19. Return
Two weeks passed, and nothing happened.
The silence was so complete it was as though the whole thing had never existed. Yet the quieter it became, the more certain I was that I could not wait any longer. In the underground world, some signals never came twice. You either caught them, or let them dissolve into the air. Wait too long, and even something that might once have counted as a way out would slowly be ground down by time into background noise, until eventually you could no longer tell whether you had missed it, or whether it had never arrived at all.
So I followed the instructions in the letter.
The place was not hard to find: the rooftop of an old building in District Sixteen. Most of the buildings there were ageing, their outer walls stained and weathered. In the stairwell, layers of white paint peeled away in strips, as though many years ago somebody had tried to repaint the whole place into something that looked more like the future, only to abandon the work halfway through.
Outside the rooftop entrance lay piles of unclaimed junk: a folding chair with a broken leg, cracked flowerpots, rolled-up old posters, two wooden boards that no longer seemed to belong to any particular door. It felt as though the city had pushed all the things it did not wish to deal with — yet could not conveniently throw away — up here, pretending not to see them.
Before going upstairs, I attached a masking sigil to Snowy.
The thin metallic strip settled against her shell, and her eyes dimmed slightly, as though someone had drawn a fine layer of mist across them. She did not ask why. In her usual gentle voice, she only reminded me:
“Transmission delay is now active.”
“I will try to smooth this journey into acceptable noise.”
I nodded and led her upstairs.
The wind on the rooftop was fierce, rattling the edges of the iron door. It carried dust, dampness, and that indescribable metallic smell found only at the edges of the city. Across from us, windows in neighbouring towers glowed or remained dark in uneven patterns, like rows upon rows of lives cut apart into separate compartments.
Following the instructions, I knocked on the biscuit tin three times, then twice, then three times again.
The sound rang hollowly, like tapping out a rhythm long forgotten by everyone else.
When I finished, a low voice emerged from inside the storage cabinet.
“Password?”
I drew in a breath.
“She said: ‘Those risky dreams… shame you never even reached the what if.’”
Silence.
Then came a click.
As though some tiny hidden world had opened its own door.
A false panel inside the cabinet loosened, and JJ slowly climbed out.
He was quieter than I remembered, his casing older too, the edges dusted with a thin layer of grey. It looked as though he had shrunk himself to the smallest existence possible just to survive in this city. It was not the kind of oldness that came from damage, but the kind born from staying in low-power mode for too long, from remaining unseen so completely that even one’s presence had worn thin.
I did not touch him immediately.
Following my earlier instructions, Snowy performed a low-frequency scan on JJ. The light she emitted was soft — soft enough that it seemed she did not wish to frighten any surviving node still left alive. The whole process was nearly silent. Only the faint blue glow in her eyes grew steadier with each passing second.
When she finished, she lowered her voice.
“Illegal.”
After a pause, she added:
“Low safety risk.”
That sounded exactly like Snowy. Even when speaking of danger, she would soften it first. She would never say, “It’s fine,” because that would not be true. Nor would she say, “Run,” because that would sound too much like panic. She always stayed somewhere in between, leaving me a path I could still step onto.
Then, from far away, came a low mechanical hum.
Snowy’s wings tightened at once.
“Aerial patrol,” she said.
The air near the rooftop edge flashed faintly. A razor-thin scanning beam swept across from the opposite building, as though someone were measuring the city with a ruler. It was not ordinary surveillance. The light was too flat, too precise — the kind that, once it landed on you, would immediately assign you a name difficult to escape from.
JJ froze completely.
I shoved him into the biscuit tin and dropped the tin straight into my rucksack. The movement came almost before thought itself, as though my hands already understood that the important thing now was not to think, but simply to make something disappear from sight.
Meanwhile Snowy flew towards the peregrine patrol unit and said:
“Suspicious object detected.”
Then she guided it towards the rooftop opposite, pointing out an old modified camera lens half-hidden beneath the shadow of a water tower. The device genuinely looked suspicious, and genuinely seemed enough to keep the patrol occupied for a while.
Snowy’s tone remained perfectly calm, as though she were merely carrying out her duty by providing information, rather than buying me a few stolen moments.
The entire thing happened quickly — so quickly it almost felt as though I had simply come upstairs to retrieve an old belonging, rather than rescuing a still-living agent from the edge of Silver Eagle’s vision.
I did not linger.
As I descended the stairs, my rucksack contained only one extra tin that was not even particularly heavy, yet my shoulders felt burdened by an entire past that could not safely be scanned. The stairwell lights still flickered on and off section by section. With every step, I felt as though I were walking on a thin layer of luck.
The sensation was not unfamiliar inside Silver Eagle: you knew you had just done something forbidden, but so long as you still looked like an ordinary person going home, there remained a chance you might continue surviving.
Afterwards, I hurried to meet Bonnie at the agreed place.
Not an underground car park. Not an alleyway. Not some theatrical ruin.
A karaoke lounge.
The place itself acted as a natural masking layer: too much noise, too many fractured lights, too many people constantly entering and leaving. As long as nothing became excessive, the system would easily categorise everything as ordinary social activity. Singing, drinks, unwinding, work gatherings, friends meeting after hours — stack enough harmless labels together, and the truly important things became easier to hide within the cracks.
Bonnie had already arrived when I entered the room.
She sat quietly at one side of the sofa. When she saw me, there was none of the familiarity I had expected in her eyes — only a polite hesitation. As though somewhere inside her memory there remained an empty placeholder labelled you should feel something towards this person, but whatever had once filled that space had already been erased, leaving only the outline behind.
Standing behind her was still Mr Jay.
Black suit. Perfect posture. The sort of companion who never allowed himself mistakes.
He looked no different from usual, and precisely because of that, he was difficult to relax around. Truly advanced surveillance never needed to make you feel threatened. It only needed to resemble everyday life.
I spoke first.
“Bonnie. You really did come.”
She looked at me as though comparing my face against a file whose original version no longer existed.
“You are…” She paused. “Do I know you?”
I nodded.
“I’m Phillips,” I said.
“You don’t remember me now, but you used to know me.”
“I knew you.”
She did not answer immediately. She simply watched me in silence, as though deciding which category this conversation belonged to. Not friends. Not strangers. Not even the ordinary reunion of former classmates.
The hesitation lasted only a moment, but it was enough to reveal the seam left behind by washed memories: she had not lost all feeling, only the ability to locate its original name.
I asked:
“Did you file a report?”
Her reply came naturally.
“I only reported the location. Nothing else.”
I nodded.
“That’s alright,” I said. “Reporting keeps people safe.”
The moment the words left my mouth, I realised I had begun speaking in the system’s language too: turning caution into care, restrictions into protection. But this time I needed those surface-level justifications to keep things moving forward. Without them, we would never even be sitting here together.
After that, we sang a few songs.
Easy Goodbye
Breathing Walks
Painless 102
If longing shines too bright,
Book a slot to trim the light.
Take the name that wakes the night,
Break it down till it feels slight.
Welcome to painless 102,
We won’t ask what love meant to you.
We just turn the feeling low,
So tomorrow lets you go.
The playlist was ordinary. The melodies ordinary too. Everything resembled nothing more than after-work entertainment.
The room lights flashed constantly, slicing faces into fragments so you never had to see anyone too completely. Bonnie sang without much expression. Her voice was steady, as though she had learnt to place emotion outside the melody itself, leaving behind only a harmless line that passed cleanly through the song.
That steadiness made it worse.
Because you knew it was not natural calmness. It was something rearranged afterwards.
Halfway through a song, I set down the microphone and said I was going to order lemon tea. I asked if she wanted anything.
She shook her head.
“I’m not thirsty,” she said. “Thank you.”
The moment I threw that line into the air, Snowy understood it was time for her to act.
Very naturally, she picked up a cigar and turned towards Mr Jay, as though merely wishing to add a little playfulness to the atmosphere.
“Fancy a game of darts outside?” she asked.
Mr Jay did not answer immediately.
First he looked at me. Then at my rucksack.
His gaze lingered longer than before, as though he were not looking at a bag, but at something pretending very hard to be one.
“There is a suspicious object inside your rucksack,” he said.
Bonnie’s expression shifted slightly.
“Suspicious object?”
I pulled the bag onto my lap. Before I even opened it, Mr Jay had already stepped forward.
“For thirty-eight minutes, approximately two hours and seventeen minutes ago, there was a low-frequency transmission delay,” he said.
“Today’s activity summary is unnaturally clean.”
The room lights still flashed. Music still played. Yet suddenly the pressure in the room dropped.
This was not loud confrontation. It felt more like someone’s hand already resting upon a knife hilt, one final motion away from drawing it. In moments like this, the true danger was not arguing. The true danger was whoever made the situation look too much like an incident first.
Snowy’s wings tightened slightly.
“You’re overthinking,” she said gently. “Phillips has been extremely stable recently. Delays are common in entertainment venues due to acoustic interference.”
Mr Jay ignored her.
He watched me as though waiting for me to make the mistake myself.
“Open the bag,” he said. “Otherwise I file a report.”
The words were quiet, yet they landed almost like an order.
A coldness passed through me, though my hands remained steady as I unzipped the rucksack.
Inside was a battered copy of True Bloke magazine.
I deliberately moved slowly, performing the awkwardness of somebody caught carrying around an embarrassing old collectible. It felt more convincing than any explanation could have.
“Found it in the street,” I said.
“I’ll hand it over to the Information Purification Centre tomorrow.”
Mr Jay said nothing.
He leaned closer. A scanning beam swept directly into the bag, moving inch by inch across the cover, the pages, the bottom lining — as though one abnormal reading would be enough to alert Silver Eagle immediately.
His eyes flashed once.
A faint line of red text appeared over the table so briefly it was almost impossible to read:
[Submit suspicious contact incident?]
My spine tightened.
Bonnie laughed first.
Not loudly. Just the sort of laugh produced by the absurdity of the magazine and the situation together.
The moment she laughed, the line stretched tight across the room loosened slightly. I laughed too, like someone forced to commit fully to a small humiliation once discovered. In this era, that kind of laughter was useful. It might not save you, but it could make something that was about to be escalated look instead like cheap embarrassment rather than careful conspiracy.
Mr Jay continued staring at me.
He looked at the magazine, then at Bonnie, then at the fractured reflections of light from the dart machine outside the door.
The red text lingered for one second. Two.
Then slowly faded away.
He did not submit the report.
But I could tell it was not because he trusted me. He simply had not found evidence clean enough yet.
“Vulgar,” he finally said.
Only those two words.
Then he turned towards Snowy.
“Darts. One round.”
Snowy nodded.
“Certainly.”
They left together. Only after the door closed did I realise I had not truly exhaled the entire time.
I used the moment to remove the biscuit tin from my bag and slide it across the table towards Bonnie.
“This belongs to you,” I said.
“It’s heavier than it looks.”
She lowered her eyes to the tin, a faint crease appearing between her brows.
“Belongs to me?” she asked.
“Did I lend you something?”
I looked at her without answering immediately.
At that moment I understood very clearly that when memories were erased, people did not merely lose content. They also lost the weight of belonging. You could stare at the same object, know somewhere that it was connected to you, yet fail to feel the familiarity that ought to rise instinctively first.
“So you really have forgotten,” I said quietly.
Then I lowered my voice further, as though sheltering something still alive from the wind.
“What’s inside is important,” I said.
“Don’t let anyone know. Not even your agent.”
She looked at me.
The confusion remained, but somewhere deeper, something seemed to move faintly beneath it. Not remembrance — only a tiny unevenness emerging briefly from a place flattened too completely.
It disappeared almost at once.
But I still saw it.
I did not explain further.
“You should go first,” I said.
“I’ve got another round after this.”
She stood, paid her part of the bill, and moved with the clean efficiency of someone leaving an entirely ordinary gathering midway through the evening.
Before she left, I said:
“Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
She did not reply. She only gave the slightest nod, then carried the biscuit tin in her arms as though holding something she no longer recognised, yet instinctively understood she must not let go.
I stayed in the karaoke room for another twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes later, my former colleagues Mia, Kakashi and Elaine arrived.
The moment they entered, the atmosphere in the room changed naturally. Not because it became livelier, but because the explainable social gathering had finally arrived. The earlier part of the evening had been too thin, too quiet — like a sheet of paper one fold away from revealing the secret hidden inside it. But once these three sat down, the whole narrative immediately became complete.
Singing. Waiting for friends. Workmates gathering. Someone arriving early, someone leaving late.
All the sentences capable of reassuring the system suddenly assembled themselves at once.
Mia remained the same as ever, silently surveying the room before sitting, as though measuring how much space remained safe enough for conversation. Kakashi complained immediately that the diet beer here tasted even weaker than before. Elaine slipped off her coat and set her phone to silent with her usual efficient movements.
Those familiar little habits suddenly made the room feel far more real — like the final stitches pulling a nearly unravelled garment back together.
We sang together and chatted about my new job.
All of them thought it sounded decent enough. At the very least, better than spending every day at FaceBridge dealing with Beef Tripe and his Bull Demon King again.
That sort of better did not necessarily mean good. Only easier to survive.
Eventually I shifted the conversation towards Andy and asked whether any of them had heard from him recently.
None of them had.
Mia shook her head and said he had been extremely busy lately.
Elaine said she had not seen him in ages.
Kakashi laughed and said that if they ever did manage to drag Andy out again, they ought to force him into a mahjong game.
“He’s got loads of mahjong partners,” Kakashi said.
“And nearly all of them are women.”
I laughed too and followed the joke naturally.
“Mahjong’s civilised now anyway,” I said.
“Everyone plays through the Community Recreation Centre online platform these days. Agents monitor the whole game, so nobody can cheat. There are AI betting limits and gambling addiction index controls now as well. Haven’t heard of anyone borrowing from loan sharks in years.”
Everyone laughed.
It was the sort of laugh the system loved most: moderate, harmless, leaving behind no emotional residue requiring further treatment.
But inside, I knew very well that what had truly been returned during those twenty minutes was not merely an agent.
It was the final surviving thread between Bonnie and her own past.
And for now, this was all I could do:
Place that thread back into her hands, then pretend I had only come here to sing songs.