The northern abandoned district. A dumping ground for information, beyond the reach of even Eight-Hundred-Eight Cyber City's garish neon.
What had once been a temple now lay wrapped in rusted circuit boards and severed cables that coiled like ivy, waiting in quiet for its final collapse.
Following the faint trail of the "bookmark" the old paper merchant had described, Miyabi passed through the crumbling temple gate.
Clank. Clank.
Behind her, Kareno's footsteps crunched across the gravel. Its sensor swept left and right with something like unease, straining to keep the shadow of its master in sight.
At the far end of the main hall, in a corner where moonlight found its way through the ruin, something stood waiting.
Skin like white porcelain. Black hair cut straight at the shoulders.
The figure recalled the automata of an older age ? yet along the nape of its neck and the line of its wrists ran fine, precise seams. Hari ? a solitary doll housing a high-performance AI, its maker unknown, the purpose of its abandonment equally so.
When she turned her slender fingertips toward the air, ink seeped from them, and electronic characters began to dance in the void.
In Hari's eyes ? eyes that held no light source of their own ? the rhythm of interception quietly kindled.
Miyabi, for her part, had already drawn the yatate without thinking. A single spark away from collision ? and in that very instant.
A single shadow drifted into the space between them.
It was Kareno.
Groaning with the strain of its half-destroyed frame, the iron mass with its missing right arm placed itself between Hari and Miyabi.
Miyabi's brush hand stilled. Never once, until this moment, had Kareno moved of its own will to interrupt her in a fight.
"...Kareno?"
Kareno did not answer. It only stood and looked steadily at Hari.
Hari, for her part, let the half-formed blades of character dissolve to nothing, and tilted her head a fraction to one side.
Machine, and machine.
Between two beings that possessed no words, something passed ? not an electronic spark, but a quiet warmth of an entirely different kind.
The aggressive light faded from Hari's fingertips.
She studied Kareno with a gaze like that of one looking into a mirror ? then, without a sound, moved her arm and pointed to a corner of the hall: the interior of a half-collapsed offertory box.
Miyabi crossed to it, cleared away the rubble, and there, sleeping within, was a single old "bookmark."
The instant Miyabi took it in her hand, it gave off a faint warmth, and for just a moment the air around her filled with the *taste* of what this place had once been ? the quiet beauty of a temple still whole.
"...You mean to give this to me?"
Hari did not answer. She only returned to her place and stood still once more beneath the moonlight ? a single doll, at rest.
There was no longer any reason left to fight.
Perhaps Kareno's presence had unlocked something that had lain dormant within Hari's programming.
Miyabi tucked the bookmark into her collar and returned the yatate to her back.
"...Let's go, Kareno."
At Miyabi's voice, Kareno's sensor flared once ? a single, full pulse ? and it set off again, following the back of the one it walked after.
Hari did not move. She only watched the shadows of the two departing figures until they were gone, her lightless eyes fixed on the dark.
Battle Haiker Miyabi.
Bearing on her back the quiet miracle that a shadow of iron had brought about, she walks on into the night ? in search of the next "memory of words."