All Sales Final

Mina’s first thought when the incubus smiled down at her from the train advertisement was that nobody who looked like that should come with monthly repayments. The digital panel above the Midosuji Line doors had been showing weather alerts a moment earlier. Now a silver-haired man reclined across a cream sofa in a black suit, one dark wing folded behind him as neatly as the cushions. His horns were small and symmetrical. His smile looked like it had been approved in a meeting.

LUXURY THAT LOVES YOU BACK.

The slogan faded into smaller text: licensed domestic companion, protection certification, flexible feeding plans, financing subject to approval.

- Of course. Put the demon on installments - Mina murmured.

The woman beside her was browsing the same company on her phone. Mina caught fragments when the screen tilted her way: Domestic aptitude 9.7. Protective instinct: Moderate. Temperament: Affectionate. Bonding compatibility: 94%. No price appeared anywhere. That was usually a bad sign. Nobody else in the carriage seemed interested. Incubi had been part of ordinary life for generations. They were a species. Companies had still spent generations selectively breeding for useful traits and inventing names for the results: licensed-born, domestic line, protection line. Mina had seen enough sponsored videos of horned men making breakfast. The comments usually bounced between recipe requests and people asking whether black wings scratched hardwood floors.

Mina had never seriously considered owning one. She had looked at the ads, sure, but she also looked at apartments with deep bathtubs and rent she could never justify. Looking was free. An incubus was not. Her phone buzzed before the train reached Hommachi.

Yui: Tomorrow 8:30, don’t forget. Tanaka moved the briefing again.

Mina grimaced. Yui had started sending reminders after Mina once showed up forty minutes late, completely convinced she was early. She worked customer support for a travel-booking company a few blocks from the station. On bad days, she spent hours repeating the same cancellation policy to people who seemed to think yelling could change the outcome.

Mina: I remember.

Yui: Screenshotting this for evidence.

Mina put the phone away. By the time she left the station, Osaka had disappeared under hard spring rain. Water hissed beneath bicycle tyres and pooled along the yellow tactile paving. Mina stopped at the convenience store for puff pastries and coffee, then walked home under a blue umbrella through streets bright with vending machines and wet restaurant signs. Her building stood on a narrow side street between a coin laundry and another convenience store. Six floors of aging concrete, unreliable plumbing and an elevator that had recently developed a grinding sound the landlord seemed committed to ignoring. Mina checked the mailbox before going upstairs. Electricity bill. Two flyers. A glossy postcard offering fifteen percent off a first companion consultation. The same silver-haired incubus from the train smiled from the front. Mina dropped it into the recycling slot.

Her apartment was small enough that standing in the kitchenette gave her a view of nearly everything she owned: bed behind a sliding partition, low secondhand table, old television, narrow balcony and one houseplant that had survived two winters through neglect. She kicked off her shoes, set the konbini bag down and locked the door.

That was when she noticed the scratches. Three thin silver lines cut through the brown paint beside the latch. Mina crouched. Maybe a key had slipped. Maybe somebody had scraped a parcel against the door. She could not remember whether the marks had been there that morning, which annoyed her. She checked the lock. Then the bathroom, the balcony and behind the curtain. She even looked under the bed and felt ridiculous the entire time.

Nothing. “You’re tired.” Her phone buzzed. The message came from an unknown number. No text, only a photograph. Mina stared for several seconds before understanding what she was seeing. A woman in a dark coat walked beneath a blue umbrella. The photograph had been taken from behind, perhaps ten metres away. The umbrella beside Mina’s door was blue. The coat was hers. Another message appeared.

UNKNOWN: You walk fast.

Her mouth went dry. A third followed.

UNKNOWN: See you tomorrow, Mina.

The police officer who arrived forty minutes later was polite and tired. He photographed the messages and the scratches, asked whether Mina had an ex-partner, a neighbour dispute, an angry coworker or anyone else who might know where she lived.

- No. Nobody I can think of.

He asked whether she had noticed anyone following her before that night.

- I didn’t know anyone was following me until they sent the picture.

The officer wrote that down. He told her to keep the door locked, save every message and call again if the person contacted her. The building’s security camera might have helped, except the landlord admitted over the phone that it had been malfunctioning for several weeks. After the officer left, Mina shoved a dining chair beneath the handle. Someone would come look at the lock in the morning. Until then, apparently, the chair was part of the security system. Mina opened Yui’s chat twice and closed it twice. On the third try, she typed “Can I stay at yours tonight?” Yui lived twenty minutes away. She would say yes. Then there would be questions, probably an offer to come get her, maybe a taxi ordered before Mina had even made up her mind. Mina deleted the message and put the phone face down.

At twelve thirty, footsteps stopped outside her apartment. Mina stood behind the door with her phone in hand until the elevator moved again. At one ten, she checked hotel prices. By one twenty, she was bouncing between locksmith pages, portable alarms and short-term apartments. Three nights in a decent hotel near work would hurt. A locksmith could come in the morning. A camera could arrive tomorrow if she paid extra.

She kept coming back to the same detail. Whoever had taken that photograph knew her name. At one forty-three, her phone vibrated again.

UNKNOWN: They leave every time.

Mina stopped breathing. The police had been gone less than an hour. Another image loaded. Her building entrance, photographed from across the street. The timestamp in the corner was current. Then:

UNKNOWN: See you at Hommachi.

Mina stared at the words. Her workplace. She called the police again. A different pair of officers came, searched the stairwell and walked the street before taking another statement. They told her a patrol would pass through the area. Without a suspect, there was little else they could do immediately. They took her seriously. One of them checked the stairwell again before they left. Mina watched the elevator numbers count down to the lobby and caught herself wishing they had forgotten something so they would have to come back.

At three in the morning, she was still awake. She searched home security services, personal alarms and private guards. A sponsored result appeared between two security companies.

BEST HOME PROTECTION COMPANIONS. OSAKA DELIVERY AVAILABLE.

Mina scrolled past the result, stopped, then went back. Aurelia Companion Group’s website opened in cream, gold and expensive-looking men. The page asked what kind of relationship she wanted with her companion. Domestic. Social. Protection. Intimacy. Full service. Mina chose protection. The first result cost ¥14,800,000. She checked the number twice.

- Absolutely not.

The next cost more. Even the lowest tier was several million yen. Mina opened one profile out of morbid curiosity. It listed height, spoken languages, cooking proficiency, driving certification, pheromone intensity, protection training, preferred feeding frequency and breeding line. There were reviews. One owner praised his curry and complained that his tail knocked things off shelves when excited. Another gave four stars because the advertised reserved temperament had turned out to mean two weeks of being ignored after bonding.

Mina rubbed her eyes. Humans had taken a species capable of dreamwalking and turned them into commodities. After a few minutes, the vocabulary on the site had started sounding normal, which bothered her more: model, unit, owner, warranty, exchange. She closed it. A scraping sound came from the door. Mina froze. Metal against metal. The handle moved. Not enough to open. Just enough to test.

- Who is it?

Silence. The handle eased back into place. Footsteps retreated. The corridor was empty again. After they left, sleep stopped being possible. Mina opened her laptop and searched for alternatives she could actually afford: incubus rehoming Osaka, surrendered protection companion, secondhand incubus. Every forum she opened seemed to have some version of the same answer: don’t.

One user wrote that the cheap listings were where old bonds and injuries nobody wanted to pay for tended to end up. Another said defective could mean almost anything a seller found inconvenient. A reply farther down read: You’re not buying defective electronics. Half the time “defective” means injured, abandoned, badly bonded, or unwilling to behave the way the first owner wanted. Mina stopped scrolling.

One discussion sent her to a small rescue directory. She clicked through three dead links before a surviving profile dumped her onto an old message board full of arguments about private brokers and unwanted incubi. Mina was halfway down the thread when she noticed a reply posted that night. If you need protection and don’t care about paperwork, old mirror still works. Token in filename.

The username was a string of numbers and the account had no other posts. Mina frowned at the timestamp. It bothered her. She opened the attached screenshot anyway. The seller details had been blurred, but the filename contained a long string of characters. An older comment mentioned a dead domain called Mirror Market. Mina found a cached version, added the string from the filename when the page asked for an access token, and clicked through a browser warning that explicitly told her not to continue. A black page loaded. No logo. No company name.

UNBONDED.

ABANDONED.

INJURED.

AGGRESSIVE.

FAILED RETURN.

UNREGISTERED.

Photographs loaded beneath the categories. One incubus had only one horn. Another listing mentioned surgically removed wings. A third warned that the previous master was deceased and separation aggression remained severe. Mina’s cursor hovered near the back button. Then she noticed the prices. They were still expensive, but they were much, much cheaper. She filtered for protection ability. Four results appeared. The first had no photograph. The second used the phrase docile after correction, and Mina closed it immediately. The third warned of uncontrolled feeding.

The fourth made her shiver. Warehouse lighting washed most of the colour out of the photograph. A man sat sideways on a metal chair with his hands hidden behind him, shoulders pulled back at an angle that made Mina think of restraints. Long black hair covered one eye. The other was muted gold and fixed on someone outside the frame with such open hostility that she stopped there for a second. Only then did she register how beautiful he was.

LOT 71-K.

Grade D / DEFECTIVE.

Protection capacity: HIGH.

Temperament: HOSTILE.

Feeding compliance: POOR.

Bonding compatibility: FAILED.

Prior ownership: REDACTED.

Registration status: INVALID.

Return eligibility: NONE.

Price: ¥180,000.

Mina checked her bank balance and did the subtraction twice. Rent was due in ten days. Payday was next week. She could spend ¥180,000 and still make rent, technically. Her savings afterward would be thin enough that she would notice every grocery run for the rest of the month. She closed the listing. Her phone vibrated.

UNKNOWN NUMBER.

A photograph loaded. It showed her building from across the street. Most of the windows were dark. One on the sixth floor was lit.

Hers.

UNKNOWN: Third window from the left.

Mina crossed the room and pulled the curtains shut.

The corridor outside remained silent. Somehow that was worse. Mina checked the peephole anyway. Empty. She checked the time next. Morning kept getting closer.

She opened the laptop again. Lot 71-K stared past the camera. HOSTILE. POOR feeding. FAILED bonding. Suitable for experienced owners only. Every line made the idea worse. Mina kept reading.

She read the last message she received again. Mina opened Yui’s chat. She did not type anything this time. After a few seconds she went back to the listing and clicked BUY. A confirmation box appeared.

ALL SALES FINAL.

BUYER ASSUMES LIABILITY AFTER DELIVERY.

NO REFUNDS AFTER BONDING.

CONFIRM PURCHASE?

Her hand hovered over the trackpad.

“This is insane.”

She read the price one more time, looked toward the closed curtains, and pressed CONFIRM.