Old Haunts 1
The train had settled into this long, grinding rhythm over the grey water. The earlier distortions had left a static in the air that made every surface feel slightly charged, as if the metal itself still remembered being something else for a few seconds. Outside the reinforced glass the sea still moved wrong, but at least it was no longer trying to become something else. Waves rolled too slow in places, too fast in others, like the surface kept forgetting the proper speed of water here and had to correct itself mid-motion. The elevated track under us vibrated with a steady metallic complaint that never quite became silent. Every few minutes the whole carriage would dip a fraction, just enough to make the table creak and the ceiling panels flex, then the stabilizers would pull us level again with a soft hydraulic sigh.
I sat across from Kei and was thinking hard.
It had been building for months now. Ever since the quarantine. The long nights in the office when the AC failed and the air grew thick and I see her white shirts clung when she sweat, the fabric turning translucent at the shoulders and the small of her back. The careless way she lit cigarettes, the line of her throat when she tilted her head back to exhale, the faint red mark the filter left on her lower lip. And when she grins… Mai's teasing had only poked what was already there. I could stop pretending it was just professional respect or leftover adrenaline from shared near-death experiences.
I wanted to fuck her.
Right now, in this compartment, I wanted to drag her across the booth table, push that thermal jacket off her shoulders, and put my mouth on the side of her neck. I wanted both hands busy at once, one cupping and squeezing her breast and nipple through the shirt until the black bra underneath shifted, the other gripping the curve of her ass hard enough to leave marks she would feel later when she sat down. I wanted to grind the heel of my palm against the front of her pants until the fabric was damp and her hips jerked, until the swollen heat of her was obvious even through the layers. I wanted to hear whatever sound she made that she would never admit to later.
The thought was pure fucking lust that made me feel like a creep. Just pure physical want. The simple animal urge that had been stacking up every time she leaned over a desk to point at a report, every time the air in the office went stale and her shirt stuck to her back, every time she walked ahead of me on a job and I had to watch the way her hips moved under those form-fitting pants. Every time she came out of her room after a short sleep with her hair messy and her eyes still half-closed, looking more human than she ever allowed herself to look during working hours.
Once it was acknowledged, I could file it. Desire was manageable. Desire was something you could decide not to act on. Attachment, longing, the softer shit, that was what anomalies and warpers liked to dig their fingers into. Better to keep it simple and hungry than let it become something that could be used against either of us.
There was a reason why the Super Emotional Response to Affliction, S.E.T.A., had been studied and theorized so thoroughly by the Fourth Reich. Human emotions had become unstable enough after the Shanghai Risk Event and the subsequent wave of reality events that they could create warped placebo effects. Grief that grew teeth. Loyalty that manifested as a second shadow. Love that started answering when you called its name. The Bureau had the files. Anyone who had been in the field long enough knew the stories. An agent who got too attached to a partner started seeing their face in the anomalies. A hunter who let grief sit too long found the grief growing teeth and walking around in their peripheral vision, waiting for a moment of weakness. Soft feelings were invitation cards for Anoms. Hard clear lust was just noise the anomalies usually ignored. It was too simple, too animal, too temporary to give them much purchase. Of course, there are monsters who use lust to prey, but most of the time they don't use it. I mean, who'd want to fuck someone while in the middle of the field full of things that want to kill you?
I realized I had been staring.
Kei turned her head. The cigarette was almost finished between her fingers. Her eyes were half-lidded, but sharp enough to catch the direction of my gaze. The filtered air carried the last of the smoke toward the ceiling vents in a thin, curling ribbon.
"Why are you staring?"
"Nothing," I said.
She waited, but she didn't look away. Outside the window the grey sea kept doing its wrong-speed roll. The train dipped once, just enough to make the table creak, then settled again. Somewhere in the next compartment a safety panel clicked as the automated systems ran another pressure check.
I kept my mouth shut. Inside, I blamed Mai for putting words to it, but that was only half true. The past months had been enough on their own. Kei moving through the office, through the cases, through the endless shitiness of Changye like the one clear thing in a city designed to grind people down. Like sunlight in permanent overcast. You looked because looking was the only honest reaction left. The rest of the city was noise, debt, anomalies, and the constant low-grade fear that the next day might be the one that finally ate you. She was something solid in the middle of it.
She finished the cigarette, crushed it out in the small metal tray, and leaned back against the wall of the compartment. The thermal jacket shifted and I saw the black bra peeking out again where the top buttons of her shirt had come loose during the earlier distortion. Caught me red-handed, but she said nothing else. I could tell she was also working on something in her head, probably crushing a thought of her own. As expected of the Boss. She didn't have an office of her own if she wasn't professional about these things.
There's a time and place for these kinds of things, and being in an armored train traveling through rails full of anoms was not the right place. The residual static in the air still made the small hairs on my arms stand up. The next serious distortion could drop us into sensory blackout again, or worse. Acting on anything right now would be stupid even by Changye standards.
I looked at the window instead of her and pulled my PDA out, opening the anomaly boards.
Old Korea was still a mess of spatial tears. Most of the active reports were the usual unstable gateways, thin places that spat out things with too many joints or no faces, and temporary planes that overlapped the ruins for a few hours before collapsing. The haunts never stayed quiet for long. Seoul itself had been turned into a fortress-city, the one reliable hub where Graded Agents could rotate back into the region to get their gear fixed, sleep without checking the walls every hour, and drink something that didn't taste like recycled sludge. Everything outside the capital's reinforced perimeter was still contested ground after the end of the world. The old industrial belts, the half-sunken coastal districts, the mountain passes that had folded in on themselves during the early Reality Events, all of it remained patchwork territory where the map changed weekly.
There was an old saying on the hunter boards: if you wanted real experience, you did the circuit. China's provinces first, then the Old Korean haunts, then the Night Parades in Japan. Personally I would take the Chinese ruins and the Korean dead zones over anything involving Onmyōji territory. The Night Parades demanded a different kind of attention. You had to stay supernaturally attuned the entire time or the distortions would simply rewrite you while you were still breathing, change your memories, your face, the names of the people you cared about. The Korean haunts at least stayed honest about the violence. You could see the tears coming if you paid attention and fought the monsters that came out. The Japanese side liked to smile first and rewrite you later.
I scrolled further. Fresh reports from the last forty-eight hours showed three new temporary planes overlapping the old Seoul outskirts. One of them had spat out a cluster of jointed things that the local crews were still cleaning up with flamethrowers and specialized containment foam. Another had overlapped for six hours and left behind a stretch of road that now led nowhere useful, just ended in a sheer drop into a spatial pocket that the survey teams still hadn't mapped. The third was still active, a thin shimmer over the ruins of an old industrial district near the former Incheon corridor. The board recommended avoiding it unless you had a full fireteam and a Graded Agents on standby. Threat assessment sat at High Orange with a note that residual emotional echoes had been detected in the area. The kind of place that liked people who arrived already carrying something heavy inside them.
I looked up from the screen.
"You ever work the Old Haunts?"
Kei was still leaning against the wall, arms crossed, cigarette smoke thinning in the filtered air. She shook her head once.
"Only the capital. Never stayed long. I'm more worried about Okinawa."
She said it flatly, like she had already decided the words were going to come out whether she liked them or not.
"I was born there. Before the Okinawan Devil."
I waited. The train rattled once against the elevated track. Somewhere deeper in the carriage a panel clicked as the safety systems ran another automatic check. The grey water outside rose and fell with that wrong rhythm.
"My parents made it out. Went to America. Most of the relatives didn't. A few cousins either. The island's been cleaned up and rebuilt for years now. That's the part that bothers me."
I turned that over carefully. A native returning to a place that had already been erased once. Emotional response was exactly the kind of thing certain anomalies liked to feed on. And the Devil's fragment we had dealt with months ago was still a fresh memory. The way the heart had kept beating after we staked it. The white flash when the sealing finished. The flayed skin on her back when the transport dumped us back into real space. The way she had refused to scream even when the pain must have been staggering.
"You think it could try to come back through you?"
Kei's mouth tightened. She reached for another cigarette, then seemed to change her mind and left it unlit. Her fingers stayed on the pack for a second longer than necessary before she set it back on the table.
"After we finished that fragment job, the Bureau put me through a closed rite. Full exorcism protocol, the kind they don't put on record. They weren't taking chances. I only found out how thorough it was after the fact. They scrubbed everything they could find."
That explained a few things. The Bureau was many things, but they were rarely stupid about residual emotional contamination. If they had cleared her and still wanted her on-site for the floating suns and the warp hole, they must have decided the risk was acceptable or that having someone with her particular history of the place might actually help. Or they simply did not care as long as the data kept coming in and someone else took the physical risk. Either option fit the way the Bureau usually operated.
I nodded and looked back at the PDA, scrolling through the latest spatial-anomaly logs from the Korean side of the route. The reports were dry as always. Coordinates. Duration of the tears. Estimated threat level. Recommended response teams.
The boards never recorded the important parts. Only the parts that could be quantified and billed.
The train dipped again. This time the motion lasted longer. The grey water outside rose toward the window for a moment before the elevated track corrected and pulled us back up with a low metallic groan. Kei's hand braced against the wall. Mine stayed on the edge of the table. The residual static in the air thickened for a few seconds, making the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up, then thinned again as the stabilizers settled.
I kept scrolling. There were older reports mixed in with the new ones. Some from years back. Mentions of Graded Agents who had gone into the deeper haunts and come out distorted, new joints, missing memories, faces that no longer matched their identification files. Mentions of teams that never reported back at all. The boards never cleaned those entries out. They left them as soft warnings for anyone who thought the circuit was just another set of jobs with better hazard pay. A few of the older entries still had the original team logos attached. Most of those logos belonged to offices that no longer existed.
Kei shifted against the wall. The thermal jacket made another soft sound against the paneling. I did not look up right away. The lust was still there. It sat in the background of my head, easy to ignore as long as I kept my eyes on the screen and my hands busy with the PDA. Desire was fine. Acting on it in a sealed train compartment while the world outside kept trying to remember how to be an ocean was a different kind of problem entirely. The next serious distortion could drop us into sensory blackout again. The last thing either of us needed was to wake up tangled together with our heads not fortified.
I closed the anomaly board and opened the route map instead. The train's projected path showed the long curve across the water, then the approach to the Old Korean coastline, then the inland tracks that would eventually swing us north and east toward the Japanese side. The estimated time of arrival at the first secure hub was still hours away.
Kei finally lit the next cigarette. The lighter clicked once. Smoke curled toward the vents in a thin grey ribbon. She watched the grey water through the reinforced glass with a half-lidded stare.
The sea kept moving wrong. And the thing I had filed away stayed exactly where I put it, simple and hungry and carefully contained, waiting for a time and place that might suddenly or never come... and there was still a long way to go.