November 21

Sae entered the apartment to the unmistakable stench of burnt tuna. Makoto stood over the stove, looking pale and with dark circles under her eyes. Sae grimaced. Neither of them had slept last night, but Makoto was the one who had planned to fake Kurusu's death and been nearly decapitated by a Shadow. Sae's Shadow. "You shouldn't be cooking," she said in what she hoped was an authoritative tone. "Or anything else. At least try to rest."

Makoto started. "You're home!" She surveyed the ruins of her dinner attempt. "I'm sorry. I know things have been rough lately, but that's no excuse. I'll—"

"You're going to take a break." Sae stepped into the kitchen. Her nose wrinkled as the odor intensified. There had been a time when she would have brushed off Makoto's exhaustion, she thought with another wince. Treated dinner as something she was owed in exchange for paying the rent. How many times had Makoto cleansed a corrupted heart and rushed home to do chores while Sae chased after promotions without even noticing? No more. "I will take care of dinner."

"You're just as tired as I am, Sis." Makoto tensed. "Has anyone said anything about Akira at work? If anyone finds out what you did…"

We'll all be dead. Killed slowly, untraceably, and painfully. "No one will find out." She put her hand on Makoto's shoulder. The movement still felt strange, like blocking for a play that she was still trying to learn. "I swear neither Shido nor anyone else will hurt you. He will pay for his crimes. After all you've done for me, it's the least I can do."

Makoto sucked in a breath. "You're going to bring him down. I know you will."

Sae's grip tightened as she sucked in a breath of her own. She wondered again what precisely she had done to deserve this and how she was going to repay the debt she owed, begin making up for all the mistakes of the past three years. She turned Makoto to face her. "We're going to bring them down. Together. The Phantom Thieves are going to need your brilliant strategies if we're to have any hope of success."

"Brilliant?" Makoto smiled, and, just for a moment, the exhaustion on her face fell away, and she was beaming.

Sae closed her eyes. What was it Kurusu had said yesterday? "Yeah, going after Kaneshiro was stupid. But she did it for you. I think Makoto would have set herself on fire if it made you proud of her. "You've always been the smart one in the family. And the brave one. I'm… proud of you." She cleared her throat. "But it doesn't do anybody any good if you run yourself ragged. I'm going to pick us both up some dinner, okay?"

"Can it be curry from Leblanc?" Makoto looked down. "Akira didn't look so good. I worry about him."

No, Kurusu hadn't looked good, even after the drugs had worn off. His face had been a mass of bruises and he had leaned heavily on Sae as they walked to and from the cab. Roughing up suspects in custody was something everyone knew the officers did, but they were usually careful to leave some plausible deniability. That they were willing to go beyond sleep deprivation or grabbing shirt collars showed just how desperate Shido was. Then again, Kurusu was supposed to have a bullet in his head and it wouldn't have mattered how the rest of the body looked. That was the level of corruption she had shut her eyes to. Accomplice after the fact. "I'll check on him, bring back dinner and a report. And then you and I are going to have a chat about how chores are divided around here. It's far past time I started doing things for you."

Makoto swallowed. "You really have changed," she said in a small, quiet voice. "I'm so proud of you."

Sae smiled and managed to make it out the door before she wiped her eyes.

She had never liked Yongenjaya—if it wasn't for Sakura's coffee being the best in the city, she would never come here. It wasn't the worst neighborhood in Tokyo, but the streets were too cramped, the paint on the houses too faded, symptoms of a rapidly decaying lower middle-class. The kind of people who would have latched onto Shido even without the Metaverse because he told them their problems were not their fault and the glory of thirty years ago could be reclaimed. Everything she had sworn that she and Makoto would never suffer.

The sign on the door of the café said "open" but Leblanc was nearly deserted and the ring of the bell seemed unnaturally loud to Sae's ears. There was no sign of Sakura. Sae relaxed. Sakura had thrown her out yesterday, but then she had been carrying the semiconscious body of someone who might as well be his son. She wouldn't blame him for hating her. Another person she would have to apologize to.

But the only person in the café was Kurusu. He sat with his back to her, scribbling furiously in a notebook and consulting an open textbook every few minutes. Sae started and looked out the door. Anyone could walk in, and they would find the Phantom here very much alive. She clenched and unclenched her fists. All her hard work—all Makoto's hard work—for nothing. She stepped around to the opposite side of the booth. "Kurusu?" she asked and mentally organized a lecture on proper witness protection protocol.

He looked at her, and the lecture died on her lips. Kurusu's skin was still mottled with bruises and half-healed cuts, but there was no trace of the-glassy-eyed stare of yesterday. His gray eyes were sharp and bright, even penetrating as a half-dozen emotions flittered across his face—irritation, shock, fear, before he gave her a small smile. "Ms. Niijima! I didn't think you'd show up again so soon." Back to worry. "Is everything okay? Akechi hasn't—"

"I haven't seen or spoken to him." She tried to smile. "I just wanted some curry, and Makoto's worried about you." So am I. "How are you holding up? "

"Better than most dead people. Tae—Dr. Takemi—says I should be fine in a day or two. I'm afraid it'll take a while for me to get my roguish good looks back." He laughed, but it turned into a coughing fit. "And my ribs feel like they've been split open."

Sae's jaw clenched, and something cold and sharp flowed beneath her skin. She would bring down Shido, but that wasn't enough. She wanted the interrogators who had done this, the bureau chiefs who had allowed it, the coroner so anxious to sign the death certificate that he hadn't even bothered to check the body, the whole rotten system that let a serial rapist get away with his crimes for years and beat the man who had done more to shine a light on corruption than most ever thought of doing. It wasn't…just. "Bastards," she muttered.

"I'm going to get better, don't you worry." His voice was low and dark and dangerous. "I have to. For Futaba and Haru and everyone else Shido has hurt."

Sae breathed in. Part of her job had been to profile this mysterious Phantom who was throwing Japan into chaos. Akira wasn't the monster she had constructed so she could feel better about discarding her ethics bit by bit, but noble wasn't the same thing as safe or tame. No one who could make yakuza bosses break down in tears was safe. His eyes darkened. No, tame was the last word she would have used it to describe Akira Kurusu.

But then he blinked. "Curry, you said? Sojiro had to pick up some stuff for Futaba, but he taught me all the recipes. I recommend it with apples."

He was going to cook for her? Now? "That's really not—"

"I've been laying around all day". He stood and shuffled toward the kitchen. "We are technically open and you are a customer. Apples?"

"Apples are fine." If he was this committed to his life as a Phantom Thief, then Shido's days were already numbered.

Pots clanged in the distance, and Sae sat. The notebook and textbook were open before her. She had never pictured Kurusu as the studious type, though his grades appeared to be excellent. Another thing she had gotten wrong about him. She read:

Giant pulses from energetic pulsars have been observed with S5 GHz = 10 kJy, but with durations of only ∼10 ns. The region from where a pulse of radiation originates must be no larger than the distance that light can travel during the duration of a pulse. If the pulsars are at a distance of 1 kpc, estimate the brightness temperature of these sources.

Sae frowned. She had been an excellent student in school, but her focus had been on the law, with only enough math and science that she could follow the forensic accountant's explanations of how a politician had managed to embezzle funds. And she didn't remember questions like these, certainly not in the second year of high school. She flipped to the cover of the textbook: An Introduction to Radio Astronomy. "You're an astronomer?"

More clanging and Kurusu all but dashed out of the kitchen bearing steaming hot curry. Sweat poured down his face "You read my problem sets?" he asked between gasps.

Sae took the curry. And put it on the table "I knew I shouldn't have let you do this. You're worse than Makoto. And you didn't answer my question. I wouldn't have taken you for the academic sort."

He put his hands in his pockets. His smile was a grimace. "Clashes with the bad boy Phantom Thief image too much for you, Prosecutor?"

Sae didn't answer right away. She had read Kurusu's file of cours —she hadn't been so oblivious a guardian that she hadn't noticed Makoto had a new group of friends She had been terrified a delinquent would ruin her sister's future. And then there had been yesterday, when everything she thought she had known about the world had been upended in a few hours. He had awakened some spark of idealism that Sae had thought snuffed out when her father had died. She knew the meek and mild boy who wore glasses he apparently didn't need was a lie and that the Phantom was a force for good, but none of that added up to knowing Akira Kurusu, Person. "I think my image of you has been as distorted as my heart." She tapped the problem. "This is too advanced for high school, isn't it?"

"Probably," he admitted and his flush deepened. "I grew up in a speck of a nothing town that didn't even have its own movie theater. Nothing to do except stargaze unless you wanted to get high." His voice was low again, but rhythmic, the sort of voice she had tried for when she needed the lay judges to hang on to her every word. "And space is so big and there's so much we don't yet. Quasars and dark matter. We don't know why the sun's corona is so hot or the cause of the flyby anomaly. And I...I want to know and apparently I'm good at math and..." He took his hands out of his pockets and held them up, as if to shield himself. "I want to know."

No, she hadn't known Kurusu at all. And that seemed a horrible failure in a prosecutor. Perhaps more than that: she had waded in a mire of ambition and lies for so long that she hadn't recognized curiosity or nobility or any other virtue when it walked up and hit her in the nose. "That's very… admirable of you." No, that sounded condescending. "I owe you an apology, Mr. Kurusu. For harassing your guardian, and for everything I've done and said to you in both worlds. A young man brave enough to risk everything you have and still curious and smart enough to want to know how the world works. It's really quite remarkable."

"Thank you." His voice was soft, but there was a raw edge, and his smile held no trace of arrogance. "You're…remarkable too, Ms. Niijima."

Her? Remarkable in corruption, perhaps, if she could have a Palace alongside monsters like Kamoshida and Kaneshiro. "Wasn't I trying to kill you the day before yesterday?"

"And you saved my life yesterday. I think we're even. And, you know, you're the only Palace creator out of six whose heart I didn't have to steal." He cocked his head to one side. "Maybe both of our visions have been a little distorted. Maybe…maybe we should start over. Get to know each other. We are working together now after all."

Sae stared at him. She didn't remember the last time she had socialized for its own sake, rather than trying to ingratiate herself with her superiors. Simply talking had seemed unimportant when she had to put food on the table. As Makoto had become unimportant. And if she was going to change, and do something with the healed heart he had given her, she would have to make an effort. He had told her that his power came from his bonds with others. She didn't have his magic, would never have it, but maybe there would be a kind of power in learning to see the real Kurusu. And maybe she wanted to hear his voice change again as he talked about things she only half understood. "I always did like coming here for coffee. If Sojiro doesn't throw me out."

"He won't."

Last objection overturned. "Then, maybe you could start by reminding me what the flyby paradox is? My physics and astronomy are a little rusty."

He chuckled, a deep rich sound that made her skin tingle. "It would be my honor, Ms. Niijima." He bowed to her, and there was no trace of mockery.

Later, Sae returned home with mostly-hot curry. Makoto lay sprawled on the couch, snoring and with her limbs flying in all directions. Sae bit her lip. It was perhaps an injustice of its own that she was being given a second chance to repair the relationship with her sister. To learn how to be human again and to fight for what was right, no matter the odds, but it was a chance she intended to take. She bent to brush Makoto's forehead with her lips. "I love you," she whispered. The words still sounded awkward in her mouth, but they were easier when Makoto was asleep.

Makoto stirred. "Hmph. Sis?" She rubbed her eyes and sat up. "You got the curry? How long was I out? How's Akira?"

"He's fine." And somehow, when they found a way to bring Shido to justice, they would all be fine. In the meantime, she would try heal the wounds in her heart that had given birth to Leviathan. "What do you know about astrophysics?"