The day arrived dressed like a meeting.
U.A. wore its best manners; the air smelled faintly of copier heat and citrus cleaner. A sign on the admin wing read VISITORS – CHECK IN in a font that believed in harmony. Somewhere above that word, someone had taped a smaller one with a ballpoint pen: quietly.
Two Commission cars slid to the curb with the choreography of decisions made elsewhere. Out stepped Dr. Imai—precise, unfrightened, carrying a tablet like a reason—and a younger man whose smile had been ironed into him. He introduced himself twice, once with his name and once with the institution. The second introduction was the one that mattered.
Aizawa met them with the manners he kept for emergencies and parents. "You're on time," he said. Compliment or warning, it fit both doors.
"Thank you for seeing us," Imai replied, genuinely. "The pilot is stable. We want to keep it human."
"Then keep it brief," Aizawa said, and led the way.
Kurobane was already in the conference room, pretending to read the building's fire evacuation map. He nodded to Imai, which in his language meant I'll argue later, not here. The young diplomat set two paper cups on the table with both hands, as though tea could be an alibi.
Renya arrived without looking like an arrival. Uniform straight, expression level. He chose the seat by the window; sunlight flattened the shadows into compliance. The square under his heel stayed coin-sized, a promise not to get involved.
"Thank you for your time, Kurotsuki-san," the young man said—voice warm, questions already shaped. "We're collecting experiences about the ARD stabilization patch. This is a courtesy visit—no grades, no stress." He smiled. Stress does not care about smiles.
Imai angled her tablet. "Three short sections," she said. "1) What you felt in public spaces after v1.1. 2) Whether the 'Night Network' left any… echoes. 3) Any boundaries you want documented."
Renya folded his hands. "Ask."
"Since the patch," she began, "do you feel less… summoned?"
"Yes," he said. "People breathe in their own shape again."
"Have you noticed devices—Calm Bands, signage—responding to you specifically?"
"They respond to whoever's most certain," he said. "It shouldn't be me."
The diplomat's smile brightened. "That's a beautiful way to put it."
"It's a warning," Renya said.
Imai didn't type that, and then she did. "Night Network," she said. "Any… afterimages? Lingering rhythm?"
He thought of the city pausing for a message and of six quiet words on a white field. "Dreams kept their receipts," he said. "Some people still hear the pause—like a room waiting for a host."
"Are you the host?" the diplomat asked, voice light, question not.
"No one should be," Renya said.
Silence arranged itself into a fourth participant. Aizawa let it sit. Kurobane watched the shadow under the table and told himself he was imagining the way it reached—just enough to touch the leg of the chair, then withdrew like a breath remembering politeness.
Imai drew a line in her notes: BOUNDARIES— and looked up. "What do you want written?" she asked.
"That the right to refuse calm exists," Renya said. "That you won't punish people for breathing wrong."
Kurobane hid half a smile. Imai did not. "Documented," she said softly.
The young man lifted his last question with careful hands. "One more, if you'll indulge me: what does it feel like when people align to you?"
He waited. The room leaned.
Renya considered the honest answer. "Like walking through a city of doors that open before I knock," he said. "It's efficient. It's theft."
Aizawa gave the slightest nod. Kurobane's jaw relaxed.
"Thank you," Imai said, meaning it. "That's all."
They stood. The square under the table made a reflexive move toward the hallway—protect, observe—and Renya's heel pressed, gentle. Stay. It did, chastened and learning.
Outside, the diplomat shook hands as if planting flags. "Public gratitude is high," he offered to Aizawa. "We'll keep listening."
"Good," Aizawa said. "Teach your devices the same."
Kurobane fell into step with Imai. "You saw it," he murmured.
"I did," she said.
"It reached," he said.
"It stopped," she countered.
They left it there, because some reconciliations belong to hallways.
Afternoon wrote itself across the city in prints and pixels. The Calm Band ads had returned, trimmed and less evangelical; the patch had softened the beat until it felt like a suggestion. Yet here and there—on a shop display, a metro kiosk, the dark gloss of a waiting-room TV—afterimages clung.
Aki noticed them the way a pianist notices a bad cable. A pane of glass would catch her reflection, and behind it—half a breath late—she saw a second version of the room keep moving. At the crosswalk, the signal changed, and a fraction of a second later, in the mirrored window of the bank, the change happened again, like a thought that had to repeat itself to believe it.
In the supermarket queue, a display above the cereal ran the loop for a breakfast drink. Children in uniforms laughed in a stock-photo way. For one frame—maybe less—the frame hiccuped, and the background breathed.
A man behind her said, "I dreamed the city last night."
"What part?" she asked, because politeness opens answers.
"All of it," he said, embarrassed. "Like… hallways. With windows." He gestured vaguely at the air. "I don't even live in a place with hallways."
"Me too," Aki said. It was not the right thing to say to a stranger. It was the true thing.
He smiled like relief had rented his mouth for a moment. The display hiccuped again.
She bought rice, tea, and a lemon and took the long way home, counting the after-breaths in screens. One in five. One in four. Then none. The city corrected itself, as cities do when they remember they're being watched.
At the apartment, the square greeted her with her rhythm, not the grid's. She clapped the syncopation she had taught it. The wood answered with mild flair, proud to show off.
"You kept our time," she said. The table glowed like a compliment.
Evening turned the windows into slow mirrors. Renya sat on the edge of his bed with the document the Commission had left—Feedback Survey (Voluntary)—and a line where names go. He did not sign. He put the paper under his hand without weight.
What the courtesy visit had been was simple: a second measurement. They had asked if he had boundaries and watched to see whether his shadow believed him.
"Come back," he told the line under his heel. It didn't obey at once. It wanted the corridor, the door, the threshold where courtesy becomes control. He waited, on purpose; he breathed, imperfect. The square returned—a child who had considered running and remembered dinner.
His phone vibrated. Kurobane:You left fingerprints on the collective sleep, kid. Be ready to clean them or explain them.He stared at the message until it felt like a person, then typed: Both.
He sat in the quiet until it became room, not performance. The Veil settled across his arms like a cloth someone had taken time to fold.
Night shrugged over the city. Somewhere, a bus emptied and two teenagers laughed the wrong way. Somewhere else, a nurse found five minutes to close her eyes and didn't dream of alarms.
In an apartment on the west side, and in a dorm room on campus, two siblings fell asleep within the same minute—the kind of synchronization that isn't product, only love.
The dream opened into glass.
Not a palace. Not a tower. A city of panes set in frames, block after block—windows and doors, screens and cabinets, every surface a place where light has to make choices. They walked in from different streets and met in the middle without surprise.
"Aki," Renya said.
"Here," she said, and took his wrist the way you check a pulse, not claim a hand.
Buildings flickered in a rhythm that was almost the old one and then wasn't. Behind the glass in each window: afterimages. A couple pausing a fight at the same syllable. A child asleep with both arms above her head. A guard counting floors in his head. The last half-second of a bus stop ad. The wrong light in an empty lobby breathing once before silence fixed its tie.
"They kept it," Aki said. "The night."
"No," he said, listening. "The night kept them."
They tested the dream's physics. Touch a pane—light dusted off like pollen. Tap a screen—one echo blinked and fell apart into motes that rose like new air. In one window, a woman stared back—not at them, but at body memory. Tears didn't fall; the afterimage couldn't afford them.
"It's not memory," Aki said softly. "It's residue."
He nodded. "Leftovers of order."
"And of kindness," she said, stubborn.
He didn't argue. The dream had room for both.
They walked. In some frames, he saw himself—never the face, only the effect of being in the room: chairs that had decided to be kinder to spines, doors that had opened a breath early, a hallway that believed in cooperation. He pressed the heel of his hand against one pane and felt, for half a second, the urge that had built the Night Network: help. The pane warmed. He lifted his hand. The warmth cooled.
"Wait," he told the dream, and it did.
"Can you undo peace?" Aki asked, not accusing.
"Yes," he said, surprising himself again by the shape of his own answer. "I can choose not to cause it."
"And when it happens without you?" she asked.
"We teach how to keep it human," he said. "We teach delay. We teach how to breathe wrong on purpose."
She smiled, weary and ferocious. "Homework for a city."
"Start with our building," he said.
They reached an intersection where four streets met and the glass grew thin. In the center stood a screen that wasn't a screen—just a plane of white, the exact shade of that morning's message. Breathe On Your Own. We'll Wait. The words appeared and faded like a sign trying not to be a sign.
"Did you write that?" Aki asked.
"No," he said. "But I agreed with it."
They stood there and watched the message decide whether to stay. It did not. It let the window go blank again, and the blankness felt like a room delivered back to its occupants.
"Close it?" she asked.
"Together," he said.
They pressed their palms to the plane. The city exhaled. Windows lost their second life and faded back into glass. Residue dusted the air—light as breath, heavy as choice. They stepped back. The streets learned night again.
When he woke, the dorm window had a thin film at the edges, like dew that had read a book. He wiped a circle with his sleeve. The cloth glittered, then didn't.
Across the city, Aki sat up at her table and found, on the inside of the pane, a soft print of her hand. She laid her palm over it. The fit was wrong by half a centimeter. It comforted her more than accuracy would have.
Morning tried to pretend it had been ordinary.
The Commission cars did not return. They sent an email with bullet points and no verbs. Public sentiment steady.Patch accepted.Further courtesy engagements to be scheduled. Imai did not attach the paragraph she had written and deleted twice about boundaries. Kurobane did not send a warning. He kept it in his mouth for later.
At U.A., Aizawa wrote nothing on the board. He stood at the front and let the class measure its own quiet. Renya arrived and took his seat and put both feet flat on the floor. The square warmed to his weight and stayed small.
Aki made tea that took longer than it needed to and tasted better for it. She wrote a new note and stuck it over the radio: If a dream lingers, we clean it together.
The city continued, imperfect, grateful, and argumentative. Some screens hiccuped one last time and then learned better. Some didn't. That was fine.
Renya looked out the window and spoke to nobody and everyone at once, voice soft enough to remain furniture.
"Dreams don't fade," he said. "They just wait for quieter rooms."