1
The murdered girl has a stone with her name on it.
I have a sleep problem.
Every channel spent the night bowing at the same three altars: a grey slab with flowers piled in front of it, a rusted factory behind a fence, and a retired detective who looked like he only shaved for cameras now.
Her name at the bottom of the screen: Angel Kurozawa.
Her new title: victim of the Angel Case.
The voiceover always built toward the same sentence, like the city had agreed on a script twenty years ago and never updated it.
"The victim was in the final trimester of pregnancy. A premature infant was delivered via emergency caesarean section and survived."
That infant was me.
On TV it comes out with that floaty tone announcers use for miracles. Cut the girl open, pull out a baby, cue the swelling music.
They never follow with: He grew up in a one-room apartment with thin walls and a night job that hates him.
Not quite as uplifting.
2
I stared up at my ceiling and tried to decide if the damp patch above the bed had grown since yesterday.
The clock on the shelf showed 02:48 in red digits that wanted me to feel guilty. Outside, the city was in its late-night mood: tires hissing on wet asphalt, a drunk laugh rising and dying somewhere far off, the faint buzz of a vending machine on the corner.
My shirt stuck to my back. The air felt used.
The dream had been back.
It never played from the beginning. I just woke up in the middle of it every time.
A hard chair. Metal legs, paint scuffed off in thin lines.
A woman's ankles tied to them, rope pressed into skin.
A light above her, too bright, pointed straight down so the rest of the room sulked in half-dark.
Concrete underfoot.
Her breathing.
That was what my body remembered best. Too fast, too shallow, catching every few seconds like a car engine trying to turn over.
Her voice.
"Please. Is someone there? I'm still here. Please."
Sometimes angry, sometimes worn through. Tonight it had been down to bone. No polite words left, just that one plea, said because saying something was better than giving the silence the last word.
I rubbed the inside of my right forearm with my thumb, over the thick line of scar where a neighbor's dog had latched on six years ago. The memory of that day — heat, teeth, my own dumb panic — was sharp enough to make my pulse jump.
My nerves reacted more honestly to that bite than to the woman in the chair.
That told me something. I wasn't sure what yet, but it felt like data.
I swung my legs out of bed. The floor was cool and slightly uneven; whoever laid the panels hadn't been overly attached to precision.
The wall to my left gave a dull thud.
Ogi's signal. You're awake too loudly.
"Calm down," I told the wall, voice low. "I haven't even stood up yet."
There was a softer tap in reply. Translation: Fine. But don't push it.
3
My phone lay face-down on the nightstand.
I picked it up, expecting only the time.
A notification from a news app I don't remember installing waited at the top of the screen.
CITY TO HOLD MOMENT OF SILENCE
TWENTY YEARS SINCE "ANGEL CASE"
Beneath the headline sat a photo.
I tapped it.
Angel stood in front of some generic shopping street. Old-style shop signs behind her, a couple of blurred passersby, the angle a little crooked. Her hair was pulled back, the way people do when they're trying to look neat. Blouse, skirt, nothing fancy. She'd put on lipstick that didn't suit her. Her smile looked like it hadn't decided whether to commit yet.
The caption: Angel Kurozawa, 18.
Same family name as the one on my resident card.
Different first name. She'd kept the holy branding for herself and written something else on my form.
I scrolled.
She left cram school at 19:42. A security camera saw her turn the corner at 19:45. After that: nothing, until factory neighbors reported "disturbances" a little after midnight.
Police car on scene at 02:03.
Ambulance at 02:17.
Hospital arrival at 02:20.
Between those times, the article went vague. "Assault." "Severe injuries." "Abduction." Words that cover a lot while telling you almost nothing.
Further down:
Patient found to be pregnant. Emergency caesarean section performed. Male infant survived.
Delivered, like a package that arrived late but intact.
4
The phone buzzed in my hand.
Guardian:
You awake?
He hates sending my name as text. Says he feels weird when it pops up on his screen at work.
Demon:
It's nearly 3
What do you think
Three dots appeared. Vanished. Reappeared.
Guardian:
They're replaying her case again
You don't gotta watch it
Too late for that.
Demon:
Whole city sharing grief for someone I've never met
Wouldn't want to be rude by sleeping through it
Guardian:
don't go out there today
I mean it
We both knew which "there" he meant. The building everyone avoided until the news needed a background shot.
Demon:
I'll celebrate in here with instant noodles and bad coffee
HR can relax
Guardian:
they still talk about that
He'd put me on speakerphone once, driving his coworkers to a staff dinner. "Say hi, Demon," he'd said, like it was something a proud father says.
The silence on the other end had apparently become office legend.
Guardian:
…you good?
That question always wanted an essay answer.
Demon:
Same as yesterday
Long pause this time.
Guardian:
good enough
Try to lie down at some point
Tiny "seen" marker. Conversation finished to both our satisfaction levels.
The room felt less empty with those lines still sitting on the screen.
5
I opened the drawer under the nightstand.
The envelope inside had the hospital's logo in one corner and a faint coffee ring like a bruise in another. The flap had given up pretending to stay closed.
He'd given it to me on my sixteenth birthday, late in the evening after his shift, hands still smelling faintly of cooking oil and bleach.
"You should have this," he'd said. "Read it or don't. Your choice."
I'd shrugged and said I wasn't curious.
I'd slit it open as soon as he fell asleep.
Now I slid the photocopies out and laid them on the bed.
Black ink. Bleached paper. Whoever had done the copying hadn't cared much about legibility in the corners.
Female, 18. Unconscious upon arrival.
Multiple contusions and lacerations.
Evidence of prolonged restraint.
No adjectives. No commentary. Just lines to be filed.
Next sheet.
Fetal distress observed.
Emergency caesarean section commenced at 02:21.
Neonate male delivered at 02:26.
Weight: 1.9 kg. Respiratory support required.
Above that, in another box:
Maternal time of death: 02:24.
Two minutes.
Her heart stopped. Then my lungs started.
The name field underneath had been filled in later. The ink there was darker, the letters slightly crooked from being crammed into a small space.
Demon Kurozawa.
The nurse who'd been there liked to talk, apparently. My guardian had passed along her story once, late at night when his guard was down.
"She insisted on filling it in herself," the nurse had said. "Her hand kept slipping. She thought it was hilarious."
If she walked out of that operating room, naming her son Demon would make for a good joke later.
If she didn't, dropping that name on the world and vanishing was, in her words, "even better."
Angel, sense of humor: confirmed.
I pressed my thumb to the copied letters of my given name. The paper crinkled a little.
People hear it and expect horns. Possession. At minimum, a serious attitude problem.
They get a guy who stocks shelves at night and has opinions about instant coffee.
Might disappoint.
6
People like to say "a mother's love is unconditional" in the same tone they use for "water is wet."
I had no baseline for that.
What I had was a man who paid the rent on time, never walked out, and occasionally pretended not to notice when my grades tanked. Teachers who stumbled for half a second before reading my name out loud at roll call. A nurse's anecdote from twenty years ago.
No one had ever touched my hair and said, "You got that from me," with pride or regret.
Looking at those sheets, something shifted inside my chest.
Not grief. To miss someone, you need memories.
Not rage. There was no easy target in the room to point that at.
It felt closer to standing at the edge of a dark stairwell and wanting to know how many steps there were, even if you weren't planning to go down.
The dates and times lined up neatly in my head.
19:42: she leaves cram school.
02:03: red and blue lights outside the factory.
02:20: admitted.
02:24: flat line.
02:26: me.
It all fit into tidy boxes in hospital language.
Everything between 19:45 and 02:03 had been left as a smear labelled "injuries sustained prior to arrival."
My dreams had been colouring that smear for months without bothering to ask permission.
I slid the papers back into the envelope but didn't close it. Let it sit there with its mouth open on the nightstand.
7
The news article still waited on the phone screen.
Under the hospital photo and the shot of the memorial stone, there were more lines: four suspects. No convictions. Allegations of interference. The phrase "public outrage" under a picture of students holding candles in the rain, faces solemn for the camera.
Below that, a bright little strip:
RELATED: WHERE IS ANGEL'S CHILD NOW?
If I tapped it, I knew what I'd get. Blurred-out childhood photos. Interview with an "expert" on trauma. Phrases like "kept a low profile" and "appears well-adjusted."
Years ago, a reporter had cornered Guardian outside a supermarket, stuck a microphone in his face, and asked if I had nightmares.
He'd stared at the camera for a long second, then said, "What kind of question is that?" and walked away.
They hadn't aired that part.
The clock on the shelf showed 02:59.
The air in the room seemed to press in closer, not colder, just more present.
The digits rolled over to 03:00.
Then shifted again.
02:59.
02:58.
02:57.
My breath caught halfway in.
There was no noise, no flicker of power. The light from the street stayed steady through the curtains.
I blinked hard.
The display read 03:01.
Everything looked as it had a minute ago. Thin walls. Cheap clock. Hand still holding a warm phone.
My heart was beating faster. That, at least, proved something had happened.
Stress. Lack of sleep. Reflections off the screen. Plenty of causes lined up, eager to volunteer.
None of them matched the feeling that whatever counted the seconds in this room had momentarily been overruled.
8
I brought Angel's photo back up and zoomed in until her face filled the screen.
The pixels smoothed some of the details away. The uneven lipstick became a soft blur. The curve of her cheek dissolved into the background.
Her eyes stayed sharp.
The city spends one day a year saying her name into microphones and arranging flowers around carved stone. Teachers tell first-years not to take shortcuts past the factory because of that girl. Parents lower their voices and say remember what happened to her.
Nobody brings up the part where she also left behind a son with a joke for a name and a file thick enough to wedge a door open.
"You're getting better treatment than me," I told the image. "You get speeches and candles. I have Ogi and this clock."
The blue-white light washed my fingers. My own reflection faintly overlaid hers. My eyes were a slightly lighter shade. The jawline matched.
"I'm supposed to be grateful, you know," I went on. "For surviving. For being rescued. For the chance to exist as human-interest filler every five years."
The words sounded smaller once they left my mouth. That was fine. They weren't meant for anyone but me and the face on the screen.
"If you wanted a weeping, inspirational type, you miscalculated."
I breathed out slowly through my nose.
"Angel," I said.
The room answered.
Not with sound. With pressure. The air thickened, as if someone had put another atmosphere on top of this one. The space between my skin and the walls narrowed without anything moving.
The clock's digits blurred again.
03:01.
03:00.
02:59.
02:30.
02:24.
The phone seemed to slip sideways in my grip without leaving my hand.
My bed was suddenly not under me.
The walls, the window, the shelf, the weak glow from outside — gone, as if someone had pulled a sheet over my entire life and yanked.
I didn't black out.
My awareness stayed exactly where it was while everything it had been looking at was rearranged.
9
Smell came back first.
Metal. Damp stone. Sweat that had dried and never been washed away.
Then sound.
A slow drip somewhere off to one side. Breathing ahead of me, fast and uneven, a little whistle to it on the inhale.
Light arrived last.
A harsh yellow circle, thrown down from a bulb hanging overhead. It left the corners of the space around me in thick shadow.
Concrete under my socks. Walls close enough that I could have reached out and touched both if I'd tried.
The chair sat in the center of the light.
Same model my sleep had been showing me: cheap metal frame, thin backing, chipped paint along the edges. Rope ran around the legs, then up to bind ankles, knees, wrists, chest.
The woman in it was smaller than the photo made her look.
Angel's hair had fallen out of whatever neat shape she'd put it in that evening. Strands clung to her cheeks. Her skin had taken on that greyish pallor people get when blood has been busy elsewhere.
Her head hung forward.
Her breathing counted out the moments. Up, down, up, down, too quick to be steady, too controlled to be surrender.
"Please," she said.
The word reached me without any of the cotton of dreams. Every scrape in her throat, every catch, clear.
"I'm here. I'm still here. Please."
Her fingers moved minutely against the rope. No real space to struggle, just enough to remind herself her hands still belonged to her.
The chair gave a faint metallic noise as she shifted. The sound bounced around the walls and came back thin but distinct.
The dream had given me this room in pieces for months. Seeing it whole was like finally reading a page that had been missing from a book and realizing all the guesses you'd made before were off.
I took a step forward. The concrete felt rough under my socks, gritty in spots where dust had settled.
Angel lifted her head.
Our eyes met.
There was no divine revelation there, no recognition. She did what any caged animal does when a new shape appears: measured it, hunting for the chance that it might mean rescue instead of more harm.
She didn't know who I was. Of course she didn't.
"Please," she said again, words tumbling over each other now that someone was in front of her. "Please, can you untie me? They said— they said— I don't— I can't stay here."
Her voice fractured in places. She forced it back together.
The right thing to do, in the stories people tell, would have been simple.
Rush to her side. Fumble with knots. Promise things you weren't sure you could deliver.
My body didn't move.
Something inside me locked onto the scene with a kind of focus that squeezed everything else out. The part of me that had spent nights reading reports and staring at timestamps recognized this stretch of time and snapped to attention.
This was the gap.
The hours between the line "last seen" and the neat, antiseptic phrase "injuries sustained prior to arrival." The part nobody had written down because everyone involved had been too busy bleeding or working.
Angel's jaw had the same slight asymmetry as mine. Her nose tilted just a touch to the left, like mine did. Our eyes were different colours, hers darker, deeper. Details logged themselves without asking if now was an appropriate moment.
My heartbeat was faster, but there was no rush of panic with it. Just that same sharpened awareness that came with taking apart old machines as a kid — wanting to see every piece laid out before someone swept the whole mess off the table.
Behind her, deeper in the corridor, footsteps started.
Heel, toe. Solid weight. Not in a hurry. Whoever was coming thought they owned the place.
Angel heard them too. Her spine went rigid; the ropes bit deeper into her shoulders. Her gaze flicked past me, desperate to see who was there.
"You shouldn't be here," she hissed through tight teeth. "Run. Please, you have to go. They'll—"
The sentence disintegrated. There were too many possible endings.
She tried to push me away from danger without knowing my name.
Odd priority for a woman whose son's name was a joke on death.
The light above us swayed a little. Shadows slanted across Angel's face, making hollows where there hadn't been any a moment before.
I stepped further into the circle, until I stood between her and the direction of the sound. Whoever came around that corner would see me first.
The footsteps grew louder.
Angel's eyes were huge now, not with the clean fear of someone facing an accident, but with the raw animal kind you get from knowing people have chosen to hurt you and might not be finished.
I felt it then — not sympathy exactly, but a tightness higher up in my chest that made it hard to get a full breath.
I wanted to move toward her.
I wanted to see who had done this.
Both impulses pulled in opposite directions and left me standing where I was, teeth clenched, every muscle arguing with itself.
A shape slid along the far wall, just out of the light.
The bulb over us jerked once. The air around my ears went heavy, like when you dive under water and the surface closes above you.
The entire scene folded.
No fade-out. No helpful blur.
Chair, woman, ropes, corridor, approaching figure — all of it vanished so completely that for a moment I had the dizzy impression I'd never left my room, had just leaned too far into a thought.
10
My ceiling was back.
So were the thin curtains, the faint glow from a streetlamp, the cheap clock on the shelf. It read 03:07 now, jerking the numbers forward as if making up for lost time.
My phone was still in my hand. Angel's photo sat back among headlines and ads, as if it had never been anything else.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
I sat up slowly.
Fine grey dust streaked the soles of my socks.
A narrow line of it marked the floor from the bed to the door, as if someone had taken careful steps through a place that didn't exist in this apartment and brought a little of it back.
I rubbed my thumb along my heel. The grime smudged.
Memorial Day had begun for everyone else.
For me, it had already gone twenty years backwards and refused to stay there.