The contract had been on the board for tooo long before Yucca took it down. Two weeks was long. Long enough that the other hunters had looked at it, calculated the sea, the distance, the creature's reported size relative to any boat a person could reasonably afford, and decided that a hundred thousand gil was not, in fact, that compelling a number.

Yucca had looked at it, calculated the same things, and told Lev they were going to hunt a Yokai.

Lev had not asked why. He was learning not to ask why, with her. The answer was always either obvious or unsatisfying, and either way you ended up on a ship to somewhere cold regardless.

This is the account of what followed. It contains, in no particular order: three sacks of salt, one very regrettable temple negotiation, a Hrothgar in a structurally compromised shirt, and two yokai who had been waiting a very long time to be found by the right kind of people.

Begin where the sea does. At the dock, before the storm, when the water is still.

The docks of Shirogane smelled like salt and old rope and the specific kind of resignation that came with a life spent watching the horizon for things that might eat you.

Yucca had noticed early on that people in the Far East told stories differently. In Ul'dah, rumors arrived fast and loud, elbowing their way through tavern crowds like merchants cutting in line. Here, a story was offered the way you'd offer tea. With both hands, in the right order, with a pause before the worst part.

The fisherman they found on the second pier was seventy if he was a day. He had the sort of face that looked like it had decided on an expression many decades ago and committed to it fully. He didn't seem alarmed by two hunters sitting across from him with a bounty paper. One of them was a woman with desert-dark eyes. The other was a Hrothgar large enough to block out the afternoon sun. Neither of these facts troubled him particularly.

Yucca spread the contract on the dock planks between them. "Umibōzu." She tapped the paper once. "What do you know?"

The man looked at the paper. Then at her. Then at Lev, whose ears had swiveled slightly in that way they did when he was paying close attention but preferred to look like he wasn't.

"My grandfather saw it." He went back to mending his net without any particular urgency. "His grandfather before him. Now it's here again."

Lev kept his voice even. "The missing ships. How many in the last moon?"

"Four. One made it back." The old man's hands didn't stop moving through the net. "One man on that boat. He wasn't speaking much when they found him. He's speaking less now."

"Can we talk to him?"

A pause. A long one.

"He doesn't sleep with a roof anymore." The fisherman didn't look up. "Says the ceiling is too low. That it presses down."

Yucca wrote nothing in her notes. She remembered it instead.

By the second day they had spoken to eleven people. A net-repair woman who burned incense at the shoreline every morning and would not say why. Two young dockworkers who had seen something from the lighthouse seawall three weeks ago and described it in the halting way people described dreams they were afraid to repeat. A grandmother who served them tea and rice cakes and explained, with great calm, that the Umibōzu did not come for the wicked or the righteous, but for the arrogant. Those who forgot that the sea was not theirs. That they were only guests, and poor-mannered ones at that.

Yucca chewed on that for a moment. "That's a lot of dead fishermen accused of bad manners."

Lev walked beside her toward the inn. "She's probably not wrong, though."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Yucca glanced up at him. The evening light off the water made his silver-grey fur look almost luminous. She looked away before that observation could go anywhere useful.

"The eyes." She said it more to herself than him. "Everyone mentioned the eyes. White and glowing. No pupils. Just light, like lanterns behind cloth."

"And the silence." Lev's pace didn't change. "Before it surfaces, the wind stops."

"We'll need something to know when it's coming before it arrives." She chewed the end of her pen. "And the bullets need blessing before we take them near that thing. Which means we need the bullets first." She looked at him sideways. "You said you could make them."

"I said I could try."

"Lev."

"I can make them." A pause. "I've done it before."

She didn't ask when. She was learning to leave some doors closed.

Lev worked at the small table in the corner of his room with the focused quiet of someone who had learned that precision was not a talent but a discipline practiced long enough to feel like one.

The silver had cost them both from their share of the last job. Not an insignificant amount. Yucca had not complained, which was itself an event worth noting in a ledger somewhere. She sat cross-legged on the window seat with her boots off, reading a folded paper she'd gotten from one of the dockworkers, watching him work without pretending she wasn't.

He poured, cooled, examined. Discarded two. Started again. She didn't ask why he discarded them. He didn't explain. The room was warm and smelled of hot metal and the faint sea wind coming through the window crack, and the afternoon went slowly in the particular way good ones sometimes did.

"What's the symbol?" She had been watching him pick up the small carving tool.

"Old Doman." He turned the bullet carefully in his fingers. "A warding seal. One of the lighthouse wardens drew it for me this morning while you were arguing with the tea vendor."

"I wasn't arguing. I was negotiating."

"You made him cry."

"He gave me a very good price."

The carving took longer than the casting. He worked each bullet with the same attention, the same slight furrow between his brows, the same steadiness of hand. Three lines, a curve, a vertical stroke, a closing mark. She watched him do the first two from across the room and then, without quite meaning to, drifted over and stood at his shoulder.

Up close, the marks were surprisingly delicate for a hand that size.

"Does it hurt?" She was looking at the bullet. "Carving it."

He looked at her. A small look, just a glance, but he'd turned his head enough that she was suddenly very aware of how close she was standing. She didn't step back.

"The metal or me?"

"Either."

"No." He went back to the bullet in his hand. "The metal doesn't know what it's being made into. That's the point. It has no intention. The seal gives it one."

She watched him work the third bullet in silence.

"Will you teach me to shoot?"

The question came out flat and simple, which was the only way she knew how to ask for things she actually wanted. He didn't laugh. He didn't pause too long either.

"Someday." A beat. "Maybe."

It was not a yes. It was also not a no. From Lev, she had learned, that was a very specific kind of answer.

She went back to the window seat and picked up her paper again. She didn't stop smiling for a while after that, which she kept carefully pointed toward the street below.

The Temple of Kugane's second district was small, old, and very serious about itself. Incense smoke pooled in the rafters like it had nowhere better to be. The stone floors had been worn smooth by three hundred years of prayers. At the far end, a large and extremely irritable wooden guardian statue watched the entrance with the expression of something that had seen everything and found all of it wanting.

Yucca had barely stepped inside before she whispered. "I know a woman in the Pearl district who would bless things for half this price."

"She was a fish seller." Lev kept his voice low out of respect for the incense, if nothing else.

"She was very spiritual."

"She sold fish."

"She said blessings over every catch. That counts."

The priest who emerged from the back was ancient. Not old in the way the fisherman on the docks had been old, which was a weathered, earned sort of age. This man was old in the way very specific furniture was old. Slightly dusty, slightly leaning, giving the impression that the main structural support was habit. He walked with a staff he clearly didn't need and wore robes of deep indigo that had seen better decades.

He looked at Yucca for a long time. Then at Lev. Then back at Yucca.

His name, he told them, was Priest Hozuki. He had served this temple for sixty-two years. He had blessed weapons, ships, marriages, fishing lines, and one very anxious chocobo whose owner had been convinced it was haunted. He was, he added with a dignity that admitted of no argument, one of the foremost authorities on warding implements in the Far East.

The price he quoted was, in Yucca's opinion, highway robbery committed on sacred ground.

"That's absurd." She said it pleasantly. "I've had whole houses warded for less."

"These are not houses." The priest was patient in the way old men were patient when they'd already won every argument they cared about. "These are implements intended to fell a sea-bound spirit of great age and malice. The ceremony requires three hours, specific incense from Yanxia, a full recitation of the Warding Sutras."

"I'll give you half."

"Madam."

"Two-thirds."

"The sutras alone require."

"Do you want the Umibōzu eating more ships or not?"

The old priest looked at her. Something shifted in his expression that Yucca, to her lasting discomfort, recognized. She had grown up in Pearl Lane. She knew that look. It was the look of a man recalculating entirely.

He cleared his throat. He folded his hands inside his sleeves.

"There is..." He said, with great careful delicacy. "...A different arrangement I might be persuaded to consider."

Lev's ears went flat.

The arrangement, as presented, was straightforward in its indignity. The priest was, by his own account, ninety-one years old. He had been in this temple for sixty-two of them. He had not, he explained with a philosophical wistfulness that made Yucca want to push him into the incense burner, known the particular experience of a woman's form in longer than he could clearly recall. He was not asking for anything improper. Simply a moment. A hand, guided, over the relevant landscape. In exchange for which he would bless six bullets, perform the full sutra recitation, use the good incense, and throw in a warding paper for the boat at no additional charge.

"Absolutely not." Lev said it before the priest had finished the sentence.

"Fine." Yucca said it at the same time.

Lev looked at her.

"Yucca."

"It's negotiated compensation. I've seen worse."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to. Go stand over there."

He did not go stand over there. He stood exactly where he was, arms crossed, ears fully flattened in the manner of a Hrothgar who had strong opinions and was expressing them through posture because words had failed to be listened to. Yucca ignored him comprehensively.

"Alright, elder." She used the tone she kept for concluding market transactions. "Eyes closed."

The old man closed his eyes with an expression of anticipatory serenity that was, frankly, haunting.

Yucca stepped to the side. She took Lev's wrist. He looked down at her with an expression she would have called warning if it weren't for the slight bewilderment underneath it. She guided his hand forward with the calm efficiency of someone defusing a mechanism she had already mentally mapped.

The priest's hand found what it was looking for.

His expression went through several phases. Confusion. Recalibration. A deep and growing uncertainty. His fingers pressed, gently. His brow furrowed.

"This is..." He said slowly. "...not what I expected."

"Mmhm." Yucca spoke from two fulms to the left.

"There is considerably more of it than."

"You said you'd forgotten. I'm sure it's fine."

Lev was staring at the middle distance with the determined blankness of a man choosing, actively, to be somewhere else in his mind entirely. The priest's hand withdrew. He opened his eyes. He looked at what was in front of him for a very long moment.

Then, with enormous and unshakeable dignity, he said: "I will bless the bullets."

He turned and walked back toward the altar.

Lev lowered his arm. He looked at Yucca. She was already picking up the bullets from the offering tray with the expression of a woman who had completed a successful transaction and was ready to move on.

"Not a word." His voice was very flat.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You're smiling."

"I smile professionally. It means nothing." She held one of the bullets up to the light, squinting at the carved seal. "He does good work, though. The incense quality is excellent."

The sutras, when they came, were long and beautiful and resonant, filling the old temple with sound that felt older than the building itself. Yucca sat through all three hours with perfect stillness. Lev sat next to her and did not, for the entire duration, say a single word about what had happened.

But his ear flicked every time she almost laughed.

She had found the beach by following the direction where the fewest people seemed to go. That was usually how you found the best ones.

It was a small cove below a ridge of black rock, accessible by a path she'd have missed if she hadn't been specifically looking. The sand was pale grey and fine. The water was a particular shade of blue-green that she had no word for in any language she spoke. The rocks at the water's edge were draped in dark seaweed and mussels and the occasional startled crab.

Lev sat with his back against a boulder, boots beside him, the sea wind moving through his mane in that slow way she'd noticed always seemed to quiet him. He had his eyes half closed and his arms resting on his knees, and he looked like someone who had put down something heavy and was remembering what his hands felt like without it.

She sat a little way from him, closer to the water, and took her boots off too. The sand was cooler than she expected. She dug her toes into it.

They had not spoken much since leaving the inn. There was no particular reason to. The day was warm, the cove was quiet except for the water, and the contract would begin soon enough.

"Does it feel like anything?" She was watching the place where the water met the horizon. "The sea. To you."

He considered the question in the way he considered all questions, without hurrying.

"Big."

She laughed. A short sound, surprised out of her. "That's all?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Something more poetic. You seem like you have a lot of thoughts."

"I have thoughts." A pause. "I didn't say they were poetic." He looked at the water for a moment. "It feels like it doesn't know you exist. The sea. It doesn't dislike you. It just has no concept of you at all. That's either terrifying or restful depending on the day."

Yucca looked at the place where the shallow went to deep.

"Restful." She settled back on her hands. "Today it's restful."

She lay back in the sand. The sky above was very blue, crossed by long thin clouds pulled apart by the high wind. She put her arm over her eyes.

"Lev."

"Mm."

"If I get eaten by a sea monster, you have to give Mira back the fifty gil she thinks I owe her. I genuinely don't owe it, but she'll make your life impossible if you tell her that."

A pause. "Noted."

"And the other thing. You know the other thing."

"I do."

"Good." She let out a slow breath. "I'm not going to get eaten."

"I know."

The wave came in. Went out.

She fell asleep in the sand for an hour, and if Lev watched the water and the horizon and the slowly changing light without once looking at his contract notes, that was a thing that happened in a small cove below a black ridge with no witnesses and therefore could not be confirmed by anyone.

The boat was small. This was the first thing. It was a fishing vessel of the kind built for two people who trusted each other enough to be that close together in a rocking box on open water for several days running. Lev had rented it from a dockworker named Hana who had looked at him for a long time before deciding that his money was as good as anyone's. She had told him three times to bring it back in one piece, and had then said. "Two pieces is also fine, as long as they're big pieces."

He had provisioned it that morning. Ropes. Lamp oil. Dried fish and rice in a sealed box. The warded vessel for collecting samples. His rifle, cleaned and loaded, the blessed bullets in a separate pouch he'd waxed against the damp. He'd tested the sails. Checked the hull. Done everything that could be done by a person who was methodical about preparation and had learned not to trust comfort.

He was untying the mooring line when Yucca appeared at the end of the dock.

She had a person with her. A young dockhand, sweating visibly, bent almost double under the combined weight of three large cloth sacks that he was carrying with the expression of someone who had been paid enough to do this and was reassessing whether that assessment had been accurate.

"What is that?" Lev looked at the sacks.

"Salt." Yucca took the first sack from the dockhand, who straightened up with the relief of a man released from a sentence.

"I can see it's salt. Why is there that much of it?"

"Because there wasn't more available on short notice." She stepped onto the boat. "I spoke to the grandmother. The one from the tea house. She said salt was the first ward against sea spirits. She was very specific about quantity."

"How specific?"

"She said, and I am quoting, 'more than you think you need.'"

Lev looked at the three sacks. Each one was approximately the size of a small child. "This is enough to preserve a horse."

"Good. We're warding a boat."

She opened the first sack. What followed was, in Lev's considered opinion, an act that would have alarmed a person with any attachment to the concept of a comfortable and salt-free existence. She started at the stern. She worked her way forward with the methodical precision she gave to everything that mattered to her, casting the salt in broad arcs over the deck, the sides, the hull, the ropes. She muttered something under her breath as she went. Not a sutra. Not any formal warding he recognized. Something older, maybe, or something personal. He didn't ask.

He did step back.

Not far enough, as it turned out.

She reached him mid-arc.

The salt hit him across the chest and shoulder with a sound that was, objectively, not unlike a wave breaking over a rock. It went into his mane. It settled into his fur with the inevitability of something finding its natural home. He stood perfectly still for a moment.

"Yucca."

"The spirit doesn't know where the boat ends and the crew begins." She did not look at him. She was opening the second sack. "You're part of the vessel now. Consider yourself warded."

"I have salt in my ears."

"Spiritually protected ears."

She continued past him toward the bow. He watched a small cascade of salt crystals fall from his left ear onto the deck. He reached up and shook his mane once, carefully, and a small snowfall of white drifted down onto the boards. The dockhand on the pier was watching with an expression of absolute neutrality that suggested he was paid not to have opinions.

By the time the third sack was half-empty, the boat looked like it had been visited by a very aggressive early frost. It crunched underfoot. The ropes were white with it. The coiled anchor rope looked like a glazed pastry from a bakery with troubling aesthetics. Yucca stood at the prow with her hands on her hips and surveyed the work.

"Good." She nodded once. "That should hold."

"My mouth has salt in it." Lev had not opened his mouth. "I didn't open my mouth."

"The sea is very large." She turned and offered him a canteen. "We are two people in a small box. I want every possible advantage."

He took the canteen. He rinsed. She was already coiling the extra rope, and she looked, in the salt-white late afternoon light, like someone who had made her peace with the risk of what they were doing and decided to face it with every tool available. Including excessive condiment.

He was not going to tell her he found this reassuring. But he did.

The sea, those first two days, offered nothing.

They sailed the marked area in long, overlapping passes, following the pattern the lighthouse warden had drawn for them on a fisherman's chart. The wrecked reefs were below them somewhere, visible in the right light as shadows through clear water, the ribs of old ships articulated against the pale seafloor. They dropped anchor at night and kept watch in shifts. Two hours on, two hours off. The sea stayed very quiet and very large and did nothing of consequence.

Lev cooked rice over the small brazier and didn't complain. Yucca read a dog-eared book she'd found in the inn's common room and translated the interesting parts aloud into common when she wanted a reaction. They played cards with a deck so salt-swollen that the faces were barely legible, which Yucca turned to her advantage in ways that were technically not cheating, she argued, since the rules had never specified the cards needed to be identifiable.

"You have two different hands you're working because you know which card is which and I don't." Lev looked at her across the card spread with an expression of complete calm.

"Everyone has different information. That's just strategy."

"Give me back the four bells you won in the last round."

"I don't see how that follows."

The nights were cold and clear. The stars over the Far Eastern sea were the same stars as everywhere else, which was something Yucca had not expected when she'd first come to this part of the world. She'd half-expected them to be rearranged into stranger patterns, renamed into something with more syllables. Instead they were just the stars. The same ones she'd watched from rooftops in Ul'dah on the nights when the heat had been too great to sleep and the city below had hummed and shuffled and coughed through the dark.

Different roof. Same sky.

It was, she had found, either comforting or unbearable depending on when you thought about it.

Nothing came on the seventh night. Nothing came on the eighth. The water stayed calm, the wind steady, and the horizon returned the same answer to every question she asked it.

She began to suspect that the ninth would be different. She didn't know why. Possibly it was instinct. Possibly it was the way the afternoon of the eighth day went quieter than it should have, and the way the few seabirds that had followed their wake since they'd left port had, sometime around noon, simply stopped being there.

She didn't mention it to Lev. She cleaned her blades instead, checked the salt still crusted along the gunwales, and made sure the warded collection vessel was within reach.

He had noticed too. She could tell by the way he cleaned his rifle without being asked.

Some things didn't need to be said.

The wind stopped at the first hour past midnight.

Not slowed. Stopped. One moment it was a steady presence at the back of the neck and then it was simply absent, as if cut away with something very precise. The sail went slack with a sound like a held breath released. The lamp between them burned perfectly still, the flame standing straight and motionless in air that had forgotten how to move.

Yucca set down her cup of tea. Lev set down his book.

They looked at each other across the lamp. The light made the angles of his face look carved from something older than stone, and she had a sudden, clear, inconvenient awareness of how long they had been in this small boat together, how small the world had been for nine days, how the space between them had been shrinking in increments too small to argue with.

"Lev." She said it quietly.

"I know." He was already scanning the water.

And then she said it, because she had been thinking about it for two days and the stopped wind felt suddenly like a deadline. "Before whatever happens tonight."

"Yucca."

"I'm not going to say anything sentimental."

"I know you're not."

"I just think."

He leaned forward slightly, just slightly, and she leaned forward too, and the lamp between them flickered once, impossibly, in perfectly still air, and the space between them was not very much space at all, and then:

The water rose.

It came up from the south. It came up slowly, the way terrible things sometimes did, giving you time to understand how large they were. First it was a displacement of water, a swell with no wave behind it, moving outward in a ring. Then it was a shape. Dark against dark, but present, because darkness that large and that deliberate was its own kind of visible.

The head and shoulders. That was what the survivors had said, and that was what it was. A head as large as the lighthouse at Shirogane's outer point, shaped like a prayer bell, rounded at the crown and featureless except for the eyes. Two points of white light, cold and absolute and utterly without warmth. A face without a face. A form without flesh. Just dark water and presence and those two white lights that looked at the small boat the way the ocean itself looked at things: without recognition, without malice, without any understanding that the difference mattered.

The boat was very small.

Yucca stood up.

"Don't." Lev was already positioning the rifle.

"I'm not going to throw myself at it." Her heart was doing something loud and fast in her chest that she had no patience for right now. "I'm going to talk to it."

"You're going to talk to it."

"The grandmother said it didn't come for the wicked. It came for the disrespectful." She kept her voice level and her eyes on the white lights. "I'm going to try respectful."

He didn't tell her she was insane. She appreciated that.

She faced it. The salt on the gunwale seemed to hiss faintly where the water touched it, a small sound like something testing a boundary. The creature was enormous and still, the two eyes unblinking, close enough now that its shadow fell over the entire boat and the water around it.

"We know you've been here a long time." She spoke in common first, then reached for the far eastern words she'd been quietly gathering from dockworkers and the grandmother's tea table, pieced together into something rough and sincere. "We know ships came through your waters with no regard for what they were crossing. We came to stop the disappearances. Not to disrespect you."

The white eyes didn't move.

But the water around the boat grew quieter. More still than still. And then the voice came, not a sound so much as a vibration that Yucca felt in the bones of her chest and the soles of her feet, a resonance the boat seemed to absorb and transmit upward through both of them simultaneously.

Yucca's throat was tight. Lev, behind her, had not fired. He was very still.

"Kaoru." She used the name deliberately. "I'm sorry. What happened to Sumi was wrong. Every part of it was wrong."

The white eyes held hers for a long moment. Something passed through them. Not peace. Not resolution. Something closer to an old wound recognizing the word for itself.

Then the wave began to form.

The grief had spoken. What came after was the rage, and rage, in something that had been grief for as long as this had, was not a different thing so much as the same thing with nothing left to restrain it.

The water rose in a wall. The boat lurched sideways, caught in the surge, and Yucca grabbed the mast rope and held on with both hands and her feet braced against the gunwale. The salt blazed white for a moment where the wave hit the hull. It actually blazed, a cold light that crackled along the boards and held, and the wave broke around them rather than through them, which bought them approximately twelve seconds.

"Now would be a good time." She didn't look away from the creature.

"The eyes are the weak point." Lev was already sighting down the barrel. "The left one. There's a dimness to it. A place where the light comes through differently."

"How can you see that from here?"

"I can see it."

She believed him.

The second wave came and the salt crackled again and held again. Yucca thought, as the water crashed over the bow: we might actually live through this. And then the arm came. Not metaphorical. Literal. A limb of dense black water, shaped like nothing that had ever had bones, sweeping down from the enormous shoulder of the creature and catching Lev across the chest with a force that should have broken ribs, and probably did, she couldn't tell, because he was airborne for a moment and then the boat caught him and he hit the stern boards hard and lay still.

"LEV."

She crossed the boat in two steps. He was conscious. Barely. Blood at his lip, one arm moving wrong, the rifle somewhere in the salt-white bottom of the boat. His eyes found her face.

"Rifle."

"Hold on."

"Rifle, Yucca."

She found it. She pushed it into his working hand. His fingers wrapped around it with a steadiness that seemed to come from somewhere below pain. She put herself between him and the water, facing the creature, and reached into the bag at her hip.

The bag with the charlatan's mixture.

Among the items she'd taken as compensation from a fraudulent merchant on the last contract: a vial of /sacred purification water, guaranteed to ward off all spiritual malevolence/ which had turned out to be seawater cut with octopus ink and a quantity of dried herbs that smelled strongly of an attempt at drama.

She had kept it because she kept everything that might one day be useful.

She was reconsidering the definition of useful now, staring at the vial, and then the creature's arm raised again and she threw it.

The vial broke against the face of the Umibōzu with a sound like nothing. The octopus ink spread across the enormous dark surface in a shape that was, by any objective measure, the least threatening thing that had ever happened in these waters. It oozed. It dripped. It formed, as it ran downward under the cold light of the creature's eyes, a shape that bore an unfortunate resemblance to a confused octopus sliding down a wall.

The Umibōzu stopped.

It looked at what had just been thrown at it.

The white eyes, for exactly one breath of time, were utterly unreadable in a completely different way than before. The way something is unreadable when it has temporarily lost the thread of what is happening.

Lev fired.

The blessed bullet crossed the night air between them with a sound like a bell struck and then struck again. It found the left eye, the dimmer one, the place where the light came through differently, and hit.

The scream was not a sound. It was everything the stopped wind had been holding.

The creature recoiled. The water rose. And then the arm came again, faster, more precise, not a sweep but a strike, aimed directly at Lev, at the source of the bullet, at the only thing that had hurt it in longer than it could name.

Yucca stepped in front of it.

She wasn't fast enough to block it. She wasn't strong enough to stop it. She was simply there, where he had been a moment before, and the arm of black water hit her and the world went sideways and very cold and very dark, and she thought, with a clarity that surprised her: I didn't finish the sentence.

I was going to finish the sentence.

The light came from below.

Not from the creature. Not from the boat. From the water itself, from the deep where the light had no reason to be, rising slowly through the dark like something that had been waiting for a long time and had finally decided the time was right.

It took shape as it rose. Not the shape of a wave or a current. The shape of a woman. Formed of water and faint phosphorescence and the particular quality of grief that has had time to become something more patient. A presence made of what remained after the urgency had passed. She rose until she stood, somehow, on the surface of the sea, and she was looking at the creature who had been Kaoru, and there was something in her expression that was not quite a smile and not quite sorrow and was entirely its own thing.

The light expanded. It moved from Sumi outward, across the surface of the water and upward, finding the Umibōzu the way warmth finds cold stone: slow and certain. The white eyes flickered. Something in the enormous dark shape shuddered, like a held thing releasing. The arm that had struck Yucca lowered into the water. The wave that had been building stilled.

The sound that came then had no name in any language Yucca had ever learned. It was the sound of something very old and very tired setting down something it had carried for longer than carrying was supposed to last.

The shapes dissolved together. Not into nothing. Into the water, into the deep, into a light that spread briefly through the dark below and then dimmed and was gone, and the sea was the sea again, only.

Yucca was on her back on the deck. The sky above was full of stars. The sail was moving again. The wind had come back.

Lev was beside her. His hand was on her wrist. Not gripping. Just present, the way a thing is present when it has been afraid and is now less afraid and does not know yet what to do with the change in those conditions.

"Still here." She said it to the stars.

She heard him exhale. A long, slow, structural sound.

"Still here." His voice was very quiet.

She turned her head to look at him. He was looking at her. His arm was probably broken. He had a cut along his jaw she hadn't noticed before. He had salt in his mane and blood on his lip and he was looking at her with an expression she recognized from no previous occasion and had no existing category for.

The sentence she hadn't finished was still there. Still unfinished. It had survived.

She opened her mouth. "I lo-"

And then, because she was Yucca and she had survived twenty-nine years by knowing exactly when not to say the thing, she closed it again. She looked back at the stars.

"We should collect the sample." A beat. "For the bounty."

A very long pause.

"Yes." He didn't move. She didn't move.

The boat rocked gently on a sea that had returned to itself, and somewhere below the hull there was still a faint luminescence drifting down and down and down, and the stars were the same stars they'd always been.

The sample could wait another minute.

The raft was not in the original plan.

To be fair, neither was the boat hull developing four significant structural fractures in its lower port side, which was the sort of damage the sea treated as a polite suggestion to reconsider one's means of transport. They had made it through the night and into the grey hours of the morning with the boat still afloat, and then the boat had stopped being afloat, gradually and then decisively, and they had transferred to the emergency raft that had been in the supply box. It was sized, optimistically, for two adults who did not include a Hrothgar.

The raft was low to the water. It was also very, very slow.

They arrived at Kugane's outer harbour at approximately the second bell of the afternoon. Yucca was sitting cross-legged at the front of the raft, the warded sample vessel balanced in her lap and her hair tied back and her clothes salt-stiff but otherwise, by any visible measure, entirely intact. Her pack was dry. Her blades were dry. She had, at some point during the return, eaten one of the rice balls from the emergency rations and was looking at the city growing on the horizon with an expression of professional satisfaction.

Lev was at the back, paddling with the single oar they'd recovered. His shirt was in a condition that could charitably be called artistically distressed. More accurately, it had been introduced to the structural stress of a yokai's arm and had formed several opinions about that experience. The left sleeve was absent entirely, having made its exit sometime between the second wave and the descent below the waterline. What remained preserved a general sense of its original purpose without committing to the specifics. He had reset his own arm during the night, splinted now with two pieces of the broken oarlock and the leather cord from the emergency kit.

The harbour workers of Kugane had seen many things arrive at their docks. They had developed a professional capacity for visual neutrality.

Several of them had stopped working to watch the raft come in.

A small child at the end of the harbour wall stared at Lev with the undisguised fascination of someone who had not yet learned to make it subtle.

They tied up at the public mooring. Yucca stepped off the raft onto the dock with the ease of someone arriving by perfectly normal conveyance. Lev followed, ducking under the bollard chain, and stood on the dock and was briefly and entirely enormous against the grey afternoon sky, in his architectural shirt.

"Hana is going to be upset about the boat." He said it to the middle distance.

"Hana said two big pieces was fine."

"None of the pieces were recoverable."

"I'll send her the bounty payment and a note explaining that it was a spiritual emergency." Yucca adjusted the sample vessel under her arm. "She'll understand. She seemed like a reasonable woman."

"She told us three times to bring it back."

"She told me..." Yucca said pleasantly, already walking toward the harbour gate. "...to bring it back in one piece. I never made that commitment."

He fell into step beside her.

They walked in silence for a while. The sounds of Kugane settled around them, familiar and indifferent, the calls of vendors and the clatter of handcarts and the specific background hum of a city that was too busy to be curious about two more hunters coming back from something difficult.

The afternoon was bright. The streets smelled of grilled meat and incense and rain on stone from a shower that had passed through that morning. Somewhere ahead a musician was playing a shamisen, unhurried, the notes falling through the air one at a time.

"Lev." She said it without preamble.

"Mm."

"The yokai was wrong."

A pause. Not a very long pause. Not a casual one.

"Was he?" His voice was entirely level. The voice of a man who was excellent at levelness and was currently employing it with great precision.

"Yes." She looked straight ahead. "There's nothing like that between us. There's a contract. A financial arrangement. A professional partnership that I intend to see through to its conclusion once you pay me back the three thousand gil you technically still owe me from the Ul'dah job, which I am tracking and will continue to track." She paused. "It's a business. That's all it is. Whatever he saw, I think perhaps his perception of certain things had become. He had been in the dark for a very long time."

"Yucca." He said it with great patience.

"I'm explaining."

"You're explaining a lot."

She stopped explaining.

The shamisen continued ahead of them. The city moved around them, completely uninterested in the two of them standing at this very specific intersection of something real and the carefully maintained fiction of something not.

She walked faster. He kept pace, because his stride was longer, and that was simply a fact about existing beside a Hrothgar that she had long since accommodated without examining why she found it preferable to walking anywhere alone.

"Let's keep going."

His voice was warm. Not laughing. Just warm, in the way it got sometimes, when he knew something and was deciding not to say it.

Business.

Just business.

She was absolutely certain of this, and the fact that she was absolutely certain of it was, she knew, the most informative thing she had said all day.