The sky opened and let the rain come down like a confession.
Akira stumbled out of the facility into a world lit by alarm strobes and wet neon. His clothes clung to him; the cold rain was a slap that kept him from collapsing. Sirens wailed somewhere far away — metal teeth chewing the night.
He kept walking without really deciding to. The building behind him burned faint light through the mist. The words on the screen still echoed in his skull: SUBJECT C: LOCATION — UNKNOWN.
Yumi was gone.
The thought was a physical thing, heavy and terrible. He had held her. He had felt her breath. He had seen the flash of recognition in her face. Then smoke and white light and emptiness.
They were looking for them now. Whoever had stoked Project Yūgen into life wanted control — or release. Either way, Akira had opened a door that would not close.
His phone buzzed. An unfamiliar number: three short tones, then a voice he both hated and needed.
"Akira."
Hayato's voice, thin through cold static. Calm. Too calm.
"Where are you?" Akira snapped.
"A safe place," Hayato said. "Not far. You need to come with me. Now."
The rain did not listen. Akira blinked and noticed for the first time that his hands were shaking — not from cold, but from whatever else crawled beneath his skin. The double's laugh, the machine's voice, the way his own reflection had split for a second and shown two eye-colors. He felt the seam along his ribs, the place where memory met invention. He felt watched from the inside.
"Why should I trust you?" he whispered.
Hayato was quiet a moment. Then: "Because I saw what they did, Akira. Because I saw the files. Because I want him stopped as much as you do. Come. Before they find you."
The voice held enough truth that Akira followed it — not because he trusted Hayato, but because there was nowhere else to go.
Hayato's car was waiting two blocks away, engine idling like a predator. He slid into the back seat without asking, drenched, shaking, eyes hollow with a new kind of purpose. Hayato drove without music, the windshield flashing with city lights.
"You could've called the police," Akira said after a long silence.
Hayato's jaw tightened. "And tell them what? That a clandestine experiment tore a family apart? The police are the same people who erased the records. They'll only bring cameras and questions and the men who made this mess. We go quiet. We go correct."
"Correct how?" Akira's voice was raw. "You offer me… what? Alliance?"
"Not an alliance," Hayato said. "A choice. Help me stop them, and I'll help you find Yumi. Refuse, and I'll make sure you disappear before they do something worse to her."
Akira looked at him. For the first time, Hayato's face was not an unreadable mask but a map of decisions. He had the look of someone who had been given an impossible job and taken it.
"We need a plan," Hayato said. "The facility we just burned — it was a local node. There are more. They won't stop until they have the synchronization they were denied. We keep moving. Find the network. Disrupt the flow. And find Subject C."
Subject C. The name tasted like iron in his mouth. Yumi reduced to a code. He swallowed and found his voice quieter, steadier. "How do we start?"
Hayato took a breath. "We start where it always begins: the files."
They moved through the city like whispers, slipping into an apartment with no name. Hayato unlocked a cupboard and pulled out a small hard drive wrapped in a plastic bag. He plugged it into an old laptop and watched the screen like a priest at an altar.
Rows of files scrolled. Blueprints. Names. The same cold terms: synchronization, emotional anchor, phase activation. But beneath the sterile headers there were human notes: patient reactions, surgical diagrams, dates. The handwriting on one JPG made Akira's skin rise:
Subject A exhibited dissociative consolidation. Subject B emergent autonomy. Subject C stable; possible vector for re-synthesis.
Akira's breath hitched. "My father's notes," he said. He hadn't known the handwriting then — but now the loops and slants were a fossil he could read. "This is him."
Hayato looked at him hard. "It wasn't only your father. There are corporations, private contractors, people who wanted a weapon or a miracle. We'll need to cut through all of them."
As they worked, the rain outside slowed to a hush. In the screen's glow, Akira watched old footage labeled YÜGEN-03. Subject C laughing — a classroom, sunlight, a child's voice that could have been Yumi's. The footage shifted. Laboratory lights. Masks. A man's voice in the background—his father, crisp and clinical.
Hayato's hand hovered over the keyboard. "There's a tag I didn't expect," he said. "Phase Two. Activation protocol. And—" he paused, the type of pause that means someone just found a buried body — "a file labeled OPERATOR: HAYATO-1."
Akira looked up, feeling the room tilt. "Hayato—?"
Hayato's eyes did not flinch. "I was part of containment," he said. "I wasn't always on the other side. I thought I could stop it from within. I was wrong."
"You lied to me," Akira said, and the words were not only accusation but a recognition of how tangled the world had become.
"Maybe," Hayato said. "But right now the only thing that matters is Yumi."
Akira wanted to hate him. He wanted to push away, to run, to let the double's voice slide back into his skull and calm him with easy lies. But the knowledge of Yumi's pale face, empty eyes — it was the only tether left. Hatred could wait. Rescue could not.
They followed trails through dead servers and scrubbed email addresses, pulling threads that formed a map: three active nodes, two in the city, one north of it at a compound with the same architectural hints as the lab under his old school. A name kept popping up: Kawachi Biomed—a shell corporation with government contracts and private funds.
"We hit the data center at dawn," Hayato said. "We pull the logs. We find who's moving Subject C. Then we go to the compound."
Akira should have felt a surge of strategy, of purpose. Instead he felt hollow and focused. The double's voice — like a second breath — nuzzled the back of his throat, urging patience, cunning, surrender.
He slammed a palm on the table. "No tactics. No waiting. If they move her again, we lose her. We go now."
Hayato's mouth tightened like a wire pulled taut. "That's suicide."
"Then we die trying," Akira said. "I don't care what the rest of the world thinks of me. I don't care if they brand me murderer or monster. I'll take down every lab and every file that breathes on my name. But I will not sit and watch them turn her into a code."
Hayato's expression softened almost imperceptibly. "Then let's make sure we die with a plan."
They left at midnight.
The city that had felt like a million anonymous faces earlier now felt like a watchful crowd. Every light a camera. Every alley a possible trap. Akira moved with a new kind of focus — his body no longer only an instrument of fear but of purpose. The double inside him quieted, not defeated, but distracted. For the first time since the first note, Akira felt something that resembled control.
They reached the first node without incident: an unmarked server farm humming behind a chain-link fence. Hayato scaled the wall with the calm of someone who had done this many times. Akira followed, breath loud in his ears.
Inside, the servers were a forest of blinking lights. Hayato worked with practiced hands, plugging in a device that whispered secrets to the machines. Files unspooled. Access granted. Names appeared. A data stream directed to the north.
They copied everything they could. Logs, transfers, timestamps. The files painted a path: TONIGHT — SUBJECT C MOVE TO SITE KAWACHI / 0300H.
Akira's heart hitched, then steadied into a drum. Kawachi Biomed. The compound north of the city. The place that would either save Yumi or end her for good.
"This is it," Hayato said. "We either get her, or they erase everything."
Akira stared at the scrolling code and for a moment he saw the two of them: himself and the double, sitting side by side, watching the same file, deciding whether to survive or to be finished. A cold, threaded thought cut through the thunder in his head.
If he failed, if Yumi became a ghost inside their machines, if the double won—then the world would rewrite him without asking.
He wiped rain from his face, clenched his jaw, and whispered to whatever part of him still listened: "Then don't let it."
Lightning split the sky.
They drove north toward Kawachi.
Behind them, the city breathed and forgot, but the network remembered everything.