The city didn't begin so much as gather.
Warehouses hunched along the tracks like tired animals, windows bandaged with wire. Beyond them, the skyline rose—angles and glass, old stone and new ambition stitched together by scaffolds. The platform smelled of iron, steam, and a hundred errands.
Reina set a steady pace. "Service gate up ahead," she said. "Eyes forward. Don't let anyone make your story for you."
Aiko kept one hand on the wooden box. Inside, the egg's green glow softened the shadows. It wasn't brighter—just nearer, the way a thought gets nearer when you decide to speak it.
Kenji walked on her other side, satchel slung over a shoulder, wearing that alert calm that made people think he was older than he was. Pulsebun trotted at Aiko's knee, whiskers twitching at every new sound.
They left the main platform for a narrow passage lined with peeling posters and a clock that ticked too loudly. A guard booth watched the service gate. The guard inside looked up, took in Reina's badge, and let his eyebrows ask the first question.
"Investigator Hoshino," Reina said, offering folded papers. "South Spur arrival. Three companions. Clearance pending."
The guard read, then read Reina's face, and decided they matched. He pressed a hidden button. The gate sighed.
"Welcome to the capital," he said—not warmly and not unkindly. His gaze snagged on Aiko a half-second longer than it should have, as if he'd felt a tug from somewhere he couldn't name.
The service yard crouched beyond the gate. Cranes leaned over flatbeds. A narrow road threaded between stacks of crates and coils of cable. Workers moved with the weary precision of people whose jobs kept the city from noticing gravity.
Reina led them along the yard's edge, then down stairs that smelled like dust and old rain. At the bottom, a door opened to a corridor the color of sun-faded paper. Kenji's shoulders eased a fraction.
"Guild annex," he murmured. "Older than it looks."
A clerk waited at a desk with a tidy nameplate: MORITA. He took their permits and stamped them with a device that clacked like a cricket.
"Temporary passes," Morita said, sliding three lanyards across. "No lab access without escort. Curfew at dusk unless accompanied. Investigator Hoshino is your point of contact."
Pulsebun eyed the lanyards. "Do I get one?"
Morita blinked. "If you promise not to chew it."
Pulsebun considered. "I promise not to chew it first."
Aiko slipped the pass over her head. In Kyoten, names did most of the talking; in the city, tags did their share.
"Lodging," Reina said. "Two adjoining rooms. Briefing room three doors down. We'll use that." Her glance touched the box in Aiko's arms. "And we do not leave this unattended."
They climbed another set of stairs. The lodging hall had narrow windows and floors that knew how to creak in a friendly way. Their rooms were clean in the way of places built to host many lives briefly. Aiko set the box on a low table and unwound the rope.
The egg glowed, patient and green. Faint gold lines threaded under the surface—more certain than in the morning, like handwriting finding its shape.
Kenji crouched beside it. "We should establish a baseline," he said. "Light frequency, pulse interval, surface pattern variation."
"Translation," Pulsebun said, settling on the rug, "we stare and write down what the miracle does."
A knock touched the doorframe. A woman in a lab coat stood there, hair pulled back, eyes not unkind. She didn't enter; she let the room decide first.
"Dr. Sera Nakamoto," she said. "I oversee V-Link diagnostics. Investigator Hoshino asked me to make myself available."
Reina appeared silently behind her. "Available," she said, "not in charge."
Nakamoto nodded like that was exactly the right shape of the sentence. "May I look?" she asked Aiko, placing the question where it belonged.
Aiko measured her the way Kyoten measures a new baker—by their hands. She nodded. "You may look."
Nakamoto stepped in with careful curiosity that matched Kenji's. She didn't touch. She leaned. "It's beautiful," she said. "And wrong."
"Wrong how?" Kenji asked.
"Not wrong like a mistake," Nakamoto said. "Wrong like a truth out of place. This doesn't belong to our century."
Pulsebun's ears flattened, then rose. "It belongs to itself."
Nakamoto's mouth tilted. "That, I can work with."
They moved to the briefing room—table sanded so often it felt like an old story. Maps on the walls: pins and string on some, tidy marginalia on others. Reina set a device on the table that hummed without sound.
"Keep this simple," she said. "No activation attempts. No powered contact with the egg. Dr. Nakamoto will take a non-invasive reading. Kenji logs. Aiko says if anything changes."
"And me?" Pulsebun asked.
"You say something brilliant when required," Reina said.
Pulsebun nodded solemnly. "Prepared."
Nakamoto unrolled a cloth case of instruments—tools from a dream of a future that fell asleep too soon. She chose a thin flat plate tethered by a braided cord to a small box with a single dial.
"Inductive pickup," she told Kenji, who was already writing. "If the egg emits anything the probe would call 'link-adjacent,' we'll see it. No emission means nothing conclusive. Emission means a very long day."
Aiko set the box on the table and stepped back. Reina's voice softened. "If you feel the hum change, say it."
"I will," Aiko said.
Nakamoto held the plate over the egg without touching. The room inhaled, like an audience before the bow brushes strings.
The dial twitched.
Kenji's pencil hesitated just long enough to count the beats, then moved.
The dial twitched again, then steadied into a small, even rise. Nakamoto watched, face quiet. "Baseline oscillation, low amplitude," she said. "Consistent with a weak link present but not engaged."
"Engaged," Pulsebun echoed. "Like a gear."
"Like a conversation," Nakamoto said.
Aiko felt the change the instant the needle jumped—a shift like a basket settling in the hand. Not more, not less. Different.
"Now," she said.
The needle tipped. A tone too low to be sound arrived and lived under their skin. Kenji's eyes widened. Reina's shoulders tightened. Nakamoto hovered her fingers near the dial, then let them fall.
"It's hearing something," Nakamoto said. "Not us."
"The city," Kenji murmured. "The network."
"The network is fragmented," Reina said.
"And still louder than a village," Nakamoto said. She folded the plate away and watched the needle sink on its own. "Enough. We don't chase it. If we do, it will start chasing back."
Reina nodded. "Thank you."
Nakamoto looked at Aiko as one person looks at another across a line they might have to cross together. "If you're comfortable," she said, "stand at the far end while we watch the egg. Sometimes proximity changes how a thing chooses to listen."
Aiko went where she pointed. Not touching anything made her hands feel too large. She thought of dough—how it answers better if you don't scold it.
The glow didn't brighten. The gold threads didn't race. But the pattern under the pattern—the one Aiko felt more than saw—aligned a fraction, like setting a tray square on a counter.
Kenji wrote that down too.
"Enough for today," Reina said. "We have to meet the liaison. They'll want to know we arrived without breaking anything they care about."
"Who's the liaison?" Pulsebun asked.
"Deputy Director Tsukuda," Reina said. "He cares about different things on different days. Today he'll care about outcomes."
The liaison's office lived three floors up behind a door that preferred two knocks. Tsukuda had elegant hair and elegant impatience. He stood to shake hands and sat before anyone else did, a trick that made the room admit his gravity.
"Investigator," he said. "Welcome back." His gaze counted Aiko, Kenji, Pulsebun—pausing in polite confusion on the last. "You brought your team."
"I brought the people the system answers to," Reina said.
Tsukuda smiled with only a few teeth. "Does it. Good. Then you'll appreciate our urgency. Incidents are rising. The public enjoys not knowing. It's our job to ensure they continue to enjoy it."
"And ours," Kenji said, "to ensure any solution isn't worse than the problem."
Tsukuda's eyes sharpened. "Who are you?"
"Kenji Arakawa," he said. "Witness."
Tsukuda didn't ask who'd given him the title. He gave a small nod that contained a larger one. "That will do. You will file observations. Investigator Hoshino will filter. Dr. Nakamoto will advise. Ms. Tachibana will not be put at risk."
Aiko heard the promise and the loophole. "Define risk."
"Let's not insult each other with definitions today," Tsukuda said, palms open. "You'll be treated as a limited-access asset under Investigator Hoshino's discretion. You may dislike the word asset. I dislike it too. Use it anyway."
Pulsebun folded his arms. "And me?"
"You will do what you have already done," Tsukuda said. "The reports call it improvisation. I call it unacceptable. Do it again."
Reina's mouth didn't move, which is how Aiko knew she was smiling.
They were dismissed politely—which is to say they were no longer needed in that room.
Back in the lodging hall, quiet returned the way water returns to a stirred bowl. Nakamoto retreated to her wing with a promise to knock before she thought. Reina filed a report with fewer adjectives than truth. Kenji arranged notes into categories and made islands of order on the table.
Aiko washed her face at the small sink and met her own eyes in the mirror. The city behind her wasn't Kyoten. The girl in the glass was still herself. Both could be true. She dried her hands and went to the box.
The egg pulsed. A hairline crack skated across its surface and vanished like a shooting star.
"Kenji," she called. He was already there.
He set his palm above the shell. "It's not breaking," he said. "It's testing its edges."
Reina leaned in the doorway. "Like a person," she said.
Pulsebun rested his chin on the table, eyes wide. "If it hatches tonight, we're naming it Something That Can Sleep."
"Let it choose," Aiko said.
Night settled differently in the capital. It hummed along the seams of streets and through the bones of buildings. The annex quieted one window at a time. Somewhere far off, a siren wrote its brief sentence and stopped.
Aiko lay awake long enough to hear the city decide it was still itself. She turned toward the wall and nearly slept.
The egg pulsed.
Something moved under the green—neither light nor shadow. The gold threads brightened, then bowed back into dark. A sound like a breath thinking arrived and left.
"Tomorrow," Aiko whispered, unsure if she was promising or pleading.
A soft knock touched their door. Reina's voice, very low: "Stay ready. The liaison wants a live demonstration in the morning."
Aiko closed her eyes. The city's hum braided with the ruin's whisper, with Kyoten's quiet, with her own small rhythm counting in and out. She held all of it as if holding one meant dropping the others.
Morning would ask for answers.
Tonight, the world allowed a question to be enough.