Hina

The next morning, the girl was gone.

Not with a door creaking open or the window sliding shut. Just gone. No sign she had ever stood there by his bed, no footprints on the floor, no outline on the blanket. Only a single feather remained on the desk, caught in the edge of the notebook he didn’t remember writing in.

But it was his handwriting. The words made no sense.

“You said I didn’t imagine it. So why does everything else say I did?”

Eito stared at it, heart ticking out of rhythm. The sun outside was too bright. Too sterile. The world had a fluorescent flatness to it, like someone had turned the contrast too high and forgotten to add shadows.

He closed the notebook and grabbed his school bag.

Outside, the neighborhood looked… duplicated. Every window glared with the same reflection. The sound of cicadas was unnaturally even, looping without variation. Eito crossed the street, past the shuttered convenience store. The rooftop above it was empty.

His classroom felt colder than usual. The chairs were too still, his classmates too quiet. Conversations stopped when he entered, like a record skipping past the vocals.

The glitchy angel hadn’t been a dream. He was sure of it. He could still feel her voice in the air.

“You’re not supposed to remember.”

That’s what she had said.

His fingers brushed the inside pocket of his uniform. The feather was still there: cool, light, yet impossibly heavy with meaning. He closed his eyes.

Just a second.

And in that moment, the lights above him flickered. The noise in the classroom stretched, bent, warped. Something passed through the room, a flicker like a system stuttering. Only he seemed to notice.

He looked up in the back corner of the empty classroom.

She was there. Sitting, quiet, not drawing attention. Hair pale, dress different now. A muted gray, like it had been washed out of color. Her eyes met his only for a second before she looked away, as if she hadn’t.

Eito blinked.

She was gone again.

After class, the world felt more brittle. The sky above the school was the wrong kind of blue, too smooth, like painted glass. The wind didn’t move the trees; it only pretended to.

He found her again in the hallway between classes, walking in the opposite direction of the crowd. No one noticed her. No one moved around her. They passed through like she was mist.

“Hina,” he said, though he still didn’t know her name. It slipped out anyway.

She stopped and turned to face him.

“You’re still here,” she said.

“So are you.”

Her expression shifted, like she wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing.

“You weren’t supposed to remember. The scan should have reset you.”

“It didn’t.”

“The more you remember, the more the system tries to correct.”

He stepped closer, the hallway falling away into silence behind them. Just them, floating in a space too still.

“Why does it matter if I remember?”

“Because this layer isn’t built to hold two.”

“Two what?”

She hesitated. Her edges wavered again, glitching just slightly, like she was out of sync with the moment.

“Two people who know it’s not real.”

The hallway warped around her. The lockers folded in on themselves for a second, brief and silent. A single crow flapped past the window, heading nowhere.

“Why me?” he asked. “Why can I still remember?”

She looked up at him. Her voice dropped to something barely above static.

“Because you weren’t born in this layer.”

A beat passed.

Then the bell rang, sharp and shrill, resetting everything.

The hallway repopulated. Classmates filed by, shoulder to shoulder, speaking nonsense words that only sounded like language.

Hina was gone.

But the static in his ears remained.

So did the feather in his pocket and the name she hadn’t told him but he knew.