Red Reef City clung to the coast of Yuzuine like a stain the sea could never wash away. Salt air mixed with fuel smoke, and neon lights bled into the pavement long after midnight. It was a city that survived by learning when to look away. By night, Red Reef lowered its voice — not because it had grown kinder, but because it no longer needed to explain itself. Beneath the streets, the underground railway carried fewer passengers and more unfinished stories, running through tunnels built in an era when the city still believed in tomorrow.
At 23:04, Platform C of the Lower Reef Subway held one of those stories.
A middle-aged man lay motionless near the edge of the platform, dressed like someone who had expected to make it home. Office slacks, worn jacket, cheap leather shoes scuffed by years of compromise. His eyes were half-open, unfocused, fixed on nothing. There was no blood, no visible trauma — only a stillness that felt misplaced, as if death had arrived quietly and left without saying why.
Flinche Iuno stood over the body, hands buried in his coat pockets, posture relaxed in a way that came from long familiarity with scenes like this. He didn't touch the corpse. Touching tended to make things personal, and personal was dangerous in Red Reef. Behind him, Mara Abigail observed the platform instead of the man, noting the empty benches, the flickering advertisements, the absence of witnesses. When she mentioned that the cameras had gone dark for exactly three minutes and that transit authorities were calling it a routine malfunction, Flinche let out a thin breath and remarked that malfunctions in this city were always remarkably punctual.
He crouched only long enough to confirm what already bothered him. The man looked peaceful — too peaceful for someone who had supposedly died alone on a subway platform. Mara pointed out the lack of struggle, no signs of a fall, no disturbance along the rails, and Flinche agreed that this was precisely the issue. People didn't usually die this neatly unless someone wanted them to. When a train thundered past on the opposite track, the wind tearing through the station and rattling the lights, the body seemed even less real, like a detail the city hadn't bothered to clean up yet.
Straightening, Flinche asked who had found the body and listened as Mara explained it had been a maintenance worker on a late inspection, nearly tripping over the man. That told him enough. If the victim hadn't fallen from the tracks, then he had arrived here alive and stopped breathing where he stood. In Red Reef, that kind of death was rarely spontaneous. It was deliberate — or convenient.
Flinche's gaze drifted toward the tunnel, the darkness stretching forward without interest or explanation. Red Reef City didn't kill out of malice. It killed when it was easier than remembering. Whatever had happened here at 23:04 wasn't an accident, it was a message, quiet and efficient. The only unanswered question was who it was meant for.
Flinche knelt this time, not to touch the body, but the platform beneath it. The concrete was cold even through his shoes, and that was where he noticed it—not blood, not footprints, but something subtler and far more deliberate. A faint residue clung to the ground near the victim's right shoe, barely visible under the harsh fluorescent lights, shaped in a shallow, incomplete arc. It looked like a water stain at first glance, the kind maintenance crews never bothered to clean, but the pattern was wrong. Too precise. Too intentional.
He studied it longer than necessary, then straightened slightly, remarking to Mara that whatever had been here wasn't spilled — it had been placed, and then removed. Mara followed his gaze and frowned, noting that there was no matching residue anywhere else on the platform. That narrowed things down. The man hadn't collapsed randomly; he had stood in a specific spot, long enough for something to leave a mark, and then he had died without moving an inch.
Flinche's attention shifted to the victim's hands. They were relaxed, fingers slightly curled, no sign of resistance, no instinctive tension. He pointed out that people who knew they were about to die didn't usually look like this. Panic always left a trace — clenched muscles, broken nails, anything. This man had none of it. Mara suggested poison, but Flinche dismissed it quietly; poison took time, and time made people react. Whatever killed him had been fast, clean, and unfamiliar.
A soft hum filled the station as the lights flickered again, and Flinche glanced upward, noting that the malfunction had ended exactly when the cameras came back online. Three minutes. No more, no less. He remarked that someone had wanted privacy, not chaos, and that kind of precision didn't belong to amateurs. Mara asked who would go to that length for a middle-aged nobody with no criminal record worth mentioning, and Flinche answered without looking at her: the kind of people who preferred their work unnoticed.
As they stepped back, Flinche noticed one last detail — a transit card lying a few feet away from the body, clean, undamaged, almost carefully placed where it would be found. He picked it up with two fingers and checked the timestamp. 23:03. One minute before the official time of death. Close enough to seem irrelevant, but off just enough to matter.
In Red Reef City, mistakes were rare. When they happened, they were intentional.
Flinche slipped the card into an evidence bag and stood, already certain of one thing: this wasn't just a murder. It was a test — of attention, of memory, of how easily the city could be made to forget something it had already decided didn't matter.
And Flinche had never been good at looking away.