---
-Melissa POV-
The rest of the week went by in a blur of sandpaper.
Tuesday, I sanded the bracket. Wednesday, Utaha said "almost" again, and I sanded it again. Thursday, she took it, turned it over in the light for a full minute, and then, without a word, set it on the shelf where the club kept finished parts. Kotori cheered. Hibiki looked up from her soldering, nodded once and went back to it, which I was learning was the Hibiki equivalent of a standing ovation.
Friday, I got a second bracket.
In between, I went to class, made exactly one deliberate mistake per day on the board, ate the cheap set lunch, avoided the vending machines on the third floor and got exactly two suspicious looks from Yuuka across the cafeteria. Kotori messaged me pictures of bearings every night. I sent back pictures of the warehouse forklift, which she found fascinating for reasons I didn't fully understand.
And every night, I lay on my bed-slash-arsenal and didn't dream. Or if I did, I didn't remember.
I didn't stop thinking about it, though. The hallway. The girl in white. "Mel."
'Take care of this place for me, okay?'
I didn't know how to take care of a whole city. But I knew how to make a list, and the Planning Board was waiting for me downstairs, and two lines on it were starting to stare at me.
MONEY. MORE SAFEHOUSES.
By Thursday night, I'd crossed the first one off.
How? That's a story for another time. Let's just say I sat down at the laptop after Engineering, cracked my knuckles, let my hands do what my hands apparently knew how to do, and by Friday morning, MONEY was no longer a problem. It was, if anything, a slightly embarrassing amount of not-a-problem.
I'll tell you about it later. It's funnier that way.
Which left the second line.
. . .
So on Saturday morning, I took Chris off.
The remover was in Storage, forty-one bottles of it. I worked one through my hair in the bathroom sink, and the white came out in a slow, milky swirl, and gold came back underneath it like sunrise. The contacts went back in their case. My eyes in the mirror were gold again.
Then I opened the Storage window, found the dark blue ring above my head, and put it away.
I didn't swap anything in to replace it.
My own halo was right there in the grid, where it had been sitting ever since I'd traded it for Chris's: two rings of light, gold and paler gold, turning slowly side by side. I looked at it for a long moment. Then I closed the window and left it there.
For the first time since I'd woken up in this body, there was nothing above my head at all. The space felt strange. Light. Empty. Like walking outside without a coat on a windy day.
'This is how Sensei walks around,' I thought. 'No halo. Nothing up there at all.'
In Kivotos, a halo was how people knew you were a student. It was how they knew you could take a bullet and get back up. A girl with no halo was either a very lost adult or something nobody had a word for. That made it risky.
It also made it the perfect disguise. Nobody could match my halo to a face if I didn't have one. Melissa Cardon didn't exist in any record in this city. I wanted to keep it that way.
The safehouses I was going to buy today were going to belong to her. Not to Chris. Chris was a girl with a student file and a seat in a classroom, and anything Chris owned, someone like Yuuka could look up. Melissa owned nothing, and nobody could look her up.
I pulled on a plain gray jacket and a pair of shorts from one of the crates, tied my gold hair back, and stepped outside into a Saturday.
. . .
Kivotos on a weekend was a whole different animal.
The streets were packed. Students everywhere, out of uniform or half in it, laughing, shopping, eating, carrying their rifles slung over their shoulders like tote bags. Robots walked their robot dogs. A dog-headed man walked a regular dog, which made me stop and stare for a second. A tank rolled through an intersection, very politely, and waited for a light.
And I walked through all of it with nothing over my head.
People noticed. Not a lot of them, and not for long. A glance at my face, then up at the empty air above my hair, then a small puzzled frown, and then they moved on, because it was Saturday and they had places to be. One little girl, holding her mother's robotic hand, pointed right at me and said "Mama, she doesn't have a..." before her mother hushed her.
'Okay,' I thought, and walked a little faster. 'Maybe I'll make the no-halo thing a sometimes thing.'
I spent the morning collecting keys.
Empty storefronts. Old offices with "FOR RENT" signs going yellow in the windows. A shuttered noodle shop with an apartment above it. A storage unit complex that didn't seem to have any security cameras. The calm in my chest had a whole checklist and ran through it at every one. Entrances. Exits. Sightlines. Who could see in. How far to the nearest station. How fast you could leave in a hurry.
The calm was very concerned with leaving in a hurry.
The landlords were their own adventure.
The first one was a robot in a tweed vest who wanted three references, a guarantor and a "brief essay on your relationship with noise." I thanked him and left. The second was a very old lady with a cat's face and a cat on her lap, who looked at me, looked at the empty space above my head, looked at me again, and said, "Cash?"
"Cash," I agreed.
"Then I don't need to know anything else, dear."
I liked her a lot.
The third was a man with a shark's head who ran the storage complex. He didn't look up from his newspaper the whole time. When I put the money on the counter, he counted it without looking, slid me a key without looking, and said, "Unit forty-two. Don't store anything that ticks," without looking.
I made no promises.
By noon, I had keys to three new places in three different districts, a shopping list for furniture as long as my arm, and a deep, quiet sense of satisfaction that I hadn't felt since the day I'd finally finished organizing the archive cabinets at my old job. Which, to be fair, had never actually happened.
Three new places that belonged to Melissa Cardon, a girl who didn't exist.
'MORE SAFEHOUSES,' I thought happily. 'Check.'
I was wandering down a side street that was slowly getting narrower and dirtier, trying to decide which of my new places needed a couch first, when I heard it.
Thud.
"Ack-!"
A body hitting a wall. Down an alley, to my left.
---
-3rd POV-
The girl in the helmet slid down the wall of the alley and sat there, dazed.
She wore a black uniform with a gray collar and a gray skirt, tied neatly at the throat with a yellow ribbon. Black socks, gray shoes. A plain white halo hung above the round, dark-visored motorcycle helmet that covered her whole head. On the ground beside her, where she'd dropped it, lay a rifle that nobody in her gang would ever normally be seen carrying: an old lever-action Winchester Model 94, its wooden stock polished and lovingly cared for.
Ten minutes ago, she had been happy.
That was the stupid part. She'd been walking down the street with the Winchester on her shoulder, actually happy, for the first time in weeks.
Her gang didn't use rifles like that. Nobody in any gang used rifles like that. Gangs used whatever was cheap and loud and sprayed a lot of bullets very fast, because nobody in a gang could hit anything anyway. When she'd shown the others the Winchester, an old lever-action she'd found in a secondhand shop and saved up three months of part-time pay to buy, they'd laughed at her. "What is that, a cowboy gun?" "Do you have to crank it?" "How many bullets does it even hold?"
She'd laughed along, because that was what you did.
The helmet was the other thing you did. You wore it. Always. In the gang, your helmet was who you were: your face, your name, your pride, all in one. Having it cracked was bad. Having it knocked off in front of people was worse. Having someone see what was underneath, when you hadn't chosen to show them, was the kind of shame you never really lived down. She hadn't taken hers off in public in over a year. Some days she wasn't sure she remembered how.
But that morning, she'd taken the Winchester out by herself, to the empty lot behind the old train yard, and lined up cans on a fence, and worked the lever. Clack-clack. Fired. Clack-clack. Fired. And every single time, a can had jumped off the fence.
Every single time.
Something about it, the weight, the rhythm, the patience of it, had just felt right. Like she'd been holding the wrong thing her whole life and had finally picked up the right one.
So she'd walked home the long way, through streets she didn't usually walk, with the rifle on her shoulder and her helmet visor down, feeling, for once, like maybe she was good at something.
And then she'd turned a corner into the wrong street, and somebody had grabbed her collar.
"What's got you runnin' around in our turf, huh?"
The girl standing over her was not wearing a helmet. She wore a tight blue uniform with a white ribbon and a skirt cut high on the thigh, simple blue shoes, no socks. Her black hair was tied back, and a black face mask with a white X across it covered her mouth. In her hands was a standard MP7, and she had it pointed straight down at the girl on the ground.
"I... Ah..."
The helmet girl couldn't find any words. She hadn't done anything. She'd just wanted to try something new. A different gun, a different street, a different way of doing things. Why did trying something new always end like this?
"No excuses? Fine." The masked girl leaned in. "Then I'll just beat you black and blue till you spit 'em out."
In Kivotos, students were tough. Tougher than anyone from anywhere else had any right to be. They could take bullets that would put a normal person in the ground, shake it off and keep going. Gunfire knocked them down, bruised them, knocked them out cold if there was enough of it. The only thing that could truly end a student was having their halo shattered.
So a beating like this wasn't going to kill anyone.
It was just going to hurt. A lot. For a long time.
TRTRTRTRTR.
Five shots rang out in the alley. The helmet girl curled up around herself and took them, gasping. Out on the main street, a few people glanced toward the noise and then went back to their shopping. Gunfire in an alley was just another Saturday sound.
"Still not talkin'? Then here's mo-"
"What do you think you're doing?"
The voice came from the mouth of the alley.
The masked girl turned.
A girl stood there, between the alley and the bright, busy street behind her, with the light at her back. Long golden hair tied back loosely. Golden eyes. A plain gray jacket and shorts, the most ordinary clothes in the world. She was small, shorter than either of them.
And there was no halo over her head.
Nothing. Just empty air.
The masked girl's eyes went up to that empty space, and then back down to the newcomer's face, and the moment their eyes met, something cold went straight through her. It felt like being looked at by something much, much bigger than the small girl standing in the alley. As if the girl were just a window, and something enormous was looking out of it.
The newcomer's golden eyes had a red tint in them now. Like embers under ash.
She took a step forward.
"Oh, now you're the quiet one?" Her voice was calm. Much too calm. "Speak."
Something hot was rising in Melissa's chest, and she didn't fully understand where it came from. She'd seen students fight before; she'd seen people get shot over a parking space and laugh it off. This wasn't that. This was somebody bigger standing over somebody smaller, somebody who couldn't fight back, and kicking her because she could.
She didn't know why it made her this angry. It just did. Somewhere at the back of her mind, a girl in white was smiling at her. 'Take care of this place for me.'
"I... hah!" The masked girl found her voice, and it cracked. "You're not even a student! You don't have a h-halo!"
She raised the MP7. Then she hesitated, the barrel wavering. Shooting a student was one thing. Shooting a normal person, someone without a halo, was something else. Normal people didn't get back up. Normal people went to the hospital, or worse.
The golden-haired girl didn't seem to care.
She kept walking. Slow. Steady. Utterly calm. And as she walked, her hair began to shine, catching the light from the street behind her and holding it, glowing faintly gold from the inside, as if the sun had come down into the alley and was walking toward them on two feet.
The masked girl did the only thing her body could think to do when it was this scared.
She fired.
TRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTR-
She held the trigger down and emptied the magazine. Sweat ran down her face. She was aiming at a girl with no halo, close enough to hit with a thrown rock, and she couldn't stop.
Students in Kivotos could tank gunfire, dodge it or dive for cover. A normal person couldn't do any of that, especially not in the space of a heartbeat.
What happened next, nobody would have guessed.
The golden-haired girl's hands moved. Too fast to follow. Left, right, left, a blur, a flicker of gray sleeve. When the MP7 finally clicked empty, she was standing exactly where she had been, completely unhurt, her arms crossed in an X in front of her chest.
Above her crossed wrists, her eyes looked straight at the masked girl.
Then she opened her hands.
Bullets fell out of them. Dozens of them. They clinked and bounced on the alley floor, tiny and flattened, a thin trail of smoke hissing up from her palms.
She had caught every single one.
The alley was completely silent.
"I'd recommend you be a good girl now," the golden-haired girl said softly, "and go report yourself to a teacher. Or an adult. Unless you'd like me to show you what else these hands can do?"
The masked girl's knees gave out. She sat down hard on the dirty concrete, the empty MP7 still clutched in both hands, staring up at the small, haloless girl with wide, terrified eyes.
. . .
-Melissa POV-
'Oh,' I thought. 'Oh no. I just did that.'
I looked down at my palms. They were a little red. A little warm. That was it. I'd just caught a full magazine of submachine gun fire with my bare hands, and they felt like I'd been holding a mug of tea that was slightly too hot.
The calm in my chest didn't think this was unusual at all. The calm was, if anything, a little bored.
The red was fading out of my vision. The heat in my chest was cooling. My hair, which had apparently been glowing, which was a thing I was going to have to think about later, settled back to plain gold.
'First green question marks,' I thought. 'Then whatever that warm thing was at Engineering. Now red.' I blinked a few times, and the last of it cleared. 'My eyes do things now. Great. Love that for me.'
'Okay. Okay. I'm fine. She's fine. Mostly. Let's just... wrap this up.'
I glanced at the helmet girl. She hadn't made a sound the entire time. She hadn't moved an inch. She was still sitting against the wall where she'd fallen, her visor pointed at me, perfectly still. Through the dark plastic, I couldn't tell if she was terrified, in shock or asleep.
I started walking toward the masked girl.
"S-stay back..."
All the swagger had gone out of her. She was holding the empty MP7 out in front of her with both shaking hands, like a cross to ward off a vampire. With every step I took, she shrank a little more, until it looked like she was trying to back into the wall itself.
I stopped.
'Okay. I'm scaring her. A lot.' I took a breath. 'Good. She deserves a little scaring. But not too much.'
I turned away from her and went to the helmet girl instead, and held out my hand.
"Let's go."
It came out colder than I meant it to. More like an order than an offer.
The helmet girl stared at my hand. She didn't take it. She didn't move. She didn't say anything.
I scratched the back of my head with my other hand.
'Right. Plan B.'
"Up you go, then."
I grabbed the back of her collar and lifted her up off the ground in one easy motion, like picking up a bag of groceries, and slung her across my shoulders in a fireman's carry. She weighed almost nothing. She didn't struggle. She just went limp across my shoulders, arms and legs dangling, helmet bumping gently against my back, with the energy of a girl who had decided that whatever happened next was out of her hands.
It must have looked ridiculous. She was taller than me. Her feet nearly reached my knees.
Before I left, I crouched, carefully, so I wouldn't drop her, and picked up the Winchester with my free hand. A student without a gun in Kivotos would be like a person walking around without shoes. And besides, it was a really nice gun.
Then I turned back to the masked girl one more time.
"I hope you learned your lesson, I guess~"
I said it sweetly, cheerfully, with a little lilt at the end. But I could feel my face, and I knew my eyes weren't saying anything sweet at all.
"EEP!"
The masked girl squeezed her eyes shut, and her finger jerked on the trigger. She'd fumbled a fresh magazine in at some point while my back was turned, and one round went off with a loud crack.
It flew straight at my face.
And a few inches from my nose, it vanished.
It didn't hit me. It didn't bounce. It didn't drop. It was there, and then it simply wasn't, and somewhere in the back of my head, a square in a grid quietly lit up: 4.6x30mm Round (Used) x1.
'Oh,' I thought. 'Huh. It does that automatically?'
The masked girl stared at the empty air in front of my face where her bullet had just stopped existing.
Her eyes rolled up into her head, and she fainted dead away.
. . .
I let out a long sigh.
'Well. That went great.'
I couldn't exactly leave her there. Not after she'd seen what I could do. Not when she'd seen a girl with no halo catch bullets and eat one out of thin air. If she woke up and started telling people about it, someone, somewhere, would eventually start asking questions. Probably someone with a very good memory and a very short temper and a calculator.
Also, she had been about to beat a girl black and blue in an alley for the crime of trying something new, and I wasn't done with her.
Before I did anything, the calm did a sweep for me. Eyes up, eyes around. No cameras on the alley walls. One window above us, shuttered and grimy. The street at the end was loud and bright and busy, and nobody out there was looking this way. A gunfight in an alley was background noise in Kivotos. A small girl walking out of one with a friend over her shoulder would be, too.
Good.
So, as I walked past her toward the mouth of the alley, I let my free hand trail down, brushed my fingertips against her sleeve, and thought, 'In.'
She vanished. Her MP7 went with her.
Masked Girl (Unconscious) x1.
'I'm going to have to think about whether Storage is a humane place to keep a person,' I thought, a little guiltily. 'Later. Short trip. She'll be fine.'
Then the more immediate question: where to take the one on my shoulders.
The warehouse was across the city, and it had a forklift, a folding chair and a bed full of guns, and not much else. The storage unit was a storage unit. But the apartment over the old noodle shop was only a few streets from here, and its landlady was a cat-faced old lady who only cared about cash.
'Noodle shop,' I decided. 'Closest. And the landlady doesn't ask questions.'
. . .
-3rd POV-
The helmet girl, slung across a stranger's shoulders like a sack of rice, had seen all of it.
She had seen the haloless girl walk into the alley. She had seen her eyes turn red and her hair turn into sunlight. She had seen her catch an entire magazine with her bare hands. She had seen a bullet disappear into nothing an inch from her face.
And just now, bouncing gently along upside down, she had turned her head to look back down the alley at the girl who'd hurt her.
The girl was gone. Not run away. Gone. Her body, her gun, all of it, as if she'd never been there at all. There was just a small heap of flattened bullets on the concrete, and an empty alley, and the noise of the street.
Slowly, the helmet girl craned her neck the other way, as far as the helmet would let her, and looked up through her visor at the side of the face of the girl carrying her.
The girl was grinning.
"I'm going to make sure you're okay," the golden-haired girl said. Her voice was perfectly friendly. "And then... we'll talk."
The way she said it made the alley feel about ten degrees colder.
The helmet girl didn't say anything. She let herself hang there, swaying, rifle and all, and stared at the passing pavement.
'What's going to happen to me?'