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.

Someone had been listening to the game inside her head.

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.

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.

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

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.

The old prefectural library stood at the edge of the abandoned tram line, a granite mausoleum of a building with gargoyles that had eroded into featureless blobs. The chains on the gate had been cut. Not recently—the rust on the fresh break was already orange—but cut nonetheless. The gate swung inward with a sigh.

The ghost countered.