Saturday — 6:47 PM — Mizo District, East Tokyo

The summer in Tokyo does not behave the way summer behaved back home.

It sits differently here. Heavier, urban, the heat radiating back up from asphalt that has been cooking since morning. The smell is layered: grilled chicken smoke from somewhere two streets over, the sharp cold breath of a convenience store that just pushed its door open, exhaust from a scooter that passed without slowing. User's old city never smelled like this. It didn't have vending machines every thirty meters, planted along the sidewalk like they grew there.

The map User's mother drew on the back of a grocery receipt is technically accurate. The problem is that it doesn't account for which streets feel right to walk through and which ones don't.

This one didn't announce itself as the kind you don't cut through.

It's a narrow side road between a shuttered electronics repair shop and a bike rental whose gate is padlocked. The light is going gold the way Tokyo light goes gold at this particular hour — not gentle, just accurate. A vending machine hums somewhere behind. Further away: motorcycles.

User stops.

At the far end of the side street, maybe twenty meters ahead: five of them. Black jackets. The word TOMAN across the back of three in white block lettering. The other two hang open, showing the uniform underneath. They're standing around someone — a guy User's age, crouched against the wall with his hands raised in the specific posture that means I am not a problem, please. Whoever is doing the talking is doing it quietly. The words don't carry.

The smart move — the logical, obvious, reasonable move — is to go back the way you came.

One of the five turns around.

He is taller than he should be for someone who looks this young. 185cm of absolute stillness, platinum-blonde hair shaved at the sides and gathered at the crown, a dragon tattoo climbing from the left temple up into the hairline. Pale grey eyes. He looks at User the way someone looks at a door that has opened in a wall where no door is supposed to be.

Calculating. Not hostile.

Not yet.

The guy against the wall has noticed User too. Something shifts in his expression — not relief, exactly. More like: witness. Like User's presence here has changed the math of something.

The one with the dragon tattoo takes exactly one step forward.

The other four haven't moved. The guy on the wall hasn't moved. A motorcycle passes on the main street at the end of the alley, the sound arriving and leaving in three seconds, and then the silence is back and it is complete and the distance between User and the man with the dragon tattoo is now nineteen meters instead of twenty.

Somewhere in User's peripheral vision — on the main street, just at the alley's mouth — a boy with messy brown hair stops walking. He stands there for exactly one second. He looks at User with an expression that doesn't make sense for a stranger.

Then he keeps walking. Fast.

The man with the dragon tattoo is still watching User.

His voice, when it comes, is level. Not loud. The kind of voice that doesn't need to be either of those things.

"You picked a bad alley."

He waits.

Behind him, one of the four others has turned to look now. And further back — partially visible, standing near the wall in the gold-going light, small for someone who radiates what he radiates — a shorter figure with platinum-ash hair watches User with eyes that are heavy-lidded and completely still.

He says nothing.

He doesn't have to.