They let him back in six days later.
He took the bus alone.
The house looked exactly the same from the street and that was the part that felt wrong. Same gate. Same potted plant. Same cracked stone on the front path. The police tape was gone. The neighbourhood was quiet. It looked like a house where nothing had happened.
He walked to the gate and grabbed the latch.
The street disappeared.
He was standing in the front hall — except he wasn't. He was watching it. Like a film playing inside his skull with the volume turned all the way up. The hallway was dark. Late at night. The kind of dark that meant everyone should have been asleep.
Four men came through the back of the house.
Not through the door — the window. Quiet and practiced, the way people moved when they had done this before. Black clothes. No faces he could make out. They spread through the ground floor without a word between them like they had already memorised the layout.
His father appeared at the top of the stairs.
Kairo stared.
He had never seen his father look like that.
Setsuna Mitsune came down those stairs like a different person entirely — no jacket, no newspaper, nothing of the quiet measured man from breakfast. His face was completely still. His eyes were reading the room the moment he hit the bottom step — counting, calculating, already moving before the first man reached him.
The first man threw a punch.
Setsuna wasn't there when it landed.
He had already stepped inside the man's reach and did something fast with his elbow that dropped the man to the floor before Kairo even understood what had happened. No wasted movement. No sound. He caught the man on the way down so the fall didn't make noise.
Kairo's mouth was open.
His father — the man who folded newspapers and complained about his collar button — was fighting four trained men in the dark and he was good. Not lucky. Not desperate. Good in the way that came from years of something Kairo had never once been shown.
His mother appeared from the hallway.
She had something in her hand — thin, flat, the kind of thing that disappeared against a palm. She moved low and fast toward the man nearest the stairs and Kairo watched her take him down with two precise movements and step over him like it was nothing.
She knew too.
Both of them. His parents. This entire other life underneath the breakfast table and the rice cooker and the nameless humming — underneath all of it, this.
The third man came at his father from the side with something in his hand.
Setsuna turned to meet him but the fourth man was already behind him and there was a sound — short, sharp — and his father's movement changed. Slower. His hand went to his side. He kept fighting but something had shifted. Something was wrong.
His mother saw it.
She called his name — Setsuna — not a question. A warning. She was already moving toward him when two more men came through the front door.
Six total.
His father looked at his mother across the hallway.
Something passed between them in that look. The kind of thing that didn't need words because it had been understood for years. His mother's face didn't break. She lifted her chin slightly. His father turned back toward the men.
He kept fighting.
They both kept fighting.
But there were six of them and something was already wrong with his father's side and the hallway was small and Kairo couldn't look away and couldn't stop it and couldn't do anything at all except stand there and watch the two people he knew least in the world give everything they had in a dark hallway while their son slept two floors above them knowing nothing.
Then one of the men said a word.
One word. Quiet. Like a signal.
Souen.
The front path came back.
Kairo was on both knees this time. His forehead was nearly touching the stone. He was gripping the gate post with both hands and his whole body was shaking and his face was wet and he hadn't noticed either of those things until just now.
He stayed there.
A minute. Maybe more.
Then he straightened up. Wiped his face with the back of his glove. Breathed in slow. Breathed out slow.
He stood up and walked inside.
He moved through the house without stopping — straight to the study, one hand on the desk, his father's echo playing out in fragments he forced himself to watch clearly this time. The files burning. The pause. The hand pressed to the mantle.
He found the hollow. Found the envelope. Found the photograph.
Old man. Mountain gate. Blind eyes.
He turned the envelope over.
Two lines in his father's handwriting.
Find the Lantern.Zenjiro. Kurama Mountain. Tell him the crane has fallen.
Kairo stood in his father's study and read those two lines and thought about the man he had watched come down those stairs. The stillness in his face. The way he moved. The years and years of something Kairo had been kept completely away from.
He hadn't known his parents at all.
He put the envelope in his pocket and left the house.
He didn't look back.