Chapter 5: Coma

When ripped from the street in Munich, Seto fell into familiar surroundings—a palace courtyard, filled with lounging cushions and white canopies for shade, a few sections arranged with gauzy curtains to offer privacy if desired. Usually, the sun burned hot overhead, but not at the moment. Instead, the sky of Egypt had darkened with clouds, and raindrops had just begun to stain the courtyard stones.

For a split second, Seto felt a disconnect. He knew he was in a virtual projection, knew the environment around him was not real, no matter how his senses testified to the opposite, and when he looked down to see himself wearing a priest's garb, he remembered High Priest Seth.

In the next second, he was High Priest Seth.

Seth despised his fellow high priests. It was not a blanket statement but rather a personal judgment of each one. Shada, Karim, and Isis were the worst offenders. The three of them clung together like a pack of donkeys, their shared friendship more devoted than their loyalty to the pharaoh. Karim and Isis—holders of the scales and necklace, respectively—were even married to each other, which Seth thought should be forbidden for high priests. They tended family duties more often than priestly ones. Shada, the bracelet wielder, was a downright menace with no discipline. He could always be counted on to neglect both training and assignment.

Mahad, the holder of the Millennium Ring, was hardly better. He did not carry the same personal distractions, but neither did he carry any ambition for the future of Egypt. Whenever the High Priest Council discussed laws, especially those with a death sentence, Mahad shrank in silence, curling his shoulders like a man carrying a ghost. When it came to fatal necessity, Mahad was weak.

But Seth would not let him shrink from this.

"Justice must be meted," Seth declared, supported by a rumble of thunder over the courtyard. The raindrops splattered with greater frequency.

Mahad stood before him, cornered in the courtyard, his white robe and headdress quickly darkening with rain. The ring's holder was the second-youngest high priest after Seth—Mahad having just turned twenty-two while Seto was still a few weeks shy of eighteen—and both of them were considered prodigies within the ranks. Seth's impressiveness rested in his swift and unparalleled command of his item, while Mahad's renown came from skill with and depth of his own personal heka. They even looked similar, both of them with the same brown hair and tall, slender builds. But despite all the commonalities, they were not friends. Mahad held seniority as a priest, having received his item before Seth had, and by rights, Seth should have deferred to Mahad's council.

But he did not defer to worms.

"We can discuss this later." Mahad lifted one hand, rain sliding down his golden-brown skin. "The weather—"

"Will damage neither us nor our items," Seth said dismissively. He took a threatening step forward; he may have been the most junior of the high priests, but he was the tallest, even if that was a bare inch above Mahad. The ring-holder's signature cowering exaggerated the difference enough to be noticeable. "Meanwhile," Seth went on, "every moment we delay gives freedom to that tomb robber. He must be dealt with."

"Killed, you mean," Mahad said softly. The pointers of the Millennium Ring quivered against his chest.

"Swiftly," Seth agreed. "Efficiently."

"The pharaoh has stayed his hand."

"We are the pharaoh's hands." Seth jabbed a finger meaningfully toward Mahad's item. "This is our mandate. Our sacred calling. We are the hammer of Egypt, and there is no enemy more necessary to crush than the one which slithered into these very walls like a viper and struck at the throne." He lifted one eyebrow and said coolly, "Unless, perhaps, you value the life of a tomb robber more than the life of our pharaoh."

Mahad's gaze darkened. Rain tracked down his clenched jawline. He gripped the staff he always carried, painted black except for the teardrop-shaped piece of jade at its top.

"I value my pharaoh's life far higher than my own," Mahad growled. "Never doubt that."

"How can I not when you hold the one item capable of finding the criminal, yet I find you cowering inside the palace walls rather than fulfilling your duty?"

For a moment, Mahad's jaw worked in silence. Seth's fingers clenched tighter around the rod as it whispered in his mind for him to reach out and order the outcome he wanted. Much as he would have liked that, there was no guarantee he could dominate the mind of a fellow item holder, and more importantly, when he'd taken his sacred oath to protect the pharaoh, it had included a vow to never turn against his fellow priests. Seth honored that vow, even when his fellow priests made it torturous to do so.

Strength, whispered a voice in his mind. Power rippled in an unseen dark, teasing Seth with images of what might be, of how much he could accomplish if the others would cease holding him back.

A drop of rain slipped down the back of his collar, stiffening him. "If I carried the ring, this matter would be dealt with already!"

"Yes," Mahad said darkly. "You've meted out a great deal of punishments on your own, Seth, I'm aware. Even some the pharaoh did not approve."

Lightning flickered in the sky. As if in echo, the green jade of Mahad's staff glowed with a flicker of inner light.

Seth stiffened with more than the discomfort of wet clothing. "If I am forced to carry the safety of the entire kingdom myself, I shall. Clearly no other high priest is up to the task."

With a sigh, Mahad softened, fingers loosening on his staff. The sudden weakness was more offensive than his accusation. "I know you have noble intentions, Seth. You're a worthy priest. Loyal to the core. But this tomb robber . . . this matter is not as simple as you make it out to be."

Seth's eyes surely flashed along with the storm. "On the contrary, it could not be simpler. If you will not hunt the robber, then you are a traitor."

Thunder cracked. With deadly stillness, Seth's hand fell to rest on the Millennium Rod.

"And I have never crossed paths with a traitor," he added, "that I did not end."

With a snap that went far deeper than thunder, Seto jolted back to himself. The surroundings of Egypt blurred with the rain, everything draining and sucking him down into a moment of blackness before he landed in an empty field. Not the street he'd been on with Mokuba and not any other familiar setting.

The cheerful green landscape and calm overhead sun did nothing to soothe his racing heart. Seto ran a hand through his hair, ensuring he was no longer wearing a priest's headdress—and checking his virtual menu, finding it unresponsive—before patting down his arms and legs. Black turtleneck. KaibaCorp belt buckle. He was Seto Kaiba, tech genius of the modern world.

But High Priest Seth lingered like a floating speck at the edge of his vision, a spark of madness ready to suck him right back in.

Mokuba had been right. He always was.

Murder pods.

The boy just hadn't realized his own brotherwas the murderer.

Though no sweat dotted his neck, Seto felt the chilling sensation all the same. His fingers trembled before he clenched his fists and ordered himself to be steady.

When he'd taken control of the Millennium Rod during his duel with Marik, he'd awakened a dormant part of his mind. Seth's memories. The timeline of them was gaping with holes—he carried gaps between memories, an empty darkness without even hazy moments to fill it—but every event he did remember was complete, without any fragmentation. A full-color clarity.

He remembered confronting Mahad in the rainy courtyard.

Later, he remembered Mahad's funeral.

And nothing between.

Seth's murderous intent haunted him. The sound of his own voice, speaking a threat he meant down to his very soul. Executing criminals was one thing—harsh, perhaps, but Seto had never carried any delusions about being harsh.

Cold-blooded murder of a fellow priest was something else entirely.

Could he really have been such a different person in the past?

He tried to force his mind to focus on the present, on the matter at hand, but his swirling doubt weakened his knees. Seto Kaiba always had a destination in mind and a clear path to it. He lived life as a player at a chess board, always twelve steps ahead of the competition. But that was because he'd always believed something about himself—no matter how many critics or enemies called him a villain, Seto believed he was good. He wanted to create a better world. He worked to tear down his adoptive father's corrupt business, to undo all the wrongs of KaibaCorp's past and replace them with something meaningful. He sacrificed to protect Mokuba.

Mokuba. Seto's heart wrenched just thinking of his loyal little brother. He didn't need Gozaburo to echo Mokuba's words to taunt him; his own mind did a good enough job.

You're the best, Seto.

Mokuba had always thought that. The reason Seto believed he was a hero was because Mokuba believed it first.

And the only reason Mokuba believed it was because he'd never met Seth.

Mokuba. Seto clenched his jaw, stiffening every muscle in his body to root himself in the moment. Even if he was a cold-blooded murderer, self-pity was a disgraceful look on anyone, and he could not afford to lose himself in it when Mokuba was trapped somewhere in this virtual realm.

Without a working menu, he would have to find a backdoor to the system. German Barbie had proven himself as a programmer, so there would certainly be one in case of malfunction or emergency.

But just as Seto began to prod at the system, the ground opened beneath him once more, sucking him back into Egypt and a fresh, bloodthirsty memory.


As Mokuba fell, his mind flashed back to sunny orange dunes and a warm, overhead sun. Would this be like Marik—someone in his mind, trying to threaten him or, worse, Seto?

But when the ground solidified beneath him, it felt . . . ordinary. And rather than standing in some conjured hellscape, he stood in a bedroom. The long, narrow room held sparse furniture—just a bed, dresser, and desk—before ending at a set of double glass doors that led to a balcony. Mokuba recognized the gold pane of the doors, the circular white railing of the balcony.

This was his room, although it lacked all of his personality: His bookshelf, overflowing with comics and action figures. His posters across the walls. His canopied bed with spellcaster curtains—he called them spellcaster, but they were really just moons and constellations. He liked seeing the stars when he slept, even if they were fake. He had glow-in-the-dark stars plastered in swirling patterns across his ceiling.

This version of his bedroom had none of that. It felt lifeless and sterile, the bedsheets a pristine white, the dresser empty of knick-knacks or even a single photograph, the desk home to a single black notebook and a stack of textbooks so perfectly aligned they must have been stacked with a ruler.

The only interesting thing in the room was the black music stand in the corner and the violin resting on a stool in front of it. Those certainly weren't Mokuba's.

"Don't touch anyt-hing," said a voice behind him.

Mokuba yelped, nearly evacuating his skin. He whirled to find the same boy as before.

Gozaburo. Invisible ants crawled across his skin, inspiring a shiver. Up close, he could see something he hadn't seen before—the hard, steely quality of the boy's strange, glitchy eyes. The sharp edges to his jaw as he clenched it. There was an echo of Gozaburo in the boy's features. Was this what Mokuba's adoptive father had looked like as a child? He couldn't have been more than Mokuba's age.

"How old are you?" he blurted. Then his face heated at the dumbness of it.

Whenever Mokuba had spoken around Gozaburo, he'd made the man angry. It didn't matter what he said or how he said it; Gozaburo always found something to criticize. Mokuba stammered or mumbled or shouted, even when he thought his voice was normal. Mokuba sounded naïve or stupid or childish, even when he thought what he'd asked was reasonable. A few months after coming to live at Kaiba Mansion, Mokuba stopped talking to Gozaburo at all.

Even that didn't always save him.

From memory, Gozaburo's gravelly voice taunted him. Are you mute, boy? Left your tongue at the orphanage? Useless baggage. You're lucky I need your brother.

"Twelve."

Mokuba blinked.

The boy in front of him lifted one shoulder in the shallowest half shrug imaginable. "I'm t-welve. I'm also twenty. Trick q-uestion."

He gestured toward the chair beside the desk, and then, hands sliding into the pockets of his white uniform, he strode forward toward the double glass doors.

Mokuba frowned.

Rather than sit, he followed close behind the boy. The glass doors threw themselves open without so much as a gesture from the boy, and he stepped onto the balcony, where a dozen images flickered to life before him in thin air, like so many TV screens blinking on. All of them showed Seto.

At Mokuba's small gasp, the boy glanced over his shoulder.

"Memories," he said, answering a question Mokuba hadn't asked. "Th-at's the engine of this virtual w-orld. I owe Zigfried thanks for per-fecting it at last. Things used to be much harder to oper—oper—operate."

For a moment, he blurred, his outline shifting as if he'd taken a rapid step to the side and then back. He clenched his jaw but made no comment on the glitch.

"Are you okay?" Mokuba asked.

The boy's eyes locked on his, cold and empty. "Why would you care?"

In the instant he spoke, he solidified, his hair flashing a dusty black, his eyes flashing a muted brown. For that split second, he did look like Gozaburo, but not an identical copy. He looked like Gozaburo the way Mokuba looked like pictures of Kota Akiyama, his real father. Mokuba had his father's black hair and high cheekbones, his father's goofy smile—all things he only knew from pictures, since he'd been orphaned so young.

He'd never seen any pictures of the boy in front of him, but he knew just the same.

"You're Noah," he said, all of his insides shrinking. "Noah Kaiba, Gozaburo's real son."

Noah's eyebrows lifted. His hair had taken on the green color again, his edges dancing with pixels. "Sm-arter than your brother. I didn't ex-pect that."

"You died!" Mokuba took a step toward the balcony, his mind reeling. He caught the edge of one of the glass doors. "Roland told me about you once, and he said you died when you were five. Seven years before Gozaburo adopted us."

Without an explanation, Noah returned his attention to the images of Seto, and for the first time, Mokuba realized it wasn't quite Seto—rather, it was Seto if his brother tried to cosplay as Marik. He wore gold armbands and kohl liner around his eyes, and in every image, he carried the Millennium Rod.

Slowly, Mokuba stepped out onto the balcony with Noah. Usually, standing on his balcony brought a refreshing breeze and the scent of the ocean from the nearby harbor. This late in summer, he should have been able to hear the bees in the garden below, flocking around the blue hydrangea. But in the virtual world, his balcony was strangely dead, the air still and silent. The only sound he could hear was the quiet murmur of voices from the projections in the air.

As he watched the screens, he felt Noah's attention until he finally met the other boy's eyes. Beyond the Gozaburo-severity, there was something else in Noah's eyes. A spark of . . . curiosity? Gozaburo had never been curious about anything. All the answers he didn't know, he pretended he did.

"Th-ese ought to show S-eto's worst memories." Noah nodded toward the airborne images. "His most suppressed experienc-e-s, his deepest shames. The system worked with Zigfried."

"Maybe Seto outsmarted your system." Mokuba smiled as he said it.

But at the back of his mind, an awful truth scratched, like an animal pawing at a barrier. Mokuba thought about Seto effortlessly reading hieroglyphs, thought about every high-priest taunt Marik had ever made. He remembered the chess game where he'd asked Seto if it was true and Seto hadn't denied it.

Seto had been someone else once. Mokuba didn't understand what that really meant, didn't understand how it was even possible, but when he'd cheerfully accepted it during that chess match, he'd done so because he thought nothing would change. Seto would always be Seto.

Yet ever since his duel with Marik, Seto's eyes had taken on a haunted look. He'd surrendered the championship match to Joey even though he hated Joey, even though he'd never surrendered a single duel in his life. Even though it wasn't a Seto thing to do.

And just minutes earlier, standing on a virtual street, surrounded by illusion, Seto had looked at Mokuba with slumped shoulders and said, I'm not sure who I am.

"Well done, Seth," said a man in one of the images. His gravelly voice came from a wrinkled old face with a narrow white beard, and from beneath his hooded white robe, Mokuba caught a glint of the Millennium Eye. "You truly are our finest recruit, worthy of the awesome power of the rod."

He and Seto stood on an ancient, cobbled street, surrounded by spearmen guards. Collapsed at Seto's feet lay a thin, ragged body with glazed eyes, murdered freshly enough that his blood was still seeping out in a growing pool. The sight of it flipped Mokuba's stomach and seared his throat with an acid taste.

Seto turned the Millennium Rod slowly in his hands, cold blue eyes watching the body with all the detachment of a winter storm sweeping across a landscape.

"High Priest Seth," was all he said.


Though he was the youngest of them—only fourteen years old—and the most newly appointed, Seth knew the other priests already thought him heartless. In truth, he'd prayed to the gods to take his heart, and the prayer had gone unanswered. Blasphemy, he was aware. When his entire afterlife depended on a weighing of the heart, it ought to have been his most cherished possession, yet since claiming the great honor of carrying a Millennium Item, he'd cursed his heart almost daily.

It made life complicated.

The guards dragged a struggling man forward in the street, forcing him to kneel before Seth and Akhenaden. The criminal wrenched against their hold, but his skeletal form could not match soldiers of the palace. He was barely a few years Seth's senior, the most wretched of creatures—starved, abused. Even without seeing into his mind, Seth could see the way his skin clung to his bones, creating hollows at his throat. He could see the bruises on the man's neck where he'd clearly been choked, the purpling of his hand where someone had broken a finger.

"This is your moment," said Akhenaden proudly, resting one hand on Seth's shoulder. He was the most senior of the high priests, the most accomplished, and he'd taken Seth under his wing, starting by convincing the pharaoh Seth deserved to hold an item after only half the training usually required.

"Show me you can enact justice," Akhenaden went on. "Show me you have the strength our kingdom needs."

Swallowing his hesitation, Seth lifted the Millennium Rod. Its Eye of Horus caught the light, and with a flash, he dove into the criminal's mind.

Pain. No one had warned him of that in his priest training—that using the rod would bring pain. It pricked Seto's mind like heated needles, setting his nerves ablaze, stretching him like a man on a rack. It was a test, he knew. The items could only be commanded by the worthy. So he endured.

As he exerted his control over the rod, the flaring pain evaporated in a wash of cool water. No matter whose mind he entered, he always found the landscape the same—a strange depiction of his home village, bordering the Nile. The houses were all in miniature, reaching only to his waist, yet drawn out and spread over a far wider area than it occupied in real life, vacant of its villagers. Except Seth and whoever's mind he brought in.

Seth splashed through a shallow depiction of the Nile River, feeling the cool relief without any real sense of wetness against his skin. The criminal stood in the center of the river, staring up in wonder at a sun that blazed without heat. Gone were his struggles. His mind knew only peace.

When Seth drew his attention, he gave the man a command: "Show me."

He met no resistance. The man's mind opened like a door swung open to eagerly welcome a friend. Though Seth tried to focus only on the crime needing judgment, a captive mind was not easy to direct, catching on the slightest ideas and diving into tangential memories.

Seth saw the man's destitute childhood, witnessed his struggle to survive. He saw a cruel mother who caned her son for the slightest offense. Even now that he was eighteen, the man did not desert her as she deserved. He brought her food. In return, she called him worthless. Broke his hand.

Gritting his teeth, Seth forced the man's mind back to the crime and found it at last, watched the moments play out as the man scaled a courtyard wall in the dark, broke into the home of a palace official, and snatched the first item of value he could find. Desperation hung like a fog in the air, making Seth tremble right along with the criminal.

The official had been awake late, reading scrolls in the adjacent room, and he caught the thief. Held him by the neck and screamed the punishment he would meet for crossing a man of the palace. Dragged him to the guards for punishment.

And the guards brought him to the high priests.

Through the man's eyes, Seth saw himself, standing tall and unwavering, a symbol of might in his priestly robes and jewelry. In Seth's shadow, the man saw the god Shesmu with his bloodthirsty smile, eager for slaughter. He saw his own approaching death.

Were Seth's eyes really that cold?

With effort, Seth ripped himself free of the criminal's mind. He sucked in one quick breath, feeling the strength of the cobbled street beneath him, the steadiness of Akhenaden's hand still on his shoulder. The most senior high priest waited with an expectant gaze.

"I have seen his mind." Seth cleared his throat to rid his voice of the slight hoarseness.

"Then you are ready to offer judgment." Akhenaden smiled, a fatherly expression dimmed somewhat by the cold metal glint of his Millennium Eye.

The ache of all Seth had witnessed remained as a pulsing force within his own skull, straining to press his eyes closed, to press him away from the criminal, to make him retreat.

Heartless. What a blessing that would have been. Without a heart, he could have sentenced criminals efficiently, as his duty required. When invading their minds to witness firsthand their sins, a heartless man would not be swayed by painful memories. A heartless man would witness childhood abuses without flinching. A heartless man would not dare to think of mercy when a criminal was so obviously guilty.

But Seth was not heartless.

As if reading his mind, the criminal cried out in anguish. "Mercy! Mercy, my priest, please!"

A frown creased Akhenaden's face. He lowered his hand from Seth's shoulder, and Seth felt the cold absence of it.

He thought of his own childhood. In memory, he saw the flames consuming his village, thought of his mother trapped far beyond his reach. Thought of the invaders responsible.

Egypt needed strength. Seth had promised himself he would become part of that, promised he would rise high enough to protect innocent citizens who could not protect themselves. Be it invaders or criminals, Seth would not allow another evil to destroy his home.

He spoke in the cold, practiced tone he'd developed. The tone of a high priest. A judge in Egypt. "You are found guilty of robbing a palace official. In accordance with the law, you will receive the appropriate punishment."

"You would kill me!" the man shrieked, lurching toward Seto, held back by guards. Tears striped the dirt across his sunken cheeks. "You would kill me for a trinket!"

I cannot do this. The thought came unbidden, a weakness as wretched as the man Seth faced.

Seth gripped the Millennium Rod. He looked down into its Eye of Horus, and after a brief moment, his breathing evened. His heartbeat surged. He was a high priest in service to the pharaoh, and he'd sworn a duty. He would see justice enacted.

Strength, whispered the shadow of a voice from the rod.

"Execute him," Seth ordered the guards.

The man screamed until the last moment. His voice died as he did, and it wasn't until the criminal's blood painted the stones that Seth felt a resurgence of the earlier ache. It had migrated from his head to his useless, beating heart.

"Well done, Seth." Akhenaden beamed. "You truly are our finest recruit, worthy of the awesome power of the rod."

"High Priest Seth." The correction was all he could manage. Seth cursed the ache in his chest, and he turned from the murder scene, scowling as he walked.

To serve Egypt properly, he would have to get stronger. Much, much stronger.


In the past, Seto still liked blue. Mokuba clung to that. While every other high priest dressed in only gold and white, the Seto of the past wore a blue tunic over his white robe, banded with gold at the waist, and when he sported a headdress, it was blue and gold too. He stood out among the high priests just as he did now at business parties, an elite among elites. As images continued to flicker past, filled with horrifying things, Mokuba didn't focus on the deaths or the trials or even the magic which might have been cool under different circumstances. He focused only on the powerful stride, familiar voice, blue eyes. The pieces of Seto he knew so well.

"Y-ou don't seem confused," Noah commented once, watching him with a steady, chilling gaze. "Horrified, p-erhaps, but not confused."

Mokuba shifted uncomfortably. If Noah was Gozaburo's son, that meant they were brothers. Where had he been all these years? He should have been a couple years older than Seto, and he'd even made a joke about being twenty, yet he was Mokuba's height, and he could have been any kid in one of his classes at school—at least with his normal look, not the glitchy green hair.

"What do you want with Seto?" Mokuba asked. He braced himself for any of the usual responses: torture, murder, revenge, seizure of KaibaCorp . . .

He fidgeted again. Noah would have been Gozaburo's heir, yet he hadn't been mentioned in the man's will. Gozaburo had even left a ship to his business rival, but he'd left nothing to his biological son.

"Truth." Noah said it flatly, without the malice Mokuba had come to expect from all of Seto's enemies. "I wan-t the tru—trut—truth."

As he glitched again, his image fracturing in half and then reknitting, a horrible sinking feeling dragged at Mokuba's gut.

"The system treats you differently from me and Seto. Clearly there's some kind of bug. Couldn't Zigfried fix that?"

Noah didn't speak for a moment. As his jaw worked with clear frustration, he flickered, then stabilized.

At last, he said, "It's no-t a bug." He flicked his hand toward the screens. "Thi-s is the bug. Instead of memories, I find a fabri-cation. Even in his own mind, S-et-o Akiyama has to outwit the g-ame."

Despite the dark circumstances, Mokuba gave a puff of laughter at the idea that Seto would always find a loophole, a way to bend impossible rules. And it was true. No matter how cornered he was, Seto would win. It was simply who he was.

Who he . . .

Images of High Priest Seth danced in the air before him.

Clenching one hand around the door to steady himself, Mokuba forced his mind to think of anything else.

"Why did you bring me here, Noah?"

Noah gave that miniscule shrug once more. From the moment they'd met, his responses had defied prediction.

Mokuba glanced back at the gloomy, drab interior. "This is my room in the Kaiba Mansion. At least, it is now. I guess it was yours first. You didn't want to . . . I don't know, hang posters?"

Something in Noah's frown hurt his heart. "I didn't liv-e here long. Four ye-ars."

Roland had said something about Gozaburo sending his son away. "And then?"

"N-anny's care." Noah's voice remained flat. "Boarding sch-ool."

That explained the uniform. Inching into the room, Mokuba tried to peer at the textbooks, but the spines faced away from him, and the top one had a protector over the front cover. Instead, he reached for the violin.

"Is this yo—"

In a flash, Noah appeared between him and the instrument, as if he'd glitched there. The boy's unnatural purple-blue eyes shed pixels like sparks of lightning.

"D-on't touch it!" he spat.

Mokuba backed up in a hurry. "I'm sorry."

Even as he apologized, his gut clenched. It turned out Noah was a lot like Gozaburo after all.

Watching Mokuba with every step, Noah returned to the balcony. He made a few gestures with his hands, grunting as the images remained unchanged.

Though it wouldn't help anything, and might even make it worse, Mokuba said petulantly, "You wanted the truth. That's Seto's past life, and you won't change it by waving at it."

The words spoke uncomfortably to something inside him.

Noah stared at him. "P-ast life."

"Reincarnation, you know." As if Mokuba were such an expert on the subject.

"Re—re—reincarnation."

Maybe he'd broken Noah. Good.

The green-haired boy turned his attention back to the images with a new light in his expression. He studied in silence. When he finally spoke, Mokuba didn't like the message at all:

"Seto Ak-iyama isn't real. Jus-t a fabrication."

"Seto's real," Mokuba said firmly.

"Where?" Noah gestured at the screens, devoid of any modern images of Seto.

"He . . ." Mokuba balled his hands into fists. "Look, whatever game you're playing, just end it, okay? It's stupid. If you want to know something, just talk to Seto. Like a real person."

Noah flinched back from his words as if Mokuba had struck him, and Mokuba felt a flash of guilt for his temper, even though Noah had snapped at him first.

"I'm not r-eal," Noah said at last, his voice broken with something more than the radio static. Before Mokuba could do more than blink, the boy's eyebrows drew down, his expression sharpening into that deep echo of Gozaburo. "N-either is your brother. Seto is as real as a ch-ild in a c-ostume, playing a part. How l-ong until he decides he's tir-ed of being a dinosaur or an astronaut? How long until Mommy rings the dinner bell, and it's time to let playtime go?"

His voice gained strength, and his hair turned dark once more, his outline solid.

Like a rope sliding off a ledge, gathering speed, Mokuba felt the doubt pile in his mind. He licked his lips, but before he could speak, Noah plowed on.

"Look at this, Mokuba. Really look. This priest you see—does he have a tag-along little brother?"

No. Priest Seth had no family. He came to the palace alone, and he ascended alone, and when the other priests tried to befriend him, he turned on them with cold blue eyes and a snarl.

"This priest you see—does he care about anyone at all?"

Mokuba looked. Really looked.

And he saw the answer in blood across the stones.

Noah's outline buzzed. He clenched his jaw, jerking as he looked away. "You-r brother is as real as a man in a c-oma. He's dreami-ng a life here, a life where y-ou matter. That leaves one qu-estion: How long until he wakes up?"


Note: Hope you're all doing well! I just published my second novel with a third on the way for this fall. It's been chaos, and I'm more than happy to relax with a little fanfiction at last. Thank you for your patience.