Chapter Text
The wind bell above the entrance of Sakurayashiki Calligraphy rang into the late afternoon. The heavy sky hung overcast, a veil stretched thin across the horizon. Nearby, the gentle rustle of brushes and low shrubs stirred beneath the breath of wind, leaves whispering against one another as if secrets passed from branch to branch. Cherry blossom trees along the path swayed with unhurried grace, their petals loosening in slow spirals, dusting the air with pale pink as they fell. Somewhere beyond the wall, the muted scrape of a gate echoed, followed by the distant and persistent murmur of cicadas.
Kaoru stood at the threshold, hands folded neatly before him, his posture composed, chin slightly dipped in a shallow bow. His expression wore the porcelain charm of civility, all immaculate poise and unreadable grace as he wished goodbye to his last meeting for the day. They disappeared beyond the stone gate at last, the clack of leather soles against the flagstones tapering into silence. Kaoru straightened slowly, the veneer of courtesy slipping from his face like a dropped fan.
A breeze swept through the courtyard stirring the gravel and lifting the bittersweet scent of camellias beginning to bloom. Kaoru glanced up, the edge of a frown catching at his brow. Beyond the swaying cherry branches, the clouds had continued to thicken into a deepening mass of slate grey that seemed to press closer with every passing minute. The light had flattened, casting the courtyard in a dull, silvery hue. Rain was coming.
He stepped back inside, sliding the shōji door close and locking it with a snick, the pale wood catching briefly on its worn track. The hush inside the studio was immediatly dim, perfumed with ink, tea leaves and old paper. The tea table was a clutter of pamphlets, scattered calligraphy tools and museum exhibit printouts stamped with a gaudy logo. Kaoru's eyes narrowed. His best suzuri stone sat askew, fingerprints smudging the lacquer. One of the brushes, his sable-handled one, had been placed bristles down.
“They touched everything ,” Kaoru muttered, his mouth curled into a sneer, voice flat with distaste.
The client’s assistant had been the worst of them both. Tapping at Carla’s interface at the centre of the table as if she were a novelty at a gift shop. Not once, but repeatedly. Testing her boundaries to see what she'd do or say. The actual client, the museum exhibit sponsor, hadn't bothered to stop him. He was too busy inspecting Kaoru’s awards and every single one of his tools with the same slow detachment one might reserve for vintage crockery, entirely entitled. Kaoru’s tone had stayed polished throughout. His patience had not. The exhibit he had been invited to collaborate on was high-profile. Too high-profile to decline. So he’d served the tea, smiled at the right moments, and resisted the urge to slap the men’s hand away with his fan. Not that his earlier meetings were any less exhausting.
A sigh. “Carla. Recap the idiocies I had before the most recent meeting.”
“Three entries,” the AI chirped. “First: a commissioner requested direct access to my source code.”
Kaoru’s lip curled. “Denied. And kindly blacklist him.”
“Of course, Master. Second: a complaint regarding your rates.”
“Also denied.”
“Third: a job applicant with contradictory qualifications.”
“Waste of time,” Kaoru murmured. “Didn’t expect a ‘no’.”
“Shall I log the day as ‘inefficient and mildly intolerable’?”
“Label it ‘Monday’. Anyone with sense will understand.” Kaoru said resignedly, slipping his hand under his glasses and rubbing at his eyes with a finger and thumb.
He then moved into the shop’s kitchenette behind the meeting room and unhooked the kettle. Water was already resting in the iron pot from earlier. The clink of ceramic and the warm, dry scent of roasted barley began to refill the air as he set the tea to steep, sleeve falling as he poured. His fingers lingered on the rim of the teacup, absorbing its warmth.
Outside, distant and low thunder murmured from beyond the hills. Kaoru shuddered, the sound tugging at something instinctive, deep in the chest. He paused, one hand resting against the counter, head tilted. A rustle echoed from the direction of the front door as though it had shifted on its hinges. He turned toward the short hallway but the entrance lay vacant, undisturbed.
Just the wind.
After pouring his tea, Kaoru settled back at the tea table, the sleeves of his kimono folding neatly around him as he lowered himself to the plum tatami and he reached for the scattered museum materials without much interest, dragging them toward him in a sweep of paper and soft, scuffing noise.
His eyes skimmed over the sponsor’s note, then a page covered in fluorescent colours and poorly aligned text. He found the science museum pamphlet wedged near the bottom, the cover already creased from overhandling. He opened it with a light frown, the corners of his mouth pressed in quiet disapproval. Page after page passed, cluttered with slogans and exclamation marks, a muddle of enthusiastic blurbs about AI integration and public engagement. Then he reached the next page.
The double-page spread featured a gorilla behind glass, the section heading read Genetic Mirroring in Endangered Species: The Gorilla Clone Initiative . It had a boastful pride in its posture. Its face wasn’t quite familiar, and yet...
Kaoru’s thumb drifted along the image, an unreadable expression painted across his features. “Carla,” he started, “when was the last time I visited Sia La Luce?”
“Tuesday. 22:14 until 01:36. Six days ago.”
“Hm. Thank you.” His gaze lingered a moment longer. “Twice in one week…” He closed the pamphlet with a gentle flap. “No. Nevermind.”
The rain started steady, a patter against the shōji and the garden stones outside. The room dimmed slightly, shadows gathering along the matting and under the shelves. Kaoru took a sip of tea, letting the warmth bleed within his skin. He let himself decompress, if not for a few minutes, as the weather worsened.
Once the teacup was empty and the last trace of warmth cooled on the rim, Kaoru set it down and his attention drifted across the disarray of the table. He pressed two fingers to a loose pamphlet and began to gather the documents into order, sliding them into a neat pile. Stylus’ returned to their sleeves. Portfolio straightened out. A few brushes lay in their usual order, handles polished smooth from use.
Until he stopped.
One was missing.
Kaoru’s eyes moved slowly across the space, then back again, as if it might reappear under scrutiny. The longer of his brushes, the one with the carved silver cap, was nowhere to be seen.
With a click of his tongue he murmured to himself, “It’s not like I leave them lying around. How irritating.”
With an equally annoyed grumble, he crouched, checking beneath the table, then rose again, robe falling back into place as he lifted the stack of leaflets to peer behind them. Nope. Nowhere to be seen. He turned in a slow circle, scanning the surfaces he’d already tidied, then knelt, palm bracing against the tatami. Nothing. A frown tugged deeper between his brows. He leaned over the tea table again, lifting the edge of a coaster, his fan, a stylus, his empty cup…
A faint hum stirred.
“Don’t.” The voice suddenly came from the centre of the table.
His hand halted mid-motion. For a second, it felt as though the room leaned with him, as if listening too. His eyes flicked to the circular glow below Carla’s projection and raised an eyebrow.
“Carla?” He responded, watching her initial flicker. “What are you saying I shouldn’t do?”
There was a pause.
“...I spoke in error, Master. The stimulus was… ambiguous.”
Kaoru’s jaw tightened and visible beneath the line of his cheek. He stayed fixed on the ‘C’, watching the pulse of light dim and settle. Interference, he told himself. Though, the silence that followed had a strange, attentive edge.Carla didn’t hallucinate. Not anymore. Not in years . He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Most clients weren’t so persistent but the sponsor had insisted on three separate demonstrations, just to be sure Sakurayashiki was a good fit for the collaboration, and each more invasive than the last. Perhaps her random response was the result of the unexpected spike, or maybe a misclassification from the weather. Still. He made a mental note to recalibrate her tonight, cross-check her latest data in time for the live demonstration he had been requested to host for the museum next week ahead of the exhibit. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Nothing urgent.
Hopefully.
He stood with a shift of fabric and carried the empty teacup back into the kitchenette. Outside had grown heavier, its sound resembling static and unbroken now, drumming harsh against the eaves.
The window above the sink was clouded with condensation. Beyond it, the garden blurred behind a curtain of water, leaves of the camellia bushes dark with wet, their edges trembling. A few trees moved in the wind in a sway that made it hard to tell if a bird was jumping between branches within or not. He turned his head away.
A flicker in the periphery.
Kaoru paused while cleaning the rim of the teacup as he glanced out again.
Something had… changed. Or seemed to. He squinted, adjusted his glasses, and looked more directly toward the hedges near the end of the path.
The bushes there looked thinner somehow. Not quite where they had been. Their shape had warped behind a veil of water, edges blurred by the streaks down the glass. One section looked as if it had been pulled back or pressed inward, a dip in the greenery where none should be. The longer he stared, the less certain he was of what he saw.
Exhaustion. That's what it was. He should head home.
The shōji door whispered closed. Kaoru slid the lock into place with a final click, the metal snug against the wood, and he adjusted Carla on his arm, making sure the pink band sat evenly above the bone, while the hook of his umbrella hung from his forearm. As he lowered his hand, a shape caught his eye.
There, just behind the doorframe, half-tucked, was a slip of paper. Crumpled. Slightly damp at the edge. He raised a brow and reached for it, tugging it free.
It was test-grade calligraphy stock, cheap and fibrous.The centre had been marked with an uneven blot of ink, as if the writer had tried to write something in kanji but failed due to the falling droplets. The lines warped, one side dragging toward the edge of the page in an uneven thread, appearing more melted than anything legible. Holding the paper between two fingers, as if it was sticky, the corners of his mouth drew taut with distaste. He looked around. The street was quiet. Only the rain running in rivulets across stone and pooling between the paving.
No shadows in motion. No figures ducking behind the trees.
He turned his body fully, and the sound that followed was sharp. Snapped wood beneath his heel which dragged his line of sight down toward it.
There it was.
His missing brush.
Now crushed at the neck beneath the edge of his zōri sandal, bristles bent and splayed with recently used ink.
His eyes narrowed and h scanned the area again, slower and more focused this time, lips parting slightly as his annoyance deepened. He tore the paper in half, then quarters, the fibrous scraps clinging to his skin in the damp air before he threw the scraps carelessly onto the wet ground to disintegrate.
“Ridiculously stupid prank,” he shook his head.
But, before he could move further, his phone buzzed.
He pulled it from his sleeve as the screen lit up with a single notification. No contact. No number. A lone message:
The ink suits you more.
The message sat there; Strange, cryptic, oddly phrased, as if whoever wrote it was trying way too hard to sound clever.
Kaoru could only scoff, the sound dry and close to a laugh. “How desperate.” The sentence cracked near the end as he slid the phone back into his sleeve and unfolded his umbrella. The sakura petal patterned fabric bloomed open in one fluid movement while he stepped onto the stone path. “Carla, trace the message.”
“Beginning trace,” she replied smoothly.
The storm drummed against the handheld canopy, droplets sliding off the edges in long, clear threads. Kaoru walked at an even pace, his zōri tapping as he passed the stone walls lining the street. Each alley he passed pulled at his attention; narrow gaps between houses, small garden paths, the empty spaces that should have held nothing at all. He glimpsed down each one. Saw nothing. Grip twitched against the handle of the umbrella.
The air felt… wrong, a layer of something other than humidity clinging beneath his skin.
“ Secondary input rejected. Awaiting override. ”
Carla’s voice. Flat. Automatic. Once more, a blank trigger.
It caused Kaoru to startle enough that the breath in his chest caught, heart thumping once loudly in his ear. Cold spread beneath his collar. He stopped walking. The umbrella hovered above his shoulder as he turned, gaze sweeping behind him.
There was nothing. Not a soul.
The street remained empty with rain falling uninterrupted.
He tilted his wrist higher while the following words drew out uncharacteristically tentative, “What… secondary input? Can you begin the trace again?”
Silence.
He frowned. “Carla?”
Another pause. Longer this time, before she answered.
“I… cannot trace, Master. It is inconclusive. Apologies.”
Kaoru opened his mouth, about to question that, to press into the strange dissonance of her voice and the flatness of the pause. However, the words seemed stuck.
No. Not because he was intimidated.
That would be childish.
Of course it would be…
The phone in his sleeve buzzed again.
Once.
Then again.
And again.
Hitting harder than the last.
Each one inexplicably untraceable.