## **Translation**

Touma noticed the headache before he noticed the boy.

It was already blooming behind his eyes, adding extra edges to everything. The lights in the old transit station were too sharp. The vending machine hummed too loudly, a thin electric sound that seemed to come from somewhere inside his teeth.

That was the first warning.

The second was the sudden certainty that he should not look to his left.

Touma kept walking.

He was used to trouble. Trouble outside his skull could usually be outrun, provided you recognized it early and didn’t waste time being curious. Trouble inside his skull had a way of keeping pace.

He looked left.

Beside a service gate, a man in a gray coat had one hand around a boy’s wrist. His other hand was inside his coat.

Nothing about him looked hurried. He held the wrist as if it were a ticket he had already checked, as if the only thing left was to put the passenger where he belonged.

The boy was small for a teenager. A school bag hung from one shoulder, its strap twisted against his collar. He wasn’t pulling away. He wasn’t saying anything.

His face had gone blank with terror.

People passed them. A woman studied the departure board. Someone beside the vending machine bent over a phone. There was enough room around the man and the boy for everyone to pretend they hadn’t seen.

Touma knew that look.

He couldn’t have said where he knew it from. The knowledge arrived without a picture, without a name: only the certainty that there was a point beyond fear where you stopped expecting anyone to help.

It was not gallantry. It was recognition.

He was tired. He had no wish to find out what the man was keeping inside his coat.

He crossed the distance anyway.

Six steps.

“Hey.”

The man turned his head.

For an instant, Touma caught what lay behind the expression—not words exactly, but their shape, their direction.

*Keep moving. Keep the kid quiet. Finish the handoff.*

The thought was narrow and practical. It left no room for the boy to be anything except something that had to be delivered.

Touma found its edge.

He had never found a good word for what he did next. *Unthink* was the nearest.

It felt like setting a paperknife to the edge of a thought.

Not cutting into the man. Not striking him. Just slipping something thin beneath the intention and lifting.

A sharp pressure drove through Touma’s skull, like a pin pushed through the inside of the world.

The man’s fingers opened.

The boy stumbled backward. His bag slipped down his arm, and he caught it clumsily against his chest.

Without the grip joining them, the whole arrangement came apart. The man’s hand hung empty. His shoulders tipped toward the service gate, his body suddenly keeping a private appointment with gravity.

For half a second, Touma felt relief.

The boy was free. That was enough. It could be enough.

Then the second half arrived.

Something hiccupped in Touma’s memory.

He looked at the boy and knew that a moment earlier, there had been something to know.

Not his name. Something before a name. The shape of a familiarity, the reason those frightened eyes had stopped him when so many other things had not.

He reached for it.

There was nothing there.

The boy stared back, still clutching his school bag.

Touma could see the terror. He could understand it.

He could no longer recognize it.

The absence was clean and quiet.

That was the cruelty of it.