CHAPTER FOUR

Zoisite stared down the barrel of the gun. It was a good gun; that in and of itself was a comforting notion. The barrel wasn't warped, so the bullet would fly true. No chance for a near-miss, especially at close range. The firing pin looked brand new and the chamber had been recently oiled. The trigger was tight and responsive. When he slid the clip into the butt of the weapon the satisfying, heavy click reassured him that that the bullets would easily chamber, not get bound up or jammed.

This was a good gun. It was probably never fired before. It smelled heavily of oil thanks to that recent cleaning, but there was an undertone of something else; something sterile like cellophane or plastic wrap. It was the same smell that a new computer or cell phone might have fresh out of the box. He could only imagine what it might smell like seconds after firing. Probably wonderful. He inhaled deeply hoping to catch that wonderful burning scent just before the hollow-point shell tore the nose and every other visible feature off his face and caved them into the back of his skull.

With a mad laugh he pulled the trigger.

"Zoisite."

He fell off the cot, slammed his head off the metal grates that passed for a floor and for a moment didn't move thanks to the lingering sleep paralysis and the powerful remnants of the dream. At that moment he might as well have been dead. He certainly felt less than alive.

"Zoi, let's get going." The voice that pulled him from his possibly eternal slumber called again. The room was dark, but he knew the voice well enough.

Jadeite's new boots squeaked in the darkness as he moved around their tiny cell of a bedroom. Zoisite lifted himself groggily to his feet, both thankful and perturbed to hear his own boots squeak against the metal mesh as well.

"You okay?" Jadeite asked. He didn't need to see his face to see the concern.

"It's been so long since I had a decent night's sleep." Zoisite mourned, "And of course the first time I get the chance, I get woken up at the ass-crack of dawn to hunt down a murderous demon."

"You were in pretty deep." Jadeite told him quietly, "Were you dreaming?"

"Mmm hmm."

"What about?"

Zoisite snickered and said, "Nothing you really want to hear about, Jed."

"I dreamt of Elysion." Jadeite countered in a solemn tone.

"What?" Zoisite asked.

"Elysion." Jadeite sounded astonished, "The Golden Kingdom."

"Oh." Zoisite replied and began stretching his arms and legs out. Joints popped as muscles strained.

"Oh?" Jadeite asked, "That's it?"

"Does there need to be any more?" Zoisite asked back.

"What do you remember?" Jadeite inquired.

"Names, mostly." His companion answered as if he were in a classroom, "The sun. Grass. Roses."

"That's it?"

"Yes…" Zoisite sighed. His frustration was evident, "Can we maybe not do this now?"

"Do what?"

"Go soul-searching for Elysion." Zoisite responded, "I know what you're going t ask me, Jed. I know where it's going to lead and it's not the sort of thing I want on my mind while I'm walking into a sniper's kill box."

"How can it not be the foremost thought in your mind?" Jadeite demanded. The briefest sliver of light from the unrelentingly overcast morning crept in showing the intensity in Jadeite's face.

"Because I woke up to a city in ruins with no clothes, no food, and no people anywhere to be found." Zoisite explained to him coldly, "All I was focused on was surviving."

"So you didn't remember Elysion at all?"

"No." Zoisite corrected him, "I remembered it well." He stood up and closed his eyes, "I remember the tranquility and the bliss of living there. It was like heaven." He chuckled in his off-kilter way, "I thought… maybe… it actually was heaven. So I tried to go back."

"That's why you've been trying to kill yourself?" Jadeite mused gloomily.

"Think about it, Jadeite." Zoisite spoke down to him, "If I really wanted to die, don't you think I would've done myself in by now?"

"No." Jadeite answered, crossed his arms, and leaned against the door frame.

"No?" Zoisite chuckled.

"Endymion." Jadeite said. Zoisite's blood flowed a bit colder at the sound of the name.

"Don't preach to me about duty right now, Jed." Zoisite ordered and tried to shoulder his way past his younger companion.

"Endymion wouldn't let you end your own life." Jadeite said. He put his arm out and held Zoisite firm by the shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

Zoisite went cold; completely frozen. He reached up and tried to pull Jadeite's arm away, but it had become the proverbial immovable object. The younger Shitennou's bright blue eyes had gone dark; dark like His eyes. Jadeite moved forward and seemed to step through his own skin and a new, ancient face stared back at Zoisite. Endymion tightened his grip and scowled.

"Master!" Zoisite could only gasp.

"You won't end your own life." His cold voice stated. Metal slid out of metal and then plunged into flesh with a ravaging tear, "Not before I've had the pleasure…"

Zoisite tasted blood, felt immeasurable pain, guilt and sorrow, and then fell into darkness that may as well have been His eyes.

And he would have fallen forever if it hadn't been for Jadeite.

"Zoisite!"

Nothing…

"Wake up!" his companion thumped him solidly in the shoulder once again. It had gone black and blue long ago.

Zoisite stirred slowly, "Master…"

"Zoisite, look at me!" Jadeite ordered.

He followed the order slowly. Those blue eyes were in front of him. Jadeite's face was wet… and dark. He had a hood pulled up over his head and as Zoisite resurfaced in reality he felt the trickle and sudden sizzle of some manner of boiling rain on his face.

"What the hell?" He sputtered as he threw the canvas hood over his own head to protect himself from the dangerous droplets.

"Zoi, are you all right?" Jadeite asked earnestly.

Zoisite shrugged and offered, "I don't think so."

"You just nodded off in the middle of our conversation." Jadeite told him. Zoisite vaguely remembered them talking about something as they walked through the rubble of the city, hunting for Tomoe's Shinigami.

"I'm sorry." Zoisite answered, surprisingly.

"I heard you call out for Endymion." Jadeite told him directly. His eyes betrayed a question.

"It was just a dream." Zoisite answered and steadied himself against what used to be a wall.

"Didn't seem like a good one." Jadeite mumbled to his companion.

"Jed…" Zoisite spoke slowly. He remembered something the dream-Jadeite had asked him, "What sort of memories do you have?"

"What do you mean?" The question more than perplexed him.

"Do you remember anything?" Zoisite asked more directly, "You know… at all?"

"Oh." Jadeite sighed. "Not much." He looked up, hopeful, "Why? Do you?"

"Vague images." Zoisite answered, "Like wisps of cloud. They're more gut feelings than outright memories. It's hard to explain."

"I feel like I used to know a lot more." Jadeite said. That was enough to pique Zoisite's interest.

"You mean you feel like…" He paused to think of the best phrasing, "You feel like you've forgotten certain things?"

"No… not quite." Jadeite answered and cocked his head, thinking hard himself on how to word the curious sensation, "Not like I've forgotten something. More like I misplaced it."

"Hmm…" Zoisite pondered. Jadeite shook his head.

"I don't know how to describe it." He confessed, "I have these feelings, like you said, and it feels like they're pointing me towards something, but when I look for it… it's not there."

"What do you remember before we woke up in this place?" Zoisite asked, gesturing to the tumbled towers and smashed glass that comprised their dreary, overcast world.

"That's one of the things that I feel like I misplaced." Jadeite answered, "Again, it feels like I know the answer, but I don't know where to look for it."

"I know exactly what you mean." Zoisite agreed and pulled his makeshift tarpaulin jacket tighter.

"When you were dreaming just now." Jadeite asked nodding in Zoisite's direction, "Were you reliving a memory?"

Zoisite tensed and clenched his hands into fists, hidden beneath his coat. The sting of Endymion's blade echoed through him again. "I don't know." He answered.

Their conversation drifted into silence after that. Jadeite seemed to understand that further prodding into Zoisite's dreamscape would only yield an emotional shut-down in his fragile companion, and Zoisite himself was in no mood to continue talking.

So they trudged forward through the sizzling rain. It didn't seem to be acidic, but it was certainly toxic. The droplets left hot, oily streaks on every surface and burned like peroxide on an open wound. Zoisite let out a chirping curse every time an errant dropped touched a hint of bare skin. The rain didn't seem to do any permanent damage to the body, but it was painful and irritating, much like the rest of this ruined world.

They passed through arches of toppled buildings and more than once had to forge their own paths over flipped cars or piles of ruined masonry that blocked their path. Their destination was, as Tomoe had told them, a courtyard a few hundred yards beyond the makeshift prison sanctuary. Jadeite spotted the open, diamond-shaped area first and huddled at the corner of a crumbling building to assess the situation.

The courtyard was bordered on all sides by tall buildings in various states of collapse. There was a ruined, eroded structure in the center of the courtyard, possibly a fountain or some sort of statue. The flower beds had been overgrown, but now everything lay dead and decaying. He looked over the towering buildings to find nearly every window broken. Any one of the literally hundreds of windows could be used a sniper's vantage point. It was a classic kill zone in every sense. There was barely any cover save for a few overturned benches and the sculpture at the center.

"This is crazy." Zoisite muttered.

"There's no point to even try to keep on your guard." Jadeite grumbled, "He could be anywhere in there."

"We could get through." Zoisite suggested in a slightly upturned voice.

"What?" Jadeite gasped at him.

"We could make it through." Zoisite repeated, "Tomoe said there was a road straight to the Crystal Tower just beyond this courtyard."

"You mean just run away and leave those people back there?" Jadeite demanded, throwing his index finger towards the prison sanctuary.

"We could come back for them." Zoisite insisted, though it sounded like he barely believed his own words.

Jadeite, soured by the suggestion, merely shook his head and turned back towards the courtyard with an assessing eye. Zoisite cringed as another drop of searing rain worked its way past his protective layers and burned his face.

"Zoisite." Jadeite spoke after several long, quiet minutes.

"What?"

"I want you to wait here." He ordered.

"Why?" he asked perplexed, "Did you forget something back at Tomoe's camp?"

"No." Jadeite replied firmly, "I'm going in there."

He pointed around the corner of their hiding place with his thumb and a drop of caustic rain singed the tip of his finger. Zoisite craned his neck to look out into the menacing courtyard and met Jadeite's determined gaze with a look of complete disbelief.

"What are you going to do, try to talk him out?" Zoisite challenged, "He's liable to kill you as soon as you stick your head around that corner."

"It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that he can be reasoned with." Jadeite argued.

"It's also not impossible that he won't put a bullet through your skull." Zoisite returned.

"Zoi, Tomoe told us he hasn't ever actually killed anyone." Jadeite reminded his companion.

"They call him the Shinigami, Jed." Zoisite added his own recollection to the argument, "You don't get blessed with a nickname like the God of Death if you haven't killed anyone."

"I'm going in." Jadeite repeated his position, "And I'm going to be counting on you to watch my back."

"And what if he shoots you?" Zoisite queried in his darkly humorous way.

"Then watch for the trajectory of the bullet." Jadeite replied in all seriousness, "At least you'll be able to tell which building he's in."

Zoisite just stared at him. Jadeite was never the type to leap without looking; he was always very meticulous and methodical in his actions. Charging in like a bull was more Nephrite's department… Zoisite felt a twinge of emotion at the thought of one of the missing members of their cadre. He pondered it for a moment. Why could he remember nuances about Jadeite and Nephrite's personalities, but not recall in detail any event prior to awakening in this ruined world? Did he even want to remember? Could the past be even worse than their present?

"Zoi, are you listening?" Jadeite's voice snapped him back to unpleasant reality.

"Sorry." He shook his head and apologized at the same time.

"Keep a sharp eye." Jadeite requested and then stood from his crouched position.

Zoisite's hand shot up instinctively and grabbed Jadeite by the cuff. The bearded blonde King turned around startled with his wide blue eyes beaming.

"Jed…" Zoisite whispered. He didn't have to say any more than that.

"A prayer wouldn't hurt." Jadeite suggested with an uneasy smile and walked around the corner.

Zoisite heard the gunshot and his heart sank as his body leapt into the air, But there was no echo, no smoke, and no scent of burning powder on the wind. He peeped around the corner with the barest sliver of his eye to find Jadeite calmly, cautiously creeping his way towards the center of the courtyard.

Zoisite exhaled, closed his eyes and ordered his brain to "Stop it!"

Jadeite's boots made no sound as he stalked his way into the ruined courtyard. The leaning, creaking buildings threatened to make this place a tomb at any moment, but he forced his way forward, keeping his eyes trained straight ahead and letting every other sense he possessed keep tabs on the world around him. He didn't dare approach the immediate center of the rough diamond of concrete, but merely skirted the edge trying to keep his positioning on the seams between the large slabs as asymmetrical as possible.

He stopped near the edge of a rotted bench and took in his surroundings in a long, leisurely gaze. The gray sky roiled overhead and the sizzling rain had died down to an oily drizzle. The smashed doorways of the bordering buildings looked almost like the yawning maw of some beast ready to devour him. The place felt claustrophobic despite the relative openness of the courtyard itself. With a final, hesitant step he puffed out his chest with a breath of stale air and stated his intentions clearly.

"Hello!" he cried, his voice bouncing up and around the towers, "I'm unarmed!"

"Nice one, Jed." Zoisite grumbled from his hiding spot out of view of the Shinigami's courtyard.

"I'm not looking to pass and I don't want to fight you." Jadeite continued and raised his arms to the level of his eyes to show his lack of defense, "I'm just trying to survive." He looked around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the shadowy assassin, "Just like you, I imagine."

There was no response, not even a whisper of dust ruffled by the breeze. Jadeite frowned inwardly, let his arms fall to his sides and then placed his hands on his hips.

"Jadeite…" Zoisite chattered to himself, feeling more and more anxious for his partner by the minute, "What are you doing? He's toying with you!"

Jadeite called out again, "I know it can't be easy out here." He paused, and then added a relatable sentiment, "Alone."

Still nothing.

"There are men and women trapped in a shelter behind me." Jadeite explained, "We're trying to reach the safety of the Crystal Tower."

No reply. No sound at all.

"The road is sure to be dangerous." Jadeite continued shouting at the empty windows, "They will surely need protection." He licked his lips and prepared for the big pitch, "Your skills, as we have been told, would be most valuable. Perhaps we could travel together? Safety in numbers!"

And still the courtyard remained silent.

Jadeite was becoming flustered by now. He ran a hand through his long, scraggly blonde hair and sighed. He glanced around at each of the buildings that surrounded him and still saw nothing.

"What can I offer in return?" He parleyed, "What do you require? Food? Medicine?"

Nothing.

"We can't help each other if you won't talk to me!" Jadeite shouted and took a step forward toward the center of the courtyard.

There was a mechanical click that accompanied his lone footstep and instantly he knew he had crossed some invisible point of no return. The booming report of a high-powered rifle echoed in veritable canyon that surrounded the Shinigami's courtyard and threatened to deafen the Shitennou if he survived whatever wound was about to be inflicted upon him.

He employed his uncanny reflexes and turned his body away from the apparent direction of the sound, but he could not completely dodge the bullet. A solid weight that might as well have been a cannon ball slammed into his right shoulder and nearly propelled him to the ground. He sprinted towards the safety of the alley where Zoisite stood screaming hysterically through the ringing, pounding echo of the explosion. A second report ripped through the air and Jadeite felt a stinging spray of shattered concrete spew up from the ground near his foot. He leapt over the debris that blocked the alley from the courtyard and fell gracelessly into a roll to protect himself from any further shrapnel.

"You idiot!" Zoisite chastised him and pulled him back around the other side of the menacing building.

"He's … so …" Jadeite panted and clutched his shoulder to staunch the flow of blood, "… fast!"

"Calm down, Jed." Zoisite ordered and pulled a clean towel and a bottle of iodine from their small pack of provisions Tomoe had given them.

"Easy! Easy!" Jadeite struggled against the pain as Zoisite pulled his and off his wounded shoulder.

He was just about to use the towel to apply pressure to Jadeite's injured shoulder when to his immediate shock and subsequent relief Zoisite found no visible wound. No smoking, lead-filled lump of burning flesh. No blood. No nothing.

"What is it?" Jadeite panted, still grimacing in pain.

"He didn't hit you." Zoisite said in disbelief.

"The hell he didn't!" Jadeite answered and twisted his neck to a painful degree to get a clear look at his sure to be bloodied and useless appendage, but it was whole and fit… and tingling slightly.

"What the hell?" He gasped.

"I saw you take the impact of a bullet." Zoisite agreed with the scene he was mentally replaying, "A body doesn't move like that on its own."

"Zoisite, he shot me!" Jadeite assured his companion.

"I know." He snapped back, still pondering.

Amazing. Jadeite thought to himself. Zoisite was never academic. He hated study of all kinds, but he was always naturally intuitive to a staggering degree. He could understand abstract concepts at a glance and could always think circles around the rest of the Shitennou. Even here in the midst of a ruined world with a maniac gunman on the other side of a shabby courtyard of cement Zoisite could lose himself in swirling calculations that only existed within the cloudy confines of his own mind.

"Was it a rubber bullet?" Jadeite asked and poked his arm where he recalled the hot lead shell tearing through his flesh.

"No bruising." Zoisite observed.

"Some other kind of concussive shot?" Jadeite hypothesized, "Maybe some sort of compressed air cannon?"

"Anything concussive would have left a visible mark." Zoisite answered somewhat condescendingly. Jadeite recalled, though he had no idea how he knew this, that Zoisite could be like that when he entered a state of deep concentration.

After a few moments of silence he asked, "Zoi?"

"Jadeite, I'm thinking." Zoisite growled at him.

Jadeite rolled his eyes and propped his back up against the cold brick of one of the crumbling buildings surrounding the courtyard. Zoisite continued puzzling and puzzling as the gray sky rolled endlessly above. Intermittent drops of oily, searing rain reminded Jadeite of where they were and what they were doing even as he rested his eyes waiting for Zoisite's eventual unraveling of the entire confusing affair.

"I need you to get shot again." Was the request that roused Jadeite from his dozing.

"What?" He coughed as his back cracked painfully from his awkward position on the ground.

"I need to see where it's coming from." Zoisite said hurriedly. He had found himself a chunk of rock and had scribbled calculations on the bare concrete where they had been sitting.

"Zoi, I know I wasn't actually wounded, but it felt like I got shot." Jadeite reminded him.

"Tough it out." Zoisite more or less ordered without looking up from his rough diagram of the courtyard which he had overlaid with grid lines and rough calculations.

"Why don't we both go in there?" Jadeite suggested, "He can't possibly pick two targets at the same time. We can separate and surround-"

He didn't get to finish as Zoisite shouted, "Don't be a pussy, Jed!"

Jadeite had no reply to that outburst. Zoisite had become obsessed, has he often did, with the task in front of him. He wasn't a meticulous planner like Jadeite and he wasn't a short-sighted brawler like Nephrite, but when Zoisite was presented with a task there would be nothing short of the end of the universe itself that could pull him away from his puzzle before its solving.

Now it was Jadeite's turn to feel that familiar twinge of emotion. He knew so much about Zoisite; his habits, his mannerisms, his foibles… how? How could he know those things out of context? What sort of lives did they share that made them such keen judges of each other's character? He recalled only traces of a green country, a deep sense of camaraderie, and the ever-present outline of the Moon in his memory. That and the unshakable, unquestionable drive to find Endymion, the Master himself.

"How many shots will this take?" Jadeite asked, clenching his fist and his jaw in preparation for the coming pain.

"I can't say for sure." Zoisite confessed, "I'll work as quickly as I can, but I'm betting I'll have the son of a bitch flushed out before he has to reload."

"I'm not a betting man, Zoi." Jadeite reminded his companion with a grimace.

"Neither am I." Zoisite replied, "This isn't random chance or luck of the draw." He was grinning slightly, as if he were relishing the moment, "It's the laws of mathematics at work; it's statistics and probability. Just cold, hard… science."

"Zoi, I can't say I put a lot of stock into science considering that we can shoot lightning from our fingertips." Jadeite snickered disapprovingly, "Add to that the fact that we're standing here, breathing and alive after we've both died. Twice."

They both stopped breathing. The alley and the courtyard beyond became bone-chillingly still. Twin sets of memories emerged from a dark corner of the Shitennou's collective consciousness; memories of death. They both shuddered where they stood.

"What the hell?" Jadeite stammered.

"Don't look at it." Zoisite cringed and forced the living visions of swords, fire, and blood out of his mind.

"Zoi…" Jadeite gasped dry-mouthed, "What did we…"

"Concentrate on the Shinigami, Jed." Zoisite spoke commandingly.

"R- right." Jadeite stuttered again and shook the deadly phantasm away. He would return to the thought later, he mused. There would be no escaping it now.

Where had it come from?

"Are you ready?" Zoisite asked, his eyes trained on the Shinigami's courtyard.

"Don't get me killed." He replied with a smirking frown.

"Just trust me, Jed." Zoisite pleaded. The look in his eyes was one of baseless surety.

"I always have." Jadeite realized.

He hesitated for a moment, fighting his body's instinctive urge to remain out of harm's way, and then put one foot in front of the other. He emerged in the courtyard again and retraced his previous steps. When he came to the point at which the first shot struck him he turned around and received a nod from Zoisite to proceed. He took another step forward and heard the same mechanical click as before.

"Fuck."

He spun around as he had before, this time in the opposite direction. A bullet, or whatever it was, whizzed past his left ear. He stumbled backwards and righted himself as he heard the click again and a second bullet streaked towards his abdomen. He scuttled out of the way, but the bullet nicked one of his lower ribs. He let out a pained howl and clutched his side. Another click preceded a third shot which struck him in the back of the left knee. He toppled over and instinctively rolled into a fetal ball to protect himself. A fourth click.

He resigned himself that he was going to die in this courtyard. It was probably Zoisite's plan all along to die out in this savaged world. He was just giving Jadeite the opportunity to go first. Fake wounds be damned. Zoisite's trickery of the mind was legendary. He probably was bleeding all over the place from that first wound and he would expire from the subsequent shots that were riddling him as he lay there, pathetic and dying. A sudden jolt of adrenaline shot through him and he pushed himself off the ground with one arm and dodged a bullet that smacked a six-inch wide hole in the concrete where his head was just laying.

He heard that damnable click again and braced himself. At least he would die on his feet like a man, not cowering like a child. Not at the mercy of a madman with a gun. Not at the hands of the woman he loved.

Rei…

"Jadeite, get down!" Zoisite screamed at him from across the courtyard.

He almost didn't hear him at all. The name throbbed across his mind like a sexual climax. It was her! How could he ever have forgotten?

"JADEITE!"

He finally heard Zoisite's shrill voice and dropped to his knees as another bullet struck him in the throat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Zoisite bounding across the courtyard. Clutched under his arm was one of the box-shaped bombs that Tomoe and his associates used to thin the numbers of Sufferers that shambled too close to their sanctuary. He switched on the LCD timer which counted down from seven seconds and he tossed it near the base of the sculpture in the center of the courtyard. Zoisite stumbled to the ground and crawled over to where Jadeite lay and sprawled himself out on top of him.

"Rei!" Jadeite called out. He was oblivious to the world and rapt in supreme splendor at the sound of the name sliding off his tongue.

Zoisite wrapped his arms around Jadeite's head just as Tomoe's bomb exploded in a vengeful howl of fire and fury. His back was exposed and he felt the flames singe his patchwork overcoat as stone and debris pelted him from above. Jadeite was gloriously oblivious to it all. The look on his face read utter bliss. Zoisite heard a series of mechanical clicks, blips, and the unmistakable sound of arcing electricity and hazarded a look over his shoulder as the dust from the explosion settled.

The fountain, or whatever it was, in the center of the courtyard had been blown apart by Tomoe's explosives. The machine that was hidden beneath its innocuous exterior had been disabled and the crippling gunshots had ceased.

"Jadeite." Zoisite coughed through the dust, "Jadeite, get up."

Jadeite was slow to respond. He looked around as though he was seeing the courtyard for the first time and slowly rose to a sitting position. The machine in the fountain was a sputtering mass of wire, metal, and circuitry now. He shook the orgasmic thought of the mysterious woman, Rei, out of his mind for the moment and focused.

"What is it?" he wondered aloud.

"I'm not sure." Zoisite confessed, "The Shinigami, I presume."

"A machine?" Jadeite balked.

"What else could think and move so fast?" Zoisite asked the obvious question.

"But it never moved." Jadeite observed, "And the bullets were coming from impossible angles."

"I don't think there were any bullets at all." Zoisite surmised and motioned to several antenna-like protrusions that lay charred on the ground, "I think it was all in our heads."

"What is this?" Jadeite became angry at the notion of being riled by a machine, "Some sort of mind-control device?"

"It could be some sort of hypnotic suggestion." Zoisite hypothesized, "Tuned to act on a certain high-frequency spectrum or something like that."

"So this whole time Tomoe and his refugees were being held prisoner by a machine?" Jadeite almost laughed.

"There's another possibility." Zoisite offered, "This machine may not have been imprisoning them, so to speak."

Jadeite thought a moment and finished the assumption, "You think it might have been keeping them here intentionally for some other reason?"

"Maybe it was trying to keep them away from something more dangerous." Zoisite concluded.

"Tomoe said that beyond this courtyard there was a road that led straight to the Crystal Tower." Jadeite remembered, "Why would anyone want to block refugees from the one safe place in the city?"

"It might not be that safe anymore." Zoisite said gravely.

"I think it's time we saw this Crystal Tower for ourselves." Jadeite concluded and Zoisite concurred with a nod.

They brushed themselves off of dust and debris and gave a final, worrisome glance at the disabled Shinigami and walked to the other side of the courtyard. Rubble was strewn across their path as they followed the brick-flanked road out. The road climbed upward and the buildings climbed along with it and obscured everything but the grumbling gray sky from view. At the crest of the hill the road curved sharply to the left and ended at an abrupt drop-off.

The sight was breathtaking in the most loathsome sense of the word. The road terminated at a crater the size of a small city. There should have been a small city there, the suburbs of Tokyo itself. Craters dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see. No rubble was left behind; just empty, black holes where millions of people should have been happily going about their lives. For miles around there was simply nothing.

However, far off in the distance almost in the exact center of the ring of destruction stood a towering, silver spire. The shining peak of the crystalline structure still managed to give off a faint sparkle in the dreary overcast that shrouded the world. The Crystal Tower stood untouched by the destruction that ravaged the city. Just the sight of the majestic structure sparked hope in the hearts of the two Shitennou who stood on the edge of the devastation.

"We'll have to skirt the edges of the craters." Zoisite planned for the journey, "The walls are too steep to climb."

"What about Tomoe and the refugees?" Jadeite asked.

"They're safer where they are, I think." Zoisite considered the difficult crossing that the two of them would face, let alone accompanied by hundreds of starving refugees.

"My god, Zoisite." Jadeite spoke in fearful awe of the pockmarked landscape, "What could have done this?"

"We could have." Zoisite spoke heavily and turned his gaze to meet Jadeite's.

"Are you starting to remember, too?" Jadeite asked. Zoisite only had to nod.

A shadow fell over them despite the lack of a sun above them. The accompanying silence was dreadful and a static energy began to build up around them as Jadeite and Zoisite spun around and looked up into the sky.

A titanic vessel hovered just a hundred feet above them. Great obsidian spikes jutted out from the center of the ship and crackled with fearsome green arcs of stray energy. The silence was replaced by a low, buzzing drone and the shadow disappeared in a blinding flash of twin searchlights falling directly on the Shitennou. The massive hovering vessel let out a low, moaning wail of a klaxon and Jadeite felt himself rising into the air.

"What the hell?" he heard Zoisite shout from beside him.

"I can't break free!" Jadeite shouted, panicked.

Zoisite raised a hand above his head and his palm began to glow with a pale blue light.

"Zoi, don't!" Jadeite shouted, "The Sufferers! You'll lead them straight to Tomoe's refuge!"

Zoisite couldn't hear his companion over the steadily growing roar of the crystal ship. His deadly, dart-like sakura flew freely from his flared palm towards the source of the light that was lifting them off the ground. The sakura seemed to be swallowed up by the light and Zoisite's defiance was answered by an arc of black lightning which cracked thunderously in Jadeite's ears and rendered his companion limp and unconscious in a second.

He rose further and further to the point that the craters began to look like potholes and the Crystal Tower merely resembled a small chunk of quartz. He felt the strength leave his muscles as he was pulled inside the ship. His consciousness faded rapidly and the last thing he recalled before he passed out was something he never expected to see. Above him amidst the amber glow of the alien lights there was a familiar insignia: that of the crescent moon. He recalled its shape from some deep memory buried within him, only where he remembered a crescent of gold pointing upwards to the heavens this warlike symbol was black and may have pointed towards hell itself.