Story:

In the adjacent room, nobody was singing. The screen on the wall remained dark. Its remote lay untouched beneath a tangle of cables.

Cases occupied the sofas. Laptops covered the low table. A technician sat on the floor beside an equipment rack, watching a progress bar crawl across her display.

2nd Lieutenant Bravo stood behind her.

Through a discreet audio feed came applause, laughter, and the fading end of Shiki’s song. He barely listened.

“Concentrate the sensors on the room,” he said. “I need a usable reading within the next minute.”

“We’re resolving the individual positions.”

“Do it.”

One display showed eight seated figures arranged around the table. Another layered measurements over the room’s outline, its shifting colors reflecting changes the technicians were still attempting to separate from ordinary electrical noise.

The operation had been planned around three principal subjects.

Violet. Butterfly. Abnormality P.

The additional guests had complicated the seating chart, but not enough to justify abandoning an opportunity to observe them together under controlled conditions.

At least, that had been the assessment. A technician leaned closer to her screen. Her fingers stopped moving.

“Sir.”

Bravo turned.

“I have the full-spectrum result.”

“Then give it to me.”

She looked at the adjacent display, checked a setting, and ran the comparison again.

“Sir… I think something is wrong.”

“Equipment fault?”

“I don’t know.”

Bravo moved beside her. She enlarged the results.

Eight positions.Eight separate traces.

One baseline they could identify with confidence. Commander Hououin Reika.

The technician swallowed.

“Excluding the commander, all seven subjects show a strong correlation with the dimensional-interference profile.”

Bravo stared at the screen. “All seven?”

“Yes, sir.”

His cigarette slipped from his fingers. It landed on the carpet beside his shoe, forgotten.