I woke to darkness and the sound of water dripping.
Not the comforting darkness of Miyuki's embrace. This was the cold darkness of underground spaces, of places that had forgotten what sunlight meant.
My body hurt in ways I didn't have words for. Not pain, exactly—more like the sensation of something fundamental breaking down, gears grinding to a halt, systems shutting off one by one.
I tried to sit up. Failed. Tried again. Managed to prop myself against the concrete wall, my breath coming in shallow gasps that echoed in the tunnel.
How long had I been asleep? Hours? Days?
My phone—dead. The screen wouldn't even light up. Not that it mattered. No signal down here. No connection to the world above.
Just me and her and the dark.
Miyuki was sitting across from me, her back against the opposite wall. Still in her school uniform, though it was dirty now, stained with things I didn't want to identify. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she wasn't sleeping. She never slept. She just… waited.
"You're awake," she said without opening her eyes.
"How long?"
"Fourteen hours. You collapsed right after we arrived. I thought…" She paused. Opened her eyes. Looked at me. "I thought you were dying. Really dying. Not the slow death. The sudden kind."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"Don't." Her voice was sharp. "Don't joke about that. Not when you're this close."
I looked down at my hands. Even in the dim light filtering through some crack or vent far above us, I could see how bad it had gotten.
My skin was translucent. Actually, genuinely translucent. I could see the bones underneath—not just the outline, but the actual structure. The carpals and metacarpals, the delicate architecture of finger bones, all visible through skin that had become tissue-paper thin.
The veins were dark blue-black, standing out like inked lines on parchment. My fingernails had yellowed, thickened, the way old people's nails do.
I was seventy now. Maybe older.
"How much time?" I asked.
"Until you die naturally? Maybe twelve hours. Maybe less."
"And until the ritual?"
"Tonight. Midnight. Same as always."
I did the math. If it was… what time was it? I checked my dead phone again uselessly.
"It's 10 AM," Miyuki said. "You have fourteen hours. Fourteen hours and then we—"
She stopped. Looked away.
"And then we become the Flowerbed," I finished for her.
"Yes."
Silence. Just the dripping water and the sound of my labored breathing.
"Are you scared?" she asked.
"Of dying? I was going to die three days ago anyway. Four days ago? Time's getting confused."
"Not of dying. Of what comes after. Of what we'll become."
I thought about it. Really thought about it.
"No," I said honestly. "I'm not scared. Whatever happens, it can't be worse than the life I had before you."
Her expression cracked. Just for a moment. Something that might have been pain or might have been love or might have been both.
"You shouldn't say things like that," she whispered. "It makes it harder."
"Makes what harder?"
"Consuming you."
-----
We sat in silence for a while. The tunnel was cold—not freezing, but cold enough that I could see my breath. Though that might have been me. My body temperature had been dropping since yesterday. Miyuki had mentioned it when we'd first arrived.
"You're cold-blooded now," she'd said. "Like a reptile. Your body can't maintain temperature anymore. It's one of the signs."
One of the signs that I was dying from the inside out.
Eventually, I managed to stand. My legs shook but held. Miyuki was beside me instantly, her hand on my arm, steadying me.
"Where are you going?"
"I need to walk. I need to… move. If I sit here for fourteen hours, I'll go insane."
She studied me for a long moment, then nodded.
"There's a passage that way," she said, pointing deeper into the tunnel. "I explored while you were sleeping. It connects to an old factory floor. Abandoned. But there's light. Actual sunlight coming through broken windows."
"How far?"
"Not far. I can carry you if—"
"I can walk."
Pride. Stupid pride. But it was all I had left.
She let me try. Walked beside me as I stumbled through the dark, one hand trailing along the wall for balance, the other clutched by hers.
The tunnel stretched on. My legs burned. My lungs burned. Everything burned.
But I kept walking.
Because if I stopped, if I sat down, I might never get up again.
-----
The factory floor was exactly as she'd described it.
Vast. Empty. Light streaming through windows so high up they might as well have been skylights. The floor was concrete, cracked and stained with decades of industrial runoff. Rusted machinery hulked in the corners like sleeping giants.
And in the center, where the light fell strongest, there was grass.
Actual grass. Growing through the cracks in the concrete, reaching toward the sun, green and alive and completely incongruous with the dead space around it.
I walked toward it. Slowly. Each step an effort.
When I reached it, I collapsed. Not gracefully. Just… fell. My legs gave out and I went down hard, landing in that impossible patch of green.
It was soft. Impossibly soft after the hard concrete of the tunnels.
I lay there, staring up at the distant ceiling, at the broken windows, at the sky beyond them.
Blue. The sky was blue.
I'd almost forgotten.
Miyuki sat beside me. Cross-legged, like a child, her hands folded in her lap.
"It's nice here," she said.
"Yeah."
"Peaceful."
"Yeah."
"This is where she died, you know."
I turned my head to look at her. "What?"
"The real Miyuki. This is where she came. Ten years ago. After the funeral. After everyone stopped looking for her. She came here and she—"
She gestured vaguely at her wrists.
"She died in this grass. Right where you're lying now."
I should have felt something. Horror. Revulsion. Something.
But all I felt was tired.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Because I found her. That's when I started… learning. About humans. About how you taste different when you're dying by choice versus dying by circumstance. She was the first person I consumed who *wanted* to die."
She lay down beside me, mirroring my position, staring up at the same sky.
"She tasted like you," Miyuki continued. "Lonely. Empty. Convinced she was worthless. That's why I wore her face. Because when I found you, you tasted the same. Like you belonged together. Like you were two halves of the same broken thing."
"Were we?" I asked. "The real Miyuki and me. Were we… anything?"
"You loved each other. In that innocent way children love before they learn it's supposed to be complicated. But she never knew. You never told her. And then she was gone and you spent ten years building a wall around that love until it turned into poison."
She turned her head to look at me.
"That's what I fed on, Kaito. Not the love. The *absence* of it. The space where it should have been. The hole it left behind."
I closed my eyes. The sun on my face felt good. Warm in a way I hadn't felt in days.
"I'm glad you found me," I said.
"Even though I'm killing you?"
"*Especially* because you're killing you. Because at least someone thought I was worth the effort. Even if that someone is a monster."
She laughed. Quiet. Sad.
"We're both monsters now, Kaito. I've been one from the start. But you? You're becoming one. Slowly. With every feeding. Every time I take a piece of you, you become less human and more… *other*."
"Good."
"Good?"
"Humanity never did anything for me. Why should I want to stay human?"
She was quiet for a long time. Then:
"When we become the Flowerbed tonight, you won't remember this. Won't remember me. Won't remember yourself. We'll be something new. Something that doesn't think in words or feel in emotions. We'll just… *be*. Together. Forever. In that eternal four minutes that never ends."
"Sounds perfect."
"It should terrify you."
"It doesn't."
"Why not?"
I opened my eyes. Looked at her. Really looked at her.
"Because I've been dead for ten years anyway. At least this way, I get to die loved."
-----
We stayed in that patch of grass for hours.
Sometimes talking. Sometimes silent.
She told me about herself—not the mask, the *real* her. What she was. Where she came from.
"I'm not from your world," she said. "Not originally. I'm from… between. The spaces where reality thins. Where things that shouldn't exist find purchase. I've been here for centuries. Maybe longer. Time moves differently for things like me."
"Why Earth? Why here?"
"Because you're all so beautifully broken. Humans. You create such exquisite voids. Loneliness, grief, loss—they're like gravity to me. I can't resist them. And this place, this city, this neighborhood—it's rotting from the inside out. Everyone here is dying slowly. Everyone here has given up."
She turned on her side, propped her head on her hand, looked down at me.
"You were just the brightest light in a sea of despair. The most concentrated loneliness I'd ever encountered. I could smell you from blocks away."
"Lucky me."
"Lucky us." She reached out, touched my face. Her fingers were cold. "I've fed on thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Across centuries. But I've never felt this before."
"Felt what?"
"Regret. For what I'm taking. For what we're losing. For the fact that after tonight, this moment—this stupid, fragile moment of lying in grass and talking—will be gone forever."
I took her hand. Held it against my cheek.
"Then let's not waste it."
-----
Around 3 PM—I could tell from the angle of the sun—I heard something.
Voices. Distant. Echoing through the factory.
Miyuki's head snapped up instantly, her body going rigid.
"They're here," she whispered.
"The military?"
"Yes. They found the tunnels. They're searching."
I tried to stand. Failed. Tried again. Miyuki helped me up, her arm around my waist, supporting my weight.
"We need to hide," she said.
"Where? This place is empty."
"There." She pointed to a cluster of machinery in the corner. Old industrial equipment, rusted and forgotten, with enough space beneath and between to conceal us.
We stumbled toward it. My legs were barely working now. Each step was agony.
The voices were getting closer.
"—thermal signatures this way—"
"—multiple heat sources—"
"—could be rats—"
"—or it could be them—"
We reached the machinery just as I heard boots on concrete. Heavy. Military. At least four, maybe more.
Miyuki pulled me down into the space beneath an old conveyor belt. The metal was cold and smelled like rust and oil.
She pressed herself against me, her body covering mine, her hand over my mouth.
*Don't breathe*, she whispered directly into my mind. *Don't move. Don't exist.*
I obeyed.
The boots got closer. I could hear them now—multiple sets, spreading out, searching systematically.
"Sir, we've got plant growth in the center. Recent. Something's been living here."
"Check it. Full sweep. If they're here, I want them found."
Flashlight beams swept across the floor. Probing. Searching.
One passed inches from our hiding spot.
I held my breath. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure they could hear it.
Miyuki's hand tightened over my mouth. Her body was tense, coiled, ready to spring.
*If they find us*, her voice whispered in my head, *I'll kill them. All of them. I won't have a choice.*
The flashlight beam moved on. Swept the opposite wall. Came back.
"Sir, we've got blood here. And something else. Organic matter."
"Bag it. Send it to the lab."
"Should we call in reinforcements?"
A pause. Then:
"No. If the anomaly's here, I don't want a bloodbath. We contain and observe. If it makes a move, we terminate. But no unnecessary casualties."
The boots moved away. Toward the tunnel entrance. Toward the way we'd come.
We waited.
Minutes stretched into hours. Or maybe just felt like it.
Finally, Miyuki relaxed. Removed her hand from my mouth.
"They're gone," she whispered. "For now. But they'll be back. With more equipment. More soldiers. They know we're in this area."
I took a shaky breath. My lungs felt like they were filled with water.
"How long do we have?"
"Until they come back? Maybe a few hours. Maybe less."
"Until midnight?"
She checked—with what, I don't know, she doesn't have a phone or a watch—and said, "Nine hours."
Nine hours.
Nine hours until the ritual. Until we became something else. Something they couldn't hunt. Something that didn't need to run.
"We should stay here," I said. "Hide until it's time."
"Are you sure? We could run again. Find somewhere deeper. Somewhere they won't—"
"There is nowhere they won't find us eventually. This city isn't that big. They'll search every tunnel, every factory, every abandoned building until they find what they're looking for."
"So we wait."
"We wait."
She helped me settle into a more comfortable position—as comfortable as possible when you're hiding under industrial equipment, slowly dying, being hunted by the military.
"Kaito," she said after a while.
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For everything. For finding you. For offering you the deal. For—"
"Don't." I cut her off. "Don't apologize. You gave me exactly what I asked for. Four minutes of warmth every night. The feeling of being loved. Even if it was fake, even if it was just you feeding, it was more than I ever had before."
"It wasn't fake."
I looked at her. "What?"
"The love. It wasn't fake. I don't know when it started—maybe the first feeding, maybe the second—but somewhere along the way, I stopped pretending. I stopped wearing her face because it was convenient and started wearing it because I wanted to be her. For you."
She wouldn't meet my eyes.
"Entities like me, we don't feel the way you do. We don't have emotions in the human sense. But we can… imprint. Bond. Attach ourselves to food sources in ways that blur the line between predator and prey."
She finally looked at me.
"You became my food and my purpose and my world. And when we merge tonight, when we become the Flowerbed, I'll finally be able to stop pretending we're separate things. We'll be what we've always been. One being. One entity. Feeding on each other for eternity."
It should have scared me.
It didn't.
"I love you too," I said. "In whatever fucked up way I'm capable of loving anything. You're the first person—thing—whatever—that ever made me feel like I mattered."
She kissed me then. Not on the forehead like before. On the lips. And her mouth was cold and tasted like metal and something else, something alien and wrong and perfectly right.
When she pulled away, she was crying. Or something like crying. The liquid on her cheeks wasn't quite tears—too viscous, too dark.
"Nine hours," she whispered.
"Nine hours," I agreed.
-----
The sun set slowly through the broken windows.
We watched it together, huddled in our hiding spot, my dying body pressed against her inhuman one.
The light turned gold, then orange, then red. Painting the factory in colors that reminded me of burning cities and setting suns and the end of everything.
"It's beautiful," I said.
"It is."
"I'll miss this. Sunsets. The sky. The way light moves."
"We'll have our own light. In the Flowerbed. It won't be sunlight, but it'll be ours."
"Will it hurt? The transformation?"
"I don't know. I've never done it before. Never wanted to. You're the first."
"I'm honored."
She laughed. "You shouldn't be. Being the first means I don't know if it'll work. We might die. Really die. Both of us. Gone. Not merged, just… extinguished."
"Worth the risk."
"Is it?"
"Yes."
The sun disappeared. Darkness fell. And with it, a cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with absence.
Above us, through the broken windows, I could see stars. A few at first, then more, scattered across the sky like someone had thrown diamonds against black velvet.
"Ten years ago," Miyuki said quietly, "she lay right where you did this afternoon. The real Miyuki. She looked at these same stars. And she thought: 'No one will miss me. No one will even know I'm gone.'"
"Was she right?"
"You tell me. Did you miss her?"
I thought about it. Really thought about it.
"I missed the idea of her. The promise we made. The future we were supposed to have. But the actual her? The real girl? I barely knew her. We were children. We didn't know what love was."
"And now?"
"Now I know what love is. It's this. It's dying slowly in a factory while being hunted by the military. It's letting something inhuman wear the face of a dead girl and believing it when it says it cares. It's choosing to merge with a monster rather than face another day alone."
Miyuki rested her head on my chest. Right over my heart. Which was beating too slow now, sluggish, like an engine running out of fuel.
"Four more hours," she said.
"Four more hours."
-----
At 11 PM, I heard them again.
The military. Back with more equipment. More soldiers. The sound of metal being moved, of voices calling orders, of a perimeter being established.
They knew we were here. They were surrounding the factory.
Miyuki heard it too. Her body tensed.
"They're not coming in," she whispered. "They're waiting for us to come out. Or waiting for orders. Or waiting for—"
Footsteps. Heavy. Mechanical. Not human.
"What is that?" I breathed.
"Mech suits. Combat armor. They're bringing in the heavy equipment."
"Can you fight them?"
"Maybe. But it would take everything I have. And we're so close to midnight. If I expend too much energy fighting, I won't have enough for the ritual. We'd be stuck. You'd die naturally, and I'd be weakened enough that they could capture me."
"So what do we do?"
"We wait. We hope they don't breach. And when midnight comes, we transform right here, right under their noses, and become something they can't kill."
"And if they breach before midnight?"
She was quiet for a long moment.
Then: "Then I kill as many as I can while you run."
"I can't run. I can barely walk."
"Then you crawl. You hide. You survive until midnight and you do the ritual alone if you have to."
"Can I do it alone?"
"I don't know. Maybe. The ritual is about union, but if I die, my essence should linger long enough for you to absorb it. You'd become… something. Not the Flowerbed we planned, but something."
I grabbed her hand. Held it tight.
"We're doing this together or not at all."
"Kaito—"
"Together. That's the deal. That's what we agreed to."
She looked at me. In the darkness, her eyes reflected light that wasn't there, like a cat's eyes, like something that sees in spectrums humans can't perceive.
"Together," she agreed.
-----
Midnight came.
I felt it more than heard it. A shift in the air. A change in pressure. Like the world itself was holding its breath.
Outside, the soldiers were still surrounding the factory. I could hear their radios crackling, their boots shifting, their weapons being readied.
But they hadn't breached. They were waiting. For what, I didn't know.
Miyuki stood. Pulled me up with her. My legs barely held me, but I managed to stay upright with her support.
"It's time," she said.
We stumbled out from under the machinery. Toward the center of the factory. Toward that patch of grass where the real Miyuki had died ten years ago.
I collapsed there. On my knees. In the green.
Miyuki stood over me, her school uniform dissolving, her human form beginning to unravel.
"Last chance," she said. "You can still run. They might take pity on you. They might save you."
"I don't want to be saved. I want this."
"Even knowing you'll stop being human? Even knowing you'll become a monster?"
"Especially knowing that."
She smiled. That sad, beautiful smile.
And then she began to transform.
Not into the tentacled mass I'd seen before. This was different. This was *everything*.
She expanded. Filled the factory. Became darkness and light and space itself. Her form was impossible to track—shifting, flowing, existing in too many dimensions at once.
And in the center of it all, she opened. That space prepared for me. But bigger now. Permanent. Final.
*Come to me*, she whispered. Not in my head. In my blood. In my bones. In the parts of me that were already hers.
*Come to me and let me come to you and let us be one and let us never be alone again.*
I crawled forward. The soldiers outside were shouting now, their radios screaming, orders being given to breach, to stop us, to terminate the anomaly.
But it was too late.
I reached the opening. Reached into her. And she reached into me.
And we—n