Chapter Text
The Hollow Special Operations Section 6 office had that particular brand of late night quiet that Harumasa had come to appreciate over the years. Not silence, exactly. The building still hummed, air filtration systems cycling, servers breathing in the next room, the faint electrical whine of monitors left on standby. But the people noise was gone. The clatter of keyboards, the shuffle of papers, the particular way Soukaku's chair squeaked when she spun in it. All of it had bled out into the hallway hours ago, leaving him alone with the darkening window and the slow crawl of the cursor on his screen.
He leaned back, stretching his arms above his head until his shoulders popped. The motion was theatrical, meant for an audience of zero, but old habits died hard. At his desk, he was always performing laziness. Slouched posture, half lidded eyes, the deliberate inefficiency of a man who wanted everyone to think he was doing the bare minimum. It was a good costume. Comfortable. He'd worn it so long he sometimes forgot where the fabric ended and his skin began.
But the office was empty now. Miyabi had left first, as she usually did. Something about a family obligation she never elaborated on, and no one asked because no one asked Miyabi anything she didn't volunteer. Yanagi had packed up shortly after, pausing at the door to gently remind him not to stay too late. Soukaku had waved goodbye around a mouthful of whatever snack she'd been destroying at her desk, crumbs dusting the front of her uniform like powdered sugar. Harumasa had waved back, smiling his easy smile. Wouldn't dream of it.
That had been three hours ago.
The cursor blinked at him from the center of his screen. Just sitting there. Waiting. He hadn't opened any files yet—hadn't even logged into the restricted partition. He was still in the thinking phase of the night, the part where he convinced himself he could still walk away. Go home. Sleep. Pretend he hadn't found that strange permission flag last week, buried in a directory he shouldn't have had access to, under a filename that was just a string of numbers and a single word in a language he barely recognized. Shàngdì. God. He'd almost laughed when he first saw it. Someone in TOPS had a sense of irony, or maybe just a god complex. Either way, it had been enough to make him bookmark the location and close out before anyone noticed his session lingering where it didn't belong.
That was seven days ago. He'd spent the intervening week telling himself he wasn't going to come back to it. That his master's disappearance was a closed chapter. That digging further would only get him killed, or worse, noticed. And yet here he was. Three hours into overtime he wasn't getting paid for, staring at a cursor that seemed to be mocking him. Coward, it seemed to say. Harumasa smiled, thin and humorless, and typed his credentials. The login screen accepted him without fanfare. He navigated through the standard directories first, the ones his clearance was supposed to access. Mission reports. Hollow activity logs. Resource allocation spreadsheets so boring they could induce sleep in a man twice his age. He scrolled through them with one hand, letting his gaze drift, while his other hand hovered over the keyboard.
The backdoor he'd installed six months ago was still there. He could feel it, a hairline fracture in the system's architecture, invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it. He'd built it during a bout of insomnia, half convinced he was being paranoid, half convinced his paranoia was the only thing keeping him alive. He'd been right about that more often than he liked to admit. A few keystrokes. A redirect through three proxy servers he'd set up in the hollows, untraceable by design. And then he was in.
The directory looked the same as it had last week. A long list of numbered folders, no metadata, no dates, no context. Just numbers and the occasional fragment of text that might have been a label or might have been noise. He scrolled slowly, his eyes skimming over each entry, looking for the one with the word that had stopped him cold last time. Shàngdì. There it was. Folder 0047. He clicked into it and found a single file: a document with no extension, no identifying information, nothing but raw data that resolved into text when he opened it. He started reading.
The first page was clinical. The kind of language used by people who had learned to describe horror as anomalies and unexpected outcomes and subject noncompliance. Harumasa had read enough internal TOPS documentation to recognize the cadence. What he hadn't expected was the scale.
Phase One: Acquisition.
A list of names. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Citizens, Hollow Raiders, even a few N.E.P.S officers. All people who had disappeared over the past five years, their cases closed with tidy explanations that no one had bothered to question. Relocated. MIA. Presumed dead in Hollow incident. Every single one of them had been taken. Marked. Processed.
Phase Two: Observation.
Medical terminology he had to read twice to believe. Inoculation protocols. Exposure trials. Something called ‘corruption seeding’ that seemed to involve direct injection of ether particles into subjects' central nervous systems. Survival rates were noted in neat columns. The numbers dropped precipitously after phase three.
Phase Three: Integration.
The text changed here. Less clinical. More… enthusiastic. Someone had been proud of this phase. Harumasa's stomach turned as he read about the integration process—about what happened when a subject survived long enough to reach what the document called sustainable corruption levels. The language was almost agricultural. Cultivation. Harvesting. Yield. They weren't just studying the corruption. They were growing it. Harumasa's fingers had gone still on the keyboard. He realized he wasn't breathing and forced himself to inhale, slow and steady. The air tasted like nothing. Recycled. Clean. The same air he'd been breathing for hours, but it felt different now, heavier, as if the words on his screen had leached into the atmosphere.
He kept reading.
Phase Four was redacted. Most of it, anyway. Whole paragraphs blacked out, leaving only fragments—voluntary participation, long term viability, ethical considerations pending approval—as if someone had tried to sanitize the document and given up halfway. But the fragments told their own story. They were the kinds of words people used when they knew what they were doing was monstrous and needed a prettier face.
Phase Five was worse.
Phase Five wasn't about the subjects anymore. It was about the data. The applications. A list of potential use cases that read like a nightmare wishlist: military augmentation, crowd suppression, infrastructure sabotage, population management. The final entry was just a single word, underlined and bolded, as if someone had wanted to make sure no one missed it.
Deployment.
Harumasa closed the file. His hands were steady. He noticed that, distantly. He'd expected them to shake. Instead, they moved with the same clinical precision he always relied on—clearing his history, wiping his session logs, erasing every trace of his presence in the directory. He was good at this. He'd had practice. His master had taught him that the most important part of any investigation wasn't what you found; it was what you left behind. Nothing, his master used to say. Leave nothing.
He was halfway through clearing his tracks when a new folder caught his eye. It hadn't been there before. He was certain of it. He'd scrolled through this directory last week, memorized the layout, and this folder—0000—had not existed. But there it was, at the top of the list, labeled with a name he hadn't seen in years. Not Shàngdì this time. Something else. Something that made his chest go cold. His master's callsign. The one no one was supposed to know. The one he'd never spoken aloud to anyone, not even to Miyabi, not even in his own head most days. It was a ghost of a word, a relic from a life that had ended the day his master walked out of the hospital and never came back.
And it was right there, on his screen, as if someone had left it out for him on purpose. Bait, he thought. This is bait. It has to be. He should close it. Delete his session. Walk away. He'd already seen more than enough. The document he'd read could bring down the entire TOPS infrastructure if it ever saw daylight. He didn't need to read another one. He didn't need to know what was in that folder. His cursor hovered over the filename.
You don't have to do this, he told himself. You can stop. You can go home. You can pretend you never saw any of it. But his master's name was right there. The man who had found him in that hospital bed, too weak to stand, too young to consent to the experimental treatments that were the only thing keeping him alive. The man who had taught him everything—archery, swordsmanship, how to survive in a body that had never wanted to survive. The man who had disappeared without a word, without a note, without even the courtesy of a goodbye. The man he was doing all this for in the first place.
Harumasa clicked on the folder. The file inside was different from the others. Smaller. More personal. It wasn't a clinical report or a data sheet. It was a personnel file, complete with a photograph of his master, younger than Harumasa had ever seen him, unsmiling, eyes tired. The text beneath the photograph was sparse. Dates of service. Areas of expertise. A note about special assignment that had been redacted so heavily there was nothing left but black ink. And at the very bottom, a single line that hadn't been redacted at all.
Status: Terminated. Subject noncompliant. Disposal completed per protocol.
Harumasa stared at the words.
Terminated.
Noncompliant.
Disposal.
They were such clean words. Sterile. The kind of language that didn't leave room for grief or rage or the hollow ache that was spreading through his chest like ice water through a cracked vessel. Someone had written those words about his master. Someone had decided that his master was noncompliant and had terminated him and had disposed of the body as if he were nothing more than contaminated waste.
He wondered if his master fought back. He hoped he had. He hoped his master had made them work for it. Then he pushed that thought down, locked it away in the same compartment where he kept his panic attacks and his nightmares and the sound of his own voice saying ‘please don't leave me’ to a man who had left anyway.
He started deleting his tracks again. Faster this time. Messier. He was rushing, and he knew it, and he couldn't stop himself. The document about his master was burned into his retinas, and every second he stayed logged into this server felt like a second too long. He wiped his access logs, scrubbed the authentication tokens, deleted the temporary files his session had created.
And then the error messages started.
At first, just one. A permissions error, which was strange because he'd already cleared that directory. Then another, this one about write access. Then a cascade of them, flooding his screen faster than he could close them, red text scrolling upward like a countdown.
Access denied.
Write operation failed.
Session terminated.
Access denied. Access denied. Access denied.
Harumasa's fingers flew across the keyboard, trying to kill the session, trying to regain control, trying to do anything—but the system wasn't responding to his commands anymore. It was moving on its own, overwriting his changes, restoring the logs he'd deleted, reinstating the authentication tokens he'd wiped. Someone had triggered a rollback. Someone had realized what he was doing and was systematically undoing every trace of his cleanup.
No, he thought. No, no, no. He tried to force a hard logout. The system ignored him. He tried to kill the connection from his end. The terminal window stayed open, error messages still scrolling, each one a nail in the coffin of his anonymity. He could feel the walls closing in, could feel the invisible hand reaching through the network to grab him by the throat—
He unplugged the computer.
The screen went black.
The silence that followed was absolute. No hum of the monitor, no whine of the cooling fan, just the building's ambient noise and the sound of his own breathing, too fast, too shallow.
“Fuck,” He panted, a hand clutching his chest.
Harumasa sat in the dark of the office, his hand still wrapped around the power cord, and stared at the dead screen. The folder. His master's file. The document he'd read. It was all still there, on the server, waiting. And somewhere in the TOPS infrastructure, an alarm was probably going off. A flag had been raised. A timestamp had been recorded.
They knew someone had been inside. They didn't know it was him. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if he was careful, if he covered his tracks the old fashioned way, if he did everything right from this moment forward. But the backdoor he'd spent six months building was gone. He could feel its absence like a missing tooth. The system had sealed itself shut while he was watching, and there was no getting back in.
Harumasa clutched the power cord and leaned back in his chair. The office was very dark, the windows showing nothing but his own reflection. A pale face, tired eyes, a smile that didn't reach anywhere. He looked at himself for a long moment, and then he looked away. Leave nothing, his master had said. But Harumasa had left plenty. Footprints. Evidence. A trail that a sufficiently determined investigator could follow straight to his desk.
Harumasa didn't move for a long time. The office settled around him in the dark, the way old buildings do, settling into its own silence, its own stillness. He could hear the walls breathing. The ventilation system cycling air that no one was awake to breathe. Somewhere down the hall, a door clicked shut, pushed by a draft or a pressure change or something else entirely. He didn't flinch. He was very good at not flinching.
His hand was still wrapped around the power cord. He made himself let go. The cord dropped to the floor with a soft thump, and the sound was too loud in the quiet, too final. Harumasa looked at his hands. They were pale in the darkness, the kind of pale that came from too many hours indoors and not enough of anything that mattered. His fingers weren't shaking. That was good. He could still trust his hands. He couldn't trust anything else.
The computer sat on his desk like a dead thing. The screen was dark, but he could still see the error messages burned into his retinas. Red text on black, scrolling faster than he could read, faster than he could stop. Access denied. Session terminated. Access denied. He wondered if someone had watched him panic in real time. If, somewhere in the TOPS infrastructure, an operator had seen his session flag and had triggered the rollback manually, laughing at how easy it was to catch him.
Don't spiral, he told himself. You don't know that. You can't know that. But that was the problem, wasn't it? He couldn't know. He'd spent years building contingencies, fallbacks, escape routes, all of it designed to keep him one step ahead of the people who would kill him if they knew what he was doing. And now, in the space of a few minutes, he'd lost his backdoor, his anonymity, and possibly his life.
He was still breathing. That was something. He made himself stand. His legs were steady. His hands, when he tucked them into his pockets, were steady. He walked to the window and looked out at the city, the lights of New Eridu spread below him like a circuit board, each glowing point a building where someone was sleeping, or working, or doing something that wasn't this. He wondered how many of them had seen the documents he'd just read. How many of them knew what TOPS was doing in the dark. None, he thought. That's the point.
The knowledge sat in his chest like a stone. Heavy. Cold. He could feel it pressing against his ribs, and he realized, distantly, that he was angry. Not the hot, sharp anger he'd expected—the kind that made you want to break things, to scream, to find the people responsible and make them hurt the way his master had hurt. This was colder. Slower. The kind of anger that settled into your bones and stayed there, calcifying over time until you forgot it was even there. He'd been angry for a long time. He just hadn't noticed.
The window reflected his face back at him. Pale, tired, the ghost of a smile still lingering at the corners of his mouth. It was a reflex now. He didn't have to think about it. His face just did that, even when there was no one around to see. He wondered when that had started. He wondered if he'd ever be able to stop. Don't think about that now, he told himself. Think about getting out of here. Think about covering your tracks.
The tracks. Right.
He turned away from the window and looked at his desk. The computer was still dead, but that didn't matter. The hard drive would have logs, temporary files, fragments of his session that he couldn't delete without powering the machine back on. And he couldn't power it back on. Not here. Not now. The network would catch him the second he reconnected, and he'd be right back where he started, only this time they'd know exactly where to look. He needed to get the computer out of the building. Or he needed to destroy it. Or he needed to—
Stop.
He was spiraling again. He could feel it, the way his thoughts were speeding up, jumping from one worst case scenario to the next without stopping to breathe. He forced himself to inhale. Held it. Exhaled. The rhythm was familiar, practiced. Something his master had taught him, back when he was young enough to still believe that breathing exercises could fix anything. Breathe, his master had said. The body is just a machine. Learn to control it, and you control everything. His master was dead. Terminated. Gone. Disposed of. The words were still there, lodged behind his sternum, and he couldn't seem to cough them up. Harumasa closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he was calm. Or close enough. The panic was still there, humming beneath his skin, but he'd pushed it down, the way he always did, the way he'd been doing since he was old enough to understand that no one was coming to save him. He walked to his desk, unplugged the ethernet cable from the wall, and wrapped it around the computer. Then he picked up the whole thing—monitor, tower, cables and all—and carried it to the storage closet at the back of the office.
He didn't turn on the lights. He didn't need to. He knew this closet the way he knew his own breathing—the boxes of old case files, the broken office chairs, the box of ethernet cables that no one had touched in years. He set the computer behind a stack of archival boxes, where no one would look unless they were specifically searching for it. It wasn't a permanent solution. It wasn't even a good one. But it would buy him time. Time to do what, he didn't know.
He closed the closet door and stood in the darkness of the office, listening to the building breathe. Somewhere below him, the security guards were making their rounds. He'd timed them, once, out of boredom and paranoia in equal measure. He knew exactly how long it would take them to reach the sixth floor, and exactly how long he had to get out before they saw him. Seventeen minutes.
The walk to the elevator was uneventful. The hallway was empty, the motion sensor lights flickering on as he passed and off again behind him, swallowing his footsteps in darkness. He didn't look back. Looking back was for people who expected to see something following them. The elevator arrived with a soft chime. He stepped inside, pressed the button for the ground floor, and watched the doors close.
And then, alone in the small metal box, he let his smile drop. His reflection in the polished steel doors was honest in a way his bathroom mirror never was. The fluorescent lights of the elevator car caught every flaw—the sallow undertone of his skin, the bruised looking shadows under his eyes, the faint tremor in his muscles that he'd been ignoring for the past thirty minutes. He looked like what he was: a man who hadn't slept properly in weeks, whose body had been fighting him his entire life, who had just seen something that was going to give him nightmares for the rest of his existence.
The elevator doors opened. The lobby was empty, the front desk unmanned at this hour, the security guards should've been making their rounds on floor four by now. Harumasa walked across the marble floor, his footsteps too loud in the silence, and pushed through the revolving doors into the night.
The air outside was cold. Not biting—it was too early in the season for that—but cold enough to make him wish he'd grabbed a scarf. He stood on the steps for a moment, breathing in the city, letting the familiar smell of exhaust and ozone and distant cooking oil wash over him. New Eridu never really slept. There were always lights on somewhere, always cars moving, always the low thrum of a million people living their lives in close proximity. It should have been comforting. Instead, it felt like a million pairs of eyes he couldn't see.
You're being paranoid, he told himself. They don't know it was you. They can't know it was you.
It was a late enough hour that the crowds had thinned, the traffic had slowed, and the people that walked past on the sidewalk had their heads down, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones, their minds somewhere else entirely. No one looked at him. No one ever looked at him. He was just another figure in the dark, just another person getting off work late, and the anonymity was a comfort and a curse in equal measure.
The walk to the parking garage was short. His car was where he'd left it, a nondescript sedan that blended into every traffic camera shot and never drew attention. He unlocked it, slid into the driver's seat, and sat there for a moment with his hands on the wheel, not starting the engine. Leave nothing, his master had said. But Harumasa had left too much. And now he had to decide what to do about it.
He started the car and pulled out of the garage, merging into the late night traffic with the ease of long practice. His apartment was twenty minutes away, assuming no delays. Twenty minutes to think. Twenty minutes to figure out his next move. Twenty minutes to wonder if anyone was following him. He checked his mirrors more often than necessary. The car behind him was a taxi, its light off, probably heading home after a long shift. The one after that was a delivery van, anonymous and unmarked. He changed lanes twice, took a turn that added five minutes to his route, and watched to see if anyone followed. No one did.
Paranoid, he told himself again. You're being paranoid.
He believed it, a little. He rolled down the windows, flooding the car with the outside air. It was cold, but he needed the sting. Needed to feel the frigid air on his face, needed to remind himself that he was still alive, still breathing, still here, even if here didn't feel like much of anything anymore. The city lights blurred as he drove. He wasn't crying. He never cried. But his eyes were wet, and the wind was cold, and he told himself it was allergies, even though there was no one around to hear the lie.
The parking lot of his apartment building was half empty at this hour. He found his usual spot, killed the engine, and sat in the dark for another long moment. The building loomed above him, pale and rectangular, most of its windows dark. His unit was on the seventh floor. He could see it from here, a small rectangle of shadow among shadows. No lights on inside. No movement at the window.
He got out of the car and walked to the entrance, keycard in hand. The lobby was small and unremarkable, the kind of building that existed solely to provide affordable housing for mid tier corporate employees and the occasional Hollow operative who didn't want to live in the dorms. The elevator creaked when it moved. The hallway on the seventh floor smelled like someone's dinner—kimchi stew, maybe—and the carpet was worn thin in places.
His door was at the end of the hall. He unlocked it, stepped inside, and locked it behind him. The apartment was dark. He didn't turn on the lights. He stood in the entryway, listening to the silence, and tried to remember if he'd left his laptop on the coffee table or if he'd put it away before leaving for work that morning. He couldn't remember. The details were blurry, smeared together like wet paint, and he couldn't tell if it was exhaustion or fear or something else entirely.
Check the windows. Check the locks. Make sure no one's been here. He moved through the apartment in the dark, his feet silent on the floor, his eyes adjusting to the dim light from the street. The living room was empty. The kitchen was empty. The bedroom was empty, the bed still made, the curtains still drawn. He checked the windows. All locked. He checked the balcony door. Locked. He checked the bathroom, the closet, the small utility space where he kept his weapons and his spare hard drives and the things he didn't want anyone to find.
Everything was where he'd left it. He should have felt relieved. Instead, he felt worse. They know, the voice in his head whispered. They always know. You think you're smart, but they're smarter. You think you're careful, but they're always watching. He told the voice to shut up. It didn't listen. And then he stopped. Something was wrong. He couldn't say what. The apartment looked the same as it always did. The same secondhand furniture, the same pile of unread books on the coffee table, the same empty takeout containers he'd been meaning to throw away for a week. But there was a quality to the silence that felt different. Heavier. As if the air itself was holding its breath.
Harumasa stood very still, listening. The building hummed around him. The distant sound of the elevator, the faint vibration of the water heater in the closet, the occasional creak of settling pipes. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that would have registered as a threat to anyone else. But he'd learned to hear the spaces between sounds. The gaps where unexpected things could hide.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen glowed to life, casting pale light across his face. He navigated to the security app he'd installed months ago, the one that monitored the motion sensors he'd placed in the hallway and the small camera hidden in the peephole of his door. The playback showed nothing. No one had approached his door since he'd left for work that morning. The hallway had been empty all day, except for the elderly woman from 7B who'd taken her dog out at three in the afternoon and come back twenty minutes later.
Paranoid, he thought for the third time. You're being—
His phone buzzed in his hand.
The notification was from his email, a personal account he used for nothing except receiving automated alerts from his various monitoring systems. The subject line was blank. The sender was a string of random characters that resolved, when his brain caught up to his eyes, into the name of a server he'd accessed exactly once. The server that had locked him out. The server that had triggered the rollback. He didn't open the email. He didn't need to. The fact that it existed at all was the message. We know, it said. We know you were there. And we know where to find you.
Harumasa deleted the email without reading it. Then he deleted it from his trash folder. Then he powered off his phone, pulled the battery out—because even powered off, even in sleep mode, he knew better than to trust a device that could be remotely activated—and set both pieces on the kitchen counter.
He stood in the dark of his apartment, in the silence that was no longer just silence, and felt the weight of something watching him from the other side of the city. Terminated, he thought. He wondered, idly, if they'd send someone to his apartment. If they'd knock on his door, or break it down, or simply wait for him to leave and follow him to some quiet place where no one would see. He wondered if his master had known, in the end. If he'd heard footsteps in the hallway, the same way Harumasa was listening now, and thought ‘so this is how it ends’. Or if it had been fast, too fast, the way these things usually were. He hoped it had been fast. He hoped his master hadn't suffered. But he knew better than to hope.
The water heater clicked off. The building settled. The silence expanded to fill the space. He sat on the edge of his bed, fully dressed, his bow on the floor beside him, and watched the window as the darkness outside slowly bled into grey. The apartment was too quiet. The building was too quiet. The whole city was too quiet, and he could feel the silence pressing in on him, heavy and suffocating, and he couldn't seem to catch his breath.
He thought about calling someone. Miyabi, maybe, or Yanagi. Someone who would answer, someone who would listen, someone who would tell him he was being ridiculous and that everything was fine and that he should go to sleep and stop worrying about things he couldn't change. But he didn't have their numbers. Not real ones. They had his work contact, his official channels, the numbers that TOPS could monitor and trace and use against him if they ever decided he was a threat. And he couldn't risk it. Couldn't risk them. Couldn't risk anyone.
He was alone. He was always alone. He'd spent years telling himself he preferred it that way, and now, sitting in the dark with the weight of what he'd learned pressing down on his chest, he wasn't sure if that was still true. It doesn't matter, he told himself. What you prefer doesn't matter. What matters is surviving.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Sleep was a distant possibility, something that happened to other people, people who hadn't just read about human experimentation and government cover ups and the death of the only person who had ever cared about him. But his body was heavy, and his eyes were heavy, and somewhere in the dark, the exhaustion he'd been holding at bay finally caught up with him. He closed his eyes. He didn't sleep. Not really. But he drifted, floating somewhere between waking and dreaming, and the hours passed without his permission.