Kaori Saejima -2021- Apr 2026

Behind the table stood a figure in a long coat, face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat. The figure did not move as Kaori approached. The only sound was the rain against the cracked window high above.

The board in her mind was perfect. Immaculate. The 81 squares stretched out like a city grid, each koma —each piece—a living soldier with a name and a grudge. She was playing against a ghost. Not a real one. A composite of every master she had ever studied: a phantom grandmaster she called The Caretaker .

As she stepped into the hallway, the light bulb above her door flickered and died.

She pulled on her coat. It was too large—her mother's, from a decade ago, the wool frayed at the cuffs. She did not own an umbrella. She did not own a phone that worked. Kaori Saejima -2021-

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.

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.

Kaori Saejima.

"Did you?" The figure stepped forward, hat tilting back just enough to reveal a chin, a mouth that smiled without warmth. "Or did you simply forget that when a master plays alone for long enough, the ghost learns to play back?"

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

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. Behind the table stood a figure in a

The ghost countered.

Someone had been listening to the game inside her head.

The game was about to begin.

She pulled out the chair.

She walked deeper. The air tasted of wet plaster and old secrets.