Mio looked away too quickly.

It wasn’t just the fact that people might see her now, Touma realized. It was what they would do in their heads the second after they saw her—the rush to file her under an anomaly, a symptom, or a system error before she had the chance to simply be a person standing in a room.

"So you're just... public now?" Touma asked, his voice snagging on the quiet hum of the cheap air conditioner. "Like, normal?"

"Not normal," Mio said, her mouth twisting into something sharp and defensive. "Just public. Please don't phrase it like they removed my nervous system."

By the bedroom doorway, Nico shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He had the look of a guy who had signed up for logistics and safe-house routing, not whatever fragile, raw thing was happening in the four feet of space between the futon and the desk. Decent enough not to stare, and clearly out of his depth, Nico muttered something about checking the hallway perimeter and stepped toward the door.

Touma half-raised a hand to stop him, then let it drop. Nico slipped out, pulling the door mostly shut behind him. Without the buffer of a third person, the cheap bedroom seemed to shrink by half. The quiet left behind after their jokes felt suddenly thin and dangerous.

Touma rubbed the back of his neck, desperate to offer some kind of useful, ordinary humanness without overstepping. He gestured clumsily toward the desk. "Do you want to sit down?"

"Are you asking because you think I'm tired," Mio said, eyeing the cheap office chair, "or because I'm making you nervous standing here like a haunted projector?"

"Both," Touma admitted. "Mostly the first one."

She hesitated, then crossed the short stretch of floor and lowered herself onto the chair.

The springs gave a loud, rusted squeak under her weight.

A wave of disproportionate relief washed through Touma's chest. The chair held her. The furniture didn't reject her. The mundane physical world was actually making space for her.

Mio caught him staring and scowled. "Don't make that face."

"What face?"

"That face." She looked away again, her shoulders drawing in slightly. Now that she had an actual face to hide behind, her fear looked a lot like embarrassment. It sat right underneath her sarcasm, close enough to the surface that Touma felt a protective tightness pull at his chest.

"Can you eat?" he asked suddenly, then winced at his own bluntness.

She blinked at him, looking down at her own hands resting on her knees. There were a hundred body-shaped unknowns waiting for them—gravity, hunger, nerves, limits neither of them had a manual for. Touma felt a sudden, sharp urge to reach out from the edge of the futon and take her hand. He stopped himself mid-motion, curling his fingers back against his own knee.

Mio’s eyes tracked the aborted movement. "You were going to ask before," she said quietly. "When Nico was leaving."

Touma swallowed. "I was going to ask if it hurt."

For a fraction of a second, the air around her—and the corner of the room itself—did a weird, half-glitch thing, the geometry straining as if the space were trying too hard to hold a shape that made logical sense. On her knee, her right index finger gave an involuntary twitch.

"Sometimes," she admitted, barely audible. "When I try too hard to hold a shape that makes sense."

Touma nodded once, keeping his voice steady and matter-of-fact. "Okay. Ground rules, then. No surprise touching. And you tell me if something hurts."

"I don't want to be a problem," she said, staring at the grain of the cheap desk.

"People are problems," Touma said. "That's just how being human works. You're allowed to take up space in the room, Mio. And if you say something is wrong, I will listen."

She looked up at him, searching his face for the performance in it, waiting for the catch. When she didn't find one, something in her posture softened by a millimeter. It wasn't trust yet—she didn't know how to do that in a body that felt borrowed from the air—but he could see her beginning to want to believe it was possible.

"Yes," Touma said quietly, answering the question she hadn't spoken aloud, careful not to dress it up in false comfort. "I'll listen."

The bedroom door swung open without a knock.

A support tech stood on the threshold, a clipboard wedged under one arm and a half-eaten energy bar in his hand. He took one steps inside, looked past Touma, and froze.

His eyes locked onto Mio in the desk chair. It wasn't the reaction of someone spotting an intruder; it was the expression of someone stumbling onto the wrong kind of miracle—something bizarre, unsanctioned, and immediately worth telling three other people about over coffee.

"Wait," the tech breathed, his gaze darting between Touma and the chair. "Who is that?"

Mio went perfectly, terribly still. Every ounce of nervous energy vanished, replaced by the rigid posture of an specimen caught under glass.

Touma stood up from the futon too fast, stepping directly into the tech's line of sight. "Not your business."

On the chair behind him, Mio's breath hitched. Embarrassment and fear arrived together in the cramped room, thick and suffocating. They could both see the shift in the tech's eyes—the exact second the surprise hardened into recognition, into gossip, into a social story he was already building in his head to explain an anomaly that shouldn't exist.

"Get out," Touma said, his voice dropping an octave. "Leave."

The tech blinked, muttered a half-formed excuse, and backed out into the hallway, pulling the door shut with a hollow click.

Silence dropped back over the room, heavier and uglier than before. The privacy hadn't just broken; it felt permanently false now.

"That was public," Mio said. Her voice was flat, stripped of its earlier bite, vibrating with a raw, visible humiliation. "So much for a dramatic reveal."

"I'm sorry," Touma said, his stomach knotting with dread. Too many eyes. It was already too late to keep rumors from starting in the building.

"What do we do when people start asking?" she asked, her hands gripping the edges of the chair seat.

"We lie," Touma said instantly, a weird mix of disgust at the world and fierce affection for her sharpening his voice. "We tell them whatever keeps them out of this room."

Mio stood up slowly. Her hands were trembling, her chin tilted up in a sudden, fierce flare of defiance against the door, the tech, and everyone waiting on the other side of the walls.

"If I am going to be seen," she said, every word deliberate and sharp, "I refuse to be seen as a mistake."

Touma looked straight at her. He didn't blink, and he didn't look away.

"You are not a mistake," he said.

The sincerity in his voice was almost dangerous in a room this small. Mio stared at him for a beat, and then a small, shaky laugh escaped her throat. It didn't cancel out the fear—her shoulders were still tight, the humiliation of the doorway still fresh in the air—but for one fragile second, the warmth between them made the room bearable.

Then came the sound from the wall.

It wasn't footsteps in the hallway, and it wasn't a hand on the doorknob. It was a soft, dry scraping just outside the bedroom, moving slowly along the drywall near the door.

It sounded distinctly like a single fingertip dragging along the other side of the wall.

Touma froze. A faint, invisible pressure seemed to bow the plaster inward, as if something immense had heard them and was leaning closer, pressing its ear against the partition to classify what was inside. At the base of Touma's neck, his limiter gave a sudden, colder pulse—not a malfunction, but a warning.

Mio’s eyes widened, the brief warmth evaporating as she looked toward the bowing plaster.

"Touma," she whispered, her voice barely moving the air between them. "Don't let the system decide what I am."

From the other side of the wall, the presence answered with a slower, deeper scrape.