They paved over the shrines a long time ago.
I walk past the train station every morning. On the wall outside Gate B, just under the cracked surveillance mirror, there's a stretch of concrete that hums. No one notices it but me. No one feels the wrongness under their shoes. The city forgets fast. It has to.
But sometimes, I remember for it.
Tetsukami gleams in the morning haze—iron and silence, with vertical glass spires like broken sword hilts stabbing the cloudline. The ads are louder than the people. Faces blank. Eyes forward. Don't make contact. Don't look for patterns. And above all:
Do not acknowledge unapproved phenomena.
The city broadcasts it everywhere—on digital billboards, on subway screens, even in the drones that pass overhead at pre-set intervals. Most people don't read the signs anymore. They don't have to. It's etched into the rhythm of the place. Smile just enough. Sleep just enough. Report anything strange, and then forget it.
A woman drops her umbrella as I pass. Her hands are shaking.
I don't stop. Neither does anyone else. She saw something.
Not my problem.
Not yet.
I live in a narrow complex near the edge of District 7, where the Bureau buildings give way to the border markets. The hallways always smell faintly of incense, even though incense is banned. The man upstairs burns it anyway. He also burns something else. Sometimes, at night, I hear chanting in a language that doesn't exist anymore.
I don't report him. If I did, I'd have to report myself too.
I reach the stairwell, pause at the sixth step. That's where the pulse frequency shifts. The null vibration towers spread sonic suppression across the entire block, low frequencies designed to keep myth-saturation levels stable. But here?
Something hums differently.
I kneel. Press my fingers to the concrete.
Too warm.
Like breath.
A sound flickers through the stone: faint, scraping, rhythmic. Like something clawing its way from the underside.
My vision pulses once.
A memory swims up, uninvited.
Wooden floors. A child sitting cross-legged. A voice from beneath the floorboards.
"You made me."
I stand up fast. Grip the railing until my knuckles ache. My blind eye throbs—a slow shimmer behind the lid, like light catching on oil.
Upstairs, in the apartment I pretend is a home, the Mourner's Gong hums once in response. Dull. Heavy. Like the last note of a funeral drum played through water.
It knows.
So do I.
---
Inside, my apartment is quiet, but never still.
It's small. Clean. The kind of clean that feels like a hospital, not a choice. One bed. One desk. One small altar that isn't really an altar, just a broken piece of floorboard from the house I grew up in, placed gently on a red cloth in the corner. I don't look at it much.
There's a photo on the wall, but the faces are blurred out. Not digitally. Just… gone. I keep it there as a reminder. I used to know the names of the people in it. Now I don't.
The air shifts when I cross the room. The gong, suspended on black cords above the altar, vibrates again—so softly that it sounds like nothing more than a breath against metal.
It's not supposed to do that. Not unless…
No. I haven't used it in weeks. And even then—only once. And only for seven seconds.
I don't remember the names of the people I used it on. But I know they deserved it. That's what Shirogitsune told me, anyway.
Not that I trust him. He's a fox, after all. And not the animal kind.
He's not here now. Not in body. Probably watching from the other side of a mirror, waiting for something to crack. He always shows up when I'm weakest. Like a ghost that gives you advice only after the poison's taken effect.
I slide the window open. The city below glows sterile blue, like a hospital dream.
Someone's crying in the apartment next door.
A baby. Or someone who remembers what it was like to be one. Hard to tell these days.
I open the black notebook on my desk.
Today, the pages are blank. I wrote something last night. I know I did. I used the ink brush. I saw the red soak into the paper. I felt it.
But it's gone now.
Paper doesn't burn. Ink doesn't fade.
So why does it always disappear?
--
On the last page, a line remains, etched deep into the fiber like it was clawed there:
"He is beneath the city. And he remembers you."
No signature. Not mine. Not my handwriting.
I close the book and reach for the ink brush. The bristles are still red. Still wet.
My hand shakes.
From the corner of the room, the gong hums again.
Not loud. Just enough to say:
We're not alone anymore.