The person Amato had sensed was a child.
A girl, maybe nine or ten years old, sitting inside a FamilyMart in Yoyogi that had been locked from the inside, the deadbolt turned, a stack of plastic storage containers pushed against the glass door from the interior. She was sitting in the snack aisle eating a bag of prawn crackers with a calm that sat completely wrong on someone her age in the current context.
They stood outside the glass and looked at her.
She looked back at them.
She had dark hair cut bluntly and was wearing a school uniform that had a dried stain on the sleeve that Amato decided not to think about. She assessed them with the kind of stillness that belongs to animals that have learned that quick movement draws attention.
"She's been in there a while," Tsuna said quietly. "Look at the shelves."
Amato looked. Several shelves near the girl's position had been picked through systematically, the remaining stock organized with a logic he could see from outside, caloric density, probably, the higher-calorie items kept close.
"How long do you think," he said.
"Days. Maybe more."
He looked at the girl. She was still watching them, eating slowly.
He raised a hand. A small wave. The kind you give someone when you're not sure of the protocol.
She stared at him.
He pointed at the door. Made a questioning gesture.
She stood up, walked to the door, and looked at the deadbolt for a moment. Then she looked back at him. Then at Tsuna.
Tsuna was standing with the pipe at her side, not raised, but visible. She seemed to notice this, shifted, and held it behind her leg where it wasn't the first thing the girl would see.
The girl turned the deadbolt.
The door opened with the soft electronic chime that automatic doors make, except this one wasn't automatic, she had manually unlatched it after apparently deciding something about them.
Amato crouched to her eye level. "I'm Amato," he said.
She looked at him.
"You don't have to say anything," he said.
She kept looking.
"Are you hurt?"
She shook her head, very slightly.
"Is there anyone else inside?"
Another head shake.
He nodded. "Okay." He stood. "We have more people nearby. We're going to bring them here and then figure out where to go next. You can come with us or you can stay here." He paused. "I'd rather you came with us."
The girl's gaze moved to Tsuna.
Tsuna looked back at her, expressionless, which was just Tsuna's face.
The girl said, very quietly: "Komachi."
It took him a moment to understand she'd given her name.
"Komachi," he repeated.
She went back inside and sat down in the snack aisle and resumed the prawn crackers. Which he interpreted, cautiously, as agreement.
He and Tsuna stood in the doorway for a moment.
"Your system," Tsuna said. "Did it say anything."
He checked. The interface had a new entry.
POTENTIAL BOND DETECTED: KOMACHI (SURNAME UNKNOWN) Note: Bond potential reads as anomalous. Classification unavailable.
He read it twice. Classification unavailable. He had no idea what that meant. He'd never seen that label anywhere in the interface.
"Yeah," he said. "It did."
"And?"
"It says she's anomalous." He paused. "It doesn't know what to do with her either."
Tsuna looked at the girl eating prawn crackers in a locked store she'd apparently survived alone in for multiple days.
"Join the club," she said.
Outside, Tokyo was quiet in the way it had been quiet since this started, that held-breath quiet, the city's normal noise replaced by something underneath it, lower and less nameable. Amato stood in the doorway of the konbini in Yoyogi with the system blinking its patient counter in the corner of his vision.
BONDS: 0.
Not yet. But the weight of them was already there, the people he'd collected in the last two days, Tsuna and her careful efficiency, Kato and his mop handle, Hana and her silence, Sato and his rice balls. And now this girl who had survived something she wasn't going to explain and had a system his own system didn't know how to categorize.
He thought about the phrase again. You are the chain.
He was beginning to understand what that meant.
He wasn't sure yet if it was a comfort or a warning.