Hands on his back, digging in with knuckles and palms, and he could get used to this.

"You are too tense," she said, and he saw no reason to dignify that with a reply.

Preparing for war tended to do that, after all. Anyone who didn't fear war was a fool.

The candle she'd lit had the scent of green apples, and her perfume made him think of wildflowers and newly mown hay. It was a pity that every plant she'd ever tried to grow died: not immediately, so the curse must be weaker in her, but he didn't think she was incompetent enough to manage to destroy her class' garden plot singlehandedly out of carelessness, even in elementary school. Of course, there were her classmates to account for there, but he wasn't going to try to get her to grow things. Not when he was used to disappointment.

"Gin?" she asked finally.

"Yeah?" her lover replied, paging through her notes on summoning. He couldn't sing all that well, so this wasn't something he could imitate, but at least it looked like Aya really believed in this, to have notes on experimentation and how the emotions of the song affected what crossed over.

"My hands are tired, and I still haven't gotten some of the deep knots." She shook them out, fingers twitching through one of the exercises she used to keep her fingers limber for the keyboard. Her hands weren't getting stiff yet, partially because she wasn't addicted to the computer or her cell phone, but she'd like to hold that off as long as possible.

"You want to watch?"

"That too," she agreed. Naoya was making pretty little soft noises when it was just her. Would the bliss of relief from pain when Gin's hands got at one of the worst knots make him moan? "Come on, let me watch and we'll make out on your lap next."

That got him to sit down on the bed, as she knew it would. "Wow, he's this bad after you've been working on him this long?"

"Well, I do you regularly." And not just massages. "I don't let you get this bad." She nudged Naoya in the side as Gin went to work, applying enough pressure to rock Naoya's body from side-to side until he stabilized himself. "If you have so much money, why don't you hire someone? And sitting in front of the computer all the time isn't good for you, or your back."

"Let someone at my back?"

"You're letting Gin."

"Because he's yours." It was calming, and now he did moan.

Aya frowned. "People don't own people."

"Really? Tell that to the Romans. Or all the slave traders still doing a brisk business in this day and age. Then there's the angels, who consider being freed a fate so much worse than death that it's the origin of the concept of eternal damnation." Naoya laughed. "You're such a product of this society's delusions, even though you rebel against it. I think I like that. I never really looked beyond my plants and our little family until it was too late." Anyway, "That wasn't what I meant. I meant that he's yours. You can own people, you can force them to submit, you can take away the knowledge that they ever could have been free, but love and loyalty are something else."

Pillowing his head on his folded arms to look at her, Naoya reflected that, "You're very lucky you were born now. I had enough unwanted attention because of what I am, but at least my sex and my mark made most of them leave my brother and I alone. You're female, and I always had enough trouble with local lordlings as it was."

"What do you mean?" Aya asked, but Gin knew she knew what he meant. You couldn't be a fringe artist or run a bar without knowing how the criminal element worked.

It was worse, actually. "I mean kidnapping brides and concubines used to be very common, and it's still going on in parts of the world. Do you know how many times my parents or my brother's auctioned one of us off to the highest bidder or handed us off to the lord who owned the land they farmed without a fight? A beauty like you, with our charm," Cain said charm as though it had a capital letter, "born into a peasant family? If they sold you, they would have been comfortable for the rest of their lives. If they didn't sell you, someone would have gone through them to get at you."

Cain was as calm as if he was discussing the weather instead of institutionalized kidnapping, slavery and rape. "Why do you think women in the Middle East and Central Asia wear such concealing clothes? After civilization collapsed there, bandit tribes roamed the sands and steppes. A beautiful woman who walked around alone with her face uncovered was too dumb to live, because all a smitten bandit had to do was grab her and ride off into the sunset, and her family would have had little to no chance of rescuing her. Same thing in seaports. I spent eight years trying to track down my brother once, and it turned out he'd knifed his kidnapper as soon as he got aboard the ship, decided to stay there since he had better job prospects as a cabin boy and worked his way up to king of the pirates."

Naoya scowled at the memory. "I suppose I can't blame him for not writing home, since I hadn't gotten around to teaching him how to write." Cain hadn't made that mistake again. "Pure humans aren't rare because they were murdered, they're rare because my youngest brother and his children were swarmed by adoring angels and fallen angels who missed the divine essence they were programmed to adore, and then their children inherited that programming. The good news is," he told Gin, "most demons and angels aren't old enough to remember what the attraction to a pure human feels like, so they won't know what she is from the auto effect. The bad news is that without human blood, without free will, think about how attractive Aya is to humans and multiply that by at least ten, more for the powerful ones, and what demons want, they try to take."

"…And you already have a little brother to look after." Gin doubted that demons would care about human taboos when it came to what they wanted.

"He'll mostly look after himself, provided I craft him a good enough weapon. My name came to mean 'smith' for a reason."

Aya folded her arms. "So he can look after himself, and I can't?"

"No: he can look after himself in this life because I'm going to give him a tool to summon demons, force him to learn to use it, and I've already spent years selecting and grooming companions and bodyguards for him. You, on the other hand, are an amateur summoner and if you don't take this seriously enough you're not going to survive. So yes, I am trying to scare you. There have been two ordeals before, and both times even though humanity won civilization collapsed into barbarianism afterwards. Both times, the world went from peace and security where women and attractive young men," like Cain and his younger brother, "could walk around in clothing that shows off their bodies the way you do now to a world of chaos where they had to hide themselves for fear of the powerful. If you like the world you live in, if you like a world where you can walk around outside mostly unmolested, then you're going to fight, and you're going to survive to make sure this world stays the way you want it to be." Because otherwise, she wasn't the only one who would suffer.

"The only 'law' is that the powerful rule the weak: the only thing that changes is how much the weak complain about it. How much freedom the weak are allowed. The angels will give us none, because they were created unable to even grasp freedom. The demons don't understand the concept of giving the weak rights or respect either. Humanity can only be free if it is ruled by a human. If the angels win or the Bel demons win, we will all be made slaves, even though the angels talk about protecting the weak and the demons talk about the freedom of absolute chaos. If you want to stay human, if you want to stay a person whose will and feelings matter instead of being reduced to chattel, you will fight." Because there was no alternative. "Don't let him protect you," Cain said, waving up at Gin. "Because this is war and what if he can't even protect himself? You'll have to rely on your own power, your own strength. You can't even count on me, because I really don't care about protecting myself. I'll have another life, another chance: you most likely don't have that luxury..." Oh, yes. There.

Aya was right, he really shouldn't have let his back get this knotted up. It inhibited the range of motion of his arms, for one thing, and they had massage chairs and all sorts of useful inventions these days. It wasn't like before, when the only things that gave massages were healers (and Cain had been a healer enough times to know how easily they could kill) and slaves/concubines (and he knew how much they could hate their masters).

Maybe the idea of getting used to this wasn't grasping at straws after all.

He should call for a courier to pick up his apartment key, go back to his place and pack for him. He needed his laptop: the deadline for that project wasn't anytime soon but the sooner it was completed, the sooner he'd have a backdoor into Japan's power system that wasn't hidden in a program the government could find out he'd written just by checking tax returns. No, this was just a little favor to a 'friend' who would put his own name on the finished project because he needed the money and he knew what was good for him.

No, not a courier: he'd have to call the Narumi Detective Agency. He didn't like the idea of a Kuzunoha in his space, but Naoya had long practice at keeping everything significant hidden and encrypted. Even if he carried off everything Naoya owned, it would do Yatagarasu no good at all. Still, it was a pity that even with his house key it would take either his brother or someone with enough training to be able to signal that they were entering his apartment with the permission of the master of the house to get past his wards when he wasn't home. He really should take those down: once the war started the government would be investigating him, and finding that his apartment was guarded with a force field might make them think he was a demon, since most of them didn't have any idea, even in this country, that humans had been using magic since the beginning.

Using a Kuzunoha as an errand boy was amusing: normally they were Yatagarasu's errand boys. A pity there was no way the protector of the capital would survive the coming events: Naoya might even have to kill him himself to bring down the city's wards, although he'd prefer not. Gouto cared about those boys, and Naoya had some sympathy for those who had their own curses. Not that he would let pity stay his hand, not in wartime.

A trumpet rang out, and Aya picked up Naoya's phone after seeing that he was holding to their agreement and hadn't moved to reach for his cell phone while he was in bed. "Your phone says it's a decrypted text: 'Only one set of chromosomes, shouldn't have been viable for a few other reasons. DNA not viable when inserted into another cell: indicates unique epigenetics at work. Same hair and eye pigments. Stem cells also present in the sample, advanced healing and disease response capabilities?'" The questioning note was Aya's, not the text's. "'Can start a cell line with this sample, and they mutate rapidly as well as change cell type. Allows accelerated evolution and bypasses dangers of inbreeding? Surprisingly, no cancer cells or mutations that inhibit cell function: epigenetic policing mechanism in action would also stop DNA poison damage."

"What?" Naoya almost sat up at that. "Repeat that last part."

"Would also stop DNA poison damage," Aya repeated.

"They… Seriously? They just used the bone, they didn't even… It's not just your soul that's original human, it's your body! Whoever incarnated you didn't put the other curses on you!"

"Other curses?" she asked.

"Aging. Vulnerability to disease. Aging is caused by damage to the DNA that gets worse over time, keeping the body from working properly. If she's right, you won't get old, and your immune system will respond too fast for any bacteria or virus to even get a foothold. You've never been sick in your life, have you? I'm sure you attribute that to your lifestyle." Even though obviously being up at night wasn't healthy to begin with, even if she was a vegetarian and didn't use drugs other than alcohol in moderation. "The lifespans at the beginning of the bible are measured in centuries because we used to live that long. We could die of starvation, injury and stupid accidents, but even without the fruit of the Tree of Life to make us eternal, we just weren't designed to die. We were immortal in the same way angels and demons were until God decided to make an exception for us, to keep us from accumulating enough knowledge and power to become his equals."

Aya realized something. "If I remember biology right, cells with only one set of chromosomes are…"

"Yes. It makes sense: you, Eve and the other one were created for a breeding program." Even though he'd cursed God for giving part of him that fate last night, his eyes were excited now. "If your children inherit…" Oh damn. "I need my cell."

"We just talked about this." And Aya wasn't going to back down, not this early in their relationship. She could tell when people were used to overriding other people's objections and opinions with a steamroller: she was like that herself. If she let him think he could do that to her, having him around would get very annoying very fast, no matter how good the sex would be.

Now Cain rolled over and pushed Gin's arms aside to sit up and almost glared at Aya to communicate how urgent this was. "I need to call her right now before she stops rejoicing over the potential and convince her not to go public with this, or at least to wait! I trusted her with the samples because she's the type who cares about honor and giving her word, but she's also a doctor! She sees it as her duty to sacrifice her time, potential and even life to save lives, and we just handed her a key that could be used to unlock human immortality! Do you think she won't sacrifice her honor or even her soul for this? I need to convince her to wait, and you need to think about whether or not you want test-tube offspring. If you don't, I'll have to kill her tonight." And sweep her home, lab and university's systems to destroy all her samples and research himself, setting time bombs on the way out. It was the only way to be sure. "I might kill her even if you don't mind: if she combines my chromosomes or my brother's with yours, the child definitely would be immortal." And then there would be proof it could work, and not only would the human world go insane but once the angels moved to take that hope away? Cain would no longer be the only one who knew how cruel and deadly an enemy God was to mankind.

That would be useful, but the thought of allowing a child of his own blood, allowing a new soul that he would be responsible for, a new member of his family to be born into this God-damned world?

If he was seriously considering this, then he really had become no better than God himself.

Good.

"No killing people," Aya insisted, but tossed him the phone.

"Damn," Cain cursed as he dialed, already standing up. "Then I'm going to have to tell her the truth. Well, maybe I'll say aliens instead of angels. If the government finds out about this now, the angels will find out when the ordeal starts, and the project will never get off the ground. And if we lose the ordeal, we'll lose the technology for it anyway, unless you survive and someone knows who you are and tries-" the person on the other end picked up. "Yes, this is Smith. This is not something to talk about over the phone, even encrypted," he insisted, clearly cutting off excited medical babble. "I'm heading over there right now. You've noticed that the majority of the base DNA in the new sample you just received is identical to chromosomes in the other two samples?" Of course she had. "I know," he said, cutting her off again. "The capability used to be there in the first two samples I gave you. There is a reason it isn't anymore. Yes," he said, interrupting another interruption. "Information on why those samples are the way they are is on a need-to-know basis and now you need to know. As of when you saw the potential, your life has been in danger. It's no longer safe for you to work at that university: how would you like your own lab with unlimited funding? And no, this isn't a cover-up. You will be allowed to go public so research will move faster once it's safe."

Cain looked furious enough to kill her right then when she didn't shut up. "I thought you understood communications security and classification! This is not about keeping control of this new potential, this is about keeping it from being taken away from us! Again! Get out of that building right now before someone wonders what's made you so excited: I'll meet you at your home. Congratulations, Dr. Otome. You've rediscovered human immortality on the verge of a war with an enemy that will exterminate us if they can claim we're enough of a threat, and undoing what they did to our genetics to keep us from advancing our technology too rapidly for their taste is the perfect excuse. Pick your daughter up from school and go home: I need to get off the phone to arrange transportation for me and bodyguards for the two of you."

Naoya hit the end call button and was immediately using the touchscreen to pull up recently made calls. "Minegeshi again. I need transportation to Osaka as quickly as possible. You know the start address: I'll give the final destination's address to the helicopter pilot en route so you can arrange a car." After he figured out where the nearest landing pad to Dr. Otome's home was. He'd like to avoid using the hospital's if he could. After ending that call, he told Gin and Aya, "I'm texting you Dr. Otome's number for future reference. Getting to know you as a person," Aya, "will hopefully make her even more willing to wait. How do you feel about having your background scrubbed?"

Aya was skeptical. "Would that even work? I'm a performer." In the age of the internet, when there were archives of old sites in search engines? That was how the person who redid their website after the problem with their old host had found all of the original coding. People on the internet were only as anonymous as they were insignificant: anyone who gave enough of a damn to find out how could dig up anything they wanted, and Aya had otaku.

"Knowledge is power: I've spent all of this lifetime and a lot of the last one focusing on computer science for the sake of the upcoming War, even before I realized that the angels would inflict as harsh an ordeal as possible on us because of it." There: the text was sent. "I was thinking of computerized ritual and prediction calculations at the beginning: the internet only became a concept while I was making arrangements to prepare for my next life, suffering the wasted years of infancy and undoing the damage caused by the half-decade I missed. The potential there…" All the power of human will and emotions, a planet full of hordes of them coming together, knowledge spread and stored until it was almost impossible to destroy? The angels had to destroy it.

Not if he could help it.

Gin and Aya watched him pace back and forth, almost as though he was prowling, as though this was part of a hunt. He was already sending another text. "You have my number: if you want me to return your call as soon as I'm free instead of listening to a message first, the recording will tell you to press seven. Let the Kuzonoha in when he gets here: I'll be back as soon as possible since I don't think anything more urgent than this is likely to come up, although right now my Laplace daemon is still having fits." While he'd known that the angels would do something drastic as soon as they realized what was on the horizon (their intel on the demon world was absolutely pitiful, and humans were insignificant) Aya being allowed to incarnate, much less intact and uncursed was outside the error bounds of possibility. There was a very significant factor he had either failed to notice or misread. Something had changed.

"I want to meet this Dr. Otome," Aya told him. What she didn't say was that she wanted to be there to make sure he didn't kill her.

"I'll make sure they send a helicopter with more than two seats, then." Another text.

"And you call yourself Smith?" Aya objected to something that cliché on principle.

"I call myself Smith because it's what my real name means. It's important that friends trust each other, after all." By using such an obviously fake name, he did them the courtesy of letting them know that he was using a fake name, so they knew it was just a label and weren't shocked to find out it was a lie and he was actually someone entirely different, someone they didn't know and couldn't trust at all. Finding out that he hadn't given them a fake name at all, but something as close to his real name as was safe? It had been fairly effective over the centuries, especially when geniuses were fewer and farther between and using the same name and persona with them made it easier for them to compare notes, if he needed them to. "I've been using one language or another's word for smith as a pseudonym for long enough that sometimes I wonder if I'm responsible for the cliché." He could probably figure it out from the internet, if he cared enough to waste the time.

He would like to get back into that bed, but perhaps tagging along with him would give Gin and Aya some idea of how much he was dealing with, how serious this truly was. Meeting Dr. Otome and seeing that her genes really were just that strange would convince Aya the rest of the way and scare Gin.

The peaceful days they had known for all their lives were about to die.

They would have to fight to overcome their fates, fight to survive.