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Chapter 8 - 8 : Fragmented World

Kyoten woke around them like it always did—buckets clinking at the well, bread cooling on racks, neighbors trading soft good mornings across the square. Inside the outpost, time moved differently. It had to, when the past was pulsing softly on a folded blanket.

The egg's light had settled into a steady green. Every few minutes faint gold threads would ripple under the surface and fade, like frost patterns appearing and melting on a winter window.

Kenji sat at the main table with the capital's packet spread before him. Reports in tight script. Sketches of anomalous V-Monster behavior in markets and train depots. And the device—small, rectangular, matte, with no obvious seam or switch—rested beside the papers like an accusation.

Pulsebun hovered, irresistibly drawn to forbidden things. "That's not supposed to exist," he said, awed and offended at once. "Which means we should press it."

"We should read first," Kenji answered, already reading.

Aiko poured hot water over tea leaves and listened to the soft, ordinary sound of steam. Ordinary was a kindness. She kept glancing at the egg, catching herself doing it, and then doing it again.

Kenji tapped the margin of the top page. "They call the device a passive probe," he said. "Prototype. Supposed to sense V-Link emissions and produce a 'diagnostic visualization.'"

"V-Link," Pulsebun repeated, tasting the syllables. "That's the word from the ruin."

Aiko's fingers tightened around the kettle handle. "The circle called me with that."

Kenji nodded. "The reports say the capital has detected intermittent signals for weeks. Pockets of activity. Then quiet. It reads like… something waking in pieces."

"Like the ruin," Aiko said.

"Like the world," Kenji said softly.

Pulsebun tipped his head. "So we're going to use the spooky box and not explode?"

Kenji set the probe on the cleared end of the table. "If it's truly passive, it shouldn't emit anything. We'll keep it away from the egg. If it behaves, fine. If it doesn't, we stop."

Pulsebun folded his paws, saintly. "I absolutely will not touch it until you say 'now.'"

"Thank you," Kenji said, and Aiko couldn't tell if it was sarcasm or prayer.

He slid a nail along the probe's edge. Nothing. He turned it over. On the underside, someone had etched a symbol—a simple circle with three short lines pointing inward. Aiko's stomach tightened. It echoed the pattern under her feet in the ruin.

"How do you turn it on?" Pulsebun asked.

"You don't," Kenji said. "You introduce it to what it's listening for."

He looked toward the egg, then away, choosing caution. He carried the probe to a shelf where he'd pinned charcoal rubbings of the ruin's etched lines. He held it near the rubbings but not against them, as if proximity might be enough.

Nothing.

"Maybe it needs a stronger hint," Pulsebun said. "Like, say, an actual hint."

Aiko stepped closer, pulse in her throat. "Let me try."

Kenji hesitated only long enough to show he'd thought about saying no. Then he nodded. "Here. Hold it. I'll reduce any interference."

Aiko cupped the device in both hands. It was cooler than she expected—darker, somehow. She closed her eyes and remembered the circle's hum like a winter breath. She didn't try to force anything open. She just… stood the way she had stood before. She remembered being seen.

The device warmed by a hair.

Kenji sucked in a breath. "Hold it steady."

A hairline seam she hadn't felt before yielded under her fingers. The top slid back like a shutter, revealing a thin pane that looked like glass and wasn't. Light seeped up through it, pale and careful, as if asking permission to exist.

Words didn't rise in Aiko. Shapes did. The pane filled with a web of lines and dim nodes, more absence than presence at first. Then a few points brightened, tentative as fireflies. Lines grew between them—some clean, some broken, some looping off the edge as if the world continued beyond the table.

"What am I looking at?" Pulsebun whispered, because whispers were what this deserved.

Kenji leaned over the image with reverent hunger. "A diagnostic overlay," he said. "A network view. The probe is mapping V-Link activity it can hear."

"Those bright ones?" Aiko asked, eyes tracking a handful of steady lights. "Kyoten?"

"Probably not," Kenji said. "Too dense. That cluster could be the capital. These thin threads—here, and here—might be rural nodes. And this—" He touched the air above a faint line that stopped abruptly. "—is a fracture."

"A break," Aiko said.

Pulsebun pointed at a drifting, flickering spark far from the rest. "That one looks lonely."

Kenji's eyes sharpened. "Or hidden. The reports hinted at signature echoes in places that shouldn't have them. The system there might be buried, corrupted… or refusing to announce itself."

"Can a system refuse?" Aiko asked.

"If it was designed to survive even when hunted," Kenji said, "yes."

Aiko stared at the web. It didn't look like a map she could walk. It looked like arteries. Like something that had been whole and wasn't, and wanted to be again.

The probe's pane fluttered. For a breath, the lines rearranged themselves, the way a mind redraws a problem after learning a new rule. A faint ring appeared around one dim point. It pulsed once. Twice. Aiko realized she wasn't breathing.

"It tagged something," Pulsebun said. "What does a ring mean?"

Kenji didn't answer until the ring pulsed a third time and faded. "A key signature," he said quietly. "It recognized a compatible pattern."

Aiko didn't have to ask what pattern. Her fingertips tingled around the device even after the ring was gone.

"We should shut it," Kenji said, voice steady by effort alone. "We've learned enough."

Aiko slid the shutter closed. The light folded in like petals at dusk.

Kenji backed away from the shelf as if distance were a shield. He wrote without looking down. "Preliminary conclusions: V-Link is active across dispersed nodes. Topology is damaged—fragmented—but resilient. System recognizes human vectors by signature. Aiko's presence appears to prime local detection."

Pulsebun flopped into a chair and stared at the ceiling. "Translation: the old world is whispering across a broken web, and Aiko is the part it listens to."

Aiko set the device down and rubbed her palms on her skirt, suddenly shy of her own hands. "I didn't do anything."

"You existed where it could see you," Kenji said.

A brisk knock at the door cut across the room.

All three froze again. This time the pause held a different weight: the shape of expected trouble.

Kenji went to the door and cracked it. The same courier stood there—Sayo—with the same damp coat and a different expression. Worry had settled on her face and made itself at home.

"More from the hub," she said. "And a verbal, because pages don't move fast enough: an investigator is en route from the capital. Today. They want local outposts to cooperate fully."

Pulsebun's ears tipped back. "Define 'cooperate.'"

"Don't hide things," Sayo said. She shifted, lowering her voice more. "Off the record… don't get trampled either. The city's scared. Scared people make rules after the fact."

Kenji nodded, gratitude in the angle of it. "Thank you."

"Be careful," she said, and left.

Kenji closed the door, the latch sounding too loud. He turned to the table where the reports lay like a script someone expected him to read. "The investigator will have authority," he said. "Maybe sense. Maybe not."

"And we have a glowing egg and a map that likes Aiko," Pulsebun said. "Great."

Aiko looked at the probe, then at the egg. The room seemed to tilt between those points. "We can't pretend nothing is happening," she said. "But if we hand everything over, we won't be choosing anymore. Someone else will choose for us."

Kenji gathered the papers into a single stack. "Then we choose what to show. And we choose what to protect."

Pulsebun sat up, tail flicking. "We also choose a plan B. And a plan C. And a plan 'the investigator is a jerk.'"

Kenji allowed himself half a smile. "Contingencies noted."

They spent the next hour making careful decisions and equally careful hiding places. Kenji slid the probe into a false spine he'd carved into an atlas of railway lines. Aiko tucked the egg's nest into a wooden box lined with folded cloth—the kind that could pass as a stack of blankets at a glance. Pulsebun tested the lanterns, the good one and the one that overheated, and hid the latter from himself.

When the knock finally came again, it didn't sound like Sayo's. It sounded like someone who knew the door would open.

Kenji did the opening. A woman stood on the step, travel-worn and neat, coat hanging just so, a Guild badge pinned where you couldn't miss it.

"Investigator Reina Hoshino," she said, holding out a sealed letter. "Kyoten outpost, correct?"

"Kenji Arakawa," he replied, taking the letter and stepping back. "Please come in."

Reina crossed the threshold and let her eyes take the room's measure. She was younger than Aiko expected, or maybe just less tired than everyone who had been awake all night. Her gaze paused on the maps, on the shelves, on the cleared table. It did not pause on the wooden box near the wall. Aiko kept her face calm and her hands still.

"I'll be direct," Reina said. "Capital wants confirmation. Incidents are escalating. We need data, not rumors." She set a small case on the table and clicked it open, revealing tools that looked like they belonged in a century that had refused to end. "You've heard of the V-Link."

Kenji's answer had layers—truth, restraint, a question. "We've heard the word."

"Good," Reina said. "Because the world is full of things that are about to hear it back."

She looked at Aiko then—just looked—and Aiko felt the room flex around that attention. Not danger. Not yet. But gravity. The kind that bends paths.

"We'll need your cooperation," Reina said. "And your honesty."

Aiko swallowed. "We can give both," she said, hearing how careful the words sounded and not changing them.

Reina nodded once. "Then let's begin."

The outpost door clicked shut behind her voice. Outside, Kyoten continued to be Kyoten. Inside, the past and the present unfolded a fragile map between four people and an egg that pulsed yes, yes, yes at a rhythm older than any of them.

The world was fragmented. The V-Link was awake. And Aiko could feel, as surely as she could smell bread when it came out of the oven, that once you start drawing lines between broken pieces, you don't get to stop just because someone knocks.

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