The ceiling was the same suspicious beige it had been last night, the lamp in the corner still broken, the carpet still doing its impression of something purchased in bulk and regretted at leisure. The safehouse kitchenette smelled of instant coffee that had never met a bean, dust, and the flat chemical note of cheap disinfectant. A normal morning in a room that was no longer capable of normal mornings, because Mio was standing in the corner.

Not a voice. Not pressure behind the eyes. Not the private, inside-the-head commentary that Touma had spent weeks learning to live with, the way you learn to live with a neighbor's television through a thin wall. Mio. Standing. In the corner. Between the narrow floor strip and the wall, where there had been nothing when he'd fallen asleep.

His face went hot. He stared.

She was checking the room — not casually, but with the quick, systematic glances of someone looking for hidden teeth in the baseboards. Her eyes moved from the kitchenette counter to the door to the window with the blinds drawn wrong. She was afraid, and he could see it now, which was a sentence that should not have meant what it meant. He had always known she was afraid. Knowing and seeing were separated by a distance that turned out to be the entire problem.

He blinked. She was still there.

He blinked again. Still there. The corner held her like it had been waiting.

This was not the safe layer. The safe layer — the one where Mio existed as voice and pressure and the strange, too-knowing presence that lived in the space between his thoughts — was gone. Or rather, it was still here, but it had grown a body, and the body had opinions about where to stand, and the room had rearranged itself around those opinions without consulting anyone.

He reached for the blanket.

His hand went through her knee.

The sensation was not pain. It was not cold. It was the specific, intimate wrongness of reaching for fabric and finding the idea of a person instead — a displacement, a skip in the texture of the room, like turning a page and finding the next one blank. His hand closed on the blanket beyond her, and he pulled it toward himself with the deliberate calm of someone who was not going to acknowledge what had just happened, because acknowledging it would require a system of classification he did not currently possess.

"Don't do that," he said. His voice came out flatter than he intended. "Warn me before you — don't just appear where my hand is going to be."

"I didn't mean to." Mio's voice had the same quality it always had — too precise, too aware of what he was about to say before he said it — but now it came from a mouth he could see, and the mouth was doing things he had never had to watch before. Choosing when to open. Deciding where to put itself in relation to the words. Her shoulders had tightened. She was standing the way someone stands when they know they are taking up space and have not yet been told whether that is permitted.

"That's what makes it worse," he said, and meant it, and immediately wished he had said it differently, except he didn't know how to say it differently, because every version he could think of sounded either cruel or like an apology, and he wasn't sure which one was true.

A pause. She was watching him with the expression of someone who already knew the next question and was waiting for him to catch up to it.

"Can you feel anything?" he asked, and then heard himself, and added: "Physically. Or — no. That was a broad question. I mean both. I don't know which one I mean."

"Physically, some. Not the way you do." She paused. Her hands moved to her sides, then to her elbows, then back — the small, visible arithmetic of a person who had never had to decide what to do with her hands before. "Emotionally, I think the answer you're looking for is that I always could, and the visibility doesn't change that. It just makes it harder to pretend you don't know."

"You always — you were always—" He stopped. The sentence he wanted was something like you were always a person, but that was not a thing he could say without it sounding like an accusation, or a confession, or both, and he was not prepared for any of those options before coffee. "You always understood me too well. That was always the case. That was the whole — yes."

"Yes," she said. "That was always the case."

The procedure came back in pieces, the way procedure did when you'd learned it under pressure and then tried to remember it in a different kind of pressure. The visible-rule. The doorway witness range. The systems. He could feel the shape of the rules he'd been given, but they had been built for a Mio who was a voice and a pressure and a presence that could be denied, politely, by anyone who didn't want to deal with her. This Mio could not be denied. This Mio was standing in his room, and his body kept treating her like the center of it — not because she was more real than before, but because the room had not been built for two, and she was the second, and the architecture knew it even if the lease didn't.

She was more alive like this. That was the thing he couldn't stop noticing. The audible Mio — the one who lived in the safe layer, who commented and warned and understood him with the specific, uncomfortable precision of someone who had been listening to his thoughts for weeks — had been manageable. Containable. A strange roommate in a single apartment, the kind you could live with by developing routines and not making eye contact with the wrong parts of yourself. The visible Mio was a person standing in his room looking afraid, and he kept glancing at her, and she kept catching him glancing, and neither of them said anything about it, because saying something about it would have required a vocabulary for what was happening that neither of them had been issued.

She started pacing. A small strip between the futon and the kitchenette counter — three steps one way, three steps back, the kind of pacing that was not about distance but about the body needing to prove it still had a relationship with the floor. There was a slight lag in the movement, a fraction of delay between the intention and the step, as if the projection were running on a signal that was not quite stable. Her fear was readable in her shoulders, in the way her breath came before her answers, in the small decisions she was making about where to put her hands. He could see all of it now, and the seeing was its own kind of problem, because it turned the abstract into the domestic, and the domestic was where Touma lived badly and felt things he hadn't filed.

The door opened.

Nico stood in the doorway. He looked at Touma on the futon. He looked at Mio pacing between the kitchenette and the wall. His face did something complicated and then settled on a version of calm that was working very hard to earn the name.

"You're both awake," he said, which was a statement of fact so obvious it functioned as a stalling tactic.

"You knew she could do that," Touma said. It came out more sharply than he meant. Or exactly as sharply as he meant. He wasn't sure.

"No — not — not like this. Not this fast." Nico's eyes tracked Mio as she turned at the kitchenette end of her strip. He was standing in the doorway the way someone stands in a doorway when the rules about doorways have just become relevant again — the visible-rule, the witness range, the procedures that governed who could see what and what seeing meant. "The limiter is stable for the moment. The projection isn't."

"This isn't a school presentation," Touma said. "She's not — this isn't a side effect. She's a person standing in my room. She's afraid. She's—" He stopped, because the sentence was heading toward a place he wasn't ready to go, and because Mio had stopped pacing and was looking at him with the expression of someone who had heard the unfinished part and was choosing not to finish it for him, which was the most Mio thing she could possibly do, visible or otherwise.

"She takes the side where we continue existing," Nico said, quietly. He was looking at her now, not at Touma. "That's what this is. The projection isn't a malfunction. It's a — she's choosing to be here. In a way that can be seen."

"In a way that can be seen by me," Touma said. "Or by—"

"By other systems." Nico's voice had the flat, careful tone of someone reading a procedure they hadn't finished memorizing. "If she's visible — if this is stable enough to register — then cameras, biometrics, recognition filters. Maybe humans. The safehouse has passive systems. I don't know what they'll make of her. I don't know what she reads as."

Mio stopped pacing. She was standing in the middle of the room now, and Touma's body treated that fact with the gravity it deserved, which was to say his body had quietly redesignated the center of the room and was now orienting everything around it — the futon, the kitchenette, the door, the broken lamp, all of it arranged in relation to her, the way furniture arranges itself around a load-bearing wall.

"Bad enough for you?" he said, and it was not clear who he was asking.