Back home I found a note.
It wasn't signed.
It was folded once and left beneath the journal on my desk. A simple slip of paper, the kind used for classroom memos or grocery lists. The ink had bled slightly from the cold air seeping through the windows. The edges were worn, as if someone had carried it for some time before placing it there.
The handwriting was neat. Blocky. Familiar in a way I couldn't place.
"Come to the old station. Where the bell never rings."
The phrasing caught me more than the message. It didn't feel urgent. It felt inevitable. Like the words had always been waiting for me to read them. Like the had been written long before I arrived.
I read it once, twice, and again. Only that it was there, and once I'd read it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It didn't feel like a suggestion. It felt like a summons.
Like something I had already agreed to.
***
I arrived just after dusk.
The old station was farther east than I had ever been—past the river, past the warehouse rows and rusted tram lines that hadn't seen service since the war scare. The city thinned there. Roads broke into gravel, and fog pooled low between the buildings.
The structure itself was skeletal. Stone bones. Collapsed roof. Iron supports exposed like ribs. A single bell tower loomed overhead, dark and still. There were no birds. No voices. Just the faint hum of wind through broken glass.
I stepped inside.
Immediately, the light changed. What little daylight remained dimmed to a dull gray. My footsteps echoed too far, too deep. The air was thick with dust, but none of it moved.
Something was wrong with the space. The angles bent too sharply. Corners where there shouldn't be corners. Shadows that didn't match their sources.
At the far end of the platform, a mirror leaned against the wall.
It hadn't been there a moment ago.
I approached slowly. My reflection looked back—but wrong. A half-second delay. My breath fogged the glass before I exhaled. My eyes blinked out of sync.
When I turned to leave, the door was gone.
***
I moved fast—back through the corridor, past the empty benches, through a turn I didn't recognize. The walls passed in closer than before. Doors I hadn't passed on the way in appeared at impossible intervals—some closed, others slightly afar, leaking light that flickered without source.
Walls flickered. Light broke like static. My shadow dragged too far behind me, then snapped back too close.
I was running, but the ground beneath me stretched and folded like fabric. Angles sharpened. My breath came uneven. My own footsteps no longer sounded like mine—they echoed in an unfamiliar rhythm, as if someone else was running beside me, just out of view.
Then the corridor twisted again, and I was back where I started—or somewhere that looked like it. The mirror was gone. The benches were wrong. A clock above the arch read thirteen o'clock.
A voice echoed. Not Clara's. Not Eberhardt's. A child's voice, maybe. A whisper through the vents:
"Don't forget who you are."
The words didn't echo. They landed like weight.
I stumbled. My hands hit the tile. It was slick, like glass underwater.
And the floor gave way beneath me, like it had never been solid at all.
***
I fell through cold.
Not the shock of winter air or icy water—but something deeper. The kind of cold that strips sound from the world. The kind that erases where you came from.
Water slammed up to meet me. Not river water—something darker. Thicker. It clung to me like memory, slow and suffocating. A current with no direction. I kicked and thrashed, but the light above me was gone. There was no surface. No breath.
Only the weight.
It pressed in from all sides. My limbs felt like stone. My chest burned with held breath that was no longer mine to hold. My vision blurred, colors bleeding into black. Thoughts slipped like fish through my hands—names, faces, entire seasons of my life, vanishing into the murk.
And then, just before I slipped under completely, I heard it.
"Ren!"
A name. Not mine. But to me.
The sound pierced everything. Not through my ears, but directly through the thread that lived behind my ribs.
And then—her hand. Clara's.
Fingers brushing mine beneath the water. A jolt through the thread, searing and total. A light without form. A memory without voice. Her touch wasn't warm, but it was real.
Time fractured.
Everything I had forgotten surged back into me—not in sequence, but all at once.
The thread in my first dream—thin and golden, floating in the void. Shuji handing me the leather-bound journal beneath the pine. Rin whispering her name for the first time in that crooked hallway. The cart barreling down the hill—rewound by instinct. The clock that had stopped at 4:44. The mask on the other side of the glass. Genzo's voice: What part of you remembers how to fight? Sayo standing in silence beneath the shrine tree. Tatsuya's blade trembling in my defense.
They came not as a story, but as a sensation. Weight. Heat. Sorrow. Thread. The feeling of dying. The feeling of beginning again.
I didn't think.
I didn't hesitate.
I reached through everything—and rewound time.
***
I gasped awake—soaked, freezing, choking on breath.
The air burned as it filled my lungs, too cold, too sharp. My fingers dug into cracked tile. My body trembled with the shock of return—like I had fallen not just through space, but through time itself.
I was back in the old station. The same broken walls. The same collapsed archways. But the ground beneath me was dry. No sign of water. No indication I had ever fallen.
And yet—I had.
The bell above me rang once. A single, deliberate tone. It echoed longer than it should have, like the sound was searching for something.
I pushed myself upright, every muscle stiff. My vision swam, the edges still blurred with the afterimage of that endless corridor.
And then I saw them.
Standing at the far end of the platform—still, watching—was Clara.
Her eyes found mine, wide with something that wasn't fear.
And just beside her, half-shadowed beneath the arch.
The man in the coat.
The one who had followed me.
He didn't speak. He didn't move.
But I knew who he was.
Genzo.