1.
Hakodate Clan Territory. Hokkaido, 2149.
An eerie silence blanketed the abandoned village, its stillness broken only by the occasional creak of decaying wood or the distant cry of a night creature. Each sound through the empty streets carried a warning—one I’d learned the hard way not to ignore. Too bad I couldn’t impart that wisdom to my present company. Aya, driven more by insatiable curiosity than common sense, darted from the shadows into the moonlit street.
“Get back here!” My voice sliced through the silence.
“Sorry.” Aya glanced back at me, looking sheepish. “I thought I saw something.” She nodded to an abandoned storefront’s soot-stained façade and splintered door. “Over there.”
“All the more reason to stay out of sight.”
A kufugaki hunt during curfew ranked as the stupidest idea ever, although breaking the law didn’t bother me as much as having to work with a group. I preferred to hunt alone. Satoshi knew it, too. I’d only agreed to come because refusing would mean admitting I resented Juno’s growing influence over my older brother. If I weren’t there to watch his back, who would? He’d become blind to anything but her words since she arrived.
“What’s the hold-up, Renata?” Satoshi’s voice, a hiss in the dark, pulled me back to the task at hand.
“False alarm,” I replied, urging Tobi and Aya back to the shadows. If there’d been anything in that building, we’d have been attacked by now.
“Well, get a move on! We need to stay together.”
If Juno was right about the kufugaki, it meant a bounty for each of us, provided the marrow-sucking mutants didn’t jump us or a sky patrol didn’t snuff us out first. Though our neighbors knew about the hunt, and the ruins were only a stone’s throw from the Hakodate bunkers, it didn’t matter. Around here, people didn’t ask questions after dark.
Still, I couldn’t get my head around it. Every time Juno said jump, he obeyed without question or hesitation. Her last visit saw him hacking the regime’s communication systems—for her uncle, so she said. Either way, it meant a death sentence if he got caught. The Satoshi I knew didn’t risk his life on a whim.
What have you done with my brother? I wanted to ask, mystified how one woman—older than Satoshi, horse-faced, thick-thighed, and with a wide swath of white in her long black braid—could turn a grown man into her personal lapdog. Were all Shinu women so adept at feminine wiles, or had she been practicing kodoku on the side, extracting poison to turn him into her personal slave?
When we returned, I made a mental note to sweep the bunker for signs of dark magic—vials and insect carcasses—and then felt ashamed for harboring such unkind thoughts. As our oldest friend’s niece, Juno was practically family. Satoshi could’ve done worse. Still, whenever I was with her, her recklessness tied my stomach in knots.
Heads low, weapons drawn, we slipped between puddles and patches of moonlight, hugging the dark like a second skin. Shadows were safer than reflections. Most of us wore dark, dull fabrics—nothing to catch the light. Clothes that knew how to disappear. We kept to the retaining wall, moving past the husks of shuttered houses and fire-gutted shops, as if something might be watching from within.
For the sake of the noobs, Satoshi had elected me rear guard. But pulling Aya and Tobi away from potential danger quickly became a full-time job. Curiosity always got the better of those two, beckoning them to investigate the dark voids behind doors, broken windows, or the interiors of deserted vehicles.
Keep to the shadows. Stay off the street. I’d lost count of how many times I’d had to repeat the same damned things! Simple enough information. You’d think it would’ve sunk in by now. Though I’d just turned seventeen, only a few years older than the two of them, I’d never had the luxury of being such a scatterbrain!
We paused when the retaining wall ended in a heap of moss-covered stones near an intersection. The ruins—the remains of an old medical complex abandoned during the nokuru pandemics—weren’t far from here. As the moon peeked through the clouds, I could see the dejected outline of its crumbling silhouette. Places like this were perfect nesting sites for kufugaki. If Juno’s intel was on point, this was where we’d find them.
The bounties I collected from killing kufugaki kept us fed and clothed. They kept us going for another week, another month, another year. Satoshi always said I was a natural at hunting them. Death defined me, he said. In a way, I guess it did. Death was my past, present, and probable future.
Nokuru, the disease responsible for the kufugaki, had been ravaging Japan for longer than I had been alive. No one knew where it had come from, so origin theories about it ran rampant. Some of these—an accidental mutation, a byproduct of extensive pollution, or lingering remnants of biological warfare—sounded plausible. Others, conspiracy theories, spread like wildfire, each more outlandish than the last.
The most outrageous of the latter implicated a New Edo lab in the virus’s engineering. Speculation ran the gamut from the virus being a weapon for enforcing civil obedience to a means of population control to a bid for global dominance. No matter how outlandish, even I had to admit there could be a sliver of truth in that first one. Now a military stronghold, New Edo, our nation’s largest holodome, sprawled over the remains of former Tokyo like a bloated terrarium—a climate-controlled enclave encased in shockproof glass and steel. If the virus had roots anywhere, they were somewhere inside that dome.
With no cure or vaccine, public panic eclipsed containment efforts. The virus mutated too fast for researchers to map its genome, each variant more aggressive than the last. Its method of transmission and symptoms remained constant, but the onset came faster, and the result was always the same.
Whenever Satoshi started in on his latest theory, the product of his too-frequent online discussions with fellow doomsday junkies, I just sighed and rolled my eyes. With nokuru, all you could hope to do was kill the kufugaki before they took a chunk out of you. Once the virus took hold, everything decayed, slipping away until there was nothing left of you but a jittery bag of bones, slush for brains, and an insatiable hunger for human flesh.
Clouds obscured the moon, plunging us into darkness. I pressed against the cool, mossy wall, waiting for Satoshi’s signal. No sky patrollers dogged us—we’d been lucky so far.
I glanced at Tobi and Aya, who huddled nearby. Please, keep it together, I thought. Don’t do anything stupid.
“Coast is clear,” Satoshi whispered after surveying the converging streets. “Let’s go!”
The ruins sat atop a knoll just outside our village. Rain had left the slope treacherous, and we slipped more than once on the way up. Thick clouds smothered the moonlight, casting long shadows across the rubble where saplings clawed through cracks and vines clung to broken stone. The breeze stayed at our backs, stirring the leaves with every step. At this rate, the kufugaki would smell us coming.
“Darkfell, look sharp!”
My head snapped to the alarm in her voice, my insides tightening. Why did she always have to use my surname, treating me as if I were a crew member on her cargo ship? More importantly, what had spooked her? I couldn’t see or smell a thing.
Kufugaki had a distinctive stench, especially those nearing the end stage of the disease. You couldn’t miss it. Imagine a dead mouse in a sealed bottle, baked in direct sunlight until its little body liquefied. Now, shake that bottle, take a deep whiff of meaty-sweet rodent slurry, and try to keep your insides from turning inside out.
“What?” I hissed back, annoyed as much by her authoritarian tone as by her electing herself the leader of tonight’s harebrained hunt. So, you saw some kufugaki earlier. Big deal, I wanted to say. Stay in the bunker with the kids and let the professionals deal with it!
When Juno didn’t answer right away, I said it again, dragging it out into three hard syllables even she couldn’t ignore.
“Satoshi and I are going to canvas around the back.” Her light grey sleeve bobbed like a flare in the murk. “You three take the front.”
Leave me to babysit while they snuck off together? Oh, hell no! “I think it’d be better if Tobi went with you guys,” I began. “That way, I can give Aya some pointers.”
“No one asked for your opinion, Renata,” Satoshi interrupted, his voice muffled by a thick black gaiter. “Juno’s in charge tonight. Just do what she says.”
“We’ll flush them out; you’ll kill them,” Juno explained. “Bounties all around! Easy money!”
Forget entering an abandoned building. Herding a horde of kufugaki into two inexperienced kids had to be her dumbest idea yet!
I yanked Satoshi to one side. “She’s going to get us all killed!” I said, not caring if she could hear. “For God’s sake, Satoshi!”
“Trust me, Renata,” he whispered through gritted teeth, his hand squeezing my shoulder until it cracked. His eyes, usually steady when meeting mine, darted away for a fraction of a second. “It’s better this way.”
It wasn’t, but the edge in his tone brooked no further discussion. As he turned to follow Juno, I caught something in his posture—a tightness in his shoulders I’d never seen before. Not fear exactly, but something else. Something that made me wonder if Satoshi wasn’t following Juno so much as playing along.
I waited, watching until the shadows swallowed them, before turning to my charges. “Well, you heard him, guys. Let’s go.”
“Do you think we’ll find kufugaki in there?” Tobi asked, his tone edged with uncertainty. “My uncle said they move around at night.”
They didn’t, but kufugaki weren’t the only things that could kill you out here. Thanks to nokuru, boars and brown bears had expanded their ranges into the lowlands. Their nocturnal foraging was another reason for the curfew.
“If Juno was right about the location, there’s a good chance we’ll find them,” I said. Provided something else didn’t find us first.
Soon, the wind petered out, leaving nothing but an eerie, predatory stillness. It was never a good sign when even the bugs were holding their breath. At least the ground, riddled with tufts of dried grass and obscured by patches of mist, wasn’t as slippery here. I eased forward, determined to reach the entrance. When my next step produced a brittle crunch, I drew back, wincing. Glass. Shit! In the silence, it sounded as loud as a gunshot.
I waited, one ear cocked forward for any telltale sounds: feral grunts, snorts, the scrape of hooves, claws, or worse, the shuffle of footsteps.
Nothing. Good.
Up ahead, Aya stopped just shy of the leaning carport—the sagging frame of what had once been the hospital entrance. A low whimper caught in her throat as she fumbled with the crossbow. The automatic weapon, a gift from Juno, looked more like a bribe than a vote of confidence. I hoped she wouldn’t have to use it. If anything charged her, she wouldn’t stand a chance.
Tightening my grip on the naginata, I took a position at her left flank. After signaling for Tobi to move, I studied the shadowy vault. Mist clung to the entrance in pale ribbons. The remnants of the sign hung by a frayed cable, swaying just enough to create a grating squeal that set my teeth on edge.
Tobi, a doughy thirteen-year-old with an overgrown crew cut, joined us, panting. “Did you guys see something?” He palmed the sweat from his face and wiped it on his pants.
The darkness beyond the entrance wasn’t empty. Something waited there, watching us. I knew it the way prey knows—a knowledge that begins as a prickle at the nape and then traces the length of your spine like icy fingers. It pools beneath your ribs, hollowing you from within, replacing blood and tissue with certainty: death waits just beyond sight.
Nodding, I raised my naginata, angling its spike outward. “Okay, all together. Slowly. Don’t shoot until you have a clear sight.”
Something clanged inside the building, the sound reverberating as if it had occurred far down one of the empty corridors. Then a woman screamed.
“Juno!”
Tobi dropped his night-vision goggles and charged across the grass.
“No, wait!”
Why would Satoshi let Juno enter a kufugaki nest alone? He never set foot in abandoned buildings and had forbidden me to do it when we hunted together. That strange look in his eyes earlier—was this what he’d been hiding?
I sprinted after the pair, reaching the carport just as shadows swallowed Tobi’s form.
Aya, not quite as foolhardy, skidded to a stop outside the hospital’s shattered double doors, sending glass and metal skittering across the ground.
“Tobi, wait! Come back!”
Only his footsteps answered, pounding down a dark hallway.
“We have to go after him, Renata.”
“No,” I hissed, yanking her back by the arm. “I’ll do it.”
“Why?”
Because hollow. That’s why. Whatever waited in that darkness had already found us.
“This could be a trap. Remember—kufugaki in the early stages of nokuru can still think. Still speak.”
A marrow-sucker with a plan. Yeah, that was all we needed.
I hit the recessed button on the naginata’s shaft, retracting it into a baton-sized weapon, sickle-bladed at one end and spiked at the other. The miniature version was easier to wield in confined spaces. “Give me three minutes,” I said to Aya. “If I’m not back, leave without me. Just get out of here. Okay?”
“But what about Juno?”
A meaty thud, followed by scuffling sounds, interrupted her. Not a good sign.
“I mean it. If I don’t come out, leave here and wait for the others at the bunker. In the meantime, try not to shoot me, okay?” One hand reached for the spelunking light on my cap. The sounds were coming closer now. If nothing else, its halogen beam might blind the mutants long enough for me to escape.
“Run! Run!” Arms flailing, Tobi barreled out of the building. He tried to scream, but a loud hiss swallowed his words.
An explosion split the night. Blinding light and clouds of noxious smoke overwhelmed us.