It took over an hour for the sleepwalking clerk to finally hand over the keys. They were not the keys to the car Rai had chosen off the rental list, but by then, he was just eager to take what he could and get out onto the road. As the clerk cautiously tapped the numbers of his license and credit card into some ancient machine, he was beginning to consider wandering into traffic, sans car.

Sao got into the passenger seat straight away, while Rai examined the wheels and announced that one patch of black ice would send them sliding to their doom.

“Drive carefully.” Sao knew Rai well enough to rethink that statement. “You can ask your friend the sergeant to provide some winter treads. If the search keeps us here that long. We’ll find her.”

Sao could be very convincing. It was like he knew what was coming. Or he was hopeful. Rai would not say either of them were true optimists but Sao was much better at forcing hope into words. In any case, Rai wanted to believe him.

He stopped thinking about Sao and Saki long enough to get them out of the rental lot safely.

Rai’s old faithful four-wheeled drive, before it had been appropriated and crashed into a wall by a twelve year old in rural Interstate, had been a rattling, open-air (due to the gaps in the undercarriage) beast. This new machine was insidiously quiet. He imagined this was what it was like to be locked in a padded room. Without hearing the machine’s roars and gasps, he couldn’t tell exactly how hard he was pushing it. He drove slow.

And while slowly cruising along the riverside, they saw her.

A sudden apparition. Rai was so surprised he forgot to hit the brakes.

The spot she had chosen to take a breather was a mile or so upriver from Murnau’s town center, on a short trussed bridge intended for light traffic and pedestrians. Her shiny black car, sleek as her hair, was on the opposite side of the bridge. She was leaning over a railing.

They sailed past the bridge. She didn’t seem to notice them.

Rai wrenched half the car onto the sidewalk, jolting Sao awake, and parked. For a moment, he stared at his phone. There was nobody else around, no camouflage. He looked up, and she was not leaning on the railing anymore, but looking straight at them with her jet-black gaze, hands locked in the pockets of her huge murky colored coat.

His heart skipped a beat but he found himself grinning. It was like a movie he’d seen; several, even. Look away and look back and she would have teleported again, inches from the hood. Maybe even standing on it. Away and back again and she’d be inside, and slash

But when he looked up from his phone again, she hadn’t moved. In her usual way, she had gotten bored of them and was looking elsewhere, at the water again.

He got out.

Sao didn’t say anything. He knew.

—

They didn’t speak until they were both resting their elbows on the railing. Rai was surprised at the feeling of it; he had been expecting the bite of frozen metal but the bars of the bridge were made of wood.

Looking southward, he saw the larger, denser slab of bridge that carried the train high over the river. Against one of the supporting beams, there was the metal staircase that led down to the makeshift marketplace. And below that, invisible in the water, the black hole that Triad had been dredged out of.

“I’m surprised you aren’t waiting to pounce on me at that shithead’s dorm,” Saki said.

“Did you already pay him a visit?” The snow had started to fall again. “No,” Rai said. “Someone would have seen you.”

“No shit. The picture...” Her exhaled breath seemed to melt the air. “It was too obviously bait.”

“I thought so.”

She rolled her eyes. “Why did you make her do it, then?”

“I didn’t.”

Her shock was well-masked, but from so close up, he couldn’t miss the twitch, and the second of an unguarded smile. “Damn, Tinsel.” Saki braced against the railing and pushed her face into her thick mittens. “She’s really one of them now. A fake. A fucking peacock.”

Her mittens were dark red, with reindeer printed on the edges. These were the hands that shoved a man out a window, threw him in a dumpster, smashed his skull until his brains leaked out.

“What do you mean?” he asked. She must have been expecting him to.

“The folks in that school are all surface flash. Everything has to be a big statement. Everything looks so…” She came up for air, yellow cheeks stained slightly red. “Can’t tell what’s the truth and what’s advertising.”

“You were tricked for a while. You thought she was begging for you help. She did say you would come.”

“That little bitch.”

Rai put his chin onto one of his hands and looked at her. The wood creaked under his weight. “Are you two really friends?”

"Do you not have any friends?” Saki tipped her head toward his parked rental, back on solid ground. “I bet you shit-talk that one all the time behind his back. Not that he doesn’t deserve it. What the hell is wrong with him, anyway?”

“I’m his supervisor.” Rai smirked. “I’d say that’s his biggest problem.”

Her disgust could have burned the paint off the railing. “When that busty woman at the barbecue threw him at the grill, it was like he wanted it. In the moment, I thought it was just some freak with a fetish but now… it’s like he knew.”

“Knew what?”

“You need a confession, at this point?”

There was a rustling of metal and Rai caught himself in time, and managed not to go diving for cover. The source of the sound was clenched in her right fist. Car keys.

“There’s probably no record of it,” Saki said, “but in my first year, I was in the Investment Club for two months. Just me and another girl. She was totally normal, here on scholarship. Not even good-looking. They tried to ignore me; even letting them know who my dad was, pouty looks was the best I could get. But they outright laughed her out of the room anytime she dared to speak.”

“Happy, Ace and Zed?”

“They hadn’t blossomed yet. As Tinsel would say.” Another semisweet smile quickly wiped off, like a window stain. “The president at the time led a chant of ‘gang rape’. They said she was asking for it. That kind of thing.”

“Did they actually-”

“Not that I saw. And I watched like a fucking hawk. It’s not like they weren’t careless around me. I caught wind that she wasn’t hot enough, even for the vampire shots. I’m pretty sure it was that loser Happy who blabbed.” She resettled against the railing. “I went to Triad. He was supposed to be the club advisor. He advised me to let everything go. He didn’t believe that anyone could feel unsafe or even put off by calls to gang rape. And you know what he said?” She let the next smile that crawled onto her face linger. “‘There’s nothing I can do.’ A guy can build ten hospitals, gets showered with praise for changing a country, and he can’t even pretend to stand up to a dozen stupid kids.”

Rai was silent.

“He and the guys didn’t go after me, of course. My dad and granduncle are on the board. I let the club know that, threatened them too, so they would leave me alone, but now I know I should have kept my mouth shut. Maybe I could have gotten those assholes to try something. If I was the one in the hospital, dad might actually have killed them.”

“You never told me that,” said a small voice.

They both turned, Saki almost swiveling right off the sidewalk. Tinsel was standing at the end of the bridge. Her scarf was unraveling, waving around her like loose skin, and the gauze taped to her neck was completely soaked through.

“We weren’t talking too much then. I was avoiding you. Because of Irving,” Saki said. She swallowed and smirked, though it wasn’t as strong as usual. “Brave of you to show your face after that trick with the picture. After all I did for you guys... I hope that bite hurts.”

A cold wind whipped by. Tinsel touched her neck to hold her scarf on, but the bandage started to slide. Like a huge red slug, it fell wetly into the folds of her scarf, revealing the blackened gouge. Saki’s mouth opened as if she might scream. She turned to head to her car, but Rai stood in her path.

“All these big shows and statements. Total peacocks, like I said. The initial vampire attacks were just guys speaking to other guys. Telling each other to have fun. Ayer might have been trying to do something for Tinsel, but he didn’t have the guts to say a single word to her. All that revenge was a message to the guys. ‘Don’t touch my girl’, like a caveman. And zero chance that any girl was on Jin’s mind when he tried his hand.” Saki stopped eyeing her car and strode up to Rai, almost pressing against his chest. “You might say I just helped Triad get more involved with his precious boys. Because it turns out there was something he could do to help me. He had something really rare to offer.”

“And you weren’t loud about it. I can almost appreciate that. It almost didn’t matter how fast we found out.” He began to press her back. She hovered below his nose and he smelled oil. “Because if the infection you tried to spread succeeds, anyone who has it is as good as dead.”

From up and down the river, police cars were beginning to approach.

“And even if he was a lousy advisor, or a lousy person, you must have seen how bad the disease got for him.” Rai’s breath was being blown back in his face by hers. “Did you really need to cause that much suffering?”

“But you did it for me, Saki,” Tinsel cried, pitching herself forward. The abandoned bandage lay like a piece of raw meat on the snow. “You stopped me from eating any of it. And Jin – you did it for him, too.”

Saki shrugged, a little too hard. Her coat fell off her shoulders. She tossed a smirk again at Tinsel. “If he had been there, who knows? You know how much that guy loves his food.”

“You wouldn’t have.”

With a huff, Saki turned and came face to face with Rai once again.

“She’s right,” Rai said. “I’m starting to see how much you really care about those two. You killed a guy and might have doomed dozens more, to show the world they couldn’t mess with your friends and get away with it. Because you couldn’t just tell them in words.”

“You’re one to talk!”

She shoved him, but her mittened hands were shaky.

“You’re right,” Rai said. “You were right to guess that I don’t have a lot of friends.”

He was transported back to the Atrium for a moment. The apprehension he felt around her. From start to end, he had always been expecting her to lash out. Smash his nose in. Start screaming, maybe. She had already done so much worse - so why was he worried?

She reminded him of someone. Someone Sao had said to let go.

Sao was very convincing, he was just so damn believable. And even when he wasn’t, Rai wanted to keep him happy, to keep him around. He had always been terrible at keeping hold of people he cared about.

“Alright Tin,” Saki said, “have a good life.”

Sao appeared at the end of the bridge, along with another car marked by the Murnau Police emblem. And Rai remembered, Sao wasn’t his boss.

He wasn’t going to let go of squat. Not yet.

Rai saw Saki’s bending neck, her arms across the counter - no, the snow-crusted railing - and her hair falling over her face as she bent over. Her leg went up and Rai grabbed her arms, but it was too late. She kicked off the top of the rail, sending a tremor through to wooden beams, and they both went over the edge, hurtling down into the black river below.

—

Rai wasn’t sure he cared about Saki, but kept holding onto her. Not just her huge spongy coat, either - one hand stayed on her wrist and the other looped around her waist, or maybe her ribcage.

It was cold. What else could it have been? But he couldn’t find a moment to shiver, or even to breathe. The water didn’t even feel wet, it felt like a million darts, buffeting his face, getting under his clothes, his hair, his eyelids. At some point his head surfaced. It was like taking a flamethrower to the face. He went under again almost immediately.

Saki seemed to be dissolving into an ooze in his arms so he held on tighter until the row of boats miraculously lined up under the railway crossing bridge caught them.

—

The team on the boat tended to Saki’s cuts and bruises and draped one of the rescuer’s coats around her. Rai got the striped tarp that the police had borrowed from the marketplace, and also used to catch and haul them from the water like a fishing net.

He pulled the tarp over his head as a hood and watched with a strange buzz of elation as Saki screamed and delivered a flat palm strike into the nose of a paramedic. She was alive.

She must have had a pretty strong constitution too, to be combat ready in such a short time, but when they had come up from the water he had been worried. It took her a few minutes to regain consciousness. Luckily Rai had kept a hold of his the whole time and unstuck himself from her the second they hit the deck. A few minutes too late and that nose would have been his.

He heard a tapping on the metal steps over on the shore, followed by a thudding through the snow. They were so clumsy he didn’t suspect they were Sao’s, but they were. His and Tinsel’s.

The moment they were close enough, Tinsel made a flying leap into the boat. Sao wasn’t so enthusiastic, but when one of the cops pushed out the gangplank for him he did step on, reluctantly.

Once his feet were on the deck, he smiled. “You did it.”

“No, you did. Right?” Rai pulled his plastic hood down. “You got the cops to send out the boats while I was talking to her. Because you knew I might be driving another girl to–”

“I was asked by the operator if the precaution might be needed, and I only approved them. Apparently, these bridges are well-known for suicides.” Sao leaned gingerly against a moldy wall. “You’re soaked.”

“You don’t say.” His waterlogged leather jacket had swollen up like a rotten fruit and his socks might have just managed to fuse to his skin. The only thing he had taken off were the gloves, which lay like dead fish on the deck. “I can’t exactly strip down here. Anyhow, experts say wet clothes are better than nothing when it comes to windchill.”

Under the boat’s canopy, Saki was sitting up and now dodging both the medics’ hands and Tinsel’s attempts to wind a hug around her. Ice and oil had gelled her hair into a stylish, scythelike swoop.

Rai stood, tossing the tarp off and regretted it instantly. The snow was falling straight and the trees were still, but even the tiny brush of wind against his skin from the swaying of the boat stung.

A cloud descended over his head and he wondered if he was passing out. An itchy, heavy cloud.

Through watering eyes he saw Sao resettle against the mildewed wall, looking smug and slender and obscenely exposed in only his light gray sweater. He crossed his arms over his chest.

Rai let the inflated wool monstrosity flop around his shoulders and felt a little too warm. All the loose threads on his neck prickled like heat rash. “Aren’t you the one who’s sick?”

“We don’t both need to be.” Sao might have been rethinking his offer. “You look better in it, anyway. Kind of like a classic gangster.”

Rai inspected the unravelling material and automatically started pulling at one of the few remaining silver threads. That figured. He looked better in something only after it had a bad run in the washing machine. And what kind of classic gangster wore wet, ragged jeans?

Plus, he never got around to telling Sao that he had never caught a cold in his life, even when he had wanted to.

Why can’t you just say thank you?

“Thanks,” Rai said. It came out sarcastic. “Thank you.”

Sao just smiled some more.

When Rai moved again, he didn’t feel the chill at all, though he was made acutely aware of how soaked his shoes were. He hobbled up the deck to where Saki and Tinsel were sitting. The medics were making some calls and the police were back on the shore, trying and failing to redirect the attention of onlookers.

“I’m gonna be put away. I’ll probably never get out,” Saki was saying.

“Then I’ll keep waiting forever.”

“Do you ever think about what you’re saying? I can tell you’re not serious.” Saki saw him approach. “Don’t do that.” It was a general order, for anyone in earshot.

Tinsel ignored the command and grasped her hand. Rai took a seat next to them. “Are you doing okay?”

Saki’s dull, whale-eyed look had returned, if it had ever for a moment been washed off. He thought, not for the first time, that she was going to hit him. But he remembered her frail attempts to push him on the bridge, her slippery unmoving form melting against him in the skin-shredding current of the river, and stayed where he was.

The air seemed to shiver with anticipation and he looked over at Tinsel. Her scarf was untied and slung over her shoulders with the ends floating free, like the sash of an old-time priest. Or gangster. The hole on her neck was bleeding freely over her chest and into her shirt.

Tracing the lines of red, his eyes moved down and he saw the word KILLER, slathered in red. Her statement, her call for help. It had worked.

He didn’t realize that he might be looking somewhere less than appropriate.

As the Historic Rail came in rumbling overhead, Saki balled her free hand into a fist and socked him in the throat.