A sharp jolt lifted her to her feet. Her vision was white. Her consciousness returned like a series of thunderclaps. There was Aizen. The plateau. The sky, which had been deep blue only an instant ago, and was now dark and full of rain. How much time had passed, she wondered. It felt as if she'd only blinked, except now she could no longer sense even a trace of reiatsu from the two men who had fought for her. Their bodies lay crumpled on the stone. A third was sprawled nearby, his white haori marking him as one of the Gotei Thirteen captains. A number seven emblazoned on his back. Komamura-taichou. She hadn't known him personally. His defeat was just more proof, if it were needed, that the powers of the other Court Guard Divisions were no match for these men. What had they done to themselves, she wondered, to reach this level of power? And what was it that Kisuke had hidden in her own soul that they desired so badly?

She was looking at the world sideways, she realised, the collar digging into the underside of her cheek. Aizen lifted her again so that only her toes were touching the plateau, and he stared hard at her face, speaking to Ichimaru as he did: "Rather defeats the point if you choke her to death, Gin."

"Sorry, Aizen-taichou."

"No matter. She seems to have sustained no permanent damage." He smiled again: that gentle, reassuring smile: "Now, where were we? Oh, yes, the gigai you wore. Urahara told you that it would completely obscure your spiritual pressure, making it impossible for Soul Society to trace your location, but that was never the purpose of the gigai. It was designed to drain the spiritual pressure of the wearer, reducing them, over time, to an ordinary human soul.

"Urahara hid the device he had created, the hogyoku, deep within your soul and then tried to transmute your soul into that of a human, with no spiritual powers. It was the safest place for him to hide such a thing. Once you were human, we would have had no chance of finding you.

"I knew I had to locate you before that could happen, so I sent Renji and Byakuya to the human world, under the orders of the Central Forty-six. Yes, Central Forty-six were already dead by then. I killed them months ago, before you even began your commission in the human world. All orders issued since that time came either from me or Tousen or from Gin, who is the only man I have ever considered to be a vice-captain to me." To her left, the smiling, white-haired captain all but squirmed with pleasure at this. "Once word of your execution got out, I suspected Kisuke would send people after you. It was convenient for me. I was able to fake my own death; the blame fell squarely on the heads of the ryoka and, while the attention of Soul Society was on them, I brought the execution forward.

"You see, the only way to retrieve the hogyoku from your soul is to tear open the soul itself and rip it out, but the only instrument with the power to pierce the soul of a shinigami in such a way is the sokyoku. At the instant the halberd pierces the body of a soul-reaper, it would obliterate their spirit, leaving just the hogyoku.

"However, when it became clear to me that the execution might not go according to plan, I knew I had to find another way.

"I visited the archives of the Central Forty-six and reread all of Urahara's research. Just as I thought, he had come up with another way. It is this." As he spoke, he raised his left hand. Before her eyes, the flesh of his palm began to transform: bloating, boiling, laithing down his arm. It seemed as if, for his hand and arm, centuries were passing in mere seconds. The skin decayed, rivulets of putrefaction running over his fingers; they dried into hard carapaces as dessication followed. The skin crumpled like leather. Where it had rotted before her eyes, the decay formed a bone-like shell. The tips of his fingers were now the points of brittle claws.

He watched the transformation with mild interest, then smiled at Rukia. "Just so," he said.

Light engulfed his arm. Monoliths of the same material burst suddenly from the rocky ground around them, until it seemed to her that they were at the centre of a circle of standing stones. He lifted her higher. Her feet no longer touched the ground. "Just so." And he plunged his hand into her chest.

The claws sliced through her. The pain came an instant later. He let go of the collar, but still she hung there, folded across his arm. She could feel his fingers moving inside. They pinched and scraped, then closed over something deep in her rib-cage, where she had always perceived her heart to be.

He tore it out.

Her vision had already faded to grey. The ground, which raced up to meet her, seemed to take forever, though he had dropped her from no more than the height of a man. She landed on her side, the impact jarring through all that was left of her consciousness. But at least the pain was gone. In its place a sense of having been hollowed out.

It had begun to rain. Heavy rain that fell in sheets, so that she was already wet even as she rolled onto her front. She could feel water striking her arms and sliding in rivulets into the folds of her yukata, plastering the materials against her body. And, because she could feel it, she surmised that she was still alive.

She sat up carefully, staring round. Immediately before her, Aizen stood. His dessicated left hand now held a tiny orb, no larger than a marble. From this, an intense blue light shone: a generosity of colour that vied with reality. Rukia stared at it a moment before her eyes slid away, up to the captain's face. He was looking at her curiously: "Remarkable," he said. He was studying her chest.

She glanced down. There was a hole through her. There was no blood and the edges were smooth, as if the cut were clean. Still, she gagged to see it and reached out as if she would cover it, losing courage at the last moment; she couldn't bring herself to touch it. It was black. Not a wound at all, but a well filled with shadow and, as she watched, it started to heal itself. First the flesh reknit, drawing itself back together, overlapping and meshing. Then the white silk of the yukata. Within less than a minute, there was no sign that it had ever been there. "Trust Kisuke to create a means of retrieving the hogyoku that leaves the soul undamaged," commented Aizen. Having watched this miracle, he cleared his throat and turned towards his followers: "Unfortunately for you, Kuchiki Rukia, you are no longer of use to me.

"Gin," he said: "Kill her."