The sky over Simuria was the colour of a bruise the week it starts to heal, and it was full of prayer.
Aizen felt it the moment the ramp kissed alien soil, not the sky, the prayer. On Earth, cursed energy tasted of everything people swallowed and buried, spite folded down at dinner tables, terror pressed flat in hospital corridors, the small daily murders of the heart. He had bathed in that flavour for a second lifetime. This was not that. This rose off the ground like warmth off fresh bread. It was cursed energy, the instruments had been screaming so for four light-years but something here had loved it into another shape, and the wrongness of that lifted the fine eyebrows.
Beside him, Gin breathed in through his nose, long and appreciative, the way another man might outside a bakery.
"Smells like a temple, doesn't it," he said. His eyes stayed shut; they nearly always did. "All that incense. Somebody out here is very, very devout, Aizen-san."
"Somebody," Aizen said, "is being answered."
Far off, past hills veined with something that glittered and was not quite metal, a bell began to ring. Then another. Then a thousand of them, in no rhythm a human throat would have chosen as though the whole horizon had drawn one breath and forgotten to let it go.
Gin's smile widened by perhaps a millimetre. "They know we're here."
"No." Aizen started to walk. "They're saying grace."
* * *
Three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres from Earth, on the far side of the Moon, a boy of eleven sat at the edge of the largest machine human hands had ever built, and was bored.
Beneath Megumi Fushiguro, through a floor of glass rated to stop a meteor, the accelerator ring curved away into a distance the eye refused to hold, fifteen hundred kilometres of tunnel folded under grey regolith, and at its heart, caged in light and spinning fast enough to bruise even the photons, a small blue-violet sphere the adults discussed only in careful voices. The Hōgyoku.
( The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has a circumference of 27km and CERN is currently planning a successor facility, the Future Circular Collider (FCC), which would be significantly larger with a proposed circumference of 91 kilometers. Real data. )
He had been told not to come here. He came most days. It was the one room on the Moon where nobody tried to teach him anything.
His father, he had learned to say the word, though it still sat wrong in his mouth, a stone he kept meaning to spit out had left four days ago. Megumi had watched the ship go from this exact spot, a splinter of white that folded the dark around itself and simply stopped being anywhere. Gin had gone too. Gin, who cheated at shōgi and flicked his ear and once, laughing, had sliced a rice ball into forty identical pieces in the time it took to blink, only to watch his face.
Six years of being quietly tormented by that man. Megumi had assumed he'd be relieved to see the back of him.
He was not relieved, it turned out. That was annoying too.
A small dark shape uncurled from the shadow at his heel, a pup of a shikigami, ink-black, one of the Divine Dogs, no larger than a real puppy because that was as much as he could hold for long. It pushed its head against his knee. He rested a hand on it without looking.
"You'll go blind, you know," said a voice behind him, mild as milk. "Staring at that. All that unshielded exotic light. First the colours go, then the edges." A pause. "Or so I keep telling the physicists. They don't listen either."
Megumi did not turn. Everyone on the Moon knew the voice. He had simply never been left with it before.
"Kisuke Urahara" came to the rail beside him in no hurry at all, clogs clicking on the meteor-glass, and folded his arms over the top bar like a man leaning on a fence to watch cattle. He was dressed as he was always dressed, which was to say badly: a striped bucket hat that belonged on a beach "three worlds" away, a coat that had never been introduced to an iron, wooden sandals in a facility where everyone else wore magnetised boots. A paper fan hung from his fingers, though there was no air on the Moon he had not personally arranged.
Of the twenty-five minds Aizen had gathered off the Earth, the ones from CERN and Caltech and the trading houses whose names Megumi could never keep straight, Urahara was the one the others went quiet around. He had never worked out why. The man looked like he'd wandered in to sell someone a melon.
"He didn't say goodbye," Megumi said. He hadn't meant to.
"No," Urahara agreed. "He isn't the sort." He said it without unkindness, which was somehow worse. "He left instructions, though. Pages of them. Do you know the very first line?"
"…No."
"'Keep the boy company.'" Urahara thumbed the hat back and grinned, and the grin reached his eyes in a way that ought to have been reassuring. "Ahead of the reactor protocols. Ahead of the Hōgyoku. First line." He let it sit. "So. I'm to be your company. Rotten luck for you, I'm the worst company on the Moon. I talk too much, and I win at every game I explain the rules to."
Despite himself, the corner of Megumi's mouth moved. He killed it. "Gin cheated at shōgi."
"Oh, Gin cheated at everything, it was practically load-bearing to his personality." From somewhere in the terrible coat Urahara produced two small cups and a flask and set them on the rail. Steam curled up, then flattened as the gallery's field caught it. "I don't cheat. I only understand the board better than the person who built it. Sit. You've been up here since the mess stopped serving, and a growing sorcerer who skips meals makes a weak shikigami." He nodded at the ink-dark pup. "Look at the poor thing. It's the size of a shoe."
The Divine Dog lifted its head and Megumi would swear it later, looked offended.
He sat. He wasn't sure why. Perhaps because it was the first time in four days someone had spoken to him as a person on the Moon and not a project on it. The cup was not tea. It was some chocolate thing, thick and absurd and plainly engineered, and it was the best thing he had tasted in a month.
"You made this," he said, suspicious.
"I make everything." Urahara sounded delighted to admit it. "That's the whole trick, between you and me. Everyone here has one clever thing. Your father has his, well. He has his depth." A small, private smile. "Gin has his one perfect cut. And I've no single clever thing at all, which turns out to be the cleverest of the lot. When you can make anything, you never lose. You only run out of afternoons." He sipped. "Drink. It'll grow your dog."
They sat a while. Below, the Hōgyoku turned and turned, throwing slow petals of light across the boy's face and the man's ridiculous hat. Megumi found, to his irritation, that the quiet had stopped being lonely and become merely quiet and that this too was Urahara's doing, accomplished without visible effort, the way the man seemed to do everything.
"When is he coming back?" Megumi asked at last. "My father. And Gin."
Urahara did not answer at once. He watched the sphere.
"That depends on what he finds," he said. "And whether it agrees to come home with him." Then, brightly, before the boy could ask what that meant: "Long enough that you and I will be thoroughly sick of each other. Come on. You can help me insult the physicists, they've mislabelled a whole rack of samples and not one of them will own up."
He rose, clogs clicking, and offered a hand up. Megumi took it. The Divine Dog trotted after them, and if it was a little larger than it had been nearer a real dog now, ears up, tail high neither of them remarked on it.
* * *
It was much later after the boy had gone to bed, after Urahara had lost three straight rounds of a card game he had himself explained, and watched Megumi very nearly forget to be sad that the shopkeeper came back alone to the gallery over the accelerator.
He did not sit. He stood at the rail with his fan shut and looked down at the small blue-violet heart of the whole enterprise, and his face, with no child left to keep company, was not unkind. It was worse than unkind. It was interested, the way a surgeon is interested, the way a man who reads the last page first is interested.
Aizen's instructions had a second line, too. Urahara had not quoted it.
The second line concerned the boy and what was folded up inside him, and the precise, careful hour at which it would have to be taken out.
"Grow well," Urahara said, to no one, to the dark, to the sleeping child three levels up and the god turning under his feet. He opened the fan. "You've a while yet."
And on the console at his elbow, unattended, a single light had begun, very patiently and to blink. Somewhere out in the cold between the Moon and the Earth, something had started asking the Moon questions.
He regarded it for a long moment.
Then, still smiling, he set the hat back on his head, and went to answer it.