THE MOON · TWENTY-ONE MONTHS SINCE THE SHIP LEFT
Megumi had rehearsed this. He had rehearsed it for two years. In the shadow-hall where he trained, in the corridors, lying in the dark with his eyes open.
In every version he had been calm. In every version his father saw him first.
Not one of the versions had happened on the loading floor.
The floor had stood empty for eleven days. Urahara had called it a resupply drill and then never run one.
Nobody asked. By now nobody did. Megumi came down on all eleven of those mornings and went away again.
On the twelfth the air in the middle of the deck grew an edge.
It was not a door and it did not open like one.
A line arrived, four storeys of it, and stood there being a line. Then it had a width. Then it had a country behind it, the colour of a bruise the week it starts to heal.
That country was Simuria, four light-years off. The road back from it had just been cut into the air of the loading floor.
The heat came across sixty metres of meteor-glass and made every alarm on the wall reconsider its position.
The smell came second. Hot stone, and something warm and sweet under it. The air handlers spent four days failing to shift it.
Then the cargo, because his father had loaded it that way.
Stasis orbs came through in ranks, thirty of them, the colour of a gas flame. A stasis orb holds a living thing still and asleep for as long as you like, and it has no opinion about what the thing is.
Each had a Greek letter on the face and a line of script under it, written in a hand that never hurried.
Each held something Megumi looked at once and did not look at again. Then crates, in a dark oily wood nobody on this Moon had seen growing.
Then the deck went warm through his boots.
It came out of the gate the way weather comes over a hill. Fourteen metres across if it was a centimetre, riding a hand's width off the floor.
One more orb, then, and the last one. Far too big for the building.
It would not go through the ring doors, which had been cut to take a shuttle. It took nine hours to walk it round.
The others carried a letter and a line of script. This one carried a single character.
Ω.
A long way inside it something turned over slowly, the colour of a lamp behind a paper shade. It went on turning.
The twenty of them stopped talking at the same instant. All together, the way a room goes quiet when a chair goes over behind you.
Twenty.
The roster had said twenty-one until the summer, when the sample librarian went home. Megumi had asked about that once and been given something true that was not an answer.
Sawicki came through behind the sphere with his eyes on the crane. Ferreira came through reading. Okonjo came last. She stopped a few paces in and looked up at the false blue morning behind the glass.
A physicist said something that would have been funny two years ago. She said it was good to be back.
Then his father came home.
He walked out of another world with his hands behind his back, at the pace of a man crossing his own hallway.
He did not look at the twenty. He did not look at the rail where his son had stood for eleven mornings.
He went to the sphere and stopped a centimetre short of it, palm flat to the air. He stayed there. A room full of people waited to be told what to do.
There was silver at his left temple now, a streak about two fingers wide. It had not been there when the ship went. Nobody explained it. Megumi did not ask. He was still not asking a week later.
"Well," said Urahara, from somewhere behind him, to nobody in particular. "I'll widen a corridor."
* * *
Gin came through last, hands in his sleeves, at the pace of a man entering a shop he has already decided not to buy anything in.
Two years, four light-years and a stolen god, and he had not changed by a millimetre.
He looked Megumi up and down the way a surveyor looks at a wall.
"You got taller," he said, in the tone of a man reporting a structural defect. "Didn't get better looking, though. Hard luck. That'll be the hat's cooking."
"You look old."
"I look distinguished."
Megumi had a list. Two years of adding to it. The whole thing went out of him at once, like air out of a bag.
What was left was a hot, undignified gladness that made him want to hit something. The only thing available was Gin. Gin knew it, and stood there with his eyes shut, enjoying it the way other men enjoy weather.
Megumi had made a shogi board himself. He had carried it down on every one of those mornings and carried it back up again.
It was under his arm now, wrapped in a coolant rag, and there was no version of this in which he came out well.
He shoved it at Gin. "Here."
Gin's eyes opened.
Gin had an answer for everything. In six years Megumi had never once got a silence out of him.
Not by asking. Not by sulking. Not by hitting him in the ribs as hard as he could at the age of nine.
Gin looked at the board.
Nothing came.
It lasted about a second. Then the fox came back, the way a light comes back after a surge.
"Eleven coats," Gin said.
"Ten." It had been eleven.
"Eleven. Two planks off a packing crate, and you've turned the stencil under so it faces the bench." He tilted it to the crane lamp and ran his thumb down the fourth file. "And she's out of true along there by about a hair."
Gin had never been able to look at a made thing without seeing every joint in it. The board had told him the whole two years in four seconds.
"Give it back."
"Nobody'll ever find it but me." He tucked it under his arm.
"You'll cheat," Megumi said.
"'Course I'll cheat."
"I know."
"Good."
He did not hand the board to anybody. He carried it himself, four levels and two lifts. At the mouth of the corridor he stopped with his hand on the frame.
"Boy. That hall still drink the noise?"
Megumi did not answer.
"Mm," said Gin, and went up.
* * *
The workshop smelled of solder and burnt sugar. For the first time in two years there was somebody in the other chair.
Urahara put a cup down in front of the most dangerous man in the solar system. "It's the chocolate. I've had two years to improve it and I haven't."
"No," Aizen agreed, having tried some. "You have not."
Urahara gave him the break-in first, because it was older and smaller. He gave it the way he gave everything, with the point buried in the middle.
"Seven months ago, two in the morning. A man came into the base through a doorway built out of your own physics."
"He came off an anchor buried nine hundred metres from my airlock. It has been sitting in that ground since before we poured the floor. He got four hundred and twelve metres in, and he was very good."
Urahara turned the cup round on the bench.
"I let him find out exactly three things. All three were true. I chose all three of them myself."
"Then I sent him home on a trolley, alive, with a fresh cartridge in his filter. A man who escapes tells his masters what he saw. A man who dies tells them what he didn't."
So the people who sent him had a report they could trust. Every fact in it picked out by the man they were spying on.
The fan came out. "There was a seam under the hair at the back of his head. Old, and badly sewn."
Aizen had not moved through any of it.
"A skull does not have a seam in it unless somebody has opened it and shut it again," he said. "Somebody put a different mind into that body and sewed the lid back down. Badly, and a long time ago."
"The seam is worth more than the barrier."
"That's what I thought."
"Do not put a name to them in front of the staff. Not yet. A name settles a thing before it has finished settling."
Urahara laid the vault register down and slid it across, open at the diagram.
The vault under the base had held seven blackened fingers of Sukuna, the King of Curses.
Twenty was all that was ever left of him. Thirteen sat sealed in clan vaults down on Earth.
These seven were the only ones loose in any world, and four of them together were enough to bring him back into it.
The diagram showed four neat empty rectangles, and the label Urahara had written under them in his cheerful hand.
*ON LOAN.*
The authorisation column beside it was blank, because nobody had authorised anything. The thief had been allowed to walk out with them.
Aizen read it, which took four seconds.
"You gave away four fingers of the King of Curses," Aizen said, "so that the world would be forced to build me a better enemy." He set the register down.
"Urahara. That is the single most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given me."
"Well. You left me two years of empty afternoons."
"You have the smaller half of it, though."
The fan stopped. Urahara let it stay stopped. Pretending otherwise would have insulted them both.
"The four are noise. Somebody down there will decide to use them, in a year or in ten. The country will do what frightened countries do. That is the loud half, and you may keep the credit for it."
Aizen put one finger on the diagram and turned the register round.
"Your man counted seven on the plinth. He took four and he left three. He will have reported that number honestly. A man who lies about a number like that is no use to anybody."
"So his masters now know there are three left. On the Moon. At an address."
He drank the chocolate. "Every clan that grows large enough to matter will want the rest of the King of Curses. There is exactly one place in any world to come and get it."
"You did not build me an enemy. You built me a queue."
"I didn't ask you," Urahara said. "I did it on a Thursday and I did it on my own."
"I know. I have read the log." Aizen rose. "I prefer to be presented with a thing finished."
"So do I."
"Yes. I had noticed. Nine days from tonight, if you please. Let them all get used to the gate first. Then I should like an evening with the two of you and nothing on the table."
He stopped at the door with his hand on the frame.
"The boy."
Urahara had had twenty-one months to choose an answer to that. He heard himself give the flattest one in the drawer.
"He's grown three now. The dogs, the toad, and one more. The third has wings, and it takes the whole hall to fly."
"Show me," Aizen said.
* * *
The shadow-hall had no light and no edges and nothing to lean on. Urahara stood just inside the door, where he always stood.
His hands went into his sleeves and the fan stayed where it was.
He had come down wanting one thing he could not say out loud.
He wanted to be wrong about the man.
Aizen walked out into the middle of the dark and said his son's name. Megumi came out of the black at a pace that was very nearly a run, and stopped himself two metres short.
The whole of the last two years was in that two metres.
"Show me the dogs."
They came up out of his shadow, white first and then black. Shoulder-high, ears up, steady. They stood in the room the way furniture stands in a room.
"Good. The toad."
The toad came, and sat where it was put, and did not dissolve.
"Good." Then, with no change in his voice at all, "Now show me the third one. The one with the wings."
The boy's head came round. Nobody had told him about the third one. Urahara had not told him either. He watched the boy decide it was the best thing anybody had said to him in two years.
The hall got weather. Air moved across the floor. The black went blacker in a shape.
Then the nue came up out of nothing with a sound like a sail taking wind. A nue is a shadow bird, and a big one, and it had cost Megumi the better part of two years.
It climbed, and kept climbing, and the long dead room was not quite enough for it.
Aizen watched it for eleven seconds without blinking. Urahara counted, the way he had counted everything in that hall for two years.
"Good," Aizen said. "Sooner than I expected."
Megumi brought it down and then would not stop talking. He said how long he could hold the wings up. Then he admitted the real number, which was better.
He put the dogs back up without being asked, to prove he could hold all three at once. Somewhere in the middle of it he stopped killing his own smile. That took him about as long as it takes anybody.
"You've grown," Aizen said, and there was nothing in his voice but pleasure. His left hand rested on the boy's head. The right had done nothing all evening, and Urahara had counted that too.
"How much can you hold now?"
It was a perfectly ordinary thing for a father to ask.
Urahara had heard the same question, phrased in the same way, put to a reactor.