Chương 18: Bait

The room above the tavern had two beds, and a window that looked onto the closed street below. They had taken it for the night. The barman had offered it without being asked, which Zero now understood was out of 'gratitude'. They sat on the beds, the floor, and the single chair, in the arrangement that had become natural over the weeks: Miho cross-legged on the floor with her sword, Yukito with his back to the wall, Viria wherever was closest to whoever she was talking to.

Zero stood at the window and looked at the empty street. The man in the corner, whose name was Fen, had given them everything he knew, which was more than the city watch had assembled and less than they needed. Over three weeks, eleven children, ages four to twelve, were presumed dead. The incidents clustered near the market district's eastern alleys but not confined to them. There were no witnesses to any of the disappearances after dark.

The two who had disappeared in daylight had last been seen walking toward an alley, seemingly drawn to something 'warm', according to one of the children. Zero had been turning that last detail over since the tavern.

"The best way to lure a villain out of hiding," Yukito said, "is with bait." Viria looked horrified.

"You are not using a child," she said. Her voice was flat, but Zero could detect an undertone of fear.

"No," Yukito said.

"We don't need a child. We need something that looks like one." He looked at Zero. Zero turned from the window. He understood immediately what Yukito was suggesting, because it was the most direct application of his available capabilities to the identified problem. He ran through the parameters in the same way he ran through physical preparation for a new modification.

"That should be possible," he said.

"It may take some work."

"How much work?" Yukito asked.

"I don't know yet. I have never attempted a full-body mimicry at that level of detail. The biological components are not the difficulty. The behavioral components are." Viria's expression was a mix between alarm and impressed.

"That is… profoundly unsettling."

"It is also the most direct solution." She thought about this." If it works."

"Yes. If it works." He began the process of trial and error.

The first attempt took forty minutes, and was wrong in a way he could not identify. He had assembled the form from general parameters: estimated age range of seven to nine based on the witness descriptions, body proportions consistent with a child of that age and this region's average nutrition, clothing drawn from what he had observed on the two children he had seen in the windows before they hid.

He stood in front of Viria, who was the only member of the team whose reaction he could not predict, because Miho would be clinically precise and Yukito would tell him the practical problems. As Viria looked at him, her expression moved through several stages, none of which she apparently decided to perform, which meant he was seeing her actual response.

"You look…" she said after deliberating, "like you are wearing a human skin suit."

"I am."

"Not. Helping." Zero sighed, "what is wrong with it?" She studied him. Her head moved to one side, then the other.

"I genuinely cannot tell you. It's correct in the sense that the proportions are right, the height is right, and it looks like a child." She paused.

"But it feels like a trap."

"Explain."

"I… cannot explain. It just feels wrong. Like it was made by something that has studied what children look like but has never been one." Zero considered this feedback and recognized it as accurate but not yet actionable.

"Is it the face?" he asked.

"It might be the face."

"The movement?"

"I haven't seen you move yet." He walked to the window and back. Viria watched.

"Yes," she said.

"It's the movement. You move like you are processing where your feet should go."

"I am."

"That's the thing. Children don't do that. They just go." Zero stood with that for a moment.

"I need a baseline," he said.

The final attempt came three hours later, after considerable internal work. He had chosen Tai Yan as his baseline. He was the youngest of the junior disciples at eight years old, and small even for that. He had not interacted with Zero directly, but Zero had observed him across twelve days: in the training yard, the meal queue, and crossing between buildings with a carefree hurry. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

He did not copy Tai Yan exactly, but used him as a calibration reference: this was what the weight distribution felt like at this height. This was what the arm-swing proportion was for a child who had been training for two years. This was the specific slight asymmetry in the right shoulder where Tai Yan favored when he was tired. Zero built outward from that calibration. He stood again in front of Viria, who looked at him for a long time.

"Still uncanny," she said finally.

"But only because I know it's you in there. Not because it looks wrong."

"What's the difference?"

"When I look at it not knowing, it's a child. When I look at it knowing, I can't stop seeing that it's you inside it." She paused.

"I think that's a me problem, not a you problem."

"Confirm with Yukito." Yukito had been looking at the window. He turned and looked at Zero for five seconds.

"I couldn't tell," he said.

"If I hadn't seen you make it." Zero looked at Miho, who also nodded.

"Adequate," she said.

"The movement is correct. The proportions are correct. The face is—" she paused, "—close enough, in low light."

"Low light," Zero said.

"Whoever is hunting children in this city does not prefer daylight. Low light is the relevant condition." Zero accepted this.

"Then we go tonight."

"Not together," Yukito said.

"You go. I follow, close enough to move quickly, far enough that whoever is watching won't see me."

"And if something moves before you can reach me?"

"I will have already moved." Zero looked at him. Yukito was looking back with the specific expression he used when he was confident that failure was not a potential outcome.

"The rest of you?" Zero asked.

"We stay here," Miho said.

"Nearby, but not visible. If Yukito signals, we move." Viria cringed, "I hate this plan."

"Why?" Zero asked.

"Because you're going to walk around a city where children have been disappearing, disguised as a child, at night, and I am going to be sitting in a room waiting." She looked at him steadily.

"I hate waiting."

"I know," Zero said.

"Tell me when you get back."

"Of course," Zero said.

The city at night was not empty. It was populated by absence: the absence of lamplight from windows, the absence of voices from houses, and the absence of the ambient human noise that Zero had come to associate with people. The streets had none of those at night. What they did have was shadow, deep and comprehensive. And in the shadow, so close to Zero that he could hear the controlled exhale of someone who had spent three years learning to be still in darkness, was Yukito. Zero moved the way Tai Yan moved.

Not perfectly; expecting perfection from a few hours of practice was foolish. But he did well enough that his footsteps were the wrong weight for an adult and the right weight for a child, and the way his arms moved carried the unconscious rhythm of a child who was lost, but not quite certain of it. Zero had been on the street for twenty minutes. He had checked four of the market district's eastern alleys, which Fen had identified as the highest-probability areas. The first three had been empty.

The fourth had a sound. Zero heard it before he was near enough to see: a scratching in the alley's deep section, followed by a brief stillness, the kind of stillness that followed a sound because the thing making it had heard something and was deciding what to do about what it had heard. Zero moved toward the alley with the gait of a child who had heard something interesting. The man was standing near the alley's far end, in the shadow between two storage buildings.

He was tall, with the unremarkable appearance of someone who had put thought into being unremarkable: plain clothing, middle age, no features that would distinguish him in a description. He looked at Zero. And suddenly, Zero understood immediately what Viria had meant about 'bad feelings'. The man's appearance was correct. Every component was correct. The concerned expression, non-threatening posture, and the distance that said I am not too close.

Underneath it, something was wrong in a way that Zero could not locate in any specific feature. He had spent his life monitoring systems for the small inconsistencies that indicated a test was not what it appeared to be. He had learned to trust the monitoring before he could articulate what it had found. He gave the signal for g et ready: a small movement with his left hand at his side. Behind him, in the dark, was the almost-inaudible sound of Yukito moving.

The man spoke, "It's dangerous for children to walk alone this late." His voice was solicitous. Zero did not respond, still looking the man over.

"Do you need help getting home?" Zero's right right thumb touched his pinky finger. In an instant, the shadows moved.

The restraints were fast. Zero had seen Yukito work in the tutorial and in the monkey fight, but this was different: The shadow-bindings wrapped the man's arms and legs before he had completed his turn toward the sound of them. He struggled, which told Zero something. And then he stopped struggling, which told Zero more.

"How did you know?" the man said. The voice had changed. The register under it had forgone the solicitous layer, replaced with a different quality that Zero did not know the word for.

"I didn't know," Zero said.

"I felt." He looked at the man and ran Identify, and the result was different from every Identify he had run before. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Species: Abaasy Type: Demonic Beast (Lupine) Level: 14 Attribute: Blood Traits: Human mimicry; predatory lure; blood qi Threat Level: Moderate Then, the 'man' stopped being a man. It took three seconds. The form cracked first at the edges, the hands and the jaw, where the mimicry was most structurally expensive to maintain.

What came through the cracks was larger and wrong in the specific way of things built around predation: reddish-black fur, a jaw too wide for the skull it had come from, legs that bent at angles designed for ground-speed rather than upright standing. Yukito's bindings held. Zero did not hesitate. He had seen the Identify result, and he knew what demonic cores were. His right hand shifted with the same efficiency he had used on the tutorial monster, and struck once, precisely, at where he presumed the heart to be.

The Abaasy collapsed. The shadow bindings held it until it had stopped moving completely. Only then Yukito released them. Zero crouched over the body. The core was visible, now that the demonic qi had gone inactive. It was dark, even in the low light, as the sect's materials had described demonic cores: black dense and without the clean luminescence of spirit beast cores.

"Its core is black," he said. Miho's voice came from the alley's entrance. She and Viria had presumably started moving when Yukito had.

"Yes," she said.

"It would be." Zero looked at her.

"It was a demonic beast," she said.

"Not a spirit beast."

"What is the difference between them?" Asked Zero with genuine curiosity.

"A spirit beast cultivates natural qi from the environment. A demonic beast cultivates corrupted energy, like blood, resentment, or predation." She looked at the core.

"They do not behave the same way, and they are not fought the same way." Zero looked at the black core in his hand. Eleven children had perished over three weeks. They had only caught one Abaasy. He looked at Miho.

"Was it alone?" She looked at the core, the alley, then finally the dark city around them.

"I don't know."