Chapter Text
The early afternoon rush turned the corridors of the second University of Tokyo into a stream of hasty footsteps. Shoulders bumped against each other, followed by mumbled apologies but aside from that, it was eerily quiet. Few students of this drone factory had the energy to chat between classes and the jobs that allowed them to pay for a future in one of the countless cubicles of cooperate Tokyo with no chance of climbing past the false sense of security that was the middle class of 2104. Any opportunities past this were reserved for those wealthy and influential enough for a place at the 1st University of Tokyo.
The walls were seamed by the afternoon shift of students hunched against them, preparing for their courses with laptops on their laps. They sat with pulled-up legs or those hurrying past them would stomp on them without looking. Everyone was busy and everyone had been comforted more often than they could count that this was nothing but good practice for the lives that awaited them once they had all outgrown the educational system.
The first lesson was that the words didn’t matter. It was either this or the streets because in days like these and with unemployment rates rising on the daily, even the drunkest shelf-stacker in their mid-thirties had one or two diplomas gathering dust under their bed.
So they worked and studied. Those with good time management skills or generous but not wealthy families withdrew to the social rooms and shut themselves away behind flimsy plastic curtains to retreat into the wide universe of virtual worlds. Chat rooms were vibrant internet cafés where all colours were permitted but the industrial grey of offices and universities of low prestige. The curtains didn’t offer a soundproof surrounding but it was generally understood to leave people to their private choices of entertainment.
The world was monochrome but only a synthport and a password stood between monotony and the fake rainbows of the data highways. Even future office drone #BD361 could afford to put on a tailor-made pixel suit and have an animated voice chat with strangers from the other end of the world.
Those in the corridors were there to work, to finish their essays or to learn for the next quiz.
But there’s always one exception.
A reply popped up on Kei’s laptop monitor, an old Toshiba model and hand-me-down from his brother. This sturdy machine could knock an intruder out cold and would still boot - tried and tested. But it’d succumb to any attempt at entering a 3D environment or voice chat even if Kei wanted to give it a try. Interacting with the alternate world with only an image-to-text description software and a 2D chat program at his disposal was like walking a wasteland of cyberspace like a blind and deaf man. And old, as many assumed.
[Is it really true? Sunako, you’re the best! But what about your parents?]
Kei’s nerves tingled. This was it, this was what he had been working towards to for the last three weeks. Finding his target had been easy but gaining her trust had been a surprisingly difficult task. Funny, back in middle and high school, his classmates had made befriending people look so easy, he had been certain that at nineteen, he should have had enough second-hand experience to emulate the process. As it turned out, pretending to be an excitable and privileged fourteen-year-old teenage girl was pretty tough. A privileged teen but no access to the most basic virtual hard- and software, that was a hard sell but finally, his story of strict, overprotective parents who didn’t want their little princess and their fortune to get harmed provided just the right thrill of tragedy for his target to trust him.
Kei rolled his shoulders, wishing the stream of people would die down already. Sitting with his long legs crossed on a hard concrete floor was doing a number to his joints.
The cursor was blinking in front of them. Nabiki was waiting for Sunako’s answer. Everything depended on this. If he did this right, he’d be out of here in two or three sentences and would never have to talk to her again.
“What about my parents, indeed,” he scoffed, cracking his knuckles and stretching his bony fingers.
[My older brother promised to help me sneak outside. He also got us the tickets, we can trust him.] His fingertips flew over the keyboard, his hands shaking with excitement. Don’t overdo it. Keep it simple and to the point. Clear instructions. This had become his mantra. One word too much and he’d tangle himself up in his own web of lies.
[You just have to be there and we’ll pick you up. You’ll see, it’s gonna be great!] He glanced over the monitor, scanning the corridor for any suspicious activity. He hated busy public places like this but they were also the best camouflage. With his old jeans, worn sneakers, and faded black hoodie that belonged to his brother, he fitted right in. If anyone bothered to look at him, they’d see another skinny student who was only a couple of skipped meals away from turning his delicate face haggard, with the dark-rimmed eyes glued to his school work so that the next breakdown wasn’t for nothing. Too poor and unimportant for the first university, too smart and driven - and maybe cowardly - to end up in the streets or get involved in criminal activities.
He sneered at the assessment of his own appearance. Poor, definitely. He pushed his slipping glasses back up his nose. The frame had been bent out of shape for a while now and in a world where artificial lens implants were around the same price as a new pair of glasses, he couldn’t afford either. Cowardly, yes, that, too. That was what he hoped everyone would think. Nobody would mistake him for one of those insane cyber hitmen and nobody would see him jump out of a dark corner in front of the barrel of a gun to slice a neck or two anytime soon.
He was quite content with the path he had chosen under his family’s circumstances. Collecting and finding data, papers, documents, diaries, analogue or digital. No riches awaited him, certainly not from a single job, his function in this crazy world of power and knowledge that got so easily corrupted by greed and ego, wasn’t flashy enough for that. More blood and drama, more money. People loved to get rid of those in their way and they loved a nasty story around it. A simple retriever like him who snuck around in digital archives and cracked the occasional backup file on an outdated system wasn’t interesting enough.
On the flipside, retrievers lived longer lives and he was good enough of it for a steady stream of jobs, despite his young age and old equipment. It was time for at least a partial upgrade for his mobile devices and he also needed to get his glasses fixed. Thank god this job was exceptionally well paid. It was also the first time his target wasn’t a lost will of a deceased great-grandfather or the last copy of the registration of property in an obscure location.
As it turned out, in an age where children grew up with their brains directly hooked up to the internet, few were aware that they left traces brighter than the neon lights of Tokyo’s red district. He broke his personal record when he found Nabiki in her favourite cyber hangout on the first day.
[I can’t wait! For real, Sun, you’re something else. I’m so glad I met you <3]
“Cherish the feeling while it lasts,” he muttered and after he made sure that nobody was watching him, he typed his last message as the fifteen-year-old Sunako Takano.
[Can’t wait either! This is gonna be so much fun! Noooo, my mom is back, gotta go. Take care, hun!]
Hit send . Exited the Blue Morning Café. Disconnected.
Letting out a long sigh, he closed his laptop. Hun. Do kids these days even call each other hun? Did they when he was fifteen? Kei had no idea.
The rush around him had died down and most real students had left for their classes. He was one of only three left sitting in corridor 6F. Well, no he was less surprised that he felt watched. But the head of the other two was bent over their devices and he suspected one of them was asleep. Or dead, either way, it wasn’t one of his concerns, nor was what awaited Nabiki when she waited for an online friend who’d never come. If he cared, he’d hope that the old woman who paid him for this truly was nothing but an estranged but loving grandma whose only son had been manipulated away by his selfish wife.
Fortunately, he didn’t care. Life was tough and one was never too young to learn that it was better to sleep with one eye open or the world would be done fucking you up before you knew it.
He checked the time on his smart wristwatch, one of the few small devices he owned that wasn’t five years or older. If he hurried and caught the next train he’d be home in less than an hour. He’d message his client from there, two days earlier than estimated. If he was lucky, it earned him a bonus but he knew better than to hope for noble generosity from strangers.
Slowly unknotting his legs, he reached for the bag next to him and carefully stored his laptop away. It might be old but it was loyal and there for him when nobody else was. His joints ached when he stood up and his stomach felt hollow. Once the money was there and properly filtered he’d have to use some of it for a grocery run, whether he liked it or not.
The rubber soles of his sneakers barely made any sound on the floor. It had become silent around him. The corridor seemed wide and endless and the only thing moving beside him was his shadow on the wall, obscured by the cold, flickering ceiling lights. Walking through this building, from study hall to study hall, had once been one of his biggest dreams and now it was not even unreachable but not even a dream anymore. Everything about it was ugly. What it stood for and the future it presented. A prison. Hopeless. Ugly. Not that what waited outside for him was much better. Whether direction he walked it, it was always like he was the proverbial lamb, only that walked himself to the slaughterhouse. If slaughterhouses were endless days of endless droning and drowning.
Kei grimaced at his own train of thought. He really needed food, he was getting weird again. One more staircase down and he reached the exit. He saw the display of his watch flashing when he reached out to push the door open. An incoming call from an unknown number
“Okaaay,” he said slowly, pulling his headset from the laptop bag. He quickly glanced around. Once he was certain nobody was there to watch him, he pulled the outdated wireframe over his head, put in one earbud, and squeezed into the corner that was the furthest away from the next office door. Even at the poor man’s academy, an analogue headset like this instead of a connection port behind his ear would have been suspicious. But only a few people had his contact info; if someone called him, it was a serious emergency or a new job. Ignoring either could make a difference between life and death.
“Hello?” He looked around nervously. Nobody was around and the wires of the security cameras were connected to the wall and nothing else. He had studied the blueprints of the university complex thoroughly, there were no secret passages, fake walls, hidden trapdoors, or trick mirrors. The ventilation slots in the wall were too high to be accessed from outside and too narrow to put a finger through.
Then why did he still feel like he was being watched?
“Hello?” he repeated hesitantly. An unknown voice chuckled at the other end.
Fuck!
It didn’t take a genius in his line of work to figure out that a stranger figuring out his work contacts was bad news. But retrievers like him rarely attracted the kind that liked to play games and the last thing he needed between him and his next paycheck was an unpredictable variable. He bit hard on his lip, the pain helping to focus his thoughts. This wasn’t good but digging up information was his forte and he had a few tricks of his own up his sleeve. He had only to overcome the abysmal timing.
Without his laptop on, he couldn’t try to track the call. He quickly swiped through the watch’s settings to record the call. A red light flashed up.
Memory full.
Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!
He moved on to the list of different active networks, to scan their activity but to see anything happening he had to keep the call open.
“Hello?” he said again, “Bernhard Watanabe speaking. How can I help you?” The unknown voice laughed again. Male, between his early and late twenties, Kei guessed.
“Bernhard Watanabe!” the stranger said joyfully. “And here I thought you died four months ago. Already worried what your poor widow and children would say if you were revealed to be involved with the stalking and disappearance of a teenage girl.”
Holy fucking shit! Kei slowly backed away from the wall and back to the stairs. With his free hand, he pulled a key card from the back pocket of his pants.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m not dead. What a horrible thing to say!” He sat down on the floor as soon as he reached the door to the basement facilities, got out and booted his laptop.
“And what are you saying about...Mitsuki! Leave my wife alone, you creep!” He tried to sound as threatening as he could while pulling out a cable from his bag and connecting the laptop with the door’s card reader. Ready to slip in the card and use it as a decoy to bypass the security system, he stared at the monitor, waiting for the connection to establish.
“Close but no cigar. Her name’s Michiru.”
“Fuck!” This time, he couldn’t stop the word from slipping out of his mouth but he had no time to dwell over mistakes. Come on, connect already! The loading screen was at 96%, fast for his machine, but time seemed to crawl. He used another wire to hook his watch up to the laptop, praying to the deities in charge that nobody would come around the corner to climb into the belly of the building within the next couple of minutes.
Adding the information flow from the watch to the laptop slowed down the internal memory and thus the connection but he didn’t have time to boot an independent partition to ease the poor machine’s load. It wasn’t strong enough to circumvent the card reader, track the call and record it, so Kei settled on the security breach and tracking.
Finally, the connection was there. He opened a series of consoles and began to type.
“Are you doing okay over there?” The voice had taken on a concerned tone. “I’ve been wondering. Using the same fake identity for longer than a week, that’s such a beginner’s mistake. And now you can’t even break through a simple basement door of a third-rated school.”
Kei froze.
He had feared this was the case but now there was no doubt.
Whoever this unknown voice belonged to, he could see him.
“Yes, I can see you,” the voice confirmed, as if it was reading his thoughts. “And I could kill you any time I want from where I am.”
“Who are you?” Kei whispered, his fingers so tense that they hurt when he entered and confirmed the last command.
“Neko-Sama.”
“What?!” He hadn’t expected an answer to his question and he certainly hadn’t expected something like this. Was this guy serious? Or a prankster, a wanna-be who had no idea what he was getting himself into?
“You heard that right. Remember that name. Because I will be the one who will stop you, Sand Viper.”
“Fuck you!” Kei ripped the headset off. He tore the cable from the card reader just when it gave a green signal and stuffed everything into his bag. He dived through the door, almost falling into the dark abyss as he disconnected his watch from the invisible tentacles of the virtual world around him.
The university didn’t receive enough funds to replace every broken emergency light in the basement but he was familiar enough with the layout to haste through the corridors and right doors without bumping into walls. But a few bruises were the least of his worries.
Whoever this weirdo was, he had done a good job stalking him. He knew what Kei had been up to, which alias he used, where he was. And it was safe to assume that he also knew the face that belonged to the code name Sand Viper.
The hatch to the sewer had survived two rebuildings of the university complex over almost two centuries and was secured with an old padlock. Kei had stolen a copy of the key two years ago. He couldn’t lock it once he climbed down the rusty ladder but the thick layer of reinforced concrete between the basement and the sewer should be enough to disrupt any signal the stalker might track. As for manually following him, well. If there was a hidden nook to squeeze into or a crowd to blend in with, he’d find it. He was called Sand Viper for a reason.
He pulled the collar of his hoodie over his nose to shield his lungs from the worst of the stench and hurried through the sewer labyrinth, turning into a moving dot on the map in his mind, where no one could track him.
Heavy rain clouds covered the sky over Tokyo and a strong breeze ruffled through the black hair of the man lying on the roof of the convenience store across Tokyo’s second university. He laughed when the call disconnected. As expected, the signal completely disappeared less than a minute later.
“And once more, the mighty Sand Viper goes into hiding.” He grinned while he selected another contact on his watch. “Don’t you worry, pretty boy, sooner or later, I’ll get you. But first things first.”
The call went through and was immediately answered by a slow “Yes?”
“Neko-Sama here!” he said proudly, not the slightest put off by the groan on the other end.
“Kuroo, no! We talked about this!”
“Come on, Kenma!” He threw his head back, pleading to the powers above. “Why does he get to get a cool nickname but I don’t?”
“Because they’re only cool when earned from the public or your enemies. When you give yourself one it’s just embarrassing,” his friend replied dryly.
“You’re no fun.”
“Get used to it already. And you didn’t do your job, am I right?”
“Well.” Kuroo picked up his rifle and secured it. Kenma would rip him a new one if he wasted a bullet by accident. “Consider most of it completed.” A heavy sigh came from the other end.
“So the viper is still alive.”
“Yep.” Unfazed, Kuroo packed the weapon away. “Lost track of him when he fled into the basement and from there through the sewers, I guess.”
“So we know for sure Sand Viper is a guy?” Kuroo heard Kenma typing in the background.
“Yep.”
“This means you got close enough to determine that much. Why is he alive again?”
“Cute ass, pretty face for someone on the skinny side. And you know I have a thing for blonds.” Kuroo replied promptly, ignoring Kenman’s impatient tone. The sound of a fist hitting a desk was less easy to ignore.
“You fucked up a job because you think the target is cute? Kuroo! If we don’t complete jobs like this it’ll damage our reputation and you know what kind of offers from what kind of folks people like us get if-”
“Yeah, yeah.” Kuroo let his friend rant and got on his way down the roof. But before he started his descent into the store’s backyard, his eyes caught a familiar shape in the distance.
“Pause your speech for a second, Kenma!” He hurried back to the other end of the roof, away from the flickering neon sign that irritated his sight this up close, and focused on the moving figure down the street. From this distance, people looked like deformed stick figures but as soon as his eyes focused and the black pupils widened until they swallowed almost all of his yellow irises, the stick figures turned into humans.
The tall man had turned his back to him and was wearing a grey, ill-fitting suit but he had followed Sand Viper around long enough to recognize that gait anywhere. A vague glimpse of colour irritated him. He took his sunglasses from his red leather jacket. As soon as he put them on, the interface established the wireless connection to his artificial eyes.
Yes, this was the same guy he had tracked and watched since he entered the university’s main building earlier. He had not only managed to escape the building unseen but to change into a completely different outfit and to put on a black wig.
“Blond suits you better, cutie.” A signal from his watch informed him of the successful reconnection with his target. Good. He removed the sunglasses and relaxed his eyes.
“Aren’t you going after him and do your job?” The signal had also been transmitted to Kenma’s workstation. He could see everything that Kuroo could see on his watch but admittingly, Kenma was better at making use of the deluge of data Kuroo’s devices and implants collected.
“Kenma, if you had seen his face you’d have a hard time killing him, too.”
“I doubt that.”
Kuroo doubted that, too, but it was irrelevant. He was the one out carrying a sniper rifle, not Kenma.
“The important thing is that I stop him, right?” He half climbed, half slid down a drainpipe, the tired metal squeaking under the weight of the tall, wide-shouldered man. He jumped down the last two meters, landing firmly on his feet, startling two crows that were bickering over one of the upturned trashcans.
“We can negotiate the killing part after I sabotaged his job. Until then, I’ll chase him around and tease him a bit.” He swung one leg over his motorcycle while securing the clasp of his helmet under his chin. A few touches and the watch’s interface was projected on the inner layer of the visor and connected with his eyes, similar to his sunglasses. “You know, having a bit of fun with my prey. I’m not called Neko-Sama for nothing.”
“Kuroo, I said NO!”
Kuroo laughed and started the engine.