I almost didn’t tell her.
That’s the ugly truth. I stood in the hospital corridor at nine in the morning, holding two cold cans of coffee and a head full of Reina’s voice, and I thought: Just keep it to yourself. Handle it. Mio’s been through enough. Why drag her into this?
It was the same reflex I’d had my whole life. Lie for their own good. Carry it alone. Don’t let anyone see you bleed.
And then I thought about a photograph with a scratched-out face, and a girl who’d spent three years holding a dead man’s name in a notebook because everyone around her kept deciding what she could handle.
Fuck that.
“Mio.”
She looked up from the bench, where she’d been reading a star chart with an onigiri halfway to her mouth. “Hm?”
“I need to tell you something. All of it. And you need to not let me edit it.”
She lowered the onigiri slowly.
“Okay,” she said.
I told her about the dinner. The old nanny. The hollow, glittering charm. The tilted head and the wide smile and the tie.
I told her about the offer.
No cost. No holes. No Mio.
When I got to that last part, Mio went very still. Not scared. Calculating. I watched her take it in, turn it over, and follow it to the bottom, and I watched her face go from pale to white.
“She doesn’t mean it can’t cost anything,” she said quietly. “She means it can’t cost you.”
“What?”
“The cost has to go somewhere. Jin said that. If Reina isn’t paying, someone is.” Her voice was calm in a way that scared me more than shouting. “She’d need someone to press the button.”
I frowned. “I don’t...”
“Think about it, Ren. The old woman. The nanny. She loves Reina. She’d do anything for her. If Reina handed her the phone and said, just press this for me, please, she’d do it. And it would take her memories. Not Reina’s.”
The corridor went very, very quiet.
“A vessel,” Mio said. “That’s what she’s offering you. A person who loves you enough to pay in your place.”
“I’d never...”
“She knows that. That’s why she chose this.” Mio’s mouth twisted. “She isn’t offering you a loophole. She’s offering me.”
The floor tilted.
No cost. No holes. No Mio.
Because Mio would be the cost.
I felt sick. I felt like I’d been punched in the sternum with a brick.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“Ren.”
“No. Never. I’d rather lose every memory I have, I’d rather lose myself, than...”
“I’d do it.”
I stared at her.
She was looking at me with those huge, steady, terrible eyes. Not crying. Not trembling. Just certain, the way you are about the one thing you’ve known your whole life.
“If it kept you whole,” she said. “If it meant you got to keep your mother, and your sister, and your own name. I’d press it a hundred times.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s a horrible truth!” I was shouting. A nurse glanced over. I didn’t care. “Do you understand what she’s asking? She wants me to turn you into a, a battery. To use you up. To watch you forget your own brother so I don’t have to forget a goddamn sandwich!”
“I’d be choosing it.”
“That doesn’t make it okay!”
“Then what’s the alternative?” Her voice cracked at last. “You keep using it. You keep losing pieces. You keep forgetting, and I keep standing next to you, remembering for both of us, until there’s nothing left and I’m the only one who knows you existed. Again.”
She was crying now.
“I can’t do that twice, Ren. I can’t. I’d rather give you everything I have.”
I crossed the space between us in two steps, dropped to my knees in front of the bench, and took her hands.
They were ice cold.
“Listen to me,” I said, low and fierce. “I’m not going to do it. Not ever. Not if she begs. Not if I’m dying. Not if you ask me. You hear me?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the one person in this fucked-up world who doesn’t pay for my life.” My voice shook. “Everybody else does. My mom with her back. Yui with her nightmares. Takumi with his stupid ramen. You, you, have already paid the most. You paid with your brother. I’m not taking another thing from you.”
Her breath hitched.
“So I’ll do it the hard way,” I said. “I’ll lose what I lose. But I’ll choose what I spend. And I’ll never let you press that button for me.”
Mio stared at me for a long, long moment.
Then she pulled her hands out of mine, wrapped them around my neck, and hugged me so hard I nearly toppled backward.
“You idiot,” she whispered into my collar. “You idiot.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Probably.”
“Don’t.”
“I’ll try.”
She laughed into my shoulder, wet and shaky and furious. “That’s not a promise.”
“I’m bad at promises.”
“I know.”
We made a deal, in the end.
I’d go to Reina. Just once. Not to accept. To listen. If Jin was right, and she was the key to everything, I had to know what I was up against. And if there was any chance, any thread at all, that the cost could go somewhere that didn’t eat people I loved, I needed to hear it from her mouth.
Mio hated it. She didn’t say so. She just walked me to the elevator, pressed something small into my palm, and closed my fingers over it.
A silver star.
Her silver star. The twin to mine.
“So you remember where you left it,” she said, trying for a joke. Her voice wobbled. “If you don’t text me in thirty minutes, I’m calling Jin. And then the police. And then probably the Self-Defense Forces.”
“That seems proportionate.”
“Ren.”
“Yeah?”
“Come back and tell me everything.” Her eyes were bright. “No editing.”
“No editing.”
The elevator doors slid shut. I stood alone with two stars in my fist, one in each hand, and thought:
If I lose this, I lose her.
So don’t lose it.
Reina’s atelier was a glass house.
I don’t mean that metaphorically, though God knows it was one. It was a literal greenhouse, tucked in a side street in Aoyama, hidden behind a bamboo fence. Inside, hundreds of white orchids hung from the rafters. A narrow table sat at the center, set for two. Warm light filtered down through the glass.
Reina sat at the head of it, in a cream-colored dress, pouring tea.
“You came,” she said. “I’m so glad.”
“I came to listen.”
“Of course. Sit.”
I stayed standing.
She smiled. That warm, devastating, millimeter-too-wide smile. “As you like.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“The vessel?” She set down the pot. “It’s simple. The app doesn’t care who presses the button. It only cares who does. The cost lands on whoever taps Reset. The one who holds the phone.”
“So you hand them yours.”
“I hand them mine. I tell them what to write. They tap. They pay.” She said it calmly, the way you’d explain a recipe. “I stay whole.”
“And they forget things.”
“A little. Mostly small things.” She tilted her head. “I’m very careful. I rotate. I spread it among people who love me. A little here, a little there. Nobody ever notices.”
“Tomie noticed.”
For the first time, something flickered across Reina’s face.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Tomie noticed.”
“She couldn’t remember your name.”
“I know. It was a miscalculation.” She lowered her eyes. “She’s been with me since I was a baby. She’s the only person I’ve ever fully trusted. I used her too much. I’m trying to be more careful.”
“Careful.”
“She agreed,” Reina said sharply. “Every year, she signs the paper. She knows what it costs. She wants to help me.”
“Does she remember signing it?”
Silence.
Reina’s lips pressed together. Her hands, folded on the table, tightened until the knuckles blanched.
“That,” she said at last, “is the cost of love.”
Something cold and heavy dropped through my stomach.
I’d come in half-expecting a villain. A monster. A person I could hate. But the thing sitting across from me wasn’t a monster. She was a woman who’d convinced herself that the people who loved her wanted to be eaten.
And the horrible part was, she might be right.
“You want me to find a vessel,” I said slowly. “Someone who’d press the button for me. Someone who loves me enough.”
“I do.”
“You want me to use Mio.”
“I want you to give her the choice.” Reina leaned forward, eyes bright. “She’d say yes. You know she would. I’ve watched her. I’ve read her file. She’d spend every memory she has to keep you whole. Don’t you think that’s her right?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because love isn’t a resource.”
The words came out harder than I’d intended. They hung in the warm, orchid-heavy air like a challenge.
Reina studied me for a long time.
Then, slowly, she began to smile. Not the wide smile. A smaller one. Real. Almost sad.
“I thought you might say that,” she said.
“What?”
“I wasn’t offering. Not really.” She picked up her teacup. “I wanted to see what you’d do.”
“You tested me?”
“Jin’s been very careful about whom he trusts. I needed to know if you were the kind of person he could rely on. The kind who’d say no.” She sipped. “You are. Congratulations. You’ve just passed the only exam that matters.”
I stared at her. “You’re insane.”
“Probably.” Her smile widened. “But I’m also honest. Which is more than I can say for my brother.”
My blood went cold. “What does that mean?”
She set her cup down. Rose slowly. Walked around the table until she stood in front of me, close enough that I could smell jasmine and rain.
“He asked you to find out who’s paying for me,” she said softly. “Didn’t he?”
“...Yes.”
“Did he tell you how many resets he’s used?”
“Hundreds. Over four years.”
“Did he tell you how many memories he has left from his childhood?”
I opened my mouth.
I thought about the roof of the Kurose library. My mother’s name. I’ve never been able to say it since. I thought about the way Jin spoke about his own past, as though describing a house he’d once walked through in the dark.
A hole in my head exactly the shape of the word I’d use to call her.
“Almost none,” I said slowly. “He said he lost his mother’s name. That’s all.”
“That’s what he thinks.” Reina’s voice had gone very gentle. “Ask him how many of those hundreds were his.”
“What?”
“Ask him.” She patted my cheek, once, lightly, like a sister. “And then ask yourself why, in six years, I’ve never lost a single memory.”
She turned and walked toward the door. Paused, one hand on the glass.
“Do you know what the cruelest thing about love is, Ren?”
I couldn’t speak.
“It’s that the people who’d give the most are always the last to know they’re being used.”
She stepped out into the sunlight, and the door swung shut behind her.
I stood alone in the glass house for a very long time.
Orchids drifted above me in the still air. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Mio: 29 minutes. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t move.
In my left hand, a silver star. In my right, another.
Ask him how many of those hundreds were his.
Why would he be paying?
Who loves Reina the most?
Who would give her anything?
I thought of a boy of seventeen, standing in a hospital corridor with a phone glowing in his hand. A boy who’d saved his mother and lost her name. A boy who’d spent four years chasing the ghost of a friend, hollowed out by a debt he couldn’t explain.
A boy with a sister he’d never stopped protecting.
No.
No, it can’t be.
But in the back of my mind, a small, cold voice whispered the answer I’d been trying not to hear.
It’s not that someone’s paying for her.
It’s that someone’s been paying for her since the day she got the app.
And he’s been looking for the culprit in a mirror.