At the far end of the street, the cobblestones ended.
Beyond them, a single track stretched into the distance. It was a station with no roof and no benches—only two stone pillars marking the boundary.
Koyoi stood between the pillars, staring into the white expanse. There was nothing there, yet the faint screech of grinding iron still lingered in the depths of her ears.
"This is the place."
Kuon closed his manifest. The blue pulse of his prosthetic eye was slower than it had been moments ago.
"Now, we just wait. It won't take long."
Asahi knelt by the tracks, retightening the cloth around his left arm. The bleeding had stopped, but his fingers were still stiff.
"I’ve never been good at waiting."
"That’s because you’ve spent your whole life running," Kuon replied curtly.
Koyoi felt her shoulders relax slightly at the sound of his voice.
In this white void, time felt formless and fragile. Even when she tried to count the beats, the rhythm slipped away immediately. She touched the pouch at her side, using the pulse of the Shizuku as her anchor.
It was steady—but it was too steady, and that was frightening.
A metallic ring echoed from far off, followed by a low vibration that reached the soles of her feet.
"Asahi, can you stand?"
"No problem."
The three of them moved closer to the tracks. From the depths of the white, a single car emerged with a pale blue lantern hanging from its front.
The train approached soundlessly, coming to a halt with a heavy sigh. When the doors opened, air of a different temperature spilled out. It smelled of paper and oil—a sharp contrast to the odorless void of the Lunar Gorge.
Koyoi stepped inside, and the creak of the floorboards beneath her feet felt strangely reassuring.
"We can move on."
Kuon took one last look down the tracks and gave a low nod.
"From here on, we are nearing the Core. The records will start flowing backward. Don't believe everything you see."
Asahi tapped the edge of the doorway.
"In that case, I’ll just decide who I do believe. You two."
The train began to move. The stone pillars slipped behind them, and the white station faded away, its very silhouette dissolving.
Outside the window, thin lines began to race across the floor of the white. One, then another—layers of overlapping records beginning to surface like the cross-section of geological strata.
Koyoi shifted her hold on the pouch as the Shizuku gave a single, deep thrum. It was a beat that announced they were close to the deep-layer Core.
In the train window, the stone pillars from moments ago appeared for a fleeting second. Even though the real ones were long gone, their image seemed to chase them.
Koyoi didn't look away, watching until the reflection vanished. She didn't want the place they had left behind to become a blur.
"That station... do you think we could go back if we wanted to?"
Kuon considered her question for a moment before answering.
"We could. But it wouldn't be the same shape. The record layer has already sunk another level."
Asahi leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
"Then we’ll just have to give ourselves more reasons to return. So that next time, we don't leave anything behind."
Koyoi nodded. To move forward, they had to remember precisely what they had passed through. That discipline had kept them alive more than once.
Kuon began in a low voice, sorting what they knew from what they didn’t. Koyoi mirrored each point in her ledger. Asahi kept his hand off his blade, checking sightlines and exits instead. They aligned themselves before the next step—because in a crisis, clarity mattered more than speed.