## **Translation**

Touma woke to find Mio standing in the corner.

Not her voice. Not the familiar pressure of someone listening from a place he couldn’t point to. Not a private comment arriving before he’d decided whether he wanted company.

Her.

In the corner.

He stared.

Mio looked back at him, then inspected the ceiling, the door, and the narrow space behind the broken lamp, as though the room might be hiding teeth.

“You can’t be there,” he said.

“I’m getting very tired of that argument.”

“I’m not making an argument.”

“Then you’re doing a poor job of describing what’s in front of you.”

The ceiling was still the same suspicious beige. The carpet still belonged to a rental cheap enough to make him reluctant to put his bare feet on it. The room smelled of dust, instant coffee, and disinfectant that had lost a long fight.

None of those things helped.

Yesterday, the safehouse had been a place where he could shut a door around what was wrong with his life. Now what was wrong with his life stood beside the lamp and looked offended by the accommodation.

“Stop staring,” Mio said.

“I’m trying to work out whether you’ll disappear.”

“Is staring part of the process?”

“I thought blinking might be.”

He tried it.

She was still there when he opened his eyes.

Of course she was.

His face felt hot. He couldn’t have said exactly why. She had already been present for enough of his life that embarrassment ought to have become redundant. But there had been a difference between knowing she was there and waking up to find someone looking back.

There had been a safe layer between the strange thing and the rest of the world.

Apparently, that was gone.

He reached for the blanket.

His hand passed through her knee.

Touma jerked back.

Mio recoiled a fraction later. The delay was small, but he saw it: his movement, her response, the room failing to make them happen together.

“Warn me before you do that.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

He held his hand against his chest. Nothing had happened to it. No cold, no resistance, no pain. That somehow made the memory of where it had been harder to bear.

“Can you feel anything?”

Mio looked at him.

“Physically or emotionally?”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. It was a broad question.”

He pulled the blanket into his lap, carefully this time.

“Could you stop acting like a person who understands me too well?”

“That was always the case.”

“Yes, but you’re doing it where I can see you now.”

Her mouth tightened. He couldn’t tell whether she was holding back an answer or deciding not to give him one.

That was new, too.

Not the possibility that she might be annoyed with him. He had plenty of experience with that. It was having to watch her decide what to do with it.

Memory began to return in pieces. The procedure. The limiter. Explanations that had sounded almost manageable while someone else was giving them. None of them had prepared him for Mio standing in a cheap room, apparently uncertain where to put her hands.

She folded them, then let them fall.

Her shoulders tightened at a sound beyond the door.

Before she answered his next unfinished question, she took a breath.

He didn’t know whether she needed to breathe. He didn’t know whether any of those movements meant what they would have meant in someone else.

But she looked more alive than she ever had as a voice.

And now he could see that she was afraid.

He looked away.

That felt worse than staring.

Touma got off the futon and began pacing the strip of floor between it and the kitchenette counter. There wasn’t enough space to do it properly. Three steps, turn, three steps back.

Every turn brought him around toward Mio.

He tried looking at the counter. At the sink. At the broken lamp, which was at least a problem he understood.

His attention kept returning to her.

His body had accepted something his mind was still trying to negotiate. It treated her as the center of the room. He left space for her when he passed. He checked her expression before speaking. When she watched him, he felt watched in a place on his skin rather than somewhere inside his head.

This wasn’t a tactical problem.

He could have done something with a tactical problem.

This was the problem of another person being in the room while he was still trying to work out how to exist in it.

The door opened.

Touma stopped.

Nico stood in the doorway, one hand still on the handle. His gaze moved from Touma to Mio and stayed there a little too long.

“You’re both awake.”

He said it with the deliberate calm of someone placing a full cup on an unsteady table.

Touma looked at him.

“You knew she could do that?”

“No.”

Too fast.

Nico seemed to hear it himself. He adjusted his grip on the handle.

“Not like this.”

Mio’s expression sharpened.

“That’s a useful distinction.”

“I’m trying to be precise.”

“Try harder.”

Nico glanced at her again. Whatever answer he had prepared before opening the door was no longer enough.

Touma remembered, belatedly, that the doorway mattered. Someone else stood there now, looking in. The rules about witnesses hadn’t stopped applying just because he had woken up embarrassed.

“So you can see her,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And that’s supposed to happen?”

“The limiter is stable for the moment.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“No,” Nico said. “The projection isn’t stable.”

Mio looked at him.

“Projection.”

“It’s the term we have.”

“You make it sound like a school presentation.”

“I’m distinguishing the visible effect from—”

“From the person standing here?”

Nico stopped.

Touma wished he hadn’t seen that: the effort it took Nico not to glance toward him, as if the two of them might quietly agree on what to call her.

“This is the first problem we’ve had outside a closed system that can talk back,” Nico said.

“Your problem can hear you,” Mio replied.

“I know.”

He sounded rattled enough that Touma believed him.

“Is she a side effect?” Touma asked.

Nico hesitated.

Mio turned toward Touma. The movement arrived with that same slight wrongness, like a bad signal briefly catching up with itself.

“Be precise,” she said.

He couldn’t tell which of them she meant.

Nico drew a breath.

“I don’t know how much of this is an effect of the procedure and how much is something the procedure made possible. Those aren’t the same thing.”

It was an answer built out of unstable passwords: each phrase apparently meant to let them through, none of them opening anything.

Touma rubbed his face.

“Whose side are you on?” he asked Mio.

“The one where we continue existing.”

That quieted him.

Nico finally let go of the door handle, but he didn’t come farther into the room.

“There’s another issue.”

“Of course there is.”

“If she’s visible here, other systems may be able to register her now.”

Touma looked at Mio, then back at him.

“What systems?”

“Cameras. Biometrics. Active recognition filters.”

The room seemed to lose what little privacy it had left.

“And people?” Touma asked.

“Possibly. We don’t know how broadly this carries.”

He thought of the clerk outside, of having to stand in front of another person and look ordinary while something impossible happened beside him. Except now it might not stay beside him. A camera could keep it. A filter could flag it. Somewhere he couldn’t see, a system might try to give Mio a name.

His embarrassment had acquired witnesses before he’d even got dressed.

“How bad is that?” he asked.

Nico’s eyes went to Mio again, then returned to him.

“Bad enough for you.”