The towers wore black glass, every pane a dead screen. Below, the square boiled—the chant, the sirens, the static of ten thousand throats—but up here the sound thinned to a nervous tremor in the window frame.
Winter paused at the service kiosk where an aquarium loop should have been. The koi was gone; a lattice of dull LEDs waited for a pulse. Emiko peeled off her glove and pressed two fingers to the seam where panel met frame. A paper seal slid from her sleeve, a thin strip with inked teeth. Tap—tap tap—tap. Green.
They slipped through the maintenance door into air that smelled of coolant and ozone. No foyer, no concierge; only a spine of stairs and a vertical throat where drone cradles slept in hexes. On the landing, a lens woke. Emiko's wrist flicked; a second seal kissed the glass and clouded it. Winter was already at the junction box, counting under his breath, fingers moving in threes, cutting the building's hearing for twelve breaths.
Up past the trading floor—tickers blank, benches still warm, a forgotten coffee ring drying to sugar. A cleaning automaton nosed the marble; Emiko palmed its face and turned its map thirty degrees. In the corridor beyond, a gate waited with a biomesh that remembered palm lines. Winter didn't look at her when he offered his own hand. It lit. The gate sighed.
At the ninety-third floor they stopped. A window wall ran the length of the room, the city laid out in cold light. The projector's blue veil washed the plaza; crowds pulsed, then broke, then mended around a new roar. In the glass, Emiko's reflection trembled—only in the throat.
"Why did you leave me?" She spoke to the window, to the ants below, to the place her voice came from at twelve and never quite returned. "At spawn."
A beat. His knuckles found the sill. One tap. Two. "Another matter. His."
Her cheekbone tightened. She exhaled, fogging a small oval that refused to stay. "How is he?" A question dressed in small clothes.
"Stubborn, as always." A pause where a smile should have landed. "Still keeps the red scarf by the door." He drummed three short, one long, two short on the aluminum trim—pattern she knew by spring nights at the threshold, waiting to be called in.
"And the garden," she said. "Is it holding?"
"Bare stalks," he answered. "Waiting on the bloom he keeps promising." His eyes stayed on the riot. "Everyone says there's no such plant. He says there is."
Her mouth moved without sound. 'Miracle', the word knocked in her chest, wanting it, staying put. "He is eating."
"When the visitor leaves, the red came. The one who never knocks."
Her wrist twitched. "Is the fence watched?"
"Every night. New dogs. They don't bark." He tapped again: short, short, long. Tail on us.
A hush opened between them that was not empty. The plaza's roar thinned to seaside in the glass; a crate went over; the blue eye brightened and dimmed. Emiko counted the rise and fall of the crowd the way she used to count his sleep when he shook through it. 'Old favours', she thought, 'old debts.' The paper in her sleeve warmed to skin.
"You should have told me." Her words carried no weight at all until they struck the window and came back heavier.
"I tried." His smile was only teeth. "The line stuttered."
"Father requested."
"He always does."
Her palm flattened to the cold. "If we bring the bloom home… seat at the table." He gave two taps, one, two—crests on the door.
Winter's gaze held the riot. "He sets the table. He moves the chairs." A breath. "He'll name you when the vase is full."
She almost tapped another question—the one that had lived under her tongue for years—then let it die in her sleeve.
"When will the visitor come?" she said instead.
"Since the crossing. Red on stair, red in glass, red in vents. Never the same face."
"I hate her coat."
"He likes it. Says it keeps wolves off."
"They were never for wolves. They were for us."
Footsteps stirred the shaft; a drone woke and slept again. Winter looked to the security cradle at the far end, dormant. Emiko flexed her fingers; ink settled.
"Family dinner." She stepped away from the window's glow.
"Sunday," he answered, falling in beside her. "Bring flowers."
"Only if they bloom."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A quiet cliffside at the threshold of neon and noise.
The message blinked in the lower-right corner of their shared vision:
Group Chat – Admin: Zilynx
"I think we're done—can we meet back near Terminal Delta?"
It hovered for a moment—clinical, blue, system-approved—before fading. But far above the noise and blinking signs of Green Digitalus, where the city frayed against the horizon, Ukiyo hadn't moved.
She sat alone on the ledge of a broken rail balcony that jutted out from a half-collapsed building—the kind of place built for a city that had stopped dreaming halfway through. A billboard frame hung sideways behind her, its lights flickering aimlessly, advertising a non-existent cola with a smiling synthetic boy on loop. Below her, chaos writhed like a living organism.
The riots surged through the concrete arteries of the city. Not loud from this height, but still audible—the chant of code-fueled desperation and rage, scattered cries for freedom or reset or revenge. It was a muffled, aching dirge that vibrated in her ribs more than it touched her ears.
She stared down at them, legs hanging, eyes like glass.
"I didn't want this," it came out quietly.
A pause.
"...You can stop hiding now."
Behind the ruined pillar, Tang-Ji stepped into view.
She looked like she'd been caught reaching into a stranger's diary. Her mouth opened slightly, but no words came. Just a breath, caught like a thread wrapped around something tender.
"I—I wasn't trying to spy. I just…" Her voice hiccupped. "Didn't want to bother you."
Ukiyo didn't look away from the city. "Let's skip the small talk," her voice flat as chrome. "What do you need?"
Tang-Ji hesitated. The words gathered in her throat, each one heavy, splintered. Like her body remembered something she didn't.
"That day…" she began, slow and unsure. "When we were fighting for our lives. You called me 'Chi-chan.'"
The name fluttered like an echo through the crumbling metal scaffold.
Ukiyo blinked once. Not in surprise—but like she was turning a page.
"You said it without thinking," Tang-Ji pressed. "Do we—did we—know each other before this?"
A long silence.
"No," Ukiyo replied. "I've never met you."
And it was the truth. Not the whole of it, but truth enough.
"…Then why call me that?"
Ukiyo finally turned, her profile lit by the neon haze blooming out of the city below. Her voice held no warmth, but no cruelty either.
"You reminded me of someone. Someone from a long time ago."
The name once meant warmth, nights spent tracing stars inside cardboard boxes, giggles over shared candies, ink drawings on skin that faded in the rain. But those memories belonged to a different girl. One Ukiyo didn't remember being.
Now, it was her turn.
She looked back at the skyline.
The sun bled slowly into the horizon, torn open by the glass towers of Green Digitalus. Its dying light scattered across the edges of augmented buildings and shattered sky-bridges. Drones blinked through alley shadows. Far below, a billboard glitched between a smiling family and a government warning:
"STAY HOME. STAY SAFE. STAY HUMAN."
The wind brushed gently against the cliff's edge, picking up static and smog from the city below. Beneath the fractured skyline, Green Digitalus shimmered in hues of synthetic sunset—orange spilling into teal, like bruises blooming over concrete skin.
Ukiyo sat like a statue carved from dusk. She didn't blink when she spoke, only stared down at the glowing sprawl below, as if the city itself owed her an answer it refused to give.
"If you had a wish," her voice almost inaudible over the wind and the far-off chaos, "and you could make anything happen—even create an entirely new world, with its own rules, its own shape—what would you wish for?"
Tang-Ji blinked, unsure if she heard right. "Huh…?"
Ukiyo didn't repeat herself. She just kept staring.
"A world where the broken things never existed. Where memory is chosen. Where pain is a code you could just delete."
Tang-Ji's brows furrowed. The question coiled around her like something half-familiar but unfinished, as if she'd heard it once in a dream or at the end of a book she never quite finished.
"I don't… I don't know what you mean. Like… are you talking about a fantasy world? A made-up one?"
Still, Ukiyo didn't answer. The glow from a broken advertisement screen flickered across her cheek, giving her face the unchanging look of someone staring through time.
"…Are you content," Ukiyo asked at last, voice colder now, more deliberate, "with the world you're in now?"
Tang-Ji faltered. She looked down at her hands as if they might help her make sense of the question. Her breath came slow. Heavy.
"…I never really thought about it like that," she admitted. "I mean… things weren't meaningless. I had people, a routine. It wasn't perfect, but…"
She frowned.
"The world's changing. I get it, I do. But… lately, I've felt like I'm drifting. Like I'm speaking into a void and no one's on the other end."
She hugged her elbows.
"I lost most of my memory seven years ago. Just… gone. Everything before that's fog. Maybe I used to feel different. Maybe the old me loved this world. I don't know."
She exhaled.
"I know it sounds confusing, but… until I find those pieces again, I don't want to decide anything permanent. I want to keep changing, learning, remembering. Until I finally know who I am. Then, maybe, I'll have a proper answer."
Ukiyo turned to her, the light catching in her iris—a deep, storm-shadowed blue, just a shade darker than Tang-Ji's own. "And what about the person you are right now?" she asked, her gaze steady, unblinking. "Do you hate this world?"
Tang-Ji opened her mouth, then closed it again. Something cracked behind her eyes.
"…I guess I never asked myself that." She paused. "I mean… does the current me hate it?"
She swallowed, searching for a truth she barely dared to trust.
"Maybe sometimes. I don't think I've ever said it out loud but—yeah. Sometimes I get frustrated by the way things are. Not just here. There, too. Everyone's constantly online. It's like… people only exist if they're being seen."
She hugged herself without realising.
"Sometimes it feels like I'm shouting into the dark and all I hear back is static. No faces. Just avatars and screens. And the silence is louder than ever."
There was a pause, quiet but charged.
"...So you do hate it," Tang-Ji murmured, watching Ukiyo. "Our world, I mean."
Ukiyo gave the faintest, cynical sound—something like a scoff but softer, more bitter. Then, finally, she turned her head.
"What makes you think that?"
Tang-Ji stared into her face, her own reflection half-caught in the dark sheen of Ukiyo's eyes.
"Your eyes."
That made Ukiyo pause.
"They're the same colour as mine… but darker. And they shake." Tang-Ji tilted her head slightly, her voice steady now. "I know that look. It's the same one I get when I sit in my room and watch myself cry in the mirror—when I feel like I'm the only one left still trying."
Ukiyo's lashes lowered. The wind tugged lightly at her white hair, made it waver like threads pulled loose from a memory.
"…The place we live in," she said softly, "is the only home I will ever know—my world in every sense. But it's a prison now."
She looked back at the city—not at the fires or the noise, but at the glowing, polished monoliths in the distance, where drones circled silently overhead.
"They watch everything. Control everything. The ones in power tighten the strings while the rest of us dance and call it freedom."
Tang-Ji listened, lips slightly parted, unsure what to say. Ukiyo's voice cut through the weight of the moment like cold steel.
"A society where every movement is tracked, every word archived, every desire manipulated through screens… that is enough for any normal person to hate."
She shifted slightly, shadows sweeping across her expression.
"But that isn't the only reason."
Her voice lowered—more to herself now.
"There's something else."
Tang-Ji didn't press. Instead, she sat down beside her.
"…When I was younger," it came out after a while, "I used to read fantasy romance stories. You know… swords, magic, kingdoms, forbidden love—stuff like that. And all those worlds had their own rules. Their own laws. Sometimes cruel, sometimes strange."
She smiled faintly, watching the wind curl between the ruined towers.
"But no matter how dark those stories got… there was always one thing that stayed the same. It wasn't the world that decided the ending. It was the people living in it."
She looked at Ukiyo again.
"In the end, there was always someone—just one person—who stood up, even when the odds were impossible. And that one person made it possible for the rest of the world to change."
She drew a breath. "I know I'm just a normal person. People call me boring, basic. I don't listen to them of course. But I know I'm not enough on my own—but that doesn't change wanting. I still keep the dream."
She shrugged, almost embarrassed by her own words. "Maybe that sounds naive. But it's why I still hope."
Ukiyo didn't smile, but something shifted in her posture. Her eyes flicked briefly to Tang-Ji's.
"And what about you?" Tang-Ji asked after a moment. "That wish you mentioned. If you could remake the world…"
She trailed off.
Ukiyo didn't answer.
Instead, she exhaled softly, gaze fixed on the dying light as the sun dipped behind the broken spires. The city was beginning to blur into its nighttime mask—halos of pink neon wrapping around rooftops, artificial stars flickering against a smog-choked sky.
Ukiyo finally turned, her voice quieter now. "Then let's see, shall we?"
"…Huh?"
"Let's see who can change the ending."
The wind stirred a strand of her hair, carried the ash-smell of something burning in the city.
Ukiyo turned to her fully now, face unreadable.
Then—almost imperceptibly—she smiled.
It didn't reach her eyes.
"…Whoever's there," she called, louder now. "You can come out too."
A scuffle of boots on old concrete. From behind a shattered steel vent, Kazami and Junyo both stepped forward, looking less guilty and more sheepish.
"Didn't mean to intrude. But if we're making this a group therapy session, I want a seat."
Ukiyo sighed, not amused but not annoyed. "You breathe loud."
"Next time," she rised from the ledge, "try not to breathe so loudly when you eavesdrop."
Behind them, the city cried on. Neon lights shimmered across their faces, each colour a question waiting to be asked.