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"Oh," Kei said, without a hint of surprise in his voice. "You actually came."
His hair was flat to his forehead, guard uniform--Forge?--matted down and soaked. Like he got waterboarded or something. He probably was.
Kai stayed still, tucking his hands into his pants pocket. He probably had leaves and twigs stuck to him, after getting roughly dropped off in a tree. "Well. I saw it on the news." He slanted his head. That, and Kotobuki's black ghost only lasted him a few hundred miles inland. "Besides, you're my friend."
Kei looked away. "Right. Friends." He said it carefully, as if to avoid the consequences of saying something so stupid out loud. "Forgot how fucked up your standards for companionship are."
"You lost," intoned Kai, and Kei looked back at him through narrowed eyes. "Didn't you, Kei." It was the only reasonable situation in which he could envision him patching a call through prison walls, asking for one Kaito. Kai was always the one he turned to last, like a final resort.
He didn't blame him. "Doesn't matter," came Kei's eventual reply. Slow, practiced, blunted with repetition. "I'm done." He said so with a dull conviction, not at all like what he said in that ratty mountain cabin months ago, petrified with the choices the world had laid out for him, hissing about a quiet stolen life. "I'm guessing you didn't get here on a stolen vehicle."
Kai hummed and glanced toward the canopy, shreds of sky gleaming through. "Nah. I flew."
Kei stared at him. Kai didn't elaborate until Kei cleared his throat and repeated, flatly, "You flew."
He thought to laugh. "Turns out the friend I made in juvie was an ajin too."
Kei's laugh was short and more curt than Kai remembered. "Are you a magnet or something? Making friends with another ajin delinquent."
"You don't count." Kai stepped up through the thick cut of tree root risen up like hills over the mountain floor and planted his feet. His shoes were unscuffed, still only having experienced linoleum floors and dirt courtyards. "You are totally an honor student."
Kei cocked his head at him, expression completely unchanged and yet still, somehow, appropriating a general air of exasperation and half-baked disbelief. "I'm a government fugitive," he said, disinterestedly, "and a wanted terrorist at age seventeen. That hardly qualifies me for honor roll, Kai."
Kai shrugged. Kei didn't move as they came to stand on the same ground in the first time for months. He was still taller than Kei, but whereas he had lost weight from detention center food, his arms and legs losing their defined muscularity, Kei had grown into some; his arms bore no obvious scars, but faint cables of lean muscle threaded through them. It looked trained up. He couldn't imagine Kei willingly subjecting himself to pull ups and push ups. He had been conspiring with a team, then, or at least somebody else. It was a little strange to integrate into his worldview; that the kid whose M.O. was getting things done by himself was getting spotted this whole time.
Huh. Kai watched Kei's face, perpetually unmoved: he had taken this seriously. Kai thought to mention it, something about how badly it sucked to put in your all and not make even the shallowest dent in the ambivalence of this place, but he saw Kei watching him back and the muted anger clenched inside him like a discarded lobster shell, impermeable and yet tangible, and said nothing. Except: "You always were an asshole."
Kei's whole face widened, then, like a river registering a pebble. Then he made a harsh sound that wasn't anywhere near a proper laugh, but it was hacking and horrible and real. "Fuck you."
They didn't jack a motorcycle, because apparently that was too on brand for the both of them and the police had four months of making motorcyclist facial searches a national priority. Motorbikes were getting less and less popular as a mode of personal transportation with all the ajin hate propaganda anyway. They stole a minivan instead, with Kei muttering under his breath and Kai keying the ignition, vaguely entertained. There were clothes packed in the back, with the lingering smell of strong perfume and cologne, and Kei tossed a polo shirt two times his size at him. "You're too conspicuous."
"I was in the air this whole time," Kai said in lieu of another argument, which was 'the sky was blue and so were the fits they wore at juvie'. Kei was shrugging off his guard uniform, shucking off the belt and unholstering the standard issued security handgun. Kai looked ahead when he yanked the shirt off his shoulders. "Everybody's gonna be looking for you. I've been famous for several months now so it's nothing new for me, but you'll be broadcasted everywhere." Kei switched out the gun's magazine with quick efficient motions, if the clean, successive sounds were anything to go by. Yeah. Trained. "You won't be normal anymore."
"I wasn't normal since I was a kid," Kai returned, and this closed Kei's mouth for the next minute.
"Right. Well," he was scrolling through a stolen smartphone now. "You're about 50% of the headlines right now. Just lagging behind me."
Kai felt the wild urge to roll his eyes for the first time in years. "Humans are not nearly as interesting as demi humans," he gave, more for the sake of argument than much else, backing the minivan up into the main mountain highway.
"No," agreed Kei. His voice lowered a little. It made Kai breathe quieter. The shift in volume wasn't softer in tone. "But that doesn't apply when you knowingly abetted an ajin."
"Sure," he heard himself say as forested peaks showed up in blurred rows in his periphery and they start their descent down the mountain, steadily gaining in speed. His fingers twitched, and he noticed for the first time how dry his mouth was. He wanted a smoke, one of Kotobuki's surreptitiously lifted contraband. "I'm not special, though."
Kei didn't reply, and Kai didn't look at him. "I guess not," his voice said, back to neutral.
They stopped by a convenience store at the mountain's base, still a few dozen miles out before they formally enter the outskirts of the city, and Kei wordlessly swept his hair to the side, tucking his bangs under the brim of the snapback from the glove box, before slipping out of the shotgun seat. "Park somewhere," he told Kai, waving the smartphone in hand. There was a faint, unidentifiable shadow across his oversized shirt where Kai could tell the pistol was. Kei watched him under the shadow of the car's ceiling, looking for the world like a boy fresh out of high school. Somehow, it made Kai's thoughts simmer, silent. "I'll be a while. Need their reception to look up stuff. You can go piss behind a tree or something. We can't risk showing your face here."
It wasn't spite or irritation that made Kai take his foot off the brake. Kei made a surprised sound when the car rolled forward with his leg still inside. "Yeah, yeah," he called back, and Kei slammed the door on him. Kai rolled down the passenger window to yell: "Get smokes!" Kei made no motion that indicated assent, his hunched back disappearing through automatic sliding doors. Kai went to shift the minivan into park at the edge of the parking lot and considered his lifelong trajectory:
- Be a fugitive. Again. Check.
- Be an ajin's co-conspirator. Again. Check.
- Be broke. Again. Check.
His options:
- Get away someplace where nobody can turn up on them. Unlikely, but not impossible.
- Avoid Sato. Indeterminate.
- Avoid cops. Undoubtedly easier.
- Avoid government dogs and bounty hunters. Reliant on the skill of their disappearing act.
- Stay under for as long as possible.
The only way Kai could imagine accomplishing all of the above was being on the road constantly. They couldn't afford a permanent home base, not unless they enlisted some powerful and moneyed man with strings to pull and a storied history in secrecy and backdoor deals. Kai figured Kei would have a list of people who fit the bill well, probably had a few under his belt already, but he had not told him of any and so Kai assumed none were particularly viable or affordable at this moment in time.
Who knows. Maybe they'll hit it big and steal something that was worth a few estates and then some. Maybe they could get Kei's black ghost to pick up cash or necessities or anything they'd ever want for, the same way Kotobuki's ghost got him free and flew him to the opening event of a new terrorism era. Kai had no qualms about any of it. He suspected Kei didn't, either. He didn't get this far to get hung up on shortchanging an inequitable society and robbing some upper class household with a criminalized power.
Kai figured if there would be anything that would get in their way, it would be Kaito himself.
He was not immortal. He could not take a bullet to the neck and survive. Also, he had a criminal record, which, in the backdrop of everything else going on, was almost negligible. But Kai learned over the years the most inoffensive detail can land hits you can't just walk away from.
Besides. It got exhausting, after a while. All of it.
Knuckle raps at the side window. Kai rolled his head to look at Kai through the tinted glass, his stern flattened face, lightly sweating. He looked sort of stupid in his snapback, totally out of place in the broad sunlight, but he also looked like a kid, not the hardened mastermind he saw framed up on cheap TV broadcasts, underscored by one-liners adults wasted their literacy on.
"Got you your cigarettes," said Kei, when Kai unlocked the doors. He slid in, plastic bags in tow. Kai counted four and spotted hair dye.
"You didn't have any liquid cash on you," Kai started, without any note of accusation. It wasn't a real question; he could guess.
"I worked for a guy," answered Kei ambiguously. Kai thought he would shrug, but instead he watched Kei's face contort into a scowl before flattening back out. He tossed a lighter his way.
"Don't die," he intoned. "You're the only one here without nine lives."
"Not all of us can be zombies." Kai fingered the lighter, flicking it on then off. The liquid blue glow settled him a bit. He gestured for the cigarette pack.
"Two people die every minute in Japan," Kei dug through the haul. Eventually, he surfaced with a neat plastic wrapped carton, and made a face when Kai took it from him. "Maybe you are one. Maybe you aren't. Depends how much fate hates you."
Kai cracked it open and shook out a stick before committing to saying anything else. "Do you?" He began. He wondered if he should turn on the car so he could roll down the windows. "Want me to be one? An ajin, I mean."
"It would be safer," Kei said, which was not an answer. The lighter whispered out a flame. "More convenient." He watched the side of Kai's face as he lit up the cigarette without a sound. "You would get creative fast, and escape routes get a lot more interesting. Close to infinite, even. But that's a mathematical uncertainty."
"It would be a lot harder to catch us," Kai guessed, wetting his lips. The cigarette burned lowly. He sucked it in.
"A lot harder to track us, yeah." Kei wasn't looking at him anymore, but Kai was. "We could drop dead in the river and get washed out into the ocean and nobody would ever find us. We wouldn't even know where we would be going." Kei flashed a grin with teeth. It gleamed from the glare off the windshield. It shouldn't have startled Kai, with what he's done and what he's seen, shivs and nails and sneering yellow teeth back in juvie from guys two years his senior, but there was a shock of not-surprise, curdling at his nape, curling his fingers. For a moment he remembered he was in a car with a being the rest of Japan considered supernatural and a freak.
More significant: he never saw Kei smile like that. It was a little awful, a little too real. Like he got it from someone else, someplace else. Like the world tore a hole in his face and stapled bone to his gums. "We could end up on the other side of the continent or wash up on India," and here Kei snatched the lighter held limply in Kai's fist, "and it wouldn't matter as long as you were tied together well enough."
The smile was gone. In its place was another level look. Kai was learning to read him again; it was a little too clean to be honest. It was transparent enough from the way Kei motioned for Kai's other hand. Kai handed the carton over without resistance. This was new, too. Kei never smoked. Not on campus, at least. Though it was not as if they were ever near each other enough for him to confirm it. Kei's fingers were slender, lean like a dancer's, or a potter's, fitting the stick in between, sparking up a flame. Who knew if he threw a mean punch.
Kai felt hot smoke wheeze up his nostrils, fill the back of his mouth. This car was going to reek. "I'm guessing that isn't just conjecture."
Kei followed and took a drag. He coughed only a little. "His name was Nakano Kou," he said. He pinched the cigarette and rolled it, a fleck of hot ash spotting a knuckle. Kei made no move to brush it off, even when Kai half-raised a hand to do it for him. He made no noise that spoke of pain, either. In the depth and casualness of that knowledge, Kai felt a kind of bleak grief surge over him; a lot like what he felt months ago, when he saw Kei crawl over the rock-dirt, dragging a fucked up leg, just to gut his own neck. Like it cost him nothing to shed the light in his eyes or stand up with minute-old blood drying on his collar. Like it was just something he should've done.
Kei did not notice this, or Kai, sitting there with his half-burned cigarette perched between his index and thumb like a firefly, when he muttered, focused: "He was an idiot."
They drove until the sun went under. Kai meandered around the base of the mountain to throw off any tails, but Kei shook his head and said, "We're good. My IBM doesn't see anything following us."
It was the official scientific term for an ajin's black ghost, Kai learned. Invisible Black Matter, coined by some hot shot genius from overseas. But that wasn't really all that interesting. "What do you call it?" He asked him, as they breezed down the interstate, windows open, the plastic bags crackling loudly in the gust that leaked through.
Kei raised his eyebrows at him. "Ghost. You. Asshole."
Kai huffed. "I bet it doesn't listen to you." He felt Kei's eyes on him. "What, did I get it?"
"You did," Kei replied slowly. "It doesn't respond to me unless I say the opposite of what I want."
Kai had to laugh. Looked like black ghosts cut right through the bullshit. The fact Kei's did is--what? Fate at its funniest, and most vicious?
"What?" Kei said, irritated. "What is there to giggle about? Huh?"
"It suits you," supplied Kai without taking his eyes off the road, even with Kei's eyes on him. It was funny. It was ironic. Kai wondered if his IBM would ghost Kei for the rest of his life.
It was not an unpleasant idea. But the more probable scenario is he wouldn't manifest an black ghost at all, if he did turn out to be immortal--too stubborn about living this one life as long and recklessly as he can. So, nothing nearly as cool as Kotobuki's winged IBM.
"Whatever." Kei kicked his socked feet up on the dashboard. But Kai could see his flushed face. "Where do you wanna sleep tonight? Car or motel?"
"Motel's risky." Kai nicely allowed the change in topic. "We should be cautious these first few weeks. The cops will probably have it out for us on the double."
Kei hummed, considering. When Kai turned the bend, something breezy was in his voice when he intoned, "Nice change of pace to be stuck with somebody with brains."
Kai glanced over. Kei was staring out the window, face mostly turned away, but shoulders relaxed. "Nakano couldn't have been that bad."
"He called me my real name in public when we were laying low."
That was not a point in this guy's favor. But it was funny. "Yeah, that's funny," he said, not bothering to hide his amusement when Kei leveled him with an unimpressed side-eye.
"You two would be friends. Bunch of morons fraternizing." Kei let the hypothetical sit for a minute. Then he sighed quietly, and Kai wondered if he missed this boy he cursed as an idiot, refused to call a friend like he did Kaito. If he did, Kai wondered if that would admit something about him, something more or less human. Something that Kei could not stand to stomach.
"Let's stop for today," Kei mumbled, like he could hear him. "I can keep my ghost out."
The ghost shoplifted an electric stove from a local superstore. It helped that they were stacked up high on the shelves far above people’s heads. Nobody noticed a suspended box. Takeout chopsticks and a thermos and plastic party bowls appeared out of thin air. Kai watched him methodically unpack the stove from its box with a neutral air until Kei scowled at him, clearly irritated and therefore somewhat embarrassed. "If we're gonna be fugitives, I want to eat hot ramen. Go dye your ugly hair."
They were figuring something out. Kei took care of groceries and supplying necessities; Kai sat and waited with the car and took stock. It made Kai restless, always itching for a hit, because he was the one who cleaned up people's messes, he was the one who walked the extra mile. But this cleared some room for him to think, come up with contingencies. Like: what if somebody found him while Kei was out? Was his prerogative to run and warn or confront and clear out? Was he to incapacitate or kill them? The thought of murdering somebody--self-defense or otherwise--didn't strike him as terrible or alarming. It just was. Maybe he had killed that man on the motorbike when he smashed his helmet in with a rock. It didn't bother him then, and it didn't bother him now. The state could not make him feel guilty for something he felt so little towards, save for a serious anger that had blunted the severity of his head wound so totally he didn't feel dizzy until hours after.
"I wanted to thank you, y'know." Kei said, when Kai finished scrubbing the faded blonde off his hair and they scraped together a hot meal with wild plants tossed in from his time with a granny who lived out in the mountains, packed into flimsy plastic bowls. An aspirational person, Kei told him. It was good to be her grandson for a while, he said with an indecipherable look softening the lines around his mouth.
Kai looked up from his noodles, chopsticks in his mouth. "For answering that call." Kei wasn't looking at him. He was staring at his own bowl, hands cupped around it. "For picking up that one time. If you hadn't, I think I would be a very different person."
Kai swallowed. He thought about this place that showed no compassion towards people that were found to be undesirable and unfit, who were often institutionalized and incarcerated and shut off completely from the rest of the world. He thought about his own life, his father's criminal record like his own. He could not imagine the perfect isolation in which ajins were placed, in some government ward where the only bright thing in vicinity were dissection table headlights. Kei's pain tolerance had to come from somewhere.
"Sure," was all Kai could think to say. Then, because he wanted to say how it was nothing, that it was on brand, that it didn't cost him anything to have helped him at his lowest, "What did you think you would have become?"
Kei looked at him. The steam from the ramen was wisping away, going cold. "I don't know. Someone like Tanaka, maybe, who shoots anybody who treats us like shit but still wants recognition from the same people who hurt us. Or somebody like Sato, who just wants to play ball and live forever." He gets quieter as he goes on. "Someone like Shimomura, who wants it all to add up to something. Someone like Nakano, who yells about justice but hates dying painfully the most." His lips curved into a not-smile. "Somebody who can't stand the idea of being averse to killing a human, I guess."
"Sorry," Kai said. He stared intently at his hands, his brittle and half-chewed fingernails. "I wouldn't have hated that person either. Kei. You will always be human to me."
Neither of them spoke. Then Kei shuffled his feet and stretched his leg out, knocking ankles with him. It was a sudden boyish notion, so young it seemed shy. "I think," he said, with care, without difficulty, "I could massacre a whole city and you would still call me your friend."
It wasn't a hard thing to admit. Kai felt himself smile. "My standards aren't that flexible, Kei. Don't test it."
He didn't respond. Kai looked; he was watching him carefully, eyes dark and sure. He was right, of course.
"You are a complete moron," he said quietly.
There was probably not a single scenario in the world where Kai could resent Kei the way Kotobuki told him he should, the way Eriko wanted him to. He supposed he could. He had all the reasons to: abandonment, neglect, indifference. But it didn't make much of a difference to him.
In the end, Kei was the only person who had the consistency to leave Kaito again and again because it suited the task at hand. Be a doctor, be a counter-insurgent. He was the only person who left Kai behind not out of an end of contractual benefits but a sense of responsibility, of some kind of care that compelled him to leave that note and tell him to go away.
Kei could not be particularly cold with the way that he was. Despite breathing the same air for years, Eriko never did see through him.
"I'll stay up," said Kei, hunching over his phone, intent and wired. The darkness yawned off him, dim moonlight slid like rakes over his back.
Kai looked over, watching and feeling the air shudder and get heavy, as if draped over. "Did you summon it?"
Kei didn't look at him, the device’s gleam blazing over his face, trickling highlights down his face in the dark. They parked in a different spot from yesterday. They were figuring out a solid routine to all their fugitive protocols: never stay in the same place twice in a row, never linger for longer than necessary, never use real names, never look the same, grab and go. "It's looking at you right now."
Kai blinked slowly, turning his head up. There was nothing there but shadowy trees and the distant streetlight. "Is it going to stop?"
"Probably not." A sigh. "Go to sleep, Kai."
"You haven't been sleeping," Kai said.
"I do. In the car."
"It's not just paranoia, is it," he said, pushing it. He felt the air around him go thick, viscous. Growing teeth.
"Do it," Kei muttered under his breath. After a moment, the area around Kai lightened, something lifting. Kai rubbed his knuckles over his neck, more intent now than grateful. It brought some satisfaction for being more or less proven right, or something close enough to it to warrant him a threat. "Your IBM thinks I’m onto something."
"Sometimes you're annoying," returned Kei, flat. The irritation wasn’t hard to read from his smoothed out face. Kai leaned back on his elbows, tucking his chin in, sharpening his choice of words on his molars. "What I mean," he continued, "is where does your incredibly high tolerance for pain come from? You used to cry whenever you got a paper cut when we were kids."
"Sometimes you're really annoying," repeated Kei, and turned to face him, face blunted in shadow. His teeth did not show when he spoke, but maybe they didn’t have to. They were roaming free as invisible matter. "What is there to say? It was real. All of it. Most corporations are in on it. The government lends ajins out like a cell line." Kai's throat closed.
"After you split off from me," he understood. Kei clenched and unclenched his hand, unresponsive. "It's like an initiation," he eventually gave, without intonation or inflection. "Ten days of getting drilled into, sawed open and dissected. Tanaka went through that for ten years. No wonder Sato wanted him on his side." He said so with a disciplined air of indifference. "Guess that's why he came to rescue me only after they did what they did. He let them play around with me for a while, just so I could wake up and tell him how much I hated humans." Kei shrugged, huffing a low unimpressed sound. "I don't pretend to know his thought process."
"Kei," Kai murmured, even though it might as well be a rhetorical question. "How much do you remember?"
"Most of it. If they noticed I was passing out, they'd reset me to wake me back up again."
Another euphemism for stabbing or shooting a kid to death. "And?" Blotty live news footage, a man getting dropped from the roof. Nagai Kei, attempting to murder a researcher in real time. Kai wet his mouth. "Did you get them?"
Kei looked up. He seemed ambivalent, without a shred of hate or malice, eyes so black they could be almost blue. Kai thought to shudder. "I would've been a different person, remember?" He said it lowly, a subterranean murmur.
"I wouldn't have minded," Kai thought he should say, somehow. For the record: I wouldn't have cared. He should not be on a pedestal.
"It's done with now," drawled Kei, thumb scrolling mindlessly at the phone’s screen. His eyes were roving the area around them, as if tracking something. "I'm not there anymore, and Sato did carry out a successful massacre. Who knows what happened to that guy I pushed off the roof. Maybe he quit."
Kai followed Kei's eyes, slowed now to a point beyond his shoulder. His gaze was pinned there like a warning. "Maybe," he said. His voice got soft. "Maybe he doesn't get to survive."
"Maybe," Kei gave, like a concession. "Don't stay up," which made Kai stare at him, and Kei motioned once at the air. "The ghost. It will keep watch. Go to sleep."
Heavy with honesty, Kai thought about protesting and making an argument about how they were just teenagers, how they were growing people, but he was tired--of Japan and everybody on it and everybody in on it. He rolled onto his side, the makeshift sleeping mat beneath him crunching with rock and pebble. “Okay,” he said, shutting his eyes. “I would not have hated you, if you had done what you had to. Kei.”
There was no response. It was another long practice of omission, quiet enough for Kai to emerge onto the brink of unconsciousness, pushing air around in his chest, when Kei muttered behind him, mild and nearly resentful, with the way it had a foot in longing: “Yeah. I guessed you wouldn't.”