

Touma woke to the fact that Mio was in the corner.

It was not a voice. It was not pressure. It was not the private, half-formed commentary that used to arrive in his head like a bad signal, like unstable passwords. She was there. Her being there was the argument. The safehouse bedroom, with its cheap rental carpet, suspicious beige ceiling, broken lamp, dust, instant coffee, and cheap disinfectant, had become a private wrongness. The safe layer between the strange and the world was gone. The private room was no longer private; visible Mio changed everything.

It was a rude way to wake up.

Touma stared. His face heated. He was hyperaware of every surface in the room. He tried to reclassify the private weirdness as something livable, but his body refused. The normal private morning was unavailable. Mio was checking the room for hidden teeth. She moved with a slight lag, offended and watchful, afraid but composed, learning the room’s rules in real time. She looked like a clerical error large enough to become visible.

“Stop staring,” she said.

“I’m not—”

He blinked. Once. Twice. The shell did not vanish.

His thought asked the room for permission before it became motion. His hand reached for the blanket and passed through her knee.

“Warn me before you do that,” Mio said.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

Touma’s body kept treating her like the center of the room. He kept glancing toward her. Now being watched by her was physical. The social geometry of the room had been rewritten. His embarrassment was no longer private; it had become operational.

“Can you feel anything?” he asked. The question was too broad. “Physically? Emotionally?”

Mio looked at him as if he were a person who understood her too well.

“That was always the case.”

Procedure memory returned in pieces. Visible Mio was more alive than audible Mio. Her shoulders tightened. She breathed before answering. She decided where to put her hands. He could see her fear now.

She paced the narrow strip between the futon and the kitchenette counter. The room reoriented around her.

The door opened.

Nico entered with the careful stillness of someone trying too hard to be calm. She was rattled, but useful in an operational way.

“You’re both awake.”

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

“No. Too fast.”

The first problem outside the closed system had just talked back. Nico stood in the doorway, in witness range, and the visible rule still governed the space. Her memory of it tightened in the doorway. The limiter was stable for a moment. The projection was not. This was not a school presentation. It was a side effect with the precision of a person.

Mio had already taken the side where they continued to exist.

He did not know how long the visibility would last, or what its limits were. He knew only that other systems might register her now. The public world’s pressure continued from outside, even with its clerk absent. The cameras were active. The biometrics were active. The recognition filters were running. Maybe humans, too.

“Bad enough for you?” Nico said.