They said the fire started at 2:17 a.m.
That number followed Kaito everywhere.
It appeared in the official report, repeated by the police officer with tired eyes, written neatly on the papers the social worker carried under her arm. Numbers were easier than explanations. They sounded precise. Final.
A storm had passed through the district that night. Wind strong enough to rattle windows. Rain heavy enough to drown out distant sounds. When the electricity returned after a brief outage, old wires failed.
That was the conclusion.
An accident.
Kaito sat on the concrete steps outside what used to be his house, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of smoke and something sharp he didn't recognize. His body felt light, hollow, as if part of him had been left behind somewhere inside the ruins.
The world in front of him looked wrong.
Not broken.
Incomplete.
His right eye saw the scorched remains clearly enough—the collapsed roof, the blackened beams, the firefighters moving slowly through the wreckage. His left eye saw nothing.
Not darkness.
Not black.
Nothing at all.
When he tried to focus with it, the world simply stopped existing on that side, as if reality refused to acknowledge it.
Someone spoke his name.
— Kaito… can you hear me?
He nodded.
The voice belonged to a woman wearing gloves, her tone careful, controlled. Adults spoke like that when they were afraid to say the wrong thing. When they didn't know where the cracks were.
Kaito noticed how everyone stood slightly to his right.
No one approached from the left.
They didn't want him to turn and realize what was gone.
The pain came later.
Not sharp. Not sudden.
A deep pressure behind his left eye, buried beneath layers of bandages and skin. Sometimes it throbbed gently. Sometimes it burned. And sometimes it felt as if something inside his skull was pressing outward, testing limits it couldn't cross.
They told him the eye couldn't be saved.
They told him he was lucky.
He believed them, because he couldn't remember what had happened.
Not clearly.
Only fragments remained—disconnected impressions that refused to form a complete picture.
Heat.
Glass breaking.
His mother's voice, close and urgent.
And his father standing in front of him, arm raised—not toward the flames, but toward something else.
Something Kaito couldn't see.
The house was declared unsafe by morning.
What remained of it stood cordoned off with tape, the structure hollowed out like a burned shell. Firefighters continued their search out of procedure more than hope.
Kaito watched silently.
His parents' names were spoken often, always with care. Too much care. The kind that suggested people were afraid to disturb the dead by saying the wrong thing.
There were no signs of forced entry.
No witnesses.
No reason, anyone said, to believe it had been anything other than an accident.
And yet, certain details refused to settle.
The front door was gone.
Not burned.
Not shattered.
Gone.
Kaito noticed it because he had walked through it every day of his life. He knew how it looked when it was closed. How it sounded when it opened.
It wasn't there.
He said nothing.
The funeral took place three days later, under a sky that couldn't decide what it wanted to do. Clouds hung low, heavy with rain that never quite fell.
Two coffins rested side by side.
Closed.
Too clean.
Kaito stood between strangers whose names he wouldn't remember, listening to words that blurred together before reaching him. He waited for something to happen inside his chest.
For grief.
For anger.
For tears.
Nothing came.
What he felt instead was absence.
A space where something important had been removed and not replaced.
Ren should have been there.
The thought arrived without warning.
Ren—his older brother—had disappeared five years ago. They had called that an accident too. An incident. A tragedy without answers.
They never found the body.
Only traces. Enough to stop searching.
Kaito had accepted it back then. He had learned how to live with a missing shape in his life.
Now, standing in front of two graves, he wondered why the two nights felt connected.
Why his chest tightened when he tried to remember Ren's face.
He remembered his brother's back more clearly.
Always walking ahead.
Never turning around.
Sleep didn't come easily after that.
When Kaito closed his right eye, he didn't dream the way other children did. There were no stories. No beginnings or endings. Only fragments—images that felt unfinished, places that felt familiar without reason.
He saw cities he had never visited.
Buildings split open like wounds.Streets swallowed by silence.Skies fractured with light that didn't belong to storms.
Sometimes, he stood alone.
Sometimes, someone stood beside him.
Older.
Taller.
Similar enough to make his chest ache.
Every dream ended the same way.
Pressure behind his left eye.
Then nothing.
The orphanage was quiet.
Too quiet.
Kaito learned quickly how to disappear into routine. Wake when told. Eat when told. Speak only when spoken to. Silence was safer than curiosity.
Children stared at his scar openly. Adults tried not to.
A thin line crossed his left eye diagonally, pale against his skin. It pulled slightly when he frowned, reminding him it was there even when he forgot.
Sometimes, when he became upset, strange things happened.
Sounds dulled, as if the world had been turned down too low. Raindrops vanished just before touching his skin. Once, a glass slipped from a table and paused for a fraction of a second before falling gently instead of shattering.
No one noticed.
Kaito didn't mention it.
He told himself it was coincidence.
One night, the dream changed.
He stood in a narrow hallway, walls cracked and darkened as if scorched long ago. Emergency lights flickered overhead, casting uneven shadows. His left eye burned—not painfully, but intensely.
Someone was speaking to him.
The voice felt familiar, but the words refused to settle into meaning.
— You're too early.
Kaito tried to respond, but his mouth wouldn't open.
— It isn't ready yet, the voice continued.— Neither are you.
A hand rested briefly on his shoulder.
Warm.
Real.
The pressure behind his eye surged.
The hallway folded inward, collapsing like paper.
Kaito woke gasping, his heart racing.
— …Too early, he whispered into the darkness.
He didn't know why the words frightened him.
Far away, in a place without windows, a file remained untouched.
No photograph.
No history.
Only a name.
KAITO
Status: SurvivedClassification: Unchanged
For a brief moment, a line beneath the text flickered—then stabilized.
No alarms sounded.
No actions were taken.
For now.
Kaito lay awake, staring at the ceiling with his one good eye.
Behind the other—behind the eye that saw nothing—something remained sealed.
Waiting.