---
-Melissa POV-
"I'm going to go look at a building," I announced at breakfast.
Three heads turned toward me.
Chris was halfway through a slice of toast, her school bag already on her shoulder, the little bronze gear in her halo turning lazily above her head. Eli was at the stove, flipping something with the focus of a surgeon. Abigale was at her end of the counter with a cup of tea and one of Eli's history textbooks, open to a chapter about the founding of the General Student Council, which was either a coincidence or Abigale being much more observant than she let on.
"A building," Chris repeated.
"A building."
"Which building?"
"A very important one," I said. "That nobody's using yet. I just want to see if it's real."
Chris looked at me for a long moment, chewing. Then she swallowed.
"You're going at night," she said. It wasn't a question. "And you're going to wear the ninja suit."
"...I might wear the ninja suit."
"You're definitely going to wear the ninja suit." She stood up, brushed the crumbs off her coat and picked up her lunch from the counter, where Eli had left it wrapped in a cloth with a little cat print. "Don't get another hole in it. Eli had to sew the last one."
"It was a very small hole."
"It was a bullet hole, Mel."
She left. The back door closed behind her. A moment later, I heard her say "Morning!" to someone in the alley, probably the cat-faced landlady, and then her footsteps faded toward the bus stop.
I stared at the door.
"She's right," Abigale said, without looking up from her book. "You are going to wear the ninja suit."
"I'm aware," I said, "that I've created a monster."
Eli set a plate of eggs down in front of me and patted my shoulder, very gently, the way you'd comfort someone at a funeral.
---
I spent most of the day doing homework.
Not the school kind. The spy kind. And this time, I actually did it before going in, which I felt deserved some kind of award.
The General Student Council's network still had the hole I'd left in it, small and quiet, the way a good hole should be. I used it to pull up the folder Rin had been staring at all week: the lease, the founding documents, the building plans. All of it scanned and filed in the GSC's archive under a name that meant nothing to anyone in this city yet.
SCHALE (Federal Investigation Club). Status: Pending activation. Advisor: [UNASSIGNED].
Pending activation.
I sat back on my stool and looked at those two words for a while.
It was real. It existed. Somebody had already built it, signed for it, filed it, and then put the whole thing on a shelf to wait. The President had made a place for Sensei before she vanished. Right down to the paperwork.
'She knew,' I thought. 'Somehow, she knew she wouldn't be here when he arrived.'
I didn't like that thought. I put it away.
. . .
The building plans were less helpful than I'd hoped.
They showed the outline: a tall, clean building in the D.U., in a quieter district a little way off from the GSC's main offices. Lobby. Elevators. A dozen floors of offices and meeting rooms and storage. A big open floor marked "lounge/cafe (TBD)." A basement level. The top floor, marked simply "Advisor's Office."
The rooms themselves were just boxes. Squares and rectangles with labels. No furniture. No notes. Nothing that told me what it was actually like to stand inside.
That was fine, I told myself. I didn't need the plans. I knew Schale.
I'd seen it every single day for years. The office behind whichever student I'd set as my main screen that week. The wide window, the city spread out behind it. The desk. The couch. The cafe, where I'd gone around tapping students on the head until they gave me little hearts. The classrooms where I'd given lessons. The rooms where students dropped in, one by one, with their bond stories and their problems and their gifts of extremely questionable usefulness.
Except, really, I'd seen a picture of it. A few pictures. A screen-sized slice of a room, drawn beautifully, from one angle. I'd never once seen a hallway. Or a stairwell. Or where the bathrooms were.
The game never showed you the stairs.
'Well,' I thought, closing the plans. 'Guess I'll find out.'
. . .
Then I opened Storage, and I scrolled down past the peaches, past the hair dye remover and the three rows of medical supplies and the lonely blueprint, and found the squares I was looking for.
Micro Sensor (Dust-Type) x36
Listening Node (Screw-Head) x14
Motion Tag (Adhesive) x22
Relay Chip (Thumbnail) x8
I'd made them as Chris.
Not all at once. A few at a time, over the weeks. Every time I built a piece of Unit 01 in the noodle shop's back room, there were leftovers. Tiny ones. I'd carry them to school in my coat pocket and work on them in the Engineering hangar, in the quiet hours spent waiting for epoxy to cure or for Utaha to come back and say "almost." A capacitor that was one size too small for the servo controller I'd meant it for. A sliver of circuit board I'd trimmed off a servo controller. A camera lens no bigger than a grain of rice that had come out of a broken drone and turned out to be the wrong focal length for anything I needed.
Too small to use in Chris. Too good to throw away. And I am, as has been established, a hoarder.
So I'd sat in the corner of the hangar with a magnifying lamp and my sanding block and a pair of very fine tweezers, and I'd turned them into something useful. A sensor that looked like a fleck of dust. A listening node disguised as the head of a screw, down to the scuffs on the slot. A motion tag thinner than a sticker. Little relay chips to pass it all along, quietly, in short bursts, through whatever network happened to be nearby.
Hibiki had wandered past once and looked at what I was doing for a while.
"...What's that," she'd said.
"A screw," I'd said.
She'd looked at it a while longer. "That's not a screw."
"It's a very ambitious screw."
She'd stared at me for another five seconds, then given me a gummy and left. I'd never been sure whether that meant she believed me or that she'd decided she didn't want to know.
I hadn't known exactly where I'd use them, back then. Just that someday, somewhere, I'd want eyes and ears in a place without anyone knowing they were there.
Now I knew where.
---
The ninja suit was waiting for me on the end of the cot when I went back to get changed, folded neatly. Eli had sewn up the hole at the elbow with black thread so fine and so even that I had to hold it up to the light to find it.
There was a sticky note on top, in Eli's careful handwriting.
Please don't get shot again. -E.
And under that, in much smaller, much neater handwriting:
Aim for their legs. -A.
I put the note in Storage. Of course I did.
Then I pulled the suit on, and reached back to tie up my hair, and had to stop and look at it in the small mirror from the workbench drawer.
It had reached my waist.
When I'd woken up in the warehouse, it had barely covered my ears. By the time I met Abigale, it was past my shoulders. And it had just kept going, quietly, a little more every morning, as if it had somewhere it was trying to get to. It wasn't speeding up. If anything, the last few weeks, it had started to slow down. But it hadn't stopped.
I turned my head and watched it swing, gold and heavy, all the way down my back.
'You know,' I thought, 'that's a very different girl from Chris.'
Long hair. Soft, a little messy. The kind of hair a kind, slightly airheaded girl might spend the whole morning braiding and still get wrong. The kind nobody would ever look at and think "spy."
I filed that away. Carefully. Under TRINITY.
Then I braided it tight, tucked the whole length of it down the back of the suit where it couldn't catch on anything, and pulled the mask up.
---
-3rd POV-
The D.U. was quieter than it should have been.
It was the administrative heart of Kivotos, the District of the General Student Council, where offices and agencies sat in neat glass towers and students in crisp uniforms walked briskly from one meeting to the next. On a normal night, it would have been well lit and well patrolled, its streets swept, its traffic lights blinking politely in time.
Tonight, a third of the streetlights were dark.
Some of the traffic signals were flashing yellow and nothing else. A Valkyrie patrol car sat at an intersection with its lights on and nobody inside it. Somewhere a few blocks away, a store alarm had been ringing for so long that it had stopped sounding urgent and started sounding tired.
None of it was dramatic. Nothing was on fire. Nobody was shooting. It was just a city with a missing piece, slowly starting to notice.
And across its rooftops, a small black shape moved like a rumor.
. . .
She stopped on the edge of an office building and crouched there, still as a gargoyle, and looked across the street.
The building on the other side was tall and white and clean, with long sharp windows and a flat roof. It was not the tallest building on the street. It was not the grandest. There was nothing on the front of it to say what it was. No sign. No logo. Just a smooth white wall, a lobby of dark glass, and a set of front doors with a plain metal plate beside them where a name would one day go.
Every window was dark.
The small black shape looked at it for a long time.
Then her gold eyes narrowed behind the mask, sweeping the building's face. The corners. The ledges. The lamps over the doors. The little dark domes of security cameras tucked under the eaves, three on the front, two on each side.
None of them had a light on.
'They're on the GSC's system,' the calm noted, quietly. 'And the GSC's system is having a very bad week.'
She checked anyway. She took out the new phone, the one from the turtle, which she'd spent half the afternoon teaching some very bad habits, and tapped into the camera feed from a hundred meters away through the hole she'd left in the GSC's network.
Black. All of them. Not recording. Not even powered. Somebody, somewhere, had pulled the building off the grid to save power, or simply forgotten it existed.
She almost felt bad about how easy it was.
Almost.
---
-Melissa POV-
I went in through the roof.
There was a maintenance door up there, the kind every building has and nobody ever thinks about, with a cheap lock that my hands looked at with something like pity. I picked it in eleven seconds with the second of my three kinds of lock picks, slipped inside, and pulled the door shut behind me.
Then I stood very still at the top of the stairwell, in the dark, and listened.
Nothing.
No footsteps. No voices. No hum of electronics. Just the faint tick of the building settling, and the far-off murmur of the city through the walls, and my own breathing behind the mask.
I clicked on a small flashlight, cupped my hand over it until only a sliver of light came through, and started down.
. . .
The stairwell was clean.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not new-clean, not shiny. Just clean, the way a place is clean when somebody finished building it, swept it once, and then locked the door and walked away. A thin layer of dust lay over everything, smooth and undisturbed, like the first snow on a sidewalk. My footsteps were the first ones in it.
'Of course,' I thought. 'It's been built. It's just never been used. Nobody's worked here. Nobody's lived here. It's been waiting.'
I came out onto the top floor.
A short hallway. Pale walls. Dark carpet. Two doors on the left, one on the right. And at the end of the hall, a wide door with frosted glass panels, and a small blank plate beside it at eye level.
I didn't need the plate to tell me what was behind it.
I walked down the hall. I put my hand on the handle. It wasn't locked.
I opened the door.
. . .
The Advisor's Office.
There it was.
The big window, the whole width of the far wall, with the city spread out behind it in a thousand lights, half of them a little dimmer tonight than they should have been. The desk in front of it, broad and solid, with nothing on top of it but a lamp and a thin film of dust. A tall-backed office chair, pushed in neatly. Shelves along one wall, empty. A long couch along the other, still in its plastic wrapping. A low table in front of it.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
And something happened in my chest that I didn't have a word for.
It wasn't the calm going still. It wasn't the tug I'd felt when I saw the Sanctum Tower. It was warmer than either of those. Softer. It felt like walking into your grandparents' house after a long time away. Like the smell of a kitchen you hadn't stood in since you were small. Like the moment you get off a long flight and the air outside smells like home.
I'd never been here before.
I'd never been here before, and I was home.
. . .
I walked in slowly. I went around the desk. I stood in front of the window and looked out at the city, and for a moment, I was not in a ninja suit in an empty building at midnight. I was on my old bed, in my old apartment, after work, with the phone held up over my face.
Mel-Sensei! Welcome back!
I could almost hear it.
The MomoTalk notifications chiming one after another. A student asking if I'd eaten yet. A student sending me a blurry photo of a cat. A student sending fourteen messages in a row, all in caps, because something had exploded and it definitely wasn't their fault. The little red number on the app climbing while I was in the shower. The way I'd always answered every single one of them, even the silly ones, even at two in the morning, even when I knew they were just lines in a game.
Because it hadn't felt like a game. Not really. Not to me.
I'd been their Sensei. Through a screen, through a username, through a few minutes stolen at lunch and on the bus and before bed. But I'd been their Sensei.
And this was where Sensei sat.
I put my hand on the back of the chair. I didn't pull it out. I didn't sit down.
'Not yours,' I told myself, gently. 'Not this time. This is his.'
But I stood there with my hand on it for a long time anyway.
---
Eventually, I made myself start working.
I'd planned to go floor by floor, top to bottom, checking each room against the building plans as I went. Methodical. Careful. The way you search a place you've never been before.
That isn't what happened.
What happened was that I walked out of the Advisor's Office, went straight past the first door without thinking, opened the second one on the right, and found a small, plain kitchenette exactly where I'd somehow expected it to be. A sink. A counter. A cabinet. A space where a coffee machine was obviously meant to go.
I stood in the doorway of the kitchenette and frowned at it.
'How did I know that was there?'
The plans didn't say. The plans just said "Room 12-B." The game had never shown a kitchenette. Sensei drank coffee in the stories, but the game never showed where he made it.
I shook it off. Lucky guess. Buildings had kitchenettes. Offices needed coffee. That was just common sense.
. . .
Then I went down a floor, and on the third stair from the bottom of the flight, my body did something strange.
I stopped, one foot on the third stair, one on the fourth, and looked down. My foot hadn't landed in the middle of the step like it had on every other one. It had landed on the very edge, on the side closest to the wall. Automatically. The way you step around a crack in your own front walk.
Slowly, I shifted my weight and pressed down on the middle of the step with my toe.
It creaked. Loud, in the silence. Loud enough that I flinched.
My body had known. It had stepped around the noise before there was any noise to step around.
I'd never been on these stairs in my life.
I went down the rest of the way very slowly.
. . .
It kept happening.
On the tenth floor, I reached for a light switch in the dark and found it on the first try, behind a door, at an awkward height, exactly where nobody sensible would ever put a light switch. Nothing happened when I flicked it, of course. The building had no power. But my hand had known exactly where it was.
On the eighth floor, I walked into a meeting room and my eyes went straight to the corner by the window, as if there were something there I was supposed to look at. There was nothing there. Just an empty corner and a little more dust than the rest of the room. I stood and stared at that corner for a full minute, waiting for it to mean something. It didn't.
On the sixth floor, a big open space marked "lounge/cafe (TBD)" in the plans, I stood in the middle of the bare floor and turned in a slow circle, and my brain filled the room in for me without asking. A counter there. Couches there. A shelf of games and manga there. A big potted plant by the window that someone would keep forgetting to water. Students, laughing, sprawled across all of it.
That one, at least, I knew where it came from. The Cafe. I'd redecorated it in the game every time a new furniture set came out.
But the room in my head wasn't the game's cafe. It was this room. This floor, this window, this exact shape. With the morning light coming in from the left.
The game had never shown me which way the cafe's windows faced.
. . .
I sat down on the floor of the empty cafe and pulled the mask down around my neck, because suddenly it was hard to breathe in it.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Okay. Let's be reasonable about this.'
The body I was living in had belonged to someone before me. I knew that. I'd known it since the first morning, when my hands had known how to check a pistol and my feet had known the warehouse. That girl had skills I didn't. Habits I didn't. A whole life I couldn't remember.
So maybe she'd been here.
Maybe she'd been here a lot.
That would explain the stairs. The light switch. The kitchenette. It would explain why the calm in my chest wasn't still right now, the way it had been with the tower. Why instead it felt quiet and soft and a little sad, like someone sitting in a room they used to love, after everyone else had gone.
But it didn't explain how she could have been here.
This building had never been used. There was dust on every surface, and my footprints were the only ones in it. Nobody had ever worked in this office or made coffee in that kitchenette or worn down the third stair until it creaked. The building was brand new. And somehow, my body knew where it creaked.
'And the dream,' a quiet part of me pointed out. 'The girl in the dream. Sitting at a desk, in an office, with a window full of afternoon light. Holding a tablet.'
And this office was Schale.
I sat on the floor in the dark for a long time, with my knees pulled up to my chest, the same way I'd sat on the noodle shop roof the night before.
I didn't have an answer. I wasn't going to get one tonight.
So I did what I always do when I can't solve something.
I started to put it in the later pile.
And stopped.
Because I knew exactly what was already sitting in that pile. A news screen I hadn't looked at. Gangs fighting over a corner nobody wanted. Three letters on a piece of cardboard, SRT, with "need to check" next to them for weeks. A girl with blue hair who'd asked me for a promise, and weeks where I'd never once stopped to wonder why.
The later pile was the reason I'd found out about the President three days late. The later pile was why I'd ended up with my forehead on a noodle shop counter, calling myself an idiot.
'No,' I thought. 'Not this one.'
I couldn't solve it tonight. I knew that. I didn't have enough pieces, and sitting on a dusty floor turning it over wasn't going to give me more. But I wasn't going to bury it, either. I wasn't going to tuck it away somewhere I'd stop seeing it, and let it sit there gathering dust until it turned into something I should have noticed.
So I held it out at arm's length instead. Close enough to keep an eye on. Far enough that it didn't swallow me whole.
My body knew this building. I didn't know why. I was going to keep watching that. Every stair, every switch, every corner my eyes went to on their own. I'd take note of every one.
And when I had enough pieces, I'd put them together.
I got up, pulled my mask back up, and went back to work. But this time, I paid attention to every step.
---
The devices went in quickly, once I let my hands get on with it.
I started in the lobby and worked my way up, and I put them in the places nobody ever checks.
A dust-type sensor on the top edge of the frame over every stairwell door, where it would sit for months under real dust and look like more of it. A listening node in place of one of the four screws on the lobby's fire alarm panel, scuffed to match the other three. A motion tag on the underside of the elevator's handrail. Two more on the inside of the lamp housings in the hallways, where the heat from the bulbs would hide their own faint warmth. A relay chip tucked behind the faceplate of a network jack in a supply closet that, according to the plans, nobody was ever going to have a reason to open.
The front doors. The back doors. The loading dock. The roof. Every way in or out of the building, watched.
I wanted to know when he arrived. I wanted to know if anyone came here who shouldn't. I wanted to know, if something terrible happened in this building, the very second it started.
And I'd given myself one rule, back in the hangar, while I was making them.
Not the private rooms.
No sensors in the bathrooms. None in the small room off the Advisor's Office that the plans marked "rest area," where I had a strong suspicion Sensei was going to end up sleeping more nights than he should. None aimed at the desk, or the computer, or whatever he'd be reading or writing late at night.
The hallways. The doors. The stairs. The places where things came in from outside. That was all.
'I'm here to look after him,' I'd told myself. 'Not to look at him. There's a difference. Protective older sister. Not a creep.'
I'd written that one on the Planning Board when I got home that night, in small letters, and underlined it twice.
. . .
The worst part was knowing who could find them.
Not the GSC. Not Valkyrie. Not some security consultant poking around with a scanner. I'd built them to fool all of those, and I was fairly sure they would.
No, the problem was the students.
Kivotos was full of girls who noticed things.
I knew them. All of them. That was the problem. I was sticking a fake screw into a fire alarm panel and all I could think of was Otose Kotama, Veritas's wiretapping specialist, who would walk into this lobby one day and feel a listening node the way other people feel a draft. Four minutes. Maybe five, if she was distracted by snacks.
Saki, of RABBIT Squad, who'd do a full SRT sweep of any building she was assigned to on principle, and probably twice out of spite.
Izuna, who'd find the dust sensor over the stairwell door because she'd be climbing on top of the door frame for no reason at all, and would then report it to Sensei, very proudly, as "suspicious ninja activity."
Hibiki, who'd look at my very ambitious screw, recognize the slot pattern, and say "...That's not a screw" for the second time in her life.
Hoshino, who would find all of them while pretending to be asleep, and then not say anything to anyone, and just look at me, someday, with one eye open, and smile.
Chihiro. Maki. Hare. Kanna. Ui, if I was ever foolish enough to hide one inside a book. Ako, out of sheer paranoia. Wakamo, because Wakamo could probably smell a bug through a wall.
I put the last motion tag in place on the underside of the roof door's handle and stepped back.
'It's fine,' I told myself. 'If one of them finds one, they'll find a screw. Or a speck of dust. There's nothing to trace it back to. Nobody to blame.'
'And if Kotama finds them all?'
'Then I'll have been beaten by Kotama, and honestly, that's fair.'
---
That should have been the end of it.
I had one floor left to check, and it wasn't a floor I needed devices on. It was the basement. The plans showed a few storage rooms down there, a utility room, a boiler, and one small room at the end of a corridor that was labeled, unhelpfully, "Reserved."
I almost didn't go.
It was past two in the morning. Every way in or out of the building was covered. Eli and Abigale were probably sitting up at the noodle shop counter again, staring at the back door. And basements were where things went to be forgotten. Mops. Old paint. Boxes of paper nobody would ever read again.
I went anyway.
I'm not sure I could have told you why. My feet just turned toward the basement stairs, the way they'd turned toward the kitchenette and stepped around the creaking stair. As if they had somewhere to be.
This time, I noticed it happening. I held that at arm's length, too.
And I let them go anyway.
. . .
The basement was colder than the rest of the building, and it smelled like fresh concrete. My little sliver of flashlight slid over gray walls, a gray floor, pipes running along the ceiling. A utility room full of humming panels, the only thing in the whole building that was still powered. A boiler. Two empty storage rooms with metal shelves.
And footprints.
I stopped so fast I nearly overbalanced.
They were faint. Very faint. I'd almost walked right over them. A thin, even skin of dust had settled over them since whoever made them had passed, softening every edge, so that in the narrow beam of my flashlight they looked less like prints and more like the shadows of prints. But they were there.
One set. Going down the corridor, toward the far end. And one set coming back.
I crouched beside them without touching anything.
Small feet. Not much bigger than mine. Narrow at the toe. And at the back of each print, set apart from the rest, a little square mark, sharp and deep, the kind only a heel makes. Boots, maybe. Something with a real heel. Someone who'd walked down here in something nicer than anyone would choose to wear into a basement.
The steps were even. Unhurried. Spaced like someone walking, not running. Someone who knew exactly where they were going, and had gone there, and then walked back out again the same way, just as calmly.
Upstairs, the dust had been smooth and unbroken, and mine were the only footprints in it. Down here, the dust over these prints was thinner than anywhere else in the building. Days, maybe. A week. Not much more than that.
Somebody had been down here. Recently. Long after the building was finished and locked and left to wait.
I knew exactly one person in Kivotos who would walk into a basement in tall white heeled boots.
I didn't let myself finish that thought. I didn't put it away, either. I just held it, carefully, at arm's length, next to everything else I'd found tonight.
Then I stood up, and I walked down the corridor beside the footprints, not on them, all the way to the end.
. . .
At the end of the corridor was a plain gray door with a small plate on it.
RESERVED.
It was locked. A real lock, this time. Not the cheap kind on the roof. A heavy, careful, expensive lock, the kind someone chooses on purpose because they want what's behind it to stay where it is.
My hands looked at it with something that wasn't pity.
It took the third kind of lock picks, and almost two full minutes, and at one point my hands stopped, sat back, and seemed to think about it, which was something I'd never seen them do before. Then they tried again, and the lock gave with a soft, heavy click, like a sigh.
I pushed the door open.
. . .
It was a small room.
Smaller than the kitchenette. Bare gray walls. No windows. A single light fixture in the ceiling that didn't turn on when I found the switch. And in the middle of the room, alone, a desk.
Not a big desk like the one upstairs. A small, plain, sturdy one. Metal. The kind you'd find in a school's storage closet, or a government archive. One drawer. No dust on it at all, though there was dust on everything else.
As if someone had wiped it clean right before they left.
I walked over to it. The calm in my chest was doing something it had never done before. It wasn't still. It wasn't warm. It was holding its breath.
I put my hand on the drawer handle.
I pulled it open.
. . .
There was a tablet inside.
Slim. Plain. A little scuffed at the corners. Its screen was black and blank, its edges were rounded and worn, and it was lying in the very center of the drawer, perfectly straight, as if someone had set it down very carefully and then looked at it for a long time before closing the drawer.
It looked like nothing special at all.
I knew exactly what it was.
I'd known it in the game, where it was the first thing Rin ever handed to Sensei, and the reason everything in Kivotos would start to get better. I'd known it in my dream, weeks ago, sitting at a desk in an office full of afternoon light, holding it in my hands as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
And I knew it now, in a cold basement in the middle of the night, in a way that had nothing to do with either of those. In my fingertips. In the place behind my ribs where the calm lived.
The Shittim Chest.
My hand had already started to reach for it.
I stopped it. Barely. My fingers hung in the air a few centimeters above the dark glass, close enough that I could see their reflection in it. Close enough to feel the faint cold coming off the screen.
'Don't,' I told myself.
'Don't touch it. This isn't yours. It's his. It's always been his.'
My hand didn't move. It didn't pull back, either.
And in the black glass of the screen, under my own fingers, I could see my face. Gold eyes. A gold braid over one shoulder, come loose from the back of the suit. A girl in a ninja suit, in a basement, at two in the morning, looking down at something she'd waited her whole life to hold.
The same face, I realized, as the girl in the dream.
. . .
I pulled my hand back.
Slowly. Finger by finger. Like backing away from a sleeping animal. I curled it into a fist and held it against my chest, and I took one step back from the desk, and then another.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Okay. You found it. It's safe. It's exactly where it's supposed to be. Rin's going to come down here someday with a confused man in a suit, and she's going to open this drawer, and she's going to hand it to him. That's how this goes. That's the story.'
'Close the drawer, Mel. Close the door. Lock it. Go home.'
I reached for the drawer to close it.
And the screen turned on.
. . .
I hadn't touched it.
I was sure of that. I was more sure of that than anything I'd been sure of since I'd woken up in this body. My hand was on the very edge of the drawer front, nowhere near the glass. Nobody else was in the room. Nothing had moved.
The screen turned on anyway.
Just a glow, at first. A faint, soft blue, rising up out of the black, the way light comes up over the sea before dawn.
My body moved before I did.
The calm didn't go still. It went sharp. My feet snapped back into a stance without being told to, weight low, balanced. My left hand came up, palm out, ready to catch whatever came at me. My right was already reaching for a pistol in Storage, the window flaring open at the edge of my vision without being asked. Every sense I had came awake at once, all of them pointed at that little slab of glass in the drawer. Sound. Movement. Heat. Anything.
There was nothing. No sound. No movement. No threat.
Just the light, getting brighter.
Blue to white. White to brighter white. It filled the drawer, then spilled out of it, then climbed the gray walls, until the whole small room was full of it, until it was coming through the mask and through my eyelashes and straight into the back of my head.
I tried to look at it. I really did. My eyes had looked at muzzle flashes without blinking.
But not this.
I couldn't help it.
I closed my eyes.
---
The first thing I noticed was the sound of water.
Not rushing. Not dripping. Just there. A soft, wide, endless lapping, the way the sea sounds at night when you're standing at the edge of it and can't see where it ends.
The second thing I noticed was that I was standing in it.
It was cool around my ankles. Not cold. Just cool, and clear, and very still. My feet were on something solid underneath it. Smooth. Like a floor.
The third thing I noticed was that the air was warm, and bright, and it smelled faintly of chalk.
I opened my eyes.
. . .
Sky.
That was all there was, at first. Sky above me, wide and impossibly blue, with tall white clouds standing in it like sculptures. And sky below me, too, reflected so perfectly in the water at my feet that for a dizzy second I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. As if I were standing on the surface of the sky itself.
And in the middle of all that blue, around me, there was a classroom.
Or what was left of one.
Rows of school desks, standing in the shallow water as if they'd grown there, their legs disappearing into their own reflections. Chairs pushed in, or pushed back, or tipped over on their sides. A wall that stopped halfway up and just ended, open to the sky. Windows with no glass in them, framing nothing but more clouds. A blackboard, faded to pale gray, with something written on it so faintly that I couldn't read it. A teacher's desk at the front, under the blackboard.
There was no ceiling. There were no other walls. Just this one broken, quiet, beautiful classroom, floating in the middle of an ocean of sky.
I knew it.
Of course I knew it. I'd tapped on it every morning before work and every night before bed, for years. A blue-and-white classroom, and a little girl sitting on the edge of a desk, swinging her legs, waiting for me to come back.
Mel-Sensei! Welcome back!
But I'd only ever seen it through a screen.
Nobody was supposed to stand here. Nobody in all of Kivotos. Not Rin. Not the GSC. Not any student, no matter how clever, no matter how strong.
This was the inside of the Shittim Chest.
This was a place only Sensei would ever see.
. . .
I turned slowly in the water, taking it in. The tipped chairs. The empty window frames. The faded words on the blackboard I still couldn't read.
There was nobody here.
The desks were empty. The teacher's desk was empty. No little girl swinging her legs. No bright voice. No welcome back. Just the water, and the sky, and the quiet.
And then I saw it.
Leaning against the side of the teacher's desk, half hidden by its shadow, the way you'd leave something you'd only set down for a minute and fully meant to come back for.
A small umbrella. Pale. Neatly closed. Just the right size for someone very small to carry.
My breath caught in my throat.
I knew that umbrella. I'd seen it on my phone screen for years, held in a little girl's hands.
I stood very still, ankle-deep in the sky, and looked at it, and didn't dare to move.