---
-Melissa POV-
"Hold still," Eli said.
"I am holding still."
"You're holding still like a cat holds still. Right before it jumps." Eli lifted the scissors, squinted at my forehead, lowered them again, and chewed her lip. "Melissa, are you sure? It's so much hair. It's such nice hair. What if I mess it up?"
"Then it grows back," I said. "Apparently very fast."
"That's not the point!"
We were in the back room of the noodle shop on Thursday evening, the day after I'd come home at dawn from a basement with tear tracks on my face.
I was sitting on an upturned crate in front of the small mirror from the workbench drawer, which Abigale had propped up on a stack of Eli's history textbooks. There was a towel around my shoulders.
My hair, all of it, all the way down to my waist, was brushed out and hanging loose, gold and heavy and faintly wavy at the ends, like it had been braided for too long and couldn't quite forget it.
The Planning Board leaned against the wall behind me. TRINITY had been circled again, three times now, in fresh red marker. Underneath it, a list.
SOMEONE NICE. SOMEONE NOBODY WORRIES ABOUT.
HAIR: LONG. HALF UP. RIBBON.
BANGS: OVER THE EYES.
"Just the front," I said. "Long enough to fall over my eyes. Not cut straight. A little soft. A little messy. Like I keep meaning to get a haircut and never get around to it."
"Why over your eyes?" Eli asked, for the third time.
"Because my eyes are gold," I said. "And gold eyes are memorable. And the girl I'm about to become is not memorable. At all. She's the girl in the back of the class photo whose face is half hidden by her bangs. She's the one everybody's met and nobody can describe."
"That sounds very sad," Eli said.
"It's very useful," I said. "Cut."
Eli took a deep breath, like she was about to defuse a bomb, and cut.
. . .
It took her almost an hour.
Not because of the cutting. The cutting was maybe twenty minutes, with six stops to ask if I was sure and two apologies for things she hadn't done yet.
The rest was everything Eli decided needed doing first and after. She brushed my hair out from the top, slowly, in long strokes, holding each section in one hand so the brush wouldn't pull. She worked out a tangle near the ends with her fingers instead of the comb, frowning at it as if it had personally offended her.
She hummed while she did it. Something soft, with no real tune. I don't think she knew she was doing it.
At one point she tucked the towel tighter around my neck, so no hair would get down my collar, and then patted my shoulder twice, absently, the way you pat a kid who's being good at the barber.
'She's mothering me,' I realized. 'She's actually mothering me.'
I didn't say anything. I didn't want her to stop.
. . .
Abigale had taken the stool by the workbench, with her Winchester across her knees and a cleaning rag in her hand. She didn't seem to be paying any attention at all. Then, every few minutes, without looking up from her rifle, she'd say something.
"Left side's a millimeter long."
Eli fixed the left side.
"Part's crooked. Two degrees."
Eli fixed the part.
"That piece by her ear. It'll stick out when she turns her head."
Eli fixed the piece by my ear.
"Thank you, Abigale!" she said brightly, every single time, as if Abigale had handed her a present. She didn't mind at all. If anything, she looked relieved, the way you look when someone else is double-checking your math.
. . .
Chris got home about halfway through.
I heard the back door and her "I'm home," and then her footsteps stopping in the doorway of the back room.
She stood there for a moment, taking it in: me on the crate with a towel around my neck, Eli behind me with the scissors and the comb, Abigale glaring at my hairline from across the room like it was a target at four hundred meters.
Then she put her bag down, hopped up onto the end of the workbench, and sat there swinging her feet.
She didn't say much. But every so often, she'd cut in.
"You're squinting," she said, after a while. "Sister. Lucie wouldn't squint. She'd just... not see very well, and not mind."
I stopped squinting.
A little later: "Tie the ribbon on the left, not the right. You always reach with your right hand when you're not thinking about it. So if it's on the left, it looks like she didn't think about it."
Eli tried it on the left. Abigale looked up from her rifle, considered it for a long moment, and nodded once.
And a little after that, very quietly, while Eli was combing out the last of my bangs: "It looks nice, sister."
I didn't trust myself to answer that one. So I just smiled at her in the mirror, and she smiled back, and Eli went on humming.
When Eli was done, I looked in the mirror.
A girl looked back. Gold hair falling in a soft, uneven curtain over her forehead and down past her eyebrows, so that her eyes were only shadows behind it. You could tell she had eyes. You couldn't tell what color they were. You couldn't really tell much of anything about the top half of her face at all.
I smiled at her. The bottom half of the girl in the mirror smiled back. Soft. Pleasant. Completely forgettable.
"...Oh," Eli said quietly, behind me. "Oh, that's creepy. That's so creepy, Melissa. You look like someone I've walked past a thousand times."
"That," I said, "is exactly the point."
---
The rest of her came out of Storage.
I'd been half expecting it, by now. I'd had a stash of strawberry milk big enough to supply a small country. I'd had a hundred and some halos, stage lights, chains, and medical kits for an army.
So when I sat down on Thursday night and scrolled to the clothing rows, looking for something I could alter into a Trinity uniform, I wasn't even surprised to find one already sitting there.
Trinity General School Uniform (Standard) x3.
Three of them. Folded. Pressed. In my size.
'Of course,' I thought. 'Of course I had.'
The calm didn't say anything. But it felt, very faintly, like someone looking innocently at the ceiling.
. . .
I laid everything out on the cot and looked at it.
A white sailor top with long sleeves, the wide collar a soft pale blue, the cuffs pale blue too, with thin white stripes around them. A big yellow bow for the front, the bright, cheerful yellow of a buttercup.
A long pleated skirt in that same pale blue, falling well below the knee, with a frill of white lace peeking out from underneath the hem like a petticoat. White knee socks with a pale blue stripe at the top. Brown loafers. A school bag, white with pale blue trim, with two buckled straps.
It was the uniform half the girls at Trinity wore. The everyday one. The one you saw on a hundred girls at once in the background of every Trinity scene in the game, walking to class, chatting by fountains, carrying books, completely unremarkable.
I loved it immediately.
Then I scrolled to the weapons, and found the other thing I needed.
Assault Rifle (Trinity Standard Issue, Pale Blue) x6.
A compact rifle with a pale blue body and a black barrel, the same soft color as the skirt, as if someone at Trinity had decided that if students were going to carry guns to class, the guns might as well match. Half the background girls in the game had carried one slung over their shoulder like a tennis racket.
I took one out and turned it over in my hands. My hands approved of it in a polite, slightly bored way. It wasn't a weapon for someone who wanted to be noticed.
Perfect.
. . .
The last thing was the halo.
I opened the halo rows and scrolled through them slowly. All of them were there. A hundred and some rings and shapes and symbols, glowing faintly in their little squares like a jeweler's display case. Stars. Wings. Flowers. Gears. Things I didn't have names for.
I passed all of them. I didn't want any of them.
Near the bottom of the last row, I found the one I wanted.
Halo (Thin Ring, Pale) x1.
Barely anything at all. A single thin ring, so pale it was almost white, the color of a cloud with the sun behind it. No shape inside it. No symbol. No color. The kind of halo you'd forget you'd seen the moment you looked away.
I took it out and let it settle over my head, and looked up at it in the mirror.
It floated there, faint and quiet and perfectly ordinary, over a girl with her eyes hidden behind her bangs.
'Hello,' I thought at her. 'Nice to meet you.'
And then, before I could stop it, another thought.
If Storage ever asked me again, someday, the way it had in the factory. If a little window ever opened and said Store memory, Lucie Fairweather? Then her very first memory wouldn't be this. Not a halo in a mirror, or a uniform on a cot.
It would be that evening in the back room. Eli's hands in her hair, slow and careful, humming a song with no tune.
Abigale, across the room, catching every millimeter. Chris on the end of the workbench, swinging her feet, catching every little thing Mel got wrong (the squint, the ribbon, the hand she reached with) and calling her sister while she did it.
A first memory of being fussed over by her family.
I didn't know yet whether there'd ever be a Lucie to keep it. But if there was, I hoped she'd like it.
---
"Okay," I said on Friday morning. "Be honest."
I was standing in the middle of the noodle shop in full uniform. Skirt. Bow. Socks. Loafers. School bag on one shoulder, pale blue rifle slung on the other.
My hair was brushed out long down my back, with the top half gathered up behind my head and tied off with a white ribbon on the left side, a little crooked, the way a girl ties a ribbon when she's doing it without a mirror and running late.
My bangs hung over my eyes. The thin pale halo floated above it all.
In one hand, I held a second burner phone in a cheerful yellow case. I'd gone back to the turtle for it on Thursday. He hadn't remembered me. I believed him.
Three people sat at the counter and stared at me.
Eli, with her chin in her hands. Abigale, with her tea halfway to her mouth. And Chris, in her long white coat with her school bag already on her shoulder, who'd come downstairs, taken one look at me, and sat down very slowly without taking her eyes off me.
"Well?" I said.
There was a long pause.
"...I don't like it," Abigale said finally.
My heart sank. "What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing." Abigale set her tea down very carefully. "That's what I don't like. I know it's you. I watched you put it on. And I still want to walk past you."
Chris nodded slowly. "It's like looking at a crowd," she said. "Except it's one person."
"You look so nice," Eli said. She sounded almost upset about it. "You look like someone who'd lend me a pencil and then forget she lent it to me."
I smiled.
"Good," I said. "Now for the hard part."
. . .
I let my shoulders drop.
Not much. Just a little. Just enough to make me look a bit smaller.
I let my weight settle onto one foot, as if I'd forgotten I had two. I tilted my head, very slightly, to the side. I let my hands come together in front of me, loosely, around the yellow phone, the way you hold something when you're not sure what to do with your hands.
And then I let go of the calm.
Not completely. It was still there, underneath, ready. But I let it step back, out of my posture and my eyes and my breathing, and let something softer step forward. Something a little slow. A little dreamy. Something that never quite knew what time it was.
"Um," I said.
My voice came out different. Higher. Softer. A little breathless at the ends, like I'd been about to say something and lost track of it halfway.
"Um, excuse me... sorry. Is this... is this the way to the chapel? I think I got turned around again. Sorry. I always get turned around." I laughed a little, embarrassed, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and missed, and it fell right back over my face.
"Oh. Um. Hi. I'm Lucie. Lucie Fairweather. I'm new. Well. Sort of new. I've been new for a while, I think? Sorry, I'm rambling. Do you know where the chapel is?"
Silence.
Eli's hands had slipped off her chin. Abigale had frozen with her tea halfway to her mouth again. Chris was staring at me with an expression I'd never seen on her face before, somewhere between awe and alarm.
"...You're scary good at that," Chris said.
"I want to protect her," Abigale said, in a strange, flat voice. "I don't know why. I need to protect her from something. Probably stairs."
"She's going to get lost in a hallway," Eli whispered. "She's going to walk into a door. Melissa, where did she come from?"
I let the calm come back. My shoulders rose. My weight settled onto both feet. My hands went still.
"From a lot of meetings," I said in my own voice, "where it was very important that everyone thought I wasn't paying attention."
. . .
Chris was still watching me. Head tilted. The little bronze gear in her halo turning slowly, the way it did when she was working something out.
"And when she's angry?" she asked.
"She won't be," I said. "Lucie doesn't get angry. That's the whole point of her."
"She will," Chris said simply. "You will. Something's going to happen at that school that you can't fix by getting lost in a hallway. And then what does she look like?"
The shop went quiet.
I thought about it. About Mika, and Seia, and a deal made in the dark. About the thing I'd come to Trinity to stop, and what I'd feel if I walked around a corner and found it already happening.
So I showed them.
I didn't change anything, really. Not the uniform. Not the ribbon. Not the bangs. I just stopped.
Every soft, slow, wandering thing about Lucie, the tilt of her head, the loose hands, the weight on one foot, just stopped, all at once, like a song cut off mid-note. My shoulders came up square. My hands went still at my sides.
And under the bangs, in the shadow where nobody could see my eyes, I let the calm all the way forward, and something underneath it that wasn't calm at all.
I didn't say a word. I just looked at them.
Eli dropped her spoon. Abigale's hand was on her rifle before she knew she'd moved it. Even Chris sat back an inch on her stool.
Then I let it go. Shoulders down. Head tilted. Hands drifting together around the yellow phone.
"Oh!" said Lucie, flustered, tucking her hair behind her ear and missing. "Sorry! Did I scare you? I'm so sorry. I do that sometimes, I think? I zone out. People say I look really scary when I zone out."
Nobody laughed.
"...That," Chris said finally, very quietly, "is so much worse than angry."
"Good," I said, in my own voice. "Because when that happens, I don't want anyone who sees it to think I'm still Lucie."
---
The paperwork took me one night.
I did it the boring way again. The way that had worked for Chris. A transfer from a small school in a far-off district that had closed a few years back, with records that existed and were real and that nobody had looked at in a very long time.
A gap of a few months for "family reasons." A request for a third-year placement in the general course, no faction affiliation, no club preference, no special skills listed except, in the box marked OTHER, "likes gardening and tea."
Lucie Fairweather. Third year. Transfer student.
I'd thought about the year for a long time.
Mika was a third year. So was Seia. So was Nagisa.
If Lucie was going to be anywhere near the people I needed her near, she couldn't be a first year sitting three floors below them in a different building with a different lunch period.
She needed to be in the same hallways. The same classes, maybe. The same courtyard at lunch, eating a sandwich on the next bench over, close enough to hear when someone's voice was a little too bright, or a little too quiet.
Close enough to be there.
'Someone nice,' I thought, looking at the finished file on the laptop screen. 'Someone nobody worries about.'
I hit submit, and sat there for a moment, looking at the little green check mark that came up on the screen.
Two weeks ago, I'd have put this off. I'd have said "later." I'd have told myself there was time.
There wasn't. The President was gone. The tower was going dark one floor at a time.
Somewhere in the D.U., a building was sitting in the dark, waiting, with a drawer in its basement and a little girl in a classroom made of sky. And a few days ago, a girl with blue hair had told me she didn't know how long she had to wait.
Neither did I.
So I was done waiting.
. . .
The paperwork was the easy part. It was the acceptance that took time: forms sitting in a queue in some office at Trinity, waiting for somebody to stamp them.
Their system estimated a week. I didn't have a week. So I slipped into the transfer office's queue the quiet way and nudged mine to the top of the pile. Gently. Just one form among hundreds, moved up a few rows, where nobody would ever notice it had moved.
The acceptance letter came back on Sunday afternoon.
---
-Christina POV-
"You said to ask next time," I said.
Hibiki looked up from her workbench.
Thursday afternoon in the Engineering hangar. Utaha had her head inside something large and loud. Kotori was explaining the history of the ball bearing to a toaster. Hibiki studied me for a long moment, a screwdriver in one hand and a gummy in the other.
"...I did," she said.
"So I'm asking."
I'd made the list on Wednesday morning, after I'd crept back upstairs at dawn and couldn't get back to sleep. I held it out.
Small servo motors. Circuit board offcuts. Cracked lenses. Battery cells that had failed testing. Antenna wire. Anything with a speaker or a microphone in it. Things you could build a phone out of. A lot of phones.
And on the second page, in smaller handwriting, things you couldn't. Joint actuators. Frame struts. A spine's worth of linkage rods. Bigger servos, the kind that moved shoulders and knees. Synthetic fiber, by the meter.
Things that, put together carefully enough, would come out about my size.
Hibiki read it twice. "...What's it for?"
I smiled the sly smile. I knew whose it was, and I'd decided I didn't mind.
"Something for my family," I said.
"...You used to say it was being put to good use."
"It still is."
"That's not an answer."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
Hibiki looked at the list, then at the bins, then at me. Then she held out the gummy.
"Bin three," she said, turning back to her bench. "The good lenses are in the coffee can. Don't tell Utaha-senpai about the coffee can." A pause. "...Ask next time."
"I will," I said, and meant it more than she knew.
. . .
Ten minutes later, Kotori rolled over on her stool, abandoning the toaster mid-sentence.
"Chris-chan! What are you building? Is it a robot? Do you need bearings? Everything needs bearings."
"It's not a robot," I said.
Which was only half a lie.
"It's a secret," I added.
Kotori gasped, delighted. "A secret project! Then it definitely needs bearings."
She spent forty minutes explaining which ones. I listened to every word, partly because it felt warmer from this side of those messages, and partly because I was going to need about forty of them. For the joints.
I didn't tell her that.
. . .
The first page was for EXCLUSIVE PHONES. The second page was for the other half of the board. DOUBLES: HOW? NOT ANOTHER CHRIS... OR? And an arrow between TRINITY and ARIUS.
I knew how she thought. I'd been her, once. Lucie would be at Trinity every day, for months. Arius was next. Mel couldn't be in two schools at once.
Either she'd go into Arius herself, and someone would have to sit in Lucie's seat. Or she'd find a girl from Arius, bring her home and train her the way she'd trained Abigale and Eli, and that girl would need somewhere to go, and something to be.
Either way, Mel was going to need a body. Fast. And the last one had taken her weeks.
But I knew how to build one. More than Mel probably realized.
Some nights, back then, she'd come home too tired to wash out the white dye or take out the blue contacts. She'd just sit down at the workbench still wearing the coat and the halo, still being Chris, and keep going. Fitting a shoulder joint. Threading wire down a forearm. Sanding a jaw plate by lamplight.
Those hours had come with me.
I remembered them the way you remember a dream about your own house. My hands, which had been her hands, setting tiny screws into a wrist. A voice, which had been hers, muttering 'come on, come on, fit' at two in the morning. The weight of an arm in my lap that, it turned out, had been my own.
I remembered building myself. Pieces of it. It meant I knew where to start.
Whether it became another sister or stayed a double was Mel's question, not mine. But the frame would be ready, in a box under my bed, one secret part at a time.
---
-Yuuka POV-
Hayase Yuuka did not trust Christina Frazure. She wanted to be very clear about that, if only to herself.
The salvage requisition sat on her desk in the Seminar office, beside a cup of tea gone cold an hour ago. Requested by: Frazure Christina. Approved: Shiraishi Utaha (enormous, written while running). Witnessed: Nekozuka Hibiki (small and neat, with a tiny gummy drawn beside it).
. . .
Her gut had never sat still around Christina Frazure.
From the first day, the transfer student had been wrong in a way Yuuka couldn't put a number to. Assignments that came back with exactly one error. Every one. For weeks. The neatest pattern Yuuka had ever seen.
Then, one Monday, the pattern stopped. Christina had smiled at her in the cafeteria like it was the first time she'd ever really seen her. And her next mistake had been a real one. Messy. Human. She'd seemed pleased about it.
Her gut said people didn't change overnight. That anything that did was hiding the part that hadn't.
But her head said: four budget folders carried in two weeks, without being asked. Never a missed deadline. Utaha calling her the most promising new member in years.
And on Tuesday, at lunch, Christina quietly double-checking Yuuka's Engineering budget while she wasn't looking, and pointing out the error on page six so gently that Yuuka almost didn't notice she'd done it.
Her head said: whatever that girl is hiding, she has never once used it against anyone.
Suspicious student, her gut told her.
Trustworthy student, her head told her.
Yuuka had never had the two disagree this badly, and she hated it.
. . .
All of it was scrap, already written off. It would cost the school nothing.
Except the second page. Joint actuators. Frame struts. Linkage rods. Yuuka had approved enough Engineering budgets to know what those parts added up to.
The inside of something roughly the size of a person.
Her gut said something very loud about that.
She signed it anyway. Then, underneath, in very small, very neat letters:
Approved. Please report the nature of the project to Seminar upon completion. -H.Y.
'It feels as though I've known her a long time,' she thought, and didn't know where that came from.
---
-Melissa POV-
"Again," I said.
Abigale picked herself up off the concrete. Her left shoulder had hit hard that time. There was a scrape on her cheek and dust down the front of her jacket, and her helmet sat by the wall where she'd set it so it wouldn't get scratched.
She didn't complain. She rolled her shoulder twice, picked up the Winchester, and settled back into her stance.
"Again," she said.
. . .
Abigale had mastered coffee cups in Unit 42 weeks ago. Coffee cups didn't shoot back.
So on Saturday morning, I'd driven us to an abandoned freight depot at the edge of the city, a concrete lot ringed with rusted containers and collapsed loading docks, and filled it from Storage.
Target dummies on rails. Pop-up plates. Smoke. Real rounds for her Winchester, because that was what she'd face out there.
And for me, a little pistol in a much smaller caliber, so that when I hit her, and I was going to hit her a lot, it would sting and bruise and knock her down, and never more than that.
And the target she hadn't expected.
Me.
"You've been shooting at things that wait their turn," I'd told her. "Out there, nothing waits its turn." Then I'd handed her a box of cartridges and stepped back into the smoke.
. . .
Before the first shot, I'd done one more thing. I'd turned Storage off.
Just the part that swallowed incoming rounds without asking. If I'd left it on, every round she fired would have vanished into a square between the peaches and the strawberry milk, and she'd have learned nothing.
I wanted her to know when she was on target. And I wanted to feel it, if she ever got close.
It didn't help her much.
Fighting me wasn't like fighting one person. Not with whatever this body had learned before I woke up in it.
My hands knew weapons the way Hina did, when she stopped holding back. My feet moved like Hoshino's, slipping in close before you'd finished deciding where she was.
I could take a hit and keep coming, and hit back hard enough to dent steel, the way Mika could when she forgot to be careful.
I could adapt the way Neru did, changing how I fought halfway through a fight, the second the old way stopped working.
I could read a battlefield with the tactics SRT drilled into its squads, every corner and sightline and fallback mapped before the first shot.
And I had Saori's refusal to stay down, the kind that got up one more time than anyone thought possible, and then once more after that.
One of the greats from every school, folded into one small girl. And the calm stitched it all together and used whichever piece the moment needed.
There were other pieces, too. Deeper down. Things I could feel the shape of but hadn't reached yet. I didn't go looking for them. Not today.
I held back. A lot. It still wasn't fair. That was the point.
. . .
She lasted four seconds that first time. I counted.
She didn't stay hidden in cover. She did what she'd always done at the range: found a spot, settled in, and waited for the target to show itself. I came around the side while she was still aiming at where she thought I'd be.
By Saturday evening, it was eleven seconds. She'd learned to stop sitting still. Fire once, move, fire again from somewhere else, so I couldn't flank a place she'd already left.
By Sunday morning, it was twenty-six. She'd stopped looking for where I was and started looking for where I'd be, reading the drift of the smoke and the scuff of a shoe on concrete.
Mostly, though, she used her eyes.
I'd known they were good. Out here, I started to understand they were different. Steel-gray with amber pupils, like looking through a scope, and they seemed to work like one.
She caught a flicker at the very edge of a container. The outline of a shoulder through thinning smoke. Even by Kivotos standards, it wasn't normal.
Something to remember.
. . .
On Sunday afternoon, which was today, she tagged me.
She'd stopped chasing me hours ago. Instead, she picked a narrow gap between two containers that I'd have to pass through, settled her rifle on it, and waited. The same habit that had gotten her knocked down in four seconds, except this time she'd guessed where I was going instead of where I'd been.
And I'd guessed that she'd guessed.
So I stopped short of the gap, tucked in behind the far container. A good meter of solid steel between us. No angle. No shot.
Then I heard the Winchester.
One crack. Then, half a heartbeat later, a high, ringing spang of metal on metal, off to my left, where the steel frame of a collapsed loading crane leaned over the lot.
And something hit me in the arm.
It wasn't much worse than a hard punch. This was Kivotos, and I was me. But with Storage off, nothing caught it, and it stung. A sharp, honest, real sting, on the side of my arm facing away from her.
I looked up at the crane. At one fresh, bright scar of bare metal on a rusted beam.
She'd bounced it. Off a beam she'd picked at exactly the right angle, around a corner, into my arm. From forty meters. Through smoke.
. . .
I'd watched and read about Kivotos students doing impossible things for years. Shots through keyholes. Shots across whole districts.
But a ricochet like that wasn't the kind of skill you trained. In the whole game, I could count on one hand the times I'd seen anything like it, and every one had been somewhere strange. Deep in the later volumes. In rare events where the rules of Kivotos bent a little, and nobody ever explained why.
It wasn't luck. Luck didn't look you in the eye afterward.
I stepped out. She was crouched behind her loading dock, the Winchester still at her shoulder, smoke curling from the muzzle. She looked as shocked as I was.
Then very, very proud.
"...How," I said.
Abigale thought about it, honestly, the way she thought about everything.
"I could see where it would go," she said. "So I sent it there."
As if that were an explanation.
The calm had gone very quiet and very attentive, the way it did when it was looking at something it had never seen before.
And I grinned, already figuring out how to train this part of her.
Not the aiming. The seeing. If she could find that line once, by accident, on her second day of real training, with a rifle she'd bought with three months of part-time pay...
'Then let's find out what she can do on purpose.'
"Again," I said. And that time, I put her on the ground.
But she'd tagged me. Around a corner.
She didn't do it again. Not that afternoon.
She tried. Twice more, I heard that same crack and spang of a round off steel.
But by then I'd already changed how I moved, the way Neru would have the second a fight stopped going her way. I stopped trusting cover just because she couldn't see me.
I started reading every beam and drum and container edge in the lot the way she did, as an angle, and stayed out of the lines they made. Both rounds whined off into empty concrete a meter from where I'd been.
Abigale lowered her rifle after the second miss and stared at me through the dust. Not frustrated. Thinking.
Good. Now we were both learning.
. . .
I didn't enjoy knocking her down. But I knew where I was sending her, even if I hadn't said it yet. Since the day after Schale, I'd pushed harder without a word: how to move, how to read a group and find the one the rest were watching, how to talk when you were scared so nobody could tell.
Abigale hadn't asked why. She'd just gotten up earlier.
---
-3rd POV-
They took a break around noon on the edge of a loading dock, eating the rice balls Eli had packed, Abigale's helmet between them.
Far off, past the depot, a long rattling burst of gunfire. Abigale didn't look up. A month ago, she would have. That was what bothered her.
"Eli unmuted her old group chat," she said eventually. "To check on girls she used to run with. It's getting worse out there. Valkyrie can't keep up. Nobody knows who's in charge." A pause. "And the helmet gangs are getting the worst of it."
She knew them. Every crew small, every crew sure it was tougher than the next, and every crew always, always broke.
"They're fighting each other over corners. Over nothing. And while they do, people with money are buying them. There's a company out in the desert by Abydos, paying helmet crews to go out there and cause trouble. Hang around some school. And the crews say yes, because if they don't, the crew across the street will."
Her voice went flat. "My old crew said yes. Last week. All of them."
. . .
Melissa waited, the way she always did.
Abigale looked at the helmet between them. Her face. Her name. Her pride. The girls she'd worn it with had laughed at her when she bought her rifle. She remembered every face.
She remembered the cans, too. Every one, falling.
The idea had been sitting in the back of her head since Thursday, too big to say. She said it anyway.
"If they were one gang instead of fifty," she said. "If somebody made them stop fighting each other, and gave them a reason to stand together, and someone to follow who actually cared what happened to them... nobody could buy them. They'd be too big to buy. And too proud."
"Somebody would have to make them," Melissa said quietly. "Somebody who'd worn a helmet. Who could out-shoot every one of them, and then put down her rifle and talk to them like people."
Abigale turned and looked straight at her. Steel-gray eyes. Amber pupils.
"Send me to Abydos," she said.
. . .
Slowly, Melissa smiled, a small, soft smile that reached all the way into her gold eyes.
"I was going to ask you," she said. "When you were ready."
"I know. That's why you've been knocking me down." Abigale looked back at her helmet. "I wanted to ask first. So it would be mine."
Melissa reached over and rested her hand on top of the black helmet for a moment. Not taking it. Just touching it.
Then she stood. "Then you've got one more week," she said. "And it's going to be the worst week of your life."
Abigale picked up her helmet and her Winchester.
"Again?"
"Again."
---
-Melissa POV-
We got home just before dinner, dusty and starving. Eli had made curry, the kind she made when she had a feeling something was going to happen. Chris looked up from the counter, and her eyes went straight past my face to my arm.
"What happened?"
I'd forgotten. My sleeve had ridden up, and the bruise had come in properly now, a big purple-blue bloom.
Eli turned around with the ladle and went pale. "Melissa! Who did that? Was it a gang? Sit down, I'll get ice..."
"It's fine. It was Abigale."
The ladle stopped halfway to the pot. Two heads turned toward Abigale, standing inside the door with her helmet under her arm and her ears going pink.
"...Abigale hit you?" Chris said slowly.
"Around a corner."
"That's not possible."
"I know."
Chris looked at Abigale for a long moment, the bronze gear in her halo turning. "I want to see the angle."
"After dinner," Abigale mumbled, and became very interested in the curry.
. . .
She told them over dinner. It was hers to tell. The group chat. The crews being bought. One week, and then Abydos, to make them stop fighting each other.
Chris nodded like she'd already worked most of it out.
Eli stirred her curry around her plate for a long time. "A week," she said finally. "That's not very long."
"No."
Eli's eyes had gone very bright.
"Who's going to tell me when the left side's a millimeter long?" she said, in a small voice.
Abigale looked at her. Something in her face went soft in a way I'd never seen before.
"You'll know," she said. "You always fix it anyway."
Eli made the teakettle noise. Then she wiped her eyes, very firmly, and sat up straight.
"Okay. Then I'm going to help." She twisted her napkin. "The gang girls. Some of them won't want to fight forever. Some of them are only there because nobody else ever let them sit at the lunch table."
She glanced at me, then away. "I know what that's like. So when you find the ones who want to stop, who want to go to school, or just eat a real dinner without a gun next to the plate..."
She took a breath.
"Send them to me," she said. "I'll talk to them. I'll feed them. I'll figure out where they can go. Peacefully. No contracts in a dark room." A small, embarrassed smile. "Probably."
I looked at Eli Witmore, the girl in the black X mask who'd once joined a crew because they let her sit with them, offering to be the door for every girl like her who wanted out. And I thought about BASE, and the school I'd caught myself building one breakfast at a time.
'Somebody's going to have to fill it,' I thought. 'With people who chose to be there.'
"Eli," I said. "I think that's the best idea anyone's had all week."
She went pink all the way to her ears and had to go get more curry.
---
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I sat at the counter with two phones: the turtle phone, and Lucie's yellow one. Arona only had one of the numbers.
Hi Arona. It's Mel. I'm sending you a second number tonight. Don't panic.
The reply came back in under a second.
Arona never panics!! Arona is a super high-performance AI!! ...Why does Mel need two numbers?? Is Mel okay???
I'm okay, I typed. But secret helpers have to change phones every once in a while, so nobody can follow them. Whenever I do, I'll send you the new number first. Before anyone else.
A pause. A long one, for Arona. Almost two whole seconds.
Before anybody else??
Before anybody else.
Even before Sensei??
Sensei doesn't even have the first one.
Another pause.
Arona is very honored. But changing phones sounds very inconvenient.
It is, I admitted. So I'm building my own. One nobody can follow. When it's done, you'll only ever need one number for me.
PROMISE??
Promise.
I sent her Lucie's number from the yellow phone. It came back almost instantly.
Saved!! Arona put Mel's second number in the SECOND deepest part of the Chest!! It is almost as secret as the first one!! :)
I put both phones face down, grinning at nothing. Then I opened the laptop and looked at Abydos.
Once one of the biggest schools in Kivotos. Now a mountain of debt, a city the desert swallowed a few centimeters a year, and five girls holding it together with stubbornness and a very old shotgun. I slipped into their student database through a side door.
Takanashi Hoshino. Third year. Committee chair. Absences: many. Naps: presumably more.
Sunaookami Shiroko. Second year. Bicycle enthusiast. Bank robbery count: officially zero.
Kuromi Serika. First year. Part-time jobs: four, at least.
Izayoi Nonomi. Second year. Extremely wealthy, not that she ever mentioned it.
Okusora Ayane. First year. The only one who'd ever filled in the budget columns.
Five ordinary files, if you didn't know what was going to happen to them.
I knew.
'Abigale's going to be out there soon,' I told them silently. 'You won't know who she is. But some of the trouble meant for your door isn't going to make it there.'
It was a start.
. . .
My hands didn't want to close the database. They'd stopped on the Foreclosure Task Force's records, the ones Ayane kept. Neat, desperate budget sheets. Interest payments that made my stomach hurt.
And three things that didn't fit.
A grocery receipt from three weeks ago. Bento boxes for the club room. Qty: 6. Crossed out by hand. A five written beside it. Initialed A.O. A week later, another receipt. Six again. Crossed out again. The same typo, twice, from the most careful girl in the school.
The club room's desk list. Six desks. Five names. The sixth line had no name at all, only a status. In use.
And a requisition, signed by Hoshino two months ago, for "one (1) blanket, large, warm." Hoshino, who'd napped on that couch for years and had apparently never needed one before.
None of it meant anything by itself. So I went to the one file I'd been circling all night, in the archive under FORMER STUDENTS (INACTIVE).
Kuchinashi Yume. Former Student Council President of Abydos High School. Status: Deceased.
Everyone who'd played knew Yume. The girl with big, hopeless, hopeful plans to save the school, who'd gone out into the desert and never come back. The reason Hoshino slept so much and smiled so lazily, and carried a ghost on her shoulders like it weighed nothing.
I'd cried over Yume in my old life.
The photo showed a girl with long cyan hair, golden eyes and a slightly goofy smile, bandages stuck on her arms like she was always tripping over something. A date at the bottom, in red. Lost in the desert. Presumed deceased. File closed.
And in the file's history panel, the one most people never look at, one line that wasn't years old.
Field modified: ATTENDANCE. Value: PRESENT. Date: 26 days ago. Modified by: [ACCOUNT NOT FOUND].
'A glitch,' a reasonable part of me said. Maybe. But somebody had marked a dead girl present twenty-six days ago, from an account that didn't exist. Somebody had bought six bento boxes, twice. Somebody had left a nameless desk in use.
. . .
I made myself think it through, the way I would have with a spreadsheet that didn't add up.
Maybe she was hiding on her own, out in the sand or somewhere closer, and had slipped into the system once to mark herself present, the way you'd touch the doorframe of a house you used to live in.
Maybe somebody was keeping her secret. One of the five. Or two. Somebody careful enough to correct a six to a five every time. Somebody who'd suddenly needed a warm blanket.
Or maybe she wasn't hiding at all. Maybe she was right there in the club room every day, at the desk with no name, eating the sixth bento, and the only thing being kept off the record was the record itself.
I didn't know which, or if any of it was true. But I knew Hoshino's face in the game, every time someone said Yume's name. And if any of this was true, that face was going to change.
I didn't shelve it. I didn't run with it, either. I held it, next to the footprints and the log entry and the strawberry milk.
Then I went into the back room and wrote, very small, under ABYDOS, beside the little sun:
YUME?
. . .
One last thing before bed: a satellite map of the desert past the city's last half-buried street.
Out there, a scar in the sand. A fenced, floodlit dig site ringed with prefab buildings and heavy machinery, run, according to a very boring public permit, by Kaiser Corporation's construction division for "geological survey purposes."
In the middle of it, a hole too deep for the satellite to see the bottom. I knew what was down there. I'd seen it in my dream: a white mechanical serpent with four yellow eyes and a storm wrapped around it. Binah.
A monster underneath. A company on top, digging toward it. Helmet gangs paid to keep everyone else away. And kilometers of empty sand all around.
Danger, inside danger, being searched by danger.
There was no safer place in Kivotos.
On the board, next to BASE, underlined three times, I wrote: THE PIT. ABYDOS. And drew an arrow from it to ABIGALE.
She'd go first. She'd take the gangs and the pressure off five girls who didn't know she existed. And while every eye in the desert was on her, I'd go down into the dark.
. . .
Before I capped the marker, my eyes went to the middle of the board. SENSEI, circled three times.
I didn't know when. The game had never said. But I knew when I'd met him.
A Monday, in November, a whole world away. The day the game came out where I lived. I'd downloaded it on my lunch break because the art looked nice, and somewhere on the bus home, around the part where a girl with long black hair and glasses asked a very confused teacher for help, I'd stopped looking out the window.
The eighth of November.
It didn't mean anything. That was a release date, not a prophecy.
I wrote it under SENSEI anyway. Very small. With a question mark.
NOV 8?
Then I went to bed, and tried very hard not to count the days.
---
On Monday morning, Lucie Fairweather walked through the gates of Trinity General School for the very first time.
She was a little late. She'd taken the wrong bus. Then the right bus in the wrong direction. Then she'd stopped to look at a cat. It hadn't been a very important cat. It had just been a nice one.
Trinity rose up in front of her like something out of a storybook. White stone and tall windows and towers with spires, stained glass catching the morning sun and throwing colors across the paths in blue and gold and rose.
Fountains. Gardens. Long covered walkways lined with arches.
A great cathedral of a building at the center of it all, with bells in its tower, ringing for the start of the day.
And everywhere, students. Hundreds of them. White and pale blue and buttercup yellow, chatting and laughing and hurrying along the paths in little groups, rifles slung over their shoulders like tennis rackets.
Lucie fit right in.
Nobody looked at her twice. Nobody looked at her once. She was just another girl in the crowd, with her hair half up in a slightly crooked ribbon, and her bangs in her eyes, and a thin pale halo nobody would remember.
Underneath all of it, I was watching everything.
. . .
I'd gotten about halfway across the main courtyard, past the biggest fountain, when I heard it.
A laugh.
It came from somewhere up ahead, over by one of the long arched walkways. Bright. Loud. A little too loud, like someone laughing as hard as she could so nobody would notice anything else. The kind of laugh that turned heads.
I turned my head.
Across the courtyard, at the far end of the walkway, a small crowd of students had gathered around someone. I could only see glimpses of her through the gaps between them. Long pink hair. A flash of white wings, folded at her back, catching the light. A halo that was very much not plain at all.
She was laughing at something someone had said. Her whole face was lit up with it.
And for just a second, between one laugh and the next, when she thought nobody was looking, it went out.
Just for a second. Like a light switched off and on again. A flicker of something tired and lonely and very, very angry, there and gone so fast that nobody in that crowd noticed.
I noticed.
Misono Mika. Pater faction. Third year. One of the three leaders of the Tea Party.
The girl who was going to make a terrible deal because nobody was listening to her.
'Hi, Mika,' I thought, very quietly. 'I'm listening.'
. . .
Then Lucie Fairweather adjusted the strap of her school bag, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, missed, and turned to the nearest passing student with an apologetic little smile.
"Um, excuse me... sorry," she said. "Is this the way to the chapel? I think I got turned around again."
The student she'd stopped was a second-year with light brown hair in low twin tails, bright yellow eyes, a sweet, slightly worried face, and an enormous plush bag slung over one shoulder in the shape of a very ugly bird with huge, vacant eyes.
Ajitani Hifumi. Peroro's number one fan.
The calm noted it, quietly, and filed it next to a club name that didn't need to exist yet. The Make-Up Work Club. The backup plan I hoped I'd never need.
"Oh! Um, the chapel?" Hifumi turned, flustered, pointing first one way, then the other, then the first way again. "It's... that way. I think. Past the big fountain, and then left at the rose garden, and... um, actually, it's easier if you just follow the bells. Are you new? You look a little lost. It's okay! Everybody gets lost here at first. I still get lost sometimes."
She hugged her Peroro bag a little closer. "If you get really lost, the library's always open. It's quiet there."
She smiled. A small, nervous, genuinely kind smile.
'Oh,' I thought. 'Oh, I remember you. I'm going to like you a lot.'
"Thank you so much," said Lucie. "You're really nice. Sorry. I always get turned around."
And she walked off, a little slowly, in completely the wrong direction.
Exactly the way she'd meant to.