Touma woke up to Mio standing in the corner of the room.

Not a voice. Not a pressure behind his eyes, and not a strip of private commentary running beneath his own thoughts. She was simply there, occupying the dead space between the broken floor lamp and the edge of the cheap rental carpet like a clerical error that had finally grown large enough to become visible.

"You don't have to be there," he croaked, his voice thick with sleep and immediate, hot-faced panic.

"And where would you prefer I be?" Mio asked. She was looking around the safehouse bedroom as if checking the walls for hidden teeth—taking in the suspicious beige of the ceiling, the scarred kitchenette counter three steps away, the faint, competing smells of dust, instant coffee, and cheap disinfectant. Even the way she turned her head had a slight lag to it, like a thought asking the room for permission before becoming motion.

"Anywhere that isn't the corner of my room while I'm waking up," Touma said, pulling himself upright on the futon. It was an exceptionally rude way to start the morning. As long as she had lived exclusively inside his head, there had been a safe layer between the strange thing happening to him and the rest of the world. Now the room wasn't private anymore, and he couldn't even pretend his problem was strictly internal.

"Stop staring," she said, her posture stiffening.

"I'm not staring. I'm trying to see if the shell vanishes if I blink hard enough."

"It doesn't."

"Great." Touma reached out blindly to drag the tangled blanket over his bare legs—and his hand passed straight through her knee.

There was no resistance, only a sudden, staticky drop in temperature that made the hairs on his forearm stand up. Mio flinched back half a step, her eyes narrowing in genuine offense.

"Warn me before you do that," she snapped.

"I didn't mean to!" Touma yanked his hand back to his chest, his face burning hotter.

"That's what makes it worse." She smoothed down the front of a skirt that didn't technically exist, her fingers hesitating before they settled at her sides.

Touma watched the micro-adjustment—the way her shoulders tightened, the small intake of breath before she decided where to put her hands. "Can you actually feel anything like that?"

She gave him a flat, guarded look. "That is a very broad question."

"Physically. Or emotionally, I guess, since you're standing there acting like a person who understands me way too well."

"That was always the case," Mio said quietly. "You just didn't have to look at me while I did it."

Fragments of the previous night's procedure were returning to him in jagged pieces—a headache of bad signal, unstable passwords, and a threshold crossed somewhere in the dark. But the mechanics mattered less than the immediate geometry of the room. Visible Mio was vastly more alive than audible Mio had ever been. Worse, he could see her fear now. She was keeping herself composed, learning the rules of having edges in real time, but the tension in her jaw was entirely readable.

Touma stood up and began pacing the narrow strip of floor between the futon and the kitchenette, trying to walk off the weirdness, trying to reclassify the situation as something livable. It didn't work. His own body kept treating her like the center of the room. Every time he turned, his gaze snagged on her; every step was calculated not to clip her shoulder. Being watched by her was no longer an abstract mental pressure—it was a physical, social problem.

The doorknob clicked, and Nico stepped into the doorway.

He stopped dead on the threshold, one hand still on the frame. His eyes went to Touma, then snapped immediately to the corner by the broken lamp.

"Okay," Nico said, his voice a fraction too even, the tone of a man trying way too hard to sound calm. "You're both awake."

Touma froze mid-pace. "You can see her. You knew she could do that?"

"No," Nico said, much too fast. He didn't step inside, remaining carefully in the doorway's witness range, his gaze locked on Mio as if she might detonate if he blinked. "And typically, the first time a problem steps outside a closed system, it doesn't talk back."

"I am right here," Mio said, her chin lifting slightly.

Nico's jaw worked. He forced himself to look back at Touma, falling back on operational procedure like a shield. "The witness rule is still active. As long as I'm in the doorway within your range, the feed holds. Your limiter is stable for the moment, Touma, but the projection isn't."

"Don't call me a projection," Mio said sharply. "It makes me sound like a school presentation."

"It's a side effect," Nico corrected, though he looked rattled enough that the precision cost him effort. "A localized bleed with person-level coherence."

"If you're going to argue about what I am," she replied, her eyes darting toward the narrow window and the public world waiting just beyond the glass, "I suggest taking the side where we all continue existing."

Nico didn't argue with that. He let out a slow, tight breath, his knuckles white against the doorframe. "Here's the real problem. If she's rendering tightly enough for me to register her from the hall, the safe layer is gone. Other systems may register her now, too."

Touma's stomach dropped. The awkwardness of the small room suddenly expanded, the walls thinning out into the street, the transit lines, the city grid.

"Street cameras," Nico said, listing them off with grim efficiency. "Biometric gates. Active recognition filters. Maybe even uninvolved humans, if they're close enough when your signal spikes." He looked from Mio back to Touma's flushed, rigid face. "Is that bad enough for you?"