Chapter 15: Mira

Light.

Too soft to be fluorescent. Too warm to be real.

I opened my eyes to a ceiling I didn’t know—white, clean, unblemished by scratches or stains. For a heartbeat, I thought I’d died. That this was some cruel afterlife—quiet, tasteful, merciful in its brightness.

Then came the smell.

Not antiseptic. Not rot.

Perfume—delicate, citrus and something floral—and books. Paper warmed by sun.

And the faint hum of city life beyond glass windows.

I turned my head slowly. My neck felt carved from stone. The pillow beneath me was alien: soft, absurdly soft, after years of steel and concrete. Sheets draped over me like whispers.

I wasn’t in the box anymore.

But the box was in me.

---

Movement. A shadow cutting across the edge of my vision.

Then a voice. Young, sharp, but threaded with something almost melodic.

“You’re awake.”

I blinked toward the sound.

She stood near the door.

Tall—not statuesque, but poised like someone who’d learned to own her space. Dark hair, slightly damp, falling in loose strands across her cheeks. Eyes the color of rain-dark glass, studying me with a mixture of caution and curiosity.

She wore an oversized sweater, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pencil tucked behind one ear like an afterthought. A small notebook dangled from her fingers.

“You…” My voice cracked. Felt rusted, like a door hinge unused for years. “Where…?”

“Shinjuku. My apartment.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, but her gaze didn’t waver. “You collapsed in a ramen shop. Fever. Dehydration. They were going to call an ambulance. You… didn’t seem like someone who wanted that.”

She set the notebook on the low table beside the bed—my notebook. The one from the box. My stomach tightened.

“I went through your pockets,” she said before I could speak, reading the tension in my face like text. “Looking for ID. Found this instead.”

Her eyes flicked to the red pen marks carved into the first page. The words I’d bled into paper:

Entry 001: I Will Not Break.

My breath locked in my throat.

---

She sat on the edge of the chair across from me, crossing her legs with quiet grace.

“Who are you, Rei Kirishima?” she asked. The name tasted strange in her mouth—soft vowels meeting steel.

The question hung between us like a blade.

I stared at my hands. The veins, the calluses, the scars like pale lightning bolts racing up my forearms. Fifteen years of silence and static and walls. How do you compress that into language?

“You read it,” I said finally, voice low.

Her expression didn’t shift.

“Not all of it. Enough.”

“Enough to what?”

“To know that whoever did this to you…” She leaned forward slightly, eyes glinting like a scalpel catching light. “…wanted to hollow you out.”

---

Something in her tone snagged against old wounds. Not pity. Something sharper.

“You think it worked?” I asked.

Her lips curved— not a smile, not quite. “No. You’re sitting here, aren’t you?”

For the first time since waking, I looked at her fully. She didn’t flinch. Most people flinch when they see what I’ve become.

“Why help me?” I said.

Her gaze flicked briefly to the notebook, then back to me.

“Because you looked like a ghost who refused to stay dead. And I…” She hesitated, voice dropping to something quieter. “I wanted to know why.”

---

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It pulsed, filled with questions neither of us voiced.

Finally, she spoke again, softer now:

“Who did this to you, Rei?”

My jaw tightened. Words hovered behind my teeth, poisonous, begging to spill. The voice on the phone. The rules. Seven years. Seven truths. The pendant burning like an ember in my mind.

But chains don’t need steel. Secrets can bind tighter than iron.

So I said nothing.

Her eyes searched mine for an answer I couldn’t give. When she didn’t find one, she leaned back in the chair, exhaling slowly.

“You’ve been gone a long time,” she murmured, almost to herself. “You move like someone who’s forgotten gravity.”

---

The room pressed in. The walls were white, clean—but in my mind, they grayed, cracked, folded inward like the box. My pulse stuttered. My skin itched for escape routes.

I swung my legs off the bed.

“Where are my clothes?”

“In the wash. They were…” She paused delicately. “…not in great condition.”

“Phone?”

“On the table.”

I snatched it up like a drowning man clawing for air. It was still there—the weight of the call like a bruise. Seven years. Seven truths. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

Mira watched me with a calm that felt surgical.

“You’re not safe, are you?”

I laughed. Short. Hollow.

“No one is.”

---

She tilted her head. A lock of hair slid down her cheek like spilled ink.

“You could stay here. Just for tonight.”

Her offer was simple. Unadorned.

But beneath it, something flickered—a curiosity burning too close to fascination.

“Why?” I asked again.

Her eyes lingered on the scars winding across my knuckles, my forearms, like maps of pain etched into flesh.

“Because you’ve seen something most people couldn’t survive,” she said quietly. “And I…” Her voice trembled on the edge of something she didn’t name. “…want to understand what that does to a man.”

---

The words coiled around me, tightening, pulling. The bed beneath me felt suddenly too soft, too intimate. For fifteen years, nothing touched me but steel and shadows. Now this—

Warm light. A woman’s voice. The scent of rain still clinging to her hair.

It was too much.

Too dangerous.

I pushed to my feet. Too fast. The room swayed. Mira rose instinctively, reaching for me—her hand brushing my arm. A spark shot through me like a live wire. My chest constricted, breath tearing in ragged bursts.

She didn’t pull away.

And for a moment—a single fractured moment—I wanted to tear through the years, through the hunger that wasn’t for food, but for touch, for heat, for something human.

My hand moved before thought caught it, sliding to her jaw, rough against her smooth skin. Her eyes widened—but didn’t close.

Then the static roared in my head.

Yukari’s face. Aiko’s laugh.

Blood on my hands that might never have been real.

I froze.

And the shame hit like a hammer.

I dropped my hand, stepping back as if burned.

“Don’t,” I rasped. Not sure if I meant her or me.

Mira’s breath shivered. Then she said, softly:

“I wasn’t afraid.”

---

The room tilted again. Not from fever this time. From everything I was trying to bury clawing its way up.

“You should be,” I whispered.