Kuri knew she was going to die, and this time it would be for good. She was scared, more scared even than she'd been when she'd bled out her life in Kaneki's arms. It was different this time. This time it was a betrayal and not a biological act.
The pain in her head was terrible. She reached up and felt gingerly around on the back of her head. Her hand came away soaked in her blood. Her thoughts were woozy. What had happened? Kuri tried to sit up, but a terrible dizziness claimed her, and with a groan, she puked her guts up, crying at the pain the movement caused her. Then she collapsed on her side, rolling away from the vomit. That's when her tear-blurred gaze moved to the metal cage above her, and then the sky beyond it—a sky that was getting increasingly less gray and more blue.
Her memory rushed back, and with it panic made her breath come in short little pants. They'd trapped her here and the sun was rising! Even now, even with the cage above her and the memory of their betrayal fresh in her mind, Kuri didn't want to believe it.
Another wave of nausea washed over her, and she closed her eyes, trying to regain her equilibrium. As long as her eyes were shut, she could control the horrible dizziness and her thoughts began to clear.
The other reds had done this. Shari had been late for their meeting. Not like that had been all that shocking, but Kuri had been pissed and sick of waiting, so she had been in the process of leaving the empty tunnels back to Anteiku when Shari and Cori finally came into the basement. They had been laughing and joking with each other, and had obviously just fed—their cheeks were still flushed and their eyes were glowing red from fresh blood. Kuri had tried to talk to them. Actually, she'd tried to reason with them and get them to return to Anteiku with her.
The two reds had spent a long time being sarcastic and giving jerklike excuses not to go with her: "Nah, we like to eat, and Yoshimura won't let us!" And "Starbucks is right down the street on Fifth. If I want coffee I'll go there—after dark—for lunch."
Still, she'd tried to be serious and give them good reasons for coming back to Anteiku, like not only was it sanctuary, but there was lots of stuff about being reds they didn't know—that Kuri didn't even know. They needed Yoshimura's help.
They'd laughed at her, called her an old woman, and said they were totally cool staying at the shrine, especially now that they had it to themselves.
Then Etsu had lumbered into the basement, looking breathless and excited. Kuri remembered having a bad feeling from the second she'd seen him. The truth was she'd never liked the kid. He was a big, stupid jerk from Hokkaido who basically thought women were cattle.
"Yeah, I found him and bit him!" He practically crowed.
"That thing? You got to be kidding. He smelled nasty," Shari had said.
"Yeah, and how'd you get him to hold still while you ate him?" Cori asked.
Etsu wiped his mouth with his sleeve. A splotch of red smeared his shirt and the scent of it hit Kuri, completely shocking her. Kaneki! That was Kaneki's blood.
"I knocked him out first. It wasn't hard to do, with him being broken and all."
"What are you talking about?" Kuri snapped the words at Etsu.
Bovinelike, he blinked at her. She was getting ready to grab him and shake him and maybe even stab him with her feathers when he finally answered. "I'm talking about the one eye. What'd you call him, Eyepatch? He showed up here. We been chasing it all around the shrine. Shari and Cori got sick of messing with it and went out to chomp on some of the late night meal feeders, but I had me a taste for ghoul. So I kept after him. Had to corner him up on the roof in one of those tower things, you know, the far one over there, away from the tree." Etsu pointed up and to his left. "But I got him."
"Did he taste as bad as he smelled?" Shari's shock and revulsion were as obvious as her curiosity.
Etsu shrugged his beefy shoulders. "Hey, I'll eat anything. Or anyone."
They all dissolved into laughter. All except Kuri.
"You have a one eyed ghoul on the roof?"
"Yeah. Don't know why the hell he was down here in the first place. Especially all beat up and broken." Cori lifted a brow at her. "Thought you said it was okay to go back to Anteiku 'cause the Aogiri were gone. Looks like they left some shit behind, huh? Maybe they're not really gone."
"They're gone," Kuri had said, already moving toward the door to the basement. "So none of you want to come back to Anteiku with me?"
Three heads shook silently back and forth as red-tinged eyes followed her every move.
"How about the others? Where are they?"
Shari shrugged. "Wherever they want to be. Next time I see any of them I'll tell 'em you said they should go back to Anteiku."
Etsu cracked up. "Hey, that's great. Let's all just go back to Anteiku! Like that's something we really want to do?"
"Look, I gotta go. It's almost sunrise. But I'm not done talking about this with you. And you should know that I may want to bring the other reds back here to live, even though we'll officially be part of the 20th Ward. And if that happens you can either be with us and act right, or you need to leave."
"How about this: How about you keep your toothless ghouls at Anteiku, and we'll stay here because this is where we live now," Etsu said.
Kuri stopped moving toward the exit. Almost as if it was second nature to her, she imagined she was a powerful predatory hawk, fixing them with a lethal gaze. As she spoke, her feathers surrounded them, sharpened to a point. "I'm only gonna say this one more time. If I bring the other reds back here, the 20th Ward will be our home. If you act right, you can stay. If you don't, you will leave." She raised her wings and the feathers came closer, making them bleed a bit. Then Kuri drew a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down, and imagining all the energy she'd called flowing out of her body and back into her wings. When she spoke again her voice sounded normal and the feathers were back on her wings. "So, you decide. I'll be back tomorrow night. See ya."
Without giving them another glance, Kuri hurried out of the basement, through the maze of rubble and metal grates spread haphazardly around the abandoned depot grounds to the stone stairs that led from the parking lot at railroad track level up to the street level of what used to be a thriving railway station. She had to be careful as she rushed up the stairs. It had stopped sleeting, and the sun had actually come out the day before, but night had brought falling temperatures and almost everything that had thawed had refrozen.
She reached the circle drive and the big covered entryway that used to keep Tokyo weather from train passengers. She looked up and up and up.
The building was just creepy-looking. That's all there was to it. Not that she didn't love the tunnels under the building, but there was something about the stone exterior with its weird mixture of art deco and machine design that creeped her out.
Of course, some of her freaky feeling could have been because the sky was already starting to shift from black to gray with the coming dawn. In retrospect, that should have stopped her. She should have turned around, gone back down the stairs, and headed for Anteiku to get help.
Instead, she'd stepped squarely into her fate and the shit hit the fan.
She knew there were circular stairs inside the main part of the depot that led up to each tower room—she'd done lots of exploring during the weeks she'd lived there. But no dang way was she going back inside that building and taking a chance that some random reds wouldn't be tucked into bed and would see her—and question her—and find out the truth.
Plan B led her to a tree that at one time had obviously been decorative, but had long since overgrown its concrete circle so that its roots had broken through the ground below in the parking lot, exposing lots of frozen earth and allowing it to grow taller than it should have. Without its leaves, Kuri didn't have a clue what kind of tree it was, other than the kind that was tall enough that its branches brushed the roof of the depot, near the first of the two towers that faced out from the roof on the front side of the building, and that was tall enough for her.
Moving quickly, Kuri went over to the tree and jumped to grab the branch closest to her head. She scrambled up the slick, bare bough, shimmying along it until she got to the main part of the tree. From there she made her way up and up, silently grateful for her red enhanced strength 'cause if she'd been a normal human, or maybe even ghoul, she'd never have been able to make the treacherous climb.
When she was as high up as she could go, Kuri gathered herself and then jumped onto the roof of the building. She didn't waste time looking in the first of the towers. Etsu had said Kaneki was in the one farthest from the tree. She jogged across the roof to the other end of the building and then climbed the short distance up so she could look down into the circular space.
He was there. Crumpled in the corner of the tower, Kaneki lay unmoving and bleeding. Why was he always covered in blood?
Without hesitation, Kuri threw her legs over the stone ridge and then dropped the four feet or so into the room.
He'd been curled up in a ball, his good arm cradling his bad one in its dirty sling. Down the outside of his arm she could see that someone had slashed his skin, which is obviously where Etsu had fed from him, though he hadn't bothered to close the cut, and the odd, off smell of his half-ghoul blood filled the little chamber. The bandage that had immobilized his wing had come loose and it was a torn pile of bloody towels half draping his body. His eyes were closed.
"Kaneki, hey, can you hear me?"
At the sound of her voice his eyes instantly opened. "No!" he said, struggling to sit up. "Get out of here. They're going to trap—"
Then there had been a terrible pain in the back of her head, and she remembered falling into blackness.
"Kuri, you have to wake up. You have to move."
She finally felt the hand that was shaking her shoulder and recognized Kaneki's voice. Carefully she opened her eyes, and the world didn't pitch and roll, though she could feel her heartbeat throbbing in her head.
"Kaneki," she rasped. "What happened?"
"They used me to trap you," he said.
"You wanted to trap me?" Her nausea was a little better, but Kuri's mind felt like it was working in slow motion.
"No. What I wanted was to be left alone to heal and make my way back to Anteiku. They gave me no choice." He stood up, moving stiffly, bent at the waist because of the metal grate that made a low, false ceiling. "Move. You have little time. The sun is already rising, when it gets high enough the trap will be sprung—the whole roof will go up in flames."
Kuri looked up at the sky and saw the soft pastels of pre-dawn that she used to think were so pretty. Now the lightening sky filled her with absolute terror. "Oh, shit! Help me get up."
Kaneki grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet, where she stood unsteadily beside him, bent like he was. Drawing a deep breath, she raised her hands, gripped the cold metal of the grate, and pushed. It rattled a little, but didn't really move.
"How is it stuck up there?" she asked.
"Chained. They hooked chains through the edges of the metal and then padlocked them to anything on the roof that couldn't be pulled up."
Kuri pushed against the grate again. Again it rattled, but held firm. She was trapped up on a roof and the sun was rising! Gathering all her strength, she pushed and pulled, gripping the metal and trying to slide it to one side so that maybe she could crawl through. With each second the sky got brighter. Kuri's skin shivered like a horse trying to twitch off a fly. The flames ignited and slowly started to rise with the dawn.
"Break the metal," Kaneki said urgently. "Your strength can do it."
"I might be able to if I was in the sky, kicking and pulling from above," she said between gasping breaths as she continued to struggle impotently against the caging metal. "But from below, I'm just not strong enough." She looked from the sky to his grey and scarlet eyes. "You should probably back off. If you're far enough you can avoid the flames." She watched Kaneki move away and, with a growing sense of hopelessness, went back to struggling with the immovable metal. Her fingers were starting to sizzle and Kuri was biting her lip to keep from screaming and screaming and screaming . . .
"Over here. The metal is rusted and thinner, weaker."
Kuri pulled her hands down, automatically clutching them under her armpits and, bent backed, rushed to him. She saw the rusted metal and grabbed ahold of it with both hands, and then pulled with all her might. It gave a little, but her hands had started to blister, as had her wrists.
"Oh, shit!" she gasped. "I'm not gonna make it. Get back, Kaneki, I'm already startin' to—"
Instead of running from her, he moved as close to her as he could get, spreading his kagune so that it provided some shade. Then he raised his uninjured arm and took hold of the rusted grate. "Think of the sky. Concentrate, and move with the dawn. Pull with me. Now!"
In the shadow of his kagune, Kuri grabbed the grate on either side of his hand. She closed her eyes and ignored the burning of her fingers and the sensitivity of her skin that was screaming at her to run! Run anywhere, just get out of the sun! Instead she thought about the earth, cool and dark, waiting underneath her like a loving mama. Kuri pulled.
With a metallic snap the grate broke, leaving an opening just big enough for one person at a time to slip out of.
Kaneki stepped back. "Go!" he said. "Quickly."
The instant Kuri was no longer covered by his kagune, her body began to blister and sizzle. Instinctively, she dropped to the floor and curled into a ball, trying to shield her face with her arms. "I can't!" she cried, frozen with pain and panic. "I'm burning!"
"You will burn if you stay here," he said.
Then he pulled himself up through the opening and was gone. He'd left her. Kuri knew he was right. She had to get out of there, but she couldn't push through the paralyzing fear. The pain was too much. It was like her blood was boiling in her body. Just when she thought she couldn't bear it any longer, a small, cool shadow fell on her.
"Take my hand!"
Squinting against the cruel sun, Kuri looked up. Kaneki was there, crouched on the grate, his kagune spread above her, blocking as much of the fire as possible, it was damaging his kagune, and his uninjured arm reaching for her.
"Now, Kuri. Do it!"
She followed his voice and the coolness of his dark wing and grabbed his hand. He couldn't pull her up by himself. She was too heavy and he only had one arm. So she thrust out her other hand, took hold of the metal, and chinned herself up.
"Come to me. I will shield you." Kaneki opened his arms.
Without any hesitation Kuri stepped into his embrace, burying her head in his chest, and wrapping her arms around him. He enfolded her with his kagune and lifted her.
"Get me to the tree!"
Then he was running, lurching, and limping, but running across the rooftop. The backs of Kuri's arms were exposed, as was some of her neck and shoulders, and as he ran she burned. With a detached, out-of-body feeling she wondered what that terrible noise was that rang in her ears, and then she realized it was her voice. She was screaming her pain and terror and anger.
At the edge of the roof he yelled, "Hold on. I'm jumping to the tree." The one eyed ghoul leaped. His body tumbled, spiraling because of his lack of balance, and they crashed into the tree.
Adrenaline helped Kuri keep her hold on him and, feeling thankful his body was so light, she lifted him, putting herself between Kaneki and the tree. With the bark to her back she told him, "Try to hold on to the tree while I slide us down."
Then they were falling again as the rough bark ripped Kuri's already blistered and bleeding back. She closed her eyes and felt for the earth, finding it serene and waiting below her.
Desperately, Kuri shot her feathers into the tree.
There was a great ripping sound and the ground at the base of the tree broke open just in time for Kuri and Kaneki to slip within a cool, dark pouch in the earth.