Chapter 12: Sell My Soul

Yori saw the moment something changed for Seto, saw the flash of absolute terror in his eyes before he stiffened.

"Mokuba," he whispered.

Above them, Gozaburo continued his villain monologue, talking about the day he first saw Seto in the orphanage, how he knew, even then, that Seto would be a useful pawn in his game. Seto didn't seem to hear him at all.

To Yori's surprise, it was Dante he turned to, not her, pointing at the magician's staff.

"Use the fire," Seto snarled.

Dante glanced at Yori, but it wasn't like she objected to giving sky-Gozaburo a fireball to the face, so she waved her hand in a go-for-it gesture. Dante grinned, showing fangs, and raised his glowing staff. The light of his tattoos flared.

The fire didn't erupt from his staff as she expected. Instead, it built in the clouds themselves, like orange lightning. Embers rising from the gray. Dante slashed his staff, and it was as if he'd puffed a bellows. Fire erupted across the clouds, slicing through Gozaburo's visage.

The man didn't cry out, didn't even flinch. His image simply dissolved into smoke, as if he'd been a puppet from the start.

Seto caught Yori's upper arm in a painfully tight grip. "However you found me, find Mokuba. Now."

The shadows roared in Yori's ears. She closed her eyes, summoning a memory of Mokuba and flinging out a hand in the dark, trying to catch the soul she sought. But she grasped nothing. Setting her jaw, she tried again. She pictured the boy who'd stayed with her in a hospital, given her a new deck, cheered for her in the tournament.

He's okay, she insisted silently. He has to be.

She wouldn't let the truth be anything else.

The bracelet flared hot on her wrist, the skin beneath growing sticky with sweat. The shadows weren't laughing at her; the red skulls swam with satisfied hums, drinking in the strength she offered. She wasn't too weak for this.

So why couldn't she find him?

"Mistress," Dante said quietly. "You would have found his mind by now if . . ."

She couldn't open her eyes, couldn't face what she would see reflected in Seto's. Mokuba had been fine just minutes before. They weren't even in the real world! What could have happened to him?

But no matter how she strained, she couldn't find him in the dark.

"Gozaburo." Seto's voice was hoarse. "The real one. Find him."

Would a face in the sky be enough memory for that? Yori tried it anyway—pictured the gloating, arrogant sneer, searched for the soul it called home.

At last, she opened her eyes, gasping in air. "Nothing." She swiped the back of her hand across her forehead, taking a step back as her knees wobbled. "I can't find either of them."

"Noah, then!"

"Mistress—"

"Stop calling me that!" Yori snapped, rounding on her Ka.

Dante gave a huff. "You've strained your heka. If you keep going, you'll collapse—or, worse, you'll fracture your mind and allow the shadows purchase. The first rule any priest learns is to know the limits of self when using an item."

The way she was heaving for breath—like she'd just sprinted a mile—said he was right. But Yori couldn't leave Mokuba in danger.

"Thanks, Dante," she said. "And sorry for this."

She caught just a glimpse of his frown before he disappeared as she released her hold on both him and the white dragon. Seto's Ka gave a quiet shriek before vanishing, and Seto flinched at the sound. Air rushed into Yori's lungs once more, and light pushed back the darkness at the edges of her vision.

"We're at the mercy of the virtual world again," she warned Seto.

"Noah runs it anyway," he said. "He's stronger than Gozaburo, or at least more tangled in the system. He's been in it longer. Just get him here."

Yori closed her eyes. Though she'd only met Noah briefly, she pictured the strange, green-haired boy, reaching for him in an unseen world.

And she caught hold of something.

"Yes!" she crowed, yanking too hard. Noah crashed into existence in the meadow as if he'd been flung from the heavens, landing on his back in what looked to be a very painful skid, flattening a line of grass.

If the boy felt pain, he didn't show it, didn't so much as groan. He just lay still. His hands fractured and reknit themselves together sporadically. Entire pieces of him had disappeared into gaping purple holes, additional pixels tumbling in every few seconds. He looked like Frankenstein's nightmare.

The pitiful sight did nothing to inspire mercy in Seto. He stood above the boy and snarled, "Where's Mokuba?"

Noah finally opened his eyes. One was a weary gray and the other a pixelated, solid purple.

"What happened to you?" Yori couldn't help asking.

"It's too la-te," Noah said, his voice raw. "H-e won."

Clearly unimpressed, Seto reached down and grabbed the boy by the front of his uniform—or what remained of it—before hauling him up. As Noah fractured, Seto's hands lost their grip, but the rough handling seemed to wake something in Noah anyway. His gray eye caught a spark of fierceness.

"Don't touch me," he hissed, stumbling to his feet. He grew in height until he stood just a few inches shy of Seto, and his face slimmed, aging him to somewhere in his late teens or early twenties. His hair showed a few streaks of black before surrendering to green again.

Seto wore the coldest glare imaginable. "You don't make the demands. I do. Now—Take. Me. To. My. Brother."

"It's too late!" Noah shouted. "Fa-ther erased his m-ind and took his body. Mokuba's gone. An-d he's never coming b-ack."

The words punched Yori in the gut, leaving her winded.

When she'd come on a rescue mission, it had almost seemed flippant. Of course she would save Seto and Mokuba. Of course she wouldn't let anything happen to her friends. She'd never for a moment thought she would fail.

But she'd failed a friend once before, long before she'd come to Domino. He was in a wheelchair, and it was her fault, and after hospitalizing the gang member responsible, she'd had to face the fact that there was nothing she could do to actually fix it.

Now she had to face that again.

Mokuba's gone. The words echoed in her ears, louder than any roar from the shadows.

She looked at Seto.

Knowing Mokuba was his entire world, Yori expected to see Seto broken, but instead, he maintained his frozen glare. If anything, he stood taller than he had while facing Gozaburo.

"I came back from death itself," he said. "So I'll bring Mokuba back, if I have to sell my soul to do it."

His words swirled around her like a cold tide, dragging at her limbs, pulling her toward something deep and dark and terrible.

Not now, Yori pled. Not ever.

But the ancient memory that had been clawing at her since she'd entered the virtual world would no longer be restrained, not without Dante to act as barrier. Like quicksand, the memory pulled her from the world above and into a hell beneath.

There was no moon the night Yaara broke into the palace. She'd belonged there once, before the war and the deaths and the chaos. That belonging had been entirely wrapped up in one royal boy with vibrant violet eyes.

He was gone now. And she didn't belong anywhere.

Which was why she'd made a deal with a god.

The bloodline of the pharaohs holds the power of Ra, Horus had told her. The power of reincarnation. Only that blood can grant your wish.

The pharaoh was gone. Akhenaden, his uncle, was dead as well. Supposedly, the bloodline had ended. But Yaara knew something even the priests didn't know, something she'd overheard from Akhenaden before his death.

He had a son. Not just any son—the blue-eyed prodigy of the palace.

High Priest Seth was a secret that was never meant to be told.

Horus said it wasn't enough to spill a little blood. It had to be all of it. When the god gave Yaara a golden dagger branded with the mark of his eye, he made it clear the blade had to find a sheath in the beating heart of Ra's bloodline.

This night, she was not just an intruder. She was an assassin.

She found Seth in his rooms, standing on the balcony and looking calmly out at a moonless night as if all his betrayals had never happened. As if he wasn't the reason the pharaoh was gone.

He'd removed his headdress, his golden ornaments, even his blue tunic. He stood in only a thin robe of white linen, arms crossed at his chest, shoulders relaxed. Compared to the merciless judge of Egypt she had always faced in the past, this simple brown-haired man seemed naked. Vulnerable.

Yaara hesitated in the shadows of the room. The dagger's hilt grew heavy in her hand.

Then she tightened her grip.

She couldn't fall for the lie. Seth was heartless, and even without the Millennium Rod, he was still taller than her, stronger than her, and possessed of training no slave could hope to match. If he realized her intent, he would not hesitate to kill her.

Besides, why should she feel ashamed to kill a man who had murdered countless others? He may have claimed it was all in the defense of Egypt, but if that had been his true motivation, he would have done anything to save his pharaoh.

If Yaara turned away now, she would consign herself to life with a shattered heart. A very short life, too, considering she was a runaway slave. Either the desert would claim her or she would meet with a soldier's spear. Meanwhile, the man she loved would wake to a second life far in the future, completely alone, left to fight the same war he'd already lost with even greater disadvantages.

She didn't know why the war had been postponed, didn't understand the plans of the gods or what the future would hold. She only knew she couldn't let him face it alone.

So she would take the bloody road forward.

Noah Kaiba's earliest memory was standing in a hallway, reaching for his father and hearing the man's rejection of him.

Tend to this, Father had told his guard. Noah wasn't even a person. He was a this.

He'd shown that memory to Mokuba. A strange thing, to be able to show his memories. Usually he just drowned in them, like a child in the deep end of a pool without a lifeguard.

Lifeguard. He hated words that contained life. He was jealous of them.

His father had promised him a new life. He'd promised that, with Noah's help, they'd bring Seto and Mokuba to the virtual world. Seto was supposed to be Father's new life; Mokuba was supposed to be Noah's.

Noah should have seen the lie. Should have recognized the water of it in his lungs. Instead, he'd let it be coated by the taste of hope. He could have taken a new life by force, just as his father had done in the end, but he'd hesitated when meeting Mokuba, let himself be distracted by learning truth rather than seizing opportunity. He should have been ruthless. Perhaps that would have shocked his father. Or perhaps that had been his father's hope all along, and Noah had once again been a disappointment.

He's such a disappointment, he couldn't even manage to do the simplest of tasks—keep living. Father had said that, too, in his message to Seto. He claimed he hated Seto, but he was honest with him. He treated Seto as an equal because Seto wasn't a disappointment. He was so much bigger. He was a threat, and even if Father hated a threat, he gave it his attention.

For the smallest moment, Noah had tried to be a threat. Tried to fight back. He'd tried to fend off his father and defend Mokuba.

It had been sentimental. Instead of drowning in his own memories, he'd drowned in Mokuba's, and he'd swallowed the water of the words the only brother he will ever have. For one foolish instant, he'd imagined he could have a brother. Imagined he could be a brother. All because Mokuba had looked right at Noah—pixelated and falling apart and barely even a ghost—and even while seeing all his flaws, the boy had smiled and said, We're sort of family, right?

It ached to think about. It pulled pieces from Noah's skin and left gaping holes behind. Another memory to drown in.

And in the end, all it had been was imagination. A fantasy. Because Noah wasn't anyone's brother. He wasn't a son to his father, and he wasn't a threat, either. Noah was just a this.

A disappointment.

"What have you done with her?" Seto demanded, gesturing to the place his friend Yori had disappeared.

Seto was so tall. Not just in the literal sense but in an annoyingly symbolic sense. Even though Noah's twenty-year-old self was only an imagined rendering of what he might have been, he couldn't make himself taller than Seto. He'd tried. But he fell a few inches short. His subconscious knew the truth. Falling short.

Noah touched his cheek where the pixels gnawed. He rubbed his fingertips together, but they blended into one tangle of digital boxes.

"I didn't do an-ything to your frien-d," he said. "She wrestles with h-er own subconscious."

He knew the feeling.

Seto narrowed his piercing blue eyes. "Turn my menu back on."

Noah slid his hands into his pockets. It was silly to keep himself in his school uniform as an adult, but he didn't know what else to wear. Slim-fitting black like Seto? Cheerful colors and a vest like Mokuba? He hadn't lived long enough to develop a personal style. He just wore what he was told to wear.

"After F-ather adopted you," he said, "he uploaded a pic-ture for me. Seto Kaiba, Mokuba Kaiba—just experiments, Father said. He t-old me you cheated against him in chess, trying to w-in adoption. He told me you made him cu-rious. He t-old me you had a dangerous mind. When he saved my life—my mind, at least—I thought Father and I were g-etting a fresh start. But every t-ime he talked to me, it was only to talk about y-ou."

"Spare me the self-pity. Turn my menu back on."

Noah smiled faintly. "You s-ound like Father."

The outward mess of Noah's appearance couldn't compare to the mess inside. He'd seen Seto's memories. At least enough of them to form a picture. Gozaburo had not been a loving father to Seto any more than he'd been to Noah—surely that should have pleased Noah. It should have satisfied his jealousy. At the very least, it should have fueled his indignation. He should have felt an outcry that his father was a terrible person who used people. He should have sworn to separate himself from the man. To be his own person.

But Noah wasn't a person at all. And all he felt was confused.

"I miss M-okuba," he whispered.

What a stupid sentiment. Missing a brother he'd never had.

The hard lines of Seto's face softened. He closed his eyes, looking away. After a moment, he said, "He has that effect on people."

Noah's lips twitched again. "He put stars in m-y room. He said I should h-ang p-osters."

Seto snorted, shaking his head.

"When Father j-oined me here, it was like a dream. I wasn't alone anymo-re. He told me you'd killed him, and I knew I sh-ould hate you, but really, I was just gra-teful. Grateful not to be alone." Noah looked up at the sky, a gray slate of textureless clouds, dim and faraway. "Someone like tha-t doesn't deserve stars."

He heard Seto shift. Heard him sigh.

"I am not the person for emotional advice," he said. "So . . . help me get Mokuba back, and he'll tell you all the reasons you deserve stars."

Noah looked at Seto Kaiba in a new light. He was tall, and standing next to him was uncomfortable, but maybe there were worse people to stand tall. Worse people to stand beside.

"If anyone ca-n save him, it's y-ou," Noah said quietly. "You don't ne-ed me."

No one did.

Perhaps that was why his father's final act before leaving the virtual world had been to train missiles on his own son.

"I like to think I don't need anyone." Seto's voice emerged slowly, like he had to weave each word through a path of obstacles to give it voice. "But at this point, even Wheeler has saved my life. Twice. So my pride is effectively shredded."

When Noah tilted his head, Seto quickly raised a hand. "Don't ask. Just turn my menu back on so I can navigate this damn world. Please."

The please was surprising. It wasn't anything close to begging; it was more clipped than that. Tossed in as an afterthought. At the last second, Seto had chosen to turn his order into a request. He was choosing to give courtesy to a person who didn't deserve it. Arguably, Noah wasn't a person at all.

But maybe he could help. At least in this smallest of ways.

Noah closed his eyes, fading into a dream of black and green. Father described the system as limiting, imperfect. Before Zigfried's additions, Noah had been the one to navigate everything, because Father claimed the coding only fought him. Noah didn't understand code. While alive, he'd never tinkered with computers or learned programming. His father argued with the system in symbols and numbers. Noah didn't know that language.

Instead, he spoke a dream. Disjointed and imprecise, the way dreams were, scrapbooked together from fragments of intention and hope joined to images. And because it was Noah's dream, it was made of music, too. Music was the only language that had ever made sense to him, and music was the only home he'd ever known.

He gave his request in violin notes rather than words, and he heard the humming response. Wherever the system played discordant intonation that didn't match his composition, he gave a little nudge, the way he would have adjusted his fingers on the strings in real life. Where the volume only whispered, he applied pressure just as he would have to a bow, giving the notes strength.

When he appeared next to Seto again, the taller boy opened his menu and gave a satisfied grunt. But he didn't disappear right away. Instead, he narrowed his eyes on Noah—thoughtful this time, rather than antagonistic.

"He had to go through you," Seto said. "You were protecting Mokuba."

Noah looked away. "I didn't make m-uch of an ob-stacle."

"Obviously. But you should have." A shadow darkened the blue of Seto's eyes. "When you first came here, were you like this—the fractured appearance, the stutter? Gozaburo doesn't have those."

Noah struggled to remember. "The syst-em was different then. Not as visual. And I h-ad no one to t-alk to."

"But something changed?" Seto pressed.

"Someth-ing . . . yes."

At the beginning, Noah had felt like an astronaut in space. Freed from gravity, from air itself, with an endless universe stretching out before him and every planet within reach. He'd chalked it up to delirium, to the confusion of trading a real life for a digital one, because soon enough, he was tethered again. Looking up and wishing for stars.

"Gozaburo crippled you." Seto spoke the words with ice. "This system was his grand plan for immortality, and once he was certain it would work, he made sure you couldn't surpass him in it. Couldn't steal it out from under him, the way I stole KaibaCorp. He never makes a mistake, and if he does, he never makes it twice."

Noah's voice deserted him, leaving him with only a mournful melody echoing deep within.

"I'll fix it." Seto didn't offer it as a grand promise, only as a statement with confidence. "Then you help me beat him."

Yaara cried next to a corpse.

The moonless night pressed down on her in condemnation, a black shroud attempting to hide her shame from the world. Beside her, Seth was stretched out on his balcony, his blue eyes now cloudy and lifeless. The golden dagger protruded from his bloodied chest, and the Eye of Horus on its hilt stared at her in condemnation.

I'm sorry, she wanted to sob, but there was no apology to cover murder.

The air thickened with the scent of incense. Heavy streams of smoke twisted through the balcony, curling into the impression of a person, mostly formless, mostly colorless. But his gold eyes pierced the gloom, matching his dagger.

With a near-reverence, Horus rested his fingertips on the hilt of the dagger still buried in Seth's chest.

"I did what you wanted," Yaara choked out. Tears dripped from her chin, and she swiped a hand at them uselessly. "Now bind my soul to the items."

"A bold choice," Horus purred. "Don't mistake me—I find our bargain most favorable. But don't you worry your beloved pharaoh will hate you once he learns how you paid for your passage to the future with his own cousin's blood?"

He probably would. But even if he hated her for it, Yaara couldn't abandon him.

The god went on. "More entertaining, I'm sure, will be what Priest Seth himself thinks."

Yaara looked up, meeting Horus's golden eyes with her own tear-filled dark ones. "What?"

"His blood holds the power. He's the vessel of reincarnation. You're merely the passenger. When he rises again, so shall you." Horus gave a crooked smile. "I wonder what he'll say when given the chance to look his murderer in the eyes—perhaps he'll repay the favor."

Yaara had always assumed Horus was a merciful god. The sacred items bore his mark, and everyone within the palace walls revered him. She'd heard Shada pray for Horus's protection on his son. During stolen nights together, she'd listened to the pharaoh whisper of Horus's guidance, of how he felt it more keenly than Osiris's or even Ra's, especially once the war began.

It was why she'd sought Horus to begin with.

"You don't care what happens to me," she guessed, "because I'm not Egyptian. Because I don't worship you."

"Oh, I care a great deal what happens to you," Horus responded. The smoke of his essence swirled restlessly. "You could be the unmaking of all my careful plans. But it isn't a true game without competition and risk."

A branch of the smoke took shape into a hand with powerful gray fingers, wisping at the edges. Horus hooked two fingers around the dagger's rounded pommel and pulled it slowly from Seth's body. It dripped crimson blood from the tip.

Yaara watched that dagger, watched the slow drip of its poison. She swallowed.

"What do you get out of our deal?" she asked.

"Ra's blood is a gateway for mortals and immortals alike," he said. "For mortals, he opens the gate to eternity. Reincarnation. A drop of divinity enhancing a mortal life. For those of us who are already divine, sometimes what we need is a touch of mortality."

He turned the dagger, grasping it in a shifting hand. Blood dripped into the smoke, hissing and sending up the heavy aroma of incense. Yaara felt it clog her throat. Her head began to swim with the darkness all around.

"Seth won't be the only one you meet in the future," Horus said, his smile as heavy as the scent in the air. "Thank you, Yaara. You've truly changed the game."

The next heart the dagger met was hers.

With a crack of thunder, Yori found herself once more in the meadow, heaving for breath. She stumbled and fell, shooting pain through her knees. She pressed her fingers into grass that felt real but didn't smell real—perhaps because her head was still full of the nauseating odor of incense.

"Yori, are you alright?" said a familiar voice.

She looked up even though she didn't want to, and her traitorous eyes took in Seto, but they didn't see him.

They saw a living, breathing, blue-eyed Seth.

Earlier, he'd said he remembered everything. He'd known about Dante, about Kisara, about high priests Yori had yet to remember. He'd called her a slave, which meant he remembered Yaara from the past.

Everything.

She couldn't speak, but she couldn't look away. Her skin burned with the heat of shame, and distantly, she heard the shadows laughing. She felt a weakness cracking in her soul, felt the darkness seeping in like wisps of fog beneath a door.

"Wrestle with your demons later," said Seto, his blue eyes unreadable. "We're getting out of here."

Note: The darkest secret in Yori's past, finally unveiled. I have to say, one of the hardest parts of this story has always been working in the backstory. Since no one remembers the past, it's very difficult to explain how things happened-like how Yori and Seto got reincarnated in the future. Neither of them knew. Until now. Hopefully everything will make sense by the end. Thanks for reading!