I thought, heaven can't help me now
nothing lasts forever
(but this is gonna take me down)

Death's an empty classroom with no windows. White on white on the walls and floor and ceiling, so blank you almost feel like you're floating, but still those fucking plastic chairs. He counts fifteen classmates, five other guys, ten girls. Punk-looking guy in a suit with shades and headphones at the front of the room. Of course the devil's a schoolteacher.

Satan takes roll call. "Higashizawa Yodai," he says, in a baritone. Higashizawa pulls his hood over his eyes and raises his hand. He thought death would be the end of all his suffering, but here he is, back at square one.

So maybe he'd thought that puberty would be kind to him - make him look a little more like those wrestlers and MMA fighters in the posters he had hanging up on his bedroom wall. Choked down enough protein powder to smother a toddler. Learned how to cook to make it a little more palatable. It didn't do anything for him, nor did all those hours in the gym, and here he was at fifteen still the same ninety-pound weakling he'd always been. Only dead.

"And of course a Game would not be a Game without its Players," Satan was saying, motioning to the room. "Over the next seven days the Composer, in His unfailing and abject mercy, will give you the opportunity to redeem yourselves and prove your worthiness to return to life. To do so you must form a Pact; you will be given missions; you will be harried by Reapers. That is all I am authorized to tell you. Oh." He grins, snakelike. "In return for the right to play His game, the Composer, in His infinite wisdom, will take an Entry Fee: the one thing you value the most."

I'll never have the thing I want most, Higashizawa thinks, miserable.

Uzuki wakes up next to that fucking dog statue with an unbearable lightness in her head and a gun in her hands. For a moment she thinks they might have taken her memories - but everything seems to be there, as far as she can tell. Her skin's still smooth. Nails still in perfect condition. Clothes still on point. Maybe they forgot to take an entry fee? They gave her one of those stupid-looking player pins, pinned it right to her blazer. Limited-edition D&B that came with her, post-mortem. Hell yeah! Red lipstick still in the left pocket, mascara touch-up still in the right. No mirror, though. Maybe they took that. (Maybe they took her reflection.)

Well, fuck you, Reapers! With a practiced hand she re-applies her face, no reason to look like shit on the day she meets the piece of man-meat who'll take her all the way back to life. Her phone buzzes. She idly scans the thoughts of the chumps wandering around while the lovers and siblings make their pacts. Seems like there's a sale at Ten-Four, Wild Boar dumping their fall line to make room for the winter stuff. Maybe she'll pick up one of their vests. Can you take stuff that you buy while you're busy being a dead person back with you to life? Fuck that, she'll check it out anyways.

Her phone buzzes again. She caps her lipstick and tucks it back in her pocket, pulls out her phone and flips it open. Meet at Ten-Four, bring a Partner, one hour, yadda yadda. Something stings her right hand. Dude in the suit had mentioned a timer. Where the hell is everyone? The crowd's thinning out.

(Did they take her popularity? Reapers on the rooftops watching her, someone with orange hair and a shit-eating grin. This wasn't the plan. Dying was never the plan.)

"Hey, you got a partner?"

Oh, for fuck's sake.

"Yashiro, right?" Izumi, Frizzy Izzy, bed-head and acne and rumpled school uniform, slides up beside her. "It's me, Izumi. Wanna Partner up?"

Uzuki groans from behind clenched teeth. Isn't there anyone left? Anyone else? Literally anyone? No, just a bright blue light and two notes played in harmony.

"Way to be the worst thing that's happened to me this week," Uzuki says after it's done, as they fight their way through a horde of frogs, Izzy's fire burning blue and Uzuki's gun shooting bright pink blossoms. "And I died earlier today."

"Way to make a girl feel wanted," Izzy returns. "Nice hair, by the way."

Hell yeah Uzuki has nice hair. It was probably her favourite thing about herself - jet-black, pin-straight, all the way down to her waist. She spent hours caring for it every day. A familiar weight on her neck.

Wait -

It's a boring life tuned into one station for eternity. Back in his infancy he'd cared enough about putting on airs, but that had been ages ago, and he was content enough now to stop pretending. Hanekoma likes to wander around Shibuya every now and then, his frequency just high enough to make the streetlights glow a little brighter.

Someone's been messing with the murals in the Miyashita Park Underpass. Normally he wouldn't care - heck, it's nice to see the kids out there doing his dirty work for him, their art good enough to just need a bit of fine-tuning before it can start really speaking to your Soul - but this is different. It's powerful stuff.

"Fuckin' finally." The kid's not turning as he tags the CAT mural. "Figured if I added enough beauty to these piles of garbage you'd slink out of the woodwork."

"Beauty's subjective." Hanekoma sticks his hands in his pockets and leans back, observing the damage. Something about the way he'd done the infinity symbol is buzzing in his brain, and that's not from the twelve shots of espresso he took that morning. He looks at it and he remembers things from when he was still inside his egg. "You could work on your handwriting. Is that the Riemann-zeta function?"

"Beauty's subjective?" The kid leans back and laughs. Laughs so hard he's clutching his stomach, paint forgotten. Shit, there's potential for a whole new Shibuya just blooming in him and he has no idea. "That's why we do math!"

It sure is a pretty little sum, white numbers on a black skull. Hanekoma finds himself grinning. He always did like himself a big ol' gamble.

"Hey," he says with some force, and the kid stops laughing. "Th' name's Sanae. Wanna come to my little bean palace and chat about your endgame over a cup of joe?"

"Hell yeah I do," the kid says. "Sho Minamimoto. Don't you dare forget it."

Kitaniji loves Shibuya beyond all reason. Its streets are familiar to him, the cacophony a symphony he witnesses on a daily basis. Sometimes he eats lunch on one of the terraces overlooking the Scramble, reads a newspaper, imagines he's a conductor and the people below are his musicians. It's not a stretch for him. His latest track, It's So Wonderful, has gotten rave reviews from the giants all the way down to the bloggers on their cell phones. Reviews mean sales. Sales mean listeners. Listeners mean followers.

He was thinking as much, enjoying a terrific steak lunch looking down at the little people, when he thought he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Two people being chased by something red and black, weaving through the crowd. They seemed to pass through bodies like ghosts before he blinked and they vanished.

Kitaniji's not a religious man - the farthest thing from it, he worships nothing but the powers he can see and feel. That afternoon he goes wandering down to Udagawa, telling himself he's going to check in with Cyco Records, but instead finds himself drawn to the CAT mural and the bright black image of death.

"Gorgeous, isn't it?" He turns to his left; there's a boy there, grey-eyed, white-haired. Something rings in his head out of tune, leaving him on edge.

"I don't believe we've met?"

"No, we haven't." The boy grins. "Well, you haven't met me yet. I've been watching you for some time. You might say you already work for me - or my associate, at least."

"Well." Kitaniji turns back to the mural. This is old hat, crazy fanboys thinking they're the first people to use the internet to trace work to an artist. He hears an audible click and turns back. The boy has a gun levelled at him, cocked and loaded.

"I have a proposition for you, Megumi."

In the beginning there was that green-eyed goddess, weeping for the folly of mankind, and announcing their inevitable doom. The War of Five Kings had ravaged the land and brought misery to its people. Edo was still young, then, listless, hardly a dream of its own.

"But a Light," she whispered, ankle-deep in a river she called Shibuya. "Yes, I thought, perhaps, there would be a saving Light to ward off your doom." All around her, the sounds of war - the clash of swords, the groaning of the dying, the screams of the newly dead. A little out of tune with Edo there was her Underground, and while she had once thought it grand that the dead filtered downriver to her Chamber of Reckoning to be judged, there were so many dead. She had witnessed enough misery. The city was to be purged.

She turned. "Now witness the chaos and woe wrought by your own fear-mongering." Behind her, the five kings stood, ruined by their own desires. She'd called them here, down the unmarked footpath that was her trail of the sinner, to witness her purging of Edo. The sun had been eclipsed; dark black sun-fire was falling upon them. "Unless you propose an alternate solution?"

From behind a king a grey-eyed boy stepped forth - a commoner, dressed in a cotton robe. "I may have a solution," he said.

She knelt. A soft-hearted and balanced soul burning bright in him. "What is your name, child?"

He smiled, and oh, what a lovely little smile! "Kiryu. Yoshiya Kiryu."

(She gave him a portion of her Light, and he judged her and found her unworthy, killed her and the five kings, erased their memory and took the rest of their power. A boy-king lording over a city on the verge of destruction, but nobody would ever accuse Joshua of lacking decisiveness. He unified the land under the governance of good people, some of them tempered by a little Game he'd devised in his spare time. And he swore - oh, yes, this is where it gets funny - he swore to never threaten Shibuya like she had again.

Joshua commissioned Sanae to capture the last bits of her, mostly as a joke, or a keepsake. He went for a stroll and had a gander around the boy-king's new Shibuya. She was everywhere: in the trees, the rivers, the backs of people's minds, in deja vu. He'd needed five pins.)

Minamimoto keeps a sketchbook, which he produces after prodding. It's some pretty exceptional stuff. Hanekoma's all into curved lines and unexpected angles, randomness, entropy, two curves that end in a point like a fang. His imprinting is imprecise and chaotic and he likes it that way. Sho's doing wild things with a compass and straightedge, fractals, repetition, hard edges, things that look like broken glass, the fine art of unboiling an egg.

"It's pretty neat, your work. - That'll be 580 yen."

"Hell yeah it is!" Minamimoto fishes in his pocket and throws some spare change on the table. He's been by the cafe most days for months and he still needs to be reminded to fork over cash in return for goods. A bit scatterbrained. It takes all kinds to make a city like Shibuya.

Hanekoma starts another pot brewing, and Minamimoto gets out his charcoals. They stay like that for a few minutes, percolation and the sound of pencil on paper, Hanekoma's favourite harmony. "Hey," the kid says, eventually. "Y'never did tell me why someone like you's pissing around here doing trig all day."

"That's secret information."

Minamimoto laughs. It's a disarmingly charming laugh and Hanekoma wonders, not for the first time, what it would be like to have a real Soul-in-the-body son.

He clears his throat. "I have something for you." Treason in the form of a sketchbook, but hell, Minamimoto's smart enough that he'd probably figure out this stuff on his own. Might as well offer him a little guidance in case he starts seeing ghosts. He rummages through some boxes in the back of the room until he finds his lookbook, Gatito's first joint work with the Composer, a primer on imprinting.

"The hell is this?"

"Have a look at it tonight. Tell me what you think." Minamimoto tucks it under his arm.

"Thanks, integrand."

"Any time, boss."

His nose in the book on his way home, Minamimoto fails to notice a green light and gets hit by a truck and that, as you have it in a city like Shibuya, is life.

Daisuke and Konishi, finding themselves not out cold quite yet, figure the Reapers are giving them a little break to catch their breath. They share ice cream in the shade of the A-East concert hall and laugh at the silly thoughts of the people wandering by.

"Hey," Daisuke says, "Y'know, it's pretty obvious what they took from me -" Poor kid looks terrible, and he keeps insisting he was pretty hot when he was alive - "But what about you? I mean, you look alright, all things considered."

"Huh?" Konishi blinks twice. She'd already forgotten what he'd said.

The first day goes iffy, the second day a little better - Uzuki accepts the fact that she and Frizzy Izzy have to put up with each other for seven days if they want to live. Opens up her heart, a little. Begins thinking that maybe she was wrong to judge people so baselessly. They're taking out popguins and chatting about cute Reapers and things feel almost normal.

Then on the third day Izzy gets crunched by a shark, dies screaming for God or Jesus or whoever isn't listening upstairs.

"Bit of a raw deal, eh?" The orange-haired Reaper has hopped down from whatever rooftop he'd been skulking on, taking out the Noise still feasting on what bits of static remained, as Uzuki stares at the spot where Izzy had been. "Well, you've got seven minutes to live. Whaddaya say we make it a slobberknocker of a going-away party?"

She turns to him. He's sucking mildly on what appears to be a lollipop, or dango, like he hasn't a care in the world. What a fucking idiot - but an idiot with immortality, and a reason to live, and people who listen to him, probably. "Hey," she says, "Who's the moron in charge here?"

He purses his lips, and they curl at the corners into a little grin. "That'd be the Game Master," he says. "Why - you lookin' for a bit of a promotion?"

"You could say that."

Kariya keeps a book full of dark shit on all the powerful men in town. He'd started it in grade school, finding work serving drinks at fancy shindigs, and had ruthlessly made his way up the corporate ladder one drunken confessed secret at a time. Maybe it's not the most ethical thing to be blackmailing friends and co-workers into getting what you want, but hey, it keeps him dressed in Pegaso with his hair dyed black. He'd planned his whole life down to the minute. Fuck anyone who gets in his way. Ambition is everything.

So it probably shouldn't have come as much of a surprise when, while waiting for the subway to take him to uni, someone shoved him right into the path of the oncoming train.

Joshua's too - well, hands-off - to cause any major problems, but Kitaniji's a bit of a hard read, and some of his officers seem like the types to bend rules if it suits them. Hanekoma strolls around every now and then to make sure things are happening according to code. Not that he's personally invested in this Game. He'd never get personally invested in a Game.

He finds Shinji and Sho on Day 6. Shinji's hunched over Sho's prone body just outside the phone booth in Molco.

"Just collapsed," Shinji says. Sho's eyes are wide, blank, glazed over; he appears to be having a seizure. "He'd been getting weirder and weirder all week, and this morning he started saying some weird stuff about a game - I mean, not the Game, but, like, that the Game's within a game? - and just kinda passed out."

Minamimoto's Soul is flickering hard. Hanekoma squats beside him, peeks into his past. Something went horribly wrong when they took his Entry Fee.

"Hey," he whispers. "Kid. Still in there?"

Minamimoto gags, then coughs up a mouthful of static electricity. "It's a game," he spits. "It's a fucking game! It's all a fucking game! Sin x over x doesn't have an integral at all!"

Pretty routine stuff for an artist: they'd tried to take his creative talent, to remind him of the true value of it. (Hanekoma can think of a million better things for the boy, more personal things.) They'd fucked up - probably forgot that he was a mathematician as well as an artist - and instead they'd just given him a glimpse into the code, the program as it truly is. A peek behind the curtain. Surprise!

He helps Sho to his feet, gives him a little portion of his power, just enough to keep him going. It's far more illegal than he'd care to think. Repercussions upstairs if they ever find out. Hopefully it would all be worth it in the end.

They make it to Day 7, Shinji and Sho together, defeat the Game Master on Cat Street. Shinji chooses life. Minamimoto can't bear the thought of a second chance, not after what he'd been through, so they give him a different promotion.

Hanekoma makes sure he ends up a lion.

"The Conductor thought that giving him the body he'd always wanted would change his mind about what's truly important." Konishi snorts. "Fat lot of good it did anyone."

"Horrifying," the Reaper beside her says. Down below, Yodai Higashizawa continues his rampage. He'd killed his partner the moment the pact was done, and the Noise had sent him into a blind rage; unable to kill them, he'd turned his anger to the other Players and Reapers. A fine piece of work, this horrendous musclebond man, covered in Noise nipping at his skin as he makes mincemeat out of the Players (his words, not theirs). The first day barely begun and already half the field eliminated.

"Reapers are on emergency call. We can overwhelm him with Noise." The field officer turns to Konishi. "Your call, ma'am."

Hell yeah it's my call. All those years ago she'd made a deal with the devil, just for moments like this. Kitaniji had a way of bending people to his will, and she'd spent the better part of her career slowly wrapping him around her finger, until he'd more or less given her all the control she needed. The Player on the streets below them was one heck of a loose cannon, but perhaps if they reminded him of precisely whom had given him his heart's desire in the first place...

"...A mind's a terrible thing to waste," the man in black says, standing over Konishi and Daisuke's prone bodies. So close, the two of them; made it all the way to the final confrontation with the Game Master, only to fail in the end. "I have a proposition for you, miss Konishi."

Konishi's gotten better at this, remembering things by repeating sentences in her head, building a scale model of the world in the fog that had taken over her mind. She blinks four times, trying to ground herself. Kitaniji helps her up.

"The Composer, in His almighty wisdom, has agreed to give you your Entry Fee back," he says. "It's not standard procedure, so He'll need something in return."

Daisuke's sitting up, clutching a mangled arm. "Hey, Mitsuki, didja hear that? You're gonna get all fixed up! - And hey, what about me?"

"- Erase him," Kitaniji says, pointing to Daisuke. "Prove your loyalty to the Reapers' cause, and the Composer will return your Entry Fee to you, unchanged."

They'd warned each other against hedonism, falling back in love with the art of being alive. But hey, a guy's gotta live when he's alive, yeah? Hanekoma smokes on occasion, gambles frequently, is reborn every time that smooth baritone of a nice cup of coffee hits his lips. Put on some rhythm and bass, give him a couple of fingers of whiskey, and he might even forgive himself for all that wasted time in the Angels' Domain.

He'll do anything to hold onto his present circumstances, the city that he loves - even commit treason.

"I've decided to wash my hands of it," that boy-king says. It's not a conversation Sanae is present for, but he hears it all the same; and the Composer knows he's hearing it. The Game is with his Conductor, but there's an unspoken challenge issued to the Producer: will you dance?

Hell yes he will.

Fucking amazing, Neku thinks, looking up at the grinning Reaper on the Udagawa mural.

To his left, footsteps, the sound of someone running.