The girl with golden lips and hair smiled when we clinked our two steel glasses of gin together. Yet, I was the only one to quaff it as she had frozen, her gaze lost over my shoulder in the green holographic horizon of Aokigahara. My drinking partner knew before my own wrist-computer that I would receive a call.

“Kumo Raïda reporting,” I stated after connecting my implant to the table port with the bulky 3.5 mm cable, enabling better communication.

“Akira? Is it done?” a modified feminine voice immediately asked through the high security channel’s static, ignoring the more basic social conventions. Her words were like daggers in my ears; hydrofluoric acid, directly injected into my cortex to nibble the calcium of my skull. It has always been a torture.

I glanced behind the girl who was still sitting motionless. Against the glitched holo-wall rested the decapitated body of my contract. Laying between his twisted skinny legs, his head had turned gray as the skin had begun to fade away, dropping off around a thin layer of dust. Without the expensive nano-drugs encapsulated in his spine, he caught up his rightful age.

“Most definitely,” I replied, nervously brushing my pearl bracelet.

I heard a lighter flaring. “Good,” she simply answered after a brief delay.

I snickered above the static sound. Lunapolis and its petty intrigues... “I still do not see the point. The Arch-King was hiding in a holo-chamber, like a hikikomori, alone and under controlled atmosphere. With no security. His rotten heart would not even allow him to copulate with the puppets.” I could not stop staring at the severed head. Disgusted by such useless brutality, my lips could not refrain my comment which, I know, could made me lose my own scalp: “Odin was harmless.”

“Do we have to go over this nonsense again?” She exhaled her poison that I could almost smell it from almost half a billion kilometers away. “We had to send a message. Thanks to our relentlessness, the Caste of Valknut is no more. The Ohm surrendering the Rings, added to the recent death of Hermes—the last of the Omegas—means that we are now the only major Metacaste powerful enough to rule over the pathetic Technocracy.”

Insisting more was a waste of oxygen but I made sure she could hear me sighing, my futile and feeble last act of resistance. “If you say so, Arch-Princess Sirona.”

“One last thing,” she almost cut me off.

“What is it?”

Her first reply got lost in the void separating us. “The Kitty is flying again,” she repeated, a hint of irritation in her voice.

My heart stopped, crushed by icy fingers. Of course, she knew. After Xiao… Lucille Blaine and the rout suffered by the whole Hemingwest clan… I should have warned the cat. I failed the girl. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. I had no way out for now.

“This is a stupid question. Even coming from you, Akira.” An expected answer from this cold warugaki. She tended to forget she was not better than me for the moment. But, as for myself, I would have had the decency to perform harakiri after such a disgraceful demotion. Yet that was a long-forgotten sense of honor that the Metacastes lacked cruelly. “Handle it,” she pursued.

Out of anger, I cut the data line, making the whole holoroom flicker. On the walls, Aokigahara vanished in a mist of black and white dots. The puppet in front of me lost its ectoplasmic coat. It began resembling to a Baltimore’s crash test dummy, still frozen with the drink in hand. “Handle it? No. I do not think I will handle it,” I chided while standing up and grabbing the model’s glass of gin. The Kitty was flying again with a Koviràn onboard. And I had to stop it? As I hadn’t done enough on the matter already…

I slowly proceeded to the mirror door, smashing the console on the table with the point of my katana to stop the insufferable static snow. Everything became dark, like the night I was trying to forget.

“The girl inherited the ship and the bad temperateness that comes along—”

Something moved in the shadow. The head of Odin was back on his shoulders and his body turned to be as alive as when I met him two hours ago. But the man who smiled at me wasn’t the Arch-King. The ghost of my old friend had taken his place. This forsaken bounty hunter could not stop haunting my mind, here deep in the Kuiper belt, years after his death.

“Damn you, Félix! We shall all suffer once again for your foolishness.”