[POV: Nardia]

  At first, Miyu did something like a systems check.

  She didn’t break down crying. She didn’t lash out. She just sat there and looked around—quiet, steady, taking inventory.

  Her eyes tracked the cockpit like a map—console lights, harness buckles, the emergency latch on the canopy. She even checked her own hands, as if confirming they were hers.

  That was what scared me.

  Panic, I could handle. Anger, too. You knew where you stood with those. But silence that methodical? Silence that patient? It felt like waiting for a machine to finish booting.

  Humans make noise when they’re confused. Even if it’s just breathing too fast, or a half-choked laugh, or swearing at the universe. Confusion spills out.

  But Miyu… she felt like she was calculating something before she let a single sound escape.

  “…Um. Hey.”

  I picked my words carefully as I spoke. Miyu turned her face toward me, slow and deliberate.

  “…You… who…?”

  “Nardia. GDC. I’m training with Team Rashid.” I swallowed. “And you… you really were a high school student?”

  Miyu’s gaze drifted.

  Not drifting like she was distracted—more like it couldn’t focus. Like her eyes were rifling through old footage, searching for the right file.

  “…Uniform…”

  She murmured it under her breath, glanced down at her chest, confirmed there was nothing there, and frowned.

  “…Classroom… window… spring…”

  Fragments.

  Not a single picture—more like torn scraps from a photograph.

  “…A cat…”

  Her voice trembled, just a little.

  Emotion bled into it.

  “…A cat… in the road…”

  She closed her eyes. Then, in the next moment, she opened them again.

  The movement looked like a human choice. A decision made in the dark.

  “…I ran… I picked it up…”

  Her words jammed.

  They wouldn’t continue.

  They wouldn’t continue, but the pain got there first.

  I knew that pain—the kind you can’t put into language, the kind that makes your chest feel like it’s splitting.

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  “…A truck…”

  Not the whole scene. Just the sound—too loud, too close—like someone had torn the sky open with a horn.

  Miyu said it like she was spitting something out.

  “…It should’ve… hurt… but…”

  She stared at her own fingers.

  Her nails were too perfectly kept. The texture of her “skin” was too uniform. No color. No warmth.

  No trembling.

  Hands that looked like they wanted to shake, but didn’t know how.

  When she pinched her arm, the metal didn’t even flush. No imprint, no warmth rising afterward—just pressure against something that refused to behave like flesh.

  “…It doesn’t… hurt…”

  The way she said it hurt more than any sob.

  Miyu pinched her arm—hard.

  Her expression didn’t change.

  It didn’t change, but her eyes looked irritated, like her body was refusing to obey her expectations.

  “…Hey…”

  She looked at me.

  “…Is this… a dream?”

  “It’s not a dream.”

  Genichiro cut in, blunt as a dropped wrench. He had a maintenance terminal in one hand, still scrolling through wiring logs like he could bully reality into behaving.

  “If it was a dream, it wouldn’t have such a pain-in-the-ass startup procedure.”

  “…Pain in the ass…?” Miyu gave a tiny laugh.

  The laugh was stiff—like she’d learned it from watching someone else do it.

  “…Am I… a pain in the ass?”

  For a second, I almost said it.

  No. Of course not.

  That would’ve been easy.

  Reality wasn’t.

  So I chose different words.

  “The pain is the situation,” I said. “Not you.”

  Miyu’s eyes wavered, just a little.

  “…Situation…”

  “Yeah. You got caught up in something.”

  Miyu touched her throat.

  There was no pulse there.

  No beat. No living rhythm.

  But she still put her hand there—because that’s where she believed her ‘self’ was.

  “…Did I… die…?”

  The question was colder than space.

  I’d seen bodies before. Out here, you didn’t always get to look away. But Miyu wasn’t a corpse. She was present—aware, hurting, and somehow trapped inside a shell that wouldn’t let the hurt show.

  For a heartbeat, I couldn’t answer.

  Genichiro answered for me, as rough as gravel.

  “How the hell am I supposed to know if you died? But you’re here. You’re moving. That’s reality.”

  “…Reality…?”

  Miyu repeated the word over and over, like she was saying it aloud to feel its shape.

  Then her gaze slid past us, toward the cockpit window—toward the black.

  Space.

  A dark ocean.

  A swarm of drifting debris.

  “…This is… space…?”

  “It is,” I said.

  Miyu inhaled sharply.

  She did the motion—breath catching—yet I had no idea if she even had lungs.

  That contradiction was the scariest part.

  “…My home…”

  Miyu started, and the words collapsed.

  “…My mom…”

  That part wasn’t machine at all.

  That part was painfully, unmistakably human.

  Miyu covered her face with both hands.

  No tears came.

  Because no tears came, it looked worse—like the grief had nowhere to go and was eating her from the inside.

  “…I can’t cry…”

  Her voice shook.

  “…Did I forget… how to cry…?”

  I reached out and rested my hand on her shoulder.

  Cold metal seeped through my glove.

  But beyond the cold, I thought I could feel something—heat, buried deep.

  “You don’t have to cry,” I said softly. “If it hurts like this right now… you’re human.”

  Miyu lowered her hands.

  Her eyes met mine.

  “…Human…?”

  “At least,” I said, “that’s what I think.”

  Genichiro clicked his tongue.

  “If you’ve got time for comfort talk, pull information out of her. If we figure out the cause, we might figure out what to do about it.”

  Right. Practical. That was Genichiro—treat the impossible like a maintenance problem until it stopped being impossible.

  I nodded and tried to keep my voice gentle. “Miyu. Just one thing. The last moment you remember before the cat—what were you doing? Walking home? Leaving school?”

  “…What to do… like, can you fix it?” Miyu asked, clinging to the words like a rope.

  Genichiro went quiet for a moment.

  Then he answered, short.

  “It won’t be easy. But I’m not saying it’s zero.”

  That was his version of kindness.

  Sloppy. Awkward. But not a lie.

  Miyu nodded slowly.

  “…Then… I’ll cooperate…”

  And then, smaller:

  “…I… don’t want to disappear here.”

  My chest burned.

  I was scared.

  And I wanted to protect her.

  Both at the same time—an ugly contradiction I couldn’t throw away.

  So we’d carry it.

  And we’d get out of here anyway.

  As Genichiro turned back to his terminal, the screen hiccuped—one line of text flashing where it hadn’t been a second ago.

  USER PROFILE: MIYU — STATUS: INCOMPLETE

  Then it wiped itself clean, like it was embarrassed to have been seen.