The rain fell on Tokyo like a million tiny prayers going unanswered.
Kisuno Minazawa's small feet splashed through puddles that reflected the neon chaos above—convenience store signs, izakaya lanterns, the endless electric hum of a city that never slept and never cared. His lungs burned. The tattered black cloak that dragged behind him, three years of survival worn into its threads, caught on a rusted bicycle rack. He yanked it free without stopping, without looking back, because looking back meant seeing them.
The police. "Stop! Kid, stop running!"
His sky-blue eyes—once bright, now dulled like sea glass—fixed ahead on the narrowing alley. At six years old, Kisuno had learned the architecture of Tokyo's forgotten spaces: which alleys dead-ended, which fire escapes had broken ladders, which dumpsters could hide a child small enough to fold himself into nothing. Three years on the streets had made him something between ghost and shadow, existing in the margins where society's gaze couldn't reach.
The convenience store bread clutched against his cloak was already soaked through. He'd grabbed three packages—two for tonight, one for tomorrow if tomorrow came. The alarm had sounded before he'd made it five steps. The manager had shouted. Then the police, always the police, with their uniforms and their questions and their promises to "help him" that meant white rooms and strangers' capture and eventually, inevitably, being lost in a system that had already failed him once.
His mother's voice, a ghost-memory: "Kisuno, close your eyes, sweatheart. Close your eyes and don't open them no matter what you hear." He'd closed them, but he'd heard everything.
The alley forked. Left or right? Left led toward the main street—exposure, crowds, nowhere to hide. Right descended into Tokyo's industrial underbelly, darker and more dangerous but familiar. He chose right, always right, deeper into the city's shadows where he belonged.
Behind him, the police radio crackled. "Suspect heading east toward the industrial district. Backup requested. It's just a kid, probably another runaway—"
Just a kid.
The words echoed in his skull as his bare feet slapped against wet concrete. The sole of his left foot was bleeding again—he'd stepped on glass yesterday, and the wound kept reopening—but pain was just another constant, like hunger, like cold, like the hollowness that lived where his heart used to be.
The alley narrowed further, walls pressing in like the city itself was trying to squeeze him out of existence. Ahead, a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Dead end. His breath came in ragged gasps. The sirens grew louder, closer, inevitable as dawn.
Kisuno turned, pressed his back against the cold brick wall. His blue eyes, so bright they seemed to glow even in the rain-soaked darkness, scanned for escape routes that didn't exist. The black cloak clung to his malnourished frame—at six, he weighed barely more than he had at three, survival burning through calories faster than stolen bread could replace them.
This is it, some distant part of him thought. Finally. Was he relieved? Terrified? He couldn't tell anymore. Emotions had become muted things, distant radio stations he couldn't quite tune into.
The police appeared at the alley's entrance—two officers, flashlights cutting through the rain like searchlights. Their faces showed not cruelty but something worse: pity.
"There you are," the older officer said, voice attempting gentleness. "It's okay, son. We're not going to hurt you. We just want to help—" "No."
The word left Kisuno's mouth without conscious thought, raw and primal. He'd heard those promises before, seen where "help" led. Foster homes where he was just another file number. Social workers with tired eyes who processed him like paperwork. The system wasn't designed for a child who'd witnessed his parents' murder, who woke screaming from memories of blood on marble floors, who couldn't remember his own last name without panic attacks.
His last name. The officers didn't know it. He'd never told them, never told anyone. Because telling meant questions, and questions meant excavating the night that had broken him, and some wounds were meant to stay buried.
"Kid, you're soaking wet. You're bleeding. Just come with us—" Kisuno bolted.
Not toward the fence—that was suicide—but to the right where a narrow gap between buildings barely wider than his small body created a sliver of possibility. The officers lunged, but he was faster, fueled by three years of running, his body a weapon honed by survival.
He squeezed through the gap, skin scraping against brick, the black cloak catching and tearing further. On the other side, another alley, this one ascending via crumbling concrete steps toward a different district. His legs screamed protest, but he climbed, taking the steps two at a time despite his size.
The rain intensified, Tokyo's sky opening like a wound.
At the top of the steps, the alley opened onto a residential street—cleaner, quieter, the kind of neighborhood where people like Kisuno didn't exist. Security cameras on every corner. Vending machines casting pools of light. And walking toward him, umbrella held against the downpour, a figure in a school uniform.
Kisagawa Hazuno, thirteen years old, was having the worst day of a lifetime of worst days.
The cram school exam had destroyed him. Mathematics problems that might as well have been ancient Greek, English passages about topics he couldn't afford to care about, science questions about a universe that seemed infinitely kinder than the one he inhabited. He'd sat in that classroom—fluorescent lights humming overhead, other students' pencils scratching confidently across paper—and felt the familiar numbness spreading through his heart like frost.
The teacher had collected his mostly-blank exam without comment. That somehow hurt worse than criticism.
Then home, where his mother was three drinks deep before dinner, where his father paced and muttered about money and uselessness and how everything would be different if Hazuno just tried harder, was better, stopped being such a disappointment. The apartment smelled like cheap shochu and desperation.
Hazuno had smiled through it all. The smile that his friends found so charming, that made him everyone's emotional support, that hid the screaming void where his authentic self had once lived. He'd perfected that smile, practiced it in mirrors until it looked real, until even he sometimes forgot it was a mask.
"I'm going out," he'd announced to parents who didn't look up.
Now he walked through rain that matched his internal weather, umbrella doing nothing against the storm he carried inside. His school uniform—carefully maintained despite everything because appearance was the last thing he could control—was getting soaked, but he couldn't bring himself to care.
That's when the small figure burst from the alley ahead.
Hazuno saw him in that crystalline way moments of significance announce themselves: a child, six or seven maybe, wearing a destroyed black cloak that dragged behind him like broken wings. Sky-blue eyes that seemed to capture and hold every ounce of light in the dim street. Bare feet bleeding against wet pavement. And an expression that Hazuno recognized with shocking intimacy—the look of something hunted, something that had given up on salvation but kept running anyway.
Their eyes met.
In that instant, Hazuno saw himself. Not the smiling, accommodating, perfectly palatable version he presented to the world, but the real Hazuno—the one drowning in plain sight, the one nobody asked about because asking meant caring meant responsibility. He saw his own desperation reflected in those impossibly blue eyes, and something in his heart cracked open.
Behind the child, footsteps. Voices. The police, closer now. "—can't have gone far, just a kid stealing food—" "—third time this month, someone needs to—" The child looked at Hazuno with an expression that said everything: Please. I have nowhere left to run.
Hazuno didn't think. Thinking was what kept him trapped in his life, performing for everyone else's benefit. Instead, he acted on instinct that felt more honest than anything he'd done in years.
He grabbed the child's arm—so thin he could feel every bone—and yanked him into a recessed doorway beside a closed noodle shop. The space was barely large enough for both of them, and Hazuno had to shield the child with his own figure, draping his school jacket over the kids distinctive cloak. His umbrella he collapsed and held low, creating a barrier of fabric and shadow.
"Don't move," Hazuno whispered. "Don't breathe. Well breath, but just don't make any noise. Alright."
The child went utterly still against him.
The police rounded the corner, flashlights sweeping the street. Hazuno forced himself to breathe normally, to look casual despite his heart trying to escape his ribs. One officer's flashlight beam passed within centimeters of the doorway.
"You see a kid run past here?" the older officer called to Hazuno.
Hazuno looked up, and somehow, impossibly, produced the smile. That perfect, practiced, utterly false smile that everyone always believed because they wanted to, because questioning it meant work.
"A kid? No, sorry officer. Just heading home from cram school. Is everything okay?" The lie tasted like rust and rain. The officers exchanged glances. The younger one—couldn't have been more than mid-twenties, still had idealism in his eyes—looked like he wanted to press further. But the older one shook his head.
"Probably doubled back. Come on, we'll check the other alley." They left, sirens fading into Tokyo's constant symphony of emergency and indifference.
Hazuno didn't move for a full minute, counting his heartbeats, waiting until the danger passed into memory. Then he stepped back, releasing the child from the doorway's shelter.
The kid looked up at him with those eyes—those eyes, like pieces of sky that somehow fell to earth and got trapped in a child's face. Up close, Hazuno could see the full extent of the neglect: dirt crusted under fingernails, hair matted with rain and worse, cheeks hollow with hunger, and something else, something deeper—a weariness that no six-year-old should carry.
"Why?" the child asked, voice hoarse from disuse or screaming or both.
Hazuno had a dozen prepared responses, the kind of cheerful deflection he'd use with his friend group or his teachers. Oh, just wanted to help! or Couldn't let them catch you, right? But standing there in the rain, looking at this broken child who'd somehow survived alone in one of the world's largest cities, he couldn't muster the mask.
"Because," Hazuno said quietly, honestly, "you looked like how I feel about myself." The child's eyes widened slightly—the first real expression Hazuno had seen, surprise breaking through that terrible numbness.
"I don't understand," the kid whispered.
"Yeah," Hazuno said, and meant it. "Me neither."
They stood in the rain, two strangers connected by wounds they couldn't name. Hazuno knew he should leave, go home to his arguing parents and his fake smile and his life of quiet drowning. But his feet wouldn't move. Something about this moment felt like the edge of something—a precipice where one decision might change everything.
"What's your name?" Hazuno asked. The child hesitated, as if the question itself was dangerous. Finally: "Kisuno." "I'm Hazuno." He paused, then asked the question he wasn't sure he wanted answered: "Where do you live, Kisuno? Do you have a home!"
The child looked away, toward the Tokyo skyline visible between buildings—those impossible towers of light and glass and promise that might as well have been on another planet for all their relevance to either of them.
"Nowhere," Kisuno said. "I live nowhere."
And Hazuno, thirteen years old and drowning in his own life, made the first real decision he'd made in years. Not the smart decision. Not the safe decision. But the one that felt like choosing to be human again.
"Come on," he said, extending his hand. "Let's get you somewhere dry. Then we'll figure out the rest."
Kisuno stared at the offered hand like it might be a trap. Three years of survival had taught him that help came with prices, that kindness was a currency he couldn't afford. But something in Hazuno's face—maybe the same brokenness Hazuno had recognized in him—made him reach out.
Their hands connected, and for the first time in three years, Kisuno didn't feel entirely alone.
Above them, the Tokyo sky continued its endless weeping, washing the city clean of its daily sins. But in that rain-soaked street, two broken people began the slow, terrifying work of saving each other.
The sirens faded into the distance, hunting ghosts that were already gone.
TO BE CONTINUED... [Next Episode: "Masks We Wear"]