Chapter 1: The First Morning
The smell of burnt toast seeped into the dream, twisting it into something sharp and acrid before it vanished entirely. Mio Suzuki opened her eyes to the water stain on the ceiling, its shape like a rotten flower. The voice followed the smell, slicing through the thin wall.“You useless girl! Are you going to sleep all day?Get up and make yourself useful!”
Her foster mother. The words were the same, maybe a different order sometimes.Mio pushed the thin blanket back, her movements careful, a silent ritual. The floorboards were cold even through her socks. On her makeshift pallet, beside her worn schoolbag, lay a book.She hadn’t put it there. It was beautiful, which felt like an insult in this place. Leather the color of dried blood, with intricate, spiraling patterns tooled into the cover.It felt heavy, substantial. Everything else in Room 3B was light, cheap, threatening to disintegrate. The apartment itself was a damp exhale of stale coffee and old mold, the wallpaper peeling back from the corners like sunburned skin. She ran a finger over the cover, then shoved it into her bag.Later.
In the kitchen, her foster sibling, were already eating perfectly golden toast. Their mother stood at the counter, her back a wall of resentment.“Your portion is in the sink,” she said, not turning around.
It was a single slice, blackened at the edges, cold and brittle. Mio picked it up.The char tasted like punishment.Koji giggled, a bit of jam on his chin. “Mio got the burnt one again.”
“She’s lucky to get anything,” their mother muttered, finally turning. Her eyes, flat and dismissive, scanned Mio from head to toe.“Stand up straight.You look sickly. People will think we don’t feed you.” She barked a laugh, a dry, empty sound.“Hurry up. You’ll make them late.”
The walk to school was a silent procession, two paces behind them. At the gates, their worlds split without a word. The moment she stepped onto the campus alone, the atmosphere shifted, thickened.Whispers clung to her uniform like cobwebs. She kept her eyes on the cracked paving stones.Class was a drone of ignored questions and averted eyes. The teacher’s voice faded into a buzz. She felt the stare from two rows back, a hot, insistent pressure on the nape of her neck.Suki Tanaka. When the lunch bell rang, the trap was sprung with casual efficiency.“Hey, Suzuki.The teacher wants to see you. Staff room.” It was one of Suki’s friends, a girl with a sharp smile.
A lie, obvious and flimsy.But not obeying was worse. The hallway to the staff room was long, echoing with the distant sounds of a normal lunch. They were waiting in a blind spot near the cleaning closet.
Suki stepped out, blocking the light from the window at the hall’s end.Her face was a mask of pretty, practiced cruelty. “You think you’re so special with that face,” she said, her voice low. “Just looking at you makes me sick.”
Mio said nothing.Words were fuel.
“She thinks she’s too good to talk to us,” another girl chimed in.
Suki’s hand shot out, not to hit, but to shove. Mio’s back hit the lockers with a metallic bang that traveled down her spine.“You were trying to talk to Mr.Ishida yesterday after class. Telling tales?”
Mio had only asked about a missed assignment.She shook her head.
“Liar.” The first punch was to the stomach, driving the air from her lungs in a silent gasp. She folded over, and then the blows rained down—not on her face, where it would show, but on her ribs, her arms, her back as she tried to curl into a ball. A sneaker connected with her shin.The pain was bright, specific, and total.
“Freak,” Suki hissed, breathing hard from the effort. “Sickly little freak.”
They left as quickly as they’d appeared, their laughter dissolving down the hallway. Mio lay there for a long time, tasting blood from a bitten cheek, listening to the throb of her own pulse in her ears. She pushed herself up, each movement a fresh knife, and limped towards the nurse’s office.
The nurse took one look at her disheveled uniform, her gritted teeth, and sighed. “Fight again, Suzuki?”
“I didn’t—”
“Save it.” The woman’s hands were efficient and cold, dabbing antiseptic on a scrape, handing her a cold pack for her ribs.No questions about who.No comfort.Just a transaction of minimal care. “You can rest here for ten minutes.Then you should go home.”
Home. The word was a black joke. Mio clutched the cold pack to her side and limped out when the ten minutes were up, every step a reminder. The journey back to Apartment 3B was a slow-motion agony of crowded trains and judgmental stares.She was invisible until she was in the way.
The apartment was empty, silent save for the constant, faint hum of the faulty refrigerator. She dropped her bag by her pallet and sank down, the cold from the floor seeping into her bruises. She wanted to sleep, to disappear into the water-stain flower on the ceiling.
Her hand touched the bag, felt the hard, unfamiliar edge.The book.She pulled it out. The leather was smooth under her bruised fingers.Had she put it in her bag this morning and forgotten? The day was a blur of pain.Maybe.She opened it.
The pages were thick, high-quality, and utterly, perfectly blank.Except for the first page. There, in the center, in what looked like neat, dark ink, was a single line:
You will return to this.
Mio stared at it.Her heart, a numb thing in her chest, gave a single, hard thump. Return to what?This day?This pain?A bitter, hollow laugh escaped her chapped lips. She wished it were true, if only so she could avoid Suki’s hallway tomorrow. She flipped the page.More blankness.A stupid joke. A prank from one of them, maybe.Something to unsettle her further.The sound of the key in the lock startled her. She shoved the book under her thin pillow just as the door opened and her foster family returned, their voices loud, full of a life that excluded her.“Mio!There’s no food. Go to the market and get a pack of beer.” Her foster father’s command was followed by a few crumpled bills tossed on the table.An errand.A reason for her to be gone.
She took the money, her body protesting every movement. The supermarket was three blocks away, across a wide, busy arterial road.The sun was setting, casting long, distorted shadows that mirrored the ones in her apartment. The walk was a haze of lingering pain and the strange, echoing words from the book. You will return to this.The traffic light at the intersection turned green. The walk signal glowed a safe, white outline of a walking man. She stepped off the curb, clutching the small list, head down.
The engine roar was sudden, overwhelmingly close, coming from her left where there should have been stopped cars.A panicked blare of a horn.She turned.Headlights. Two blinding suns growing instantly larger, filling her entire world.
There was no time to react, no final thought. The impact was a giant’s fist, a sound of crushing metal and shattering glass that was also, somehow, utterly silent to her. She was airborne, weightless for a timeless moment.Then the pavement met her, a brutal, unforgiving embrace. The world tilted sideways, reduced to the gritty texture of asphalt against her cheek, the warm spread of something wet and profound across her abdomen. The pain was a distant second to the shocking hollow coldness that followed it, a sudden, vacuum-like emptiness.
Her vision tunneled, the frantic sounds of shouts and squealing tires fading into a muffled hum. The beautiful, dusky gold of the sunset sky dimmed above the silhouettes of gathering people.A strange calm settled over her. The cold sharpened, but the fear was gone.You will return to this.
The thought surfaced, clear and quiet amidst the shutting down of systems. Under her, tucked deep in her schoolbag now lying shredded in the street, the leather-bound journal remained untouched, unmarked by the violence.A little hope, then.A little promise.
Mio let her breath out, a final, faint mist in the cooling air, and halfway embraced the dark.