The train to Yuki's hometown took just under two hours, most of it spent in a silence that wasn't uncomfortable so much as necessary. Hiroto didn't try to fill it. He'd learned that from her — some silences weren't empty. They were just full of things that hadn't found their shape yet.
It was raining lightly when they arrived, the kind of rain that barely counted as rain at all, more like the air deciding to be heavier than usual.
"It gets worse by evening," Yuki said, checking her phone. "It always does here, this time of year."
The town was smaller than Yukihara, quieter in a different way — not the muffled quiet of constant rain, but the stillness of a place people had slowly stopped needing to visit. A river ran along its eastern edge, wider than Hiroto expected, calm now, betraying nothing about what it had done two years ago.
They didn't go to her parents' house. Yuki walked past the turn that would have led there without slowing down, and Hiroto didn't ask about it, and she didn't explain, and that felt like exactly the right amount of the subject to touch for now.
"This way," she said instead.
Her old street was ordinary in the particular way that made it worse. A row of modest houses. A vending machine humming outside a closed shop. A telephone pole with a faded flyer for a summer festival that had happened years ago and never been taken down.
Yuki stopped in front of a house that wasn't the one she'd grown up in, but close enough to it that Hiroto understood without asking.
"Here," she said. "This is where I was standing. My window was the one up there." She pointed, briefly, then let her hand drop. "She was down there, near the drain grate, where the street dips."
They walked to the spot together. Rain had started to pick up, the light kind sharpening into something with real weight behind it, drumming softly against umbrellas neither of them had bothered to open.
Hiroto crouched at the low point in the street, running his fingers along the edge of the drain grate. Nothing. Just wet concrete, ordinary moss, a scatter of old leaves gone soft and dark.
"I don't feel anything," he said. "No rain slowing. No — pull, or whatever it is."
"Maybe it doesn't work like a light switch," Yuki said. "Maybe it needs something more than just standing here."
They waited anyway, for almost half an hour, until the rain had soaked fully through both their coats and the streetlights had flickered on early against the graying afternoon. Nothing happened. No stillness. No girl.
Yuki exhaled, disappointment sitting plainly on her face for the first time since Hiroto had met her — she usually hid things like that better.
"I thought—" she started, then stopped herself.
"You thought if you came back, she'd be waiting," Hiroto said quietly.
Yuki didn't answer right away.
"I thought maybe I'd get to ask her about Rin," she said finally. "Not about any of this. Not the fifth place, or the door, or any of it. I just wanted to ask if my sister was scared. If it was fast." Her voice had gone very flat, the way voices go when they're being held together on purpose. "I never got to ask anyone that. There wasn't anyone left to ask."
Hiroto didn't say anything. He didn't reach for her, either — some instinct told him this wasn't a moment that wanted to be touched, only witnessed. He simply stood beside her in the rain and let the silence be the kind that was full.
It was nearly dark by the time they turned to leave. Hiroto glanced back once at the drain grate, at the low dip in the street where the rain was pooling now, running toward it in thin dark lines.
Something caught his eye at the grate's edge — small, easy to miss, half-buried in wet leaves.
He crouched down again.
It was a piece of old stone, no bigger than his palm, worn smooth on one side. On the other, faint but still legible if he tilted it toward the streetlight, was a carving — a simple spiral inside a circle, the edges softened by years of weather.
He'd seen that exact shape before. Carved, larger and cruder, into the single remaining post at the burned shrine outside Yukihara.
"Yuki." He held it up.
She crossed back to him and went very still when she saw it.
"That's not from here," she said slowly. "I mean — I don't know where it's from. I never saw anything like that on this street before. Not in eighteen years of walking past this exact spot."
"It's the same symbol," Hiroto said. "From the shrine. The one that burned down."
Yuki took the stone from his hand, turning it over carefully, the way she'd turned the pages of the old journal — like something that might dissolve if handled wrong.
"Two places," she said. "Two hundred kilometers apart. The same mark." She looked up at him, rain running down both their faces, neither of them moving to wipe it away. "That's not a coincidence. That's a trail."
Hiroto looked down at the drain grate, at the water gathering and disappearing into the dark below the street, going somewhere neither of them could follow.
"Then we follow it," he said. "Wherever else that symbol shows up. That's where the rest of her is waiting."
Yuki closed her hand around the small stone, holding it the way you hold something you've decided not to lose again.
"Okay," she said. "Then we're not done here. We're just getting started."