Long Ago

Summer had given its last gasp. The evening had come quickly, the Great Lamp already falling beneath the northern horizon even though it was only a little past six. The city was bathed in red-gold light, reflected in the distant ocean.

I sat alone in the Hierarch's Way tram station, which was starting to quiet down slightly after the evening rush, but was still pretty heavily occupied. A mix of businessmen and women returning home and people already changed into casual clothes and looking to head into town sat around reading papers, books, or attuned to their logic engines and staring into the middle distance. Some secondary schoolers chatted noisily off to my left. The world, in spite of whatever happened to me, continued to move forward.

A tram ascended from down the hillside, and pulled slowly into the station. Several people around me rose from their seats and stepped towards the doors, while others, in turn, stepped out - almost exclusively working people and students, since this was primarily a residential district.

I'd almost given up when Ran stepped out, clad in a casual, mutely-colored ruqun, her schoolbag slung over her shoulder. She spotted me instantly. I couldn't see her face from behind the veil at a distance, but her posture came across as worn out.

That was probably nothing compared to me, though. Things had doubtlessly improved from a couple of weeks ago, but I probably still looked worse than I had since-- ...well, I looked bad, was the point. I'd hoped no one sitting close to me had bothered to closely inspect my neck, or anything above it.

Ran approached the bench where I was sitting. "Hey," she said.

"Hey," I replied.

"Sorry I'm late," she went on. "Got stuck in extra-planar physics. Lecture dragged on 20 minutes longer than it should've."

"It's alright," I told her softly. "Was it interesting, at least?"

"Not all that much," she said. "It was mostly focused on mirror symmetry, though we only really went over the basics of the concept today." She raised a hand to her face, yawning. "I understood maybe half of it."

"Which half?" I asked. "IIA or IIB?"

She blinked, raising an eyebrow. "What?"

"Oh," I said, disappointed. "Sorry, I thought you were making a joke." I paused. "You know, because the premise is that there are two theoretical manifolds with different geometric properties that are equally feasible on a mathematical level. So if you only understood half of it--"

"Yeah, Su," she said flatly, rubbing her eyes. "I got it. But no. I was just saying I didn't really understand the lecture."

"Sorry," I repeated.

We were silent for a moment, her still standing over me. The doors on the tram pulled themselves mechanically shut, and it began to slowly slide down the track.

Since it had happened, most of our exchanges had become dominated by this sort of small talk. I didn't feel like there was much left that I could say, and she probably held similar sentiments. It's hard to put the feeling that was on my mind into words. Something like the calm that comes after defeat. Something like a funeral. Something like an empty field...

No matter what took place, what happened in any person's individual story, the world continued to move forward.

"Hm," she said, putting her hands in her pocket and glancing around. "Kinda a busy day out here, huh."

"Well, it is Friday," I pointed out. "Lots of people going downtown."

"I guess," she muttered, shrugging slightly. "You would've thought people would be more cautious after that bomb went off the other week."

I shrugged. "It's a pretty big city. Four people dying out of five and a half million probably doesn't reach people that much, especially when they're comparing things to how they were a few years ago." I glanced down the road. "I mean, it can't be much worse then how many people are getting killed by traffic accidents."

She stared ahead tiredly. "Should've figured you'd say something weird and utilitarian like that."

"Plus, the Gray Flags only really go after, you know." I twisted my lip slightly, trying to think of the right phrasing. "Political figures."

She sighed. "They should've just stuck to killing cops. At least back then you could usually count on them being assholes." It was hard to tell to what degree she was speaking facetiously. She paused for a moment, then looked to me. "You wanna take a walk?"

I frowned. "I thought you wanted to come over and pick up your clothes."

"I do," she said. "But not yet."

I didn't have any reason to refuse, and it felt like it might be a good idea to clear my head for a bit before heading home. This was only the second time my parents let me out of the house unaccompanied since I'd left the hospital, and it felt good, to an extent, just to move my body around in the fresh air again. Even it did feel a little disruptive to the unsteady stability I'd found.

We left the tram stop and, stepping off the sidewalk, ventured north, finding our way to the banks of one of the numerous small tributary rivers to the Katharsi that flowed through the area. It was only a dozen meters wide, running adjacent to the shopping district and flanked by grassy slopes on both sides. We walked uphill, against the current, the flow of the water trickling in the background.

"So," Ran began asking. "How are you feeling?"

I was silent for a moment before answering. "It could be worse, I guess," I eventually said, rubbing my bandages. "I'm sleeping okay again. And it doesn't really hurt any more, unless I crane my neck or swallow too much food at once."

"And your leg?" she glanced downward. "You're still walking with sort of a limp."

I glanced downward. "I think it's mostly just psychosomatic. They took me for my second appointment with the Osteoic Biomancer last week, so it's supposed to be completely fixed. It just feels... Unsteady, somehow. Stiff." I wiggled it a bit as I took my next step. "He offered to help with my neck, too, but it's healing fine. I didn't want to mess with my cellular hygiene."

She frowned. "That kinda stuff is pseudoscience, Su. They only push it to keep regular physicians from going out of business."

I scratched the back of my head. "I just don't want to do anything imprudent with my long-term health. Since... Well, you know."

She snorted, shaking her head slightly.

She was right to laugh. It was an obscenely self-contradictory thing to say, given the circumstances.

"Anyway," she added, "I didn't really mean, like. Physically."

"Oh," I said, and slowly frowned. "...I don't really know, honestly. I've just been trying not to think about anything, since they let me go back home."

"Not think about anything?" she repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"I mean, obviously I do think about things," I clarified. "Just-- Well, not anything serious. I've mostly been lying in bed and trying to focus on daydreaming. Fantasy worlds, that kinda stuff."

"What kinda fantasy worlds," she asked casually.

I thought about it for a few seconds. "Mostly where I'm like, an Elf," I explained. "Where I live peacefully on my own in a forest with a bunch of animals, and don't have to worry about anything. Grow crops, build a house up in the trees. Stuff like that."

"That sounds really boring," she said critically. "You don't even really like animals."

"I like animals!" I protested, looking to her. "I mean, as long as they're, y'know. Well-behaved."

"It doesn't sound healthy, either," she added.

I nodded, looking to the ground. "It probably isn't. But I don't really know what else to do. I mean... Even if I upset everyone and promised I wouldn't try again over and over, things haven't really changed." I glanced at her for a moment, hesitant. "Uh, sorry. I don't mean to be callous."

"It's alright," she spoke, staring ahead.

"I mean, I know you were upset. And I did appreciate you being there, and everything--"

"You don't need to make a big show of justifying yourself, Su," she said. "I get it."

I shook my head.

"It wasn't just you. Everyone was so upset," I continued after a moment, my eyes turned towards the hills. "When-- When her mother first came in to the hospital, she ran over and held me for... I don't even know, it felt like a quarter of an hour. She kept saying that she was sorry over and over." I swallowed. "And her little brother couldn't seem to work himself up to say anything to me at all. He just kept standing over by the door, looking like he was going to cry."

Ran said nothing. She might've nodded a little, or it could've just been her head bobbing along with the steps.

"Her dad almost got angry when he came in," I continued. "But then he got flustered and started apologizing, too, like he was scared he'd done something really wrong. It was like I was seeing a whole different side of him. And Iwa bought me a bunch of gits, and kept trying to act cheerful, even though she was obviously really anxious." I swallowed the air. "It was really weird, you know? I've never seen anything like that happen."

"Yeah," Ran said quietly.

"I felt guilty, afterwards," I went on, my face contorting into a pained smile. "Because I let myself get caught up in the moment, and feel happy. When really, she's already been gone for so long. And I'm the one who--"

"That's enough, Su," Ran said, cutting me off. "Quit it."

I hesitated, but fell silent, my eyes falling back towards the ground.

We kept walking for another five, maybe ten minutes. Eventually, we came to a hill a little off the riverside, which offered a wonderful view of the lion's share of the city below. The rows and rows of increasingly dense housing as it approached the Mnimi, and then surrounding and beyond it, the bronze and artificed wood towers of the city center. It would turn out to be a lot less impressive than the skyline of Old Yru, but back then - and especially when I'd first come to the city - the sight still took me aback. It was nothing like the dingy flatness of Itan at all.

I always felt strange, the more I thought about it. How much I didn't belong here, in this wealthy neighborhood. At these fancy schools. In this pretty, glamorous city.

Everything really was twisted beyond repair.

Twilight was starting to give way to dusk, now, stars becoming visible at the upper regions of the sky. We walked to the top of the hill, and Ran suggested we sit down for a bit. So we did, taking off our veils to better appreciate the sight. (This was technically breaking the law, but it didn't feel likely there'd be any watchmen who'd make a fuss about a couple kids way off the path.) A few minutes passed without either of us saying much of substance.

Then...

"Why did you do it?" she asked, with a sort of distant bluntness.

I didn't answer for a moment. Not because the question was exactly a surprise, but because there were a few judgements to be made in offering an answer.

"I mean... Don't you know that already?" I eventually asked in return, my voice weak. "Because they wouldn't see me at the clinic any more." My voice quietened a bit. "Because they said there wasn't any hope."

I thought back to that afternoon. Even though it hadn't even been a year, it'd felt so different from the first time they'd told me they wanted to discontinue the assimilation treatment. All professional pretense had disappeared, and the conversation had snapped wildly from being an argument to the doctor practically all but begging me to drop out of the clinic. He'd told me that I needed to just think of myself as having a normal mental health problem, and had offered to prescribe me a whole pile of things I was now educated enough to know were pretty inappropriate. At one point, I was pretty sure he'd even been offering me some sort of bribe.

Though he was probably just concerned for his reputation. I'd learned a little bit about the institutional politics of acclimation clinics, and apparently even one case where a patient caused a serious problem could get you shut down. They'd censored it in the papers, but I'd managed to learn about one in I'Rakka Plateau that had a failed patient who made a massive stink about what had happened to her on the logic sea and had threatened to take the government to court over the issue, and practically everyone working there had seen their careers drain into the gutter.

Of course, none of it had been his fault anyway. In retrospect, it was pretty remarkable - remarkably stupid, maybe - that I'd managed to badger him into repeating the last year of the treatment plan over, despite it being pointless according to all scientific evidence. Defeat is something that the mind is capable of denying so long as the possibility of victory is not 0. I had chosen to a nuisance of myself just to avoid facing the reality of the situation.

"But when we talked about that, you just told me you were going to think about what to do next," she said.

"Oh," I murmured. "Yeah."

"So what happened?"

I looked at my hands.

"I dunno," I said quietly. "Or, rather... I did think about things for a few days. But it just felt like navel-gazing. There's nothing I can really do to change anything." I was silent for a few moments. "All this time, I've been justifying doing normal day-to-day stuff, lying to everyone, on the basis that it'll be for the best when things go back to normal. But if that isn't going to happen, then that whole idea goes out the window, and everything I've done has been... Violating." I sighed. "I mean, I can't just go on existing like this. Just pretending to be someone else forever."

Ran nodded distantly, not turning to face me either. "That's what I figured, I guess."

"It felt like it'd be better to just... Let her rest," I said.

Some birds fluttered overhead. One by one, artificial light started to emanate from the taller buildings in the inner city. Oreskios used a lot of Biomancy in its infrastructure, so the glow came slowly, with only the skyscrapers belonging to the biggest companies and wealthiest citizens bursting suddenly with arcane or gas illumination.

"Do you want to die?" Ran asked.

I hesitated for a moment, stumped by the forwardness of the question. I fidgeted a little. "I want to make things okay."

"That's not what I asked," she stated. "I mean, is it painful? Or do you just feel guilty?"

I furrowed my brow, and slowly clasped my hands together tightly.

"I-- I dunno," I said. "I guess deep down, I don't really want to die. Or at least, it's really terrifying when I think about it. To be honest, I was having trouble even working myself up to do it that night... I might've given up if I hadn't slipped off the branch." My face flushed with embarrassment. "It didn't seem so bad to just fade away slowly until only Shiko was left, but that felt completely different."

"Well, yeah," Ran said flatly. "No matter how much you change, so long as it's the same brain, your still kinda around. But when it dies, that's it." She clapped her hands together idly. "No more you."

"I mean, technically, my brain did die," I said. "Before, I mean. When they scooped out the pneumaic nexus to... Do all that stuff."

We'd managed to infer some of the specifics of what had probably really happened by looking into the research. Successfully preserving a living person's pneuma, even one of the very few that managed to mature naturally, was still something that'd never been officially done. But if it had been...

She eyed me for a moment. "Well, you're more like a plaster-cast of a person's brain sewed into someone else's. The original 'you' probably still kicked the bucket when she stopped being conscious for the last time."

I scratched my head uncomfortably. "That's kinda unsettling, when you put it that way."

She shrugged very slightly. "Count yourself lucky you're not her, I guess."

I bit my lip.

"I wish things could go back to the way they were," I said, after a moment. "Or that I could forget my old life, and Shiko could go back to normal. But they can't, and I can't." I sighed. "So, even I don't want to die, it feels like the only moral thing left to do. The only way to return the situation to a net zero."

Ran nodded again, a little more intently this time. She reached into her bag, only half-looking at it, and rummaged around for a moment before retrieving some sort of snack bar wrapped in papyrus. She unfolded it and took a furtive bite.

"If you die," she said, "it's not like you'll be doing her, or me, some kind of favor. There's no such thing as an afterlife, no 'rest' you're keeping her from where you go off to some peaceful nirvana. What's left of her would turn to mush alongside everything else in your skull." She chewed the food in her mouth aggressively. "Don't let yourself fall into bullshit magical thinking."

"Sorry," I said, reflexively.

"And you can't violate anything more than you already have, because there is no 'her' separate from you left to be violated." She took another quick bite, her mannerisms tense. "If you want to talk about ethics, the right thing to do is probably to spend the rest of your life doing charity work, or some shit like that. You being alive isn't some ongoing crime. It's just how it is."

It's just how it is.

"But things are only like that because of what I agreed to do," I said, glancing to the side. "It's my fault. If nothing else, I feel like there should be some kinda justice. You know?"

She let out a long sigh, still chewing.

"Why did you do it, Su." she asked, for a second time, though the inflection was very different. She spoke so flatly, it barely felt like a question.

I blinked. "Do what?"

"Agree to, you know. Pretend to be her," she said. "What was even going through your mind? You never really told me. Not properly."

"I thought you didn't want to know," I said, frowning.

"Well, I do now."

I made an anxious expression. "Well... I needed somewhere to live, since I was too old to stay with my foster family any more. I wanted to go to school somewhere that wasn't too dismal. And since I learned I wouldn't need an induction, I thought about maybe trying to train to use the Power..." I laughed grimly to myself. "Though I probably wouldn't have made it. Back then, I was useless at everything that's important-- Math, pronunciation, just staying focused..."

"I'm sure you could have been worse," Ran said, her tone more or less emotionless.

"I dunno about that." I wiped the underside of my nose with my finger, sniffing. "A-and they told a good story, I guess. That he was dying of dementia, that he'd spent years and years trying to reunite with his daughter from before the collapse, and seeing her was his last wish... That Utsushikome had been meant to be--" I cut myself off, biting my lip. "The whole situation is really creepy now, looking at it rationally. But I was desperate. And it was only supposed to be for a few weeks. I didn't know anything about how pneumenology worked--"

"Again, you're not really answering," she said. "You're just stating a bunch of facts you've already told me before. Not what you were actually thinking."

I frowned. "Well, it's hard."

"Give it a shot," she said.

I rubbed my brow. "I-I dunno... I don't think I really even conceptualized it properly." I swallowed the air. "Or rather, my state of mind was distorted."

"What do you mean, 'distorted'?"

I hesitated, trying to think about how to phrase it without sounding self-obsessed. "My whole life, it'd felt like nothing good ever really happened to me. To the point that 'nothing good will happen' had become an absolute rule. And I'd be doing some awful job in the same shitty town for hundreds of years." I furrowed my brow. "When they contacted me out of the blue with the offer, it was like something out of a fantasy story. Like I'd stepped into a different world where suddenly anything was possible."

"You're saying you got caught up in the moment and didn't think it through."

I shook my head. "No, I did think about it. It's more like I didn't have the frame of reference to consider it properly." I took off my glasses for a moment, holding them in my hands. "When they told me I was the only one who could do it... For once in my life, I felt like I was someone who mattered. And that I could see a brilliant, shining light that would take me away from all the painful things in my life. It felt like a--"

Like a miracle, I thought.

"...like a lifeline," I said. "A way for things to be different."

"And that made you feel like you had a right to invade someone else's life in the most extreme way imaginable," she stated, a little bitterness leaking into her tone.

My face contorted painfully.

Ran sighed. "Sorry. There wasn't any point in saying that."

"I mean, you're not wrong," I said, putting my glasses back on. "I didn't have any right at all."

We were silent for a few moments.

"What I meant to say," she finally continued, "was that even if you did something incredibly stupid and irresponsible... Something that can never be taken back... You didn't really know what you were getting into." She vigorously munched the last of her bar before swallowing it in one big gulp, then looked to me. "So it's not your fault. At least, not your fault enough that you deserve to die."

I didn't know what to say.

"In the end. You were just some dumb kid getting preyed on by an old asshole trying to make another old asshole happy. You're a victim, too," she stated. "So fuck it. If there's no justice for you, I guess there's none for Utsushikome either."

"I- I can't really believe you're saying this," I said softly.

"Neither can I," she said, distant. "To be honest, I dunno if this is what I really think, or if I just can't break the habit of trying to think of you as her for so long after this whole brainfuck of an ordeal. Or maybe it's stupid to keep trying to draw a distinction between the two of you at all." She shook her head. "Or maybe I'm just deluding myself over someone who's been gone for years. It's all just--" She cleared her throat. "It's all too fucking weird."

Her voice cracked a little at the end, and I noticed that she was crying.

I'd only seen it happen a couple of times. When Ran cried, it was always strangely quiet. She never sobbed or wailed. Her chest just gently heaved up and down as the tears fell down her face towards the bare earth.

I slowly reached up a hand, and placed it on her shoulder. With everything so complicated, it didn't feel right to take it any further than that.

We sat there for a few more minutes, the last of the lamplight fading from the sky, leaving only a blue tint on the rim of the bowl of the Mimikos, towering in the northern horizon. Once Ran calmed down a little, we went back to small talk, chatting a little about how well - or rather, not well - I'd been doing catching up with my university coursework I'd missed, and some other bits of gossip from the campus I'd missed out on. She talked about novels for a few minutes, and I talked about an echo game I'd been playing while recovering while she tried not to look bored.

Eventually, we went back down the hill. Back to the streets. Towards my house.

"There was one idea I had," I said, after a silent lull in the conversation. "About... Where we could go from here."

She glanced up at me tiredly. "What's that?"

"I thought that maybe we could try and track down the person who did the procedure for my grandfather in the first place."

She narrowed her eyes. "You're thinking that they might know something that might help?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding. "I mean... Even if there's no way left to fix things according to pneumenology, it's not supposed to be possible to even be in a situation like mine at all, you know? So it stands to reason that there are Egomancy techniques with capabilities that've been written off in the field since it was banned."

She considered this for a moment, turning back to face forward. "I read that even Egomancy couldn't mess with the pneuma outside of an Induction. And you can't do an Induction more than once on any given person."

"There are exceptions to every principle," I said. "We don't know what method they used for me in the first place, since there weren't any records. There might be some method that wouldn't work for other people they could--"

"Hey, Su," Ran interrupted.

I blinked. "What?"

"Can we talk about this later?" she asked. "I think... It'd be good for both of us to kinda take a break from thinking about this crap."

"Oh," I said, "...okay."

A moment passed.

"In principle, though," she said, contradicting herself, "what I said four years ago is still true. If there's anything I can do to help Shiko that you're willing to go along with, I'll give it a shot." She looked up at the stars. "In for a penny, in for a pound, right?"

I hesitated for a moment, then smiled slightly. "Right."

I don't really know why I asked it, in that moment. I'd wondered for so many years without ever vocalizing the question, and the serious moment of the conversation seemed to have already passed.

It just slipped out.

"If it's okay for me to ask," I asked, "but what made you care so much about her, in the first place?"

"Huh?" she raised an eyebrow at me.

"Utsushikome, I mean," I said. "You were the only one who noticed something was strange, when this all started. And you've done so much." I looked away, suddenly feeling nervous. "But... To be honest, I can't remember her having spent much time with you at all, before then. Or anything that could make you feel that way..."

Contrary to my expectations, Ran just laughed. It was low, but not bitter. "Is that right?" She inclined her head towards me. "Nothing at all, huh."

"Sorry," I said, wary. "That was probably a stupid thing to bring up..."

"No, it's fine," she said, shaking her head. "I wouldn't expect you to remember. Though I'm surprised you can't figure it out anyway. It's probably pretty fucking obvious."

We turned a corner, on to my street. The trees, leaves still just about clinging to their branches, swayed in the wind.

"I guess I'll spell it out for you," she said, "but only if you answer a question for me, first, and I like the answer. I wanna be a little selfish."

"Okay," I said, nodding.

"What was your relationship with her?" she asked. "They picked you because the two of you used to know each other, but you've never really told me any details."

My lips felt dry. "Well... You never asked."

"Yeah, because the whole situation is fucking creepy," she said. "But that's the second time you've said something like that today. And again, I'm asking now."

The evening air was getting a little chilly. Another sign of the time of year. I ran my hands over my sleeves as the cold came over me a little, thinking.

"There's not much to say, really," I said. "I mean... We were friends."

Ran furrowed her brow curiously. "In what sense?"

"I dunno. In the way that all kids are friends, I suppose..." I brushed a little hair away from my eyes. I hadn't been bothering to braid it, recently. "We hung around after school, played games. Studied a lot, since I was always behind her in grades. Sometimes I'd stay over at her house and we'd eat dinner. Sometimes we'd read books and talk about them later... It was nothing special, I guess."

"How did you meet?" she asked.

"Oh," I said, and laughed a little with embarrassment. "It was stupid. I used to get bullied a lot in primary school, and for some reason, a few other kids had stolen my logic engine and told me they'd buried it out at the beach-- It wasn't true, they'd just hidden it in the teacher's desk. But I was pretty gullible, so of course I went looking for it." The smile stayed on my face. "The beaches in Itan are really rocky. It's hard to dig around, and you can end up hurting your hands if you're not careful. I must've been at it for hours when she came across me."

"She helped you?"

I snorted. "No, nothing like that. She just told me to come inside because I was acting crazy. Then bandaged up my hands and offered to let me borrow her logic engine for the day. It was a lot to do for some random kid from your school, thinking back to it."

"It sounds like her, though," Ran said, her tone thoughtful.

"Y-Yeah." I exhaled gently. "I went over to her house to pick it up, and saw a novel I'd been reading on her bed. We talked about it, and then one thing led to another."

"Hm." She seemed to take all this in for a few moments, then gave a slow nod. "Were you close?"

"I don't know, really," I said, frowning. "Not particularly, I don't think. She had a lot of other friends, so we'd only meet up a couple times a week. She was always doing something or another. But..." I bit my lip. "I did have a lot of fun."

"I guess that's all you really want, when you're a kid," Ran said.

"Yeah," I said, tiredly.

There was once a person who felt they lacked everything. Power, wealth, love. Everything they saw in others slipped away from them.

And so, they planned to summon a demon.