I got to the ramen shop before she did, which was the point.
The place was called Ichiraku and it sat on a side street two blocks south of Atami station with its lights on and its windows fogged and the smell of pork bone broth pushing out through the fan above the door. I'd walked past it a dozen times on my surveillance routes and never gone in. It stayed open past midnight for people who worked late and ate alone and didn't need conversation with their food.
Serafall had texted me twenty minutes earlier. Six words. Do you have time to talk? And I'd typed back Yeah, I've got a minute and sent her the address of a ramen shop I'd never eaten at. She'd responded with Yay! and a string of emoji that included a bowl of noodles and a sparkle and something that might've been a cat. I'd put the phone down and put my jacket on over the Stealth Suit and checked the Exitus Pistol in the thigh holster and walked out into the dark.
The cook was a heavy guy in his fifties with burn scars on his forearms and a towel slung over one shoulder. I said tonkotsu and sat at the stool nearest the door and he turned to the stove and that was that. Two other customers – a courier at the far end working through his bowl with the steady rhythm of a regular, and an older woman in the middle reading a paperback with her empty plate still in front of her. A TV in the corner played some variety show with the volume low. The fluorescents hummed, and the whole place smelled like rendered fat and soy sauce and garlic and stock that'd been going since dawn.
The ramen came in about four minutes. Wide bowl, the broth thick and white, chashu sliced and torched at the edges and laid across the noodles, a soft-boiled egg halved with the yolk still orange and barely set. I broke the chopsticks apart and started eating. It was good. Rich and heavy with all that collagen from the bones, and the char on the pork cut through the fat. Good ramen.
I was halfway through the bowl when the door opened.
She had on a pink hoodie and denim shorts and sneakers with little star-shaped clips on them, and her dark hair was up in twin tails tied with matching ribbons. Tote bag over one shoulder with some cartoon mascot on it. She could've been nineteen, coming back from a late movie.
She wasn't nineteen. And we both knew it.
She smiled at the cook, bright and easy, and sat two stools to my left with the empty one between us. Pulled a menu card from the holder and went through it.
"Karaage set with fried rice, please!"
Oil popped and hissed as the chicken went into the fryer. Neither of us said anything. I ate my ramen and Serafall sat with her hands folded on the counter and watched the variety show and tilted her head at a joke like she actually found it funny. The courier finished his bowl and put money down and left. The woman turned a page.
The karaage came out golden and glistening on a plate with shredded cabbage and a lemon wedge, and the fried rice followed a minute later, a generous mound with the grains separated and flecked with egg and green onion and small cubes of ham. Serafall squeezed the lemon over the chicken and picked up a piece and bit into it and closed her eyes.
"Oh, that's really good," she said to the cook, and he grunted without turning around.
She ate three pieces of karaage and some rice, and then she looked at me.
"So how've you been?"
I stirred the last of my noodles. The broth had cooled and the fat was congealing along the edges.
The last time I'd seen Serafall Leviathan was in Portland, Maine. It felt like a lifetime ago.
"I mean, busy," I said. "Pretty busy."
She smiled. "Oh, I'm aware."
The variety show cut to a green tea commercial and the jingle played twice before the program came back on.
"Okay, so, the reactor was definitely my favorite," Serafall said, scooping fried rice. "Your CEO taking that long pause before he gave them the numbers, and then the curtain, and everyone in the room losing their minds." She ate the rice. "Did you coach him on the timing or is he just like that?"
"Nah, that's all him. I just gave him something worth showing off."
"He's good at it. Good pick, too. A man the entire industry had basically written off, and then he's up there on stage rewriting the whole energy sector with a smile on his face. The press can't help themselves with that kind of story; they eat it up every time." She tapped the back end of her chopsticks against her lower lip. "The skincare thing was smart, though. Different kind of smart. You're not just going for the big wow anymore – you're actually building out distribution, getting into markets properly. That's the boring stuff that really matters in the long run."
The cook cleared my bowl without being asked and set down a cup of barley tea. I wrapped my hands around it. The ceramic was warm and the grain smell came up with the steam.
"So you've been keeping track of all of this," I said.
"Oh, absolutely. Everyone has." She said. "You're kind of the most interesting thing happening in the human world right now, and it is not a boring world."
The woman with the paperback stood and left money on the counter and walked out. And then it was just us and the cook, who'd moved to the far end to scrub a pot and didn't seem to care one way or another about anything happening at his counter.
Serafall pushed her plate forward and turned on her stool to face me. Her sneakers swung a few inches off the floor.
"Portland feels like forever ago, doesn't it?" she said.
"Yeah. It does."
"I remember that look on your face when you figured out I wasn't going to stop you."
I turned the cup in my hands.
"Why didn't you?" I said.
She blew on the surface and set the cup down and looked at me, and the whole act just went away for a second. What was underneath was old and sharp and paying very close attention.
"Because you hadn't done anything wrong," she said. "You killed a vampire that was trying to kill you and you killed a devil that was also trying to kill you and had kidnapped your mom beforehand. As far as the Underworld was concerned, Helena Stolas bit off more than she could chew and signed her own fate."
"Also, I probably couldn't have stopped you anyway," Serafall said, and she was fully back now, the lightness returned like a switch being flipped. "That nullification thing you do? Getting close to it was just... ugh. Genuinely unpleasant. It wasn't dangerous, not at the level you were running it back then, but it was awful. You know when you're standing next to a speaker and there's some frequency you can't quite hear but your teeth absolutely can? It was like that, except somehow worse."
She tilted her head. "It's a lot stronger now, by the way."
"Yeah. Yeah, it is."
"Like, a lot stronger."
"Yeah."
She ate another piece of karaage. The crunch was loud in the empty shop.
"The swim was really impressive, by the way," she said. "North Atlantic in November. We lost you somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland and didn't pick you up again until you were in freaking Finland, which – I mean, that's kind of ridiculous."
"Wait, you were tracking me?"
"Loosely! Just loosely." She shrugged one shoulder. "I wanted to make sure you didn't die. Is that so bad?"
Of course, I didn't trust her. I reminded myself of that regularly. She was a devil and a Satan and she served the same institution that let somebody like Valefar grab a literature student out of her apartment and remake her into something she'd never asked to be.
But she was the only devil I didn't hate. I'd been sitting with that for two years and I still didn't know what to do with it.
"Oh, the skincare thing," Serafall said, pointing a chopstick at me. "That one actually got Sona excited, and Sona does not get excited about things. Like, ever. She called me and went on for forty straight minutes about the dermal regeneration mechanism and what it implies for magical healing theory, and I was sitting there pretending I only understood half of what she was saying."
She smiled. "I understood all of it. Obviously. But she really likes explaining things and I would never take that from her."
"Who's Sona?"
"My little sister!" Her face lit up. "Sona Sitri. She runs the student council at Kuoh Academy and she is, objectively, the smartest person in almost any room she walks into. She also has extremely strong opinions about how basically everything should be organized and she genuinely cannot figure out why the rest of the world isn't on board."
She took a bite of rice. "I love her so much, honestly."
Kuoh had come up in Raynare's surveillance data. Devil territory. Two peerages operating out of a high school.
"You're bringing her up on purpose," I said.
"I'm bringing her up because she's my sister and I'm proud of her." Serafall pushed the empty karaage plate aside. "And yeah, okay, a little on purpose. You're in Japan for the foreseeable future. The tech keeps coming. The map of who's where starts mattering whether you want it to or not. Sona's in Kuoh. Rias Gremory's in Kuoh. Kuoh's in your neighborhood."
"Sirzechs's sister."
"Oh, you've done homework."
"Yeah, I've got good people."
She laughed at that, sudden and genuine, and the cook glanced over from his end of the counter. She covered her mouth and her shoulders shook.
"You really do," she said. "Whoever's running your corporate side is genuinely terrifying, by the way. And I mean that entirely as a compliment. Our intelligence people have been trying to unravel Azad Capital Partners for months and every layer they peel back there's another one underneath and it's just... somehow more boring than the last one. Shell companies and privacy laws and financial laws and bla bla bla."
She picked up her tea. "The boringness is what gives it away, actually. Real corporate structures have inconsistencies and weird edges. Yours is too clean."
I drank my tea and didn't say anything.
The variety show had ended and some drama had come on – a detective and a series of phone calls from unknown numbers. The detective's phone rang and he stared at it for a solid five seconds before picking up.
"Oh no, just let it go to voicemail," Serafall said.
"Nobody in a drama ever lets it go to voicemail."
"They really should, though. It would fix like ninety percent of their problems."
The cook brought fresh tea, swapped both cups in one smooth motion, and went back to his end. Outside the window the street was dark and empty – a vending machine across the sidewalk and the blue glow of a convenience store sign down the block and nothing else.
Serafall wrapped her hands around the new cup and looked down into it. She was quiet for a moment, and that was unusual for her.
"So," she said, and her voice was a little quieter. "What's the plan, Amir?"
I looked at her.
"You're building something. That's kind of obvious at this point. The tech, the companies, the money, all of it. And you're not doing it for profit and you're definitely not doing it for fame because you've gone way out of your way to keep your name off everything. So there's a plan. There's something you're actually building toward."
She turned the cup in her hands.
"And I guess what I really want to know is whether that plan has devils in it as enemies."
The drama played on the TV. The detective walked down a wet street and a car went past and its headlights stretched his shadow long across the pavement.
I thought about Sakura sweeping the entryway of a house that wasn't hers because she had nowhere else on the planet that wouldn't get her killed. And I thought about Serafall in a pink hoodie and star-shaped clips, who'd let me walk out of a parking lot when she didn't have to and tracked me across an ocean to make sure I was alive.
The cook wiped the counter down with a damp rag, left to right, slow and even.
"I don't know," I said.
Serafall looked at me for a while, and her legs had stopped swinging.
Then she nodded and picked up her tea and drank.