01 | disuse

a/n

chapter one! hope you enjoy it :)

with love,

krissy


d i s u s e



"ATTENTION. RESIDENTS OF Tennoji neighborhoods, Osaka, please evacuate. Level four Red Lung quarantine: effective. Attention. Residents of Tennoji..."

I dangle my legs off a bright crimson neon sign overlooking the dark street. Below, men, women, and children armed with fat luggage follow officers toward the distant Osaka tower. It's unsettling to watch, if not how disturbingly strange this is. I've always known Tennoji as a lighthouse in the dark, bustling with life, the walls bright with sleek murals of birds in flight and arching dragons.

Tonight, the lanterns are unlit, the shops are boarded up, and the vibrant displays are colorless.

A lot of men and women have their faces covered. Their bodies are wrapped in thick coats. I recognize telling signs--the broken cough of someone infected. The bloodshot eyes. Hands wrapped tightly together as plumes of sour smoke blow from the medic tower that has replaced Tennoji park.

My hand rises to my ear. "Lin, you see something?" I whisper.

The screen crackles a little. Film dirt slides over my vision, reminding me that the sharp edges are a luxury of my precious contacts. The user interface system built into the accommodation, Lin, scans the crowds below with a quick flash here and there of holographic signs.

"No sign of the target," she reports. "To be fair, the provided drawing is quite...incomprehensive."

I wrinkle my nose and pull my legs up into a crouch. "Well, don't blame me. Whoever put out the bounty for Ren's head doesn't seem to know who he's looking for."

"Alternatively, you could surf the Net. Run search?"

"No, I've checked. He's not there."

Lin's a machine. She has no emotion. But I swear she's teasing me. "Are you positive?"

I roll my eyes. "Yes, Lin. I ran every search I could the minute I saw the bounty notification." Below, a skinny guard emerges from an apartment complex, tugging along a round woman desperate to silence her shrieking child. Uneasiness stirs in my stomach. "Lin, where are they being evacuated to?"

"Commencing search. One moment, please."

"You never take longer," I murmur, rubbing grease off my fingers.

Once settled outside, the screaming child grows quiet, sniffs up her snot, and takes a forgiving rice ball from the guard, whose pale face looks ridden with guilt.

Lin's voice crackles to life.

"Unable to get a read on their destination. Connection is down." Red flashes. "Battery at thirty-percent. Proceeding further is not recommended."

"I'm going in."

"You are proceeding further."

"If the bounty's right and Ren is from Tennoji, he'll be here."

"I don't recommend--"

"Yes, yes, we get it." I grunt as I stand, tucking myself into the shadows of a window awning. "Damn foot's asleep."

Red Lung has been a chronic problem in Osaka for at least thirty years. They tracked it first from poisoned fish in the water when a small breakout happened thirty-two years ago in the Nanko Port area. There are old articles in online archives about it, with zealous reporters connecting it to waves of water and air pollution from military production during the war.

Eighteen years ago, the Lung broke out again. Since then, it comes in waves. My mother caught it, turned half-blind, then passed it the effects to her offspring, as the disease does. There's talk of a Red Lung antidote hitting the markets soon, if they can learn how to mass-produce it. As if on cue, the Lung has been moving northward fast as ever. First Tennoji. Then it'll be Namba, up to Shinsaibashi, all the way up to the Osaka Castle area.

Here's what's strange.

A string of cold-case murders have been growing at the exact same rate. They call it the Red Wing.

Fury stirs in my chest. On instinct, my fingers feel the sharp edge of a wrinkled playing card tucked into my inner coat pocket. The symbol it bears is burned into every bone in my body: one damn playing card with a single angel wing printed in bloodred ink.

Ace.

I don't dare look.

The defeated lilt of the officer's voice rises in my memory. "It's the only thing evidence we have. There was one card for every body."

There were four hundred two bodies. I read every article.

With the new wave of cold-case murders and the release of vision-enhancing contacts, bounty hunting became popular as a way to pay rent and put food on the table. Jobs were unreliable. But if you knew your way with a knife, you could control and predict your income. You could protect your family and your city. Demand for contacts skyrocketed.

Blindness manifests itself in many different ways. Blurred shapes. Blotchy vision. No peripherals. Light perception. No light perception. I count myself lucky. 20/200 vision, blurred shapes. Still, the contacts, in the three hours they run on battery, are game-changers.

Some people shame us for using the accommodations. But they work. Isn't that all that matters?

My limbs burn as I race across ragged rooftops, dilapidated signs, crisscrossing cable wires, and steel chimneys. Wind rushes into my lungs. My short hair whips across my eyes. I feel like I'm wading through that sour herbal smell the medic towers can't stop belching.

Lin is a little too faithful--with every inch I cross, the contacts are flashing with holographic labels of the locations I'm passing, ready to be expanded upon command.

A leaning building pokes into view just as red flashes.

"Battery at twenty-percent. Proceeding further is not recommended."

"Battery," I groan. "Always about the battery. Lin, enter low battery mode."

A little loading circle in the velvet sky appears. "Entering low battery mode," she returns.

I catch my breath, hands on my hips, and watch the river of Tennoji families flock northward toward a giant mess of rusted metal and blackened shingles wrapped in moss and greenery. I wince. Flooded in lantern-light, the thing looks like a pagoda squashed so ruthlessly into the ground it's lost all sense of support. Legs broken and all.

The streets are emptying out as the last of the crowds proceed through a gate. I find my path back to ground level, battered sneakers hitting gravel.

I tug my hood sharply over my head as I walk. "Lin, what's that building?"

"Unable to provide information in low battery mode."

I stifle another groan. "Then exit battery mode."

"Battery at fifteen percent. Exiting battery mode is not rec--"

"Lin. Just do it."

Red flashes over my vision. Then, after a moment, her voice flickers into my ears again. "Hina, you are approaching Tenshi Orphanage, half a mile from Daikokucho Station."

Its glow touches my face.

"Tenshi Orphanage?" my mouth says.

"Correct. The orphanage was shut down two years ago after a mass-murder of its faculty."

"Mass-murder of its faculty? What does that mean? Which faculty?"

"All of them."

A shudder works through me.

All of them?

"The cold-case murder is reportedly tied to other cold cases frequent in your browsing history, including the Minami Brawlery case," Lin continues. "Classification: Red Wing."

The word rings ice-cold through my mind. Ice lances down my spine. Suddenly, I'm thrown off balance, as if my brain has touched a jarring memory it can't grasp, throwing it back with full panicked force. A dozen fragments flash through my mind. A thunderstorm, water soaking my shoes, a flash of white lightning sparking fire.

I can't breathe. In the rain, a red wing flashes in my eyes. It's splattered in red blood across a white-sand floor. Even when I close my eyes, it burns into my eyelids with white-hot fury.

"Lin, stop," I make out through gritted teeth.

She sounds puzzled. "Hina?"

"Stop," I gasp. The world swims into a blur. I'm suddenly frantic. Is it the contacts? Are they malfunctioning? Has the battery died? "What did I say about showing me that--"

"Hina," she answers calmly, "I did not show you anything. Alternatively, I ran facial recognition of the crowds and found a familiar face. Classification: Ren-shu Ko."

I blink. Suddenly, everything dissolves. I'm leaning heavily against the side of the street again, the last of the crowds trickling through the gate, becoming one with the greenery shrouding the pagoda.

I suck in a breath and clear my throat. "How? Their backs are turned."

"There is an operating security camera overlooking the entrance."

"Okay, okay, okay," I breathe, quickening my steps. "Did you try cross-checking his face with records?"

"Accessing files now."

My breaths are becoming steadier, deeper. Good. I need this focus. Clenching my hands in fists, I break into a light jog and slip into the crowds, squeezing past whimpering children, stone-faced teens, grim faces lined with stress creases. The thick smell of greenery, rainwater, and rotting stones fills my nose.

Bloodshot, nervous eyes fill my vision. Red swims before my eyes.

"Battery at ten percent. Proceeding further is not--"

"Yeah, we get it," I mutter quickly. "Files?"

Red fades. "Files accessed. There are..." A confused lilt touches her voice, as if the existence of Ren-shu Ko has puzzled even a machine. "...no records related to a Ren-shu Ko. He is unverified."

"Nothing," I say, disbelieving.

"That is correct."

"What about security camera footage? Photos online? Anything?"

"There are only two matches."

"Okay," I prompt, "tell me more."

"Both matches are from CCTV footage from Osaka Port, Nanko Port Area."

"Abandoned areas," I clarify.

"Yes," she continues, "but the location has had two million searches within the past hour. A post on a black market forum tells me Osaka Port is the site of a classified medicine shipment."

"What shipment?"

Lin pauses to run a search. Like a boat in the sea, the flow of the crowd carries me past the gate, where a wide yard is flooded by rich moss and grass wrapping like blankets around fallen pillars, lampposts, and disused security trucks. The entrance of the orphanage itself is marked by two open steel doors colored a rusted copper, dripping with rain, as if the door frame is leaking with tears.

"The shipment is a sample of a new prototype for the Red Lung antidote," she says.

"Antidote?" my mouth echoes.

"Yes. It seems Ren-shu Ko is interested. The antidote arrives tomorrow at three hours."

Three in the morning. 

"Okay," I breathe. The steel doors are approaching, the entrance yawning open, but it no longer holds any appeal. "Okay, then I'll just find him there. It's a weakness. Easy ambush. Perfect, Lin. That's dynamite."

"I'm sorry, Hina," she answers quizzically, "but I found no indication of explosives at the shipment."

My lips twitch. "An expression, Lin."

"I--"

Her voice crackles into static. A pang of fear touches my chest.

"Lin?"

The world swims with red. A different, deeper voice repeats in my mind, Lin but not Lin, twisted and crackled. My heartbeat spikes.

"Battery. One percent. Battery. One percent. This is a two minute warning. You have one hundred and twenty seconds to--"

"Shit," I breathe. It takes five minutes at my fastest to get home. I spin, weaving quickly against the crowds. Out.

Commotion erupts. A guard notices and shouts.

"Fugitive!"

"Get her down here!" another barks.

Footsteps and gasps fill the air. In the panicked crimson, my eyes search for a vantage point. There. A corner of the gate has been warped, as if someone has curled the edges down. Perfect for a climb. Not far from the surrounding buildings.

"You have one hundred and ten seconds."

I'm too terrified to speak. My feet propel me forward toward a fallen pillar. Launch me toward the drooping gate, the metal like a finger extending to lend help.

"One hundred and five."

I've just hopped atop the gate, hovering over greenery, when something on the pagoda's roof catches my eye.

A figure in black crouches on the shingles, blending into the night. There's a golden light in his hands, perhaps a makeshift flashlight. He's tall, broad-shouldered, brows thick over his eyes as if drawn in thick, angry charcoal.

Guards rush toward me. He lifts his eyes to mine.

I forget to breathe.

It's not the wild quality of them that terrifies me. It's the cloth that masks the rest of his face. Black, bearing a red symbol.

A single angel wing, printed in bloodred ink. 

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