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Manufactured snow fell in fat, lazy flakes upon the neon tiers of New Tokyo, and with a slow exhale the megalopolis seemed to pause for a moment to look up in wonder. There hadn’t been snow in ages. Not since the Council had deemed it an unnecessary extravagance. In warmer months the weather drones still delivered rain twice weekly, but for many years now the artificial winters had been totally dry.
Suguru watched the snow from his place high above the city.
He’d chosen a marvelous spot to enjoy the view—a narrow lookout platform near the top of the Sentinel’s sheer-sided tower, just below the brilliant beacon pulsing soft and rhythmic and bathing the entire city in waves of ethereal blue. The snow caught the light. It glinted and glittered till the sky seemed full up with falling sapphires.
“Very pretty,” Suguru mumbled, voice dulled by his helmet. He sat down heavily, exhausted, and let his feet hang loose over the edge of the platform. Behind him the tower hummed. It came in an endless pulsing boom, that hum. Deep, and resonant. Felt through the chest. Layered over it were any number of polyphonic frequencies, so intricate and expressive that Suguru had begun to think of them as the Sentinel’s voice. “But let’s not make a habit of this, okay? I’m sick of taking the blame for your boneheaded ideas.”
The Sentinel warbled out a cheerful tone, totally unrepentant.
“Yeah, you’ve got them fooled.” Suguru busied himself with his tactical suit. The cybernetic webbing clipped beneath his arms was dead useful—it let him manipulate air currents and was far and away one of Shoko’s greatest innovations—but it was also very uncomfortable, and very difficult to detach. It didn’t help that Suguru was trembling, made clumsy by the thrum of adrenaline still beating fast through his blood. His fingers slipped around the finicky clasps. “They all think you’re some supreme form of being, but I know the truth. You’re just a supreme pain in the ass.”
That cheerful humming spiked high, indignant, and Suguru bit back a grin. “No, you’re right,” he said. “I had fun. Now quit fucking with my comm. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”
Finally free of the webbing, he leaned back to rest against the tower. It was constructed of a strange material—some relation to marble, very pale and totally seamless, uninterrupted by anything except the lookout platform and a quartet of prongs that supported the beacon gallery at its peak. There were no other blemishes—no maintenance panels, no vents, no joinings. No entry points of any kind. By all appearances it seemed to have been hewn from a single block of stone.
Of the many mysteries surrounding the Sentinel, that was the one that frustrated Suguru most.
Because the tower wasn’t solid stone. He could feel in the reverberating frequencies, in the deep cavernous hum that rumbled through his chest like a second heartbeat, that the tower was hollow. Hollow, but inaccessible. There was simply no way to get inside.
Suguru knew. He’d tried.
A second wave of weather drones began their circuit over the city, leaving dense contrails of snow in their wake. Suguru snuggled in to watch, pressing himself closer to the tower. It was warm to the touch, as always. A comfort against the cold. Suguru ran a grateful hand back and forth over the stone, smiling when the Sentinel chirruped a sweet trio of frequencies—a melody that Suguru had learned meant joy.
A sigh that Suguru had learned meant pique crackled suddenly over the comm in his helmet.
“I presume this was your doing.”
Nanami could fit entire conversations into a huff of annoyed breath, but he’d betrayed himself when he spoke—there was a slant of pleasure in his voice that he hadn’t quite managed to suppress. Suguru grinned. “Couldn’t resist. The kids have never seen snow.”
Another wave of weather drones entered the pattern above him. As high up as he was, Suguru could see how they followed set routes beneath the latticework of piping suspended over the city—those pipes formed the arteries of the Biosphere, funneling water for the drones to condense and precipitate into mists and rain and, currently, snow. It was a magnificent feat of atmospheric engineering. It was also proprietary. The very same company that owned the Biosphere also had full rights to the city’s water, which as a target made the Gojo Syndicate both very lucrative and very, very well-defended. You’d have to be fucking certifiable to try and run a job against them.
Lucky for New Tokyo, Suguru and his crew were plenty crazy.
“The kids are having a fantastic time.” That was Choso, animated in a way he only ever became when he was on babysitting duty. Choso wasn’t even on this job. He must’ve been so excited to report about the kids that he'd tuned into the channel just to gush. “Yuji practically busted through the wall trying to get outside. It was fucking adorable.”
A whine of feedback, then a deep voice kept very carefully level. Miguel. “Uh-huh, adorable. Except now the Gojos know we had our fingers in the Troposphere. They’ll have the servers locked down and rebooted before sunrise. Tell me, Suguru, what was the point of all this if they kill Doc’s virus before she can actually do anything with it?”
That had been Suguru’s objective for the night—to plant malware in the Trop servers, which programmed the synthetic atmosphere beneath the dome of the Biosphere, and give Shoko a backdoor into the system. Once inside, she would scrape the Biosphere’s code and attempt to piece together a digital map of the city’s water mains. With a bit of luck, they'd be able to follow them all the way back to their underground source: the reservoirs.
That was the real prize.
In a world where resources were rationed, water usage in New Tokyo was strictly measured and strictly regulated. Ostensibly this made sense. But when rights to a resource belonged entirely to a single entity, it was only a matter of time before that entity began abusing its power.
The Gojo Syndicate had done a marvelous job at marketing themselves as altruists. And in some ways, they were. The titan conglomerate had been an authority even in Old Tokyo, and it was their foresight and formidable resources that had first initiated development of a city meant to withstand the end of days. What’s more, the Gojos were responsible for both the innovation and the maintenance of the Biosphere, and had been the first to harness the power of the enigmatic Sentinel.
It was no exaggeration to say that New Tokyo would not exist without them. And of all the conglomerates that presided over the city, the Gojo Syndicate were widely regarded as the most benevolent.
But then they’d begun taxing the water. And people had begun to die.
So Suguru and his crew had set their sights on an impossible target.
“We’ve got bigger concerns.” Another sigh from Nanami. “Had it just been the snow, the Gojos might have written this off as just another disruption. But they’ll strip the server before they reboot it, Geto-san. They’ll find the malware. Once they realize this was part of a bigger job, it’ll mean increased surveillance and increased security.” He paused, probably running premortems in his head. “We need to alert Ieiri-san. I don’t know if that virus can be back-traced.”
All fair points. Nanami was right to be worried. Or, he would have been, except—
“I didn’t plant the virus,” Suguru said. The resulting silence was very loud.
“We don’t need it anymore,” he went on, and tapped a painted nail against the small black box in his pocket. It was made from plastic, which was rare, but aside from that Suguru had no idea what it was. That didn’t worry him. The Sentinel had been the one to guide him to it, and the Sentinel had never once steered him wrong. “We got what we came for. And now they’ll think that all we came for was a bit of snow.”
Which hopefully meant the Gojos would be so preoccupied with the Trop servers that they’d never realize the actual hit had occurred someplace else.
The old physical archives hadn’t been difficult to access. There had been biodigital scanners, of course, and a tricky atmospheric pressure monitor that would sound the alarm at even the slightest displacement of air, but those had both been neatly bypassed with a bit of help from the tower still vibrating happily beneath the gentle pass of Suguru’s hand.
“Smart!” Haibara, cheery as ever. “Geto-san thinks of everything!”
Miguel snorted. “Sure. And maybe one day Geto-san will actually tell us everything. For example—” His careful control slipped, voice shaking with the angry relief that comes after a bad scare, and Suguru settled in for the scolding. He deserved it. He’d gone off script from the moment his boots hit the ground, jeopardizing his own safety and the integrity of the job. Had anyone else done something so stupid, it would have been him delivering this dressing down.
“—why the fuck were you in the archives, Suguru? Never mind blowing a hole in the whole goddamn plan without bothering to warn anyone, I can’t believe you risked an infiltration without doing preliminary reconnaissance. And you’d better have a damn good reason for turning off your comm. Do that again and I swear on the Sentinel I’ll knock your bloody teeth in.”
Miguel paused and took a steadying breath. It fizzed over the comm. “Now, where are you?”
Suguru bit down on a smile. Miguel was intensely protective, especially of Suguru, and it was sort of nice to be worried over. Nice, but unnecessary. Suguru was their best and most capable combatant, and with the tower guarding his back there was literally no safer place he could be.
“You know where I am,” Suguru said. Behind him the Sentinel hummed. “Haibara, I’m gonna miss the rendezvous. You can head back on your own.”
“I can wait!” chirped Haibara.
Nanami’s voice crackled through. “No, you can’t. A few media bots are already attributing the snow to us. You need to get home before the streets turn into a madhouse.”
New Tokyo had no shortage of rabble-rousers. From street gangs to organized activist groups, the city was rife with disgruntled people low on patience for the conglomerates that kept them so strictly to heel. For all they chafed and rebelled, however, no crew had ever really managed to hit a conglomerate where it hurt. Especially not one of the big three.
And then Suguru came along.
Some ten years back, a terrible infection had torn through the lowest levels of the city. It was a common disease, easily treated, but the drug manufacturers had claimed shortages and refused to supply medication. Of course, there had been no shortages. Everyone knew that. The sickness had been a controlled burn, an intentional culling to keep the population contained in a city with incredibly finite space. It would have succeeded, too, except out of nowhere a miraculous shipment of penicillin had appeared in the free clinics across all six affected wards.
Each shipment had been stamped with a wide blue eye. The mark of the Sentinel.
The clinic managers had spread the word, and seemingly overnight Suguru and his crew had gained popularity from the slums to the Heights. They’d even been given a name. The Six Eyes. Soon enough there had been an emblem to go with it: six blue eyes, three stacked beside three, for the six shipments of penicillin and the absolute cheek of labelling them with the mark of the Council’s greatest asset. By the end of that first week, the emblem of the Six Eyes had been graffitied across half the city. By the end of that first year, Suguru and his crew had entered into urban legend.
In the decade since, the Six Eyes had been credited with countless acts of rebellion—with sabotage and sedition and playful disobedience, all done in defiance of a despotic corporate government—and had inspired countless more. Insurgency was in vogue. These days the people of New Tokyo supported different crews like they were sports teams, and whenever one pulled off a fuck you to the Council or the conglomerates they’d flock to the streets to celebrate.
And no crew was more celebrated than the Six Eyes.
If the bots were attributing the snow to them, Suguru wagered the streets would be overrun with partygoers within minutes—and immersed as he was in the Sentinel’s warmth and deep, lulling frequencies, he had no inclination to try and beat them home. He’d wait a few hours and then slip away through the waning crowds.
“If you’re not back here by sun-up, I’m coming after you.” A resigned breath hissed over the comm, and Miguel signed off. “Tell the Sentinel I say hello.”
Suguru smiled. With the exception of Yuki, neither Miguel nor anyone else in the Six Eyes really believed him when he said the Sentinel spoke to him, but they’d seen Suguru pull off enough impossible jobs based on enough impossible hunches to at least entertain him in his delusions. They’d even begun speaking of the tower like it was an honorary member of the crew. It had become a running joke to pass along their well wishes at the close of a job, and in a chorus of static everyone else on the channel bid their farewells.
Obediently Suguru relayed their words, joke or otherwise. He thought it would make the Sentinel happy to be thought of. Sure enough, that triplicate of delighted overtones lilted through its frequencies.
“Yeah, you did good,” Suguru said, tugging off his helmet as his comm went quiet. He took a moment to admire how the black glass reflected the neon city lights, the Sentinel’s lovely tide of blue, and then set it aside. It was a handsome piece of equipment—Yaga always outdid himself when he was given full creative license—but Suguru hated wearing it. To anyone asking he’d bluster about the hypocrisy of obscuring his identity when the Council too hid always behind avatars, but more honestly he disliked it because it got stuffy and he was very particular about his hair.
Luckily, he needn’t bother wearing it here. There was no one around to spot him.
In a city where surveillance was common and information was sold as a commodity, this was the one place in all of New Tokyo that Suguru could really let down his guard. The one place he could really rest. There were no drones, no cameras, no biodigital checkpoints, because interference from the tower (intentional, Suguru thought) crippled their interfacing. There were no people, either. The frequencies that radiated from the Sentinel in that constant booming hum were to Suguru very comforting, almost tranquilizing—but in most other people they caused episodes of sheer, mind-numbing terror. Especially up close. Prolonged exposure almost always led to psychosis, and because of that the Tower District was totally deserted.
The Sentinel stood alone.
A little selfishly, Suguru was glad for that. He liked having the tower all to himself. Plus, without people developing the district, the area around the Sentinel was given over instead to green, growing things—a rare sight in the city. There were cherry trees and flowering plums in the spring, and in winter the pale camellias collected frost. It was a beautiful place. The Sentinel made it lovelier still, and beneath the fall of snow it was genuinely breath-taking.
“There hasn’t been snow like this since I was a kid,” Suguru said. He tucked himself closer to the warm tower and sprawled out onto his back, letting one leg hang loose off the edge of the narrow platform. His breath puffed blue in the winter air, dyed by the aurora gleaming above him. “They used to let it gather up a bit in the Merchant Ward. It got better turnout for the festivals, you know? Everyone came out to the thoroughfares all bundled up and cozy, looking for street food and hot drinks. Sometimes there’d be live music. Games.” Suguru grinned, remembering. “One year there was this massive snowball fight—like, spanning multiple levels, multiple blocks. I took cover behind a dessert stall, and the old lady who ran it gave me a little piece of kintsuba every time I landed a hit on someone.”
The tower hummed, frequencies spiking with interest, and happily Suguru carried on.
For the next few hours he chatted, rambling about upcoming jobs, and how much the kids liked their lessons, and how Hakari and Kirara couldn’t run missions together anymore because their conversations were nauseating over the shared comms. He recalled the plot of a mystery novel he was reading, and in the course of talking it through thought he’d figured out the ending. He described a new card game he'd learned, and a spicy soup that he’d tried, and how the gentle fall of snow made him feel a little sad.
Through it all the tower hummed. Sometimes the resonance changed, dipping or lilting as it reacted to something Suguru said, or harmonizing with his voice like it too had things it wished to say.
Eventually Suguru quieted down and let himself just listen. He couldn’t derive any complex meaning from the changing frequencies—only things like broad emotions and basic direction—but he loved how they beat through him, hypnotic and deep and dulcet. So sweet they felt like music. Layered into that complicated melody were the ambient sounds of New Tokyo itself: light rails and construction bots, flashing advertisements and distant sirens, the footsteps and merrymaking of thousands of partygoers out in force to celebrate the fall of snow—all of it came together in a discordant symphony of life, a testament to a city in its prime.
A testament to the might of the tower thrumming happily against Suguru’s ribs.
New Tokyo was the last real bastion of a decimated race. She had sister cities scattered across a world overcome with ice and toxic gases, but those cities were only surviving. New Tokyo thrived. The Biosphere made that possible, filtering the poisonous air beyond the city limits and blocking out the cold, and beneath its cover the conglomerates and their Council played at divinity. They manufactured the seasons and the synthetic atmosphere that kept the city alive—
But it was the Sentinel that truly shifted the balance.
Powering the Biosphere and everything else in the city besides, the Sentinel was a limitless source of pure energy, safeguarding tens of millions of lives against the desolation that waited beyond. Everyone who lived in New Tokyo understood that. They knew their neon-soaked streets were dissonant with all the chaos of a city in bloom because the Sentinel was keeping watch from its high and lonely hill—a lighthouse in a storm, crowned not with a lantern but with all the potent force of a hyper-localized sun.
As for what exactly the Sentinel was, no one knew.
Some people didn’t wish to know. It didn’t matter to them what the Sentinel was, only that it was. So long as it continued to offer its power, they didn’t care to squint too closely at something they couldn’t understand, something that terrified them, something they’d long ago taken for granted.
Most people, though. Most people wanted to know.
Suguru wanted to know.
There were plenty of theories, of course. But the Council had forbidden any formal sort of study, and the city’s numerous universities obeyed that mandate without argument. They’d lose their funding, otherwise. In their place, independent researchers and armchair conspiracists did their best to hypothesize, ranging everything from a proton star to an ancient being that had emerged from the melted permafrost before the ice returned with a vengeance. But that was all guesswork. Speculative, and unproven.
In many ways it did nothing but add to the mystery.
Neo-religions called it a god. They claimed the Sentinel as their deity and ornamented their shrines with paltry imitations of the vivid blue light that lent its heartbeat to the city, declaring that they were the chosen people, that New Tokyo had been blessed.
Suguru had no patience for such cultists. To him the Sentinel was no god.
Ever since he was very small he’d claimed it only as a friend.
“But a really annoying one,” he said. Anticipating the tower’s miffed little warble, Suguru swept a hand through the air in time with the tune, like he was conducting it. The Sentinel cut it off sharply and instead let out a deep cranky drone that shook the whole tower and Suguru’s laughter along with it.
When the first light of dawn broke over the Biosphere, cutting fractals through its thin membrane, Suguru endured a beat of disappointment. He didn’t want to go. But there were people waiting for him at home, and so dutifully he got to his feet and began the slow work of reattaching the wretched webbing.
Immediately the Sentinel’s humming dulled. Its frequencies clashed, tuneless and gloomy.
Suguru snorted. “You big baby. Are you pouting?” He ran a knuckle over the warm stone, but that gloomy humming didn’t brighten. “I’d stay here all day if I could. But you’ve got a city to power—” Suguru tapped again at the plastic box in his pocket, “—and I’ve got a monopoly to topple.”
Pulling on his helmet, Suguru touched his forehead twice to the sulking tower. In the cresting dawn it shone golden, dappled all in blue.
“I’ll tell the crew you say hello,” Suguru promised.
Then he stepped off the platform, and let himself fall.
-:-
The streets had mostly calmed as Suguru made his slow way home, but he could spot neon blue paint nearly everywhere he looked. The Six Eyes, three stacked beside three, emblazoned on billboards and snow banks and even a passing light rail. Tribute, to the crew that never failed. Maintenance bots were out in force to clean up. They would have the graffiti scrubbed away by the end of the day—
—and by the end of the night it would be painted fresh all over again.
Grinning to himself, Suguru turned off a pedestrian thoroughfare and trotted down a set of stairs, then another, and another, before crossing a courtyard bathed in oscillating blue light and climbing a few stories back up. The city was a maze. Suguru knew it like he knew his own name. He used that advantage to take a convoluted path home, stopping off in a dead zone to divest himself of his helmet and tactical gear, and then again at a cafe to watch for surveillance drones while he nursed a much-needed cup of coffee.
The surface of his coffee rippled faintly in time with the Sentinel’s rhythmic humming. This far away Suguru couldn’t make out any variance in the frequencies, and in fact he struggled to hear any overtones at all, but there was no place in the city that the Sentinel couldn’t be felt. Suguru leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, enjoying how the deepest tones vibrated gently through the air and beneath his feet.
That beat kept him company as he finished his coffee and started again for home.
Suguru and a few other members of the Six Eyes shared a machiya townhouse in the Trades Quarter. Like most residences in the labyrinthine, multi-leveled city, the townhouse was a narrow thing, but very tall, and doubled as a structural support for the tiers both above and below. Suguru could enter from the ground floor, which was solidly in the Trades Quarter. Eight stories up he could exit into the Merchant Ward.
Suguru didn’t much like the Merchant Ward. It was too loud, too bright, too overwrought with marketing and sales bots. The Trades Quarter, on the other hand, was the most traditional neighborhood in all of New Tokyo, and after the Tower District it was Suguru’s very favorite. Walking through the Trades Quarter felt like visiting a forgotten age. Everywhere there were red lanterns and dark wood, paper screens and hidden courtyards. It even got real sunlight.
It had also got a good heaping of snow.
The little garden spilling out before the townhouse was buried under fluffy drifts, and there was evidence of a great battle in the snowballs splattered across the engawa. Someone had built a snowman. Next to that was a decent attempt at the Sentinel: a tall tower—sturdy enough, if slightly on the lean—capped with a lantern that was still lit and flickering. Probably Megumi’s handiwork, judging off all the careful detail. He’d even added the lookout platform that had been Suguru’s hideout for the past few hours.
Suguru smiled. He’d have to remember to mention this the next time he was there.
“Quit your sappy grinning and get in here,” came a dry voice. Suguru looked up. Shoko was leaning in the entryway, puffing on her pipe and squinting at him. Magenta smoke hung heavy in the air around her. “You need to go put Miguel out of his misery. He’s driving me up the fucking wall.”
“Got it,” Suguru said, biting back a laugh. “Guess that explains why you’re out of your cave.”
Shoko was one of the foundational members of the Six Eyes and, in Suguru’s opinion, the greatest cyberneticist New Tokyo had ever seen. She and Yaga together were responsible for outfitting the entire crew with the cybernetic tactical gear that kept them alive, kept them safe, but more than that Shoko was a genuine sorceress when it came to tech. She was brilliant with new-age systems and even better with old ones, resurrecting and rehabilitating archaic technology so reliably people had begun calling her Doc.
She fucking hated that nickname. Probably that’s why it had stuck.
Shoko was indispensable to the crew. She was also an obsessive shut-in who rarely left the lair she called a workshop, which meant Miguel must have been upset enough to come to her in search of a (very unwilling) listening ear. Nothing short of forced commiseration would have driven her all the way outside.
“Got something for you,” Suguru said, handing over the plastic box. Shoko’s eyes lit with interest. Without another word she emptied her pipe over her forearm, snatched the box from Suguru’s hand, and disappeared inside.
Suguru didn’t bother following her up to her workshop. Shoko wasn’t the sort to explain herself as she worked and she could get snippy if pestered with too many questions; he’d let her seek him out when she found something worth sharing. Anyway his curiosity at the little plastic box was rapidly becoming eclipsed by his interest in a hot meal.
Removing his boots and snow-sodden socks, he went in search of breakfast.
The townhouse kitchen was a lovely thing, all tatami floors and scrubbed-over wood. It was Nanami’s domain more than anyone else’s, so it was kept very tidy (under threat of violence) and smelled always of fresh baking. A system of mirrors brought in natural light and the soft pulse of omnipresent blue, and usually the space was full up with noise and with laughter.
Just now, however, it held only Yuki.
“Oh thank the fucking Sentinel,” she said, looking up from her coffee when Suguru wandered in. He cocked an eyebrow. It wasn’t like Yuki to be so concerned, but the relief in her voice was palpable. Suguru might have been a little touched, only then she carried on and ruined it. “Miguel had me assigned to rescue duty. That is not how I wanted to spend my morning.”
Suguru snorted. “Like you’d ever miss a chance to hold that over my head.”
“Fair point.” Yuki smiled and got to her feet. Coming over to greet him properly, she leaned in and touched her brow twice to Suguru’s, once at each temple. The gesture was an old one, and very intimate—an expression of trust left over from the bygone age of neural interfacing. These days it was done mostly between family.
“Breakfast?” Suguru offered, when they broke apart. “I’m starving.”
“Sure, if you’re cooking. I’m not allowed.”
Suguru grinned. “You’re still banned? I thought Nanami forgave you for the fire.”
“He said he’ll forgive me when I find a replacement for his pan.” Yuki slouched past Suguru as he began rummaging for ingredients and draped herself dramatically across the kitchen table. “I’ve been to half the shops in the city, Suguru. I can’t find cast iron anywhere.”
That wasn’t surprising. Iron was strictly rationed, and even though manufacturing behemoths like the Kamo ventured regularly beyond the Biosphere to log and to mine, only some materials could be acquired with enough surplus to distribute for civilian use. Wood was easy to get, and glass. Metal was not. That made lasting, reliable tools like a cast iron pan practically priceless. Anyone in possession of such a thing would care for it lovingly, and guard it fiercely. Nanami had been understandably devastated at the loss.
Suguru made a sympathetic sound as he whisked up some eggs. “Get used to dish duty.”
“Speaking of, have you seen Miguel? Heard you fucked up the mission.” Yuki waggled her eyebrows. “That means extra chores.”
“I didn’t fuck up the mission,” Suguru insisted. “I just, uh—”
“Turned off his comm, broke into the archives, and threw away our access to the Troposphere,” said Miguel, stomping into the kitchen. He came up to take a firm grip on Suguru’s shoulders, trapping the bowl of whisked eggs between them. “The snow just stopped, Suguru. They’ve locked down the servers.”
Which, if the job had been run as planned, would have meant curtains for the next stage. A critical hit, end of the line, knockout blow for a mission that had been months in the making, all because Suguru had obeyed an instinct for mischief and an urgent push from the Sentinel.
But the job hadn’t been run as planned, and Suguru had no doubt at all that there was something significant about the little plastic box currently under Shoko’s knife.
“Breakfast?” he said, holding up the eggs. “I’ll make you a really good omelet.”
Miguel stared at him. Probably it would have been intimidating if not for the way his mouth twitched as he tried and failed to bite down on a smile.
“You’re such an ass,” he said at last, stepping back so he could give Suguru a once-over. Finding him hale and whole, he leaned in to touch their foreheads together and then went to plop down next to Yuki. “You could at least pretend to be a little sorry.”
Dutifully Suguru put on a sheepish expression, which only made Miguel smile wider.
“I’ll take green onions in mine,” he said. “And cheese.”
Suguru got to work on the food, chopping and frying as he listened to Miguel and Yuki chatter. The three of them were the unspoken captains of the Six Eyes—no job was run without at least one of them involved and on the ground—and so their conversations typically revolved around work. Not this morning. This morning they spoke only of the snow, recalling their favorite memories of childhood snowfalls and making bets on which of the kids had initiated the snowball fight. They didn’t bother guessing who’d won. The twins’ coats were hanging soggy in the genkan, and if they’d been involved there was no chance of any other victor.
The Sentinel’s lowest tones set a beat for their conversation. Suguru tapped his foot to keep time, humming to himself as he plated up the omelets and slid them down the table. Then he lobbed a bottle of hot sauce at Yuki’s head.
“Itadakimasu,” she cheered, snatching it out of the air. She shuffled over when he came around to join them, leaving him the seat between her and Miguel. With both of them looming large at his shoulders, Suguru got the distinct impression that he was being penned in.
An interrogation was coming. Best to get out ahead of it.
“Shoko has the—um,” he began, realizing midway through that actually he would have been better off staying quiet. “Thing.”
Yuki looked up from her food. There was a fleck of sauce at the corner of her mouth, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. Suguru understood very suddenly where Todo had got his manners. “The thing?”
He took a bite of egg and chewed slowly, trying to think of a nicer way to explain that he had no idea what he’d stolen, or why it had been worth derailing the entire job. No such inspiration struck. “Yeah,” he said. “The thing I stole from the archives. A little black box.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you lead with that?” Yuki turned to Miguel with a syrupy smile. “That sounds nice. Doesn’t that sound nice? I’ve always wanted a little black box.”
Miguel pushed away his plate. “Why the archives, Suguru? You should have been on the full opposite side of that data center. Taking a route that we vetted, through security we prepared for.”
Suguru knew. He’d had his path memorized so thoroughly he could’ve done it with his eyes closed. Only, he hadn’t so much as turned toward the direction of the server rooms before a harsh, grating frequency had shaken through the floor and right up into his bones, rattling him so powerfully his teeth had clacked together.
The Sentinel. Telling him, in no uncertain terms: WRONG WAY.
And so Suguru had turned around.
“Which, you know, eventually brought me to the archives,” he said, pushing eggs around his plate. “I don’t know what I took. But I know the Sentinel wanted me to take it.”
Miguel looked unconvinced, but Yuki, bless her, was nodding.
As a girl, Yuki had been raised in the cult of the Sentinel. Her family had been deeply devout, and so had she. It was only as she’d grown older that she’d begun to wonder what, exactly, the Sentinel was—and with that curiosity had come the first stirrings of concern. She’d worried that New Tokyo had become too dependent on the power of something they didn’t understand, and she’d caused waves in the cults with her loud questions and louder doubts.
It was that firebrand spirit that had led her to fall in with the Six Eyes.
She and Suguru, especially, had become very close very fast through their shared fascination with the tower. Yuki, convinced that the city needed contingencies and alternative sources of energy, had joined Suguru in his search to understand the Sentinel’s true nature. They’d spent years wondering, and theorizing, and researching, and Yuki had grown into someone empirical and deeply shrewd.
But she’d never fully lost her reverence for the tower.
Watching her snap up the last bite of her omelet, still quietly nodding, Suguru knew that she agreed with him: if the Sentinel wanted something done, such a thing warranted doing. No questions asked.
Miguel did not share their mind.
“So, to summarize,” he began, scrubbing a hand over his face, “you took a wild detour through an unmapped level of the data center, with your comm turned off—”
“That wasn’t intentional,” Suguru lied, loyally. “The archives had insulated walls—”
“—because an overgrown battery ‘told’ you to steal something from the most powerful people in the city, and you don’t even know what it is?”
“Well, when you say it like that—”
A sharp clatter came suddenly from the hallway, and all three of them turned as one to watch as Shoko came barreling into the room. Her grin was wide and completely genuine, which put Suguru immediately on edge.
“None of you know what it is,” she said. “But it’s gonna change fucking everything.”
And then she was gone, bolting back toward her workshop. For a moment the kitchen was quiet, and very still—and then Suguru was on his feet, Miguel and Yuki close behind.
By the time they arrived at her workshop, Shoko had already got situated at her console. It was a massive, intimidating system. Everywhere there were sensor arrays and omni-screens and flickering holoprojected codices, the entire thing esoteric and impenetrable and well beyond Suguru’s interest or ability to understand. Shoko, though, navigated it like an extension of her own body. Which, in a way, it was. On her left hand all the fingers past the second joint had been replaced with a synth-alloy that she’d bioengineered specifically to optimize her interfacing.
Just now, however, she’d waved everything away and dragged forward an ancient-looking monitor instead. The screen was full up with pixelated diagrams.
“Shit, Doc,” said Yuki, coming up to peer over her shoulder. “Are you using wires?”
“Yeah,” Shoko said. She sounded gleeful. “This is old school. Some real clay tablet shit.” Shoko tapped at the little black box with a metallic finger and threw Suguru a delighted look. “You took something called an external hard drive. People used to use them to store information locally—like, physically—which made it impossible to access if you didn’t actually have the drive. They’ve been outlawed since the Data Wars.”
Miguel hummed, his interest piqued. “So they’re secure?”
“More secure than anything stored on a communal server, at least. Not to mention you’d need specialized equipment to access it, and specialized knowledge to recognize it in the first place. This one was encrypted, too, but the algorithmic strength was pathetic. Probably an AI-generated key, which, obviously, became obsolete back when— don’t touch,” she snapped, interrupting herself when Miguel reached out to pick up the drive. She flicked his hand so sharply it made an audible thwack, those metal fingers bruising. Miguel snatched his hand back with a scowl.
“The hard drive alone is valuable,” Shoko continued, caging it possessively under her hand. “But it’s the information stored on the drive that’s really gonna blow your minds.”
She nodded to the monitor, and Suguru and Yuki crowded in to see. Miguel joined a second later, still cradling his hand.
“Schematics,” Shoko said, pulling up file after file on the flickering screen. “Dating back almost two centuries. Naturally there have been changes over the years, but—look. These are the original plans for the city.”
It took Suguru a moment to comprehend what he was seeing, but as Shoko pulled up one blueprint after another his jaw slowly went slack, and sweat gathered along his palms. He couldn’t tell if the faint tremor spiriting up his spine was from a rush of adrenaline or from the vibrations of a far-distant heartbeat, too low to be heard.
“That’s—” Yuki said, pointing.
“The original subway system,” Shoko said, nodding. “Before they introduced the light rails. They reused a lot of the infrastructure, but some of these routes aren’t on any current maps.”
Which meant a whole network of tunnels beneath the city, their use unknown. For a crew of insurrectionists, that alone was a goldmine.
“It just keeps going,” Shoko said. “Everything is out of date, obviously, but the bones are there. The power grid, the greenhouses, the goddamn sewers—we’ve got specs for everything. Including . . . ”
She pulled up another diagram, and Miguel, leaning so close to the screen his face glowed in the faint light, began to laugh. It was a giddy sound. Astonished. “The water mains.”
“Going all the way back to the reservoirs. There are eight, apparently, and they all have multiple access ports for maintenance.” Shoko waved a hand and called up a holographic map of the city, sinking her fingers into the display to pull forward the Trades Quarter. “There’s one not far from here. Dunno if it’s still accessible, but we could have it scouted and confirmed within the hour.”
Suguru exchanged looks with the others, identical expressions of disbelief on their faces. The structural schematic for the reservoir Shoko had pulled up on the screen was dotted with multitudes of access ports—and if these blueprints were antiquated, there was a chance some of them had been closed up, or abandoned. That meant less security. That could mean no security.
The job became very suddenly real, its vague and distant finish line now close and enticing—all they had left to do was tap the reservoir and distribute water quietly and conservatively to the people who needed it most. That was only two steps. Easy.
Suguru bit down on a smile, holding in a breath till his chest was full up with it. The Sentinel had brought this to them. It had given this to them, and Suguru thought he might burst with pride.
“The Sentinel says hello,” he said, smirking at Miguel. “By the way.”
Miguel met his crooked grin with a wide smile of his own. “Fine,” he said, digging a knuckle into Suguru’s ribs. “Fucking fine! I believe it! The Sentinel did your job for you, and if I could get anywhere near the fucking thing without pissing myself, I’d kiss it full on the mouth.”
“Blasphemy,” Yuki teased. “Got anything else for us, Doc? I just know those Zen’in bastards have a secret bunker somewhere.”
“Well, actually,” said Shoko, and her voice was suddenly different. Slower. More serious. Suguru and Miguel quit their quiet squabbling and turned to listen. “There’s one more thing I think you should see.”
She clicked through several screens until she got to a folder bloated with files—architectural sketches, all—and began to open them, one by one. Suguru went hot and cold all at once, struck through with a bone-deep recognition that closed up his throat.
The sketches were varied. There were conceptual drawings, assembly details, structural schematics. There was an engineering cross-section that detailed the internal structure—hollow—as if sliced by an imaginary plane. There was even a diagram of the immense foundations, which were cut through with utility ports and a whole mess of subsurface floor plans, and sunk so deep they anchored into the bedrock of the city.
Every sketch was labeled NEW TOKYO TOWER.
Suguru gripped the back of Shoko’s chair, leaning in so close his nose almost touched the screen. Beneath his feet the Sentinel’s deep hum pulsed through the room.
“What is this?” Miguel said, frowning. “I’ve never heard of New Tokyo Tower.”
“Yes,” said Yuki. Her voice came out soft. Awed. “You have.” She reached out and touched the monitor, tracing a shaking finger down through the maze of underground infrastructure. There was a whole complex buried there—a hidden facility that provided subterranean access to the tower above.
Suguru finally remembered to breathe. “You just know it by a different name.”
-:-
Suguru stood with his toes over the edge of the lookout platform, one hand pressed flat against the tower at his back. The frequencies layered over the Sentinel’s deep humming came very fast and very faint—a rapid heartbeat beneath a held breath.
“Nervous?” Suguru said. He swept his thumb back and forth over warm stone. “Me too.”
“Do you want to go over it again?” asked Nanami. He sounded the same as always—composed, slightly put-upon. “I’ve identified nineteen weak points in the plan.”
“Which we’ve accounted for,” Yuki snapped. “Quit freaking out the newbies, Nanami.”
A low laugh sounded over the comm, derisive and bold. Maki, eager to prove herself. “Don’t worry, Sensei. I’ll keep this quadrant locked down till Yuuta is done throwing up.”
Suguru grinned, blood singing. He thrived under pressure and he’d always loved the buzz that came with real stakes, but today it was a really spectacular sort of hum. A euphoric exhilaration, augmented with the restlessness of the tower beneath his palm. Part of him still didn’t believe this was happening.
“All teams confirm position,” Miguel ordered. “Anybody fucks this up, they’re on garbage duty for a month.”
One by one voices came crackling over the comm, alternating quiet confirmations and nervy, stupid jokes until the entire crew had checked in and sounded off. Eighteen people. Every active member of the Six Eyes had volunteered for the job, mobilized for the sake of understanding their only honorary member.
They didn’t know what they’d find inside the tower. They’d devised contingency after contingency, ready for any eventuality and prepared for any outcome. Could be the job would amount only to reconnaissance. Could be it’d end in exposé, or extraction, or pure, unmitigated enlightenment. Could be they’d be met with violence.
Wherever it took them, the Six Eyes would be ready.
It was their most complicated job to date. A symphony of moving parts that had to go off exactly. Each person had their own intricate part to play, their own cue, their own measure, and each looked to Suguru to begin the score. He had to choose the exact right moment. A beat too soon, or a moment too late, and everything would collapse—the entire thing was a masterclass in insanity.
But Suguru and his crew were plenty crazy.
Suguru adjusted the webbing beneath his arms. “Miguel, check in.”
For a moment there was only static, then: “All clear. On your go-ahead. Oh, and Suguru?”
Suguru didn’t wait for him to finish. The frequencies humming all around him had spiked, giddy and ready and urgent, and as Suguru stepped off the platform to initiate the job, Miguel’s voice came faintly around the pull of gravity and a rush of wind.
“When you get inside, tell the Sentinel we say hello.”
-:-