The wind chimes at the door sounded before she looked up.
The man who stepped in was familiar.
The second client from opening day — the one who had asked her to divine his fate and been shown the door for it.
He was looking at her with the specific expression of someone who had rehearsed what they were going to say and was now finding the rehearsal inadequate.
“Hello, Miss Ke — Keiko.” The greeting came out slightly uneven.
Keiko gestured to the chair.
“Sit down.”
He sat, carefully, like someone still deciding whether they had the right to be there.
“Do you need a reading?”
“Yes.
I need you to find someone.” He straightened slightly.
“A child.”
She placed paper and pen on the table without comment.
He wrote — name, address, date of birth, physical description — and pushed it across.
His hands were not entirely steady.
“I need to know where he is.
Whether he is alive.”
Keiko read the paper.
A child.
She looked up at the man.
“A neighbor’s child?”
“Yes.” He pressed his lips together.
“He went missing half a month ago.
We have not found him.”
She picked up the small mirror from the table, oriented herself with the information on the paper, and began the incantation.
The room settled into the particular quality of attention that genuine divination produced — not dramatic, not theatrical, just a change in the weight of the air.
A minute passed.
She opened her eyes.
“I found him.”
The man leaned forward.
“Is he–”
“He is dead.”
The color left his face so completely and so fast that she watched it happen in real time.
He sat back as if his spine had stopped working, hands flat on his thighs, staring at nothing.
“Impossible,” he said, very quietly.
“Impossible.”
Keiko waited.
The grief moved through him in the way grief moved through people who had been hoping until the last moment and had just run out of hope.
It took several minutes. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
She did not rush it.
When he came back to himself, he was clutching his own hair and his voice had gone rough.
“Can you tell me how he died?”
She hesitated for a moment.
Then, quietly: “A ritual.
The body was opened.”
She left it at exactly that.
It was enough.
More than enough.
She watched him work out what those words implied about what the child had experienced, and watched the color leave his face for the second time, and watched something underneath the grief harden into something else entirely.
Then he went to his knees.
“That legend.” His voice was not steady.
“It is real.
It is actually real.”
He pressed his forehead to the floor.
“Please help me.
They say you can change ordinary people — make them something more.
Please.
I am asking you.”
His forehead hit the floor again.
And again.
Deliberately, with the persistence of someone who had decided this was all they had left.
A thin thread of blood appeared at his hairline.
Keiko stood up quickly and moved to the side.
He turned to follow her and kept going.
She moved again.
He followed.
She stopped.
“Get up.” Her voice was flat, not unkind.
“Stop.
You are getting blood on my floor and I have not agreed to anything yet.” She reached down and got a hand under his arm and pulled.
“Up.
Sit.
Tell me about this legend and then I will decide.”
He resisted for a moment — the stubbornness of someone who had committed to the gesture and was not sure what came after — and then let himself be helped up.
He walked back to the chair unsteadily and sat down.
He wiped the blood from his forehead with the back of his hand and looked at it without much reaction.
The legend had appeared during the Third Shinobi World War.
Ten years ago, roughly.
A time when people were dying in large numbers by conventional means, when strange deaths were easy to attribute to ordinary causes and nobody had bandwidth to investigate inconsistencies.
Which was, Keiko thought, a very convenient time for a cult to operate.
“Full moon nights,” the man said.
“Black-robed figures.
Rituals.
They take pure souls — children, mostly.
Something about controlling life and death through the sacrifice.”
“And after the war ended?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know.
I am ordinary — I do not have a shinobi’s information network.
But those children who died during the war, they were all ruled accidental.
Ninja investigators found causes of death.
There was no investigation of anything else.”
“Xiaobao — the boy I am asking about — he simply disappeared.
No accident.
No explained cause.
Just gone.”
Keiko turned this over carefully.
The Jashin cult in peacetime would not have simply stopped.
Cults operating on ritualistic sacrifice did not take extended breaks from their practices because a war had ended.
What they did was adapt — become more careful, spread their operations thinner, work through intermediaries.
The children who died in apparent accidents during the war might not all have been accidents.
The peaceful years since might have the same pattern, just better disguised.
And the Land of Hot Springs, with its open borders and tourist traffic and relatively thin intelligence coverage from the major villages, was exactly the kind of territory where something like this could operate with reasonable safety.
Whoever had taken Xiaobao had been careless or confident enough to simply take him without staging an accident.
That implied either disruption of their normal pattern, or a specific reason the child had been selected that overrode the usual caution.
She did not yet know which.
The man was looking at her with the specific expression of someone who had given everything they had and was waiting to see if it was enough.
“So what are you asking me for, specifically?” She kept her voice even.
“You want me to find someone to handle this on your behalf?
Or–”
He went to his knees again before she finished the sentence.
“I want to do it myself.”