They say every detective eventually loses sight of what's real.
Some start seeing patterns in wallpaper. Others hear confessions in static.
For me, it started with dreams.
Every night since that alley, I see spirals—shifting, breathing, whispering my name.
And every morning, I wake up half-convinced I'm still dreaming.
The Depsy office felt colder when I returned. Maybe it was the broken heater. Or maybe it was the way people stopped talking when I walked in.
Risa didn't look up from her desk. She just muttered, "Internal Affairs is here."
"Already?"
"Yeah. Hoshino's got two auditors from the GRC upstairs. They're asking about Aria." She finally glanced up. "And about you."
I gave a humorless laugh. "Great. Guess I'm the new suspect."
She lowered her voice. "Ren… whatever's going on, you look worse than usual. You've got that thousand-yard stare thing again."
"That's just my resting face."
She didn't smile. "Don't joke. You've been different since the alley."
I wanted to tell her everything—about the sigils, the Echo, the voice message—but something stopped me. Some instinct whispering, Not yet. Not here.
The conference room on the third floor smelled of fear and burnt coffee.
Two men waited inside. Both wore the charcoal-gray suits of the GRC's Internal Oversight Division—the political wolves who hunted their own.
The taller one stood as I entered. "Detective Ishikawa. I'm Auditor Rehn. This is my associate, Agent Lirra."
Lirra nodded—a demon, judging by the faint shimmer of her irises. Half-blood, maybe. Her expression was unreadable.
Rehn gestured to a chair. "Please. Sit."
I sat.
He opened a slim tablet. "We've reviewed your case files on the Hollow Smile murders. We've also received testimony suggesting you've been in unauthorized contact with your former partner, Aria Vale, since her suspension."
"She wasn't suspended," I said. "She disappeared."
Rehn didn't blink. "Convenient terminology."
Lirra leaned forward slightly. "Detective… did you experience any resonance disturbances during your last encounter with Vale?"
My pulse ticked upward. "Define 'disturbance.'"
"Hallucinations. Voice intrusion. Temporal dislocation."
"I blacked out," I said. "Woke up alone. That's all."
Rehn studied me for a long time, then turned to his partner. "Note that," he said.
They asked more—too many questions phrased too precisely. About Aria's therapy methods, my Echo Reflex levels, the exact timestamp of the audio message on my phone.
When it ended, Rehn stood and said, "Detective Ishikawa, until further notice, you are relieved from field duty. Turn in your badge and sidearm."
I stared at him. "You think I'm compromised."
"We think you're connected. There's a difference."
Back at my desk, Risa watched silently as I dropped my badge onto the table. It landed with a dull clink.
"Guess that's that," I said.
"You're really off the case?"
"Officially."
"And unofficially?"
"Still breathing."
She sighed. "Ren… whatever you're chasing, it's eating you alive."
"Good. Maybe I'll catch up."
I left the precinct just before midnight. The city was quiet in that eerie, post-rain kind of way—streetlights bleeding halos through mist, shadows moving like thoughts.
I ended up at Aria's apartment. Police tape still hung across the door, half torn. I ducked under it and stepped inside.
The air smelled like smoke and lilac shampoo. Her notebooks were gone, but the desk drawer held a single recording device.
I pressed play.
A faint hum. Then her voice.
"If you're hearing this, Ren, it means the Echo found me. Or maybe it found you first. I can't tell anymore. The difference between our minds is thinning. That's how resonance works—it bleeds. Remember what I told you? About the second heart?"
A pause. A sigh.
"Listen closely. The Echo isn't a person. It's an idea. A psychic recursion born from guilt and memory. It attaches to unresolved emotions—feeds on them. I thought it was mine alone, but… you were there that day too, weren't you?"
The audio glitched—static rising like breath.
"You keep pretending you don't remember. But the Hollow Smile victims… they weren't strangers."
The recording ended.
I sat there for a long time, frozen, staring at the recorder like it might finish her sentence if I waited.
They weren't strangers?
My chest tightened.
The first victim, Nakamura—a counselor. The second, a journalist. The third, a young man studying cognitive science.
I'd skimmed their files a dozen times. Their names didn't mean anything. But their faces—
My hand trembled. One of them. The young man. I'd seen him before. Not in a file, but in a mirror.
He looked like me.
Back at my apartment, the spirals returned. They crawled along the walls like mold, whispering, turning, pulsing.
I stumbled to the bathroom sink, splashing water on my face. The reflection in the mirror blinked half a second too late.
Then it smiled.
Not me. Not quite me.
"You're close, Ren," it said softly. "You just need to remember the session."
"What session?" I whispered.
"The one she made you forget."
My reflection tilted its head, eyes flaring red.
"You were never her partner. You were her patient."
The world fractured—memories slamming into each other. A therapy room. Aria sitting across from me, notebook in hand. My voice trembling. Her eyes kind.
I wasn't a detective then. I was just another survivor of the war, broken, lost, trying to forget what I'd done as an Echo operative.
Aria had pulled me out of that abyss. She'd rewritten my memories, buried the truth so I could function. And when the murders began, something in those repressed layers started to wake up again.
I stumbled backward, gripping the counter. My pulse was a siren in my skull.
The reflection smiled wider.
"Welcome back to therapy, Detective."
Then the lights flickered—and it was gone.
When I woke hours later, dawn was bleeding into the sky. My phone was buzzing again. A new message—unknown number.
"Meet me at the old train yard tonight. Bring no one."
No signature, but I didn't need one. I could feel her resonance in the words.
Aria.
I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the gun I wasn't supposed to have anymore.
If the dreams were right—if the Echo was part of both of us—then maybe I wasn't chasing her. Maybe we were chasing the same ghost.
I holstered the weapon, lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke spiral upward.
It looked just like my dreams.