The air in the tuition center was thick with the smell of floor cleaner and the collective anxiety of multiple exhausted students. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a persistent hum that vibrated inside Miko's skull. She spent the first hour hunched over the book while sitting on the floor along with others cramming chemical equations into her mind like she was packing a suitcase that was already too full.
But tonight, the silence in her head was interrupted by something unusual.
"Hey, you're doing the stoichiometry wrong. You forgot to balance the oxygen."
Miko looked up, blinking. Beside her sat Rina. Rina was everything Miko wasn't, animated, messy, and seemingly unaffected by the weight of the ceiling. Initially, Miko had felt an intense, agonizing awkwardness around her. She didn't know where to put her hands or how to modulate her voice. She almost felt like a robot trying to pass as human.
But slowly over the days, the awkwardness had scabbed over. Rina talked about her day, complained about the physics tutor, and told jokes that Miko didn't always understand but found herself nodding to anyway. Having a friend felt like holding onto a small, wooden plank in the middle of the ocean. It was a strange, terrifying anchor to a world Miko was already halfway finished with.
"Earth to Miko?" Rina whispered, nudging her arm. "You look like you're staring at something behind me. Is there a spider?"
Miko's gaze snapped back to the textbook. She hadn't realized she was staring. "No. Just tired from a long day at school," she lied.
The truth was, the corners of the room didn't look right tonight. As Rina laughed at a doodle in her notebook, Miko felt the temperature in the room drop—only for her. Out of the corner of her eye, the shadows cast by the stacks of extra chairs seemed to detach themselves from the floor. They moved like shadows.
Then came the sound. It wasn't a voice, not exactly. It was more like the memory of a whisper, a low-frequency vibration that skipped over her ears and landed directly in her chest. It hummed a tone of deep, resonant sorrow—the kind of sound a sinking ship might make as the hull finally gives way.
"...not yet..."
Miko gripped her pen so hard the plastic groaned.
"You okay? Your hand is shaking," Rina said, her voice full of genuine concern. For a second, the warmth in Rina's tone pushed the cold back. The shadows settled. The voice now silence.
"I'm fine," Miko said, forced a smile that felt like it was tearing through her skin. "Just a headache. My mom... she's been stressed lately."
She went back to her equations, but the numbers no longer made sense. She was terrified. Not because of the shadows, and not because of the whisper. She was terrified because for the first time in months, she had found someone she actually liked and the void residing in her seemed to be getting jealous.
The more she tried to be human with Rina, the more the darkness seemed to reach out to remind her where she truly belonged.
As the class ended and the students began to pack their bags, Miko looked at the empty chair in the corner. The shadow there was gone, but the air remained cold. Something was coming. Something that couldn't be fed with biscuits or silenced by a mother's shout.
"A man 's presence is unimposing," Miko remembered reading somewhere, "but his shadows are vast."
With the weight of these thoughts in her head, miko begins walking back home after bidding Rina goodbye for the day. When she reaches back home by the next half an hour miko is greeted by a series of questions from her mother as always asking her about what the teacher taught and so on..