It was nothing, a bundle of heavy nothing which the Utopian held out carefully, as if it were a swaddled infant. The hero groped a bit before touch let him grasp the gift, and a few shimmers betrayed hints of substance as it unfolded. As spider’s threads catch the sunlight for a moment, then vanish again into invisibility, so glints flickered around Achilles’s lithe, athletic form as he twisted and stretched within the gift. Only as he tried out the vizor did I recognize the coat for what it was.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Ghost

Written July 20–21, 2454

Events of April 12

Shinjuku

I like their screams, loud and raw and failing, none of the fake, suspended purity of actors’ screams. They force themselves to stop screaming, but the almost-silence just makes them panic anew at every sound: their footsteps, their swishing clothes, the echo of their breathing ricocheting through the steel ceiling ribs, which make this basement warehouse a nightmare labyrinth now that a hunter’s cunning has murdered the ceiling fixtures’ artificial day and conjured true dead night.

「Keep it together!」 The second-largest of the clustered six reveals herself as the leader so easily. 「What are you, guards or children? There’s no such thing as Ghost!」

Ah, ignorance, the predator’s ally. The hunter lets itself be heard now, a light, pinging scrape of something passing flight-fast through the beams above the cowering prey. An ash scent follows, and a faerie tinkle as one more emergency light, which they might have found and fixed, powders their shoulders with its rain of glass dust. One of them fires at the source of the sound, the shot’s quick flash illuminating the maze of steel and boxes for a lightning second, and revealing, moving among them, nothing. The poor fool doesn’t even remember to fire twice.

「Ghost is real! It is! My ba’sib saw it when it took out Hino and the others!」

What is that trembling ray of white-blue brightness? A pocket light, multiplying the mad, geometric shadows of the beams as it shakes in an unsteady hand. An instant later a broken yelp sends the light spinning across the floor. Why shoot the light in someone’s hand when you can shoot the hand, and add blood to the dark?

「There! Above us!」

The predator’s weapon makes no bang, but a hum lingers in the beams, and one of the prey fires some hopeful shots into the shadows. Another silenced shot shatters the offending gun, and the hand which held it.

「We’re dead! Ghost never leaves targets alive!」

「Shut up! Be quiet and listen!」

The light they dropped is still on, cutting the darkness with its little blade of visibility as it lies on its side among some sacks ten meters from the clustered prey. Now the predator drops something into the beam’s path, gleaming wet and pale, with scraps of flesh and sinew clinging to its length: a bone.