The scent of toasted bread and rendered fat clung to the air as T'Jadaka dragged a spoon lazily through his eggs, unbothered by the morning, unbothered by anything. Lila sat across from him, her juice glass lifted halfway to her lips and forgotten there, her gaze drifting to him every few seconds before snapping away.
The floorboards announced Ruy before he appeared—loose-legged, unhurried, wearing the grin of a man holding a winning hand. Vitaliya materialized at his shoulder like a co-conspirator.
"Morning, lovebirds."
The juice went down wrong. Lila slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes watering. "Ruy—"
"What?" He reached past her for the kettle, all innocence, pouring himself tea with the careful attention of someone who had absolutely nothing to say. "Just good morning. What'd I do?" He cut a glance sideways at Vitaliya. She pressed her lips together, shoulders shaking.
T'Jadaka bit into his bread.
"It's just—" Vitaliya propped herself against Ruy's arm, tilting her head at the pair of them with the air of someone conducting a scientific observation. "You both disappeared last night. And now here you are. Looking very..." She made a vague, floating gesture with her hand. "Rested."
Lila set both elbows on the table and put her face into them.
"Details," Ruy said simply.
A long pause. Then Lila surfaced, cheeks so red they looked sunburned. "Nothing happened." She reached up and tugged her collar a half-inch higher without seeming to notice she'd done it. "We talked. And then we—we kissed. That's all."
Ruy and Vitaliya looked at each other.
"Kissed," Ruy repeated, flat as a floorboard.
"Just kissed," Vitaliya confirmed, as if verifying a disappointing weather report.
"Made out," Lila corrected, then immediately looked like she wished she hadn't. "That's it. That is the whole thing."
Ruy turned to T'Jadaka with the gravity of a man delivering a eulogy. "Brother. I am disappointed in you."
T'Jadaka pushed his empty plate to the side. "I got what I wanted."
He said it simply, without flourish, and then looked at Lila—just a beat, just long enough for something private to pass between them—and the corner of his mouth moved.
Lila looked down at her plate and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
From the far end of the room, Farrah wrapped both hands around her mug and didn't say anything for a moment. T'Jadaka threw his head back at something Ruy said, the laugh sudden and full and a little ungraceful, and it hit her somewhere behind the sternum. She took a slow sip of tea.
"I'm happy for them." Marla was already stirring a second spoon of sugar into her cup, not looking up.
"You're taking this very calmly," Farrah said, "for a woman with two teenagers sneaking around her house."
Marla's spoon clinked against the rim. A small, pleased smile crossed her face. "Better here than out there, don't you think?" She set the spoon down. "Besides—" She leaned in, dropping her voice like they were trading secrets in a pew. "I'm the one who gave Vitaliya and Ruy the condoms."
Farrah's mug stopped moving.
"I had a husband," Marla continued, perfectly serene, lifting her tea for a sip. "I was young once. I know what burning urges feel like." She raised an eyebrow. "You think teenagers are built different?"
Farrah stared at her. The tea had gone lukewarm in her hand. "Marla." She searched for the word. "You are a menace."
Marla smiled into her cup.
The crash came from the hallway—something ceramic, something heavy—followed immediately by T'Jadaka's voice detonating through the walls:
"RUY! VITALIYA! I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU TWO DON'T—"
Both women flinched. Farrah grabbed her mug before it could tip.
"Are you sure they're not children?" Farrah asked, already rising from her chair.
Marla's shoulders shook. She couldn't help it.
Ruy came through the doorway at a full sprint, nearly taking out a chair. "It was a joke, bro! You literally cannot take a joke—!"
T'Jadaka was three steps behind him and not saying a word, which was somehow worse. He caught Ruy by the back of the neck with one arm, hauled him sideways, and locked his head against his ribs.
"I told you." The knuckles came down. "I told you."
"VITALIYA—" Ruy's voice had gone reedy. "Babe—help—get this—"
Vitaliya stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching with something between pride and mild scientific interest. "That's it, baby. My honor."
"I can't—" Ruy wheezed, scrabbling at the arm around his throat. "I cannot defend it—like this—"
Farrah stepped between them, one hand on each chest. "Enough." She looked at T'Jadaka until he let go. "Help me clean this up. I'm going to the store."
"What are you making?"
"Red beans. Rice. Cornbread."
He looked at her for a moment. The grin came slow. "That's because it's the only thing you can make without—"
"No." Her voice wobbled on it.
He laughed, low in his throat, and leaned in close enough that only she could hear. "Miss Marla's gonna start hovering around the kitchen when she smells it. Just so you know."
Farrah pressed her palm once against his cheek—brief, warm, matter-of-fact—then moved past him. She kissed Ruy on the forehead as she passed, same as she kissed T'Jadaka: no ceremony, no announcement, like it was something she'd been doing her whole life.
"I love you, Jadaka."
"I love you too, Mom." He was already picking up the pieces of whatever Ruy had knocked over. "Don't let them cheat you on the cornmeal. You know how they get near closing."
She paused in the doorway. The sword went over her shoulder, the canvas bags over the other. She looked at him once—just once—and then she was gone.
The door had barely clicked shut before Ruy spun around, pointing.
"Mama's boy!"
T'Jadaka's head snapped up. The grin came fast and dangerous. "Who's the mama's boy, hoe—"
Ruy was already running.
The chase dissolved into a tangle of limbs near the far wall, T'Jadaka working Ruy's arm into something that looked anatomically inadvisable. Vitaliya and Lila watched from the table, chins resting in their palms.
"He's different lately." Vitaliya tilted her head as T'Jadaka smoothly shifted his grip, folding Ruy into a triangle choke like he was refolding a napkin. "Like, I keep catching myself doing a double take every time he laughs. It's still weird to see."
"UNCLE—I GIVE, I GIVE—!"
Lila's mouth curved without her meaning it to. "Every time I see him smile it just—" She pressed two fingers to her sternum, absently. "I don't know. It does something."
Vitaliya's gaze drifted back to T'Jadaka. Stayed there. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth for just a half-second.
The warmth drained out of Lila's expression.
"He's mine, Vitaliya."
Vitaliya blinked, then waved a hand like she was shooing a fly. "Oh, relax. You can admire the art on the walls without trying to take it home." She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms. Though if you two ever implode, I am absolutely first in line—
"Stop thinking about my man!" Lila hissed. "You have a boyfriend!"
"Speaking of which." Vitaliya sat forward, propping her elbows on the table, the corner of her mouth hooking upward. "That reminded me of something. You're not telling the whole story."
Lila's spine straightened. "I told you what happened. We kissed. End of story."
"Oh, I believe the kissing." Vitaliya's eyes didn't move from Lila's face. "But I think something else happened too. I think you saw it."
The color rose up Lila's neck in a wave.
"Why does your brain live in the gutter twenty-four hours a day—"
"You didn't say no, though."
A long pause. Lila looked at the ceiling. Then the table. Then let out a breath that collapsed her entire posture.
"Fine." The word came out barely above a whisper. "Yes. I saw his... rod."
Across the room, the wrestling stopped.
Ruy slowly turned his head. T'Jadaka went very still.
"Aye." Ruy's voice dropped to a murmur. He leaned sideways toward T'Jadaka. "I think our girls are talking about our meats."
T'Jadaka pinched the bridge of his nose. "Can we please go to another room."
"Nah, hold on—" Ruy grabbed his arm. "Look, I see the way Vitaliya looks at you. I'm not blind. I'm not saying I'm insecure, I'm just saying—man to man—I need to know I can beat you in something. You know what I mean?"
T'Jadaka looked at him for a long moment. "You know how that sounds, right?"
"Shut up—"
"Like, genuinely. The way you're talking right now—"
"I said shut up and let me listen!" Ruy elbowed him hard and pressed closer to the wall.
"No way." Vitaliya's voice jumped an octave. She grabbed Lila's wrist. "You were actually about to—don't lie to me, I know that face—"
"We were close." Lila pulled her sleeve down over her fingers, staring at the table. "Things got—it was all—and then he actually—" She exhaled sharply through her nose. "And I just. Froze."
Vitaliya went quiet.
"He noticed." Lila's voice had dropped, softer now, the embarrassment giving way to something more careful. "Like, immediately. He didn't push. He just... stopped. Covered me back up. Held me." She picked at a thread on her hem. "We didn't go through with it."
Vitaliya stared at her for three full seconds.
Then she lost it completely.
The laugh came out of her like a dam breaking—both hands slapping the table, chair scraping back, her whole body folding forward. "OH MY GOD—" She pressed a fist to her mouth, wheezing. "You mean to tell me—he had a ten-piece situation going on and you chickened out—"
"It wasn't funny—"
"—you actually chickened out—"
"It was enormous, Vitaliya, it was like a—I panicked, okay!? It was like a tree trunk—"
Vitaliya straightened up, laughter evaporating in an instant, replaced by an expression of dead-serious scientific inquiry. "Wait. Wait. Lila. Estimate. Give me a number."
Lila looked around the room like she was checking for witnesses. Then she leaned in and whispered.
Vitaliya's jaw unhinged.
"To your—" She lowered her voice to a strangled hiss. "Belly button?!"
The words detonated in the air.
From the other side of the room came a sound—a very small, very high-pitched sound—and then Ruy turned and walked directly into the wall face-first and stood there, pressing his forehead against it.
T'Jadaka dragged a hand down his face. "Are you happy?" He looked at Ruy's back. "Can we go now? This is genuinely disturbing."
Ruy didn't move from the wall.
"Ruy."
"...Fuck you."
"What did I do—"
Ruy turned around slowly. The look on his face was that of a man who had just received profoundly unwelcome news from his doctor. "Fuck you." He pointed. "Fuck your daddy. Fuck whoever contributed to that gene pool, because this is criminal, man. You're already better looking than me, and now—"
"You're the one who stood there and listened!" T'Jadaka threw both hands up. "You did this to yourself! I told you to walk away!"
"God damn." Vitaliya was still staring at T'Jadaka with the expression of someone reassessing everything they thought they knew. She turned to Lila. "You didn't just get a man, you got a discovery. That's not a person, that's a natural phenomenon. Lila, I am begging you—do not let that go—"
"I won't." Lila sat up straighter, something shifting in her face—the mortification still there, but underneath it something quieter and a little fierce. A small, private smile pulled at her mouth. "And yes. I'm done sharing details with you."
Vitaliya pressed a hand over her heart like she was taking a vow. "I'm done. I'm a changed woman." She turned to Ruy. "Baby. We need to have a conversation."
Ruy was still staring at T'Jadaka. The stare had not moved.
T'Jadaka met it without blinking. "Don't look at me like that."
"I will look at you," Ruy said, very quietly, "however I want."
"I didn't ask to be born—"
"And I didn't ask to know this." Ruy turned away. "But here we both are."
T'Jadaka picked up his fork, pulled his plate back toward him, and took a bite. "'Miggas stay be hating.'" He chewed. "Now leave me alone. I need to eat before my appetite disappears completely from all of this."
The marketplace bags bit into Farrah's fingers, heavy with produce and cornmeal and the particular weight of a domestic errand nearly completed. She gave Ed a wave over her shoulder—the old man was already retreating into his shop, still smiling about the candy—and she was three steps into the street before she looked down at the bags and felt the absence.
Ah, shit. I didn't even grab my—
"Cigarettes?"
Her hand caught the pack before her brain registered the throw. Pure reflex. Old muscle memory that should've been retired by now.
She looked down at what sat in her palm.
Deadly Sanctuary. Black and silver lettering. Long-style cigarettes, not shorts. The cardboard crinkled under the slow tightening of her grip.
The street moved around her—vendors calling, a cart rattling over cobblestones, a child arguing with his mother—and Farrah stood in the middle of all of it and said nothing, her eyes cutting through the crowd the way a blade cuts through cloth. Clean. Without hurry.
He stepped out of the alley the way a man steps out of a painting he's been living in too long. The suit was charcoal and bespoke, white shirt pressed to a knife's edge. The blond was a dye job—harsh against the warm brown of his face, the dark fade at his temples. The glasses sat on his nose with practiced authority.
No lenses in them.
Never any lenses.
"Long time no see, espléndida."
Farrah let the cigarette pack fall. It hit the cobblestones without ceremony.
"It shows, Javier." Her voice was flat water over flat stone. "You used to know what I smoked."
Something moved behind his eyes—acknowledgment, maybe. The closest he ever got to flinching. His lips curved into the smile she remembered, the one that had never once reached anything deeper than his teeth.
"Symbolism," he said. "For what comes next."
The shadows peeled themselves open.
Ten of them. Black tactical gear, weapons already in hand, arranged around her in a circle tight enough to feel like a throat. Not one of them moved. They just waited, the way trained dogs wait—coiled, reading the hand that would release them.
Farrah looked around the circle slowly. Let them watch her look.
"A jump, Javier." She let a half-smile rest on her face, unhurried. "That's not really your style." She let the words hang, then: "But everybody's been talking. You went toe-to-toe with Raiken." She clicked her tongue softly. "Just surviving a Mazoku leaves marks. Doesn't it?"
Her eyes went briefly unfocused. A small sound escaped her—soft, private, entirely out of place.
Javier's smile tightened at the edges. "What's funny?"
"Nothing." She blinked back into the present. "Good memory."
She reached into her jacket, produced the pack she'd caught, and shook a cigarette free with a single practiced flick. It landed between her lips like it had been aiming there all along.
"You got a light?"
"You're not seriously going to—" One of the tactical figures shifted, hand tightening on his weapon.
The man directly in front of her sucked in a breath that swelled his chest to capacity and roared in rapid-fire Japanese, his voice cracking with something that lived in the border territory between terror and religious ecstasy.
Farrah stared at him.
"What the hell is his problem, Javier?"
Javier had two fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose. "He's a fan."
She looked around the circle. "The beautiful or the badass?"
"Both," said eight voices. In unison. With what could only be described as reverence.
Javier closed his eyes briefly—the expression of a man mentally revising his hiring criteria. "I am never using fanboys for a targeted hit again."
"I'm flattered, boys." She tilted the unlit cigarette toward them. "Before we do this—who hired you?"
"We ain't—"
"Father of the CEO you killed." Javier pushed the lens-less glasses up his nose with one finger. "His son's death. He knows what the boy was when he died. Doesn't seem to care much. He just wants you in the ground."
The disgruntled mercenary spun on Javier like he'd been slapped. "Why would you say that—"
"Because this is my mission." The smooth drawl was gone. Something older and harder had replaced it, a voice that came from somewhere below the suit, below the glasses, below all of it. "And she's my friend. Even now."
"FRIEND? Who the—who are you even talking to—"
"You, broke bitch—"
Farrah watched them devolve for exactly two seconds.
Then Javier stopped himself. She could see the moment he decided—a breath drawn through the nose, a hand smoothing the lapels flat, the particular stillness of a man recollecting himself from a considerable distance. He crossed to her.
The silver Zippo appeared from his breast pocket. He cupped the flame with his other hand, shielding it from nothing—there was no wind—and held it to the end of her cigarette.
She drew slowly. The ember glowed amber. Smoke moved between them like a curtain being drawn.
"You were always sweet to me," she said.
His expression shifted into something that cost him. "You were always cold." He watched the smoke curl. "But you've changed."
She smoked in silence. Finished it down to the filter and pressed the butt against the cobblestone with the toe of her boot.
Her eyes came up.
The ten men were still in their circle, watching, waiting. She read them in the time it took to exhale her last drag. Stances wrong. Weight distribution sloppy. The kind of fighters who'd spent their training hours on strength and none on stillness.
Amateurs.
She let the thought settle without satisfaction. Then the first one lunged.
She didn't retreat. Didn't brace. She came up—vertical explosion from a flat-footed stand—and the spinning heel kick caught the formation like a thrown stone catches glass. Bodies scattered into storefronts, into parked vehicles, into each other, the sounds of impact overlapping in ugly percussion.
She landed without a sound.
"You're slacking on speed," she said to no one in particular.
A fireball sputtered toward her face from the left—small, poorly formed, the kind of attack that belonged in a first-year classroom. She raised one hand and flicked her wrist. The flame died a foot from her nose, snuffed by a ripple of displaced air she'd barely thought about creating.
Behind her, the whisper of steel clearing leather. A knife. Coming low and fast.
She stepped inside it by a margin that would've made anyone watching hold their breath. Her augmented arm—the metal one, the one that caught the light differently than skin—swung out and drove the man into the pavement. The impact cracked stone. Left a ring of fractured cobblestones and a crater the size of a dinner plate.
Phase one, she thought. He's tiring me on Phase one.
Across the street, Javier hadn't moved. Hands in his pockets. Head slightly tilted. Watching with the focused patience of a man who had planned for what came after.
She didn't have time to read his face before fingers locked around her ankles.
The man in the crater—broken, bleeding, the man who should not have been conscious—had both hands clamped on her boots. Above her, two more had already left the ground, arms sweeping down in synchronized arcs, blue crescent blades of compressed air screaming toward her torso.
She didn't think. She grabbed the man by the collar and pulled—ripped him clean out of the asphalt like uprooting a stake—and swung him up. The wind slashes tore through him instead of her. He made a sound that stopped quickly. She put him down without looking at what remained.
"None of you are going to make me draw." She rolled her shoulder, settling her jacket back into place. "I want you to understand that I'm a little disappointed."
Javier hadn't moved. One finger tapped against his chin, slow and rhythmic.
She's improved. He watched her sidestep a kinetic blast and counter with a kick that sent three men into a wall simultaneously, the impact leaving silhouettes in the plaster. That's not just time and training. Raiken did something to her. He thought about what he knew—S/0 physically at sixteen, SS/0 in combat skill before she'd been old enough to vote. A Mazoku existed outside any scale he had access to. They simply were. Ancient and incomprehensible and permanently violent in the way certain laws of physics were permanent.
Whatever he gave her when he broke her, she rebuilt herself out of it.
The street went quiet by degrees. Ten men. None standing. The sounds of the injured filled the silence—ragged breathing, someone cradling a wrist—and Farrah stood in the center of it all without a hair out of place, her eyes on him.
"This isn't it, Javier."
"No," he agreed. "That was Phase One."
The men began to move.
Not the stumbling movement of the badly hurt. The wrong kind. Smooth. Rising in the particular way that bodies rise when something else is directing them, their broken limbs knitting wrong-fast, the vacancy behind their eyes deepening into something that wasn't vacancy at all.
"Don't." The playfulness was gone from her voice. Stripped clean. "Whatever you're about to do—don't. I don't want to kill any of you."
Eleven identical smirks answered her.
They assumed the stance together—left fist high, right held close to the chest—then crossed their arms downward in a single sweeping motion, ceremonial and precise. Like a lock turning.
"Roses are red, the Word is my shield..."
The streetlights died. Not flickered—died, filaments going cold mid-hum. The ambient glow of the district, the signage and lanterns and lit windows, folded inward and was swallowed. The darkness that replaced it had texture to it, a physical presence that pressed against the skin.
From somewhere without a source, wolves.
Farrah's jaw tightened. Void Beasts. The recognition moved through her like cold water. He found people who know the Summons.
Javier removed his hands from his pockets.
She moved for the nearest chanting man and Javier came at her fast—faster than his posture had advertised—a kick aimed at her ribs with the commitment of a man who'd made peace with what he was doing. She caught it on her forearm, redirected the force, put him into the wall to her left. He bounced off it like he knew how to.
"You're going to let them burn themselves up," she said, not a question. "You're sacrificing them."
"They volunteered." He straightened his lapels. The glasses had not moved a millimeter. "I've never seen you sentimental before, espléndida."
"With the weight of heavens and this sacred treasure..."
She came at him. All of it, no restraint—fists in sequences that blurred the air between them, body blows redirected at the last second into checks and guides, the strategy of someone trying to move a wall without breaking it. Javier was good. He had always been good. He absorbed and parried and slipped with the fluency of decades of discipline.
Her knuckle caught his forearm and he felt it in his teeth.
She's not trying to kill me, he registered, arms beginning to throb from what her version of holding back felt like. She's trying to move me. Their hands met in a closed parry and the shockwave rolled outward, every window on the block going white and then gone, glass raining down into the silent street.
The chanters dissolved.
They didn't run, didn't fall. They simply came apart into the dark, bodies folding into the black the way smoke folds into more smoke. Their voices remained, growing, filling the street from no particular direction.
The last line arrived like a verdict:
"We summon the Divine Streets General—BIG RAGA THE OPP STOPPA!"
The darkness split.
Eight feet of it, minimum. Dense as architecture. The shiesty mask pulled tight across a face that suggested the concept of a face. Above its head, a dharma wheel of shadow-energy rotated slowly—eight spokes of crackling dark light spinning with the patience of something old pretending to be playful.
The eyes behind the mask found her. Two slits. Glowing.
The grin stretched the fabric from ear to ear.
"SUU-WOOP." The voice was bass that lived below hearing, pavement-deep, felt in the sternum before it reached the ears. "Big Raga in the building, bitches."
Farrah looked at it for a long moment.
Then she looked at Javier.
Her hand moved to the hilt of her sword—first time all night—and her fingers settled around the grip with the quiet certainty of someone finally arriving somewhere they'd been headed all along.
"Now we're talking," she said.