Mio looked away too quickly.

It wasn't just the shock of having a body in the room that bothered her, Touma realized. It was what came next. Having a face meant people wouldn't just see her—they would immediately start trying to classify her.

"So," Touma said, rubbing the back of his neck because his hands didn't know what else to do. "You're... public now. Not normal, obviously, I don't mean normal, just—"

"Please don't phrase my existence like someone just removed a tumor from your nervous system," Mio said. Her voice was flat, defensive, and slightly too fast.

By the doorway, Nico shifted his weight. He looked like a man who had signed up to monitor a technical anomaly and instead walked into the middle of a domestic crisis. He had the basic decency to stare at the carpet rather than at Mio, clearly not built for this kind of sudden intimacy. He murmured a half-formed excuse about checking the hall perimeter, backed toward the door, and paused with his hand on the frame.

Even with Nico only halfway out, the cheap safehouse bedroom already felt smaller. The air conditioner hummed quietly against the window, doing nothing to thin the sudden density of the room. Touma sat on the edge of the futon and gestured awkwardly toward the desk.

"Do you want to sit down?" he asked.

Mio eyed the cheap wooden chair by the desk. "If I sit on it and phase through the floor like a haunted projector, neither of us is going to recover from the embarrassment."

Still, she moved toward it. She lowered herself onto the seat with rigid, deliberate caution.

The chair squeaked under her weight.

Touma let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. It was stupid, maybe, how much that sharp little creak of wood and cheap screws mattered, but the sheer relief of it hit him in the chest. The furniture hadn't rejected her. The mundane world was actually making space for her.

Mio caught him staring and bristled. "Don't make that face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making a deeply earnest face. Stop it."

She was hiding behind the sarcasm, same as always, but having an actual face changed the math. Without the buffer of the interface, her fear looked a lot like embarrassment. It sat right there in the tight line of her jaw and the way her shoulders refused to drop.

Touma looked at her hands resting on her knees, and a dozen clumsy, practical questions crowded into his throat at once. "Can you... eat?"

The moment he said it, the sheer scale of what they didn't know about her new body settled between them. Did she need food? Did she sleep? Did the air feel cold on her skin? He wanted to reach out and take her hand—just a simple, grounding human gesture to prove she was really there—and he actually lifted his fingers an inch off the futon before stopping himself. He pulled his hand back into his lap.

Mio’s eyes flicked down to his hand, then up to his face. She noticed the aborted movement. She noticed the question he was holding back, too.

At the door, Nico tried to slip out completely, bumped his shoulder against the frame in his haste, winced, and finally vanished into the hallway, pulling the door mostly—but not entirely—shut behind him.

In the quiet that followed, Touma looked at the floor. "I was going to ask if it hurt."

For half a second, the room around Mio did a weird, half-glitch thing—not disappearing, just the air near her collarbones sharpening and blurring at the same time.

"I'm just trying too hard to hold a shape that makes sense," she muttered, looking away.

Her fingers twitched against her skirt. Touma saw it and firmed his voice, trying to offer something useful instead of pity. "Okay. Ground rules, then. First: no surprise touching. I won't grab you or reach for you without asking. Second: tell me if something hurts."

Mio didn't look at him. "I don't want to be a problem."

"People are problems," Touma said, a little too bluntly. "That's just what taking up space is. Look—if you say something is wrong, I will listen."

He didn't dress it up or try to perform comfort. He just said it, repeating the promise in the steady way he held her gaze: Yes. I will listen.

Mio stared back at him. It wasn't trust yet—she didn't know how to do that in a body—but across her face, small and unguarded, was the distinct look of someone who wanted to believe it was possible.

Then the bedroom door pushed the rest of the way open.

One of the support techs walked in holding a clipboard, eyes down, clearly expecting just Touma. He stopped dead two steps inside the room.

The tech stared at Mio. It wasn't the awe of someone witnessing a breakthrough; it was the blank, invasive stare of someone stumbling onto the wrong kind of miracle—a freak accident in a back room.

"Who is that?" the tech asked.

Mio went perfectly still. Every bit of defensive movement vanished from her posture, freezing her into an object under inspection.

Touma stood up from the futon too fast. "Not your business."

Embarrassment and fear arrived in the room at the exact same time. Touma could see the shift in the tech's eyes—the immediate calculation, the birth of a story that would be passed down the hall in whispers within ten minutes. Not a person, just a rumor with a silhouette.

"Leave," Touma said, stepping into the line of sight between the doorway and the desk chair. "Get out."

The tech backed out and pulled the door shut, the latch clicking into place like an insult.

The silence left behind wasn't fragile anymore; it was ruined.

"That was public," Mio said. Her voice was quiet, stripped of its usual bite, tight with the specific humiliation of having been looked at like an exhibit. "So much for a dramatic reveal."

Touma stayed standing, his heart hammering against his ribs. There were already too many eyes in this building. It was way too late to keep her a rumor.

"What do we do if people start asking?" he said.

"We lie," Mio replied instantly, a flash of familiar, disgusted affection in her tone that almost sounded like her old self. Then her jaw tightened, and the humor vanished. She looked toward the closed door, her voice dropping into something hard and explicit. "If I am going to be seen, I refuse to be seen as a mistake."

She wasn't talking about self-esteem. She was talking about classification—about what happened when a system, or a room full of people, decided your existence was just a symptom or an error to be corrected.

"You are not a mistake," Touma said.

He meant it so completely that the words came out with a dangerous sincerity, heavy enough to warp the air between them.

Mio blinked at him. Then, despite the tension still locked in her shoulders, she let out a small, shaky laugh. It didn't cancel out the fear in the room—nothing could, right now—but for one second, it made the cheap, cramped bedroom bearable.

Then a soft scraping sound came from outside the room.

Both of them froze. It wasn't footsteps in the hallway, and it wasn't someone at the door.

It came from the wall right beside the doorframe. It sounded distinctly like a single fingertip dragging slowly along the other side of the drywall—accompanied by a faint, impossible pressure pushing inward against the plaster, as if the structure of the building itself were leaning in.

At the base of Touma's skull, his limiter pulsed once, cold and sharp. A warning. Whatever the system was doing out there, it wasn't just passive surveillance anymore. It had heard them, and it was pressing closer to listen.

Mio stared at the plaster, the color draining from her face.

"Touma," she whispered. "Don't let the system decide what I am."

From the other side of the wall, the presence answered with a slower, deeper scrape.