On the fourth night, I barely slept.
Gió’s memory fragment lay under my pillow, its heartbeat pulsing against my temple—each beat like a knock from somewhere far away.
I began recording every detail of the city in a small notebook: license plates, café signs, snippets of conversation from strangers. I feared that if I didn’t write it down, I’d forget it the next day—or worse, that it would vanish entirely.
The next morning, when I opened the notebook, every page was blank.
Only a faint circular stain remained—exactly where the fragment rested in my pocket.
I held it in my hand. Its pulse quickened slightly, and in my mind flashed an image of Gió standing by a riverbank, wind tossing her hair, her thin smile hiding something unspoken.
Was it an illusion, or a real memory? I couldn’t be sure.
On the fifth day, the blue dome above shuddered faintly. Electric lines across it flared as if overloaded, light racing along the “wires” before fading away. A few streetlights flickered in quick bursts, their glow falling across the faces of passersby—none of whom reacted, as if they hadn’t noticed at all.
I decided to test it.
I returned to the café from the first day, sitting in the same seat. The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of me, identical to before, without asking.
I blurted out:
“Has there… ever been a woman here, with long hair?”
She looked at me for several seconds, her eyes as empty as a still lake, then turned and walked away.
I gripped the memory fragment tightly, a chill spreading from my palm up to my shoulder.
The sixth day. Midnight.
A sound like shattering glass rippled through the air. Everything froze for a single heartbeat, then rewound—like a film spinning backward.
Colors blurred, streets curled into ribbons of light, and the dome above twisted into a vortex of blue, swallowing everything into its center.
I blinked—and found myself standing in the square, back at the exact spot of “day one.”
The vendor once again held out the slanted flyer. The same child ran past, the same small scrape on their cheek.
No one else noticed. Not a single look of surprise.
Only me—and the fragment in my pocket, pounding hard, as if trying to tear through the silence of this world.
Gió’s voice echoed in my head, faint but clear:
“If you hold on… I will find you.”
