---
-Melissa POV-
Lucie Fairweather got lost eleven times in her first three days at Trinity.
I counted.
Every single one of them was on purpose.
. . .
The first time, she got lost on the way to her homeroom and ended up in the library.
It was enormous. Three floors of dark wood and tall windows and shelves that went up so high they had their own ladders, and a hush so deep it felt like walking into a held breath.
Lucie wandered in, looked up at all of it, and said, "Oh, wow," at a perfectly normal volume.
Every head in the room turned.
From behind the front desk, a pale girl looked up from a very old book and stared at her over the top of it. Dark gray hair in long twin tails that fell all the way to her knees, tied with violet-blue ribbons, a matching headband, and tired violet-blue eyes. Kozeki Ui. Head of the Library Committee. A third year, like Lucie, with the permanent expression of someone who had never once been left alone to read in peace.
"Shh," said Ui.
"Sorry!" Lucie whispered loudly. "Sorry. I'm lost. Is this the chapel?"
Ui looked at her for a long moment.
"...No," she said. "It is very much not the chapel."
"Oh." Lucie looked around again, at the shelves and the ladders and the dust drifting through the sunlight. "It's really pretty, though."
Something in Ui's tired face changed. Not much. Just a little.
"...It is," she admitted. Then, after a pause: "The chapel is the other way. Please close the door quietly on your way out."
Lucie did. Very quietly. And then she came back the next day, at lunch, and sat in a corner with a book about pressed flowers, and didn't make a single sound for forty minutes.
When she left, Ui gave her a very small nod.
'One,' I thought.
I'd started a second count by then, right alongside the one for getting lost. Everyone Lucie met. The friends, and the people who were only just starting to be.
. . .
Hifumi was in the library on the third day.
I'd known she would be. Ajitani Hifumi, second year, light brown hair in low twin tails and bright yellow eyes, who spent half her lunches hiding among the shelves with her Peroro bag on the seat beside her, reading the kind of books other girls might tease her about.
Lucie sat down at the same table. Not too close. Just close enough.
She didn't say anything for a while. Then, very quietly, she pointed at the bag.
"Um. Sorry. Is that Peroro?"
Hifumi went very still. The way you go still when somebody has noticed the thing you love, and you're waiting to find out whether they're going to laugh at it.
"...Yes," she said cautiously.
"He's so cute," said Lucie.
Hifumi stared at her.
Peroro is not cute. Peroro is a large white bird with a vacant expression, huge, unfocused eyes and a tongue that hangs out of the side of his beak. Almost nobody in Kivotos thinks Peroro is cute.
Hifumi does.
And now Lucie will too. After all, everyone I talk to here will be Lucie's friends, not mine.
"You... you think so?" she whispered.
"His eyes are so big," said Lucie, with complete sincerity. "He looks like he's always surprised by something nice."
Hifumi's face did something wonderful. It lit up from the inside, slowly, like someone turning up a lamp.
Forty minutes later, I knew about every limited-edition Peroro plush released in the last three years, the difference between a store exclusive and an event exclusive, and the tragic story of the Rainy Day Peroro keychain that Hifumi had missed by a single day. Ui had shushed us four times.
At the end of lunch, Hifumi held out her phone, a little shyly.
"Um. There's a Momo Friends pop-up shop next month. In the D.U. If you... if you wanted to go. Maybe. With me."
Lucie's yellow phone came out of her bag.
"I'd love to," she said.
And somewhere underneath Lucie, I felt something warm and simple and completely real, that had nothing to do with plans at all.
'Two,' I thought. And then, for a second: 'No. That one doesn't get counted. That one's real.'
But that was the point, wasn't it?
Lucie wasn't supposed to be a mask with nothing behind it. She was supposed to be loved. A kind, clumsy, goofy girl people actually wanted around, who got lost and dropped things and thought Peroro was cute, and who had real friends because she was a real friend.
The more real she was, the better she'd work. And the more real she was, the happier I'd be to be her.
'Two,' I thought again. And this time, I let it count.
---
I found Mika on Thursday.
Or rather, Lucie got lost on Thursday, and happened to end up in a small, quiet garden at the back of the Pater faction's wing, with a stone bench under a white rose arbor, and sat down on it to eat her sandwich.
It was a very nice bench. It was clearly somebody's bench. There was a cushion on it.
Lucie didn't notice. Lucie never noticed anything.
She'd gotten about halfway through her sandwich when a shadow fell across her lap.
"Um," said a voice above her. "You're in my seat."
I looked up. Lucie looked up.
Pink hair. White wings, folded neatly at her back. A bright, cheerful smile with something very sharp and very careful sitting just underneath it, like a knife in a velvet box.
Misono Mika.
"Oh!" said Lucie, flustered. "Sorry! Is this yours? There's a cushion. I thought it was just a really nice bench."
"It's a really nice bench," Mika agreed. "Because it's mine." She tilted her head. Her smile didn't move, but her eyes did, sweeping over Lucie top to bottom. The plain uniform. The plain halo. The bangs. "You don't know who I am, do you?"
Lucie thought about it, visibly.
"Um," she said. "Should I?"
There was a pause.
And then Mika laughed.
Not the loud laugh from the courtyard. Not the one for crowds. This one was smaller. Surprised. It came out of her before she could stop it, like a hiccup.
"Oh my gosh," she said. "You really don't."
"Sorry," said Lucie. "I'm new. Well. Sort of new." She held out the other half of her sandwich. "Do you want half? It's egg salad. To say sorry for sitting in your seat."
Mika looked at the sandwich.
I watched her think about it. I watched her decide whether this was a trick, or a joke, or a girl from some other faction trying to get close to a Tea Party leader with an egg salad sandwich. I watched her decide that nobody would be that obvious. Or that stupid.
She sat down on the other end of the bench, and took the sandwich.
. . .
We didn't talk about anything important. That was the point.
Mika talked about a cake shop in the D.U. that had closed down, and how it was a crime, and how she'd personally write a petition if she thought anyone would sign it. Lucie talked about how she'd gotten lost on the way to the garden, and the way before that, and the way before that. Mika laughed at her. Lucie laughed too, because she didn't seem to mind being laughed at.
That was something Mika noticed. I saw her notice it.
. . .
Halfway through the sandwich, Lucie knocked her juice box off the bench with her elbow.
Mika caught it before it hit the ground. Without looking. One hand, very fast, the way you'd catch something you'd been half expecting to fall.
"Wow," said Lucie.
"You're a disaster," Mika said, handing it back. Then she looked at Lucie a little more closely, and frowned. "And your ribbon's crooked. Like, really crooked. Did you tie it in the dark?"
"Um. Kind of? I was running late."
"Oh my gosh. Come here."
And before Lucie could say anything, Misono Mika of the Tea Party had shifted down the bench, untied the white ribbon, and was retying it with quick, careful fingers, muttering under her breath about girls who couldn't be trusted to dress themselves.
I sat very still and let her.
. . .
In the game, Mika was always the one who needed looking after.
She was the one who got scolded. The one who made a mess and then had to be talked down from it, or talked out of it, or forgiven for it.
Most of what Sensei ever gave her was tough love, because most of what she did needed it.
There were messages I'd never forgotten. One night she'd kept him with her so late that he had to sneak out of Trinity without being caught, and afterward he'd told her, plainly, that he was upset. Not playful. Real.
A teacher caught in a student's dorm after curfew could lose everything, and she hadn't thought about that until it was too late. That was so mean... I'm sorry, she'd written.
And another time, she'd cheerfully admitted she'd broken curfew and lied to him about the time to keep him there. You were tricked by a naughty student again. Heehee. And then, right after: Please don't hate me, though, okay?
Mika was used to being the problem. Everyone treated her like one, and so she acted like one, and so everyone kept treating her like one.
But nobody had ever needed her to be the careful one before.
And right now, sitting on her own bench with her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration, fixing the ribbon of a clumsy transfer student she'd known for twenty minutes, she looked like someone who'd just discovered she was good at it.
"There," Mika said, sitting back. "Now you look like a person. Try not to fall in a fountain on the way to class."
"I'll try," said Lucie, and touched the ribbon. "Thank you. You're really good at that."
Mika opened her mouth, like she was about to say something sharp and joking.
Then she closed it again, and looked pleased, and a little embarrassed about looking pleased.
'Good,' I thought. 'Lean on that, Mika. Be the one somebody relies on, for once. See what it feels like to be trusted with something.'
It wouldn't fix everything. I knew that. One clumsy friend wasn't going to undo everything the game had planned for her.
But it might be enough to make her stop and think, one day, before she did something that couldn't be taken back.
Then, near the end of lunch, there was a quiet moment. The bell hadn't rung yet. The roses were moving a little in the wind. Mika was looking up at the arbor, not saying anything, and for a second her face did the thing I'd seen in the courtyard. The light went out of it.
"You laugh really pretty," Lucie said, out of nowhere.
Mika blinked. "What?"
"Your laugh. It's really pretty." Lucie was looking at her sandwich crust, not at Mika, the way people do when they're saying something they're a little embarrassed about. "But sometimes it sounds kind of tired. Like you've been laughing for a really long time and nobody's let you stop."
The garden went very quiet.
Mika didn't say anything. She just looked at Lucie, and for a moment there was nothing careful in her face at all. Nothing sharp. Just a girl who'd been seen, very suddenly, by someone who wasn't supposed to be looking.
Then the bell rang.
Lucie jumped about a foot. "Oh no! I'm going to be late! Sorry, sorry, thank you for sharing your bench..."
She grabbed her bag and her rifle and hurried off. In completely the wrong direction.
Behind her, I heard Mika call out.
"Hey! Egg salad girl! What's your name?"
Lucie turned, walking backward, almost tripping over a planter.
"Lucie!" she called. "Lucie Fairweather!"
"That's the other way, Lucie!"
"Oh! Thank you!"
She turned around and went the right way. Behind her, very quietly, I heard Mika laugh again.
The small one. The real one.
'Hi, Mika,' I thought. 'I'm still listening.'
---
-3rd POV-
"Fairweather," said Hasumi.
She set a thin folder down on the table between them.
It was late afternoon, in a small meeting room on the second floor of the Justice Realization Committee's building, and the three of them had been meeting here once a week for almost a year now, officially to coordinate between Justice and the Remedial Knights, and unofficially because they were the only three people at Trinity who seemed to notice the same kinds of things.
Hanekawa Hasumi, vice-chair of Justice. Tall and composed, with long black hair to her waist, dark red eyes, a small mole under her left eye, and a pair of large black wings folded at her back. Always watching.
Kenzaki Tsurugi, its chair. Long, wild, wavy black hair, a sharp red choker, and teeth that were sharper than teeth had any business being. She looked like she might bite through the table, and was, at the moment, eating a cookie very politely.
And Aomori Mine of the Remedial Knights. Waist-length light blue hair with streaks of pink, two front braids tied with pink ribbons and clipped with little medical-themed hairpins, light blue feathered wings, and bright green eyes. She sat perfectly straight in her chair with her hands folded on the table and an expression that suggested she was ready to rescue someone at any moment, whether they wanted it or not.
"Third year," Hasumi went on. "Transfer. Started Monday. From a small school out in the eastern districts that closed three years ago."
"And?" said Tsurugi.
"And her records are perfect." Hasumi opened the folder. "Every grade. Every attendance sheet. Every signature. All of it real, all of it on file, all of it exactly where it should be." She paused. "Nobody's records are that perfect, Tsurugi. My own aren't. Yours certainly aren't."
Tsurugi chewed her cookie thoughtfully. "Maybe she's just very organized."
"She got lost on the way to the restroom yesterday," said Hasumi. "Twice."
. . .
"She came to the infirmary three times this week," Mine said.
The other two looked at her.
"Twisted ankle, Monday," Mine went on, in her calm, steady voice. "She tripped on the stairs outside the chapel. Bumped head, Tuesday, on a low arch in the east walkway. Scraped palms, Wednesday, from a fall in the rose garden." She folded her hands a little tighter. "Each time, she came in limping. Or holding her head. Or holding out her hands. And each time, when I examined her..."
"Nothing?" Hasumi asked.
"Nothing," said Mine. "Not a bruise. Not a mark. Not a single scratch. As if she'd never been hurt at all."
There was a pause.
"I gave her a sticker each time anyway," Mine added. "She seemed very happy with the stickers."
. . .
"I saw her during the firing drill on Tuesday," Tsurugi said slowly.
She'd put the cookie down. Which, for Tsurugi, was serious.
"The one where the blanks went off early on the east lawn. Half the first years jumped out of their skins. A couple of them dropped their rifles. Fairweather was standing about ten meters from the line." Tsurugi frowned. "She dropped her books. She squeaked. She looked very startled. All very normal."
"But?" said Hasumi.
"But she didn't flinch," said Tsurugi. "Not her shoulders. Not her eyes. Not her feet. She squeaked, and she dropped her books, and she looked surprised. But her body didn't move at all. It just stood there and waited for the noise to be over." Tsurugi was quiet for a moment. "I've only ever seen that once before. In someone who'd been shot at so many times it stopped being interesting."
The room was very quiet.
"So she's lying," said Hasumi.
"Or she's very, very used to danger," said Mine. "And doesn't want anyone to know."
"Or both," said Tsurugi.
They looked at each other.
"So what do we do?" Mine asked.
Hasumi closed the folder.
"Nothing," she said. "For now. She hasn't done anything wrong. She hasn't hurt anyone. If anything, she's been..." She hesitated, searching for the word. "Nice. To everyone. Ichika says she's the friendliest transfer student she's ever met."
"Mari likes her," said Mine. "Hanae likes her. Serina likes her very much. She keeps finding her."
"Mashiro thinks she's suspicious," said Tsurugi.
"Mashiro thinks everyone is suspicious."
"...True."
Hasumi slid the folder into her bag.
"We watch," she said. "Quietly. And if she turns out to be exactly what she looks like, then we've wasted a little time keeping an eye on a sweet girl who can't find the restroom."
"And if she's not?" said Tsurugi.
Hasumi didn't answer that.
---
-Melissa POV-
What Hasumi didn't know was that I'd already met half her committee.
And half of everyone else's.
. . .
I met Nakamasa Ichika on Monday. Second year, Justice, with straight black hair to her waist, two mismatched hairpins, blue-gray eyes and black wings. She found Lucie wandering the Justice building's halls looking for the chapel, and laughed so hard she had to sit down, and then walked her there personally, chatting the whole way about the best vending machines on campus and which teachers were secretly nice.
I met Shizuyama Mashiro on Tuesday, when Lucie got lost near the Justice rooftop and found a small first year with a neat black bob, shiny black eyes and black wings, lying flat on her stomach behind a sniper rifle, staring very intently at nothing.
Mashiro looked up, narrowed her eyes, and informed Lucie that she was standing in a restricted area, that loitering near Justice's facilities was suspicious behavior, and that justice would always prevail.
Then she gave Lucie extremely detailed directions to the chapel, including two shortcuts and a warning about a loose stair.
"Thank you," said Lucie. "You're really nice."
Mashiro went pink to the tips of her ears and said, "Justice is not nice," and went back to her rifle. But she watched Lucie all the way to the stairs. To make sure she didn't fall on the loose one.
I made a small mental note on the way down.
A quiet sniper who lay perfectly still for hours and could see things nobody else could. And another quiet sniper, about to leave for Abydos, who could do the same.
'She and Abigale might get along,' I thought. Then I pictured the two of them in the same room, staring silently at each other down their scopes, neither one willing to blink first.
'...Maybe.'
. . .
I met Iochi Mari on Monday afternoon, in the chapel itself, where Ichika had finally delivered her. Mari was arranging flowers by the altar. A small, gentle first year from the Sisterhood, with long orange hair, a braided side ponytail tied with a gold ribbon and a flower, soft cat ears, sky-blue eyes, and a kinder face than anyone had any right to have.
She didn't ask Lucie what she was doing there. She just smiled and asked if she'd like to help.
Lucie dropped a vase. Mari didn't mind at all.
And then Wakaba Hinata, a tall third year with messy black hair down to her hips and warm red eyes, came around the corner with an armful of hymnals stacked taller than her head, tripped on the same step Lucie had tripped on, sent the hymnals flying, and caught Lucie, Mari, the hymnals and the second vase all at once, without seeming to notice how strong that was.
"Oh! I'm so sorry!" said Hinata, setting everyone down very gently. "Are you hurt? I'm always knocking things over."
"Me too!" said Lucie, delighted.
They looked at each other with the instant, deep understanding of two people who apologize to furniture.
Mari laughed softly into her sleeve.
. . .
And I met Sumi Serina everywhere.
A second year from the Remedial Knights, with short pink hair, a little ponytail tied off to one side, and pink eyes. She was the kind of girl you'd never notice until you needed her.
Every time Lucie "tripped," every time she bumped her head or scraped her hands or turned an ankle on a perfectly flat path, Serina was there. Not running up. Just there, already, kneeling beside her with a first aid kit open, as if she'd been standing behind the nearest corner waiting for someone to fall over.
"Are you alright?" she'd ask, in her calm, kind voice. "Let me see."
And every time, there was nothing to see. And every time, Serina looked at the perfectly unhurt ankle or the perfectly unscraped palm for a moment longer than she needed to. Then she'd smile, put a bandage on it anyway, and say, "Please be careful, Fairweather-san."
By Thursday, she'd stopped saying "Fairweather-san." By Friday, she'd started saying "Lucie."
Asagao Hanae, her junior, a first year with lavender hair in two pigtails so long they reached her legs, came with her twice, and both times gave Lucie a cheerful lecture about the importance of watching where you walk, and then tripped over the first aid kit.
. . .
It wasn't a strategy. Not really. I hadn't planned to meet any of them.
But Lucie was kind to everyone who stopped to help her. And in Trinity, it turned out, a lot of people stopped to help.
By Friday, she could barely walk from one end of the main courtyard to the other without somebody waving.
Ichika, from the Justice steps. Mari, from the chapel garden. Hinata, from somewhere behind a tower of hymnals. Hifumi, from the library window, holding up her Peroro bag so Lucie could see it. Serina, from nowhere at all.
And the whole time, very quietly, from the windows of a meeting room on the second floor of the Justice building, three older girls watching her go.
I knew they were there. I waved at them, too.
Lucie waved at everybody.
---
Seia was the one I was afraid of.
I'd known that before I ever set foot at Trinity. Yurizono Seia, Sanctus faction, third member of the Tea Party. Small and fragile, with long champagne-gold hair, fox ears and a quiet, distant voice, who saw the future in her dreams and told almost nobody what she saw.
Everyone else at Trinity, I could fool. Seia, I wasn't sure about.
So I'd planned to stay away from her. At least for the first week. At least until Lucie was a familiar face, part of the furniture, someone nobody worried about.
Lucie got lost on Thursday afternoon anyway.
I swear, that one wasn't on purpose.
. . .
It was a quiet part of the campus. A long, empty corridor in the Sanctus wing, all white stone and tall windows, with late sunlight lying across the floor in long gold bars. I'd taken a wrong turn looking for a shortcut back to the main building, and then another, and somewhere around the third, I realized my feet had stopped telling me where to go.
There was a girl at the end of the corridor.
Sitting very still on a bench under the window, in a pale uniform, with a book closed in her lap. Fox ears. Long, straight hair the color of champagne, falling past her waist. Eyes that faded from pink to gold. Small enough that she looked like she might blow away if somebody opened the window too fast.
She wasn't reading. She was looking at me.
She'd been looking at me, I realized, since before I came around the corner.
Lucie stopped. Lucie smiled her lost, apologetic smile.
"Oh! Um, sorry. I think I got turned around again. Is this the way to the main building?"
Seia didn't answer.
She just kept looking.
---
-3rd POV-
Yurizono Seia had been dreaming badly for weeks.
Not nightmares. Seia didn't have nightmares. She had something worse: dreams that were true, or would be. A tower going dark. A city getting louder. A deal made in the dark, between two people who should never have been in the same room. A girl with pink hair and white wings, crying. Seia, falling.
She didn't tell anyone about them. She'd learned long ago that people didn't want to hear what she saw. And, worse, that telling them rarely changed anything.
So when a girl came around the corner of the Sanctus corridor on a Thursday afternoon, Seia did what she always did with strangers.
She looked.
. . .
Not with her eyes. With the other thing. The thing that showed her what was coming.
And she saw nothing.
That had never happened before.
Everyone had something. A shape. A color. A thread running forward into the dark. Even the most ordinary student at Trinity had a future that Seia could see the edges of, if she looked hard enough.
This girl had nothing. Just a plain, pale halo, and bangs over her eyes, and an apologetic smile. And behind all of it, where her future should have been, a blank, smooth, empty white, like a page nobody had written on yet.
Not empty, exactly. Unwritten. As if whoever was underneath that smile hadn't been decided yet. Or didn't belong to any story Seia could read.
Seia kept looking.
And then, very slowly, something rose over the white.
. . .
It came from the edges first. A faint glow. Then brighter. Gold. Not harsh. Not blinding. Warm, like the first light of a spring morning coming through a window. Gentle. Patient. The kind of light you'd want to sit in on a cold day, with a book in your lap, and close your eyes.
Seia felt it on her face, though nothing in the corridor had changed.
She felt something in her chest she hadn't felt in a long time. Something loosening. As if a hand she hadn't known was clenched had just begun to open.
Safe, the light seemed to say. You're safe. Rest.
It spread until it covered the blank page completely, edge to edge, until there was no white left to see. Only her. Only the clumsy, smiling transfer student with her bangs in her eyes and her ribbon crooked.
It was the sun.
Lucie Fairweather was the sun.
. . .
And then, because Seia was Seia, she looked closer.
Into the center of the light.
And for just an instant, she saw what lay at the heart of all that gentle gold. What the warmth was, underneath. What it would become, if anyone was ever foolish enough to reach too close to it, or hurt what it was warming.
It didn't have a shape. It didn't need one.
It was the sun, still. The same sun. But seen from close enough to burn.
Seia pulled back so fast her book slid off her lap and hit the floor.
---
-Melissa POV-
The book hit the stone with a sharp little clap that echoed down the whole corridor.
Lucie jumped. "Oh! You dropped your..."
She hurried over, bent down, picked it up, and held it out.
Seia took it slowly. Her hands were very steady. Her face was very calm. But her fox ears had gone flat against her head, and she was looking at Lucie the way you look at a fire you're not sure is under control.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything.
Then Seia spoke. Her voice was quiet and distant and very, very precise, the way it always was in the game, as if every word had been weighed on a scale before she let it out.
"The main building," she said, "is back the way you came. Left at the second window. Then straight."
"Thank you!" said Lucie. "Sorry for bothering you."
She turned to go.
"Fairweather-san."
Lucie stopped. Nobody had told Seia her name.
Seia was still looking at her. At Lucie. Only at Lucie, as if whatever might be underneath had already been covered over by something too bright to see past.
"Be careful," she said softly, "where you walk. Some paths are warmer than they look."
Little did Seia know, the paths themselves weren't any warmer.
It was Lucie who would make them burn.
. . .
I don't know what Lucie said back. Something polite. Something flustered. Something about getting lost a lot.
I was too busy keeping my hands still.
The calm had gone sharp. Every part of me was pointed at that small, fragile girl on the bench, the same way it had pointed at a glowing tablet in a basement. Not as a threat. As something it didn't understand.
She'd seen something in Lucie. I didn't know what. But she'd seen it, and she'd let Lucie know she'd seen it, and then she'd let her walk away.
And she hadn't, I was almost sure, seen me at all.
Lucie waved goodbye. Seia didn't wave back. She just watched, with her book held very carefully in both hands, until I turned the corner.
I didn't breathe properly until I was three corridors away.
'Okay,' I thought, leaning against a wall in a stairwell, with my heart going much faster than Lucie's ever should. 'Okay. Arm's length. She saw something. She didn't say anything. She's not going to say anything. That's Seia. She never says anything.'
'And that's the problem.'
---
By the time I got home on Friday night, I was more tired than I'd been since the four days I spent building Chris.
Being Lucie all day was harder than being Chris had ever been. Chris had been quiet. Chris had sat by the window and made one mistake on the board and kept her head down. Lucie had to talk. Lucie had to trip, and laugh, and forget things, and be nice to every single person who spoke to her, and never once let the calm show through, not even when a firing drill went off ten meters away.
And then, every evening, I came home, pinned the bangs back off my face, and went straight back out to the depot with Abigale until it was too dark to see.
That week, we'd been working on the ricochet.
On purpose.
. . .
She couldn't do it every time. Not even close. Most of her attempts whined off into the concrete or the sky. But two or three times a night, I'd hear that crack, and that spang, and feel something hit the steel plate I'd taped to my chest for practice, from somewhere I'd have sworn she couldn't see.
"How did that one feel?" I'd ask.
And she'd think about it, honestly, and say something like, "The beam was warm from the sun. It made the line bend a little." Or, "I didn't look for the angle. I just knew where you'd be standing, and the angle was already there."
I didn't understand half of it. Neither did she.
But she was getting better. And on Sunday, she was leaving.
---
That was why I almost didn't notice the box.
It was Friday night, past eleven. I'd just come back from the depot. Abigale had gone up to bed. Eli was asleep at the counter again, with a cooling cup of tea next to her elbow and a recipe book open under her cheek.
And Chris was sitting on the floor of the back room in her pajamas, next to a large cardboard box, waiting for me.
"Sister," she said. "Can I show you something?"
. . .
She opened the box.
Inside, carefully packed in layers of foam and bubble wrap, was most of a person.
Not finished. Not close. But I knew what I was looking at the second I saw it, because I'd built one before, piece by piece, in this same room. A spine of linkage rods, neatly assembled. Two shoulder joints. Most of an arm. The beginnings of a frame, about my size, laid out in sections like a very careful puzzle.
I stared at it.
"Chris," I said slowly. "What is this?"
"It's for Lucie," Chris said.
She didn't look away. She sat up straight on the floor, with her hands folded in her lap, the way she used to sit in class back when I was her, and looked right at me.
"You can't be at Trinity every day and go to Abydos and the pit and Arius and everywhere else," she said. "You're already so tired you fell asleep standing up in the shower on Wednesday. I heard you hit the wall."
"...That was one time."
"You need a double. Somebody to sit in Lucie's seat when you can't. I knew you'd need one, so I started building it." She paused. "From Engineering scrap. Hibiki gave me the coffee can. Yuuka signed the form. Kotori thinks it's a secret project with very good bearings."
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
"I remember how to do most of it," Chris went on. "Some nights, back when I was you, you were too tired to take the dye out, and you'd build my arms while you were still being me. So I remember those parts. The joints. The wiring. The frame."
Her hands tightened in her lap. "But I'm stuck. I can't do the rest. The parts that make it more than a frame. Those came from the blueprint, and I only ever saw pieces of it. Little bits, over your shoulder, when you were too tired to notice I was still... there."
She looked at me.
"So I need your help," she said. "Please. Let me help."
. . .
I didn't say anything for a long time.
I looked at the box. At the careful foam. At the spine she'd assembled by hand, every rod straight, every joint seated perfectly. At the arm with its wiring threaded neatly down the inside, the way I'd threaded it once, at two in the morning, muttering come on, come on, fit.
Then I looked at my sister. Sitting on the floor in her pajamas. Waiting.
I'd built her to be a double. She'd become a person instead. And now that person had gone and built me a double of her own, in secret, one borrowed lens at a time, because she'd noticed I was tired before I had.
"...Okay," I said. My voice didn't come out quite right. "Okay. Let's do it together."
Chris smiled. Not the sly one. The other one. The one that was just hers.
---
I sat down on the floor beside her, opened Storage, and reached for the blueprint.
I'd only ever looked at it inside the window before. Or spread it out across the back room like a map, in those four sleepless days. I'd never actually taken it out.
So I did.
Blueprint: AL-1S (Partial) came out of Storage into my open palm.
And it unfolded.
. . .
It wasn't paper. It had never been paper.
It was light.
A small, bright point of it hovered just above my hand, about the size of a marble, glowing a soft, steady gold. Then it opened. Layer after layer, unfolding outward from that single point like a flower blooming in fast-forward, until the whole space between us was full of it.
Designs. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Floating in the air in thin, glowing lines. A frame, slowly rotating, its joints labeled in tiny script. A hand, opening and closing. A spine, broken out into every single linkage, each one turning gently on its own. Wiring diagrams that spread and branched like gold rivers. A faceplate, seen from the front, then the side, then from inside.
And in the middle of it all, small and bright and pulsing slowly, a heart-structure. The same shape I'd built for Chris by lamplight. The same one beating in her chest right now.
Chris's mouth had fallen open.
The light was reflected in her blue eyes. Hundreds of tiny gold lines, turning.
"Sister," she whispered. "It's so big."
And then, behind the wonder in her eyes, something else woke up. I watched it happen. Her gaze stopped drifting and started tracking, line to line, joint to joint, the way it did over a workbench in the hangar.
Her inner engineer. Her true self.
It began to work.
. . .
I reached out, slowly, and touched one of the floating designs. A shoulder joint.
It moved under my finger. It actually moved. It slid forward out of the cloud of light, grew larger, and turned so I could see it from every side, with every screw and spring and wire laid out and labeled. When I spread my fingers, it opened up into its parts. When I closed them, it put itself back together.
Like something out of a movie. A genius in a garage, waving his hands through a hologram, building armor out of light.
I laughed. I couldn't help it.
"Chris," I said. "Look. You can read it."
And she could. That was the thing that stopped my breath. When I'd studied it before, half of it had been scrambled, crawling, unreadable, like something had pressed its hand over the page. Most of it still was, if you looked deep enough. Down at the very core. Down where the heart-structure pulsed, and the lines got smaller and stranger and started to twist.
But the rest of it. The frame. The joints. The wiring. The parts that made a body a body.
That was all clear now. Every line. Every label.
As if, somewhere in the last few weeks, the blueprint had decided it was all right for us to see that much.
I thought about when, exactly, that might have happened. And there was really only one answer.
Before Chris, I'd been guessing. Reading a language I only half knew, sounding out the words. Then I'd built her, all the way, with my own two hands, and she'd opened her eyes and asked if I was her sister.
After that, the words had started to make sense.
It reminded me of something from my old life. The skill trees in games, where half the branches stay grayed out and locked no matter how hard you stare at them, until one day you finish something big enough, and they quietly light up. Not because the tree changed. Because you did.
Making Chris had been my something big enough.
And whatever part of me had leveled up that night, Chris, who'd come from that very same night, could read it too.
. . .
Chris reached out, very carefully, and touched a forearm design with one fingertip.
It turned for her, too.
She made a small sound, half a laugh and half something else, and touched another. And another. Her hands moved through the light faster and faster, pulling designs forward, spreading them open, comparing them to the pieces in her box.
"This one," she said. "This is the wrist I couldn't figure out. The tendon cables go under, not over. That's why it kept locking. And this, the spine, I had the linkage spacing wrong by two millimeters. And this..."
She stopped. She'd pulled a faceplate forward, and it hung in the air in front of her, glowing gold, turning slowly. Blank. Smooth. Waiting for a face.
Chris looked at it for a long time.
"Sister," she said quietly. "When we finish this one. Is it going to be another Lucie? Or another... me?"
I didn't answer right away.
I looked at the faceplate. At the heart-structure, pulsing at the center of all that light. At the parts I still couldn't read.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "That's why we're going to build it together. So whichever it turns out to be, she'll have both of us."
Chris nodded slowly.
Then she reached for the box, and pulled out the half-finished arm, and held it up beside the glowing design so she could see where it was wrong.
We worked until two in the morning, sitting on the floor of the back room in the gold light, with Eli snoring at the counter and the city loud outside the window.
And when I finally crawled onto the cot, gold light still swimming behind my eyelids, it was the best sleep I'd had all week.
---
-3rd POV-
That same night, on the other side of the city, in a small, quiet room in the Sanctus wing of Trinity General School, Yurizono Seia lay awake and looked at the ceiling.
She didn't want to sleep.
She knew what she'd see if she did. The tower. The deal. The girl with pink hair, crying. Herself, falling.
She'd seen it every night for weeks. It never changed.
But tonight, when she finally closed her eyes, it was different.
The dream came the way it always did. The dark corridor. The sound of footsteps behind her. The cold.
And then, at the very edge of it, where the dark had always been, there was something new.
A warmth. Faint. Gold. Like the first light of morning, coming in through a window she'd never noticed was there.
It didn't change the dream. Not yet.
But for the first time in weeks, Seia slept until morning.