When I woke again I wasn't strapped down anymore, but I had no illusions that I'd open my eyes safe in my bed at home. Even before I opened my eyes I could feel the raw, burning injuries on my wrists from my writhing, and the sore ache of my throat from my screams.

The room I found myself in was some sort of cell. Three solid white walls, a small sink and toilet tucked into the corner behind a flimsy curtain, the cot I was lying on, and bars facing a hallway. I couldn't see from where I sat how many cells there were in all, but I could see that the cell directly opposite me was also occupied, and that its occupant was watching me back.

"Are you alright?" The man looked about my dad's age, with kind, dark eyes and dark hair braided down his back. "We saw them drag you in. You've been out for hours."

I glanced around at the word "we", but the other cells in my view were empty. I wasn't sure how to answer his question. I was absolutely not alright, but I wasn't in too much pain, and this other prisoner seemed to mean well.

"I'll live," I said finally, though the joke was probably lost on him. Or maybe it wasn't. If he was in a cell opposite mine, it was entirely possible he'd been repeatedly killed and un-killed in the same way as me. Maybe even for the same reason. "Are you related to Yusuke, too?"

"Who?" The confusion seemed genuine, and the man shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Why do you ask?"

"Apparently my cousin is an 'unusual specimen', but he's 'too well-guarded', so the…" I didn't know how to describe the thing that had tortured me without sounding like a crazy person, so I settled for waving my arm suggestively and finished, "took me instead."

"Took?" The man repeated, brows furrowing. He scanned me up and down, eyes lingering on my wrists and my filthy school uniform. "You didn't volunteer."

He'd said it as a statement, a horrified realization. It was my turn to stare. "Volunteer for what?"

Silently, the man walked to the front of his cell and slid down to sit on the ground, hands clenched around the bars and looking as if he was settling in to tell a long story. I crossed to the edge of my cell on unsteady legs, mirrored him, and listened.

If he'd his story to me 24 hours ago I'd have called him crazy. But since I'd spent the last day being smothered to death and revived by something I was positive wasn't human, and had briefly experienced what I was fairly sure was my soul leaving my body, I decided to take him at his word.

He told me his name was Kai, and that he and two others were students of the great psychic called Metamura. He told me how he and his fellow students had a great love and respect for their master, who was like a father to them, and who had helped them all to develop and refine their psychic techniques. He told me how his master had fallen deathly ill a short while ago, and that no doctors could cure his sickness. And he told me how the demon, Dr. Ichigaki, had come and offered to help their master—for a price.

In exchange for their cooperation in his blood research, Ichigaki promised he'd cure their master. Given what I knew of Ichigaki's nature from my violent kidnapping, torture, and repeated death, I strongly suspected that that was a lie. But because Kai looked so mournful and defeated already, I kept those thoughts to myself.

"I'm Ren Nakano, by the way," I said eventually, after Kai had finished his story and fallen into a brooding silence.

The belated introduction managed to draw a smile and a weak chuckle from Kai. "Nice to meet you, Ren. I only wish it was under better circumstances."

"Yeah… me, too."

We didn't talk after that. We both retreated to our respective cots, and though I had no sense of night or day in the dim artificial lighting of the cells, I tried to sleep. I rested with my eyes closed, teetering on the edge of dreams for what felt like hours until a loud metallic clattering woke me, followed by murmured voices and shuffling.

In his cell across from me, Kai stood quickly and gripped the bars, craning his head in the direction of the noise and watching intently. I followed his lead, coming to the edge of my cell and trying to get a look at the source of the noise.

The clattering appeared to have come from a large metal door, now closed, just down the hall. The voices and shuffling came from four figures now approaching our cells. Two of them were human-looking, with slumped shoulders and heads hanging as they stumbled along. I guessed based on their apparent humanity and Kai's rapt attention that these two were En and Ryo, his fellow students. The other two figures, who were sneering and hauling the humans along by the arm, were most certainly not human.

I couldn't decide if they looked more feline or reptilian. Their skin was in shades of light orange-brown, covered in thin hair, and their bulbous yellow eyes had vertical slits for pupils. Their long, reptilian tails swayed behind them as they walked, and as they sneered at the humans I could see glimpses of long, sharp, crooked teeth protruding over their lips.

They didn't speak to or acknowledge me or Kai as they manhandled the other two into the cells on either side of Kai's. Kai watched intently, and the two newcomers shot him reassuring looks before they entered their cells and lost sight of each other.

The demons—from Kai's story I assumed they were demons like Ichigaki, and not humans like us who'd been experimented on—left, snickering to each other as they left through the heavy metal door. The heavy clang of the metal and the snick of a tumbling lock echoed down the hall of cells.

"Are you two alright?" Kai asked as soon as they'd gone. He pressed against the bars of his cell, although no matter how far forward he stretched he didn't have a sight-line into the neighboring cells the way I did.

"We're fine," said the man to Kai's left and my right. He was broad-shouldered and tan, with dark, shaggy hair and a large cross-shaped scar to the left side of his forehead that thankfully looked long-healed. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, maybe a decade younger than I pegged Kai to be. "They just ran some more tests, and took some more blood."

"A lot more blood," the one to Kai's right mumbled. He seemed even younger than me, maybe 15 or 16 at most. Long, spiky orange hair hung to his chin, a long fringe obscuring most of his face.

"A lot more blood," the first allowed. "But we're fine." His eyes slid over to me, curiosity plain. "Who's this?"

"This is Ren Nakano," Kai introduced, looking much more relaxed now that he knew his friends were safe. "Ren, this is En," he gestured to the the cell with the younger boy, "and Ryo." He gestured to the cell with the dark-haired man on his other side. "En, Ryo, Ren here did not volunteer for Dr. Ichigaki's experiments."

From the way his eyes sharpened, I could tell that Ryo understood immediately what Kai meant. It took En a few moments longer to grasp his meaning, but then he gasped. "What?"

Ryo curled his hands around the bars of his cell, peering at me critically. There was no mirror in the cell, but I could guess I was in a sorry state, considering how rapidly Ryo's eyes darkened with anger. His brows drew together in confusion after a moment, and he glanced in the direction of Kai's cell to ask, "But why would he do that?"

I opened my mouth to suggest that perhaps it was because Dr. Ichigaki was an insane, evil demon, but En beat me to it. "Why wouldn't he?" En's fingers twisted in his shirtsleeve, a nervous gesture that made him look even younger. "This whole thing has been suspicious from the start."

Ryo's lips tightened impatiently, though the look was lost on En. "Yes, but Dr. Ichigaki convinced us to agree to his experiments. We all walked into his lab willingly. Why kidnap her, but not us?"

That thought hadn't occurred to me, but after a bit of thought I had a good guess. "You three are trained martial artists, right? And psychics?" Ryo nodded shortly. "He probably knew he couldn't take you by force."

That answer seemed to satisfy Ryo's curiosity, though he didn't look at all pleased. And it raised yet another question, which En voiced. "You're not a psychic?"

I opened my mouth to deny it, but hesitated.

Kai had explained that psychics were humans who could harness their own spiritual energy. And Ichigaki, before he began his experiments, had talked about Yusuke and his 'fascinating shortcut' to unlocking his 'spiritual powers'. Was that what Ichigaki had been hoping to achieve? And if so, had he succeeded?

At last I answered, uncertain and halting, "...I wasn't when he took me."

En just blinked, puzzled, but Kai's face rapidly drained of color, and Ryo leaned forward against the bars once again, eyes sharp as broken glass. In a positively dangerous voice, he demanded, "What did the doctor do?"

I was shaking my head before even finished the question. I couldn't say it. If I had to repeat aloud exactly what had happened in that lab, I was sure I would lose the already-tenuous grasp I had on my sanity.

"I don't want to talk about it." Ryo and Kai seemed to accept that, though judging by the looks on their faces they could probably guess it was bad. En, though, huffed a frustrated breath, clearly out of the loop.

"What is it?" He looked to his left, visibly irritated by the silence and his inability to see the looks on his friends' faces. "What am I missing?"

Kai took a breath in, but held it for a long moment before he spoke. Eventually he said, in a deep, soothing voice, "Every human has their own spirit energy. And every human can harness that energy, if they have the strength and discipline to work for it." It almost sounded like a quote, he uttered it so carefully.

"Master Metamura taught us that," En said quietly, seeming calmer now that Kai was talking. "But what does it have to do with Dr. Ichigaki?"

"You know that some people have more energy than others. Some, like you, can harness that power more easily. Others," Kai paused, a small, self-deprecating smile on his lips that only I could see, "require years of training even just to become aware of their spiritual power, let alone harness it."

En was nodding, unsurprised. All of this was new to me, but clearly it was review for him. "So?" He prompted when Kai paused for a long moment.

"Some other people…" Kai glanced at me, then away. I was glad not to suffer the pressure of his eyes as he explained, "Under extraordinary circumstances, some people can tap into their spiritual power without the proper training."

"Extraordinary circumstances?" En echoed, confused.

Kai shook his head. This time it was Ryo who spoke up, voice grim. "Trauma. Danger. Death."

"Oh." En looked at me. Opened his mouth, then shut it. I looked away, busying myself with tugging my uniform jacket's sleeves down to more fully cover my battered, bruised wrists. "...Did it work?"

I, too, was interested in the answer to that question. Kai looked uncertain, Ryo thoughtful. "I can't tell," Ryo said. "But there's a simple enough way to find out."

My first instinct was to ask if it would hurt. But since asking that question would be pretty telling, and since these guys seemed to want to help, I asked instead, "How?"

"Focus on gathering all your spirit energy in your index finger," Ryo instructed. "If you are a psychic now, it will begin to glow and feel warm when you have focused your energy there."

"Right…" I stared at my right hand. My index finger was a little dirty from the events of the last day or so, but it didn't glow in the slightest. "And how do I do that, exactly?"

"Uh…" Ryo floundered, apparently struggling to articulate it any better than that.

Kai sighed, though not impatiently, and said, "It's difficult to describe. Your energy flows through your body. When you can focus on it, and gather it, you'll feel it."

"So I have to focus it to feel it, but I have to feel it to focus it?" It all sounded very circular. Ryo shrugged helplessly, but nodded.

"The energy is part of you," En said, tapping his fingers to his chest just over his heart. "It should feel warm, and familiar. Did you ever see ghosts or get bad feelings or premonitions, before?"

Until very recently I hadn't believed either of those things even existed, so I shook my head, bemused. "Then just try to find that warm, familiar feeling and direct it to your finger."

"Closing your eyes helps," Kai added.

The vague instructions did not inspire confidence, but I figured I might as well try. I shut my eyes and turned my attention inward. I became aware of my breathing. The lingering tightness in my chest. The scrapes on my hands and knees, and my swollen, tender wrists and ankles. I felt the dry, raw ache of my throat, and even the steady thrum of blood through my veins. I heard my heart as it beat.

And there, near my heart, was the focal point of the warmth Ryo had described. I could feel it pulsing through my veins, flowing through my body in sync with my blood. I tried to focus on directing that warmth to my hand, but it resisted, seeming reluctant to disrupt its natural flow. I imagined gathering up the warmth and pushing it, slowly, down my right arm, through my hand, and to the very tip of my index finger.

Eventually my finger grew warm, and tingly. But was I just imagining it? Or was it real?

I peeked my eyes open, and saw that there was indeed a pale golden light emitting from my index finger. The visual confirmation threw me off enough to break my focus, and the energy I'd gathered in my finger dissipated almost immediately to resume its normal flow through my body.

"So it did work," En murmured. When I looked up from my hand, Kai and Ryo were nodding in agreement.

I didn't really have much hope, but I had to ask. "I don't suppose there's any way these psychic powers could help me blast my way out of this cell, is there?"

En shook his head, shoulders slumped. "Even if your spirit power was strong enough to break through the walls—"

"And it's not," Ryo cut in bluntly before En continued.

"The cells have their own energy field. You wouldn't be able to get through." There was a resigned tone in En's voice that made me suspect he may have learned this the hard way.

The suspicion was strengthened when Ryo muttered moodily, "You'd just hurt yourself trying."

"We made a promise." Kai's voice was quiet, but En and Ryo flinched like he'd shouted. En looked chastised by the reminder, but as Kai continued Ryo dipped his head, hands clenched into fists so tightly his knuckles went white. "We promised to undergo these experiments in order to save Master Metamura. We are honor bound to keep that promise!"

"And what about Ichigaki?" Ryo snapped. En flinched again at the outburst. Kai's jaw tightened. "You really think he's going to keep his end of the bargain? After he kidnapped this girl? He has no honor!"

Kai opened his mouth to retort, but En beat him to it, voice small. "If this was really just blood research… why would he need psychics?"

No one had a good answer to that question, and we all fell silent. I found myself grateful that En couldn't see his friends the way I could. Surely ignorance had to be better than seeing the looks of utter despair and defeat on Kai and Ryo's faces.

I turned away from the sight, returned to my cot, and tried to quiet my mind enough to return to sleep.

My dreams were uneasy. Though the first thing I did upon lying down was toss the cot's small pillow to the far side of the cell, I still woke several times from nightmares of suffocation, heart racing gasping desperately for breath. I couldn't tell if I'd slept for hours, or only minutes, before the feline-lizard demons returned and opened the door to Kai's cell.

"Wait!" Ryo pressed against the bars of his own cell, reaching one hand beyond urgently. Kai was already in the hall, one arm held firmly in the clawed grip of one of the monsters.

"Take me instead!" Ryo demanded. "I want to talk to Dr. Ichigaki!"

That was a supremely stupid idea, I thought, and Kai seemed to agree, because his eyes widened and he stood straight. "Ryo, no!"

The demon who wasn't holding Kai smiled a wicked, too-wide smile. "Dr. Ichigaki isn't interested in anything you have to say."

The demon holding Kai snickered. Ryo ground his teeth, anger on his face like a thundercloud. "Just what the hell is going on here?! What kind of blood research is this?!"

There was a beat of tense silence. Then the demons laughed, raucously, a sound like nails on a chalkboard. En and Kai's faces were bone-white at the sound, but Ryo's flushed with anger.

"The doctor told us this might happen." Still chuckling, the demon who'd spoken before reached into its pocket. "That's why he gave us these."

The demon produced a small device. It was about the size of a pocket calculator, and seemed harmless enough—until the demon pressed a button on the side and blinding energy sparked between two metal prongs protruding from the end of it. Without hesitating, he pressed the thing against Ryo's outstretched arm.

I had never been curious about what burning flesh smelled like, but I found out anyway in that moment. The air filled with an acrid, burning stench as Ryo's skin blackened where the energy touched him. He cried out in pain and yanked his arm back inside his cell with such force that he landed on his back, head cracking against the concrete floor.

Panicked by the sound, I pressed closer to the bars to check if Ryo was still moving, still breathing, though I kept a wary eye on the demon with the device in case he decided to wave it in my direction. Thankfully, Ryo was still awake, hissing in pain as he slowly levered himself up to a seated position with his good arm. Kai, however, hadn't seen his recovery, and struggled against the demon holding him, eyes wide with panic.

"Ryo!" Kai's hands sparked with energy for the briefest moment and he stepped forward, trying to make his way back towards Ryo's cell, but the demon gripping his arm yanked him mercilessly backwards. It aimed a vicious kick to Kai's knee, sneering as Kai crashed to the ground with a grunt of surprise. The demon leapt on him before he could recover, securing his hands behind his back with what appeared to be thick metal manacles.

"Stop!" En cried, gripping the bars to his own cell. Ryo, clutching his blackened arm, had shuffled back to the door of his cell and watched with wide eyes. "What are you doing?!"

"Energy-suppressing manacles," the demon sneered, gleefully yanking Kai to his feet. "Don't even try it!"

The demons dragged Kai down the hall. En, Ryo, and I watched, stunned to silence, as the door at the end of the hall clanged shut. The noise echoed down the hall, a horrible, final sound. Our harsh breathing seemed ultra-loud in the quiet that followed.

"Ryo, are you okay?" En asked urgently.

Ryo was looking grimly at his blackened arm. I couldn't tell for sure just how bad his injury was—the color might have been ash, or it might have been necrotic skin—but the awful smell of his burning flesh still lingered in the air. En couldn't see it, though, so he had no reason to doubt Ryo when he said, voice tight, "I'm fine."

I shot Ryo a look to let him know that I, at least, knew that for the bald-faced lie it was. He returned it with a resolute stare, just daring me to contradict him out loud and upset En further. I didn't dare. I turned my gaze away, jaw set.

At Ryo's reassurance, En had turned worried eyes to the door at the end of the hallway. "Do you think Kai will be okay?"

"...He'll be fine, too." Despite his words, Ryo didn't look at all confident.

"He will be fine," I said without thinking. En and Ryo's eyes snapped towards me, hopeful and skeptical in turn. I swallowed, and explained my reasoning. "Whatever it is Ichigaki really wants… He wants us all alive for it."

The cell block was quiet after that. En, exhausted by the events and likely still suffering from the after-effects of having too much blood drawn, fell asleep on his cot not long after Kai was taken. When En's breathing had been steady and soft for long minutes, Ryo made his way to the small sink tucked in the back corner of his cell and tried to clean his injured arm without making too much noise.

The tap squeaked, and the water trickled, and Ryo hissed in pain as he cleaned his wound, but En never stirred.

When Ryo had gingerly dried off his arm and returned to sitting on the edge of his cot, I surveyed the damage. Much of the black had washed off, but the entirety of Ryo's forearm was a mottled, bruised purple, surrounding an angry-looking blister that looked like it would need to be drained.

"How are you feeling?" I asked quietly, keeping my voice low so as not to wake En.

Ryo jolted a little, seeming to have forgotten that I was there, and could see him. He adjusted his posture in an attempt to hide the state of his arm. "It looks worse than it is."

I interpreted that to be roughly equivalent to, I am in terrible pain but am too macho to admit it. Still, his arm wasn't my main concern. "I'm more worried about your head, to be honest."

The cracking sound his skull had made as it hit the floor had been stuck in my head like the chorus of a catchy song, playing over and over again. Ryo looked surprised at the reminder—not a good sign, with a head injury like that—and tentatively prodded at his scalp with the fingers of his uninjured left hand. After a moment he winced, quickly drawing his hand back into his lap.

"You didn't black out, did you?" I didn't know what to look for in terms of concussions, but I knew blacking out and vomiting were bad signs. "Are you nauseous at all?"

Irritatingly, Ryo was beginning to look amused by my questions. "I appreciate your concern, but I don't have a concussion."

"My friend Naoko told me that once," I informed him dryly. "Right before she ruined my shoes."

Ryo huffed a laugh, but seemed to regret it immediately, based on the pained grimace that flashed across his face. Still, he said, "It'd be pretty hard to ruin your shoes from over here."

"Fair enough."

Ryo didn't say anything more. I fidgeted. I had a vague impression that people who were possibly concussed weren't supposed to sleep, but I wasn't sure for how long.

"How long have you three been here, anyway?" I asked at last, partly to satisfy my curiosity and partly to keep Ryo from laying down on his cot.

Ryo paused, considering the question. "Maybe two weeks?" But he looked uncertain about the answer. "It's hard to say for sure. I think they feed us three meals a day, but they never dim the lights, and there's no windows, so…"

"Right." I drummed my fingers on my leg thoughtfully. "Have you been here the entire time?"

"These cells, you mean?" I nodded. "When we're not in the lab, yes."

I tried to think of any circumstances where I'd walk into a room like this willingly, but I couldn't. "And that didn't make you suspicious at all?"

It was a rude question, and I regretted voicing it as soon as the words left my mouth, but Ryo didn't look angry. Just… tired.

He closed his eyes with a sigh, and murmured, almost like a prayer, "Master Metamura is like a father to us… We would do anything to save him." He opened his eyes and looked at me, and I felt as pinned as I had back on Ichigaki's table. "Even undergo experiments by a demon doctor... or walk into this prison, of our own free will."

He stopped talking, then, but I could hear the words he left unsaid perfectly clearly, just the same.

Even die.

"What are you using all this blood for, Dr. Ichigaki?"

I could have been in the drama club for the performance I was putting on. What I really wanted to do was take the syringe the doctor was using to tap my veins and shove it all the way through his beady eye and into his brain. But my hands were bound to the demented dentist's chair that the doctor kept in the blood-taking room. I was cuffed at all times, whenever I wasn't in my cell, which meant that violence wasn't an option.

Flattery, however, was.

It was a calculated decision on my part. If there was anything I knew about serial killers, villains, and madmen, it was that their biggest weakness was their ego. When they felt secure in their victory, they inevitably shared too many details about their plans—just enough for the heroes to foil them escape.

I was hoping, if I wasn't too antagonistic, if I seemed curious and even impressed with the doctor's work, he might make just such a mistake. Hopefully he wasn't too genre-savvy.

Ichigaki did look a bit surprised at the tone of my question, and the respectful title, but he didn't pay too much attention to it, turning his attention immediately back to watching my blood fill the syringe.

"Research, my dear," he said as he placed the full syringe on the tray and readied another. "Research."

I swallowed quietly and decided to press my luck.

"Research on psychics?"

Ichigaki paused for half a second before putting the needle in my arm. "Obviously."

It was a dismissal. He wasn't going to discuss it. I would probably have to wait a few days until he took me from the cells again to draw blood, and hope he would be in a better mood. But I didn't want to wait that long.

I put on my best curious face, the perfect picture of a teacher's pet, and asked, "What's your hypothesis, Doctor?"

It was like I'd said the magic word. Ichigaki gave me a considering look. It was not quite like he saw me as a real, sentient being. No, in that moment, he looked at me like I was a dog who'd learned a new trick, showing that I wasn't quite as stupid as he'd initially thought.

That suited me just fine, though. If he thought I was really smart, he might not dare to talk.

"My hypothesis…" He said it slowly, smiling his awful smile and savoring the word. "...is that the human spirit is a vastly underutilized source of energy. And with the right technology, I believe that I can harness that energy in a way the world has never seen!"

He'd gone full mad-scientist at the end there, voice rising in a crescendo, eyes distant as he imagined his scientific triumph. I supposed I should count myself lucky that Ichigaki was not of the Frankenstein persuasion, slicing and dicing in an attempt to bring the dead to life.

But then, he'd already accomplished that, hadn't he?

It was enough information for one day. I tucked the doctor's ambition away in my mind for later consideration.

Ten days passed, by my reckoning.

After returning from Ichigaki's lab, I had startled my fellow prisoners with the loud tearing noises as, struggling with only my teeth and hands, I tore the red neckerchief from of my school uniform into thin scraps of fabric.

"What are you doing?" En had been the one to ask, eyes wide. He'd looked a little disgusted, or perhaps a little worried that I was going insane from captivity.

"Making a calendar," was my answer.

We received three meals a day. Each day, when we received the third meal, I made a knot in the scraps of shredded fabric I'd tied in ribbons to the edge of my cot. Three meals, one day, one knot.

I made two initial knots, for the two days that had already passed since I was taken. On the fourth day, I had been taken to have my blood drawn for the first time. The again on day seven.

To my fellow prisoners' puzzlement, I had been as polite and compliant as possible with Ichigaki and the demons who served him. Ichigaki called them M4 and M5. They likely had real names, like En, Ryo, and Kai, who I had learned Ichigaki called M1, M2, and M3 respectively.

"Does that make me M6?" I had asked the doctor as he drew my blood for the second time.

Ichigaki had chuckled. "That would be neat and tidy, wouldn't it? But no. You're a little different, my dear, a little peculiar." He had patted my cheek, then, with his clawed hand. It was an oddly normal gesture—he was not cold or clammy, as one might expect a monster to be. His hand was dry and warm, the touch almost affectionate, as if I was a precocious child or a favored pet. "No, I've decided to call you Nana."

And he'd smiled that awful smile, like he was expecting me to smile and appreciate the name. Luckily he'd pricked me with the needle again just then, and I was able to hide my distaste for the moniker with a show of discomfort.

Nana. Seven. A name and a number, all in one. I normally appreciated a good bit of wordplay, but this was an exception.

Now, on day ten, I was taken once more to the blood-drawing room, and Dr. Ichigaki greeted me by 'name' as I was strapped once more into his vampire chair.

"May I ask you a question?" I asked when the doctor had half a syringe already. He would allow it, I knew, but asking if I could ask would give him a sense of power.

Sure enough, the doctor chortled. "But you just have, my dear girl." Still, he gave me a patient sort of glance to indicate that he was still listening. How generous of him.

"What makes Yusuke such a fascinating specimen?" The question was asked uncertainly. Curiosity was there, of course, but more than a little self-consciousness, too. As if I weren't sure if I were measuring up to Dr. Ichigaki's expectations. As if I wanted to.

"That's why I'm here, right?" I asked. Ichigaki pulled the filled syringe from my vein and turned to set it gently on the tray, then turned his dark, too-intelligent eyes back to my face. "Was it just the…" The pause, where words failed me, was not an act. "The shortcut?"

Ichigaki smiled a tight-lipped smile. I was glad for once not to see his teeth. "Heavens, no. Yusuke's resurrection is only the first of his peculiarities." Yusuke seemed to be Ichigaki's favorite subject, as he happily continued, "He's also shown enormous growth in power in a remarkably short span of time!"

Ichigaki paused, then, a slight frown forming as he glanced between my face and my veins. "A trait you do not seem to share… yet."

There was something funny in his tone on that last word that wrenched a question out of me I hadn't meant to ask. "What if I don't share it at all?"

Ichigaki's answer was almost mechanical, the sadistic fondness with which he'd called me Nana completely absent. "That would be most unfortunate."

The words stuck in my head. As M4 and M5 escorted me from the lab, That would be most unfortunate. As they wrenched open the heavy metal doors to the cell block, That would be most unfortunate. As we passed other cells on the way back to mine, cells that were empty, but for some mysterious dark stains on the walls that I had tried not to think too much about. But now the rusty color of them lingered at the corners of my eyes, wondering if perhaps their previous occupants had been… unfortunate.

My fear must have shown on my face, because as soon as M4 and M5 had shut the door behind them Kai asked, "Are you alright?"

The fingers on my right hand twitched in agitation, itching with the memory of the golden energy I'd manifested there to prove my psychic abilities. My heart pounded because I knew in my bones that glowing fingers would not be enough.

Instead of responding to Kai's question, I asked, "Can you teach me how to get better at using my spirit energy?"

Kai's eyebrows raised sharply at the unexpected question—or perhaps at the hollow tone in which it was delivered. "Why do you ask?"

"Yusuke has shown 'enormous growth' in a short amount of time." My fingers twitched again. "...I'm afraid I won't measure up."

I'm afraid I'll be a dark stain on the wall, I didn't say. In the back of my mind, Ichigaki's voice: That would be most unfortunate.

I may as well have said the words, though, because Kai's face grew grim. "We can try. But we are no masters, ourselves."

"And there's only so much you can do in these cells," Ryo added, gripping his cell bars as he joined the conversation. En, too, was at the edge of his cell, listening.

"Just teach me whatever you can," I said, because in matters of life and death I'd take anything I could get. "Please."

It took three days for me to call on my energy at will without needing to close my eyes and meditate. After that, I spent a week practicing moving the focal point of my energy from one body part to another—finger to finger, hand to hand, hand to foot, and so on.

The next step after that was manifesting the energy outside my body, in a physical form. The others had demonstrated what they could of their own techniques. Kai produced a javelin made of pure energy, but in the confines of his cell, was unable to throw it. Ryo displayed his method of coating his hand in energy like a glove, assuring me that, when he struck something with it, the results were explosive.

Only En's technique was conducive to showing off in the cells. His energy manifested in the form of rings, one on each arm, and he was amazing with them. His control was so absolute that he might as well have been playing with circus rings, doing tricks and rolling the energy rings around. At my wide-eyed admiration, En had also proudly informed me that this was nothing—because in a real fight, he could even create illusory rings, making two projectiles look like six.

Watching En and replicating his technique were two different things, though. For simplicity's sake I stuck to attempting to form my energy into a ball, about the size of a softball. It was an easy, familiar shape in an easy, familiar size, which was an advantage, because it gave me one less thing to think about when attempting to channel my energy.

Disrupting the flow of energy to make it go where I wanted in my body had been easy compared to the effort it took to make the energy manifest outside my body. It took me ten days just to be able to hold the ball stable without dissipating, and another three to be able to toss it from hand to hand.

I practiced nearly nonstop. When I wasn't eating, sleeping, or getting my blood drawn, I was practicing. Manifesting the orb, tossing the orb, catching the orb.

In the evenings, when I'd exhausted myself too much to continue practicing and we'd all eaten our third meal, we talked.

En, I learned, had grown up in a normal family with no history of spirit awareness. He'd been able to sense ghosts and demons from a young age, though, and for years he'd been scared and confused. His family, unable to understand, had shipped him to dozens of psychologists and child therapists before he was finally approached by Master Metamura, who helped him control his powers and make sense of everything he'd experienced.

Kai, meanwhile, had come from a long line of psychics, but had an unusually hard time accessing his own spirit energy. When his own family gave him up as a lost cause, he went from teacher to teacher, trying to find a master who would help him finally reach his inner potential.

Ryo was less open about his past. He'd curtly explained that his parents had been moderately talented human psychics who were killed by demons, and that he came to learn from Metamura after their deaths. He didn't go into detail about how it happened, but the haunted expression on his face made me pretty sure he'd either seen it happen, or had found the bodies in the aftermath. He didn't say when it happened, either, but Ryo looked not much older than his mid-twenties, so I wouldn't have been surprised if he was a teenager, or even a child when they'd been murdered.

When we tired of retelling our tragic backstories to each other, we found other ways to pass the time. Kai was pretty well versed in history and myth from his travels, and made for an excellent storyteller. When all of us were in our cells, he'd tell folk tales or stories of great heroes from history, and En, Ryo, and I would nod off to his soothing voice.

En would lead games, sometimes. He'd think of a famous person and we'd have to ask questions to figure out who it was, or challenge us with riddles and tongue twisters. Kai had already heard most of the riddles En told, so he tended not to answer them, happy instead to listen to Ryo and me as we tried to puzzle out the answers. Ryo outright refused to participate in the tongue twisters. He said it was because they were childish, but I suspected he just didn't want to sound stupid when he tripped over his words. In any case, En, Kai and I would repeat them as quickly as we could, dissolving into quiet laughter when we inevitably tripped up.

"Hey, Ren?" En asked one night. Or I guessed it was night. We were all lying in our cots trying to drift off.

"Yeah?"

En's voice was small and quiet. It had been his turn for blood today. "Can you sing?"

Not a question I was expecting. I craned my neck up from the cot, but there was no way I'd be able to see En's face from this angle. "Sure. Anyone can sing." Not everyone could sing well, but I was alright as long as I wasn't too ambitious with high and low notes. No one had ever plugged their ears while I sang karaoke, at least.

En was quiet for a moment. Then, "Would you sing something?"

If someone had asked me that under normal circumstances, I would have been embarrassed and tried to decline. But there's a special kind of intimacy and trust that develops when your cellmates can watch you peeing. They didn't, of course, but still. I was pretty much beyond embarrassment with En, Kai, and Ryo. "You wanna hear anything in particular? I only really know pop songs."

"Doesn't matter."

I picked a slow love ballad I could take my time with that I knew didn't have any high notes my voice would crack on. I finished a few minutes later to silence, and I wondered if En had fallen asleep. But then he asked, "Another?"

I paused, trying to think of another song I could sing decently that I knew all the words to, but as I thought a deep, low voice sang out an old folk song. I turned to look at Kai, but to my surprise he was lying peacefully, eyes closed. It was Ryo who had started to sing.

On the afternoon of day 40, I crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and muttered curses.

After weeks of practice I could manipulate my orbs of energy easily. When I felt I'd hit a stopping point, I tried to move on to what felt like the next natural step: manifesting two orbs of energy simultaneously. Unfortunately, my first attempt had blown up in my face—in a very literal sense.

The problem, Ryo had informed me while I absently traced my face, trying to reassure myself that yes, I did still have eyebrows, was control.

"It has to be second-nature to you, or it'll just keep blowing up in your face."

"Any advice on how to do that?" And, because I'd come to expect it, I said preemptively, "besides years of study and practice?"

Kai had shut his open mouth, and Ryo had recommended the exercise that currently had me falling on my ass. The challenge was to balance in handstand on only one finger, using my energy to support myself. Supposedly this was to increase my spiritual strength and help me regulate the flow of my energy, but in the first few days I attempted it I began to suspect that the exercise was designed less for my improvement and more for Ryo's amusement. But En and Kai assured me the exercise was valid, so I stuck with it, going for longer and longer times without falling down.

Until times like now, when I exhausted myself so much I couldn't last for more than a few minutes. Determined, I pushed myself off the floor and prepared to begin again.

"Ren. Stop." It was an order from Kai. He didn't often speak so firmly, and when he did it was usually a warning to stop before I hurt myself, so I paused and gave him my full attention. He rose from his seat on his cot and approached the bars. He halted maybe two feet back, standing tall and relaxed, eyes calm.

"Match my movements." Kai raised his arms. Curiously, I raised my own, mirroring him. Kai moved his arms slowly, pushing and pulling motions like gentle waves on a beach. He turned, and his movements flowed, and I replicated the smooth movements as best I could.

I expected Kai to explain what he was doing, explain how I should be using my energy, but he said nothing. Growing impatient after what felt like half an hour of gentle, flowing movement, I asked, "What next?"

"Nothing," Kai said, voice as low and calm as the waves his movements emulated. "You continue like this. Then you eat, and then you rest."

I halted abruptly, staring at Kai accusingly. "How is this supposed to help, then?"

Kai stopped moving now as well, looking slightly disappointed. "By exercising your body, and resting your spirit."

"I'm not trying to rest my spirit," I spat, half incredulous, half angry. "I'm trying to make it stronger."

Kai eyed me silently for a moment. "You are on your school's track team, are you not?" The oddness of the question, combined with Kai's overly-optimistic use of the present tense, threw me off, but I nodded nonetheless.

"What happens to runners who run hard, every day, without rest?" Kai asked patiently. I frowned, beginning to see where he was going with this. "Are they stronger? Faster?"

I clenched my jaw for a moment, but couldn't help answering truthfully. "No." There was always one or two new kids on the track team who pushed themselves too hard in an attempt to improve, or to impress their senpai. It never worked out in the long run.

"Why not?"

Because they didn't allow themselves time to recover, they never improved. They were more prone to injury, and because they were without rest, they couldn't perform at their best. "...They burn out."

Kai nodded sagely, a small smile tugging at his lips. But only for a moment, before his gaze turned serious, earnest. "I understand you feel a sense of urgency about this, and we all want to help you as much as we can. But working until you collapse will do you no favors."

I did not want to admit that Kai was right, because that would mean that I had to rest. Resting meant that I had time to think, and when I had time to think, my thoughts were dark.

Dwelling on being trapped in this cage. Memories of my deaths in Ichigaki's labs. Wondering what would have happened if I'd died. If it would be better than what Ichigaki had planned for me. Wondering if I would die anyway, permanently, if I didn't live up to whatever expectations that mad doctor had for me.

It was the final fear that had me nodding and following Kai's movements again. Because if I didn't rest, I wouldn't get stronger. And if I didn't get stronger, I might not survive.

And so I matched Kai's movements, and breathed deeply, and tried not to dwell on why I was doing it.