Erina wasn't interested in torture, and she was sure someone like Julian was impossible to crack anyway. She had to give up her train of thought.

  She switched tracks. "Those markings… the ones like lightning. Darius has them on his arms. Kirigami has them around his eye."

  Julian was still silent. Erina couldn't tell what he was thinking.

  "Lazarus has them in her hair," said Erina. "What are they?"

  A quick, short breath left him. If Erina didn't know better, he almost sounded amused.

  "Lichtenberg figures," said Julian. "That is the formal term. The path of lightning… The growth of trees… The veins in our bodies. Fractals are nature's most fluent language. The most natural form." He adjusted himself under the tree, looking for a position where it wasn't crushing quite so much air out of him. "It is the proof of what we gave up—what Eve forced us to gain."

  "…I see."

  "I will admit," said Julian. "These powers are not meant to fight. They are tools with which to rule. An eye that sees all futures. A heart that acknowledges no equals. A mind that dives into the soul itself." A dry smile crossed his face. "I suppose there is one exception. Hands with which to conquer all things."

  He shifted his head. Deep red eyes met green.

  "What kind of person do you think would seek such power?" he said. "To harness all of it at once. And what are you compared to that?"

  "That's what I intend to find out," said Erina. "I'm not content to live in ignorance. I want to find the answers, no matter how terrible." Frowning, she pointedly added, "Not least of which because you'd condemn me for it either way."

  "You should not have come here." He shook his head as he settled back into the dirt with a rueful smile. "…Fragarach."

  "Eh?"

  "This is a world that does not exist," said Julian. "What we can touch is nothing but the closest we can approximate to it—an incomplete shadow built from the past of those who set foot here."

  "I… see."

  "The sword on the hill. That is the key."

  Erina looked over her shoulder to where she knew it was, even out of sight. "Have you been here before?"

  "Not this constructed space specifically, no."

  "So how do you know where to go?"

  "A world without reality defaults to the first strands it can grasp. The people who enter this place define it."

  Erina waited for him to elaborate, but nothing else came. She muttered in thought, "Is this a memory or a dream? If you know this place, it must be… the memory of someone you know… or someone who has been here before?" She asked, "Who was it? What happened here?"

  No response was forthcoming. Julian didn't seem interested in speaking another word. Erina left the enforcer under the tree and made her way to the hill.

  Once again, she stood before the bloodstained blade.

  Erina thought to herself. An approximation of a world, unbound by reality and incomprehensible to human perception. Space barely held itself together. Time did not flow properly. The copycat trees, the empty half-city… They existed—or rather, didn't exist—because their memories lacked such details.

  Erina's hand reached out, hesitant and faltering. Her fingers stopped shy of touching the handle and flinched back. There was nothing wrong with the sword as far as she could tell. There was no trace of lingering magic or distorted reality. Battered and bloodstained, yes, but ordinary otherwise. Even so, looking at it twisted her gut into knots. It made her feel queasy in a way even the rotted laboratory depths didn't.

  Was it a trick? Was this Julian's last attempt to stop her from going any further? Erina scanned the sword.

  It wasn't a sword, in the same sense that what she stood on wasn't grass and dirt. Its composition wasn't metal, nor were the trees really made of wood. Everything came back… blank. Yet in that regard, it was also perfectly normal for its surroundings.

  Erina quashed her misgivings and forced her hand to close around the handle—

  .

  Erina started. Her fist was closed on nothing but air.

  She looked around. There was no forest. That reality had ceased to be, a new one asserted in its place. She stood in a long, dark red hallway that seemed to continue forever. It was small and thin, dim walls patterned and floored with carpet like the hall of a modest house.

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  Tall mirrors adorned the walls, facing each other in an endless repeating pattern down the hall. Erina's reflection looked back at her. Her reflection's reflection looked away at its own reflection, on and on beyond her sight. Erina checked over her shoulder one more time before setting out down the hall in the direction she assumed was forward.

  There was no lighting. The only illumination came from the small arched windows near the ceiling. A moonless night sky hung on the other side, starlight twinkling down into the lonely corridor.

  A cracked mirror, jagged lines running across it. Erina's gaze lingered on it as she walked by.

  Then she doubled back. This one wasn't a mirror. Rather than her own reflection, Erina saw a tiny blonde girl in a dark, dismal room. She was curled up on a dingy cot. The thin sheets did little to disguise her thinner frame. Filth and grime coated the walls of the cramped underground cell. Erina couldn't identify the stains on the sheets… or rather, she didn't want to.

  Erina reached out and touched the glass. It was solid. The cracks in the mirror revealed the wall behind it. There was nothing on the other side.

  She lingered at the frame a moment longer, and then moved on. Erina's reflections walked with her.

  Not all of them were mirrors. Rough men appeared in the cell, little more than vague black outlines, their identities long since forgotten. The girl lifted off her feet by the hair, struck back to the floor, and dragged up again to take out their frustrations on.

  The thin sheets were stripped away from her cured fingers. Her bare form exposed and an inaudible scream on her lips, a rough hand pushed her down and the men—

  Erina moved on, her head down and her gaze carefully avoiding the mirrors. She wasn't interested in staring at the depravity humans were capable of. Still, she couldn't avoid looking entirely.

  Youkai couldn't be killed physically. That didn't mean they couldn't be hurt. They could be beaten, struck against a wall, kicked until every rib in their body broke. They would feel all of it… and then they would heal, ready to be broken again.

  More cracks began to appear in the mirrors that emerged from the dark. Against her will, Erina's eyes drifted to a severely damaged one looking into another scene, fissures covering most of its surface. The same girl in the same cell. There was a stranger with her, but this one was a person—not the shadowy faceless things from before. Erina couldn't see his face from this angle as he covertly offered the frail girl a flask of water and dry, stale bread. She could see he had nothing better to offer. It was one droplet of mercy in an ocean of torment.

  Another mirror, another glimpse into this other world. Erina saw him return again under cover of night with only a candle to guide him, sneaking the girl whatever he could. He sat with her and offered what little solace he could. He was there at the sidelines as the rest of the men he worked with did as they pleased with her—but he never participated. He waited until they were gone, veins in his arms betraying the tight fists in his pockets, and then went to comfort her in their absence. He was in no place to free her, but the girl seemed so incredibly grateful for even this pittance of relief.

  Erina couldn't hear the words, but she could see the new light of hope that returned to the girl's eyes. Perhaps this wouldn't be the rest of her life. Maybe it was okay to believe that one day, something better existed out there, and would arrive for her. He would make sure of it. Clinging to that last spark of hope, she endured.

  One single intact mirror gazed into a cell covered in blood and corpses. Another figure had entered the scene—green hair, dressed in a dark suit, a bowler hat, a reptilian tail, and a vicious scowl that he had to come all this way to drag this girl by the scruff of her neck out of this hellhole.

  One hand holding the thin sheets together around her, the girl fought Hiro every step of the way. Blood coated half her face. She kicked and yelled, trying to go back, desperately grabbing onto the bars of the cell for dear life, doing everything she could to make him turn around. All of it was in vain. That man's body lay slumped in the corner of the cell, most of his head blown off with a wretched splatter painting the wall above him. Hiro didn't bother to differentiate one thug from the rest; they could all die the same.

  The next mirror was covered in spiderweb cracks. More, fractured so thoroughly that they were nothing but white glass. The further Erina walked, the fewer mirrors remained intact. Before long, there were no mirrors in sight—only broken shards of glass covering the floor. Dark stains on the walls marked where they should have stood.

  Erina found herself at a crossroads. The corridor split here, two more paths snaking off. Starlight glimmered through the windows of one path alone. The others saw nothing but black. Erina followed the starlit path, ignoring the countless branches and forks that quickly split off in every direction. Glass crunched quietly under her shoes.

  She crouched down and picked up a shard. She glimpsed Akira on the other side, a battered beige cloak covering her as she walked through an old-fashioned village plucked straight from the feudal era. There wasn't a trace of technology in sight.

  A rainforest. A weathered castle. The lava-lit trenches of Hell. A futuristic city. A warm humble house with a faceless family. A cemetery filled with graves. Shards of the past were all that remained. Everything else was forgotten.

  Erina lost track of time. All she knew was that eventually, some of the shards still clung to the walls. Making her way through the labyrinthine corridors, those shards became more numerous. Mirrors mounted onto the walls once more. Erina's reflections walked with her.

  She saw Akira and Goukei locked in combat. She saw countless men and women she didn't recognize. She saw her patriarch stand in Hiro's office, the words on her lips inaudible as she swirled a small cup of sake with a sardonic grin. She saw her at a desk of her own, cigarette in hand as she delivered a silent speech to the hostesses lined up before her.

  Erina saw herself. She gazed down alongside Akira from the rooftops as the Kirigami men had her past self against the wall in that alley.

  And then there was no more to see—only her own reflection looking back with the same grim expression.

  The hallway ended not long after that. Erina pushed open the twin doors, harsh bright light searing her eyes as she stepped through into what lay beyond.

  She noticed the noise first. The ambience of rain surrounded her—the first proper impression of a reality that continued to move. A drizzle so light it barely fell at all over the cityscape, dampening the streets, darkening the buildings, rolling down the glass.

  Erina stopped squinting. The skies were overcast. A blanket of light gray clouds stretched across everything, to the horizons and beyond. She was on the edge of a rooftop in an unfamiliar city that was all too familiar to the one whose memories took form here.

  Erina knew before she turned. She knew there was no more door behind her, no way back into the past. She knew who was standing on the other side of the rooftop with her… who had waited for her to come this far.

  "…Akira," said Erina.

  "Yo." She sat at the very edge overlooking the concrete jungle, one leg swinging idly in the air. A cigarette burned between her fingers as she turned her head, welcoming Erina with a lopsided grin over the shoulder. "What kept you?"