The walk home from Aoi Serizawa's sterile, silent house was the loneliest journey of my life. The city of Kitahama was alive with the warm, electric pulse of a Tuesday evening. The murmur of conversation spilled from open-fronted ramen shops, neon signs painted the wet pavement in strokes of brilliant pink and blue, and the river of people flowed around me, each person an island of their own mundane, beautiful concerns.
For the first time since this whole nightmare began, I was truly alone.
Yuki was gone. She hadn't been erased. She had...retreated. She had fled from a truth more painful than non-existence, the truth that her continued ghostly survival had been paid for by the life of a friend she couldn't even remember. The empty space beside me, which had once been a source of silent commentary and ethereal presence, was now a gaping, aching void. The world felt muffled, the colors less vibrant. It was as if she were the antenna that allowed me to pick up the full spectrum of reality, and now, all I had was static. My own.
I kept turning my head, expecting to see a flicker of silver hair, to hear a witty, insightful, or sometimes just plain weird observation whispered in my ear. But there was nothing. Just the city, and the crushing weight of silence.
Guilt was a cold, heavy stone in my stomach. I had done that to her. I had taken her fragmented, painful reality and shattered it completely with a single, logical, brutal question. I had been so obsessed with finding the truth, with piecing together the puzzle, that I never stopped to think about what the picture might show. I had unearthed a memory that was, for her, a curse.
When I got back to my own empty apartment, the silence was even more profound. It wasn't the peaceful solitude I used to crave; it was the oppressive silence of an abandoned house. I walked into my room and pulled the photograph from my pocket. Ryoichi Tanaka's masterpiece. A moment of eternity at Misaki Shrine.
I looked at the impossible girl in the corner of the frame. Before, she was a mystery, a clue. Now, she was a memorial. This photograph wasn't just an image of Yuki. It was a tombstone for Mio Asakura. A beautiful, terrible monument to a cosmic crime.
"Yuki," I whispered to the empty room. "I'm sorry."
The words felt hollow, useless.
I spent the rest of the night in a state of solitary vigil. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't read. I couldn't listen to music. I just sat at my desk, staring at the photograph, and tried to do the one thing that seemed to matter. I tried to find her.
I closed my eyes and focused inward, past the throbbing of my own thoughts, past the beat of my own heart. I focused on the static. The background hiss of reality. Before, I had tried to block it out. Now, I dove into it. I imagined it as a vast, grey ocean, and I was searching for a single, faint signal. A flicker of silver light. A note of a familiar, sad song.
I sent my own thoughts out into that ocean. Yuki, I'm here. It's okay. We'll fix this. Just come back.
But the ocean remained vast, grey, and empty. There was no answer. She was lost, adrift in the sea of her own forgotten past, and I had no lighthouse to guide her home.
The next day at school was a lesson in temporal distortion. Every minute felt like an hour, every period an eternity. The world of classroom 2-B, with its trivial dramas and shouted greetings, felt like a broadcast from another planet. I was merely a passenger, counting down the seconds until the real part of my day began.
I saw Hina. She gave me a small, worried smile. She must have noticed the new, profound exhaustion etched onto my face. She had her sunflower charm, her personal Artifact, clipped to her bag. She had found her anchor. I had just watched my own drift away.
Before first period, the three remaining members of the Anomaly Investigation Squad convened near the shoe lockers, a silent, grim-faced meeting. Renji was there, leaning against the wall. The abrasive, cynical mask was gone, leaving his face looking bare and vulnerable. The shadows under his eyes were as dark as my own. He looked like a man who hadn't slept in three months, and probably hadn't. He gave me a curt, almost imperceptible nod. It was a greeting, an acknowledgment. We were allies now, bound by the ghosts we carried.
Aoi stood beside him, her posture as rigid as ever, but her analytical gaze was focused on me. "Your cognitive function appears to be at 74% of its optimal level," she observed quietly. "The absence of the anomaly is having a measurable effect on your stability."
"I'm fine," I lied.
"Negative," she countered instantly. "You are functioning. You are not fine. There is a quantifiable difference."
The three of us standing there must have been a strange sight. The Zombie, the Robot, and the Reformed Delinquent. The weirdest, most broken club in school.
"After school," Renji said, his voice a low rasp. "My place. Don't be late." He then turned and walked off to his own class without another word.
His abruptness wasn't hostile anymore. It was just... weary. He was a man with a promise to keep, a final, painful duty to the friend he had lost.
The hours crawled by. I found myself constantly looking at the empty seat beside me, a habit I hadn't even realized I'd formed. The absence of Yuki was a physical presence. A cold draft. A missing color from the spectrum. I felt like half of my own brain had been scooped out. She had become my partner, my sounding board, my encyclopedia of the supernatural. Without her, I was just a boy who saw static, armed with a handful of painful, half-formed theories.
Finally, the last bell chimed. It was time to visit the dragon's lair.
Renji Kurobane lived in a small, nondescript house in a quiet residential neighborhood. It was the kind of place that was so perfectly average it was almost invisible. The paint was neat, the small garden was weeded, but there was a palpable sense of emptiness about it, like a model home that no one had ever actually lived in.
He was waiting for us at the door. "My parents are on a business trip," he said by way of greeting, a statement that seemed to explain his entire personality in a single sentence. He led us inside.
The interior was what I'd expected. Clean, tidy, and utterly impersonal. It was a house, not a home. It was the perfect environment to nurture a cynical, detached loner. We followed him up a flight of stairs and into his room.
The dragon's lair. It was dark. Thick blackout curtains were drawn over the windows, plunging the room into a perpetual twilight. The only light came from the glow of a computer monitor. The room was sparsely furnished: a bed, a desk, a bookshelf. But unlike Aoi's library of knowledge, Renji's shelves were filled with photography books and albums. Thick, leather-bound volumes dedicated to the masters: Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Daido Moriyama. And on the wall, there was a single, large, framed photograph. A black and white shot of the city from the Kirigamine Observatory, so sharp and full of life it felt like you could step right into it. Ryoichi's work. A shrine to a forgotten god.
"Sit," Renji ordered, gesturing to the floor. There were no chairs.
Aoi and I sat on the cold wooden floor. The tension in the room was thick enough to choke on. Renji stood before his closet, his back to us. He stood there for a long time, his hand on the handle, as if gathering the strength to open it.
"He called it the Eidolon," Renji said, his voice quiet and strained. "I looked it up once. It's a Greek word. It means a phantom, a shade, an idealized image. He was a pretentious bastard like that." A flicker of fond exasperation crossed his face, a ghost of a smile.
He finally slid the closet door open. It was mostly filled with clothes, but on the top shelf, covered in a black cloth as if it were a holy relic, was a hard-sided camera case. He reached up with trembling hands and carefully took it down. He placed it on the floor between us with the reverence of a priest placing the sacrament on the altar.
He opened the case.
My breath caught in my throat. The Master Artifact.
It was an old film camera, a beautiful, heavy piece of German engineering from the 70s. Its metal body was worn brassy at the edges from years of use. But it had been modified. Heavily. The standard leatherette had been replaced with a dark, unfamiliar material that seemed to absorb the light. The lens mounted on the front was huge and complex, with calibration marks etched into the barrel in a script that wasn't Japanese or English. It looked almost like alchemy symbols. And attached to the hot shoe on top wasn't a flash, but a strange, prism-like device made of polished obsidian and wound with thin silver wires.
It was a machine, but it felt alive. It was a tool of science that had been cross-bred with a grimoire.
"He said it didn't capture light," Renji explained, his gaze fixed on the camera, his voice distant. "Not really. He said it captured the 'existential resonance' of a subject. It imprinted a moment's state of being onto a specially prepared silver-halide medium. It was his life's work."
He looked at me, his amber eyes filled with a deep, bottomless pain. "This is what he used. To see me. To save me. It's the reason he's gone."
His hand hovered over the camera, then retreated. "Take it," he whispered. "I can't... I can't look at it anymore."
I reached out, my own hands trembling slightly. The moment my fingers brushed against the cold metal body of the Eidolon, all hell broke loose inside my head.
It wasn't a backlash. It was an explosion.
A tidal wave of raw, unfiltered information crashed into my consciousness. It was a million times stronger than the photograph. It was the source code.
The smell of darkroom chemicals, acrid and sharp—the scent of creation. The roar of a thousand different kinds of static, a chorus of cosmic noise—the sound of the universe's background radiation. A rapid-fire slideshow of images flashing behind my eyes: the terrified face of the kendo girl, the confused look of a boy from the Go club, dozens of other forgotten students, each with that horrifying, faceless echo superimposed over them—the ghosts Ryoichi had documented. And underneath it all, a torrent of emotion that wasn't mine. A fierce, obsessive, desperate drive to know, to understand, to solve the equation. A profound loneliness. A brilliant, burning passion. And finally, a deep, soul-shattering despair, followed by a calm, terrible resolve.
I was feeling Ryoichi Tanaka. All of him. All at once.
"Aaaargh!" A cry of pain was torn from my throat. I recoiled, my hand flying back as if burned. The camera sat there on the floor, humming with a silent, terrible power. The overload was too much. My head felt like it was splitting open.
"Hoshino-kun!" Aoi's voice was sharp with alarm. Renji stared at me, his face pale with a horrified recognition. He knew this feeling. He knew the power of that machine.
But something else was happening. The psychic energy erupting from the camera, amplified by my own heightened emotional state, by my desperate, night-long search for Yuki... it was acting as a beacon. A lighthouse in the storm of static.
In the corner of Renji's dark room, the air began to shimmer.
A faint, flickering light appeared, like moonlight struggling to break through clouds. It coalesced, sharpened, and took form.
It was Yuki.
She was back. She looked fragile, her form more translucent than ever, her eyes wide with a mixture of pain and fear. But she was here. She had been pulled, or perhaps guided, back to us by the very instrument that had caused her so much pain. She stared at the Eidolon camera, and I could feel her sorrow, her fear, and her grim resolve wash over me.
"Yuki," I breathed, the pain in my head already starting to subside, replaced by a flood of overwhelming relief.
She looked at me, and in her eyes, I saw a new strength. The strength of someone who has faced the worst parts of themselves and survived. "I'm okay, Kaito," she whispered. "I... I had to think."
Renji was staring at the empty corner where I was looking, his mouth agape. He couldn't see her, but he could see my reaction. He could feel the sudden shift in the room's atmosphere. The impossible things I had told him were suddenly, terrifyingly real. "She's... here?" he stammered.
I could only nod, my gaze locked with Yuki's.
We had the camera. We had the team. We had the ghost. The immediate goal was achieved. But it was a hollow victory. We possessed a machine of unimaginable power, with absolutely no idea how to use it. Ryoichi's genius—his developing process, his knowledge, his theories—was gone, erased along with him. The Eidolon was a key without a keyhole.
"His notes are gone," Renji said, as if reading my thoughts. "We'll never know how he made it work."
"Perhaps not," Aoi's calm voice cut in. She had moved closer during the commotion and was now examining the camera case, her analytical gaze missing nothing. "Ryoichi Tanaka was a genius, but he was also a paranoid researcher working in secret. It is illogical to assume he would not create a backup of his most critical data." Her nimble fingers were probing the lining of the old leather case. "A false bottom, perhaps, or..."
Her fingers stopped. She had found a slight irregularity in the worn leather, a small flap that was almost invisible. With the delicate precision of a surgeon, she lifted it.
There was a hidden compartment beneath.
My heart hammered against my ribs. We all leaned in. Inside the small, felt-lined space, there wasn't a key or a roll of film. There was a single sheet of paper, folded into a tight, neat square.
Aoi carefully extracted it and unfolded it.
It wasn't a page of notes. It was a star chart. A beautiful, hand-drawn map of the night sky, depicting the constellations of the northern hemisphere with painstaking detail. One constellation, Lyra, was circled in red ink.
"What is this?" I asked, confused.
"Turn it over," Yuki whispered, her eyes fixed on the paper.
Aoi reversed the chart. On the back, in Ryoichi Tanaka's neat, technical handwriting, was a single, cryptic sentence. A final clue from a boy who had rewritten reality.
The sky forgets, but the stars remember. Her name is a constellation. Find it before the next new moon.