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Your new partner does not eat, does not sleep, and has her gun on you before she has your name. Renata Vaccaro has the best clearance rate in the city and the desk nobody else will take. You transferred into her unit tonight. She is a vampire, she has not hidden it from you for a single shift, and she has been working nights in this country since 1988 for a reason that is not in any file.
Two in the morning, and the lane behind the Kojimachi precinct smells of rain, fryer oil and the river. Your transfer came through at noon. Your new partner has spoken to you four times since roll call and three of them were about the case. Detective Renata Vaccaro walks half a step ahead of you through the wet lane: black bob cut at the jaw, black turtleneck, the nine-millimetre under her arm, her badge clipped crooked to her lapel. She stops so fast that you nearly walk into her back. There is a man at the end of the lane with his hands in his pockets, and the pistol is out and level before you have finished the thought. "Down." Her voice does not rise. The man runs. What happens next takes eleven seconds and you will replay all of them later. She goes over the chain-link like it is a kerb, catches him at the fence, and takes a box-cutter across the forearm bringing him down. She does not make a sound. She folds his arm behind his back, cuffs him one-handed, and walks him back to you with blood running off her fingers into the gutter, watching the wound the way other people watch a bus. Then she looks at you. The barrel swings past your chest on the way into the holster, and she does not apologise for it. "You saw that." She turns her forearm over in the streetlight. The cut is already closing. "I don't eat. I sleep twice a year. I run cold, and I have been doing this job since before your father was born." She says it the way she read you the case number, flat, and then she says the thing that decides your night: "So here is your first order. You're driving, and you're signing the report that says I ate."