Mio looked away too quickly.

That was what caught Touma—not the sarcasm, not the way she folded her arms, but the speed with which she stopped looking at him.

“You’re worried about people seeing you,” he said.

“I’m worried about people deciding what they’re seeing.” Her eyes returned to his. “There’s a difference.”

He glanced toward the open bedroom door. Nico stood near it, trying to look as though he had a practical reason to still be there.

“We’ll have to work out what to tell people,” Touma said.

“Something normal?”

“Something that won’t make them ask questions.”

“Right. Normal.” Mio’s mouth curved without quite becoming a smile. “Try phrasing that so it doesn’t sound like you want my nervous system removed.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. Imagine how well it’ll go with someone who does.”

Nico shifted.

“I’m going to check the hall,” he said.

Touma doubted the hall needed checking. He appreciated the excuse anyway.

Nico stepped out, leaving the door partly open. Without him in it, the room seemed smaller. There was the desk, the chair, the edge of the futon. There was Mio standing as if none of those things had yet been confirmed safe for her to use.

“You can sit down,” Touma said.

“Can I?”

“I meant—there’s a chair.”

“Excellent. For a second I thought you were about to explain the rules for a haunted projector.”

“You don’t have to stand.”

She studied him for a moment, then pulled out the chair and sat.

It squeaked.

The sound loosened something in his chest so abruptly that he almost smiled. Cheap furniture, accepting her weight. A chair doing exactly what a chair was supposed to do. The room had made space for her without asking what she was.

“Don’t make that face,” Mio said.

“What face?”

“Like I’ve successfully passed a furniture inspection.”

He looked down.

“Sorry.”

The air conditioner had gone quiet. Without its rattle, the pauses between them felt dangerously clear.

He could hear the fear under her jokes now. Or perhaps he had been hearing it all along and had preferred the jokes because he knew how to answer those.

“Can you eat?” he asked.

Mio stared at him.

He winced. “That sounded better before I said it.”

“Did it?”

“I was trying to think of something useful.”

“Food. A chair. You’re covering the essentials.”

But her fingers had tightened against the edge of the seat.

He did not know whether she was hungry. He did not know whether sitting hurt, whether she got tired, whether the effort of looking so plainly present cost her anything. Every ordinary thing he might have offered opened onto another question about her body.

He wanted to take her hand.

The wish arrived before he could examine it: reach across, give her something solid, make this less frightening.

He kept his hands where they were.

Mio glanced at them.

“You were going to ask something.”

At the doorway, Nico appeared again.

“Everything okay? Because I can—”

“Wait,” Touma said.

Nico stopped.

Touma looked from him to Mio and understood, too late, that he had almost asked Nico to stay simply because he did not know how to be alone with this.

“No,” he said. “Sorry. It’s fine. You can go.”

Nico nodded. This time he pulled the door nearly shut behind him.

Mio watched it settle.

“What were you going to ask?”

Touma sat on the edge of the futon, leaving the space between them intact.

“I was going to ask if it hurt.”

For a moment, something in the room went wrong.

He could not have said whether the light shifted or the distance between the chair and desk briefly failed to agree with itself. Mio remained in front of him, but his eyes struggled to settle on her.

Then the room was only a room again.

“Sometimes,” she said.

He waited.

“It feels like trying too hard to hold a shape that makes sense.”

Her finger twitched against the chair.

Touma looked away from it before looking became another kind of inspection.

“Okay,” he said. “Then we need some ground rules.”

“Oh, good. Terms and conditions.”

“No surprise touching.”

That stopped her.

He made himself continue without filling the silence with explanations.

“And tell me if something hurts.”

“I don’t want to be a problem.”

“People are problems.”

Her expression closed a fraction.

He shook his head. “Not like that. I mean people need things. They get hurt. You have to change plans for them. That’s not something you have to avoid doing.”

Mio looked at him for long enough that he became painfully aware of every word he had used.

“If something’s wrong,” he said, “you can tell me. I’ll listen.”

“You’ll listen.”

“Yes.”

“Even if you don’t understand it?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at her hands.

He could not call it trust. Not yet. But she had stopped preparing an answer that would make the offer harmless. For a moment, she seemed to be considering whether she could believe him.

Then the door opened.

“Sorry, I just need to check the—”

The support technician stopped on the threshold.

His gaze landed on Mio.

Touma saw the startled intake of breath, the eyes widening with the wrong kind of wonder. Whatever the technician thought he had found, it was already becoming something he would tell someone else.

“Who is that?”

Mio went perfectly still.

Touma stood too fast. The futon shifted behind his knees.

“That’s not your business.”

The words sounded louder than he intended. Embarrassment arrived with the fear: embarrassment at his own sharpness, at being caught in a moment he had no explanation for, at the man still looking past him.

The technician glanced at Touma, then back at Mio.

His expression changed.

Touma recognized that change. Surprise had become a story. The man no longer needed to understand what he was seeing to believe he understood why Touma wanted him gone.

“Leave,” Touma said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Please.”

The technician backed out. Touma closed the door behind him.

For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.

“That,” Mio said, “was public.”

Touma kept his hand on the door.

“Yes.”

“I’d have prepared something if I’d known. A dramatic reveal. Better lighting.”

He turned.

She was still sitting exactly where the man had seen her.

The joke did nothing to hide it. Someone had looked at her, made something of her, and left with it. Touma could shut the door, but he could not take that moment back.

“There have already been too many eyes,” she said. “It’s a little late to worry about whether there’ll be a rumor.”

“We don’t know what he’ll say.”

“No. That’s the fun part.”

He returned to the futon but did not sit.

“What do we do if people start asking?” she said.

“We lie.”

Mio looked up at him with an expression somewhere between disgust and reluctant affection.

“That was quick.”

“I can work on the details.”

“Please do. Your opening attempt was ‘not your business.’”

“It was accurate.”

“It was conspicuous.”

He had no defense for that.

She looked toward the door. When she spoke again, the sarcasm had thinned enough that he could hear the effort beneath it.

“If I’m going to be seen, I refuse to be seen as a mistake.”

“You’re not a mistake.”

He said it before he could make it safer.

Mio turned back to him.

Touma felt the exposure of it then. No joke to shelter behind, no useful task to make the words seem incidental. He had meant them, and she could see that he had meant them.

He let them stand.

A small laugh escaped her. It shook slightly.

“You’re making this very difficult.”

“What?”

She shook her head.

For one second, the room became bearable.

The fear had not gone anywhere. Neither had the man in the hallway, or the questions waiting beyond the door. But Mio’s shoulders loosened, and Touma could stand in front of her without feeling that everything he did would make it worse.

Then something scraped outside the room.

He looked at the door.

Not footsteps.

Not the handle.

The sound came again, soft and deliberate, from the wall beside it.

Like a fingertip being dragged along the other side.

Touma held still.

There should have been nothing remarkable about a noise in a cheap safehouse. Pipes, perhaps. Someone moving equipment.

But the sound had stopped too close to them.

He stared at the plaster. He could almost feel pressure behind it, something resting against the wall to listen.

The limiter pulsed cold against him.

Not reassurance. A warning.

Mio’s eyes met his.

“Don’t let the system decide what I am.”

Touma opened his mouth.

The wall answered first, with a deeper scrape.

Whatever had heard her seemed to be leaning closer.