---
-Melissa POV-
For the record, I said I wouldn't watch.
I said it the night before, very firmly, while pressing the phone into Chris's hands. "You'll be fine. You don't need me hovering. I'm going to sleep in for the first time in a week, and I'm not going to think about you at all."
Which is how I ended up flat on my stomach on the roof of a convenience store across from Millennium's main plaza at seven forty in the morning, in a gray hoodie, with no halo, eating a melon bread and watching the gate through a pair of compact binoculars.
In my defense, they were very good binoculars. I'd found them in Storage. Of course I had.
The plaza was the same as always. Students streaming toward the gate, yawning, laughing, carrying rifles like lunch boxes. A drone zipped overhead with a pizza box strapped to it. High above the plaza, the giant news screen was scrolling something in red, and I noticed it in the corner of my eye the way you notice weather. Something about the General Student Council. Something postponed.
I filed it under later. I had more important things to look at.
Because there she was.
White hair. Long white coat. Plain dark blue halo, and if you looked very, very closely, which nobody in that plaza was doing except me, a tiny bronze gear turning at its center.
She stopped at the edge of the plaza and just looked up at the buildings for a second, the way I had on my very first morning. Then Sumire jogged past and waved, and Chris turned and waved back and said something, and even from across the street, even without being able to hear it, I could tell it came out exactly right.
Then she walked through the gate.
She didn't look back. She didn't look for me. She just went, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Which, for her, it was.
I lowered the binoculars.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Okay. She's in. She's fine. I'm fine. I am a very normal, very calm older sister.'
I finished my melon bread with a slightly wobbly lip, which was the melon bread's fault.
. . .
It wasn't until I was halfway back to the noodle shop that it hit me.
I had nowhere to be.
No class at eight forty. No seat by the window. No one deliberate mistake on the board. No bracket waiting for me in the hangar. No Yuuka look in the cafeteria. No need to go home, wash out the dye, pop out the contacts, and become someone else for the evening.
For the first time since I'd woken up in this body, there was nothing on my schedule at all.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. A robot with a briefcase walked straight into my back, said "Pardon," and walked around me.
'What do people do,' I wondered, 'when they don't have anything to do?'
My old life had an answer for that. It was "sleep for fourteen hours and then feel guilty about it."
I'd been awake for most of four nights in a row building a person.
That sounded like an excellent plan.
---
I woke up at three in the afternoon, face down on the cot in the back room, with my hoodie twisted halfway around my body and the imprint of a notebook spiral on my cheek.
The first thing I did, before I'd even opened both eyes, was reach for my phone.
My hand patted the floor next to the cot. Then my pocket. Then the floor again.
Then I remembered, and laughed into the pillow.
'Right. It's in Chris's pocket. With Kotori and her roller bearings. Where it belongs.'
I didn't have a phone. I had just given away the only phone I'd ever had in Kivotos, and I hadn't even thought about it until now. Some master spy I was.
I dragged myself up, shuffled out into the shop, and found Eli behind the counter scrubbing a pot that was already clean, and Abigale sitting at the end of the counter with the Winchester apart in front of her on a cloth, cleaning each piece one by one.
"Good afternoon, Melissa!" Eli said brightly. "There's rice. And soup. And I can make eggs. Do you want eggs?"
"I want eggs," I admitted, and sat down on the stool next to Abigale. "And I need a phone."
Eli stopped scrubbing. "You can use mine?"
She held it out. It was in a pink case covered in stickers, half of them cartoon cats and the other half warning labels she'd peeled off things around the shop. One said DO NOT IMMERSE.
"That's very sweet," I said. "But I'm going to need one that nobody can trace. To anybody. Including me."
"Oh." Eli looked at her phone, then at me. "...Is mine traceable?"
"Everyone's is traceable, Eli."
She looked at her phone again, suspiciously, as if it had been lying to her this whole time.
I made a mental note. NEW PHONE. It was going on the Planning Board as soon as I'd had eggs.
. . .
Eli made the eggs. Abigale kept cleaning. For a while, the shop was quiet in the good way, the way it had gotten used to being: the hiss of the pan, the small precise clicks of the rifle coming apart, the old radio on the shelf muttering a weather report nobody listened to.
"It's been loud this week," Abigale said, out of nowhere.
I looked over. She was running a little brush through the barrel, not looking at me.
"Loud?"
"Outside." She clicked something back into place. "More shooting at night. Over by the train yard. Over by the old market. I hear it from the range when I walk home."
"Oh! Me too!" Eli set the plate of eggs down in front of me. "My old crew's group chat won't stop buzzing. I muted it, I promise, I'm not talking to them. But it pops up anyway." She made a face. "Three gangs are fighting over a corner by the train yard right now. It's a terrible corner. Last month nobody even wanted it."
"Huh," I said, and ate my eggs.
It didn't mean anything yet. Kivotos was always loud. Kivotos was a city where a bank robbery made the news only if somebody did it with style.
But I filed it under later, right next to the news screen.
My later pile was getting a little tall.
---
But first, a phone.
The calm, it turned out, knew exactly where to buy one. Which was a little worrying, considering what kind of phone I wanted.
It took me three bus stops and a long walk to a market street on the edge of the district, where the shops got smaller and the signs got more creative about spelling. Halfway down, between a stall selling grilled corn and a stall selling what looked like grenades but were labeled DECORATIVE ORBS, there was a tiny kiosk with no name at all. Just a sliding window, and behind it, a wall of phones. Hundreds of them. Pinned up on pegboard in neat rows like butterflies in a museum.
Behind the window sat a very old turtle.
Not a turtle-shaped robot. Not a student in a turtle costume. A turtle. A large, wrinkled, bespectacled turtle in a knitted vest, sitting on a cushion, reading a newspaper so slowly that I watched him turn exactly zero pages in the time it took me to walk up.
"Hello," I said. "I'd like a phone."
The turtle lowered his newspaper. It took a while.
"New?" he asked.
"Not new," I said. "Clean. Nobody's name on it. No history. Nothing that points back to anybody."
He looked at me over his glasses for a long moment. Then he looked above my head, at the empty air where a halo should have been, and then back down at me.
"We don't say burner," he said. "We say pre-loved."
He reached up, very slowly, and took one off the pegboard without looking. It was small, black, completely plain and roughly the size of a bar of soap.
"Prepaid. Unregistered. No camera, because cameras get people in trouble. Battery lasts a week." He set it on the counter. "Drop it in water and it forgets everything. On purpose."
"How much?"
He named a price. I paid in cash. Heist money, ten yen at a time. It felt right, somehow, to spend it on something nobody could trace.
The turtle counted it very, very slowly. Then he slid the phone across the counter to me and picked up his newspaper again.
"Thank you," I said.
"Come again," said the turtle, from behind the paper. "Or don't. I don't remember faces."
I believed him.
. . .
I turned it on as I walked back to the bus stop. It buzzed once, cheerfully, like a puppy that didn't know anything about anything. No contacts. No apps. Nothing.
'Hello,' I thought at it. 'You're going to see some things.'
I put it in my pocket. It wasn't the same as the old one. That one had Kotori in it, and a whole gallery of roller bearings, and the message that told me Chris Frazure had been accepted to Millennium.
But that one belonged to Chris now. This one was mine.
---
When I got back to the shop, I did something I'd been putting off for weeks.
I sat down at the counter with the secondhand laptop, the one I'd used for the heist, and I opened a browser, and I did research.
I want to be clear about how long overdue this was. I had been in Kivotos for weeks. Maybe more. I had built a fake student, joined a club, rented three safehouses, skimmed ten yen off every bank account in the city, hired two employees, snuck into the ruins in a ninja suit, and built my sister by hand.
And in all that time, I had not once sat down and properly checked the news.
In my defense, I was busy.
In my other defense, I knew how this story went. Better than anyone in this city. I knew the names. I knew the schools. I knew the bosses and the tragedies and the jokes. It had felt like I could look things up later, the way you skip a cutscene in a game you've already played.
Except this wasn't a game. And I'd never actually played the part that came before the beginning.
So I started with the thing on the screen that morning.
GENERAL STUDENT COUNCIL: PRESIDENT'S SCHEDULED ADDRESS POSTPONED INDEFINITELY.
The article under it was three sentences long. The President was attending to important matters. The address would be rescheduled at a later date. The General Student Council thanked everyone for their patience.
That was all.
I read it twice, and the calm in my chest, which had been dozing contentedly since Friday, went very, very still.
. . .
I knew that stillness. The first time I'd ever felt it, I'd been standing at the warehouse window on my very first morning, looking at a white tower so tall it disappeared into the clouds.
'Attending to important matters,' I thought. 'Postponed indefinitely.'
My fingers were already moving.
I didn't break into anything. Not yet. I went through the front door first, the boring way, the way my hands always preferred. The GSC's public pages. The D.U. district news. The student forums, which in Kivotos were a terrifying swamp of rumors, memes, ads for black-market gun parts and arguments about which school's cafeteria was the worst.
It took me ten minutes to find the first thread.
has anyone actually seen the GSC president lately??
Forty-two replies. Most of them were jokes. Some of them were students saying they'd heard she was on vacation, or sick, or on a secret mission, or that she'd been abducted by aliens, or that she'd finally gotten so bored with paperwork that she'd simply walked into the sea. One of them was a picture of a cat wearing a tiny crown, captioned "the real president."
But a few of them weren't jokes. A student who worked part-time delivering lunches to the GSC building said nobody had ordered the President's usual since last week. A Valkyrie first-year said her squad's patrol schedule had been "changed three times in four days by somebody who clearly doesn't know what they're doing." Someone else said the Sanctum Tower's lights had gone wrong on the top floors, and they'd been wrong for days.
I sat back.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Okay. Front door's not enough.'
I cracked my knuckles. My hands seemed very pleased about it.
. . .
The General Student Council's network was nothing like Millennium's.
Millennium's security was a castle built by geniuses with too much free time. The GSC's was more like a very large, very old government office: important, crowded, held together by procedures and passwords that hadn't been changed in a while and one or two people who were clearly working much harder than they were being paid to.
I was in within twenty minutes. I left no footprints. I touched nothing I didn't need to.
And the first thing I found was a memo.
It had gone out last Friday, to every office in the GSC, from the desk of the Chief Administrator. It was four lines long.
Regarding the President's schedule: do not confirm. Do not deny. Continue all operations as normal. Direct all questions to my office. -N. Rin
I stared at the name.
Nanagami Rin. Long black hair, glasses, a cape coat lined with stars. The poor girl who, in the game, was the very first person Sensei ever met, standing in a GSC office with a face like she hadn't slept in a month, explaining that the President had disappeared and Kivotos was falling apart and could you please, please help.
In the game, she'd already been tired.
I hadn't realized I was watching the part where she got that way.
. . .
I kept going.
There was more. Not a lot, because Rin was clearly good at her job and was keeping it very quiet. But enough. Patrol schedules shuffled and reshuffled. A request from the Finance Office asking who was supposed to sign things now. A request from the Defense Office, signed by a Shiranui Kaya, asking the same question in a much less polite way. And a long string of automated error messages, the same one over and over, timestamped every hour for days.
SANCTUM TOWER: ADMINISTRATOR AUTHENTICATION FAILED.
SANCTUM TOWER: ADMINISTRATOR AUTHENTICATION FAILED.
SANCTUM TOWER: ADMINISTRATOR AUTHENTICATION FAILED.
Someone was trying, every single hour, to log in to the tower that ran Kivotos. And every single hour, the tower was saying no.
I scrolled up. And up. And up. Past the errors, past the requests, all the way back to the last line that wasn't an error.
SANCTUM TOWER: ADMINISTRATOR SESSION CLOSED. USER: PRESIDENT.
There was a date and a time next to it.
I looked at it.
Then I looked at it again.
Then I did something I had not done since I was very small. I counted on my fingers.
Monday. Today. Sunday. Saturday. Friday.
Friday, before dawn.
The fourth night. The back room. The memory warm in my cupped hands. The light in Unit 01's chest pulsing once, twice, like a heartbeat starting. Chris eating her very first bowl of fried rice, and the sky outside going gray not long after.
That was the morning the President of the General Student Council had logged out of the Sanctum Tower for the last time.
. . .
I didn't move for a long time.
Eli had gone out to the market. Abigale was back at her end of the counter, the Winchester together again, quietly oiling the lever. The radio was talking about rain on Thursday.
And very far away, in a part of me that wasn't quite memory, a voice was speaking. Calm. Fond. A little tired.
Mel. Take care of this place for me, okay?
I'd heard that voice in a dream, weeks ago. A girl with long blue hair and a halo like a star, in a hallway full of sunset, smiling a small, tired smile and asking me for a promise I didn't remember making. I'd woken up asking whether the other girl in that dream, the one with long hair and empty eyes, had been me.
I'd never asked what it meant that the President had asked.
'It's a coincidence,' I told myself firmly. 'It has to be. Things happen on the same day all the time. It's a big city. Somebody somewhere in Kivotos was also baking a cake that morning. Somebody was getting a haircut. It doesn't mean anything.'
The calm in my chest didn't say anything. It just stayed very, very still.
I decided I was not going to think about it.
I thought about it for about two hours.
---
-3rd POV-
Across the city, on one of the upper floors of the General Student Council building, a clock on the wall ticked over to the hour.
Nanagami Rin looked up from her desk.
The office was quiet. It was supposed to be quiet; it was the Chief Administrator's office, and people only came in when they had to. But lately it had become a different kind of quiet. The kind that sat on her shoulders. The kind that made the stack of unsigned papers at the edge of her desk look taller every time she glanced at it.
Requests from the Finance Office. Requests from Valkyrie. A request from the Defense Office, from Kaya, which was not really a request. A note from Ayumu, written very small and very politely, apologizing for asking, again, who should sign the Corrections Bureau budget. A bag of chips on the corner of the desk, which Momoka had left there that morning "for morale" and then come back for twice.
Rin took off her reading glasses, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and put them back on.
Then she pulled the terminal toward her, the way she had every hour for four days, and entered the administrator credentials for the Sanctum Tower.
She knew they were the wrong ones. They were the only ones she had. They were the President's backup codes, the ones the President had given her years ago with a wink and a "just in case, Rin-chan," and then never once mentioned again.
She pressed enter.
SANCTUM TOWER: ADMINISTRATOR AUTHENTICATION FAILED.
Rin looked at the message for a long moment.
Then she turned her chair, just slightly, toward the other side of the room. Toward the bigger desk by the window. The one with the empty chair, and the star-shaped paperweight, and the pile of occult magazines that nobody had been allowed to throw away.
On top of the magazines sat a plain folder. Rin had found it there on Friday morning. She had read it twelve times since. It contained a building lease, a set of keys, a stack of founding documents for an organization she had never heard of, and one name, printed neatly on the tab.
SCHALE.
And underneath it, in the President's loose, cheerful handwriting:
For when they get here. Be nice to them, Rin. ;)
Rin didn't know who "they" were.
She didn't know where the President was. She didn't know why the tower wouldn't listen to her, or how long the city would keep pretending not to notice, or what she was supposed to do with a folder and a winking face.
She did know that it would be the hour again in fifty-nine minutes.
She turned back to her desk, pulled the next unsigned request off the stack, and started reading.
---
-Melissa POV-
At some point, I got up to put the laptop away, and my eyes landed on the Planning Board.
It still lived on the wall of the back room, a big flattened sheet of cardboard covered in marker, its corners curling, MONEY and MORE SAFEHOUSES and ROBOT DOUBLE all crossed out or checked off or annotated in increasingly smug handwriting. BASE? sat underneath in fresh ink.
And down in the bottom corner, in the oldest ink on the whole board, from my first days in the warehouse, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor in somebody else's clothes, was a list of schools.
ABYDOS, with a sun and a cactus and HELP LATER. TRINITY, circled. GEHENNA, with a question mark. ARIUS, with a small star.
And under that, all by itself, with nothing written next to it at all:
SRT.
I remembered exactly what I'd been thinking when I wrote it.
'Shut down? Still running? I don't even know where the story is with them yet. Need to check.'
Need to check.
I had never checked.
I stood there and looked at those three letters for a long moment. Then I walked over to the counter, sat down on my stool, and very slowly lowered my forehead onto the countertop until it rested against the wood with a soft, defeated thunk.
"...Melissa?" Abigale said.
"I'm an idiot," I said into the counter.
There was a pause.
"...Okay," Abigale said, and went back to oiling her rifle.
I appreciated that about her. She didn't argue with facts.
. . .
SRT Special Academy. The President's own special forces school. Elite units, the best of the best, trained to go where Valkyrie couldn't. And, most importantly, answering directly to one person and one person only.
The President.
I lifted my head off the counter, opened the laptop again, and went looking. It didn't take long. Rin hadn't buried this one as deep, maybe because she didn't have time to bury everything.
A draft. Unsigned. From the Defense Office.
PROPOSAL: Suspension of SRT Special Academy operations pending review of chain of command.
They didn't know what to do with a school that answered only to someone who wasn't there.
So they were going to close it.
And I knew how that went. RABBIT Squad, four girls in SRT gear who wouldn't transfer and wouldn't give up, living in a park and eating thrown-out convenience store bentos and bathing in oil drums. FOX Squad, the elite of the elite, going somewhere much darker. A whole school's worth of students who had been the best at something, suddenly told they weren't anything at all.
My hand twitched toward the keyboard. Just a little. Just to make the proposal get lost in a folder somewhere. Just to buy them a week.
Then I stopped.
'And then what?' I asked myself. 'Then what, Mel? You stall the paperwork, and then what? You can't run a special forces school out of the back room of a noodle shop. You bought your first phone from a turtle three hours ago.'
I hated it. I hated it a lot. But the calm, still and quiet in my chest, agreed with me. Not yet. Not like this. If I grabbed SRT now, I'd grab it badly. And then I'd lose it, and them along with it.
I closed the laptop.
Then I got up, found the marker, and next to SRT, in very small, very grumpy letters, I wrote:
LATER. AFTER BASE. I'M SORRY.
And a small frowny face, because I'm a professional.
---
By the time Eli came back from the market, I'd pulled the Planning Board off the wall and laid it face down on the floor of the back room.
"Oh no," Eli said, standing in the doorway with two bags of groceries. "Did it do something wrong?"
"No," I said. "I need the other side."
She looked at me. Then she put down the groceries, went out to the alley, and came back two minutes later dragging an enormous, perfectly flat sheet of cardboard that had clearly once been a refrigerator box.
"I've been saving it," she said, with dignity. "In case."
"Eli," I said, "you are wonderful."
She went pink all the way up to her ears and had to go put the groceries away.
. . .
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the new board, the way I had back in the warehouse, and uncapped the marker.
For a while, I didn't write anything.
Because here was the thing I'd figured out, somewhere in those two hours of not thinking about it.
The President was gone.
In the game, that was the very first thing anyone told you. It was the reason for everything. The President disappears, and Kivotos starts to fall apart, and the General Student Council, out of options, calls in someone from outside. A teacher. An adult. Someone with a strange tablet and a habit of believing in kids nobody else would believe in.
It was the starting gun.
The story was starting. Not someday. Not eventually. Now. It had started on Friday morning while I was watching my sister eat fried rice, and I'd missed it, because I was busy being happy.
I didn't regret that part. I'd do it again.
But I couldn't afford to miss anything else.
'How long until Sensei?' I thought. 'A week? A month? The game never said. It just says she disappeared, and then it starts. Could be tomorrow.'
The tutorial was over. And I'd spent it building one person.
I needed more of me.
. . .
At the very top of the board, I wrote: WHAT NOW (AGAIN).
Then, underneath, the schools.
MILLENNIUM.
I started to write CHRIS next to it out of habit. I got as far as the C.
Then I stopped, and looked at that C for a long moment, and crossed it out.
'No,' I thought. 'Chris isn't my eyes. She's not an identity. She's not a plan. She's a girl who's going to go to school, and make friends, and build things people use, and come home and tell me about it if she wants to. That's all she has to be.'
Next to MILLENNIUM, I wrote: COVERED? (CHRIS IS CHRIS. DON'T MAKE HER A SPY.)
And underlined DON'T twice.
. . .
TRINITY.
'Tea Party,' I thought. 'Nagisa, Mika, Seia. Three people trying to run a school full of factions with daggers behind their teacups. Seia's going to see something she shouldn't. Mika's going to make a terrible deal because she's lonely and angry and nobody's listening to her. And Seia's going to pay for it.'
ID. DOUBLE. SOON, I wrote. And then, after a moment: SOMEONE NICE. SOMEONE NOBODY WORRIES ABOUT.
GEHENNA.
'Chaos. The Prefect Team. Hina, who's carrying the whole school on her shoulders and would very much like to take a nap. Problem Solver 68. The Gourmet Research Society, who blow up restaurants for flavor.'
ID. DOUBLE. And next to it, before I could think about it too hard: SOMEONE WHO STOPS FIRES BEFORE THEY START.
ABYDOS.
I paused there longer.
I looked up, through the door into the shop. Abigale's helmet hung on the hook by the front door, where she'd started leaving it. Beside it, the Winchester, gleaming.
'Not yet,' I thought. 'Not yet. But someday.'
I didn't write anything next to ABYDOS. I just drew another small sun.
SRT. LATER. AFTER BASE.
ARIUS.
I stopped there, too.
Arius was going to be the hardest. You couldn't transfer into Arius. You couldn't fake your way in through the front door, because there wasn't one. There was only the dark, and the woman who ran it, and a squad of girls who'd been taught that everything was in vain and believed it.
But if I could get someone inside...
'Someone outstanding,' I thought slowly. 'Someone good enough that the adults watching Arius look at her first. Someone who pulls the eyes off Saori and her squad, so they can breathe for once. Someone the others notice.'
'And someone with a cute side. Because those girls have never been allowed to have one, and somebody should show them it's allowed.'
'And she'd be on the inside when Arius starts reaching into Trinity. She could tell Trinity-me who's coming. When. Why.'
Two of me, on opposite sides of the same plot, passing notes.
Next to the star, I wrote: SOMEONE OUTSTANDING. (CUTE SIDE.) INSIDE. EYES OFF SAORI'S SQUAD. TALKS TO TRINITY.
Then I drew a little arrow between ARIUS and TRINITY, and looked at it, and felt a little bit like a villain in a heist movie.
A good one, though.
. . .
Then, under all of it, the problems.
DOUBLES: HOW?
Because that was the part I still hadn't solved. My original plan had been simple. One robot double for each identity. A body that went to class while I was somewhere else. And I'd tried. I'd built Unit 01 to be exactly that.
And Unit 01 had become Chris.
If I built the next double the same way, with the same blueprint and the same kind of memory, I wasn't building a double. I was building a sister. Every single time.
I sat with that for a minute.
'Would that be so bad?' a small, warm part of me asked.
'Yes,' the practical part answered. 'You can't ask a person to be a disguise. You just wrote that in big letters on the board.'
'Then figure out the difference.'
I wrote: NOT ANOTHER CHRIS... OR? and left it there.
. . .
And then, because I couldn't help it, I opened Storage.
Only one of the three squares was left. Blueprint: AL-1S (Partial) still sat where it always had, its gold lines quiet now, with nothing to point to. Unit 01 and the memory were gone. They'd become Chris. Where they used to be, there was just an empty space between the blueprint and a box of spare servos.
I looked at that empty space for a long time.
'Store memory, Frazure Christina?'
That box had come up on its own. In the factory, in the dark, with Aris asleep in front of me. I hadn't asked for it. I hadn't pressed anything. Storage had just... offered. And I'd said yes, because it felt right, and because something behind the window had felt so warm and so glad.
But I didn't know how it worked.
I didn't know why it had happened. Was it the factory? Was it Aris, and whatever was sleeping inside her? Was it because Chris had been my first identity, the one I'd worn every day for weeks? Or was it just something Storage had decided to do once, for reasons of its own, and would never do again?
'Store memory,' I thought at the window, carefully. 'Uh. Please?'
Nothing happened.
I tried again, picturing the Trinity girl I hadn't even invented yet. Nothing. I tried picturing Chris, just to see. Nothing. The window sat there, patient, rows and rows of squares, a blueprint and a box of servos and an empty space between them.
My stomach did a slow, cold turn.
'What if that was it?' I thought. 'What if that was a one-time thing? What if Chris was the only one, and every other double I build is just a doll that stares at a wall and says hello?'
I closed the window. My hands were shaking, just a little. I put them flat on the cardboard until they stopped.
'Then I'll figure it out,' I told myself. 'I studied the blueprint once. I can study it again. I'll figure out what memory even is, if I have to.'
It wasn't very convincing.
I didn't notice, as the window folded away, that something at the very edge of it had flickered. Just once. Faint and gold. Like someone trying very hard not to say anything.
. . .
NEW PHONE. (Done. A turtle.)
BASE? I erased the question mark. Then I wrote it back in. Then I erased it again and underlined BASE three times instead. I still didn't know where. But it wasn't a question anymore.
. . .
And last of all, right in the center of the board, where everything else could point to it, I wrote one word.
SENSEI.
And I circled it.
Once. Twice. Three times. Until the marker started to squeak.
. . .
I sat back and looked at it all. Every school. Every question mark. Every problem I didn't know how to solve yet.
It was a lot.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Where do I even start?'
And the answer was right there, in the middle of the circle.
If the President was gone, then the story had started. And if the story had started, there was one place in this whole city where it was going to begin. An office in a tall building in the D.U. that I'd looked at every single morning for years, as the background of a game's main screen, with a cup of coffee in my other hand. The place Sensei would walk into. The place everything would run through.
Schale.
I didn't even know if it existed yet. If it had furniture. If anyone had swept the floors. If anyone in this city even knew its name.
Under SENSEI, I wrote, in small, neat letters:
FIRST: SCHALE. GO LOOK.
---
-3rd POV-
Abigale and Eli stood in the doorway of the back room and looked at the new Planning Board.
It took up most of the floor. Melissa sat in the middle of it, legs crossed, marker in hand, gold eyes moving over the words as if she were reading a map of somewhere she was about to go.
"That's a lot of schools," Eli said.
"It is," Melissa agreed.
"Are you going to go to all of them?"
"Sort of."
Eli tilted her head. "How?"
Melissa looked up. She seemed to think about how much to say. Abigale had seen that look before: every time Melissa started to explain something about herself, and then stopped right before the bigger part.
"Something happened," Melissa said finally. "Last week. Someone very important went missing. Nobody's saying it yet. But things are going to get worse out there. Louder." She glanced at Abigale. "You've already heard it."
Abigale nodded slowly. The train yard. The old market.
"And someone's coming," Melissa went on. "I don't know when. Someone who's going to try to fix it. And I'd like to be ready. I'd like to be everywhere I need to be when that happens, without anyone knowing I'm there."
"Who's coming?" Eli asked.
Melissa smiled, a little crookedly.
"A teacher."
Eli and Abigale looked at each other. Neither of them understood. Neither of them asked.
"So," Abigale said quietly, after a moment. "What do you need?"
Melissa looked at her for a long moment. Then at Eli. Then down at the board.
"More of me," she said. "And more of you. Stronger. Better. Both of you. Because I can be in a lot of places, but I can't be everywhere. And the people I trust most in this city are standing in that doorway."
Eli made a small noise like a teakettle and had to look at the ceiling.
Abigale didn't say anything. She just stood up a little straighter.
. . .
"So..." Eli said, once she'd recovered, pointing at the board. "More Chrises?"
"No," Melissa said. Then, after a pause, "...Maybe? I don't know yet. That's what the question mark is for."
"How many?"
Melissa looked at the board. Trinity. Gehenna. Abydos. SRT. All the empty space after them.
"...Several," she said.
---
-Melissa POV-
Chris came home at six.
I heard the back door, and then her footsteps, and then her voice in the shop saying "I'm home" to Eli, a little uncertainly, as if she were trying the words out to see if they fit.
They fit. Eli said "Welcome home!" so loudly that a cat outside knocked something over.
I came out of the back room and found Chris sitting at the counter with her coat still on and her bag still on her shoulder, holding a cup of tea Eli had already put in her hands, and looking like someone who'd been handed an entire day and didn't know which part to talk about first.
Eli slid a second cup in front of me as I sat down next to her.
"So?" I said. "How was it?"
She thought about it.
"Utaha-senpai let me work on the drone," she said. "Alone. For an hour. She came back and looked at it for a really long time and then said 'acceptable.'"
"That's huge," I said, and meant it. "She said 'almost' to me for two weeks."
"I know," Chris said. "I remember." She smiled a little. "Kotori talked to me about roller bearings for all of lunch. It was great." She paused. "Oh. And Hibiki asked me something."
I was halfway through a sip of tea. "Hm?"
"She came over while I was working on the drone. She watched for a while. And then she said, 'You used to take a bunch of scrap we threw out. What was that for?'"
I choked.
Eli had to pat me on the back. Abigale silently handed me a napkin.
"What," I wheezed, "did you say?"
Chris turned her cup around in her hands. And then she smiled. It wasn't her usual soft smile. It was a small, sly, mischievous one, and I recognized it instantly, because I'd seen it in the mirror plenty of times.
"I told her," Chris said, "that it's being put to very good use."
There was a pause.
"...And?"
"She looked at me for a really long time," Chris said. "Then she said '...Hm,' and gave me a gummy anyway." She took a sip of tea, looking extremely pleased with herself. "She said I should ask next time. I said I would."
I stared at her.
'She gets that from me,' I thought. 'Oh no. She gets that from me.'
"And Yuuka?" I asked, once I could breathe again.
Chris's smile turned into something thoughtful.
"She looked at me in the cafeteria. For a long time. Then she said, 'You seem... different today.'"
My heart did a small, tight thing.
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'Good different?'" Chris shrugged a little. "And she said, 'I haven't decided yet.' And then she made me help her carry budget folders."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. "That's Yuuka."
"That's Yuuka," Chris agreed.
. . .
"Oh. And I got one wrong," she added.
I blinked. "What?"
"In class. On the board." She looked up at me, and her blue eyes were very bright. "A real one. Not on purpose. I carried a number wrong, and the teacher marked it, and the whole class saw." She paused. "Mel. I made a mistake."
"...And that's... good?"
"It was mine," Chris said simply.
I didn't have anything to say to that. So I just reached over and ruffled her white hair, and she let me, and the little bronze gear in her halo turned, very slowly, maybe a tiny bit faster than it had that morning.
. . .
"Chris," I said, a little later, carefully. "This morning. On the big screen over the plaza. Did you see the news?"
She thought about it.
"No," she said. "There was something in red. I didn't look." She frowned slightly. "Should I have?"
I looked at her. At her plain blue halo and her tiny gear and her cup of tea and her first real mistake.
"No," I said. "You did exactly right."
---
That night, after the shop was dark and everyone was asleep, I climbed out the upstairs window onto the roof of the noodle shop and sat on the tiles, still warm from the day, with my knees pulled up to my chest.
The city was loud. Louder than it used to be. Far off, over by the train yard, I could hear the faint pop-pop-pop of somebody's argument. A siren wound up somewhere, then gave up halfway, as if it couldn't be bothered.
And past all of it, far across the rooftops, standing over the city the way it always had, was the Sanctum Tower.
It was lit up the way it always was. Mostly. But near the very top, a few floors of windows were dark, and the lights around them flickered every so often, stuttering, the way a screen does when something behind it isn't working the way it should.
I'd seen that tower on my very first morning. I'd felt the calm go still then, too, and I hadn't known why.
I still didn't know. Not really.
But I knew what it felt like to be asked to take care of something.
"I didn't forget," I said quietly, to the tower, or to the girl with blue hair who used to run it, or to nobody at all. "I just didn't know when you meant."
The tower didn't answer. The windows near the top flickered once more, and went dark.
I sat there a while longer.
Then I went back inside, past the sleeping shop, past Abigale's helmet on its hook and Eli's apron folded over the counter and Chris's coat hung neatly by the door, and into the back room, where the new Planning Board lay across the floor in the dark.
In the middle of it, circled three times, one word. And under it, in small neat letters, the first step.
Tomorrow, I was going to go look at a building.
Ready or not, the story was starting.
And this time, I was going to be there for all of it.