The transition from the dead city to the living building hit his lungs first.
Inside the Shinjuku Prince Hotel, the lobby smelled like unwashed bodies trying to hide beneath the sharp, metallic tang of instant coffee boiling on a portable stove.
Kai stopped just inside the sliding glass doors. They were pried open and wedged with a cracked concrete block.
He stood in the shadows near a rusted luggage cart and counted.
Thirty-one.
Thirty-one people scattered across a lobby built for hundreds. They had strung battery-powered camping lanterns from the grand chandelier, casting uneven, shivering yellow light over the marble floor.
He mapped the room.
Near the front desk, a broad-shouldered man was stacking canned peaches, slamming each tin down harder than necessary. He kept checking over his shoulder to ensure the three people hovering behind him were watching. A faction forming around calories.
By the floor-to-ceiling windows, a cluster of five sat on the floor with their knees pulled up. They kept looking out the glass, tracking the empty street. The new arrivals. The ones who still thought a siren would sound and a truck would pull up to take them home.
The rest were loose fragments. A woman pacing a tight circle near the dead elevators. Someone entirely hidden under a foil blanket, shivering.
Kai stepped fully into the light.
The low hum of conversation died. Thirty-one heads turned. Eyes dropped to his boots, dragged up to his face, and lingered on the absolute stillness of his hands.
A man detached himself from a group near the elevators and walked over. He was thin, wearing a suit jacket that looked like it had been slept in for a week.
"New," the man said.
"Nineteen hours," Kai said.
"Obi." The man pointed a thumb at his own chest. His voice had the texture of frayed string. He looked at Kai's pocket. "You found a Signal."
Kai pulled the black glass rectangle out, just enough to show the edge. Kept his thumb over the screen.
"Good. Saves me a trip outside to scavenge one for you." Obi rubbed the back of his neck. The skin there was raw. "You know the math yet?"
Kai said nothing. Obi shifted his weight, rubbing his neck again. He launched into a speech.
"Everyone starts with three days," Obi said, pointing at his own pocket. "Pulse Days. Visa. Whatever you want to call it. Every midnight, the sky does whatever it does, and you lose a day. It drops. If the number hits zero, the silver light comes down."
"Void Call," Kai said.
Obi stopped rubbing his neck. "You saw one."
"Four."
Obi blinked. The number seemed to throw off his script. "Right. Well. You don't want to be under it. To get more days, you clear the Arenas. The buildings that light up out there in Kabukicho at night. You go in, you play the game, you survive, you get days added to your screen."
Obi stared at Kai's face, pausing exactly where a normal person would start begging for answers.
Kai asked none of them. He was looking at Obi's left cuff. A loose thread hung from the seam. Obi kept picking at it, unraveling it millimeter by millimeter.
"Colors," Kai said.
Obi frowned. "What?"
"The Arenas. They light up in four colors. Red, blue, white, green. Why."
"Suits. Like a deck of cards." Obi shifted his weight. The lack of panic from Kai was clearly making him uncomfortable. "Red is Hearts. Psychological. Blue is Diamonds. Logic and math. White is Spades. Physical endurance. Green is Clubs. Teamwork."
"And the numbers."
"The difficulty," Obi said. "Two of Spades is a sprint. Seven of Spades is a war. The number on the card is the number of Pulse Days you win."
A closed loop. Blood for time. Time spent to bleed again.
"Got it," Kai said.
He walked past Obi.
Obi turned. "Wait. Where are you going? Daisuke is rationing the—"
"I don't need rations."
Kai left him standing there. He walked across the marble, keeping his face entirely blank, feeling the eyes of the room slide off him.
He moved toward the far corner of the lobby, intending to check the stairwell access.
He stopped.
There was a table near the emergency exit. A man sat there, alone. Mid-thirties. Dark button-up shirt, the sleeves rolled precisely to the elbows.
The man was eating beans out of a tin with a plastic spoon. One bite. Chew. Swallow. Next bite. He kept his eyes on the wall, isolating himself through sheer mechanical repetition.
Kai watched him.
The man's left wrist flicked. He checked his watch.
Time in The Hollow didn't matter. The only time that existed was the midnight drop and the timer on a game screen. A watch was a dead relic.
But the man checked it. His eyes dropped to the dial. The second hand was frozen at the twelve. He held his gaze there for a fraction of a second, then returned to his beans. He didn't look at Kai.
A man who maintains dead routines in a dead city.
Kai filed him. Variable: High competence. Risk: Unknown.
The elevators were dead. He found the emergency stairwell.
He walked up.
Nineteen flights.
His calves burned by floor twelve. He pushed through it, keeping his breathing measured.
He bypassed the lower floors, climbing until the smell of the lobby faded completely. Floor nineteen.
He walked down the carpeted hallway. The silence up here was thick. It smelled like stale air conditioning and expensive fabric cleaner.
Corner room. He checked the handle. Unlocked.
He pushed inside. Standard luxury suite. King bed, untouched. A wall of glass looking out over the city.
Kai didn't look out the window yet. He checked the bathroom. Empty. He checked the closet. Empty. He tested the deadbolt, and jammed a wooden chair under the adjacent suite's handle anyway. Then he went to the window.
The sun was dropping behind the jagged teeth of the Shinjuku skyline. The light turned bruised and purple.
Kai sat on the edge of the mattress. He pulled the Signal from his pocket.
PULSE DAYS REMAINING: 2
He had tomorrow. Then he had to play.
He set the device on the nightstand. The glass was cool against the wood.
Outside, the darkness took the city.
And then, the city woke up.
In the district to the south—Kabukicho—the buildings began to ignite. Not streetlights. Not neon signs. Entire structures glowing from within, pulsing with a slow, rhythmic intensity.
A heavy, arterial red bled from a theater to the south. Two streets over, the sterile blue of an office block cut through the dark. He mapped a harsh white glare punching out of a parking garage, and far to the east, the sickly green of a department store.
The Arenas. Waiting.
Kai leaned closer to the glass. He traced the geometry of the illuminated buildings, committing their locations to memory. He was calculating distances, assessing the safest routes through the dark streets to reach them.
Movement caught his eye.
Not in the Arena district. Closer.
Directly across the street from his window. Another hotel tower, slightly shorter than the Prince.
On its flat rooftop, standing near the edge, a figure.
Kai's breath stopped in his chest.
The figure was a man. He was leaning against the concrete parapet, looking directly at Kai's window. Nineteen floors up. Across a seventy-foot gap of empty air.
Even in the bad light, Kai could see the hair. Pure, startling white. Not the grey of age. Chemical white. Bone white.
The man wasn't holding a lantern, but the ambient glow from the distant Arenas caught his eyes. They were pale. Luminous.
Kai didn't step back. He didn't break eye contact. He held his ground at the glass, locking his posture into absolute stillness.
Across the gap, the white-haired man tilted his head.
He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. It was a slight, cold curving of the lips that suggested he already knew exactly what Kai was going to do next.
Kai's hand twitched toward his pocket. The muscles in his forearm locked tight. He forced his fingers to open. Pressed them flat against his thigh.
He blinked. Once.
The rooftop across the street was empty.
Kai stared at the concrete parapet. There was no door nearby. No access hatch the man could have ducked behind in the fraction of a second Kai's eyes were closed. He was just gone.
Kai didn't move away from the window. He stood there while the cold from the glass seeped into his shirt.
Thirty-one people below him. A dead watch ticking. A man who wasn't there. The variables were compounding.
He pressed his thumb against the scar in his eyebrow. Hard.
He reached out and closed the heavy blackout curtains, dragging them shut until the pulsing lights of the Arenas were gone.
He sat in the dark and waited for the red and blue lights to stop burning against the back of his eyelids. They didn't.