Rikitake Entry No. 012 Suzune Wakakusa -

"Containment," Suzune whispered. Her voice was soft, like wind through dry bamboo. "Not rehabilitation."

"I'm sorry," Suzune said, and she meant it. "But you've been containing the wrong thing."

ENTRY NO. 012.

That was her designation now. Not Doctor Suzune Wakakusa, former head of the Ministry of Cognitive Ethology. Not Suzune , the woman who had once calmed a berserk typhoon-class Thought-Whale with a single verse of a lullaby. Just a number and a surname, stripped of honorifics, stripped of mercy. Rikitake ENTRY NO. 012 Suzune Wakakusa

Silence. Then the warden's voice, cold and curious: "To what?"

She was the cure.

Whir. Click. Unfold.

"Correct." The warden slid a tray through a slot in her cell door. On it: a single origami crane, folded from silver leaf, and a vial of clear liquid. "Your daily choice. The crane or the draught."

The silver crane in her hand began to move.

Today, she took neither.

The facility called Rikitake was not a place one entered willingly. It was a terminus for the broken, the brilliant, and the damned. Buried three hundred meters beneath the artificial island of Nami-no-Kuni, its corridors were lined with lead and silence. Suzune Wakakusa knew this because she had counted every step of her descent.

And the cure was about to be very, very loud.

Suzune stepped into the corridor, barefoot, wearing the same grey shift she'd been issued on Day One. She did not run. She walked with the calm of someone who had already heard the ending of the world and decided it needed a different composer. "Containment," Suzune whispered

The warden's voice boomed from overhead speakers: "ENTRY NO. 012. Return to your cell. Lethal countermeasures authorized."

The lock on her door snapped open.