The afternoon sun bled across the cracked pavement, but I felt no warmth. It was one of those late autumn days when the light is thin and pale, like watercolors washed too many times. The kind of day that made everything look tired – the buildings, the trees, the people shuffling home from work.
I walked the same route I had walked for two years, four months, and eleven days. Past the convenience store with the flickering sign that had been flickering since before Yuki vanished. Past the park where children laughed – laughter I no longer understood. Past the bridge over the dry canal where I used to skip stones with my sister.
That was before.
Before the police came to our door with their careful words and sympathetic faces. Before my mother stopped cooking dinner and started drinking wine straight from the bottle. Before my father threw Yuki's clothes into garbage bags and stored them in the basement, as if erasing her would erase the pain.
I stopped counting the hours a long time ago. The minutes were worse. Every tick of the clock was a reminder that she wasn't coming back. That the world had swallowed her whole and left no trace.
No body. No witnesses. No explanation.
Just a missing person report that grew colder with each passing season.
My parents had moved on. They said grief was a river you had to cross. I said grief was a hole you fell into and never climbed out of. We stopped arguing about it. They stopped waiting for me at dinner. I stopped coming home on time.
The apartment building on Maple Street looked grey. Everything looked grey.
I was sixteen years old, and I had already learned that the world was a cruel, indifferent place. That people disappeared. That no one came to save them.
That hope was a lie we told ourselves to keep from falling apart.
Then I saw him.
He stood under the broken streetlamp – the one that hadn't worked since before Yuki vanished. It was rusted, the glass shattered, the bulb long since stolen. No one had bothered to fix it. No one cared.
But the man stood beneath it as if it cast light.
He was tall – taller than me by a head. Thin, almost gaunt, with the kind of build that suggested he had once been stronger but had let himself wither. His coat was long and black, made of a heavy fabric that belonged in winter, not this humid spring evening. It was the kind of coat that would be unbearably hot, but he didn't seem to notice.
His face was ordinary enough to forget – middle-aged, with tired eyes and a shadow of stubble. He could have been anyone. A teacher. A businessman. A homeless man who had found a nice coat.
But his eyes.
His eyes were not ordinary.
They were dark, almost black, and they held a depth that made my stomach clench. When he looked at me, I felt like he was looking through me – past my skin, past my bones, past the memories I kept locked in the darkest corners of my mind.
He knew me.
Not my name. Not my face. Me.
"Ren Yuki."
His voice was soft, almost gentle. It was the voice of someone who had said these words many times before, to many different people. It was the voice of a man who had stopped caring about the reactions he provoked.
I stopped walking. My hand tightened on the strap of my backpack. My other hand slipped into my pocket, fingers brushing against my phone. The familiar weight was a small comfort.
Every instinct told me to run. To cross the street. To pretend I hadn't heard.
Strangers didn't know my name. Strangers didn't wait for me under broken lamps.
"Who are you?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. I had practiced being brave in front of my parents, in front of the police, in front of the therapists they sent me to. I had learned to hide the tremor in my throat.
The man smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.
"I am called many things. Ferryman is one of them."
Ferryman. The word conjured images of ancient myths – of souls crossing rivers, of coins placed on dead eyes, of journeys from which no one returned.
"I don't know you." I took a step back. "I'm calling the police."
He didn't flinch. He didn't move to stop me. He simply reached into his coat – that heavy, black coat – and pulled out a photograph.
The world stopped.
It was Yuki.
But not the Yuki I remembered. The girl in the photograph was older – maybe twenty, maybe twenty-two. Her face was harder, sharper, the softness of childhood replaced by the hard lines of someone who had seen too much. Her hair had turned white as snow, long and wild, falling past her shoulders like a frozen waterfall.
She stood in a place that hurt to look at. The ground was ash – grey and black, like the aftermath of a fire. Behind her, twisted shapes rose from the earth – structures that might have been buildings, but their angles were wrong, their proportions inhuman. The sky was red, the color of dried blood.
And she was smiling.
Not a happy smile. A tired smile. The smile of someone who had survived something terrible and was still surviving.
"She's alive," the Ferryman said. "And I can take you to her."
The world tilted.
I had imagined this moment a thousand times. The police knocking on the door with news. A phone call from a hospital. A letter in the mail. A stranger on the street with a photograph that shouldn't exist.
But never like this.
Never with a man who called himself the Ferryman and wore a coat that belonged to another season.
"Where is she?" The words came out as a whisper.
"A place. A trial. A game." His voice dropped, intimate and cold. "One hundred floors. A tower of madness and monsters. She's been there for ten years, her time. Here, it's been two. Time flows differently there."
Ten years. My sister – my sister who taught me how to tie my shoes, who held my hand when I was scared, who promised me that nothing would ever hurt us – had lived ten years in hell.
It sounded insane. Impossible. The rambling of a madman or the delusion of a cultist.
But the photograph. Those white-haired eyes. I knew them. I had grown up looking into eyes just like them, though hers had been brown, not white.
"Why are you telling me this?" My voice cracked. I hated how small I sounded. "What do you want?"
The Ferryman's smile widened. It was a terrible smile – the smile of a man who had watched countless souls make the same choice and felt nothing.
"Because you're different. You shouldn't exist in the pattern. And different things… change things."
He extended his hand.
His fingers were long, pale, the nails clean. There was no dirt under them, no calluses on the palm. He was a man who did not work with his hands. He was a man who had never needed to.
"Come with me, and you'll find her. Refuse…" He shrugged. "Stay here. Live your grey life. Grow old wondering. She'll never know you tried."
I looked at his hand.
I thought about my parents, sitting on the couch, watching television. The glow of the screen would be painting their faces in shades of blue and grey. They would not look up when I walked in. They would not ask where I had been. They had stopped asking months ago.
I thought about Yuki. Alone. Fighting. Surviving.
Maybe she wasn't waiting for me. Maybe she had given up too.
But I hadn't.
I reached out.
My fingers touched his palm. His skin was cold – not the cold of a winter night, but the cold of a corpse, of something that had stopped being alive a long time ago.
I should have pulled away.
I didn't.
The world went white.
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