Squad37

I could barely walk.

Leonie kept me upright with one hand around my arm—that strange constant heat of her soaking through my sleeve, like she’d just come in from a long day in the sun and never quite cooled down—and steered me out into a corridor. An office floor. Carpet tiles, dropped ceilings, the smell of new paint and sawdust still hanging in the air.

And the whole thing was a lie.

I knew fronts. I’d lived inside one for two years. This was a good one, but it was a front—half-finished behind its own face, doors that opened on rooms with nothing in them, a reception desk no one had ever sat at. GenKin Entertainment Systems on the wall in cheerful primary letters, again on a glass partition, again on a stack of unopened boxes. Arcades and home consoles. I knew the name. They were the ones bleeding their cabinets into every smoky bar and basement in the country, every dim little alcove where they turned kids and lonely men into a steady drip of coins and chips. I’d wandered into one of their places once, out of pure curiosity, and lasted about three minutes before the weight of all that ogling chased me back out the door.

But nobody designed an arcade cabinet here. Nobody sold a single chip out of this floor. It was a costume on an empty body.

And as Leonie walked me past a half-pinned promotional poster, I caught it in the very tail of my eye—small, in the corner, the kind of thing you weren’t meant to read: a partner mark. Yamada Group.

Good, I thought, the old reflex kicking in under the grief and the fog, cataloguing, placing, mapping the exits I couldn’t yet use. The paint was wet-fresh. The prints were sharp, just-run, ink that hadn’t had a week to sit. You didn’t ship a brand-new front like this somewhere remote and assemble it under a sheet. So I’m still close. Kyoto, or Osaka. This isn’t the kind of place you’d stand up on some far-off isl—

“Yes,” Edward said from ahead of me, without turning around. “We’re in Osaka. Osaka Business Park—the new towers by the castle, if you want the address.”

I hadn’t said a word.

“No need to hide it from you.” He kept walking, easy, hands in his pockets. “Besides—you could pull it out of our heads yourself, if you bothered to look. You’re in there now. We’re all in there together.”

Oh, I thought, dull and cold. Right. Connected.

And he heard that too, and said nothing, and just kept leading us down the hall.

Edward had just read the whole of my mind—the investigating, the cataloguing, the exits I was already pricing out—and dismantled it in two flat sentences without breaking stride. Then he crossed toward a smaller door at the end of the hall.

And as he passed in front of us, as he turned his head our way, I felt something move through Leonie.

Her skin went warmer. Warmer than her already-impossible baseline, a little surge of it against my arm. A reaction, I noted, almost clinical—and then the noting got away from me, because the link didn’t stop at her skin. Her heartbeat kicked up. And under the heartbeat, something else unfurled: a soft fluttering high in her chest, quick and bright and unmistakable, and beneath that, warmer still, less polite, a low pull of want that had nothing to do with body temperature at all.

Attraction. For Edward. And—oh. More than attraction.

I turned to look at her before I could stop myself.

She was already looking at me. Waiting for it. A wide, slow, knowing smirk spread across her face—the face of someone who’d just felt a stranger flip open the most private drawer in her head and had decided, on the spot, to be delighted about it.

“Wanna take a deeper look?” she said, low, delighted, daring me. “You might enjoy—”

“No THANKS!”

It came out far too loud, and I felt my whole face go scarlet, a sudden scandalous heat climbing up my neck that I couldn’t blame on her for once. I yanked my attention back out of her like a hand off a hot stove.

Okay, I thought, mortified, staring fixedly at the carpet tiles. Okay. Note to self.

Peeking into people’s minds was not the clean, careful, one-way thing it sounded like. You didn’t get to choose what came through the door once you’d opened it. You got all of them—the fear and the lies and the address of the building, yes, but also the heartbeat, and the flutter, and the parts they kept in the dark.

Leonie was still grinning at me, entirely unrepentant, as she hauled me through the door after Edward.

They brought me through into a wide hall, and for a moment the place was just work—rows of people bent over terminals, the green flicker of screens, the low chatter of a room with a job to do.

Then I saw him.

Off to one side, laid out flat on a stretcher under the hard light: Sasaki. Not crumpled now, not folded in a truck corner—straightened, arranged, but utterly motionless. Switched off in a way no sleeping thing ever is.

“Sasaki.”

I was moving before I knew I could, lurching out of Leonie’s grip, half-running, half-falling across the floor toward him with his name tearing out of me—and Nathan moved with me. He didn’t grab me, didn’t block me; he simply closed, folding into the space at my side and holding there, an arm’s length off, that ancient stillness wrapped around a boy’s frame, matching me step for stumbling step. Ready. Whatever I might be about to do, whatever I might be about to become, he meant to be near enough to end it.

Edward lifted a hand and nodded to the room, and nobody else stopped me.

Two men stood over the stretcher. One was tall and old and thin, grey from his hair to his skin to the medical gown hanging off him. The other was middle-aged, solid, in oil-stained mechanic’s breeches, the kind of man who fixes things that aren’t supposed to be people.

“What did you do to him?” I got my hands on the stretcher rail and couldn’t make myself touch the rest. “What did you do?”

The old man glanced past me, to Edward, and waited for the nod before he answered.

“He’s deactivated,” he said, calm and dry. “They didn’t overpower him so much as switch him off. Mid-fight. Cleanly.” A faint frown, almost professional admiration. “Someone knew exactly the right word to use.”

A word. The freeze in the back of my skull. They had a word for him.

“How—what—” My voice came apart. “Can’t you turn him on? Wake him up, do something, you have all of—”

“You’re the one who should be able to do that,” Edward said, from where he stood. He didn’t come closer—he didn’t need to; Nathan was already the one tethered to me, half a pace off my shoulder. “You have his whole operative command set. You always have. He answers to you. He was only ever going to answer to you.”

I didn’t have the first idea what to do with that. And as I turned, off-balance, reaching for the stretcher again, Nathan turned with me—still there, still at that exact unhurried arm’s length, a shadow I couldn’t shake and wasn’t meant to.

That was when the doors at the far end banged open.

A young woman came in fast, sharp in a fitted skirt suit, heels quick on the concrete. Her eyes cut to Nathan for a half-second—something in the glance, something private—then slid off him and went to Edward.

“Urgent.” She held out a folded slip of paper. “Orders. From Sakamoto.”

The whole room changed.

Every screen-bent head came up. The chatter died. The old man went still over Sasaki; the mechanic straightened. They were all looking at Edward now as he took the paper and unfolded it—and even reaching for it through the link, I got nothing but symbols, a dense little block of code I couldn’t read.

Edward looked at it.

And said nothing at all.

Edward read the slip once more, then folded it closed.

“Inform the ops,” he said. “We’re not taking it. Monitoring only.” A beat. “The target are still members of the Yamada Zaibatsu”

The mechanic’s eyes went wide.

“Pass it down the chain,” Edward added, and Saika—the girl in the skirt suit—looked at him, puzzled, like the order didn’t sit right.

The old doctor was the one who put words to it, dry as ever. “Looks like the council keeps using violence to tame Japan.”

“Squad31 will turn Tokyo into a warzone.” The mechanic shouldered into it, jaw tight. “Edward, we can’t let them. You know what those people do when they’re let off the leash.”

“I can’t, Masao.” Edward didn’t raise his voice. He never did. “We have the priority asset right here. We can’t go anywhere now. None of us.”

Saika opened her mouth—then hesitated, and tried again, careful. “Sir. With all respect. Isn’t this rather too much information for…” Her eyes flicked to me. She didn’t finish the word, but she pointed it. The asset.

Edward smiled. And turned, and looked at me.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. Trust goes both ways. Doesn’t it.”

He smiled again—an easy open invitation.

“Come. Let’s see if we can recover Sasaki’s word together.”

And it hit me all at once.

The calm under it. The cadence of his voice, unhurried, certain. Those deep eyes that looked older than the face around them.

The blond hair was wrong, the build was wrong, everything on the surface was wrong—

—and underneath the surface it was him. Yet for a moment I had a sense of deja-vu. I was ogling him.

“We could always share him, if you’re interested.”

Leonie’s voice cut clean through the moment, bright and wicked, and I jolted out of the spiral so hard I nearly lost my footing. She was grinning at me again, delighted, having felt every bit of where my mind had just gone.

Saika blinked between us. ”…What am I missing here?”

“Oh, you want in too, Saika?” Leonie’s grin widened. “I thought you only liked long steel katanas.”

“No!” Saika went scarlet in an instant—“Leonie!”—and her eyes shot, helplessly, betraying her completely, straight to Nathan, who hadn’t moved a muscle and hadn’t stopped watching me.

Edward chuckled, low.

The doctor and the mechanic exchanged a look and scoffed in unison—something under their breath about kids these days, about what the world’s come to, the weary muttering of two grown men who had, apparently, signed on to take orders from this.

And that was the thing that landed coldest, even through the grief and the uncanny ringing in my chest:

This was it. This ragtag handful of barely-adults—flirting, blushing, teasing each other across a dead man’s stretcher—were deciding who lived and who died on the other side of the world. Refusing an order over morning banter. Holding Tokyo’s fate and mine in the same idle hands.