The shortcut through ōmiya Alley saved Kaito Aoyama exactly seven minutes on his walk home, and he'd used those seven minutes to accomplish absolutely nothing for the past three years.

  Seven minutes times 365 days times three years. That was 7,665 minutes of reclaimed time. Roughly 127 hours. Over five full days of his life won back from the universe by cutting through a narrow alley that smelled of wet cardboard and old cooking oil.

  Five extra days on this earth. He’d spent most of them staring at his phone.

  Cold rain hit the back of his neck and slid beneath his collar. October in Saitama. The sky hung heavy and gray, a solid bruised ceiling promising it wouldn't let up anytime soon. He hadn't brought an umbrella. Checking the weather forecast would have required a level of self-care he hadn't unlocked yet. That implied there was some kind of progression system for being a functional human being, and if there was, Kaito Aoyama was stuck on the tutorial.

  His phone was at three percent. He'd burned the battery watching videos during every class instead of charging it, which was exactly the kind of decision that defined his existence. Short-term entertainment. Long-term consequences. Zero adaptation to the pattern.

  Today's highlight reel: a 38 out of 100 on his English quiz. A new personal record in the wrong direction. The teacher had looked at his paper with an expression usually reserved for roadkill.

  To cap it off, the Kita Street vending machine had eaten his last hundred-yen coin. Again. C3 slot. The one that never dropped. He was half-convinced the machine was sentient and specifically targeting him, a paranoid thought, but also the most personal relationship he had with anything in this neighborhood.

  He turned the corner into the alley.

  And stopped.

  A girl was lying on the wet ground.

  His brain processed the image in pieces, buffering like a bad Wi-Fi connection. Bare feet. A white dress catching more light than the single flickering streetlamp should have allowed. Silver-white hair fanned across the concrete in a way that painters spent entire careers trying to capture. Except painters usually left out the oily puddle she was lying in, and the crushed Boss Coffee can floating inches from her head.

  She wasn't moving.

  Kaito's thoughts redlined from zero to five hundred, none of them useful.

  Is she dead? Do I call someone? Who do I call? What's the emergency number?

  Why didn't he know the emergency number? He was seventeen years old. He'd had a phone for four years. If he ever died in an alley, it would be because he sacrificed brain space for video game memes instead of basic survival protocols.

  Okay. Focus. Step one: check if she’s breathing. That felt like the universally accepted step one. Unless step one was running away, a highly valid strategy for someone whose primary life skill was conflict avoidance.

  He didn't run.

  He approached slowly, the way you edge toward something that might be a sleeping cat or an unexploded firecracker. He crouched. His knees hit the wet concrete, cold rainwater soaking immediately through his uniform pants. Great. Spectacular. The perfect climax to a garbage Tuesday.

  She was breathing. Her chest rose and fell beneath the soaked white fabric. Her skin was pale, dangerously translucent. Cold to look at. Actually cold, too, he realized, because he'd extended his hand without fully committing to the touch, and the air radiating off her was actively bleeding a chill like an open freezer door.

  He should call an ambulance. The police. Anyone more qualified than a teenager who failed English and couldn't operate a vending machine.

  His phone was at three percent.

  He grabbed her arm and gave a hesitant shake. "Hey. Wake up. You can't sleep here. It's raining, there's trash, and this isn't…"

  The air detonated.

  There was no other word for it. The moment his fingers made contact with her skin, something between them cracked open like a seam in the world. Blinding light erupted from nowhere and everywhere. A translucent screen, easily six feet tall, blazed into existence between them, hovering in the downpour like the world's most aggressive pop-up ad.

  Blue-white symbols cascaded across its surface. Text in a language he shouldn't know, but could somehow read. Numbers. Categories. A vast, tree-like structure branching in every direction, glowing against the greasy brick like a neon sign from a dimension that hadn't been invented yet.

  Kaito threw himself backward, palms skidding raw on the wet concrete. His tailbone slammed into the curb, pain shooting straight up his spine, but his brain refused to process it. Because there was a GIANT, FLOATING SCREEN in the middle of ōmiya Alley.

  It hung there. Serene. Massive. Radiating soft blue light that caught the rain like falling diamonds.

  The girl's eyes fluttered open.

  They were gold. Not hazel, not amber or honey or any of the words people used when they meant "brownish but pretty." Gold the way forged metal is gold. Reflective and cold. For one terrifying second, Kaito saw a vastness inside them he couldn't name, a depth that fundamentally did not fit inside a human iris. Simultaneously, a sensation slammed into his ears. It wasn't a noise, but a frequency he felt vibrating in his back teeth, like the last reverberating chord of a song played in a room he’d already left.

  Then she blinked.

  The vastness vanished. They were just eyes again. Confused, terrified human eyes staring at a human boy who was sitting on his butt in a puddle, mouth hanging open.

  She looked at the floating screen. Looked at him. When she spoke, her voice came out hoarse and fragile, like something that had been screaming for a long time and only just stopped.

  "I think... I died."

  Her hand moved reflexively to her chest. She didn't press against her heart. Instead, her fingers pushed flat against her sternum, searching for something deeper. Her hand met only skin and bone. She stared down at herself in blank shock before her arm dropped, splashing into the puddle.

  For exactly ten seconds, neither of them breathed.

  The screen hovered between them, unbothered by the rain passing through it. Kaito stared at it. The girl stared at him. The rain continued doing its thing because the rain did not care about supernatural phenomena.

  "You…" Kaito started. Stopped. Tried again. "Did you just…"

  "The screen," she interrupted, her golden eyes locked on the projection. "You can see it?"

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  "It's SIX FEET TALL AND GLOWING."

  "You can see it." The repetition carried a sudden, desperate weight. She tried to sit up. Her arms shook. She made it halfway and then her elbow gave out, collapsing back into the puddle with a splash that was both pathetic and somehow dignified.

  Kaito did the math on his options.

  Option A: Call for help. Phone at three percent. Possibly enough for one call, to a number he didn't know. Option B: Leave. Walk away, go home, pretend this didn't happen. Maintain the comfortable numbness that had defined his life for the past two years. Option C: Do something stupid.

  He stood up. His pants were soaked. His tailbone throbbed. The screen still hovered, tall, silent, and completely impossible.

  "Can you walk?" he asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Can you try?"

  She tried. One bare foot slid under her, then the other. She managed to stand for a single heartbeat before her knees buckled. Kaito caught her. She weighed absolutely nothing. It was like catching a cold, wet paper bag that smelled strongly of ozone and a cloying sweetness he couldn't identify.

  "Okay," he said. "So walking is a no."

  "Where am I?" she asked.

  "ōmiya Alley. Saitama. Uh, Japan. Earth."

  She looked at him like the last word in that list was the one that needed explanation.

  "Right," he said. "You're coming with me."

  He didn't frame it as heroic. He wasn't being noble. She was blocking his shortcut, she had no shoes, and it was raining. More importantly, he knew, in the quiet, awful way that you know things about yourself at seventeen, what it felt like when nobody came for you. He knew the particular shape of that silence. The specific weight of a room where no one was going to walk through the door.

  She was in that silence right now.

  He couldn't step over her. He could have, physically, it was easy. But it would have made him a different kind of person, and whatever kind of person Kaito Aoyama was, that wasn't it.

  She leaned on him. Her arm went over his shoulder. His arm went around her waist. They moved slowly, awkwardly, two people who didn't know each other trying to share a center of gravity.

  The screen followed them.

  It floated behind the girl like a rectangular ghost, bobbing gently in the air, casting their shadows long and strange against the alley walls. When they reached the main street, a salaryman in a gray suit walked directly through it without flinching. Without blinking. Without any indication that he'd just passed through a six-foot holographic display.

  Kaito watched this happen. Processed it. Felt his heart rate do something creative in his chest.

  Only he could see it. The screen. The glow. Whatever this was.

  That was fine. That was totally fine. He was walking home with a barefoot stranger who might be dead and a floating screen that only he could see. This was Tuesday.

  She kept looking at things. Streetlights, cars, a man walking a Shiba Inu. She stared at each thing with an expression that Kaito could only describe as first-time. Not curiosity. Not wonder. Something rawer. Like a person who had arrived somewhere and couldn't quite believe the furniture was real.

  "The light here is different than where I am from," she said quietly.

  He didn't know what to say to that, so he said the first thing that came to mind. "Yeah, they replaced the bulbs on this street last year. LEDs. Saves energy or whatever."

  She looked at him like he was speaking a language she'd heard once in a dream.

  They kept walking. Rain on their shoulders. The screen trailing behind. Two people moving through a Tuesday evening in Saitama while reality quietly rearranged itself around them.

  Kaito's house was a nice house. That was what people always said when they saw it. Good neighborhood. Two stories. Small garden. The kind of place where families were supposed to happen.

  Inside, it was clean in the way that unoccupied model homes are clean. The living room looked like a furniture catalog. The kitchen counters were bare except for a coffee machine that his mom used once a day and a microwave that sat slightly crooked on its stand because somebody had bumped it three months ago and nobody cared enough to fix it.

  The air was perfectly neutral. Temperature-controlled and emotionally vacant.

  His mom sat on the couch, her phone screen reflecting pale light across her glasses. Her thumb flicked in the practiced rhythm of a person who had been scrolling for hours and would continue scrolling for hours more.

  She barely glanced up as Kaito dragged a strange, soaking-wet girl through the foyer.

  "Oh. A friend?"

  The word 'friend' was doing a terrifying amount of heavy lifting. Kaito decided not to inspect it.

  "...Yeah."

  "The guest room's clean, I think."

  She went back to scrolling. No follow-up questions. No "where did you find her." No "why is she wet and barefoot." No "should I be concerned that my teenage son brought home an unconscious stranger." Just a glance, a word, and a return to the screen.

  Kaito didn't react because this was normal.

  That was the thing about his house. There were no fights. No yelling. No slammed doors. There was just this. Two people occupying the same space the way furniture occupies a room. Present. Accounted for. Not meaningfully interacting.

  He walked the girl to the guest room. She stood in the doorway and stared at the bed like she'd never seen one.

  Maybe she hadn't.

  He went to the hall closet and pulled out clothes. His older sister's stuff, still in boxes because his sister had moved out at eighteen and apparently owning clothes in a house you no longer lived in was acceptable. He found a T-shirt and sweatpants and handed them over.

  "Here. You should change. You're soaked."

  She held the clothes with both hands. Stared at them. Then, with the careful deliberation of someone solving a puzzle, she put them on. The T-shirt hung to her knees. The sweatpants pooled around her feet in waves of excess fabric. She looked like a child wearing a costume of an adult.

  She looked up at him from inside this fabric cocoon. Fragile. Ridiculous. Both at the same time.

  "Thank you," she said. The formality in her voice was strange. Slightly too precise. Like she was translating from something with more grammar than Japanese.

  "Don't worry about it." He stepped back, his hand finding the doorframe. "Do you have a name?"

  She paused. Something flickered behind her golden eyes, the struggle of reaching for something that should be there, only to grasp at empty space.

  "Noel," she said, tasting the syllables. "I think... my name is Noel."

  "Noel. Okay. You seem a bit messed up in your head. I'm Kaito. The bathroom is across the hall. Don't..." He thought about it. "Don't do anything weird there."

  She tilted her head, genuinely perplexed. "Why would I do something weird in a bathroom?"

  "Just. Don't."

  He pulled the door shut, leaned the back of his head against the hallway wall, and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

  What just happened to my life?

  In the guest room, Noel sat on the bed.

  The house was quiet around her. She could hear the boy's footsteps retreating down the hallway. The sound of water running. A door closing. Then nothing.

  She was alone.

  She raised her hand. The screen responded. It materialized from the air like it had been waiting for her to call it, glowing soft blue in the dark room. The light fell across the bed, the walls, the ceiling, casting everything in the color of deep water.

  She scrolled.

  The screen was massive. Not physically, but in scope. Categories branched in every direction. Skills, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, each one grayed out. Locked. Names she could read but couldn't access. The tree structure went deep, deeper than the screen could display without scrolling, and she scrolled and scrolled and the list kept going. Branch after branch after branch, disappearing into territories she couldn't yet see.

  At the top of the screen, text:

  [NAME: ???] [LEVEL: 1] [SKILL POINTS: 9,999,999] [UNLOCKED SKILLS: 0] [CONDITIONS: LOCKED]

  Nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine.

  She stared at the number. Her expression shifted. Not confusion. Not fear. Something older. Recognition. The look of a person who opens a door and finds a room they've been in before, in a dream they can't remember having.

  Then grief.

  It moved across her face like weather. A cloud passing over a landscape. Quick but total.

  She whispered a word. A single word in a language that didn't exist in this world. It possessed no equivalent in Japanese or English or any tongue spoken by any mouth on this planet. If pressed, the closest translation would have been something like: "again."

  She closed the screen. It folded into nothing.

  She sat on the bed in a dark room in a house that belonged to a boy who had not walked past her.

  She knew what this was. She just didn't know why.