Yurui The Cursed One

And now I have to go home and somehow explain why I’m late and in tatters. What am I even supposed to say? Sorry, Mother. Class ran late because a giant centipede came through the ceiling, I turned into a monster, and had to shed most of it as I ran home. Don’t worry about it, I’m fine now. No. Probably not.

Sorry, Mom, I might be hunted by the most powerful corporation in the world because my body became the kind of problem corporations put in locked rooms. Still a little much.

Maybe my monstrous self would have handled this better. It could have casually strutted into the apartment, full of confidence, wearing what was left of my uniform, black plates scraping the doorway, claw-like armored fingers clicking softly against each other as I walked. Maybe then she would finally look up at me.

Or not. I might be giving her too much credit.

The thought lands harder than I expect. The scene builds itself in my head: My mother on the couch, TV light crawling over her cheeks. She would not even look surprised. She’d just stare at the TV, wearing the same tired expression she does every night.

I loosen my grip on the rusted sign and resume my journey towards the slum. As much as I would like to take a break and think things over, I’ve got no time to waste, not when Miracle Inc could be right on my heels.

Night has settled over the slum. Most people hide behind locked doors by now. Around here, a scream after dark does not bring help. It only reminds everyone to stay quiet. The residents know all too well not to poke your nose where it doesn’t belong. People vanish into alleys, stairwells, empty lots, and no one bothers asking too many questions. There are too many ways to disappear here, and after a while, one more missing person barely turns any eyes.

Monsters do not come out in the slum after dark. They do not need to when the streets are already full of people. Junkies willing to do anything for another fix. Powerful blessed from the city, hunting the homeless and whoever else is unlucky to find themselves caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human traffickers patrolling with their white vans. Some idiot with a cheap back-alley blessing burning under his skin, desperate to prove himself. At this hour, ordinary people are a rare sight; the slum leaves the streets to those who are either looking for trouble or are too desperate to avoid it.

Despite all that, I cannot make myself hate it. Dangerous or not, it is still home.

It’s not all bad, though. As the darkness engulfs the slums, it hides all the ugly parts in the shadows. Every wall, fence, and bare stretch of concrete is crowded with graffiti. Broken windows, leaking pipes, walls swollen from damp. Balconies sagging beneath wet laundry, rusted railings, and floors bowed under the weight of buildings packed far beyond what they were meant to hold. People sleeping in corners and against the sides of buildings, knees drawn to their chests, wrapped in whatever they managed to find. All of it fades away into the darkness.

At least for a few hours, I don’t have to be embarrassed to call it home.

The first neon sign appears around the corner: a pink bottle pouring painfully bright blue liquid into a smiling woman’s mouth. The words flicker beneath her.

PURE BODY. PURE LIFE. MIRACLE INC.-APPROVED

The woman’s painted face glitches every few seconds. Her smile stretches too wide, then snaps back into place. I pass under her without looking up for long.

After dark, the ‘‘business district’’ wakes into a life all its own. The street is full of noise: chatter and laughter spilling from bars, voices overlapping, music dragging people into rough little dances between the stalls. Generators cough behind food stalls. The smells of frying oil, cigarette smoke, and old beer thicken the air. A sound of breaking glass is followed by a burst of applause and men cheering way too loudly.

The narrow road grows brighter and louder with every step, until the dark gives way to red lanterns, yellow signs, pink neon advertisement holograms, the shining green of bottle-glass, electric-blue strips buzzing over doors that promise food and drinks. After nearly an hour in the dark, the first burst of light makes my eyes water. I stop, blinking, while a flurry of colors smears across my vision. I wait until my eyes get used to the brightness and keep walking, following the half-paved street deeper into the slum.

On the upper floors, most of the windows are dark. Some of them are boarded. Some are broken. Some still have curtains hanging inside, untouched for so long that they got caked in layers of dust. But below the dark windows, on the ground level, business goes on as usual. Bars lean open behind cracked doors, spilling music and the smell of stale beer into the road. Food counters steam under cloudy plastic sheets. Secondhand shops blink with rows of salvaged screens, their shelves crowded with old tablets, cracked phones, loose batteries, counterfeit electronics, and computers that look older than some of the buildings. You can find almost anything there, as long as you do not ask where it came from or expect it to work for long.

There is a lone clinic with WALK-INS WELCOME glowing in blue above the door, and a handwritten sign taped beneath it.

CASH FIRST.

We don’t have many of them over here, and the few we do have are bad enough that if you get seriously ill, you either find a way to reach a city hospital or start making peace with dying.

Beyond the slum, Miracle City rises in layers of light, bright enough to pass for an artificial dawn. Its glow reaches all the way here, spilling over rooftops and catching on puddles, broken bottles, rusted balconies, and the wet plastic roofs of food stalls, until the whole slum glitters in the cheapest, saddest way possible.

Ahead, the street thickens into the usual night market. Beneath flickering neon signs powered by stolen electricity, rows of people push shoulder to shoulder, selling each other scraps. The voices of haggling and bartering fill the air. Coins change hands so fast you would think they were burning holes in people’s palms.

The “business district,” in all its glory.

I keep my head down and let the crowd swallow me. Eyes lowered, shoulders tucked in, every step slow and deliberate. That is how you stay safe around here. Do not hurry. Do not stare. Do not give anyone a reason to remember your face. The last thing I can afford is curiosity. Here in the slum, anything that draws attention invites trouble.

A man curled beside a shuttered pawnshop lifts his head as I pass. His beard is stiff with something that might be vomit or soup. His eyes slide over my uniform and sharpen for half a second. My academy uniform that is now in complete tatters. I fold my arms across my chest, trying to cover up as much of it as I can.

Too late. He’s already seen it.

“Rich girl,” he says, and gives one ugly laugh, then doubles over coughing.

That is the funniest thing anyone has said to me all day. I do not look his way. I only quicken my pace enough to put distance between us.

Two women argue outside a gambling den, their voices too tired to sound properly angry. A boy younger than me sits on an upturned crate with a plastic tray balanced across his knees, selling miracle charms. Cheap little things. Luck beads. Health threads. Focus stickers. The kind of garbage people buy when real blessings are unattainable. His tray is almost empty.

Hope sells well when it is cheap and offered to people with nothing left to lose.

A group of men near the entrance to an alley goes quiet as I approach. My shoulders tighten. I move closer to the lit side of the street. One of them smiles as his gaze slips below my face, and my skin prickles. Every part of me wants to curl inward. Instead, I drop my hand to my side and keep my steps even, pretending that his filthy gaze has not just violated me.

My hands twitch, the memory of claws flickers through my fingers. For a heartbeat, I can almost feel them coming back. Black armor sliding under my skin. Fingers splitting. Spine unfolding. I imagine turning toward those men and watching their smiles fall apart as my own mouth pulls into a wide, awful smile.

Then the fantasy ends. No armor. No claws. No black plates pushing through my skin. Just my bare feet on the street, my hand hanging uselessly at my side, and the group of creepy men laughing behind me.

It still hasn’t fully sunk in to me yet that I am back to being a regular girl again. I snap out of it and realize that I was grinning like an idiot the whole time. The men had let me pass without as much as saying a word. Maybe I looked like too much trouble. Not surprising really. I probably looked insane. A weird girl limping past in tattered clothes, smiling to herself like she has already lost the argument with reality.

I guess me being an idiot saved me once again. Nothing says don’t touch me like walking through the slums at night, looking genuinely unhinged.

I keep walking, too embarrassed to glance back and see if I have become the joke they were laughing at all this time.

The district thins after two blocks. The lights become fewer, meaner. The music fades behind me, replaced by the damp hum of old pipes and the distant pulse of generators. I slip through an alley between a closed butcher shop and a building with half its front wall covered in blessing advertisements. Every smiling model on the sign has been given horns in black marker. Most likely the work of local children.

What can I say, honestly, good taste.

The alley spits me out into the courtyard of the towers. There are three of them, though “towers” is a generous word for buildings that look like they might collapse at any moment. They are just three enormous slabs of concrete sunk into the ground, rotting upward like bad teeth.

Most of the windows are dark. A few glow with candles, battery lamps, DIY clamp lights hooked to stolen wires- little signs of life blinking weakly in the dark. On the side of the middle building, a billboard burns bright enough to bleach the concrete white.

Of course that still has power. The residents can freeze in the dark, but God forbid the ads stop shining.

A woman in a white coat holds a glowing infant against her chest.

MIRACLE INC. FAMILY CARE — BECAUSE EVERY LIFE DESERVES A BRIGHT BEGINNING.

The billboard casts soft blue light across the entrance below. Underneath it, a man lies slumped beside the door, one arm bent wrong beneath him, lit up like he was a part of the advertisement. A ring of empty beer bottles around his feet tells the whole story.

I slow down when I see his feet. No shoes. For a moment, I stand there listening, though I already know better. No snore. No groan. No breath I can hear over the billboard’s electric hum. Maybe he is dead. Appears to be way too out of it to be passed out from alcohol. From the looks of it, he’s been lying there for a while already.

I should check if he’s okay.

I do not.

I gather what is left of my uniform, step carefully over his legs, and go inside. Everyone here knows better than to stick their nose into someone else’s business. That is one of the first rules the slum teaches you. It probably looks heartless to anyone watching from the outside, but for those who live in slums, well, it’s deeply ingrained in us from childhood not to go against the rules. Believe it or not, they exist to keep you safe.

The billboard light dies behind me. The moment I step inside, the hallway turns pitch black. It is colder in the lobby than outside. The air smells of mildew, rust, old cooking oil, and the sour damp that never leaves concrete once it settles in. Somewhere above me, water drips in a slow, steady rhythm.

The building has not had power in months. Not in the corridors. Not in the stairwells. Not anywhere that would help people avoid breaking their necks. A few apartments still glow behind closed doors, but that only means someone has run an illegal line from another building, paid off the right man, or got lucky enough not to burn the place down yet.

Not that I really care anymore. Who needs light when your feet already know the way? Am I right?

Three steps forward. Avoid the broken tile. Left shoulder near the wall. Past the mailboxes, though calling them that feels generous; the useless little metal doors haven’t been opened for years. The row just hangs there, like an ugly decoration bolted to the wall.

Walking past them, I turn before the elevator doors, which were sealed shut with rusted bolts that looked older than me. I keep my shoulder at a good distance away from them, careful not to brush against the doors. They are sealed.

Supposedly.

I have lived here long enough to know better than to test anything this building calls secure.

The stairwell door groans when I push it open, the sound scraping through the quiet hallway. The climb feels longer than usual. The second floor brings the familiar stink of urine, cheap perfume, and burnt oil. On the third floor, Mrs. Sayo’s door is cracked open, though I cannot see Mrs. Sayo inside. I smell soup, thin and onion-heavy. A baby’s wailing echoes through the entire floor until it cuts off so suddenly that the stairwell seems to hold its breath.

I keep on climbing. On the fourth-floor landing, two voices whisper in the dark. I press myself close to the wall and wait them out. Only when they fade behind a closing door do I keep going. As I climb towards the next floor, I can still smell the thin, onion-heavy soup-like scent coming from behind me.

The fifth-floor railing shifts when my shoulder brushes it. I freeze, breathe through my teeth, and remind myself not to lean on it. On the floor itself, there are two boys crouching beside a dead socket, trying to strip wire with a kitchen knife. One of them sees my uniform and looks away too fast.

Ignore it, keep on walking.

On the sixth floor, there is a giant red eye painted on the wall. Someone drew it years ago, huge and uneven, with black lashes dripping down the concrete like tears. The paint is old now, flaking around the edges, but the thing still looks awake. It watches me as I climb up and down the stairs every single day. Tonight, I stare back as I walk past it.

Then one more turn. One more flight. One more stretch of dark that my feet know better than my eyes.

Seventh floor.

Home sweet home.

By now, my breathing has evened out, and the worst of my shaking has passed. My legs still hurt. My feet are raw. Every breath tastes like rust and old smoke. And yet I continue walking confidently in complete darkness.

I know every part of this corridor like the back of my hand. The loose wire hanging out in the open just a few steps in. The place where the floor dips near the wall. The pipe that sticks out just low enough to catch your shoulder if you get too close to it. The patch of ceiling that drips even when it hasn’t rained in weeks.

I pass the cracked mirror nailed near the hallway bend. In the dark, it catches only the faintest outline of me.

Good. I’m in no mood to look at my tattered self right now.

Our door is near the end, under the brown stain that has been spreading across the ceiling above it for as long as I can remember. I stop there and reach into my pocket for the key. I have the key in my hand, but I still knock first. Once, softly. I don’t want to startle my mom by coming unannounced in the middle of the night.

No answer. Of course not. Maybe she is asleep. Or maybe she just can’t be bothered to answer her daughter at the door. With Mom, both options sound equally reasonable.

A tired sigh escapes my mouth. I slide the key forward in the dark and find the lock on the first try. A tiny satisfaction sparks in my chest.

“Seventeen,” I whisper, a happy smile creeping onto my face.

That is the seventeenth time in a row I hit the key in the hole, in complete darkness, on the very first try. Some people inherit blessings that let them bend light, heal wounds, stop bullets, and command bodies with a word. I get the ability to find a keyhole in the dark.

Clearly, I’m the chosen one destined for greatness.

No matter. I take what I can get. Life does not exactly throw a lot of victories my way, so I have learned to be grateful for scraps.

I stand there with my fingers on the key, and just as I am about to turn it, the strength goes out of my hand. There are two things I am genuinely good at. One: moving through a powerless building during the night without breaking my neck. Two: I can tell exactly what Yashiro is feeling from the tiniest change in her expression.

Apparently, that is what my entire life amounts to. Finding keyholes in the dark and reading expressions off other people’s faces. I could put it on a résumé. Fluent in darkness. Advanced experience anticipating rich-girl violence. Excellent performance under prolonged humiliation.

Truly, a skill set worth envying.

My mouth twitches. I twist the key.

Click.

Then the door opens.

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