Kaori Saejima -2021- -

And somewhere deep in her mind, on the immaculate 81 squares she had built to survive the silence, the silver general she had moved in her apartment that morning began to glow with a cold, impossible light.

Inside, a single sheet of heavy, cream-colored paper. The message was brief:

The Caretaker. She had invented that name. She had never spoken it aloud. Not to her therapists, not to the one ex-boyfriend who stayed long enough to learn her tics, not to the mirror on the nights she wept without sound. Kaori Saejima -2021-

"You came," the figure said. The voice was neither male nor female. It was old and young at once. Tired.

The figure sat down. Gestured to the empty chair. And somewhere deep in her mind, on the

Kaori was thirty-four. Once, she had been a child prodigy of the shogi circuit—the "Lioness of Kyushu," they called her after she defeated a reigning grandmaster at sixteen. But that was before the accident. Before the tremor in her left hand made it impossible to place a piece without knocking over three others. Before her mother’s funeral, which she watched through a hospital window, her jaw wired shut after a seizure sent her down a flight of concrete stairs.

Someone had been listening to the game inside her head. She had invented that name

She did not sit. Not immediately. She stood there, dripping rainwater onto the marble floor, her useless left hand hanging, her right hand trembling at her side. The board waited. The ghost waited.

For three years.

The gold general from 2014. Her abandoned pawn. It sat in the center of the board's edge, placed precisely on the 8th square of the first rank, like a marker on a grave.

Kaori's breath caught. Her left hand twitched inside the glove, a moth against a windowpane.