[POV: Yoji]

  After that, everything moved at the speed of real life.

  Kikurin said, “I remember his face. And the place he’s tied to.”

  I didn’t think she meant it metaphorically. If the water inside her had recorded the man’s “history,” forgetting would’ve been the unnatural part.

  I called the police.

  At first, they brushed me off. But then Kikurin—shaking, crying—told them what she’d seen. Professor Yoda explained just enough, carefully sanding down the edges of the impossible. And more than anything, the lead was concrete. An address. A route. A pattern.

  A few days later they caught the man in a delirious state.

  The face on the news footage looked like the outline we’d seen through steam. His eyes refused to focus on anything. His mouth spat out words that didn’t connect. He wore the expression of someone being chased.

  Then came the follow-up report:

  They found a little girl’s body under the floor of his house.

  When I heard that, nausea punched up from my gut. My stomach went cold. My throat locked. Kikurin sobbed until her voice broke. When I called the professor, he went silent.

  No one wore a victory face.

  It wasn’t even about whether revenge was “right.” It was the terror of the fact that the rightness had become reality.

  Mama had said she figured it out after she died—meaning a dead person had brought back information the living couldn’t have known. If that was true… then maybe the border really had thinned. Maybe we’d peeled it open.

  Which is why we blurred the video.

  The case was too real. Too sharp. The speed at which someone’s misery became “content” was nauseating. Online, blessing and condemnation were thrown with the same heat—and both turned into numbers. And numbers were a grinder. They would have ground that girl’s death into views.

  Kikurin agonized, then uploaded a heavily obscured version. White haze. Audio buried in noise. Careful commentary. At the end, she prayed for Mama and the child.

  No jokes. No usual high-energy persona.

  Her voice was quiet. The shadows under her eyes were darker than makeup. She looked like someone who’d cried herself hollow.

  The view count still climbed.

  Watching it climb made my skin crawl.

  People in the comments wrote things like:

  “This is insane.”

  “Actual proof.”

  “Respect for handling it seriously.”

  “More, please.”

  More, please.

  That was the problem. The phenomenon didn’t care what kind of attention it got. It only cared that it got it.

  After the upload, the professor’s “ear” stopped responding.

  It wasn’t a clean shutdown, like flipping a breaker. It was more like something on the other side had turned away.

  Yoda stared at the silent waveform for a long time, then muttered:

  “…It didn’t stop. It closed.”

  “Closed?” I asked.

  “We thought we were the ones stopping it. But perhaps the other side decided, ‘Enough.’” He swallowed. “We aligned too perfectly. Which means… we slipped.”

  Slipped.

  That word stabbed me again.

  I found myself staring at the ice fragment left on the desk. The faint hexagonal pattern still shimmered on it.

  If memory could crystallize… did it still remain here?

  That voice. That fog. The texture of revenge when it finally becomes real.

  A thought rose, ugly and bright:

  If we started it again… would it connect again?

  And if it connected—what would slide through this time?

  The worst part was this:

  Some small piece of me wanted to know.

  After the incident, time moved on wearing the face of “nothing happened.”

  The news cycled to the next story. Kikurin’s video got consumed as “that crazy haunted episode,” and the comment section’s heat flowed to a different fire.

  But inside me, the fog from Yoda’s office—the screams, the wet static—stayed damp. At night, when I poured water into a glass, I’d swear a thin white film stretched over the surface.

  A trick of light. Condensation. I knew that.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  And still, every time my fingertips got wet, my thoughts started to slide.

  Kikurin changed a little after the case. She laughed and said her psychic sense had “leveled up.”

  Maybe she’d been changing the whole time. The difference was that now it was obvious.

  I started skipping research to help her—manager work, basically.

  The TV world was faster and duller than I’d imagined.

  Fast, in how quickly it moved: pitch approved, location booked, script distributed, shoot finished. Blink and it was over. A director I’d met exactly once slapped a schedule onto my clipboard and said, "We’re losing light. Move." A sponsor rep called during setup to ask if Kikurin could say the product name "more naturally," like grief had a preferred cadence.

  Dull, in how it filed everything down to fit the runtime. Fear and grief got rounded into broadcast-friendly shapes. Someone’s tears became a beat before commercials. When a crew member whispered, "Cut, cut," the room exhaled and reset like nothing had happened. Even the haunted locations were treated like props: mark your tape, hit your line, scream on cue. Only afterward, in the van, did anyone admit their hands were shaking.

  And somehow, Kikurin could breathe there.

  She’d always dominated a room, turning laughter into gravity, turning a scream into everyone’s gaze. She rolled the audience’s emotions in her palm like dice.

  But after the incident, something else had been added. Weight.

  Her words hit harder. Her instincts were too accurate. The second she stepped into a location, she’d point out what no one else had noticed yet.

  “That spot’s wet,” she said at an abandoned school. She pointed with two fingers like she was drawing a boundary line. “Don’t touch it. Chat’ll clip you for dying.”

  Nobody believed her. Then minutes later, water dripped from the ceiling corner, hit the equipment, and one unit died with a pop.

  Coincidence, you could say.

  But coincidence stacking on coincidence makes laughter thin.

  On another shoot—an old hospital site—she stared down a dark corridor and said, flatly:

  “Someone’s calling. There’s a white kid.”

  The crew rustled. Cameras swung. Lights shook. Viewers would love it. It looked like a planned beat.

  But what they found wasn’t a ghost.

  It was a small stray cat—white fur filthy, body trembling with fear.

  Kikurin scooped it up and stroked it with hands that were suddenly gentle.

  “You were scared, huh.”

  Her voice when she said it was low. Too low.

  I heard it through the monitor and felt my spine go cold. I couldn’t swear it wasn’t Kikurin.

  But there was something in it—soft, wet kindness, like a mother speaking to a child.

  The show still worked. If anything, it worked better. Kikurin’s value rose as “someone who can really see.” The internet screamed real. Antis screamed staged. Both became numbers.

  And once it became numbers, the phenomenon felt like it strengthened on its own—as if attention itself made the border thinner.

  In the end, I quit grad school.

  It wasn’t that I “chose” to throw research away. I simply couldn’t sit under fluorescent lights and pretend I was fine, writing equations like the world was intact. That device had peeled back the edge of my worldview.

  Cold air slipped in through the peeled seam. Returning to my old life just meant living in constant chill.

  I told my advisor, “I’m going into video work.”

  Half truth. Half lie.

  What I actually wanted wasn’t “video work.” I wanted to make films. I wanted to be a director—the dream I’d carried in high school, then buried under excuses. I wanted to pick it up again without apologizing for it.

  And, realistically, I thought staying near Kikurin would be safer.

  The irony is obvious. Believing you’re safest closest to danger is proof your senses are already warped.

  I became Kikurin’s manager—and her boyfriend.

  Paperwork. Scheduling. Shoot logistics. Sponsor calls. Travel planning.

  The busyness did save me in one way: it left less time to think.

  But inside that busyness, I kept seeing her… slip.

  Her laughter would cut off mid-burst, then restart in a different way. Her gaze would drift out of focus, and she’d nod like she was answering someone who wasn’t there. She washed her hands more. Drank water constantly.

  Water. Memory. Infection.

  Yoda’s words replayed at the edge of my mind.

  One night, on the drive back from a shoot, Kikurin said suddenly, “Hey. There’s a kid I want to see.”

  She was in the passenger seat, watching the city lights smear across the window. Her profile was rigid under passing headlights. The line landed without her usual joking cushion.

  I kept my hands on the wheel and met her eyes in the mirror. For once, her fear wasn’t dressed up.

  “Who?”

  She exhaled and opened her phone.

  A memo app. An address.

  I didn’t know where she’d gotten it.

  But the moment I saw it, something cold dropped into my chest like a stone.

  “Back at that inn in Tohoku,” she said. “Remember that couple we saw?”

  I remembered instantly—the near-empty lobby, the wood stove, the white darkness beyond the windows. A young couple that felt slightly out of place. The man looked exhausted, sharp-eyed. The woman seemed gentle, but shadowed.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Their… kid.”

  The word kid sounded damp in her mouth.

  “Why do you want to see her?”

  Kikurin tried to smile. The smile collapsed halfway.

  “I don’t know. I just… feel like I have to.”

  “Okay,” I said, even while dread crawled up my ribs.

  The next day we drove to the address. We parked in a coin lot and walked into a residential neighborhood.

  There was a small park.

  Pull-up bars with chipped paint. A slide warmed by the last sun. A sandbox with half-buried plastic shovels. Swings that creaked in a slow, patient rhythm. Late-afternoon light slanted down, stretching long shadows from the playground equipment. Someone had drawn hopscotch squares in pale chalk on the asphalt. A wisteria trellis near the path carried a faint sweet smell, out of place in the cold air. Dinner scents drifted from nearby houses: soy, grilled fish, something buttery. Children laughed, and the sound should have been enough to make me relax.

  Ordinary. Gentle. A place where nothing should happen.

  And yet my chest wouldn’t settle.

  Near the swings stood a young mother and father.

  I knew them. No doubt. The same couple from the inn. The man was tall, eyes sharp. The woman still had that softness—and that faint darkness.

  Between them was a little girl.

  Black hair. Red cheeks. Running, grabbing sand, laughing. She looked normal.

  But I saw it.

  The moment she grabbed the swing’s chain, her fingertips seemed to turn translucent—just for an instant, white and thin, like light passing through ice.

  My brain offered an explanation: sunset glare. Reflection.

  My gut rejected it.

  That whiteness looked like the white shape I’d seen in the steam.

  Kikurin stopped in front of a wisteria trellis. Her shoulders jolted like her breath had caught.

  Then tears started spilling down her cheeks.

  No warning. No buildup. Just silent, steady drops—down her face, off her chin, dotting the asphalt.

  “…Thank god,” she whispered.

  Her voice was low.

  And in that moment, certainty locked into place:

  There was still something inside her.

  The voice that had connected in Yoda’s office. The presence that had laughed in the fog. The infection of recorded water hadn’t fully broken.

  So I asked, carefully—like words could cut you.

  “…Is Mama still inside you?”

  The instant I said it, the air turned cold.

  It felt like the wind stopped. The children’s voices went distant. The swing’s creak lagged, like the whole world’s timing slipped by half a beat.

  Kikurin straightened and looked at me.

  She smiled.

  Not her usual bright, careless grin. Only her mouth lifted. Her eyes didn’t.

  A smile like thin ice right before it breaks.

  “Who knows?” she said.

  It was Kikurin’s voice.

  And yet, behind it, I could almost hear another voice layered underneath—husky, kind, and mean in the way only a loving predator can be.

  I remembered the snow in that lab.

  And I realized the border hadn’t thickened.

  It was just waiting.

  (FIN)