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As a child she dreamed of heroes, the strong and good who protected the weak and small, saved them from harm, brought monsters down from destruction. She had needed them then, and then she had dared think she could be one.
She can’t say for sure if it was the logical step that brought her to Kritiker; for all that she’s always been convinced she’s done the right thing, she came to think of herself more as a companion, something of a guide.
But she’d run late and the world had ended.
Hanae shakes herself. Melodrama has never served her well and now is really not the time to start wallowing in flappy coats and self-recriminations. She shakes the brass knuckles onto her right hand and thinks that the old heroes, the true heroes, were never afraid to do what was necessary. She still doesn’t feel like the heroes she’d wanted as a child.
The man is a worthless powerless Eszett agent, the kind they use up and throw away like paper cups and in another life maybe she could have taken pity. He folds with little more than a broken nose and some cracked ribs - inelegant and imprecise, but Manx has developed a good instinct for which ones need effort and which ones break at a glare. She doesn’t like wasting her resources.
There is a warehouse, he says, where they are pretty sure Schwarz has holed up.
“Pretty sure?” she says, archly.
He flinches. “They’re not - they’re - there was a dispute over our future trajectory,” he says, stumbling a little over the words, and something tinks in the back of her mind. “They lost the favour of the elders. I - I mean, they’re not with us, they’re traitors, but you want them, right? This is good intel, I’m helping you.”
Manx smiles and gets someone to write down the address and knocks the agent out with a punch that’s maybe a little more forceful than absolutely necessary. “Dump him in the bay,” she says, drops the knuckles back in her pocket. She hates the smell of a trap.
“You shot the messenger,” Brad Crawford says, amused. He’s standing on the corner, arms loose at his sides, his whole posture casual and superior. Hanae has her gun trained on him before he’s finished, finger hesitating by the trigger, and he raises his hands in mock-surrender. Something’s burning nearby, acrid and oily. Something is burning all over Tokyo.
“What do you want?”
“Right now I’d like some reassurance,” he says, frowning near-comically, and she itches to take the fake expressions off his face. Maybe there wouldn’t be any to replace them. “I was banking on you being the, hm, ‘good guys,’ and then I learn you throw unarmed and unconscious people in the sea. He had a mother, you know,” he adds reproachfully.
“Maybe you should send an orphan next time,” she says, feeling petty and irritable and fed up with the way that Abyssinian stares through them all with hollow eyes, the way Shuichi is still dead and the world is turned inside out to put her here like a ghost in her own streets. She tries to scan for snipers or ambushers, or another street gang of salarymen and school teachers, without taking her eyes off Crawford.
“Oh, we’re quite alone,” he says, and she really didn’t miss his breezy smugness. She walks carefully closer, staying safely out his reach. Her arm is steady.
“It was a cute story. You, caught with treason, wanting our help. Very cute.”
He tilts his head non-commitantly, but he must have known they’d see right through that one so she takes it as acknowledgment on his part.
“How is Fujimiya Aya?” She has to ask; she doesn’t really want to but even bad news are important information.
“Possessed,” he says, dismissively.
In her dreams she still watches Fujimiya Aya rising like something from an old horror movie; speaking with something that definitely could not be her own voice. Hanae had been late, but she’d been there. She wishes she hadn’t.
“What is it?” she asks, because it’s the best shot at an answer they’ve had so far. They’ve assumed ‘demon’ but they’ve no idea which one, what kind.
“It’s easy to get some little detail wrong,” he says, looking philosophical under the flickering street lights. “Especially when you’re working with a bullshit made-up language. They got the one the ritual called, but not the one they wanted.”
She rolls her eyes at him, impatient. Crawford’s empty talk is even more tedious now; she hadn’t thought that possible. He sighs, and she thinks he has to make an effort to tell the actual, plain truth. She hopes it hurts.
“They believe that Hitler was the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, one known as Kalki. This avatar would come at a time of disorder and immorality to bring about the end of the iron age and the beginning of the golden age -”
Or maybe it pains him that the truth is so dumb.
“- destroying the faithless and restoring the good race to a long era of total happiness.” The corner of his mouth pulls up with something like distaste. “I’m sure you can see the obvious parallels. When the Reich fell, the remnants of the more esoteric branches of SS fled into the mountains, some of them joining into Eszet.”
“Only some?” She lets her arm sink to her side; worst case, she’ll shoot him in the kneecap. Even he should be bothered by that.
He shrugs. “There was some ideological dispute, but the Elders won leadership by showing their peers the light of their vision and the bodies of those too slow to expat.”
“Why Japan?”
“It could have been anywhere; they’ve had agents looking for the right vessel all over the world. But Fujimiya Aya was here, and so we came. Avatars don’t age, you know.”
“And all the things you’ve done - the murders, the madness, Takatori...” (Hanae has a long list of misdeeds labeled, for simplicity, ‘Takatori Reiji.’ She is a little comforted that at least ‘Shuichi’ is the last entry.)
“We’ve been very busy creating the right conditions.” He sounds proud of a job well done, and she pushes the sick little feeling in her stomach down.
A shot rings out, far away, then another, then silence. She left her agents at the base, and they had better have stayed there or she will shoot them herself. Still, she worries, in the little pocket at the back of her mind that she’s set aside for non-emergencies.
“And now you expect me to believe we have a reincarnated Hitler in a young girl’s body about to run Japan?”
“Oh no. Like I said: bullshit made-up language, but very accurate rituals and penances. That girl holds the last avatar of Vishnu.” He pauses to let that sink in, as if it could. “And once he’s up to full strength they will use him to take over the whole world.”
She opens her mouth a few times, dismisses a number of obvious questions. She saw it, she thinks. She saw it happen and she didn’t stop it. “Full strength,” she says finally. “What about until then?”
He smiles then, vicious and pleased. It’s oddly comfortingly ordinary, like a pebble in her shoe. “Vishnu is not some demon to be summoned like a dog, but their power, pulling on the whole of Eszet, was great enough to tear through the worlds; he is confused and open for influences, and they are keeping him surrounded by their prayers.”
“So if they were interrupted..?”
“Someone with the right gift, the right connection, might convince him the time of Kalki has not yet come.”
“Sounds like a job for a telepath. Why are you talking to me?”
“You have the manpower, we have information you need.”
Hanae can’t help it, life has been too awful lately; she laughs until her eyes tear up. Crawford looks a little - yeah, that has to be his miffed face, like his annoyed face with an extra crease at the corner of his mouth. She decides to ask the obvious.
“Why should I believe you’re turning against them now?”
He looks briefly uncomfortable, and she thinks she will cherish that look for the rest of her life. “It didn’t go quite as we had planned it, either.” He gives her an introduction in Crawford Planning and as he talks she thinks Holy shit. For a brief traitorous moment, she wishes Shuichi had had half that forethought. She considers recruiting. “Then the Elders put the girl under their direct surveillance, and, well - here we are.”
She fixes him with a look which would have been a lot more efficient on someone who wasn’t Crawford. “So, wait - if they don’t trust you, what use are you to us?” Before he can answer that, suspicion hits. “What were you going to do with Aya?”
“Your attention to the most pressing matters at hand is impressive as ever, Kitada. You and your toy soldiers were too late to stop the ritual. This is your responsibility, your people suffering. I am offering you a chance to help.”
He sounds angry and she thinks he must be distracted, because he botched the whole deal. She would have expected him to start with trying to guilt her and fed her information with a teaspoon. This is all wrong, and she is inclined to believe him just for that. Of course, she saw him work with Reiji; he might still be playing her.
“As I was trying to say, we have the kind of information you get when you’ve been working directly for the leaders of an old occult organization on the preparations for the greatest summoning in modern history.”
“You played a high-stakes game with one of the most dangerous organizations in the world and lost, tough. That still doesn’t convince me to trust you.”
“You don’t have to trust me-”
She cuts him off with a gun to the face and a glare that, apparently, conveys just how close she is to walking away.
“They have my team,” he says tightly, and Hanae is stunned. She’d almost come to think of them as an organic whole, impossible to divide. But Crawford’s face is drawn and angry, and when she thinks about it she hasn’t seen them in one place since the Tower. “Eszet have rewarded us with promotions; Schuldig has been chosen to escort the Lady on her approaching travels and is deep in preparations, while Nagi and Farfarello have already been sent to prepare their arrival in key cities.” By dropping a few heads, Hanae assumes.
“And you?”
“I remain to aid the Elders as necessary. Listen,” he says with an emphasis even deflecting Reiji’s worst ideas didn’t merit, “I want my team, you want the girl. We have a little time to work out a solution, but we have to be done before they leave for the Fatherland. We have barely a week.”
She thinks about it. Weiß, what’s left, won’t like it. Kritiker admin staff will be divided; Birman won’t like it. Shuichi wouldn’t like it. Hanae doesn’t like it. They might end up served as demon supper, for all she knows; Eszet cleaning up loose ends. But they don’t really have much else to go on.
A little too close for comfort, something crashes and crumbles, like a demolition site. Someone gibbers, muted by distance.
“I’m going to talk this over with my teams. Get in touch with me tomorrow, I know you have my number. Don’t send a messenger, I am fed up with taking out your garbage. I want some reassurance that Fujimiya Aya will be returned to us, in good condition. I want you out of Japan when this is over. You can use the night to think of how to get me in.”
He smiles like the gears of his plans are starting to turn again. “I need a secretary.”