"Is this guy a monster?"
Ada looked down at her brother's upturned face, his now-dulled deep blue eyes reflected in her gold-pink pupils. She did not answer the question, because the answer was too obvious.
"'Monster' isn't quite accurate." Shengu Xuan shifted the grass stem from the right corner of his mouth to the left and slipped both hands back into his pockets. His chaos-colored eyes looked down at Daemon's head, which only reached his waist. "Monsters are at least still within your understanding. I'm not."
Daemon's deep blue eyes stared at him for several seconds. The vertical line between his brows had closed completely into an invisible fine mark, and the remaining blue specks on his body were still peeling away and fading, a few at a time.
"Then what exactly are you?" The boy's voice had regained its proper childishness, but his questioning tone had nothing childish about it.
"That's the third time you've asked. Your sister asked too, and so did Isshiki. The answer's always the same." Shengu Xuan turned and took two steps toward the passage, his boot soles scraping against fragments of the shattered alloy door. "A tourist. A tourist here to kill time."
"Tourists don't trample the whole world underfoot."
"That's because you haven't met enough tourists."
The corner of Daemon's mouth twitched. The frustration of wanting to argue but finding no opening flashed across his face. He ran barefoot to Ada's side and looked up at his sister with a questioning gaze.
Ada crouched and brushed the stray hair off Daemon's forehead with fingers still wet with culture fluid. Gold-pink pupils met deep blue ones for an instant under the cold white lights.
"Go with him." Ada spoke very softly, at a volume only the siblings could hear. "His system of power lies