---
-Melissa POV-
'She's really light...'
I'd carried the helmet girl fireman-style for about three blocks. Weight wasn't the problem. I could have carried her across the whole city. The problem was that she was taller than me, so her legs dangled down to my knees and bumped them with every step, her helmet kept knocking into the back of my head, and I had to hold my neck at a weird, crooked angle to keep her balanced. By the third block, my neck was stiff, and I was pretty sure she was getting carsick. So somewhere around the fourth block, I swung her around into a piggyback instead. She let me. She let me do everything. She just wrapped her arms loosely around my neck and rested her helmet against the back of my head and said absolutely nothing, which, as far as I could tell, was her whole personality so far.
People stared. A small golden-haired girl with no halo, carrying a taller girl in a gang helmet on her back and an antique rifle in one hand, walking calmly down the sidewalk on a Saturday afternoon.
I smiled at them. They stopped staring.
The apartment over the noodle shop was exactly where I'd left it that morning, which is to say, above a noodle shop that hadn't sold a noodle in years. The narrow stairs up the side of the building creaked under the weight of two people. At the top, the door was old and green and had a brass number on it that was missing a screw, so it hung a little crooked.
My door. My first door that belonged only to me. Well, to Melissa Cardon, who didn't exist. Same thing.
I'd gotten the keys to it, and to two other places, in cash, in one morning.
How, you ask?
That's the funny part.
---
-3rd POV-
The day before, on a perfectly ordinary Friday morning, the regional manager of one of Kivotos's largest banks was enjoying his coffee.
He was a robot with an old cathode-ray television for a head, the boxy kind with a slightly curved glass screen, and on that screen a pixelated face was smiling contentedly at the steam rising from his mug. He had a corner office. He had a view. He had a plaque on his desk that said "BEST MANAGER" that he had bought for himself and was very proud of.
The door burst open.
"Boss!"
One of his employees stood in the doorway, panting, clutching a tablet to her chest. Her tie was crooked. Her face was white.
"You seem rushed," the manager said mildly, setting down his coffee. "What's the problem?"
"M-money has been taken out of every account in our system!"
The pixelated face on the manager's screen froze. Then it glitched into a pair of enormous, horrified eyes.
He slammed both metal hands down on his desk. The BEST MANAGER plaque jumped. "WHAT?! HOW MUCH?!"
The employee drew herself up. She took a deep breath. And with all the gravity of someone announcing the end of the world, she declared:
"Ten yen from every account!"
There was a pause.
"...What?"
"What?"
The manager's screen flickered through several expressions and failed to settle on any of them.
"Ten yen," he repeated slowly.
"From every account," she confirmed.
"Every account. In our bank."
The employee swallowed. "Every account in every bank, sir. Across Kivotos. All of them. At exactly 3:00 a.m. Ten yen each."
The manager looked at her for a long time. Then he picked up his coffee again, took a long sip, and set it down.
"Ten yen," he said. "Is anyone going to notice ten yen?"
The employee thought about it.
"...No, sir."
"Has anyone complained?"
"No, sir."
"Then let's call it a rounding error," the manager decided, and turned his screen back toward his lovely view.
And so, on that perfectly ordinary Friday, with no alarms, no explosions and no one the wiser, Kivotos's greatest heist quietly came to an end. Ten yen at a time, the spare change of an entire city had found its way into a handful of accounts that did not exist, belonging to a girl who did not exist, who had done the whole thing on a secondhand laptop on a Thursday night, in a warehouse, while eating peaches out of a can.
---
-Melissa POV-
'And nobody was any the wiser,' I thought, with a deep and smug satisfaction, as I unlocked the green door.
The calm in my chest had been very specific about it. Don't take a lot from anyone. Take almost nothing from everyone. Nobody chases ten yen.
My old accountant would have fainted. Then he would have asked me how I did it. Then he would have fainted again.
I nudged the door open with my foot and walked in.
The apartment had come furnished, which the cat-faced landlady had mentioned that morning in the same tone she might have mentioned the weather. "The last tenant left in a hurry, dear. Furniture's included." I'd decided not to ask why the last tenant had left in a hurry.
It was small. A living room with a sagging brown couch, a low wooden table and a bookshelf with no books on it. A tiny kitchen through an archway. A bathroom. A bedroom with a bare mattress. The windows looked out over a narrow street and the backs of other buildings. It smelled faintly of old noodle broth and dust.
It was perfect.
I set the Winchester down on the low table, carefully, the way you'd set down something precious. Then I crouched and let the girl on my back slide down until her feet touched the floor.
She stood there, swaying slightly, helmet tilted toward the floor.
"Take off your shoes," I said. "I'll grab a med kit. Go sit on the couch."
I didn't wait to see if she'd do it. I walked straight through to the bathroom and shut the door behind me.
The bathroom had a cabinet under the sink. The cabinet was completely empty, except for a dead spider. I opened Storage and scrolled, looking for anything medical.
I didn't find a first aid kit.
I found a whole section.
It took up three full rows of the grid, neatly sorted, as if the girl who'd owned this body had organized it on purpose, the way you'd organize the supply closet of a field hospital. First Aid Kit (Large) x87. First Aid Kit (Small) x214. Field Trauma Kit x46. Burn Treatment Kit x38. Splint Set x60. Bandage Roll x500+. Antiseptic (Bottle) x120. Painkillers (Case) x22. Suture Kit x75. Bruise Cream x93. A row of things I didn't recognize the names of at all, and a few I recognized and really wished I didn't.
I stared at it.
'Okay. Of course she did.'
That wasn't a hoarder's stash. Not just a hoarder's, anyway. That was someone who had expected to patch people up. A lot of people. Over and over, for a long time, somewhere far from any hospital.
The calm in my chest didn't say anything. But for a second, it felt very tired.
I pulled out one of the large kits.
I opened the cabinet so it would sound like I'd taken it from there, waited a second, and closed it again.
Then I stood there for a moment, holding the kit, looking at myself in the cloudy bathroom mirror. Gold hair. Gold eyes. Nothing over my head.
'Okay. Gentle. She's scared, and she's hurt, and she just watched a girl with no halo catch a magazine and make a person disappear. Be the nicest person she's ever met.'
From the living room, I heard the soft thump of shoes being set down, then the creak of old couch springs.
'She listened.'
. . .
When I came back out, the helmet girl was sitting on the very edge of the couch with her knees together and her hands in her lap, her helmet still firmly on. She was slowly, carefully peeling off a pair of black fingerless gloves, one finger at a time, as if every finger was a decision.
Her shoes were lined up by the door. Neatly. Toes pointed out.
I walked around the couch, set the med kit down on the table next to the Winchester and snapped it open.
"I'd recommend taking off the helmet," I said. "I need to make sure you aren't bruised under there, or suffering from anything that involves the word 'blunt.'"
She flinched. Her whole body went stiff at the word "helmet," and her hands tightened on the gloves in her lap.
"I..."
That was it. That was the whole sentence.
I sighed, softly, and sat down on the low table across from her, so I was a little lower than she was. Then I put on the kindest smile I could find.
"I won't bite," I said. "I'm just here to help. And if you're not comfortable taking it off, that's fine. We'll work around it." I tilted my head. "Can you tell me your name, at least? I'm..."
I stopped.
'Chris?' No. Chris had a file, a class and a treasurer watching her. 'Something made up?' I could. It would be easy.
I looked at the girl hunched on the edge of my couch, holding her gloves like they were the only thing keeping her together.
'Melissa doesn't exist anywhere. There's nothing to find. And I don't want to lie to her.'
"...Melissa," I said. "Melissa Cardon."
It was the first time I'd said it out loud in Kivotos.
It felt strange in my mouth. Good strange.
The trick was to talk to her like a normal person. Get to know the patient. Make them comfortable. The calm in my chest knew exactly how this worked; it had done it before, many times, with people much more frightened than this. Once they were comfortable, the rest came easy.
She flinched again when I said my name, and her visor turned away from me, toward the window, toward the floor, toward anywhere I wasn't.
"...I'm Abigale," she said finally. It came out muffled through the helmet, so quiet I almost missed it. "Abigale Winchester..."
'Winchester.'
I glanced at the rifle on the table, then back at her.
'She has the same name as her gun. Did she pick the gun because of the name? Or did she...' I decided that was a question for later, and filed it.
"Nice to meet you, Abigale," I said. "Is it all right if I check your arms? Your legs? Where she shot you?"
There was a long pause. Then a very small nod.
She rolled up her sleeves.
'Good,' I thought. 'Good. Arms first. Nothing she has to take off.'
. . .
Kivotos students were tough. I knew that. I'd watched them shrug off gunfire for years on my phone screen. But tough didn't mean nothing happened. Five rounds of MP7 fire at close range had left a cluster of angry, purple-red bruises down her right forearm, already swelling, the skin scuffed and broken in two places.
"Hm." I turned her arm gently in the light. "Close-range bullet bruising. You'll need some bandaging and something for the swelling. Hold still."
I pulled out gauze, antiseptic wipes and a tube of bruise cream, and got to work. My hands did most of it. They were quick and light and careful, and they knew exactly how much pressure to use. The calm in my chest had done this a thousand times. I just tried not to get in its way.
Abigale held perfectly still.
"Mind telling me what you were doing back there?" I asked as I cleaned the scrapes. Keep them talking. Distract them from the sting.
"Um..."
She was quiet for a while. I let the silence sit there, and didn't push it.
"I wanted to try out a firearm different from usual..." Her voice shook a little behind the visor. "Everyone uses the same kind of gun. In my... in the gang. Cheap ones. Loud ones. I wanted to try something that was... mine."
I looked at the Winchester on the table. At the polished walnut stock, the lever worn smooth from use.
"It's a good gun," I said. "A really good one. Model 94. Lever-action. People think they're old-fashioned, but in the right hands, they're incredible. You don't spray with a gun like that. You aim."
Her visor turned back toward me. Just a little.
"...You think so?"
"I know so."
Something in her shoulders loosened. Just a fraction.
Then she asked the question I'd been dreading.
"Also..." Her voice dropped even quieter. "What happened to that girl? I... I looked back, and she... she just... disappeared."
I gulped.
'Right. That.'
. . .
I wasn't sure how to explain it to her, because I wasn't completely sure how to explain it to myself.
I'd had a week to think about my powers. More, if you counted the days in the warehouse. I'd had a week of pulling peaches out of thin air and storing forklifts and catching bullets, and in that week, I'd come up with what I was calling, in my head, My Working Theory. It went something like this.
First. If I had to describe my main ability in one word, it would be "Storage." But that wasn't quite right, either. It wasn't that I had storage, like a bag or a backpack. It felt more like I was storage. Like the concept of keeping things, holding things, putting things somewhere safe and taking them out again, had decided to live inside me. The window with its little grid and labels was just how my brain made sense of it. It was hard to describe. But that was the gist.
Second. Storage wasn't something new. Whoever this body had been before me, she'd had it for a long time. Long enough to fill it with forty cans of peaches, enough medical supplies to run a field hospital, a hundred halos and every bottle of hair dye remover in the city. She'd used it constantly. It was as natural to this body as breathing, which was probably why it had started catching bullets on its own.
Third. The eyes.
The eyes were the part I liked least, because I understood them least. The first morning: green question marks, when I was confused. After the dream: green question marks again. At the Engineering Department: some kind of warmth behind them, right when I'd been trying my hardest to convince Utaha. And today, in the alley: red. A wash of red over everything, right when I'd been angrier than I could remember being in years.
My best guess was that whatever I felt, my eyes didn't just show it. They pushed it outward. Projected it onto whoever I was looking at. The masked girl hadn't fallen over because of the bullets I caught. She'd fallen over because I'd looked at her while I was furious, and some of that fury had landed on her.
And I had a feeling, a strong one, that it wasn't something this body had been born with.
'You have my blessing.'
The pink figure on the ocean of stars. The warm hand under my chin. Whatever she was, she'd given this body something before it went to sleep. I was pretty sure it had something to do with the eyes.
A god, maybe. Or something close enough that the difference didn't matter.
. . .
All of which was a lot to explain to a shy girl in a helmet with a freshly bandaged arm.
So I didn't.
"Well," I said, "she's right here."
Before I pulled her out, though, I opened Storage and found her square: Masked Girl (Unconscious) x1. I didn't love the idea of dropping an armed person onto my floor, unconscious or not.
So, without really thinking about it, I tapped her square with my mind.
The square opened.
A second, smaller window unfolded out of it, like a drawer sliding out of a cabinet, and inside it was a list. Everything she had on her.
MP7 (Loaded, 1 round chambered) x1. MP7 Magazine (Full) x3. Face Mask (Black, X) x1. Phone (Cracked Screen) x1. Wallet x1. Keys (Ring of 4) x1. Hair Tie x1. Gum (Mint, Half Pack) x1. Uniform (Blue). Shoes (Blue)...
The list kept going. Every single thing on her, down to the last button.
I blinked at it.
'Oh. Oh, that's useful.'
I tapped the MP7, then the three magazines, and dragged them out of her little window and into the main grid. They settled into their own squares: MP7 x1, MP7 Magazine (Full) x3. Separate from her. Mine now.
I checked her window again. The gun was gone from her list. Everything else stayed where it was.
'I can pull things apart in here,' I thought slowly. 'Take what I want off something without touching it. If it works on a person's pockets, it'd work on anything. A broken robot. A wrecked drone. Whatever's lying around after a fight.'
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a list labeled ROBOT DOUBLE quietly got a lot shorter.
I closed the window, held one hand out over the floor beside the couch, palm down, and thought, 'Out.'
Thud.
The masked girl appeared on the floorboards in a heap, exactly as she'd been when I'd stored her: unconscious, mouth hanging slightly open behind her X mask, one arm flung out, her hand closed around nothing at all. She let out a small snore.
Abigale made a sound like a kettle.
"Ah! W-where did she..."
She pointed at the unconscious girl. Then at me. Then at the girl again. Then at me. Her finger was shaking.
I smiled at her. Then I decided to do something that, in hindsight, I probably should have thought about for longer than half a second.
I pointed at her visor.
"Close your eyes real quick," I said. "I'll tell you when to open them."
She didn't. Of course she didn't. She was too busy pointing.
It didn't matter. I reached out, rested two fingertips lightly on top of her helmet, and thought, 'In.'
The helmet vanished.
Motorcycle Helmet (Black, Visored) x1.
. . .
The second it was gone, I realized what I'd done.
The whole alley came back to me in a rush: the way she'd flinched at the word "helmet," the way her hands had tightened. A helmet gang girl who wore her helmet everywhere. I knew this. I'd read about the helmet gangs. Your helmet was your face. Your name. Your pride. Having someone take it off you without asking was...
'Oh no. Oh no, that was a really big deal, wasn't it?'
I opened my mouth to apologize. I had the helmet halfway back out of Storage.
Then I actually looked at her, and forgot what I was going to say.
Her eyes were still open. Wide open. She hadn't closed them at all.
Her hair was brown. A warm, deep brown, like polished walnut, exactly the same shade as the stock of the Winchester on the table, with lighter streaks running through it where the light caught it and darker ones underneath. It was a little flat on top from the helmet, and a little messy, and it fell just past her jaw.
Her eyes were something else. The irises were a cool, clear steel gray, and right at the center of each, where a pupil should have been plain black, there was warm amber, like a point of light caught deep in glass. When I looked into them, I could see myself in them, small and sharp and perfectly focused, the way you'd see something through the lens of a scope. Like looking down a sight and finding someone looking back.
Her skin was pale from never seeing the sun, and soft, and well cared for. Her cheeks were round. Her mouth was slightly open.
None of that could be seen through that helmet. Not one bit of it.
'Holy hell,' I thought. 'She's adorable.'
"I... Wa... Ababababababa..."
Abigale was short-circuiting. Her face was going red from the chin up, like a thermometer filling. Her hands came up toward her head, where her helmet should be, and found only hair. Her eyes went even wider. The red reached her ears.
"Ababababababababa..."
"Abigale?" I said. "It's okay, I'll give it back right now, I'm so sorry, I didn't think..."
Plop.
She fell over sideways onto the couch.
Steam was coming off the top of her head.
"...Oh," I said. "She fainted."
. . .
I stood there for a moment in my brand-new secondhand apartment, holding a helmet I'd just pulled back out of thin air, looking at a girl who had fainted on my couch and another girl who had fainted on my floor.
'Two for two. I'm on a roll today.'
I set the helmet down gently on the table beside Abigale, right next to her Winchester, where she'd see it the second she woke up. I pulled the old blanket off the back of the couch and tucked it over her. Her face was still bright red, even unconscious. She looked very peaceful, for someone who was steaming.
'Let her rest,' I decided. 'I'll apologize properly when she wakes up. Maybe with food. Do I have food that isn't peaches?'
I didn't.
'Noodles,' I thought. 'I live over a noodle shop. That has to be good luck.'
Then I turned around and looked down at the other one.
The masked girl. Still unconscious on the floorboards, still snoring faintly. The girl who'd emptied an MP7 at someone trying something new for the first time.
I tilted my head and looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment.
The calm in my chest looked at her too. It was very quiet. It had opinions, and it was keeping them to itself.
I opened Storage, scrolled down past the peaches and the hair dye remover and three rows of medical supplies, and stopped on two squares, side by side.
Rope (Long) x1. Portable Stage Lights (Box) x1.
I smiled.
'I knew there was a reason she had these.'