Chapter 15: Io's Undertide (The Invitation Arrives)

The word came out of her mouth at four forty-seven in the morning.

Ren knew the exact time because he had been awake for an hour already, lying on his futon in the dark with the dream still running behind his eyes — the black water above, the corridor's wrong geometry, the breathing that belonged to no chest he could name — and watching the ceiling with the particular stillness of someone who has learned that moving makes it worse. He had the travel alarm on the tatami beside him because he had taken to setting it, the last two weeks, as if the dream were something that could be prepared for. He saw the minute change from forty-six to forty-seven and that was when Io, three meters away on her own futon on the other side of the fusuma they had pushed back at the start of summer because the apartment's cross-ventilation required it, said the word.

She said it the way a person says a word in their sleep — not whispering, not shouting, but with the full ordinary conviction of someone contributing to a conversation that is proceeding normally. One word. Two syllables, possibly three, with a vowel quality that was not quite Japanese and not quite anything else Ren could place, and a consonant at the beginning that he had no letter for and would spend the next twenty minutes trying to represent.