The boy's eyes were open.
That was the detail that Kurapika registered first, before the shape of the face, before the recognition that followed. The preservation had caught him in the last moment before death or immediately after, at the instant when the eyes were fully open and the scarlet was at its complete depth, and that was not an accident. It was the entire point.
The collectors required the color at its most saturated. The scarlet eyes of the Kurta clan appeared only at the height of rage or grief, activated by emotional extremity, and so the method was: induce the extremity first, and then take the eyes at the peak of it, and then preserve the peak. What the collector received was not simply a pair of eyes. It was a record of the last thing a person had felt, frozen permanently in glass.
The boy in the jar had been furious. Or terrified. The eyes did not distinguish between the two.
Kurapika had no expression.
His eyes burned their own shade of red.
He turned fully toward the wall.
Floor to ceiling, sealed jars, filed in rows, all of them containing the same color. The scarlet that the clan had carried for generations and that had gotten every one of them killed for carrying it. He knew some of these had changed hands multiple times, purchased from intermediaries, extracted from other collections. The Fourth Prince had been systematic. He had been patient. He had assembled what was here over years, and whatever he had paid for it, he had considered it a reasonable price for the aesthetic pleasure of ownership.
The skeleton knight formed around Kurapika with the slow deliberateness of something that did not need to hurry. Crimson aura shaped itself into bone and purpose. The Book of Resurrection appeared in his hands, sixth in the series, the one he had not yet needed to open.
He opened it now.
The skeleton's fingers broke the seal on the jar that held his friend's head. The glass parted. Kurapika reached inside, and gently, with the specific care of someone who understands they are performing an action that cannot be redone, closed the open eyes.
Then he sealed the jar into the book, and the book accepted it, and he began moving along the wall.
Camilla came in while he was still working.
She was too perceptive to mistake silence for absence of feeling, and too composed to say anything about it. She moved to the far side of the room and stood there without intruding on the methodical work of Kurapika sealing one jar after another into the book until the wall was empty.
What she did look at, instead, was the object resting on King Nasubi's substantial lap. It was the size of a human head and carved from something that was not quite stone and not quite wood, its surface cut with patterns that resolved, on close examination, into human faces. Not decorative faces. Faces with opinions about being made into a container for ritual purposes.
She found it extremely unpleasant. She filed this under useful information.
"Camilla," said the king's voice, unhurried. "What do you know about the deposed prince?"
Camilla considered the shape of the question. She had filed information about every Kakin political event within the past three decades on general principle, including the ones that most people had found too embarrassing to discuss at length. She reviewed what she had.
"Chima Chiyuta," she said. "Born to a collateral branch. Raised at court. Stripped of title approximately three years ago when it was discovered she had conceived a child outside any recognized union, by someone not of Hui Guo Rou blood." She paused. "She died shortly after. Benjamin's people were involved." Another pause, longer. "You're saying she is your mother."
"I am saying exactly that."
"She would have been approximately twenty-two years old when you were born," Camilla said flatly. "You are visibly not a three-year-old child."
"I am not," agreed King Nasubi's face. "Until recently."
She had processed stranger things since meeting Liam. She processed this one with the efficiency of practice.
"Then tell me," she said.
It was not, as stories go, a complicated one. Chima Chiyuta had found someone outside the palace, under circumstances that had gone with her when she died, and had become pregnant, and had kept it hidden for long enough to understand that discovery would mean the end of both herself and the child. What she could not have known was the specifics of the detection mechanism that waited for exactly this contingency.
The ornamental vessel on the king's lap. Liam tapped it once with one broad finger.
Every prince born into the Hui Guo Rou line had their blood placed into this vessel at birth or shortly before. It was a formality, a genealogical record, and also a mechanism for the succession war that would follow. The guardian spirit beasts that each prince would eventually cultivate were contingent on this initial registration. When Chima Chiyuta was examined, the child she was carrying did not produce a blood entry that matched the royal line. It produced nothing. The vessel found no basis for a guardian spirit beast, because the father was not Kakin royalty.
She had fled. She had hired professional Hunters to help her. Benjamin had deployed resources to find her, because that was the kind of thing Benjamin had done with resources when family honor was the stated objective.
She had died on Ghost Island.
"My story," said King Nasubi's voice, "is that I am something that was not born here. A wandering consciousness, a soul between places, which found the site of her death and was drawn to it. Her resentment was very strong when she died. Strong enough to be felt across whatever boundary I exist on the other side of. I fell into the infant in her arms, which had not yet died, and that became the body I woke up in."
Camilla stood with her arms folded and listened.
"So," she said, when he finished, "the body is the deposed prince's son. The soul is something else. The body is three years old."
"The body was three years old," Liam corrected pleasantly. "The heart has never been three years old. The body found this arrangement as unsatisfying as you'd imagine and has been adjusting accordingly."
"You are also controlled by Liam?" said a voice from the air.
Aria materialized near the doorway in the specific way she had of appearing in spaces where she had not been, carrying a paper cone of candied fruit in one hand and what appeared to be a raw carrot in the other. She looked at the king's large body with frank curiosity.
"Yes," said Liam.
"And Liam is three years old."
"Liam was three years old. It is a more complicated situation than the number implies."
"Oh." Aria ate a piece of fruit. "Okay."
Liam introduced Camilla, who received the introduction with the expression of someone who has already determined they will not be friends with this person and is prepared to work alongside them anyway. He introduced Kurapika, who had finished with the wall and was standing quietly to one side with the Book of Resurrection closed in his hands.
"Camilla is Ring G, code name Shiva," Liam said to Aria.
Aria looked at Camilla with interest. "Shiva," she said. "Is that because you destroy things?"
Camilla did not answer.
"She chose the name herself," Liam offered.
Aria considered Camilla for a moment longer, concluded that she was probably very dangerous, and filed this in the appropriate category. Liam asked, in the tone of someone inquiring whether a person would like another cup of tea, whether she would be interested in joining the organization.
"Sure," said Aria. She ate her carrot.
Liam explained the Ten.
Currently active were Tendo, Dora, Suzaku, Delicious-D, Shiva. Pending was Barbie, whose ring had been set aside for delivery. Four positions remained open.
Aria picked one of the four empty character names and then asked what code name she was supposed to choose.
"Whatever you like," Liam said.
She thought about it for the length of time it takes to finish a carrot. Then she said the first thing that came to mind, which was the name of something she'd encountered once on Freier Mountain that she'd found impressive, and that became her code name, and she went back to eating the candied fruit, and the recruitment was complete.
Kurapika had been waiting with the patience of someone who has multiple questions and is selecting the most important one.
"Liam," he said. He used the name directly, which he did when the situation was serious enough that operational titles felt inadequate. "When you were in the air. The figure that put the killing strikes on Tserriednich. That was your real body, wasn't it. Summoned or projected here from wherever it currently is."
King Nasubi's face turned to look at him.
"I noticed it," Kurapika said. "Before the Nine Yin aura concentrated enough to make the form illegible. The shape was wrong. Not wrong in the way of a technique or a Nen construct. Wrong in the way of anatomy. Your real body, Liam." He held the king's gaze steadily. "Why does it have three heads and six arms?"