**Translation**

Touma woke to find Mio standing in the corner.

Not her voice. Not the familiar pressure of someone listening from somewhere inside his head. Not a private comment waiting to make his morning worse.

Mio herself, visible against the wall beneath a suspiciously beige ceiling.

He stared.

She glanced toward the door, then back at him, as if she were checking whether the room had any teeth he had neglected to mention.

“You’re here,” he said.

“Yes.”

“No. You’re *here*.”

“I understood the first time.”

His face was getting hot. He had no idea why that should be the first useful response his body could produce, but apparently it had decided embarrassment was more manageable than anything else available.

The safehouse smelled of dust, instant coffee, and cheap disinfectant. There was a broken lamp beside the futon. The carpet had the flattened, exhausted look of something that had spent years being rented to strangers.

Yesterday, all of that had been ordinary in an unpleasant way.

Now Mio stood in the middle of it like a clerical error large enough to become visible.

“Stop staring,” she said.

“I’m trying to work something out.”

“Using my face?”

“I thought you might disappear if I blinked.”

“You’ve blinked.”

“I noticed.”

She folded her arms. The movement lagged very slightly behind its beginning, as though the thought had needed to ask the room for permission before becoming motion.

That made it worse.

If she had flickered, if she had looked like a bad signal, he might have known where to put her in his head. Instead, she looked offended. Offended and watchful, with her shoulders held too carefully.

There had been a layer between the strange part of his life and the world. Not a good layer. Not even a convincing one. But he could still look at an empty room and pretend the room was empty.

That was gone.

He pushed himself upright and reached for the blanket.

His hand went through her knee.

Touma stopped.

Mio jerked back. For an instant, her expression lost every trace of composure.

“Warn me before you do that.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

He pulled his hand against his chest.

There had been no resistance. Nothing his fingers could use to explain what they had just done. He could see her knee. He could see where his hand had passed through it. His body insisted that one of those facts had to be wrong.

“Sorry,” he said.

Mio looked down at herself, then at the space between them.

“Just—look first.”

He nodded.

Apparently they had room rules now.

He gathered the blanket more carefully, keeping his hands where he could see them.

“Can you feel anything?”

Mio’s eyes narrowed.

“Physically or emotionally?”

“I meant—”

“Because that was a very broad question.”

He rubbed his face.

“Could you stop acting like a person who understands me too well for five minutes?”

“That was always the case.”

He had no answer to that.

Pieces of the procedure began returning to him. Not in order. A phrase, a warning, the memory of trying to follow instructions while everything important seemed to depend on words he had not understood quickly enough.

None of it explained what he was supposed to do with her now.

Mio shifted her weight.

He watched her decide where to put her hands.

That was the part he had not been prepared for.

Her voice had always been alive. Irritatingly alive, sometimes. But he had supplied so much of the rest himself that he had not known he was supplying it.

Now her shoulders tightened before she answered him. Now there was a small pause that looked like a breath.

Now he could see that she was afraid.

She was doing a better job of concealing it than he was, which somehow made it harder to look at her.

Touma got off the futon.

There was a narrow strip of floor between it and the kitchenette counter, just wide enough for him to pace if he turned frequently and accepted that it would look ridiculous.

He paced anyway.

Every few steps, he glanced at her.

He tried not to. That only made him more aware of doing it.

His body kept treating her as the center of the room. He adjusted his path around her. He checked her expression before he spoke. When he turned his back, he could feel the fact that she was watching him—not as a private awareness anymore, but as something located behind his shoulder.

This was not a tactical problem.

It was a social problem, which felt deeply unfair under the circumstances.

The door opened.

Touma stopped pacing.

Nico stood in the doorway with one hand still on the handle.

His eyes moved from Touma to Mio. There was a pause, brief enough that he had probably meant to hide it.

“You’re both awake.”

Touma looked at him.

“You knew she could do that?”

“No.”

The answer came too fast.

Nico seemed to hear it too. He eased the door shut, carefully, as if a quieter latch might improve the conversation.

“Not like this,” he added.

“That’s a different answer.”

“It’s a more precise answer.”

Mio looked at him.

Nico looked back at her and then, with obvious effort, returned his attention to Touma.

“She’s the first problem we’ve had outside a closed system that can talk back about the procedure.”

“I’m standing here,” Mio said.

“Yes,” Nico said. “That’s part of what I’m trying to account for.”

Touma glanced at the doorway.

Something about Nico’s position there caught against a remembered instruction. The visibility rule. Whatever had happened, that rule was still in force. The open door had not been an ordinary open door, and Nico standing in it had not been an ordinary arrival.

“So what’s stable?” Touma asked.

“The limiter. For the moment.”

“And what isn’t?”

Nico’s gaze slipped toward Mio again.

“The projection.”

Touma looked at her, then back at him.

“You keep saying ‘projection’ like we’re discussing a school presentation.”

“What would you prefer?”

“Something that sounds less like she should be appearing on a wall.”

“The terminology matters.”

“So does the fact that your side effect looks like a person.”

Mio’s expression hardened.

Nico drew in a breath.

“I’m trying to be precise.”

“Then be precise about that.”

For a moment, no one spoke.

Touma wished he had not said *side effect*. He had meant to throw Nico’s language back at him. Judging by Mio’s face, it had not stayed where he had thrown it.

Nico pressed his lips together.

“I’m not arguing about whether she’s on our side.”

“Good,” Mio said.

“She takes the side where we continue existing,” Touma said. “That seems clear enough.”

“It is.” Nico’s voice was carefully level. Too carefully. “But her intentions aren’t the only thing we need to consider.”

Touma stopped with his hand against the kitchenette counter.

There it was. The part Nico had been working toward.

“What else?”

“If you can see her, and I can see her, we have to consider whether other systems can register her now.”

Touma looked at Mio.

She had gone very still.

“What systems?”

“Cameras. Biometrics. Active recognition filters.”

Each item made the room feel a little less private.

“And people?” Touma asked.

“Possibly. We don’t know how broadly this works yet.”

The thought of the world outside returned with unpleasant clarity: a clerk looking up, a camera over a counter, the ordinary expectation that anything visible could be noticed and anything noticed could become somebody else’s problem.

He had been worrying about where to look while he got out of bed.

Nico was talking about recognition filters.

Touma glanced at the closed door. For the first time since waking, he was grateful it was closed for a reason that had nothing to do with embarrassment.

“How bad is that?”

Nico hesitated.

Not long enough to suggest he lacked an answer. Just long enough to make Touma wish he had not asked.

“Bad enough for you.”