Aya
The gunshot was so loud it didn't just ring in my ears; it vibrated in my teeth.
For a split second, the world turned into a silent film. I saw a flock of crows erupt from the pine trees, their black wings beating frantically against the grey sky. I saw Kaito's head snap back, not because he was hit, but because he was instinctively tracking the sound. And I saw the cooler box—the mysterious container he had guarded so carefully—slip from his grip and tumble into the damp ferns.
I didn't think. I didn't scream. I simply dropped to the ground, my face pressing into the wet needles of the forest floor. The smell of rotting leaves and gunpowder filled my nostrils.
"Stay down!" Kaito hissed.
He wasn't running for cover. Instead, he crouched low, his eyes scanning the dense thicket behind us. He looked less like a surgeon in that moment and more like a predator that had just realized there was another wolf in the woods.
"Who is it?" I whispered, my voice trembling so much I could barely form the words. "Is it Ishii?"
Kaito didn't answer. He reached into his coat—not for a scalpel this time, but for something heavy and dark. A gun. Of course he had a gun. A man like him doesn't leave his "perfection" to chance.
Another shot rang out, bark splintering off a cedar tree just inches from Kaito's shoulder.
"Run, Aya," Kaito commanded, his voice eerily calm despite the lead flying through the air. "Run toward the shrine. Don't look back."
"What about you?" I asked, though I wasn't sure why I cared. Maybe it was the shock. Or maybe I wanted to be the one to end him, not some ghost in the trees.
"I'm going to finish this," he said, his eyes fixed on a shadow moving between the trunks. "Go!"
I didn't need to be told twice. I scrambled to my feet, my backpack heavy on my shoulders, and sprinted up the narrow, winding path. My lungs burned. The air in Mitso was thin and cold, and every breath felt like swallowing needles. Behind me, I heard the exchange of gunfire—the sharp, clinical cracks of Kaito's pistol against the booming roar of a shotgun.
The path led me deeper into the heart of the forest, where the trees were so thick they blotted out what little light remained. I could hear my heart drumming in my ears—thump-thump, thump-thump—like a countdown.
I reached the clearing where the old Takeda shrine stood. It was a crumbling wooden structure, its red paint peeled away by decades of neglect. This was where my family used to come every New Year. This was where Sakura and I had played hide-and-seek when we were children.
And now, it was a crime scene.
I ducked behind one of the stone fox statues that guarded the entrance. My hands were shaking so violently I had to sit on them to keep from making noise. I pulled my phone out of my bag. No signal. Of course. Mitso was a dead zone in every sense of the word.
Then, I remembered the device in my pocket. The tiny recorder I'd found under the car seat.
I pulled it out and looked at it. It was still recording. But there was a small light flashing—a blue light. It wasn't just a recorder. It was a GPS tracker.
Someone knows where I am.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me. Slow. Heavy. Irregular.
I gripped the handle of the camping knife in my bag. I didn't pull it out yet. I waited.
"Aya..."
The voice was raspy, wet, and filled with a pain that sounded ancient. I turned slowly, my back against the cold stone of the fox statue.
Standing at the edge of the clearing was a man. He was wearing a tattered yellow raincoat, the same kind the local woodcutters wore. But it was his face that made me want to scream. It was a map of scars—burn marks that had turned his skin into a patchwork of melted wax. One eye was clouded over with a milky film, but the other... the other was bright, sharp, and unmistakably familiar.
"Haruki?" I breathed.
The man leaned against a tree, a double-barreled shotgun hanging loosely in his hand. He was bleeding from a wound in his side—Kaito's work, no doubt.
"You shouldn't have come back, Aya," he said, coughing up something dark. "I tried to warn you. I sent the messages. I put the tracker in the car."
"You... you killed Sakura," I said, finally pulling the knife out. My voice was a snarl now. "You were the one obsessed with her. You followed her. You took her hair!"
Haruki let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it didn't sound so much like a death rattle. "Obsessed? Yes. I loved her. I wanted to protect her. But I didn't kill her, Aya. I was there that night. I saw the 'Gentleman' do it. I saw him open her up with the precision of an artist."
"You're lying! Kaito is the killer! He has her hair! He has her lip balm!"
"He has them because he took them from me," Haruki hissed, taking a stumbling step forward. "Ten years ago, I tried to stop him. He burned my house down with me inside. He thought I died. But I crawled out of the ashes. I've been living in these woods, waiting. Waiting for him to bring someone else here. Waiting for him to bring you."
I looked at him, then back toward the path where the shooting had stopped.
"If Kaito is the killer," I whispered, "then who is the real Kaito Mori? The man Ishii said died ten years ago?"
Haruki pointed the shotgun toward the path. "Look for yourself."
Kaito emerged from the shadows. His black turtleneck was dusty, but he was uninjured. He held his pistol with a steady, relaxed grip. In his other hand, he carried the cooler box. He had retrieved it.
He walked into the center of the clearing, ignoring Haruki as if he were nothing more than a nuisance. He looked at me, and for the first time, his mask of perfection was gone. His eyes were wide, filled with an ecstatic, terrifying light.
"The reunion is almost complete," Kaito said.
"Kaito, stay back!" I yelled, holding the knife out.
He stopped and tilted his head. "Kaito? Is that who you think I am? Poor, dull Kaito Mori. He was a brilliant student, you know. But he didn't have the stomach for the 'true' art. He cried when he saw what I did to Sakura. So, I had to replace him. I had to become him."
My head was spinning. "Replace him? You... you stole his life?"
"I am a surgeon, Aya. I know how to reshape things. I reshaped my face to look like his. I studied his walk, his voice, his handwriting. I took his degree, his job, his reputation. It was the ultimate surgery. A total transplant of an entire existence."
He set the cooler box down on the mossy ground and unlatched the lid. A hiss of cold vapor escaped.
"And now," he whispered, "I'm going to show you why I brought you to Mitso."
He reached into the box and pulled out a glass jar. Inside, preserved in a clear liquid, was a human heart. It was small, delicate, and perfectly preserved.
"This is Sakura's heart," he said, his voice filled with a strange, distorted tenderness. "And do you know what the best part is? It's still 'beating' in my mind. Every time I look at you, I see the missing piece. You have the other half of the necklace, but I have the real thing."
Haruki raised his shotgun, but he was too weak. His arms were shaking. "Monster..."
Kaito didn't even look at him. He fired his pistol—once, twice. Haruki fell back against the tree, the light fading from his one good eye.
I was alone. Alone with a man who had stolen a dead man's life, a man who kept my sister's heart in a box, a man who was now walking toward me with a scalpel he had pulled from his pocket.
"Don't be afraid, Aya," Kaito said, his voice dropping to that soothing, doctor's tone. "This won't hurt. Not nearly as much as the grief has. I'm going to make you perfect. I'm going to put you and Sakura back together. One heart, one box, one soul."
I backed away until my heels hit the wooden steps of the shrine. There was nowhere left to run. I looked at the knife in my hand. It looked like a toy compared to the clinical precision of his scalpel.
But then, I remembered the blue light on the recorder.
"The police are coming," I said, my voice cold. "The device under the seat... it's a GPS tracker. They've been following us since we left Tokyo."
Kaito paused. He looked at the recorder in my hand. For a second, a flicker of doubt crossed his face.
"You're lying," he said.
"Am I? Haruki put it there. He wanted the police to find you. Why do you think he didn't kill you in the woods? He was just stalling you. Waiting for the sirens."
As if on cue, a distant sound drifted through the trees. The faint, rhythmic wail of a siren, echoing off the mountainsides.
Kaito's face contorted into something subhuman. The perfection was gone. The surgeon was dead, and the beast was all that remained.
"Then I'll have to work fast," he snarled, lunging at me.
I didn't scream. I didn't close my eyes. I swung the knife with everything I had.