Archive of Our Own

THIRTEEN DAYS

Saki was waiting outside the classroom at the end of the school day with her phone held up at arm's length, filming nothing.

"Chat," she said. "Chat. Chat, she's here. She's real. Chat, say hi to the GOAT—!"

"Who are you talking to?"

"Icchan." Saki lowered the phone. Her free hand had already found the edge of the lockers and started going on it, four fingers in sequence, the way it did against every flat surface she had ever been within reach of—desks, trays, her own knee, the rail of a hospital bed. Ichika had decided years ago that it was structural, like a pulse. "Icchan. Icchan, listen to me, hold on, don't move, don't blink—two weeks. Two weeks until the show. Leo/need is highkey so back that it's genuinely diabolical, we are so back it's a canon event, we're aura farming, we're farming so much aura that the other rizzlers have started calling. They want the methods. They're begging for the methods. I'm not giving them the methods, they can starve out there, this is a closed grindset."

Ichika did not respond, except for continuing to walk with Saki.

"So here's the vision, and I need you to be normal about this—" Saki said.

"I'm always normal," Ichika said.

"—maximum yap. Full crashout promo. Zero thoughts, head empty, only bit. I write it, we film it, we post it, and every single person in this district gets fed—I'm taking the whole plate and the plate underneath it—and then we run it AGAIN onstage as the MC, because I am, respectfully, cooking. Let her cook. Nobody has ever let me cook. I've been in this kitchen by myself, Icchan, and this is going to be peak fiction, this is going to be so much lore that they're gonna need a whole wiki, this is going to be the single most devious ninety seconds ever committed by a girl band in Shibuya, and unc status is a myth, and I am the one who disproved it. Deadass. On god."

"Who's unc?"

"Not us." Saki pointed at her with both hands. "Never us. We're forever twenty-two."

"We're sixteen."

"Exactly."

There was a specific thing Saki did when she got excited, which was to stop making any concession at all to the fact that other people had to understand her. Ichika had known her since they were six and had never once been able to explain to anybody why she liked it so much. It was like being read to in a language she didn't speak, by someone who was very sure the story was good.

"You get a line," Saki said.

"I get a line?"

"You get the line. Icchan, it's so you-coded. It's giving main character. When you say it, people are going to be on the floor. Emergency services will be involved. I've thought about this an amount that's honestly probably a diagnosis, it's genuinely the most unemployed use of a brain I've ever committed to, and I'd do it again—"

"Okay," Ichika said.

Saki stopped. "Bro didn't even ask what it was."

"I don't need to."

Something moved across Saki's face too fast to name. They walked out into the last good light of the afternoon. Late September, the heat finally breaking, everything gold and slightly too warm along the edges. Saki "yapped"—her word—the whole way to the station, full sentences overlapping other full sentences with no gap for a reply to fit through. Ichika understood maybe seventy percent of it, which was a good day.

The show was in two weeks. Ichika had not told anybody what the show meant to her, because it was embarrassing and because it was not, strictly, about the show. It was that it would be the ninth one. That was the embarrassing part. She knew the number. She had counted every live the four of them had played since the band came back and she could produce the figure instantly, without doing any arithmetic, the way you can produce your own age. Nine. In two weeks it would be nine.

Because the thing nobody seemed to have noticed was that getting Leo/need back had not fixed it. It had only changed the denomination of the fear. For two years she'd been frightened that it was over—she could put dates on that stretch, she had put dates on it, at night, more than once. Now she was frightened that it would stop again, and that was worse, because now there was a streak. Streaks are things you can be standing there watching when they end.

Every show was one more piece of evidence. That was all any of it had ever been. She had a private and completely insane conviction that if they got enough of them stacked up, at some point the number would get large enough to hold.

So, two weeks. A room. All four. On the same night. Third on the bill—the biggest yet, the first one that felt less like proof of something surviving and more like a plan for something to come.

Ichika would have carried the amps in her teeth.

"The thing about the bit," Saki said, walking backwards down the hill so she could face her, "is that it has to be stupid. Like actually, deeply stupid. Because if you do a serious MC, people just stand there and scroll on their phones and think about dinner. But if you go out there and you're a complete menace for ninety seconds, they remember you. They go home and they tell somebody. That's the whole game. That's the entire game, Icchan."

"You've thought about this."

"Icchan, I've highkey thought about nothing else. I've thought about this in the bath. I've thought about this during math. I thought about this so hard on Tuesday that I walked into a pole."

"Is that what that was."

"That was a tactical pole—"

"You told me you were attacked."

"I was attacked. By a pole." Saki spun around to walk forward for a bit, which lasted about nine steps. "Anyway. The point is I have a plan and the plan is airtight."

"You've really thought about this."

"I have a document."

"You have a document?"

"It has sections."

She was walking backwards and she wasn't looking, and Ichika put a hand on her elbow to steer her around a pole without either of them commenting on it, which was a system they'd had since elementary school and had never once discussed.

"Hona-chan's doing the intro," Saki said. "Because Hona-chan has that voice where she sounds like she's about to give you a certificate. And Shiho gets one line and one line only, at the end, and she's going to hate it, and that's the joke."

"What's her line?"

"Not telling you. If I tell you, you'll do the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have the worst face. You have a face like a golden retriever finding out about taxes."

They got to the crossing and had to stop. Saki turned around properly and stood with her hands in her blazer pockets, rocking on her heels, and Ichika looked at the side of her head and thought about how in the spring she'd have said that Saki was doing well, and now in autumn she'd have said Saki was doing great, and she wasn't sure when exactly the word had changed.

"I want to explain something," Ichika started.

"Say less."

"I haven't said anything yet."

"Say even less." Saki grinned at the traffic. "I know what you're going to say. You're going to say you don't want to be cringe onstage. And I'm telling you, as your keyboardist and your childhood friend—cringe is a construct. Cringe is a psyop. Cringe was invented by the opps to keep girls like us small and quiet and normal-sized, and I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it anymore, I'm going to be so cringe that it loops around, Icchan. It goes all the way around the back and comes out as rizz. That's the sigma grindset. That's the Tenma grindset. My brother didn't invent it but he's on it. I'm cringe-pilled now. Fully converted. I took the whole bottle."

"Are you high?"

"I wish."

"That's... not what I was going to say."

"What were you going to say?"

Ichika thought about it. The light changed.

"I forgot."

"See," Saki said, delighted, and set off across the road. "Say less."

At the station Saki sat down on the step by the ticket gates to dig her pass out of her bag, and stayed sitting a second longer than the task required, one hand flat on the concrete. She was still laughing about something. She just did it sitting down, and it took her three tries to get the next sentence out, because she kept running out of air halfway and having to start again.

It was the happiest Ichika had seen her in weeks.

"Bet," Saki said finally, to nobody. "Bet. Bet! It's highkey so over for everybody in the hood. They're cooked. They're so cooked. Somebody go and tell them they're cooked, I can't, because we're gonna be busy bandmaxxing!"

"Saki, what the f—"

"Language, twin."

TWELVE DAYS

They filmed in the classroom in the Sekai, because there was no better place to do it. And Ichika thought privately that it would be less embarrassing this way.

The document turned out to be real. It was four pages long. It had headers.

"Right," Saki said. "Positions. Hona-chan, you're stage left of me, which is that way—"

"Which way?"

"That way. Shiho—"

"No," said Shiho.

"You haven't heard it."

"I heard it outside through the door. I'm not saying that."

"You get one line."

"I know which line."

"Shiho." Saki pressed the pages to her chest like a wounded aristocrat. "Shiho, this is highkey going to be the most important ninety seconds of your entire life."

"It won't be." Shiho sat down at a desk at the back with her bass case across her knees and got out a book. "I'll do it at the live. I'm not doing it fourteen times so you can pick a take."

"That's an L. That's a real, documented L, and I'm writing it down."

"Okay."

"That's actually so mid of you."

"Okay."

"SYBAU—" Saki caught herself, glanced at Honami, and visibly downgraded. "That's so mid. Hona-chan, tell her."

"I think you look nice today, Shiho," Honami said.

"Thank you."

Ichika laughed, and then the phone was pointing at her, and she stopped.

"Okay!" Saki propped the phone against a stack of textbooks on the windowsill, checked the frame, moved it two centimeters, checked it again. "So the shape of it is: Hona-chan opens, I go, you come in on the turn, and then we all look at Shiho and Shiho does the thing."

"I'm reading," said Shiho.

"You're in the frame, Shiho. You're in the corner of the frame reading a book like an NPC with one line of dialogue and it's devastating—that's lore, that's auramaxxing, that's giving mysterious bassist, people are going to be so unwell about you and you won't even have done anything, that's content—"

"Then I'm content."

It took Saki about a second and a half. Ichika watched it arrive.

"Right." Saki clapped once. "So the shape of it. Hona-chan, you're the announcement. You're a train station. You have never been funny once in your entire life and you don't know what any of these words mean—"

"That's true," Honami said.

"—and that's the engine. Then I go off. And I keep going off. I go off for like thirty seconds until everyone watching is a little bit worried about me. And then—" she pointed at Ichika without looking up from the phone "—Icchan comes in and turns the whole thing off."

"Turns it off."

"Kills it. Flat. Like you've just walked past and you're already gone. That's the turn."

"Okay," said Ichika, who did not understand a single part of this.

"Take one, chat! Everybody be so normal."

Take one lasted four seconds, because Honami had her drumsticks in her hand for no reason anybody could establish and got the giggles about it.

Take two, Honami got the whole thing out.

"Attention. This is not a drill." She read it exactly as written, in the voice of a woman reading it exactly as written. "On Sunday, at the Shibuya live house, the band Leo/need will perform. Their setlist is—"

Saki went at eleven seconds, laughing so hard she had to sit down.

"Take two was dogwater," she announced afterwards, scrolling back through it. "Certified dogwater. That was so bad it has to be studied. Scientists should be looking at that. We don't speak of take two."

Take three, they got as far as Saki's part.

"—and I want everyone to understand what's happening on Sunday," Saki said into the phone, at speed, hands going. "Four bands are on that bill. Three of them are about to have the worst night of their entire lives. I'm not going to say which three. I think it's kinder if they find out live. There's a keyboard part in the second song that I'm not explaining, you just have to come and receive it—"

She stopped mid-sentence, struck by a better idea, and simply stood there with her eyes unfocused, working it out, while the other three waited.

"No, forget everything, chat! I've got it, it's better." And she rewrote a third of it on the spot.

Take four was better. Saki watched it back with one hand pressed flat over her heart. "That's cinema," she said, quietly, like she meant it. "That's actual cinema."

Ichika began, around take five, to notice a specific and unfamiliar sensation: she was the only person in the room who was concentrating.

Because Honami wasn't. Honami was having a lovely time. Honami got her words wrong constantly and cheerfully and simply started again, and asked what things meant in the middle of a take without any apparent awareness that this was a thing a person might feel strange about. Shiho, in the corner, wasn't concentrating either, and yet Shiho—Ichika could see it—was following it. When Saki hit a good one, Shiho's mouth moved. Shiho got every single joke and had decided, as a matter of policy, not to award any of them.

Once, when Saki went past too fast, something came out of the side of Shiho's mouth at a volume that wasn't aimed at anybody—the same thing Saki had just said, in different words, flat. It went into the room and died there. Shiho turned a page.

And Ichika stood in the middle of the frame with her hands not knowing where to be, doing a thing that everybody else was finding easy.

Her line was seven words long. She had it in front of her, in Saki's handwriting, on the fourth page.

Nah, she's cooked. We're all cooked. Sunday.

"Take five," Saki said.

Ichika waited for the end of Saki's part, and came in, and said, "Nah, she's cooked. We're all cooked. Sunday."

Nothing happened.

"Take six," Saki said. "Icchan, this time—okay, don't take this the wrong way—"

"That's never—"

"—don't land on it. You're landing on it. You're going, and then you're arriving. There shouldn't be an arriving."

"Where should there be?"

"There shouldn't be a where. That's what I'm saying! It's not going anywhere!"

"Then how do I know when it's finished?"

Saki opened her mouth, and then closed it, and looked at her for a second with an expression Ichika couldn't read at all.

"You just do," she said. "Take six."

Ichika said, "Nah, she's cooked. We're all cooked. Sunday."

It came out with all seven words in the right order. Everybody looked at her in a friendly way.

"Take seven," said Saki.

Here was the thing that took Ichika until about take six to work out: she was bad at this. She'd braced for shy, and shy she could have managed—she'd been once shy on a stage in front of two hundred people and gotten through it fine. This was something else. She'd say the words and they'd come out with all the letters in the right order and land in the middle of the classroom like a dropped plate, and everybody would go quiet in a friendly way, and Saki would say okay, again, and Ichika would have absolutely no idea what she'd done wrong.

Honami was also bad at it. Honami was, in fact, considerably worse.

"Saki, sorry—what does this word mean?"

"Which one?"

"This one." Honami turned the page around. "I want to make sure I'm doing the feeling right."

"Oh! Okay, so, it's like—you know when something's really good, but in a way that's slightly illegal?"

"Ohh."

"Like if a cake was too moist."

"Oh. Yes. All right." Honami nodded to herself, resettled her shoulders, and delivered it into the phone with the calm authority of a woman announcing a train delay.

"Attention. This is not a drill. On Sunday, at the Shibuya live house, the band Leo/need will perform. Their setlist is disgusting. Please make arrangements."

It was the funniest thing that had happened all week. Saki fell over. Actually fell over, on the floor, wheezing, and had to sit down with her arm over her stomach.

"You cooked!" she gasped. "Do it again. Do it exactly like that, don't change anything—"

Ichika laughed too. She meant it. She stood there in the good light with her arms folded and laughed at her friend and felt, somewhere well below the level where she'd have to do anything about it, a small cold thing turn over.

Honami didn't understand the line either. Honami had just asked.

They ran Ichika's part eleven more times.

"Nah, she's cooked. We're all cooked. Sunday."

"Try it faster."

"Okay."

"Nah, she's cooked. We're all cooked. Sunday."

"Okay, that's—hm. Try it slower?"

"Okay."

"Try it like you're not the one who's saying it."

"What?"

"Like it's—like you're quoting somebody. Like you found it somewhere."

"Where would I have found it?"

"Bro really said—" Saki pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Okay. Try it like you're annoyed."

"At who?"

"At nobody, Icchan, it's not—you're not annoyed at a person."

"How can you be annoyed at nothing?"

"That's the entire way I've lived my whole life!"

Honami, in the background, said "ooh" appreciatively.

"Try it like you don't care."

"I do care."

"I know, that's the—" Saki stopped, and rubbed her face, and then dropped her hands and smiled, and it was a nice smile, it was a completely and entirely nice smile. "It's fine. It's my fault, the writing's clunky. I'll fix it tonight."

"I can keep going."

"Nah, we're good. We got Hona-chan's, that's the gold. Everybody wrap it up." She was already scrolling back through the takes. "Shiho, you're released. Go be gorgeous elsewhere."

"Finally." Shiho didn't look up from her book. "You two used to talk, you know."

Everybody heard it. Nobody responded. Honami started coiling a cable that didn't need coiling.

"We're talking right now," Saki said, cheerfully, to her phone.

"Sure."

That was the whole thing. It took four seconds and then the afternoon carried on over the top of it, and they packed up, and Honami had brought apple pies, and on the way back out Saki did a bit about the apple pies that made Honami laugh so hard she had to sit down on somebody's desk.

Afterward, Ichika went home and did her homework and answered three messages from her mother and lay on her bed in the dark with her phone above her face, and thought, it's my fault, the writing's clunky. Saki had written the line. Saki had written all four pages of it in one night, apparently, and every single line worked except hers. Ichika thought, she cut my part short because I was making it stop being fun.

Then she put the phone face down on her chest, because she'd noticed her own thought and didn't like it, and that was usually enough.

It wasn't, that time. It sat there.

TEN DAYS

Ichika had a list called stuff.

That was on purpose. She'd named it that so it would look like nothing, and it did look like nothing, sitting in her notes app between a shopping list and a half-finished set of lyrics. Two hundred and some lines. One term per line, with a definition after it in her words.

New ones went on top, which meant the whole thing ran backwards. The newest sat at the head of it and the numbers counted down as you went, all the way to number one at the very bottom, stranded there in a different season. Scrolling down the list was the same as going back in time.

Which also meant the number at the top only ever got bigger. She tried not to look at that part. It wasn't a count of words. It was a running total of how far behind she'd got, and it went up on days she'd enjoyed.

She'd been adding to it after practice. Just the ones she hadn't wanted to interrupt for—which often ended up being all of them.

It was eleven forty at night and Ichika was sitting on the floor of her room with her back against the bed, because the day had been long, and she'd gotten into the list to add one thing, and then she'd started scrolling.

She scrolled for a while.

The app kept dates on things, if you asked it. She hadn't known that. She found out by accident, pressing something on the screen while she was trying to select something else, and a little gray line appeared at the bottom of the note that said when it had been created.

May of last year.

Ichika sat on the floor of her room and looked at the word May.

She'd thought—if she'd thought about it at all, which she'd been careful not to—she'd have said this started in this summer. Maybe August. Something recent, something to do with the show, some new phase of Saki's that would pass the way the accordion had passed and the extremely specific interest in penguins had passed.

May was seventeen months ago.

May was the month they met. Not the month she met Saki—she'd met Saki when they were six and Saki had had a gap in her teeth and strong opinions about a wall. The month the four of them met. Properly. As this. The month she'd found the song, and the month they'd all walked into a world that was made out of their own feelings and stood around in it being embarrassed, and the month the four of them had been in a room together, on purpose, for the first time in two years.

May was—she scrolled to the very bottom, to the first line, the oldest one, and it was a word she now used herself, comfortably, without thinking. She'd forgotten she ever hadn't known it.

She had started the list the same month she got them back.

That was the part that got her. The bottom of the list had dissolved into her, quietly, over a year and a half, absorbed the way you absorb a house you've moved into, and she had never once said out loud: I don't know what you're talking about. Can you tell me?

She could have. It would have taken four seconds. Honami did it every single day and Honami was completely fine, Honami was probably asleep right now with a clear conscience and with flour on something.

She scrolled up through it slowly, the way you'd walk through a house you used to live in.

Some of the entries had question marks after them, where she'd guessed. Some had two definitions, because she'd revised—heard it used a second way three weeks later and gone back and added the correction underneath without deleting the first one, the way you'd keep a receipt. A few had little notes on the end. only about food?, not to teachers., she does this with her hand., etc.

One of them, from July, just said, don't use this one. She could no longer remember why.

The entries got shorter as they got more recent. In May she'd written full sentences. By September she was down to three or four words, the way you write when you already basically know and you're just topping up.

That was the bit that finished her off, in the end. Not that she'd been studying. That she'd been getting better at it.

Ichika turned her phone off and sat in the dark with it.

Then she turned it back on and added the two from that afternoon, because the show was in ten days and she had a line to land.

NINE DAYS

Saki had rewritten it. She came into the music room with her hair still damp from the rain, drumming the rolled-up pages against her leg the entire way, and announced that the old version had been "a war crime," that she'd been "lowkey sleep-deprived and delulu," that she took full responsibility, and that the new version was completely different.

It was not completely different. It was three words longer.

"Just try it," Saki said. "Trust the process. Let me cook."

"What process?"

"Vibes, Icchan. The process is vibes. The process has never been anything but vibes. There is no process. I made it up in the bath and now it's canon. I'm vibes-pilled."

She held up her phone. On the screen was a photograph—if it was a photograph, which Ichika was not prepared to commit to—of a wooden log with arms and legs and a face, holding a small baseball bat, standing alone in a field at dawn.

Saki said what sounded, to Ichika, like tongue tongue tongue saw her, with total conviction.

Ichika ran it back. Somebody's tongue. Somebody had seen her. It did not improve. She waited for the rest of it. There was no rest of it. Saki put the phone away again.

"That's brain damage, Saki," Shiho said, sparing Ichika the need to answer.

"I prefer lifestyle."

Here is what Ichika did, and she was never entirely proud of it afterwards.

She stopped trying to understand it. She'd spent three days trying to work out what her line meant, so she could mean it, because that was how she'd been taught to say anything at all—you found the true thing and then you said it and people could tell. And it hadn't worked once. So standing there in the music room with the rain going sideways past the window and Honami tuning the snare behind her, she gave up, and instead she just did Saki.

Not an impression. Nothing that obvious. She just took the shape of it—the way Saki hit the front of a sentence too hard and let the back of it fall over, the way she put the emphasis on the word you'd least expect, the little upward hook at the end like everything was a question she already knew the answer to.

"Nah, she's cooked," Ichika said. "We're all cooked. Anyway. Sunday, be there."

Same words. Three more than last time, and every one of them Saki's. She didn't land on any of them. She got to the end and just stopped, the way you stop walking.

The room detonated.

Honami dropped a stick. Shiho—Shiho laughed, out loud, one enormous involuntary bark of a laugh that she immediately looked furious about. And Saki went absolutely silent for a second and then screamed, and came across the room at full speed, and Ichika got hit by her at approximately the momentum of a horse.

"ICCHAN."

"Woah—"

"Was that—WAS THAT—Hona-chan. Hona-chan, did you see her. Did you see what she just did—"

"I did see," said Honami, retrieving her stick.

"She ATE. She ate and left absolutely NO crumbs. There are no crumbs. Forensics attended and found nothing. There is no evidence that a meal occurred in this building. That's a W. That's the biggest W I've witnessed in person. Hona-chan, I'm gagged. I'm actually dying, I'm on the floor, right now—"

"Okay—?" Ichika said uncertainly.

"You're mogging everyone. You're mogging me, and I wrote the line—that's peak. That's actually peak. That was so clean I should be taking notes. I wrote it and I should be taking notes. You're larping as me and you're better at it than I am, I need everyone to understand that I have never once been mogged in my own script before today. I'm not being normal about this, I want to be clear, I have decided not to be normal about this—"

Saki had both arms around her neck and was shaking her back and forth, and Ichika was laughing, actually laughing, up at the water-stained ceiling of a music room she'd been in a thousand times, with her best friend's chin digging into her collarbone.

It was, without any competition at all, the best ten seconds of the month.

"Do it again," Saki demanded, from somewhere around Ichika's shoulder.

"No."

"Do it again—"

"You'll wear it out."

"You can't wear it out, that's not—Hona-chan, tell her that's not a thing—"

"It might be a thing," said Honami.

They ran it four more times to get a clean take. Ichika landed it every time, exactly the same, because she'd found the shape of it and the shape didn't require her to be there. Saki sat out the fourth one, waving them on and drinking a bottle of Pocari Sweat.

After practice, Ichika walked to the station on her own, because Saki had gone the other way to meet Tsukasa about something.

"Nah, she's cooked," she said, quietly, to the platform. "We're all cooked. Anyway. Sunday, be there."

Then again, a bit differently, to see if it would come apart.

A businessman two meters away moved an extra four meters away.

It didn't mean anything. She turned it over and it was just sounds—a shape she could reproduce perfectly and could not open. And she understood, standing there with the announcement going overhead about the next train, that this was a thing she could do forever.

She could do the shape every time. She could laugh at the right moments, which was mostly just watching Saki's shoulders. She could keep the list, and study, and land every line, and be—from the outside, from where Saki was standing—completely fluent. Indefinitely. For years. And nobody would ever find out, and nothing would ever have to be said, and she would never have to sit in a room and admit I don't know what you're talking about, I haven't known for a year and a half, please slow down.

The relief of it went through her like warm water.

And that was the worst part.

SEVEN DAYS

Sunday. No practice, no filming, no document. Saki messaged her at ten in the morning—a photo of a vending machine with nothing else attached—and Ichika went.

It was a good day.

They didn't do anything. That was what made it good. They walked from the station down to the river because Saki wanted a drink from a specific vending machine that she claimed was "peak," and it took forty minutes to get there, and the drink was identical to every other drink in Japan, and Saki drank it looking out over the water with an expression of total vindication.

"Worth it."

"It's the same."

"It is not the same. Icchan. Icchan, look at me. It's colder."

Ichika turned her drink around in her hands twice before she said it.

"That's cap."

Saki nearly dropped hers. "Yooooo—did you just—"

"It came out of a machine on a hill. It's colder because it's on a hill."

"That's what I'm saying! The hill is part of it! You can't separate the drink from the hill!"

Saki looked around at the river, the grass, the actual sky, like she was noticing all of it for the first time. "We're outside right now," she said, with real wonder. "Icchan. We're touching grass. This is historic. Somebody should be filming this."

"Nobody would want to be filming this."

"That's what makes it historic."

They sat on the concrete steps by the water. A man was throwing a ball for a dog that had clearly retired from ball-throwing years ago and was humoring him. Saki went on about the dog's inner life for six unbroken minutes—full backstory, motives, an ex the dog was apparently avoiding—and Ichika laughed until her stomach hurt, and she understood every single word of it, and she didn't notice that she'd noticed until much later.

They talked about nothing important. About whether Honami's brother was growing taller and could be taller than Honami in a few years time. About the second-year who'd started bringing an entire thermos of soup to class. About a teacher's new haircut. About the show, a bit—the load-in time, whether Shiho was going to be weird about the amp again.

Then they went up to the shopping street because Saki wanted to look at a coat she had no intention of buying, and they spent forty minutes in a second-hand place that smelled of dust and other people's houses, and Saki put on a floor-length fake-fur thing in a color not found in nature and modeled it down the aisle with total commitment while the owner watched with the expression of a man who had seen everything.

It was the worst coat Ichika had ever seen. It came down to the floor and kept going, so that Saki had to hold the front of it up to walk, and the color was somewhere between apricot and a traffic incident, and the collar stood so high that from the side there was no Saki in it at all—just a shape moving down the aisle at speed with a face somewhere in the middle of it.

The sleeves had taken her hands completely. Ichika could still see the right cuff going, four beats in sequence, against a rail of other people's cardigans.

"Verdict?" Saki demanded, sweeping the hem.

"You look like a villain from a children's film."

"That's highkey aura." Saki put a hand flat on her chest—somewhere under all that fur, approximately where her chest was. "Icchan. That is the single best thing you have ever said to me—"

"It does suit you, though."

Saki stopped mid-sweep.

"...Don't."

"Don't what?" Ichika said.

"You can't just say things."

Saki put it back on the rail. She did it carefully, which she didn't do with most things, and neither of them said anything about that either.

They walked. The afternoon got long. At some point they ended up sitting on the wall outside the shut-up flower shop with two ice creams they'd bought for no reason at all in October, and Saki went quiet—a good quiet, an ordinary one—and swung her heels against the brick.

"Do you remember the thing with the bicycle," Saki said.

"Which thing with the bicycle."

"The thing with the bicycle."

"Oh." Ichika laughed. "God. The hill."

"You let go—" Saki said.

"I didn't let go. You told me to let go—"

"I told you to let go later, I said the word later, that word was in the sentence—"

They went through the whole thing. They'd gone through the whole thing perhaps three hundred times over ten years since it had happened and it had worn into a shape, like a stone step, and every part of it went exactly the way it always went, and both of them said their lines, and it was—Ichika thought, licking melted ice cream off the side of her wrist—the single easiest thing in the world.

She didn't have to look anything up. She'd been there.

"That's the best story we have," Saki said.

"It's not a good story."

"It's the best story we have. Everything else is just, like, things we did. That one's got a plot."

Saki's phone went off in the late afternoon. A little chime, not a message tone—the same one it had made at the same point in the day for as long as Ichika could remember.

"Ugh," she said, and turned it off, and dug around for the little case she kept in the side pocket, and something came out with it and fell onto the step: a small card, printed, with a hospital's name across the top and a date box.

Ichika looked at it.

Saki picked it up and put it back without any particular hurry. "The boring one," she said. "They do it every six months, they take about a cup of blood, they tell me I'm annoyingly healthy, my mom cries in the parking lot, we all go home. It's the most unemployed thing ever. Lowkenuinely not even worried about it."

"When is it?"

"Thursday. Whatever. Anyway—" and she was off, immediately, about the soup thermos again, at a speed that had a slight edge of downhill to it.

Ichika let her go for a minute. Watched the water. Watched the retired dog decline a ball.

"Saki, are you—"

The dog barked. Not at them; at a bicycle. But it was loud and close and both of them jumped and then laughed at each other for jumping, and by the time it was quiet again the sentence had gone somewhere Ichika couldn't get back to.

"Am I what?"

"Nothing. I forgot."

"You forget so much stuff." Saki nudged her shoulder with her shoulder. "Girl, you're like a really beautiful goldfish."

On the way back in the station Saki took the long way around to the escalator instead of the stairs, and said it was because the stairs were for cardio-freaks and she was a free-thinker, and Ichika said that was fair, and they went up the escalator.

That was the whole day. Nothing happened.

Ichika thought about it a lot, afterward. She's not sure why.

FIVE DAYS

The video went up on Tuesday night with no warning at all. Ichika found out because her phone lit up nine times in eleven seconds and the ninth one was Shiho, who never messaged anybody, saying only: saw it. fine.

She watched it four times.

It was good. It was really good—Saki's edit was tight and stupid and the timing was surgical, and Honami came in first, four seconds in, like a train arriving at a station made of custard, and Ichika's bit was there at the end, exactly as she'd done it, sounding for all the world like a person who knew what she was saying.

The comments came in fast. Faster than anything they'd ever put up. People from school, mostly, and then people who probably weren't, and then people who definitely weren't.

Somebody with no profile picture called it ragebait. Saki replied to that one personally: its not ragebait if its true and also im not mad, YOURE mad

Ichika read all of them, which was a mistake for reasons she couldn't identify at the time.

The number under it went up while she was looking at it. That was a strange sensation she had not been prepared for—not pride exactly, more like standing at a window watching weather arrive. Four hundred. Six hundred. She refreshed it and it was eleven hundred, and she put the phone down and did her English homework badly for twenty minutes and picked it up and it was three thousand.

Honami messaged the group at nine thirty.

Honami: Everyone has seen it!! Even Yoisaki-san has seen it. She asked me what my line meant and I said I don't know and she said that's okay 😊

Saki: chat that girl is SO cooked—Saki had replied instantly.

Saki: massive L on her for not getting it really 🥀

Honami: Oh no. Is that bad?

Saki: no hona chan its the best thing thats ever happened to anybody

Honami: Okay!! 😊

Ichika read that exchange and felt, for one second, so lonely that she had to sit up.

It wasn't the joke. It was that Honami had asked, in public, in the band chat, cheerfully, and received an answer in the same coin, and gone away perfectly happy without any of it costing her anything at all. Honami didn't want to be inside it. Honami was standing outside it holding a plate of apple pie and having a lovely time, and the door was open the whole while, and it had always been open, and Ichika had been picking the lock for a year and a half.

Saki was in there. Replying—not to a few, to all of them, dozens, one after another, in a stream. And every reply was three words long and completely lethal, and half of them Ichika couldn't parse at all, and the strangers on the other end were coming straight back at her, instantly, in the same register, like a rally.

There was nothing wrong with any of it. Ichika sat on her bed and scrolled through her best friend having forty simultaneous conversations at a velocity that Ichika had never once been on the receiving end of, and could not locate a single thing to be upset about.

Somebody had quoted her line. anyway. sunday, be there. They'd added something to it, and eleven people had agreed, and it was—clearly, from the shape of it—a compliment. About her.

Somebody else, further down, had written: the way she's talking about the guitar girl in this... does he know. Six replies pointed out there was no he. The original commenter replied exactly with no further explanation, and forty people liked that instead.

She read it six times and didn't understand it, and didn't add it to the list, and turned her phone over.

Then she turned it back and checked the times.

The replies ran from eight in the evening straight through to ten past three in the morning, unbroken, no gap longer than four minutes. Saki had sat up all night talking to strangers in a language Ichika was studying like a subject.

She looked at 3:11 AM for a while.

She's happy, Ichika thought, and put the phone on the floor, and lay in the dark, and did not sleep especially well.

FOUR DAYS

"Okay, so I moved some stuff around," Saki said.

The music room after school, Wednesday, rain again. She had the pages out on the piano lid, marked up in three colors of pen, and she was talking fast because she was always talking fast, and Ichika had her guitar half out of its case and stopped with the neck in her hand.

"The MC's running long. Which is my fault, I got greedy, I wrote a whole—there was a section about pigeons, it doesn't matter, it's chopped," She turned a page around. "So, Hona-chan's doing the intro and then Hona-chan's also doing the end line."

"Both?"

"Both. Because the thing Hona-chan does where she sounds like an announcement—that's the joke, right, that's the entire engine, and it lands twice as hard if she's the one who comes back for it. And then Shiho does her one line and dies inside and we all go home rich."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Ichika became aware that she was holding her guitar by the neck like a rake.

"That's my line," she said, finally.

"I know! I know, and you killed it, genuinely, you did it better than I wrote it, which is humiliating for me personally." Saki looked up, and she was smiling, and it was completely without any edge at all. "But it means you'd have to do the voice, live, cold, in front of two hundred people, and you'd have to hold it through the laugh, and holding through a laugh is genuinely so much harder than people think. And she's got the count-in for the second song like eight seconds later. It's just tighter this way."

"Right."

"Also you hate it."

"I don't hate it."

"Icchan." Saki laughed. "You go slightly gray."

"This is better for the show," said Shiho, from the corner, not looking up. "The MC was long."

"Thank you, Shiho."

"I'm not agreeing with you. I'm agreeing with the pacing."

"I'm sorry, Ichika," Honami said, and she looked genuinely stricken about it, one hand up like she was volunteering to give the line back. "I don't mind either way. If you'd rather—"

"No, it's fine." Ichika heard her own voice come out bright and easy and completely normal. "She's right, it's better this way."

And it was. That was the thing. Ichika stood there in the music room and ran it in her head—Honami's flat certificate-voice coming back at the end, the callback, the laugh, the count-in—and it was better. Anyone could see it was better. She'd have made the same call. She had a horrible little thought while she was standing there: this was the first decision anybody had made about her in a year and a half that she'd been able to follow all the way through. Everything else—the jokes, the replies, the timing, the reason a thing was funny at 3 a.m.—arrived at her already finished, like weather. This one had reasons. She could hold all of the reasons at once. It's running long. Honami's is funnier. She's got the count-in eight seconds later. Every single link in it was solid.

That should have been a relief, but for some reason it wasn't.

"Do you want me to try it once more?" she heard herself say. "At the run-through. Just so you've got both."

Saki looked up from the pages, and she was so completely without suspicion that it was almost unbearable to watch.

"Nah, girl," she said, warmly. "Don't put yourself through it."

"Okay."

"Great," said Saki. "Alright, chat. Let's go!"

They went in with Honami counting them off.

Ichika never got used to the moment of it—the way the music room folded politely out of existence around the edges, the way the sound went first and then the light, and then there was that other sky, the enormous impossible one, going gold at the corners like a photograph left in a window.

Miku was sitting on the low wall waiting for them, kicking her heels.

"Chat," she said, brightly. "Chat, they're here. It's so joever. Erm—chat, is this real?"

Saki made a sound like she'd been shot.

"MIKU."

"Was that right?"

"That was so right. That was—Hona-chan. Hona-chan, are you hearing this. She said erm. Nobody told her about the erm. She's been studying, she's been going to the LIBRARY—"

"It's so joever," Miku repeated, delighted with herself. "Right? Saki said if you say it about a thing you love, it means the opposite. It's like a reverse. And then if you say it about a thing you hate, that's also the opposite, so it comes back around and it's the same again. It's very efficient."

"It's the most efficiently peak language ever invented in the history of human beings and absolutely nobody appreciates it. Linguists are shaking. Linguists are so cooked right now and they don't even know—"

"Okay, but do the other one," Saki said. "Do the one from Tuesday."

"Oh!" Miku sat up straight, hands on her knees, with the air of a very good student about to recite. She said something four words long that Ichika couldn't even begin to understand.

Saki made a sound like a punctured tire and sat down on the wall.

"She's timing it," she wheezed. "Hona-chan, she's—she left a gap. Nobody taught her the gap. She worked out the gap on her own—"

"The gap seemed important," Miku said, pleased.

"The gap is EVERYTHING—"

"How many have you actually taught her?" Honami asked, still unpacking.

"Like six?" Saki counted on her fingers. "Oh, but there was that one from the other day, so I suppose that makes seven—?"

"Six-seven," said Miku.

Everyone looked at her.

Miku made a small gesture with her hands, like she was balancing an invisible tray, said nothing further, and looked extremely pleased with herself.

"Son, I'm cryin'," Saki said.

Nobody in the room was named Son. Nobody in the room was anybody's son. Ichika added it to the day's running total and let it go past.

"I didn't teach her that one," Saki added, very quietly.

"No," Honami agreed.

"Nobody taught her that one," Shiho added.

Miku put her hand out, unprompted—open, angled, held at exactly the right height, like she'd been saving it up. Saki stared at it for a second, genuinely stunned, for once, with nothing at all to say. Then she took it. Palms met, thumbs hooked, a pull that brought their shoulders together for half a second, and out again with a snap on the release—and Miku got to every part of it a fraction ahead of her, the way you can only do if you already know how it ends.

"I don't understand any of this," Honami said comfortably, unpacking the rest of her kit.

Ichika laughed with everybody else and did not understand it either.

That was the part she kept coming back to, afterward, at night, for weeks. Not the rest of it. That. Standing in the Sekai—the place that was made out of them, the place that existed because the four of them had wanted something badly enough to build a world with it—and needing a translation. Nobody had taught Miku that one. Which meant it had come out of the place itself, and the place was only ever made of four things, and Ichika went down the list and took herself off it first.

They ran the set.

Ichika kept up. That was the part nobody could have told from the outside—that keeping up was a thing she was doing, actively, every four bars, the way you keep a plate spinning. She'd stopped listening to the song somewhere in the second verse and started watching Saki's left hand instead, timing her own entrances off the angle of Saki's wrist, because if she watched closely enough she never had to feel her way into anything. She could arrive exactly on time without ever once being early.

It worked. It always worked. And it was the best they had ever played. Not close. Ichika felt it happen somewhere in the second song, that thing where you stop hearing four instruments and start hearing one, where Shiho's bass arrives half a hair ahead of where you expected it and it's right, and Honami's snare picks you up like a hand under your elbow, and Saki's left hand does something underneath the chorus that she has never done before and will probably never be able to explain. The sky did what it did when they were good, which was to get taller.

Nobody could have told, from the outside, that Ichika's eyes had started to ache from the specific effort of never once looking away.

They stopped between songs, the way they always did, and Saki sat down on the keyboard bench sideways with her legs stretched out and her head hanging back, and stayed there through the whole conversation about the transition, agreeing with things, not getting up.

"Are we doing the tag or not doing the tag," Shiho said.

"Doing it."

"You said last week—"

"Last week I was in my flop era." Saki flapped a hand at the sky without lifting her head. "Last week I was an NPC. That girl's dead now, we don't claim her. We're doing it."

Ichika looked at her lying back on the bench with her arm over her eyes and thought: she's wrung out, she's been up all night on that video, she's fine.

That was, in fairness, probably ninety percent true.

They ran it again from the top, and it was better again, and Miku sang the second harmony from the wall without being asked and got it exactly right, and by the last chorus Honami was hitting the crash hard enough that Ichika could feel it in the strings under her fingers. There is a specific thing that happens when a band is good and knows it. It has nothing to do with anybody being pleased. It's closer to a kind of vicious agreement—everybody arriving in the same place at the same time on purpose, over and over, for four minutes, on a dare.

They finished the last song and nobody moved for a second.

Then Honami said "oh," very quietly, and Shiho put her bass down with real care, like it had done something for her, and Saki screamed.

She screamed and threw herself off the keyboard bench and there was a general collapse in the middle of the floor, four people and a Miku, all talking at once. Ichika got an elbow in the ribs. Somebody's hair was in her mouth. The light was going gold and gold and gold.

"—that turnaround, Shiho, that turnaround, do it every time, I'm begging you—"

"It was a mistake."

"It was canon now—"

"Ichika, your solo was lovely—" Honami said, trying to change the subject.

"—no, no, listen, listen, everybody listen—" Saki was up on her knees in the middle of them with both hands out, breathless, radiant. "Chat, listen. In four days we walk into that room and we are going to have so much aura about it. We're going to be feral. We're going to be so feral that the venue puts up a sign—"

And then Saki continued and didn't stop talking. Ichika couldn't have reconstructed the whole of it later. Only pieces came back, in the wrong order, at three in the morning, for days afterward.

"—and the other bands, right, the opps, the opps, they're going to be standing at the back going, erm, chat, why is the keyboard girl like that, and the answer is LORE, they don't have the lore, they didn't sit through the arc—"

Honami was already gone. Ichika had her eyes on Saki's shoulders, where she kept them, and got there on time.

"—no, because Shiho's aura is doing numbers passively, that's the thing about Shiho, she's aura farming with the game closed—"

"It was a mistake," said Shiho.

"—which is why, and I want to be so clear about this, the only correct response to does he know is—"

Ichika never found out what it was. Miku made a noise like something being stepped on. Honami put a cymbal down on the floor and folded up over her own knees, and Shiho turned around to face the wall so that nobody could see her face and did not turn back for some time.

Then a beat Ichika got nothing of at all. Eight or nine words, most of them ordinary ones, arranged in an order that did something to everybody in the room except her.

"—and this is going to be the most peak show in the history of shows," Saki finished, hoarse, hands out, "and I've been yapping for ten straight minutes and I regret NONE of it, this is the most productive yap of my entire life—"

It escalated and escalated and stopped making sense somewhere in the middle and got funnier as it stopped making sense. That was the entire technology of it. And Miku was howling—Miku, who had learned the whole thing in a week, was laughing so hard she had a hand on Saki's shoulder to stay upright.

Ichika laughed. She laughed a half-beat late. She knew it as it was happening. Her eyes had been on Saki's shoulders for two hours by then, waiting for the cue the way she always waited for the cue, and for one half-second, for the first time all evening, they were just eyes—tired, unwatching, hers—and by the time they caught back up the room had already moved on without her. Half a beat. Nothing. Nobody in the world would have caught it.

But Saki caught it. She didn't stop. She landed the end of the bit and took the laugh and let it run out, and then she leaned over sideways while everyone was still recovering, and put her hand on Ichika's arm, and said—kindly, easily, quietly, so that it was only for the two of them, the way you'd tell somebody they had something on their face—

"You don't have to laugh if you don't get it, Icchan. Honestly. It's fine."

Honami was saying something to Shiho about the load-in.

"How long, have you known that I don't?" Ichika asked.

"Hm?"

"How long have you known?" Ichika asked a little louder.

Saki blinked at her. Still smiling. Still absolutely nowhere near understanding what was happening, because from where she sat nothing had happened at all.

"I dunno." She shrugged one shoulder. "Ages? Since spring last year, maybe. It's not a thing, I just—you do this face, and I figured, whatever, you don't have to—"

"Spring."

"Yeah, like—May? Maybe June?" Saki laughed. "You're so bad at hiding things. You've got a face like a—"

"May," Ichika said.

Something in the room changed temperature. Honami stopped talking.

"Icchan—"

"You've known since May." Her voice didn't sound like hers. It sounded thin and very reasonable, which was worse. "You've known since the month we met again, and you never said anything, and I never said anything, and we've just been—we've been doing this. Both of us. For seventeen months. And you decided it was easier to let me not know."

"That's not—" Saki sat back on her heels. "That's not what—I wasn't going to embarrass you—"

"You gave my line to Honami."

"Because it's better, you said it was—"

"It is better!" It came out too loud and hit the enormous sky and came back. "It is better, that's what—I know it's better, I would have done the same thing, that's why I—"

She stopped. Everyone was looking at her. Miku had gone very still.

There was something wrong with her hearing. All the air had gone out of the Sekai at once and left a pressure behind her eyes, and her hands had begun doing something she was not in charge of, and she could feel her own pulse in three separate places, one of them her throat.

She thought, with total clarity, from somewhere about a meter behind herself: stop now. You can still stop now. Nothing has happened yet.

"You cut me out of the joke," Ichika said, "and you were right to."

"Ichika," Honami said.

"And I can't even be angry about it, because everybody's been so—you're all being so nice to me. All of you. Shiho translates now. Did you know you do that? You do it under your breath, you don't even notice you're doing it. And Honami just asks, Honami asks like it's nothing, and I've had a list on my phone since May, I've got two hundred and eleven things on a list on my phone like it's a subject, like I'm revising for you—"

"A list?" said Saki.

"—and I did the line by copying you. That's all that was. I copied you. I don't know what it means, I've never known what it means, I just did the shape of your voice and everyone laughed—"

"Icchan—"

"—and I could do that forever." Her eyes had gone hot and her voice had started coming apart at the top. "That's the—no. No, that's not—I could do it forever, that's the thing, that's the actual thing. Years. I could do it for years and you'd never find out and it would be fine, it would be completely fine, and I was—"

She lost it for a second and took a shaky breath. Got it back somewhere lower down.

"I was glad, when I worked that out," Ichika said. "I stood on a platform and I was glad."

"Icchan—"

"So don't tell me I don't have to laugh. I've been laughing for a year and a half. I'm good at it now."

"Then why didn't you ask me?"

It cracked out of Saki like something breaking, and it was so unlike her that Honami actually flinched.

"You could have asked me at any point," Saki said. She was on her feet. "Any single point in a year and a half. One time. You could have said, 'Saki, what does that mean?' and I'd have told you, I would've have explained it to you for an hour, I'd have been so annoying about it—do you know how much I'd have loved that? Do you have any idea how much I would have loved being asked?"

"I couldn't."

"You could. It's just—"

"I couldn't!"

"Hona-chan does it every day!"

"I'm not Honami!"

"Yeah, no shot—" Saki stopped. Put a hand over her mouth. Took it away. "I didn't mean that."

"Saki," said Shiho, quietly. "Sit down."

"I didn't mean that," Saki said again.

"I know you didn't," Ichika said, and heard her own voice arrive at somewhere flat and far away and much worse than shouting. "That's the problem. Nobody in this band has meant anything. That's how we got here."

"Ichika—"

Every sentence she had ever handed this girl had been read over before it left her.

This next one wasn't.

"You didn't used to be like this." The sky had begun, very slowly, to lose its gold. "You didn't talk like this. When you were in the hosp—"

Ichika stopped.

She stopped with the word actually in her mouth, half of it out, and the rest of the sentence standing right there behind it where absolutely everybody could see the shape of it.

Nobody moved.

Honami had her hand over her mouth. Shiho had stood up. And Saki was kneeling on the floor of the world they had made out of loving each other, both hands flat on her thighs and not moving, looking up at her, and her face had gone through something and come out the other side completely blank.

"Finish it," Saki said.

"I wasn't—"

"No, go on." Not angry. That was the unbearable part. "Say the rest."

"I don't know what I was going to say."

"Yes, you do."

The light was almost gone out of the corners now. Ichika could hear her own breathing. Somewhere a long way off the Sekai was making a sound she'd never heard it make, low and thin, like a room being emptied.

"Ichika," said Miku.

Just that. Just her name, plainly, in a completely ordinary voice, without a single one of the words Saki had spent a week teaching her—and that was how Ichika knew exactly how bad it was, because even the Sekai had stopped doing the bit.

She didn't say anything first. She grabbed her phone and unpaused "Untitled," and went back. She just went, and the world take her away.

Outside it had got properly dark, in the way October does, all at once and forty minutes early. Ichika walked to the station with her hood down and her hair getting wet and she did not cry, because there was nothing available to cry about yet; there was only a very large flat feeling, like a page.

She got on a train. It was full. She stood.

Somewhere around the third stop it started replaying, and once it started she couldn't get it to stop, and it wouldn't play in order. It came back in pieces, out of sequence, and every piece was the worst one. Saki's face going through something and arriving at nothing. Honami's hand over her mouth. Shiho standing up—Shiho, who never moved quickly for anything in her life.

And her own voice, mostly. Her own voice, gone flat and reasonable and not hers at all, saying every single thing she had spent seventeen months not saying, out loud, at volume, to a room.

She had never done that before. Her mind kept arriving back at it, a tongue at a broken tooth. She had never once handed Saki a sentence she hadn't checked first—every message redrafted four times, every visit-story assembled on a train, two hundred and eleven entries copied out by hand so she would never have to ask a question in front of anybody. She had spent her entire life proofreading herself before she spoke.

And the one time she hadn't.

She got off a station before hers. She didn't decide to. She was on the platform before she understood she'd moved, and then she was standing on the yellow line at the far end where the roof stops, in the rain, at the exact spot where she'd stood five days ago and said Saki's line out loud to herself and found out she could do it forever.

It had felt like relief that day. She remembered that very clearly. She had stood in this exact spot and been relieved, and been ashamed of being relieved, and gone home.

She would have taken it now. That was the thing she couldn't look at directly. Offered the same deal again—do the shape forever, laugh half a beat late forever, keep the list until she was thirty and never once say the true thing—she'd have signed it right there on the platform without reading it, without ever looking back.

Ichika got her phone out. The screen was covered in water and she wiped it on the inside of her sleeve, and there was nothing on it.

No messages. Nobody had sent anything.

She'd known there wouldn't be. She checked anyway, and standing there she understood what the silence actually was: three people had watched that happen and every one of them had arrived, separately, at the same conclusion, which was that there was nothing you could send about it. There was no version of "are you okay?" that fit it. She had put all of them somewhere none of them had words for, in under four minutes, using only her mouth.

And underneath that, lower down, where the real one lived: this is how it starts.

Because she knew how it went. She had watched it happen once already, at thirteen, and she still had every message from it saved. It didn't start with a fight. It started with everybody being extremely reasonable and nobody knowing quite what to say, and then a week of that, and then a month of it, and then you are two years older and you don't know where anybody is, and there was never a day you could point at and say there, that's the one, that's where I should have said something.

She had four minutes and nothing else to do, so for once she let the thought go all the way to the end.

It went like this: the band was the only reason she was guaranteed to see them.

That was it. That was the whole thing, and it had been sitting in her since May without ever once being allowed to finish. Practice was Wednesdays and Fridays. Load-in was Sunday at four. Those were scheduled. Every single time in the last seventeen months that she had been in a room with all three of them, a calendar had put her there.

So take the band out and what was the mechanism?

Honami answered. Honami always answered, because Honami was kind, and answering isn't starting. Shiho didn't message anybody, which meant there was no way on earth to tell the difference between Shiho being Shiho and Shiho quietly deciding she was finished with all of it—no signal, there had never been a signal, and if it ever happened Ichika would find out the way she found out the first time, afterward. And Saki was out there generating her own reasons and did not need anybody to come at four o'clock in the afternoon anymore.

Back in August, she recalled lying on her bed and having gone through the last fifty messages between herself and each of the other three and counted how many more had been started by the other person. She hated that she'd done it, and yet she'd done it anyway. She could still produce all three numbers without thinking, the same way she could produce the number of shows.

And she could just ask. That was the absurdity of it. Ten seconds. Are we friends or are we a band. She was never going to, and she knew it standing in the rain with total clarity, because the answer arrived either way and there was no version of it she could survive.

So she hadn't asked. She had made a vocabulary list instead. She had counted shows instead. She had built an entire apparatus for staying near people without ever once having to say stay.

And tonight she had finally opened her mouth and said everything—every ugly true thing she had, at volume, to all three of them at once.

Every single thing except the question.

She sat down on the wet bench and put her bag on her knees and held on to it with both arms, and that was when it arrived—all at once, from nowhere, her whole body suddenly involved, the way it comes when you've been keeping it somewhere it was never meant to be stored. She got her sleeve over her mouth. A woman further up the platform looked over, and then very kindly looked away.

Ichika let three trains go, in the end. She couldn't have said why, except that getting on one meant the evening was finished and tomorrow started, and tomorrow she would have to find out what she had broken and whether it was the kind of thing that comes back.

Then she walked the rest of the way home in the rain, and let herself in, and told her father she'd eaten dinner, and lay on her bed in her wet uniform with her arm over her eyes.

Her guitar was still in the Sekai. She had walked out and left it standing there, in a place she had no way of reaching on her own. She thought about that for a while because it was easier than thinking about the rest of it, and then stopped, because there was something underneath it she didn't want to pick up: the only way to go back and get it was together.

And then, much later, in the dark, the real one—the one that had been standing at the back of the whole evening with its coat on, waiting for the room to clear:

Saki said to finish the sentence, and I couldn't.

Not because I did not know what the rest of it was.

Because I did.

THREE DAYS

Saki wasn't in for the morning.

Ichika checked the door of 2-B eleven times before lunch and then hated herself in the stairwell about it. She had composed and deleted four messages by second period. The fourth one had been nine lines long and the version she sent said im sorry about yesterday and nothing else, because everything else she wrote turned out, when she read it back, to be a request to be forgiven, and she didn't think she'd earned one yet.

Saki replied at 1:40.

its fine :)

Ichika looked at that for the whole of fifth period.

At lunch she took her tray to the stairwell instead of the classroom, which she had not once done in three years, and ate looking at a wall.

A girl from the year below found her there—Ichika didn't even know her name, just a face from the corridor—and asked, kindly, if she was all right.

"Yes," Ichika said, before the question had finished landing. "I'm fine, thank you."

The girl went away looking faintly reassured. Ichika sat with the tray on her knees and didn't eat any more of it, and for a long moment couldn't have said why the exchange had left her feeling like she'd swallowed something wrong.

The seventh time she went past 2-B, Saki was in it.

Ichika got three steps beyond the door before her body worked out what it had seen and turned her around.

Through the glass: Saki at the desk by the window, books out, sitting square to it with both feet flat on the floor. Reading.

Her hands were still.

Ichika stood in the corridor and looked at them, and something went through her so cold and so complete that she had to put a hand on the wall.

Saki's hands did not do that. Saki's hands had never done that. They went on desks and windowsills and the backs of chairs and her own knees, four fingers in sequence, all day, every day, through every lesson and every conversation and every meal Ichika had ever eaten beside her. They had done it in a hospital bed. Ichika had a photograph, somewhere, of a ten-year-old Saki with a drip in her arm and a paper crown on, mid-sentence, laughing—and even in a still photograph you could tell her free hand was going on the bed rail, because it was blurred and the rest of her wasn't.

They were folded now. One on top of the other, on the desk, placed there.

Some time between yesterday and today she had noticed she was doing it, and stopped.

Then Saki looked up and saw her standing there in the corridor.

And she smiled. A nice one. Perfectly pleasant, the kind you'd give anybody. She lifted one hand about six inches off the desk, held it there for a second, and put it down again, and went back to her book.

Ichika walked to her own classroom and sat down and did not hear any part of the next lesson.

They had practice at five. Everyone came. Nobody had suggested canceling and nobody would have.

It was the worst hour Ichika had ever spent in a room with a guitar.

Saki was fine. That was the thing you couldn't get hold of. She said hello. She asked Honami about the load-in time. She played her parts perfectly—better than perfectly, with a kind of careful accuracy that had nothing in it at all—and when Shiho asked whether the second song should come down a bit under the vocal Ichika said, "Yeah, good idea," and did it.

Three words. Yeah, good idea.

Between songs Saki sat at the keyboard with her hands in her lap. Not resting on the keys, not going on the side of the bench, not doing anything at all—in her lap, one on top of the other, exactly the way they'd been on the desk. Saki filled the gaps between songs. That was her job in this band as much as the keyboard was; she filled them so completely that Ichika had never once in seventeen months found out what the gaps sounded like.

Now she knew. They sounded like a room with four people breathing in it.

At one point Ichika laughed at something Honami said, and Saki, who had opened her mouth to add something, closed it.

Ichika watched her do it. Watched her put it away.

"Sorry," Saki said, when she noticed she'd been seen. "I'll keep it down."

There was a full second where Ichika thought she might actually be sick.

They ran the set twice. It was flawless and it was the worst thing Ichika had ever heard. Everybody played their parts and nobody played anybody else's, and the songs went past like items on a list being ticked, and when they finished the second run nobody said anything at all, because there was nothing to say about it. It had been correct.

Nobody suggested going in.

That was the thing that stayed with her. Four people stood in a music room with the door to another world essentially in their pockets, and not one of them mentioned it, and everybody understood exactly why, and it was never raised.

They packed up early. Shiho left first, and Saki went right after her, saying something about chores, and Ichika stood in the middle of the music room holding a cable she had no memory of picking up.

"She was like that when she came back," Honami said.

She was crouched by the drums, unbolting something, not looking up, in the way that Honami said the most important things she ever said.

"When?"

"When she came back to school." Honami turned the wing nut, and turned it, and turned it. "She was so polite, Ichika. For about a month. She'd check everybody's face before she said anything. If a teacher asked if she was all right she'd say yes so fast it was like she'd been holding it ready." The cymbal came off. Honami set it down flat. "She used to apologize for coughing."

"She never did that with me," Ichika said.

"No." Honami went on turning something that had already come loose. "She never did."

The rain had got heavier against the window. Somewhere below them a door banged.

"That's what I'm telling you," Honami said. "You were the only one she didn't do it to." She looked up, finally, and her eyes were red, and her voice was perfectly steady, which was somehow the most Honami thing that had ever happened. "In ten years I have never once seen Saki be careful around you. Not once. Until today."

Ichika opened her mouth to say I'm fine—the whole sentence half-assembled, automatic, before she'd even decided to say it.

She stopped.

Honami was still looking at her. Not accusing. Just looking, the way she looked at a drumhead to check the tension.

"...You just did the thing," Honami said, quietly. "Just now. I watched you do it."

"I didn't—"

"You did. It's fine, I'm not going to make it a whole—" Honami went back to the wing nut, turned it once more for something to do with her hands. "I just think you should know you've got one too. That's all."

Ichika put the cable down on the floor.

"I did that," she said.

"I don't think it works like—"

"Honami. I did that."

Honami didn't argue with her, which Ichika was grateful for and also could have died of. Honami just got up and put her arms around Ichika, briefly and firmly, the way you'd right a chair, and said, "Then go and undo it," and went back to packing up her kit.

Ichika walked home the long way, past the river, and did not stop anywhere, and got in an hour later than she needed to.

TWO DAYS

Friday she couldn't find her. Saki was somewhere else at lunch and gone by the time Ichika got downstairs, and there was no practice because Honami had work and Shiho had to review, and the messages Ichika sent got hearts on them, little tapped-back hearts, which is a thing you do to a message when you would like it to be over.

Saki hadn't been online since Wednesday afternoon.

Ichika worked that out at about half past twelve, standing at the window at the end of the corridor, and it was a stupid thing to have checked and a stupider thing to feel in her stomach.

Because Saki didn't really post. That had never been the thing—making something and putting it up cost her actual effort, and the video had taken a week and most of her sanity. What Saki did was answer. Instantly, to everybody, at a velocity that suggested she had never once in her life put her phone face-down. You'd say something in the band chat and her reply would already be sitting underneath it, three words long and lethal, before you'd finished reading your own message back.

She had done it from a hospital bed. Ichika could remember being fourteen and awake at one in the morning and getting six replies inside ninety seconds, each one worse than the last.

The last thing she'd sent to the band chat was Wednesday, 4:11 PM.

Saki: today were going to be SO locked in i can feel it

Ten minutes before they went in.

Since then, it had been twenty hours.

She was still tapping hearts on things—that was what Ichika couldn't get past. The hearts kept arriving, promptly, on everything. The minimum viable quantity of Saki. The smallest available signal that a person has read a thing and does not intend to say anything about it.

Ichika scrolled back through a year of the band chat, standing at a corridor window at lunchtime like somebody with nothing else going on in her life, to work out whether forty-four hours was a record.

It was. The next longest was nineteen, back in February, when Saki had dropped her phone in a canal and then talked about it for a week afterward.

She put her phone in her blazer pocket.

Six minutes past four, Shiho messaged her.

Shiho: she's not answering me either. don't read into that, she doesn't answer me anyway

Then, a minute later:

Shiho: for what it's worth you weren't wrong about any of it

Then, two minutes after that, clearly with effort:

Shiho: you were just wrong at her

Ichika sat down on the steps outside the gate and read that about nine times.

Ichika: i know i'm going to fix it

Shiho: good. show's on sunday

Ichika: i know

Shiho: im not saying it because of the show

There was a pause of about ninety seconds, during which Ichika could see, in a way she'd never be able to explain to anyone, Shiho Hinomori deciding whether to send one more message.

Shiho: we did this before. i was the one who didnt say anything that time

Then, later, almost as an afterthought, in a different tone entirely:

Shiho: youve gone quiet. dont do that one either. thats not the fix, its just the same problem wearing your face

Ichika: thanks

She got home and lay on her bed in her uniform and didn't turn the light on.

Somewhere around nine she got up and started looking for the photograph.

She could have told herself she was looking for comfort. She wasn't, particularly, and some clear-eyed part of her knew it even as she did it: she was looking for evidence. She wanted the worst version of Saki she had, held up directly against the thing she'd broken on Wednesday, because if she could prove exactly how bad it was she'd at least have the shape of what she'd done instead of just the feeling of it, which wouldn't hold still.

It took a while. It was in the second box, under the yearbooks. Saki in the bed with the paper crown. Ten. Enormous eyes. Ichika would have been in that room about eleven minutes after school every day for a period of her life she had trained herself not to count in months.

She sat on the floor with it and ran the evening again, the way she'd been running it since six o'clock, looking for the exit. There had to have been one. A place where the sentence could have stopped a syllable earlier, a place where she could have breathed instead of said the next word—stop now, you can still stop now, nothing has happened yet, she had heard herself think exactly that, clear as a bell, and kept going anyway.

She could find the place. She just couldn't get back to it.

Then she got out her phone and opened the note called stuff and scrolled all the way to the bottom, to May, to the very first entry, and she read her own small careful definition of a word she now used without thinking, and she understood with total clarity that she had been doing homework so that she would never have to ask a question, and that the reason she would never have to ask a question was that a question would mean saying "I can't keep up with you," and the reason she couldn't say "I can't keep up with you" was not pride at all.

It was that Saki had spent four years being the one who couldn't keep up.

And Ichika had gotten used to it.

She wrote a message. She deleted it. She wrote another one.

In the end she sent the message.

Ichika: are you home tomorrow

The reply came at eleven minutes past midnight. It meant Saki was awake, and that was the only piece of information Ichika had had in two days.

Saki: yeah

ONE DAY

She stood outside the Tenma house for four minutes before she rang the bell.

She knew the doorbell. She had a relationship with this doorbell. There had been a period of her life in which she had pressed it every day after school and been let in by a woman who always said she's had a good morning in a voice that meant something else, and a later period in which she had not pressed it for eight months, and a period after that in which pressing it had felt like an imposition on a family who had been through something she had only watched.

The gate needed painting. That was new. She thought about that for a while instead of ringing the bell.

Then she rang the bell.

Tsukasa opened the door.

"ICHIKA!" He said it like a herald. He had a script rolled up in one hand and the doorknob in the other, and he filled the entire doorway with the sheer fact of himself. "You are most welcome. You find the household in disarray. I am, as ever, at the very pinnacle of my craft and no one under this roof respects it."

It occurred to Ichika, standing on the step, that the two Tenma children were exactly the same volume. Precisely the same. They had simply been issued different vocabularies at some point and had run with them, and if you put them in a room and turned the words off you would not be able to tell which was which.

"Hi, Tsukasa."

"She's upstairs. She's been up there since Thursday." He said the second part at exactly the same volume, and only afterwards, in the half second while he stood aside, did the smile go somewhere slightly different. "Take your time," he said. "She's terrible at coming down."

Saki's room hadn't changed since she was eleven. The curtains were shut. It was two in the afternoon.

There was a plate on the carpet by the bed with something on it that had stopped being food at some point. And the keyboard was unplugged, and whoever had unplugged it had wound the cable up afterwards and laid it on top in a neat coil.

Ichika looked at the neat coil for a while.

Saki was on the floor with her back against the bed and her knees up.

"Hey," Ichika said.

"Hey."

And then Ichika watched her gather herself. Watched her take a breath and reach for it—the way you reach for a light switch in a room you've lived in for years, without looking, absolutely certain.

"Chat," Saki said. "Chat, she's—"

It didn't come.

Ichika would think about that for a long time afterwards: the specific sound of a sentence being abandoned in the middle. Saki got three words out and then there was simply nothing behind them, and her mouth stayed open for a second around a joke that hadn't arrived.

"Sorry. Hang on. Let me—"

"You don't have to do that," Ichika said.

"No, I've got it—"

"Saki."

"I've got it." She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Give me a second. It's right there, it's literally right there—"

Ichika sat down on the floor against the wardrobe, opposite, with about half of a meter of carpet between them, and said nothing at all, and after a while Saki stopped trying.

Ichika had rehearsed roughly nine hundred sentences on the train here. She used none of them.

"Your appointment was Thursday," Ichika said.

"Is that why you came?"

"No."

"Because if you came because you feel bad about Wednesday, you don't have to do that either." Saki said it to her knees, evenly, like something she'd had ready for two days. "I already said it was fine. I said it in a message. You can go home."

"That's not why I came."

"Then why?"

Ichika opened her bag and took out the envelope.

She'd been carrying it since Friday. It had gone soft at one corner from being in and out of her hands on trains. She leaned across the carpet and put it down on the floor between them and sat back, and Saki looked at it for a second before she picked it up, and then went entirely still.

The paper crown. The drip. The pajamas. Ten.

"Why have you got this?" Saki asked.

"I found it on Friday, I was looking for—"

"Why have you got this, Icchan?" Her voice had gone somewhere thin. "Are you—what is this, is this a thing? Have you come round here to make me look at—"

"Look at your hand."

Saki stopped.

"What?"

"Your hand. In the photo." Ichika's own hands were doing the shaking thing again and she put them under her arms. "Look at it."

Saki looked at it.

It was blurred. In a room where somebody had come and straightened her sheets four times that day, on a drip, in a paper crown, ten years old and going nowhere for months—the only part of that photograph that hadn't held still long enough to be photographed was her hand on the bed rail.

"On Thursday, I looked through the door of your classroom," Ichika said, "and they were folded."

Somebody knocked on the door.

Both of them went off like a light going on.

"Yes!" Saki called, brightly, and Ichika sat up straight and put a completely normal expression on, and Mrs. Tenma opened the door with a tray and said something warm about how nice it was, how lovely, she'd heard there was a show on Sunday, was Ichika staying for dinner, and Saki said, "Maybe!" in a voice with about nine exclamation marks in it, and Ichika said "thank you" twice, and the photograph had gone face-down on the carpet at some point without either of them appearing to have moved it.

The door closed. They listened as her footsteps faded.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"They want to see me in three months," Saki said. "Instead of six."

The room was very quiet.

"Is that—"

"It's nothing." It came out fast and flat. "It's genuinely nothing, they said it four times, it's a scheduling thing, it's—they've got a new consultant and she likes to see people more often for the first year, that's all, it's an admin thing, it's not—nobody was worried. Nobody in that building was worried."

"Okay."

"So it's fine."

"Okay."

Saki put her forehead on her knees.

"Three months puts it after New Year's," she said. "Which means the next one's in spring. Which means—it just resets it. That's all it does. I had months left of not thinking about it and now I've got three, and everyone keeps saying it's nothing, and it is nothing, and I know it's nothing, and I've been lying on this floor since Thursday night doing math about a scheduling change."

Thursday morning was the appointment. Thursday afternoon was the corridor, and the glass, and two hands folded on a desk, one on top of the other, placed there.

Ichika had carried that around for two days as a thing she had done. She had been fairly proud of how squarely she was carrying it. And it turned out she had stood at a window looking at somebody else's Thursday morning and signed her name to the bottom of it. She didn't say any of that. She could see what it was: an extremely elaborate way of asking to be told it wasn't her fault.

"Why didn't you—"

"Because then it's real." Saki lifted her head. Her eyes were absolutely dry, which was worse than the other thing. "Because the second I say it out loud to anybody, they do the face. My mom does the face. Tsukasa does this thing where he gets quiet, my brother, who has never been quiet in his life. And then everybody's careful for a week and I have to spend the whole week being okay at them so they'll stop."

"I wouldn't have—"

"You're the worst one."

It landed like a slap, and Saki heard it land, and pressed on anyway, because she'd clearly been holding it for a while.

"You're the worst one, Icchan. Because you were there. Everybody else has to imagine it. You sat in the chair. You know what I look like when I'm not okay, you've seen it more than my brother has, and if I ever go quiet around you—if I'm ever just, like, normal volume, for one evening—you'll look at me and you'll see it. You won't even mean to."

Saki wiped her face with the back of her wrist, roughly, like it was an annoyance.

"So I'm loud," she said. "That's the whole point. If I'm loud enough, nobody checks."

Outside, a long way down, Tsukasa was declaiming something at somebody in the living room.

"And the show's on Sunday," Saki said. "And there's four bars at the front of the second song that's just me, on my own, and I keep—"

Her voice cracked. She got it back.

"I keep losing it. Not the notes. I know the notes, I could do the notes asleep. I get to the front of it and there's nothing there, and I have to wait and find it off Hona-chan when she comes in. Four times this week. Nobody's said anything." She turned her hands over in her lap. "And I can't ask them to say something, because then they'd have to ask me why."

"Okay," Ichika said.

"And I can't work out why that's the bad one." Saki frowned down at her own knees, as though they had been unhelpful. "Because it's not the being ill. I'm not scared of being ill, Icchan, I've been ill, I'm honestly world class at it. I know every part of how that goes. That bit's boring."

"Then what is it."

"I don't know." It came out with more heat than she'd meant, and she looked sorry about it immediately. "Sorry. That's—that's the thing, though. I've been lying on this floor since Thursday trying to get to the end of that sentence and I can't do it."

She tried anyway.

"It's the after," she said, slowly. "Maybe. It's not the four bars, it's that afterward there's a week. There's always a week. Where everybody goes—" she made a small flattening gesture with one hand, smoothing something down. "And you all get quiet in the same way at the same time, and someone carries my bag without asking, and Hona-chan starts asking how I slept—which she does anyway, she asks everyone, but for that week it isn't the same question."

The rain had started again against the window.

"And it takes ages," Saki said. "It takes ages for it to stop. And I don't want to go back."

She pushed the heel of her hand against one eye.

"That's not right either. What I just said. It's near it but it isn't it." She sounded genuinely frustrated, in the specific way of somebody who is good with words and has run out of them. "I'd like to get it right once."

"You don't have to get it right."

"I'd like to," Saki said, to the carpet.

There was a silence that went on a beat too long.

"Can I say the other thing," Saki said. Quieter now. Not performing anything, not even the tired kind.

"What other thing?"

"You said—in there. Before the hospital bit." Saki was looking at her knees again. "You said you could keep going like that forever. The list, the laughing, all of it. Never saying anything." She swallowed. "And you said when you worked that out, you were glad."

Ichika's whole chest went cold.

"I keep coming back to that one," Saki said. "Not the hospital one. Everybody would assume it's the hospital one. That one's just a wound—you swung and it landed, people do that when you corner them."

"Saki—"

"It's the glad." She pulled her knees in tighter. "Because glad means you'd decided. Glad means there was a plan, and the plan was to keep it nice. To be fine at me. Forever, you said."

"That's not what I—"

"Do you know what that is, though?" Saki's voice had gone thin and quick. "That's everyone. That's every single person I know. That's my mom in a parking lot and the entire third floor of a hospital and every teacher I've had since I was fourteen. Smoothing it over. Keeping it nice. Deciding what I get told." She wiped her wrist across her face. "You were the one who never did that. Not once, in ten years. You've never once managed me, Icchan, not when I was at my worst, not ever, and I have thought about that more than you know. And then you found out how. And you were glad about it."

There was no version of "I'm sorry" small enough to get through the door that had just opened.

"I wasn't managing you," Ichika said.

"It looked—"

"I know what it looked like. I'm telling you what it was." Her hands had started again; she pushed them under her arms. "If I'd asked you, I'd have had to say it out loud. In a room. To your face." She made herself do it. "I can't keep up with you anymore."

The rain went on against the window.

"That's all it was," Ichika said. "That's the whole thing. I found a way to never have to say that sentence, and I was glad, and it was nothing to do with you at all. It was just being a coward with very good timing."

Saki was quiet.

"Say the last word again," she said.

"What?"

"You said anymore."

Ichika didn't answer.

"Icchan." Saki had gone very still. "Keep up with me anymore. That means there was a before."

Ichika got up off the floor and crossed the half meter of carpet and sat down next to her, shoulder to shoulder, against the bed. Saki let her.

"I'm going to say the rest of the sentence," Ichika said. "The one from Wednesday."

"You don't have to."

"I do, though. Don't I," Ichika looked straight in Saki's eyes. "Saki?"

Saki looked away, and then back, and didn't say anything, and her hands had stopped somewhere in the middle of it.

"I was going to say you didn't talk like this when you were in the hospital," Ichika said. "And what I meant—what I actually meant, underneath, and I've known it since Wednesday and I've been trying to find a way to say it that isn't disgusting, and there isn't one—is that I always knew where you were."

Saki didn't move.

"Every day at four," Ichika said. "For years. I always knew exactly where you were and exactly how to get there and that you'd be pleased to see me. And then you got better, and Honami got a whole—Honami got a life, she's got friends I've never met—and everybody went off and became people, and I'm so happy about it, Saki, I am so unbelievably happy about all of it, and also I don't know where anybody is anymore."

She heard her own voice go.

"And you got the furthest," Ichika said. "You went the furthest of anybody. You've got a whole language. You've got a whole life, you're out there all day experiencing more of it, you don't need anyone to come at four anymore. And I've got a list on my phone."

The room stayed quiet for a long time.

"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me," Saki said.

"I know."

"No, I mean—" Saki laughed, wetly, horribly. "I mean it's the worst thing because it's the same one. That's my one, Icchan. Do you know what the worst part of being in there was? It wasn't the—it wasn't any of the stuff you'd think. It was that it was the only time in my entire life I was ever completely certain where you were."

Ichika turned her head.

"Four o'clock," Saki said. "Every day. Sitting in that chair with your school bag still on. And I'd get better and I'd think, right, great, and then somewhere behind that I'd think—and then she won't come at four anymore. And then I'd feel like the single worst person who has ever lived, and I've never told anyone that, and I'm never telling anyone that again."

"I used to plan them," Ichika said. "The visits. On the train. I'd work out three things to tell you, because you'd ask what happened and I'd have to have something, and nothing ever happened, so I'd—I'd save things up. I'd notice a dog on Tuesday and hold on to it until Thursday."

"I know you did."

"You knew?"

"Icchan, you'd get to the third one and go all—" Saki did an impression, badly, of somebody arriving at the end of a list. "You'd get to the third one and then you'd have nothing left and you'd panic and start telling me about the weather."

"Oh my god."

"It was the best part of my day."

"The weather?"

"The panic," said Saki. "The panic was so, so good."

Ichika laughed with her whole face in her hands.

"I used to save things too," Saki said, after a while. "The other way around. I used to be really, really careful not to say certain stuff before four o'clock, so I'd still have it when you got there. Anything funny. If a nurse said something funny at eleven in the morning I'd just—" She mimed putting something in a pocket. "And carry it around all day."

"That's the same thing."

"It's the exact same thing. We were doing the exact same thing in the same room and neither of us said." Saki tipped her head back against the mattress. "That's so stupid. What is wrong with us. We're SO unwell." Saki put her hands over her face. "We're—oh my god, we're the same. We're the same person. That's so embarrassing. That's so much worse than us being different—"

Saki sniffed and wiped her face with her left sleeve and looked at her properly for the first time since she'd sat down.

"You've been doing it too," she said. "This week."

Ichika went still.

"Hona-chan told Shiho and Shiho told me, because apparently everyone in this band has opinions about everyone else's coping mechanisms now, which is so unfair to me specifically, I invented this—" She stopped herself, shook her head. "I notice everything about you, Icchan. That's kind of the whole problem we're having." It came out without any bite in it at all. "So don't. I mean it. You don't get to tell me not to get smaller and then go and do it yourself the second I'm not looking."

"Please stop holding your hands like that."

Saki looked down at them. They were folded in her lap, one on top of the other, and Ichika watched her register it—watched her find out, in real time, that she'd been doing it since Ichika walked in.

"Oh," Saki said.

"I've been thinking about it for two days and I think I'd genuinely rather you shouted at me for a year."

"You said I—" Saki's voice wobbled. "Icchan, you said I left you behind—"

"I said something that was about me and I aimed it at you." Ichika found she was crying and decided to allow it. "You didn't do anything. You got better. That's the—Saki, that's the whole thing, that's the thing I wanted more than anything I have ever wanted, I used to actually pray about it, and then it happened, and then I spent a year and a half quietly grieving it. Do you understand how insane that is? I've been sad about the best thing that ever happened. I'm sorry for being a selfish jerk."

Saki was crying now too, properly, in the way she did, which was mostly furious.

"So don't get smaller," Ichika said. "Don't you dare get smaller. I've watched you do it for two days and it's the worst thing I've ever seen and I made it happen."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want you to explain things to me."

Saki laughed. "Explaining it kills it."

"I know."

"It's like—it's dead, Icchan, it's a dead joke, you can't do anything with it after—"

"I know, Saki," Ichika said. "Do it anyway. Out loud. In front of everybody. Every single time. And I'll ask, so you don't have to guess."

Ichika got out her phone, and she opened the note, and she held it out.

Saki took it and looked at the screen and didn't say anything for a while. She scrolled. And scrolled. And scrolled, past this summer and back through the winter and the whole of last year, two hundred and eleven lines of a girl's small tidy definitions of her best friend.

"Oh, Icchan," she said.

"Don't."

"You've written them out like vocab—"

"I said don't."

"There's an example sentence—" Saki's voice went up two octaves. "There's an example sentence! You made example sentences! Who did you make it for?!"

"For myself!"

"That's—okay, that's actually kind of a W. The whole list is a W. I'm furious about it, but it's a W. I'm unironically proud of you for this, is the embarrassing part."

And then Saki made a noise, and Ichika braced, and it turned out to be a laugh—a real one, an enormous ugly wet one, the first one in three days.

"This one's wrong," Saki said.

"What?"

"This one. This is so wrong. Icchan, this is catastrophically wrong, you've had this in your head since June—?" She turned the screen around. "It doesn't mean that at all. Where did you even get that?"

"From context."

"From context—"

"You never explain anything!"

"Right." Saki wiped her face with her sleeve, sat up straighter, and put the phone on her knee. "Right. Okay. From the bottom. Number one—"

"Not number one. Number one's fine."

"Number one is not fine, number one is—" Saki squinted. "Okay, no, number one's fine. Number two."

"Number two is also fine."

"Number two is fine but you've got the tone wrong. You've written it like it's neutral. It's not neutral, it's—you'd only ever say it about something you'd already decided you were going to be annoying about. It's got a stance."

"How am I supposed to write down a stance?"

"I don't know! That's why it's a bad list!"

"It's a good list—"

"It's a beautiful list and it's completely wrong." Saki scrolled. "Oh, no. Oh, Icchan, no. This one."

"Which."

"Where did you learn this one?"

"You said it about the second-year girl with the thermos."

"I said it ironically."

Ichika stared at her. "How would I know that?"

"You'd—" Saki opened her mouth. Stopped. Sat with it. "Okay," she said, more quietly. "Okay, yeah, no, that's—yeah. You wouldn't. You couldn't have. There's nothing in the sentence that tells you."

"So what does it actually mean?"

"Nothing! That's the whole—it doesn't mean anything at all on its own, that's the point of it, it only means something because of who's saying it and what their face is doing—"

"Then how does anybody—"

"You have to be there, Icchan! You have to be there for like nine hundred hours! It's not a language, it's a—it's a haunted house, you have to have lived in it—"

Number three took eleven minutes. Number three had a diagram, which Saki drew on the back of the envelope, badly, and then rejected, and started again on the other side.

"—so it only works if you're slightly wrong about it on purpose, which is the whole reason you can't just—"

"You and your stupid brainrot."

Saki put the phone face-down on the carpet like she needed both hands for what was about to happen.

"Excuse me—"

"Number four."

"No. No, hang on—did you just—" She sat all the way up. "That's an unc sentence, Icchan. That's a Dad sentence. You sound like you're about to tell me to get a haircut and put a coat on and tie my shoelaces—"

"Number four, Saki."

"She's gone full unc. One evening. Chat, I've lost her, she's forty—"

"I've been forty this whole time," Ichika said. "You just couldn't tell because I never said anything."

Saki made a noise like a kettle and went over sideways onto the carpet.

Somewhere around the ninth entry Ichika got up off the carpet, while Saki was still going, and crossed the room and opened the curtains.

Then she picked up the coiled cable from the top of the keyboard, and unwound it, and plugged the keyboard back in.

Saki didn't stop talking. She was explaining something about a man in a video, at length, with her hands. But her eyes went with Ichika the whole way across the room and the whole way back, and when Ichika sat down again on the carpet Saki's voice did something small in the middle of a word and then carried on.

They went through forty of them before Tsukasa yelled up the stairs about dinner. Saki explained every one, badly, with digressions, and every single one of them died on contact, and by the eleventh entry they were both laughing so hard that Ichika had to lie down flat on the floor.

None of them were funny anymore.

It was the best evening of Ichika's entire year.

THE DAY

The first thing Ichika did when she got to the live house was find Saki's hands.

She was over by the loading door with her keyboard case on a cart, arguing cheerfully with a man twice her age about a cable, and her hair was doing something insane on one side, and her jacket was buttoned wrong. She had the cable in one hand. The other was going on the lid of the case, four fingers in sequence, the whole time she was talking, and had clearly been going for some while, and would evidently continue going for the foreseeable future.

Ichika stood in the doorway with her guitar on her back and had a small private moment about it.

Load-in was chaos. Shiho got into a dispute regarding the bass amp, which everyone had known she would; at one point she looked at it and muttered "clanker" at it under her breath like it owed her an explanation.

Ichika didn't know that one. She filed it out of habit, and then found she wasn't going to write it down, and decided to ask instead, out loud, at a time when at least two people would hear her do it.

Honami produced, from somewhere, a tin of something baked, and distributed it to the other three bands, and by seven o'clock Leo/need had exchanged contacts with another band.

Twenty minutes before doors, Ichika found the house tech and asked him to move her.

He looked at the stage plot, and then at her, and shrugged, and dragged her mic stand a meter and a half to the left—off the spot the guitarist stands in, off the spot she had stood in at every show they had ever played, and in tight against the side of the keyboard. Close enough that Saki would be able to hear her without a monitor. Then he tore off a strip of yellow tape and put down a fresh mark and went away.

Ichika didn't mention it to anybody.

She watched Saki find it, from across the room, about ten minutes later. Watched her stop. Watched her look at the tape, and then at the keyboard, and then work out what the distance was for. Watched her look up, and around, and find Ichika immediately, the way she always did, in any room, within about a second.

Neither of them said anything. Saki went over and put her foot on the mark for a moment, like she was checking it would hold.

Then she went back to arguing about the cable, and Ichika didn't check on it again.

The green room was the size of a bedroom and contained, at various points in the evening, eleven people, four guitars, a drum stool nobody claimed, and a box of oranges.

The second act went on. You could hear everything through the wall—not the words, just the shape, the low roar and then the flat silence between songs and then the roar again. Shiho put her headphones in and did not speak to anybody for forty minutes, which Honami explained was normal and good.

Honami handed out oranges.

Saki had gone quiet. Not the Thursday quiet—Ichika checked, carefully, twice—but a working quiet, sitting on the arm of a broken sofa with her hands on her knees, flexing her fingers open and closed, staring at the wall like it owed her money.

Ichika went and sat on the sofa arm next to her.

"Hey."

"Hey."

The second act finished something enormous next door. The roar came through the bricks.

"If I lose it," Saki said, to the wall.

"Then I'll give it to you again."

"Yeah, but after—"

"Saki." Ichika bumped her shoulder. "Then I'll give it to you again, and you'll come in on the second one, and four hundred people will go home not knowing anything happened. And then we'll get food. And on Monday I'm going to be so normal at you that you'll want to hit me. I'm not going to ask how you slept. Not once, all week."

Saki laughed at the wall.

"You'd forget."

"I keep lists," Ichika said. "I'm world class at it."

Saki looked at her hands for a while.

"Count me into the second one," she said. "Like properly, like the little nod thing. I keep losing the front of it."

"Okay."

"Even if it's not cool."

"It's not going to be cool," Ichika agreed. "I'm going to do it like a swimming teacher."

Saki laughed, once, a startled bark of it, and put her forehead on Ichika's shoulder for exactly two seconds—and then, without lifting her head, in a completely different voice, "Are you scared?"

Ichika looked down at the top of her head.

"Yes," she said.

Saki went still.

"You always say you're fine."

"I know."

"You've said you're fine about everything for two weeks."

"I know." Ichika found she meant it, saying it this time, in a way she hadn't the other times. "I'm scared the only reason I ever know where you are is that somebody wrote it in a calendar. I'm scared four hundred people are going to show up next time and I still won't know what half the words mean. I'm scared that the next time we go in, it'll still remember what happened in there." She breathed out. "There. That's three. I usually only manage three before I run out and start telling you about the weather."

Saki lifted her head and looked at her for a second, and something in her face had gone very soft.

"That was so much better than the weather," she said. "I loved it so much."

Somebody put their head around the door and said ten minutes, and she was up and moving and loud again before she was fully upright.

They waited in the wings while the crew reset the stage, in a corridor that smelled of dust and cable and someone else's cologne, close enough to the front that they could hear the room filling up on the other side of the black curtain—that specific pressure a crowd makes just by existing, before it's even made a sound.

Saki was vibrating. There was no other word for it. She'd run out of things to check—her keyboard, her mic level, Honami, her own reflection in a dark monitor screen—and now she was just standing very close to Ichika, yapping, because yapping was the only setting she had left.

"You're tweaking," Ichika said.

"I'm locked in. There's a difference. Also don't call me out like that, you don't just get to do that now—" Saki checked the monitor screen a fourth time. "Okay, I'm tweaking a little. You know what you look like right now," Saki said, apropos of nothing, "is a beautiful goldfish."

"You brought that up on your own. Nobody made you say that."

"I stand by it completely. Fully committed. Round little eyes, no idea what's coming, extremely portable—imagine being that consistently beautiful and not even knowing it, couldn't be me—"

"I'm not portable."

"You're so portable, Icchan, I could put you in a little bag—" Saki caught herself laughing at her own joke before she'd even finished it, the way she did when she was running on nerves instead of material. "Okay. New bit. We're lowkey goldfishmaxxing tonight. That's the whole vibe. Goldfishmaxxing."

"That's not a word."

"It is now. I've decided."

"You can't just make one."

"I can absolutely just make one. There's a whole ecosystem, Icchan, there's a process—but yes, fine, also, sometimes you can just make one." Saki wiped her palms on her skirt and checked the monitor screen again. "That one's ours, by the way. Say it's ours."

"It's ours."

"Not the internet's. Not the people Shiho keeps saying are coming next time. Just—"

"Saki."

"—a closed—"

"Saki."

Something in how Ichika said it made her stop.

Ichika had been holding this sentence since the station platform, the first afternoon, back when two weeks had sounded like a long time. She'd stopped expecting an opening for it somewhere around day nine. She made one instead.

"Saki, what the fuck."

Saki's whole face went through four expressions in under a second.

"ICCHAN."

"I've been trying to say that for two weeks."

"You—you swore. Backstage. Before we've even played—"

"I know."

"This is the most unhinged thing that has ever happened to me, and I say that as someone who has personally watched a man fight a vending machine—" Saki grabbed her own hair with both hands. "I'm having a whole crashout. A full one. In the wings. Two minutes before we go on. I'm never recovering. That's it. That's peak. That's the ceiling, there is no more ceiling above this ceiling. Okay. Tomorrow. We do the whole list. All two hundred and eleven, properly, I'm sitting you down—"

Saki caught herself.

"That's boring, though," Saki said, smaller. "That's such a boring thing to do to you. You really don't have to. If you'd rather just—"

"All two hundred and eleven," Ichika said. "In order. I'll bring a pen."

Saki blinked. "You'll bring a pen."

"I'll bring a pen."

Something in Saki's shoulders came down a full inch, the way it does when a held breath finally leaves.

"Okay," she said. "But not tonight. Tonight I've got other plans for us."

"What plans."

Saki turned to face her properly, and for once there was nothing performing in her expression at all.

"The MC bit," she said. "I want to change it. Right now, standing here, about to walk on."

"Saki—"

"I want you to ask me. Live. What something means—for real, in front of everyone, not just on my bedroom floor where nobody's watching and I can take it back if it goes badly. A little improv."

Ichika went very still.

"You hate not knowing how a joke's going to land."

"I hate it. I've never once in my life said a bit out loud without already knowing exactly how it goes." Saki's hands weren't quite steady. "But you asked me for real, once, and it was the best thing that's happened to me all year, and I don't want the version of us that only works in private. I want to find out if it works out there too. With you starting it. Not me."

"What if it doesn't land?"

"Then it doesn't land, and Shiho says something devastating right on cue, and we survive it, same as we've survived literally everything else this month." Saki held out a hand, not quite steady, in the dark of the wings. "Do you trust me to be bad at something in front of people?"

Ichika thought about a wet platform in October, and a girl she could have imitated forever, and how much easier that would have been than this.

"Yeah," she said. "Do you trust me to ask a question you don't already know the answer to?"

"God, yes." Saki's laugh came out wet and startled. "Obviously. Always did."

Down the corridor, someone called two minutes.

Ichika felt herself start counting without meaning to—pure habit, the old arithmetic, this makes it nine, nine is good, nine is a streak—and got about halfway through the sum before she noticed she was doing it, and let it go unfinished, for the first time since May. She didn't need the number tonight. Whatever happened out there wasn't going to be decided by a tally she'd been keeping since the day they got the band back.

Honami appeared at the end of the corridor already glowing. Shiho arrived a half-second later, already walking, already moving toward the light without checking to see if anyone followed, which was its own kind of faith.

Then she stopped, a meter short of the curtain, turned around, and put two fingers up.

The Star Piece. They had done it before every single thing they had ever played, including the ones that were just the four of them in a music room with the door shut.

Honami's came out to meet them. Then Ichika's. Then Saki's—both of them, because there were four of them and a star has five points, and it had been Saki's job to be two of them since they were eleven years old and nobody had ever once discussed it.

They got it wrong twice, the way they always got it wrong twice, because Honami's angle was never right and Shiho would die before mentioning it. Then it locked: five hands, fingertips touching, a small crooked star in a corridor that smelled of cable, with a hole in the middle of it.

Nobody said anything. It had a name and that was all it had ever had. Honami had tried to give it words exactly once, years ago, and Shiho had walked out of the room.

Ichika had a number for the shows. She had never once had a number for this. In ten years it had not occurred to her to keep one.

She looked at it instead—four girls and five points, Saki holding two sides of the shape at once, one hand on Honami and one on Shiho, doing the work of a person who wasn't there. Both of her thumbs were going. Four beats in sequence, on both sides of the star, the way they went on everything.

Then it came apart, all at once and without a signal, the way it always did.

Saki got one of hers over to Ichika before it had finished coming apart, and took her hand—unglamorous, sweaty, real—and didn't let go. And went on drumming against the back of it with her thumb, four beats in sequence, over and over, the entire time, without any apparent awareness that she was doing it at all.

"Hey, Icchan."

"Yeah."

"Say less?"

Ichika looked at her—a minute from a room full of people who had no idea what they were about to get—and shook her head.

"Say more," she said. "Come on."

They went out toward the light together, still holding on, before either of them had to find out how it went.