Tokyo's evening lights bled into the rain-streaked windows, a mess of neon and water that made everything look a little softer than it was. The office didn't soften anything.
"Tachibana," his boss said, tapping the misprinted sheet with a pen that clicked like a metronome for disappointment, "this is the third revision you've submitted this week."
Ren kept his spine bent at the familiar angle of apology. "I'll fix it right away."
"You said that on Monday." The pen clicked again. "And again on Wednesday."
Around them, keyboards still rattled. Someone coughed. Someone else laughed, not at him—but his skin pretended it was. Ren gathered the papers, murmured another apology, and backed out of the glass cubicle as if it might bite him.
At his desk, he corrected the layout with hands that tried to be steady. The cursor blinked like it was judging his life choices. The spreadsheet numbers finally lined up. He sent the email. No "thanks" came back. There never was.
I checked three times and it was still wrong. If I check ten times, will it be right, or will I just be late again?
By the time he left, the rain was a sheet. It got into his collar, down his cuffs, in the squeak of his shoes. At the station, he stood beneath a half-broken awning and watched messages go from "Delivering..." to "Seen." The last one he had sent hours ago—Can we talk?—sat under two blue checks like a gravestone.
A reply arrived at last.
Let's not meet anymore. Sorry.
He stared at the screen until the characters turned into gray worms. A laugh slipped out. It sounded light, almost cheerful. It wasn't.
Okay. That's fine. People don't meet me. They pass by me. Like trains.
He shoved the phone into his pocket and walked. The city was an orchestra of puddles and tires, umbrellas tilting like black flowers. He didn't open his. The rain felt honest.
Ten minutes later, he ended up at the public padel courts near the river—three rectangles of damp green under hard white lights. The sound of the ball, pock—pock, was steadier than a heartbeat. His old classmates from a rec group were there, two pairs in a friendly rally, laughing wide, the kind of laughter that invited people by accident and excluded them on purpose.
"Ren!" one of them called, waving. "We were short a scorer!"
Not a player. A scorer. He smiled anyway, because he was good at smiling when it didn't matter.
He sat on a folding chair by the fence with a clipboard and penciled in numbers. The ball skidded off the glass wall, came rolling like a small yellow moon to his shoe. Instinct made him nudge it up with the frame of a cheap racket someone had left leaning against the fence. He swung—late. The ball choked on the frame and died in the net.
"Scorekeeper-san," someone joked, "stick to numbers."
Everyone laughed. So did he. The racket felt like it wanted to leave his hand.
I don't even hate them. I just... don't belong where the ball goes.
When they packed up, he helped coil the net cord, because helping made it easier for other people to forget he was there. The last of the group bumped fists and drifted toward ramen shops and train platforms, steam and conversation already warming them. Ren walked the other way, into a neighborhood where the buildings hunched lower and the neon signs gave up on spelling their names right.
He didn't pick the alley. The alley picked him, a sliver of darkness between a shuttered bookstore and a repair shop that smelled like rust. Far inside, a sign flickered in an embarrassed way: NO NAME PAWN. The letters stuttered, half-lit, as if they were pretending to be a different sign that got lost on the way here.
Pawn...? I don't need anything. I don't have anything anyone would want.
He should have kept walking. He did not. Something in the window caught his eye—a slice of night with stars trapped in it. He stepped closer. It wasn't the sky. It was a racket.
A padel racket, black as a storm cloud, with hairline cracks running across the face like constellations. The cracks weren't dead. Light moved in them—faint, not neon, not reflection. The kind of light that wasn't sure if it existed.
Ren leaned toward the glass. His reflection leaned back: a thin guy, hair damp, tie crooked, eyes tired in a way that sleep didn't fix. Behind his reflection, in the gloom of the shop, there was a mural. He hadn't noticed it at first. A court made of glass, rising like a cathedral nave, with a star painted directly above the net. The star was wrong. No two points were the same length. It looked like something that had been broken and then remembered.
The door had a CLOSED sign. The handle had a chain looped around it and a small brass lock that had clearly retired from opening things years ago. Ren put his palm against the window to block the street glare and peered in.
Something whispered.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't in his language. It wasn't in his ear. It was a thought that someone else had left lying around. The words arrived like dust motes: Only those who still stand after losing may enter.
He swallowed. "Hello?"
No answer. Of course. He pressed his fingertips harder into the glass. The hairline cracks in the racket—were they brighter now?
I'm tired. That's all. I'm making glow out of rain.
He took a step back. The rain came down in clean lines. His phone buzzed with a train delay alert. He didn't check it. He looked at the racket again. The mural again. His reflection. He tried to imagine a version of himself that could walk past this. He failed.
He curled his knuckles around the door handle, not to open it—just to feel something cold and solid and normal.
The chain rattled.
"Ha—" He pulled his hand away as if the handle had teeth. The CLOSED sign swayed. The chain didn't fall. The lock didn't move. But the sound was real. He wasn't imagining that. He could feel the small tremor travel through his fingertips into his wrist.
"Is anyone—" He stopped, because the door handle turned under its own weight.
The chain went slack like a snake letting someone step over it. The lock didn't unlock. It simply... wasn't where it was, the way an old memory sometimes slid to the wrong shelf.
The door opened.
Air spilled out—cool, dry, the dust-sweet taste of cardboard and lacquered wood. Ren stood there with rain running off his hair into his collar, as if he had reached the edge of weather and found a place that didn't need it.
He stepped inside.
The first thing he noticed was the quiet. Not the absence of sound, but the presence of a different kind. The rain noise stayed outside like a polite guest. Inside, every scuff on the floor, every breath, every rustle of an old paper inventory had weight.
The second thing he noticed was that there was no clerk. A bell above the door should have chimed and summoned a short, apologetic man with a towel and a "just a moment." It didn't. The only bell was a small bronze thing on the counter that had collected a dome of dust like a tiny snowdrift.
Shelves went back into the dim, full of other people's almost-memories—cameras with leather cases, a violin whose bow string had given up, boxes labeled in handwriting that didn't want to be read. And on the wall, the mural he had seen from the street: a court not painted, but inlaid with slivers of glass, the net a silver wire, the star above it made of something that had once been light and then changed its mind.
He moved along the counter, not touching anything. The racket in the window sat on a velvet stand, one edge propped as if in mid-swing. Up close, the cracks were more than cracks. They were a map. Some lines curved into each other; some stopped over nothing and started again later as if the space between belonged to a different object. Under the throat of the racket, a tiny metal plate was screwed into the wood.
The plate had no letters on it. It had a symbol: a dot inside a five-point star that didn't match itself.
Ren's knuckles hovered. "This is stupid." His breath fogged the glass. "I don't even—"
The whisper again. Closer this time, like it had learned the shape of his head. Only those who still stand after losing may enter.
"I already entered," he muttered, and then felt ridiculous for arguing with what might have been the air.
Standing after losing. His throat tightened. I've been standing so long my legs forgot why.
Something changed in the mural. It wasn't the image. It was the light in the image—the way the star above the net sharpened and then softened, the way a cathedral window looks different when a cloud moves. Ren blinked. The star brightened just enough to show that the silver net gleamed, thread by thread.
He put his palm flat on the counter, close to the racket, not on it. He didn't know why he was careful. He didn't know what would happen if he wasn't.
"Do you sell this?" he asked the empty shop. "Or do I... rent it? With what?"
There wasn't an answer. There was a feeling, like a coin rolling in the pocket of a coat he didn't own. It stopped with a small certainty: Touch it.
He didn't like being told what to do, even by feelings. He picked up the racket.
Cold ran up his wrist, not the wet cold of rain, but a clean cold, like a glass of water had decided to be a temperature. The cracks lit gently. The glow wasn't blue or white or anything he had words for; it was the glow of a thing that knew itself. It balanced in his hand as if his hand had always been there in every version of itself that had ever been.
He turned his wrist. The racket face caught the room and broke it into pieces that didn't quite fit back together.
"Okay," he said, voice thin. "That's... that's cool."
His reflection in the glass case drifted over the mural—Ren's face floating above the net of the glass court. For a moment, the star hung exactly at his chest. His breath hitched.
A new whisper, not in the room. In him. It sounded like his own voice taken apart and put back together by someone who didn't know him but wanted to. Do you wish to keep losing in a world that will not see you?
He bit down on the answer that was already there. "That's a rude question."
Or lose for a reason in mine? the voice added, as if it was offering a choice between two trains going to the same station in different weather.
He should have laughed. He didn't. His throat hurt in a way that had nothing to do with rain.
Lose for a reason. He felt something in his chest tilt toward those words like a plant toward a window. I'm good at losing. If it meant something—if it changed something—
He swallowed. "And if I win?"
The mural's star sharpened again, a pinpoint through the fog. The cold in the racket softened enough to feel like a grip, not a warning.
He didn't get words back. He got a picture: crowds in a stadium that was also a temple; a ball's arc leaving a line of light that didn't fade; a net humming like a throat just before a person says something they can't unsay.
Ren closed his eyes. For half a breath, he thought of his boss's pen, of the text message under the word "Sorry," of laughter at a friendly court that had room for everyone except what he was.
If I lose there too, at least I lose for a reason.
He exhaled and opened his eyes and said, "Fine. Use me," to a shop that didn't have a clerk and a mural that wasn't supposed to move and a racket that didn't belong to anyone he could name.
The star in the mural opened.
It didn't burst. It didn't explode. It rearranged the room so that the wall was not where it had been and the space beyond it was not where space usually went. Light came forward the way a hand reaches out from under water.
Ren had time to think This is a very stupid thing to have agreed to, and I never even learned a proper serve, and Please let there be someplace to stand, all layered on top of each other like clear sheets with different maps.
He felt the door behind him close by itself. He felt the rain stop touching his shoulders in the way that rain stops when the world forgets that it was raining. He felt the racket in his hand weigh exactly as much as a promise.
The light touched his palm. Something small and bright stamped itself at the base of his thumb—a tiny mark, a star with a dot in its chest. It cooled there, a brand that didn't hurt.
"Ehh..." he whispered, because sometimes the wrong word is the only one you have.
The mural swallowed the counter, the shelves, the dust. It kept the bell. It kept the air. It took everything else and smoothed it into glass.
Ren stumbled forward because forward was the only direction left. The court on the wall was no longer on the wall. It lay beneath him and above him and exactly at the distance where a ball would bounce if someone served hard and true.
He didn't scream. He wasn't brave. He simply didn't have a scream available.
The last thing he saw of the shop was the CLOSED sign swinging on the inside of the door with a small, dignified patience.
The last thing he heard was a whisper that might have been his own voice finally agreeing with itself.
Stand, then.
The door behind him clicked.
And the shop's lock—without being touched—unlocked.