A white shadow stood outside the train window.
Beside the tracks that cut across the sandy plains, near the leaning wreckage of a signpost, a white, human-shaped silhouette drifted vaguely in the haze. Koyoi pressed his forehead against the glass and squinted.
The shadow had no face. Its form below the shoulders was blurred, shimmering as if dissolving into the swirling dust and heat haze. Yet, it was undeniably looking this way.
It had a gaze. Even without a face, the weight of its stare remained.
The droplet inside Koyoi's pouch trembled faintly. It wasn't a tremor of fear, but a vibration closer to sorrow.
"...What is that?"
Asahi gestured toward the window with a tilt of his chin. His hand rested on the hilt of his greatsword, but he made no move to draw it. He had likely judged that it wasn't an opponent one could strike from inside a train.
Kuon narrowed his prosthetic eye. The blue light within attempted to focus on the white shadow, but the glow simply passed through it.
"I can't read it. It isn't recognized as an object of observation. There is no reaction from the Catalog."
It meant the being had been erased from the records. Something without a name, unrecorded, belonging nowhere in the observers' classification system. A bleached remnant of a memory, lingering there in the mere shape of a human.
Koyoi placed his hand against the window. Through the glass, the white shadow’s outline wavered slightly.
"...I think they're waiting."
"Waiting?"
"For their name. Standing here, all this time."
Kuon said nothing. He dimmed the light of his prosthetic eye and closed the Catalog. He knew the cruelty of trying to force a reading on something that could not be read.
The train picked up speed. The wheels bit into the sand, and the screech of iron echoed through the carriage. The white shadow began to slide toward the edge of the window.
Koyoi didn’t take his hand away. The shadow was pushed to the corner of his vision, eventually sinking into the dust. In the final moment, the white silhouette tilted slightly.
It looked as if it were bowing its head.
Or perhaps, it had simply begun to crumble. Once the train passed, it would no longer be visible to anyone. It was uncertain if another train would ever pass this way again.
The droplet in his pouch pulsed one last time. Small and quiet. As if to say: I remember.
Koyoi lowered his hand and pulled the pouch back to his chest. The place where the white shadow had stood had already returned to the color of the sand. Only the vibration of the train remained, steady against the soles of his feet.