There was no sky.

  When Yurie looked up, a gigantic brass gear sat motionless overhead, sealing off the heavens like a lid. It filled her entire view.

  It wasn’t turning. It wasn’t turning—and yet it was heavy. The sky was heavy. Just lifting her gaze made her neck feel like it would grind at the bone.

  The smell rising from underfoot was iron-rust, and it hit her lungs with a scorched, sour discomfort. The moment she inhaled, the back of her throat went gritty. Dry, powdery air clung to her membranes like dust that had decided it belonged there. She licked her lips—nothing but dryness. She reflexively let out a shallow breath—no white puff, no warmth. Only cold.

  This wasn’t a floor.

  It was screws by the thousand, snapped mainsprings, peeled-off clock faces. Parts that had kept only their shape lay piled and layered like corpses of time.

  Time had stopped flowing here, crumbled into dust, and fallen in hard, metallic drifts. Every step drove a sharp corner up into the sole of her white shoe. An ugly sound rang out—rang out, and yet didn’t echo. The space offered no reflection, no return, but her inner ear still felt scraped raw by it.

  “…This is gross.”

  The mutter was swallowed by the still air and disappeared. Yurie swallowed. Nothing changed. This place was missing what living breath always brought with it—moisture, warmth, the faint presence of life. It was the same thick silence that had sunk into her room after the funeral, after everyone left—only here it had been given a body.

  Silence existed here like a kind of sound. There was no noise, only pressure. Her heartbeat felt obnoxiously loud.

  “Standing still won’t show you anything. What, you want to end up as a specimen?”

  Mermi’s voice cut through from half a step ahead, cold as metal. Her golden coat lifted proudly along her spine, and she radiated a brazen will with her whole small body. In this gray world, her back looked like the only thing that carried real body heat.

  —Only looked. A distance Yurie couldn’t touch. Half a step ahead.

  “What are you spacing out for? This is a graveyard for things people love because they don’t move. If you want to join the unmoving junk along with that empty Gamaguchi of yours, I won’t stop you.”

  Mermi sniffed, quick and sharp. In the dry air, that tiny sound was bizarrely vivid. Her sarcastic gaze pinned Yurie’s trembling fingers in place.

  Mermi’s words weren’t comfort. They were meant to cut weakness away. At the same time, they were a provocation, feeding Mermi’s furious irritation at Yurie’s inability to move.

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  Panic tightened Yurie’s throat. Her fingers clenched around the Gamaguchi’s strap until blood seemed to drain from them. Leather bit into skin; her nails blanched.

  It hurt.

  That hurt was, barely, life.

  If she stayed inside this dead-stillness, she would become another inorganic lump of plastic. That wasn’t a feeling so much as a verdict. Instinct put it plainly: the unmoving won here.

  “…If you want to move,” Mermi said, “then win it for yourself.”

  She didn’t turn around. She didn’t turn around—and still she stated it like a verdict, speaking over her shoulder.

  “Of course, that’s only if you’re prepared to carry that ‘pain’—the price of moving—for the rest of your life.”

  In the center of the workshop stood a massive workbench. Its brown paint had worn thin, leaving a warped wooden surface that caught the light with an unsettling sheen. It was wood, and yet there was no smell of wood. Only oil, rust, and the rotten stench of time.

  Mermi gathered herself and sprang lightly toward it.

  That was the moment—

  “—Kyaaaan!”

  A razor-sharp yelp, like something breaking, stabbed straight through the center of the world.

  It wasn’t Mermi’s voice. And yet it was unmistakably the aftershock of an “anomaly” burned into the deepest part of Yurie’s mind—an injury that never faded.

  Her chest tightened on its own. Her throat closed on its own. Her breath stopped.

  Her vision warped, rippling like heat. Color peeled away, and the filter that had covered the world was torn off with violence.

  Beyond the workbench, a bizarre shadow with four arms—the Magician—toyed with a single rusted silver needle, wearing a flat, inorganic sneer.

  Four arms moved in a steady rhythm. Like a puppet. The joints were just slightly… off. Off—and yet the needle tip was grotesquely precise.

  The needle spun once between fingers. A petal of rust dust drifted up and hung in the air.

  There was no thread. No thread anywhere. Still, the Magician traced the air with the hands of someone sewing.

  Click.

  The needle made the sound of touching something—though there was nothing to see. In the next instant, Yurie’s chest clenched hard.

  Her breath—cut off halfway.

  Sewn.

  That was the thought. As if the back of her throat had been lifted for a single stitch.

  The needle hadn’t touched Mermi. And yet Mermi’s legs kept trembling. As if invisible nails had pinned her down, and only her freedom was being ripped away.

  That needle was trying to sew the world’s time in place. To sew Mermi’s freedom in place. To sew the very phenomenon of “not being able to move” itself—

  forever.

  Yurie couldn’t blink. Her eyelids trembled, but they wouldn’t fall. The scene in front of her began to fix itself in place, as if it had been stitched to her eyes.

  “Mermi!”

  The shout she tried to throw out came out thin, swallowed by the stale air. *Help her—*the command screamed inside her, and yet Yurie’s feet wouldn’t move, as if they’d been sewn to the metal shards underfoot.

  Move. Move, move, move!

  (Why am I always like this?!)

  A scream swelled inside her, about to become a voice. She couldn’t do anything. She could only watch—back then, too. Now, too. The sensation of “not making it in time” crawled over her body and took control.

  The version of herself that couldn’t extend even a fingertip was nauseating—so hateful she wanted to kill it.

  She wanted to crush it. Break it. Tear it apart.

  And still her legs wouldn’t move.

  Self-disgust squeezed her organs barehanded. She didn’t know the reason. The meaning. The origin. But as the golden fur in front of her began to collapse, she swore she would never forgive the self who only stood there.

  Never forgive. Not this time. This time, she would move.

  “…Yuri! Don’t you dare freeze up!”

  That voice made her spine jump.

  Who’s frightened? I’m frightened.

  And in that moment, the enormous brass gear that should have been motionless—

  answered the pounding that burned in Yurie’s throat.

  Girrrii.

  With an ominous grind, it began to turn in reverse.