Junk Zone

Static coiled around them like fog, folding and splitting apart as the world shifted again. For a moment, everything hung in silence, and then the ground returned beneath their feet.

Eito stumbled once, catching himself on a rusted beam. The air smelled wrong, like ozone and dust and old sun bleached plastic. Above, the sky was a jagged patchwork of code fragments, flickering like shattered glass. Buildings towered around them, half loaded and broken, their edges dissolving into static.

The Junk Zone.

They stood in the hollow skeleton of a forgotten city, pieces of alleys, fractured storefronts, walls that glitched and reformed endlessly. It looked like a world someone had tried to delete but never finished the job.

Eito straightened, his hand still tingling from where Hina had held it. He looked around, unsettled by how familiar some of it was. Broken street signs with names from his neighborhood. A half collapsed school gate that looked like the one near his apartment. There were the faint outlines of convenience store awnings similar to the one the night he met Hina, flickering in and out.

Hina was already walking ahead. Her steps were steady, as if she'd done this countless times before. Eito followed, watching the set of her shoulders, the way her gaze stayed focused forward, on what, he wasn't sure.

"This place…" he murmured. "I recognize some of it."

"It collects the pieces of anomalies," Hina replied without looking back.

Eito didn't press further. The warped scenery spoke for itself.

They moved deeper into the maze of abandoned structures, passing glitching billboards, frozen traffic lights, and piles of debris that hummed faintly with broken data. Eito's pulse quickened as a distant echo looped somewhere, a fragment of a nostalgic child's laughter, distorted and hollow.

Hina stopped beside a crumbled wall covered in static burns. She crouched low, shifting aside warped cables and fragments of broken signage.

There, nestled among the rubble, lay a small pair of wings, delicate and incomplete. Each was barely the size of their hands, crafted from glitching feathers and luminous strands of translucent code. They shimmered faintly, catching what little broken light filtered through the fragmented sky.

Eito crouched beside her. "Now that you have what we're looking for, what does it do?"

"A key to leave the memory layers," Hina answered simply.

He reached for one of the small wings, the surface was surprisingly solid beneath his fingertips: metallic, cool, almost organic. The coding strands shifted faintly, like they recognized him.

"It was left behind," Hina said softly. "Someone the system erased… they made this."

Her voice was steady, but Eito caught the faint tremor hidden beneath. He wondered if-

"We should finish what they started," Hina replied, interrupting his thoughts. "It's the only method of escape I know."

Eito glanced at her. There was that same distant look, that practiced calm he was learning to recognize as carefully constructed. It couldn't hide the lingering regret and what he concluded was guilt behind her eyes.

He held the small wing a moment longer then placed it gently back beside its pair. "Then let's finish it in their memory."

Hina carefully tucked both into her bag.

Above them, the fractured sky crackled faintly, the world beyond flickering and failing to hold itself together.

Eito silently kept Hina, who stood alone, company. She was glancing at the sky above, seeminhly ruminating over countless memories. The shadows of forgotten loops trailed after them, fractured echoes of lives lost, quietly lingering.