Hakuno had woken up to the sight of blue eyes and a persistent voice. It had surprised her that anyone would care enough to come for her; after the bright flare of orange fire that had torn her away from the world, she had been prey to disturbing dreams about darkness and people who crumbled into it like they were made of paper instead of flesh.

'Really?' she asked her saviour, the one who had proudly declared her name to be Rin. 'It was terrorism?'

For some reason the girl looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with her skirt, which left, Hakuno was pleased to note, little room to the imagination. 'Um, yeah...it happened a little before my time though, s-so don't expect me to know all the details!'

'I know. Fifty years...' Hakuno pressed her hands against her head with a groan. 'I still can't believe it.'

Her family: gone. Incurable disease: cured. Either by time or perhaps just an advance in medical knowledge. How ironic that the explosion that robbed her of the world she had once known had prolonged her existence, just enough to save her.

'Thank you for waking me up,' she said finally with a smile. 'You didn't have to; I'm a stranger and you didn't really owe me anything. So I'm pretty grateful.'

A dark look passed over Rin's face then and she looked away. Had they been in an old anime of some sort, Hakuno could well imagine the wind choosing to stir at that moment, to pass over her hair and force it over her expression. But as it was, the distance between them was clear and nothing barred her way to seeing the other girl's sadness.

'Yeah,' Rin muttered finally. 'You're right.'

Hakuno felt as though she was left with no option but to travel the world, just to see how it had changed. It got disturbing pretty quickly though, and every time they passed through a town or city, she was met with the same view; the buildings tall, grey, and pristine against the tiny forms of the people who passed into them, their faces usually bleak.

It was all the Harway family's fault she learnt, thanks to the angry rants Rin put her through, usually twice a day. People were divided, allowed happiness only in the restrictions that they had no power to flee from.

'It's a mess,' Rin often concluded stormily, 'only they'll never see it that way. So we've got to take action; show them the results of messing with human nature, and how much value we place on freedom.'

Rin, Hakuno decided, was the kind of person who could cause genocide with good intentions.

The next second she felt a frown twist her face; why did that thought disturb her so? Sadness welled up inside her and her fingers twitched as though they longed to reach over and stroke someone's hand in comfort.

'I had no choice! They wouldn't stop! I tried to reason with them, you know?'

Hakuno grimaced and pressed her hand to her head.

'Hakuno?'

Rin was touching her, sounding panicked, her hands smoothing down the arm of the sweater she'd brought her, red and riddled with fuzzy bumps.

'I'm...okay,' Hakuno managed. 'I just think I need to rest for a while.'

Rin frowned and looked round. 'Here,' she decided, 'they say it's open to any member of the public after all.'

Hakuno frowned, her eyesight meshing with the paving stones as her steps trailed into the dusty edge of grey. The dizziness forced her to hobble her way across the street, the feel of Rin's hand being her only lifeline, a chain that pressed gently but firmly across her knuckles. But still, the action felt wrong and unfamiliar, like Hakuno was a girl playing dress-up in a relationship where nothing fit. But what else could she do?

Hakuno trailed after that decisive grip, locked in a hand that felt too strong, too tight to hold any real sort of feeling in its grasp, her feet lifting up over steps that guards seemed to spring out of as soon as her feet touched concrete. She blinked and looked up, the grey clearing like fog into colour.

Rin, for her part, scowled and buried her head deeper into her polo-neck, the rim of her untrendy baseball cap swaying a little as she tugged it fiercely to the front. She waved a couple of plastic cards in front of her, things Hakuno was keen to note looked a lot like library ID cards, photos of them emblazoned within the corners. Photos Hakuno didn't remember taking.

The guards stared, then re-adjusted their spines into their correct ram-rod positions, marching away with a twirl so reminiscent of ballerinas, that Hakuno had to bite back the giggles. Rin tugged her forward, her glare a clear warning as Hakuno choked on the woolly sleeve of her sweater.

The museum was well-lit inside, almost like a greenhouse as it possessed glass for walls instead of the bricks and paint Hakuno could remember most museums having thirty years ago. A plague, boldly placed in the center, instructed visitors to keep to the right and travel round in an anti-clockwise direction. Oh, and also to give thanks to the Harways for their generous funding. Rin grumbled at that.

'Ha! Look round closely – you see any information billboards next to the objects they've so kindly left on display? No – just plastic placards hanging up next to each glass case, saying simple things – like we were children. And those glass walls, perfect for guards to spy through, yes?'

Hakuno nodded, getting the message. They walked round carefully, arm-in-arm, Rin's grip turning sharp as her nails dug in nervously. Hakuno fought back against the urge to wince, her eyes hungrily devouring the small little statues on display beside the jewellery cases and mirrors. They were trinkets, she realised sourly after a minute. Tiny little things with labels fastened beside them saying the era of history they were used in and the name of the archaeologist who found them. Nothing else, not even a historian's theory of what sort of people used them, or the daily life they might have experienced. It was a far cry from the sort of thing she could remember museum notices saying.

How depressing, she thought. And then came to a stop next to a small sarcophagus, child-sized, she thought, in comparison to a bigger one she had once seen in an exhibition years ago. The top was black and jagged, unnervingly chipped so that parts of it resembled half-melted slag. But still, the shape of a jackel head arose out of the mess, ears pricked up like a rabbit's as its muzzle sloped off into a torn-apart slide, now appearing more cat than canine.

Hakuno stared at the ears, at the sharp points they bared to her narrowed eyes and felt her headache worsen. It was almost like she was expecting them to twitch suddenly, to shuffle under her hands, the ones she now had pressed against the glass. And then Rin pulled her back, harshly leaving only the smudges from her fingertips behind and Hakuno could not help but watch them mournfully fade out, like they were mere data being erased.

'Are you mad?' Rin demanded. 'Why don't you try and look more like a thief admiring their next haul?'

Hakuno frowned. 'I'm no thief,' she protested half-heartedly, trying to ignore the throb of guilt inside.

'No?' Rin's eyebrow twitched. 'Then don't get all watery eyed over some priceless artefact!'

Hakuno's hands rose, her fingers shuddering over tear tracks as they made contact with her skin. It was true she was getting all weepy over something that had just happened to catch her eye.

Rin's expression softened slightly. 'Come on,' she said gently, 'let's get out of here.'

And though her grip was as gentle as her voice, her fingers tracing the bone in her knuckles instead of squeezing, too fast and too tight, like a stranger might have, Hakuno could not help but feel as though she were being stolen away.

Hakuno's dreams were riddles. They were wrapped in terror, in flashes of pain ad spikes of adrenaline, caught in an endless chase that had Hakuno waking, caught in a desperate desire to stay alive. But in the sleeper train she was in, the interior of the carriage hung heavy in the dark, swaying with the clunk of wheels passing over the tracks, the sound clattering out like a mottled lullaby.

Some people might have felt frightened by this. Not Hakuno. She had no home to remember, nothing to compare to the everyday strangeness of waking in a new place.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, ignoring Rin's snores and the sharp drone they left behind, before looking back at her and realising that even awake, she felt trapped by Rin's noise, by all the things she said and all the ones she didn't.

But what she could do to change anything at the moment, she had no idea.

Hakuno gave up, swung her legs back up and let her head land back on the pillow with a welcome thud.

Back in her dreams, Hakuno was running, running, always running. Her voice spilled out of her in terrified gasps and she choked on the darkness that flowed out of the space surrounding her and enveloping her limbs. Her teeth chattered, even as they dissolved in her mouth.

I made my wish, she thought, though the ferociousness with which she felt this felt strange, alien. I made my wish and that should be enough.

'Ah,' said something else, more thought than voice, slipping through the dream, no, memory, like a hand coming in to fill the dark gaps between Hakuno's drifting fingers. 'There never seems to enough time, not when death approaches. I have felt this sensation before, dear master. But unlike me, this time you will not face it alone.'

Hakuno remembered, no she dreamed, surely, that she reached out with her decaying fingers, looking beyond the revelation that she had an origin, that a human wore her appearance and had cast the beginning of her personality from within the stunted containment of a cryogenic chamber. She remembered touching something, no someone, who shouldn't have been there.

Tamamo, she thought, is this what eternity feels like?

There was a pause.

'No,' came the reply.' You do not feel eternity. You sink into it and if you are lucky, if you are divine, you surface and float through. But, unfortunately, as great as you are, my master, it is beyond a human's capabilities.'

Hakuno wore the thought warmly, that she was human, human enough to die, to fail to cleave out a place for herself among the stars. She had become good at that, taking comfort in the small things since she knew that other, greater things, like breathing, were lost to her forever. In fact the possibility had never been there in the first place.

'The best you can become,' Tamamo continued, 'is dust. But ah, never fear, master! For I shall become it along with you! Though...'

And here things drifted, they paused, as thoughts burned without words, flames of pain licking at the edges as they crackled and died.

'I once ruled the sunlight,' Tamamo said and Hakuno, in the midst of pain, had to strain to hear her. 'And while I am less than what I once was, and a fool besides, I can perhaps do this much for you. I can ensure that you wake up within the sunlight.'

Hakuno was not sure what happened then. But she could guess with all her human limitation. She remembered the way something seized her with a warm caress of thought, drifting over her limbs in the way she could imagine sunlight moving over her tights, and wearing down ridges of gold into the pleats of her skirt. It felt like syrup rolling through her lungs, into her chest with a stroke of heat, but oh, this heat had claws, it dug, it burnt, and what memories she had tore free, with a jagged howl of pain that left her undone. Her body, what was left of it, as it trailed diamond-shaped holes of data, fell apart like a handful of salt launched upon the waves, falling, a tiny slip of noise that came to rejoin, dissolve into the rest. But Hakuno was free, torn from what had housed her, and in claws that were not claws, in hands that were not hands, she felt Tamamo cradle her close, her heart, her invisible chest, burning like a furnace.

'Hee hee,' Tamamo murmured like a fool, sounding half drunk as she did so. 'I am sorry, master. It seems my former words have been lies. I cheated, juuuust a little. The grail should have stopped me, but here, where the whole of human history is recorded, I managed to find a little of myself that I had thought lost long ago. But I have so little time now. I am no longer unseen.'

Hakuno railed her thoughts, now sharp without pain to hold them back and a failing body to tear them apart. But Tamamo ignored this. She simply... pushed. And Hakuno, much like a boat, was launched.

Hakuno woke up, eyes wide in a way they had not been for what felt like months. She shivered and shook. She had always been Hakuno Kishima but now she was something more. She was not two people, not exactly, but now she felt as though she were a twin, no, as though her twin had come to root successfully in her head.

The truth was, Hakuno had always been plain, soft-spoken and long-suffering, accused by prior classmates of being too like a robot. The NPC look-a-like she had once fooled Rin into thinking she was, was actually not so far from the truth of her original personality, or at least the one she displayed to the world. In some ways, running through the Mooncell's clutches, watching people die and living with the guilt, taking their wishes, their desperation alongside her victories, carrying memories she thought she was doomed to lose...she had been more alive there, than in all the years she had struggled on earth, bits and pieces of her falling out as the disease caught hold and made her shed years of her life. Even now, cured of what ailed her, she could remember very few things about herself. Hakuno, the Hakuno she had been as a mere fragment of data, felt more real, more human, all encompassing, like a god that had slipped beneath the folds of her skin.

She wasn't sure who she truly was anymore. But she still wore the name proudly, Hakuno Kishinami, and at least two people, one of whom now slept beside her, thought that had been worth something.

Hakuno knelt, half-slipping, half-sliding off the bed and tearing the sheets from her ankles with a grim rip that seized the air and shook it from silence. She felt Rin stir, and cared not how she woke her.

For they had escaped. But Tamamo had not.

Hakuno bent, knocking her head against the top of her knees with a welcoming bump. The skin wore into her forehead with a red hot bolt of pain, bright as a needle that glinted in the dark. It was like a sunburn and she wanted, she felt, like she needed to cry.

But burning, with a fever that felt like remembrance, the tears would not come. They stayed, gleaming in her eyes with a watery sheen that felt bigger than the ocean. And Hakuno waited, waited for dawn to break, for the sun to creep into the carriage and brighten the room, for the colours to wash in and remind her of what Tamamo could no longer see, trapped in a death that did not suit her.