Chapter Text
The body language of a mugging was something Rin had learned to read in Fuyuki at twelve, when Kirei had made her walk the rougher districts alone at night as a lesson in situational awareness. The lesson had been about mana signatures and threat assessment. What she had actually learned was that violence had a grammar. A particular way bodies arranged themselves in relation to each other, a specific tension in the shoulders of the person with power, a specific collapse in the shoulders of the person without it.
The grammar was apparently universal. New York, it turned out, conjugated fear the same way Fuyuki did.
Most things did not translate as cleanly. She had spent the first hour recalibrating for scale. The width of the avenues, the height of the buildings, the way the city simply did not stop in any direction she looked, which Fuyuki did not do. Fuyuki had edges. This city seemed to regard edges as a failure of ambition. The signage was overwhelming and entirely in English, which was fine. She read English, spoke it without accent when she chose to, had been made to study it with the same rigour applied to everything else that mattered in the Tohsaka household. But reading it in volume at speed while simultaneously constructing a working map of an unknown city from first principles was a different cognitive load than reading it in a classroom. The screens were everywhere and brighter than she was accustomed to, and the vehicles were larger, and the people moved with a purposefulness that she recognised but at a density she did not. She had been to Tokyo twice. This was not Tokyo. The subway had been an experience she had filed under things she would process later, after more pressing problems were resolved.
Three men. One woman, late forties, handbag clutched with both hands against her chest in the way people held things they had already decided not to surrender. A gap between a laundromat and a fire escape that the city had apparently decided counted as an alley. Eleven forty-seven PM, and Rin had been in this world for precisely six hours, which was not enough time to have developed opinions about its inhabitants but was apparently enough time to have confirmed that pressing problems were not going to resolve themselves on her preferred timeline.
She stopped walking.
The rational decision was to continue walking. She had no money, no identification, and a prana reserve that had been declining at a slow and relentless rate since she had arrived, like a clock running on a battery that no one had thought to replace. She had six jewels in the inner pocket of her jacket, charged before she had left her apartment in Fuyuki, and six jewels was not a number she was comfortable spending on strangers in a city she did not understand yet. She had problems of her own, which were significant and unresolved, and the woman in the alley was not her problem.
Rin looked at her for two seconds.
Then she looked at the three men.
She made some calculations.
The calculations were not in the woman's favour, in the sense that three men and one woman and a grammar of violence she recognised too well did not require much calculation at all. The resource expenditure of one jewel against what was about to happen to a person who had done nothing wrong except be in the wrong place, which was Rin's definition of a problem she could solve.
She took a step toward the alley and stopped.
Because something moved above her.
She had excellent peripheral vision. She had trained herself to have excellent peripheral vision because peripheral vision in a Grail War was the difference between noticing a Servant before it reached you and not. What she saw in her peripheral vision did not fit any category she had available. Something — someone — had just dropped from the fire escape two floors up, which should have produced sound and impact, and had instead landed in a way that was nearly silent, absorbing the fall in a crouch that lasted less than a second before it was moving again.
Moving toward the alley. Moving fast.
Her hand went to her pocket.
The figure, and she could see now that it was a person, roughly adolescent in proportion, wearing something dark with a red design she could not resolve at this distance, dropped into the alley and Rin completed her assessment in the two seconds before he moved: enhanced human, physical augmentation, operating on the vigilante model she had already intuited existed in this city. Probably trained. Probably more capable than his build suggested. Manageable threat profile for three non-enhanced men.
She took her hand off the jewel.
"Evening, gentlemen," the figure said. The voice was young. "Great night for this kind of thing. Really nice alley. Very atmospheric."
The largest of the three men recovered first and moved forward, and the figure moved with him. But not in the direction Rin had predicted. She had read the angle of approach and the weight distribution, worked out his line. But not the line he used, and the result landed differently than she'd expected. The man's arm going in a direction arms did not typically go, briefly, but the figure had taken an impact to the shoulder doing it, a glancing thing that he absorbed without apparent difficulty but that revised her assessment of his predictability downward. He had not dodged. He had decided the hit was acceptable and traded it for position.
She did not know what to do with that. It was not the kind of efficiency a person had through training. It was the kind a person had through having decided, some while ago, that certain things were acceptable to have happen to them. Which was a different problem entirely, and not one she wanted to be looking at at eleven forty-seven on a Thursday.
The second man had a knife. She saw it before the figure did. She was certain of this, watching his attention track the large man's recovery when the blade came out from behind the second man's jacket. The third man had already gone. This was the moment she pulled the jewel, because whatever this person was doing, he was facing the wrong direction, and a knife in the back was not a grammar she was willing to let complete its sentence.
She started to work out the throw and stopped.
Because the figure had already pivoted. A movement through one hundred and eighty degrees that should not have been possible at that speed from a standing position, driven by what appeared to be a genuinely extraordinary sense of where the danger was. And his hand came up and something shot from his wrist, a thin line almost invisible in the dark, and the knife hit the wall of the laundromat.
She lowered her hand.
She had been wrong about the sequence. She had read him as occupied, attention forward, back unguarded. And the reality had been that his attention was not located where his eyes were, which was not a property of humans she had a classification for. It was not enhanced hearing alone. It was not enhanced reflexes alone. It was something she did not have a word for and could not place, and the feeling was not quite unease. Adjacent to it, but not the same thing.
The man with the knife looked at the wall, and then at his wrist, and then at the figure in front of him. He left the knife. He ran.
The large man on the ground was reconsidering his situation. The figure looked at him for a moment. Just looked, with a quality of attention that Rin recognised as a decision being made and then said, very quietly, "Don't," and something in the delivery of that single syllable was sufficiently different from the rest of his performance that the man on the ground decided to agree. He left as well.
The woman had pressed herself against the wall during all of this. She was shaking. The figure turned to her and his whole posture changed. Hands visible, body angled away, physical capability folded into something careful and small. Rin read it as deliberate de-escalation. She had seen this technique before. She had not expected to see it from someone operating on improvised ethics.
This, too, went into the category of things she had not predicted.
He was young, definitively young, the proportions adolescent even under whatever he was wearing. "You okay?" he said. "Did they— are you hurt?"
"No," the woman said. "No, I'm— thank you. Thank you, I—"
"Do you want me to call someone? I don't have a phone on me, but—" He looked around the alley and then, for the first time, looked at Rin.
She had not moved. She was standing at the mouth of the alley with her hand still at her jacket pocket and she was aware that this was not a posture that read as innocent bystander, but she had not yet determined what posture was appropriate for this situation, which was a new experience for her.
The figure looked at her hand. At her pocket. Back at her face.
"Hey," he said. His voice did the thing voices did when they were performing normalcy over something else. "Did you see which way the other guy went?"
"South," Rin said. "He was not fast."
"Great. Cool. That's— yeah." He looked at her for another moment with the quality of someone recalculating. "You were going to do something."
It was not a question.
"I had not decided yet," Rin said, which was not entirely true but was accurate enough.
"You had something in your hand."
"I carry things."
The woman was watching this exchange with the slightly dazed quality of someone whose adrenaline had not yet metabolised. The figure seemed to remember she was there. He turned back to her, produced an improvised business card from somewhere — she did not see where — and offered it. "Nearest police station is four blocks east. You can file a report, though honestly I don't know how useful— the point is, you should go somewhere with more people. Okay?"
The woman took the card. She looked at it. She looked at him. "Who are you?"
"Working on it," he said. Which was not an answer. Which was somehow more honest than an answer would have been.
The woman left. Her footsteps were quick and became quicker once she was out of the alley, and then it was eleven fifty-three PM in New York City and Rin was standing six feet from someone she could not classify, and the feeling was profoundly irritating.
She studied him openly. This was not polite but it was useful, and politeness was a resource she allocated deliberately. He was letting her do it. He had not moved away or attempted to end the conversation, and he was watching her with the same quality of assessment she was directing at him, which meant he had noticed what she had been about to do and was trying to understand it.
"You moved before I did," Rin said.
"I heard them," he said.
She worked through the angles. He had been above the alley on the fire escape. The ambient noise of the street was considerable. The men in the alley had not been loud. "From up there."
A pause. "Yeah."
"Your hearing is enhanced."
Another pause. Longer. "Are you— is this a thing you're asking because you're writing a paper, or—"
"I am not writing a paper."
"Journalism club?"
"No."
"Okay." He seemed to run out of categories. "I had like two theories and they were both versions of that." He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, and the motion reminded her of someone trying to look casual who had not yet determined what casual felt like in this body. "The— the thing with the knife. The line."
"Yes."
"You've never seen that before."
"No," Rin said. Which was true. She had seen a great many things in the years of her training as a magus, and none of them had involved thin adhesive lines fired from wrist-mounted devices. "What is it made of?"
"Proprietary blend," he said.
She looked at him.
"I made it myself," he said, which was clearly true in the way some things were clearly true before you understood why you believed them.
"You made it," Rin said.
"I'm very smart."
"And what you did with the first man. The fall from the fire escape. That was not training."
He was quiet for a moment. She was asking questions no ordinary bystander would ask, and she knew it. But she had spent six hours in a city she did not understand, and he clearly had information about it that she needed, and he had clearly noticed that she was not what she appeared to be.
"No," he said finally. "It wasn't training."
"Enhanced strength. Enhanced speed. Sensory augmentation. Non-magical mechanical augmentation." She was reviewing the list rather than directing it at him. His head tilted. "You're not dangerous to me."
"That's a weird thing to say."
"I am assessing you."
"I noticed." He looked at her hand, which had gone back to her pocket. "What were you going to throw?"
She weighed it. She had almost no information about this city, and he clearly had a great deal of it. She withdrew the jewel. A red one, charged with compression force, and held it out on her palm.
He leaned forward and looked at it. She watched his face. There was the thing most people did, which was see a pretty gemstone and register it as decorative, and there was the thing some people did, which was look at it for slightly too long because something in the quality of it was wrong in a way they could not name.
He did the second thing.
He looked at it for four seconds. Then he looked at her.
"What does it do?" he said.
"What do you think it does?"
"I think it does something," he said. "I think it was going to do something to that man with the knife, and I think it was not going to do that man any favours."
"No," Rin said. "It would not."
She closed her hand around the jewel and put it back in her pocket. He watched this with the quality of someone filing information away for later, and she noticed that his sensory augmentations included something she could not resolve precisely. A faint directional awareness, a quality of attention that moved slightly ahead of where his eyes were. He had already noticed, she thought, that she was not carrying a weapon in any conventional sense. He was not afraid of her. He was not afraid in the way that meant assessing his options and finding them sufficient.
This was interesting. It was interesting in the way that things were interesting when she did not want them to be.
"Are you from here?" he said.
"No."
"The city? The— are you American?"
"No."
"Okay," he said. "Do you have— is there somewhere you need to be? Because it's almost midnight and you're—" He stopped. Started again. "You look like you've been walking for a while."
She had been walking for approximately four hours. Her shoes, which were correct for Fuyuki in October, were less correct for a city in which she had covered twelve kilometres since arriving through a displacement she still could not explain, attempting to map a place that had no correspondence to any map she owned.
"I am oriented," she said.
"Sure," he said, in the tone of someone who did not believe this but was not certain he had the standing to say so.
She studied him for another moment.
"You're going to keep doing this," she said. "Tonight. After I leave."
He did not answer immediately, and in the not-answering she heard something she had not been listening for. A quality of feeling that sat underneath the performance of casualness and did not quite go away. It was not fear. It was the particular exhaustion of someone who had been carrying something heavy for long enough that they had stopped noticing it was heavy.
"Yeah," he said. "Probably."
"There is a man," she said, "approximately six blocks south, who ran from this alley with functional legs and a head start. If you are going to do this tonight, he is the nearest unresolved problem."
The figure looked south, then back at her, and something in the posture shifted. The particular shift of someone who had been given permission to go and was not certain if they wanted to take it.
"Will you be—" he started.
"I am oriented," Rin said again.
He looked at her for one more second with the quality of assessment she had been directing at him, and then he moved. Not running, not in any configuration of movement that looked like running, but covering distance at a rate that should not have been possible, up the wall of the laundromat, across the fire escape, gone.
She stood in the mouth of the alley for a moment.
She took stock. She had six jewels, now, which was still six jewels because she had not used one. She had no money, no identification, no shelter, and no framework for a city she had been in for less than seven hours. She had six hours of observational data about a place she did not understand, and she had just added, to that data, one severely anomalous individual who was clearly not fully aware of what he was and clearly operating under a moral framework that was producing behaviour she could not predict reliably.
He had made her hesitate. He had moved before she finished calculating — and she hadn't modelled for that.
She began walking south. Not toward the six-block destination she had just provided him. South in the sense of direction, because she needed to move and moving while thinking was more efficient than standing while thinking, and because standing in an alley at midnight was not a stable position.
He had not asked her name. She had not asked his.
She thought about the way he had said working on it when the woman had asked who he was.
She filed it with the rest.