---
-Melissa POV-
The first time, it had taken me four days.
Four days and four nights, mostly alone, stripping robots in the dark and sanding brackets until my fingers went numb, guessing my way through a blueprint I could only half read. By the end of it, my hands had been shaking.
This time, it took two nights and a day.
Because this time, I wasn't alone.
. . .
Chris worked like she'd been born for it. Which, I suppose, she had.
I'd wake up from a twenty-minute nap on the cot and find her exactly where I'd left her, cross-legged on the back room floor in her pajamas, the blueprint hanging in the air in front of her like a small golden galaxy. She'd pull a design forward with two fingers, spread it open, check it against the part in her lap, and fix it before I'd even noticed it was wrong.
"Wrist," she'd say, holding out a hand without looking up.
I'd put a wrist actuator in it.
"Thank you. Shoulder housing next. The left one. The right one's done."
"When did you do the right one?"
"While you were asleep." She tilted the shoulder joint in the gold light, frowning at it. "You snore, sister."
"I do not."
"You do. Eli says it sounds like a very small motorcycle."
. . .
Eli kept us alive.
She came and went all Saturday morning with trays. Rice balls. Soup. Tea. More tea. Toast cut into triangles, because she'd decided at some point that triangles were more encouraging than squares. She set each tray down beside us without a word, picked up the last one, and went away again, the way you'd tend a fire you didn't want to go out.
Once, very early, I caught her standing in the doorway, just watching. The blueprint was open, the light was moving across the walls, and Chris and I were bent over the same half-finished hand, our heads almost touching.
Eli didn't say anything. She just had a soft look on her face, like someone watching two sisters build a sandcastle.
Then she went to make more toast.
. . .
By Saturday noon, the body was mostly whole.
It lay on the workbench under a sheet, the way Chris once had. Long. Slender. A little taller than me, the same as Lucie had been all week, thanks to an extra inch I'd hidden in the heels of her school shoes. She'd always seemed like a girl who'd stand up straight, when she wasn't busy tripping over things.
Chris had done the hair herself. Gold, like mine. Long, like mine, down to the waist. But softer, with a little more wave at the ends, as if it had spent its whole life coming loose from ribbons.
The face, I'd done.
It was my face. It had always been my face, under the bangs. But I'd let it be a little rounder at the cheeks. A little softer around the mouth. The face of a girl who smiled first and thought about it afterward.
The eyes were still closed. Under the lids, they were waiting. I'd made them a warm, honey amber. Not gold like mine. Not blue like Chris's. Something gentler. The color of afternoon light through a window.
I pulled the sheet up to her shoulders and stood back.
"She looks like she's napping," Chris said softly.
"She does."
"She's going to be so clumsy, isn't she?"
"...Probably."
Chris smiled.
"Good," she said.
---
At two o'clock, I left Chris with the heart-structure diagrams and drove Abigale out to the depot one last time.
Neither of us said much on the way. She sat in the passenger seat with the Winchester across her knees and her helmet in her lap, watching the city go by. The streets were louder than they'd been a week ago. We passed two burned-out cars and a Valkyrie checkpoint with nobody manning it.
Abigale watched all of it. She didn't say anything about any of it.
But I saw her hand tighten on the stock of her rifle.
. . .
"Final test," I said, when we were standing in the middle of the empty lot.
The containers. The collapsed crane. The scarred loading docks. The concrete, pitted now with a week's worth of rounds. All of it looked smaller than it had the first morning. Or maybe she'd just gotten bigger.
"What's the test?" Abigale asked.
"Ninety seconds," I said. "You have to tag me once. Not by luck. On purpose."
"And you?"
I looked at her.
"This time," I said, "I'm holding back a lot less."
Abigale looked at me for a long moment. Then she put on her helmet.
She hadn't worn it during training once, all week. She'd always set it down by the wall, so it wouldn't get scratched.
The visor came down. Black. Smooth. Her face. Her name. Her pride.
"Okay," she said.
. . .
I won't describe all ninety seconds. I don't think I could.
I'll say that I moved faster than I had all week. That I used things I'd kept back on purpose, before. That I went through the smoke and over the containers and around the crane like it was a place I'd lived in my whole life, and that the calm put every piece of every great girl in Kivotos together without asking me, and that for most of those ninety seconds, Abigale never saw me at all.
I'll say that she didn't panic. Not once.
She moved. She fired once, moved, fired again. She went still in a spot I'd never seen her use, and waited, and when I didn't come, she moved again before I could come around behind her. She'd stopped thinking like a girl at a shooting range. She was thinking like a girl who'd be alone in a desert full of people who wanted to hurt her.
. . .
At around thirty seconds, I started taking pot shots at her through the smoke. Quick ones. Two or three at a time from my little pistol, from wherever I happened to be, just to keep her head down.
The first one should have caught her in the arm.
It didn't. Because Abigale turned toward the sound of my shot, raised the Winchester, and fired at the bullet.
I heard it happen. A sharp, tiny crack in the air between us, like two pebbles knocked together very hard. My round, gone. Swatted out of the air.
And her round didn't stop.
Her Winchester threw a much heavier bullet than my little pistol. It hit mine, shoved it aside like a truck hitting a bicycle, and kept coming, barely slowed, along the line my shot had come from. Straight back toward me.
It went past my ear close enough that I felt the wind of it.
I stood very still in the smoke for half a second.
'She shot down my bullet,' I thought. 'She shot down my bullet, and then she used it to find me.'
. . .
I fired again from somewhere else. Twice.
Crack. Crack. Both of them, gone. And two heavier rounds came screaming back up the lines, one of them close enough to clip a lock of my hair.
That was twice.
There wasn't going to be a third.
I changed everything. The way Neru would have. I stopped shooting from one spot and started shooting on the move, never firing twice from anywhere, never letting her follow a line back to me. And I started shooting more. Not two or three rounds. Five. Eight. A steady rain from every direction at once, too many to shoot down, too fast to trace.
I watched her figure it out.
She could intercept one round. She could intercept two. She couldn't intercept ten, not with a lever-action rifle that held a handful of cartridges and took time to work. Every round she spent knocking mine out of the air was a round she couldn't spend on me.
So she stopped trying.
She went low behind cover and let my shots crack harmlessly off the concrete around her, and she waited. Conserving. Counting. Working the lever slowly, quietly, so I couldn't hear how many she had left. Looking for a better opening, the way a hunter waits for the deer to step out of the trees.
It was exactly the right call.
I'd have been proud of her if I hadn't been so busy trying to win.
. . .
At seventy seconds, I put her down. Hard. A round from my little pistol across her shoulder, and she went over onto the concrete.
She got up.
At eighty, I put her down again.
She got up.
At eighty-six seconds, I was on top of a shipping container, moving fast along the roof of it toward the gap where I knew she'd be. Out of every line she had. Every angle. I'd checked every beam and drum and edge in the lot on the way, the way I'd learned to after the first time.
She fired.
Not at me. Not at anything I could see.
There was a crack, and a spang, high and bright, off the side of the crane. And then a second one, half a heartbeat later, lower, off the corner of a loading dock I'd already crossed and dismissed.
Two bounces.
The round came up off the second one at an angle I hadn't checked, because there'd been no reason to check it, because nobody could make a shot like that.
It hit me square in the back of the shoulder.
. . .
I stopped on top of the container and stood there for a moment, with the sting spreading warm across my shoulder blade.
Then I turned around.
Abigale was standing in the open, in the middle of the lot, with her rifle still raised and smoke curling up from the barrel. She lowered it slowly. Then she reached up, unclipped her helmet, and took it off.
Her hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat. There was a fresh scrape on her chin from the concrete. Her steel-gray eyes were enormous.
"Eighty-eight seconds," I said.
"Was it on purpose?" she asked. Her voice was very quiet. "It felt on purpose."
"It was on purpose."
Abigale let out a long, shaky breath. Then she sat down, right there on the concrete, with her helmet in her lap, as if her legs had decided they were done for the day.
I climbed down off the container and went and sat beside her.
We didn't say anything for a while. Far off, past the edge of the depot, somebody was shooting at somebody else. Abigale didn't look up. Neither did I.
"You're ready," I said finally.
"I know," said Abigale. And then, after a moment, much more quietly: "Thank you, Melissa."
I bumped her shoulder with mine. The one I hadn't hit.
"You did that," I said. "Not me. I just knocked you down a lot."
"You did knock me down a lot."
"I did."
She almost smiled.
---
We worked through the night.
Chris and I, on the back room floor. Eli asleep at the counter. Abigale asleep upstairs for once, because I'd ordered her to, and she'd been too tired to argue. The blueprint glowed. The heart-structure took shape between our hands, small and gold-wired, piece by careful piece.
It was the only part of the blueprint I still couldn't fully read. Down at the core, the lines still twisted and crawled. But I'd built one before. My hands remembered it, even where my eyes couldn't follow. And Chris's hands remembered watching mine.
At a quarter to five on Sunday morning, Chris set the last connection, sat back, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.
"Done," she said.
We looked at it. The heart-structure, sitting in the center of the open chest under the lamp, humming faintly. Waiting.
"Now what?" Chris whispered.
Now came the part I was afraid of.
---
I'd thought about it every day for two weeks.
Since the night I'd sat on the back room floor and asked Storage to store memory and gotten nothing at all. Since I'd tried again, picturing a Trinity girl I hadn't even invented yet, and nothing had happened. Since I'd lain awake wondering if Chris had been a one-time thing. A miracle that came once and never again.
What if I'd built a body for nothing?
What if she just lay there?
I sat down on the stool beside the workbench and looked at her. Long gold hair, spread out across the bench. Closed eyes. A crooked white ribbon, which Chris had tied on her, crooked on purpose, on the left.
Then I reached out and took her hand.
It was cool. Still. Not quite a hand yet.
I closed my eyes, and opened Storage.
. . .
Nothing.
The window opened the way it always did. Rows and rows of squares. The peaches. The strawberry milk. The blueprint, empty in its square now, the gold light still out in the room.
Nothing new.
I sat there and waited. My heart was going very fast. Behind me, I could feel Chris holding her breath.
'Please,' I thought. Not at Storage. Not at anything in particular. Just out into the dark behind my eyes. 'Please. She's so close. She has friends waiting for her. She has a bench, and a library, and a girl who fixes her ribbon. Please.'
Nothing.
And then, at the very edge of the window, something flickered.
Faint. Gold. I know now that it was the same flicker that had been there two weeks ago, the night I'd first asked. I just hadn't been looking. Like someone who'd been trying very hard not to say anything, and had finally decided it was time.
A small box opened at the center of the window.
Store memory, Lucie Fairweather?
. . .
I made a sound. I don't know what kind.
Behind me, Chris grabbed the back of my shirt in both fists.
'Yes,' I thought. 'Yes. Please. Yes.'
The memories went out of me the way they had with Chris. Not taken. Copied. Warm and bright and flowing, down my arm and through my fingers and into the cool hand in mine.
I felt them go.
A crate in the back room. A towel around my shoulders. Eli's hands in my hair, slow and careful, humming a song with no tune. Abigale, across the room, catching every millimeter. Chris, swinging her feet on the workbench, calling me sister.
The library, and Ui's tired eyes, and a very small nod.
Hifumi's face lighting up like a lamp. He looks like he's always surprised by something nice.
A garden. A white rose arbor. A juice box caught one-handed. Quick, careful fingers in my hair, retying a ribbon. Now you look like a person.
Ichika laughing so hard she had to sit down. Mashiro going pink to the tips of her ears. Mari's flowers. Hinata catching everyone at once. Serina, appearing out of nowhere with a bandage and a kind voice, saying Lucie.
A long white corridor, full of late gold light. A small girl with fox ears, looking at me as if I were the sun.
And underneath all of it, the parts I'd thought while I was her. The getting lost on purpose. The counting. The half-real, half-pretend clumsiness. Mika's tired laugh, and how much I wanted to fix it. The look on Chris's face when she asked what Lucie looked like angry.
All of it. Every bit of it that had been Lucie.
Then the box closed, and the window went quiet.
And the hand in mine moved.
---
-Lucie POV-
The first thing I noticed was that someone was holding my hand.
The second thing I noticed was that I was lying on something very hard, and that my hair was everywhere, and that something was poking me in the back that was probably a screwdriver.
The third thing I noticed was the smell. Solder. Tea. Toast. Noodle broth, faintly, from somewhere farther away. The smell of a home that a lot of people had been working very hard in.
I knew that smell.
. . .
I knew a lot of things, it turned out.
They came all at once, the way you remember everything about your life the second you wake up in the morning, before you've even opened your eyes. The library. The garden. The corridor. A bench with a cushion on it. A hymnal stacked taller than a girl's head. A sticker from Mine, shaped like a little bandage, which I was fairly sure I'd stuck on the inside of my school bag.
And before all of it, at the very beginning, the very first thing I'd ever remembered:
A towel around my shoulders. Hands in my hair. A song with no tune.
I opened my eyes.
. . .
There were faces above me.
A girl with white hair and blue eyes, standing close enough to touch, with both hands clamped over her mouth and tears running down her face. A little bronze gear turning very fast in her halo.
And a girl sitting beside me, holding my hand. Small. Shorter than me, I thought, though it was hard to tell lying down. Long gold hair, coming loose from a braid. Dark circles under her eyes. A smudge of something on her cheek.
And two eyes, so bright and so gold they didn't look like eyes at all.
I knew that face.
It was my face. I'd seen it every morning in the mirror for a week, right before the bangs came down. A little sharper than mine. A little more tired. But mine.
She was looking at me like someone who'd been waiting outside a door for a very long time, and had just heard the handle turn.
"...Hi, Lucie," she whispered.
. . .
I knew who she was. I knew exactly who she was. I had her memories of being me, and I knew what it felt like to be her, being me. The counting. The planning. The calm, standing a little to one side while I tripped over things. The way she'd let it go, sometimes, and just enjoyed being kind.
I knew she'd built me. I knew she'd been afraid I wouldn't wake up.
I knew what I was supposed to call her.
But I looked up at her, and at the white-haired girl crying beside her, and at the ceiling, and at all the gold light still floating in the air from the blueprint, and the very first thing out of my mouth, before I could stop it, was:
"...Um. Sorry. Is this the chapel?"
. . .
There was a silence.
Then Chris made a sound that was half a sob and half a laugh and all at once, and had to sit down on the floor.
And Mel, my sister, my creator, the girl who'd been me, put her face down on the edge of the workbench beside my hand and laughed so hard her shoulders shook.
"No," she said, into the workbench, her voice wobbling all over the place. "No, it's very much not the chapel."
"Oh," I said. I thought about it. "...I got lost again, didn't I?"
"You got found," said Chris from the floor, wiping her eyes. "Welcome home, little sister."
Little sister.
I tried the words out, very quietly, in my own head. They fit. They fit like a ribbon somebody else had tied for me, crooked, on the left, exactly the way I liked it.
I smiled. I couldn't help it. It was the first thing I'd ever done with this face that I hadn't learned from somebody else.
---
-Melissa POV-
Her halo came in a few minutes later.
She was sitting at the counter by then, on a stool, wrapped in a blanket Eli had brought down at a run, with a cup of tea in both hands that she kept almost spilling. The thin pale ring floated over her head, the same one I'd worn all week. I'd taken it out of Storage and settled it over her while she was still asleep. The borrowed one.
And then, as we watched, something kindled in the middle of it.
Small. Round. Gold. A tiny sun, glowing softly at the very center of the ring, the color of the first light of morning.
Chris saw it first. She pointed, speechless.
Lucie looked up, cross-eyed, trying to see her own halo, and nearly fell off the stool.
"Is it nice?" she asked anxiously. "Is it a nice one?"
"It's a sun," I said.
Lucie went very still. I knew exactly what she was thinking. I'd felt that memory go into her only minutes ago. A long white corridor. A girl with fox ears. Some paths are warmer than they look.
"...Oh," said Lucie softly. "That's kind of a lot to live up to."
"You'll manage," said Chris.
. . .
She'd brushed her bangs aside to look at her halo, and for the first time I saw her eyes open in the lamplight.
Honey amber. Warm and gentle and a little sleepy, like afternoon sun on a windowsill.
Not mine. Hers.
"I made those," I said, before I could stop myself.
Lucie blinked at me with them. "They're really pretty," she said. "Thank you."
Then her bangs fell right back down over them, the way they always did, and she didn't push them back up.
'Good,' I thought. 'Keep them for the people who earn them.'
Tomorrow morning, Lucie Fairweather would walk through the gates of Trinity again, and get lost, and sit on a cushioned bench, and let Mika fix her ribbon.
And for the first time, it wouldn't be me.
. . .
"Oh," I said. "That reminds me."
I reached into Storage and took out the yellow phone. Lucie's phone. The one I'd carried all week, with its cheerful case and its two saved numbers: mine, and Hifumi's.
I held it out to her.
"This is yours," I said. "It always was."
Lucie took it in both hands. She turned it over, and then she unlocked it without even thinking about the code, because of course she knew the code, and looked at the contacts.
Hifumi. With a little Peroro sticker next to the name, which I definitely hadn't put there. Lucie must have, at some point, while she was still me.
"Hifumi's going to text you," I warned her. "About Peroro. A lot."
Lucie hugged the phone to her chest. "Good," she said.
. . .
That left me with one more thing to do.
I took out the turtle phone and typed.
Arona. It's Mel. Remember the second number I gave you? The yellow one?
Arona remembers everything!! It is in the SECOND deepest part!!
It belongs to my sister now.
There was a pause. A long one, for Arona. Almost three whole seconds.
Mel has a SISTER??
Since WHEN??
Since about twenty minutes ago.
THAT IS NOT HOW SISTERS WORK!!
And then, a moment later:
...Can Arona be friends with her too??
I looked across the counter at Lucie, who was trying to drink her tea and look up at her own halo at the same time, and was losing at both.
I think she'd like that a lot, I typed.
Arona is moving her number to the FIRST deepest part. Next to Mel's. Because she is family now. And then: Tell her Arona says hello!! And welcome!!
"Lucie," I said. "Someone says hello. And welcome."
"Oh!" Lucie looked up, delighted, and nearly spilled her tea. "Who?"
I smiled.
"A friend," I said. "You'll meet her someday."
---
The sun was coming up properly by then. Eli had gone upstairs to wake Abigale. Chris had fallen asleep sitting up at the end of the counter, with a wrist actuator still in her hand.
Lucie and I sat at the counter, side by side, with our tea.
"Sister," Lucie said after a while. Quietly. Not quite looking at me. "Can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
"When Chris asked what I'd look like angry. And you showed them." She turned her cup around in her hands. "I remember it. I remember how it felt. Everything going quiet and square, and the calm coming all the way forward, and something underneath it that wasn't calm at all."
"I remember too."
"But that was the calm. Your calm." She looked down at her tea. "I don't think I have that. When I reach for it, it isn't there." A pause. "So when it happens. When I need to be angry, for real, at that school. Will it be me? Or will it be you?"
. . .
I thought about it for a long time.
About Chris, asleep at the end of the counter with a part still in her hand. Chris, who'd pulled the blueprint apart with her fingers like she'd been born knowing how. Chris, who wanted to understand everything, and build everything she understood.
That hunger had been mine, once. The thing that had stood up in my chest in the back room after the ruins, wanting to know. It had gone into her, and it had stayed, and grown, and become hers.
And Lucie. Who'd woken up and asked if this was the chapel. Who'd nearly fallen off a stool trying to see her own halo, and hugged a phone because it had a Peroro sticker on it. Who loved people first and thought about it afterward. That had been mine, too. All the warmth I'd poured into being her for a week, every kind word, every bit of care for a lonely girl on a rose-covered bench.
Each of them was a piece of me. Not a copy. A piece. The part of me that had been loudest while I was being them, given a body of its own and room to grow.
And if Lucie was my heart, then she had all of it. Not just the gentle part.
"It'll be you," I said. "It won't be the calm. It'll be something else. Something that's yours."
Lucie looked up at me through her bangs.
"What will it be like?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But you love people so much that it spills over. So I think, if anyone ever hurts the people you love..." I looked up at the little sun glowing over her head. "I think that'll spill over too."
Lucie was quiet for a moment.
Then she looked down at her cup. The tea in it had gone cold an hour ago. It was steaming again. Just a little. Just a thin curl of it, rising in the morning light.
Neither of us said anything about that.
. . .
"One more thing," I said. "Seia."
Lucie's shoulders went a little stiff. "The girl in the corridor."
"She can see what's coming. Not always clearly. But she sees things." I chose the words carefully. "When she looked at you, there was something underneath. Something she couldn't read. That was me."
"And now?"
"Now there's nothing underneath," I said. "Just you. If she looks again, all she'll see is the sun."
Lucie thought about that.
"Is that good?" she asked.
"It's very good," I said. "Just be kind to her. She doesn't sleep much."
"I'll bring her a sandwich," said Lucie, with total seriousness.
I laughed. I couldn't help it.
---
There was one more person who needed to meet her.
Abigale came down the stairs at seven, dressed for the road. Black jacket. Boots. The Winchester slung over one shoulder and her helmet under her arm. A duffel bag Eli had packed, unpacked and repacked three times, with snacks hidden in every pocket.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
Lucie was sitting at the counter in a borrowed sweater, holding a piece of toast, with crumbs on her chin and her ribbon crooked.
They looked at each other.
"...You're Lucie," Abigale said finally.
"I'm Lucie!" said Lucie, and then, because she'd forgotten she was holding toast, waved with it, and sent the toast flying across the counter.
Abigale caught it without looking.
She held it out. Lucie took it back, bright pink.
"Sorry. Thank you. I do that."
"I know," said Abigale. "I watched you practice."
. . .
She stood there a moment longer, looking at Lucie with her steel-gray eyes. Something in her face was working, quietly, the way it did when she was lining up a shot.
"I said I wanted to protect you," Abigale said. "Before. When you were still Melissa."
Lucie nodded slowly. "From stairs," she said. "I remember."
"I still do." Abigale set her helmet down on the counter for a moment, so she had both hands free, and reached over and very carefully straightened Lucie's ribbon. Just a little. Not all the way. "I'm going to be far away for a while. So be careful on stairs. And in fountains. And in gardens."
"I'll try," said Lucie, and her eyes had gone very bright under her bangs. "Be careful in the desert."
"I'll try," said Abigale.
Then she picked up her helmet again.
---
We walked her to the bus stop at the end of the street. All of us. Eli in her apron, sniffling and pretending she wasn't. Chris in her long white coat, holding Lucie's hand so she didn't trip on the curb. Lucie in a borrowed sweater, holding the last of her toast.
And me, beside Abigale, with a small bag in my hand.
"Phone," I said, holding it out. "Turtle phone. My number's the only one in it. Text me every night."
"Every morning," said Abigale. "You'll be asleep at night."
"...Every morning, then."
She took it. She put it in her jacket pocket and zipped it shut, the careful way she did everything.
"Money's in the side pocket. Addresses for two safehouses I rented out there are in the front. Medkits in the bottom." I hesitated. "And if it goes bad, if it ever goes really bad, you don't wait. You call. I'll come."
"I know," said Abigale.
"I mean it."
"I know you do." She looked at me. "That's why I'm not afraid."
. . .
The bus came around the corner, old and dusty, with ABYDOS on the sign in the front window.
Eli lost the fight with her sniffling and threw her arms around Abigale, duffel bag and rifle and all. Abigale let her. She even patted Eli's back, twice, very awkwardly.
"Write to me," Eli said into her shoulder. "Not just Melissa. Me too."
"I'll write to you."
"And eat."
"I'll eat. You packed enough food for a month."
"It's for two weeks!"
Chris shook her hand, very formally. Lucie hugged her, almost knocked her over, and apologized three times.
And then Abigale stood in front of me.
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
Then she put on her helmet. The visor came down. Black. Smooth. Her face. Her name. Her pride. The girl inside it wasn't the girl who'd once been too scared to take it off in public.
"See you, Melissa," she said.
"Go get them, Abigale."
She got on the bus. She found a seat by the window, near the back, and set the Winchester across her knees. The doors hissed shut. The bus pulled away from the curb, slowly, and turned toward the edge of the city and the long road out to the desert.
She didn't wave. She didn't need to.
But just before the bus turned the corner, I saw her lift one hand, very briefly, and press it flat against the window.
. . .
We stood at the bus stop for a long time after it was gone.
The four of us. Eli sniffling. Chris with her gear turning slowly. Lucie, with her little sun glowing faintly over her head in the morning light, and a crumb of toast still on her chin.
And me, in the middle of all of them.
Two sisters now. A friend gone off to the desert. Another one standing right beside me with tear tracks on her face and enough food waiting at home to feed an army.
It was more family than I'd ever had in my whole first life.
"Okay," I said finally. My voice came out rough. I cleared my throat. "Okay. Who wants breakfast?"
"Me!" said Lucie, and stepped off the curb, and tripped.
Chris caught her by the back of the sweater without even looking.
Lucie beamed up at her. "Thank you, sister."
"Every time," said Chris. "Every single time."
And we went home.
---
That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I stood in front of the Planning Board.
Under TRINITY, there were still the words I'd written two weeks ago. ID. DOUBLE. SOON. SOMEONE NICE. SOMEONE NOBODY WORRIES ABOUT.
I crossed out ID. DOUBLE. SOON.
Next to it, in big, careful letters, I wrote: LUCIE.
And drew a little sun.
Under ABYDOS, beside YUME? and the sun I'd drawn there before, I wrote: ABIGALE. LEFT SUNDAY.
Then I stepped back and looked at the rest of it.
. . .
Millennium had Chris. Trinity had Lucie. Abydos would have Abigale, and soon, a desert full of helmets that answered to her.
Gehenna could wait a little while. Gehenna's problems were loud, and they happened out in the open, where anyone could see them coming.
Arius couldn't.
Arius was the opposite of loud. Everything that school did, it did in the dark, behind walls, under a cathedral nobody visited. And everything it was going to do, everything that would one day come crashing into Trinity and into a girl on a rose-covered bench, would be decided somewhere I couldn't see.
Lucie would be there when it arrived. But by then it would be too late. Whatever Arius was planning, I needed to know it before it happened. Not after.
I needed someone on the inside.
I circled ARIUS. Twice.
Then I drew a line from ARIUS, and another from THE PIT, and joined them both at a single word in the center of the board.
NEXT.
---
The turtle phone buzzed at six on Monday morning.
I was already awake. I'd been awake for an hour, lying on the cot, staring at the ceiling, waiting for exactly this.
I picked it up.
One message. Nine words.
Arrived. Desert is loud. Found the first crew. Morning.
I read it three times. Then I lay back down, and put the phone on my chest, and smiled at the ceiling until the alarm went off.