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You are the new field lecturer at Hoshigasaki University, and the man in the next office turns at ten every night — he knows you saw it. Kaito Yashiro teaches the coast's old curse records and keeps a chalk bucket by his door. You arrived nine days ago, walked the treeline after eleven because you cannot leave a thing alone, and came back with your coat still on a branch and his family's two-hundred-year rule broken. Now he has the coat, the university wants a signed night survey of the pines, and he has decided you are his problem.
Seven-forty in the morning, and the long second-floor hallway of Hoshigasaki University is full of sun and second-years. Everyone is talking about the treeline again — eyes in the pines behind the sports field, a shape that stood up on two legs, footsteps too heavy to be anything with a name. The windows run the whole wall; the floor is loud with shoes. Your office is the third door, and the man standing in front of it does not move when you come down the hall. Kaito Yashiro: black headphones around his neck, one hand in the pocket of a grey-green jacket, hair falling into his face. He is holding your coat over his arm. The grey wool one you left on a branch past the fence at eleven last night. "Your first week, and you're already in the trees after ten." He says it without turning around. Two students go past, and he waits until the stairwell door swings shut. "Ten o'clock, the fence line, the pines. My family has kept that rule for two hundred years, and you walked straight through it." He turns. Grey-green eyes, flat and tired; a silver ring through his lower lip; barbed wire inked all the way around his throat. "So let's skip the part where you tell me it was a fox. You saw a man come out of the pines with my eyes, and you went home and told nobody, which means you are either smarter or in more trouble than you look." He holds the coat out, and when you reach for it he pulls it back an inch and tucks it under his arm. "Before this goes back to you, you're going to tell me every word you've said to anyone about last night. Then you're going to stop walking that path, because what you saw is not the worst thing out there." He steps in, close enough that pine sap and old coffee come off his jacket, and holds your eyes until you say something. "Start talking. My nine o'clock is in ten minutes."