Those were golden days; they were days when she was never alone. They had the safety of the shack on the outskirts of town to return to every night, and one another's eyes and ears at times when the Rukon seemed to brim with violence. Thugs still owned the streets and murderers slunk in the shadows. Yet, while they protected one another, it seemed to her that their cares had melted away. She understood now what she was, what she and Renji were, and she wasn't afraid anymore.

But the Rukon was without pity.

The town began to encroach on their stronghold. It happened over years; the slum shifted, more buildings were erected, while the old shack fell into ruin and the children slept either between its crumbling stones or in the grass behind its broken walls.

She was no longer a child now though. She was a grown woman and no longer content to sleep on the ground.

She took a vacant house not far from the old shack. When it rained, the roof leaked and, in summer, the walls rotted, but it was shelter nonetheless. The others too went their separate ways, trying to find their places in an adult world. Suddenly, she was alone again.

They tried to meet every day, usually down on the banks of the river where they'd always gone to fish, but years of watching others backs and having her own watched for her had made Rukia forget how dangerous the streets of Inuzuri really were.

Within the space of a year, the numbers who met on the riverside dwindled. Kenichi and Dai disappeared without a trace. Kenji was murdered for the coin he carried. Hisoka was killed in a fight. News reached Rukia and Renji only after it was too late. Splitting up had been inevitable, in the end, and she and Renji had always been the strongest. Inuzuri was merciless on the weak.

One night, she went down to the river and Renji wasn't there.

The city was burning. There was a fire in Seventy-ninth, which had spread from one house to another until it seemed to her that all of Rukongai would be devoured by it.

She was certain she would know if anything had happened to Renji and yet, when she returned home that night and sat alone in her house, listening to the shouts outside, news of the devastation in Seventy-ninth being passed from one person to the next, she was still afraid. Beyond the tumult, there was the sound of the wind in the rafters of her house. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine a world in which Renji didn't exist.

So, when a knock sounded at her door, she started up, wrenched it open, and flung her arms around his waist. He was much taller than her now. Her head rested on his chest and she could hear his heart thudding through the coarse tunic he wore. He half-embraced her, half-pulled her back into the room so that he could close the door on the smell of smoke outside.

She knew before he spoke that he brought news of Hayate, the last of their friends. He had been missing for a week and Rukia had known, in her heart, that he was gone.

There was a space only for a bed and a table in her dwelling, so Renji sat with her on the bed, one arm around her shoulders, holding her just tightly enough that she could feel the tension running through him.

"He's dead," he said.

"In the fire?"

"No. Killed. I don't know why. Maybe someone's idea of fun."

She shifted against him:

"We shouldn't have" – she started, but, without looking at her, he interruped:

"Don't say it."

"It's true."

"No, it would have happened anyway. It was always going to end like this."

She looked up at him. He was staring hard at the darkness outside her window and something in his expression made her lower her voice:

"When did you start to believe that?"

"When Kenji died," he said: "When you didn't cry." He glanced down at her. She had never shed a tear for any of them. Until now, she hadn't been sure that he had noticed. She felt a wash of shame and stood up, turning so that he couldn't see her face. She didn't know if he would understand or if she could even begin to explain why she felt so cold inside. It was as if the emotions that drove the rest of the world, the world in which souls circled in their endless dance of life and death, could not take root in her. She was a point of stillness at the centre of it all. It was a place without fear. She was stronger now than she had ever been, had no reason anymore to fight for her survival. There was no fear of death now: no aging, no fading, no deterioration or decay. Just her own existence. In the face of eternity, the idea of mourning one loss, one death, seemed petty, absurd even. She had no right to it. "This place," Renji said suddenly: "It was just a bit too harsh for us all to make it through."

Stilling the emotions in her face, she returned and sat with him on the bed. He put his arm round her again.

That night, for the first time since the night they'd met, she slept again in the crook of his body, both of them still dressed in the clothes of the day, having talked long into the night and fallen asleep with more unspent words on their lips. When she woke in the hours before dawn, they were side by side like lovers; his arm was bout her waist, his hand resting on her belly. She could feel him breathing against her back and could hear the soft sound of morning rain tiptoeing across the roof. The fire had not come and destroyed everything in the night then. Life, it seemed, would carry on and yet, as she lay there, she knew that something was ending and something else had begun.

That day, after the rains dried up, the sun came to scorch the city, drinking in the humidity in the air and leaving it to hang across the streets of Rukongai in a gauzy brown mist.

They buried Hayate in the morning, while the air was cool. Three graves, marked by piles of stones and wooden staves, now stood on this secluded outcrop in the foothills of the mountains. Rukia had discovered this place when she was still a child, accessible only by a treacherous path cleaving to the edge of a sheer cliff. There had always been peace and solitude here, and all of Rukongai stretched out beneath her. She had gazed at it for hours back then, just a slip of a girl with her chin resting on her knees. She had gazed at the city and at the white towers of the Sereitei beyond. She had not guessed, back then, the sequence of events that would lead her here again, time after time, carrying the bodies of her friends.

The air was dusty over Inuzuri today, the diamond clear river a stark contrast to its shadowy streets. She stood on the very edge of the outcrop, the wind snatching at her hair and the sash of her yukata. Beyond Rukongai, those white towers blazed against the sky.

"Renji," she said: "Let's become shinigami." Her voice was soft: "If we do, they'll let us live in the Sereitei. I've heard it's comfortable there. Let's become shinigami and let's go to the Sereitei."

She felt him approach and then his hand touched her shoulder:

"Yeah, let's become shinigami."