We played the song again. And again. And again.
Each time, a little piece of the fear chipped away. Each time, my voice, my real voice, grew a fraction steadier. It never became Hoshiko's voice. It remained a raw, fragile thing, full of cracks and imperfections. But it started to feel like it belonged to me. By the time we finally stopped, the sun had set, and the room was bathed in the dim, orange glow of a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
My throat was raw. My body ached with a satisfying, deep-seated exhaustion I had never known. It was the tired of having created something, not the tired of having been used up.
Mio and Kaito packed up their instruments in a strange, subdued silence, occasionally glancing at me with expressions I couldn't decipher. When they left, they both gave me a short, almost imperceptible nod. It wasn't friendship, not yet. But it wasn't hostility anymore. It was a truce.
Ren was the last to leave. He flicked off the amps, plunging the room into a ringing silence. "We practice Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays," he said, not looking at me as he packed his guitar into its worn case. "Don't be late."
That was all. No "good job." No "welcome to the band." Just a simple statement of fact. A schedule. An expectation. It was the most validating thing anyone could have said.
The walk home felt surreal. The cool night air was a balm on my flushed cheeks. The familiar path along the seawall seemed new, as if I were seeing it in color for the first time. The stars, which the song had called "drowning," looked fiercely, brilliantly alive in the black sky. I was utterly drained, hollowed out, but the emptiness felt clean, like a room that had finally been aired out after being sealed for a decade.
When I slid open the door to the Tanaka house, Chiyo and Akira were at the low table, drinking tea. They both looked up, and I saw their expressions shift. I must have been a sight—my hair a mess, my face pale with exhaustion, my uniform rumpled. But for the first time, I wasn't hiding behind a mask of shy fear or numb despair.
I gave them a small, tired smile. A real one. It felt strange on my face, like using a muscle I had forgotten I had. "I'm home," I said, and my voice was a hoarse, scratchy whisper.
Chiyo's face softened into a look of such profound, gentle warmth that it made my heart ache. Akira just stared, his teacup paused halfway to his lips, an expression of quiet astonishment on his face. He had never seen me smile before. Not really.
I didn't offer any explanations. I was too tired for words. I just kicked off my shoes and went to my room, the echo of their silent, surprised gazes following me.
I collapsed onto my futon, my limbs feeling heavy as lead. The single bare bulb above me seemed as bright as a stage light. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, my body thrumming with the phantom vibration of Kaito's bass, my ears ringing with the ghost of Mio's drums and Ren's guitar. My own raw voice was a ghost in my throat.
A feeling rose in my chest, a warm, buoyant sensation I hadn't felt in so long I could barely recognize it. It was light. It was clean. It was... happiness. A genuine, unscripted, terrifying happiness. It had been born in that room, in the middle of that raw, ugly, beautiful noise.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow, and the smile on my face vanished.
I had run from the stage. I had run from the microphone. I had run from the act of singing for an audience, because it was a cage that had slowly crushed me.
But tonight, standing in front of a microphone, singing for an audience of three hostile strangers, I had felt freer than I ever had in my entire life.
I sat up, my heart beginning a slow, heavy drumbeat of confusion.
Did I just get happy... by performing?
The question was a cruel paradox. Was the cage and the key the exact same thing? Had I just run a thousand miles only to end up back where I started, just in a smaller, dustier room? I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, the warmth in my chest turning cold with a familiar, sickening dread.
The darkness behind my eyelids wasn't empty. It was filled with strobing lights and the roar of a faceless crowd, a sound that felt like it could shatter bone. That was the stage. That was the performance. A perfectly executed piece of machinery, and I was the ghost that made it run. Every note was calculated, every smile was rehearsed, every tear was a product to be sold. The happiness I projected was a lie so profound it had poisoned the very concept of joy. I had run from that lie. I had chosen emptiness over the suffocating falseness of it all.
So what was this?
I took my hands away from my eyes, staring up at the plain wooden ceiling of my small, borrowed room. The warmth in my chest from an hour ago was a ghost now, replaced by a cold, clinical confusion. I tried to dissect the feeling, to analyze it the way Ryouko had taught me to analyze market trends and audience demographics.
What was the difference?
There was a microphone. There was an audience, albeit a tiny, hostile one. There was a voice coming from my throat. On paper, the components were the same. But the equation was entirely different.
Tonight, the music wasn't a cage. It was a dark room I had stumbled into, and my voice was a fumbling hand on the wall, trying to find its shape. The lyrics weren't a script. They were a map of a place I already knew, a place of loneliness and waiting. My voice... it wasn't a tool. It was a wound. And for the first time, I had let it bleed instead of covering it with a glittering bandage.
The Hoshiko performance was about being perfect. This was about being present.
The thought was a small, dangerous spark in the darkness of my confusion. Hoshiko was an idea, an untouchable, flawless doll on a screen. Tonight, in that room, I wasn't an idea. I was just a girl, terrified and terrible and, for three and a half minutes, completely and utterly real. The noise we made wasn't for profit or for fame. It wasn't even for the other people in the room, really. It was for the song. We were all just serving the song.
But the fear was a coiled snake in my gut. What if this was a trick? A siren song luring me back onto the same rocks that had shipwrecked me? What if this feeling, this fragile, beautiful thing, was just the first step on a path that led right back to Ryouko's world? Maybe the cage just starts out bigger, with more comfortable bars.
I turned onto my side, curling into a ball, the futon soft beneath me. My throat ached. My body was exhausted. But my mind was a frantic, buzzing hive. I had built my entire escape, my entire new identity, on a single, simple premise: performing is pain. Music is a weapon. The stage is a prison.
If that wasn't true... then what was? Who had I been running from? Ryouko, or myself?
The questions were too big, the answers too far away. The paradox was a knot I couldn't untangle. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the thoughts away, trying to find the blank, dreamless sleep of the truly exhausted. But even as my breathing began to slow and the edges of my consciousness began to blur, one final, terrifying question echoed in the quiet of the room.
If the cage and the key are made of the same material, how do you ever know if you're escaping... or just locking yourself in again?
Sleep didn't provide any answers. It just pressed pause on the frantic whirring of my mind. I woke up to the same pale morning light, the same terrifying question hanging in the air from the night before. The happiness I had felt was a ghost, and the confusion was the only thing that felt solid and real.
I was quiet during breakfast, moving through the morning rituals with a detached, mechanical precision. Chiyo and Akira exchanged a look over their bowls of rice, but they didn't press me. They gave me the space I didn't know how to ask for.
The walk to school was a solitary one. I left a few minutes before Akira, needing the silence. The air was cool and smelled of salt and damp earth. I pulled my uniform jacket tighter around myself, my hands shoved deep into my pockets. My throat was still a little scratchy, a physical reminder of the sounds I had pulled from it. Was that the key? The pain? Hoshiko's voice was a flawless, polished diamond. Mine was a piece of raw, jagged stone. Maybe the value wasn't in the perfection, but in the cost of creating the sound.
I was so lost in my own internal maze that I didn't notice the figure ahead of me until I was almost upon him. On the narrow path that hugged the seawall, walking with a slow, deliberate pace, was Ren.
My heart gave a painful lurch. My first instinct was to stop, to turn around, to find another way. But the ultimatum he'd given me echoed in my head. If you run out that door again, don't ever come back. It wasn't just about the club room door anymore. It was about all of it.
I took a breath and kept walking, my shoes scuffing quietly on the pavement. I slowed my pace, keeping a careful distance behind him. He didn't seem to notice me. He had headphones on, the thin white cord snaking from his ears to the pocket of his trousers. He wasn't looking at the ocean or the sky. His gaze was fixed on the ground in front of him, as if he were trying to solve a complex problem written on the asphalt.
We walked like that for several minutes, a silent, disconnected procession of two. The space between us was charged with the memory of the night before—the raw music, my broken voice, his blunt, challenging acceptance. I had a thousand things I wanted to ask him, and not a single word to articulate any of them.
As we neared the turn-off that led up to the school, he stopped. He pulled his headphones from his ears, letting them hang around his neck, and turned. He had known I was there the whole time.
We just stood there for a moment, the sound of the waves filling the silence. His expression was, as always, unreadable.
"Your voice," he said, his own voice low and slightly rough in the morning air. "Is it sore?"
The question was so simple, so practical, it caught me completely off guard. He wasn't asking if I was okay, or what I was thinking. He was asking about the instrument. My instrument.
"A little," I managed to say, my own voice still hoarse.
He gave a single, sharp nod, as if confirming a piece of data. "Don't push it today. We'll work on the arrangement."
He looked like he was about to turn and leave, to continue on his solitary walk. But he hesitated. His gaze dropped to the ground, then flicked back up to my face.
"Last night," he said, and the words seemed to cost him a visible effort. "You found the right notes."
And then he turned and walked away, leaving me standing alone on the path by the sea. He hadn't said it was good. He hadn't said he was impressed. He had just said that in the middle of all that terrible, ugly noise, I had found something true.
I watched him go, a strange, unfamiliar warmth spreading through my chest. It wasn't the explosive, confusing happiness of the night before. It was something smaller, quieter. And for the first time, it didn't feel like a paradox. It just felt like a beginning.
Ren's words, the simple, unadorned statement that I had "found the right notes," echoed in my mind all day. It wasn't a compliment, not in the way Hoshiko had been showered with praise. It was a clinical observation, a piece of data confirmed. And that was precisely what made it so powerful. He wasn't judging the performance; he was analyzing the sound. It made him less of an antagonist and more of an enigma, a complex problem I found myself wanting, inexplicably, to solve.
During class, I watched him from the corner of my eye. He was the same as always—slumped in his chair, staring out the window, a black hole of indifference in a room full of noise. But now, I saw things I hadn't before. The calluses on the tips of his left-hand fingers. The way he would subtly tap out a rhythm on his desk with his thumb, a secret beat only he could hear. He wasn't just bored; he was somewhere else entirely, in a world made of notes and chords that was far more interesting than the history of the Kamakura period. The more I learned, the less I knew, and the more I wanted to find out.
The school day passed without incident, and soon enough, I was back on the rooftop, the familiar chain-link fence separating our small sanctuary from the vast, blue sky.
"You seem... lighter today, Hotaru-chan," Emi commented, biting into a melon pan. "Did something good happen?"
I thought of Ren's gruff, minimal acknowledgment on the seawall. It felt too small, too personal to share. "The math is starting to make a little more sense," I lied, and was surprised to find it wasn't a complete lie. The world in general was starting to make a little more sense.
"That's great!" she beamed. "See? I told you this place wasn't so bad." She took another bite of her bread, then her eyes lit up with a new, even more excited energy. "Oh! Oh! I almost forgot to tell you! The End-of-Summer Festival is in two weeks!"
"Festival?" I asked.
"Yeah!" she said, practically bouncing. "Every year, at the end of August, the town holds a huge festival down by the old pier. There are food stalls, and games, and everyone wears yukatas, and they hang lanterns all along the streets. It's the best night of the year."
"It is very pretty," Yui added softly, a rare, genuine smile on her face. "They set off fireworks over the water."
"And," Emi continued, leaning in as if sharing a huge secret, "they always have a stage set up for live music. And the main event, every single year, is the high school Light Music Club."
The melon pan I was holding suddenly felt like a rock in my hand. My blood went cold. A stage. A festival. An audience.
"They're not like, a pop band or anything," Emi went on, completely oblivious to my internal crisis. "They're... intense. Like, real rock. The seniors who graduated last year were amazing, and everyone's been wondering what the new group sounds like. They always get the whole town nodding their heads."
She paused, a look of sudden realization dawning on her face. "Oh my god. That's probably why they were so rough with you at first," she said, her eyes wide. "The festival is a huge deal for them. They take it super seriously. They're probably practicing like crazy for it."
The pieces clicked into place with a horrifying, sickening snap. Mio's hostility. Kaito's nervousness. Ren's absolute, uncompromising intensity. It wasn't just about making noise in a dusty room. It was about this. A performance. A real, public performance, with expectations and a reputation to uphold.
The small, quiet beginning I had felt this morning, the fragile warmth of finding the "right notes," was suddenly overshadowed by the looming silhouette of a stage. I had just stepped into a quiet, dusty room to find my own voice, only to realize that room had a deadline. And it ended in front of a crowd.
The problem with a ghost is that it leaves no tracks.
For two weeks, Ryouko Yorukawa had been hunting a ghost. From her minimalist, white office high above the endless sprawl of Tokyo, she had deployed all the considerable resources at her command. Private investigators, digital forensics experts, quiet inquiries to old contacts. The result was a perfect, symmetrical, and infuriating null value.
There was no credit card activity. No use of public transport under any known alias. Hoshiko's phone had been wiped and abandoned in a train station locker. The asset had simply vanished, evaporated into the vast, anonymous sea of Japan.
Her assistant, Tanaka-san, stood rigidly before her desk, delivering the morning's report of failures. "We have expanded the search to include youth shelters and small, independent inns within a 300-kilometer radius of the last known location. So far, nothing."
Ryouko stared at the large monitor on her wall. It displayed a map of Japan, littered with hundreds of small red dots, each one a dead end.
She tapped a long, manicured finger against her chin. Frustration was a messy, useless emotion. She dealt in data. The current data was insufficient. Therefore, she needed a new search parameter.
"You are looking for a runaway," Ryouko said, her voice quiet and cool. "That is the wrong approach. You are looking for a girl who wants to hide." She swiveled in her leather chair to face him, her eyes sharp and analytical. "You are not thinking about the product's psychological architecture. You are not considering the conditioning."
Tanaka-san blinked, confused. "Ma'am?"
"I did not spend a decade building a racehorse just for it to live in a field and eat grass," Ryouko said, her voice dangerously soft. "The instinct I programmed into her is deeper than her fear. Her need for the stage is more fundamental than her desire for freedom. She thinks she's running away from the stage, but the truth is, she's just looking for a different one."
A slow, cold smile spread across her lips. It was the smile of a mathematician who has just found the elegant, hidden variable in a complex equation.
"Tanaka-san," she said. "Stop looking for shelters. I want a new list. Cross-reference every rural town with a population under fifty thousand with a list of annual, public music events. Specifically, end-of-summer festivals. Prioritize any that have a history of showcasing local, amateur talent."
The assistant's eyes widened slightly as he understood. He bowed quickly. "Immediately, Yorukawa-sama."
He returned less than an hour later. The new map on the screen had far fewer dots. Most were small, insignificant community gatherings. But one stood out. A small, coastal town on the Izu Peninsula. Population, negligible. Industry, fishing. But its End-of-Summer festival was surprisingly well-regarded in the region, known for its fireworks and, more importantly, for giving the local high school's music club the headlining slot every single year.
Ryouko stared at the name of the town. It was perfect. Obscure enough to be a hiding place, but with the one fatal feature she knew Hoshiko, on a subconscious level, would be unable to resist. The irresistible lure of an audience.
"She's there," Ryouko said. It was not a guess. It was a certainty. She had written the algorithm of Hoshiko's soul, and this was its logical, inevitable output.
"Shall I dispatch a team?" Tanaka-san asked. "We can have her back in Tokyo by morning."
Ryouko held up a hand, silencing him. "No. That would be a public issue. Messy. Amateurish." She leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixed on the dot on the map. She could see it all now. A public festival. A local stage. The perfect venue for a final, public lesson. She wouldn't go and drag the asset home. That would only create a martyr.
No, the plan had to be more elegant. More... theatrical.
She would let her little bird sing on her new, tiny stage. She would let her think, for one brief, shining moment, that she was free. And then, from the wings, Ryouko would appear. Not to pull her away, but to applaud. To praise her. To offer her a contract with a new, even more brilliant cage. In front of everyone. In front of the entire world. She would make it impossible for Hoshiko to say no without looking like an ungrateful monster.
It was perfect. She could stand in the back of the crowd, hidden in the shadows. She could pull the strings, and the master of puppets would make her little doll dance one last time, right into her hands.
Certainty was a luxury, but confirmation was a necessity.
The dot on the map was a statistical probability, a near-perfect alignment of data and psychological profiling. But Ryouko Yorukawa had not built her empire on probabilities. She had built it on facts.
"One operative," she instructed Tanaka-san, her voice a flat, calm instrument of command. "Not one of your usual thugs. I want someone who looks like they belong. A lost tourist, a traveling photographer, a student researcher. Someone who can fade into the background of a town where everyone knows everyone else."
"Understood," he said, already making notes on his tablet.
"Their instructions are simple," Ryouko continued, her gaze fixed on the map on her monitor, as if she could will the information into existence. "Visual confirmation of the asset. I need high-resolution images, especially of the face and hair. I need to know the name she is using. I need to know her daily routine: where she lives, who her associates are. They are to observe only. No contact. No interference. If she so much as suspects she's being watched, the operative will be terminated. Am I clear?"
"Crystal, Yorukawa-sama."
With the order given, Ryouko settled into the most difficult part of any campaign: the waiting. For two days, she operated as normal. She attended board meetings, eviscerated a marketing proposal for a new boy band with surgical precision, and conducted a series of media interviews about Hoshiko's "brave and necessary period of rest." In each interview, she projected the perfect image of a concerned, maternal guardian, her words a masterclass in corporate empathy.
"Her well-being is, and has always been, my absolute priority," she said to one reporter, her voice laced with a believable, manufactured warmth. "Art requires a tremendous emotional expenditure, and Hoshiko has given her fans everything. It's time for her to recharge. When she is ready, her music will be waiting."
It was all part of the narrative. The public had to see her as the worried mother, so that when she finally "found" her lost child, it would be a reunion, not a capture. She was playing chess with the media, with the public, and with the asset herself. That was the game, and she was the undisputed grandmaster.
On the third day, Tanaka-san entered her office and placed a single, sealed manila envelope on her desk.
Ryouko dismissed him with a wave. She waited until the door clicked shut before she opened it. Inside were a dozen glossy photographs and a single-page report.
The photos were taken from a distance, slightly grainy but clear enough. The first few showed a girl with short, dark, choppy hair walking home from school with two other girls. The subject was laughing at something one of her friends had said. It was a genuine, unguarded laugh, completely unlike the practiced, camera-ready smile Ryouko had spent years perfecting. The sight of it stirred a flicker of professional irritation.
She looked closer. The next photo was a tighter shot of the girl's head from behind. As the sun hit her hair, Ryouko could see it: a faint, unmistakable shimmer of silver at the roots. A quarter-inch of new growth. The product's most valuable, immutable feature.
The report was concise. Asset: Hoshiko (Real Name Unknown). Alias: Hotaru Abe. Residence: The Tanaka household. Proprietors: Chiyo Tanaka (82), Akira Tanaka (21). Associates: Emi Sato, Yui Akiyama (classmates). Affiliation: Enrolled as a second-year student at the local high school. Member of the Light Music Club.
Ryouko let out a slow, satisfied breath. The Light Music Club. The final, perfect, damning piece of data. It was beautiful. It was poetry. The racehorse hadn't just found a field; it had found a racetrack.
She leaned back in her chair, the photos spread across her desk like winning cards. The original plan—a dramatic, personal appearance—now seemed clumsy. Amateurish. Why go yourself when you can make the world do your work for you? A much more elegant solution began to form in her mind.
"Tanaka-san," she said into her desk intercom. "Cancel the physical surveillance."
"Ma'am?"
"I want you to leak an anonymous tip to a few of the more ambitious online music journalists. The ones who are desperate for a scoop. Tell them there's a rumor of a 'once-in-a-generation talent' emerging from an unlikely place. A human-interest story. Ensure at least one of them decides the festival is worth covering."
A pause on the other end. "And if they capture an image of the asset?"
"That is precisely the point," Ryouko said, a slow smile spreading across her face. "When the buzz starts, when the photos surface online, we will be ready." She tapped her pen on the desk. "Finalize the incorporation of the new subsidiary label. 'Tidal Wave Records.' It needs to be completely independent, untraceable back to us. And find me a scout. Someone young, passionate, and utterly convincing."
This was a far superior strategy. She wouldn't be the villain who dragged her star home. She would be a silent observer, an ocean away. She would let the media create the narrative. And when a charming scout from a cool new indie label showed up to "discover" a raw, talented local band and offer them their dream, the asset would walk into the new cage willingly. Happily, even.
It was no longer about a public confrontation. It was about owning the narrative itself. She wouldn't just reclaim the asset; she would reclaim her story, and the girl would thank her for it.