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

Not a voice behind his eyes. Not a sudden pressure at the base of his skull, or a dry line of private commentary. She was just there, occupying space like a clerical error that had grown large enough to become visible.

For a long second, he didn't move. He stayed flat on his back on the thin futon, staring up at the safehouse’s suspicious beige ceiling, and then let his eyes slide back toward the broken floor lamp. The room smelled of dust, instant coffee, and cheap lemon disinfectant. Until last night, those details had belonged to a cramped, miserable, private room. With Mio standing beside the dead lamp, watching the walls as if checking the plaster for hidden teeth, the room felt stripped of its walls entirely.

"Stop staring," she said.

Touma’s face went hot. He sat up too fast, the blood rushing in his ears. "You're there."

"Yes. We established that last night."

"No, we established an emergency," he said, his voice cracking slightly before he forced it down. "I'm trying to see if you vanish when I blink."

"Try blinking harder," Mio said, though her posture didn't relax. "It won't help, and right now it's just rude."

When she had only been inside his head, there had been a safe layer between the strange thing happening to him and the rest of the world. He could walk down a street, buy a train ticket, nod at a convenience store clerk, and keep the entire anomaly locked behind his teeth. Now that safe layer was gone. The private weirdness had crossed over into the room, and there was nowhere left to hide it.

He muttered an apology and reached blindly for the edge of the blanket to pull it over his legs.

His hand passed straight through her knee.

There was no resistance—just a sudden, staticky drop in temperature and the dizzying sensation of touching a place where the air had forgotten how to behave.

Mio flinched back so sharply her shoulder clipped the lampshade, though the paper didn't move. "Warn me before you do that."

Touma yanked his hand back against his chest, his heart hammering against his ribs. "I didn't mean to! You moved—"

"That's what makes it worse," she snapped. She looked down at her leg, then back up at him, her expression pinched with an offense so immediate and human that Touma forgot to breathe.

"Can you feel anything?" he asked. Then, realizing how broad that was, he winced. "I mean—when that happens."

Mio didn't answer right away. She shifted her weight, and Touma noticed the slight lag in the movement—like a thought that had to ask the room for permission before becoming motion.

"Physically, or emotionally?" she asked tightly.

"Don't act like a person who understands me too well," Touma said, rubbing the back of his neck. "It's too early."

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

Pieces of the previous night’s procedure came back to him in jagged fragments—bad signal, unstable passwords, the feeling of his own nerves being used as copper wire. But none of that technical panic prepared him for this. Visible, Mio was somehow much more alive than she had ever been as a voice. He could see the way her shoulders tightened before she spoke. He could see the tiny intake of breath before an answer, and the awkward, self-conscious way she kept deciding where to put her hands now that she had hands that needed placing.

Worst of all, he could see her fear. In his head, she had always sounded cool, precise, and untouchable. Here on the cheap rental carpet, she looked like someone standing on thin ice, listening for the crack.

Wait, no—he couldn't sit here staring at her legs. Touma forced himself up off the futon and began pacing the narrow strip of floor between the bedding and the tiny kitchenette counter.

It didn't help. His body kept treating her like the center of the room. Every time he turned near the sink, his balance adjusted around where she stood. Every few seconds, his eyes flicked back to her to make sure she hadn't flickered out or stepped closer. Being watched by her was no longer an abstract mental state; it was a physical geometry problem. It wasn't even a tactical crisis yet—it was a deeply awkward social one, which somehow made his skin crawl worse. What a rude way to wake up.

The lock clicked, and the bedroom door swung inward.

Nico stood in the doorway holding two paper cups of coffee. She took one look at Touma frozen by the kitchenette, then let her eyes track deliberately to the corner by the broken lamp.

Her knuckles whitened around the cardboard sleeves, though her voice came out aggressively, artificially calm. "Good. You're both awake."

Touma pointed a finger toward the lamp. "You knew she could stay like this?"

"No," Nico said, a fraction too fast. She didn't step inside. She stayed planted right on the threshold, keeping herself within the doorway's witness range—the exact line where the room's visibility rules had caught her the night before. "Yesterday was the first time the problem stepped outside a closed system and talked back."

"The limiter is stable for the moment," Mio said to Nico, her chin lifting slightly. "The projection is not."

"Please don't call yourself a projection," Touma muttered, pressing his palms against his eyes. "You make it sound like a school presentation."

"Would you prefer 'side effect'?" Mio asked coldly.

"I'd prefer you didn't sound so much like a person when we're arguing about what you're made of."

Nico cleared her throat, trying to pull the room back into something resembling an operational briefing, though her gaze kept darting to the slight delay in Mio’s fingers as Mio folded her arms. "Whatever we call it, we have a bigger issue than bedroom etiquette. While I was downstairs, I ran a diagnostic on the local relay."

Touma lowered his hands. "And?"

"She takes the side where we continue existing," Mio said quietly, watching Nico's face. "Which means she has bad news."

Nico didn't deny it. She looked at Touma, the forced calm finally slipping enough to show the raw nerves underneath. "If she's crossed the threshold enough for me to see her standing in this doorway, it's no longer just an eyesight rule between the three of us. Other systems may register her now."

The air in the small room seemed to thin out. The embarrassed heat in Touma's face vanished, replaced by a cold, sinking weight.

"What kind of systems?" Touma asked.

"Street cameras. Transit gates. Biometric sweeps. Active recognition filters," Nico listed, each word landing heavier than the last. "And if she spikes hard enough near a terminal, maybe ordinary humans who have no business looking at her." She lifted one of the coffee cups an inch, her expression grim. "Is that bad enough for you?"