The temperature dropped. Frost spiderwebbed across the glass case. And then, between one blink and the next, a figure stood at the far end of the table.

“You want me to change the records,” she said.

But her heart—her foolish, romantic, truth-starved heart—reached for a pen.

Not a flutter. A deliberate slide, as if pushed by an invisible finger. The poem had repositioned itself by three centimeters. Honami stumbled backward, knocking over a stack of restoration tools. The clatter was obscene in that holy quiet.