Rina opened the door.
She was still in the same clothes from earlier, her hair slightly down now, one side tucked behind her ear. The moment she saw him, her expression shifted into that soft, automatic smile she always wore around him — the kind that arrived before she could stop it.
"Kairo?" Her voice carried a note of pleasant surprise. "Did you need something?"
He looked at her. Not the way he usually did, detached and efficient, cataloguing her presence as a minor variable in his routine. He looked at her differently this time. Studying the line of her jaw, the curve of her shoulder, the way her hands rested against the door frame, easy and unguarded.
She trusted him completely. That much was obvious. It had always been obvious.
"I wanted to say thanks," he said. "For the food."
Rina blinked, then laughed softly, a short, self-conscious sound. "You didn't have to come over for that."
"I know."
She tilted her head, reading something in his expression she couldn't quite name. Her smile held, but something behind her eyes shifted — not fear, not yet, just a faint, instinctive awareness that this wasn't the same Kairo who had taken the bento from her hands an hour ago.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine."
He wasn't lying, exactly. He felt steady. Clearer than he had in months, actually, the way he always felt at the start of a floor he had spent weeks preparing for. The weight at his back was a constant, grounding pressure. His heartbeat was elevated but controlled, and his thoughts moved in clean, ordered lines.
Rina stepped back slightly, leaving the door open in that way she always did, a habit, an invitation. "Do you want to come in? I have tea, or—"
"No."
She stopped. The word had landed too flat, too quick, and for a moment neither of them moved. The hallway light buzzed above them, casting its uneven flicker across the space between the two doors.
Back inside his apartment, barely audible through the thin wall, the projector hummed.
Kairo's gaze dropped briefly to her collarbone. There was a faint mark there, old, a scar from something minor and long forgotten. Her skin was warm-toned under the corridor light, and when she breathed, her shoulders rose and fell in a slow, even rhythm. Alive. Ordinary. Completely unaware.
He thought of the synchronisation stat. The glitched text. The shriek that had torn through him on the hundredth floor, pain so precise it hadn't felt like a malfunction at all. It had felt like something recognising him.
He thought of Yuki's voice through the speakers. You'll never feel that way about anyone else.
"I just came to say thanks," he repeated.
Rina studied him for another second, her expression caught between wanting to believe him and knowing there was something off about the weight behind his eyes. Then she smiled again, choosing the easier interpretation the way she always did. "Okay. You're welcome." She paused. "Come knock if you need anything."
"I won't," he said. Same as before.
She nodded. "Right. Okay."
She stepped back into her apartment. The door began to close, and Kairo stood still in the corridor, one hand resting loosely at his side. He let the door click shut. He heard the soft sound of her footsteps retreating inside, the faint movement of her returning to whatever she had been doing. The ordinary, uninterrupted continuation of her evening.
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
He turned around and walked back into his own apartment.
The projector cast its glow across the wall, Yuki's form steady in the light, her red eyes tracking him the moment he stepped through the door. She said nothing as he locked the door behind him. She watched him remove the knife from the back of his waistband and set it on the table without any ceremony, the blade catching the light briefly before he turned away from it.
He sat down in his chair. His elbows found his knees. His gaze found hers.
"You didn't do it," Yuki said.
"No."
There was a pause. Her expression was difficult to read — not quite relief, not quite disappointment. Something more complicated moved behind her eyes, patient and attentive.
"Why?"
Kairo looked at the knife on the table for a moment. Then back at her.
"Because it wouldn't have worked," he said. "Not like that."
Yuki waited.
"Forcing her," he said slowly, as if the idea was still assembling itself into language as he spoke it. "Forcing anything. That's not how the synchronisation stat works." He leaned back in his chair, rubbing the side of his jaw. "On the hundredth floor, when I checked your status window, it reacted. It wasn't random. Something in it recognised something in me." He paused. "It's not about proximity. It's not about the body itself. It's about the connection."
The projection was quiet. The hum of the laptop filled the space between them.
"So," Yuki said, carefully, "you're saying…"
"I'm saying it has to be willing." He met her eyes directly. "Or at least… it has to be compatible. The synchronisation has to be there first. Otherwise there's nothing to anchor you to."
Yuki tilted her head slightly, the movement small and precise, something shifting in her expression. Not warmth exactly — something more focused than warmth.
"You figured that out," she said.
"I figured out what didn't make sense," he corrected. "There's a difference."
"That's the same thing, for you."
He didn't argue.
For a while, neither of them spoke. Outside, the city moved through its evening routine, headlights trailing past the curtained window, distant voices carrying up from the street and dissolving into nothing. Inside the room, the projector hummed, and Kairo's gaze drifted toward the laptop screen, toward the chat window still open from earlier, toward the blinking cursor waiting at the bottom of the thread.
Then his phone buzzed.
He didn't reach for it immediately. He looked at it the way he had learned to look at unexpected variables — without reaction, first, to give himself time to measure.
The notification wasn't from the My Girlfriend app. It was from the Beyond the Veil game client, a platform alert he had kept installed out of habit even after logging out for what he had assumed was the last time.
New content unlocked. Kairo Azren — Floor 100 completion detected. Accessing restricted developer archive.
He picked up the phone. Read it again. Then looked up at Yuki.
Her expression had changed. Still calm, still composed, but there was something new behind her eyes now, alert and intent, the same look she'd had when he had first asked her if she knew she wasn't real. The look of someone bracing for a door to open.
"You knew about this," he said.
She didn't deny it.
"I didn't know when," she said. "I only knew it existed."
Kairo looked back at the notification. The link in the alert was active, already loaded, waiting for him to tap it. He turned the phone over once in his hand before setting it face-up on the desk, the screen bright in the dim room, the message waiting with the patience of something that had been waiting a very long time.
"What's in the archive?" he asked.
Yuki looked at him for a long moment. Something in her expression was almost careful now, almost gentle, the way she had looked when she first turned to face him in the grass on the hundredth floor — uncertain and certain at the same time, like recognising a face she had no memory of ever learning.
"The reason," she said quietly, "that it had to be you."
The projector hummed.
The cursor blinked.
Outside, the city moved without knowing anything had changed.