He laid it out honestly, which was the version of the conversation he’d decided on during the three hours of tracking across Kyoto.
Honesty, in this case, was both ethically preferable and tactically sound, because Telos Karma was a probability-sense Longinus and lying to someone who could feel the weight of causality was a genuinely terrible idea.
He needed the Gear.
He wanted to separate it from its current wielder—not through force, but through a process that would transfer it into a form he could use without destroying what made it functional.
She would be left with her life, her memories wiped of the supernatural elements specific to the transfer, free to return to whatever life she chose.
Or.
She could join his peerage, which was currently composed of exactly himself, and grow into whatever she was going to become without the constraint of a family structure that had already demonstrated it found her more useful as an asset than loved as a person.
Or.
She could tell him to leave, and he would leave, and he would find another way.
He meant the last option.
That was important.
He made sure it was clear that he meant it.
Momiji was quiet for a long time.
“You’d take the Gear,” she said slowly, “and wipe my memory of this conversation.”
“Yes.”
“And I’d go back to my brother.”
“Yes.”
“Why would you do that?
You could just—” She stopped.
Looked at him with something sharper than the wariness she’d been carrying.
“You could have just taken it.
While I was sitting outside.
I was distracted.”
“Yes,” he said again.
“So why didn’t you.”
He thought about how to answer that.
Not because he didn’t know the answer, but because the honest version of it was slightly embarrassing for a Devil who was supposed to be playing an impressively pragmatic long game.
“Because you looked like you were having a bad enough day,” he said.
“And because taking things from people without asking is something I find—” He searched for the right word.
“—distasteful.”
Momiji stared at him.
“You’re a very strange Devil,” she said.
“I’ve been told.” He hadn’t, actually, been told, because he hadn’t spoken to enough people yet for anyone to develop an opinion about him.
But it felt like the kind of thing that was going to come up repeatedly, and getting comfortable with it seemed practical.
She made her choice the way people really do—messily, slowly, with stops and starts, and even a moment where she buried her face in her hands while Lucian sat across from her, respectfully staring into the middle distance.
The shape of her decision was: her brother.
Not the clan, not the tradition, not the duty.
Her brother Takeru, who was receiving hard time from four other Principal Clans over his choice to keep Momiji operationally active, who had apparently never once suggested she should be sidelined, who had fielded every criticism and every political pressure with the specific obstinacy of someone who had decided that protecting a person he loved was more important than making four powerful families comfortable.
“If I stay in the supernatural world,” she said, “I make it harder for him.
The Gear makes it harder.
Every time I use it around clan representatives, they file another complaint, they put more pressure on him—” She stopped.
“If I go back without it—if there’s nothing unusual about me anymore—he can just be the clan head.
Without the argument.”
“Yes,” Lucian said.
“That’s what would happen.”
“You could make sure it happened.
The memory wipe.
You could make it—clean.” She said the word like she was testing its weight.
“He wouldn’t have to remember losing me.
He’d just think I came back.
Changed my mind about the exorcist path.
That I wanted something quieter.”
“I could do that, yes.”
“And the Gear.
You’d use it for something good?”
He considered that.
“I’d use it to find people who need help before it’s too late to help them.
That’s the most immediate application.
Beyond that—” He spread one hand.
“I’m trying to prevent several very large disasters.
Whether that qualifies as good is somewhat dependent on your ethical framework, but the disasters in question are the kind that affect large numbers of people negatively, so I’m inclined to think yes.”
Momiji almost smiled at that.
It didn’t quite make it to her face, but it got close.
“Several large disasters.”
“The list is longer than I’d prefer.”
“Aren’t you too young for this?”
“This came up in my internal monologue as well,” he said.
“I’ve decided not to dwell on it.”
This time the smile did make it.
Small, and tired, but real.
She looked at her hands for a moment, then back at him.
“Do it,” she said.
“Cleanly.
Make sure Takeru doesn’t—make sure it’s not a loss for him.
Just a change.”
“I will,” he said.
And he meant that too.
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