“No one actually changes.”

“Look at you! This might be a real conversation we’re having about human feelings.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but then stopped and narrowed her eyes a bit, like I was seeing her stumped for the first time. Until she laughed.

The rest of the night is the exposition scene the editors will cut for time before the theatrical release because it doesn’t test well with audiences, and the studio is pushing for Kaori to get the villain edit. Because nothing about her is delicate—the blunt ends of her asymmetrical haircut, the chewed tips of her fingers, her eyes that always seem to be peering into everyone. And we’ll smooth over the fact that I’d momentarily charmed her, and the only way to peek further behind her mask was to help her take it off.

I’d found a slip of paper that morning when I’d been straightening up my room. A printout from the first night I’d joined Kaori by the Envisioner, weeks ago. Drowned, trapped by debris from a crumbled building. I placed the paper on her desk.

“What’s this?” I asked, sliding the paper closer to her.

She eyed the printout with her cool, tea-colored eyes.

“My parents went missing and…” She trailed.

“You asked the machine? I thought the past was a no-no.”

A pause, a sip of tea from her gold-laced mug. “Curiosity is a natural human instinct.”

I listened as she told me about her family. She’d already been at Oxford when the tsunami hit Japan, twenty-four years ago. I’d been nine at the time and too young to remember or understand the disaster until I’d learned about it later in school. My lungs on fire—drowning was still my worst nightmare.

Kaori had been eighteen. When she’d left for Oxford, her parents had moved out of Tokyo and into Katsuura, by the coast, hoping for more breathing room away from the clogged capital. They’d been the ones who pushed her to leave for graduate school, anyway. Oxford had dangled a full ride, research grants, and the promise of a small army of undergrad research peons for her. Even still, her second year there, she could see that they’d been itching to have her back home. They’d always expected she’d return some day.