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She would call out first—hesitantly, then forcefully, like a slow knee-deep struggle through dense currents, moving forward centimeters, sliding back meters.
Hei.
Yin could sense Hei's presence in the room without use of an observational specter. The signature glow of synchrotron radiation was blue for every soul, but the temperature and composition of the specters varied. She could sense whose specter it was just by feeling it with her own. She couldn't sense Huang, but his gait was always more of a shuffle than Hei's, so she could easily tell when he was approaching, and from which direction. Mao's specter was incredibly weak, given his disconnection with his original body. The azure flare within his animal form was always shifting, adapting the traits of the host body. In the black cat, Mao's specter was warm and somewhat relaxed. Sometimes, though, she could sense a cold strain of anxiety flaring up, a human paranoia that suggested a mind well-acquainted with death and dying.
Hei's specter never budged. It was always icy when they were on a mission, thawing only near its end, or when he was critically wounded. She could sense his specter without water when he was close enough; she could sense the precise reserve of bloodied guilt, fury, fatigue, and forsaken memory that made up Hei.
She could sense him through several walls when his specter was hot enough.
When she had first begun locating contractors through her observational specter, she'd categorized them, much like labeling folders in a filing cabinet. Indifferently, efficiently.
The trademark of a doll.
Yin had been a sullen child, broody and persistent. She could ignore what she didn't want to acknowledge. She knew too well what would hurt and what was safe. She had turned away from helping hands, turned away from her piano teacher as he eagerly regaled her with a brief history of train engines during their first trip abroad for a competition. As a doll, she was the opposite. Always reaching towards the fire and not knowing it would burn her.
Reaching towards Hei's hand, not knowing he would wrench his away, as though burned.
She sensed that the look he threw her was nothing short of disdainful.
She sensed that her heart had moved.
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.
When Eelis approached her for the first time in years, she felt a stab of something ripple through her own specter. Something like the alternating flashes of hot and cold she perceived from Mao when his cage fell into the river and he had no means of escape. Something like the violent indignation that surged through Hei when Amber reappeared before him, smiling like they were still wishing on fallen contractors in the humid swamps of South America.
When she touched the keys, her specter dimmed gradually, like a campfire flickering out in the rain.
"Kirsi," he pleaded from her side, and she felt only ashes inside, ashes of a sorrow she could no longer surrender to.
Hei was behind her. She could sense him.
His specter was absolutely still.
Slightly warm.
The soot of her past fell away as Eelis released her hands, and what remained were embers of a fire she didn't quite know how to stoke. She felt a tug in her specter, felt another something, something like the cursed homecoming of the pyrokinetic schoolgirl's remembrance of her father, an embrace laced with farewell, something like a quiet Sunday afternoon spent stroking Mao's feline form curled in her lap after a long mission.
Something like belonging.
Her pulse stuttered.
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.
He spoke her name in the manner of a snowflake melting on the tip of his tongue—defrosting with a flare of cold, then warmth.
Yin.
Hei had never experienced any significant emotion without severe ramifications.
Loving Pai had only urged her to mature too soon, to save the brother who'd sought to shield his sister with blades of steel and a mouthful of lies. Trusting Amber had only compelled her to count on his naiveté in the grand scheme of things, offering up her life and those of their kind as the price. What the fuck made him worth saving? His heart branded him a traitor. His brain branded him a machine, and his hands a killer. A commodity. So a small share of humans could shirk dirty work, he gouged a pre-selected, luckless share with stainless steel and conductive cables until their eyes rolled back and jaws fell slack. And the Syndicate rewarded him for this supposed rationality.
When he did conquer his cold blood, it was always at the expense of the warm blood of others.
There was no way out of the red.
He couldn't find it within himself to be irrational anymore.
Not when he was living proof of the collateral damage his humanity had dealt.
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.
The seaside was an ideal location to be, given Yin's medium. But seeing her gazing out the window with an expression of muted longing, he couldn't help but suspect she'd chosen the resort for another, less obvious reason. Her fingers clenched and unclenched the skirt of her blue sundress, but her lithe figure was perfectly still. It wasn't her power, but Yin had a way of suspending time, a way of pausing before speaking—a way of making you wait on the second half of an unfinished sentence, leaning in with bated breath, like something crystalline would bloom from the silence, like something precious would precipitate and evaporate all within a blink of an eye.
But Hei had never been patient.
He grabbed her hand and tugged roughly.
"Let's go outside for a bit," he spoke in her stead.
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.
He awoke often in the night out of sheer habit.
He would turn to his left first, glancing over to the doll in repose. She never tossed and turned. When she rose to brush her teeth in the morning (she unfailingly woke up before he did, as if programmed to do so), there was always a perfect imprint of her body in the mattress, unmarred by shifting restlessness. He'd begrudged her for it initially; resented her for her indifference to the meaning of burden, for her eyes that were never forced to bear witness to the depravity of it all. After catching her standing motionless in a rainstorm and sneezing, he'd resented the sliver of vulnerability in her stoic composure. He'd resented her more when she met them under the tree the next morning entirely unaffected; no cold, no coughs, no nothing.
Nothing.
When it became clear to him that she could not be held accountable for the discomfiting distance between them, he realized he'd resented the fear of losing himself.
Of glancing in the mirror to the sight of dead eyes.
But when he had blinked blearily and struggled to lift his head in a shallow crater near the gate and something very blue and very familiar rose from a puddle inches from his left hand, emanating a tingling concern, he'd grasped at that nothingness as if it were something.
Hei studied Yin with a quiet shame in the tense posture of his shoulders.
He was roused from his regrets only by the observation that something was off.
She had discarded a good portion of the white sheets so that only a small triangle remained over her stomach.
Hei glanced to the window, recalling that it was a full moon.
She had been anxious (as much as one can be while appearing apathetic) to return to their room before the moon rose.
He glanced back to her unmoving form, noting the three shades of white: the mattress, the sheets, and her slim forearms and legs gilded with moonlight.
When Yin awoke at the crack of dawn, she looked down and discovered herself fully covered in the sheets she had strewn aside.
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He looked her in the eye like he was looking for her, and not her observational specter.
"Believe me," she intoned, steady for the first half and inflecting the last word as if she couldn't remember how to speak with emotion, but was giving it a go anyway.
The result was a breathy murmur that sounded like the last words of a soldier kissing soil.
Hei searched her amethyst irises.
Yin's gaze had always been unnervingly direct. Blankly intense. But her mouth was drawn into a tight frown, and her fingers twitched in his grasp.
There was nothing remotely blank about her body language now.
He tugged her forward, but when she resisted ever so slightly, he jerked her closer as she lost her balance and tumbled into his chest. She remained limp for several seconds before craning her face into his shoulder, brushing against his neck. Hei breathed in the soft lemon scent of hotel shampoo, palms moving up from her waist to the dip between her pronounced shoulder blades. "Believe in me, too."
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It's been a long time since he had any reason to murmur, "I'll protect you."
He outlined her dozing profile with a pensive gaze and dimly wondered if he would be capable of it, this time.
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Hei sighed. "Next time, tell me what you're thinking."
He couldn't tell whether he was expecting too much of her, or too much of himself. He couldn't tell what she was thinking, couldn't tell what motivated her, couldn't tell what she saw when she looked him in the eye. He couldn't tell why he began to sense that she had moods. Huang would've mocked him 'till the end of his days. But he swore that she had been something close to happy when letting the waves crest over her feet and ankles for the first time. That she had been somewhat troubled when their stay at the resort abruptly transitioned to escape. That she had been morose when he held her, morose with a sense of an unidentified ache. Rummaging through the fridge, he procured a head of iceberg lettuce and several stalks of green onion. Reaching for the large knife hanging from a rack above the sink, he positioned the lettuce on the wooden surface and chopped it cleanly in two.
Yin remained silent.
Hei waited to her to speak.
As the blade sunk into one half of the lettuce with a crunch, she lowered her head and murmured, "I wish I could stay with you forever, just like this."
He froze.
Yin clenched the rim of the stool.
The young man with rat-like teeth appeared just then, short of breath and clutching both sides of the door frame as he panted.
Yin slowly lifted her head, eyes blank again.
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Posture.
Everyone had a posture.
The woman atop on the wooden table held a sultry pose, like her powers of gravitational manipulation made sitting upright difficult.
Hei had a tense posture, right hand closing over a spool of wire, ready for the subtlest provocation.
Yin had... a doll's posture.
Like she didn't know what she was doing, standing there.
But she turned to face the woman, and it seemed like she had walked into that room with a purpose, like she belonged in that exact spot above the wooden floorboards.
She was never the first to let go of his hand.
"I'm not sure what I am when I'm around this man, but—"
Hei's mind was racing in attempt to keep up with the fact that Yin was speaking with intent, Yin was speaking more than a fucking sentence on her own will, Yin, not the other spectral Yin, not the deranged other entity that had at times possessed her—no—Yin, Yin was expressing herself.
He would pause to glance at her at random intervals after that, checking on her. As if she was becoming so real, she might disappear.
Like all the others he'd ever invested himself in.
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.
Hei had to restart his own heart when the illusionist's rakish smile and haphazardly brushed dirty blond locks vanished to reveal porcelain-white hair.
Yin slumped to the ground.
The fuck—?
Hei was never gentle when the situation called for quick action—be it an oversupply of voltage to the brain or a tight jerk of a wire laced several times around a hyperventilating throat. He wasn't gentle as he lunged to Yin's side, knees scraping bits of gravel on the ground. He wasn't gentle as slid his arms under her neck and back, arms and hands scratching frayed carpet.
But he always lifted her gently, the way she'd accepted the female contractor's newborn with unsure, pale arms as the bundle of weight and warmth quieted in her hold.
He touched her as one might catch a feather—with open palms and a thudding pulse straining to be still.
.
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"Did you really think you could have a peaceful life with her?"
He'd spent a lifetime eschewing peace for service—service to save his sister, service to save his life, service to save a comrade's life, a client's life, service for the sake of service, service without hope of salvation, service in a godless world run by men and women who spoke of heaven and swam in hell. The small, barely-there quirk of her lips had shaken him. No one in their trade ever smiled without reason. They hadn't the luxury for spontaneity. Every action was committed for a net gain.
Yet she existed among them, meandering at her own pace, spending an afternoon practicing how to contort her facial muscles.
Contractors didn't dream.
He supposed dolls weren't programmed to either.
But the flap of her dress in the breeze made him wonder.
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.
She wasn't fragile.
She had the strength to subdue Izanami, to halt the suction of Hei's specter as it was drawn out of him and towards the haze of blue glowing around the other that had usurped Yin.
Hei had never heard her voice as clearly as he did when she all but yelled STOP and shoved him away, shoved the prophetic force of an overturned world away with wiry arms, thin wrists and unseeing eyes.
Hei had never felt his lungs constricting as tightly as they did when she spoke steadily, unwavering, through tears—
and then she was gone.
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.
"Four thousand for the doll?"
"A couple thousand more and I won't pretend I didn't hear you."
"You're shitting me. The boy looks like any other doll. Dead eyes, dead heart. Thank god they're not brain-dead. They'd be walking corpses; fucking specters in the flesh."
Hei lunged for the exit, taking the bar stool with him as it fell in his wake. He only just managed to scramble off before his legs buckled in the rungs. His throat burned with the sting of vodka as he gasped for breath, choking into his arm. At twenty-two steps, his toes had grown numb. At twenty-eight, it spread to his ankles.
"Hey you! You haven't paid your tab, you louse! Get back here!"
He hurled the entire bottle of gin by the neck at the bartender, turning his back as the man dropped to the snow-covered cobblestone streets with a muffled thud.
Hei slid down against the grimy wall of an alley, jamming the heels of his palms into his eyelids.
He grit his teeth to the taste of salt and alcohol.
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I couldn't save you. I'm so sorry.
Pai's murmur - you liar.
I said I'd never leave you.
Yin's murmur - you're lying.
I'm so sorry. Fuck, I'm sorry it turned out like it always does. I'm sorry. So fucking sorry.
For rotting away like a pathetic drunk, unharmed, while you're...
He shook the last of the canister empty, tossing it into the snow.
Give me a sign.
Yin.
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.
"She's still alive."
He flinched out of his drunken daze, turning slowly to exchange a starkly sober glance with the agent above, fingers ghosting over the blood-crusted blade handles at his sides like an old friend greeting another with a familiar insult and a wisecrack.
Three words.
Three words to halt his heart.
Three to jumpstart it.
Three words and his world runs red again.
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