A toxic gray light diffused through the morning sky when Light Yagami awoke. Thick oilsmoke of machines seeped up from the underground factories through the steaming sewer manholes and the ashen-mouthed iron chimneys where the bums huddled as the nights became colder. A chemical residue glistened on the streets; flashes of bursting particles, the uncombusted waste of an inefficient fusion core, crackled and shimmered in the air. Lower on the streets, shapes moved through the industrial fugue; a man with a pushcart followed by a crowd of school-aged children; the crook-limbed figure of a pan-handler; cars, puffing inefficiently through the poor air on oxygen starved engines. In the north, the nuclear rainbow of a mako blast arched across the sky. He touched the cool glass.

"Good morning, Midgar," he said.

Light worked at Shinra Headquarters, the building that dominated the Midgar skyline, pushing its enormous bulk out over gridblocks 0, 01, and 02 in sector 0, the very center of the city. He walked twenty-five blocks to the place where the dirty sidewalks converged at an empty fountain in the courtyard of the building's enormous lobby entrance. Once inside the lobby, Light flashed his card at a security guard and slipped up the back stairs.

Tennis was in the past. It was not played here. He exercised each morning by running up the seventy flights of stairs.

Light's office was on the 70th floor, overlooking the ruins of Midgar City. The population had abandoned the city after the One-Winged Angel had turned the sky and the stars themselves into a weapon; metero, summoned from the darkness, had devastated the city. They had built Edge City, a broken down ghetto, but a monument to their survival.

The people of Edge, and the Turks with them, had returned after the War of the Ghosts (as it was officially known or, as it was talked about among those who had witnessed it, the War of Children), had shattered the fragile stability of Edge City. The moved to the upper level of the palatial headquarters because they needed to be close to Rufus Shinra, the besieged president of the corporation. More importantly, Shinra could no longer afford its royalty. The company had been repeatedly humbled and at last, the lesson had sunk in. Shinra tightened its belt. They consolidated space; they sacrificed offices and break rooms, they turned the bottom floors of the building into shelters for Midgar's orphans and these were overflowing before they even began to comb the streets. They cut spending wherever they could; they went without paychecks and worked for living expenses alone.

The city was bankrupt, its infrastructure collapsing down to the innards.

At his desk, in an office overlooking the northern expanse of the city obscured by its soft, chemical twilight, Light pulled out the death note and began to work. At his computer terminal he pulled up a series of encrypted electronic messages, forwarded to him from random, specially encrypted rely points set up all over the city. All of the messages were from hardened criminals and they contained the names and photographs of individuals who had acted as their accomplices.

He began by going through what remained of Shinra's criminal databases and killing off the criminals who had been incarcerated before meteor, and escaped afterwards. This was a slow, but steady process. Nevertheless, after meteor, the city had lost almost all of its police force and Light knew that most of the criminals operating post-metero had never been arrested, or processed.

But the subtle genius of the death note was found in the way Light used it to manipulate the actions of those whose names he wrote. Each criminal he killed he instructed, via the death note, to send him the names and faces of all their accomplices. This allowed Light to keep current with the problem of crime in Midgar and to continue to kill criminals who had never been logged in Midagr's systems, or who had begun their activity only after every semblance of law and order was officially defunct.

Nevertheless, without any type of law enforcement or peace-keeping force, it was an uphill battle. Kira had at last found a force as ubiquitous and determined as he was: its name was Lawlessness.

"Light?" Tseng stood in the doorway of his office. "Light, are you coming? To the meeting?" He spoke in Wu-Taian, a language which had only one or two critical differences from Japanese; it was something he and Light had in common. Light blinked and looked at the clock.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The time slipped away from me. I'll be right in." Tseng nodded and shut the door. Light closed the Death Note and tucked it in his jacket. Presently he became aware of the soft, sickly flapping of two scabbed wings.

"When can we go back?" Ryuk whined, his grim-face frozen in its feelingless grin.

"I'm not completely sure how shinigami brains process information," Light said, "but I can say with some certainty that yours is only marginally successful. I told you, I don't know when we can go back. I don't know when we can go back because I don't know how we came here."

"I thought you said it was because you were needed here, and cosmic forces always organize the universe so each element can exert its influence where it is most needed? See? I remembered."

"I also said that was one possible explanation, but that it sounds too much like an episode of Quantum Leap to be true."

"Oh, right. I forgot that part."

"I have a meeting so I'm going to ignore you now." Light walked out into the hall and down three doors to a tiny conference room, utilizing a desk rather than a conference table, around which the Turks had gathered.

"I apologize for being late," he said. Reno Sinclair said,

"You missed my motion. I moved, before you walked your late-ass in the door, that since we all smoke we lift the ban on smoking in government offices. Can I get a second?"

"Second," Tseng said, then: "All in favor?" All the Turks, Light included, raised their hands.

Cigarettes were lit around the desk. The meeting began.

"First order of business," Tseng said. "We need to talk about Kira."