-v1.0.0h-: -eng- The Shell Part Iii- Paradiso

“Dante,” Reiji said carefully. “The Divine Comedy. The ninth circle is for traitors. Frozen in ice.”

She reached out and touched his cheek. Her fingers were cold. Not the cold of death. The cold of something that had never been alive to begin with.

Reiji called it the truth. Toko’s room was white in the way a grave is white. White sheets, white walls, the white hum of a fluorescent light that never turned off because she had stopped asking for night. Reiji visited every third day—the train from the city took four hours, and he spent them reading old case files that no one else would touch. Missing persons who had been found with their mouths sewn shut by no thread. Children who drew the same symbol before vanishing: a spiral that devoured its own tail. -ENG- The Shell Part III- Paradiso -V1.0.0H-

And when he opened his eyes again, he was back in the hospital room. Toko was asleep in her bed, her hand resting on the window, the condensation spiral half-finished. The fluorescent light hummed. The clock on the wall said 3:33 AM.

Her hand paused on the window. The spiral she had been drawing—a perfect, unbroken line—hung mid-arc. Then, slowly, she turned her head. Her eyes found his. And for the first time in half a year, she spoke. “Dante,” Reiji said carefully

And he had just refused to write one.

“Do you know why hell has nine circles?” Frozen in ice

“The door that leads out of the story,” she said. “The one that says: The author is dead. The reader is God. And God is tired of reading. ” Reiji did not take her hand.

He turned to face the mirrors—all of them, infinite, spiraling.

“Toko,” he said. Not a question. A key turning a lock that had already been picked.

Toko tilted her head. The ghost-Reiji flickered.