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viii.
Neku only feigns sleep. He can feel Beat pace restlessly a few feet away. Next to him Shiki is breathing deeply and evenly, back pressed against his, her warmth familiar. Occasionally, Shiki moves, writhes, and Neku thinks he knows what she dreams about. His breath freezes in his throat when he realizes that he fears having the same dreams.
The sounds come to him first: his own voice calling for Shiki as he tore past each cell to a steady thrum of the Reapers thundering in, rhythmic as their phaser blasts. The sound of a gun being loaded. Joshua actually firing old-world lead bullets, each shot its own explosion; deadly, dirty blasts. The tang of burnt flesh when a phaser round had grazed Shiki’s side. His skin remembers the slick feeling of blood seeping out underneath his fingers, frantically pressing cloth to the wound.
Finally, sight: Joshua serene in the violent light, skin stark over dark gunmetal as he reloaded.
Sound again.
“Go," Joshua had urged. His voice was soft and Neku’s sense of hearing zeroed in it so easily that it was like he’d set it on autofocus. Joshua could make the world fade into white noise. "I can hold them for a while.”
They’d been in a prison, the first time they’d met. It had been a scene with the same theme, the same soundtrack; and Joshua does like his symmetry, likes the poetic twist to a day’s end.
“But—“
“Hm. And here I thought you couldn’t afford to lose.”
“Josh,” Neku had said; it sounded like a plea even to himself. He let himself put one hand on the side of Joshua’s neck. The pulse there was racing, thrumming warm against his hand. “Catch up. We’re heading straight to H’s then to the Conductor’s chamber. We’ll wait a day. If you take longer than that just get to H and stay there until we come back.”
Joshua had smiled at him, and never had Neku hated it more—his benign contempt, his condescension, the obnoxiousness that made him so unreadable. Neku hated him so much it hurt.
Then Joshua had both hands on his gun and he was rushing towards the Reapers, firing at them, and Neku turned away at the sound of the first phaser blast that had the world moving back at normal speed. He and Shiki ran, ran, ran, and had not looked back.
Now Neku finds himself opening his eyes. Beat’s pacing has stopped and the other boy is sitting with his back to the wall, eyes closed and mouth open. Rhyme is curled up beside him. There’s the click of the door opening; Neku aims straight for the doorway. Mr. H puts his hands in the air, feigning a deer-in-the-headlights expression that would have been hilarious any other time. Neku sighs with relief, lowering his phaser, as Mr. H lowers his arms and smiles at him. The warmth doesn’t reach his eyes. Neku breathes in slowly, tries to calm the feeling of his heart thrashing in its place in his chest.
(“Have you ever heard of Schrödinger, Neku?” Joshua had asked him once, huddled over a control panel. Sparks had thrown harsh light over the bones of his face, casting sharp shadows in the hollows of his collarbones.)
“Found him yet, Mr. H?”
“I was lookin’ in the deceased inhabitants files,” says Mr. H in a tone Neku is learning to identify as cautious. “Found a bunch of Reapers, freshly added. And one tech student. I'm sorry, 'Phones.”
The news doesn’t hit him straight in the gut. It doesn’t make him feel pain or anger. It doesn’t make him feel much at all. He thinks of Joshua, leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, raising one pale eyebrow, and does not feel. Neku sits, staring at H, who goes straight to his cupboard to pour himself a drink. At the table, H pushes his face into his hands.
Neku lies back down and looks at the ceiling. No, of course Josh would hack himself into the deceased inhabitants files to throw anyone looking for him off his trail. Tomorrow he’d be here, with his heavy old-world gun, turning his infuriating, smug face to Neku’s. Tomorrow he’d be here.
v.
When the uprising came she’d kept her head low, even though Eri was shouting at the Reapers, her chants for freedom printed all over her body. Shiki had held on to Eri the night before, desperate, begging her not to go; they had a life here. It wasn’t beautiful, it wasn’t so free, but it was a life, and Shiki was content with it all: waking up with Eri in the mornings, eating whatever they could, mending Reapers’ uniforms and coming home to Eri every night. Then again, Eri had been made of fiercer stuff. She’d wanted more.
Call it fate, call it terrible luck; Shiki is walking past as the riot gets ugly. For a moment she turns, searching for Eri in the crowd, and the next thing she knows a Reaper is behind her, gripping her arms. No, you don’t understand, I’m not part of this! I’m just getting home! She screams herself deaf, straining against the bindings the Reaper forces on her.
From the other side of the hall she spies Eri being kicked into a metal table, getting up briefly. Her eyes meet Shiki’s. Suddenly there is fire there, the blaze Shiki loves in her, something she would never have herself; and Eri is rushing towards her with her laserknife out, her mouth forming the syllables of Shiki’s name; one phaser blast. A last glimpse of Eri’s motionless smoking form as the rest of the mob, dispersing, writhing, tramples over her. Shiki’s knees buckle and the world blurs.
The wall of the cell slams into her as Shiki is thrown in. She blinks hollowly at the lights. Turning, her cellmate regards her coolly. He’s a boy about her age with spiky orange hair. Bruises mottle his arms.
Then she turns away and waves crash over her, heavy and harsh, a storm that howls with Eri’s voice; Shiki curls into herself so that her screams are muffled as she shrieks with grief, with rage so blind and hatred so deep she must be dying of it. She wishes it would take her, but her lungs keep taking in air, her blood keeps flowing. Every second is more torturous than the last. She doesn’t sleep that night. Her cellmate makes no move to comfort her; she barely notices him there. The world is a swirling vortex and the only thing in it is her need for Eri beside her.
She doesn’t know how long she spends in the cell. Time ceases to matter. Shiki eats only because Eri would be livid if she’d wasted away in her absence. She thinks only of Eri waiting at home, tinkering with the hilt of her laserknife, then pulling the covers over Shiki and burrowing in herself, their shared warmth the only thing that matters in the whole wide world.
Dreaming, she sees Eri free, dancing across the ship’s hallways, and then the ship explodes around them, starbursts so bright she is blinded; then she is waking and the ship is still exploding. The bars of her cell fizzle out. A young man stands above her, helping her cellmate up. Everything about him is pale, from his hair to his eyes to his skin, and he reaches down.
“Well?” he asks as Shiki hesitates. “Are you going to put my hard work to waste?”
She grips his hand.
The first time Shiki Misaki breaks out of the Shibuya’s prison, she is a wreck, a wasteland. Even as she follows her savior, her cellmate, and two other prisoners, a huge boy and a tiny girl, she looks around, hoping to catch a flash of pink hair, a familiar confident grin. Once she thinks she sees Eri’s eyes in the crowd, but a blast tears apart another bloc and Shiki is scrambling towards survival, leaving Eri behind.
Hours later, she sits in Mr. H’s living quarters, a blanket wrapped around her. Mr. H explains to them the nature of their mission. Joshua broke out a bunch of prisoners, but they’re the only ones who followed him all the way here. This is a chance Eri would’ve killed for; the irony is not lost on Shiki. As Joshua and Mr. H go through augmented maps, system designs and security details, Shiki thinks: It should be Eri here. But I’m the next best thing.
Mr. H puts a phaser in her hand. She thinks of Eri’s eyes when she last saw her: undefeated, brilliant, bright. Eri rushing towards her. Bang. Eri screaming for justice. Bang. Eri putting on the shirt Shiki made for her birthday, her face lighting up with unbridled joy. Bang. Eye of the needle.
Shiki beats the others at target practice every time.
ii.
The Shibuya’s come a long way from its squeaky-clean beginnings, Sanae notices. He’s found his way into the filthy heart of the city, making a home for smugglers, bookies, all sorts of criminal folk, but also the downtrodden and the downright desperate. The drinks at WildKat are cheaper than at anywhere else on the Shibuya. Everyone’s invited to his cozy little joint, which Sanae keeps as clean as possible. If anyone starts trouble, he’s got a gigantic Reaper-class phaser under the table, and Sanae was one of the first to learn how to use it. Since WildKat opened its doors, there have been no fights that lasted more than two seconds.
“Morning, H, got anything for me today?”
Sanae likes Neku Sakuraba because the boy (not fair to call him that, really, but Sanae thinks he’s more than earned the right to call anyone on this ship ‘boy’) loves music. Every morning he comes in with his headphones on, his music player ready for a fresh data transfer. Pop, blues, jazz, reggae, hell, even the weird post-rock shit Sanae had to download after getting to know Joshua; anything you can name, Neku is hungry for it. Today Sanae’s prepared a mix of stuff the kids used to call chillstep.
He feeds the mix to Neku’s music player as he prepares Neku’s usual order, black coffee with a tiny drop of honey, hot as he can make it.
“Thanks,” Neku says as he receives it and puts the player back in his pocket, smiling at Sanae.
“No problem, ‘Phones.”
Sanae’s seen him a bunch of times outside of WildKat, but he only ever catches Neku smiling when Sanae is handing him his coffee and his music player.
The door swings open; Sanae has one of those old-world bells that ring when the door it’s attached to is moved, so he looks up immediately, ready with a friendly smile. What he sees strikes him dumb.
He’s been waiting for this, so he shouldn’t be so shocked, but there he is, right there, his wiry frame below the neon lights, shoes hitting the cold floor, reflections shifting in the black glass plates around the bar. Joshua looks the same as the last time Sanae saw him, just as young, just as unreal. It’s easy to imagine another scene entirely, where the ground beneath them isn’t moving, where the atmosphere isn’t manufactured. Three tables away from the entrance, Neku has turned and is blatantly staring. Joshua raises one hand in greeting; even the lines of his palm seem like a reminder of a lifetime ago.
He walks past the steel tables—they’d been his, originally—and comes up to the bar, making himself comfortable on one stool. He tucks a stray lock of hair behind his ear then leans on the bar with his arms crossed in front of him, looking up at the menu.
“I’ll have a latte,” he says, voice a little hoarser than Sanae remembers it.
“Coming right up,” Sanae replies. He stares at Joshua like he’s hungry for the sight of him. Which is not altogether false.
So it worked. He brings Joshua his drink.
“Well? How do you like it, J?” he asks, gesturing at WildKat, when Joshua is done taking his first sip.
Joshua looks around appraisingly as he drinks his coffee.
“Well, it’s more Shibuya than anything else on the Shibuya.”
At this, Sanae laughs.
“Sure, sure. That’s fair. Tell me what you’ve been up to; I’ve got a slow morning to kill.”
“Nothing much,” Joshua admits. “I came straight here. To be honest now that I’m here I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do. I guess I could always wait tables. Or fall into bed with a rich socialite and attempt to mingle with the upper class. Do they host good parties?”
He’s smirking, batting his eyelashes; not a thing has changed, despite the Shibuya’s many transformations under its succession of Conductors. Sanae leans over the bar a little and lets Joshua inspect the yen coin he keeps on a chain, turning it over and over in his hand.
“Dunno, Josh, see if you can find out. If you ever feel like playin’ server, though, there’s always a spot for ya here.”
Joshua looks up from the coin, pushing an empty cup towards Sanae.
“You know I always look forward to spending more time with you. Could I have a martini?”
“It’s pretty early in the day, J,” Sanae reminds him. Joshua rolls his eyes.
“Please. The time of day on this ship is completely arbitrary. After all, it’s always dark outside.” He traces the edge of his cup. “I’ve gone too long without life’s pleasures; don’t deny me this.”
Sanae makes it the way Joshua likes it: with Bombay Sapphire and equal parts dry and sweet vermouth. He doesn’t really plan on denying Joshua much right now. Another customer comes up and orders coffee, which Sanae busies himself with. In his seat, Joshua looks around WildKat, at the plastic tissue boxes, the old-world posters, the road signs plastered haphazardly on one wall; there’s something like wistfulness in his gaze.
vi.
Neku had always assumed that H’s living quarters would be a lot different from his; maybe because of the fact that WildKat is the most eccentrically decorated place Neku’s seen on the Shibuya, but it turns out H lives in a space that Neku could almost mistake as his own. It’s a little more spacious, yeah, and there are mattresses on the floor, but it’s got the same nondescript plastic furniture. The Command-issued screens are absent. Instead, the walls feature several small prints of photographs. They’re walls in open air, rising out of gray dirt, splashed with color.
The lines are familiar. Neku’s seen them before across hidden nooks and crannies in the Shibuya, bright and daring, the only things in the entire ship that could make him catch himself smiling. He wonders where Mr. H could’ve gotten these prints.
“You know I’m not staying,” Neku tells the guy who broke him out of prison. He’s sitting at H’s coffee tables taking inventory of actual bullets, counting the rounds and magazines. Neku didn’t know they still made those.
The guy looks up. He’s got unsettling eyes, a color so pale Neku can’t tell if they’re gray or blue or purple or what, and every time he looks at Neku he’s reminded of butterflies and moths thrashing in place, needles pinning their tiny bodies to the wall. Joshua, he had said his name was.
“Is that so?” he asks lightly.
“I’m not gonna report you. Whatever you do, I don’t care. And thanks for breaking me out of prison, but I can’t stay here. I’m gonna go back to my normal life, and live it normally, like any other normal person on this ship. So, thanks again. But that’s as far as this goes.”
Joshua chuckles, turning back to his ammo. Neku has a brief flashback of the older kids who used to hold his headphones out of his reach, snickering derisively at him until he showed them he could kick their asses. He doesn’t like the way Joshua laughs.
“You have a criminal record. The way you’re talking, I bet it was a glitch in the system that put you in prison, but whatever it was, the offence they have on you is severe enough that you shared a cell with someone who was involved in the most violent riot since this Conductor came in power. Now there’s a prison break in your record, too. They have your photographs and your files. Give up H’s protection and the Reapers will take you away within a matter of minutes,” Joshua says, as casually as though he’s describing a good day at work.
“Is this a threat?”
Joshua looks right at him again. Something that’s not quite a smile flits across his face.
“No. I’m merely stating the facts and a reasonable prediction. Any chance you had at a normal life is gone, dear. Now it’s either you help H and me or you go back to life as usual in the Shibuya, which will only end with you dead or back in prison. It’s not much of a choice, is it?”
It isn’t. He doesn’t answer because now that he thinks about it, Joshua’s right. His old life was over the minute the Reapers arrested him onconspiracy charges, of all things, when Neku had spent so much time and energy avoiding the goddamn revolutionaries. If he goes with H and Joshua, Neku will only be making the charges true. If he doesn’t, it’s back to prison for him. The Shibuya’s justice system won’t try too hard to discover the truth about one more wayward kid.
Joshua finishes taking inventory and tidies up his stuff, moving to get up.
He walks past the coffee table towards Neku and steps near him, into his personal space. As though he couldn’t get any creepier. Neku holds his gaze, unflinching. Up close Neku can see the shadows on Joshua’s irises, his blonde eyelashes white in the light. Neku inhales a soapy scent.
“Think of it like this,” says Joshua in a much lower voice, “the world is out to get you. The man controlling that world is the Conductor. So what do you do to make the world stop trying to destroy you?”
The solution sounds so simple when Joshua puts it that way. It also sounds so much more dangerous.
“You stop the Conductor,” Neku says, letting out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding in.
Joshua smiles at him, lax and slow, as though he knows some kind of secret Neku doesn’t. How patronizing. Neku wants to punch it off his face, see the bruise he’ll leave on Joshua’s cheek, push into it until Joshua's composure falters and he shows evidence that he is, in fact, human.
“Very good, Neku,” Joshua says softly, before he moves past Neku and calls for H. Neku stands there with his fists clenched at his sides, blinking, wondering what the fuck just happened. (He just got recruited into a rebellion he didn’t sign up for, that’s what the fuck just happened. What is the universe’s problem with Neku Sakuraba?)
ix.
“Neku,” Shiki says gently, one hand on his shoulder. His vision focuses again. She’s decked out in full gear, as is Beat. “We need to move.”
Kitaniji awaits them, but he doesn’t know that yet. Neku cleans his phaser. He’s no closer to figuring out what's going on with the Conductor, why people are being rounded up, why he was put in prison. Bullets from Joshua’s ammo stash are scattered across Mr. H’s coffee table.
The first night he spent here, he’d thought Shiki pathetic. He hadn’t trusted Joshua. Beat and Rhyme had seemed so irrelevant, so unimportant.
Without thinking, Neku takes a bullet and places it in his pocket, zipping it up carefully. Shiki’s hand on his shoulder tightens. Neku takes a shaky breath, preparing to stand up. Instead he crumples against her. She holds him like he never did for her back when they first met.
Does he cry? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. Kitaniji is going to eat lead.
iii.
(“You’ve grown old.”
Joshua drags the blade across Sanae’s cheek, shaving the last of the beard away. He marvels at the feel of Sanae’s skin beneath his palm. It was getting boring, existence the way he was; he’d thought it never would, back then, when he and Sanae were still playing with the limits. Now he knows why he had believed that: it was because he spent all that time like this, warm and close, every nerve ending gasping for contact.
“Guess I have. Hope that doesn’t make me obsolete, though.”
Pressing their foreheads together, Joshua can taste the air Sanae breathes. His fingers flex. When he inhales he remembers rain drumming on stone, solid rock beneath his feet, the wind whipping his hair back, and the feeling of a jacket being placed on his shoulders, the hand that had brushed against his skin. There are things that don’t fade with time.
“Let’s see,” he says, placing the blade down, leaning in.)
i.
The rain burns; there’s acid in the clouds. Joshua peers out the window and sees it, ugly and towering, a dark shadow, a looming reminder. He’s familiar with the story; next they’ll herd the animals in pairs, and all the nonbelievers will be washed away into obscurity. Straight into hell. He’s upset, of course—why wouldn’t he be?
His fingers fly over the keys again and a line of code ghosts across the screen, which fiddles with the pneumatics across the second level. This little ecosystem is all he’s ever worked for. A much humbler Joshua had refused to call Shibuya his city in his head, but lately the possessive pronoun has snaked its way into his subconscious, insidious and pressing, all the more so now that he’ll have to leave it behind.
Of course he’ll have to, he knows, when he turns over a rock and when the radioactive sensors jump and screech, when the rain falls to scorch meat off frail bones of those unlucky enough to be caught outside. Joshua’s not an idiot.
The comms bleep. When he switches to the surveillance system it shows Joshua a man in protective poncho, which won’t do much for long if Joshua doesn’t let him in. The man glances up at the camera and Joshua knows who he is. Those dark glasses, the twist to the mouth—unmistakable. If Joshua lets him die on his doorstep the ark men will have his head.
Ten minutes later he’s serving tea to Sanae Hanekoma on a little steel table. Joshua makes sure not to abandon Shibuya’s maintenance—in fact he makes a bigger show of it, nearly downright ignoring Hanekoma.
“So,” he says, since Hanekoma seems to be content with sinking into zen silence. “What is it you want with little old me, exactly?”
“No beating around the bush with you, huh.”
Hanekoma grins at him, leaning back a little more casually in his seat. His body language is open and relaxed, sleeves rolled up and hands on the sides of the armchair, but Joshua knows that trick too.
“Absolutely none. Now is this business or pleasure? If it’s the former I can call you Hanekoma-san. If it’s the latter, you’ll have to tell me what you’d like to be called.”
“Business,” Hanekoma answers. “But call me H. What about you? Should I go with Kiryu-kun or Yoshiya-kun?”
If there’s bait in it—Joshua can’t see any mockery in the man’s face, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be there—he doesn’t rise to it. He tells Hanekoma to call him Joshua.
“Alright. Joshua, I wanna talk to you about the ship.”
“What ship?”
“C’mon, don’t play this game with me.”
Joshua raises an eyebrow.
“Conversations about the ship usually end with someone getting shot, stabbed, or throttled. Unfortunately I can’t fit any of those things into my schedule today; we’ll have to talk about something else. The tea, maybe. The weather, definitely. Isn’t it just pouring out there? I’m flattered you bothered to brave the rain to come see me, but I’m afraid that effort must now go to waste.”
Hanekoma stands up and stretches his arms out in a gesture that only makes him look slightly ridiculous.
“You know what? Search me, I know you have some kinda detector in this room. Didn’t bring a single weapon with me.”
Joshua believes him, but he takes the scanner and turns it on anyway, turning the wide blue beam on Hanekoma. The small round light turns green after he drags the light to the top of Hanekoma’s head.
“You still have your hands. I could still get throttled.”
Grinning, Hanekoma sits back down and shrugs. Obviously he’s got enough of a handle on Joshua now that he won’t keep arguing his point. When Hanekoma gets back to drinking his tea, casually as you please, Joshua finds himself smiling a little bit.
“Fine,” he says. “Let’s talk about the ship.”
“You know where we are right now?”
“Not really, no,” Joshua admits. He hasn’t been following anything about the ark aside from the rumors that float around the Shibuya grapevine. Nara and Hideki have been saying things about joining up with the crew, so Joshua assumes they’ve got some sort of organization up already, and presumably places for people to work in.
“The people side of things, we got it down. Jobs all lined up and everything. Organized most of the crew. The ship’s also mostly built, and infrastructure’s pretty amazing—seein’ all this,” Hanekoma says, nodding at Shibuya’s surveillance screens, “I think you’d like it.”
“You’re aware that if I wanted to sabotage you, this information is more than enough to go on, right?”
Hanekoma flashes him another self-assured grin.
“Nah. You ain’t the type.”
With a showy flick of the fingers, a rectangular block of glasslike light erupts from Hanekoma’s hand. Instinctively, Joshua reaches for his gun, but he puts it back down again when the screen loads and he sees blueprints, code, system files flashing by. Joshua watches as Hanekoma explains some of the main functions, bringing up elements of code by enlarging the screen several times. Slowly, the ark's systems come to life in his mind. Hanekoma's building a skeleton, wrapping it in layers of digital muscle, cyber cells waiting to become organs. There are some parts just begging to be fixed. Joshua’s hand itches.
“Whaddaya think?” Hanekoma asks at the end, leaning forward in his chair.
“Hm. Not quite impressive, but getting there.”
“See, that’s where you come in.” Hanekoma puts his cup down and looks at Joshua critically, although the amusement hasn’t left his face. “You don’t look surprised.”
“I guessed that for this project to work, you wouldn’t have to program a ship. You’d have to build a habitat. That,” he enunciates carefully, tilting his head towards Shibuya’s surveillance screens, the lines of code projected on the walls, “is a game only I can navigate. So you want me to play.”
“Bingo.”
Joshua doesn’t need Hanekoma to start listing down what’s in it for him. Survival, first and foremost. A lot of people still delude themselves into thinking that they’ll last much longer on the planet, but Joshua’s a realist. The only way to go now is up. Then there’s the ship. Shibuya, or at least this Shibuya, is something Joshua’s built on the skeleton of old data structures (an older Shibuya, deceased now), but with this project he'll have a sandbox that’s all his own. He doesn’t have to wrangle new function from outdated code. He can write his own. The ship will be his, and Joshua’s self-aware enough to that’s what will get him over to the ark project.
He regards Hanekoma carefully and takes one last look around his room. Definitely, Joshua loves his Shibuya. He loves the systems he’s improved and built far more than he can love anyone who actually lives in it, but Joshua’s never been a slave to sentiment. He’ll leave it behind; imagine his Shibuya surviving humanity. The image of a race of aliens touching down and finding it when all of the humans have died out is a pleasing one.
He pours himself and Hanekoma more tea.
“When do I start?”
He read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a decade ago, as a scared little child, and suddenly the image of the Chesire Cat springs to mind, unbidden, as Hanekoma leans back and smiles at him.
x.
Neither of them have as much as a phaser. Last time Neku checked, Shiki was following him, but there’s no time to wait for her. Kitaniji’s hand is on a button near a microphone, and Neku lunges. He has less reach; Kitaniji is taller than him. He’s thrown off as soon as he gets a blow in, but Neku is back up on his feet again.
He blocks Kitaniji’s blows and pulls him closer before kneeing him in the stomach; Kitaniji goes down. Keep your opponent beneath you, Joshua’s voice says in his head, hit them until they’re still. Neku punches and punches and punches. Every time Kitaniji’s head hits the floor it’s not hard enough. Then suddenly he feels a grip on his leg and he’s being thrown back, the air knocked out of him. Before he can stand up again Kitaniji’s hands are around his neck, squeezing. Neku scrambles, scratching at him, tearing white lines. Colors dance in his vision and pain rips through him, ragged desperation screaming for air.
Come on now. The memory of Joshua holding him down surfaces. Lilac eyes, hair that glimmers under bright lights. Deceptively lithe limbs pinning him down, the touch like a firebrand. Neku’s blood barreling through his vessels with heat pulsating in every drop. Use your anger.
The rage is there but it’s impotent; his muscles cry out their hunger for oxygen. He can feel his movements lose energy. The world darkens at the edges.
A burst of light. Kitaniji’s smoking, scorched head falls on him. Neku scrambles backwards and gasps, gulping in the air, feeling life filling up his lungs again. Another breath. His throat hurts, the skin burns, but he’s alive. It’s over. Shiki crouches next to him, the muzzle of her phaser still radiating heat. Neku reaches for her and she holds him; she’s shaking, he realizes, choking down sobs as she and Neku cling to each other.
“Congratulations,” says a familiar voice from above them, “on your Klingon promotion.”
Neku gathers what energy he has and wrenches himself from Shiki’s grasp, turning wildly to look for the smirk, the haze of pale hair. It’s not a hallucination; Shiki is looking around too, eyes wide and frightened.
“Joshua?” she gasps. Neku doesn’t trust himself to speak. “You’re alive?”
“That’s debatable,” Joshua’s voice says again.
“Whaddaya mean?”
That’s Beat in the doorway, lowering his phaser as he takes in the scene before him. Rhyme follows not long after. She raises her phaser in a heartbeat when a screen flickers to life in front of them. Shiki’s ID picture is displayed on the left side. Beside it, large letters spell out CONDUCTOR: SHIKI MISAKI. A chuckle echoes around the room; the sound makes something in Neku’s chest clench.
“You’re the ship,” Rhyme mumbles, lowering the phaser, eyes widening. Then, more clearly, “You’re the ship. I’ve been looking through some of the system files H dug up. This is… you’re some kind of AI.”
“Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Well, sort of. I am a real boy, you know. Although there are plenty of strings on me.”
Beat stares at Rhyme, who is still looking resolutely towards the screen. Neku is frozen still, thinking of Joshua, who had felt very real when Neku pulled him behind a tank as a squad of Reapers marched past on patrol. He'd heard Joshua breathe in the darkness as they waited for a Reaper to leave the surveillance chamber they'd been stealing from.
“But you were… you were there. You were with us,” Neku finally says. I felt your heartbeat, he doesn’t say. I felt your pulse.
“Cryo is a marvelous anti-aging method. You should try it sometime." The airy tone of Joshua's voice only becomes even more unnerving when it's floating out of the speakers instead of his mouth. Being faceless doesn't do him any favors, Neku thinks. "You see, I only wanted to come out to play because I was bored. I didn’t think Megumi would break out the Carl Schmitt like that. Nasty, that manual override function—you can yell at H about it later; he programmed it in so that I wouldn’t abuse my power. Now that we have some hindsight, that seems downright hilarious, doesn’t it? I’m never going to let him live it down.”
“So,” Shiki says in a shaky voice. “All of this happened because you were bored? Because you couldn’t be bothered to properly wield the power you had? This is what Eri died for?”
“If the video logs tell the truth, which they always do, you’ll find she died for you, dear. You think you’re the only who’s lost what’s important to you? ” Joshua retorts. Shiki pales. “I lost my planet. I lost a friend in Megumi twice—when he decided to follow the examples set by some of the more regrettable leaders in Earth’s history, and when you shot him in the head. In fact, I almost lost my life freeing you from prison—technically, I’ve died for you, and I didn’t even like you the best. A little gratitude, please. Sometimes terrible things happen that you can’t control. I found a way to fix what I broke. And quickly, too. There was always the slow way, but I don’t have much patience for politics.”
A weighty silence falls over them. Neku closes his eyes. All this time, what did they gather data for, if Joshua really knew all they need to know already? For their rapid-fire arguments, for the smiles they could drag out of each other? For the feeling of Joshua’s dry palm touching his arm, holding him back?
“There’s a power vacuum now,” Rhyme says quietly. “Is Mr. H going to be Conductor?”
“Oh, no,” Joshua says with another chuckle. “He doesn’t trust himself with power. Rightly so, I think. The youngest Conductor in the history of theShibuya; I would think at least one of you would want that feather in your cap.”
Beat and Rhyme look at each other. Shiki’s eyes are closed, and she’s breathing in and out, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. Neku tries very hard not to look at Kitaniji’s corpse. He remembers a time when he wished for a normal life. Then he remembers Joshua lounging on one of H’s mattresses, the words out of his mouth always sharp as cut glass, sparking something in the back of Neku’s mind.
“I’ll do it,” he says. “I can be Conductor.”
“Excellent. You were always my favorite,” Joshua says in that half-whisper he only uses to talk to Neku when they’re alone among the machinery, stealing schematics and incident logs in dark chambers, pausing to hide as they rush home. Light touches, Joshua’s eyes dark and full of intent, his lips parted; moments so heady and brief that when they broke, Neku could no longer really know if they had really happened.
Beeps and clicks echo around them as the system starts, throwing light on every surface. Shiki’s picture flickers and Neku’s face replaces it. CONDUCTOR: NEKU SAKURABA; age: 23. A pink heart appears next to his name, and Neku blinks.
He wonders what the fuck he just got himself into.
iv.
(“Shibuya, how are you?”
Silence. Megumi waits for the smooth male voice to greet him good morning, but the Shibuya has become a less eager conversationalist as of late. He wonders if it was ever like this for his predecessor, but if he was still here for consultation Megumi wouldn’t even have the position.
He flicks one switch on the control panel. The left screens light up, showing images from the ship’s lower regions. A spaceship with slums. What a shame, Megumi thinks, seeing a youth—male or female, hard to tell—receive a handful of coins, clutching their ruined clothes to their prone body. Switch. An old woman is mugged. Switch. A circle of men gamble away their fortunes, presumably as their children wait to be fed.
Megumi flicks another switch. The upper classes are socializing. Certainly the surveillance footage in their areas are cleaner and prettier than the footage of the poorer regions, but Megumi has spent enough time with the Shibuya’s elite to know that the only difference between evil in the lower decks and evil in the upper decks is the false pristine patina that covers the crimes of the rich.
The Shibuya, with its infinite wisdom and its reach far into ever corner of the ship, cannot control people. It must have seen enough of what it was meant to save. Megumi feels cold fear settle in the pit of his stomach. The Shibuya has abandoned them; they are on their own. No, he thinks. He must bring it back. If he can bring back order to the world and restore justice, all will be well. He flicks off the surveillance screens and activates the biolink. Megumi Kitaniji must be the Shibuya now.)
vii.
When Neku and Joshua come back from their latest data-gathering mission, Sanae is waiting for them at his coffee table with a fresh pot.
“Hey, H,” he and Neku say at the same time. Neku turns away, flustered. Joshua touches his elbow, just a flutter of a touch, and Neku looks at him again, raising one eyebrow, but there’s fondness in his eyes. Now he just reminds Joshua of himself.
“I’m beat. Gonna turn in early. See you in the morning, Josh, Mr. H.”
Neku yawns and makes for the guestroom, which he and Beat are sharing tonight. Joshua keeps his eyes on him until the door closes, after which he sits down by Sanae, who pushes his cup towards Joshua. Joshua drinks and almost splutters.
“This is only ten percent coffee. The rest has to be petrol.” Joshua shoves the cup back to Sanae, who takes a long gulp. His throat works as he swallows, the weathered skin shifting. Then Sanae nods in the direction Neku went, a question clear in his eyes.
“What’s that all about?”
Joshua smirks.
“Jealous, are we?”
“Curious,” Sanae says, smiling back. Joshua believes him.
“Just building incentive.” Joshua touches his lips with two fingers briefly, observing the way Sanae watches the motion. He'd done the same in front of Neku not much earlier. It had been difficult to resist the impulse to kiss him, then. "I like to think I can be motivational."
“Whatever you’re doing seems to be working,” Sanae comments. Joshua can’t read his tone; is that praise or disapproval? It’s one of the things he likes most about the man, how unreadable he is. Otherwise Joshua would’ve tired of him decades ago. (Sometimes he considers the possibility that he is blinded by what he feels, but then again, he is Yoshiya Kiryu.)
Joshua leans back, putting his head on Sanae’s shoulder; Sanae’s arm pulls him into a half-embrace. After so long without it, this kind of touch is enough make contentment bloom, warm and pleasant, in his chest. As the lights of the chamber dim, Joshua closes his eyes and draws in the scent of Sanae’s skin. There are things that don’t fade with time.
“It should come as no surprise. After all, I learned from the best.”