Touma woke to Mio in the corner of the safehouse bedroom.

Not a voice. Not pressure. Not the private commentary that had lived inside his head. She was simply there—visible, solid enough to argue by existing. Cheap rental carpet under the futon. Suspicious beige ceiling. Broken lamp. The lingering smells of dust, instant coffee, and cheap disinfectant. A narrow strip of floor between the bedding and the kitchenette counter. The room that had been private was no longer private, because she had become something the world could see.

He stared. His face went hot.

“Stop staring,” she said.

He blinked hard, once, twice, testing whether the shell would vanish if he refused to look. It didn’t. The safe layer between the strange and the ordinary world was gone. She was present in the room the way a person is present—shoulders tight, eyes watchful, checking the corners as if the walls might still have hidden teeth.

He reached for the blanket. His hand passed through her knee.

She flinched. “Warn me before you do that.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

The contact left a residual wrongness in the air. He sat up carefully, hyperaware of the new geometry of the room. “Can you feel anything?” he asked. The question came out broader than he’d intended.

“Physically or emotionally?”

She answered like someone who had always understood him too well. That, he realized, had always been the case. Procedure and memory returned in pieces. Visible Mio was more alive than the version that had only been audible. He could see her fear now—the way her breath caught before she spoke, the small decisions about where to put her hands, the slight lag in her movement as if the body she wore was still learning the rules in real time.

She began to pace the narrow strip between the futon and the kitchenette. His own body kept treating her like the center of the room. He kept glancing toward her without meaning to. Being watched by her was no longer an internal sensation; it was physical.

The door opened. Nico stood in the doorway, trying too hard to look calm and failing.

“You’re both awake.”

Touma’s first thought was still embarrassment. The second was that Nico had walked into a problem that was no longer closed.

“You knew she could do that?” Nico asked.

“No. Too fast.”

The visible rule was still active. Nico was inside its range. Limiter stable for the moment; projection not stable. This was not a school presentation. It was a side effect with the precision of a person. She had taken the side where they continued existing.

And that meant other systems might register her now—cameras, biometrics, active recognition filters. Maybe humans. The private embarrassment of waking up to an impossible girl in the corner had just expanded into networked detection risk.

Nico looked from Touma to Mio and back again.

“Bad enough for you?”