People in the Rukon lived for sixty or seventy years. After that, so it was said, they returned to the world of the living. An endless cycle.

Rukia wondered, sometimes, if her own life was the beginning of one of these cycles and if that was the reason that she had no memories of a time before it. But there were other differences between her and the souls in Rukongai, some more subtle than others. One was that she and Renji and, to a lesser extent, their friends, were aging differently to the other citizens of Inuzuri. The years, it seemed, refused to touch them.

At first, there was nothing strange about it. For the first twelve or thirteen years of her life, time passed for her as it did for everybody else and the days, months and years marked her body. But, after that, there came a change. A slowing down. At first, it went unnoticed, but, by the time she was able to count out two decades of her life in living memory and still see only the reflection of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl in the river where she fished, then she was forced to re-evaluate. Kenji, Kenichi, Hisoka and Dai, the four boys who had been younger than her in Renji's gang, began to outpace her, growing into men while she remained, for all intents and purposes, a child. She could only conclude that, for reasons unknown, she and Renji were trapped outside the cycle of souls. She had never lived and she would never live, but her existence would continue for an eternity, scavenging among the slums of the Rukon. The vastness of that eternity, which she knew in her heart could be shattered only by an unnatural end, haunted her at night. She never shared her fear with Renji, although she wondered if it was the same for him too, and her only comfort was that she would not spend that eternity alone.

It was autumn and a rumour was spreading through the streets that a man from Inuzuri had been called to the Court of Pure Souls.

"A boy from Rukongai set o become a death-god?" said a voice in the crowd as Renji and Rukia pushed their way through.

"He was always such a good boy," said another.

Renji's gang were foregoing their usual hunt for food to indulge in an afternoon's entertainment. There was an air of opulance and mystery surrounding the death-gods and to see one would certainly be worth a day without food. Still, Rukia had become very dependent upon nourishment and she was finding it hard to ignore the groaning hunger in her stomach. She tripped as she ran. Renji called back:

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah. Go on ahead. I'll catch you up."

He vanished into the scrum of people as she picked herself up and dusted herself off. Hunger made her clumsy. She jogged on, cursing under her breath.

She caught up with Renji and the others outside a house like any other in Inuzuri. It was fashioned of tumbledown mud-bricks and straw, with a door that rested at least as much on the floor as it did on its hinges. Yet, parked outside was a palanquin honed from the most exquiaite black wood, polished and varnished to a finish so smooth that it reflected an image the crowd who stood around it. Rukia, who was used to seeing only a distorted reflection of herself in water, stared along with the rest of them. She didn't know what she had expected, but she was still surprised to see a child staring back at her: a child with a woman's eyes, but a body so small and thin that it looked as if it would break like a china doll.

Beside her, Renji reached out to touch the polished wood. No sooner did his fingers brush the surface than a man in a black cloak stepped forward from behind the palanquin:

"Don't touch that, you brat! Get away! All of you!" He clapped his hands and the children sprang away to a respectful distance, just as the door of the shack opened and a young man stepped out.

He looked as out of place as the palanquin in the dusty street, but he leant back into the house to kiss an elderly woman on the cheek and, from where she stood, Rukia could see that the woman wore rags, just like everyone else in Rukongai. The man, however, seemed to her to have come from another world.

His skin was clean. His eyes were sharp and far older than his years. He wore a sword on his hip and the black uniform of a soul reaper and, as he stepped into the street, Rukia's world slid out of focus.

Renji caught her as she fell.

She became aware of his arms around her waist and chest, holding her up, and shielding her, too, from the black-clad man who had first reprimanded them and who had now stepped forward with a kick aimed at Rukia's head as punishment for her having fallen towards the palanquin. He was stopped, however, by a word from the soul reaper:

"Don't."

It was all that Rukia could do to pull her vision into focus. She could see now that there were differences in the way the two men were dressed. The nearest wore a plain black robe with an obi of the same material. His face was angular and weathered.

By contrast, the death-god was ageless. His obi was white, as was the juban he wore beneath his shihakusho. As he stepped closer, she felt her breathing tighten and Renji, too, stiffened. She could feel his heart beating against her back, his arms holding her with an urgency that made her realise that he, like her, was unable to run.

The shinigami dropped down on one knee before them and fished something out of his bag: a little cotton package. He took something from it and held it out so that Rukia could see it. It was a fairly unassuming ball of rice. He pressed it to her lips: "You must be hungry," he said. When she hesitated to take it, he added: "It's alright. Being hungry is the sign that you have strong reiatsu, like me. Your body reacted to my spiritual pressure. That's okay. If you eat you'll feel better. Here, have these – for both of you."

Renji relinquished his hold on her just a little to take the bag of rice balls, even as Rukia swallowed the first, barely having tasted it. All she could focus on was the shinigami. She could feel him, in the same way that she could feel Renji. Well, perhaps they were a little different, but it was that same sense of presence. If she closed her eyes, if she moved away, he would still be threre. His imprint, though similar to Renji's, was many hundred times more powerful.

Soul reapers were otherworldly beings. They could travel between the realms of the living and the dead, but the only thing Rukia truly understood was the awe and fear they inspired in the people of Inuzuri.

Rarely seen in the streets of Rukongai, save on the checkpoints between districts. They were considered a grim portent. Where the shinigami stepped, it was said, demons followed. No-one could match their swordsmanship. They were the rulers of death in its many forms, but they were respected too because they brought order where there could or should be no order: in the violence of murder, in the throes of disease, at the bedside of a loved one; they made sense out of what was senseless.

Rukia did not understand the connection between herself, Renji and the shinigami, but she had some notion of reiatsu, the spiritual pressure that the death-god had mentioned. Reiatsu was the source of their power.

Was it possible, she wondered, that it might be the source, too of hunger, of thirst, of agelessness?

When the shinigami was gone, leaving them sitting in the street with the prize of their rice balls, Renji explained to her what he knew of the shinigami. It was little more than her, but he had heard of a magic they possessed called kido. By focussing reiatsu into a desnse point, he said, it was possible to manifest energy: light, heat, motion. He wanted to try it. Indeed, over the next three days, it became his obsession. And, at the end of that time, he succeeded in creating a single, tiny orb of red light.

Rukia was troubled by this new interest of his. The three days it took Renji to discover one of the first and simplest forms of kido were three days in which she and the others got by on a minimum of food because Renji's fascination with his powers afforded them no time to scavenge. They had found a place, a dead end alley, which was distant enough from the hubub of town to mean they went undisturbed, but also far enough from their own lodgings to ensure that the other children didn't see them. Rukia was sitting on an upturned barrel. The five boys who followed Renji everywhere were ranged about, watching him. Once more, the tiny red light flared into existence.

She had noticed a change in herself in these last three days. She had scorned Renji at first, thinking it would be dull to watch him straining over something he had no real knowledge of, but, from the moment he had begun to focus on his reiatsu with a pained look of concentration, she had noticed a difference in the sense she had of his presence. If she had been looking at the silhouette of a person, which was sometimes how she imagined him to be within that extra layer of her consciousness where she could feel him day and night, then the outline would have blurred and become shadowy. It poured into itself, like black sand. Yes, that was exactly it. The more she concentrated on him with her inner eyes, the clearer his presence became and the more she began to picture it as a shimmering, changing mass of particles, like sand or dust.

To create the light, whether he was conscious of it or not, he was forcing streams of those particles down the length of his arms. Where they touched his wrists, or the points where his wrists should be were she overlaying her inner vision on her outer, the dust motes cleaved together. From where they were densest, the power emerged.

After watching him practise this many times, she turned her attention to herself. She had never tried to sense her own reiatsu before. She didn't know whether it was possible any more than an eye swivelling in its socket might catch a glimpse of itself. Since she didn't know what to look for, she imagined herself as she had seen Renji, in her mind's eye: a shadow made of dust.

Nothing happened. She tried to imagine the dust shifting, but she could feel no connection between the images in her head and the sense of her own body. Disappointed, she closed her eyes and tried to shut out the murmurs of the boys around her. There was only her and that shadow. Except the shadow was her. She pushed her consciousness forward, into the image, imagining it folding around her, enveloping her and streaming through her.

Pieces of her thought had substance. She felt them snag her and, in the same instant that she believed she could open her eyes and find herself surrounded by that whirling black dust, her vision filled with light.

There was no darkness here. The energy was pure white and cold.

All this time, it seemed to her, she had been seeing the world inverted. She was not a child. What she had taken as reality was the illusion and everything that she had perceived as a shadow was suddenly filled with light.

The rest was effortless.

The energy flowed down her arms and into her hands. Her palms felt cold. When she opened her eyes, a sphere of light hung just above the tips of her fingers. Its edges were transparent, like glass, but its centre was almost too bright to look at, as if she had somehow trapped the light of a star. It was, she thought, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, as broad as the span of her two hands beneath it. She gasped in delight.

The boys, who had been watching Renji's attempts and offering praise or encouragement as was appropriate, whirled to look at her. There was a stunned silence and then the small crowd erupted with cries of amazement. Renji's eyes were wide and round. She had the small pleasure of glimpsing his face that way the instant before he scowled and looked away. And she laughed. She hadn't meant to compete with him, but it was hard for her not to enjoy his envy.

"Ah, Renji," cried Dai, turning back to their nominal leader: "You could be shinigami. Are you and Rukia going to become death-gods now?"

Rukia answered for him:

"I don't want to be a stupid death-god. I want to stay here with you guys." She sprung off the barrel and turned to look once at Renji's face; there was disappointment there, but relief as well and she knew, from the shouts of the other boys, that she had made the right decision. Without waiting to see if Renji would answer for himself, she took off down the alleyway, hollering, and the others came after. He could either stay there with his damned reiatsu or he could follow her for a change.