The sentō door slides shut behind us, and the latch gives a thick thunk that swallows the street. The vibration runs through the frame and into the floor, a brief shudder in the wood before everything settles. Traffic thins to a far hiss, filtered down until it sounds more like air than engines. Voices smear behind the frosted pane. Rain keeps working at the awning in fine threads, gathering at the edge in tiny beads before they drop, one after another, into the gutter’s steady swallow. 

Heat waits right inside the threshold. Hidden vents and old seams breathe out damp warmth; the stone under my feet gives back yesterday’s warmth in a steady push that travels straight up my shins. The air is hinoki boards and soap, damp wood warmed through, with that chalky mineral bite wet tile gets when it’s been scrubbed hard enough to squeak. There is an occasional drip ticking somewhere it shouldn’t, the vent giving a faint rattle on the exhale. With no one else here, there’s nowhere for my nerves to hide. Every movement feels overexposed.

My shoulders try to climb up around my ears.

The crosswalk is behind us, behaving again, counting cleanly, pretending it never stuttered. My nerves keep replaying the miscount—6, 1, 4, 9—over and over, like a scratched recording. The itch under my wrist comes back with its own ugly certainty: there’s always a trade, there’s always a lever, and my hands know where to reach when I’m scared.

My fingers drift toward my belt knot.

The pocket watch taps my hip. Inside, the minute hand ticks against the glass, a private knock from something that wants attention.

Isleen catches it immediately.

She doesn’t look at my hand. She reads the whole entryway in one sweep: shelves, corridor angles, where a person could get pinned, where they could bolt, where the building narrows enough to turn you into a mistake. The sentō’s rules are built into the place—threshold strips, textures, the layout that tells you what to do without needing a voice. Isleen reads it like she reads stairwells.

“Take off your shoes,” she says.

My mouth reaches for a joke on reflex, something about her escorting me like a guard detail. The heat steals it before it can become anything. All I manage is a thin, obedient, “Right.”

We move into the vestibule. A narrow bench runs along the wall, scuffed smooth by decades of half-balanced bodies. Communal slippers sit beneath it in a neat row, worn into obedience by countless feet. Under my feet, the world changes in steps: street grit to tile, tile to the strip of wood that marks the boundary where you’re supposed to leave the outside behind.

I bend, loosen the laces of my shoes, and step out.

It’s a small task. My hands know it’s small. My nerves treat it like a wire I’m biting through.

I set my shoes on the shelf and nudge them into a straight line. The shake shows up anyway, trying to climb up my arms. My attention slides toward my belt knot again, hunting the old solution before I can stop it.

The pocket watch knocks my hip again.

Isleen’s eyes catch it and don’t let it pass.

“Let me see your hands,” she says.

My stomach drops. “I… What? I didn’t even—”

“You reached.”

I drag my hand down like it’s been burned and park it against my thigh, against ordinary fabric and bone, a place that isn’t the knot at my waist. 

Isleen steps closer by half a pace. Her voice goes low and firm, each syllable tightened down. “Don’t bargain with it in here.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

Her eyes flick to my hip. “Test it somewhere else.”

A small cold space opens behind my ribs. My hand stays where I put it. My attention keeps roaming, restless, searching for something it can grip that isn’t the watch.

That’s when I notice the counter.

It sits off to the right, half swallowed by shadow. The stool is empty. The air where a clerk would stand stays blank, unoccupied by breath or small talk. Nothing here offers you the usual distractions of a public place; the room refuses to play host. It exists warm and watchless.

A plastic dish holds a few coins. A faded fee sign leans against the wall. Beside it, a handwritten note is taped up.

Back door sticks. Don’t force it.
Key bands in the tin.
Leave coins if you can. A place like this survives on upkeep and reciprocity.

— Hiroyuki D’Accardi

“Unreal,” I mutter, and my voice comes out half-muffled by the warm air and my own disbelief.

Isleen’s eyes flick over the note, then the little dish where the coins sit, then back to the doorway.

“He could’ve skipped the note,” I say, because my mouth hates sincerity and tries to bite it before it spreads. “He could stand outside for ten minutes, politely ask for yen, and the city would pay the boiler fund.”

I tap the paper once with my fingertip, right over his name. “I’m serious. ‘Hello. If you can.’ Blink. Slight smile. We’re rich. We own three sentōs and a small railway.”

Isleen reaches beneath the counter and finds what she wants with an ease that makes my stomach tighten. A latch gives. A drawer slides open. Inside sits a metal tin, elastic key bands in faded colours, old locker keys on rings, and laminated instruction cards in two languages: English and Japanese.

Isleen lifts the tin out and sets it carefully on the counter. She sorts the bands with her fingertips, selects two, drops the rest back in, and closes the lid. 

Red for me. Blue for her.

Her attention flicks to the coin dish. She reaches into her pocket.

“I can—” I start, because my reflexes love volunteering me.

Isleen doesn’t glance over. She sets the coins into the dish, one at a time, like she’s maintaining an old agreement rather than paying a fee. “Leave it,” she says.

Heat rises under my skin. “I wasn’t trying to—”

Her gaze lifts and pins me. “You were about to turn it into punishment.”

My mouth closes on nothing useful.

She pushes the red band toward me. The elastic is warm from the room. The key attached to it is older than the lights and heavier than it has any right to be, built to hold ordinary belongings and all the private emergencies people bring into places like this.

My fingers brush hers when I take it. My body reacts like I’ve touched a live wire. I resent my own nervous system for being so enthusiastic about humiliation.

Isleen’s expression doesn’t move. Her hand withdraws as if nothing happened.

“Put it on.”

I slide the band over my wrist. It sits snug against my pulse, soft pressure, a quiet claim. The key rests there like the building is keeping track of me now. Like it expects me to follow the sequence.

Isleen slides her own band on—blue against her skin—and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. One of the red eyes braided into it blinks slowly, then goes still.

We head toward the lockers.

The air gets wetter as we go. Steam curls under the bathing-room door in lazy coils. The hallway narrows into cubbies, lockers, and plastic baskets under a sign that asks you not to leave valuables unattended. The sign might as well be a joke. My life has taught me that unattended means invited.

My hand drifts toward my hip again before I can stop it.

Isleen doesn’t turn her head. She still catches the movement.

“Locker,” she says.

“I’m going to put it away,” I snap, too fast. 

Her eyes narrow by a fraction. 

“You’re going to argue first,” she says.

“I’m not—”

“Kohana.”

My name in her voice drags my attention back into my body. Tile underfoot. Steam in my lungs. The key band on my wrist. The fact that I am standing in a sentō, not a corridor that wants to turn into water.

I exhale through my nose. “Fine.”

A locker door opens with a metallic squeal when I turn the key. Inside is a blank rectangle that smells faintly of detergent and old metal. Harmless. Built for normal things.

My pocket watch refuses to become normal when I tug it free.

The chain slides against fabric with a soft hiss. The case sits heavy in my palm, familiar weight, familiar offer. The glass face catches fluorescent light and throws it back cold. The minute hand ticks with a restlessness I feel in my thumb.

My brain starts doing its favourite trick: counting what a minute could buy if I threw it hard enough.

Isleen steps closer; warmth gathers at my shoulder. She holds position without putting a hand on me. It’s enough to box in my instincts before they can run wild.

“Steam and metal,” she says, the reprimand packaged as an observation. “Your worst habits love a room like this.”

“I can keep it in check—”

Isleen’s eyes stay on the watch a moment longer. “You won’t,” she says. “It’s already starting. Your attention narrows, and you start tallying ways to make it hurt.”

Anger climbs my throat because anger is simpler than the other thing. “I’m not stupid.”

Her gaze lifts to my face, direct and unadorned.

“You’re stubborn,” she says. “You confuse momentum with being right.”

The words land where my ribs start. Too accurate. Too familiar.

“Stop babying me. You don’t need to treat me like I’m five.”

“Mm.” Isleen shifts her weight, blocking my angle without touching me. “Five seconds away from spending yourself on something pointless.”

That hits worse than any insult.

My eyes burn immediately, which is unforgivable, so I blink hard and stare into the locker instead. The dull metal waits, impersonal and patient. My hand hovers over the threshold, the watch heavy in my palm, ticking once like it’s clearing its throat.

I hate how quickly my body leans toward listening.

I set it inside anyway.

Metal touches metal.

My ribs give way like a brace snapping. Air rushes back into my lungs so hard it makes me queasy. My fingers clamp the locker edge until my grip feels like mine again.

I shut the door. Turn the key. The latch catches with a small, decisive click.

Isleen watches the whole sequence without comment. When the lock holds, her posture eases by a fraction—subtle, but there.

My voice comes out serrated. “Satisfied?”

Her eyes flick to the key on my wrist, then to the seam of the locker door, then back to my face. “Less at risk,” she says.

We undress the way the sentō teaches, starting with coats, then uniforms folded into neat rectangles. The moment my skin meets the hot air, gooseflesh prickles my skin. Heat moves in fast, finding every place I’m used to covering, every place I’ve taught myself to forget. Coolness still lingers in the building’s seams, caught in the tile, tucked under the thresholds, and where it meets the warmth, it turns me into an outline: collarbone, ribs, the soft hollow at my throat. I can’t pretend I’m only routes and exits in this sanctuary. I’m here. I’m a body, unfortunately.

Isleen gathers her hair without ceremony and ties it back, exposing the nape of her neck with the same blunt practicality she uses for everything else. That should be irrelevant. My nerves disagree, going alert in the wrong direction, inspecting the lines of her shoulders with the same discipline I use to catalogue threats. I tighten my focus to the tiles. To the hooks. To the rules.

She reaches towards the shelf and hands me a small towel. Our fingers graze in the pass, and the rough weave surprises me, harsher than I expect against my palm. Isleen’s face doesn’t change; she gives me nothing to catch.

Bare feet on tile. Warmth under the arches. My mind keeps trying to draw a threat map out of habit, but my attention keeps snagging on the fact of her, on the quiet indecency of being seen without even a sleeve to argue with. I tell myself to stay disciplined. I tell myself to keep it in check. The steam makes liars of us all.

My gaze slides back toward the locker hallway.

The thought of the watch flares up, automatic and embarrassing: check it, listen for it through metal, make sure the door hasn’t lied. A reflex that wants an audience even after I’ve shut the box.

Isleen catches the glance.

“It’s away,” she says.

I swallow. “Yeah.”

“I’m talking to your hands.” 

“Are you done supervising?”

Isleen doesn’t look at me. “No.”

The word is plain. It holds me in place more effectively than comfort ever does.

We step through the bathing room door.

The sentō’s washing area is spare. A run of shower stations faces the wall, each one paired with a low stool and a bucket set squarely within reach. Steam gathers at the far end and softens it into a pale haze, while everything close stays clean-edged and unforgiving: grout lines cut straight, drain covers dark against the tile, a thin sheen of dampness catching the light and turning the floor into something that looks slick even when it’s safe.

I pause long enough to take it in.

My wrist aches out of habit, and my fingers reach for weight that isn’t there. I find only an elastic and a key. The chain is gone, the glass is gone, and with them the familiar pull.

At first, the absence rings in my head, then it opens out into a room.

Relief hits, and shame comes on its heels. My body accepts it too quickly. That readiness makes my stomach turn.

Isleen steps forward and claims a washing station with the same grounded efficiency she brings to everything else. She sets her bucket down, kneels, and begins to wash, movements settled into muscle.

I linger a pace behind her, unsure where to put myself.

Isleen glances up. “Here,” she says, and shifts her bucket just enough to clear space beside her. It’s the smallest adjustment that’s easy to dismiss as logistics.

My throat tightens at the ease of it anyway.

I kneel. The stool creaks under me. Steam settles on my shoulders and collarbones. I wet the towel and start scrubbing my arms, not hard enough to hurt, but not gentle either. My brain tries to turn the motion into meaning: scrub the numbers out, scrub the miscount out, scrub the lever out of my hands.

Water runs down my wrists and over the key band. The metal key bumps against my pulse: you have somewhere to put things. You can close a door. You can leave the day on the other side for a while.

Isleen rinses her hair. She closes her eyes under the stream, then opens them and looks at me.

“You let it go,” she says.

My chest draws tight. “For now.”

“For now is how you begin,” she replies, and turns back to her bucket, hands returning to the sequence with the focus of someone who trusts steps more than feelings.

My wrist aches again, quieter this time, asking its usual stupid question. I leave it unanswered.

I rinse my hands. Water slides off my fingertips and ticks against the tile. Beyond the divider, the bath holds its heat, dark and heavy, the surface barely disturbed.

The watch stays in the locker. Metal door. Key on my wrist.

The urge rises again and searches the room for purchase.

It finds nothing.

I let my breath out slowly, then take another. The air catches hot at the back of my throat, and the steadiness belongs to me. I keep my hands where I can see them.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

I sit on the low stool at the station Isleen chose. My knees draw in; my body tries to shrink even when there’s nowhere to disappear. The plastic bucket rests between my ankles. Water beads on my forearms, runs along the tendons, gathers at my wrists, then slips off the elastic key band in slow drops.

I’m naked, and my brain stays on patrol.

It does its work the way it does in hallways, measuring before it feels. Divider height. Door placement. Towel within reach. The ugly competence of treating comfort as equipment. Tile, steam, drains, angles; it tries to turn a bathhouse into a map.

Isleen sets her bucket down. The clack echoes cleanly in the empty room. Her hair is rinsed back already, wet strands slicked away from her face, and the little red eyes, braided through it, blink slowly in the steam before settling. Mist gathers on her lashes and breaks apart. Her shoulders stay loose. Her focus stays put.

She tests the shower with the back of her wrist, then turns the tap. The water changes its voice; it starts harsh, then evens out. She watches it strike tile and gather into runnels that find the drain.

“You’re shaking,” she says.

Nothing in her tone offers a cushion.

“It’s hot,” I answer, automatically. The easiest explanation comes first, every time.

Isleen’s eyes drop to my hands. My fingers are clenched around the bucket rim hard enough to pale my knuckles.

“You’re cold inside,” she says.

Heat sits thick in my lungs. My body can’t pick a direction; it floods me with the urge to move and steals the room to move in. Throat tight. Hands itching for a task—hit, bolt, vanish—while my ribs trap air too high and too shallow. I’m geared for impact, and the only thing here is steam.

A twitch runs through my shoulders and flicks water from my hairline. The tremor lives deeper than muscle. It isn’t fear in a clean, obvious sense. It’s the residue after.

I make myself loosen my grip, one finger at a time.

Isleen watches without comment, no reward, no correction.

She reaches for the sentō soap. Plain bottle, squat shape, no perfume. She pours a small amount into her palm, rubs until it foams, then holds the bottle out toward me without lifting her head.

“Wash,” she says.

I take it.

Soap slides into my palm, slick and cold. I start with my arms. Lather squeaks faintly on my skin. Steam clings to the foam. Water keeps hitting the tile in an even curtain. With only the two of us in here, every sound has room to echo: spray, drip, the soft knock of my bucket shifting a fraction.

I scrub my forearms, and my mind does what it always does. It notices. It tallies.

A bruise begins to bloom under my wrist where my hand hovered near my belt knot earlier. My fingers remember the absent tug of chain. Hunger opens in my stomach hard enough to make my mouth water. The bakery is long gone, burned off by adrenaline, and my body wants a refund.

I rinse my arms. The first hit of water makes me flinch anyway. My nervous system needs a second to accept the stream isn’t a strike.

Two of Isleen’s fingers touch the inside of my elbow. Light contact. Exact placement. Gone before my mind can build a story around it.

“Breathe,” she says, and then she does it where I can hear it: slow in through the nose, long out through the mouth.

I try to match her. My lungs stutter once, then catch. Steam fills my throat. My exhale shakes at the end and I let it, because fighting it would cost more than I have.

I shift on the stool. The soap bottle turns slick in my hand. My gaze slides to the tile wall across from us.

The reflections don’t line up right.

Not a full hallucination. Not a clean threat. A small inconsistency—glossy tile turning moving bodies into pale streaks—and one streak at the edge of my vision angles wrong. For a second, it resembles a railing. A wet line. A shape my bones recognise.

My throat tightens.

I blink.

Tile. Steam. Water. The world insisting on being itself.

My mind goes back and presses at the seam again, looking for purchase.

Isleen’s gaze follows mine. She doesn’t ask what I saw. She doesn’t confirm it. She shifts an inch to the left so her shoulder blocks the worst of the reflection from my line of sight. The movement comes across as lazy if you don’t know her. It changes everything.

A human wall. A practical solution.

“Hair,” she says, as if we’re discussing routine and nothing else.

I swallow and nod once. My body wants to argue. My brain wants to obey.

I scoop water from the bucket and pour it over my head. It’s hot enough to sting my scalp, and the sting anchors me. My hair darkens, heavy and clinging. Water runs down my temples and into my mouth. I spit it out and keep going.

Isleen turns her tap a touch cooler. This time, she doesn’t test it for herself. She holds her wrist under the stream, then slides her hand under mine and guides my forearm into the water, correcting the angle as if she’s fixing posture.

The touch is firm. The intent stays clean.

Coolness eases the burn on my skin, and my breath settles.

I hate how quickly my body responds to being handled. I hate how much it helps.

I work shampoo into my hair. My fingers tremble. Foam runs down my neck and shoulders. I scrub harder than I need to.

“Relax,” Isleen says. “You’ll give yourself a headache.”

“I’m fine.”

Her eyes lift to my face. She’s unimpressed in the specific way that makes lying feel childish. “Your hands are trembling.”

Whatever edged reply rises in my mouth collapses before it reaches my tongue. My shoulders ache. My scalp is already tender. I lower my hands a fraction.

Isleen reaches for the handheld nozzle. Click. A brief test stream into the bucket. Then she angles it toward my hair.

My body tightens on instinct. Control flares in my chest. Refusal lines up in my throat, neat and practised.

Isleen waits. She holds the nozzle where it is and looks at me until the moment stops being about winning.

“Let me,” she says.

Two words, flat and certain.

My throat works. I nod once.

She rinses the shampoo out in slow arcs. Water presses foam down my back. It drips from my chin. Her knuckles brush my shoulder when she adjusts. 

I close my eye, because keeping it open makes everything louder. Behind my lid, the crosswalk stutters again. Orange digits smear. The walking figure flickers.

My wrist aches out of habit, searching.

The watch is locked away. There’s nothing to grab.

Panic rises for a blink.

Air follows it.

My breathing drops into the cadence she set earlier—inhale, long exhale—steam leaving my mouth in a cloud.

Isleen shuts the nozzle off. The change in sound expands the room again: water settling, drip into the drain, the soft shift of our stools on tile.

“Face,” Isleen says, and hands me my towel.

I press it to my cheeks. Rough, warm, soap-scented. My hands shake against the fabric. I breathe into it until my pulse stops trying to sprint. When I lower the towel, Isleen isn’t watching my eyes; she’s watching my breathing.

“Count with your breath,” she says.

My mouth twitches. “Are you—”

“Four,” she cuts in, and her inhale is exactly four counts. Then she exhales longer. “Six.”

I stare at her.

This is what she does when she can’t say I’m keeping you here without choking on the words.

I inhale—one, two, three, four. Exhale—one, two, three, four, five, six.

Isleen nods once, as if the task is completed correctly.

“Again,” she says.

We do it again. My gaze drifts past her shoulder to the vent near the ceiling.

It coughs.

A small mechanical hiccup, like a throat clearing itself. Steam pulses from it in a slightly uneven rhythm, and my brain lights up at once: Miscount. Seam. Opening. My skin prickles. The vent coughs again. For a fraction of a second, the steam pattern resembles a handprint on glass. My stomach flips.

Isleen tilts her head up. She watches the vent the way she watches any stubborn appliance.

Then she stands.

She takes two steps to the wall and reaches up with her towel.

She presses the towel flat against the vent and holds it there. Steam darkens the fabric. The coughing stops, as if it realises it’s been noticed and decides to behave.

Isleen lowers her arm, wipes her hand on the towel, and sits back down.

The whole act takes seconds.

She resumes rinsing her own hair as if nothing happened.

My throat tightens anyway. “You saw that.”

Isleen doesn’t look at me. “It was loud.”

“It was—” I start, then stop, because explaining wrongness out loud feels like feeding it.

She turns her head just enough for her eyes to meet mine. Her voice stays level. “The building is trying things.”

I swallow. “And you—”

“I stopped it,” she says, and lets that end the sentence.

My chest aches with the blunt simplicity of it.

I look down at my hands again.

They’re still trembling.

My stomach growls, loud in the quiet. Heat rushes to my cheeks. My body, betrayed by hunger, announces itself.

Isleen’s gaze flicks downward, catches the moment, then moves away.

“Kohana,” she says, and my name sits steady in her mouth. “Eat after.”

“We already ate.”

“That was before. This is after.”

The logic is so simple that it feels unfair. Aftershock requires fuel. Panic burns everything.

My voice thins. “Fine.”

Isleen rinses the last of the soap from her skin and stands. Towel over her shoulder, she looks toward the baths beyond the divider.

“Water,” she says.

My body wants to hesitate. The bath is deeper, warmer, more enveloping. Steam gathers there. Sound changes there. My brain offers doors and corners in exchange.

I force myself to rise.

My feet find the warm tile and I sway slightly, lightheaded. The crash creeps up from my calves into my knees. My heart is running too fast for a room that is only water and soap.

Isleen steps half a pace ahead of me, positioning without making it obvious. Her shoulder blocks the sheen of tile that keeps catching my eye at the wrong angle. Her body becomes a moving boundary, and I follow her because my body trusts the shape of her refusal more than it trusts my own mind.

We arrive at the baths, and the air grows denser. The water, hot and dark, rests still with hardly any ripples on its surface.

Isleen goes in first. She tests the edge with her toes, then eases down, knee by knee, one hand on the tile for balance. The water takes her gradually—shins, thighs, waist—darkening her skin with gloss, turning the steam around her into a shifting veil. She lets out one long breath, and her shoulders uncoil by a fraction.

I step in after her.

Heat wraps my ankles, calves, and knees. It’s almost too much. It softens bone. My skin flushes at once. My pulse flares in protest.

A hiss slips through my teeth.

Isleen’s hand appears at my elbow again.

“Slow,” she says.

I sink gradually, inch by inch, letting my body adjust instead of demanding it obey. The heat hits my stomach, and the hunger in me yelps, sudden and animal, as if it’s been shocked awake. When I finally sit, with my body submerged up to my ribs, a sound escapes from me—part relief, part grief. I clamp my mouth shut, embarrassed.

Isleen looks at me. “Too hot?”

My pride wants to say no. My body wants to say yes. I split the difference.

“A little,” I mutter.

She shifts away from the hottest inlet, so the current around me runs slightly cooler. The water pattern around my torso changes. The heat becomes tolerable.

Gratitude rises in me, immediate and unwanted. It makes me feel exposed. I stare at the waterline where it meets my skin. It trembles with each breath. My hands float up, palms half-open, searching for something to hold.

The pocket watch is gone. There’s no metal to clutch. The key band sits snug against my wrist, harmless. The key bumps lightly when my hand moves.

I flex my fingers under the water. Ripples spread and touch Isleen’s knee before sliding away.

My brain checks exits again. Divider. Door. Isleen.

The tally always returns to her.

She sits close enough that the water between us stays warmer. Close enough that if I drift, I meet her boundary. She angles her body so I’m contained without being trapped: wall at a safe distance behind me, her shoulder beside me, the bath edge in front.

She watches my breathing.

I inhale too shallow; she catches it.

“Longer,” Isleen says.

I exhale longer, steam leaving my mouth in a quiet cloud.

She nods once. Tiny. It still hits me in the chest.

My eyes catch the water’s surface near the far corner. The overhead light reflects in it. For a second, it resembles lockers. For a second, it resembles a rail.

My stomach twists.

I blink.

Water. Light. My mind trying to sell me my favourite story.

At the edge of the bath, a tap hesitates when Isleen adjusts it. The stream stutters—on, off, on—and a familiar rhythm tries to form in that hesitation.

My wrist aches.

My hand twitches.

Isleen’s fingers close around my wrist under the water, skin-to-skin, real enough to cut through the spiral.

“Stay,” she says.

I nod once.

The tap steadies. The stream smooths out. Whatever the building was trying loses its grip and slips away.

Isleen releases my wrist as if it never happened. She leans her head back against the tile and closes her eyes for a beat, listening, counting.

Steam beads on her cheek and slides toward her jaw.

My gaze catches there before I can stop it.

I look away fast, annoyed with myself.

“You keep watching the door,” I mutter, because talking is safer than looking.

Isleen opens her eyes. “It’s a door.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Isleen studies me for a moment. Her expression refuses the easy options. There is no comfort offered, no threat performed; everything in her stays packed tight, held behind the line of her mouth.

“You want to run,” she says.

Heat floods my face, fast and humiliating. “I do not.”

Isleen doesn’t blink. Her gaze stays on me the way a dog keeps its eyes on a gap in a fence, already certain what will try to slip through.

“You want to run,” she says again; her voice doesn’t rise, “and you want to be caught.”

The sentence hits like two things at once, a shove and a grip. It makes my stomach drop. It makes my spine go hot.

“Stop talking about me like I’m prey.”

My throat burns. My words come out too blunt and betray me anyway, the last syllable wobbling.

Isleen tilts her head, slowly. She is patient in the way predators are patient, in the way wolves watch the exact moment a deer realises the forest has been listening. The red eyes in her wet hair blink once, sluggish.

“Aren’t you?” she asks. A smirk touches the corner of her mouth and doesn’t spread. She refuses to give the expression anything resembling warmth.

I curl my hand under the water and dig my nails into my palm. The heat blunts it into pressure, a small, controlled hurt I can choose on purpose. It’s easier than the other kind, the kind that chooses you.

Isleen watches my hand vanish beneath the surface. The red eyes in her hair blink slowly, as if they’re counting, too, as if they’re waiting for me to bolt so she can do what wolves do best, follow the movement, close the distance, make the chase into a boundary I can’t cross.

“You flinch like you expect the room to change its rules,” she says, voice low. “You keep your hands moving so you can pretend your body isn’t here. You’ve been counting since we walked in. Numbers cannot build you a door.”

Her gaze drops down to the water line where my hands keep vanishing, to the places I try to hide the truth in plain motion.

“You say prey because you hate the story that comes with it,” Isleen continues. “Small. Cornered. Owned by whatever looks at you first.” Steam presses between us, warm and wet. “Prey lives. Prey learns the forest by heart. Prey keeps its breath quiet. Prey runs because it wants tomorrow.” 

Her eyes lift again and settle on me, steady and unblinking. 

“And you,” she says, “keep offering yourself to the edge. You want the world to decide for you so you can stop carrying it. You ask it to push.” A faint curve touches her mouth and dies there. 

“You want a captor,” Isleen adds, “because a captor is simple. The rules are posted. The door is locked. You can press your forehead against it and call it pressureproof, but freedom has no lock to blame. It makes you pick a direction and live with it. It means your hands don’t get to reach for a lever and pretend it was an accident.”

Her gaze flicks, briefly, to my wrist and then back to my face.

“If you’re going to run,” Isleen says, and her lip lifts a fraction, wolf-quick, wolf-calm, showing the pale edge of a canine, “run at something that can take the running out of you.”

I look at Isleen’s mouth instead of her eyes because my body remembers her first lesson with me, her hand in my chest, her fingers closing around my heart. I remember the way my breath snagged, the way the world narrowed to that one awful, sacred truth: she could have crushed it, and she didn’t. She held it, looked at me and told me, in that same flat voice, that it was hers.

So when she talks about captors and doors and the edge of the world, my body hears the older sentence underneath: I can reach you wherever you try to hide.

I swallow. The sound is loud inside my head.

“I want you to chase me,” I say, and the confession scorches on the way out. “I want you to catch me.” 

The words come faster after that, as if speed makes them less true. “Because when you put your hand in my chest, when you held my heart—” my voice wobbles and I clamp down hard enough to feel it in my teeth “—it got quiet,” I manage, almost soundless. “Everything in me got quiet.”

Isleen doesn’t rush to answer. She watches me, patient, fixed, waiting to see what gives, and then she leans in, close enough that her warmth becomes another boundary in the steam.

Her mouth barely moves when she speaks. “Do not make a habit of being found.” Her lip lifts, almost pleased, before her mouth smooths again. “Do not show me your throat,” she adds, voice still even, “and call it nothing.”

The words leave a mark without raising a bruise. I feel my own swallow too clearly. I tuck my chin a fraction, the reflex immediate: hide what can be taken, keep the vulnerable parts behind bone and posture. The bathwater laps at my ribs and slips away; steam drifts past my face in thin sheets. Under the surface, my fingers curl once, then flatten against my thigh as I force them still.

Isleen doesn’t follow my retreat with comfort. Her gaze drops to the waterline, to the way my breath keeps snagging high in my chest, to the small, involuntary tremor in my hands when I try to relax them. She shifts an inch, and the current around me changes—less heat rolling straight into my stomach, more room to adjust.

“After this,” she says, voice low, “you eat.”

My mouth twitches. “You’re really—”

“After this,” Isleen repeats, and there is a faint roughness there, as if she’s forcing the words through a narrow gate. “You sleep.”

Sleep.

My chest cinches at the word. Sleep means letting go. Sleep means a body left unguarded. Sleep means my mind gets a dark stage and the freedom to populate it with whatever it can reach.

I swallow. “I don’t want to sleep.”

Isleen’s eyes come to mine. “You will.”

Two words. Flat. Final.

My stomach drops. I should resent her for it. A part of me does.

Another part—deeper, humiliating—eases at once, as though it’s been braced for days and has been waiting for someone else to carry the decision. Relief hits so quickly it feels like nausea. It stings behind my eye.

I blink hard, angry at the wetness gathering there.

Isleen looks away first. She won’t turn this into tenderness by watching it happen.

The restraint is its own kind of mercy.

We sit in the heat, steam clinging, water holding us in place. The tremor remains, threaded through muscle. Hunger stays acute. The crash waits in the background. My brain keeps counting doors.

Right now, the only thing that matters is Isleen’s shoulder against mine, her attention fixed on the room’s seams, her body set so I can’t drift into the wrong places.

I breathe four in, six out.

Somewhere far off, the building coughs once, then goes quiet again.

Isleen doesn’t move.

Neither do I.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The common room holds its warmth in a way the street never does. It clings to plaster and wood, settles into corners, refuses to spill back out the moment you notice it. The air carries green tea, wet cedar, and that clean mineral edge of hot water that’s been running for years with no audience. Behind a divider, a dryer rumbles on a steady cycle, domestic and indifferent. Everything else feels turned down, as if the building has decided shouting is unnecessary.

My hair stays damp, heavy at the ends, darkening the collar of the borrowed yukata. The fabric is thin and simple, softened by too many washes and too many borrowed nights. My skin runs hot from the bath; my fingertips have gone wrinkled. My pulse refuses to match the room. Vending machines and slippers shouldn’t make me feel this keyed-up.

Isleen walks beside me with the same measured control she carried into the water. Shoulders loose. Eyes awake. She keeps a precise distance, close enough to bracket me, far enough to keep it from becoming a comfort I can pretend not to need.

The tea machine sits against one wall, squat and metallic, buttons glowing under a sticker that promises HOT in cheerful block letters. Beside it, vending machines throw bright rectangles of light onto the floor, rows of bottled water, canned coffees, and strange jelly pouches. The light makes the room feel slightly unreal, as if we’re all caught in the glow of an aquarium.

Wren is already here, of course.

She’s sprawled across one of the low couches with the careless authority of someone who refuses to sit properly on principle. Her hair is damp too, pale strands stuck in soft, unruly shapes against her cheek. A towel hangs around her neck, the ends twisted together, and her jaw works slowly on something sweet.

Hiroyuki sits at the low table, a paper cup of tea cradled between his hands. He looks wrong here in a way that makes the room feel borrowed: too composed under fluorescent light, too luminous for plastic trays and coin slots. His wet hair is slicked back from his forehead, a few strands loose at his temples. His folded clothes sit in a neat stack beside him, as if even this pause deserves manners.

On the table: our evidence of occupation. A torn wrapper from a strip of bandages. A small bottle of antiseptic. Two extra towels folded and set aside with intention. A crumpled receipt scrap under Wren’s elbow, marked in her acicular handwriting: EAT FIRST.

Below it, smaller, pressed hard enough to bruise the paper: IF THE CLOCK MISCOUNTS—

The rest is folded under itself.

A second note sits tucked beneath the edge of the tissue box, visible only if you know to look. Hiroyuki’s handwriting is clean and economical, the kind of clarity that tightens my throat because it reads as care without permission.

Water. Then food. Then sleep.
Keys here. Watch stays away from steam.
Count out loud if the room shifts.

— Hiroyuki D’Accardi

I stop at the table’s edge and stare at it too long.

Wren’s eyes flick up and catch me. Her smile shows teeth. “Ah,” she says, voice sugared sharp, “the little general returns from her cleansing rites.”

“I took a bath,” I reply.

Wren looks pleased anyway. “You emerged still wearing your face. That counts.”

Isleen’s gaze skims Wren, then the table. She reaches for a hair tie, cheap black elastic, and holds it out toward me.

“Hair,” she says.

My damp ends trail down my back, cold against my spine, heavy enough to tug at my scalp. My hair has its own gravity, ankle-length even gathered, slick with water, clinging to me and refusing to stay out of the way.

“I’m fine,” I say, because my mouth offers that lie before it offers anything else.

Isleen’s eyes narrow. “Tie it.”

Wren makes a delighted sound. “Listen to her.”

I take the elastic. My hands shake once when I lift my arms, a small betrayal that makes my teeth set. I gather the weight of my hair into a low ponytail and wrap the tie around it. The tug against my scalp grounds me far more than it should.

Wren watches my shoulders drop a fraction and clicks her tongue, satisfied. “Look at that,” she says. “Peace. Miracles abound.”

I turn to the vending machines because giving my hands a task feels safer than standing there with my pulse in my throat. I press a button for canned coffee before I can negotiate with myself. The machine clunks and spits the can into the slot.

The metal is cold in my palm. Condensation slicks my fingers at once. The cold wakes the old habit in my wrist—the reaching, the reflex to pay again—even though there’s nothing there to grab.

“Hands off your wrist,” Isleen says, blunt as a barrier.

I freeze.

Wren’s laugh is quiet and delighted. “She sees you.”

Hiroyuki doesn’t lift his voice. “Sit,” he says, simple as instruction. “Drink. Let your body finish arriving.”

I want to argue on principle. Instead, I return to the couch and sit on the edge of the cushion beside Wren. I pop the can open; the click feels loud in the room’s quiet.

I sip. Sweet and bitter. Immediate.

Wren leans forward as if she’s about to deliver doctrine. “Eat,” she says, cheerful as a curse. “You’ve got that look.”

“What look,” I ask.

“The one where you start drafting martyrdom in the margins,” Wren replies, tapping her cheek.

“I’m just tired,” I say, aiming for clinical.

Isleen’s gaze stays on me. “Tired isn’t the only thing.”

Wren reaches into her pocket and presses a sticky sweet into my palm. “Taste of after,” she murmurs.

“My appetite is not your project,” I mutter, but my fingers close around it.

Wren beams. “Everything is my project.”

Hiroyuki sets his tea down with the cup aligned neatly to the table edge, then begins refolding the bandages and supplies, tidying our corner without making it precious. He glances up at me, gold eyes steady. “You’re trying to turn this into maintenance,” he says.

“Because it is.”

“You’re doing well at maintenance,” he replies. “You’re also avoiding the part where you feel the night.”

My throat tightens. The discomfort isn’t hunger this time. It’s being read aloud.

Isleen shifts a little closer; her knee touches mine for a brief second, an unadorned contact that pins me in my body. “Maintenance is your excuse,” she says.

“Excuse for what?”

“For refusing,” Isleen answers.

Wren leans in, eyes bright. “You polish your suffering until it shines,” she says, sweetened again, “then hold it up as proof you’ve earned air.”

I peel the candy wrapper open and put the sweet in my mouth. Sugar floods my tongue, tacky and alive. 

Behind the divider, the dryer changes its rhythm.

Click. Pause. Click again—too conscious, too interested in being counted. My hand tightens around the can. My wrist flares with that old reaching instinct, the part of me that starts hunting for a lever the second the world offers one.

Isleen’s head turns a fraction.

Wren stops chewing. Even Hiroyuki’s hands still on the bandages, the fold held mid-air as he listens.

The dryer clicks again. The pause stretches. The cycle tries to become a count.

My fingers twitch toward my wrist.

Isleen stands.

She crosses the room, pulls the divider aside, and opens the dryer door. Warm air spills out. The pattern dies at once, collapsing into ordinary noise. A towel is caught half-out of the drum; she tugs it free, shuts the door with a firm push, and the machine resumes its normal turn.

She comes back and sits down.

Her gaze lands on my hands. “No,” she says.

The word leaves no room.

Hiroyuki finishes the fold he paused on. Wren exhales, pleased and annoyed in equal measure, as if the building has failed to entertain her properly.

The room stays what it is: vending light, tea heat, four bodies refusing to let the night become a story.

And my hands stay where they belong.