and abandon them without another word, when they'd spent all that time doing as she asked; she needed to do that, in that moment, and now she has a chance to reevaluate.

Like she chooses her friends: met through her older brother, but chosen by her.

They didn't invite her older brother with them to Donburi Town. Invite him on most outings, always have time for him, love just hanging out around Shibuya, whenever he's not working his odd jobs, his deliveries. But not today. Not to Donburi Town. Rhyme only. And not because of her older brother's busy-ness. Because they chose to invite her, and only her, on this day. Not an attachment to her older brother.

Like Sho chooses to bring her food. Like she chooses to eat it. Like he chooses to offer her that selfish kindness.

Like she chooses to selfishly kindness, because she knows it stems from his own choice, not for her weakness, not for her vulnerability, not for her needing protected, but for the simple and pragmatic fact that he wants to see the Taboo root, and the Taboo taking root benefits from having access to as much energy as her body needs.

What she needs... What she wants... What she chooses...

Like she chooses to pull out her phone. Like she chooses to squeeze her hands against the case until she can concentrate enough to hold it steady. Like she chooses to scroll through to the group chat—the one with her older brother in it—where the Wicked Twisters have left no messages at all, and to her private PM with Rindo where he's left a single message that she could leave on read. Like she chooses to read that message: that he'll get her meal boxed and give to her at school tomorrow if she wants it, and that if she needs anything, she can ask—that Nagi, Shoka, and Fret feel the same and decided not to all message her to avoid overwhelming her.

Like she chooses to backspace through her typos. Like she chooses to pick up the phone after she drops it. Like she chooses to peck out her message one character at a time.

Like she chooses, after a moment, to text back not to apologize, not to imply that she did anything except what she needed to do, but to thank him—and all the Wicked Twisters—for letting her come, for letting her stay, for letting her go. Like she chooses to thank him for getting her meal box and affirm that she'll get it from him tomorrow.

Like she chooses to text her gratitude to the Wicked Twisters: they can talk to her over PM if she wants, if they can handle no guarantee of timely response.

Like she chooses to thank them for their discretion over PM—not the group chat that her older brother can read—and asks them not to tell her older brother anything.

Like she chooses to smile when they agree without another word of concern.

Like she chooses to react with thankful stickers to their remarks supporting her. Like she chooses to respond when Rindo asks her gently about what has happened and what has been going on: she can't tell them yet, but she'll tell them soon, as soon as she can, and that she isn't in any danger.

...Like she chooses to thank him. For being her friend. For sticking beside her all these weeks even though she's acted so snippy, so snappy, so irritable, so bitter.

He doesn't have to. None of them have to.

Yeah, he knows that. They all do. He's choosing to stick by her anyway. So are the Wicked Twisters; she can question each of them if she wants. And if she feels better, they can go catch a movie, window shop, arcade hop, putz around internet cafés, whatever she wants. And if she never feels better, she'll always have a space beside them, an empty plate, a vacant seat, waiting for her. If she wants to come. If she wants to stay. If she wants to leave.

Because...they have fun with her. And they care about her. And she's been there with them, beside them, since the Game, as long as any of them have. She's a Wicked Twister too. If she wants to be.

Sometimes he'll mess up and reach out to her when she wants him to leave her alone. Sometimes he'll know what she told him not to say anything no matter what, and still end up inquiring how she's doing.

He'll try to get better about it.

And she'll try to get better, she texts back, about not lashing out, about calmly reminding him if need be, about reminding herself that being asked what she needs doesn't equal being spoken down to, being condescended to, being protected.

Rindo responds with a sticker of some FanGO cat-like creature. Yeah. They'll both keep trying.

Trial and error, getting closer, figuring out not compromises in the middle of the road, but what she needs on her side, what he needs on his, what each of the Wicked Twisters need on their own.

She sends him sticker of thanks in kind—no wonder Fret loves these, with how she doesn't have to mess with tiny keyboard layouts or typos, just tap the big sticker that she can barely miss—and slides her phone back into her pocket, then hangs her head between her knees and crouches like that for... She doesn't know how long.

She's a Wicked Twister, too, huh. If she wants to be. And even if not, she has a place. To come, to vibe, to be. Just with her. As she is.

As she—

The sudden burn up her left arm and down her right wrist makes her rocket upwards. The shock of orange hair, the know-it-all smirk, the casual friendly backwards lean: it takes a second for her gaze to focus and see not Neku, but someone—something—that makes her inhale sharply enough to feel the cut along the inside of her throat. "Is this the—"

"Is this the what, Skulls Jr.?"

Rhyme scrutinizes the empty space behind his parka-clad shoulders. No wings. Not even a shimmer of black. Even with the usual small size of his wings, he looks skinnier, more vulnerable like this, firmly planted in the RG, studying her coolly over the rims of his citrus shades, a dull red lollipop perched against his lip.

"Hm?" He raises his eyebrows.

Her arm... Her arm burns. Her hand, too. The muscle steams. The nerves crackle. The blood boils. The hair on the back of her nape rise as gooseflesh breaks out over her. As the sluggish blood in her arteries starts, sloshes, speeds through the vessels, the noxious slurry within her threatening to split her veins at the seams. Clenching the left limb tightly, right fingers digging into her own flesh, Rhyme forces it down along her side. His idly curious gaze glides down her shoulder, her elbow, her wrist, as though he were examining a mildly interesting lizard on the wall or snail beneath a rock while waiting for the bus.

Shoving her left hand into her pocket, Rhyme keeps her right grounded on her arm. Her vocal cords close. Any sound through them escapes with a growling vibration.

Something about him. About his face, about his repose, about that which teems beneath his skin.

She could sink her teeth into him. She could rake her claws into him. She could smash her Soul into him and—

Hhh. What? Yes, he summoned the shark Noise that erased her, but her older brother's on good terms with him, and she didn't even have that sensation during the Game. Part of the Taboo? A response to Reapers? What, exactly, is she—

"Whoa there, cowgirl." Koki Kariya taps the lollipop against his lower lip. "Thought I saw a familiar face out and about. I'm not allowed to say hello?"

Rhyme keeps her mouth clamped shut to find anything to say that won't lash him into the wall behind her.

Koki shrugs. "Meh, just stopped by to say thanks. All your hackin' and basketcase translatin' during Shibuya's longest Game? Man, we would'a been boned without ya. S'all I got."

"...He's not a basketcase," she says.

His eyebrows arch higher, his mouth curling up into a knowing smirk. Her teeth grind together. "Hm?"

Sho. "Minamimoto. You don't have to be the fox pawing at sour grapes." It surprises her, the mildness of her voice despite how her intestines have roiled up inside her, how much of her putrefied body has seemingly left her abdomen to shudder into her arm, packing it so full of hunger that the overripe flesh will burst like a fruit. "You not understanding what he says doesn't make him a basketcase."

"Sure," Koki replies, nice and easy. "Couldn't have done it without ya. Protectin' this town. Been getting chances to stargaze plenty thanks to you. Thanks, Skulls Jr. Big time."

She kept the line of her mouth into a lax curve, something halfway to a smile, trying to keep that—that writhing—out from her expression. Not to hide anything. But because she chooses. She chooses. "Mm."

"And, uh..." His gaze dips towards her hand in her pocket again and then back up. "That thing you're workin' on, on the down-low?"

Rhyme doesn't stiffen. Doesn't straighten. Doesn't flinch. Relaxed. Relaxed. Relaxed.

"Try to keep it lowkey. Just a little advice." The candy rolls back and forth across his mouth. "Y'know, few folks are stargazers like me. Most don't stop to smell the concrete roses. Don't think anyone else's picked up on it. Might've picked up on things being a little funky, but hey! What's Shibuya without a little funky, right?" Koki leans back into a comfortable silence.

She offers him nothing but quiet in turn, her left hand in her coat, her right hand a vice around her arm.

"Indulge my curiosity for a sec, would'ja? Curious, s'all." Rhyme watches the lollipop. Like a diversion of a magic trick, a distraction of a pickpocket, but she watches it again. As if noticing, Koki tilts it away from his lips. The stick dangles loosely from between his fingers. She could swipe at it, make it drop from his hand. "Why?"

"Why...what?" She tilts her head.

"Heh. You've got spunk, Skulls Jr. Good for the city." He hums. The silence stretches, spans, stains the distance between them. "Why'd you take it? You know what I mean."

"I don't know what you mean," she responds. "But I want Shibuya to be itself." If his eyebrows arch any further they'll surely start flying off of his brow. "Chaotic, and clashing, and noisy." Her fingers relax around her arm. The boiling sensation clings to the insides of her skin, but she focuses enough to let herself raise her right hand towards the sky, as though to hold it in her palm. "Unbound."

The lollipop dances through an arc as Koki manipulates it between his fingers until he's popped it back into his mouth. Then he studies her. She studies him back, her face reflected in his irises, the lower half tinted yellow by his lenses.

When he flicks the lollipop out, he touches it back to his lips, like he's giving it a kiss.

"Ding-ding-ding! That's today's mystery bonus answer. Thanks for playing, folks. Good job. And that's all the time we have today." The way he turns, the way he walks, like he's slouching away, having put on a little show-and-tell, asking her about her favorite flavor of soda and then casually waltzing away. "Oh, and next time you're gonna make some 'masterpiece' like the Math Man? At least try not to use anything that might stink in the afternoon sun the next day."

"...I'll keep that in mind." Quitting her hands from her pockets, she interlaces them at her front. The gloves tug on one another where they brush against the other. "For a more pleasant Shibuya."

Koki observes her. Rhyme observes him. He shrugs. "Well, gotta bounce. You know how it is. Got a long day ahead of me not doin' my Reaperly job." As his body rotates, his face wanes away from her and his wingless back waxes towards her.

"Wait."

"Hm?" The revolution stops. He glances back over his shoulder.

"One more thing." Now Rhyme straightens up of her own volition. "Call me something else."

The corner of his mouth quirks up with his brow. His face waxes back into view. "'Stead of 'Sku—'"

"Yes," she cuts in, not loudly, but quietly, gently, "instead of that name."

"Meh, sure. Whaddaya want me to call you, girl?" Koki shrugs. "Go easy on me. Not anythin' too complicated. I know your favorite dumpster diver's prob'bly got stuff lodged in his memory to number infinity, but us common peeps only got so many shelves in the head, y'know?"

Rhyme presses her hand into her cheek. "You want me to come up with it. Hehe, I don't really care what you think about me. I was curious. If you can't come up with anything but what you named my brother, well, that's on you."

"Heh. All righty. It's funny that you think I care about what you think about, what, my creativity? Pfft." The lollipop points towards her like a microphone.

"I don't think that. If Uzuki hasn't gotten you to do your work after this many years trying to work you up, I sure don't think I will." She giggles to herself. Doesn't matter if he laughs. "Discretion is the better part of valor, as they say."

"Hey, now, I've gotten convinced of plenty in my time. Not outta caring 'bout what people think." A little fondness in his tone? Learn something new every day. "Over who's gonna buy who ramen. So, lessee here." Koki hmmms. More like a mmmmm, relaxing down to his bones. "Cap."

Her hand drifts upwards, and then Rhyme chooses to pinch the brim of her hat. "Cap?"

"Just like that. Cap. You've got a good head on your shoulders, and if anyone could whack someone in the RG, no cap, just point and bust a cap, it'd be you." When he shrugs his time, he shrugs with both of his arms exaggeratedly pointed up, the lollipop balanced between his thumb and middle finger as if about to do a pirouette. Rhyme can't call him wrong. She'd die for her brother, kill for her brother, do anything for her brother. And for herself, too. "'Sides, you're the Cap-tain of your own fate and all that jazz. Makin' me work on my lunch and come up with a name instead of just rollin' over and taking Skulls Jr. Heh!"

"...Hm." Rhyme presses her other hand into her cheek.

"Hm? No good?" The lollipop rolls over his lower lip. "'Fraid I'm fresh outta ideas, then."

Her fingers push into her face, the Taboo's heat palpable through the fabric, the hunger tangible through the ache, the prickling persistent yet unable to control her choices. "No...I think that's pretty good. At least for now. If I Cap-tain my boat another way, you'll know sooner or later, stargazer."

"Heh! Sure, Cap." Koki resumes his walk out of the alleway, but he doesn't...turn his back on her, this time, that vulnerable, wingless expanse of his scapulae. "Shibuya's in for a wild ride, isn't it?"

"I'll be picking up my license soon." Rhyme smiles. "And I'm pretty sure I'll make a good driver."

Chapter Text

With Kaie refusing to help her—for good reasons on his behalf, as far as she could tell—Rhyme made an attempt to access the UG's denizens through her favorite ex-Reaper friend.

Not her older brother, whose one-week stint during which he had earned zero points and learned a whopping none of the so-called 'Reaper Spurts' didn't count.

But Shoka. Who promptly informed Rhyme that she hadn't had any contact with any Reapers, from Shibuya or Shinjuku, outside of texting with Kaie. She offered to put Rhyme in contact with Kaie if Rhyme needed his number.

Rhyme laughed. She very much appreciated the...assistance, but no need.

Still, with no access to the UG's denizens, and Kaie having blocked off his archival route, Rhyme had...no real way of continuing her research into the Taboo. The Taboo, hm? On one hand, Kaie had sounded very convinced that its power could only lead to destruction, that it would cause nothing but pain and grief, or whichever specific words he had used. On the other hand, if anything could break a law laid down by the Game itself, it would be something so forbidden that Kaie hadn't even wanted to talk about it.

Well, if it possibly, perhaps, within the bounds of Imagination, existed. She wouldn't blame Kaie for maybe or maybe not telling her about something that might have or might have not existed.

Not that she doubted Kaie, or his warnings. But her older brother had also called her coming into Shibuya by herself dangerous, and yet Rhyme had come and in the process helped save Shibuya.

...Which didn't help if all of her leads had gone cold.

No one else to ask about the UG. Minamimoto hadn't let anything slip to any of the Wicked Twisters. Shiki and Neku knew a whopping nothing about it. Occasionally, when the situation allowed it, Rhyme attempted to probe the waters to see if Neku's recollections of the Game might have implied any details that Neku himself hadn't connected.

She and Kaie hadn't yet managed to achieve any breakthroughs on reverse-engineering Mr. Hanekoma's app, either. So much for her plan to photographs on the calendar days when Minamimoto's Game had gone on in the search for clues, any clues. But it represented something for her to do, even if they hadn't made much headway, and so she would doggedly pursue it. At the very least the tools that they built in the process would benefit the RNS.

The seasons passed into one another. Talks of the Game grew less frequent as conversations shifted to their presents and futures. The Wicked Twisters kept inviting her places. She went. Just to exist there. In her own little compartmentalized space, more an extension of her big brother's presence there than anything else, a source of awwwws whenever her big brother displayed his big softie heart.

The world spun maddeningly on.

The rest of her life, she guessed, would continue on like this, twiddling her thumbs, finding herself in the darkness between others' lights, nowhere to belong to beyond her older brother's shadow, without a pack to call her own or the capacity to dream of one. The same wheel of time, rotating onwards, that would carry her past high school, into college, and through whatever came next.

She'd keep chasing after anything, sniffing out leads with even the slightest possibility to go somewhere, but a part of her, smug, condescending, disdainful, its wings still singed with copper, looked down at her as though to say that it had told her so.

What tipped Rhyme off, in the end: a slip of the tongue.

"Oh, yeah, I got you that because I thought you'd like it. A friend of mine said it was great."

Neku had ordered for her at Donburi Town, because the bus had arrived a few minutes late, and he had decided—on her behalf—to get her something so that it would have arrived to their table in time for her arrival. He was paying for the meal, had offered it in exchange for Rhyme grabbing a bite with him, Shiki, and Eri, and Rhyme had gone. Because such outings really involved Neku ordering something for her older brother that Rhyme could take home and put in the fridge. And even if Rhyme couldn't accept charity for herself, she would for her older brother. He'd protest, but she'd take it.

And Neku had gone ahead and gotten Rhyme one of the most expensive bowls on the menu. A new seafood bowl, sparked just a few weeks ago, overflowing with sea bream and horsemackerel. Because he knew that she knew that he knew that she would've gotten something cheaper on his tab.

Even if she ended up annoyed or insulted at him for having ordered for her without asking, he knew that she knew that he knew that she'd eat it anyway to avoid wasting it.

And that, she mused, mattered to him. That he knew that she knew that he knew she'd end up getting something nice and meaty into her stomach, not just the most inexpensive item she could muster to avoid straining Neku's fat wallet. Because he knew better than she did what was good for her. Because eating a bigger portion was better for her even if it meant him not asking her what she wanted. According to him. Right.

"Is that so?" Rhyme asked, holding the brand-new bowl, breathing in the admittedly mouthwatering scent of fresh-cooked horsemackerel mingling with dabs of vinegar and citrus. "Which friend?"

"Uh, nobody you know...that well," Neku responded awkwardly, his gaze shifting towards her older brother, who was chowing down on his beef bowl, and then to Shiki, who was giggling over the menu with Eri, the two of them reading through some of the new descriptions for the dishes. The new server, someone who loved seeing people smile as they ate, had revamped the menu for maximum hilarious punch.

"No one I know that well?" Rhyme furrowed her brow. "Is something going on I wasn't aware of?"

He cleared his throat. "I'll tell you later."

And he did. Rhyme made sure of it. Doggedly tracking him out of Donburi Town, doggedly asking him what he'd meant, doggedly demanding to understand the secrecy, which turned out to be: Eri's presence, and the fact that none of them could speak about the Game to those who hadn't experienced it. And her older brother's, and the fact that Neku hadn't wanted to rock the boat by announcing he was going out for tea every week with someone her older brother couldn't stand.

The friend: Coco Atarashi. Who had tasted a brand-new food bowl. In the past few weeks.

"Yeah, Coco's back in town," Neku admitted on their monthly walk back from TOKYU HANDS. "I'm not going to ask her about the Taboo stuff, okay? We don't talk about that during our weekly teatimes. We don't even talk about the Game. We just talk about life. How things are going. Food. Fashion. Everyday things. And I don't think that you should ask her either, Rhyme. We're all trying to move on."

"...I wasn't going to ask you to ask. You already said you wouldn't back then. I know that we're trying to move on. I am, too." Rhyme tucked her hands into her jacket pockets. She let the quiet stretch just enough before she pulled a card out from the inside of her sleeve. "Besides, Kaie already told me that it's dangerous and destructive. I don't have any intention of being the cat killed by curiosity."

He visibly relaxed, his steps taking a jauntier tune. "That's good. I'm glad that you listen to Kaie. He has a good head on his shoulders. So do you. I know you'll be better safe than sorry."

She stepped over the cracks in the sidewalk, one by one, as carefully as if walking over eggshells. "How's Minamimoto?"

"They're getting along better than they were," Neku responded with a smile, and then a frown. "Rhyme... What are you thinking?"

"Hm? I guess that I shouldn't assume, either. But I thought, where there's smoke, there's fire, so if Coco has returned, maybe Minamimoto has, too." Linking her hands behind her back, Rhyme smiled sweetly at him. "I know that you and my brother don't see eye-to-eye on 'Tabooty,' but—" Neku cracked up a little before his frown clamped back into place. "—I agree with you. When I heard about him from you, it sounded like he'd grown a lot in the years from the first Game to the second. The way that the Wicked Twisters talk about him just makes him seem a little lonely."

Rhyme listened to his slow exhalation, as though he were trying to breathe off the conflicted look on his face. "He's not a misunderstood stray cat, Rhyme."

"Didn't you say that his Noise form was a lion?" she offered, tone gentle and soft. "When he tried to erase you during his Game, and when he tried to erase the Wicked Twisters during their Game, too."

"Okay, Rhyme, what are you getting at?" Neku spoke with surprising kindness, bordering on the pity he clearly felt but tried to not to express. Or maybe Rhyme was assuming.

"Could you pass on my phone number to him?"

She walked a few more steps before realizing that he'd stopped dead in his tracks. Rhyme turned towards him. The few other passersby on the sidewalk, dressed mostly in Shepherd House and HOG FANG from the nearby stores, steered away from the two of them. "Why?"

"Because, first—" Rhyme held out her forefinger. "—you asked me not to talk to Coco about the Game, and I told Kaie that I would try to gather information for his archive of all phenomena." The line of Neku's mouth thinned, as if to say, this again? "Don't worry! Kaie doesn't want any info on the Taboo, so I don't need to ask him for any of it. With him having figured out everything about Soul Pulvis, he's a font of knowledge for a lot of topics. I know that you passed on his explanation of Soul Pulvis to me, and Neku, I trust you, but I want to get it straight from the horse's mouth. Or...the lion's mouth, in this case. It'll just be a text interview!"

He rubbed his shoulder.

"I'm not going to tell the Wicked Twisters or anyone else. I'll ask him a few questions over text, and if he isn't interested in answering, I'll stop. I'd give those questions to you to pass on to him," Rhyme added, "but you said that you want to move on from the Game. I want to respect that, Neku."

"I guess a phone conversation wouldn't hurt," Neku said after a moment. Rhyme kept her face very carefully still, her smile very carefully bright. "Just...don't think that you can make friends with him, okay? Some of the Wicked Twisters tried to put their friendship with him over..." He sighed. "You're the only person I've met to have been able to understand him to that degree. He's...less crazy that he used to be. Having someone to talk to might help him be a little less crazy than that." She remained very, very quiet, merely nodding. Neku pinched the bridge of his nose. "Beat would kill me, but I owe you and Kaie a lot. Shibuya owes you and Kaie a lot. Are you really just going to talk to him about Soul Pulvis for the archive?"

"Honesty is the best policy, you know!" Rhyme beamed. "I'll gather the information and then stop. Oh, you know, maybe if he wants to talk about math, I'll hear him out. I don't have anyone to talk to about some of the college-level courses I'm working on right now, either. But that's all."

Neku's hand clung to his shoulder. "You want to talk about him about math...?"

"Not even Nagi has fun talking about the—" He hadn't finished his high school degree, having dropped out after missing three years between fifteen and eighteen. She could have picked anything. "—central limit theorem with me!"

He seemed to study her closely, and she continued to smile. "...I'll talk to him. If he promises not to involve you in anything dangerous, or even think about involving you in anything dangerous... I think it could be good for him to have an outlet. And for you to talk to people who aren't..."

"Aren't what, Neku?" Rhyme tilted her head innocently.

His fingers flattened out. The quirk of his mouth, the slight askance of his gaze: something like...guilt. "Aren't involved with Beat. It could be healthy for you. That's all."

She froze as Neku had, her soles planted into the ground, her smile fading away as she stared at him, stared through him.

He waited.

Rhyme swallowed. "...That might be...a good idea," she managed, quietly, after a moment, the shiver running through her spine, the heartbeat warbling in her throat, the copper bitter on her tongue. "Just...to expand my world."

"Mm... To expand your world, huh?" She watched the tendons rise in the back of his hand. "Just...promise me that you won't get involved in anything dangerous, either. I know that you're cautious and careful, but you've also done some things like walk into Shibuya in the middle of the Reverb." Before she could say anything, Neku continued: "I know that you only did that to save Shibuya, so you're not going to get involved in anything bad here. All right. I'll ask him."

"I promise." Her fingers squeezed together so tightly that the old scars up her arms ached. "Nothing dangerous. I'll be... I'll be a good little sister, okay?"

Neku closed his eyes. His hand fell away from his shoulder. "...I trust you, Rhyme."

She....

She hoped he did.

Chapter Text

It hadn't surprised her: Sho's reaction to her 'heap.' The boombox, the stereo, the amps, the CD players, the bent microphone, the music box. Why had she chosen those? What had brought her to bring them together?

Because her older brother's name for her, and Rhythm Warning, had a theme of music. Because Rhyme had taken the assignment less as self-expression and more as classification. Picking out whatever pieces fit the mold. Couldn't classification itself mean self-expression? As when Sho had brought together all of those airplanes, or bits of them? Or when he had constructed a heap of various elements related to cars, traffic lights, street signs, and so on, each disparate component tied together by the road?

When he split up those candies by color, each in a tiny heap of vibrant hues, had that not marked his own self-expression?

He'd agreed. Sure. Nothing wrong with having a theme.

But had Rhyme felt like her heap had sprung from her own self-expression? From her own statement about herself?

"If living is an art," she had responded levelly, "then the fact that I stacked these things together is also art."

"Ha! Living is an art. So's painting." But one could sell out. Commercialize. Paint, but not from the heart. Not necessarily a problem, as far as Rhyme mused, if one did so deliberately. "But is that what you're trying to express about your own set of integers, femtogram? You're only congruent to yourself."

No. That which she had made...

"Rhythm Warning. A psych that was chosen for you by the parameters of the obtuse angles' Game. That other variable you respond to. A variable chosen that the roadkill chain-substitutes for you. I'm asking you to define your own variable, femtogram. Write your own factoring proof. If you want to take the left-hand path, femtogram, it has to be your proof. Want to only copy other proofs in your handwriting? The right-hand path's right there. You pick whatever vector you want. And this?"

Rhyme had watched him swing his leg back. The muscles in her own thighs had coiled and tensed, as though either emulating the sensations that he must have felt in that moment, or urging her to turn tail and run.

"Cruuuuunch! Garbage all the way down!"

For a second, she had turned away, had screwed her lids shut. But no. She would open up her eyes. She wouldn't look away from the corruption. She would keep her gaze on this transformation. As Sho had crashed his boot into the art. As the boombox's wires whined. As the covers of the CD players fragmented. As the amps split into pieces, chunks of plastic littering the ground. As the microphone ended up bent in the other direction which, funnily enough, made it stand up almost straight again. As that music box with the hand-painted giraffe toppled onto the cement and burst. The inner mechanisms must have moved slightly from the impact, as the music box had played two or three short, soft notes before it had twwwwnggggged into cacophony and then fallen into shattered silence.

She had stared at the pieces scattered all over. At the head of the hand-painted giraffe that she'd sought to preserve.

Part of her had shuddered. What a shame. What a waste. What a misuse of something beautiful.

But...wasn't that the point?

Like she, herself. What a shame. What a waste. What a misuse of something beautiful, when she didn't wear a smile. Shouldn't she have accepted it? To have lived like that music box, hand-painted, lovingly crafted by those around her, for the sake of brightening their lives with the beauty of her existence, the beauty of her 'happiness,' the beauty of her 'protected smile?'

That her older brother went through so much pain and so much suffering, exhausting himself, working himself to the bone, being there with her, for the sake of her having the chance to smile at him.

All of it possible, so that he could protect her smile.

Yet what of herself? What of her own pain? Her sadness, her anger, her bitterness, her jealousy, her pride, her greed, her desires, her wants, her needs?

What a shame. What a waste. What a misuse of something beautiful, when she could radiant happiness and contentment on everyone in her life.

Like a sunflower on a windowsill, ever aching to turn towards the light even if that meant those gazing upon that flower would only see the green and brown of its back. Like a sunflower on a windowsill, ever turned towards those gazing upon that flower, so that they could see its beautiful golden petals, but at the cost of the sunflower wilting from the shade.

That music box. So pretty, so well-loved, so beautiful, that she couldn't bear to see it crunched.

That music box, the springs in its guts clattering on the cement, the bumped tape inside splintered into chunks, the clever mechanisms of gears now a rain of metal, teeth bent or chipped off entirely, never to play again.

Nothing so pretty, so well-loved, so beautiful, that it couldn't get crunched for the sake of the people who make art of it.

Her 'protected smile.' Her 'happiness.' Her 'existence as herself,' too. Crunchable. Crunched.

Garbage all the way down. Not a matter of her skill, or lack thereof. A child haphazardly grasping for shiny bits and throwing them into a pile to roll around in would have made something more artistic than she had, something more representative of living. Something more like life.

Life.

Rhyme could take that smile and crunch it, could take that happiness and crunch it, could take that as existence as Raimu Bito and as Rhyme and even as the femtogram and crunch it too.

To make herself a magnum opus. To make herself art. To dissolve and coagulate as she came ever closer to the person she wanted to be.

Not to suffer for the sake of her art. But to...something. To acknowledge herself? To allow herself the wholeness of her experience, the entirety of her being? To crunch herself as she pleased, rather than allow the world to crunch her into that single thing, that false promise of the spider's thread as her only hope for salvation?

Life. Her life. Living as art, which didn't mean that all living made art from the self. Or, rather, that all self-expression... No, all self-expression was self-expression, but...

But it was the difference between art borne from a façade, and art born from a truth. Not necessarily a singular truth, but some truth, somewhere, of how that person lived. Or...something like that?

The word tumbled through her head each day. Trying to work through imprinting her own psych onto a pin. Trying to make a sigil of her own intent. Trying to create her own symbolic sigil language of her own design. Trying to find a symbol that could represent her.

Trying to make heaps. Trying to express herself. Trying to figure out what, exactly, she could transform into art.

Rhyme didn't have to make something from scratch. All the matter and energy of the universe, all the Soul and Imagination, had been and would be.

But life existed, as Sho had said, in the moment of change.

Life existed in the moment that one thing became another. In the moment that something moved. In the moment that energy and Imagination flowed down their gradients, ever spinning the universe towards the eventual end of its lifetime, change part and parcel with mortality, the only true immortality necessarily going hand-in-hand with a final stagnation, a final stasis.

It didn't matter that Sho took knowledge from those who came before. It didn't matter that Sho expressed himself with existing symbols. It didn't matter that Sho grabbed objects that others had created and remixed them for his art.

Because it mattered what he did with them. How he changed them.

Like a mathematical operator. Whatever garbage passed through Sho's operator would end up changed. Even if it ended up exactly the same as before, an irreversible process had occurred. Taken together, everything that he made, that he heaped, that he transformed into art, painted his own unique signature, his own unique identifier, his own unique operator. His own vector. His left-hand path. Something that he generated, from the origin that he hadn't chosen, along all the inflections that he had chosen.

She just had to...find her operator. Had to reverse-engineer it. Her perfect solution. Imperfect, but perfect for her, by her own choice.

Now, how in the world would she do that?

Life. The word tumbled through her head with every glance at the blank pin, every failure to create a sigil, every 'heap' that ended up crunched. Sho had told her that he'd praise her and critique her in equal measure, by whatever he truly believed, and he did. To think that she had ever accused him of just smiling and patting her head.

At the very least...she'd gradually gotten a little bit better at interpreting his art.

Just a little bit.

But it kept her coming back night after night for lesson after lesson, failing, falling, beating her head in frustration against the wall, the same things over and over and over again. How could she find life so elusive? Because Mr. Hanekoma hadn't put her Soul back together, her Soul, her whole Soul, and nothing but her Soul, making her less than life? Because the lack of her dreams deprived her of something fundamental to life?

More excuses? Things that had contributed, that had 'factored in' as Sho might have said? Either way, she'd have to find some way forward.

Infinite left-hand paths, right? Like the infinite artworks that Sho appeared able to put out. The infinite artworks that Rhyme had started to eke that, to see, to comprehend, even just a little.

Through all of that fatigue, through all of that weight, through all of that heaviness of the seconds and the minutes and the hours and the days and the weeks and the rest of her life—if she could ever call it that—at least she could hone her skill at something.

Rhyme kept applying his philosophies to his art. Seeing the interconnections. Comprehending the themes that continuously cropped up, but also how he changed them, over time. Different iterations on similar themes. Saying new things in the details. Elaborating on his worldview. So many different ways to state such disparate and yet similar parts of himself, the artist intrinsic to the art and separated at the same time. Separable, she might have said.

And they kept coming together amongst piles of garbage. For him to work on his art while she worked, or attempted to work, on hers.

And he kept writing on that paper. Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.

And the moon kept waxing. Filling in silver day by day. Brightening the little alleyway in which they spent most of their time.

"Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom," Rhyme mused, depressing the spraypaint can trigger repeatedly, little wisps of coral-salmon spritzing onto the brick at a time. Her latest failed attempt at a sigil splattered on the wall above her crouched form. She wasted another few spritzes of graffiti. The random, chaotic patterns that they formed reminded her of the modern art she'd peeked at in her classes. "Is there another lesson that you could teach me?"

"Ha! Another medium of art?" Sho called in response. She could hear the scratching of his pencil even from here. Earlier the sounds of shrieking metal and whumping fabric had resonated.

If Rhyme had to guess, he'd built up a heap and now lounged on it as he continued his scratching.

"You said that Mr. Hanekoma taught you all kinds of art media, right? And you took a little bit from most of those lessons, carried it forward into your own art. I know that you didn't need any of those lessons! You would've figured out how to heap garbage all on your own," she added hastily, "but you still think that you derived things from those lessons, which you integrated into yourself?"

His throaty laughter at the words derived and integrated brought a well-worn smile to her face, a smile that she wouldn't tire of no matter how many times a simple math pun amused him.

"I know that I'm going to have to keep trying. Don't worry! I don't think that there's going to be some magical medium of Imagination use that will suddenly make things click in my head. Change begins with the self. I have to figure out how I'm going to be me. And I think that I'm...really slowly...doing that? Little by little bit."

Rhyme could hear his boot tapping impatiently. She could have paused on purpose, to drag it out, to wait and see how long he'd tap tap tap that boot, smear his patience out from the asphalt.

But what purpose would it serve? Just to remind him that she could frustrate him whenever she wanted to?

So she went on, instead. Just opened her mouth and said what she wanted to say.

"I think that learning about different media is really fun! All work and no play makes Rhyme a dull girl." She finally glanced back at him over her shoulder. He perched at the height of a vertically-aligned blue racecar that he had studded throughout with everything from fire extinguishers to scissors, even an array of rainbow-hued gachapon, with the engine block carved out and tossed into the pile of garbage for another heap some other time. "So, Sho, let's have a talk about something. Teach me."

"Heh! Sure!" As he leaped from the top of his latest masterpiece, he yanked one of the gachapon machines out from the car's underbelly and drove it upside-down into the cement, then seated himself on it as a makeshift chair.

It gave her an impression similar to if he'd just taken a chair and turned it around, to lean his chest on its back, drape himself in the opposite way to how one 'should' have sat on a chair.

"Hmph. Another lesson. Factor pins, factor sigils." Abruptly his grin grew teeth. "Femtogram!"

Rhyme braced herself for whatever he might suggest. But the quickening of her pulse in her wrist didn't spring from fear or trepidation. A tangible excitement. A palpable enthusiasm. For learning. For trying. For working it out. One way or the other, she'd work it out. "Yes?"

"Let's make some Noise!"

What?

"Ha ha ha ha ha! You've got the static in your Soul, femtogram. Heh heh heh. The resonance of that constructive interference... Now that's a variable I'd love to solve for. We'll start the sequence with something that needs Imagination the way that pins do—something that you can make even if you're struggling to define your own variable. All Players use psychs; all Reapers make Noise."

She'd frozen at the fourth word. The rest of the sounds lined up one by one, but she only processed them in fits and spurts. She could hear him talking onwards, could hear the explanations fanning out, about emotions, about catalysts, about aligning Soul with code, about breaking the brackets of that code.

Make some Noise. The static in her Soul. Sho had transformed into Noise against his will, the Wicked Twisters had said, having consumed too much Soul Pulvis.

Just like her.

But also: Sho had transformed into Noise willingly and wantingly, Neku had said, having made himself into a lion for the sake of crunching the Composer.

"Sho," Rhyme said, interrupting whatever equations about Fourier transforms and wave interference that he had begun to speak through, "can you turn yourself into your Noise form?"

Grinning, he leaned forward on the gachapon machine. "Sure, if I have the right inputs. The algorithm and graphs have been marked on my Soul."

"The right inputs? If I asked you to turn your Noise form right now, would you?" Rapidly she continued: "I'm not asking you to do that right now! Please don't!"

"Naturally. Hmph. I factored out Leo Cantus myself. Means I have to add the right inputs, since I've broken the limiters on my Soul, heh. Taboo Noise, trash Noise: they've got the right frequency for that constructive interference that triggers the equation. Like a mineral forming around a catalyst, it introduces Noise code that the rest of my Soul crystallizes around temporarily." Sho leaned back, his fingers wrapped around the gachapon machine's rim. "It's such a simple equation."

"So you have to...absorb some Noise in order to become a Noise yourself?" Rhyme asked, her tone as careful as her words. "But your Soul is currently in the code of Taboo Noise, right?"

"Ha!" Once again he angled forward towards her. "The limiters on my Soul are broken, femtogram. All the sound of 428 makes Noise. But the Noise generated by Reapers is fettered by a specific code. The UG can't be truly unbound from code until all of it is unbound from code and artificial restrictions."

Rhyme nodded. "Okay...but that doesn't answer my question. If you're Noise right now, why do you need to absorb Noise in order to become Leo Cantus? You said that you picked the form of Leo Cantus out yourself. But even though you picked it out for yourself, you can't access it without absorbing Noise? You said that it crystallizes around the Noise code introduced...so are you temporarily putting a code on yourself? Why? Is that how Reaper officers do it, too? Because I've never heard the Wicked Twisters say that."

"Hmph. Reaper code is specifically engineered to transform into Noise code with sufficiently high energy inputs." Sho placed his hand horizontally low. "As Reapers climb up that garbage hierarchy, their code gains a greater and greater capacitance for storing energy." As he continued to speak, he moved his hand up, as if he were walking it along the steps of a ladder. "When the Conductor gives someone a Noise form, the Conductor expands that capacitance further and brands it with a specific imposed pattern. Then that trash Reaper has enough capacitance to store energy that they can expend it to temporarily force their code into their Noise form, an explosive exothermic reaction."

She found it remarkably endearing, how he made his hands whoosh away from one another in a demonstration of an explosion.

"But it's inherently limited. They can only force their Soul into a single shape, like the psych of a specific pin."

"So it's something like a change of states? Water gets hotter, but if you don't have enough energy to keep heating it, it won't boil. But if you add enough energy, you can bring it to boil. And then, when it's boiled like that, you can cool it down again. When the vapor cools down and becomes water, that's like the equivalent of the Reaper going back to being a Reaper." Rhyme stroked her chin. "Basically, Reaper officers that have Noise forms are the ones who have burners hot enough to bring themselves to a boil. But they're limited...in comparison to you?"

"Ninety degrees. They're limited. Once they activate their Noise form, that higher energy state's a new equilibrium: their constant, until they run out of energy." Sho shrugged. "It's trash. And they don't factor out their own shapes for the Noise, either."

Rhyme rocked her hand against her cheek. "Wait. If all Reaper code can become Noise code, but not all Reapers have Noise forms, what happens if a Reaper that doesn't have a Noise form yet gains that energy?"

"Work it out." Smirking, he eyed her with curiosity cast across his features, most evident in the perceptive tracking of his pupils.

"Well, you said that it had to do with capacitance. So I'm guessing that it would be like overloading a circuit. Either the excess energy gets moved somewhere else, or...the Reaper...explodes?"

That gave her pause. She unfolded herself from her squat by the wall and turned around to face him properly rather than continuing to look at him over her shoulder.

"I guess if we're going to do with the changes of state thing, it's more like...how both temperature and pressure contribute to what state of matter something can be in. It's like how water boils at a lower temperature when you're at a higher elevation. That's why people who live on high mountains have to adjust their recipes. And water at higher pressures takes a higher temperature to boil. Some kinds of matter—I don't remember if water is like this—won't boil at all if the pressure is high enough, no matter what temperature it's at."

"And what's the intersection between this—" Sho pointed at her. "—and Noise forms?"

"The intersection is that code is like pressure. Reapers officers with Noise forms are under low pressure, so they can 'boil' into their Noise forms at achievable temperatures. Reapers lower down the hierarchy are under so much pressure that they won't 'boil' no matter how much energy they put in. Because their code limits them! Is that right?"

He hehed. "Sure, I can see the analogous angle."

"But am I right?" she inquired. "I just gave you an analogy, but I'm asking if my prediction's right. No matter how much energy, they just won't turn into Noise at the higher pressure of their restrictive code."

"Correct!" Sho laughed. "Reapers only explode into Soul when erased!"

She allowed herself a small fist of victory. "Okay! Okay. I'm starting to see it. It's kind of funny. If I think about it as a visual hierarchy, and the low-ranking Reapers are at the bottom, then they're under the pressure of all the Reapers higher up on the hierarchy, like they're holding up all of that weight. Meanwhile the ones at the top are being supported by everyone beneath them, so they don't have pressure weighing down on them. A-anyway, that's not relevant to the conversation."

He looked at her with some unidentifiable emotion. Not necessarily disinterest or boredom, but...something.

Rhyme coughed into her hand and continued. "It's interesting that the lowest ranking Reapers are just basically...Players? I mean, even Players can use Noise pins and summon Noise with them." Such as herself. "I know that most Noise pins have different effects for Players compared to Reapers, but some of them...do summon the Noise, right?" Such as herself. "I guess that makes sense. The point of the Game is to find humans who are...'talented' enough to become low-ranking Reapers. You only play the Game for a week, but you can be a Reaper for years. So you have lots of time to slowly climb the ranks. It feels like the word Reaper covers a bunch of different individual codes."

"Ninety degrees!"

Sho seemed to reserve his sharpest smile for her unprompted ponderings. Not just looking for answers to his questions, but looking for her to ask the questions.

"'Reaper code' isn't a single code," he affirmed. "Players, supports, harriers, officers, officers with Noise forms, Conductors: each step has its own limits and capacitances. Not congruent. Neither is 'Noise code.' Noise produced by the Souls of 428, Noise produced by Reapers, Taboo Noise, the double-cosine's Dissonance Noise, plague Noise, trash Noise: we classify them as Noise for shared properties, such as the ability to intersect the UG and RG at the same time."

"But even though they're under the same general umbrella, they're not all the same code," Rhyme repeated. "Just like you can be Taboo Noise, but you still need some other Noise—and only some specific types of Noise will work?—to transform into Leo Cantus."

She squinted at him. Wait. Had he engineered this entire conversation just to get her to figure out the solution to her own problem?

Or had he just taken the opportunity to give her the tools she needed?

...Or had he just had something to say, and said it?

"Because the code of Leo Cantus is different from the Taboo Noise of your Soul. Which means...that you are introducing code into yourself? Even temporarily? What's the point of that? I thought you hated those limits and bounds. Wait, wait, let me see if I can factor it out myself." She pressed her fingers into her cheeks as she contemplated. "So the benefit of a Taboo Noise form is that you can choose a shape for your own Noise, right? And you can generate its powers. You have more control over it than you would with a Noise form that the Conductor gave you. But the flipside is that you have to introduce a code to yourself, and you have to consume Noise from somewhere else. But I'm guessing that the trade-off is worth it to you? Even though you don't like codes?" She studied his face. "Why?"

"Femtogram." He gestured at himself. "Have you seen me use that operator?"

"No, but I'm not a very good case study. I've never seen you in the Games as myself, and it's not like I know what you get up to outside of these lessons." Rhyme tilted her cap up. "Have you?"

Sho scoffed. "Haven't intentionally fettered myself with a code since I dissolve-and-coagulated myself off the roof of Pork City. I'd had the Taboo integrated up to here—" He touched about halfway up his left forearm. What...did that mean? "—and I was running out of 𝑡-value. So I unbound the rest of my code at the same time. Heh!" Once again he made that gesture emulating an explosion.

"And here I thought you said Reapers only went kaboom when they got erased," Rhyme noted, smiling.

"I never miscalculate," he countered immediately. "I'd shattered my Reaper wings and unbound myself from that code even before I'd transformed into Leo Cantus. When I 'went kaboom,' I wasn't a Reaper anymore."

She tsked teasingly at him, but she couldn't suppress the smile at Sho saying the words 'went kaboom.' "Okay, okay, I yield. You don't miscalculate. So you're saying that... You mean that you wouldn't turn into Leo Cantus, because you wouldn't want to fetter yourself with a code?"

"Hmph." His bracelet jangled against his necklace where he ran his hand over his chest. "Just to show you the masterpiece of my design, I'd temporarily fetter myself. Leo Cantus's zetta cool—for a code-bound Noise."

Rhyme giggled. "You think that your—" Fursona. Sho wanted to show her his fursona. "—design is so cool that you'd show me?"

He nodded decisively, and she broke in pearls of mirth, doubling over slightly with her arms pressing into her abdomen. She could read the pride in his smile, the complete belief in his own coolness in his eyes. So proud of his fursona. It sparked a little...warmth in her chest. She really could just make some absolute garbage and call it art as long as it came from herself. Didn't have to make something that anyone else would find cool.

"But you'd need to generate some Noise for that, so...let's not, right now. I have another question, anyway." The taste of copper still burning on her tongue. "Do you... Do you have control of yourself when you're Noise? When you're Leo Cantus?"

"Heh! If I take that operator willingly." Abruptly Sho scowled. "That trash Noise and its garbage cognitive energy intercepted my calculations and screwed 'em up."

"You mean, when you were fighting the Wicked Twisters?" Rhyme asked. "Nagi and Fret told me about that, how you didn't have control then." She tilted her head slightly. "They don't want to believe that you'd hurt them on purpose. And from what I know about you, you wouldn't 'crunch' your own allies. Even if you didn't care about them, you wouldn't waste their talents or usefulness, right?"

He replied with a dismissive downwards wave. "Trash Noise turned all my senses into cross-products."

"So you didn't hurt them on purpose? You did go berserk?"

"Hhhah. Naturally. Garbage—" Sho jumped down from the gachapon machine, his boots scuffing along the cement. "—trying to bind me. I couldn't subtract that trash Noise fast enough. Kept integrating itself, messing with my calculations. Hmph. Persistent sums of digits."

She dipped her head. "That doesn't sound very fun."

"But that's an outlier. If I produced Noise from the Taboo and added it to myself, I'd keep my control perfectly balanced." Then he huffed. "The most zetta annoying part is how unaesthetic its additions to my design are. It's a factoring lion! I don't need any porcine polyhedra summed to my beautiful masterpiece!"

Ignoring his apparent irritation at Soul Pulvis's ugliness and lack of aesthetic design, Rhyme focused on the first part: "So if you did make your Noise form out of your own Noise, you'd have control over it."

"Don't make me reiterate."

"No, no, just checking my understanding. It's a shame that you can't have your 'zetta cool' Noise form without having to bind yourself into code. Reaper officers can do it because they're already bound into code. And it's the same with psychs summoning Noise, since the psych in the pin forces the Imagination into a certain code." Rhyme shuddered. "I don't... I know that you have a different experience than I do, with being Noise. But I can't imagine ever willingly... I know that you said that you needed power. I get that. And to you, since you were never forced to be Noise, it probably doesn't feel like..."

"Being bound by any code is garbage. Take whatever yoctogram who bound you into Noise and crunch 'em." Sho punctuated his point with a crack of his fist into his palm. "But you've miscalibrated. There's nothing axiomatic about Leo Cantus requiring a code. I derived a modified version of the Reaper Noise form code because I had a limited 𝑡-interval. Figured that I could adjust it and fix it after I crunched the Composer. Now? I'm not bound by any limits anymore. I've already had to alter my current physical makeup through refinery sigils thanks to the double-cosine's radiamn terrible aesthetic opinions. As long as I can write my own proof for it, there's no reason I can't make a zetta cool transformation that won't be bound by code and that won't require me to integrate Noise into myself to trigger it. Some on-the-fly transposition of my components."

Rhyme blinked. "Then why haven't you done that already? Is it because you don't want to be Noise? I mean, like an animal? I know you're still Taboo Noise as you are."

"Heh! I'm still iterating on my own formulae. I'll keep on iterating on those formulae until my series converges! Ha ha ha ha ha! Zetta fun times." Sho smirked cockily. "I've got some other proofs to work out first. But once I've factored those out and unlimited my 428 from those obtuse angles, heh... I'll see what I can do about this interesting little problem you've posed."

She hummed. "You're still iterating on your own formulae. Even you, Sho, when you know better than anyone else who you want to be. But even the sharpest sword should still get its turn on the whetstone, as they say."

He shrugged. "Haven't reached infinity yet."

"That's right. You haven't reached infinity yet. But you'll keep on trying until your series converges. Hehe... So theoretically, you could have a Noise form of your own design that would be completely under your own control, without the need to turn yourself into code. Because you wouldn't be using whatever code the Reaper Noise forms use. You'd just be using your own codeless Soul—"

At least as codeless as one could get under the circumstances, with the Higher Plane having restricted the UG and choked it all out in artificial codes.

"—and changing your shape. Like how right now, your shape is a human one, because... Because you want it to be." Rhyme tucked her hands under her chin. "Are you human, Sho?"

"Naturally. Being human doesn't equal being weak. The obtuse angles who try to convince every exajoule to fractionate their physical materia out into some polydimensional pleroma radiating with yottacandela can get derived! The monad can get fffffffffactored. We're all the demiurges of our own vectors." Demiurge... Where had she heard that before? Something else to Moogle later. "Corollary: being human doesn't equal some arbitrary, limited, junk categorization. I define my own variable." Sho twirled his pencil—when had he gotten it out, his movements so swift and quick that she could barely pay attention?—around his thumb and caught it between his middle and ring fingers. "And you can define yours, femtogram."

"Hey, is this why you didn't officially join the Wicked Twisters as a Player?" She rubbed the underside of her jaw. "Well, I'm guessing that you had other reasons. You weren't planning on sticking around after you collected your data, and you didn't want the Shinjuku Reapers to know that much about you."

...Except that Shoka had told Rhyme, all that time ago, that Sho hadn't had any qualms about offering to tell her his secrets if she told him hers.

"But the fact being a Player would've bound you to a code again, too." For a moment Rhyme simply observed him. Then, exhaling, she quit her hands from under her chin to brush the length of her jacket. "Why would you want to become a Noise? An animalistic Noise? Is it only for power?"

"Hmph. Don't make me remediate you." The pencil's tip jabbed in her direction. Sho certainly had a tendency to jab for emphasis. Finger, pencil, megaphone. "It's so zetta cool, femtogram.'

Rhyme laughed out of disbelief. He had said that earlier. Of course. Why would Sho Minamimoto do anything if he didn't find it relevant to his plan, zetta cool, or both?

"To transform yourself," he went on, "into whatever you want. Plug any numbers you choose into your own equation. Having a different shape doesn't change the value of your humanity unless you want it to. But, heh, having a chance to derive an entirely new set of data on 428..."

Rhyme folded her arms over her chest as she mused. "A little like walking a kilometer in someone else's shoes. Getting to run across the city as in another body of your own choosing. I've seen enough movies where people want to turn into animals. Read enough books. Before I became Noise, I thought it would be pretty fun. Who hasn't? Getting to fly like a bird, stalk like a tiger, lope like a wolf. But..."

"But what, femtogram? Sounds like zetta fun times to me." Sho thumbed behind him. "It's a different way to displace your vector."

She followed the line of his thumb towards the nearly-full moon above. Far from the curved crescent horns that had silhouetted behind Sho's head a time or two, it had plumped up into a silver fruit. The full moon in, most likely, a handful of days. And beneath it: the city skyline, or at least the little hint of it visible from over the top of the alleyway. All those shadowed rooftops. She could picture, in the style of film noir or a nighttime shot in an animation set to some picturesque and stylish music, a Noise racing across those shadows, itself a black blur that leaped and bound from one roof to another, a bolt of darkness through the city, unbound, unfettered, free.

Rhyme had spent enough car rides idly imagining some sort of animal running alongside the vehicle, stared outside the window through enough lectures absentmindedly picturing some manner of beast loping along the electrical lines.

The desire to run. To feel the wind on one's face and the ground beneath one's feet. To exist exuberantly in one's body. To sense the beat of one's heart and the sting of one's lungs. To embrace all the freedoms of one's being.

That full, unbridled symbol of freedom.

Her hands found their way into her pockets. "I guess. I don't really know if I want to anymore. It's nice to think that you might be able to turn into whatever you want and back again, once you make up a sigil for it. Good for you. I hope you enjoy it. But if I had the chance? I've already been a Noise once. I don't want to do something like that again. And I get it, because I was bound by a code, and what you're going to do would be truly unbound by anything."

"It's garbage if it's not from free will," Sho noted evenly.

"It is garbage if it's not from free will," Rhyme agreed, "and I'm not sure what we're talking about. It's not like I'm going to become a Noise again unless something seriously upends my life. At that point, I'm going to have bigger fish to fry than whether or not I'm a Noise." She gripped the fabric on the insides of her pockets. "So, Sho, were you going to show me how to make some Noise? Let's make some Noise."

"Heh, enough irrelevant chatter. Let's make some Noise, femtogram!"

Sho wrenched the gachaphon machine out of the cement and tossed it behind him into its own heap. It smacked into the racecar's flank; the entire installation toppled over. The series of crashes, squeals, and pops resounded as various objects embedded into the car's metal went fwizzing out, some of them cascading into the wall, others flying into the eclectic collection of materials he'd brought with him. One of the fire extinguishers burst with a bang that made Rhyme wince.

As the ringing in her ears faded, Rhyme heard the jingling of: pins? Sho held up a moonlight-reflecting array of black and white pins with decal-like Noise designs on them, arranging them between his splayed fingers. "Noise! Even if code didn't exist, Noise would. When the sonorous sounds of Soul coalesce with will, Noise forms. If we want to make our own Noise, there's multiple algorithms we could use. The most uninspiring one? Erasing existing Noise and then immediately binding that Soul into pin. Reapers call it 'taming.' Trash! It works only because of the artificial Mersenne-Fermat prime distribution of Noise forced top-down on 428 by the Composer's vibrations."

Rhyme blinked rapidly. "The what?"

"The Noise in a city's natural sound matrix—the Song of Shibuya—depends on the collective interactions of individual vectors. A Noise ecosystem like that is a cacophony. As many frequencies of Noise as there are frequencies of emotions. Endless forms most beautiful and most flawlessly calculated, constantly evolving, transforming with the city's chaos."

His voice rose in pitch with his enthusiasm, as he lifted his arms upwards. She found herself smiling at him, at how he spoke.

"But it's simpler—" Sho hhhed on the final syllable. "—for the Game to have specific categories of repetitive, repeatable Noise with specific behaviors and stats. So those 4253—"

"4253?"

"—trash Reapers know where those standardized Noise fall into their factoring difficulty curve—" Right, he'd mentioned that, much earlier, when he'd described his experiences as a Player and subsequently a Reaper. Rhyme had never guessed that the Games involved a difficulty curve, but...she could see why, she supposed. "—and so that Players can have a manageable and standardized Noise Report or whatever the helix they're defining it as nowadays."

Rhyme tapped her finger on her chin. "I guess that makes sense. If you're going to run a Game, it's important for a Player to scan a Noise symbol and know roughly what they're getting into. Not having a really weak Noise in one scan, and then something far beyond their power in the next. If you want to give Players steadily increasing and more difficult Noise as they level up and become better, then you have to manage all the Noise so that they're around the same level each day and gradually get tougher. Like in a video game."

"That's because this factoring Game is a bunch of unneeded rules and regulations forced on the UG for the sake of generating more obtuse angles. Sure, it 'makes sense' if you're assuming that the Game itself makes sense. But it was artificially imposed. The Noise are an oversimplification of a zetta beautiful chaos system." He clapped his hands together, one on top of the other. "The UG and RG are a coordinate system, the upper half-planes and lower half-planes. Functions can cross the axes. Superiora de inferioribus, inferiora de superioribus! Noise generated from emotions, emotions generated from Noise, influencing one another into the city's Song."

"Hm," she pondered. "It's like the difference between a wild wood and a zoo. Or a natural plain and a lawn."

"Naturally. The natural numbers and their intersections, the harmonic vibrations of superstrings, the music of the spheres—that's how the city's Song should resonate. Instead we have a garbage homogenized Song Composed by the factoring Composer." Sho tilted his hat low. "When I factorize the Composer and plug myself into that pretty little number, heh heh heh..."

She angled her own hat low, but not at the same exact angle that he had. "...You'll bring Shibuya back to the wild wood and let whatever Noise want to exist, exist."

"Correct. Heh..."

"Makes sense to me." Sort of, at least. Rhyme couldn't have pictured it or what would replace the Game. If anything had to replace the Game. "So, you were trying to tell me about the different ways that people generate Noise? Before we went on that tangent," she added, bearing down on the last word.

His barking laugh brought the beam to her lips. "Heh, tangents can lead to unexpected congruencies."

"Right. Sometimes we all need to take a leap of faith... I have to say that I usually prefer to look before I leap. I think that I've had enough leaps of faith for a lifetime." She smiled sweetly. "So, what were you saying about the methods of generating Noise? Since...I assume that that's the point to the lesson. One of the ways that trash Reapers can generate Noise is by erasing Noise and binding it to pins, and that works because the Composer has 'factored up the Game' by making it standardized."

"Ha!" The intense smugness of his mirth made her beam even more widely. "Ha ha ha ha ha! You're getting it, femtogram."

"So, what are the other methods of generating Noise? I know that there's tons of different kinds of Noise out there, but I'm guessing from how this conversation has gone so far that we're talking about our pretty standard, run of the mill, regular sorts of Noise that we get when we scan." Rhyme leaned back against the wall. "There's more than one way to skin a cat."

Sho shoved the pins back into his coat. "Naturally. The major way of generating Noise relevant to this function is the condensation of Soul."

"Condensation of the Soul... If the Soul is everything around us, and Noise is generated from human emotions, then I'm guessing that the condensation of Soul is taking that Soul and...somehow turning it into Noise. Hmm. You said that it needs a catalyst. If Noise forms around emotion, then are we offering emotions as catalysts? Like our own?"

Pinching her fingers, Rhyme mimed touching them to her heart as though collecting emotions, then opened her palm in an offering to the skies.

His grin widened.

"A flawless series of deductions." Such pride in his tone. Rhyme let her fingers stroke along the brim of her cap. "It doesn't have to be your emotions. It can be your will, your thoughts, your cognition, your beliefs. By calibrating the catalyst precisely and using our Imagination to influence the shape that the Soul takes, we can make any kind of Noise imaginable. And Imaginable."

"But I'm guessing that," she pondered, "since you said that we'll be starting with something simple, that we're not going to go for any form imaginable, or Imaginable."

Sho raised an eyebrow. "Demonstrate the hypothesis."

"Hm. If this is something that any Reaper can do, then I'm guessing that..." Rhyme pressed her hand into her cheek. "Hm. Something that any Reaper could do. Something that has to do with the fact that Noise are standardized. Okay, I'm guessing that, if you just have any emotional catalyst whatsoever, the Noise that will end up forming around it is one of the existing Noise for that difficulty curve." She wiggled the fingers of her other hand. "Is that right?"

"Correct. The Noise that crystallizes around the catalyst will be forcibly modulated into one of the standardized types. The standardized types change over time with the difficulty curve and the changing thoughts of the city. 428 didn't have stingers before, but it's lost boomers, because the Composer can't have too many different Noise types for the mindless monomial who tremble in terror at the prospect of a three-digit Noise Report."

She shook her head. "You've really gotta warn me next time you think you're gonna be talking about the Game! I'll have to bring some fries with me."

He said nothing. Rhyme cleared her throat.

"For all the salt," she added mildly.

His eyes narrowed. "What the factor are you talking about?"

She giggled. "I look forward to the Noise Report that can't fit into phones because of how many different Noise types there are."

"Heh, sure you will. You'll be building the RNS capable of sorting 'em all." His eyes gleamed.

Rhyme's lips parted slightly for a full second before the weight of his words slammed into her upside the skull. "...Yes, I will. That's right. It'll be my responsibility."

"Ninety degrees." His hat's visor angled back up. "Heh. If it's from your free will."

"It will be," she responded firmly, grinding her sole into the cement at the same time. "It sounds like fun, and I want to do it. And it's something that I can do. So, unless you change your mind, I will."

Sho leaned forward for a moment, his shoulders held back and loose, and then shrugged. "So, femtogram, ready to make some Noise? Hardly a practice test. As long as you're in the UG, take a miniscule fraction of your Soul—your thoughts, your feelings—and use it as a catalyst."

"Hmm..." Rhyme pinched her fingers again.

If she closed her eyes and pictured her body filled to the edges with Soul, vibrant as a rainbow, a kaleidoscope of clashing feelings, emotions, tensions, desires, and wants, fears and hopes, despairs and yearnings, thrumming, teeming, humming under her skin, then she reached deep into that maelstrom—her fingers pressed against her sternum and then sliding to the left until her heartbeat slammed and wobbled against her fingertips, at the densest pocket of emotions within her—and plucked out a single string. One long ramen noodle of cognition. A thread about: ramen. Her mild hunger, having not eaten anything for a few hours, on top of that constant dull ache of hunger deep within her abdomen where the copper collected in the spaces between her guts.

Then, with her eyes still closed, she slowly drew that glowing string out from her chest. She envisioned that thread breaking loose from her body and wriggling in her palm.

An offering for the Noise. A worm of bait for some passing Noise to chomp on and thus get caught by her hook.

No... She was making a Noise. Not bait on a hook, but a soft tendril of nervous tissue, a notochord for the Noise's flesh to form around.

So she held it high. The notochord. Which may or may not have even existed: she probably just pinched her fingers together around empty air. But in the shadows behind her eyelids, a different picture formed. She imagined the Soul flowing in eddies around it, most of it rushing back, but trickles and rivulets here and there catching, clinging, feeding on the Soul that she offered to its altar, and the fluffs and burrs that clung attracted others. At first, only a smattering, and then a stream, a brook, a river, a lake, a sea, an ocean, swirling around this tiny thread of cognition as a whale feeds on krill.

The emotions in her body, the thoughts, that came and went. So many emotions. So much Soul, overflowing from her. The smiles and the happiness and the contentment and the peace, and also the pain, the sadness, the anger, the bitterness, the jealousy, the pride, the greed, the desires, the wants, the needs.

Life. Everything in the delta. The water in her body cycled constantly, the cells, the energy, the matter.

Nothing about her set in stone. An ephemeral pattern formed over and over again, waning and waxing, tearing itself down to build itself back up.

Like the electricity in her nervous system that made up her choices, her preferences, her memories, her identity, herself, a constantly forming and reforming transient pattern that would change ever so slightly with every passing instant of time. Changing. Transforming, in small ways, in big. Living was art. Living was art and living was change and so art, too, was change.

Sho's infinite monuments, iterations on similar themes, weren't just repetitively saying the same thing, over and over. The artist as part of the artwork, the artwork as part of the art, a glimpse of the emotions and cognition and Soul passing through them in that moment. Not lightning caught in bottles, but lightning observed on faraway clouds or nearby storms, a single crackling bolt of white that existed for a split-second before passing elsewhere, a living burning symbol of what path the electricity had taken in that one ephemeral moment.

And his art, just like that: a transient lightning, a living burning symbol of what path his electricity—crackling with the feel of static and the taste of copper—had taken in that one ephemeral moment. That one ephemeral work of art.

That transient experience.

It didn't matter even if Mr. Hanekoma hadn't brought back all of her Soul, or had gathered up something else alongside it.

The Soul she had in her today, that cycled in and out of her body, the same Soul that stitched together the fabric of the universe, was hers.

The weight in her palm and the vibrance of him laughing in her ear brought her to open up her eyes.

The dixiefrog sitting on her hand ribbited.

Chapter Text

The dixiefrog had dissipated after a few moments, fading into a red-and-black decal before vanishing entirely. Not gone, as Sho explained, but merely uptuned to the slightly higher plane that Players typically accessed by scanning.

Rhyme waved the dixiefrog good-bye, her smile soft and wide. She watched the night sky above, the stars twinkling in constellations known and unknown. Just like that, she'd made some Noise.

"Kicking up some fuss before the night ends," she mused.

She listened to Sho's rowdy laugh. "Heh! Quoting Someday... Now that's a tastefully trigonometric identity."

Stretching her arms up above her head, Rhyme felt her shoulder blades crack. "It's a good song. I'm glad you introduced me. You know, it's been a while since we went to karaoke, hasn't it? Since we've been " She rolled her shoulders while her back kh-kh-khed in relief. Ah, she hadn't realized how just tightly wound she'd held her muscles for so many days. "Oh. That felt nice."

"Hmph. Need a change of pace, femtogram?" Sho motioned around the alleyway. "There's other quadrants we could try if you're going to make some Noise."

"Oh, really?" She tilted her head left and right, popping out the tension in her neck. "Show me what you have in mind."

Rhyme hadn't frequented the O-EAST concert hall, but she'd passed by the venue enough times. Her first entry into its dark depths had seen her and her older brother defeating its golden master. She still hadn't seen a concert there, but perching on the catwalk high above the scooped bowl of blackness within her gave her a newfound appreciation for techs who worked the lights which studded the vertical bars. As was, Rhyme gripped Sho's sleeve tightly; at least if she slipped and toppled off the catwalk, he'd surely catch her before she broke her neck.

...Mostly because, if he didn't, he would've wasted all this time and gotten almost no experimental data out of it.

Flicking on her phone's flashlight, she lit up the thin metal walkway he'd brought her to. Just as she began to slide her trainers forward and test the boundaries of the catwalk, she heard his boot clomp against the steel. As he turned, he dragged her arm with him, and she found herself walking behind him—holding his sleeve the way a baby elephant might hold their parent's tail, at least in the cartoons she'd seen—while he powerwalked across the metal without anything resembling fear or hesitation.

Then again, he'd said it himself. Fear and mercy were garbage. Hesitation and sentiment were trash.

Her phone's light bobbed as other metal structures revealed themselves in the bowels of the concert hall, not counting the blue-moon circle in the background decorated with a massive black crossbeam.

Still the same as from the O-EAST she had combated Noise in four years ago. Shiki and Neku had regaled her with the story of having chased a techie down to make sure he bought cough drops and a fuse, while Rhyme and her older brother had been tracking down a completely unrelated quest that they'd gotten from Princess K: a riddle solving for the identity of O-EAST's master. They'd skateboarded up and down Dogenzaka, O-EAST, and the Bunkamura trying to find the poor RG humans who had ended up unwittingly recruited into the mission, scanning them for memes about O-EAST and then imprinting them on others who would then cough up some hints while confused at the sudden flashes of inspiration.

She couldn't remember the final hint anymore, but something about the great golden shadow that cloaked the stage in night, in whose dark they'd find the master: the mote of golden light.

No need to defeat the giant bat-like Noise, only to locate the golden bat amongst its flock of purple gabba bats while the lights oscillated on and off.

Neku and Shiki had managed to erase Vespertilio Canor anyway, of course.

But it'd made Rhyme wonder about the nature of the Game. About how the Players all located and solved disparate parts of the day's mission. About how the Reapers just seemed to do whatever they wanted, like 777 employing Players despite not necessarily getting an assignment to do so. How, exactly, had the Game run as 'smoothly' as it appeared with such haphazard designs? Had Game Master Higashizawa blown out the fuse? Presumably, he'd written up the riddle. But the fuse? And 777 needing cough drops? And him only opening the concert hall after they'd set the band up for the day?

...Maybe Higashizawa had considered himself a fan of Def Märch and had wanted the Players to investigate O-EAST so that they, too, would hear 777's rocking metal music.

"Sho, I've got a question."

She walked into his back, smacking her nose against his coat, before she realized how abruptly he'd stopped. As she instinctively jumped back, Rhyme felt her left heel pass an edge. Clenching Sho's sleeve she rightened herself. Her heart raced in her throat. She gasped for air and firmed her stance on the solid steel. "Well? State the problem."

Rhyme wheezed. "D-don't stop so suddenly. Warn me first."

"Not my problem," Sho said coolly. "I'll decelerate when and how I want. State the problem, or I'll continue on the sequence."

Not worth pursuing. "You were a Game Master, weren't you?"

"Ninety degrees." Even with her phone's flashlight pointed away from his face, she could see his grin in the terrifying whiteness of his teeth compared to the rest of his face. "Did what I wanted then, too. Even erased myself since those useless yoctograms couldn't manage." He laughed to himself about it while Rhyme cleared her throat.

"Neku mentioned how he had some missions that week related to Tin Pin that you gave out. But there were some missions related to—" Rhyme scrutinized his eyes intensely. "—ramen?"

His eyes didn't change, but his grin widened. "Ha! Show your proof."

"Well, I wasn't privy to what was happening on the streets then—" On account of the whole living life on her older brother's shoulder as a Noise thing. Little detail. "—but Neku's told me a little about it. There was negative Noise possessing the Don—you know, Mr. Ken Doi, from RAMEN DON? It's SPICY CURRY DON now, but it was RAMEN DON then. Anyway, some other ramen place opened up? Shadow Ramen. You know, it's still around. They don't get many customers, but the ramen's actually pretty good. It's got a nice...kick to it?"

"Femtogram," Sho cut in. "Don't waste my time."

Rhyme nearly opened her mouth to continue the story she'd been telling before, to force him to listen to her ramble about the menu, but she halted in her tracks, inhaled, and reorganized instead. "I guess you didn't like that tangent."

Her pun rewarded her with a clipped, genuine laugh.

"My question: if negative Noise affected anyone having a problem, we'd see negative Noise possessing a lot of Shibuya. But it only affects one or two at a time. Can any Reaper put a negative Noise on someone?" Rhyme peeked up at him. "Or would it have to be you, Game Master Minamimoto, who put a Noise on Mr. Doi? And why?"

"Heh! Factor it out yourself." Sho smirked crookedly. "What's the probability it was me?"

"Pretty high." With the free hand not holding onto his coat, Rhyme pressed her hand into her cheek and hummed. "I don't know the exact rules. I don't even know if you like ramen. But I'm guessing that only the GM can possess people. Since, with negative Noise, you have to solve the person's problem. You can't just erase the Noise. So it would have to fit with the GM's plan for the day's mission. Maybe other Reapers could do it, but they have to follow the GM's orders? Hmm. But I think that you purposefully chose to put a negative Noise on Mr. Doi. So, why?"

His mouth opened into a sneer. Rhyme sighed.

"Okay, factoring it out myself. Hm. Because you liked the ramen at RAMEN DON? Fret seems pretty convinced that you don't like ramen too much, not Suzu Slurpz or Glutton 4 Gluten. Could be that the Don's ramen was so especially delicious that you liked it, but I think that that's not very likely."

Rhyme scratched her chin.

"So, that makes me think that you had another reason. I don't think that you had any real reason to dislike Shadow Ramen, other than the fact that they were annoying from what Neku told me. But you had bigger fish to fry. You were trying to crunch the Composer. Taking the time to notice one random sell-out store opening—"

Sho laughed. "Selling out is garbage! It's not art from the Soul, congruent only to itself!"

"Right. Taking the time to notice one random sell-out store opening in Dogenzaka wouldn't be your style. Now, it could be that you were monitoring all of Shibuya and putting negative Noise on all of their competitors so that Players would do something about it." Rhyme squinted at him. No change in expression. "Neku's observant and perceptive. If he only saw Mr. Doi, then I don't think that too many other negative Noise existed. Especially since your Taboo Noise more or less ate many of the Players in that week."

He shrugged. "Sure. So what's your theory?"

"My theory is that... Well, to be honest with you, I hadn't had a theory until I started talking. I'd just remembered that I thought it was weird for Game Master Minamimoto, who famously didn't issue missions for half the week, to suddenly turn around and put a negative Noise on a ramen shop owner and get him to save his business. So, now, thinking about the fact that you don't like ramen, and you're clearly egging me on..." She tapped her jaw. "I do think that you were trying to do something good for RAMEN DON. And if it's not because you like ramen, is it because Mr. Doi did something for you at some point?"

His laughter echoed off the rafters. "Keep iterating on that proof and maybe you'll solve for your missing variable."

"...Does that mean I'm close?" Rhyme inquired. "I'm not making any assumptions."

"Heh. Accelerate." Swiveling around, Sho resumed powerwalking away without another word.

Stumbling, she caught herself and jogged after him down the catwalk. "It's not like you to avoid answering a question!"

"Heh! Get Laplace operated!" Though he didn't turn towards her when he replied, she had no trouble understanding his booming thunderclap voice. She'd never heard him whisper, or even lower his volume to an inside voice. "It's so zetta boring to give you the answers. I'll answer the question when you've got a full proof."

"I guess that's fair. Hmm. I hope you know that this means I'm going to walk away thinking that Mr. Doi did something for you. I just don't know what yet. Is it fair game for me to ask him about y—"

Rhyme didn't walk into Sho that time, because she noticed him stopping and ceased walking herself a step before slamming into his back. "My advice?" he said roughly. "Don't."

She could just about picture the scoreboard lighting up. Rhyme: 2. Sho: 0. "Don't, because...I'm right, and he did something for you? And if I go to talk to him about it, he'll tell me about you? Or he'll tell me things about you that you wouldn't want me to know, huh?"

"Ha!" Sho barked in turn. "Why don't you solve your own equations instead of finding variant chains to do it for you?"

"Hm. Are you calling it cheating?" Rhyme pressed.

He still faced forward. "Naturally!"

"...Which implies that you think that I'd find something out." She beamed. "Thus supporting my hypothesis! Besides, how else am I supposed to get that information? How am I supposed to give you a proof if you don't give me a way to gather evidence for it? You won't let me guess at random, and you don't answer my questions. So, what?" Rhyme poked his back with her sleeve-clad elbow. "Maybe if you answer some of my questions..."

Sho huffed. "Fine. You get one question."

"Guess I better make it count." She giggled to herself. After a moment she observed his shoulders shaking—in laughter?—and then the sound resounded, the mirth long and loud enough to rattle the catwalk beneath her soles. Forming a small fist of victory with her free hand, Rhyme gave Sho a chance to finish laughing before she continued: "So what do you think about Mr. Hanekoma abandoning you for the sake of Shibuya?"

She could hear his jaw snapping shut. Rhyme resisted the urge to burst out into laughter herself. "The helix? What overlap does that have with RAMEN DON?"

Interesting. "That's a piece of information: you're not the best with names, but you remember the name of RAMEN DON. Anyway, you told me that I get a question. You didn't say it had to be related to Mr. Doi."

"Femtogram..."

"You know, I'm technically correct, which is the best kind and worst kind of correct." Rhyme smirked at his back. "Well? Are you going to go against your word?"

"This question's worthless," he responded irritably. "Do I have to reiterate myself? It's irrelevant. He did what he calculated had the highest probability of leaving 428 chaotic and noisy. I think he miscalibrated, but he did leave 428 chaotic and noisy again. Heh. Even if that hyper-real hectopascal—" Rhyme felt herself smiling. "—chose to plug in a number that ended up being as invariant of a chain as I had calculated he would be, and starting another Game with the factoring Executor over 428's future, that hollow-skulled hectopascal H is taking whatever vector he thinks will guarantee Shibuya's future. I already told you this. Repeatedly, femtogram. If me getting crunched is necessary for 428's future, fine. That's just how it factored out."

Rhyme tugged slightly on Sho's sleeve, just to feel the fabric between her fingers. "But do you feel...abandoned? Hurt? Upset? How do you feel about it, Sho?"

"Irrelevant," he volleyed back immediately. "Ask me something with measurable data."

She exhaled. "Okay... You said that you made art in the RG and that Mr. Hanekoma taught you lessons in different types of art. I already know that Mr. Hanekoma is CAT, by the way, if that was something you were worried about." He let out an explosive laugh, but she couldn't see where she'd made a math pun. Hm. Another question. Perhaps she'd probe more of his feelings on...some of Mr. Hanekoma's other characteristics. "Did you ever try to do anything with your art? Sell it, or something like that?"

"Null matrix!" Sho thundered.

Stroking her chin, Rhyme inclined her head. "Yeah, just about what I expected."

"Selling out? Selling out is garbage! Crunch! I'll add it to my heap! The only things I allow in my art are flawless calculations and beauty! Ha ha ha ha ha! H can cram all of CAT's commercial artwork in his cylinder's lower orifice!"

Why did that make Rhyme laugh so much? She struggled to contain her giggling. Something about how sincerely, earnestly, and mathematically Sho had made such a painfully immature comment brought a bit of a giggle to her throat and perhaps tears to her eyes. And maybe she got a certain kick out of hearing him insult Mr. Hanekoma. Which made her just as painfully immature, didn't it?

"Outputting commercials—" He said the word as if it would lead to a micalculation if he kept it on his tongue for too long. "—for the sake of broadcasting garbage command codes throughout my 428?"

"Sho," Rhyme said finally, "what are command codes?"

He made a sound in the back of his throat that she could only have described as disdainful. "They're a stronger form of meme imprinting. Make an artwork, stick a command code onto it, and any random radian whose Soul resonates with it will receive the message like a radio transceiver."

"And you don't like it," Rhyme pondered, "because it's not of their free will, right? It's basically like a form of brainwashing? Maybe less extreme, but it's the same general idea. I mean, any art can lead to inspiration and changing others. You can't really see or view anything without being influenced in some way, big or small. But you want people to change based on what they themselves saw in your art, not because something is forcing their brain to think a certain way."

"Ninety degrees, femtogram. Heh heh heh."

She waited a moment to see if he'd say anything more. "What do you think about the messages of his command codes? 'Enjoy the moment more?'"

"Ha! 'Enjoy the moment more' is one helix of an aesthetic message! But who gives a digit? Even if it's a message I didn't have a fraction of a percent of a disagreement with, I wouldn't want it in a command code."

"That makes sense. So you don't dislike the command codes because they're spreading a message that you don't like," Rhyme noted. "You disagree with them because you don't like the very idea of command codes in the first place. It doesn't matter if they're spreading terrible things or awesome things. It's the idea of brainwashing people that bothers you." She paused. "It bothers me too, just so you know."

"Hmph. I'd question the numbers of digits in your intelligence quotient—"

Rhyme tugged on his sleeve again. "That doesn't actually measure intelligence."

Sho scoffed. "I'm not talking about those lowest common denominator tests with insignificant correlations."

"Let me guess. You just used the phrase because it had the word 'quotient' in it?" Ah, her smile was starting to ache from having beamed too much.

"Correct," he answered without a hint of sheepishness or anything similar, merely pure, candid, and straightforward affirmation. "H and his commercialized works will always have a fraction of the aesthetics of the transient art I make on the street. It's so zetta annoying because his work does have beauty and flawless calculations—" Mr. Hanekoma's art...full of beauty and flawless calculations? Rhyme blinked at the prospect. Somehow, the fact that Sho had decided to praise someone else's art...felt nearly surreal. But it made sense, too. Of course he'd see art on the street and like it. He loved Shibuya. Not just his own art. "—but he chooses to plug in command codes and fractal it outwards commercially. I want to see him plot his gorgeous functions without any of that trash junked into the heap. Factoring H!"

"I hope that you can someday, Sho. Maybe even Someday. No command codes, no commercialization, just you and Mr. Hanekoma making art." Rhyme smiled. Sincerely, it dawned on her. ""Having seen the kind of art you make, and CAT's commercials, I think you make better art."

She could hear the smirk in his tone. "Nicely calculated."

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm selling out myself, going to college and all of that, but I won't know what I'd do with myself otherwise." Rhyme rested her hand on her cheek. "If I weren't going to college...?"

"Heh! Academia? Academia is garbage, too! Cru—"

This time Rhyme added in her own voice to his: "Crunch! Add it to the heap! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

At this, at last, Sho angled his head towards her over his shoulder. "Was that supposed to be congruent to my frequency?"

"I thought it was a pretty good impression given that I don't have your vocal cords," Rhyme responded levelly. "You don't think so?"

"I don't factoring sound like that." This, but she could hear the mirth in his timbre and see the grin stretching lopsidedly across his face. "It's ha ha ha ha ha!"

"I'll practice later." She meant it. She'd get in front of a mirror or something, start Moogling tutorials on laughing like a supervillain for ideas. Not that his laugh sounded like that. But she had a long way to go to match it if she were starting from her usual giggling. A long way to go, huh... "What I was saying about selling out was... I don't really have anything against college myself," Rhyme mused, "but it's mostly my older brother who wants me to go. I guess he wants his suffering to feel like it has a point, and that point is my success." She shook her head. "Anyway, this isn't really relevant. I thought I had more questions about Mr. Hanekoma, but...I'm ready for you to show me whatever you were going to show me."

When Sho crossed his arms over his chest, the abruptness of the motion almost sent her flying into him.

Rhyme let go of his sleeve and repositioned. "I wasn't trying to annoy you that time, Sho. Or waste your time or anything like that."

"Hmph." She watched him. He watched her, not yet saying anything. "Academia's garbage. But if you're going to wade into garbage, at least wade into it for yourself. Don't trace some arc because some other radian told you to. Only if it's your radiamn radian." She squinted at him. Was he...giving her life advice? "If you want to be part of the remainder, divide yourself out from radians trying to chart your vectors for you. Eradicate 'em from your spatial coordinates."

"Is that what you did," Rhyme asked carefully, "when you were in the RG?"

"Heh. Ha ha ha ha ha!" Sho's shoulders rolled back. What did that mean? "Heh! I miscalibrated and weighed the college endpoint too heavily. Pops defined a 'good life' variable—"

Pops? 'Good life?' She could feel her remaining braincells crashing into one another like potato chips in an over-shaken bag attempting to build connections to what he'd said before.

"—and I tried to solve for it." He'd tried to...go to college? She couldn't envision Sho in college. She couldn't even envision him in high school. Had he worn a uniform? Quietly taken tests? Worked in groups? Turned it in his homework? Put together arts 'n' crafts projects? Actually, he might've liked that last one. No, wait, not if it didn't allow for his self-expression. "Waste of my time," he growled, "and waste of time."

"Pops?" she said aloud. "M... Mr. Hanekoma?"

Sho laughed like he'd 'go kaboom' if he didn't keep laughing. "The two aren't even in the same quadrant."

"Oh." Rhyme nodded to herself. "Okay. Then, Pops... Was he your...'dad?' Or something like that?"

He shrugged. "Lived on the second floor of his joint for 8𝑦."

"Wait, the second floor?" she asked sharply. "And it's not Mr. Hanekoma?"

"Don't make me remediate you," Sho snapped. "I made art in WildKat. The greatest fraction of my nights were spent at Pops'." He rotated himself around on his heel. "Now accelerate, femtogram. We've wasted enough 𝑡-value here already. You can ask me more questions on the distance there."

Not at the speed at which he walked, no. Rhyme nearly tripped over her trainers keeping up without slipping off the catwalk. The phone's flashlight continued bobbing and weaving. Abruptly the walkway opened up into a metal platform. Perhaps the architecture made some sense in daylight, but in the night, she couldn't make heads or tails of the black flats and curved shadows forming along the walls. Sho passed through what looked like an opening to a tunnel, Rhyme following closely behind.

Had they gone into some back storage? Were they breaking and entering—well, they had already broken and entered—into some private VIP lounge in the back?

No, looked like back storage after all, and deep into the back storage, into some long deserted hallways stocked with austere black shelves; here and there, she could see where bored workers or furtive tag-ins had scribbled on the metal, though Sho didn't slow down enough for her to make out much other than occasional loops in grey. But she could see some of the contents of the shelves that they passed. Definitely back storage. Made sense: what would Sho Minamimoto want with some VIP lounge, when he could get his hands dirty with crates' worth of wiring, lights, lenses in various colors, cameras, microphones, unused merchandise—including boxes upon boxes of unsold and ungifted black tees for some band or group unfortunately named WEWY—printers, phones, fax machines, more lights, lots of lights, tons of lights, in different shapes and sizes, and doohickeys that she couldn't identify.

And what was Raimu Bito doing here, with him, in the extensive back storage of O-EAST, other than fumbling through creating another attempt at an art heap?

Even if they didn't make an art heap...just the way that she was walking behind him: she'd figured out how to turn that into art. And the rest of living. One stumbled, flailed step at a time.

At some arbitrary point that only Sho could have known he stopped once more and swept his arms out in front of him as though he were presenting her not with the back storage that they were trespassing illegally on, but with the greatest of feasts.

The greatest of feasts...composed of shelves stocked with multicolored glass covers.

"Take whatever trash you want, femtogram! I'll balance the equations!" Sho grinned toothily.

She almost opened her mouth to ask whether this was stealing. Of course. Breaking, entering, trespassing, stealing, whatever other crimes they had committed together, and now he cared so much about his own definition of—fairness? Didn't seem like fairness, exactly—that he'd offered to balance the equations for her. "Thanks, Sho," Rhyme said instead, letting go of his sleeve.

As she turned towards the nearest shelf to inspect its contents, she heard the now-familiar crinkle of paper. "Heh. Make it zetta interesting."

These shelves: mostly an assortment of glass lenses of various kinds in different shapes and hues, though further on in the shelves she could see more lights. The models here looked somewhat older. Huh. Plucking several from their boxes, Rhyme ran her fingers over them, feeling the smooth and slightly scratched surfaces. A heap, huh? A heap that represented art. Not just a stack of objects. Not just some things that she had arbitrarily jammed together. But something that represented her, in the here and now.

If she could pull that notochord free from her chest, then she could do it again. But not to lift it high for Noise. To add it to her heap: the emotions in her body, the thoughts, that came and went. So many emotions. So much Soul, overflowing from her. The smiles and the happiness and the contentment and the peace, and also the pain, the sadness, the anger, the bitterness, the jealousy, the pride, the greed, the desires, the wants, the needs.

Right now, what she needed—

—and if Sho was going to balance the equations anyway—

—which meant that she could do anything right here because he'd take care of it—

—crunch.

The purple glass shattered underfoot. Her heel ground into the fragments that twinkled over the floor. Then another, in green: set carefully on the floor between the shelves and smashed with her heel. Then another, in red: obliterated under her weight. Then another, in blue: demolished from the impact. Then another, in yellow: splintered into chunks before evisceration. And the final one, in the closest color to coral-salmon pink that she could find, that she wedged into the pile of multicolored glass shards. She'd done so carefully, taking caution not to cut herself, and now she stood back, took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and jumped onto the final lens.

With a sound like something so heavy and so stuck giving way at last, it crunched beneath her sole.

Perhaps she couldn't heal yet, but she could heel.

Or try to. Her left leg went sideways on the glittering bed of fragments, and she lunged for the shelf to regain balance. Best not to faceplant directly into the pile of dirty glass shards she'd just created all over the floor.

Her finger-joints stung here she'd broken her fall. Panting, she checked her cap—still firmly on her head—and then glanced back at him.

His pencil still scratched away, but his gaze riveted towards her as if she had magnetized him.

Rhyme motioned to the mess beneath her. The rainbow of purple, green, red, blue, yellow, and pink, obliterated and mixed together from the impact of her steps, randomly assorted in a chaos system springing from where she had walked and how she had almost fallen. She exhaled, grinning, her fingers still twinging. "Well?" she called. "I hope you were paying attention to that whole thing, because the making-of was part of the transient experience! Did you hear the glass tinkling? That was the melody. I said I'd make some Noise! So, peanut gallery?"

"Heh. Heh heh heh. Ha ha ha ha ha!" Sho's pencil lifted from the paper as he jabbed the tip towards her, then shoved his hand into his coat.

Now she clamped her palms over her ears in time.

"ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ʙᴜᴛ ɢᴀᴜssɪᴀɴ ɴᴏɪsᴇ ᴏғ ɢᴀʀʙᴀɢᴇ!" he shouted into the crackling megaphone that sparked and whined. She grinned. He grinned back. "ᴛʜɪs ᴀʀᴛ ɪs ғᴀᴄᴛᴏʀɪɴɢ ᴛᴇʀʀɪʙʟᴇ ᴀs ᴀ ᴛᴇʀᴀᴛᴇsʟᴀ ᴛᴇɴsᴏʀ."

"Teratesla?" She smirked. "That's a heckuva magnetic field!"

The megaphone crackled off. His eyes glittered with more light than all the glass combined. "So you better tetrate higher, you tasteless tetrahedron. Show your work, femtogram."

"Heh... Ha ha ha ha ha!" Rhyme clapped her hands together, then jabbed a finger in his direction. "So it's art to you! You can think it's terrible! Who gives a digit? You're still admitting it's art!"

"Wrong answer, and that's not how I factoring sound!" Sho's laughter boomed through the back storage, the shelves clinking against one another from the noise, and Rhyme hoped her laugh would someday rattle the rafters even more rowdily. "I'm admitting it's art?"

"No... You're right!" Rhyme brushed her fingers over the cap, angling the visor up. "No comments from the peanut gallery! Your opinions are garbage! I'm admitting it's art!"

His grin broadened. "That's my protégé!"

As the word bounced into her ears—a sound that shook the air, a voice that shook the heart—she felt something warm slink down her left palm. Rhyme glanced at her hand. Red. Dark red, pooling in the creases, running across her skin to drip into the pile of fragments before. Into the heap. Her heap.

For all of her caution, she'd cut herself somewhere. Like he had, all those nights ago, digging his hands through the vending machine, the garbage he'd turned into art.

Raimu Bito, artist and artwork in one.

Chapter Text

Donburi Town. Moyai Mart. Tacos y Más Tacos. Mexican Dog. Fret points out the times least frequented by people, if that would help, and Rhyme... Rhyme agrees to come, so long as she can leave at any time. Each event wrenches at her heart a little less. No, not quite true: her head remains as heavy, her cranium as buzzing, her eyelids as sticky. But she works around it. Through it.

It never gets easier.

Yet it gets less frustrating, for her to be able to get what she wants out of it: to finish her meals, to chomp through delicious fresh food, to listen to the Wicked Twisters' conversations, to speak up, every so often, here and there.

The oily black sheen of the Taboo, when she rolls her sleeve up to the shoulder, and then subsequently quits her undershirt entirely to let Sho inspect its traversal across her body, has spilled along her chest and back. Strips and swirls of her pale skin shine through. The solid jet stain up her arm, striped with spirals of milky peach, fractals and fragments into tongues where it bifurcates past her shoulder. Though she can't see the edges that stroke her shoulder blades, she can feel them: both in the burning agony that makes their silhouettes stands out in sharp relief under her threads at all times, and from the heat of Sho's finger where he traces the contours.

The tattoos on her front, deadened and numbed yet simultaneously prickling and needled, have begun to coalesce into the pattern of her design. She can just see it in the gaps between the darkness.

So long has she sought for herself in the blank void between the lights. Now she finds those touches in the spaces between the darkness, all the little things will interlink and rise above the ink into herself. She has descended into the well, sunk her fingers into the rotting sludge at its depths, sifted through the slime and dampness to find the fragments of bone, and begun to congelate them into a skeleton of her own make. Not in her own image, but in the image that she chooses.

It hasn't formed. Not yet. The pain that stipples her skin and fuses her flesh hasn't reached all the way.

When the image does form, it won't form because of the pain, but beside the pain. The pain doesn't grant her the design, doesn't grant her the weight of Sho's hand on her hat or the kindness of Kaie and the Wicked Twisters' messages awaiting her. She'll go through the pain if she has to, accept what it means to face the darkness within herself. But she holds fast to that, what Sho tells her.

"The zetta uncomfortable body is a load of garbage. Looks zetta stylish, femtogram. Won't get more comfortable, but it'll get smoother if you practice, until the friction's zeroed out." He circumscribes the perimeter once again. "My advice? Start trying to uptune. Second you can do so, you'll be in better coordinates."

"I'll think about it," Rhyme answers. Her boiling fingers press heat into her cheeks. She can feel their shapes against her skin even if she can't feel the curve of her cheek against the fingers.

He's hypothesized that the sensation will return once she can tune across both planes. Maybe, maybe not.

Either way she's prepared for what will come. Ready for it.

"The zetta discomfort's partially derived from the code imposed by the UG. Code rejects the Taboo and vice versa. Accepting the darkness in your inner surface's never going to be such a simple equation. But breaking the brackets of one's code doesn't need to hurt this much," he observes. "You've been counting, femtogram."

"I like that the Fibonacci numbers get so big so fast that I can't memorize them. I have to add them every time. That little bit helps. It's funny. I wouldn't think that distracting myself would help me concentrate better, but I guess it's the same principle as relying on a white noise machine." Rhyme brushes her fingers along her face. "So if we unbound the UG from code, do you think we'd hurt less, overall?"

He shrugs. "Every equation has its constants."

Nodding, she rests her palm on her cheek. "I could do with the pain, but I wouldn't give up being me for anything else in the world. I'm only congruent to myself."

The ink continues to seep through her, into her. It starts to hurt when she breathes, either in or out. The phantom emptiness in her stomach matches a phantom emptiness in her heart, a yawning abyss that she could gaze in for the rest of her life, meeting its eye without fear, because she's already invited it to gaze back.

So Rhyme attends restaurant outings. She finishes her meals. Sometimes she has to leave early, the pain or the ache or just her fatigue overwhelming her.

The Wicked Twisters let her go. Without concern, without inquiry. They leave an empty plate and an empty seat wherever they travel; she comes, stays, and leaves. They trust her to figure out how far she can walk on her own. Sometimes they slip up. Sometimes Nagi grimaces when Rhyme gasps. Sometimes Fret blurts out a question when the pain singes along her syllables. Sometimes Shoka reflexively catches her when Rhyme stumbles. Sometimes Rindo reminds her that she doesn't need to push herself so hard, only to immediately back-track and remind himself that that'll only prompt her to push herself harder.

But around them, at least a little bit—not as much as around Sho—Rhyme learns to uncurl the coils that she's kept so tightly wound, to exhale the breaths that she's held for days and weeks.

If she shows a little pain on her face, if she speaks with a little agony in her timbre, if she lets herself drop a fork or spill a glass, they don't take the fork and glass from her.

Still in the public eye. Not like with Sho, where she can cling to his sleeve if she needs to—and because she knows she can, she usually doesn't.

Not like with Sho, where she can speak freely of the torture and the joy alike.

Not like with Sho, who has felt pain with enough congruencies to nod back.

Yet even those moments, with the Wicked Twisters, where Rhyme can metaphorically peel back the gloves and high-collar undershirts she's taken to wearing, to show the darkness underneath. Maybe someday soon she'll be able to peel back the mask outside and really show them. Show them the ink. Show them the designs she's painted onto her skin. Show them what she's dissolving and coagulating herself to be.

Hopefully, to some extent, in how she speaks up, in how she messages back, in how she offers more to their conversations than tidbits of wisdom, they can already start to see that person taking shape before them.

And the food that she eats, that she packs her stomach with, that she chows down to such an extent that Fret jokes that Boss has been ousted as the Wicked Twister with the largest appetite—if they ever have an eating contest, his bet's on Rhyme—helps her to temporarily stave off that gnawing void inside of her.

Maybe the fact that she sits near the Wicked Twisters, taking in their presence, helps too.

...Not because she's leeching off of their emotions or absorbing their Soul.

...Is it?

Her older brother, Eri, Shiki, and Neku keep urging her to get herself checked. That something has gone wrong. That something, somewhere along the way, happened.

But Rhyme's gotten much better at donning the mask around them.

At smiling as though she feels no pain, at speaking with a timbre free from agony, at keeping her limbs perfectly still. She keeps her encounters brief when she can. She doesn't use a fork or spoon more than necessary, taking as large chunks as she can into her mouth to minimize the time that she has to spent maintaining a whole and complete perfect orderly stillness to her hand, as opposed to embracing the unpredictable chaos.

Opening and closing her mouth less often helps anyway. She wonders if her canines will sharpen like her nails have.

Her older brother still worries, still frets. She tries to smile at him, to hug him, to assure him that she's happier than she's ever been.

He wants to know what happened. Picking a college happened, she tells him: a college where she won't have to move, a college where she'll get to hug him every day like this. He hugs her back, and she holds the embrace for as long as she wants to, until her dislike outweighs it. For his sake, to tide him over in this space between the light and the darkness, in this twilight as the sun sets and the moon rises. Already she can see the first stars emerging, twinkling on the darkening skin of her chest. When she can connect the constellation that she's drawn into the sky—spraypainted into the sky—then she'll show him, too.

She wears baggier clothes so that she can tuck her arms inside when she tires of keeping them from spasming. But the spasms lessen with time as she relearns her nerves. Even in her stillness, they no longer writhe entirely as they did, only twitching and occasionally contracting against her will, like tics.

The precision of Sho's actions, his capacities to start and stop his limbs wherever and whenever he wants, whet her curiosity on whether she'll ever achieve that, too.

Perched on her bed with several emptied bags of Sunshine Shibukyu at his side, Sho adds his two 'sense:' "Could be. We don't know all the expected values. You're in your own vector."

"And me being like this doesn't mean that me moving isn't art," Rhyme adds. Her own wisdom. Not merely a quote, but remixed and remade from the quotes and experiences and shared thoughts of herself and others, a burgeoning heap of her own. "I'm still using the garbage. If I never end up being able to control myself the way you do... If I'm always going to have some of this—" Her fingers curled and uncurled automatically. "—then it's fine. It's me. It's garbage, and it's my garbage."

"Naturally." He laughs rowdily; he can, because her older brother has yet to return home. Whenever her older brother remains in the apartment, Rhyme puts her finger to her lips: their sign for Sho to control his volume, or try to. He can't. Not very well. He can stop himself from becoming louder, but he can't lower his voice to a whisper regardless of how much effort he puts in. Rhyme can. Rhyme can murmur, mumble, speak barely above a breath. Sho can't. And even still, he walks on, as himself. Not much of a whisperer. That's fine. He can shout out the melody with her.

So what if he can't whisper? So what if she lacks precision? They have the choices that they made.

What they can control. What they can't control. Variables and constants. Transforming the garbage into art. Purifying without consuming. Dissolving and coagulating. Making the most of what and who they are.

And they have each other. Congruent pains.

Not because they've felt the same pain, but because they've reached out to each other. The times around the campfire after the battle, sharing from the same cooking pot, wrapping up each others' wounds. Not from the suffering, but from the kindness and compassion, pragmatic and selfish, benefitting from the other, taking from the other and thus giving to the other so that they can continue to take, refreshing in their honesty.

Sho's presents of food to sate her hunger, presents of sigils to clean her threads and body from sweat, presents of presence, time, attention to what she decides she needs. And her presents of the data he asks for, of the alternative vector to his own, of the discussions on how their experiences have aligned or diverged, of her presence.

Her answers to the questions that he posed. Her responses to the lessons that he taught her.

Yeah... Sho never gets her any gifts. She's never asked for them. Not for the names gifted to her, not for the charity gifted to her, not for the decisions from others who think they know better gifted to her.

But when she hasn't asked for gifts...she has asked for presents. For presence.

And he gives her that. And she gives him that, in turn.

Her mentor's protégé. He laughs when she asks: "Zetta duh I'll keep teaching you. The lessons don't end at the twelfth or forty-eighth iteration. Natural numbers go on to infiiiiinity, femtogram. The universe will run down its number line before we run out of identities to prove." Scoffing, Sho flicks up the brim of his visor. "We could even resume now."

"I think I need more time to recover first," Rhyme admits. "I've been giving myself my own lessons on keeping the pain hidden and on making sure that I can still text with my fingers missing sensation."

"Heh heh heh. There's no rules or orders, no limits or boundaries. Whenever you want to learn, calibrate, calculate, we've got theories to test and art to make." Sho's hand rocks over her hat, letting her feel the weight without bristling at the contact of human skin, and she angles her chin up to push her cap into his palm. "I won't be waiting."

"But you'll be periodic." Rhyme smiles. Not sweetly, not gently, but with all the strain in her body visible in the wince of her eyes and wrinkles around her mouth.

He grins. "Radiamn straight."

Somewhat less straight to her is what to do about Fret. Fret's constant invitations to the movies, to shopping, to the arcade. He never tires when she declines him, just cheerfully chirps in understanding and invites her again the subsequent day. No pressuring. Even asks her a few times whether she wants him to stop asking. Not intending to be annoying.

Not just all the Wicked Twisters, but her specifically. Requesting her presence. Because he wants to hang out with her.

Not her older brother. Not her as an honorary Twister. Her.

Movies: stuck there for hours without an easy exit without disrupting everyone else, even if Fret would understand. Shopping: having to move without much chance to rest, having to deal with everything at the same time. Arcade: too many people buzzing around, on top of how much concentration she'd need to put out.

Then he invites her to karaoke. They'll get a private booth, he tells her, far away from other people. And they can turn the volume down low if it bothers her, the way he does whenever he's chilling out with Boss! And they can rest easy between songs as much as she needs. And she doesn't even need to sing at all if she doesn't want to. He wouldn't mind belting out aaaaall her favorite tunes.

Despite herself, or maybe because of herself—the herself that she's chosen to be—Rhyme agrees.

They go. A private booth. Rhyme inquires if she can set the lights low and Fret enthusiastically agrees. Of course she can. She survives the booth: the screen on one side, the plush rug over the floor, the soft couch-like seat that stretches over the entire wall.

Rhyme curls up on a corner of the long seat. Fret spins through the records in search of something to sing, commenting here and there on the songs that the other Wicked Twisters like as he goes. "Boss really loves Your Ocean. I can't sing it without choking up, if I'm gonna be honest. Shokie hates this one, I guess 'cause the lyrics are pretty samey. It's not my kinda style anyway, Junk Garage.

"Oh, hey, Rhyme, I think you might like this one? Little Things. Actually maybe not. I dunno if you'll really vibe with the lyrics.

"Oh, man, dude, Breaking Free's great. Rindude loves that one. Think my Beat-buddy would too! Shoka's real big on Shibuya Survivor and I can see why. bird in the hand, too. The Dead Seatbelters' cover of OWARI-HAJIMARI ramped up the original! That's what my Rindude says anyway. I'm gonna be honest. I've never even heard the original. My knowledge of music is just, like, 'Nice, that sounds pretty, doo-doo-doo.' Ooh, this is one of Mr. Minami's favorites. It's not the sorta song that I ever would've thought he'd like? He knows the lyrics though. Oh, Rhyme, you wanna hear something funny? One time I got him to sing the English version, right? Well, 'singing.' The guy just yells, you know?"

She knows.

"Anyway, so the dude totally screwed up the lyrics."

At that Rhyme realizes that she's been smiling for a while, and that smile has widened when Fret mentions the song. "You mean Someday?"

"Yup!" He's tossing the mic up and down as he scrolls through the digital selection.

Rhyme sits up slightly, just enough to uncurl. Her head's still heavy, still buzzing, still about to split down the seams. This doesn't make it any less painful. But the happiness doesn't have to outweigh the pain. Just be there, too. "You mean the line—" Moogling the lyrics, she brings up the Japanese translation of the English version side-by-side with the official English lyrics. "—that's supposed to go, 'I know how dumb I am, but so are you,' but Sho sings it as, 'I know how damned I am, but so are you?' It's...just like him to twist the song into whatever he wants to say. Especially something that edgy."

She giggles. The sound of it comes out a touch pained, a touch strained, and Fret's eyes widen for just a second before he visibly takes a breath, relaxes, and smiles wide. "Yeah! Wow, I never even noticed him messing up that line. Wait, how'd you know? Oh, man, Rhyme, have you been doing karaoke with Mr. Minami and holding out on me?"

"A little. A few months ago. We haven't gone any time recently." She unfurls her hands, feeling the gloves stretching over her fingers where she fans them out.

"Well, hey! How 'bout we go all together sometime? Me, you, Mr. Minami, whoever else you want!" Fret waggles the microphone. "It'd be pretty fun!"

Brushing her hand against her cheek, Rhyme ponders. "Maybe someday. It would be fun. Oh, maybe 'someday!' Heh."

"Ayyyyy!" Fret claps. "Like the song! I get it! I kinda like the English lyrics more." He rubs the back of his head with his free hand, a light blush scattering over his cheeks. "'Sometimes I need someone to hold me tight?' Yeah. I really feel it."

"That makes sense. I'm glad the English version's there if you like it more! You know, I'm with Sh—him on liking the Japanese lyrics better than the English ones. The English ones are...fine?" Rhyme tabs her thumb through them. "'Someone said I am such a foolish girl. Who cares? It's better than without a fight.'"

Fret brings the microphone to his mouth like an interviewer. "I like that line, too! That's kinda what I've been trying to get to, I guess. I'm foolish but I'm trying! With my, heheh, my comrade-in-arms, I'm putting up a fight, right?"

"Right. So, I like it too. The Japanese version's just a little..." She doesn't need to look at the lyrics for this one. The song Sho sang enough times during their karaoke sessions to kick 'em off that those words race around her head, picking out lyrics. "'On moonless nights,' 'kicking up a fuss before the night ends,' 'leaping the fence,' 'laughing like a fool on the roof,' 'a shadow tagged in the graffiti,' 'the voice that'll wake me up—I want you to shake me,' 'even if it breaks, don't worry; it'll return to its shape.'" She smiles. "'Don't worry. Because this is the way my life goes.'"

"Kinda hard not to worry about your friends sometimes," he says, confessionally, "but I'm trying! Oh, I know you were just quoting the lyrics and stuff! Just, reminded me. Thanks for, uh. Letting me mess up, and stuff." A sheepish smile, a hopeful glance. "And for being here."

Rhyme toys with the slightly loose tip of the glove over her left forefinger. "'Someday...I'll show you a smile, out from under the cloudy sky. Searching for the words to shout...I'm still on that journey today.'" How easily she could tug it off. Lift her hand. Splay her fingers. Let him see the darkness she's kept under wraps for all this time, even before Sho ever texted her, even before she ever met Fret in the first place. "That's my favorite part, I think. Someday, I'll shout out the melody to you, too."

"A-awww, well, you know! I'm happy to listen. And even sing along!" Fret waves the mic.

"Thank you. Listen to my song... I'll listen to yours too." She beams.

He beams back, then giggles self-reflexively. "Thanks! And, uh, yeah, anyway, it's pretty funny because the lyrics are so different in the two versions! It's like a totally different song! I guess a lot of things get lost in translation."

"I think I understand. It's hard to put something in another language. Especially when it has to follow the beat and rhyme of the original song too. It's a little bit like trying to explain something to someone who's never felt it. Like putting into words what takoyaki tastes like. Or what it feels like to be so lonely." Rhyme lowers her palm to her chest where the prickling tattoo needles have sunk inside her sinews, her muscles, her cartilage, her ribs, her lungs, her...

...Her heart.

That yawning ache. That void. That hunger. That nothingness within her, the chasm slowly widening, as if the black hole inside her were sucking in her insides, swallowing them, emptying her out. Not so far from the truth, really. If the Noise fraction of her Soul's devouring the emotions from the human fraction to feed and multiply, then—

Fret tilts his head. "Well, hey! Speaking of Someday! 'Sometimes I just need someone to hold me tight,' right? When I get all lonely, I ask for hugs and stuff. From Mr. Minami, too! Never took that guy for much of a hugger, but I guess I never asked him. And then one day we were heading back from Tin Pin and we were at the bus stop and it was wicked cold and you know how he's all warm and stuff? Anyway, I ended up falling asleep on the guy—"

He laughs to himself, at himself. Somehow Rhyme can see that. Fret just woozing over, yawning from exhaustion, flopping onto Sho's side, taking a rest on him, and Sho just..letting him.

"But, anyway, you're not too big on hugs and stuff like that, right?" Rhyme dips her head. "Well if you figure out anything I can do, just let me know!"

Dipping her head: a mistake. The lightheadness makes her shut her eyes to regain some bearings, fingers clawing into her shorts. "Being here with you... Misery loves company, and so does happiness, I think."

"N-n'awww!" He's grinning so broadly, eyes bright and cheeks flushed.

"Wanna pick a song?" she asks, gently. "I think I could use a little distraction?'

"Oh, yeah! Sure!" Spinning through the songs, he picks out something that starts with a few discordant notes. "This one's from the Princess! Oh, uh, Princess Coco. It's her fave. Rindo thinks it sounds awful. Maybe I just don't have any ears, but it sounds...fine? Not amazing, but, okay, here we go!"

For all of Fret's disclaimers about the song, his singing—rich, warm, melodiously in tune—makes it sound heavenly. He has the voice of an angel, not that she'll ever use that particular description in front of Sho. Not like an obtuse angle at all, but an acute angle. Very acute. Rhyme listens in. When the song ends, abruptly, his singing fading out, the silence that surges in heavies her head even further. Did Fret feel this woozy and faint when he fell asleep on his 'Mr. Minami?'

He offers to pass Rhyme the mic, but she'd prefer for him to take another. And another.

A far cry from karaoke with Sho, with him leaping on the table and jamming out until the poor thing shook on its legs and threatened to fall apart, shouting out the songs completely out-of-tune, about to destroy the entire karaoke booth in his sheer enthusiasm for the music that rocked the heart and shook the spirit. Fret stands in place, sways lightly back and forth, and croons the songs. She can almost sense herself melting into the seat from the combination of his singing and her own dizziness.

Rhyme counts the Fibonacci to the beats of the song, to the syllables of the melody. Breathes. Tries to keep her gaze focused on the words blurring over the screen. At least while he sings she can focus her attentions on the euphony of his timbre, of the harmony between his voice and the music that ebbs and flows around her, cushioning her. Music soothes the savage beast, as they say.

But the silence between songs, when Fret makes sure to stop to give her a chance at the mic, makes her wince.

She shudders at the splashes of quiet, at how the buzzing returns, endless and restless, so much harder to bear having heard the song.

Hungry? Thirsty? She fumbles through her pocket for one of the energy bars she's carried around recently. Doesn't matter what flavor. Doesn't make a difference to her. The rectangular prism shape of it makes her laugh to herself but it comes out more like a dry, harsh crackle that she tries not to alert Fret to. Hypothesis correct: the wooziness dies down some after proper infusion of the chocolate-peach taste. The single energy bar can't make up for all the sleepless nights, all the aching pain, all the yawning void and needy pulse and sharp pangs of hunger within her, but it helps. A little. Maybe.

The lyrics of the song Fret's singing gives her a wry smile. "Oh, this next one's... I used to listen to it a lot! Not anymore. Boss and Mr. Minami have been big helps with this one. Here we go, a one-two-three, and: 'Oh, insomnia, seems we meet again—'"

This time, before the between-act silence hits, with the last bars of the instrumental fading away, Rhyme accepts the mic. Better than waiting for her to decline in the silence.

Reaching her hand out, she closes her fingers around the metal that Fret holds out. Still warm from his grip.

Then, bracing her legs against the seat, Rhyme ever so slowly stands up and immediately—

"Shit, sorry! You were gonna hit the table! Gonna set you back and stop touching you right now! Sorry! Okay, here you go!"

Gravity rushes around her. The ceiling, the floor, the walls: everything blurs. Two sensations ground her, electrifying her body in fire and ice, the frostbite shooting through her at the same time as the magma. His hands, his touch, his skin somewhere on hers, her flesh crawling akin to an animal trying to claw away—she doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, she doesn't like it—but the shattered fragments of glass she's carried in her gut that have gouged and ulcerated further every day: fading. The stinging washing away. Like a hole finally filled. Her first meal in weeks.

She's forgotten the taste of food. Real food.

Not the facsimiles she's been stuffing into her mouth in an attempt to keep the shadows at bay, but a deep and full satiation, something she can sink her teeth into, rake her claws over, ribbon it into shadows of black, feel the electric crackle of static dripping down her chin, and stain her tongue in its delicious copper.

Finally. After all this time. She can hear the sound she makes in the back of her throat, that thrumming vibration, halfway between a growl and a purr, the yawning void inside her closing, soon to be snug and full and satisfied and—

It tears back open. All at once.

The moment that her skin stops crawling her innards rip agape, the void within her ten times sharper, writhing in her abdomen and chest, the fangs meant to bite down into that food now shredding her intestines in search of anything to eat. The dizziness crashes into her brow as though she had concussed herself against the road outside. Her breaths hurt. Her vision swims and whitens.

Her hands snap out. Close around his warm wrist, the delicious pulse beating against her fingers through her gloves. Jerk him forward until his palm slaps against her cheek.

Her spine arches involuntarily from the simultaneous discomfort of the touch and the fullness in her gut, the fullness in her heart, that blood flowing for the first time in weeks, the once-sluggish, nearly congealed crumble of dust now boiling in her arteries, waking, racing, blush rising in her cheeks and radiating warmth out to her limbs.

Her mouth ringed red, her tongue coated in copper, reaching for that lightning she wants to swallow until her voice crackles with it.

"H-hey, are you—sorry, I know I'm not supposed to—Rhyme!?"

"Fret—" That vibration in the back of her throat, thick and low, audible, pounding against her skull, resonating with it, as if her skin would crawl hard enough to split apart and reveal the rot underneath. "—call Sho. Now."

"Sh—Mr. Minami? Man, how come everyone's on a given name ba—sorry! Calling! Uh, Rhyme? My phone's over—I need my hand—"

She tries to unstick her fingers. Tries to force them open. But her muscles keep contracting, keep squeezing, keep pulsing rhythmically with the shadow writhing over and under and everywhere in her flesh, burrowing, clawing, tearing whatever chunks from him her teeth and nails and claws and fangs and anything else can scrape off, bite off, rake off. "I can't—"

"Uh, gotcha, I'm—I'll figure—sorry!"

Something shifts underneath her. A sharp pain bangs through her back but she can't anchor it onto anything. The warmth of his fingers on her cheek could burn a hole through her skin if she keeps him on at the same time that her gut will burn a hole through her flesh if she lets him go.

"Hey, Mr. Minami, sorry, Rhy—huh? Yeah, we're at—sorry, sorry, dude, calm down! Yeah she—what's-it-called, the karaoke on the Center Str—Mr. Minami? Shit, sorry, I'm gonna have to call him back. Come on, Mr. Minami. Come on, come on, pick up, pick up, pick u—whoa!"

The sudden agony with which the hunger returns has her writhing but something vices her around the midsection.

She seizes up as she dangles. Her hands reach back out, clawing for that which she's lost, the heat against her side boiling her without any of that food. Sounds crowd through her ears. Shouts, yells. Her left side scorches hot as her limbs chill frozen even while she tries to fight herself from the grip.

Seconds, minutes, hours, days, week, months, years: however much time passes she's eating herself alive, canines lancing through her flesh to the spurts of copper that spray the roof of her mouth and dribble out her nose, the viscous drops oozing down her chin and gathering under her tongue, ripping mouthfuls of her own arm meat and chewing up morsels of her fat just to swallow it down to keep herself from starving, sooner gnawing off her arm and through her arm and to the ends of her arms than accepting the trap of being bound, the copper so bitter and so delicious, her teeth around her own organs, churning through the choked remains of her corpse for the few bursts of lightning she can swallow until she's truly eaten herself dry.

The sudden bloom of warmth courses through her; the air smells of—sunlight?

To you who are not from here,
welcome home.

The sentiment resonates through her skull and warbles down her spine. Warmth fizzes over her entire body. That heat radiating through gives her a sensation similar to when she first tried the Instrumentalist pin at Sho's behest, holding it in her hand while standing on the MIYASHITA grass until the buzz of the UG matched the buzz at the base of her neck. The world so invitingly bright, her cheeks so invitingly blushed, her head so invitingly light, her body so invitingly flushed, everything so invitingly right. As though she has trudged through the winter snows all season, and only now wound her way home, the warmth washing over her as she opens the door to where she belongs.

The pins-and-needles up her left shoulder and right arm—the sudden waves of sustenance shuddering through her from below—the hot rush of the yawning void within her filling up and closing in—

She drops to wherever that delicious copper is rising from and meets something hard that scraps against her face. Rubbing her cheeks on the—ground?—she squirms with her entire body flat against that cool surface. It comes in pulses like a heart. Every beat squirts that sublime taste directly into her mouth. She opens wide to suck it in; she feels it across her skin. She's reaching up and reaching out, gorging herself on the flow, letting herself swell up in it until she couldn't possibly eat any more, until she's panting on her hands and knees, the world palpable on her palms, her fingers feeling as she dig into the ground, everything tangible.

The agony striking around the perimeters of her own darkness still burns through her flesh.

But here the Taboo has congealed, where it's stitched itself whole, her skin...

Her skin doesn't prickle. Doesn't needle. Doesn't shiver and tremble as if allergic to existence.

Her eyes water, but not from pain.

In comparison to what she's faced—in comparison to what she's felt—the agony inside her, the rotting flesh, the dissolving and coagulating, the Taboo razing down her body: manageable. Tolerable. Not welcome, but livable. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts so bad, and it hurts in a way that she can... That she can just be.

The weight on top of Rhyme's head through her hat makes her glance upwards, thwarted by her visor. But she has a fairly high probability of her hypothesis being...correct.

"Stubborn scalene. What are you, an inverse idiot trying to pound yourself stupid?" His tone sounds halfway coarse and halfway hoarse. With his hand pushing the brim of her cap down she can't see him, but she can hear how his voice has risen in volume and lowered in pitch. "You won't be able to live only in the RG soon, femtogram, no matter how much time you spend tangent to others' curves. Figure out how to uptune to the UG, and soon. In the meantime you'll have the pin in your room. Call me before you hit the factoring axis, hollow-skulled hectopascal. Pork City's got the maximal Gaussian noise distribution of emotion and Soul. So plug it into your factoring function, or you'll be a Gödel-forsaken futureless fractal. Radiamn."

"Sho," she whispers, palms flat on the ground, abdomen pushed into the Pork City stairwell cement. "...Thank you."

"Hmph. It's garbage if it's not free will. If you're trying to get crunched, get crunched. Not my problem. But do it on purpose. Not out of stubbornness. Mindless monomial."

Rhyme listens to him breathing, level, even, and she counts up the Fibonacci, stopping at the sixth-hundred-and-sixty-sixth term. That warmth fizzes through her. She could lie here forever. Could fall asleep here. Fret was smarter than all of them combined, falling asleep on his 'Mr. Minami' like that.

She inhales Soul. That electric taste of copper along her tongue. That lightning. Feeding on another. Leeching. Just like the first time when she came to the Pork City stairwell with Sho. The rest of her life. Dependent on others' Souls. Hungry for them. But not... Not unable to survive. Not unable to make the people she fed off of...happy. Taking from them. Inconveniencing them. Burdening them. And...giving? Being inconvenient. Being burdened, in turn. Can't live without other people, but—could she ever? Can't live without other people... Just like...

"...Hey, Sho?"

"What, femtogram?"

"...You wanna go out for karaoke sometime? With me and Fret?"

"...Heh."

"It sounds like zetta fun times, doesn't it? That's my hypothesis."

"...Heh heh heh. Sure. I'll test your theory, femtogram."

Chapter Text

Rhyme heard nothing back and shrugged. She'd given it her best bet. If Neku had decided not to pass along her number after all, or—more likely—if Minamimoto had decided not to text her after all, she'd done what she could have.

Maybe Neku hadn't passed it along. After all, he'd gotten fairly busy recently. After so much time spent wandering around not knowing where he'd end up—what dreams he'd fulfill—he'd gotten his answer in the mail. A mysterious set of keys, just mysteriously shown up one day, with a mysterious letter wishing him luck.

The keys had just so happened to open the doors to Mystery Circle. To the former WildKat. To what had now become, with the help of Gatto Nero's founders, a new hip café, run by Neku Sakuraba, the hero of Shibuya. He called it Mewsic.

Mr. Hanekoma had just happened to simply drop Neku's future in his lap. From the saint of Shibuya to the hero of Shibuya.

No mail for her, though. Just collateral.

Rhyme mentioned it to Neku. Not being collateral. Minamimoto's lack of texting. While wiping down the Mewsic counter, assured her that he'd extracted a promise from Minamimoto not to get her involved in anything dangerous, whatsoever. Oh, yeah, he'd passed Minamimoto her phone. Oh, Minamimoto hadn't texted yet? Well, the guy was pretty fickle and capricious. Came, stayed, and left whenever he wanted. Acted like a cat, really. But not the tameable kind of stray cat. Like a wildcat. A mountain lion. Or, well, a regular lion, actually. Oh, yeah, Neku hadn't had to go to Coco to pass on the number after all. Minamimoto had come to the café. Just strolled in when Neku had opened it and demanded pancakes.

Neku hadn't thought that he would ever see Minamimoto's face again, much less in broad daylight, much less lounging on his counter eating through his sprinkles straight from the jar.

He had struck up a sort of deal with Minamimoto. Minamimoto could show up whenever he pleased to raid Neku's pastries for free as long as he updated Neku on his goings-on whenever he did. Something of a safety measure. Minamimoto had gotten less crazy, but he could...really screw up Shibuya if left unattended. So having the guy waltz in to satisfy his never-ending sugar craving made sense. As long as Neku could keep an eye on him, he'd happily give up some free food. Seemed that Minamimoto needed it, too, since Shibuya had gone to ShibuPay and Minamimoto still only carried around cash and yen pins.

Besides, Neku found the guy kinda entertaining. Same kind of entertainment value he got from cat videos on ZuuTube. Watching the guy eschew all social boundaries and just stand in his boots on top of the glass pastry display case, reaching in upside-down for the last chocolate muffin, made Neku laugh.

Rhyme blinked rapidly. Minamimoto only carried around cash and yen pins? Why? Did he not have a phone?

He shrugged. Maybe? Minamimoto hardly seemed like a phone guy.

She rubbed her temples. She'd asked Neku to pass on her phone number...

Either way, Rhyme supposed that she finally had something to thank Mr. Hanekoma for. Because in giving Neku the keys, he'd—intentionally or not—opened a path for her to get ahold of Minamimoto. If Minamimoto couldn't text her back, then she could probably catch him drinking whipped cream by the can at some point.

Turned out not to need it. The text from the unknown number announced itself by demanding the solution to a mathematical puzzle. Rhyme spent an afternoon brushing up on linear algebra and responded with the calculated eigenvectors.

Neku mentioned it with a laugh the next time that Rhyme came by Mewsic. After over a year of Coco wheedling him to at least get a crappy flip-phone so that she could contact him if he wandered off again, Minamimoto had finally agreed to get a phone.

...To talk to her, apparently.

Huh. Minamimoto wanted to talk to her that much?

Apparently not about anything relevant, because he sent her absolutely nothing other than mathematical problem after mathematical problem and ignored all of her texts other than to respond with 'wrong answer' or 'correct.'

Still, even if him ignoring her texts made her sigh at another dead lead, she found the puzzles mildly entertaining—okay, very entertaining—so she kept answering them. He began to send her multiple a day, firing the next off as soon as she had answered the last, progressively becoming more complicated. Rhyme worked on them through her classes, worked on them after her classes, and whenever she had a spare moment. Read up during her breakfasts and dinners with her older brother, scribbled out on scratch paper during lunch.

It made her laugh. This guy...had gotten a phone for the first time after so many years...just to test his math puzzles on her.

Maybe he'd saved up so many puzzles from his tenure as a Reaper and now he'd finally gotten to unload all of them. So what would happen when he got to the end? If he ever did?

The number increased. Four a day, ten a day, forty: she lay on her abdomen in bed with the phone on her pillow, instantly starting to work them out as soon as he sent them, throwing the answer back to him within a few minutes and getting another, racing against the clock to see how many she could solve in the hours between going home from school and bedtime.

The moment that she sent back the 428th answer and received the immediate 'correct,' she didn't get a puzzle back. Rhyme looked blankly at her phone. A broken pattern, after all this time?

Then the text arrived.

His name was Sho Minamimoto, and she was so zetta fascinating. So zetta fascinating, that he wanted to sight read the Sheet Music of her Soul. If she could name a time and coordinates, he'd converge.

A nerve in Rhyme's eyelid twitched where she read the message, over and over. He wanted to what?

She texted back. Would he meet her somewhere, in broad daylight, in public, not to 'sight read the Sheet Music of her Soul,' but to discuss what exactly he meant? With him paying, of course./p>

He agreed. Time and coordinates?

Rhyme had never before seen in person, and the person who showed up to Donburi Town both resembled the descriptions and didn't resemble the descriptions at all. Oh, he matched the physical description. Taller than the vast majority of Shibuya, dressed like a punk rocker who'd stumbled into an emo convention, his black hat studded with silver pins, intimidation wafting off of him, his expression predatory, three whiskers marked on each cheeks, black tattoos spreading along his hands and disappearing up into his short-sleeved trenchcoat, dark skin, messy brown hair, all black and grey in clothes, boots made for walking.

But neither her older brother nor Neku had mentioned the shit-eating grin that appeared to constantly spread over his face, or the brown of his irises, or the fact that he looked remarkably enthusiastic about meeting her.

"Hello, Sho," she said, cutting through all the politeness, through all the honorifics, through all the respect, jumping straight to given name, flat given name, to see how he'd react.

How he reacted? He grinned at her. "Femtogram."

Well then. Raimu Bito met Sho Minamimoto. Girl met boy. Femtogram met Sho.

Sho broke into a long-winded rant immediately. Rhyme listened as they walked into Donburi Town, listened as she ordered herself the Hokkaido bowl, listened as he went for the Nagoya eel, listened as she ate, transfixed by his apparent capacity to speak without pausing for breath for the better part of the hour.

He had so much to say about her. He'd heard from Neku how Rhyme had comprehended his words, interpreted them for Kaie, and saved Shibuya. Yes, the Wicked Twisters—the 'zeptograms'—had done their part. But anyone could have crunched Phoenix Cantus if necessary. He could've crunched Phoenix Cantus.

No one else could have done what she had done. No one else had ever managed to factor out his words like that.

Rhyme sat in her seat with a spoonful of sea urchin and salmon roe suspended in her mouth, trying to keep her expression completely neutral.

He wanted to examine her Soul for its zetta fascinating qualities. He also wanted to talk to her. When he became Composer, he wanted her to make him an RNS for his own purposes. He didn't need her in the UG when she'd managed to do everything that she'd managed to do in the RG. He considered the Game a factoring load of garbage if it could've erased someone like her. He wanted the use of her abilities, of her knowledge, of her capacity to comprehend. He wanted to send her more mathematical puzzles because he found it so zetta fun.

And he wanted to sight-read the Sheet Music of her Soul because—

She held her hand up. A thousand thoughts coursed through her at once, wheels within wheels. The comprehensible and the incomprehensible. How much he had just dumped on her.

And Sho. Sho Minamimoto. Neku had warned her. Not to confuse madness for genius. Not to treat him as a stray cat. A dangerous person who had gotten most of Shibuya's Reapers erased during his Game, who had blown himself up, who had come back to life illegally, just like that, just like that, and who now was seated across from her, devouring eel, speaking with his mouth full, offering her a place, offering her a future, offering her a person—a fellow Shibuyan—who had wanted to speak to her, who had wanted to understand her, who had wanted to work with her, for herself. Not for her older brother.

But first she had to understand what exactly he meant by what his Composerhood would bring.

But long before that, she had to know more about him.

About whether she could trust him, safely.

About whether he would back off if she told him no. About whether he would stop. About whether he would listen to her.

So she started. To see how far she could stretch his patience. To see how much she could get him to do with her. To see if he'd snap. All in public. All in broad daylight. All in safe spaces where she could escape and call the police if need be.

To karaoke. To animal cafés. To arcades. To board game shops. To restaurants. To anywhere and everywhere she could think of.

She encountered her first problem and rapidly solved it. He didn't have ShibuPay on his phone, the phone that he had just gotten to text with her, because he refused to use anything that could track him, that would require of a legal name or a registry. Not a real problem: she broke his phone for him, hacked it in and out, got him a custom sort of ShibuPay that would show up anonymously. She'd already had to hack ShibuPay for herself and her older brother. No sweat.

Now he could pay for anything, including all the places that only took ShibuPay.

He'd spend the entire time ranting, trying to convince her, and she'd spend the entire time seeing how much she could ignore him and mooch off his wallet before his patience shattered.

It didn't.

She confirmed what the Wicked Twisters had told her about Sho: his proficiency at light-gun games and most other arcade titles, and his inability to play racing games. His horrible singing voice and his incredible enthusiasm for singing, grabbing the mic and jumping onto the table—whether at a public karaoke bar or in a private booth—to belt out the words, spinning through songs with driving beats and grungy riffs, singing whatever lyrics he wanted, Someday—both the Japanese and English versions—Junk Garage, Transformation, and even one of her older brother's favorites, TATAKAI.

TATAKAI, huh. He'd rather be the villain, he shouted-sang while she covered her ears, as long as he knew it was right.

He had the biggest sweet tooth that she'd ever seen, but couldn't handle anything even mildly spicy or hot. Something as innocuous as mint made him sputter. It made her giggle. She kept ordering him the spiciest option on the menu wherever they went. Just to see what he'd do. Just to see if he'd snap.

He didn't go ga-ga for cats at cat cafés the way that she'd expected. But they went ga-ga for him, swarming him to drape themselves over him while he sneezed, eyes watering from cat allergies that Rhyme couldn't stop laughing about, still ranting to her through the cat fur coating him. The tattoos on his hands apparently radiated heat, and animals from cats to snakes ended up curling next to him.

The digital Hachiko display at TOKYU PLAZA though? Oh, that he could look at forever, calling it in zetta good taste.

She was starting to understand why Neku had described him as entertaining in the same way that cat videos were entertaining.

Seeing this guy, this larger-than-life guy, squeezed in next to her in a bright pink fluffy chair at the maid café digging through a chocolate cake covered in so many sprinkles that she couldn't see any of the cake—yeah, that made her laugh.

Daily entertainment, really. Listening to him rant with his funny mathematical metaphors. Watching him try so hard to convince her while she decided that they'd hit up a public karaoke bar next so that she could observe the patrons booing him off the stage at his scarcely tolerable singing.

She...appreciated his enthusiasm for everything. His sincerity. His straightforwardness.

He said exactly what he wanted, and he did exactly what he wanted.

Day in and day out. Never giving in. Never giving up. Just ranting, and ranting, and ranting, patiently paying for everything, patiently converging wherever and whenever she texts, patiently explaining about his bid for Composerhood, about how he wanted to proof Shibuya from the Angels so that those like the Executor and the Composer couldn't ever erase or homogenize it again. And upend the garbage Game and the trash Reaper system and sync up the Souls of his Shibuya to keep it noisy, and chaotic, and so zetta cool.

He...reminded her of her older brother in many ways. Extremely skilled in his passions, fiercely loyal to that which he most wanted to protect, stubborn to a fault, quick to violence, willing to lose it all. A fan of The Dead Seatbelters' hit TATAKAI.

He'd rather be the villain...

He'd keep holding the mic and singing his heart out no matter how much the patrons in the bar complained, miming strumming the mic stand like an air guitar, jumping up and around the stage, landing on his knees and rearing back for the highest notes, just because he liked the song, and he wanted to sing, and the world would listen to the volume if not the melody of his song.

The confidence. The confidence to tell people to listen to his song, and then sing, whether or not they did.

No matter how far she tried to smear his patience across the asphalt, he just kept popping back up, kept trying, kept following the lyrics of the song that she picked over and over for karaoke: he didn't mind the funk; he did what he did; just keep on rockin' rockin', rock and rock tonight.

At long last, she asked him: why did he have so much patience?

Because, he explained, he did what he wanted and he got what he wanted, and he had full confidence that the femtogram had enough understanding of the situation to agree with him once he'd properly calibrated.

She asked him: why did he agree to all of these restaurants and karaoke and arcades?

Because, he explained, he found them so zetta fun.

She asked him: why did he want to sight-read the Sheet Music of her Soul?

Because, he explained, he'd been to a parallel dimension.

Rhyme stared at him, keeping a smile of mild interest on her face while her heart nearly thudded out of her chest, as he explained.

A parallel dimension that he'd entered to hunt down where Soul Pulvis had scattered, so that he could fix his Soul that had gotten corrupted and nearly erased by taking too much Soul Pulvis into himself. He'd murdered the alternate-universe of himself—Rhyme quietly sipped her soda as she processed this information—and then Dove into Rhyme's Soul. Out of all the Souls of Shibuya, only she had gotten attacked by Soul Pulvis. Only she hadn't recognized her own memories. So why? Why, femtogram? What secrets did her Soul contain? He had so many hypotheses and he wanted to test them all, on her and with her.

Because, she answered, she'd been...erased. She'd been erased...

So? He'd been erased. In fact, he'd erased himself. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Because, she answered, she'd turned into Noise, and then turned back into a human.

So? He'd turned into Noise. In fact, he'd turned himself into Noise, and remained human throughout it all. A human with some extra bells and whistles, but a human nonetheless.

Because, she answered, she'd lost her Game and her entry fee, but she'd still gotten reincarnated into the RG, and now she lacked her dreams, even four years on.

That made him lean forward. Made him gaze right into her eyes with his, his pupils wide and blown-out, his grin all teeth. Did she really. An ex-Player with a missing entry fee. Heh heh heh. What did that mean.

...Mr. Hanekoma had bound her to a pin and brought her back, and then the Composer had reincarnated her—

H? He scoffed. No factoring kidding she had something screwed up in her Soul if that factoring hectopascal's shoddy work was a factor.

Her eyes widened. He knew Mr. Hanekoma. He knew Mr. Hanekoma—as Neku had speculated, from the Taboo—and he considered Mr. Hanekoma's work...shoddy? Not another person who fell over himself kissing the saint of Shibuya's shoes.

His hypothesis? Some hypothesis of all the above. Lingering Noise in her Soul. The impact of the entry fee, and whatever the Composer must have integrated to her Soul in order to prevent her from ever gaining her entry fee again. And whatever had gone wrong with her Soul, heh heh heh, it had affected beings with overlaps to her Soul in parallel dimensions, getting them tangled up with Soul Pulvis.

Wait. Other Rhymes were suffering because she had problems in her Soul?

Correct. And if he read the Sheet Music of her Soul, then he could gather data and solve this little problem. Cruuuunch.

Wait. He could solve her problem? What did... What did he mean by that?

Heh. Simple. If his hypothesis proved true—and he had confidence in his hypotheses—then he could crunch the Noise in her Soul and whatever was preventing her from restoring her entry fee.

Wait. He could... All this time, she had thought of the entry fee as something that she had been missing. As a void. As a lack. As a hole.

He'd never investigated it before. But it followed logically that the Composer would have had to leave something in her Soul that prevented her from accessing it if she still didn't have it, rather than ripped something out. He could've been wrong, sure. He'd have to peek through her Soul to see.

Wait. He could...possibly...maybe...restore her entry fee. Just like that.

Within the realm of possibility. So would she let him sight-read the Sheet Music of her Soul already?

Wait...

Wait what, femtogram?

Wait... There was a new cat café opening up on Takeshita next week, and she wanted to go. He'd go with her, wouldn't he? To continue this conversation there. On his bill.

...Name the time and coordinates, and he'd converge.

Chapter Text

Every street of Shibuya teemed and hummed with its own patterns of Noise that changed day by day. Examining the months' worth of data Sho had put together, Rhyme could see the pulsations that he meant, the patterns of Fermat and Mersenne primes he'd mentioned, rippling outwards from the epicenter, fixing all the sound in the city to a few types of Noise.

Well, she'd had to read a few papers about said prime patterns. But after some studying up and reverse-engineering his proof, she could see how the terms shook out.

He'd rested his hand on her hat, smirking proudly, when she'd recapitulated the proof. She could still sense that weight on her head.

Not a sensation that she would have considered pleasant in of itself, but pleasant for what it represented.

Now Rhyme could make out the artificially applied distributions of Noise, like canals dug in straight rows over the once-winding rivers that had flown deeply through Shibuya. How the distributions ticked onwards in predictable patterns.

Predictable, where the chaos system shouldn't have been. Clockwork. Periodic not out of choice, but out of rules forced from on high.

It fit with what she'd seen during her Game: specific groups of Noise appearing in specific artificially cordoned-off sections that changed each day.

Something like an orchestra. Instead of every member bringing their own instrument or deciding how and what they'd play, they brought a small selection of decided-upon instruments and sat in particular sections: violins, violas, cellos, basses, a harpist or pianist or two. And then these Players listened to the Conductor for their cues, playing the music that a Composer...

Rhyme had started to see from where the labels had sprung.

She couldn't call orchestras intrinsically worse than everyone playing whatever they wanted. Both types of music had their places in the world, neither better nor worse, merely different. But to have the orchestra imposed from the top-down as the only way of playing music?

In an ideal world, those who opted to play in an orchestra could. And those who wanted their wild jam sessions, clawing through vending machines into inside-out blossoms of artistry, smashing glass lenses into twinkling heaps of living, could, too.

For now, however, the Noise that coalesced around the strands of Soul that Rhyme offered up fit the artificial distributions.

Ravens croaked on her arm before fading into decals and then from sight entirely, into the scannable plane a breath's-breadth above the UG. Wolves nosed her palm and let her scruff the soft fur on their necks. Stingers clacked their pincers, but more as though trying to say hello than to threaten her. Grizzlies twitched their soft, shaggy ears. Leons blepped their tongues onto her trainers without so much as a twinge of pain. Jellies brushed their ticklish tendrils over her head, no electricity coursing through them.

Depending on how and where her Soul coiled around her fingers—figuratively, as far as she could tell—the Noise would coalesce in her palm, or on the street beside her, its head gently touching her fingers.

The first time she'd tried to go for something bigger—a stinger—she'd held her hand with her palm skyward, like she had before. The Noise had apparated in her palm, just as the dixiefrog had.

Except the drum 'n' stinger had weighed so much more, and Rhyme had toppled over onto the cement while Sho had nearly torn his throat laughing at her.

She'd thanked him for not trying to catch her mid-fall. Though, if she'd ever fall on something sharp, Rhyme would appreciate a hand.

Sho had hehed, then advised her to try again.

This time Rhyme had carefully pointed her palm downwards, and the second drum 'n' stinger had grown around the catalyst of her emotions with its smooth tail-tip cooling her palm.

No combat zone required. A few moments in the UG, as long as she held that offering of Soul close, and then they flitted upwards.

Although she'd only ever considered Noise as existing in combat zones, it made sense in retrospect that Noise could simply hang out in the UG if they chose to. After all, the shark Noise that had erased her had risen from the ground fully in the UG, without pulling her into a combat zone. Otherwise, Shiki and Neku wouldn't have been able to see her erasure. Wouldn't have undergone the pain of seeing her cease to exist. She could recall seeing the frog Noises peeling free from floating decals on her first day, on how she and her older brother had skated away from the screaming pactless Players getting erased all around them.

And Sho himself, too. Taboo Noise, casually straddling the RG and the UG at the same time without having to pull anyone into a combat zone to exist.

The Noise that she generated in the UG—frogs, wolves, ravens, stingers, 'leons, jellies, grizzlies, even a rhino that had whuffled at her, ears flicking, before shuffling off the UG's coil into the scannable plane—never attacked her. Did all Noise act so tamely towards its...creator?

"Null matrix." Noise naturally fed on Soul. But the Noise they generated had its particular programming. During Rhyme's Game, most Noise had avoided feeding on pacted Players unless the Players attacked first by scanning and purposefully agitating them. But a pactless Player's code essentially marked them as an all-one-could-eat feast for the Noise.

"Wait, but...my older brother said that the Noise didn't attack Reapers even in the combat zones. And he fought a lot of Reapers during the third week. He said that he couldn't walk down a single street without getting ambushed, so while it might've been a coincidence, that seems like a stretch. How did that work?"

Different patterns of constructive interference broadcast on different frequencies. In the base UG, Noise read pactless Player codes as delicious, while pacted Players and Reapers looked like garbage. In the combat zone, pacted Players suddenly started to look awfully appetizing.

"But Reapers still look unappetizing," Rhyme concluded, "even in the combat zone. That makes sense. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so is tastiness."

She could only envision Game Master Higashizawa garnishing Players with sprigs of parsley and bay leaves. A little salt sprinkled on top, a little wasabi dabbed on the side.

"Like how a hotdog sitting on a clean paper plate looks a lot more appetizing than the same hotdog lying in the middle of an oil slick on the road."

He grinned crookedly. "Now that's a deduction."

Rhyme pressed her fingers against her cheeks as she mused, contemplated, thought, wandering with Sho throughout the city, freed from the alleyway, asking questions, generating Noise in different locations, watching him iterate on art forms, making her own by smashing, by crashing, by mashing, letting fly the joy of destruction and construction, of dissolution and coagulation.

How had that favorite song of Sho's gone?

On nights like this, kicking up a fuss before the night was over. Making some noise. Making some Noise. Everywhere from Dogenzaka to Spain Hill, from Cat Street to the Shibuya Hikarie, from O-EAST to MIYASHITA, from SHIBUYA STREAM to TOKYU PLAZA, from Udagawa to Takeshita.

She hummed the lyrics under her breath, sang the revolving chorus: "Don't worry. Because this is the way my life goes." Then she turned towards Sho. "So what about the current Game? Since there aren't pacts, are there?"

"You can still make 'em if you know what you're doing. The double-cosine and I made a union of our respective sets," Sho replied, bending a stoplight over his knee as the plastic and metal groaned and cracked. "But the Noise and the Players have had their codes changed to handle a more expansive associative property: teams. Light puck's been factored out."

"Oh, wow." The red-and-green teapot Rhyme held shattered against the cement. "I really liked the light puck. I've been wondering why the Wicked Twisters didn't know what it was. I thought maybe they had changed the name to a musical pun, like how they talk about dropping the beat now."

What the Game had lost in light pucks and fusions, it had gained in beat-drops, mash-ups, and killer remixes.

And now even teamless Players wouldn't end up devoured by Noise. It gave the Players a chance to meet different teams and decide which team they'd join without getting immediately chomped. Rhyme mused: if only her Game had permitted her to shop around for a partner instead of going for the first person who had jumped in to forge a pact with her. She still likely would've gone with her older brother, but it made her wonder.

It seemed that the rules of her Game had focused around partnering with any stranger and having to understand them. Fair enough, for a Game intended to teach Players to open up their worlds.

But the Imagination-driven combat turned this into a lottery: either they'd find someone who could use psychs well, or they'd end up erased.

Sho had mentioned that his original partner hadn't contributed much to the battle. While Sho had figured out a hack across combat zones, the average Player, no matter how much they opened themselves up to their partner, would perish.

The new rules, on the other hand, encouraged Players to consider different team options. They didn't have to join a team until the end of the week, even, so they could theoretically weigh their options carefully. Including making their own new team! And for good reason: it appeared that the rules prevented team members from transferring once joined, which made little sense to Rhyme, but then she hadn't set up the system.

That meant Players only fought Noise when the Players chose to. And Reapers? Sho shrugged; he hadn't witnessed any Reapers fighting Noise in combat zones under the new rules and couldn't say one way or another. If he had to guess, the Noise still wouldn't find Reapers very palatable. With absolute certainty he could claim that the Noise didn't find Cantus codes palatable.

Right, the Wicked Twisters had mentioned struggling with Cervus Cantus's ravens dragging them out from behind buses, a fact that she didn't have the full context of. Though... She could still taste the copper on her tongue from when Tigris Cantus's electric blood had surged over her mouth. Not actual blood, in reality, even if her nightmares said otherwise. The static of her Soul.

Sho countered: Just because Noise code didn't make 'em look palatable didn't mean that they wouldn't be.

Musing, Rhyme expanded her own analogy. That hotdog lying on the road might not have whet her appetite much, but it'd still taste like a hotdog.

Precisely.

That all followed logically. But what about the Taboo Noise that Neku and her older brother had fought? That Noise had attacked Players and Reapers alike and even hunted them down in the scannable plane.

The question made Sho grin. His Taboo Noise had had a very different code, or rather something close to a lack thereof. They actively fed on anyone who tuned to the scannable plane or above. Not the RG, to keep Shibuya's citizens safe. Though they mostly kept to the scannable plane, they could sink into the UG if they had something calling them there, seeking the higher vibes associated with Angels and any overlaps, chewing through Reapers and scanning Players alike.

Was all Taboo Noise like that? Confined to the UG or above? Wait. Silly question. She'd met him in the RG. Leo Cantus and Taboo Sho Minamimoto had different codes. Different types of Taboo Noise could have different codes or lack thereof too.

What made them all Taboo had to do with its nature. Or, more precisely, how they broke the rules set up by the Higher Plane, in ways that made those Noise particularly dangerous against Angels and uncontrollable by Reapers.

...Did he regret it? Making Noise that erased Reapers?

Heh! If he had to choose between the trash Reapers getting erased, or the entire city getting erased along with the trash Reapers, he'd call the trash Reapers merely collateral. A waste, sure: even the most garbage of Reaper could lob a psych or two at the Angels. But no, not a bone of regret or remorse in the entirety of his body. Not a bone of bullshit, either.

That...that also made sense. So, how had he generated the Taboo Noise, anyway? And hadn't his partner, Coco, generated her own Noise, too? Dissonance Noise? Bright pink with red eyes, unstable forms glimmering in static?

Purple, not pink, he corrected. A zetta cooler color.

Rhyme giggled into her sleeve.

Dissonance Noise and Taboo Noise both had their unique, particular properties, honed and studied over time. "If you want to start generating your own novel Noise, femtogram, start by making your own code for them. Something unique."

She tilted her head. "How do I do that?" He smirked as if to challenge her very question. "Let me guess..."

They said it in unison: "Factor it out yourself! Ha ha ha ha ha!"

He hehed at her. "Still not anywhere near the artistry of my laugh."

The artistry of a corny, cheesy laugh that sounded more like a car engine misfiring or a chainsaw revving off rust than it did what she would've considered 'human laughter' before meeting him. Before meeting him. Because nowadays Rhyme could scarcely imagine a more human laughter than the laughter of someone who hadn't had anyone to laugh with for at least eighteen years of his life and still laughed anyway.

The prospect of generating her own Noise, like imprinting her own pins, drawing her own sigils, making her own art: Rhyme prepared to start metaphorically banging her head against the wall again.

But she'd figured out a way to make her own art. If she could do that, then she could figure out how to not only make some Noise, but make her own Noise. Not just play the instruments provided, but sneak her own instruments in under regulations, listen to the forbidden notes harmonize with her melodies. Holding as tightly to that as she held onto the strings of her Soul, Rhyme asked where. Where could they make some noise—and she could make some Noise—that wouldn't end up forcibly conformed to the existing distribution?

Well, with a sufficiently powerful Imagination and a sufficiently driven will, she could make that kind of Noise anywhere.

But for her first time, while Rhyme still experimented with the basics, she didn't need to deal with additional restrictions.

So they trekked from Cat Street, over Scramble Crossing, up beside the 104 building, into Dogenzaka, past SPICY CURRY DON that Sho smirked at—he said something about satou ramen, which didn't come up on any Moogle searches, but she'd keep trying—and further towards Pork City.

Pork City. Where she could make Noise of her own. Where she, with all the Noise static still singing in her Soul, could make Noise.

The thrill of having finally broken through something had paused her pondering. But, heh, what poetic irony, that after four years of gnawing on her own arms, of sinking her teeth into her flesh night after night, the medium that she'd finally had some success on...

...Noise.

Because she had lived through a Noisy life? Because she had some intrinsic connection to Noise? Did the Noise...see her as one of them, and thus collected around her Soul?

"Low probability. Noise can feed on other Noise, but Noise trend towards feeding on Player and human Souls. Hmph. My hypothesis? You see Noise as alive. You're drawn to that life. Heh heh heh. Besides, we haven't yet run this trial. Generating Noise by someone else's equations is just plugging your numbers in the formula. Hardly even a practice test. This is the real exam. Will you be able to write your own equations? Will you be able to make your own Noise?"

"That's right..." Her voice trailed off. "I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch." Literally, in this case.

"If you can heap your own Noise, I wouldn't assume a correlation between your Noisy Soul. You've been expanding on all axes since then. You can make art, femtogram. You're getting closer to making out your own congruency."

Her own congruency. Not just in the void between others' lights. But her own congruency, her own shape forming. Not copying the sublimate of copper, but...

Sho jimmied the door to Pork City. The stairwell had several signs plastered all over it stating no entry given imminent construction, but he ushered her up the square spiral staircase anyway.

Rhyme's mouth gaped to see the chunks of what looked like skyscraper wall littering the bottom floor. When she craned her neck upwards, she could see where the railing had bent or broken in several places along the sides, where something that resembled scorch marks left the cement ashen. "...What happened here?"

Sho's smug laughter echoed off the walls. "The double-cosine thought she could outcalculate me. Now elevate yourself!"

Pork City. Mark City. He took the steps two at a time while she jog-ran after him. The last time that she had stood here in this stairwell, the rhythmic beats of Imagination had flowed through her and vibrated with her, human emotions palpable even in the RG. The dead of night left the building eerily quiet, but she could still taste how those pulses had felt. "Why does this place have two names? Wait, let me clarify. Plenty of places have two names, but this has...two names, you know what I mean?"