Rikitake Entry No. 012 Suzune Wakakusa -

Today, she took neither.

She was the cure.

The Song Below was not music. It was a frequency emitted by the Earth's molten core—a resonant thought-pattern older than humanity. Most brains filtered it out as noise. But Suzune’s unique neurology, the very gift that had made her a prodigy, turned noise into meaning. And what she heard had driven three of her assistants to suicide and one to claw out his own eyes. Rikitake ENTRY NO. 012 Suzune Wakakusa

She had chosen the crane for 411 days. Each one she unfolded, studied the crease pattern, and refolded into a different shape—a wolf, a lotus, a spiral that collapsed into a point. It was a test. Rikitake was an experimental facility, and every inmate was both prisoner and puzzle. The cranes contained encoded data. The draught was amnesia. Today, she took neither

Silence. Then the warden's voice, cold and curious: "To what?" It was a frequency emitted by the Earth's

"I'm sorry," Suzune said, and she meant it. "But you've been containing the wrong thing."

The facility called Rikitake was not a place one entered willingly. It was a terminus for the broken, the brilliant, and the damned. Buried three hundred meters beneath the artificial island of Nami-no-Kuni, its corridors were lined with lead and silence. Suzune Wakakusa knew this because she had counted every step of her descent.