Chapter 22: Hidden In The Open

The next morning, Apricot took the train downtown. She stood gripping a metal pole as the carriage swayed, watching her reflection slide across the dark glass between stations. Chino’s words had not faded overnight. If anything, sleep had sharpened them, stripped away the disbelief and left only the architecture of the claim.

A ritual. A sigil. A city built as an instrument.

She needed to see it for herself.

The Public Records Archive occupied a full block on Okabe’s government row, granite columns and stone lions flanking an entrance carved with Uchellan script. The kind of building designed to remind you that the state had been here longer than you and would remain long after. Apricot climbed the steps and pushed through the heavy doors.

Inside, the air was cool and still. Her footsteps echoed across polished marble. A young clerk sat behind a broad oak desk, sorting documents with the mechanical precision of someone paid by the hour and aware of it. She looked up as Apricot approached, expression calibrated to the minimum warmth protocol required.

“I need to access the city-planning archives,” Apricot said. “Original zoning and street-layout plans for Blue Ash.”

The clerk’s fingers paused over a holographic keyboard, its keys hovering in faint light above the desk surface. She studied Apricot the way customs officers study passports.

“Those files are restricted. Not open to the public without clearance.”

Apricot placed her press credential on the counter. The plastic caught the overhead light, the Okabe clan emblem glinting. The clerk picked it up, turned it over, then held it to the scanner. A green indicator blinked.

“You don’t look like the usual type we get for restricted requests,” the clerk said. She glanced between the credential and Apricot’s face, as if checking for a mismatch. “They usually send stuffy old men for this kind of thing.”

Apricot managed a polite smile. “Surprise.”

The clerk’s mouth twitched, not quite amused but no longer suspicious. She set the card down and stood. “I’ll pull the microfilm. It’ll take a few minutes.”

She disappeared through a side door. Apricot pocketed her credential and leaned against the counter, letting the tension in her shoulders ease for the first time since leaving Chino’s house. The archive’s silence pressed in around her, the kind of quiet that smelled like dust and old paper and had opinions about who belonged.

“Apricot?”

She turned. A tall young man crossed the lobby toward her, hands in his coat pockets, dark hair falling across his forehead in its usual state of defiance.

Sato.

Something loosened in her chest at the sight of him. “What are you doing here?”

He stopped beside her, mouth pulling into a crooked expression that wasn’t quite a smile. “Re-registering with the press office. One of my photos caught a city official in a compromising position. Instead of going after him, they slapped me with a protocol violation. Fined me my earnings from the article plus restitution.” He punctuated it with an exaggerated eye roll.

The casual delivery didn’t mask the bitterness underneath. Apricot knew the math. For an Uchellan-born journalist, even minor infractions carried real weight. The government held its own citizens to a different standard than foreigners like her, harsher in some ways, more possessive. Her status as an outsider had its own dangers, but institutional punishment wasn’t one of them. Not yet.

“That’s criminal,” she said. “I’m sorry they punished you for doing your job.”

“That’s the job.” He shrugged, the crooked grin returning. “They’re not scaring me off.” He studied her for a moment, reading something in her posture she hadn’t meant to broadcast. “What about you? What’s got you pulling restricted files at nine in the morning?”

“Research project. Blue Ash history.” She kept her voice light. “Probably nothing.”

Sato held her gaze a beat too long, then let it go. He always knew when to stop pressing.

“Listen,” he said, lowering his voice. “Those photos you took at the bank. I developed the roll a couple weeks back. Something showed up in a couple of the frames. Something I can’t explain.”

Her pulse kicked. “The ones from the robbery?” she whispered. That was the only roll she had shot recently, taken in a haze of terror. She barely remembered pressing the shutter.

“Yeah.” The humor left his voice. “I need to show you. Come by the Shōja Building after you’re done here. You remember where it is.”

“I’ll be there. Definitely.”

He nodded, already backing toward the exit. “I’d hang around, but I have to pick up Machi from work. She turns into a demon if I’m late.” He rolled his eyes, fond rather than annoyed.

Apricot laughed despite herself. “Go get her. I know how she gets.”

He gave a quick wave and jogged off, leaving her feeling not safe, exactly, but steadier. Less alone.

“Ma’am.” The clerk had returned, holding a metal canister and a brass key. “Your microfilm. Follow me.”

---

The viewing room was small, windowless, and lit by nothing but the machine’s own glow. The microfilm reader sat on a metal table, squat and industrial, its eyepiece and dials worn smooth from decades of hands that had turned them looking for things the city would rather stay buried.

The clerk loaded the reel. “You know how to operate it?”

Apricot nodded.

“Key’s for the door. Lock it if you want privacy. You have one hour.”

The door clicked shut. The room smelled of warm circuitry and something older, the mineral tang of documents aging in the dark.

Apricot leaned into the eyepiece and began to turn the dial.

Frames slid past in pale succession: indexes, stamps, property deeds, survey notations. Bureaucratic sediment, decades of it, compressed onto reels thin enough to hold in one hand. She worked through them methodically, adjusting the focus knob with small, patient turns, scanning headers and file dates until the numbering shifted into the range she needed.

Early zoning and development maps for Blue Ash. Pre-Crisis records. The originals.

The first schematic snapped into clarity beneath the lens.

Even at a glance, it looked wrong. Streets curved in deliberate arcs where standard grid planning would have run straight. Radiating lines cut across the layout like spokes of a wheel, connecting intersections that had no functional reason to be connected. She recognized thoroughfares she had walked herself, but seen from above, stripped of storefronts and traffic and the ordinary noise of living, their arrangement felt designed for something other than transit.

Apricot sat back from the eyepiece. The humming machine cast its pale rectangle of light onto the wall.

She opened her notebook and began to sketch.

The perimeter highway first: a broad circle, hand-drawn and imperfect but close enough. Then the main arteries, spoke by spoke, each one traced from the microfilm and transferred to paper with the careful attention of someone building a case. Two wide avenues crossed in an X. Another pair converged in a sharp V. Curving boulevards swept between them in long, deliberate arcs. She scrolled through additional frames to verify the smaller streets, the connective tissue between the major lines, and added those too.

Half an hour passed. The room stayed silent except for the machine’s mechanical whir and the soft scratch of her pen.

When she finally stopped, it was because the pen had nowhere left to go. The drawing was complete.

She held the sketch up to the projector’s glow.

It was there. The sigil Chino had described, stretched across miles of infrastructure, hidden in the geometry of the city itself. A vast circle enclosing intersecting angles, lines converging on a central point. Not a street plan. A diagram.

Apricot set the notebook down. Her hands were steady, but something cold had settled behind her ribs.

She sat with it for a long time, staring at her own crude drawing while the microfilm trembled in its frame beside her. Chino could have been wrong. An old woman seeing patterns in her own trauma, just as she had warned. But the lines on the page did not look like streets. They looked like instructions. And the correspondence between Chino’s description and the original plans was too precise to be coincidence or grief.

Carefully, she rewound the film, listening to the soft plastic clatter of frames retreating into the canister. She gathered her notes, capped her pen, and slid both into her bag.

The corridor outside the viewing room was empty, lit by the same institutional fluorescents as every government building in the city. She returned the reel and key to the drop slot at the front desk. The clerk was gone, her stack of documents undisturbed, the holographic keyboard dark.

Outside, autumn air cut into her lungs. She stood on the archive steps, breathing, letting the cold burn the fog from her head. Pedestrians passed on the sidewalk below, anonymous in overcoats, moving through a city whose streets spelled something none of them had been taught to read.

Apricot descended the steps and started walking. Sato was waiting.

She caught a crosstown tram, standing room only, gripping the overhead rail as the car rattled through commercial blocks. The afternoon light slanted hard through the windows, striping the passengers in bars of gold and shadow. Apricot watched the city slide past and thought about how many times she had ridden these streets without seeing them. The gentle curve of Okabe Boulevard. The spoke-like intersection at Sixth and Tenbō. Pieces of the sigil she had just traced on paper, passing beneath her feet in real time.

The tram deposited her two blocks from the Shōja Building.

---

The Shōja Building was a repurposed mid-century office tower in a district that couldn’t decide if it was commercial or residential. Its lobby still had the original terrazzo floor and a directory board listing tenants who had vacated years ago. Apricot keyed in the after-hours code Sato had given her and took the elevator to the tenth floor, where frosted-glass office doors still bore the peeling gold names of defunct consulting firms and boutique agencies. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a greenish pall across scuffed linoleum. A pair of salarymen passed without looking up, muttering about deadlines.

Sato’s apartment occupied the far end of the hall, behind what had once been an accounting firm’s metal door. She knocked. The sound was too loud in the corridor’s stillness.

He opened it almost immediately and waved her inside.

The room looked less like a living space and more like an evidence wall. Photographs hung from lines strung across the ceiling, taped in clusters along every vertical surface. Black-and-white cityscapes, crime scenes, street vendors, stray cats, neon reflected in puddles. Fragments of the city suspended in midair, frozen under warm lamplight. The only tidy section was the desk in the corner, flanked by developing trays and a battered reading lamp.

Apricot wandered deeper, careful not to brush the hanging prints. She recognized a few faces among them: fellow students, journalists, Machi unmistakable with her trademark scowl.

“How was Machi?” she asked over her shoulder.

Sato groaned. “Still mad I was late. But ramen fixes everything. She’s fine.”

Sato crossed to the desk and picked up two photo prints. His expression had changed, the easy humor from the archive stripped away. He held them face-down for a moment, as if deciding something.

“Remember your roll from the bank?” he said. “I developed it a couple weeks ago. Most of the shots came out fine. Better than fine, given the conditions.” He paused. “But two of them have something in them I can’t account for.”

He turned the prints toward her. “Were those in the frame when you took them?”

Apricot took them. Standard five-by-sevens, edges still curled from drying.

The first showed the protest outside the bank. Motion-blurred, chaotic, exactly as she remembered. Raised fists, a man mid-shout at the frame’s edge, bodies scattering from a police line.

But above the crowd, suspended in the upper third of the image, hung a smear of black. Vaguely human in silhouette, dissolving at the edges like smoke caught in wind.

She lifted the second print. Same scene, a heartbeat later. The shape was lower now, closer to street level. Clearer. She could almost make out the suggestion of shoulders, the bend of limbs, and two faint reflective points where eyes should have been.

Her arms prickled with goosebumps.

“You see it,” Sato said. Not a question.

Apricot passed the prints back with a steadiness she did not feel. “It was chaos out there. I didn’t notice anything like this at the time.” That much was true. “The camera hit the ground pretty hard. Could the sensor have glitched?”

Sato gave her a flat look. “The frames before and after are crystal clear. A glitch doesn’t selectively corrupt two random shots sandwiched between clean ones.”

He pinned the prints onto the corkboard above his desk, separate from everything else, as if quarantining something he didn’t want touching the rest of his work.

“They freaked me out,” he admitted. He let out a short laugh. “For a second I thought I’d photographed a ghost.”

He laughed.

Apricot did not.

“They freak me out too,” she said quietly. Her arms folded across her chest. In the warm lamplight, the figure in the photograph seemed to hover at the edge of her vision, caught mid-step between the visible world and whatever lay behind it. She thought of the microfilm drawing folded in her bag. Two different kinds of evidence, one geometric, one photographic, pointing at the same impossible conclusion.

Sato had already moved on, pouring tea from a dented thermos, pulling down a tin of crackers from a shelf. He talked while he worked, university gossip, newsroom politics, the small currency of a friendship maintained across distance. Apricot accepted the tea and let his voice fill the room. She heard about half of it. The rest of her stayed with the black silhouette on the corkboard and the notebook in her bag, the city’s streets rearranged into something that was never meant to be a map.

She excused herself when her sentences started fraying. Sato walked her to the door.

Outside, the afternoon had sharpened, light angling hard between buildings, casting the kind of shadows that cut clean edges across pavement. Apricot walked through them toward the train station, hands in her coat pockets, the weight of two proofs pressing against each other inside her.

A drawing that confirmed the conspiracy.

A photograph that confirmed the haunting.

Neither could be shown to anyone who wasn’t already in too deep to turn back.