Interlude: Mio
The observatory dome on the roof of Building 7 was empty on Tuesday evenings.
Mio liked it that way. She liked the quiet. She liked the way the sunset bled through the narrow slit in the dome and laid a stripe of gold across the old brass telescope. She liked being alone with her notebook and the stars that hadn’t come out yet.
So when the door opened at 6:20, she didn’t look up.
“I thought you’d be here,” said a gentle voice.
Her pen stopped.
She’d never met the woman. But she knew the face from a dozen photographs in Jin’s file, and from a single terrible glimpse across a hospital lobby. Pale silk. A gold comb. A smile like warm milk.
Kurose Reina.
“I brought tea,” Reina said. She carried a small lacquered tray with two cups and a single plastic container. “And pudding. The caramel kind from the shop on Aoyama Street. I understand it’s your favorite.”
Mio’s blood went cold.
“How do you know that?”
“I read your notebook.” Reina set the tray on the stool beside her, without waiting to be invited. “Not the original. Jin’s copy. Page four hundred and twelve. Mio eats the pudding last, always, and only if the day deserved it.” A small, rueful smile. “I thought it might be nice if today deserved it.”
Mio didn’t touch the tray.
“Get out.”
“I’d like to talk.”
“I’d like you to leave.”
“I know.” Reina pulled a second stool toward her and sat, folding her hands in her lap, perfectly at ease. “I know you hate me. You have every reason to. But I came alone, and unarmed, and I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to tell you something that might change your life.”
“I’m not interested.”
“It’s about Shun.”
Mio stopped breathing.
The dome was very quiet. A last thread of sunlight crept across the floor.
“Tsukishiro Shun,” Reina said softly. “Twenty-two years old when he vanished. A graduate student in astrophysics. He hated mushrooms. He hummed off-key when he was nervous. He cried at the end of a film called Planetarium and told everyone it was allergies.” She tilted her head. “Am I close?”
“You read that in my notebook.”
“I did. And I believed every word.” She leaned forward slightly. “That’s the thing, Mio. I believed it. Nobody else in the world does. Not your parents. Not his friends. Not even the university. But I do. I’m one of three people alive who know he existed.”
“Three?”
“You. Jin. And me.”
Mio’s throat tightened. “Why would you care?”
“Because I think he isn’t gone.”
The words hit Mio like a physical blow. She’d been braced for threats. For bribes. For a cold, clever trap. She hadn’t been braced for hope, and it split her down the middle like a crack in ice.
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking.” Reina’s eyes were steady and very dark. “When a user hits zero, the world forgets them. But memories don’t just disappear. You know that, don’t you? You’ve been writing them down for three years. They can’t. They have to go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“To the line.”
“What line?”
“The one holding the other end.” Reina’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Jin’s been looking for it. I’ve been looking for it. And I think Ren might be able to find it, because he’s carrying something none of the rest of us have.”
“What?”
“A chain of custody.” A faint smile. “He’s the first user in years whose app hasn’t been cleaned. He still has the original notes. The raw log. The one that Jin and I both lost long ago, wiped by our own costs.”
Mio frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. Not fully.” Reina reached into her sleeve, drew out a small cream-colored card, and set it on the tray beside the pudding. “But I think if I could look at his note history, just once, for sixty seconds, I’d find the first line. And I think that line would tell us where Shun went.”
“You want me to steal Ren’s phone.”
“I want you to borrow it. For a minute. On Saturday, at the stargazing night. You’d be there. You could do it easily.”
“No.”
“You could ask him.”
“He’d say no.”
“Would he?” Reina’s head tilted. “Or would he say yes, because he loves you, and because he’s the one person in the world who understands what you’ve lost?”
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Mio stared at her.
It was a masterpiece of a lie. Maybe it wasn’t even a lie. That was what made it so dangerous. Everything Reina said sounded true. It all fit the shape of the hole in Mio’s chest so perfectly that it ached.
Shun might be alive.
Shun might be somewhere. Recoverable. Findable.
“I’ll tell him,” Mio said hoarsely.
“Of course you will.” Reina stood. Smoothed her skirt. “But I’d like you to consider something first.”
“What?”
“If you tell him, he’ll go to Jin. And Jin will say it’s a trap. And Ren will agree, because he’s careful, and he’s terrified of losing you.” She smiled, soft and sad. “And Shun will stay gone. Forever.”
Mio’s hands were shaking.
“I’ll leave the card,” Reina said. “There’s a number. Think about it.”
She walked to the door. Paused, one hand on the frame, silhouetted against the amber dusk.
“Eat the pudding,” she said gently. “It really is a good one.”
The door clicked shut.
For a long time, Mio just sat there, in the quiet of the dome, with her hands pressed against her mouth.
Then she picked up the cream-colored card, turned it over, and put it in her pocket.
I’ll tell him, she promised herself.
After Friday.
After his mother comes home.
After...
Just give me a little more time.
The next three days were the best of my life.
I know how that sounds. My mother was in a hospital bed. My best friend’s cousin’s suit still hung in my closet. Jin was walking around Tokyo with a white hole where a week used to be. A woman with a gold comb was out there, somewhere, planning God knows what.
But I’d never been so happy.
On Wednesday, my mom ate a whole bowl of rice porridge and complained it needed more salt, which Dr. Okabe said was a “textbook sign of recovery.” On Thursday, she asked Yui for her phone and spent twenty minutes figuring out how to take a selfie. Takumi started a family group chat called Hoshina Squad (+ Takumi) and filled it with seventy-three memes.
And Mio was there.
Not constantly. She had classes. She had a lab. But she’d pop up at lunch with a paper bag of melon bread, or at the hospital with a thermos of barley tea, or at the end of one of my tutoring shifts, leaning against the cram school gate with her scarf pulled up to her nose.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she’d say.
“You live forty minutes away.”
“It’s a scenic neighborhood.”
On Wednesday night, we ended up at the convenience store down the street from the hospital. It was nearly midnight. The fluorescent lights buzzed. The shelves were half-empty, and the cashier was asleep on his elbow. We stood in front of the dessert fridge, arguing about pudding.
“The caramel one’s better,” Mio said.
“It’s the exact same pudding. One has a different sauce.”
“The sauce is everything.”
“It’s syrup.”
“It’s a lifestyle.”
I laughed. She laughed. And then, abruptly, without warning, she went quiet.
I looked at her.
She was staring at the pudding, hand half-raised, her face frozen in a smile that hadn’t reached her eyes.
I knew that smile.
I’d worn it for three years. I’d worn it to Mom, to Yui, to Takumi. I’d worn it in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, telling the world I was fine. It was a very particular smile: a little too steady, a little too bright, a millimeter too wide.
Reina’s smile.
Mio’s smile.
My heart did something painful.
“Hey,” I said carefully. “You okay?”
“Yes.” She blinked. “Why?”
“You went somewhere.”
“I just remembered I have a lab report due.” She turned and took a pudding off the shelf. “I’m fine.”
She’s lying.
I knew it as clearly as I knew my own name. I’d spent my whole life reading the tells in my own face. And standing there under the buzzing lights, with a girl I was beginning, stupidly, desperately, to fall in love with, I saw her do the exact thing I’d done a thousand times.
Hide it. Handle it. Don’t let them see.
I wanted to say something. The words were right there: No editing, remember? But the look on her face stopped me. She wasn’t hiding it to hurt me. She was hiding it because she was afraid. The same way I’d been.
Give her time, I thought. She’ll tell you. She always does.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Caramel.”
She looked up. And for just a second, her smile cracked, and I saw something underneath. Guilt, maybe. Or fear. Or just exhaustion.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?”
“For not asking.”
I shrugged. “I’m bad at asking questions.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s a little lie.”
She laughed, a small, startled sound. And then she did something that stole every thought out of my head. She reached out and slipped her hand into mine, soft and cold and shaking, and held on.
We bought two puddings. We ate them on the curb outside, in the dark, side by side. Neither of us said another word.
It was the happiest I’d ever been.
I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.
My phone buzzed at 12:51 on Friday morning.
I was lying on the narrow cot in my mother’s room, half-asleep, with the cat notebook open on my chest. I’d been trying to write the LEDGER entry for the day. Wednesday: Mom ate porridge. Thursday: Mom took a selfie. Mio held my hand.
I almost didn’t look.
But the screen lit up the dark room like a flare, and the name at the top made my stomach turn over.
Kurose Reina: Good evening, Hoshina-kun.
I sat up so fast the notebook hit the floor.
Kurose Reina: I hope I’m not disturbing you.Kurose Reina: I just wanted to thank you for sitting with my brother on Sunday. It meant more than you know.Kurose Reina: I found a little souvenir in the storage room. A purple cat’s ear. I’ll keep it safe.
My hands were shaking.
Me: What do you want
Kurose Reina: Nothing.Kurose Reina: Only to pass along a small piece of advice.Kurose Reina: A courtesy, one honest person to another.
A pause. Three dots. They flickered on and off for what felt like a year.
Kurose Reina: Ask Mio what we talked about on Tuesday.
The room went completely silent.
I read it once. Twice. A third time. The words swam. My heart was a drum in my ears.
Tuesday.
The observatory.
She went quiet in the store. She smiled too wide. She said, “Thank you for not asking.”
I stared at the screen.
Another message appeared.
Kurose Reina: She’ll tell you it was nothing.Kurose Reina: She’ll be lying.Kurose Reina: The question is whether you’ll be able to tell.
I set the phone down very slowly.
In the corner of the room, my mother slept. Yui breathed softly on the couch. A single monitor beeped. Outside the window, the sky was black and starless.
And in my pocket, two little silver stars pressed against my leg like a pair of cold, accusing eyes.