Chapter 110: You’re Not My Mother
"Raizen" she said, and the name fit him the way it always had - cool hand to a hot forehead, the sound that told his bones they could put their weight down. "You’re doing enough."
Wind paused at the ridge like it had manners. Snow held its breath. Raizen didn’t move.
She stood just past the lip where camp light died - a neat slip of gray coat. Hair that never stayed pinned at her temple. The careful smile that emptied rooms of their noise, and filled them with warmth.
"I see you" she went on, voice a low house-sound remembered from other winters. "Running harder than anyone asks you to. Giving blood to things that don’t bleed back. You think you’re always late. You’re not."
His throat closed. Words gathered and tripped each other trying to get out.
"You -" He had to swallow twice. The second one hurt. "You weren’t there. I should’ve - I was..." He hated that his breath shook. "I’m always -"
"Enough" she said. Not scolding. The word you use to set a table down so it doesn’t break. "You learned to hold everyone’s weight. That isn’t a crime."
She stepped closer. The drift at her feet didn’t slough. No spoondrift nipped her cuffs. The air moved around her the way a river moves around a rock.
"I saw you at the wall" she said, and the sentence cut clean through time. "Saw you laugh when you couldn’t breathe. Saw you give that girl -" her eyes flicked down, conspiratorial, fond "- stars to wear."
Hikari’s earrings. The gift he’d made small on purpose so it wouldn’t have to be brave. He felt that memory open like a palm and the cold put a tooth in it.
He wanted to go to his knees. He wanted to get angry. Both impulses arrived with their hands in identical pockets.
"I’m trying" he breathed. "I’m trying to do it right."
"I know" she said. "I see."
He took one step. The snow squeaked - the honest, brittle sound of cold under weight. He watched her feet like the answer might be there. The drift around her shoes was too tidy. The hem of the coat didn’t darken. The mast-light behind him threw his shadow left. The shadow at her feet pointed right.
Wrongness is a map, Kori always said. Learn it or you’ll be buried in someone else’s story.
He looked up anyway. That was the hard rule: be human first, then correct yourself.
He set the words in his mouth like a fragile thing and let them go.
"You’re not my mother."
It came out soft. It split him open anyway.
She didn’t flinch. The smile stayed. It gained teeth you couldn’t see, only feel.
"We’ll meet again, Raizen" she said, and his name sounded like the edge of a knife that didn’t want to kill him.
The mountain blinked.
Then the air exploded.
Jets arrived. Pressure hit first - air folding, snow leaping into thin veils. Floods swung as one, carving white wedges across the slope. Rotors heaved the quiet into confetti.
Raizen stood alone in the glare, eyes tearing in the blunt white. Spotlights pinned the slope like a diagram. The first quadcopter hit the pad, struts kissing snow like careful feet. The second hovered and pivoted, floodlight washing the trees a sterile noon. Two more came in staggered. A squadron of jets slashed overhead, dropped flares that hung like tiny suns, then circled wider to draw a bright perimeter in the sky.
Vanguards poured out. Lines, angles, hands moving where hands knew to go. The kind of sudden that comes from years of rehearsal.
Alteea’s voice slid into Raizen’s head on a fresh channel, almost like a slightly panicked shout. "Don’t touch him. Do not touch anything. Mark the space with light so we can catch the wrong."
"Perimeter clear!" another voice answered from somewhere behind the glare. "Hold the ring!"
Footfalls bit snow. Safety catches clicked off without show. A rope slapped the pad and coiled itself into perfect circles like it had practiced.
"Raizen!"
Feris hit the edge of light in a sprint, eyes bright and furious. Keahi at her shoulder, scanning for directions the world could break. Lynea angling past him, sighting not at him but through him - she’d learned to trust other eyes to report the monsters she hadn’t met yet. Obi pulled up on Raizen’s other side and for once didn’t make a joke first. He read Raizen’s face like a map.
"Tell me you didn’t walk toward it" he said, quiet. It wasn’t a rebuke. It was a prayer that wanted to be true.
"I -" Raizen’s breath came wrong, too shallow, like the air had changed its mind about entering him. "I heard her."
"Who?" Keahi asked. The sort of who you ask when you don’t want to borrow the wrong grief.
"My... Mother" he said, and something fragile in the circle of bodies around him made a sound a machine couldn’t record. Hands stiffened. A tin cup ticked against someone’s belt, someone else shut their eyes like that would stop the room from touching.
"She spoke" he managed. "She said she sees me. That I’m -" He couldn’t say enough out loud. To say it was to hand it away and watch it get cheap.
Alteea crackled back in: "Division Five, freeze the footprint pattern if there is one. Mark flow with lasers in a grid - eight by eight meters. Drones, give me local phase drift. If it took shape there, space is wrong there. We can read wrong."
"Copy" someone said. Metal kissed metal as emitters locked in. Speared beams crossed overhead and held still until they drew a trembling cube around the place where a mother had stood and had not stood. The light revealed nothing. The nothing was data.
Two more quads flared and sank into the basin with exaggerated care. Hatches opened on hydraulic sighs. Division Five filed down one ramp with the sort of economy you get from being bad at dying. Division Six down the other, eyes already turned into instruments. The drones fanned out, their beams not sweeping but anchoring, nodes of white that threaded the air into a web that would twitch if anything breathed in it wrong.
Rune came last - slate alive in his left hand, stylus forgotten in his right, weapons ready, on his back. He hit the pad too fast, skidded, didn’t notice. He looked up, saw Raizen, saw the light pattern, and the blood left his face without asking permission.
He pushed through two people who outranked him and didn’t see them. Half a dozen voices reached Raizen first.
"What did it say?"
"What shape did it take?"
"Where did it stand?"
"Did it touch you?"
"Was there heat?"
"Was there wind?"
"Did it smell like -" someone started and thought better of finishing the sentence.
He tried to answer all of them and answered none of them. His voice wouldn’t cooperate with the order words wanted.
"It... looked like her" he said, and hated how small the words were for the size of it. "Talked like her. Remembered things it shouldn’t know..."
"Of course it did" Alteea said in his ear, soft and furious. "Of course it did."
"Obi, stay back" Keahi said, without looking, because she knew how his impulses worked. He stayed, vibrating like a string.
Rune then reached him, breath running ahead of him. He put a hand on Raizen’s shoulder - hard, not gentle - like he needed the contact so the world wouldn’t slide. Fear makes people rude. Rune’s grip was careful even now, which meant the fear was worse.
"The readings -" he said, and the word broke on his teeth. The slate in his other hand jittered. If you looked quickly, the graph just looked busy. If you looked long, it looked like a huge spike. "Do you have any idea -"
His eyes were too wide for the light. He swallowed, stared in a way that made Raizen feel both seen and made of glass.
"Do you understand what you saw!?" Rune asked, and then didn’t wait for mercy. Then, his voice trembled:
"You - you stood face to face... with an Anathema."