Chapter 1: There You Are
The first time Gojo Satoru walked into your shop, he ducked under the doorframe, knocked a wind chime off its hook with his hair, and said, "Wow. This place is haunted as hell."
"It's not haunted," you said, without looking up from the blade on your bench. "It's stocked."
You had been running the shop for three years by then, since your grandfather's hands got too bad to hold a hammer. It sat behind a vintage clothing store in Shimokitazawa, down a passage so narrow that most people walked past it, and it looked, to anyone without the eyes for it, like a dusty knife sharpener's: a long counter, glass cases, the smell of oil and hot iron from the forge in the back. To anyone with the eyes for it, the place hummed. Every blade on the walls had been quenched, folded or bound with cursed energy. Half the grade ones in Tokyo had something of your grandfather's on their belts, and lately, something of yours.
You knew who he was, obviously. Everyone in your world did. The tallest man you'd ever seen, white hair standing up over a black blindfold, dark uniform, hands in his pockets like he was shopping for socks. The strongest sorcerer alive. The man the higher-ups were so afraid of they had to pretend they weren't.
He wandered along your cases, bending to look at things, though you had no idea how he looked at anything with that blindfold on. He picked up a tanto from the end of the counter and turned it over. He put it back. He picked up a ceramic cat that was not for sale and also put that back.
"I'm looking for a gift," he said. "My kouhai's birthday. Nanami. Very serious guy, wears a tie to fight, hates fun. Something that says, 'I respect you, but I also want you to suffer.'"
"I have a lot of things like that."
"I bet you do." He leaned his elbows on your counter, right next to the blade you were working on, so close you could smell him: something clean and sugary, like the inside of a candy shop. His head tilted. "What's that one?"
You hesitated.
It was a tanto, plain-hilted, the blade barely longer than your hand. You'd been working on it for a year. You'd quenched it in water from a shrine spring on the winter solstice and folded it a thousand times and, on the last fold, bound it with a vow that cost you something you didn't like to think about. It looked like nothing at all. It was the best thing you had ever made.
"It's not finished," you said.
"Liar." He grinned. "It's finished. It's humming like a beehive. What does it do?"
You should have lied again. You didn't, and later you would wonder if you'd known even then what you were doing. "It closes distances," you said. "Things that are held apart. Barriers. Some techniques." You set down your polishing cloth. "I've never tested it on anything strong."
He went still. Not dramatically. Just a pause, the kind a cat makes when something moves in long grass.
"Test it on me," said Gojo Satoru.
"No."
"Come on. Just a little poke." He held out his hand, palm up, over the counter. "I've got Infinity on. It won't touch me. Nothing touches me. It'll be like poking a wall with a chopstick, and then you'll know it's not finished, and you can be sad about it, and I'll buy something to cheer you up."
You looked at his long pale hand, lying open on your counter. You looked at the blindfold.
You picked up the tanto, and very carefully, with the flat of the blade, you touched it to the back of his knuckles.
It touched him.
You felt it go through. A tiny resistance, like pushing a needle through a drumskin, and then nothing, and then the cool flat steel resting against his skin. Warm skin. Ordinary skin, with a pulse in it.
Nobody spoke. Outside, in the passage, someone's bicycle bell rang twice.
Gojo Satoru took his hand back. He put it in his pocket. Then he reached up, with the other hand, and pulled the blindfold down around his neck.
You had heard about his eyes. You had not been ready for them. They were the blue of the sky at a very high altitude, pale and glassy and lit from inside, framed by white lashes, and they were looking at you as if nothing else in the shop, in the street, in the city, had ever existed at all.
"Huh," he said softly. "There you are."
He bought a letter opener for Nanami. He came back the next day for nothing.
He came back the day after that, and the day after that. He brought pastries from a bakery in Ginza that you'd mentioned once, and a coffee, made exactly the way you took it, which you had never told him. He sat on the stool at the end of your counter and talked while you worked, about everything and nothing: a curse in Shinjuku he'd flattened with one finger, Nanami's face when he opened the letter opener, a trip to Okinawa he wanted to take that he was absolutely certain you'd love. He wore the blindfold. You didn't need to see his eyes to know where they were.
You liked it. That was the problem. You liked him. He was funny and ridiculous and endlessly, loudly bored by everything except you, and you'd been lonely in that shop for three years without quite admitting it.
Then small things started happening.
The man from the property company who'd been threatening to raise your rent called to say, with real fear in his voice, that he'd reconsidered. The curse that had been nesting in the drains at the end of your passage for months, a low-grade thing you'd learned to step around, was simply gone one morning, not exorcised but erased, leaving a smooth crater in the concrete. A rival smith in Nakano who'd told half of Tokyo your grandfather's work was overrated sent you, out of nowhere, a written apology.
You mentioned the drains to Gojo. "You know anything about that?"
"Me?" He licked cream off his thumb. "I'm just a humble teacher."
And then there was Morioka.
Morioka Ren was a grade two who'd been coming to your shop for a year to have his naginata sharpened. He was nice. Quiet, decent, a little shy, with a habit of rubbing the back of his neck when he talked to you. On a Thursday in October, he finally asked if you'd like to get dinner on Saturday, and you surprised yourself by saying yes.
On Friday morning, Morioka Ren was reassigned to Hokkaido. Indefinitely. Effective immediately. He called you from the airport, baffled, apologising, saying it had come from very high up and nobody would tell him why.
You hung up and stood very still in the middle of your shop.
When Gojo came in that afternoon, whistling, with a box of daifuku under his arm, you were waiting for him behind the counter with the tanto lying in front of you.
"Morioka," you said.
"Who?" He set down the daifuku. "Oh, the naginata guy. Yeah, I heard. Rough. Lot of curses in Hokkaido this time of year, they really needed somebody. Good for his career, honestly."
"Did you do it?"
He was quiet for a second. Then he leaned over the counter until his face was very close to yours, the blindfold a black line across it, and said, quite pleasantly, "Would it matter?"
"Yes, it would matter. You can't..."
"I didn't hurt him." His voice was light and easy and sweet. "I'd never do anything to upset you. He's fine. He's eating crab in Sapporo." He tilted his head. "He wasn't right for you, anyway. He rubs his neck when he lies. Did you notice? I noticed."
"That's not your call."
"Isn't it?" He smiled. It was a beautiful smile, wide and bright and wildly pleased, and underneath it, very far down, something enormous moved, like the shadow of a whale passing under a small boat. "I can see you, you know. All the time. Your cursed energy. It's the only quiet thing in this whole loud city. I could find you from Shibuya with my eyes closed. I could find you from Kyoto." He reached out, slowly, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear. His fingers were warm. Nothing in Infinity stopped them now. "I just like to know you're safe."
You should have been afraid. Part of you was. But a bigger part, the part you didn't like to look at, felt that touch all the way down your spine and wanted to lean into it.
"Get out of my shop," you said.
He laughed, delighted. He went.
You worked late that night. You told yourself it was because you had orders, which was true. You did not tell yourself it was because you didn't want to go home and lie in bed thinking about a man who could see you through walls and had decided, apparently, that you were his.
It was past midnight when you finally locked up and walked the ten minutes to your apartment, a cramped second-floor place above a ramen shop with a staircase on the outside of the building. The night was cold. The streets were empty. You had the tanto in its sheath at your hip, the way you always did now, without quite deciding to.
At the top of your stairs, the light on the landing was out.
You stopped. Something was wrong. The air smelled of iron, and not the clean iron of the forge. Your door was standing open an inch.
And on the landing, half in shadow, there was a man lying face down on the concrete.
He was dressed in dark clothes, gloves, a mask pushed up onto his forehead. A curse user. You could feel the residue of his energy hanging in the air, sour and wrong. There was a knife on the ground near his hand, a long thin cursed blade with talismans wrapped round the hilt, and you knew without being told what he'd come up your stairs in the middle of the night to take.
He wasn't breathing. There was no blood. There was no mark on him at all. He looked as if something had simply reached into him and switched him off.
From inside your apartment, through the open door, came the crinkle of a plastic wrapper.
You pushed the door open with your foot.
Gojo Satoru was sitting cross-legged on your kitchen counter in the dark, blindfold on, eating a strawberry mochi out of the pack you'd been saving in your fridge.
"Hey," he said, through a mouthful. "So. Bad news." He nodded toward the landing. "You should really get better locks."