Chapter Text
The fluorescent lights in the supermarket were the kind that buzzed. A low, consistent hum that some people learned to ignore. Seri never had.
She paused in the produce aisle with a clementine in her palm, thumb gently puncturing the skin. It was too soft. She dropped it. It hit the floor with a dull splat and rolled under a display of radishes. Her other hand had already reached for a bag of lemons. She liked the shape of them. Like they were always slightly angry.
She did not need lemons. She liked their presence. She liked the sour weight of them in her coat pockets. A strange thing to carry around. People noticed. Then looked away.
Seri Yanagi was eighteen, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty two. No one could quite agree. She had been seventeen for a while now. Her birth records were inconclusive. Makima said that was “not important.” Makima said many things weren’t important.
She had a grocery list in her head, written in the voice of a woman she had seen die. Not a relative. Just someone memorable. A high voice. Spindly fingers. Lavender perfume.
“Eggs, Seri-chan,” it whispered in memory. “Don’t bruise them this time.”
Seri didn’t bruise things on accident.
She tilted her head. A child in a red hoodie was staring at her from the end of the aisle. His mother was comparing soy sauces. The child had big eyes. Honest eyes. Seri liked those. She winked. The boy blinked, then ran off.
She tossed a dozen eggs into the basket and didn’t check if any cracked.
Her boots made a wet noise against the linoleum. It hadn’t rained, but there was blood on the soles. From something earlier. Not relevant.
Peering through the aisles, she wore her school uniform even though she hadn’t been to school in three weeks. Or was it years? She couldn’t be sure anymore. A tailored jacket, pleated skirt, striped socks just off regulation. A safety pin hung from her collarbone where a button had once been. The button was in her jewelry box now. Along with teeth. Two watches. A pair of false eyelashes she hadn’t removed from a dead woman’s face. Souvenirs. Makima called them "acts of self-soothing." Seri called them "mine."
People said Seri smiled too much. Especially when she was angry. Especially when she wasn’t. Her face did things on delay. She laughed half a second after everyone else. Or before. She did not always understand when things were jokes.
Makima had her running errands now. Groceries, mostly. Deliveries. Listening in on people. Watching. Killing, sometimes. But the small things were the most important, Makima said.
You cannot control the big without understanding the small.
Seri didn’t argue. She liked being useful. And she liked Makima’s dogs.
She just wasn’t sure if she liked being one of them.
At the register, she emptied her basket one item at a time: eggs, lemons, one can of peaches, a claw hammer, soy sauce, floss. The cashier glanced at the hammer, then quickly away.
She smiled at him. Wide.
He gave her two plastic bags. She left one behind. On purpose.
Outside, the air was metallic. Distant sirens. Distant screams. This was normal. Tokyo had never been quiet.
She walked along the curb with her feet balanced on the concrete lip. One foot in front of the other, arms out. Like a tightrope. She was humming something. An old lullaby. Or maybe just the sound of her own tinnitus.
People didn’t look at her too long. Even when she giggled. Even when she had blood on her hands. She wasn’t important enough to cause a scene, and not unimportant enough to ignore. That perfect middle. She lived there. A footnote in a city hemorrhaging from the inside.
They called her the Errand Girl. Or Makima’s Pet. Or just “her.” No one wanted to say her name. Names gave shape. Names gave weight.
But her name was Seri.
Seri like serenade . Seri like serrated . Seri like seraphim with a smile that could peel you open.
And she had a Devil in her pocket. Somewhere under her ribcage. Sleeping. Purring. Waiting.
Not today.
Today was just groceries.
Seri bought her groceries, then walked two miles out of her way just to kick a traffic cone into the river. It didn’t float. That made her irrationally angry.
She stood at the edge for ten minutes, watching the current slither past, wondering how much blood it would take to stain it properly red. Not the neon kind from movies. But real red. Thick. Metallic. With meat in it. She pressed her fingers into the lemon hidden in her coat pocket until the rind split and stung her cuticles.
She liked that pain. It reminded her that things had skin, and skin was meant to be punctured.
On the next block, a girl was selling takoyaki. Seri didn’t like takoyaki. She bought a box anyway and offered one to the stray cat huddled under the bench. It hissed. She hissed back.
Then she sat beside it and chewed a piece herself, even though the octopus made her stomach twist. She kept her mouth open as she chewed. The cat watched, distirbed.
“Rude,” she said.
The cat looked away.
Seri wiped her mouth on her sleeve. There was a fresh tear in her skirt from earlier—a fight with a devil that smelled like baby powder and molasses. The Innocence Devil. All big, wet eyes and hiccuping sobs like it wanted forgiveness. Seri hadn’t even used her full contract. She’d gouged out its eye with a spoon and fed it its own fingers. It had begged. That made her bored.
She hated crying. In others, it made her restless. In herself, it made her confused.
Makima had once told her, “Some people become weapons to protect themselves. You became one because it looked fun.”
Seri hadn’t responded. Makima’s words didn’t need agreement. They sat in the air like mirrors you weren’t allowed to look into for too long. Seri stared anyway. Maybe something would flicker behind the reflection. Maybe, one day, it would smile back.
She dropped the groceries at one of Makima’s apartments. Not the main one—just one of the smaller, sterile dens for people like her. She let herself in with the passcode. 0606. Meaningless. That was the point.
She put the eggs in the fridge. The hammer in the sink. A lemon on every windowsill, like wards.
She left without saying anything. Makima never greeted her. Seri didn’t say goodbye. That was something they shared: no entrances, no exits. Just presence and absence. The space in between was irrelevant.
By the time Seri reached the park, the sun was slipping behind the rooftops. She liked the park at dusk. The swings were always empty, and the cicadas screamed loud enough to strip thoughts clean. Not that she wanted silence. She liked hearing herself think. It made her feel dangerous. Capable. Chosen.
On the swingset, she took out her switchblade and carved her name into the underside of the rubber seat. SERI. All caps. Sharp and clean. Not a single waver. Her penmanship was something she took pride in. The Jaw Devil had once told her it looked “like the alphabet had teeth.”
That devil was dead now.
She hadn’t killed it. But she’d watched. Chin in hand. Feet swinging gently. Like now.
She didn’t mourn devils. Or people. But she remembered everything.
The problem with being useful, she thought, is that people don’t stop using you.
Makima kept her busy. Errands. Hits. Surveillance. Babysitting rookies she couldn’t stand. Once, she’d duct-taped one to a tree and left him there for four hours because he wouldn’t shut up about how “devils are people too.”
They weren’t. Devils were stories given flesh—compulsions shaped into bone. Seri liked stories. She liked flesh. But combine the two and start asking for mercy, and you were already halfway to being devoured.
Her phone buzzed at 6:47 p.m. She didn’t answer. If it were urgent, Makima wouldn’t have called. Makima didn’t do urgency. Seri went back to carving:
SERI.
SERI.
SERI.
A name like a ward. Like a curse scratched into wood to keep things out—or in.
She’d had a family once. Not the dinner-table kind. The kind that left knives under pillows and didn’t speak in hallways. Her mother was beautiful in a way that made people obedient. Her father wore socks with holes and said things like “Don’t trust a devil that smells good.”
She hadn’t. But she’d liked the ones that did.
The Scent Devil had smelled like dying roses and burnt sugar. She’d kissed it before cutting its throat, just to see if it tasted the way it smelled. It didn’t. It tasted like rust.
She liked that too.
At 8:12, she went home.
Home was a one-room apartment with a mattress on the floor and three locks on the door. The walls were papered with receipts, ticket stubs, magazine clippings, and a line of teeth she’d nailed along the baseboard. Mementos. Proof of passage. She didn’t believe in photography—too clean, too curated. Too easy to fake.
She kicked off her boots, poured a glass of milk, and spat it out a second later. Expired. She laughed so hard the glass slipped from her hand and shattered. She didn’t pick up the pieces. One caught in her sock and cut her heel. She bled a little. Licked it clean.
She kept one lemon from the grocery run earlier that day—one lone spare from the others stacked around the windows of Makima’s spare apartment like wards. Seri didn’t like keeping groceries in her own space. But sometimes she stocked the fridge in Makima’s, just in case. In case she dropped by. In case she noticed. Seri didn’t know if Makima ever actually used the place, but it was better to believe she might. Better to pretend she had.
She fell asleep in her coat, fingers curled around the lemon like a prayer bead.
Morning found her with a lemon in her hand and the taste of rust in her mouth.
She woke to a crooked beam of light carving across the mattress, blinking slowly as if the world had returned too quickly. Her coat was tangled around her legs. The air in the apartment smelled faintly of sour milk and something older—something like old rain trapped in concrete.
She got up without brushing her hair. Didn’t bother to change her socks. The one with the blood had dried stiff around the heel. She shrugged on yesterday’s jacket, pocketed the lemon, and left.
She didn’t have anywhere to be. Which was part of the problem.
The streets had the gray, overcooked look of a city mid-hangover. The kind of day where nothing felt real unless it hurt. So she wandered. Stepped on cracks deliberately. Counted her footsteps until she forgot the number and started over. She walked until she didn’t feel like herself anymore, which was the goal.
And now she’s squatting on the curb outside a konbini, poking a crushed canned coffee with the toe of her shoe.
She is not supposed to be here.
Technically, she is not supposed to be anywhere without permission. “Probationary field observation,” they call it, like they’re watching a zoo animal post-mauling. They clipped her nails (not literally, they don’t touch her now), and they told her: you are only to engage with assigned targets, with oversight, with restraint.
And Seri said, “Sure.”
She meant: whatever.
The glass doors whisper open, and Seri steps inside, trailing the cold behind her like a rumor. Fluorescent lights hum overhead, buzzing like they know something she doesn’t. The air smells like old rice and artificial melon, sharp and clean in a way that makes her teeth itch. She blinks against the brightness, lets her eyes skim over the racks of magazines, candy, boxed lunches.
She doesn’t need anything. That’s not the point.
She walks slowly, deliberately, like a sleepwalker halfway through a bad dream. Not looking for anything, exactly—just waiting to see what looks back.
She hasn’t bought anything yet. She's just been standing in the aisles picking things up and putting them back and watching the clerk get twitchy behind the counter. Maybe she’ll steal something just to feel something. Maybe she won’t.
Maybe she’ll tell someone she stole something even though she didn’t, just to see how fast they’ll look at her like a bomb.
That part’s always funny.
A man walked past her earlier with a leash in his hand and nothing on the end of it. Just the leash. It was red.
Seri said, “Nice pet,” and smiled too wide.
He didn’t look back.
She’s not really supposed to be in public without her minder. But Kurose’s been skipping their walks lately—tired of her, maybe. Or scared of her. Or hoping someone else does the dirty work. Her file probably says: Will not kill without provocation, followed by a paragraph that clarifies: Seri decides what counts as provocation.
She’s not unreasonable.
She hasn’t killed anyone this month.
She thinks that should count for something.
She ends up with sour gummies and dried fish strips. She likes the way they fight back—sugar like acid on her tongue, salt stretching in her teeth.
The clerk flinches when she thanks him by name. She read it off his tag. He wasn’t expecting that.
She tucks the moment away. The flicker of alarm. That thin slice of silence when someone can’t tell if you’re being kind or cruel. If they’re about to be seen—or marked.
That’s the wire she walks. The Shame Devil hums clearest when people are right there—strung between hope and humiliation, shaking under their own skin.
Her last mission snapped on that wire.
The devil was already cornered. Small. Soft-looking. A team was on the way.
“Observe only,” they said.
But Seri got bored.
So she stepped in. Not to fight. Not exactly. She moved like a question.
She hadn’t meant to kill it. She’d wanted to see something. Hear something. Maybe devils had dreams when they bled. Maybe she wanted to ask.
It looked like a boy. That was the problem. Or the excuse. She can’t remember which one made it into the report.
What she does remember is the moment it looked at her like a person.
And the moment it stopped.
People get so angry when devils kill. Like it isn’t the same thing they do, just slower. Like dying with taxes and small talk is any cleaner.
She doesn’t hate people. But she doesn’t worship them either.
Anyway, everyone’s rotten somewhere.
She heard someone say that once. Might’ve been her.
The Shame Devil likes her because she never pretends. That’s what it told her once—drunk off someone else’s regret, licking sorrow from its teeth like wine.
It called her pure, in the way knives are pure. All edge. No apology.
She asked it what the price was.
It grinned with a hundred mouths.
You’ll feel everything you make them feel, it said.
She nodded. “Fine.”
It never said she’d enjoy it. Just that she’d bleed where they bled. Flinch where they flinched.
A mirror, with nothing behind it.
She sees Makima sometimes. Or thinks she does.
In elevators. In reflections. Behind her eyelids, which is rude.
Makima smells like power—strict rules wrapped in skin just starting to rot. When she speaks, the world tilts. Everyone listens. Seri does too—can’t afford not to.
Once, Makima called her a “liability.” Seri said nothing.
Because what could she say? It wasn’t pride that held her still. Seri already felt small—fragile, cracked, barely whole. Makima didn’t make her feel smaller. She just made everything sharper.
Sometimes, when Makima praises her, Seri holds it like a secret treasure—brief flickers of light in the dark. But mostly, her mind fractures without warning. Her body acts without permission. Orders break like brittle bones.
And suddenly, she’s killed someone. Disobeyed. Maybe that's why she's on probation.
She walks home with the bag in one hand and a single grape soda in the other. It’s not hers. She stole it from the cart of a middle schooler who didn’t notice. She doesn’t even like grape. She just wanted to see if she could walk the whole way without drinking it.
She makes it halfway.
It’s warm and awful and exactly what she deserves.
That’s the kind of logic her devil likes.
When she gets home, she throws herself across the couch like she’s been shot. Arms dangling, face down, spine bent at a dumb angle. The TV is on. A man is confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. The audience claps.
Seri sighs.
Maybe she’ll go out again. Maybe not. Maybe someone will come find her and tell her there’s another mission.
Maybe she’ll say no, and they’ll stop asking.
Maybe she’ll say yes, and do it wrong on purpose.
Either way: she’s bored.
And boredom is just another kind of hunger.
And hunger always leads to something.
Even if it’s ugly.
Even if it’s her.
Seri didn’t lock the door.
There was no point. If someone wanted to kill her, they’d do it. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. And if they hesitated , she’d feel it in her molars before they even crossed the threshold.
The lock clicked anyway.
She didn’t look up, just balanced a spoon on her pinky, one boot half-on. Her ramen had gone cold. Her boredom hadn’t.
“You’re early,” she said, voice low, flat. Not really a question.
She had no idea if Makima had said she was coming. But somehow Makima being early always felt accurate. Like a storm coming three days before the weather report predicted it.
Makima stepped in without a word, the faintest trace of rain still clinging to her coat, but not a drop on her. Seri had never understood how she did that. She didn’t even bother trying anymore.
Makima’s presence filled the room, sharp and precise. Seri felt the air shift, like something moved beneath her skin—electric, fragile.
“You didn’t knock,” Seri said, still not turning.
“I didn’t need to,” Makima said calmly, voice cool as ice.
Seri finally looked up. Makima’s gaze was steady, unreadable. Not warmth. Not cold. Just something unreadable that vaguely made Seri wonder if she really was going to die today, which made no sense because Makima was Makima. But for some reason, her blood chilled, just a little.
“I was hoping it was the Lust Devil,” Seri said, dragging a nail along the counter’s edge, voice lighter, like a joke she wasn’t sure was funny. “At least she’s a little less predictable.”
Makima’s lips curved slightly—almost a smile, but nothing more. “You’re not on speaking terms.”
Seri shrugged, the barest twitch at the corner of her mouth. “Not exactly.”
“You broke your handler’s vertebrae last week.”
Seri’s voice dropped into a whisper, almost playful. “He touched my hair.”
Makima’s expression didn’t change. “He offered you a lollipop.”
“He touched my hair.”
Seri’s grin was sharp, but quick to fade. She didn’t expect Makima to understand, didn’t expect to explain.
Makima moved deeper inside, every step measured, like the floor yielded to her will. Seri’s stomach tightened.
“You’ve been quiet.”
“I’m on probation.”
“You haven’t killed anyone.”
“Not that anyone can prove.”
Makima stopped just in front of her, eyes locking on Seri’s hands—restless, tapping.
“Still biting your nails?”
Seri shook her head, fingers still drumming. “No.”
“Why?”
Seri’s grin was thin. “No regrets left to bite over.”
A pause, thick and heavy. Makima touched a chipped cup, then the radio’s bent antenna, as if seeking permission from the objects themselves.
Seri broke the silence. “I don’t get why people hate devils.”
Makima’s brow lifted.
“Everyone acts like we’re different,” Seri said, voice lighter now, teasing almost. “Devils are monsters, people are people. But they scream the same, lie the same, die the same.” She glanced at Makima. “People just beg more.”
“Devils don’t?”
“They don’t waste the breath.”
Makima turned slowly. “And you?”
Seri smiled, faint but steady. “I don’t like begging.”
Makima’s gaze sharpened, slicing through her like cold wire. Seri didn’t flinch, but inside, something twisted—faint, like a half-forgotten ache she wasn’t sure she still owned. The weight of those eyes pressed against her skin, stirring a fog of memories she wasn’t sure she wanted to reach for.
Her mind scrambled, fragments slipping just beyond grasp—snatches of heat, smoke, a name whispered too softly to catch.
Then Makima spoke, her voice almost gentle in contrast, cutting through the haze.
“You were in middle school when your father set your house on fire.”
“He said it was a shame his daughter came out wrong.”
Seri’s head tilted, eyes wide but vacant, as if something deep inside had cracked open and let the silence rush in. She didn’t remember telling Makima any of this. She didn’t remember telling anyone. Maybe she never had. Or maybe she did, but that part of her had long since been swallowed by shadows.
She swallowed hard. Her voice came out flat, uncertain. “I got a nice coat out of it.”
Makima stepped closer, voice softer still, almost careful. “You feel nothing about it?”
“No.”
“Not even shame?”
Seri’s lips curled into something close to a smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“I gave it away.” Her voice brightened, like she was announcing a secret. “Traded it for a devil.”
Makima smiled at that. The rare, real kind. “A fair trade.”
Seri walked past her, flicking her spoon into the sink. It clanged, loud, shrill. “What do you want?” she asked, twisting her hair into a bun that didn’t stay.
Makima said nothing for a moment. Then: “You haven’t been useful lately. That needs to change.”
“Oh, good. Was hoping you’d ask me to start stabbing things again.”
“You’re not stable yet.”
Seri made a face. “I was never stable. I was predictable. That’s not the same thing.”
“You’re still recovering from disciplinary action.”
Seri yawned. “You say that like it’s a disease.”
Makima’s eyes didn’t blink. “Are you bored, Seri?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to be bored?”
“No.”
“Do you want to be useful?”
Seri hesitated. Then she grinned. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
Makima didn’t react. Which meant: yes. Or worse — no, but that it didn’t matter.
“Do you want to be useful?”
Makima finally turned toward the door.
“You’ll report to Sector 5 tomorrow. Quiet work. Supervised.”
Seri snorted, pulling her coat tighter around herself. “I’m not wearing the stupid vest.”
“You’ll wear what you’re told.”
Makima paused at the threshold, then left without another word.
Seri stood alone, the spoon still ringing faintly in the sink. She stared at her reflection in the rain-streaked window—oil-dark and shifting.
She didn’t smile back.
She whispered, barely audible, “Stupid woman.”
She wasn’t sure if she meant Makima or herself. Maybe both. Maybe neither.
The past was a fog she didn’t want to clear. Makima’s words stirred it, but Seri wasn’t ready to sift through what was buried. Forgetting was easier.
She grabbed a switchblade from the wall, slid it into her boot, and stepped out.
Probation or not—boredom was the real sentence.