Chapter 1: The Dead Draw

  The stench of the abandoned Shibuya maintenance tunnel was a suffocating mix of ozone, flaking rust, and dried blood. Shin pressed his back against the freezing concrete pillar, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps.

  His ribs ached. His knuckles were split open, leaking dark red drops onto the flooded platform.

  Fifty thousand yen, he repeated in his head, a frantic, looping mantra. Just survive tonight, get the payout, and send the fifty thousand yen. If he missed the transfer this month, his mother wouldn't be able to make rent. It was that simple. That brutal equation was the only reason he had stalked down into this underground nightmare in the first place.

  Footsteps echoed through the pitch-black, stagnant tunnel. Wet, heavy, and totally abhorrent. It sounded like someone walking on bare bones.

  "You can't hide forever, little rat," a voice gurgled from the shadows. It was the pit-boss, a massive Yakuza enforcer whose left arm had been entirely replaced by a writhing mass of black, hardened veins.

  Shin’s hands shook as he reached into his jacket pocket. His fingers brushed the bone-numbing, heavy iron of his only Bind-Plate. It was a jagged square of metal, dense as lead, with a crude carving of a grinning wooden face etched into the surface. He had bought it off a dying scavenger in Kabukicho three days ago. He didn’t even know if he had the strength to activate it.

  The footsteps stopped. The pit-boss stepped into the dim light of a flickering fluorescent tube. Beside him crawled his entity—a Stray. It glared like a hairless dog, but its jaw split all the way down its neck, revealing rows of yellow, human-like teeth.

  "Kill him," the pit-boss muttered, spitting into the murky water. "Take his plate."

  The jaw-dog shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and launched itself across the room.

  Shin didn't think. He reacted. He slammed the iron Bind-Plate against his own bleeding knuckles. The rules were absolute: Blood Toll first. The iron drank his blood. A freezing numbness shot up his arm, settling deep in his chest. It felt like someone had poured liquid nitrogen directly into his lungs.

  "Finally," a voice whispered. It didn't come from the tunnel. It came from inside Shin’s head. A voice like grinding sandpaper.

  Black smoke erupted from the iron plate in Shin’s hand, swirling and snapping into a physical shape. It didn't roar. It didn't scream. It just hung in the air between Shin and the charging jaw-dog.

  It was a Japanese karakuri marionette, standing nearly six feet tall, its wooden joints held together by rusted barbed wire. It wore a filthy, blood-stained butcher's apron over traditional tattered robes. In its right hand, it held a massive, rusted surgical scalpel. Its face was a carved, painted Noh mask with a smile that didn't reach its empty, hollow eyes.

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  The jaw-dog slammed on the brakes, its claws scraping frantically against the slick concrete, suddenly terrified.

  The marionette slowly turned its wooden head back to look at Shin. The wood creaked loudly in the quiet, dripping tunnel.

  "What is the order, master?" the thing whispered in Shin's mind, the carved smile seeming to stretch just a millimeter wider. "Give me a piece of your memory, and I will carve them into ribbons."

  Shin’s chest heaved. The jaw-dog was recovering from its shock, its muscles coiling like rusty springs as it prepared to lunge. The Yakuza enforcer laughed, a wet, ugly sound.

  "It's a blank plate, you idiot," the boss sneered. "You don't have the juice to command a karakuri. Finish him!"

  The jaw-dog sprang.

  "Do we have a deal?" the Marionette’s voice scraped against the inside of Shin’s skull.

  "Take it," Shin choked out, his vision blurring. "Take the memory of the summer festival in Enoshima. The fireworks. Just kill that thing!"

  The reaction was instantaneous. A blinding spike of white-hot agony pierced the space right behind Shin’s eyes. For a split second, he smelled gunpowder and sweet shaved ice, heard his mother laughing beside him—and then, it was gone. Sucked into a cold, empty vacuum. He knew the event had happened, but the warmth, the faces, the feeling of the night were entirely erased.

  The carved Noh mask of the Marionette snapped upward.

  It didn't leap; it flickered. One second it was standing in front of Shin, the next it was directly underneath the airborne jaw-dog.

  There was no epic clash. Just the sickening, wet sound of a rusted scalpel moving faster than the human eye could track. Snick. Snick. Snick.

  The jaw-dog hit the flooded concrete in five separate, bloody thuds. Black, tar-like blood exploded across the stagnant water, hissing as it evaporated into foul-smelling smoke.

  The tunnel went dead silent. Only the steady drip-drip of condensation echoed off the walls.

  The Yakuza boss stared at the butchered remains of his entity, the color draining from his face. His writhing, cursed arm twitched in panic.

  The Marionette slowly stood up from the wreckage. Its wooden joints clicked rhythmically as it turned its head toward the boss. It raised a single, blood-stained wooden finger and pointed at the man's chest.

  "More," the sandpaper voice begged in Shin’s mind. "Let me carve the hulking one."

  "No," Shin gasped, dropping to his knees. The freezing numbness of the Blood Toll was spreading to his legs. "Stand down. Return."

  The Marionette paused. For a terrifying second, Shin thought it was going to disobey. Then, with a sound like violently escaping steam, the wooden nightmare collapsed into black smoke and sucked itself back into the dense iron plate on the floor.

  The Yakuza boss didn't wait to see if Shin could summon it again. He threw a heavy, sealed envelope onto the dry edge of the platform and scrambled backward into the pitch-black, his heavy boots splashing wildly until the sound faded completely.

  Shin let his head fall against the freezing concrete pillar. He dragged himself forward, his split knuckles screaming in pain, and grabbed the envelope. He tore the corner with his teeth. Crisp, clean ten-thousand yen notes stared back at him.

  Fifty thousand yen. Enough for his mother's rent.

  He clutched the envelope to his chest, closing his eyes to try and picture her face on that summer night at the festival. He dug deep into his mind, searching for the colors of the fireworks or the sound of her voice.

  But there was only a cold, dark static. The toll had been paid.