CHAPTER 4

POV – Azra'il

Two days.

Forty-eight hours since the loft incident, and my twin brother had developed a new hobby that I ranked, in ascending order of irritation, as: unsettling, predictable, and execrably executed.

He was following me.

Not in the discreet, professional manner that someone with genuine surveillance experience would employ. Rudeus followed me with the subtlety of a wild boar attempting to conceal itself behind a thin branch. I detected him regularly in the corridor when I left my room, found his shadow in the kitchen doorway when I stood watching Lilia prepare lunch, and on one truly memorable occasion nearly tripped over him when he attempted to hide behind a crate in the hallway that was, generously speaking, half his width.

〈Eos, the specimen is following me again.〉

[Confirmed. Current distance: four and a half metres. Approach speed: zero. He stopped when you stopped. Camouflage technique: nonexistent.]

〈Any hypothesis as to the objective?〉

[Three possibilities in order of probability. First: he wishes to ask questions but cannot find the right opening. Second: he is attempting to collect additional behavioural data before acting. Third: he simply does not know what he wants and is improvising.]

〈Probably all three simultaneously.〉

I would have allowed it to continue for a few more days, out of pure scientific curiosity regarding his breaking point. But on the afternoon of the second day, whilst I was seated on the sitting room rug observing the mana circulation patterns in the air with the concentration of someone who has better things to do, I heard the unmistakeable sound of a held breath approximately two and a half metres behind me, behind the large armchair that nobody ever used.

My patience, already a finite resource under normal conditions, reached its limit.

"I know you are there," I said, without turning, in the casual tone of someone remarking on the price of bread. "You have been doing this for two days. If you have something to say, come and say it. Otherwise, find a less pathetic pastime."

He remained behind the armchair for one second longer than necessary, as though evaluating whether pretending not to be there was still a viable option.

Then the sound of someone shifting behind the armchair.

Rudeus appeared from the side of it wearing the expression of someone caught stealing biscuits from the pantry, torn between wounded dignity and the relief of no longer having to hold an uncomfortable position. He stood a few paces from me, regarding me with that new caution that had replaced the instinctive fear of the past three years.

That was an improvement. Caution I could work with. Fear was merely noise.

He looked at the sitting room door. At the corridor. At the staircase. He was checking the position of the adults with the quiet competence of someone who had done so many times before in very different circumstances.

The house was silent. Zenith was upstairs folding laundry. Lilia was in the courtyard. Paul had gone out that morning and would not return until late afternoon.

Rudeus looked at me. He drew a breath with the comic gravity of a three-year-old preparing to ask a question of adult weight.

"Are you like me?"

I looked at him. I did not respond immediately, allowing the question to occupy the room for a few seconds.

"That depends on what you mean by like you," I said at last.

He frowned slightly. "You know what I mean."

"I do. But I want to hear you say it."

His brow contracted with the effort of someone who had realised too late that they had walked into a very simple conversational trap. He was weighing his words with the care of someone unaccustomed to having to explain something they considered self-evident. The frustration of an adult mind confined to a three-year-old vocabulary was visible in the physical effort he made to arrange the sentence.

"You... remember things," he said, carefully. "From before. From somewhere different to this."

"Yes."

He blinked. He had clearly expected more resistance.

"Then you are." It was not a question.

"I am."

Rudeus watched me for a moment with the expression of someone who has confirmed a hypothesis but does not quite know what to do with the confirmation. Then, with the inevitability of someone who knows the conversation has only one direction, he asked, "Where did you come from?"

I looked at him. Then at the ceiling for a moment, considering the full scope of the honest answer to that question.

"That question has too many answers for a single afternoon," I said. "You first."

His expression shifted immediately. The investigative caution gave way to something I recognised as genuine discomfort. The kind that belongs to someone who had spent the entire conversation prepared to ask questions, and now realised, too late, that conversations work in both directions.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I..." he began, and stopped.

[Specimen's heart rate rising. He is processing what to reveal and what to withhold.]

〈Fascinating. He has more self-awareness than I credited him with.〉

"I was a Japanese man," said Rudeus at last, in the controlled tone of someone who had placed the safest card in the deck on the table and had no intention of revealing anything further unless strictly necessary.

I tilted my head.

"Japanese."

"Yes."

I considered for a moment, weighing the information with the same idle interest one applies to examining a stone on a path. "So was I. In one of my lives."

Rudeus's expression made a swift journey through several destinations. He had expected resistance, perhaps scepticism, perhaps denial. He had not calculated the possibility of my simply agreeing and then complicating everything in the same breath. "What do you mean, one of your lives?"

"Exactly what I said."

He looked at me with that particular expression of someone trying to determine whether their interlocutor is evasive by nature or by sport. He probably arrived at the correct conclusion that it was both, and that neither was going to change in the next five minutes.

"All right," he said, with the dignified resignation of someone who decides to ignore the confusing part and press forward before things deteriorate. "So you know Japan."

"I know a Japan."

Rudeus's green eyes blinked. "There is more than one?"

I looked at him with the expression of someone about to do something purely for personal amusement, with no intention whatsoever of apologising for it. Then, without preamble:

「もちろん。それで、お前はどの日本から来たんだ？」

The effect was immediate and entirely satisfying.

Rudeus did not freeze dramatically. It was the quiet, absolute stillness of a mind that has received information it cannot fit into any available category. His shoulders rose half a centimetre. His green eyes widened slightly. He wore the particular expression of an adult man trapped in a three-year-old body who has just heard, for the first time in years, the sound of his own language coming from the mouth of a silver-haired child he had actively avoided since birth.

I allowed the moment to exist for as long as it deserved before returning to the local tongue. "Which Japan did you come from?" I asked again, with the clinical gentleness of someone translating for a confused patient.

"My Japan was ordinary. Cars, television, the internet. Nothing special," he said, his voice slightly different, the voice of someone still reorganising their internal files.

"Mine had those things too."

Rudeus relaxed his shoulders by a fraction of a second, beginning to nod with the satisfaction of someone who has found common ground.

"It also had people with extraordinary abilities," I continued, in the exact same tone. "Most of them went about in colourful costumes, shouting the names of their attacks in the middle of the street. It was a government-regulated profession. With a trade union, a national ranking system, and live press coverage."

Rudeus's shoulders halted mid-nod and remained suspended there whilst his brain processed what his ears had just received.

"...what."

It was not a question. It was an involuntary sound.

"Professional heroes," I clarified, with the helpfulness of someone who believes the issue was simply a lack of detail. "Quite colourful. Occasionally loud. The finest ones had fan followings, sponsorship contracts, and collectable action figures. It was an interesting world. Chaotic, but interesting."

Rudeus looked at me with the expression of someone who went to the kitchen for a glass of water and found a horse inside the refrigerator. "You are making that up."

"I am describing it."

"Government-regulated costumed superheroes."

"With annual licensing examinations and a code of conduct. The system was rather bureaucratic, in truth."

He closed his eyes for one full second with the air of someone appealing for patience from some higher entity. When he opened them, his expression had assumed the controlled rigidity of someone who decides to accept an absurd premise in order for the conversation to continue in any direction at all. "All right. Then it is not the same Japan."

"I said as much."

"You said a Japan. You did not say yours had superheroes."

"You did not ask for the details."

Rudeus regarded me with the expression of someone seriously reconsidering the sequence of decisions that had led them to this conversation. Then he turned his head slightly to one side, as though adjusting the angle of his vision might help reorganise his thoughts along with it. "How did you die there?"

"That is a long story."

"Summarise."

"I would rather not."

Rudeus's chubby fingers drummed once against his knee, the minimal gesture of someone accustomed to being more direct than circumstances permitted. He abandoned that particular thread with the restraint of someone filing the question away for later and pressed on. "Were you a woman or a man in that life?"

"In that one, a woman."

"And in the others?"

"It varied."

Rudeus's brow contracted with the herculean effort of someone attempting to construct a framework of understanding from materials that kept arriving in the wrong shape. "Varied how? Did you want to be a man? Is that it? Are you... transgender?"

〈Eos.〉

[Observing. With metaphorical popcorn.]

I looked at him with the expression of someone who has previously had to explain multidimensional concepts to cosmic entities without physical brains and considers this a reasonable warm-up for the afternoon. "Not exactly. But explaining the distinction with precision would take longer than your three-year-old brain can sustain in a single sitting, so I shall simplify: I have been too many things to concern myself with categorisation. In this life, Zenith chose the feminine pronoun with the authority of someone who does not accept challenges to her decisions. It does not bother me sufficiently to correct her."

Rudeus looked at me with the specific expression of someone whose operating system has encountered an error that is not critical but will not close on its own, and who is not quite sure how to handle it. His small eyes moved across my face as though searching for some sign that I was joking.

I was not.

"You are very strange," he said at last, with the particular intonation of someone who has reached one conclusion and has no energy remaining to reach another.

I considered the remark with the gravity it deserved, which was minimal.

"You have just told me that you died in a traffic accident in Japan, were reborn as my twin brother in a medieval magic world, and spent the past three years attempting to surveil me with the stealth of a young elephant," I said. "Neither of us is in any position to use that word as a criticism."

The corner of Rudeus's mouth moved.

It did not quite become a smile. But it was close enough to be registered by my database of facial expressions, which at that point in my existence was considerably extensive.

〈Eos.〉

[Yes?]

〈Note that the specimen retains a residual sense of humour buried beneath considerable layers of trauma and depravity. It may be at least partially recoverable with time and appropriate supervision.〉

[Adding to the file. With moderate scepticism, duly noted.]

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