1
I didn't sleep again.
I lay down, sure. Switched the light off, stared at nothing, waited for my body to trick itself.
It didn't.
By 06:00 the red numbers on the clock had marched forward in an honest, boring way. No rewinding, no tricks. The dust trail on the floor hadn't moved.
Fine grey streak from bed to door. Little fans of powder where my socks had pressed down.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and inspected my feet.
The dirt wasn't from this room. I knew every stain in this place; I'd contributed most of them. This powder was lighter, more granular, like the fine stuff that settles in places nobody has swept in years.
I rubbed my thumb along my heel again. It smeared into a faint grey crescent on my skin.
I wiped it on the sheet and left a mark there too.
If last night had been a hallucination, my brain had gone to the trouble of adding props.
Good taste.
I pulled one sock off carefully and folded it inside out, trapping the remaining dust. That went into the drawer next to the hospital envelope, as if the two belonged together.
Case file. Evidence.
My heart had steadied sometime after three. My thoughts hadn't.
I'd made two lists in my head while the numbers crawled toward morning.
Option one: I'd finally lost it. Years of being "that kid from that story" had caught up with me. Hallucination. Sleep disorder. Stress-induced dissociation. Any psychiatrist with a coat and a prescription pad could have a great time with it.
Option two: I had stood in the factory at 02:24 a.m. on the night my mother died, and some unpleasant law of reality had yanked me back to my bed before I got to meet the man who murdered her.
I wasn't sure which option disturbed me more.
2
Guardian shuffled out of his room around 06:30, hair sticking up, T-shirt bearing the logo of a ramen shop that no longer existed.
He yawned his way to the tiny kitchen and started water for coffee.
"Morning," he said, voice gravelly.
"Already?" I answered.
He grunted approval at the joke and reached for the jar of instant. We'd both given up pretending we were going to own a real coffee machine one day.
"You watch the coverage?" he asked without turning.
"Some," I said.
The kettle clicked off. He poured, stirred, took a sip, winced.
"They added more slow shots of that stone this year," he said. "Got a new angle on the factory too. Must have sent in a drone or something."
"Ratings," I said. "Can't just recycle the same drone every year."
He snorted. "You sleep at all?"
"Thought about it," I said.
He glanced over his shoulder at me. His eyes were bloodshot but focused.
"If you want me to call in sick for you, I can say your stomach's off," he offered.
We both knew I wasn't scheduled until late, but he liked to express concern through fake logistical problems.
"I'm fine," I said. It wasn't true in the clinical sense, but I could stand up and hold a conversation, which was the minimum standard.
He drank more coffee, making a face like every swallow was a personal insult.
"They're doing the sirens at noon," he added. "Two minutes silence, all that."
"Timed with 02:24?" I asked.
"Yeah. They like symmetry." He set his mug down. "You staying away from the site?"
He tried to say it casually. Failed.
I watched the steam rise from his drink and vanish.
"I'll be here," I said.
He searched my face for a moment, then nodded. It wasn't that he believed me; he just decided to trust me enough not to press.
We rotated around each other in the cramped space, the way people do when they've spent years not stepping on each other. He got ready for his shift. I rinsed my face in lukewarm water until my skin stung.
The dust trail on the floor sat in the corner of my vision like a stain nobody wanted to acknowledge.
3
He left at seven.
As soon as the door closed behind him, the apartment felt different. Not quieter; his presence never took up much sound. Just… emptier in the way a room does when you know nobody else is going to walk through it for a while.
The clock ticked over to 07:01.
I stood in the middle of the room and tried to remember every detail from the factory.
Concrete. The pattern on the chair seat. The layout of the corridor. The distance between the doorway and the spot where I'd appeared.
If last night had been real, the building in my head and the one still standing in the industrial district had to match somewhere.
If it hadn't, I'd still get some exercise and maybe an arrest for trespassing.
I grabbed my jacket, my wallet, and my keys.
The sock with the dust stayed in the drawer.
I wanted something untouched to compare.
4
The air outside had that washed-out quality morning gets after rain in this part of the city. Pavements damp, sky a flat pale sheet without enthusiasm.
Billboards along the main road had all put on black and white for the day. "NEVER FORGET ANGEL KUROZAWA" in bold letters above her photo. Smaller text about safety campaigns and courage and community.
People walked past them on the way to work, barely glancing up.
The factory sat two train stops and one bus ride away, in the old manufacturing zone the city kept threatening to "redevelop" and then forgetting again.
I kept my hood up and my eyes on the screen of my phone, pretending to scroll nothing in particular while the carriage rocked.
A woman in a suit across from me was reading an article titled Angel's Legacy: How One Tragedy Changed Our City's Laws. Her face didn't move the whole time.
The bus from the station was nearly empty. Memorial Day or not, nobody had business out there unless they worked in the logistics companies that still used the warehouses.
The factory came into view behind a line of bare trees. It looked smaller than on TV. The camera always made it loom; in person it was just a tired building that had been built cheaply and then left to fall apart.
Yellow tape blocked the main gate, mainly for show. The city loved symbols.
A little further off, in a small paved square, stood the memorial stone. A few people already gathered around it: an older woman with a bouquet, a cluster of students in uniforms, a man in a cheap suit holding a single flower as if he didn't know what to do with it.
I didn't go that way.
The fence had more than one weak point. Signs warned about danger, security, prosecution. The paint had flaked off in sections.
I found the same gap every bored teenager had found over the past twenty years and slipped through.
5
Inside the fence, the air changed.
Quieter. Not because it was really any more silent, but because the city sounds—traffic, announcements, someone shouting into a phone—were suddenly further away.
I crossed the rough ground in front of the building. Broken glass crunched under my shoes in places; weeds pushed through cracks in the concrete like they'd been trying for a long time and finally succeeded.
The factory doors had been chained once. The chain lay on the ground now, cut cleanly at one link. Journalists, probably. Or bored kids. Or cops who wanted easier access for annual reenactments.
I stepped through.
Inside, dust swallowed my footsteps. It lay thick on the floor in drifts and thin films, disturbed here and there by older tracks.
The smell hit me in layers.
Rust, old oil, mold. Underneath it all, something faint that might have been smoke from long-ago machines, or just my imagination.
It didn't smell like blood. Not anymore. Two decades and several clean-up crews erase a lot.
I stood just inside the entrance for a moment and let my eyes adjust.
Broken windows let in strips of light. Old machinery hunched in the shadows, hulks with cables hanging down like dead vines.
My heartbeat picked up. Not from fear of the place itself, but because my brain started overlaying last night's vision on top of it, like tracing paper.
The corridor from my dream hadn't been on the ground floor.
I'd have to go up.
6
The stairs to the second floor had lost their railing on one side. A "NO ENTRY" sign lay face-down on the first landing.
I tested each step with my weight before committing. The concrete held, though it complained with little falls of grit.
On the second floor, long rooms stretched away, filled with more machines and tables where people had once stood and done repetitive tasks until the site closed.
The corridor I remembered had been narrower, more confined.
I turned left.
The factory was a maze built by someone who didn't care about navigation. Corridors led into rooms that led into more corridors. Some doors hung off their hinges. Others were jammed half-shut.
I moved from one strip of light to another, past peeling paint and old safety posters still clinging to the walls.
After ten minutes of wandering, I found it.
The space on my retina and the hallway in front of me matched.
Same width. Same proportions. Same slight narrowing toward the far end.
My hands felt cold, despite the jacket.
Halfway down, a single bulb socket still jutted from the ceiling. No bulb now, just the metal base.
Rust stains marked the concrete beneath it in vague dark circles.
My chest tightened.
I walked to that spot.
Standing there made my stomach lurch in a way that had nothing to do with height or hunger.
Last night I'd arrived facing the chair, Angel just a few steps away. Now there was only empty floor, rough with years of dust and grit.
I knelt and brushed the surface with my fingertips.
My touch left lines in the powder.
Beneath the dust, faint and pale, something had marked the concrete. Four small circles in a rectangle, like where chair legs had once stood for a long time and worn their presence into the stone.
If you didn't know to look, you'd miss it.
I knew to look.
Heat pricked the back of my neck.
Either I'd memorized a random corridor too well from television and tried to force my imagination onto it, or I'd been standing here while my mother tried not to fall apart.
The second explanation felt less ridiculous.
7
My phone said 11:47.
Outside, the memorial crowd would be growing. The officials would be getting ready to say their lines. Speakers checked, cameras framed, someone testing the siren system.
I stayed where I was.
The city would stand still at noon for her. Two minutes, one for each of those missing scores on the clock in the operating room.
It seemed fitting to spend it in the place that had made those two minutes necessary.
I sat with my back against the wall, down where Angel's chair had been, and rested my forearms on my knees.
The concrete was cold through my jeans.
Dust settled on my jacket and didn't care about anniversaries.
If I closed my eyes, I could place the elements of last night's vision onto this space.
Light above. Rope. Her breathing.
Those boots approaching from further down the corridor.
My hand curled unconsciously into a fist. Fingernails bit my palm.
I opened my eyes.
The hallway remained solid. My knuckles hurt. No sudden transportation.
My pulse eased down a notch.
"So it only happens when you feel like it," I muttered.
The clock on my phone read 11:58.
8
Outside, faint through the building, a siren rose.
Not a full emergency wail, just a long held tone, steady and flat. The city's way of telling everyone it was time to pause and pretend we were thinking about the same thing.
I stood up.
The hairs on my arms lifted.
Sound carried strangely through all the walls and empty rooms, losing sharpness and gaining a sort of weight.
I looked up at the empty bulb socket.
"Angel," I said quietly.
Nothing shifted.
No instant plunge back into night.
The siren continued outside, then faded. Silence pushed back in.
I checked the time again.
12:00.
"Angel Kurozawa," I said, clearer.
Still nothing.
Relief and frustration wrestled in my chest.
Part of me had wanted proof. Part had wanted to be wrong.
I took a slow breath, tasting dust.
"What did they do to you before they put you in that chair?" I asked the empty air.
My voice bounced down the hallway, thin and quickly swallowed.
The phone in my hand warmed.
The battery icon dipped a percentage.
Real life, reminding me it existed.
I slid the device into my pocket.
One more test.
I stepped back onto the faint marks of the chair legs and said, "Angel."
9
The world didn't flip.
It leaned.
Concrete under my feet stayed firm, but everything around it tilted sideways in some invisible direction. My stomach reacted like an elevator taking off too fast.
The light from the broken windows dimmed. Not all at once, but as if someone were gently pinching it away.
The air thickened again. That same pressure as last time, like a hand had closed around the entire space.
My skin prickled.
This time I knew enough to stay still and pay attention.
A low vibration settled in my teeth. My ears popped as if I'd changed altitude.
My brain offered a half-dozen explanations—panic attack, oxygen levels, structural instability—then gave up and watched.
Colour drained from the corridor. The peeling green on the walls faded to a uniform grey. The rust stains lost their shape.
The dust stirred.
Not from a gust, not from footsteps, but from something... rearranging the way time lay over this particular stretch of floor.
I kept my balance by focusing on my own breathing.
In, out. Count. Again.
Then the building let go of me.
10
Sound came back as traffic.
Not the distant, faint noise from earlier, but close, varied, right on the other side of a thin wall.
I wasn't in the hallway anymore.
I stood on a street corner.
The world had colour again, but it was the wrong kind.
The billboards were different. No digital screens. Big painted boards with catchy slogans and smiling people advertising soft drinks and cram schools.
The cars looked familiar, but older. Boxier shapes. Different license plates. Fewer of them.
Overhead wires crisscrossed the sky in dense lines.
My clothes were the same. My jacket, my jeans, my shoes. My phone was still in my hand, but when I jabbed the power button, the screen stayed black.
No battery. No service. No anything.
The air smelled cleaner. Less exhaust, more rain and concrete.
A group of students in uniforms walked past me, chatting. Their haircuts, their bags, their lack of earbuds put them in the wrong decade.
My heart climbed into my throat.
I turned slowly.
Behind me, across the road, stood the factory.
Not sagging. Not abandoned.
Windows intact. Paint not yet peeled. No fence, no warning tape, no memorial stone.
The company logo still shone on a sign above the main doors.
A white van drove past the entrance, turned into the yard, and rolled to a stop.
The clock on the bank down the street, mounted high on the wall, showed 19:38.
The date beneath it: 11 / 08.
A young woman walked along the sidewalk on the opposite side.
School bag. Cram school folder tucked under one arm. Hair pulled back with a cheap clip. The same face as the grainy photo, only moving now, frowning slightly as she checked the time on a little silver watch.
Angel Kurozawa.
Alive, annoyed, late for something.
I watched her pass the factory gates without slowing down.
The part of me that had spent years staring at that name on paper took one step forward.
The rest of me followed.