Initial Contact

Eito didn’t remember falling asleep, but something woke him.

A shift in the air, the way a room changes when it is no longer empty.

The static from the radio had gone silent.

He sat up. The green glow of the dial still pulsed softly, casting long shadows across the floor, but the usual hiss had vanished, leaving a hush that rang in his ears. He caught his breath.

Someone was in the room.

He didn’t hear footsteps. No door had opened. But she was there, standing just beyond the edge of the window’s light, where the shadows folded too densely for a space so small.

The girl from the rooftop.

The dress was the same, white and flickering faintly at the edges as if unfinished. Her hair hung pale and weightless, and those glitching, impossible wings shimmered in and out of form like the air around her couldn’t decide if she was allowed to exist.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

“You were watching me,” Eito said at last. His voice was softer than he meant it to be. Not afraid exactly, but something close. Reverent, maybe. Disoriented.

She tilted her head.

“I was remembering,” she said. Her voice had a strange quality. Not metallic, not robotic, but layered, like several versions of herself were speaking at once, only slightly out of sync.

Eito’s pulse heightened. He realized he was gripping the edge of his mattress, fingers tense.

“Who are you?”

“I don’t think that matters yet.”

A pause stretched between them.

“Are you real?”

The girl didn’t answer right away. Instead, she stepped forward. Though it didn’t quite look like walking. She moved in uneven increments, as if she were being rendered in real time, a frame behind the present moment. The shadows bent slightly around her, accommodating her presence with glitchy reluctance.

“I’m here,” she said simply. “And so are you. That’s all that matters for now.”

Her gaze drifted toward the radio. Eito followed it. The needle had moved again, faintly glowing against the green dial. He hadn’t touched it.

“That sound,” she murmured. “You hear it too?”

“The static?”

She nodded. “It’s not just noise. It’s a bleed. The signal between layers.”

Eito stared at her. “You mean like dimensions?”

“Layers,” she corrected. “Slices of what’s real. Most people only see one. You’re beginning to see more.”

He opened his mouth to argue, to ask what the hell that even meant, but something inside him recoiled. It felt familiar. Like she wasn’t telling him something new, just reminding him of something he’d always known but buried.

“Why me?” he asked.

A beat passed. Her wings flickered in the low light, catching for a moment on something invisible in the air.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But I wasn’t supposed to come here. Not like this. Not to you.”

“You’re part of it, aren’t you?” he said slowly. “The system. The one that keeps resetting everything.”

Her expression faltered. She looked away.

“I’m supposed to help keep the layers stable. When someone begins to remember too much, when the bleed spreads, I’m meant to contain it. Recalibrate. Remove the cause.”

“Erase them.”

Another silence.

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Her eyes returned to him. In them, something flickered. A question she hadn’t known how to ask.

“Because you didn’t feel like noise.”

That shouldn’t have made sense. But it did.

She stepped closer again, and this time, her form held more solidly. The glitching around her softened, her edges clearer. Not stable, but closer. She stood at the foot of his bed now, barely an arm’s length away.

“Then why are you here now?” Eito asked, voice low.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I want to understand what makes you different.”

“Or maybe you want to be.”

That hit something in the air between them. Like an old, taut invisible thread.

Her wings shimmered briefly, fully, then flickered out.

“Maybe,” she whispered.

The static returned. Soft at first, like a breath. Then rising. The radio hissed with a gentle distortion, and outside the window, the city lights blinked once. Only once. A pulse.

The girl turned to the window. The green light cast her profile in strange shadows.

“They’re going to notice soon,” she said. “The system doesn’t like when something remembers what it shouldn’t.”

“I don’t remember anything,” Eito said.

She didn’t turn around.

“But you will.”

Then she was gone.

She walked toward the window, and by the time he reached it, there was only the night. Quiet. Distant. Holding its breath.

A single feather lay on his floor still glowing faintly in the dark.