Kagoshima at night had that tranquillity specific to cities of the south. Not the silence of a dead place, but of a place that genuinely rests, with streets that had little movement at that hour and air warmer than Tokyo's even in the early hours.
Kato walked with his hands in his pockets.
Renji walked with his eyes on everything that was not Kato: the buildings, the alleyways, the small guesthouses, the closed houses, the darkened windows, any corner where a trace of mana might remain that could explain what was happening to Aoi.
But there was nothing clear.
Or worse.
There was far too little.
"The hotel one wasn't it," said Kato.
Renji did not respond immediately.
"No."
"But you were following it."
"The victims were disappearing in their sleep," said Renji. "Aoi started getting worse in her sleep. It was the closest thing to a lead I had."
Kato looked at an old guesthouse on the other side of the street. The vacancies sign flickered with a weak light, as though even the electricity was tired.
"So you don't know what the remnant that cursed her looks like."
"No."
"You don't know if it has a body."
"No."
"You don't know if it's nearby."
Renji tightened his jaw.
"No."
Kato was quiet for a moment.
"That explains why you're searching everywhere."
Renji kept walking.
"If I don't know where it is, I have to search everywhere."
Kato glanced at him.
"That's not a plan."
"It's what I have."
They continued for hours.
First they checked an abandoned guesthouse near a narrow avenue, where Renji had felt a strange residue two nights before. The place smelled of damp, old wood and rooms that nobody had opened in months. Kato walked along the main corridor calmly, touched a wall, looked at the ceiling and then shook his head.
"Nothing."
Renji did not want to accept it immediately. He checked the rooms one by one, opened empty wardrobes, lifted mattresses covered in dust and came back to the corridor with the same closed expression.
Then they went to an alley behind a laundry open twenty-four hours. The white light of the running machines came through the windows and cut the darkness into cold rectangles. Renji said a woman had lost consciousness near there the previous week. Kato crouched beside a damp stain on the ground, moved his fingers close without touching it and barely frowned.
"Anything?" asked Renji.
"Cheap detergent."
Renji looked at him.
"I'm talking about the mana."
"So was I. I was also hoping for something more dramatic."
They continued.
In a residential street, Renji stopped suddenly.
"There."
Kato looked up.
At the far end of a narrow passage, something moved between two rubbish bags. A small shadow, hunched, with two eyes gleaming in the broken light of a street lamp.
Renji already had his hand on the sword.
Kato did not move.
"Renji."
"I felt it."
"So did I."
The shadow came out slowly.
It was a cat.
Black, thin, with one folded ear and the kind of offended dignity that only cats have when they discover someone is watching them too closely. It stopped, observed both hunters, meowed once and went on its way as though it had decided neither of them deserved any more attention.
Kato watched it go.
"Dangerous."
Renji closed his eyes for a second.
"Don't say anything."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking many things."
Renji kept walking.
Kato followed him with a faint smile that did not quite finish forming.
Later they checked a small shrine between buildings, an area behind a closed clinic, and the car park of a transit hotel where Renji swore he had felt something resembling the contaminated mana of Aoi's mark. In every place they found traces, but none of them were sufficient. Old echoes. Deformed residues. Mana from lesser remnants that had passed through there, or from people who had felt fear at some point and had left a weak pressure in the air.
Nothing pointing to a core.
Nothing leading to a body.
Nothing that could be killed.
Kato did not take long to understand the problem.
Renji was not searching calmly.
Every time they found a mana residue, he moved ahead. Every time there was nothing, he tightened his jaw more. It was not determination. It was the kind of tension that accumulates when someone has been doing the same thing for too long without the result they need.
"We're not going to find it like this," said Kato.
"Then we keep searching until we find it," said Renji.
"That's not determination, Renji," said Kato. "It's exhaustion with a sword."
Renji looked at him.
"Aoi doesn't have time for me to rest."
Kato held his gaze for a moment.
"And you're not going to save her if you start confusing cats with remnants."
Renji did not respond.
He did not keep walking with the same urgency of the last few minutes either. It was not exactly yielding. It was the kind of involuntary pause the body makes when something it has been told is right, even if the mind has not yet finished accepting it.
"Let's go to a bar," said Kato. "We have a drink, we sort through what we found, and then we go back."
"No."
"Renji."
"No."
Kato looked at him with the patience of someone who had already had that conversation before and knew exactly how it ended.
"You're still the same," he said.
"So are you."
"Then you know I'm going to keep at it until you accept."
Renji let the air out slowly.
"One beer."
"Two, if the first one improves your temper."
"Don't push it."
Renji's flat had that quiet of the early hours, when the person who usually gives it warmth is sleeping and everything else adjusts to that absence.
Yuna was sitting in a chair near the bed, phone in hand with the time on the screen. Kato and Renji were taking longer than she had expected, which with Kato was not necessarily a sign that something was wrong, but was not a sign that everything was going according to plan either.
Aoi stirred.
Yuna put the phone away and moved closer.
Aoi opened her eyes with the confusion of someone who does not quite remember how they got to where they are.
"What happened?" she said.
"You fainted making the tea," said Yuna. "Renji brought you to bed. He asked me to stay with you while he and Kato went to look for something that might help."
Aoi processed that.
She looked down with the expression of someone who already knew that feeling and had never quite managed to get used to it.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm causing trouble again."
"It's not your fault," said Yuna.
Aoi tried to smile.
"Renji says the same thing."
"Then for once I'm going to agree with him."
Aoi smiled. This time more genuine, smaller, the kind that comes out when something arrives from where it was not expected.
The bar was the kind that has no name on the sign, or does but nobody uses it, because everyone in the neighbourhood already knows which one it is. Warm lights, few tables, a television at the back with the volume low showing something nobody was really watching. The owner was the kind who does not ask questions because he has already seen enough to understand that questions rarely help.
Kato ordered two beers.
Renji said he was not there to drink.
Kato replied:
"Perfect. Then hold the bottle and pretend you're a normal person."
Renji did not laugh.
Kato did. Short, without exaggerating, the kind that comes out when something genuinely amuses him even if he knows it is not the moment.
After a while that was neither completely uncomfortable nor completely comfortable, Kato asked:
"What did you do all those years?"
Renji looked at the bottle.
Kato did not press him. He had a drink and waited.
"I was lost," said Renji at last, in the tone of someone who chooses that word because it is the most honest one available, even if it is not the most comfortable. "Without a headquarters, without a teacher, without a place to go back to. I survived. I did small jobs, moved from city to city. And kept killing remnants when I found them."
"As a hunter?" said Kato.
"No," said Renji. "As someone who knew how to kill them."
Kato noticed the difference. He did not point it out. He just filed it away.
"I didn't want to keep being part of the system," Renji continued. "But I couldn't pretend remnants didn't exist. I stayed in the middle. Outside the headquarters, but unable to leave that world entirely."
Kato nodded.
"And how did you end up in Kagoshima?"
"I got a job as a photographer," said Renji.
Kato looked at him.
"A photographer?"
"Yes."
"I wasn't expecting that."
"That's why I didn't tell you."
A local magazine, Renji explained. Photos of small events, businesses, landscapes, pieces that did not need much. Nothing important. Just something that paid the rent and food and did not require explaining too much about who he was or where he came from.
"That's where I met Aoi," he said.
Kato listened without interrupting.
Renji explained that at first he kept his distance. His life was still tied to remnants, and that was not something one could easily share with someone who did not know remnants existed. But Aoi was not easy to push away. Not because she insisted intensely, but because she treated Renji as though he were a normal person.
"And that mattered?" said Kato.
Renji looked at the bottle.
"Aoi didn't ask me what I was," he said. "She asked me if I'd eaten."
Kato was quiet.
Because he understood what that meant. Not as a concept, but in the way one understands things one has also lived through, even if in different circumstances.
"When Aoi got ill," Renji continued, "at first I thought it was something ordinary. Doctors, tests, tiredness. Then I started to see the mark. The contaminated mana. The traces."
"And you didn't tell her?" said Kato.
"She was frightened."
"People are usually more frightened when they're in danger and nobody explains why."
Renji tensed.
Kato said it not with cruelty but with the directness of someone who knows there is a truth there and that not saying it does not make it disappear.
"I'm going to tell her when she's safe," said Renji. "People deserve to know the truth. But not while that truth could destroy her before I can save her."
Kato looked at him.
"There's always a good reason to wait."
"Don't start."
"It wasn't me who started," said Kato. "That line was yours."
Renji did not answer.
The bar kept being the bar: the warm lights, the television on low, the owner who asked no questions. And in the silence between the two men there was something neither of them named, because naming it would have required saying what they both already knew: that Renji was trapped in the same logic he hated.
Not because he was an empty hypocrite.
But because when the truth touches the person one loves, it is no longer so easy to let it go.
"Did the doctors say anything else?" said Yuna, with the care of someone asking a question that knows it can open in any direction.
Aoi looked at her hands.
"They didn't find anything clear," she said. "Some spoke of stress, exhaustion, psychological problems."
"Psychological problems?"
Aoi smiled. Small, without any real humour.
"When they don't know what it is, sometimes they give it names that sound less empty."
Yuna said nothing.
Aoi kept looking at her hands.
"Maybe they're not entirely wrong," she said. "My life was never completely normal."
She paused.
"My mother died when I was born," she said, in the tone of someone who has said that enough times for the words to no longer have the edge they had at the beginning, but which never quite becomes completely neutral either. "There were complications during the birth. I survived. She didn't."
Yuna listened.
"My father could never forgive me," said Aoi.
She said it with the calm of someone who has reached an understanding. Not reconciliation. Not complete acceptance. Understanding. The difference between knowing why something happened and that being all right.
"When I was small I didn't understand why he looked at me as though I had done something wrong," she continued. "Before I could talk. Before I could have done anything. Over the years I understood. For him, I wasn't his daughter."
She paused.
"I was the reason his wife was no longer there."
Yuna could not find anything to say that would be sufficient.
"I don't remember doing anything wrong," said Aoi, in a voice that was beginning to have that tremor of something one has kept stored for a long time and which comes out anyway, even when one does not want it to. "But I grew up with the feeling of apologising for existing."
Yuna moved closer to the bed.
Aoi tried to hold it together. The kind of holding together that people do who have learned that crying is a burden on others and who prefer not to be a burden, even when the body is no longer entirely in agreement.
She did not hold it together.
Yuna held her without saying anything first, because there was nothing to say that would arrive before the embrace and be worth more than it.
Aoi cried.
Yuna noticed the mark while she held her.
It was not obviously visible. It was beneath the pyjamas, near the collarbone, the kind of thing one would not see without knowing what to look for. But Yuna knew what to look for.
A greyish mark, with that texture of contaminated mana that did not correspond to the mana of anyone living, spread in fine branches beneath the skin, like the roots of something that had been growing slowly for a long time.
Aoi could not see it.
Yuna could.
"My father died a while ago," said Aoi, between the tears that were gradually subsiding. "And shortly afterwards the dreams started. The tiredness. The fever. The fainting."
Yuna heard that.
The father's death.
The curse.
The dream.
I don't want to sleep.
She looked at the mark again.
The mark pulsed.
It was not the pulse of something alive. It was the kind of movement that something makes when responding to something external, like a reaction, as though something outside had sent a signal and the mark had received it.
Aoi did not notice.
Yuna tightened her jaw.
"It's not your fault," she said.
Aoi did not respond.
"None of this is your fault," Yuna repeated, with more firmness.
Not to convince her of something she was slow to accept, but because it was true and truths sometimes need to be said more than once before they arrive fully.
In the bar, Renji looked at the empty bottle for a moment.
"We should go back," he said.
Kato nodded.
"Before we go back," said Kato, "did we really find nothing tonight?"
Renji looked at him.
"We didn't find the remnant."
"That isn't what I asked."
Renji did not respond.
Kato set his bottle on the table.
"We found that you're searching in any place where something resembles what's happening to Aoi."
Renji looked at him.
"And what does that mean?"
"That you're not following the remnant," said Kato. "You're following your fear."
Renji tightened his jaw.
"Careful."
"Always."
"Doesn't look like it."
Kato let that go.
"The hotel one was putting its victims to sleep. That's why you followed it. The woman at the laundry fainted. That's why you checked that area. You felt a strange trace near the car park and ran before verifying it. The cat I'm not going to mention because I'm a kind person."
Renji looked at him in silence.
"You just mentioned it."
"I mentioned it to say I wasn't going to mention it."
"That's not how it works."
"I never said I was perfect."
Renji looked away.
Kato became more serious.
"I'm not saying you're wrong to search. I'm saying that if the remnant that cursed Aoi doesn't leave clear traces outside, maybe the point isn't outside."
Renji looked at him again.
"What do you mean?"
Kato did not respond immediately.
He did not yet want to say it without being sure.
"Let's go back first," he said.
Renji looked at him for one more moment. Then he stood without pressing, because he knew Kato well enough to know that when he did not say something it was because he was still assembling what he needed to assemble before saying it, and pressing him before he was ready only made him take longer.
Outside Renji's flat, on the other side of the street, something was still.
Not completely still.
It had the stillness of something that breathes in a way that is not breathing, of something that watches in a way that is not looking.
Under a street lamp that did not quite light, the silhouette appeared human only as long as one did not look at it too directly.
It did not call out.
It did not enter.
It did not need to yet.
It did not have enough of a face to appear human, but it had enough memory to hate her.
In Aoi's chest, the mark pulsed again.
As though someone, from outside, had just reminded her of the guilt of having been born.