Chapter 1: The Minder
The orders came folded inside a bento box, under the pickled plum, which you thought was a little much even for the higher-ups.
You read them on the Shinkansen out of Kyoto with the lid tilted toward the window. Three lines of brushwork on rice paper, no seal, no signature. Accompany the special grade pair to Kusatsu. Maintain the curtain. Report all conduct, conversations and use of technique to this office directly. Underneath, smaller, a fourth line that wasn't an order so much as a carrot: The matter of your family's debt will be reviewed favorably upon receipt.
You ate the plum. You burned the paper in the train toilet with a match and a flick of cursed energy, and you watched the ash go down and thought about your mother's face the last time the clan accountant came to the house.
Then you changed at Takasaki for the bus into the mountains, and by the time you stepped off into the sulfur-yellow steam of Kusatsu at dusk, you had decided two things. You would do the job. And you would not, under any circumstances, get attached.
You lasted about four minutes.
"Oh, she's cute," Gojo Satoru said, before you'd even finished bowing. "Suguru, she's cute. They sent us a cute one. That's suspicious, right? That's a little suspicious."
He was leaning against the railing that ran around the yubatake, the great steaming field of wooden channels in the middle of town where the hot spring water runs down to cool. The steam came up around him in sheets and simply didn't touch him. It curled away an inch from his coat. He had a paper bag of onsen manju in one hand and a half-eaten one in the other and a black blindfold over his eyes, his white hair shoved up over it in a way that should have looked ridiculous and instead looked like someone had designed it.
"Satoru," said the man beside him. "Say hello like a person."
"Hello like a person."
Geto Suguru sighed through his nose. It was, you would learn, a sigh he had been sighing for over a decade and had polished to an art form. He was taller than you'd expected from the stories, broad through the shoulders under a black kesa, his long hair tied up in a half bun with a loose fringe falling across his brow. The gauges in his stretched earlobes caught the lamplight. He looked at you with narrow, heavy-lidded eyes, and it was a mild look, perfectly polite, and you had the immediate and specific feeling of being read from the first page.
"Thank you for coming all this way," he said. "I'm sorry about him. He was raised by wolves."
"I was raised by the Gojo clan."
"Like I said."
You straightened up. "I'm your curtain. Grade 1. Kyoto office." You named your clan. Neither of them reacted, which was a small mercy; most sorcerers in Tokyo either hadn't heard of your family or had heard about the debt. "I was told there are seven missing."
"Nine as of this afternoon," Geto said. "Two more walked into the field last night. Witnesses say they were smiling."
Gojo held out the bag of manju. "Snack?"
"No, thank you."
"You've been on a bus for two hours. Have a snack."
"I'm fine."
"She's fine, Suguru."
"I heard her."
"She's suspicious and fine." Gojo tilted his head. You couldn't see his eyes behind the blindfold, and you knew perfectly well that it didn't matter, that the cloth was there to keep the world out and not to keep him from seeing it. The Six Eyes see cursed energy the way other people see color. They see the shape of a technique before it fires. Rumor said they could see the flow of a person's energy so finely that he could tell when someone was lying from the way it stuttered.
You thought about the ash going down the train toilet, and kept your energy as smooth as still water.
"What's your technique?" he asked. "I'm going to guess. Don't tell me. Is it ink? It's ink, isn't it. You've got it under your nails."
You looked at your hands. You'd scrubbed them twice on the train.
"Folding Screen," you said. "I paint barriers. Panels, mostly. They hinge."
"Show me."
"Satoru," said Geto.
"I'm being collegial!"
You sighed, pulled the brush from the case at your hip, and drew a single stroke on the air between you. Black ink bled out of nothing and spread, branching, until it was a panel as tall as you were, a pine tree on a gold ground, the way your grandmother taught you, every needle exact. You hinged a second panel off the first with a flick, a crane in flight. Then you closed them around the paper bag in Gojo's hand like a book closing on a pressed flower.
When you opened them again the bag was in yours.
There was a short silence over the yubatake. Somewhere below, the water chuckled down its wooden channels.
Then Gojo Satoru laughed, a real laugh, startled and delighted, his head thrown back. "Suguru. Suguru, did you see that."
"I saw."
"She stole my manju."
"You did offer."
"I offered one." He turned the blindfold toward you, and even through the cloth you felt the attention land, heavy and bright. "That was through Infinity. You went through it. How'd you go through it?"
"I didn't go through anything," you said. "I closed the barrier around the space you were holding, not around you. The bag was never inside your Infinity. It was just near it." You took out a manju and bit into it. Brown sugar, sweet bean. "These are good."
"Oh no," said Geto, very quietly, to no one. "Now he's going to like you."
The ryokan the higher-ups had booked was the old kind, all dark cedar and paper screens and creaking floors that sang when you walked on them. You had a room of your own at the end of the corridor. They had the big suite next to it. One room, you noticed. One room, two futons that by morning would be pushed together, and a low table that was already covered in sweets, case files, and a single long black hair tie.
You had read the files on them before you came. Everyone in jujutsu society had read something. The strongest pair. The two who'd come through the Star Plasma Vessel mission when they were barely old enough to be sent on it, and who'd come out of it different: Gojo with the Six Eyes finally awake to everything, Geto with something in his face that the reports didn't have a word for. Then years of jobs nobody else could do. Special grades exorcised like housework. The higher-ups paid them and hated it, and every few months somebody in a dark room in Kyoto asked what would happen if Gojo Satoru ever decided he didn't feel like taking orders, and somebody else said not to worry, Geto would keep him in line, and a third person asked who exactly kept Geto in line, and then everybody stopped talking.
The files didn't mention that they finished each other's sentences. Or that they argued about everything, constantly, in a low affectionate murmur like two people who'd been doing it so long it was a kind of music. Or that Geto touched the small of Gojo's back when they walked through a door. Or that Gojo, who supposedly let nothing in the world touch him, let him.
They didn't mention that they'd both start looking at you like that.
You noticed it the second night. You'd spent the whole day on the curtain, a dome of black ink and painted plum branches over the entire yubatake while they walked the channels, Gojo with the blindfold pushed up and the Six Eyes blazing, Geto with three of his own curses unspooled from nowhere and sniffing along the water like hounds. The thing in the hot spring field was clever. It hid in the steam itself. It was there and not there, and every time Gojo said "Got you," it was gone.
After dinner Geto knocked on your screen with two knuckles.
"Bath," he said. "Before the water gets crowded. You held that curtain for nine hours. Your shoulders are up by your ears."
"They're always up by my ears."
"I know. I've been watching." He said it simply, the way he said everything, and then he smiled, and it was not a polite smile. "Mixed bath's outdoors. The view's good."
"Is he there?"
"Satoru's always there. He's had a towel on his head for twenty minutes. He's waiting to see if you'll come."
"Why?"
Geto considered that. In the low lamplight his eyes were very dark, and it seemed to you that whatever he said next, he had already decided to tell the truth.
"Because we talked about it," he said.
The outdoor bath sat on the edge of the ryokan's garden behind a bamboo fence, a ragged oval of grey stone and milky, mineral-blue water steaming into the cold. Snow on the rocks. Snow on the pines. A stone lantern, half buried, glowing gold.
Gojo was up to his collarbones in the water, white hair darkened with steam and slicked back off his face, a folded towel on his head. He'd taken off the blindfold. You'd never seen his eyes without something in front of them. They were blue the way the sky is blue in the very first second after a storm, so bright they looked lit from behind, and the lashes around them were white as the snow.
He looked at you. You stood very still in your thin cotton yukata with your towel against your chest and let him look.
"Hi," he said, not loud at all for once.
"Hi."
Geto came past you, dropped his yukata over a rock without any fuss whatsoever, and stepped into the water. You saw the long line of his back, broad and scarred and strong, and the ink of his hair coming down out of the bun, and then he was sitting beside Gojo, shoulder to shoulder, and Gojo's hand slid under the surface and settled somewhere you couldn't see, and Geto leaned into it without looking.
You took a breath that came out white.
"I'm not going to bite," Gojo said. "Suguru might. He's got a whole thing."
"You're a menace," Geto said, without heat.
"I'm honest. That's different."
You hung your towel on the bamboo. You untied the yukata. The air hit your skin like a slap and then the water hit it like a mouth, scalding and soft, and you sank in up to your chin on the other side of the pool and stayed there with your knees pulled up and your face burning.
For a while none of you said anything. The steam rose. Somewhere in the town a bell rang the hour.
"So," you said eventually. "You talked about it."
"Mm." Gojo tipped his head back against the stone. "We share things. Always have. Everything, actually. Food. Missions. Futons. Clothes, though his don't fit me, he's got those big dumb shoulders."
"My shoulders are proportional."
"Your shoulders are a crime." Gojo's eyes slid sideways to you. The Six Eyes in the dark were almost too much to look at. "We've never wanted to share anybody before. Not like this. We kept waiting for one of us to want somebody the other one didn't. Never happened. Then you stole my manju through my Infinity, and Suguru looked at me, and I looked at him, and." He shrugged one bare shoulder out of the water. "Here we are."
"You've known me two days."
"I've known you two days," Geto agreed. "I've watched you hold a barrier for eighteen hours over two days without asking for a single break. I've watched you lie to him about whether you were hungry four times. I've watched you look at us when you think we can't see you." His voice was low and patient and absolutely certain. "We're not asking you for anything tonight. We just thought you should know the offer's on the table, and that it's an offer, and you can say no."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I'm devastated and I eat all the sweets in Gunma," Gojo said. "And Suguru says I told you so. And we still have a nice time exorcising a curse together, and you still get your report written."
He said it lightly. He said it so lightly. But under the water, your whole body went cold, because he'd said report, and nobody had told them about any report. Nobody was supposed to know.
He was smiling at you. It was a very gentle smile.
"You've got really smooth cursed energy," Gojo Satoru said. "Like still water. Almost nobody's is that smooth, you know. Not unless they're working pretty hard at it."
And across the pool, in the steam, very slowly, Geto Suguru held out his hand.