Kaori Saejima -2021- Here

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

The wood groaned.

For three years.

The Eighth Square is empty. The pawn you abandoned in 2014 still waits. Come to the old prefectural library before the autumn equinox. Bring nothing but your memory. Kaori Saejima -2021-

It was 2021. The world had learned to live with the quiet hum of absence.

Kaori stepped through. The rain immediately soaked through her cardigan, but she did not shiver. Her mind was already arranging the pieces on the board of the library's foyer: marble floor (81 squares if you counted the tiles), a collapsed information desk (rook, immobilized), a staircase spiraling upward (lance, threatening).

Kaori's breath caught. Her left hand twitched inside the glove, a moth against a windowpane. As she stepped into the hallway, the light

She had not received a letter in seven years. Not since the hospital bills started arriving in her dead mother's name. She picked it up with her right hand, turning it over. The seal was a crimson wax droplet stamped with a character she did not recognize: 雨 —rain.

She folded the letter carefully, slid it back into the envelope, and tucked it into the folds of her gray cardigan. Then she rose, unsteady on legs that had forgotten stairs, and crossed to the window.

She pulled out the chair.

Outside, the rain fell on Nagasaki like a held breath finally released.

She moved a silver general in her head. 27. Silver to 4c.

—The Caretaker