“What happens now?” she asked.
Floor 5 was dark and cold. The air smelled of rust and lavender—a strange combination that made her chest ache. At the end of the corridor, behind a steel door with no handle, she felt him. The Ghost.
“You’re the first,” she replied.
A sound answered. Not a voice—a vibration in her skull. Finally.
He tilted his head. “I am also the last. Until you.” Nyoshin 454 Mio
“I know you’re there,” she whispered.
Outside, in a field of wild grass she had never seen before, Mio Tanaka sat on a fallen log and watched the sunrise for the first time in her life. Beside her, the Ghost—whose real name, she had learned, was Ren—was trying to remember how to smile without pain. “What happens now
“What do we do now?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.