Rin snatched up the blueprints that lay on his lap and pretended to study them until the other two left him alone. It was very much pretend; he couldn’t focus on them, not after what he’d just experienced.

What was left of the picture frame lay shattered across the floor, fragments of dusty glass scattered across the fading carpet. The nearby wall had a sizeable dent from the impact. Rin stood still for a moment longer. He gazed up, eyes closed, at the solitary bulb in the ceiling in hopes the light would…

It was surprising how much noise a conversation could endure, if you came to think about it. The human ear has a neat trick of filtering out conflicting background noise, and honing in on the subject’s focus. Of course, that only really works for crowds and chatter-filled gatherings. When the only sound apart from that…

Rin then became acutely aware of just how small he really was. He looked down, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The ground seemed miles away, vast stretches of tarmac beneath him as he soared. The distance between the building he’d stood on originally and his house had once seemed achievable. Now, though? He wondered whether…

Nagora Ibuse had been assigned lead investigator into this case. He had just finished interviewing the last of the witnesses from Senketsu High School. He hadn’t slept a wink since then. Strong coffee was all that was keeping him conscious for the time being.

The crowds were immense. Kinuka Amibari had been in busy places before, but nothing stacked up to this. She and her friends had gone on day trips to the Tokyo city centre once or twice, but not even the crossing in Shibuya was as packed as the street was now.

Nowhere, a place that didn’t exist, held a room with no name. Dimly lit, the air in the room hung heavy and loitered, gloomy, as the shifting shadows on the wall danced around in an odd, syncopated rhythm like pictures in a zoetrope. The room wasn’t home to darkness only; there was also a long…

Dentaku looked on in horror as the entire space they were in began to distort. The walls began warping, the brushed metal shifted through several entire colour spectra with no end in sight. The numbers on the buttons rearranged themselves before his own eyes. The counter above the door had disappeared entirely. The whole lift…

A bar was the last place Dentaku Bango expected to find himself on a weekday evening. Weekday drinking was for alcoholics and overworked employees—sometimes both—bored to tears with their run-of-the-mill job, shoving their faces and wills to live against the corporate grindstone. The only thing waiting for them beyond the empty bliss of the bottle…