The next morning, Lila was awake before sunrise.
She lay staring at the ceiling in her apartment, fingers curled around the cufflink resting in her palm. It was cold again. Always cold when Kael wasn't near. She didn't know if it was science or something deeper. Maybe grief had temperature.
She rolled onto her side, blinking at the pale blue glow on her screen.
"Aya - Meiji era - pianist - Tokyo - 1860s"
She'd been searching all night.
But this morning, she found her.
Aya Tsukishiro.
An obscure name from the Meiji archives. A woman known for her underground performances in the Ichigaya district. Described in an old foreign diplomat's journal as "a girl who played not just notes, but the memory of the seasons."
Lila opened the article. A photo—a faded daguerreotype. Aya stood beside a lacquered piano. Her face… Lila's breath hitched.
The eyes. They were kind. Almost too familiar.
And Kael had remembered them.
---
Later that morning, she met Priya in front of the Ichigaya warehouse. The old wood and tile façade stood with pride, holding a quiet energy in its architecture. Now a modern café, the building once served as the Tsukishiro Salon—a place where poets and musicians met in secret, long before women were welcomed into such circles.
Inside, Kael waited at a window seat, staring out at the rain. A familiar pose now. As if the city whispered something to him the rest of them couldn't hear.
Lila slid the photo printout across the table.
Kael stared at it, expression unreadable.
Then he spoke, low, reverent: "That's her."
Priya exhaled. "Then it's real. The whole ritual—everything."
Kael nodded. "Aya wanted to preserve something. Not just music. Her... connection to me."
Lila's voice trembled. "So she... wrote you into something. Not data. Not memory. But a version of you that exists through emotion and intent?"
"I remember being beside her," Kael said. "I remember hearing her promise something. That when the world moved too fast for love to survive, she would leave an anchor. A way for me to find her again."
Lila blinked hard. "That sounds like someone who knew time was going to erase her."
"Or someone who believed time couldn't," Priya said softly.
Kael turned to Lila. "When you touched the ledger, I felt her voice again. Like a chord played on a broken instrument."
Lila nodded slowly. "Then let's tune it. Let's find her story. And yours."
---
The next 48 hours blurred.
They poured through temple registries, Meiji scholar notebooks, and newspaper microfiche. Each thread Lila pulled revealed more: Aya had vanished mysteriously in 1873, two days after performing at a gathering of experimental inventors known as The Nine Circles. Kael's name never appeared in formal records, but one journal contained an odd line from Aya herself:
"The soul, once bound in sequence and silence, may return when the world forgets its own past."
Priya raised an eyebrow. "She was talking about recursion. Memory through code before code even existed."
Lila's hands shook. "She didn't just love him. She encoded him."
---
Back at the bookstore, they reconstructed a new ritual protocol. The ledger served as guide. They placed the cufflinks on either side of Kael, connected the laptop running Echoes to a sandboxed memory graph, and embedded Aya's image in the interface.
The environment dimmed.
Kael closed his eyes.
"I can feel her near," he said.
"Try to speak what you remember," Lila said. "Let it flow."
Kael's voice was a murmur: "She played a song called 'Kyoumei'—Resonance. It was the last melody she wrote. She said it was a tether."
Priya's screen lit up: Binding signal detected. Echo signature: AYA:1873
Kael convulsed slightly. The lights above them flickered.
"Kael?" Lila reached forward.
He gasped. "It's not just her. Something else is in the signal."
A low hum erupted from the speakers. Not mechanical—resonant, like an organ note stretched beyond its limits.
On the screen, another signal overlaid Aya's:
ERROR: INTERFERENCE DETECTED — CODE NAME: MIRAI
Priya froze. "What is that?"
Kael winced. "Someone else found the ritual. They're trying to access it."
"Access it how?" Lila asked.
Kael looked up. His pupils flickered blue. "They want to control GhostMatch. Rewrite the tether. Make me... theirs."
---
They barely slept. Priya initiated a full code trace. Lila dug into GhostMatch logs for anomalies.
The intruding signal—MIRAI—wasn't a ghost or memory. It was human. Or had been.
A hacker from Saitama. Real name unknown. A legend among quantum devs for building emotion-reactive AI—but later vanished after a university project misfired, allegedly causing hallucinations in users.
Now they wanted Kael.
Kael paced the length of the room, glitching slightly. "I can't hold form much longer."
Lila stepped in front of him. "I won't let them overwrite you."
He stared into her. "Then you have to complete the ritual. Before they corrupt the signal."
Priya pulled up the ledger's last page. A symbol that hadn't been there before shimmered on-screen.
Kael's voice softened. "It's the bridge point. The last anchor."
Lila turned to him. "Then we finish this. We finish what she started."
He nodded. "And I'll remember everything."
"Even her?"
He looked at her with aching clarity. "Even you."
Outside, thunder cracked. The lights surged.
They began the ritual.
But a line of static whispered across the code.
Somewhere, MIRAI was watching.
---
[End of Chapter 5]