Ren Amamiya found himself mildly troubled, staring at his own supine nakedness in the mirror on the ceiling of his room in the Lockbox Hotel. He was in Edgetown- a disgusting hovel of a city that disgustingly violated Draculesti's tenets and consumed humans to fuel its economy of base hedonism. The very bed in which he now lay was at best a naive, dishonest attempt to provide a fantasy of equal relationship between a vampire-kin and a human. At worst, a one-sided mockery of it. Owners brought their slaves here to play house and fuck. It was a flawed concept so foul that the musk of it seemed to hang permanently in the air. Last night, Ren had had to retreat to the shower to get it out of his nose.

And then Makoto had come into the shower after him- a thoroughly unexpected reinitiation of their sexual intimacy. That- that had been the best shower of his life. And it had transitioned into the best night of his life, as their activities returned from shower to bed as he and Makoto had lost themselves in addictive rhythms.

Makoto's naked body was also visible in the ceiling mirror, as she was asleep next to him, her face buried in his side and one of her toned thighs curled over Ren's own. But despite how much Ren thought this current situation was astonishingly pleasurable, his mind doubted and he was troubled.

When he looked into the mirror above, was that man up there not just another dhampir in a joke of a heart-shaped bed, who had just fucked a human woman who was helplessly in his power? Did she even have a choice? She was literally locked with him in this room and lacked any practical means to actually resist him if she wished to. And she was figuratively locked to his side because the Empire would eat her up if he did not keep a firm claim upon her.

Was the Ren looking up at the mirror any different then any of the other countless dhampirs who had laid here in this bed, looking up at that mirror?

Ren took a deep sigh, trying to shake off the spiral of self-depressing doubts. Makoto had advanced on him, both in that cave and in the shower last night. Surely that was a pure sign of consent and her genuine interest in her half of this… whatever this relationship was. This doubt was illogical.

But Ren failed to beat back his own self-doubt and worried alone in silence. Makoto stirred in her sleep slightly, her thigh moving gently over Ren's skin. That small, pleasant sensation triggered Ren's desire and he became steadily and slightly painfully erect. But he was entirely unwilling to selfishly wake Makoto due to his own desire, so Ren grimaced and watched himself in the mirror, laying there, suffering silently, watching intently as Makoto slept peacefully beside him. Her lithe nakedness in this situation was somewhat like an unreachable source of cool water, and Ren was dying slowly of thirst.

Makoto woke to the subtle smell of coffee grounds. That scent still somehow following Ren despite his distance from his cellar room back in Tock-Yo. It was a nice smell. Nicer than their room, in general. It was a Ren smell, and Makoto found that safe and alluring.

"You slept well," observed Ren.

Makoto raised her head and blinked, Ren looking slightly down at her over his bare chest.

"Mmmf…" she said, and looked about the room for a window. There was not one. "What time is it?"

"Almost noon," said Ren immediately.

Makoto looked around for a clock. "How do you know?"

"I can feel it. Can't you?"

Makoto sighed and lowered her head back into his side and pressed her nose in slightly, enjoying the luxury of the safety of this space and the lack of an impelling need to rush off somewhere else. "No, Ren. I can't just feel where the sun is."

"Huh," said Ren, as if that was mildly surprising to him.

That got Makoto thinking along idly about sunlight and time of day. "I can tell if it's morning or afternoon by the color of the light, I suppose."

"Even flowers can do that, Makoto. And they don't have eyes."

Makoto raised her head and looked at Ren. He was grinning at her playfully. She dropped her head back down again.

"Fine. I'm very unimpressive then."

"I wouldn't say that at all," said Ren.

Makoto felt his hand travel a short distance along her leg that she had draped over him. Makoto sucked in breath and liked the feeling of it. She ran her own hand along his body and ran into something else that was awake. Ren flinched.

And that led to another repetition of their activities from the night before.

It was two hours until they were washed, dressed and re-equipped for their journey. They looked briefly around this second haven of theirs, both of them finding some strange new charm in its tacky, disgusting look- purely because of the opportunities it had provided them with each other. Then they left, shut the door, and the tension of Edgetown quickly pressed back down upon them.

Just down the hall, a human woman was trying to keep herself from being pushed into the doorway of a room three doors down. A drunken dhampir was laughing and obviously not trying too hard to accomplish his task, seeming to enjoy the woman's struggle against him. Makoto felt sick and almost reached for her gun, but Ren put a strong hand on her shoulder and moved her out of his way. He led the way towards the hall and the struggling couple.

"Got a lively one," said Ren as they neared.

The dhampir drunkenly laughed and turned his head toward Ren, " Yeah, I-"

Ren's hand reached out and shoved the dhampir's head into the steel frame of the hotel door. The man's skull deformed slightly and he fell like a ragdoll into a sitting position on the ground. The human woman looked at Ren in stark terror, and then in panic at Makoto. They shared a glance, and Makoto felt exposed to the most chilling expression of human terror and desperate despair that she had ever witnessed, and perhaps ever would. This single moment of shared human expression would haunt her for the rest of her life. It was like the look of a sheep that was aware of itself standing in line at the slaughterhouse.

"Go on back to your previous handler," said Ren softly. "Tell them someone murdered your client for his money. Or if you run for it, avoid the roads. Go southeast. Find a Kurusu village."

Ren then bent down and took the dead dhampir's wallet from his pants. The human woman frantically looked at him in panic, and then at Makoto, and then edged out of the room and ran down the hall and thumped away down the stairs. Ren stood up and looked in the wallet. Makoto could see a few pieces of currency. Ren pocketed it and threw the wallet back down on the corpse, presumably for authenticity.

"Makoto," said Ren, taking a moment to stare down at the man he had killed. "Am I any different from this man? Didn't I put you in one of these rooms, too?"

Makoto had no idea where this was coming from. "What are you talking about? You're not like him at all!"

Ren looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable to her. He was obviously concerned about something. His eyes searched hers. Then he looked back at the dead dhampir, lifted his leg, and stomped the dead dhampir's skull into a more pulpy shape.

"Don't think he's capable of coming back from that," said Ren as he led Makoto on down the hall.

She followed thoughtfully. For someone who had admonished her from trying to rescue everyone she saw, Ren seemed to be displaying an odd sort of beneficent hypocrisy.

Makoto followed Ren out of the hotel without further incident and into an Edgetown that had lost a lot of its mystique in the light of day. It was one long, dirty street. The tall walls of stacked businesses were an ugly, old stone. The signs which had glowed in garish color in the darkness of night were now faded, dead-looking things. And speaking of dead looking things… there were a few scattered human corpses laying about, slowly starting to bloat in the heat of the noon sun.

Suppressing her disgust, Makoto forced herself to ignore them and look elsewhere on the street. About a hundred yards up the way, a team of humans in chained collars were loading some sort of cart with a limp human body. The cleanup crew, apparently. And a few dhampir were walking here and there in the wide-brimmed hats that every dhampir seemed to utilize. Makoto did not have the world knowledge to know it, but everything about Edgetown looked like a party district in its habitual morning hangover phase- everything dirty, abandoned, and evoking a sense of foundational regret of bad decisions.

Ren led them across the street and uphill. During a moment when no one was close to them, Ren stopped and gestured Makoto closer to him for a short briefing.

"Naturally, things are quieter on the street during the day. But there is an underground to Edgetown, too. If any nobles come here, that's where they tend to go. The administrative stuff is underground, and I intend to use Jin's credentials to access his messages and storage. Then we are going to get the hell out of this shithole."

"You're going to… steal his mail."

"...Basically."

"Great. And what do I do?"

"Humans aren't allowed in the official offices. There is a holding area outside that's guarded by what passes for police here and- damn. Now that I think about it. I should have left you in the room."

Ren paused, as if considering taking her back to the hotel.

"Do humans get stolen there? At the administrative office?" said Makoto.

"No. Not that I've ever heard of, anyway," said Ren, sounding worried still.

"Then I'll be as safe as at the hotel," said Makoto. "Let's just do it so we can get out here."

Ren's eyes searched hers. "All right. But just-"

"I know Ren. I'll manage."

Ren nodded and they continued on. Further up the street, a broad opening in the buildings revealed downward escalators. Ren led them on and they rode down into the depths.

"Ren," whispered Makoto. "Why isn't everything just underground? Wouldn't that make more sense?"

"Yeah," said Ren. "I asked my brother, Mishima, about that once. I couldn't follow everything he said, but the crux of it is: building underground is a huge pain and a lot can go wrong. So generally, only things that are essential around the clock are built in the ground. Everything else is on the surface."

"So it's an economical decision?"

"Mostly, I guess. I think sometimes it's just plain impossible, too. I don't know. Mishima is way more into that kind of thing."

Makoto heard the soft din of people and so abandoned her attempts at conversation. That was probably as much as Ren knew on the subject anyway. She steeled herself into being the visible human slave to her dhampir master.

The administrative underground was stark and clean compared to the street above. Nobody was lying around, and the vampires were walking about with purpose. There seemed to be a moderately long underground mall of shops and offices and very few humans. The ones that were here seemed to be in relatively good health and worked independently in rooms behind steel bars, even performing direct business transactions with vampires and dhampires. It was an entirely surreal sight to Makoto who had thought Edgetown at night was weird enough.

Most of the walkers down here seemed to be dhampir, who were not in the habit of taking off their hats, even indoors. But a few more elaborate figures strutted about with long gleaming hair, fine clothing, and obvious entourages. Nobles. At least six that Makoto could see from casual glance. She gritted her teeth and tried to calm her quickening heartbeat.

Ren took gentle hold of her upper arm and led her through the underground mall. No one seemed interested in them. No one seemed interested in anyone, actually. This seemed a place to get things done and then leave, which suited Makoto just fine. At the rear of the mall, there was a larger office front that seemed busier than most. Outside, a line of clean, single-person cages stood- and being that a few were occupied with bored-looking humans- their purpose was clear: it was like a bag-check, but for living beings.

Makoto found herself being led towards it. Great.

"Don't try to talk to anyone," whispered Ren. "You'll scare the humans and make everyone mad."

Three dhampir in gray uniforms stood around the line of steel cages, all with bored looks on their faces and thick, official looking batons dangling from their hips. If Makoto had not recently observed the effectiveness of blunt force trauma when caused by Ren's excessive strength, she might have not taken these guards very seriously. But now she feared clubs in the same way as swords- they just hurt you in a different way, but no less fatally.

Ren approached the uniformed man who seemed to double as the clerk and held up one finger. The man handed Ren a key with a number attached to it, and led Makoto over to an empty cage, had her step inside, and locked her in. He looked at her seriously for a moment through the bars, gave an impassive, single-eyed wink, and then hurried away into the office building to perform whatever act of subterfuge he felt obligated to perform for his mother.

Makoto stood for a while, vampire watching. To her, business happened almost normally. Except for the caged humans, Makoto didn't notice too many differences between this underground mall and any place of business in Tock-Yo. The nobles were the high society members, the dhampir were the commoners, and the humans were the poor. It was an unnervingly accurate simile.

"Whoa, we have a good gallery this morning," said a voice that Makoto immediately didn't like the sound of.

She turned her head to find silvery eyes staring at her at close range from the other side of the cage bars. Makoto edged back away from them, not that she had far to go. The eyes belonged to a lean male figure with shiny, slicked-back black hair, giving him the appearance that his head was wet. There was a strong smell of hair tonic in the air. His clothing was pure white with a sort of tiger-print interior. A few other men stood nearby in casual dress, and by their more gray-based eyes, she figured them to be dhampirs. This first peacock, however, was definitely a pure blood vampire.

"Hey, who owns you? Are you for sale?" asked the noble.

Makoto wasn't sure of the protocol here, but based on everything Ren had said, she decided to just shake her head to the negative and avert her eyes from the vampire. There wasn't much else she could do in the situation. Why did she attract all the weirdos? Well, it was also possible that a lot of vampires around here were attracted to her, but it was only the weirdos that were willing to break their own social customs and act on it.

"Hey! Away from the bars there!" shouted one of the uniformed guards.

"Hey, yourself!," said the vampire with a turn of his head. "Do you know who I am?"

"It doesn't matter who you are!" said the guard. "Off the bars or your name goes before the commission."

The vampire made a tch noise and withdrew his hands from the bars a half inch, widening his eyes at the guards. "There! Not touching! Okay!"

The guards frowned at him, but they made no further objection. This seemed to give the vampire leeway to stalk around Makoto's holding cell. His entourage joined him.

Great. Just great. Well, all she had to do was ignore him and keep her head down. Ren would be back soon.

"Hey, Mina," said one of the dhampirs from behind Makoto. "She'd got a Kurusu brand."

The tenor of the vampire called Mina changed immediately. His stance went from playful to serious in a moment. Makoto bit her lip and pulled her shirt up to hide the brand on the back of her neck. She'd forgotten about it. Ren had forgotten about it. Even after the stories of anti-Kurusu political maneuvers in Edgetown, they had neglected this one little detail: Makoto's brand.

"She's hiding it, too," observed Mina. "I bet she's still owned by a Kurusu, then. Let's wait for them to get back and see what we've got here."

Damn! And there was no way to warn Ren!