stained with red, awash in green

Shotaro was nineteen years old and starting to get impatient. Sure, there were people who didn’t find their other half until well into their forties, but there were plenty more who’d already found theirs by the time they were his age. Any day now, he told himself. He half-imagined that it might happen while he was on a case—while confronting some leggy femme fatale carrying a cigarette holder and a dark secret.

He’d never dreamed that his soulmate would be some kid they’d come to extract from a Dopant-filled warehouse.

But as soon as Shotaro caught sight of the bedraggled, pajama-clad kid walking down that corridor, his world exploded into color.

Granted, he didn’t immediately realize that “color” was what was happening. He stumbled back into a wall, dropping the attaché case he’d been entrusted with, and covered his eyes with his hands. “What the hell—?!”

When he lowered his hands and looked around again, and it wasn’t gone, he realized. That kid was The One. The kid they’d come to rescue was his fated partner.

He only had one thing to say to that.

“Seriously?!”

Shotaro scooped the attaché case off the floor and started after the kid. He stopped after only a few steps. “Don’t take a single step away from here,” Sokichi Narumi had told him before going to confront the facility’s security guards.

But this was vital. For the first time in his life he could truly see, and it was thanks to that kid right there. And besides—if he could save the kid all on his own, the boss would finally see that he wasn’t just some useless hanger-on. He could be a hard-boiled detective, too.

So he ran down the corridor, its walls tinged with a sickly hue he couldn’t name—he wasn’t exactly in any position to sit down and learn his colors—and called out, “Hey! Hey, you!”

The teenager in the pajamas stopped at the threshold of the door he was approaching. He turned—he was a boy, Shotaro saw now, which was confusing, because if they were supposed to be each other’s destined partners… Shotaro didn’t have time to question that, though, because the boy’s eyes widened as, presumably, color flooded his field of vision.

Many people laughed or cried tears of joy when they finally met their other halves. But this boy curled in on himself, twisted his fingers into that messy hair of his, and he screamed.

“Eh?!” Shotaro exclaimed. “Hey—stop that, you’re gonna attract more of those guys in the freaky masks!”

And the boy did stop screaming, but he was far from okay. He looked up at Shotaro, his eyes wide and panicked. “What is this?! Everything—my vision changed, I—”

Shotaro stared in disbelief. “It’s called color. How do you not know about it?”

The boy shook his head. “I’ve never—” He stumbled through the doorway and into a high-tech lab of some sort. “I’ve never seen anything like this before!” And never heard about it either, apparently. Shotaro couldn’t believe what he was hearing. How could a weird shut-in like this guy be his soulmate?

Shotaro reached toward the boy, but the boy screamed again and shoved him away. The recoil sent the boy staggering back through an arch into a tall cylinder that was positioned in one corner. He cried out in surprise, but before either of them could do anything the boy had vanished into thin air.

Shotaro dropped the briefcase again.

This was bad.