The lobby glass hands me back a thin boy whose blazer tries too hard. Inside smells like printer heat and the kind of coffee that has given up on being called coffee. A guard in a sweater reads a paperback with one finger parked as a bookmark. Fluorescent panels turn the floor into patient paper.
"Evening," he says, because he's the sort of person who makes room for niceties.
"Evening," I echo, because I'm trying to pass for human. "Yonoshita's lab."
He glances over the rims of his glasses: school shoes, too-straight jacket, a posture pulled forward by an invisible string. "You delivering something?"
"Worse," I say, then regret it. "Visiting."
He sighs like the building does that to him ten times a night, picks up the receiver, murmurs into it, waits for a buzz. A green light flicks on. He gestures with his chin. "Seven."
The elevator hums like a throat holding back a cough. In the steel I catch a smear of my face—dark crescents under the eyes, mouth practicing sentences it hasn't earned. Kaori's fingertip presses phantom-hard at the center of my chest: We're not done talking about finals. Tsubaki's voice laces itself through that memory and ties a knot: Don't vanish. Eat something with a color. The doors open.
Seventh floor is whisper-bright. The carpet knows how to swallow footsteps without chewing. Somewhere a compressor breathes in a square rhythm. The name beside the frosted glass is small and sure.
Saitou Yonoshita.
I knock three times because I need the sound to be more than my pulse.
A chair scrapes. The handle turns. The door opens exactly far enough to justify hinges.
The man framed there looks like a sketch that refused to become a painting. Hair combed back by impatient hands, coat thrown on a body that doesn't ask for warmth. His face is the color of sleep that didn't help. When his eyes land on me they do the math and write No on a line I can't see.
"Wrong floor," he says. "Middle school is downstairs."
"I need five minutes," I say. My voice files an exhaustion report without asking me. "I'll give back four."
"Find an adult," he replies, already closing.
Words jump out of me like I knocked them free. "Frataxin collapses when the repeats balloon. The cell chokes on its own iron and pretends it's air. The heart keeps quiet until it can't. Idebenone looked good, then didn't. EPI-743 twitched the right way and scared people into hoping. The stress switch—the one that tells cells don't burn down—isn't bolted shut. It's just too heavy for one hand."
The door pauses mid-swing. His grip on the edge tightens. The look he gives me is not admiration; it's a scalpel deciding whether you're worth the cut.
"Who taught you that," he says. It isn't a question. It's an accusation with an empty nameplate.
"Papers you have to dig for," I answer, trying to sound like ink is a friend. "People who wrote them and then didn't sleep." I force the next part. "My uncle sent me."
He doesn't react, not with his mouth. His eyes spend a heartbeat on that and then shut down like blinds. "Name."
"Hayase Arima."
That gets an actual flicker—recognition or irritation or both. It's small, and it dies fast. "He should know better," Saitou says flatly. "He has always known better."
"He told me you wouldn't listen." I try to stand still without looking like I'm bracing. "He also said you're the only person worth trying."
"Your uncle's compliments buy you nothing."
"I'm not asking them to."
He looks me over again, slower. "You smell like lost sleep," he says. "You'll burn out before you touch a beaker brat."
"If being tired buys her standing time," I say, my throat catching on the pronoun, "I'll pay for it."
Something in his face shifts—muscle memory of a flinch—but he steps back. Not invitation. Absence. I step in anyway, because staying in the hall would be a different kind of lie.
The lab carries the ordinary cathedral of bright light and plastic. Benches lined with glass that looks like it keeps secrets for a living. A hood with a sash set to a height it likes. A centrifuge counting down a number no one has time for. In one corner, a corkboard holds photographs like breath. The woman who smiles in two of them teaches the room how to be gentler. A bed takes that lesson away in the third. There's an empty square at the bottom right; absence pinned to cork.
"Talk," he says. The syllable is a tray: put usefulness on it or leave.
"I want a corner," I say, laying my folded summary on a clean patch of bench like it's an apology. "A label maker with my name on a strip if that helps. I'll wash what needs washing. I'll be quiet until there's a reason not to be. One project. Small steps. No grand claims."
"You want." He says it like the word is a fly in his drink.
"My mother had it," I say, and the lie fits my mouth too easily. "That's where the reading started." I pull breath through glass. "And someone I love does now." Not a complete lie but half of one
"Stop." He doesn't raise his voice; the silence does it for him. "Don't toss that word around to pick locks."
"I'm here because the locks are killing people," I say. "Because I'm fourteen and everybody thinks that means I should practice being a person instead of being helpful while I can."
He picks up the paper between two fingers like it's on probation. He doesn't read. He taps it against the air between us.
"You're a child," he says. "You're built for desks and exams. Not for rooms that chew up whatever you think your time is worth."
"Time is the only thing I have to spend," I say, "and I'm on a worse clock than you think."
He cocks his head. It's the only sign he's listening for meaning and not just for noise."Two people in one life..." he murmured
"How did you find me," he asks harshly, as if checking if the lie has a matching set.
"Like I said Hayase, my uncle" I repeat "He said you'd hate this. He also said you hate a lot of things that deserve it." I let a beat be what it is. "He said you're the smartest bitter man he knows."
"That sounds like him." It comes out like an insult that wishes it could be a compliment, or the other way around. His eyes flick back to the corkboard and then refuse to return. "Why are you here."
"Because the door that tells the cell to stop panicking when it's on fire—" I stop myself before I start trying to be poetic to a man whose poetry died the day someone else did. "Because there's a lever we can pull without breaking the wall to get to it. People tap it. No one leans hard enough."
"We." He chews the word with visible skepticism. "You and your science club?"
"You and me," I say, because swallowing that is worse. "I can help you measure whether we're leaning in the right place without bleeding out months. If I'm wrong, you throw me out. If I'm right, you get to be angry at your own success instead of at the world."
"You rehearsed that in an elevator."
"In a notebook, a train, a hallway, and my head," I admit. "I don't have the luxury of being elegant."
"What you have is a mouth that thinks speed equals conviction." He yawns without opening his mouth. "You know a handful of terms. You have no hands."
"Then I'll borrow yours," I say. "Or learn fast. Or both."
Something mean rises in his eyes, the sort of meanness grief uses when it is tired of crying. "Do you think I didn't stand where you're standing," he asks, almost conversational, which makes it worse. "Do you think I didn't read until the letters went on strike? I begged men with shiny names for ugly favors and paid for them. I traded time I needed for time I didn't get. She died anyway. And the building kept all its lights on."
"I can't rewrite that," I say. "I'm not asking to. I'm asking you to let me try before I run out of chances to deserve trying."
He stares. He's not trying to see through me; he's trying to see how much of me can survive being seen.
"Don't say her," he says, nodding toward the corkboard without turning. "Don't make her your lever."
"I won't," I say. "I'm using mine."
"And this person you 'love.'" The word is careful in his mouth, like he borrowed it. "You will not bring her here. You will not tell me her name. You will not use her as your excuse when you fail."
"I won't bring her," I say. "I won't say her name. I don't need an excuse." The next sentence falls out because if it doesn't now it never will: "She plays like gravity took a holiday. She fell and people clapped because they didn't know where to put their hands and I wanted to set the world on fire for it."
He closes his eyes for exactly the length of one breath. When they open, they're glass again. He sets the summary down without reading it, as if eye contact with paper would be too intimate.
"Your uncle," he says. "He did you a favor and a cruelty. He always had a talent for both."
"He told me not to expect much," I say. "And to knock anyway."
"You're good at anyway." His mouth twitches. Not a smile. A spasm of muscle that remembers how. "You look like a cautionary tale, Arima."
My last name sounds strange coming off someone else's bone. It makes this real in a way the lab didn't yet. "That's generous," I say. "I was aiming for footnote."
"Here is my generosity," he says, dry. "Go home. Sleep. Wake up less theatrical. Then stay out of my way."
"I don't know how to do two of those." I swallow the rest because arguing about sleep is an insult to anyone who has sat next to a bed long enough for morning to stop mattering. "Let me put one thing in your head. Then you can throw me out."
"You already shoved five in." He gestures with his chin. "One more and I charge admission."
"The measurement," I say. "Not the ruler everyone keeps using because they're scared of building a new one. A quicker way to tell if we're leaning on the right door. No miracles. Just less guessing."
He's quiet for a beat too long to be nothing. "Less guessing," he repeats, like a man indulging a child with fake steering wheel. "You think I haven't watched men build rulers and declare themselves tall."
"Some rulers are crooked," I say. "If we fix the bend, at least we stop lying to ourselves."
"Do you hear yourself?" His voice stays level but the edges sharpen. "You think words are wrenches. They aren't."
"My words aren't the wrench," I say. "My hands will be. If you let them."
He looks at my hands. It's worse than a slap. "Hold them out," he says.
I do. They shake a little. They always do now, when I haven't eaten right or slept right or told the truth right. He doesn't flinch. He's seen worse.
"Put them down," he says. "You're scaring the glass."
My mouth is dry. I know what has to happen, and hating it won't make it smaller. I bow. Not a gesture—an angle. I let the world tilt over me and I don't fight it. My forehead doesn't touch the floor. We're not in a place that deserves that. My breath stutters anyway.
"Please," I say to the tiles. "If all you let me do is rinse and label, I'll do it like it matters. If you let me learn, I'll learn without talking until talking is useful. If I waste your time once, I'll never trouble you again."
A timer on a far bench ticks to zero and complains to no one. My knees burn. I let them. He leaves me there long enough to make a point. Then:
"Up," he says. "You're making the floor think it's church."
I straighten. The lab swims and then considers that beneath it. He paces three steps. Turns. Comes back two. He studies me like I'm an instrument he doesn't use anymore.
"You're fourteen," he says, not for the first time, but this time it sounds less like an insult and more like a diagnosis. "You look older in the ways that don't help."
"I don't have the right ways," I say. "I have this."
"You have an uncle who should know better." The name is in his mouth again like something he doesn't want to chew. "You have a talent for walking into rooms that will not thank you."
"Then I'm with the right person," I say.
He exhales. Not quite a laugh. Not relief. Something that admits to being tired of anger.
"Fine," he says. The word lands like a coin thrown to stop a beggar from singing. "Leave your number."
The pen appears in my hand as if it had moved there to be helpful. I write in the corner of the summary: name in small capitals, digits, a time that looks reasonable and another I will answer anyway. The numbers blur for a second and then be themselves again.
"When I call," he says, chewing each word as if it has fiber, "you come. And when you get here, you will impress me more than this performance. I don't need another body to shuffle boxes and peel labels. If that's all you are, I will send you back to your textbooks."
"Yes," I say, because breathing anything else would be stupid.
He turns as if to end me, then pauses. I make the mistake I came to make.
"I have something," I say. "I'll bring it next time."
His head snaps back. "Why," he growls, "wouldn't you bring it now."
"Because if I walked in waving it, you'd have shut the door before I finished the sentence," I say. "I needed to touch base first. Hitting you with a trick would have made you throw me and the trick out together."
He scowls because I'm right and he hates that. "It had better be good," he says. "If it isn't, don't come back."
"It will be useful," I say, choosing the smaller word because it's truer. "I'll bring it clean."
He doesn't dignify that. He flips the summary, scrawls a room number and a window of time like a dare. His writing is quick and square. He underlines nothing.
"One more thing," he adds, voice reverting to the tone of a man who has memorized his conditions. "Anything that starts in a room with my name on it ends where everyone can reach it. If you are here to keep something for one person, take the elevator."
"That's the point," I say, and the relief in that sentence almost sinks me. "If it works at all, it shouldn't belong to me."
"If it works," he repeats, and the four letters sound like a superstition he doesn't wear in public.
We look at each other over the bench. For a second the lab belongs to our breathing and the small machines that ignore us. There is no warmth in it. There is something else I can use: permission that doesn't like itself.
"That's all," he says, with finality sharp enough to cut a page. "Go home. Try the sleeping thing. You look like a bad example."
"Yes," I say, and each time I say it tonight I dislike the way it makes me sound and like what it makes possible.
The hallway owes no one applause, so it gives none. At the elevator I see my hands shake and choose not to be theatrical about it. The doors close on a reflection that looks like a boy who got allowed to fail somewhere important.
Downstairs, the guard glances up without lifting his head. "Got what you came for?"
"I left a number," I say. "That's as far as I got."
"Sometimes that's the whole job," he says, and finds his place in his book again.
Outside, the air has cooled into something that forgives without forgetting. Streetlights learn their names. I walk because standing still invites panic to come sit on my chest and ask how my day was. The glass throws me back; I walk through myself. A vending machine blinks. I buy a bottle the color of oranges and faith, and a rice ball with a green fleck that might qualify as vegetable if Tsubaki were in a generous mood. I peel, chew, swallow, because caring for the machine is sometimes the only way to keep the music from dying.
My phone buzzes. You alive? from Tsubaki. The echo of the music room tries to stand up again—the heat, her bat bag, my mouth finding a bad joke to set on fire before it left. I type:
Home. Ate something orange. Will lie down.
I don't add: Thank you for being angry in the right direction. I don't add: I chose a door and it opened a centimeter and I am trying not to weep on the hinges. I press send. The tiny whoosh sounds like a bird too small to matter, and still, it matters.
Two blocks from the station the river runs like a sentence that hasn't chosen its verb. It behaves. It has no idea it was a stage this afternoon. The railing is cold when I touch it. I breathe against the metal until it fogs and then clears, fogs and clears, like a lesson about patience I don't want.
The train pretends to arrive on time. Inside smells like coin and old magazines. I find the same spot by the window by a man asleep in a delivery jacket and look at nothing that helps. The summary paper is no longer a weight in my pocket; the number I left is an ache under my skin. The car rocks and the city edits itself past us. I count the clicks it takes to cross a bridge. I do not count anything else.
At my stop the platform sings metal and boredom. The stairs argue with my knees. The door to the apartment sticks and thinks about asking me to earn it; then, with a small shudder, it decides to be reasonable. The room smells faintly like dried ink and something citrus I forgot to throw out. The towel Kaori left folded on the piano bench in all the wrong ways is still where she put it. I don't touch it.
On my desk I lay out a clean sheet. In the top corner I write his name in block letters I can't mistake through fatigue. Under that, the room number he scrawled. Beneath that, a window he gave me to fall through. I don't draw maps. I list: what to bring, who not to be, how to keep my mouth closed until it can carry weight.
I add one line:
Do not perform. Work.
Across town, there's a lab with a corkboard and an empty square. A man with a voice like clipped wire has my number next to a summary he didn't want to read. Somewhere he's arguing with the part of himself that recognizes the look in a boy's eyes as something he lost and something he despises. Somewhere he's deciding whether to dial.
I turn off the light. The dark makes the room honest. I lie down the way Tsubaki instructed—horizontal, like a person—and wait for sleep to forgive me. It confuses me with the hallway on the seventh floor: carpet that muffles, a door that listens. When I knock this time, it opens without asking who I am. In my hands there is weight that isn't fear. On the bench there is a place where something belongs that didn't yesterday.
Morning won't care about my metaphors. It will care if my hands are steady. It will care if my feet know the way back. It will care whether the person I love is upright long enough for a day to call itself worth it. The lab door is closed now. That's how doors begin. My number sits on his bench. That's how some futures begin.
I sleep as if I'm being watched by a room with bright lights. I wake with the sentence already half-written in my teeth: bring it clean.