The tap came again.
Soft. Deliberate. A single knuckle against glass.
Kaien's hand hovered on the curtain. His heartbeat felt too loud for the size of his chest.
Airi breathed steadily from the other room. The house held every sound like it was deciding which ones to keep.
He pulled the curtain back.
A figure stood on the sill.
Tall. A coat that moved like smoke. A hood that swallowed any face it might have had. Where eyes should be, the night showed nothing back.
The window latch slid up without a hand touching it. Cold air spilled across his skin.
The figure didn't climb; it folded into the room as if the space made room for it. It stopped at the foot of his bed. The floorboard didn't creak. The house did not complain. The night just… bent.
Around its neck hung a small hourglass on a short chain.
The sand inside moved the wrong way—edging upward in tiny pulses, then hesitating, as if it were testing the strength of the glass.
Kaien's throat worked. No sound came out.
The figure reached out.
Darkness shaped like fingers pinched the chain. It lifted the hourglass and placed it, gently, in his palm.
Cold.
He could feel the weight of the thing—toy-sized, no heavier than a keychain and yet pressing his hand down. A hairline crack ran along one bulb, catching the moonlight in a thin, silver vein.
He waited for words.
The figure said nothing.
No explanation. No demand.
Only silence. The kind that hummed like a held breath.
Then the thing that might have been an arm withdrew. The figure tilted, as if listening to a sound Kaien could not hear, and slid backward. The window let it through as easily as a shadow walking into deeper shadow.
The night air rushed in and then calmed. The curtain settled. The latch clicked down.
Kaien looked at the hourglass in his hand.
The sand had gone still.
A faint ticking—too faint to be a clock—hid inside the glass, like a sound remembered rather than heard.
His room gradually remembered how to be his room again.
He exhaled.
He set the pendant on his desk as if it might bite. Then he sat, because his knees had stopped agreeing to the idea of standing.
On autopilot, he pulled his notebook close and wrote in a hand that shook once, then steadied:
02:14 — "Visitor (hooded, no face).
Left object: hourglass pendant.
Sand seems to flow upward, then settles. No speech. Temp drop."
He added a second line, then scratched it out. He wasn't sure if the smell that rose into his memory was actually in the room or just his head trying to make a pattern that didn't exist.
He wanted to wake Airi and say, Tell me this is normal. Make a joke about it.
He didn't.
Instead, he wrapped the chain twice around his fingers and let the pendant rest against his skin
Do not tell anyone, he wrote.
Then he underlined it, too hard, until the page wrinkled.
He slept eventually.He dreamed a sound like sand running backwards and woke with his jaw clenched so tight it hummed.
---
Morning sunlight peeled itself up the window frame like it
Airi stormed his room before the alarm did. "Onii-chan!"
He flinched.
She paused, reading his face the way she read cartoons: big, obvious, with total focus. "Nightmare?"
"Something like that."
She clambered onto the bed and pressed a palm to his forehead like she was a doctor from a shoujo manga. "No fever. You just look… grumpy."
"Thanks," he said dryly.
She pointed at the lump under his pillow. "What's that? A secret?"
He snapped a hand over the outline before realizing—not the pendant. Just the notebook. "Notes."
Airi squinted in suspicious big-sister-in-a-small-body mode.
Then she softened and tucked into his side, cheek on his shoulder. "Eat breakfast with me? Mama made tamagoyaki and she's going to be sad if leave it"
He pried himself off the mattress and carried the new weight in his pocket. The hourglass lay against the liner fabric and seemed to cool the bone of his leg.
Every ordinary thing felt overdressed. The way the kettle boiled. The scrape of chopsticks. Airi complaining that her egg was "too eggy." The distant squeal of brakes on the morning bus.
He should have told them he wasn't okay.
He didn't.
---
At school, the day wore the shape of a normal day. The hall chatter. The slamming of shoe lockers.
"Kaien!"
Sota bounded up to him with a grin already two-thirds formed. He was very much alive.
Kaien stopped moving.
The image from yesterday scrolled over the real Sota like a double exposure: the grey skin, the split mouth, that cracked smile. The smell.
He didn't realize he'd taken half a step back until his spine touched a locker.
"Whoa. Dude. You look like you saw a ghost."
Sota broke off a piece of bread and held it up like an offering. "Food fixes everything?"
Kaien forced normal into his mouth. "You were… busy yesterday?"
"Homework," Sota lied cheerfully. "And then I fell into a time vortex called 'Not Doing Homework.' Why?"
Kaien's voice felt like a plastic mask. "No reason."
Nozomi materialized like she'd been summoned by the tension. "He didn't sleep,"
she said, scanning Kaien's face with that gentle stubbornness.
"You get dark circles when you don't sleep. And you get quiet when you have dark circles. It's math."
"New theorem," Sota said, mouth full. "Nozomi's Law of Worry."
She elbowed him. Then her eyes flicked back to Kaien. "You sure you're okay?"
He thought about the hourglass cooling his pocket. He thought about the hooded visitor's silence, about Sota's rotting grin that only he seemed to have seen.
"I'm fine," he said.
Nozomi didn't believe him. She didn't push. She just stayed closer than usual the rest of the morning,
During math, the air in the room felt too thin. The whisper of pencil on paper scratched his nerves.
And then under the desk.inside his pocket the pendant clicked softly against the metal rivet of his jeans.
Not a loud sound. Just a tap, as if the glass had decided to speak in punctuation.
Kaien gripped it through the fabric.
It was cooler than the room.
He didn't pull it out.
He didn't flip it.
He just held it there, like holding a pulse.
When the bell rang, Sota leaned over. "Ramen?"
"Club," Nozomi answered for Kaien, curving a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.
"I'll walk him to the gate after."
Kaien didn't argue. He was tired
---
After classes, they lingered by the gates as the light thinned.
"You're spacing out" Nozomi said,
"Yeah."
"You want to tell me why?"
He imagined the instant her expression would make confusion first, then fear, then that protective anger she got on behalf of other people.
He imagined Airi's little face when she asked are you sad?, and he imagined the hooded figure standing in quiet like a comma in the middle of a sentence.
"I'll figure it out," he said.
She waited for a bit then bumped his shoulder. "Don't get yourself lost while you're 'figuring.' Text me when you get home."
He nodded.
Sota clapped his back. "Don't fall into any time vortices."
"Shut it, Sota," Nozomi said automatically. It made all three of them smile, briefly.
They peeled in their three directions. Kaien did not take the shortcut.
He walked the long way. Past the old bookshop with the cat in the window. Past the bakery that always smelled like sugar. Past the vending machine
The world stayed normal. The world stayed normal.The world stayed normal.The world stayed normal.The world stayed....
He reached his gate and breathed like he'd run.
Airi's shoes were already by the door. So were his mother's.
"You're late," Airi complained, which was how she said I'm relieved.
"Won't happen again," he lied.
His mother rummaged in her bag. "I'm stepping out to the store—ten minutes. Watch your sister?"
"Yeah."
Airi puffed up. "I don't need watching."
"You absolutely do," he said, because ritual holds the walls up.
She flopped onto the stool by the kitchen counter, swinging her legs. "Can I make tea?"
"Let me—"
"I can do it," she insisted. "I'm 11"
He hovered anyway, half-guard, while she warmed water and got two mugs the big chipped one he always used, and the fox-faced one she refused to let anyone else touch.
She reached for the sugar on the top shelf. Stretched. Stretched. The stool wobbled.
"Airi"
"I've got it"
The mug tilted. The stool hit a crack in the tile. The fox mug skated, clipped the edge of the counter, and launched.
Kaien moved. Too slow.
The world narrowed to ceramic and Airi's small gasp.
His hand went to the hourglass because there was nowhere else to put it. It was a reflex, His thumb rolled over the glass and the pendant turned.
He didn't even know he'd flipped it until the sand inside sprang.
Upward.
The air folded.
The sound of the mug in flight unwound into a suck of silence. Steam curled back down into the kettle. The wobble of the stool smoothed to stillness. Airi's gasp shrank back into her mouth like a fish slipping under water.
Kaien's stomach dropped as if he'd missed a stair that didn't exist.
The house shuddered without moving.
He blinked
The mug was back on the counter.
Airi's fingers were just starting to reach for the sugar. The kettle was ok. The stool was flat on four legs.
The clock on the microwave read 17:02.
Kaien stared.
He looked down at his phone without meaning to.
17:02.
His notebook on the table lay open from earlier. The pen he'd left diagonally across it was still diagonal, still wet at the tip, as if the minute he'd just had had never been written into the paper of the world.
Fifty-seven seconds.
He didn't know how he knew the number, but his body did. 57. A precise subtraction.
"Airi...." he said. His voice sounded far away. "Don't climb."
She blinked at him, not understanding the panic in the shape of her name. "I wasn't "
"Just don't."
He stepped in. He took the sugar down himself. He put the mug on the inside of the counter, away from the edge. Then, for a long second, he just stood there and listened to the hum of electricity and the tiny click of the kettle gearing up like a throat clearing.
Airi's eyes narrowed. She hopped off the stool, crossed the distance, and wrapped her arms around his waist with small, fierce force. "You're being weird again."
He folded a hand over the back of her head. It shook. "I know."
"Don't be weird," she ordered against his shirt. "I don't like it."
He laughed once, broken. "I'll try."
When the kettle clicked, the sound jolted him
He poured. He sugared her tea too much because he always did. She forgave him because she always did. The fox mug sat safe
He needed air.
He needed math.
He needed a list.
When Airi was absorbed in a cartoon, he slipped to his room, closed the door softly, and set the hourglass on the desk.
Up close, it looked ordinary and wrong at once. The glass had the faint imperfections of hand-blown work. The metal caps were dull, not polished. The hairline crack traced a thin, bright path like a vein trying to become a map.
Kaien set his phone timer to 00:57 and tapped start.
He flipped the hourglass.
The timer rolled back to 00:57 so sharply it was like time had been punched.
He breathed in through his nose, out through his teeth.
Again.
Test 2. He dropped a pen. Halfway through the fall, he flipped the pendant. The pen leapt in a smooth arc back to his fingers.
Test 3. He placed a cookie on a plate and took a bite. Flip. Whole cookie again. Bite back in his mouth? No mouth empty, hunger the same. Cookie restored, stomach not.
Test 4. He scratched a line on his wrist with his fingernail. Flip. The red mark faded
He wrote in the notebook, hand cramped with the speed of catching truths:
> Rules (draft):
• Flip = rewind exactly 57 seconds.
• Only I remember the rewound minute.
• Physical world resets to previous states (fallen objects return, etc.).
• My body? Mixed. Injury fades, hunger does not reset.
• Sound…? Feels like it reverses, then cuts out.
• Slight nausea.
• Pendant cools after — temp drop?
• No obvious cooldown on second attempt (needs more testing).
He stared at the last line. The hourglass lay in his palm, humming or maybe he only imagined it. The sand had settled.
He waited.
He closed the notebook.
"Onii-chan?" Airi's voice came from the hallway. "You said we could draw."
He shoved the hourglass into his inner pocket and opened the door with a face he hoped looked like a brother, not a suspect.
They sat cross-legged on the floor with a scatter of crayons between them. Airi drew a fox with blue stripes again. Kaien drew a shape and had to admit it was a clock.
"Why are you drawing a potato?" Airi asked.
"It's modern art."
She hummed, unconvinced. Then she leaned into him until her shoulder touched his arm and stayed there,
He let her.
The house softened into evening.
His phone buzzed. Nozomi: [You okay?]
He looked at the message for a long second
that wanted to be longer. Then he typed: [Home. All good.]
A lie, small and necessary.
He almost followed it with [Did Sota text you?] and didn't.
He almost wrote [I saw something behind the west wing] and didn't.
He drew another clock.
Night came down.
They ate. Airi declared his miso "acceptable" and then snuck a second helping. Their mother asked Nozomi to come by Saturday and eat properly for once. Kaien washed dishes until the water went lukewarm
He told himself he would not touch the hourglass again tonight.
He nearly kept the promise.
---
Around one, the house quieted to that thin wind sound old buildings make.
Kaien lay on his back and listened to nothing.
Tick.
It wasn't the wall clock.
It wasn't the fan.
It was the faint.
He pulled it out.
In the dark, the hairline crack caught nothing and still shone.
He held it up and thought, wildly, about Sota. About how he'd seen him gone and then seen him whole and cheerful, pinked by morning, the rot erased from the face of the day
Fifty-seven seconds wouldn't save a life.
Not from whatever he'd seen in that alley.
But it could nudge a moment. Unspill a mug. Unbreak a bone? Unsay a word?
He pictured Nozomi's eyes, the way worry sat under the brightness when she looked at him.
He pictured Airi on the stool.
He pictured the hooded figure's silence like an answer withheld on purpose.
He put the hourglass down on the nightstand and told himself to sleep.
He almost did.
And then the smell came.
Faint at first. Then heavier. Not the kitchen. Not the street.
Rot. Thick and wrong. A memory made meat.
Kaien's fingers seized the pendant.
He lunged to the window, yanked the curtain aside.
The alley was empty.
But in the cone of the streetlight,. Not a person. Not a shadow. An outline that insisted a person had stood there a second ago and the world hadn't fully caught up with the absence.
His stomach flipped. He had the insane urge to flip the pendant.
He didn't.
He stood there with the chain cutting into his hand and the smell fading, and he understood something colder than the night:
The minute he'd eaten earlier hadn't vanished harmlessly.
Something of it lingered.
He closed the curtain slowly.
He sat on the edge of the bed and wrote in the dark, the pen gouging because he could not see the lines:
> Addendum: After use, residual bleed? Smell/•memory of… (Sota?) appears where it •shouldn't. Cost? Unknown.
•Do not use casually.
•Do not tell Nozomi.
•Do not scare Airi.
His hand shook.
The pendant lay between his fingers like a coin you shouldn't bet, the kind that looks like luck and isn't.
The ticking softened, then faded.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling until he couldn't tell if his eyes were open.
Just before sleep took him by the throat, the window clicked.
Not a tap.
A click, like a latch choosing a side.
He sat bolt upright.
A shadow crossed the sill.
He held his breath so hard his chest burned.
The hooded figure did not come in.
It stood, a shape darker than night, and tilted its head as if considering the boy with the hourglass.
Then it was gone.
No words.
No promise.
Just the quiet, and a minute he wasn't sure he still owned.