Panic is a physical thing. It's a cold, metallic taste in the back of my throat, a vise-grip tightening around my chest. My breath comes in ragged, shallow gasps. I am in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, shrouded in an impenetrable, silent darkness. Every horror story I've ever heard rushes to the forefront of my mind.
My hands fly out, patting the space around me, searching for something, anything, to ground me. The sheets are cool and smooth. My hand hits the hard edge of a nightstand. Phone. There should be a phone. My fingers scramble across the surface, clumsy with fear. They find nothing but a smooth, cool lamp base and a small glass of water that I nearly knock over.
No phone. No video. No gentle chime. No voice of the girl from yesterday to explain the unexplainable.
Tears prick at the corners of my eyes. This is a hundred times worse than the gentle, sunlit confusion of my usual mornings. This is a waking nightmare. My brain is a blank slate, and my entire world is a black void.
Get up. Find a light switch. Find your brother. The rational part of my mind is still there, a tiny, flickering candle in a hurricane of fear. I have to move.
I swing my legs out of bed, my bare feet hitting a cool wooden floor. I stand up slowly, my hands outstretched like a sleepwalker, and take a tentative step forward. I immediately walk, shin-first, into the hard corner of a desk. A sharp, hot pain shoots up my leg, and I cry out, stumbling backward and landing hard on the floor.
The tears come in earnest now, hot and helpless. I am completely, utterly lost.
Curled on the floor, my head in my hands, a single, strange thought cuts through the panic. My feet know the way.
It's not a memory. It's an impulse. A deep, instinctual tug, like a phantom limb. A feeling in my muscles, my joints. The girl from yesterday, the day before, every day since the accident—she's walked this path in the dark to use the bathroom, to get a drink of water. Her body has practiced it. A procedural memory. A ghost map etched into my nerves.
My hand instinctively goes to my desk, my fingers fumbling in the darkness. They know where my pencil case is. They know where my textbook sits. They know… the corner where the postcards are.
Driven by this new, bizarre instinct, I crawl toward the desk I just ran into. My hands move across the surface with a strange, shaky confidence, a muscle memory that is completely disconnected from my conscious, terrified mind. My fingers brush past a book, a lamp, a pen holder. And then, they close around a small, thick piece of cardstock.
The postcard. The one I wrote just before the darkness fell.
My heart gives a powerful thud of hope. It's a message. It's a clue. But I can't read it in the pitch-black. It's useless.
I almost throw it down in frustration, but the ghost map in my feet is still pulling at me. It's not just a path through the room. It's a path to something. The window. My body wants to go to the window.
Clutching the postcard like a holy relic, I get to my feet again, more carefully this time. I let my body lead, my feet shuffling tentatively across the floor. My hands stay outstretched, finding the cool, smooth surface of the wardrobe, then the rough texture of the corkboard on the wall, before finally hitting the cold glass of a large window.
Just as my fingers touch the pane, the world outside is illuminated by a silent, brilliant flash of lightning.
For one spectacular, terrifying second, the room is revealed in stark black and white. The bed. The desk. The photo wall, a chaotic mosaic of smiling faces. The doorway. It's all there. The lightning vanishes, plunging me back into darkness, but the afterimage is burned into my retinas. It was real. I am in a real room.
And in that brief, ghostly light, I had glanced down at the postcard in my hand. I only caught a few words, a single sentence I'd written for myself at the bottom of the card, a contingency plan I didn't even know I had. A final instruction from the girl who knew a storm might come.
My heart pounding, I wait for the thunder to roll in the distance. The words float in the darkness in front of my eyes, a glowing white imprint against the black.
"When all else fails, the roof."
The roof. Of course. The one place that is constant. The safe harbor. The start of the ritual. It's an insane idea. I'm in my pajamas. There's a storm outside. But it's the only instruction I have, the only breadcrumb in this terrifying, dark forest. It's a mission.
My bare feet find the hallway carpet. The house is eerily silent, amplifying the sound of the wind rattling the windows. I don't dare call for Haruto. I don't know who he is. Right now, the postcard is the only voice I trust. I find the main stairwell, my hands gripping the banister as I descend into the even deeper darkness of the main floor.
The path to the front door is another route my body seems to know. My hand finds the doorknob, the deadbolt. A moment of panic—what if it's locked? But it turns easily.
The second I step outside, the storm hits me. The wind is a physical force, whipping my hair into my face and chilling me to the bone through my thin pajama shirt. Rain is starting to fall, fat, cold drops that soak my clothes in seconds. This is crazy. This is dangerous.
I almost turn back, but the memory of that stark, empty darkness in the room is worse. Out here, at least there's the distant glow of the city lights, the flash of lightning, the roar of the wind. There's life.
I don't know where I'm going. I'm just a terrified girl in her pajamas, walking in the rain. I pull my arms around myself, shivering, and start moving. My feet, clad only in flimsy slippers, guide me down the pavement. The ghost map is still working, still pulling me in a direction my conscious mind doesn't recognize. The path to school. My body has walked it every single day, a mindless, ingrained routine.
The walk takes forever. By the time the dark, familiar silhouette of Hanamori High comes into view, I am drenched, shivering violently, and operating on pure, unthinking instinct. The main gate is locked, but my hand goes to a section of the wrought-iron fence that is bent just enough to squeeze through—a shortcut Nami probably showed me yesterday.
I stumble through the empty school grounds, the familiar buildings looking like monstrous skeletons in the stormy darkness. I find a side entrance, one used by the janitors, and to my shock and profound relief, the door is unlocked.
Inside, the school is even darker and more silent than my house. The emergency lights cast long, distorted shadows down the empty corridors. The air is cold and smells of chalk dust and floor wax. Every creak of the building, every rattle of the wind against the windows, sounds like a footstep.
But the ghost map isn't gone. It's stronger here. A specific hallway on the third floor is pulling me forward. Not the main stairwell. A different one. My feet move with a certainty that is baffling. Left at the science labs. Right at the library. Up a narrow, rarely used flight of stairs. It's a route that feels practiced, secret. A path carved out of habit. A corridor that remembers for me.
My shivering hand pushes open the heavy metal door at the top of the stairs. The wind rips it from my grip, slamming it back against the wall with a deafening crash.
And there I am. On the roof.
The rain is coming down in sheets now, blurring the lights of the city into a watercolor smear. The wind howls, threatening to push me right off my feet. I'm soaked, freezing, and terrified. But I'm here. I followed the instructions.
Then I see him.
He's standing by the railing, a dark silhouette against the stormy sky, holding a large, black umbrella that is practically useless against the sideways rain. It's Reo. He's here, in the middle of a storm, in the middle of the night. His uniform is soaked, his hair plastered to his forehead.
He must have heard the door slam, because he turns. His eyes widen in disbelief when he sees me—this drowned, pajama-clad apparition.
He runs to me, his umbrella clattering to the ground, forgotten. He grabs my shoulders, his hands warm and steadying, even through my soaked pajamas.
"Arisa!" he says, his voice ragged with a desperate, frantic relief. He doesn't say Tsukimi-san. He says my name. "The power went out across the whole neighborhood. I knew your anchors would be gone. I called Haruto, he said you weren't in your room. I thought… I hoped…" He stops, his throat working. "I hoped you would remember the way."
I stare at him, the rain streaming down both of our faces, my mind struggling to catch up. He was here. Waiting for me. He had trusted the ghost inside me, the part of me that remembers the path, the part of me that knows the rooftop is safe. He had trusted her to get me here.
My hand closes around the small piece of cardstock in the pocket of my soaking wet pajamas, and a single sentence gives me my mission: "When all else fails, the roof."