And without any other word, the battle had finally begun.
The first thing Aiko threw at her wasn't a blade. It was a roulette ball.
She flicked it off the rim of an overturned table with her thumb, casual as a coin toss, and Hina's eyes tracked it out of pure reflex — a small white blur spinning through the red-lit dark — which was exactly the point, because Aiko was already gone from where she'd been standing.
Then, Hina dropped flat.
The karambit passed through the air where her throat had been and buried itself in the mirrored column behind her, spiderwebbing the glass.
In the fractured reflection she caught a smear of pink moving right, and she rolled left, came up on one knee, and fired twice at the motion.
Both rounds punched through a slot machine. Coins vomited out across the carpet in a bright, ringing flood.
"Ooh, close, baby girl!" Aiko's voice bounced off the ceiling, impossible to place. "You got faster, bestie. That's so good. I was terrified this would be over quick."
Hina silently moved.
Standing still in a room with Aiko was a way of volunteering to die, so she kept low behind the barricade of flipped blackjack tables, gun up, breath slow, cataloging everything.
Exits: main stairwell behind her, escalators dead ahead, the VIP bar to the east where Aiko had first appeared. The unconscious debtor lay ten meters to her left, slumped where she'd dropped him, the photo of his daughter tucked in his jacket. Aiko had seen her spare him and applauded it.
Which meant Aiko would use it.
Hina shifted position, angling herself between the sleeping man and the east side of the floor, and she heard the giggle before she saw the shape.
"Aww!" Aiko rose lazily from behind the craps table, chewing, arms draped over the rail like a kid watching ducks at a pond. Her second karambit hung loose from one finger ring, spinning. "You put yourself between the sad dad and me. That's adorable. That's literally adorable. Do you know what the old you would've done? The old you would've shot him herself so that nobody could use him against her."
"The old me had a lot of bad teachers." Hina kept the Glock steady on Aiko's center mass. Fourteen rounds left.
Aiko was thirty feet away, which felt like nothing.
Anyone inside seven meters of her with a holstered weapon was already dead; at thirty feet she had perhaps a second and a half of grace, and Aiko was letting her keep it the way a cat lets a bird keep its head start.
"Bad teachers." Aiko popped her gum. "That's what we're calling him now? He's going to be so hurt, you know. He talks about you constantly. My daughter this, my masterpiece that, give me her back. Honestly, it got annoying. I used to sit in those briefings thinking, God, just kidnap her and shut up." She stretched her arms. "But no! he said, 'she'll come back... I know...' What a pain in the ass that old man!"
"Move away from the table, Aiko," Hina demanded, not wanting to hear any other word from her.
"Or you'll shoot me? Sweetie, you've been able to shoot me for twenty seconds. But I know that you're not shooting me because you want to ask me something first." Aiko smiled, and there was something genuinely warm in it, which was the worst part.
She had always smiled like that. On the swings in the park, sharing melon bread, waving Hina over to sit with the group—the same smile. "Go ahead. Ask. I've been dying to have this conversation for two years."
Hina's finger didn't leave the trigger. "The park."
"The park!" Aiko clapped her hands together, karambit and all, delighted. "Okay. Yes. So. Full disclosure, since we're girls being honest with each other." She hopped up to sit on the craps table's rail, boots dangling, completely exposed, daring Hina to fire. "The whole thing was a job. The group, the picnics, the birthday thing with the sparklers — Sabushi wanted eyes on you after you started slipping your handlers. Not to hurt you. To watch. You were his favorite thing in the whole world, and you'd started smiling at strangers, and that scared him more than any cop ever did."
"And you volunteered," Hina said, her finger close to pull the trigger.
"I begged." The word came out sweet and rotten. "You don't understand what you were to people like us, Hina. You were famous. The prodigy. The one he raised from scratch. Getting to stand next to you and hold your shopping bags while you tried being a real girl — it was like babysitting a nuclear warhead that wanted to learn how to braid hair. I'd have done it for free. But that was not the real point." Aiko added, looking straight into Hina's eyes.
"Sabushi actually wanted to show you that no matter how much you tried to escape, your criminal past and all the people you've killed will always return to you—" Aiko said, but she couldn't finish her sentence.
Hina fired.
Not at her chest, but at the rail, an inch from Aiko's hand — a message, nothing more, and even so Aiko was somewhere else before the shot finished echoing, dropped and flowing along the floor between the tables, laughing, genuinely laughing, and Hina swept the gun across the gaps trying to find pink in the strobing red and couldn't.
"Rude!" Aiko sang out from the dark. "I was sharing!"
"You stole two years of my life and killed two innocent people, Aiko," Hina said, her voice dripping with venom.
"I gave you two years of your life!" The voice moved as she spoke, left, then closer, then impossibly far right; she was circling. "Who do you think talked Sabushi out of pulling you back in, that first winter? Who wrote the reports saying you were stable, harmless, playing house? Me. You had picnics because I lied on paperwork, bestie. You're welcome."
Then, Hina backed toward the mirrored column, putting the cracked glass behind her, cutting off the angles.
Her heart was doing something she didn't like. Not fear, but something messier.
Every word out of Aiko's mouth was poison, obviously, calculated, obviously — and some of it was probably true, which was the design of it. The best lies came wrapped around a bone of truth so you'd choke trying to spit them out.
After a few instants, Hina heard the gum pop directly above her.
Aiko dropped from the top of the column.
Hina got the Glock up, and Aiko's karambit hooked it at the trigger guard, ripped it sideways out of her grip with a strength that had no business living in those thin wrists, and then they were inside each other's reach, and the world got very small and very fast.
The curved blades came from angles knives shouldn't come from.
That was the thing about karambits in trained hands — they didn't stab, they harvested, hooking and pulling, every miss becoming a backswing.
Hina gave ground across the coin-strewn carpet, her own knife working in tight, flat arcs, deflecting more than blocking, feeling the shock of each contact ring up through her wrist.
A hook caught her sleeve and opened it to the lining, while another kissed her collarbone and left a hot line.
Aiko fought the way she talked, in constant chatter, feints stacked on feints, and through all of it she never stopped smiling and never stopped chewing that strawberry gum, the smell of it everywhere now, sweet and childish and mixed with blood.
"You want to know about Shota?" She asked between slashes.
The name went in under Hina's guard better than any blade could have.
Her rhythm hitched. Barely. A half-beat. Aiko's boot found her hip in the gap and threw her backward over a toppled chair, and Hina turned the fall into a roll and came up with cards and casino chips scattering around her, knife up, breathing hard.
Aiko stood in the aisle, backlit by a sputtering slot machine, twirling both karambits — she'd pulled the first one back out of the ruined mirror at some point during the chase, because of course she had — not even winded.
"Because that one wasn't a job," Aiko said. "That one was for me."
"I don't care, Aiko. Just shut up." Hina said.
"He was so easy, Hina. That's the part I need you to understand. I didn't seduce him. I barely worked. I laughed at three of his jokes and touched his arm once, and he was already composing the breakup speech in his head. Your first boyfriend. Your first attempt at being a person. The reason why you took a few risky missions, right? To pay for the medical bills of her mother," She sighed, theatrical, pressing a karambit flat to her chest like a hand over her heart. "And his face while we did it — while he was betraying you — I used to replay it at night. That little flush of guilt underneath the excitement. He was beautiful, saying that he belonged to me and me alone. People are so beautiful when they're being weak. But his expression when he saw the body of that poor girl hanging up from the ceiling... God... so beautiful..." She licked her lower lip.
Hina's knuckles had gone white around the knife handle.
Somewhere far below her rage, a cold, professional voice was telling her this is the plan: she is doing to you what Jin does; she is fishing for the lunge — and Hina heard it, and agreed with it, and stayed exactly where she was, and hated how much effort it took.
"You killed him, Aiko. I stopped caring a long time ago." Hina said.
"Yeah, I did it. He was a cheater, so he deserved it, right?" Aiko wrinkled her nose, like admitting she'd eaten the last cookie. "But the killing was the boring part, honestly. The good part came before. You never heard how it really went, did you? The scene the police found — Shota and that innocent girl from another city who was then recognized as me. Thanks to Sabushi, everybody assumed they died together, killed by a psychopath for cheating. Luckily, you weren't in the city back then; that's why nobody suspected you." She started walking, slow, unhurried, closing the distance one step at a time, and her voice dropped into something confidential, the tone of a friend sharing gossip at a sleepover. "She was already dead, Hina. Days before. I needed a second body for the scene to read right, and she fit the story. I kept her ready. And when everything was set, I brought Shota to that room with that love letter, and I let him see her before I did anything to him at all."
Hina stopped breathing.
"That was the best face of my entire career," Aiko said softly. Her huge eyes had gone glassy and bright, lit from inside by the memory. "Better than his betrayal face. Better than anything. He looked at her body and understood everything at once — what I was, what he'd left you for, what was about to happen to him — and it all arrived on his face at the same time, in layers. I stood there and watched it assemble itself. I didn't touch him for a whole minute. I didn't need to." She blew a small pink bubble and let it pop. "You should thank me, really. He suffered for you at the end, desperately calling out for you while I kept stabbing him in non-vital points to extend his suffering. That's more loyalty than he ever showed you alive. God... I'm getting wet just by thinking about it..."
After her words, the casino went very quiet.
Rain lashed the floor-to-ceiling windows. Coins settled somewhere in the dark with small metal sounds. The unconscious father breathed on, slow and oblivious, ten meters away.
And Hina — who had spent the climb up five floors holding onto her humanity with both hands, who had shot kneecaps instead of skulls and tucked a photograph back into a weeping man's jacket — felt all of that carefully protected warmth freeze over in the space of a single heartbeat, and discovered, with a strange calm, that it was still there underneath the ice. Intact. Hers. Aiko hadn't broken it.
She'd just shown Hina exactly what it was for.
"Okay," Hina said quietly.
Aiko tilted her head. "Okay?"
"I was going to kill you fast, but I think that death would be too easy for you." Hina rolled her shoulders once, and something in her stance changed — weight settling, the knife rotating in her grip, her gray eyes going flat and depthless in the pulsing red light. "Thank you for talking me out of it."
For the first time since she'd stepped out of the shadows, Aiko's smile flickered.
Then, after a few instants, it came back wider than ever, and she lunged.
"Guess the real show starts now, right?" She said.
What happened next didn't look like the earlier exchange. The earlier exchange had been Aiko playing and Hina surviving.
These were two graduates of the same terrible school with their leashes off, and the casino paid for it.
They fought through the blackjack pit and the ruins of the bar, over tables and under the dead chandeliers. The tempo climbed past anything human eyes could have followed cleanly — Aiko a whirl of hooks and spinning steel and manic momentum, Hina a straight cold line through the middle of it, giving up flash for economy, spending nothing.
Every hit was meant to be the last.
Aiko's blade opened a cut above Hina's eyebrow, while Hina's answer laid the fishnet on her ribs open and the skin beneath it too.
Aiko cartwheeled off the mahogany bar, laughing, blood running down her side, and threw a bottle of thirty-year scotch that Hina batted apart midair with her forearm; glass and liquor rained across the carpet and Aiko came through the spray of it low and shrieking with delight, and Hina met her head-on for the first time, no retreat, and their blades locked at the hilt with both women's faces inches apart.
"There she is," Aiko whispered through the strain, eyes enormous, joyous. "There's the girl he built. Hi, honey. I missed you."
"You keep talking about faces," Hina said.
She dropped her weight, broke the lock downward, and headbutted Aiko across the bridge of the nose.
"Watch mine, bitch."
Aiko reeled back, blood sheeting over her mouth, and skipped out of range before Hina could follow — three light bounces backward on her boot heels, shaking her head like a dog throwing off water. When she looked up again, the smile was back, but it had teeth in it now, and her eyes had stopped pretending to be friendly.
"Okay," she said, spitting red onto the carpet. "Okay okay okay. New game."
She turned and threw a karambit at the sleeping man.
She did it without windup, mid-sentence, a flick of the wrist as casual as tossing a gum wrapper — and Hina was already moving before her mind finished naming the target, because some part of her had been waiting for exactly this since the moment Aiko had called him the sad dad.
She crossed the distance in three strides and swatted the spinning blade out of the air with the flat of her knife, the impact cracking up her arm, the karambit spinning off into the dark, and the cost of it was everything Aiko had wanted it to cost: position, angle, attention.
Aiko was on her back before the karambit finished falling.
The second blade hooked over Hina's shoulder from behind, going for the throat, and Hina got two fingers of her free hand up in time to catch the curve of it — the edge biting through her glove and into skin — and threw her head back into Aiko's already-broken nose.
Aiko snarled, an ugly sound with no music in it, and rode her down to the carpet, and they grappled in the coins and the broken glass, too close for technique, down where fights stop being fencing and become arithmetic.
An elbow. A knee. The blade scraping off the floor an inch from Hina's ear. Hina's thumb finding the fresh cut on Aiko's ribs and grinding into it.
Aiko screamed and laughed at the same time, the two sounds braided together, and wrenched free, rolling away through the coins — and when she came up onto her feet with blood in her teeth, the karambit Hina had batted out of the air was back in her left hand, scooped off the carpet mid-roll without so much as a glance.
Two blades again. Nothing she touched stayed lost for long.
"See, that's the difference between us," she panted, circling. The playfulness was still in her voice, but it was thinner now, stretched over something ragged. "You'll spend your life guarding sad strangers, and it makes you so easy to steer. I don't guard anything. Nothing's ever been able to steer me."
"I know," Hina said, getting up slowly, letting her breathing settle. Her cut hand dripped a small dark line on the coins. "That's not the flex you think it is. It just means nobody ever came back for you."
Something crossed Aiko's face then — fast, involuntary, gone before it could be named — and Hina put it away with everything else. Even poison keeps records.
For the first time since she'd stepped out of the shadows, Aiko came in without saying anything at all.
This time Hina didn't give ground, and she didn't pay in rage either.
Rage was what Aiko had been farming all the time, and Hina refused to hand over a single coin of it.
What came instead was procedure, the deepest and oldest training she owned, executed at full speed with total commitment: a feint at the eyes that Aiko bought, a knee that ruined her balance, the left karambit stripped from her hand with a wristlock that bent the joint to its shrieking limit.
Aiko spun with the lock instead of resisting it, flexible as wet rope, and slashed backhand at Hina's throat with the remaining blade, and Hina swayed a centimeter outside the arc and cut the inside of Aiko's forearm as it passed.
Deep. Precise. Exactly where she intended.
The second karambit fell out of fingers that could no longer close.
Aiko looked down at her own hand — at the fingers trying and failing to make a fist, tendons cut, the signal dead between wanting and doing — and something behind her eyes changed. Fear would have been the sane thing. What surfaced instead was fascination.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, you're not going to kill me."
"No," Hina agreed, and swept her legs. "Worse."
Aiko went down hard among the scattered coins. She tried to roll, tried to get her knees under her, quick even now, quicker than almost anyone alive.
Almost.
Hina followed her down, and the knife moved four more times.
Behind the right knee. Behind the left. The back of the left forearm, matching the right. Each cut placed with the detachment of a woman defusing a bomb, severing exactly what needed severing and nothing more — no arteries, no bleed-out, nothing that would grant the mercy of an ending.
When it was done, it had taken perhaps three seconds, and the most wanted knife-fighter on two continents lay on a casino floor unable to hold a blade, stand, walk, or crawl.
The silence afterward had weight.
Hina stood over her, breathing evenly, blood running from her eyebrow, and wiped her knife clean on her own torn sleeve.
Aiko lay in the coins and looked up at her with those huge eyes, taking inventory of her own ruin, and then she started to giggle — wet, nasal through her broken nose, and completely sincere.
"Worse than killing me," she said. Blood bubbled at the corner of her grin. "You know that, right? You know exactly what this is. He taught you this. Death is a payment, uselessness is a sentence. God, Hina. He'd be so proud."
"Maybe." Hina crouched, just out of reach — habit; there was no reach left to be out of — and picked up both karambits, one after the other, and threw them backhand through the window behind the bar. Glass crashed. Rain and wind howled into the room, and the storm smell washed through the strawberry and the copper. "But he isn't the reason."
"No?" Aiko asked as if she were not feeling any pain.
"You spent two years studying me, and you still don't get it." Hina stood. She pulled the duffel strap back over her shoulder, settling the dead weight of it against her hip. "You're not alive because I only wanted you to suffer. You're alive because there's a man ten meters from us with a seven-year-old daughter, and there's a girl downstairs I made a promise to, and I decided that Sabushi doesn't get to decide what my hands are for anymore. Not even through you." She looked down at her — pink hair matted dark, the punk-anarchist armor of studs and chains lying there like a costume after the play — and felt, at last, absolutely nothing that Aiko could use. "The police will collect you with the rest of the debts, and I'm sure that they will make good use of you. Tell them whatever you want. Your face means nothing to me anymore." She said, before giving her one last glance. "I suggest you not move if you want to stay alive. Just say that you're a victim."
She turned and walked toward the stairwell.
"Hina."
She didn't stop, but she didn't hurry either, and Aiko's voice followed her across the ruined floor, sing-song, straining to be light and not quite managing it for the first time.
"Sabushi knows everything. About Rei, about that hot white-haired guy..." A wet laugh. "The only thing I'll say is that you should be fast. I've heard that Yuki has unleashed a special squad called 'Protocol 9' made by criminals. They're dangerous."
Hina paused at the stairwell door, one hand on the cold steel.
"Goodbye, Aiko," she said, and pushed through the door.
Behind her, alone in the wrecked casino with the rain blowing through the shattered window and the coins going dull under the strobing red lights, Aiko Nakamura lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and laughed until the laughing turned into something else, and there was no one left on the fifth floor awake to hear which.
The stairwell air tasted clean by comparison.
Hina climbed. Sixth floor. Seventh. Her legs burned in a distant, irrelevant way, and the cut above her eyebrow had gone tacky, and the bag with Luigi Morsuno's head thumped its dull rhythm against her hip.
Forty-three floors between her and Sabushi.
Somewhere below, Kai and Akira were fighting for the drive on B-6, and she made herself not think about how the shooting down there had stopped a while ago, because there was nothing she could do about it from a stairwell except climb faster.
'Just a little longer, Kai...'
She was two steps from the eighth-floor landing when she heard it, faint through the concrete and the storm.
Helicopters. More than one, flying low and fast, coming in from the direction of Central Command.
Hina stopped. Listened. Sabushi didn't use helicopters; his power was all basements and back rooms. The police didn't fly in weather like this for anything short of war.
Her phone buzzed once against her ribs. Unknown number. A single message.
'Nine coming. Not police, not Kobayashi. Get out of the open floors. — S'
Hina read it twice, standing in the red-lit dark between the seventh floor and the eighth, and felt the shape of the day change around her.
"Nine," she said quietly, to nobody. "Guess that Aiko wasn't lying."
Then she started climbing again, faster now, while somewhere above the storm the Hunters began their descent.