“After you,” he said, and the immortal followed the girl into the rain.

Rin met his gaze. The rain outside began to fall harder, drumming on the dojo’s tiled roof. In the silence between them, Manji heard what she wasn’t saying: How many more? How many until I feel clean? How many until my parents’ ghosts stop screaming?

The first thing Manji noticed was the smell .

“Rin,” he said. Her name tasted like dust and obligation.

“You don’t believe in luck.”

He didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t had an answer for a hundred and fifty years.

Manji bent down, retrieved his bamboo hat, and settled it over his face. The weight of it felt like a promise.

Rin knelt beside the last body—a boy, really. Sixteen, maybe. His waki-zashi was still clutched in his death grip. She closed his eyes with two fingers, murmuring something Manji pretended not to hear. A prayer, or a curse. With Rin, it was hard to tell.

Manji looked up. A young woman in a worn kimono stood silhouetted against the gray afternoon light, one hand on the doorframe. Not a warrior—no sword at her hip, no calluses on her palms. But her eyes were old. Older than her face. They tracked the fresh wound on his forearm—a deep gash from the last standing swordsman—and watched, without flinching, as the skin knitted itself shut.

“Let’s go,” she said finally. “The next one’s in the pleasure district. He likes to watch women drown.”

“No.” He looked at his hands—the same hands that had killed a hundred men, a thousand, a number that stopped meaning anything after the second century. Hands that had held his daughter, once. Before she aged and withered while he stayed seventeen. “I believe in grudges.”

“You move like a man who’s forgotten how to die.”