Ryo walked a little faster ahead of Remi, but she grabbed his bare shoulder and pulled him back. “Listen to me! I know you play a charade. You have been using this job as a shovel to bury something inside you. Sure, you say it’s for the good of the innocents and the civilians, and you’re not wrong. But you and I both know that that is not why you are with the Kaijin.”

Ryo glared at her. “Shut up. Right now.”

“No! Because if you keep up this façade it will eventually—!”

Ryo seized her by her arms and shoved her against the wall, gripping her throat. He didn’t squeeze, though he held her there, eyes wide with what could only be explained as the clashing tides of utter calmness and unchained anger.

If Remi was scared, she didn’t show it. Her body was slack, eyes locked on Ryo. She could have taken him down from that position easily, he knew. It was impulsive and brazen to confront her in any manner, and more so like this. Foolish boy, she’d say as she breaks his fingers one by one. Dimmer than a brain-rotted runt, as she dislocates his kneecaps, listening to him sob and gnash his teeth in pain. She was a coiled snake, and the only reason she wouldn’t fight was by her own choice.

“… eat you up completely…” she muttered.

“You… are my ally,” Ryo said slowly. “And at most a co-worker. You know nothing of who I am.”

“I’m quite certain I know who you are, Ryo,” Remi whispered. “I just don’t know why.” Her eyes drifted down the hall, signaling she was done with the conversation.

When he let her go, they continued to walk in silence. Remi rubbed her shoulder but said nothing, until:

“Here. This room.”

The door was displayed with an intricate stitching like the others, but Ryo was too distracted to pay it much attention. He slid it open ahead of Remi and walked in. The entire room was nearly bare, a platter of teacups and a blackened kettle sitting center on the polished wood floor, and the only other pieces being two tiny, green plants in tinier pots pushed into the far corners against the cream-colored walls.

“This is it?” Ryo’s eyes hardened. “Where’s Shinji?”

“He’ll be here, don’t worry.”

Ryo sat cross-legged next to the tea platter, an exasperated look plastered across his face, the immediate presence of enmity having slowly bled away. He sat there with an entirely new sense of conflict, one Remi could not describe, least of all explain. From her perspective Ryo was a man that treated himself as a machine. He could speak and smile and think and feel but at most times there was such a complete lack of humanity in his poise. She imagined him looking up at her, grinning slightly, a queer look in his eye, then, reaching up with one hand, peeling away the skin from his lips past his ear, bloodless and translucent in the light of spilled oil lamps which ignited the floor and the walls and the beautiful paper doors with bright orange flames. She imagined a skull of steel, shiny as an oiled blade in the firelight, an exposed eye twitching in its socket then falling to the floor and melting in a pool of jelly. Behind it were clockwork gears and a faceted, dull green jewel that turned with the tick tick tick of the gnashing cogs, twinkling like the seconds on a pendulum clock, the heartbeats of a lifeless machine. The room was engulfed completely, his mouth unhinged for some final word or another but remained silent, walls were scorched black and the stitchings were burned to ash. All she could feel was sadness.

“Rem!”

She blinked. Ryo wasn’t the one who spoke, but a new arrival that had slipped inside as she was caught in a deep, troubling thought. A young man in a white robe and hair as black as his sister’s, tied in a ponytail, stood by the door. He had a face as hardened as Ryo’s yet it carried the beginnings of wrinkles one associated with expressions of happiness. His eyes drifted from Ryo to Remi and he smiled slightly. “You alright there, Rem?”

“Shinji!” She let go a great breath she didn’t know she had been holding, embracing him in a hug.

“I appreciate your timeliness, Shinji,” Ryo didn’t move from the floor but looked up at the ceiling with apparent boredom. “Was about to go looking for you while Rem daydreamed.”

“I don’t think Mother would have liked that,” Shinji laughed. “I’m assuming you’d like to get started immediately?”

Ryo turned his head. “You know me so well.”

“Okay, then.” Remi let go of Shinji and he sat across from Ryo, with Remi on his left between them. “Let’s begin.”